The War - Continued

It’s never too soon to say I told you so. I find nothing in my post The War, April 13, 2022, that has not proven to be true. Nevertheless, as the Ukraine situation is beginning to reach its inevitable conclusion, it’s surely time to post an update.

Those of you who have avoided the pro-Russian blogosphere since the Special Military Operation began on February 24th, will have been thoroughly marinated in relentless Western propaganda. By now, you may be even more convinced of the rightness of the USNATO position, the evil of Putin, his army, and his country – and continue to look forward to the tyrant’s imminent fall from grace.

Heaven knows, you might even still believe that ‘Ukraine is winning’ although facts on the ground clearly demonstrate the falsity of this position. But whilst I continue to grapple with my bemusement, I think I may have discovered something that reaches beyond the propogandist impact of the Lame-Stream-Media: an additional, and surprising factor in your wrong-headedness.

This new intelligence has been gleaned from reading a typically vitriolic, anti-Russian journal long a bastion of the Establishment Press, and thus an intrinsic part of the L-S-M, The Atlantic. Writing in the December 2022 issue, Anne Applebaum, a staff writer, sets forth, under a headline that declaims, ‘PUTIN MUST LOSE, And the Russian empire must die’, that “Neither then (the beginning of the 20th century), nor later did most Russian liberals understand that the imperial project was the source of Russian autocracy”. In other words, in Russia, as elsewhere, she suggests that imperialism is inimical to liberalism. This, after a few columns of text on the emergence of Russian liberal ideology, from its flowering in the 19th century through to the dissolution of the Moscow School of Civic Education initiated by Putin by his declaring it a “foreign agent.” This is a school, incidentally, at which Anne Applebaum was a frequent guest lecturer and which is considered by her to represent the final flowering of Russian liberalism.

A viewing of the Hulu TV series, The Great, season 1, 2020, will demonstrate that it was Catherine II that introduced liberalism to the Russian Court via the works of Montesquieu and Voltaire in the mid-18th century thus confirming the Russian Enlightenment tentatively introduced earlier by Peter the Great. No matter, what Applebaum really wants to write about is the autocracy of Putin.

Let us travel back, instead, a couple of millennia and consider the words of Jesus, as reported by Matthew in the King James Bible, ch.7, verses,

i) Judge not, that ye be not judged.

ii) For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

iii) And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

iv) Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

v) Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Harsh words, but entirely apposite. The beam in Judge Anne’s eye is, of course, the American imperial project - the source of this country’s plutocracy, stealthily developed under the prevailing conditions of late capitalism. Further, the liberalism currently in the ascendency in the West, and which the U.S. attempted to impose on Russia after the fall of the USSR, is neoliberalism. It was this ideology that briefly prevailed under Yeltsin to the great detriment of the Russian population before the ship of State was righted by Putin.

As the Special Military Operation continues, Applebaum writes, “…the majority of Russians remain silent, even as they are cowed by propaganda or swayed by nationalist slogans...” Hmmm…in the first half of the 20th century, building on the work of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna, Carl Yung developed a psycho-spiritual construct that answers the why and how in Matthew’s reporting of Jesus’ famous rhetoric - declaring that “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face”. He recognized that the ego defends itself by consigning its shadow elements to others or, as Edward Edinger writes in, Ego and Archetype, 1972, ‘multiplicity is manifested by the exteriorization or projection of parts of the individual psyche into the outer world.” Hence the trope of ‘projection’ inculcated in popular culture via Psych. 101.

Flipping through the print edition of The Atlantic a few weeks ago I was loathe to read Applebaum’s essay, recognizing it as blatant propaganda, but the stridency of the title acted as a goad to my curiosity. I was eventually drawn to it by its explicitness, its extremeness, and its raging projection! I felt the need to read it for its reversal of a truth I have firmly held since my April posting: USNATO MUST LOSE, And the American Empire must die! With this idea in mind - that Applebaum attributes to Russia the dark, deeply shadowed side of her psychic understanding of her native land, the United States of America - I embraced her essay and plundered it for its obvious projections.

Applebaum posits that there has been a great diaspora of Russian liberals during the 20th century whilst those liberals who remained have continued to believe that another kind of State is possible. This is a circumstance she tags as a trunk and branch theory of Russian liberalism, in which she notes that “Democratic ideas did not triumph in either the branch or the trunk in the years that followed the Russian Revolution because the State needed so much violence to keep Ukraine, Georgia, and other republics inside the Soviet Union.” Here she explicitly suggests that the presence of State violence is an insurmountable obstacle to democracy. It is not too difficult to conjure the shadows that haunt this sentence: the violence done to the world by the U.S.A. in preventing communism from subverting its Empire, or the violence done to the Middle East and South Asia to keep oil flowing to the American heartland.

Again, parsing, “Outside the country, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians are beginning to understand how closely the empire and the autocracy are linked”, the reader must accept that only expats have the agency to think subversive thoughts. Is mind control in Russia so efficient? By Removing the caveat, “Outside the country” we have a perfect projection of ‘hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans are beginning to understand how closely the empire and plutocracy are linked’. That same cohort is also very much aware that empire is entirely and always predicated on violence. At the risk of being accused of shooting fish in a barrel, and before I turn to the current situation in Ukraine, may I offer:

“Many Russians therefore oppose not just the regime, but the empire; for the first time some argue that it is not just the regime that should change, but the definition of the nation. Kasparov (the champion chess-player turned politician) is one of many who argue that only military defeat can bring political change.”

I will let you play with that one, only noting that the U.S. defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have not budged the political needle in the U.S. In any case, Russia’s defeat would demand the corollary of a USNATO victory and a confounding of a historical continuum dating back to 1954. Does anyone really believe that could happen under the Biden administration, headed as it is by someone who has vigorously supported every one of these imperial misadventures?

Applebaum entirely elides the fundamental shift in global power of which the Special Military Operation is a symptom and which I elaborate here. Meanwhile, The American Conservative, founded in 2002 by that old warhorse and inveterate foreign policy curmudgeon, Pat Buchanan, and which is the very antithesis of the L-S-M, has provided a reliable guide to the conflict over the last few months with contributions from inside-the-beltway writers such as Douglas Macgregor Col. (ret.) and Peter Van Buren, an establishment conservative unafraid to speak truth to power manifested by the administrations of either party.

Rather than steer you towards sites that I rely on for their daily analysis of conditions on the Ukraine front, but which often require me (and most likely you) to hit the translate ‘Russian to English’ button, I will instead suggest that you read the following – All American – and distinctly un-lame analyses.

Washington’s Carthaginian Peace Collides with Reality, Douglas Macgregor, November 29, 2022

Whither Ukraine? Peter Van Buren, December 5, 2022

Perhaps in reading these articles, you will reflect on your own proclivity for projection and embrace the possibility of awakening to Reality.