Wall Street & the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

Wall Street & the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

By Kerry Bolton 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

My last article ^[2] documented the funding of the March 1917 Revolution in Russia.[1] The primary financier of the Russian revolutionary movement 1905–1917 was Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn Loeb and Co., New York. In particular Schiff had provided the money for the distribution of revolutionary propaganda among Russians prisoners-of-war in Japan in 1905 by the American journalist George Kennan who, more than any other individual, was responsible for turning American public and official opinion against Czarist Russia. Kennan subsequently related that it was thanks to Schiff that 50,000 Russian soldiers were revolutionized and formed the cadres that laid the basis for the March 1917 Revolution and, we might add–either directly or indirectly–the consequent Bolshevik coup of November. The reaction of bankers from Wall Street and The City towards the overthrow of the Czar was enthusiastic.

This article deals with the funding of the subsequent Bolshevik coup eight months later which, as paradoxical as it might seem to those who know nothing of history other than the orthodox version, was also greeted cordially by banking circles in Wall Street and elsewhere.

Apologists for the bankers and other highly-placed individuals who supported the Bolsheviks from the earliest stages of the communist takeover, either diplomatically or financially, justify the support for this mass application of psychopathology as being motivated by patriotic sentiment, in trying to thwart German influence over the Bolsheviks and to keep Russia in the war against Germany. Because Lenin and his entourage had been able to enter Russia courtesy of the German High Command on the basis that a Bolshevik regime would withdraw Russia from the war, Wall Street capitalists explained that their patronage of the Bolsheviks was motivated by the highest ideals of pro-Allied sentiment. Hence, William Boyce Thompson in particular stated that by funding Bolshevik propaganda for distribution in Germany and Austria this would undermine the war effort of those countries, while his assistance to the Bolsheviks in Russia was designed to swing them in favor of the Allies.

These protestations of patriotic motivations ring hollow. International banking is precisely what it is called–international, or globalist as such forms of capitalism are now called. Not only have these banking forms and other forms of big business had overlapping directorships and investments for generations, but they are often related through intermarriage. While Max Warburg of the Warburg banking house in Germany advised the Kaiser and while the German Government arranged for funding and safe passage of Lenin and his entourage from Switzerland across Germany to Russia;[2] his brother Paul,[3] a partner of Jacob Schiff’s at Wall Street, looked after the family interests in New York. The primary factor that was behind the bankers’ support for the Bolsheviks whether from London,[4] New York, Stockholm,[5] or Berlin, was to open up the underdeveloped resources of Russia to the world market, just as in our own day George Soros, the money speculator, funds the so-called “color revolutions” to bring about “regime change” that facilitates the opening up of resources to global exploitation. Hence there can no longer be any doubt that international capital a plays a major role in fomenting revolutions, because Soros plays the well-known modern-day equivalent of Jacob Schiff.

Recognition of Bolsheviks Pushed by Bankers

This aim of international finance, whether centered in Germany, England or the USA, to open up Russia to capitalist exploitation by supporting the Bolsheviks, was widely commented on at the time by a diversity of well-informed sources, including Allied intelligence agencies, and of particular interest by two very different individuals, Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The London Times, and Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor.

On May 1, 1922 The New York Times reported that Gompers, reacting to negotiations at the international economic conference at Genoa, declared that a group of “predatory international financiers” were working for the recognition of the Bolshevik regime for the opening up of resources for exploitation. Despite the rhetoric by New York and London bankers during the war that a Russian revolution would serve the Allied cause, Gompers opined that this was an “Anglo-American-German banking group,” and that they were “international bankers” who did not adhere to any national allegiance. He also noted that prominent Americans who had a history of anti-labor attitudes were advocating recognition of the Bolshevik regime.[6]

What Gompers claimed, was similarly expressed by Henry Wickham Steed of The London Times, based on his observations. In a first-hand account of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Steed stated that proceedings were interrupted by the return from Moscow of William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens, “who had been sent to Russia towards the middle of February by Colonel House and Mr. Lansing, for the purpose of studying conditions, political and economic, therein for the benefit of the American Commissioners plenipotentiary to negotiate peace.”[7] Steed also refers to British Prime Minister Lloyd George as being likely to have known of the Mission and its purpose. Steed stated that international finance was behind the move for recognition of the Bolshevik regime and other moves in favor of the Bolsheviks, and specifically identified Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York, as one of the principal bankers “eager to secure recognition”:

Potent international financial interests were at work in favor of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists. Those influences had been largely responsible for the Anglo-American proposal in January to call Bolshevist representatives to Paris at the beginning of the Peace Conference—a proposal which had failed after having been transformed into a suggestion for a Conference with the Bolshevists at Prinkipo. . . . The well-known American Jewish banker, Mr. Jacob Schiff, was known to be anxious to secure recognition for the Bolshevists . . .[8]

In return for diplomatic recognition, Tchitcherin, the Bolshevist Commissary for Foreign Affairs, was offering “extensive commercial and economic concessions.”

Wickham Steed with the support of The Times’ proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, exposed the machinations of international finance to obtain the recognition of the Bolshevik regime, which still had a very uncertain future.

Steed related that he was called upon by US President Wilson’s primary adviser, Edward Mandel House, who was concerned at Steed’s exposé of the relationship between Bolshevists and international financers:

That day Colonel House asked me to call upon him. I found him worried both by my criticism of any recognition of the Bolshevists and by the certainty, which he had not previously realized, that if the President were to recognize the Bolshevists in return for commercial concessions his whole “idealism” would be hopelessly compromised as commercialism in disguise. I pointed out to him that not only would Wilson be utterly discredited but that the League of Nations would go by the board, because all the small peoples and many of the big peoples of Europe would be unable to resist the Bolshevism which Wilson would have accredited.[9]

Steed stated to House that it was Jacob Schiff, Warburg and other bankers who were behind the diplomatic moves in favor of the Bolsheviks:

I insisted that, unknown to him, the prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg, and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia.[10]

Steed here indicates an uncharacteristic naïveté in thinking that House would not have known of the plans of Schiff, Warburg, et al. House was throughout his career close to these bankers and was involved with them in setting up a war-time think tank called The Inquiry, and following the war the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, in order to shape an internationalist post-war foreign policy. It was Schiff and Paul Warburg and other Wall Street bankers who called on House in 1913 to get House’s support for the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.[11]

House in Machiavellian manner asked Steed to compromise; to support humanitarian aid supposedly for the benefit of all Russians. Steed agreed to consider this, but soon after talking with House found out that British Prime Minister Lloyd George and Wilson were to proceed with recognition the following day. Steed therefore wrote the leading article for the Paris Daily Mail of March 28th, exposing the maneuvers and asking how a pro-Bolshevik attitude was consistent with Pres. Wilson’s declared moral principles for the post-war world?

. . . Who are the tempters that would dare whisper into the ears of the Allied and Associated Governments? They are not far removed from the men who preached peace with profitable dishonour to the British people in July, 1914. They are akin to, if not identical with, the men who sent Trotsky and some scores of associate desperadoes to ruin the Russian Revolution as a democratic, anti-German force in the spring of 1917.[12]

Here Steed does not seem to have been aware that some of the same bankers who were supporting the Bolsheviks had also supported the March Revolution.

Charles Crane,[13] who had recently talked with President Wilson, told Steed that Wilson was about to recognize the Bolsheviks, which would result in a negative public opinion in the USA and destroy Wilson’s post-War internationalist aims. Significantly Crane also identified the pro-Bolshevik faction as being that of Big Business, stating to Steed: “Our people at home will certainly not stand for the recognition of the Bolshevists at the bidding of Wall Street.” Steed was again seen by House, who stated that Steed’s article in the Paris Daily Mail, “had got under the President’s hide.” House asked that Steed postpone further exposés in the press, and again raised the prospect of recognition based on humanitarian aid. Lloyd George was also greatly perturbed by Steed’s articles in the Daily Mail and complained that he could not undertake a “sensible” policy towards the Bolsheviks while the press had an anti-Bolshevik attitude.[14]

Thompson and the American Red Cross Mission

As mentioned, House attempted to persuade Steed on the idea of relations with Bolshevik Russia ostensibly for the purpose of humanitarian aid for the Russian people. This had already been undertaken just after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the regime was far from certain, under the guise of the American Red Cross Mission. Col. William Boyce Thompson, a director of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, organized and largely funded the Mission, with other funding coming from International Harvester, which gave $200,000. The so-called Red Cross Mission was largely comprised of business personnel, and was according to Thompson’s assistant, Cornelius Kelleher, “nothing but a mask” for business interests.[15] Of the 24 members, five were doctors and two were medical researchers. The rest were lawyers and businessmen associated with Wall Street. Dr. Billings nominally headed the Mission.[16] Prof. Antony Sutton of the Hoover Institute stated that the Mission provided assistance for revolutionaries:

We know from the files of the U.S. embassy in Petrograd that the U.S. Red Cross gave 4,000 rubles to Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers, for “relief of revolutionists” and 10,000 rubles in two payments to Kerensky for “relief of political refugees.”[17]

The original intention of the Mission, hastily organized by Thompson in light of revolutionary events, was ‘”nothing less than to shore up the Provisional regime,” according to the historian William Harlane Hale, formerly of the United States Foreign Service.[18] The support for the social revolutionaries indicates that the same bankers who backed the Kerensky regime and the March Revolution also supported the Bolsheviks, and it seems reasonable to opine that these financiers considered Kerensky a mere prelude for the Bolshevik coup, as the following indicates.

Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing US Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles,[19] and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.[20] Thompson met Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan Co. in London to persuade the British War Cabinet to drop its anti-Bolshevik policy. On his return to the USA Thompson undertook a tour advocating US recognition of the Bolsheviks.[21] Thompson’s deputy Raymond Robbins had been pressing for recognition of the Bolsheviks, and Thompson agreed that the Kerensky regime was doomed and consequently “sped to Washington to try and swing the Administration onto a new policy track,” meeting resistance from Wilson, who was being pressure by Ambassador Francis.[22]

The “Bolshevik of Wall Street”

Such was Thompson’s enthusiasm for Bolshevism that he was nicknamed “the Bolshevik of Wall Street” by his fellow plutocrats. Thompson gave a lengthy interview with The New York Times just after his four month tour with the American Red Cross Mission, lauding the Bolsheviks and assuring the American public that the Bolsheviks were not about to make a separate peace with Germany.[23] The article is an interesting indication of how Wall Street viewed their supposedly “deadly enemies,” the Bolsheviks, at a time when their position was very precarious. Thompson stated that while the “reactionaries,” if they assumed power, might seek peace with Germany, the Bolsheviki would not. “His opinion is that Russia needs America, that America must stand by Russia,” stated the Times. Thompson is quoted: “The Bolsheviki peace aims are the same as those of the Untied States.” Thompson alluded to Wilson’s speech to the United States Congress on Russia as “a wonderful meeting of the situation,” but that the American public “know very little about the Bolsheviki.” The Times stated:

Colonel Thompson is a banker and a capitalist, and he has large manufacturing interests. He is not a sentimentalist nor a “radical.” But he has come back from his official visit to Russia in absolute sympathy with the Russian democracy as represented by the Bolsheviki at present.

Hence at this time Thompson was trying to sell the Bolsheviks as “democrats,” implying that they were part of the same movement as the Kerensky regime that they had overthrown. While Thompson did not consider Bolshevism the final form of government, he did see it as the most promising step towards a “representative government” and that it was the “duty” of the USA to “sympathize” with and “aid” Russia “through her days of crisis.” He stated that in reply to surprise at his pro-Bolshevik sentiments he did not mind being called “red” if that meant sympathy for 170,000,000 people “struggling for liberty and fair living.” Thompson also saw that while the Bolsheviki had entered a “truce” with Germany, they were also spreading Bolshevik doctrines among the German people, which Thompson called “their ideals of freedom” and their “propaganda of democracy.” Thompson lauded the Bolshevik Government as being the equivalent to America’s democracy, stating:

The present government in Russia is a government of workingmen. It is a Government by the majority, and, because our Government is a government of the majority, I don’t see how it can fail to support the Government of Russia.

Thompson saw the prospects of the Bolshevik Government being transformed as it incorporated a more Centrist position and included employers. If Bolshevism did not proceed thus, then “God help the world,” warned Thompson. Given that this was a time when Lenin and Trotsky held sway over the regime, subsequently to become the most enthusiastic advocates of opening Russia up to foreign capital (New Economic Policy) prospects seemed good for a joint Capitalist-Bolshevik venture with no indication that an upstart named Stalin would throw a spanner in the works.

The Times article ends: “At home in New York, the Colonel has received the good-natured title of ‘the Bolshevik of Wall Street.’”[24] It was against this background that it can now be understood why labor leader Samuel Gompers denounced Bolshevism as a tool of “predatory international finance,” while arch-capitalist Thompson lauded it as “a government of working men.”

The Council on Foreign Relations Report

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) had been established in 1921 by President Wilson’s chief adviser Edward Mandel House out of a previous think tank called The Inquiry, formed in 1917–1918 to advise President Wilson on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It was this conference about which Steed had detailed his observations when he stated that there were financial interests trying to secure the recognition of the Bolsheviks.[25]

Peter Grose in his semi-official history of the CFR writes of it as a think tank combining academe and big business that had emerged from The Inquiry group.[26] Therefore the CFR report on Soviet Russia at this early period is instructive as to the relationship that influential sections of the US Establishment wished to pursue in regard to the Bolshevik regime. Grosse writes of this period:

Awkward in the records of The Inquiry had been the absence of a single study or background paper on the subject of Bolshevism. Perhaps this was simply beyond the academic imagination of the times. Not until early 1923 could the Council summon the expertise to mobilize a systematic examination of the Bolshevik regime, finally entrenched after civil war in Russia. The impetus for this first study was Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which appeared to open the struggling Bolshevik economy to foreign investment. Half the Council’s study group were members drawn from firms that had done business in pre-revolutionary Russia, and the discussions about the Soviet future were intense. The concluding report dismissed “hysterical” fears that the revolution would spill outside Russia’s borders into central Europe or, worse, that the heady new revolutionaries would ally with nationalistic Muslims in the Middle East to evict European imperialism. The Bolsheviks were on their way to “sanity and sound business practices,” the Council study group concluded, but the welcome to foreign concessionaires would likely be short-lived. Thus, the Council experts recommended in March 1923 that American businessmen get into Russia while Lenin’s invitation held good, make money on their investments, and then get out as quickly as possible. A few heeded the advice; not for seven decades would a similar opportunity arise.[27]

However, financial interests had already moved into Soviet Russia from the beginning of the Bolshevik regime.

The Vanderlip Concession

H. G. Wells, historian, novelist, and Fabian-socialist, observed first-hand the relationship between Communism and big business when he had visited Bolshevik Russia. Travelling to Russia in 1920 where he interviewed Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, Wells hoped that the Western Powers and in particular the USA would come to the Soviets’ aid. Wells also met there “Mr. Vanderlip” who was negotiating business contracts with the Soviets. Wells commented of the situation he would like to see developing, and as a self-described “collectivist” made a telling observation on the relationship between Communism and “Big Business”:

The only Power capable of playing this role of eleventh-hour helper to Russia single-handed is the United States of America. That is why I find the adventure of the enterprising and imaginative Mr. Vanderlip very significant. I doubt the conclusiveness of his negotiations; they are probably only the opening phase of a discussion of the Russian problem upon a new basis that may lead it at last to a comprehensive world treatment of this situation. Other Powers than the United States will, in the present phase of world-exhaustion, need to combine before they can be of any effective use to Russia. Big business is by no means antipathetic to Communism. The larger big business grows the more it approximates to Collectivism. It is the upper road of the few instead of the lower road of the masses to Collectivism.[28]

In addressing concerns that were being expressed among Bolshevik Party “activists” at a meeting of the Moscow Organization of the party, Lenin sought to reassure them that the Government was not selling out to foreign capitalism, but that, in view of what Lenin believed to be an inevitable war between the USA and Japan, a US interest in Kamchatka would be favorable to Soviet Russia as a defensive position against Japan. Such strategic considerations on the part of the US, it might be added, were also more relevant to US and other forms of so-called “intervention” during the Russian Civil War between the Red and the White Armies, than any desire to help the Whites overturn the Bolsheviks, let alone restore Czarism. Lenin said of Vanderlip to the Bolshevik cadres:

We must take advantage of the situation that has arisen. That is the whole purpose of the Kamchatka concessions. We have had a visit from Vanderlip, a distant relative of the well-known multimillionaire, if he is to he believed; but since our intelligence service, although splendidly organized, unfortunately does not yet extend to the United States of America, we have not yet established the exact kinship of these Vanderlips. Some even say there is no kinship at all. I do not presume to judge: my knowledge is confined to having read a book by Vanderlip, not the one that was in our country and is said to be such a very important person that he has been received with all the honors by kings and ministers—from which one must infer that his pocket is very well lined indeed. He spoke to them in the way people discuss matters at meetings such as ours, for instance, and told then in the calmest tones how Europe should be restored. If ministers spoke to him with so much respect, it must mean that Vanderlip is in touch with the multimillionaires.[29]

Of the meeting with Vanderlip, Lenin indicated that it was based on a secret diplomacy that was being denied by the US Administration, while Vandrelip returned to the USA, like other capitalists such as Thompson, praising the Bolsheviks. Lenin continued:

. . . I expressed the hope that friendly relations between the two states would be a basis not only for the granting of a concession, but also for the normal development of reciprocal economic assistance. It all went off in that kind of vein. Then telegrams came telling what Vanderlip had said on arriving home from abroad. Vanderlip had compared Lenin with Washington and Lincoln. Vanderlip had asked for my autographed portrait. I had declined, because when you present a portrait you write, “To Comrade So-and-so,” and I could not write, “To Comrade Vanderlip.” Neither was it possible to write: “To the Vanderlip we are signing a concession with” because that concession agreement would be concluded by the Administration when it took office. I did not know what to write. It would have been illogical to give my photograph to an out-and-out imperialist. Yet these were the kind of telegrams that arrived; this affair has clearly played a certain part in imperialist politics. When the news of the Vanderlip concessions came out, Harding—the man who has been elected President, but who will take office only next March—issued an official denial, declaring that he knew nothing about it, had no dealings with the Bolsheviks, and had heard nothing about any concessions. That was during the elections, and, for all we know, to confess, during elections, that you have dealings with the Bolsheviks may cost you votes. That was why he issued an official denial. He had this report sent to all the newspapers that are hostile to the Bolsheviks and are on the pay roll of the imperialist parties . . .[30]

This mysterious Vanderlip was in fact Washington Vanderlip who had, according to Armand Hammer, come to Russia in 1919, although even Hammer does not seem to have known much of the matter.[31] Lenin’s rationalizations in trying to justify concessions to foreign capitalists to the “Moscow activists” in 1920 seem disingenuous and less than forthcoming. Washington Vanderlip was an engineer whose negotiations with Russia drew considerable attention in the USA. The New York Times wrote that Vanderlip, speaking from Russia, denied reports of Lenin’s speech to “Moscow activists” that the concessions would serve Bolshevik geopolitical interests, with Vanderlip declaring that he had established a common frontier between the USA and Russia and that trade relations must be immediately restored.[32] The New York Times reporting in 1922: “The exploration of Kamchatka for oil as soon as trade relations between this country and Russia are established was assured today when the Standard Oil Company of California purchased one-quarter of the stock in the Vanderlip syndicate.” This gave Standard Oil exclusive leases on any syndicate lands on which oil was found. The Vanderlip syndicate comprised sixty-four units. The Standard Oil Company has just purchased sixteen units. However, the Vanderlip concessions could not come into effect until Soviet Russia was recognized by the USA.[33]

The Vanderlip syndicate holds concessions for the exploitation of coal, oil, and timber lands, fisheries, etc., east of the 160th parallel in Kamchatka. The Russian Government granted the syndicate alternate sections of land there and will draw royalties amounting to approximately 5 percent on all products developed and marketed by the syndicate.[34]

It is little wonder then that US capitalists were eager to see the recognition of the Soviet regime.

Bolshevik Bankers

In 1922 Soviet Russia’s first international bank was created, Ruskombank, headed by Olof Aschberg of the Nye Banken, Stockholm, Sweden. The predominant capital represented in the bank was British. The foreign director of Ruskombank was Max May, vice president of the Guaranty Trust Company.[35] Similarly to “the Bolshevik of Wall Street,” William Boyce Thompson, Aschberg was known as the “Bolshevik banker” for his close involvement with banking interests that had channeled funds to the Bolsheviks.

Guaranty Trust Company became intimately involved with Soviet economic transactions. A Scotland Yard Intelligence Report stated as early as 1919 the connection between Guaranty Trust and Ludwig C. A. K. Martens, head of the Soviet Bureau in New York when the bureau was established that year.[36] When representatives of the Lusk Committee investigating Bolshevik activities in the USA raided the Soviet Bureau offices on May 7, 1919, files of communications with almost a thousand firms were found. Basil H. Thompson of Scotland Yard in a special report stated that despite denials, there was evidence in the seized files that the Soviet Bureau was being funded by Guaranty Trust Company.[37] The significance of the Guaranty Trust Company was that it was part of the J. P. Morgan economic empire, which Dr. Sutton shows in his study to have been a major player in economic relations with Soviet Russia from its early days. It was also J. P. Morgan interests that predominated in the formation of a consortium, the American International Corporation (AIC), which was another source eager to secure the recognition of the still embryonic Soviet state. Interests represented in the directorship of the American International Corporation (AIC) included: National City Bank; General Electric; Du Pont; Kuhn, Loeb and Co.; Rockefeller; Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Ingersoll-Rand; Hanover National Bank, etc.[38]

The AIC’s representative in Russia at the time of the revolutionary tumult was its executive secretary William Franklin Sands, who was asked by US Secretary of State Robert Lansing for a report on the situation and what the US response should be. Sands’ attitude toward the Bolsheviks was, like that of Thompson, enthusiastic. Sands wrote a memorandum to Lansing in January 1918, at a time when the Bolshevik hold was still far from sure, that there had already been too much of a delay by the USA in recognizing the Bolshevik regime such as it existed. The USA had to make up for “lost time,” and like Thompson, Sands considered the Bolshevik Revolution to be analogous to the American Revolution.[39] In July 1918 Sands wrote to US Treasury Secretary McAdoo that a commission should be established by private interests with government backing, to provide “economic assistance to Russia.”[40]

Armand Hammer

One of those closely associated with Ludwig Martens and the Soviet Bureau was Dr. Julius Hammer, an emigrant from Russia who was a founder of the Communist Party USA. There is evidence that Julius Hammer was the host to Leon Trotsky when the latter with his family arrived in New York in 1917, and that it was Dr. Hammer’s chauffeured car that provided transport to Natalia and the Trotsky children. The Trotskys were met on disembarkation at the New York dock by Arthur Concors, a director of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, whose advisory board included Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Co.[41] Dr. Hammer was the “primary owner of Allied Drug and Chemical Co.,” and “one of those not so rare creatures, a radical Marxist turned wealthy entrepreneur,” who lived an opulent lifestyle, according to Professor Spence.[42] Another financier linked to Trotsky was his own uncle, banker Abram Zhivotovskii, who was associated with numerous financial interests including those of Olof Aschberg.[43]

The intimate association of the Hammer family with Soviet Russia was to be maintained from start to finish, with an interlude of withdrawal during the Stalinist period. Julius’ son Armand, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, was the first foreigner to obtain commercial concessions from the Soviet Government. Armand was in Russia in 1921 to arrange for the reintroduction of capitalism according to the new economic course set by Lenin, the New Economic Policy. Lenin stated to Hammer that the economies of Russia and the USA were complementary, and in exchange for the exploitation of Russia’s raw materials he hoped for America’s technology.[44] This was precisely the attitude of significant business interests in the West. Lenin stated to Hammer that it was hoped the New Economic Policy would accelerate the economic process “by a system of industrial and commercial concessions to foreigners. It will give great opportunities to the United States.”[45]

Hammer met Trotsky, who asked him whether “financial circles” in the USA regard Russia as a desirable field of investment? Trotsky continued:

Inasmuch as Russia had its Revolution, capital was really safer there than anywhere else because, “whatever should happen abroad, the Soviet would adhere to any agreements it might make. Suppose one of your Americans invest money in Russia. When the Revolution comes to America, his property will of course be nationalized, but his agreement with us will hold good and he will thus be in a much more favorable position than the rest of his fellow capitalists.[46]

The manner by which Russia fundamentally changed direction, resulting eventually in the Cold War when Stalin refused to continue the wartime alliance for the purposes of establishing a World State via the United Nations Organization, traces its origins back to the divergence of opinion, among many other issues, between Trotsky and Stalin in regard to the role of foreign investment in the Soviet Union.[47] The CFR report had been prescient in warning big business to get into Russia immediately lest the situation changed radically.

Regimented Labor

But for the moment, with Trotsky entrenched as the warlord of Bolshevism, and Lenin favorable towards international capital investment, events in Russia seemed to be promising. A further major factor in the enthusiasm certain capitalist interests had for the Bolsheviks was the regimentation of labor under the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The workers’ state provided foreign capitalists with a controlled workforce. Trotsky had stated:

The militarization of labor is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labor forces. . . . Is it true that compulsory labor is always unproductive? . . . This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive. . . . Compulsory slave labor was in its time a progressive phenomenon. Labor obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism. . . . Wages must not be viewed from the angle of securing the personal existence of the individual worker [but should] measure the conscientiousness, and efficiency of the work of every laborer.[48]

Hammer related of his experiences in the young Soviet state that although lengthy negotiations had to be undertaken with each of the trades unions involved in an enterprise, “the great power and influence of the trade unions was not without its advantages to the employer of labor in Russia. Once the employer had signed a collective agreement with the union branch there was little risk of strikes or similar trouble.”

