Posts Tagged With: Politics

Wealth worships Armageddon?

Posted on September 23, 2025 by kilroy100

Gil Duran, courtesy of The New Republic magazine

September 16, 2025

“Satanic Panic”

What’s Up With Peter Thiel’s Obsession With the Antichrist?

The tech mogul is amping up his apocalyptic rhetoric—and adding a dangerous dose of extremism into the already-fraught culture war.

Peter Thiel speaks at The Cambridge Union in Cambridgeshire, England

Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.

Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”

Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.

Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.

Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.

These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”

But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.

“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”

Four horses of the Apocalypse

(The Four Horses of the Apocalypse, announced by the Fifth Trumpet)

Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.

Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”

Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.

“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.

Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.

“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”

Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.

“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”

He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.

Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.

Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”

Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.

Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.

Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”

Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.

“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.

Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.

“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”

Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.

“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”

He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.

Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.

Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”

Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.

Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.

Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.

After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”

These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”

But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.

“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”

Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.

Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”

Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.

“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.

Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.

“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”

Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.

“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”

He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.

Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.

Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”

Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.

Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.

Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.

After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”

These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”

But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.

“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”

Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.

After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”

These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”

But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.

“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”

(Carl Schmitt quote, his “sovereign” was A. Hitler)

Last week, in the hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the words “demon” and “evil” trended on X as some on the right portrayed his murder as the work of supernaturally possessed Democrats and leftists. Major right-wing influencers echoed Carl Schmitt’s ideas, calling for a political crackdown on Kirk’s critics. Chris Rufo, a prominent right-wing propagandist, called on law enforcement to “infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate” the “radical left.”

This is where apocalyptic rhetoric always leads. When political opponents become evil, cosmic enemies, persecution, and violence become a sacred duty. This surge in demon and devil talk showed that Thiel has correctly identified a potent but perilous impulse in our politics.

But if tech billionaires seek to spread Christianity, they should stop hunting Antichrists and reflect on the words of Jesus Christ, who urged his followers to practice empathy and forgiveness and to care for people rather than exploit and surveil them. Instead of worrying about Armageddon, Thiel should heed the Gospels, which warn that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Now there’s scripture worth dwelling on—and it’s a problem that no AI, no surveillance, no power, no money can fix.

Categories: History, Science and Biography | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment
 
 

A HISTORY OF NATIONAL FAILURE, DECLINE AND WAR


Warnings From Weimar

Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails

Daniel Ziblatt (courtesy of Atlantic Magazine)

August 28, 2025

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin, August 1936 (Action Images / Reuters)

DANIEL ZIBLATT is Professor of Government and Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy and a co-author of How Democracies Die.

On March 23, 1933, inside a dimly lit chamber filled with the stale scent of cigar smoke, Ludwig Kaas tried to convince himself he was making the right decision. A Catholic priest and the leader of Germany’s establishment Center Party, he stood at a crossroads. For several years, his party had sought to block Adolf Hitler’s rise. But in 1932, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) became the largest force in parliament, and in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. As he moved to consolidate power, the Center Party had become the last remaining obstacle to his bid for total control over Germany.

Hitler had introduced the Enabling Act, which would allow him and his cabinet sweeping powers to rule by decree, thereby dismantling democracy at its core. The act needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The Social Democrats—the only other significant group of parliamentarians that still fundamentally supported democracy—were too few to stop it alone. If the Center Party also resisted, it could block the act’s passage.

But Kaas hesitated. He feared what would happen if his party defied the Nazis. Would it survive? Could democracy endure if his party resisted? Hitler’s storm troopers had already begun arresting political opponents. Kaas convinced himself that his best option was to cooperate—to work within the new reality rather than be crushed by it. “We must preserve our soul,” he told his colleagues, “but a rejection of the Enabling Act will result in unpleasant consequences for our party.” The act passed, 444 to 94, opening the path to Hitler’s dictatorship.

This episode illustrates the dangerous logic of abdication: the belief that, faced with a rising threat to democracy, surrender is strategy, cooperating with an autocrat is survival, and sparing oneself or one’s party from immediate punishment is worth opening the door to long-term authoritarian rule. Kaas was not alone in this kind of thinking. In the years leading up to that moment, three catastrophic miscalculations—each rooted in short-term maneuvering and self-justification—paved the way for Hitler’s ascent.

Today, this chapter of the Weimar Republic’s history should be revisited. At a moment in which democracy is backsliding in places as varied as Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States, it is a reminder that democracy often erodes slowly at first, via the gradual surrender of those entrusted to defend it. But with each concession, autocrats become bolder, defenses grow weaker, and reversal becomes harder. Responses that, early on, can feel pragmatic—waiting it out, remaining silent, cutting a deal—only embolden autocrats, leading ultimately to the demise of democracy itself.

FATAL TRANSACTIONS

The fateful decisions that doomed the Weimar Republic were made in the aftermath of World War I, shortly after the birth of a new democracy in Germany. The Weimar constitution, drafted in 1919 under the influence of luminaries such as the legal scholar Hugo Preuss and the sociologist Max Weber, enshrined civil liberties, expanded rights for women, and established labor protections. Building on wins secured by an already robust civil society, a broad and confident coalition of progressive forces, liberals, Social Democrats, and the Catholic Center Party established Germany’s post–World War I republic.

Yet this republic was also fragile. It was roiled by rampant political violence, frequent political assassinations, and street fights between communists and fascists, both of whom rejected the new regime. Still, after three turbulent years of hyperinflation and political unrest, by 1924 the Weimar Republic had entered a period of relative stability.

Beginning in 1929, however, the crash of the U.S. stock market hit Germany, triggering a catastrophic economic downturn and mass unemployment. The Communist Party and the Nazis gained ground in elections. This made it difficult for the German parliamentary system to form governments, and country’s president had to resort to installing new chancellors at the head of parliament without parliamentary backing—an extraordinary measure. The resulting policy gridlock enhanced the Nazis’ appeal.

The German conservative establishment granted Hitler legitimacy.

But the Great Depression alone did not doom the Weimar Republic. Many other embattled republics in Europe and North America survived this era of economic and political turmoil, including two other new European republics, Czechoslovakia and Finland. What mattered most were not just the shocks themselves but German leaders’ responses to them—choices that shaped the republic’s fate.

The country’s conservative establishment made the first mistake. In the late 1920s, the mainstream right-wing party, the German National People’s Party, was struggling. Its leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a powerful businessman and media mogul, but he lacked charisma and mass appeal. As he watched Hitler’s Nazi movement gain popularity in state and national elections in the late 1920s, Hugenberg saw an opportunity—not to stop Hitler, but to use him.

Hugenberg recruited the Nazis into a campaign to undo Germany’s obligation to pay World War I reparations. He hoped that their fervor would help reinvigorate the conservative cause. A 1929 referendum attempting to rally the German public behind annulling the debt—and classifying politicians who agreed to pay it as traitors—failed, but the partnership changed everything. It elevated the Nazis from a band of fringe extremists to a political force that had been granted legitimacy by one of Germany’s most influential political figures.

