AndyRussian invasion of Ukraine
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If you live in the UK, you might want to check out Russian Godfathers, which will air on BBC2 this Thursday. Basically it looks like it will be a 50 minute roundup of who’s who in Russia, who is on the up, and who has recently come crashing down to earth.
Putin, able to see matters rather straighter than Yeltsin, realised two crucial things about the oligarchs: that they were potentially more powerful than him, and that they were about as popular with your average Russian as a man idly burning bundles of £50s outside an orphanage (according to one 2004 poll, only 18% of Russians opposed wholesale renationalisation of the country’s resources). In a country in which anti-semitism never quite went out of fashion, the fact that many of the oligarchs are Jewish makes them an even more tempting target for a populist like Putin (after the arrest of arch-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin’s already high approval rating was measured at 80%).
I doubt it’ll reveal anything particularly startling, but it should be a quite interesting way to while away hour or so.
Short pithy synopsis, applicabe to documentary exposes or the protest industry in general. With the oligarch’s pulling all the strings soap opera isall there is
You write “the fact that many of the oligarchs are Jewish makes them an even more tempting target for a populist like Putin”, They are a tempting target because they stole the economic treasures of Russia from a drunk and then left the country. If they are Jewish then they should be more careful as by acting in this self serving way they only build on their reputation. This is not an anti-semitic statement, this is fact. And as for calling Russia anti-senitic, Why shouldn’t the People of Russia be less than benevolent to the Jews, after all Leon Trotsky and 300 Jews, financed by American Jewish money killed their monarchy and created misery in Soviet Russia & Eastern Europe for almost 80 years.
Perhaps because those particular Jews are long dead and buried.
The Jews who live today have nothing to do with them, and should not be judged on what went before.
If these oligarchs have stolen from the Russian people (which they did) they should be judged because they are criminals who stole from the Russian people, not because they are Jews who stole from the Russian people.
By the way – where does the whole “financed by American Jewish money” come from?