Every war has a war in the shadows. This one involves #Putin#TrumpPutin#MalignantNarcissism and related circles of associates and investors as well as deep corruption and compromise. Good leaders–grounded and strong in their ethics, integrity, knowledge, and outlook plus experiences and skills–would not do as #TrumpPutin do in relation to their dishonesty, ruthlessness, and violence.
Moscow’s in . . . and we’re (we #Americans) are getting screwed. Putin has the power of a real “deep state”, specifically #SovietPostSoviet criminal #KGB / #FSB, and #RussianPower itself operates the state as a criminal enterprise–that’s how #Yanukovych got booted out of #Ukraine! In the #USA, we have gotten for a Presidential candidate a dumb narcissistic jerk. I believe he’s a traitor — #TrumpFakeElectorsAndBallots — who serves #Putin. He wants to replace our #ModernAmericanSecularDemocraticRepublic with his own system of private patronage. Add the look-up, “Trump, Money Laundering, Russia.”
😦
None with power, so far, appear to be able to say “No” to either #Putin or #Trump, neither of whom have normal boundaries or limits in the governing of their own behavior.
Flying rockets into playgrounds ain’t normal; baldly lying to #Americans, especially those who appear to trust you most, ain’t normal either.
Suggestions?
Lately, I’ve been noting, #WeAreAmerican–not an organization, a fact of life, #Democrats and #Republicans, all #AmericanCitizens–and I am certain the good and noble possessed of integrity are tired of #TrumpPutin, would that their “investors” would tired of them as well as all would seem to represent bad business and irremediable political evil.
Put yourself in Trump’s mind-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/. Most of your life has been spent in the shadow of a traumatic “narcissistic mortification” that you do not wish to experience ever again–and you determine you never will. First, you forget about it, pack it away, didn’t happen; then, you come out swinging, a good guy, unassailable, courageous, heroic–and to prove it, you will roll the dice! 🙂 (awful cliche). Your realpolitik is pretty tough–nasty environment–but your image is gold and you are in with all of the in-crowds! You brag up a storm; snow the bankers; charm and screw the subcontractors. The better part of human nature and prudence takes its course and you need cash, a lot of it, and it turns out you have been noticed all along, boychik.
You have a “roof” and a dragon (unlimited “resources” long before “Game of Thrones”) and plenty of “narcissistic supply”. Whether or not you can pay the freight or stay out of trouble, the high is like no other–Y-O-U! own the world!
The Dragon wants to get you to take the both of you a little higher and, well, you are an executive and the very image of American gold-leafed success–just one more step.
How hard could it be?
We should know more about the lives–and demons–associated with healthy leaders, but the evil get our attention and we have powerful concept, methods, and tools for getting “behind the curtains” and finding what the malignant narcissist has tried to cover as well as avoid all of his life, i.e., his humiliation before authority.
So Trump sits in court, a “stable genius”–a horse’s ass for countless others–found out and subject to the control of power more powerful–also more possessed of integrity–than himself.
I think he knows he has been played for criminal political power–call it the #MoscowSystem for #PiratesMurderersAndThieves–and not only will millions of others not look at him as they once had but he may not look at himself as he once had. So he yawns in court. He’ll make noises about a “rigged game”, but he’s delusional, and it’s not–and the #AmericanPublic in vast majority knows that that, finally, is the truth.
For disappointed Trump Republicans, consider a reset on your own methods of discerning truth or your own motivations for accepting baseless and outrageous accusations and claims–and come to some understanding about Malignant Narcissism and related criminal and politically criminal psychology.
For United States Military and Police: be true to your oath as well as quintessential American ethics, principles, traditions, and values: America’s Founding Fathers produce by 1789 a remarkable guidance for a secular democratic republic, truly one nation with justice and liberty for all. Never forget for one minute that you are the defense and security for the most advanced and greatest complex integrated and essentially classically humanist political system on the planet (well, France might be healthier at the moment–but we’ll show them how it’s done). 🙂
Good American citizens fight for the same things but play each to their own abilities and strengths.
In a recent Tweet, the high and not so mighty Dmitry Medvedev, chair of the Security Council of Russia, referred to Ukrainian President Zelensky as a “provincial clown”. After so many years of accumulating material about Russia, I had quite a bit to pack into one riposte–>
In the end, the darkness you believe surrounds you–that paranoia–is your own and fixed by a reliably delusional, grandiose, messianic, and malign narcissism that has no other purpose than the want of adoration (narcissistic supply).