Breaches of the codes as negotiated could result in dismissal, with recourse by the sacked worker to a labor court which, in Hammer’s experience, did not generally find in the worker’s favor, which would mean that there would be little chance of the sacked worker getting another job.[49]

However, Trotsky’s insane run in the Soviet Union was short-lived. As for Hammer, despite his greatly expanding and diverse businesses in the Soviet Union, after Stalin assumed power Hammer packed up and left, not returning until Stalin’s demise. Hammer opined decades later:

I never met Stalin—I never had any desire to do so—and I never had any dealings with him. However it was perfectly clear to me in 1930 that Stalin was not a man with whom you could do business. Stalin believed that the state was capable of running everything without the support of foreign concessionaires and private enterprise. That is the main reason I left Moscow. I could see that I would soon be unable to do business there and, since business was my sole reason to be there, my time was up.[50]

Foreign capital did nonetheless continue to do business with the USSR[51] as best as it was able, but the promising start that capitalists saw in the March and November revolutions for a new Russia that would replace the antiquated Czarist system with a modern economy from which they could reap the rewards was, as the 1923 CFR report warned, short-lived. Gorbachev and Yeltsin provided a brief interregnum of hope for foreign capital, to be disappointed again with the rise of Putin and a revival of nationalism and opposition to the oligarchs. The policy of continuing economic relations with the USSR even during the era of the Cold War was promoted as a strategy in the immediate aftermath of World War II when a CFR report by George S Franklin recommended attempting to work with the USSR as much as possible, “unless and until it becomes entirely evident that the U.S.S.R. is not interested in achieving cooperation . . .”

The United States must be powerful not only politically and economically, but also militarily. We cannot afford to dissipate our military strength unless Russia is willing concurrently to decrease hers. On this we lay great emphasis.

We must take every opportunity to work with the Soviets now, when their power is still far inferior to ours, and hope that we can establish our cooperation on a firmer basis for the not so distant future when they will have completed their reconstruction and greatly increased their strength. . . . The policy we advocate is one of firmness coupled with moderation and patience.[52]

Since Putin, the CFR again sees Russia as having taken a “wrong direction.” The current recommendation is for “selective cooperation” rather than “partnership, which is not now feasible.”[53]

The Revolutionary Nature of Capital

Should the fact that international capital viewed the March and even the November Revolutions with optimism be seen as an anomaly of history? Oswald Spengler was one of the first historians to expose the connections between capital and revolution. In The Decline of the West he called socialism “capitalistic” because it does not aim to replace money-based values, “but to possess them.” H. G. Wells, it will be recalled, said something similar. Spengler stated of socialism that it is “nothing but a trusty henchman of Big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it.” He elaborated in a footnote, seeing the connections going back to antiquity:

Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e. poor) parties necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is as true today as it was for the Gracchuan age, and in all countries . . .[54]

It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchu’s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed.[55]

From the Gracchuan Age to the Cromwellian and the French Revolutions, to Soros’ “color revolutions” of today, the Russian Revolutions were neither the first nor the last of political upheavals to serve the interests of Money Power in the name of “the people.”

 Notes

[1] K. R. Bolton, “March 1917: Wall Street & the March 1917 Russian Revolution,” Ab Aeterno, No. 2 (March 2010).

[2] Michael Pearson, The Sealed Train: Journey to Revolution: Lenin–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1975).

[3] Paul Warburg, prior to immigrating to the USA, had been decorated by the Kaiser in 1912.

[4] Col. William Wiseman, head of the British Secret Service, was the British equivalent to America’s key presidential adviser, Edward House, with whom he was in constant communication. Wiseman became a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. From London on May 1, 1918 Wiseman cabled House that the Allies should intervene at the invitation of the Bolsheviks and help organize the Bolshevik army then fighting the White Armies in a bloody Civil War at a time when the Bolshevik hold on Russia was doubtful (Edward M. House, ed. Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Col. House [New York: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1926], Vol. III, p. 421).

[5] Olof Aschberg of the Nye Banken, Stockholm, the so-called “Bolshevik banker” who became head of the first Soviet international bank, Ruskombank, channeled funds to the Bolsheviks. On September 6, 1948 The London Evening Star commented on Aschberg’s visit to Swiss bankers that he had “advanced large sums to Lenin and Trotsky in 1917. At the time of the revolution Mr. Aschberg gave Trotsky money to form and equip the first unit of the Red Army.”

[6] Samuel Gompers, “Soviet Bribe fund Here Says Gompers, Has Proof That Offers Have Been Made, He Declares, Opposing Recognition. Propaganda Drive. Charges Strong Group of Bankers With Readiness to Accept Lenin’s Betrayal of Russia,” The New York Times, May 1, 1922. Online at Times’ archives: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E00E3D81739EF3ABC4953DFB3668389639EDE ^[3]

[7] Henry Wickham Steed, “Through Thirty Years 1892–1922 A personal narrative,” The Peace Conference, The Bullitt Mission, Vol. II.  (New York: Doubleday Page and Co., 1924), p. 301.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Charles Seymour, 165–66. House was assigned by Wilson to draw up the constitution for the League of Nations, and in 1918 formed a think tank at Wilson’s request, called The Inquiry, to advise on post-war policy, which became the Council on Foreign Relations. House was the US chief negotiator at the Peace Conference in Paris, 1919–1920.

[12] Henry Wickham Steed, “Peace with Honor,” Paris Daily Mail, 28 March 1922; quoted in Steed (1924).

[13] Crane was a member of a 1917 Special Diplomatic Mission to Russia, and a member of the American Section of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

[14] H. W. Steed, 1924, op. cit.

[15] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1974), p. 71.

[16] Ibid., p. 75.

[17] Ibid., p. 73.

[18] William Harlan Hale, “When the Red Storm Broke,” America and Russia: A Century and a Half of Dramatic Encounters, ed. Oliver Jensen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 150.

[19] Ibid., p.151.

[20] “Gives Bolsheviki a Million,” Washington Post, 2 February 1918, cited by Sutton, ibid., pp. 82–83.

[21] A. Sutton, op.cit., p. 8.

[22] W. Harlan Hale, op.cit., p. 151.

[23] Trotsky while still in the USA had made similar claims. “People War Weary. But Leo Trotsky Says They Do Not Want Separate Peace,” New York Times, March 16, 1917. This was why he became the focus of British intelligence efforts via R. H. Bruce Lockhart, special agent to the British War Cabinet in Russia.

[24] “Bolsheviki Will Not Make Separate Peace: Only Those Who Made Up Privileged Classes Under Czar Would Do So, Says Col. W. B. Thompson, Just Back From Red Cross Mission,” New York Times, January 27, 1918.

[25] Robert S. Rifkind, ‘”The Wasted Mission,” America and Russia, op. cit., p. 180.

[26] Peter Grose, Continuing The Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006). The entire book can be read online at: Council on Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/index.html ^[4] (Accessed on February 27, 2010).

[27] Ibid. Chapter: “Basic Assumptions.”

[28] H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows, Chapter VII, “The Envoy.” Wells went to Russia in September 1920 at the invitation of Kamenev, of the Russian Trade Delegation in London, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik regime. Russia in the Shadows appeared as a series of articles in The Sunday Express. The whole book can be read online at: gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html ^[5]

[29] V. I. Lenin, December 6, 1920, Collected Works, 4th English Edition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), Volume 31, 438–59 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/06.htm ^[6] (Accessed on August 4, 2010).

[30] Ibid.

[31] A. Hammer, Witness to History (Reading, England: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), pp.151-152.

[32] “Vanderlip’s Empire,” The New York Times, December 1, 1920, 14.

[33] “Standard Oil Joins Vanderlip Project,” The New York Times, January 11, 1922, p. 1.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1974), pp. 62–63.

[36] “Scotland Yard Intelligence Report,” London 1919, US State Dept. Decimal File, 316-22-656, cited by A. Sutton, ibid., p. 113.

[37] Basil H. Thompson, British Home Office Directorate of Intelligence, “Special Report No. 5 (Secret),” Scotland Yard, London, July 14, 1919; cited by Sutton, ibid., p. 115.

[38] A Sutton, op.cit., pp. 130–31.

[39] Sands’ memorandum to Lansing, p. 9; cited by Sutton, ibid., pp. 132, 134.

[40] A. Sutton, ibid., p. 135.

[41] Richard B Spence, “Hidden Agendas: Spies, Lies and Intrigue Surrounding Trotsky’s American Visit, January-April 1917,” Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 21, #1 (2008).

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44]  A. Hammer, Witness to History, op. cit., p. 143.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid., p. 160.

[47] K. R. Bolton, “Origins of the Cold War: How Stalin Foiled a New World Order,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 31, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/31/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/all/1 ^[7]

[48] Leon Trotsky, Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, April 6th, 1920. http://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/05.htm ^[8] (Accessed on August 4, 2010).

[49] A. Hammer, op. cit., p. 217.

[50] Ibid., p. 221.

[51] Charles Levinson, Vodka-Cola (West Sussex: Biblias, 1980). Antony Sutton, National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (New York: Arlington House, 1973).

[52] Peter Grose, op. it., “The First Transformation,” http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/first_transformation.html ^[9]

[53] Jack Kemp, et al., Russia’s Wrong Direction: What the United States Can and Should do, Independent Task Force Report, no. 57 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006) xi. The entire publication can be downloaded at: http://www.cfr.org/publication/9997/ ^[10]

[54] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), Vol. 2,  p. 464.

[55] Ibid., p. 402.

Source: Ab Aeterno, no. 5, Fall 2010

 

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[4] http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/index.html: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/index.html

[5] gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html: http://www.counter-currents.comgutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html

[6] http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/06.htm: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/06.htm

[7] http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/31/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/all/1: http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/31/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/all/1

[8] http://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/05.htm: http://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/05.htm

[9] http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/first_transformation.html: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/first_transformation.html

[10] http://www.cfr.org/publication/9997/: http://www.cfr.org/publication/9997/

Wall Street & the March 1917 Russian Revolution

Wall Street & the March 1917 Russian Revolution

By Kerry Bolton 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

“There is no proletarian, not even a communist, movement that has not operated in the interests of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money — and that without the idealists amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.” Oswald Spengler.[1]

The “Russian Revolution” (sic) is heralded in both the popular imagination and by academe as a triumph of the people against Czarist tyranny, even if most concede that the utopian vision turned sour, at least with the eventual dictatorship of Stalin. However a look behind the multiple facades of history shows that the “Russian Revolution” was one of many upheavals that have served those who provide the funding. Few–whether laymen or supposed “experts”–ever seem to question as to where the money comes to finance these revolutions, and we are expected to believe that they are “spontaneous uprisings of the people against oppression,” just as today we are still expected to believe that the so-called “colour revolutions” in the Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, etc., are “spontaneous demonstrations.” This essay examines the funding of the March 1917 Russian Revolution, the so-called First Revolution that served as an opening scene for the Bolsheviks, and concludes that there are forces at work behind he scenes, whose goals are far removed from the welfare of the masses.

March 2010 marks the ninety-third anniversary of the (First) Russian Revolution, which served as the prelude for the Bolshevik coup the following November, known as the “Bolshevik Revolution.” A look beyond orthodoxy shows with ample documentation that socialism, from social democracy and fabianism[2] to communism, has generally “operated in the interests of money” as Spengler observed.

The Fabian historian and novelist H. G. Wells, when in Russia in 1920 observing the still precarious Bolshevik regime, commenting on how arch-capitalists were even then already going into the embryonic Soviet republic to negotiate commercial concessions[3], wrote:

. . . Big business is by no means antipathetic to Communism. The larger big business grows the more it approximates to Collectivism. It is the upper road of the few instead of the lower road of the masses to Collectivism.[4]

Big Business saw in socialism a means for both destroying the traditional foundations of nations and societies and as a control mechanism. In the case of Old Russia where a State based on monarchical and rural traditions was not amenable to being opened up for global business exploitation of its resources the scene was set for the upheavals of 1917 back in 1905 at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, which played a significant role in the formation of a Russian revolutionary cadre.[5] The funding for the formation of that cadre came from Jacob Schiff, senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York, who backed Japan in the war against Russia.[6]

The individual most responsible for turning American opinion, including government and diplomatic opinion, against Czarist Russia was the journalist George Kennan[7], who was sponsored by Schiff. In a collection of essays on American-Russian diplomacy, Cowley states that during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 Kennan was in Japan organising Russian POWs into ‘revolutionary cells’ and claimed to have converted “52,000 Russian soldiers into ‘revolutionists’”. Cowley also adds, significantly, “Certainly such activity, well-financed by groups in the United States, contributed little to Russian-American solidarity.”[8]

The source of the revolutionary funding “by groups in the United States” was explained by Kennan at a celebration of the March 1917 Russian Revolution, as reported as by the New York Times:

Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution.

He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokio, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.

The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had . . .

“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,” he said, referring to Mr Schiff, “and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.”

Then was read a telegram from Jacob H. Schiff, part of which is as follows: “Will you say for me to those present at tonight’s meeting how deeply I regret my inability to celebrate with the Friends of Russian Freedom the actual reward of what we had hoped and striven for these long years.”[9]

The reaction to the Russian revolution by Schiff and indeed by bankers generally, in the USA and London, was one of jubilation. Schiff wrote enthusiastically to the New York Times:

May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high! Jacob H. Schiff.[10]

Writing to The Evening Post in response to a question about revolutionary Russia’s new status with world financial markets, Schiff replied as head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.:

Replying to your request for my opinion of the effects of the revolution upon Russia’s finances, I am quite convinced that with the certainty of the development of the country’s enormous resources, which, with the shackles removed from a great people, will follow present events, Russia will before long take rank financially amongst the most favoured nations in the money markets of the world.[11]

Schiff’s reply reflected the general attitude of London and New York financial circles at the time of the revolution. John B. Young of the National City Bank, who had been in Russia in 1916 in regard to a US loan stated in 1917 of the revolution that it has been discussed widely when he had been in Russia the previous year. He regarded those involved as “solid, responsible and conservative.”[12] In the same issue, the New York Times reported that there had been a rise in Russian exchange transactions in London 24 hours preceding the revolution, and that London had known of the revolution prior to New York. The article reported that most prominent financial and business leaders in London and New York had a positive view of the revolution.[13] Another report states that while there had been some disquiet about the revolution, “this news was by no means unwelcome in more important banking circles.”[14]

These bankers and industrialists are cited in these articles as regarding the revolution as being able to eliminate pro-German influents in the Russian government and as likely to pursue a more vigorous course against Germany. Yet such seemingly “patriotic sentiments” cannot be considered the motivation behind the plutocratic support for the revolution. While Max Warburg of the Warburg banking house in Germany, advised the Kaiser and while the German Government arranged for funding and safe passage of Lenin and his entourage from Switzerland across Germany to Russia; his brother Paul,[15] as associate of Schiff’s,[16] looked after the family interests in New York. The factor that was behind this banking support for the revolution whether from London, New York, Stockholm,[17] or Berlin, was that of the tremendous largely untapped resources that would become available to the world financial markets, which had hitherto been denied control under the Czar. It must be kept in mind that these banking dynasties were–and are–not merely national or local banks but are international and do not owe loyalty to any particular nation, unless that nation happens to be acting in their interests at a particular time. [18]

The Bolshevik Revolution of eight months later, despite the violent anti-capitalist rhetoric, was to open Russia’s vast resources up to world capitalism, although with the advent of Stalin, not to the extent that the plutocrats had thought when the Lenin-Trotsky regime had held sway for several years.

Notes 

This essay is based on parts of chapters in my book Revolution From Above: Manufacturing “Dissent” in the New World Order (London: Arktos, 2011). I hope to submit a similar essay on the funding of the November 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution for the October-November-December issue of Ab Aeterno.

[1] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West, 1918, 1926 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1971), vol. 2, p. 402.

[2] The Fabian Society features on its coat-of-arms a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Prominent among the founding members were literati such as H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw. The Fabians founded the London School of Economics and Political Science as a training academy for the future governing elite in a collectivist state. According to co-founder Beatrice Webb, funding for this came from Sir Ernest Cassel of Vickers armaments and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York; and the Rothschilds, et al. (K. R. Bolton, op.cit., “Revolution By Stealth”).

[3] Washington A. Vanderlip was in Russia at the same time as Wells, negotiating commercial concessions with the Soviet regime–successfully.

[4] H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows, Chapter VII, “The Envoy.”  Wells went to Russia in September 1920 at the invitation of Kamenev, of the Russian Trade Delegation in London, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik regime. Russia in the Shadows appeared as a series of articles in The Sunday Express. The whole book can be read online at: gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html ^[2]

[5] The Russian monarchy and the Russian peasant were both considered historically passé by the Western financial establishment, in the same manner that in our own time the Afrikaner farming folk were considered passé and their system of apartheid hindered the globalisation of South Africa’s economy. Like the March and November 1917 Russian Revolutions, the ostensibly “Black” revolution in South Africa eliminated the Afrikaner anachronism and under “socialism” has privatised the parastatals (state-owned utility companies) and privatised the economy.

[6] “Jacob Schiff,” Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. XVI, p. 431. Schiff gave a loan of $200,000,000 to the Japanese aggressors, for which he was decorated by the Japanese Emperor.

[7] Robert Cowley, “A Year in Hell,” America and Russia: A Century and a Half of Dramatic Encounters, ed. Oliver Jensen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), pp. 92-121. The introductory note to the chapter indicates the nature of Kennan’s influence: “An American journalist, George Kennan, became the first to reveal the full horrors of Siberian exile and the brutal, studied inhumanity of Czarist ‘justice’.” Cowley quotes historian Thomas A. Bailey as stating of Kennan: “No one person did more to cause the people of the United States to turn against their presumed benefactor of yesteryear.” (A reference to Czarist Russia’s support for the Union during the American Civil War). Cowley, ibid., p. 118.

[8] Ibid., p. 120.

[9] New York Times, 24 March, 1917, pp. 1-2.

[10] Jacob H. Schiff, “Jacob H. Schiff Rejoices, By Telegraph to the Editor of the New York Times,” New York Times, 18 March, 1917. This can be viewed in The New York Times online archives: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9802E4DD163AE532A2575BC1A9659C946696D6CF ^[3] (accessed 12 January 2010).

[11] “Loans easier for Russia,” The New York Times, 20 March 1917. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B04EFDD143AE433A25753C2A9659C946696D6CF ^[4] (accessed 12 January 2010).

[12] “Is A People’s Revolution.” The New York Times, 16 March 1917.

[13] “Bankers here pleased with news of revolution,” ibid.

[14] “Stocks strong – Wall Street interpretation of Russian News,” ibid.

[15] Paul Warburg, prior to emigrating to the USA, had been decorated by the Kaiser in 1912.

[16] Paul Warburg was also Schiff’s brother-in-law.

[17] Olof Achberg of the Nye Banken, Stockholm was to serve as the conduit for funds between international banks and the Bolsheviks.

[18] For example, what national or prior imperial loyalties could a banking dynasty such as the Rothschilds owe, when they had family branches of the bank in London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin? The same question applies to all such banks, and in our own time to the trans-national corporations.

Source: Ab Aeterno: Journal of the Academy of Social and Political Research, no. 2, March 2010

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Europa opta por South Stream

Otra victoria rusa: Europa opta por South Stream

Ex: http://www.elespiadigital.com/

Continúa el tendido del gasoducto South Stream (Flujo Sur) en Europa. Bulgaria ha empezado a constuir el tramo que suministrará el gas ruso a Europa Central y del Sur. En lo que resta de año, se dará inicio a la construcción de la correspondiente infraestructura en Serbia, luego de lo cual le tocará el turno a Hungría. Además, los contratos sobre el tendido ya están suscritos con Grecia, Eslovenia, Croacia y Austria.

La extensión del tramo búlgaro supera 500 kilómetros. Las obras de construcción se iniciaron en la más económicamente deprimida parte noroccidental de Bulgaria, donde la tasa de desempleo supera el 20 %. Se pronostica que la ejecución del proyecto impulsará el crecimiento económico del país. Gracias a South Stream, Bulgaria recibirá inversiones por importe de tres mil quinientos millones de euro, casi tres mil millones de euro engrosarán sus arcas públicas, exenciones sobre el precio del gas y trabajo para los contratistas locales.

Además, al Holding energético de Bulgaria, socio del gigante gasístico ruso Gazprom, se le otrogará un crédito por el monto de seiscientos veinte millones de euro.

South Stream es un proyecto costoso, los gastos en su tendido ascienden a 16 mil millones de euro. Pero, desde la óptica de la seguridad energética, sus ventajas son evidentes, según ha expresado en Bulgaria el presidente de Gazprom, Alexéi Míller:

–Se trata de un importantísimo componente de la seguridad energética para todo el continente europeo, pues el gas se suministrará directamente desde Rusia a Bulgaria y a la Unión Europea, sin atravesar los países de tránsito.

Bajo el término "los países de tránsito" se sobrentiende a Ucrania que sistemáticamente genera problemas, icnumpliendo los compromisos de pago, bombeando ilíctamente este hidrocarburo en sus depósitos subterráneos. En un pasado, este país eslavo causó irregularidades en el suministro de gas a Europa. Al alcanzar South Stream la capacidad proyectada, estos problemas pasarán a la historia, se muestra seguro el director del departamento analítico en la entidad Alpari, Alexánder Razuváev:

–Después de que Gazprom adquiriera Beltransgaz (operadora del sistema de gasoductos de Bielorrusia) y se pusiera en marcha la tubería North Stream, estos riesgos disminuyeron considerablemente. Cuando comience a funcionar South Stream, los riesgos prácticamente dejarán de existir. Por lo que se refiere a Europa, tendrá los suministros garantizados. Se barajaba una variante optativa, el gasoducto Nabucco, que no resultó ser viable. Correspondientem ente, Europa optó por South Stream.

South Stream empezará a suministrar gas a la población de Europa ya a finales de 2015. La capacidad de su primera ramificación superará los quince mil millones de metros cúbicos anuales. En toral, a esta arteria gasera le corresponderá un 10 % del consumo continental de este hidrocarburo.

Spengler e l’anima russa

Spengler e l’anima russa

La Russia antica e la “pseudomorfosi” illuminista

Autore: Stefano Arcella

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/

Nel Tramonto dell’Occidente[1], Oswald Spengler si sofferma ampiamente sulle peculiarità dell’anima russa. Tale analisi è collocata nella seconda parte dell’opera, che si intitola “Prospettive della storia mondiale”[2], la prima parte essendo dedicata a “Forma e realtà”, ove delinea la sua visione ciclica della storia, definisce l’“anima” di ogni civiltà, con le famose fasi, l’una ascendente (Kultur) e l’altra  discendente (Zivilisation) di ogni ciclo storico, per poi tracciare una morfologia comparata delle civiltà che offre un grande scenario di macrostoria [3].

Altrettanto interessante e stimolante è l’applicazione del metodo comparativo spengleriano per studiare e decifrare l’affinità morfologica che connette interiormente la lingua delle forme di tutti i domini interni ad una data civiltà, dall’arte alla matematica alla geometria, al pensiero filosofico e al linguaggio delle forme della vita economica, essa stessa espressione di una data “anima”, ossia di un “sentimento del mondo” che contraddistingue un certo tipo di sensibilità.

In questa prospettiva, anche i fatti politici, assumono il valore di potenti simboli; per Spengler occorre saper cogliere che cosa significa il loro apparire, l’ “anima” di cui essi sono espressione.

Pseudomorfosi

Nella seconda parte dell’opera, l’Autore colloca lo studio dell’anima russa nel capitolo sulle pseudomorfosi storiche ed è partendo da questa categoria spengleriana che si può comprendere il suo modo di descrivere il mondo russo.

Per spiegare la pseudomorfosi, Spengler parte da una nozione di mineralogia. Egli attinge  ad un fenomeno naturale per spiegare e definire un fenomeno storico, in ciò accogliendo un procedimento di osservazione scientifico-naturalistico tipico di Goethe, al quale esplicitamente si richiama nella prima parte della sua opera.

“Si supponga uno strato di calcare che contenga cristalli di un dato minerale. Si producono crepacci e fessure; l’acqua si infiltra e a poco a poco, passando, scioglie e porta via i cristalli, di modo che nel conglomerato non restano più che le cavità da essi occupate. Sopravvengono fenomeni vulcanici che fendono la montagna; colate di materiale incandescente penetrano negli spacchi, si solidificano e danno luogo ad altri cristalli. Ma esse non possono farlo in una forma propria: sono invece costrette a riempire le cavità preesistenti, e così nascono forme falsate, nascono cristalli nei quali la struttura interna contraddice  la conformazione esterna, un dato minerale apparendo ora sotto le specie esteriori di un altro. E’ ciò  che i mineralogisti  chiamano pseudomorfosi” [4].

Dalla nozione di mineralogia passa quindi alle pseudomorfosi storiche.

“Chiamo pseudomorfosi storiche i casi nei quali una vecchia civiltà straniera grava talmente su di un paese che una civiltà nuova, congenita a questo paese, ne resta soffocata e non solo non giunge a forme sue proprie e pure di espressione, ma nemmeno alla perfetta coscienza di sé stessa. Tutto ciò che emerge dalle profondità di una giovane animità va a fluire nelle forme vuote di una vita straniera; una giovane sensibilità si fissa in opere annose e invece dell’adergersi in una libera forza creatrice nasce soltanto un odio sempre più vivo per la costrizione che ancora si subisce da parte di una realtà lontana nel tempo”[5].

Di questo fenomeno Spengler ci offre vari esempi quali la civiltà araba – che egli fa risalire,  come sentimento del mondo, al III secolo a.C. – che fu costretta e soffocata nelle forme di una civiltà straniera, quale quella macedone col suo relativo dominio (impresa di Alessandro Magno e civiltà ellenistica).

