"Neo-liberalism" is the new fascism

I wrote a couple of weeks ago here about the link between the UK government's economic policy, and the economic policy of fascism. More broadly, I have also talked about the link between capitalism and psychopathy. There is a link that threads together each of these ideas - neo-liberalism/ capitalism, fascism and psychopathy - that I think needs more intellectual clarification.

To reiterate what I've said previously, when I talk about "fascism", I'm not talking about the commonly-accepted, narrow and misleading, concept of "fascism": racist, prejudiced and authoritarian. Although these are parts of fascism, the more important part is the economic model of fascism, as this is what actually keeps the system running.
I said in my previous article about "economic fascism" (that type which seems to operate, for example, in the UK) you have a system where the government supports the interests of "big business" at the expense of everyone else, especially the "left wing" interests, such as the unions and employee rights in general. Given this lifeboat by the government, this system encourages inefficiency, irresponsibility and corruption in those corporations themselves, which are necessarily economically supported by the government when the need arises. In other words, you have a system where profit is private, and debt is public - the corporations take the profits, and the government (the taxpayer) absorbs corporate losses.
This system reinforces a corporate oligarchy that is economically supported by the government; the taxpayers/electorate can do little about this if the major parties in the country all support this system. Corporate sponsorship of those parties also encourages political patronage, as do the necessary "connections" (another form of corruption) that political parties need from corporations in order to gain financial support.

This is the essence of the "Anglo-Saxon model" that has existed on both sides of the Atlantic since the early '80s, and has spread to the rest of the Western World on the whole. This is the system that is also at work, with some modifications, in the Eurozone, effectively a German economic protectorate. This system is also at work in a more extreme form in Russia (which is ran as a form of modern feudal state); China, being effectively a capitalist one-party state, has its own version of this system. But the basic point is that the majority of the major economies in the world are now ran according to some version of the "neo-liberal" model.
And the "neo-liberal model" is designed to benefit the corporations most of all. I wrote previously about the links between capitalism and psychopathy: another trait that we see in psychopathy is "parasitic lifestyle" - callously living off the charity of others, and milking it for all you can. As we see from "economic fascism", corporations (and banks) do the exact same thing with governments - telling governments to do what they can to maximise corporations' profits, not interfering when they're making a profit, but getting governments to take the fall when corporations make a loss. This is the definition of parasitic behaviour. And this type of corporate parasitic behaviour - economic vampirism - could only flourish under economic fascism, known these days as "neo-liberalism".

So we see that the psychology of neo-liberalism and economic fascism are equivalent to that of psychopathy on an international scale. Another characteristic of psychopathy that I mentioned is that when psychopaths attain power, the result is chaos. This is also true of corporations in general, and through their preferred ideology of "neo-liberalism". Because corporations know nothing of morality (seen as a negative in business), or loyalty and "patriotism", globalisation has resulted in corporations becoming more powerful than countries, and toying with some countries as predators toy with their prey.

"Globalisation" is seen as a great positive for the world as a whole. And yet, while it is true that there are benefits, the biggest winners of all are the corporations that had been lobbying "neo-liberalism". Because globalisation is a result of the successful campaign began by the corporations' neo-liberal project thirty years ago, inspired by the ideology of Ayn Rand and the Objectivists. Monetarism then became the new pet phrase used by Anglophone countries to explain how Objectivism and "neo-liberalism" could be implemented in the real world economy.
Ayn Rand herself was an economic and philosophical theorist who, in essence, devised the basis for the system that exists today. I also wrote an article reviewing the similarities between the philosophy that Rand created (Objectivism) and the characteristics of psychopathy here: the similarities were so unnerving as to suggest that Rand herself may well have been a psychopath, at least at an intellectual level. Her "psychopathic ideology" was then used as the basis for the "Anglo-Saxon model" (also called neo-liberalism) that we know today.
Which brings me full circle back to globalisation. Neo-liberalism was the impetus for globalisation, where corporations and banks saw the world as without borders, unchecked by national frontiers or morality. They saw the world as their stage, and governments as their pawns.
Their "big con" worked in several ways. Corporations and banks used neo-liberalism as a way to urge national governments to implement financial and employment "reforms" that benefited corporate interests to maximise profits, while also getting governments to sell-off national industries as private monopolies that would be economically insured by the government. At the same time, corporate interests encouraged governments to break down barriers between each other to allow corporations to more easily out-source and relocate their operations, thus maximising their profits even further. At the same time, corporations would always use the threat that any other alternative to what the corporations/ banks wanted would result in national economic collapse: in other words, a glorified protection racket. This was showing that corporate interests were not only two-faced and bereft of loyalty or morality, but also supreme conmen and racketeers.

Globalisation was therefore the superseding of national governments by trans-national corporations and banks, for the purpose of profit. This was economic fascism, but on a global scale not seen before, controlled by the corporate elite.
I touched earlier on the point that when psychopaths attain power, the result is chaos. So when the world is ran by a corporate oligarchy that follows a psychopathic economic ideology, the result is chaos on a economically-global scale.

You might think that chaos is the last thing that corporations and banks would want, but if you look historically at the world economy over the past hundred years, you see that "chaos" is built in to part of the economic cycle that these corporate interests have developed, refined even more in the last thirty years since they have advanced their neo-liberal model across the developed world.
The economic model that corporations have promoted in the past thirty years resulted in the Financial Crisis of 2008. But what we saw was that it was governments who went into debt because of the crisis, not corporations: because the banks and corporate interests forced them to absorb the private debts - while at the same time the financial sector insisted that the governments were the one who had to pay off the debts quickly, rather than the private sector.
It was the Financial Crisis of 2008, thirty years in the making, that had given the banks and corporations the opportunity to close the deal with the national governments around the world: the deal that closed the collar around the "slave" neck of government, solidifying the economic redundancy and moral bankruptcy of national government as a meaningful institution, and guaranteed in cast iron terms the untouchable nature of corporate interests in a globalised world.
The chaos of the financial crisis has barely affected corporate interests and the financial sector in real terms; only caused superficial scratches which they can shrug off, for their position is immeasurably stronger now than five years ago. It is the institution of government that has been decisively dragged to its knees; with national governments accepting debts and years of "austerity" for the honour of continued lip service to the amoral corporations. So "chaos" is a relative term.

It is "chaos" for those subservient to the psychopathic interests in control (the corporate oligarchy following their "neo-liberal" ideology): for national governments are the manipulated willing servants to this psychopathic ideology, while they then serve their masters' amoral bidding on to the government's wider population. As Stalin ruled the USSR through years of terror for the sake of his psychopathic "ideology", so the new fascism of "neo-liberalism" perfects the art of terror on a world scale in its most subtle guise - terror masquerading as freedom. While this "neo-liberal" model is entrenched around the world's developed countries, they are told that this is the ideology of true freedom: the freedom to choose your pleasure, to consume as you please. But this "freedom" is a simple smokescreen, for the choices the population make are all owned by the corporate oligarchy.

The real "terror" and "chaos" comes from the lack of real "rights" - you have the right to consume, but only if you have money, and how much money you receive is decided by the corporate oligarchy. For in a true "neo-liberal" society, things like employment rights, welfare rights and social rights are inconveniences to the pursuit of profit ; in a "neo-liberal" society, there are no innate "human rights", except for those that are convenient to the private sector's pursuit of profit. Everyone's life becomes a commodity. No-one has any rights - only the right to die. This is the fascist economic utopia: where government is just a cash cow for the corporate oligarchy, whose Social Darwinism turns everyone and everything in the world into a mere commodity; employees fighting each other for the right to work, while also terrorised into slavish obedience to the private sector.

