Russia Russia Russia!

 You know, one thing I’ve always been aware of, ever since Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, was how he’s never had a critical word to say about Vladamir Putin.  How the Russians did him a big favour later that year, by hacking into the emails of  the Democratic party and publishing them on the internet, at the same time as Trump was under fire for making sexist remarks about grabbing women’s genitals. 

How Trump’s first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was previously the campaign advisor for Victor Yanukovych, Putin’s pick for Ukrainian President,  who was thrown out of office by a spontaneous uprising of Ukrainians in 2014, known as the Maidan revolution, leaving Manafort without a job and in debt for a million dollars to a Russian oligarch, until he teamed up with the Trump campaign.

Or, how, when a journalist asked Trump about his support for a murderer like Putin, Trump shrugged it off, and said the U.S. was no better.  How Trump was under investigation by the FBI for his connections to the Russians (the Mueller investigation) which did not find Trump guilty of collusion, but did uncover Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, which Trump won, and did lead to the indictment of some of Trump’s associates for concealing Russian income - Manafort, and lying about meeting with the Russians - Flynn.

Or, in 2018 at the Helsinki Summit with Putin, when asked by a journalist if he believed his own Intelligence reports that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump said no, instead he believed Putin, because Putin had very strongly denied the charge to him personally.

And let’s not forget that during his Presidency, Trump tried to blackmail Zelensky by threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine if Zelensky didn’t launch a public investigation based on Trump’s Russian dis-information on his Presidential rival, Joe Biden, a crime for which Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019.

 

Or that in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump had complimented Putin as a “genius”, saying “Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions,” “I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

So,I was angered but not surprised last week, when Trump turned on Zelensky and blamed Ukraine for Putin’s invasion, and then tried to force a manifestly unfair demand for  Ukrainian mineral rights in exchange,not for any real guarantees, but in order to pay for U.S. military aid. Is this what the United States has come to? Siding with the aggressor, Putin?  Extorting another country in a protection racket?  And then to top it off this week the United States for the first time, siding with Russia and North Korea in voting against a U.N. resolution in support of Ukraine!  Welcome to the axis of evil, America! 

There is no doubt that Trump looks up to Putin, that he admires his ruthlessness and savagery, and that he despises democracies like Ukraine and Canada.  This is a U.S. president who wants to go back to the nineteenth century, when great powers were carving up Africa and Asia, who actually wants to be on the same side of the table as Putin, letting him take Ukraine and the Baltics, so that he, Trump, can similarly physically expand the United States by taking over Canada, Greenland, and Mexico.

Trump is a moral cretin, a psychopath, who has no empathy for anyone, who sees the world entirely in terms of winners and losers.  He is incapable of understanding the vital importance of the Ukraine war for defending Western democracies against Russian aggression.   The Ukrainians have suffered the loss of millions fleeing to other countries because of Russia’s indiscriminate bombing; they’ve lost land, some of  their cities to the Russians, many soldiers killed or wounded, many citizens tortured and murdered and thousands of their children kidnapped, in Putin’s criminal invasion. But the Ukrainians are actually doing the Western world an incalculable service by holding the line against Putin’s aggression and degrading his military.  Unlike the last world war, we in the West don't have to send our soldiers, the Ukrainians are fighting for us, holding Russia back.  All we have to do is support them with weapons.  It’s a very cheap price to pay for what we are getting, and a very high sacrifice for the Ukrainians.  But if the U.S. stops supporting Ukraine and tries to force a deal favoring Putin, which it looks like Trump is about to do, and if the Ukraine were to lose this war as a result, the consequences would be catastrophic for the entire world.  We would then not have the luxury of avoiding direct involvement in the war, because, one way or another, the war would come home to us.

The Unified Reich

 I don’t know if many readers will remember an American video about a year ago heralding a “Unified Reich”  and calling for “a New International Order”, but events have now caught up with the video’s message if what transpired at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference is any indication.  The U.S. Vice President, J.D. Vance openly embraced German neo-nazis and then lectured Europe on worrying too much about Russian and Elon Musk’s attempts to influence their elections. He chided Europeans for paying insufficient  attention to “the enemy within”, a chilling phrase that echoes Trump, but also invokes Adolf HItler’s rage against the Jews and the left in the Weimar Republic.  Who among us can forget Elon Musk’s triumphant “Sig Heil” the day of Trump’s inauguration?  Or Trump’s very recent statement “He who saves the country does not violate the law.”  Together, these events seem to me a repeat of the Nazi slogan:  “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer!”  in English: “One People, (i.e. Maga), One State, One Leader” - in other words, a “Unified Reich”.  