Non è questa la sede per esaminare la pseudomorfosi araba, perché tale tema ci porterebbe lontano, considerando la peculiarità della visione storica spengleriana, rispetto allo specialismo della storiografia occidentale del suo tempo con la quale egli polemizza e argomenta in modo approfondito.

Altra pseudomorfosi è quella che inizia con la battaglia di Azio del 31 a. C.

“Qui non si trattò di una lotta per la supremazia della romanità o dell’ellenismo; una lotta del genere era stata già combattuta a Canne e a Ama, ove ad Annibale toccò il destino tragico di battersi non per la sua patria bensì per l’ellenismo. Ad Azio la nascente civiltà araba si trovò di fronte alla civilizzazione antica senescente. Si doveva decidere il trionfo dello spirito apollineo o di quello magico, degli dei o del Dio, del principato o del califfato. La vittoria di Antonio avrebbe liberato l’anima magica; invece la sua sconfitta ebbe per conseguenza che sul paesaggio di tale anima si riaffermarono le rigide, disanimate strutture del periodo imperiale”[6].

Pseudomorfosi russa

Un ulteriore esempio di pseudomorfosi ce lo offre la Russia di Pietro il Grande. L’anima russa originaria si esprime nelle saghe di Kiev riguardanti il principe Vladimiro (verso il 1000 d. C.) con la sua Tavola Rotonda e l’eroe popolare Ilja di Muros. Qui il pensatore tedesco coglie l’immensa differenza fra anima russa e anima faustina (ossia quella europea tesa verso l’infinito e simboleggiata dalle cattedrali gotiche) nel divario che intercorre fra tali poemi slavi e quelli sincronici – rispetto ad essi – della saga di Malthus e dei Nibelunghi del periodo delle invasioni “nella forma dell’epica di Ildebrando”[7].

Il periodo “merovingio” russo (ossia il periodo aurorale) inizia con la liberazione dal dominio tartaro di Ivan III (1480) e si sviluppa attraverso gli ultimi Rurik e i primi Romanov fino a Pietro il Grande (1689-1725). Esso corrisponde al periodo che va, in Francia, da Clodoveo(465-511) fino alla battaglia di Testry (687) con la quale i Carolingi si assicurano il potere  effettivo. Spengler coglie qui un’affinità morfologica.

“A questo periodo moscovita delle grandi stirpi bojare e dei patriarchi, durante il quale un partito della Vecchia Russia lottò continuamente contro gli amici della civiltà occidentale, segue, con la fondazione di Pietroburgo (1703) la pseudomorfosi, la quale impose all’anima russa primitiva le forme straniere dell’alto Barocco, poi quelle dell’illuminismo e infine quelle del diciannovesimo secolo. Pietro il Grande fu fatale per la civiltà russa. Si pensi alla sua corrispondenza “sincronica”, a Carlomagno, che metodicamente e con tutte le sue energie attuò ciò che Carlo Martello pochi anni prima aveva scongiurato con la sua vittoria sugli Arabi; il sopravvento dello spirito mauro-bizantino”[8]. 

Nella visione spengleriana, Pietro il Grande impone alla Russia una forma che non le è congeniale, che è lontana dallo spirito contadino, antico, mistico e religioso della Vecchia Russia. Carlomagno avrebbe mutuato in Occidente una forma mauro-bizantina (l’Impero, la struttura gerarchizzata sul modello romano-orientale) che non sarebbe stata congeniale all’Europa dell’alto  Medio Evo (adopero questa periodizzazione per farmi intendere, anche se essa non è affatto spengleriana).

Qui lo studioso tedesco introduce una riflessione che è di rilievo centrale e che contribuisce a far comprendere anche la storia della Russia contemporanea.

“Lo zarismo primitivo di Mosca è l’unica forma che ancor oggi sia conforme alla natura russa, ma esso a Pietroburgo fu falsato nella forma dinastica propria all’Europa occidentale. La tendenza verso il Sud sacro, verso Bisanzio e Gerusalemme, profondamente radicata in tutte le anime greco-ortodosse, si trasformò in una diplomazia mondana, in uno sguardo rivolto verso l’Occidente … Furono importate arti e scienze tarde, l’illuminismo, l’etica sociale, il materialismo cosmopolita, benché in questo primo periodo del ciclo russo la religione fosse l’unica lingua nella quale ognuno comprendeva se stesso e comprendeva il mondo” [9].

Questa imposizione di un modello straniero generò un sentimento di odio “davvero apocalittico” contro l’Europa, intendendo con tale termine tutto quanto non era russo, anche Roma e Atene, insomma l’Occidente nella varietà ed anche nell’antichità delle sue manifestazioni.”La prima condizione a che il sentimento nazionale russo si liberi è odiare Pietroburgo con tutto il cuore e con tutta l’anima” scriveva Aksakoff a Dostoevskij.

In altri termini, Mosca è sacra, Pietroburgo è Satana e Pietro il Grande, in una leggenda popolare, viene presentato come l’Anticristo[10].

Tolstoi e Dostoevskij

Per Spengler, se si vogliono comprendere i due grandi interpreti della pseudomorfosi russa, occorre vedere in Dostoevskij il contadino, in Tolstoi l’uomo cosmopolita.

“L’uno non poté mai liberarsi interiormente dalla campagna, l’altro la campagna, malgrado ogni suo disperato sforzo, non riusci mai a ritrovarla”[11].

Qui la lettura di Spengler diviene dirompente e innovativa, con tratti tipici da “rivoluzione conservatrice”.

Egli considera, infatti, Tolstoi come la Russia del passato e Dostoevskij come simbolo della Russia dell’avvenire, il che equivale a dire che l’anima contadina antica della Russia, l’anima legata al sentimento delle radici e delle tradizioni, rappresenta l’avvenire, mentre lo spirito cosmopolita e illuminista, di stampo occidentale moderno, è destinato a tramontare.

Peraltro, questa spirito cosmopolita era profondamente divorato da un odio viscerale contro un’Europa moderna da cui non poteva liberarsi, essendovi profondamente legato. In altri termini, una sorta di amore/odio verso l’Europa.

“Tolstoi odiò potentemente l’Europa da cui non poteva liberarsi. Egli l’odiò in sé stesso e odiò se stesso. Per questo fu il padre del bolscevismo[12]..

Dostoevskij, al contrario, non nutrì un tale odio ma un fervido amore per tutto ciò che è occidentale, nel senso delle antiche radici culturali dell’Europa.

“Un simile odio Dostoevskij non lo conobbe. Egli nutrì un amore altrettanto fervido per tutto quello che è occidentale. “Io ho due patrie, la Russia e L’Europa”[13]. Questa affermazione dello scrittore russo è molto sintomatica delle sue inclinazioni. Spengler passa poi a citare un brano del romanzo I Fratelli Karamazov che è molto eloquente circa quello che lo scrittore russo intende per richiamo interiore verso l’Europa.

“Partirò per l’Europa – dice Ivan Karamazov al fratello Alioscia – io so di non andare che verso un cimitero, ma so anche che questo cimitero mi è caro, che è il più caro di tutti i cimiteri. I nostri sacri morti sono seppelliti  là, ogni pietra delle loro tombe parla di una vita passata così fervida, di una fede così appassionata nelle azioni che hanno compiute, nelle loro verità, nelle loro lotte e nelle loro conoscenze che io, lo so di già, mi prosternerò per baciare quelle pietre e per piangere su di esse”[14]

L’Europa, per Dostoevskij, è quella delle radici antiche, della memoria storica, dell’identità, degli avi, delle antiche fedi e delle antiche lotte. In altri termini, l’Europa non è quella dell’illuminismo cui guardava Pietro il Grande, ma esattamente il contrario.

Mentre Tolstoi si muove nell’ottica dell’economia politica e dell’etica sociale, in una dimensione intellettualistica, tipicamente occidentale e moderna, Dostoevskij era al di là delle categorie occidentali, comprese quelle di rivoluzione e di conservatorismo.

“Per lui fra conservatorismo e rivoluzione – scrive Spengler – non vi era differenza alcuna: entrambi erano per lui fenomeni occidentali. Lo sguardo di una tale anima si librava di là da tutto quanto è sociale. Le cose di questo mondo gli apparivano così insignificanti, che egli non dette alcuna importanza al tentativo di migliorarle. Nessuna vera ragione vuole migliorare il mondo dei fatti. Come ogni vero Russo, Dostoevskij un tale mondo non lo nota affatto: gli uomini come lui vivono in un secondo mondo, in un mondo metafisico esistente di là da esso. Che cosa hanno a che vedere i tormenti di un’anima col comunismo?” [15]

Spengler conclude asserendo che “il Russo autentico è un discepolo di Dostoevskij benché non lo abbia letto, anzi proprio perché non sa leggere. Lui stesso è un pezzo di Dostoevskij”[16]

Per Spengler il cristianesimo sociale di Tolstoi era intriso di marxismo; Tolstoi parlava di Cristo ma intendeva Marx, mentre “al cristianesimo di Dostoevskij appartiene invece il millennio che viene”[17]

L’analisi spengleriana si proietta nel futuro, anticipando di circa un secolo gli sviluppi della storia russa, in un momento storico in cui trionfava il bolscevismo e tutto sembrava andare in direzione contraria. Il punto è capire cosa intenda Spengler per “cristianesimo  di Dostoevskij”. Lo studioso tedesco ha fatto riferimento a questa vocazione mistica che trascende il mondo dei fenomeni, dei fatti, ai quali l’anima russa non attribuisce un valore decisivo, il mondo metafisico essendo l’oggetto di interesse centrale e prioritario.

“L’immensa differenza fra anima faustiana e anima russa si tradisce già nel suono di certe parole.  Il termine russo per cielo è njèbo ed è negativo nel suo n. L’uomo d’Occidente volge il suo sguardo verso l’alto, mentre il Russo fissa i lontani orizzonti. Occorre dunque vedere la differenza dell’impulso verso la profondità dell’uno e dell’altro nel fatto che nel primo esso è una passione di penetrare da ogni lato nello spazio infinito, nel secondo è un esteriorizzarsi fino a che l’elemento impersonale nell’uomo si faccia uno con la pianura senza fine…La mistica russa non ha nulla di quel fervore, proprio al gotico, a Rembrandt, a Beethoven, che si porta verso l’alto e che può svilupparsi fino ad un giubilo che invade il cielo. Qui Dio non è la profondità azzurra delle altezze. L’amore mistico russo è quello della pianura, quello verso fratelli che subiscono lo stesso giogo, sempre nella direzione terrestre; è quello per i poveri animali tormentati che vagano sulla terra,  per le piante, mai per gli uccelli, per le nubi e per le stelle” [18].

Il cristianesimo russo-ortodosso è, dunque, per Spengler, un misticismo della Madre Terra, dell’immensa pianura, degli spazi sconfinati.

Fra Spengler e Steiner

Introduco qui alcune mie riflessioni. Questa pianura sconfinata è geograficamente -  e simbolicamente -  un ponte fra Oriente e Occidente. La Russia è una terra che sente storicamente il richiamo di Bisanzio, ossia dell’Impero Romano d’Oriente, come ho dimostrato nei miei contributi su Toynbee e su Zolla ed il loro modo di intendere l’anima russa e i suoi archetipi.

La Russia risente, però, anche di influssi spirituali e culturali spiccatamente orientali.

Un fenomeno che merita di essere osservato con attenzione è quello dell’attuale diffusione del buddhismo in Russia (di cui abbiamo testimonianze e riscontri anche qui in Italia presso i centri buddhisti frequentati dai russi provenienti direttamente dalla loro terra), particolarmente di quello tibetano che, nella sua iconografia e nel suo simbolismo, è segnato da figure luminose, da un senso di chiarità e di Luce spirituale che tradisce anche antiche influenze iraniche, come Filippani Ronconi ha evidenziato in Zarathustra e il Mazdeismo [19].

Questa “mistica della Luce” (adopero qui tale termine in un senso lato, non tecnico) si incontra necessariamente col misticismo della Madre Terra, con propensioni tipiche dell’anima slava.

È a questo punto che va considerata la previsione di Rudolf Steiner, secondo il quale in Russia rinascerà la religione di Zarathustra[20] , ossia una nuova mistica della Luce ed un nuovo sentimento del mondo, quello della lotta fra Luce e Tenebre nella storia, nella dimensione terrena, in forme adatte ad un ben diverso contesto storico, etnico e geografico rispetto a quello in cui maturò la riforma spirituale del Profeta iranico. Nella morfologia delle civiltà di Steiner la civiltà russa sarebbe la sesta civiltà – quella del futuro – dopo le prime cinque (Indiana, Iranica, Egizio-Caldaica-Babilonese, greco-romana, anglo-tedesca) che nel loro susseguirsi denotano una sorta di movimento pendolare da est ad ovest e poi di nuovo verso est. Una tale previsione sulla rinascita della religione di Zarathustra può avere una sua plausibilità ove si consideri appunto la posizione di ponte che la terra russa ha fra Oriente e Occidente e quindi simbolicamente di collegamento, di raccordo spirituale e culturale.

Il bolscevismo aveva significato, per un arco di 70 anni, una interruzione nella comunicazione spirituale fra Oriente e Occidente, un blocco materialistico, nel che può vedersi l’azione di influenze non meramente profane, secondo quella dimensione di profondità della storia che è tipica del “metodo tradizionale”di cui Evola ha parlato ampiamente in Rivolta contro il mondo moderno e sul quale chi scrive è tornato ampiamente ne I Misteri del Sole.

Un tale culto della Luce, ove un domani dovesse diffondersi, dovrà necessariamente innestarsi sul “sentimento della pianura” costitutivo dell’anima russa, per dirla con Spengler, e cogliere nella Madre Terra – la “Santa Madre Russia” – il teatro di una lotta fra Luce e Tenebre, fra Verità e Menzogna, fra elevazione dello spirito e demonìa della materia e dell’economia.

Si colgono, in definitiva, i primi segni premonitori – dal Buddhismo al rilancio dell’Ortodossia – dell’affiorare graduale di una nuova “forma spirituale” che ha profonde connessioni col risveglio del sentimento nazionale russo, di un forte senso delle proprie tradizioni e della propria identità che si esprime oggi nella linea politica di Putin e nel suo rilancio del ruolo di grande potenza della Russia, della sua proiezione mediterranea, del suo interagire e fare blocco con le nazioni del BRICS.

La stessa legislazione contraria alla propaganda dei gay, il rifiuto di Putin a dare i bambini russi in adozione alle coppie gay in Occidente, il forte richiamo alla tradizione religiosa russo-ortodossa, l’opposizione al “politicamente corretto”, sono tutti fatti politici sintomatici di un risveglio dell’anima russa, quella antica, interpretata e sentita da Dostoevskij.

I fatti politici, come diceva Spengler, vanno letti nella loro valenza simbolica, cogliendo i fermenti profondi di cui essi sono espressione e cercando d’intuire e anticipare le linee di tendenza che essi prefigurano.

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[1] L’opera è del 1917 in prima edizione; la traduzione che ho consultato e studiato fa riferimento alla seconda edizione del 1923.

[2] O.Spengler, Il Tramonto dell’Occidente, Guanda, Parma, 1991, p. 653 ss.

[3] Id., op.cit., p. 89 ss.

[4] Id., op.cit., p.927.

[5] Id., op.cit., pp.927-928

[6] Id., op .cit., pp. 930-931.

[7] Id., op.cit., p.932.

[8] Id., op.cit., p.932.

[9] Id., op.cit., pp.932-933.

[10] Id., op.cit., p. 934.

[11] Id., op.cit., p.934.

[12] Id., op.cit., p. 936.

[13] Id., op.cit., p. 936

[14] Id., op.cit., p.936.

[15] Id., op.cit., p.937.

[16] Id., op.cit., p. 939.

[17] Id., op.cit., p.939.

[18] Id., op.cit., nt.178,  pp.1459-1460.

[19] P. Filippani Ronconi, Zarathustra  e il Mazdeismo, Irradiazioni, Roma, 2007.

[20] R. Steiner, Miti e Misteri dell’ Egitto rispetto alle forze spirituali attive nel presente, Antroposofica, Milano, 2000.

Eurasian Union: Substance and the Subtext

Gulshan Dietl

Ph.D., Professor of the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

 

Ex: http://www.geopolitica.ru

 

The Eurasian Union has come to the present stage in its evolution within a remarkably compressed time-frame. Although the idea was first mooted by the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbaev in 1994, it hibernated for long years.[1] It was only in late 2011 that Vladimir Putin revived the idea; visualised it as one of the major centres of economic power alongside the EU, the US, China and APEC; and initiated the process of its implementation. In November 2011, the presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus signed an agreement to establish the Eurasian Economic Space (EES) that would graduate towards the Eurasian Union. The EES came into existence on 1 January 2012. The paper proposes to examine the origin of the idea and assess its implementation todate with an analysis of the substance and subtext of the organization.

Eurasian Union: The Origins

On 3 October 2011, Vladimir Putin published a signed article in the daily newspaper Izvestia titled “New Integration Project in Eurasia: Making the Future Today.” Putin was the Russian Prime Minister at that time and set to take over the Russian Presidency. The article can thus be interpreted as the assignment he set for himself in his second tenure. On the ground, the “Treaty on the Creation of a Union State of Russia and Belarus” already existed. The Treaty envisaged a federation between the two countries with a common constitution, flag, national anthem, citizenship, currency, president, parliament and army. On 26 January 2000, the Treaty came into effect after the due ratifications by the Russian Duma and the Belarus Assembly. It provided for political union of the two, creating a single political entity. Whether the Treaty laid down a proto Eurasian Union remains to be seen.

The European Union (EU) announcement in 2008 of its Eastern Partnership Programme (EPP) may also have inspired the Russian drive towards reintegration of the Eurasian space. The EPP was initiated to improve political and economic relations between the EU and six "strategic" post-Soviet states -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine -- in the core areas of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the promotion of a market economy, and sustainable development.[2]  There was much debate over whether to include Belarus, whose authoritarian dictatorship disqualified it. The eventual invitation to Belarus was the concern over an excessive Russian influence in that country.

The US plan to deploy the NATO missile defence system in Poland and Czech Republic was already a source of concern for the Russians. China was emerging as a serious player in the region through its heavy investments in energy and infrastructure. The Russian determination to keep the post-Soviet states away from the US, the EU and China made the Eurasian project a priority in its foreign policy. The Treaty between Russia and Belarus intended to keep the latter into the Russian fold.[3]

 Eurasianism: The Idea

Eurasianism as an idea predates the Soviet Union. The Russian identity has been contested by the Occidentalists, the Slavophils and the Eurasianists. The latter claim Russia as the core of the Eurasian civilization. Today, the former Soviet states accept the Russian centrality but not the core-periphery division bet Russia and the rest.

Within Russia itself, the Eurasianists always considered the Soviet Union to be a Greater Russia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Eurasian political project is to reunite the Russians from the former Soviet territories and ultimately to establish a Russian state for all the Russians. Aleksander Dugin is an ideologue and activist for neo-Eurasianism in Russia. His political activities are directed at restoring the Soviet space and unification of the Russian-speaking people. The South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity is a sworn Eurasianist himself and eager to make his country a part of Russia.

Organization and Accomplishments

The Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the governing body of the EES is set up in Moscow for the time being. Kazakhstan has already staked its claim to host its permanent headquarters. The formula under which the 350-member body would be filled allots Russians 84 percent of staff, the Kazakhs 10 percent and the Belarusians a mere 6 percent. The formula has been worked out on the basis of the population in the three countries. The expenses towards accommodation and infrastructure would be borne by Russia.

The EEC will be eligible to make decisions with regard to customs policies, as also the issues relating to macroeconomics, regulation of economic competition, energy policy, and financial policy. The Commission will also be involved in government procurement and labour migration control.[4] The right of the EEC to sign contracts on behalf of all of them is contested.

The Supreme Eurasian Union Council will be the apex body of the group. The vice- premiers of the three countries would be leading their countries’ delegations in this body. There are differing opinions on the powers of its apex body.

Eurasian Union is an economic grouping. Its objective is to expand markets and rebuild some of the manufacturing chains destroyed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus had set the process toward this goal and the Eurasian Union is a continuation of the same process.[5]

The EEC has made some progress, in the meantime. It has simplified the trade rules, eliminated border customs and facilitated free movement of goods, services and capital. It has also encouraged migration of labour among its signatories. The trade among the three is estimated to have gone up by forty percent last year alone. Russia has benefitted from cheaper products and labour force from the rest of the two and several hundred Russian enterprises have re-registered in Kazakhstan to avail cheaper tax rates. Kazakhs and Belarusians have found a large market for their products in Russia.

Major hurdles still remain. A common currency has not been agreed to. The pace of economic integration is yet another point of debate among the three. Belarus would not be comfortable with market integration, which would require economic reforms. Eventually, the economic reforms could lead to political reforms and even changes in political system. Belarus is least prepared for such an eventuality.

Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan         

Within Russia, the Eurasianism still holds an appeal; and not just among the marginal groups. The Eurasian Union is perceived as an expression of Eurasianism that would lead to the state of Russia for all Russians. There are calls to invite countries like Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland and even China and Mongolia to join the Eurasian Union. At the leadership level, Putin may also prefer ruling over an expanded space encompassing the entire or most of the former Soviet territory.

The Russian raison d’état for the Eurasian Union cannot be traced to such feelings alone. The missionary zeal to reach out to the neighbours involves subsidizing them. As a general rule, economic integration must necessarily involve mutual benefits for all the parties - even when the benefits are not in equal measure. An economic arrangement does not only eliminate tariffs and other restrictive trade barriers among the signatories, it also formulates and implements tariffs and trade barriers against the non-signatories. Facilitating trade among themselves and restricting trade with the outsiders is the dual track of any economic group. 

As regional integration proceeds in much of the world (not just through the EU but also via NAFTA, ASEAN and Washington’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, among others), the post-Soviet space remains largely on the sidelines. A lack of horizontal trading links and isolation from global markets contribute to the region’s persistent underdevelopment. By reorienting members’ economies to focus on the post-Soviet space, a Eurasian Union would create new barriers between member states and the outside world.[6] Russia is particularly worried about the Chinese forays into its neighbourhood. And the EU Eastern Partnership Programme threatens to encroach into the space that Moscow considers its own sphere of influence.

A second powerful reason for Russia to reach out to its neighbours is that the neighbours are steadily making Russia their home. The influx of migrants from the former Soviet territories has generated a lot of resentment and will soon become a serious political issue. In the circumstances, helping to improve the economic situation beyond the Russian borders and assimilate the new arrivals in a common citizenship is being considered. The then president Dmitry Medvedev explicitly linked the issue of immigrants to the expansion of the state borders. He spoke of the time when the giant state had to comprise different nationalities that created “Soviet People”. "We should not be shy when bringing back the ideas of ethnic unity. Yes, we are all different but we have common values and a desire to live in a single big state," he said.[7]

Russia is not single-mindedly committed to the Eurasian Union. It has initiated and nurtured several other multi-lateral organizations and become a member of scores of others initiated by others. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan[8] is one such. So is the Commonwealth of Independent States comprising most of the post-Soviet countries. It is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that is clearly a China-led group. The Quadrilateral Forum comprising Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan is a Russian project.

It has not shied away from making deals with the EU, either. In 2003, it entered into an agreement with the EU to create four common spaces: 1. of freedom, security and justice; 2. cooperation in the field of external security; 3. economy; and 4. research, education and cultural exchange. Since the formalisation of the Customs Union, Putin has insisted that the EU formalise its relations with the Customs Union before a new basic treaty between the EU and Russia could be formalised. At the EU-Russia Summit in June 2012, he also sought the EU support for the Kazakh and Belarusian bids to join the WTO.[9]

Kazakhstan has formulated and pursued a “multivector” foreign policy since independence. It seeks good relations with its two large neighbours as also with the West. Its operational idiom, therefore, is “diversify, diversify and diversify”.

Its relations with the US are centred on counter-terrorism. In Central Asia, it is now the most favoured US partner in the war on terror. It has welcomed the US-sponsored New Silk Road. The Aktau Sea port is expected to emerge as the capital city on this cross-Caspian Road as the central point for transportation, regional educational cooperation and tourism. The Transportation and Logistics Centre is being developed in the city. Aktau hopes to play a role within the New Silk Road that Samarkand played in the Old Silk Road.[10]

Its relations with Europe are as good. Its bilateral cooperation with the EU dates back to 1999, when it entered into the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with it. The European Commission has agreed to support its application for membership of the WTO. On 1 January 2010, Kazakhstan became the first post-Soviet state to assume the chairmanship of the 56-member Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Its trade with the EU accounts for as much as the trade of all the Central Asian countries put together. France has a trade agreement with it that is worth $2 billion under which France would help build a space station and cooperate on nuclear development.

It is its close ties – in fact, too close ties – with China that explains its active membership of the Eurasian Union. China’s presence in the country is pervasive. In 2005, the Asatu-Alashanku oil pipeline between the two countries went into use. The second stage of the same from Kenkyiak to Kumkol is already in works. A gas pipeline is being discussed. In the same year, China bought Petrokazakhstan that was the former Soviet Union’s largest independent oil company. At $4.18 billion, it was the largest foreign purchase ever by a Chinese company. In 2009, it gained a stake in the MangistauMunaiGas, a subsidiary of the KazMunaiGas, which is the Kazakh national upstream and downstream operator representing the interests of the state in the petroleum sector. Even as economic ties get stronger, there could be a point of friction between the two regarding the Uighur-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement in the Xinjiang province of China. There are 180,000 Kazakhs of Uighur descent, which is a source of discomfort to China.

Belarus is a landlocked country and dependent on Russia for import of raw materials and export to the foreign markets. Its dependence on Russia is aggravated by the fact that the US has passed the “Belarus Democracy Act”, which authorizes funding for pro-democracy Belarusian NGOs and prevents loans to the government. The EU has imposed a visa ban on its president Alexander Lukashenko. Even as the Belarus’s dependence on Russia is overwhelming, their bilateral relations have gone through severe frictions. In 2004, there was a gas dispute as Russia stopped the gas supply for six months before a compromise on the price was worked out.

