1/ Let's talk about why Putin is doing what he's doing.
To understand Putin, we need to understand how Putin sees the world, how he was trained, and what drives him.
To do that we need to unpack a some history so we can put Putin in the context that allows us to understand him.
2/ First off, Putin was a KGB agent. For those of you that don't know the KGB was the Main security agency in Soviet Union. It dealt with internal security, intelligence and secret police functions.
It's isn't exactly this, but imagine combining the FBI and CIA...that's the KGB
3/ The KGB did intelligence work at home and abroad. Internally the KGB would MONITOR PUBLIC AND PRIVATE OPINION, internal subversion, and any revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc. The KGB would spy on Soviet citizens and was in charge of stomping out dissent within the USSR...
4/ So the KGB played the role of ensuring there would be no dissent at home, and would engage in intelligence gathering, disinformation, subversion, and espionage abroad.
Again, like the CIA and FBI combined, but communist and with almost no due process for those it arrested...
5/ Now, where the KGB was the security agency, the Politburo was the political power in the USSR. There was a rather convoluted structure to the USSR, but the fact is the Politburo of the Communist Party was in fact the ruling body and the center of political power in the USSR...
6/ The head of the politburo was the "General Secretary" and the General Secretary was the De facto Leader of the USSR occupying a similar role to the President in America, or the Prime Minister in Britain (again, not exactly, approximately)
Got all that? Good, Let's continue...
7/ So, for most of the Soviet Unions history, no former head of the KGB had ever been able to become General Secretary. The reason for this was that after Stalin Died Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech called On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences"...
8/ Which lambasted Joseph Stalin's leadership, and the Cult of Personality he had created around himself. After that, Soviets were wary of giving one man too much power. They knew a former head of the KGB being General Secretary would have the loyalty of the security apparatus...
9/ And making that person the General Secretary would make them unstopable as there would be no mechanism available to check their power. It would be another Stalin.
Got all that? Ok, so here is where we get back to Putin...
10/ Remember that in 1975 Putin goes to work for the KGB.
In 1982 the Soviets go against their previous thinking, and they select former head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, to be the General Secretary of the politburo and de facto leader of the USSR.
According to Ion Mihai Pacepa
11/ "the leaders of the former Warsaw Pact intelligence community, when I was one of them, looked up to Andropov as the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist party in governing the Soviet Union."
Andropov shifted the influence away from the politburo and to the KGB...
12/ (Ion Mihai Pacepa was a subordinate of Andropov)
So, while this happened, Vladimir Putin would have been watching it, and he would have been aware of what was going on. Not "as it happened" (there was no internet and Soviets always were delaying information) but...
13/ He would have had something of an inside view of what Andropov was doing, and why, why it was effective, and how Andropov was able to get power and maintain it.
Hold that thought while I make one other point and then we can wrap this up....
14/ When Putin was in the KGB the Soviet Union was a world power, and the Soviets were seen as on of twosuperpowers in the world along with the united States. At that time, is was not clear which power would come out on top. (in retrospect it's obvious, at the time it wasn't)
15/ At that time the soviets were feared and respected, had absolute dominance in their region of the world, and could exercise influence all over the world.
This is what Putin wants.
Putin wants to return Russia to it's place of respect, power, and prestige on the world stage.
16/ He sees the dissolution of the USSR as a mistake. When the USSR dissolved the direct influence the USSR maintained over it's satellite states (such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany) was lost, and the power of Russia was diminished...
17/ He wants to return Russia to it's former glory.
But, as we have seen, he has learned his lessons from watching the Old Soviet Union, and from his training as a KGB officer. As such Putin uses thuggery, espionage, deceit, disinformation, and subversion as his tactics...
18/ So it should surprise us not at all that Putin would invade one of the old territories of the USSR, particularly when he has a lot to gain if he can get it and keep it.
This is exactly what we should expect from him. After all, the USSR would regularly engage in exactly...
19/ This sort of expansionist behavior. We should expect this from Putin.
Further Putin has been telegraphing his nostalgia for the USSR for some time. The Russian hockey team was wearing the Jersey's of the USSR at a tournament in Moscow this past December.
That's not a fluke
20/ Putin is pulling out the old Soviet playbook in a bid to bring Russia back to prestige and prominence.
Putin may not subscribe to old Soviet Communist ideology. I am not entirely sure. What I am sure of is that Putin is an authoritarian thug who needs to be countered...
