“Maybe I’ll say something that someone might dislike, but that’s the way I see it,” Putin said in an interview for the docuмentary Valaam, an excerpt of which was broadcast on Russia 1. “First of all, faith has always accompanied us, becoming stronger every time our country, our people, have been through hard times.

“There were those years of militant atheism when priests were eradicated, churches destroyed, but at the same time a new religion was being created. Communist ideology is very similar to Christianity, in fact: freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice – everything is laid out in the Holy Scripture, it’s all there. And the code of the builder of communism? This is sublimation, it’s just such a primitive excerpt from the Bible, nothing new was invented.”

Putin went further by comparing the Communists’ attitude to the Bolshevik leader Lenin to the veneration of saints in Christianity. “Look, Lenin was put in a mausoleum. How is this different from the relics of saints for Orthodox Christians and just for Christians? When they say that there’s no such tradition in Christianity, well, how come, go to Athos and take a look, there are relics of the saints there, and we have holy relics here,” Putin concluded.

On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the seizure of state governments by America’s homegrown neofascist movement with the historian Paul Street.

The creeping homegrown Christianized fascism that is steadily gaining power in the United States is most evident not in Washington but in state-level politics. Some 150 million Americans live in fully or mainly “red states,” where state politics and policy are completely or largely in the hands of a neofascist Republican party. There are 22 states where Republicans control the governorship and legislatives bodies. There are 15 states where the Democratic party controls the governorship and legislative bodies. And there are 13 states with divided governments. In the “red” states such as Texas and Florida, laws are being passed to suppress voting, outlaw abortion, forbid honest discussion of white systemic racism in public education, ban local governments and school districts from enforcing minimum wage ordinances, prohibit local vaccine and mask mandates, cut pandemic-related unemployment benefits, reject federal Medicaid dollars to help the poor receive health care, and persecute undocuмented workers and their families. The nation’s most retrograde corporate political funders and operatives – the Koch-backed “fifth column” culprits in historian Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains – have long focused heavily on politics and policy at the state level. State politics, with the collapse of the local press and its consolidation by a handful of corporations, is an easy mark. It is rarely covered and almost never in-depth. Corporations, for relatively small costs, can buy the loyalty of state officials and banish those who do not do their bidding. What is happening, as the historian Paul Street writes, is that in the white-nationalist “flyover” states, Republican neofascists are hard-wiring these jurisdictions to orchestrate this creeping coup with Leninist discipline.

Paul Street is the author of 10 books including his latest Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement. He also writes regularly for Counterpunch where he published a recent column headlined “What Happens in the Red States.”

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CH: Welcome to On Contact.  Today we discuss the seizure of state governments by America’s homegrown neo-fascist movement with the historian, Paul Street.

PS: Their opposition to abortion was intimately related to a much broader overall fascistic worldview about just about everything, people are.  And the connecting link in all of this was personal responsibility.  They kept going on and on about personal responsibility.  Poor people are poor because they’re lazy.  There’s also this under text of inferior.  They even view COVID at the level of just a completely personal level.  They blame people for getting COVID.  It’s a personal responsibility issue.  They are obsessed with the notion that anytime the government ever steps in to help anyone, welfare programs, or pro union legislation, or public health mandates, that that is a socialist, Marxist, totalitarian assault on personal responsibility.