The Antidote To The Strongman Is Responsibility

Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has netted some impressive losses for Russia.  Among those losses are up to 17,000 Russian troops killed, over 40,000 Russian casualties (including soldiers who have been wounded, but not killed), pariah status among the nations of the world, crippling economic consequences, and a series of singular losses on the propaganda front.  But over the last week and a half, Russia has mounted a ferocious cyber-counterattack in order to retake the initiative in the information war.  So we have many, many "news" sites aligned with the Far Right (and blogs by Putin trolls who pretend to be, among other things, morbidly obese housewives) which are criticizing President Biden as weak or incompetent, or accusing Ukraine of developing bioweapons, or who are repeating the tired old Russian talking point that Russia's attack of Ukraine was designed to eliminate a potential "threat to Russia" either from NATO - which has not attacked Russia at all - or from the presence of independent, happy, self-reliant people on Russia's doorstep.  (In other words, "YOUR freedom is a threat to ME!")

The most recent weapon to be deployed in this information war is the threat of the "chaos" that may engulf the world if Russia is not allowed to get its way.  So there are Russian mouthpieces spouting threats of the end of the world, or the threat of nuclear war, or the threat of widespread economic breakdown as a result of the West's resistance against the imperial ambitions of Putin.  To be sure, there is some substance to those threats.  But that substance consists of the weaknesses of position which we in the West have created for ourselves as a result of allowing ourselves to become dependent on Russia for a number of the resources needed in our modern industrial economies.  We knew for decades that in depending on Russia for things like grain, oil, and fertilizer, we were relying on a regime that despises democracy and human rights, a regime that would use our dependence as a tool to try to subjugate us.  Putin's Russia would now try to persuade us that we have only the stark choice between the kind of "peace" that comes from capitulating to Putin versus starvation and shortage.  That, however, is false.

We have also known since the 1970's that the resource base of the societies and economies of the Global North would one day decline to the point where we would have to devise new ways of living - ways that are more suited to a world of limits.  Recognizing those limits is not the end of the world, and we don't need to have a meltdown when faced with the need to make necessary adjustments.  However, a meltdown is just what many of us have had (or, to use a British expression, too many of us have thrown a wobbly) whenever the need to learn to live within limits has been mentioned.  Our tantrums are provoked at the thought that our lives, our ambitions, our dreams, our cravings might to be subject to limits.  This is especially true of the privileged upper-middle-class members of the dominant culture.  And this leads to a danger.  For although we know, deep down, that everyone on earth will have to face a world of limits, the danger is that we will choose to believe strongmen and populists who promise us otherwise - men who promise that by waving a magic wand they and they alone can bring back the days of past glory if only we give ourselves entirely to the wishes of these men.  The experience of those of us who lived through the Trump years or through the disaster of post-Brexit Britain should be enough to teach us otherwise, but as Abe Lincoln once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time..."

The antidote to the false promise of the strongman and the populist is a willingness to accept the world as it is - that is, to make peace with reality - and to figure out the best and most moral way of living within the reality into which we have been placed.  Grab a clue: the present time of shortages and high prices was coming even without the West's sanctions against Russia.  Didn't anyone notice the shortages of 2020 or how gas prices were rising throughout all of 2021?  

P.S. I have at least three four blog posts in the oven.  Over the next month I hope to publish them.  One post will be an essay on the subject of populist leaders and how the pedagogy of the oppressed is designed to liberate the oppressed from the lies of the populist by teaching the oppressed to take personal and collective responsibility for our own lives.  (Today's post is a sneak preview.)  The second post will deal with the threat which false charity poses to genuine liberation.  The third post will be about programming search engines.  The fourth post will be a brief sketch of my experiences as a small business owner, as well as the things that moved me to pursue entrepreneurship.  Stay tuned.

The Case For Electrification In 2022

The geopolitical events of the last month have shown how foolish it has been for the free nations of the world to allow themselves to be hoodwinked into economic dependence on the regimes of tyrants.  In particular, we see how Russia has tried to use Western dependence on its fossil fuel resources as a means of dictating the internal affairs of the nations of Europe.  This has been one of the cornerstones of Russian imperialist strategy under Vladimir Putin.  It makes sense therefore when dealing with thieving little thugs like Putin to cut one's reliance on those thugs to zero.

