A Quote by Vladimir Voinovich
Most people consume information passively-whatever they're being fed. They're being fed Russian television, which tells them that in the 90s there was a terrible catastrophe, that before that life had been all right, and then when Putin came many people say, "I've never lived as well as I'm living under Putin." That's true-there has never been such a level of affluence. But now, it looks like people will have to tighten their belts, and some are already having doubts.
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Donald Trump didn't even understand, right, that [Vladimir] Putin was playing him. So, in Putin's mind, I have no doubt that Putin thinks that he's an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation, although Putin would never say that.
The thing that has disturbed me most about the Russian hacking episode is - and the thing that surprised me most has not been the fact of Russian hacking. The cyber world is full of information gathering, you know, propaganda, et cetera. I have been concerned about the degree to which, in some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government. I think that's something new.
Putin described Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. These - the Russian people view Ukraine as an extension of Russia. And so there is a sense that Putin really will do whatever it takes, even in the face of overwhelming, diplomatic, and economic pressure to defend what he sees as Russia's vital interest. And I think when we're trying to understand what's going on in Ukraine we have to keep that in mind. This isn't a simple case of Putin agitating for a fight.
Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg.
If we [black people] do not show up and support the march towards cinematic equality, the march towards being on a level at - we don't even have to be higher than whites, but to be viewed in the same common thread of this is a professional, these are stories that people are interested in, instead of being fed the same old BS dogma that's been fed and the studios have used.
I remember being 18 and being fed up with everything - fed up with society, fed up with the political system, fed up with myself - and then you kind of go, 'Actually, this voting thing is amazing,' because you have a chance to change it, right?
I understand why Vladimir Putin is very popular in Russia - he's probably the first Russian leader to not apologize for being Russian. People always pin it down to one man, but there's hundreds of millions of Russians of various sorts. Putin does seem to be very popular in Russia, if only because he stands up for Russians wherever they are, which is exactly what Americans do with Americans, of course.
In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.
Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up having more. Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you've been. Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past. Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here. Best place to be, eh?
I don't think anyone in the 1990s, the late '90s, anticipated that the Putin they knew then would become the Putin we know now.
We never get any gratitude for what we do. We just are constantly ripped. We are constantly complained about. We are constantly attacked. And people are fed up with it. People are fed up being told they haven't done enough, that they don't do enough, that they don't care enough, that they're mean-spirited, that they're extremists, when this is the most loving and charitable, the most giving country the world has ever seen.
I had a chance to talk with President [Vladimir] Putin and he clearly said to me very directly, "I will think about that. I will think about this challenge of how we win." Look, this is not easy for Putin. Everybody says, "Oh, Putin's made a big move." Well, Putin is [in Syria] now; and if he wants to fight ISIL alone, that's a challenge, folks.
German leftists have still not understood the degree to which Russian President Vladimir Putting has drifted to the right domestically. Now, insightful observers are saying that Putin is trying to create something like a reactionary Internationale. The turn toward homophobia and to clerics is completely ignored by leftists in Germany. Their sympathy for Putin comes largely from their antipathy for America. And this anti-Americanism is what binds them with the far-right.
I think that people in the phase between being someone's kid and being someone's parent have always been uniquely narcissistic, but that social media and Twitter and LiveJournal make it really easy to navel-gaze in a way that you've never been able to before. People taking pictures of what they eat and showing them on their Facebook. People assume that people have a level of interest in what they're doing that's maybe far greater than it is, although there is an audience for all that stuff.
Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.
Some politicians are scared of Putin and some are extremely apologetic, actually. And I feel very sorry for this because some people who are like my friends from the left flank, they praise Putin because they see him as the fighter against American imperialism, which he is not. You know, why would you select between American imperialism and Russian imperialism? To my mind, it's exactly the same thing.
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