The Worrying State of Neocon-Critical Discourse in the Slavlands

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With the start of open hostilities between Kiev and Moscow, I was privately convinced that it was only a matter of time until we saw a renewed discussion in Russia of the ethnic neocons and their role in the conflict in Russia.

It made sense, in theory at least.

After all, Ukraine is a country with an openly ethnic neocon president sending Slavs to fight and kill other Slavs while being bankrolled and supported by neocon oligarchs based in Ukraine and their cousins in the West. Surely, Russia, a country filled to the brim with conspiracy theorists, would be flooded with “conspiracy theories” about the ethnic neocon role in this disastrous conflict. Furthermore, many of the most brazen examples of treachery being committed within Russia are by oligarchic individuals with names like Roman Abramovich, who infamously brokered a deal to free the Azov prisoners, received Kremlin insider info which enabled him to move his assets ahead of the SMO, and probably made some coin warning NATO as well.

Let me just cut to the chase by saying that no such Overton Window shift has occurred in mainstream Russian society, to my knowledge. While the state media channels are probably the last place that anyone could expect to hear the topic of ethnic neocon subversion discussed openly in any country, it would at least be interesting to note just how many prominent ethnic neolib/con media personalities fled Russia at the beginning of the war. Some have since returned, but most have stayed abroad, in Latvia or Israel, mostly. But while I am sure that many ordinary Russians noticed that a large portion of the media class decided to show their anti-Russian sentiment and, in some cases, open support for Ukraine and NATO, I have not seen any prominent right-wing Russian personalities with any position of note within Russian society pointing out the obvious connection between holding open anti-Russian positions in Russia and having neocon ancestry.

If anything, there has been an audible and veritable hush in Russian society. One gets the impression that people are no longer sure what they are allowed to or not allowed to say anymore. But, to make sense of the current state of neocon discourse in Russia, we ought to acquaint ourselves with some of the most prominent players. For that, a little bit of history is in order.

Paradoxically, it was during the late Soviet Union that we saw a flowering of this kind of discourse. Solzhenitsyn emerged as a hero-dissident (in the West at least) and began to openly address the neocon nature of Bolshevism at the peak of his career. He was supported in this by many of his fellow dissidents. Some tip-toed up to the line of being anti-Zionist, while others, like Shaferevich, went all the way, writing academic literature that was critical of the neocon role in Russian, and even world history. Then, the 90s and early 00s saw a proliferation of public anti-neocon public figures. These were all extremely colorful personalities in their own right.

Take Aleksey Dobrovolsky, for example.

His bio reads like Solzhenitsyn’s, but you have probably never heard of him. In short, when the Soviet Union began its anti-Stalin reforms following the palace coup against Stalin, Dobrovolsky, an ardent True Believer in socialism and the anti-capitalism struggle, got thrown into jail for opposing the “liberalization” efforts of the anti-Stalin faction (the Trotskyites). Yes, you read that right, the Soviet Union spent a lot of time jailing and institutionalizing Communists who were a little too Communist for the authorities’ tastes. People who actually believed in the socialist ideal filled up the gulags before, during and after Stalin’s reign. Then, they also filled up the gulags of the Russian Federation for opposing the new capitalist direction of the country.

A strange history, and one that should give True Believers in political ideologies everywhere pause.

While in prison, Dobrovolsky became friends with literal Nazi prisoners and right-wing dissidents after which he began to support National-Socialism, folk religion, revisionist history, the whole nine yards. He became big in the 90s and his efforts popularized ethnic nationalism and ethnic spiritualism in Russia. You have heard of the Kalovrat, presumably?

Most people assume that the Kalovrat is an ancient Slavic symbol. While it does appear in some instances, in Slavic folk art, it was Dobrovolsky who ascribed a sacred meaning to it, and popularized it. In that sense, the symbol is the equivalent of the SS’s Black Sun.

Which also appears to have been largely “made-up” and did not have a storied history of use before the various occult societies in Germany and Europe adopted it.

