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

[American Dream]

Mandating Passivity: On Liberalism, Loving Enemies, and Punching Nazis


Two men who loved their people.

The Vichy Collaborators also were not Nazis. In fact, the French Aristocrat, Christian de la Mazière, whom Marcel Ophuls interviews in The Sorrow and the Pity, notes that the Vichy officials looked down on him and treated him with contempt when he signed up to join the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne on the Eastern Front. This was an all-French (alt-French?) division of the SS. These same Vichy Collaborators who, like Richard Spencer, were not Nazis, followed the Nazis’ orders and, on July 16-17, 1942, rounded up approximately thirteen thousand Parisian Jews for deportation to various death camps. The Nazis had said that Jewish children under the age of sixteen were not to be included in this roundup (named the Vél’ d’Hiv Roundup, because the Jews were warehoused in the Vélodrome d’Hiver before being deported) but the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, who, like Richard Spencer, was not a Nazi, decided to also include four thousand Jewish children for “humanitarian” reasons—Laval reasoned it was in the children’s best interest not to be separated from their parents. These children, the youngest of whom was eighteen months, were sent to Auschwitz, after being separated from their parents at prior internment camps, by French officials who, like Richard Spencer, also were not Nazis. In 1995, Jacques Chirac said sorry about that and, in 2012, Francois Hollande said ditto.

But on January 20, 2017, Richard Spencer got punched in his not-Nazi head and, later on, punched in his not-Nazi face while celebrating the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States. Attacks on Spencer have continued. On April 9, 2017, it was reported that Richard Spencer “got his [not-Nazi]ass kicked” (and glitter bombed!) while trying to flee a rally in a cab. He reportedly told the cab driver that he thought that those who had masked-up and donned the black were going to kill him. This was a rally Spencer had organized because he believes that America should have a good relationship with Bashar al-Assad and shouldn’t be interfering in Assad’s business in Syria.

Read more: https://poserorprophet.wordpress.com/20 ... nazis/amp/

[American Dream]

Here’s the bizarre reason why the right loves Tulsi Gabbard



Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 15, 2019

That adds some credence to a piece in the New York Times by Lisa Lerer titled “What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?” She laid out some of the same ties to far right groups that I pointed out a few weeks ago. While there is no direct evidence that Gabbard is courting those groups, it is important to note the question and examine why she is a favorite among them.The central message of Gabbard’s campaign is that she stands against the foreign policy establishment as the anti-war candidate. But as Shikha Dalmia points out, that is deceptive.

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, has made opposition to war her signature issue…But that doesn’t make her a peacenik; it makes her an America-Firster, just like President Trump. Indeed, although she went out of her way to condemn Trump as a “warmonger,” there isn’t much daylight between her position and his — which is no doubt why the former White House aide Stephen Bannon, the notorious architect of Trump’s America First campaign, interviewed her for a position in the administration.

In describing herself, Gabbard says that “when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk. When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.” Evan Hill notes how far she’s willing to go on the former.

Gabbard is a staunch supporter of the United States’ counter-ISIS campaign, but her view of the fight goes much further. During a visit to India in 2014, she told an interviewer that the United States had failed in its “very clear” mission to defeat “Islamic extremism”—the fight she said led her to enlist after the September 11 attacks—and that we needed “to focus all of our efforts and energy” and “root out this evil wherever it is.” When pressed on whether torture could be part of those efforts, Gabbard didn’t reject it, saying some believed it worked. Invoking the fantastical scenario of a ticking nuclear time bomb, Gabbard said that if she were president, she “would do everything in my power to keep the American people safe.” If there was a gap between Gabbard’s philosophy and the forever war, it was hard to spot.

More: https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/heres-the-bizarre-reason-why-the-right-loves-tulsi-gabbard/

[American Dream]

In Search of the Russian Soul
How Russia Became the U.S. Far Right’s Mirror


A demonstrator holds up a sign of Vladimir Putin during an anti-Trump 'March for Truth' rally on June 3, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

Hannah Gais
October 11, 2019


Yet the Kremlin’s concern about the possible threat posed by domestic ethno-nationalist groups didn’t dissuade the West’s burgeoning Alt Right from turning to Russia for support and inspiration. In 2008, Preston Wiginton, an American White nationalist with ties to both Russian and British far-right movements and who was reportedly working as DPNI’s Director of International Relations,[45] spent most of his time pontificating on the importance of Russia to the broader White nationalist movement while touting the benefits of an anti-immigrant Russian identity.[46] (Although he was believed to have once sublet David Duke’s Moscow apartment,[47] Wiginton also began staking out his own territory, dubbing Duke an “opportunist” who “will meet with anyone if it makes him look good.”[48]) Wiginton would later use his contacts and access to Texas A&M, his former alma mater, to host various pro-White nationalist events. Among his guests were Aleksandr Dugin, who spoke to the university by Skype because sanctions prevented him from attending his own event in person,[49] and Richard Spencer, the White nationalist credited with coining the term “Alt Right.”[50]

The Alt Right proper was not far behind, although joint organizing with Russian extremists has been haphazard. On the one hand, there is the Alt Right’s interest in Dugin. Arktos, a White nationalist publishing house now based in Hungary, has published a number of Dugin’s works in English, beginning with The Fourth Political Theory in 2012. Another book, the 2014 essay collection Eurasian Mission, outlined Dugin’s approach to working with White nationalists.[51] Around the same time, Richard Spencer and his innocuously-named think tank, the National Policy Institute (NPI), began churning out translations of Dugin’s work with the help of Spencer’s then-wife, Nina Kouprianova. In 2014, Dugin was even billed as one of the main speakers at NPI’s inaugural “European Congress” in Hungary. The conference, which was organized by Spencer and several other prominent White nationalists from American Renaissance and other outfits, proved to be too racist even for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who prevented Dugin and others from entering the country.[52] But the following year, in 2015, Taylor, along with White supremacist lawyer Sam Dickson, made his way to Russia for a conference hosted by Russia’s nationalist party, Rodina (“Motherland”).[53] The event, dubbed the International Russian Conservative Forum, sought to bring together far-right activists from across the globe—what Jared Taylor, the long-time head of American Renaissance, called “an exercise in vigorous free speech that probably could not have been held anywhere else in Europe.”[54] Around the same time, Rodina, along with the far-right, Orthodox Christian nationalist Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), sought to form an international organization for far-right groups dubbed the World National Conservative Movement (mezhdunarodoe natsional’no-konservativnoe dvizhenie).[55]

