Fair & Balanced (To the Max)

Friday, October 20, 2006

Technates are Neo-Soviets!

I resume my thankless efforts to find a geopolitical home for technate-advocate Skip Sievert. All paths continue to lead back to Putin's Neo-Soviets. That's not only post-communist Russia but its central Asian satellites.

I give you, Robert Bruce Ware, What Will Come of Anna Politkovskaya's Death? Or, at least an excerpt:
In the North Caucasus, it is no longer the time of the corrupt ex-Soviet elite, who governed many of the republics in the Yeltsin years. Nor is it any longer the day of their charismatic counterweights, such as Dzhokhar Dudaev and Shamil Basaev in Chechnya or Ruslan Aushev in Ingushetia. Rather, this is the dawn of the North Caucasian technocrats.

The emergent technocracy is illustrated nowhere better than in Chechnya's neighboring Republic of Dagestan, where Mukhu Aliev was appointed by Putin earlier this year to be the republic's first president. Though he served for more than a decade as chair of the local parliament, Aliev managed to avoid the factionalism and corruption that undermined Dagestan's nascent democracy. With a doctorate in philosophy and a three-room, Soviet-style apartment, he is seen by most Dagestanis as a principled manager attempting to build a meritocracy while undercutting local corruption.
Maybe Skip's resistance has to do with Stalin's legacy? I was just sitting here wondering to myself, what if Trotsky had got into power? Would he have been able to modernise Russia, and concentrate on attaining internal Weberian bureaucratic ideals? Wouldn't have history would have turned out better? Techocracy would have survived in a better light?

As it is, the idea technocracy has survived only as a quaint obscurism. Look at to what lengths I have been driven to find references in the mainstream? Frankly, I am blue in the face and my patience is about to give out.

Updating:
In the North Caucasus, it is no longer the time of the corrupt ex-Soviet elite, who governed many of the republics in the Yeltsin era. Nor is it any longer the day of their charismatic counterweights, such as Dzhokhar Dudayev and Shamil Basayev in Chechnya or Ruslan Aushev in Ingushetia. Rather, this is the dawn of the North Caucasian technocrats.

The emergent technocracy is nowhere more evident than in Dagestan, where Mukhu Aliyev was appointed by Putin earlier this year to be the republic’s first president. Although he served for more than a decade as chair of the local parliament, Aliyev managed to avoid the factionalism and corruption that undermined Dagestan’s nascent democracy. He is seen by most Dagestanis as a principled manager, who is attempting to build a meritocracy while undercutting local corruption.

There are many comparisons between Aliyev in Dagestan, and ??imuraz ??msurov in North Ossetia. Much like Aliyev, Mamsurov was the speaker of the North Ossetian legislature, who was relatively free of political baggage. Already known for his decency, Mamsurov achieved overwhelming popularity when he declined to have his own two children released from the school in Beslan during the 2004 hostage crisis. How, he asked, would he then be able to look his neighbors in the eye? Less than a year later, Putin appointed him to lead the republic.

A few months after that, Putin appointed Arsen Kanokov to replace Valery Kokov as the head of Kabardino-Balkaria. During Kokov’s fifteen-year rule, the republic was mired in political corruption and economic stagnation. As a wealthy businessman, Kanokov resembles neither Aliyev nor Mamsurov, but he is a step up from his predecessor.

Back in Chechnya, the Kremlin anointed Alu Alkhanov as Chechnya’s president prior to the 2004 election that replaced his assassinated predecessor, Akhmed Kadyrov. A former policeman, Alkhanov is respected by most Chechens as a principled, if not particularly powerful, leader. Alkhanov lacks power vis a vis Kadyrov’s 30-year-old son, Ramzan, who serves as Chechnya’s loyalist premier and leads a militia of several thousand men. The rivalry between Alkhanov and Kazyrov illustrates two Weberian ideal types – “bureaucratic” versus “charismatic” authority.

Ramzan has had a role to play because Chechnya’s government is too weak to support Alkhanov’s bureaucratic approach. Through brute force, Ramzan gets things done, but Ramzan’s brutality was a regular target of Politkovskaya’s exposes.

