becoming the enemy cartoon
Humankind possesses a peculiar skill in transforming its highest ideals into something very akin to their opposites. The world's various religious traditions transformed their typically messianic and universalist beliefs into particularistic grandiose ambitions, counterposed to the message of universal love those religions originally professed and then sought to propagate. Christianity merged with Roman imperialism, expansionism, and colonialism, and so the Vatican would develop a veritable state apparatus, foreign policy, and expansionist aims. Islamic imperialism imitated Christianity's global mission and its militarized methods. The Catholic Church pursued revanchist Crusades in order to not just recover Christian lands from the Muslims but to expand Catholicism against its breakaway Eastern Church and its Orthodox successors in eastern Europe, most notably the Russian Orthodox Church. This is because the admirable tenets of these faiths, in humankind's imperfect hands, evolved over time into absolutist ideas that brooked no alternatives, the latter of which came to be seen as ultimate evils that had to be expunged from human existence in order for the promise of religion X to be fulfilled as its god, it was argued, insisted. Absolutism became the hallmark of the faith itself, disallowing any variations, deviations, pluralities within. Moreover, variations, deviations, and plurality outside religion X came to be regarded as a threat to it, and had to be expunged to save God's plan, message, and fulfillment on Earth. Absolutism's presence had to be absolute, ubiquitous.

This devolution of virtuous thought into absolutist self-righteousness and antagonism towards alternative views is sadly all too human and is the result of the power of the absolutist temptation in humankind's hubris and conceit. Many great thinkers have warned against the dangers of absolutism, ideology, or ideological fanaticism, and the like. Isaiah Berlin warned:
"(T)o find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present, and future, actual, possible, and unfulfilled is symmetrically ordered," according to Berlin, "(i)s one of the deepest of human desires." [Isaiah Berlin, "Historical Inevitability," — Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Vintage Books, 2013), p. 180].
This passion for monist explanations, a "transcendent whole," is driven in part by a desire to throw off the burden of individual responsibility in an unfathomable, chaotic world (Berlin, "Historical Inevitability," p. 154). This escape from responsibility, indeed freedom is accomplished, in Berlin's terms, by handing it over to a "vast amoral, impersonal, monolithic whole - nature, or history, or class, or race, or the 'harsh realities of our time', or the irresistible evolution of the social structure - that absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticize, and against which we fight to our certain doom" (Berlin, "Historical Inevitability," p. 189, see also pp. 152-4). Berlin occasionally listed the kinds of supreme causes around which various monist myths had been constructed, and which he thought ought to be avoided. Typical is the following list of "concepts" that had "played their parts in teleological-historical systems as protagonists upon the stage of history":
"Race, colour, Church, nation, class, climate; irrigation, technology, geopolitical situation; civilization, social structure, the Human Spirit, the Collective Unconscious" (Berlin, "Historical Inevitability," p. 139).
Oddly enough political system, regime type, democracy, republicanism, and the like are missing consistently from Berlin's lists of absolutist maladies (Berlin, "Historical Inevitability," pp. 139 and 151-2).

In his fine, thought-provoking review of Gary Saul Morson's Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, Vladimir Goldstein writes:
"Certainty comes in all shapes, however. Morson provides a telling example from Anton Chekhov, whose short story 'Gooseberries' features two brothers. One of them, Nikolai, finds happiness in the gooseberries which he grows on his own patch of land. The other brother, Ivan, is disgusted with the happy, gooseberry-gulping Nikolai. Ivan fulminates against 'happy' people, selfish in their joy, exhibiting no empathy for the rest of humanity. But this angry self-righteousness becomes intolerable in its own way. Morson writes:
'Ivan...has grown as obsessed and narrow as Nikolai, albeit in the opposite direction.' A frontal attack on another person's position opens the doors to a monological, rather than dialogical, view of the world. One's sense of wonder is replaced with certainty." "Even efforts to expose lies, overstatement, or self-righteousness can fall victim to the same defects."
The gravitation towards absolutism on the wings of certainty, is a seduction to which states, nations, peoples, cultures, and individuals often fall. This kind of fall is rampant today, from American domestic politics to international affairs. There is a disturbing pattern in our 21st century in which various key actors, especially in politics, are 'obsessed and narrow' 'in the opposite direction' from which they originally began to imagine and realize themselves and act. Consequently, they are replicating the very evil which they once were devoted to opposing and, in some cases, through and against which they were born. Returning to Berlin, he noted:
"(N)o one milieu or group or way of life is necessarily superior to any other; but it is what it is, and assimilation to a single universal pattern, of laws or language or social structure, as advocated by the French lumieres, would destroy what is most living and valuable in life and art. ... Every group has a right to be happy in its own way. It is terrible arrogance to affirm, that to be happy, everyone should become European" (Isaiah Berlin, "Herder and the Enlightenment," in Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, pp. 359-435, at p. 415).
It is a short leap from arrogance to absolutism. Arrogance is a precursor or symptom of a belief on one's superiority-a short path the belief that humankind must adopt one's views for its won benefit, and we, the superior ones, will show, lead, and ultimately force the inferior others onto the right path.