In 2009, the two fought what has come to be called “milk wars”. Moscow banned import of Belarusian dairy products, claiming that they did not meet Russian packaging standards, a non-tariff measure allowed under the common customs code. The disagreement cost Belarus approximately $1 billion. The real problem was that Belarusian farmers were heavily subsidized, meaning that the cost of milk production in Belarus was substantially lower than that in Russia. As a result, Russian dairy producers were on the verge of bankruptcy and looked to their government for support. In response to Russian action, Belarus introduced a ban on the purchase of Russian agricultural machinery, accusing Russia of not providing leasing for Belarusian tractors (a major source of income for Belarus).[11]

Destination Ukraine?

Ukraine is the raison d’être for the entire Eurasian project, according to many. “Once past the verbal hype, it becomes clear that in fact it [Eurasian Union] has nothing to do with Eurasia and has everything to do with a single country, which, incidentally, is situated in Europe of all places: Ukraine,” according to an analyst.[12] Its key task is to draw Kiev into the integration project.

The primary reason for Russian stake in Ukraine is the Ukraine-Russia-Turkmen gas pipeline. Till the break-up of the Soviet Union, it was a domestic grid. Today, the gas trade between Turkmenistan, Russia and Ukraine is not just a commercial proposition, but an illustration of triangular dependencies of the three countries. The key issues in terms of transit are that all Turkmenistan’s gas exports outside Central Asia pass through Russia, which puts the latter in complete control of around three-quarters of Turkmenistan’s exports. Russia’s position vis-à-vis Ukraine is extremely vulnerable in that more than ninety percent of its gas exports to Europe pass through that country.

Thus, Ukraine is the transit point as well as the choke point of the Turkmen and Russian exports. It has also been a leaking point of the deliveries. In early 1990s, there were serious disruptions as Ukraine pilfered the gas for its own domestic use. Since then the gas deliveries have become an important issue in the political and security relationship between Russia and Ukraine, having featured in the package of agreements which have included issues such as the future of the Black Sea Fleet and Ukrainian nuclear weapons. There was a serious stand-off between the two in 2009, when the Russians cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine over price dispute. A compromise was reached only after Ukraine agreed to pay more for the gas that was, till then, subsidised.[13]

The second most important Russian stake in Ukraine is that Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula hosts a Russian navy base whose lease term was extended for twenty-five years in 2010 by a special agreement between Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Viktor Yanukovych, despite an unresolved gas dispute. This facility provides Moscow with strategic military capabilities in an area that Russia once considered crucial for the security of its southwestern borders and its geopolitical influence near the “warm seas.”[14] In return for the extension of the lease, Russia agreed to a thirty percent drop in the price of natural gas it sold to Ukraine.

A third reason for Russian interest in Ukraine could be that the latter represents a promising market of 45 million potential consumers, in the context where Russia seeks to diversify its own economy and export destinations.

Russian diplomacy to retain control over Ukraine and the US diplomacy to extend its control over the same have repeatedly to come to a clash. Till recently, Ukraine was pointedly excluded from both the EU and the NATO expansions[15]; as also from the list of possible invitees. Since the “Orange Revolution”, the situation has radically changed. How the energy pipeline politics plays out in the changed circumstances remains to be seen.

For its part, Ukraine has not closed its options between the EU and the Eurasian Union. Its prime minister Mykola Azarov, speaking at a meeting to discuss “Ukraine at the Crossroads: The EU and/or the Eurasian Union: Benefits and Challenges” said, “Ukraine has never contrasted one economic organization with the other and we cannot do that from many points of view. We are in ‘between’ and we must have friends both here and there.”[16]

Conclusions

There is no Eurasian Union todate. And yet, it has been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny as also of prescriptive analysis. Its future membership, the direction of its evolution and the gamut of its activities must remain speculative in the meanwhile.

In lieu of the final conclusions, some tentative recapitulation of the above is in order. The Russians aim to retain the former Soviet space within their own sphere of influence, seeking to diminish the US, Chinese and the EU presence out of it to the extent possible. The Kazakhs are keeping all their options open: seeking a central role in the US-sponsored war on terror and the New Silk Road, permitting pervasive Chinese presence in their economy, promoting bilateral and institutional ties with the EU, and becoming a member of the Eurasian Union. “Diversify” is the name of the Kazakh game. Belarus is landlocked and dependent on Russia for its trade exports and imports, and the Belarus president is persona non grata in much of the West. Under the circumstances, the Eurasian Union is a solution to much of its problems.

Ukraine has signed a Memorandum of Understanding on trade cooperation with Eurasian Economic Commission. Much will depend on whether and when Ukraine decides to join the Eurasian Union.

Published in Journal of Eurasian Affairs

---

[1] The Kazakh people like to point out that Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazabaev was the first leader to propose the Eurasian Union in 1994. Chinara Esengul, “Regional Cooperation”, March 27, 2012. http://www.asiapathways-adbi.org/2012/03/does-the-eurasian-union-have-a-future/

[2] Kambiz Behi and Daniel Wagner, “Russia’s Growing Economic Influence in Europe and beyond”,  23 July 2012. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kambiz-behi/russias-growing-economic-influence_b_1696304.html

[3]  On 30 September 2011, Belarus withdrew from the EU initiative citing discrimination and substitution of the founding principles. Three days thereafter, it refuted its decision to withdraw. The EU-Russia competition was obviously at work in quick turnarounds in Belarusian position.

[4] Retrieved from news.mail.ru and kremlin.ru in Russian. Quoted in Wikipedia, “Eurasian Union”.

[5] The Customs Union came into existence on 1 January 2010. Removing the customs barriers among them, the countries took the first step towards economic integration.

[6]Jeffrey Mankoff, “What a Eurasian Union Means for Washington”, National Interest  http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/what-eurasian-union-means-washington-6821

[7] Gleb Bryanski, “Putin, Medvedev Praise Values of the Soviet Union”, Reuters, 17 November 2011,  http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/11/17/idINIndia-60590820111117   

[8] In June 2012, Uzbekistan decided to suspend its membership of the CSTO.

[9] http://www.euractiv.com/europes-east/putin-promotes-eurasian-union-eu-news-513123 “Putin Promotes Eurasian Union at the EU Summit”, 5 June 2012

[10] “Kazakhstan: U S Interest in Global Hub on the Caspian”, http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/kazakhstan-aktau-united-states-caspian-sea-caucasus-trade-afghanistan-silk-road-strategy

[11] Behi and Wagner, n. 2

[12] Fyodor Lukyanov, gazeta.ru. 17 September 2012. Quoted in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russianow/opinion/9548428/eurasian-union-explanation.html   

[13] The Ukrainian prime minister at that time, Yulia Tomashenko, has since been sentenced to seven years in prison for abusing the authority and signing the deal.

[14]  Georgiy Voloshin, “Russia’s Eurasian Union: A Bid for Hegemony?”, http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/russias-eurasian-union-a-bid-for-hegemony-4730

[15] Putin was reported to have declared at the NATO-Russian Summit in 2008 that if Ukraine were to join the NATO, he would consider annexing the Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in retaliation.

[16] http://www.kyivpost.com/content/politics/azarov-ukraine-never-contrasted-eu-with-eurasian-u-1-127756.html  Kyivpost, 17 May 2012.

 

Раздел: 

Евразия

Регион: 

Россия

Теги: 

Eurasian Union

geopolitics

Russia

Eurasia

Vers un chasseur russo-brésilien?

Résilience de la NSA ...

Vers un chasseur russo-brésilien?

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org

Ce qui paraît à la fois logique et inévitable depuis le début des sidérantes aventures de la NSA au Brésil, révélées par Greenwald & Cie, se concrétise. Les premiers jalons sont posés pour une éventuelle coopération entre le Brésil et la Russie pour un avion de combat, disons russo-brésilien, qui pourrait être considéré à partir de l’hypothèse d’un développement du modèle russe de cinquième génération (le Soukhoi T-50, programme russe avec déjà une coopération indienne), ou d’une extrapolation de ce programme. La chose (l’exploration d’une coopération) a été dévoilée après une rencontre entre le ministre russe de la défense et le ministre brésilien de la défense. Le ministre russe a fait une visite fructueuse en Amérique du Sud, continent d’ores et déjà antiaméricaniste où la Russie voudrait renforcer ses ventes stratégiques d’armement. De façon plus concrète pour un autre domaine, la rencontre au Brésil devrait déboucher sur la finalisation, début 2014, d’un contrat entre le Brésil et la Russie pour un ensemble de missiles sol-air pour une valeur annoncée de un $milliard, avec transfert de technologies.

Pour ce qui concerne l’avion de combat, une dépêche AFP du 16 octobre 2013 dit ceci, en y ajoutant un cas hors-domaine où un geste des Russes pourrait faire avancer le dossier : «Brazil said Wednesday it hopes to develop state-of-the-art combat aircraft with Russia, and purchase surface-to-air missile batteries from Moscow. [...] “We are very interested in discussing projects relating to fifth generation (combat) aircraft with new partners,” Defense Minister Celso Amorim told reporters after talks here with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu. “The issue was mentioned as a basis for discussion, but it is for the medium term.” [...]

» [Shoigu] stop in Brazil also coincides with Rousseff pressing for the release of a Brazilian biologist detained in Russia along with 29 other Greenpeace activists after protesting Arctic oil drilling. Ana Paula Maciel was one of 30 activists from 18 countries arrested by Russia in late September and charged with piracy after authorities said they had found “narcotic substances” on the Dutch-flagged Arctic Sunrise, used in their protest.»

La même dépêche mentionne évidemment le contrat actuellement en cours, pour 36 avions de combat pour le Brésil, dits de “quatrième génération”. (Ce concept de “générations” est douteux dans sa signification opérationnelle. Son développement argumentaire constitue plus une manœuvre de relations publiques des USA d’il y a quelques années, pour verrouiller le JSF dans la présentation de son exceptionnalité supposée. L’exceptionnalité du JSF est d’ores et déjà admise, dans le domaine de la catastrophe technologique proche de l’impasse bien entendu, mais le mythe de la “génération” comme facteur rupturiel de progrès survit, de la quatrième des chasseurs actuels à la cinquième des chasseurs nouveaux “du futur”. L’argument de RP s’insère du fait de la catastrophe-JSF dans l’image d’un mythe de plus en plus érodé et de plus en plus contestable, cela dans un contexte de mise en cause générale de la fiabilité fondamentale de l’avancement technologique à ce stade, voire d'une impasse pure et simple du technologisme.)

Le contrat 36 avions/4ème génération a connu bien des vicissitudes. Le Rafale était en 2009 un énorme favori, quasiment choisi selon une cohérence française stratégique prometteuse où même la Russie était incluse (voir le 4 septembre 2009) ; il devint bientôt un favori perdu et sans doute sans plus aucune chance à cause de l’effondrement du sens stratégique indépendant de la France (voir le 24 mai 2011). Le F-18 lui a succédé comme favori, selon la logique habituelle des pressions US sur une nouvelle présidente (Rousseff), soucieuse d’améliorer ses relations avec les USA. Tout cela été pulvérisé par la crise Snowden/NSA, touchant d’abord directement le F-18 (voir le 13 août 2013), puis, d’une façon radicale, les relations du Brésil avec les USA (voir le 25 septembre 2013).

... Ainsi tiendra-t-on les assurances du ministre brésilien de la défense sur la poursuite de ce contrat plutôt comme un vœu pieux de l’establishments militaire brésilien que comme une prévision assurée. D’ailleurs, la partie américaniste, comme indiqué également ci-dessous, ne prend plus de gants pour signifier sa position désespérée.

«Amorim said he hoped the fourth-generation aircraft bidding process would be “finalized soon.” But Boeing's bid to win the contract appears to have been damaged by reports of extensive US spying on Brazil. The allegations, based on documents leaked by fugitive US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, led President Dilma Rousseff to cancel a state visit to Washington, putting Boeing's bid on hold, Boeing Brazil chief Donna Hrinak said last week. “The postponement of the visit means that any progress about the issue (aircraft contract) was also postponed,” Hrinak, a former US ambassador to Brazil, said during a seminar on the Brazilian economy.»

En effet, la perspective de ce contrat 36 avions de combat/quatrième génération nous paraît extrêmement réduite. Elle est aujourd’hui réduite de facto au seul Gripen si l’on tient compte de l’effondrement successif probable des offres Rafale et F-18. Un tel achat d’un avion suédois tenu par des contraintes US draconiennes interdisant tout transfert de technologies sur près de 50% de l’avion (moteurs et électronique sont US) n’a plus guère de sens politique ni industriel dans le contexte actuel, alors que le Brésil est dans une position socio-économique tendue, avec une agitation de rue qui rend impopulaire toute dépense publique qui n’est pas vitale. Bien entendu, le climat politique général (la Suède est dans le bloc BAO et sous obédience US affirmée) est un facteur très important allant contre ce choix. Bref, c’est tout le marché des 36 avions de combat/quatrième génération, entièrement appuyé sur des offres du bloc BAO alors qu’il était au départ diversifié par la perception d’une stratégie française indépendante, qui est menacé d'effondrement par la politique du bloc BAO.

La démarche russe a ainsi tout son sens et sa logique, et la probabilité est que le contexte politique va pousser au développement de l’examen du projet envisagé, sinon à son accélération, le moyen terme pouvant notablement se raccourcir. Le vrai problème est d’ordre de la politique industrielle. Le programme russe de cinquième génération, le T-50, est largement orienté vers une coopération avec l’Inde, avec les transferts de technologie qui vont avec, et déjà largement avancé. Le Brésil pourrait-il s’y insérer ? Pourrait-on envisager une version spéciale de coopération pour le Brésil, ou une coopération à deux passant à trois ? La politique dit “oui”, d’autant qu’il s’agit de trois pays-BRICS et que la Russie veut donner une dimension stratégique au BRICS. Les domaines industriel et technologique, avec une bureaucratisation touchant parfois à la paralysie (surtout dans le cas de l’Inde) suggèrent bien plus de réserves alors qu’un tel domaine de la coopération à ce niveau nécessite une très grande souplesse. Plus encore, les problèmes fondamentaux de blocage technologique des projets avancés, illustré magnifiquement par le JSF, jettent une ombre universelle sur tous les projets de cet ordre. Quoi qu’il en soit, il reste que la question est non seulement posée mais ouverte.

Elle est aussi ouverte que la question précédente semble se fermer. La question qui concernait la pénétration stratégique du Brésil par un pays occidental au travers du contrat de quatrième génération actuellement en discussion, semble effectivement avoir obtenu une réponse catastrophique. L’orientation politique des pays concernés ayant évolué vers le standard bloc BAO, on a pu mesurer la profondeur de la catastrophe de la politique française avec Sarkozy à partir de 2009/2010, avec Hollande suivant fidèlement ces traces. Il n’y a guère de commentaire à faire devant l’évidence du constat, sinon à observer une fois de plus que l’“intelligence française” est capable d’accoucher en période de basses eaux son double inverti absolument radical, dans le chef de l’aveuglement et de la fermeture de l’esprit. Quant à la partie américaniste, l’aventure en cours de la désintégration de la NSA, avec ses effets collatéraux colossaux dont celui du Brésil est le fleuron, ne fait que confirmer dans le sens du bouquet de la chose la constance d’un aveuglement qui doit tout, lui, à la sottise profonde d’une politique US de brute force malgré les atours du soft power dont elle prétend se parer (voir le 9 octobre 2013).

Cette affaire des chasseurs brésiliens est exemplaire, quatrième et cinquième générations confondues, ou même sixième pour les experts rêveurs qui pensent, les braves gens pleins d’espoir, à la situation d’ici 10-15 ans... Elle est exemplaire de l’effondrement de la politique de la civilisation occidentale prise comme un bloc (bloc BAO), et dans un temps incroyablement court. Elle est exemplaire aussi de l’affirmation diversifiée et très puissante, et aussi rapide, des pays qu’on a peine à qualifier encore d’“émergents”, notamment les BRICS, et la Russie et la Brésil dans ce cas, dans ce cadre spécifique des renversements politiques. Elle est exemplaire enfin, – cela ne peut être dissimulé car c’est finalement le principal, – de la rapide détérioration de tous les attributs de la “contre-civilisation”, que ce soit les conditions stratégiques, le technologisme, les conditions courantes de la “gouvernance”, etc., et cela aux dépens des principaux producteurs de la chose (le bloc BAO) mais aussi des autres (y compris les BRICS), l’ensemble du monde étant simplement confronté à la réalité terrible d’un effondrement civilisationnel sans aucun précédent historique dans son ampleur et sa rapidité.

La geopolítica rusa del siglo 21

La geopolítica rusa del siglo 21: multipolaridad y ruptura del asa Anaconda

por Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

Ex: http://paginatransversal.wordpress.com

La Jornada, Bajo la Lupa – Entre los prominentes invitados al seminario internacional del Centro de Estudios de la Transición/Centro de Estudios Geoestratégicos de la UAM-X estuvo Sivkov Konstantin Valentinovich, primer vicepresidente de la Academia de Problemas Geopolíticos y doctor en ciencias militares.

Konstantin es segundo de a bordo de Leonid Ivashov, anterior jefe del departamento de asuntos generales en el Ministerio de Defensa de la URSS. Cobra mayor relieve su postura a raíz del triunfo diplomático de Rusia en Siria (ver Bajo la Lupa, 22/9/13).

Ivashov es muy conocido en los multimedia internacionales y sus puntos de vista suelen ser polémicos (v.gr. el terrorismo internacional no existe: su despliegue beneficia a la oligarquía global) y considera que mientras el imperio de Estados Unidos se encuentra al borde del colapso, corresponde a los BRICS la misión de reconfigurar el mundo (Réseau Voltaire, 15/6/11).

De la ponencia de Konstantin, La geopolítica de la URSS y Rusia, me enfocaré en la parte de Rusia.

A su juicio, la lucha geopolítica global basada en la ideología fue cambiada a la confrontación de civilizaciones: la civilización occidental (euro-estadunidense) confronta las civilizaciones ortodoxa, islámica, confuciana (china). Resalta la similitud con la tesis huntingtoniana del choque de civilizaciones que lleva a la inevitabilidad del conflicto de la civilización occidental con el resto (del planeta).

Identifica cuatro de los más importantes factores al desarrollo de la geopolítica mundial:

1. Formación intensiva de un único sistema mundial de poder dominado por EEUU.

2. Intenso crecimiento poblacional y presión al ecosistema por consumismo occidental.

3. Desequilibrio global industrial y de materias primas: el mayor potencial industrial se concentra en EEUU/Europa/Japón, mientras los recursos de materias primas se concentran en Rusia y en los países del tercer mundo, y

4. El carácter independiente de las trasnacionales como sujeto geopolítico

La activación de los cuatro actores genera una crisis global por la contradicción entre el consumismo y la escasez de materias primas. Define a Rusia como una entidad geopolítica cuya base es Eurasia.

Su inmenso potencial intelectual, su posición del centro euroasiático y su potencial militar significativo pone en duda la durabilidad del modelo unidireccional sin remover (sic) a Rusia como sujeto de la geopolítica” a la que habría que demoler como a su antecesora URSS.

Arguye que la etapa más lúgubre de la historia de Rusia en la década de los 90 del siglo 20 (nota: la era entreguista Yeltsin) encontró a la élite política rusa bajo el control total (¡supersic!) de EEUU.

Ocurre el desmantelamiento científico de Rusia y la privatización de sus joyas geoestratégicas, llegando hasta el asesinato de sus principales científicos, mientras las principales empresas de petróleo/gas e infraestructura de transporte acabaron en manos de compradores (sic) domésticos y trasnacionales.

Así la geopolítica de Rusia operó bajo el control directo de los servicios de espionaje de EEUU: capitulación total. ¡Uf!

Peor aún: el liderazgo ruso fomentó la de-sintegración interna. Pero no contaron con la resistencia oculta de los bajos niveles de la jerarquía y las protestas de la población que hicieron fracasar el esquema desintegrativo que permitió la llegada al poder de Putin, con su equipo proveniente de las fuerzas armadas y los servicios de seguridad, como nuevo estadio de la geopolítica rusa.

Considera que el fracaso de las campañas de Irak y Afganistán, la liberación de Sudamérica de la hegemonía de EEUU, en particular Venezuela, y el fracaso de la operación (¡supersic!) Primavera Árabe, debilitaron la influencia de EEUU en Rusia cuando Occidente exhibió sus pies de barro.

Rusia se libera así de su subordinación a los dictados de EEUU en la esfera de la geopolítica global y comienza un regreso suave a los principios de la geopolítica soviética, pero con diferentes bases conceptuales e ideológicas.

Juzga que los instrumentos más importantes de la influencia geopolítica rusa fueron creados con el único plan de una red de oleo/gasoductos.

A partir de la derrota de EEUU en Irak, Rusia operó un acercamiento con China cuando estableció sus tres proyectos geopolíticos exitosos: el Grupo de Shanghai, los BRICS y la Unión Euroasiática. El Grupo de Shanghai genera el espacio euroasiático de Bielorrusia a China mediante una unión económica.

Los BRICS han cortado en términos económicos el asa Anaconda (nota: del nombre de la ominosa serpiente constrictora más grande del mundo) rompiendo una profunda brecha en el sistema de zonas, la influencia de EEUU que cubre a Rusia.

En una entrevista a Pravda.ru (15/9/11), Konstantin explica el significado del cerco a Rusia por EEUU y su despliegue misilístico en la periferia inmediata rusa, parte del proyecto Anaconda: Rusia es todavía percibida por EEUU como el principal adversario estratégico y su tarea consiste en neutralizar las armas nucleares de Rusia y empujarlo fuera de las principales áreas de los océanos mundiales, aun del mar Negro.

La Unión Euroasiática (Rusia, Bielorrusia y Kazajstán) cubre 85 por ciento del territorio de la ex URSS y es el precursor de mayor integración en el espacio postsoviético.

Rusia se pronuncia por la multipolaridad, en cooperación particular con Europa continental que desea sacudirse la hegemonía de EEUU.

Juzga que los cambios tectónicos en la geopolítica global asociados a la transferencia del centro económico de gravedad a la región Asia/Pacífico, sumado de la crisis financiera occidental, implican la inevitabilidad de una seria reorganización del panorama geopolítico, acoplado con la amenaza de conflictos militares de gran escala (sic).

Aduce que el triunfo presidencial de Putin significó una fuerte derrota para las fuerzas occidentales internas en Rusia, lo cual disminuyó considerablemente su impacto en la geopolítica rusa, ya que el control occidental del país es un factor crítico para la restauración y conservación de la dominación del mundo por Occidente.

Los vectores prioritarios de la geopolítica rusa: 1. Al oeste: desarrollo de relaciones igualitarias con Europa y normalización de relaciones con EEUU, para prevenir el desliz a una nueva guerra fría. 2. Al sur: la zona del Cáucaso, medioriente y noráfrica, donde Rusia aspira a normalizar la situación militar y política y frenar los conflictos militares, sobre todo en Siria (¡supersic!) 3. En Sudamérica (nota: no Norteamérica ni Centroamérica: desarrollo de relaciones económicas), y 4. En Asia: el más importante hoy (¡supersic!) para Rusia donde se compromete a un mayor reforzamiento de buenas relaciones con sus grandes vecinos China e India, Vietnam, las dos (sic) Coreas, y la normalización de relaciones con Japón.

Llama la atención que Konstantin no haya citado la invasión de Georgia a Osetia del Sur y la vigorosa respuesta rusa que, a mi juicio, cambió dramáticamente al mundo (El mundo cambió en el Cáucaso; Bajo la Lupa, 20/8/08).

Ahora al unísono de Rusia, la misma serpiente constrictora Anaconda ha reaparecido en el océano Pacífico, donde tiene en la mira a la apetecible China, muy difícil de digerir.

Fuente: alfredojalife.com

Twitter: @AlfredoJalife

Facebook: AlfredoJalife

Kopp online 319

Nr. 319 vom 17.10.2013
Crash-Gefahr in den USA steigt: die Hintergründe Redaktion Die Einigung der Politik in den USA auf eine neue Schuldenobergrenze wurde weltweit erleichtert kommentiert. Dieses Theater jedoch ist für objektive Betrachter nicht nachzuvollziehen. Denn das Problem wurde nicht aufgeschoben, sondern sogar noch verschlimmert. mehr
Geopolitische Kräfteverlagerung: Russland sucht Handel und Investitionen mit China F. William Engdahl Während sich die meisten Medien im Westen auf den Fortschritt bei den Gesprächen über die dubiose, von den USA unterstützte Transpazifische Partnerschaft (TPP) zur Liberalisierung des Handels konzentrieren - China ist von den Verhandlungen ausgeschlossen -, zeigt man sich darüber in China nicht allzu betrübt. Denn zurzeit werden Investitionen und Handelsbeziehungen im und zum Nachbarland Russland, dem ehemaligen Gegner im Kalten Krieg, stark ausgeweitet. Die auf den ersten Blick unspektakulären Vereinbarungen deuten auf eine tektonische geopolitische Verschiebung hin, die dem Westen, vor allem den USA, noch zu schaffen machen wird. mehr

 

The ceremonial changing of the Guard at the Kremlin, Russia

Entretien avec Aymeric Chauprade sur la Russie

"Si la Russie court derrière le modèle occidental, elle sera toujours en retard"

Entretien avec Aymeric Chauprade

Propos recueillis par Alexandre Latsa

Ex: http://fr.rian.ru

Aymeric Chauprade bonjour, pourriez-vous vous présenter aux lecteurs de RIA-Novosti qui ne vous connaîtraient pas?

