Post Putin Plan for Russia

'There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.' 

Source: Wm. Shakespeare in Julius Caesar Act 4Scene 3Line 249

Russia today faces its arguably most consequential crossroads since 1918. 

Putin's tyranny has nearly run its course in Ukraine and, consequently, in Russia as well. The military is not effective, Moms are angry at the losses of nearly one million sons, Putin will die in the near future and there is no succession plan in place.  

A Russian failure to plan any transition may result in more misery and repression if another tyrant takes over - such a takeover may result in prolonging Putin's repressive policies.

However, Russia can make a different choice, a choice which would avoid that future. Russian power brokers [political, military, security, et al] can choose to install a representative government instead of a tyranny. After all, most Russians want to look to the West and perhaps join the European Union [EU]. There's a lot of hard work to create that future, but it can be done.

With proper planning Russia can emerge as a stable, prosperous member of the European Union. Great nations are great because their citizens are prosperous. [THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS, Paul Kennedy, 1987, Random House New York.]

The good news is that choosing EU membership as a goal will install a sound economy, reduce political repression and assure Russia's power and influence at a time when Western Democracies including the United States have become so indebted to Oligarchs and thus frozen in policies that they will likely fall behind as Russia advances.

A country can become an official candidate for EU membership once it meets basic political, economic and reform criteria. It can then start formal negotiations on 35 chapters covering many different policy areas with the EU.

'In order to apply for EU membership, a country has to be European and respect the EU's democratic values. It also needs stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and the rule of law; a functioning market economy; and the ability to take on and carry out the obligations of the EU membership. Dec 6, 2023.'

  

Here are those detailed steps.

BEFORE THE EU APPLICATION

There are some prerequisites before making an EU application.

STEP 1: Establish a shadow Duma before Putin's demise using expat Russians who will meet and work on the EU Candidate process; and, begin writing a new Constitution. USA and EU can help organize and fund this. The shadow Duma can continue after Putin's demise until a newly elected Duma can meet. 

STEP 2: Create a Steering Committee to manage the process. This Committee will have vast authority but only for a limited time. It may require outside assistance to keep to the course. It will establish coordination with both top intelligence and military officials to secure their agreement they will accept subordination to civilian authority established pursuant to the new Constitution. Discharge those who refuse.

Step 3: Enact martial law to prevent violence, election interference and possible overthrow of new government. 

STEP 4: Conduct elections to the new Duma with international supervision ensuring election integrity.

STEP 4.  Nationalize all enterprises above an arbitrary limit such as 1,000 employees. The state will manage the enterprises. Later, the Duma can negotiate proposed acquisitions on a case-by-case basis with the objective of professional sustainable management and financial capacity

STEP 5. New government seeks outside cash assistance to endure that newly nationalized enterprises can meet their payroll until divested. Such assistance may take the form of loans to the State or firm. Loans to enterprises can be repaid upon a sale to private parties. 

STEP 6. Appoint judges who support the new government to all judicial posts. Ensure each judicial appointment requires a public impeachment in the Duma to be overturned or compromised.

STEP 7. Establish Civil Service board to establish required credentials for new employees select and install government employees. Ensure that all meetings of the Board will be publicly viewable. 

STEP 8. New Duma will establish areas of interest for business enterprise regulation; then, it will write appropriate regulations.

Documenting Russia's plan to subvert USA democracy:

Heather Cox Richardson  Oct 7

  

This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts. 

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian. 

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. 

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true. 

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States... encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,... [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.” 

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates. 

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation. 

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted. 

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie. 

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone. 

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.   

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk. 

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster. 

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/06/politics/fact-check-trump-helene-response-north-carolina/index.html

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world#.nbJrrXK8gx

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/02/08/514102356/steve-bannon-aligns-with-vatican-hardliners-who-oppose-pope-francis

John B. Dunlop, “Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics,” paper available at https://stanford.io/3wTNlEx.

Quoted from “Joseph Goebbels: On the ‘Big Lie,’” Jewish Virtual Library, https://bit.ly/2PlQmdI.

Office of Strategic Services, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, Walter C. Langer, CIA-RPDP78-02646R000600240001-5, Washington, D.C., August 24, 1999, p. 38. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf

​​https://www.yahoo.com/news/vance-says-trump-won-2020-192218871.html

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/10/01/vance-walz-vp-debate-tonight/moderators-fact-check-00182066

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/gop-disinformation-trump-vance-20241006.html#loaded

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/10/gov.uscourts.dcd_.258148.252.0.pdf

https://gazette.com/news/wex/helene-makes-unlikely-friends-of-republican-swing-state-governors-and-biden/article_b2814791-6ca3-5d89-9a3f-35ab3c135c4a.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4870818-barack-obama-donald-trump-new-kamala-harris-campaign-ad/

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/10/harris-trump-crowd-size-debate-00178116

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/06/mike-johnson-donald-trump-election/

X:

keithboykin/status/1842975629995921781

NewsJennifer/status/1842940155847746011