War and fog of war: nuclear plant captured? What’s next?

The New Neo Posted on by

The fog of war has been unusually thick lately.

I may have the order incorrect, but first we had a report of an attack on the large Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, then that it had been captured by the Russians and was on fire, then that it was an outbuilding there that was on fire, then that the Russians hadn’t captured it after all, and now that it has been captured by the Russians and they are in control of it.

I’m going to assume that last assertion is correct. I’ve read all sorts of things about what the danger is in terms of the plant itself, if Russia were to threaten to do something damaging to it. I don’t know whether the following is true (I got it from a comment to the post I just linked), but I have a sense that it is (and here’s a post I wrote over ten years ago about Chernobyl):

[Zaporizhzhia’s] a VVER reactor. It’s essentially impossible for those to melt down due to damage, by design. Even an explosion would be extremely difficult to trigger, intentionally or otherwise. A leak of radioactive material, yes; the most likely scenario would be clouds of radioactive steam released into the atmosphere in the event of complete containment failure.

But as we saw with Chernobyl, even that isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as decades of anti-nuclear propaganda has been trying to convince us.

But in the larger sense, Russia is holding all of Europe and certainly NATO hostage because Russia is a nuclear power – a huge nuclear power – and its head has pronounced himself willing to use nuclear weapons in this fight. Even if NATO wanted to enter the fray to directly help Ukraine, it is afraid to do so because that would trigger an enormous conflict that might rightly be known as World War III, if people survived to talk about it.

That is the fear that Putin is exploiting to get what he wants. World War II was between non-nuclear powers until the US ended it by using its newly-developed unilateral nuclear force (two atom bombs) against Japan, a country that seemed ready to go on nearly indefinitely and essentially commit suicide while killing enormous numbers of Allies troops. Now, with so many countries armed with nuclear weapons, the situation is quite different because any large-scale engagement risks setting off a huge conflagration, depending on Putin’s state of mind and that of his confederated. And yet not engaging him allows him to take what he wants.

That situation, in turn – as Ukraine’s neighbors watch it fall – will encourage those non-Russian neighbors to arm themselves as best they can, so that when their time comes to be gobbled up by Russia, they can put up a good fight alone.

There are some rumblings (see this and this) that Russians are starting to get the picture of what’s really happening, despite Russian propaganda trying to hide the scope of the invasion from them. How important will protests become? I don’t know, but it’s not as though Putin cares what the people think. What could matter in terms of their effectiveness is whether those with the power to remove him (if any such people exist, and if enough of them disagree with the course he’s taken) will do so and will be able to institute a different and better course.

You may have noticed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that I haven’t made many specific predictions about what will happen in the war in Ukraine, or about details such as bombings and casualties and the like. I leave that to others, and there’s plenty of it to go around on both sides. The fog of war is a real thing. Propaganda is also a real thing.

I certainly read about what’s going on in the conflict, but I choose to write about the why and its meaning.

In the meantime, I want to call your attention to something that’s been flying under the radar but which we knew was coming – another Iran deal, this time even worse. Like most of what Joe Biden does, it follows in Obama’s footsteps but ups the ante considerably and will almost certainly have even more disastrous consequences:

In talks with Iran informally being run by a Russian diplomat named Mikhail Ulyanov, the Biden Administration is on the verge of giving Iran what it wants – a world stage and normalizing terrorism by removing, among others, the Revolutionary Guard from the list of terrorist organizations.

A former US State Department diplomat with expertise in Iran is sounding the alarm. He isn’t the only one. Present State Department officials in Vienna aren’t just concerned — they are frightened. Gabriel Noronha is the former diplomat. He wrote about his concerns six months ago – that the US was giving in to the Iranians’ demands. Now, present officials have contacted Noronha and are worried. Very worried.

Please read the whole thing. If the report there is true, it is more evidence that the Biden administration wants to destroy America and damage what’s left of the free world. Without solid and consistent American leadership – which does not exist anymore – other power coalitions will vie with each other for the spoils, and more of them will be armed with nuclear weapons.

The “NATO is at fault” argument is absurd: what does Russia want?

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of people on the right, both on this blog and elsewhere, are arguing that Putin did what he did in Ukraine because of NATO’s “expansion” towards his borders. I’ve been arguing otherwise for quite some time, mounting similar points to those expressed in this article by Claire Berlinski. I think she says it especially well, however, so I’m going to quote her.

