The Saker's Review Of My Latest Book.

Andrei Raevsky (The Saker) wrote today a review on my book. You are welcome to participate in discussion. 

This year it is my immense pleasure to review his latest book “The (real) Revolution in Military Affairs“. Let me immediately say that you do not have to read the first book to greatly enjoy the second one, but I still do think that the best “combo” to get a full picture would be to read both books in the order they were published. Still, today I will review only the second book.

I am sure it could be an interesting discussion. 

The Duran Interview.

As I stated a couple days ago: There will be a lot of back-and-forth on this issue in coming days. It started, and Alex Christoforu and Alexander Mercouris discuss in no non-sense manner the meaning of the launch of the Power of Siberia. It is an excellent 35 minutes long discussion (listen to the very end) and it contributes greatly to an understanding of geopolitical dynamics. 

Sadly, I cannot post here another interview, it is strictly in Russian with no subs, with a man whose change in strategic outlook in the last year or so is simply breathtaking from almost defeatism to now asserting Russia as a major power pole globally. I am talking about Captain 1st Rank (Ret.) Konstantin Sivkov, who was known in Russian internet as a man with grim views on Russia. Now he sings as a bird. That's a symptom, a positive one. But in The Duran's interview around 30th minute I finally heard from Mercouris the word which was waiting to be said--a synergy. This, plus, of course, pointing out that Obama and his cabal fvcked it up so badly with Russia that it will be viewed as one of the most catastrophic policies for the West in history. But then again, what do you expect from mediocrities with degrees in law. So, enjoy.  

The Only Things That Matter. Just A Rant.

Just a rant--no structure, no concrete point, just some thoughts thrown at the fan. Ah, yes! Stock market is up, it is down, it is now up again. What a field for speculation--both pseudo-intellectual and financial. Yet, one has to look at "fundamentals": you know, the actual debt and manufacturing to get the feel. Here is the problem:

Dec 2 (Reuters) - Wall Street fell on Monday after President Donald Trump said he would restore tariffs on metal imports from Brazil and Argentina, while weak domestic manufacturing data fanned worries of a slowing economy in the wake of the U.S.-China trade war. The U.S. economy's manufacturing sector contracted for a fourth straight month in November, as new order volumes slid back to around their lowest level since 2012. Construction spending also unexpectedly fell in October.

I like the word highlighted in yellow. Unexpectedly? Really? Another "analysts":

Meantime, an unexpected decline in U.S. manufacturing showed the sector lacked momentum in an environment of corporate investment cutbacks, subdued global demand and a still-simmering trade war.

Blah-blah, blah-blah, blah-blah. Yada yada yada. Pardon my French: unexpected my ass. Me getting pregnant--that's unexpected, me winning Lottery--that is entirely unexpected, me becoming the CEO of Chrysler--talk about a complete shocking surprise. US economy realistically not growing--yeah, let's call it that, not growing--is completely expected for anyone who doesn't spend their days at Wall Street or in a front of computer playing  games or browsing porn. Indeed, what is "momentum" for manufacturing? No, really, how can one apply this momentum thing from Physics, which is Mass times Velocity, to a manufacturing sector? OK, I get it--production growth over time, right? Or, following "economic" definition of a momentum as:

Momentum is the rate of acceleration of a security's price or volume – that is, the speed at which the price is changing. Simply put, it refers to the rate of change on price movements for a particular asset and is usually defined as a rate. In technical analysis, momentum is considered an oscillator and is used to help identify trends.  

Confusing, eh? Especially fascinating is this: rate of acceleration. Oh, boy. Acceleration is a rate of change of the velocity over time, thus rate of acceleration in Physics is a... Jolt or a Jerk. 

But give those big time economic "analysts" a break, as is stated even in WiKi:

The existence of momentum is a market anomaly, which finance theory struggles to explain.

