Thirty Years War for Our Democracy™
Pro-BRICS and Anti-BRICS factions in the West fight for the right to lord it over the rest of us.
In To the Castle and Back (2007), poet, playwright, former dissident and then-president Vaclav Havel recounted his stream-of-consciousness experience in “the Castle”—that is, his time in the office of the president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003).
Havel’s account is not the usual stuff of presidential memoir. His is not a story of making bucks stop or having a hand in channeling events. His account stands out as more of a story of being channeled and never having the option to pass a buck or stop a buck for his minders would never pass him bucks in the first place. From the perspective of the bureaucracy, his job was to be a Biden-esque figure-head. His job was to deliver speeches prepared by others and to otherwise project the illusion of democratic process onto a regime he himself recognized as nothing more than “Mafia Democracy” pressed in to the service of a system of “Mafia Capitalism.”
Havel spent a lot of time trying to make time to craft his own speeches. One can imagine it, an established man of words, wanting to speak his own words, but he seemed overwhelmed with the volume of demands to speak and make public appearances. He spent his time being ineffective, and he seemed to know it. And, were he available for comment today, would he be willing to admit that? If he could roll back time, would he do it again (run for office)? Was it a mistake to lend his credibility to a team of people who he came to see were not interested in liberal democratic reform or market liberalization? Would he regret having been made a tool of the post-Communist Establishment? Why did he play this game for so long?
Havel had understood that the post-Communist Establishment amounted to little more than an evolved version of the Communist Establishment—the same establishment against which he and other dissidents had struggled against for some decades.
[A]fter the fall of communism, or rather of the totalitarian system of the communist type, there arose in most countries of the former Soviet bloc a transitional phase that we might provisionally call “postcommunism.” It is a period of unprecedented and rapid privatization not yet contained within a solid, tried-and-true legal framework and in which, naturally, the former communist nomenklatura, or communist enterprise managers, took a significant part. …[T]hey formed the core, or at least an influential sector, of the new entrepreneurial class. They know that democracy means freedom of expression and political association, but they are clever enough to impose limits on these freedoms. The system they favor is, therefore, not truly open but rather has a tendency to close in upon itself. In subtle ways, the economic power links up with political power and the power of the media to create something I once called Mafia-capitalism, though it could equally be called Mafia-democracy.
Did he understand that he ended up as nothing more than a tool of the post-Communist Establishment? Perhaps. But, did he not see himself as also becoming a tool of the post-post-Communist Establishment—as a tool of Our Democracy™? As of 2007, that was not obvious, for, within a few pages of making his speech to the reader about Mafia Democracy and Mafia Capitalism, he ends up talking about the prospect of organizing a set at a local jazz club (in Prague) for Bill Clinton so that Bill might show off his skills on saxophone. Closer to the end of the book Havel comes out as having been in favor of NATO enlargement as early as 1994. And, then, during a stint some ten years later in United States, Havel notes that
… I was at the Clintons', who live not far from us.... [Bill Clinton and I] talked for about an hour about everything imaginable — Russia, Ukraine, common experiences, his visits to Prague. We also discussed whether Hillary should run for president… I'm naturally in favor of her running for president. I was struck by one thing that Clinton touched on, but which I had heard as well from other leading American Democrats, that while the Republicans can always position themselves as strong supporters of certain basic values, such as the family or the right to life, the Democrats are at a certain disadvantage: they refuse to make their lives simpler by holding to simple and traditional dogmas without qualification and without regard for the current state of the world, and for that very reason it can appear as if they are not defending clear values. I think that the Democratic Party has at its disposal a great fund of intellectual and political capital but that it's waiting for the right person to bring the two together and articulate a clear, comprehensible, yet modern hierarchy of values. Perhaps Hillary will be the one to do that, who knows? Naturally I have no great insight into the real background of politics here, but I must mention at least one impression. Everyone I've met so far seems outstanding for their competence, their matter-of-factness, and their generosity. In this regard Czech politics still has a long way to go and a lot to learn. (pp. 161-162)
Since Havel put those words into print, Hillary Clinton did not prove to be the one to articulate a clear, comprehensible, yet modern hierarchy of values, but we did witness the cartoon Messianism of “the constitutional scholar” Barack Obama who has made a mission of undermining constitutional governance by (among other things) institutionalizing an inchoate program of racializing everything and following that up with his tacit support for the queering of everything. (Note that the constitutional scholar has published as many academic articles in constitutional law—or in any subject area—as everyone born tomorrow. He did, however, publish two memoirs by the ripe old age of 41.) We now find ourselves burdened with an atavistic hierarchy of values according to which the role of politics and policy is, in Obama’s words, to “punish our enemies” and “reward our friends…” And what better way to do that than to create an ecosystem of NGO’s through which to launder government spending. Staff the NGO’s with friends and distribute laundered funds to the political base. Finance the entire operation by exploiting fiat currency. That is, print money in order to extract wealth from your enemies via an implicit inflation tax and then direct that extracted wealth to the NGO-sphere.