Her article takes the form of her answer to a reader on the topic of Ukraine, Russia, and NATO (I’ve put the reader’s initial statement to which she’s responding in bold, and I also have bolded certain parts of Berlinski’s response that I want to emphasize):

Independent of Putin, any regional power that has sufficient military capability will try to prevent distant powers from stationing military forces on their border.

Claire: Will they? Why hasn’t France, say, tried to prevent us from stationing forces on its border? Or Poland? The United States has troops stationed in nearly 150 countries. I haven’t counted how many borders this represents, but clearly, it is not true that any regional power with sufficient military capability will try to prevent distant powers from stationing military forces on their border.

Russia objects to the presence of our military forces on its border because it views us as an enemy. It does not view us as an enemy because our military forces are on its border. This gets the causality wrong. Our forces are on its border because it views us as an enemy—and what’s more, it means to invade our allies.

Russia views us as an enemy because we’re an obstacle to Russian imperialism, first; and second, because it sees us as what we very frankly are: a revolutionary country whose ideas are an inherent threat to Russia’s system of governance.

The idea that this conflict is owed to NATO’s determination to encroach upon Russia’s borders is Russia’s talking point. It’s incoherent. NATO is a defensive alliance. The Kremlin knows perfectly well that NATO will not, like Napoleon or Hitler, march on to Moscow in an unprovoked and conventional war. Russia’s security is not threatened by NATO. The security of Russia’s neighbors, however—who are our longstanding, democratic allies—is gravely jeopardized by Russia.

We’re not a “distant power” stationing forces on “Russia’s border,” in any event. We’re members of the NATO alliance; the alliance comprises 30 countries of which only two are not in Europe. If Russia objects to having armed forces on its Western border, it should stop invading its neighbors. That would without a doubt result, quite quickly, in a demilitarized Europe. The evidence for this is that even when Russia was busily picking off its neighbors, one by one, much of Europe had trouble imagining why they needed to spend more on their militaries…

This seems a relevant moment to remind readers that dissolving NATO was precisely what Russia demanded in its ultimatum before it invaded Ukraine. It did not demand that Ukraine abstain from joining NATO, as many seem to think.

There’s more about NATO there, and the article also goes on to publish in full another piece that appeared briefly in the Kremlin-aligned media on February 26. It’s publication back then was apparently an error. It appears to have been one of those pieces that are written in advance, in this case with the expectation that Russia would win the Ukraine War in a couple of days. Please go to Berlinski’s article and read the whole thing.

And apparently it’s bona fide, not some sort of fake news. I can’t swear that, but the circumstances under which it appeared certainly strongly indicate it.

That artile was taken down fairly quickly, but not before people had seen it and archived it. If it’s serious – and I believe it is – it makes it clear that those who say this conflict doesn’t concern us are sadly and utterly mistaken. I wish they were correct, but I strongly suspect that they are not. The article dovetails with things Putin has been saying and doing for years, which is another reason I believe it’s for real and that it expresses his actual goals: not just to regain the old Russian empire, but – as Khrushchev once famously said – of buryng us.

Here’s an excerpt [my emphasis]:

Russia is restoring its unity — the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome. Yes, at a great cost, yes, through the tragic events of a virtual civil war, because now brothers, separated by belonging to the Russian and Ukrainian armies, are still shooting at each other, but there will be no more Ukraine as anti-Russia.

Remember Nineteen Eighty-Four? To paraphrase, “If you want a picture of the future [of Ukraine and all other countries Russia conquers], imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

Remember, too, that although Orwell’s book was set in England, it was modeled after what Orwell knew of the Soviets. Putin isn’t a Marxist, but he has the same devotion they had to subjugating those who might want autonomy. Don’t forget also that before he was a politician, Putin was a KGB guy.

More [emphasis mine]:

Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together —in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians. If we had abandoned this, if we had allowed the temporary division to take hold for centuries, then we would not only betray the memory of our ancestors, but would also be cursed by our descendants for allowing the disintegration of the Russian land.

Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a historic responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution of the Ukrainian question to future generations. After all, the need to solve it would always remain the main problem for Russia — for two key reasons. And the issue of national security, that is, the creation of anti-Russia from Ukraine and an outpost for the West to put pressure on us, is only the second most important among them.

The first would always be the complex of a divided people, the complex of national humiliation…

…Now this problem is gone—Ukraine has returned to Russia.

