SDG16

Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin’s two wars

Alexandr Dugin and Patriarch Kirill are two people with influence on Putin. Photo: Alexandr Dugin’s FB

Alexandr Dugin, is the fascist Russian whose philosophy Steve Bannon (Trump’s former top advisor) adheres to.

PUBLIC ORTHODOXY by Sergei Chapnin :

On Thursday morning, we woke up to a different world. In this new world, the Kremlin is fighting two wars at once: it has launched a major war against Ukraine and has continued war against Russia. The consequences of these wars will be severe for the people of both countries. If the aggression against Ukraine is an open war, with bombings, troops on the territory of an independent state, and military and civilian casualties, the Kremlin’s war against Russia seems less obvious. Arrests, political assassinations, trials turned into a farce, torture of prisoners, suppression of independent media, pressure on lawyers and civil activists—all these seem incomparable to open-armed aggression, and yet it is a war that the Kremlin is waging hard and consistently against its people.

On February 24 alone, the day Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border, 1,700 people were detained in various Russian cities. Almost all of them will be convicted by the “pocket courts” of Putin’s Russia. The Kremlin did not like the fact that Russian citizens dared to speak out against the war with Ukraine.

Is the voice of the Orthodox Church now heard in the warring countries? Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has spoken twice in recent days. On the eve of aggression, on February 23, when Russia celebrates the old Soviet holiday, Red Army Day (renamed Defender of the Fatherland Day in 1993), the patriarch laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin wall and delivered an unexpectedly large sermon. First, he stressed that “we live in times of peace, but we know that in times of peace there are also threats.” That is eight years of smoldering war in the Donbass, where thousands of soldiers and civilians have died on both sides, many of whom were members of the Church of which he is the Primate, mean nothing to the Patriarch. And then: “Unfortunately, there are threats even at this moment—everyone is familiar with what is happening on the borders of our Fatherland.” That is, the borders of the Fatherland are the “sacred borders” of Russia, which must be protected, while the borders of other countries, where he is revered as Patriarch, do not mean that much to him.

Less than 24 hours after these words, Russian President Vladimir Putin will order an attack on Ukraine.

The Great Awakening vs the Great Reset

BRITISH PUBLISHER ARKTOS: Alexander Dugin’s The Great Awakening vs the Great Reset is an open declaration of war against the twin diseases of liberalism and Western political modernity. Dugin calls upon the inhabitants of the Heartland to relentlessly attack, on all theoretical and practical fronts, the global elites of the coastlands, who try to impose their perverse, anti-human ideals by ruthlessly eradicating the long-standing cultures and traditions of all peoples in the world.

The demented usurper Joe Biden and his slavish Democrat acolytes are opposed by the Trumpists, who represent normal America and do not want to see their country submerged in a one-world, transhumanist dystopia. Just like the other rooted societies, they want to preserve their time-honored way of life amidst the strangling tentacles of hysterical trans- and homosexuals, treacherous anti-White agitators, and murderous Black Lives Matter grifters and terrorists.

Thus the stage is set for a showdown of truly apocalyptic proportions, pitting the forces of righteous anger, those who want to preserve traditions and the true richness of human diversity, against the Antichrist and his Soros-backed minions of insidious degeneracy and evil, who want to erase all bonds and communities — down to the human race itself.

Sounds like the book all speakers at CPAC quotes without probably even knowing it.

“The resolution of the Ukraine question.”

From National Review June 18. 2014 by Robert Zubrin:

Men of action cut a large figure in the history books, but it is the ideas placed in their heads by men of thought that actually determine what they do. Thus the scribblings of mad philosophers can lead to the deaths of millions. As the modern-day heir to this tradition, Alexander Dugin bids fair to break the record.

Most Americans don’t know anything about Alexander Dugin. They need to, because Dugin is the mad philosopher who is redesigning the brains of much of the Russian government and public [and alt-right movements in the whole western world (easy to spot because somehow they all are anti-vax also)], filling their minds with a new hate-ridden totalitarian ideology whose consequences can only be catastrophic in the extreme, not only for Russia but for the entire human race.

In recent months, as the embrace of Duginist ideas by the Putin regime has become ever more evident, a number of articles have been written calling attention to the threat. But now, with the appearance of “The American Empire Should Be Destroyed”: Alexander Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology, by James Heiser, we finally have a book-length treatment. It is well worth reading.

This article on Putin’s war with Ukraine must have been written by Alexandr Dugin:

by Thomas de Waal
@Tom_deWaalSenior Fellow, Carnegie Europe. Scholar/writer on Caucasus, E. Europe, Russia. Author of “The Caucasus.” For proper analysis read my books/articles, not tweets!

