Perverse History, Perverse Civilization.

Civilizations, like people, have moods, and act accordingly. Kremlin Russia’s successfully vile and hyper violent history has brought us minds like Putin’s, vile, hyper violent, claiming there are only “sovereigns” and “colonies”.

In 2016, Putin asked students if they knew where Russia ended. A boy rose and stood:”Russia ends at the Behring Straight, Mr. President!” “Wrong,” replied Putin. Putin corrected the miscreant:”Russia never ends!” 

President Vladimir V. Putin views himself as carrying on the task of the Russian czars. Sprawling back in an armchair, spread like an octopus, basking in chuckling self-satisfaction, Mr. Putin started a televised meeting with young entrepreneurs in Moscow on Thursday June 9, 2022, by reflecting on Peter the Great’s 18th-century conquest of the Baltic coast, describing that land as rightfully Russian.

“He wasn’t taking anything away — he was returning it,” Mr. Putin said of that territory, before hinting that he was doing the same thing in his war in Ukraine. “He was returning it and strengthening it. Well, apparently, it has also fallen to us to return and to strengthen.” And he laughted. A scared old 5 feet 5 inch, anti-western, backward looking, regressive poisoning weasel, compares himself to the young and unafraid Peter the Great, a 6 feet 8 inch, forward looking, fanatically pro-western, forward-thinking progressive fighting to death the religious establishment and all old ways, who succeeded to change Russia from the past into the future.

The Baltic nations, then, are next to be “returned”. Thus, like Ukraine in Putin’s estimation, those Baltic nations are not nations at all, but confiscated Russian territories… Just like Ukraine, which Putin has insisted, is not a country, but a piece of Russia ruled by Nazis. According to Putin it seems as if Eurasia should have just one country, to which everything has to be “returned”.

That reasoning was rejected, even by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. That, arguably infernal, trio knew well that the Moscow led empire could survive only if the nations that the Czars had conquered were given a lot of autonomy. So Ukraine joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a “republic”… And, as a “republic” was one of the 40 founding members of the UN. 

Contrast this with Putin’s position, expressed June 9: “It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, were talking about an union of republics, thus recognizing a measure of democracy, individuality and autonomy. Putin is just talking about “Russia”. And “Russia” has “no fences”, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. Putin: “Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.“

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And what does “Russian” mean? In a nutshell, around 12 centuries ago, Novgorod hired Swedish warriors to rule itself, and those warlords promptly went down and conquered what became Ukraine, an exceptionally wealthy land, for agriculture and minerals. Rus was thus created, and then expanded eastward. However, by the 1200s, the centrifugal forces which had affected Novgorod 4 centuries earlier made themselves manifest again: Rus was too extended, too wealthy, too diverse… Unfortunately at that point of disunion, the invading Mongols show up, asking for submission, in the footsteps of their ancestors the Huns. 

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Putin in presidential transcript, June 9, 2022: We visited the exhibition dedicated to the 350th birth anniversary of Peter the Great. Almost nothing has changed. It is a remarkable thing. You come to this realisation, this understanding.

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.

… Narva is in Estonia… I sent the following to the New York Times which had claimed the door was shutting with Russia, and it was sad. It was censored, showing, once again the complicity between new York oligarchy and Russian oligarchy:

Moscow’s autocratic run, launched with Ivan I “Moneybags” started with a cynical collaboration with the Golden (Mongol) Horde, as tax collector for all Russias. It was highly successful, creating the world’s largest empire, colonizing many nations and religions.

However, overall and in the fullness of time, democracy has proven more adept to create the civilization we need to exist. Now, though, tyrants can muster greater powers than ever before. And the planet has become very small: rockets can go around in an hour or so. A final confrontation looms, as Biden correctly pointed out, many times.

Just today Putin declared that Peter The Great was “returning” the Baltic nations to Russia in the 1700s, not conquering them… and that he, Putin, was doing the same. 