Je suis géopolitologue. Une formation scientifique d'abord (mathématiques) puis de sciences politiques (docteur) et dix années titulaire de la Chaire de géopolitique de l'Ecole de Guerre à Paris, entre 1999 et 2009. J'ai aussi enseigné la géopolitique et l'histoire des idées politiques en France à la Sorbonne et en Suisse à l'Université de Neuchâtel.

Je suis maintenant également consultant international et très heureux de travailler de plus en plus avec la Russie. Mais je suis également souvent en Amérique Latine et j'ai des réseaux africains développés.

Vous êtes considéré comme l’un des fondateurs de la nouvelle géopolitique française, pluridisciplinaire, attentive à décrire le « continu et le discontinu » dans l’analyse des questions internationales, pourriez vous expliquer aux lecteurs de RIA-Novosti ce qu’il en est exactement?

Je me rattache au courant dit réaliste qui tient compte de la force des facteurs de la géographie physique, identitaire et des ressources, dans l'analyse des relations internationales. Mais pour autant, je ne néglige pas les facteurs idéologiques. Ils viennent en combinaison des facteurs classiques de la géopolitique que j'évoquais à l'instant à savoir les déterminants liés à l'espace, aux hommes dans leur identité culturelle (ethnie, religion...), et à la quête des ressources. J'insiste sur la multicausalité (il n'y a pas de cause unique mais chaque situation est la combinaison unique, un peu comme l'ADN d'une personne, d'une multiplicité de facteurs déterminants) et sur la multidisciplinarité (je refuse l'idée que ma matière, la géopolitique, puisse rendre compte à elle seule de la complexité de l'histoire ; attention au "tout géopolitique", au "tout économique" ou "tout sociologique"). La tentation de tout expliquer par sa discipline, comme le font beaucoup les sociologues aujourd'hui, est une dérive née de l'hyperspécialisation qui nous éloigne de l'époque des savants généralistes, ces savants du XVIe siècle qui étaient à la fois philosophes, mathématiciens et souvent hommes de lettres!

Quant au "continu et au discontinu" c'est ce souci qui me vient de ma première formation scientifique de séparer la dimension continue et même parfois linéaire des phénomènes, de leur dimension discontinue et parfois erratique. Il faut savoir suivre les courbes des facteurs de temps long (la démographie par exemple) mais il faut aussi savoir lire les discontinuités, les sauts, de l'Histoire.

Vous avez le mois dernier été invité au prestigieux Forum Valdaï, cofondé par RIA-Novosti. Pourriez-vous nous faire part de vos impressions sur ce forum?

D'abord j'ai été très honoré de figurer parmi les nouveaux invités du Forum de Valdaï. Ce fut une expérience véritablement passionnante. Les débats sont de qualité, l'organisation rigoureuse. C'est une sorte de Davos russe mais avec une différence notable : il n'y a pas de pensée unique mondialiste unanimement partagée. Des sensibilités différentes sont représentées. Si l'on voulait simplifier d'un côté, les Occidentalistes qui, Russes ou Occidentaux, célèbrent le "modèle démocratique occidental", essentiellement américain et considèrent que celui-ci doit être l'horizon vers lequel doit tendre la société russe, et de l'autre côté, les partisans d'un modèle original russe, dont je fais partie, bien que n'étant pas russe, qui considèrent que la Russie n'est pas seulement une nation, mais une civilisation, dont la profondeur historique est telle qu'elle permet de proposer aux Russes un modèle original. A Valdai, j'ai beaucoup entendu les Occidentalistes se lamenter du fait que la Russie était encore loin des standards occidentaux, à cause d'un prétendu déficit démocratique et d'une forte corruption. Je n'idéalise pas la Russie sous Poutine qui travaille d'arrache-pied au redressement de ce pays depuis 13 ans ; j'en mesure les maux mais je dis simplement que lorsque l'on parle de corruption il faudrait premièrement rappeler que les indicateurs de mesure sont faits pour l'essentiel par les Occidentaux, et les Américains en particulier, ce qui n'est pas une assurance d'objectivité, et deuxièmement s'intéresser non seulement à la corruption de l'Occident lui-même mais à son fort pouvoir corrupteur dans les pays en voie de développement!

Par ailleurs je considère que si la Russie court derrière le modèle occidental, elle sera toujours en retard. Bien au contraire, un pays qui a su pousser si loin la création artistique et scientifique, me paraît plus que capable de proposer un contre-modèle, lequel ne devra pas être fondé sur la toute puissance de l'individualisme, mais au contraire sur l'âme russe, sur la dimension spirituelle de ce pays. Il faut faire attention à une chose : le communisme, comme rouleau compresseur de l'esprit critique et de la dimension spirituelle de l'homme, a été un préparateur redoutable pour le projet de marchandisation de l'homme que propose l'individualisme américain.

Je suis convaincu que le retour à la Sainte Russie, au contraire, peut être un formidable réveil du génie créateur russe, qui seul lui permettra de reconstruire, au-delà des hydrocarbures et d'autres secteurs, une économie performante et innovatrice.

La question de l’identité a été extrêmement discutée et le président russe a utilisé une rhétorique eurasiatique pour parler de l’Etat Civilisation russe, pensez vous comme certains que le réveil russe l’éloigne de l’Occident, et donc de l’Europe, et devrait intensifier son rapprochement avec la Chine?

Si la Russie s'éloigne de l'Occident ce sera de la faute de l'Occident américain. La Russie est en effet diabolisée dans les médias américains dominants et par conséquent dans les médias européens qui s'en inspirent. Cette diabolisation est injuste, c'est de la mauvaise foi qui vise à présenter le redressement russe comme agressif alors que celui-ci cherche à consolider sa souveraineté face à l'impérialisme américain qui fait glisser les frontières de l'OTAN aux frontières de la Russie et de la Chine.

La Russie développe ses relations avec la Chine, dans le cadre notamment du groupe de Shangaï et aussi parce que les Chinois ont compris que les Russes pouvaient être des partenaires solides dans un monde multipolaire. De fait, ces deux puissances partagent la même vision de l'organisation du monde : elles respectent la souveraineté des Etats, refusent l'ingérence chez les autres, veulent l'équilibre des puissances comme garantie de la paix mondiale. Toutes deux s'opposent au projet unipolaire américain qui, il suffit de le constater, a déclenché une succession de guerres depuis l'effondrement soviétique : Irak, Yougoslavie, Afghanistan, Libye, Syrie maintenant... Où avez-vous vu les Russes dans toutes ces guerres?

Je pense que la Russie ne veut pas se contenter d'un partenariat avec la Chine. Certes la Russie est une puissance eurasiatique, mais il suffit de s'intéresser à son histoire, à son patrimoine culturel, pour voir qu'elle est une puissance profondément européenne et qu'elle n'entend pas se couper de l'Europe. Si les Européens se libéraient de leur dépendance à l'égard des Etats-Unis tout pourrait changer et un fort partenariat stratégique pourrait se nouer entre l'Europe et la Russie.

Vous aviez lancé le 13 juin dernier un « Appel de Moscou », quel regard global portez vous sur la Russie d’aujourd’hui?

D'abord j'essaie de ne pas idéaliser la Russie même si je ne vous cache pas que je me sens extrêmement bien dans ce pays, parce que le matérialisme m'y paraît sans cesse équilibré par une sorte de profondeur d'âme insondable. Je pense que quelque chose est en train de se passer dans la Russie de Poutine et j'espère seulement que le Président Poutine pense à la manière de perpétuer son héritage, car la pire chose qui pourrait arriver ce serait le retour des occidentalistes de l'ère Eltsine, qui prennent la Russie pour un pays du Tiers monde qu'il faudrait mettre aux normes occidentales. L'appel de Moscou que j'ai lancé poursuivait deux buts: d'abord montrer mon soutien au refus russe du programme nihiliste venu d'Occident (mariage homosexuel, théorie du genre, merchandisation du corps), ensuite montrer aux Français qui défendent la famille et les valeurs naturelles que la Russie peut être une alliée précieuse dans ce combat. Je suis très surpris et heureux de constater à quel point mon appel de Moscou lancé à la Douma le 13 juin 2013 a circulé en France dans les milieux catholiques qui se sont mobilisés contre le mariage homosexuel.

Le souverainisme est à vos yeux une notion clef de l’équilibre mondial. Très curieusement ce concept est abandonné en Europe alors qu’en Russie et dans nombre de pays émergents l’affirmation et le maintien de la souveraineté semble au contraire un objectif essentiel. Comment expliquez-vous cette différence d’orientation?

La souveraineté est une évidence pour tous les peuples du monde, et en particulier pour ceux qui ont pris leur indépendance récemment ou qui aspirent à créer un Etat indépendant. Les Européens de l'Ouest, ou plutôt leur fausses élites gouvernantes, sont les seules du monde à avoir abdiqué la souveraineté de leurs peuples. C'est une trahison dont elles devront répondre devant l'Histoire. Des millions de Français ont péri à travers l'Histoire pour défendre la liberté et la souveraineté du peuple français, sous les monarques comme en République. Mon nom est inscrit sur les monuments aux morts français. Si les Français voulaient s'en souvenir, il n'est pas une famille française qui n'ait son nom inscrit sur ces monuments aux morts, de la Première, de la Deuxième ou des guerres de défense de l'Empire français.

Imaginez-vous un Américain ou un Russe abdiquer sa souveraineté? Pour eux le patriotisme est une évidence, qui va d'ailleurs tellement de soi que tout parti affirmant un programme nationaliste en Russie est perçu comme extrémiste parce qu'il n'y a nul besoin là-bas d'affirmer l'évidence. Nos amis russes doivent comprendre en revanche qu'en France ce n'est plus l'évidence et par conséquent qu'il est normal qu'un parti politique qui veut rendre au peuple la souveraineté, mette celle-ci au sommet de son programme!

Aujourd’hui nous assistons à une relative rapide modification des relations internationales, avec le basculement du monde vers l’Asie et la potentielle fin du monde unipolaire. Comment envisagez vous que cette transition puisse se passer?

Ce que je vois c'est que les Etats-Unis refusent de perdre leur premier rang mondial et peuvent créer de grands désordres, peut-être même des guerres de grande ampleur, dans les décennies à venir, et que les Européens, quant à eux, sont dans la gesticulation kantienne, la proclamation de belles leçons de morale qui s'accompagnent d'un déclin en puissance dramatique et donc pathétique.

Au sein de cet basculement, la France semble quant à elle pourtant de plus en plus aligner sa politique étrangère sur les intérêts américains, cela est visible avec la crise en Syrie. Comment l’expliquez-vous?

Je l'explique très simplement. L'oligarchie mondialiste a pris le contrôle des principaux partis de gouvernement français, le PS et l'UMP. La majorité de ses dirigeants ont été initiés dans les grands clubs transatlantiques. Ils ont épousé le programme mondialiste et ne raisonnent plus en patriotes français comme le faisait le général de Gaulle. Lorsque le peuple français l'aura compris, ces fausses élites seront balayés car elles n'ont pour bilan que le déclin en puissance de la France et la perte de sa souveraineté.

Vous avez soutenu Philippe de Villers en 2004, auriez appelé à Voter pour Nicolas Sarkozy en 2007 et vous venez de vous ranger au coté de Marine Le Pen. Souhaitez-vous désormais entamer une carrière politique?

Le mot carrière ne me va guère. Si j'avais choisi de faire une carrière dans le système, alors j'aurais choisi de proclamer autre chose que des vérités qui dérangent. Je n'ai qu'une ambition, pouvoir dire à mes enfants, au seuil de la mort, que j'ai fait ce que je pouvais pour défendre la liberté et la souveraineté du peuple français. J'ai soutenu Philippe de Villiers que je respecte.

Mais je n'ai jamais appelé à voter pour Nicolas Sarkozy, que je vois comme soumis aux intérêts américains. Je ne sais qui a pu dire une chose pareille mais je vous mets au défi de trouver un seul texte de soutien de ma part à Nicolas Sarkozy. C'est d'ailleurs son gouvernement, en la personne de son ministre de la défense Hervé Morin, qui m'a brutalement écarté de l'Ecole de Guerre parce j'étais trop attaché à l'indépendance de la France et que je m'opposait au retour de la France dans les structures intégrées de l'OTAN. Donc de grâce que l'on ne dise jamais que j'ai soutenu ou appelé à voter Sarkozy.

En revanche, oui je soutiens Marine le Pen et il est possible que je joue prochainement un rôle sur la scène politique à ses côtés. Marine a un caractère fort, une carapace héritée des coups que son père a pris pendant tant d'années, et je la sens donc capable de prendre en main avec courage le destin du pays. Le courage plus que l'intelligence est ce qui manque aux pseudo-élites françaises, lesquelles sont conformistes et soumises à l'idéologie mondialiste par confort.

Comment envisageriez vous la relation franco-russe?

Je l'ai dit et je le redis haut et fort. Si le Front national arrive au pouvoir, il rompra avec l'OTAN et proposera une alliance stratégique avec la Russie. Ce sera un tremblement de terre énorme au niveau international et c'est la raison pour laquelle, avant d'arriver en haut des marches, et même avec le soutien du peuple, il nous faudra affronter des forces considérables. Nous y sommes prêts. Et n'oubliez pas que la France est le pays de Jeanne d'Arc. Tout est possible donc, même quand tout semble perdu!

Merci Aymeric Chauprade.

Les lecteurs souhaitant en savoir plus peuvent consulter votre blog ou le site Realpolitik-TV.

L’opinion exprimée dans cet article ne coïncide pas forcément avec la position de la rédaction, l'auteur étant extérieur à RIA Novosti.

Alexandre Latsa est un journaliste français qui vit en Russie et anime le site DISSONANCE, destiné à donner un "autre regard sur la Russie".

La era de la ginecocracia

La era de la ginecocracia

por Evgueni Golovín*

Ex: http://paginatransversal.wordpress.com

Muchos libros en nuestro siglo se han escrito sobre la visión del mundo femenina, sobre la psicología femenina y el erotismo femenino. Muy pocos fueron escritos sobre los hombres. Y estos pocos estudios dejan una impresión bastante desoladora. Dos de ellos, escritos por conocidos sociólogos son especialmente sombríos: Paul Duval – “Hombres. El sexo en vías de extinción”, David Riseman – “El mito del hombre en América”. La multitud masculina de rostros variopintos no inspira optimismo. Al contemplar a la multitud masculina uno se entristece: “él”, “ello”, “ellos”… con sus discretos trajes, corbatas mal atadas… sus estereotipados movimientos y gestos están sometidos a la fatal estrategia de la más pulcra pesadilla. Tienen prisa porque “están ocupados”. ¿Ocupados en qué? En conseguir el dinero para sus hembras y los pequeños vampiros que están creciendo.

Son cobardes y por eso les gusta juntarse en manadas. Si prescindimos de las refinadas divagaciones, la cobardía no es más que una tendencia centrípeta, deseo de encontrar un centro seguro y estable. Los hombres tienen miedo de sus propias ideas, de los bandidos, de los jefes, de “la opinión pública”, de las arañas que se chupan el dinero y que lo dan. Pero las mujeres son las que más miedo les dan. “Ella” camina multicolor y bien centrada, su pecho vibra tentadoramente… y los ansiosos ojos siguen sus curvas, y la carne se rebela dolorosamente. Su frialdad – qué desgracia, su compasión erótica – ¡qué felicidad! “Ella” es la materia formada de manera atrayente en este mundo material, en el que vivimos solo una vez, “ella” – es una idea, un ídolo, sus emergentes encantos saltan de los carteles, portadas de revistas y pantallas. “Ella” es un bien concreto. El cuerpo femenino bonito cuesta caro, tal vez más barato que “La maja desnuda” de Goya, pero hay que pagarlo. Una prostituta cobra por horas, la amante o la esposa, naturalmente, piden mucho más. El lema del matrimonio estadounidense es sex for support. Las puertas del paraíso sexual se abren con la llavecita de oro. El cuerpo masculino sin cualificar y sin muscular no vale nada.

La realidad de la civilización burguesa

Aunque nos acusen de cargar las tintas, la situación sigue siendo triste. La igualdad, emancipación, feminismo son los síntomas del creciente dominio femenino, porque la “igualdad de los sexos” no es más que otro fantasma demagógico de turno. El hombre y la mujer debido a la marcada diferencia de su orientación están luchando permanentemente de forma abierta o encubierta, y el carácter del ciclo histórico-social depende del dominio de uno u otro sexo. El hombre por naturaleza es centrípeto, se mueve de izquierda a derecha, hacia adelante, de abajo a arriba. En la mujer es todo al revés. El impulso “puramente masculino” es entregar y apartar, el impulso “puramente femenino” es quitar y conservar. Claro que se trata de impulsos muy esquemáticos, porque cada ser en mayor o menor medida es andrógino, pero está claro que de la ordenación y armonización de estos impulsos depende el bienestar del individuo en particular y de la sociedad en su conjunto, pero semejante armonía es imposible sin la activa irracionalidad del eje del ser, convencimiento intuitivo de la certeza del sistema de valores propios, la instintiva fe en lo acertado del camino propio. De otro modo la energía centrípeta o destrozará al hombre, o le obligará a buscar algún centro y punto de aplicación de sus fuerzas en el mundo exterior. Lo cual lleva a la destrucción de la individualidad y a la total pérdida de control del principio masculino propio. La energía erótica en vez de activar y templar el cuerpo, como ocurre en un organismo normal, comienza a dictar al cuerpo sus propias condiciones vitales.

La androginia del ser está provocada por la presencia femenina en la estructura psicosomática masculina. La “mujer oculta” se manifiesta en el nivel anímico y espiritual como el principio regulador que sujeta o el ideal estrellado del “cielo interior”. El hombre debe mantener la fidelidad hacia esta “bella dama”, la aventura amorosa es la búsqueda de su equivalente terrenal. En el caso contrario estará cometiendo una infidelidad cardinal, existencial.

¿Pero de qué estamos hablando?

Del amor.

La mayoría de los hombres actuales pensarán que se trata de tonterías románticas, que solo valen cuando se habla de los trovadores y caballeros. Oigan, nos dirán, todos nosotros – mujeres y hombres – vivimos en un mundo cruel y tecnificado en condiciones de lucha y competencia. Todos por igual dependemos de estas duras realidades, y en este sentido se puede hablar de la igualdad de los sexos. En cuanto a la dependencia del sexo, sabrá que en todos los tiempos ha habido obsesos y erotómanos. En efecto, las mujeres ahora juegan mucho mayor papel, pero no es suficiente para hablar de no se sabe qué “matriarcado”.

Ciertamente, no se puede hablar del “matriarcado” en la actualidad en el sentido estricto. Según Bachofen, el matriarcado es más bien un concepto jurídico, relacionado con el “derecho de las madres”. Pero perfectamente podemos ocuparnos de la ginecocracia, del dominio de la mujer, debido a la orientación eminentemente femenina de la Historia Moderna. Aquí está la definición de Bachofen:

“El ser ginecocrático es el naturalismo ordenado, el predominio de lo material, la supremacía del desarrollo físico”

J.J. Bachofen. Mutterrecht, 1926, p. 118

Nadie podrá negar el éxito de la Época Moderna en este sentido. A lo largo de los últimos dos siglos en la psicología humana se ha producido un cambio fundamental. De entrada a la naturaleza masculina le son antipáticas las categorías existenciales tales como “la propiedad” y el tiempo en el sentido de “duración”. El carácter centrípeto, explosivo del falicismo exige instantes y “segundos” que están fuera de la “duración”, que no se componen en “duración”. El destino ideal del hombre es avanzar hacia adelante, superar la pesadez terrenal, buscar y conquistar nuevos horizontes del ser, despreciando su vida, si por vida se entiende la existencia homogénea, rutinaria, prolongada en el tiempo. Los valores masculinos son el desinterés, la bondad, el honor, la interpretación celestial de la belleza. Desde este punto de vista, “Lord Jim” de Joseph Conrad es casi la última novela europea sobre un “hombre de verdad”. Jim, simple marinero, ofendido en su honor, no lo puede perdonar, ni superar. Por eso el autor le concedió el título, porque el honor es el privilegio y el valor de la nobleza. El justo y el caballero errante son los auténticos hombres.

Podrán replicar: si todos se ponen a hacer de Quijote o a hablar con los pájaros ¿en qué se convertirá la sociedad humana? Es difícil contestar a esta pregunta, pero es fácil observar en qué se convertiría dicha sociedad sin San Francisco y sin Don Quijote. Don Quijote es mucho más necesario para la sociedad que una docena de consorcios automovilísticos.

La civilización burguesa es medio civilización, es un sinsentido. Para crear la civilización hacen falta los esfuerzos conjuntos de los cuatro estamentos.

Decimos: centralización, centrípeto. Sin embargo no es nada fácil definir el concepto “centro”. El centro puede ser estático o errante, manifestado o no, se puede amarlo u odiarlo, se puede saber de él, o sospechar, o presentirlo con la sutilísima y engañosa antena de la intuición. Es posible haber vivido la vida sin tener ni idea acerca del centro de la existencia propia. Se trata del paradójico e inmóvil móvil de Aristóteles. En el centro coinciden las fuerzas centrífugas y las centrípetas. Cuando una de ellas apaga a la otra el sistema o explota o se detiene en una muerte gélida. Es evidente: lo incognoscible del centro garantiza su centralidad, porque el centro percibido y explicado siempre se arriesga a trasladarse hacia la periferia. De ahí la conclusión: el centro permanente no se puede conocer, hay que creer en él. Por eso Dios, honor, bien, belleza son centros permanentes. Es la condición principal de la actividad masculina dirigida, radial.

En los dos primeros estamentos – el sacerdotal y el de la nobleza – la actividad masculina, entendida de esta forma, domina sobre la femenina. Y únicamente con la posición normal, es decir alta, de estos estamentos se crea la civilización, en todo caso la civilización patriarcal. El burgués reconoce los valores ideales nominalmente, pero prefiere las virtudes más prácticas: el honor se sustituye por la honradez, la justicia por la decencia, el valor por el riesgo razonable. En el burgués la energía centrífuga está sometida a la centrípeta, pero el centro no se encuentra dentro de la esfera de su individualidad, el centro hay que afirmarlo en algún lugar del mundo exterior para convertirse en su satélite. La tendencia de “entregar y apartar” en este caso es posible como una maniobra táctica de la tendencia de “quitar, conservar, adquirir, aumentar”.

Después de la revolución burguesa francesa y la fundación de los estados unidos norteamericanos vino el derrumbe definitivo de la civilización patriarcal. La rebelión de La Vendée, seguramente, fue la última llamarada del fuego sagrado. En el siglo XIX el principio masculino se desperdigó por el mundo orientado hacia lo material, haciéndose notar en el dandismo, en las corrientes artísticas, en el pensamiento filosófico independiente, en las aventuras de los exploradores de los países desconocidos. Pero sus representantes, naturalmente, no podían detener el progreso positivista. La sociedad expresaba la admiración por sus libros, cuadros y hazañas, pero los veía con bastante suspicacia. Marx y Freud contribuyeron bastante al triunfo de la ginecocracia materialista. El primero proclamó la tendencia al bienestar económico como la principal fuerza motriz de la historia, mientras que el segundo expresó la duda global acerca de la salud psíquica de aquellas personas, cuyos intereses espirituales no sirven al “bien común”. Los portadores del auténtico principio masculino paulatinamente se convirtieron en los “hombres sobrantes” al estilo de algunos protagonistas de la literatura rusa. “Wozu ein Dichter?” (¿Para qué el poeta?) – preguntaba Hölderlin con ironía todavía a principios del siglo XIX. Ciertamente ¿para qué hacen falta en una sociedad pragmática los soñadores, los inventores de espejismos, de las doctrinas peligrosas y demás maestros de la presencia inquietante? Gotfied Benn reflejó la situación con exactitud en su maravilloso ensayo “Palas Atenea”:

“… representantes de un sexo que se está muriendo, útiles tan solo en su calidad de copartícipes en la apertura de las puertas del nacimiento… Ellos intentan conquistar la autonomía con sus sistemas, sus ilusiones negativas o contradictorias – todos estos lamas, budas, reyes divinos, santos y salvadores, quienes en realidad nunca han salvado a nadie, ni a nada – todos estos hombres trágicos, solitarios, ajenos a lo material, sordos ante la secreta llamada de la madre-tierra, lúgubres caminantes… En los estados de alta organización social, en los estados de duras alas, donde todo acaba en la normalidad con el apareamiento, los odian y toleran tan solo hasta que llegue el momento”.

Los estados de los insectos, sociedades de abejas y termitas están perfectamente organizados para los seres que “solo viven una vez”. La civilización occidental muy exitosamente se dirige hacia semejante orden ideal y en este sentido representa un episodio bastante raro en la historia. Es difícil encontrar en el pasado abarcable una formación humana, afianzada sobre las bases del ateísmo y una construcción estrictamente material del universo. Aquí no importa qué es lo que se coloca exactamente como la piedra angular: el materialismo vulgar o el materialismo dialéctico o los procesos microfísicos paradójicos. Cuando la religión se reduce al moralismo, cuando la alegría del ser se reduce a una decena de primitivos “placeres”, por los que además hay que pagar ni se sabe cuánto, cuando la muerte física aparece como “el final del todo” ¿acaso se puede hablar del impulso irracional y de la sublimación? Por eso en los años veinte Max Scheler ha desarrollado su conocida tesis sobre la “resublimación” como una de las principales tendencias del siglo. Según Scheler la joven generación ya no desea, a la manera de sus padres y abuelos, gastar las fuerzas en las improductivas búsquedas del absoluto: continuas especulaciones intelectuales exigen demasiada energía vital, que es mucho más práctico utilizar para la mejora de las condiciones concretas corporales, financieras y demás. Los hombres actuales ansían la ingenuidad, despreocupación, deporte, desean prolongar la juventud. El famoso filósofo Scheler, al parecer, saludaba semejante tendencia. ¡Si viera en lo que se ha convertido ahora este joven y empeñado en rejuvenecerse rebaño y de paso contemplara en lo que se ha convertido el deporte y otros entretenimientos saludables!

