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No More Brother War?

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left” Bertrand Russell

The Dissident Right’s analysis of the on-going war in Ukraine has revealed a significant number of intellectual and theoretical failings. It has been hampered by an inability to unmoor itself from a hyperpolarised, myopically partisan view of the world which is undergirded by misguided sentimentality. The question we should be asking now is not which side is the most moral in this conflict, but rather what will this war mean for Europe and Europeans? To answer that question, we require a realistic assessment of who we truly are. Those who lament the sight of brother fighting brother once again on European soil fundamentally misunderstand that conflict is the central dynamo of our people; as historian Niall Ferguson puts it, competition is one of the killer apps of Western civilisation. With this in mind, we must view this war not only as a crisis but an opportunity to remake Europe in our image.

Undoubtedly, for those affected by this ferocious conflagration it is a source of untold misery. It is understandable that nationalists and liberals alike should mourn the unwarranted casualties who are suffering through horrors of war the like of which have not been seen since dissolution of Yugoslavia. This sentiment is acutely felt by those invested in the preservation of the European people. At a time when we are so demographically imperilled, it seems suicidal madness for tens of thousands of the bravest and best of our people to be killed in a futile neo-imperial struggle. It is reasonable to feel that the Achilles’ heel of Europe has been our fractious, violently quarrelsome nature. It is reasonable to think this – but it is also wrong.

Seventy years of peace and hegemonic liberalism have done dramatically more damage to European demographics and culture than any previous war ever has. Some would contest this point immediately, arguing that Europe exhausted itself fighting two catastrophic World Wars which nearly destroyed not only the continent, but the entire planet. Yet it was not these wars which are themselves the cause of our ills, but the spiritual and psychological fallout in their aftermath. Our total loss of confidence prompted Europe to surrender its primacy on the world stage and to turn inwards, submitting itself to the strait jacket of governance by globalist institutions. The European martial spirit has largely laid dormant since then, and we have been decaying ever since. This is a wakeup call.

Just because the West has viewed war only as an instrument to be utilised when remaking unwilling third world countries in our ideological image, the rest of the world has not taken on that definition. Russia never transitioned from the old realities of geopolitics, its policy makers, many of whom were forged in the Soviet system, still view power as stemming from territory, natural resources, tanks, and missiles. While the Western political elite congratulates itself on the fact our soft power can raise the LGBTQ flag around the globe, Russia never updated its geopolitical calculus. A plethora of explanations have been offered for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but perhaps Occam’s Razor suits best when asking why Putin launched his unexpected gambit. Rightly or wrongly, Russia believed it could invade unchallenged and ultimately gain spoils in land, subjects, and plunder by doing so.

Whether or not this is actually true is another matter. It may well be the case that this has been a colossal miscalculation by Putin. While liberal comparisons between Hitler and Putin abound, one comparison that may ring true is just as Hitler remarked that he had only to kick in the door of the Soviet Union and the whole rotten structure would collapse, Putin may have reached a similar assessment of the West. In reality, the Russian state may have too few troops and too little political will to see this invasion through to the end. It is enticing for some to hope for a total Russian victory, not out of petty animosity towards Ukrainians but because Russia could represent a new traditionalist hegemonic force, an antidote to Western woke tyranny. This is a simplistic and naïve view – Russia is operating out of sheer national interest. Alexander Dugin is offering an honest assessment when he states that Eurasianism is not for export – it is naturally a geographically limited endeavour.

Indeed, it seems laughable to suggest that a nation which is struggling to project power a few hundred miles from its own border could be the next globe spanning superpower. Putin in the end may not be a conquering hero, but rather a kamikaze pilot crashing the Russian state into the aircraft carrier that is Western liberalism. Putin fancies himself as a modern Peter the Great, however if he mismanages this campaign, he may end with more in common with the doomed Tsar Nicholas II.

