I have my targets.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is burning–and it is losing its war with Ukraine.
Donald Trump is being slowly cornered by his own display over a lifetime as a “short-fingered vulgarian” with a history involving Soviet and post-Soviet Russian power plus a conniving ruthless history as a developer and landlord and another history involving Italian and Russian mafia. Will his MAGA base come up to speed on reality? The Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models, the Internet search engines in general, and the plain overwhelming lot of honest, high-integrity analysis and reportage bodes will for criminals, compulsive liars, and the entire Trump-Putin class of malignant narcissists . . . provided the public — however one may define that, whether as western, global, Mongolian in spirit, straight out of Valdai, or out of Chatham House or, gasp, even the Neo-Nazis of the ass-kissing kowtowing Heritage Foundation: truth matters–and those possessed of curiosity, courage, and integrity themselves are going to find it.
Vladimir Putin who appears to have gotten his big step up into the international spotlight via the Moscow Apartment Bombings appears well done in the most unfavorable of ways. It has been truly something to watch him glad-handing and parading with the most repressive and totalitarian of “leaders” in the world while his country declines in power, its oil business deeply damaged, its most visible Black Sea fleet sunk where it once inhibited the aggression of others with its very presence. Putin has not been very good for Russians or even the circles that patronized and promoted his existence for gains of their own. The ugly power of the Phantom of the Soviet may be finally . . . fading even while smiling for the cameras.
For Americans and the too easily seduced MAGA movement as well as the progeny of the criminal-lunatic Puritan front that colonized its portion of the nation, intent on wealth and the subjecting of women to charges of witchery and the unspeakable “penalty” of burning at the stake, have had their moment through Donald Trump who appears most of all intent on controlling EVERYTHING as a dictator and a despot with his roots firmly planted in the American experience with greed and unconscionable ruthlessness. As the Nazi he so well has admired, he has made himself opposed to all that would be good and noble, much preferring a marble plaza to the lawn that graced the White House rose garden–and then beside it a dance hall for the wealthiest of the America’s — and the world’s elites — and damn Americans (including MAGA Americans) not so well graced.
In its framing, the Cold War appeared to pit Russian Communists against American Capitalists, and the defeat of Russia’s ageing leadership through the bankrupting of the state, an inflection point helped along by the Russian Army’s ejection from Afghanistan, seemed to signal the end of a titanic struggle. There was just one problem in the aftermath: the criminal KGB that had run the Soviet enterprise into the ground wasted little time in putting itself back in business and by the winter of 1996-7 appears to have been handling Ayman al-Zawahiri for his compact with Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centers that was to follow (reference on his blog: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/).
Donald Trump had come to the attention of the KGB (if not beforehand) with his marriage to Ivana whose father, Miloš Zelnícek, reported to the Czechoslovakian secret internal police force, the ŠtB, a behind the Iron Curtain operation aligned with the KGB. He must have proven even back than that he could be handled and channeled to undermine the national purpose and related security of the United State of America.
I’ve placed this bloc numerous times on X over the years–why not here once more?
#RussiaRussiaRussia
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/czechoslovakia-spied-on-trump-to-exploit-ties-to-highest-echelons-of-us-power; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2024/11/08/well-have-it-fixed-so-good-said-donald-trump/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2025/02/18/trump-piracy-board-disarm-and-plunder-the-united-states-of-america/; https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/.
While President Trump mulls the matter between the despotic Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian defense, dignity, and freedom, he has not proven much of a defender, if any at all, of the Western civilizational experience that birthed the secular democratic republic known to all as the United States of America. He has yet to prove to Americans that he knows his country and understands his job. As he fails the nation by degrading its administrative complement, especially in the regions of Justice and Security, and puts in place the mindless and venal enablers and sycophants that enables his narcissistic dream, he too may be expected to look old, archaic, far out of place in power over a people that would be free to choose their course with assurance and confidence. He’s made himself gold, this American President, but he has brought ruin to much of what he has bought, managed, or operated.
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