Why the West Can’t Stomach Russians

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When it comes to Russia or the USSR, reports and historical accounts are blurry; that’s so in the West, consequently, so also in all of its client states. Fairytales intermingle with reality; they masterfully inject fabrications into the subconsciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact, the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It’s sparsely populated. It’s deep; a classic once stated:

It’s impossible to understand Russia with your mind. You can only believe in it.

Generally, the Western mind doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual, and complex. Since the “olden days”, especially since the Crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, Westerners told fables about their “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple:

Virtuous Europeans civilised savages and spread Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.

Of course, tens of millions died in the process, they shackled further tens of millions and brought them to the “New World” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labour paid for (and still do pay) for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that didn’t matter, as the bloodshed was something abstract and far away from the over-sensitive eyes of the Western public. Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically “massaged”, or even if the narrative is utterly false. What matters is that there’s no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion-makers know their people… their “subjects”… perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they ask for. Generally, rulers and reigned live in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals… to live well, to live extremely well, as long as others must pay for it with their riches, with their labour, and often with their blood.

Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their highlife; they even detest admitting that their life is extremely “high”. They like to feel victimised. They like to feel that they’re “used”. They like to imagine that they sacrifice themselves for the rest of the world. Above all, they hate real victims… those they murdered, raped, plundered, and insulted for decades and centuries. The recent “refugee crisis” showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. They humiliate, despise, and insult people who made them rich and who lost everything in the process. Be they Afghans, Africans, Middle Easterners, or South Asians… or Russians, although Russians fall into their own unique category.

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Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science, and philosophy. To Western eyes, they look “normal”, but actually, they aren’t. Russians always want “something else”; they refuse to play by Western rules. They stubbornly demand to remain different, to be left alone. When confronted, when attacked, they fight. They rarely strike first; they almost never invade. However, when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force and they never lose. They turn their villages and cities into invader’s graves. Millions die defending their Motherland, but the country survives. Moreover, it happens again and again and again, as Western hordes, for centuries, assaulted and burned Russian lands, never learning their lesson and never giving up their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus. In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight them, and especially those who win.

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It gets much worse than that. Russia has a terrible habit… not only it defends itself and its people, but it fights for others, protecting colonised and pillaged nations, as well as those under unjust assault. It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million lives, but it did it, courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the USSR for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing is always in direct conflict with its own principles, therefore, “extremely dangerous”.

The Russian people arose; they fought and won the 1917 Revolution, an event that terrified the West more than anything else in history as it attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless, and racially colour-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism. Right after the victory in World War II, Soviet Internationalism greatly helped, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents to stand up and to confront European colonialism and American imperialism. The West (especially, Europe) never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular for helping to liberate its slaves.

That’s when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, the West unleashed an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria with monstrously destructive force. It employed tens of thousands of “journalists”, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics. It spared nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except glorified and often-“manufactured” Russian dissidents). They systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into Western history textbooks and media narrative tales of the “excesses” of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-World War II era. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the monstrous cruelties of the British, French, Americans, Czechs, Poles, Japanese, Germans, and others. Only rarely did Soviet and Russian views ever penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.

Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation they fed them. Eventually, many people living in Western colonies and client states did the same. They taught a great number of colonised people to blame themselves for their misery. The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place… many people living in the USSR succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, they became cynical and aggressively “disillusioned”. They became corrupt… naïvely but staunchly pro-Western.

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It was the first (and most likely the last) time in the history that the West defeated Russia. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda. You could easily describe what followed as genocide. First, the USSR stumbled into Afghanistan, the war injured it, the arms race with the USA weakened it, abetted by propaganda that literally flowed like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local “dissidents” also played an important role. Under Gorbachyov (a useful idiot of the West), things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that the West paid him to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground… precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, the mighty and proud USSR suddenly shook in agony, uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; it died painfully but swiftly.

A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch, and confusedly pro-Western Russia arose. A Russia governed by an alcoholic B N Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London, and other Western centres of power. It was a totally unnatural sick Russia… cynical and compassionless, built on someone else’s ideas… a Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations. Is the West now daring to say that Russians are “interfering” in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds? Washington and other Western capitals didn’t only “interfere”; they openly broke the USSR into pieces. Then, they began kicking Russia, which was at that point half-alive. Did they forget it all or is the Western public fully “unaware” of what took place during those dark days?