Much hay has been made by Twitter armchair generals and gleeful Western media outlets about supposed Russian military ineptitude. The true impact of this on the eventual outcome of the war is likely overstated, after all, war is a series of disasters that results in a winner. Clausewitizian principles have not gone away on the modern battlefield, and if anything, the unknowable variables that cause the friction of war have multiplied in the drone era. The problems of devising and executing new military doctrines in an untested full scale modern war environment most likely affect both sides equally. The Ukrainian military may be equipped with thousands of cutting-edge Javelin anti-tank weapons and Turkish drones, but it is also operating as many as 35,000 World War 1 era Maxim guns.

The question is not therefore if Russia is making mistakes on the ground, but how much capacity to absorb costly engagements it has. This is not the mass army of the Soviet Union, there is no endless supply of motivated human waves to throw at the enemy. Russia, just as the West, is a demographically depleted nation whose population at large has a limited willingness to fight. The deployment of Chechen fighters to the front outraged nationalists of all stripes, but there is undoubtedly an element of raw Machiavellian pragmatism in this decision. Russia has neither the raw numbers nor the political appetite to win this war with native troops alone. The same impetus that prompted Germany’s Bundeswehr to mull over recruiting Poles, Italians, and Romanians has factored into Russia’s military strategy. This is not the triumphant burst of vitality from a young upstart nation, but rather two decrepit and demographically disappearing states squabbling for scraps.

The defects of Russia’s military machine have been exposed for all to see, but in launching its unexpected assault, Russia has shone a searchlight on the laughable infirmity of Europe’s security apparatus. Germany’s notable handwringing and delay in sending so-called lethal aid to Ukraine is in part a result of the dire state of its own armed forces. Europe’s elite have been left red faced as NATO members bicker over the limited supply of materiel. Germany is scouring its museums for tanks and dispatching mouldy and inoperable boxes of missiles to Ukraine’s frontline. It has failed to deliver tanks promised to Poland. Dissent grows in the alliance as France seeks a negotiated settlement, while nations such as Croatia and Hungary are hedging their bets. A fifth of Ukrainian territory is now in Russian hands, and disunity amongst European states may allow Putin to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Whether Putin succeeds in his bid to annex Eastern Ukraine and beyond will however not be the lasting legacy of this invasion. Whatever else Putin has done, he has thrown a brick through the glass house of European sloth and inaction. Just as Gavrilo Princip’s bullet ended the old order in Europe forever, once the first missile hit Kiev it detonated all the old assumptions and platitudes of our liberal elite. European policy makers and much of the public at large have believed that the borders of Europe which were drawn up in 1945 are immutable facts of life. The truth is nations are living entities maintained not by political abstractions, but by the blood and sweat of patriots on the battlefield. This has always been so, and this iron law of the nature never changed despite wishful liberal thinking. Putin has fanned the embers of the martial spirit in Europe once again. While much ham-fisted propaganda has been disseminated in Ukraine’s favour, it is undeniable that the average infantryman facing down Russian tanks doesn’t believe nationhood is a mere set of abstract theories. He is fighting for hearth and home in a pitiless existential battle. Putin has proven to a Europe subservient to foreign military powers that it cannot rely on them for its security. If European states wish to survive, they must now be defended by Europeans.

While Putin has dramatically exposed the laughably misguided assumptions at the heart of our collective defence, he also put paid to the lie diversity is our strength. The large contingent of Ukrainian citizens who felt themselves to be ethnically Russian have sabotaged their state from within. Minorities have been weaponised, and this model could be applied next to the Baltic states and beyond. This prompts uncomfortable questions when we brooch the topic of divided loyalties in a Europe that houses tens of millions of foreign born and ethnic minority citizens. Our multi-ethnic societies have never been tested by a true crisis, and conflict begets conflict, as old ethnic tensions stir again, with Bosnia being just one example.

