Amarna Forum

Matthew Jim Elliott Groyper Wrote:Tao Lin described how he fell behind in middle school:

Quote:[...]

Good essay devolving into run-of-the-mill cry about pollution and evil corporations. Yeah farmers coat everything in expensive pesticides because muh corpos, nevermind the absolute overflow of mouthbreathing biomass requiring fodder. Look to Malthus, not Marx: the solution is billions must die. But nobody can stomach this. Which makes it inevitable. Hail Thanos.

Edit: there's an entire point to be made about how all the notions of well-being and individual autonomy through higher per capita resource consumption via retvrning to ancestral diets and working out, all combined, bump against the Malthusian pressures and hence lead to the inevitability Lebensraum. The charge that gym makes men fascist may have wider implications than at first thought, and that's a good thing. But it's also entirely off-topic.

What Tucker Carlson doesn't understand about Ukraine

To Slava, or not to Slava. That really is the question, isn't it? 

From what I get from this new piece, it seems that 'what Tucker Carlson doesn't understand about Ukraine' is that... it's complicated. Well, that much was clear when Prezident Vladimir Vladimirovich was courteous enough to try helping Mr. Carlson understand the situation by providing him with copies of 17th century "documents" that illustrate Russia's historical claim to Ukraine.



I think that what the author is trying to say is that the crux of the issue that Carlson (being a stand-in for conservative or even "dissident" Joe Schmoe) seemingly doesn't understand is that overly indulgent sympathies either toward Ukraine or Russia for entirely self-serving political reasons will likely be ill met either way. More mainstream "dissident" reasons for voicing support for the latter are often a means of trying to delegitimise the American establishment, whether it be by emphasising the need to address domestic instability before sending billions of dollars to support Ukraine or by revealing libtards as hypocrites for supporting ~Literal Nazis!~ (which is completely ineffective when the Libtard World Order holds enough power and sway to be able to not even have to care about being hypocritical). 

The 'Ukrainian Nazis' / Russian "denazification" casus belli is more so what I'm interested in discussing. The article explains it as such:

Quote:The most extreme Ukrainian nationalists at the turn of the 1990s sought to break the last and most deeply held of Soviet taboos; embracing the label of ‘neo-fascism’, as a gesture of contempt for a moribund society and a political project that had failed to the point of absurdity. The concepts of ‘neo-fascism’, and the forces of anti-fascism that stood against it, were in any case entirely manufactured by the communist governments of Eastern Europe as specious justification for political repression and an atmosphere of paranoia against any western influence.  The embrace of symbolism designed to antagonise an old elite that was rapidly losing its remaining authority is analogous with the similar trend among youth subcultures in the west, most obviously the punks, and in terms of its political content should be taken just about as seriously.

For the Russians, it’s all far more simple. As far as they were concerned, the Nazis were primarily out to get them and to extinguish the Soviet Union as a manifestation of Russia’s geopolitical presence; the disloyalty of those Ukrainians who stood with the Germans for any reason became a longstanding source of resentment on the part of many Russians [...]

It would be too crude a characterisation to say that Vladimir Putin calls contemporary Ukrainian nationalists ‘Neo-Nazis’ because that’s what he thinks a Nazi is, but it is fair to say that it is a comparison most Russians, especially of his generation, so close is the association in their minds.  Similarly, an entire generation of Ukrainains who came of age in the final years of the USSR, learned to become so contemptuous of the official Soviet characterisation of Ukrainian national sentiment as being adjacent to Nazi sympathies, that even Jewish Ukrainians are comfortable to shrug their shoulders at - and in some cases even join in with - the cult of Bandera, and the obliviation from Ukrainian national memory of the very real crimes of the UIA during the war.

I think that the Russian perspective is more worthy of attention, since the governments of America and basically the entirety of Western Europe stand in opposition to Russia. What does "denazification" mean? The below quote is from Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson and is how he describes it, at least publicly anyway.

