#dictators

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

[canadianabroadvery]

[odinsblog]

“It was December 1993, and I was sitting in my flat in Moscow, watching what must have been one of the first ever election night results shows on Russian television for a Parliamentary election.

It was an unusual spectacle, to say the least. Politicians, pundits and Russian officials were sitting around drinking champagne. And then this happened: On came an astrologer to deliver his celestial political forecast.

Looking back, it was quite appropriate really, because 30 years ago, Russians had stars in their eyes about freedom, democracy, and their country's future. That night, as well as electing a new parliament, the Duma, Russians also approved a new constitution. The constitution which, many years later, Vladimir Putin would change through a referendum to give himself the chance of twelve more years in power.

For a Russian election these days, you don't need astrologers or fortune tellers or crystal balls. I can tell you now pretty much what the result of next March's Russian presidential election will be. Vladimir Putin will win, and with a landslide.

There are several reasons for my confident prediction.

Russia's current political system is Putin's political system, his rules, his election. And although his will not be the only name on the ballot, his opponents are unlikely to include Mr. Putin's most vocal critics, arch rivals, and serious contenders. The president's most high profile opponents have either been poised, fled into exile or been put in prison. What's more, the Kremlin controls television. Vladimir Putin receives lots of airtime, and on tv, he's much praised, never criticized. Handy that, when you're seeking reelection.

And there's another reason he'll do well.

Meet Alexander. Alexander is a young tv reporter from northeastern Russia. At Vladimir Putin's end-of-year press conference recently, he stood up and declared, ‘We all support your decision to run in next year's election, because you've been in power for as long as I can remember.’ There are many Russians like Alexander who simply cannot imagine anyone else in the Kremlin, not because they idolize Vladimir Putin, they just see no alternative to him. I've often heard people here say, ‘Well, if not Putin, who then?’ The Kremlin has engineered that. It has cleared the political landscape of any potential challenges to the man who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister for nearly a quarter of a century, to make sure that those two words, that little question, ‘who then?’ is left unanswered.

Even the war in Ukraine and what are believed to be huge Russian military losses, don't appear to have sparked disillusionment in Russia's President and Commander-in-Chief.

It was Putin's decision to launch the full scale invasion, but some Russians believe that at a time of war, it is their duty to back their leader without questioning his motives or the consequences.

Crucially, the other thing you find a lot of here is indifference. Many Russians don't seem to care who's in power in the Kremlin. They just hunker down in their town or village and try to get through life as best they can. Indifference, too, benefits Vladimir Putin.

For all these reasons, his fifth election victory isn't in doubt.

But what I find much harder to predict is Russia's future. These are very dark times. Darkest, of course, for Ukraine, but for Russia, too. You can feel aggression in Russian society building. You can see repression growing, and you can see a leader who is determined, whatever the cost, to emerge from this war the winner.”

—Steve Rosenberg, BBC's Moscow correspondent, on Russia’s short lived democracy turned autocratic dictatorship

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Banksy

* * * *

I wonder if dictators are popular today because hardly anyone alive remembers the havoc they wrought & why we fought against them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

+

“I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.” 

― Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other

[marsfilms]

Happy Ides of March! Do not forget to stab your nearest authoritarian politician.

[tomorrowusa]

Trump's use of violent rhetoric for the past nine years is disturbing and has the potential to incite unbalanced and extremist elements in this country. But if he is using it to frighten us or coerce us into doing or not doing something, then we shouldn't take the bait.

We should not at all fear a Trump loss this year. While it won't solve all our problems, it would remove the greatest threat to American democracy since the 1940s from politics and throw what remains of the GOP into disarray.

While we should worry about the potential catastrophe of a second Trump administration, Donald Trump himself is not high on my list of people personally to be feared. He's an orange bag of pus with a big porcine mouth and bad hair. Birds would just poop on him if he were a scarecrow in the middle of a farm field.

Dictators and wannabe dictators are always making violent threats. For example: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us every 3 to 6 months. Putin somehow wants us to think that he's the only person in the world with nuclear weapons.

But caving to threats from autocrats almost always does more harm than good in the long run. If France and Britain had stood up to Hitler when he threatened Czechoslovakia in 1938, there may not have been World War II in 1939.

