Bohemian Tangents

The Dark Age continues. Trump almost pulled off the insurrection, but the pandemic he boosted has lingering effects on supply chains and labor shortages. The huge corporations are price gouging, boosting inflation, so as to blame Biden. The fact that Trump, the worst president ever, a pathological liar and sociopath still has influence over politics at all, means we’re very much in a Dark Age…

Let’s examine the concept of democracy: “The Attack on Democracy” is the headline for attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021. “Democracy” is a useful euphemism for the predatory capitalists in charge of the de facto plutocracy for which “democracy” is a facade. The Jan. 6 attack on the capitol symbolizes the crumbling of this democracy facade. Democracy is an ideal, not a political system. The social welfare policies of our government had democratic aspirations and succeeded for decades, lifted many millions out of poverty into a huge middle class. This was in essence a brief quasi-democratic period in our history, but the plutocrats in charge have been dismantling it or decades. The wealth cabal created the system of neoliberalism, the de facto machinery or system of global governance by huge transnational corporations. Neoliberalism, seldom mentioned on our corporate funded MSM, has systematically offshored labor, defunded federal programs for the non-wealthy, deregulated government agencies charged with public health, safety, worker’s rights, and environmental protection. Democracy, if it has ever existed, depends on government promoting the rights and welfare of all citizens. When huge corporations are subsidized, allowed to evade paying taxes, allowed to offshore labor, to enrich an elite few, this is not democracy. Democracy has been dismantled for decades, long before the attack on the capitol.

As the House Select Committee investigates Trump and his crooked insurrectionist cohorts, we witness the ongoing descent into moronic socio-political divisive vitriol fueled by the social media. This Dark Age is merely the latest dark chapter of neoliberalism that has methodically constructed a predatory capitalist state in lieu of the once social welfare state.

The 2010’s decade is The Terrible Tens, marked by the Citizens United Ruling, Super PACs, and the concentration of political power into predatory capitalists. White nationalist extremists took inspiration from Obama’s victory in 2008, and Trump opportunistically fed off white anger, as he doubted in 2011 the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. While the Obama administration was attempting to recover from George W. Bush’s subprime crash, Fox News fueled outrage over Obama’s  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Angry white conservatives gave Dubya a pass for tanking the global economy in 2008 via a real estate boom consisting on adjustable rate mortgages with no down payment. A NINJA loan is a slang term for a loan extended to a borrower with little or no attempt by the lender to verify the applicant’s ability to repay. It stands for “no income, no job, and no assets.” Lenders literally boosted their income by lending to people unable to maintain payments. Such is the recipe for an inevitable real estate crash. But it was Obama’s fault that he had to clean up Bush’s cratering of the global economy.

The Terrible 2010’s began with Dark Money Super PAC’s for old white male billionaires blaming Obama and setting the stage for the dimwitted despot Trump to take office in 2016. At the same time, social media surged as the primary “news source” whereby emotional triggering via algorithms took precedence over factual accuracy. Facebook did in fact contribute greatly to Trump’s victory via Cambridge Analytica and twitter circulated Trump’s moronic musings until Jan. 8, 2021. For all the ebullient optimism for the Information Superhighway, we are now afflicted by rampant algorithm-based discord, fragmentation of society into tribes arguing on the social media. No serious efforts towards a solution are apparent.

When Americans are divided as they are, it is easier for a fraudulent fascist, pulling the strings of white nationalists, to take office and spread lies to the extent where truth becomes a nostalgic artifact.

NINJA Loan Definition (investopedia.com)

The recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade represents the triumph of white supremacist fascism, as the facade of democracy has been demolished for decades, beginning long before the psychopath insurrectionist took office in 2016 and was unwilling to submit to the results of the 2020 election.

Fascism results from the alliance of ethno-nationalism with the capitalist oligarchy in a given country. During stable times of relative prosperity a so-called “democracy” functions as a quasi-egalitarian plutocracy. Democracy is a euphemism suggesting that the non-wealthy achieve representation in government by the right to vote, even as American citizens witness the plutocracy of rich donors aggregated into Super PACS whereby districts are gerrymandered to suppress the votes of poor whites and people of color, whereby corporate executives can buy their way into government offices to write laws to dodge paying taxes and to slash social programs while boosting subsidies for themselves. When welfare for the wealthy replaces welfare for the working class and poor, we have a plutocracy, despite the lingering archaic euphemism of “democracy”.