#MikePence’s refusal to stop #Congress on #Jan6 effectively stopped #Trump’s #Jan6RealSteal. #Trump, who appears not to understand either #Democracy or #Integrity, had lied to his base and the #GOP every step of the way to the last election–and he hasn’t changed one bit. As a #MalignantNarcissist and #PoliticalCriminal slow-walking toward his grand jury reviewed #4FelonyCases91Counts, he’s incapable of serving other than his projected image.
#AINOS – Americans In Name Only. #TAKs – Trump’s Ass Kissers.
Latent Political Impact
Adult responsible Democrats and Republicans, critically thinking, reasoning, and reasonable in the constructing and fine tuning of good public policy, appear slow to comprehend how deep the attack on America’s way of life, domestic tranquility, and defense and moral strength among nations has gone. In fact, a portion of today’s GOP has traded its conservative Constitutional moorings for a reactionary feudal-medieval position in time and is fast floating away from the desires, hopes, and ideals of ordinary Americans who would not allow themselves to be dumb.
For Republicans, where are “the adults in the room”?
Where is the push-back from conservatives who should be mad as hell as regards the selfish and piratical theft of their democracy?
#FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts well may be called #AmericanTraitorTrump–and no conservative Republican dares call him out to his face.
We have seen the brazen and greedy–where are the brave and free among the much less visible virtuous?
A Note on Nobility and Virtue
In Putin’s world, the fire sale of state assets into the pockets of former Communist Party nomenklatura had been set up by the mid-1980s as insurance and precaution against the possibility of bankrupting the state (hunt around in Karen Dawisha’s work for the scholarship). “A New Nobility” appears intended for the KGB/FSB and associated oligarchy that would become wealthy enough to live as it pleased without concerns for the development of Russia and its people. Private estates built on private wealth and power would become as unassailable as those who owned them. Putin would return Russia to feudal-medieval barbarism and the patrimonial authoritarianism in which the test of sovereignty and dominion would be the ability to destroy persons and property as alike and at will and with impunity.
For the west, that world awaits only inaction or passive and tacit popular American approval at the polls.
Anyone who is not constrained may wield power with a hammer and the fear of it, but in the better liberal democracies of the world, all hew to the ideals, laws, and principles of democratic order by constitution and by legal code, centuries of it and fine tuned by conflict, reason, and struggle for the greater good.
Whatever “the nobility”–who would themselves represent law in each their respective domains–may think of themselves, there are those around them–or placed beneath them–who judge quietly, perhaps sullenly, but with determination to set right the wrongs of merely vulgar power. The dimensions that matter: awareness and comprehension; compassion and empathy; good conscience and intents; courage and fortitude; goodness in spirit; good grooming and manners; inherent grace, justice, and magnanimity.
Suzie Qz posted this on X today as appropriate to Trump’s #RevoltingGOP and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s role in the reactionary subversion of America’s guiding principles and values:
If you would be passionate about the survival of American democracy, be at least curious about the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia that served to end it while also revolutionizing European diplomacy, redefining the assumptive principles of sovereignty, and forever modifying relationships between powers and the management of their affairs beneath an umbrella greater than themselves. This one treaty would then set a part of the stage for America’s own revolutionary departure from the power known to kings.
Before the Westphalia settlement, there was no recognizable diplomatic profession. Spies, irregular envoys, and heralds citing scripture or handing out ringing declamations were the usual route that princes chose to alert one another to the start of war. After Westphalia, the diplomatic craft was practiced by a kind of well-born guild, with members who were adept at melding reason, precedent, and law with quiet allusion to the implication of armed compunction.
Perhaps a little bit to be less blunt or hurtful in the criticism or solicited response to another’s cooking, demeanor, fashion, or life.
Perhaps now and then for hooky, nooky, and bong–that’s not so good but fair in a mood or pinch.
Perhaps a convenient compliment for a kiss.
Perhaps to spare another pain or worry in souring conditions, so one is thought just fine when things are dicey.
To hide something (not so big a deal); to get something (and make life a little more sweet).
It takes another kind of nut to snowball a whopper, to put one over on a community, to seduce, fuck over, and ruin an associate, family, institution, or state–but that’s what malignant narcissists wind up doing in the process of covering the memory of their own humiliation or mortification with a great projection of an undamaged and unassailable heroic self, courageous in adversity, heroic before all, and totally full of bullshit.
The type I have in mind: delusional, grandiose, messianic and in appearance absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of conscience. In the cause of their own baseless glory, one may wade into their swamps of baseless accusations, defamations, deflections, denials, fabrications, frames, omissions, and revisions (some of them alibis). And downstream to be found in their targets: baseless belief, confusion, and eventual disappointment as the “reality” painted turns out having had nothing to do with reality at all.