Hugenberg’s miscalculations did not end there. In 1931, he hosted a major right-wing rally in the spa town of Bad Harzburg, inviting Hitler to stand alongside Germany’s nationalist elite. The idea was to present a united conservative front. Instead, Hitler stole the spotlight. His paramilitary forces marched through the streets in a show of discipline and power as Hugenberg faded into the background. By 1933, Hugenberg had realized the full scale of his mistake. He reportedly told a fellow conservative: “I have committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in human history.” But by then it was far too late. At a pivotal moment, Hugenberg had given Hitler what he needed most: respectability.

A PREVENTABLE DEATH

The German political establishment’s next miscalculation was even graver: elevating Hitler to power outright. By 1932, Germany’s parliament remained paralyzed. No governing majority could be formed. Conservatives were desperate to establish a stable government that excluded the Social Democrats and Communists, but they lacked the numbers to govern alone. President Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero, continued to cycle through chancellors, unable to find anyone who could command the support of a majority of parliamentarians or contain Germany’s deepening economic crisis. Then former Chancellor Franz von Papen made a bold suggestion: offer the chancellorship to Hitler—but surround him with conservative ministers who could control him.

Von Papen was confident that Hitler could be kept on a leash. “Don’t worry,” he told his right-wing colleagues. “Within two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner he’ll squeal.” In January 1933, Hindenburg signed on to the plan, believing that Hitler would remain a figurehead.

The opposite happened. Hitler immediately began consolidating power, sidelining his handlers and dismantling the opposition by arresting leading figures such as the former Prussian minister of the interior and other Social Democratic and Communist Party members of parliament. The Nazi Party was not the choice of a majority of Germans—about two-thirds of Germans had voted against it in the 1932 national elections—and Hitler’s violent moves to seize more influence caused a new atmosphere of intense fear to grip the country. The gamble that antidemocrats could be tamed if they were granted power had failed spectacularly.

German politicians believed they could bargain away democracy’s protections.

The February 1933 Reichstag fire, which did so much damage to the parliament building that it temporarily forced the body to hold sessions in the Kroll Opera House a few blocks away, provided the perfect pretext for repression. Hitler’s new government blamed communists for the blaze, also claiming to have proof that they were stockpiling explosives. The Nazi-led government launched mass arrests, and Hitler immediately promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree, a draconian measure restricting freedom of the press and assembly and allowing the police to detain suspects indefinitely without a trial.

It was this climate of emergency following the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to propose the Enabling Act. Kaas and his fellow Center Party leaders debated it for hours, torn between principle and self-preservation. Some urged resistance, warning that Hitler’s power must be checked. But most feared the consequences of defiance. Still others clung to the hope that by cooperating, they might influence Hitler from within—perhaps by helping weaken their Social Democrat rivals or by carving out protections for Center Party or Catholic leaders. In the final vote, all 73 Center Party parliamentarians capitulated, justifying their surrender as a necessary evil to save the party. As Kaas himself told his colleagues, “If a two-thirds majority [is] not achieved, the government will carry out its plans through other means.”

But there was nothing strategic about this vote. Along with all of Germany’s other opposition parties, the Center Party was dissolved within months. The Center Party’s support for the act did not moderate Hitler; it gave him total control. This was the final, fatal miscalculation—the belief that democracy’s protections could be bargained away but democracy itself could still somehow survive.

DON’T BET ON IT

No democratic constitution is self-enforcing, not even ones much older than the Weimar Republic was in the early 1930s. Citizens and leaders must defend democratic institutions whenever they are threatened and whatever the scale of the threat.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections. Mainstream political leaders had many opportunities to push back. But Hugenberg believed he could use Hitler to revitalize his conservative movement. Von Papen believed he could control Hitler after making him chancellor. Kaas believed that capitulating to Hitler’s demands would protect his party and buy time for a more significant resistance. They were all wrong.

Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve.

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AS THE US IS EDGING TOWARD DICTATORSHIP—

Posted on December 23, 2024 by kilroy100

The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America

Xiao Gongqin thought that, in moments of flux, a strongman could build a bridge to democracy. Now he’s not so sure.

By Chang Che

December 21, 2024 (from the New Yorker Magazine)

A large mural depicting current and former Chinese leaders clockwise from top Mao Zedong Deng Xiaoping Hu Jintao Xi...

A large mural depicting current and former Chinese leaders: clockwise from top, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, and Jiang Zemin.Photograph by Mark Schiefelbein / AP

When Russian and Chinese élites talk about history, they often mean “History”—the grand Hegelian march toward progress. Since the end of the Cold War, the East has lived with the undignified thesis, popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that democracy had defeated the authoritarian alternatives of the twentieth century. That idea has not aged well. According to a European survey of more than two hundred countries, 2022 was the first time in two decades that closed autocracies outnumbered liberal democracies in the world. Americans have become unreliable underwriters of the international order. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has incited Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War and China’s Xi Jinping is remaking global institutions in his own image, bereft of democratic values. When Xi visited the Kremlin in March, 2023, a little over a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told Putin that the world was changing in ways “we haven’t seen in a hundred years.” “Let’s drive those changes together,” he said. Putin, hands outstretched, nodded. “I agree.”

Donald Trump’s victory this November turned what some dismissed as an electoral fluke, in 2016, into an enduring political reality. “We have won,” Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian ideologue known to some as “Putin’s philosopher,” proclaimed on X. “Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.” Ren Yi, a blogger and grandson of a former Chinese Communist leader, wrote that Trump’s win, along with his chumminess with Elon Musk, has created something of a “techno-authoritarian-conservative” alliance that resembled the authoritarian cultures of East Asia. “The ‘beacon’ of the free world, the United States, will lead various countries into illiberal democracy,” Ren predicted. “There is no end to history, only the end of the Fukuyama-ists.”

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The morning after the U.S. election, I got a message from a seventy-eight-year-old historian in Shanghai named Xiao Gongqin. “I have predicted on several private occasions that Trump would win,” he wrote. Trump, he reasoned, was a necessary corrective against a “woke left” that “had truly gone overboard in recent years.” This level of antipathy toward American progressives is not uncommon among Chinese liberals, who, since 2016, have flocked toward Trump, in part to repudiate a Democratic Party whose emphasis on political correctness—real or imagined—reminds them of China’s past disasters in socialist governance. But Xiao is not a liberal, and his well-known anti-democratic influence on Chinese politics made him an instructive voice on America’s current predicament.

Xiao is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization. Drawing on a range of sources—Chinese history; Samuel Huntington’s theory of “modernizing authoritarianism”; the Asian “dragons” of Singapore and South Korea, which had grown rapidly under authoritarian rulers—these intellectuals pushed, and supplied the moral ballast, for China to postpone the end of history.

Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988, continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”

As a writer covering Chinese culture and politics, I’ve watched with a sense of foreboding as America has begun to manifest the same authoritarian compulsions that have long dominated Chinese life. There is a cosmic irony in the way that the twenty-first century has played out: the West, hoping its adversaries would become more like it, has inextricably become more like them. Slowly, ideas that Xiao and his allies had propagated decades ago—the stabilizing force of the strongman and a reverence for cultural traditions—seem to have arrived in the control center of the world’s most powerful liberal democracy.

After Trump’s recent victory, I decided to pay Xiao a visit. I wanted to understand the scholar who had helped salvage the strongman from the dustbin of history, and to know what he made of the figure’s present, and likely future, proliferation. What I found, to my surprise, was a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.” His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people. He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism, and he even seemed to support America’s New Right. But as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. Authoritarianism, Xiao told me, “has its own problems.”

When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.” Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control.

On an overcast Monday evening, I arrived at a low-rise apartment tower in Shanghai, where Xiao lives with his wife. He is a sprightly man, with salt-and-pepper hair and wispy bangs that he brushes to one side. Every day, for twenty years, he has kept to an intense exercise routine—a hundred and fifty squats and more than three hundred volleys of a squash or tennis ball outside. During that time, he has been hard at work on a hefty three-volume history of China from antiquity to Deng’s “reform and opening up.” (He hopes to complete it by 2030.) Xiao has an obsession with classical music. He often leads guests into a spartan living room, where he shows off an oversized speaker system on which he spent tens of thousands of dollars. (“My entire life savings,” he told me.) On my visit, we listened to the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter’s rendition of the “Carmen Fantasy,” at a volume suited to the hard of hearing.

In the days after the U.S. election, Xiao wrote an essay on his blog in which he opined about the result’s geopolitical ramifications. He feared that Trump’s isolationist bluster would lead some Chinese to underestimate U.S. commitments to Taiwan, raising the “probability of direct conflict between the U.S. and China.” During our meeting, however, he also expounded on how the countries were similar. China’s neo-authoritarianism in the eighties, he told me, shared a common enemy with today’s Republican Party: the “romanticism” espoused by the “radical liberals.”

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Xiao used the term romanticism to describe the belief, inspired by the Enlightenment, that humanity can design ideal societies through reason. He criticized this view for disregarding history and experience—or, to riff on an old adage, for “making the perfect the enemy of the feasible.” Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism, witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.

Shortly after Mao died, in 1976, the reckoning began. Crowds gathered around a Democracy Wall near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to post demands for freedom and accountability. Intellectuals called for a “New Enlightenment,” and an iconoclastic 1988 documentary, “River Elegy,” compared Chinese civilization to a muddied Yellow River that was in need of a “good scrubbing.” In the frenzy to repudiate the past, Xiao saw history repeating itself. The Cultural Revolution had cemented his faith in a liberal modernity, but it also, paradoxically, instilled a visceral fear of that modernity’s real-life accelerants. In the spirit of William F. Buckley, Jr., the architect of modern American conservatism, Xiao stood “athwart history yelling Stop.”

The seeds of “neo-authoritarianism” came to Xiao around 1983, when he was researching republican China, the country’s first major attempt at democracy. The experiment followed the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty, in 1911, and was seen by many of Xiao’s coevals as a fount of inspiration. But what Xiao found was complete and utter chaos. “The National Assembly couldn’t do anything except mess things up,” Xiao told me. “The parties would just go at each other with total disregard for the nation’s interests.” China, Xiao concluded, lacked the “software system” for democracy: a civil society, a rule of law, a culture of political bargaining and compromise. “I do not mean to say that I am fundamentally opposed to Western democracy,” Xiao told me. “I personally feel very envious of the United States and the West.” But, he went on, moving the system over is implausible because China “lacks so many of the conditions.” What China needed was something like a final emperor, the breaker of the despotic chain who would summon modernity by fiat. Xiao reverse-engineered democracy back to the strongman: “In order to have democracy, there must be civil society,” he told me. A civil society requires economic prosperity; economic prosperity requires political stability; and political stability “requires a strongman.”

In 1988, Xiao introduced his theory at an academic symposium, and “neo-authoritarianism” officially entered the public discourse. The idea was reviled by liberal intellectuals, who accused Xiao of rationalizing the status quo—or, worse, tilting China back toward the system that it had just escaped. But his theory seemed to mirror the temperament of Deng, who, for all his reformist tendencies, was a ruthless apparatchik. Throughout his reign, the man hailed as a pragmatic liberalizer jailed Democracy Wall activists and denounced unwelcome foreign ideas as “spiritual pollution.” In the spring of 1989, students gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest for greater political freedoms. Intellectuals led by the literary critic Liu Xiaobo joined a hunger strike in solidarity. Deng imposed martial law and approved the final order to clear the square.

Protester and soldiers.

Xiao told me that Liu and the demonstrators held “considerable responsibility” for the carnage on June 4th that year. The hunger strikers, it seemed, had contracted the same romantic virus that plagued the turn-of-century reformers, the Red Guards, and Gorbachev. “Neo-authoritarianism’s No. 1 enemy,” Xiao told me, “is the radical liberals.” Only once they were “marginalized,” he continued, could Chinese society stabilize and experiment with political freedoms. (Liu Xiaobo died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison.)

If reformers like Liu had, in Xiao’s view, pushed China beyond its immediate capacities, American progressives were now doing the same to the United States. For Xiao, the Democratic Party, élite universities, and Western corporate boards were the new epicenters of romanticism. Open borders ignored the real difficulties of cultural assimilation—it was, as he put it, like “mixing Type B blood with a Type A body.” Transgender identity was just pseudoscience: “The belief that everyone can decide their gender—it disregards human experience,” Xiao told me. (Xiao did not seem to be familiar with “radicalism” on the American right, from white nationalism to QAnon.) The implication was clear: in 1989, the man who repelled the radicals was Deng Xiaoping. In 2024, it was Donald Trump.

Perhaps one reason why authoritarianism has returned to America is that the country’s fundamental political questions are beginning to resemble those of the East. For most of American history, politics revolved around how to limit government. But, in the Communist world, the question was often about how to rebuild it—and save it from bad actors. The stakes felt higher. There are many probable causes of our eastward drift: the failures of globalization, the betrayals of technological progress, cultural anomie, the provocateurs who profit from the sense that the world is about to burn. Whatever the origin, America’s inner conflict now feels comparable to the pivotal decade when Xiao and his liberal adversaries fought over China’s future.

