I am amused every time I hear the term “Russian oligarch”
used on American media that is mostly owned by a small group of billionaires.
Perhaps amused it not the right descriptor. What is the word
for the feeling you get when encountering someone with either a profound mix of
arrogance and ignorance or else someone with great intellect and greater capacity for deception?
Perhaps there is not a word in the English language for that mixture of disgust
and despair, but there should be.
You see, The Washington Post, our newspaper of note and the one most likely to
use the term “Russian oligarch”, is owned by the richest person in the entire
world. Part of that wealth comes from U.S. intelligence agencies. FOX News is
owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is worth $13 billion. The owner and namesake of
Bloomberg News is worth $35 billion. So to use the term oligarch to apply to
rich Russians while ignoring the worse condition that exists in the U.S. seems
rather hypocritical, don’t you think?
But that is not the extent of hypocrisy, it is merely the
stepping-off point. Because the mere fact that oligarchy exists in Russia today
is not a symbol of an inherent flaw in the Russian people, nor does it make
them our enemy. Oligarchy exists, to the extent that it does, not because of Vladimir
Putin. The oligarchs were already established by the time Putin came on the scene:
it was a mess he had to deal with, not one of his own making. No, oligarchs
exist in Russia today because that’s the system we helped Russia set up.
It’s what we do, or rather what our oligarchs do and then pretend it was done in our name. We go into other countries
in order to exploit their resources and labor, and the easiest way to do that is
buy off a few people and make them co-partners in exploiting their people and
their resources. We make of their nations little oligarchs in our likeness. That’s why so many people from those countries we’ve “helped”
end up trying to emigrate to our shores. It’s not so much that our system is
better, it’s because we’ve worked hard to make their system worse.
Any place where you see people whose skin color is darker
than ours, take a look at the ones we consider our allies. If they have an
extreme contrast between a few really wealthy people and a lot of really poor
ones, they’re our friend. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at Columbia: how many
years have we been supporting that country militarily? Indonesia? We’ve spent
decades making them what they are. If you look at any country rich in natural
resources, you will find a great amount of poverty along with an immensely rich
ruling class. This isn’t because they are backwards but because of how we rigged
the system in order acquire their resources for our own use.
But the country with the greatest disparity between haves
and have-nots is not one of our allies, not a country we supported, disrupted,
or invaded. No, according to Fortune Magazine, the nation with the greatest inequality,
and hence the one most oligarchic, is the United States itself. But this is
still not the primary reason American media is laughably hypocritical for using
the term Russian oligarchs. The real hypocrisy is reserved for the fact that
their oligarchs were the result of the economic “reforms” we helped them to impose.
If you are old enough to remember the time immediately after
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you will recall all of the “aid” we
lavished upon Russia in an attempt to give them an economic system based on our
model. And if you remember that, you will most likely remember terms like “austerity”
and “shock therapy”. Think about that term for a moment. It was the pull the
band-aid off quickly theory, and it involved a lot of old people going hungry
and losing all the security they had worked for their whole lives. And it
involved a few entrepreneurs getting very rich very quickly as the wealth of
the nation that was once held communally found its way into the hands of a very
few.
Here is a description of the conversion ushered in by the United
states by Seumas Milne from The Guardian:
“Capitalist restoration brought in its wake mass pauperisation and
unemployment; wild extremes of inequality; rampant crime; virulent
anti-semitism and ethnic violence; combined with legalised gangsterism on a
heroic scale and precipitous looting of public assets.” Anyone with a sense of
proportionality might want to consider if anything Russia did or allegedly did compares
to that.
We created the oligarchs in Russia. We did it. They were not
a creation of Putin, they were on the scene when Putin came to power. They were
a situation he had to deal with, not a result of his rule.
But we blame him, blame Russia as an entity. Somehow their
very Russianness causes them to be our destined enemy. Because we need an
enemy, we always need an external threat to distract us from our own problems
with oligarchy. It has been my personal experience that it is best not to follow
those who tell you who your enemies have to be.
The troll farm, too, is most likely a result not of Putin
but of the economic system we helped them learn. The alternative idea that it’s
a nefarious tool of Putin seems as ridiculous as a Police Academy script. It’s
called free market capitalism, doing anything for a buck no matter how sleazy
and destructive to other humans. I understand people posting whatever they need to
in order to draw people to their advertisers. There is no shortage of such
behavior in America, as well. How else does one explain MTV? We have our
entrepreneurs who buy patents to life-saving drugs in order to jack up the
prices even though some will die as a result. That’s all legitimate behavior in
the amoral game called capitalism.
This is the system we promote. This is our standard
operating procedure. And rather than deal with the reality of our oligarchic
and utterly amoral system, we distract ourselves by pointing fingers at others
and calling them oligarchs. We clutch our pearls and worry over their influence
on our unblemished democracy. Not that we unaided would create these fears,
the media needs to feed them to us. We are constantly being directed to hate various
enemies far from our shores, a rotating cast of bogeymen who threaten our very
way of life. True, occasionally these threats are real, but so is the threat of
an oligarchic dystopia the likes of which George Orwell or Jack London
imagined.
I’m not an expert on Russia. I don’t know what Putin has or
has not done, do not know if he is a good man or a bad one except for what I hear
in the media. But it is obvious he is an intelligent man, and I don’t see him
getting involved in the Keystone Kops plot being painted by our oligarchic
media.
I don’t know the state of corruption in Russia. But I really
don’t see why I need to be a Russian expert in order to point out the problems
we have in my own nation, problems that are getting worse and worse as we
fiddle away the hours fretting about Russian oligarchs. I earlier used the word
proportionality and regarding the Russian interference there is none. There is merely
a screaming irrationality of a mob too angry to think, too obsessed to take a
step back and gain perspective. If I wanted to manipulate a population into
going along with actions that are not in their own best interests, that is
exactly the state I would want them in.
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