"Why far-right nationalists like Steve Bannon have embraced a Russian ideologue "I figured that The Shower Cap would have an entry in his Rogues Gallery for Bannon." "
A practitioner of Leninist tactics, he can be expected to make the most of the contempt of Congress charges he faces.
by Ron Radosh November 18, 2021 5:30 am
Steve Bannon, former advisor to President Donald Trump, and his attorney David Schoen, right, address the media after an appearance at the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse on contempt of Congress charges for failing to comply with a subpoena from the Committee investigating the January 6th riot, on Monday, November 15, 2021. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
On Monday, Stephen K. Bannon surrendered to federal authorities and was released on his own recognizance after a court appearance in the afternoon. He was not reticent. To the contrary: He brought along his own people to livestream and record an impromptu street-side appearance as he left the court building. Those who saw it on the TV news channels noted his excitement, his ability to seize the moment to gain more support from the MAGA movement, and to extol his goals. “We’re taking down the Biden regime,” he announced.
-- this is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden. Joe Biden ordered Merrick Garland to prosecute me from the White House lawn when he got off Marine One. And we’re going to do—we’re going to go on the offense, we’re tired of playing defense, we’re going to go on the offense on this. And stand by. --
Claiming that his indictment on two charges of contempt of Congress violated “freedom of speech and liberty,” he pledged that he was “never going to back down. They took on the wrong guy this time, okay?’ As he turned away he had one more comment: “If the administrative state wants to take me on, bring it. Because we’re here to fight this . . . we’re going to go on the offense.”
Bannon clearly saw the opportunity to gain attention and to let his audience know that he would continue as he has—and would not cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection. He was scheduled to appear this morning before a federal judge (virtually) for his arraignment, but yesterday filed a motion waiving the arraignment and pleading not guilty:
In his Washington Post .. shorturl.at/cyZ67 .. column, Michael Gerson notes this week .. shorturl.at/hiV27 .. that many public figures in the GOP and Trumpist movement are dangerously contemplating violence. They seek, he writes, to unleash “the force of nihilism in American politics—the mad desire to blow up our political order and put citizens at one another’s throats.” That description certainly applies to Steve Bannon.
Bannon spelled out his plans and strategy to me way back on November 12, 2013, at a book party held at his D.C. townhouse (the so-called “Breitbart Embassy”). “I’m a Leninist,” he told me as he introduced himself. He then went on, as I recounted in a 2016 Daily Beast article .. https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-trumps-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist , to inform me that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” The “establishment” included the GOP leaders and what others considered the conservative press. National Review and the Weekly Standard were, in Bannon’s eyes, “left-wing magazines.” I ended my article with a prediction that, sadly, has proven correct. I wrote that should Bannon succeed, there would be “a hostile takeover of the GOP.”
In attempting to create his revolutionary movement for a kind of populist nationalism, Bannon took ideas from both the left and the right. His claim to populism extended to praising Bernie Sanders’s call for limiting immigration because he thought it hurt American workers. In a 2018 interview with Ben Schreckinger of GQ magazine .. https://www.gq.com/story/steve-bannon-february-2018-interview , Bannon proclaimed that “the greatest power on earth is the working men and women in this country,” which might as well have come from Eugene V. Debs in the 1920s. Schreckinger responded that Bannon’s words reminded him of Woody Guthrie. Bannon responded that although “the populist left” had taken Guthrie’s most famous song as their own anthem, “This Land is Your Land,” is “still one of the most powerful songs written in this country. So I’m a big fan.” Were he living, Guthrie, a self-proclaimed Communist and Marxist, would have been horrified.
Above all, Bannon’s Leninist tactics led him to take the strategy for his populist campaign from the most extreme leftists in the 1960s: the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground.
