(Disclaimer: The author of this article lived among Russians in the Baltics for half a decade and got on very well with them, so by no means is this an anti-Russian rant. A people and its rulers are not one and the same, and many Russians disapprove of how their country is being run).

A Beguiling Non Sequitur

"Having erroneously supposed that capitalism was an ideal system, many have fallen into despair because capitalism is imperfect. This has led them to the opposite extreme; that is, the belief that capitalism is the main enemy of good people everywhere, and that Vladimir Putin is their natural ally (perhaps, even, their liberator). Arising with this theme, ever so delicately, we find among the conspiracist demagogues of our time an anti-Ukrainian and anti-NATO animus, which dovetails nicely with their qualified regard for President Putin. If America is evil and decadent, then Russia must be good and healthy." ~ J.R. Nyquist in Putin’s Stooges and the Reification of Western Man, 5th April 2024.

One of the most distressing issues facing the very few well-informed conservatives in the West is a foolish belief among large numbers of their fellow conservatives that just because our own western globalist elites are reprehensible characters and patently evil, it must follow that their arch-enemies are decent and honourable.

This appears to be the logic of Ron Paul, Tucker Carlson, and many others, and is the gross blunder that is superficiality.

That is to say, they take Putin and his claimed conservative credentials at face value, never pausing to study his past, to study his alliances, to study his statements made to the Russian people, or to study his track record of brutal elimination directed against all credible opposition.

Rather, they parrot blatant Russian propaganda.

Consider, for example:

All that matters to such careless conservatives is (a) he makes good soundbites that tickle their ears and (b) he is the western elites’ enemy, and on that flimsy basis, their hearts and minds are won, as the absurb Captain America meme below demonstrates:

Putin as Captain America
This is what Russian seduction of western conservativism looks like: a KGB thug given a Messianic makeover.

A Rotten Root: The Staged Collapse of the Soviet Union

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was actually initiated by the Russian leadership.” ~ Vladimir Putin, in interview with Tucker Carlson, 8th February 2024.

While the current adulation bestowed on Putin by so many on right in the West is a travesty of judgement, there is an even worse precursor to conservative denialism / cognitive dissonance: their typical reaction to rational assessments of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Simply put, everyone – conservative and leftist – assumes the official narrative is correct and nobody wants to countenance the alternative: that the USSR’s collapse was not organic, but rather orchestrated from within as a strategic deception to wrong-foot the West.

For years I also believed the organic USSR-collapse narrative until I discovered Joel Skousen's argument in favour of a staged collapse of the USSR, which he outlines in his Analysis of Strategic Threats in the Current Decade (2010-2020).

Skousen substantially bases his assessment on the fact that the whole police state apparatus throughout the eastern bloc was simultaneously stood down in a coordinated way.

He has also been plainly influenced in his analysis by the defector testimony that forms the bedrock of the thinking of anticommunists such as Jeff Nyquist, who interviewed Golitsyn and other defectors who had sagely predicted the liberalising of the USSR years before it happened, on the basis that the transformation was being carefully prepared to deceive and disarm the West and buy time for Russian modernisation.

Golitsyn, for example, predicted in 1984 in his book, New Lies for Old, that there would be a grand thawing of the USSR's stance towards the West, the Berlin wall would come down, a charismatic, charming open-armed leader would emerge to offer an olive branch to the West, etc.

Most of Golitsyn's predictions came to pass, especially the major ones, thereby establishing his credentials as a bona fide defector and credible messenger to the West.

Fulfilled Defector Predictions: Convergence & China's Return to Russia's Side

Despite the fulfilment of the world-shaking developmets Golitsyn foretold and the plain fact that Russia has remained under extreme tyranny in the years since the USSR's dissolution, there is an even stronger basis for asserting that the Soviet Union’s collapse was staged, and that comes in the form of the controversial details of Soviet strategy that Golitsyn supplied, corroborated by the GRU defector Viktor Suvorov, author of Spetsnaz.

Spetsnaz by Viktor Suvarov

I say controversial, as it seems the prevailing view in western intelligence circles is that Golitsyn's entire narrative was somewhat tainted by his comments on Soviet strategy which are only now, belatedly, being confirmed as entirely correct.

Essentially, many baulked at his assertion (or professed to do so for political reasons) that Soviet strategy was so strident as to entail staging a divergence between Russia and China in the form of the well established and widely believed Sino-Soviet Split.