The facade of democracy has been crumbling for decades, under the wrecking ball of neoliberalism, itself a confusing term connoting the authoritarianism of the transnational capitalist cabal, the clique of huge transnational corporations on a mission to disempower labor and transform government into their own welfare trough. Integral to this power grab by corporate pigs is control over the mainstream media, guided by a for-profit consumerist model, called “infotainment”, whereby various sets of narratives and titillating stories vie for the attention of various sectors of the population. The social media serve as megaphones to amplify the sport of adversarial clickbaited socio-political tribes whose vitriolic noise  replaces any semblance of journalism. Amidst this chaos, an extreme narcissistic con-artist is enabled to become president, even when losing the popular vote by 2.9 million. The tribal enmity between Team Hillary and Team Trump was aided and abetted by white-supremacist-funded internet bunk.  Retro-Murican voter suppression in key swing states brought the sociopath charlatan into office, affirming the intentions of our white aristocratic forefathers dreading a possible “tyranny of the majority”, those peasants who might have run roughshod over the aristocracy enshrined in their Constitution, this Constitution prohibiting the vote to women, blacks, and poor whites. The electoral college is the schema of white male supremacy, not democracy.

Wedge issues are the key components for the ascendancy of Retro-Murica. As the “bi-coastal tribe” deluded itself for decades about “liberal democracy”, the infotainment media preached trickle-down narratives, market fundamentalism, supply side economics, black women on welfare driving Cadillacs, poor people as takers, and rich people as creators. The fly-over state tribe flocked to Rush Limbaugh, rightwing talk radio, then Fox News, then to rightwing think tanks scripting white supremacist narratives called “news”. Wedge issues include abortion, trickle down economics, God, gays, and guns. It’s very effective tribalism to establish the enemies called “liberal elites” be they Hollywood celebrities, George Soros, or other “commies” who want to undermine traditional white majority culture. In our social media clickbait culture wedge issues are much more easily narrated than intellectual discussions of issues. As the non-wealthy argue on the social media, become fragmented into opposing tribes, the noisiest tribe, angry white men, gains the most power. Hence the United States collectively descends into a new Dark Age, already long underway when Trump came into office. Our current socio-political dumpster fire rages on.

We are headed for a more loathsome Retro-Murica because of ongoing pandemic-caused supply-chain dysfunctions and the opportunistic corporate price-gouging causes inflation to soar, and it’s easier to blame Biden than study the actual causes of this anomalous inflation. Liberals are divided into moderate and far left sub-tribes, thus setting the stage for a mid-term shellacking later this year. The last democratic president, Obama, had his mid-term shellacking with the help of white male rage amped up by Fox Noise and rightwing social media and talk radio. Enough whites were enraged by Tea Party rhetoric on #1 rated Fox News and rightwing radio, both of which outweigh liberals on the social media. The same rightwing media dominance persists. Check the ratings of Fox and rightwing talk radio and podcasts. Prepare yourselves for this Retro-Murica to get worse.

Yes, it’s fascism. As World War I broke out, the working classes in Europe aligned for their respective nations, not the international proletariat. Mussolini was in Italy’s socialist party, but broke from it and alligned with other fascist ideologues who had already maligned socialist ideology. Georges Sorel, French proto-fascist, wrote Réflexions sur la violence, a fascist blueprint inspiring Mussolini. Fallacious white supremacist manifestos like The Protocol of the Elders of Zion were circulated by Henry Ford. In the Cold War Era redbaiting amped up white supremacy. The John Birch Society was co-led by Fred Koch, father of Charles and David. He said “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America”. Racism maligning both blacks and Jews scheming to implement a “New World Order” has been amplified on the internet and social media by conservative oligarchs. Retro-Murica is built on the foundations of paranoid racist narratives, the wedge issues of God, Gays, guns, and abortion, and the destruction of sane dialogue via the internet with its social media algorithms.

It’s time to realize “democracy” was always a quasi-egalitarian plutocracy, and is now descending into authoritarian plutocracy in which women are forced into birthing their rapists’ babies and many people maintain rabid devotion to a charlatan pathological lying mafia-style ex president. Twitter gave Trump a platform for incessant BS until January 8, 2021. Some social media have made perfunctory steps to limit rightwing bunk, but Tik Tok gives Trumpers free reign. The noisiest most butthurt people, angry white men, will make sure Retro-Murica takes precedence over any liberal idealizations we once held dear. Facing reality is the first step towards healing, to seek anything approximating democracy in this Retro-Murican Dark Age.