So, if the whole theory struggles to explain it, what do you expect from us, mere mortals, trying to conceptualize something which is beyond the  grasp of those financial "theorists". Anyone with even basic university level math can create a shitload of different ratios and indexes which will add to an already fully confusing and failing to predict anything "theory" which fails to see an economy as a consumer matrix in different cultures, together with the fact that at this point of time it is impossible to create any reasonable demand on a plateau of a consumer economy whose only growth today in the United States and, in general, combined West, can be achieved only by producing sex robots, blowing smoke up the ignorant asses of progressive public selling them Tesla and other so called "hi tech", and by creating an artificial demand for useless services and consumer gizmos which only dumb general public down. Period. We are at the end of financial capitalism which cannot create real wealth anymore. OK, one can built couple of skyscrapers here and there, but what else? Ah, the horrifying words of wealth distribution begin to sound. How can one create a real wealth, a real capital which is measured not in funny electronic records called "money" or in increasingly useless apps for already totally stupefied by their cell phones and social networks syphilis youth? Hm, a billion dollar question. 

And then, there is an issue of energy. How can you do anything without energy? No, not the so called "green" energy or the chimera of a renewable sources--this type of "energy" is a technological and a financial train wreck and by now, together with anthropogenic climate change, is not even a viable science and technology but an ideological hammer used for herding current and future dopamine dependent generations of ignoramuses into the concentration consumer pastures where their remaining humanity will be excreted same way as fiber and soylent green rich diet. It doesn't look good for them if present model persists. It increasingly looks like that those generations will get very good options in terms of places they can waste their increasingly virtual lives away, such as social networks with bigger and better exhibitionism factor, of course, in strictly defined politically correct barb wired limits. What those generations will not have, are good options for healthcare, education and employment, which also means families. To get that, those generations will need a lot, and I mean a lot, of energy and of this energy's correct and effective distribution. Here is how energy consumption changed in the last 200 years or so:

Now take a look at the regional spread, so to speak:

That speaks volumes, doesn't it? And the trend is easy to establish. You see the relation here? No actual wealth-creation, no real energy consumption. Real wealth creation--growth of energy consumption.  Sure, Asia-Pacific has some catching up to do in terms of its infrastructure, but it is clear where the REAL wealth is being created and where it stopped to be created. I, of course, am not talking about operations on the stock market, they do consume some energy, which goes into operation of the computers and software designed for speculation and blowing bubbles, but other than that, this is as much as it goes into the wealth creation. I am sure the energy required to build or repair one major bridge or to produce a single commercial aircraft by far exceeds energy required for a stock buyback which leads to increased "capitalization" of some company. Like a real estate market--one day your house is worth $200,000, next year it is already $260,000. You see--no effort at all and $60,000 has been created out of pure air. But that is what this graph demonstrates--real economic growth requires energy, when there is no growth, there is no energy consumption increase, even when one considers real energy-saving technologies, of which yours truly is an enthusiastic supporter. 

Everything we do in our lives requires energy. Creating things is the most energy-expensive activity. Yet, if you look at the graph, population of North America and Europe was growing (will omit here how) steadily in the last 15 years, yet, energy consumption remained rather flat. It is a problem, the system capped real wealth-creation and the runaway process of social stratification began in earnest. But, but even when sensible federal or state's level decisions are made, they still end with this:

Or with San-Francisco which is by now is a certified shit-hole, same goes for many parts of L.A. And, in general, no one can afford to live anymore in NYC or pretty much any large American urban agglomeration, unless it is Deep South, but even there. In other words, the United States allegedly has a shitload of money, allegedly its economy grows, but it doesn't and things deteriorate practically everywhere. Like in this report:

It is not just the issue of mood or narrative, there is a growing realization in the United States that the country is in trouble. But even abundance of energy and "money" still cannot prevent a contraction of the only thing which matters--real economy and everything that follows with it, real, not part time retail, jobs and wages. The system is utterly broken and there is NO workable solution to this quagmire. The energy consumption graphs will remain flat, until they will begin to dive and the dive is coming. It is a perfect storm of corrupt elites, collapse of education and upbringing, and of radical de-industrialization committed in pursuit of financial chimera. It is what it is. Only nations which consume (and produce, that goes without saying) actual energy will eventually progress towards finding or discovering new sources of it and will push towards new frontiers of not only material wealth, which is important, of course it is, but will see new horizons for human development which will be in space travel and colonization of Solar System. For that, one will have to have sources of vast energy, real advanced manufacturing sector and population which sees a larger purpose in life than mere accumulation of wealth.  

The secret to it? Consumer matrix, most normal people eventually understand that material wealth satisfies only to a certain point and for many this certain point is usually fairly well-defined: it is decent housing, decent transportation and....You add your points. Good thing to discuss.

