Written by George Monroe

In his seminal book, The Way of The Explorer, Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell wrote that his view of life on our home planet was profoundly changed as he returned from a visit to the moon. Riding back through space in the Kittyhawk command module, he observed the earth from a unique vantage point and realized in that moment that most views of human activities from an earthbound perspective are incomplete. Composed of disparate bits and pieces, limited accounts are always missing some relevant facts and often lead to wrong conclusions and harmful conflict. In the ancient fable of the blind men describing an elephant, each man was certain he knew the entire truth. Observing a more complete picture of human activities from a distant and less encumbered viewpoint can help to form a realistic perspective on our current trouble with Russia.

As exemplified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, untamed egotism is a central driver of international conflict. Hidden from view, groups of wealthy egocentrics scheme to eliminate and replace democracies with a new strain of fascism by chipping away at democratically fashioned laws and protocols. This includes such reductive measures as appointing directors of government programs who are committed to shutting them down, cutting current program funds, stacking courts with paid off extremists, failing to protect civil rights, incarcerating troublemakers, privatizing public properties, and failing to honor legal agreements. When legitimate authority is sufficiently weak, “shock and awe” strategies including actual or threatened war, destructive trade policies, induced riots, and acts of domestic terror are introduced to create an atmosphere of mind-numbing chaos, fear, and confusion in which more undemocratic measures can be introduced.

This anti-democratic scheme was actually created in America based on the social philosophy of Russian novelist Ayn Rand who immigrated to America in 1926.  American economist and professor at the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, embraced the social postulates presented in her books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  He conducted research on ways to implement them in communities likely to resist a scheme for instituting “free market economics” and claimed his results validated his premises and methods.

With teams of recent graduates from the University of Chicago School of Economics Friedman was able to spread the illusion of his “scientifically proven” economic doctrine all around the world. The governments of many eager nations, including Russia, were lured or coerced into economic traps that made them beholden to power brokers within U.S. corporations. Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” were assisted in these ventures by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The austerity measures required were implemented in the nations involved and led to economic disaster for most of their citizens while greatly increasing wealth for a few.

There were other disastrous effects beyond economic disparity. Under Friedman’s plan, when public resistance becomes a problem it is to be dealt with first by re-education. If this action fails to result in quick compliance, threats and punishments are to be swiftly introduced. People who still offer strong resistance must be firmly suppressed. When a brutal version of this plan was tried during the reign of Chile’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, more than thirty thousand resisters were “disappeared.” There were similar casualties when the plan was applied to many other countries including Russia.

For most of the 1990’s, Vladimir Putin watched carefully and learned well as this scheme was ruthlessly employed with Friedman’s guidance in his own country. When the smoke cleared he joined with a few newly rich elites to establish a reconstituted Russia and was elected its President. All of this was first exposed and documented in 2007 by journalist and social activist Naomi Klein in her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

In December of 2017, Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University Nancy MacLean, published an award winning book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. It exposed secret meetings of aspiring plutocrats to discuss plans to force on an unsuspecting America an updated version of Friedman’s scheme created and promoted by industrialist Charles Koch.  Koch was inspired by the extreme right wing economist and adviser to Friedman, the late James  Buchanan, in whose view the proper role for the majority of people in a society is to serve the wealthy elite.

Koch promotes and finances egregious actions by the wealthy minority he leads including voter suppression, gerrymandering, eliminating worker unions, and hijacking voting machines. In her search through Buchanan’s voluminous archives after his death, another of MacLean’s disturbing discoveries was that Vice President Mike Pence has for a long time been a secret supporter of the Koch takeover plan.

A very different perspective on our current Russia problem is offered by Yale University Professor of History Timothy Snyder, a multilingual expert on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe. His April 2018 book, The Road To Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America documents in detail the kind of government that wealthy Russian oligarchs would like to reestablish in Russia and internationally.

As leader of this power group, Putin promotes serious changes in governments around the world to make them more compatible with the current Russian regime. His wish list includes elimination of democracies, privatization of all public properties, white male rule, greater access to money and power, disbanding NATO, formation of a coalition of Eurasian nations, freedom to collude with other oligarchs around the world, and permanent control of the masses.

How does this relate to Putin’s courtship with Trump and messing with elections in America? Putin believes that he can achieve what he and the Koch led U.S. oligarchs want by helping Trump and his minions force the updated Friedman scheme on the United States.

A comprehensive view of global events should alert us to Nancy MacLean’s warning that “we are at a crucial moment in our history and we will not get another chance. They say again and again that this going to be permanent (like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was intended to be), and they’re very close to victory.”