Dead Oligarchs in Moscow and Catalonia

https://www.newsweek.com/oligarchs-murder-suicide-1699766

These could have been Putin ordered hits but the larger story is one of a smashed machine – of fissures become chasms. The sanctions regime is pushing the Russian economy to the limits and while fortunes are made in some cases and lost in others, many actors are forced to make rash decisions. Debts are called in – sometimes they can't be paid because money was lost, squandered, or used for other means. Such trying times expose these realities and powerful men are quickly toppled.

Desperate times spawn desperate actions. Betrayals ensue, plots are hatched, and sometimes they fail. In search of favour and allies, some will speak out and betray the confidence of one-time collaborators and conspirators.

The West is only interested in writing anti-Putin hit pieces. Fine, there's plenty to write about. In a world of criminality and criminal regimes, his stands out. It's not an order rooted in liberal democracy but the corruption (and the response to it) that was born of the free-wheeling capitalism of the 1990's. And driven by mammon, his system operates under a mafia-like umbrella. Ironically (and few people realise this) that's how much of the world has operated until relatively recent times – even in the West. Additionally, there's little difference between such mafia polity and that which characterised the medieval order. How many have romantic notions about that era of history? Men of power have often had more in common with Don Corleone than the supposed uprightness and bureaucratic integrity of an Angela Merkel or a Jimmy Carter.

In our own time the perception of Western politics has been cleaned up over the past fifty years, and having basically bought and subverted the media, the endless stream of scandals which give the public a glimpse into the inner workings of the Establishment are largely swept away, whitewashed, and functionally obscured. Memories are short and frankly so are attention spans. Or perhaps in another capacity we could say that more is revealed today than in the past and yet people are simply callous. In the past things were not reported and deliberately obscured. Today things are spun and the propaganda is more smoke and mirrors. It's different but ultimately the same.

Some movements (such as Trumpism) rightly perceive there's a great deal of corruption in Western liberal governments and yet ignorant of history (and sometimes basic concepts) they all too often fail to understand it – all the more when they've hitched their wagon to one who is at the far end of the corruption scale.

Hardly outdone by the Putin regime, the Western political order is also a tale of corruption and murder and while perhaps a bit more nuanced and polished than the crudity of its Russian counterpart, in the end it can claim no moral superiority. Maybe it plays more of a game in terms of bureaucracy and makes more of an attempt at playing 'due process' while the Russian system is more akin to the old world – one that is direct and sometimes brutally to the point. Regardless, neither can claim some kind of morality. If you think the American judiciary, police, legislatures, or Wall Street are just or free from corruption, then you're a product of the public education system and the mainstream media. Often these elements are at war with each other. It looks like someone is pursuing justice and truth but all too often it's just corruption wearing a different mask – one power centre in government seeking to subvert another, factions vying for power.

Returning to the dead Russians, were these cases of families being eliminated mafia style? Were they cases of broken men under great stress and despair that resorted to a kind of Samson option – pulling the whole thing down on top of themselves and their families?  One death is in Moscow, another in Spain. Everyone assumes that if they were hits – that they were ordered from the Kremlin. It very well could be but I wouldn't assume (let alone presume) that. The spectrum of possibility must be widened. There's a whole realm of activity related to the many 'oligarchs' that transcends Vladimir Putin circle of power. The West's role and relationship with these figures is not clearly understood and in other cases has been deliberately obfuscated. There's a lot of Russian money that has flowed in and out of American and British banks, as well as a larger story that few even begin to grasp. It has to be discovered in bits and pieces as no objective and uncorrupted narrative has been produced so far.

I look forward to the developments in these stories but we may not know what happened for many years.