UPDATE:  No comments. All to the point.

Oh, Not Again.

Another one of those pieces by some Pentagon's big honcho about this and that. Pentagon's R&D Chief Mike Griffin waxes exceptional and writes another, in a row of now tiresome, platitudes about how US Armed Forces are great... sort of. He starts with a predictable fodder of Berlin Wall:

Nov. 9 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event followed within a couple of years by the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freeing of the Eastern European vassal states. Francis Fukuyama thought we had reached “the end of history,” that global great power conflict was at its end and that the ascendancy of the Western liberal concept was the permanent future. “We won the Cold War” — it says so in all the history books. Winning is great, except for the part where the losers retreat, rethink, retrain and try again; while the winner thinks the race is won once and for all — which is why the United States now finds itself running from behind in certain aspects of today’s great power rivalry. How did we get here, and what should we do about it?

I have news for Griffin: Fukuyama is a classic representative of the American so called political pseudo-science class and could serve only as an Exhibit A of sheer ignorance, expected from the guy with no particular education or coherent analytical skills. Obviously, neither Fukuyama nor Griffin are good scholars of Clausewitz who is explicit in that: in war the outcome is never final. (c) Oh boy, was Clausewitz a Marxist? I though in a 200 years since Vom Kriege was penned we all should have developed some degree of recognition of what works and what doesn't in Western Civilization's most important work on war. No wonder Lenin was a huge fan of good ol' Carl. But that simple fact aside, there is one thing which Griffin, himself a superb engineer with a stunning array of STEM degrees and former NASA chief must know that his this statement is trivial at best:

Equally critical was the ability to prevail against a larger force in a conventional fight. The U.S. seized the advantage with precision, with a precise conventional strike, enabled by pattern-matching seekers. With a global positioning system to guide force projection to the right place, stealth technology to hide our aircraft from enemy radar, encrypted high-rate communications to enable superior command and control, electronic warfare to deny that advantage to our enemies, unmanned aerial vehicles for both reconnaissance and force projection, and the uncontested dominance of the space domain to tie it all together, we prevailed.

It is becoming downright nauseating reading these Clanciesque pop-warfare narratives since most of them are not true. I don't know if Griffin's tenure at NASA taught him anything but NASA being a paying customer of Russian rocketry for years now, he surely must know that the age of precision guided weapons originally was started by Nazi Germans in WW II when they sunk Italian battleship Roma with radio-guided Fritz-X bomb. But these were Soviet who developed an astonishing array of anti-ship missiles in post-WW II period and I am sure Griffin should know that those by definition are precision guided weapons. It just happened so that the United States was not even a competitor in this field from the inception, lagging badly in development of combat missile technologies in which Soviet Union and Russia had and have a dramatic technological lead, which today may have become insurmountable for the United States. In terms of air defenses the United States military is not even a competitor having nothing even remotely comparable to S-3XX-4XX-5XX systems, not to mention systems of A-235 Nudol. I will skip talking about hyper-sonic weapons here altogether. I will just add that Russians were involved with satellite-based navigation since the same time US got involved with GPS--early 1970s, such as Parus. GLONASS followed in 1982. Griffin surely must know about TU-143 Reis or even ancient LA-17R too. You know, drones.

My question is not even with Griffin's statement such as this:

In brief, the United States no longer possesses the unquestioned technical superiority to dominate a future fight.

Because most of "unquestioned" was primarily, up to late 1970s, in processing power and electronics, but in the fact that Griffin narrates totally made up history of US weaponry which, bar few limited fields, was neither "unquestioned" nor dominant. Even US jewel of a true technological excellence, it's world-class superb nuclear submarine force experienced a serious technological push-back since late 1970s which resulted in at least technological parity by 1990s. My quarrel is with this "creative" history of the warfare as a narrative of only American ingenuity and pioneering--this is absolutely false. Those challenges Griffin talks about--and they ARE challenges in every sense from technological to doctrinal--they didn't appear out of nowhere in an instant. All those challenges gestated and grew out of these very Russians understanding the nature of the warfare and doing their due diligence in R&D and fighting doctrine field. The roots of those "challenges" are in 1970s and 1980s, not in 2010s. Well, what do you know--I just wrote a book on the nature of real revolution in military affairs. It is precisely about what Griffin talks. But in the end, these ad nauseam trivialities, such as this:

What near-term risks are we willing to take, and what current systems are we willing to let go, so that we can invest in capabilities that will impose costs on our adversaries and deter them from starting a fight because they know they cannot win? This is the critical national security challenge of our time.