If we resolve to vote and don't get distracted by third party vanity candidates, Trump's political career will end later this year and his residency in a federal facility – other than the White House – will probably begin next year. Trump is trying to create fear in others because he's afraid of what will happen to him if he can't manage to hijack the 2024 election.

[mysharona1987]

[deadpresidents]

"It's pretty much impossible to go anywhere in Iraq and not be reminded of Saddam. Thousands of portraits of him appear on walls and in glazed mosaic tiles on concrete plaques. In granite, bronze, and gilded statues he holds a sword aloft; he prays; he rides a prancing stallion. Saddam smiles, frowns, fires guns, smokes cigars. He is depicted wearing a black leather greatcoat and matching trilby; in military uniform; in Arab robes, three-piece suits, and even, oddly, trekking gear. He is sometimes thin, sometimes imposingly muscular, occasionally fat, his face pouchy and double-chinned. He wears a judge's robes and holds scales in his hands; dandles small children on his knee; stands with bloodied sword over a mutilated serpent whose tail is in the form of a cruise missile. On one building, eight identical smiling Saddams are set together, creating an effect not unlike that of Warhol's 'Marilyn Diptych.'" -- Jon Lee Anderson, "The Unvanquished", The New Yorker, December 11, 2000

It's almost chilling how similar this sounds to the ridiculous propaganda images on social media used in the present-day United States to build up the MAGA/Trump personality cult. This is happening here.

[gravity-rainbow]

"The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries."

Aldous Huxley Brave New World Revisited

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Facebook's Real Names policy helps Cambodia's thin-skinned dictator terrorize dissenters

A common refrain from Facebook apologists and anti-anonymity activists is that its “Real Names Policy” promoted “civility” by making users “accountable” for their words. In this conception, snuffing out anonymous speech is key to protecting “the vulnerable” from trolls and other bad actors.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

But while some trolls hide behind anonymity, others are only too happy to sign their vitriol. Donald Trump didn’t need an anonymous account. Tucker Carlson is right there in the chyron. Nick Fuentes isn’t hiding behind a pseudonym — he’s proud to be associated with Holocaust denial.

Despite the moral panic about “cancel culture,” the powerful can say outrageous and disgusting things without any meaningful consequence. But when it comes to speaking truth to power, anonymity protects the vulnerable from retaliation.

Nowhere will you find a better case-study of this phenomenon than in Cambodia, a basket-case, one-party dictatorship that has been ruled over by the corrupt, authoritarian dictator Hun Sen, a former general, since 1985.

Hun Sen’s corruption and authoritarianism chafed at the Cambodian people, but his repressive statecraft allowed him to keep a tight grip on the reins of power. But all that nearly came to a halt in 2013, when an opposition movement, organized on Facebook, came within a whisker of defeating him during what should have been a sham election.

Other dictators would have used that moment to block Facebook, but not Hun Sen. After squeaking out a narrow victory, he decided to take control of Facebook in Cambodia and co-opt it as a tool of oppression. To do this, Hun Sen would weaponize the Real Names policy.

Because he was dictator, Hun Sen already knew the real names of every person in Cambodia, which meant that he could tell when a Cambodian poster used a pseudonym. Armed with this knowledge, Hun Sen forced Facebook to order Cambodians to post under their real names (which made them liable to arrest and torture) or fall silent.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-cambodia-democracy#.km2QBoKME

Hun Sen then spent public funds to hire a bleating army of astroturf supporters from Filipino clickfarms who would “like” his posts and shout down Cambodians — especially exiled Cambodians speaking from abroad — who dared to criticize him:

https://qz.com/1203637/facebook-likes-are-a-powerful-tool-for-authoritarian-rulers-lawsuit-says

All of this created cover for the “Khmer Riche”: politically connected insiders and Hun Sen’s relatives, who looted the country, hired Pricewaterhousecooper to help them offshore their money through Cypriot banks, and procured glden passports from Cyprus to let them trip through the EU on luxury spending-sprees:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/

Earlier this month, Hun Sen took an “official visit” to the Maldives, which was commemorated by an official Facebook post that included a gallery of Hun Sen relaxing in a seaside luxury resort:

https://www.facebook.com/hunsencambodia/posts/pfbid02KYoqDAJbeMGyRP9xMYpntYEdKsczGQijRGYJiDDiPSV4u5DDxmwXuCjpRrse8AEtl

As Mech Dara1 wrote for Vod, the post racked up thousands of “fawning comments,” along with a single, brave remark from “Ver To” (a pseudonymous account): “Yes, our beaches are the most beautiful, but our leaders are the dirtiest in the world, aren’t they?”

https://vodenglish.news/hun-sen-orders-police-to-find-facebook-beach-insulter/

Within hours, Hun Sen had vowed to use Facebook to hunt down and punish the person behind “Ver To,” writing “This is a wicked man’s words. Please, police, find it immediately. Where is it?”

