This brief expose of "Putin's Brain" shows the roots of Putin's ultranationalist Russian orthodoxy. It's crackpot history and political science and the limits of it are being exposed in Ukraine. Russia was a superpower because they successfully stole nuclear secrets from Britain. Historically, Russia was at best a great power among other great powers, but usually a second tier power. It remains to this day a second tier power with a brief period of brutal regional hegemony from 1945-1989.
We know Putin's vision of the world is a twisted vision. What is being laid bare time and time again is the degree to which Putin and his world view sees the West.
After World War II, Stalin was not terribly aggressive in confronting the West, at least in terms of expanding his area of dominance. When Yugoslavia broke with Moscow, he did nothing. When Kim Il Sung's army was pressed to the Yalu, he did nothing - ceding the initiative to Mao. The reason was simple. As a naïve Marxist-Leninist (Stalin wasn't a deep thinker) he took it as an article of faith that the West would eventually collapse in a proletarian revolution.
Putin's "Brain" sees things slightly different. For him, the West is decadent and corrupt (Corrupt? From a Russian?!) Here is the salient piece from the profile:
In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.
The plan was clear all along. Putin helped Trump. Putin helped the Brexiteers. Putin helped Catalonian separatists. The degree to which we have a smoking gun is less clear. Is there a file in the CIA somewhere with all of Trump's financial ties to Russia? Does MI-6 have Nigel Farage's bank statements?
The most extreme anti-Putin voices like Anne Applebaum have chastised NATO for not striking at Russia's military. Yeah, no. That's a terrible idea that threatens all life on earth. Pass.
However, we are at war with Russia. It's somewhere between a Cold War and a Tepid War at the moment. The history of anti-communism in America in the 1920s and 1950s is not pretty. There was a wholesale assault on American civil rights and liberties.
But...
If we have credible information that Donald Trump or Madison Cawthorn or Marjorie Traitor Greene or any of those odious shitbirds in the GQP are receiving active assistance from Russia, we need to act on that.
One thing we can't do is rely on the voters of western North Carolina or northwest Georgia to rid of us of Russian assets in the halls of Congress. The Putinesque vision of a revanchist nationalism built on a cultural conservatism that even many Republicans have walked away from is still very much the position of the majority of Republican voters. If Greene and Cawthorn win their primaries, they are going to win the general election. We saw this with William Barr, who laid out how Trump was working to destroy American democracy, which appalled Barr...but he'll probably vote for him anyway if he gets the nomination.
That excessive partisan zeal that would put people who are actively and repeatedly demonstrating their contempt for American democracy back in charge of our government demonstrates that we need to do more than rely on public shaming and the judgments of history.
Fuckers need to be in jail.
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