Rasputin, Shoko Asahara, David Koresh, Jim Jones, The Donald

 

Did you know that Playboy Magazine has a senior White House correspondent? That would be Brian Karem, no fan of Señor Trumpanzee. And the feeling is mutual; when Trump tried taking away his press pass and access, Karem-- a recipient of the National Press Club's Freedom of the Press award, sued him in federal court-- and won. Karem, lead singer of Maryland's Rhythm Bandits Band, had offended one of Trump's in-house Nazis, Sebastian Gorka, by noting that right-wing social media scribes-- invited to a press conference to pretend they are legitimate journalists-- "a group of people eager for demonic possession." That was in the summer of 2019. This weekend, Karem was exposing the Trumpist Death Cult for Bulwark readers, redefining Trump himself as "an egotistical, narcissistic shaman who promises his adoring worshipers that he will right all wrongs." Sounds about right.

Karem compared Trump to cult leader and "master manipulator" David Koresh and Trump's followers to the Branch Davidians (of Waco fame). "H.L. Mencken," wrote Karem, "unflinchingly clear-eyed, said that every great religion was susceptible to cults. Mystics, he wrote, drive many cults and the 'essence of mysticism is that it breaks down all barriers between the devotee and his god, and thereby makes the act of worship a direct and personal matter.' David Koresh did that. Jim Jones did that. So does Donald Trump.

Trump is, in his own perverse way, one of the greatest mystics of the 21st century. He is a masterful manipulator who told everyone from the beginning of his political career how he could shoot someone in front of witnesses and not lose a voter. He also explained that he calls the news media liars so people won’t believe us and will believe him.

Like every mystic, Trump adheres to magic over science. When pressed about climate change, he said the scientists don’t know. When pressed about the pandemic he said it would magically disappear. He often refuses to wear a mask and may be responsible for as many as 40 people in and around the White House becoming infected by the coronavirus. Like the huckster selling snake oil or the phony shaman dancing around a fire, Trump proclaimed himself feeling “great” in a video he tweeted to his millions of adoring fans. His magic is that of the wizard in the Wizard of Oz, and few who love him would dare pull back the curtain.





He is the political messiah who will right all wrongs, drain the swamp, build a wall, make the economy better, and turn life into heaven on earth. Only he can solve the problems-- never mind that he caused most of them. He lies to convince his worshipers, who in turn believe him because he addresses their concerns. Something isn’t right if the common man is getting screwed so much and life is so tough. Trump must be right. He’s a common man to the common man. Millions of his evangelical Christian admirers act as though he is a Christian; they are unwilling or unable to see he clearly is not . In truth, he’s merely a rich, pampered insecure man who only worships himself. It’s hard to see as he gives those who feel so disaffected an enemy to hate. It’s not our fault, he says, it’s the swamp. It’s the deep state. It’s anyone but us.

Like every cult leader, his outsized ego and narcissism fuel the rage he has against those who think or act differently than he. His closest disciples and believers have gone all in-- because they see a path to glory and power they would otherwise not have. Stephen Miller, a man perpetually picked last for kickball, would never reach such heights without Trump, the mystic, as his mentor. Trump is a sedulous fly-catcher and he is among the best. He’s never worked for a living, but has convinced hard-working Americans that he alone knows what is best for the working man. He’s never served either in the military or in politics, prior to his run for president, but those who believe in him see a dedicated and selfless public servant who would charge into a tense standoff with guns blazing, like a cinematic Rambo.

He will continue to preach as he does because he knows nothing else. His minions will take up arms on his behalf-- triggered by the president whom the marginalized and the dangerous have found a friend. He is indirectly responsible for those who plotted to kidnap a governor. He told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by. The KKK endorses him. Every violent paramilitary group in the United States flocks to him as Branch Davidians flocked to hear their messiah in Waco.

The language is nearly the same. David Koresh spoke of an apocalypse at the hands of the federal government. So does Trump. Koresh said they were out to get him. So does Trump. Koresh violated the most basic forms of civility to maintain control. So does Trump.

Though he may still be contagious from the coronavirus, he plans once again this week to hit the streets and attend a rally where his supporters will deny science, refuse to wear masks, and blow off social-distancing. Meanwhile, the White House remains a biohazard petri dish with staffers terrified of catching the virus from Typhoid Donny, a president who wants to serve and promote his cult.

In the end, the Branch Davidians, assuring themselves that the apocalypse was upon them, died in a fire inside their own compound. Trump too says without his re-election, apocalypse could be upon us.

Here’s hoping Trump and his cult go a different route than the Branch Davidians should the president lose his bid for re-election.