As many a tyrant through history, and Kremlin rulers for seven centuries, Putin is distracting his oppressed population with a foreign war which enables him to declare all his opponents, “traitors”, “Nazis”, “criminals”, etc. Nothing new here… Except for one thing Putin has been leveraging: nuclear weapons. This is the first time in history a tyrant can, and threatens to destroy the world, if he does not succeed to conquer. 

A sad moment, for sure. But also a moment that cannot be denied.

We are confronted to the choice of submitting to the will of one man, his vision of humanity, or utter destruction. It is crucial that this one man doesn’t get his way: other tyrants, starting with Xi, would follow his path. It is not a question of imposing democracy, but surviving this.

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Putin wants to do the same as Peter: getting back what was Russian all along… Notice that, right now, Russia occupies Prussia, something even Peter the Great didn’t do.

How did Russians become the way they are? Because tyranny has ruled Russia, and Kremlin led tyranny has been so highly successful… as a tyranny and land gobbler The enormous physical size of Russia has created imperviousness to other influences, which have been kept at a distance. The mood created by the tyrant in Moscow ruled without a rival, or even an awareness. Russia’s enormous geography made it isolated, and propicious to intellectual and mental fascism. It was all so suffocating that Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, created a new capital far from Moscow and its Kremlin, a kind of fortress full of churches.

In the rest of Europe, the situation has been different: diversity ruled, very different ways of thinking and even emoting have been entangled. As Blaise Pascal put it in the 1600s: Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Truth before the  Pyrénées, error beyond them.  When Pascal wrote this, France and Spain, separated by the  Pyrénées, were in the middle of a war which lasted more than 2 centuries, creating the Netherlands and finishing with the Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s second-eldest grandson, becoming Philip V of Spain in 1700. Louis XIV had ejected 10% of the population of France, the Protestants who kept on protesting at a distance, creating elites in other countries who hated French autocracy. That in turn caused the next monster war, the war of The Succession of Spain, which brought enormous losses of French territory, and immense misery, especially in France (although the grandson stayed in place, and the present king of Spain is a descendant…)

In non-Russian Europe, it has become impossible to be unaware of opposite points of view and how maddening the differences could get… About nothing much. The Franco-English war, the so-called “100 years war” which lasted nearly 5 centuries (1300s until 1815), originated as a civil war, French plutocrats against French plutocrats… They called themselves aristocrats, power of the best, but they were not good for the majority of the population.

Now Europeans, outside of Russia, understand that differences enrich, and otherwise do not matter that much, and one shouldn’t go to war about them. Indeed the price for not understanding Vive La Difference is atrocious wars. And their consequences (100 millions killed by the so-called Spanish flu of 1918)… At least differences do not matter between Europeans… and their cultural descendants… and, in some ways, ascendants, the Americans. I said ascendants, because Europe learned quite a few things from the Americas, not just tomatoes, potatoes, and rubber… But also the Nature God and various ecological, or martial ways. 

Russians also learned a lot, and maybe too much, fighting the Mongols, Tartars, Tatars, and other bellicose nomad nations. Nomads have to be bellicose, but, ultimately, once the nomads have been pushed away, aggressivity from a civilization becomes perverse.

It is traditional among the woke and other pseudo-progressives to criticize European imperialism… But careful studies show that the reality was more about empires of the weak proposing deals that the Natives could not refuse, either because they were dead from Euro-African pandemics, or because said deals were irresistible. This is what I have long believed and it is now found in an academic book  “Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order”.

Actually, one should consider that the greater degree of democracy of Europe facilitated directly (nicer power) and indirectly (ideological, scientific, technological) European domination.

Although some of these aspects also applied to Russia (for example Behring was a German officer employed by the Czar), the bottom line in Kremlin Russia stayed the mood set up by Prince Alexander Nevsky and his grandson Ivan Danilovich Kalita. The mood was not to stand for progressive principle and democracy, but instead for power at any cost. Alexander was installed as the Grand Prince of Vladimir (i.e., the supreme Russian ruler) in 1252… by the Mongols. Alexander, made previously Prince of Kyiv by the Mongols, faithfully supported Mongol rule within his domains. In 1259 Alexander led an army to the northern city of Novgorod, an independent republic (at the origin of Rus), and forced Novgorod to pay tribute it had previously refused to pay to the Golden Horde.