Following what many Americans considered the most consequential election of a lifetime, Elon Musk has vowed to “delete” a bloated government. Trump promises to eradicate an army of deep-state conspirators, whom he calls “the enemy within.” Democratic norms and the rule of law are mere windshield ornaments on the road to American redemption. In its emphasis on results, this approach is familiar to Chinese authoritarians. “The people didn’t want romanticism, they wanted performance,” Xiao told me when I asked him why he thought Trump had won. The Democrats didn’t perform, he added: they didn’t secure the border, and they didn’t improve the economy.

For all of Xiao’s attention to the psyche of “radical liberals,” I was most struck by his own. In the Liu Xiaobos of the eighties, Xiao had glimpsed a romanticism redolent of the Red Guards. In this light, an advocate for peaceful democratic change, who kept vigil in Tiananmen Square to protect students from oncoming tanks, had been similar to violent revolutionaries. Xiao, of course, had been a revolutionary himself—and who better to recognize a radical than a recovering radical? The current generation of Communist Party leaders is not so different in their perspective. “The Politburo is a Red Guard Politburo,” Geremie Barmé, a prominent Australian sinologist, told me. China, he continued, “lives with a completely unresolved, profound historical trauma . . . and is now led by people who are all the product of trauma. All of this is why it is so repressive.”

One is not born but becomes an authoritarian. Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century’s giant of illiberal thought, drew his theories from his personal experience living in the Weimar Republic. Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel traced his anti-democratic conversion to earlier defeats: his “trench warfare” against progressive students in college; the post-financial-crisis marginalization of libertarian dogma. Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.

Thiel and Xiao are vastly different thinkers, but this only makes their commonalities more striking. In believing that democracy was either premature or past its prime, they turned to the strongman as an antidote. “The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, told me, “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When I asked Xiao what a democracy in China might look like, he said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.

For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won, where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.” ♦

Chang Che, formerly the Asia technology correspondent for the New York Times, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2022.

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 IMPERIUMS MADE SIMPLE (Dan Townsend, New Mexico, 2024)

Posted on November 20, 2024 by kilroy100

im·pe·ri·um

 (ĭm-pîr′ē-əm)

n. pl. im·pe·ri·a (-pîr′ē-ə)

1. Absolute rule; supreme power.

     (Empires, wherever they existed, had certain common characteristics):

  1. Emperors, whether conspicuously insane and angry/paranoid (Caligula, Nero, Ivan “the terrible”) or, in some cases, relatively amiable and approachable, were consumed by the need to perpetuate, defend and expand the boundaries of the Empire.
  1. In order to accomplish this mandate, Empires required outsize expensive standing armies and navies, fueled by priority demands on the treasury of the country, and an endless supply of male citizens of acceptable levels of mental and physical health obliged to be available from the age of 18 to 55.
  1. Patrilineal succession was the usual way for Emperors to keep power within the family, with exceptions within the inner circle involving poisons and assassinations altering course to competing patrilineal lines or even Empresses—Elizabeth and Catherine of Russia—Elizabeths I and II, Victoria of England. Citizens of the Empire had no say whatever in the selection of their leaders at any level.

                             HOW “IMPERIUM” IN THE US, 2024, TOOK ROOT

Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, left his family home in Kallstadt, Germany in 1885, obtained a steerage ticket and joined the 1.8 million Germans who emigrated to the US, settling initially in New York City pursuing the barber trade. His motive for leaving Germany had to do with the requirement of Imperial Germany that male citizens of sound mind and body commit to 2 years of compulsory military service.

Life in the chaos and overcrowding resulting from huge numbers of immigrants settling in NYC did not agree with Frederick, so after 6 years he managed to join the long trek to the west coast and the opportunities presented by desperate gold rush participants.

First in Seattle and later in the chaos of the Klondike Gold Rush, Friedrich (later anglicized to Frederick) engaged in various business ventures such as restaurants and brothels-both in high demand where money flowed like water and “anything goes” was the norm.

As the “gold fever” died off along with the lure of profits from gambling, prostitution and extortionate prices for supplies for gold seekers, Frederick gathered up his wealth and planned to live the rest of his life not as a struggling barber but a member of the property owning “gentry” of his home town (Kallstadt, Bavaria) in Germany.

For a time, Frederick, now with wife, property and standing in his home town, looked ahead to launching a family and a comfortable life going forward.

The Bavarian Palatinate authorities, however, would not let him. They claimed he had left Germany as an illegal emigrant, evading taxes and the compulsory two-year military service. Frederick pleaded that he and Elisabeth were “loyal Germans and stand behind the high Kaiser and the mighty German Reich”. It was all to no avail.

Before the bureaucracy could mobilize its police powers to carry out the penalties due an “illegal alien”, Frederick liquidated what he could and, with his new bride and what he could carry boarded another ship to the US with, at the time, only cursory medical checks and paperwork at Ellis Island for west European immigrants with provable assets.

Frederick Trump and his bride arrived in NYC at the peak of a real estate frenzy extending into the cities outer boroughs. So instead of going further west, Frederick’s assets went into apartments and commercial properties in the city. Eventually, a son was born, Frederick Christ Trump. All was well until Frederick Senior died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, leaving his wife and son, 15 years old. Frederic C. and his mother managed to keep the family business going until Junior was old enough to take over full management responsibilities.

(Looking ahead to Donald J. Trump’s 2015 campaign for President, largely based on immigration fears. It’s worth noting that the Trump family was, upon the US entry into World War I, threatened along with many other immigrants from Germany who were referred to as “enemy aliens” to such an extent that some were murdered and assaults on the street were common. As a result, Frederick Trump’s family began to claim that they hailed from Sweden instead.)

It was only from the 1980s that Donald Trump started to stand by his German roots.

Donald’s father Fred continued to invest heavily in New York real estate, laying the foundations for today’s business empire.

He eventually had a management team with which he could enjoy the fruits of wealth, including a visit to Scotland during which he met Mary, a maid, then employed at the Andrew Carnegie estate in Scotland. Courtship and marriage took place, after which, eventually, 4 children were born, the last of whom in 1946 was Donald John Trump.

Over time Frederick C.’s management team activities got the attention of the Manhattan District Attorney for various shady practices and links with criminal organizations. Clearly however, Junior’s skill at marshalling permits, materials and contractors for the construction of new buildings got the attention of the War Department which was faced with the need to speedily get housing built for workers at defense plants all over the country during World War II, so a deal was struck to relax Trump’s legal issues while he was engaged in constructing worker housing.

Not to mention the princely sums paid Frederick C. during the worker’s housing construction. It’s been remarked upon that this government project was the foundation of the Trump Organization’s rapid acquisition of power and wealth in Queens Borough, New York City.

Junior’s eldest son Frederick Christ Trump Jr. had been groomed by his father to succeed him in managing the Trump Organization, but was unhappy with the practices and associations with organized crime his father employed and resisted having anything to do with them. Aviation was his “independence” card, as he trained, and pursued a career as a pilot with Trans World Airlines. 

