Is Virtue An Advantage Or Disadvantage For Societies?

I have been traveling around the U.S. for several months and have been impressed by how ethical and empathetic ordinary working people commonly are. In Eugene, Oregon, I ate breakfast several days in a row at a Denny’s next to my hotel. (The hotel gave a coupon in lieu of a breakfast.) I overpaid the first day, because I didn’t know how to apply my coupon. A waitress chased me down in the parking lot to alert me to my mistake and two days later, took my check — all to save me four dollars.

I feel like institutions and giant business are constantly trying to cheat people. Debt traps have brand names and shiny logos. Hotels hide “amenity fees”. It is a near-constant assault. But, in my experience, actual humans in daily encounters are usually very nice.

I don’t know how long such bottom virtue can last under assault from above. I think most Americans are pretty cynical and pessimistic about the possibilities of collective political action to check elite depravity. Historically, I know in other societies, civil wars have erupted out of revolutionary potential and in some cases pretty much ruined social trust in the conflicts that followed.

I am thinking of Greece in particular, which I know well, where trust at the level of daily encounters among strangers dissolved and politics became clientist.

I don’t know any details, but I think China has gone thru some unimaginably intense civil trauma to get to where it is in terms of building both social trust and trust in institutions.

Trouble is there are a lot more countries and people that lack any semblance of virtue.

I have noted before how India is and will remain backward, because the comprador – oligarch class under the British, simply took their place and fed themselves at the trough with no vision for improving the country as a whole.

So to underscore the point the chauvinistic s**t that is Modi has announced, that he is going to the settler-colonial genocidal state and will address the Knesset. Amusing to see this dips**t prostrating to another racist apartheid monster who looks down at all brown people.

https://x.com/narendramodi/status/2025610920920252718?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Clearly also a move to suck up to the US. No longer even pretending to sit on the fence.

This is why India will never be a superpower, will always be a backwater. Even more so because one would assume that Russia and China must now lose confidence in India as a strategic partner.

So I hope you are right about virtue – and the outcome for those that lack it!

They are better people than Americans. Doubtless that will outrage many, but if you think otherwise you’re engaged in special pleading. How many countries have they invaded and destroyed? How many people have they killed or impoverished, including their own people? They’re expanding education and healthcare, working hard to make housing cheaper, etc, etc…

With a few exceptions, this is/was true of my former Chinese coworkers.

A little personal history is in order. As a college student, I pulled a stint in a Chinese restaurant. The owner and his wife worked there, and he worked harder than anyone I had ever known. He took care of us, he bought us Christmas gifts and threw Christmas parties. He had his quirks, to be sure; the only thing I didn’t like is that he didn’t like to give you time off for being sick. But other than that, he was a very good boss, one of the best ones I’ve had.

(I still remember him and the staff talking about a young woman, who worked there and was something of a ‘problem employee’, but he refused to fire her because “she had that baby” to take care of. Contrast this to a job I had at a sandwich shop, where the owner fired a young woman who was a great worker but who was caught stealing a small container of potato salad for—her child. Mind you, this owner would give everyone a free beer for working a shift, but wouldn’t let anyone substitute a small cup of potato salad or food item for that beer.)

In short, this Chinese owner exhibited loyalty. And he got it in return. I recall after I left and starting working at my Fortune 500 company, there was an Octoberfest in my college town, and I visited a booth my former Chinese restaurant was running at the festival. They were short-handed, and guess what?—I ended up working much of the night, for free, to help out. Loyalty given gets loyalty in return.

At my former job, the Chinese hires were generally humble and willing to learn. This was far different from the domestic hires; we often hired from US universities we deemed “elite” with very competitive graduate programs, where the students saw each other as “the competition” to be bested. The graduates from these universities were often know-it-alls who didn’t actually know much and were loathe to admit it. Worse, they brought the attitude that their coworkers were “the competition” to show up rather than fellow experts to collaborate with.

One Chinese coworker I knew who aced the Gaokao was also unusual in another way: as I have a history degree to go along with my scientific background, I couldn’t swoosh him with a historical reference, even fairly obscure historical references. That kind of well-roundedness in education is sadly lacking in our domestic graduates.

@Jan A:

I know a construction company in California. They have a policy – WE NEVER PAY OUR DEBTS.

They buy a piece of equipment, finance as much as humanly possible, then never make payments. The notices pile up. They ignore them. The phone calls go to voicemail.

