Russia: the Bloody Insanity of “We Can Repeat” — part 1

You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!
– Nietzsche

by Wolf Stoner
National Vanguard Russian correspondent
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HUMAN NATURE presupposes conflict. The phenomenon of life itself is impossible without conflict and constant realignment of forces. Even from his cradle, a baby cries and asserts his demands to the outside world. Having learned to crawl, he starts to pick fights with other toddlers. The urge to compete with peers is an inbuilt quality. Growing children become more competitive as they age. In adulthood, that spirit is realized in all kinds of activities, starting from business and professional rivalry between individuals and going all the way up to wars between states.

If competition is normal, then when do those conflicts cross the line and become something counterproductive and abnormal? On an individual level it is obvious: If a child mercilessly kicks his siblings because of some trifling dispute about toys, that is abnormal. The parents need to pay close attention and rectify the behavior of their child.

In international relations, the same rules apply. The only difference is that there is no supreme authority that can adjudicate the dispute. Therefore, the leaders themselves must exercise the supreme responsibility in arranging their affairs according to the true long-term needs of their nations.

The greatest catastrophe of the last century happened when the ruling classes of Europe failed to evaluate correctly the true long-term interests of their respective nations and started a bloody fight for petty reasons.

Since then, the situation has become much worse. Now, none of the ruling classes in White countries represent the interests of their nations. And if the ruling class doesn’t care about the people it governs, it is sure to look upon them as expendable cattle, or as inanimate economic units which can easily be replaced by any other units.

The first state to adopt this attitude was the USSR. From the very start, the Bolsheviks were ready to kill as many people as necessary to achieve their political ends. This strategy brought some short-term successes, but in the long run it exhausted the Russian population so much that its vital forces couldn’t be restored. That is the main problem with cannibalistic ideas like Marxism. By ruse and threat they can accelerate the exploitation of the productive forces of a society, but they abuse the people so much that their powers are rapidly dissipated and the whole society becomes an empty shell; only the wily sycophants remain, together with the lowly drunken creatures at the very bottom, who are so useless and non-threatening to any political system that they always survive social tsunamis. The socioeconomic decline of the USSR from the 1960s through the 1980s can be explained by this process of social exhaustion. The most valuable people were simply expended in wars and insane industrial projects; the most creative and independent-minded were intentionally annihilated as potentially dangerous to the system.

This is one of the main traits of any tyrannical system. At the very start, it can achieve greater results than traditional society, but soon it exhausts its human potential and slumps down in disgrace. The situation is even more aggravated when the tyranny is exercised by a small alien ethnic group over an ethnic majority. In that case, the rulers have even less incentive to preserve the human capital of the subjugated population. On the contrary: Such a tyranny wants to extract maximum gains in the shortest time because later the power dynamics of the situation could change.

It must be acknowledged that the Bolsheviks were very successful in creating a system enabling the most efficient extraction of value combined with annihilation of masses of people deemed a threat to the state’s alien overlords. The social mechanism started by them was unique in many ways. Its main feature was that the immediate executors of this cannibalistic program were part of the ethnic majority, too. The worst elements of society were picked up, empowered, and used against the better part of society. This thorough transformation of Russian society essentially annihilated its traditional ethnic identity. It was replaced by an artificial set of attributes. The natural urges of men were redirected into different channels better suiting the needs of the rulers. The basic urge of asserting ethnic identity was replaced with “Soviet patriotism”; the lack of substance was compensated for by an aggressive emotional exultation, stoked by ubiquitous propaganda.

This substitution was very effective. The majority of Russians accepted this fake Soviet patriotism as a replacement for true ethnic loyalty. This helped the Soviets win the Second World War. Afterward, the Soviet system continued to exploit natural social forces by redirecting them into perverted channels, but it didn’t last long. Such false systems are doomed. They are not self-sustainable; they annihilate the very foundation on which they try to erect their “eternal” structure. By denying the people their true identity and by denying biological reality itself, these systems smother the main sources of prosperity in any society. Men can’t be creative and productive if the satisfaction of their most basic spiritual needs is denied. And the need to have an ethnic community with its distinct identity is the most basic spiritual need of all; all else becomes useless if this is denied.

The successor state to the USSR, the Russian Federation, has inherited the whole set of ideological dogmas of its predecessor. And even though, in the first decade after the Soviet collapse, the Kremlin was compelled to lay low and diminish its pressure on society, Putin’s ascent to power signified a restoration of the ruling class. Everyone at the top wanted to return to the “old good days” when the USSR dictated its will to half of the world. This supposed “greatness” had nothing at all to do with Russian ethnic interests. Quite the contrary; it was based on the most brutal enslavement of ethnic Russians. Russians were supposed to work, fight, and die for the sake of a privileged and largely alien minority.

In order to make the Russian masses obey the system, the most intricate and devious brainwashing was employed. The idea of “Soviet patriotism” was at the core of this brainwashing. The trick was to invoke the people’s innate ethnic feelings, but redirect them into completely different channels. The best example of this trick is the Eisenstein movie Alexander Nevsky in which the whole setting is made in such a way as to appeal to Russian identity. But after that is done, the image of the main enemy is shown in all its “Satanic” glory — the image of Germans “who want to annihilate Russians” and “devour their lands.” That is the main trick: to evoke true ethnic feelings, but at the suitable moment present a totally false image of the enemy. This psychological mechanism is very simple, but effective. Almost all Soviet propaganda was built on this method. So, the ethnic Russians were inculcated with this kind of “patriotism” for more than half a century. It has become a part of their collective identity.

