Appeasement Birds of Right & Left Flock Together in Political Horseshoe

Chomsky, Greenwald, Melenchon Fly on Left Wing With…..

Putin Buddies Trump, Tiki-torched Tucker, J.D. Vance, Salvini, Orban, LePen Flying on Right Wing

in a political marriage that midwifes Baby Z:

You know you’re in a political horseshoe when you find Chomsky headlining a Tea Party gear site with ads for gun rights t-shirts (F**k you, I want one!):

When I met Chomsky at a lecture at MIT in 1977 he was one of my intellectual idols. His book American Power and the New Mandarins’ brilliant chapter on my thesis subject, the anarchist revolution in the Spanish Civil War, was one of my historiographic bibles. This is the context I use the horseshoe above to explain the inverted and paradoxical politics of who’s taking which side on western intervention in the Russia-Ukraine war.

How paradoxical? If you had told me in 1977 that in 40 years there would be a plutpopulist Republican Russian asset in the White House and that the American left was supporting the CIA and the FBI, I would have asked “what are you smoking, and can I have some?”.

Now a quick tour of the political horseshoe’s inverted paradoxical world. First, alt-right site Breitbart likes Italian communists’ defense of Putin:

Russia Just Defending Itself from ‘Capitalism’, Says Italian Communist Party

Members of the far-left Italian Communist Party (PCI) have expressed sympathy for Russia and its president Vladimir Putin, claiming that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a matter of self-defence for Russia. The party recently made headlines for a poster to celebrate Victory in Europe (VE) day on May 8th which advertised an event in Monti Prenestini-Casilina that featured the “Z” symbol used by the Russian military during its so-called “special operation” in Ukraine.

While Putin fanboy and Lega leader Matteo Salvini got dressed down by the same t-shirt he’d worn in a Red Square photo op in 2017, when the mayor of the Polish-Ukraine border town Przemysl re-presented it to him:

‘Your friend Putin’: Salvini confronted during border visit

The mayor of a Polish town has called out the leader of Italy’s right-wing League party for his pro-Kremlin views, derisively calling Matteo Salvini a “friend” of Russian President Vladimir Putin

The Polish mayor had seen Salvini’s fanboy fashion statement before:

Putin’s party signs deal with Italy’s far-right Lega Nord

In the French horseshoe, far left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon agrees with his neo-fascist opposite Marine LePen that:

Melenchon: Washington has decided to annex Ukraine to NATO

The French presidential candidate asserts that NATO is the real aggressor in the Ukraine crisis, and not Russia.

Marine LePen, his nominal opposite on the obsolete linear political spectrum, agrees:

“The policies I represent are the policies represented […] by Mr Putin”, Marine Le Pen tells in this 2017 interview….Le Pen…blamed tensions with the West firmly on the US and NATO, which she accused of arming countries on Russia’s border. “Ukraine is part of Russia’s sphere of influence….“If you’re trying to say that Russia poses a military danger to European countries, I think you’re mistaken in your analysis.”

The Horseshoe Movie is a Rerun

History doesn’t repeat exactly, but rhymes enough to make America First Lindbergh and pre-June 22, 1941 communists sloganeer and smile together:

The neo-Stalinist beneficiary of western useful idiocy, Vlad the Crimea Loser 2.0, says there’s nothing wrong in this red-brown rerun, or its first edition:

Vladimir Putin says there was nothing wrong with Soviet Union’s pact with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany

Russian president says he sees nothing wrong with treaty with Nazi Germany that led to the carve-up of Poland — and blames Britain for destroying any chance of an anti-fascist front By Tom Parfitt06 November 2014 • 1:16pm

Vladimir Putin has said there was nothing bad about the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the non-aggression treaty which led to the carve-up of Poland at the outset of the Second World War, suggesting Britain and France were to blame for Adolf Hitler’s march into Europe….

Delusions At Both of the Horseshoe’s Ends

In this fantasy world we see Russian power inflated evidence-free and an explanation-free default to grant Russian-Western parity, in which:

1. Russia won’t lose and its victory is inevitable. So don’t fight it.

2. Ukraine can’t win; the EU will collapse under a Russian disinformation barrage.

3. Ukraine deserves to lose because of: Nazis in Azov, corruption, Ukraine oppressed the Donbass Russians, the Orange and Maidan Revolutions were western coups, Zelensky is a thug and dictator.

This is, of course, like saying Catalans and Basques oppressed the Spaniards, so Franco was right to ban their languages. But let’s not derail this train with too many analogies…..

The Fatalistic “Realist” Delusion

The other Ukraine can’t win variant is the sphere of influence jungle Mearsheimer invokes, along with his odd neo-fascist bedfellow, LePen. He says we must fatalistically accept, ignoring that its global export of kleptocracy to Londongrad, the 2016 Brexit and Trump election victories, Miami, NY and multiple yacht harbors, is lethal to western democratic institutions. Having worked for 20 years in the yachting industry until 2012, I saw this up close. For the gory details see the Hudson Institute’s The Kleptocracy Curse: Rethinking Containment.

What they all miss due to ahistorical ignorance and evidence-free blinders:

• The enormous and permanent gap between Russia’s geopolitical ambitions and its capacity to realize those ambitions because…
• Russia is a land-based colonial empire on the periphery of global capitalist trading networks.
• Russia’s long history as kleptocratic mafia state and exporter of commodities, serfdom and gangster kleptocracy, whether Tsarist, Bolshevik or Putinist.
• Russia as dependent tech importer that loses wars without a western ally (Crimea, Japan, 1905, Afghanistan 1979–89). Putin’s idol Peter the Great learned shipbuilding from the Dutch in Zaandam and architecture from the Italians to build his new capital. No Dutchman or Italian went to St. Petersburg to learn anything.
• Empires on the periphery of the global trading system are geopolitical rogue states that can only disrupt the incumbent’s order, not create an alternative. Think of modern Vandals and Huns vs Rome. Keynes described what follows to a reporter who asked about the Great Depression: “Yes, it was called the Dark Ages, and they lasted 400 years.”

Ignore these Rules of Russian History…and you’ll get hit in the head with a horseshoe.