Totalitarianism is the form of government whereby the state exerts power over all aspects of the lives of its citizens, thereby limiting all personal freedom. Communism, as founded and established by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, was the first form of totalitarianism. This extremely tyrannical form of government has no similarity whatsoever with the harmonious classless communist society proposed by Karl Marx. (I’ve written about the other totalitarianism, Fascism, and will write more about it).

The fundamental premise of Marx’s communism is for the proletariat to remove the bourgeoisie from power and exploitation of the proletariat and eventually create a communist society with no class distinctions. In terms of implementing a new economic or political system liberating the workers from their capitalist exploiters, Lenin was no socialist, and certainly no communist. His version of Marxism, called Marxism-Leninism, is the quintessence of propaganda used to conceal the true nature of his totalitarianism, a mode of government executed by the dictatorial clique of Communist Party apparatchiks. Leszek Kolakowski clarifies in his analysis of Marxism its belief that “capitalism will finally be swept away by revolution, when economic conditions under capitalism and the class-consciousness of the proletariat are ripe for this”. The revolution was to be a mass movement of the proletariat, not a coup d’etat, as was undertaken by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in October 1917. The submission of the workers’ movement to a cadre of Bolsheviks is the path to totalitarianism, not to socialism nor “communism”

Prior to Lenin’s rise to power, Marxism had already split into reformist and revolutionary camps. Marx’s cynical view of the state reduced it to the bourgeoisie’s organ of exploitation of the proletariat. Democratic socialists achieved a prominent role in Germany, enacting socialism within parliamentary democracy. In 1875 the General German Workers’ Association and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party merged to become the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Otto von Bismarck outlawed socialist meetings and publications and dissolved socialist political parties. Upon the repeal of the anti-socialist law in 1890, the 1891 Congress at Erfurt enacted a new program, reflecting Marxist doctrine in legislative form, the basic blueprint for the social welfare state, social democracy.

The 2nd International which commenced in 1889, was the assemblage of the world’s social democratic parties and adhered to Marxist ideas. It was not a uniform, centralized organization with an elaborate body of doctrine acknowledged by all its members, but rather a loose confederation of parties and trade unions, working separately though united by their belief in socialism. It was a marriage between socialist theory and the worker’s movement. Upon Engel’s death in 1895, Marxism splintered into what A James Gregor called “heterodox Marxisms”. Darwinism, racist pseudoscience, even proto-fascist ideas created new ideologies that eventually spawned totalitarianism in both fascist and communist forms. For all its idealism, Marxism degenerated into totalitarianism, and in this essay we explore Lenin’s fraudulent regime which presumed to serve the proletariat.

In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party split due to disagreements between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Julius Martov’s Mensheviks. Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks persisted.  The Bolsheviks condemned  their rivals as  opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Lenin’s path to Bolshevik totalitarianism consisted of using all the instruments of czarist repression to set up a totalitarian capitalist state. The term “communism” served merely to separate his Bolsheviks from social democrats.

Lenin’s totalitarian proclivities were revealed in his vanguardism, stressing the tight organization of the (Communist) Party and its independence from momentary desires of the proletarian masses. The professional revolutionaries had scientific knowledge possessed by the Party elite, acting as a vanguard to lead the Proletariat. Lenin rejected all major trends in Western Social Democracy, true to Russia’s czarist anti-democratic authoritarianism. His betrayal of socialism, even the Marxist form thereof, came long before the Revolution. In 1899, his Development of Capitalism in Russia  falsely claimed that Russia had attained a relatively advanced state of capitalism development, meaning  a significant proletariat class emerged, and was therefore ready for a proletarian revolution. Such was not the case in backward agrarian Russia. The Marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat was intended as a transitional phase or mechanism to create the classless Communist society, which is the opposite of what happened in the totalitarian Bolshevik regimes of Lenin and Stalin. Marx wrote of a supercession of the state while Engels wrote of the withering away of the state. This is very odd given how Marx ridiculed “utopian” socialists and deemed himself “scientific”.