This was a claim too far for some of Golitsyn's handlers, who had invested too much credibility in this staged communist schism to accept it could possibly be an elaborate hoax forming part of what anticommunists refer to as the "Scissors Strategy", a plainer term for the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model of manipulative coercion.

Golitsyn had insisted that the Russians wanted to appear as making a clean break from communism whilst secretly preserving it as a force in this world in the form of China's government (plus the other satellite states nearby like North Korea), leaving Russia free to clean up its act and divert western attention at the Cold War's end to the far lesser threat posed – at that time – by Beijing, yet covertly maintaining an indissoluble ideological bond behind the scenes with China on the understanding that, at the right moment, they would re-emerge as allies in readiness for a "joint clenched fist" strike against a suitably weakened, imbalanced and subverted West.

In accordance with this warning from Golitsyn, which some if not all in the western intelligence agencies took as speculative theorising rather than disclosure of actual secret plans, he made use of the term convergence, which refers to the moment when the West is wholly infiltrated, compromised, subverted and effectively subsumed into the communist bloc, with the metaphorical scissors of the eponymous strategy being snapped shut - see, for instance, Jeff Nyquist's article The Scissors Strategy as Method for Agent Positioning.

With convergence, all long-term Soviet strategies would come to the boil simultaneously, homing in on a common final objective: the total cultural, societal, governmental and military defeat of the United States of America and its western allies, leaving the West as a vast bounty, free to be plundered at will by the victorious communist allies.

And now that Russia is openly aligned with hardline final-phase Marxist China again, along with even harder line communist North Korea and a whole gaggle of tyrannical, totalitarian anti-western regimes (imparting veritable guilt not so much by association, but by affiliation), Golitsyn's predictions about convergence assume a whole new gravitas.

Russia covets Europe

YELTSIN: I ask you one thing. Just give Europe to Russia. The U.S. is not in Europe. Europe should be the business of Europeans. Russia is half European and half Asian.

CLINTON: So you want Asia, too?

YELTSIN: Sure, sure, Bill. Eventually, we will have to agree on all of this.

CLINTON: I don’t think the Europeans would like this very much.

YELTSIN: Not all. But I am a European. I live in Moscow. Moscow is in Europe and I like it. You can take all the other states and provide security for them. I will take Europe and provide them security. Well, not I. Russia will…

Bill, I am serious. Give Europe to Europe itself. Europe never felt as close to Russia as it does now...

We have the power in Russia to protect all of Europe, including those with missiles. We’ll make all the appropriate treaties with China. ~ Except from transcript of the last meeting between Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, in Istanbul Turkey, 19th November 1999, starting on page 3 of the declassified transcript from the Clinton Presidential Library, reported by J.R. Nyquist in What Do Golitsyn’s Correct Predictions Tell Us?.

The "de-Atlanticisation" of Europe has been a geopolitical aim of Russia (in both its USSR and post-USSR phases) since the end of World War Two, or perhaps even longer, forming a central tenet of the Eurasionist doctrine enunciated by Putin's "guru", Alexandr Dugin, and is built on the idea that Russia is the natural dominant power in Europe and thus has the right, if not the mandate, to seek to remove any rival's dominance over the continent.

In simple words, that means Russia regards American (and British) influence over Europe as illegitimate in terms of the light of nature itself and therefore as immoral and deserving of forceful removal.

This is rather akin to the logic that posits that Argentina is the natural and therefore rightful owner of the Falkand Islands because they consist of an uplift in the continental shelf extending from Argentina into the south Atlantic, or similar arguments being pushed by Russia (and others) for oil extraction rights in the Arctic.

Such logic, is of course, contrived to justify a financial motive, at least in the case of Russia's desire to dominate Europe and the Arctic.

Really, Russia wants a militarily neutered Europe as a market for its hydrocarbons, but at the expense not just of America's ejection from European affairs, but far more so, America's total and final defeat, so that it can never pose a threat to Russian hegemony again.

That is, Russia is now manoeuvring to remove the Anglo-American establishment and its concomitant military power from the face of the earth forever, leaving it to carve up the world with its ally China for the near-to-medium term (although one would obviously expect Russia and China, once victory over the West had been accomplished, to perhaps turn on each other).

Russia does not think like the West

While the Kremlin speaks about the threat of NATO encroachment (despite NATO having always been weakly postured in a containment stance using the bare minimum of military personnel at and near its borders with Russia) and laments the broken promise of no eastward expansion of NATO (despite no such promise ever having been made), it also invokes strange if not downright bizarre historical arguments to justify its geopolitical moves, thereby highlighting a striking dichotomy between Russian and western discourse.

