TAT’s New Year’s resolutions, 2024…
TAT’s New Year’s resolutions, 2024…
TAT followers and other readers,
A couple of days ago, on the way home from visiting my son and his family, including two of the four cutest grandchildren on the planet. I began fine tuning what TAT needed to accomplish this critical year of 2024. Those thoughts led me to acknowledge that, everything I write about, is not only to ensure a more secure and higher quality life for my children and grandchildren, but for all of the children and grandchildren around the world. I was raised to not only pursue a life committed to the greater good, but to act on those beliefs. This is how TAT came to be and will continue to be in this coming year.
Everything I write throughout the year is about sharing truth, in order to support all that our children, grandchildren and fellow citizens need to survive and thrive in an ever more complicated and all too often, dangerous world. Today, I will talk about a few of my focuses as 2024 beckons us all, to a new and hopefully better world. It won’t happen by accident and so, I plan to wear out this old keyboard, in order to do my part. I hope that all of you and those you care deeply about, will join me by reading TAT, sharing it and better yet, acting on the truths that are the core of my efforts.
Below will be a few of the focus areas that TAT will speak directly to in 2024. These areas are key to managing the exhaustive list of threats to our nation, our allies and in fact, the globe. Underpinning ever single threat is the issue of influence. Not one objective in the US National Security Strategy can be achieved unless we as a nation and among our allies, are proficient in influence. Please remember this as you read through the sections. This topic alone, will be the focus of my book, coming out in the Spring.
Also remember as we keep influence at the core of all topics, that for the past 40 plus years, the US and allied national security communities such as NATO, have be a failure in the profession of ethical influence, offensively and defensively. In my professional opinion, this is our most critical vulnerability. After all, the near catastrophe imposed on Americans and the free world during and since our 2016 election, is now an even more acute threat and underpins every category in the list of focus areas.
Onward
Focus area #1, Narrative Warfare
The coming year will be pivotal for most everyone on the planet. Elections are on everyone’s minds, and this means a great deal is at stake, not only in the US but in many nations around the world. This is especially true in those nations that make the decisions that can support or imperil all of us. In all elections now, influence plays a key role and this year with stakes so high, it will be what we call within our Think/ Do Tank, Narrative Strategies, Narrative Warfare. To make this more digestible, when you see the words Narrative Warfare, we’re talking about professionally managed influence and at the highest level, of the art and science of influence.
Narrative Warfare, when well understood and campaigned with by professionals, is how we project our true values and defend them from the most heinous global leaders. During the Cold War, we did both and just like the Cold War, Narrative Warfare will determine the fate of billions of global citizens. It is incumbent for all of us to do our part to separate truth from the conspiracy theories wielded like weapons of war, by dictators, genocidal brutes, authoritarians and their enablers like oligarchs, regardless of which nation they hail from. We must also learn to deny media, masquerading as news outlets, the freedom to maneuver as legit sources.
The reason that NW is first on the list is for the very simple reason, that making decisions, whether on policy, voting, being knowledgeable on issues etc. is the key element of every single threat, regarding ours and the globe’s, security. If we don’t understand how we make decisions, we cannot possibly know how to protect ourselves from what is termed, malign influence. Or in other words, when we are being influenced by those who would diminish US and common human values in order to support some nefarious and in Putin and Xi’s cases, genocidal global powers, the threat to freedom grows exponentially. The term used in national security for a nation, committed to its true values and well defended from bad influence, is resilience.
Our resilience has been sliding precipitously downward towards our now, all-time Trump era low, since Newt Gingrich and Jerry Falwell launched their “immoral majority” assault on truth, several presidents ago. In the Trump era, our resilience has degenerated to the point that it has been insufficient to protect our nation from Putin, Oligarchs (Russian or otherwise) and MAGA and a decade’s worth of global, far-right extremism. At the core of this disintegration of true American values is WCN or White Christian Nationalism or often shortened to just CN or Christian Nationalism.
Theocracy and democracy are nowhere close to being the same thing. Also, the WCN being espoused and imposed on all US citizens, is much the same as Russian, right wing ideology and now the core element of the US Republican Party’s theocratic nonsense, intended to destroy our republic and replace it with a state not unlike Iran or Afghanistan.
