"What Is To Be Done?"

Time, I guess to dredge up Lenin and fight fire with fire.

"What Is To Be Done" is Lenin's 1902 consideration of how to mobilize the working class to oppose and ultimately defeat the Czar and his capitalist minions. It is said that the eminence grise of the Trump regime, one Steve Bannon, ex-Breitbart "News" -- is a Leninite and is political advice to the regime is driven more by Lenin than by Hitler. That remains to be seen.

The recent threat-power display by the regime -- which now refers to the action as a "travel ban" -- was very much in the mold of a Hitler rather than a Lenin, but we'll let that pass for the moment. The point was to exert arbitrary power over a "despised minority" and incite chaos in the process. Worked beautifully. They're probably having quite a chortle over the success of the exercise in inspiring fear, panic, and inchoate "resistance."

There will be many more shocks of this nature, as the regime consolidates its grip on the awesome power of the United States Government.

Czarist Russia had far fewer opportunities for resistance than the US does today, despite the many restrictions on protest and the militarized response to protests considered "serious" by the State -- cf. Standing Rock.

Yet the Czarist state was brittle and fragile and came tumbling down almost without an effort in 1917 when the Mandate of Heaven (ie: the will of the Petrograd proletariat) was withdrawn. Without the ability to command obedience from the Rabble in the Capital, the Czar's rule was suddenly and completely over.

Among my many papers, I have contemporary documents from the (March) Revolution that demonstrate how completely stunning the fall of the Czar and the collapse of Czarist rule was to those who engaged in the Revolution. Their victory was a shock, and they were clearly unprepared to take the reins of the Empire. Interestingly, they were curried by Britain and the US, in order to convince them to continue the war with Germany, because apparently that was all that really mattered to the Allies; the Czar could go to hell.

When Kerensky announced that Russia would continue the war, despite the fact that the war was the proximate cause of the Revolution, it made the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks a necessity. For the sake of the Russian People, the war had to end.

Trouble was, once the Bolsheviks were successful, they found themselves riding the tiger and facing invasion and civil war which almost brought them down before they had a chance to consolidate their own Revolution.

Such are the vicissitudes...

Anyway, what we have in this country is a very weak "provisional government" based in part on Leninite principles but not ruling on behalf of the People -- despite its populist veneer and propaganda.

The provisional government has demonstrated that it can and will exercise arbitrary power, and in doing so, it tested its authority over the security apparat. Must have been satisfying all in all.

At least the Customs and Border Protection agents at the airports are all in with the Trump regime and will follow their orders without question, regardless of public protest and court orders to desist.

Having demonstrated that, they can move on to the south, imposing arbitrary power to detain and turn back Mexicans and others who arrive at the southern border. This will be even more chaotic and disruptive, as travel between Mexico and the United States at the southern border is far more massive than that between the US and the 7 Countries. Millions of crossings every day.

But they've shown that just detaining a few hundred is enough to put the fear in the remainder.

The chaos that ensues is useful, too.

So. How do we actually confront and counter this -- or do we?

This is the question, and this is why it's time to get out our Lenin -- and Mao for that matter -- and study up. We're in for a bumpy ride.

Riding the Ukrainian Tiger

There's been little or no mainstream news coverage of Ukrainian matters for many weeks, as the so-called military operations of the Kiev coup-regime continue in the East and South, supplemented by all kinds of militia and "privat-armi" action, including the phenomena of death squads, so beloved of our own government's adventurism abroad.

So far as I can tell, the mayhem and chaos is confined to the "separatist" regions, but it is bloody and nasty and is meant to terrorize the locals into complying with the demands of the Freaks in Kiev -- whatever they may turn out to be. There is, after all, supposed to be a "national election" tomorrow that is intended to endorse and confirm the Kiev Freak-Regime in power, and to assert one or another of the "Western" oligarchs as President, probably the so-called Chocolate King, Poroshenko.

Someone the West can do business with at any rate.

It must be said that Russia has stayed pretty much out of this mess of growing proportions on its western border. Despite all the propaganda and hysteria about "Putin-Hitler" and "Putin-Stalin" and the nonsense about "reviving the Soviet Union" and all the constant baiting of the Kremlin by Anglo-American and EU interests, Putin and the Kremlin have remained remarkably calm and restrained. They have not intervened on behalf of their Russian-speaking Ukrainian brothers and sisters, in fact they seem to have shunted them away as the death and destruction from Kiev continues unabated.