The fall of the American republic into global hegemony and soft authoritarianism is replete with irony of self-righteousness and the sense of exceptionalism leading to degradation of the American self-identity and the pluralistic values that defined the American idea and a petty form of soft authoritarianism - all rooted in the absolutist idea of America's democratic superiority. Having defeated the failing totalitarianism of the late Soviet Union and continuing to position herself as democracy's, indeed the world's 'indispensable nation' in an eternal quest to build a worldwide democratic order, it has come to regard itself in a new twilight struggle against authoritarian China and Russia. In reality, it is mired in avoidable conflicts of its own making and descending into authoritarianism. America, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave', was conceived in opposition to British colonialism. Americans fought a revolutionary war to rid themselves of British authoritarian rule from across the seas. Afterwards, America occasionally even supported aspirations for independence in Europe's colonial holdings. However, America's messianic view of its own republican revolution spawned a messianic American revolutionism with global pretensions. The trap of imperialism and absolutism was laid. The trap closed after World War II, when the U.S was drawn deeply into Europe's geopolitical games and a global contest for hegemony between its own capitalist model and the the socialist model of the new power on the world stage: the very internationalist Soviet Union. The USSR's ambitions of global communist revolution required a global capitalist response, and when the USSR turned its revolutionary gaze to the Third World, America was drawn into a global contest for hegemony. With the communist and Soviet collapses, America transformed its global defense against communist expansionism into a global republican offensive to maximize U.S. power over friends, foes, and everyone in between. Its vision of proper politics and economics, no matter how contested and transitory that vision was at home, needed to be expanded internationally to establish the 'democratic peace'. This had eery echoes of the communist ideology of the Soviets, which held that war — like every human evil — was a product of capitalism. The victory of the worldwide socialist revolution would bring a social and international utopia — a proletarian peace.

Somewhat similar to the Soviet outcome, America's quest for republican hegemony yielded war, a military-industrial-congressional war machine, and a creeping authoritarianism of the U.S. political system. America had come full circle, replicating in new guises colonialism, imperialism, and absolutism in opposition to which she was founded. The icing on this rotten cake is that the U.S. and its Western allies, having defeated totalitarianism in the form of German fascism in World War II and Soviet communism in the Cold War, are now embracing a Maidan regime in Kiev that honors the German Nazis' Ukrainian fascist allies and sometimes German fascism itself.

The U.S. transformation doubles back on a somewhat similar one that its communist opponent underwent during its history from a 'democratic' and anti-imperialist movement. Many forget that, despite its utopian absolutism, Russian communism was conceived by its adepts as a democratic exercise devoted to the destruction of capitalist oppression and the quasi-republics and autocracies it hid behind. Hierarchies were to be destroyed in favor of universal (indeed uniform) equality, where the proletarians would share power and all the world would be the proletariat. The need to eliminate classes, nations, and their cultures to construct this 'new Soviet man' on the way to achieving this goal in one nation foiled the democratic element in this poorly thought through idea. At the same time, the messianic element of a 'world revolution' by the 'international proletariat' contained the seed of imperialism much as dreams of a republican world and democratic peace held the seed of American messianism, universalism, and, ultimately, hegemony. Like all such hegemonic messianic ventures, both the Soviet and American variations have failed.