Invoke only one question--under what stone did Mr.Griffin spend last 20 years in order to not recognize the fact that it is the United States who unleashed non-stop violent wars and coups all over the globe and made sure that people will start the fight once they recognize that their livelihood and sovereignty is under attack by the United States. Luckily, the instruments to defend themselves against American military aggression are better than those of the aggressor and that what saddens US establishment, which has no idea what real war is. Or maybe they do? And that is why they are sad.

This brings me to another point, of Michail Khodaryonok today making a statement to RT:

An attack by NATO on Russia’s westernmost exclave Kaliningrad – a scenario that’s been speculated about in the media lately – would lead to a nuclear apocalypse and affect even countries not involved in a hypothetical conflict.International media have recently made regular publications on how Kaliningrad – the Russian outpost in Europe – could be ‘captured’.Such publications serve the interests of NATO members’ military and industrial complex, according to Kaliningrad’s governor Anton Alikhanov.

What Khodaryonok forgets to mention is that Russia has enough conventional deterrent to not go for the nukes. I may understand (I think) where Khodaryonok is coming from but he, as a graduate of the Academy of General Staff, should know that conventional step in the escalation process in case NATO wants to commit suicide, is, in fact, an additional deterrent and adds robustness to Kaliningrad's defense. Khodaryonok writes:

Now, a few remarks on the message posted by China’s Eastday.com. It says that if NATO and Russia went to war, the bloc could seize the Russian region in a matter of two days. Our Chinese comrades are a little off with their timeline. The operation would not actually take this long, and the result would be very different. It would take Russia no longer than 40-45 minutes to launch a nuclear strike, and after that we would be able to do only one thing – discuss the peculiar aspects of the modern nuclear apocalypse. To sum it up, the battle for Kaliningrad would under no circumstances remain an isolated military conflict. It would become just an episode of a global nuclear war. And even the countries not involved in this conflict would suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, these are the effects of using strategic nuclear weapons.

While Khodaryonok is absolutely correct in stating that such a conflict will not stay local, I don't know if he missed Valery Gerasimov's statement (in Russian) couple of years ago that already then Russia had enough cruise missiles deployed on critical strategic directions for a complex deterrence by means of high precision weapons. A lot of time passed since then and when even RAND admits impossibility of involving NATO in a conventional conflict with Russia:

“We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek told a security conference on Thursday. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.”

Khodaryonok  retired from the Armed Forces in 2000. 19 years ago. Since then one could observe a dramatic change in Russia's doctrinal thinking with introduction of "strategic force deterrence by high-precision weapons" already in 2010 Military Doctrine. One couldn't fail to notice that these were primarily conventional forces that Russia was improving and updating since early 2000s. This was done primarily to be able to fight a conventional, not a nuclear, conflict. So, if Mikhail Khodaryonok thinks that in case of NATO attacking Kaliningrad, Russia is going to go for nuclear jugular immediately, I have a bit of disagreement with him, because the first thing which will be done will be a conventional strike on NATO's infrastructure and for that Russia has enough force to disrupt NATO's C4ISR architecture and inflict major losses. That is precisely what is called a "strategic force deterrence" by means of stand-off, precision-guided weaponry. In the end, rearranging stones in D.C., Brussels or London in purely conventional way is nothing that 3M14 or X-101 cannot do. It is also a good way to avoid apocalyptic scenario by inflicting a lot of pain for aggressor to have second thought about escalation. It is so self-evident from Russia's military development since mid-2000s, that it is strange that Khodaryonok had to reply in this manner to some strategic delusions by some butt-hurt "strategists" who lost every single war they were involved in since 2000 and who still are dreaming of some revenge out of desperation after seeing the myth of their conventional military power blown to smithereens. In the end, even R.D. Hooker's "opus" is about "defending" Baltics and cannot be taken seriously from any professional point of view. Khodaryonok, evidently, forgot Macron begging not to sink French frigate or harm any forces in April 2018. They are not complete idiots there, yet. They can calculate and know, as an example, that NATO's fleet combat life in case of attacking Kaliningrad will be counted in tens of minutes before Kinzhals or P-800s arriving. Khodaryonok MUST know these things. As for nuclear war. Well, no special commentary is needed here.   