In the summer of 1914, the socialist movement suffered the greatest defeat in its history when it became clear that the International solidarity of the proletariat — its ideological foundation — was an empty phase and collapsed in the face of the Great War, much to the despair of the socialists believing in the strength of their movement. Having promulgated defeatism against the imperialist powers, Lenin initially refused to believe that the German social democrats had obeyed the fatherland’s call to arms. In every European country the great majority had instinctively adopted a patriotic attitude. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, felt Russia must be defended against invasion, and all the Mensheviks thought likewise. The workers’ movement organized into parties adhering more or less strictly to Marxist ideology, had obtained real successes in the fight for labor legislation and civil rights. This seemed to show that existing society was reformable, whatever the doctrine might say and thus knocked the bottom out of revolutionary programs. Revolutionary socialism, based upon a radical break of the current regime was more natural in Russia, the Balkans, and Latin America, where there was no liberal democratic tradition. In Western Europe the proletariat had been developed along with capitalism, and the bourgeois democracies with reforms which had lifted the proletariat out of misery. Marxism had in fact brought about its own dissolution as an ideological force by contributing to a workers’ movement. Lenin’s usurpation of power was based on his fraudulent ideology, Marxism-Leninism, which exploited and abused workers, the opposite of actual socialism.

Lenin was in Switzerland during the March 1917 Revolution. Much to his chagrin there was an all-Russian conference of Soviets with much agreement between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. A joint meeting of these factions began discussing unity between them. Lenin stopped these negotiations. The authoritarian Lenin’s aim in the Russian Revolution was not only to destroy all organs of socialist self-administration, but also all other socialist parties and organizations except his own. Towards this goal he employed falsehoods, slander, and brutal force against all opponents, among whom he counted socialists, except those willing to submit to him. He finally succeeded in smashing his opponents via his coup d’etat in Oct. 1917. Other prominent Bolsheviks (Zinoviev, Rykov, Rjazanov, Lozowski) demanded the formation of a socialist government composed of all Soviet parties. They declared that the formation of a purely Bolshevik government would lead to a regime of terror and to the destruction of the revolution and the country. Lenin’s hopes for a Bolshevik victory in elections were dashed when the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had the overwhelming majority. In making a despotic Bolshevik regime, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly which they had previously championed. Lenin said the elections were invalid. On December 7, 1917 the Cheka was established, precursor to the K.G.B. It was the Soviet secret police force, operating outside the law.  Lenin established an authoritarian police state, called “state capitalism” by Kautsky.

The Bolsheviks’ concept of dictatorship was actually contrary to Marxist theory, which posited a historically necessary link between development and socialism. Bolshevism did not provide for a healthy gestation of the proletariat’s  maturation in the context of adequate capitalist development and the experience of struggle seasoned by the exercise of political and civil liberties. Without adequately developed capitalism and the proletariat within it, there is no proletariat strong and intelligent enough to build a socialist state. The Bolsheviks calling themselves the Communist Party comprised an absolutist-despotic system antithetical to proletarian liberation and empowerment.

The Greek-French philosopher-economist-psychoanalyst, Cornelius Castoriadis remarked that the Soviet Union was dominated by a militaristic, bureaucratic institution which he called total bureaucratic capitalism (TBC). This name implies that the principle of the social order in the USSR is truly an analogue—albeit a more centralized analogue—of the Western capitalist order, which Castoriadis called fragmented bureaucratic capitalism (FBC). He  then argued that both TBC and FBC were rooted in a common “social imaginary”, which was expressed as a desire for rational mastery over self and nature. Both capitalist and Marxist theory assumed that capital has enormous power over humanity. This results in an excessive desire by both the TBC and FBC to control this capitalist force. The Leninist version of “Marxism”, whatever its pretensions of proletarian governance may have been, created a totalitarian bureaucratic system that could theoretically gain “mastery over the master”.  Yet, the exploitation found in Western society was not solved by this system of control; it was instead rendered more total and crushing. The managerial, bureaucratic class became a unified, oppressive force in itself, pursuing its own interests against the people.

Lenin’s socialist facade hid his admiration of the American capitalist managerial system, Taylorism: His essay, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” asserted it was necessary to “take a lesson in socialism from capitalism’s big organizers.” In 1918, Lenin wrote that while Taylor’s system may be a product of the brutality of capitalist exploitation, it is also admittedly one of the greatest scientific achievements of its kind. He could not help but praise its effective analyzation of mechanics, motions, and work methods

“…the Taylor system, properly controlled and intelligently applied by the working people themselves, will serve as a reliable means of further reducing the obligatory working day for the entire working population, will serve as an effective means of dealing, in a fairly short space of time, with a task that could roughly be expressed as follows: six hours of physical work daily for every adult citizen and four hours work in running the state.”

