The Daydreams Of An Eternal Idealist - Hitler, Stalin, And Mao Were Just Bumps In The Road

Taken together Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were responsible for one hundred million dead; and yet Vicki Parsons was still optimistic.  Bumps in the road, she said.  The road to the peaceful, verdant, and communal society of the future is all but guaranteed.  History does not always repeat itself.  Humanity is not consigned to perpetual war, ignorance, selfishness, and there resides in all of us a natural reserve of goodness, generosity, and good will. 

 

Just whistlin' Dixie, of course, but if it weren't for optimists like Vicki the world would be even more corrupt and venal than it already was - or so said her colleagues and friends, all united in their belief in the natural, inborn, and ineradicable goodness of Man and his ultimate utopian future. 

In the mean time, the world kept up a drumbeat of violence, mayhem, terrorism, and war as if there were no tomorrow.  Pol Pot mandated forced marches out of Cambodian cities into the countryside and executed shopkeepers, bureaucrats, doctors, and teachers to cleanse Khmer society of all traces of bourgeois, capitalist society.  'This is the Year Zero', he said, the first of a new history of a perfect world.  Millions died of execution, starvation, and disease until he was stopped by the Vietnamese army.

Mao's Great Leap Forward was the inspiration for Pol Pot. Millions were sent into the countryside in forced labor collectives, mini-gulags which produced little and consigned all to poverty and death by starvation. 

Stalin's totalitarianism was brutal and universal, and tens of thousands died in Siberian gulags.  Hitler's death camps are well known - unconscionable, unbelievable horrors of mass ethnic extinction. 

'History is not the sacred shibboleth you make it out to be', Vicki said to her conservative Vassar classmate whose husband was a favorite of George W Bush who rewarded him with a senior diplomatic post.  'We are not under the yoke of the past. Things can change for the better.'

The classmate, a friend since the old days and used to Vicki's remonstrations, said only, 'Well, dear, let's see'.  

The Twenty-First century was starting off badly, Vicki had to admit.  Perhaps not with the same rigorous cruelty of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but with a violent entitlement nonetheless. The current wars in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon were but minor league skirmishes compared to historic conflagrations, but violent nevertheless.  What did that mean?

'Let us pray', said Reverend Archibald Pender of the Westmoreland Methodist Church of Christ, and then with his spiritual invocation put aside, he launched into his familiar sermon about Donald Trump, 'Predator in Chief', usurper, unlawful inhabitant of the White House. 

The congregants of the church attended Sunday services just to hear the Reverend Pender call out the evil in the White House, to expose his villainy before the faithful, and show his godforsaken evil intentions. 

There were many Sunday services like the Reverend Pender's but none so forceful, accusatory, and brutally honest as his.  He virtually thundered with righteousness and saw himself as Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jacob all put together. 

 

Vicki was completely taken by him.  His words touched her deeply and strengthened her resolve.  The interloper would soon be out of the White House, peace would again reign, and goodness would prevail. God was her spiritual lover, her soulmate, her congregational husband. 

At the same time American and Israeli rockets were reducing Tehran to rubble, eliminating the imams and ayatollahs, destroying missile silos and underground drone armories, blowing offenders of the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz out of the water as the air forces of both countries ruled the skies.  

Hamas, resurgent after months of Israeli bombing, was once again 'referred to the underworld', blasted to within a fraction of survival; and Hezbollah, thinking it had a military advantage because of Israel's involvement with Iran and Gaza, stepped up its attacks on Haifa and Jerusalem but was summarily 'excused from this earth'. 

'Bumps in the road', Vicki insisted, nothing but interruptions in the journey forward.  The new world - the one of gender reassignment, the replacement of the black man on the pinnacle of the human pyramid, and the redistribution of wealth concentrated in Wall Street - would not be deterred.  The very goodness of the new American century would not only result in domestic unity but international peace. 

Vicki had given her all to the movement, even as unlikely as it was to come to fruition.  She was a passionate, lifelong, true believer in the progressive mission for a better world. 

Her conservative friends tried to dampen the fires a bit, if for no other reason than to prepare Vicki for the comedown, the intrusion of Trump on her marvelously innocent dream; but there would be no such thing.  No matter how many rockets rained down on Tehran, no matter how many Hamas and Hezbollah operatives were eliminated, peace was in the air, ephemeral perhaps but there to be grabbed. 

How someone like Vicki could stay the course, hold true to communalism, world peace, and the world community and diversity in the face of such Machiavellian ambition was a puzzle.  She must have known; and yet there she was, still in the choir loft, singing the same hymns, praying to God with no reward.  There must be a place in heaven for such faithful. 