Y además.

¿Acaso la sublimación se reduce a las especulaciones intelectuales? ¿Acaso el impulso hacia adelante y hacia lo alto se reduce a los saltos de longitud y de altitud? La sublimación no se realiza en los minutos del buen estado de humor y no se acaba con la flojera. Tampoco es el éxtasis. Es un trabajo permanente y dinámico del alma para ampliar la percepción y transformar el cuerpo, es el conocimiento del mundo y de los mundos, atormentado aprendizaje del alpinismo celestial. Y además se trata de un proceso natural.

Si un hombre tiene miedo, rehúye o ni siquiera reconoce la llamada de la sublimación, es que, propiamente, no puede llamarse hombre, es decir un ser con un sistema irracional de valores marcadamente pronunciado. Incluso con la barba canosa o los bíceps imponentes seguirá siendo un niño, que depende totalmente de los caprichos de la “gran madre”. Obligando el espíritu a resolver los problemas pragmáticos, agotando el alma con la vanidad y la lascivia, siempre se arrastrará hasta sus rodillas buscando la consolación, los ánimos y el cariño.

Pero la “gran madre” no es en absoluto la amorosa Eva patriarcal, carne de la carne del hombre, es la siniestra creación de la eterna oscuridad, pariente próxima del caos primordial, no creado: bajo el nombre de Afrodita Pandemos envenena la sangre masculina con la pesadilla sexual, con el nombre de Cibeles le amenaza con la castración, la locura y le arrastra al suicidio. Algunos se preguntarán ¿qué relación tiene toda esta mitología con el conocimiento racional y ateísta? La más directa. El ateísmo no es más que una forma de teología negativa, asimilada de manera poco crítica o incluso inconsciente. El ateo cree ingenuamente en el poder total de la razón como instrumento fálico, capaz de penetrar hasta donde se quiera en las profundidades de la “madre-naturaleza”. Sucesivamente admirando la “sorprendente armonía que reina en la naturaleza” e indignándose ante las “fuerzas elementales, ciegas de la naturaleza” es como un niño mimado que quiere recibir de ella todo sin dar nada a cambio. Aunque últimamente, asustado ante las catástrofes ecológicas y la perspectiva de ser trasladado en un futuro próximo a las hospitalarias superficies de otros planetas, apela a la compasión y el humanismo.

Pero el “sol de la razón” no es más que el fuego fatuo del pantano y el instrumento fálico no es más que un juguete en las depredadoras manos de la “gran madre”. No se debe acercar al principio femenino que crea y que también mata con la misma intensidad. “Dama Natura” exige mantener la distancia y la veneración. Lo entendían bien nuestros patriarcales antepasados, teniendo cuidado de no inventar el automóvil, ni la bomba atómica, que ponían en los caminos la imagen del dios Término y escribían en las columnas de Hércules “non plus ultra”.

El espíritu se despierta en el hombre bruscamente y este proceso es duro, – esta es la tesis principal de Erich Neumann, un original seguidor de Jung, en su “Historia de la aparición de la conciencia”. El mundo orientado ginecocráticamente odia estas manifestaciones y procura acabar con ellas utilizando diferentes métodos. Lo que en la época moderna se entiende por “espiritualidad”, destaca por sus características específicamente femeninas: hacen falta memoria, erudición, conocimientos serios, profundos, un estudio pormenorizado del material – en una palabra, todo lo que se puede conseguir en las bibliotecas, archivos, museos, donde, cual si fuera el baúl de la vieja, se guardan todas las bagatelas. Si alguien se rebela contra semejante espiritualidad, siempre podrán acusarlo de ligereza, superficialidad, diletantismo, aventurerismo – características esencialmente masculinas. De aquí los degradantes compromisos y el miedo del individuo ante las leyes ginecocráticas del mundo exterior, que la psicología profunda en general y Erich Neumann en particular denominan el “miedo ante la castración”. “Tendencia a resistir, – escribe Erich Neumann, – el miedo ante la “gran madre”, miedo ante la castración son los primeros síntomas del rumbo centrípeto tomado y de la autoformación”. Y continúa:

“La superación del miedo ante la castración es el primer éxito en la superación del dominio de la materia”.

Erich Neumann. Urspruggeschichte des Bewusstseins, Munchen, 1975, p. 83

Ahora, en la era de la ginecocracia, semejante concepción constituye en verdad un acto heroico. Pero el “auténtico hombre” no tiene otro camino. Leamos unas líneas de Gotfried Benn del ya citado ensayo:

“De los procesos históricos y materiales sin sentido surge la nueva realidad, creada por la exigencia del paradigma eidético, segunda realidad, elaborada por la acción de la decisión intelectual. No existe el camino de retorno. Rezos a Ishtar, retournons a la grand mere, invocaciones al reino de la madre, entronización de Gretchen sobre Nietzsche – todo es inútil: no volveremos al estado natural”.

¿Es así?

Por un lado: conocimiento dulce, embriagador: sus vibraciones, movimientos gráciles, zonas erógenas… paraíso sexual.

Por el otro:

“Atenas, nacida de la sien de Zeus, de ojos azules, resplandeciente armadura, diosa nacida sin madre. Palas – la alegría del combate y la destrucción, cabeza de Medusa en su escudo, sobre su cabeza el lúgubre pájaro nocturno; retrocede un poco y de golpe levanta la gigantesca piedra que servía de linde – contra Marte, quien está del lado de Troya, de Helena… Palas, siempre con su casco, no fecundada, diosa sin hijos, fría y solitaria”.

1 de enero de 1999.

* Evgueni Golovín (1938-2010) fue un genio inclasificable. Situado completamente fuera del mundo actual, cuya legitimidad rechazaba de plano. “Quien camina contra el día no debe temer a la noche” – era su lema vital. Profundo conocedor de alquimia y de tradición hermética europea, también era especialista en los “autores malditos” franceses, románticos y expresionistas alemanes, traductor de libros de escritores europeos cuya obra está catalogada como “de la presencia inquietante”. Su identificación con el mundo pagano griego llegó al punto de que algunos que le conocieron íntimamente llegaron a definirlo como “Divinidad” (para empezar por el principio, Golovín aprendió el griego a los 16 años y comenzó con la lectura de Homero). En los años 60 del siglo pasado se convirtió en la figura más carismática de la llamada “clandestinidad mística moscovita”, conocido como “Almirante” (de la flotilla hermética, formada por los “místicos”). Fue el primero en la URSS en difundir la obra de autores tradicionalistas como Guénon y Évola. Ya en los años 90 y 2000 redactó la revista Splendor Solis, publicó varios libros y una recopilación de sus poemas. Veía con recelo las doctrinas orientales que consideraba poco adecuadas para el hombre europeo. Y, sobre todo, nunca buscó el centro de gravedad del ser en el mundo exterior. En su “navegación” sin fin siempre se mantuvo firmemente anclado a su interiore terra. El encuentro con Evgueni Golovín, en distintas etapas de sus vidas, fue decisivo para la formación de futuras figuras clave en la vida intelectual rusa como Geidar Dzhemal o

Alexandr Duguin

24/08/2012

Fuente: Poistine.com

(Traducido del ruso por Arturo Marián Llanos)

La Russie et l’ONU contre l’OTAN

par Xavier Moreau 

Ex: http://www.realpolitik.tv

Nous avions déjà fait un parallèle entre les faux-massacres attribués aux Serbe en Bosnie et au Kosovo, et les tentatives de montages du même type en Syrie. La manipulation des cadavres des civils, la volonté de faire fi des inspections de l’ONU, le règne absolu de la mauvaise foi et du mensonge, le soutien total au terrorisme, sont bien les marques de la diplomatie américaine.

La question est de savoir désormais si les États-Unis vont intervenir. Le rôle de la France et de l’Angleterre n’étant important que pour donner une légitimité à cette fameuse communauté internationale, incarné en fait par les États-Unis et eux seuls.

Pour continuer notre parallèle avec le Kosovo, il faut prendre en compte plusieurs facteurs.

Premièrement, les opérations au sol au Kosovo ont été un échec. La mafia albanaise, même encadrée par les services secrets occidentaux, s’est faite laminer par les unités serbes. L’OTAN n’a jamais osé venir affronter les Serbes directement, consciente de la faible valeur combattive du soldat américain face à son homologue serbe. De plus dans le cas de la Syrie, les États-Unis n’ont pas 250.000 hommes prêts à envahir le pays comme pour l’Irak.

Deuxièmement, le bombardement par des missiles de type « Tomawak » n’aura pas plus d’effet sur l’armée syrienne que sur l’armée serbe. Rappelons que l’action de « Raytheon » avait été diminuée de moitié après les résultats de la campagne de bombardement sur la Serbie. Du point de vue militaire, ces bombardements n’auront en effet que peu d’efficacité. Les troupes syriennes combattent imbriquées avec les islamistes dans des zones urbanisées. Il restera aux Américains les bombardements pour terroriser les populations civiles, ce qui constitue leur spécialité, mais qui en Serbie a au contraire mobilisé la population contre l’envahisseur. Ils pourront cependant être utilisés pour éviter la débandade des islamistes, en leur faisant croire à une intervention américaine. L’enjeu étant d’arriver à Genève 2 avec quelque chose à négocier.

Troisièmement, les bombardements aériens à haute altitude. Ils n’auront guère plus d’efficacité que les missiles, et comme eux pourraient viser les cibles fixes des infrastructures civiles ou militaires, aéroports, centrales électriques, bâtiments administratifs ou de télévision, etc. En outre la DCA syrienne, même avec des bombardements à haute altitude, risque de faire des dégâts dans une aviation habituée à bombarder impunément les civils comme les militaires.

F117 “furtif” abattu au-dessus de l’ex-Yougoslavie le 27 mars 1999, grâce un vieux radar des années 70…

Quatrièmement, les bombardements d’appuis au sol. Dans ce cas-là, les pertes seront encore plus grandes, et à moins que l’armée turque envahisse la Syrie, elles seront sans effet réel sur les résultats des combats, à moins de concéder la perte de dizaines d’avions.

Cinquièmement, la suprématie aérienne. C’est un objectif auquel l’OTAN peut prétendre, avec également de nombreuses pertes à la clé, et toujours un faible impact sur les combats au sol. Le fait que le ciel serbe fut américain n’a rien changé sur les combats d’infanterie.

Sixièmement, l’action diplomatique. Ce qui fit basculer la volonté au demeurant très faible de Milošević en 1999, fut le soutien insignifiant de la Russie et pour finir, la pression de Viktor Tchernomyrdine sur le Président serbe. La Russie d’alors avait un Président malade, une oligarchie corrompue et pro-américaine et était ruinée après la crise de 1998. Seule l’action symbolique du Premier Ministre de l’époque, Evguéni Primakov, sauva en partie l’honneur de la Russie. Rappelons tout de même que Milošević obtint satisfaction sur tout ce qu’il demandait déjà à Rambouillet.

Aujourd’hui, la Russie de Vladimir Poutine est tout sauf un pays faible, et ce sont les pays occidentaux, qui sont ruinés et qui ne peuvent plus se permettre d’autres aventures militaires. Les systèmes S-300 sont sans doute déjà en Syrie, même s’ils n’ont pas encore été livrés. Dans ce cas les pertes en chasseurs bombardiers seront importantes. Le dernier sondage montre que seuls 9% de la population américaine est favorable à une intervention. Comment expliquer la mort de pilotes dans un conflit qui, une fois de plus, ne mènera qu’à une impasse ?

Si l’on part du principe, pas toujours évident, que les États-Unis sont un acteur rationnel, l’agitation actuelle ne se justifie une nouvelle fois, uniquement par le fait qu’il faut donner de l’espoir aux djihadistes, pour éviter une débandade complète, et que le conflit syrien s’arrête avant même la réunion de Genève 2. Il est possible que les menaces soient suivies de bombardements, mais leur efficacité restera limitée et risque de provoquer une escalade dans la région où l’Iran n’a pas l’intention d’abandonner son allié. Pour les États-Unis, l’enjeu est de taille, une défaite des islamistes par l’armée syrienne les privera de leur meilleur allié depuis l’Afghanistan, en passant par la Yougoslavie, jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Plus que jamais, la Russie, comme le prévoyait Emmanuel Todd en 2002, est la puissance pacificatrice nécessaire à l’ordre multipolaire, qui quoi que fassent les États-Unis, se met en place peu à peu.

Xavier Moreau

L'allemand Siemens investira plus d'un milliard d'euros en Russie

L'allemand Siemens investira plus d'un milliard d'euros en Russie

Joe Käser

 

Ex: http://fr.ria.ru

TOUAPSE, 11 octobre - RIA Novosti

Sur le même sujet

• Russie: Poutine salue les investissements de Siemens
• Aéronautique: la Russie coopérera avec l'allemand Siemens
• Le russe Gazprom et l'allemand Siemens signent un accord de partenariat
• La Russie achète huit TGV à Siemens

Le consortium allemand Siemens AG continuera d'investir en Russie en dépassant le montant d'un milliard d'euros prévu pour 2013-2015, a déclaré vendredi à Touapse (littoral russe de la mer Noire) le président de Siemens AG Joe Käser, lors d'une rencontre avec le président russe Vladimir Poutine.

"Il est toujours difficile d'investir le premier milliard, mais cela devient plus facile avec le deuxième (…). Nous continuerons d'investir dans l'industrialisation de la Russie, l'efficacité énergétique de l'industrie russe et les technologies médicales. J'estime que nous pouvons élargir notre partenariat pour le bien des habitants de la Russie et de notre consortium bien sûr", a indiqué M.Käser.

M.Poutine a pour sa part déclaré que le consortium allemand pouvait également coopérer avec les sociétés russes en Allemagne. "Vous avez mentionné le groupe pétrolier Rosneft parmi vos partenaires. Rosneft est déjà actionnaire de quatre entreprises en Allemagne", a rappelé le président russe.

Multipolarism as an Open Project

Alexander Dugin

Ex: http://www.eurasianaffairs.net

 Professor of the Moscow State University, Doctor of political sciences, founder of the contemporary Russian school of Geopolitics, leader of the International Social Movement “Eurasian Movement”, Moscow, Russian Federation.

 

I. Multipolarism and “Land Power”

Geopolitics of the Land in the Global World

In the previous part we discussed the subject of globalism, globalization, and mondialism in a view considered to be generally accepted and “conventional”. Geopolitical analysis of the phenomenon of the subject of globalism, globalization, and mondialism has showed that in the modern globalism we only deal with one of the two geopolitical powers, namely, with a thalassocracy, a “Sea Power” that from now on claims for uniqueness, totality, and normativeness and strives to pretend to be the only possible civilization, sociological and geopolitical condition of the world.

Therewith, the philosophy of globalism is based upon the internal surety with universalism of exactly the Western-European value system thought to be the summary of all the diverse experience of the human cultures on all stages of their history.

And finally, in its roots, globalization has an active ideology (mondialism) and power structures that spread and bring this ideology into use. If taking into account that the latter are the most authoritative intellectual US centers (such as CFR and neoconservatives), structures of the US Supreme Military Command and their analysts (Owens, Sibrowsky, Barnett, Garstka), international oligarchs (such as George Soros), a number of international organizations (The Bilderberg Club, Trilateral Commission, etc.), and innumerous amount of analysts, politicians, journalists, scientists, economists, people of culture and art, and IT sector employees spread all over the world, we can understand the reason why this ideology seems to be something that goes without saying for us. That we sometimes take globalization as an “objective process” is the result of a huge manipulation with public opinion and the fruit of a total information war.

Therefore, the picture of global processes we described is an affirmation of the real state of affairs just in part. In such a description, there is a significant share of a normative and imperative volitional (ideological) wish that everything should be quite so, which means, it is based upon wrenches and, to some extent, striving to represent our wishful thinking as reality.

In this part, we will describe an absolutely different point of view on globalization and globalism that is impossible from inside the “Sea Power”, i.e. out of the environment of the nominal “Global World”. Such a view is not taken into account either in antiglobalism or in alterglobalism because it refuses from the most fundamental philosophical and ideological grounds of Eurocentrism.  Such a view rejects the faith in:

•  universalism of the Western values, that Western societies, in their history, have passed the only possible way all the other countries are expected to pass;
• progress as an indisputable forwardness of historical and social development;
• that it is limitless technical, economical, and material development, which is the answer for the most vital needs of all humankind;
• that people of all cultures, religions, civilizations, and ethnoses are principally the same as the people of the West and they are governed by the same anthropological motives;
• absolute superiority of capitalism over other sociopolitical formations;
• absence of any alternative for market economy;
• that liberal democracy is the only acceptable form of political organization of the society;
• individual freedom and individual identity as the superior value of human being;
• liberalism as a historically inevitable, higher-priority, and optimal ideology.

In other words, we proceed to the position of the “Land Power” and consider the present moment of the world history from the point of view of Geopolitics-2, or the thalassocratic geopolitics as an episode of the “Great Continent War”, not as its conclusion.

Of course, it is difficult to refuse that the present moment of historical development demonstrates a number of unique features that, if desired, can be interpreted as the ultimate victory of the Sea over the Land, Carthage over Rome and Leviathan over Behemoth. Indeed, never in history the “Sea Power” was such a serious success and stretched might and influence of its paradigm in such a scale. Of course, Geopolitics-2 acknowledges this fact and the consequences included. But it clearly realizes that globalization can be also interpreted otherwise, namely, as a series of victories in combats and battles, not as the ultimate win in the war.

Here, a historical analogy suggests itself: when German troops were approaching to Moscow in 1941, one could think that everything was lost and the end of the USSR was foredoomed. The Nazi propaganda commented the course of the war quiet so: the “New Order” is created in the occupied territory, the authorities work, economical and political hierarchy is created, and the social life is organized. But the Soviet people kept on violently resisting – at all the fronts as well as in the rear of the enemy, while systematically moving to their goal and their victory.

Now, there is precisely this moment in the geopolitical stand of the Sea and the Land. Information policy inside the “Sea Power” is built so as no-one has any doubt that globalism is an accomplished fact and the global society has come about in its essential features, that all the obstacles from now on are of a technical character. But from certain conceptual, philosophical, sociological, and geopolitical positions, all of it can be challenged by suggesting an absolutely different vision of the situation. All the point is in interpretation. Historical facts make no sense without interpretation. Likewise in geopolitics: any state of affairs in the field of geopolitics only makes sense in one or another interpretation. Globalism is interpreted today almost exclusively in the Atlantist meaning and, thus, the “sea” sense is put into it. A view from the Land’s position doesn’t change the state of affairs but it does change its sense. And this, in many cases, is of fundamental importance.

Further, we will represent the view on globalization and globalism from the Land’s position – geopolitical, sociological, philosophical, and strategical.

Grounds for Existence of Geopolitics-2 in the Global World

How can we substantiate the very possibility of a view on globalization on the part of the Land, assuming that the structure of the global world, as we have shown, presupposes marginalization and fragmentation of the Land?

There are several grounds for this.

1. The human spirit (conscience, will, faith) is always capable to formulate its attitude to any ambient phenomenon and even if this phenomenon is presented as invincible, integral, and “objective”, it is possible to take it in a different way – accept or reject, justify or condemn. This is the superior dignity of man and his difference from animal species. And if man rejects and condemns something, he has the right to build strategies to overcome it in any, most difficult and insuperable, situations and conditions. The advance of the global society can be accepted and approved but it can be rejected and condemned as well. In the former case, we float adrift the history, in the latter one – we seek a “fulcrum” to stop this process. History is made by people and the spirit plays the central part here. Hence, there is a theoretical possibility to create a theory radically opposite to the views that are built on the base of the “Sea Power” and accept basic paradigms of the Western view on the things, course of history, and logic of changing sociopolitical structures.
2. The geopolitical method allows to identify globalization as a subjective process connected with a success of one of the two global powers. Be the Land ever so “marginal and fragmentized», it has serious historical grounds behind itself, traditions, experience, sociological and civilization background. The Land’s geopolitics is not built on a void place; this is a tradition that generalizes some fundamental historical, geographical, and strategical trends. Therefore, even on the theoretical level, estimation of globalization from the position of Geopolitics-2 is absolutely relevant. Just as well as there is the “subject” of globalization in its center (mondialism and its structures), the Land Power can and does have its own subjective embodiment. In spite of a huge scale and massive forms of the historical polemics of civilizations, we, first of all, deal with a stand of minds, ideas, concepts, theories, and only then – with that of material things, devices, technologies, finances, weapons, etc.
3. The process of desovereignization of national states has not yet become nonreversible, and the elements of the Westphalian system are still being partly preserved. That means that a whole range of national states, by virtue of certain consideration, can still bank on realization of the land strategy, i.e. they can completely or partially reject globalization and the “Sea Power’s” paradigm. China is an example of it; it balances between globalization and its own land identity, strictly observing that the general balance is kept and that only what consolidates China as a sovereign geopolitical formation is borrowed from the global strategies. The same can be also said about the states the US have equaled to the “Axis of Evil” — Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, etc. Of course, the threat of a direct intrusion of US troops hangs over these countries like the sword of Damocles (on the model of Iraq or Afghanistan), and they are continuously subject to more politic network attacks from inside. However, at the moment their sovereignty is preserved what makes them privileged areas for development of the Land Power. It is also possible to refer here a number of hesitant countries, such as India, Turkey and others, which, being significantly involved into the globalization orbit, preserve their original sociological features, getting out of accord with the official precepts of their governing regimes. Such situation is characteristic of many Asian. Latin-American and African societies. 
4. And, finally, the most general. — The present state of Heartland. The world dominance, as we know, and thus, reality or evanescence of monopolar globalization depends on it. In 1980-90-s, Heartland fundamentally reduced its influence area. Two geopolitical belts – Eastern Europe (whose countries were within the “Socialist Block”, “Warsaw Pact», Comecon, etc.) and the Federative Republics of the USSR consistently withdrew from it. By the mid 1990-s, a bloody testing for a possibility of further breakdown of Russia into “national republics” had started in Chechnya. This fragmentation of Heartland, down to a mosaic of marionette dependent states in place of Russia, had to become the final accord of construction of the global world and the “end of history”, after which it would be much more difficult to speak about the Land and Geopolitics-2. Heartland is of central importance in the possibility of strategical consolidation of all Eurasia and, thus, the “Land Power”. If the processes that took place in Russia in 1990-s had moved in a groove and its disintegration kept on, it would be much more difficult to challenge globalization. But since late 1990-s — early 2000-s, a turning-point has taken place in Russia, disintegration was stopped; moreover, the federal authorities have restored control over the rebellious Chechnya. Then V. Putin implemented a legal reform of the Federation subjects (excision of the article about “sovereignty”, governors’ appointment, etc.) that has consolidated the power vertical all over Russia. The CCI integration processes have started gathering pace. In August 2008, in the course of the five-day conflict of Russia with Georgia, Russia took its direct control over territories beyond the borders of the Russian Federation (Southern Ossetia, Abkhazia), and acknowledged their independence, in spite of a huge support of Georgia on the part of the US and the NATO countries and pressure of the international public opinion. Generally, since early 2000-s Russia as Heartland has ceased the processes of its self-disintegration, has reinforced its energetics, has normalized the issues of energy supply abroad, has refused from the practice of unilateral reduction of armaments, having preserved its nuclear potential. Whereby, influence of the network of geopolitical agents of Atlantism and Mondialism on the political authority and strategical decision making has qualitatively diminished, consolidation of the sovereignty has been understood as the top-priority issue, and integration of Russia into a number of globalist structures menacing its independence has been ceased. In a word, Heartland keeps on remaining the foundation of Eurasia, its “Core” — weakened, suffered very serious losses, but still existing, independent, sovereign, and capable to pursue a policy, if not on a global scale, then on a regional one. In its history, Russia has several times fallen yet lower: the Domain Fragmentation on the turn of the 13^th century, The Time of Troubles, and the events of 1917-1918 show us Heartland in a yet more deplorable and weakened condition. But every time, in some period, Russia revived and returned to the orbit of its geopolitical history again. The present state of Russia is difficult to recognize brilliant or even satisfactory from the geopolitical (Eurasian) point of view. Yet in general — Heartland does exist, it is relatively independent, and therefore, we have both a theoretical and practical base to consolidate and bring to life all the pre-conditions for development of a response to the phenomenon of monopolar globalization on the part of the Land.

Such an answer of the Land to the challenge of globalization (as a triumph of the “Sea Power”) is Multipolarism, as a theory, philosophy, strategy, policy, and practice.

Multipolarism as a Project of the World Order from the Land’s Position

Multipolarism represents a summary of Geopolitics-2 in actual conditions of the global process evolution. This is an extraordinarily capacious concept that demands a through consideration.

Multipolarism is a real antithesis for monopolarity in all its aspects: hard (imperialism, neocons, direct US domination), soft (multilateralism) and critical (alterglobalism, postmodernism, and neo-Marxism) ones.

The hard monopolarity version (radical American imperialism) is based upon the idea that the US represents the last citadel of the world order, prosperity, comfort, safety, and development surrounded by a chaos of underdeveloped societies. Multipolarism states the directly opposite: the US is a national state that exists among many others, its values are doubtful (or, at least, relative), its claims are disproportional, its appetites are excessive, methods of conducting its foreign policy are inacceptable, and its technological messianism is disastrous for the culture and ecology of the whole world.  In this regard, the multipolar project is a hard antithesis to the US as an instance that methodically builds a unipolar world, and it is aimed to strongly disallow, break up, and prevent this construction.