As American capitalism was soaring in 1895, Frederick Winslow Taylor gave a speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This was the formal public birth of Taylorism or Scientific Management, the new way to organize factories. By subjecting workers to machines and submerging individual choice beneath systems, Taylor’s new system would produce “a conflict free, high consumption utopia based on mass production”. When Russia was reduced to humanitarian and economic ruins from the 1918-22 Civil War, Lenin structured his economic reforms on his version of Taylor’s hypercapitalist Scientific Management. Trotsky militarized Scientific Management during the Civil War in his transportation policy. Stalin turned it into a “Communist” truth. The first Soviet Five-Year Plan was drawn up with the help of leading Taylorist advisors imported from the United States. As a result two thirds of Soviet industry was built by Americans. The same principles were adopted by Albert Speer in his economic organization of the Third Reich under Hitler. With a few adaptations, Taylorism was used to run military production, forced labor, and racial genetics programs.

Lenin’s propaganda for “communism” fooled not only common citizens in the Soviet Union but leftist intellectuals worldwide. At various stages, the veil was lifted exposing the sham of communism. Nikita Khrushchev blew the whistle on (the safely deceased) Josef Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party on February 25, 1956, and the ripples quickly spread. As historian John Lewis Gaddis puts it, the speech “pulled down the façade – the product of both terror and denial – that had concealed the true nature of the Stalinist regime from the Soviet people and from practitioners of communism throughout the world.” Leftists around the world holding communism sacred became increasingly disillusioned as the Soviet communist facade crumbled. The Left’s intellectuals veered into postmodernism and “identity politics” in the attempt to create intellectual and/or political relevance. As postmodernism rose in prominence, so did neoliberalism, global despotism by transnational corporations which dismantled the social welfare functions of government.

SOURCES:

The Betrayal of Marx by Frederic L Bender

Lenin | Taylorism in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (osu.edu)

Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism by A. James Gregor

Castoriadis, Cornelius | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (utm.edu)

Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique, and Radical Alternatives by Christos Memos

Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2 by Leszek Kolakowski

Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938 by Massimo Salvadori

Social Democracy vs Communism by Karl Kautsky

When Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin’s crimes • Troy Media

Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul

The attempted coup on January 6 is THE big story of 2021, overshadowing all others. Trump and a team crooked cohorts in his cabinet and in Congress attempted to throw out the election results. The dynamics of power, similar to mafioso-style intimidation and manipulation have revealed loyalty to mob-boss Trump trumps duty to elected constitutents. Key Trump bootlickers who engineered the attempted coup like Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows refused to testify before the House panel.

Division among democrats in Congress was among the top stories in 2021. Despite a margin of 7 million votes over Trump, Biden’s victory had to endure Trump’s attempted coup on January 6. Within Congress, a single democratic senator, Joe Manchin, among 50 in the new majority (when combined with the democratic Vice President Harris), worked in harmony with republicans to negate the power of his party’s majority status.

On September 2, 2021 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York slammed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia after he came out against the price tag of a $3.5 trillion social spending bill and urged Democrats to slow down its passage.

The “fossil fuel” bill she is referring to appears to be the $1 trillion infrastructure bill focused on roads, bridges, and broadband that cleared the Senate in July with the backing of every Democratic senator and some Senate Republicans like Mitch McConnell.

AOC Tears Into Manchin Suggestion to ‘Pause’ $3.5 Trillion Bill (insider.com)

Joe Biden signs $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law | News | DW | 15.11.2021

News networks saw a significant drop in viewership in 2021, according to Nielsen, after many networks drew bigger audiences the previous year amid the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 presidential election, among other big stories.

The drop in viewership this year was larger among cable news networks, with a 38 percent drop in weekday prime-time viewership for CNN, 34 percent drop for Fox News Channel and 25 percent drop for MSNBC.

Network news channels fared somewhat better than their cable counterparts, with viewership at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” dropping by 12 percent each and viewership for NBC’s “Nightly News” dropping by 14 percent.Fox News was the most watched cable news channel for a sixth consecutive year, commanding 44 percent of the day audience and 47 percent of the primetime audience in 2021.

The number of unique visitors at The Washington Post’s website dropped by 44 percent in November compared to the previous year, around the time of the 2020 election, while it dropped by 34 percent at The New York Times.