Rod Dreher As A Symptom.

Nowadays, when I speak about American "intellectual" class, I cringe. No, it is not just the issue of an ongoing disaster which American foreign policy is, or cooking of books in terms of American economy--a euphemism for Stock Market. It is because there is nothing intellect-related in this class and most importantly, there are no indications whatsoever that any improvement is expected. Colonel Lang, evidently, had it with this American "academe" and wrote some really succinct observations on this issue. 

The world is filled with conformism and groupthink.  Most people do not wish to think for themselves.  Thinking for oneself is dangerous, requires effort and often leads to rejection by the herd of one's peers. The profession of arms, the intelligence business, the civil service bureaucracy, the wondrous world of groups like the League of Women Voters, Rotary Club as well as the empire of the thinktanks are all rotten with this sickness, an illness which leads inevitably to stereotyped and unrealistic thinking, thinking that does not reflect reality.

It is an excellent piece and I strongly suggest to everyone to read it. Now that we established a framework of sorts, I can go back to my shtick which long ago became my part-time job of sorts and repeat all over again--American Russia Studies field is a wasteland of ignorance, propaganda, cliches and stereotypes. It is literally dominated by two types of people: those who have no clue or those who have their own agenda, with the latter being by far the largest contingent. The fact that American "academe" which allegedly specializes in Russia has no clue about the subject of their study can be easily observed through the well documented, and easily referred to, events of the last 20 years. A bunch of neocon baboons and mediocrities such as Obama completely destroyed Russian-American relations because they thought that Russia would crumble. Well, we know the result, don't we? In civilized societies such "scholars" and politicians would have been long ago ostracized and had their sinecures removed. Not in the United States. 

But if that wasn't bad enough, a new, much larger disaster, has struck the field of American Russian Studies field, which, probably, now will never recover from a complete epistemic closure--Rod Dreher visited Russia. It is an unmitigated catastrophe on unimaginable scale since this guy who has a degree in "Journalism", that means no viable tools for sensible generalizations, started writing his impressions about Russia in The American Conservative which today culminated in an Exhibit A of American so called "intellectual" class inability to learn anything. Coincidentally, Dreher's piece is precisely about that--inability to learn. How ironic. The title of Dreher's piece is symptomatic for a history, especially Russian history, ignoramus: 

The Russian Twilight Of Late Imperial America

Bang! There you go, from the start--drawing historical parallels between two countries which have dramatically different histories in virtually every single aspect of their existence. Recall, if you will, my constant warnings about those parallels. From my latest: 

This brings us to the more important issue—historical parallels. Drawing historical parallels is an extremely dangerous business wrought with huge risks of miscalculation and learning wrong lessons. History, certainly, does provide some valuable lessons but at this stage the entirety of the term history, as it was understood even fairly recently, does not reflect the immense complexity of human development and activity for the last roughly hundred years. Those developments can no longer be described within traditional frameworks because an greater number causalities are being afflicted not just due to human nature but now to the technology created by and in service to it

But, of course, Rod Dreher knows better and without much ado pulls out what he calls "revered" (revered by who?) piece of the so called "Russian history" by James Billington. Billington's 1966 opus The Icon and the Axe is your typical Cold War fodder filled with all so familiar narratives of Russia's origins to a now pretty standard routine of quoting great Russian writers (Dostoevsky, of course him) trying to show that Russian culture, that is pre-Revolutionary culture, the culture of Russian aristocracy and land-owners, pretty much ended with 1917. As Dreher narrates:

According to Billington, in the 1890s, younger Russian elites became frustrated with the country’s long struggle towards constitutional liberalism, especially when the reactionary Tsar Alexander III took over from his assassinated father, a (relative) liberal who had ended serfdom. The new generation of intellectuals and artists moved into two different directions: dialectical materialism (that is, Marxism, whose leading exponent at the time was Gyorgi Plekhanov), and transcendental idealism, along the lines of the visionary Christian thinker Vladimir Soloviev. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, wanted to revitalize society through working-class revolution. Soloviev, an Orthodox Christian, but one strongly influenced by Western Christianity, sought social renaissance through a return to a kind of religious mysticism. Writes Billington, “The materialists claimed to be the heirs to the traditions of the iconoclastic Sixties [1860s] ; the idealists claimed to be developing the traditions of Dostoevsky’s aesthetic and religious reaction to iconoclasm.” What drove them was  “the exasperation of a new student generation with the subjectivism, pessimism, and introspection of the age of small deeds.” Writes Billington, the “new radicals of both right and left” were both seeking “some new philosophic bedrock on which to stand.”

Let me make a short commentary here: it is easy to "learn" about culture, it is sure as hell not Signal Processing or Differential Equations. That's the point, only highly trained people provide solid opinions on such topics. Let's put it this way, unless a person has a damn serious scientific background, he cannot pass a sound judgement on a variety of complex issues related to modern civilization and its main driver--industry and technology. On culture? Oh boy, what a wonderfully unstuck field it is, one can go and "interpret" the shit out of anything without even referring to things which actually matter. I can wax philosophical and "cultural" whatever I want. Anyone with even basic education and average intelligence can concoct a couple of narratives which will simultaneously prove, say, Dostoevsky as being correct and wrong on some critical issue. In the end, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina can also be "explained" simultaneously as both a victim of Russia's upper class peculiarities and social dogma, and as a self-centered psycho-bitch--both characterizations work. That is the nature of "humanities" which rely as much on a spin as on actual facts. In the end, Strobe Talbot was educated on Russia by arguably best Western scholar on Russian culture and intelligentsia Isiah Berlin. Boy, what a waste of time that turned out to be, either due to Talbot's lack of intellect, which I totally can conceive, or Berlin not being a great mind and teacher--this one is hard to believe.  

But here is the problem, after Dreher spent a month in Russia, visited here and there some churches, spoke to some fringe figures and now tries to draw parallels between Russia and US. Sadly, Dreher, I guess after he found out who he was meeting with in Moscow, removed the piece called Moscow Diary, but my comment to him remained on Disqus:

Rod, pardon me, but you are wasting your time and learning nothing of value in Russia and about Russia, especially when one considers a category of public you meet, I don't understand why you went there, when you could have wrote same thing by reading materials about Russia in US media.

He met, totally expectedly some "dissident" so called "Christians", one of them was, if my memory doesn't fail me, after Dreher removed his "Diary" was Mr. Ogorodnikov--a rather shady figure who still tries to pass for Christian Democrat and still listens to Radio Liberty, which characterizes him extremely well. These were this kind of "dissidents" about who Russian Orthodox Church had this opinion:

В конфликте между религиозными диссидентами и представителями государственных структур Церковь, в лице иерархов, занимала позицию государства, в первую очередь, потому что официальная поддержка диссидентов могла навлечь на Церковь новые гонения. Другой причиной было то, что среди религиозных диссидентов было много людей, оторванных от подлинной церковности, для которых протестная деятельность становилась самоцелью. Позднейшие годы со всей убедительностью показали правильность такой позиции церковного руководства. Когда богоборческого государства не стало люди, привыкшие бороться против чего угодно, лишь бы бороться, направили свою энергию против Церкви.

Translation: In the conflict between religious dissidents and representatives of the state structures (in Soviet times), the Church as represented by Hierarchy took the position of the state, primarily because of the fear that Church's support for these dissidents could inspire new persecution. The other reason was the fact that among religious dissidents many people were detached from true Church and for who the protest activity was the main purpose. Later years demonstrated convincingly the correctness of such position by Church. When the godless state disappeared, people who got used to protest against anything, as long as they could protest for the sake of protesting, directed their energy against the Church.      

That's warmer and this definition covers pretty much most (not all) of the Soviet dissidents and Russia's professional "protesters" today. As long as the pressure on Russian state is maintained, the better it is. Moreover, nowadays Russian Orthodox Church is viewed by many in the West as a part of the Russian State and as such is perceived as an enemy. I wonder (wink, wink) if Dreher removed that post after recognizing the fact that some of his contacts in Russia could hardly be representative of Russia and Russians in general, and Russian Orthodoxy in particular. But it is, indeed, a peculiar fact that he removed that post.  Yet, even if recognizing this fact, references to ANY Russian experiences, as Billington limited them to pre-1917, not to mention drawing any parallels to the United States, even if one would find a degree of commonality in a  classic liberal thought between Russian intelligentsia and Western thinkers (after all, Tolstoy even carried a medallion of Jean-Jaques Rousseau all the time), any parallels are not only incorrect, they are harmful. 