If we cannot agree on our most basic democratic principles, our resilience has little or no chance to recover. If it does not recover, the very strength of our national resilience, becomes a has-been.
The relationship between Christian nationalism and anti-democratic attitudes has a long history in this country. Limiting access to voting and employing violence in order to disrupt the democratic process are not aberrations. After the Civil War and throughout the years of Jim Crow, Christian leaders routinely provided the theological arguments needed to rationalize limiting Black Americans’ access to participation in the democratic process. They explicitly tied these efforts to their desire to protect the purity of a “Christian” nation. Consider the most infamous articulation of Christian nationalism’s anti-democratic goals from Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Moral Majority. In an oft-repeated 1980 speech to a group of evangelical leaders, Weyrich explained: “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome―good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Even then Weyrich was aware that a democracy with free and open elections threatened the likelihood of white, culturally conservative Christians maintaining privileged access to the levers of power. The takeaway was obvious: make it more difficult for the political opposition―non-conservatives, but implicitly racial and ethnic minorities―to vote. - Excerpt - Time Magazine - BY ANDREW WHITEHEADMAY 27, 2021 Whitehead (@ndrewwhitehead) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at IUPUI and author of the forthcoming book, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church. He is co-author (with Samuel Perry) of the award-winning book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.
All religious freedom is endangered in the US these days, because the GOP is attempting to impose WCN on everyone. Here in Texas, this is codified in the Texas GOP’s, 2022 Platform. Their platform is very much the same as the national GOP ideology.
The only way to recover the resilience that is at the core of protecting ourselves from foreign and domestic influence, is to rebuild our connection to our actual core, American values while simultaneously demonstrating that the fake patriotism of the current GOP is based on fake national values, like guns, God and Trump.
We must also concurrently, just as during the Cold War, lead our diplomacy with the values of Western Liberal Democracy. Democracy is the US calling card, more than any other specific issue. If we learn how to project ourselves in this manner, we will once again defeat the powers pushing far-right authoritarianism.
The problem with doing these things is that the US and NATO national security communities, refuse to relearn ethical influence. They are obsessed with technology solutions only and this is about as helpful as poking yourself in the eye with your own finger. I have darn near worn the fingerprints off of my fingers writing about this failure but won’t stop until they begin to hear and pursue reality. They need to begin by listening to operators and academics who “get it” rather than exclusively to researchers who have never once, operated in the real world of national security.
Topics you will see from this category:
Extremism, violent and threatening in other ways such as:
Candidates and issues that undermine US national security and our constitution.
Terrorism, domestic and otherwise such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Neo-Nazism, MAGA, Hindutva, etc.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing by thugs like Xi, Putin, a handful of African movements, the military Junta in Myanmar, Azerbaijan’s, Putin-inspired assault on Armenia etc.
The RBIO or Rules-Based, International Order
Whether you live in a city, small town, farm or ranch, communities require rules that best treat their citizens equitably. This is what the RBIO has meant to the world for nearly 80 years. The old Soviet and Chinese communist parties attempted to attempted and failed to replace the RBIO with their own, authoritarian communism. Today, communism really does not exist anywhere and is not a threat to anyone. The only remaining officially “communist nation” is China and they are communist, in name only.
The current threat trend, just like the late 1920’s and 30’s is extreme-right-wing governments with some sort of religious nationalism at their core. Most are WCN or CN but then there is Modi’s India whose radical Hindu party operates on a Hindu version of WCN, called “Hindutva.”
The BJP is an electoral front for the “Sangh Parivar”—a consortium of Hindu Nationalist outfits who firmly believe in a religion-based political ideology, or “Hindutva,” which seeks an exclusive homeland for Hindus. Under this framework, other religious communities can only maintain a second-class citizenship. The surge in Hindu nationalism, guided by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—a right-wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation founded in 1925—has exacerbated the vulnerabilities of religious minorities. Founding members of the RSS, like Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar and Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, drew inspiration from the ideologies of Mussolini and Hitler, advocating the supremacy of their respective races through the annihilation of “other” impure races and cultures. They referred to Christians and Muslims as “internal threats.” - By Dr S. Khan -Vulnerabilities of Religious Minorities in India: Unmasking the Impact of Rising Hindu Nationalism - Australian Institute of International Affairs - 18 AUG 2023
Religious forms of Nationalism are a threat to the RBIO and largely because they are tools of manipulation used by authoritarian thugs like Putin, Xi, Trump/ MAGA, Modi, Orban’, the Saudis, Iran etc. The intent of all authoritarians is simple… it is the acquisition of power for the sake of power. No authoritarian nation has ever, throughout history been benevolent to their citizens or the citizens of nations that they controlled. They attempt to control every aspect of life within their spheres of control. Things like religion, education, business, courts and law enforcement and military resources are their tools of procuring obedience from their citizens.
