(Not even the NY Times has anything on this as I post this. I don’t know about TV newworks since I don’t usually watch TV news. The link that follows is from Enduring America).
It appears dictators everywhere are in trouble these days. Russia now appears to getting hit with growing demonstrations over complaints of massively rigged elections. I suspect they’ll get bigger and continuous if not now, after winter ends. (Winter being a special problem in Russia). It’s not the sort of problem that goes away.
Russia, like Iran, has had a pseudo-democracy in which the government arrests journalists and has used death squads tied to the security forces who kill opposing politicians, journalists and human rights demonstrators. Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, had been ineligible to run lasd time, so he used a surrogate much as Ahmadinejad hopes to do while he controlled things behind the scenes. Now that the term is almost up, Putin was hoping to seize Russia’s top office one again. Like Supreme Leader Khamenei and the Shah in Iran, Czar Putin has lost popular legitimacy. As in Iran, he has relied heavily on the security forces and manipulating elections to keep in power. Like Khamenei and other dictators, Putin is blaming foreign conspirators for all his problems.
Russia, which has a naval base in Syria, and recently supplied advance missiles to Assad, has been a major backer of both the Iranian and Syrian dictatorships and has joined with China in blockiong sanctions against both. If the chaos gets bad enough there, it should effect economic and other arrangements with both those regimes. Freedom for the Russia people, the Syrian people and Iranians. I suspect China’s government may break out in a sweat over this news.
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