The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 09, 2017 9:37 pm

Review: “Dreamer of the Day” by Kevin Coogan


What is less well known is that an American fascist theoretician, Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960), himself marginal in the American radical right even today, is actually a theoretical pioneer of the contemporary international fascist revival with its new cultural politics, and is recognized as such from France to Russia’s contemporary “red-brown” ferment. (Yockey is promoted in the U.S., and somewhat disingenuously, mainly by Willis Carto and the Liberty Lobby.(2)) Contemporary fascism, internationally, finds it a largely losing battle to conjure up the old biological racism and master-race theories: they can chip away at the still-powerful association of such biological determinism with the concentration camps, but they have found a far more fertile path in circumventing such questions with a whole new battle over “culture”. And once this is recognized, the centrality of Francis Yockey, the subject of the excellent book by Kevin Coogan under consideration here, and who spelled this out in his 1948 book Imperium, looms into view.

Yockey, in in his youth, in the depths of the depression, was briefly sympathetic to Marxism, but quickly abandoned it for fascism. Subsequently, in late 1930’s Chicago, he jostled different far-right groups such as pro-Hitler German Bundists, anti-labor vigilantes, Silver Shirts and the Father Coughlin movement. But Yockey himself was no storefront fascist. Possibly the decisive ideological influence in his life had been the reading, in 1934, of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (a world-wide best seller in the 1920’s). Through Spengler (including his later works Years of Decision and Prussianism and Socialism) Yockey stepped into the ferment of 1890-1933 Germany known as the “Conservative Revolution”, and such other (sometimes brilliant) reactionary theorists as Carl Schmitt, Karl Haushofer, Ernst Niekisch, Ernst Juenger, Moeller van den Bruck, not to mention the highly ambiguous earlier figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. For most of these intellectuals, Hitler and the Nazis were vulgar guttersnipes and their “voelkisch” (i.e. populist) ideology merely one more version of the mass society the Conservative Revolutionaries despised. What mainly characterized the Conservative Revolution were variants of an aristocratic radicalism that imagined a regeneration of decadent bourgeois society from the throes of materialism, democracy, socialism and feminism by a “hard” cultural elite of “supermen”, men such as those tempered in the trench warfare of World War I and the “storms of steel” (the title of Juenger’s 1920’s best-selling novel) of the modern technological battlefield. Spengler, in his major work, had defined “universalism” as the passage from “culture” to “civilization” in an organic rise and fall; this phase emerged when the old culture-bearing elite was sinking into effete aestheticism, and prepared the way for Caesarism (an anticipation of the coming of Hitler).

Aside from Spengler himself, two figures of the Conservative Revolution in particular stand out as decisive influences on Yockey: Carl Schmitt and Karl Haushofer. As a student at Georgetown University in the mid-1930’s, Yockey encountered Schmitt as the leading international Catholic jurist of the period. Schmitt’s relationship to Hitler and the Nazis was complex, but hardly (to put it mildly) a hostile one. Schmitt’s sophisticated legal theory was little short of state-idolatry, and presented a distinction between “enemy” and “foe” which passed easily into fascist political and legal thought. An “enemy” for Schmitt was an opponent of the moment, with whom there was temporary conflict and disagreement, but a “foe” was an irreconcilable opponent against whom the struggle was potentially total and lethal. Schmitt ridiculed Western parliamentarism and democracy, and developed ideas about the inevitability of extra-parliamentary activity — i.e. activity in the streets — which also influenced the German New Left in the 1960’s (Schmitt was among other things an admirer of Lenin). This in turn shaped Schmitt’s idea of Ernstfall or “ultimate confrontation” in which normal legality had to be suspended. (Schmitt provided the legal cover for the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives” in which Hitler eliminated the “red fascist” wing of the Nazi Party around the Strasser brothers).


...The real key to Yockey, however, is summed up in the term “National Bolshevik”, a somewhat obscure yet very important strand of the 1920’s Conservative Revolution, and one which is increasingly important today. The term “National Bolshevik” refers to an ambiguous minority current that appeared in the revolutionary wave in Europe immediately following World War I. The term was first used by Bela Kun, head of the short-lived Communist government in Hungary in 1919, and cropped up in some statements of Karl Radek, the Communist revolutionary who conducted Comintern business from his prison cell in Berlin in the same year, meeting with members of the German business(4) and military elite as well as with the German radical left. (He also laid the foundation for Russia’s commercial treaty with Attaturk in 1920, concluded even as Attaturk was murdering leading members of the Turkish Communist Party.) In 1923, the German CP undertook the brief “Schlageter turn”(5) of several months during which it worked with the Nazis in a campaign against the Versailles Treaty, staging rallies and sharing podiums from which Ruth Fischer attacked “Jewish capital” in a way sometimes difficult to distinguish from fascist rhetoric(6). Already in 1922, Germany had signed the Rapallo treaty with the Soviet Union, allowing the defeated German army to to use the Ukraine for secret training and maneuvers banned under the Versailles Treaty. Because of Germany’s central position in continental Europe, the possibility of a German- Russian rapprochement against the West often hovered over European power politics, posing a direct threat to Britain and France, and much of the foreign policy of the two major world empires was aimed at preventing just such an alliance. Germany since 1870 had been the “new power” threatening British and French hegemony , and German support of different kinds for anti-colonial movements in the British and French empires (which dated from the pre-1914 Kaiserreich) was a constant problem for the latter. Thus in 1922 when the Rapallo treaty brought Germany into an alliance with revolutionary Russia, there was general consternation in Anglo-French ruling circles. In 1932, (as in 1923) the German Communist Party again cooperated with the Nazis (7) in strikes and street actions against the “main enemy”, the “social-fascist” German Social Democrats, a perspective they bizarrely maintained even after Hitler seized power and put them into concentration camps, expressed in their slogan “After Hitler Comes Our Turn”. Finally, the consternation occasioned by Rapallo was completely eclipsed by the impact of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1939.

