Clearing Up My Positions (Again)

For the slow ones out there.

I didn’t expect my last post to attract so much vitriol from the commentariat over at Unz.com. Mr. Unz himself liked the first comment which mocked me for not talking about Russia’s new hypersonic missiles. I’m not really sure how to interpret that. I can draw some conclusions though.

1. Unz knows who I am and reads my stuff

2. He refuses to link my blog for one reason or another

That’s all I really care about - the rest is just internet bullying and internet bullying isn’t even real so I’m not going to cry about it. It’s just the typical case of entitled old-timers having a go at the youth. A tale as old as time.

As for Unz, he can disagree with me and I understand why he probably would - his whole site caters to the older demo and the writers are predominately older folks as well. But no real harm, and no foul as far as I’m concerned. Besides, I also don’t agree with him on his whole COVID being a bioweapon stance or his pro-Messican immigration position. Frankly, all I want is a simple referral link, and then we can continue to agree to disagree but mostly just agree on pretty much 90% of everything else.

That being said, there are a handful of writers on the site who share my views on the situation, such as Paul Craig Roberts, who was basically expressing similar concerns as mine own self for months now. Laurent Guyenot is quite good on the religious stuff as well. I read all of Unz’s Pravda articles religiously and I’ll even read E. Michael Jones on occasion. And that’s pretty much it. A lot of filler on that site, let me just say that much.

But in the spirit of clarity, I ought to clarify my positions, yet again, seeing as I’m now routinely accused of being a 5th columnist in much the same way as I accuse my critics of being 5D theorists.

Clarification #1: I support Putin

I’d never go against a popular man in the highest seat in the land - it goes against my entire political philosophy. That is pretty much my main reason. Also, for better or for worse, Putin is a living symbol of the Russian people, and I think he does a good job in representing his country on the world stage. He also presents an image of himself as being calm, collected and as a reasonable, but firm advocate for his country’s interests. It gives me pride to see Russia represented by a serious man who doesn’t drink, doesn’t molest children and who appears to have all of his faculties about him at all times. This is far more than most countries can say.

Clarification #2: I do not support revolution in Russia

The revolutionary faction in Russia is led by the permanent Liberal Opposition, which is loosely allied, or at least this was the case in the past, with extreme factions of the Nazi-Right, the Libertarians, and even some neo-Communist kooks.

For my part, I did everything in the power to demand that the Right in Russia divorce itself from the Liberals and their bags of money, insider government connections and monopoly in the media. This was quite difficult to do, and I fought an uphill battle against Pogromists, Navalnyists, Svetovites, Kryloviks, Limonevites, Yunemanniviks and all the other assorted riff-raff from my humble media platform while carving out a small, but vocal purist faction unwilling to be used by Liberals as the muscle for a planned maidan in Moscow. Things so happened to pan out that Pogrom jumped off his balcony, Navalny finally got nailed for his embezzlement operations, Svetov’s pedo past forced him to flee the country, Krylov croaked and Limonev also passed away, and Yunemann simply gave up and sold his party to a larger political conglomerate. This means that, at the time of this writing, the Liberal-Nationalist alliance is well and truly dead because all of its Liberal and Nationalist leaders are either dead, gone or out of business.

It’s hard to believe, but my buddies and I stand almost entirely alone amidst the smoking ruins and now run the largest right-wing paid podcast operating in Russia now (which isn’t saying much, to be fair). Furthermore, we are Putin loyalists and always have been, despite me taking shots at the FSB occasionally (which I really shouldn’t do lol) and my criticism of how the war has been handled. We were, in fact, the only Putin loyalists on the Right for many years. So, whatever you may think of the Right’s ideas and political positions, you cannot accuse our particular project or me, in particular, of working to undermine Putin’s rule. Nobody within the Right was as vocal and persuasive about the need to rally behind the populist popularity of Putin as myself. My position has always been that if there was one person in the entirety of the Russian government that could be counted on to make the hard decisions, it would be the guy who will be brutally murdered (and his family and friends) should Russia lose to NATO. I argued that, despite his shortcomings, there was simply no one else as popular and as nationalistic to rally behind in Russia. And no one else who has his back as much to the wall as him either.

