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| Khan Putin "de-Nazifying" the Ukraine one skull at a time. |
How can we explain Putin's rather unhinged invasion of the Ukraine? Why did the Kremlin state embark on what increasingly looks like a desperate and dangerous measure? The answer, I believem is that Russia is suffering from a bad case of what can only be described as "Mongol-lag."
What exactly do I mean by this term? Well, it's simple. It's just like jet lag, but it effects a country—Russia—rather than a jet passenger, and the cause is not airline travel but medieval Mongol invasion. The time difference thing is completely the same, although the periods are clearly longer with "Mongol-lag."
One of the main problems of history is the intrinsic natural characters of countries, cultures, and civilizations versus the extrinsic attitudes that they are forced to adopt—or moulded into—in competition with their historical rivals or invaders. Often it's a case of fighting the next war with the weapons of the last one, or, in Russia's case, existing in a form that was spurred by past historical conditions, but is completely unsuited to its present day conditions.
If you go far back, Russia had a fleeting existence as a unitary state soon after it was founded by the Viking Russ in the 9th century. It was then known as the "Principality of Russia." By the 10th and 11th centuries, however, it had already broken up into several entities, including the Principality of Polotsk, the Principality of Vladimir, the Republic of Novgorod, the Principality of Chernigov-Tmutorokan, etc.
Occasional efforts were made to reunite some of these, but by the early 13th century Russia had devolved into at least ten reasonably large-sized states in what is now Belarus, Ukraine, and North Western Russia.
So, after several hundreds of years of development, it could be said that Russian civilisation had assumed its natural intrinsic form, that of a multi-state, rather than a Byzantine mono-state. If it had been left alone, that is probably how it might have stayed. But it was definitely not left alone.
The Mongols happened!
This changed everything. Russia was obliterated, its cities destroyed, its people massacred and enslaved. Pyramids of skulls appeared on the steppes. Those states that survived outright annihilation remained little more than shadows of their former selves, mere vassals and tribute gathering zones for the Khanate of the Golden Horde.
Out of this darkness, after more than two centuries, Russia gradually re-emerged. But now, rather than its natural intrinsic form of a multi-state entity, it was pushed, moulded, and distorted into an over-centralised, Tsarist entity, with everything controlled from Moscow. This was the time of Ivan the Terrible. The true, beautiful, multipolar character of Russia had been crushed. Or had it?
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| Cossacks, true Russians |
In many ways Putin is correct when he claims that Ukrainians are just Russians. All large countries have regional variations. The Cantonese Chinese are different from the Mandarin Chinese, but both are Chinese. Likewise America too has great diversity between its regions and states but there is a common Americanness somewhere, which is essentially just a variant of a wider Anglo culture.
But where Putin is wrong is in assuming that this common Russianness can only be expressed in a heavily centralised unipolar state, one where all Russians must live under the heel of the Muscovite state.
This is not the essence of Russia, and it never was. No, this is much more the historical essence of Genghis Khan and the Mongol horde. That is exactly what Vladimir Putin is seeking to impose on the Ukraine and his fellow Russians.
Putin's theory of Mongolism, for all Russians, was set out in a lengthy article published at RIA Novosti, a state-owned domestic news agency that is the mouthpiece of the Kremlin's darkest thoughts. Written by Kremlin hack Timofey Sergeytsev, it was titled "What should Russia do with Ukraine.”
Translated from Russian the article includes the following outlandish and deeply troubling statements:
The special operation revealed that not only the political leadership in Ukraine is Nazi, but also the majority of the population. All Ukrainians who have taken up arms must be eliminated - because they are responsible for the genocide of the Russian people.
Ukrainians disguise their Nazism by calling it a "desire for independence" and a "European way of development". Ukraine doesn't have a Nazi party, a Führer or racial laws, but because of its flexibility, Ukrainian Nazism is far more dangerous to the world than Hitler's Nazism.
Denazification means de-Ukrainianisation. Ukrainians are an artificial anti-Russian construct. They should no longer have a national identity. Denazification of Ukraine also means its inevitable de-Europeanisation.
Ukraine's political elite must be eliminated as it cannot be re-educated. Ordinary Ukrainians must experience all the horrors of war and absorb the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for their guilt.
The liberated and denazified territory of the Ukrainian state should no longer be called Ukraine. Denazification should last at least one generation - 25 years.
So what does all this so-called "denazification" involve? The article sheds its lurid light with a list of bullet points:
—liquidation of armed Nazi formations (which are understood as any armed formations of Ukraine, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine), as well as the military, information, educational infrastructure that ensures their activity;
—the formation of people's self-government bodies and militia (defense and law and order) of the liberated territories, protecting the population from the terror of underground nazi groups;
—installation of the Russian information space;
—the confiscation of educational materials and the prohibition of educational programmes at all levels containing Nazi ideologies;
—mass investigative actions to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, the dissemination of Nazi ideology and support for the Nazi regime;
—lustration, publication of the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime, their involvement in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as a punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who will not be subject to the death penalty or imprisonment);
—the adoption at the local level, under the supervision of Russia, of primary normative acts of denazification "from below", the prohibition of all types and forms of revival of Nazi ideology;
—establishment of memorials, memorial signs, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuation of the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;
—the inclusion of a set of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people's republics;
—establishment of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.
This strikes a chilling note. The formula is that the Kremlin decides who is a "Nazi" and then executes them. There is plenty of evidence that they are following this playbook.
Sergeytsev adds:
Russia will have no allies in the denazification of Ukraine. Since this is a purely Russian business. And also because not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but including, and above all, Western totalitarianism, the imposed programs of civilizational degradation and disintegration, the mechanisms of subjugation to the superpower of the West and the United States.
Are they really being serious, you can't help but ask, as it all sounds so absurd. But these are the cold unlaughing words of lunatics.
Yes, Putin has created a strange amalgam of anachronistic Mongolian-inspired terror, oddly justified to the wider world by recently imported Western liberal hysteria against "Naziism." With one eye on Russia's distant Mongolian past, Putin has another on the shrill pointing-and-sputtering of Western SJWs and antifa. Putinism is Mongolism with much of the cruelty of the original.
What Putin is trying to create is an out-of-time historical reaction to stimuli that no longer exist.
Russia is no longer threatened by invasion. NATO expansion was never a military threat. Putin lied when he claimed it was. Can you imagine NATO, a purely defensive alliance made up of dozens of mild-mannered democracies, getting its ducks in a row long enough to launch an aggressive invasion of Russia? Of course not.
Instead of the Mongols, the expansionary Ottoman Empire of yesteryear, the Sweden of Charles XII, the insurgent Poles, and the 2nd and 3rd Reichs, Russia is now bordered by the EU, the geopolitical equivalent of a large stuffed toy. Even without its nuclear deterrent, European Russia is totally safe on that flank. China, too, seems disinclined to ever invade its remote Siberian territories. Why would it, when it can get all the logs, gas, oil, and ores it wants peacefully?
You could say that the version of Russia that Putin represents is a conquered and humiliated country, its nature crushed and deformed by extrinsic forces. This is what the present war is really about: Ukraine (an expression of an intrinsic, modern multipolar Russia), against the Putinist state (an enslaved, extrinsically defined Russia, a glaring anachronism, several centuries out of date, still trembling at the shadow of the Great Khan, constantly acting up).
That is the "Russia" of Vladimir Putin, an historical monstrosity and a horrific denial of Russia's multipolarity and enormous potential. Putin's Russia is nothing less than an evil "Anti-Russia" and must be destroyed so that the real Russia may live.
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
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