Quote:You say Hitler has been dead for so many years, 80 years. But his example lives on. People who exterminated Jews, Russians and Poles are alive. And the President, the current President of today's Ukraine applauds him in the Canadian Parliament, gives a standing ovation! Can we say that we have completely uprooted this ideology if what we see is happening today? That is what denazification is in our understanding. We have to get rid of those people who maintain this concept and support this practice and try to preserve it – that is what denazification is. That is what we mean.

Now, I largely agree with many others who have already characterised Russia's move against Ukraine as its definitive break with the "West". Still, I am not convinced that Russia has ever had a legitimate claim to support the idea that it civilisationally stands apart from the West, i.e., that it is an entirely separate civilisation in its own right. Of course, there is the Duginist position which asserts, more or less, that the Russian understanding of geopolitics is fundamentally rooted in a perpetual congnisance of a sort of imperial 'manifest destiny' wherein Russia is in the process of completing its "civilization building mission". "Nazism" and "denazification", through this lens, would seemingly carry implications that reach far beyond just eastern Ukraine. It can be debated all day whether Putin or the Russian levers of power actually subscribe to Duginist thought. I don't know nor am I going to pretend that I do. Honestly, I don't think that anyone other than them knows with certainty. Still, are people really content to dismiss the eschatological sentiment that sits at the core of what Dugin claims to be the "essence" of the "Russian people" as mere quackery? 

Quote:There is a little misunderstanding in U.S. analysis of possible Russian answer to eventual direct participation of NATO in conflict – through Poland or elsewhere. U.S. most clever experts exclude preventive nuclear strike being sure that Russia uses this ultimate weapon only in the response to previous nuclear strike of the West. They are wrong in that. We are already in different stage of conflict. For Russia it means to be or not to be. For the US certainly it is highly important but not existential. So be not so sure. We've crossed the border.

I am not a dishonest person, so I've no issue admitting my wholly Western ignorance of Russia's deeply historical perception of itself. While I also despise modern Pharisaism, I make no efforts to obfuscate where my inborn sympathies lie (for better or for worse). There is the Third Rome political theology, which I suppose that I disagree with in principium, though I hardly understand it with all that much confidence.



If one takes "Third Rome" to be legitimate and entertains the idea that what survives of Western civilisation and the Church upon which it was built (itself having been built upon what survived of the First Rome) no longer retain any divine blessing or mandate, then it may also elucidate some of the possible unsaid motives of those who in the past, though interestingly less so as of recent, liked to invoke the phrase "Heil Putler". But I'm not really into conspiracy theories and that type of neurotic speculation is meaningless in any case.

Anyway, given that there was some discussion about the war in the shoutbox a few days ago, maybe others have thoughts on this recent J'accuse piece, or "denazification" / Duginism / "Third Rome" more generally.

I would like to bring attention to what is probably the most important political piece of our time: The Promise of a White Obama. It's at least the most important political piece I've read, because it both encapsulates and provides a remedy for many problems with modern American politics, all in a brief, two minute read.

Torbert Fahey, J'accuse Wrote:Today, the centre-left white moderates of America are not motivated by a sense of pity, but of fear. The world has become a much scarier place for members of our parent’s generation since the happy days of the early Obama presidency. All of the things that conservative influencers point towards as evidence of the chaos of Biden’s America are mostly just as disturbing to moderate centre-left whites, they just do their best to trust woke academics who tell them things like transgenderism and unhinged racial hate-mongering are good and healthy.

Woke zealotry is unnerving to moderate liberal whites, but in general they can deal with these feelings by saying “well, once upon a time black equality was frightening to comfortable folks like me, why should my comfort now be prioritized” when they see things like BLM burning down cities or China Joe having a dissociative episode in the middle of a Politburo Q&A session.

The problem that the author sees (correctly) is that the Democrat party has been captured by increasingly insane Marxoids who are able to deliver the fullness of their desires through the corpse-puppet China Joe, and that White liberals and moderates go along with it because it's the Right Thing to do, even if it means turning the country into a new South Africa.