Infamous Lies
Chechen Rebels Destroyed Apartment Buildings in Moscow
More likely, Russia’s secret political police, FSB, loaded basements with explosives in the dead of night, set off the detonations, and “credited” an allegedly unruly Chechnya resistance for the act in order to convince Russians to elect Vladimir Putin as their best problem solver and hope for security and stability. Code name: “Storm in Moscow”; on this blog: “Reference: Journalist Alexander Zhilin, Operation Storm in Moscow AKA Moscow Apartment Bombings” (May 3, 2023). And the payoff for the False Flag Operation? Not only election to power–and today absolute and imperious power–for Putin, but in his head and for his twisted spirit “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply”, i.e., the adoration and validation of the Russian People without end.
Democrats Stole the 2020 American Election
The United States of America has for its defense against all enemies foreign and domestic the services of 27 integrated Federal security agencies. For election, the nation enjoys a full suite of relevant threat detection and law enforcement capabilities from Homeland Security on down to security assistance for local districts. Against all of that, Donald Trump has launched the lie, rumor, belief, and “alternative truth”–which is no truth at all!–that his opposition (how dare they…) stole the 2020 national election. “Election Denialism” appears to have become for some–including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson–their faith-based religious obligation, but no factual basis for it has surfaced, and without that, Trump’s efforts to overturn the previous election amount to no more than the most delusional and grandiose attempted theft imaginable.
A Note On Stealing A Modern Or Transitional State to Operate as Criminal Enterprise
Putin and the Russian Mafia State appear to have set a certain tone in the region of archaic-reactionary and brutally repressive kleptocracy, and my guess is Trump is trying to catch up. Well, this is for America’s Christians to know as regards how criminal power exploits faith and related institutions: “KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y” (January 18, 2021).
From gutter to mansion, America supports an extraordinary duality in relation to sinners and saints, and, quite frequently, the would-be saints turn out the most curious of sinners. The famous are known: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Pool Boy, Giancarlo Granda (People, Jan. 25, 2022)–and noted Becki in relation to the couple’s role at Liberty University, “We had to put on an act” ; Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye (maiden name LeValley) who together in marriage stumbled over the husband’s one seemingly acknowledged affair–one allegedly forced with Jessica Hahn, who was paid off for her silence–and allegations involving several homosexual flirtations or liaisons (The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1988). The less famous but in their own wild way as infamous, whether charmingly so (old rascal) or heinous (for having committed a crime), we may be collectively just not all that angelic. Penance, piety, prayer, and promise afterward may suffice for easing conscience and erasing guilt, and sometimes penance precedes change, present and future, for the better. In any case, I wonder if all Americans, and regardless of religious subscription, may not expect some level of pious hypocrisy in themselves, if honest, or in their ranks (if that’s more comfortable) while striving to do better, but to cover repetitive criminal intent or behavior with the appearance of piety, that is something else.
One may not refer to either Donald John Trump or Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as ethically or morally good men. As the governors of nation-states, neither has offered much evidence of care, concern, or interest for the whole body and spirit of their respective nations–Russians suffer sustained abuse and neglect if beyond Putin’s near direct circles of influence and power; for ordinary Americans, Trump has bragged to his wealthy friends from his own gilded halls at Mar-a-Lago, “You All Just Got a Lot Richer” (Vanity Fair, Dec. 24, 2017) after signing into law substantial tax breaks for them. Having ceded substantial tax revenues to private sector interests–and the public be damned (which it literally might be if such power prevails)–why should the buccaneer not commandeer the entire ship of state for his own crony capitalist private enterprise–just as Vladimir has done? He has already developed a base ripe for ripping off.
Marching Forward Into the Past
Around the world, constituencies will find leaders who prefer to treat the idea of the state as a private and family enterprise to be milked for their own profit and the securing of their family and their associates. They’re motivated by greed and lust and–given their underlying fear of humiliation and consequent delusional self-concept and obsession with their own aggrandizement–the allure of their own potential to control others without question. Centuries ago, that characterization would have fit well with a medieval world more than familiar with the concept of “Absolutism” or “Absolute Power” and its violent and not infrequently tyrannical enforcement. Today, the same personalities and personal psychology–associate what I have in mind with Erdogan, Orban, Putin, and Trump–appear archaic but difficult to address and ameliorate from the perspective of any democratic idealism, especially from the vantage of the still revolutionary Constitution of the United States of America (related in the way of inspiration for revolution and the idea of a new nation–Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, January 10, 1776). The named would be quite comfortable beneath the titles of Sultan Erdogan, Tsar Putin, King Orban, and, perhaps, King Trump.