But it was the U.S. 2016 election that solidified the U.S. Alt Right’s appreciation of the Russian Far Right. For many in the movement, Trump’s praise of Putin and his campaign promise to improve U.S.-Russian relations was more than welcome. Matthew Heimbach, former head of the neonazi Traditionalist Worker Party, became a central organizer in the effort to forge transnational, far-right ties between the countries. Although Heimbach was unable to attend the St. Petersburg forum, he traveled to the United States in September 2017 with RIM’s Stanislav Shevchuk, who, as Heimbach told Think Progress, was the group’s Western Europe representative. Their joint tour came just weeks after White nationalists stormed Charlottesville, Virginia—a live reenactment, of sorts, of the Charlottesville marchers’ chant: “Russia is our friend!”[56]

Russia as a Haven for Anti-LGBTQ Hate?

While Russia may have seemed a promising ally for Holocaust deniers and White nationalists, Russian far-right actors have, thanks to various government crackdowns, found their reach to be limited, forcing them to instead rely on fleeting personal connections. As scholar Marlene Laruelle has argued in researching the issue, “It is important not to conflate influence with confluence.”[57] That is, while both groups sought to collaborate on certain issues, broader cooperation was hard to achieve. Yet they found common ground in anti-LGBTQ activism, most prominently through the World Congress of Families.

As a project of the U.S.-based International Organization for the Family, which promises to “[unite] and [equip] leaders worldwide to promote the natural family,”[58] the WCF was founded with the primary mission of defending the traditional family from the destructive forces of modern liberalism. The WCF was born out of the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society—one of several organizations, including Focus on the Family, that rose to prominence thanks to a wave of institutionalized homophobia within fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s and ‘80s. But while the WCF’s origins are thoroughly American, it could not exist without Russia.

As WCF co-founder Allan Carlson told ThinkProgress, the organization was created several years after he was “contacted out of the blue” by Anatoly Antonov, a professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, in the early ‘90s.[59] Antonov invited Carlson, a former Reagan administration official, to Russia to discuss the importance of the “natural family.”[60] In 1995, Carlson went, meeting with a variety of scholars, politicians (including members of Russia’s Ministry for Social Protection), and activists.[61] Some, such as Ivan Shevchenko, head of the Orthodox Brotherhood of Scientists and Specialists, were eager to make their religious affiliations known.[62]

All shared serious concerns about an impending demographic winter—a term used by “pro-family” groups to refer to the quasi-apocalyptic effects of population decline that, at least in some cases, is akin to White nationalist fears of “White genocide.”[63] In the West, figures such as Steve Mosher of the WCF-partner organization, the Population Research Institute, have expressed concerns that “anti-family” policies and non-White immigration will lead to the decline of Western civilization.[64] In Russia, population decline was and continues to be a serious concern, even outside far-right politics,[65] as poverty, low life expectancy (especially among men), and brain drain have all contributed to a population decline. But rather than address the long-time structural inadequacies behind these statistics, conservative activists have blamed liberalism for destroying the so-called natural family.

The WCF helped cultivate the image of Russia as a valuable partner for American far-right thinkers and organizers across the spectrum. “We are convinced that Russia plays and should play a very prominent role in the matter of family advocacy and moral values on a global scale,” Larry Jacobs, WCF’s now-deceased managing director, said in a 2013 interview.[66]

Cooperation between Russian and American far-right activists continued and grew. In 2014, a massive leak from Russian hacker group Shaltai Boltai revealed strong connections between Alexey Komov, WCF’s Russian representative, and prominent nationalists such as Aleksandr Dugin and Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.

Read more: https://www.politicalresearch.org/2019/ ... ssian-soul

[American Dream]

The Swarmachine: A Historical Puzzle (Part 1)




Anomalies

Mowat, and those that follow him – Tarpley, Marshall, and Engdahl, present a picture much different from this. For them, the entirety of the revolution – and not just the profound subversion – is created from the ground-up in a bid to destabilize Russia by gaining supremacy over its petrol-based territorial concerns. They present an alternative genealogy of these youth-centric, media-optimized and information technology-enhanced movements, finding a precedent long before the cases of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and linking them instead to advances made in social psychology at the British Tavistock Institute in the 1960s. “As far back as 1967,” writes Mowat, “Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the ‘hypnotic effects’ of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of ‘swarming adolescents’ found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s.”xxvi Mowat adds that this swarm behavior was found in practice during in social movements in France of 1967 and 1968, charging that these were aspects of NATO plan to destabilize the government to Charles De Gaulle. Engdahl contributes to this narrative, writing that “A curious tiny group named the Situationist International played an inordinately large role behind the student uprisings in May 1968 leading some researchers to posit that it was backed or steered by US intelligence.”xxvii


“swarming adolescents”

The genealogy is continued with the figure of Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a leading scholar on globalization issues and the internationalization of corporate structures. Mowat draws particular attention to the fact that Perlmutter had been a longtime “follower of Emery.”xxviii He notes that while participating in a “Program for Social Innovations in Global Management” at Cleveland, Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, Perlmutter envisioned how a “rock concert in Katmandu” depicted clearly how the forces of globalization were shifting the traditional bedrocks of culture – something Mowat sees not as the inherent deterritorializing tendencies of transnational capitalism, but the hints of a strategy going back to Emery’s own preoccupations ‘swarming adolescents.’ From the rock concerts to ‘global events’ to mediation via mass media, Perlmutter sees the groundwork being laid for a ‘global civilization’; extrapolating, Engdahl writes that these ideas “contained the core blueprint for the ‘new and improved’ US-made regime change, the modern form of US-staged coup d’etat,” and then immediately links this to the interest in swarming emerging from RAND theorists like Arquilla and Ronfeldt.xxix

