There is no difference between the arrest of Alexei Navalny at Moscow Airport tonight and the impeachment last week of Donald Trump. Navalny and Trump are seen by their respective political establishments as enemies who must be silenced at all costs. Silencing opponents is the work of dictators.
Both establishments have dug their own graves: Putin in trying to murder Navalny last year, Congress in plotting to bar Trump from all political office, even as the town dog catcher, and worse, if the expression of sheer hatred on Nancy Pelosi’s face is anything to go by, try to put him behind bars.
Both governments will then have their very own famous martyr, and famous martyrs, especially those in prison, are flames from which great conflagrations can erupt.
Seems that the California Democrats are preparing to parachute Meghan Markle into the Senate, replacing Kamala Harris. But this is just the first step -Markle is on her way to the presidency. Why not? Markle is as capable as Obama was, to give speeches about how bad Western Civ always was and is now.
Interesting scenario from Editor Harris re the one-party consumer state and dissenters being imprisoned.
Couple points:
The main current contenders for dominance in any one-party Western State are greenist, or at least they say greenist things. Now, the kinds of greenist policies now promulgated by influential Western greenists necessarily involve the non-use of fossils fuels. And there is no sign of replacement renewable energy sources that can provide the amount of energy required to maintain high levels of consumption. Sure China, India and other Asian and Latam countries would continue to use fossil fuels and might be able to supply lots of consumables to the West. But unless the West continues to be wealthy, which requires the use of fossil fuels or greatly expanded nuclear-generated electricity, there will be fast declining cash surpluses available to pay for the masses to consume stuff made in China, India and other non-Western precincts.
Then there are the Western greenists who know that to make their greenist dreams come true, the population will have to be reduced to 50%, perhaps even just 10% of its current levels. But China, the rest of Asia, Africa, India, LatAm, will not reduce the sizes of their populations for their own various reasons. That’ll be quite a pickle for the West, innit.
That is, while the one-party consumer state with large numbers of dissenters in the gulags presents a fascinating scenario, I think there are a few matters that loom large as complications -complications that will present challenges perhaps more pressing than voting rights for the incarcerated.
A parallel which might make my attitude clearer is that I absolutely disagree with depriving prisoners of the vote here in the UK. As we head toward a one party consumer state our prisons will be filled with political prisoners and depriving them and lunatics of the vote will be a way of silencing the opposition by making the act of defiance an illness or a crime. Make Trump a criminal and you wipe him off the political map
“Make Trump a criminal and you wipe him off the political map.”
The gulags … the cultural revolution … the killing fields … racial equality today … all the great deeds of the left in power, or the right acting as proxy, are massively destructive of life and natural right. What’s wiping Trump off the political map in comparison?
This edit facility is very good, btw. Well done.
Your list of infamous communist atrocities bizarrely includes the incongruous ‘racial equality today’. Secondly, the actual atrocities only happened after leftists had destroyed democracy, civil rights and patriot leaders first. There is your comparison with what has happened to Trump.
Very true – but the race element is, as so often, a red herring. What we are looking at is a sudden coalescence of “class-consciousness” on the part of America’s increasingly detached elite, with an acceleration of its steady drift to the left. In short, being left is an assertion of belonging to the elite; and since it is dangerous to be “outflanked” by your competitors within an ossified hierarchy, aspirant “leaders” are engaged in a competitive race to the extreme. That all the members of this elite should speak with one screeching, insincere voice is further evidence of putrescence and national decline. The crash, when it comes, will be ugly. Trump was the USA’s last chance to avoid its Gadarene destiny.
Good points you make. But I think to regard “race as red herring” can divert attention from key matters. Differences in distributions of educability, trainability, productivity, propensity to violence and other criminality, loyalty and gratitude to benefactors, and gratitude for the freedoms and wealth-creating and peace-maintaining institutions that only whites created -all of these are subject to race factors. And sure, many white power-mongers now express full derision/hatred of the very factors that gave them such a rich life -that’s the way to power for the Left.
Clearly demographic change fuels the Democrat success, though Trump has Black and Hispanic supporters.
The Establishment may be digging its own grave, but all the signs are that it is digging “ours”.
Trump the last chance to save US democracy? Surely his term began, at last, the populist fightback against the leftist capture and corruption of US democracy. Trump revealed to the non-leftist world the elitism, corruption, bigotry, tyranny and madness now consuming ‘progressive’ ruling elites around the western world. Until US Democrats prove conclusively that they neither defrauded the election nor staged the Capitol Hill insurrection to stop Trump (impossible, in my opinion), they will never again be trusted by most Americans. That’s a huge victory for Trumpism, perhaps fatal in the longer term.
Not just your opinion, it is indeed impossible to prove a negative. How fascist of you to baselessly accuse somebody of a crime, and assume them guilty unless they can prove they didn’t do it.
The fact that many of trump’s allies in positions to have witnessed any irregularities first hand have unequivocally stated that there were none has obviously passed you by.
You’d be pissed off if you were accused and assumed guilty of murder if nobody could even identify a missing person, never mind a corpse.
It was my pleasure
… with this sociobiological qualification:
Eurasians share something of East Asians’ conformism and authoritarianism. They tend to respect strength in their leaders. American whites, however, are not only drawn from the much more individualistic European racial type, but are products of an Enlightenment project, and thus the very apogee of Individual Man. The prospects for a Trump-centred rebellion are higher by orders of magnitude, therefore, than for any nation-wide, populist action against Putin.
The Marxists don’t want equality, certainly not equality of opportunity. They want equality of outcome. They want equity.
