America's Diverse Irrelevance - The Machiavellian Genius Of Putin, Xi, And The Ayatollahs

Vladimir Putin, it was reported, had a good laugh over President Biden's stumbling, mumbling debate performance. Not that it was any surprise, for unlike Biden's cabal of insiders who refused to see what was going on - or better what was not going on - in the President's head, Putin saw the disassembly of the old man early on, and factored his dementia into his geopolitical strategy.  There was no way that this fool would best him in Ukraine no anywhere else in the world. 

For Putin, Biden's mental disarray was a metaphor for America - a country dithering and dabbling in marginal, completely irrelevant issues, and in so doing fragmenting the country into mini-parcels of sexual misfits, hysterical black women, racialized street mobs, godless zealots.  

This last - the thing about godless zealots - was particularly amusing to Putin's entourage.  It wasn't so long ago that America was aiming its nuclear missiles at the 'godless heathens of the steppes', and now that Russia had returned to its Imperial past and the glories of Orthodoxy, the American Left had gone godless, taking a page from Soviet communitarianism, and pasting it into their arch-secular Utopian playbook.  

 

The new Russia under Putin has no fissiparous tendencies.  It had reduced Grozny to rubble, had neutered the Chechens, sent a clear message to both the North and South Caucasus to sign up or be removed, and reignited a nationalistic, patriotic fidelity to Mother Russia.  There has been no doubt in Putin's mind, nor in the Russian people, that the ignominy suffered at the hands of the West in 1989 after the fall of the USSR would never be forgotten.  Imperial Russia would be reincarnated, the Slavic peoples once again united in a common, historical destiny. 

Russia never lost its Slavic, Orthodox Christian, Czarist center.  The years of Soviet dismantling of the foundations of the Russian Empire were just an unfortunate interlude.  The Soviets had only one thing right - Russian hegemony- but went about extending it in the wrong way.  Now, the same imperial aspirations have been reconfigured and reformulated.  The Romanoffs might be gone, but the central authority of their court has not only not been forgotten but embraced. 

China of course has a much longer imperial history. The Qin Dynasty established the first empire in China, starting with efforts in 230 BC during which the Qin leaders engulfed six Zhou Dynasty states.  In the nearly two thousand following years, China became one of the most powerful empires in the world; and now, not unlike Russia, is reassigning its Communist past to the archives, and reestablishing itself as the premier world power. 

 

China, again like Russia, has moral philosophy and religion at its heart.  Gone are the days of dismissing Buddhism as an arch-enemy of the people. Confucianism once again provides the critical moral center for the new, modern China.  China has historically embraced a worldview that places the country at the cultural, political, or economic center of the world.  The Chinese always considered themselves to be "all-under-Heaven", ruled by the emperor, the Son of Heaven. Those that lived outside of the Huaxia were regarded as "barbarians".  Although the courts of Imperial China are past, the ethos of the worldly importance of China is still alive and well today. 

The 1979 Iranian Revolution re-established the profoundly conservative Islamic roots always present in Persia.  Like Russia and the USSR interim and China with Mao, Iran tolerated and managed under the Westernized, secular Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, but returned to their roots in the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini.  Iran today, reunited with its Persian imperial and Islamic pasts, has a strong cultural, spiritual, and moral center.  The ayatollahs have no compunctions about their neo-imperial designs, and in their support for Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Taliban and other radical Islamic movements, is perfectly clear about its hegemonic ambitions. 

By comparison to these three regimes, the United States is a drifting, meandering, wandering place with no sense of central ethos, no unifying national or international purpose, and only vague, unformed, inchoate notion of 'diversity' - a diversity, the same leaked report from the Kremlin added, of gay men, black tarts, and the disabled.  At least the working class formed a significant, relevant, and powerful socio-political group that gave the USSR a strong cultural center that replaced the czarist courts.

Whether the Imperial Court of the Romanoffs or the Proletariat, Russia acknowledged the need for a unifying cultural center.