Some will say that Alexander had no choice, that the ends justified the means. Maybe or probably. But the fact remains that, with Russian civilization in balance, Nevsky and his grandson Ivan I collaborated with evil. A traditional mentality was founded, of reverence to an evil leader, often wholeheartedly supported by many Russian intellectuals. And that mood was made sacrosanct: Alexander Nevsky was canonized in 1557 CE. These observations have not escaped Ukrainians, and they are starting to remove statues of Alexander Nevsky and various famous “Ruscist” (Russian + fascist) writers.

The situation with imperial Russia is completely different, and deeply perverse from the rest of Europe, because aggression was used as a method of extermination, relentlessly, for centuries, against fellow MASTER CIVILIZATIONS (Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.).

As Putin put it on June 9 2022: ” I promise that I will try to respond to all your proposals and ideas. It is easier for me to do this than for you. I just give instructions; you need to come up with ideas, while I just need to listen to you and give instructions. (Laughter.)”

Return it all! It’s all mine! We Russians own all of this, Peter said so! I have no ideas, just instructions!

This is why the Kremlin dictatorship has to be crushed: the model of one smart idiot giving instructions to everybody, according to a perverse vision of history he erroneously claims to share with Peter the Great (who tortured and killed his one surviving son… one of many people Peter was very familiar with and had to kill in very torturous ways… Some of them he argued with as they were dying, broken by him)… has to be crushed. 

Maybe Peter had to do all this killing and fighting: surely he couldn’t let the Swedes won at Poltava… But Putin did not have to cause mayhem. Comparing himself with Peter the Great, a two meter tall giant, Putin, in his shortness of vision, forgets that Peter had many excuses, excuses which Putin does not have, and three centuries have extinguished the context in which Peter thrived… with a real Swedish invasion and before that, extremely obdurate Christian fanatics, the “Old Believers“, organizing conspiracies, plots, and coup after coup… who had to be broken at the wheel just so the country could live. Instead, Putin is allied to the present day version of the Old Believers…

With its gigantic territory and interesting civilization, Russia has a lot to offer… especially while the planet warms up. But, as it strays into nuclear plated fascism, democracy can’t make any quarters… Should we falter in our defense of democracy it would surely be our ride to hell!

It goes without saying that similar charges can be made against the English American colony’s descendant regime, for somewhat similar reasons. Many of our essays have adressed this.

Perversity brought domination of the beholders. But now this is not a sure thing anymore. Times have changed: they are more subtle. It is time to understand this, what role perversity played, and why, and thus how to transmogrify it.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The core of the present essay, found in italics above, was censored by the New York Times propaganda machine as a comment to an article on June 9, 2022, written by a Russian, who claimed it was so sad that the door was closing between the US and Russia. Never mind that it is Russia which is slamming the door to democracy, while Putin is playing Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, with the twist of threatening to blow up the planet… It stays troubling that the newspaper of record in the USA keeps on rejecting isegoria and parrheisia…

Most Of History Is The History Of Conspiracies. Those Who Deny It, Deny Oligarchy. Often Because They Belong To It.

Con-spirare means simply together-breathe. Conspiracies are even more frequent that the oligarchies they enable. Oligarchies are organized by individuals so close to each other, that they breathe together. Oligarchs also dine together, have parties together, play various games together, love together, marry together, do business exclusively with each other, etc. If oligarchies want to stay in power, they have to deny that there are such collusions, because smart people would attribute the unjust power of oligarchies to such collusions, instead of more meritorious circumstances. So dutifully, little scholars in the employ of oligarch condemn “Conspiracy Theory“, to satisfy their employers and get treats like the greedy pigeons they are… To boot, the employees of oligarchy accuse common people of being racist. Conspiracy Theory is out, say the conspirators, Race Theory is in, instead. Amusingly, said conspirators ted to be always of the same “race”… 