Do the body of Marxists want anything beyond destruction, Iain? Isn’t their appetite solely destructive, and isn’t the hidden temple of equality … the constructive agenda … only for the gentile and, therefore, solely Judaic?
Yes, Harry, just so. But Red State America is white America minus the liberal fringe. There is, as I said on another thread a couple of days ago, an assortation coming. It will be very substantially racial. It will almost certainly be accomplished through violence. The limit of my understanding, however, is on what basis a people enculturated in a Jeffersonian liberal project can found a non-liberal nation. I have not yet seen any comprehension among white Americans that they cannot keep their formative beliefs and still generate a stable and vivifying life for their kind. They are such a committed non-philosophical people.
What an arrogant post. First, on whose authority do you claim that white Americans can’t keep their ‘formative beliefs’? Do you extend your order to the many black or brown or yellow Americans who vote Republican, more so for ‘racist’ Trump than for any other Republican president? Second can you see the obvious bigotry in your sneering generalisation that white Americans or ‘their kind’ are ‘non-philosophical people’? Lastly, can you offer any support at all for your huge claim that the USA, one of the most famously tolerant, least racist and most liberal nations ever to exist, could not have been founded by whites? Surely it isn’t your intention to incite racism against white Americans?
On what grounds does race rather than culture determine levels of individualism? You need good evidence for the big, suspiciously racist claim that Europeans are more individualist because they are white. As for popular revolt being less likely among less individualistic Russians: What about the collective memory Russians have of Soviet communism, or Putin’s turn to the church and Russian national pride, both factors making popular revolt far less likely? Putin the populist doesn’t face a Russian deep state that fears its own citizens like Trump does/did.
Given equal cultural contexts, can differing propensities to violence and educability be explained by race? You need very good evidence to enter this very old and very thorny debate. Certain cultures and governments certainly use racial difference to ground discrimination and prejudice, but they also use religious or political differences. For example, Chinese communists imprison Uigyur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists for refusing to assimilate. US Democrats use both race and conservative opinions to discriminate against white Republicans, and they particularly hate black Trump supporters or ‘Uncle Toms’. But ability to think, observe and make judgements by use of such examples is required in these matters.
This is absolutely ridiculous. The Russian government tried to kill Navalny, for God’s sake. Navalny risks both his life and liberty by going back to Russia.
Impeaching Donald Trump for a second time was only a symbolic gesture, since he will no longer be president in a few hours, anyway. If the Senate convicts him, and only if a second, separate vote requests it, he will be barred from running for president again. As he should. This has nothing to do with Navalny’s fate.
There’s nothing in Navalny’s behaviour which mandates the slightest punishment. Everything in Trumps behaviour mandates punishment.
There is no freedom nor justice in Russia. The junta in power does what it bloody likes.
Impeachment in the United States is a constitutional procedure. It happens according to the law. There’s something called democracy in the US, whatever weaknesses it might have. There’s no such thing in Russia. Never been.
The equivalence you’re trying to draw is morally repugnant.
Not really. The “impeachment” may be constitutional but it is still corrupt. The American left is using the trick of the Emperor Augustus – sustaining the forms of the Republic, but utterly poisoning their spirit. As in the last days of Free Rome, today’s USA is under the thumb of a cartel or oligarchy – namely the bosses of Big Tech – and they have all but criminalised serious principled opposition to their agenda. The one-sidedness of their justice is almost as blatant as its illegitimacy: they ban Trump but ignore the even worse transgressions of their own, more violent allies. I advise you to watch the careful skewering administered by Mr Andrew Neil to a spokesman for the Big Tech interest on Spectator TV. And then people wonder why so many of us smell a rat when it comes to the recent American election! Because the rats are at work on every aspect of American public life.
I agree with Stéphane. This is an unnecessary and quite pointless comparison and equivalence. Both men are political actors of vastly different level of function, living in very different political systems. If they are both vilified by a given political elite, for their own specific reasons, surely we can delve deeper into each problem and picture to examine it for what it is. It seems that at present, frankly, too much of political discussion is riddled with comparisons and equivalencies of whichever stretch suits the author, to deliver a point (often yet repetitive). The most common areas thrown into the usage is Maoist regime, Orwell, Stasi, etc. Surely, we can discuss political liberties and policies in their own right, in each individual case, as it applies in the relevant social and legal context?
Stephane’s fascistic slander (‘Everything in Trumps behaviour mandates punishment’) is far more repugnant than the ironic comparison of the main article. Also, your uncritical assumption that US democracy remains intact is naive in the extreme, given the fraudulent election and the obvious framing of Trump and his 75m+ supporters as violent insurrectionists at the Capitol Hill. (Study how Hitler staged and used the infamous Reichstag fire of 1933 to launch his destruction of Weimar democracy). Basically, anyone denying full investigation of Trump’s accusations of fraud both disrespects his right to be heard and condones the collapse of public confidence in the US electoral system. No way can such a stance ever overcome the huge distrust and divisions that now dominate the USA. It’s obvious that innocent people typically welcome investigation to clear their names, and that those who don’t ooze guilt. Why don’t you name a Democrat or any leftist who has insisted on a full and fair trial to prove Trump’s allegations are false?
Hitler did not stage the Reichstag Fire.
As for Trump’s replacement, Biden looks like opening to US doors and Democrat membership to Mexicans, Muslims and Mongols….let ’em all come, and build the New World inside America itself as an example to all. Meanwhile, get rid of Andrew Jackson’s portrait from the Oval Office, Who wants a Founding Father when you’ve got St George Floyd?