There is plenty of real evidence to support this point about the degradation of employment rights, by looking no further than the UK Conservative government's policy towards welfare and labour: job insecurity (a euphemism for "employment chaos", or the psychological terrorism of the workforce) has become an almost accepted fact of life for employees in recent years. The changes that the Conservative government have brought about in their approach to welfare and employment rights only intensify this: unemployed being forced to work for free for the private sector, or even prisoners being brought in to work for the private sector, all help to make it easier for companies to sack paid employees and replace them with the unemployed or low-paid prisoners.
All this helps to add to "job insecurity" - all part of ratcheting up the sense of chaos and terror within the workforce, making it easier for the private sector to control their employees (especially when they have little or no union representation). It allows the private sector to reduce their costs towards employees even further, while having the double benefit of reducing employees to slavish lambs desperate to keep their (low-paid) jobs, under the threat of being replaced by the unemployed if things get awkward for the employers. This is the kind of chaos created by an economic system best ran by psychopaths, and for psychopaths.

Because the governments continue to offer no alternative to their populations than this psychopathic "neo-liberal" model that is economically crippling them, the populations have no alternative than accept it, unless they wish to be branded "extremists" or "revolutionaries" for daring to think of an alternative to this global form of economic fascism.

Fascism, apart from the economic model, as outlined above in its present form, also includes an intolerance of other thinking, as "thinking" by definition is dangerous to maintaining the illusion that the populace is actually better-off under economic fascism. It suits the purpose then that most of the right-wing politicians in government around the world who support the neo-liberal model are either also linked to the corporations somehow, or are too ignorant and narrow-minded to consider any other idea.
To some, Conservatism as an ideology is not known for its intellectuals. The word "intellectual" is more likely to be followed by the prefix "left-wing" than "right-wing". Ayn Rand is perhaps the most famous 20th century right-wing "intellectual" that most know today, and as I mentioned earlier, her "ideology" is almost indistinguishable from clinical psychopathy. "Intellectualism" is something that right-wing commentators sneer at far more than their left-wing counterparts: the main reason because smart people scare those who benefit the most from the long-existing hierarchy. As they lack the intellectual capabilities to justify their beliefs, they resort to intolerance and more insidious measures as a shield. Put another way, it is more difficult to "intellectualise" a system based on simple hierarchical thinking and inequality; Ayn Rand's ability to rationalise and provide a moral system for social hierarchy and rampant inequality stands out from the rest of 20th century intelligentsia. Few others were able to provide such a feat of mental gymnastics as "The Virtue Of Selfishness". The philosophy that Rand set out is what "Neo-liberals" have been inspired by ever since, as it is the only one that comes close to providing a philosophical (if ultimately amoral) justification for inequality and exploitation.

People like Romney in the USA and Cameron in the UK are products of this system, born to believe this "ideology" because they are intellectually incapable of justifying it in any other way.
Like Hitler, they repeat the same mantras again and again ("There Is No Alternative!"), so that people will finally grow tired and acquiesce.

Fascism has now been taken to its almost logical conclusion as a economic model - the global subservience of government to the private sector, with the global population and its resources as their plaything. Fascism is the economic system that matches the most closely to the characteristics of clinical psychopathy.

As said before, psychopaths are predisposed to prosper in business and politics, so what better way to take their power to its logical conclusion than by using an economic system - economic fascism, now know as "neo-liberalism" - that allows them to put those psychopathic characteristics into practice on the world?


 

London 2012 displays the best and worst of the UK.

With the Olympics a few days old now, it is already clear what kind of face Britain has shown to the rest of world. As might be expected, foreigners have been given, in the sphere of the Olympics, the psychology of Britain in a microcosm.

London as a choice of venue for the Olympics in the 21st century was always going to have its critics, from Londoners themselves, probably most of all. And Londoners have some fair reasons for complaint. But first, let's deal with the positives that people give for endorsing London as a "natural" choice as an Olympic host city.
Those in support of London 2012 talk about London as "the world's city": like New York, the other great Anglophone metropolis of the world, London is a multi-cultural melting-pot, and a demonstration of what good things can be achieved from globalisation. In other words, London and New York are, almost without doubt, the two world cities that most symbolise globalisation; and it seems no coincidence that they both happen to be the two greatest cities of the two Anglophone powers in the world. Globalisation, therefore, can be said to be best represented by the Anglo-Saxons. The British Empire's long legacy from both sides of the Atlantic is to have been the brainchild of what we know as globalisation today.

London as "the world's city" is the main reason given for those supporting London's host status. Other reasons include things like British people's passion for sport; British people's natural openness to foreigners (given the first positive earlier); London's ability to provide the logistical support and organisation, and the right venues and settings for an Olympic host city. These points may well all be true to an extent, but each  has a flip side, which I'll talk about in a moment.

As I said, Londoners were probably amongst the first sceptics/cynics towards the optimism created around London's hosting of the Olympics. The status as "the world's city" is probably without dispute, barring New York, which I think puts London/ New York on an equal (even attached) status as the "twin" Anglophone metropolises of globalisation.
Londoners' main concern about hosting the Olympics was logistical, and has been shown to be justified, as we have seen so far: the traffic caused by the Olympics has been crippling in some areas, as well as causing a huge strain on an ancient metro system. These were issues that were not properly resolved before the bid was put forward, and had not been dealt with in the seven years leading up to the event itself. All this was predicted, and little was really done about it, except to encourage Londoners to either go abroad on holiday for two weeks, go to another part of the UK, or go out into the city as little as possible. Not exactly an advert for "British organisation" when your plan is more-or-less to cross your fingers and hope that nothing goes wrong!

I talked about the "flip side" to some of the positive reasons given for London 2012.

One reason was Britain's sporting enthusiasm. Yes, British people are passionate about sport; but there's a big difference between being passionate and being good at it. The thing that sadly distinguishes Britain from many other "great" sporting countries is how less seriously we take sport as an undertaking. This comes from the top and passes down through the psychology of Brits themselves. Apart from the introduction of lottery funding (saving British Olympic sport from becoming a continual laughing stock; one reason why we only got one gold medal in Atlanta 1996, before the lottery funding seriously kicked in), which has masked the government's underfunding to an extent, Britain's government spends much less than other comparably-sized nations (let alone the likes of Australia!) on sport as an investment. If anything, with the selling-off of public playing fields and the like over the years, the government has been allowed to do this because of British people's psychology. This is because Britain as a nation seems disregarding of taking sport too seriously: a game of "gentlemen amateurs" is still the prevailing mentality amongst many people, which any other nation would think belongs in the 19th century. As a result, sport is not taken as a serious profession, unless you want to be a top-class footballer - and even then, the natives have to compete against "more glamorous" foreigners who Brits prefer to see play rather than their own.
So no wonder Britain is still lagging behind the rest of the world in Olympic achievement - much of the British success is made in spite of being British, not because of it.

These are the main issues before even the Olympics had started. But what we have seen since are stories that are even more revealing.
There was the G4S scandal, which showed how the country is really ran to the world: badly. An Olympic host city, whose government sold a massive security contract to a company who then completely failed to provide the required number of staff, causing the government to rely on soldiers who had been on their hard-earned holiday, as well as police who are already fully-stretched as it is by their own government. The government would have saved more money if they had just used the police to begin with (as the police chief explained the cost ratios), but the government were determined to sell off this role to a private company which ministers had shares in. This was a pathetic fiasco worthy of a banana republic.
Then there's is other issues surrounding the government's cowardice to the Olympic committee over ticketing and logistics. Because the Olympics is essentially a huge multinational-backed sporting event, the companies involved want as many tickets for venues as they can get. The government therefore allowed them masses of tickets, at the expense of ordinary sports fans. But because the companies themselves are not really interested in "sport", only what money they can get out of it, the result is half-empty venues because many seats are reserved for "absentee" sponsors who want the tickets, either just for the sake of it, or to sell-on at an inflated profit to someone desperate enough to pay the massively over-the-odds price. This is where internet ticketing companies like "Ticketmaster" and the like come into play.
And because the Brits can be such "jobsworths" when it comes to following the rules, no matter how insane or unfair, they refuse to sell the tickets to the general public, or let in people for free just to fill the venue for the sake of it, or allow non-sponsor approved products into the venues. This is another of the "flip sides" to British "organisation": when following the rules, we can act too much like sheep.
Then there's the issue of the "ZiL Lanes": again, the government's genuflection to Olympic corporate interests means that whole parts of London have become virtual no-go areas for cars, as well as other major routes being reduced by the "Olympic lanes"; and again, because some British people are so scared of breaking the rules they even don't use the "Olympic lanes" when they could (out of hours), they make a bad situation worse.
To add farce to the organisational fiasco, I read that some keys to Wembley stadium have gone missing. Let's hope that no-one planning anything unpleasant finds them...

