Repost: The Recovery of Subversive Virtue

I am running a bit ragged this weekend, so I won't have time for a research-heavy post.  However, if you want ideas for a low-risk way of resisting a dominant oppressive system, please check out my post from a few years ago titled, "The Recovery of Subversive Virtue."  See you next week, God willing.

An Open Letter to the Black Lives Matter Organizers

I am writing as an African-American who really wants us to win our struggle for liberation and who really wants us to succeed in removing Donald Trump from office.  But I am afraid that events that took place yesterday in Seattle may make it more likely that we will lose.  This is why I am writing today.

You know, I am sure, that the world is watching the ongoing protests against the murders of unarmed Black Americans in this country and in Portland.  These protests fall within a certain category of tactics of nonviolent resistance.  (By the way, when I talk about strategic nonviolent resistance, I am not talking about Martin Luther King!  Rather, I mean what Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution is talking about in her TED video.)  In the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, nonviolent resistance actions can take two forms: tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  Tactics of concentration include mass rallies and street protests.  One problem with street rallies is that they can be hijacked by agents of the State who incite violence (including property destruction) in order to discredit the protesters by claiming that they are anarchists.  Thankfully, that narrative had begun to shift because of the Wall of Moms in Portland (joined lately by the Wall of Dads and the Wall of Vets).

But in Seattle yesterday, violent infiltrators disrupted what should have been a peaceful protest and instead provided the world with images that play right into the hands of Donald Trump.  Those images make us look like criminals and undermine our attempts to discredit the system that is oppressing us.  Note also that the NAACP has commented on how what started as a Black expression of struggle against White oppression has been dangerously hijacked.  The protests are no longer really about Black lives, but about attention-seeking White people.  As I said above, I support the Wall of Moms - especially because they have put themselves at the service of their Black and Brown neighbors.  But I agree 100 percent with the NAACP condemnation of the anarchists and other agitators.

Therefore, I am begging you as a fellow African-American to shift your resistance to tactics of dispersion.  I'd also like to ask that you please stop holding mass rallies and protests unless you create a system to make sure that everyone who shows up will remain nonviolent.  This applies especially to White people who show up at a protest, because most of the violence (including property destruction!) that has been perpetrated at protests over the last two months was done by White people.  If you want to see why nonviolent discipline is so important, please watch this video by Professor Erica Chenoweth (and this one also).

I would also ask that you all study not only the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, but that you also study the literature on effective community organizing.  This falls right in line with what the family of George Floyd asked of us all in the aftermath of his murder by the police.  Note that George Floyd's brother condemned the violence that had erupted even in the early days of the protests over George Floyd's murder, and he demanded that those who want to see changes happen work in a positive manner to make those changes happen. 

I have not suffered like George Floyd's family (or Tamir Rice's family, or Michael Brown's family, or Stephon Clark's family, or Breonna Taylor's family).  But as a kid I was exposed to a lot of intense racist physical bullying.  I went to White churches where the racism was more subtle, yet just as damaging.  I've been followed by police and even stopped by police simply because I am Black.  I've suffered workplace harassment.  To me, it seems that Donald Trump wants to bring back an America in which it's okay for white supremacy to treat us all like trash.  Trump has been losing this year because of his incompetence.  But if he wants to try to rescue his reelection by picturing himself as a law-and-order president protecting the world from chaos, why do you want to hand him situations where he can "prove" his claims?  I don't want to suffer another four years of his garbage.  Do you?

And if you are White and you are reading this, please stop showing up to BLM protests unless you know that you can control yourself and not vandalize property or provoke law enforcement officers by stupid stunts like throwing firecrackers or other objects at police.  You're not the heroes you seem to think you are when you pull such stunts.

Thanks to all who take the time to read this.

A Teaching Moment: What Is Backfire?

If you've been following Donald Trump's attempts to quell peaceful protests against police killings of African-Americans, and if you are wondering how to make sense of it all, I'd like to offer a bit of assistance in explaining the dynamics of nonviolent civil resistance.  By the way, I am in no way an expert.  I've just read a lot of books over the last three and a half years ;)

So from time to time over the next three months, I'll be pointing out certain elements of what's going on in the United States right now, and I will be using and explaining terms from the literature on civil resistance.  Today's term is backfire.