The solution? A White Obama who can tell these people "no, it's ok to have a border, it's not racist to deport migrants" and things of that sort in an Obama-like fashion--that is, the appearance of a young, cool, and suave moderate--to alleviate feelings of wrongdoing in supporting a National program.

Quote:In 2008 Barack Obama won over white moderates by offering them a chance to relieve their sense of guilt. To white moderates, Obama was an appealing avatar for black America, a cultural monolith that loomed large in their minds as an object of pity and undeniable moral reproach. Moderate whites felt an overwhelming urge to ‘make things right’ and alleviate the specter of black suffering which had been constantly inflated for them by years of civil rights education. Moderate white America was constantly on the verge of despair vis a vis the possibility of ever achieving a racial reconciliation, but they felt deep in their hearts that something needed to happen. In darker moments, the white moderate might think that blacks would never ‘catch up’ and that the rectification of slavery would necessitate the transformation of America into another South Africa.
...
[Obama] offered them a way to palliate their sense of pity and guilt without overturning their lives or bringing on national degradation. His 2008 victory was a moment of profound national euphoria for this class.

The modern White Liberal can not support Trump because of his Character. A bold, brash, unapologetic Alpha Male who openly declares that he will crush anyone who betrays him. This is not a criticism of Trump, mind you, as Trump is a necessary development as we all know; but the person who comes after Trump--or who comes after the one who comes after Trump--should, maybe must, be this kind of character.

Quote:When middle-aged moderate liberals see a Trump victory they also see the overturning of society on behalf of their nebulous and frightening nihilist children. Trump is a stand-in for all the chaos of the future in the same way Obama was once a stand-in for the piteous spectacle of black poverty and disenfranchisement in America.

Moderate white liberals are not monsters; they recognize that they are inextricably associated with this thing that they fear. They do not want to disenfranchise their own children and ruin their own country with four more years of China Brandon’s toxic mixture of malevolence and ineptitude. There is a small part of them that recognizes the necessity of a Trump victory, but this voice is cowed by fear.
...
We have many things in common with well-educated liberal whites. They love Europe and France in particular. Point out to them that unapologetic cultural chauvinism and immigration restriction is tellement Français. They feel very insecure about patriotism and desperately want to be thought of as upstanding Americans, which is why they constantly try to gin up goofy astroturfed American boosterism like Matt Yglesias saying we can integrate the whole world because we’re America! They hate, hate, hate, middle eastern moral adventures and democracy promotion.
...
The first MAGA warrior who plays the suave diplomat to America’s frightened liberals will achieve outstanding success.

There are other points in this article that I have not hit, one being the alt-right teenager as recognizeable phenomenon, so feel free to discuss those as well, but I highly suggest reading--and rereading--this article, especially if you plan on being politically active beyond Xitter-alt posting.

Aizen Wrote:I would like to bring attention to what is probably the most important political piece of our time: The Promise of a White Obama. It's at least the most important political piece I've read, because it both encapsulates and provides a remedy for many problems with modern American politics, all in a brief, two minute read.


There are other points in this article that I have not hit, one being the alt-right teenager as recognizeable phenomenon, so feel free to discuss those as well, but I highly suggest reading--and rereading--this article, especially if you plan on being politically active beyond Xitter-alt post

This is not a new idea. It has been discussed many times, and you can even find historical analogues of the strategy. All you end up doing is taking 1 step back. You immediately take 2 steps forward a moment later. That said, there's nothing wrong with it, and people who want to feel effective should do whatever they wish to. Suffice to say, the only way such a move works is if it turns into a "coup" afterwards. The modern white liberal will not support this, not in the least. And it is very easy to blend into such a regime and subvert it immediately after. Largely because nothing has changed, you have merely comforted yourself and a few others.

