Last weekend [before March 11, 2022] a far-right group called America First held a political rally in Orlando. At one point, organizer Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist also involved in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, invited attendees to cheer for Russia. Soon the audience was chanting “Putin! Putin!”

Without context this may seem puzzling. Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom?

BY Bethany Moreton

In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin* in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump’s attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent** who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party.

GUSNOTE:

• EVEN IF THERE WAS “RUSSIAN” ELECTION INTERFERENCE IN THE USA, AND DESPITE AN ON-GOING COURT CASE TO PROVE THIS, MUELLER WAS UNABLE TO PROVE A LINK BETWEEN PUTIN AND TRUMP, AS NO-ONE CAN PROVE THAT PUTIN AUTHORISED ELECTION INTERFERENCE IN THE USA. PUTIN DENIES HAVING INTERFERED IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN 2016 AND 2020. THIS SHOULD BE GOOD ENOUGH FOR US COURTS AND US MEDIA.
• THE “CONFESSED RUSSIAN AGENT” WAS A NOT REALLY A RUSSIAN AGENT BUT ONLY MADE A GUILTY PLEA TO LIMIT HER TIME IN COURT. ONE CANNOT SEE HOW BUTINA COULD INFLUENCE THE RABID RIGHT OF THE NRA TO INFLUENCE THE RABID REPUBLICAN PARTY…..
• RUPERT MURDOCH, THE AUSSIE AMERICAN MEDIA BARON, HAD FAR FAR MORE INFLUENCE ON VOTERS THAN A FEW RUSSIAN BLOGGERS MAKING THEMSELVES PASS AS AMERICANS…..
• UKRAINE IS ONLY PARTIALLY A US ALLY BY DEFAULT. MORE THAN FORTY PERCENT OF UKRAINE'S POPULATION IS ALLIED WITH RUSSIA. BEFORE 2004, UKRAINE WAS MOSTLY ALLIED WITH RUSSIA, AND THE USA SPENT A LOT OF CASH TO BUY THE NAZI PART OF UKRAINE (GALICIA) AND THE ELECTIONS OF ZELENSKY (JEWISH NAZI).

Bethany Moreton continues: 

More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin. 

GUSNOTE: THIS IS NOT A HISTORICAL DESCRIPTION OF A “CHEF D’ETAT” WORTHY OF A DECENT HISTORIAN. BETHANY MORETON IS A BIASED RACONTEUR. AT HER TOILET-BOWL LEVEL, ALL WORLD LEADERS WOULD BE KLEPTOCRATS, ESPECIALLY ALL THE US PRESIDENTS, WHO ALL LIED AND HAVE BEEN TRYING TO GET THEIR HANDS ON THE “HEARTLAND” AND THE REST OF THE WORLD — BY BUYING ALLIANCES OR CONQUERING VARIOUS COUNTRIES FROM LIBYA, IRAQ TO EVEN GEORGIA — THOUGH NOT ON HORSEBACK…

Bethany Moreton continues:

In the following vignettes, I explore how these connections came to exist, and what they reveal about the transnational currents of U.S. conservatism and white nationalism.

In the summer of 2018, the white supremacist League of the South debuted a bold new initiative on its website: in Russian, the neo-Confederates invited “the Russian people” to understand themselves as “natural allies” of white U.S. southerners in the fight “against the destructive influence of globalism.”

As descendants of white Europeans, we come from the same genetic pool. As heirs of the European cultural tradition, we share the same values, traditions, and way of life. And as Christians, we worship the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and our common Faith binds us as brothers and sisters. We Southerners believe in a society built on real organic factors such as Blood, Culture, and Religion.

If we are looking for historic roots of this imagined commonality between U.S. white nationalists and Russians, a good place to start is the 1975 address of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn to the New York chapter of the AFL-CIO labor union.

There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. . . . [T]hey set her free. Although she didn’t have a rough time in this country, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts.

The Nobel laureate’s vituperation seems like a bizarre digression in a speech primarily devoted to denouncing the West’s weak, short-sighted capitulation to the ruse of Soviet détente. But in fact it was a window onto a fast-coalescing relationship between Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Christian nationalism and the new post-Civil Rights politics of whiteness of his American hosts.

The U.S.S.R’s defectors and escapees had helped shape U.S. definitions of freedom since the onset of the Cold War, but Solzhenitsyn was unique. Born the year after the October Revolution into a propertied and educated family whose land was collectivized, Solzhenitsyn later wrote that he began to lose faith in the Soviet system after witnessing Red Army war crimes while serving as an artillery officer during World War II. Letters critical of Stalin landed him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in 1945. In a politically tinged decision, the Nobel committee awarded him its prize for literature in 1970, and Soviet authorities handed the West a cause célèbre when they denounced the writer as a dupe of Western reactionaries. In 1972 he announced his faith in an open letter addressed to the Moscow Patriarch. Two years later, after the first volume of his massive, quasi-historical The Gulag Archipelago (1974) was published in the West, he was deported.

