The destiny of mankind
And our sorry lot are determined
In Ukrainian fields and villages,
Amidst fire and violence,
For such is the destiny
Of our long-suffering land.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko
The shooting down by Russian terrorists of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (with 298 peaceful civilians on board) on July 17, 2014, marked a turning point in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. This act of terrorism has been compared to the shots fired in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, that eventually started the First World War.
We can’t as yet assess the geopolitical, military, ecological, and moral consequences of the heinous crime committed in the sky over the Donbas. Those responsible for the blowing of the passenger jet out of the sky will be condemned forever. God will punish those who laughed watching the explosion in the sky and then looted the crash site until the fifth generation, and the place will remain likewise condemned. However, even now people are beginning to realize that the explosion in the sky over the Donbas was probably His last warning to Russia that had invaded a friendly neighboring country, bringing death, subjugation, and ruffian-like disregard for set international rules and laws of human morality.
We don’t know what punishment history will mete out to Russia, but we know that there is no avoiding this punishment.
For the past 15 years, before the very eyes of the West that remained in a state of democratic euphoria (the end of the Cold War, collapse of the USSR, restoration of democracy in Central and Eastern European countries), Russia has slowly but surely cultivated forces of neo-Nazism, imperial revanchism, hatred of democratic values and contempt for international agreements on the inviolability of borders and human rights.
That was how Nazism evolved in the Weimar Republic, in 1920s-1930s, driven by Germany’s desire of revenge for the lost war, racial supremacy of plebeians, and blind faith in the invincibility of violence and SA and SS armed gangs.
The West (the US and EU) refused to believe that Russia would embark on that path. Instead, they invested huge sums in what they saw as democratic transformations in Putin’s country (after all, Russia was a member of G8) and its integration into a global liberal-democratic system. Those were vain illusions, like ones entertained by the United States when trying to make Saddam Hussein its ally or “tame” Al-Qaeda during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Russia was slowly rising from its knees. Refusing to overcome phantom pain from the amputated imperial limbs, it gave way to the spirit of revenge, reviving mirages of the Stalinist past, with the temporary flow of oil and gas dollars giving rise to ambitious dreams about a world superpower – although objective data testified to Russia’s lowering global economic status, degradation of its economy and education and scientific potential, as well as the loss of democratic achievements of the Russian people.
Russia’s economy is currently worth 2 trillion dollars; that of the EU countries, 16 trillion, and that of the US, 16 trillion. In other words, Russia’s is no match for the GDP of the US and EU countries. It is 16 times lower! Not coincidentally, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on CNN’s State of the Union (March 2014): “Look, Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country… It’s kleptocracy. It’s corruption. It’s a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy, and so economic sanctions are important.”
The fall of communism and disintegration of the Soviet Union raised hopes for the revival of a democratic Russia without the omnipotent secret police and the mad desire to impose on the rest of the world its ideology and a state system of subjugation.
Russia, however, creatively revised the Stalin-Brezhnev legacy, returned to the monarchic-chauvinistic origins of tsarism, upgraded the latest developments in electronic technology to influence public opinion, and like a roly-poly toy, arose as another Evil Empire, rather as its modern dangerous mutant.
Much to the surprise of liberals in the West, the fall of the communist system did not result in a moral democratic revival of Russia. They had to agree with those who said that it was not communism (as a European invention) that influenced Russia, but vice versa, considering that Russia begot Bolshevism with its heinous crimes.
The cult of violence on a government level and subjugation of other peoples (ethnic minorities) became part the Russian people’s genetic code.
Russia rejected the lofty Christian traditions of its philosophers at the turn of the 20th century, ignored the democratic trends during the perestroika campaign, and spiritually degraded in the early 21st century, liquidating democratic freedoms, zombiefying the population with transparent lies on the television channels, enhancing the alliance between the KGB-minded government machine and an Obscurantist variant of Orthodoxy, promoting mass Black-Hundred organizations in Russia and abroad, particularly in Ukraine. Russians appear to have forgotten Nikolai Berdyaev’s description of the Black Hundred as an abscess in the body of the people; they dared call themselves a Union of the Russian People, but they hated everything that made that people great.
