The Pravda headline says:

Vladmir Putin is the Franklin Roosevelt of our times

Oh boy, is that rich. You know, if Pravda just sprinkled half of its stories into the Russian soil, all of that agricultural rebuilding and reform that Putin was supposed to be finishing up by now (7 years into his government) would be accelerated tenfold by some of the best the fertilizer ever written.

Don't give up reading before the end. This is the official voice that the Putin Administration uses to communicate with the Russian people. Here's a doozie of a whopper of a quote of an official lie referring to world circumstances to justify four terms for the Putintate:

These days Russia has very similar issues to tackle in terms of foreign policy, according to Pavlosky. “In short, you can take a look at yesterday’s speech by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It was a war-cry. He actually called on the administration to prepare for the war against Russia,” said Pavlovsky.

Someone dreamed up the Roosevelt analogy to do two things: humanize Putin and reinforce the perception that it has always been the expectation that he would rule for multiple terms -- well, because he's needed. And here is where the personality cult comes in . . . the Soviet Man is needed, a Master Russian, to lead Russia (subtext: nobody else can save us . . . except . . Terminal Vlad the Terminator, the "man of steel," which in Russian is the word "Stalin" by the way).

The piece is written better than the usual English version of propaganda on Pravda. You probably know that "Pravda" in Russian means "Truth," and that this plays well with the Russian people whose traditions respect absolute values such as truth, and want someone to tell it to them once and for all.

If demagogues like Putin will only say the words they want to hear, the politician will be forgiven for sinning in the name of the Russian people. It is a manipulation and deception of the trusting Russian soul, and an abuse of the Greek and then Russian Orthodox concept of "economia" (some lesser failing overlooked because of a redemptive outcome which overcomes and amends it ).

Russians want to believe in the good of their country, in their government, and that they are on the right side. We all do. One of the ways the Putin regime has succeeded in tapping that desire, is show Russians what they want to see. If Putin truly had been feeding Russia's health, agriculture and civil infrastructure outside of Moscow for the past six years, I could chalk this propaganda up to politics only and recognize his achievements. But Putin is not the Russian FDR. He has not been good to the Russian people.

Mr. Putin focuses on the United States to draw attention away from his own record at home. Where Gates the other day said we do not know what will happen in Russia and therefore argued for a deterrent defense, RF propagandists have turned this into "the US plans a war."

Russians want to see a strong leader, and so Pravda posts a picture of Putin taking off his mirrored sunglasses, striking the James Bond spy image. It brings back memories of the "Soviet Man" puffed during the USSR nightmare as that inscrutable, cool, calculating man who isn't afraid of being brutal, yet is quite the intellectual. (It is exactly such a "man" that drove Russia into extreme poverty, but never mind.) And so the Soviet Man is back out of the propaganda dust closet, is shined up to a bloody red, and put on display.

In reality, Russians never needed any of this propaganda. It was put there to replace their Christian hope, which had been outlawed. Their religious traditions and people were terrorized, brutalized, murdered and silenced. The Soviet "art" with muscular Soviet workers was meant to replace Russian Orthodox iconography.

Russians have no shortage of strong men and women, brilliant thinkers, holy women and men, and bright businesspeople. But they dare not speak up too loudly or ask tough questions. A Putinesque Sovietism accosts Russian society and soul all over again, this time dressed with KGB machismo. Putin is using whatever he can to wage a resourceful propaganda war. Russia is falling under a great spell of delusion from a president that is not what he claims to be.

This I know for sure: Lt. Col. Putin is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he is certainly no Czar Nicholas II.

When Holy Russia returns, Putin and his Soviet cronies in BMWs will be long gone. The Russian people outside of Moscow will have new hospitals, medical supplies, affordable and quality agricultural products and a bus system to help them get to and from Church. Right now, while Putin's been feeding his pals on caviar and French champagne, the people go to hospitals where they have to bribe people to get care; can't get sterile innoculations because the isopropyl alcohol has been consumed by alcoholics; and most people wonder when you will turn your attention to Russia instead of Soviet ambitions.

Postcript: For those who would now get off topic by listing US propaganda and governing abuses, I'd encourage that in a different thread, unless it is your contention that wrong US actions justify wrong Russian regime actions.

You see, this is not an attempt at a creative new form of Jazz music, this is the achievement of soulful and celebratory Jazz on a narrow road or a Frostian road less travelled, and it is specialized yet has breadth in amenability to accompaniment. It could be played far and wide and make the soundscape a place to want to be again in public. Some sounds played these days make me leave and leave early from public places. These will make people go back and stay a while.

Is this a promotion? No, it's a recommendation simply because I visited Tom Wright's site and clicked a few buttons to hear what was up with the clips and here's where I did that. You want to hear something special? Here:

TWTunes clips

Check it out if you haven't already!