Shortly after he rose to power in 2004, it was possible to view Ramzan as a necessary evil. Perhaps his brutality was the only realistic alternative to the brutality of Russian-Chechen warfare, on the one hand, and the brutality of Chechnya’s de facto independence on the other. But Politkovskaya never saw the necessity of Ramzan; she just saw the evil.

It is no longer possible to dismiss her point, given the Kremlin’s recent bureaucratic appointments in the region. If the Kremlin can support principled bureaucrats in Dagestan and North Ossetia, and something remotely along those lines in Kabardino-Balkaria, then why can’t it bolster Alkhanov in Chechnya and nudge Ramzan toward the sidelines? However slowly and painfully, Chechnya has stabilized in the past two years, and it will soon be ready for bureaucrats like Alkhanov.


Russian Profile

6 Comments:

Blogger J.C. said...

Food Blogger , I know that you would like to associate technocracy with some evil scheme , but the reality is that it is Uniquely American, has nothing to do with Communism, and may be our best bet out of the confounding trouble we are in due to the very uncreative operating system we now have.
For conspiracy theory stuff just look to our own corrupt system here. We are not a so called Democracy , as people think.
We have been stripped of many traditional rights here now, and the future with our Price System as technocrats call it, looks very bleak.
In essence we are destroying ourselves to maintain the class or caste system here , and there is really no reason to do so , as there are alternatives to it.
If you have not read our Technocracy Study Course , from 1934 I would encourage you to do so.
It is available on my site, www.technocracynow.org and is free.
Also I would encourage you to go to our official website at www.technocracyinc.org to just take a look at the people who are running our program , I would be curious if you think these people appear to be particularly threatening.
I am happy to say that there has been a large uptick in interest in the last year about a technocratic system for here.
One reason most rights have been taken away from Americans by both political parties in the last 6 years , is to pave the way for an even more brutal version of the current price system
Technocracy offers the only viable alternative to what the system is doing now. That is why we are considered the only real threat to the present system.
Because we are not a political system , the politicians naturally are doing all they can to keep us under wraps.
Our military however is well aware that our political system is now not operated from the American people , but by corporate money masters.
I encourage you blogger to be open minded. You may find yourself on the side of the military along with the American people , in a protest to keep the politicos from destroying America. They are plundering America now for their god. Their god is the almighty dollar, and they will sacrifice any number of brainwashed soldiers for that purpose. They will also turn on the American people , and have now. Tumultuous times are coming.

Saturday, 21 October, 2006

 
Blogger J.C. said...

Technocracy is not so obscure as you might think. There are lots of people writing and commenting on it .
Lots of renewed interest now.

Saturday, 21 October, 2006

 
Blogger Indicted Plagiarist said...

I think thou doth protest too much.

Saturday, 21 October, 2006

 
Blogger Blogging4Food said...

He doth protest too much. That's why I piled on an update. Technocratic and bureaucratic solutions appear to work some places.

Tuesday, 24 October, 2006

 
Blogger J.C. said...

Very interesting Food Blogger, this actually does makes sense , and now I believe you are starting to see a little of my point of view.

Although the type of technocracy portrayed here is different from what we advocate for north America, it kind of shares the non-political,
meritocracy, get things done,
without belief baggage aspect.

The technate we propose for here includes energy accounting , and that is something they can not do in the mentioned places at least not now any way because of their lack of resources.
Bush was even talking about a form of technocratic government , partially in Iraq a couple of years ago , before I think his handlers told him to keep his mouth shut with that word.
The powers that be never usually use the word Technocracy so it was surprising to hear it.~!~

Technocracy puts our political system out of business and they know it.
It may be the only way out of the coming collapse for us here.

We are facing a debt collapse, ecological collapse, etc, soon.
The nice thing about technocracy is that it is designed with maximum freedom in mind.
Americans came up with it in the 20`s and 30`s and that time period was extremely creative.
It is an alternative culture , that may actually create a better society that can survive into the future.
The danger is that this one does not have what it takes to do that.

Wednesday, 25 October, 2006

 
Blogger Vigilante said...

Interesting.

Thursday, 26 October, 2006

 

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