Eventually, the lender sues on the note. The company stalls the process as much as possible, then offers $.40 on the dollar. Negotiations drag on for a time, eventually they settle at $.60-$.70 on the dollar, together with a settlement agreement and an NDA. $.60 int he hand is better than a dollar that you have to collect later.

The company stalls payment on that settlement note for as long as possible as well. They have the dough, just don’t want to pay. Meanwhile, they got a 30% discount on the equipment, an de facto interest-free loan, and they will sue on the drop of a hat if the lender reports their malfeasance. This helps them underbid the competition.

They’ve been at it for decades, the principals all free as birds and loving life in the Eptsein Class, private jets and all (that’s how I know them).

bruce wilder
re the difference between elites and ordinary people, i think it’s mostly down to the ‘automatisation’ of decisions.
the more money you have the more things are systematised, and the incentive of the system is to maximise. so decisions that screw others are made a kind of default, they’re not really decisions at all, they’re kind of automatic.
if that waitress hadn’t reimbursed you she would have broken no law, but she had a decision to make. there would be no decision in a big organisation.
even worse, to some extent these organisations have even automatised the process of breaking the law where they identify a lack of enforcement or an absence of punishment. so it’s a no-brainer. if this entails delivering maximum shareholder value, it’s kind of the job.

I’ve always thought that both good and evil are generally manifestations of self-interest, save good is “long term self-interest” and evil is “short term self-interest”. That’s why Western economies started to suck once as Stirling Newberry termed it, the “death bet” calculation became economically favored starting with Reagan/Thatcher.

If one has to live with the long-term consequences of one’s actions, then that generally drives one to better behaviors. No one starts smoking thinking of a dying cancer patient in a hospital bed, no one starts drinking heavily thinking of becoming an alcoholic, no one starts doing drugs thinking that they’ll be searching on the floor for the last pill that fell out of their hands. No, as the short-term consequences of all theses behaviors can be pleasant, they ignore the possible long-term consequences. This not only applies to self-harm, but to harm done to others: the reason why stockholders prefer CEOs who live far away from the companies they are supposed to manage is that when they downsize them, they don’t see the pain caused by their actions. Even thieves if they had to live with the consequences of their bad behaviors would face some deterrence.

That’s why stealing in primitive societies which lasted long enough to have been studied is practically unknown. For one thing, there are no ‘generic’ articles; everything is made specialized, and thus no anonymity. If I were to steal Ian’s shirt no one would believe me if I said “I found this somewhere”, but would say “What are you doing wearing Ian’s shirt?” But the other thing is that you have to live with the consequences of hurting someone else.

Would humans act better if we didn’t age and die? Would we behave better if we saw the long-term consequences of our actions? That’s a hard question to answer. Many years ago, I wrote a blog talking about aging and death and about speculation about beings that are natively immortal, unless killed by something: Tolkien’s elves and Anne Rice’s vampires. With elves, being immortal in a world where things you love die is a painful experience, and immortality makes you want to retreat to areas where things are everlasting (love’s “hardest lesson” being that everyone and everything you love one day will pass away).

With vampires, their minds are not flexible enough to deal with change, they eventually lose all the interests they once had to become fixated on blood, leading to a “tasteless” life (pardon the pun), and the world becomes increasingly strange to their minds locked in a specific age. LeStat at the end of Rice’s book is virtually a prisoner in his own home; he doesn’t go out because the 21st century world is too strange for his 18th century mind. Eventually, vampires tire of their existence and decide one day not to return to their caskets but await the sun that will destroy them. They commit suicide.

here is how Pierre Elliot Trudeau did it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau

“Trudeau was minister of justice and attorney general, during which time he liberalized divorce and abortion laws and decriminalized homosexuality.”

‘As prime minister, Trudeau pioneered official bilingualism and multiculturalism. During the Quebec sovereignty movement, he invoked the War Measures Act in response to the 1970 October Crisis and led the federalist campaign to victory in the 1980 Quebec sovereignty-association referendum.

In economic policy, he introduced the capital gains tax, expanded social programs, sharply increased deficit spending, and introduced the Anti-Inflation Act in response to the 1970s recession.

In a bid to move the Liberal Party towards economic nationalism, Trudeau established Petro-Canada and launched the National Energy Program, both of which generated significant controversy in oil-rich Western Canada and led to a rise in what was called “Western alienation”.

Trudeau’s government also converted Canada to the metric system, created Via Rail, and passed the Access to Information Act and the Canada Health Act. In foreign policy, Trudeau reduced alignment with the United States, maintained cordial relations with the Soviet Union, and developed strong ties with China and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which put him at odds with other Western capitalist states.