But “National Bolshevism” refers to much more than just a rapprochement between Germany and Russia, or tactical collaboration between Communists and Nazis against liberals and Social Democrats. It condenses a series of attitudes which reach far beyond Europe, and which have wider currency in the contemporary world than is generally recognized: hence the importance of Yockey and of Coogan’s study of Yockey. National Bolshevism is one of the most extreme forms of appropriation of elements of the revolutionary socialist movement for the preservation of class society. Weimar Germany from 1918 to 1933 was a laboratory of a myriad of currents thrown up by the simultaneous potential of working-class revolution (1918-1921) and of the extreme reaction (which borrowed significantly from the workers’ movement) brought to bear against that potential, culminating in Hitler’s triumph in 1933. Though figures such as Bela Kun and Karl Radek are better known, National Bolshevism entered the workers’ movement most dramatically in Hamburg and Bremen in 1920, articulated by the two German ex-Wobblies Wolffheim and Laufenberg, who threw themselves into the German workers’ councils that sprung up after World War I. For Wolffheim and Laufenberg, as for a number of other currents of the early 1920’s in Germany and elsewhere(8), workers’ revolution was the royal road to the national revolution; for the National Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution was itself a national revolution(9). (To his credit, Lenin called National Bolshevism “eine himmelschreiende Absurditaet”, roughly, a “monstrous absurdity”. Unfortunately, other figures of the Third International were not so careful.)

The National Bolsheviks, and later Yockey, saw the cosmopolitan proletarian internationalism of Lenin, Trotsky and the early Russian Revolution as a superficial veneer which was cast aside by Stalin(10). “National Bolshevism” ultimately transposes Marx’s theory of the war between the classes to an international theory of struggle between “bourgeois nations” and “proletarian nations”, and buries the singularity and autonomy of the working class (the international class par excellence) in a mystique of the state and the nation. In the interwar period, the main “bourgeois nations” (or plutocracies, as Georges Sorel, among others, called them) were Britain and France; after 1945, the same logic was transposed to the new center of world capital, the United States. And nowhere moreso than in the work of Francis Yockey. The “proletarian nations” were first of all Germany and Italy, but the term applied equally (if not moreso) to all the “new nations” created by the Versailles Treaty, beginning with Eastern and Central Europe, not to mention the Latin American nations under the thumb of Anglo-French or American finance capital, and last but hardly least the growing nationalist ferment in the colonial world, a ferment encouraged, as indicated earlier, by successive German governments.

It is still little recognized today how ideologies first developed in interwar Europe to describe the tensions between the “core” bourgeois democracies and the “periphery”(11) of “young” or “new” nations were exported to the semi-colonial and colonial world, often directly through the influence of “National Bolshevik” or later National Socialist figures,
and after 1945 by the Nazis who fled to the Middle East and Latin America. After 1918, dozens of new nations emerged from the four defeated empires (Hohenzollern Prussia, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, Romanov Russia and the Ottomans) and after 1945, dozens more appeared in Africa, the Middle East and the rest of Asia from the breakup of the British and French empires. In most of these “new nations”, as well as in the semi-colonial countries of Latin America (Peron’s Argentina and Vargas’s Brazil come to mind), there was a real or potential local elite that recycled alloyed or unalloyed “National Bolshevism” from its original Central and Eastern European interwar sources into international “left” “anti-imperialist” currency. The 1960’s Western leftist admirers of Chou en-lai and Lin Piao would have perhaps been surprised to learn that the latter’s occasional references to the struggle between “bourgeois nations” and “proletarian nations” had been articulated decades earlier by Joseph Goebbels and Gregor Strasser. It would have been less of a surprise, or none at all, to Francis Yockey.

In 1947, Yockey settled in a remote village in Ireland to write his magnum opus, Imperium, in which he attempted to reinvent fascism for the new U.S.-dominated world. Yockey had gone AWOL from the U.S. Army in 1942 after a ring of German and pro-German saboteurs to which his family had connections was arrested by the FBI. Two months later, this “Fifth Columnist” (as opposed to an actual spy for Germany, in Coogan’s assessment) had returned voluntarily to the Army and, after a real or feigned mental breakdown, managed to be honorably discharged in 1943 for “medical” reasons. He held a couple of government jobs and then, (“incredibly”, as Coogan puts it) in late 1945 went to Germany as a prosecuting attorney for the Nuremburg trials. Less than a year later, he was fired from this position, in which he had distinguished himself by chronic absenteism, using that year to build up contacts to the anti-Allied German underground which was actively conducting terrorism and sabotage against American military targets.

Much of Imperium reads like recycled Spengler, arguing for a hierarchy of culture elites, drawing on the same organic metaphor of rise and decay of cultures used by Spengler.


More at: http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/revie ... in-coogan/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Mar 11, 2017 6:14 pm

For Some, 111 Million White Russians Are Dangerously Intoxicating

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David Duke appears on the Russian network RT.


One who quickly spotted the opportunities in Mother Russia was none other than his eminence, Dr. David Duke. The Klansman and one-time Louisiana congressman received his doctoral in history in a Ukrainian diploma mill cited for its pervasive anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, he became an eloquent theorist of what has become an important part of Trump’s worldview.

In 2004, when Duke was just beginning his advanced studies, he published an impassioned broadside entitled, “Is Russia the Key to White survival?” One can hardly get more direct than that. In it, he laid out his fears and dreams in muscular and often lurid prose.

First, the fears:

Our race faces a world-wide genetic catastrophe. There is only one word that can adequately describe it: genocide. It is a relentless and systematic destruction of the European genotype.

Unchecked, low White birthrates, massive non-White immigration and intermarriage will mean the complete genetic destruction of the great European race that produced an overwhelming share of the world’s great art and literature, scientific and economic advancement. Make no mistake about it: unless our people wake up and act courageously, our very genotype; our people as a unique, living breed of life upon this planet – will be wiped out! Such would be the greatest ecologic and evolutionary disaster ever to befall our planet!


And whether they agree with Duke—or even know who he is—millions have a visceral connection to this sentiment. And, they are frantically searching for salvation, or at least relief. Duke knows the answer: “All across the Western world, I see our racial consciousness growing, our movements increasing, our spirit rising. Everywhere, our people are putting aside petty differences and nationality divisions and understand that now we must have White Pride Worldwide and White Unity.” Nowhere is that truer, he said, than in Russia, “Russia is a White nation! Of the many capital cities of Europe, it is accurate to say that Moscow is the Whitest of them all.”

Duke admits here that there is but one obstacle preventing white hearts in Russia and the U.S. from beating as one. As you might guess, it’s the Jews… again. But even in 2004, he saw a powerful – though flawed – leader riding shirtless to the rescue. “Although there are many reservations about President Putin,” said Duke, “he is perhaps the only leader in the Western World to take any measures against the Jewish-Supremacist media bosses.” He was equally happy 12 years late rabout the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. On election night, he tweeted, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life… make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump!”

If some white nationalists view Duke as rather passé, others are picking up the torch. Alt-right mouthpiece Richard Spencer has jumped on the Siberian Express. According to Mother Jones, “Spencer calls Russia ‘the most powerful white power in the world’ and admires Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism—he would gladly admit most Russians into his ideal ethnostate.”


