The Unprecedented Protection Afforded Aristocrats
How Modern-Day Monarchists Allow Bad Men to Thrive
While in both jail and prison, I saw my share of actual violence, although, predictably, violence was rarely used against those who most deserved it, i.e. the gang leaders who were often behind its perpetration. Rather, the elite of the yards enjoyed a measure of immunity reminiscent of royalty, proving once again what superb microcosms prisons often make.
Incarceration also affords one oodles of time to read, write, and study, and I was a liberal arts type of autodidact. What my immersion in history taught me is that the main objectives of both the American and French Revolutions was to eliminate aristocracies.
They both failed. Mostly.
Based on the reason, rationality, and scientific empiricism of The Enlightenment, the idea behind both revolutions was to afford the general populace the same natural rights enjoyed by the wealthy. This concept took root in America and was especially effective at separating church from state. But the U.S. Constitution never addressed the income gap. Quite the contrary; white male property holders were the only citizens allowed to vote. Indeed, the founders were aristocrats almost to a man, many of whom sneeringly viewed the general populace as an unruly mob incapable of rational thought, which was why they allowed only landowners to vote. And although we’ve striven to exorcise this kind of thinking (even though the mob mentality has proven somewhat prophetic; too many voters rely on mawkish populism over reason), both the aristocracy and its obligatory income inequality remain intact – a datum which is even more obvious in global politics.
I’ll return to this presently, but first, there is an art-of-war reason for the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7; to scuttle the peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia – the latter of which wallows in aristocracy thanks to a dynasty of blue-blooded Yankees posing as latter day Texans. Moreover, the assault on Israel has the sinister stink of Iran (which is also an autocratic aristocracy) all over it, and the Iranians and the Saudis, for various reasons, hate each other. But even if the mullahs in Iran are not directly involved in October 7th, they still fund both Hamas and Hezbollah, and for these reasons alone they should be dealt with severely.
There are undeniably other motives for the violence in Israel, including old fashioned terrorism as well as prisoner swaps – in 2011, for instance, the Israelis exchanged 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier. That’s some powerful negotiating with terrorists, although I possess neither the authority nor the judiciousness to offer criticism, let alone a solution.
What I do know is that the Iranian mullahs are allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin, although, oddly, we don’t call Putin a terrorist; neither murderer nor kidnapper nor thief even after he committed the first two on Alexi Navalny and countless others. He also, sometime earlier, stole an entire peninsula from Ukraine in what can loosely be described as an armed robbery. But because he’s a world leader aka aristocrat, we use the word annexed. Sounds much more innocuous even as Putin is currently using kidnapping, terror, and murder in an attempted armed annexing of the rest of Ukraine, and this while Trump and his cadre of nabobs egg him on.
A military man, former KGB agent and hardline communist, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin made his bones in East Berlin, where he never quite got over its collapse or the subsequent dissolution of his beloved Soviet Union, especially those countries that had declared their independence, hence the armed robberies and attempted armed robberies. In this he has a close ally in China’s Xi Jinping, another communist aristocrat with an eye on stealing Taiwan.
Both, of course, would shun the oxymoronic term communist aristocrat just as they would robber barons. But communist aristocrats like Putin and Jinping are indeed alive, thriving, imprisoning, and murdering with impunity, including Kim Jong un in North Korea, Raul Castro in Cuba, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. All are great friends and collaborate on victimizing their citizens with crimes like land grabs, the aforementioned armed robbery, and the occasional junior genocide.
Likewise, Western World leaders have been tacitly acknowledging Putin’s aristocracy by schmoozing and breaking bread with him (along with Jinping) during G20 summits and other events, but none more fawningly than Trump, who’s done everything but fly up Putin’s ass and construct a nest to roost he and his brood in, and this only because Vlad prevented it. It really is a one-sided love affair, especially as Trump could not pull the United States out of NATO during his last reign. Instead, unabashed, he flew up the ass of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBL) of Saudi Arabia instead. Also known as Prince Bone Saw, MBL earned this moniker after he ordered the murder and dismemberment of United States resident and WaPo reporter Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. Despite (or perhaps because of this), Trump and his clutch have been cozied up there in a shitstorm of elitism – a nest of mendacious nobility which includes some professional golfers like Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, both of whom also fancy themselves modern-day royalty.