In an expanded version of Daral’s article on Global Voices, we see Hun Sen’s Interior Ministry swing into action to punish this mild act of dissent, with ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak saying:

> This is not freedom of expression — this is insulting the leader of the country. … Even for me, we cannot accept this.

> People who live abroad can say anything, but in Cambodia they cannot.

> Even though the prison is crowded, there is enough space to hold these people.

Hun Sen knows that Facebook will help him hunt down this dissenter and jail them in one of his “crowded prisoners,” because Facebook’s Real Names policy dictates that this will happen.

The Real Names policy might as well be called “The Zuckerberg Doctrine.” It originates with Mark Zuckerberg’s oft-stated belief that people who present a different facet of their personality to different people are “two-faced.” This is an abysmal, idiotic belief, one that requires that we related to our bosses the same way we relate to our lovers, and also to our grandparents. But on the plus side, outlawing anonymity and pseudonymity makes it a lot easier to assemble nonconsensual surveillance dossiers on our activities, social graph and beliefs, and then sell access to those dossiers to advertisers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/22/social-scientists-have-warned-zuck-all-along-that-the-facebook-theory-of-interaction-would-make-people-angry-and-miserable/

Lots of companies have tried for their own Real Names policy. Famously, it was a feature of Google Plus, Alphabet’s failed Facebook competitor. More recently, Twitter’s new owner has made moves to link Twitter accounts to identities by hiding posts that aren’t from “Twitter Blue” accounts, and then insisting that these accounts must be verified with a phone number.

The powerful can abuse the powerless and get away with it, in large part because the powerless can’t speak back without risking retaliation. Sexual abuse was a feature of many industries and large companies for decades, but it too anonymity to create the #MeToo movement. There, anonymity is a force for accountability — not a way to avoid it.

Image: Hun Sen/Facebook (modified) https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=765259764955813&set=pcb.765259798289143&type=3&theater

Fair use: https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

[Image ID: Cambodian dictator Hun Sen's Facebook photo of himself swimming in the blue Maldives sea. Superimposed over him in white sans-serif lettering on red rectangular backgrounds is a quote from a Cambodian Facebook user: 'Yes, our beaches are the most beautiful, but our leaders are the dirtiest in the world, aren’t they?']

[duxfemina]

Who puts the dick in dictator?

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

🤦🏽🤦🏼🤦🏾

[slack-wise]

Socialist fraternal kiss between Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, East Germany, 1979.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Tim Campbell

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 29, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 1, 2024

Today’s story is that in the negotiations to fund the government and pass the national supplemental security bill, MAGA Republicans appear to be losing ground. Biden appears to be trying to weaken them further by making it clear it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are preventing new, strict border security legislation.

The first of two continuing resolutions to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 will expire tomorrow. Fiscal year 2024 began on October 1, 2023, and Congress agreed to a topline budget, but it has been unable to fund the necessary appropriations because MAGA Republicans have insisted on having their extreme demands met in those measures. In this struggle, former president Trump has urged his loyalists not to give way, telling them in September 2023: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” 

But a poll from last September showed that 75% of Americans oppose using brinksmanship over a government shutdown to bargain for partisan gain. 

After kicking the can down the road by passing three previous continuing resolutions, House Republicans a week ago expected a shutdown. But today they backed off. The House passed a short-term continuing resolution that pushes back the dates on which the two continuing resolutions expire, from March 1 and March 8 to March 8 and March 22. The vote was 320 to 99 in the House, with 113 Republicans joining 207 Democrats to pass the measure. Ninety-seven Republicans opposed the bill, as did two Democrats who were protesting the lack of aid to Ukraine. 

Tonight, the Senate approved the continuing resolution by a vote of 77 to 13. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it tomorrow. “What we have done today has overcome the opposition of the MAGA hard right and gives us a formula for completing the appropriations process in a way that does not shut the government down and capitulate to extremists,” Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said.

