The Third World War Started. It’s Anthropological

Abstract: Putin’s nuclear threats to all made clear as early as February 2022 that his invasion was a world war. Yet, many regimes are for Putin, they are just afraid to say so. Worldwide, the countries supporting the old fashion invasive genocide of the Kremlin in Ukraine are more primitive philosophically: they like advanced wisdom less than the ignorance that used to reign. 

Those Putinophile countries are easy to spot: they tend to be the least democratic countries.

This is another reason why the world war has to be won As Soon As Possible. Indeed those are early days. World wars are best won in early days. So far, China, impressed by the West, and what is at stake, has been careful. Should the Kremlin make great strides against Ukraine, however, Putin may suddenly get more military allies, and the war would extend.

WWIII is a war of one wisdom against another, a progressive wisdom striving toward even more advancement, and an anti- wisdom which consists in claiming that advancing wisdom is the problem, and the solution is authoritarianism, also known as good old fashion fascism, now with nukes.

Now these less advanced democracies are not just less advanced in wisdom, they are less experienced in the viciousness of the fight of democracy against tyranny. In the West, it goes back to the Atenian statesman Solon (2,550 years ago). 

… Not that our knowledge is good enough in that conflict: imperial militaristic Roman fascism and its mythological dog called Catholicism are still the object of an obsequious cult…

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AUTHORITARIAN And OLIGARCHICO-PLUTOCRATIC REGIMES CAN ONLY ADMIRE PUTIN:

1. Fascist countries tend to support Putin, because he is a kindred spirit… and a last chance to stop democracy. There are of course exception: Rwanda’s Kagame regime, for example was created in Washington, which knows where all the bodies are buried. Saudi Arabia too will think twice before rebelling against the West as historically the West (Anglosphere, Japan, South Korea) is its big ally against Iran which historically has occupied parts of Arabia sometimes for centuries, and Arabs and Persians have been historical enemies since Alexander…)
2. To claim that Germany, which was manipulated into becoming full of gas, a slave to the Kremlin and privileged support of Beijing is more democratic than, say, France is fraught: what if great leader Merkel, obstinately blind to Putin’s atrocious nature, was actually a KGB agent? Would Germany look as democratic? Or is the imperial role of Germany inside Europe, at the level of industrial policy a marker of democracy? Germany can treat say, Slovenia or Greece, as client states. Does that make Germany less democratic? Yes. But not in the criterion of the panel above. The Kremlin would quickly annexed all the small countries, except for the existence of NATO. In the 1930s, not only did it annex and used genocide in Poland, but didn’t annex Romania only because it was afraid of Hitler [1].

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL WAR:

That Russia launched another phase of its war of elimination of Ukraine is not surprising. The policy started in 1240 CE, when the Mongol collaborator Alexander Nevsky (not his real name) became “Prince of Kyiv”. Kyiv had just been annihilated by the Mongols for daring to resist the invaders. 

Ever since the occupants of the Kremlin were obsessed by a mentality of total control of as much of the world as they could get their hands on, and that policy has been entangled with internal dictatorship. The oligarchic dictatorial mentality was pervasive through religion and literature. It was also permeated by brutality, which made it effective. For example, nobody wanted to live from potatoes in Siberia, so the Czars deported there millions of opponents, and in the end succeeded to make most of Siberia a Russian colony, and there, by Russian one has to understand somebody who deeply believed in the Kremlin’s mission. Brutal? Yes. Would anything else have worked? No. At some point an empty Siberia would have been invaded by the Chinese multitudes, as Czar Stalin explained.

Obama the Weak, another collaborator of Vladimir Putin, gave the Kremlin tyrant a green light for the invasion of Crimea and then the Donbass (Bassin of the Don). Huge offshore oil and gas may be off the Crimea, and the Kremlin, for centuries, has been obsessed with acquiring control of the Black Sea. The Donbass, long the center of heavy industry, is still full of interesting minerals. Southern Ukraine is an extremely productive agricultural area, with rich soils and plenty of water, feeding half a billion people. 

Putin’s land grab is in the best Kremlin tradition, and it’s also according to the best fascist imperialist mentality, thus all would-be plutocrats, tyrants and their hangers-on are motivated to see Putin succeed against the We The People mentality.

Some in the West have been surprised that Russia did not collapse economically. This is due to a confusion between GDP, Gross Domestic Product, and PPP, Price Purchase Parity Product. Obnubilated by the raw Russian GDP, roughly the size of that of Italy, they forgot that GDP reflects only international trade standing, not the internal economy. The Russian PPP is much larger than its international component. It was nearly 5 trillion dollars before Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Moreover, Russia has a complete economy at its disposal, with the world’s largest landmass, 17 million square kilometers, nearly as big as the USA plus China… The only thing Russia lacks is a positive attitude to democracy and the subsequent creative activity it fosters. 

So the attack of Putin’s Reich on Ukraine is the case of a large and wealthy country attacking a weak and small one. But one can’t accuse the occupants of the Kremlin of being creative: the Russians gave that same exact argument to an unbelieving Adolf Hitler in 1940.  “A great power [Russia] cannot be threatened by a small country [Finland]. Hitler:”Your existence is not threatened by Finland!” Molotov:”Our moral existence is threatened by Finland!”

What was the moral existence of Russia? Dictatorship! Lenin and company, following Marx, called it “dictatorship (of the proletariat” Nobody knows what the “proletariat” is, so “dictatorship” is all that’s left [1].