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Elvis » Sat Mar 11, 2017 11:45 pm

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sun Mar 12, 2017 8:19 am

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 15, 2017 9:58 am

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Putin, Assad and the fall of Aleppo
Masters of disinformation

While the attention of the world is focused on events in Aleppo, Assad and his allies are talking about the "liberation" of the city. Some believe him, left wing anti-imperialists for example. By Emran Feroz

The Syrian conflict has several narratives, all of which are jostling for media supremacy. In the end, the one that is being heard most clearly is that of Bashar al Assad. If this were not the case, he and his Iranian and Russian allies would not have been able to recapture Aleppo in the shadow of worldwide disinterest.

There are many reasons why it has happened like this. One is that those left-wingers in the West, who often like to present themselves as being against war and in favour of peace, have taken sides with Assad and Putin. What we are talking about here are primarily groups that believe themselves to be "anti-imperialist", "critical" or "alternative" – and who are presently celebrating the capture of Aleppo as a "liberation".

As critical as these groups supposedly are, they have not recently been focusing on Russian bombs or on the horrors perpetrated by pro-Assad foreign militia, but on those people trapped in eastern Aleppo who were circulating calls for help and farewell messages.


Continues at: https://en.qantara.de/content/putin-ass ... nformation
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Elvis » Wed Mar 15, 2017 2:31 pm

Masters of disinformation


:roll:
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 20, 2017 10:35 am

How America's Right-Wing Fell in Love with Putin and Moscow


White Nationalists, Trump, and Putin

In early 2015, the leading lights of Europe’s far-right, including members of Austria’s Freedom Party and Greece’s Golden Dawn, met in St. Petersburg, Russia. The meeting, on its own, was one of the most notable gatherings of Europe’s regressive, xenophobic far-right in years. The group organizing the event, the Russian Imperial Movement, is itself an outgrowth of groups like Rodina—a Russian political party founded by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, a high-ranking Kremlin official charged with running Russia’s defense industries.

Among the Americans attending the conference was Jared Taylor—one of the foremost proponents of “race realism,” which claims genetic superiority for Europeans—who spent his time at the conference condemning America’s liberal policies, including support for same-sex relations. Taylor was joined by Sam Dickson, a former KKK lawyer and another prominent face of American white supremacism. Echoing his European counterparts, Dickson used the opportunity to praise Putin for helping encourage higher birthrates, and exhorting his compatriots to preserve “[the white] race and civilization.” (It remains unclear who paid for the Americans’ travel.)

The conference was, more than anything else, a networking event—and an opportunity for the trans-Atlantic far-right to unite in support of rolling back liberal policies, expelling non-whites from their countries, and unwinding Western democracy. It was also an opportunity for attendees to vie with one another in their praise for the Kremlin, and to lay that much more groundwork in the pursuit of what Matthew Heimbach, as detailed below, has called the “Traditionalist International.”

It’s worth noting that the current crop of leaders within American white nationalist circles—which includes Spencer and Heimbach, as well as, to lesser extents, Taylor and Dickson—relies on rhetoric that is different from that of previous iterations of the white supremacist movement. For instance, this new crop of white nationalists places less explicit emphasis on the notion of the supremacy of one race over any other. Spencer and Heimbach attempt to mask their white supremacy by professing co-equal respect for whites and non-whites alike, and claim that they are merely fighting for an all-white state alongside attendant states for other races. “I support white power, black power, brown power, and yellow power,” Heimbach recently said. “All races should be the dominant political force in their region. That is why America needs to be divided into smaller, ethnically and culturally homogeneous states. … We need to stop the hate and separate.”

Yet Spencer and Taylor, despite the claims that their movement has little to do with traditional white supremacy, have both espoused bogus biological theories about racial difference—a classic tool of white supremacists—in attempts to justify their view that the U.S. must undergo a separation of the races. Interestingly, and perhaps predictably, there is no universally accepted definition of “white” that exists within the white nationalist movement. For example, while Spencer considers his wife, Nina Kouprianova, to be white, other outspoken members of the white nationalist movement—including Southern nationalist Greg Johnson—point to Kouprianova’s Georgian heritage as evidence of what they claim is her non-European lineage.

Whatever nominal differences remain between the current crop of white nationalists and holdovers from an earlier era, there was little question about which candidate these contingents preferred in the 2016 presidential election. Duke not only endorsed Trump, but was inspired by Trump to once more run for office. Spencer held a now-notorious rally after Trump’s election that culminated in shouts of “Hail, Trump!” Heimbach, for his part, was accused of violence against those protesting Trump. And Taylor recorded robocalls to rally support for Trump, whom Taylor said would see that immigrants should be “smart, well-educated white people” rather than Muslims. In all, America’s white nationalists and white supremacists were effectively uniform in their support for Trump.

But white nationalists’ support for Trump didn’t stem solely from his claims that Mexican immigrants were “rapists,” his vow to block Muslims from traveling to the U.S., or his sharing of faulty, racially charged crime statistics with millions of followers on Twitter. Indeed, much of Trump’s appeal for white nationalists can be found, unsurprisingly, in incendiary outlets like Breitbart, recently led by Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon. (Among the tags Breitbart uses for stories: “black crime,” “feminazi,” and “left wing thugs.”) White nationalists also viewed the foreign policy Trump espoused during the presidential campaign—a mix of America First isolationism, appeasement of Russian expansionism, and aggressive distrust of multilateral organizations—with glee.

And they all—white nationalists and Religious Right figures alike—looked fondly on what appears to be Trump’s mutual admiration of their authoritarian hero, Putin.


Read at: http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/amer ... ves-russia
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:14 am

Confusion on the Left


Allying with Fascists
The view that everything is a result of a conspiracy by US imperialism leads to some very strange bedfellows indeed. Take the Workers World Party and their wholly owned subsidiaries: the International Action Center (IAC) and United National Anti-war Coalition (UNAC). In 2014 they participated in a conference in Moscow organized by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR). This is a group that has links with fascist groups, if it is not fascist itself. According to this report (well worth reading on its own), along with these two US groups there were in attendance “Russian and Italian fascists and U.S. white nationalists from the neo-Confederate group League of the South.” None of this was mentioned by the IAC and UNAC, who seem to have no problem working with these fascists and racists.

This is what happens when the left sees only the hand of US imperialism in everything, when it fails to see the laws of motion of history, when it fails to see the working class as having its own interests, distinct from and opposed to every capitalist force in the world.