Marching Forward Into The Future: A New American Community
Now that we’re all here, we’re going to have to deal with ourselves as a whole community and not so much as myopic and parochial islands fit for some Americans and not for others.
All American citizens are Americans.
Our guests are of two kinds: aspiring Americans or foreigners who have come here for business or travel.
As Americans, our challenges are not only American but by way of our own far expanded global awareness–apprehension or “consciousness”, actually–we have made ourselves global and universal in character. So have others, and with transnational business (and crime) all of the next functional steps have already been taken. Basically, our connections have changed and become enjoyable, essential, and permanent–or if adverse or made cautious by our own dependence, then a part of the challenge of an evolving new world.
Also as Americans, we have lived by a deeply devoted and earnestly defended Constitution designed to establish and sustain forever a secular democratic republic. Our western civilizational heritage–Judeo-Christian well acknowledged; Greco-Roman for the history, legends, and myths still echoing our own existence–has arrived here compassionate, down to earth, and reasoning. The wealth of the world has been brought here a long time, and as there is only one world, one Earth, we’re already blended with it and perhaps ready to adjust and assimilate, discard what’s not going to work, and appreciate that which proves good universally. We’ve been doing that a long time too, but for international relations, more may be involved than wearing cashmere and sipping tea.
We may see more than we once did; we may do more than we once could; and we should look ahead and do more than live in the past–or allow the greatest future ever to be stolen from all by evildoing feudal-medieval nutcases, whether religious extremists or criminal politicians who cannot contain their own worst compulsions.
So this much I may suggest about the next New World that is the one in which we are already living: it just hasn’t room for malignantly narcissistic “leaders” and their self-absorbed devotion to their own aggrandizement, enrichment, and power through fraudulent display and theft outright. The Next New World will need knowledgeable, powerful, and visionary high-integrity souls for its leadership in the development, establishment, and distribution of extraordinary systems for agriculture, business, education, health, justice, and general prosperity and security worldwide.
Russia Paid Off European Politicians In Relation to Ukraine and Violence Elsewhere
Since Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s overseas aggression has reached a fever pitch. Yet Russia can still rely on the occasional friendly voice in Europe: Last November, for example, far-right Italian local legislator Stefano Valdegamberi penned an op-ed decrying the EU’s decision to designate Russia a terrorist state as “a serious mistake” that “foments conflict by denying historical truth.”
But what Valdegamberi didn’t mention was that he had long been collaborating with a secretive Russian lobbying group with a direct link to the Kremlin. Since at least 2014, that group had designed plans to channel cash to European politicians to help it legitimize Russia’s occupation of Crimea and promote pro-Moscow policies inside EU countries.
Greg Olear’s 2018 investigation of how the world works between Donald J. Trump, Russia’s political interests, and related mafia and ill-gotten wealth.
America Has Lost Its Objectivity Over “Spy Balloon”, Says Chinese Pundit–And He’s Right
Influential commentator Hu Xijin blamed American “politicization” and “hype” for preventing the incident from escalating, saying that competition to look tough on China meant that the United States “has already lost its objectivity.”
In the normal course attending diplomatic incidents, investigations ensue, and with “spy data” presumed already transmitted, there would seem not much point in destroying the technology involved in the overflight. Of course, there was Gary Powers too, so Biden did what ranting Republicans appeared to expect in the way of “tough” leadership. It was not a good decision nor display of national air and space defense–the object should have been addressed and turned or interdicted on or just past arrival in American air space.
China has already apologized for the incident–“On Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that the balloon was theirs, but called it a “civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological purposes,” that had gone off course. And the ministry expressed rare “regret” for the incident.” Beijing should now follow up with details regarding the research mission and its technology, in general, while the U.S. Navy attempts retrieval of the drowned payload.
The Silencing by Removal of Ilhan Omar From the Foreign Affairs Committee
The angry header displayed this morning in The Jerusalem Post: “Decision to remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee was overdue -editorial: What makes Omar particularly dangerous is that while she spews blatant antisemitism, she pretends not to be an antisemite.”
Omar herself had asked (same article), “‘Why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the (National Rifle Association), or fossil fuel industries or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?'”
Conservative and liberal Americans have now to ask this question: what else is off the table?
Who hasn’t an ox?
Our American system relies on compassion, education, intelligence, open discourse, earnest problem-solving abilities, and respect, not religious or tribal hate.
Apparently, some Jews–not this one although I have become with experience very much an American of Jewish descent–believe Ilhan Omar’s election and voice should be nullified where it most counts, and suspicion, for that is what is expressed by, “. . . pretends not to be an antisemite”, put in place of of argument, education, and reason. The only lesson imparted: don’t mess with the Jews, even if and when they are wrong.