This genealogy is puzzling for several reasons. For one, the leap from Perlmutter to RAND is conducted without drawing clear the historical linkages between the two; the reader is left to assume that there are indeed associations between the two. With this linkage in question, the importance of Emery and Perlmutter, much less the Tavistock Institute, becomes extremely less clear – as well as the notion that youth-based swarming tactics are generated via suggestibility induced by television, rock concerts, and other forms of mass-media. Engdahl briefly mentions the history of Tavistock, writing how after World War 2 the Rockefeller Foundation subsidized the organization and reconfigured its internal organization; the interest in this social psychology research lab was allegedly to “co-opt legitimate psychological insights into social groups and social dynamics in order to refine techniques of manipulation.”xxx

The case of the color revolutions is not the first time that Tavistock and its affiliation with the Rockefeller Foundation has been linked to countercultural networks. Mark Stahlman, writing on the Nettime mailing list, calls attention to cybernetician Gregory Bateson’s speech at the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference,xxxi titled “Conscious Purpose vs. Nature.” This talk used cybernetic models, discovered in the military-industrial labors of the second world war, to depict civilizations as an entity bound up in complex systems; he argues that both traditional structures of power and the forces resistance to them are ultimately flawed due to the inability to articulate the world as an interconnected ecology. Stahlman characterizes these developments as part of a “psy-war sensibility”xxxii – after all, the Dialectics of Liberation’s organizer, anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing, had been affiliated with Tavistock from 1957 to 1967.xxxiii He further argues that “[countercultural struggles] are at the heart of the ‘Rockefeller’ effort to ‘social engineer’ the world through ‘control by choice’ for more than 60 years.”xxxiv


R.D. Laing


Gregory Bateson

Where does this ongoing interest in the Tavistock Institute come from? The source here, presumably, would be the ongoing preoccupation with the institution held by the constellation organizations and journals orbiting Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche’s own trajectory had begun in the Marxist circles in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s; during the events at Columbia University in 1968, he launched the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) with the aid of members of the Progressive Labor Party – the latter having been expelled from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The NCLC took a hardline stance against the radical counterculture, seeing movements like the SDS as being ‘tainted’ by the influence of Black Nationalism, Third World liberation struggles and the Frankfurt School theories espoused by Herbert Marcuse. By the early 70s this discontent blossomed into a massive conspiracy theories, connecting US intelligent services to a bid for world domination perpetrated by the British government. This increasingly paranoid worldview was reflected by a shift from the far-left, following an abandonment of Marxist ideology, to to the far-right, with ties being formed with the Ku Klux Klan and Liberty Lobby (founded by the staunch anti-Semite Willis Carto). Despite these overtures, LaRouche’s network is large, operating through various organizations (the aforementioned NCLC, the International Caucus of Labor Committees, the Schiller Institute), political parties (the US Labor Party), and publications (New Solidarity, Campaigner Magazine, Fusion, Executive Intelligence Review).

The critics of the color revolution model – Tarpley, Marshall, Engdahl (with the exclusion of Mowat) – have all been affiliated, at one point, with various LaRouche organizations. Stahlman, too, is without exception, having written for Fusion Magazine,xxxv while also having served as the vice-president of Computron Technologies Corporation, an information technologies firm close to the LaRouche network.xxxvi Tarpley, meanwhile, was the editor of The Campaigner, the official organ of the NCLC, a board member of the Executive Intelligence Review, and the president of the Schiller Institute’s US branch; he distanced himself from the network in the mid-90s. Marshall seems to lack direct ties to any of these organizations, in 2003 he organized a talk by LaRouche for the College Democrats organization at Middlebury College.xxxvii Engdahl can be found contributing to the Executive Intelligence Review until the mid-90s, after several decades of being affiliated with the NCLC. A 1974 issue of The Campaigner discusses Engdahl at length, describing him as the victim of a bizarre “brainwashing plot” conducted by the CIA, presumably based on methods perfected at the Tavistock Institute.xxxviii

Furthermore, each idea propagated in their analyses of the color revolutions is based upon precedents found within LaRouche’s expansive conspiracy theories. For example, a 1974 issue of the the NCLC’s New Solidarity attempts to the link, much like Engdahl in Full Spectrum Dominance, the Situationist International and the events of May ’68 to the CIA:

The Makhnist Situationist International pig countergang created by the CIA from scratch in 1957 in France under the slogans “Kill the Vanguards!,” “Workers Councils Now!,” and “Create Situations!,” is the paradigm example of a CIA synthetic all-purpose formation. The loose and programless anarchist “left cover” countergang on the SI model is ideal for the CIA for the recruitment of new agents, the launching of psywar operations…xxxix

Then we have the curious repetition of the theme of rock music, which Mowat and Engdahl both fold into their discussion of the swarming youth movements. Rock music has been a frequent target of LaRouchian critique, ranging from the relationship of the Grateful Dead to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program to the atmosphere of ‘Dionysian intoxication’ that concerts and festivals generates. An article in The Campaigner in 1978 is even more explicit, and connects several of the strands found in the criticisms of the color revolutions:

…one need trace the origins of today’s standing army of rock musicians and exotic composers no further historically than the post-World War II academic hegemony of the malicious Aristotelian doctrine of “cultural relativism” synthesized in the London Tavistock Institute in the late 1930s and associated with warped, former Office of Strategic Services intelligence associate and “cultural anthropologist” Margaret Mead [the wife of Gregory Bateson]… Mead’s and [Gustave] Reese’s assertion that any manifestation of general cultural retardation, now matter how bestial or degenerate, has its “democratic” right to exist in opposition to policies of cultural, intellectual, and technological development serves not only for the perseverance of long-standing British colonial policy for the developing sector. The same outlook, in the form of the Frankfurt School-Tavistock Institute known popularly as Adorno and Nevitt Sanford’s The Authoritarian Personality has constituted the basis of direct extension of the most bestial aspect of that colonial culture to the advanced sector nations over the last twenty years.xl

Reviewing the innumerable threads of LaRouche’s conspiratorial ideology, one begins to see the emergence of a rich tapestry revolving almost entirely around the concept of “social engineering,” enacted by the British Empire and the Rockefeller Foundations and various ‘front’ organizations, like the CIA and Tavistock. The problem is that not everything that be dismissed entirely out of hand; like all effective propaganda systems, the LaRouche conspiracy blends well-documented historical facts with outright fabrication, collides unfounded conjecture with coincidence, and distills the complexity of events swirling through time down to a very basic linearity – a historical determinism founded on the dialectical opposition of, oddly enough, Platonic universalism with Aristotlian ‘relativism.’

