It is an awful campaign as well as an awful politics for Americans.

Hillary Clinton – Red-Green alliance
Donald J. Trump – Brown new nationalists

Both themes go back to Moscow (but I may try to give up that obsession for a while). 🙂

Basically, we are too divided a nation, and we should really be wrestling with the sources of that division. They’re not necessarily in our lifestyles nor justified by the latest outrages appearing in the news.

We’ve been a compassionate people, a Christian-majority nation, with a secular Constitution and the courage to have come this far with much of the implementation of its ideals and sense of mission. Why the candidates and the public are whipping up so much mud — or getting into so much trouble — and spattering the same everywhere eludes answers.

Has our nation simply become bored with itself and in a mood to rumble?

Although the Obama Administration appears to be taking the pacifist tack of refusing enmity with Moscow (say, over the demise of Turkey as a NATO-spirited state and potential European Union partner), BackChannels finds it impossible to dismiss the presence of the Cold War’s “Russia v NATO” / “Moscow v Washington” contest over existence beneath the shadow of nuclear mutually assured destruction.

That argument seemed to have been settled in 1991 while functioning democracy and rule of law seemed also to have been on its way to the former Soviet communist state.

What perhaps has gotten in the way is an inherent medievalism characteristic of Russian political culture.

Flipping from the tsars to the Party to the “vertical of power” federation has changed primarily who is in charge, not produced (in the Soviet Era) any “dictatorship of the proletariat” or now in Putin’s era the distribution of power and expansion of economic development familiar to the more true democracies of the west.

One may ask what is happening to those democracies — as well as America’s — as each “Allahu Akbar attack” promotes xenophobic nationalism and post-Soviet disinformation produces legions of misdirected “old comrade network” politicos and strident (also anti-Semitic) Muslims and “Islamists” (on BackChannels, the two intertwine to become the “Red-Green Alliance” involving organizations as familiar as Black Lives Matter, Palestinian Solidarity, and International Solidarity).

This is really a “Syndicate Red Brown Green” post.

One should ask: what is Syndicate Red Brown Green doing in the United States?

How is it that whether generally aligned with the Democratic Party or the Republican, we appear — at least as portrayed through general mass media — to have become vicious toward one another?

While Russians in their majority continue on track with economic suffering (and Syrians not directly protected by Assad continue suffering Russians), “Moscow” appears to be getting “Washington” to look much like itself with breathtaking corruption associated with candidate Clinton and in Trump the now recognizable brawling, sprawling, and outsized narcissism more familiar to Moscow lackeys like Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych.

Trump, to his credit and perhaps innocence after all, has yet to rack up a record of scandals associated with a term in office, but for that odds may be even between Clinton, the consummate Washington insider, and himself, the very opposite as a Washington outsider.

Here at the beginning of this day, the heightened “Red-Green” presence in the Democratic Party and its reflection in the “Brown” resurgent populist nationalism of the Republican Party bode ill for the United States as we approach the November elections.

Reference

Breslow, Jason M. “Inequality and the Putin Economy: Inside the Numbers.”  Frontline, January 13, 2015.

This online journal is a forum for some of the more recent academic essays of Professor Matthew Raphael Johnson. Given current events in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s extraordinary rebuke to American liberal arrogance internationally, alternative and revisionist work on Russian history and politics is sorely needed. He was the first among English speaking Orthodox writers to understand Putin as a needed balance to the American empire. This postmodern imperium, headquartered in the US, is a demonic, serpentine dominion that spreads the postmodern acid of American mass-zombification to the world. It is Antichrist.

The Soviet empire was malignant, but what replaced it in the 1990s was worse. The Russia that survived Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin almost disappeared under liberalism. It was the creation of the American postmodern Imperium. It is more insidious and sophisticated than the USSR because it is not based on state power. Instead, it is based on the rule of private capital. The cosmopolitan and neurotic American capitalist seeks to “liberate the individual” so as to more easily enslave him to his passions. Then, this isolated mass-man, this crippled, malformed cipher of a human being, is offered the satisfaction of his passions for a fee.

The rise of Novorossya is the most significant political development since the collapse of the USSR. It is a new politics, one that combines nationalism and socialism into a Christian, humane and just political order that has not been seen before. That it rises on the ashes of “independent Ukraine” and on Orthodox territory is no accident.

Johnson, Matthew Raphael.  Selected Essays.  (Website).  The Russian Orthodox Medievalist.

Graham-Harrison, Emma.  “Russian airstrikes in Syria killed 2,000 civilians in six months.”  The Guardian, March 15, 2016.

Updated Reference

Persuade Me Politics.  “Donald Trump: Patriot, Savior or Tyrant?  (Part 1).  October 5, 2016.

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