It’s fascinating and instructive to learn and digest the varied critiques of the current Russian presidential elections, March 16-18, 2024. Western journalists each on the political Left and the supposed political Proper have uniformly attacked the vote as “rigged” and the election as stolen. That’s, the election equipment of “dictator” Vladimir Putin—who, together with Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, is the chief most loathed globally by each the political Left and the Institution Proper—manipulated and massaged the outcomes to the impact that the Russian president acquired 87% of the votes solid (the turnout was round 74%).
Right here is how the English Leftist paper of file, The Guardian, leads off its reporting of March 18 on the Russian vote:
Though Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory with 87% of the vote within the Russian election was no shock, these elections had been vital each for the Kremlin and for these in opposition to Putin.With voter turnout at 74% – the very best in historical past – something lower than a landslide victory would have recommended that those that didn’t vote for Putin represented a big pressure in Russian politics. This could have been significantly awkward within the case of younger upstart Vladislav Davankov, who, with 3.79% of the vote, got here a detailed third place. Davankov has been mistakenly described as an anti-war candidate – he helps peace and negotiations, ‘however on Russia’s situations and with out one step backwards’ – however his platform additionally known as for ‘freedom of speech and opinion, as an alternative of intolerance and denunciations’, and ‘openness and pragmatism as an alternative of looking for new enemies’. [Claims by NPR that all oppositions candidates were in jail are patently false].
A number of opposition figures, together with the well-known blogger Maxim Katz, and barred candidate Boris Nadezhdin, publicly said they might vote for him. In response to Vote Overseas, Davankov gained nearly all of votes at Russian polling stations in different nations. With such a ‘subversive’ candidate on the poll sheet, nothing apart from absolute victory would have allowed Putin to sleep at evening.
It was clear for a while that the Kremlin noticed this election as a check of the regime’s legitimacy. It was not sufficient for the Kremlin to win the election – it additionally needed to display public engagement…. There was a push for early voting, particularly within the occupied territories in Ukraine, the place electoral officers accompanied by armed males in uniform knocked on folks’s doorways and politely requested them in the event that they wish to vote early. Those that didn’t but have Russian passports had been allowed to use their Ukrainian IDs. In Russia there have been the standard raffles, discos and canteens at polling stations to entice folks out….”
In different phrases, Russian election officers did a few of what American—Democrat—election officers and brokers did for the 2020 election, most particularly within the six essential battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.
By no means thoughts, say the critics. Russian elections and American ones are two separate species, not comparable. The Russian ones should not credible, they solemnly intone—Putin is a tyrant who was simply consolidating his energy, they add.
And abruptly up pops, conveniently, a virulent anti-Putin Russian analyst, Sergey Shpilkin, who employs a doubtful methodology to estimate that maybe as many as 31 million out Putin’s garnered whole of 76 million (or about 41%) of the Russian president’s vote whole is faux! His evaluation “hinges on evaluating the distribution of votes for various candidates with the turnout at every polling station. A good election [sic!] would sometimes present an identical distributions differing solely in absolute values. Nonetheless, discrepancies on this sample recommend vote inflation by means of poll stuffing or the rewriting of vote tallies, which seem to have considerably skewed the official outcomes.”
His suggestion is sheer hypothesis based mostly on what he conceives as a “honest election” and based mostly on the presence or lack of an identical vote whole percentages for candidates throughout the board in all voting districts. In different phrases, he fails to have in mind regional variations in voting and voting patterns, variations between city and rural voting, and different vital elements which might account for vote totals. Certainly, is it not going that areas of Russia nearest to and most affected by the warfare in Ukraine may vote in another way than, say, areas within the Siberian Far East? Or that town of Moscow, much more influenced by Western “tradition,” may skew such guestimates?
Nonetheless, the outcomes of Shpilkin’s miraculous deduction have been solemnly seized upon by the Institution Media each in Western Europe and in the US, as such a conclusion reinforces and confirms their view that “Putin is (one other) new Hitler” who has destroyed “democracy” and “freedom” in Russia.
Report after report echoes the identical chorus. But, regardless of that close to uniformity within the media and among the many US and EU political governing class that the Russian elections had been rigged, and that if solely a “honest” election could be held, Putin could be toast, the information on the bottom display the precise opposite. Vladimir Putin stays very talked-about in Russia. And infrequently a uncommon and life like appraisal will get previous the gatekeepers. Even the anti-Putin UK Telegraph (March 19) was compelled to confess that the Russian president “enjoys a daunting stage of assist that Western media and politicians obscure….” And the Telegraph means that it understands why: “to protect the phantasm that there’s only one evil madman in charge for the warfare in Ukraine, moderately than a nation with far too many brainwashed anti-Nato, anti-Western nationalists eager to endorse their chief’s aggression.”
Regardless of stories from the BBC and The Economist that solely “some” Russians in truth assist President Putin, even The New York Occasions was lastly compelled to confess that impartial polling by the well-regarded Levada Middle (that has been monitoring Putin’s approval score since 1999) revealed that his assist nationally in Russia stood at 86%. “Maybe much more shocking,” continued the Telegraph, “a ridiculous 75 per cent of Russians advised the pollster that their nation is on course.”