Red-brown Russian marginal Nazis, such as Aleksandr Dugin, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and Sergei Glazyev who for a long time had to make do with the sidelines of Russian public opinion, which at the start of the 21st century stage was still in democratic fervor since the fall of the Evil Empire (one is reminded of the good traditions of Andrei Sakharov, Galina Starovoytova, Anna Politkovskaya, Yerii Afanasyev, Valeria Novodvorskaya, etc.) gradually, with support from Putin and his regime, won a leading position in the shaping of a public policy of chauvinism and aggressive rejection of any values of Western democracy. It was then the postulates of the “Russian World” were formulated as those of a community of “people of different nationalities who speak Russian and live in different regions of the world (!); people with their particular genetic code who are not afraid of death and despise foolish everyday comfort (!).”
This is a code of Russian soldiers of fortune, upstarts, characters like Girkin and Pushkov, adventurers, riffraff backed by Putin and Kirill Gundyaev. Given the go-ahead, money, and weapons, they would turn not only Ukraine, but also Israel, Latvia, Serbia, Moldova, even Australia into a “Russian People’s Republic.” Similar terrorist rabble grew in our land and willingly fell into the Russian World’s embrace.
The Russian World emerged in place of the Third International, that combat terrorist hand of communist Moscow. RW is a subversive organization rooted in Russian chauvinistic rather than international principles, but with the same objectives, serving as the Kremlin’s foreign political tool, helping it revive the Eurasian empire, so Russia could oppose the modern West.
Stalin wanted to expand the Soviet Union so its frontiers would be the same as those of tsarist Russia (Molotov said with satisfaction in the twilight years: “We coped with that task rather well.”). Putin’s objective is less ambitious; he wants Russia to have the Soviet frontiers. This paranoid project has a super-goal: DESTRUCTION OF UKRAINE as a state, as a people with its language and culture, eradicating the very idea of the Maidan as a symbol of Ukrainian freedom and national dignity.
Whereas the Third International came up with slogans relating to the working people’s class solidarity, the Russian World has inherited the Nazi principle of the purity of blood that calls for war against all the other ethnic groups and communities.
A bit of history. Whereas the Bolsheviks tried to capitalize on internationalist moods, creating all those short-lived “people’s” and “democratic” republics from Bavaria to Tuva, Germans chose nationalist moods even before Hitler came to power. In 1925, German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann (of the German People’s Party) wrote that protection of Germans abroad (“10 to 12 million fellow countrymen who are under the foreign yoke”) is one of the great tasks of Germany. Hitler turned this principle into a means of warfare and aggression (e.g., Anschluss, occupation of Czechoslovakia and Poland).
In dozens of countries near and far away from Germany ethnic German organizations were created as a prototype of Putin’s Russian World. They were all under the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and Gestapo’s control. Before the war, the German American Alliance in the US numbered over 300,000 members. There were 750 Nazi organizations. Eighty thousand Germans lived in Argentina, and almost 600,000 in Brazil, including 15,000 NSDAP members. In 1935, the People’s Union for German Affairs Abroad was established in the Third Reich to supervise thousands of German organizations and 400 foreign Nazi Party centers abroad. It was thus Nazi fifth columns formed in sovereign states. They proceeded to fuel the fire of interethnic conflicts, destroying national (Czech, Polish, and other) schools and enforcing the German language.
Today, one is, mildly speaking, surprised to watch European politicians, especially those in Germany (who know only too well the outcome of Hitler’s policy) turn a blind eye to the Nazi-like ethnic aspect of Russia’s war in Crimea and Donbas. It suffices to leaf through the recent issues of the newspaper Slovo prosvity (The Word of Enlightenment) to see the hair-raising scope of atrocities by the Russian chauvinists against the ethnic Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied areas.