Opposition to US Imperialist Intervention
None of this is an argument for the intervention of the US government into Syria. As this article explains, no capitalist power, including the US regime, is capable of intervening in Syria (or anywhere else in the world) to the benefit of the working class majority. But there’s a simple matter of logic: If US capitalism is incapable of such intervention, what makes anybody think that Russian or Iranian capitalism is capable of it? On the other hand, if the reactionary Putin regime can be defended for intervening in Syria to fight the Islamic State, then how can these lefts oppose US intervention to also fight the Islamic State?


Historic Role of Working Class
What lies behind this sort of “thinking” is not only a refusal to take a serious look at history; it’s also a failure to consider the working class as a potential subject of history; it sees the most powerful capitalist country in the world – US capitalism – as having unlimited power to manipulate and control everything. It refuses to see that there are not only laws of motion of the capitalist economy; there are also laws of motion of political development.

If foreign policy is just an extension of domestic policy, then the reverse is true also, and this is the problem. Much of the same left that doesn’t see international struggles in clear class terms also doesn’t see the struggle here like that. The same light-minded, ahistorical approach, the same refusal to look beneath the surface, the same failure to see the class forces at work apply at home too.


More at: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2017/03/14 ... -the-left/














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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 8:54 am

Marine Le Pen “Russia and France should work together to save the world from globalism and Islamic fundamentalism.”

Image
Marine Le Pen Meets Putin in Moscow.

Marine le Pen is liked in Moscow, because she backs breaking up the European Union, lifting sanctions against Russia, and, above all, recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea. The Front National had also sent a representative as an observer during the referedum in Crimia on joining Russia, which claimed that the vote was free and fair. This attitude convinced the Kremlin to take a friendly stand on the extreme right movement.

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:23 am

http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/th ... of-mirror/


Thirteen Reflections of Golden Don in the Hall of Mirrors

by Jordy Cummings

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These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay?


TS Eliot, Gerontion


1.

Roger Stone is a DC troublemaker of the old school. Stone was close to Lee ‘Willie Horton’ Atwater, supported the Contras and reaction more generally throughout the ‘New Cold War’ of the eighties. Stone and another backroom operator, Paul Manafort even lobbied for Marcos and for Mobutu, not to mention a Russian oligarch or two. Later on he worked with Al Sharpton, FBI informant. All of this is to say that, whatever is being said about his connections with everyone from the Russians to Julian Assange – though WikiLeaks denies a connection with Stone – there is no doubt that Stone has friends in high places. Indeed, he recently admitted a relationship with the hacker Guccifer 2.0, widely said to be a Russian asset, and many point out that Stone seems to have predicted the Podesta e-mails being leaked. He continues, in his media persona, to take on a believable attitude of, well, not giving a shit. At various points, he claims to have been poisoned by secret agents, likely British Intelligence. He has a tattoo of Richard Nixon’s face on his upper forearm. His credo and that of his comrades is ‘Admit nothing; deny everything; launch counterattack.’ That credo may well have a point of origin in a certain Roy Cohn.


Like Trump, Stone is a protégé of the legendary Cohn. Yet we hear hews and cries, not dissimilar in tone from some of Cohn’s invective, from a range of people, from Michael Moore to Bill Kristol that Trump is loyal not to America, but Moscow. Moore has put out the call to President Trump: ‘Vacate, you Russian Traitor’. Bill Kristol is more subtle, tweeting about how between Trump and what he himself calls the ‘deep state’, he’d take the latter any day. By this logic, Stone, a die-hard defender of all things ‘Make America Great Again’, is more Trumpite than perhaps even Trump himself, being allegedly a key element in a Moscow backed conspiracy to install what amounts to a Manchurian Candidate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And indeed, intelligence services do seem to have Stone as a ‘target’ for their investigations into the alleged activities of the Soviet Union Russia in ‘manipulating’, or ‘hacking’, the election. So, Roger Stone went on Alex Jones’ Infowars Radio a few weeks back and said: ‘The Deep State has got to cut the shit.’

Yet what is this ‘deep state’? Is it the one in which Trump has just appointed an architect of the torture and extraordinary rendition programme as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency? CIA operative Gina Haspel’s deviousness in ‘the company’ came early. As a top coordinator at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, the site of the torture of Abu Zubaydah, Haspel mocked Zubaydah and accused him of faking his symptoms. Yet the tradecraft that really seems to have impressed certain higher-up elements in the Agency, was her initiative in rationalizing the destruction of evidence. This has made her, according to a report in ProPublica, a divisive figure even in agency circles. In all reality, the ‘deep state’ is a hall of mirrors, a paranoid dog-eat-dog world riven with factionalism and competitive individualism. As can be seen in the recent Showtime Documentary, The Spymasters, featuring every living former CIA chief, the major division, it seems, in what they call the ‘IC’ (intelligence community), is roughly: torturers vs. drone-fetishists. And it is from this former crowd of rough and tumblers that we can situate the likes of Haspel and indeed, Roger Stone.



2.

We must agree with Roger Stone on the ‘deep state’. In the last instance, no radical should ever support what amounts to ‘deep state’ machinations towards a soft-coup. Even if one grants a wide manner of Russian involvement in the US election, as Glenn Greenwald astutely points out, if Donald Trump is bad, countenancing a ‘deep state’ takeover is entering waters far more uncharted. American democracy may be hollowed out and merely formal, but these forms are important, many won in spite of the desire of ruling classes. There are numerous avenues in which Trump is already being opposed, from the streets to the courts. Trump has provoked opposition from a wide manner of quarters. A leftish feminism is reaching broader and broader audiences, while socialist organizations are growing exponentially as spaces that Americans feel are necessary to oppose Trump. The reversal of the travel ban by some of the most classically Pacific Northwestern nerdy jurists is the real deal, but these bespectacled Washingtonians would not have had the gumption, I reckon, to stand against Trump, were it not for the spontaneous protests that arose against the Muslim ban. Any attempt to keep even a tiny amount of public oversight of the state, both deep and narrow, would be stopped in its tracks if Trump lay victim to palace intrigue.



3.

The situation in regards to those Russia connections right now, is pretty fucking confusing. Why would the CIA go after a businessman? Is this a power grab by ‘the deep state,’ a term that has gotten so loose in comparison to how it has been used to signify elements in, say, the Greek and Turkish states, to nearly have no meaning? Many use it to signify specifically, the intelligence and police apparatuses that organise beyond command hierarchies and formal legalities. This makes sense to a limited degree, but is that how it is now being used in Alex Jones-inflected commentary? Perhaps not. In any case, the investigation of a prominent businessman and potential politician who may well have financial ties to organized crime, domestic as well as foreign – the latter of which are often connected with states – doesn’t seem, on the face of it, to be of a piece with how the Greek deep state pressured the SYRIZA government to capitulate to the Troika. In addition, the moves against Trump involve elements beyond the intelligence and police services, indeed they seem largely driven by freelancers like former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, Clinton machine operatives like John Podesta and Sid Blumenthal, consultants, people with connections of one form or another.

