Narcisso-Fascism 3: Hating Russia.

Russia is by far the largest country on earth, fabulously rich in natural resources but sparsely populated, with the bulk of its population concentrated in the far west, adjoining Europe and the Middle East. Here, with no natural defences, it has been exposed to countless invasions. In the first forty years of the last century, first Russia and then the USSR was invaded not once, not twice, but five times. The last, the Nazi invasion in 1941, was probably the most catastrophic invasion in human history, with up 27million deaths in four years and near total devastation of vast areas of the country. In six months in 1941, the Germans took some 3.25 million Soviet soldiers prisoner. By the end of the year, 97% of them were dead, making it the single greatest slaughter of humans in our ghastly history.

In 1945, after the almost inconceivable horrors they had endured, the Soviet government swore: “Never again. Nobody will ever threaten us again.” This is why Stalin insisted on a cordon sanitaire of servile governments in Eastern Europe, not because Russians had any particular liking for Eastern Europeans, most of whom they regard as hicks, but to stop any invading army roaring across the dead flat north European plains, straight into the Slavic heartland, as had happened so many times in their history. Stalin’s plan was for a united, neutral and disarmed Germany sitting astride the centre of Europe. That way, he felt, there could be peace on this most troubled and troublesome of continents. The Americans refused. They rearmed West Germany, incorporating it as essentially the core of NATO, and launched the Deutsche Mark without consulting the Soviets. Out of this came the real Cold War in which the US and its vassal states enacted a policy of “containment,” surrounding the USSR with nuclear-armed military bases, bombers and submarines so close that the Soviets could hardly breathe. Thus threatened, the Soviet government was forced to pour its limited resources into building a vast military to try to counter the West, but eventually was bankrupted, as per the American plan.

In 1989, Eastern Europe got to its feet and walked out of the Soviet zone of influence. In 1991, the USSR itself finally fell apart. Under the ebullient, alcoholic and egregiously corrupt Boris Yeltsin, and led by American economists and political scientists, the shocked and shrunken Russia embarked on a crash program of building a western-style economy in a vast country sprawling across eleven time zones. However, it had absolutely no tradition of “free markets” and none of the institutional infrastructure. Just as a historical example, after World War II, the US set up an aid program for Europe, known as Marshall Aid after Gen. George Marshall. It is always said that Stalin refused to allow the USSR to participate but this is not true. He asked for the aid but was refused because, quite deliberately, the program had to be administered through private banks. After a generation of war and socialism, there were no private banks in the USSR, so they missed out. Which was humiliating, and leads to another point about Russia and Russians: they have long memories.

So when the privatisation program of the 1990s collapsed in a firestorm of corruption and looting and the country fell into penury, that was seen by Russians as just another example in a very, very long list of Western perfidy. Was that economic collapse intentional? Did the US government call on its best economic brains to plot how to wreck the Russian economy? I don’t think so, I don’t think Americans can plan that far ahead. To my mind, it was a stupid program, born of their greed and their blind incompetence, held together by hubris and contemptuous triumphalism: “Them Russkies will either crash through or crash but either way, we stand to make our fortunes so let ‘er rip.” Regardless, the transition failed, immiserating and impoverishing the great bulk of the population to the extent that the average life span actually dropped by several years.

While all this was going on, and despite its promises, the West inflicted yet another humiliating threat by expanding NATO to the very borders of Russia. Why was NATO not disbanded at the same time as the Warsaw Pact? The Americans say it is purely a defensive pact but that’s patently false: in 1991, who was able to threaten Western Europe and, more to the point, North America? Nobody. Nobody was able to and nobody wanted to. People had had enough of threats. Hauling itself up by its bootstraps, the new Russia, alternately piloted and kicked by the reviled Vladimir Putin, actually asked to join the EU and NATO but was rejected on both counts – by the US, of course, which couldn’t stand the competition. As a result, Russia retreated into sullen orientalism, embarking on a program of rapid modernisation while suppressing a number of violent separatist movements and eliminating further adventures by NATO around its borders. Ominously, one of these was in what it saw as part of its Slavic heritage, Ukraine. Several times, the US, NATO or other Western powers announced that Ukraine would be invited to join NATO even though Russia was absolutely clear that this would not be tolerated. The thought of hostile, nuclear-armed forces installed in bases just a few kilometres from its borders, with no possible means of defence, provoked repeated and deadly serious warnings from the Kremlin, all of which were ignored.

