About the “Mirror-MAGA” movement in the USA:
On the “other side of the mirror” in the pre-1980 USA, many people who self-identified as “patriots” considered that this required an attitude of support for “my country, right or wrong.”
Now, 45 years after passing through the “point of inflection” in 1980, we can see clearly how the “Reagan Economic Miracle” has “Satanized” this once noble country – it is no longer capable of being “right” under any circumstances. No matter which individuals are “elected” to positions of political office, this country’s extraordinary power is inevitably employed to advance the pecuniary interests of those who occupy the top of the “Reagan Economic Miracle” pyramid. And this is always “sold” to American consumers with a maudlin narrative, typically founded on “invented” “facts,” and replete with buzzwords like “liberal democracy,” “humanitarian values” and “human rights.”
Ironically, the most fundmental “human right” of all long since ceased to exist in those manifestations of “liberal democracy” (which the USA seeks to impose on the rest of the world) that are aligned with the “Reagan Economic Miracle” in the USA. The Russian Orthodox Church (via spokesman Archpriest V. Chaplin) describes this “fundamental human right” as the right to be “free from transformation of the human personality into a commodity, an impersonal module of a consumer-technological system.” (See Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 21st century, S.G. Osmachko (2013) (in Russian), note 33).
Protestants have a difficult time grasping what IS this “fundamental human right” that they no longer possess. Understanding this “fundamental human right” entails understanding that the human personality is a “trinity” (i.e., an image of God) – one component of this “trinity” being the mysterious “spirit,” which co-exists with “soul” and “body.” In societies such as the USA which deny consumers this “fundamental human right,” the “individual rights” that are much-touted by the West become, frankly, meaningless, because “spirit” is effectively “excised” from the “structure” of society, from the “social fabric.” Such “spiritless” societies thrive, economically, by convincing consumers that “I know who I am” without ever arriving in a state where “spirit,” “soul” and “body” comprise a harmonious presence and certainly without any kind of “connection” between the individual and a unified “collective spirit.” In such societies, secular liberalism actively works against the attainment of unity (harmonious presence) within oneself, and even more so against trinitarian (“love thy neighbor as thyself”) communion with others.
President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” movement are now preparing American consumers for a domestic “war” against “the enemy within.” But WHO is this “enemy within?” According to Democrats it is Republicans and according to Republicans it is Democrats. Trump’s MAGA followers call themselves “patriots.” Yet any real “patriot” with eyes to see and ears to hear must surely realize that the real “enemy within” is both the Democrats and the Republicans. It is the group which, while paying for both of these parties’ “electoral campaigns,” tells American consumers that the USA needs a trillion-dollar-per-year “Department of War” in order to advance their interests in the world. It is the group which, speaking through their Democrat and Republican well-paid servants (who are in “reality” spiritual slaves), tells consumers to prepare for a “showdown fight” against the evil Chinese, the evil Russians and the evil Iranians.
America’s coming struggle against “the enemy within” is not unlike the struggle undertaken by an individual sinner struggling to be Christian according to Orthodox teaching – this is the struggle to get free of one’s badness in order to be able to BE one’s prayer (a unified presence) and to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (attain trinitarian communion “in Christ” with “thy neighbor”).
The “mirror-MAGA movement” is about consumers who want to “Make America Good Again” through what I call “American Perestroika.” “American Perestroika” knowingly entails the collapse of the “Reagan Economic Miracle” political-economic order. This is about choosing to “kill the beast” before it kills us. It is about accepting the “Godly suffering” that will attend a sudden decline of GDP to pre-1980 levels (in relative terms). America’s nuclear deterrent is entirely sufficient to protect the country against invasion, no matter how bad the domestic economic situation may become. No amount of failure to pay mortgages will cause any existing buildings to spontaneously fall down! Shared economic deprivation can serve to bring consumers together who have been willfully “scattered apart” by “divide-and-conquer” “mechanical capitalism.”
I do not believe that there yet remains in “Reagan Economic Miracle” “liberal democracies” anything that can reasonably be construed as free, sincere, legitimate “electoral process.” And this is, in my view, openly admitted by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report “Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe” (S. Prt. 115-21)(2018). This report identifies as an “assault on democracy” attempts to convince consumers to reject the “centrist consensus” (i.e., the “Reagan Economic Miracle” political-economic order) and not submit to the “enemy within”.
And so, this story is never going to have a happy “Meet John Doe” Hollywood ending whereby American consumers defeat the “enemy within” and “Make America Good Again” via “electoral process.”
Nevertheless, I believe the time will soon come when consumers will be given the opportunity to repent themelves of the “Reagan Economic Miracle” and turn to Christ, for real, this time, with a sincere, sustained effort to re-build American society according to the founding principle “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This opportunity will arise because the “Reagan Economic Miracle” will soon collapse under the “weight” of its own hypocrisy and its unsustainable “printing” of “money” – “money” that is ultimately backed only by military power and the will to use it (i.e., to commit mass murder in furtherance of pecuniary aims).
The Mirror-MAGA movement to “Make America Good Again” is a wave of realization. It is slowly but inevitably permeating the American culture of “cognitive dissonance” whereby consumers remain convinced of their own individual goodness, unwilling to confront their horrific collective badness. It is a “lifting of scales from the eyes,” whereby consumers, at last, comprehend the spiritual catastrophy of the “Reagan Economic Miracle” that they inflicted on themselves and attempted to inflict on the rest of the world.
