When 'Stability' Means Surrender
In a democracy, you have a personal responsibility for the choices of your nation
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I was searching for a post — my review of a Peter Pomerantsev book where the word ‘stability’ was used in relation to Putin as some sort of incantation, a conjured dream spell to lull the people toward political paralysis.
And instead, a post popped up from November 5, 2024, where I wrote:
Republishing my tribute to Russia’s last best hope — Boris Nemtsov — as we cherish our freedom from tyranny for another day.
I decided to republish my report on Nemtsov, as a final warning on voting day of what could happen to America if Trump was reinstalled.
America was always imperfect, but it could always be improved. And I didn’t grow up under tyranny. I grew up in an imperfect Democracy, and I was happy.
I wrote books with rap artists that detailed struggle, but I wrote them in their houses overlooking the Sunset Strip, with a view of Catalina Island on a good day, because this is America, and even dead end streets can lead somewhere.
America, the country that voted in President Obama, twice, is now a land of tyranny.
And Russia’s fingerprints are everywhere on the crime scene.
Russia exploits existing divisions in every country it targets, so two things can be truth at once: America is racist, and Russia exploits that.
Recall these details from the Mueller Report, which too few bothered to read:
Among the Russian-organized protests identified by Mueller’s team: a march attended by thousands of people organized by Russia’s IRA in New York City. Among the details of that march to Trump Tower on Nov. 12, 2016: It was organized by the Facebook page — “BlackMattersUS” — created by the St. Petersburg, Russia, operatives to exploit racial tensions between black and white Americans. The event was shared with 61,000 users.
On page 18 of Mueller's indictment against the Russians, we learn that a St. Petersburg-operated Instagram account called “Woke Blacks” posted this message on October 16, 2016:
“… (a) particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote for Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”
We also learn that the Russians purchased an ad on an Instagram account called “Blacktivist” that read:
“Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”
Celebrities ranging from Sarah Silverman to Trevor Noah retweeted fake Black accounts from Russia.
America had help marching itself off a cliff. Voter suppression and interference aimed at the Black vote were key strategies of the Russian operation. Mueller’s investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to boost Trump through a social media campaign coordinated by Russian intelligence. And although they used many narrative techniques, exploiting already existing racial divisions proved to be low hanging fruit.
And of course, we did nothing, so by the time Kamala Harris becomes the candidate, information warfare techniques aimed at exploiting existing racial divisions were now on steroids — delivered through a “$44 billion dollar psyop cannon” owned by the richest man in the world, who coordinated with the Russians. And of course, we did nothing.
As political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay says, the Russians are opportunists.
“They’re not that clever,” MacKay told Bette Dangerous. “Russians do not cause these catastrophes. They’re the person who comes to the scene of the arson after it’s already there and just pours more gasoline on it.”
Russia watcher Keir Giles calls it “the long screwdriver.”
In July 2024, I met Keir in a pub in England, and here’s a snippet of our conversation:
Heidi: So in America, we have an election coming up, and I am seeing all the same operatives who were doing ‘but her emails’ now doing the ‘step aside’ Joe Biden op. Are there any echoes that you can hear of potential active measures going on? Or do you just think there’s this organic crises in America?
Keir: The two shouldn’t necessarily be disentangled fully, because active measures lean on organic crises and augment, as opposed to inventing in the first place, just the same as when people see a Putin trace behind, for example, the Reform Party in the UK and the right of center parties in France — that’s not necessarily rhetoric that is inspiring this, these are genuine grievances that people are responding to by voting in this way. And the question is more to what extent can we see the Kremlin reaching in with a long screwdriver to turn up the volume…
How do you tell the agents of influence who are doing this consciously from the useful idiots who think they’re doing it of their own accord? And the sad truth is often you cannot tell from open sources, because it’s a counterintelligence problem. Because you need to have that information. You cannot derive it from open sources, like ‘what’s in their email accounts, what’s in their bank accounts? Who are they talking to? How are they being incentivized?’ And to find that out requires the political will and prioritization to devote resources to actually finding it out through the security and intelligence services of given country.
Two months after that conversation, we did find out that media ‘influencers’ were being paid by Russia to push anti-democratic, pro-Russian narratives on an unsuspecting public. And of course, we did nothing.