What the LaRouchians concern themselves, with their interest in the Tavistock Institute, is the cultivation of what Philip Mirowski has called the “Cyborg Sciences” and Eugene Thacker the “informatic” paradigm.xli This includes the interrelated domain of post-war sciences that runs the gamut from cybernetics to game theory, communication theory to molecular biology, family therapy to military systems analysis to neoliberal economic systems; it is also true that many of the organizations that the LaRouche network dedicates so many pages too – the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Macy Conferences, Tavistock, etc. – were essential in developing these sciences, and through their relationship to social and material bases have laid the groundwork for much of our contemporary, globalized world.

This fact has been woefully under analyzed, and on a mass-scale, represents a critical blind spot for those attempting to eek out exit-points from the current world system. Misguided ideologues like the LaRouchians only obfuscate these matters further, distorting the actuality of these events and the technological, political, economic, and philosophical filiations that made them possible and likewise have been created by them. The end-point for each of these sciences has been the swarm – the network distribution of disparate forces and their capability for collective movements, self-organization, and self-regulation – and the fact that both opposition figures as well as those who wield instruments of power have been able to latch onto this formulation as a source of agency merits a deeper look.

Sifting through the scattered events, ideas and movements that LaRouche and his followers have so unfortunately parsed together into a cohesive, singular image, can we construct an alternative genealogy, one that is far more equitable to contributing to our understanding of – and hopefully resistance to – the neoliberal society, something than can only be described, as Deleuze once did, as a society of control?

https://deterritorialinvestigations.wor ... le-part-1/

Family, school, army, and factory are no longer so many analogous but different sites converging in an owner, whether the state or some private power, but transmutable or transformable coded configurations of a single business where the only people left are administrators. Even art has moved away from closed sites and into the open circuits of banking. Markets are won by taking control rather than by establishing a discipline, by fixing rates rather than by reducing costs, by transforming products rather than by specializing production. Corruption here takes on a new power. The sales department becomes a business’ center or “soul.” We’re told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world. Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters. Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.

Gilles Deleuze-
Postscript on Societies of Control

[American Dream]

Third Democratic Party debate

BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON OCTOBER 16, 2019

Syria, Tulsi Gabbard and red-brown alliance
One of the most spirited subjects to be discussed was foreign policy, specifically Syria, and here is where the truly dangerous nature of Tulsi Gabbard emerged. All the candidates but her strongly condemned Trump’s actions. While Gabbard mildly criticized it, her main point was to call for an end to “the regime change war that we are waging in Syria”. She repeated this phrase – “regime change wars” – time and again. This is the term the overt and covert Assad supporters use. They claim that the revolt in Syria is just a US effort at regime change. Along the way, they dismiss or ignore Assad’s absolutely criminal repression. So Gabbard was making a dog whistle to them. (At least Biden attacked her for this lie of hers.)

The issue of Syria is the key nexus where the “left” and the far right, including outright fascists, meet, and Tulsi Gabbard is playing the role of the magnet for this tendency within the Democratic Party. She seems to be very conscious of that, as she was the only one to be fairly restrained also when the issue of a woman’s right to choose, a woman’s control over her own body, came up. In the few minutes allotted to her, Gabbard chose to talk against third trimester abortions. Regardless of whether she is right or not, this again is a dog whistle for the anti-abortion crowd.

It is no accident that Gabbard is endorsed by fascists like David Duke and far right conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich. No matter what happens with Trump, Gabbard will likely continue as a dangerous meeting point for the far right and the “left”. She will continue to sow confusion, despite the fact that she will almost certainly not come near the nomination.


The contestants. Gabbard pulled a brilliant move
by dressing in white while all the other candidates were in dark colors.
But that was the least of the ways she stood out. She’s a true danger.

More: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2019/10/16 ... -debate-2/

[liminalOyster]

She repeated this phrase – “regime change wars” – time and again. This is the term the overt and covert Assad supporters use. They claim that the revolt in Syria is just a US effort at regime change. Along the way, they dismiss or ignore Assad’s absolutely criminal repression. So Gabbard was making a dog whistle to them. (At least Biden attacked her for this lie of hers.

I am, to put it mildly, struggling to buy that "regime change," a very mainstream democrat phrase during the W years, is now a fascist dog-whistle. Nor for that matter that Joe Biden did peace and justice a real solid.

[American Dream]

The claim that her politics is more "America First" than anti-Colonial, Internationalist and what have you, bears further consideration. I'm no big fan of the Dems, but I would place a lot of the things she does in line with new Republican currents.

[American Dream]

I just made a post dedicated to this proposition:

Tulsi Gabbard Is No ‘Progressive’ on Foreign Policy

[American Dream]

(Guest Article) Nazis, Russians, and Tories; Oh My! Penetration of Conservative Canadian Media by Pro-Russian Actors

Over the past year, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, the husband of alt-right campus activist Lindsay Shepherd, has received recent coverage for his previous work as an editor for Charles Bausman's Russia Insider. A central hub for the dissemination of pro-Russian disinformation during the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Russia Insider was funded by Konstantin Malofeev, the oligarch sanctioned by Canada for his role in funding Russian militias involved in the country's invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Malofeev is also known for funding the activities of Russian political operatives Aleksandr Dugin and Alexy Komov, individuals involved in foreign influence operations targeting western countries. Ever since his public exposure, Cosmin has made pains to self-censor himself as a means to stay relevant though still enjoys signalling his extremism to his followers. He frequently claims to have not known about Bausman's ideological inclinations, that is not true. A VKonkate page Cosmin created during his stint at Russia Insider shows the only person that Dzsurdzsa followed was Holocaust denier Aleksandr Dugin. Past tweets include quotes of American Nazi sympathizers during World War II, including Ezra Pound and James Laughlin. Currently, Dzsurdzsa now works as an editor for the Post Millennial, an astroturfed website cofounded by Jeff Ballingall whose coverage revolves solely around producing partisan propaganda favouring the Conservative Party of Canada.

