Boy, Haven't I Heard This Tune Before?

LOL. Of course, Russia is a "threat". She has been since the United States decided that it is the force for everything good against everything bad and that the war it is when the United States bombs weak defenseless nations into the stone age and then changes those hapless countries into shitholes, while profiting from it. But that is not a real war. 

Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said Russia remains the most urgent and immediate threat to the homeland even as China captures the attention of defense policymakers. “Russia is the primary military threat to the homeland today. It is not China—it is Russia,” VanHerck told Air Force Magazine on the sidelines of the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md. VanHerck explained that while China is the “long-term existential threat” to America, Russia is the stronger warfighting threat today. “From a kinetic standpoint—submarines, bombers, cruise missiles, those kinds of capabilities—Russia is the primary military threat,” VanHerck said, calling Russia and China “equals in non-kinetic—cyber, space.” “They have to both be feared,” he added.

Russians are strange people, they just don't like to be democratized. Especially when stand-off weapons are involved and, with a typical Russian cunning and perfidy, arrived to a conclusion that if they are getting bombed and invaded, they might as well respond in kind and do bombing of their own. You know, as in rearrange stones in the lands of those who bomb Russia, and in doing so destroy forces which bomb Russia. Yes, I know, this is such a treachery on Russians' part. How could they refuse all those benefits of "democracy" and the general even concluded: 

“If your only option to prevent an attack on the homeland is to nuke them, you’re not in a good place,” he said. “We have to create other capabilities and options to create doubt in their mind about ever striking our homeland.”

Right. Because we all know that the only thing Russians sleep and dream about is how to strike Skid Row or Detroit... ah, wait, I believe it has been bombed already by someone.

Well, you get my drift, after all, who said that Robocop movies were fiction? Communities like these are popping up around America like mushrooms after the rain. 

On a more serious note, however, it is clear that the United States militarily is in a bind and is undergoing a severe tactical and operational cognitive dissonance spurred by the decades of "transformation" which resulted in deluding itself with some very special "American way of war", while in reality nothing in warfare changed in terms of its main objective since the times of Clausewitz' truism that the main object of war "is to compel the enemy to do our will". Russians are not that kind of people who are compelled to do anyone's will (as many greatest military leaders in human history learned the hard way), and if they refused to do so on the insistence of Napoleon and Hitler and their largest armies in history in their time, they certainly wouldn't do it on America's account. 

Russia is certainly not going to attack the United States but if the United States attacks Russia, yes, Russia has means to obliterate the United States in response, no matter what efforts the United States undertakes to prevent such a response. Basically, VanHerck's main grievance is this: he doesn't want to be bombed back while bombing others. I know. But it is what it is--American generals do not know what it means to lose their families as a result of war, that is why they have such a cavalier attitude towards war. Russia, however, makes them uncomfortable and they don't like it. 

Russian verb, which Putin uses, сдохнуть, sadly, does not directly translate into English and it is not "drop dead", this verb is used when one describes the death of an animal--human dies, animal сдыхает. The nearest term is to croak. These are subtleties of Russian language which many in the West cannot grasp. VanHerck also expressed his opinions on Arctic, but I heard this tune before too. Sure, looking at the Rosatom fleet today I really cannot see what investment in time and treasure will be required on the US side to catch up. No, really.  

Sometimes people just have to stick to doing what they do best. Russians certainly did--they make best weapons and ice-breakers. And a couple of other things which are beyond the narrow scope of this post.

Back To My Cryptic Post--Why Russia Is A Clear And Present Danger to The US-I

You remember my recent cryptic post and how Arctic Fox blew my cover. 

From the cited article (Google Translate): "Vladimir Putin’s thesis that the real reason for the trade war between the USA and China is not at all a distortion of the trade balance or an artificially low yuan exchange rate (as they like about this) say our American partners, but the fact that China has found an effective way to combine state planning and a market economy, and the Americans understand this." 

OK, Putin is spot on here defining the principle, not just a nation, which represents clear and present danger to the neo-liberal world (dis)order. Yes, China is certainly a big threat to the current West in economic sense, but, apart from this principle, metaphysically China is not a threat. Russia is, and for a simple reason--average Chinese and average Westerners have few things in common and many differences which, effectively separate them civilizationally. Average Russians and average Westerners (those who are still sane, of course), on the other hand, are virtually indistinguishable in their outlook, not to mention visually. I know Germans and Americans who look like a god damn bums and drunks from some backwater Russian village, while I know many Russians who are constantly mistaken for Germans, Scandinavians (Duh!)  or look like your typical American. Granted, I still can recognize Slavic features in the crowd of Westerners most of the time. 