To end on a positive note, the great highlight so far has been, ironically, the opening ceremony. The choice of Danny Boyle, famous director and a working-class Lancashire lad, was inspired, because his background would bring a more balanced and broader perspective to the event than someone from metropolitan London. What was even more extraordinary, was that no-one except for Boyle himself and those directly involved in the event, knew what the full schedule would involve. He had sole knowledge and control of the event; a blank cheque to display his talent and vision as he saw fit.
The event was at times jaw-dropping in its ambition and spectacle; more like watching a live motion picture, happening right before your eyes, than just a public event; you never knew what twist of the story to expect next - precisely the intention of Boyle, no doubt. Boyle managed to achieve in that hour-plus of energy and analogy, more than has been seen at any previous Olympic opening ceremony. It is doubtful that any other organiser would have been able to achieve the effect that Boyle did on Friday night in the stadium, or at any future Olympic opening event.
Boyle did indeed succeed in telling a story, live before our eyes, and in such as way that only someone as inventive and bold as he could have. This was Boyle displaying the very best of Britain to the world, in an hour-long spectacle that summarised it into a microcosm of nostalgia, energy, egalitarianism, inventiveness, and diversity.

Why Psychopaths are running the world

There have been many articles written, especially over the past few years, about the link between capitalism and psychopathy.
I wrote something similar myself last year here
As a reminder, the twenty common recognised characteristics of psychopaths are:

• Glibness/superficial charm
• Grandiose sense of self-worth
• Pathological lying
• Cunning/manipulative
• Lack of remorse or guilt

• Emotionally shallow
• Callous/lack of empathy
• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

• Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
• Parasitic lifestyle
• Lack of realistic, long-term goals
• Impulsiveness
• Irresponsibility
• Poor behavioral controls
• Early behavioral problems
• Juvenile delinquency
• Revocation of conditional release
• Criminal versatility.

The list above is taken from the generally-recognised "psychopath check-list". In order to be classified as a "psychopath", a person should fit with the large majority of these characteristics, either partially or fully.

Psychopaths, medically speaking, are a human aberration, which are usually born with the "moral" part of the brain not functioning. In other words, they are physically incapable of feeling empathy (i.e. pity or remorse), and have difficulty understanding real human emotion. They are therefore extremely dangerous in wider society, responsible for the majority of violent crime, fraud - and also are disproportionately represented in the higher echelons of business and politics.

Because psychopaths naturally make decisions on an amoral basis, they are naturally advantaged in the area of business, where decisions that can decide the fate of thousands (of employees, or customers) should be for the benefit of the business, regardless of the consequences on the wider world. Free market capitalism, at its heart, is based on an amoral philosophy, and those who are naturally amoral are bound to prosper in it. 

So when characteristics such as amorality are combined with other psychopathic traits, such as cunning, arrogance, a grandiose sense of self-worth, and irresponsibility, in the world of business and politics, they are seen not as human weaknesses, but strengths. "Amorality" is seen as being hard-headed, "cunning" is seen as being practical, "arrogance" is seen as self-confidence, "a grandiose sense of self-worth" is seen as ambition, "irresponsibility" is seen as being a risk-taker. You get the idea.

So psychopaths are therefore more likely to prosper and quickly advance in a corporation than the average human being, as they posses characteristics that business see as "skills". An intelligent psychopath will more easily be able to climb the corporate ladder; an intelligent psychopath will be able to remain "undetected" for longer, even for life, if they can find a profession where their characteristics blend in seamlessly with their social peers. A psychopath has no remorse or sorrow for what they do; it is their nature to be remorseless and merciless. These feelings are beyond their comprehension. There are also the less intelligent psychopaths: these are the ones you're more likely to hear about, because they were caught. These are the serial killers, thieves and fraudsters who were not smart enough to know how to evade detection or know how to get what they wanted without violence. What slightly annoys me about Bret Easton-Ellis' novel "American Psycho" is that his portrayal of Patrick Bateman as a psychopath lacks the full spectrum of psychopathic characteristics - you see his violent urges, but little of his charm, manipulation and cunning.The psychopath serial killers are usually the ones that haven't found a way to repress their violent urges through other methods; a high-powered businessman as a serial killer is therefore an unlikely event.  

The way they usually manage to escape detection for so long is because they learn to be good actors, learning how to imitate human emotions, copying a look, or a mimic, in order to blend in. Naturally charming, persuasive and gregarious, even flirtatious, psychopaths can easily manipulate others to get what they want. Which is why, apart from business, psychopaths are also attracted to public office.
One other thing worth mentioning about psychopaths is that their irresponsibility is often displayed through a flagrant sex life - leaving a string of women with fatherless children, for example. In other words, the desire to callously "spread their seed", means their psychopathic behaviour is more likely to trickle down to the "next generation", through a combination of passing on their psychopathic genetic traits, as well as the environmental factor of children being born into an unstable family unit. One psychopath can breed many more psychopaths because of their amoral sexual behaviour. This tells us that if this is repeated over a long enough time frame, psychopaths can become even more prevalent in human society, creating even more chaos, proliferating over the generations like an unstoppable virus. This makes stories about the many sexual indiscretions of politicians and high-powered business leaders even less surprising.

Look again at the psychopath check-list, and think about the number of politicians fit the description. It's especially revealing to look at the childhoods of politician and leaders. I recently looked at Stalin here as a case study for what happens when a psychopath takes control of the world's largest country.The answer was chaos. Stalin ruled the country through a thousand shades of terror, to the point that no-one knew who to trust or what to think. He manipulated the US President in order to control half of Europe, tried to starve West Berlin to break post-war Germany, and instigated and maintained the Korean War until his death. As we saw from Stalin's childhood, his violent upbringing, living an amoral life in the rough streets of Tsarist Georgia, fits with the common characteristics of psychopathy. And everything else about his life fits the bill exactly. 

There are other public figures, more recently, who also seem to have a worryingly-high correlation with the characteristics on the psychopathy check-list. I do seriously wonder about the metal state of Michael Gove, the current UK Education minister: he seems to lack any empathy at all, and seems intent on creating chaos in the education system, and so on.

But the wider point is this: because corporations and public office are naturally attractive to psychopaths as the skills necessary closely correlate to their own characteristics, is it any surprise that the world is in such a mess? 

The Financial Crisis of 2008 was caused through the irresponsibility and amorality of the financial sector, who encouraged staffers who would take the biggest risks on investments they tricked others into taking. Then when this house of cards came tumbling down, the financial sector blackmailed the politicians into what is effectively a huge protection racket. The politicians then manipulated the wider public into accepting paying for that racket out of their own pocket, while the politicians also set about dismantling the public sector beyond recognition, leaving little left for the public to recognise. Countries like Greece and Spain are bearing the brunt of a vast social experiment organised by the IMF and ECB in Frankfurt; closer to home, the UK government is attempting something similar.

And while all this is going on, those who are at the top 1 per cent are continuing their game of avoiding tax, routinely committing crimes that rob the nations of the world from revenue that would be more than enough to pay off the world's debts. This 1 per cent are responsible for perpetuating a system of "controlled anarchy": a system designed to favour those at the top of the hierarchy to do as they wish, while forcing us "mere mortals" to live off less and less while fighting each other in an increasingly unstable and deteriorating working environment, yet told to follow the rules religiously or face the full force of the law. This is the law (and chronic instability) that the 1 per cent designed.
Technology developed through this Neo-liberal Capitalist system serves two functions: making it easier for the private sector-government symbiosis to monitor peoples' actions; while other aspects of technology act as a sop, deluding workers into thinking that their lives are superficially getting better. "Facebook" conveniently combines these two ideas together.