It may be hard to imagine that war, destruction, and chaos could lead to anything good for the European people. And yet, the path we were treading was one of our self-extinction; of a slow and suffocating senility. We were heading quietly into night as a new and alien world rose around us. When our race is in the slaughterhouse, anything that disrupts the machinery is a necessity. Europeans have always fought and struggled and sacrificed. The story of Europe is the story of our Janus headed dialectic; pagan fought Christian, Catholic battled Protestant, Royal dynasty was pitted against Royal dynasty, great and terrible modern ideologies squared up against each other. It is this constant reinvention of our continent by these huge battles of ideas that has enabled Europe to be the engine of world history for nigh-on three millennia.

Tactical assessments are infamously difficult to get right – it is almost impossible to know if Putin will win or lose. War is not a zero-sum game and in the short to medium term it may be the case that both sides suffer. What we can predict with more certainty is that we have seen the high watermark of the liberal order. Reeling from their defeats in Afghanistan and Syria, the liberal warmongers and meddlers are now besieged in their heartland. The Asiatic battering ram is at the castle gates, and this chaos might just be the distraction required for the patriots to escape from the dungeons. We do not dream of a Europe under Russian dominion. Those in Eastern Europe who have experienced Russian rule would scarcely recommend it, and the fact that Russia must impose itself by force speaks to the lack of appeal of its system. We want a Europe ruled by Europeans, for Europeans. Our elites are driving us off a cliff, and now is the time for us to wrestle the wheel from them.

Above all, the current conflict has elevated the stakes of all politics. We have no time for frivolity in the face of direct and immediate danger. People across our continent are waking up to the uncomfortable reality that is not enough to simply believe in Europe; you must fight for it too. In the shockwave of economic and political turmoil to come, masses of disenfranchised and disillusioned Europeans will be looking for new political solutions. It is incumbent on us to be waiting in the wings, ready to offer our vision of the world and to shepherd our misled people back to greatness. War is a terrible thing, but to struggle is to live. There will be much more struggle to come, and we must be ready to make sure we are the victors of that struggle.

The Ice Man Cometh

March 4, 2017 / admin / 0 Comments

“Slavs in their Original Homeland”, Alphonse Mucha

The Trump administration is a government under siege. Despite securing the greatest electoral upset of recent history and overcoming the slings and arrows of recounts, legal challenges and violent mass protest, it is an administration haunted by an omnipresent and malevolent spectre. While accusations of misogyny and racism failed to derail the President, the dogged claims of nefarious Russian influence and collusion have managed to inspire a near psychosis in Republicans and Democrats alike. This however, is nothing new. Talking tough on Russia has been a staple of Western governments; fabricating the Russian bogeyman a seemingly essential element in liberal national unity and a fundamental plank of contemporary foreign policy. Yet there is more to this Russophobia, this total distrust of the East, than simple political expedience. Globalists and liberals have identified Russia and the East as a grave existential threat to their grip on power, one that must be stopped at all costs. Thus, the question must be asked, what are they so afraid of?

On the surface, the answer to this seems obvious. Russia is an illiberal, bellicose and calculating semi-rogue state which has designs on reoccupying its near neighbours and establishing itself as the new world hegemon. As a perennial enemy of the West, its mere existence entails the remote but ever present threat of nuclear Armageddon. Its calculating eternal despot is always looking to exploit our weakness and provoke us, as evidenced by Russian naval manoeuvres and its military’s endless exercises. In this narrative of the liberal institutionalist, we live in a world where a neo-Hunnic horde could sweep over the steppes and descend upon us at any time. Yet for an ideology which declares itself steadfastly against xenophobia, Orientalism, and paternalism these are shockingly primitive appraisals of the world’s second power. And if these assumptions were confined merely to Russia, they would be egregious but at least could be masked in the superficial garb of national interest. But even a cursory glance at contemporary politics reveals that it is not the Russian state the liberals fear, but the re-awakening of the Slavic spirit.