Worse comes to worst, we know that Putin is going to go down with the ship.

My conscience, therefore, is clear. I did what I could to prevent the formation of the same taran that caused the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and I did it at great personal cost to my burgeoning internet e-celebrity career. The entirety of the Right put myself and my partners on a blacklist for years. Luckily, because of the war, and the resurgence in popularity of the patriotic position in Russian society, we are able to work with new up and coming voices in Russia civil society and move past the old associations with actual, literal 5th columnists who dominated our segment of the political spectrum for literally decades.

Clarification #3: I am not trying to demoralize anyone

What I write for the English-speaking internets has literally no effect whatsoever on the situation within Russia or the developments on the battlefield. You can root as hard as you want for Putin or Donbass or Jewlensky or whoever, but it won’t make a lick of difference. I do not lose any sleep at night sharing my analyses of the war to Westerners sitting in their homes literally thousands of miles away from the seat of the action. Whether you like to admit it or not, you guys are powerless to even affect the policies of your own local governments, let alone affect what the Kremlin will do next.

This blog and the insights that I share with you with my posts, podcasts and even the occasional insightful comment left by someone else should all be treated as a learning exercise. We are here to learn lessons and to take these newly acquired insights and transfer them to issues closer to home. In other words, exploring power processes, the basics of how wars are won or lost, how the media works, how populism succeeds or fails - all it should be quite easy to apply to other situations closer to home if we try.

Also, there are just people out there reading my stuff who want to gain a better understanding of Russia either out of cultural affinity, historical interests or they’re exploring their retirement options and don’t look forward to spending their twilight years in Jamaican-run assisted-living concentration camps in the West. Welcome to the blog! Glad to have you!

Also, what I say in Russian for a Russian audience is different in tone and content. I almost exclusively focus on encouraging the Russian Right to start putting forward a positive vision for the country and popularizing it. While some Russian philosophers whine about how there is no “Russian Idea” I’m actually out there hammering one out. If you read the blog, nothing that I’m proposing in Russian would come as a great surprise to you.

I advocate for a return to the established and effective Russian political tradition of Authoritarianism and I defend it from its Liberal critics.

I defend ethnic nationalism and do what I can to divorce it from unsavory associations with failed foreign nationalist projects of the past century.

I also do my best to explain and advocate the Right’s embrace of Populism as an effective strategy going forward.

Actually, I even advocate for the restoration of the authority of the Orthodox Church in Russian society, even though I do not personally subscribe to the outlandish metaphysical or historical claims of Nicene Christianity.

If I have any other positions - well, they’re news to me.

Clarification #4: I am not really interested in historical revisionism

I am not a historian and I do not have a particular historical political party/movement or whatever that I am trying to rehabilitate.

You might think that the Reds or the Whites or the Browns or the Purples had it all figured out and that we ought to rehabilitate their image. All I can say to that is that everyone needs hobbies to pass the time, I suppose. But I have no interest in engaging in these debates. I’ve been there and done enough of that to know that it leads nowhere.

Each movement or personality in history came about as a result of the unique historical circumstances of its time. The only underlying lesson that can be learned from these various political movement is how they went about solving problems. That is, their platforms and their worldview was built on addressing the problems that their respective societies faced at the time with the tools that they had at hand. That’s it. That’s how it is done. That’s how it was always done. And we should do the same.

There is no political bible for us to thump. No prophet to bow down before. And no easy solutions to any of this.

But we have to go about getting out of this mess it like it was always done: by simply honestly addressing the respective problems that our societies face and then proposing solutions to them. Then, eventually, we go to the people with our proposals and give it the good old Harvard try. OK?

That’s about it.

That’s all I’m proposing.

How can I make it any simpler than that?