Most right-wingers in Russia are aware of the Kalovrat, but it has also become immensely popular among neopagans and hippy-types, who are not necessarily political in the traditional sense. Both groups are largely ignorant of the symbol’s origins in the Soviet gulag by a former Stalinist admirer being "red-pilled” by captured German soldiers and various Russian occultists. At the moment, Wagner’s Rusich division uses it and it is quite popular in right-wing fashion. Patches, shirt designs, memes. You get the picture.

But the Ukrainian side does not. This, despite the immense popularity of neo-paganism and the Kalovrat in Ukraine before the war. This is easily explained by the fact that the Kalovrat is regarded as a pan-Slavic symbol and it is Russia that is de facto fighting for the reunification of the Slavlands now and Ukraine for their balkanization.

SHOCKER: Aiden the released British Azov fighter believes that Russians are the REAL Nazis because they use the Kalovrat.

Furthermore, the Right in Ukraine has been taken over by Galician regional nationalism or worse, Azov-style civic nationalism.

Yes, you read that right, the organization known for its use of SS symbology and its brutal warcrimes against Russians has a stated ideology that denies the importance of ethnicity. Officially, theirs is a language and borders on the map style nationalism. In theory, a Russia could learn Ukrainian and become Ukrainian. But then, so too could an African and a neocon. In the meantime, Ukraine is criminalizing speech critical of ethnic neocon power. Back in the day though, Azov was a pan-Slavic organization that was staffed by Russians in Ukraine, and Russians who fled Russia following the crackdown of the spooks on the nationalists following their poorly thought-out allegiance with the Permanent Liberal Opposition, a deal brokered by Evgeniya Albats “turning” Aleksei Navalny to her cause.

Azovites were then hired by the ethnic neocon oligarch Igor Kholomoisky to do his dirty work. They ideologically justified this by, I kid you not, appealing to NEETshe, who was a neoconophile.

Their argument, in short, was that NEETshe would have approved of a kind of merger of ruthless neocon capital with ruthless paramilitary gangs.

Will to power, baby.

This is actually a true and accurate reading of NEETshe, by the way. The man worshipped materiality and power, so it would make sense that he would respect the people with the most money and power and who have no qualms about ruthlessly pursing it. His complaint with Christianity was that the New Testament wasn’t as ruthless and supremacist as the Old Testament.

That of all the desert religions, Europeans got the short end of the stick with Christianity.

That Christian morality was just a bunch of mewling nonsense that had reduced Christians to being a race of hypocritical gossipy church wives who had sublimated their inherent desire for competition, conquest and domination into a bizarre moral code. In other words, instead of just defeating their opponents with swords, Christians competed by trying to guilt trip one another and in a holier than thou virtue signaling arms race. Here, he is absolutely correct in his assessment of both the Old Testament and Christian morality, and, frankly, he describes the suicidal SJW “do-gooder” phenomenon as well. Prescient. Morality is akin to Godliness in our warped Christian and post-Christian worldview and we are at the tender mercies of religious fanatics.

The same kind of moral busy-body behavior is excoriated in Raspaille’s seminal Camp of the Saints and the blame for Europe’s “fictional” destruction in the book is laid squarely on Europeans’ obsession with being “moral” at the expense of, well, everything else.

Morality is a spook in our own minds and cudgel in the hands of those who have power, who decide what is moral or not. And it has always been so.

Thus spoke Rolo.

So, actually, Azov’s ideological logic is flawless, and I cannot dispute it. All I would say is that this is exactly why no one should follow NEETshe. The man was smart, and everything that he said was more or less true and logically consistent. However, all of it is premised on a worship of pure materiality and the conflation of Christianity’s two-faced and non-stop morality guilt tripping with metaphysics and the concept of higher realities all together.

But we can evolve past Christianity’s moral code based spirituality AND reject the worship of raw materialism as well.

There is a third path.

It also only goes to show that I was absolutely right to point out that ideology is a dirty whore that can be made to dance and contort itself into bizarre positions to the fancy of anyone with money. A point which, ironically, NEETshe would have agreed with as well.

By the way, that’s all in my book, which you should get. It’s short, easy-to-read, and it comes with a paid sub to the blog. Go do this now. Thank you. We will continue our discussion on the other side of the pay wall. It gets even gooder and you don’t want to be missing out. Sub, sub, sub!