The first in the U.S. evangelical right to recognize Solzhenitsyn’s political utility was North Carolina’s white supremacist senator Jesse Helms. Helms was at the time involved in supporting Rhodesia’s ruling white minority as a bulwark against communism. Intrigued by a 1973 report from the World Anti-Communist League, Helms pursued the dissident writer, inviting him to North Carolina and proposing that Congress grant him honorary U.S. citizenship. When Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to the United States in 1975, Helms dispatched his own translator as interpreter and escort. The Nobel laureate’s first stop was the senator’s suburban Virginia home, where the two compared notes on their respective Christian faiths and the paramount necessity of religious freedom to all other human freedoms. Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to speak to the AFL-CIO during the same trip came from its conservative leader, George Meany. Meany’s enthusiasm for the dissident writer derived from the labor leader’s Catholic sexual conservatism, his support for the Vietnam War, and his decades dedicated to purging left tendencies in the U.S. labor movement.

Solzhenitsyn’s visit was a success, and his message was passed among evangelical champions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Evangelical periodicals lauded his denunciations of U.S. moral degeneracy alongside Soviet criminality. He was soon swept up into the pantheon of Christian intellectuals claimed by evangelical activists dedicated to the suffering church in Russia.

Also haunting Washington that summer was Chuck Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon who’d recently been released from prison after serving time for trying to obstruct the Watergate investigation. Now freed, he was feverishly assembling his prison conversion narrative, Born Again (1976). Colson had been a key architect of the new Republican electoral coalition forecast by strategist Patrick Buchanan in 1973—the white, Christian, conservative Silent Majority that combined the former “Dixiecrat” wing of racist Southern Democrats with the second- and third-generation children of white working-class immigrants. In the Nixon White House, Colson had been responsible for wooing Catholic and Eastern Orthodox “white ethnic” union members away from their New Deal allegiance to the Democratic Party—including, specifically, by building a relationship with AFL-CIO President George Meany. Colson had also been instrumental in promoting Nixon to Christian conservatives by staging church services in the White House. Shortly before his arrest in 1974, Colson had been converted to Christianity by the CEO of the defense contractor Raytheon Company, an influential member of the secretive, politically potent D.C. Christian organization The Fellowship Foundation, best known for organizing the annual National Prayer Breakfast that is obligatory for sitting presidents.

For Colson and his colleagues on the right, Solzhenitsyn was not only a celebrity “Slav”–one of the major European immigrant ethnic groups they courted as an alibi for “white”—just as “crime” and “welfare” were being inscribed on Black and Hispanic Americans. More specifically, he represented a way to control the narrative about who got to be called a political prisoner. At stake was the legitimacy of the “law and order” politics that had won white ethnics to the Silent Majority. The War on Poverty was transformed into a “war on crime” by shifting resources and responsibility for social programs to law enforcement. Social protest was managed through massively expanded incarceration.

But behind bars, members of the Black Power, New Left, and Puerto Rican independence movements embraced an identity as political prisoners and called their prisons “the fascist concentration camps of modern America.” Prison uprisings exploded, peaking at forty-eight in 1972. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was bombarded with appeals for U.S. carceral systems to be subjected to international law. Andrew Young, the first African American ambassador to the UN, acknowledged that there were “hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people I would call political prisoners” in the United States. The most internationally recognizable was Angela Davis.

In speeches, editorials, and his book Loving God: The Cost of Being Christian (1983), Colson undertook a kind of counterintelligence campaign, promoting Solzhenitsyn as the paradigmatic political prisoner, a white man who had been persecuted for his anti-communist politics and his Christian faith. Over the next four decades, Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry helped reframe the national conversation around criminal justice: arguing that rehabilitation could only come from the inner drama of religious conversion, Prison Fellowship justified the removal of secular, publicly funded services like GED classes, job training, and drug treatment from U.S. prisons.

In the contest over the meanings of captivity, Solzhenitsyn served the Christian right’s efforts to replace Attica with the gulag. American evangelicals leveraged his moral status to amplify the message: the people really suffering, in the United States and globally, were white Christians being crushed by the hands of godless government.

READ MORE:

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-u-s-christians-who-pray-for-putin/

HERE, FOLLOWING THIS HALF-DRIVEL BY BETHANY, WE HAVE TO DO A NECESSARY DETOUR VIA WALMART…. UNDER ALL THIS MORETON'S PALABRA, DESIGNED TO DISMISS THE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE RIGHT-WING, IS THE VALUE OF A DOLLAR….

