My apologies to anyone who may have been disappointed by the sparseness of my recent posting. I have come into a season in which once again, to use a favorite expression of mine, I am working like a dog. But I thought I'd take time tonight to write a few words about something that recently came to my attention. And I have some upcoming posts in the oven - soon, hopefully, they'll be "ready to eat."
In a previous post I mentioned that I have recently been enjoying some of the fiction of David Cornwell, who became famous under the pseudonym of John le Carre. (le Carre gave us a kind of spy fiction that is actually palatable. For a long time I had regarded the genre as simply about a bunch of guys in business suits trash talking each other while brandishing semiautomatic pistols. Boring after a while...) The most famous of his stories involve a character named George Smiley, through whom le Carre portrays the psychic cost of trying to achieve good ends by bad means. The same theme runs through many others of le Carre's stories, particularly A Small Town In Germany. Naturally I grew curious to learn more about Mr. le Carre, as I listened to BBC audio dramatizations of these stories, and later, as I watched the BBC video dramatizations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People. What I discovered about le Carre was both intriguing and deeply refreshing - especially his political perspective.
For in describing the outcome of the Cold War, le Carre has often said that "the right side lost, but the wrong side won." By this he means that the totalitarianism and autocracy of the Soviet Empire had to fall apart. But in the West, there was nothing to replace it - no grand humanitarian vision that could have elevated all the peoples of the earth. The West certainly offered nothing that could fill the vacuum left in Russia by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus what happened was a shift from hyper-socialist economic and political control into hyper-capitalism. Russia became an illustration of the Scripture which says, "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes, and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first..." For the best-positioned members of the Russian ruling class became the oligarchs and kleptocrats of the new order, and Putin became the chief kleptocrat.
Thus the ruling elite of Russia became very much like the wealthiest and most powerful denizens of the West - especially the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. For the United States had long been in the process of losing its soul. And so we come to an interview of Mr. le Carre which was conducted for the Fresh Air show on NPR in 2017. In that interview, John le Carre said the following:
"Let's look, first of all, at the operation influence, if you like, and how that's exerted, what we suspect the Russians are doing, not only in the United States, what they did in Britain for the referendum, maybe in Britain for the election. They certainly interfered in Macron's election in France. So who are these forces? And what is really spooky, I think, and profoundly disturbing is they come from the West as well as the East - that there are oligarchs in the West who are so far to the right that they make a kind of natural cause with those on the other side of the world. Both of them have in common a great contempt for the ordinary conduct of democracy.
"They want to diminish it. They see it as their enemy. They see - they've made a dirty word of liberalism - one of the most inviting words in politics. They've - and so they're closing in on the same target from different points of view..." [Emphasis added]
Note le Carre's assertion - that the oligarchs of both the East and the West have begun to come together in common cause to destroy freedom throughout the world. This was blindingly obvious during the reign of Donald Trump. It has become even more blindingly obvious within the last two months. For Fox News attack dog/talking head Tucker Carlson has boldly spoken in support of Vladimir Putin and against the independent sovereignty of Ukraine. And a number of Republican politicians - who were historically well-known for their anti-communist and anti-Soviet stands - have suddenly gone quite soft (if not actually silent) on the crisis of Russian aggression against Ukraine and against the West.
This has some rather interesting implications. I would suspect that pro-Putin sentiment is quite high just now among many members of far-Right or white supremacist groups in the United States, as pro-Putin spokespersons managed to make significant headway among many white American evangelicals before and during the reign of Donald Trump. These people should perhaps learn a lesson from the experiences of the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who got what they were asking for in 2015, and have had to live with the consequences ever since. Their initial support for Putin has soured, as they have discovered that Putin has not led them to the Promised Land. They have discovered instead that they have been enslaved by means of sophistry. (Isn't that frequently how slavery begins?) The supporters of Putin in the United States will find the same experience waiting for them in due time. For "the wise woman builds her house, but the foolish tears it down with her own hands."
But a more interesting complication awaits those who support this unholy joining of oligarchs. For China and Russia have published a joint statement of intent to remake the world according to an image of their liking. And that will very soon pose problems for those rank-and-file working-class rubes in the United States who hitched their wagon to the the Republican Party, to Donald Trump, and to the Global Far Right. Under Trump, they were taught to hate China. But under the coalescing leadership of the emerging league of global oligarchs, they will be forced to love China - not the rank-and-file people of China, mind you, but the autocratic leadership of China. That is bound to induce some serious whiplash in the souls of many white supremacists and racists in the United States. Ambulances should be standing by.