So we come to the question of how the West can eliminate its reliance on Russian oil and gas in the quickest and most advantageous manner.  And in this regard, my mind was provoked recently by hearing of a few design and construction projects in the northern U.S. which are replacing natural gas-fired space conditioning equipment with all-electric, variable refrigerant flow heat pump HVAC systems at a number of government facilities.  Many of the facilities in question already have existing rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, which can be used to offset the energy cost of the new HVAC systems. 

These projects are an example of a larger trend in the architecture/construction industry and among facility managers to shift from buildings which use fossil fuels for space conditioning to buildings which use electricity only.  There are encouraging reports and studies which indicate that, given the current trends in the development of renewable energy sources and advances in HVAC systems, a shift to all-electric buildings can be significantly cheaper in the long run than maintaining buildings that continue to use fossil fuels.  I don't have time today for a detailed analysis of the literature on this subject, but I do intend to write a few posts that go into this subject in more detail as soon as I have time for more intense research.  However, for those who want to beat me to the punch (please do!), the following sources are a good place to start:

• A Case for Electrifying Heat In End-Use Residential Sector Towards Carbon-Free Buildings, Tolu O. Sodeinde, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019
• "Efficient Electrification Newsletter," Electric Power Research Institute, January/February 2020
• "Edison International Sustainability Report 2019", Edison International
• "NBI BETR Webinar, 2-22-2021", New Buildings Institute
• And, for something slightly more cautionary, "Increased Electrification of Heating and Weather Risk In the Nordic Power System," Trotter, et al, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, December 2021.

Of course, any large-scale transition to an all-electric society must rest on a foundation of cheap, widely available electricity from renewable resources.  Here we have research that shows a very optimistic picture, as stated in an April 2019 report from the German Energy Watch Group in partnership with the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (aka LUT University) in Finland.  The title of the report is Global Energy System Based on 100% Renewable Energy: Power, Heat, Transport and Desalination Sectors.  A key paragraph from that study is the following:

"A transition to a global 100% renewable energy system is no longer a matter of technical feasibility or economic viability, but one of political will. Not only do we need ambitious

targets, but also stable, long-term, and reliable policy frameworks, adapted to regional conditions and environments. We call on the global community to urgently pursue a forward-looking pathway towards net zero GHG emissions by launching a rapid change of the way we use natural resources and provide electricity, heat and transport." - Hans-Josef Fell.

One of the findings of the study is that regional energy independence can be achieved by the development of regional renewable energy resources, as described in the paragraph titled, "Electrification and Decentralisation Lead To More Efficiency."  This would eliminate or at least drastically reduce the need for import of energy by one region from other regions.

Clearly these topics deserve deep and urgent consideration!

Freire's Pedagogy: 2. Breaking The Sadistic Cycle

This post is a continuation of meditations and explorations of Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  To me, the consideration of this book follows logically from the consideration of strategic nonviolent resistance which I set forth in the series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  The first post in the current series on Freire's Pedagogy laid out the necessity of our present consideration.  To repeat some statements from that post, freedom from oppression is the goal of a liberation struggle based on strategic nonviolent resistance.  This liberation struggle cannot be successful if it is waged only by isolated individuals.  It must be waged by people in collective, interdependent relationship - that is, by people who have chosen to organize.  The question then becomes how to persuade people to organize - especially when the organizer discovers that it is often very hard to rouse oppressed people to liberating action.  Freire's book begins to explore why oppressed peoples so often act for a long time in ways that do not reflect a desire for freedom, but rather for its opposite, and what foundational work must be done to begin to liberate people in their minds so that they can begin to liberate themselves in actuality.