It is amid this atmosphere that the European Union has become increasingly dismayed by the activity of its Eastern members. Viktor Orban’s steadfast Hungarian resistance to the vast refugee columns that swept over Europe in 2016, including a sustained campaign of barrier building not unlike the plans of President Trump, are a long running source of chagrin to the institution. But he is by no means alone in earning their paternalistic ire – the positions of the Czech, Slovakian and Polish governments have all come under fire for a myriad of sins including prioritising Christian refugees, refusing benefit payments, taking only a paltry number of refugees, and harsh treatments of refugees upon arrival – refugees to Latvia and Lithuania were so disillusioned they reportedly abandoned the countries altogether after only a brief stay. A perhaps even more significant departure from the party line came in the wake of the attack on the Berlin Christmas Market. While Germany and the EU were busily trying to bury the horrifying news in their usual platitudes of living with terrorism and how relatively safe we all are, the Polish people exploded in indignation at the loss of one of their sons, Lukasz Urban, the lorry driver who was killed and whose vehicle was used to perpetrate the attack. The Polish people immediately sought to engineer his elevation to national hero status, with hundreds attending his funeral including the President as well as calls for him to posthumously receive the Order of Merit.

This attachment to even a ‘mere’ lorry driver may at first seem simple opportunistic populism; but it is indicative of a central tenent of the Eastern spirit, namely: tribal thinking. Identifying with fellow Christians, attempting to resist the forced transplanting of outsiders, and considering even the poorest in the ethnic community worthy of defending are all not merely incidental acts of government, but products of the Eastern mindset. It is the same mindset that inspires Russia not to view itself bounded by state lines, but to consider wherever Russians dwell to be Russia. This is a queasy prospect for Western policy makers who have done their best to detach states from any notion of being made up of the citizens; and instead view the state as first and foremost a bureaucratic and managerial entity which draws its power from above, not below.

The growing revolt in the East has also highlighted a fundamentally flawed assumption at the heart of liberalism: liberalism sees all peoples as ultimately interchangeable, and while liberal policy makers knew that Eastern Europe was still rife with the regressive attachments to kin, country and religion, they believed that a change in economic circumstance would precipitate a change of worldview. Quite simply, they thought they could remake their societies with cold hard cash. This is borne out by the ruthlessly pragmatic architects of neoliberalism in Russia, who in unleashing the ‘shock therapy’ transition from the Soviet economy to free markets affected a national demographic crisis as so severe it plunged the nation into negative population growth as thousands died in the squalor of poverty and alcoholism; all while the crown jewel assets of Russia’s previously stated owned economy were seized at rock bottom prices by predatory capitalists. What should have followed this ignominious episode if liberal doctrine was correct was a reintegration of Russia into the world system and a flourishing of pluralistic democratic society. Instead from the tumult emerged a fiercely nationalistic uncompromising leader who immediately set about undoing this catastrophic external meddling.

Undeterred by this abject failure, liberal policy makers tried the exact same policy again, this time on the newly freed states of Eastern Europe. The cause of their failure, they reasoned, was not the particularities of the Eastern spirit – but rather the underestimation of the amount capital required to reprogram a people. So when the waves of Eastern European states acceded to the European Union, the liberal elites enacted their dogma with renewed vigour, this time eager not to make the same mistake as they did in Russia, and thus they were generous with the terms of loans, amount of foreign investment and development packages granted to the fledgling members. However, the result of such policies once again was dire demographic strife as well as this time draining the local populations of the most productive members who freely sought to chase wealth, fleeing their native countries en masse. Despite these depredations, the globalists thought they had succeeded this time. The Eastern European states with their desire to free themselves from Russian influence eagerly committed to fiscal and military integration.