What is backfire?  It is the phenomenon that occurs when an oppressor tries to crush a nonviolent movement by means of violent State repression only to find that the violence perpetrated by the State makes the citizens of the country even more disgusted with the oppressing government.  When an oppressor's repression backfires, three things happen:

• The oppressor's legitimacy in the eyes of the country's citizens decreases
• The nonviolent movement actually becomes stronger and bigger as people formerly on the margins join the movement as an expression of their disgust with the oppressive regime
• And the oppressor's pillars of support are further weakened.

Backfire works best when the civil resistance movement maintains strict nonviolent discipline, including abstaining from property destruction. Moreover, skillful nonviolent resisters are able to amplify backfire through a wise selection of tactics.

The backfire dynamic is strongly at work in the confrontations between Trump's Federal storm troopers and unarmed citizens in the Black Lives Matter protests.  Before Trump sent Federal agents to Portland, the BLM protests had been declining.  But Trump's move not only highlighted the brutality of the Federal thugs, but it also provoked a "Wall of Moms" who came out to protect their children from attack by forming a human shield.  That "Wall of Moms" has now been joined by a "Wall of Dads" armed with leaf blowers to combat tear gas fired by the Feds.  And there will soon be a "Wall of Vets".  Far from crushing the BLM protests, Trump has only made them grow bigger and more energized.  Moreover, these "Walls of Parents" are spreading rapidly to other cities.  And a Republican former Homeland Security director has openly criticized Trump for sending Federal troops uninvited to American cities that did not ask for these troops.  These developments show that Trump does not understand backfire.  They also show that neither he nor his current DHS secretary are exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Want to learn more about backfire?  Read Making Oppression Backfire by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies.  You can download it for free.

By the way, please also read my two previous posts.  They contain some necessary criticism of the ICNC.

The History of the Suffragettes - Further Proof Of What the ICNC Has Lost

The International Center On Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has recently tried to advise those protesting the brutal racism against people of color in the United States, and specifically those protesting the murders of unarmed African-Americans.  As I have written previously, I used to be a supporter of the ICNC and greatly enjoyed reading its offerings, as I thought that the ICNC presented an excellent education in strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of neutralizing an oppressor's power.

But during the last several months I became concerned by the appearance of writers and "teachers" attached to the ICNC who suggested that low-level violence (including property destruction!) could help a nonviolent movement succeed faster with better outcomes than strictly nonviolent resistance.  Because of my previous readings on the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance and my understanding that autocrats and oppressors frequently try to inject violence into a nonviolent movement in order to undermine it, I could only conclude that the ICNC had been infiltrated by a person or persons working for Trump, Putin, or the regimes they represent.  One example of my concern lies in the article written by Professor Tom Hastings in which he lays out his opinion of "when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign," as well as his own story of how he was arrested three times for destroying military property.  From his article it is obvious that Mr. Hastings believes that there are times when property destruction is both justified and helpful to a movement.

The only thing is, Mr. Hastings is dead wrong.  And the experience of the suffragette movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Britain and the United States proves it.  According to a 2015 analysis by George Lakey, the British suffragette movement achieved much less than the American movement, and it did so even though it started earlier and many more women were involved.  Why?  Because the American women who agitated for the right of women to vote did so using entirely nonviolent acts, whereas in Britain (oh, such a staid and proper society!), women resorted to arson, blowing up post offices, and smashing windows.  That's why, by 1920, while waging a nonviolent campaign that ran all the way through World War 1, the American suffragettes won equal access to the ballot box, while in Britain (where the women were forced to suspend their campaign during the war), by 1918 only women who were over 30 and owned property were granted the right to vote, even though they had begun their campaign five years before the American suffragettes.  It wasn't until 1928 that British women gained fully equal access to the ballot box - eight years after this victory was won in the United States.  Lakey asks what slowed the British women down, and the answer is that they undermined themselves and their movement by engaging in property destruction.

Mr. Hastings should maybe read the article by George Lakey.  Or he might read the essay by Jack DuVall (formerly of the ICNC) which criticized the property destruction instigated by some supposed "anti-fascists" in the early days of the Trump administration.  That violence played directly into the hands of Trump.

Thankfully, the protesters now facing down Federal troops in Portland do not seem to be listening to Tom Hastings.