Or rather, this where we get to the divergence in how the so-called civilised West strategises and how the Russians and their fellow “barbarians” do.

You may have heard the comments from Russian state TV mouthpieces about how "there can be no world without Russia" and if needs be, the world will go down with Russia too.

This is, in fact, a cameo of entrenched Russian cultural thought.

In other words, they profess that they would gladly die in a burning house if it meant depriving a hated enemy from possessing it, even though they plainly believe and openly state they are a special nation with a special right to dominate.

Of course, I'm not saying every Russian person is like that, but I am making a broad-stroke class commentary here for the sake of getting to my point.

Better still, I'll quote verbatim a snippet from a Nyquist post in which he quotes Russian thinkers of yesteryear:

The “Russian World” concept is related to what Nikolai Berdyaev criticized in his book The Russian Idea.

According to Berdyaev, a peculiar ideology of sorts formed in Russia which was political and chauvinist, messianic and nihilist. This ideology held up Russia as a special country with a special mission to save the world from itself. “The Russian World” concept updates and streamlines these older notions to fit Moscow’s purposes of the moment.

Related to this, Berdayaev’s book on Dostoyevsky said there is an apocalyptic and nihilistic streak running through Russia.

Spengler, curiously, suggested that Russians culturally represent a revolt against Greek and Roman antiquity. This is relevant in terms of the philosophical and political lessons that Russians have refused to absorb from history.

For example, their rejection of Polybius’ praise for the Roman constitution as a system of checks and balances; or, their rejection of the critical spirit of Socrates, or Cicero’s emphasis on liberty.

There occurs, then, an unrealistic idea of “the empire,” and also the tribe itself which casts aside reason and reality. The imperfect world we live in does not become liveable by way of wisdom, or better institutions.

What is sought is something beyond what exists or is even possible in the present dispensation.

According to Berdyaev, “This means that the Russian people, in accordance with their metaphysical nature and vocation in the world, are a people of the End. Apocalypse has always played a great part … among the masses [in Russia].”

This is a particularly frightening observation (under the present circumstances), if true. According to Berdyaev, who was Russian himself, “In our thought the eschatological problem takes an immeasurably greater place than in the thinking of the West, and this is connected with the very structure of Russian consciousness which is but little adapted and little inclined to cling to finished forms of the intervening culture.” ~ J.R. Nyquist in Putin’s Russia at the End of Its Tether, Part I, 29 April 2022.

Certainly the Russian elites, if not a large body of those who tag along with the Kremlin narrative, seem to be a restless, insatiable, envious, angry, capricious, bloodthirsty and self-destructive cabal and so by no means do they, at least as a tribe, think like westerners do; what is unconscionable to us – sacrificing one's queen, to apply a chess analogy – is an acceptable recourse to them.

Incidentally, this is the same reason why their Cold War models of engaging NATO involved sending their own ground forces through irradiated regions of Europe and why they still speak of nuclear arms as just another weapon type, almost being bemused at the "weak" western fixation on the horribleness of nuclear weapons.

To us, that is irrational and reckless; to them, it is fair game and accordingly, we are effeminate and pathetic for thinking otherwise.

And, naturally, this elite-cultural mindset explains why it is plausible that the Russian Communist Party leadership back in the Cold War era would see fit to stage the USSR's collapse and swallow the hardships that ensued in the years immediately following that (many old Russians even today, with a better quality of life, nonetheless bewail "staryye vremena" = "olden times", with wistful longing for a golden past and a nostalgia for communist-era living).

Russia's Current Actions Validate the Claims of the Defectors

But for all of those insights into the stereotypical Russian mindset, they are still not what seals the theory, for me, that the Russian oligarch elites, fronted by the Communist Party, staged the USSR's collapse.

Rather, as I mentioned above, the clincher is the present outworking of the predicted strategic moves foretold by the defectors, actions that are undeniable manifestations of the exact decades-old convergence strategy Golitsyn et al tried so hard to warn western conservatives about.

To summarise those actions, both Russia and China control tyrannical proxies (Belarus and North Korea), they have both been modernising their nuclear forces at breakneck speed (while the USA's last new nuclear development was around 40 years ago, only recently starting to be redressed by the new Sentinel missile system), they are both building up narratives for engaging the West in nuclear war, they are both attacking the West through broad spectrum pre-WW3 warfare, and they are both seeking to reabsorb "lost" or additional territories (Ukraine and Taiwan respectively).