He also oversaw Canada’s entry into the G7 forum. In 1982, Trudeau patriated the Constitution of Canada and established the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with the Constitution Act, 1982, which achieved full Canadian sovereignty.”
—-
his son helped to tear down all of his work, and has no shame.

Carney might be for real, and understands what his part was in this, and things must change, we shall see.

sooner or later, the oligarch run empire will implode, you can see its coming by what is happening, even citizens of new york openly from both sides of the street, threw snowballs at cops forcing them off of the street.

that would not have happened a few months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKsD8VW0jO0

its only a matter of time before the oligarchs have under mined the empire till the point of no return, then mass chaos ensues, as the oligarchs then turn on each other also.

the nazi’s were always trying to bump each other off.

and someday the empire will run into a real leader who takes off the gloves.

Ian, i agree with you on what the chinese have done for their own, but by doing everything they can to hang onto that trade surplus, it might under mine them in the end.

Thanks, Ian, pretty much spot-on, as usual.

Responding by paragraph– 3rd paragraph, absolutely true. That is why those of us, myself included, gullible enough to vote for Obama in ’08 had buyers’ remorse immediately; an utter sociopath, who would do what he was told, for the (S)Elect, than lie about it with flowery verbiage: “Let’s look forward, not back.” Torture is okay, the real meaning, well when “we” do it. The ground was laid for Obama in the late 20th century by Newt Gingrich. He developed the idea that empathy was a very BAD thing, reasoning not incredibly clear, I guess it stifled sacred “competition” or the sacred Market too much. Also, he’d develop kooky pseudo-sociological theories to win over the greedy piggies who just wanted their slop. My favorite was a long-term divide and conquer theorem he created to normalize racism and roll back civil rights coverage for non-whites, minorities, I presume the gheys also. He called the Civil Rights Reforms “Social Engineering”, the bad kind (not like distributing income upward or the endless failed wars for profit), their was an implicit assumption that we should all hate and want to harm those “different” from us, starting with the weakest and most vulnerable, of course. Newt wouldn’t just blurt out racist shit like Diaper Donnie, “the Somalis all have IQs of 68, and they’re stealing from us”, but he would improve his product with professorial flourishes.

4th paragraph, of course, much smaller pie, and fewer at the top to feed off of it. So, just before reading this my browser “pocket” offered me a story about how lawyers in blue states are filing lawsuits on the federal-pushed new restrictions on vaccines. Who will Trumpism benefit, we all know– In more or less order of importance: Tech-Bros, Billionaires, Zionist ethnic cleansers, extremist right-wing groups (rhetorically at least; in France some “Kill all the Ayrabs” dude got beaten to death by a gang of the people he was targeting, the French ambassador was called on the US carpet ‘coz I guess the French State is supposed to protect “Matamoros” people?) Matamoros of course meaning Muslim-killing, one in Spain, one in Mexico. . . next, Crypto & BitCoin scammers his family is tight with, the Chemical companies, RFK Jr. bragged he was suing Monsanto for billions for production of Glyphosate to poison fields and spread Cancer with; MAHA were big supporters of this, but by saying it’s “needed” for “National Security” “protection” all those awards get cancelled, RFK Jr. immediately gets on board and spits in the face of his fanboys and girls. Trump bribed “the farmers” with supposed relief “from tariffs” of billions, after throwing away billions at Ayn-Rand Lunacy-ruled Argentina, which undermined those US farmers bigly . . . The Dimmies court a similar bunch, but are more focused in Big Finance, Private Equity, Chucky Shumer stuff, and on the margins they’ll pretend to like gays, lesbians, “the blacks” (who they claimed just looooved them some lifelong segregationist and scammer Joe Biden). Rinse and repeat.

5th Paragraph– Protect and promote your own people, their incomes, health, housing and security. This was of course done in US history by the New Deal, but that is anathema to both the Far Right and Center Right Parties, as is “the Left” generally ‘coz those stupid idiots want to “help people.” Can you imagine? The Elites can’t. In the book Shattered on Shrillery’s failed 2016 campaign, it became emblematic among her staff even before they lost that “We can’t have nice things.” Well, no irony here, this was their exact message to the Dimmie Voters, you’ll get more wars, more economic inequality and pollution and condescension, coming from a cackling Battle Axe with none of the smoothness of Barry Obama. Naturally Trump beat that poisoned chalice, it was a fait accompli.