It is estimated that, depending on where you draw the line, psychopaths make up between 1 and 5 per cent of the general population. It should give those who chant "we are the 99 per cent" some food for thought. Which "99 per cent"? And which "1 per cent"? The ultra-rich, or the ultra-psychopaths? To what extent is there an overlap between the richest 1 per cent and the psychopathic 1 per cent?

When you look at the behaviour of those who are in positions of power, be it in business, finance or politics, you sometimes seriously do have to wonder about the mental state of some of them. When psychopaths are put in positions of power, the result is anarchy. 

Isn't that what the world is facing now?

Psychopaths, revolutions and Hollywood: From Gotham City to Gorky Park

Last month I wrote a set of articles (beginning here) that loosely linked the fictional Batman character "The Joker" (as played by Heath Ledger), to the real-life biography and psychological state of Stalin, aka "Koba", The Wolf.

Fiction and reality rarely meet exactly for the sake of convenient comparison. But I did see some intriguing similarities between the psychological state of mind, modus operandi and "agenda" of "The Joker", and that of Stalin.
In an nutshell, both Stalin and The Joker seemed to be personalities born from a chaotic upbringing, ruffians raised on the brutality of the streets; both used their key role within a wider organisation (the Bolsheviks and The Mafia, respectively) to rise quickly to supersede and eliminate their rivals; both simultaneously perfected the art of unpredictable and amoral terror for their purposes on their rivals and the general population; and both seemed to be driven not by any earthly design or goal (such that money or luxury was of no value), but the goal of terror and chaos for its own sake, or to simply paralyse the human aspect into a submission to chaos.
To the extent that "The Joker" and Stalin had an ideology or end in mind, they were simply in rebellion against everything else that was. "The Joker" turned against The Mafia that had originally put their trust in him as he saw them as morally beneath him (as he was completely amoral and nihilistic); Stalin turned against people who had supported him to gain power soon after gaining power himself, as he saw them as hypocrites and against his "purer" form of revolution.

This brings me to the new, and final, part of the Batman trilogy, "The Dark Knight Rises", which was released this weekend, and I saw at the cinema. What interested me most in the film was how it compared to the previous one in terms of plot, the underlying psychology, and the characterisation of the films antagonist, Bane. 
The psychology of Bane is markedly different from "The Joker". In summary, Bane is a mercenary employed by a businessman, John Daggett (Bruce Wayne's rival), who then uses his cohort of mercenaries to attack the Stock Exchange and by manipulating stocks bring about the bankruptcy of Wayne. Bane, however, has his own agenda separate from Daggett, who then sidelines the businessman, coerces Batman into a confrontation to disable and exile him, then uses explosives to trap the police of the city underground, while also destroying the bridges of the city, trapping the population. Bane then forces open the city prison, releasing criminals to run amok in the city while also encouraging the population to rise up against the "corrupt" rich. The last twist is the nuclear device that Bane had stolen from Wayne's research centre, holding the city to ransom from the outside world, knowing all the while that the device would eventually destroy the city in a matter of months.
Bane's "ideology" is not as purely chaotic as "The Joker": Bane's ideology is a methodological one, if no less amoral. His "end" is clear: to destroy Gotham City, while bringing about some kind of chaotic "class warfare" in the meantime.

The director of "The Dark Knight Rises" and "The Dark Knight", Christopher Nolan, has said that there is no intentional resemblance to contemporary events in the West in the latest Batman movie (eg. Occupy Wall Street), and I believe him. There isn't one: but the film did get me thinking again about the "Bolshevik connection", and another personality of the Bolshevik revolution: Stalin's predecessor, Lenin.
The story of Bane and his "cause" towards Gotham City raises some similarities to how Lenin came to power in Russia.
Both Bane and Lenin were "introduced" to their fate by outside forces: Bane was employed by the businessman John Daggett to bring down Bruce Wayne, while Lenin was smuggled into Russia by the Germans to bring down the Tsar. Both men succeeded in their assigned task, but both Bane and Lenin later betrayed their former "paymasters": Bane later has Daggett killed, while Lenin tries to export his revolution to Germany after the war. Lenin was psychologically a rebel of the cultured middle-classes, an emigre internationalist; in a similar manner (again in contrast to "The Joker"/Stalin), Bane appears like some psychological cross-breed between Hannibal Lecter and revolutionary leader - with a cultured manner (gained from pseudo-ideology of the "League Of Shadows") and non-specific international accent, but with a resolute hatred of the wealthy, using it to channel his eventual aim  to destroy, like Lenin, everything that existed before. Both men did not flinch at the unlimited use of violence for the purpose of their aims.

Probably I'm reading far too much into two films, but that is what makes film so endlessly engaging: being able to get so much out of two films and the antagonists in each. But Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy works, as a collective piece of art and as an engaging moral tale, as well as Jackson's rendering of "The Lord Of The Rings", or Lucas' (original) "Star Wars" trilogy.
All three of these trilogies (and each of a different genre - comic strip/gothic/crime, fantasy, and science-fiction) tell us a lot and reflect much on the frailty of human nature, how we as humans are fascinated by the personification of evil, and what makes people become, and behave as, psychopaths. The essential battle between good and evil is never as black-and-white in reality as it is often explained, and these three trilogies, by Nolan, Jackson and Lucas respectively,clearly show that.
It is the shades of grey, the compromises, hard choices and frailties that circumstance forces upon us, that make a human what they are, for good or ill.
It is a sign of a great work of art when art does seem to imitate life so seamlessly.

Welcome to the (anarcho-fascist) revolution

I am quoting a small segment from wikipedia.org, describing an economic situation where the economy is designed on "the basis of private property and of private initiative, but it is subordinated to the tasks of the state. As part of the relations between workers and employers (the system is) guided by the principles of social Darwinism: the strongest support, rooting out the weakest. In economic practice, this means, on the one hand, protecting the interests of successful businessmen, on the other - the destruction of trade unions and other organizations of the working class".

Ignore some of the more emotive language, and examine the situation described in simple economics: sound like anything familiar in the UK?

It should, because the above situation is more-or-less comparable to the ideological position of the Conservative-led government. By definition, they believe that the private sector to be morally superior to the public sector; that the private sector is considered (by definition) more efficient and more cost-effective in providing services; that the public sector, by comparison, is inefficient and its workers of questionable loyalty, liable to be an arm of the unions; big business is to be indulged as much as possible, the barriers to business torn down in favour of businesses' wishes and against excessive employees' rights. And yet, in spite of the government's indulgence and favour towards business, it still feels the need to control some core design: a strong justice system; a strong policy of border control, while at the same time, encouraging business to out-source beyond the country itself. 
In other words, an illogical contradiction is in place: encouraging the free market, while supporting the the "cartelisation" of the market; against immigration, but in favour of foreign out-sourcing; against the inefficiency and innate incompetence of the public sector, but indifferent to the private sector's identical incompetence; the government wants to out-source services to the private sector, but still be in control of who gets the services; for the free market, but also against the free market.

The Conservative-led government may be considered as disciples of Ayn Rand's economic and ideological vision of a pure form of free market capitalism, but this would be a misnomer. The Conservatives in government are not pure free market capitalists, because they believe that the government should still be in core control of some aspects of the decision-making process - which companies get to run which services. A pure free market would see virtually no government as such at all; as Ayn Rand designed, "government" would only control the justice system and the military: the private sector would provide everything else. 

But the Conservatives have no wish to vote themselves out of existence. The Conservatives plan is more long-term, a slice-by-slice destruction of the British welfare state. As the David Cameron's former-key policy advisor, Steve Hilton, said, by the end of a full term, "everything needs to have changed". This is what the Conservative plan is: a virtual revolution under the noses of the electorate, much of what is being done never part of the Conservatives election manifesto.
Education, health and welfare to be redesigned out of recognition from what existed before, with much of the services handed out to large corporations, and what left pared down to the bare minimum to prevent public revolt. The justice system's public sector services to be similarly handed out to large private firms like the now-infamous G4S: police services, the prisons, and so on. 
This is all happening right now. The continual demonisation of the unions, and the continued quasi-religious zeal in the adherence to non-intervention in the free market, means that the government is indifferent and also feels blameless as the unregulated property market slowly destroys the livelihoods of families across the country; as rising property prices (especially in the uncontrolled rental market) mean that many people on what were once considered "average" salaries find themselves as the new "working poor", spending their salary on rising rents, rising bills, rising fuel, and rising high street prices, with nothing left over at the end of the month.
And all the while, the government claims to be fighting for the interests of the "aspirational classes" (whoever they are!), while at the same time doing almost nothing to help anyone earning less double the average national salary. 