So then, what is it that is driving the CIA – or to be more clear, networks within the CIA and other government institutions, to go to war with Trump? Can it partially be deemed a sort of civil servant mini-rebellion, akin to the Park service alternate twitter accounts, the State Department resignations and the like? This could plausibly be a motivation for mid-level intelligence operatives, in the same way revelations inspired Ellsberg, Snowden, Manning and so on. John Le Carré is renowned for his critical eye towards his former employers in the secret services but doesn’t mince words when writing about ‘traitors’ like Kim Philby. To Le Carré, what Philby is alleged to have done – blown networks, gotten people killed – goes beyond ‘politics’, it is institutional, not political treason. An angle of institutional or corporate loyalty overriding going-along-to-get-along may well be hegemonic at Langley, where more than a few likely have the Washington Post’s David Ignatius on speed-dial. Yet this seems far more organized, and as much driven by media, in particular CNN, as it is by ‘the deep state’. This could well have to do with the liberal intelligentsia, and in particular, the educated denizens of the intelligence services and diplomatic corps’ genuine revulsion at Trump as well as revulsion toward the masses and potential change coming from below. Yet there is probably more to it than that.

An unfinished side-note to this comes in the form of the revelation that the disgraced General Flynn, even while advising Trump, was a lobbyist/agent of the Turkish state, even writing an op-ed comparing Gulen to Bin Laden. The connections between Flynn and Turkey are verified, and now a matter of public record. Could Flynn’s Russia connections, always circumstantial, be a mere McGuffin for his all-too-real role as a Turkish operative? How better to throw off the scent of working for one tyranny than appearing to work for another? Could this be the real reason he had to walk the plank? Could it be that the Turkey story is so explosive and implicates far too broad a segment of the American lobbying scene that Russia has become the focus so everyone else can keep their head up and above the fray? Very little is known at this point about Flynn’s connection to Turkey, whose interests don’t necessarily align with Moscow.



4.

Trump is stepping on a lot of toes that are attached to powerful feet. To call Trump a traitor would be ludicrous. It is true, however, that while comfortable with a containable Trump, the American ruling class (as a whole) wants to do everything possible to stop Trump from fundamentally altering the ‘world alliance’, such as, by downgrading NATO and other international institutions and preferring to deal with Europe, as Bannon has said, on a bilateral basis. For some people around Trump, from Stone, Flynn and Manafort, to Bannon and the Breitbart crowd, the ‘liberal international order’ is not worth sustaining, materially or ideologically. It may well have been a mistake in the first place. Yet any time there are revelations about Russia we see a bit of a media two-step. Trump goes out and plays to the crowd about ‘fake news’ and, in a perhaps unintentional act of trolling, calls the media ‘enemies of the people’, while Mike Pence, Mattis and others are quietly trotted out to genuflect to NATO or the very existence of the European Union. Yet what Trump wants seems unclear. His White House seems chaotic, to a point that people don’t even want to work there. Trump is all image: he has been open about wanting to pick cabinet members and agency chiefs as if they were out of central casting. John Bolton’s moustache was too garish for Trump, preferring, as he does, the gristled old school appeal of Rex Tillerson. Beyond knee-jerk Fox News-derived ‘analysis’ there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Trump himself holds any fixed positions on international affairs. He does, however, have positions on making money. Making money is tremendous! Indeed, the collective ‘hive mind’ of the state/media ideological state apparatus that is pounding Trump may well be coming from a multiplicity of places, but cannot be reduced, in a vulgar Marxist sense, to a single tangible ‘interest’. Trump’s Russia connections on the other hand, most certainly can. Capitalism.



5.

So back to Roger Stone. Stone, Manafort, Bannon and company are concretely rooted in a far-right network that seems to have worked within the ‘deep state’ since way back when, but have a bit of a tendency to go a bit far for those who I would call the ‘sober analysts’, from Arthur Schlesinger to Ezra Klein. Perhaps the debut of this tendency was the adventurism of General Douglas McArthur, who wanted to extend the Korean War all the way into China. And indeed, McArthur’s adventurism was of a piece with Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy’s red-hunting project, which was about ‘who lost China?’ Joe McCarthy himself whelped about ‘communists and queers’ in the State Department, not unlike Donald Rumsfeld and his macho pals griping about Colin Powell in the George W. Bush era. Of those targeted by Cohn and McCarthy, it was the fabled ‘China Hands’ like renowned scholar Owen Lattimore that bore the brunt of their crusading zeal. Notably Lattimore, who had a good deal of pull at Foggy Bottom, as an eminent China scholar, was disliked by his colleagues for his unvarnished attitude towards the various forces at play in China at the time. No Maoist by any stretch, he nevertheless was pretty critical of Chiang Kai-Shek and it would not be mistaken to read into his perspective an attitude, shared by broad segments within the American state at the time, that the ‘Communists’ weren’t that bad after all. Lattimore was targeted quite vociferously by the ‘China Lobby,’ later courtiers of Tricky Dick.

However, at least since the rationalization of the American state in the first few decades of the 20th century, the world of intrigue, intelligence services, diplomatic corps and the like, attracts as many liberal intellectuals, from Lattimore to Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowdon, as it does ideological zealots and mercenary-types. One does not at all need to buy into the absurd conspiracy theories of Nafeez Ahmed, or LaRouchean dribble drabble about a ‘civil war’ within the deep state, to realize that there are multiple contending networks within the state apparatus, defined not merely as the US government and its bureaucracies, but the entire K-Street lobbying/consulting/mercenary/beltway media scene that defines Washington D.C. The former, the ‘sober analysts’, those who may have even favoured Castro’s defeat of Batista and quietly read Monthly Review and spoke about a fabled ‘convergence’ between the US and USSR, were somewhat cast aside in the fifties, post-McCarthy, but came back as the ‘best and brightest’ under Kennedy. Yet these forces, like Robert McNamara were blinded by their own ideology of technocratic and post-ideological anti-communism, which led to escalation, and then war in Vietnam, and then, with their fall from grace, the re-empowerment of the ultra-right. Indeed, the China Lobby, those that pushed McCarthy to attack Lattimore as a gay communist, helped Nixon win the 1968 presidential election through an intermediary that advised the corrupt South Vietnamese leadership to avoid peace talks, that with Nixon they would get a better deal than that would have been offered up by that Minnesotan liberal Hubert Humphrey! There is far more concrete evidence of ‘rigging’ in the 1968 election than there is for Trump in 2016.