So, after Big Brother Russia has taught Little Brother Ukraine how to love Big Brother, like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the focus will be on a larger project:

And here begins the second dimension of the coming new era—it concerns Russia’s relations with the West. Not even Russia, but the Russian world, that is, three states, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, acting in geopolitical terms as a single whole. These relations have entered a new stage—the West sees the return of Russia to its historical borders in Europe. And he is loudly indignant at this, although in the depths of his soul he must admit to himself that it could not be otherwise.

Did someone in the old European capitals, in Paris and Berlin, seriously believe that Moscow would give up Kyiv? That the Russians will forever be a divided people? And at the same time when Europe is uniting, when the German and French elites are trying to seize control of European integration from the Anglo-Saxons and assemble a united Europe? Forgetting that the unification of Europe became possible only thanks to the unification of Germany, which took place according to the good Russian (albeit not very smart) will. To swipe after that also on Russian lands is not even the height of ingratitude, but of geopolitical stupidity. The West as a whole, and even more so Europe in particular, did not have the strength to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence, and even more so to take Ukraine for itself. In order not to understand this, one had to be just geopolitical fools.

Note the resurgence of a language of European racism – the Anglo-Saxons versus the Slavs, I suppose. Note also the contempt expressed for the west as well as the hatred.

More [emphasis mine]:

And already fifteen years ago, after Putin’s Munich speech, even the deaf could hear — Russia is returning.

Now the West is trying to punish Russia for the fact that it returned, for not justifying its plans to profit at its expense, for not allowing the expansion of the western space to the east. Seeking to punish us, the West thinks that relations with it are of vital importance to us. But this has not been the case for a long time — the world has changed, and this is well understood not only by Europeans, but also by the Anglo-Saxons who rule the West. No amount of Western pressure on Russia will lead to anything. There will be losses from the sublimation of confrontation on both sides, but Russia is ready for them morally and geopolitically.

This next prediction has turned out to be somewhat incorrect so far:

Because the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well — this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlanticists, this is Russia’s return of its historical space and its place in the world.

Russia does have some allies, but they are other non-Western powers such as China, and even China has pulled back a bit. More people are horrified by what Putin has done than the Russians bargained for.

However, nuclear weapons remain Putin’s not-at-all-secret weapon. I don’t think we’ve ever had a situation in which a nuclear power has been quite so threatening, except perhaps the Soviets during the Cold War era. Putin’s nuclear-weapons rattling brings me back to my youth, a time in which nuclear war with the USSR seemed very possible and childhood imaginings that it would destroy the world were easy to entertain.

I hope the Russian article I just quoted is mere hyperbole. I don’t think it is, though. As I’ve said before, I think it represents Putin’s long-held mindset. As the world takes its actual COVID masks off, Putin has taken his metaphoric mask off and shown us his face even more clearly and completely than ever before. You can feel the bitter taste of his swallowing post-Soviet Russian humiliation for all those long years, and now he spits it out again at Westerners’ conventions, niceties, naivete, and desires.

Sadly, I don’t think our leaders are up to the task of threading this needle – of stopping Putin without triggering a destructive rage in him that could cause him to launch such weapons, depending on his state of mind. I have no idea what the Russian protocol is regarding that or even what those under him believe – do they share his mindset? – and whether anyone could stop him or whether anyone would stop him. Putin’s power in the world comes from that threat, and his money comes from selling fossil fuels to a west that was too stupid to see what was coming, and too busy virtue-signaling to protect itself.

On the 2020 election in Wisconsin

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems like a long time ago – doesn’t it? – that the 2020 election occurred. Maybe that’s because Biden has managed to do so much damage in the time that he’s been president that it makes it hard to believe it’s only been a little bit over a year.

But some wheels of investigation of that election grind on. Recently Special Counsel Michael Gableman testified as to the findings of a study he headed:

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman was the special counsel for the report, ordered by legislative Republicans. Gableman testified before an Assembly committee Tuesday about the 136-page report.

“Accordingly, at this stage, the recommendations included in this Report largely fall within the umbrella of enabling oversight and transparency of our election systems. It draws no conclusions about specific, unauthorized outside interference or insider threats to machine voting, but it does provide numerous examples of security gaps that tend to enable bad actors to operate in the shadows. Absent access to these systems, it would not be unfair for any citizens to conclude the worst, however.”

I have long maintained that that was the problem with the election. The safeguards against fraud were relaxed and/or removed, the opportunity was there and the motivation was there, and people are rightly suspicious with no way to definitely prove that fraud occurred or did not occur. That situation is virtually guaranteed to undermine trust in election results.

