Russia, which is at odds with China (Goble; Marrow; Siow) and with Europe, just as we are (Meixler), even as the EU and China lace their hands together under the blanket (Lau; Fallon) would make a far better ally [against China] than the EU would.
-This author; Peakd entry, 9 January, 2021
It Should Be a Movie: "I Was a Teenage Russophile"
"I wanted to witness Russian culture first-hand. Well, on the morning of February 24, 2022, Russia granted that wish."
Russia...
Growing up, just hearing the country mentioned would make me smile and sigh. Sure, in my father's generation they'd been the bad guys: the core of a soulless, Godless, Communist Union with thousands of nukes pointed at us. Sure, in those days they'd dressed up old-school Asiatic imperialism in Marxist rhetoric to justify expansionism. Sure, they'd spent those days repeating Catherine the Great's old trick of painting a pretty (and fictitious) picture of "working for the People" and then getting tea-sipping, effeminate Western artists to echo this delusion while in reality they had a death camp network that put Hitler to shame. But that was then. This was now. Russia kicked their bad habits after their beloved Soviet Union fell, right?
Sure they did.
At least, so I thought.
Meanwhile, the West slid into decadence and decay. And it has to be said, that's one part of Vladimir Putin's anti-Western rhetoric that is actually true. With every passing year of Democrat rule, that "Godless Communist Union" rhetoric we used to denounce the USSR with, sounded more like a description of the United States than it did of Russia. While American and European universities were crying for "safe spaces" because people old enough to be drafted were traumatized by mere words (Bouchrika), rewriting science textbooks to claim there were 107 genders (sexualdiversity.org Staff), and letting men dressed in women's clothes get away with threatening to shoot anyone who tries to stop them from following our daughters into the bathroom (Alexander), Russia started to look like that "land of heroes" that Grigory Potemkin always described them as; a land where men were men and women were women, where people said what they meant and meant what they said; a place where a president could still speak of Biblical Values without being shrieked at by a Church-hating media complex.
Of course, it all turned out to be empty lip-service, but none of us knew that in those days.
Russia, in my mind, was everything in the present that America had been at our cultural peak; a place where people maintained standards of honor and courage unmatched anywhere on Earth. They were beyond us; culturally, morally, and militarily.
So I believed, anyway.
And, so did a lot of the American Right.
And of course, Russia knew that we on the American Right perceived them this way. And no one in Russia took this image-crafting more seriously than Vladimir Putin himself. I've already written an article describing how he used our revulsion at the Leftwing Fanaticism of the Obama Era to cultivate a following among American Conservatives.
It was a time when it seemed like everything American conservatives hold dear (patriotism, ruggedness, faith, family) was being dragged through the mud by America's president and enshrined by Russia's, to say nothing of the image of weakness our president at the time was presenting, compared to the unabashed, chest-beating, Conan-the-Conqueror masculinity of Russia's president.
-This author; Peakd entry, 21 Mar, 2022
Just as Catherine the Great brought French writers like Denis Diderot under her spell (Lentin), and like Kruschev and his successors beguiled Leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Douglas Tottle, now Putin, in proud Russian tradition, created an illusion around himself (and Russia) that was carefully sculpted to appeal to a discontented element in the West.
The only difference is that before, that discontented element had always been the Left. Now, it was us.
As for me, in the Russia-fans brigade, I was leading the charge. I spent an entire year studying Catherine the Great. I studied their language, their music, their literature. I moved to Kharkiv, as close as I could get to Russia, and spent my life savings (or what was left of it, after what China put me through) to build an English school with my own two hands.
In fact, when I moved to Ukraine (and fell in love with a Ukrainian woman who adored Russian history and literature as much as I did), it was for the sole purpose of being nearer to Russia... a fact which took on an unmistakable irony considering that Russia began amassing its troops on Ukraine's border at almost the exact same time I arrived. And oh, that entry in this blog from back in March 2021 did NOT age well.
I've always wanted to visit Russia, but I'm not crazy about having Russia come to visit me. So now, in addition to constantly having to worry about a Chinese invasion of my children's backyard, I have to keep an eye out for a Russian invasion of mine.
Dammit Russia, I really want to like you, but you're not making it easy.
In truth, it's probably just some chest-beating. Biden's been determined to prove "I'm not Trump" by shaking his fist at Putin, a tactic to gain support with his moronic base who still cling to the "Trump colluded with the Russians" line, so it's only natural Putin would have to swing his dick in return. It'll likely blow over.
...cringe... twitch...
