Porfirio Diaz. Presidente de Mexico, 1876-1880 and 1884-1911
If you´re not aleady reading Dmitri Orlov´s blog, Cluborlov.blogspot.com, you should be. Lately, since the trouble in Ukraine has snowballed out of control and anti-Russianism is higher in the US than at any time since the cold war sputtered out, Orlov, who left the Soviet Union at age 12 in 1974, and sees the same fate for the US. Orlov has concentrated on analyzing relations between the two countries, with the EU stuck on the hind tit and watching the heavyweights to see which way this will go.
Vladimir Putin, the Czar of all the Russias, for his part has been the picture of restraint and self'-efacement, as Obama & the rest of the clowns in the US polititical apparatus try to outdo each other in their condemnations of ¨The Russian dictator¨ and his flocks of syncophants, and proposing new, harsher, and more suicidal economic sanctions.
Putin, who finally ran out of patience and put countersanctions in place, doesn´t have to worry, and he doesn´t. When you´re he world's biggest oil producer nobody can do much to you (unless they can live without oil), and politically he´s still in his salad days. His dictatorship is approaching its tenth year, still in the ¨honeymoon¨ period. My observation of dicatorships.going back to Ollie Cromwell and a couple thousand years beyond is that they´ve got shelf lives of 30 years or so. The first 10 everybody loves Dick, and they tell each other he's the hottest thing since spicy guacamole. From years 10 to 20, it´s touch-and-go. After 20 years his beloved people are waitiing for the old dog to leave, one way or the other. If he´s still around after 30 years of rule, he has to be helped toward the exit.
Its the fortunate dictator who dies before he´s held power for 20 years -- the late Mr Chavez is a good example. Russians and Venezuelans will be quick to point out that both Putin and Chavez were popularly elected to their positions, but almost all of them start out that way -- as reformers. Porfirio Diaz of Mexico was beloved by his people, and modernized Mexican infrastructure, economy, & military. Under Diaz, the country for the first time truly became the United Sates of Mexico. But he stayed on the job too long, & by the time he left, feeling agaist him was universal. The old war horses never know when to quit, & feign blindness to the corruption that inevitably overtakes their administrations.
Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is now 34 years the dictator, and so far past his pull date he´s stinky Limburger. That´s the same length of time we´ve been ruled by a tyrranical oligarchy in this country. So I realize an oligarchy is not the same as a dictatorship, since no single individual bends the nation and people to his will. However, the tyrrany is as great as that of Robert Mugabe or Vlad the Impaler, beginning in 1980 with the elevation of St. Ronald the Good and Great to the presidency, which might easily and appropriately be renamed The Office of the Head Bullshitter.
With the oligarchy now so far past its viable shelf life it´s stinking up the globe, the US is in its death spiral. Orlov has known this since he got here years ago and began looking around. Americans are mostly impervious to reality these days, but as the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said, "Reality is the one thing that, when you stop believing in it, it doesn´t go away." Orlov's hypothesis relates back to his own experience as the old CCCP unraveled, and he knows what even school kids now know hang on to any gold and silver you have, and get more now while it´s cheap.
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