Whether we like it or not, the world is globalized. Most nations depend on commerce, natural resources, labor and IP (intellectual property) from other nations or regions of the world. It is the RBIO that tends to keep the globe from becoming a series feudal kingdoms run by thuggish lords. Yes, there is also a strong, misogynistic element to all forms of nationalism. Women do very poorly in nations under the spell of nationalist fervor. In other words, the only people with all of the rights within an authoritarian nation are men, regurgitating the “party line” and are responsive to the wants, needs and desires of the dictatorial thug, sitting on the throne of an authoritarian nation.
Throughout the year, I will spend a great deal of time writing about men like Putin, Xi, Orban, Modi and the intended expansion of BRICs. The anti-western alignment of the nations joining BRICS, puts the RBIO at increased risk. All have strong relations with Russia and China. They all love the dollar but with China a driving force, replacing the dollar as a global currency is but one of their intentions. Other intentions include replacing the RBIO as the definitive global order. Xi’s China dream is his ultimate cause and having more nations aligned, solidifies his BRI/ Belt and Road concept of global conquest by 2049.
The bottom line to this category, is that maintaining and improving the RBIO is essential to sustaining a world less threatened by the current threat of right-wing-extremism and its associated authoritarians.
Topics that you hear about under this category are but not limited to:
Putin
Ukraine
Xi
China
Right wing extremism
NATO
OAS, Organizacion de Los Estados Americanas or Organization of American States, The EU, ASEAN and the African Union
The final category will be mostly a miscellaneous grouping of threats that don’t fit into either of the two above and often will be about domestic issues leading up to our election in November. Separating fact from the fiction of the MAGA crowd and what their actions and inactions mean to US and global security.
An example would be how the GOP refuses to fund Ukraine’s fight for not only their survival but that of NATO and the free world. As it pertains to an acute and potentially imminent threat, today’s MAGA GOP is at the top of my list. I’m not just talking about theocratic nationalism and hard to perceive threats to our constitution and republic, but to the lives of US citizens and our allies fighting real wars in places like Israel and Russia.
You will also hear about the threat of oligarchism, corporate and individual. Examples are how big oil threatens our planet and manipulates our political system to make murdering our planet, more profitable to only them. Another is how SCOTUS imperils our republic with their pro-business/ anti-citizen agenda that enables oligarchism, authoritarian rule and the imposition of the court’s religious values on US citizens. The Roberts’ court is now the pinnacle of disgrace for all historical Supreme Courts.
You’ll read how Congress has become the enablers of big money lobbyists that prevent healthcare comparable to the rest of the civilized world, enables big pharma, oil, insurance, airlines and so many other special interests. We, the citizens who understand our democracy and the history of our founders and nation, could hardly be more disappointed in how lobbyists are undermining all that people like; John Adams, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and more, foresaw for our new republic. Concurrently, they dishonor all of the millions of men and women who have sacrificed so much to sustain their hopes and dreams.
Finally, you will likely hear ad nauseum, about the need for Civics and history classes in public school, not the vouchers that promote CN at taxpayer expense and the historical revisionism of the GOP. History is not ours to manipulate, it is to learn where we come from so that we can go further in expanding the achievements of morality and our national values.
As most of you know by now, I have broken with family tradition in the Trump era. I was raised to never talk about politics and religion in public. To me, I still do not but most consider many of the topics that I write about, political. I personally consider them national security but either way, I will not continue to speak out in favor of US and human values. It is how I was raised, and I will not shirk my duty. Those of you who have followed TAT this past year, already know this and I am beyond grateful for your continued support. To those just now joining or sharing with your friends, families and colleagues, welcome.
Let’s all work together to make 2024 a year of progress for our true national and human values. I always appreciate those who share, and I implore you in 2024, to share more often when you feel these essays worthy of your support.
Onward
Paul