6.

Under Nixon you had a third force entering the picture, with the Kissinger crowd. Kissinger didn’t have much time for the ultra-right. He was a man of ideas, of grand designs that would always require tactics that were historically and geographically specific, as shown in Greg Grandin’s masterful Kissinger’s Shadow. The right-Hegelian Henry was able to play the chastened best-and-brightest crowd on one hand off against the tooth gnashing Operation Phoenix killers on the other hand. To the former, he gave Détente and, what’s more, China. To the latter was given absolute carte blanche in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, putting together the international network of mercenaries and intelligence operatives that produced our Roger, our Paul, our General Flynn. This latter faction joined forces, even against Nixon from the right, as what has come to be known as the ‘Neocons.’ This network, a boon to the military-industrial-complex, big oil and the ‘Cowboy’ Sunbelt faction of American capitalism finally coalesced with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Of course, as we shall see, this wedding of neocons and the ultra-right mercenary crowd was to take some hits in later years.



7.

One well known wit quipped on social media upon Trump’s election that the real story would be its implications for Marxist state theory. Yet what we’ve seen since the election is merely more substantive proof of a theory of the state that arguably goes back to Marx’s 18th Brumaire. The uniquely American state is not merely ‘relatively autonomous’ from capital. It is a factor required for the social reproduction of capitalist social property relations – and one of these structural requirements is this degree of autonomy. It is indeed the ‘Executive Committee for the Management of the Common Affairs of the Bourgeoisie’. Yet, I ask, dear reader, have any of you ever been on an Executive Committee, say, in a political organization or a union? Does the ‘exec’ usually speak with one voice? Executive committees are cut-throat pressure cookers, packed with opportunists who would throw their grandmother under the bus if it meant more power, more control. So then how do we define the American state apparatus if not as a container for a ‘war of all against all’ as adjudicated, of course, by varying branches, that may well, themselves, be rife with duelling factions?

The very existence of this type of arrangement, I’d contend, is not merely a feature of the ‘actually existing’ American state, but is revealed by history to be a defining feature of states and sovereigns. As Marx puts it, ‘It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers … which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.’ Competitive individual subjects are the raw material of the American Leviathan. And those subjects always need that proverbial shadow-man, a player willing to wade through the hall of mirrors at the service of the state, in order to keep from getting their own hands dirty. Just as capitalism needs mafias, capitalist states also need shadow-men. And sometimes the shadow-men acquire their own power by virtue of their indispensability. It could be Roy Cohn or Paul Manafort, Sidney Blumenthal or Bill Kristol. It’s even better when these guys are at each other’s throats. Witness the ‘team of rivals’ fetish shared by Obama and Trump alike!



8.

So let’s go back to Roy Cohn and our Roger, rankled as he is by the Deep State. Cohn and McCarthy did a lot to set back the cause of ‘anti-communism’ among liberals in the United States. It doesn’t seem hard to imagine a salon filled with the likes of Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling bemoaning the abuse of Anti-Communism in the name of Midwestern demagoguery. It also doesn’t seem hard to imagine this kind of crowd imagining that McCarthy was effectively a Soviet agent, as was imagined in The Manchurian Candidate to which we will return. Within a few years, however, the situation had stabilized; McCarthy had been discredited and was widely a figure of satire, while anti-communism could be rational, thoughtful, even post-ideological once again. In this atmosphere, novelist Richard Condon wrote a book that would end up being an all time classic Hollywood thriller, The Manchurian Candidate. As one of the great shadow-men of the Clinton camp, Sidney Blumenthal, puts it in a recent essay in London Review of Books:

At the height of the Cold War, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate laid out a Russian conspiracy to elect a malleable president. Raymond Shaw, a US army sergeant during the Korean War, is captured and brainwashed along with the other members of his unit in Manchuria. His comrades are programmed to testify falsely to his bravery, for which he wins the Congressional Medal of Honor. ‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life,’ they all declare. The American war hero is turned into a Russian sleeper agent, groomed to assassinate the presidential nominee at the convention. But Major Ben Marco, a former member of his army unit, breaks through his brainwashing and so instead of murdering the nominee, Shaw shoots his mother, who had been controlling him throughout, along with his idiotic stepfather. Decades later, Condon explained the inspiration for the perverse dynamic between Raymond Shaw and his mother. ‘Raymond’s mother is Roy Cohn, and her husband Johnny is McCarthy. I was fascinated by the very strange relationship between Cohn and the senator. Roy ran McCarthy, totally dominated him.’




9.

So do we now see an historic reversal? In The Manchurian Candidate, a foreign-controlled stooge is meant to be a stand-in for a reactionary. With Donald Trump, a reactionary is a stand-in for a foreign-controlled stooge. The very forces that pioneered McCarthyism begat forces seemingly attacked by McCarthyism, or more properly Roy Cohn’s dark power. Cohn is a fascinating historical specimen, perhaps best captured in Nicholas Von Hoffman’s biography Citizen Cohn, later to be made a superb TV movie with James Woods, and also, a character in Tony Kushner’s majestic Angels in America. Cohn was the personification of the American state’s mercenary faction: quite literally, he was a Mafia lawyer and mentored Trump beginning in the early Seventies, though Trump turned his back when it turned out Cohn was dying of AIDS. The thread tying all of this together is Roy Cohn-style politics. Cohn’s use of political actors, from gossip columnists to more ‘moderate’ Republicans like Robert Taft is precisely, after all, what is occurring with the ‘deep state’ and media gang-up on the Stone crowd. Yesterday’s Walter Winchell is today’s Anderson Cooper. Yesterday’s Robert Taft is today’s John McCain. Underneath ‘partisanism’ this is about the use of information and intimidation to monkey-wrench one’s rivals. It is cliché to point out that hunters become hunted, but the Cohn faction is now on the opposite end of Cohn-ism.

Indeed, it is no wonder that this faction – big oil, the Mafia, and of course, adventurist real estate con artists like Donald Trump – became close to the Russian Mafia state in the quarter century since the end of the Cold War. The seemingly well-connected investigative reporter James Henry writes, in an investigative piece in Frances Fukuyama’s American Interest, that this agglomeration of scoundrels resembles ‘a veritable Star Wars bar scene of unsavoury characters, with Donald Trump seated right in the middle.’ As Henry implies, the swerve that became an encounter between the Trump/Tillerson/Tony Soprano wing of the American bourgeoisie and the Russian mafia state, is an historically specific phenomenon. This all pivots around Russia’s ‘emergence since the 1990s as a world-class kleptocracy, second only to China as a source of illicit capital and criminal loot, with more than $1.3 trillion of net offshore ‘flight wealth’ as of 2016.’



