I was reading a piece about the necessity of expanding NATO eastward, when my attention was arrested by this:
The KGB ousted Gorbachev in a futile attempt to save the secret police regime that was collapsing under a great wave of human emancipation.
The leader of the coup was Gorbachev’s deputy, Gennady Yanayev. And I thought to myself: why would the secret police care? I mean, every regime needs its “intelligence community” to defend the regime from spies and saboteurs and renegades. Oh, and from “armed insurrectionists.”
And was there really a “great wave of human emancipation,” or was the old regime just past its sell-by date and failing to keep the trains running on time? And if the old regime was past its sell-by date, what does the secret police care? Unless, of course, they were going to lose their jobs, because budget cuts.
Here at home our “intelligence community” is doing a bang-up job of protecting the regime. Why, the regime is even proposing a nice new office complex for the FBI, bigger than the Pentagon, and nicely situated away from crime-ridden Washington, DC, so that the average FBI employee can drive to work rather than take the subway to save the climate.
And yet, all is not quite copacetic with our beloved FBI. There seem to be the occasional whistleblowers blowing the whistle about this or that, although they always seem to be low-level yahoos. I suppose that up in the top ranks there are various alliances — not really cabals — people with a common agenda that work together in dealing with the president’s appointees and in boosting each other for promotion. But why does the FBI lower itself to going along with political shenanigans like the Russian Collusion caper?
Oh, of course. Because if FBI leadership doesn’t go with the regime’s shenanigans then it doesn’t get the promotions that it so richly deserves.
So at what point does the police — or the military — decide that the politicians are so hopeless that it s time for a new and competent leadership — us guys — to get things sorted out?
And yet, why did the KGB chappies like Putin inherit the Soviet Union? Was it because the post-Stalin, post Krushchev, post-Gorbachev party members were just clueless placemen that didn’t have a clue how to do politics?
OK, I guess Lenin explains everything. At the end of the Tsarist regime, with a lost war and everything falling apart, nobody in the regime knew what they were doing. But Lenin did; he had thought about regime change and had taught himself how to play the game. Pity that he knew how to do revolution but not how do create a just, prosperous society. But you can’t have everything!
Then we could say that the KGB chappies like Putin that inherited the Soviet regime were pretty clueless too. They knew how to beat people up, but not how to prevent the looting of Mother Russia by their pals, the oligarchs and Putin’s kleptocracy. They knew how to run Russia like a mafia don, but not how to create a new Russia free from looting and pay-to-play that would be the envy of the world.
I suppose it all come down to this. Any national police force lives by coming down hard on the regime’s enemies. And one fine day it wakes up and realizes that the regime is the enemy.
But when it comes to thinking outside the box of fighting the regime’s enemies, the national police are clueless. Like the regime politicians they serve.