And of course, some may recall how a year later, in the days leading up to the attack, much of the Right, myself included, mocked the Biden Administration for insisting Russia was going to attack (and then getting the date wrong, not just once but twice). It was madness. Calm, collected, always-a-step-ahead, 5-D chess-player Vladimir Putin wasn't some maniac out to start a war with the West, we thought. That was all just Biden looking for attention. There wasn't going to be a war between Russia and Ukraine.
Of course, like most of the world, I was only vaguely aware that there already was an ongoing armed conflict(1) between Russia and Ukraine. Like most of the world, I still basically thought of all of the former USSR as "Russia." And the entire reason I'd come to this side of the world was because I wanted to witness Russian culture first-hand.
Well, on the morning of February 24, 2022, Russia granted that wish.
Speaking of Movies, "From Russia With Love."
"Now, we in the West have a host of mental gymnastics that we learn to employ when a nation we have come to admire doesn't behave the way we expect them to, and I put so many of those mental gymnastics to use that you might as well call me Bart Conner."
"Не волнуйся, папа. Я помогу Иисусу позаботиться о Саше." (2)
Those were the last words Stassiya Kravchenko, a 7-year-old girl who was one of my students, uttered to her father as her eyes beheld their last sight in this world: her 2-year-old brother's body being pulled from the rubble.
And as I spent the day sorting through the blood-soaked and burning ruins, collecting bodies of children, some recognizable and some not, I found myself with three, simple, seemingly incomprehensible words repeating in my head: "Russia... did this?!"
I'm not going to bother recounting the experience of waking up in the middle of a warzone. For one thing I've already written most of what any historians will ever care to know from the early days, as well as the days that followed (including my brief and unplanned stint as a draftee in the Ukrainian Army), and for another, there are plenty of actual Ukrainians who have done a better job of describing the nightmare than I ever could. But for the benefit of my American readers (especially my fellow Right Wingers), let me give a quick dose of perspective.
Try to remember the morning of September 11, 2001; the feeling of waking up to find your country under unprovoked attack by an enemy who openly declared his desire to see you wiped out. Now, imagine that instead of a pair of landmarks in a pair of cities, it's your entire country under attack. Then, imagine that instead of being a superpower under attack by some third world hooligans, you're a nation with roughly the land area of Texas, the GDP of Virginia, and just over the population of California, and the nation attacking you is (or claims to be) "the second strongest army in the world."
And of course, to truly understand what it is like to be Ukrainian right now, instead of a day of terror, imagine that feeling lasting for 545 days (and counting).
And it didn't jive with this mental image many of us had built up, of "The Brave and Honorable Russian Bear."*
Now, we in the West have a host of mental gymnastics that we learn to employ when a nation we have come to admire doesn't behave the way we expect them to, and I put so many of those mental gymnastics to use that you might as well call me Bart Conner.
First, there's the "well, we shouldn't have provoked them" argument; the commonly-repeated theory that Russia is only doing this to Ukraine because of pressure put on them by the US and NATO. And yeah, I clung to that one for a while.
...Until my research uncovered that this made no sense.
.
Then, of course, there was the "it's not Russia; it's Putin" argument; the comfortable delusion that this war was something the people of Russia were led unwillingly into by a tyrannical dictator whom they didn't want, and that they would not have chosen such mindless hate on their own. And frankly, if my fiancee wasn't a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, I'd probably never have come face-to-face with the parasitic glee with which Russians on social media mock the war crimes their troops are committing, which means I'd probably have never realized how patently false this one is either.
It took a while. It seriously, seriously took a while for it to sink in. But in the end, no matter how immoral or amoral or sexually deviant or lazy and pampered Western society has gotten, it doesn't make a barbarian horde of genocidal savages a culture to try and emulate. And just as we would have been fools for trying to say in the '40's "it's not Germany, it's just Hitler... remember, Germany gave us Grimm's Fairy Tales," or "don't be so quick to blame all Italians for Mussolini... don't forget that they gave us Michelangelo," the world cannot, cannot, CAN, NOT, continue avoiding the ugly reality that yes, all of Russia is guilty.
And yes, there's a part of me that simply thinks, "well, it's a phase Russia is going through, brought on by a madman. I mean, Japan committed atrocities in WW2, but they eventually atoned. Right? Germany killed 6 million Jews and 2 million others in camps, but they eventually were absolved, right? So... the Russia I grew up reading so much about, is still in there... somewhere... Right?"
