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Tue 14 Sep, 2004 09:28 am
President Vladimir Putin has announced radical changes to Russia's democratic institutions that will give the Kremlin greater power than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Mr Putin effectively negated the right of citizens to elect a regional representative. Instead, he will propose the country's 89 regional governors.
He also announced on Monday that seats in the Duma allocated to single-member constituencies will be replaced with a fully proportional system.
Mr Putin said the changes were vital to boost state authority after the Beslan tragedy, in which hostages were killed when Chechen rebels raided a school.
The move will accord even greater control to his United Russia party, which already has the backing of about two-thirds of the deputies in the Duma.
The announcement, made in an address to regional governors, follows the school siege in southern Russia, which ended with the deaths of more than 300 people, half of them children.
It is an ugly thought that the deaths of all those Russian women and children was an inside job; orchestrated for the purpose of dissipating civil liberties.
I never believed we were "better" than the Russians in the midst of the cold war era. It seems since the first joint Soyuz Apollo missions we have been grappling for commonality.
Unfortunately many of our similarities have been that our states possess systemic and insidious problems. Much of it here is a conflict of liberty and basic exercising of rights vs. scarcity and lack of organization.
Instead of allowing people to define their own needs the state steps in. The irony here is that we are seeing the introduction of of a domestic surveillance program as a new idea.
And in the Soviet Union it is a beast slouching back.
I sense that we are dealing with Cosmic Weather here. You wonder what crises are occurring on Tralfalmador (or at least I do because I'm sure we're not unique).
If we can weather this storm we may find that the state isn't that interested in us, nor we in them.
For now, I think I'll rent both versions of Orwell's '84 movie even if the Reagan era differed. The Edmund G. O'Brien version always got me looking for parallels in the neighborhood.
And the Richard Burton version as I recall was pretty well done. I'd rerun Brave New World too but I think Orwell has more to do with Bush and Ashcroft than Aldous Huxley especially with his imagination and private life.
Don't tell the state what you're afraid of. They have a special room for you!
Not only does the state step in in both societies to send the youth off to do battle; but here much more than in the former Soviet Union we have a gigantic private sector which uses the state in complicity to the rape of the environment and exploitation of people that the private sector does far better than the government.
This is perhaps more to cause concern than that polls can be skewed and bought can be bought in the American Public sector.
That is a problem the former soviets don't have with the exception of their well known sex industries.
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