The Potemkin Reflex

 

The ship was one of the navy’s pride, bearing the name of an esteemed statesman of its homeland. It served dutifully, carrying out its tasks with the professionalism and elan expected of its service’s long history. But morale had collapsed. The government had blundered into a war it assumed would be an easy victory over a weaker regional power — and it was not. Worse, conditions aboard the ship deteriorated under wartime stress so badly that even the food became unfit for consumption.

Eventually the situation grew so dire that the crew mutinied. They seized the ship and fled while loyalist vessels scrambled to hunt them down. It played out like something straight from The Hunt for Red October — except this time the sailors weren’t defecting to a better world. They were escaping misery.

That is the story of Potemkin, a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Russian Navy that mutinied during the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. You can watch these events recreated in Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's classic of world cinema, Battleship Potemkin. I encourage you to watch this short film...while you still can (I don't know anything; I am just speculating based on America's authoritarian trajectory):

For a moment, did you think I was referring to the USS Abraham Lincoln, the beleaguered aircraft carrier where the crew has been subjected to unspeakable hardships by an indifferent "Department of War"? That is an understandable mistake, seeing the remarkable similarities spanning the 121-years of history between the two vessels. Of course, Abraham Lincoln has not mutinied — nor is anyone suggesting it will — but in a time when a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual predator is the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces, nothing remains unthinkable.  But so far, the stunning incompetence of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth has not completely broken the American military establishment, and for that, the nation should be truly grateful. However, one has to wonder how much more our sailors can endure, especially in light of President Trump's recent flippancy that, after enduring a grueling 260-day deployment without a single port call, Lincoln had not been deployed "nearly long enough." It is a comment worthy of a Tsar. Just eat the maggoty meat and be grateful it's not also wormy, you seadogs!

Anyone who has been paying attention should not be surprised by the callous treatment this administration shows toward servicemen and women. After all, it has been reported that Trump described American service members as “suckers” and “losers,” and General John Kelly — his own Chief of Staff — has publicly stated that he had to explain to Trump what happened at Pearl Harbor because Trump was clueless about the past sacrifices of America's military. This is the same man who avoided the draft by claiming bone spurs, a condition that supposedly made marching impossible but never interfered with his ability to golf around the world. He would even joke about how avoiding STDs from his clubbing life was a personal Vietnam War. While I’m no expert in Tsarist Russia, I’m fairly certain even the most callow Russian princeling managed a better martial record than anything Trump ever achieved with the military. And, needless to say, recent reports of Trump hiding in a catering cart to avoid a suspected Iranian assassination attempt did nothing to improve his warrior image.

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The recent events surrounding Lincoln, along with the broader military and geopolitical fallout from Trump’s disastrous war with Iran, have become a dire problem for the world of MAGA. This movement has always portrayed itself as a band of fearless, pro-military ubermensch — warriors who would lay America’s enemies low while elevating the armed forces through testosterone and jingoism. But reality has not cooperated. Trump campaigned on ending “forever wars,” only to plunge the country into one of the worst in recent history. And Pete Hegseth, after illegally renaming the Department of Defense into the antediluvian "Department of War," has now presided over a six‑month catastrophe in which the United States not only lost control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz and had multiple US bases rendered inoperable from successful Iranian strikes, but has effectively lost the entire conflict by failing to achieve a single stated war goal, something that has Iran publically mocking the Trump regime's incompetence on the global stage.

After those historic humiliations comes this unprecedented scandal aboard Abraham Lincoln, where the regime finds itself being called out by the families of military personnel in a desperate plea to alleviate the unlivable conditions not just on that aircraft carrier, but on other ships as well.  In short, the Trump regime is now reenacting the very situation that once led to the Potemkin mutiny, and it is eating away at their pro-military veneer.

With the Trump regime already squandering the goodwill of the American public, including many who were duped by them time and again, they are now also in danger of losing the warfighters, a demographic that, according to exit polling, broke heavily in their favor in 2024. If that happens, they are truly FUBAR going into the midterm elections. And they know it. With the loss of military voters, a "blue wave" will surely become a blue extinction-level event.

Hence, the frantic response worthy of a damage‑control team on a supercarrier. As with Tsarist Russia, Trump and his cabinet of enfants terribles are courting a mutiny - not a literal one, but a political mutiny, driven by a familiar blend of hubris and incompetence. 

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I only maintain a small social media profile, mostly for hobby-related stuff, so when my political posting starts attracting trolls, I know I am touching a sore spot that MAGA desperately wants to quash no matter how minor the account may be.  This happened to me back in July of 2025, when a rather unremarkable post concerning New York's Democrat governor attracted a flurry of hostility from MAGA trolls. Not surprisingly, this was in the wake of the so-called Epstein Files revelations.  MAGA was so desperate to bury that news that, like children, they believed the best course of action was to shout down anyone who dared attack the orange god-king. When I brought up the fact that Trump was mentioned over thirty thousand times in the files, the response I got was stunning in its willful moral blindness: "I don't know, and I don't care."

Interestingly, this scenario has now repeated. After making a social media post encouraging people to watch Battleship Potemkin because of the similarities to what America is now witnessing, my little account attracted a MAGA crusader on a mission to quash any discussion about this distressing issue. This latter-day Beria's entire argument boiled down to the thin gruel that merely acknowledging sailors’ suffering is somehow an act of disloyalty, one worthy of a racist Tokyo Rose appellation. They further insisted that the wives and mothers (notice the obsession with seeing women as treacherous - the misogyny is Shakespearean!) speaking out were “stupid” for breaking operational security, as if mold, sewage leaks, and unsafe berthing conditions were classified secrets. The only proper response to the news about US sailors in distress, according to this individual who might well be "Baghdad Bob" in a new life, is to keep quiet and not talk about it, because that is the patriotic thing to do.  

It was the "I don't know, and I don't care" response once again, the same tune just played by a different air guitarist. When Trump is implicated in something ugly, the response isn’t curiosity or concern; it’s a kind of ritualized blindness. Cover your eyes, cover your ears, cover your mouth. Pretend the problem doesn’t exist, and accuse anyone who acknowledges it of disloyalty.  That is the only strategy that remains to a political movement incapable of acknowledging, let alone fixing its mistakes. In the world of MAGA, we are all just pawns on the chessboard of the Epstein Class betters. To take a stand and call out rank incompetence and cruelty is to be labelled a thought-criminal and exiled to a gulag in the name of patriotic fervor. 

Like Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru, the Three Wise Monkeys, stoop-backed authoritarian lickspittles the world over always resort to this strategy of self-imposed ignorance. Some do it out of fear. Others, because they are so deeply into the cult, have lost the ability to be critical. But most do it because trying to defend the indefensible is a conundrum without a solution.  The only possible response is not to respond at all, to be metaphorically blind, deaf, and dumb, and demand others do the same. 

Be that as it may, whatever the reason, the result is always the same: slavish loyalty to the regime never produces the victory it promises; just inevitable collapse. The Tsars of Russia learned that the hard way when they refused reform and fell victim to revolutionary communists.  Ironically, the same political illness would later doom those self-same communists in less than a century.  And now the authoritarian rot has found its way to America's shores. I don’t expect the outcome to be much different.

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