This one is for the lurkers

This is a video from The New Yorker YouTube channel that breaks down why putin invaded Ukraine into a quick and easy summary. You don’t have to read 600 page books or watch every Putin Files interview. This is it:

It’s also where we are headed. The US also has oligarchs and they are also busily stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. But what makes the US different from Russia is we don’t have any history of government by a suppressive tyrannous regime – except in the south where early American oligarchs managed to suppress an entire population for a couple of hundred years until the Civil War. Then after a brief interlude, they tightened their grip again until the civil rights era. They’re still at it, trying to take back their property and have thrown all their support behind a new type of tyrant. I have no doubt that promises have been made and favors extracted to keep the oligarchs happy and tax free and the Trumpists in charge of the military/security state so that the oligarchs can plunder where they left off and the rest of the US, including the white guys, get nothing for their slavish support but an American dream that is more and more elusive to them.

No matter how you slice it, the US will become like Russia, no, more like Alabama, if the Trumpist part of the Republican Party is not beaten in the next elections.

In other words, we don’t have to all live like Alabama if we don’t want to. We can go back to 2 party politics and force the genies back into their bottles. If we don’t, then everybody in the US loses when the oligarchs steal everything they didn’t get with the first Trump regime, Trump or DeSantis become president and install their own loyalists in the military and security apparatus, and suppression and bad stuff happens for real and not just in the fantastical imagination of Q.

That’s what’s happening. NATO didn’t provoke putin. He just needed an excuse. The US giving weapons to Ukrainians won’t provoke putin to drop a nuke. He’ll just use it as an excuse because he is losing and was always going to lose against what the Ukrainians and Zelenskyy have built.

That’s the summary. That’s all you need to know and any Russian would tell you this if putin hadn’t shoved a 15 year jail sentence sock in their mouths.

Part 2 is about fascism and how putin is a classic fascist. This is Jason Stanley who has a clear definition of fascism as a means to an end. Fascists use traditionalism, nationalism and propaganda on their followers so that they can take over countries and impose a tyrannous regime on it. In other words, tyrants get to power using fascism. Once they get there, they can govern however they please. That is what has made fascism so hard to define. It looks like different things in different countries but all of those countries went through the same set of steps to get there. Also, fascism is a right wing phenomenon that can come out of a democracy because democratic governments do not limit free speech.

Now, I don’t expect the lurkers to actually believe anything Stanley is saying. He’s a so-called elite in a fancy Ivy League school, Nevermind that he went to The State University of New York Binghamton as an undergrad which is anything but elite. But for once, look at Stanley not as some kind of condescending smarty pants and look at him as a messenger. He’s just delivering the bad news to you based on what he’s seeing. “killing the messenger” isn’t going to stop reality no matter what they’re telling you any more than refusing to get a Covid vaccine is going to stop you from getting sick.

Listen to what Stanley says putin is using to persuade Russians. It’s all about traditional values, restoring Russia to its former greatness, placing all the blame for their problems on outsiders, other countries, LGBTQ+ people, women. And to top it all off, they point at their enemies as the fascists. It’s the “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever I say bounces off me and sticks to you”.

Fascists use the same playbook and methods and that’s why they’re easier to spot these days. You can see where they are succeeding in different countries like in Hungary with Victor Orban.

It’s all about traditional values, curtailing the rights of women, and LGBTQ people and black people or immigrants. Anyone who is other than the favored group is a target of anger and suppression to make the once dominant group feel more powerful. This is how it works. If the fascists are lucky, they’ll have their own media working hard to pump out disinformation and propaganda. It’s how they do it.

Yes, it is happening here. When you can’t say “gay” in a public school, when states place even more draconian measures on women seeking abortions, when Mexican truckers are stopped at a border crossing to harass them and cause millions of dollars in fresh produce to go to waste and drive up the cost of food, fascism is at work.

Ok, those are the short, easy to digest summaries and warnings. You lurkers are probably not going to take any of this seriously because currently, the tyrants and the fascists are promising you dominance. But once they get into power, they will quickly make sure you can never vote them out and then they can plunder and rule however they please.

You’re not special. They don’t think you’re any different than the gay people or women or Mexicans. In fact, they think even less of you because they know you will believe anything they throw your way. And when they take over, you’ll see that they were just using you and it will be too late to do anything about it.

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