Oops - Apocalypse!

 

In the last book of the New Testament, called “Revelation”, there is a chilling metaphor for the end times:  “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”  These are, in no particular order:  famine, disease, war, and death.  Death is the hooded skeleton carrying a big scythe, by the way,  a common image in Medieval times due to the recurrence of deadly plagues that swept over Europe for a thousand years.

For most of my life it seemed like we’d done a good job in keeping these horsemen at bay.  There were no pandemics since 1919, no big wars since 1945, and when there were famines they were localized to failed states in Africa, and we, in the rest of the world, collectively organized rescue missions.  Not only that, but the twentieth century saw life expectancy increase from sixty years to eighty years in all industrialized countries.  Whoa Horsemen!  

But then came the twenty-first century, and almost the first thing that happened was 9/11, Al Queda’s attack on the twin towers in New York.  Then the 2008 financial meltdown in America, then the 2020 Covid Pandemic, and two years later Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has turned into the largest and most destructive war since 1945, and threatens to become the first phase in world war three if Russia is not stopped. 

 And barely noticed in all of this is the fact that life expectancy in the United States has, for the first time in history, started to decrease.  So it looks like those horsemen are back on the horizon.  And I might add that Donald Trump bears an uncanny resemblance to another character in the book of revelations whose name starts with “anti” and ends with “Christ”.

It doesn’t help that Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk has just shut down U.S.A.I.D., the U.S. charity organization that is the world’s largest funder of food and medicine aid.  This means that more deaths from famine, and more out of control disease outbreaks are a virtual certainty.   Also occurring were deep cuts to medical research, including vaccine research and pandemic preparedness.  Perhaps to top it off, were savage cuts to the program that was monitoring H5N1 infections in U.S. cattle.  I guess the philosophy here is “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” 

It doesn’t help either that the head of the U.S. department of Health is JFK junior, a vaccine skeptic.  It’s almost like Donald Trump wants a repeat of his first administration’s disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic, only this time the human death rate from the bird flu virus could be as high as fifty percent, rather than two percent as it was for covid.  And this time Public Health authorities will be banished from the scene - replaced by the  free-dumb to not wear a mask, to  take vitamin A and horse de-wormer instead of getting a vaccine, and to  achieve herd immunity by mingling in crowds with other like-minded individuals. By the time this is over people everywhere will be glad they decided ahead of time to avoid travelling to the United States.  By electing Donald Trump, Americans have inadvertently opted to join his game of Russian Roulette with their health and safety.  It is not a pretty picture.  But it is one that we’ve seen before and it comes with four hooded horsemen, one of whom bears a scythe. Welcome to the Apocalypse, and say hi to the four horsemen

The Moral Breakdown of America

 “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”  - Hanna Arendt

“The fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” - Elon Musk

“The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level….This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as…Marco Rubio and …J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.”  - Ruth Ben-Ghiat

How lucky we are to live in a society like Canada, where the country’s motto is “peace, order, and good government”.  Our coast-to-coast nation was built out of diversity, with the coexistence of  three peoples:  the French, the English, and the First Nations.  We have not always lived up to the ideal of  mutual respect but we have come a long way from our rough  beginnings. 

 President Donald Trump’s hostile attempt to weaken our sovereignty by raising tariffs against Canadian products is a clear and present danger for all of us. But this moment of existential threat has catalyzed a new understanding of who we are, as a nation, in comparison to our cousins to the south. It has brought us together, not pulled us apart.  We stand proud and united in the face of this threat against an obviously bigger  and more powerful foe.

Contrast our unity with that of the “United” States.  Even their name belies reality.  The United States is not united.  And that is because it is led both by a President and a political  party that has suspended moral and legal norms in the pursuit of authoritarian power. It began long ago with the widespread acceptance of lies, the denigration of scientific knowledge and the denigration of the legitimacy of government institutions.  Once the consensus on knowledge and legitimate authority was destroyed, the way was open for a demagogue like Donald Trump to spread lies and sow fear and prejudice amongst the population.  Chillingly, like Adolf Hitler, this demagoguery was focused on despised minorities and refugees, people already considered aliens by many within the country.

Trump, a convicted felon and sexual predator himself, has continually stated falsehoods about refugees, claiming they are murderers, rapists, and the mentally ill.  He has so poisoned American society with his lies that a majority of the population supports his draconian plans to deport millions of immigrants. But this deportation scheme is a pretext for bringing about the moral collapse of American society, paving the way for an authoritarian government.

In a moral panic, such as witch hunts,  “satanic daycares”, and  “transexual grooming” political opportunists spread fear and induce public hysteria in order to seize political power.  These same fear mongers are noticeably silent about real dangers such as increased access to guns and automatic weapons, climate change, and the preventable spread of infectious disease.  By amplifying ignorance and lies they condition a receptive portion of the population to increase their receptivity to lies even further, so that they end up in an information bubble, consuming only  media that confirms what they already believe and rejecting objective information from more mainstream sources.

It then becomes easier to manipulate people  to further dehumanize those they’ve already been conditioned to fear, such as refugees, visible minorities, and LGBTQ people.  This is the same political technique that was used in Nazi Germany.  First dehumanize a low-status group such as trans people, then isolate them, taking their literature out of libraries, excluding them from school sports, and medical care.  The basic idea is treat them as less than human and deserving of bullying and mistreatment.  Next expand this process to other low status groups, so that more and more of the population becomes involved in isolating, dehumanizing, and persecuting a growing minority of people.  In this way more and more people become involved in the moral breakdown of society.