Continues: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... ories.html

[American Dream]

A “New Dawn” for Fascism: the Rise of the Anti-Establishment Capitalists

by MICHAEL BARKER



Wall Street’s Bolshevik Conspiracy?

Today the main proponents of the fabrication that the Bolsheviks were merely tools of Western imperialists are right-wing conspiracy theorists, many of whom like to refer to themselves as either libertarians or apolitical. One of the most famous texts expounding this timeless deceit is Anthony C. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974), a book whose “research” has now been given a new breath of life by Professor Richard Spence’s more sophisticated but equally conspiratorial book Wall Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905-1925 (2017). But despite being an apparent specialist in modern espionage and the occult, Spence, like many more run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists, has an unhealthy propensity for treating declassfited files released by ill-informed intelligence agencies at face-value. Spence however is no marginal scholar as in 2010 he worked as a research fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and has been interviewed the Russian television channel NTV as a so-called specialist on “Trotsky’s American Connections” for an upcoming documentary on the Russian Revolution. In addition he remains a regular contributor to the popular pro-Putin conspiracy magazine, New Dawn.

For those who simply don’t have the time to keep up with the latest extraterrestrial elite machinations and the New World Order’s genocidal plots, you should know that New Dawn is a big-hitter in the field, with bimonthly issues over-brimming with ‘adverts’ for alternative medicine boosted by all manner of quasi-fascist nonsense.[1] The latest issue of this bloated magazine leads with the article “Putin takes on the U.S. Deep State” (July/August), with the author of this piece being former InfoWars editor, Patrick Henningsen. Most notably the only politician listed on New Dawn’s roll-call of endorsers for their verbose tosh is the neo-fascist, Alexandre Dugin, who they correctly identify as the “leader of International Eurasian Movement.” As Dugin’s endorsement explains: “New Dawn magazine is one of the best sources of realistic information on the state of things in our world as it nears its inevitable and predicted end.”

Here the connection between the delusions promoted by New Dawnand the mystifying work of people like Professor Spence is the utility of their ideas to the powerful, more specifically in helping to undermine the legitimacy of revolutionary socialism. Certainly the liberal (globalist) elites that New Dawn and their writers obsess about do engage in anti-democratic activities. But New Dawn’s paranoid ramblings about the actions of these allegedly all-powerful elites is far removed from the sober Marxist class-analysis that is necessary to understand how such elites profit from capitalism (and sometimes from fascism). But what else would you expect from a magazine that includes well-known fascists like Dr Kerry Bolton upon its roster of regular writers. Focusing on Bolton for a moment, he cites as authorities for his own pro-Putin conspiracies the work of Antony C. Sutton and Richard Spence, and asserts that Stalin was correct in his belief that both Trotsky and his followers “were agents of foreign capital and foreign powers” seeking to promote capitalism!?

Bolton points to the fact that a handful of leading Trotskyist intellectuals went on to work hand-in-hand with the CIA as further proof that Marxists were always working for Wall Street. What Bolton fails to mention is that these intellectuals all renounced their belief in Marxism in order to become well paid and respected conservatives. Moreover in the early days of their new-found careers as turncoats these former Marxists simply joined forces with the longstanding conservative leadership of the AFL-CIO, who right from the early days of the Russian Revolution had been open in their opposition to Bolshevism and to union democracy more generally. Bolton is therefore only correct when he says that neoconservative activists eventually went on to help create the US Government’s interventionist and imperialist National Endowment for Democracy (NED), but only in the early 1980s. Bringing his conspiracy up-to-date, elsewhere Bolton draws a direct connect between “international capital” and individuals like George Soros and groups like the NED, with regards their continuing role in “fomenting revolutions”. As he goes on to explain for an article published with the neo-fascist/Traditionalist publisher Counter-Currents (an outlet which popularizes the nazi mysticism of “Hitler’s Priestess” Savitri Devi):

“The primary factor that was behind the bankers’ support for the Bolsheviks whether from London, New York, Stockholm, or Berlin, was to open up the underdeveloped resources of Russia to the world market, just as in our own day George Soros, the money speculator, funds the so-called ‘color revolutions’ to bring about ‘regime change’ that facilitates the opening up of resources to global exploitation. Hence there can no longer be any doubt that international capital a plays a major role in fomenting revolutions…”

Putin’s Ukraine

In the November 2014 issue of New Dawn the magazine featured another article authored by Bolton titled “The great conspiracy against Russia: what is really behind the campaign against Putin?” His purile rant began with considerable gusto:

“When the war-drums start beating in Washington against a state or statesman, one is entitled to wonder what transgression might have been made against the ‘New World Order’. Over the past few decades we have seen one nation after another succumb to either financial blandishments, or when those fail, long-planned, well-funded ‘spontaneous’ colour revolutions, and as a last resort bombs. The states of the ex-Soviet bloc largely succumbed to ‘colour revolutions’ orchestrated by the Soros network, aligned with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID and a host of other funds and NGOs.”

Following close to Putin’s now-official propaganda line, Bolton fumes against the imperialist interventions of the NED undertaken in the Ukraine and their allegedly manufacturing of endless popular uprisings. But in reality it should be obvious that the sizable financial support provided to civil society groups by US elites does not allow them to manufacture revolutionary discontent out of thin air; it only allows them to promote their own capitalist interests in their ongoing attempts to forestall genuinely radical, dare I say, revolutionary socialist change. Yes, the US will do everything in their power to encourage new capitalist governments that are more likely to prioritize friendly relations with them, but so too would Russia.

So in the Ukraine, as elsewhere, Putin intervenes as an imperialist power-broker to promote his own countries’ capitalist foreign policy objectives, while the US does the same. Neither, however, have the best interest of the working-class at heart, and so both governments and their contributions to the “East-West tug-of-war” deserve our criticism. This is not, however, how other political commentators see matters, and perhaps in part because of the lack of an influential working class political alternative (which still needs working on), some misguided people end up following the crude logic that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Bolton breaks from such motivations only because he chooses to support Putin because it serves his own personal agenda – even though, it should be said, Putin himself is no fascist.

