News bits

A New York Times article, How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions, is interesting:

At every step of his political career, Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action.

Fifteen miles south of the Pennsylvania border, looms a fortresslike structure with a single smokestack, the only viable business in a dying Appalachian town.

The Grant Town power plant is also the link between the coal industry and the personal finances of Joe Manchin III, the Democrat who rose through state politics to reach the United States Senate, where, through the vagaries of electoral politics, he is now the single most important figure shaping the nation’s energy and climate policy.

Mr. Manchin’s ties to the Grant Town plant date to 1987, when he had just been elected to the West Virginia Senate, a part-time job with base pay of $6,500. His family’s carpet business was struggling.

Opportunity arrived in the form of two developers who wanted to build a power plant in Grant Town, just outside Mr. Manchin’s district. Mr. Manchin, whose grandfather went to work in the mines at age 9 and whose uncle died in a mining accident, helped the developers clear bureaucratic hurdles.

Then he did something beyond routine constituent services. He went into business with the Grant Town power plant.

Mr. Manchin supplied a type of low-grade coal mixed with rock and clay known as “gob” that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity. In addition, he arranged to receive a slice of the revenue from electricity generated by the plant — electric bills paid by his constituents.

He created his business while a state lawmaker in anticipation of the Grant Town plant, which has been the sole customer for his gob for the past 20 years, according to federal data. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians.  

Records show that several energy companies have held ownership stakes in the power plant, major corporations with interests far beyond West Virginia. At various points, those corporations have sought to influence the Senate, including legislation before committees on which Mr. Manchin sat, creating what ethics experts describe as a conflict of interest.

Legal corruption is not limited to the Republicans. It is bipartisan. This exemplifies the corruption of our two-party system and the moral rot that enables it.

Another NYT article, When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained, shows the moral only moral concern for that motivates most big companies, profit: 

Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network.

The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia. 

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence and digital surveillance who reviewed some of the Nokia documents at the request of The Times, said that without the company’s involvement in SORM, “it would have been impossible to make such a system.”

“They had to have known how their devices would be used,” said Mr. Soldatov, who is now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Money talks, everything else walks.

And, as we all know, demagogues and tyrants block inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning as much as possible:

Zelensky Gives Interview to Russian Journalists. Moscow Orders It Quashed.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a 90-minute-long Zoom interview on Sunday to four prominent journalists from Russia, the country invading his. Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement notified the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview.” Journalists based outside Russia published it anyway. Those still inside Russia did not.

That speaks for itself.

Ukrainian soldier by the wreck of a Russian tank

Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism

“The fact of the matter is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1927

“My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1927

“Politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1948

Ivan Ilyin, ~1920

This was written by historian Timothy Snyder, a well-known expert on democracy and tyranny. This is pretty creepy stuff with some close parallels to American radical right thinking, morality and propaganda tactics.  

Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. Today, his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin.

And so the Russian, a philosopher, understood history as a disgrace. Nothing that had happened since creation was of significance. The world was a meaningless farrago of fragments. The more humans sought to understand it, the more sinful it became. Modern society, with its pluralism and its civil society, deepened the flaws of the world and kept God in his exile. God’s one hope was that a righteous nation would follow a Leader into political totality [wholeness], and thereby begin a repair of the world that might in turn redeem the divine. Because the unifying principle of the Word was the only good in the universe, any means that might bring about its return were justified.

Thus this Russian philosopher, whose name was Ivan Ilyin, came to imagine a “Russian Christian fascism”. Born in 1883, he finished a dissertation on God’s worldly failure just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Expelled from his homeland in 1922 by the Soviet power he despised, he embraced the cause of Benito Mussolini and completed an apology for political violence in 1925. In German and Swiss exile, he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s for White Russian exiles who had fled after defeat in the Russian civil war, and in the “1940s and 1950s [he wrote] for future Russians who would see the end of the Soviet power.”

