Putin, Rockefellers and Trump

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Life and profession have accustomed me to a reasonable sufficiency of explanations. If one can make do with simple and obvious, there is no point in burdening the complicated. In science, this principle is called the Occam blade, and in everyday life my American friends say, "If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck".

I had to think about that when I was working on a text about who really rules America. Many of us, for some reason, refuse to believe that President Joe Biden, who is on the threshold of his 80th birthday and who clearly finds it difficult to move and talk without stuttering at times, is actually holding the reins of power unaided. And I wrote my text in response to questions about "who is behind it".   

No "behind the scenes"

Immediately disappoint the fans of conspiracy: no "world behind the scenes", a secret global power that supposedly rules everyone everywhere, including the United States, I do not believe. Any authority needs "power belts", that is, performers, at least partially initiated into the essence of what is happening. And as it was said in the cult Soviet film about the scouts "Seventeen Moments of Spring", "Was wissen Zwei, wisst Schwein" ("what the two know and the pig", old German folk wisdom).

And from our American journalistic friends  experience, I am also convinced that all the secrets are becoming clear - sooner rather than later. Especially when information can be, what is called, cashed, that is profitable to sell. And just for that, all the conditions have been created overseas: everything is being reproduced and put up for sale - from Mein Kampf ("My Struggle", Adolf Hitler’s manifesto) to "Communist Party Manifesto" and "Protocols of Zion Sages" - only bought. As far as I know, in the history of the White House, there have never been owners who have not tried unsuccessfully to combat information leaks, including the most confidential. Or to take another reason: summits, which I in my long reporter’s life have seen dozens, if not hundreds. If it is not Biden who is really in charge of America, why do the leaders of, say, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia deal with him in the US?

Or do they all, so different, dance to the same music, ordered from a single center? And who or what is there, in this centre? The notorious Bilderberg Club? (Many of those who are called permanent members, I met personally; these are ordinary people who, if they have a voice in big politics, only have a deliberative voice.) The Vatican? (When America elected its first and last Catholic President, John Kennedy, before Biden last century, there was a lot of buzz about not allowing prelates to seduce him.) Masons? (Personally encountered them, but in museums, Nina Berberova, who wrote a book about them, talked.) Aliens?

Finally, to refer to some higher power, supposedly standing behind the backs of real leaders, I am simply not interested as a journalist. So you can "justify" anything, without really explaining anything - from geopolitical shifts to pandemic. As the astronomer Pierre-Simon de Laplace told Napoleon Bonaparte, "I did not need this hypothesis". The same Occam razor.

"He’s an orphan here Aside from reasoning. 

In the West, such people are referred to as the Cardinals of the Realm - after the famous monk Father Joseph looming over Cardinal Richelieu’s shoulder when he actually ruled France under Louis XIII. The 41st President of the United States, George Bush, the eldest, once made an awkward joke that under his son’s administration, the real power broker in the White House was the second Lady of the United States, Lynn Cheney, not her husband, the vice president.

I can say with absolute certainty that the White House itself in those years did not tolerate such jokes and did not allow. Moreover, when I negotiated with Bush-son’s aides about his presidential interview for TASS and inquired about the possibility of a separate additional meeting with his father, I was jokingly told, but firmly, "He is an orphan here". In other words, even his father’s shadow was politically unacceptable to him - even though he had a good team as a parent.

As the subject was kept under the radar, I asked many times the most experienced and knowledgeable colleagues in the American presidential pool, including the legendary Helen Thomas, how independent a junior Bush is. There is no doubt about this or any reference to Cheney’s alleged special role. By the way, Bush, the father, and himself behaved towards the son-president with the utmost correctness and tried to stay in the background. This was conspicuous, for example, at the Russian-American summit held in 2007 at the seaside manor of Bush senior in Kennebunkport.

Are the Rockefellers up to date? Or here's another episode: on the same topic, also from personal experience, but from a different angle. Remember the funny pictures from the Runet where Jacob Rothschild and David Rockefeller were supposedly celebrating the signing of a secret protocol to increase the cost of travel on Tver routes? So three decades ago, that same Rockefeller once welcomed me to the headquarters of his family clan in New York (in a nearby skyscraper was the agency The Associated Press, from which TASS rented a room for its office) to talk about family charity. It was the only subject he agreed to discuss.