Two things which all those Russia "scholars" in the United States fail to grasp about Russia because it is beyond the grasp of most of them:  

1. Russian peasant commune and its world-view;
2. War. 

These two factors explain why Bolsheviks were able to get and hold on to power for so long, the same as why Bolshevism transformed itself into something else entirely in Stalin and post-Stalin period. 

Crimean War, a simple fact, Russian Army faces Anglo-French force, armed with rifles, with smooth bore muskets which barely have a half range of British and French arms, not to mention not being in the same league in terms of accuracy. I will abstain from comparing respective fleets. Russia loses the war, is humiliated and is forbidden to have any fleet on the Black Sea. As none other than Grand Duke Konstantin noted:

We cannot deceive ourselves any longer; we must say that we are both weaker and poorer than the first-class powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material terms but in mental resources, especially in matters of administration. 

Did this thought ever visit Dreher or Billington when almost exactly 50 years from humiliating defeat in a Crimean War, Russia will be humiliated yet again in Russo-Japanese War with Russia's Baltic Squadron annihilated at Tsushima by Japanese Fleet in one of the most lopsided defeats in history. Almost surreal defeat which exposed Russia's weakness. Then comes Revolution of 1905 precipitated both by humiliation of Tsushima and by Bloody Sunday. Then comes its suppression with Russia's peasantry, when not executed, literally whipped--yes, villagers crowded at the central square, with Cossacks administering public whipping of men and women. Russia was literally whipped in 1905-07. And then comes WW I. I have to put it politely, American history, even when one considers Civil War looks almost tame compared to what even old Russophobe and falsifier of Russian history Richard Pipes called "rougher political climes".  

In what state Russia approached WW I is a separate topic, especially after everything became public and was generally settled--for Russia WW I was a catastrophe which resulted in millions upon millions of killed, maimed, displaced and, in the end, proved Grand Duke Konstantin's post-Crimean War diagnosis correct yet again, this time on a gigantic scale. Can some American journo who can not even speak Russian and who writes some fantasies about some Benedict Option even comprehend what effect those wars which saw millions of Russian lives wasted for the reasons which are beyond his grasp had on Russia and Russians? I am sure he has no clue as one would expect from a product of US humanities "education". Then it is no surprise that one will try to find some elusive symmetries between Russian and American history when in reality there are none and can not be. I am not sure Rod Dreher had time to actually get himself into the memorial on Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow, but in the Hall of Memory and Sorrow there are 2, 660,000 small chains with tear drops on them, each chain symbolizing 10 people, in all--a memory of 26,660,000 Soviet citizens who died in WW II. Remarkably, those 2,660, 000 chains is roughly the number of Russian soldiers killed in WW I, without civilians. If Dreher wanted to experience epiphany, he should have gone there to take in a remote physical representation of what almost 2.7 millions killed look like as tear-drops. I think he would have had some answers, maybe, and would avoid drawing parallels to a fate of an American nation (???) which has no grasp of horrors of continental warfare and no experience with it. 

Then maybe, all those platitudes about culture, GULAG and other Cold War cliches and falsities will yield to an attempt, as late Father Robert Tobias wrote to perceive great depth and maybe understand that real Russian Church is not just in, however magnificent, Orthodox Cathedrals but in this:

Or in this, the closest one can get to living and dead marching together as one. 

If that is not a spiritual religious experience, I don't know what is and that is how Soviet Flag flies proudly by, in many cases, people wearing Christian cross. But that is the fact which is beyond comprehension of the American intellectual class, the thing they cannot wrap their brain around, the same as inevitable leaning to the  REAL Left of Russian society. They just don't get it in the US and Rod Dreher is a symptom of this narrow mindedness which cannot be cured, with protracted pseudo-intellectual discussions about Russian culture or without them. But I repeat myself.

Satanic.

