Undermining the Western experiment — from the right
Let’s face it…. The Kremlin and KGB remain the same, with the identical goal, to undermine the modern western experiment in open-fair-accountable rule of democratic law. This enlightening article from The Washington Post — Maria Butina is just the tip of the Russian iceberg — compares Moscow’s current cozy support of the U.S. radical right to their 1930s subversion via the American far-left.
There are no essential differences. Indeed, some of the very same individuals are using some of the very same methods against us, as they did back when they wore hammer-and-sickle pins and sang the Internationale.
This time, though “ it’s not a proletarian revolution. Instead, it’s a kleptocratic coup d’état: The modern Kremlin project seeks to undermine Western democracies, break up the E.U. and NATO, and put corrupt relationships rather than the rule of law at the center of international commerce,” notes Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum.
Applebaum draws parallels between accused Russian agent Maria Butina and 1940s Soviet spy Jacob Golos, who worked diligently to support communism. She writes: “Precisely because the analogy is so exact, it’s worth remembering why Golos and his network failed. In large part, it was because the center-left — especially the anti-Soviet wing of the American trade union movement — rejected Soviet-style communism in the United States. It’s also because, in the 1940s and 1950s, the American political establishment, Democratic and Republican, unified around the need to defeat Soviet-style communism in Europe. And it’s because, even in the depths of the Depression, the majority of Americans were never beguiled by the appeal of authoritarianism.’
Unfortunately, attitudes toward authoritarianism, oligarchy and autocracy seem to have shifted in America these days.
Indeed, as I point out elsewhere — in my article The Miracle of 1947 — the most powerfully anti-communist element in the United States in the 1940s was the American labor movement… the AFL-CIO etc., which pushed for containment of the USSR, not just isolationism. It was the Greatest Generation — and their favorite living person, Franklin Delano Roosevelt — who won the fight against extremism of right and left and led us into the most productive and free era in history.
But back to Anne Applebaum:
“It’s not at all clear that we are in the same situation now. A wing of the Republican Party is preparing to double down and support the Russian autocracy, which it believes, mistakenly, is “Christian.” While the Pentagon and parts of the bureaucracy — the State Department, the FBI — certainly understand the need to push back in Europe, the White House certainly does not. Which side the Republican Party will end up on is anybody’s guess.”
Oh, we are past guessing. It is down to individual Republicans, now. If just one million of them decide to turn away from Rupert Murdoch’s raving-traitorous teat and rejoin an advanced, adult, scientific, fact-centered, compassionately practical civilization, then we’ll prove we are not lesser men and women than our forebears, but worthy of the title, citizens.