And a big "thank you!" to Mark Hackard for sending me his article!
The Saker
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National Nihilism
by Mark Hackard
Strategies for full-spectrum dominance encompass far more than just military means – their entire point is found in politics, the struggle for power. Movements proclaiming themselves the champions of national salvation thus deserve extra scrutiny, since they might serve precisely the opposite end.
Ever since a US-backed junta seized control of Ukraine in February, the country’s ethnic, cultural and linguistic fault lines have been accentuated to deadly effect. The predominantly russophone south and east have already paid a terrible price for resisting the new liberal-nationalist regime, from a fiery massacre in Odessa to outright war against Donetsk and Lugansk, two regions bordering Russia that have declared their independence. Had Vladimir Putin not moved to secure Crimea, the peninsula today would be suffering an analogous fate. When we consider the atrocities committed against the inhabitants of historical Novorossiya (New Russia), it must be understood that Kiev’s counterinsurgency is far more significant than a local conflict – it is a proxy war the Pax Americana wages against Russia in order to command the Eurasian heartland.
In the quest to “contain” and destabilize Russia, Washington has found willing and eager proxies in Ukrainian nationalists. Longtime enemies of Moscow, outfits like Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Rebel Army (UPA) worked in close partnership with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. With the Reichstag still smoldering and the new Cold War underway, the United States would continue where the Abwehr and SS left off, dropping nationalist agents into western Ukraine to conduct sabotage and guerrilla campaigns against the Soviet government until the early 1950s. The Berlin Wall may no longer stand, but US/NATO employment of Ukrainian nationalists in subversion programs continues to this day. Aside from the $5 billion the US has openly spent over twenty years to suborn Ukraine, it stands to reason that substantial clandestine assets were also dedicated to that objective.
Supported by the CIA as well as Polish intelligence, Kiev has attempted for the past two months to bring the east to heel, yet the regime has little to show for the effort other than dead and wounded in the thousands, while towns such as Slavyansk and Kramatorsk are pulverized under sustained bombardment. The regular Ukrainian army, demoralized, underfunded and under-equipped, hasn’t taken to the repression with the revolutionary fervor expected of them by the junta. Rather, Kiev has relied on the newly-instituted National Guard, foreign mercenaries and paramilitaries bankrolled by billionaire oligarchs like Dnepropetrovsk governor Igor “Benya” Kolomoisky, an ardent Zionist with a business empire reportedly built on ruthless criminality. Filling the ranks of these “special battalions” are motivated but often inexperienced thugs from neo-fascist Right Sector, the group that played a pivotal role in the success of February 22nd’s Maidan putsch. The death squads have proven adept at terrorizing civilians, but they haven’t fared so well in combat with local resistance forces.
Possible outcome of the Ukraine crisis: Novorossiya and already Russian Crimea (South/East), Malorossiya-Ukraine and Galicia (North/West).
Underlying the regime’s disastrous attempt to smash the revolt in the east is the utter incoherence of Ukrainian nationalism. Ukraine as a nation-state has all the natural viability of Belgium, for it is an artificial country hopelessly divided within Soviet-era borders. Civil war has erupted because ethnic Russians and culturally Russian Ukrainians, for generations living on traditionally Russian lands, refuse to accede to a poisonous chauvinism demanding the surrender of their religious, cultural and linguistic heritage. The armed ideologues who come to impose “ukrainianization” might as well be foreign invaders seeking to wipe out a subjugated people’s very identity, and this is why bands of rebels in the Donbas are fighting to the knife.
While far from the only case, the fabricated nature of militant Ukrainian nationalism becomes clearer through the lens of great-power competition. The shaping of “Ukraine” (originally Malorossiya – Little Russia – plus Galicia and Volynia) as an entity implacably hostile to “Muscovy” is an ongoing Western geopolitical project launched in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Poland and the Vatican maneuvered to fracture the unity of Orthodox Eastern Slavdom. From that time and in succession, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and now the United States have all found fostering and further inciting this antagonism as an economical means to undermine and even attack Russia itself. Though foolish and extremely dangerous, America’s latest bid to incorporate Ukraine into the “free world” is thus well-founded in historical precedent.
Also set in historical precedent is US collaboration with fascists. Far from limited to sponsorship of Pinochet-style military governments in Latin America, it’s worth recalling that Wall Street actively financed Adolf Hitler’s rise to Weltmacht. And so today the ultra-nationalists of Ukraine enjoy Washington’s tacit support as they drive to ethnically cleanse the country’s south and east of Russians and attain a pyrrhic victory for their ideology. Since Right Sector, Svoboda and other radical parties are enraptured by the legacy of National Socialism, they would do well to remember not only its fate, but also its dialectical function. The wholesale destruction and dehumanization wrought by Nazism merely cleared the way for the triumph of international capital, which from the end of World War II has enforced its dictates through liberal political economy, cultural Marxism and American military power. As US President Barack Obama elaborated in a recent speech in Warsaw:
We have a solemn duty — a binding treaty obligation — to defend your territorial integrity. And we will. We stand together — now and forever — for your freedom is ours.
The banksters are at liberty to subvert, invade and expropriate across the world forever. A key condition for the IMF’s extension of its $18 billion loan to Ukraine is “territorial integrity” – in their war on Novorossiya, nationalists act as the foot soldiers of predatory multinationals. They march not for their fatherland, but for the greater glory of Exxon-Mobil, Monsanto, and Lady Gaga; they are expendable, and so is Ukraine. Fantasies of a state from the Carpathians to the Caucasus seem quaint compared to the vision of planetary rule decreed by the masters of the dialectic, and the parochial nihilism of Bandera’s disciples represents only a transitory stage toward universal enslavement and the dissolution of all peoples.
Globalist elites design their policies according to the classical maxim of divide et impera, yet its esoteric corollary is solve et coagula, the alchemical process applied to entire societies. Behind inane sloganeering on freedom, democracy and human rights lies a relentless desire to destroy. Sovereignty must be ended, sex and the family distorted unto grotesquery, and God usurped by Mammon. The nation – the great extended family – must be annihilated. What the Brave New World needs are neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but demographic biomass engineered for exploitation.
Ukraine’s tragedy provides us a ready example of nationalism manipulated for the benefit of internationalist oligarchs. And Russia must meet its own challenge of upholding traditional identity against the onslaught of the West’s postmodern imperium. The organic, tribal nationalism of the blood can be reconciled with the higher demands of the spirit; such has been the mission of the Church and state in forming a wider Russian Orthodox civilization. In the meantime, the mounting outrages and provocations of the Kiev junta are catalogued for the sake of justice – to be meted out at a time of the Kremlin’s choosing.