----- [INSERT: Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news, explained "The dangers in Sinclair Broadcasting Group's takeover of local News." [...]In 2008, Sinclair raised eyebrows yet again for running an ad attempting to tie then-Sen. Barack Obama to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The ad declared that Obama was “friends with Ayers” and that his “political career was launched at Ayers’s home.” (It wasn’t.) This was an ad, not Sinclair original programming — but, the New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg noted, it was an ad that Fox News and CNN declined to run due to legal concerns. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152520746
Former '60s Radical Is Now Considered Mainstream in Chicago [...]Nearly 30 years after surrendering to police, Ayers and Dohrn, both in their 60s, are tenured university professors whose work on school reform and juvenile justice have won them bipartisan respect. 2010 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=55209472
Right Wing Vs. Left Wing Violence: Conservatives Desperately Try to Justify: [...]However, once again, the trap of moral equivalency has been set. Using leftist violence that occurred 40 years ago to excuse violence today is about as bullshit an excuse as saying that it's not so bad that you killed that hobo because Jeffrey Dahmer used to fuck the corpses of his victims. 2010 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48598035] -----
He echoed particularly the New Left’s most visible and potent leader, Tom Hayden. As David Frum noted in the Atlantic .. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-strategy-steve-bannon-indictment/620704/ , Bannon’s antics are reminiscent of the Chicago Seven, the defendants (including Hayden) in the 1969-70 trial recently glamorized in Aaron Sorkin’s Netflix movie .. https://www.netflix.com/title/81043755 . In that trial, the defense ignored the law and normal courtroom procedures to stage what Frum calls a “media spectacle intended to show total contempt for the rules, and to propagandize the viewing public into sharing their contempt.”
The basis of the charges against the Chicago Seven was the violent mayhem during the 1968 Democratic convention. Hayden instigated those who came to protest to engage in violence. Frum rightly sees a point of comparison here between Hayden and Bannon. Hayden thought that if the 1968 protesters turned violent, it would provoke a tough response from the mayor and the Chicago police, thereby exposing the true “fascist” nature of the United States. Bannon, meanwhile, anticipated .. https://news.yahoo.com/heres-what-we-know-so-far-about-steve-bannon-and-the-jan-6-capitol-riot-212419169.html .. an “attack” and “all hell” breaking loose on January 6—and indeed, the pro-Donald Trump mob, as Frum writes, “forc[ed] a police officer to shoot to defend the officeholders whom it was his duty to protect.”
Not only did Bannon adopt the tactics of Hayden, but he has also paid homage to the Weathermen. In a Tea Party speech .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf_Yj5XxUE0 .. in New York City on April 15, 2010, Bannon inflamed the rowdy crowd, beginning with a fierce attack on the “financial elites in the political class” who during George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations arranged bailouts and other economic rescue measures to prevent a major financial crash after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. [YouTube of embedded video]
Then, Bannon made a statement that echoes a line the late democratic socialist leader Michael Harrington used to make in his speeches; Harrington said that America creates “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_capitalism_for_the_poor .” In Bannon’s rendering, the American system offers “socialism for the very poor and the wealthy, and a brutal form of capitalism for everybody else.”
Next, Bannon made a statement using the exact words and rhetoric spoken by the Weathermen—the terrorist branch that emerged from the New Left, known most for planting bombs at police stations, banks, large corporations, and the U.S. Capitol. They were so proud of this that in their own publication, they proudly listed all the targets at which they had successfully planted and set off bombs. Infamously, on March 6, 1970, some Weathermen were making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse when they inadvertently exploded the bombs, causing the death of three of their own and the injury of the others present. Had they not blown themselves up, the bombs would have been used at a dance for new Army recruits at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Hundreds might have been killed or maimed. Bill Ayers, perhaps the most well-known of the group’s alumni, wrote that “We who survived went on to carry out a handful of highly visible antigovernment bombings.”
