Today is the day! But some food for thought in regards to the American election [Video]

My friend and colleague John Varoli has a great and thought-provoking piece that he published in his Substack account on 4 November. I find it compelling, and I am not sure I agree with every point, but he makes a very good argument, and I have to admit that the possibility of his being correct is very high indeed.

Before we get into the piece, I just want to welcome everyone to the ultimate day of the US’ Silly Season, a.k.a. the United States of America Presidential election (and for many others too), and what do we have? A lot of chaos, misinformation and propaganda. Nasty stuff, too; difficult to sort out. For myself, I have somehow, perhaps by God’s unique grace, arrived at a sort of calm point – I am a Trump guy, and I am swept up in the whole mess as much as anyone, and far more than I ought to be, to be honest. But, there it is. So, for that reason, my emotions may interfere with my logic in my response, but let’s get to the good man and his words. I think many readers will absolutely resonate with this work.

When an Immoral Nation Votes, Don’t Expect Change

Across the globe, the U.S. Govt proves itself the main source of strife, war, repression and genocide. No election can change this. The system is predatory; citizens indifferent and immoral.

By John Varoli, Nov 4, 2024

Recently, Donald Trump said he’ll issue an ultimatum to Moscow to remove its troops from ethnic Russian regions that were arbitrarily given to the Ukraine Soviet Republic by the Bolsheviks over a century ago. How ironic that Donald Trump, in effect, sanctions the actions of communist revolutionaries.

A person’s attitude towards Russia and Zelensky’s brutal regime are a litmus test — Do you stand for human rights, justice and civilization; or do you stand for ethnic cleansing, totalitarian rule, and the suppression of basic human rights?

I was hoping to see leadership and backbone from Trump on this matter. But he has shown none. He has caved to the ‘Deep State’ that he claims to fight against. The usually outspoken Trump suddenly goes timid on the topic of Russia, afraid to say anything to upset the status quo promoted by the U.S. foreign policy elite.

A man who is fighting the ‘Deep State’ does not shake hands with one of its protégés, the brutal butcher and dictator Vladimir Zelensky. A genuine leader speaks the truth, even when it’s not easy and potentially costly. Russia is not our enemy. Period. Russia is the enemy of globalist oligarchs who Trump claims to be fighting against. So why is it so difficult for him to call for peace with Russia?

Do you recall that nauseous feeling whenever you hear about a school shooting in America? Small and teenage children picked off and murdered in cold blood by a crazed shooter — nothing could be more sickening. Right?

That moral anguish, however, disappears when it comes to bombing and massacring children in the Middle East and Russia; when young men are hunted down and shot by Zelensky’s regime; when Orthodox Christian churches are closed, burned and bombed, and the priests beaten and jailed, also in Ukraine. All these crimes committed in the past year, paid for by American taxpayers, yet few among us care.

Wherever there is war, mass slaughter and repression, you’ll often find the U.S. government fueling the fires. Meanwhile, our corporate media justify the bloodshed as a necessary price to “defend democracy.” Sadly, none of this is new; it’s consistently been the case for 125 years, ever since we conquered the Philippines, massacring about 400,000 civilians who resisted our invasion.

I just returned from three weeks in Japan, and visited the Tokyo Raid Memorial, which commemorates the day in March 1945 when in the course of an hour the U.S. incinerated over 100,000 civilians as part of a deliberate terror bombing campaign. That raid is history’s single worst case of mass murder in a single day.

I also visited Hiroshima. One can’t fully understand the horror of the nuclear bomb until you visit. No amount of reading or viewing of video/photos can fully convey the evil of dropping the nuclear bomb on innocent civilians. Remember, Japan never attacked the U.S.; it attacked a naval base that was on territory (Hawaii) illegally occupied by the U.S. since 1898. So what right did the U.S. have to justify massacring millions of Japanese in revenge?

