It is truly amazing that people are going on and on about Trump, as if the
terrible ideas which he voices, are somehow, outof the ordinary or
un-American. It is as if all of these scholars and journalists have blotted
out our history. If I weren't still reading Infamy, perhaps I'd be less
incensed. But I am reading it, and it is an account of how Americans act
when they feel threatened. It's ironic that in a discussion that Chris
Hedges had with Josh Fox about Fox's new film, they talked about how, in
order to survive the terrible things that are in store for us as a result of
our climate disaster, we need to build community, strengthen our
relationships, help each other, because that is the only thing that matters,
the survival of the human spirit. But that isn't what Americans do. The
things that both leaders and the common people said about American Japanese
people during war War 2 were filled with racism and hate. America
imprisoned its own citizens, then demanded that the young men fight for
America. When some of them balked at fighting for a country that had
imprisoned their families and stolen their property, America threatened to,
and in many cases did, withdraw their American citizenship. Innocent people
were shot and killed by guards in the camps for no crimes. And we now have
people in indefinite detention for no reason. We are killing civilians in
countries where we've never declared a war. We are the only country that's
dropped atomic bombs on other people. We are supporting regimes that
torture, that behead people, that are responsible for slow genocide. Trump's
sin is to say all this stuff out loud, to say it's OK. Our government has
done, and is doing much of it. We have ongoing racism within our Caucasian
population. But none of this is supposed to be said out loud. Back when
America imprisoned its citizens of Japanese descent, the founder of the ACLU
helped FDR fashion a legal justification for the concentration camps. Today,
Obama's lawyers helped him craft a legal justification for assassinating an
American citizen without a trial. Obama was ready to make changes in social
security benefits which, in effect, would have cut them. And regardless of a
denial of this fact which appeared in one of the articles I read recently, I
did hear him say that he agreed with Romney on cutting social security in a
presidential debate. But when Obama or Hillary takes positions or actions
which liberals and Progressives would condemn if a Republican took them,
they are not challenged. I'm not supporting Trump. But I'm saying that all
this pretense of horror at his positions, is actually horror that he says
such disgusting things out loud. One can murder Muslims with drones all
over the world, so long as one does it quitely with legal justification. One
can quietly surveil Muslim communities and send FBI agents to entrap the
poor and discontented into committing to a terrorist act so that arrests for
terrorism can maintain public support for continued war. But it's very
impolite to talk about surveillance of Muslims or mass imprisonment
publicly. If one is going to do such a thing, one will do it politely with
legal justification.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2016 10:55 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Trump's Putin Fantasy
Blah blah blah!
I'll be more interested in what we can do in promoting our "American
Democracy" around the globe, once we have our own house in order.
Flapping about how corrupt other governments are, merely takes the spotlight
off our own mess. If we can't deal with our own people and bring an end to
the misery created here at home by Corporate Capitalist gone amuck, why in
all that is sane, would we think we are the ones to tell others how to live.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/21/16, S. Kashdan <skashdan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Trump's Putin Fantasywell."
by Timothy Snyder
NYR Daily, The New York Review of Books, ---- April 21, 2016
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/04/19/trumps-putin-fantasy/
Few foreign leaders seem enthusiastic about the prospect of a Donald
Trump presidency. But there is one who should be pleased: Vladimir
Putin. Or so Trump seems to think. Most prominent Republicans
criticize President Obama for reacting too feebly to Russian domestic
oppression, the Russian invasion
of southern and southeastern Ukraine, and Russia's growing threat to
NATO in
Eastern Europe. Trump, on the other hand, has praised Putin's "strong"
leadership at home, called NATO "obsolete and expensive," and made a
point of describing his friendship with Putin--though it seems to be
entirely imaginary.
From the beginning of his candidacy last summer, Trump has repeatedly
claimed that he would "get along very well with Vladimir Putin." Last
fall,
after he was interviewed on the same segment of 60 Minutes as Putin,
he warmly referred to the experience of being "stablemates" as "going
This was strikingly at odds with reality, since Trump was in the USvulnerability.
and Putin in Russia during the interviews, and the two men did not in
fact meet.
More extraordinary still, Trump has indicated, in his selection last
month of Carter Page as a foreign policy adviser, that American policy
to Europe will be guided by Russian interests. Page, heretofore known
as an adviser to
Russia's state gas company, has been among the prominent Americans
spreading
Russian propaganda about Ukraine's revolution in 2014 and the Russian
invasion that followed. In his writings he has questioned Ukraine's
status as an independent state, which is precisely the line that
Moscow took to justify its invasion. He
maintains--preposterously--that Ukraine is like Quebec inside a Russia
that is like Canada. Quebec is a province and Ukraine
is a country. He has referred to Russia's annexation of Ukraine's
Crimean peninsula, a signal violation of international law, as the
"so-called annexation."
It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend.
Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on
television. Trump's financial success (such as it is) has been as a
New York
real estate speculator, a world of private deal-making that can seem
rough and tough--until you compare it to the Russia of the 1990s that
ultimately produced the Putin regime. Trump presents himself as the
maker of a financial empire who is willing to break all the rules,
whereas that is what
Putin in fact is. Thus far Trump can only verbally abuse his opponents
at rallies, whereas Putin's opponents are assassinated. Thus far Trump
can only
have his campaign manager rough up journalists he doesn't like. In
Russia some of the best journalists are in fact murdered.
President Putin, who is an intelligent and penetrating judge of men,
especially men with masculinity issues, has quickly drawn the correct
conclusion. In the past he has done well for himself by recruiting
among politicians who exhibit greater vanity than decency, such as
Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schroder. The premise of Russian foreign
policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the
practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the
West who agree. Moscow has
found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea
of an
American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed
unlikely. Trump represents an unprecedented standard of American
servility,
and should therefore be cultivated as a future Russian client.
