How To Avoid Being Sucked Into The Media Vortex Of Misleading War Coverage-

 

Below in brackets is the last paragraph of the introduction to my Special Report written beginning June of 2020, "Trump's Really Good People- Nazis, Separatists, Secessionists, Militias and Boogaloos-- Russia's Fifth Column To Disrupt The Election."  It included the above picture.

["I've been involved in Russian issues since 1983. I know the Russian people and their history. It did not, by the way, begin in 1917. The Russians have a strategic view which goes back a Millennium. Their cultural imperatives are never transactional or situational. They will use up and throw away Donald Trump when they are finished with him, but their actual grand strategy is geopolitical, cultural, and religious. Yes, religious. They are among the best chess players in the world, very patient and deceptive.  The open secret about what drives them is Putin’s relationship with Russian Orthodox Christianity.]

I was aware then that when many people first read this, it seemed like what some might call "a head scratcher". "Religious? Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB thug religious, get out of here," many were thinking. 

Part 2 dealt with what motivated Putin's Russia to deploy a decade or more of asymmetric warfare against the US, including emphatically their 2012- 2016 operation to install Trump as US president. We covered "revanchism and The Third Rome,"  (meaning the drive to restore the greatness of an Orthodox Imperial Russia) as the two most important determinants of Putin's policies. 

For readers of TRR, you will also remember a stand alone article written in November of 2019, "Czar Vladimir The Terrible..What makes Putin Tick."

Today, as people worldwide are agonizing over the horrific tragedy of Putin's attempted destruction of Ukraine, you are now hearing about Putin's deep commitment to Russian Orthodox Christianity, and his core belief that Kyiv is Russian, their equivalent of Jerusalem. This is a belief rooted in the "Third Rome" doctrine, that Moscow is prophecied to succeed Rome and Byzantium as the center of a worldwide Russia-centered Christian Empire. 

This belief also has it's adherents within the extremist elements of what I would describe as the "deep apocalyptic Christianity" of fundamentalist Catholicism, and Evangelicism. Not surprisingly these are the same forces in the US and Europe actively embracing Putin's murderous drive to crush Ukrainian independence, and strategically humiliate the US and Biden presidency. 

This is how you have the seemingly odd confluence of the Franklin Graham/Pat Robertson Evangelicals with the extreme charismatic "Fatima prophecy" based Catholics such as Steve Bannon and ex-Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigáno, and Patriarch Kiril of Moscow, working jointly as an unholy axis of christo-fascist ecumenicism.

Most people who have closely followed the origins of this war are only now becoming conscious of the strategic alliance operating for more than a decade between Putin's ROC and the Christian nationalists of the west in attacking democracy and its institutions. Some among us have had our eyes on this for much longer. 

As I said in the quoted introduction to my report, this doctrine of "The Third Rome" has been uppermost in my views regarding Russia since 1983. It was that year in which the US and the then Soviet Union nearly came to blows in the aftermath of the Soviet Air Force shooting down Korean Airlines (KAL) flight 007 while in international airspace, killing all 283 people aboard including a US Congressman. 

So in my political career, all Russia-related strategic policies in which I was periphally involved started with this concept of the historical/cultural/political matrix which governed Russia's outlook, regardless of their particular form of government at any given time. 

The most destructive strategic blunders US policymakers have made in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were based on the belief that the US could impose democracy on failed states and/or militarily defeated nations, whether Russia, Iraq or Afghanistan whose culture was rooted in religious fundamentalist irrationality, "blood and soil" tribalism, or simply lacking in science-based education. We continue to miscalculate by projecting our own values onto people who have little or no foundation upon which to absorb western ideas and build democracy. 

This miscalculation with Russia, beginning in 1993, is what has awakened the feral and hostile beast of Russian Third Rome christian nationalism which is currently engaged in ripping Ukraine apart. (For more background, read my report's summary of the destructive effects of the West's neo-liberal economic reforms in Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse)

One question people should be asking is why is it so inconceivable to so many that the same ruptures in the West's political and cultural life which are currently driven by fundamentalist religious insanity would not be at work equally in the East? 

To understand the politics and history of a nation, one has to begin with it's culture. And therefore we must understand how their culture is to great extent both a product and continuation of their religious/philosophical worldview,  notwithstanding the sometimes marginal impact of modernization. 

Cultural imperatives are what determine the outlook of nations in ways of which they are not necessarily conscious, up until periods of sustained scientific revolutions and political change over generations overthrow the previous cultural paradigm.

If you believe that a spontaneous Russian anti-war movement, for example, is going to depose Putin and adopt a democratic system because they have cell phones and social media and used Instagram, and that therefore they are ready for a revolution, you are making the same mistake as US policymakers over the recent 30 years of projecting your values onto a people with a decidely different culture. 

The truth is that however fervently you are trying to wish a successful Russian resistance into existence, despite exceptional cases, the majority of their people are in the grip of the Third Rome and their "Czar", and are in support this war. Their youth are wearing "Z's on their clothing and parroting the Putin line. 

The degree to which Americans wish to believe otherwise is a way of coping with their sense of powerlessness, anger, and disgust with the traitorous pro-Putin Trumpian media universe here in the US. So you want to be inspired by the coverage of the Western influenced brave souls who stand up to Putin's bloody regime, and that is natural and normal. But please, do yourselves a favor and stop deluding yourselves into believing that they are a strategic factor right now that can bring about an end to this war. 

What they can do, like the isolated leaders of the active resistance to Hitler, such as Bonhoeffer, "The White Rose", and those of the Von Stauffenberg July 20th "Valkyrie" Plot, is to redeem Russia's soul, possibly at some time in the future. 

This isn't cynicism speaking. It's reality, a dose of which you are getting here from someone who worked in the background on these issues with zero notoriety for 40 years. I'm not just "some guy on the internet who did some research" using Google. And I'm here to prick a few bubbles (not to be a "pr**k) and hopefully pull some people out of the media vortex of conflicting false realities or fantasies. 

You are looking at a religious war. Read about the history of such events. They are as old, destructive, irrational, and without end as is religion itself. There are no formulas for solving them other than a revolution of the mind, and the overturning of centuries of cultural paradigms. We are not going to do that sitting at home and scrolling Google News.