'La Lucha Continua', Vicki shouted on her way to the National Mall to protest the bombing of Iran. There was no way that this inconscient, inhuman, barbaric assault on innocent civilians could continue; that the bullying ape in 1700 would have his way.

 

Peace was the answer, but of course Vicki was just singing hosannas, as far removed from human enterprise as the man in the moon. 

Life couldn't possibly be the way Trump saw it, Vicki concluded, an existence as bad as Hobbes had offered - short, nasty, brutal, and ugly - but there it was, unmistakable and undeniable, and this throwback was taking advantage of it.  That was the irony of it all.  Good people like Vicki came up empty after years of righteous protest while the brute prospered.  

'What hath God wrought?', Vicki recalled from Bible study; but God was an extra in this drama, an offstage prop, a fill-in from central casting. 

Vicki's children were fighting again - Bernoulli's principle gone awry. Only smashing and breaking had value. 'Haven't I taught them anything?', Vicki wondered. 

'Mom, something's burning', her daughter shouted; but Vicki's mind was elsewhere, in that hopeful never-neverland of dreamy promise.  She yelled at her daughter, 'Well, take it off the bloody stove', but immediately regretted taking Trump frustration out on Baby Dolly.  This is what life had come to, trapped like a fly in molasses, buzzing but impotent.  Donald Trump would go on killing just like Genghis Khan, the Crusaders, and the English soldiers at the siege of Agincourt. 

'I refuse', she said.  'I absolutely refuse', but for an instant she realized there was nothing to refuse. All her caterwauling, her chorus of defiance, her bellowing demands were just blowing in the wind. 

Epiphany? Cause to turncoat and cross the aisle? Yes and certainly, but not yet.  'Takes time', Indians say. Siva's cycle of creation and destruction although endless does not revolve in a day; and so it was that Vicki gradually pried herself loose from the grasp of her handlers and became her own woman.  Not that she cheered Israeli missiles blowing Iranian shelters to smithereens or American precision laser-guided bombs taking out an imam, but inwardly applauded their resolve and then capitulated to old 'let it be' Epictetus. 

Spheres Of Influence, Donald Trump, Taiwan, And Latin America - Machiavelli And Regional Hegemony

'This is my sphere of influence', Harper Flynn said to his wife who was once again rearranging things on his desk after dusting, 'which means hands off. 

'But dear', his wife said. 'It wanted dusting and it is a part of the household after all'; and so it was that a discussion of Taiwan, the President's trip to China, and the question of regional hegemony turned into a marital squabble. 

That always seemed to be the case.  Women simply couldn't keep to themselves, couldn't keep out of it despite themselves. As a young child whose room was a ruckus of boy things - toy dump trucks, soldiers, dinosaurs, comic books, and baseball stirrups, he couldn't understand why his mother was always in their picking up.  'Because I know it's there', she said to her son when he asked why he couldn't keep his room the way he wanted. 

In the Ondaatje book, The English Patient, Count Almasy insists on a world without maps, a world without ownership and belonging, a simple world as God made it with no national boundaries, no claims, no deeds, and no definition.  The desert was never one place, said Almasy, but always shifting.  What was here today will be gone tomorrow, the desert's own and no one else's. 

Of course this idea as noble and elegantly simple as it was, was untenable, and before long Almasy was claiming Katherine as his, and to save her life he gives away secrets to the Germans. 

There is nothing new or particularly unusual about staking a claim.  This is what the first settlers of the American West did - simply marked off the perimeter of their land, fenced it and kept off interlopers and intruders with a shotgun. 

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first step to land titling, legal ownership, and capital.  One's land had value when titled and could be mortgaged, sold, or rented; and that alone was the key to westward expansion and Jefferson's Manifest Destiny. 

The territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific was America's, Jefferson said, European America's and over the course of the next hundred years ago European Americans tamed and settled that land and crisscrossed it with railroads.  The Indians - Native Americans - were in the way, and by the early Twentieth Century were either eliminated or in reservations. 

There was nothing new or special about this territorialism. Genghis Khan and his Mongol-Turkic armies burst out of the steppes with his ten thousand horsemen, and conquered territory from Europe to Japan. He was known for his savagery, and the roads between conquered villages were lined with severed heads on spikes as a warning to all in his path. 

 

The Crusades were organized by Pope Urban II to rid Jerusalem of the infidel, but they were no different than the armies of Genghis Khan, territorial in intent, and bloody in execution.  Jerusalem is ours! said Urban, western, Christian, civilized and European. 

The history of territorial expansion is long, consistent, and predictable; so the desires of Russia for Ukraine, China for Taiwan, and the United States for Venezuela and Cuba fit a pattern.  American with military force ousted the Communist dictator in Venezuela, Russia will eventually regain the Donbass region of Ukraine, and Taiwan will become part of greater China.  It is the law of hegemony or spheres of influence. 

