Dmitry Orlov: The Last Crusade, Part 2

Dmitry Orlov

We are, most of us unwittingly, bearing witness to a momentous development: the end of the thousand-year Drang nach Osten—the relentless eastward march of the reanimated corpse of the Western Roman Empire, with the Pope as its symbolic head and Vatican as its symbolic capital—known as the Crusades. Of these, the Southern Crusades are far better known in the West, while the Northern Crusades, launched in 1147, are far less widely known. But they were kept going the longest—until February 22, 2022—because, unlike China, India and just about every other non-Western country, Russia has never surrendered to anyone.

The gauntlet was thrown down in 1252, when Alexander Nevsky accepted an official document, called yarlyk, from Khan Batyj of the Golden Horde (part of the Mongolian Empire), allowing him to reign as the Grand Prince of Kiev (and thus the ruler of all of Russia), rather than ask for a blessing from the Pope in Rome, as was required of all Western kings. To these Western potentates, their claim to be ordained by God was based on approval by His head office at the Vatican; to the Russians, the Pope was just some heretic usurper. The religious distinction played itself out over time, but the notion that there is an exclusive club of Western nations who deserve to wield authority over the rest of the world has remained to this day.

There followed a series of onslaughts on Russia spanning many centuries, all stemming from the same simple principle: that which the West cannot control must be destroyed. The Germans and the Swedes kept on attacking it until 1709. Then the French attacked again in 1812; and then the Germans in 1941. The Americans were poised to attack in March of 2022, via their Ukrainian/NATO proxies, but were preempted by Russia’s Special Military Operation. Thus, the last Crusade has been aborted and further attempts seem unlikely, since, at this point, there is no question of destroying that which the West cannot control, and not just Russia but also much of the rest of the world. Even tiny North Korea can stand up to the collective West and wag a finger in its face. The thousand-year show is nearly over.

Over the previous centuries, every time after Russia expelled yet another crusader, some other Western nations would take the lead and attempt to march on Moscow: it was the Germans (as the Teutonic Knights), then the Swedes, the Poles, then some more Swedes, then the French under Napoleon, then the Germans under Hitler, and now the Americans (disguised as some hapless, clueless Ukrainians) under Biden. (Yes, the last act of this drama is most definitely a farce.) But who could possibly rise up as the next crusader du jour? Nobody! There isn’t anyone left in the West to continue the project.

There is a curious 100% correlation between the foreign languages the Russians choose to study and the Western capitals they then come to occupy. The Russians studied French—and Russian cavalry rode into Paris; they studied German—and Russian tanks rumbled into Berlin. And now the Russians are all studying English, starting with the second grade. Therefore, we should expect some Russian fireworks over Washington (London is only capable of some minor dirty tricks by now). This correlation is just something to watch out for—in the future.

But we are already in a position to review the history of this the last and final crusade, which is currently nearing its end. To do so, we need to rewind back to 1998, 24 years ago. The Russian economy lay in ruins, the first Chechen War was essentially lost and the West was busy looting what was left of the Soviet economy. Separatist sentiments were rife and the country could have fallen apart at any moment, fulfilling the age-old Western dream of erasing Russia from the political map.

And then something went horribly wrong: instead of drunk president Yeltsin, Putin came to power and actually won the Second Chechen war. Putin’s appearance on the world scene had come as a complete surprise to the Western deep state, which then realized that it needed a whole new plan to destroy Russia for sure this time: a new, globalist Drang nach Osten. The main goal of this new onslaught was the continued complete domination by the US of the entire world, assured by dismembering, engulfing and devouring its main geopolitical opponent, Russia. Russia was to be simultaneously attacked from the west (via the Ukraine), the south (via the Caucasus) and the east (via Afghanistan and Central Asia). Russia’s trade in oil and natural gas was to be disrupted, its economic connections to the world economy severed, and its politics disrupted by internal protests.