Nothing is more “American” than bombings and mass murder. Don’t deny it. It’s in our DNA. “Wipe Iran off the face of the earth”. “Nuke ‘em”. “Bomb them back to the Stone Age”. No other nation speaks like that in regard to others; but these phrases are common American parlance when discussing foreign affairs, revealing what an immoral nation we are: One Nation Certainly Not Under God.

How can any sane and moral person utter such militaristic phrases unaware of the amount of suffering and misery to which others are condemned for the ‘crime’ of not submitting to the U.S. imperial steamroller. We seem to have no moral qualms when our government commits mass murder abroad, as long as it’s in the name of promoting ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

Conclusion — dress up war and mass murder in beautiful words and noble intentions, and Americans will find it acceptable.

As the world’s leading global power, foreign policy should be the issue that determines presidential elections. But it is not. Most Americans are more worried about the price of gasoline, which for the past two months has suspiciously hovered at record lows in order to boost the fortunes of the incumbent Democrats.

Understanding U.S. foreign policy is very simple. We only need to ask the question: Is the U.S. fostering peace and order, or is it destabilizing the globe? Events of the past 35 years are very clear — the U.S. government, and the oligarchs who control it, have repeatedly proven themselves to be the greatest threat to the global order.

I’ll never forget that day in summer 1990 when the U.S. began beating the drums of war against Iraq. It was the end of an era. From 1975 to 1990, the post-Vietnam era, the U.S. was a relatively peaceful nation that avoided major conflicts, even negotiating an end to the nuclear arms race with the USSR. It was a time when one was proud to be an American.

Evil never sleeps, however. Having lost the USSR as the bugbear to justify their war-mongering, U.S. militarists set their sights on the Middle East. And so began 35 years of war that has led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more left homeless.

The predator class that controls the U.S. can’t be restrained. No legislation nor institution exists that can bring them to justice for their many crimes. Has a single state official or oligarch ever been prosecuted for the brutal, illegal wars and genocides of the past 35 years? Not one.

Fast forward to today — another grueling presidential election campaign is set to conclude, and the American people must choose between two candidates that justify empire and all its heinous consequences — brutal proxy wars, genocide of unruly populations, and even nuclear war.

Kamala Harris openly promises more war against Russia and mass murder in the Middle East. As I said above, Trump will also pursue a similiar foreign policy. In effect, there’s little difference between the two candidates. Trump even admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he is “crazy” and this is apparently good because it means that other nations fear him.

Trump won’t scale back the empire. He is obsessed with American “greatness”, which means that the U.S. will continue to destabilize the international order, enhancing our status as a pariah nation. (Yes, most of the world hates us).

Whoever wins the presidential race, the loser will be the human race. Neither candidate stands for a moral U.S. foreign policy based on mutual respect of national interests and human rights. Both candidates want a world where the U.S. is the apex predator, taking what it wants, when it wants and brutally punishing those who resist.

Is this really the country we want to live in? Is this a country to be proud of? Certainly no moral, sane and decent person would ever answer “Yes”.

In 1821, veteran diplomat and future U.S. president John Quincy Adams warned not to get involved in foreign conflicts “in search of monsters to destroy”, by which he meant to avoid getting involved in wars abroad where we imagine ourselves to be the “good guys” on a noble crusade to save the world.

In searching for monsters to destroy, the U.S. has itself become the monster and greatest threat to the global order. Unless the U.S. returns to the original principles of its Founding Fathers, then this nation is doomed to face the wrath of God for its wickedness. Just don’t be surprised if and when that day comes.

My comments will be brief and incomplete, by design, just touching on points I think should also be considered:

I am certainly a big Trump guy, so my perspective may be distorted. Here goes:

John is 1000 percent right about morality, perhaps far more correct than one might expect. First of all, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo of the OCA, a rather controversial and curmudgeonly fellow that used to scandalize all the Seraphim Rose fans at Seminary, wrote on our blackboard a truly remarkable piece of wisdom I have never forgotten:

MORALITY IS A HERESY.