The United States has always been territorial.  Manifest Destiny was an expression of territorial right.  Texas belonged to the United States, not Mexico; Chile and is copper mines were well within America's sphere of influence so President Allende had to go.  The United States supported the military regimes of Brazil and Argentina because they were always to remain America's allies; or put another way, America's foreign properties. 

 

While not in America's immediate geographical sphere of influence, it intervened militarily in the Philippines and took it over as colonial ruler for years. The US fought a long, bloody, and ultimately losing battle to keep Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia within its sphere of political influence. Its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, similarly failed enterprises, were to keep those parts of the world under American control. 

Ronald Reagan intervened militarily in Nicaragua,  the Dominican Republic, Haiti,  and El Salvador for the same reasons.  They belong to us, said the President, if not by Constitution and title, then by right. 

So those in America who find Donald Trump's warning to Taiwan to keep its missiles in their silos, and to make no public pronouncements of independence from China, do not understand history.  The assimilation of Taiwan into China is a foregone conclusion just as Hong Kong and Macau were; and there is no way that the United States will engage in a bloody no-win war with China to defy it. 

Trump is a true Machiavellian and his foreign policy is based on national self interest. What would America gain by confronting the Chinese over Taiwan?  Nothing.  By the same measure what does America gain by perpetuating the war in Ukraine at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, the destruction of the country's infrastructure, and billions of US treasury dollars when a Ukrainian victory, as impossible as that might be, would gain the US nothing.

The Biden Administration insisted that democracy was at stake in Ukraine, an extension of American exceptionalism; but as Machiavelli pointed out centuries before, it is folly to get involved where there is no tangible, observable, quantifiable reason to do so. 

American liberals are howling, beating their chests in righteous indignation.  How could he? they sputter? How could he give away a sovereign country? Toss it into China's hamper with nary a second thought.  The answer is easy, they say - billions of dollars of trade with China that will benefit his cronies and American oligarchs.  Another example of the crude insensitivities of this rube, this barroom brawler, this fool. 

Of course billions are at stake in the US-China negotiations, and that is the whole point of the new Machiavellian foreign policy of the United States.  And Trump, the ultimate deal maker, knows that China holds all the cards.  It owns our debt, is a country of a billion and a half Confucian-inspired patriots, has progressively and deliberately rounded up the world's rare earths, and is in a geopolitical position of supremacy. Throw it all away out of some exceptionalist principle.  Read Machiavelli's The Prince. 

Harper Flynn got the geopolitical picture easily - life was a series of territorial disputes, ownership was not only the basis of capitalism but a feature of human nature and his office was his.  

His wife not surprisingly also took the office dispute as a metaphor.  There were principles involved here, contracts of marital communalism, the right way to behaves within larger contexts.  Machiavellian territorialism was just a convenient academic cover for taking and holding what is mine regardless of the larger world.  

The world if filled with One Worlders, Neville Chamberlain capitulating idealists, peace at any price accommodators who put a fictious value over reality.  Anyone in their right minds should have seen Hitler's intentions; and it should not have taken an outspoken Churchill to call out Stalin's hegemonic ambitions. 

Taiwan for the time being will remain quiescent, unobtrusive, and no obstacle to profitable deals to be concluded by the world's two greatest adversaries.  As it should be.  Foregone conclusions should never be challenged, and above all, a la Machiavelli,  moral principle should never get in the way of geopolitical self interest. 

The Cult Of The Black Man - A White Woman Seduced And Bilked By A Canny Nigerian Scammer

Vicki Cabot gave unusual love a try - not today's meme of lesbian and transgender love and Folsom Street Fair S&M - but love with a Nigerian.

Her mother warned her against the relationship.  'They are scammers to a man', she said.  Her husband who worked for the World Bank had a No Nigeria clause in his contract.  So many of his colleagues had negotiated the same codicil that finding loan officers for the multi-million contracts concluded with the Nigerian government was well nigh impossible. 

'A shithole', said Frank Cabot who had learned his lesson the hard way, traveling to Lagos as a Bank intern, harassed and shaken down at the airport with not enough money to pay the bribes demanded by the taxi driver and hotel clerk, he sought refuge in his embassy after he had given up his silk ties, Rolex, and Armani suspenders.

The reputation of Nigeria was well deserved.  No one came out of there in one piece, thousands were conned by online fraud every day, and most savvy Washingtonians checked cabs for Nigerian drivers before getting in. 

Lagos was a stinking, festering slum.  Whatever money had been realized from the sale of Niger delta oil - before Exxon, Shell, and Gulf had pulled out, went into offshore bank accounts with nothing left to run the country.  In short order the whole country had become a toxic, gang-run, miserable, lawless place. 