Tobe Berkovitz, a political communications professor at Brown University, told Agence France-Presse earlier this year that “Trump was the goose that laid the golden egg and that was especially true for the cable networks and dominant newspapers.” He said that Biden, who he described as “boring,” does not provide the “drama” seen in the previous White House.

The professor suggested that viewers and readers needed “a break from the hysteria” and would likely turn away from news content in favor of scripted entertainment.

News networks see major viewership drop in 2021 | TheHill

Opinion | Trump’s Jan. 6 Coup: How It Worked, How Close It Came, and Why It Failed | Will Bunch (commondreams.org)

Russians, especially President Putin, view political developments beyond their borders outside the rubric of great power politics. Anything significant occurring in a post-Soviet satellite country, like Ukraine, a vassal state, must be connected to outside maneuverings. The default narrative for most, if not all, coups is “The CIA is behind it!”. Naturally, the Kyiv Maidan protests were viewed as a CIA plot, which led to what some call “Obama’s coup”. Putin’s propaganda power flows beyond Fox News’s viewership into independent and centrist camps armed with the cynicism to see ubiquitous corruption in all politicians along with omnipresent CIA plots.

The Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity originated with Ukraine’s President Yanukovich, a Putin puppet, who on 11/21/2013 abandoned a trade and aid agreement with the EU in exchange for a $15 billion loan from Russia. This servitude to Putin motivated hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to protest. Of their own free will, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovich whereupon he fled into Russia. When Putin saw the protests in Kyiv’s Maidan he didn’t see a homegrown movement against corruption and in favor of European integration. He saw a CIA plot (in his imagination). Moscow’s claims of pending “genocide” at the hands of “fascists” precipitated an annexation of the Crimean peninsula and instigation of a bloody war in the country’s eastern Donbass region. Putin accused the west of staging a “coup” against Yanukovich. The Kremlin narrative of the “coup” included claims of “genocide” at the hands of “fascists”, and Russia’s anti-coup narrative stated the CIA, in cahoots with Ukrainian neo-Nazis, Western intelligence agents fronting as pro-democracy activists, along with EU bureaucrats, all combined to mastermind a violent takeover. Consider the fact that Ukraine elected a Jewish Prime Minister, Volodymyr B. Groysman on April  14, 2016, 3 years before Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was elected. But what about those Neo-Nazis!

Putin is determined to prove that a liberal democracy will lead to chaos, thus expending much blood and treasure to ensure post-Maidan Ukraine becomes a failed state. On 11/21/13 Mustafa Nayyem (according to author James Kirchik cited below) incited via Facebook the Maidan Revolution upon the President Yanuvovich’s rejection of an EU trade and aid treaty and acceptance of a $15 billion loan from Russia. Hundreds of thousands gathered at the  Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square of Kyiv, capital city of Ukraine, which grew into the largest pro-European rally in history – Euromaidan. In Feb. 2014 nearly 100 demonstrators were killed by government forces. A treaty was signed transferring the power of the Ukraine presidency to the parliament and withdrawal of security forces from downtown Kyiv.

As Yanukovich fled Ukraine, Putin ordered Russian forces to begin returning Crimea to Russia. Five days later “little green men” seized government buildings and raised Russian flags. An illegally installed Russian puppet government headed by a local crime boss announced a referendum to decide Crimea’s future status.  This sham referendum had 97% of Crimeans voting for its annexation to Russia. No international body recognizes the so-called referendum. On March 27th, 2014, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution  in which it stated that the referendum in Crimea was not valid and could not serve as a basis for any change in the status of the peninsula. This was not enough to satisfy Vladimir Putin who felt compelled to topple the new Ukrainian government in Kyiv. Russian propaganda had exposes of Western plans to destroy Russia. Russia claimed that the new “fascist” government in Ukraine was planning a genocide of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. A crooked mirror of Maidan developed in East Ukraine as paranoid propaganda from Moscow triggered a revival of Soviet-era fears about the West. Rallying cries came, inciting Russian speakers to take up arms against their Western oppressors. Russia helped spawn ragtag separatist militias, arming and funding them. They seized government buildings and formed People’s Republics in Donetsk and Lugansk, instigating a bloody war in the Donbass region of Ukraine.