So oligarchies deny conspiracies exist. Instead they prefer to attribute their success to “God”, a great dog in the sky, or chance, or… merit… not the application of groupthink, group discrimination, and group plots… All all too close to plain old racism not to muster  a putrid odor…

Yet, conspiracies exist, history is full of them. Conspiracy is a more general notion than the notion of “plot”, with which it is often confused by lesser minds. A plot necessitates a conspiracy. A conspiracy does not necessarily entail a plot. Conspiracies, like elites socializing together, do not necessarily create explicit plots. 

Oligarchies bind through conspiracies and act through plots. Consider for example Julius Caesar: his entire life was spent fending off, or organizing conspiracies, sometimes for excellent reformist reasons (his distribution law in 59 BCE, when Caesar, as Consul, worked directly with the People Assembly, so-called Centuriate Assembly, ignoring the Senate which led to hatred which brought diverse plots, including civil  war and Caesar’s assassination…).. 

One of the oldest documents in the world, engraved in stone by pharaoh Ramses III describes a “conspiracy of the Sea People in their islands” (Sicily, Sardinia, etc.) which destroyed most civilizations (Egypt barely survived and enslaved an entire invading army.. Israel appeared a bit later…) 

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Here is a more detailed example:

RUSSIA, LAND OF CONSPIRACIES, FROM IVAN THE TERRIBLE TO PUTIN…

Peter the Great was born in 1672. His reforms, battles and conquests had a lasting modernizing impact on Russia, as he firmly intended. Many institutions, and conquests, of Russia originate from his reign. He adopted the title of Emperor in place of the old title of Tsar in 1721, founded and developed a Navy and the city of Saint Petersburg, which remained the capital of Russia until 1917. A year before his death from pneumonia after bathing in a river in the middle of winter, Peter founded the first Russian university. Peter spent his entire life fighting lethally against opponents who preferred death to Peter’s far-sighted reforms. Many of these opponents were extremely close to Peter, and he publicly executed some of them from his own hand, arguing with them even during their execution. One can say Peter had to, because the conspirators were so fanatical and kept on going, like demented energy bunnies, until death stopped them.

Like many children of European monarchs, Tsaverich Alexey Petrovich, son of Czar Peter the Great, didn’t often see his father, who spent much of his reign away fighting the Ottomans and Swedes and traveling around Western Europe to instruct himself. Instead, Alexei was surrounded by a Moscow entourage that believed in “less westernization and a bigger role for the Orthodox Church, the aristocracy, and the old ways”. Alexei bathed in conspiracies of those vested in the obsolete and Russia-defeating ways that Peter had fought against for his entire life, in continual life and death struggles.

Still a boy, under the secret and forbidden influence of his banned mother, Alexey once swore to his confessor Jacob Ignatiev, that he wished his father’s death; the confessor answered: “God will forgive you; we all wish him dead because there are too many burdens on the people” (Impositions of Czar Peter such as cutting beards and removing boots while sleeping…). The confessor spent enormous time with Alexey, often in drunken feasts of equally minded oligarchs. 

Peter wrote to Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, in the hope of recovering his son Alexey, who had fled to Germany and then Napoli, yes, in Italy, part of the “Roman” empire: …”a friendly fraternal confession to share it with you, namely, about my son Alexey. Some time ago the Prince received a command to come to me so that I could distract him from indecent living with indecent people. But instead he hid somewhere and I can’t find him. For his sake I ask your Majesty that if he is found secretly or explicitly in your areas, he should be ordered to return to me…”

Peter’s son returned to Russia. After adverse testimony from his own pregnant lover, Alexay ended tortured to death (that was presented to the public as “died of sadness”)_. And on it went: the rest of the history of Russia is a succession of conspiracies, plots and coups. The consequences could be serious: when Elizabeth, daughter of Peter and  Czarina for twenty years was on the verge of winning against Prussia and Britain in 1761, she died and her nephew who succeeded her, and admirer of Frederik II, immediately withdrew from the war, and Prussia-Britain won, with consequences such as the loss of America for France, and Nazism for Germany…      

