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July 28 - August 4, 2018
People suffered because God’s creation was irresolvably conflictual.
Facts and passions could not be aligned through revolution, only through redemption.
The Soviet Union was ruled by a small group of people who claimed legitimacy from this specific politics of inevitability.
Ilyin despised Lenin’s revolution, but he endorsed its violence and its voluntarism.
Ilyin shared Stalinist judgments about the contagious perversity of Western culture down to the smallest detail.
Though Ilyin wrote books chronicling terror under Stalin, his attitude to the law was essentially similar to that of its perpetrators. Andrei Vyshynskii, the notorious prosecutor at the show trials, believed that “formal law is subordinate to the law of the revolution.” This was precisely Ilyin’s attitude with respect to his planned counterrevolution.
Ilyin saw Russia as a homeland of God to be preserved at all costs, since it was the only territory from which divine totality could be restored.
Ilyin’s view was that Russia would save the world not from but with fascism. In both cases the only receptacle of absolute good was Russia, and the permanent enemy the decadent West.
Soviet communism was a politics of inevitability that yielded to a politics of eternity.
Then it was a state with a task: to build socialism by imitating capitalism and then overcoming it. Stalinism was a vision of the future that justified millions of deaths by starvation and another million or so by execution in the 1930s. The Second World War changed the story. Stalin and his supporters and successors all claimed after 1945 that the self-inflicted carnage of the 1930s had been necessary to defeat the Germans in the 1940s. If the 1930s were about the 1940s, then they were not about a distant future of socialism.
The oligarchy that emerged in the Russian Federation after 1991 had a great deal to do with the centralization of production under communism, the ideas of Russian economists thereafter, and the greed of Russia’s leaders.
American conventional wisdom contributed to the disaster by suggesting that markets would create institutions, rather than stressing that institutions were needed for markets.
In the twenty-first century, it proved easier to blame the West than to take s...
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Those who proclaimed Ilyin’s ideas from the heights of the Russian state were the beneficiaries rather than the victims of capitalism’s career in Russia.
The only thing that stands between inevitability and eternity is history, as considered and lived by individuals.
The underlying logic of the Russian war against Ukraine, Europe, and America was strategic relativism.
first time in Ukrainian history, public opinion became anti-Russian.
Russia would bomb Syria to generate refugees, then encourage Europeans to panic. This would help the AfD, and thus make Europe more like Russia.
Russian conspiratorial ideas, spread by the European far Right, found traction in some corners of the American Right.
The pronouncements of former Republican congressman Ron Paul, who ran for president in 2008 and 2012, were particularly interesting. Paul, who described himself as a libertarian, had mounted powerful critiques of American wars abroad. Now he defended a Russian war abroad. Paul cited Sergei Glazyev with approval—although Glazyev’s fascist politics and neocommunist economics contradicted Paul’s libertarianism, and Glazyev’s warmongering contradicted Paul’s isolationism.
In LaRouche’s view, Ukraine was an artificial construction created by Jews to block Eurasia.
At the time of her television appearance, the Russian citizen in charge of security was Vladimir Antyufeyev, who characterized the conflict as a war against the international Masonic conspiracy and foretold the destruction of the United States.
July 2016, not long after the Brexit referendum, Donald Trump said, “Putin is not going into Ukraine, you can mark it down.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun more than two years before, in February 2014, right after snipers murdered Ukrainians on the Maidan. It was thanks to that very set of events that Trump had a campaign manager. Yanukovych fled to Russia, but his advisor Paul Manafort kept working for a pro-Russian party in Ukraine through the end of 2015. Manafort’s new employer, the Opposition Bloc, was precisely the part of the Ukrainian political system that wanted to do
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Writing in The Nation in the summer and autumn of 2016, Cohen defended Trump and Manafort, and dreamed that Trump and Putin would one day come together and remake the world order. The mendacity and the fascism of the Russian assault upon the European Union and the United States, of which the Trump campaign was a part, was a natural story for the Left.
The older idea of plausible deniability, constructed by Americans in the 1980s, was to make claims in an imprecise way that allowed an escape from accusations of racism.
Andrei Kozyrev, a former foreign minister, explained that Putin “realizes that Trump will trample American democracy and damage if not destroy America as a pillar of stability and major force able to contain him.”
Kiselev, the leading man of the Russian media, celebrated Trump as the return of manhood to politics on his Sunday evening program, Vesti Nedeli. He fantasized before his viewers about Trump satisfying blondes, including Hillary Clinton. He was pleased that “the words ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are not in the vocabulary of Trump.”
Trump was the payload of a cyberweapon, meant to create chaos and weakness, as in fact he has done.
Trump’s advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.
Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the “VERY successful businessman” of his tweets but an American loser who became a Russian tool.
no one who mattered in Moscow believed that Trump was a powerful tycoon. Russian money had saved him from the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure.
Perhaps Trump was entirely unaware of what was happening on his properties.
Trump’s apparent business, real estate development, had become a Russian charade.
In 2006, citizens of the former Soviet Union financed the construction of Trump SoHo, and gave Trump 18% of the profits—although he put up no money himself.
As a candidate for the office of president, Trump broke with decades of tradition by not releasing his tax returns, presumably because they would reveal his profound dependence on Russian capital.
In the words of Felix Sater, writing in November 2015, “Our boy can become president of the United States and we can engineer it.” In 2016, just when Trump needed money to run a campaign, his properties became extremely popular for shell companies.
When Trump ran for president, he did so on the premise that the world really was so: that a fictional character with fictional wealth who ignores law, despises institutions, and lacks sympathy can govern people by causing pain.
In 2010, RT was helping American conspiracy theorists spread the false idea that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. This fiction, designed to appeal to the weaknesses of racist Americans who wished to imagine away their elected president, invited them to live in an alternative reality.
Trump the winner was a fiction that would make his country lose.
violence? It should be possible, as a
presidential elections in Ukraine, Russia
