The Four Things Russia does in Georgia
A few people have asked me about what just happened or is happening in Georgia, so here goes, I will try to be brief. Also, I am not there. But Tedo Jonas is there and this is the best thing I have read about what is going on. “Russian Soft Power Fails, Pointing the Way to a New Georgian Consensus”, find it to get more first hand information.
A couple of things to remember. The trigger for all this was a Kremlin lackey addressing the Parliament of Georgia from the speakers chair in Russian on behalf of a Kremlin created organization called the “Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of Orthodox Christian Nations” It is impossible to understand the great outpouring of Georgian sentiment without understanding the four pillars of the Kremlin’s current colonial effort.
The first is occupation and why they are doing it. Russia isn’t occupying Crimea, or Abkhazia, or South Ossetia or the Transnistria because they want the land, responsibility, or even to actually legally annex. It simply wants to use those occupations to keep Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova unstable. They know that if those countries controlled their own borders they would soon become successful members of NATO, the EU and the West.
The second pillar of their neocolonial push is the promotion of division. The Kremlin supports any person or entity that will divide its’s colonial targets, they don’t really care which types of division they are, they are constantly innovating; creating new ways to promote division. That can be through confused corrupt journalists, politicians, clergy, and others, almost anybody who publicly points a finger at “them” to create a sense among “us” of victimhood.
The third pillar of Kremlin neocolonialism is corruption. They want corrupt leaders, inside deals, shell companies, offshore cash, opaque transactions. They don’t really care who is involved, they will support whoever wants to implement big secret financial deals away from the eyes of the public because that is how they operate. Anybody who operates differently is a a threat, in their worldview.
The forth and final pillar is deploying the Orthodox Christian church to serve as bridge among neighboring nations that they can then march across. The Kremlin is not comfortable with these former Soviet countries being independent, they don’t believe there is such a thing as an ally, they believe in a world of monarchs and vassals. So in this case, the Kremlin uses both the various Orthodox churches, the institutions, and also the informal connection between the faithful. The idea is for the Russian Orthodox Church to be in charge, and for adherence to the Orthodox faith to be put in contraction to the West and Western ideology which means democracy, the rule of law, and the tolerance of alternative views. Those are things they don’t want and more importantly don’t want the Russian public to see, particularly near by.
Putin is more and more calling in favors from Georgia’s ruling party, refusal to accredit a US Ambassador, preventing a Georgian deep sea port at Anaklia through the ridiculous charges against Mamuka Khazaradze of TBC bank, and now this most recent dog and pony show. But it was too much for the people of Georgia. And interestingly there was significant trouble brewing between the Pride march and the homophobes, but that was swept away amidst the social consensus that the bigger issue was the government’s increasing cooperation and acceptance of Kremlin interference in Georgia.
