Like Trump, Putin displays Dunning Kruger effect, thinking his narrow, bitter, and paranoid view is genius, hugely over-estimating his own intelligence while deprecating everyone else’s.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, NK’s Kims, Noriega, Khomeini, Saddam, Pinochet, Marcos, Mussolini, Ceaușescu, Vlad Tepes, Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, the Medici, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Nero, Caligula, and on and on. See a pattern developing when it comes to power, corruption, and megalomania?
Yet we the people still tolerate this pyramid scheme, which always collapses on us, always hollows out so-called civilization, always risks extinction. Civilization itself proves to be a psychopath’s grift to steal the benefits of mass, controlled labor for a select few.
For the Founding Fathers, the deeper agenda was precisely to stop small coteries from garnering power through deception, hoarding wealth, and violence. They sought a system to make authoritarianism fail, always through democracy. They wanted to hand the power to the people, believing each of us can join in a collective vision of peace and prosperity.
Compromises, amendments, and fiddling fine-tuned both a free and open society as well as ensuring the rich elite kept control. Decades of chipping away at rights, enshrining privileges, and sneaking into law outrages and atrocities, wormed corruption toward the healthy heart of Constitutional America on behalf of the despots and exploiters. Hence Capitalism proved Democracy’s undoing, the existential enemy, every bit as vicious as any autocracy. With the profit motive, those who put property and profit over human beings need no actual tyrant to wreck everything.
We’re reduced by now to lowest common denominator profit points and consumer units, each dispensable, controlled by propaganda and advertising lies, and now our vote is sneered at by a greedy, power-mad GOP. Cancerous seeds of autocratic fascism planted by the likes of Putin all over the world blossom into the disenfranchisement of most of humanity.
Women, the LBGTQ, people of color, and anyone not a rich white male are targeted. They’re not allowed in the club, which extolls white supremacy and sexism, racism and draconian control over anything kind or human. Strident fear, greed, and hate is the club’s motto.
We see all this clearly and the gloves, and masks, have come off. We hear GOP Senators and Congressmen give aid and comfort to our enemies and cries of treason are shouted down as crazy fringe extremism. Extremists get to define what’s normal now. We know all this.
It’s simply time, again, as ever, to stand up and fight these tyrants back down. Bullies don’t stop on their own. They must be stopped. Psychopaths don’t shame or grow a conscience. They must be stopped or they will always do worse.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance but when the enemy, seen clearly, self-declared and belligerent, is at the gates, it’s time to fight.
///
NOTE: No images are included because pictures of war are too prevalent right now.
Slava Ukraine.