Regime Change Inc. and the New World Order

A further intriguing example of similar reactionary thinking vis-a-visthe dynamics of social change is provided in the work of F. William Engdahl, who in 2004 republished his 1992 book A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order with the left-wing publisher Pluto Press. Prior to Pluto’s not so inspired decision to publish this book, Engdahl had spent decades working as an editor for Lyndon LaRouche’s conspiracy network (at least until 1997), and his book merely recycled many LaRouchite narratives including that the 1960s counterculture New Age movement was a manufactured CIA-backed “project.” To be more specific, according to Engdahl the creation of the hippie movement had been overseen by the “Anglo-American liberal establishment” which was then used in conjunction with another “weapon” of the elite, the creation of a “manipulated ‘race war’”. As part of this fictional elite-orchestrated process of social change Engdahl went on to add more details to his heady conspiracy, noting that: “The May 1968 student riots in France, were the result of the vested London and New York financial interests in the one G-10 nation which continued to defy their mandate.” In a brief comment he then explained his idiotic belief that…

“modern Anglo-American liberalism bore a curious similarity to the Leninist concept of a ‘vanguard party,’ which imposed a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the name of some future ideal of society. Both models were based on deception of the broader populace.”

Since publishing his first book Engdahl has continued his prolific publishing record by writing for New Age neo-fascist magazines like New Dawn. Building upon his credentials as an oil historian he now publicises his conversion to the latest right-wing conspiracy craze that asserts that oil is actually limitless and not actually a fossil fuel (in this Engdahl consciously drew upon Stalinist research carried out by Russian and Ukrainian scientists in the 1950s). Engdahl’s ability to read conspiracies into any subject are truly second to none: a couple of years ago he chose to misinterpret medical research that actually highlighted progress in the struggle to fight cancer in order to write an article asserting that scientific evidence proved that chemotherapy, not cancer, is the real killer!

Engdahl it seems is a man with a special mission, and in recent years he has served on the advisory boards of two neo-fascist journals that were published in Italy (Geopolitica which was edited by a leading member of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, and Eurasia, Rivista di Studi Geopolitici which was published and edited by Italian Nazi-Maoist Claudio Mutti). Engdahl is also a regular contributor (like Dr Bolton) to the articles and videos produced by the neo-fascist Russian think tank Katehon – a group funded by billionaire philanthropist Konstantin Malofeev (see later) whose work is overseen by the close Dugin-ally and homegrown Ukrainan esoteric fascist, Leonid Savin. In line with this political orientation, Engdahl additionally writes and acts as an advisor for Veterans Today, an organization that, in the name of opposing warmongering, does yeoman’s service to popularizing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.[2]

Engdahl’s railing against the globalist conspiracy was fully evident in his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Herein Engdahl focuses on the historic activities of liberal philanthropy and the NED in creating what he calls synthetic movements for ‘non-violent change.’ This book was well-received in certain Russian military circles, and was cited approvingly by fellow Katehon contributor Andrew Korybko in his 2015 book Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Changewhich Korybko was able publish while he was a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. Korybko is also privileged enough to be able to espouse his views to a global audience through his work as a journalist for Sputnik International. However, although people like Engdahl and Korybko do great work at popularizing disempowering theories, arguably the most effective proponent of the conspiracy surrounding the activities of the NED in Eurasia was undertaken by Putin’s former chief PR strategist, Gleb Pavlovsky.

Gleb Pavlovsky’s unique role in helping develop a reactive strategy to foreign “democracy” promoters like the NED has been referred to as “Putin’s Preventive Counter-Revolution” by Robert Horvath. He argues that his strategy was born of the regimes anxiety in the wake of the 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia, which marked “the first of the new wave of democratic revolutions in the post-Soviet space”. Pavlovsky is subsequently credited with having been the “mastermind of the Putin regime’s response” to these NED/Soros-backed democratic interventions. Moreover, Horvath adds a personal aside to this tale, observing that because Pavlovsky had served as “an advisor to the [Viktor] Yanukovych camp in the Ukrainian presidential election [in 2004], he had experienced the ‘Orange Revolution’ as a personal defeat.” Hence Pavlovsky’s went on to play a critical role in encouraging Putin to respond with a more thoroughgoing embrace of a conspiratorial interpretation of social uprisings.

No doubt taking hope from such conspiracies, Putin, during the 2007 Russian election, delivered his “most venomous tirade against the enemy within” for “counting ‘upon the support of foreign foundations and governments and not the support of their own people’. The following week these foreign enemies were then the focus of Arkadii Mamontov’s powerful conspiracy documentary Barkhat.ru (velvet.ru), which, as Horvath explained, “vilified leading opposition activists involved in the Other Russia coalition.” In this documentary F. William Engdahl found his voice yet again as the sole foreign expert to legitimate this open display of state propaganda. Echoing the aforementioned conspiracies surrounding the foreign funding of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mamontov maligned the anti-Putin political activism undertaken by the libertarian Russian-Croatian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, explaining to his viewers that Kasparov had “returned from America, like his colleague Trotsky once did”.

Bigotry in the Service of Tsardom

Perhaps styling himself after Fox News’ own once-powerful conspirator, Bill O’Reilly, Mamontov never misses a chance to launch vicious tirades against western liberalism. Mamontov thus puts his weekly sermons on the major national TV channel, Rossiya 1, to full use in the service of Putin’s anti-liberal brand of authoritarianism. In many ways the content of these Orwellian hate shows might be seen as an attempt to emulate Stalin’s famous show trials, allowing Mamontov and his conspirators to publicly try and convict all those guilty of tainting Russian patriotism. Just as Stalin persecuted Trotsky’s supporters as fascists (the enemy within), to Mamontov all critics of Putin (whether liberal or socialist) are fascist as far as he is concerned. That said, it is the alleged perversion and decadence of the West that features as Mamontov’s number one target, with one of his most vile contributions to date being his 2015 documentary Sodom, which is nothing other than a relentless attack on homosexuality. Keen to utilize ‘independent’ western critics to attack America’s latest so-called export, Sodom features the notorious anti-gay Christian activist Scott Lively, who in addition to being the author of bile-filled book The Pink Swastika, famously advised the Ugandan government on their notorious anti-homosexual legislation. Lively later went on to closely replicate Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill by working with Brian Brown to help the Russia state draft their own hateful Anti-Gay Laws. Notably, only last year Brian Brown went on to be elected president of the World Congress on Families – an international far-right coalition which has been correctly described as “one of the major driving forces behind the U.S. Religious Right’s global export of homophobia and sexism.” Joining arms with American funders, conservative Russian elites also played a central role in founding the World Congress on Families; and one billionaire who is to the fore of currently funding the Congresses activities is the loyal Putin-supporter, Konstantin Malofeev.