The soft monopolarity version does not only act on behalf of the US, but on behalf of “humanity”, exclusively understanding it as the West and the societies that agree with universalism of Western values. Soft monopolarity does not claim to press by force, but persuade, not to compel, but explain profits peoples and countries will obtain from entering into globalization. Here the pole is not a single national state (the US), but Western civilization as a whole, as a quintessence of all the humanity.

Such, as it is sometimes called, “multilateral” monopolarity (multilateralism, multilateralization) is rejected by Multipolarism that considers Western culture and Western values to represent merely one axiological composition among many others, one culture among different other cultures, and cultures and value systems based on some absolutely different principles to have the full right for existence. Consequently, the West in a whole and those sharing its values, have no grounds to insist on universalism of democracy, human rights, market, individualism, individual freedom, secularity, etc. and build a global society on the base of these guidelines.

Against alterglobalism and postmodern antiglobalism, Multipolarism advances a thesis that a capitalist phase of development and construction of worldwide global capitalism is not a necessary phase of society development, that it is despotism and an ambition to dictate different societies some kind of single history scenario. In the meantime, confusion of mankind into the single global proletariat is not a way to a better future, but an incidental and absolutely negative aspect of the global capitalism, which does not open any new prospects and only leads to degradation of cultures, societies, and traditions. If peoples do have a chance to organize effective resistance to the global capitalism, it is only where Socialist ideas are combined with elements of a traditional society (archaic, agricultural, ethnical, etc.), as it was in the history of the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam and takes place today in some Latin-American countries (e. g., in Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.).

Further, Multipolarism is an absolutely different view on the space of land than bipolarity, a bipolar world.

Multipolarism represents a normative and imperative view on the present situation in the world on the part of the Land and it qualitatively differs from the model predominated in the Yalta World in the period of the “Cold War”.

The Bipolar World was constructed under the ideological principle, where two ideologies – Capitalism and Socialism – acted as poles. Socialism as an ideology did not challenge universalism of the West-European culture and represented a sociocultural and political tradition that threw back to the European Enlightenment. In a certain sense, Capitalism and Socialism competed with each other as two versions of Enlightenment, two versions of progress, two versions of universalism, two versions of the West-European sociopolitical idea.

Socialism and Marxism entered into a resonance with certain parameters of the “Land Power”, and therefore they did not win where Marx had supposed, but where he excluded this possibility – in an agricultural country with the predominant way of life of a traditional society and imperial organization of the political field. Another case of an (independent) victory of Socialism – China – also represented an agricultural, traditional society.

Multipolarism does not oppose monopolarity from the position of a single ideology that could claim for the second pole, but it does from the position of many ideologies, a plenty of cultures, world-views and religions that (each for its own reasons) have nothing in common with the Western liberal capitalism.  In a situation, when the Sea has a unified ideological aspect (however, ever more going to the sphere of subauditions, not explicit declarations), and the Land itself doesn’t, representing itself as several different world-view and civilization ensembles, Multipolarism suggests creating a united front of the Land against the Sea.

Multipolarism is different from both the conservative project of conservation and reinforcement of national states. On the one hand, national states in both colonial and post-colonial period reflect the West-European understanding of a normative political organization (that ignores any religious, social, ethnical, and cultural features of specific societies) in their structures, i.e. the nations themselves are partially products of globalization. And on the other hand, it is only a minor part of the two hundred fifty-six countries officially itemized in the UN list today that are, if necessary, capable to defend their sovereignty by themselves, without entering into a block or alliance with other countries. It means that not each nominal sovereign state can be considered a pole, as the degree of strategical freedom of the vast majority of the countries acknowledged is negligible. Therefore, reinforcement of the Westphalian system that still mechanically exists today is not an issue of Multipolarism.

Being the opposition of monopolarity, Multipolarism does not call to either return to the bipolar world on the base of ideology or to fasten the order of national states, or to merely preserve the status quo. All these strategies will only play in hands of globalization and monopolarity centers, as they have a project, a plan, a goal, and a rational route of movement to future; and all the scenarios enumerated are at best an appeal to a delay of the globalization process, and at worst (restoration of bipolarity on the base of ideology) look like irresponsible fantasy and nostalgia.

Multipolarism is a vector of the Land’s geopolitics directed to the future. It is based upon a sociological paradigm whose consistency is historically proven in the past and which realistically takes into account the state of affairs existing in the modern world and basic trends and force lines of its probable transformations. But Multipolarism is constructed on this basis as a project, as a plan of the world order we yet only expect to create.

2 Multipolarism and its Theoretical Foundation

The absence of the Multipolarism Theory

In spite of the fact that the term “Multipolarism” is quite often used in political and international discussions recently, its meaning is rather diffuse and inconcrete. Different circles and separate analysts and politicians insert their own sense in it. Well-founded researches and solid scientific monographs devoted to Multipolarism can be counted on fingers[1]. Even serious articles on this topic are quite rare[2]. The reason for this is well understood: as the US and Western countries set the parameters of the normative political and ideological discourse in a global scale today, according to these rules, whatever you want can be discussed but the sharpest and most painful questions. Even those considering unipolarity to have been just a “moment[3]” in the 1990-s and a transfer to some new indefinite model to be taking place now are ready to discuss any versions but the “multipolar” one. Thus, for example, the modern head of CFR Richard Haass tells about “Non-Polarity” meaning such stage of globalization where necessity in presence of a rigid center falls off by itself[4]. Such wiles are explained by the fact that one of the aims of globalization is, as we have seen, marginalization of the “Land Power”. And as far as Multipolarism can only be a form of an active strategy of the “Land Power” in the new conditions, any reference to it is not welcome by the West that sets the trend in the structure of political analysis in the general global context. Still less one should expect that conventional ideologies of the West take up development of the Multipolarism Theory.

It would be logical to assume that the Multipolarism Theory will be developed in the countries that explicitly declare orientation upon a multipolar world as the general vector of their foreign policy. The number of such countries includes Russia, China, India, and some others. Besides, the address to Multipolarism can be encountered in texts and documents of some European political actors (e.g., former French minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Vidrine[5]). But at the moment, we can as well hardly find something more than materials of several symposiums and conferences with rather vague phrases in this field. One has to state that the topic of Multipolarism is not properly conceptualized also in the countries that proclaim it as their strategical goal, not to mention the absence a distinct and integral theory of Multipolarism.

Nevertheless, on the base of the geopolitical method from the position of the “Land Power” and with due account for the analysis of a phenomenon called globalism, it is quite possible to formulate some absolute principles that must underlie the Multipolarism Theory when the matter comes to its more systemized and expanded development.

Multipolarism: Geopolitics and Meta-Ideology

Let’s blueprint some theoretical sources, on whose base a valuable theory of Multipolarism must be built.

It is only geopolitics that can be the base for this theory in the actual conditions. At the moment, no religious, economical, political, social, cultural or economical ideology is capable to pull together the critical mass of the countries and societies that refer to the “Land Power” in a single planetary front necessary to make a serious and effective antithesis to globalism and the unipolar world. This is the specificity of the historical moment (“The Unipolar Moment”[6]): the dominating ideology (the global liberalism/post-liberalism) has no symmetrical opposition on its own level. Hence, it is necessary to directly appeal to geopolitics by taking the principle of the Land, the Land Power, instead of the opposing ideology. It is only possible in the case if the sociological, philosophical, and civilization dimensions of geopolitics are realized to the full extent.

The “Sea Power” will serve us as a proof for this statement. We have seen that the very matrix of this civilization does not only occur in the Modem Period, but also in thalassocratic empires of the Antiquity (e.g., in Carthage), in the ancient Athens or in the Republic of Venice. And within the Modern World itself atlantism and liberalism do not as well find complete predominance over the other trends at once. And nevertheless, we can trace the conceptual sequence through a series of social formations: the “Sea Power” (as a geopolitical category) moves through history taking various forms till it finds its most complete and absolute aspect in the global world where its internal precepts become predominant in a planetary scale. In other words, ideology of the modern mondialism is only a historical form of a more common geopolitical paradigm. But there is a direct relation between this (probably, most absolute) form and the geopolitical matrix.

There is no such direct symmetry in case of the “Land Power”. The Communism ideology just partly (heroism, collectivism, antiliberalism) resonated with geopolitical percepts of the “ground” society (and this just in the concrete form of the Eurasian USSR and, to a lesser degree, of China), as the other aspects of this ideology (progressism, technology, materialism) fitted badly in the axiological structure of the “Land Power”. And today, even in theory, Communism cannot perform the mobilizing ideological function it used to perform in the 20^th century in a planetary scale. From the ideological point of view the Land is really split into fragments and, in the nearest future, we can hardly expect some new ideology capable to symmetrically withstand the liberal globalism to appear. But the very geopolitical principle of the Land does not lose anything in its paradigmatic structure. It is this principle that must be taken as a foundation for construction of the Multipolarism Theory. This theory must address directly to geopolitics, draw principles, ideas, methods and terms out of it. This will allow to otherwise take both the wide range of existing non-globalist and counter-globalist ideologies, religions, cultures, and social trends. It is absolutely unnecessary to shape them to transform into something unified and systematized. They can well remain local or regional but be integrated into a front of common stand against globalization and “Western Civilization’s” domination on the meta-ideological level, on the paradigmatic level of Geopolitics-2 and this moment – plurality of ideologies – is already laid in the very term “Multi-polarism” (not only within the strategical space, but also in the field of the ideological, cultural, religious, social, and economical one).

Multipolarism is nothing but extension of Geopolitics-2 (geopolitics of the Land) into a new environment characterized with the advance of globalism (as atlantism) on a qualitatively new level and in qualitatively new proportions. Multipolarism has no other sense.

Geopolitics of the Land and its general vectors projected upon the modern conditions are the axis of the Multipolarism Theory, on which all the other aspects of this theory are threaded. These aspects constitute philosophical, sociological, axiological, economical, and ethical parts of this theory. But all of them are anyway conjugated with the acknowledged – in an extendedly sociological way – structure of the “Land Power” and with the direct sense of the very concept of “Multipolarism” that refers us to the principles of plurality, diversity, non-universalism, and variety.

3 Multipolarism and Neo-Eurasianism

Neo-Eurasianism as Weltanschauung

Neo-Eurasianism is positioned nearest to the theory of Multipolarism. This concept roots in geopolitics and operates par excellence with the formula of “Russia-Eurasia” (as Heartland) but at the same time develops a wide range of ideological, philosophical, sociological and politological fields, instead of being only limited with geostrategy and application analysis.

What is in the term of “Neo-Eurasianism” can be illustrated with fragments of the Manifesto of the International “Eurasian Movement” “Eurasian Mission»[7]. Its authors point out five levels in Neo-Eurasianism allowing to interpret it in a different way depending on a concrete context.

The first level: Eurasianism is a Weltanschauung.

According to the authors of the Manifesto, the term “Eurasianism” “is applied to a certain Weltanschauung, a certain political philosophy that combines in itself tradition, modernity and even elements of postmodern in an original manner. The philosophy of Eurasianism proceeds from priority of values of the traditional society, acknowledges the imperative of technical and social modernization (but without breaking off cultural roots), and strives to adapt its ideal program to the situation of a post-industrial, information society called “postmodern”.

The formal opposition between tradition and modernity is removed in postmodern. However, postmodernism in the atlantist aspect levels them from the position of indifference and exhaustiveness of contents. The Eurasian postmodern, on the contrary, considers the possibility for an alliance of tradition with modernity to be a creative, optimistic energetic impulse that induces imagination and development.

In the Eurasianism philosophy, the realities superseded by the period of Enlightenment obtain a legitimate place – these are religion, ethnos, empire, cult, legend, etc. In the same time, a technological breakthrough, economical development, social fairness, labour liberation, etc. are taken from the Modern. The oppositions are overcome by merging into a single harmonious and original theory that arouses fresh ideas and new decisions for eternal problems of humankind. (…)

The philosophy of Eurasianism is an open philosophy, it is free from any forms of dogmatism. It can be appended by diversified areas – history, religion, sociological and ethnological discoveries, geopolitics, economics, regional geography, culturology, various types of strategical and politological researches, etc. Moreover, Eurasianism as a philosophy assumes an original development in each concrete cultural and linguistic context: Eurasianism of the Russians will inevitably differ from Eurasianism of the French or Germans, Eurasianism of the Turks from Eurasianism of the Iranians; Eurasianism of the Arabs from Eurasianism of the Chinese, etc. Whereby, the main force lines of this philosophy will, in a whole, be preserved unalterable.(…)

The following items can be called general reference points of the Eurasianism philosophy:

• differentialism, pluralism of value systems against obligatory domination of a single ideology (in our case and first of all, of the American liberal democracy);
• traditionalism against destruction of cultures, beliefs and rites of the traditional society;
• a world-state, continent-state against both bourgeois national states and “the world government”;
• rights of nations against omnipotence of “the Golden Billion” and neo-colonial hegemony of “the Rich North”;
• an ethnos as a value and subject of history against depersonalization of nations and their alienation in artificial sociopolitical constructions;
• social fairness and solidarity of labour people against exploitation, logic of coarse gain, and humiliation of man by man.»[8]

Neo-Eurasianism as a Planetary Trend

On the second level: Neo-Eurasianism is a planetary trend. The authors of the Manifesto explain:

«Eurasianism on the level of a planetary trend is a global, revolutionary, civilization concept that is, by gradually improving, addressed to become a new ideological platform of mutual understanding and cooperation for a vast conglomerate of different forces, states, nations, cultures, and confessions that refuse from the Atlantic globalization.

It is worth carefully reading the statements of the most diverse powers all over the world: politicians, philosophers, and intellectuals and we will make sure that Eurasianists constitute the vast majority. Mentality of many nations, societies, confession, and states is, though they may not suspect about it themselves, Eurasianist.

If thinking about this multitude of different cultures, religions, confessions, and countries discordant with “the end of history” we are imposed by atlantism, our courage will grow up and the seriousness of risks of realization of the American 21^st century strategical security concept related with a unipolar world establishment will sharply increase.

Eurasianism is an aggregate of all natural and artificial, objective and subjective obstacles on the way of unipolar globalization, whereby it is elevated from a mere negation to a positive project, a creative alternative. While these obstacles exist discretely and chaotically, the globalists deal with them separately. But it is worth just integrating, pulling them together in a single, consistent Weltanschauung of a planetary character and the chances for victory of Eurasianism all over the world will be very serious.»[9]

Neo-Eurasianism as an Integration Project

On the next level, Neo-Eurasianism is treated as a project of strategical integration of the Eurasian Continent:

“The concept “the Old World” usually defining Europe can be considered much wider. This huge multicivilization space populated with nations, states, cultures, ethnoses and confessions connected between each other historically and spatially by the community of dialectical destiny. The Old World is a product of organic development of human history.

The Old World is usually set against the New World, i.e. the American continent that was discovered by the Europeans and has become a platform for construction of an artificial civilization where the European projects of the Modern, the period of Enlightenment have taken shape. (…)

In the 20^th century Europe realized its original essence and had gradually been moving to integration of all the European states into a single Union capable to provide all this space with sovereignty, independence, security, and freedom.

Creation of the European Union was the greatest milestone in the mission of Europe’s return in history. This was the response of “the Old World” to the exorbitant demands of the “New” one. If considering the alliance between the US and Western Europe – with US domination – to be the Atlantist vector of European development, then the integration of European nations themselves with predomination of the continental countries (France-Germany) can be considered Eurasianism in relation to Europe.

It becomes especially illustrative, if taking into account the theories that Europe geopolitically stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals (Ch. de Gaulle) or to Vladivostok. In other words, the interminable spaces of Russia are also valuably included in the field of the Old World subject to integration.

(…) Eurasianism in this context can be defined as a project of strategical, geopolitical, economical integration of the North of the Eurasian Continent realized as the cradle of European history, matrix of nations and cultures closely interlaced between each other.

And since Russia itself (like, by the way, the ancestors of many Europeans as well) is related in a large measure with the Turkish, Mongolian world, with Caucasian nations, through Russia – and in a parallel way through Turkey – does the integrating Europe as the Old World already acquire the Eurasianism dimension to full extent; and in this case, not only in symbolic sense, but also in geographical one. Here Eurasianism can be synonimically identified with Continentalism.[10]»

These three most general definitions of Neo-Eurasianism demonstrate that here we deal with a preparatory basis for construction of the Multipolarism Theory. This is the ground view on the sharpest challenges of modernity and attempt to give an adjust response to them taking into account geopolitical, civilization, sociological, historical and philosophical regularities.

---

[1]  Murray D.,  Brown D. (eds.) Multipolarity in the 21st Century. A New World Order. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010; Ambrosio Th. Challenging America global Preeminence: Russian Quest for Multipolarity. Chippenheim, Wiltshire: Anthony Rose, 2005; Peral L. (ed.) Global Security in a Multi-polar World. Chaillot

Paper. Paris: European Institute for Security Studies, 2009; Hiro D. After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. Yale: Nation Books , 2009.

[2] Turner Susan. Russia, Chine and the Multipolar World Order: the danger in the undefined// Asian Perspective. 2009. Vol. 33, No. 1. C. 159-184; Higgott Richard Multi-Polarity and Trans-Atlantic Relations: Normative Aspirations and Practical Limits of EU Foreign Policy. – www.garnet-eu.org. 2010. [Electronic resource] URL: http://www.garnet-eu.org/fileadmin/documents/working_papers/7610.pdf (дата обращения 28.08.2010); Katz M. Primakov Redux. Putin’s Pursuit of «Multipolarism» in Asia//Demokratizatsya. 2006. vol.14 № 4. C.144-152.

[3] Krauthammer Ch. The Unipolar Moment// Foreign Affairs. 1990 / 1991 Winter. Vol. 70, No 1. С. 23-33.

[4] Haass R. The Age of Non-polarity: What will follow US Dominance?’//Foreign Affairs.2008. 87 (3). С. 44-56.

[5] Déclaration de M. Hubert Védrine, ministre des affaires étrangères sur la reprise d’une dialogue approfondie entre la France et l’Hinde: les enjeux de la resistance a l’uniformisation culturelle et aux exces du monde unipolaire. New Delhi — 1 lesdiscours.vie-publique.fr. 7.02.2000.  [Electronic resource] URL: http://lesdiscours.vie-publique.fr/pdf/003000733.pdf

[6] Krauthammer Ch. The Unipolar Moment. Op.cit.

[7] Евразийская миссия. Манифест Международного «Евразийского Движения». М.: Международное Евразийское Движение, 2005.

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

This entry was posted in Journal of Eurasian Affairs, vol.1, Num.1, 2013 by eurasianaffairs. Bookmark the permalink.

Too Much Putin?

Too Much Putin?

By Michael O'Meara 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

US hegemony may be approaching its end. Once the world refuses to acknowledge the imperial authority of its humanitarian missiles, and thus stops paying tribute to its predatory model of the universe (as momentarily occurred in Syria), then American power inevitably starts to decline – and not simply on the world stage, but also domestically, among the empire’s subjects, who in the course of the long descent will be forced to discover new ways to assert themselves.

***

Historically, America’s counter-civilizational system was an offshoot of the Second World War, specifically the US conquest of Europe — which made America, Inc. (Organized Jewry/Wall Street/the military-industrial complex) the key-holder not solely to the New Deal/War Deal’s Washingtonian Leviathan, but to its new world order: an updated successor to Disraeli’s money-making empire, upon which the sun never set.[1]

The prevailing race-mixing, nation-destroying globalization of the last two and a half decades, with its cosmopolitan fixation on money and commerce and its non-stop miscegenating brainwashing, is, as such, preeminently a product of this postwar system that emerged from the destruction of Central Europe and from America’s Jewish/capitalist-inspired extirpation of its European Christian roots.[2]

The fate of white America, it follows, is closely linked to the “order” the United States imposed on the “Free World” after 1945 and on the rest of the world after 1989. This was especially evident in the recent resistance of the American “people” to Obama’s flirtation with World War III – a resistance obviously emboldened by the mounting international resistance to Washington’s imperial arrogance, as it (this resistance) momentarily converged with the worldwide Aurora Movements resisting the scorch-earth campaigns associated with US power.[3]

***

Everyone on our side recognizes the ethnocidal implications of America’s world order, but few, I suspect, understand its civilizational implications as well as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

On September 19, barely a week after our brush with the Apocalypse, the Russian president delivered an address to the Valdai International Discussion Club (an international forum on Russia’s role in the world), which highlighted the extreme degree to which Putin’s vision of world order differs from that of Obama and the American establishment.[4] Indeed, Putin’s entire line of thought, in its grasp of the fundamental challenges of our age, is unlike anything to be found in the discourse of the Western political classes (though from the misleading reports in the MSM on his Valdai address this would never be known).[5]

Putin, to be sure, is no White Nationalist and thus no proponent of a racially-homogenous ethnostate. This makes him like everyone else. Except Putin is not like everyone else, as we’ll see.

Certain East Europeans, instinctively anti-Russian, like our Cold War “conservatives,” refuse to appreciate Russia’s new international role because of historical grievances related to an earlier legacy of Tsarist or Soviet imperialism (though their grievances, they should know, bare little comparison to those “We Irish” hold against the English ruling class). In any case, such tribal grievances are not our concern, nor should they prevent the recognition that East Europeans and Russians, like Irish and English – and like all the national tribes belonging to that community of destiny distinct to the white man – share a common interest (a life-and-death interest) in being all prospective allies in the war against the globalist forces currently assaulting them in their native lands.

It’s not simply because Russia is anti-American that she is increasingly attractive to the conscious remnants of the European race in North America (though that might be reason enough). Rather it’s that Russia, in defying the globalist forces and reaffirming the primacy of her heritage and identity, stands today for principles that lend international legitimacy – and hence a modicum of power – to patriots everywhere resisting the enemies of their blood.

***

Qualitative differences of world-shaping consequence now clearly separate Russians and Americans on virtually every key issue of our age (more so than during the Cold War) – differences in my view that mark the divide between the forces of white preservation and those of white replacement, and, more generally, between the spirit of European man and the materialist, miscegenating depravity of the US system, which approaches the whole world as if it were a flawed and irredeemable version of itself.

In this sense, the decline of American global power and the rising credibility of Russia’s alternative model can only enhance the power of European Americans, increasing their capacity to remain true to their self-identity. US imperial decline might even eventually give them a chance to take back some of the power that decides who they are.

Putin’s discourse at the Valdai Club addressed issues (to paraphrase) related to the values underpinning Russia’s development, the global processes affecting Russian national identity, the kind of 21st-century world Russians want to see, and what they can contribute to this future.

His responses to these issues were historically momentous in being unlike anything in the West today. Cynics, of course, will dismiss his address as mere PR, though the Russian leader has a documented history of saying what he thinks – and thus ought not be judged like American politicians, who say only what’s on the teleprompter and then simply for the sake of spin and simulacra.

Foremost of Russia’s concerns, as Putin defined it in his address to the club’s plenary session, is “the problem of remaining Russian in a globalizing world hostile to national identity.” “For us (and I am talking about Russians and Russia), questions about who we are and who we want to be are increasingly prominent in our society.” In a word, Putin sees identitarianism as the central concern of Russia’s “state-civilization,” (something quite staggering when you consider that the very term [“identitarianism”] was hardly known outside France when I started translating it a decade ago). Identitarianism in the 21st century may even, as Putin implies, prove to be what nationalism and socialism were to the 20th century: the great alternative to liberal nihilism.

Like Bush, Clinton, or other US flim-flam artists, Obama could conceivably mouth a similar defense of national identity if the occasion demanded it, but never, not in a thousand years, could he share the sentiment motivating it, namely the sense that: “It is impossible to move forward without spiritual, cultural, and national self-determination. Without this we will not be able to withstand internal and external challenges, nor will we succeed in global competitions.”[6]

The operative term here is “spiritual, cultural and national self-determination” – not diversity, universalism, or some putative human right; not even money and missiles – for in Putin’s vision, Russia’s historical national, cultural, and spiritual identities are the alpha and omega of Russian policy. Without these identities and the spirit animating them, Russia would cease to be Russia; she would be nothing – except another clone of America’s supermarket culture. With her identity affirmed, as recent events suggest, Russia again becomes a great power in the world.

The question of self-determination is necessarily central to the anti-identitarianism of our global, boundary-destroying age. According to Putin, Russia’s national identity

is experiencing not only objective pressures stemming from globalisation, but also the consequences of the national catastrophes of the twentieth century, when we experienced the collapse of our state two different times [1917 and 1991]. The result was a devastating blow to our nation’s cultural and spiritual codes; we were faced with the disruption of traditions and the consonance of history, with the demoralisation of society, with a deficit of trust and responsibility. These are the root causes of many pressing problems we face.

Then, following the Soviet collapse of 1991, Putin says:

There was the illusion that a new national ideology, a development ideology [promoted by Wall Street and certain free-market economists with Jewish names], would simply appear by itself. The state, authorities, intellectual and political classes virtually rejected engaging in this work, all the more so since previous, semi-official ideology was hard to swallow. And in fact they were all simply afraid to even broach the subject. In addition, the lack of a national idea stemming from a national identity profited the quasi-colonial element of the elite – those determined to steal and remove capital, and who did not link their future to that of the country, the place where they earned their money.

Putin here has obviously drawn certain traditionalist conclusions from the failings of the former Communist experiment, as well as from capitalism’s present globalizing course.

A new national idea does not simply appear, nor does it develop according to market rules. A spontaneously constructed state and society does not work, and neither does mechanically copying other countries’ experiences. Such primitive borrowing and attempts to civilize Russia from abroad were not accepted by an absolute majority of our people. This is because the desire for independence and sovereignty in spiritual, ideological and foreign policy spheres is an integral part of our national character . . . [It’s an integral part of every true nation.]

The former Communist KGB officer (historical irony of historical ironies) stands here on the stump of that political/cultural resistance born in reaction to the French Revolution and its destruction of historical organisms.