Trump’s claim that he is saving the country is the exact opposite of what he is doing. Because taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. government and its agencies, conducting mass firings of civil servants, and destroying and withholding government data has deadly consequences that go far beyond the initial performative shock and awe.  Civil servants serve the people;  they uphold the laws of the land, hold industrial polluters to account, protect consumers from fraud, ensure schools and hospitals are up to standard, prevent tainted food or dangerous medicine from being circulated,  inform the public about recent outbreaks of infectious diseases, of danger from extreme weather, and much much more.  By shutting down these government agencies and firing their employees, Musk and Trump are putting the entire population of the United States at risk.  

The wholesale destruction of government data is revealing in itself.  What better way of covering your tracks than getting rid of the evidence?  Taking away public data and funding for public research ensures that Trump’s government can flood the zone with propaganda, effectively depriving people of the means to check and monitor what their government is actually doing, or of what the consequences could be.

When the government shuts down public data and watchdog agencies, they are guaranteed to be up to no good.  Note, that we’ve seen this before when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister of Canada, and he defunded Canadian environmental science, muzzled government scientists, and actually threw the research literature into dumpsters.  Harper, who like candidate Pierre Poilievre, is closely allied with the Fossil Fuel industry, was banking on the principle that without good data, it is impossible for the public to get accurate  knowledge of the consequences of these industries emitting carbon dioxide and other pollutants, and how they ought to be mitigated.  Depriving citizens of the means to monitor the health of their environment doesn’t seem very consistent with democratic principles, does it? And if you, the enquiring reader, see a pattern here with right wing governments, fossil fuel companies, and the erosion of democracy,  you may be onto something. 

OK, but you may be thinking, with all the tech billionaires hanging with Trump at the inaugural, where were the oil barons, the Koch brothers, the head of Exxon, etc.?  Well, those guys prefer to be in the background, but rest assured their lavish funding is very busy behind the scenes doing a lot of the work of supporting Republican and Conservative party candidates as well as producing a  constant flood of misinformation about climate change and the benefits of fossil fuels. 

The thing is, few have any idea how deep this subterfuge is, or how far back it goes.  And surprise, surprise, it goes way back.  I’ve just finished listening to the audio version of Canadian author Carol Off’s book:  At a Loss For Words:  Conversations in an Age of Rage.  Besides being an author, Carol is even better known for being a host on the CBC radio show “As it Happens.” which provided a lot of the material for the book.  In her book she takes six words:  “freedom”, “democracy”, “truth”, “woke”, “choice”, and “taxes”,  and shows how their meanings have been deliberately twisted and distorted by the extreme right.  

The original initiative for the modern right comes from a small group of economists and evangelical Christians, who objected to the U.S. federal government’s campaign of desegregation in the 1960’s, and from rich oil men, namely the Koch brothers, who didn’t like democracy,  being taxed, and being fined for dumping toxins into the air and water. With the oil oligarch’s money they created an entire ecosystem of interconnected right wing think tanks:  The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Foundation, The Heartland Institute, The American Legislative Council, known as ALEC, which manufactures made-to-measure union-busting, anti-environmental, anti-abortion laws on demand, and let’s not forget The Federalist Society, funded by dark money, which has been instrumental in selecting Supreme Court judges in order to overturn Roe vs Wade’s legalization of abortion. 

Which brings us to Trump’s in-your-face oligopoly and project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation. 

 What we are seeing with Doge’s wholesale destruction of government agencies and Trump and Musk’s lawbreaking is the culmination of the extreme right's plans to get rid of democracy.  What appears as out and out chaos is actually the point.  If the U.S. government is gravely weakened, public data destroyed, and civil servants fired en mass, then the government is likely to fail at protecting its citizens.  If science and higher education is defunded then there will be no independent sources of knowledge and everyone will be at  the mercy of the peddlers of disinformation.  As a result Americans will have even less trust in government and in scientific knowledge than they have already,  and there will be no objective standards to hold those in charge accountable. It’s rule by the rich, otherwise known as - Oligopoly.  Trump sees more in common with Putin’s Russia  than he does with  a democracy like Canada’s.  Getting rid of democracy - That’s the “the Unitary Reich” and “New International Order”.