<\/p>\n
I am puzzled and bewildered by Jeff Nyquist\u2019s views on Russia and the soviet union.\u00a0 To start with, he says that in recent years \u201cRussia has moved backwards, ever closer to the USSR\u201d.\u00a0 That presupposes by inference, that it has moved forward in the past \u2013 away from the ussr.\u00a0 My confusion stems from my previous understanding of Nyquist\u2019s position; namely, that the events of the 1989-1991 were a gigantic deception; that the \u201ccollapse of communism\u201d, \u201cend of the cold war\u201d and \u201cdisintegration of the soviet union\u201d, were all staged and, therefore, did not happen.\u00a0 If we agree that all this never happened, how can we now maintain that Russia is moving closer to something that it has never in the last 82 years ceased to be?\u00a0 I believe that it still is, and always has been, the same old soviet union, which conveniently changed its name and this view seems to me the only logical consequence of my position that the collapse of communism was part of a long term strategic deception plan.\u00a0 From my viewpoint, once we agree on this, any talk of \u201cRussia\u201d is absurd and the idea of her \u201cmoving closer or further away from soviet union\u201d immaterial.At the end of his article Common usage in strategy and tactics <\/em>Nyquist says: \u201cThe Russians no longer fly the Soviet flag over their capital. (They have retained it for their armed forces, however.)\u201d\u00a0 I am staggered by this.\u00a0 So let\u2019s try and think this one through.\u00a0 Supposing they did still fly the hammer and sickle (or whatever else was their hateful symbol) would that have changed everything and Nyquist would no longer call them \u201cRussians\u201d?\u00a0 Should our perception of a power \u2013 which I thought we both agreed had embarked on a long term deception strategy \u2013 be dictated by the colour of their flag?!?\u00a0 Frankly, I do not care one jot whether they fly Disneyland\u2019s flag over Kremlin and paint Mickey Mouse on their tanks \u2013 Putin would still be the same old soviet.\u00a0 Imagine Goebbels taking over from Hitler and replacing Swastika <\/em>with the German flag \u2013 would that make him less of a Nazi?\u00a0 Now you see it, now you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Soviets have actually retained a multitude of the old symbols, from the soviet anthem \u2013 ah, but they changed the lyrics so now it\u2019s quite all right, I guess \u2013 to the names of towns (e.g. Kaliningrad), even the venerable Maryinsky Ballet reverts to its soviet name \u201cKirov Ballet\u201d when touring in the West.\u00a0 Dropping all these soviet names and symbols would still not change one bit in the soviet substance of what Jeff Nyquist calls \u201cRussia\u201d.\u00a0 But they could just as well do it and why not?\u00a0 They can obliterate every single symbol of the soviet past just for the show because they can create any fiction they wish.\u00a0 In a perverse sort of way, the real tragedy is that they don\u2019t have to do that because the masquerade has been accepted even though they still use the soviet anthem and call their towns Leninsk, Ulianovsk, Sovetsk or Octyabrskiy, they still honour Stalin as a \u201cgreat war leader\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n Unless I again hopelessly misunderstand something, Nyquist seems to be saying that, although we have witnessed a giant staging of events orchestrated from Moscow, we should still take it at face value.\u00a0 Or alternatively, it was all for the show and we do not believe one bit of it but let\u2019s go along with it anyway because the thoughtless multitude with their common usage dictates it.\u00a0 Or perhaps: they told us that soviet union is no more, we don\u2019t believe them but let\u2019s call it Russia anyway, shall we?\u00a0 And then this alleged Russia has allegedly moved away from what soviet union was \u2013 was it still deception or was it \u201creal\u201d? \u2013 only to subsequently move \u201cbackwards, ever closer to the ussr\u201d.\u00a0 Now you see it, now you don\u2019t?<\/p>\n Yes, the reader is right if he thinks this looks suspiciously like some sort of an insane game.\u00a0 This game is known as a long term deception strategy and I counted JR Nyquist among those very few who bravely unmasked it, who did not succumb to it.\u00a0 So what happened?<\/p>\n I think I know what happened.\u00a0 We have to go back to the origins of communism to understand it.\u00a0 The roots of communism lie in the West \u2013 in the ideas of Enlightenment, in the French revolution, in Marx\u2019s ideas about the nature of industrial revolution in Britain \u2013 but after the bolshevik coup, for reasons of political expediency, it suited various powers to identify it with the \u201cmysterious East\u201d.