The domestic offshoot of this turn to imperialism is a turn to political authoritarianism and ideological absolutism. The authoritarian Patriot Act accelerated a pattern of expanding centralization and police state-style development after World War II. The Obama administration doubled down on surveillance of the public, assassinated American citizens abroad without a court trial, and relied on executive orders to circumvent Congress. It spied on journalist Sharyl Atkisson, wiretapping her devices, hacking her computers, and blackmailing her as she sought her files' return. AP reporters were subpoenaed, and journalist Barry Rosen was arrested on trumped up charges. Trump did little to block the Democrat Party-dominated professional bureaucracy and local governments from repressing U.S. citizens during COVID. Under the corrupt and cynical Biden administration, the Democrat Party-state has massively intensified Obama's weaponisation of the law enforcement and intelligence apparati, as the 'Russia hacked the election hoax' and January 6th false flag plot pinned on Trump, Republicans, and indeed all conservatives. Douglass Mackey was sent to a federal prison slot for posting an anti-Hillary meme. J6 protestors have been demonized as domestic terrorists, and for minor infractions many have become political prisoners. Most recently, a seventy-two year old grandmother, Rebecca Lavrenz, was sentenced to a year in prison and fined some $250,000 for wandering into the Capitol and talking cordially with a police officer for ten minutes before departing. Now the Democrat Party-state has concocted falsified indictments at President Trump in order to prevent him from running in or at least winning the 2024 presidential election. All this is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of repression of Americans' constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms in America's new 'a-republican' order; one that threatened to become a single-party dominant state, a non-republican, soft authoritarian regime, if the Democrat Party-state gets its way.

U.S. allies also are strongly enthralled by absolutist ideas, though as in the case the U.S there is sometimes an instrumentalist motive behind the zealously demonstrated adherence to them. America's Western allies in particular are excessively wedded to the new neo-liberal doctrine that imposes particular views and policies on both domestic and international issues. The new secular religion dictates proper views to Western states' peoples on issues ranging from sexuality to religion to medicine to politics and economics. We can see the instrumentalization of American absolutism perhaps best in its foreign entanglements.

Ukraine is a peculiar mix of instrumentalized professions of 'democracy' and the counter-absolutism of nationalism in the form of ultra-nationalism and neo-fascism. Ukraine, having rejected ostensibly Soviet communism and Russian authoritarianism, has fallen into the grips of absolutist nationalism, ultra-nationalism, and neo-fascism, embracing authoritarianism and Western neo-imperialism. This was done in order to save itself from the supposedly far more authoritarian Russia with which the West pushed Kiev into war in order to continue NATO and EU expansion across Eurasia. It is no coincidence that as U.S. republicanism waned, Western neo-imperialism drove Ukrainian ultranationalism and authoritarianism in the name of 'democracy.' NATO-Russia Ukrainian War is invigorating further Ukrainian ultranationalism and authoritarianism. It is well-known, if less talked about nowadays that the Maidan regime is well-infested by ultranationalists and neofascists from the military, state security, intelligence, and police. It is not just ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and Jews who face discrimination and violence with impunity under the Maidan regime. Hungarians and Romanians are repressed in their languages and cultures, against the protests of the Western democracies, Hungary and Romania. (Meanwhile, the former demands peace with Russia, the latter supports NATO's war efforts in Ukraine.) Ukrainian nationalism is even taking a page out of its communist enemy's book, attacking religion - or at least a particular religious organization, the Moscow Patriarchate-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church - and subjecting its adepts to torture and prison. The repression includes: the confiscation of the Church's property and the arrest and beatings of clergy. Among the latter included the beating of Metropolitan Longin of the Holy Ascension Monastery Banchensky in western Ukraine


The pattern of domestic ultranationalists and neofascist repression has transmogrified since the beginning off the Donbass civil war begun in April 2014 into international terrorism, supported by the 'community of democracies' through its intelligence services and military wing: NATO. Thus, like America, born in cradle of Soviet totalitarianism's collapse and the advent of market republicanism in the former USSR, Ukraine has descended into something more like republicanism's opposites: authoritarianism, growing neofascism, war, and terror. The West and its Ukrainian and other allies fight a somewhat restrained Russian terror, that they provoked, with a not so republican but very imperialistic terrorism — all in the name of 'democracy' and human rights. Unlike in Ukraine's case, religion is not always the victim; sometimes it is the perpetrator of authoritarianism, violence, and terror.

We see today a rebirth of religiously-driven, nationalist, if not ultranationalist colonialism in Israel. This has led to the use of neofascist methodologies of war and state terror, culminating so far in a fascist-like racist genocide in a country created in response to such abnormality. Born in violence and the brutal slaughter and removal of Palestinians from the land they resided, the Israel state had early been sown with seeds for replicating something of the horror that the Europe's Jews barely survived in the Nazi Holocaust; all generated by a passion for self-defence reflected in the pledge: "Never again." Decades of Arab invasions, the growing threat of Islamist absolutism, and jihadi terrorism has combined with internal republicanism to bad effect: a hardening the Israeli heart in pursuit of maximal security. Now, in a matter of months, the IDF has slaughtered more than 40,000 civilians and wounded many more in a self-declared, self-defence action. Tens, if not hundreds of IDF war crimes have been documented. This was carried out in response to a horrific, albeit, Hamas attack that killed little more than a thousand but one that Jerusalem nurtured by its cruel colonial policies in the Gaza Strip.