(God bless the Wall of Moms!  Now that shows innovation in tactics of protest!  Compare what they are doing with what the Mothers of the Disappeared did to the Argentine military regime before it fell.  They also did it to the Pinochet regime in Chile. And note: the Wall of Moms is spreading to other cities.  How can Chump - er, I mean, Trump - call these women thugs?!)

As long as these protesters continue to remain nonviolent in the face of Federal violence perpetrated against them, they will continue to show the world that the real thug and violent actor is the one and only Donald J. Trump.

Shifting Pillars Of Support, Or, Why We Must Stop Listening to the ICNC

In my post, "Why Are These Weapons Strong?", I described the overall goals, strategy and methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Once again, I'll state the overall definition of nonviolent resistance as I see it:

Nonviolent resistance: a system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction.

The method of choice of the Black Lives Matter movement is the use of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to end the brutal racism of the dominant American culture against people of color.  And the proper application of strategic nonviolent resistance against oppressors works by removing the pillars of support which uphold those oppressors.  I described these pillars of support in last week's post.

Now those who have studied strategic nonviolent resistance know that it is such an effective method when properly applied that oppressors frequently try to inject violence into an initially nonviolent resistance struggle so that they can more easily crush it.  We saw this in the United States under Trump from 2017 to 2019 with the staged clashes between the Antifa and various right-wing groups.  I believe we are seeing it again with the rise of people who engage in acts of destruction against monuments commemorating heroes of White American history.  Regardless of how you may feel about these heroes (and believe me, I don't regard these people as my heroes), here's the go to jail truth about property destruction: it is perceived by many people as an act of violence.  Violence polarizes people and causes the agents of the oppressor to tighten their loyalty to the oppressor.  It also plays right into the hands of oppressors who claim that they must oppress in order to maintain "law and order" and to protect society from "chaos."  Even property destruction therefore decreases the ability of the liberation struggle to weaken the oppressor's pillars of support.  Violence - including property destruction - also diminishes mass participation in a movement.

So why are some of those who claim to stand on behalf of Black lives engaging in attacking monuments?  And why, after several weeks of protests, have those who seek to resist oppression not broadened their tactics of nonviolent action beyond protest?  If you're reading this blog and you are Black or Brown, please read Gene Sharp's books on nonviolent resistance!  Or please start studying the CANVAS core curriculum!  If you're White and you claim to want to support Black and Brown people in their struggle against White racists, please read these books also!  And please stop trying to hijack our struggle or to turn our struggle into an expression of your own private grievances!  Most of the vandals who have acted during the protests of the last several weeks have been White.

One other thing.  While I have in the past enjoyed reading the literature of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, I think it's time to reject them for the present, as I wrote in a post in May of this year.  In that post, I said that those who want to incite violence have managed to infiltrate even some organizations whose ostensible mission is to teach strategic nonviolent resistance.  I also challenged the ICNC to take out some of its own trash.  But the ICNC has recently posted on the front page of its website a link to an article written by professor Tom Hastings at Portland State University which argues that there are times when property destruction (that is, protesters destroying property that doesn't belong to them) is helpful to a nonviolent campaign.  Wrong, Professor Hastings!  Can Hastings name a single instance in which destruction of someone else's property enabled nonviolent resisters to weaken an oppressor's pillars of support?  I don't think so!  If protesters destroy other people's property (even statues!), it shows their lack of competence in weakening the oppressor's pillars of support.  Think of the many cases in which BLM activists were successful in getting oppressive state governments to remove their own monuments commemorating racist heroes.  Now that's skill.  As Isaac Asimov once said, violence is truly the last refuge of the incompetent - unless the violent actors happen to be agents provocateurs.

Donald Trump badly needs a "rally round the flag moment" just now.  We need to make sure that we don't give him one.

Voting As An Act of Civil Resistance, Or, Whose Idiot Is Umair Haque?

Logo of OTPOR! Serbian nonviolent resistance movement

which ousted Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Image By Le serbe - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14240808, 

retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 12 July 2020

Ever since Donald Trump's capture of the White House in 2016, I have been fixated on the question of how oppressed people (or people targeted for oppression) can shatter the power of their oppressors without resorting to violence.  My initial research led me to the writings of Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, and Gene Sharp.  Later, my reading expanded to include the work of Srdja Popovic.  From these thinkers and activists I learned to see strategic nonviolent resistance as system of means by which the powerless and the oppressed shift the balance of power between themselves and their oppressors without the use of physical violence or property destruction, as I wrote about in an earlier post.