10.

Yeltsin was, for all intents and purposes, far more under the sway of the US, and more broadly, ‘the International Community’ than near any other Russian politician. Even more than the relatively competent US-backed politicians like Pinochet or Marcos, Yeltsin was Infinitely malleable. Under Yeltsin’s watch, neoliberal shock therapy, which Henry compares to a Stalinist Five Year Plan, gave rise to a reaction in the form of the right-wing populism of Putin and his own camp of disempowered Russian deep state apparatchiks (make no mistake, if any state has depth, it’s the Russian state). As Henry’s analysis has it, the outbound flight of the newly accumulated capital of those who had made a shitload of money off of shock therapy was accompanied by vultures licking their chops with their money pouring in, be they Mafias of all stripes, investment banks, Exxon, Donald Trump, everyone wanted a piece of the pie with the new Godfather in town, Vladimir Putin. Putin certainly crushed or exiled some oligarchs, but this was quite clearly a consolidation of power. Indeed, we should see it, given the necessity of these players – Mafias, banks, oil, Golden Don – in the reproduction of global capitalism, we could even point out that if Putin didn’t exist, Capital would have to invent him. In the case of Trump and his ilk’s concretely verifiable links with Russian business, Mafia and state, Henry’s work is indispensable. Until very recently, the Trump organization did very little to hide its links with Russian big business, not unlike other capitalists with investments in Brazil, India or China.



11.

So let us return to D.C.. The Best and Brightest camp was at its perch in the Obama administration, having made uneasy but solid peace with the neocons on adjustment and consolidation of US imperial strategy. Alongside this, as I explained in Jacobin, there had been the rebranding of the CIA as the liberal cadre burrowing away, even under the George W. Bush administration. Anyone and everyone near the CIA made it known that they opposed the war in Iraq. Contradictions started to appear in this front, however, during the Obama administration, pivoting specifically around the ‘deal’ in Iran. Many, even including Greenwald, overstate the idea that Russia and Trump’s rationale for opposing Clinton was Clinton’s plan for ‘regime change’ in Syria. While that may well have been the case in an argument lost back in 2012-13, it strains credulity to believe that Hillary Clinton had any plan to substantively shift US Syria policy by 2016. There was some gossip that Trump, having met with Kissinger, was planning a pivot to Russia to counter China, a reverse of Kissinger’s earlier move. This is not entirely implausible. Even more plausible would be that Trump simply neither knows nor cares about Syria, probably couldn’t even place it on a map.

Among those networks disempowered within the deep state around this time was that around General Michael Flynn, himself having been pushed out of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama/Panetta years. There are all sorts of stories as to the reason for this, but it seems quite clear that Flynn and his network coalesced with networks, like those led by Stone, and Manafort, who had been doing business in Russia and in Ukraine, just as they had done business with Republican candidates and Ferdinand Marcos. Manafort appears to have a decades-old relationship with Russian capital, even helping formulate Russian policy! These guys were players, who had all sorts of contacts, and, hey, word is that Donald Trump is gonna run for president? Shit! Donald Trump? What was good for these guys was good for Trump and for Russia, and it seems quite likely that there was some degree of active coordination between the Russian state and the Trump campaign. It needs to be remembered, however, that this is hardly unprecedented, from Israel to China, nations have influenced elections on multiple levels in the United States of America. In global capitalism, everyone can try and have a say everywhere. It’s the American way – indeed US officials not only openly bragged about their influence on their ‘help’ getting Yeltsin elected in 1996, this became a prototype for how they’ve operated over the last 20 years. This is to say, through ‘consultancies’ who with the CIA’s blessing, help ‘opposition’ candidates in Latin America. Manafort may have stepped out of the mainstream with his taking on Pro-Putin politicians in the Ukraine, but he was just one of many people marketing ‘our brand is crisis’.



12.

So about that hall of mirrors…

Before Cohn, before McArthur, before McCarthy, there was James Jesus Angleton. While he was part of the Oh-So-Social (OSS) set, smoking Virginia Slims and eating Mussels at the club, and friendly with the legendary Kim Philby, it would be no mistake to label Angleton a bit of a fascist. A gifted poet and editor of Furioso, a Yale based poetry journal, Angleton published and was friendly with Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot. Indeed, Elliot gave him the central metaphor for which to understand parapolitics or ‘the deep state’ and beyond that, the entire international underground of spies, criminals, mercenaries and Mafias. This is ‘the hall of mirrors’, of distorted images refracting infinitely in strange loops or Moebius strips, and the presumption that paranoia and even mistrust of one’s own instincts are standard-operating-procedure. Angleton, by all accounts, was absolutely obsessed with moles, with double agents, convinced towards the end of his career that even his colleagues who wanted to push him out were themselves double agents. This was due, in part, to Angleton having no way of disproving the idea that they were double agents. In turn, more than a few, looking back on his friendship with Philby, thought Angleton himself was a double agent and that his persona was, as Trump calls the ‘fake news’ about Russia, a ‘ruse’.

Once you start wandering around the wilderness of mirrors, anything is possible. It is akin to Peter Ustinov’s film Romanoff and Juliet, in which Ustinov plays the Prime Minister of some tiny entity akin to San Marino, who spends his time wandering back and forth between the U.S. and Soviet embassies. First, he learns the U.S. knows the Soviet Code and he thus duly notifies the Soviets. The Soviets claim they already have this information, thus Ustinov tells the Americans: ‘they know you know their code’. The Americans claim they already have this information. Back he goes to the Soviets, explaining: ‘they know you know they know your code’. And so on, until finally, after a dozen ‘you knows’ and ‘they knows,’ one of the Ambassadors exclaims ‘they do??!!’

This is the proverbial last instance.



13.

When it comes down to it, in regards to the parapolitics of Trump and the deep state, and the interests at play – Wall Street and manufacturing wanting an opening to Russia, the military industrial complex wanting new enemies, tech wanting free trade and less surveillance – there is no ideological unity within the ruling class, and hence not within the state itself. They are all Peter Ustinovs, wandering around between embassies. Yet it is not enough to merely say ‘neither Washington nor Moscow but Peter Ustinov!’ on one hand, or to dismiss this as petty politics within the state that have no bearing on capitalist power in general, or the repressive, racist authoritarianism of the Trump regime in particular on the other hand. It actually is the playing out of the real competition of the former within the latter, and how the dreidel lands after spinning around is the moment in which an Ambassador is shocked. There is no telling what is going to happen next, so while it would be folly to end up like Angleton, convinced everyone around him was a Russian agent, it is useful to adopt an approach that examines the necessary internal relations within what cannot simply be called ‘the deep state’. Instead, given the fluidity between state apparatuses, the blurring of lines between coercive on one hand, and ideological on the other, it makes more sense, at this point, to merely call it the state.