More:

“…[I]t is up to government to justify its actions to the people, not the other way around,” Gableman wrote. “A few additional recommendations in this Report fall within the second umbrella— maintaining political accountability…[O]utside groups and the bureaucrats in Madison who run our elections have not been accountable to the voters or the state government”…

He specifically cites Zuckerberg’s grants prior to the election:

Gableman’s report deems the grants as “prohibited election bribery,” citing a state law which prohibits a city from receiving money to facilitate electors going to the polls or to facilitate electors to voting by absentee ballot.

“The Zuckerberg-funded CTCL/ Zuckerberg 5 scheme would prove to be an effective way to accomplish the partisan effort to “turnout” their desired voters and it was done with the active support of the very people and the governmental institution (WEC) that were supposed to be guarding the Wisconsin elections administrative process from the partisan activities they facilitated,” the report states.

The report adds:

The report also concludes the extensive use of absentee ballot drop boxes violated state law, and suggests legislative action should clarify what is permissible.

Democratic Governor Evers pooh-poohed the report, predictably calling it a “colossal waste of taxpayer dollars,” while the AG of Wisconsin said it was “a full-throated attack on our democracy and a truly shocking example of the authoritarian mindset at work” and “a shameful, deeply embarrassing episode for our state legislature” as well as a “train wreck.”

When I first read that Joe Manchin was sitting with the Republicans…

The New Neo Posted on by

…during Biden’s SOTU speech last night, I assumed it was a metaphor.

Turns out he actually was sitting with them:

Mr. Manchin, a moderate West Virginia Democrat, opted to sit on the side of the House chamber traditionally reserved for Republicans rather than with members of his party.

Mr. Manchin was seen sitting next to GOP Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Roger Wicker of Mississippi. He was the only Senate Democrat to sit with Republicans.

Of course, Romney was sitting with the Democrats (that’s my attempt at a joke).

I don’t see Manchin as having any plans to actually change parties, however. I see his seating choice as a way to emphasize his rift with his own party as well as his power to change parties if he decided to do so.

Biden’s SOTU

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “AesopFan” managed to watch the speech and has this summary.

I haven’t watched the speech, have only read a few excerpts, and find I’m not even interested in commentary about it. That’s a new low point of interest for me. Why should I care what Biden’s script du jour says? Why should I care how well or poorly he reads it? Everything he’s actually done so far, and most of what he’s said as well, has been awful. His decline is obvious, physically and cognitively, and I would add “morally” if I thought he’d ever had much moral sense to begin with.

There was a conversation last night in the comments of this blog that also mentioned the German word “Fremdschamen”:

That’s the German word for feeling embarrassment for someone else. That’s what I feel when I listen to Biden speak. I hate that feeling so I will not watch.

A wonderful word, and apropos. As much as I detest Biden, and as much as I think his own naked ambition was responsible for this presidential run and no one had to twist his arm, I also feel considerable Fremdschamen when I watch him. It’s a gut thing.

And speaking of speeches – here’s a closer look at Putin’s speech of February 24

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve been talking a lot about what Putin thinks and what he intends. But he gave a speech right before the invasion of Ukraine that purportedly explained his motives and aims. Although of course he might have been lying – politicians are certainly known to do that – I think his words may indeed reflect his worldview and are at the very least some form of the truth.

So let’s take a look at some excerpts from that speech that Putin delivered on 2/24/22, right before the invasion. This is a translation, of course, and the entire speech can be found here.

Towards the beginning he sets the main theme, which is that Russia wants peace but is threatened and it can’t wait till it’s too late to defend itself against Nazis. Yes, Nazis. You may be a bit surprised – as I was – to see the frequency and centrality of the Nazi references Putin makes:

If history is any guide, we know that in 1940 and early 1941 the Soviet Union went to great lengths to prevent war or at least delay its outbreak. To this end, the USSR sought not to provoke the potential aggressor until the very end by refraining or postponing the most urgent and obvious preparations it had to make to defend itself from an imminent attack. When it finally acted, it was too late.

He’s leaving out a few details, however [emphasis mine]:

On September 17, 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov declares that the Polish government has ceased to exist, as the U.S.S.R. exercises the “fine print” of the Hitler-Stalin Non-aggression pact—the invasion and occupation of eastern Poland.