Comment: Most of those 'thousand' deaths can be laid at the door of the IDF:


Rather than trying to grow a civil society among its Palestinians, the Israelis reinforced the ethnic and religious boundaries between Israelis and Palestinians through an apartheid-like system. At the same time, the Israeli state was infiltrated increasingly by radical Zionist ideology, proselytizing the idea of a God-mandated Greater Israel and racist attitudes towards the Palestinians as new untermenshchen that, according to some Israeli leaders, needs to be excised from the Israel's organism by almost any means necessary. This ideological orientation is now probably the dominant one in Israel. When put into practice since October, it seems eerily reminiscent of the Nazi violence implementing the idea of Germany as the superior race, the blood of which must be protected from and cleansed of contaminating alien bodies by any means. All this is cemented together by an apocalyptic eschatology that designates the Jewish people and the Israeli state as messianic chosen instruments. These Israeli elements resemble the religious fanaticism one can find among Israel's enemies — Hamas, not to mention Hezbollah, various Sunni jihadist groups, and Iran's Shiite Twelvers and other Shiite strains of radical Islamism — against which the Jewish state is opposed in another twilight struggle. The growing Israeli radicalism is evidenced by the high-ranking officials' call for elimination of the Palestinian people and Israel's military policy, strategy, and tactics in the Gaza War, which seem designed to achieve genocide and the birth of Greater Israel. Israel's Jews, many of whom are appalled by this extremist turn, ran from Europe to their ancestral homeland to escape the Nazi threat only to find their promised land embracing a diluted, religious form of neo-Nazism. As in Ukraine, war in Israel is unlikely to breed moderation but rather the further radicalism still of Zionist absolutism.

Returning to the U.S., when America's first President George Washington warned of 'foreign entanglements' and President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial-congressional complex, they could have never imagined their homeland's leaders hailing the killing of Russians, no less 'on the cheap' supposedly by expending lives 'to the last Ukrainian' in order to achieve it and citing the benefit of profits and providing 'good jobs' to Americans. Nor could they have imagined their nation supplying weapons for a near-genocide, while its leaders touted their efforts to provide medical aide to the tens of thousands of living victims. Together they would reason that the former's feared 'foreign entanglements' had led directly to the latter's military-industrial-congressional complex. These, they would say, cannot be the fruits of true republicanism.

The descent into acting like one's enemy is no better understood than looking at the terrorist-like methods being carried out by Western powers' intelligence services in the Middle East and Ukraine. For example, NATO weapons, training, and intelligence support Ukrainian bombing attacks that routinely target civilians as well as assassinations in Donbas (since 2014) and Russia proper. Somewhat less malignantly is a frontal attack in the West itself on freedom of speech and the press carried out jointly by Westerners and Ukrainians. Thus, Britain's MI-6 and Ukrainian SBU-affiliated Website 'Molfar' cooperate to put at risk of assassination or other crimes various anti-NATO Western journalists and public figures — including former FOX journalist Tucker Carlson, Time magazine's Simon Shuster, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sacks, Congressman Thomas Massie, Hungarian President Victor Orban, UK parliamentarian George Galloway, and Elon Musk. Another example is the trend in places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania to repeat the supposed irredentism of their Russian foe. Thus, right-wing parties there are calling for returning territories lost to Soviet Ukraine at the end of World War II. In these and other ways, the Ukrainian war following the COVID scandal and the rise of globalist authoritarian trends throughout the West have planted the seeds for a possible turn to the very fascism and authoritarianism across our civilization that we claim to fight.

