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by Mark Hackard
Geopolitical analysis, the art of explaining power relationships through the prism of impersonal geography, can be a helpful tool for observers of the Great Game – but it also has its limitations. A case in point is the renewed US-Russia confrontation. Think tanks and policy insiders easily sell the narrative that from the dark days of the Cold War to our own time, Russia and the United States are fated to play in a zero-sum contest for the future of Eurasia and the world. Deterministic theories, though, can be used to legitimize predatory policy, and pseudo-scientific formulae often conceal manipulations by parasitic elites. Scoring a fortune off human misery and mass death, plundering economic assets, and shaping entire societies in one’s own image all find justification in claims of historical inevitability and the necessity of “progress.”
While Russia and the United States can easily be cast as eternal enemies in the manner of Rome and Carthage, or Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa for modern audiences, we should recall that the two states were originally allies. From the time of 1776, Russo-American friendship was a contributor to the peace and security of both nations for nearly a century and a half. Catherine the Great shrewdly supported the independence of the American colonists, who were able to mount a successful rebellion against an exploitative oligarchy acting through the British Crown. In the terrible cauldron of the US Civil War, Tsar Alexander II, liberator of the peasantry, sent his fleet to America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts to deter British and French intervention schemes.
In Realpolitik, where expediency is the order of the day, alliances are defined by a common adversary. For both Russia and the United States, that adversary was not simply another nation-state like England or France, but a financial international bent on controlling the world through elaborate fraud, war, and revolution. Banking dynasties under names like Rothschild, and later Morgan, Warburg, and Rockefeller, had ascended to power in the West from the seventeenth century onward. Their planned global imperium of borderless labor and capital flows, today promoted as the Open Society by billionaire speculators such as George Soros, was already entering its initial stages of implementation. Thus the fledgling American Republic, an Enlightenment project but not yet under bankster domination, and Imperial Russia could unite for the freedom of their peoples and against the assaults of the Money Power.
What changed? In the early twentieth century the masters of usury struck back decisively against the United States and Russia, by stealth in the former case and an outright coup d’état in the latter. Through various machinations, the privately-run Federal Reserve Bank was established in 1913 to issue the US currency at interest, suborning institutions of government and crushing Americans with a national debt now counted in unfathomable trillions. The Great War was unleashed upon Europe in a nightmarish conflagration, and in 1917 the Russian Revolution, funded by the banking houses of London and Wall Street, installed a vicious Bolshevik regime – dependent on Western credit for the whole of its existence. As for the rest of the twentieth century, we witness globalist plutocrats’ use of dialectics, wielding ideologies as weapons and pitting nation against nation, in the Hegelian procession toward the World State.
Today the realization of that Novus Ordo Seclorum draws ever nearer. And as its grand strategist emeritus Zbigniew Brzezinski makes clear, Washington’s “indispensability” marks only a period of transition:
In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but is also likely to be the very last.
Brzezinski artfully neglects mention of what is intended to supersede American unipolarity: planetary tyranny, a system of total population control and resource extraction. Moreover, all of this is being constructed in the name of “liberty” and “equality,” abstractions serving as mere rhetorical cover for a demonic will to power. It is the liberal program of the oligarchs that has erected an all-pervasive surveillance grid unprecedented in scope, and it is their program that aims to rob man of his faith, family, and heritage, abolishing all that makes him truly human. In the novel The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky articulated this drive with prophetic pathos through his utopian theorist Shigalev, who “proceeding from limitless freedom,” would “bring about an unlimited despotism.” Pyotr Verkhovensky, the leader of the story’s revolutionary cell, exults:
To level the mountains is a good notion, not a ridiculous one. I'm for Shigalev! We don't need education, enough of knowledge! There will be enough material for a thousand years, but obedience must be arranged. There's too little of one thing in the world: obedience. The wish for education is already an aristocratic wish. A little bit of family or love, and you have a desire for property. We will kill the desire: we'll unleash drunkenness, scandal, denunciation; we'll unleash unheard-of deviance; any genius we'll extinguish in infancy. All toward one denominator: total equality... The slaves must have rulers. Total obedience, total impersonality, but once every thirty years Shigalev will set off a spasm, and everyone will begin to eat each other to a certain point, just so that everything’s not boring.
Behind every effective revolutionary stands the financier who created him. Equality to the slaves, an equality of the graveyard, and to the moneyed elite – godlike power over the Cosmos. In exchange for ever more "inherent rights" and meaningless depraved spectacle, socially-engineered mass man forfeits his freedom and his soul. With the West conquered, now all of humanity is set for standardization through postmodern colonialism, covert-action NGOs, carrier battle groups, and killer drones. Any sovereign state resisting the march of progress must be destroyed.
At the Cold War’s end, a defunct Soviet Union was supposed to fold into the world controllers’ planned capitalist-communist synthesis, and minor “rogues” like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya could be dismembered with impunity in the meantime. From the chaos, destitution, and demoralization of the post-collapse period, however, another Russia has slowly re-emerged, its people broadly nationalist and increasingly unashamed of their thousand-year ancestral faith, Orthodox Christianity (see footnote). Nothing could be more intolerable to the robber-baron superclass, who have already for the past century waged ruthless war against religion and organic cultural identity in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to impose their desolating vision upon mankind.
Another round of US-Russia tensions might be unfolding, but such a clash was neither foreordained nor inevitable; between the two largely distant lands there is mutual nuclear deterrence and an absence of directly conflicting vital interests. Beyond inane sloganeering about democracy and human rights, more sophisticated Western strategists can cite new iterations of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland thesis or the latest Eurasian pipeline maneuvers as reasons to “contain” Russia. None of this accounts for a cosmopolitan oligarchy that sets policy, subsidizes scholarship, and manufactures consent in pursuit of its totalitarian agenda. In their quest to liquidate the American, the Russian, and every other unique people, the predators from the bankster international consider themselves above all laws human and divine. Yet the swelling arrogance of sociopaths brings about their downfall – and the sooner their crime spree comes to an end, the better chance we all might have for peace and reconciliation.
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Footnote: It should be noted that even Russia is still not free of the banksters in its own state apparatus, with the Central Bank and the Medvedev government under the influence of pro-Western liberal technocrats familiar with Putin from his days in St. Petersburg. With economic warfare waged by the international a present-day reality, it would be reasonable to expect a quick resolution to this problem in the near future.
I am extremely happy to post today and article submitted for publication to me by Mark Hackard who, with Daniel Spaulding, writes a most interesting blog called "The Soul of the East" whose aim is to translate and spread the writings of such Russian thinkers and philosophers like Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Lev Tikhomirov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Walter Schubart and Konstantin Pobedonostsev. I have to confess that when I saw that list of names I went "wow!" as I had never expected to see so many of my favorite authors mentioned (especially Tikhomirov!) on an English language blog (all that was missing from this list to truly make me happy would
have been Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Solonevich and Leonid Borodin). Hackard even lists Father Seraphim Rose as one of his main influences. Bottom line - this is a very interesting and unique blog written by very interesting and unique people - make sure to check them out!
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.