6th– Let’s quote the philosopher Marcus Aurelius, “You know a thing by what it does”, Virtue produces one outcome, thieving and predation another. We know who is virtuous and who clearly is not. The one thing I’ll credit the R’s for is that DJT has torn off the fake hypocritical mask, they do not even pretend to a drop of human kindness to anyone not in their own Club. All others must be beaten or destroyed, Stephen Miller channels some 1930s thuggish characters incredibly well. Blood and Iron! Blood and Soil!! Obviously the Chinese are (for now at least) morally superior to late stage USA.

#s 8 and 9– US leadership has long been openly corrupt, it ramped up radically with Bush Jr. and the cancer just metastizes from there. Yes, the profiteering off “defense” (sic) is obscene and actually makes the US weaker in the long run. But short-term profit is all that matters to these people of course.

As to your final 2 paragraphs, yes, the Mongols were pretty “evil” to the people they conquered, at least initially, but then largely withdrew, made them pay a tithe and let them run their own societies mostly as they had, based on local conditions. None of the US “You must enact Neoliberal Austerity Economics,I ” impose our religion or mores (“We’re saving the women in Afghanistan by bombing their families, we’re kind, ain’t we?”)

I appreciate Bruce W’s 2 posts and that at least at a granular, individual level, the kindness of people hasn’t been beaten out of everyone, at least in the service and other sectors. I have seen exceptions to this in my own travels, but relatively few. As organized religion has declined, however, I think that is a sensible evolution of society, and if people can’t be good to others based on beliefs about Sky-Gods and fears of an eternity of torture after death don’t work . . . Well if people are immoral enough to be scumbags whenever they can without religion, the same people would’ve been so even with the veneer of religion. I guess there might be a few stupid people who imagine the Eye in the Sky is watching them every moment, and can be forced into timorous good behavior by that. But that’s no podium to put morality on whatsoever.

Ventzu is 100% right on India, it is a pity. The worst country in the world by far for treatment of women, regular pogroms against Muslims and other religious minorities, rapes normalized when people are forced into arranged marriages. Modi is and always has been utter scum, they will remain “a backwater” until caste-based racism and other Bronze Age Beliefs are effaced. (Not that there aren’t a lot of beautiful ideas in the Vedas and elsewhere, but such content tends not to age well over millenia.)

Oh, before leaving, Due Dissidence did a segment today based on someone who is actually doing Good– Zohran Mamdami, only sworn in during January. His popularity has gone up to 86% approval (literally about twice Trump’s) after he just got the City bailed out within less than 24 hours from a massive snowstorm dropping 14 inches. People are paid well to shovel snow, it’s “Socialist” the haters scream. They did a long list of things he’s done right (or people allied with him, activists, have accomplished now that he is in power), plus a couple of bad moves he’s made, he is a politician after all. I took some notes, here’s what’s been accomplished in just less than 2 months:

The Good: 1. The Israeli/IDF Drone manufacturer Easy Aerial was evicted from the Brooklyn Navy Yard by a grassroots opposition group who pointed out their role in genocide. Mamdami had at best an indirect role in this, appointed new people to the BNY Board who responded to public pressure. 2. NYC dropped the bullshit IHRA definition of Anti-Semitism that even the man who wrote it doesn’t support. Being Anti-Zionist no longer means mandatory “anti-Semitism” charges, police attacks, doxxing and threats, etc. I imagine that uber-Zionist Police Chief now has her hands tied in terms of sending in violent cops to randomly attack students protesting peacefully. 3. This one has a bit of compromise in it, he endorsed the empty vessel Gov. Kathy Hochul, and in return he won Universal Pre-K and Kindergarten funding from the State. A bit of a deal with the devil, but still, children and families will benefit. 4. He IS forming a New Rent Board for a Moratorium on boosts by landlords, this was always possible, even the incompetent idiot Bill DeBlasio did this, briefly, before the Real Estate Industry bought him off and started jacking up rents again.