Dugin and Glazyev make no secret of their hatred of ethnic Ukrainians (whom they would only recently pat on the shoulder condescendingly and call brothers): “Previously we saw Kyiv and Galicia. Now there is nothing to see. These bastards don’t interest anyone any longer. They are still cursing and spitting blood, but their time is up. Now is the time of Novorossia [New Russia],” writes Dugin (24/05/2014). “Putin, crush the vermin! Ukrainians must be killed and killed again. I believe so as a university lecturer.” (06/05/2014) “The impression is that Odesa and Kharkiv trust the scoundrels of the old political elite too much. The destiny of all south and east [of Ukraine] is a people’s uprising. The DNR is a unique zone of a liberated Russian World, including Donetsk, Sloviansk, Mariupol, and Kramatorsk. Luhansk is also beautiful. The South-Eastern Front must unite the lands of the Russian World with a new military and political entity, Novorossia. Too bad Odesa and Kharkiv… are still passive in terms of political self-determination and self-defense organization. Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Dnipropetrovsk, I think, should start guerrilla operations against the junta’s totalitarian repressions.” (From Dugin’s Facebook, 28/04/2014). And this from a lecturer with Moscow State University, a theoretician of geopolitics and Eurasianism, a herald of the present-day Russian Middle Ages who acts as a regular agent provocateur, inciting killings of Ukrainian nationals (among them quite a few ethnic Russians) and destruction of peaceful Ukrainian towns and villages.
After the shooting down of the Malaysian flight by the Russian World’s thugs, Aleksandr Dugin did not wash his hands of the innocent blood. He is like his favorite Nazi German Eurasian geopolitician Karl Ernst Haushofer who paid for the Nazi war crimes with his life and that of his son and wife.
Sergei Glazyev (born in Zaporizhia), Putin’s adviser on Eurasian integration, is struggling to become another theoretician of the “new Russian civilization,” coming up with discoveries rating entries in clinical schizophrenia textbooks.
“The current European fascists are trying to destroy not only national, economic and cultural distinctions, but also individual human ones, including gender and age differentiation (sic)… European bureaucracy is the number-one motive force of modern European fascism… The EU is actually a European bureaucratic empire that forms its economic space in the interests of American-European capital under US control… The catastrophe which is taking place in Ukraine can actually be defined as an act of aggression against Russia on the part of the US and its NATO allies (!).”
I wonder if Obama and Merkel have read these ravings penned by Putin’s Eurasian adviser. On August 14, 1939, several weeks before the invasion of Poland, the Nazi newspaper Die Nazionalzeitung wrote: “The existence of the Polish state brings shame on world culture and is a threat to [world] peace.”