Funny how they pretend not to notice that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has very recently proven himself to be the quintessential aristocrat, his bitch Trump less so, the latter more a land baron. Both, however, (not to mention scads of their minions) court that America – our-shit-don’t-stink – first air and are absolutely, even gleefully content to quite literally pull food from the mouths of ordinary workers in developing countries like Mexico and China – because, you know, their standard of living is soooo astronomical when compared to our own – just so we can theoretically pay less for goods, and this not even mentioning the willful carnage they are inflicting on mainly women and children by withholding aid from still poorer countries in Africa and Asia.
Putin, meanwhile, tends daily to his own aristocratic flock, which includes Bashar al Assad of Syria, one of the world’s preeminent upper crusters. I know this because he is still alive and in exile in Moscow after he, with Putin’s help, committed genocide against his own people while three presidents, Obama, Trump, and Biden, did very little. Indeed, the title of a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) from last year says it all: “A Total of 230,224 Civilians Documented as Dead, including 15,275 Who Died due to Torture, 154,871 Arrested and/or Forcibly Disappeared, and Roughly 14 Million Syrians Displaced.”
Such statistics are depressingly, almost cavalierly, well known. I’d have served some time in po boy’s prison, I’m thinking, if I committed even a smidgen of such crimes.
My point is that the aristocracy of Putin and Assad manifests in the fact that they are both still alive and un-incarcerated; that their lives are obviously worth more to world leaders than the 14,385,095 alluded to above by SNHR; and that, crucially, the democratic west recognizes the patriciate of both Putin and, until quite recently, Assad (along with the rest of the silk stocking rabble) over the natural rights of all those Syrians, not to mention the rest of us.
And although the deaths are a feather in Putin’s aristocratic ass, it’s the ousted that gets him singing like a cuckoo. His main goal is to lay refugees like eggs in democracies in the hopes of destabilizing the latter. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2022, “over 12 million Syrians remained forcibly displaced.” He is still doing it in Venezuela, where near 8 million refugees have fled the country, 3 million of whom have settled in Colombia – an extraordinary burden on one of our staunchest allies. And let’s not forget 6.8 million (and counting) from Ukraine, and yet despite this colossal misery inflicted on people and country alike, Putin is not only still breathing – where’s Seal Team 6 when you fucking need them? – but rubbing our beaks in it.
It’s not like we are helpless. In September of 2011, a drone sent by President Obama killed American Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
He was obviously not an Aristocrat.
And in January of 2020, President Trump ordered the assassination of not-at-all-royal Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iran. My question is, if we can liquidate these men because they were terrorists, then why not Putin, Jong un, or even that little shit Maduro in Venezuela? The answer is that the world recognizes their aristocracy. Their eminence matters more, much more, than the literally millions of human beings who they have collectively murdered, tortured, incarcerated, and/or uprooted.
The Monarchist sympathizers will bring up two reasons why we can’t assassinate Putin and Jong un at least: international law and the fact of their nuclear weapons. My answer to the former, however, is fuck international law, just like we did for al-Awlaki and Soleimani and even bin Laden.
And as to the latter? well, nuclear-tipped missiles are the ultimate foreskin, are they not? An apropos crown adorning all those swollen heads. The idea that a world leader may retaliate with a nuclear strike provides said leaders an unprecedented level of protection, which is why rogue states like Iran desperately covet a nuclear arsenal. But this protection only exists because we allow it. Jong un has no nukes worth mentioning. And Putin is an oligarch who subsists on power and obscene amounts of wealth – more a czar than a commie. He’s not going to risk his own life by waging a nuclear war against Europe and the United States even if we were to use NATOs collective might to drive him out of Ukraine, which is what we should be doing. He’s too busy being a billionaire. As such, he’s neither stupid nor suicidal.
And if we were to simply assassinate him? Well, dead men launch no nukes, nor indeed much of anything else.