By 2012, life in this sorely-tried country was starting to improve but then further trouble erupted in the running sore that Ukraine had become. In 2014, a democratically-elected but corrupt, pro-Russian government was overthrown in another American-engineered coup (the first was in 2004), allowing extreme right-wing elements to move into the government. Ukraine has long had a serious fascist movement but their presence in government was regarded by Russia as a provocation too far. Added to this, and probably even more inflammatory, were the discriminatory policies of the new Ukraine government toward the Russian speaking majority in the two eastern-most provinces. Far-right wing militias, especially the Azov Battalion, began attacking Russian areas, Russian irregular forces responded, and in no time there was another full-scale war on European soil. As a result, Russian troops stationed in Crimea occupied the peninsula, which had been separated from Russia just sixty years before, and soon after, it was annexed. Fighting continued until February 2022 when Russia began its current invasion. Why did this happen? Was it just, as we are so often told, because Putin is a wicked latter-day Tsar or budding Hitler who wants to rebuild the USSR on the corpses of his neighbours? Was the Russian invasion really unprovoked? No, and no.

Russia had said repeatedly that incorporating Ukraine in NATO would represent a threat worse than the Nazi threat and would be resisted forcefully. The reason is simple: Russia would be left absolutely defenceless. In the space of a few hours, hostile forces would be able to swarm across the border and penetrate deep into Russia, just as the Wehrmacht did in June, 1941, but very much faster. Short and intermediate range nuclear missiles fired from forward bases in Ukraine would be closing in on Russian targets even before their radar had locked on them. When it became clear that, eagerly urged by the West, Ukraine was moving to a position of hostility, meaning Russia had no cordon sanitaire, Putin was left with no choice. If he did nothing, he may go down in history as the man who left his country wide open to invasion, so he acted. As he had warned, and as many serious Western scholars had also warned, Russia would not accept being cuckolded by the West.

And so the war grinds on, with hundreds of thousands of dead and injured and huge civil devastation, just because it suits the US to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. By why is it so important? Why were Russia’s overtures to Europe in the 2000s rejected? The answer is clear: if Russia, with its vast resources and huge, skilled workforce, had allied with Europe, especially Germany’s industrial base, the US would have been rendered irrelevant and impotent. Imagine it: a single trading bloc, with free movement of currency and of labour, stretching around the globe from Portugal’s Atlantic coast to just 85km across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Imagine 900 million energetic and enterprising people controlling the bulk of the world’s natural resources and speaking with a single voice which, crucially, America could not shut down.

The choice facing the US was binary. A Eurasian alliance would have meant the end of America’s dominance of the world. The decision was never in doubt: the US determined that shattering Eurasia into a thousand squabbling bits was preferable to having the continent at peace, working essentially as one. An alliance had to be prevented at all costs and, at this stage, with the way things are going, “at all costs” includes the growing risk of nuclear war.

Today’s fighting in Ukraine today actually goes back to the 1920s when Britain and France realised their mission in life was to prevent any form of alliance between Germany and the deeply loathed Bolshevik regime in the new USSR. As what have been called ‘empires of the peripheries,’ meaning peripheral to the Eurasian landmass, Britain and France and then the US could not hope to match such an alliance. They would be dominated by it, essentially irrelevant to the direction of the world, which they would not accept. The easiest way to block it was to encourage anti-Communist governments in Germany, a policy with which Germany’s right wing parties and industrialists were delighted to cooperate. In 1933, when the Nazis were finally handed the keys to the Reichskanzle, champagne corks popped in Whitehall, the Elysee and in DC.