The West kept spitting at an impoverished and injured country; it refused to honour international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. It unleashed its multinationals and “privatised” Russian state companies, stealing what the sweat and blood of Soviet workers during long decades built. Interference? Let me repeat… it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, and shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we? Now, they tell us that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With a straight face, the West lies; pretending that it didn’t try to murder Russia. Those years… pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West or a semi-colony! There was no mercy or compassion from abroad. Many idiots… kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and the provinces… suddenly woke up but it was too late. Suddenly, many of them had nothing to eat. They got what the West told them to ask for… Western “freedom and democracy”… they got Western-style capitalism, in summary, total collapse.

I remember well how it was “then”. I returned to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, and Leningrad. Academics from Akademgorodok outside Novosibirsk sold their libraries in the bitter cold, in Novosibirsk’s dark metro underpasses… runs on the banks… old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners and teachers. Russia was under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Suddenly, its life expectancy dropped to Sub-Saharan African levels. Russia… humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.

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However, that nightmare didn’t last long. Russia will never forget nor forgive what happened… those short but horrible years under both Gorbachyov and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat. Russians know perfectly well what they don’t want, anymore! Russia stood up again… huge, indignant, and determined to live its own life in its own way. Within a few years, Russia evolved from an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West into a free and independent Russia, which once again was one of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth. As before Gorbachyov, Russia is once again able to help those nations under unjust and vicious attack from Western imperialism. The man leading this renaissance, President Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world… this is no time for weaklings. President Putin isn’t perfect (who is, really?), but he’s a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist. Now, once again, the West hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; an undefeated, strong, and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants. That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia is always ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.

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There’s something deeply pathological in the Western psyche. It can’t accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world. This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than Christianity, which for decades hasn’t really played an important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical; it’s fundamentalist and unquestionable. It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the world. It sees the West as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru. Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is the more brutal and extreme the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth.

Today, the Empire employs thousands of “academics”, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists, and other highly paid professionals in all parts of the world for two goals only:

• to glorify the Western narrative
• to discredit all that stand in its way and dare to challenge it

Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally, being near second. The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some Europeans and Americans are beginning to question the tales coming from Washington, London, and elsewhere. Wherever one turns, there’s a tremendous medley of lies, semi-lies, and half-truths, there’s a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. They attack Russia for interfering in US domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenceless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore… in brief, for everything imaginable and unimaginable. Criticism of Russia is so comprehensive and ludicrous that one begins to ask very legitimate questions:

• What about the past?
• What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly, the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?

The more I analyse present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with Russian and Ukrainian historians who are my friends.

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In the eyes of the West, Russians are “traitors”. Instead of joining the looters, they stood by the “wretched of the world”, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud, and free. Remember that “freedom”, “democracy”, and many other terms, mean totally different things in different parts of the world. You could never describe what’s happening in the West as “freedom” in Russia or in China, and vice versa.

The frustrated, collapsing, atomised, and egotistic societies of Europe and North America don’t even inspire their own people anymore. They escape by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even Africa… escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness, and emotional cold. Nevertheless, it isn’t the business of Russia or China to tell them how to live or not to live! In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China don’t need and don’t want Westerners to tell them what freedom is and what democracy is. They don’t attack the West and expect the same in return. It’s truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others. Many victims are too scared to speak. Russia isn’t. It’s composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary… itself as well as many others living on this beautiful but deeply scarred planet.

Russian culture is vast… from poetry and literature to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft; they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. However, when millions of lives of innocent people are under threat, both Russian hearts and muscles quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armour. There’s no match for Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West. Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east. That is why the West so desperately hates Russia.