The fact that the Conservatives still claim to represent the "ordinary hard-working, honest families" of Britain is typical of the arrogance of their self-belief. What evidence is there that they have done anything at all to improve the lot of the average person, the average family? None whatsoever. The evidence only points to the opposite. 
The "big con" is that the Conservatives, even after the financial crisis, banking scandals, the various corrupt and morally vacuous (or just mindless) judgements made by members of the government, still believe that they are the party best suited to governing the country, and somehow manage to twist the truth to make enough of the "aspirational" classes believe them, as well as the guaranteed votes of the indifferent and amoral rich. 

The Conservative government is in the middle of carrying out a quiet ideological revolution: you can call it an "anarcho-capitalist" revolution if you like - where the government creates a system of blissful anarchy for big business and the rich, and a system of helpless anarchy for everyone else. But that would be missing some important points, mentioned in the quote at the beginning.
The system described in the quote, which seems to similar to the mindset of the Conservative-led government, is the economic system, not of "anarcho-capitalism", but of fascism.
While the racism and prejudice has been carefully air-brushed out of existence by the likes of David Cameron and his "Chipping Norton set" of cosmopolitan Conservative friends, there still remains the economic ideology, which is unchanged, if slightly cleaned up.

This is the real truth: that while the Tories may have given the appearance of cleaning up their act from the days of being the "Nasty Party", choosing a charming but intellectually vacuous leader in David Cameron, behind the scenes the ideology of "Economic Fascism" remains.
With Cameron content to allow his ministers free rein to forcibly put their revolutionary ideas into practice on the living laboratory of the UK, fear is in the air, with ministers revelling in the psychological terror and "creative chaos" they are creating. And all the while, Cameron acts as the vacuous front-man to this amoral revolution, repeating his mantra:
"There Is No Alternative!".

The UK's five-year prison sentence

These days I'm thinking a lot about "The Decline Fall Of The Roman Empire", the famous weighty tome by Gibbon that chronicled the last thousand years or so of the Roman Empire.
In the UK today, it feels as though we're living through a British version of that, only the "reality TV" version, where the government plots the decline for everyone else to deal with.
"The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire", if such a book were ever written, would probably start at the beginning of the First World War, and (supposing this happens) end with the secession from the Union of Scotland from England after the general election of 2015; a period of roughly a hundred years. Even if the Scots choose to remain in the Union, it is clear they want control of their own economy, rendering London's real power over Scotland to be marginal, and little more than symbolic. From controlling roughly a quarter of the world's population, a hundred years later the British government would no longer be in control of even its own island, let alone anything else of importance.

This is the geo-political reality. The strategic, economic and social decline of the former British Empire's situation is even more marked and desperate.
The real decline of British governance started in the 1970s with a variety of factors: economic stagflation, a decline in real living standards, and the unions' increasing hold over the government. This led the Thatcher government to make an abrupt change - a virtual non-violent economic revolution - to severely restrict the power of the unions, while at the same time selling-off various government assets to companies, and handing over handling of the economy to the banking sector, trusting them with the job of re-building the British economy.
This philosophy worked well, at least for twenty-five years. Successive governments of both parties agreed with this new ethos - gradual privatisation of government assets and a ripping up of the regulations that controlled the actions of the banking sector. And, overall, this seemed to work, as the British economy, without an empire any more, thrived up to the first decade of the 21st century.
But the whole concept was an illusion, and a catastrophic one at that. Without rules to rein them in, banks became to think they were infallible, and the more the economy grew on profit built from non-existent, inflated assets, the more the government thought the banks should be indulged. In as much as there was a system explaining where Britain's financial sector was getting its money from, anarchy reigned.

The implosion of that system and the financial chaos that followed has been documented before, and don't need to go into further detail about that. Suffice to say, when the banks succeeded in extorting from the government the bailout that the government then felt obliged to pass on to the public sector and the British taxpayers, the decline of Britain's status as a sovereign power was set in stone. From the 1980s onwards, Britain had gone from being at the beck and call of the unions, to being a servant to the mercenary and amoral banks; a nation-state in the pockets of companies that knew nothing of honour or patriotism. And if the government tried to complain, the banks' threat to flee the country, threatening to leave the country economically in the lurch, was always effective in keeping British government voices quiet. Britain was hostage to the banks' protection racket.

By 2010, when the Conservatives came to power with the LibDems, the decline was accelerated. The public sector cuts (the government's price of the banks' bailout) that had tentatively been discussed under the Labour government, were now marked as the new government's main economic strategy to improve the economy - largely because this was what the banks told them to do. Worse, this strategy had the opposite effect as intended; worsening the economy, expanding the government's debt, increasing unemployment and deprivation, while the government refused to accept any responsibility for creating it.
That, along with "reforming" government institutions such as education, health and welfare - slashing their budgets, terrorising staff, and selling off government services to companies - as well as firing thousands of police, and reducing Britain's military to a bare minimum, the government had succeeded within two years in alienating almost every major sector of society. Only the rich were the ones unaffected, as they knew how to milk the system - or lack of - for themselves. For those at the top, as with the banks, wonderful anarchy reigned; for the rest, it was misery, a situation of financial poverty, or something close to it. In either case, the majority of the British population were living in times where collective morale at its lowest in living memory.

When not alienating various sections of society - either with perverse intent or ignorance - the Conservative government was demonstrating almost unbelievable levels of incompetence, adding to the British public's sense of disbelief piled upon helplessness. Because those of the Conservatives now in government were mostly chosen through their connections to the Prime Minister's circle rather than their merit, it led to people being chosen far above their station.
People like the Home Secretary Theresa May, and the Culture Minister, Jeremy Hunt, are the prime examples, though there are others. These two in their first two years in their respective positions in government, presided over various chaotic blunders, scandals and generally bringing the position of minister into disrepute through their own glaring incompetence. But these two remained in their positions even after all this, refusing to accept any responsibility for anything, with the Prime Minister still gamely supporting them. His seeming refusal to take many things very seriously, Prime Minister David Cameron presided over a situation where government contracts were passed out to companies that were ran (or part-owned) by ministers or the friends of ministers. This is more commonly called corruption, but the government would still refuse to accept that anyone had ever done anything wrong. As the Conservatives saw it, as no one had ever intentionally done wrong, then no-one could ever be blamed for wrong-doing: there were only "mistakes" or "omissions".

This is the mentality you expect in a banana republic. And this is what Britain had been reduced to after two years of Conservative government.
The government has stated the intention of staying in power for a full five-year term. The LibDems, in their cowardice of the British electorate, are maintaining this government-by-banana-republic. In other words, because Britain is a democracy, that's why the government doesn't want to have elections.
The rest of the British people, the ones not rich anyway, have to wait another three years before they have the right to use their "Get Out Of Jail Card".

It's a five-year prison sentence that the government has enforced on us - five years of austerity; destruction of the public services and selling off of government assets; government indifference towards unemployment and investment; and five years of the UK being ran by corrupt, mindless buffoons allowing their friends to run amok with what was once called the homeland of British Empire, while blaming it on everyone else.

Nearly a year on from the riots, England has learned nothing

Last August, riots enveloped London and various cities in England, the worst civil unrest for decades.

At the time, the rioters were demonised as the worst of our feral youth, epitomising what was wrong with the lack of morals in our society.
In many ways, the young people who rioted and looted did symbolise a lot about our society: but people read the riots the wrong way. The fact that rioters were looting shamelessly was seized upon by politicians and media commentators as a sign that family values had been destroyed; that the younger generations believed in nothing but what they could get for themselves.
That may well have been true; but the resulting judicial backlash, where many looters were given over-the-top sentences, said as much about the mood of the establishment. Many of the establishment couldn't believe that these hordes of young people, from the lowest rungs of society and intermingled with gangs and petty crime, were capable of causing so much anarchy in just a few days. But they did. And so the response from the establishment was as knee-jerk as possible to nip this mood of anarchic uprising in the bud.