For the West, meaning Britain and France with the US tagging along, the goal was the preservation of their privileged status regardless of the cost to other peoples. Subsequently, the entire Western policy toward the new Nazi government was directed at not rocking their boat, for the simple reason that Hitler’s hold on power was fragile. If his government fell, the only viable alternative was the Bolsheviks, and that was unthinkable. As a result, whatever Hitler wanted, he was given. The policy was called ‘appeasement’ which is now touted as “If we let him have this bauble, perhaps he’ll be satisfied and won’t ask for more.” In fact, it was a matter of “Give him whatever he wants, just don’t give the socialists a chance to topple him.” Nahum Goldmann, one of the most influential of the architects of the Zionist project, who was on the spot throughout the 1920s and 30s, made this absolutely clear :

At the beginning, the democracies could easily have stamped out Nazism, but they did not dare: Flandin, Chamberlain and company were hoping that Hitler would put an end to the Soviet regime, and that is one of the reasons for their policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany and their consequent indifference to the Jewish tragedy. Kissinger has never forgiven them [1, p157; the last sentence indicates that Kissinger was fully aware of their real motives].

In 1938, when the Nazis decided they wanted chunks of Czechoslovakia’s industrial base, the Slavs were not given the option of defending themselves. Their country was dismembered at a conference where they weren’t even invited. The reason was simple: if Hitler had carried out his threat to invade, there was an even chance that the Wehrmacht would be defeated, leading Hitler’s government to collapse. Inevitably, the socialists would take over and their first move would be a pact of friendship with the USSR, then with the downtrodden subjects of the empires, such as India (which comprised modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) and North Africa. And that would be the end of world dominance by the peripheral empires. That was not going to happen. If Czechoslovakia had to be sacrificed for the British, French and Americans to maintain their dominance, then goodbye Prague.

Today, the whole of US foreign policy is directed at driving an irrevocable wedge between Europe, essentially meaning Germany, and Russia. This is why Germany was brought into NATO, why NATO persists today even though the Warsaw Pact is no more, why Russia was not allowed to join either NATO or the EU and why the CIA blew up the Nordstream II pipeline. Isolating Russia, keeping it broke and disorganised, has been the driving obsession of American foreign policy since 1945, just so Americans can wake in the morning and say “Well, we’re still No. 1.” If, after the disastrous privatisation program of the 1990s, that vast country had disintegrated into squabbling, mafia-ridden fiefdoms, then so much the better. It would have meant the US and its multinational friends could loot the world’s greatest store of natural resources at their leisure, with no possibility of opposition. Except China. Don’t forget China.

So to revisit the questions posed above, namely, is Putin a wicked latter-day Tsar or budding Hitler who wants to rebuild the USSR on the corpses of his neighbours, and was the Russian invasion of Ukraine really unprovoked? We can easily dismiss the second question: most emphatically, it was carefully engineered and provoked over decades by the West. As garrulous politicians have repeatedly blurted out, the specific intention was to bankrupt Russia just as the involvement of the USSR in Afghanistan pushed it over the financial cliff. In a recent interview with the bloviating Tucker Carlsen, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (who has held the job for 20yrs) exposed this plot:

They (the US) fight for keeping the hegemony over the world, on any country, any region, any continent. We fight for our legitimate security interests … (US Sen.) Lindsay Graham who visit some time ago Zelensky for another talk, he bluntly, in presence of Zelensky, said that Ukraine is very rich in rare earth metals and we cannot leave this richness to the Russians, we (US) must take (starting at 0.45).

Any Western country threatened in the way Russia has been threatened would have reacted in exactly the same way as Russia has done. The US and UK and their coalition of castratos invaded Iraq with far less provocation than Russia has endured.

