Putin's Trojan Horses

I have been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings for a while now.  I like her style and her clear-headedness regarding current events and the hucksters who drive many of these events.  She has done admirable work tracking the shenanigans of the right-wing/white supremacist doofuses who have infected not only the United States but the entire Global North as well.  Her latest post describes the increasingly violent threat posed by these idiots against decent people everywhere.  

I thought it good to add a reminder that the source, the main engine and the leadership of many far-Right/white supremacist organizations nowadays is Russia.  I suggest that the reason for the recent uptick in trouble from these groups is tied closely to the fact that Putin is no longer winning his geopolitical games, and wishes to expand his use of hybrid warfare in his assault against the West.  As I mentioned in my last post, Putin's Russia is now good for nothing.

The Jewel And The Dragon

I need to keep my promises, and one of those promises is to finish writing a concluding series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, a book which deals with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But this past week I began to try to build new habits around time management, and the long-range goals I am trying to accomplish with my new time-management scheme include being in bed by 10 PM every night and getting really good on the guitar.  I have about an hour and a half of practice time scheduled for tonight...

Next week, God willing, I will have another post ready.  One thing I do want to mention in the meantime is that I have recently commented several times on this blog about how well the nations of the East (and I mean the Asian nations, not Russia!) have done in navigating global crises which have shown the weaknesses and fault lines of the nations of the West, including the United States.  One particular crisis which the Asian nations have navigated particularly well is the COVID-19 pandemic.

But now it seems that agents of the Global Far Right have infiltrated Asian societies in an attempt to sow division and discord.  This is especially true of the proponents of anti-vaxx (that is, anti-vaccine) propaganda who have made their voices heard in realspace and in cyberspace over the last few months.  One doofus who comes to mind is Brad Bowyer, who was born a British citizen but who managed to insinuate himself into a leadership role in a political party in Singapore - until he made a remark comparing Singapore's efforts to ensure vaccination compliance to the efforts of Hitler to round up Jews for extermination.  That remark has recently cost him his political position.  Let's see if he manages to bounce back.  And let's see if he is successful in his attempted cultural poisoning of Singapore.  Lee Kuan Yew would never have tolerated him.

Mr. Bowyer himself.  Image taken from the Straits Times

Singapore is not the only Asian nation suffering from the attack of the lunatic fringe, as seen in the following articles: "Anti-Vaxxer Propaganda Spreads in Asia, Endangering Millions," "Coronavirus vaccine: anti-vax movement threatens Asian recovery," and "The Inherent Racism of Anti-Vaxx Movements."  Note that last article, and note the murderously genocidal motives of the promoters of anti-vaxx propaganda.  Note also that one of the chief sources of this propaganda is Russia.  Perhaps the common people of Russia are distressed by the fact that Putin can't seem to organize a successful effort to put out the wildfires which are destroying their homeland.  They can take comfort in the fact that their taxes are being used instead to try to destabilize the rest of the world.

Солнечный свет

Sunshine go away today

I don't feel much like dancin'

Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life

He don't know what he's askin'

When he tells me I better get in line

I can't hear what he's sayin'

When I grow up I'm gonna make it mine

These ain't dues I been payin'...

- from Sunshine by Jonathan Edwards (a 1971 blast from the past!)

I am still busy with the kind of work that pays bills, so I will have to postpone the continuation of my posts on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by Gene Sharp.  But I want to comment today on something I came across while researching the material for my most recent post in the From D to D series.  

That post drew from a book by Basil Henry Liddell-Hart titled, The Strategy of Indirect Approach.  That book was inspired by Liddell-Hart's experiences in World War 1, both as a combatant and and an observer.  And because this book was written in the 1940's, Liddell-Hart reserved the last chapter for a commentary on the opening events of World War 2.  That chapter is appropriately titled, "Hitler's Strategy."  Liddell-Hart holds up Adolf Hitler as an outstanding example of the power of the indirect approach to warfare, saying that "The peaceful Powers have suffered a lot from 'missing the bus' through their slowness to gauge what he [that is, Hitler] would attempt next."

Liddell-Hart comments that this "missing of the bus" is a strange thing given the fact that before his ascent to power, Hitler spelled out exactly both the general strategy and the specific methods by which he would attempt world domination.  Through his autobiographical Mein Kampf and his public speeches, Hitler laid all his cards on the table.  Of particular note is the fact that Hitler sought to disarm and disintegrate his opponents as much as possible through means that did not involve actual war, so that when the time for arms actually came, a military victory could be achieved with the least possible cost.  To quote Hitler, "People have killed only when they could not achieve their aim in other ways ... There is a broadened strategy with intellectual weapons ... Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself."