At the time, left-wing apologists like Ken Livingstone and others, blamed the cuts, the moral crisis in banking and government indifference as underlying causes for the riots, only to be shouted down as Marxists. But when we look at what has been discovered about the banks, government and the "establishment" since then, those "Marxists" have, if anything, been shown to be over-cautious in their analysis of moral breakdown in society.
Because moral authority and values, by definition, is supposed to come from the top: a value system functions as a top-down system. In other words, expecting those at the bottom of the social order to follow the rules set down by authority, when the country's supposed "moral authority" ignores the concept entirely, is not only absurd, it is completely abhorrent to any concept of civilisation.

This is the reality of the UK in 2012: Britain's establishment allowed the country to to held hostage by a cartel. Mexico has been terrorised and held hostage by a drug cartel for nearly fifteen years. For the past fifteen years, the UK has been held to ransom by its financial sector. The five leading banks who now control the vast majority of the banking sector of the UK have been extorting the UK government: unless you give us what we want and do as we say, the banks have said, we will leave your country to the dogs and go elsewhere. In other words, the banks have simply modified a Mafia "racket" in order to seem respectable. As a result, they have destroyed the UK economy, then terrified the government into a further "racket" called the "bailout" to pay for the banking sector's economic stupidity - for which everyone else in the country is paying for, in the form of public sector cuts.

Let's be straight here: because the UK government has no effective control of the banking sector, as there are virtually no regulations whatsoever, the government cannot send people to prison: you can't be sent to prison if there is no law to break in the first place. This is the financial anarchy that is the UK banking system. And under such conditions, amorality and recklessness are bound to follow as night follows day.

This "anarchy" goes on. Another major factor that led to the UK economic collapse was the banking sector's inflation of the property market. Again, as there are virtually no government controls in this sector, prices can rise as much as the banks or landlords wish. Houses, compared to average earnings, are nearly twice as expensive as they were forty years ago. So banks have forced many onto the (also uncontrolled) rental sector, further pushing up rental prices. Again, because the government has no appetite to interfere to improve the lot of its own people, everyone suffers.

Then there is price inflation, of essentials like food and fuel. Although inflation is on average low, for essentials prices have been increasing many times above inflation year on year since the financial crisis started. Again, the government does nothing.
Then there is the economy and unemployment situation generally, for which the government does little to improve. As the financial sector is a major political contributor to the governing party, the stink of corruption runs deep. Government incompetence piled upon indifference towards the poor, and an ideological war to destroy employee's rights, educational aspiration and the British sense of "fair play", makes it no surprise that people have such little faith or trust in government or the establishment in general. Why should they?

Given that the government is keen to sell-off public assets like our schools, railways, health service to private (even foreign) companies, while also destroying the military and police service in the name of "cuts" (the same cuts that are deemed necessary because the government surrendered its authority to extortion from the banks), what moral authority does the government have left?

The reality, therefore, is this: that the government and the "establishment" of the banking sector, sections of the amoral media sector, as well as those at the tip of the economic hierarchy in general (meaning those who avoid paying their dues to the state by stashing their money off-shore), do not deserve the respect of average people on the street. They deserve our contempt.

Instead of focussing on "benefit cheats" and the "feral youths" behind the riots, the government should be focussing on bringing the real criminals to justice: those like the bankers, who have destroyed the country, yet still hold the entire country to ransom in an extortion racket; who cheat the public purse of billions each year; whose indifference to the plight of the young family trying to get a house or the small business trying to get a loan should be made criminal.
But the government won't, at least not until it is forced to by the public. The truth about politics is this: that politicians only do things they don't like when they feel it is absolutely necessary.

How do you make them listen? Last August, some people thought they had an answer.

The real tragedy about the riots last year was that the raw anger that those young people felt was directed at the wrong targets, at least in terms of getting their point made. Since this government came to power two years ago, we've had student protests that resulted in Conservative HQ being surrounded and damaged; we've had strikes by a welter of public sector workers; we had the riots by young people who felt they had nothing to lose and everything to gain from opportune looting and destruction; we've had police officers marching in protest against the government.
Last August saw young people looting, while others saw a chance to "get even" with the police. In both these actions, their anger was tragically misdirected. Looting local shops only destroys the local economy, while attacking the police solves nothing.

The real source of the country's damnation is the amoral banking sector, the sector which is most responsible for the vast inequality that has mushroomed in the last thirty years, as well as being responsible for the economic crisis, the property bubble, the government's cuts, not to mention the "me" culture and everything that symbolises. The government's moral emptiness, in selling their soul to the banks, indulging the banks whenever they could, at the expense of everyone else, is the other main culprit.

 Both are morally culpable; it would only be fair, then, for them to be made fully aware of their culpability in this crime against the people of Britain. For too long, people in this country have been meek: meek in their unquestioning respect for "authority" and the "establishment".
Every self-respecting ordinary person in the country has a good reason to despise this government and the banking sector it supports: from young people, students, the poor, the "working poor", the public sector, even the military and the police. All these different sections of society have a legitimate grievance against the situation the government has perpetuated. The government, in the past two years, has succeeded in alienating most sectors of society. Only the rich, the heartless, and the indifferent in society support it.
The Conservative government remains in power due to the spineless acquiescence of the LibDems. If all these aggrieved segments of society united, then an unmistakeable point could be made: it is only the meekness of those segments by failing to unite that the government remains in power, and the banks remain beyond the reach of justice, free to continue their reign of terror.

It's time for British people to find their courage again. Last August, the government succeeded in victimising the rioters and looters through divide and rule, placing those rioters against the ordinary law-abiding people struggling to make ends meet. We should not allow the government to pull the wool over our eyes again.

If they want to talk up the threat of "class war", then the government should be careful not to insult our intelligence. Even a man on his knees knows something about self-respect.

Stalin and power: when "The Joker" became "The Boss" (2)

The start of the Second World War was an auspicious event for Stalin.
With his empire now firmly in his hands after the years of the "Terror" (as explained previously here), Stalin turned his full attention to foreign affairs. Stalin had got involved in the Spanish Civil War, as an opportunity to spread influence and as a testing-ground for military and covert tactics (and as well as a way of raising finance through gun-running), but it had been Stalin's only real "action" abroad since attaining power (The Soviet Union had been a big enough theatre to keep him occupied with forcing his combined vision of terror and modernisation on the country). In the event, he used the Spanish Civil War as a vast living laboratory for repeating the same terror tactics as used during the Russian Civil War, causing as much chaos and terror on his own side as on the purported enemy. But by 1939, the Spanish Civil War was a memory, "The Terror" on the home front was over, and Stalin was ready for other machinations; so he turned to Europe.

Stalin didn't trust Hitler (part of the reason for Stalin's involvement in the Spanish Civil War was reducing the influence of Fascism across Europe), but neither did he trust Britain and France, and saw a callous opportunity to extend his empire with Hitler's collusion. Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 came about through a Soviet-Nazi treaty to effectively carve up Eastern Europe between them. Germany took the western half of Poland, the Soviet Union the eastern half, while Germany turned a blind eye to the Soviet annexations of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), and Moldova (then called Bessarabia). Once in Poland, Stalin approved the massacre of the Polish military command at Katyn, to prevent any reprisals. In the winter of that year, to gain further territory, Stalin also approved war against Finland, though this turned into a military winter quagmire (mostly due to Stalin ridding himself of the most able generals in "The Terror", and relying on unqualified Politburo cronies); eventually Finland agreed to cede to the USSR a chunk of their territory close to Leningrad (former St Petersburg).
Stalin and his government knew that Hitler couldn't be trusted, but Stalin was not expecting a German attack in 1941, confident it would happen the year after. In the spring of that year, Hitler sent his forces into the Balkans, the area that Stalin had considered his sphere of influence in the carve up of Eastern Europe. He had helped set up a Communist government in Yugoslavia that year as a balance against Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria's support for the Nazis. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, the Communists lasted ten days.