LINK TO VIDEO IN ENGLISH
https://rutube.ru/video/private/13da66c49d61295c5a6df587bfc9271b/?p=PXpgQL2658M0p8ZpOuM6vg
LINK TO VIDEO IN RUSSIAN
https://rutube.ru/video/private/90d871f3496a152dc568897fa51a8faa/?p=1SLOzf9tOIvzPAhkIldnig
About the “Union of Workers within the Economic Body of Russia” movement:
Russia has come to a dramatic “crossroad” in the trajectory of its history.
After the fall of the communists in 1991, Western countries forcibly imposed upon Russia a consumerist “market” economy based on western Protestant principles of “individualism” – something wholly unrelated to the Orthodox world view and to the historical evolutionary patterns of Russian society. And in so doing, western countries forced Russians to endure utter humiliation as 65% of state-owned property was “privatized” in a massively corrupt process whereby the “sales price” was, on average, 3.6% of the true asset value (1) – a process that famous Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn referred to as “the greatest crime against the Russian people.” (1) Subsequently, 77% of Russians voted to re-do the “privatization,” but by then it was too late – the new “Westernized” “system” was firmly in power. (1)
There was an initial period under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin when the Russian state eagerly cooperated with “the Masters” of the “Reagan Economic Miracle” while they invested in this IMF-imposed “privatization.” But then Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, turned the tables on this program, earning him not only the status of “permanent bad guy” in the eyes of gullible American consumers but also effectively a “Fatwa” death sentence from “the Masters.” The resulting “system” in Russia became a kind of “bastard” hybrid of Western style “free market” “individualist” consumerism driven by capitalist oligarch clans combined with traditional Russian principles of autocracy administered by corrupt local government officials. Grigori Yavlinsky, economist and leader of the opposition Yabloko party says that “the New Democratic Russia never involved any actual change of power at the top.” (2) Yavlinsky says that the Russian economy is “complex” and “not easy to explain rationally”- a “symbiosis” of corrupt officials and “opaque” business practices. The “system,” according to Yavlinsky, “is not state governance as such, but is essentially a compromise between the executive head of state and representatives of influential economic and political clans, who act as intermediaries between the top of the power pyramid and its core.” (2)
Now Western countries are openly at war with Russia. Assuming that the world survives this, the great question is “what is Russia’s development trajectory going forward?”
On its current trajectory, Russia is headed towards a Russian-version of the same Western “mechanical-capitalism” that Satanized the once-noble USA. The “Reagan Economic Miracle,” that Americans attempted to force upon the entire world, produces an “Economy of Death”—a “mechanism” for maximizing returns for the top of the “pyramid of capital” that must continue to expand to avoid collapse. The Western “Economy of Death” literally “consumes” humanity itself, transforming triune individuals into effectively “binary” “carnal machines” with no spiritual interaction within society.
Russia is still far behind the West on the road to “mechanical capitalism.” And unlike the situation in the West, the precious spiritual treasure of “sobornost” still persists in Russia as a fundamental feature of the “social fabric” that remains after 1000 years of Orthodox Christianity – a feature that the communists did not destroy but rather made use of to their own ends. But “sobornost” in Russia is, by all accounts, already greatly diminished compared with past times. And it can be readily predicted to disappear altogether if “the system” does not change course.
The “Union of Workers within the Economic Body of Russia” movement seeks to forever preserve and, indeed, extend “sobornost” in Russian society. It is a movement of believers, who understand the reality of the Creator’s love and our need for it, that seeks to bridge the disjunction between Holy Russia and the Communist era. The Union seeks to become a fundamentally new economic force, owning the means of production and providing its members with spiritually satisfying housing, Orthodox schools, and “houses of culture” – a new model of “ownership,” with no stockholders and no “pyramid of wealth.”
The “trade Union movement” seeks to help “the system,” including its predominantly Jewish oligarchs, undertake a conscious, purposeful transformation of the Russian economy – to de-Westernize, turning away from the “Economy of Death” and embracing instead the Orthodox Christian principles of the “Economy of Life.” These were expressed in 1912 by the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov, a formerly Marxist economics professor. The “Economy of Life” views society as a living organism. Its aim is NOT to maximize returns for the “pyramid of capital,” but rather to provide a spiritually satisfying life for the workers, who fundamentally drive the evolution of the “social organism.” Its foundational principle is that joy in life comes from “sobornost,” from empathy, NOT from “consumption.”
(1) Russian Economy in Transition (1990s – XXIst century) Problems and Prospects, M.A. Ignatskaya (2006) (In Russian)
(2) Realeconomik: The hidden cause of the great recession (and how to avert the next one), Grigori Yavlinsky (2011) (In english).
LINK TO VIDEO IN ENGLISH
https://rutube.ru/video/e1e5ba728b553123ceb523ee6c95e36b
LINK TO VIDEO IN RUSSIAN
https://rutube.ru/video/e1e5ba728b553123ceb523ee6c95e36b/
About the Editor:
The editor is known by his Orthodox name Theophan and his ochestvo Robertovich.
He is a retired American living in Saint Petersburg, Russia, who refers to himself as a “spiritual refugee.”
The three icons shown with “recent posts” are of Saints with whom Theophan has been praying for many years – St. Theophan the Recluse (Russian), St. Gregory Palamas (Greek) and St. Pitirim of Tambov (Russian).