Mass suicide, Jonestown style, would be a great and glorious ending for the Trumpist cult; it would solve, more or less, so many problems for this country and for the the world. Dragging the rest of us into it through insurrection, on the other hand... not so glorious or great. Conservative NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, has a different vision of Trump-- not so much a mystic or budding autocrat as a noisy weakling and predicts that there will be no coup after Trump loses 3 weeks from tomorrow. Douthat acknowledges that Trump is basically a fascist but pointed out that he "lacks popularity and political skill, unlike most of the global strongmen who are supposed to be his peers. He lacks power over the media: Outside of Fox’s prime time, he faces an unremittingly hostile press whose major outlets have thrived throughout his presidency. He is plainly despised by his own military leadership, and notwithstanding his courtship of Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley is more likely to censor him than to support him in a constitutional crisis. His own Supreme Court appointees have already ruled against him; his attempts to turn his voter-fraud hype into litigation have been repeatedly defeated in the courts; he has been constantly at war with his own C.I.A. and F.B.I. And there is no mass movement behind him: The threat of far-right violence is certainly real, but America’s streets belong to the anti-Trump left."

Douthat hangs his hat on the fact that "one can oppose Trump, even hate him, and still feel very confident that he will leave office if he is defeated, and that any attempt to cling to power illegitimately will be a theater of the absurd... [T]he scenarios that have been spun out in reputable publications-- where Trump induces Republican state legislatures to overrule the clear outcome in their states or militia violence intimidates the Supreme Court into vacating a Biden victory-- bear no relationship to the Trump presidency we’ve actually experienced. Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like “plotting” implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks."

Interfering In Other Countries' Domestic Politics-- What Monsters Do That?

One of the excuses many of the Trump-Putin useful idiots give for dismissing Putin’s hacking of the U.S. elections is that governments do it all the time— especially the U.S. Well, they are certainly right about governments doing it all the time, but that doesn’t make Putin’s coup against America any more palatable than, say, the U.S.-British coup against Iran in 1953. Glen Yeadon's book, Nazi Hydra In America includes a chapter about how the CIA recruited a whole lot of Nazis after the World War II to work for it in various capacities, including that of helping overthrow governments that were deemed unfriendly to American corporate power. The CIA was busy all over Europe, of course (as were the Russians) but both countries’ spy agencies were super-involved in Iran as well.

Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy Roosevelt was the CIA's agent in Iran that installed the Shah and overthrew Mossadegh. The plans issued by Mossadegh for nationalizing the oil fields precipitated his removal. The reader should understand that Mossadegh had been elected to office. Once the Shah was in power he was persuaded to name Fazlollah Zaledi as Prime Minister. During WWII Zaledi was imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis. Once firmly in control Iran completed a contract with an international consortium of oil companies. One member of that consortium was Standard Oil of New Jersey, a client of Sullivan and Cromwell. Jack Anderson reported that the Rockefeller family had helped arranged the coup that brought the Shah to power. Anderson had listed a number of ways the Shah demonstrated his appreciation. The CIA also provided training for the dreaded Savak or secret police of Iran.

...The result over the next two decades was the Shah enriched himself at the expense of his fellow countrymen using the brutal Savak to maintain control. Of course he remained a loyal ally of the US and corporate America such as Standard Oil of New Jersey got pricing breaks... The reader can now see the pattern, first the legally elected leader purposes reforms or maybe leaning to the left in a move that threatens corporate America. He is then dispelled and replaced with a hard right leader favorable to US [corporate] interests. The new leader enriches himself at the expense of his fellow countrymen and becomes an ally of the US. He maintains power through brutality and outright murder with a police force trained by the US. This then is the model that the US has followed since WWII, often times in the 1950s ex Nazis were employed as agents. The US press should be considered a co-conspirator in that they cover up the bloodshed by ignoring the killing as they did in Nicaragua. It is a model that has been repeated time after time in all corners of the globe from the end of WWII to the present time. Noam Chomsky terms the resulting state as subfascist. The resulting brutality and looting of the country by a group of elitists proceeds as it did in Germany under the Nazis.

The U.S. has interfered in the domestic politics of every country in Latin America, catastrophically in most, such as Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Uruguay, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras… And the U.S. has a long sordid history interfering in the domestic politics of counties like Greece, Italy, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hungary, Ukraine, Congo, Indonesia, Australia, Angola, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq… Did you know U.S., British, French, Japanese, Canadian, Czech and Greek troops invaded Russia in 1918? American troops occupied Vladivostok and Arkhangelsk. In fact, Russians aren’t completely paranoid to think the West has been interfering in their politics for over a century.