I was a member of CPSU, I am still pretty much an atheist, or, if you will, atheist agnostic,  but even the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism was largely copied and re-imagined from 9 (not 10) Commandments. This is beyond, it is pure unrefined evil from a country which gave us numerous genders and psychotic Greta Thunberg. 

A church in Malmo has a new altarpiece meant to celebrate inclusivity by replacing Adam and Eve in paradise with gay couples in suggestive poses, while depicting the serpent tempting them as a transgender woman.The controversial work of art is not new. Photographer and artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin painted it in 2012 and tried to donate it to the Skara Cathedral just before the church was preparing to conduct the first same-sex wedding in its 1,000-year history.The openly lesbian artist, who has a history of blending religious imagery with pro-minority activism, said at the time that she wanted to test if the Church of Sweden was as gay-friendly as it claimed to be when it embraced same-sex marriage in 2009. The Skara Cathedral politely declined the gift, saying it was about political activism and not faith.But over seven years have passed, and now Wallin has got her way, even if it isn’t in her home city. St. Paul’s Church in Malmo accepted the painting called “Paradise” as its new altarpiece and unveiled it on Sunday, the first day of Advent. Helena Myrstener, the pastor, said that “history was written” in the hanging of the “LGBT altarpiece” as she tweeted a photo of the painting.

I am not going to upload this disgusting image. Europe, this is your future. You wanted it, you were working tirelessly to remove anything sacred from your culture--you succeeded. I don't think this is possible, yet, in the US--too many armed people, and there are still many with genuine Christian faith (not Christian Zionists--these are a separate matter). What's next? We know what's next--institutionalizing of pedophilia and eventual departure into oblivion of a complete depravity and then Jihad by Muslim element which will wipe out whatever is left of Europe and will turn it into a Sharia concentration camp. Guess what, first who will be violently dealt with will be representatives of European sodomy and pedophilia community with European snow-flakes being next in line for either enslavement or physical annihilation. I am not sure I personally will weep for Europe anymore--it increasingly becomes, for all my atheistic background, satanic. Let it burn. 

Geopolitics Of Pipes.

As was announced earlier, Power of Siberia was switched on today. 

And, without being sappy sentimental, it is, indeed, a historic moment since solidifies Russian-Chinese alliance with the blood of modern geopolitics--energy. Initially, Power of Siberia will pump modest volumes of natural gas but they will grow each month. China will need more, much more. Even English language propaganda outlets such as Associated Press had to note a true meaning of this pipeline. 

BEIJING (AP) — China and Russia launched on Monday a gas pipeline that is more than 6,000 kilometers (3,750 miles) long, an outcome of their long-planned energy partnership. As its relationships with Europe and the United States have grown more volatile, Russia is looking to bring its vast natural gas resources to the east. China is the world’s largest energy consumer and needs new supply sources to meet domestic demand. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin inaugurated the pipeline — dubbed the “Power of Siberia” — through a joint video conference. “This step takes Russia-China energy cooperation to a whole new level and brings us closer to achieving the goal set together with Chinese President Xi Jinping of extending bilateral trade turnover to $200 billion in 2024,” Putin said. The pipeline bolsters the nations’ ties while China is embroiled in a trade dispute with the U.S. It stems from a $400 billion deal signed in 2014 by Russian state energy giant Gazprom, which agreed to deliver 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to China National Petroleum Corp for the next 30 years. Gazprom built the Russian side of the pipeline, which runs from new Siberian gas fields to the Chinese border.

Remarkable in this commitment to get to $200 billion volume of trade, which now seems a totally achievable goal by 2024. It also makes it clear that with Power of Siberia operational and more similar projects in the pipeline (ahem), Russia's position vis-a-vis Europe re: gas supplies improves dramatically. I am sure Kiev is celebrating this event joyfully (/sarc). Nothing personal, just business, which also makes Russia's shift to Asia obvious. There will be a lot of back-and-forth on this issue in coming days, but, hopefully, there will be enough cool heads who will look into the issue of power balance WITHIN Russian-Chinese geopolitical arrangement, to finally dispel all this contrived BS about "junior-senior partner" dichotomy and will concentrate on actual tangibles which drive Russian-Chinese relations and, with that, world's power balance. Who would have thought 15 years ago that the world will move the way Russia and China move.