Trump correctly says that Putin respects strength. But of course Putin
prefers weakness, which is what Trump offers. As Putin understands
perfectly
well, the president of the United States has standing in Russia, and
enjoys
far superior power to the president of Russia, only insofar as he or
she mobilizes the moral and political resources of a rule-of-law
state. It is precisely Trump's pose of strength that reveals his crucial
As anyone familiar with Russian politics understands, an AmericanRussia.
president
who shuns alliances with fellow democracies, praises dictators, and
prefers
"deals" to the rule of law would be a very easy mark in Moscow. It is
unclear how much money Trump has, but it is not enough to matter in
state.
If he keeps up his pose as the tough billionaire, he will be flattered
by the Russian media, scorned by those who matter in Russia, and then
easily crushed by men far richer and smarter than he.
Putin has been accordingly circumspect in his return of Trump's
wooing. For
him Trump is a small man who might gain great power. The trick is to
manipulate the small man and thereby neutralize the great power. In
his annual press conference last December, after hearing six months of
praise from Trump, Putin said that he welcomed Trump's idea of placing
US-Russian relations on a more solid basis, and characterized Trump as
"flamboyant, talented, without a doubt." It is hard to miss the
ambiguity of "flamboyant," but Trump chose to miss it.
The next day Trump seemed pleased. Perhaps having been misadvised
about what
Putin actually said, Trump said that, "When people call you brilliant
it's always good." After suggesting that killing journalists was
normal, he concluded warmly that "I've always felt fine about Putin, I
think that, you
know, he's a strong leader, he's a powerful leader, he's represented
his country." Not long after that, Trump defended Putin from the
official British inquiry into the assassination of Alexander
Litvinenko. Trump's reasoning was that Putin "said he didn't do it."
In March Trump said that Putin was a stronger leader than the
president of the United States. For a crumb of praise from Putin,
Trump has presented criminality as normal and sold out his own head of
unusual situation.
Let us imagine the first few weeks of a Trump administration. Most of
his domestic agenda will quickly prove illegal, or at least very
complicated to
implement. He is not a man who has displayed much patience for management.
It seems very likely that he would quickly turn abroad for that surge
of approval that he seems to find so pleasurable. And there would be
no easier
way to gain such a feeling than currying favor with Putin. It is so
much easier to ignore traditional allies than to cultivate them, and
so much easier to ignore aggression than to maintain order. The louche
style that Trump seems likely to bring to American foreign policy is
all he will need to garner praise from the man he admires. Given what
Trump has done thus far, under no stress and with little
encouragement, it is terrifying to contemplate what he would do as a
frustrated American president looking for
love.
Even as Putin carefully cultivates a future client, the Russian
population (alone in the developed world) prefers Trump to Clinton,
and Russian elites
reveal their excitement at the prospect of a tame America. It is
unusual, of
course, for Russian or other public figures to take sides in American
elections. Prudence usually overrides preference; even the most
willful authoritarians and media figures usually hedge their bets,
knowing that endorsing a losing candidate can bring eight years of bad
luck while endorsing the eventual winner may bring very little. In
this particular election cycle, however, Russian politicians are in an
Hillary Clinton has been the target of such criticism from Russia andTrump.
its current president that it is impossible to create the impression
of evenhandedness. In December 2011, Vladimir Putin personally (and
absurdly) blamed Clinton, then US secretary of state, for giving a
"signal" that prompted Russians to protest faked parliamentary elections.
Once liberated from the normal rules of the game, Russian politicians
have been able to give voice to what seems like heartfelt sympathy for
Vasily Likhachev, a Communist in the Russian parliament, explicitly
expressed his preference for Trump over Clinton. Dmitry Kiselev, the
Russian
talk show star best known in the West for reminding us that Russia can
turn
the US into "radioactive ash" and for advising that the hearts of gays
be burned after their deaths, gushes that "a new star is rising--Trump."
Konstantin Rykov, a member of Putin's United Russia party and a
leading media manager, opines that Trump is "the very embodiment of
the American dream." Aleksei Pushkov, the chairman of the Russian
parliament's international affairs committee, tweets admiringly about
Trump on a regular
basis. Most revealingly, he wrote that Trump "can lead the Western
locomotive right off the rails."
The explicit endorsement of Trump by Aleksandr Dugin, the leading
Russian fascist ideologue and a very important media presence in
Russia, is particularly alarming. The premise of Dugin's "Eurasian"
movement is that Russia and the West are artificially separated by
enlightened ideas of the rule of law and individual rights. Once
leaders of the West understand that
these are artificial (Jewish) implantations, they can join Russia in
the embrace of fascism. Dugin accordingly praises the American people,
calling upon them to shed their "oligarchic" elites and return to
their true
(fascist) values. I read Dugin's use of "oligarchic" to mean
"Jewish"--a suspicion confirmed by Dugin's reaction to an actual
oligarch who enjoys the
backing of American neo-Nazis: "Trump is the voice of the real right
wing in
America," he writes. "Vote for Trump!"
The Russian expectation is that a Trump victory would be ruinous for
American power, and that such power as remains will be deployed to
support Russian interests. Trump's fantasy friendship with Putin is
one more reason
to expect that a Trump victory would also be disastrous for American
values
and institutions. Putin can be expected, if the two men actually meet
as presidents, to flatter Trump's vanity and urge him onward toward a
full assault on the Constitution. Russia is in a downward spiral of
its own; what
Americans must consider now is a weak presidential candidate who wants
to follow Putin's charm where it leads, which most likely means
straight to the
bottom.
April 19, 2016, 3:09 pm
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Putin's 'Goodfellas'
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