All three men - Putin, Xi, and Khamenei - hope that Biden will remain in the electoral race and will be re-elected.  Nothing would serve their interests more than another four years of American weakness, disassembly, fractiousness, and exceptionalism.  There is no need for impatience.  Their countries have thousands of years of history, changes in empires, dynasties, and clerical rule.  They know how to wait until the time is right for decisive moves. 

Iran does not need to attack the United States. It is doing plenty of damage by its support of terrorism, especially Hamas and Hezbollah and the weakening of Israel.  China could take over Taiwan and Tibet but why should it?  It has largely neutralized the Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in the west of the country, and has consolidated Han power; and Russia's victory in Ukraine has been a foregone conclusion since the first shot was fired.  It may take years, but because of the desultory support of the West, the corruption of Zelensky and has government, and Purim’s absolute resolve, victory will be theirs. 

The likely election of Donald Trump will put some spine back into America. He is more than up to facing down Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollah - a worthy Machiavellian adversary, and shades of Henry Kissinger will govern with only one thing in mind - America's geopolitical interest.  

Everything from restoring a traditionally American cultural center, to fostering energy independence, to strengthening government finances, managing the debt, and becoming less beholden to foreign investors, will be in Trump's sights, and America's adversaries don't like being sighted down the barrel of his gun.   

It won't happen overnight, but one only needs to look at Argentina to see how the unequivocal policies of the new conservative president have already worked and inflation rates are tumbling.  From Trump's first day in office, things will change. 

When The Truth Never Matters - Love With A Dramatic, Fabulist Woman

Mary Lou Barilla was a beautiful mestizo Ecuadorian woman, half white thanks to her cornflower blue eyed American farmgirl mother, and half Indian thanks to her father, prince of the Napo Jivaros, last remaining indigenous tribe of the western Amazon, hunter-gatherers, jungle warriors, and heirs to thousands of acres of prime jungle highlands.  

 

The two had met a missionary camp in Misaualli, a port and trading post on the Napo River, tributary of the Amazon where goods of the altiplano were transshipped and sent eastward to Brazil and Uruguay.  He in all his tribal finery, feathers of macaw and jungle parrot, skins of anaconda and crocodile, and tattoos of native root and berries, was taken with the young blonde woman who had come to the Amazon to preach the word of the Lord, and made his overtures - a bowl of turtle broth, lizard and tapir, and a bouquet of tropical flowers. 

She, taken with this brazen, bronzed, impossibly handsome jungle warrior, married him in Iquitos by the missionary pastors who had educated him, returned with him to Puyo where he left her pregnant and alone. 

Mary Lou grew up in Quito, initially outcast because of her mixed race and the persistent European elite arrogance concerning the tribes of the Amazon and the black slave-descendant Garaffas of the coast, but prized for her unique beauty, charm, and natural elegance. 

I met her on a United Nations mission to Ecuador, one of many thanks to the generosity of European donors who saw Ecuador as a major player in both democratic reform and environmental protection. The entire South American continent, it seemed, had never shaken the caudillo militarism of Bolivar, and after elections were won by a moderate, secular, and progressive candidate from Guayaquil, Ecuador became a country to watch and to support. 

Mary Lou was an impresario of some note. Having expanded her media empire to cover the country, she turned to mega-events, the icons of the Sixties and Seventies from Woodstock to Altamont, and brought them to Ecuador. 

I met her at an international gathering at the Hotel Bolivar, a canape and champagne event honoring Paulo Miranda, human rights activist turned conservative maven, leader of the opposition but feted for his charitable work with Indian orphans 

She was stunning in a sequined black sheath, cultured pearls, and hand-carved bone earrings.  She was exquisite; and despite her entourage and obvious social cachet, I approached her.  I will never know why this princess agreed to my offer for dinner. It was perhaps because of my own parentage - a Turkish pasha Ottoman side, and a dim, Kazakh, demi-oriental heritage, both of which showed up in my eyes and coloring - or because of some distant memories of an Armenian count she had known.  I never bothered to calculate the odds or parse the antecedents. 