The Third World War started on a small scale. But so did the Second World War, which started in 1931 when the rogue Japanese army in Korea went on the attack and conquered most of Manchuria in 12 days. Manchuria, 1.5 million square kilometers, is more than twice the size of France, Texas, or Ukraine. Nobody did anything about it, so it led to de facto military coups in Japan, and a world mentality of landmass power grab and military coups which infected Italy, Germany, Spain, etc (The First World War started as a plot and conspiracy by Germany, but it was conceive to achieve surprise…).

The present conflict WWIII is existential: representative democracy against representative oligarchy. Thermonuclear weapons give it punching power.

This is an anthropological war. Democracy, real democracy, one human, one vote is the incarnation of human ethology. Dictatorship is the consequence of civilizational fascism, which gives civilization its military edge. 

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There is a science and technology to making democracy work. Rome was handicapped by vast distances and slow communications which made it hard to extend democracy out of Latium (this observation that democracy was local was thoroughly debated in Rome in the period 150 BCE to 87 BCE and brought the Social War. And, some have said, the fall of the Republic). Modern representative democracy is an advance in complex understanding and corresponds to more advanced wisdom. Reciprocally, the love of old fascism, blatant in Russia and China reflects an attachment to ancient values (authoritarianism, patriarchy, anti-homosexual values, anti-feminist values, etc.)

After the crushing of Greek democracy at the hands of Macedonian generals Antipater and Craterus, dictatorships became ubiquitous until they got slowly reverted, with fits and starts, throughout the European Middle Ages, with its numerous Parliaments and republics, blossoming with the English revolutions of the Seventeenth Century and especially American and French Republican revolutions of the Eighteenth Century. 

The increasing democratic and open society spirit was typically examplied by steam power: known in antiquity, slavery made it redundant. However a French engineering professor, Papin, developed it, and built the first steamship. Exuberant English businessmen, in particular Watt, stole the invention, because the economically open society enabled those engineers to exploit it (in complete opposition with imperial fascist Rome, which blocked innovation in engineering).  

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Nazism, and its “Third” Reich, adopted and reinforces forces which presided to the rise and establishment of the Second Reich: militarism, hyper nationalism and antijudaism. It was to a great extent malevolent adopted mentalities: militarism came from Prussia (which was created that way by a crusade of the Teutonic knights), nationalism  was borrowed, misinterpreted, from France (which had unified Germany twice), and antijudaism came from the fascist Roman empire and its Christian dog. 

Nowadays, much of the primitive antidemocratic anthropology is also borrowed from here and there in past traditions which are often revitalized by tyrants of tyrannic plutocratic organizations. Putin dug out and revived the old Kremlin imperialist mission… Just as crafty operators from the deep plutocratic state dug out, revived and excited old mentality tied to Islamism and autocracy to make it easier to get oil and graft out of the Middle East (the US used Khomeyny’s Shia against the Iranian democracy of Mossadegh, and the Muslim Brotherhood to create a mess in Egypt in the hope of using Nasser… but that backfired for a long time….).

As I repeat all the time, a world war can be aborted. Had the USA allied itself to France in 1933, or any time before 1940, the full horror of world war two would have been avoided. It was a matter of decency.

Now of course, France could not have been made into a client state of the USA in 1939, and the US would have just reinvigorated rivals by helping France and Britain (and a few million Jews) by helping France before 1940, and that’s why it didn’t do it… although the anthropology of France and the USA is nearly identical. 

And now, of course, Eastern Europe can be turned into a client area of the USA. Already nearly all of Europe has turned this way, by buying US weapons it will be stuck with for decades to come.The only exception is France, which has its own weapon system… So the USA has a clear and present reason to help Ukraine… A reason it didn’t have in 1939.

However, it is in the interest of the USA to spread the capacity for fighting around, among those with similar anthropology.

No respect for active and passive accomplices of genocide? It often fits just right with respect for our future, or that of our values, descendants and what not… Western anthropology is not just more advanced, it’s more advanced for being the closest to what humanity evolved to be.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The map is to be taken with a grain of salt. First, large military democracies with nuclear weapons are the watchdogs protecting the herd of the sixty or so democratic countries (there are only three nuclear armed countries: France, UK, US). Being the most powerful states which have ever been, and necessarily ferocious in military protocols and precautions, they can’t be as nice and happy-go-lucky as, say, New Zealand. Divulging some secrets in these extremely dangerous nuclear states exposes perpetrators to… termination (one way or another; it could be some sort of social/career termination). And must have to. 

Second, small countries, say Costa Rica, can live under the umbrella of mighty allies: Costa Rica has no army, but, should a neighbor invade it, the USA would intervene. Countries such as Senegal or Gabon, have been protected since independence by their initial protector and creator, France. 

Third, a country such as Switzerland was built, by war, slowly over the centuries. Huge countries such as Mexico or Brazil or Mongolia let alone China, were vast empires created by military force, and must be, to this day, be kept together by force….

In other words, it’s easier to have democracy in Iceland or Norway, which interest nobody, than in countries such as France, a crossroad of Europe for dozens of thousands of years… 

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[2] Proletarius was the lowest strata of Roman society, citizens without property. It was exempted from taxes and military service, and served the state only by having children. Lenin was from such a wealthy family that his mother could pay for his exile in Western Europe…. 

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Tags: WWIII