All of which is but the tip of the iceberg.

But what you have to ask yourself is this: would they really send the KGB defectors like Golitsyn into the West with a staged collapse narrative just to cover up for the organic collapse they knew was coming, at the risk of the West taking that theory seriously and ramping up its own defences and intrigues against Russia accordingly?

You have to weigh this up as an objective analyst would and if you do so, in full cognisance of the foibles of the Russian stereotypical character on the one hand, and their establishment’s culture of unfathomable duplicity on the other, I cannot see how anyone could think that exposing "the plan" could be worth saving some face over an economic mess that they themselves were never exactly shy about when begging the West for help in WW2 or for grain in the decades following.

And so I revert to Nyquist's comments again:

"The Russian World” is clearly connected to “The Russian Idea.” Both are heresies; mainly because in both the concept of salvation is political, like in Marxism. This is why Marxism fits so neatly with Russia’s tragic past, according to Berdyaev, who also noted, “In the deep manifestations of its spirit the Russian people is the least philistine of all peoples, the least determined by external forces, and the least fettered to limiting forms of life, the least disposed to value the forms of life. Given this fact, the most Russian manner of life, for instance, that of the merchant class as described by Ostrovsky, became repulsive to a degree which was unknown to the people of Western civilization.”

Berdyaev added, “In the Russian the nihilist readily comes to the surface. ‘We are nihilists,’ says Dostoyevsky. Side by side with servility and selfishness, the rebel, the anarchist comes easily into view; everything flows on into extremes of opposition, and all the while there is a striving after something final. Among the Russians there is always a thirst for another life, another world; there is always discontent with that which is. An eschatological bent is native to the structure of the Russian soul.” [from pp. 211-12 of “The Russian Idea”]. ~ J.R. Nyquist in Putin’s Russia at the End of Its Tether, Part I, 29 April 2022.

In simpler terms, this is an explicit assertion by Russian intellectuals that they are (generally speaking) a resentful tribe that can't really bear to see even their own do well, that they are quintessentially barbarian (as Churchill lamented), self-destructive (as at least one Russian I know admitted she herself is), restless, envious, malcontented, implacable, and spitefully willing to pull the trigger on a "Samson option" if it looks like they are going to lose.

Watch as Putin's Mask Slips

In mid March 2024, Putin was re-elected as President of Russia with a massive 87% vote.

"Nothing at all suspicious about that", one expects any still-wilfully blind western conservatives to say.

But now that this sham election ritual has happened, Putin can confirm, to friend and foe, the near universal backing of the Russian people as he consolidates Russia’s “new ideology” or internal narrative, which goes like this:

"Russia is under attack from Satanist, immoral, corrupt Anglo-Saxon “imperialists” / “capitalists” who seek its subjugation and destruction...

In contrast to the morally decrepit West, Russia is a noble, pure bastion of traditional family values and Christianity, and does not require the rest of the world beyond it to help it because it is already a self-sufficient autarchy.

Given the perverseness of its enemies, Russia reserves the right to dispense with any international treaty that it deems injurious to its interests, and the right to draw the whole world into a thermonuclear war if it feels it will be destroyed by the aforementioned external forces."

All of the above provides a launchpad for extreme measures to be applied both domestically and beyond by the Russian government as it continues along the path to nuclear war that it embarked on when it invaded Crimea in 2014, with some commentators predicting mass prosecutions of Russians who deviate from the regime narratives, and suggesting that the Kremlin is set to accuse them of supporting “enemy values”; in addition to genuinely foolish young people promoting western liberal wokery, this will also target harmless evangelicals, with mass arrests and public trials awaiting all who shall be castigated as “enemies of the state”.

In short, his coming actions will make it increasingly obvious that Putin is acting with a totally free rein thanks to the overwhelming "mandate" of the Russian people as he tightens his grip over the country and effectively returns it to a Soviet-era Marxist tyranny, in all but name.

Conclusion

By this stage, whether you agree with my faked-demise-of-the-USSR assertion in this article or not, it should be at least somewhat obvious that there are no "good guys" in the emerging great East-West stand-off.

Rather, there are only sociopathic oligarchs in charge, wrestling for control of the planet.

That being the case, are you going to rely on government to safeguard you and your family when this geopolitical struggle becomes radioactively kinetic?

Or will you do the responsible thing and attend to this matter now, while there is still a little window of opportunity left to do so and before the quiet walk to the exits turns into a stampede?