AS EXPLAINED BEFORE ON THIS SITE, THE AMERICAN LEFT IS FAR MORE HYPOCRITICAL THAN THE RIGHT, BECAUSE THE RIGHT IS SHAMELESS ABOUT BEING ULTRA-CAPITALISTIC WHILE THE LEFT IS MAKING ALL SORTS OF EXCUSES TO AVOID SOCIALISM WHILE BEING FULLY CAPITALISTIC (IMMERSED IN THE VALUE OF CASH)… THE SMELL OF MONEY DRIVES BOTH IDEALS WHICH ARE VERY SIMILAR, TO THE EXCEPTION OF A FEW RESTRICTIVE CAVEATS, IN WHICH GOVERNMENTAL SOCIAL WELFARE IS REPLACED BY PRIVATE CHARITY OR PHILANTHROPY TO VARIOUS DEGREES. THE SUM TOTAL OF WHO CONTROLS WHAT, ESPECIALLY WHEN CHARITY AND PHILANTHROPY ARE TAX-EXEMPT, MAKE SOCIAL “JUSTICE” AND WELFARE MORE EXPENSIVE TO THE TAX-PAYERS — AND OFTEN UNJUST AND INNEFICIENT EXCEPT FOR THE RICH. 

SO THE GENERAL DIFFICULTY IS TO BALANCE WHAT THE GENERAL BOURGEOIS PUBLIC IS PREPARED TO PAY IN WHICH FORMAT TO A GOVERNMENT WHICH THEY DON’T LIKE OR PREFER, DUE TO MEDIA INFLUENCES.

HERE WE COME TO:

Inequality and Dishonesty Will Kill Democracy

In November 2, 2022, less than a week before the recent national election, President Biden delivered a speech warning against voter intimidation, political violence and threats to democracy. He also added that those who question the results of any election they lose are attempting to “subvert the electoral system itself.”

Soon afterward, Fox news reported that conservatives called the speech “despicable,” while Hayes Brown of MSNBC said it was “a solid, sincere bit of oration.”

It is not a surprise when Americans disagree, but disagreements like these are often disagreement for disagreement’s sake. I’m persuaded that before anyone warns of (or denies the existence of) “threats to democracy” Americans should have a shared definition of the term as well as a common understanding of the narrower “our democracy.”

Dictionary definitions are pretty simple so I will start with one. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a democracy is “government by the people,” a form of government in which “sovereign power resides in the people as a whole and in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.”

Pinning down the meaning of the narrower “American democracy” is more complex. A common misunderstanding is that American democracy equals majority rule, but while the will of the majority is important, there are limitations. Since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, for example, the United States has clearly recognized that the rights of numerical minorities must be protected from both the government and from the majority.

Another fallacy is that the American system of government defines democracy for everyone. It does not. Since 1787, democracy has spread globally and almost every democratic nation has a unique structure.

In 2019 the PEW Research Center reported that more than half of countries in the world are democratic; “As of the end of 2017, 96 out of 167 countries with populations of at least 500,000 (57%) were democracies of some kind, and only 21 (13%) were autocracies. Nearly four dozen other countries – 46 or 28% – exhibited elements of both democracy and autocracy.”

There are many democratic elements at the core of how American government works, but they exist alongside a variety of anti-democratic elements. Some of these were written into the original Constitution. Others came later.

For decades the late political scientist Robert A. Dahl gave considerable attention to this dichotomy. In his 2002 book, “How Democratic is the American Constitution?” he discusses a number of undemocratic elements in the original Constitution. Only a few of these have been eliminated since 1787.

Professor Dahl’s list includes: the fact that slavery existed, that women and minorities were not allowed to vote, and the fact that votes in the Electoral College were not proportional to the population allowing the winner of the presidential election to have fewer votes than the loser.

Dahl further cites two important antidemocratic elements, both relevant today. Each state, regardless of size or population, has two senators, which gives smaller states “an increased prominence,” and that the Supreme Court Justices, with lifetime appointments, can rule on the constitutionality of laws.

If we want to reduce “threats to our democracy,” we should be talking more about how American democracy has evolved and acknowledge how the United States became more democratic by eliminating some barriers to participation.

The definition of democracy included the idea that in a democracy, “all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.” Advances towards that ideal have always come with struggle and even when progress has been made, oppositional forces have been able to push back.

The 13th Amendment managed to abolish slavery only after a bloody civil war. And, it was only after years of protest and agitation that the right of women to vote was recognized by the 19th Amendment in 1920. Unfortunately, Dahl’s other anti-democratic elements remain untouched with new barriers to participation joining them.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example, was an attempt to increase democratic participation by overcoming legal barriers preventing African Americans from exercising their right to vote. That progress has been slowly whittled away over the last decade by the Supreme Court starting with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 which struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that determined which states and counties were subject to preclearance for any new voting practices and procedures.

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/30/inequality-and-dishonesty-will-kill-democracy/

REAL DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN MORIBUND FOR A LONG TIME NOW (POSSIBLY SINCE YEAR ZERO) — BECAUSE INEQUALITY AND DISHONESTY RULE THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM.

THE RICH CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT. WITHOUT MONEY, ONE DOES NOT GET ELECTED AND, ONCE ELECTED, THE MONEY FOR “ELECTIONEERING” (WHICH HAS NOT FALLEN FROM THE SKY) NEEDS TO BE REVERSED BACK-SCRATCHED…. 

THE ONLY WAY TO AVOID THIS CAPER IS TO INDULGE IN A SOCIALISTIC STRUCTURE, BUT THIS CANNOT HAPPEN IN A COUNTRY LIKE AMERICA…. AMERICA HATES SOCIALISM!

MEANWHILE THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM HAS BEEN CULTIVATED BY THE POWERS IN CHARGE AND THE MEDIA, AS A GREAT INCENTIVE FOR THE POOR TO REJECT SOCIALISM LIKE A BAD SMELL…

PRESENTLY THE RIGHT REJECTS THE WOKE IDEAL AND THIS IS WHERE THIS STORY STARTED WITH SOME VIEWS THAT ARE ANTI-SOCIALIST AND ANTI-WOKE, LEAVING A TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN FAMILY ETHIC WHICH PUTIN, RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY, SUPPORTS. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT PUTIN INTERFERES IN US ELECTIONS, BUT MAY PROVIDE THE OTHER SIDE OF A FREEDOM WHICH HAS DIFFERENT CREDOS.

SO WHAT ABOUT WALMART?

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise Paperback – September 7, 2010

BY Bethany Moreton

In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.

While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next.

This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.

The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).

SO WHAT ABOUT WALMART? 

GOD, GUNS AND GREED ARE THE CREDO OF AMERICAN FREEDOM… WE ALL KNOW THIS, OR DO WE? 

MEANWHILE, "THEM" RUSSIANS AGAIN….:

Zelensky cracks down on Ukraine's biggest church

Kiev's domestic security agency has launched a series of raids at Orthodox Church sites

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has announced new measures seeking to ban religious institutions deemed to have links with Russia. He said the move is intended to safeguard the nation’s “spiritual independence” amid Kiev’s conflict with Moscow.

The president's principal target is the Ukranian Orthodox Church, the country's largest, which is linked to the Moscow Patriarchate.

The statement comes as the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security agency, launched what it called a “counter intelligence” action at several Ukrainian Orthodox Church sites in three regions. The raids targeted at least eight religious sites on Friday, aiming to identify individuals suspected of undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Writing on Telegram, Zelensky said on Thursday that the National Security and Defense Council had held a meeting, which focused on “numerous facts of ties of certain religious circles in Ukraine with the aggressor state.” The Council has instructed Ukraine’s government to introduce a law to make it impossible for “religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence” in Russia to operate in the country, Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s state watchdog responsible for overseeing the religious sphere was ordered to establish whether the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has religious links with the Moscow Patriarchate. 

READ MORE: 

https://www.rt.com/russia/567520-ukraine-crackdown-russia-churches/

AT THIS STAGE, WE KNOW THAT DEMOCRACY IS A DIFFICULT STATE OF GOVERNMENT WHICH DEMANDS SCRUTINY... WHEN PRESIDENTS CAN PICK AND CHOOSE A VARIETY OF ACTIONS, INCLUDING GOING TO WAR, WITHOUT REFERRING THESE TO THE “PEOPLE”…. WE ARE BEING TAKEN FOR FOOLS.

OVERALL, BETHANY MORETON IS NOT A HISTORIAN DESPITE COLLECTING FACTS. THAT IS TO SAY SHE HAS A POINT OF VIEW DESIGNED TO DISMISS ABOUT HALF OF THE PEOPLE — THOSE WHO HAVE REJECTED THE “WOKE” IDEAL WHICH IN MANY WAYS IS FLAWED, NOT BY ITS RIGHTFUL EXISTENCE BUT BY THE SHEER PROPORTION OF A MINORITY WHICH OVERCOMES THE MAJORITY OF THE LEFT — AND DISTORTS THE MAIN FACTOR OF EQUALITY.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS DISTORTION, ALSO LIES THE TRADITIONAL RELIGIOUS MORALS WHICH CAN INFLUENCE MORE THAN HALF OF AMERICAN PEOPLE — EVEN IF THEY DON’T BELIEVE 100 PER CENT IN GOD.

GUS LEONISKY

RABID ATHEIST

CARTOONIST SINCE 1951

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....................