Mike

Good 'ol trusty Pravda, which served the USSR for decades, is back, doing what it does best. Check these "stories" out:

'Land Of The Free, Home Of The Brave.' America now has staggering 7 million jailed citizens 12/04/2006 [article] / World / Americas As many people around the World continue in their amazement over the total moral and economic collapse of the American Nation, a possible new clue as to why this so was revealed this past week with the United States Department of Justice announcing the staggering rate in which their government has been jailing their own citizens, and which now stands at 7 million Americans

Russia and Europe to come into conflict over death penalty used against terrorists

USA executes murderer and Nobel Prize nominee Last week Stanley Williams was nominated for the Nobel Peace Price for writing books for children

USA executes its citizens every ten days

Saddam Hussein likely be sentenced to death penalty for committing crimes against humanity The forthcoming trail (sic) will most likely be as scandalous and sensational as the recent legal process against US pop star Michael Jackson

Will executions haunt the American public?

Russia considers death penalty issue to punish terrorists

American justice

United States celebrate Human Rights Day with double execution

By his remarks in Munich, Vladimir Putin again assumed that the current Russian Federation government is continuous with the USSR, sounding the difference between the governments mainly in acronyms, style and geographic size.

Mr. Putin's remarks accuse the US of overreaching and compared its conduct with that of the Cold War USA. This comparison begs the question of what regime was in power over Russians at the outset of the Cold War that necessitated the US policy of containment and competition across the board.

Answer: Josef Stalin's regime - murderer, ethnic cleanser and imprisoner of hundreds of millions of Russians and other ethnicities. Its routing and relocating of the Kulaks alone destroyed morale, food supply, health and life in the Russian people. Families, fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, grandparents, and so on, separated, re-educated, imprisoned, murdered and forced into silence by brutality. The Soviet regime was comparable to that of the Kims of North Korea; a personality cult.

Vladimir Putin's implied argument at Munich: that the world should not remember the responsibility of Russia for bowing to Stalin, and for participating in a Cold War on the world (not just the United States).

The latest propaganda to come out in certain pro-Moscow forums has been the falsehood that the Soviet Union "won" the war against Hitler while omitting mention of critical US alliance in the effort.

Of course the Russians and a hard winter drove the Nazis back to Germany, and ultimately beat them from the East. And Western forces benefitted from that Russian courage, grit and resolve. But that is only half of the story and would not have been possible without the allied invasions and battles from the West, plus the Western aid to Soviet forces through Scandinavia and by air from Alaska.

The Russians did not face the 50 plus divisions of German troops that Hitler sent to defend Germany against the Western Allied invasion by December 1944, nor all of those which perished, were reduced, or captured defending France, N. Africa, Italy etc.. They did not face the full strength of the Luftwaffe, which was busy engaging the US and UK's forces. And they were fed by a sustained British / US effort to supply the Soviet Army with food and provisions which ultimately succeeded in breakthrough once German Naval harrassment was minimized.

The mythic intimation of a near single-handed Russian defeat of the Nazis is a sign of nationalistic propaganda issuing from Moscow.

All of these sounds from Moscow come after a decade in which the US engaged in the BRAC process of military base closures reflecting the expectation of the end of the Cold War for good. We can discuss the errors of nations, but we cannot do it on the basis of incomplete histories born of nationalistic fantasy created in a dictator's office.

Congratulations to US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for his mature and well spoken response to Vladimir Putin's speech at the security meeting in Munich. By recognizing Putin's rhetoric as representative of an old-guard Cold War spy mentality gripping the Kremlin, Mr. Gates aimed true.

It is appropriate to talk past Mr. Putin, because Russia deperately needs new leadership. Russia needs to sweep the Kremlin of those of the Soviet mindset that Putin has proven dwell therein. Not to do so seems to be an expression by Russia that it prefers the 20th century to the 21st, although the 20th was perhaps the most dismally measured by mass human suffering than any in history.

Time to move past the politics of poisoning, coercion, ideological revolutions, and hopefully, counter-ideologies as extreme in implication as those we want not to see repeated. For example, the US must itself reactivate the power of its civil freedoms guaranteed by the US constitution while pruning some activities of such low constitutional value that they actually damage human freedom in the marketplace more than bolster same.

Under cover of technology, totalitarian intrusion and control through financial and personal information technologies, with private institutions subject to simple intrusion by government agencies, is no better than the archaic varieties of anti-civil libertarian largesse. Ronald Reagan rightly warned the US against Big Government, which I read also as, Big Brother, because such a Bureaucratic Giantocracy will reach into so many private sector venues that its regulation, oversight and intrusive power will make it indistinguishable from the largest private sector entities. If revolving doors between top corporate and government posts were not enough, long reported over the years by political scientist Thomas R. Dye's Who's Running America series, why is enmeshed information sharing not a circumvention of distinctions b/w government and corporate? One need not theorize conspiracy to point out blazing conflicts of interest.

The US cannot be good in the world unless it finds good in its own heart, which good has to include constant checks and balances against over-concentration of power, corruption and circumventions of public trust. Corrupting from within cannot sustain attempts to be good abroad. And that is not just a matter of message or explication, it is a matter of conduct, results and health-status in the US domestic sphere.