Nearly two meters tall Peter the Great was painted when he visited London, by the same painter who painted Newton and Locke… Peter nearly caused the court of France to faint when he grabbed the child king Louis XV, at Versailles, and brought him up in the air to embrace him… His serious purpose was to study European high tech, and he worked in Dutch shipyards. Later he duplicated the ship making in Russia, building Russia’s first Navy, and a mighty one…

All historical figures were involved in conspiracies and plots. This is true even of intellectuals. Live conspiracies and plots are themselves covered up by other conspiracies, plots and propaganda… it reminds me of renormalization in Quantum Field Theory… The apparent masses and charges are not the real masses and charges, and the more detailed the analysis, the more different… Exactly as QFT has it, and for similar reasons… This is an interesting case where state of the art physics provides a ready-made example of how refinement of analysis changes the analysis itself.

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ENABLING THE NAZIS, AND THUS THE HOLOCAUST OF WORLD WAR TWO WAS A CONSPIRACY: However, that was (greatly) a US Deep State conspiracy, and those are generally protected from revelation by overlaying layers of other conspiracies (Why? “Revelation” in Greek is “apocalypse...). So there is another conspiracy to cover-up the fact that Hitler was enabled by a US cover-up. That cover-up, itself enabled by its own set of lies, is called “isolationism”.

Before 1942, Roosevelt, other top US politicians and the US media conspired to hide from the US public the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. To do so, FDR fired his friend Dodd, a University of Chicago historian. Dodd had been FDR’s ambassador in Berlin, who was extremely well informed and extremely anti-Nazi. The story is told in “The Garden Of The Beasts“, by Erik Larson, an excellent book.

Then FDR named another pro-fascist plutocrat (Jo Kennedy) as ambassador to London… and argued with Hitler for years… thus validating and recognizing Hitler as an interlocutor… when there was just one way for civilization to talk to Hitler, war, and it was precisely what France and then Britain, decided to do. Because they had to, there was no alternative. For the US Deep State, the one centered around Harvard, Nazism was the key to world control…. And indeed the stupid Nazis sent a battleship to Boston to celebrate Harvard! I say “stupid”, because it did not dawn on the Nazis what the American Deep State was exactly up to… namely a bait and switch similar to the one of 1914-18 (first pro-German, and Germany enabling, then anti-German). The Nazis… and Europe… would have gained from making a more in depth analysis of what exactly the US powers-that-be were exactly up to… while they helped Nazi Germany (not just to exist and go to war, but even to bring Nazism to power…)

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A few glimpses of functioning, multi-generational conspiracies:

The mother of the present US Secretary of State was elevated to “Commandeur” of the French Legion of Honor (it’s a supreme grade of the Legion d’Honneur, above Chevalier, which means knight, to which some mainstream US journalist were also elevated, like Roger Cohen…). So was the Sec of State’s stepfather Pisar (at the highest possible level of Legion d’Honneur…)… All US citizens, not French… But somehow at the core of the inner machinery of… France… Donald Mayer Blinken (born November 11, 1925) is an American businessman and former ambassador. He was a director and one of the founders of E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company, an investment bank in New York…. Easy enough, when one is a scion of the Warburg banking family… During the Weimar Republic, Max Warburg served on the board (‘Generalrat’) of the Reichsbank from 1924 to 1933, under Hjalmar Schacht, (until 1930). Dr. Schacht, himself a pawn of JP Morgan (secretly tied to Rothschild), was the financial master mind of fascizing Germany in the 1920s and 1930s… thus Wall Street… and Hitler… most important promoter. Schacht was Hitler finance and economy minister. A monster scandal, severely repressed, happened when, shortly after Hitler got to power, and when Nazi rule was not yet firm, a book revealed that the Warburg, German-American Jews, had financed Hitler. The book was ordered destroyed by “judges” everywhere… Just one copy survived… Yet there are plenty of reasons to believe in its overall message, that Hitler had secret backers (it’s even possible a family member of the Warburgs wrote the book as a warning against Hitler… [1])

Hey no oligarchies here, nothing to see, please do not ask too many questions… Pisar’s clients included many Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, and many known political and business leaders of the 20th and 21st century, including some notorious ones: tycoons Hammer and Maxwell, French and US presidents. His books have been translated into many languages. Pisar was the longtime lawyer, confidant of ill-fated plutocrat Robert Maxwell a plotter so great that, at his burial after he mysteriously “feel” from his yacht of the Canaries, the Israeli PM solemnly declared he could never say all the services he rendered, they were top secret…

https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/legion-d-honneur-la-liste-des-promus-du-14-juillet-2021-20210714.

Another glimpse:

Congo has 2/3 of the world’s cobalt (for so-called “renewable”, actually intermittently clean energy). In 2021, most Congolese mines are Chinese owned (19 out of 25). Some of these mines are so enormous, cities have sprung next to them. The purchase by the Chinese of a giant American-owned Cobalt mine in Congo was done by a private equity firm with Hunter Biden, son of Biden, on its board… as a founding member… As in the Warburg cases, a number of companies were created to use as screens for plausible denials (plausible only to very friendly media breathing the same air and going to the same receptions…)

Race to the Future: What to Know About the Frantic Quest for Cobalt. A New York Times investigation examines the global demand for raw materials as the clean energy revolution takes off. This is what we found.

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Rage against “Conspiracy Theory” is something intellectuals employed by plutocratic university seem to view as a duty to demonstrate how much they support the established oligarchy. After all, their self-respect and a crucial part of the propaganda they project depends upon denying that they belong to anything else, but an oligarchy of merit. Typical is this October 2021 declaration from a particle physics theorist:

“Conspiracy theory would be hysterically funny if it weren’t so widespread and so incredibly dangerous. Today it threatens democracy, human health, and world peace, among many other things. In the internet age, scientists and rational bloggers will have no choice but to take up arms against it on a regular basis.” (Professor Strassler claimed to be all angry against silly people who believe there was some conspiracy about how one represented the activity of La Palma’s volcano… Because they are unused to digital data… But in truth he seems to have been more interested in fustigating so-called and non-defined “Conspiracy Theory“) Strassler is a specialist of QFT, Quantum Field Theory… Hey dear professor Strassler, visiting scholar at great intellectual Harvard university, please define “Conspiracy Theory”? (Strassler is an excellent physicist…). Curious how much Harvard keeps on resurfacing, the naïve may say… But it is no accident whatsoever: the daughter of Xi, Chinese president, went to Harvard to, to learn to think oligarchically, lest she didn’t know how to do that very well already… Harvard is the leading plutocratic university. History may well vomit on it… As the place where misleading the world was taught. Yes, Obama became a genius at Harvard, blossoming later as a disaster for health care and the climate, the CO2 crisis, and world peace… Although magnificent propaganda has persuaded hundreds of millions of poorly informed victims… of the exact opposite, a testimony to plutocratic brainwashing…

Now of course Strassler thinks probably the world of Blinken, son of Blinken, stepson of Pisar the Great… Who mysteriously went from gangsters of a pillar of the world, in a few years (family connections did it)… And that’s the entire point. Strassler wants us to not doubt Bilken and his ilk, and their oligarchy-given right to lead the world establishment (into the wall, but hitting a wall should calm the commons). Strassler is trying to seduce his superiors at harvard to get what the pigen wants: more crumbs from the masters.