Thanks to some felicitous combination of genes, environment, and circumstance she was attracted to me and I to her, and an improbable love affair began - not an ordinary one, if there ever was an international, ethnically confused relationship that had the promise that this one had - but a unique one.  Mary Lou had no use for what is or what was, and preferred what could have been and what could be.  That is, she was a fabulist, an eye-painter, a woman unconcerned about verifiable fact who preferred to live in a world of her own invention, 

I listened to the most improbable tales of knighthood, reception by the Queen, a Rolling Stones extravaganza, and a 100,000 seat stadium in Vienna filled to overflowing - all thanks to her enterprise, allure, and presence.  

At first I questioned her - where exactly, when, and under what circumstances - but then I realized that by interrupting her magnificently embroidered, superbly adorned, sequined, spotlighted version of the truth, I would lose her. 

Soon it didn't matter if she had ever been at the Court of St. James or at a private seance with the Pope, whether she had homes in Rimini, St. Tropez, and Miami, or whether she was worth millions or was simply a penurious divorcee. 

I knew that such an affair could not last - that the Great Gatsby-esque fictional arcade would have to be dismantled, that she would have to be called on her most fantastical and exaggerated claims - but in the meantime, what better journey could there possibly be?  

Lovers always misrepresent themselves in the dating game; but we were doing away with the here and now altogether.  Not only was our affair out of bounds - it had nothing to do with currently 'other' responsibilities - it was based on air. 

We never talked about our lives, our engagements, our entanglements, just our interests; and what better way to know someone than in, as Ondaatje wrote in The English Patient, a world without maps.  

The stories we told each other needed no grounding, nor was any sought. Our life together, as transitory as we both knew it would be, was better without bricks and mortar, tethers, traces, and bridles. 

This was just a sample of the virtual world to come, a cybernetic fugue into imagined reality, personalized, crafted events, mediated love affairs with the most beautiful, enticing, desirable women of the world.  Who would ever choose 'the real thing'?

We both, of course, went back to bricks and mortar - she to her impresarial empire, I to the very prosaic world of mortality, morbidity, and fertility - but that was no denying the brief encounter in some other place.

Neither one of us had to acknowledge the permanent goodbye.  Once one had lived in this other place and gone back to the first place there was no returning. Fantasy at best is airy and insubstantial; but neither one of us, I am sure, ever regretted spending time there. 

In Praise Of Kings, Emperors, Tsars, And Shahs - The Sorry Tale Of An America Which Has Lost Its Way

The mantra of the Left is familiar and predictable - monarchy, royalty, aristocracy are irrevocably bad, throwbacks to white colonial rule, feudalism, and upper class rule.  Forget that kings and queens, emperors, shahs, and czars created the world's great civilizations, spread art, philosophy, religion, and sophisticated culture throughout the world, they say, and remember only slavery, exploitation, and 'Let them eat cake' arrogance. 

Revisionism of course, and a particularly myopic one.  Seen through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity, diversity, and inclusivity history never happened. Today, as Pol Pot said, is the beginning of The Year Zero. 

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and in April 1975 enforced a mass evacuation of Cambodia's cities to found a new agrarian society.  Any one with links to a bourgeois past - anyone who had worked in white collar professions, who had owned property, land, or businesses were executed.  Only the laboring class would survive his pogroms and would live to populate a new world of socialist roots and Khmer communitarianism.  Over two million people were killed during his regime. 

Maoist Enver Hoxha returned Albania to the Dark Ages, and in a perverse fantasy like that of Pol Pot turned the country into a Neolithic, primitive society.  'We will begin again', he said, reprising Pol Pot, 'and create a new, wondrous society'; but to get there, nothing must remain of the old, the European, the capitalist monarchies of the past.  His regime was brutal, unforgiving, and murderous. 