A key method of destroying enemies from within consists of understanding and playing on the weaknesses of the great men of the nation one seeks to conquer.  Liddell-Hart therefore described how Hitler used this method to destroy the Weimar Republic in order to install himself as the supreme leader of Germany and the Nazi Party as the sole political instrument of Germany.  But what is more disturbing is how Hitler then used the same methods to undermine the other nations of Europe.  Among the things done to implement this strategy are the following:

• Support of the emerging fascist government of Italy
• Support of General Franco's successful overthrow of the Spanish government
• A series of relatively bloodless military victories against militarily inferior neighbors.  These military moves were made under the pretext of answering the call for help made by supposedly oppressed German minorities and sympathetic partisans in these countries.
• From page 306 of Liddell-Hart: "To prepare the way for his offensive, he [Hitler] sought to find influential adherents in the other country who would undermine its resistance, make trouble in his interest, and be ready to form a new government compliant to his aims.  Bribery was unnecessary - he counted on self-seeking ambition, authoritarian inclination, and party-spirit to provide him with willing and unwitting agents among the ruling classes." (Emphasis added.)

It is this last point which I want to emphasize.  When the members of a polity are decent, moral people, this moral and ethical purity is a source of strength even if the polity may be militarily weak.  But when there are members of the polity who seek to make themselves great by trashing their fellow human beings, they expose themselves to the possibility of being trashed in turn by a power greater and more skillful than themselves.  That power is itself a power of darkness, and it finds an open door of assault when the darkness within it calls out to the darkness of the great men of the polity - and finds a ready answer.  (This, for instance, is how Hitler almost destroyed Josef Stalin.)

So it is that the darkness within Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin has called out to many of the great men of the West and has found a ready answer.  For the strategy and the strategic moves of Putin's Russia have been in many ways an almost exact mirror of the opening moves made by Adolf Hitler over 80 years ago.  I would like to suggest that among Putin's most "willing and unwitting agents" are many members of the Republican Party, the white American Evangelical/Protestant church (see this also), and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.

In mentioning Putin's close relationship with many of the leaders of the white American evangelical/Protestant church, I want to be clear that I do not believe for a moment that Putin is actually a Christian.  Nor do I believe he has any noble spiritual motives.  But I do believe that Putin, like Hitler before him, is an embodiment of the kind of global hegemon which the world will see in the perhaps not-too-distant future, a ruler described thus: 

And in his place a despicable person will arise, on whom the honor of kingship has not been conferred, but he will come in a time of tranquility and seize the kingdom by intrigue...And after an alliance is made with him he will practice deception, and he will go up and gain power with a small people... (Daniel 11:21, 23; see also Daniel 8:23-25)

Could Putin then be "da man"?  может быть; кто знаете?

P.S. If you want to read more of my posts on Russia, the following are a good place to start:

• The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 1)
• The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 2): The Role of Russian Orthodoxy
• The Revanchism of the Third Rome: Symphony's Chords
• The Revanchism Of The Third Rome, Part 4: Caesar's 21st Century
• The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
• No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
• The Tearing of the Fig Leaf Dress

A Clarifying of Stance

As regular readers of this blog know well, from October 2017 until a few weeks ago, I took a break from writing posts in order to focus on things that very much need to be done in realspace with real people and not disembodied clouds of electrons.  Many of those things require ongoing work, so my posting will continue to be spotty for the next several months.

However, I do check my stats from time to time, and I noticed that this blog got several hundred hits during the last few days.  I also noticed that visitors to this blog have been reading the extensive back catalog of posts I have written.  There come times in the history of anyone who uses words when they have to eat a few of their own words, and I have lately realized that I need to eat some of mine.  So here goes...

I started blogging back in 2006-2007, when I was just beginning to awaken to the real nature of white American power.  I had been (and still am) a Christian, and a big part of the teaching I received from mainstream American evangelicalism was the notion that I should support American supremacy wherever and whenever possible because America was God's nation, and that the Republican Party was the party of true Godliness and Christian virtue.  My process of detoxing from that Kool-Aid began with my leaving an abusive church run by a family of petty criminals.  From that point I began to notice the patterns of abuse which not only appear in abusive churches whose leaders are not held accountable, but also extend to corporations, political parties, and nations whose leaders put themselves above accountability.

I had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and in 2004 while still under the influence of mainstream American evangelical Kool-Aid, but in 2006, the contradictions and injustices of the Bush administration proved to be too much for me to swallow.  As a person of color, what especially triggered my gag reflex was the appearance of overt anti-Latino racist campaign ads sponsored by the Republicans.

From 2007 onward, therefore, I began to search for and be drawn to writers whose perspective was not jingoist American patriotism.  That unfortunately was the time during which writers such as Dmitry Orlov were becoming popular.  He was a smooth talker, and his writing accurately captured many of the criticisms I had of America and of the historical and ongoing use of American power to oppress the vulnerable.