That's the part of me that keeps binge-watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and thinking, "So it's simple. We just need to help Russia find its own real-life Legate Damar."
Sure. Because, I mean, real-world problems are always simple enough to be solved by following an example from syndicated science-fiction TV, right?
But then... but then there's a part of me that hears little Stassiya's last words repeating over, and over, and over...
Muscoviae Delendam Est
"There's a part of me, a loud part, that's ready to just say 'kill 'em all! Let God collect the 'Good Russians'."
American society is highly polarized, and not just where Ukraine is concerned. With the exception of a brief period of unity after 9/11, we have spent most of the 21st century split into two mutually destructive, irreconcilable camps. And while this may be a clumsy and not by any means exhaustive summary of what defines those two camps, or their ideals, it will do. Those on the Left admire China. They look to Beijing as a model that America should emulate. Well, ancient Chinese wisdom offers some insight into what to do when an entire nation knows their hands are drenched in blood and they revel in it, as is the case with Russia.
The Admonition of Pan'geng says, 'An unruly and insolent people should be wiped out, leaving no remnants, no seeds of trouble sown in the land.' This is how the Shang Dynasty prospered."
-Sima Qian, Records of the Historian (Wang Guozhen translation), p. 435
Sounds pretty unambiguous, doesn't it?
But hang on, that's the Left's role-model: China. I'm talking to my fellow Conservatives here: the ones on the Right. And the Right, by contrast, looks to our own society's Judeo-Christian roots for inspiration. "Get back to the Book" is the rallying cry of the Right, in reference of course to the Bible. Wasn't that what a lot of us thought we liked about Russia in the first place? That big talk of "Biblical ideals?"
Okay then.
Let's forego this pre-Confucian mumbo-jumbo, and look for a Biblical answer to what to do about an entire nation where every citizen is a celebratory participant in mass murder, shall we?
Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
-1 Samuel 15:2-3 (KJV)
...
Maybe this is emotion speaking, rather than reason, and it shouldn't be acted upon.
Maybe there were those among the Allies who said this same thing about Germany, or Japan, or Italy after WW2.
And maybe, years from now, after a defeated Russia has done some soul-searching and rebuilt a better version of itself, some Russian scientist will cure some disease or something and the world will have cause to be grateful that these words weren't acted upon.
But I say it anyway.
There's a part of me, a loud part, that's ready to just say "kill 'em all! Let God collect the 'Good Russians.'
...If He can find any."
(1) For clarity, I'm not referring to it as a "war" until 5 AM Kyiv Standard Time on 24 February, 2022. References to a "conflict" rather than a "war" refer to the time when the fighting was confined to the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine; Donbas and Crimea.
(2) "Don't worry, daddy. I will help Jesus take care of Sasha."
Works Cited
Alexander, Harriet. "Transgender activist warns women who try to stop her using their bathroom that 'it will be the last mistake you ever make' in chilling video urging LGBTQ people to buy guns." Daily Mail. 23 Apr, 2023. Web. 22 Aug, 2023. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12005947/Trans-activist-warns-women-blocking-bathroom-mistake-make.html
Bouchrika, Imed. "Coddling College Students: Is the Safe Space Movement Working?" Research.com. 27 Jul, 2023. Web. 22 Aug, 2023. https://research.com/education/coddling-college-students
Goble, Paul. "Moscow worried about Beijing’s ‘sinicization’ of Central Asia, Caucasus." 112 News. 13 November, 2020. Web. 9 January, 2021. https://112.international/russia/moscow-worried-about-beijings-sinicization-of-central-asia-caucasus-56405.html
Lentin, A. "Catherine the Great and Denis Diderot." History Today. Web. 23 Aug, 2023. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/catherine-great-and-denis-diderot
Marrow, Alexander. "Russia announces troop build-up in Far East." Reuters. 17 September, 2020. Web. 9 January, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-military-idUSKBN2682JM
Meixler, Eli. "French President Emmanuel Macron Calls for a 'European Army' to Defend Against China, Russia and the U.S." Time. 6 November, 2018. Web. 9 January, 2021.
https://time.com/5446975/emmanuel-macron-european-army-russia-us/
Sexualdiversity.org Staff. "How Many Genders Are There? Gender Identity List." Sexualdiversity.org. 7 Dec, 2022. Updated 22 May, 2023. Web. 22 Aug, 2023. https://www.sexualdiversity.org/edu/1111.php
Sima Qian. Trans. Wang Guozhen. Selections from 'Records of the Historian'. Beijing, 2017. China Intercontinental Press.