Unfortunately the unrelenting pressure his father applied to abandon his aviation career and take the reins of the Trump Organization took its toll, causing Frederick Junior to eventually become an alcoholic and forfeit his pilot certifications, causing his early death at 42. This left Donald J. as the only male heir left as Frederick Sr. descended into early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Donald J. made a great show of concern for his father, while at the same time being mentored by daddy’s Mafia lawyer, Roy Cohn. 

When Donald J. took the reins of the Trump Organization officially, one of his first acts was to try to deprive the family of his elder brother of their share of the inheritance by, among other things, cutting his nephew, suffering from a variety of health issues,  out of the corporate health plan to which the family was entitled. The psychologist Mary Trump, Donald J.’s niece and sister of the nephew mentioned, was often quoted during the 2024  campaign as trying to alert the public of the danger of allowing Donald J. another chance at the Presidency. Unfortunately her warnings were not heeded by the voters.

The irony here is that Donald J.’s grandfather fled Imperial Germany, only to wind up with a grandson who, according to all indications seeks to create an Imperial regime on the smoking ruins of Constitutional Republic we have, up to now enjoyed. 

    Addendum

                              

 

Dr. Mary Trump published a book, ominously titled, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Most readers won’t need any more clues about her subject – her uncle, President Trump. But those who do could consult the cover, which features a photo of a young Trump before he became the figure who now lumbers upon the world stage and lurks in so many nightmares.

Three and a half years into the Trump era, endless words have been spent illustrating the chaotic and cruel personality that can, to cite just one example, schedule a huge ego-gratifying rally in the middle of a deadly Covid pandemic caused by a viciously contagious virus.

According to her publisher, Mary Trump will bring her special perspective – insider, psychologist, writer – to bear on incidents and information never before revealed.

Trump isn’t aging well

Having devoted years to the study of the man and the Trump clan, I can say that the bits teased so far suggest that Mary Trump has the goods. To begin with, she’s the daughter of the President’s eldest sibling, Fred Trump Jr., who may have been the original victim of Donald Trump’s bullying.

As publisher Simon and Schuster put it: “She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for regifting, to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.”

Warm and easygoing, Frederick Junior was, by all accounts, ill-suited to play the role of cutthroat real estate baron, which was what his father expected of him. Happy to step in, Donald did all he could to prove that he was the more deserving son.

When Fred Jr. finally ceded first position among the heirs to the family business, he became an airline pilot. Donald mocked his profession. “What’s the difference between what you do,” he would ask, “and driving a bus?”

After Fred Jr. died at age 42 from complications of alcoholism, Donald turned his death into an object lesson that reflected well on himself. Donald pointedly abstained from tobacco and alcohol because of his brother’s struggle, saying, “I watched him. And I learned from him.”

The cruelty didn’t stop with Fred Jr.’s death in 1981. Later, when the paterfamilias Fred Trump Sr. died, heirs learned that his will distributed his estate among his children and their offspring “other than my son Fred C. Trump Jr.” The children of Fred Jr. sued, noting that an earlier will, written prior to Fred Sr. being diagnosed with dementia, had granted them proper shares.

Soon after the suit was filed, Donald changed a health insurance policy, taking away coverage for a disabled infant born to Fred’s own son, Fred III. (A second telling anecdote from author Harry Hurt III, who has written about the Trumps, describes Donald briefly considering evicting his brother and sisters from their rent-free homes in a Trump building unless they paid cash for the property.)

When asked in 2000 whether withdrawing the child’s insurance was cold-hearted, the man who claimed to be a billionaire said, “I can’t help that. It’s cold when someone sues my father.”

The suit was settled and the baby was again insured, but 16 years later, when he was running for president, Donald Trump seemingly had no regrets. Asked about the incident, he said, “I was angry because they sued.”

For those who know the family lore, the circle is completed by a little anecdote published in Hurt’s 1993 book “Lost Tycoon.” Hurt reports overhearing Fred Trump Sr. talking about his son Donald and his wife Mary flying off together. “I hope their plane crashes,” said Fred, adding that then “all my problems will be solved.”

Reports on the upcoming book suggest that the author will share juicy stories she learned from the President’s sister, Maryanne Barry. It wouldn’t be the first time that Barry, perhaps inadvertently, revealed something true about her brother. Speaking with writer Gwenda Blair in 1990, Barry shared a story about when Donald was a young man and turned a game of catch with Barry’s seven year-old son into a cruel contest.

“Donald kept throwing it faster and faster, harder and harder, until I hear this crack and the ball hit David’s head. Donald had to beat the seven year-old.”

This cold-hearted nature followed him into his political career. As president, Donald Trump has treated the children of asylum-seeking immigrants with great cruelty, separating them from their parents and locking them in cages. During our current pandemic, with over 116,000 dead in the US and more succumbing every hour, he has been so cavalier as to advocate dangerous unproven cures.

The biographer quoted below is Michael D’Antonio, a former journalist for Newsday and the author of The Truth About Trump. “In my own experience as a Trump biographer I have answered questions about the origins of the President’s weird ways by citing both genetics and his upbringing. This nature-and-nurture answer is a bit of a cop-out, but it is the best I have been able to muster after studying the man and his family.”

Because she has lived close to the source and possesses real expertise in mental health, Mary Trump’s opinion matters greatly to those seeking answers. I can’t wait to read her book.

Trump’s comments are in line with his vicious verbal attacks on Mexicans and other immigrant groups in the United States. But they betray his own family background. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, a German, lived a migrant life in the US on the edge of illegality and rejection. During the World War I, he belonged to an immigrant group which was sweepingly labelled the “enemy within” or – in his grandson’s parlance – a Trojan horse.

The great wave

Friedrich Trump was swept to the United States in one of the biggest waves of mass migration in history. During the 1880s and early 1890s, 1.8m Germans emigrated to the US.

Wartime spy fever

World War I was not a happy time for German-Americans. They were summarily labelled as “alien enemies” whose true allegiance lay with the Fatherland. Nativist spokesmen agitated against “hyphenated Americans” as potential spies and saboteurs. Use of the German language was seen with suspicion. In contrast to many of their compatriots, the Trumps did not need to anglicise their surname as it worked perfectly in English.

The most notorious case of public violence was the lynching of German immigrant Robert Prager in Illinois. He was tarred and feathered, forced by an agitated crowd to kiss the American flag and sing patriotic songs, and finally hanged from a tree in front of 200 onlookers.

Frederick Trump evaded the fate of Prager, but not the other deadly weapon which swept the world once the war was nearing its end. In 1918 and 1919, Spanish influenza killed between 20m and 50m people worldwide. On a summer’s day in 1918, Frederick returned home from a stroll through New York with his son Fred (Donald’s father), went to bed feeling sick, and passed away the next day.