This shift in the balance of power occurs when skillful nonviolent resisters are able to weaken or destroy the pillars of support of an oppressive government by shifting the loyalty of the people who comprise those pillars of support.  For those readers who may not be familiar with strategic nonviolent resistance, "pillars of support" are those organizations which provide social power and legitimacy to a regime and its leaders.   These include the police, the military, banks and other financial institutions, and the media, as well as others.  Skillful strategic nonviolent resisters are able to weaken the allegiance of the members of these organizations to the regime by two means: first, by pointing out the corruption, evil, destructiveness, and specially, the unsustainability of the current regime, and second, by presenting a righteous alternative to the regime.  By employing both of these means, the nonviolent resisters weaken and eventually destroy the legitimacy of the regime.  Once the regime loses legitimacy, it can no longer command obedience - therefore it can no longer survive.

In reading the history of successful nonviolent resistance campaigns, I have recently been struck by the role which elections played in the resistance struggles.  Elections can be a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, skillful dictators and autocrats use them as a tool to divide the opposition so that the dictators can retain the appearance of a mandate to power.  This was the strategy of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, as documented by Chenoweth and Stephan in the chapter of Why Civil Resistance Works titled, "The Philippine People Power Movement, 1983-1986."  This was also the strategy used by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who retained his power for several years by dividing and co-opting his opposition as documented here and here.

But there are times when elections as a weapon are seized from the hands of autocrats and dictators by an opposition who skillfully uses the elections to remove the legitimacy of the dictatorial regimes.  They do so not only by publicizing the evils of the current regime and the possibility of a righteous alternative, but also by the following additional means:

• Massive "get out the vote" drives, especially among disaffected and marginalized populations,
• The development of a robust network of volunteers into an effective, independent means of monitoring election results,
• And the development of a means of nonviolently causing painful sanctions against the regime in the event that it tries to cheat, rig the election, or refuse to accept the results.

The development of an independent election monitoring network was the means used by both OTPOR! and CeSID in Yugoslavia to verify that Milosevic had in fact lost the 2000 election, as documented here and here.  The bulldozer strike and subsequent mass march on Parliament provided the painful sanctions that forced Milosevic to resign.  In a similar way, the Philippine opposition skillfully used the 1986 election to de-legitimize Ferdinand Marcos, employing a network of half a million volunteer election monitors to expose the cheating of the Marcos regime, and employing a massive general strike and huge mass protests to provide the pressure that forced Marcos out of office.

Now in 2020, those who treasure the continued supremacy of a favored few are hanging their hopes on the slim possibility that Donald J. Trump will pull off some sort of Election Day miracle that will enable him to "win" the election (meaning the Electoral College) even if he loses the American popular vote by several million.  In order to get the American people to passively swallow the results of such an "election," the election must be made as close as possible.  Thanks be to God that right now, it doesn't appear that the election will be close at all, and that it appears that not only Donald Trump, but a lot of Republicans are about to be ejected from office as if by the violent projectile emesis of the American body politic.  Yet those who want another four years of Trump continue to fight on.  And some of their tactics are sneaky.  Those of us who lived through 2016 can spot these tactics.

One particular tactic is to try to say that there's really not much difference between Biden and Trump, or to characterize the choice between the two men as a choice between the "lesser of two evils."  The users of this tactic seek to increase its effectiveness by using supposed voices from the Left to make such assertions.  These supposed members of the Left claim to oppose Trump and winner-take-all capitalism, yet they also claim that voting for Biden is an act of ideological impurity and that we who stand to suffer the most from another four years of Trump should not lower ourselves to vote for someone like Biden.  Among such voices is Omar Haque, who lumps both supporters of Trump and supporters of Biden into the same category, which he calls "The American Idiot."  Omar is not the only idiot trying to pull such a stunt.  There is also the website In These Times (published by the Democratic Socialists of America), who last month wrote an article titled, "Want To Defeat Trump Without Campaigning for Biden? Here's How."  Note that if you read their article, you may conclude that it should have been titled, "Want to Waste Your Time In Symbolic Opposition To Trump While Handing Him A Second Term?  Here's How."  (Note also that In These Times has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to downplay the evidence of Russian interference in the American electoral process - even though the entire American intelligence community is united in their assertion that Russian interference is real and did take place in 2016.)