So we begin once again with a foundational question, namely, what is the purpose of freedom.  Freire answers this by stating that "the people's vocation" is to become more fully human.  I would put it thus: that our calling is to fulfill our ontogeny (that is, the reason why we were created as human beings) to the greatest extent possible.  Freire describes this pursuit as "the pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person."  However, this pursuit of self-affirmation requires the pursuer to shoulder the necessary costs of the pursuit, the necessary costs of being a responsible person.  It is the desire to have the self-affirmation without shouldering the costs which leads some people to become the oppressors of their fellows - that is, the owners of their fellows and of the fruits of the labors of their fellows.  

An example of this is found in the book Garden Graces written by George Grant, a white American evangelical author with Dominionist leanings.  In that book, Mr. Grant celebrates the life and intellectual accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson.  What is especially ironic is Mr. Grant's celebration of Jefferson's accomplishments in the realm of farming and gardening.  For while Jefferson is credited with being a master strategist and inventor in the realm of agriculture, the actual work of implementing Jefferson's ideas was done by African slaves.  Jefferson had the opportunity to develop and express his intellectual talents in the realm of husbandry, but his slaves, on the other hand, were forced by the threat of violence to simply do as they were told.  By that threat of violence - the threatened violence of the oppressor - these slaves were deprived of the opportunity to develop their own humanity, including the intellectual dimension of that humanity which Jefferson got to develop in himself.  

And so we come to a series of key statements made by Freire in his description of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed: 

• "Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human." - Pedagogy, page 55.

• "Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized." - Pedagogy, page 55.  Two observations regarding this statement: first, that in order to deaden their own consciences, the oppressors must convince themselves that their intended victims are not persons and are not human.  Second, consider the abundant historical examples that prove the statement that it is the oppressors who throw the first punch and initiate the violence - from the unprovoked murder of Abel by Cain to the unprovoked conquest of the American continent by Europeans to the unprovoked colonization of Africa and Asia by the European "great powers" to the most recent example - the unprovoked attack and invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

• The corollary to the previous statement: "For the oppressors, 'human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are 'things.'" - Pedagogy, page 57.

• "This behavior, this way of understanding the world and people (which necessarily makes the oppressors resist the installation of a new regime) is explained by their experience as a dominant class...Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence—initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. This climate creates in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness—possessive of the world and of men and women." - Pedagogy, page 58.  This possessive consciousness can be illustrated by examples.  A personal example is the experience I had several years ago at a technical office where I worked, in which I came in contact with a white South African man who had left South Africa shortly after apartheid ended.  It quickly became clear to me that he could not bring himself to see me as a fellow human being (I being a Black man), but rather as one of his former possessions who had somehow been stolen from him.  The daily sight of me - a degreed technical professional who had the same job rank and privileges as him - must have given him ulcers!  Another example, both contemporary and historical, is the warped Russian desire to possess and dominate the Baltic nations (not to mention the entire world), an attitude beautifully illustrated by Olga Doroshenko in her posts on Russian narcissism.

• "As beneficiaries of a situation of oppression, the oppressors cannot perceive that if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all women and men. This is why their generosity is false. Humanity is a "thing," and they possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the "others," of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion." - Pedagogy, pages 58-59.  Not only is this a corollary to the previous statement, but this explains why oppressors consider the struggle for liberation to be an act of subversion - for that struggle subverts the supposed "property rights" of the oppressor.

• "If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate "things." This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to "in-animate" everything and everyone it encounters, in its eagerness to possess, unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism." - Pedagogy, page 59.  This statement is the central point of today's post.  To define sadism, Freire quotes from Erich Fromm, who writes that "The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive."  This sadistic drive seeks to turn the animate, with its freedom and unpredictability, into the inanimate - thus killing it.  This is why the language of oppressors "smells like death," to paraphrase Srdja Popovic.

So Paulo Freire asserts that a central pillar of the oppressor's thinking is the desire to treat other human beings as mere objects, and to wholly possess these "objects", to bring these "objects" entirely under his control.  I say right now that the only Being who has a genuine right to call us His possessions is our Creator.  Allowing fallen, fallible men or women to have that right over us leads us very quickly to the experience of sadism.

