Since this is Russia:

[dancesofthelight]

I wonder if Comrade Vladimir the Butcher of Grozny ever really had Parkinsons, or if this was like Tsar Peter III's fatal case of hemorrhoids? 

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-denies-putin-stepping-down-leader-due-parkinsons-disease-1545425

( A tale of proto-Wehraboos, disgruntled empresses, and hemorrhoids, Oh My! )

So, with that in mind, did Vladimir Putin ever really have Parkinson's? Does he have it, or did his oligarch buddies decide he's finally started to overreach himself and Russia, try the August 1991 route, utterly failed at it, and this 'lack of concern 'about health reflect a much more classical kind of Russian power behind the starch walls of the Kremlin? 

Personally I suspect it was this and that the health excuse means as much or as little as it usually does in Russia, which is to say that an autocrat never falls, he just has a health condition, sometimes involving strangulation or dying in his own piss from a stroke because his attempt to orchestrate a new pogrom of Jews and doctors bit him in the ass.

Since the monthly topic is Class Warfare:

[dancesofthelight]

It's worth reflecting at length on one of the biggest and sharpest ironies of the failures of the USA as an ideal versus what it actually has been. In the America of offering the skulls of adults to He Who Walks Be-er corn, Jesus, and apple pie, the idea is that the tree of liberty is  refreshed by the blood of tyrants, that humanity was created equal and that the right of those when faced with repression is to smash it by any means necessary.

And yet, in US history, there are but a few names that have actually done so. Are they hailed as heroes for so doing? No. Why? They did it on behalf of opposing white supremacy, a thing that was considered across the Atlantic then and now to be a utopian fever dream, and where revolution in the name of the seizure of the Bastille or the glorious proletarian revolution of the Vorkuta mines and NKVD gunfire is heroic, those who were held in bondage overthrowing their masters by the bayonet, of course....
( Nat Turner, Prophet of Freedom )

( John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave but his soul goes marching on )

.

And yet.....is this really so different or as much of an aberration as it seems? Germany suppressed the Peasant revolts of the Reformation Age, the ones those who sought to reshape the engineering of the soul deemed worth suppressing in gunfire. The UK doesn't exactly cheer on Wat Tyler or the executioners of Charles I, nor does France on the whole admire the Jacobins whose main result was progress over a pyramid of corpses culminating in the rise of the first Bonapartist monarchy.

Where revolutionary ideals are admired they are seen in a sanitized version that pretends class war is a matter of ballots and not bullets and not an entirely literal war full of war's futility and grinding atrocities that the winning side calls just and the defeated side only gets to write if it happened to get an Andrew Johnson and not Lenin. Real revolutions are bloody maelstroms of chaos where the organized systems of power break down, and they tend to degenerate into a civil war if they didn't start as one because in the absence of state power the system of control does not shift to the wise or the kind but to the well-armed and the fanatical.

This is why the overthrow of the Pahlavis did not see Constitutional Revolution 2.0 but the rise of the Shah.

It is why the fall of white Tsars saw red Tsars and not that much different here.

Is the USA refusing to admire its most overt and bloody revolutionaries really that exceptional, or do other parts of the world cheer their most bloody revolutionaries whose idea of progress was rooted in a pyramid of skulls?