This past summer I visited Russia for the first time and one of my favorite lesser-known attractions was the Museum of Political History in St. Petersburg— great way to go through Russia’s rich history. I spent tike in a room devoted to Rasputin and just this week, the London Times ran a piece which seems pretty definitive about who— one of their agents— assassinated the monk and why. On January 7 Ben Macintyre wrote “Today The Times publishes a world exclusive — exactly a century late. On January 2, 1917, Robert Wilton, The Times correspondent in Petrograd, sent an urgent telegraph to head office with the news that Grigori Rasputin, the infamous ‘mad monk’ who had enraged members of the royal court by his intimacy with the tsarina, had been murdered four days earlier, and his bullet-riddled corpse thrown into the icy Neva River. Wilton’s detailed report did not appear in the newspaper. The Times decided to hold it back for reasons of diplomacy and good taste — and perhaps because the Foreign Office ‘hinted’ that it should do so.”

“Rasputin was shot in a room in the basement of the palace of Prince Yusupov,” wrote Wilton, whose words appear in newsprint here for the first time.

“Prince Yusupov did the shooting. Conjointly with other young Princes of the Blood . . . they had decided some time ago to ‘remove’ Rasputin because they regarded him as the cause of a dangerous scandal affecting the interests of the dynasty.”

But what Wilton did not report (and may not have known) was whether MI6 was involved in the death of Rasputin.

Was Prince Felix Yusupov, an Oxford-educated aristocrat married to the tsar’s niece, aided in the assassination by British intelligence in order to keep Russia fighting in the First World War?

Was the fatal bullet fired by an MI6 officer?

These questions will never be answered, and the mystery of Rasputin’s death will never be completely solved, until and unless MI6 opens up its files. A Siberian mystic, Rasputin insinuated himself into the Russian royal family, exercising particular influence over Tsarina Alexandra, to the fury of other family members — notably the hot-headed, flamboyant, cross-dressing and fabulously wealthy Prince Yusupov, the only member of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club to admit murder.

Alexandra was German by birth, and it was rumoured that she and Rasputin led a faction intent on making peace with Germany and pulling Russia out of the war. Britain, desperate to keep its Russian ally fighting, had the motive to want Rasputin dead.

The authorised history of MI6 is silent on the subject of British involvement in the killing, but there is no doubt that Samuel Hoare, the MI6 station chief in Russia, believed that Rasputin was sabotaging the war effort.

Hoare told the MI6 chief Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the original “C,” that if Rasputin were to be liquidated “the country would be freed from the sinister influence that was . . . endangering the success of its armies.”

A key suspect in the murder is Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, a 28-year-old MI6 officer and close friend of Prince Yusupov from their time at Oxford. Tsar Nicholas II told the British ambassador that he suspected “a young Englishman who had been a college friend of Prince Felix Yusupov, of having been concerned in Rasputin’s murder”. Rayner’s chauffeur later confirmed that the two men had met several times at the Yusupov palace in the weeks leading up to the murder on December 30.

The post-mortem examination carried out by the professor Dmitrii Kosorotov indicated that Rasputin had been shot three times, with different weapons.

The forensic evidence suggests that the final shot to Rasputin’s head could only have come from a revolver firing a lead, non-jacketed bullet at close range, most likely a British .455 Webley — the gun favoured by Rayner.

A letter from a second MI6 officer, Stephen Alley, also points to direct British participation in the murder plot: “Although matters have not gone entirely to plan, our objective has clearly been achieved. Reaction to the demise of Dark Forces [an obvious allusion to Rasputin] has been well received by all, although a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement. Rayner is attending to loose ends . . .”

Back in England, Rayner reportedly confided to family members that he had been present at the murder, and retained a bullet he said he had acquired at the scene. After the war, he helped Yusupov to write a graphic, self-serving and largely fictional account of the assassination, named his son after the prince, and died in 1961 after burning all his papers.

Lies, half-truths and uncertainties have long lingered around the murder of Rasputin, as reluctant to die as the monk himself, who allegedly survived both poisoning and shooting, and may even have been half-alive when he was dumped in the frozen river.

But the mystery surrounding Britain’s role in his death is the most enduring, and the most important factor, since it underpins a century of Russian mistrust of Britain.

If Rayner was involved, he may have been acting in a personal capacity, or as a British agent, or both. He may not have been involved at all, with the allegations against him just being the result of Russian propaganda and anti-British feeling.

I doubt Putin cares about a 28 year old British spy shooting Rasputin in 1917. He’s probably more interested that many Russians believe the CIA somehow persuaded Gorbachev and/or Yeltsin to sell out the Soviet Union. And he’s not thrilled about NATO’s policy of encirclement or about how the West overthrew his ally in Ukraine and replaced him with their own puppet. Does this make it “right” that Putin got even by installing Trump as president of the U.S.? Of course not— but it makes it easier to understand some of the chit-chat about it.