A mistakenly published Russian article gives us a chilling insight into the neo-imperialist thinking in Russia that drives Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. RIA Novosti news agency accidentally published an article, tagged with a publication date of 8 AM on February 26, already celebrating a Russian victory and collapse of the Ukrainian state within an anticipated two days. It’s still on their site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html

The main theme is that the “operation” is a defeat for the West’s project to defeat Russia. That Putin seized the moment to return Ukraine to its historic Slavic union with Russia and Belarus. Potential NATO candidacy is seen as a symptom of the problem, not the main cause. Some quotations first and a few comments at the end: The author calls this a “new era.” “Russia is restoring its historic unity: the tragedy of 1991, that terrible catastrophe of our history, that unnatural aberration, has been overcome.”

He concedes it’s “a civil war in which brothers still shoot at each other even though they were divided only by their membership of the Russian and the Ukrainian armies. But there will now no longer be a Ukraine which is anti-Russia.” The only mention of Ukrainians as people.

Putin, we are told, had to act now or to lose Ukraine forever. “We can say without a drop of exaggeration, that Vladimir Putin took upon himself a historic responsibility, by deciding not to leave the resolution of the Ukrainian question to future generations.”

The main issue was “the complex of a divided nation and a complex of national humiliation when the Russian House began to lose part of its foundation (the Kievan one) and then was forced to reconcile itself to the existence of two states of not one but two peoples.”

The answer? Kill Ukraine’s sovereignty.“Now this problem no longer exists: Ukraine has returned to Russia. This doesn’t mean that its statehood will be liquidated but it will be re-structured, re-established and returned to its natural condition as part of the Russian world…

“…In which borders and in what form.. (through the CSTO, and the Eurasian Union or as part of the Union State between Russia and Belorussia)?—questions like this will be decided when we have placed a firm full stop to the history of a Ukraine as an anti-Russian entity.”

The author moves to the West. “Did anyone in.. Paris and Berlin, seriously believe that Moscow would give up Kiev?… the West as a whole, and Europe in particular, lacked the strength to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence, let alone to take Ukraine for itself.”

“More precisely, they had only one option: to bet on the further collapse of Russia, that is of the Russian Federation. But it should have been clear twenty years ago that this would not work. And already 15 years ago, after Putin’s Munich speech [of 2007]…”

The big geopolitical clash will cost Russia but it will survive: “No amount of Western pressure on Russia will have any results. There will be losses from the transformation of the confrontation on both sides, but Russia is ready for them morally and geopolitically.”

A big theme for the author is that France and Germany are allegedly fundamentally different from the “Anglo-Saxons,” the UK and US, who are trying to assert Western hegemony over everyone, them included.

“The German project of European integration makes no strategic sense as long as there is Anglo-Saxon ideological, military and geopolitical control over the Old World.”“Europeans are now completely uninterested in building a new iron curtain on their eastern borders.”

“[T]he construction of a new world order – and this is the third dimension of current events – is accelerating, and its contours are more and more clearly poking through the unravelling fabric of Anglo-Saxon globalization. A multipolar world has finally become a reality.”

“the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well: this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlanticists, this is Russia’s recovering its historical space and place in the world.”

Article ends: “China and India, Latin America and Africa, the Islamic world and Southeast Asia – no one believes that the West leads the world order, much less sets the rules of the game. Russia has not only thrown down a challenge to the West,…

“..it’s shown the era of Western global domination can be considered fully and definitively over. The new world will be built by all civilizations and centres of power, naturally, together with the West (united or not) -but not on its terms and not according to its rules.”

A few final comments. This is a Russian imperialist discourse: rejected at the end of the USSR, given respectability again under Putin in 2000 but still marginal. It entered Putin’s public speeches after seizure of Crimea—and now has entirely captured Putin’s world-view.

Much of the Russian foreign establishment is anti-Western to various degrees but not nearly this aggressive (which is why most of them did not predict the invasion). But their views mean little when Putin makes all the decisions.

The author gives no agency to Ukrainians as people. He twists himself in a knot asserting that “brothers still shoot at each other, even though they have been divided only by their membership of the Russian and the Ukrainian armies.” It’s regrettable fratricide, folks.

He magnifies differences in the West over Russia into major splits. That’s now answered by Germany’s historic reaction to events. Like most imperialists he fails how small countries, from the Baltic States in 1940 to Czechoslovakia in 1968, feel about big neighbours

The author gets it wrong anticipating Ukraine’s collapse and European disunity. Thank the Lord! But there’s less to cheer elsewhere. The bet that only the West cares about Ukraine still has to be disproved, given equivocation of China, India, Turkey’s limited response.

The piece also reveals how far paranoia, grievance and aggression is embedded in state decision making—and is thus far immune to an alternative reality. Part of this is a willingness to endure hardship in pursuit of this Russian imperial project.

We can only hope Ukrainian resistance, international pressure and diplomacy will eventually force a re-think, but what will have happened to Ukraine, how many thousands of lives will have been lost before that happens? ENDS

Thank you all for the huge response! Let me add one caveat. We can’t know that the article reflects the Kremlin’s intentions, only that a big news agency commissioned it to celebrate victory—and it “rhymes” with Putin’s big speech last week. Let’s hope other views prevail.

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