Remember the Domino Theory? The idea that if one country fell to Communism, so would another, and another after that? This was the justification behind the Vietnam War, and a whole host of other shitty things the United States government, military and national security agencies did during the Cold War. To be fair...it was largely founded on U.S. observations of the takeover of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, and of course this idea would be reinforced by what happened in Southeast Asia after US forces withdrew, when all the petty regimes we'd supported against Communism came crashing down within a month or so of each other in 1975.
I grew up hearing about this stuff. I was taught to fear and hate Communism, the Russians, and the Soviet Union, in roughly that order. As anybody who's read me knows, I went to Christian schools and I used to be a Republican.
Today, the world watched in horror and rage as the President of the United States stood beside the President of Russia, a Chekist, a man trained in espionage by the Soviet KGB, and took his side against the United States, against two-thirds of the American people, against our allies and against Democracy. When asked to lay the blame for interference in US elections on Russia, Trump chose instead to "hold both sides responsible." He chose to blame America for being attacked by the Russians.
Fuck you, Donald Trump, fuck you.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm fucking pissed.
Today, I watched prominent Evangelicals take the side of Putin and Trump, regardless of the fact that Vladimir Putin and his lackeys have persecuted Evangelical Christians in Russia and Ukraine.
Who knew that if they'd wanted to win the Cold War, and pacify the American hard-right and American Fundamentalist Christianity, all the damned Russians would have to do was fake a change in political orientation...as the remnants of Soviet Communism, now stripped of social programs and anything that helps the little guy, but still operating from the same playbook and doing the same shit...have now effectively done?
It's well known what the Communists would do when they took over a country, which of course was round up all the existing political leadership (sometimes including indigenous Communists) intellectuals, known conservatives, military officers not on their payroll, political dissidents, religious leaders (and believers as well, in many cases) and most of them would simply be shot.
Call me crazy, but I'm not sure how Republicans think their own lust for power will be served by being a puppet regime when the first thing the people so many of them have tacitly allied themselves with historically do is knock off the leadership of even the allied or puppet regime. It's kind of hard to be in power forever when you're dead.
For awhile now, but especially today, other dominoes have begun to fall, many of them in some very unexpected ways. Among other things, even conservatives and Republicans are not immune to the very same disgust that fuels my rage this afternoon.
I've already written about the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democratic electorate and the desire on the part of the Democratic base that their elected officials get off their butts and fight...and about the conservative panic over that fact. I have likewise written about how I think most of the fear of immigrants and people of color stems from the fact that those people often don't vote Republican. Never mind that Republicans haven't given any of those people a reason to vote Republican in at least a decade.
This afternoon, I've watched as other dominoes begin to fall:
I'm not a fan of this guy, really, but he's been consistently anti-Russia and I can live with that.
Maybe it's just me, but I think something is about to break, here. Trump has been pushing the envelope while governing only on behalf of his base...which is maybe, at most 20% maybe even 25% of the population...while doing his damnedest to drive out anybody with a soul or with any preexisting values that aren't just "What Trump said."
Meanwhile the news broke this afternoon that Maria Butina, a Russian agent with extensive ties to the GOP, the NRA and at least one Russian oligarch, has been arrested. That seems to be a pretty obvious shot across Trump's bow by the very National Security agencies he stood up there and maligned in Helsinki while standing next to Vladimir Motherfucking Putin.
The intelligence community knows what's up, and they've got a Royal Flush while Trump has a pair of twos. My guess is they're probably far ahead of where anybody thinks they are in investigating all this crap, but if I had to guess, their strategy is "make the evidence insurmountable."
But we can't count on that, can we?
No. We can't. Chances are, that line of reasoning will at best leave us with another Republican in power, one with an equally shitty set of priorities, and a valid case to go to war against Russia...which is something non-Trumpist Republicans have wanted basically forever...and something that I think even the Trumpist ones would do if it'd take the pressure off or save their hides.
No, that's not it.
In a democracy, particularly in the American ethics of democracy and life; the last line of defense is always you and me, the average person, the citizen-soldier, On 9/11 the first reliable defense of our country was not mounted by the government, or the intelligence community or the military...but by ordinary unarmed citizens whose plane had been hijacked. Knowing they would die too, they stormed the cockpit and caused the hijackers to crash in a Pennsylvania field. Their battle cry "Let's Roll!" was adopted by the whole damn country.
Don't think it might not come to that again, because it will, maybe this time, but if not this time then the next, or the next after that. Civilization comes at a cost, every single time. There have to be those who will take a stand against the fall of night.
Freedom isn't free, Democracy isn't a given, privilege can be taken away. America is not some magical place that is unlike the rest of the world and somehow immune to the problems and pressures that lead to major crack-ups or civil wars or social change in other countries. American exceptionalism is crap. It can happen here. The only reason it hasn't, fundamentally is the incompetence and lack of motivation on the part of America's first wannabe fascist autocrat.
We have a powerful and unique thing here, however, in that we were the first country to really decide that even a part of the public should get some say in how their government was run. For much of our history the whole world watched the American experiment. When we fought our civil war, it's not an exaggeration to say that other countries followed events assiduously and did plenty of armchair strategic planning on our behalf. There's a scene in the old musical "The King and I" where the King of Siam (Played by Yul Brenner) and his advisers are meeting with American diplomats, and tell them that what they really need to crush the Confederate Armies is squadrons of heavy cavalry equipped with war elephants. The story is apocrypal, of course, but the interest of people around the world in our events at the time is well known.
As is the fact that much of the rest of the world has adopted, or tried to adopt, democratic systems similar to our own. How our current crop of "Conservatives" decided not to regard this as a measure of our success and instead decided it was something to fear...I will never understand it. It's one thing to decide that one deserves to have power, it's completely another to cast aside the very means they...and for that matter we as a nation...have achieved it. There's not much of a pension plan in the Dictator business, which tends to end in firing squads, hangings or at best ignominious deaths in foreign countries more often than it doesn't, and far less of one in the Collaborator business...which historically ends with beatings, public humiliations, shootings and lifelong outcast status for the collaborators.,
Interest in the American Crisis of today is likewise global, my social media feeds are very often aflame with the condemnation of people from other nations, or filled with expressions of support from those people, for those of us who are opposed to Trump.
The pressure is mounting, the stakes are increasing, but the other side keeps screwing up.
Keep pushing, and the dominoes will fall one by one.
But you've got to keep pushing. You've got to show up and vote. It's just that simple, freedom isn't free. Civilization is not a given. We have to keep at it and do our part. We can't count on someone else to do the hard work of saving our civilization...WE have to be the ones to take a stand against the fall of night and say "No more."
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