States, peoples, and cultures other than Western ones are no less vulnerable to this turn towards the methods and values of their antipodes and foes. Russia needs to be particularly vigilant that it does not fall into the same trap. There is little likelihood that Russia will adopt its historical Other's republicanism any time soon, but it appears vulnerable to adopting its communist era antipode. The inverting dynamic of becoming one's negation described above suggests that a post-communist Russia will itself be tempted by the sin of ultra-nationalist and/or religious-derived absolutism. Communist internationalism rejected states, nations, national cultures, and religion as the unfortunate negative but temporary epiphenomena of capitalist stage of human development. With the coming of communism all these supposedly would wither away. In post-Soviet era, Russia has re-embraced the state, the nation, its culture, and religion. War, either in the act or reaction in its aftermath (e.g., Weimar Germany), can be a powerful incubator of militarism, nationalism, revanchism, and absolutism. America's continuous wars during the Cold War and its aftermath gave birth to an American nationalism, particularly among its elite. In exposing the hypocrisy of today's West, its ideology, and decaying culture, Russia could cultivate within itself a dangerous self-righteousness, rendering itself thereby susceptible to a new absolutism.

The Russia state's already, soft albeit, authoritarian political system could become harsher, turning to a state ideology and invigorating the disposition to a new Russian political messianism to replace the Soviet predecessor's messianic role of the international proletariat. The pattern of universalism in Russian culture, thought, and political history carries the seed of imperialism, of which Russia is often accused but has managed to constrain since the end of the Cold War, despite all the Western provocations from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine.

For now Russian President Vladimir Putin has been careful to separate nationalism and ethnicity. Russian nationalism today is state nationalism theoretically encompassing all the country's nationalities. The Russian president has been exceedingly scrupulous in emphasizing Russia's multinational, multicultural character as a microcosm of the larger Russian/Eurasian civilizational idea now popular in Russian political and strategic culture. However, under there stresses of war, Western efforts to 'de-colonize Russia' by encouraging separatism, and the Orthodox religious revival, a creeping ethnicization of Russian state nationalism could emerge.

Moreover, in response to the West's increasingly antagonistic materialism, secularism, transgenderism, and the like, there is a risky politicization of Russian Orthodoxy, including a mixing of military-patriotic sentiment and Orthodoxy. Military symbols and religious symbols are being mixed. The new Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces is the prime example. It includes icons featuring religious, military, and political figures from Russian and Soviet history. Russian military units in Ukraine often feature Orthodox symbols. Kiev's war on the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church can intensify the mixing of nationalism, Orthodoxy, and military-patriotism in Russian political and strategic culture. This mixing could produce a new religious-based absolutism born from the ashes of communist totalitarianism. The sense of 'woundedness' among Russians that resulted from the 20th century reminds one of the Jews' and Israel's and has yet to be fully understood. Another Russian-Jewish parallel is their ancient histories' and cultures' experience with messianic beliefs. Such drive much of Israeli politics already and could come to do so in Russia.

A young would-be Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky once said:
"I would really like to address Mr. Putin. Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin), if you want... Me personally, I'll tell you honestly: I'm ready, I don't know... if you need, I can beg you on my knees. Because Russia and Ukraine are truly fraternal peoples. I know millions... I know thousands of who live in Russia. Wonderful people. We are of the same colour. We have the same blood. We all understand each other, regardless of language. We are a great people. You are a great people. We are one country, absolutely. We all love each other madly."

Now he heads an ultranationalist regime infested with neofascists. His army targeted Russian (and Ukrainian) civilians in Donbas before the war and in Russia proper after February 2022. He vehemently rejects peace talks with Russia.

If individuals can make 360-degree turnabouts in their worldviews, so can states, nations, and cultures. Oddly enough, the 'enemies' of the United States today, China and Russia along with their allies abroad, once wholly enchanted by absolutist ideas and ideologies, strongly eschew them. To be sure, Russian culture's aspiration to tselostnost' or 'wholeness' — communal, societal, global, and cosmological — inclines it towards absolutism (see Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost': Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2021)]. However, this aspiration to communalism, solidarism, universalism, and religious monism has rarely become reality in the course of Russia history. Only Russia's Soviets had success in communalism and solidarism and made some gains for communist internationalism. As far as China is concerned, a similar tendency to unity is evident, and this lends itself to the adoption of absolutisms. For now, however, it is the U.S. and its allies who very much act upon increasingly absolutist ideological formulas. The rabid pursuit of the 'democratic peace' has produced revolution and war abroad and increasingly division and chaos at home. The community of democracies is becoming increasingly authoritarian, while professing to promote 'democracy' abroad. In this way, the West, particularly America, is becoming the very enemy it claims to be destined to eradicate. Perhaps it will succeed by destroying itself?

It is worth noting that in each case, the above parties have adopted ideological absolutisms from their ideological, absolutist enemies. Absolutist thought breeds absolutist thought in a counter-opposite form. Absolutism is eminently hindered in breeding pluralism, free markets, and republicanism. The 21st century is proving that.