Much like the amazing Octopus-like reach of the Koch Brothers in America, Malofeev, as a devout extremist philanthropist, not only acts the president of his own neo-fascist think tank, Katehon, but has also founded his own his own Russian Orthodox TV channel with none other than Dugin sitting at its editorial helm. Another of Malofofeev’s explicitly elitist pet ambitions is to ensure that a new patriotic cadre is ready to rule Russia when (as he hopes) the Eurasian movement comes to complete domination of the state apparatus. To undertake this task Malofofeev created St Basil the Great School, which as he explained “in an interview with the Guardian, is meant to function as ‘an Orthodox Eton’, which will prepare the new elite for a future Russian monarchy.”

More: https://louisproyect.org/2017/08/23/a-n ... pitalists/

[American Dream]

Sometimes #campism sneaks up on you

https://twitter.com/BlackSocialists/sta ... 7216996353

[Joe Hillshoist]

The claim that her politics is more "America First" than anti-Colonial, Internationalist and what have you, bears further consideration. I'm no big fan of the Dems, but I would place a lot of the things she does in line with new Republican currents.

She is a politician. She is gonna say what she thinks she needs to get elected.

So if she frames her policies one way - ie anti colonial - then it will be spun in the media a particular way. Same with this use of language. If she frames them as "America first" the she doesn't automatically alienate a bunch of people who have been programed to react against "anti colonialism" like a dog whistle.

The moment you alienate those people you lose the chance to do anything to change the way they think or bring them around to a side of politics that is less nasty and fucked up.

BTW Her old man was a Republican wasn't he? And she is a Hindu. Both those things are likely to make her more socially conservative (and to make her sketchy about Muslims. My old man used to always bang on about how dangerous Muslims were, back in the 70s and 80s. Grew up with them in Fiji and despite the historical animosity between Muslims and Hindus the reality of those situations when you pushed for the detail was the same ordinary tribalism everyone carries with them.)

The fact she publicly described her change of heart on same sex/queer issues and put a context to it is a good thing imo cos it shows a person prepared to examine their own behaviour and beliefs in the context of the wider world and change it if they feel its appropriate to change.

[American Dream]

I tend to view things from the perspective of cult mind control. Not that I am saying that she is a robot or anything like that, but that these cultish groups tend to promote rigid thinking and wack beliefs. I would not be surprised that she changed her homophobic stance because she realized that it would be very hard for her outside the Republican Party if not, but I can't say that I consider Modi or Assad "good eggs" in any way. Also, the fact that she was going for a position in the Trump Administration is, I think, telling...

[American Dream]

Against campism: What makes some leftists support Putin?

NOVEMBER 5, 2015 BY ADMIN



By Daphne Lawless, Fightback Tāmaki Makarau

At the time of writing, Russian forces are intervening in the civil wars in Ukraine and Syria; supporting the rebellions in the eastern provinces in the first case, and dropping bombs in support of the government of Bashar al-Assad in the second.

While he may have been a general in the old KGB, Vladimir Putin is no socialist. While Russia is formally ‘democratic’, political rights are very limited for anyone not aligned with Putin’s United Russia party. Notoriously, queer communities are persecuted by means of a law against “homosexual propaganda”, and Putin has fought a bloody civil war to quell the independence struggle in the republic of Chechenya. Neo-liberal economics has been used to cut living standards every bit as fiercely as it has in the West.

So why would anyone on the Left support Russia intervening in Ukraine or Syria, any more than they support the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan? Because they do. Leftist magazines like Counterpunch support Russian bombs falling in Syria. Several leftists in Aotearoa/NZ are members of a Facebook group called “Vladimir Putin Fan Club NZ. Putin it right !!” (sic)

Multipolar disorder

Several arguments have been used by such people. Perhaps the most serious is that in favour of a “multipolar world”. The argument is that the current world neoliberal system hinges on the unchallenged hegemony of the “Western” bloc, under the military leadership of the biggest imperial power of the planet, the United States. Therefore, a “multipolar” world would mean more freedom for popular forces to move against the global neoliberal order.

The late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was a great promoter of this idea. Many Western leftists who supported his government’s struggle for the working people and poor at home were left scratching their heads as he toured the world shaking hands and doing deals with the authoritarian leaderships of Russia or China, or Libya’s Qadhafi. He even supported the Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe, which imprisons and tortures socialists, and counted as an ally the Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko, who boasts of “wringing the necks” of the political opposition.

As an isolated leader of a socialist government in a capitalist state, Chávez can’t be blamed for trying to get any help he could. But for those of us without the responsibilities of state power, making a virtue out of necessity is not the basis for a political strategy.

This kind of politics is often called “campism” – in the metaphor that the world is divided into several military “camps”, with the largest being the Western camp led by the United States. Therefore, any government which disagrees with American foreign policy – no matter how oppressive to its own people, or however wedded to neoliberal market economics – can be supported. These governments are even called “anti-imperialist” – as if there were only one imperialism, that of the Western bloc. Those who’ve been watching China’s moves to extend its military reach across East Asia, or its economic power in Africa, have good reason to question that.

When two camps go to war…

The best argument which has been made to explain this thought process is that it’s a left-over from the Cold War, when the world was (at first) divided between the Western/USA bloc under the slogan of “freedom”, and the Eastern/Soviet bloc under the slogan of “peace”. Later, China emerged as the leader of a third bloc under a slogan of “national independence”.

At the time, many Western leftists saw the Soviet Union or China as “workers’ states”, which were a better alternative to capitalism. This led to many twists and turns as local parties and movements jumped around to justify the foreign policy of their preferred foreign “socialist” country. It was an article of faith for such groups that since their preferred country was “socialist”, it could not be imperialist, based on Vladimir Lenin’s analysis that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. Therefore, even when the Soviet Union ransacked eastern Germany’s industrial base after the Second World War, or invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan to support its puppet regimes, this could not be “imperialist” by definition.