It is one thing when a profoundly "alien" culture such as China achieves economic success and, indeed, shows a working combination of the state planning and market economy. I will omit here, of course, some serious structural problems Chinese economy and especially its military power have--on the surface it is still an amazing achievement. But realistically, few White European stock people will immediately rush to learn Chinese (Mandarin) language or will start listening to Chinese music or read Chinese literature en-masse. They will continue to buy relatively cheap consumer goods produced in China, but few will really get into Confucianism or start quoting Sun Tzu at the New Year's party. Russians are different. Many Americans still think (wrongly, of course, but still good example) that Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, played every 4th of July pretty much everywhere in the US, is related directly to America's 1812 War. In other words, it is as much American as it is Russian. It is easy to re-appropriate such things--they are effectively from the same cultural root of Classic Western Civilization.  In the end, the number of Tolstoy's War and Peace TV and movie versions in the West (all of them subpar) is impressive, not to mention Soviet Sergei Bondarchuk's masterpiece, which IS in many respects a Western movie, despite being so Russian. Soviet sci-fi movies by Klushantsev, especially his Planet of the Storms which influenced so many in the Hollywood  sci-fi genre, including none other than George Lucas. 

Soviet education in STEM, some of its key principles and even text books, were adopted in the West. All that and much-much more was possible only between peoples who communicated in the same cultural code, had many similarities in their idiosyncrasies. For the West China is NOT that, Russia, including Wests pathological Russophobia IS. Even hatred of Russians and Russia is profound because West recognizes in Russia its OWN OTHER. China's economic success is bad enough for a Western neo-liberal establishment, which, let's be clear about it, is by far not just those omnipotent Jews, but a serious combination of moneyed and aristocratic strata which is as European in its whiteness and culture as is humanly possible. Russia's success in fusing state planning and market economy and free enterprise--this can have catastrophic consequences for the West as it exists today. In the end--do not forget the most important thing for which Russians have a proverb: once every century combined West goes to Russia to get its ass handed to it. So true, since 1242 Alexander Nevsky's remarkable defeat of Teutonic Knights at lake Peipus (Chudskoe), Russia was in a constant fight with the West for own survival. This is the image, the archetype of the West forever ingrained in Russian psyche by efforts of two geniuses of Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev (probably the first ever modern heavy-metal music ever) in 1938:

After all, even Emerson, Lake and Palmer didn't hesitate to base their and rock music's one of the greatest albums on Mussorgsky's music. So, you see--cultural roots of Russia and West have a lot in common, but most importantly: Russian Marxism was Marxism, after all, and Marxism is a strictly Western invention. Well, guess what, the biggest West's handing of its ass on the platter in history, was done by historic Russia, known then as the Soviet Union, under the banners of this very Marxism, based entirely on Marxist view on technological, social and industrial progress. Boy, those Russian T-34s and Katyushas with Lavochkin and Yakovlev's fighters were a pain in the ass for Axis. And once the Banner of Victory was raised at Reichstag in May, 1945, the combined West literally shat its pants precisely for the reasons of those pesky Russian commies having a bit different view of the human rights and distribution of GDP, than it was viewed in D.C. and London, or Paris. And here comes this most important issue, Russians kicked Western ass so many times, granted, losing sometimes here and there, that through this rather consistent ass-kicking they made their views on the social order known--the whole 20th and 21st centuries are about these views. And while China cannot present a record of power accomplishments against combined West, Russian one looks extremely impressive. 

So, here is the deal: Russians, on average, even within new generation, which was not subjected to any kind of Marxist/Soviet indoctrination today still maintain a very "progressive" outlook on life. No, not progressive in modern Western sense, quite the opposite, this outlook is largely "conservative" and nationalistic, but it contains within itself a fundamental social difference of which many Russians wrote and continue to write:

Thirty years passed by since the Soviet project faded in historywhen failed the test of time. But majority of Russians still does not acceptsociety which stratifies into “elites” and “outcasts” as a just one. Russiansstill thinks that all people, regardless of birth, have equal rights to theriches of native land. That preservation of people is more important thanpreservation of wealth. That one cannot live better at the expense of others.  

Here is the trick, in Russia you cannot preserve people within liberal economic paradise. You simply cannot. In fact, you cannot do it anywhere. Russians tried to do the "libertarian" thing in 1990s--it ended with a national catastrophe and de facto economic genocide of population, in millions. Eat this, Stalin, right? So that "experiment" is over, but what is emerging and is clearly visible now in Russia is truly threatening to the world order ran by whiteboard economists, lawyers, journos, political pseudo-scientists, Wall Street swindlers and other people who do not know what real work is and how and what should be produced to keep the country running. Call it whatever you want: a deindustrialization, financialization, neo-liberalism or laissez-faire', it is all pure distilled moon-shine capitalism built around the myth of a "free market" and "free trade"--two of the greatest simulacra ever invented (after America's defeat of Nazism almost alone) because none of those things exist anymore, if they ever existed to start with. Russians, both through theory and tragedy, learned it the hard way and now are doing things which are anathema to Western snake-oil peddlers. Would you believe it, Russians not only want their strategic resources (increasingly being returned back under state control) NOT controlled by financiers, but, oh the horror, they insist that basic health care must be free (or for a symbolic pay, yes, yes MRIs and CatScans included) and no state support for gender-changing operations or plastic surgery. Kids entering universities on a "budget" (free) still constitute a huge share of Russian students. And these are but a few things West have, or don't as in the US, and all of this is dispensed through Russian state's policies. Russians hate their state, they also love it deeply and cannot live without it, because they know without it they will not survive--that's the difference and it is a strategic one....

To Be Continued...