By September 11, 2001 the new plan was ready and launched in grand style by knocking down three New York skyscrapers using two Boeing passenger jets—a sort of latter-day miracle of loaves and fishes that left those hampered by knowing a little too much arithmetic at a distinct disadvantage. This gave the US a carte blanche for suspending civil liberties at home and for inserting its forces anywhere abroad as part of its Global War of Terror, which was, given the engineered nature of the 9/11 event, a sham on top of another sham.

Step one was to prepare a Central Asian incursion by invading Afghanistan in 2001. That effort went famously badly. There were two failed coup attempts—one in Turkmenistan in 2002 and another in Kyrgyzstan in 2005—both thwarted by Russia’s special services. The Americans lingered in Afghanistan for an interminable 20 years, having been sidetracked into profiting greatly from the heroin trade, but once American drug addicts started switching to the much more cost-effective Chinese-made fentanyl there was no reason to continue the Afghani heroin business. The last parting present was the attempted coup in Kazakhstan in January of 2022, which was quelled by Russian troops invited by Kazakhstan’s president. Thus ended the effort to destroy Russia via Central Asia.

Step two was to prepare a terrorist incursion via the Caucasus. The government of Georgia was overthrown in 2003 and the US, with Israeli assistance, started training the Georgian military. An effort was made to organize yet another round of Chechen separatist mania, with an infusion of Islamic fundamentalists via Georgia’s Pankisi gorge. This could have posed a problem for Russia—or not, we’ll never know for sure, because on August 8, 2008 Georgia’s psychologically unstable president Saakashvili jumped the gun and started shelling Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia. That region was arbitrarily lumped into Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic by the Bolsheviks and then got stuck there after the Soviet Union disintegrated, similarly to what happened to the Donbass in the Ukraine. Russia responded by flushing the Georgian military out of the area and generally defanging it. What Saakashvili did, in essence, was trade a Georgian tactical defeat for a Russian strategic victory. Georgia has remained defanged ever since, putting the southern incursion plan in limbo.

Step three was by far the most successful. The Orange Revolution in Kiev in 2004 was followed up by various other revolutions and coups, culminating with the violent Maidan revolution in the spring of 2014. Inspired by Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Russophobic pipe dreams, the US pinned great hopes on the Ukraine and took a no-expense-spared approach to turning it into a sort of anti-Russia. This effort has so far led to Russia expanding by five new regions (Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) while turning the Ukraine into a world class parasite, flooding Europe with eight million migrants and sucking in a hundred billion dollars in aid (used to feather a great many oligarchic nests) and weapons (which are either destroyed at the eastern front or used to flood the international black market).

The Ukraine is now a zombie failed state, its economy more than halved, its infrastructure wrecked, its society savaged and its government by far the most corrupt on the whole planet. Although this part of the plan to destroy Russia has gained the most traction, its chances of allowing the US to dismember, engulf and devour Russia are still nil.

Meanwhile, a bad harvest in Russia in 2010 provided what could have been a major strategic windfall in what became known as the Arab Spring. Grain price increases in African and Middle Eastern countries which had subsisted largely on Russian grain imports caused major misery there. As a result, social upheaval, sometimes culminating in government overthrow and civil war, gripped Tunis, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrein, Algiers, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Djibouti and Western Sahara.

This situation allowed the US to hatch an entirely new plan for attacking Russia from the south by playing the Islamic radicalism card yet again. It had failed famously in Afghanistan and in Chechnya, and so, following typical US government logic, why not use it again? Radicalized Islamic youth from these various distressed countries were organized into ISIS, a.k.a. the Caliphate or the Islamic State, which was then infused into Iraq, Syria and Libya, provided with weapons , training and lavish media support with Hollywood-style propaganda videos of beheadings of infidels wearing traditional American orange jumpsuits. The execution was not without its comedic elements: at one point the Pentagon ISIS and the State Department ISIS went to war against each other, in what must have been the world’s first instance of interdepartmental terrorism.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/c43462b6-39fe-4c67-952c-00bc15b6e152