Trump opposes helping Ukraine in its fight to resist Russia’s invasion, and under his orders, MAGA Republicans have also stalled the national security supplemental bill, which contains Ukrainian aid, as well as aid to Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The measure passed the Senate on February 13 by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29, and is expected to pass the House if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) takes it up, but so far, he has refused.

Today, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told reporters that “several” House Republicans are willing to sign a discharge petition to force Speaker Johnson to bring a national security supplemental measure to the floor for a vote. A simple majority can force a vote on a bill through a discharge petition, but such a measure is rare because it undermines the House speaker. With Johnson refusing to take up the Senate measure, Fitzpatrick and his colleague Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) have prepared their own pared-down aid measure. Fitzpatrick told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday that “[w]e are trying to add an additional pressure point on something that has to happen.” 

Speakers from the parliaments of 23 nations wrote to Johnson yesterday and urged him to take up the Senate measure, saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has “challenged the entire democratic world, jeopardizing the security in the whole European and Euro-Atlantic area,” and that “the world is rapidly moving towards the destruction of the sustainable world order.”  

On Tuesday, Johnson met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate majority leader Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to discuss the importance of funding the government and passing the national security supplemental bill. There, he was the odd man out as the other five pressed upon him how crucial funding for Ukraine is for U.S. national security.

Yesterday, Johnson told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that the leaders told him he was “on an island by myself, and it was me versus everyone else in the room.” He went on: “What the liberal media doesn’t understand, Sean, is that if you’re here in Washington and you’re described as a leader that’s on an island by themselves, it probably means you’re standing with the American people.” 

But an AP-NORC poll released today shows that it is not Johnson but the others at that meeting who are standing with the American people: 74% of Americans, including 62% of Republicans, support U.S. aid to Ukraine’s military. 

The struggle between Biden and Trump for control over U.S. politics played out starkly today as both were in Texas to talk about immigration. Both say the influx of migrants at the southern border of the United States needs to be better managed. But Trump blames Biden for what he compares to a war in which an “invasion” of criminal “fighting-age men” are pouring over the border. (NBC News noted that “there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States” and that, in fact, their review of crime data ”shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.”)

Trump promises he would solve immigration issues instantly with executive orders, although his orders during his term faced legal challenges.  

In contrast to Trump’s promise to dictate a solution, Biden emphasized that the government should work for the people. In Texas, he noted that the federal government has rushed emergency personnel and funds to the state to combat the deadly wildfires there that have burned more than a million acres, and he urged Congress to pass a law to address border issues, as he has asked it to since he took office. 

Such a measure is popular, and earlier this month, Trump undermined a bill that was tilted so far to the right that it drew the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the U.S. Border Patrol union. Senators from both parties had spent four months hammering the bill out at the insistence of House Republicans, who then killed it when Trump, apparently hoping to keep the issue open for his campaign, told them to. 

Today, Biden urged Congress to pass the $20.2 billion bipartisan border bill that would, he said, give border patrol officers the resources they need: 1,500 more border agents, 100 cutting-edge machines to detect and stop illegal fentanyl, 100 additional immigration judges to deal with the backlog of cases, 4,300 more asylum officers, more immigrant visas, and emergency authority for the president to shut the border when it becomes overwhelmed. 

Biden spoke directly to Trump: “Instead of playing politics with the issue, instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me, or I'll join you, in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill. We can do it together…. Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don't we just get together and get it done. Let’s remember who the heck we work for. We work for the American people, not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We work for the American people.”

Trump may not share that perspective. Last night, Maggie Haberman and Andrew Higgins of the New York Times reported that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in Hungary, will visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week as Trump scrambles to find the more than half a billion dollars he needs to pay the fines and penalties courts have ordered. “We cannot interfere in other countries’ elections,” Orbán said last week, “but we would very much like to see President Donald Trump return to the White House.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tomorrowusa]

'Sleepwalking into dictatorship': Trump warnings spook America

If somebody promises he's going to be a dictator, believe him.

Register and vote – and make sure every like minded citizen you know does the same. Remember that voter registration is geographic: if you've moved since the last election (even just next door) you need to register at your new address.

Be a voter | Vote Save America

[mysharona1987]