Treason has many faces: Trump loves Putin, Boogaloo loves BLM

We need to touch on a number of points fairly quickly. First: A dubious Nikita Khuschev quote has been making the rounds on the anti-Trump side of the internet.

It reminds me of a statement by Nikita Khruschev in 1958: "We can take over America without firing a single shot. All we have to do is put someone in a position of power in their country." Sounds like it has happened does it not?!

Sounds like bullshit.  If Khruschev had actually said those words, the quote would have been one of the great inevitabilities of American discourse. You would have encountered it a zillion times by now -- in textbooks, newscasts, editorials, histories, biographies, documentaries, "good" websites, political speeches, novels, James Bond movies, the works.

This particular fabrication was probably created by the John Birchers, who believed that Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers were agents of the Soviet Union. Morris Kominsky's The Hoaxers documents many similar examples of "false quotation syndrome."

And now for something a little more current...

Bountygate: The go-between is named. After flirting with several responses to Bountygate, Trump has decided to go with a classic: Denial. It's all a hoax, says he.

If that were true, the administration would have said so from Day One.

Moreover, John Bolton would have said so. Instead, Bolton has admitted (more or less) that White House censors kept this particular bit of information out of his book. I could list another half-dozen reasons to deny Trump's denial, but the Bolton thing should suffice for now.

The NYT has taken this story into remarkable new terrain. The Russia/Taliban middleman, we are told, was (is?) a low-level Afghan drug dealer named Rahmatullah Azizi, who has been doling out the blood money and is now living the high life in Russia. The Times claims to have contacted people who have known Azizi for years. They report that he suddenly became very wealthy after joining forces with Unit 29155, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) unit that has been credited with much recent mischief.

Unit 29155 first came to American attention when it was credited with the 2018 attempted assassination of GRU defector Sergei Skripal. Various voices on Twitter, Reddit and similar places have claimed that 29155 was a hoax fabricated by enemies of Putin or Trump. If so, the hoaxers include the French and Spanish governments, as well as our own intelligence community.

I have tried to do some further research into Azizi, but it's not easy. Several men by that name have Facebook pages, but there's no way to be sure which Azizi is the Azizi. It's possible that the name is a pseudonym.

To me, the most important point here is the drug connection. A couple of posts down, I opined that Vladimir Putin may intend to commandeer the Afghan heroin trade. What a naive sap I was! Looks like he accomplished that task years ago.

Anyone over the age of fifty should be stunned by Russia's partnership with the jihadis, because memories of the USSR's great misadventure are so vivid. But that was then, this is now, and drug money is drug money.

Here's a fascinating report on how the Taliban funds itself. It takes a lot of dough to keep fighting the American military, and you will be infuriated to learn that much of the cash came from your tax dollars.

The United States has spent more on Afghan infrastructure than it spent to rebuild Europe after WWII (measured in constant dollars). The Taliban always manages to scoop up a good portion of these dollars. The afore-linked article speaks of a large bridge that the Taliban blew up up six times -- and with every rebuild, the Taliban skimmed off a massive amount of the construction funds.

They also profit from legitimate concerns, such as the trade in emeralds and lapis. (My fellow painters, forego your dream of using genuine Ultramarine. It's over-rated.) Basically, the Taliban is the Afghan mafia: Nobody does anything unless Da Mob gets their cut.

But the biggest source of cash is, of course, the drug trade.

Although the Taliban has diversified its funding, the main source of revenue remains their involvement in Afghanistan’s drug trade. Primarily, this concerns the trade in opiates, such as opium or heroin. Some estimates have placed its share of Taliban income at 95%.

Now go here:

The Russian state is highly criminalised, and the interpenetration of the criminal ‘underworld’ and the political ‘upperworld’ has led the regime to use criminals from time to time as instruments of its rule.
Russian-based organised crime groups in Europe have been used for a variety of purposes, including as sources of ‘black cash’, to launch cyber attacks, to wield political influence, to traffic people and goods, and even to carry out targeted assassinations on behalf of the Kremlin.

Today, Russian-based organised crime (RBOC) is responsible for around one-third of the heroin on Europe’s streets, a significant amount of non-European people trafficking, as well as most illegal weapons imports.

These groups offer everything from Afghan heroin and Russian methamphetamines, to cybercriminal expertise, and investment of dirty money.

The real questions: How long ago did the Taliban and the Russians join forces? When did the Afghan war become a proxy war between Russia and the United States? Would the war have lasted so long without Russian help? Since most of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan, how much of the drug trade is now controlled by Russians?

Step back and ponder this majestic tableau: The opiate addicts of West Virginia steadfastly support Trump, partner to Putin, who prospers from the poppy. Neat, huh? We are all one in the great circle of dope.

Speaking of treason: Boogaloo. Here is the most interesting article on the Boogaloo movement I've yet seen. The most fascinating -- and counter-intuitive -- aspect of this story concerns the not-so-covert feelers that the Boogalooers have sent out to representatives of Black Lives Matter.

“The reason you see these guys showing up at George Floyd protests is because they see a common cause with the [Black Lives Matter] movement,” Friedfeld said, referencing the handful of Hawaiian-shirted Boogaloo boys observed at recent rallies.

“There’s even been an effort within the Boogaloo movement to signal that they align with BLM, he added. “They’ve been going to lengths to say that they aren’t white supremacists and that there’s no room for them, but you see people flow between the two.”

Back in the '60s, Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell formed links with the Nation of Islam. I've been told that this unholy union -- not Elijah Muhammed's irregular love life -- was the real reason Malcolm X broke with NOI. (Spike Lee's movie has many virtues, but it leaves a lot out.) Decades previous, the KKK formed an alliance with Marcus Garvey; today, Richard Spencer seems to have a bit of a crush on Louis Farrakhan.

Although the BLM movement has my sympathies, I also have my worries. Some BLM-friendly writers have hinted at attitudes that can fairly be described as very NOI. I can support a movement for equality, but I can't support a movement which argues that white people are inherently evil.

Some have begun to flirt with separatism and insurrection. You may recall that Professor Lisa Durden was fired when she expressed unabashed anti-white racism on national TV: "All I care about is the way you look, something that you can’t control, and on that basis alone I’m judging you and I’m hostile to you." Back in the 1960s, that kind of talk from black people was music to George Lincoln Rockwell's ear. In the near future, the same music could be the overture to a Boogaloo.

And that's a terrifying prospect.