21/ Whether or not the west has the spine to do that is an open question. But we have seen this all before, and we ought not to be surprised that Putin would do this. His history practically begs us to think this is exactly what he would do.
One last thing....
22/ This thread, and it's ideas are not my own. I am not expert in Putin or Russia, but people who know much more then I do have relayed this to me, and I am relaying it to you.
I think it is spot on.
/fin.
PS/
I should add, because I forgot to make this clear in the original thread:
Putin doesn't want Russia's power and prestige back because it makes the lives of ordinary Russians better. He wants Russia's prestige and prominence back for his own aggrendizement and personal power
PPS/
This isn't a selfless thing for the glory of Mother Russia...it's about the selfish glory of Putin.
Regular Russians will suffer greatly so that Putin can increase his own power and sense of self importance on the world stage.
/fin
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If you hang around leftist circles enough you'll hear the "nazi bar" parable, and this explains how they think about everything.
They don't see themselves as part of being a social movement based on highly controversial and hotly disputed ideas...
...Leftists think their moral values, and social views are just uncontroversial expressions of what is morally right, and leftism is just what you get when everyone is "being kind" and "being a good person."
In their heads, they are the regular crowd at the bar.
They see leftism as the natural, normal, and healthy state of affairs that occurs when everyone is "being kind," they don't realize that leftism is a worldview and political ideology that is hotly contested, and that's built on a set of social values that are highly controversial
1/ This "government teacher" doesn't know when America was founded, won't teach students the official curriculum, and teaches kids about activism, anti-racism, and Black Lives Matter.
Woke teachers took over K-12 education and the get funded by grants like these,
2/ The entire education system is full of activists, professors, and teachers who believe teaching is a political act, and Social Justice (AKA: woke ideology) should be the foundation of all learning and education.
Many of them are funded by the grants Murkowski wants to protect
3/ Let's take for example the 21st Century Community Learning Center Grant Murkowski mentioned in her letter.
This grant funds a school Rann Miller teaches at. Miller wrote an article defending the use of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 project in education👇
1/ The U.S. Government Accountability Office was designed to be a non-partisan watchdog that Audits government for waste, fraud, and abuse.
However, the GAO has been captured by progressives who are using it to advance to advance their political ideology.
And I have receipts.🧵
2/ The job of the GAO is to hold government institutions accountable for the way they spend money and carry out their mission. That is, the GAO doesn't decide what policies get implemented, it makes sure the policies government passes get implemented, whatever those happen to be.
3/ In other words, the GAO is supposed to ensure that government institutions are actually using the funding they get from congress to implement the policies congress has actually passed, rather just implementing the policies that the bureaucrats themselves prefer.
1/ In March this guy farmed 11 million views and 20K RT's by saying an "RFK blackmail story is breaking from multiple angles," while vaguely insinuating the CIA and Pfizer were involved and regurgitating widely available information.
2/ His whole game is to take widely available information dug up by other people and use it as a pretext to suggest that various events are caused by powerful interests who "pull the strings," and then make vague and unfalsifiable insinuations regarding who the string pullers are
3/ This is how he posture as a brave truth teller whose doing his own research when all he's really doing is regurgitating readily available information read through a cynical and conspiratorial lens, while engaging in wild speculation about "whose really pulling the strings."
I don't think the left realizes the degree to which giving puberty blockers and sex-changes to kids who wanted to change genders was a test of moral and intellectual integrity, and that test utterly destroyed the moral and intellectual credibility of everyone who failed it.
The people who went along with gender ideology didn't just end up on the wrong side of public opinion, they demonstrated for the whole world that they had no intellectual integrity, moral fortitude, and no ability to stand up for the truth or think for themselves.
The people who went along with gender ideology showed that they have no intellectual or moral anchors of any kind, and that they will pretend to believe anything and go along with any ideology in order to preserve their social standing and the esteem of their colleagues.
Woke leftists think people's conscious beliefs are determined by their cultural environment, so whoever controls the content of the culture controls the consciousness of the masses.
They want to control culture so they can control thought, which is basically the game they're in.
They think everyones views are socially/culturally determined; programmed into them by social forces of which they are unaware. Of course, the leftists never think their own views are just culturally determined, or that they have been programmed to be leftists.
They think they have transcended the cultural programming and are now able to influence the culture, to move culture forward because they are critically aware (or have critical consciousness) which lets them see the development of culture and the source code of social reality.