To a “by the books” American Orthodox Christian, this seems like a scandalous thing for a bishop to say, but it really isn’t. Think about how the Left talks about “morality” – it is – at least to my perception, MOSTLY the Left that speaks of morality, but they do not mean “Christian” morality, they mean something else. I think it would be careless to generalize that morality as being activist, leftist, socialist, communist, etc. because I don’t think it is.

I do think their sense of morality reflects the way they already feel and think about things, and, while their thinking may be in line with the above named ideologies, the main feature is that it is based on how that person FEELS about the rightness or wrongness of topic X.

For example, John notes that Americans are more concerned about gas prices than about foreign policy – the vast majority of Americans have never left their homeland. Foreign policy is some pie-in-the-sky idea like a movie, not dealing with a war on our shores – it might as well be a video game for some people. I think this drives the myopia American people often exhibit.

In general, Morality is heretical because it is not Christian, neither is it secular, nor Marxist… it is sort of a declaration of the rightness or wrongness of something based on HOW I FEEL about it, rather than on some objective higher standard. That is strike one.

Strike two is that Morality is a ‘cheat code’ that in earlier times determined “proper behavior”, and for Americans and British people this has a particularly nasty aspect. It leads us to be polite instead of honest, snide instead of direct, and arrogant as hell instead of humble. We are placed in the position of the Pharisee who “prayed thus with himself, ‘Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men…” where the chief element is pride of self for BEHAVING according to some moral code, and not actually being a servant of God.

I imagine all cultures have moral codes, but these are only supposed to offer the forms – they are NOT all there is; usually our kids are taught HOW to behave, later they learn WHY – hopefully. If they don’t, that is when morality becomes increasingly arbitrary, based on the whims and emotions of the moralizer.

To the idea that Trump plans to make Russia give up territory, I have to admit that my opinion of this is based on the fact that I simply have not seen or heard anything specific about his plan for ending the war that I can quantify or declare that “he is going to do precisely XY and Z” – and I would further offer that (1) if he did say what he was going to do it would instantly prevent him from succeeding at it because both sides would know, and also the Deep State Media pundits would use it against him incessantly (Putin stooge, etc.). So, I don’t think he has said a definite course of action. No one in Russia is reacting to any definite course of action that Mr. Trump has stated as THE plan.

I think President Trump himself may not actually know what the best course is, because today is Nov 5th, and what is needed today may not be what is needed if and when he becomes President-elect. The situation is fluid, and ever changing, so I think he will simply catch up on any and all intel if he is elected and then proceed from there.

That being said, I can NOT say that he wouldn’t go the path John wrote, simply because he is in the American bubble, or if you like, the “Overton Window” of “acceptable ideas”, which is limited in such a way that there will be a great temptation to NOT think in a real empirical and truthful fashion.

However, if there is anyone who is capable of thinking and acting in a reality-based fashion, it is Mr. Trump, and if there is anyone NOT capable of doing that, it is Mrs. Harris. Harris demonstrates great cleverness in maintaining her position in life – prosecutor, senator, VP… but this is like someone who is sly at maintaining their title while being completely inept.

My final comment is this: Don’t let cynical secularists get you down. There are a lot of Americans who are geopolitically savvy – at least somewhat – not one of them wants war with Russia, a whole lot of them are calling BS on Zelensky, et al, and Israel and so on.

Where people like us fail is that we don’t take personal responsibility to truly vet candidates OR to hold them to account when they don’t represent our wishes as citizens. The Framers of the US Constituation said that if we do not take responsibility for our Republic we will surely lose it – we will in effect, throw it away.

The present-day notion is “elect person X and HE WILL TAKE CARE OF ME” and this idea certainly applies to Trump supporters as it does to Kamala supporters – but I suspect that what Trump would ideally try to do is to put us in charge of taking care of ourselves with him helping how he can, where Harris people are content with Big Nanny State.

This may not be much of a difference, but I think it is there.