And the author provides: “In the identical manner that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s guide, Hitler’s Prepared Executioners challenged the notion that it was Hitler alone who was chargeable for the horrors of WW2 and the Holocaust, we should be trustworthy in assessing Russian aggression past Mr. Putin. The media hopefully pretends that Russian aggression is solely a Putin drawback. In truth, polling from Levada and others signifies that there are a troubling variety of Russians who endorse Putin’s warped view that Ukraine isn’t a official nation [sic].”
Thus, the true enemy is not only Vladimir Putin, however the Russian folks, your entire Russian nation. We are able to solely think about what alarms that units off within the fetid minds of Western globalists. Will the unelected and fanatical Neoconservative/Leftist globalist overseas coverage apparatchiks, hidden away in faceless edifices in Washington and Brussels, now declare that their “warfare” to rid the world of Putin, maybe assassinate the Russian president as a result of he gained’t settle for their tutelage, should be prolonged to the whole thing of the Russian folks? In different phrases, are we now watching the onset of an ethnic and spiritual warfare towards a complete inhabitants? Is that what the US State Division and our overseas satraps in Bonn, London, and Paris now are envisaging within the identify of “(y)our democracy”?
Think about: all impartial polls previous to the Russian presidential election indicated that Vladimir Putin would win overwhelmingly by an enormous margin of maybe over 80%, which he did. Why, then, pray inform, given the worldwide scenario and the way he’s negatively considered by American and EU leaders, would he affirm the views of Washington and Brussels that he was a “dictator,” a “new Hitler,” when assuredly he was destined to win by such a big margin? It is mindless, and, if something, Putin will not be dumb. Even when the tyrant as he’s usually portrayed, he did NOT must rig something.
Certainly, a powerful case might be made that the not too long ago accomplished Russian elections had been really fairer in some methods than their 2020 American counterparts. On the very least accusers within the US ought to look at their very own disreputable historical past of voter fraud and manipulation earlier than zealously attacking Moscow.
Are we not witnessing a type of gaslighting and projection by American and EU critics of occasions in Russia, particularly as we think about the varied efforts in the US to rig elections nationally or just stop an opponent from being on the poll (e.g., the actions of Colorado and some different states to take away Donald Trump from the presidential poll).
As Mollie Hemingway, Dr. Naomi Wolf, Tucker Carlson, and others have convincingly proven, our personal 2020 American presidential election was fraught with very skillful rigging. The 2020 election was undoubtedly essentially the most corrupt in American historical past. As Hemingway recounts, we witnessed a mixture of vastly prolonged absentee voting and counting newly-discovered votes after the election was purported to be over, the shortage of correct voter identification, vote harvesting, and the intentional use of unverified drop bins, all of which was backed up by tens of millions of {dollars} and assist from such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg. And we should add to this the direct and flagrant collusion of the information media which purposely hid the blockbuster story of Hunter Biden’s corruption and Joe Biden’s involvement in it.
Hemingway sums up what occurred:
[T]o an alarming diploma, Democrats achieved management over elections in 2020. What made 2020 totally different was that for the primary time ever the teams that supported Democrats had been allowed, on a widespread foundation, to cross that vibrant pink line that separates authorities officers who administer an election from political operatives. Unelected liberal activists had been allowed to embed in authorities workplaces and truly take over election administration duties in essential battleground states. They got huge quantities of voter info and even put accountable for designing, distributing, and gathering ballots…. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys had been allowed to rent and prepare their very own members of the family to function referees after which bought indignant the opposing staff didn’t publicly settle for a slender loss with a number of controversial calls. [….] (Hemingway , Rigged: How the Media, Bid Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Washington: Regnery, 2021, pp. 206-207)
Our nationwide overseas coverage elites stress that we favor implanting “democracy” throughout the globe, and that we are going to do all the things to see it flourish. In fact, Russia (after which China, Iran, Hungary, and so forth.) is available in for harsh criticism. But, a few of our main allies—Saudi Arabia involves thoughts—are most undoubtedly not “democratic.” Our zeal for “(y)our democracy” has its velleities.
Or, think about our newest trigger celebre, the protection of “(y)our democracy” in Ukraine. Our media and authorities reward its chief, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “new George Washington.” But Zelensky’s authorities in Kiev has suppressed opposition events and put his opponents in jail, whereas persecuting Ukraine’s massive Russian Orthodox spiritual church. Even former president of the European Fee, Jean-Claude Juncker, has described our ally as “a rustic corrupt in any respect ranges of society.”
The straightforward truth is that American criticism of the Russian elections, the fixed accusations towards its president, and the US dedication to defeat Russia in Ukraine, even when it prices the life of each Ukrainian, is actually ideological and based on the right assumption that Russia refuses to return to the standing which it had below Boris Yeltsin, who was, in caricature known as “America’s poodle” for his subservience to American globalist coverage.
The creating globalist template can brook no opposition, whether or not domestically from a Donald Trump who fails to heed the instructions of the Deep State, or from a Vladimir Putin who believes that the true pursuits of his nation don’t at all times coincide with Davos, Washington, or Brussels.