Paranoid nation

The dangerous mix of paranoia and xenophobia directed against German-Americans during World War I had profound and long-lasting effects. The Alien Enemy Bureau was established in the early days of the war with a brief to identify and arrest disloyal foreigners. It was headed by J. Edgar Hoover, then a young civil servant in the Justice Department. Here he picked up the tools he would use later as all-powerful director of the FBI.

In 1940, the notorious House Un-American Affairs Committee published The Trojan Horse in America, a compendium of domestic organisations believed to work for foreign powers. Chapter titles included “Mussolini’s Trojan Horse in America” and “A Trojan Horse of German War Veterans”.

All this was reason enough for the business-minded Trumps to deny their German heritage, claiming they hailed from Sweden instead. Donald’s father Fred invested heavily in New York real estate, laying the foundations for today’s business empire. It was only from the 1980s that Donald Trump started to stand by his German roots.

Trump’s own grandfather was an illegal emigrant whose income stream included alcohol and prostitution at a time when these were legally contested. He was an unwanted returnee to Germany, and then a potential “enemy alien” within the United States who had declared his loyalty to the German Kaiser – but ultimately made an immense economic contribution spanning generations.

Today, his grandson lambastes Mexicans as criminals, intends to erect a wall to keep them out, and warns of Syrian refugees as Trojan horses. If Donald Trump wins his party’s nomination, historians will have many a field day digging out the contradictions between his anti-immigrant rhetoric and his family background.

Most Serene, Most Powerful Prince Regent! Most Gracious Regent and Lord!

I was born in Kallstadt on March 14, 1869. My parents were honest, plain, pious vineyard workers. They strictly held me to everything good — to diligence and piety, to regular attendance in school and church, to absolute obedience toward the high authority.

After my confirmation, in 1882, I apprenticed to become a barber. I emigrated in 1885, in my sixteenth year. In America I carried on my business with diligence, discretion, and prudence. God’s blessing was with me, and I became rich. I obtained American citizenship in 1892. In 1902 I met my current wife. Sadly, she could not tolerate the climate in New York, and I went with my dear family back to Kallstadt.

The town was glad to have received a capable and productive citizen. My old mother was happy to see her son, her dear daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter around her; she knows now that I will take care of her in her old age.

But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the High Royal State Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence in the Kingdom of Bavaria. We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.

Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.

In this urgent situation I have no other recourse than to turn to our adored, noble, wise, and just sovereign lord, our exalted ruler His Royal Highness, highest of all, who has already dried so many tears, who has ruled so beneficially and justly and wisely and softly and is warmly and deeply loved, with the most humble request that the highest of all will himself in mercy deign to allow the applicant to stay in the most gracious Kingdom of Bavaria.

Your most humble and obedient, Friedrich Trump

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GOD BLESSES PUTIN’S WAR?

Posted on February 10, 2024 by kilroy100

08 FEBRUARY 2024, THE TABLET

Putin’s holy war

by Martin Sixsmith

Soviet politics and the Russian Orthodox Church

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is a staunch critic of a Western-induced ‘cultural miasma’. Records have shown his links to the KGB and to Vladimir Putin.

The patriarch and the president reinforce each other’s conviction that the two-year-old war in Ukraine is necessary to prevent a decadent West imposing its depraved liberal values on Russia.

Patriarch Kirill criticised by MPs for links to Putin ahead of historic visit to UK

In April 1242, with the Russian lands in danger of being overrun by the advancing forces of the Teutonic Knights, Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod needed a miracle. And, as his outnumbered forces rode out to confront the invaders on the frozen waters of Lake Peipus, he got one. “In fierce battle came the crash of breaking lances and the ringing of sword on sword, until the ice turned red with the blood of men,” wrote the official chronicler of the Novgorodian princedom, “until in the sky appeared God’s hosts of heavenly troops, aiding our Prince to victory … I know this is true, for an eyewitness hath told me so.”

The chronicler’s reassurance that God must be on our side because “an eyewitness hath told me so” is a curlicue embellishment on a time-honoured theme. Princes and presidents throughout history have claimed the endorsement of Heaven to shore up their authority. Vladimir Putin is no exception.

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has generally been an ally – oftentimes, a servant – of the Russian state since the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus’ in 1589. Under the ultra-conservative, antisemitic Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who served as procurator of the Holy Synod between 1880 and 1905, the ROC became part of the campaign to fight foreign influence and return Russia to its own “God-appointed” path, opposing western ideas of individualism, democracy and freedom of thought – desiderata that would be voiced again with gusto in the second half of Putin’s reign.

Despite the Bolshevik persecution of the Church, in 1927 Patriarch Sergius pledged the ROC’s loyalty to the Soviet state, triggering a schism and the declaration of a rival seat of Russian Orthodox power, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Under Boris Yeltsin, the ROC was kept largely on the margins of power. Putin made a bigger effort. He spoke of his lifelong Orthodox faith and used it to his advantage. At his first meeting with George W. Bush, he showed him a metal cross that he said had been a gift from his mother on the occasion of his secret baptism in the 1950s. Although he didn’t wear it during his time in the KGB, Putin said he had had the cross blessed on a trip to Jerusalem in the mid 1990s at his mother’s behest and it had later miracu­lously survived a fire at the family dacha. Since then, Putin said, “I have never taken it off.” Putin returned much of the property confiscated from the Church by the Bolsheviks and showered its leaders with praise and money. In 2007, he attended the ceremony in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that ended the 80-year-old schism within Russian Orthodoxy. “The restoration of church unity is an important condition for rediscovering the lost unity of the Russian people,” he declared.

When Putin announced in 2012 that he would return to the presidency after serving a term as prime minister, Patriarch Kirill, who had been elected in 2009, was his most vocal champion. The reign of Vladimir Putin, he assured the faithful, was “God’s miracle”. Kirill endorsed Putin’s description of the 1990s as a new Time of Troubles and blamed Russia’s “moral collapse” on western influences, ­including the excessive individualism that accompanied the liberalisation of politics and the economy. He gave thanks that the Church had remained a bastion of integrity, holding Russian society together in those difficult years, preserving the nation’s true values and ready now to aid President Putin in his crusade to put Russia back on its feet.

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and the president of the Russian Federation were soulmates, dedicated to the same “eternal principles” of conservatism, stability and strong rule from the top. When the KGB archives were opened briefly in the 1990s, a free-thinking Orthodox priest, Fr Gleb Yakunin, trawled through the classified documents and came away convinced that the Moscow Patriarchate was “practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB”. Yakunin listed all the agents within the Church who m­ade regular reports to the security services. He revealed that “agent Mikhailov”, who travelled regularly to Switzerland, was none other than “a certain Archimandrite Kirill, working in the Church’s department of external relations”.