When the Ukrainian military asserted itself, the Kremlin amped up its involvement. Even the downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet over Ukraine by a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft missile did not temper Russian military intervention. Western indecisiveness in the wake of the crash emboldened Putin to further militarize the Ukraine, transforming the stealth invasion into a conventional war. The Gerasimov Doctrine has been used to render Ukraine chaotic, hurl it into civil war. Waves of disinformation avert accurate media coverage in the EU and USA. RT is in alignment with this with this propagandistic Ukrainian campaign, including that the CIA shot down the Malaysian jet.

Kremlin propagandist Valery Gerasimov wrote an article in 2013, one year before before the Crimea operation and Donbass war. He promoted the shrewd use of subterfuge and disinformation that Moscow would soon deploy to expert effect. “A perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.” Such disastrous chaos has indeed come to fruition. Russia’s military intervention, dubbed by analysts as “hybrid, non-linear, and special”, has employed “humanitarian aid convoys” containing weapons, “local self-defense units” led by Russian special forces, and other euphemistic implements designed to confuse and distract adversaries while providing plausible deniability that anything resembling a war is taking place. These military/propaganda ops are accompanied by a wave of disinformation intended to divide and subvert the West.

Unlike the Cold War Soviet Era, the new Russia does not seek high approval in other nations, preferring to be feared over being loved. Russia’s disinformation operations have the 4 D’s: (1) Dismiss the critic; (2) Distort the facts; (3) Distract from the main issue; (4) Dismay the audience. When you create a moral quagmire in which everyone is wrong, therefore wrong actions become normal. Today Russia aims to sow confusion and defeatism in the West by poking holes in its narratives and ridiculing and upending the very notion of objective truth – a strategy acclaimed historian and author Timothy Snyder calls “applied postmodernism”.

The bulk of the information here comes from The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchik published in 2017.

Other sources:

Revolution of Dignity – Wikipedia

Ukrainians Elect Country’s First Jewish Prime Minister : NPR

EU vs DISINFORMATION

Timothy Snyder warned us fascism was coming — now he says we can survive it | Salon.com

As we celebrate MLK day and ponder what he dreamt for America, we remain mired in Jim Crow Murica. This is the portion of the United States inhabited by dimwits rabidly devoted to Donald Trump.

This dark age of Trumpian authoritarian white-nationalist politics persists despite the failure of the January 6 attack on the capitol. As we learned upon Obama’s election in 2008 amidst the subprime meltdown engendered by George W Bush, angry white conservatives flew into a rage and used dark money from three national conservative groups, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and DontGo which led the tea party movement in April 2009. Having a new black president incited conservative billionaires to pool their resources to preserve the wealthy white ruling cabal’s power. As Obama and democrats in Congress were cleaning up Bush’s economic fiasco, conservative pundits whined about Obama’s policies. Trump rode the wave of white outrage over Obama, spewed Birther BS, doubts about Obama’s birth certificate on Fox Noise in 2011, laying the groundwork for running for president 5 years later. Trump had his finger on the pulse of Jim Crow Murica, knew that it gave him a chance to win, given that Jim Crow Murican politicians in key swing states could suppress Hillary voters, flipping these states to red. Electoral Jim Crow Murican voter suppression gave a victory to Trump who lost by 2.9 million votes to win.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself… I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.”

In 1965, thanks in large measure to Dr. King’s moral leadership, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, finally giving millions of African Americans the most fundamental right in a self-governing society—the right to choose our elected representatives, instead of submitting “to the edict of others.”

Last year alone, 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to the ballot box to silence the voices of communities of color, voters with disabilities, young people and other historically underrepresented groups. The frightened white republicans passing these laws know that they can’t win on the merits of their policies, so they are rigging the system instead.

At an Arizona rally on 1/15/2022, Donald Trump said: “The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”

False. There is no evidence that white Americans are being denied access to vaccines or treatments.

Trump Rally Fact-Check: Covid-19 and Election Falsehoods – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan is one of the lawmakers who texted with Mark Meadows, chief of staff to former President Donald Trump. Jordan forwarded this text message to Meadows

“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. ‘No legislative act,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’ The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).”

Laws aimed at voter suppression are ‘the worst’ since Jim Crow. How Black voter trends could be impacted. (yahoo.com)

Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county election boards | Reuters

To save America’s democracy, Democrats need to start acting like Republicans | TheHill

House votes to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress (cbsnews.com)

The Tea Party Movement: Who’s In Charge? – The Atlantic

Advancing Dr. King’s voting rights legacy – TheGrio