So far as matters can be puzzled out from afar -- and the lack of "news" from the region is as telling as if there were actual news being reported in the mainstream -- the Kiev coup-regime is as freaky as The Saker makes them out to be. Though curried by Anglo-American and EU imperialists, they are massively incompetent to actually govern -- not that anyone else is on tap who might be better.

Since independence in 1991, Ukraine has been ruled by a succession of incompetents and kleptocrats, leaving little or nothing in their wake. I've been struck by the videos I've seen of various parts of Ukraine, from Kiev eastwards. Practically every building is a legacy of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. It appears that almost nothing has been built -- at least from Kiev eastwards -- since independence, and programs on the Vremya Odessa channel continuously highlight the deterioration of housing and other buildings from the Imperial and the Soviet eras -- which are almost the only buildings there are in any case.

The place is falling apart, at least those parts that are not being deliberately destroyed by the Freaks in Kiev and their henchmen.

Of course this civic deterioration and lack of infrastructure construction and maintenance activity is widespread throughout the West as well. In Ukraine, it's no surprise that a handful of kleptocrats, styled "oligarchs" hoovered up all of the valuable properties and industries as soon as they were offered by Kiev and that is a major reason why little or nothing is or has been done on behalf of the public interest, and nothing resembling a government of the people has ever taken root in Kiev. It can't so long as everything of value is in the hands of kleptocrats and oligarchs and everyone's deteriorating well-being is dependent upon them rather than on the will of the People themselves.

While the situation in Ukraine is far starker than what we see in the West, they mirror one another. Oligarchic control isn't as complete in the West, but it is getting there, the goal being more like the Ukraine (minus the civil unrest) than not.

It's dreadful.

But that's the world these global oligarchs and kleptocrats want for the rest of us; what they want for themselves is another matter.

The Ukraine is turning into another Yugoslavia or even (God forbid) another Libya, and this has got to put some fear into the minds and hearts (such as they are) of the oligarchs and kleptocrats and their servants. Profits can still be made, of course, if the situation deteriorates completely, as it did in the Former Yugoslavia and Libya, but the amounts extractable -- and on whose behalf -- are seriously diminished under such conditions than they would otherwise be.

Stability may not be a short term objective, however. More wealth can be looted faster under conditions of chaos and warlordism than under any stable regime, so if the short-term objective is to steal as much as possible from the Ukrainian people -- and to destroy what can't be stolen outright -- then maintaining the current conditions are much preferable to having an actual national government in Kiev. Note, for example, how the sham of national governance is maintained in Baghdad  while the wealth of the nation (such as remains after wars and occupations) is pillaged and what can't be taken is destroyed day in and day out...

Having an unstable Ukraine on the borders of Europe and Russia would not seem to be in the interests of either Russia or the EU over the long term, however. What's there now is a tiger that isn't being ridden very well by anyone, not the Freaks in Kiev, not the oligarchs and kleptocrats, not the Kremlin, and not by the sponsors of the coup.

The mess gets worse daily.

The Ukrainian people are being used and abused badly. Their attempts to take matters into their own hands are understandable, but as we've seen so often elsewhere, the people who are actually capable of taking control of the chaos are the rightists, the Fascists and the Nazis, not the socialists/communists and democrats. This is what happened in Europe during the interregnum between the World Wars, and in a sense, it's what's happened throughout the West and East during the Post - Soviet Era.

In other words, power has devolved since the expiration of the failed Soviet experiment into a re-animation and revision of the supposedly destroyed Fascist/Nazi experiments of the post-WWI era. Since the Soviet version of Communism and the Fascist/Nazi version of Capitalism were essentially mirror images of one another, both totalitarian and in competition with one another -- eventually at war with one another for supremacy (or survival as the case may be) -- the absence of the Soviet model together with the resurgence of the Fascist/Nazi model means gross imbalance at the very least. Specious claims that Putin-Russia are the mirror image of the Soviet Union, and thus the mirror image rivals of the West are ludicrous. Putin-Russia are integral aspects of the Western rightist resurgence. Compared to the EU, Russia today is more like Poland in comparison to Germany in 1937 or 39. Poland was just as Fascist as Germany at that time though not quite as dominance-minded. Their governance and economic regimes were practically the same.

So it is with Russia and the EU; they're hardly distinguishable.

Ukraine is a tiger being ridden by the EU and US, but without grace or skill, and Russia seems content to see it falter and even die.

Putin-Russia have the Crimea and that's sufficient unto the needs of the Kremlin.

There can be no sufficiency, though, in the eyes of the West under its current neo-Fascist/Nazi regime. It's either all or nothing.