Right, Blinken went to Harvard (what else?). So now Blinken, family connected to Warburg connected to Hitler (one way or another) has the right and duty to steer the world: he was born that way. And us, who see that see what should not be seen and theorize about what one should not theorize. Some will scoff, and say that it was always that way, and always will be. But that is incorrect thinking: we are in exceptional times, with an on-going Sixth Mass Extinction, the preceding one was 66 million years ago… and we are led by… abject conspirators. They are abject, because they feel, in their infamy, that they are qualified to feel, think and act in the name of the world… And they have obviously been making a terrible job at it (from thousands of nukes threatening to blow us all any time, to a dismantling, deconstructioning climate and imploding biosphere).

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History is not restricted to conspiracies: natural events and vast economic, ecological and sociological forces also arise. But most of the human actions launched by leaders and oligarchies are enacted by conspiracies. 

Denying the necessity of making theories of conspiracies is denying the necessity of studying history as a science… precisely to study plots and conspiracies and how to prevent them… Denying conspiracies is what oligarchies need to exist, to breathe together… In peace… to digest us in peace.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: New York Times has written many essays deploring “conspiracies theories”. Condemning theories about conspiracies as a mental disease destroying “democracy” is a staple of the NYT. The last one was yesterday, 11/22/2021. I sent a comment to the last of these essays explaining the difference between plots and conspiracies, and the ubiquitousness of conspiracies in history. My comment was delayed overnight, and published only after the comment section had been closed.

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[1] Franz von Papen once a German Chancellor (in 1932) and Hitler’s colleague (in 1933) recommended the Warburg book in his memoirs that were published in 1953… The book was also said to have got the help of French intelligence which desperately tried to show the US-Nazi ties… a strategy which may have backfired as early as 1933, when FDR took a detestation of France…

Russian Soul Weak From Weak Literature

What makes Russia led by the Kremlin, strong, makes Russian culture weak. And reciprocally.

Boris Nemtsov, main opponent to dictator Putin, was assassinated next to the splendid Saint Basil Cathedral. He was going to lead on Sunday a march against Putin’s war in Ukraine. Nemtsov, an ex-Vice PM, and ex-Vice Speaker of the Duma, Parliament, was killed below the Kremlin’s windows, a place full of police, and state security. As if to show that the killers had nothing to fear… from the Kremlin.

Four shots in the back, each lethal. Nemtsov’mother had told her son that “if he kept cursing Putin, Putin would kill him.”  Putin promised her justice would be served. However an underling on the investigative committee immediately suggested that the assassination may be related to the Charlie Hebdo massacre (!). I have a more prosaic approach.

Pretty Catherine, Soon To Make A Lethal Coup Against Her Spouse, The Czar. For Starters. Putin Wants To Recover What She Invaded.

Russia is a place where opponents and critics keep getting killed, for purely political reasons. The tradition is not new. Ivan the Terrible had some differences with his son. He killed him. Peter the Great had the same problem. He had his son torn with red hot pincers. That son also died.

How are those unable to communicate, led alone love, their children, these terrible Czars, some of the great heroes of the eternal Russian soul?

Russian leaders keep on reminding us that they have nuclear weapons. Putin keeps on reminding us he mourns the “Big Country” (Imperial Russia… not the USSR, which had devolved some power to its constituent republics…). Now the ex-head of Mi6 in Britain is admitting that:

“Russia has become a danger to Britain and the country must be prepared to take steps to defend itself and its allies”, the former head of MI6 says.

Sir John Sawers, who recently retired after five years as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that Russia poses a “state to state threat“.

Sir John said such threats would require more defense spending. But called on “increased dialogue”.

Body of Nemtsov, St Basil. Kremlin Behind. So Far, Only Bullets Talk

Here I am, dialoguing. The Russian intellectual class has failed, all too smothered by its own nationalism, not say laziness, to erect a robust critique against its masters.

And this mood of intellectual pusillanimity has been long in power (I am thinking not just of the irritatingly conservative Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or Gorbachev, here). True, as Peter The Great confronted the “Old Believers” with a maximal ferocity I approve of, he was no doubt confronted to the fiercest critique. However, in Russia the dialogue tends to be between ultra-conservatives, and those conservatives who are for some progress.

All the fiercest criticism is always coming from the savages (notice that this covers not just the “Old Believers’, but also Lenin, Stalin and their ilk).

