Russian treachery is extreme and it is everywhere - The Guardian

[ffr]

Nationalism always breaks its promises because nationalists hate enemies in their countries more than they hate the enemies of their countries. Millions of American conservatives proved it when they voted for Donald Trump, even though he was an open admirer of a hostile foreign power.

Local hatreds, not national security, moved them. They hated Obama more than they feared Putin. They hated political correctness. They hated – not without reason – the attacks on freedom of speech. They hated rich liberals and defence lawyers. They hated Black Lives Matter and immigrants speaking Spanish in the shop queue. They hated the “experts” who told them that fossil fuel caused global warming and gun ownership caused crime. For all their patriotism, when it came to the crunch, they cared as little for national security as the “reds” their ancestors condemned in the 20th century.
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If that is not enough for you, consider that the CIA once inspired fear around the world. Now it is so feeble it cannot stop a Russian plot in plain sight to manipulate a US election. The FBI once harassed real and imagined communists it claimed were in the pocket of the Kremlin. In 2016, its director intervened on behalf of the Kremlin’s chosen candidate in the US presidential election.
<snip>

Shocking though the fellow travelling of the useful idiots of the right is (and what a pleasure it will be for western leftists of a certain age to throw back the insults conservatives once threw at them), it is not wholly incomprehensible. A large cohort of Cold War conservatives did not oppose the godless communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and its satellites because they were dictatorships but because they were godless. Russia may be a dictatorship again, but the atheist state has gone and it is a godly dictatorship now that Putin has embraced the Orthodox Christianity of the tsars. To further endear himself to conservatives, he persecutes homosexuals and denounces the liberal values that threatened his rule in the street protests of 2012 so vehemently his ideologue Alexander Durgin could say the world needs “a Nuremburg Trial for liberalism”. - The Guardian

Cliff's Notes: 2016 will be marked as a religious war; Christianity at war with all others.

[JHan]

1. great read.

[dhill926]

2. big K & R....