'He's a professor', Vicki told her father who was unmoved.  A scam too, he said, informing her of the thousands of fraudulent CVs the Bank got every day from Nigerian 'professors'.  'They scam you coming and going', her father said, 'corrupt, dishonest, shady and nasty from the word go'; but Vicki had been charmed by this suave, polished African who treated her like the Queen of Sheba, and who was as far from the stereotype painted by her father as the man in the moon. 

Or so she thought.  The man, Adrian Adebayo, was as crooked as they come, in the United States on an overstayed tourist visa, and on the prowl for susceptible, credulous, and naive young women like Vicki.

'I hit the jackpot', he told his friends back in Lagos, for Vicki was the heiress of a considerable fortune.  Her father might be an international civil servant on salary, but her inheritance was unimaginable.  The offspring of one of Boston's finest families, first in line among the grandchildren of the patriarch of the family, she was the jewel in the crown. 

Now, why Vicki got caught in this tender trap is a simple story of doing the right thing. At college she had been convinced that the black man was at the top of the human pyramid. but because of slavery, Jim Crow, and persistent racism, he foundered at the bottom.  With effort, desire, and hard work, American society would be soon reconfigured and the black man would be restored to his primal place. 

Nonsense, of course. Brown University was not exactly an unbiased institution of higher learning, and had been coopted by social reformists and was now fully in their hands.  The administration, the faculty, and the students were all part of the same political cabal. The whole campus marched to the same drummer, flew the same flag, and prayed to the same gods. 

Where possible young white girls hooked up with black men, admitted to the university under a liberal affirmative action program, and who like every pimp from the ghetto were on the prowl for nubile white girls. There was a pecking order among the student body at Brown.  At the top were girls dating black men, then girls in lesbian relationships, then gay men together, and finally bi-sexual students who were testing the waters but had not yet committed to one side or the other.

Vicki, was an unfortunately homely girl who might have inherited Grandfather Cabot's money but none of the patrician, graceful look of the women of the family. Somewhere along the line she got a Jewish look - sallow skin, prominent nose and lips, and untamable hair.  She was often asked by her Brown classmates if she had changed her name. 

She was the perfect mark for Adrian Adebayo - a homely woman trained in the fantasies of cultural diversity and the myth of the black man.  The way into her treasury was as simple as could be.   

Vicki was not Adrian's first score.  He had been quite the man about town, showing up at progressive conferences, seminars, and public events.  He had enough money to keep him above water until he hit the jackpot - his second cousin had made his fortune in a devious but impressive Somali-like fraud in Atlanta, a Ponzi scheme where millions were invested in shell companies, and all of it siphoned off to Aruban banks. 

He had almost made it.  If it hadn't been for an annoyingly investigative father, he would have tied the knot with Alison Parker, a girl like Vicki born and bred in a culture of privilege and wealth and a graduate of Duke (where she had been immersed in the same cauldron of diversity and black idolatry as Brown).  

To her tears and flapdoodle, he left town before the old man called in ICE; but he had learned his lesson.  Chicanery has its limits, and the careful plotter must cross all the American t's and dot all the i's. 

Adrian and Vicki got married over the wild protests of her parents. His visa was regularized, the path to citizenship assured, and the marriage contract concluded without punitive codicils.  In short order he was legal, free, and rich, and was never heard from again. 

Now, Vicki, chastened, humiliated, and shamed should have at least admitted her 'miscalculation' as she called it, apologized to her father for having dismissed his warnings, and gone on to a more stable emotional and political life.

But she insisted that Adrian was a good man, and to throw him in with a bunch of thieves and worse to condemn an entire country and a whole continent was wrong, exactly the kind of racist opinions that set back the cause of the black man for decades. She had been blinded by his attentions, his demeanor and yes, although the hated to admit it, by his extraordinary sexual endowment.  

This had always been the worst racial stereotype in the white grab bag, but when it turned out to be true, she was as surprised as any white, liberal woman would be, but quite happy about it.  Serviced by this black man every night was a pleasure few women could imagine. 

No, Adrian might have had his faults; and yes, she was bilked and deceived by him, but all the more reason to blame colonialism for the persistent underdevelopment of Africa. He was a victim of oppression and racism, and it was white people's duty - her duty - to fight for the black man wherever he lived. 

Vicki was a defiantly unreconstructed liberal.  The roots of progressivism planted during her Brown days were still deep and strong.  Other weaker, less committed women might have turned conservative, tossed aside the whole idea of cultural diversity, and stuck to their own kind; but not Vicki. Political commitment and the philosophy which provides its foundation are not so easily dismissed.  She would be lifelong progressive, a believer in racial justice, and the lover of a proud black man.