The warning signs were there, but Stalin believed his own rhetoric, and his sycophantic Politburo was too weak to contradict and bring some reason to their preparations. When Hitler's forces attacked the Soviet Union at the same moment, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, in June 1941, Stalin was pole-axed. The Soviet military command, under the wing of Stalin's incompetent and arrogant Politburo, stood no chance against the highly-organised Nazi war machine. Within a few months, the Nazi forces had occupied territory thousands of miles into the Soviet Union. By October, they were within miles of Moscow (where there was almost anarchy on the streets), and Leningrad was almost surrounded, its population on the verge of starvation.
Stalin evacuated the families of most of the Politburo to Samara near the Urals, and was on the verge of ordering the government and population to evacuate Moscow too. But he made a point of staying and everyone else therefore did the same. During the German bombing raids he made a point of living in an underground station; he moved government operations underground and slept like a vagrant on the stone floor, wearing his greatcoat to sleep in.
Shunning the trappings of power, at these moments he seemed to revel in the image of an outcast and a rebel;  like "The Joker" in Batman, an anarchic ascetic fighting a war against the the establishment, orthodoxy of all kinds, and almost everything else besides. There would be other moments during the war when Stalin would make a point of pointedly defying social graces in front of his military officers and ministers, testing their patience as well as their social orthodoxy. And in spite of this, in many ways he was less of an ideologue than Lenin or the older Bolsheviks in the Politburo: and this intellectual flexibility allowed him a further edge over those around him and under him - it made him a difficult man to predict. This was another of the many facets of Stalin's psychological terror; almost everything with him was some form of power-play or subtle game of terror, whether it was a simple meeting, a dinner, or an alcohol-fuelled all-nighter. Creating chaos was his second nature.

The winter set in, slowing and stalling the German advance on Moscow, so the following spring, the Nazis turned to the south, sweeping through the Ukraine, heading for the Caucasus and the oil-fields of Baku. By August 1942, the Germans were at Stalingrad on the Volga river, a massive strategic prize as well as prized for its symbolic name. It was here that the Soviet weapons of terror against their own people re-surfaced; deserters had already been summarily shot in the previous year of Soviet retreat, so any sign of weakness here was dealt with even more harshly, with express permission from "The Boss". But it was also at Stalingrad that Stalin finally realised he needed real generals and to heed the opinion of real military experts: because of this, the German army was captured early in 1943, and it was from this point onwards that Stalin never looked back.
For the rest of the year, the Soviet military pushed the Nazis back to the frontiers of the Soviet Union. When Stalin then went to meet up with FDR and Churchill in Tehran late in 1943, Stalin showed a different side to his personality: Stalin the charmer.
Tehran was the first of two meetings between these three leaders (the other was Yalta early in 1945). Stalin used all his capacious charm (as he was a skilled performer, as well as a master of the art of psychology) to win over FDR, while isolating Churchill against FDR and himself. This had the result of FDR effectively surrendering Eastern Europe to Stalin's sphere of control after the war, in order to get Soviet involvement in the war against Japan. Churchill later bitterly regretted not being able to be stronger with FDR against Stalin's  machinations.
1944 saw further terror imposed on the re-conquered parts of the USSR and Eastern Europe. Beria, now undisputed master of these dark arts as Stalin's right-hand man, oversaw the deportation or and massacre of the ethnic populations of these areas: millions were affected. Meanwhile, as the Soviet troops got to within sight of Germany itself, Stalin was dismissive of the millions of women raped by his soldiers, even doing so to some of their own women held as German prisoners: he saw it as part of the spoils of war.

When the war was ended, Stalin emerged as the master of half of Europe. Any country that had been "liberated" by the Soviet Union would likely find itself a Soviet satellite, answerable to Moscow and Stalin. And by this point, with Stalin's self-confidence through the roof, he enjoyed toying with the visiting legations from his East European tributes.
This "toying" typically involved alcohol: lots of it. Stalin, when in the right mood, could drink like a fish, continuing these games well into the early hours of the morning. His own colleagues were not immune; on the contrary, Stalin seemed to gain great pleasure from seeing how drunk and incapable he could make his colleagues, testing their limits simply for the sake of it. As Stalin was a natural night-owl, many of his decisions taken with his colleagues were done at these drunken all-nighters. His sense of humour was sharp and he often made a point of humiliating his colleagues mercilessly. Even having a drink with Stalin was a form of psychological torture.

If possible, Stalin's behaviour after the war became even more erratic. Ministers who considered themselves amongst his most loyal supporters, found themselves under suspicion, as did the military, now that the war was over. Wives of ministers became the newest form of psychological pressure to come to heel: some wives were killed, others imprisoned to ensure loyalty, while the ministers under suspicion themselves were demoted. Other ruthless and amoral "bright young things" emerged from this latest merry-go-round of psychological torture in the years after the Second World War, while people like Beria, a one-time "bright young thing" and head of Stalin's terror operations, were mistrusted by Stalin and demoted.
This new game of psychological torture continued almost up to his death. The new "bright new things" that he had promoted after the Second World War at the expense of older hands like Beria, were themselves to become victim to Stalin's game: within a few years, he had dispensed of their services, and promoted others by the opening of the 1950s. Then, in the autumn of 1952, with Stalin mindful of his years and the succession, Stalin publicly humiliated many of the older loyalists in the Politburo, expanding the number of ministers in government (with younger loyalists), while also firing any older hands he thought were likely successors.

But aggression at home was not yet finished. Stalin, suspicious of the new state of Israel and a possible "Fifth Column" in Russia, turned to the Jews. What was ironic here was that the Bolshevik party was attractive to Jews historically because of its internationalist outlook. Many of the original Politburo in the 1920s were Jews; there was still at least one Jew on the Politburo at the time of Stalin's purge of Jewish influence; others had Jewish wives. These were all affected and suffered through Stalin's latest wave of terror: many were killed or imprisoned. This terror continued in one form or another right up to Stalin's death.

In the middle of all this, the Cold War was becoming a reality. Stalin was wary of the new atomic power of the USA, but wanted to test it nevertheless. Beria oversaw the Soviet atomic programme, while the long-standing foreign minister, Molotov, toured the capitals of the world to charm and champion the Soviet Unions's new place as a world power, only challenged by America. The Greek civil war, which the Communists eventually lost because Stalin saw it as of only peripheral concern, was a precursor to a decisive showdown that Stalin was looking for with his new nemesis, the USA. The venue for it, in 1948, was Berlin, the post-war divided capital of Germany. Seeing that the Soviet Union had far greater troop numbers in post-war Germany than the Allies, he saw an opportunity to annex the whole of Germany as Soviet satellite. To do so, Stalin simply ordered the closing of all the frontiers to "free" West Berlin, calculating that the Western powers would be too divided or weak to respond. In this roll of the dice, with the stakes between two great powers, Stalin gambled, but misjudged his opponent. America kept West Berlin alive through a feat of modern aviation, continual flights almost every minute, to keep West Berlin supplied with food and the necessities to survive. After a year of this, Stalin realised the game was up, and he opened the borders.

His gambit over in Europe, events allowed Stalin to turn to the east. By 1949, with the coming to power of Mao in Communist China, and neighbouring Communist North Korea, Stalin saw new possibilities in the Far East. In  1950, he encouraged the North Korean leader, Kim Il-Sung, to invade the American-backed South. As Communist China and North Korea were effectively reliant on Soviet diplomatic support, the ensuing Korean War was, in effect, "Stalin's War". This was Stalin escalating his game to the next level, after the failure of the blockade of Berlin the previous year. Within a few months, the US had invaded in support of the South Koreans. China asked for direct Soviet support from Stalin to repel the Americans: he refused, but encouraged China to intervene on his behalf to support Kim Il-Sung, nonetheless. Thus China entered the Korean War late in 1950, and by the summer of 1951 had forced the Americans into a bloody stalemate. With the Korean peninsula now mostly obliterated by warfare, and with millions dead or homeless, the North Koreans asked for Stalin's support for a ceasefire. Again Stalin refused, ensuring that the bloody attrition continued up to his death in 1953.
The Korean War demonstrates Stalin's psychopathy at possibly its most ruthless and cunning. Through his own manipulation, he had engineered a war between his Communist "allies" and the West, the bloodiest war in modern history after the Second World War. It seems that Stalin was intent on entangling the Americans in a bloody war of attrition (which ultimately cost President Truman his job and killed thousands of US soldiers) with people who he was totally indifferent towards, even contemptuous of. One quote of Stalin's, when talking to a Chinese diplomat during the Korean War, sums it up. Talking of the North Koreans, he said:
"What have they got to lose, except the lives of their own men?"