[The Guns of August [...]Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=40778056]
Bannon ended his 2010 speech with a reference to the left-wing terrorists lifted from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—“It doesn’t take a weather man to tell you which way the wind blows”—and then an even more explicit, if somewhat obscure reference, to the Weathermen: “The winds blowing off the high plains of this country, through the prairie, and lighting a fire that’s gonna burn all the way to Washington in November.” Although his audience may not have gotten the reference, Bannon was saying that he and the Tea Party were revolutionaries, a new right-wing version of the Weather Underground, who also want to bring down the system. The publication in which the Weather Underground spread its ideas was named Prairie Fire .. https://www.amazon.com/Prairie-Fire-Politics-Revolutionary-Anti-Imperialism/dp/B000EEGAYM/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486161599&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=Praririe+Fire .. because, they wrote .. https://archive.org/details/PrairieFire_20170422/page/n9/mode/2up, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”
-- A movement has no right to exist if it doesn’t fight. The system needs to be overthrown. . . . Revolutionary movements must be contending for power, planning how to contend for power, or recovering from setbacks in contending for power. Certainly every movement must learn to fight correctly, sometimes retreating, sometimes advancing. But fighting the enemy must be its reason for being. We build a fighting movement. --\
In another speech .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLmQGN-g0Ds .. from that period, delivered in Florida in October 2011, Bannon sounded like Bernie Sanders. He branded recent high-school grads “generation zero” because their parents’ generation passed on to them “zero net worth.” Middle-class people who sent their children to college were, according to Bannon, “paying for their own and their children’s destruction.” [A 2nd YouTube of embedded video]
Bannon then attacked the bankers of Goldman-Sachs—where, ironically, he made his own early fortune—for getting rich over the backs of regular people who lost their homes and saw their incomes regularly declining. “There’s no recession in the Hamptons,” he said. “There’s no recession in Georgetown.” Bannon’s fans, who would become MAGA mainstays, were “the last line of defense” protecting the United States of America.
One must wonder if Bannon’s listeners even knew that the wealthy business and banking leaders that he condemned were the very people among whom Bannon lives, and from whom he was made rich from investments in their companies, and is most comfortable with. Remember, this is the guy who was arrested on fraud charges while staying on the yacht of a Chinese émigré billionaire. That 2020 arrest was for allegedly defrauding the people he asked to give money to a help underwrite construction of the wall on Mexico’s border. Bannon reportedly siphoned off over a million dollars from the group for himself. But of course President Trump, on his last full day in office, pardoned Bannon .. https://www.justice.gov/file/1358426/download . So much for the “middle-class people” Bannon professed to care about.
Does Bannon consider himself today’s Tom Hayden, but from the right? Hayden, said the social-democrat Irving Howe, “was auditioning to become the American Lenin.” The left-wing journalist Jack Newfield thought that Hayden “would become the first American president to emerge from the ranks of the New Left.” Hayden tried to be each but failed to be either.
When he died two weeks before the 2016 election, Hayden’s obituaries discussed his career as a leftist moderate Democrat who entered politics in California but who couldn’t move beyond the state assembly and state senate to statewide or national office. But before he turned to electoral politics in the mid-1970s, extolling Robert F. Kennedy as his model and hero, he was an extremist ideologue. He lived in a far-leftist Berkeley commune, bought guns, and engaged in rifle practice in the hills with his cadre, preparing for the coming revolution he thought would be led by the Black Panther Party and by young people in the “liberated zones” of Berkeley and of New York City’s Upper West Side.
If one views Bannon as a new right-wing version of Tom Hayden, or if he views himself that way, perhaps he too will choose to run for office. Or he might prefer to remain a strategist for other politicians, especially if Trump decides to run again, at which point Bannon may again seek an appointment from which he could again try to steer Trump in the direction he favors.
Bannon made clear on Wednesday that he intends to fight the contempt of Congress charges against him. If he can find a way to draw out the court proceedings and to turn them into circus, you can expect him to do that. If he is found guilty, he could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for each charge of contempt. That’s a small amount to Bannon, given his wealth—but don’t be surprised if he sets up a legal defense fund to raise money off his followers. Imprisonment would make Bannon a martyr for MAGA, and could strengthen his standing to become the movement’s titular leader after Trump.
Of course, he also has the option of submitting to the subpoena and appearing before the House January 6th Committee. If Bannon does appear, instead of invoking the claim of executive privilege he could assert a Fifth Amendment privilege. Back in the 1950s, when gangsters and Communists who were called before congressional committees “took the Fifth,” the public at large considered it an admission of guilt. Likewise, most Americans today—minus the Trumpist base—would view Bannon’s taking the Fifth as a tacit admission of guilt. (Congress, for its part, could reject a Fifth Amendment assertion and pursue a new contempt charge, or could seek an immunity order .. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/fifth.pdf .. that would compel testimony.)