8 March 2018

Andre Vltchek

NEO New Eastern Outlook

https://journal-neo.org/2018/03/08/why-the-west-cannot-stomach-russians/

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Russia’s Orthodoxy Makes It Natural Defender of Mainstream Islam

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The West’s liberal crusade is anathema to both Russian traditions and Russia’s legally stringent views on foreign policy. One can characterise the contemporary foreign policy of the Russian Federation as a pragmatic defence of self-interests along with the interests of its allies. It tends to conduct all of these policies within the framework of international law. In fact, Russia often finds herself having to define the precepts of international law to other nations who frequently violent it. Most frequently, Russia uses the UN as a forum to accomplish this. The long-serving and recently-deceased Russian Ambassador to the UN, V I Churkin was emblematic of Russia in holding others to account, at least in terms of rhetoric and voting record.

By contrast, Western foreign policy often shows a flagrant disregard for international law. Israel’s recent illegal attack on Syria, as well as the illegal presence of US, Turkish, Saudi, Qatari, British, Dutch, Belgian, German, and Jordanian soldiers, airmen, and terrorist proxies in Syria, is just one example of the West and her allies using extralegal means to paint the world map in their particular shade of blood. One could equally point to the illegal wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia as other relatively recent examples. However, beyond the illegality of much of Western foreign policy, there’s another way in which it diverges sharply from that of Russia. Of course, a quest for profit underpins Western policy, but beyond this universal reality, it’s crucial to understand how the West attempts to sell its foreign policy. Even more important is the fact that many Western political figures actually believe what they say when promoting their policies (although some clearly don’t).

Western foreign policy is a latter-day version of a crusade. It’s an open endorsement of violence in order to attain what they define as a worthy goal. It’s war justified neither by law nor ethics but by ideology. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the Medieval Crusades were an attempt to conquer and pacify the lands of “non-believers”, forcing them to submit to their own view of worship and holiness. The Fourth Crusade (1202-4) demonstrated that the holy warriors targeted not only Muslims and Jews but also Christians. The Latin conquerors severely weakened the Greek Orthodox Roman Empire during the Fourth Crusade, paving the way for full Turkish conquest three centuries later and the beginning of Greek captivity to the Ottoman Empire.

Although they typically confine the concept of zealotry to debates on religious wars, the West implements a similar ideological strategy in selling the policy of “régime change, anytime, anywhere, with or without legal authority”. Nevertheless, in their zealous destruction of legitimate Arab régimes, the West did something even more insidious than their crusading forbearers did. They not only attacked peaceful Muslim nations, nations whose populations live side by side with Christians, but they made these countries dangerous places to live for moderate Sunni Muslims (the majority of the global Muslim population), all Shi’ite Muslims, and all Christians. Iraq and Libya are now hotbeds of Wahhabi/Salafi Islam and the terrorism that almost inevitably flows from it. This was never the case prior to Western wars upon these states. Currently, Syria is engaged in a life and death struggle against the same Wahhabi forces representing what many would justifiably call heretical Islam.

Although Russia doesn’t form its alliances and foreign policy strategy on a religious basis, Russia paradoxically acts as a defender of faith by omission. Because Russia refuses to engage in zealous quests for resources based on the creed of liberal imperial zeal, Russia is de facto acting to preserve the peaceful religious status quos of the modern Arab world in states where secularism is best defined as a freedom to pursue religious activities as one wishes irrespective of one’s faith or how committed one is to that faith. As an Orthodox Christian state, Russia’s religious tradition had no part in any crusading activities or the later imperial expansion of various Catholic states, the most prominent example being Spain whose interpretation of Catholicism led Conquistadors to view the pagan natives as underlings to be conquered. I don’t intend this historical reality to offend nor shame modern Catholics, whose contemporary religious practice is as peaceful as any other mainstream Christian denomination. However, liberals took the worst parts of Roman Catholic history and applied them to wars of conquest and exploitation, carrying on a tradition that’s part of Western culture.

Interestingly, one doesn’t need to be religious in order to internalise and adopt this particular feature of Western history. The humanistic/secular French the pretext of liberal revolutionary zeal for their wars on fellow European states in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Likewise, Leon Trotsky, a Marxist atheist, sought to apply the same creed to his view of world revolution. It’s little wonder that many of the born-again neoliberals in Tony Blair’s Warhawk government spent their school days as members of Trotskyist organisations.