But in truth, we did more than nothing — they were invited to the White House and the Pentagon and now make up members of the White House Press Pool.
So if you wonder why I, too, became a Russia watcher, it’s because my imperfect country was the target of the Russian war machine and the attacks are ongoing.
Last night, at a pub in Europe, I told an Irish-Scotsman at the bar that Václav Havel predicted America would fall due to lazy consumerism.
He said: “Yeah, but it was fun on the way down.”
We all had a great laugh — a brief balm for the trauma.
Europeans, too, are traumatized over what is happening in America. I meet many people who have canceled their annual trips to America, with heavy, heavy sorrow, described as “soul destroying” by one new friend.
And although the spider web of disinformation is everywhere — with people being targeted to believe that immigrants are the problem and not the billionaires taking direct aim at their democracies — more seem to be waking up to Russia’s long screwdriver reaching in to turn up the volume on preexisting grievances in each remaining democracy.
Nice country you got there, be a shame if you could no longer work out your problems in house.
This is a long way to say I am very pleased to note that recent investigative reports suggesting increased security around the bunker gremlin, Freezer Face Putin — due to coup and assassination threats — is rooted in “real intelligence.”
Putin has functioned as the global contractor to international oligarchs to take on the project of destroying democracies, whose rules, regulations, law, and human rights gets in the way of their desire for global domination and unbridled greed.
I asked Bette experts for their thoughts on the latest reports of Putin’s increasing paranoia, the Special Tribunal forming in Europe for Russia’s war crimes, the corruption in plain sight in the US, and the point of Trump’s trip to China. Here is their response:
Political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay, Ottawa, Canada:
Putin’s paranoia is real. Ukrainian intelligence assesses that Putin spends most of his time in bunkers in southern russia. He does not visit his residences; he does not work in the Kremlin.
The Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine matters. It establishes some continuity with the rules-based international order established in 1945, which is now mostly destroyed thanks to the Putin regime and the Trump regime. The Netherlands announced the initial phase of the Special Tribunal will be hosted in the Hague – which is the seat of the International Criminal Court and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. This is a strong signal.
Americans are passive bystanders to the grifting of Trump’s sons because civil society has been largely destroyed in the United States. Americans exist as powerless, atomized individuals rather than as members of communities that have collective power. Russia has expended great efforts of Chekist warfare to take away the feeling Americans used to have of belonging to a greater whole. What the russians have done – with the enthusiastic help of the oligarchy in the USA – is turn Americans into vatniks.
The point of Trump’s trip to China was for the Xi regime to demonstrate it is every bit as good as the Putin regime at using reflexive control to manipulate Trump. After meeting Xi, Trump said everything the Chinese Communist Party wanted him to say. The pattern was exactly the same as Trump’s behaviour after his phone calls with Putin. Because Trump has no moral character or sane rationality, Xi and Putin understand their poisoned words simply need to be the last words Trump hears because Trump will repeat them unthinkingly.—Dr. Michael MacKay for Bette Dangerous
Disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler, Vienna, Austria:
The problem with the reports about Putin’s paranoid policies, no matter if on the international or domestic scale, is that most of it is unverified reports or speculation, which does not mean that he does not suffer from this development of many authoritarian leaders in history.
On the Special Tribunal, it will matter for sure in the sense that it will create awareness and coverage, maybe it will not lead to direct consequences or will serve only as a kind of additional guideline for future policies. What we also can expect is that the tribunal will be defined not only by the countries that take part in it, but also by the ones who are not on board, they will be mentioned to downplay the relevance.
On corruption in plain sight, in general, I wish there would be more critical thinking regarding wrongdoings also within one’s own party. I do not see this at the moment to a huge extent, it seems we are in a permanent “election phase”.
On China, the West, not only the United States, is extremely connected to the powerful Chinese economy, the signals of this trip, as far as I heard from journalists I talked to at the recent conference in Lviv, are quite mixed. Personally I am worried about the fate of Taiwan.