\u00a0 For the Catholic Church bolshevism was a manifestation of all that was wrong with the Orthodox Church.\u00a0 For Polish nationalists it was just another expression of Russian imperialism.\u00a0 For Western politicians congregated at the Genoa Conference it was convenient to see the murderers as \u201crepresentatives of Russia\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the Bolshevists, whom the Germans used to detach Russia from the Allied cause; who afterwards murdered the Tsar and the Russian Imperial family in circumstances of revolting barbarity; who killed, tortured, or caused to be assassinated tens of thousands of their fellow-countrymen; who plundered the public treasury, and private purses, banks and churches with fine impartiality; who wrecked and ruined Russia beyond hope of reconstruction and brought upon her an unexampled famine culminating in widespread cannibalism–when representatives of these men were invited to Genoa to assist in the reconstruction of Europe it seemed that paradox could no further go. But yesterday it went further.<\/p>\n Applying to the conveners of the Conference the principle sic vos non vobis<\/em> the Bolshevists installed themselves from the outset as arbiters of this pan-European gathering and went from strength to strength. They launched insolent propaganda throughout the world. They accepted the Cannes Resolution \u2018in principle\u2019, while reserving the right to amend and extend its conditions \u2013 and were not expelled from the Conference convened solely on the basis of those conditions. Invited to negotiate privately at the British Prime Minister’s villa and to luncheon with him, they signed during those private negotiations a separate treaty with the Germans.\u201d [1]<\/p>\n For Wickham Steed, who was observing it at close quarters, \u201cthe sight of M. Tchitcherin, top-hatted, in faultless morning coat, yellow gloves, and a red flag in his button hole, boarding an Italian battleship, conversing amiably with King Victor Emmanuel, drinking champagne, clinking glasses, and exchanging signed menus with the worthy Archbishop of Genoa, to whom he descanted upon the idyllic freedom enjoyed by the churches in Russia, was a spectacle incomparable and indescribable in prose.\u201d\u00a0 But Wickham Steed was an exception; he did not care much for the common usage.<\/p>\n Whole volumes were written to prove that the red plague was not an international danger but the same old Russia.\u00a0 Polish politician and historian, Jan Kucharzewski, wrote a monumental work in seven volumes, From White Tsardom to Red<\/em>, which encapsulates in its title the basic premise of continuity between the Russian Empire and the soviet union.\u00a0 Naturally, quotes of acerbic de Custine were pulled out of the cupboard and aired.\u00a0 The whole of Russian history was called upon to prove the continuity.\u00a0 Wasn\u2019t dreaded cheka <\/em>exactly like Okhrana<\/em>?\u00a0 Weren\u2019t Dzier\u017cy\u0144ski\u2019s czekists <\/em>and their torture chambers just like Ivan\u2019s Oprichniki<\/em>?\u00a0 Wasn\u2019t Stalin\u2019s murderous disregard of human life modelled on that of Peter the Great?\u00a0 Well, they were surely superficially similar.\u00a0 But to say that it was a mysterious manifestation of the \u201cdark Russian soul\u201d is to surrender to lazy thinking.\u00a0 There were thousands of murderous princes in Europe and Ivan the Terrible was not any worse a tyrant than Henry VIII.\u00a0 No Russian dynasty has ever sunk as low as the princely thugs of the House of Anjou.\u00a0 Okhrana <\/em>as a model for soviet secret police?\u00a0 I guess that would be true: a model of how NOT to run secret police; after all, Dzier\u017cy\u0144ski and Stalin were arrested many times and always managed to wriggle out.\u00a0 What a pity Okhrana<\/em> wasn\u2019t a bit more efficient.<\/p>\n And what about de Custine?\u00a0 Surely, in this modern age we should give some credit to the account of a disgraced, openly homosexual aristocrat who mercilessly mocked the country he did not understand \u2013 sounds perfectly like a modern day tourist.\u00a0 But even if we assume that his report was accurate, what can it tell us about today\u2019s Russia, 170 years later?\u00a0 Or about Russian culture as such?\u00a0 Does Jane Austen tell us much about the culture of today\u2019s Britain?\u00a0 Or maybe we should look for a more insightful foreigner\u2019s account: how about Dostoyevsky\u2019s description of the hell on earth he encountered in London in 1862?\u00a0 Would that tell us much about today\u2019s London?\u00a0 Strangely enough it probably does, thanks to Dostoyevsky\u2019s genius, to which the debauched Marquis did not even pretend.\u00a0 The real uselessness of de Custine today, however, lies in the small matter of October 1917 coup, when bolsheviks slayed Russia as it was.