Putin’s rise to power is charted in encyclopaedic detail in Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West, by Catherine Belton, published in 2020. This is an unusual book as she was obviously given access to troves of information that could only come from Western spy agencies. In addition, Putin’s many exiled enemies were delighted to talk to her so the book has to be read with this in mind. As a former KGB officer, Putin was raised, educated, trained and worked in essentially a criminal atmosphere; corruption is in his blood. However, he is also a nationalist and decidedly conservative in his views. He is clever, hard-working and, as the interview with Tucker Carlson showed, remarkably well-versed in his country’s long history. I do not believe any Western politician for the past half-century could perform at such a level.

But is he evil at, say, the level of George W Bush, whose unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq led to the deaths of some two million people and the devastation of several countries? I don’t see any evidence for that. Is he a nice person? Forget that, it’s not in the job description. Obama was a jovial soul when it suited him but, every Tuesday afternoon, he ordered the murders of many hundreds of people he was told needed to be murdered to make the world safe for American companies. Is Putin more corrupt than Donald J Trump? It’s unlikely but, like Tony Blair, he’s smarter and smoother and hides the money better. However, corruption is not a disqualifier; all politicians are corrupt, which we will come to another day. Is Putin a latter day Hitler or Genghis Khan or Pol Pot, intent on slaughtering his enemies en masse? No, he’s not although he’s not averse to bumping off a few of them, much as the US and Israel do on a grander scale. Does he simply want more land? With over 17million km² behind him, most of it empty, it stretches credibility to suggest that he would risk ruining his country just to snatch another 0.15million km² (0.8%) from a neighbour. What, then, is his motivation? What is his message for the West? Simply this. Backed by the entire Russian nation, every man, woman and child, Putin is saying: “This is 2025, not 1825; this is our country, not your Deep South; and we’re not your niggers to push around.” *

Just as with China, all the Russian government wants is for people to treat Russia and Russians as their equals and to stop threatening their country. To be civilised, in other words. Unfortunately, the utterly insightless American elite and their British poodles don’t believe they have equals this side of heaven. Firm in the belief that their noble intentions render them blameless, they are constitutionally incapable of seeing that, to others, their actions are threatening and, very often, criminal. Their modus operandi is to make people offers they can’t refuse so, when somebody does refuse, collisions become inevitable, for which they blame the other side. In psychological terms, this is known as “projection,” in common parlance, it’s called lying (as in the WMD excuse for invading Iraq to take its oil). Faced with the traditional Western policy of “submit or else,” Putin’s Russia is refusing and, crucially, it will continue to refuse even when Putin has gone. The collision between the US and Russia is a work in progress, so Putin has to be painted black. Which Belton’s book certainly does, although it should be read in conjunction with Whitney Webb’s two volume account of America’s breathtaking corruption in One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein. Corruption and spying, a la CIA, KGB, MI5, and Mossad, go hand in hand.

If perchance the Western elite ever realised that other people saw them as threatening and were scared of them, what would they do? Drop everything and rush off to etiquette classes? See their therapists to weep over how nobody understood them? Like hell they would, they’d laugh and double down on the terror.

The name of the game is domination. It’s the game that all humans love to play. The winner takes all leaving the losers to plot revenge. It has no end.

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* Yes, I know Americans don’t like to be reminded of this word. In fact, by calling it “the N-word,” they pretend it never happened, it had nothing to do with them. But shoving the word into the memory hole does nothing about the attitudes that bred it. The sense of God-given superiority that led American colonists to drive native Americans to their death, enslave people from another continent and then live like European nobility on the proceeds has never gone away, it’s simply hidden better. Jim Crow is alive and well and having a whale of a time in DC, planning how to take over the world by castrating Europe (done), crushing Latin America underfoot (98% complete), destroying the Middle East (almost complete, only Iran still standing), destroying Russia (in progress) and strangling China (at advanced stage of planning). This is replaying “How we conquered the West” on a global scale. The goal of this carnage is so the American elite can swagger around, whips and guns in hand, reeking of whiskey, and spit in the face of the world: “Who’s Number One ‘round ‘ere? Thass raht, black boy, say it agin. Ah’m Number One an’ donchu forgit it.”

1. Goldmann, Nahum (1978). The Jewish Paradox. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.