"Те, кто готов отказаться от существенной свободы, чтобы купить немного временной безопасности, не заслуживают ни свободы, ни безопасности."
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
So goeth a purported quote from Benjamin Franklin which made the blogosphere rounds during the George W. Bush era. We may never know how many terror attacks (if any) were foiled by the controversial PATRIOT Act, but one thing is for certain: Russia’s authoritarian security state failed spectacularly when Moscow’s Crocus City concert hall was targeted on Friday:
Less than a week ago, Russia President Vladimir Putin claimed a fifth term with his highest-ever share of the vote, using a stage-managed election to show the nation and the world that he was firmly in control.
Just days later came a searing counterpoint: His vaunted security apparatus failed to prevent Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years.
Friday’s assault, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That is especially true after two years of a war in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he cast as his top priority after the election last Sunday.
"The election demonstrated a seemingly confident victory,” Alexander Kynev, a Russian political scientist, said in a phone interview from Moscow. "And suddenly, against the backdrop of a confident victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”
Putin seemed blindsided by the assault. It took him more than 19 hours to address the nation about the attack, the deadliest in Russia since the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in the country’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian leader said nothing about the mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State group committed the attack.
Instead, Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the assailants had acted "just like the Nazis,” who "once carried out massacres in the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.
[…]
The fact that Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a potential terrorist attack is likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and tightening security, he dismissed them as "provocative statements.”
"All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Putin said Tuesday in a speech to the FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, referring to the Western warnings. After Friday’s attack, some of his exiled critics have cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true security concerns.
Rather than keeping society safe from actual, violent terrorists, those critics say, Putin has directed his security services to pursue dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of "traditional values.”
A case in point: Just hours before the attack, state media reported that Russian authorities had added "the LGBT movement” to an official list of "terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors leveled against Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who died last month.
"In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, wrote in a social media post Saturday, "terrorists will always feel free.”
Part of the reason Vladimir Putin remains popular among Russians, though the true measure of his popularity cannot be known in a state where speaking up can get you pushed out of a skyscraper window, is because he oversaw a massive decline in violent crime compared to the chaotic 1990s.
That’s why I’ve said that if Putin had dropped dead of a heart attack around 2008 or so, before Russia’s invasion of Georgia showed us what was to come, he would probably go down as the greatest leader in modern Russian history. Which is kind of like being the least bad Kim to ever rule North Korea, but it would be something.
But this isn’t the first time a terrorist attack has happened on his watch. And in a country where anyone who might say “no” to the strongman too often gets shipped off to IK-3, there will likely be many more.
Assuming they aren’t orchestrated by Putin himself.
There’s a lot of speculation - some of it from Russia’s designated scapegoat, Ukraine - that the Crocus City attack was a false-flag by Putin’s own security services. I’m skeptical. ISIS has perfectly “valid” reasons to attack Russia, and if it was indeed a set-up by the Putin regime they surely wouldn’t have made themselves look so hopelessly incompetent.
Needless to say, security failures happen in the West, too. The Uvalde and Parkland school shootings, which similarly involved law enforcement officers sitting on their asses while carnage ensued, come immediately to mind.
The details of these failures are now well known, and officials have suffered actual consequences, thanks in no small part to officials and media who can speak up without getting a splash of polonium in their Starbucks lattes. We’ll see what Russians are allowed to say about those who were supposed to protect them, and to whom they gave up basic freedoms in trade, but I’m not expecting much more than a few inconvenient “suicides” and then everything going on as usual.
In the meantime, the big brains on Twitter have blown this mystery wide open:
People like Galloway, whose recent election to the House of Commons should make Brits shut up about their American cousins possibly voting for Trump this November, believe they’re living in something like the Scooby-Doo universe and they’re driving around in a garishly colored van unearthing the shocking troof everyone else is too brainwashed to see.
And their patented investigative technique? Reviewing press releases and mainstream media reports and finding examples of the conspiratorial masterminds openly admitting their crimes.
Try to wrap your mind around this logic. The CIA/Mossad/Koch Brothers/GeorgeSoros/WEF/Bill Gates/Reverse-Vampires conspirators decide they’re going to commit a terrible crime and blame it on their enemies so they can take over the world. They swear hundreds if not thousands of people to secrecy so they can pull it off. But they also gloat about it in the media, because something something evil.
The “Building 7” conspiracy theory from 9/11 is a classic example. In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein said that his building in the World Trade Center complex was so badly damaged by fire, and at risk of imminent collapse, that he told the fire department commander that “maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
Sheeple like you and I understand this to mean the building was lost and that firefighters should be withdrawn. But the Loose Change crowd takes this as an admission by Silverstein - and, boy, do they emphasize that last name for some reason - he ordered a controlled demolition.
Which of course means all of 9/11 was an inside job. And that one of the conspirators talked about it on national television, because (a) he’s so eeeeeeeeeeeevil that he thinks he can get away with it, and/or (b) he’s really stupid.
Actually, professional conspiracy theorists think everyone else is really stupid, and that they are in possession of some secret knowledge which only they were smart enough to uncover. It gives some semblance of meaning to their otherwise dismal lives.
They’ve always been with us. But never before have they been able to so easily broadcast it.