"All" means the end of rivals like Russia and China. Not their incorporation into the Western Realm, their extinction.

India has just elected a Fascist government, interestingly enough. Perhaps that assures that India doesn't fall into the "rival" camp. I don't know, but could be. Meanwhile, China is declared a rival and indeed cyber-enemy. While name-calling the West and particularly the USofA "mincing rascals" is cute, I'm sure the Chinese know very well what is up and are taking appropriate steps to protect themselves.

Ukraine is not a rival, it's a resource to be exploited, nothing more or less, and what can't be exploited is to be destroyed. Depopulation is already under way -- has been a feature, not a bug, of Ukraine's independence from Soviet/Russian control.

Russia doesn't seem to be interested in participating in either the destruction or the exploitation of Ukraine and seems content to let the locals fight over the debris, and let the EU/US/NATO axis try to make something other than a giant mess of what's left.

And every time I see the claim that the West is "supporting" Nazis and Fascists in Ukraine, I shake my head and think, "No, the West IS Fascist and Nazi." The Anglo-American/EU Imperial Project isn't something "other than" Fascist/Nazi, it IS the Fascist/Nazi project made manifest once again.

G9 -- Snowden Appears In Russia Amid the Hoohah Over Microsoft Revelations (Ride The Tiger)

Yes. Well. The Prodigal Returns -- or at least he reappears. It will be interesting to see how his saga plays out from this point given yesterday's bombshell Guardian story regarding Microsoft's willing participation in the National Spy Games.

Julian got into his fine pickle, recall, almost immediately after he mentioned that WikiLeaks was going to release internal communications from some bank's (thought to be BofA) executive suites. Until that moment he'd been something of a gadfly and clown as far as the Powers That Be  were concerned, and his big releases were media chum and money makers. Afterwards, he was a wanted fugitive denounced and deplored by practically every living government or private sector personality suckling at the corporate teat. So he sits, fuming, in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, run to ground. WikiLeaks has been largely neutered.

The situation is somewhat different with regard to Snowden, Greenwald (et al) and the Guardian. The leaked material is being vetted with US government representatives prior to publication by the Guardian. You'll notice that almost nothing that's being published is bylined Greenwald alone -- and that I would say is a safety factor in all the hoohah. Snowden essentially disappeared after he made the video interview in Hong Kong, and reports of his travels and whereabouts and struggles had to be taken with a grain of salt because there were no witnesses and no proof that any of it was accurate or true. Now he has appeared, apparently in Moscow at the airport where he has apparently been staying since he arrived from Hong Kong, but video of this appearance has been forbidden, and practically all news of it is coming from tweets from inside the meeting room and interviews outside it  -- interviews not with Snowden.

His safety at the airport -- if not his comfort and convenience -- is supposedly assured as he or his handlers work out the details of asylum somewhere, eventually.

The Microsoft story yesterday was really the first time that the releases had touched upon how willingly cooperative the NSA's corporate partners have been on behalf of the National Surveillance State, and that struck me as the "BofA" moment for this saga.  Once that door is opened, it can never be shut again. Because it directly affects the international power and profits of behemoth corporate entities, it is seen as the same kind of existential threat to those behemoths that Julian's BofA threat-comment did, thus, you would think that the full force and power of the corporate-state would be unleashed against... what?

Julian threatened to release sensitive and confidential information about banks; Snowden provided information to the Guardian and the Guardian has released sensitive and confidential information about Microsoft's cooperative relationship with the NSA, and Snowden has now "appeared" in Moscow (at least for a moment) and, apart from some boilerplate denials and fudges, Microsoft and the government with which it functions in symbiosis have been remarkably silent, remarkably restrained -- despite claims of a Global Manhunt and all the rest of the spectacle that's been made of the saga, including the downing of the Bolivian president's plane in Vienna.

Of course both the government and Microsoft had foreknowledge of what was to be published and so it seems to be throughout this story, such foreknowledge has calmed some of the expected hysteria, something that was not necessarily the case with Julian and WikiLeaks -- though until the third rail of banking docs was touched, there was little effort to silence Julian or stanch the flow of leaks through WikiLeaks.

So far as I can tell from the very limited amount of information acquired by the Guardian at the Snowden Appearance in Moscow, the only "news" was that he is applying for asylum and will stay at the airport until it is granted and he is able to safely make his way elsewhere. Or maybe he'll stay in Russia.

OK. The tiger is mounted; let's see if it can be ridden.

holio ‏@holiode 

#Snowden pic.twitter.com/rhiz2eqpg8