This reminds me of blogger Olga Doroshenko's excellent description of the Russians who claimed to be opposed to Putin and to his aggression against Ukraine, yet who criticized the attempts of the Ukrainians to liberate themselves from Russian aggression because those attempts did not meet the Russian standard of "perfection".  As she pointed out, when you are doing all you can to liberate yourself, yet someone criticizes your efforts on the grounds that they are not "perfect", it is a sign that the critic really wants you dead.

Let's take a lesson from the Serbians who successfully used elections to oust Milosevic.  They rallied a formerly fractured opposition behind a candidate who stood the best chance of delivering them from both Milosevic and from the ongoing destruction of the nation under Milosevic.  Was that candidate "perfect" No!  But was he aimed in a radically different direction than the continued slide into self-destruction under Milosevic?  Yes!

Biden is not perfect.  (What mortal human being is?!)  Yet he is aimed in a radically different direction from Trump.  As was said of Milosevic, it can be said of Trump that his language smells like death.  I want life to win this year.  Therefore, I am voting for Biden.  And I am wondering if we have the political will to organize ourselves effectively in the next three months in order to put teeth into an electoral loss for Trump.  Are we willing to do what the Serbs and the Filipinos did?

The Go To Jail Truth

My worldview during the last five years has been based on the following premises:

1. That the universe which we all inhabit is a moral universe ruled by the moral standard of a righteous Creator;
2. That an essential pillar of that moral standard is the duty of each human being to treat his or her fellow human beings with dignity and charity;
3. That the Creator of the universe stands ready to enforce His righteous moral standard by imposing consequences on those who break that standard;
4. And that since the most privileged members of the United States have broken that moral standard in making themselves great by murdering and oppressing their fellow human beings, the consequences of this moral breach have begun to spread throughout American society.  I have called these consequences the outworkings of damnation. 

The theoretical basis and starting point for my worldview (and especially of point #4 of that worldview) is found in passages such as Proverbs 22:22-23; Jeremiah 7:9-10; Ezekiel 18:4; Ezekiel 22; and James 5:1-6.  Now when a worldview first comes into being, it is nothing more than a hypothesis.  In order for the worldview to become mature, it must be tested by observation.  Therefore, in order for me to be able to confidently assert the worldview I have laid out above, I must be able to point to destructive or damaging consequences which threaten the privileged and which are the direct result of the dirty tricks used by the privileged to gain and keep their privilege.

But what is interesting is that in searching for the evidences of the outworkings of damnation among the privileged, the searcher encounters various flavors and levels of "truth".  The particular flavor of truth which the searcher encounters will depend on whom he asks for that "truth".  If he or she asks the holders of power and privilege, the answer contained in their words will be very different from the answer which might be obtained by planting hidden cameras, listening devices and skillful spies to observe the affairs of the holders of privilege and power.   This is not surprising, since the wealth of the privileged consists not only in the actual physical assets which they have, but in the image of wealth and power which they are able to project to the world.  In fact, if a person's image is strong enough, he can get a lot of what he needs or wants based on image alone - whether it's obtaining a huge line of credit because he looks like he is rich enough to repay his loan, or whether it's successfully intimidating someone else because the bully has made himself look too powerful to resist.  We might call this projection of an idealized image "managed truth."  (Kind of like "managed democracy", isn't it?)

Last week, the United States was treated to an example of this "managed truth" in the latest employment report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Trump administration celebrated this report by shouting that the American economy is "coming back faster, bigger, and better than we ever thought possible" in the face of the coronavirus pandemic because 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy between mid-May and mid-June.  However, as a number of sources have reported (see this, this, and this for instance), this supposed recovery does not reflect the state of the economy as it is today.  For these jobs were added during the hasty and ill-conceived rush by many states to reopen their economies, and those states are being forced now to backtrack their reopenings due to an explosion of COVID-19 cases.  Moreover, the vast majority of jobs that were added are in the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors - sectors which are most likely to be shut down again due to the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some actual figures from the BLS are given below:

• Hospitality and Leisure - 2.1 million jobs added
• Food Service and Drinking Places (bars) - 1.5 million jobs added
• Amusements, Gambling and Recreation - 353,000 jobs added
• Retail Trade - 740,000 jobs added.