The ACORN episode from 2009 is apposite. James O’Keefe and colleagues, then with Project Veritas, exposed “voter registration fraud,” among other things, at the NGO The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Congress subsequently stopped funding ACORN… but the federal government has since proceeded to fund voting registration initiatives, including initiatives that aggressively register non-citizens.
Meanwhile, in the July 30 edition of The Scroll (Tablet Magazine’s excellent daily news roundup), Park MacDougald himself deploys the money laundering metaphor and elaborates on some of the Biden administration’s initiatives to feed the NGO Borg. “To cite just a few examples:
In 2021, the president of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center bragged in a closed-door donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” had reached out to the SPLC to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.” Under the Biden administration, federal agencies have targeted parents’ rights groups, Catholic churches, U.S. military personnel, and pro-life nonprofits as potential domestic “extremists” or “terrorists.”
As The Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Simonson reported earlier this year, the White House has used its Justice40 Initiative—a “whole of government” effort to use climate spending to help “underserved communities”—to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) grant money to “community-based nonprofits” for “technical assistance.” Some of these allegedly “community-based” groups are, in effect, fronts for major Democratic dark-money organizations such as the New Venture Fund, part of the Arabella Advisors network.
Left-wing nonprofits, including Demos and Vot-ER, helped draft a March 2021 Biden executive order on “promoting access to voting,” according to records obtained by Kaminksy via a Freedom of Information Act request. Vot-ER, a nonprofit founded in February 2021 by Biden “White House fellow” Alister Martin with seed funding from Tides and Arabella, partners with local federally qualified health centers—which this year received an additional $4.4 billion from the Biden administration—to register low-income Medicare and Medicaid recipients to vote. In a 2023 interview with The Aspen Institute, Martin explained that Vot-ER was working to first deliver federal funds “directly into the pockets of low-income patients,” and “then we can have a conversation with them in six months, nine months about voter registration.”
As Scroll senior writer Park MacDougald (i.e., yours truly) detailed in his May article for Tablet, in December 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency gave $50 million in federal grant money under the IRA to Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a subsidiary of a larger nonprofit that has received funding from progressive dark-money groups such as Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and the Foundation for an Open Society. CJA, in turn, has fundraised for Stop Cop City, an illegal antifa-led protest in Atlanta whose leaders have been subject to a state-level RICO indictment, while several of its subsidiaries have organized illegal anti-Israel protests, including a December protest at the Capitol Rotunda in D.C., in which 50 activists were arrested.
In our May 6 Big Story, we cited reporting from the Free Beacon that Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)—an anti-Israel NGO funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Open Society Foundations, among others—has coordinated with officials in the Biden State Department to set U.S. policy vis-à-vis allegedly violent Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank.
What would Vaclav Havel have to say about these kinds of games? Would they conform to something approximating his notion of a Mafia Democracy subordinated to a Mafia Capitalism, or would he go along with it?
In Tablet Magazine itself, Lee Smith imposes some structure on what the purpose of assembling the NGO Borg is: “[A]n American political faction is employing third-world tactics—surveillance, censorship, election interference, political prosecution, and political violence—to put the United States under the thumb of a single party led by a man who in his mind has become the people.” That man, of course, would be Obama.
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In other news, no premiers or presidential candidates were assassinated this week, but Venezuela held elections—Venezuela still goes through the motions of holding elections?—with the incumbent Nicolas Maduro claiming to have secured 5 of every 9 votes and the opposition claiming to have secured nearly 7 of every 10 votes. Both sides cite their preferred data and sound bites, but, puzzling (to me) is the fact that so many observers of “the Left” in the United States have made a big deal of weighing in on the matter… and on inveighing against the Venezuelan opposition and in favor of the Chavista/Maduro regime. Why bother?
