I can't deny some satisfaction with having confirmation of the conclusion I came to recently that almost all analysis of political entities in terms of the ideologies that they claim to be governed by gets the reality of it totally wrong, the more accurate framing is that when powerful people do the kinds of things that now dominate politics in the United States, Russia, China, etc. is to ask how closely those match the known behavior of mafia. The confirmation comes from James Comey's comparison to the meeting he sat in with the then president-elect Donald Trump, Reince Priebus, etc. to the actions of La Cosa Nostra that he learned of when he was a prosecutor.
That it comes at the same time in my study of the Scriptures and concentration on what scholars of them point to as the core narratives of those, the Exodus account and, even more so, the development of the alternative which constitutes the Hebrew-Jewish identity is striking, to me at least.
I don't think I could possibly have come to a clear understanding of how many things that without that framing seem screwy, things like The Nation, the Green Party, alleged former-liberals like Alan Dershowitz enabling the ratfucking of our election through lies enabled by the ACLU, Joel Gora and the Warren Court on behalf of the current Post-Czar, Vladimir Putin, with the help of the so recently adored Wikileaks and Julian Assange, etc. The same framing helps me to understand how those dear old commies of our lefty youths, pretty much the entire cast of heroes in the book Naming Names, the heroes of the movie Reds and, yes, the more recent treatment of the movie Trumbo, were fans and supporters and even agents of Stalin as he was doing exactly the same things that Hitler is rightly condemned as the most evil man in history for AND IT WAS KNOWN AS THOSE CINEMATIC - LEFT FORUM HEROES KNEW EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING ON IN PLACES LIKE UKRAINE AND MOSCOW.
The fact is that all of that, the fascists, the Nazis, the dear old commies were not polar opposites, but believers in closely allied ideologies that disdained morality and such things as THE TRUTH. If you want the best example of that, it's how the American and other lefts in the democratic and quasi-democratic left did an about face as soon as Stalin made nice with Hitler and they all started sounding like Republicans from areas of the country where Hitler was popular. or who had business interests in Germany and Austria. And even more so their 180 degree turn back as Hitler attacked Stalin held territory.
The use of ideology to explain how that old left and the old new left was different from fascists is largely fraudulent, as can be seen in how they held up such Stalinists and later Maoists as heroes of any kind of democratic left even as Mao's own campaign of slaughter in the Cultural Revolution was being accurately reported as it happened. And it is significant that that was still going on even as Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their opening with Mao's government.
The real way towards understanding all anti-democratic and most non-democratic governments is to look at them as kleptocracies, mafia states, that is especially true now as the combined force of billionaires who have stolen and hoarded so much of the wealth of the entire world becomes the predominant force opposing democracy based on informed, honestly electioned governments of, by and for The People.
Groups such as the Green Party of the United States of America,m led by Putin asset Jill Stein, magazines of the left which regularly publish the kind of stuff Stephen Cohen, Patrick Lawrence, and others, the ones who have for the past century been encouraging the left to adopt policies favoring some of the worst, most blood drenched dictators in the world AND A SERIES OF UNIMPORTANT BALLOT BOX POISON POSITIONS, largely on behalf of the materialist, atheist world view that those dictators subscribed to, have discredited themselves out of any possible future use to a real, democratic left, the political-science analysis that is consistent with such an analysis of politics as if the truth and The People don't matter - depending on the assertions made about economics in place of the most salient things as tens of millions of murdered people and plundered environments - has to be entirely junked. Their record of producing failure for the real left, half a century of it, is a definitive discrediting of their ideas, their programs and their basic framing.
I would recommend the analyses of Walter Brueggemann, of Marilynne Robinson, of Pope Francis (his recent letter Gaudete et Exultate is just the most reader friendly of those) and others as the source of a real alternative which is in every way more consistent with an egalitarian, democratic, alternative based in justice, especially economic justice. All of the old organs of the secular left have discredited themselves, they don't work, they never were an alternative. They gave us 50 years and counting of fascist ascendency.
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