Guest Wrote:This is not a new idea. It has been discussed many times, and you can even find historical analogues of the strategy. All you end up doing is taking 1 step back. You immediately take 2 steps forward a moment later. That said, there's nothing wrong with it, and people who want to feel effective should do whatever they wish to. Suffice to say, the only way such a move works is if it turns into a "coup" afterwards. The modern white liberal will not support this, not in the least. And it is very easy to blend into such a regime and subvert it immediately after. Largely because nothing has changed, you have merely comforted yourself and a few others.

Words of wisdom: this articles from what I’ve read looks like a evaluation of historic momentum rather than abstracted theory like you’re referring to. It’s a post-trump plan for specific historic goals, not a win-all theory. The historic element also means it can’t be interpreted by abstracted theory.

Dif-G Wrote:Words of wisdom: this articles from what I’ve read looks like a evaluation of historic momentum rather than abstracted theory like you’re referring to. It’s a post-trump plan for specific historic goals, not a win-all theory. The historic element also means it can’t be interpreted by abstracted theory.

You replied to this nonsense that addresses no particular claim in the article better than I could have, thank you. We're not talking about achieving #TND. If a "White Obama" was able to make liberals feel ok with--even good about--deportation and remigration, that alone would be a Victory of historical importance. As is stated, we do have many things in common with liberal, urbane whites, the major difference is that our morality is alien to them, but all that takes is a reframing of their morality to achieve the same ends as ours.

The modern German transhearts kikes because of the Holocaust, but it was those same Germans that carried out the greatest war in human history. The mind of the masses is fickle, like a woman, and can generally be manipulated to whatever whims a ruler desires. Similarly, with the power and/or rhetorical skill to do so, a "White Obama" could convince these people that browns staying in their own countries is better for them and that they are not bad people if they don't want wealth transfer to the Global South.

There is obviously a certain amount of Political Deception necessary in this, and our White Obama would need some level of skill in this regard (especially considering that this is a large part of Obama's power, a skinsuit wearing cipher who can somehow appear "at home" as black, white, or some other thing to the White liberal). It's not absolutely necessary, though, that White Obama need be as skilled as real Obama in this if White Obama has anywhere near the same level of personal magnetism as Trump, considering that Trump singlehandedly started a religious leader-worship movement through his sheer aura and no intention on his part.

White liberals need to feel safe with their vote. Even though no one is looking at their ballot, there is a tremendous level of personal guilt they have for niggers due to North Korea levels of indoctrination. A young, charismatic MAGA warrior will give them the self-security they need in the role of White Obama--one who will act as Obama, but oppose everything that dirty nigger stands for.

august Wrote:Anyway, given that there was some discussion about the war in the shoutbox a few days ago, maybe others have thoughts on this recent J'accuse piece, or "denazification" / Duginism / "Third Rome" more generally.

I had a long, reply that was wiped from existence to answer this, oh well I will now present its thesis in a economical form. I agree with it's author Abu Naji's argument which I'll reproduce his concluding remarks of.

Abu Naji Wrote:For those, particularly those on the right, who are sceptical about the wisdom of western support for Ukraine; either for economic reasons, security reasons, or simply because they doubt the ability of our current leadership to navigate such a path; indulging the Russian narrative uncritically is laden with risks. Primarily for their own credibility, but also for precedents that it sets for their own domestic priorities. The misuse of the history of World War 2 and the Nazis by the postwar USSR, and modern Russia, to legitimise the contemporary policies favoured by its elites, presents a valuable opportunity to oppose the same from being done by progressives in our own societies today. Challenging the institutions created after the Second World War like the ECHR will always invite casuistic accusations of ‘Nazism’. The game of ‘who is Hitler?’, is, apart from anything, tedious.

Just as westerners shouldn’t allow themselves to drink too deeply from the cup of sentimental nationalism relating to Ukraine or any nation whose history they don’t have the same depth of understanding for as they do their own, neither should they feel the need to participate in malicious mudslinging between neighbours. This is particularly critical for the American wing of the dissident right who appear to be far closer to wielding serious political power than their British equivalents are likely to be for several electoral cycles.

It addresses a real misunderstanding if you look on twitter you have people utterly mind killed by this conflict, repeating whatever often inventing their own claims not even native partisans believe sadly I must say especially by so called contrarian gadfly's. This gives a sober view that has been sadly neglected. However it does not go into great detail of the dynamics between the two sides or this use of WWII by the modern Russian state I will to answer August and show my thoughts influenced by many a Russian I've read  and spoken to. That being this use of WWII is simply the most visible sign of a Russian establishment that has no real wish to escape the world order and moral order built on the bones of the 'Axis Powers' that even if one did not like said powers or their vision what has replaced them should offend all civilized men-there is no drive to topple this beyond speech of a "Third Rome" "Multi polar order" that if one reads closely it is simply mutant take on what already exists. One that barely tries. First let me quote a important point made by Russian historian Sergei Vladimirovich Volkov On the Question of Communist "Statehood" http://swolkov.org/publ/13-2.htm which machine translation renders quite ably.

Sergei Vladimirovich Volkov Wrote:Yes, and what could be the political sense of an alliance between communists and anti-communists? There is none, and therefore such an alliance cannot exist. It is clear that the main question of any "unification" is under what banner it will take place or, in practical terms, who will actually head such a "united" Russia. Let provocateurs and fools hang crossed red and tricolor flags at their gatherings, but the state has only one flag. So, which one is it? This is the question that pretenders to the role of unifier usually prefer not to answer, and moreover, they pretend that it does not exist at all. The main thing, they say, is that there should be no "split between the Russian people"

---

As for the communists' claims to restoring the integrity of the "state," they are as hypocritical as they are unfounded.
It should not be forgotten that their state is not Russia, but the USSR, which by its very nature did not possess any integrity, representing a conglomerate of "states" with the right to free secession. The Russian Empire possessed integrity, which would never have disintegrated without the Bolshevik coup. It was the communists who dismembered the territory of the historical Russia they had destroyed into artificial republics on the national principle, drawing arbitrary borders through the living body of the country and conditioning state unity only on the domination of communist ideology, thus laying the groundwork for its disintegration. The Soviet system was deliberately constructed in such a way that it was impossible to free oneself from communist ideology without destroying the territorial integrity of the country and turning even the Great Russians into a "divided nation." So in 1991, the communists reaped only what they themselves had sown when they established their power.

Now lets look at how Russia's leader has resolved this knot since that was written in 1997.



This goes deeper than mere symbolic incongruity of course one simply has to lay out his reasoning for intervention happily given a official English translation like all his statements by the government itself. 

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843

Putin Wrote:It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.

Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?

The answer is simple. Everything is clear and obvious. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union grew weaker and subsequently broke apart. That experience should serve as a good lesson for us, because it has shown us that the paralysis of power and will is the first step towards complete degradation and oblivion. We lost confidence for only one moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world.

---

Of course, this situation begs a question: what next, what are we to expect? 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.

As a result, the country was not prepared to counter the invasion by Nazi Germany, which attacked our Motherland on June 22, 1941, without declaring war. The country stopped the enemy and went on to defeat it, but this came at a tremendous cost. The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after the hostilities broke out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of lives. We will not make this mistake the second time. We have no right to do so.

---

I would like to additionally emphasise the following. Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, those who will never forgive the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making a choice to reunite with Russia.

They will undoubtedly try to bring war to Crimea just as they have done in Donbass, to kill innocent people just as members of the punitive units of Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler’s accomplices did during the Great Patriotic War. They have also openly laid claim to several other Russian regions.

If we look at the sequence of events and the incoming reports, the showdown between Russia and these forces cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.

---

It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force. At the same time, we have been hearing an increasing number of statements coming from the West that there is no need any more to abide by the documents setting forth the outcomes of World War II, as signed by the totalitarian Soviet regime. How can we respond to that?

The outcomes of World War II and the sacrifices our people had to make to defeat Nazism are sacred. This does not contradict the high values of human rights and freedoms in the reality that emerged over the post-war decades. This does not mean that nations cannot enjoy the right to self-determination, which is enshrined in Article 1 of the UN Charter.

Putin and his gang in Russia's government have echoed the same since and indeed did 9 years ago when this war started. There is no Third Rome here, Dugin is not there sans the fact he simply follows the same mental current as the former KGB agent and many other Russians it is a mix of Soviet establishment ideas(NATO's Operation Barbarossa II is around the corner) luke worm ideas on Ukrainian and Russian unity and right to chose the former heavily colored by Soviet establishment ideas and eyebrows raised at  Western Abhorrence while almost all that under grids said West is in the country in fact the sacrifices ordered on a nation by a leader that hid for two weeks in his chambers until his general staff took control of fighting the Panzer's he blew off-That regime was great, totally special(For further reasoning why the Red Hijacking made Russia tinted with 'modernity' especially the kind we hate see my arguments against it here https://amarna-forum.net/t-Questions-abo...3#pid14593) 



This is the self image taken by a good many Russian patriots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheburashka
This picture is their understanding of the conflict. Well at least its done in a serious mann-It is not. The products of the USSR that took power have corrupted the state as seen infamously in 2022 but warning signs appeared in every conflict of modern Russia's history, reforms duly budgeted and then pocketed. For one, one can ask about this war alone why a 8 year wait? Because neither of the rusted coal and industrial regions that broke from Ukraine were part of the plan when the government was toppled and Russia was left figuring out what to do. Crimea was to be secured in a high wire operation


And then...well a few weeks later those among the population who feared the change in government would further take away from what pride they had left in post soviet malaise ruin everything target the Russian language and rip them from the motherland them and some from Russia proper stepped in. They went no more.



With barely any help from the Kremlin. As noted by a key participant Pavel Gubarev

Pavel Gubarev Torch of New Russia:How the West Acted in Ukraine Wrote:I also remember how the West had been preparing for war for all of those
years and how it became dominant in Ukrainian minds. The Kremlin likes
to complain that it financed Ukraine’s independence to the tune of about
$200 billion in gas subsidies. It obviously didn’t help. The West spent forty
times less -about $5 billion, but achieved a great deal more.
The West invested its money skillfully, and in a targeted manner towards
the most active people. By contrast, the Kremlin gave money to the
corrupt, the stupid, and the bandits. More importantly, the West worked
hard with its people, creating networks from them and supporting them.
By the time that the second Maydan began, it had 150,000 “soldiers” at
their disposal from non-profit organizations.
How did the West find those people? The Westerners first looked for
people who were active without any funding, who worked on enthusiasm
alone. They were people who wrote something or made something that
was of value to the West. The West invested in them by giving them
grants. Each time they were preparing to make a grant, they reviewed the
applicant’s activity. How is the applicant’s activity developing? How do
they intend to spread their ideas? If the applicant is continuing to be
valuable, then the West gives them more money. In addition, they will
send them to training camps in Europe and America. The West looked at
and supported activists from across the political spectrum – from
outspoken neo-Banderists to animal rights activists to sexual minorities.
The Americans did not launch activities with money – they looked to see
what was going on without them, then expanded them with greater
funding. They looked for sincere supporters – real Ukrainian nationalists
and supporters of a Western-style democracy, then invested in them. The
results were obvious.
What did Russia do? It was all about “money”. Some money was
appropriated for events. Some was squandered by incompetents. Some
money was simply stolen, with kickbacks being paid to the disbursement
agent. By the time of the Kiev coup on 21 February 2014, there was
almost no Russian influence in the Donbass. There was some influence in
Crimea, but barely anything in Donetsk. The Russian government had no
organization and knew few people. It was a major contrast to the
Americans, who had a file-cabinet worth of connections. The difference in
approaches was shown in time.
At Donetsk University 2000-2005 we made a club for New Russia history
buffs. It was only a small circle in a sea of gloom. We didn’t get any grants
from Russia, and no one scaled up our activities. Those who preached
Ukrainian nationalism and demonized monstrous Muscovites and Asiatics
by contrast did receive grants. Our opponents in the history department
received invitations and tickets to symposiums and conferences abroad.
Some went to Poland, the Baltic, and the United States. Their worldview
was elevated to canon status by the power of the state and foreign grants.
It became mainstream. Our views by contrast were considered to be
wrong. My friends and I were marginalized.
The power of the Ukrainian nationalists was a thousand times greater than
ours and manifested itself at Maydan. It turned out that the flexible,
clever, and predatory American system was more adept in the struggle for
the hearts and minds of Ukrainians than the slow moving and bureaucratic
Russian system. One side had motivated, active, and well-funded fanatics.
The other had nothing. Those few funded by Russia turned out to be
grifters, and they instantly disappeared as soon as the enemy made
himself known.
Even now, Russia isn’t ready for hybrid warfare. That kind of struggle is
fought with information, charity, creativity, networked structures, and
civic engagement. What Moscow can achieve with billions of dollars, the
Americans can achieve with merely tens of millions. It is very
disappointing that the Americans had fifteen projects in the Donbass while
the Russian Federation didn’t even have one. USAID, the Adenauer
Foundation, an anti-smoking project, and other Western foundations all
worked to undermine pro-Russian sympathies in the Donbass, yet failed.
The Americans had pawns in the game for the Donbass while Russia had
queens.
Funded activists were bedazzled by the United States. They were
enchanted with images of the beautiful West and the ideals of democracy.
The Americans worked hard to indoctrinate them, and many became
sincere believers. The Americans also got quality people – many were
educated and successful with nice cars and nice apartments.
The enemy succeeded in one of the most important struggles – to be seen
as fashionable, modern, and cool. Meanwhile, the idea of the Russian
World was seen as archaic, Soviet, and outdated. Russia’s failure in culture
cost it a great deal of Russian blood.

I feel he omits a bit the long bubbling national tendency by saying it was almost all American marshaling (Where did the already existing come from? What made it so such materialism could sink in so deep?) but he gives a important on the ground account that gives credence to my point, Russia had a shambolic response informed by fossils trying to play the game of post 1945. This has been its defining character under the current government. A unserious heel for the wrestling match, simply one of the biggest on the roster, as a actual plan beyond hollow appeals to what the people know well that's not what the Kremlin desires. The colorful heads of eastern uprising would be pushed out as the Kremlin stepped in to help stopped Ukraine and then things would be frozen in a state of no war and no peace for 8 years. 8 years of the remaining Ukrainian state arming itself and building actual state capacity so it would not be saved partly due to initiative of neo nazi football hooligans(The entire conflict can be put in a framework of a post modern civil war with a key factor being post soviet failures but my detour for context is long enough). Then Putin made his choice for reasons he has not wavered from in public. And the conduct of that has been less than optimal. Russian patriots direct participants in the start or second start have been some of the loudest. They have been either tempered or charged with extremism by a state not even honest enough to bring back defeatism as a charge. 


So to conclude fundamentally this is a conflict that comes from the contradictions and unresolved tensions in the post 45 order. Like many others of its kind the primary participants still play the game that lead to this and have no planned intention of a grand side step. To all this people like Dugin will babel about how America must tilt, and how a unique order will eclipse the West. All while engaging only with Western thought(Compare the Spengler citations in his work to the thinkers from the countries he will say will rise up, a classic western intellectual move really) in a country where even the alleged crusaders mirror their opponents in cultural mores.
And so it goes with the rest of the multipolar world, wherein Naji had a particular focus on certain talk I went over briefly the origins of this conflict what the rhetoric of the Russian state reveals about its inner nature and how its approach illustrates further. I consider it a understandable but serious mistake to think current Russia has a serious capacity or firmness to its stated desires or they are anything but brittle(One should ask what it says about a nation fighting a blood thirsty junta it stresses not too many conscripts will be needed) resting on Soviet rust and taking on the same water as everyone else.