When members of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after staging a performance of their “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Kirill made the most of it. Russia and Orthodoxy were once more under threat, he warned, for the moment by “blasphemy and outrage”, but physical violence might not be far behind. “Those who would invite us all to mock our shrines, reject our faith and, if possible, destroy our churches are testing the people’s ability to protect their holy places.” For Kirill, the “holy places” that require protection extend beyond the borders of the Russian Federation: the “canonical territory” of the ROC is considered to encompass all places where Orthodox Christians follow the Russian rite, just as canon law shall be applied to Russian citizens wherever they abide. His own title, Kirill is fond of reminding people, is Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’.

Kirill’s assertion of Moscow’s authority abroad paralleled the state’s Russkiy Mir doctrine, entitling the motherland to intervene in the fate of Russians beyond its boundaries. Putin, in turn, cited Kirill’s devotion to “God’s intentions regarding [his] land and [his] people” as legitimising his own mission to reunite the Russian lands. Patriarch and president both declared themselves in favour of Russian pride and Russian patriotism; and both stated their intention to defend “trad­itional values” in the face of the “cultural miasma” seeping into Russia from the West.

Following the protests of 2011–12, Putin increasingly adopted the sort of conservative language that Kirill had long favoured, with the apparent aim of shoring up his support among traditional Orthodox believers, some of whom had taken to the streets to demonstrate against him. Kirill’s favourite themes – that Russia’s “spiritual sovereignty” was being assailed by “liberal trends emanating from the Protestant societies in the West” – appeared with regularity in Putin’s speeches. He told the Russian parliament that the West had sunk into a morass of depravity and was now trying to inflict it on Russia. “The Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God. What can you say! Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction. The [western] elites are going crazy and this cannot be cured, it seems. But our duty is to protect our children. And we will do this. We will protect our children from degradation.”

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 presented Kirill with a dilemma. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine had split, with some priests no longer accepting the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. When masked soldiers of the Russian Federation – Putin’s “Little Green Men” – appeared in Crimea, priests of the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) had rushed to their side, blessing their holy mission and helping to negotiate the surrender of Ukrainian troops. Fr Dimitry Vasilenkov, a priest who would receive the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship by presidential decree for “providing care in Crimea”, saw the Church’s role as the fulfilment of divine will. “What can this be, if not God’s miracle? The Lord did not allow for any bloodshed. [After all], polite people need polite chaplains.” The invading forces were invited to use religious premises as barracks and for stockpiling weapons, while Orthodox priests loyal to Ukraine who refused to help were chased out of their churches. One them, Fr Ivan Katkalo, said the clergy were acting on direct orders from Moscow. “[Their] priests carried out assignments that were set at the very top levels […] When priests allow military people carrying weapons into their church, this stops being a church and starts being an organisation that answers to the state.”

Other participants in the “Crimean Spring” also had connections to the ROC, including the banker Konstantin Malofeyev, the so-called “Orthodox oligarch” whose charitable foundation had spent tens of millions of dollars supporting the Russian Orthodox Church. In February 2014, he had warned Putin that Western Europe was on the verge of “absorbing” Ukraine “element by element”. He demanded the immediate annexation of Crimea, to be followed by the fomenting of discontent in eastern Ukraine to create “political legitimacy and moral justification” for a Russian takeover. In Malofeyev’s plan, the pro-Russian message and the call to rebellion would be disseminated by ROC priests in sermons to parishioners across Russian-speaking Ukraine. Within a matter of weeks, Crimea had been annexed and Malofeyev’s former head of PR, Alexander Borodai, was named Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Malofeyev subsequently spent large sums of money financing Igor Girkin’s Sloviansk Brigade and promoting the “historic” duty of Russians to volunteer to fight to protect their Orthodox brothers abroad (the most famous literary example of this is Anna Karenina’s lover Vronsky setting off to defend the Serbs from the Ottomans in the 1870s). A unit calling itself the Russian Orthodox Army was also commanded by Girkin and financed by Malofeyev. It was, said Borodai, a “public-private partnership” with the Russian state.

Far from condemning Russian military aggression, Patriarch Kirill seemed to condone it. As early as 2011, he had commended the willingness of the “[Russian] Christian believer to sacrifice his life more easily than the non-believer, as he knows that his exist­ence is not going to end with the end of this life”, and declared that the Church had always blessed those who fought in a “just war”. Christians, he said, had an obligation to defend their homeland and, given that the Russian Orthodox lands encompassed the entire territory of Holy Rus’, it was right and proper to continue the fight for Russia’s “spiritual sovereignty” in Ukraine. When hostilities escalated in Donbas in 2014, Kirill claimed that “the conflict has an unambiguous religious underpinning”. “Catholics and schismatics”, he said, were moving from “preaching hatred for the Orthodox Church [to] carrying out direct aggression … under the guise of an anti-terrorist operation”. He instructed priests to bless the Russian troops departing for battle, as well as the tanks, rockets and shells that would be used to kill the Christians over the border. The head of the Church’s department for cooperation with the army, Bishop Stefan of Klin, explained that “our armed forces have sacred help from above, from God and from the heavenly saints”.

When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Patriarch Kirill supported his contention that it had been made necessary by the actions of “groups who view Russia as a thorn in their flesh [and] wish to wipe Orthodox Rus’ from the face of the earth”. In a sermon at the Cathedral of Cyril and Methodius in Kaliningrad, he assured the congregation that the war was the fault of the West: “Our Fatherland has committed no crime. People are against us not because we are bad, but because we are different.”

When in September 2022 Putin announced the mobilisation of young Russians to fight in Ukraine, Kirill assured them it was their Orthodox duty to go. In a speech that could have been made by Islamist jihadis, he promised eternal joy to those willing to sacrifice themselves in the cause of holy war. An international group of Orthodox scholars and clergy made the case for expelling the Russian Orthodox Church from the World Council of Churches. “Just as Russia has invaded Ukraine,” they declared, “so too the Moscow Patriarchate of Patriarch Kirill has invaded the Orthodox Church.”

Instead of bringing the faithful back to the Russian fold, Kirill has seen millions of them depart. Fr Nicolay Pluzhnik, a Russophone priest in the Kharkiv region, had previously been loyal to Moscow, but could not accept the patriarch’s authority. “When I hear them say they are protecting us and fighting some ‘Holy War’, I think they are either blind, or they are not serving God but the devil. We were living peacefully until they came. But far from protecting us, they bombed and tortured and killed. Before the war, parishioners were completely free to choose what church they went to […] For many of them it was not even a significant difference to go to a church that followed Moscow or not, they just wanted to pray to God. Now all of that has changed.”