In the late Soviet Union, Soviet patriotism markedly eroded; its obvious falsehoods becoming too apparent to all. At the end of the 1980s, the prevalent attitude about the Soviet “patriotic” narrative was a sarcastic smile. But after a decade of economic depredations of alien oligarchs under the new “democracy,” people in Russia started to perceive the very idea of political pluralism as something inherently bad. In comparison to the chaos of the 1990s, the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union started to seem like a paradise lost. The new rulers in the Kremlin played on those feelings when they started their restoration drive in the early 2000s. The gullible masses couldn’t see that, under the trademark of Brezhnev’s “cheap sausages,” the most atrocious form of Stalinism was smuggled into power. And Soviet-style “patriotism” was at the core of this restoration.

One of the defining features of Putin’s Russia is its ever-growing patriotic frenzy. State propaganda has done its utmost to inflame the general public with the idea of “restoring our greatness.” All means have been used to this end. It is one of the few fields in which the Russian state has been really successful and efficient. (Everything else turned out to be a sham.) The modern Russian propaganda machine is even more effective and multifaceted than it was in Soviet times. And it is definitely much more diverse and flexible. In contrast to Soviet propaganda, modern Russian propaganda is not constrained by any fixed ideology. It tries to use all ideological strains to its advantage. The secret services actively co-opt people from all political movements. Anyone is acceptable to the FSB — be it communists, anarchists, liberals, monarchists, or even some Hollywood “nazis” — but only so long as they are useful.

The main distinctive trait of the Putinist state is its practicality, which has been refined to the level of a high art. The system doesn’t actually care at all about any kind of moral considerations, yet always plays the role of the supreme moral authority of the world. This mentality allows the system to lie on any issue, to pretend innocence after committing any crime, and to assert that the blood on its hands is nothing more than cranberry juice. Maria Zakharova and Sergei Lavrov are the most prominent actors in this theater. The art of being a virgin-prostitute is something very special, psychologically. It requires one to earn money by prostitution, while at the same time honestly believing and actively asserting that one is a true virgin. No one in the world can compare in this regard to modern Russian statesmen. Even weathered Washington political scoundrels blush when faced with yet another spate of the Kremlin’s nonsense.

Some people even assert that the Kremlin’s rulers have gone mad. But that is not the case. They know their trade well. They understood long ago that what really matters is perception of reality, not reality itself. They act like a Michael Corleone-type character in a restaurant. It doesn’t matter whether everyone saw him shoot two men; what really matters is the manipulation of perception afterward. The Kremlin’s denial of the MH-17 episode is almost an exact analogy. It is the same tactic, but applied on a different level.

They play this game constantly. They know that, even when exposed, there are enough buffoons or fellow-criminals to vociferously parrot the Kremlin’s version of events. And in some cases it is enough to present the whole affair as a controversy, instead of an obvious crime. “Everyone has his own opinion,” “it is a murky business,” “each side has its own truth.” They even encourage all kinds of insane theories about extraterrestrials, evil spirits, and paranormal phenomena that purport to explain such events. Anything will do if it helps to distract the public’s attention and to muddy the waters. It is not a coincidence that Putin and his inner circle have an organized crime background. They are experts in evading public scrutiny and investigations.

I mentioned these facts in order to set the scene; to show the extent to which the perception of reality is skewed in Russia. The people have lost sight of any true beacons of truth, any measuring scales that would allow them to correctly evaluate ongoing events. It is an Alice in Wonderland world where everything is possible and everything can be justified. Even smashing a man’s head with a hammer on camera is officially lauded as a “triumph of justice.” Any atrocities are allowed here as long as they serve the interests of the ruling gang. The whole country has been transformed into one huge prison camp. To tell the truth, this transformation happened a hundred years ago — but three decades ago the fence of this prison was partially destroyed, some gates were opened, and the regime weakened. Now, though, the old-school bosses are again in the saddle and the system is restored.

In this article, I want to touch on one particular aspect of this system: its total insensitivity to human life — or, to be more precise, to life itself in any form. The only lives that matter to the ruling gang are their own. Everyone else is considered a disposable commodity. This is a continuation of the same mentality that was established when Marxism became the regime’s official ideology. Such a vision of the world emerges naturally from communist ideology. If all bipedal creatures are equal, and any of them can easily be replaced by other such creatures, then there is no need to value any of them. The famous phrase of Soviet Soviet Marshal Zhukov — “Why spare them? Russian women will give birth to yet more” — perfectly encapsulates this outlook. To Zhukov, everyone around him was expendable.

The Soviet Union waged its wars according to this underlying mentality. The human cost was never an issue. The leadership’s only worry was how to conceal the true number of deaths from foreign observers in order to avoid spoiling the holy image of the “worker’s state.” The level to which human life was devalued in the USSR is unprecedented in history. Even the Aztecs valued it more. Little wonder that now, with the state run by former KGB operatives, this mentality is bearing all its evil fruits. The only difference today is that, in the age of information and instant communication, the concealment of facts has become more difficult. The heaps of corpses of Russian soldiers strewn on the battlefield today can be seen by anyone who cares to look on the Internet. Yes, the Kremlin denies everything (as usual), but these denials can’t disprove real images.

Those who are interested in military history are well aware of the Soviet methods of conducting a war. There are many eyewitness testimonies of what really happened in those days, but those testimonies are rarely buttressed by photos or films. This allows the system to deny all such information as lies and “distortion of history.” Everything that contradicts the official Russian fairy tale about World War 2 is proclaimed a “distortion of history” nowadays. They have even started to deny, once again, the mass killings of Polish officers at Katyn. Nearly the whole of Russian society now is in denial, both of the past and of the present. Everyone who dares to speak about it is automatically designated as an enemy.

To be continued

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