Glazyev wrote about the “Ukrainian aggressor” for Prokhanov’s newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow): “Instead of ‘Heil Hitler!’ they shout ‘Glory to the Heroes!’ meaning those characters whose only exploit was the shooting of helpless Jews down the Babyn Yar ravine. And this considering that the Ukrainian oligarchs, including the leaders of Jewish organizations, are financing the Right Sector’s anti-Semites and Nazis… Maidan sponsors appear to have forgotten that in a Nazi-big-time-bourgeoisie symbiosis the Nazis have always got the better of the liberal businessmen. Precisely what’s happening in Ukraine, with the remaining oligarchs competing with the Right Sector’s fuehrers in Russophobic and anti-Moscow rhetoric, as well as in the appropriation of property of former sponsors of the Nazis who fled to Moscow.” (15/05/2014)
Obviously the current theoreticians and practitioners of Russian Nazism from numerous Black-Hundred-like organizations are trying to make the Jews (by an old tradition) and Ukrainians into one target. Whereas the NKVD propagandists invented the word combination “German-Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” their today’s counterparts are looking for “Banderite Yids.” There is a sad joke in Kyiv: “If the motherf***ers occupy Kyiv, the Jews and Ukrainians will be forced to wear yellow Stars of David with a blue Tryzub (Trident) and together head for Babyn Yar…”
Moscow terrorist Borodai, prime minister of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, clarified the Russian World’s objective in Ukraine:
“The borders of the Russian World are considerably wider than those of the Russian Federation. I am carrying out a historic mission in the name of the Russian nation, a superethnos bonded by the Orthodox state. As I did in the Caucasus, I am fighting the separatists in Kyiv who are fighting the Russian empire.” (http://grani.ru/… 21/07/2014)
Russia is suffocating under the weight of the spiritual mob. Dmitry Bykov, a noted Russian liberal writer and journalist, says: “It has become clear that the worst enemy of freedom in Russia is not the regime, the secret police, censorship or repressions. It is chauvinism. Nationalism. Using nationalism like carbon monoxide, they are stunning the patient so he gets no treatment.” (http://echo.msk.ru/ …18/04/2014)
To be more precise, the enemy of Russia is chauvinism risen on the toxic yeast of the regime, rule of the secret police, censorship, and repressions.
The Russian World, Black Hundred, polite “little green men,” thugs in Crimea and Donbas, millions of zombiefied citizens of Russia have their leader and teacher, the key architect of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West. His name is Putin.
Putin as a small-time KGB functionary, a corrupt underling of Anatoly Sobchak sporting a raspberry pink jacket, was underestimated by both Russia’s ruling elite and international politicians. Even such an inveterate critic of Yeltsin as Mikhail Poltoranin, former democrat, member of the Interregional Group of Deputies, described the future ruler of Russia rather superficially: “Putin... learned deceit and greed from nosy KGB men; narcissism and Khlestakovism, from Sobchak; sullen contempt for the destiny of the nation, from Yeltsin. All these qualities... yielded a diffuse product... of great destructive power.” (Mikhail Poltoranin. Power in Trinitrotoluol Equivalent: The Legacy of Tsar Boris (in Russian), Moscow, 2010.)
In actuality, Putin’s evolution from a playboy rolling in money who, together with a gang of ex-KGB thugs and Gazprom men, robbed Russia, to a formidable dictator capable of launching World War III, is far more complicated than Poltoranin sees it.
Putin today is a hybrid leader of Russian chauvinism and Black-Hundred anti-Western forces; he is a typical product of the new information epoch. He has studied the experiences of Stalin, Hitler, Brezhnev, Andropov, White Guard generals, and Red Cheka men. Putin has shown the world a new 21st-century phenomenon, combining in Russia a democratic facade with KGB-rooted authoritarianism. His idee fixe is to prove the viability of an anti-Western, anti-liberal model of the state as a special project of Russian civilization.
The towns and villages of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts today are the best illustrations of this kind of civilization.
This is a civilization of bandits, compared to whom Yanukovych, Azarov, and Kliuiev are refined aristocrats. This is a civilization of mass shootings, abductions, and tortures. It is epitomized by a drunk unshaven thug posing for the cameras on the crash site of Boeing 777, holding a children’s toy. This is a civilization of the mob, rednecks and killers that revel in their power over normal people. This is the kind of civilization that awaits Russia when this horde of terrorists returns home. They will bring fire and blood to Russia and eventually will storm the Kremlin.
Allowing, for the time being, certain trappings of the liberal information epoch in Russia (e.g., the Internet), Putin has placed an all-embracing Goebbels-like propaganda machine at the disposal of the regime. His statement about Dr. Goebbels as a “talented man” in the presence of scared gray-bearded Jewish sages was consciously sadistic because they knew only too well how their people had suffered at the Nazi ideologue’s hands.