Hitler’s troops were already wreaking havoc in Poland, having invaded on the first of the month. The Polish army began retreating and regrouping east, near Lvov, in eastern Galicia, attempting to escape relentless German land and air offensives. But Polish troops had jumped from the frying pan into the fire—as Soviet troops began occupying eastern Poland. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-aggression Pact, signed in August, had eliminated any hope Poland had of a Russian ally in a war against Germany. Little did Poles know that a secret clause of that pact, the details of which would not become public until 1990, gave the U.S.S.R. the right to mark off for itself a chunk of Poland’s eastern region. The “reason” given was that Russia had to come to the aid of its “blood brothers,” the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who were trapped in territory that had been illegally annexed by Poland. Now Poland was squeezed from West and East—trapped between two behemoths.

So the USSR was there at the very start of the war as an ally of the Nazis, invading another country in order to get back some of Russia’s lost empire and supposedly to save its countrymen “trapped” there. Russia sure has a funny way of trying to delay the outbreak of war. And it sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?

While there, the peace-loving Soviets decided it would be a great time to massacre the cream of Polish military leadership and culture. You can read all about it here.

But getting back to Putin’s February 24 speech, he was already alluding to nuclear weapons and the fact that he’s willing to use them if attacked:

Those who aspire to global dominance have publicly designated Russia as their enemy…

As for military affairs, even after the dissolution of the USSR and losing a considerable part of its capabilities, today’s Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states. Moreover, it has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.

More from Putin [emphasis mine]:

The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile “anti-Russia” is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons.

Let’s pause to reflect on what he’s saying there, because I think it’s important. Russia is surrounded by lands that are Russian. If the people in those lands hate Russia and want little to nothing to do with it, it’s only because they are fully controlled from the outside. According to Putin, their not wanting to be part of Russia has nothing whatsoever to do with their own ethnicity or feelings of being a separate nation, or with atrocities Russia has committed against them in the past (Holomodor, anyone?), or with the attractiveness of the west either economically or culturally compared with Russia, or with simply wanting autonomy to decide their own destinies.

No, no, of course not. It’s all the fault of big bad NATO, putting these countries behind a new Iron Curtain and keeping them from their obvious love for Mother Russia and their hidden but sincere and ancient desire to merge with it once again.

After talking about the purported Ukrainian “genocide of the millions of people” who live in Dombass, he said [emphasis mine]:

…[W]e will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.

That’s why he started with the USSR’s fight against the Nazis in WWII. He is claiming that the large majority in Ukraine who don’t want to be part of Russia are Nazis committing genocide (instead of Ukrainians who are part of a back-and-forth conflict), and therefore the whole of Ukraine must be taken over and disarmed, de-Nazified, and that people affiliated with the regime must be tried by the Russians (or a new government the Russians install) and punished.

This “denazify” reference is to some neo-Nazis in western Ukraine who have a small following . It’s similar to what the left says in the US vis a vis Trump and the January 6ers, or what Trudeau said about the truckers – that they are all neo-Nazis or predominantly neo-Nazis. There are such movements in Ukraine (relevant information here and here), but their power and size are way exaggerated by Putin for his own purposes. The people actually in power and vast majority of the people who support them are not Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.

Putin continues:

We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force.

This was said right before the invasion. Subsequent events have certainly proven that that was a lie – an invasion is certainly “by force.”

And here’s a truly creative piece of Orwellian sophistry from Putin:

The current events have nothing to do with a desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. They are connected with…defending Russia from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people.

See, says Putin, there’s the real Ukrainian people who are in solidarity with Russia, and then there are the fake usurpers who “have taken Ukraine hostage.” The latter group are all Nazis, and we need to fight WWII over again and liberate Ukraine from the Nazis.

Later Putin expands on this theme by appealing to the Ukrainian military with the same argument:

Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.

By the way, a little historical aside is that a lot of those Ukrainian fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers in WWII initially welcomed the Nazi occupiers because they saw the Germans as liberators from the hated Russians who had exacerbated the famine and helped to starve them during the 1930s.

Then Putin repeats his implied nuclear threats towards anyone who would stop him:

No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken.

In addition, Putin has been asserting for years that Ukraine is not a real country, it is a Russian creation and part of Russia. So although in that February 24 speech he talks about wanting countries to preserve their autonomy (which I believe is something he does not actually support, certainly not for much of Eastern Europe, except of course for Russia itself), he has also said many times that Ukraine is not a real country. See where we’re going here?

Putin also made a recent speech on Ukraine’s history, explaining why it’s not a country [emphasis mine]:

He started by saying that modern Ukraine was a creation of Vladimir Lenin, who carved a Soviet Republic out of what Putin said was Russian land. Putin said that Joseph Stalin supplemented Ukrainian lands with lands from other eastern European countries following the Second World War, and that his successor Nikita Khrushchev “took Crimea away from Russia for some reason and gave it to Ukraine” in 1954. Putin said that these decisions were “worse than a mistake,”…

…Ukrainians have been quick to point out that Kyiv was founded hundreds of years earlier than Moscow, and that Ukraine has its own distinct language and customs.

