Banana Republics I Have Known
CAUTION: objects in mirror may be closer than they appear...
Here’s some names you may not be aware of. See if you can recognize what they all have in common.
Jimmy Lai-Hong Kong
Maria Corina Machado-Venezuela
Moreblessing Ali-Zimbabwe
Alexi Navalny-Russia
Juan Chamorro-Nicaragua
What could all these people, from these vastly different parts of the world all have in common? They are all political prisoners. In a nutshell, they are guilty of being the opposition to established pollical powers. None is demonstrably guilty of any real crime, only of calling out the corruption and abuse of power of the established ‘government.’ It’s ironic; getting arrested for calling out abuse of power is, in itself, proof of that abuse of power. No matter. Totalitarians sleep easily at night, with no regard for their blatant hypocrisy.
Jimmy Li has been proclaimed guilty of sedition and unlawful assembly.
Maria Corina Machado has been disqualified as a candidate for president by a ruling from the Venezuelan Supreme Court. The court’s claim is that she is guilty of corruption.
Moreblessing Ali is not being persecuted, anymore. She is dead. Murdered. Her lawyer, on the other hand, is under arrest for pursuing her case.
Alexei Navalny has been persecuted relentlessly by Vladimir Putin for the crime of running for president against him. Oh, wait; Navalny was arrested, tried, and convicted of ‘extremism’. With that conviction, Navalny is disqualified from running for president. Two of his lawyers have also been tried and convicted.
Juan Chamorro has been arrested in a wave of arrests of opposition candidates.
Derisively, countries in which the people in power persecute their political opposition are called banana republics. An incomplete list of such totalitarian countries includes Russia, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe. And, oh yes, the most recent addition, The United States of America.
No president, nor his supporters, have ever been subject to arrest and persecution strictly for their political beliefs ever before in the USA. That is not absolutely true. Communists were harassed in the 1950s, but no one was faced with arrest and long-term imprisonment. No individual communist was persecuted non-stop for eight solid years. NO candidate for president, being natural born and thirty-five years of age, has ever been denied the opportunity to run for president. Well, not since the nineteenth amendment, anyway.
No, this is all new to the USA. I am not surprised that a hundred or so scum could be found in Washington DC to pursue such a reprehensible agenda. What surprises me and saddens me to the core is that enough tens of millions of US citizens could be led by the nose into supporting this coup. Yes, coup. Most coups are ‘silent’ coups, achieved from within and without military action.Â
As the Soviet Union collapsed, a group of Russian oligarchs simply took over the government. There was no election, no nothing. They now have absolute control of Russia, with Putin as their head. No shots fired. Same for Venezuela, in which Hugo Chavez was legitimately elected, and then seized absolute control of the government by stuffing all the highest positions with his own cronies. Same for China, in which XI Jinping is now the absolute ruler for life.Â
In the USA, we have Joe Biden, who most of us agree was never smart enough to do much more than make a fool of himself. How did he end up being a candidate for president, much less winning? Maybe I’ll work on a deeper answer to that in a later post. For now, let’s presume that the people who made him president have no intention of ever yielding their power.
But what about all those laws that Trump broke?! You mean when he led an insurrection that NO prosecutor has ever claimed happened? The one in which NO one has been arrested, much less tried and convicted of insurrection? The one in which ten people WERE tried and convicted of seditious conspiracy. TEN. By some counts there were nearly half a million Trump supporters there that day. TEN. And they didn’t commit sedition, they CONSPIERED to commit sedition. That’s legalese for they talked about it but didn’t do it. So, on Jan 6, we have ten people talking about sedition. That’s it. Plus a riot. Yes, a riot.
Trump’s efforts to challenge the vote certification on that day were entirely legal. He’s not the first to do it. The certification process is there for a reason; it’s not ceremonial. It is the time when anyone can make their case challenging electors, which is what many have done before Trump did it. In fact, AFTER Trump’s challenge, Congress voted to insulate itself from such challenges. If what Trump did was illegal, then why did they need a new law, making it illegal? Where is the OLD law that made it illegal? There isn’t one.
Trump was never in any legal trouble until he left the presidency. At over seventy years old, Trump was suddenly proclaimed a criminal. The totalitarians now proclaim that he is guilty of over valuating his property. Why now? He’s owned property for over half a century. Why NOW?  Plus, no impartial, non-political assessment of his valuations has found anything improper or unusual. The banks that he ‘lied’ to have expressed no issue with his valuations.