Some formerly pro-Moscow priests joined the autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church; others, including the monks of the historic Pecherskaya Lavra in central Kyiv, faced searches and evictions as the Kyiv authorities became convinced they were sheltering Russian personnel and equipment. According to a 2023 Royal United Services Institute report, “the one body of ideologically committed agents supporting the invasion was the Russian Orthodox Church. Beyond its efforts to support Russian information operations, its priests were widely recruited and run by the Russian special services and their monasteries and churches used as safe houses […] The use of religion as cover is not only a widely established method of the Russian special services but also creates its own protection mechanism because of the political sensitivities of state targeting of religious institutions.”

When the desired rapid victory in Ukraine did not materialise, religion provided another useful prop. Putin’s long-time adviser and sabre rattler, Sergey Karaganov, declared it was time to go nuclear, with a pre-emptive strike on a Nato city such as Poznan. It would be a hard choice, Karaganov admitted, but – just as he did with Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Teutonic Knights – God would support Russia’s cause. “The creation of nuclear weapons was the result of divine intervention. God handed a weapon of Armageddon to humanity to remind those who have lost the fear of hell that it exists,” he said. “We will use God’s weapon, thus dooming ourselves to grave losses. But if we do not do this, Russia will die and most likely the whole of human civilisation will cease to exist.” By using God’s nukes, Russia “will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the five-century-long western yoke, but we will also save humanity”, Karaganov declared. “In the end, the winners are not judged. And the saviours are thanked.”

Martin Sixsmith is an author, television and radio presenter and journalist. Adapted from Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War by Martin Sixsmith with Daniel Sixsmith (Bloomsbury Continuum, £25; Tablet price £22.50).

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GOODBYE ALASKA?

Posted on December 14, 2016 by kilroy100

alaska-return-to-russia-plaque

RUSSIANS have demanded the return of Alaska from the US in a fiery new memorial.Images of the stone engraving in the Crimean town of Yevpatoria have emergedin the region recently annexed from the Ukraine by Vladimir Putin.Russia has flexed its muscles in Crimea since seizing the region from neighbour Ukraine in 2014.

Carrying an image of Crimea and Alaska, an inscription on the marble slab reads: “We have returned Crimea, you are to return Alaska!”

Has Vladimir Putin set his sights on ALASKA after war-mongering Russians demanded the US state is returned to Moscow’s rule?

United States bought the icy state from Russia for just £6million back in 1876, or $7.2 million dollars. Though an enormous sum just after the Civil War, Russians in 2016 are quick to point out that our government paid with a “rubber check”, since the Senate of the day refused to back the check with actual money. This is the basis of the claim by many that the U.S. acquired Alaska through fraud.

Years passed until the Russian Ambassador summoned a number of Senators, including Daniel Webster, to a sumptuous dinner during which he provided Senators present with a “gift” of $10,000 (the equivalent of millions today) each. Soon afterward, the Senate backed the check mentioned above with actual funds.

BY DANNY COLLINS, staff writer for the London SUN newspaper

27th October 2016, 2:57 pm

It is just the latest in a series of coded warnings from newly-resurgent Moscow that it is eyeing up its former territory.

How Russia once ruled a North American empire all the way down to California

Russia first established colonies in North America back in 1733.

Eastern pioneers first established settlements in Alaska, Canada, and then later in California.

Russia also held two ports on the Pacific islands of Hawaii.

Voyages were first made across the narrows of the Bering Strait in the hunt for valuable sea otter pelts.

By the mid 19th-century, intrepid explorers had established Fort Ross in California, for the purpose of growing food for its Alaskan colony.

But Moscow was forced to abandon its American adventure by 1867, citing the high cost of war with Britain–at the time considering annexing (by force) Russian territory adjoining its own North American lands, now known as Canada. An additional problem was that the sea otter harvest had resulted in depleting the resource, very nearly rendering the species extinct.

The Russian and US mainland are separated by barely 55 miles across the Bering Strait.

Each country possesses one of the Diomede Islands, which are only two miles apart.

It means two of the world’s superpowers are barely a few thousand metres (yards, in English measure) apart at their closest point.

The USA’s largest state was later found to contain reserves of natural gas and oil.That fact has not gone unnoticed in Russia, which lies only 55 miles away from Alaska across the Bering Strait.

.On one of Vladimir Putin’s carefully monitored “call-in” programs, a caller asked whether he would like to see his country seize America’s 49th state. Yet Vlad brushed off the question, dismissing the region as a cold outpost of no interest to Moscow.

He replied: “My dear caller, why do you need Alaska?”

“Although we sold Alaska to the United States for a song, we are the northern country. “

“Seventy percent of our territory today is located in regions of the North and Far North.”

“Alaska is not in the Southern hemisphere. It is also cold there.”

“Let’s not be hot-tempered.”

lyube-russian-band-favored-by-putin      RUSSIA’S CUDDLY MUSIC MAKERS–“LYUBE”

Lead singer of the band “ Lyube”,  Nikolai Rastorguyev had sung about the need for Russia to reclaim its territories in Alaska. V. Putin is a fan of this musical group. “Mixed signals” are hallmarks of Putin’s style. Below is an example:

“Do Not Fool with Us, America!The Tsars were wrong! Russia and Alaska are two banks of the same river!”

“Give back our dear land, dear Alaska, give it back to us!”

“We should have reclaimed Alaska a long time ago!”

Only last year an inflammatory TV documentary was aired with the name “When Will Alaska become Ours?” No doubt the script was a production of the Putin homeland propaganda machine. Nothing gets on Russian TV without approval.

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Guns

Posted on August 11, 2015 by kilroy100

hiram_with_gun2

Las Cruces Sun News 08/09/2015, Page C05

Your opinions 

The Devil’s Paintbrush is still doing damage

The human weakness for mayhem and murder has been a consistent source for profit through the ages, a fact well known to the arms industry behind today’s National Rifle Association.

Armories of Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Russia and the United States at the end of the 19th century produced versions of the “Maxim Gun,” referred to as the “Devil’s Paintbrush” due to its use in conflict since the original 1883 patent by its inventor, Hiram Maxim: “In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said, ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.’” Ninety percent of those felled in the battlefields of WWI from bullet-related injuries died from Maxims and clones employed in that war. Similar numbers succumbed in WWII and subsequent wars from land and airlaunched ordnance fired at a rate of 600 rounds per minute and higher.

Sprayed ordnance at up to 1,200 rounds per minute is available from the muzzle of the Glock 18, a 2-pound gun that occupies the space within a lady’s handbag.

Trust the NRA, its network of craven politicians and infotainment jockeys to make such toys available to whomever wants one — presently available only to our increasingly militarized police forces — but stay tuned!

Imagine the result of a suspected attack inside a darkened theater answered by vigilantes in the audience with fire, the walls echoing from all directions and lit cell phone screens confused with muzzle flashes — enough body bags for the outcome?

Back to the NRA and its sponsors — Sir Basil Zaharoff, the most notorious arms dealer of all time, was known as the “Merchant of Death.” I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sharing the honor.

Dan Townsend, Las Cruces 
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