And make no mistake, that is what Trump and his followers are attempting to do in America, to level the moral landscape, destroying empathy, and encouraging bullying, hatred, and violence against “the other”.   Needless to say, in no way does this strengthen and unite a society.  It does the opposite, because getting rid of empathy and common morality destroys the cooperative underpinnings of a society, leading to the destruction of trust, accumulated knowledge, and goodwill, and to a regime of unaccountable corruption.

How to Make "That" Make Sense

Yesterday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this, on the occasion of Trump’s tariffs against Canadian goods:  “So today,the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

OK, let’s do that:  perhaps it does make sense if you consider that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, a Manchurian Candidate who returned from a business trip to Russia in the late 1980’s to proclaim in full page ads in major U.S. newspapers that the U.S. defence of Europe and Japan was subsidizing these countries and a waste of taxpayer’s money(which shows that he hasn’t changed his tune on that subject since then);  who ran a Russian money laundromat selling overpriced New York real estate to the Russian mafia;  who twenty years later began a winning Presidential campaign by borrowing the Russian propaganda technique of fire hosing multiple lies, obtaining additional help from the Russian “Internet Research Agency”, and publicly asking for Putin’s help to dump private emails from the democratic party onto the internet, which Putin, in fact, did the next day.

So you may be asking, if Trump is the Manchurian candidate, why didn’t he do more to benefit Russia in his first administration?  Well, the answer may be that, not having any previous political experience, he didn’t know how to, and his administration, which was largely made up of responsible people, constrained him from doing so.

But this time, both his words and actions actually do respect Russian priorities.  Putin has invaded Ukraine and wants to take it over and do away with  democratically elected leader Vladimir Zelensky;  and in the last week Trump has tried to make a unilateral deal with Russia, shutting out Zelensky, and giving Putin everything, without asking for any concessions in return.  He’s insulted Zelensky and the European Union, and betrayed his North American trading partners, while basically telegraphing that he won’t bother defending Europe  if Putin decides to invade another European country - a clear violation of the Nato agreement. And then he suspended intelligence surveillance of Russia, started the process of cancelling sanctions against Russian Oligarchs, and suspended military aid for Ukraine.  So last Friday, a Kremlin spokesman said  that Trump’s “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations…largely aligns with our vision.”

As the Kremlin has pointed out, Trump has acted quickly to fulfill their wishes.  It took only one week for President Trump to deliver the breakup of Nato, the emasculation of American intelligence, the crippling of Ukraine’s defence and the welcoming of Russian Oligarchs to America’s shores - almost everything that Russia has wanted - handed to them on a silver platter. There - does that make enough sense now?

 

Trump is a Russian Asset: or The Manchurian Candidate 2.0

   Note: This synopsis is about a remake of the 1962 movie starring Frank Sinatra, but the ridiculous and convoluted details of my story does not duplicate any of the ridiculous and convoluted plot details of the original.

A gaudy debt ridden American businessman with a love for bling and beautiful women hosts a beauty Pageant in Moscow, and is befriended by Russian agents. He is encouraged by them to pursue a political career back in the United States.  With the Russians help he is able to stave off bankruptcy by laundering Russian mafia money into purchases of New York real estate. One of the first things he does upon returning from Russia is to purchase a full page add in major U.S. Newspapers criticizing U.S. foreign policy, essentially calling for the end of U.S. military support for its allies, notably Saudi Arabia and Japan, as well as unspecified others, arguing it is a waste of taxpayer’s money to subsidize the defence of these foreign nations. He considers running for President at this time, but doesn’t follow through. Ten years later he becomes famous by starring in a reality show where he plays a savvy  business tycoon who has a flair for firing people. Ten years after that he re-enters politics by publicizing racist tropes about the first Black President, Barack Obama.  Then, adopting Russian propaganda techniques to spread a firehose of lies and conspiracy theories, he runs for President, and with the help of Russian hacking of his opponents emails, and Russian bots and fake social media accounts, he narrowly wins the election.   Once in power, he is actually hemmed in by the career politicians in his cabinet, who carefully prevent him from making some, but not all, of the bad decisions he intends to make. He is impeached twice, but there is not a sufficient majority to have him banned from running for office again. A year later he loses the next election, but claims he actually won it and foments an insurrection that fails.  Biding his time, he remains in contact with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and congratulates him on the occasion of his 2022 military invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. After dealing with multiple lawsuits for tax fraud, election fraud, stealing government documents, fomenting a violent insurrection, and sexual molestation, he is given legal immunity by a compliant Supreme Court.  He then goes on to win the following Presidential election, with the help of a huge injection of money from the richest man in the world.  This time, he surrounds himself with yes men and delegates the richest man in the world to downsize his government and make it more vulnerable to massive corruption.  All the while he is having long private phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, a former KGB agent, who is trained in manipulating psychologically vulnerable subjects. 

Then on the last day of February, one month after his second inauguration, he has a meeting in the oval office with Vladimir Zelensky, President of Ukraine, ostensibly about a mineral deal but really about giving Zelensky a public rebuke for rejecting a fake peace deal that, in fact, hands Ukraine over to Putin, the aggressor.  

At this point the Manchurian candidate reveals his real intentions by criticizing Zelensky for hating Putin and not trusting Putin’s word, saying he has known Putin for a long time, and the two of them have both suffered from unfair investigations to do with his first impeachment trial.  The Manchurian Candidate unceremoniously sends Zelensky on his way while he starts the process of abandoning military aid to Ukraine, withdrawing from the Nato Alliance with Western democracies, dropping sanctions against Russia, and establishing military, economic and intelligence ties with Russia.  To be continued.