Two days ago I wrote about the explosion on Petersburg’s underground, suggesting that the old cui bono principle pointed at Putin as the ultimate culprit.
The possible bono was multifarious: using the explosion as a pretext for stamping out the opposition after the protest rallies on 26 March, forcing the populace to close ranks behind ‘the national leader’, creating an atmosphere of xenophobic psychosis, reinforcing the perceived need for Russo-American – or rather Putin-Trump – cooperation in combating Islamic terrorism.
A word of avuncular advice to Putin’s propagandists: chaps, if I were you, I wouldn’t use the term ‘national leader’ too often. Some people may translate it mentally into German and shudder.
Especially if they saw a programme about the Rothschilds on Russia’s official Channel 1 and recalled how the German national leader rallied the people behind one pet hatred.
Valeriy Fedoseev, the host of Voskresnoe vremia (Sunday Time) exposed the sinister role the Jewish bankers have played ever since the nineteenth century. This is persisting, since those awful Jews are now bankrolling such mortal enemies of Russia as the US and ISIS.
This was followed by an uncritical reference to a secret world government pulling the strings behind the scenes. By way of visual support, the programme showed a long fragment from a propaganda film produced in 1940 by Dr Goebbels’s department. The footage was presented – again uncritically – not as vile, cannibalistic rabble-rousing, but as a documentary.
To its credit, Channel 1 didn’t bother to conceal the film’s provenance. On the contrary, this was cited as validation of authenticity and implicitly as proof of historical continuity and verisimilitude.
Now Channel 1 is no different from Soviet media: it does little without specific instructions from the Kremlin. Thus the timing of this revolting rant is telling. As is the timing of the Petersburg explosion for that matter: less than a week after the anti-Putin rallies.
At the same time all state channels, both TV and radio, turned up the volume of their shrieks about the urgent need to support the national leader. One people, one state, one leader is heard loud and clear, this time in Russian.
It has been announced that pro-Putin rallies will be held all over the country on 8 April, and one has to congratulate the government on its efficacy. In Soviet times it generally took longer to organise such outbursts of loyal enthusiasm.
Speaking on another government channel, the writer Prokhanov explicitly linked anti-government protests with the explosion, or rather two explosions, about which later. “The single provenance of these actions,” said Prokhanov, “can be easily surmised.”
His show host, Putin’s propagandist Soloviov nodded with alacrity: “I don’t believe in such coincidences.” Neither did another guest, Duma deputy Alexander Khinstein. Rather than just pointing an accusing finger at the train-exploding opposition, he came up with a concrete solution to the problem: “If we want security, we must roll back democracy.”
Since democracy already exists on paper only, what this prominent Putin stooge means is that a campaign of state terror will be aimed at stamping out all dissent. Khinstein emphasised his credentials by explaining that liberal opponents of Putin are the likeliest culprits in the Petersburg murder: “They regard people not as individuals but as building blocks for their own pedestal.”
Meanwhile, in addition to mere speculation, some strong circumstantial evidence has come to light, enough to conclude that, rather than dissenting intellectuals, it’s Putin’s FSB that organised the explosion.
Two bombs had been planted on the fated train, but only one of them went off. Yet for the first hour after the tragedy all state channels were talking about two explosions, not one. They were citing ‘official sources’, but how could those sources get it so wrong?
The only possibility I can think of is that they knew about the two bombs, assumed that both would detonate, but hadn’t yet been informed that the second one didn’t. Hence Pokhanov and all the leader’s men were talking in chorus about two explosions, not one.
This means the same ‘sources’ had foreknowledge, which in turn means they had had the bombs planted. If there’s an alternative explanation, I’d like to hear it.
Parallels with the 1933 Reichstag fire are begging to be drawn, and in fact those putative terrorists among the Russian intelligentsia are drawing them all over the place. Like most other such parallels, these aren’t quite exact. But neither are they spurious.
It took that fire six years to conflagrate a world war. But, unlike the Russian intelligentsia, I’m not going to draw any analogies. They’re much too obvious.
Instead I’m trying to imagine what will happen in Russia when it’s not the liberal intelligentsia who take to the streets, but hungry people, those 20 million who live at or below the ‘survival minimum’ of £130 a month (with prices only marginally lower than in Britain).
Many of them are in work, getting paid a pittance while Putin and his gang are siphoning billions’ worth of laundered cash into offshore accounts. The pressure in the boiler is rising, and Goebbels-style propaganda can keep the lid on only for so long.
Only naïve ignoramuses think the national leader would hesitate to unleash the kind of carnage that made other national leaders so justly famous. Only the unobservant and uncritical can fail to see the significance of the current events.
Cash will be confiscated in the next great world financial crisis as it was in Cyprus during the last. So good luck to the Putinistas with that. As for the ordinary folk, like Trump’s creditors, they lost their money years ago and will never get it back so they should not worry who gets it next.
It is suggested the bombings of the apartments in Moscow which precipitated the 1999 war in Chechnya were set by the Russians themselves False flag stuff very plausibly could be attributed to the Chechen.