Yet all this overlooked one other vital aspect of the Eastern psyche – the martial spirit. Though charged with dark plots for world domination, it has twice been the Russians who have stopped the march of globalism bent on creating a global order by force of arms; first defeating Napoleon on the frozen steppes of Borodino and second demolishing the ambitions of the thousand year Reich in the rubble of Stalingrad. Russia has demonstrated itself to be not the eternal enemy of the West, but rather the avowed enemy of globalism. When it once again felt the tightening noose of an encroaching foreign ideology it acted swiftly and uncompromisingly to stop its advance and also demonstrate the impotence of the ideology, firstly with its war in Georgia and secondly its annexation of the Crimea in Ukraine. Herein lies liberalism’s most fevered fears about Russia, in these two incidents it proved many of the most sacred assumptions of liberalism to be untrue. The will to fight was ultimately proven to trump economics and institutionalism, and in its projection of force to secure its native enclaves in Abkhazia and the Crimea, Russia utilized military power masterfully in stark contrast to the costly and ultimately futile liberal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This embarrassment was compounded even further, when the West had to call upon Russia’s help to extricate itself from the colossal disaster it had created in the Middle East. It was Russia who decisively scuppered Western plans to deploy ground troops to Syria, thus averting yet another crisis. In exerting such power over international politics Russia unravelled yet another attempt at a hegemonic unipolar world order; and in the same instance had proven why monolithic bureaucratic group think was so dangerous. The indefatigable Russian spirit had burst from the permafrost of the Soviet Union, undone the efforts to sabotage and subjugate it by neoliberal zealots, and now was ready to strike a blow at the true enemy of Western and Eastern Civilization – radical Islam. It is no coincidence that ISIS began to suffer serious military reversals once the West finally allowed itself to co-operate with Russia, who pursued the group with its characteristic pitiless ferocity; demonstrated most starkly by reports of a young Spetsnaz officer who called an airstrike on his own position to eliminate nearby ISIS fighters. Utilizing the brutal and hard learned lessons of Chechnya, the Russians began to deal deep wounds to ISIS, a feat which the West had singularly failed to achieve.

At the same time, the tribally thinking states of the East began to realise that the European Union and global institutionalism was not delivering the utopia it had promised. The aid money had long since dried up; the rush of migrants made demands on economies and peoples who have little to give; and most damningly, the wave of terrorism that swept Europe in 2016 proved that the European Union and NATO had not only failed to protect its nascent external allies in Georgia and Ukraine, but could not even protect its own citizens. Thus while some Eastern European states have remained faithful to the new order, others began to have serious reservations. While they had wanted to settle old scores with Russia and sought to better their economic lot, they did not wish to abnegate their right to exist as many Western European states seemed intent on doing. To the inheritors of the legacy of John III Sobieski and his famed winged hussars who played such a pivotal role in saving Europe at the Gates of Vienna in 1683, swapping Russian terror for Islamic terror has come to seem a less than appealing deal.

It can thus be seen that, while temporarily dampened, the Slavic spirit is awakening in Eastern Europe, defying the will of the increasingly authoritarian will of their new Union. At the same time, Russia is confounding liberal ideological assumptions as well as consistently frustrating liberal foreign policy aims. It is for these reasons that the mere insinuation of Russian involvement sends liberals into such fits of terror and explosive rage. In their hearts, they know that Russian involvement has precious little to do with either Trump’s election, or with his wish for more cordial relations with the state. It is not the machinations of Russian intelligence services or Russian money that has swayed his mind, but current events that may have imbued him with a dose of sympathy to Eastern values. It is this fear that drives liberal outrage, unable to process that it is their failing narrative and their own mismanagement, not conspiratorial plots that have undone them. What they fear is not simply a presidency open to the underlying assumptions of the Eastern spirit, but the wholesale collapse of their ideological project. What they fear, whether in the defiance in Eastern Europe or in the foreign policy victories of Russia, is that The Ice Man Cometh, and when he arrives, he will sweep away the meek, exhausted and ultimately calamitous ideas of the global elite.

Transcendental Titans

Revolt Against Modernity

Tag: Russia

No More Brother War?

The Ice Man Cometh

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