We didn’t have the Internet in the current sense, but we had one of its prototypes in the form of a LexisNexis search engine, whose database I, preparing for the conversation, thoroughly searched. Noticing my knowledge, Rockefeller wondered how I knew so much about his family. And having heard the reference to the source, strictly asked the assistant: they say, and we have such a system? That bravo said that there was a search engine and that the charitable fund was keeping up with the times.

Name magic, of course, exists - that’s why I asked to be interviewed. But still as you wish, and I could not and can not imagine my interlocutor at the time in the role of the behind-the-scenes ruler of the world and the Tver routes. At least no more than Biden, whom we all now see. 

I myself, by the way, am following him with sympathy, because, firstly, I remember him as a young, energetic and talkative senator, and secondly, I had the opportunity to witness firsthand how the owners of the White House grow old in general. That’s why there are so many funny jokes about how the president’s teleprompter controls the country.

How to prove a negative

I myself, I repeat, prefer to think that Biden is the master of himself and his administration. But at the same time I am well aware that sceptics who believe otherwise, I still do not convince. In my experience, people generally live by faith, not by facts, and above all by those who deny faith. As I have long formulated for myself, some know that they believe, and others (usually "advanced" and mostly liberal) believe that they do. And of course, with such faith in their own minds, they can’t be bulldozed.

Especially when it comes to proving something that isn’t real or something that isn’t. Well, I mean, unicorns (or secret world government) don’t happen, or that you’re not a camel. In English, this is called to prove a negative, and the problem is considered almost insoluble. Experienced press secretaries reject questions in this form from the door.

Conspiracy president

So it’s essentially impossible to debunk conspiracy theories about who rules the world, and America in particular. But can we then at least try to understand why the doubts about this have blossomed now, on what they rely? Is it only the apparent senility of a sitting US president? In fact, if so, it can be considered as a coincidence of historical circumstances. Well, they voted for a cute "Uncle Joe," and he, as they say, didn’t live up to trust, didn’t pull...

In my view, the answer is obvious: of course, it’s not just Biden. No matter how low he was now judged by his compatriots (and his poll results were undoubtedly disappointing), only two years ago he seemed to his supporters, first of all to his fellow Democrats, but also to many "independent" central voters, almost saving the country from Republican President Donald Trump. He was openly demonised by the political opposition, which regarded him as almost a usurper, and he himself in turn just fanned conspiracy theories: first of all, an implacable deep bureaucratic underground, the so-called Deep State (Deep State)And then the alleged stolen election victory.

All this, of course, was known to the interlocutors better than mine. But the whining, mutual irritation, and even bitterness between Americans of different views did not subside, but increased. Under Trump, things went so far as to seriously discuss the possibility of civil war and split the country into "red" (republican, conservative) and "blue" (democratic, liberal) America. The threat of impeachment of senior officials from an emergency became almost commonplace: Trump was impeached twice in a row, under Biden after a recent US Supreme Court decision on abortion began to impeach judges.

The main reason for all this, as I wrote in the previous text, I see in one thing: after the dissolution of the USSR, the Americans decided that now the devil is not their brother, and went to all sorts of trouble. Caused crises at home and abroad. Now we are being dished out and trying to understand what America will be and what role it will play in the new multipolar world that is emerging before our eyes.

Our prominent economist Alexander Auzan, with whom I discussed these issues the other day, sees the systemic origin of the current troubles in the US in changing the pattern of immigration. They say that people used to go there mostly for freedom and opportunities for self-realization, and now - in expectation of getting social care of the rich country. The motivation is fundamentally different, involving different types of relations between power and society and different visions of the future. But he agreed that, in recent decades, the struggle over those models across the ocean had escalated into a crisis with no end in sight. That’s what I’m talking about.    

Earth on three elephants

Well, there are many reasons for controversy and contradiction. So, literally, when these lines were written, I had a bell ring in my office box. In particular, it showed that, in the opinion of every third Russian, the Sun revolves around.