Sir John said he was disappointed how, after the end of the Cold War, Russia’s and Europe’s paths had failed to converge. “[Russia] keep on reminding us that they have nuclear weapons,” he said.

How come Russia did not join the West readily?

Atavism.

Look at the immensely wealthy Count Tolstoy and other famous Russian authors. They are all about a subtle propaganda: Russia is a traditional place. Count Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina and other books, is all about the Russian soul being conservative. And the triumph of conservatism. Dostoevsky satirized revolutionaries and endorsed the Tsarist autocracy (one absolute ruler) and faith in Christ and the Orthodox Church.

The truth about the greatness of Russia is more geographical than moral. Russia was successfully led, for centuries, by a cruel, determined and highly imperially efficient plutocracy. It’s too effective to be all that conservative. Or then one should call the Dark Side “conservative”. This is (partly) why Russia ended as the largest empire on Earth. Europe was unable to reconquer North Africa, but Russia was able to set up forts all the way down to the California coast. (And conquer half of Eurasia.)

That different truth is what constructed the empire, and thus what has to be hidden. At this point, Russia is proceeding on mental inertia, doing what it knows best: do whatever it takes to cruelly grab more territory. Even if it means killing dozens of critiques inside, and risk total war.

But why no books on historical Russian figures? Where are the Alexandre Dumas of Russia?

Dumas did not hesitate in depicting some of France’s figures in pretty drastic, not necessarily flatering, situations. Think about what he wrote (all true) about Marguerite de Navarre.

De Sade directed his worst critiques to the Great Leaders. He presented the great leaders anointed by the Lord, as monsters who needed to kill… sadistically all and any, especially the innocent, just to relax during their vacations (incensed, the Ancient Regime and Napoleon put De Sade in prison. Still, in between De Sade launched the Revolution of 1789… from the Bastille! Don’t expect conventional history books to relate this).

The tradition of fierce critique among literary figures is obvious in France by the time of Rabelais. Rabelais made an entire parody of the Bible, complete with grotesque names and the most disgusting habits. Thanks to the disgusting Francois I, three philosophers were burned alive. Rabelais, the son of a lawyer, who endowed himself with an overall education second to none, not just as a philosopher, philologist, translator, lawyer, but also as a Medical Doctor.

Very similarly to Abelard, Rabelais fought the church tooth and nail, in a constant, unending war. His collaborator Étienne Dolet was burned alive, for atheism (and being relapse, the technical charge against Johanne of Arc). Obviously the sort of mentality obvious in Abelard, and the early Franks, travelled across the ages.

In the Thirteenth Century Dante had put a contemporaneous Pope in hell. No less. (No wonder, shortly thereafter Buridan publicized his heliocentric theory, which he deduced from new mathematics and new physics. The Church had Buridan work destroyed 130 years later: another proof that the intellectuals were at war, in Western Europe, with the powers that be.)

Even earlier, Abelard wrote the book “Sic and Non” (“Yes And No” ) about the main theses of the Church. That was in the early Twelfth Century, and the war between the philosopher and the fanatical Saint Bernard became absolute.

It is not a question of winning. It is a question of having a tradition of daring to engage into war against religious and political authority.

Where are the terrible, pitiless Russian literary descriptions of Russian autocrats?

Russia, since Ivan the Terrible, has had the bloodiest, most cruel leaders ever known. They killed, their children, spouses, and other close relatives. They should have allowed to write juicy books, the sort Roman authors have accustomed us to.

And what do Russian writers write about?

Anything but.

So now enjoy Putin.

A nation with a non-examined soul is not worth admiring. To say the least.

Patrice Ayme’

Note: Meanwhile the Western powers ought to give the Ukrainians counter-strike radar (the Ukrainians were only given radar warning of incoming shells, but not the software to direct counter-strikes; in the 1990s the French broke the siege of Sarajevo, by striking rogue “Serbian” artillery with radar directed counter-strikes)