In March 2000, I voted for Vladimir Putin.
Surprise, surprise!
It was the only time I voted for him. Before, in 1996, I voted to re-elect Boris Yeltsin.
After 2000, I never voted for Putin: 2004, 2012, 2018… You bet I won’t vote for him this time. The 2024 presidential election in Russia is very hard to call an election. I think it is absolutely comparable to the Soviet-era elections.
I can go further and say I would have voted for Putin-2000 one more time. It is not like he was the man of my dreams back then. I know the man who was much better than Putin at the time. His name was Boris Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s favorite before Putin. Incidentally, he was reportedly killed by Putin’s order, in February 2015, right in front on the Kremlin, on the bridge… Russia would have been an entirely different landscape had he been chosen by Yeltsin. Unfortunately, Boris Nikolayevich turned down Nemtsov in 1998, and decided to go on with Putin in 1999.
The biggest mistake of his life.
Then it was Alexei Navalny trying to run for president of Russia in 2018. He wasn’t allowed to run for some silly ‘technical’ reason.
Anyway, in 2000, Putin was a completely different man. Or, I must admit, he seemed to. As years passed by, he shrugged off the democratic dust from his shoulders to reveal his imperialiastic/mob/KGB nature to become a monster as we know him now.
So, I think I made a mistake voting for him. I knew a guy back then, an English interpreter and a snowboarding photographer, who told me in 2000: ‘Dude, are you crazy to vote for him? He’s a fucking KGB. Once a KGB, always a KGB. You can’t repair it!’
I told him to fuck off. I thought I was a smarter ass than him and knew the stuff he didn’t.
The rest is history.
Why do we vote for these chumps?
Due to our deeply flawed voting structure in Britain, we actually don’t vote for our leader, the prime minister – we merely vote for the political party and it’s the party’s members of parliament that decide which chump will lead the nation.
And my God, the current Tory rabble occupying 10 Downing Street have given us some of the worst chumps in living memory. Cameron was a total coward, May and Truss were just utterly inept, Johnson was a lying and cheating misogynist, and the exceedingly wealthy Sunak is so far removed from knowing what his country’s people actually need, that there’s talk about him being removed before the next election (probably towards the end of 2024).
So, in a sense, the British voters can only be accused of voting for a corrupt party that constantly make the majority of Brits worse off. Of course, it’s only the minority that actually vote Tory. Our current ruling party benefits from their wealthy chums in the media and elsewhere, who demonise anyone who isn’t a Conservative.
The biggest problem is that I don’t see a credible alternative. Opposition to the Conservative party is pretty much fragmented. This current lot have most of the right wing of British politics all to themselves, especially since UKIP buggered off as a political force.
The left is split between loads of parties, of which Labour is the most significant, but even it is split internally between socialists who favour modernisation, and the old-school trade unionists, still living in the 19th century. Politically, the Conservatives benefit from that, and from our “first-past-the-post” electoral system.
Back in the 19th century, Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once told the House of Commons that a Conservative government was an “organised hypocrisy”. Nowadays, it’s a totally bungling disorganized hypocrisy, which has nothing of merit to note.
Whoever wins the next election, I am equally sure that I will still be asking why the country voted for these chumps………
Why do we vote for these chumps?
In the US the answer is fairly easy: this is the choice we’ve been given. The Nation has a two-party system and it’s the parties that nominate their candidates. The people vote for who they like best. In this case, they would both lose to any other major candidate.
After four years of constant drama with Trump, I thought a quiet, institutional leader would help sooth the nation. President Biden was/is competent and centrist. I believed, wrongly as it turns out, that the wild-eyed MAGA’s would calm down and decide to join the country again. I wasn’t counting on Trump’s mouth or the Fox Fear Network. I was naive to the point of gullible to think that those making unhinged claims would simply give up money and power so easily.
Biden wants to run again because he thinks he must win to save America. I’m sure my ego would be every bit as big in his position. The truth is that Trump has never won any political race and he sure as hell will not win this time. He once came in second but won the Electoral College. This election has nothing whatsoever to do with Joe Biden, it only concerns Trump. Do you want an authoritarian leader: yes or no. That’s it. Trump cannot win by votes, but there’s a decent chance he can repeat 2016 and get in through the back door.
But that’s not the question for this week: The question is; why do we keep voting for these chumps? In prosperous nations around the world, we see the exact same explanations and forces at work. The mega rich no longer pay taxes, the media is owned by these same people and they blame immigrants. This fairytale distracts the angry from the real, core issue: wealth inequality.
The angry believe they have been played for fools and they’re right. They are getting played again. Tesla is working on robots and Musk has announced he plans to replace humans with robots as soon as Tesla can. He wants one billion robots available as soon as possible. Nobody, anywhere will have jobs. But first, I fear we must have WWIII in order for the mob to figure out who they are fighting. Millions must die so thousands can play on yachts. Is it 1984 yet?