This was the legacy that Stalin, the "Godfather" of Bolshevism, left the Soviet Union. When he died early in 1953, the jostling for power began immediately. Beria was killed; others were discredited. Khruschev, who was to take power after a period of transition, set about denigrating Stalin's record and distancing himself from his part in Stalin's thirty-year period of tyranny and terror. Of the millions affected by terror over the years of the Soviet Union, almost all of them occurred under Stalin's watch, and the majority of them during "The Terror". With Stalin dead, some semblance of sanity came to the government of the Soviet Union.

"Koba", the wolf, was dead. It seemed he had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of terror in all its guises.

Stalin and power: when "The Joker" became "The Boss" (1)

In my last article here, I talked about Josef Stalin's "early years": his time as a young ruffian in Tsarist Georgia, becoming a "Bolshevik" underworld kingpin/terrorist (as a pseudo-"Joker"-like character from "The Dark Knight"), and his status at the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution.

I ended with how he manipulated his political situation with his rivals to gain power after Lenin's death. But the struggle for supremacy of the Bolsheviks by Stalin itself reads like a political, no-holds-barred version of "The Godfather", and began once Stalin was released from exile just as the Tsarist government fell.

During the nine months of the democratically-minded "Provisional Government" in 1917, Lenin was aiming for a Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was the real "practical" face of the Bolsheviks, however, as he was responsible for organising and carrying out much of the terror. The Bolsheviks were seen by their opponents (i.e. the rest of the civilised world) as little short of ruthless criminals and amoral terrorists hiding behind a pseudo-philosophy: and although Lenin and the other emigres were the intellectual head of the movement, Stalin was its living, beating heart, keeping all its various organs in check and moving according to plan. During 1917, it was Stalin who showed how invaluable an asset he was to Lenin: keeping him safe in a number of safe-houses that were under Stalin's control, even organising Lenin's temporary escape to Finland when the heat was getting too much from the Provisonal Government. In other words, in those nine months, while Stalin was demonstrating his reliability and loyalty to Lenin and the cause, it also showed how reliant Lenin was at the time to Stalin's charity - and this was also a subtle game of power over Lenin.

Once in power, the Bolsheviks had to fight to maintain power, and the resulting Civil War lasted mainly from the end of 1917 to the end of 1920 (the last pockets of fighting was mopped up in 1923). During those few years on fighting, which caused appalling damage to the already-traumatised Russian economy, as well as killing millions of civilians directly or indirectly, the Bolshevik army under Trotsky at first relied on the expertise of former Tsarist officers. Stalin, in his first move to undermine Trotsky (who was seen as a possible successor to Lenin), went against this order while defending Tsaritsyn (later called Stalingrad) against the anti-Bolshevik forces. He trained his own army, promoting Bolsheviks who were loyal to him, and by the end of the war had upstaged Trotsky.
 Stalin in the Civil War, continuing his ruthless and amoral approach and applying it to warfare, killed many former Tsarist officers, as well as deserters and those who he deemed unreliable. He also waged war against peasants, burning villages as punishment or to prevent other forces from utilising the countryside. Let loose on the the warring nation,  Stalin was at war with anyone and everyone, like a force of nature.

When the war was finally settled, "Koba" (his Georgian nickname, meaning wolf), turned to cunning manipulator. Having already undermined Trotsky, he sided with two other anti-Trotsky rivals and Lenin allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, to ensure that when Lenin died in early 1924, he had their approval to become the new leader. He then turned on Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1926, discrediting them in favour of the so-called moderate "Rightists". Soon afterwards, he ditched his support for the "Rightists", and discredited their leaders in government, Bukharin and Rykov. Stalin reversed Lenin's moderate agricultural policy that had been supported by the "Rightists", instead enforcing collectivisation, and by 1928, had declared war the the entire Russian peasantry.
By the time he had reached his fiftieth birthday in December 1929, when he was declared as the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union by his ministers, he had destroyed any real rivals in government by discrediting both sides of his party, as well as declared war on the peasants through collectivisation. This "war" against Russian farmers (kulaks), killed millions through a combination of terror and famine (and lasted for more than three years), the Ukraine with almost Biblical scenes of suffering, affected the worst.

In late 1932, while the self-inflicted famine still ongoing, Stalin's wife committed suicide. From this point onward, Stalin began to lose much of what have been called his earlier so-called "humanity". Stalin had three children, though for much of his life he treated them abysmally.
The eldest, his son Yakov (to his first wife, who had died in 1905), went on to fight with distinction (and fatherly pride) in the Second World War, was captured by the Nazis and died by hurling himself onto an electric fence in a Nazi POW camp. The Nazis wanted to swap Yakov for Field Marshal Paulus, but Stalin refused on principle.
The son and daughter he had to his second wife, called Vasili and Svetlana, were less lucky. Vasili grew to be an insecure, Caligula-like figure in Stalin's "court": constantly drunk, lewd and with a sexual appetite to match, he was responsible though his recklessness for the deaths of many, his crass behaviour and wild parties legendary. A trained pilot, he was famous for his drunken airborne antics, including mock dive-bombing Tblisi in one particular episode. Svetlana, the apple of her father's eye, was a victim to Stalin's deep-rooted insecurities, like the daughter of a Mafia Don, suffering for years while any man she became acquainted with was in danger of being killed (many were).
Worse was the fact that during "The Terror" (see below), many of the members of Stalin's wives families were either arrested, deported or killed on Stalin's orders.

Here was the other thing worth mentioning about Stalin: he openly thought of Ivan The Terrible as his template for governance. Massacring the nobles was what Stalin respected about Ivan The Terrible, only Stalin thought he should go further. During Politburo meetings, Stalin would doodle sketches of wolves, an animal he clearly identified with, as his nickname "Koba" (wolf) suggests. When reviewing the cases of those "suspects" brought for questioning, he would often write notes in the margins to encourage further torture; his gallows sense of humour was notorious. There had been sporadic campaigns of terror from 1930 onwards, but they paled in comparison to "The Terror".

Then there was "The Terror"(1937-39). One of Stalin closest and trusted allies, Kirov, was killed in suspicious circumstances, in December 1934. Having been "inspired" by Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives", Stalin saw this as an opportunity to rid the party completely of threats to his leadership, and made Hitler's purge seem pathetically-modest by comparison. Shortly after Kirov's death, the two thirtysomethings who would be the main administrators of "The Terror", Yezhov and Beria (who also a Georgian, like Stalin), were promoted. By now, of the "old guard" that had been there since the beginning, only Stalin loyalists were left in the Politburo, with Yezhov and Beria the "bright young things" deemed the new generation, and ultra-loyal to Stalin, sharing his blood lust.

By the end of 1938, with "The Terror" almost two years old, the "Show Trials" that had followed Kirov's murder had led to a purging of the party on an industrial scale: there were monthly quotas agreed by Stalin that each province of the USSR were to meet. The monthly quota for each province was often in the tens of thousands: of those arrested by the quota, many were later killed. And some provinces regularly went over their quota just to affirm their loyalty to the cause. "The Terror" extended into the minorities; ethnic Poles and Germans the worst affected. Worst of all, the military was seen by Stalin to be especially untrustworthy, so around half of the military leadership were either arrested, deported or killed. Even the judges at some of the trials were later killed. And in the ultimate irony, Yezhov, the main administrator of "The Terror", was implicated by his understudy, Beria and killed. The madness of blood had come full circle.

Continue to Part Two here