carefully recruited collaborators

“…Red Army soldiers and Russian agitators moved from village to village recruiting the least successful, least productive, most opportunistic peasants and offering them power, privileges, and land confiscated from their neighbors. In exchange these carefully recruited collaborators were expected to find and confiscate the ‘grain surpluses’ of their neighbors….these two newly created groups defined one another as mortal enemies. The kulaks understood perfectly well that the komnezamy had been set up to destroy them, the komnezamy equally understood perfectly well that their future status depended on their ability to destroy the kulaks.” Anne Applebaum. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.

identity politics engineered by a government intent on scapegoating, if not destroying, a subset of the population…employing an embittered subclass of the polity and turning its frustrations and resentment into acts of violence against another subset for the benefit, both political and economic, of an elite…us against “them”…they are the “other”…foreign…alien…not of us…we, as a nation, aren’t there…yet…we’re zeroing in on it though…why else all the talk about walls and the detentions at the border…and it doesn’t stop there…an entire presidential campaign that was built on fear by both sides…to what purpose besides division…balkanization…the ad wars over pepsi/coke…bud/miller….chevy/ford politicized to pro-life/pro-choice…nra/gun control…immigration…covid…the distortions of qanon ( today is international conspiracy theorists day…born fifty-seven years ago and still celebrated by manipulative fucks everywhere…nothing more helpful in the control of the mob than a good conspiracy theory…donny is aware [or, at least his handlers are ] of this…smoke and mirrors to divert the great unwashed’s attention from what is really going on ) perceived differences keep us at one another’s throats…figuratively and literally…and who wins? us? or the elite? that is the one true societal division…the rest are the creations of the media and of the politicians and of the clerisy…curious that lenin’s bolsheviks numbered about 1% of the population…a seeming statistical universal that transcends ideology…so…again…what do the 99% have in common…what can link them instead of dividing them…we all work…workers…and the bulk of the value of what we produce goes to someone else…we have stuff…they have wealth and the power ( the two are fungible ) that goes with it while many of us rent storage space and service the interest on the debt we incurred for the stuff…and they brand us…politically and as consumers…to keep us from seeing the reality…and we keep buying into the dream…i find the current president a vapid twit…beyond a bit more civility in administration i do not expect much more from the next one…or the one after that…they are all representatives in the pay of that same elite that wants to keep us divided…maintain BAU...the veneer will change ( unless dwindling options for avoiding incarceration of flight leads donny into the very real treasonable area of political violence…given his solipsism you cannot discount the possibility even if you may debate the probability )…the substance of what is beneath it will not…we are a long way from the end of “interesting times”.