In contrast, other socialists refused to take sides. They described themselves as supporters of a “Third Camp” – opposing both the Western/US camp, and the camp of the bureaucratic states claiming to be socialist, with the “camp” of independent working-class action. The Socialist Workers Party in Britain led with the famous slogan of “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism”. During the workers’ uprising in Poland in the 1980s, while other socialists were trying to justify a Russian-backed military crackdown on the Solidarity independent union, the SWP’s newspaper headline read: “Russian tanks, Western banks, hands off Solidarity.”

Old slogans

One way to see the love-fest for Putin or other “anti-imperialist” dictatorships is simply a leftover from the days of the Soviet Union. Of course neither Russia nor Syria claim to be any sort of socialist country. But when you’ve spent a long time in the habit of thinking that the real problem in the world is American military hegemony – rather than the global capitalist system which that hegemony really serves – then you can justify any oppressive regime which is anti-American.

The “campists” even still use the old Soviet sloganeering – for example, when they claim that the Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine are fighting “fascists” in the Ukrainian government. While there certainly are some vile fascist mobs backing the Kiev regime, the mobs who rule the “Novorossiya” zones are only different in the symbols they use. Like the USA uses “anti-terrorism” as an excuse for conquest today, so did the old Soviet Union use “anti-fascism”; the official name of the Berlin Wall was the “Anti-fascist Protection Barrier”.

One sure sign of a campist mindset is that vile behaviour which is condemned on the other side is condoned on one’s own side, or outright denied. Campists are rightly outraged at the beheadings, sex slavery and other barbaric practices of the Islamist extremist group Da’esh (also known as ISIS). But they keep their mouths shut about the Syrian government’s use of “barrel bombs” and poison gas against opposition forces – even arguing that their chemical attack on Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus was a “false flag” operation.

We are all pawns

The use of the term “false flag” brings up the close alliance of “campism” with conspiracy theory. Campism, which sees the world as something like a “game board” where various governments move their pieces, can’t accept the concept of independent action by oppressed peoples or the working masses. So, every uprising against an “anti-imperialist” government is rejected as a CIA-backed “colour revolution”. It’s no coincidence that RT, the Russian government-backed news channel, promotes American conspiracy theorists who are considered a joke in their own media.

And of course the United States have an interest in overthrowing such governments and replacing them with reliable toadies. But to believe that that nullifies the existence of real grassroots movements within such uprisings is to reject the idea that socialist revolution is possible at all, that everything is secretly manipulated by some government or secret service or other such conspiracy. As one British socialist put it: “If you can’t fight for yourself, either because you are too weak or too isolated the temptation is to look for other forces who can do it for you.”

The kind of mindset which could defend Zimbabwe or North Korea as “anti-imperialist” could end up actually supporting Da’esh, on the basis that the democratic Syrian opposition forces have accepted guns from the West – and this is indeed what at least one group calling itself “communist” has declared. It is the logic that “stability” under a dictatorship is better than a chaotic situation of uprisings – a point of view which should be associated with conservative “realists”, not revolutionary socialists.

The enemy at home?

Other times, you hear the argument that“the main enemy is at home”, and therefore we have to oppose our own governments, not foreign governments. “The main enemy is at home” is a slogan that the German socialist Karl Leibknecht used to oppose the Social Democrats’ sell-out to support the First World War, which was justified with the argument that the Tsar of Russia was a much worse tyrant than the Kaiser of Germany.

But the people using that slogan to support the Syrian or Russian governments on this issue ignore that Liebknecht was opposed to all the imperialist governments fighting in the war. He certainly didn’t support the Russian government of the time any more than he cheered on his own. And of course he supported the Russian Revolution which brought down the Tsar from below – not the German armies on the Eastern Front.

We certainly want to oppose our own government. So we have to oppose New Zealand military intervention in Syria, Ukraine or any other civil conflict, and deny any support for the United States military or any Western-backed coalition – just as we oppose the barbarism of the Russian or Syrian governments or Da’esh. But we can’t let ourselves become useful idiots for any other oppressive regime.

https://fightback.org.nz/2015/11/05/aga ... ort-putin/

[Joe Hillshoist]

I tend to view things from the perspective of cult mind control. Not that I am saying that she is a robot or anything like that, but that these cultish groups tend to promote rigid thinking and wack beliefs. I would not be surprised that she changed her homophobic stance because she realized that it would be very hard for her outside the Republican Party if not, but I can't say that I consider Modi or Assad "good eggs" in any way. Also, the fact that she was going for a position in the Trump Administration is, I think, telling...

Yeah i don't follow it enough but she's a topic of conversation among some friends. I didn't know she'd chased a spot in the trump admin. Then again given her party to me there isn't alot of difference. I agree on the cult thing to a point but I'm pretty sure Butler is a registered and officially acceptable (or whatever the process is to confer legitimacy) Hindu guru. My old man was a Hindu priest, not in India in Fiji, so it wasn't as strict in terms of all the hardcore politicisation of castes and such. its a fairly open religion and the version she identifies with is pretty clear in its aims and requirements. Its one of the more conservative schools of Hinduism tho.

I dunno about the change in her beliefs ... on one hand I wouldn't trust any politician on the other going to war (or any similar kind of life changing and challenging experince away from home) can change the way you see the world, especially if you've come from a small town kind of background and I imagine Hawaiiian politics is very much like that.

Modi is scum. Assad ... I dunno. Pretty scummy but in this particular circumstance not as scummy as some.

I know people who were in Syria 10 - 15 years ago and it was a reasonably modern society compared to what it is now. One of them mentioned that people were sad about the Iraq invasion and how bad it was gonna be for people in Iraq. Then again he is also a repressive middle eastern dictator.

Personally I'm a bit disgusted with the US stabbing the Kurdish people in Syria in the back (again for what the 30th time? as far as US betrayal of Kurdish people goes...) But I guess someone like Trump, or any US admin on either side of politics for that matter, was never gonna let their support for a socialist peoples movement last. But from what i understand the Kurds were less fucked up than every other party in that conflict.