A tireless worker, Ilyin produced about twenty books in Russian, and another twenty in German. Some of his work has a rambling and commonsensical character, and it is easy to find tensions and contradictions. One current of thought that is coherent over the decades, however, is his metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. A crucial concept was “law” or “legal consciousness” (“pravosoznanie” [compound word pravo=law & soznanie=consciousness]). For the young Ilyin, writing before the Revolution, law embodied the hope that Russians would partake in a universal consciousness that would allow Russia to create a modern state. For the mature, counter-revolutionary Ilyin, a particular consciousness (“heart” or “soul,” not “mind”) permitted Russians to experience the arbitrary claims of power as law. Though he died forgotten in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today.

Marxists such as Lenin were atheists. They thought that by Spirit, Hegel meant God or some other theological notion, and replaced Spirit with society. Ilyin was not a typical Christian, but he believed in God. Ilyin agreed with Marxists that Hegel meant God, and argued that Hegel’s God had created a ruined world. For Marxists, private property served the function of an original sin, and its dissolution would release the good in man. For Ilyin, God’s act of creation was itself the original sin. There was never a good moment in history, and no intrinsic good in humans.The Marxists were right to hate the middle classes, and indeed did not hate them enough. Middle-class “civil society” entrenches plural interests that confound hopes for an “overpowering national organization” that God needs. Because the middle classes block God, they must be swept away by a classless national community. But there is no historical tendency, no historical group, that will perform this labor. The grand transformation from Satanic individuality to divine totality must begin somewhere beyond history.

According to Ilyin, liberation would arise not from understanding history, but from eliminating it. Since the earthly was corrupt and the divine unattainable, political rescue would come from the realm of fiction. (my emphasis) In 1917, Ilyin was still hopeful that Russia might become a state ruled by law. Lenin’s revolution ensured that Ilyin henceforth regarded his own philosophical ideas as political. Bolshevism had proven that God’s world was as flawed as Ilyin had maintained. What Ilyin would call “the abyss of atheism” of the new [Soviet] regime was the final confirmation of the flaws of the world, and of the power of modern ideas to reinforce them.

After he departed Russia, Ilyin would maintain that humanity needed heroes, outsized characters from beyond history, capable of willing themselves to power. In his dissertation, this politics was implicit in the longing for a missing totality [wholeness] and the suggestion that the nation might begin its restoration. It was an ideology awaiting a form and a name.

Although Ilyin was inspired by fascist Italy, his home as a political refugee between 1922 and 1938 was Germany. As an employee of the Russian Scholarly Institute (Russisches Wissenschaftliches Institut), he was an academic civil servant. It was from Berlin that he observed the succession struggle after Lenin’s death that brought Joseph Stalin to power. He then followed Stalin’s attempt to transform the political victory of the Bolsheviks into a social revolution. In 1933, Ilyin published a long book, in German, on the famine brought by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

Writing in Russian for Russian émigrés, Ilyin was quick to praise Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Hitler did well, in Ilyin’s opinion, to have the rule of law suspended after the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Ilyin presented Hitler, like Mussolini, as a Leader from beyond history whose mission was entirely defensive. “A reaction to Bolshevism had to come,” wrote Ilyin, “and it came.” European civilization had been sentenced to death, but “so long as Mussolini is leading Italy and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture has a stay of execution.” Nazis embodied a “Spirit” (Dukh) that Russians must share.

According to Ilyin, Nazis were right to boycott Jewish businesses and blame Jews as a collectivity for the evils that had befallen Germany. Above all, Ilyin wanted to persuade Russians and other Europeans that Hitler was right to treat Jews as agents of Bolshevism. This “Judeobolshevik” idea, as Ilyin understood, was the ideological connection between the Whites and the Nazis.

The article is long. Those are some selected parts.

Germaine’s fraught descent into mindreading and clinical diagnosis

What baffles the hell out of me are the recurring thoughts and behaviors among authoritarians, including the ones ruining American society today. They include morally noxious and ridiculous beliefs that (i) inconvenient truth is nothing at all, literally nothing, and (ii) they know how fix all problems and save humanity, which they are happy to do by force. Those minds reek of deep, cold sociopathy. They will kill if they have to, and probably enjoy it. There is no room for logic, morality or empathy in that black place. Unquestioning self-delusion of perfection manifests as dumb, cold arrogance. 