Regarding China’s activities in the information space and in Europe, we can observe that Chinese propaganda is not only part of authoritarian left (Tankies) circles, but China is more and more worshipped by the European far right. Not that I suggest an escalation or forced confrontation with China, but we need to face the realities of the policy of the regime. Trump called Xi Jinping a “friend”, well, that is his rhetoric, but the question is, are there already signs that the US softens its policy regarding Taiwan?—Dietmar Pichler for Bette Dangerous
Geopolitical analyst Joni Askola, Finland/France:
The media tends to sensationalize Putin’s paranoia as a new crisis. The truth is, he has been deeply paranoid for years. We saw the evidence during COVID, and we see it now in his total avoidance of the frontlines. This trajectory will certainly intensify over time, but it is going to be a gradual slide rather than a sudden break. He is facing massive failures, yet his grip on the state is so centralized that unseating him remains incredibly difficult.
If you look at Trump’s track record, his biggest success is how he has made people completely numb to corruption. When you have a leader saying and doing outrageous things multiple times a day alongside an entire team doing the same, it creates a flood of scandal that people just stop processing. It is incredibly sad to watch because it leaves us stuck in this post-truth era. Getting back to any sense of political normal is going to take a long time, even when he is finally off the scene.
Re China, we are seeing a clear pattern where Trump is showing immense vulnerability not just toward Russia, but toward China. While he routinely threatens and insults allies who practice diplomatic restraint, he approaches Beijing with praise and appeasement. The Chinese leadership understands his transactional framework perfectly. They recognize that he is negotiating from a position of weakness, making him eager to accept structurally poor agreements that he can reframe as domestic victories. It is a harsh reality for the China hawks who voted for him, as they have been completely sidelined.
Joni is so right — people en masse have stopped processing the scandals, leaving us stuck in a post-truth space.
That, too, is illusion.
Truth is real. We need our thinkers, as Marci Shore said in our recent Happy Hour.
The truth is a Special Tribunal is being formed.
The truth is both in Europe and Canada, rule of law still stands, which is why these countries are relentlessly under attack by the Putinists and Musk-ovites.
If the telegenic new leader of Hungary, Péter Magyar, turns out to be for real, and not another Russian theatre understudy, Hungary may offer a template for how to beat corruption. I am withholding judgement until time tells.
The world will regain real stability when people start fighting for truth, as young people are doing in the streets of Georgia and as Ukrainians are doing on the battlefied.
So I just found the original post I was seeking with the quote on ‘stability.’
In that review of Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, I wrote:
He doesn’t pull punches on the central thesis of his book: that Russia’s ‘glittering masquerade’ is delivered through media by the ‘battering ram of Kremlin propaganda’ — a ‘society of simulation’ — where politics is performance art and everything is PR. The promise of ‘stability’ was always cover for the intended fascist mafia state run by the bandits from St. Petersburg.
I dug a little deeper to find the quote from his book that inspired that summary. And it’s preceded by his introduction to political technologists — “the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz.”
He writes how “they first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting antistate actors (anarchists in the nineteenth century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR.”
And thus, he sets the stage, for how the word “stability” became the opiate for the masses to remain in a state of paralysis as Putin refined the mob-state consortium.
He writes:
As former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the President on foreign affairs, (Vladislav) Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential prodemocracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the President is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in… TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for twenty minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind.
They repeat the great mantras of the era: the President is the President of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the President is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the President as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective”…
“Effective,” “stability”: no one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them, the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.—Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
As Trump continues his corruption spree, expect words like ‘stability’ and ‘effectiveness’ to populate corporate media ad nauseum.
Cute headlines over the past 48 hours:
“Investors bet on stability after Trump-Xi summit”
Expect more understudies to play all sides in kayfabe wars, and know, they all lead us back to tyranny.
When Jeff Bezos winks and nods, and tells us to “give credit where credit is due” when it comes to Trump — puppet, criminal, jailer — know that he runs with the oligarchs. And it was the oligarchs who contracted with Putin to destroy all remaining democracies as they try to consume our world.
Don’t stop processing.
Justice will keep on happening, if we will it so.
Look at the 36 countries willing to put their names on the line to create a new Special Tribunal to go after Putin and his criminals? How soon before that can be directed at Trump?
“There’s no doubt that Putin’s demise is inevitable because no amount of Botox is actually going to save him from being carried out of the Kremlin feet first,” Keir Giles told me in 2024, before somberly warning me that America’s collective amnesia was threatening the world.
We are in the middle of a global “confrontation between the retreating forces of democracy and those authoritarian powers that think it's a return to the normal and natural order for them to be in the ascendant,” he explained.
I hope you’ve picked your lane.
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