The example of Putin, this political dwarf (Poltoranin scornfully writes that Putin resembles Stalin about as much as a teakettle does a steam locomotive) afflicted with megalomania and inferiority complex, who looks down his nose at the liberal Western leaders, regarding them as dupes and useful idiots (one is reminded of Hitler seeing off Chamberlain and Daladier departing from Munich in their limos in 1938, saying it was horrible to have to deal with such paltry individuals) shows what terrible mutations occur in history; that there is no lasting triumph of democracy, just as there is no lasting rule of dark forces. If there is a law of conservation of good, then there should be a parallel one of conservation of evil.
Sad but true: the forces of evil that manifested themselves with such destructive force in the 20th century have not disappeared but remained in a latent, hidden, state, now and then breaking the surface of history the way hot lava suddenly appears in extinct volcanoes.
Putin is trying to revive the Evil Empire (albeit in a caricatural, truncated format) in the fields and blood of Ukraine before the very eyes of humankind. Over the past several years he has become an extremely dangerous violator of the international law and order, even though Russia, as a nuclear power, member of the UN Security Council, until recently a member of G8, and signatory to the most important international agreements and declarations, is supposed to be its guarantor.
According to Andrei Illarionov, during Putin’s presidency Russia’s share in gross world military spending has increased by 5.2 times – from 0.95 percent in 1999 to 4.94 percent in 2013, setting a world increment record. Simultaneously, the index of civil liberties and human rights in Russia has dropped from 42 to 26 (with the index of unfree countries being at less than 34). Afghanistan, Myanmar, Oman, Yemen, and Rwanda show the same index (26) as Russia; 169 out of 209 moderately free countries, including Zimbabwe, Qatar, and Angola, show a higher index.
All these years Putin has been preparing to avenge his defeat during the 2004-05 Maidan in Kyiv. Instead of caring about the well-being and free development of the peoples in the Russian Federation, promoting neighborly relationships with Ukraine, Putin has spent huge sums on the strengthening of subversive and terrorist groups, working out plans of annexation, dismemberment and destruction of Ukraine. Using bribes and threats, stick and carrot tactic, he has been corrupting the Ukrainian political leadership, turning the so-called elite into a pack of traitors, Lubyanka agents, and fifth column. He despised Yanukovych the way a prison camp guard officer despises a con while cynically watching the thief turn Ukraine into Europe’s first totally criminalized state.
I am convinced that we will eventually learn the truth about what happened in February 2014, about how Putin talked Yanukovych into first ordering bloodshed on the Maidan and then fleeing to Russia, so he could seize Crimea in time of anarchy and start combat operations against mainland Ukraine.
The second – and final – fiasco of Putin’s puppets on the Maidan in 2014 sent the “national leader of Russia” ballistic and made him vent all his pent-up hatred on Ukrainians.
By starting the war between Russia and Ukraine, shedding Ukrainian blood on Ukrainian territory, Putin committed a crime against the world Slavic community, against Orthodoxy, against family ties between many Russians and Ukrainians. He did what Cain did to his brother Abel.
Determined to throw Ukraine to its knees, he had a foreign passenger jet liner blown out of the sky, thus fastening himself and his Russian World to the stocks because such crimes are not pardoned by a human and even less so by the Heavenly Court.
A new countdown of world history has been underway since July 17, 2014, when three Heavenly Hundreds were destroyed in the sky over the Donbas.
Whereas the Soviet Evil Empire could keep its crimes (Holodomor, massacre of Polish POWs at Katyn, Stalin-Hitler conspiracy, shooting down a Korean passenger jet) secret for some time, today is the Internet epoch, so no dictator, no Lavrov or Churkin can keep crimes away from the public eye.
Putin and his Russian World can commit more crimes. The Ukrainian army will keep losing men in battles. There will be more bargaining in the West behind Ukraine’s back. There will be more ordeals, but the most important thing has occurred. Putin has lost the Ukraine game. He has lost Europe, the United States, and Canada. He will lose Russia, as well.
