The convergence of powerlessness and desperation with a perceived order spells...???????

Proportionality, the preferred option of deferring to the majority, while the minority absorbs the loss, and prepares to ‘fight another day’ is the norm in a democracy. If and when the radical minority rises up and takes the majority hostage to its demands, and the leaders of the purported majority ‘sell out’ to those radicals, then stalemate is the new reality in the short run, and in the long run, a new pattern of both defiance and emasculation and self-sabotage emerges. And while there are not any ‘shots’ fired’ in the physical, literal way, the long-term implications of the convergence of a hot-headed, instransigent, and anarchist ‘gang’, whether on the floor of the House of Representatives, or on the streets of a modern city, with an ambitious, and grovelling opponent who seeks their compliance, redound for a protracted period.

And while this ‘model’ of  drama just played out in the U.S. Congress, there are some parallels that have different but equally significant import. Ironically, as historian Jon Meacham noted on Morning Joe on MSNBC this week, one parallel is that the Republican Party has been subjected to a similar kind of hostage-taking these days by twenty-some insubordinates as was America itself over the last few years, in that an intransigent, radical minority has held the nation hostage to its demands, since the descent of the former, now disgraced president, rode down that elevator in trump tower, to declare his candidacy for the presidency.

A similar and somewhat parallel dynamic is playing on the global stage, with the instransigent, anarchist, Putin and his allies, who together seem determined to demonstrate to the ‘west’ that their power and influence can and will be deployed irrespective of the damages that determination wreak. Contempt for the ‘west’ epitomized in contempt for Kevin McCarthy, is shared by Iran, North Korea, and other nations whose colours are only slightly less clear.

Belarus, tjos week announced a trial for its Human Rights Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Ales Bialiatski. “Mr. Bialiatski, 60, was arrested in anti-government protests in 2021, and his supporters say that Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime is trying to silence him. He is accused of smuggling cash to fund opposition activity, according to the Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Centre, which Bialiatski founded. He faces up to 12 years in prison….The Belarus leader, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, rules with an iron fist, and has in the past been described in the West as Europe’s last dictator. He has allowed the Russian leader to launch missile attacks from Belarus as part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” (Samuel Horti, BBC News, January 5, 2023)

The Moscow Times reports, January 5, 2023, “With the help of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko cracked down on the opposition movement, jailing his critics of forcing them into exile. The Vesna trial is the first in a series of high-profile court cases due to begin in Belarus over the coming weeks, including those of several independent journalists and that of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the leader of the opposition movement who now lives in exile.”

 These notes point to the potential of Belarus joining the war in support of Russia. On December 19, 2022, in The Guardian, Pjotr Sauer writes, “Vladimir Putin has discussed closer military cooperation with his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, during a rare visit to the country, as fears grow in Kyiv that Moscow is pushing its closest ally to joint a new ground offensive against Ukraine.”

It is not only Belarus that Ukraine has to fear. This week The GZERO newsletter reports: Iranian-made drones have allowed Russia to inflict significant damage on Ukrainian cities, infrastructure, and civilians and Teheran may also soon help Russia with missiles. North Korea may be providing weapons as well.

Meanwhile, western news reports that the U.S., Germany, France are each upping their military contributions to Ukraine: (From The GZERO Newsletter) France announced its intent to supply Ukraine with several dozen ‘light battle tanks’..and the US and Germany followed suit, confirming on Thursday that they will send armoured combat vehicles to Ukraine and that Berlin will dispatch an additional Patriot. (missile defence system)

News reports in the west tend to tilt toward the contributions from western allies of Ukraine, while the Russians continue to garner both support and weapons from a small number of allies, themselves determined to undermine the power and influence of the majority of western countries.

And while people like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson nightly defame McCarthy, and  Carlson and his viewers tilt towards leaders like Orban in Hungary, (from which country Carlson has actually broadcast his diatribe), the continuing support from the U.S. for Ukraine, under the new Republican majority in the House is coming under some cloud of doubt, as McCarthy has declared ‘no blank check’ for Ukraine.

The concept of a radical, intransigent, anarchist, and potentially nihilist “mob’that represents a small minority, both in the United States and over the weekend in Brazil (while Bolsonaro is reportedly visiting Mar a Logo) having an inordinate as well as an unjustified and unjustifiable amount of power and influence, is a model that is increasingly both flexing its muscle and confounding the establishment powers on other fronts.

In Canada, the Freedom Convoy is the symbol of this intransigence, defiant as they were (and continue to be?) over issues like imposed lockdowns and masks during COVID. This gang continue to trouble authorities in Canada over how to address such open and rebellious movements. Were Emergency Measures needed to quell the protest that paralyzed Ottawa and the Ambassador Bridge, is only one question still being debated. In Florida, Governor DeSantis, in a speech this week, declared, ‘while others grinded down their people,’ Florida freed its people during COVID”…(We can hardly ignore the malaproprism or the glaring grammatical error of substituting ‘grinded’ for ‘ground’ coming from both a Yale and a Harvard Law grad.) The larger point, however, of attempting to paint Florida as the ‘non-compliant’ outlier among what by implication are the ‘weak’ and spineless majority of states who prioritized the health of their people, in an effort to garner trump cult voters, indicates the depth to which this outlier archetype has become embedded in the zeitgeist of the nation.