Over time (and especially as the police murders of unarmed African-Americans became much more obvious), the criticisms voiced by Orlov were joined by criticisms voiced by other Russian writers and media outlets like Russia Today.  What I did not know was that these voices were not being raised in order to call America to repentance or to provide a viable alternative to the things they were criticizing, but to divide America in order that Russia might take the place of global hegemon.  I also did not fully understand the extent to which national narcissism, exceptionalism, racism, white supremacy, and intolerance of other cultures had become part of the bedrock of Russian culture and society.

Thus it was that if you were reading my posts from 2007 up to 2016, you would have detected a strong pro-Russian bias.  But those days are over.  What ended them was the election of Donald Trump and the revelation of the part played by the Russian government in installing neo-fascist leaders and governments in many nations of the Global North.  What ended my pro-Russian bias was also the revelation of the role played by people like Aleksandr Dugin in the formulation of Putin's geopolitical strategy.  The words I must eat are the words I spoke in praise of Russia (and Putin) as some sort of viable alternative to the oppression which characterizes American power.  Russia is no alternative.  To steal a bit from Tolkien, Russia is to the United States what Boromir and Gollum were to the One Ring.

So...if you want to read my back catalog, please also read a few of these posts:

• The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
• No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
• The Resistance Heats Up In Russia
• Or, any of the posts that fall under the heading of "The Revanchism of the Third Rome."

You can also read blogger Olga Doroshenko's three-part series titled, "Russia as a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Ukraine as a Narcissistic Injury."

Fall-Winter 2019-2020: Please Drive Less

Why, you may ask.  Well, you may have noticed that gas prices have been on the rise here in the U.S.  However, my reasons for asking you to drive less extend a bit beyond trying to save you some change.  My reasons actually extend into the realm of geopolitics, as you might have guessed.  Here are some geopolitical reasons for you to chew on:

First, Russia is largely a petro-state whose economy depends to an excessive degree on exports of raw materials.  This means that the stability of the Putin regime depends on a high price of oil and other exported extractive resources.  The high price of oil between 2007 and 2012 allowed Putin to make a sort of bargain with the Russian people: allow Putin to be an autocrat in exchange for "stability", "order", and "prosperity."  Low oil prices and sanctions have undermined this bargain - hence Putin's attempt to deflect attention from Russian domestic woes by his invasion of the Ukraine and his military operations in Syria.  (Indeed, his intervention in Syria was meant to distract Russians from the failures of his operations in the Ukraine.)

Second, the unraveling of the Russian economy has provided the Russian opposition to Putin with a huge window of opportunity.  The economic stagnation (nay, even contraction!) which Russian society has experienced from 2014 onward has exposed the hollowness of the bargain which Russian citizens were enticed to make with Mr. Putin.  As a result, resistance against Putin has spread like wildfire - especially from 2017 until now.  Russians are increasingly experiencing "cognitive liberation", with the result that the attempts by the Russian government to use harsh punishment to quell public protests have instead made an increasing number of Russians even more determined to protest.  This is a prime example of the dynamic of "backfire" at work in a civil resistance struggle.  Once backfire starts to happen in a sustained way in an oppressed population, the oppressor or autocrat is in dire straits!

Third, it is quite possible that recent events related to the rise in oil prices may be an attempt by Putin to scrape together enough cash to re-instate his "bargain" with his own people.  Consider the drone attack against Saudi oil production facilities a few weeks ago.  Some blamed "Houthi rebels" while Trump blamed Iran.  I certainly do not claim to have the proof needed to tell you exactly who did it.  But I do know that Saudi oil production facilities experienced a cyberattack in 2018, and that that cyberattack originated from the Russian "Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics".  It is also known that Russia has initiated cyberattacks against Ukrainian power distribution infrastructure and other Western targets.  And it is known that Russia and Saudi Arabia are oil production rivals.  The 2018 cyberattack was not the first against Saudi oil facilities.  It seems that whoever wants to knock Saudi Arabia out of the oil exporting game has gone from throwing electronic signals at them to throwing bombs and bullets.  And this past week an Iranian oil tanker was attacked off the Saudi coast.  These are the reasons why oil and gasoline prices have been climbing lately.  High oil prices might prop up Putin's regime a little longer.

Fourth, whatever we on the outside can do to deny Putin what he wants helps to remove from the earth a threatening regime that wants to take over the world.  This reason should actually have been first on the list.  Don't like Putin (or his familiar spirit, Aleksandr Dugin)?  Then walk, bike or take public transit to the places you need to go.  Save a few bucks (and the world) in the process.  By the way, for every finger I point at you, there are three pointing back at me! If I get up early tomorrow (contingent on getting to bed early tonight), I can bike to work...