There are greater odds for revolution to befall the USA than Russia at the moment.
The news hasn't been quiet or normal since 2019. The world was far from ideal back then, but I still hoped we'd outfox neoliberalism. I know better now and understand the only game left to us is to be the last man standing. Resist as much as you can, but remain alive because there is no hope for a happy hour once dead.
In 2024, like every morning since the pandemic's arrival four years ago, I wake to news reports of some fresh hell seeping across the remnants of our civilisation. Yesterday it was the murder at Putin's behest of Alexei Navalny, who was imprisoned like a Decemberist in a Russian penal colony somewhere near the Arctic Circle. Some say Alexei Navalny was a CIA asset whilst others say Julian Assange is a Putin asset. I say the motivations for even the simplest of things everyone does have complicated actors that influence those actions.
Navalny was not a Sakharov, Mandela or Palestine's Marwan Barghouti. He wasn't the Russian who would unite the people against Putin or lead a popular opposition to topple him. His effectiveness was in exposing Putin's regime for what it is- a mafia state. Navalny's documentation of corruption in the Putin government pissed off many hard-working ordinary Russians, who- like hard-working Americans, Brits and Canadians want to believe that government is more than a means to siphon off money for the benefit of the entitled.
A dead Navalny' becomes more of a problem for Putin than when he was alive. Now dead, the living will ascribe him political sainthood, erasing his strong ethnonationalism and pronounced racism. Yet Putin's days are less numbered than much of the leaders time at the helm of government.
There are greater odds for revolution to befall the USA than Russia at the moment. There is a good chance Putin will survive politically longer than Biden and there is an even greater chance Putin will outlast Biden on this mortal coil.
Dotage is a word that comes to mind when defining this last year of Biden' Presidency- despite its vigorous push for war everywhere. Biden is the old dog that can't and won't learn new tricks-everything has a 1977 aura to his geopolitics. But then the empire was strong and neoliberalism was just starting out. Whereas now it all feels like the Emperor Waltz playing for Austria's Franz Joseph in 1916. In 2024, Biden's Presidency is a fearful journey. It resembles being in an Uber late at night, with a broken Sat Nav- driven by an octogenarian with macular degeneration. Getting safely home is an open questioned.
A political system that can only offer geriatrics like Biden and Trump to govern its Empire is a system not in decline but in free fall. The 1980s were like this for the Soviet Union, and the last years of Mao in the 1970s were also similar for China.
Had the West any foresight, they would know - like bars, Empires also have closing times. It should be doing its utmost to get Putin to the peace table now rather than after the US presidential elections in November. I think who ever wins then, it will be a time of chaos. The impediment to getting any peace deal now is also because governments and the news media are under the thumb of NATO and NATO is under the thumb of the industrial military complex.
NATO wants to rewrite the maps of Europe, Asia and the Mideast as if it is 1815 or 1919. However, the real direction NATO is leading us to is the burial ground for fair and equal societies.
Revolution or repression are now the only options available for our future. And that- as a man with more life behind him than ahead of me is terrifying.
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“Yesterday it was the murder at Putin's behest of Alexei Naval…”
We don’t know this. And, in fact, it doesn’t make sense as Navalny was safe in prison in the Arctic, and this is a propaganda bonanza for NATO. Putin is a dangerous, scary guy - but he’s also smart and rational. He only kills people when it is useful to do so. This murder isn’t useful, and does not serve him.
Now, the US has millions of people who’d never heard of this guy until a couple of days ago, who know absolutely nothing about him, suddenly weeping as if the guy were MLK, rather than a right wing nationalist and probable NATO/ CIA asset.
I am not saying his imprisonment or death were justified (I honestly don’t know enough to weigh in…) but while Americans are up in arms about Russia’s political prisoners, it thinks nothing about its own. We have innocent civilians dying in Gitmo, forced Snowden into exile, imprisoned Manning for nearly a decade, have been torturing Assange by proxy, and have left a trail of dead journalists either through inaction or seemingly direct action.
As useful as this death is to the US propaganda machine, and as necessary to push through more funding for our MIC, it would make more sense for the US to have ordered this hit.
Boy, I LOVE it when people who aren’t American, don’t live here, don’t know much about life here- tell ME how stupid I am for supporting Joe Biden. I just love it. You didn’t live through Reagan. Then Bush I. You didn’t live thru Bush II, (who just about destroyed the country and the world). Then we got Obama, who probably saved the country from imploding, (or at least held off the waves for a while). To be anything to left of Ted Cruz is to ALWAYS be fighting a rear-guard action against a HORDE of “Christian”-Fascists with more guns in their CARS then you have in your entire country; more money than the rest of the world COMBINED; and who never have to deal with an interested national press corps. Nevermind an adversarial press corps. I’ll take Joe Biden every day & twice on Sunday.