<\/p>\n Russia, with all her imperial pretences, died in the infernal fire of the bolshevik revolution and in her place the centre of international communism was born.\u00a0 Bolsheviks pretended to be Russians when it suited them to promote that image; apart from that, they spat on Russia.\u00a0 Is it really such a wonder that the directions of expansion of the new creature built on the ruins of Russia, were identical to those of the Russian Empire?\u00a0 What else could they be?\u00a0 But Imperial Russia had no interest in Cuba or South Africa, in Angola or Venezuela.\u00a0 Imperial Russia, like most empires in history of mankind, tried to \u201crussify\u201d conquered countries.\u00a0 Soviets never do that.\u00a0 They use Cubans in Cuba and Poles in Poland, Vietnamese in Vietnam and Americans in America.\u00a0 Most empires exploited the vanquished for the benefit of their own populations but the quality of life in Warsaw under the commies has always been better than in Moscow.<\/p>\n Apart from the bloodiest days of the revolution, when all that was Russian was destroyed, soviet union never disparaged Russian nationalism, as Nyquist maintains, it merely used it, as any other weapon in the armoury.\u00a0 Only once we understand that nationalism of every hue is no more than a tool in their hands, that we can appreciate the importance of the dialectic of Russian vs. soviet.\u00a0 In fact, the 22nd<\/sup> congress of the soviet communist party quietly dropped the doctrine of dictatorship of the proletariat <\/em>and replaced it with a new concept of state of the whole nation.<\/em>\u00a0 This was the same congress, on which the abrupt departure of Zhu En-lai precipitated the sino-soviet split.\u00a0 The new \u201cnationalist face\u201d of communism was agreed at the outset of the long term deception strategy.<\/p>\n The mistake of placing the origins of communism in the \u201cmysterious East\u201d is equally tiresome.\u00a0 Kipling and Churchill are usually called upon to put the stamp of approval on this abdication of spirit of enquiry.\u00a0 The East is supposed to be so strange and so enigmatic, that the rational mind of a Western man cannot possibly comprehend it.\u00a0 One of the most laughable aspects of this particular misunderstanding is the imaginary inability of the West to come to terms with the idea of a \u201clong term plan\u201d.\u00a0 The reality is much more prosaic and does not contain any mysteries.\u00a0 Long term planning is impossible in democratic societies because any plan beyond the next general election is doomed and even if it were possible democratic politicians would be incapable of hatching such a plan.\u00a0 But this does not make long term planning a peculiarly \u201cEastern\u201d idea.\u00a0 Churches in their political, temporal capacities, always plan for the long term \u2013 is Vatican somehow \u201cEastern\u201d?\u00a0 Every powerful dynasty in history planned for centuries ahead \u2013 were the Bourbons Chinese or the Hohenzollerns Russian?\u00a0 Every dictator always plans for the longer term than his democratic counterpart \u2013 commies only took it further, developed the idea and put it into practice.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing incomprehensible about it.\u00a0 Having said that, it is quite true that the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus <\/em>with his attention span of a hamster, sharpened on the intellectual diet of \u201creality tv\u201d or whatever it is called \u2013 cannot possibly comprehend anything as complex as a long term strategy.\u00a0 But what does this matter?<\/p>\n It has always been the case that most people are unable to confront reality \u2013 unless it is served as a surreally sick pulp on their screens \u2013 or formulate their own opinions.\u00a0 Leftists realised that a long time ago and came up with an idea of opinion forming elites<\/em>, whose role it is to create common usage language and common usage opinions for others to repeat parrot-fashion.\u00a0 But we are not on the Left.\u00a0 We ought not to bring down the ancient and noble notion of an intellectual elite and soil it in the mud of \u201copinion forming\u201d, however nice and intelligent the opinion-makers might be.\u00a0 And this nicely brings me to my last subject: why we ought not to allow the common usage to dictate the terms of our discourse.<\/p>\n ______<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am puzzled and bewildered by Jeff Nyquist\u2019s views on Russia and the soviet union.\u00a0 To start with, he says that in recent years \u201cRussia has moved backwards, ever closer to the USSR\u201d.\u00a0 That presupposes by inference, that it has moved forward in the past \u2013 away from the ussr.\u00a0 My confusion stems from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debaty","category-michal-bakowski","category-trojkatna-konstelacja"],"yoast_head":"\n\n