Morning music
On this day a year ago
Looking at that blog post, it is almost incredible to see quite how many tweets used in it have been expunged by Twitter in the past months, mostly I think recently. The censorship now is heavily oppressive, not far from amounting to tyranny.
Where does Russia go from here?
I want to look beyond the immediate military situation in Ukraine, to where Russia is placed culturally and geopolitically in big-picture terms.
The present situation of Russia vis-a-vis the Western world is that, with some exceptions (notably export of gas), Russia can neither import nor export.
In fact, the new import-export regime imposed on Russia is far more strict than the limited embargo imposed on the Soviet Union and its satellites during the Cold War: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls.
The CoCom regime was focussed mainly on military applications, whereas the new sanctions affect almost everything.
There has always been, certainly since the time of Peter the Great (17thC) a tension between Russia and the West. That was for a long time more evident in Russia itself than in the West. Peter was a Westernizer, who wanted to drag old Russia into the modern age. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great. To that end, Peter visited the upcoming mercantile and military powers of his time, particularly England and Holland.
Catherine the Great [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great], a German, was another modernizer and Westernizer (up to a point) but, in an interesting parallel to Stalin’s later rule, also intensified the harshness of serfdom.
The Westernizing tendency in Russia continued to exist in tandem with its opposite, the Slavophile tendency, which held that the Slavs, led by Russia, had their own unique future mission, and should not be too affected, contaminated by, or corrupted by Western habits and values. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavophilia, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westernizer.
While, in the 19th and 20th centuries, there were both tendencies in both government and intellectual life, Russian statesmen tended to be Westernizers, people such as Witte [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Witte], whereas the Slavophile tendency was stronger in the worlds of philosophy and literature. One thinks of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky etc and, later Soloviev [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(philosopher)], Berdyaev [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Berdyaev] and others.
These categories were not strictly drawn, though. Some writers were more Westernizing (e.g. Turgenev) and some governmental figures more Slavophile, e.g. Pobedonostsev [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Pobedonostsev], whose slogan was ” Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” [Правосла́вие, самодержа́вие, наро́дность]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy,_Autocracy,_and_Nationality.
Tsars Nikolai I and Alexander III were quite Slavophile, others (notably Alexander II, who liberated the serfs) more influenced by the West.
Slavophiles tended to distrust, inter alia, Western notions of democracy, reliance on technology, and the influence of Jews and Jewish notions: “The characteristics of the Jewish race are parasitic; for their sustenance they require the presence of another race as “host” although they remain aloof and self-contained” [Pobedonostsev]. Again, though, a line cannot be strictly drawn.
There was always a ying/yang aspect to the Slavophile/Westernizer dichotomy; a little bit of each in the other.
The Soviet regime likewise had Slavophile elements, more obviously so after 1945, though it was fundamentally a Westernizing movement: “Socialism means Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” [Lenin].
There was a paradox, though. The dictatorial Westernizing movement of Bolshevism, that became Sovietism, could only maintain its power via a degree of enforced isolation from the West, which might be called, arguably, a Slavophile policy, at least in effect..
Dissidents against the Soviet regime were sometimes Westernizers (such as Sakharov [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov], wanting Western civil rights and so on, but also sometimes Slavophiles such as Solzhenitsyn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn].
The Soviet Union from the death of Stalin in 1953, and especially since Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956, was fundamentally Westernizing, trying to copy the West in many respects, if only to try to outdo the West. The West had Concorde, so the Soviet Union had to have “Concordski” (the bungled TU-144). One example.
Since 1989, when Socialism fell (though the Soviet Union walked on, mortally wounded, until 1991), Russia has pursued an almost insane Westernist policy, even under Putin. That may now be reversed, or a different path pursued.
Having said that, Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, will not want to be cut out of Western technological progress. That would seem to suggest both an increase in Russian research and development, and an uptick in intelligence activity, including outright espionage.
The atom bomb secrets of the West were uncovered and captured in the 1940s and 1950s by a combination of huge scientific effort and huge espionage effort. In latter days (1960s through 1980s) the KGB’s “Line X” was the main organization involved in scientific and technical intelligence-gathering, together with, on the military side, the GRU.
We cannot talk about Western influence on Russia (and indeed Europe proper) without considering the often baleful effect of Anglo-American, mainly American, cultural exports. Film, TV, contemporary music. Whether Putin’s Russia has the spirit to stand against that is doubtful. Even the German Reich had to compromise to some extent on popular culture.
It has been said, by such as Rudolf Steiner [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner, and Valentin Tomberg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg], that the far future will see two races emerge on the Earth, a “good” race based in Russia, and an “evil” race based in North America.
I have blogged before about how Russia, of all countries in the world, could subsist under a system of autarky [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autarky]. It now seems that it may have little choice.
Whether Putin himself, with Russia’s transitional, post-Soviet, and post-Yeltsin form of society, will survive long is an open question. After Putin, the Russian leadership will have to thoroughly reform and reset Russian society, without Western help and without Western interference and exploitation.
A good start, culturally, would be for Russia to eliminate, as far as possible, pop/rock (etc) music. Also, most contemporary American films, and certainly most “sit-coms” and TV dramas.
Tweets seen
System politicians in the UK now have to admit one of two possibilities: either they were stupid idiots about “Covid”, or they were the conscious dupes of the transnational “Great Reset” conspiracy.
The hysterical “trans” nonsense has taken over feminism and imprisoned it in a distortion worthy of Kafka.
Have these “erudite apes” (as Hitler called them) ever heard of, say, Animal Farm, or Faithful Ruslan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithful_Ruslan.
“Yesterday he was evil and an enemy, but today evil and a friend“, so to speak…
A friend of the NWO, anyway…
Afternoon music
Alison Chabloz
The latest blog post from persecuted satirist and singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz: https://alisonchabloz.com/2022/03/20/an-early-birthday-gift-has-arrived/.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 