According to our friends over at The Greyzone (Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Kit Klarenberg) as well as comedian Jimmy Dore, opposition to Maduro amounts to the pro-imperialist impulse to “steal oil.” Venezuela maintains control over some of the largest oil reserves in the world and therefore Imperialism, QED. I would suggest, however, that their argument, such as it is, suffers from not even being wrong.
These very same people have demonstrated themselves to be the vanguard of October 7 denialists. They’ve framed 10/7 as largely an inside job and have aggressively dismissed reports of atrocities as nothing more than Mossad (Israeli) propaganda. And, even if Hamas had committed atrocities, that’s fine, because atrocities are just part of the anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist project.
Meanwhile, the Obama-ist Blob in Washington has come out nominally in favor of the Venezuelan opposition. But, why? Wouldn’t these same people subscribe to the anti-imperialist interpretation? Or, why weigh in at all and just let the Maduro and his Colectivos black shirts restore their control over Venezuela?
I will leave that puzzle for another time, but will pose this speculation: The pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-US, pro-Maduro, pro-Lula, pro-Kirchner, pro-Russia crowd is merely anti-West and thus opportunistically pro-BRICS. Meanwhile, the pro-Ukraine, pro-EU/NATO crowd has also demonstrated its own anti-Westerness in many colorful ways—just look at the Olympics in Paris—but it turns out to be anti-BRICS. In Wolfowitz fashion, it can’t abide rivalry from any other power center. That said, the pro-BRICS and anti-BRICS factions do share some interests. They disfavor Israel and favor Iran. And they are pro-Kirchner and pro-Lula, because they hate Trumpy characters like Argentina’s Miliei and Brazil’s Bolsanaro. But, mostly what brings them together is the desire to impose technocratic neo-Stalinism on the rest of us. These people really do hold on to the gauzy dream of what the dictatorship of the One State can achieve. Indeed, let me take up (again) this business of a tired pro-Stalinism dressed up in the equally tired rhetoric of anti-imperialism… for that (I would claim) is what the language of “anti-imperialism” masks: a misty yearning for neo-Stalinism.
It turns out that the same folks who liberally toss around terms like “genocide” and “Fascism” with respect to Israel are now tossing around the worn-out language of “anti-imperialism” with respect to Venezuela.
In the June issue of The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson observes that English translations of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973) started coming just one year later (1974), fifty years ago. Solzhenitsyn’s presentation of Stalinist and then post-Stalinist repression had rendered it
… [not] so easy to [any longer] cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the USSR. In France, where Marxism had remained fashionable, the book changed the course of intellectual life, and in America it helped counter the New Left celebration of Mao, Castro, and other disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
A puzzle in my mind is how anyone could have cherished a sentimental attachment to the Stalinist experiment by the time the “show trials” of the 1930’s got going. I’ve written about his many times: Western press flocked to Moscow in the 1920’s to bear witness to the expected triumph of the Stalinist plan—literally the Soviets’ First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932). The plan included taking up the aborted effort under Lenin’s leadership to collectivize the entire agricultural sector. The bit about “Land” in Lenin’s sloganeering of “Peace, Land, Bread!” may have gotten the bulk of the peasantry to go along with the revolution because of the promise of land redistribution. The peasants did not anticipate the bait-and-switch of early-1920’s collectivization… but they did effectively resist it. Hence the Peasants’ War of 1920-21. But, by the time Stalin’s clique had disposed of its rivals—Trotsky’s faction, for example—and consolidated its hold on power, the Soviets were ready to deal with the peasants. The plan was to label the troublemakers enemies of the state—these would include the “kulaks”—and to execute one-third of those, banish another third to camps in Siberia, and to situate the remaining third on collectivized farms. The Soviets reorganized the old, Tzarist system of labor camps in Siberia as the G.U.L.A.G. system. They did this to accommodate the new stream of inmates.
Collectivization upset the productivity of the agricultural system, and the stream of “Stalin’s gold” (wheat) that the system did produce ended up rotting in railroad yards. Indeed, the great tragedy of collectivization may have resulted mostly from the disruption of logistical networks. Getting stuff from farm-to-table was not (and is not) a trivial business.
Famine, liquidation and banishment resulted in the deaths of some millions, and when the Western press in Moscow started to figure this out, we would witness a great sorting: Who would cling to the Stalinist dream, and who would call it out for the nightmare it really was? Most of the press chose to go along with the propaganda.