One other possibility: Bannon could appear before the committee and do what Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin did during the Chicago Seven trial when they made a fool of Judge Julius Hoffman by engaging in crazy antics. He could stage a performance and try to ridicule and undermine the entire purpose of the investigation, seeking to embarrass and ridicule Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, and the other committee members.
If Bannon is sent to prison, he will presumably, if permitted, give prison interviews to all who request them: Fox News and OAN and Newsmax, talk-radio shows and right-wing podcasts, and of course the Trumpist websites like American Greatness, Breitbart News, and Frontpagemag.com, the publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which in 2017 gave Bannon an award for “courage.” A committed Leninist fighter knows never to give up on the dream of revolution.
Vladimir Putin: a miracle defender of Christianity or the most evil man?
"Why far-right nationalists like Steve Bannon have embraced a Russian ideologue "I figured that The Shower Cap would have an entry in his Rogues Gallery for Bannon." And how his medieval fantasies distort history for his cause. [...] To understand Bannon and the threat posed by his reemergence, we need to get to know the dangerous Russian ideologue who has inspired him:Aleksandr Dugin, a man once called “The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World .. https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-dangerous-philosopher-behind-putins-strategy-to-grow-russian-power-at-americas-expense ” for his influence on world politics.A Russian political analyst and modern fascist, Dugin has written dozens of books laying out his political philosophy. His Eurasianist ideology is grounded in a fundamentalist religious nationalism that seeks to create a Christian empire that unites Europe and Asia in a quest to restore a “traditionalism” rooted in conservative Orthodox Christian values and white supremacy."
Russia’s Invasion Shadows U.N. Assembly Amid ‘Colossal Global Dysfunction’ [...]But as much as the war loomed over the assembly, the leaders of several smaller nations touched only briefly on the conflict in their speeches, reflecting the reluctance of many countries to get entangled in the rivalries, and economic sanctions, imposed on Russia since the war began. P - In their view, the focus on the war has taken global attention away from the crises they face, including climate change, food shortages and internal conflicts. P - Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, called on major powers not to let their rivalries sow new destruction on the African continent. “Africa has suffered enough of the burden of history,” he said. “It does not want to be the place of a new Cold War.” P - For leaders from the Middle East, the war in Ukraine was not the most pressing issue. King Abdullah II of Jordan and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, brushed over the fighting there and instead urged the assembly to support the long unresolved cause of the Palestinians. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170022034
Why the World Isn’t Really United Against Russia [...]China and Japan both had obvious reasons to feel disserved by the era’s international diplomacy, but as bad as they were, the humiliations they suffered were of a categorically smaller nature than the insults delivered to a large host of then-still-colonized lands. The League of Nations gave powerful endorsements to Western imperialism, granting European countries the authority to extend their control over broad stretches of territory under the guise of the league’s so-called mandates. P - The continent of Africa was especially targeted by these arrangements. African colonies had just supplied hundreds of thousands of troops and invaluable economic support to their European masters during World War I, and returning African veterans clamored for independence. In response, European powers argued that Africans had not yet reached a level of civilization required to even begin contemplating self-rule. The irony was lost on the Europeans that they themselves had just emerged from what was arguably the most barbarous war in history. P - This was not the end of the insults though. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170639908
The Russian president’s Orthodox faith is central to his worldview but he has used it to justify invasion and violence in God’s name
[Vladimir Putin at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow] What has been missed among Vladimir Putin’s ranting about Ukraine and Nato is the religious dimension in his thinking. Photograph: Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/EPA
Sun 6 Mar 2022 06.00 AEDT Last modified on Sun 6 Mar 2022 13.54 AEDT
With Russia invading Ukraine, its president, Vladimir Putin .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/vladimir-putin , has been painted by many in the western media as the most evil man in the world.
Commentators are asserting that this premeditated act is evil. I do not disagree. To see a war in Europe nearly 80 years after the end of the second world war is unthinkable. What other words describe such violence and the man who singlehandedly has authorised this assault? Now that Putin has twice raised the chilling proposition of nuclear weapons – referring to Russia as “one of the most powerful nuclear states” and later ordering that nuclear forces be placed on “special alert” – the global images of a trip wire to nuclear armageddon are disturbing our equanimity. What other word but evil captures this? In contemplating this I think there has been a missing dimension in naming Putin’s messianic and religious pretensions. And as a minister of the gospel, this perspective has caused me deep heartache.
