Like most people, I often wonder who would fall for such transparent fraud and how the scammers manage to net billions of dollars each year.
It turns out that there is a compelling reason why those letters are written the way they are. Separating people from their money is a labor-intensive project and the scammers don’t want to waste time on people who in the end will see through their deception. By writing their letters without minimal pretense at authenticity, they can quickly screen out everyone who can be even remotely skeptical and identify the 0.001% of the world’s population gullible enough to be victimized.
This goes a long way toward explaining what has been happening in Russia over the past year and a half. The list of international crimes committed by the Putin regime, of blatant lies spewed out by its propaganda, of idiotic statements made by its government officials and of preposterous or creepy laws passed by the State Duma is so long, you’d need another year and a half just to mention them all.
Just in recent days there have been public executions of banned food products, inspections of St. Petersburg stores by local “cossacks”, a couple of very funny public pronouncements by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a 20-year prison sentence given to Ukrainian film director Oleh Sentsov on trump-up charges, foreign soap and detergent brands have been removed from stores, attacks on an art show in Moscow and the destruction of an “ungodly” work of art in St. Petersburg, Medvedev’s visit to Russian-occupied Japanese islands and a suggestion by Vice Premier Dmitry Rogozin that the Japanese could commit harakiri if they didn’t like it, the early release of Evgenia Vasilieva accused of defrauding the Ministry of Defense of millions of dollars and, most recently, a proposal by Duma deputy and pro-Putin Soviet-era crooner Iosif Kobzon to break diplomatic relations with the United States and an admission by the same person that he had been granted a visa to get medical treatment in Western Europe with the help of Vladimir Putin.
All this occurs against the background of ongoing insanity: continued occupation of Crimea, military action in eastern Ukraine in which Russian citizens die almost daily to be buried by their country like so many dogs, never-ending attempts to destabilize the Ukrainian government, the glorification of Stalin and the criminal Soviet past and so on.
A joke now making rounds suggests that the news out of Russia should be read on a daily basis, because if you wait a week and get it all at once, you may flip your lid.
There is, however, method in all this madness. Bombarding the Russian public with all this stuff, the Putin regime is administering a constant loyalty test. If you accept it, then you’ve got no brain or have sold your soul to the Devil.
Unlike the Nigerian scams, which are constantly exposed, debunked and warned against by the media, the Russian television is constantly telling you that there are great advantages to being a fool and great rewards for being a cynic. If you’re willing to become one or the other, you’re a Putin cadre. If not, you’ll have to leave the country or become a nationalen Verräter and join the fifth column.
But even in applying this litmus test to the population Putin’s KGB regime is not original. This “idiot technique” was invented and successfully practiced on the Soviet people by Stalin and his repressive machinery. Constantly raising the degree of absurdity, Stalin offered to his subjects a succession of hard-to-believe propositions: that professional engineers sabotage and wreck facgtory equipment, that Lenin’s associates whom Stalin put on show trials are British and Japanese spies, that the Soviet Union is the happiest and most prosperous land on earth, that Stalin is the “genius of all sciences”, etc.
Those who were even mildly skeptical or ironic were promptly liquidated. Thus people with brain and conscience disappeared and the instinct of self preservation altered the national psyche for those who survived: it was clearly safer to be an idiot wildly cheering for Stalin – or, if you can’t dumb yourself down enough, then cynically pretend that you are.
In this respect, it is very interesting what is going to happen to the Russian economy. The Russian economy has been severely crippled. Unless sanctions are removed or the Middle East oil producers are drawn into all-out regional war, the negative dynamic will endure. Government reserves and private savings will be drawn down, unemployment will rise, the banking sector will go bankrupt, store shelves will emply, real estate prices will collapse, and so on.
The recent attacks on “sanctioned” food and foreign soap brands are merely an indication that the Russian government is starting to economize on hard currency.
However, government officials keep repeating that the crisis has bottomed out and the economy and the ruble are about to start coming back. Idle talk about mythical import substitution is rampant. Putin, when he mentions the economy at all, comes off sounding like a nincompoop and ignoramus.
This also serves a purpose. There was a Soviet-era joke about the Soviet economy. Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev are travelling by train. The engine dies and the train stalls. Stalin says he can fix it and gets the engineer shot. The train doesn’t move. Khrushchev posthumously rehabilitates the engineer, but the train still doesn’t move. Brezhnev gets up, draws the curtains on the window and says: “We’re moving.”
This joke can soon be updated for modern Russia. Putin leaves the curtains open and says: “We’re moving.” The idiots and cynics cheer and shout “Long live Putin!”