The fluidity of the situation, with Trump’s beloved alt-right scene turning on Reince Preibus and even Steve Bannon himself as enablers of a sleeper cells operating within the state, agents of the nefarious Barack Obama, with perhaps guidance from our Sid Blumenthal and even maybe Leon Panetta – because why not? Preibus is, according to this paranoid reasoning, the one who made the martyr Flynn walk the plank. Bannon, meanwhile, is enabling Preibus, So let us give Roger Stone the last word: ‘I think this is Pearl Harbour for the true Trump supporters, the Trump loyalists…. Priebus moved on General Flynn and I think he intends to move on Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller next. He is not serving the president well. The people he hired are loyal to the Republican National Committee, not the President of the United States.’ Many the speculation can thus be made, if we re-enter that hall of mirrors one more time. What is Stone’s game here? Is he an old hand, like those slow-talking veteran socialists who at meetings need to make every point humanly possible, simply because they need to know they are being heard? Or does he have something up his sleeve, pertaining, perhaps, to recent outreach between Ukrainian Pro-Putin politicians to Trump, through the intermediary of Trump’s private lawyer? In other words, perhaps Stone is proverbially saying, while flashing that old Nixon tattoo, ‘come at me’! One could go on and on, yet in reality, this is a prime example of a known unknown in the topsy turvy funhouse of the hall of mirrors.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby kool maudit » Tue Mar 28, 2017 8:25 am

I gotta say... that was a good read.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 11:06 am

Update: Trump and Russia

Image

But in Trump’s case, push has come to shove, and he’s so deeply connected with Russian financiers and bankers that he cannot disentangle himself, even if he wanted to. But this idiot, short sighted plunderer probably doesn’t even want to, even if it weren’t too late. That makes the mainstream of the US capitalist class very nervous that in a crisis with Russian capitalism he will not act in their interests.

So CNN, and other major news media, are putting out the view that Trump might not be really representing “America” and “our” interests. What they really mean is the US capitalist class’s interests. This is too much for most people here. Already, Trump’s approval ratings are down below 40% (some surveys show as low as 35%). Normally, the “honeymoon” period would still be in effect and a president would have approval ratings well over 50%. His present ratings are below whatever Obama ever had. There is still a layer of Trumpsters who will support him no matter what. (As Trump said during the campaign, he could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue in NYC and still retain his support.) What this shows is that the majority in the US is still under the sway of the mainstream of the US capitalist class, as represented by the likes of CNN. That’s because the economic or world political crisis here is not that severe…. Yet.

“Deep State” Conspiracy Theorists
Some conspiracy theorists are claiming that the “deep state” – namely the CIA – is hitting back because it wants a war with Russia. Behind this is the claim that this is so because war is profitable. Incredibly, some who claim to be Marxists echo this nonsense. Why would the military-industrial complex, of which the CIA is part, want to oust Trump for their own financial interests? Isn’t he proposing a $54 billion increase in military funding? No, politics is not that simple.

In reality, the “deep state” is simply part of the capitalist government, which is much more than just the elected officials; it entails all wings of the government bureaucracy. And now one wing of that bureaucracy is keeping in check a president who is not fully beholden to the mainstream of the US capitalist class. And if that president doesn’t fall into line, he will be removed by one means or another.

Enemy of my Enemy = My Friend?
But make no mistake about one thing: Just because the mainstream of the US capitalist class has major conflicts with their counterparts in Russia and the representative of Russian capitalism – Putin – it is a huge mistake to think that workers in the US or anywhere else should side with Putin. Just ask the Russian working class. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.


More at: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2017/03/29 ... nd-russia/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Apr 03, 2017 2:42 pm

World War or World Socialist Revolution?

The world situation is much worse than the liberals and some socialists think.

We saw this through a recent meeting of the socialist “Peace and Freedom Party” featuring a speaker who is a supporter of Putin – Rick Sterling – and a long time Marxist – GS – who is caught in a time warp. They were talking about the attacks on Trump by the CIA, the Democrats, and others.

“Trump Wants Peace”
For Sterling and co., the issue is that “Trump wants peace” and the military industrial complex doesn’t so they’re trying to undermine him. Thirty seconds of reflection will completely disprove that view. Trump wants a $54 billion increase in military spending. He’s stepped up bombing in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and who knows where else. He’s given the US military even greater license to murder civilians. This is peace?

Image
Result of Trump-ordered bombing of al Jinah, Syria.
This is peace?


Listening to the likes of Sterling is like listening to the global warming deniers. They have lots of assorted facts that they string together, without any coherent story. We wouldn’t have to listen to them at all, except that they represent some powerful forces (Trump, Putin, etc.)

Trump’s Financial Ties
The reality is that Trump’s deep and widespread financial ties with Russian capitalists are at the heart of the matter. He’s seeking to use his administration as an outgrowth of Trump Company. That’s what he’s brought his daughter and son-in-law into the White House for – to manage that connection. He’s willing to sacrifice the global interests of US capitalism to the financial interests of the privately held Trump Company. This is strictly a no-no for US capitalism. (Here is an article that documents this, and here is another one.)


More at: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2017/04/02 ... evolution/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:01 am

Jesse Dunstan of ‘The Right Stuff’ Believes Sarin Gas Attack in Syria Was Faked

Image
Neo-Nazi has stupid opinions. News at 11.

Analysts, such as Dr. Beyza Unal of the International Security Department at Chatham House, cast doubt on Russia’s claims, arguing that rebel groups would have neither the money nor the expertise to purify and store sarin gas.

And it’s one thing to suggest, as Vladimir Putin did after a similar chemical attack in 2013, that Syrian rebel groups are staging a false flag to mobilize countries against the Assad regime. Yes, it’s a stupid theory, but some members of Trump’s alt-right fan base, such as white supremacist Jesse Dunstan, have taken this sarin gas trutherism to absurd new depths.

Dunstan, who goes by the pseudonyms Sven and Seventh Son, is a regular on The Right Stuff’s popular podcast The Daily Shoah. He also indicated in a Twitter rant that he believes the attack on the Idlib province was entirely fabricated as part of a neoconservative (i.e., Jewish) plot to push America into another armed conflict.

He began by asserting that there were no gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps, and that no chemical agents were used — at all — in Syria. He also called it a “jewish [sic] false flag to start another jewish [sic] war.”


More at: https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/04/06/je ... was-faked/
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