At a personal level I have been required to reflect on my memories of the man and whether I sensed I was in the presence of evil. Back in 2013 I had a meeting with Putin in his dacha two hours out of Moscow. It went for over an hour and half. He was courteous and inquisitive and even agreed to some of the requests we were making. I and the delegation of three others came away thinking he could be reasonable. None of us thought him evil. But now I wonder?
The occasion then was the G20 when Russia had the presidency and Putin was the first leader to invite civil society leaders to meet and participate at the highest level and enjoy an equal access and platform with the business G20. I was leading the Australian delegation and we urged him to stop beating up Russian NGOs and to widen the space for civil society dissension and debate. Amazingly he did not disagree.
As I think back there were some interesting clues. We waited in an ante room for the meeting under a picture of the first Crimean war. All I knew about that was the story of Florence Nightingale, not why it was fought and even who won. Putin’s aide told us that the 1853-56 war was personal for Putin and Russians remembered it as if it was just yesterday. Christian Russia had been shocked that the Christian west had sided with Muslim Turks and defeated them. I thought of this later when in 2014 Putin annexed Crimea and rode roughshod over sovereign Ukrainian territory.
In our meeting with Putin, he said that he was insistent that young Russians start going back to church. He wore a cross around his neck and I later learned he had been secretly baptised by his mother as his father was an atheist. He seemed fascinated that I was a reverend and questioned me about faith. I pushed the envelope and raised why he had sentenced Pussy Riot for singing in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/22/russians-support-orthodox-church-pussy-riot .. and he said the church had been deeply offended. I said but a church, despite its offence, believes in the primacy of forgiveness not punishment for a blasphemy, and he looked at me with blinking incomprehension as if to say why would they forgive? But did I sense I was in the presence of evil? No.
-- "He has little understanding of Jesus, who said ‘blessed are the peacemakers’" --
We have heard a lot of ranting from Putin about the threat to Russia from Nato encirclement and justifications for the invasion to denazify Ukraine .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ukraine .. and stop their genocide of Russians. This is all propaganda and nonsense. What has been missed is the religious dimension in Putin’s thinking, although in delegitimising Ukraine, he did refer to it as an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.
This spiritual space is an important clue often overlooked. In 988 Vladimir king of the Rus was the first Christian convert. In Kyiv he summoned the whole city to the banks of the Dnieper River for a mass baptism. Holy Mother Russia was born. In 2019 the Ukrainian church broke with the Russian church and declared its independence. But Putin and the Russian church will not accept this because it is the site of the imagined mother church for all the Rus.
I was encouraged to read that some 176 Russian Orthodox priests .. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orthodox-clerics-stop-war-ukrane/31730667.html .. a few days ago had signed an open letter condemning the war. This is a small crack in Putin’s complete capture of the church within Russia. Such signs of dissent point to a recovery of the Gospel of peace and transcends the Rus religious tribe.
Despite the Bolshevik years, this sense of a holy destiny of Kyiv and Mother Russia has never left and Putin is its champion. Under Putin the Orthodox church has boasted that it is building and opening three churches a day, and the church celebrated the return of Crimea. Little wonder the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill a decade ago called Putin “a miracle of God .. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-russia-putin-religion-idUKTRE81722Y20120208 ”.
And in Putin’s mind it goes further.
Just as he probed me about Christianity .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/christianity .. in the west, he reportedly said in a speech in 2013: “We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of western civilisation. They are denying the moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual.”
Kyiv must be taken, in his mind, to preserve the Christian battle. And there may be many Christians in the west who agree with some of his sentiments.
A miracle defender of Christianity or the most evil man? Well, it is Ukrainian Christians among others whom he is now slaughtering indiscriminately and he has little understanding of Jesus, who said “blessed are the peacemakers”.
No, this is a power vision threaded through with nationalistic Christian theology. And evil is the right word when a leader uses religion to justify in God’s name invasion, violence and annihilation.
* Tim Costello is a fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney
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