Russia suffered a profound spiritual crisis in the 1990s at every level, both theoretically and practically. The internal stability and prosperity afforded by the Putin years gave Russia a sense of peace and allowed Russia to return to its heritage as the largest Orthodox Christian state in the world. As such, some would say Russia has a duty to defend fellow Christians. However, Russia articulates its foreign policy differently. Russia defends its allies against aggression, but the fact remains that in doing so, Russia is by default, living up to its tradition as a defender of the faith. Nevertheless, Russia it defends not just the Orthodox faith. Russia defends Muslims throughout the world at a time when Western wars of aggression target Islamic populations and when Western politicians like Geert Wilders lambaste Islam in the most disparaging terms. Russia must make it clear to a Muslim world bombarded by Western and Saudi propaganda, that it’s a more honest defender of Islam than any major power on earth. It’s able to say so because of its record of legality in foreign affairs and because of a Christian tradition that Europe (and largely, America) has entirely forsaken.

20 March 2017

Adam Garrie

The Duran

http://theduran.com/russias-christian-tradition-natural-defender-mainstream-islam/

2 January 2017. Now, Here’s a Read n’ Heed… Brian Eno on 2016/2017

2017

Andreas Walsh

2016

Andreas Walsh is a local painter who lives in the Hudson Valley south of me and north of NYC. The scene appears to be the Catskills… it may be the hilltop near the Buddhist monastery up the road from Woodstock…

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The consensus among most of my friends seems to be that 2016 was a terrible year, and the beginning of a long decline into something we don’t even want to imagine. Indeed, 2016 was a pretty rough year, but I wonder if it’s the end… not the beginning… of a long decline… or at least the beginning of the end… for I think we’ve been in decline for about 40 years, enduring a slow process of decivilisation, but not really quite noticing it until now. It reminds me of that thing about the frog placed in a pan of slowly heating water…

This decline includes the transition from secure employment to precarious employment, the destruction of unions and the shrinkage of workers’ rights, zero hour contracts, the dismantling of local government, a health service falling apart, an underfunded education system ruled by meaningless exam results and league tables, the increasingly acceptable stigmatisation of immigrants, knee-jerk nationalism, and the concentration of prejudice enabled by social media and the internet. This process of decivilisation grew out of an ideology that sneered at social generosity and championed a sort of righteous selfishness. (Thatcher: “Poverty is a personality defect”. Ayn Rand: “Altruism is evil”). The emphasis on unrestrained individualism had two effects:

• creating a huge amount of wealth
• funneling it into fewer and fewer hands.

Right now, the 62 richest people in the world are as wealthy as the bottom half of its population combined. The Thatcher/Reagan fantasy that all this wealth would “trickle down” and enrich everybody else simply hasn’t transpired. In fact, the reverse happened:

• the real wages of most people have declined for at least two decades
• their prospects (and the prospects for their children) look dimmer and dimmer.

No wonder people are angry, and turning away from business-as-usual government for solutions. When governments pay most attention to whomever has most money, the huge wealth inequalities we now see make a mockery of the idea of democracy. As George Monbiot said:

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.

Last year, people started waking up to this. A lot of them, in their anger, grabbed the nearest Trump-like object and hit the Establishment over the head with it. However, those were just the most conspicuous, media-tasty awakenings. Meanwhile, there’s been a quieter but equally powerful stirring… people are rethinking what democracy means, what society means, and what we need to do to make them work again. People are thinking hard, and, most importantly, thinking out loud, together. I think we underwent a mass disillusionment in 2016, and finally realised it’s time to jump out of the saucepan.

This is the start of something big. It’ll involve an engagement… not just tweets, and likes, and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and political action too. It will involve realising that some things we’ve taken for granted… some semblance of truth in reporting, for example… can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good analysis, we’ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY… direct financial support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the non-corporate non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if we want happy and creative children, we need to take charge of education, not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social generosity, then, we must pay our taxes, and we must get rid of our tax havens. Moreover, if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely charismatic ones. Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain, resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance, and callousness. If we want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I think we’re starting to.

There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a surprising year.

1 January 2017

Brian Eno

Facebook

7 August 2016. Vladimir Putin on the West

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There is a civilisational gulf between the West and the rest of the world. The West wants to ram its potty non-culture down the throats of the rest of the world. The rest of the world isn’t buying it. If the West tries to impose its notions by force, I fear that they’d find themselves overmatched. Just sayin’…

BMD