The predecessor and inspiration for these two men, Mao Zedong was responsible for 100 million Chinese deaths due to starvation, persecution, forced labor, imprisonment, and mass executions. 

The political similarities among Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Mao, and American progressives is striking - all wanted to pretend the past did not exist, that human nature could be reformed and fundamentally changed, and that progress towards an engineered Utopia was indeed possible. 

European white civilization, of course, is our heritage, our legacy, and our model.  The American Republic was based on European Enlightenment, English jurisprudence, French philosophy, and Greco-Roman principles of governance. Its art and literature have been the foundations for American creative enterprise.  While America, like any country, has developed its own indigenous national cultural resources, it would not exist as a modern society without Europe.  It was Europe, not Africa which gave  us our cultural start, our enterprise, and our ethos.

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The revisionism of progressives is profoundly hypocritical and dangerous.  Attempts to negate the past, expunge it from historical records, damn it universally, and start over are frighteningly similar to the ideas of Mao, Hoxha, and Pol Pot. Their attempts to remove all traces of Southern history - i.e. to deny that it ever existed - and to disparage, dismiss, condemn, and ignore white European civilization, are no different. 

This new ethos has had serious consequences - there is no longer a universal ethos, guiding moral and cultural values at the center of American society, no unifying fundamental principles within a civil society.  All has been divided, parceled up into segments of irrelevant racial, ethnic, and gender identity within a distorted philosophical notion of 'equality'. 

Every institution is being forced to accommodate this revisionist Orwellian nightmare. Schools have lost their charter, their responsibility to educate and are little more than hothouses of faux forums on injustice and social ills.  The courts - especially the Supreme Court - is overwhelmed with cases dealing with race, gender, and ethnicity.  

Municipalities are hemorrhaging funds spent on 'social reform', attempts to redistribute wealth according to race that are no different from Soviet-style economic re-ordering.  The media have lost track of world affairs and are obsessed with transgender issues, black supremacy, and anti-capitalism. 

At the same time as the American ship founders; ballast, hold, cargo, and fo'c'sle splintered and strewn on the rocks, Xi, Putin, and the Ayatollahs laugh with glee.  They, inspired by and looking to their imperial past with no compunction, hesitation, or shame, operate from a strong, definable, and unshakeable cultural center.  They do not want to forget Persepolis, Czarist Russia, the great dynasties of China, or the Mauryan and Gupta empires.  These historical antecedents are not just historical events, recorded and recounted, but living, relevant realities.  

Louis XIV, the Sun King of France did not limit his cultural expression to Versailles. He was so confident of the universal relevance of French culture - art, music, philosophy, literature, and science - that it had to be spread.  Imperial conquest is very much about territory, land, and wealth; but it is also about cultural certitude. 

The United States has no dynastic or imperial history, but a legacy of one.  To assume that our process-oriented, legalistic, and economic-based society can somehow stand independent of the past is arrogant at best. America does have its own history - that of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, documents which embody the Enlightenment principles on which the nation was founded; but even they are dismissed as irrelevant, outdated, and anachronistic in a woke age. 

Returning to these roots - early independent American history and the European civilizations to which we owe our culture - is essential to regain our footing; and not least to regain the respect of our allies and adversaries. Xi, Putin, and the Ayatollahs see us as patsies, mired in narrow, parochial disputes, obsessively inward-looking, naive and hopelessly idealistic.

They are all Machiavellian to the core, opportunistic, nationalistic, and hegemonic - but such an attitude cannot be based on airy idealism.  Behind it is their imperial past - a sense that Russia, China, and Iran are descendants of greatness who have not lost sight of it. 

 

Meanwhile the United States fusses over the definition of a woman, racial fantasy, and who should be an American.  Russia wants Ukraine and Slavic hegemony, China wants Taiwan and Tibet, Iran wants an Islamic caliphate - raw, anti-democratic imperialism? Hardly.  Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollahs are doing what comes naturally to powerful imperial regimes while the United States can only watch, carp, and whine.