This is why, in the struggle for liberation, the oppressed must not be led into the fallacy that says that oppressor and oppressed are merely two sides of the kind of bilateral disagreement in which each side shares blame and in which each side must make some compromises.  Such a fallacy will be preached by the oppressor the moment the oppressed succeed in mounting a challenge that seriously threatens the domination of the oppressor.  If you are in a disagreement with another person because you want to just live your life and mind your business while the other person wants to roast you over a barbecue and stick you between two pieces of bread, what sort of acceptable "compromise" can you reasonably work out?  What concessions should you make?

And this is also why in a struggle against an oppressor, appeasement will never work.  For if you respond to the threat of oppression by attempting to appease the oppressor, you will sooner or later come to a situation where, in the limit, you are totally dominated by the sadism of the oppressor and you find that you have become a masochist.  That is living death.

How to Help Ukraine

It is heartening to see the outpouring of sympathy for the people of Ukraine from many of the people of the West.  However, we must beware of Russian attempts to hijack and mislead those who want to provide material support to the people of Ukraine at this time.  Yesterday, for instance, I received a spam donations request message from a sender who spoofed the email address of a law firm in northern California.  I am not a particularly trusting type nowadays, so I called the law firm in question and found out that the email message was indeed fake.

For this reason I am glad that the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has published an article listing a number of legitimate organizations to which we can donate in order to help the Ukrainian victims of Russian military aggression.  The link to that article is here.  The article also has information describing steps we can take to protect ourselves from Russian cyberattacks, particularly those that come via spam or phishing emails.

一个奇怪的案例

Note: please read yesterday's post also.

The conflict between China and the West is a conflict of centuries.  And over the last decade and a half, my sympathies have come to lie ever more with the Chinese.  However, the events of the last several weeks have forced those sympathies onto a knife edge.  For Chinese president Xi Jinping has chosen to become an ally of Russian president (and imperialist) Vladimir Putin.  In so doing, I would assert that he has begun to sell out both himself and his nation to a process of subjugation from which China managed to extricate itself only within the last seventy or eighty years.  And he has shown himself to be evil.

To understand the roots of the present conflict between China and the West (and of the sympathy for China which had until recently been growing in me), it is helpful to examine a bit of history.  And the history of European (and later, American) contact with China from the eighteenth century on has been a history of "breaking and entering", to use the lingo of cops.  That breaking and entering involved things like the use of British and American military power to force China to open its economy to trade with the West.  (This was almost exactly like the forced entry of the Japanese economy by the United States in the 1850's.)  This then led to economic, and later, military and political colonization of China.  The aftermath of breaking and entering is usually looting, and the nations of Europe, together with the United States, engaged in a long campaign of rapacious exploitation of China.  (See this and this also.) 

This breaking and entering, along with the resulting looting, was accompanied by a concerted attack on the Chinese soul.  This attack took two forms: the opium trade, and the forced entry of European and American Protestant missionaries into China.  The opium trade was the diabolical way in which Britain sought to correct the deficit it had run up in its trade for Chinese luxury goods.  European goods were not as good as Chinese goods, and the hard currency of European silver was running out, so the British substituted opium for silver, and ensnared millions of Chinese people in crippling addiction as a result.

The damage done by European and American missionaries was of a different sort.  It consisted first of a degrading and infantilizing treatment of Chinese people by the missionaries, a treatment whose source was a smug and arrogant attitude by the missionaries toward the Chinese, as captured in such statements as this:

"It may be interesting for you to know how I go about the country.  I dread laziness in the Chinese helpers.  I have already seen some of it.  If the foreigner rides, his Chinese brother will also expect to ride..." - Goforth of China, page 96.

It is only understandable that such an attitude would anger the native Chinese, for these missionaries did not come with the humility of Christ, but as part of a conquering imperial cabal, a cabal of imperious shovers of things down other peoples' throats.  When the inevitable backlash that was the Boxer Rebellion occurred, these same missionaries forced poor Chinese peasants to pay obscene reparations.  But the most galling thing was that these missionaries sought to teach the Chinese that their duty was to "submit to their earthly masters" (that is, to their European masters), even though these missionaries were citizens of nations which had never turned the other cheek or submitted to even the slightest imagined injustice without a bloody fight.