He’s charged with attempting to throw the vote in Georgia, except that he didn’t. He believed that votes had been improperly handled, and he wanted missing ballots to be found. It is beyond question that, correct or incorrect, Trump believed (believes) that there are missing ballots. It is entirely legal to challenge a vote count for any reason. Nothing he did fell outside the law. Oh, and there’s Stacy Abrams, also of Georgia, who has made essentially the same claims concerning her own election, but has faced no charges. Why not?
Trump never attempted to sneak his records out of the White House. He considers them to be his records, just as Obama, Bill Clinton and both Bushes have claimed their WH records to be their own. They’ve never been challenged on it. Of course, Biden had no right to his records, because they weren’t his. Only the president can claim ownership of such records, and Biden was a senator and VP at the time. And we now have a prosecutor confirming what we knew all along; Biden is guilty concerning his records. But he won’t be prosecuted because he is too mentally unstable to prosecute. Huh?
But let’s back up to the beginning. Within days of his election, Hilary was conspiring openly with her cronies about having Trump removed, based on a 25th amendment ruling of incompetence. It was an absurdity, of course, but she would have done it if she could have gotten away with it. She went from there to the Trump/Russia collusion lie that SHE engineered. There was never a thought in her head that any of it was true. But she knew there were enough useful idiots that she could sell it wholesale. Remember that the Mueller investigation was charted to investigate Russian interference in the election, not just specifically of Trump. By rights, Hilary should have been examined with the same scrutiny, but that never happened. Mueller was unconcerned with the kickbacks to the Clintons from Russian oligarchs.
Then we have the first impeachment, in which a ‘whistleblower’ who had NO firsthand information claimed that Trump said impeachable things in a phone call that the whistleblower never heard. But, he claimed, ‘others’ who were party to the call told him of the things Trump said. Those ‘others’ denied having any such discussion with the ‘whistleblower’. So, what is claimed, concerning what Trump said? Do you know what the claims were? A lot of people don’t, yet they are sure he was guilty, based on nothing but a deep-seated hatred of the man. It was claimed that Trump talked to Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, about Biden family kickbacks in Ukraine. Well, if it’s true, why couldn’t Trump discuss it? Even if it WASN’T true, why couldn’t Trump discuss it? Can you explain?
Of course, Trump was impeached precisely because it WAS true. It was Pelosi’s way of killing two birds with one stone; distract people away from the Biden kickbacks, and refocus the useful idiots on their induced hatred of Trump.  Most people hadn’t cared that much about Trump, one way or the other, until he ran for president. Then the MSM got their marching orders from the oligarchs on high, and it was on. Denigrate Trump and his supporters at every opportunity. Treat us like vermin. Pretend that we can’t possibly be as smart and informed as all those useful idiots with their liberal arts degrees in political science, art history, revisionist history, and the like.
Now, here we are, eight years later, and the useful idiots are clamoring for the oligarchs to seize absolute control, just as they’ve done in China, in Russia, in Venezuela, in Zimbabwe, in Nicaragua, in a multitude of other countries.
And now, in the USA.
Don’t get me wrong; all these countries have elections. They just don’t matter. When the people in power arrest the opposition and subject them to incessant lawfare, that is the very definition of totalitarianism.
NOTE: I wrote this a few days ago, but today, Feb 16, 2024, Alexei Navalny has died. Putin will come up with some excuse, and probably eulogize with phony sympathy for what a true patriot Navalny was. Never forget, Navalny suffered from merciless persecution for many years. Putin murdered him, as sure as if he’d put a bullet in his head. Couldn’t happen here? Why not? What makes you so sure the US government is ever so much more principled than any other, and will always be so? The totalitarianism will stop, when YOU stop it.
Let me be the first to comment. There are various interpretations of who Alexei Navalny was. Was he a saint, working tirelessly to free Russia of Putin's oppression, or was he a less than desirable 'extremist' and swindler? The two are not mutually exclusive. He could have been both, and I haven't been able to sort through the politics to find essential truth. But I have no doubt that Putin would and did persecute Navalny for daring to go up against his organization. If I don't know all there is to know about Navalny, I know more than enough about Putin. He has destroyed any hope of a free Russia any time in the foreseeable future. And I know America. We are letting it slip away from us. Once it's gone, elections will mean nothing, just as they mean nothing in any banana republic. Challenging beliefs, removing yourself from your comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable. Well, tough. It is time, if you haven't already done so, to recognize that Washington politics is no longer about democracy, a republic, or any such. It is about raw power. If you trust in these people, you are damned FOOL.
"What surprises me and saddens me to the core is that enough tens of millions of US citizens could be led by the nose into supporting this coup. Yes, coup." - this saddens me, also. Trump is in harm's way.