BRUCE LERRO—In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither. Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia. For political and economic reasons, I disagree with Nicholas Berdyaev’s characterization of the Russian “soul” as conflicted spiritually between Dionysian paganism and ascetism or politically between anarchism and despotism. However, what Berdyaev is right about is that Russians are not bourgeois.
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JIM KAVANAGH—The Jesuits were formed as the vanguard of the Counter-Reformation and have historically been attached to reactionary politics, but the order is also highly adaptable to the changes in social ideology, while maintaining a consistent commitment to educating the future elite. By the time I was in high school, some good men like Daniel Berrigan, were teaching smart students to see the world through lenses of intellectual and moral honesty, helping them lapse to the left. Like Fidel, who said the Jesuits who ran the high school he attended, “influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline and their values. … They influenced my sense of justice.”
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JIMMY DORE—For five years as a CIA officer in the 1970s, Frank Snepp worked as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief strategy analyst in the United States Embassy in Saigon. He later became a whistleblower and, during a 1983 interview recently tweeted out by Edward Snowden, Snepp explained in detail how he and his CIA colleagues used to plant false stories about the Vietnam War with targeted top-tier American journalists, all in an effort to influence public opinion and legislation in Congress. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss how in Snepp’s time the CIA had to use guile to get journalists to spread propaganda whereas today intelligence operatives are invited to do so directly from the pages of the New York Times or the set of CNN and MSNBC studios.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—Xi contends that in these past 5 years the CPC strategically advanced China while “correctly” (Party terminology) responding to all foreign challenges. Particularly key achievements include poverty alleviation, the normalization of Hong Kong, and progress in diplomacy and national defense.
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BRIAN BERLETIC—The US-backed opposition in Thailand replicates in many ways the violence and intimidation the US sponsored in Ukraine from 2014 onward – just as Ukraine is meant as a proxy against Russia – a US client regime in Thailand would transform the country into a proxy against China. An alarming incident of violence where a Thai opposition leader publicly assaulted his critic is dangerously being portrayed as “heroic” by Western-sponsored opposition media to encourage further violence and intimidation – creating the same division and destruction throughout Thai society that is currently consuming Ukraine.