So we come to the events of the mid-20th century, in which a number of subjugated nonwhite nations were, by means nonviolent in some cases and violent in others, throwing off the yoke of their European oppressors.  At about the same time that the nonviolent Indian struggle for independence under Gandhi was coming to its climax, two leaders of armies in China were slugging it out with both foreign oppressors and with each other.  And it is important to note that neither Chiang Kai-Shek nor Mao Zedong were without a certain hostility toward the West.  Both men sought to establish a separate, self-sufficient Chinese identity.  But theirs was a duel between competing revolutions, a duel which Mao won.

One immediate result of Mao's victory was the beginning of a violent purge of historically corrupting Western influences from Chinese culture.  Thus drug users faced prison (and sometimes, death), drug dealers faced death (almost always), and missionaries faced both prison and death.  But in his drive to establish an ideologically pure expression of "revolution," Mao fell into the error described by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

"However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating 'bureaucracy' the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation."

That is, Mao's revolution became "stagnant" and "turned against the people, using the old repressive, bureaucratic State apparatus."  This was one of the factors which caused Mao's China to stagnate economically and intellectually.  

It was this stagnation which his successor Deng Xiaoping sought to reverse by gradually loosening the strictures of Maoist China to allow more independent thinking, entrepreneurship, and creativity.  The result of Deng's changes was an explosion of prosperity within China, although it was unequally distributed, as noted in Deng's expression "Let some get rich first."  Yet this explosion of prosperity led to an explosion of national economic (and hence political) power, which led to a huge increase in Chinese soft power.  A final result of Deng's reforms was the emergence of a China every bit the peer of any nation of the West - a China that had decisively freed itself from white Anglo/American/European domination.  I suggest that this is what provoked the wrath and opposition of Donald Trump against China.  And because Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, I suggest that Trump's economic aggression against China was an expression of Russian uneasiness about China's emerging power.  You see, China became the big fish that got away - a separate, non-Western, nonwhite, self-sufficient polity that could no longer be subjugated or exploited.

The loosening of strictures and the gradual encouragement of freedom in China was not without its challenges.  For there needed to be a healthy definition of freedom, and not the definition currently in fashion in the United States, where freedom means the freedom to become an addict of capitalist exploitation - that is, the freedom to become enslaved by means of one's addictions.  But the Chinese leadership was also left with a lingering insecurity about the possible effect on their people of any allegiance which might compete with unquestioned and total allegiance to the Chinese government.  This is why, for instance, opposition to Biblical Christianity (and to other religions not sponsored by the state) continues in China.

I do have a certain sympathy for that insecurity, although I also have a sharp criticism of that insecurity.  As a Christian, I am concerned by the persecution of Christians by the Chinese government over the last century - a persecution that continues to this day.  But I must also say that I perfectly understand the reasons for that persecution.  For if goons and thugs had done to me what European and American missionaries did to the Chinese people in the 19th and 20th centuries - if they had also tried to use the Bible to justify what their governments and big businesses and soldiers did - I too would be strongly tempted to reject what was being served up to me as "Christianity"!  In fact, this is what has happened to me as a Black man in my exposure to the toxicity of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church! It is a miracle that I am still a believer.  Every day I have to remind myself that all that garbage is not God's fault.

And yet as a Christian, I must confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and that I must live out my life as a statement of subjection to Him.  I must also say that I support the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ.  And regardless of one's religious persuasion, I believe that everyone on earth will one day be forced to accept the fact that they are creatures made by a Creator and accountable ultimately to Him.

But the weakness of the Chinese insecurity is that the Chinese government, in its response to historical oppression, has set itself up as the god to whom its people must give their sole allegiance.  The presence of any other independent authority provokes feelings of massive insecurity among the rulers of China!

This means that the emergence of any sub-groups of self-sufficient, self-determining people among the Chinese population constitutes a threat.  Thus the presence of genuine democracy anywhere in the world, or the possibility of genuine democracy in China comprises a terrifying threat to the leadership of China.  This is why in allying China with Putin, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have shown themselves to be opposed to a world in which any independent group of democratically-organized people exists anywhere, lest awareness of such a group of democrats tempt the Chinese people to want such a free life for themselves.  For the revolution begun during the days of Mao has once again fallen into "bureaucratic" doldrums from which it has not yet been able to rescue itself.