ISBN 978-7-5085-3050-5
Siow, Maria. "Could Russia Side With the US, India Against China?" South China Morning Post. 22 August, 2020. Web. 9 January, 2021. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3098398/could-russia-side-us-and-india-against-china
Powerfully written @patriamreminisci. I could write a number of posts in response. For now, I simply want to acknowledge that I have read yours word for word.
Is there anything a Holy God hates more than the shedding of innocent blood? I am not a theologian and make no claim to knowing the answer. As a strong advocate for the Judeo-Christian worldview (and much more), however, I can attest to His ancient decrees about the consequences ...
And the unmistakably clear biblical instances where His judgment was there was nothing redeemable about whole groups of people ... In our time, with so much resistance to the ancient wisdom of there being "nothing new under the sun," something so ... "barbaric" ... is categorically rejected.
In its place? Well, how about "wars of liberation" to help whole groups of people be ... "free?" When they have absolutely nothing in their past indicating they have any idea what that even means ... Which becomes abundantly clear only after the sacrifice of much "blood and treasure" ...
While making no claims to being an expert on Russian history ...
... this never applied in my circle of acquaintances, as the Russians appear to be one such people group ...
Anyway, there is my brief $0.02 in support of your efforts in writing this post. "Worth every penny" ... 😉
It seems that the generation of Republicans whose memory of the Cold War is clearer, who remember Ronald Reagan as "the leader we elected" and not just "the guy who was president when I was little" (and who, as a result, had several decades of Russian crimes still in their memory) were less prone to Russia's "charm offensive." Among those of us who are younger (I hate to admit it but I'm only a few months away from being one of these damned millennials that everyone has griped about for a decade and a half), there's been a definite "Moscow Calling" trend over the past decade or so.
Yes, interesting point. One about which I could also write a whole series of posts (hmmm, I sense a "trend" here 😉) ... I am most assuredly of the uhhh ... "old school" ... class of Americans. Whose fathers fought in World War II, after growing up in the Great Depression era ...
Russia could have been ... "dealt with" (Patton should have been turned loose) ... back then, but ... The "powers that be" had other ideas (Patton died under mysterious / questionable circumstances) ... I could go even further into how the Russian people initially welcomed the Nazi armies as "liberators," at least of sorts, from Stalinist terror, but ... Ohh, wait a minute, Hitler wanted them "dealt with" only slightly less severely than the Jewish people ...
History about which far too few of our younger generations have any idea ...
The China Model is Dead." If so, maybe material for a future post!Just read this, @patriamreminisci, and thought of you. You might find it of interest - "
Dear @patriamreminisci !
my amigo Rob!
I interpreted that you claimed that Putin and all Russians were to blame for the war!
Most East Asians, myself included, speculate that the West and Russia will divide Ukraine!
I felt that the current war in Ukraine was similar to the situation in the Crimean War in the 19th century!
The Crimean War
It amazes me how frequent this prediction is. Frankly, even if any in the West do harbor such intentions (and I'm sure there are, even George Friedman who is rather cold and calculating and not prone to flights of fancy, predicted something similar as early as 2011), it won't take a very long conversation with ANY Ukrainian these days to learn quickly that it won't fly. They're not about to fight a war for independence only to yield that independence to someone else.
Dear Rob!
Many East Asians, myself included, worry that China will start a war to conquer Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula while the US is wasting all its strength on the war in Ukraine!
I am currently questioning whether the US has the power to keep peace in East Asia!
So, I hope the war in Ukraine will end soon!
By itself? The US has never had the power to do that by itself. But Japan, India, Australia and South Korea all four are commonly underestimated. Those four by themselves are a match for China. Add in the US Navy (which isn't involved in Ukraine) and China isn't able to do much.
Dear Rob!
The world I live in is already dominated by Chinese capital.
So, I always listen to Chinese.
There are also Chinese in the S-K military.
So, the military alliance between Japan and Korea is difficult.
"So, the military alliance between Japan and Korea is difficult."
Yeah, and there's some really bloody and bitter history between the two as well. But it has always been true that in the game of geopolitics, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." South Korea and Japan, even if they don't like each other, realize that they have the same local enemies: North Korea and China.
Rob!
I agree with you!
In particular, relations between the Korean Peninsula and China have been like brothers or enemies for over 2,000 years.
China is currently tempting South Korea with its greatest political and economic interests.
China argues that a peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula can be achieved with the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea.
China claims that the US can no longer protect peace of the Korean Peninsula.
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