That adds up to a total of 4.69 million out of the 4.8 million jobs that were added.  It should be noted that the resurgence of the pandemic threatens all of the job gains in these classes which I have listed.  Not only this, but the last two BLS jobs reports have contained a "misclassification error" which falsely lowered the reported unemployment rate.

So if seekers for the truth of things - especially those who wish to accurately track the outworkings of damnation - cannot rely on official statements from those who are experiencing that damnation, where can they turn?  One possible source of truth is the official reports and communications which the most privileged members of society share with each other, for it is these reports which are most frequently used as the basis for the decisions made by these privileged members.  Petroleum geologist Arthur E. Berman once referred to these reports as "the go to jail truth".  Why refer to these as the "go to jail truth"?  Because if the captains of certain industries lie to each other (or to government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission) about the actual state of their industries and market sectors, a whole lot of people stand to lose great big money - thus (hopefully) obliging the liars to go to jail.  The threat of jail time is usually enough to keep most people honest in their official reporting.

But what if the most privileged members of society have corrupted themselves to such a point that they will stop at nothing in order to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense?  For evil is progressive.  The first step is to disregard moral restraints against taking advantage of one's fellow human beings.  The last step is to disregard even the physical or financial realities of one's situation in the desire to be godlike.  Along the way, people who have thus given themselves to evil stop telling even the "go to jail truth", and the organizations, businesses and polities headed by them enter the realm of willful blindness.  Last week the State of Texas entered this realm, as a state which rushed the reopening of its economy and which is now facing the overwhelming of its medical system due to COVID-19 cases that have spiraled out of control.  But if you want to find out how much the Texas medical system has become overwhelmed, good luck asking the State government.  They won't tell you.

According to Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril, organizations and polities operating under willful blindness have certain characteristics.  First, most of the lower level inhabitants or employees know that something smells rotten.  Second, many of them can actually see some of the skeletons in closets and/or dead bodies under beds.  Third, the higher-ups in these organizations and polities will have created an environment that is hostile to truth-tellers.  Fourth, such organizations and polities tend to break down rather suddenly and dramatically in a way that surprises the outside world even though the lower level people on the inside could see the breakdown a long time in coming.  The collapse of Enron is a good case in point.

How can seekers of truth track the outworkings of damnation through organizations or polities which have entered the phase of willful blindness?  Ms. Heffernan gives us some suggestions on pages 237 and 238 of her book.  First, we need to have a sense of history - especially the history of the collapse of dysfunctional organizations.  By studying the collapse of a multitude of types of organizations along with a multitude of types of organizational dysfunction, we can get a sense of the general trends along which the outworkings of damnation are likely to propagate.  Once we recognize these trends, we watch the dysfunctional organization to see if we can spot the "weak signals" which indicate a trend.  Where the weak signals accumulate, a trend is likely emerging.  It was attention to these weak signals that enabled a CIA analyst named Herb Meyer to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union several years before it happened.

And this bears thinking about a bit more deeply.  For I'd like to suggest that Putin's Russia may be headed for a second collapse.  As someone living in America, I have focused largely on trying to track the outworkings of damnation in American society - yet the United States is by no means the only nation which is worthy of damnation.  Russia has proven itself over the years to be at least the equal of the U.S. when it comes to national narcissism and the desire to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  (See this, this, this, this, and this for instance.)  Putin's use of dirty tricks (such as election-tampering, promotion of far-Right/racist/skinhead organizations, assassinations, and now bounties) to make Russia great by tearing down the West have also been well-documented over the years.  Indeed, when one reads M. Scott Peck's description of malignant narcissism in his book People of the Lie, one can't help but think of Russia under Putin.  To quote Peck, "As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life - usually in the name of righteousness."  When observing Russia, therefore, some weak signals to watch out for include watching what happens to truth tellers in Russia who reveal Russia's imperfections.  Another (not-so-weak) signal is the Russian attempt to meddle in other people's lives in order to destroy them. (He who spends all his time minding other people's business doesn't have time to mind his own!)  A third weak signal is seeing how frantic the Russians (and their mouthpieces in the West) become when the fig leaves sewn by Russia to cover its shame slip in the least bit to expose some raw flesh.  Watch the weak signals.