I expect that further research would reveal this: The reality of the Stalinist nightmare started to outrun the propaganda of the Stalinist dream. What to do? The show trials of the 1930’s provided an opportunity to assign blame to potential rivals. Label them “Wreckers” and let the system dispose of them.
The gambit worked. The Stalinist clique managed to retain its hold on power. Then came the biggest political gift of all: the German invasion of Russia in 1941. No one would have been situated to challenge the Stalinist clique for there was a more immediate threat to suppress. The war also provided an opportunity to dispose of the Deplorables. Instead of sending them off to the gulags or just putting bullets in the back of their heads, deploy them in the first wave of forces assaulting German positions. Situate the elite, reliable troops behind them, and then send in the NKVD. It would be up to the NKVD to execute non-communists in liberated communities and to install Communists in leadership one liberated village at a time.
The war also provided cover for the pro-Stalinists in the Western press. For every German unit American and British forces faced in West, the Soviets faced down at least two German units on the Eastern front, and they enjoyed the privilege of losing well more than 20 million people in doing it. Imagine, as RFK Jr. has suggested during the course of the 2024 election season, that every city east of the Mississippi River had been devastated. That is the kind of the thing the Soviets put up with.
Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 1946. Fulton, Missouri, not far from the Mississippi River, may not have been the center of the universe, but it was from there that Churchill gave voice to a nascent opposition to Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe… as well as to the prospect of the Sovietization of the entire West, for that it was what Stalinists hoped would yet obtain. Oddly, it was what neo-Stalinists still hope will yet obtain.
The fact that there still exist neo-Stalinists who maintain gauzy perspectives on the Stalinist experience remains a puzzle. Hence a motivation for Gary Saul Morson’s essay. It is also a motivation for Izabella Tabarovsky’s essay of July 31 on “Zombie Anti-Zionism” in Tablet. The subtitle of the essay is:
The left’s addiction to warmed-over Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda from half a century ago proves that its criticism of Israel has nothing to do with facts on the ground in Gaza.” The essay takes up the puzzle about why a Soviet-inspired anti-Zionism emerged at all.
Why remains a puzzle, but the fact of it constituted part of the motivation for this essay. There is a non-trivial part of the “anti-war” crowd (with respect to the war in Ukraine) that also appeals to the ugliest exterminationist sentiment with respect to Israel. And that same crowd has come out this last week with the definitive view that opposition to the reported election results in Venezuela amounts to nothing more than a CIA psy-op. Because “Oil!” Obviously.
The narrative that the CIA is running around destabilizing countries “for oil” is something that strikes Brother Russell (Russell Brand) as a serious concern. I appreciate Russell Brand very much and am happy to toss a few dollars into the bucket to support his platform, but I disagree with him on this matter. The CIA may or may not have assumed a pivotal role in destabilizing this regime or that regime, but it would be hard to identify enduring successes. More than that, are we not crediting the CIA with more competence than it really has? Are these not the same people who missed 9/11 and had placed the Soviet economy in 1989 at about 50% the size of the US economy when, in fact, it had proven to be no larger than 14% of the US economy. Does the CIA not suck and has it not mostly sucked since its inception in 1947?
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The main idea I get from Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” is that, when everyone knows that the system is a joke, and everyone knows that everyone knows that the system is a joke, then the system become susceptible to collapse. It becomes a matter of drawing a card from a deck. On any given day, the system may collapse.
Granted, it can take a long time. It took nearly ten years after the Gdansk Shipyard Strike of 1980 for the Iron Curtain to finally tumble down. These last 30 years, however, neo-Stalinists have reverted to pre-1930 form. Neo-Stalinists are intent on tearing down walls (national borders) rather than erecting Iron Curtains. Their project accords more with the program of the Communist International (“Comintern”) according to which the Communists should export the revolution and ultimately impose unified, global government. Hence the business of agitating for the free flow of peoples—to most of whom liberal democratic norms and constitutional governance are not cognizable—into countries that have long established democratic norms and constitutional governance.
Where would Vaclav Havel come down with respect to that? Would he find himself siding with the pro-BRICS faction or the anti-BRICS faction? Or would he find himself deciding that both factions are anti-democratic notwithstanding the fact that as of 2005 he had some confidence in the anti-BRICS faction to deliver “a clear, comprehensible, yet modern hierarchy of values”?
Scenes from the Gdansk Shipyard:
