“ Different countries’ protests may claim they’re just “inspired” by one another, but a chilling tactical similarity to the protests suggests a deeper level of international coordination. Last year, the Logically group revealed Melbourne’s protests occurred among worldwide action devised and organised by extremists from Germany. Supposedly local organisers in Canada and Australia have been tracked to foreign servers, operating hacked accounts. Observe now how the same behaviours – from shared language, icons and slogans to their direct organising tactics on the ground – are common across the protests. Note that their political targets are consistently the apparatus of democratic government itself.
The street-level participants of these protests don’t have to be slick, admirable or coherent to be useful to this movement – just credulous, unquestioning and willing to be mobilised. Where the protest presence grows, so do arson attacks and warnings of escalating violence.
The Museum of Australian Democracy was recently set on fire; it’s time to face we are in the era of Brownshirts Without Borders. Unless we can formulate international tactics for dealing with them, it’s not just Ottawa that’s under siege. It’s democracy in the west.”
William Saletan recently made the frightening point that those Americans who have become the greatest threat to their republic are those who’ve been convinced by propaganda lies that they’re saving it.
This is the article referred to:
It turns out that you don’t have to renounce any of our nation’s founding principles to betray them. All you have to do is believe lies: that real ballots are fake, that prosecutors are criminals, and that insurrectionists are political prisoners. Once you believe these things, you’re ready to disenfranchise your fellow citizens in the name of democracy. You’re ready to cover up crimes in the name of fighting corruption. You’re ready to liberate coup plotters in the name of justice.
I would argue that the greatest threat are those directing and fomenting these efforts globally.
It’s no coincidence that this is exactly the kind of trans national effort that Steve Bannon has explicitly stated he was building. That certain billionaires have been funding and that their relationships with and veneration of Russian autocrats needs investigation.
This is the type of work the NSA, FBI, CIA purportedly have as a reason to exist for. But have they been captured by these undemocratic autocrats & has privatization of these services just handed autocrats the keys to those castles?
It’s a complex situation. The organisations and the top appointed officials have always ultimately served corporations and their major shareholders first. However, there are a lot of people in the permanent bureaucracy of those orgs who sincerely believe that some form of liberal democracy* as defined by the Constitution is the key to American strength and prosperity. When Bannon and the Qnuts and their ilk talk about the “deep state” that’s who they’re referring to.
[*albeit one more surveillance- and cop-friendly than most of us here would be comfortable with]
The political-economic ideology that’s became the default in the West and much of the rest of the world for the past 40 years is built on a constant stream of lies. From the establishment of the Chicago and Austrian Schools, hiding the true goals of neoliberalism is an integral part of it. Along with greed and white supremacy, it’s been one of the common values in which they find an affinity with their fascist allies.
Putin now has a four-week window in which to move. After that, his threats to freeze German grannies by cutting off the natural gas will be rendered useless and Berlin will show more solidarity with the rest of the EU in backing Ukraine’s sovereignty.
If (as we all hope) Putin doesn’t invade then Ukraine will start methodically wiping out the remaining Russian-backed rebels in Donbas over the spring and summer*. It will be a nasty business conducted under cross-border artillery fire from Russia but better than a full-scale Russian invasion now.
[* preferably using their own fascists as cannon fodder]
“Clearly there’s great concern that Russia is going to invade a sovereign nation, a free, sovereign nation, with people that want to remain independent. It’s unjustified. There’s no excuse. It’s without honor. And it changes the world dynamic,” he said, adding, “We’ve gone 80 years as a world without a major nation invading another and replacing its government.”
I do have to wonder if the increasing “trucker convoys” etc is part of a strategy of diversion to undermine responses in the Ukraine. Will the far right start pushing the line that Ukrainians don’t really exist, that they’re just Russians?
World history is weird: my gut reaction was ‘we’ll all help Germany get through the winter, against the big bad Russia’, despite the fact that my father was a WWII vet, when allies and enemies were exactly the reverse and not surviving the (Russian) winter was one of the things that brought down the Nazis.
At this point the artillery isn’t being hauled on trucks or trains, it is being driven to positions. Most of the video is coming from the Belgorod area. The staged meeting with Lavrov for the cameras is just building on the narrative that they are doing all they can do to stop what they are going to do anyway.
