Tags

, ,

From the Awesome Conversation

I don’t support Fascism on the Left.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-trump-officials-making-government-a-family-business

Why support it on the right?

Escape the echo chamber you’ve been in and get a breath of fresh air.
Some additional reading, not necessarily for you but any curious about bridging the worlds of medieval absolute and modern democratic power –>
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-orban-balaton-procurement-exc/exclusive-hungary-premiers-friends-and-family-win-more-and-more-public-business-idUSKCN1GR213 – 3/15/2018

https://theblacksea.eu/stories/malta-files/erdogan-family-in-secret-offshore-ship-deal/ – 5/26/2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/us/politics/trump-erdogan-family-turkey.html – 11/12/2019

In the way of some older men growing gray and tired, my patience for writing longer copy — and responding to endless online arguments — may be growing thin, so above I hope I’ve telegraphed a statement about political bullying, the sometimes ironic destruction of freedom by those who most pretend to represent it, and the related plundering of states by their own leaders. The “by any means” Far Out Left has indeed shouted down its favored targets, time and again, and it has carried forward from Russian anti-Semitic traditions its own brand of Jew-hate (reading recommended from other history: Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism, Cambridge UP, 2009), but Orwellian Left seems to me far from the moderate liberalism known to the best of America’s Democratic and Republican Parties.

Similarly, one cannot overlook the effects of 9/11 (2001 for kiddies) on both the promotion of necessary state security organizations and (less necessary) reactionary nationalists. On that tack, Erdogan, Orban, and Trump suffice for examples of a want of return to a medieval and frequently ugly political absolutism. All who would become dictators cannot wait to get their mitts on a state’s army and treasury — and then have at it with their perceived competitions — while “the people”, Left or Right leaning, may be seduced by dogma and made ready for plundering and damnation, and much to the delight of breathtakingly enriched family and friends.

Related online from 2017: https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-opccrp-report-inner-circle-wealth/28814462.html.

I will have to find again historian Richard Pipes’ observations on Russia’s struggle with constitutional monarchy and with the concept of sovereignty. For the most part, Russia’s assertion of sovereignty considered property and persons alike in its dominion, and proof would be the right to destroy either at will and with impunity.

Think of that when you reflect, if ever, on Russia’s behavior across the so far long nine years of the Syrian Tragedy.

Europe chose a different direction in its comprehension and — in the end — consideration of others.

–33–