The Bad– 1. When the big snowstorm hit, there were some immediate deaths at a homeless camp, likely from freezing temperatures and lack of indoor housing, though the Statists and Cops claimed it was “overdose deaths” (did the Little Match Girl in Dickens overdose trying to stay warm with matches?), so he sent in the Goons/Cops to roust everyone and make them freeze harder. He’s allegedly/maybe gonna walk this back and look for temporary indoor housing? 2. He made deeply ignorant comments lying that Cuba and Venezuela “steal elections” and have no credibility, sinking to the level of an AOC. He’s a skeezy politician, guess he can’t identify with Latinos much. He sounds like one commenter here who seems to believe all us Spics are dirty, ignorant and fuck our mothers. Actually somebody covered recently that in South Korea, they have started calling black and Latino tourists “monkeys” and attacking them as subhuman. I imagine this is not widespread, but it’s interesting. Due Dissidence did a story recently, Russ of the podcast has been traveling across Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, en route to China, and covered the growing anti-Semitism the Zionist state creates worldwide. In that part of the world, somebody heard 2 Israeli tourists speaking Hebrew, they were immediately attacked and beaten very nearly to death. He joked that the Zionists “are the worst thing for the Jews since (the movie) It’s A Wonderful Life.”

So back, briefly, to Mamdami– There’s one commenter here who is not really socialist at all (& has been very clear about that) whose done repeated purity screeds on how Zohran will 100% sell out. Now that could still be correct, but his initial few months don’t support that. Wouldn’t he rather stay employed and popular? Doesn’t he do well for himself by doing good? (As the New Deal did.) Some people are natural defeatists, they’re like the crab in the pot that’s heating up, just want to keep the other crabs in to die with them, Misery loves Company. The DD guys called out a certain sector of the (psuedo)Left for doing this, it’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. We should go there when the evidence supports it, not go there when it doesn’t, so my only point here is Mamdami is (according to public sentiment after less than 60 days in office) seemingly off to a good start. If he betrays us, call it out, but wait for the actual evidence.

And yet Stalin won. As Alan Clark (who was Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary and consequently NO friend of the Soviet Union) compared it to France, which folded under considerably less pressure in 1940: the French decided that the pleasures of wine, adultery and civilized conversation were worth not fighting for. (Clark also was quite familiar with such as these and was inordinately proud of his knowledge of French.)

Hell, the only thing that spared the british was the english channel.

Anyway, if pirates are too small scale, look at the Mongol Empire, at the Ghaznavids, the Mexica, the Timurids, to name a few.

‘Lifting 800 million people out of poverty in 30 years is worth a flapper.’

People weren’t ‘lifted out of poverty’ Ian. They were forced from largely self-sustaining farming activities into wage labor factory and service jobs.

I am not saying that there weren’t some who wanted to ‘urbanize’ but it was largely forced on them by others in the interest of building and hardeining the Chinese State apparatus which itself is simply another profit-making center.

I mean, you’re not seriously going to argue that the Chinese establishment ‘lifted people out of pverty’ in 3 decades due to a grassroots movement of Chinese farmers who said they wanted to become factory worker wage slaves if oinly a powerful political establishment could force them to do so!

An utter hatred of everything US and ‘western’ – the ‘other’ within all of us – this tendency destroys clear analysis.

Fyi, I didn’t say China was responsible for America not having a law that prohibits foreign ownership of real estate but nonetheless, China is playing its part. Where is the morality in that? The virtue? All I see is greed all around. It’s greed that has prevented any laws prohibiting foreign ownership of real estate in America and it’s greed that motivates the Chinese investors to realize even greater returns on their invested wealth.

Mark Level:

Mamdami is also proposing to cut the budget of the red coats(cops), and do a hiring freeze instead of adding 5000 more red coats to terrorize new yorkers.

Like & Subscribe:

free trade is one of the largest drivers of bubbles and inflation in this country.

we make nothing anyone wants, even military equipment is not wanted. to get someone to buy it, requires threats and corruption.

so what to do with the trillions you get from that idiotic corrupt system of free trade? why you recycle it back to the dim witted country that free trades. into their real estate market, stock market, bonds etc..

helping to blow up huge financial bubbles, that threaten the financial health of the dim witted country corrupt and stupid enough to free trade.

at least china is not stupid enough to free trade. but its a high wire act, because their economy is so strong from the trade surplus, everyone wants onto the gravy train now, that eventually they will do stupid things to hang onto it. we are starting to see that now.

that’s why the yuan is not a reserve currency, and they are doing everything so far to keep that from happening.

but you can’t have both. you would think by now they could have figured it out.

More to Spud– Great take on Marshall Zukhov. We have one Russophobe Commenter here who repeatedly claimed to me that Hitler way outsmarted Stalin and the Russians were losers. Despite the fact that Hitler and his skeezy Mistress had their brains blown out, with their lovely dog “Blondie”, and the body burnt so Stalin couldn’t get a souvenir. (Which he did end up getting.) You call out that person on his bad economics in the post following.