The public media uses depictions like ‘mob’ for the kind of language and perspective that surrounds the trump ethos, the inference being that their leader imitates the mob boss, directing others to do the dirty work and washing his hands of all responsibility and culpability. And while law enforcement concentrated on both their names and their methods, and brought many to justice, this iteration of hostage-taking, defiance, and rebellion, on the global scene has so many ugly implications as to be demanding and receiving the focused attention of governmental departments that range from the military, to national security, to foreign affairs, and even to electoral stability.

 

In the U.S., as we all know, directly from Steve Bannon, the trump cult has a primary motive to deconstruct the actual administrative structure. On Monday January 9, 2023, Bannon was recorded on his podcast saying that while the voting machines used in Brazil are different from those used in the U.S. each country has to ‘fight its own fight’ in a clear and conjunctive alliance with Brazilian insurrectionists. And, based on the multiple, nefarious, insidious and highly seductive manoeuvres that have been deployed, and have twisted at least the Justice Department into a paralyzed pretzel, regarding the ‘big names’ that lead the ‘insurrection’, it is not only fair and reasonable but essential that the Biden administration continue to monitor and adapt to the continuing threat to the stability of the nation, And the threat, while housed within, has the implicit if deceptive support from people like Putin and his allies in their active deployment of cyber-invasions.

In some ways, McCarthy’s reputed ‘sell-off’ of many of the protections of the speaker’s office and chair, in order to gain the necessary votes to become Speaker of the House, has parallels with the NATO response of scrupulous adherence to the letter of the charter of NATO, in refusing to consider Ukraine a full and legal member of NATO and thereby justifying restraint in the provision of military aid to Ukraine. Everyone knows, and Putin has publicly declared, that his ‘fight’ is with the West, and that includes NATO. And just as the trump cabal will stop at nothing in their campaign to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions, so too will Putin and his allies do whatever it takes to undermine and subvert whatever stability might be vulnerable in the West. And that includes the kind of infrastructure Russian forces are destroying in Ukraine, as well as the electoral foundational infrastructure that offers the best hope for democracy.
Unless and until NATO comes to its senses, and begins to conceive of the magnitude and the insidious and nefarious and ubiquitous nature of the
Putin ambition, this was will only grow. And every day, as Russia becomes more embroiled in the pursuit of its goals, it grows as a threat to world stability and order.

On January 3, 2023, writing on GZERO’s website, in a piece entitled, Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2023, Annie Gugliotta writes:

#1. Rogue Russia: A cornered Russia will turn from a global player into the world’s most dangerous rogue state, posing a serious and pervasive danger to Europe, the U.S., and beyond. Bogged down in Ukraine, with little to lose from further isolation and Western retaliation, and facing intense domestic pressure to show strength, Russia will turn to asymmetric warfare against the West to inflict damage through a thousand ‘paper cuts’ rather than through overt aggression that requires military and economic power Russia no longer has. Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling will escalate. Kremlin-affiliated hackers will ramp up increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks on Western firms, governments, and infrastructure. Russia will intensify its offensive against Western elections by systematically h supporting and funding disinformation and extremism. Attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure will continue. In short Rogue Russia is a threat to global security, Western political systems, the cyberspace, and food security. Not to mention every Ukrainian civilian.

 The historic convergence of minority insurrection, war, shooting and imprisoning activists (Iran) with an establishment that is unsure of how to respond to this kind of power-grab, for the sake of power, and nothing else, whether inside a specific country or across the globe has serious implications for us all.

At the very moment when global conditions require the exercise of restraint, meeting of minds and political goals and purposes, the explosion of an insurrectionist movement that seems to have one over-riding identity: seize power from the established institutions for the sake of demonstrating that they can. Such despicable and growing political cancer seems to demand a shared and collaborative approach to neutralizing its potency.

Of course, social media is the new link that makes granular reports of insurrection and war and defiance of traditional and conventional power and authority fly through the atmosphere in real time, emboldening those seeking to take up arms to do so.

Washington, Moscow, Tehran, Kyiv and the people and the many infrastructures in Ukraine, North Korea, and potentially Taiwan are all in varying degrees, current and/or potential hot spots for violence. And the plague of violence, at both the domestic and the international level is feeding itself, in a less predictable and less rigorously researched manner than the pandemic. It is also not unreasonable to speculate on a potential, if currently hidden and undisclosed, political, cultural and desperation link between the pandemic and the spate of violence.

Global warning and climate change only add fuel to the fire of discontent, anxiety and a determined resistance to quell or forestall its own ravaging power.

None of us can ignore the racial component in all of this either.

Powerlessness, or the perceptions of powerlessness, in all of its many iterations, is a deadly, venal, and lethal white-hot ignition and furnace. And for some of us, those who are at the heart of the ignition, also seek to become its fire-fighters….and the rest of us are beholden to their various dark goals and purposes.