“Part of the reason that Ukraine has never had stable statehood is because of Russia,” says David Patrikarakos, an author of two books about foreign affairs and non-resident fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He says that Putin deliberately ignored the long history of Ukrainian nationalism, including the country’s war of independence against the Soviets that began in 1917, and its resistance to Soviet rule after World War II. “There has been a strong impulse of Ukrainian nationalism for at least the last century, and [of] the Russians just slapping them down militarily,” Patrikarakos says. “And that’s continuing today.”

…“What he’s saying is something far wider: Ukraine is not a legitimate state. Ukraine is Russia. It should never have existed as anything else,” Patrikarakos says. It could also be an ominous bellwether for future military action, he suggests. “If you do not accept the idea of Ukraine, then you clearly by implication do not accept the idea of Georgia, the Baltic States, Moldova and everything else.”

I see no reason to doubt that these are his true and basic beliefs, and that he sees this as the perfect time to act on them.

Putin the Slavophile

The New Neo Posted on by

I was plowing through some of Putin’s speeches and it occurred to me suddenly that he might be described as a Slavophile. It’s a term I remember from a class I took in college called “Russian Intellectual History.” But I realized that trying to write a post expanding on that thought about Putin would require a lot of brushing up on the concept on my part.

And then tonight by chance I happened across this article that speaks of the subject with more knowledge than I could have mustered in a crash course:

It’s not that [Putin] doesn’t want prosperity for Russia. His early popularity was based on stabilizing the ruble. But the economy must rightfully take a distant second place to restoring Russia’s national pride and dignity after what he views as the “catastrophe” of the Soviet empire’s humiliating defeat in the Cold War. Our foreign policy experts too often forget that dictators like Putin don’t have to worry about public opinion and economic performance the same way that democratically elected leaders do. Rulers for life, they can put these to one side for prolonged periods of time in service of the greater goal of national honor.

Although Putin’s ambition is to restore Russian control over its former Warsaw Pact captive states, he in no way wishes to restore the Soviet regime itself. Russian history has long been riven by a cultural conflict between those who look to Europe, the West, and the Enlightenment as the path that Russia should follow and those who are loyal to Slavic nationalism, which is deeply religious and not interested in economic prosperity. In literature, this divide was typified by the different outlooks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, which Tolstoy crystallized as the difference between St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the era of anti-Soviet dissidence, this split was typified by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin is in the Slavophile camp. A devotee of Berdyaev, a Slavophile critic of Marxism-Leninism, Putin believes that Soviet communism was an import of European rationalism that poisoned the authentic Russian soul, which has nourished the country’s national and artistic greatness.

Does the Russian soul really matter to Putin? As I wrote in Tyrants, modern tyrants and conquerors since Robespierre have been bolstered by an ideology. Slavophile thought is crucial to Putin’s worldview, including both Berdyaev and also the modern writer Aleksandr Dugin’s ideology of “Eurasianist National Bolshevism.” Dugin, an academic and popular pundit, tried to rescue what he saw as the authentically Russian agrarian populist impulse behind the original Bolshevik Revolution from its betrayal by Lenin’s “scientific” socialism imported from European thought, calling instead for a “revolution of archaic values” based on the blood and soil traditions of family, rural life, and religious faith. Putin commissioned Dugin to overhaul the Russian education system to remove all traces of Gorbachev-era glasnost and perestroika, which both believed were signs of creeping Enlightenment rationalism and materialism corrupting the Motherland.

I am fairly certain that the obvious decline of Western pride in its own accomplishments, of abandonment of many traditional values connected with family and faith and a host of other things, and its adherence to wokeness have only solidified Putin’s rejection of the West as a decadent and weak bunch. It’s a disdain and contempt that Islamists share, and China has its own version.

More:

Dugin gave Putin the ideology he needed to reject the tainted European strain of Soviet communism while rehabilitating it as a great patriotic people’s movement, including the rehabilitation of Stalin in his role as wartime champion against Hitler. This ideology also enabled Putin to make what is to him a coherent argument that, while the Soviet communist regime will never be restored, the Slavophilic populism that was its true lifeblood can be—a national tribalism extending to all Slavic peoples including Ukraine, Poland, and the Balkans, who must be gathered back into the Russian fold.