He loves to take shots at the miserable furriners, “not like us.” He feigns disgust for the US ruling class selectively, but it reeks of insincerity. He is sure that Russia will topple at any moment, that their shovels and washing machine chips are running out, the Mighty Banderist forces will drive the Red Filth out any day, take back not just the 20% of land taken in the Russian-speaking areas but drive on into Moscow and hang the “dictator” Putin from a meat hook, like happened to Mussolini (not exactly a winner either.) What delusional fantasies.

Mark Level:

yep that retreat was ordered for a reason. most people think it was because of incompetence, when actually it was to set up the biggest slaughter in modern history of a invading army.

however today, Putin is on borrowed time now. he no longer has the luxury of waiting like Zukhov had. i understand 2022-2024, he needed time to rearm. 2024 should have been hammer time. because the oligarchs are coming now full steam ahead.

its taken 500 plus years now to get this far, and nothing is going to stop them but a solid brick wall, that’s pops up out of no where, as they smash into it head on, in a spectacular fashion. like operation bagration.

the long retreat was a setup for stalingrad, kursk was a trap for the germans, still to stupid to understand what they faced. and operation bagration. pretty much finished them off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

Spud

its little known that Stalin caught some of his senior generals playing footsie with the west when he allowed the germans to use russian soil to train the german military to avoid the WWI agreements.

those generals were plotting the return of the capitalists. they had to be purge

This is almost certainly not true. Stalin fed this information to the Nazis in order to have it leaked to use it against his own military chiefs.

The same people who argue your point also say that Trotsky, Kamanev, Zinoviev, Tomsky, Buhkarin, Radek, and everyone else who had been close to Lenin and had never agreed with each other while occupying positions of power were also in one grand conspiracy with the fascists to overthrow Stalin and make the Soviet Union a fascist state. The evidence for this is almost non-existent.

A feature of Stalin’s government was that one could almost say it was more dangerous to be a dedicated communist than an outright opponent. Solzhenitsyn actually WAS an opponent caught discussing the overthrow of the Soviet regimen with a friend via letters for two years, and was merely jailed. He joined a hunger strike with Ukrainian followers of Stephen Bendera in camp and was not punished for it, and when he developed cancer he was successfully treated for it by the state. He was released from the Gulag by Khrushchev where he resumed writings critical of Stalinism (and by inference, the USSR possibly) and when he finally crossed the line with the Gulag Archipelago (which is not history,, but a collection of anecdotes) he was again just exiled for it. Not tortured or shot.

Meanwhile, Trostsky got an axe in the head, Tukhachevsky was beaten so badly his confession had his blood drops all over it, Pyatakov was brought before the Politburo staggering and being unable to speak properly as his teeth had been knocked out, and Kamanev, Radek, Buhkarin, Zinoviev and others got bullets in the head mostly in the middle of the night. Ian has said, probably correctly, that one of the reasons that Soviet communism failed was that its leaders stopped believing in it. If so, torturing and shooting those who believed in it most fervently probably didn’t help things along.

Spud

I’ve read those documents, and more (and listen to Youtubers suchs The Finnish Bolshevik and Hakim) who try to justify Stalin’s purges, and no, there was no significant ‘fifth column’ in the USSR. The “evidence” that these present is fragmentary and unconvincing. And as we tried to tell President Cheney in the early 2000s, confessions extracted by torture should NOT be taken as evidence. A “confession” that has the confessor’s bloodstains all over it is not evidence. Moreover, during the show trials there were accused who retracted their confessions during the trial, only to be sent back for more torture until they re-confessed.

Supposedly Marshal Rokossovsky was a member of the “Fifth Column” but he was pulled out of NKVD prison to be put in charge of armies. So…was Rokossovsky a member of the Fifth Column or not? And if he was innocent, what does that say about the other “guilty”?

‘Is Canada really breaking away from the US?

I mean, is Carney trustworthy?’

Carney just confirmed that he supports the Israel-US-NATO naked aggression against Iran.

Canada hasn’t relinquished its membership in the NATO club.

Canada is part of the Israel-US-West ‘five eyest’ military-intel alliance.

Canada currently does about half a trillion dollars worth of business with the US while its business with China is minicsule in comparison.

I don’t think China-Canada business or political relations will improve much unless Canada agrees to at minimum leave the five eyes alliance which is directly in conflict with China.

Canada remains a vassal of the US even as the US continues its decline.