This, then is the motivation of Xi Jinping's alliance with Vladimir Putin.  For Putin has the same desire to set himself up as a god in opposition to any other authority.  Hence, Putin has the same fear of a free society existing anywhere on earth.  Autocrats such as Putin wish to create a world in which responsible, independent self-determination is unimaginable because no examples of it can be found or seen anywhere, a world in which the only thing that can be seen is the autocracy of the autocrats.  But in allying himself with Putin to create such a world, Xi Jinping is about to discover that he has found a frenemy - or rather, that the frenemy has discovered Xi Jinping to be a chump.  And China may find itself ensnared in yet another relationship of subjugation to an earthly foreign power.   I think of recent studies that show the impact of ambivalent personal relationships on personal health.  Relationships with frenemies are a very world of ambiguity, and Putin has been known as a master of ambiguity.  I expect that Jinping's China will find itself valued only for how useful it is to Putin - while having to endure, from time to time, the dumping of narcissistic Russian ethnic hostility onto some of its citizens, as happened in 2020 during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.  China will be taken on quite a ride.  A certain tail will wag a certain dog.  And Xi Jinping may soon find himself leading quite the dog's life.

P.S.  I forgot to elaborate on the statement I made at the start of this post.  I said that my initial sympathies for China have been forced onto a knife edge by events of the past few weeks.  Let me explain a bit more.  If the government of China continues to support the government of Vladimir Putin IN ANY WAY, I will begin to BOYCOTT ALL Chinese-made goods to the maximum extent possible.  I will not do this with joy, for my sympathies toward the Chinese people remain steadfast.  It is their government, like the government of Russia, which must be resisted, as it is being run by thugs.

The Export of Misery

So...Russia has finally decided to go through with their invasion of Ukraine.  This is Russia's punishment of Ukraine for being Ukraine and not Russia - the revenge wrought by Russia for the intolerable narcissistic injury suffered by the Russians in their encounter with a people that has chosen its own separate identity.  Isn't that the way it always is with narcissists?  Their declaration is always, "You must die because you refuse to be an extension of me!"

God damn Putin's Russia.  And God damn Vladimir Putin, Alexandr Dugin, and the whole apparatus of which they are part.  God damn the Russian leadership's division of the world into zones of conquest arrogantly and presumptuously crisscrossed by Russian "red lines."

There is one silver lining in this present cloud - namely, that it has become blindingly obvious what sort of nation Russia has become and what sort of leadership it now has.  The advantage of stealth possessed by wolves successfully camouflaged in sheep's clothing disappears once the sheep costumes have been abandoned.  But there is also a danger - namely the danger that the depredation of the wolf will both continue and expand by means of a lack of moral courage of the sheep, particularly of the bellwethers, the rams of the flock.  This is what almost happened in the late 1930's when Adolf Hitler chose to play a game remarkably similar to the game now being played by Vladimir Putin.  In this re-run of that earlier game, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson's voice becomes merely a more rabid repeat of the sympathies expressed by Charles Lindbergh toward the Nazi party.  And as for the bellwethers - will the hard necessity of resistance be obfuscated by them as it was by Neville Chamberlain?  That is, will the West lull itself back to sleep with half-measures rather than facing the hard necessities - both moral and intellectual - of successful resistance, of successful defense of a separate identity that one can call one's own, of successful removal of a tyrannical threat?  In the days to come, it won't be good enough merely to say, "I tried."

A further note: many, many ordinary rank-and-file Russians have now begun to make their voices heard by standing against Putin and his narcissistic little war.  They themselves have stated boldly that they want to craft a separate identity of decency and morality for themselves.  They are rejecting the identity of "Putin's Russia."  Pray for them - many of them are now being arrested by Putin's apparatus of goons.  Speaking as I have of wolves in an earlier paragraph, I say now that Putin is expertly acting the part of a son of a dog.

The Stories Prophets Tell

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.