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Jun 6, 2022·edited Jun 6, 2022Liked by Ben Sixsmith
Most rampage killers in Europe are either political - like the Provisional IRA - or religious, like various Islamic groups, usually of the Wahhabist persuasion. In the US, they tend to be students - or recent ex-students - in public secondary schools, who were isolated and bullied, some under psychiatric care, some not, and who were known to relevant authorities who uniformly failed to take appropriate action, and often used the resultant violence to further their own partisan political agendas. In the latest instance, the guns and ammo used by the shooter cost upwards of $4000, and he was employed as a part-time minimum-wage employee, so that seems a little odd, too. For the past few months, the Democrats in Congress have been on their usual gun-grabbing thing they do in election years. Oddly enough, these shooting incidents go up pretty sharply during these campaigns - it's probably just an interesting coincidence, rather than agitprop. It infuriates their opposition, and pleases their supporters. It pits one half of the country against the other - or at least in past years it did, this year things are a bit different, due to the woke nonsense of last year, people are getting a bit sick of the rabid partisanship of the "woke" crowd, and quite a few have lost faith in the credibility of government for numerous reasons. With the utter failure of the Democratic Party domestic policy to help the working and middle classes - and to funnel huge amounts of money to their donor class - they're going to need some good distractions to continue their tenure in office. Frankly, you could pick members of Congress like you pick members of juries and end up with a better result.
As for Ukraine, the history of Central Europe in the late 1930s is relevant, if Hitler had been forced back into his own country when he moved his troops into Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, instead of "Peace in Our Time", we might not have had World War II and the ensuing destruction. Putin has his eyes on far more than just Ukraine - "It should be noted that Dugin does not focus primarily on military means as a way of achieving Russian dominance over Eurasia; rather, he advocates a fairly sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services, supported by a tough, hard-headed use of Russia's gas, oil, and natural resource riches to pressure and bully other countries into bending to Russia's will. Dugin apparently does not fear war in the least, but he would prefer to achieve his geopolitical goals without resorting to it.
Drawing on the extensive twentieth-century literature on geopolitics--and especially on the interwar German school of Karl Haushofer--Dugin posits a primordial, dualistic conflict between "Atlanticism" (seafaring states and civilizations, such as the United States and Britain) and "Eurasianism" (land- based states and civilizations, such as Eurasia-Russia). 43 As Wayne Allensworth noted, once one penetrates below the surface of Dugin's seemingly rational and scholarly language in Foundations of Geopolitics, one realizes that "Dugin's geopolitics are mystical and occult in nature, the shape of world civilizations and the clashing vectors of historical development being portrayed as shaped by unseen spiritual forces beyond man's comprehension." 44 In Dugin's treatise, as Allensworth underscores, the author has appropriated almost wholesale "the idea" of Belgian geopolitician Jean Thiriart, who "recognized the Russified Soviet Union as the final bastion of civilization in a Europe overrun by rootless American consumerism." Thiriart earlier had advocated the formation of a new "Holy Alliance" of the USSR and Europe aimed at constructing a "Euro-Soviet Empire," which would stretch from Vladivostok to Dublin and would also need to expand to the south, "since it required a port on the Indian Ocean." https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics Aleksandr Dugin has had close ties to Putin since 1999, and Putin's policy comes straight from Dugin's writings.
Most rampage killers in Europe are either political - like the Provisional IRA - or religious, like various Islamic groups, usually of the Wahhabist persuasion. In the US, they tend to be students - or recent ex-students - in public secondary schools, who were isolated and bullied, some under psychiatric care, some not, and who were known to relevant authorities who uniformly failed to take appropriate action, and often used the resultant violence to further their own partisan political agendas. In the latest instance, the guns and ammo used by the shooter cost upwards of $4000, and he was employed as a part-time minimum-wage employee, so that seems a little odd, too. For the past few months, the Democrats in Congress have been on their usual gun-grabbing thing they do in election years. Oddly enough, these shooting incidents go up pretty sharply during these campaigns - it's probably just an interesting coincidence, rather than agitprop. It infuriates their opposition, and pleases their supporters. It pits one half of the country against the other - or at least in past years it did, this year things are a bit different, due to the woke nonsense of last year, people are getting a bit sick of the rabid partisanship of the "woke" crowd, and quite a few have lost faith in the credibility of government for numerous reasons. With the utter failure of the Democratic Party domestic policy to help the working and middle classes - and to funnel huge amounts of money to their donor class - they're going to need some good distractions to continue their tenure in office. Frankly, you could pick members of Congress like you pick members of juries and end up with a better result.
As for Ukraine, the history of Central Europe in the late 1930s is relevant, if Hitler had been forced back into his own country when he moved his troops into Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, instead of "Peace in Our Time", we might not have had World War II and the ensuing destruction. Putin has his eyes on far more than just Ukraine - "It should be noted that Dugin does not focus primarily on military means as a way of achieving Russian dominance over Eurasia; rather, he advocates a fairly sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services, supported by a tough, hard-headed use of Russia's gas, oil, and natural resource riches to pressure and bully other countries into bending to Russia's will. Dugin apparently does not fear war in the least, but he would prefer to achieve his geopolitical goals without resorting to it.
Drawing on the extensive twentieth-century literature on geopolitics--and especially on the interwar German school of Karl Haushofer--Dugin posits a primordial, dualistic conflict between "Atlanticism" (seafaring states and civilizations, such as the United States and Britain) and "Eurasianism" (land- based states and civilizations, such as Eurasia-Russia). 43 As Wayne Allensworth noted, once one penetrates below the surface of Dugin's seemingly rational and scholarly language in Foundations of Geopolitics, one realizes that "Dugin's geopolitics are mystical and occult in nature, the shape of world civilizations and the clashing vectors of historical development being portrayed as shaped by unseen spiritual forces beyond man's comprehension." 44 In Dugin's treatise, as Allensworth underscores, the author has appropriated almost wholesale "the idea" of Belgian geopolitician Jean Thiriart, who "recognized the Russified Soviet Union as the final bastion of civilization in a Europe overrun by rootless American consumerism." Thiriart earlier had advocated the formation of a new "Holy Alliance" of the USSR and Europe aimed at constructing a "Euro-Soviet Empire," which would stretch from Vladivostok to Dublin and would also need to expand to the south, "since it required a port on the Indian Ocean." https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics Aleksandr Dugin has had close ties to Putin since 1999, and Putin's policy comes straight from Dugin's writings.
if I ever catch you referencing Red Scare in a non-derogatory manner I'll cancel my subscription by god