Presumably Ilyin really believed what Snyder finds from his published works. But the idea that people like Putin sincerely relies on the same reasoning feels wrong. Putin very well could point to Ilyin as moral justification for his brutal tyranny, but does he really buy all that crap about flawed God, national restoration and whatnot? I doubt it. It’s a buttload of garbage, useful only as an smoke screen.

In my opinion, Putin is a sociopath with intelligence, viciousness and a good work ethic, not someone concerned with God’s mistakes or any other high-minded reasoning. He does not care about dense philosophical argument. That is just a foil to elevate his joy of brutality and mega-scale theft to a learned excuse to be a cruel, rotten tyrant-kleptocrat. He likes wealth and power. That’s it. 

Well, maybe he also likes killing people.

Question: Is Germaine off the rez, out of his depth and/or just shooting blanks, or are Putin and radical right American authoritarians really drinking Kool-Aid and blither cocktail?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to fuster for citing this article.

Mass delusion, moral courage and the mass psychology of fascism

A 21:49 video by groups called After Skool (AS) and Academy of Ideas discusses mass psychology involved in violence and authoritarianism. It points to innate human traits as the key source of mass psychosis, which AS calls mass mental illness. Some of this feels dated, but the general contours feel very relevant and current.

The video starts with these thoughts:

According to  Wikipedia, Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others...” 

A couple of points from the video:

• Humans are their own worst enemy dues to incapacity to control themselves, summarized as “Man is wolf to man”

• When mental illness (mass delusion) in a society become the norm, humans are at their worst

Episodes of mass psychosis include American and European witch hunts 

of the 16th and 17th centuries and 20th century totalitarianism 

• Moral and intellectual rot and loss of control typifies the mass psychosis disease among the affected; those people typically become unreasonable, emotional and irresponsible to some non-trivial degree; crimes can become group-sanctioned and acceptable or normalized, but nearly all of the affected people are unaware of this → the psychosis manifests itself almost entirely or entirely in the unconscious mind, not consciousness 

• The most common case of mass psychosis is a flood of negative emotions resulting in anxiety, fear and panic, and that leads people to look for psychological relief and comfort from the burden; some people have the moral courage (my term, not in the video) to face their fears and anxieties, but most people experience a psychotic break that leads to a state of mind grounded in a perception of more simplicity, order and personal agency (control) in their lives → people gain relief by blending fact with fiction and rationality with comforting motivated reasoning → irrationality increases and rationality decreases

• In modern times, the greatest threat from within is the appeal of totalitarianism (or at least authoritarianism -- democracy is always a threat); the rulers are power hungry and see themselves as Godlike or perfect; most of the affected masses are willing to cede power to the elites in return for psychological comfort

• The masses are primed for totalitarianism by sowing fear through constant propaganda, fake news, lies and confusing reporting to obscure the true nature of what is happening; over time, public confusion leads people to be more susceptible to false claims and waves threats; threat presented in successive waves are asserted to be increasingly dangerous and imminent; a side effect is decreasing morality (loss of moral courage, my term, not in the video)

Does this sound familiar? It should because it is and has been standard 

Republican and American radical right propaganda tactics for decades --

That includes laissez-faire capitalist propaganda and 

Christian nationalist fundamentalism propaganda   

• Social media, cell phones, information screening algorithms, and shameless propaganda and lies on television and radio are collectively persuasive and pervasive → people voluntarily subject themselves to the propaganda of the elites and powerful special interests  → people get trapped in siloes and are insulated from dissenting opinions and reality that is contrary to the propaganda

Pragmatic rationalism is a parallel structure

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Freeze Peach for bringing this video to my attention.

 PREFACE:

As oft discussed with Germaine and Friends on here, I am loathe to use the word FASCIST to describe someone's political philosophy or a political party, even if they seem to display Fascist-like tendencies. For anyone reared under Fascism - as my parents were - they have a different view of what Fascism is than those who use the term loosely to describe an opposing political view but have never actually lived under Fascism.

That being said, it is only fair that since we Liberals are subjugated to terms such as Communists ourselves, and even, if you can believe it, being called Nazis by the Right, that I post verbatim the following Op-Ed that suggests that - by golly and geewhiz - we might indeed have Fascists amongst us.

Op-Ed

Words, words, words

March 25, 2022

Weighty words are tossed about these days like confetti, with no understanding of what they mean or where they come from. Among them are gestapo, gazpacho, liberal, conservative, populist and fascist. Let’s start with fascist.

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Polonius: What do you read, my Lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

As editorialists are bound to do, by habit or word count, I consulted my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971 edition: 4,116 pages, 16 lbs.) and found no listing for fascist.

What? In the O.E.D.? Say it ain’t so!

It ain’t. I found the word in the Supplement, on page 3,962. “Fascist: One of a body of Italian nationalists, which was organized in March 1919 to oppose Bolshevism in Italy, and, as the partito nazionale fascista, under the leadership of Signor Mussolini assumed control of the Italian government in October 1922; transf. applied to similar organizations in other countries.”

(For the record: Signor Mussolini? Really? In 1971?)

So, as editorialists are wont to do, by habit or deadline, I went to the O.E.D. online, where I found: “fascism. n. 1. an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. 2 (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.”

I don’t know about you, but I am hesitant to challenge the authority of the Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes, with 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages). So let’s assume that the O.E.D., as usual, is correct. But let me add that fascists tend to be racist, and prejudiced against all sorts of people for all kinds of reasons.

These days, if, god forbid, I were a pundit for Fox News (in general use: Faux News), I would ejaculate (“1. To dart or shoot forth; to throw out suddenly and swiftly, eject … 2. To utter suddenly (a short prayer), now in wider sense; any brief expression of emotion)” — as I was saying — were I a right-wing pundit (“1. one versed in Sanskrit”) I would ejaculate: “Fake news! The Oxford English Dictionary is selling fake news! We all know the chief dangers to the world come from Communism, in all its forms!” (On this more soon.)

Although, were I (subjunctive mood: assuming against reality) a pundit for Faux News, I surely would not mention the Oxford English Dictionary at all (“elitist left-wing professors who speak in foreign tongues!”), but would just ejaculate (“suddenly and swiftly … any brief expression of emotion”) that it’s so unfair to call elite right-wing jillionaires such as Tucker Carlson, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, Josh Hawley, Donnie Schrumpf, et al. fascists, but not use the word to describe Vladimir Putin.

Fair point.

After all, Putin is a fascist. He’s certainly not a communist.

Faux News question: So, you’re telling us, Bob, that Putin is a right-wing fascist, not a left-wing Marxist dictator.

Bob: That’s correct.

(For the record: Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Dracula (1431-1477), was a bad man. Can we agree on that? Vlad II (Vladimir Putin, 1952-??) also is a bad man, and a fascist: tossing around the word “Nazis” at Jews: How tasteless can a man get?) 

So with all Vlad II’s blather about Ukraine being under the iron grip of a neo-Nazi Jewish president (vide: non sequitur), why have newspapers and other media around the world refrained from calling Putin a fascist? Isn’t he doing what Hitler did?

Fascism of the Left used to be called Communism while I was growing up, during the Cold War. But Stalin and his spawn were not Communists: they were Fascists.

So too, despite the horror Americans are supposed to feel at the word “communist,” Putin and Xi Jinping are not Communists: They are fascists.

So too, despite the modern Republican Party’s bogus horror at anything supposedly “liberal” (such as teaching U.S. history in public schools) the danger to our republic today, at home as well as from overseas, comes not from communists or liberals — it comes from fascists: “extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.”

And racist? Consider the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee dialing for dollars this week, trying but failing to crucify Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Well, white guys and gals: No one could say that you didn’t give it the old college try.

https://www.courthousenews.com/words-words-words/

As an aside: While this SNOWFLAKE could concede that the likes of Trump, Carlson and Hawley could definitely be Fascist, I find the above mention of McConnell and McCarthy as Fascist a little over the top - they are party hacks, but Fascist?