In developing new strategies to preserve Russian identity in a rapidly changing world, Putin similarly rejects the tabula rasa contentions of the reigning liberalism, which holds that you can “flip or even kick the country’s future like a football, plunging into unbridled nihilism, consumerism, criticism of anything and everything . . .” [Like Burke, he in effect condemns the “junto of robbers” seeking to rip the traditional social fabric for the sake of short term profit, as these money-grubbers prepare the very revolution they dred.]

Programmatically, this means:

Russia’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity [against which America’s counter-civilizational system relentlessly schemes] are unconditional. These are red lines no one is allowed to cross. For all the differences in our views, debates about identity and about our national future are impossible unless their participants are patriotic.” [That is, only Russians, not Washington or New York, ought to have a say in determining who or what a Russian is.]

Self-criticism is necessary, but without a sense of self-worth, or love for our Fatherland, such criticism becomes humiliating and counterproductive. [These sorts of havoc-wreaking critiques are evident today in every Western land. Without loyalty to a heritage based on blood and spirit, Russians would be cast adrift in a historyless stream, like Americans and Europeans.] We must be proud of our history, and we have things to be proud of. Our entire, uncensored history must be a part of Russian identity. Without recognising this it is impossible to establish mutual trust and allow society to move forward. . .

The challenges to Russia’s identity, he specifies, are

linked to events taking place in the world [especially economic globalization and its accompanying destruction of traditional life]. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.

The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people [i.e., the Americans and their vassals] are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis. [Hence, the US-sponsored desecrations of Pussy Riot.]

What else but the loss of the ability to self-reproduce could act as the greatest testimony of the moral crisis facing a human society? Today almost all developed nations [infected with the system’s counter-civilizational ethos] are no longer able to reproduce themselves, even with the help of migration. Without the values embedded in Christianity and other world religions, without the standards of morality that have taken shape over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. We consider it natural and right to defend these values. One must respect every minority’s right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be put into question.

Tolerant and pluralist though he is here, Putin nevertheless affirms the primacy of Russia herself. Our politicians get this 100 percent wrong, Putin only 50 percent – which puts him at the head of the class.

At the same time we see attempts to somehow revive a standardized [i.e., Americanized] model of a unipolar world and to blur the institutions of international law and national sovereignty. Such a unipolar, standardised world does not require sovereign states; it requires vassals. In a historical sense this amounts to a rejection of one’s own identity, of the God-given diversity of the world.

Russia agrees with those who believe that key decisions should be worked out on a collective basis, rather than at the discretion of and in the interests of certain countries or groups of countries. Russia believes that international law, not the right of the strong, must apply. And we believe that every country, every nation is not exceptional [as the Americans think they are], but unique, original, and benefits from equal rights, including the right to independently choose their own development path . . .

This is our conceptual outlook, and it follows from our own historical destiny and Russia’s role in global politics. [Instead, then, of succumbing to America’s suburban consumer culture and its larger dictates, Russia seeks to preserve her own identity and independence.]

Our present position has deep historical roots. Russia itself has evolved on the basis of diversity, harmony and balance, and brings such a balance to the international stage.

The grandeur of Putin’s assertion here has to be savored: against the latest marketing or policy scheme the US tries to impose on Russia, he advances his queen, pointing to a thousand years of Russian history, as he disperses America’s corrupting ploys with a dismissive smirk.

Though seeing Russia as a multiethnic/multi-confessional state that has historically recognized the rights of minorities, he insists she must remain Russian:

Russia – as philosopher Konstantin Leontyev vividly put it – has always evolved in ‘blossoming complexity’ as a state-civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state-civilisation model that has shaped our state polity….

Thus it is that Russians, among other things, “must restore the role of great Russian culture and literature. . . to serve as the foundation for people’s personal identity, the source of their uniqueness, and their basis for understanding the national idea. . .” Following Yeats, he might have added that the arts dream of “what is to come,” providing Russians new ways of realizing or re-inventing themselves.

I want to stress again that without focusing our efforts on people’s education and health, creating mutual responsibility between the authorities and each individual, and establishing trust within society, we will be losers in the competition of history. Russia’s citizens must feel that they are the responsible owners of their country, region, hometown, property, belongings and their lives. A citizen is someone who is capable of independently managing his or her own affairs . . .

Think of how the “democratic” powers of the Americanosphere now hound and persecute whoever insists on managing his own affairs: e.g., Greece’s Golden Dawn.

The years after 1991 are often referred to as the post-Soviet era. We have lived through and overcome that turbulent, dramatic period. Russia has passed through these trials and tribulations and is returning to herself, to her own history, just as she did at other points in its history. [This forward-looking orientation rooted in a filial loyalty to the Russian past makes Putin something of an archeofuturist.] After consolidating our national identity, strengthening our roots, and remaining open and receptive to the best ideas and practices of the East and the West, we must and will move forward.

***

As an ethnonationalist concerned with the preservation and renaissance of my own people, I hope Russia succeeds not only in defending her national identity (and ideally that of others), but in breaking America’s anti-identitarian grip on Europe, so as to insure the possibility of a future Euro-Russian imperium federating the closely related white, Christian peoples, whose lands stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals.

But even barring this, Russia’s resistance to the ethnocidal forces of the US global system, will continue to play a major role in enabling European Americans trapped in the belly of the beast to better defend their own blood and spirit.

And even if Europeans should persist in their servility and the United States continues to lead its “mother soil and father culture” into the abyss, Russians under Putin will at least retain some chance of remaining themselves – which is something no mainstream American or European politician seeks for his people.

If only for this reason, I think there can never be “too much Putin,” as our Russophobes fear.

Notes

1. Desmond Fennell, Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of Post-Western Civilization (Dublin: Sanas, 1996); Julius Evola, “Disraeli the Jew and the Empire of the Shopkeepers” (1940), http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id34.html ^[2].

2. “Boreas Rising: White Nationalism and the Geopolitics of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis ^[3]” (2005).

3. “Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements ^[4]” (2010).

4. President of Russia, “Address to the Valdai International Discussion Club” September 19, 2013. http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/transcripts/6007/print ^[5]. (I have made several grammatical and stylistic changes to the translation.)

5. Much of my understanding of this comes from Dedefensa, “Poutine, la Russie et le sens de la crise” (September 23, 2013) at http://www.dedefensa.org/article-poutine_la_russie_et_le_sens_de_la_crise_23_09_2013.html ^[6].

6. Samuel P. Huntington was the last major representative of the US elite to uphold a view even vaguely affirmative of the nation’s historical culture – and he caught hell for see. Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).

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Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/10/too-much-putin/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/putin.jpg

[2] http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id34.html: http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id34.html

[3] Boreas Rising: White Nationalism and the Geopolitics of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/boreas-risingwhite-nationalism-the-geopolitics-of-the-paris-berlin-moscow-axis-part-1/

[4] Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/against-the-armies-of-the-night/

[5] http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/transcripts/6007/print: http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/transcripts/6007/print

[6] http://www.dedefensa.org/article-poutine_la_russie_et_le_sens_de_la_crise_23_09_2013.html: http://www.dedefensa.org/article-poutine_la_russie_et_le_sens_de_la_crise_23_09_2013.html

Challenges and Opportunities for Russia

Restructuring the World by Normative Means: Challenges and Opportunities for Russia

Alexandra Shapovalova

 

Ex: http://www.geopolitica.ru

In the light of global crisis lasting for almost five years the traditional advantages of the West in world politics have turned obviously relative. Its military power is ever more costly and ever less effective for imposing stable order in strategically important regions. Its economy is creeping and prospects of its growth are still obscure. And with resurfacing deep societal imbalances Western ideational leadership is also fading away. In many respects the West finds itself excessively dependent upon foreign markets including those of rising powers which strive to retain and expand their political autonomy.

This means that the gap between the West and the Rest cannot be sustained by usual power instruments and in several years it can be narrowed to a dangerous and irreversible extent. Such perspective prompts the United States as well as the European countries to exert urgent efforts in order to prevent imminent assault on Western leadership in the global system.

The strategy to be deployed for this purpose has crystallized in the last two years and consists in promoting major realignments of global and regional powers around the newly consolidated Western community. This strategy has as its main vehicle the normative influence wielded through redefining economic and political rules within and outside that community. And its practical implementation proceeds along two initiatives presented as a centrepiece of Barack Obama second presidency – Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP or ‘Economic NATO’) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

These projects are intended to form an exclusive circle of countries with close political proximity and high-level normative convergence. Within these frameworks new basic socioeconomic rules could be agreed that would further be extrapolated outwards to the markets of alien regions. Economically this circle would benefit from revitalized capital flows leading to essential reindustrialization of its economies, while normative expansion to third countries, spurred by their aspirations to have an access to the core zone, would enable the renewed West to shape external markets according to the own needs. Rising powers remaining outside the core, first of all China and Russia, would have to adapt to the new rules and make strategic concessions. Thus the centre-periphery structure of world economy and hence of world politics would be secured and Western leadership reasserted.

This strategy of economic and normative consolidation may be quite logical outcome of the tendencies unfolded in recent years where consensus on global rules is hardly attainable, and the economic weight of rising powers makes the increase of their formal representation and political influence in the global institutions inescapable. Perhaps normative impact is actually the only potentially efficient and not so costly leverage at the West’s disposal now. But in political sense it is quite risky and may bring destabilizing outcomes in no less scope than military force. In addition, its implementation is far from unproblematic given the trends dominating the transatlantic relations as well as in US interaction with Asian states over the past years.

Problems with implementation

Despite widely spread idea that crisis may generate radical renovation of domestic and foreign policies, the key global players demonstrate the opposite inclination towards sticking to decades-old reliable methods and ties. In this vein, after several not very convincing attempts at opening to the ‘new horizons’ Washington again returned to traditional alliances and partnerships that underpinned its international posture after the Second World War. Though shattered by centrifugal forces due to inevitable differentiation of interests, these alliances seem more promising in the sense of resource sharing and political solidarity in times when going-it-alone is not a viable option any more. Leaving aside an even more intricate constellation in the Trans-Pacific dimension of US policy let’s focus upon its transatlantic component.

The European states still remain the closest allies for the US since, as Simon Serfaty argues, no other two poles in the world may form a more complete partnership than the US and the EU[1]. But the situation looks not so unequivocal from the vantage point of the EU interests and priorities.

On the one hand, since the beginning of 2000s the EU has persistently aspired to forge a new quality of transatlantic partnership in order to maintain American security engagement in the European continent and retain own position and influence in transatlantic compact. But at the same time, European capitals exhibited little enthusiasm to the prospect of being drawn into American strategy of military interventions outside Europe. Ensuing indifference on the part of Washington generated anxiety over possible ‘transatlantic divorce’. Election of Barack Obama raised far-reaching hopes in this regard and led to amelioration of political atmosphere between the two shores of the Atlantic. But the actual shifts in relationship turned rather ambiguous, and the clear common vision of the future global order as well as of major international issues has not emerged[2], due to reasons not dissimilar to those of George W. Bush era. The kind of conceptual stalemate was aggravated by disagreements over anti-crisis measures and US announced ‘pivot to Asia’ threatening to further reduce American engagement in Europe.

On the other hand, in the post-bipolar era the European Union managed to accumulate important assets which however modest as they may seem provide it with a capability to pursue own strategy in the international scene. In the economic dimension the EU has long turned into US competitor allowing the analyst to speak about ‘transatlantic bipolarity’ in trade matters[3]. It also elaborated a full-fledged normative basis and consistently employs it as a power leverage in interactions with third countries precisely in the way the US envisage for TTIP. At last, in the past decade the EU built up its own web of relationships with neighbouring and remote regions which although not extremely influential lays the ground for its political autonomy, and renouncing it for the sake of supporting US global strategy looks fairly unreasonable.

Certainly, Washington put forward potent arguments behind its ambitious proposal. It portrays it as a last resort means that can avert EU economic stagnation and political downscaling and, in general, keep alive the euro zone and the European integration as a whole. Its appeal may be even greater if combined with substantial political benefits for particular member states, first of all Germany and Great Britain or for communitarian institutions like the European Commission.

But the real implications of this project should be assessed more carefully. The economic benefits of a suggested free trade area for both sides seem disputable and much depending upon its concrete parameters. Even in the best case the foreseen growth rate does not exceed 0,5 % of the EU’s GDP provided the complete opening of markets, which is far from guaranteed.

No more clarity is there in political and institutional side of the matter. Here the main challenge stem from the prospect that streamlined transatlantic integration may really absorb the European project and thus put a brake upon its movement towards a kind of federal model. The recent history already witnessed such a shift when EU-NATO cooperation forestalled essential deepening of European defence integration as was predicted by Hanna Ojanen[4].

An even more significant problem emanates from the process of converging of regulatory rules and eliminating non-tariff barriers. Up to now the EU rejected to make its normative basis subject to negotiations with a third state and it is hard to imagine how it may compromise it this time especially when several major agreements with solid normative components are underway with neighbouring countries.

The matter is complicated by the fact that the conceptual ground for such convergence is also out of sight. it is an open secret that the US and European practices of economic regulation and state-society relations differ to a serious degree. In essence, consolidation inside the supposed core circle may prove no easier to carry out than potentially projecting it outwards after that.

Apparently, all the above mentioned problems may find more or less satisfying solution provided sufficient political will. Initially there was abundant voluntarism on the part of the EU institutions to strike a lucrative trade deal but as far as the issue is discussed by foreign ministries in the course of setting the mandate for negotiations, numerous reservations arise which can postpone reaching agreement within the EU. And the calendar of the project is rather pressing – American side urges to sign the deal in 2015 and the European Commission dared to set the deadline even earlier in 2014 before the elections to the European Parliament. But these terms are hardly realistic.

Another serious nuance must be mentioned in this context. The post-bipolar era unleashed a process of rediscovering mental, societal and cultural divergences between US and the EU. Together with generational shifts in the United States away from Cold War mass affinity with Europe it produces a context where transatlantic proximity is not taken as granted by European and American public. Such considerations stipulate a necessity in blurring distinctions and reinforcing societal solidarity between the two shores of the Atlantic while accentuating the divergences and gaps with non-Western societies. Ostensibly, a recent wave of same-sex marriage campaign is an integral part of such tactics and it actually contributed to further cultural fence-mending with the outer word.

In sum, the key transatlantic question today is whether the US manages to impose China threat on the EU to an extent justifying economic and normative subordination like it managed to impose Soviet threat to subordinate it strategically sixty years ago. But the EU should realize that agreeing to the US proposal amounts to agreeing to the global strategy it promulgates, a strategy where there would be scarcely an autonomous role for the EU.

Global and regional risks

Normative strategies as such – and the EU has amply experienced it elsewhere – are accompanied by a range of problems starting from the problem of indirect political effect due to which normative influence in each concrete case depends on the reaction of the recipients. But the US ‘two-rings’[5] strategy contains even more serious risks for global governance that cannot be voluntarily dispelled.

As many observers pointed out, it threatens to subvert current multilateral order where general political compromise by all stakeholders is the imperative conditions for progress. In the first turn it will challenge global trade and development institutions, notably the WTO. For the EU that has ever been a protagonist of effective multilateralism inscribed even in its security strategy assuming its failure and contributing to it is a rather confusing political step[6]. It has ever constructed its foreign policy identity in terms of ‘the other West’ acting in contrast to US exceptionalism and arrogance to smooth the disproportions of world development. In fact, its ‘normative power Europe’ pretence is founded upon contrasting its international posture with that of US[7].

But the weakening of global institutions is only part of the problem. Their functionality is already fading and the time when their reforming alone could be sufficient for adjusting world power balance is over. But substituting them with bilateral deals is by no means an optimal solution. Preferring bilateral bargaining over multilateral compromise in order to sustain the power asymmetries may engender new round of balancing unchecked by any universal claims. It should be born in mind that asymmetry even on cooperative terms may endure only when recognised and accepted by both sides, otherwise it produces only exacerbation and desire to vindicate own status. In present day multipolar world it is not the case. Artificial fixing of global hierarchy through arbitrary limiting the range of countries participating in elaboration of economic rules will lead to antagonizing rising powers, entrenching polarization of the global system and setting a new overwhelming conflicting structure.

Perhaps for somebody conflicting structure may seem quite pertinent and even attractive owing to its disciplining effects but there are no reasons to deem that in such structure the West will be able to retain its pre-eminence indefinitely. Unilateral escalating tension and rising stakes would create significant pressure for the West itself which not all of its participators would be willing to withhold. Burden sharing has always been a delicate issue for transatlantic community ever containing an essential element of free-riding. Can Washington this time throw behind its design sufficient weight to bind its partners and simultaneously to impose necessary concessions on its rivals? The answer is far from obvious.

Moving global competition into normative realm is hardly a stabilizing development. Norms and values are deeply interlinked with societal worldviews and the rifts they promote elicit highly emotional reactions in the public-at-large. Instead of intended delaying the shaping of already crystallized multipolar landscape, normative differentiation may catalyze its emergence in an explosive balance-of-power mode deprived of meaningful multilateral restraints.

Russia: how to win the game without participating in it

The role of Russia in the US normative strategy is clearly defined as an outsider that at a certain stage will be compelled to accept the Western terms due to economic or strategic reasons. But even if the task of ‘coercion into cooperation’ of Russia is somehow secondary for this policy in comparison to containing China, Russian front nevertheless is important for elaborating and sophisticating the Western normative toolbox. Russia and East European states are primary objects of the EU normative strategy developed under Eastern Partnership programme which is wholly supported by Washington. And recent trends demonstrate a new round of intentional bringing of normative differences to the fore of the US and EU’s Russia policy.

Russia’s response to those trends is two-fold. On the one hand, Moscow adopted the tactics of overt rejecting Western allegations against its normative pitfalls and voices public criticism at the Western values and their practices that sometimes bring about the ever more visible societal distortions and imbalances. On the other hand, Russia embarked on creating an own normative platform within the framework of Customs / Eurasian Union. Such steps are useful though their implementation as for now looks clumsy and hardly improving Russian international and domestic profile.

But the game that is unfolding in world politics does not allow for purely defensive strategies. Normative fence-mending by the West cannot be matched by symmetrical fence-mending by Russia not least because Russian capabilities for that are below the necessary scope. What is more telling, for Russia trying to build own fences means playing the US game and pouring water at the mill of American projects. Russia is gradually getting entangled in normative competition over values, standards and worldviews before producing an alternative she can come up with.

That competition in itself is highly unfavourable for Russia forcing upon it a choice of either norm-contender role that she is yet not apt for, or norm-taker status that she cannot and should not reconcile itself with. Russia needs an own normative strategy which can be projected outwards and its shaping is currently underway but lacks two essential elements that constitute the principal underpinning of Western normative power – firstly, a pretended universal legitimacy of its norms and, secondly, high living standards of its society.

Russia will not gain much from simply criticizing Western norms or creating a set of technical rules relevant for restricted Eurasian space. No more will it benefit from adopting a staunch anti-Western posture. Delimiting mental and cultural distinctions from the West makes sense only with subsequent formulation of an own universal message and worldview upheld with perceptible improvement of socioeconomic situation in own society. Russian potential ability to offer such a message for its direct environment as well as for the world as a whole emerges its key political advantage in comparison to other rising powers. But proceeding from a defensive stance Russia will hardy be able to formulate it. To that end much can be drawn from its XIX century strategy of promoting universal value of Russian culture[8].

Of course, such normative strategy should proceed along adequate political and economic efforts aimed at preventing the disruption of the existing multilateral world order and emphasising the risks of such disruption together with the progress that can be achieved through multilateral consensus-building process. But under present circumstances relevant normative positioning is indispensable for successful pursuing of the likewise policy line.

Published in Journal of Eurasian Affairs

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[1] Serfaty S. The West in a World Recast // Survival. – 2012. – Vol. 54, No. 6. – P. 33

[2] Alessandri E. Transatlantic Relations Four Years Later: The Elusive Quest for a Strategic Vision // The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs. – 2012. – Vol. 47, No. 3. – P. 20-36.

[3] van Oudenaren J. Transatlantic Bipolarity and the End of Multilateralism // Political Science Quarterly. – 2005. – Vol. 120, No. 1. – P. 1-32.

[4] Ojanen H. The EU and NATO: Two Competing Models for a Common Defence Policy // Journal of Common Market Studies. – 2006. – Vol. 44, No 1. – P. 57-76.

[5] Доктрина Обамы. Властелин двух колец / Авторский коллектив: С.М. Рогов, П.А. Шариков, С.Н. Бабич, И.А. Петрова, Н.В. Степанова http://russiancouncil.ru/inner/?id_4=1783#top

[6] Laïdi Z. Le multilatéralisme en berne

http://www.telos-eu.com/fr/globalisation/politique-internationale/le-multilateralisme-en-berne.html

[7] Duke, Simon 'Misplaced 'other' and normative pretence in transatlantic relations' // Journal of Transatlantic Studies. – 2010. – Vol. 8, No. 4. – P. 315-336.

[8] Почепцов Г.Г. Cмислові війни в сучасному світі http://osvita.mediasapiens.ua/material/17967

Archetipi della Russia nella lettura di Elémire Zolla

Archetipi della Russia nella lettura di Elémire Zolla

di Stefano Arcella

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it

Nel suo libro Archetipi (Marsilio, Venezia, 2002), Elémire Zolla descrive i modelli mitici con un linguaggio allusivo, quasi esso stesso simbolico, che lascia spazio all’intuito del lettore e ne sollecita il risveglio.

Il superamento del dualismo io/mondo, il senso dell’Uno-Tutto, i significati archetipici dei numeri, il continuo richiamo alla loro valenza simbolica, la loro percezione emotiva e non freddamente intellettuale, la esplicazione della loro funzione: lo studioso introduce in un mondo antico, a volte addirittura primordiale, eppure straordinariamente presente nel nostro tempo.

“Un archetipo – egli scrive – è ciò che aduna in un insieme una pluralità di oggetti, coordinandoli a certi sentimenti e pensieri. Il contatto con un archetipo non si può esprimere nel linguaggio ordinario, esige esclamativi e idiotismi, comporta una certa eccitazione. Quando una mente feriale sfiori un archetipo, smarrisce il suo instabile equilibrio e cade nella disperazione. Può capitare all’improvviso: scatta l’amore durante una recita galante, scoppia la furia nell’occasione più futile, cala la disperazione quando l’ambizione è soddisfatta, il dovere compiuto, l’affetto di tutti assicurato … Una vita del tutto sensata e disciplinata è un’utopia: crede di poter ignorare gli archetipi. L’uomo ha bisogno di assiomi per la mente e di estasi per la psiche come ha bisogno di cibo per il corpo: estasi e assiomi possono provenire solo dal mondo degli archetipi. Né bastano estasi lievi, brividi modesti: la psiche cerca la pienezza del panico. L’uomo vuole periodicamente smarrirsi nella foresta degli archetipi. Lo fa quando sogna, ma i sogni non bastano. Deve sparire da sveglio, rapìto da un archetipo in pieno giorno” (p.76).

Eppure, è difficile dare una definizione precisa ed esauriente degli archetipi. Essi sono, per Zolla, “energie formanti”, ma li potremmo anche chiamare “miti mobilitanti” che parlano alla psiche dell’uomo, “idee-forza” primordiali che si rivolgono al cuore, alle emozioni, alla sensibilità e che quindi rifuggono da un inquadramento rigido nel pensiero dialettico.

Nel quadro di un intero capitolo dedicato alla “politica archetipale”, ossia alle risonanze degli archetipi nel dominio politico, Zolla illumina anche gli archetipi che si sono manifestati nella storia russa.

“Bisanzio instillò il suo ultimo mito nella Roma teocratica, ma in Russia risorse. Certi circoli ecclesiastici vi coniarono il mito di Mosca come terza e ultima Roma. Ivan III sposò nel 1472 la nipote di Costantino Paleologo. Era come se il destino russo fosse stato suggellato quando, secondo la vecchia cronaca, gli inviati di Vladimir ispezionarono per lui l’Islam, l’Occidente e Bisanzio. Nell’Islam li colpì uno scomposto fervore, nell’Occidente non ravvisarono traccia di gloria, ma la bellezza dei riti bizantini non riuscirono a scordarla.

Ivan IV il terribile assunse il titolo di zar, parola slavonica assonante con Caesar. Nel secolo XVI fu lanciata la leggenda di Augusto che aveva assegnato la Russia a Prus, avo di Rjurik, fondatore della prima dinastia” (p.104).

Vladimir, il duca di Mosca nel X secolo: tanto è antica la vocazione bizantina della Russia. La descrizione di Zolla coincide con quella di Arnold Toynbee, ma aggiunge questa importante leggenda di Augusto che esprime un richiamo ideale diretto alle origini dell’Impero Romano d’Occidente e non solo a Bisanzio; il mito si fa storia e la storia diviene incarnazione di un mito. In questa dimensione mitica possiamo cogliere l’anima russa molto più di quanto non ci dicano le cronache, le successioni dinastiche, gli intrighi diplomatici.

L’analisi di Zolla si differenzia da quella di Toynbee quando evidenzia che il mito incrollabile degli Zar fu la liberazione dell’ortodossia prigioniera dei Turchi, la conquista di Costantinopoli chiave dell’impero ecumenico.

Nella storia e nella cultura russa, Zolla coglie due miti: quello “costantinianeo”- ossia il mito dell’Imperatore romano-orientale – e quello dell’imperatore-filosofo, di ascendenza ellenica e platonica che ha la sua riemersione nel pensiero, negli scritti e nell’opera di Giorgio Gemisto Pletone, che nel XV secolo pone il seme fecondo della fioritura del neoplatonismo “pagano” prima in Grecia, a Mistrà, poi in Italia, in occasione del suo viaggio nel 1439.  Quando Bisanzio cadde, nel 1453,  per mano dei Turchi, avvenne una divaricazione dei due miti: i neoplatonici greci si trasferirono in Italia, mentre il mito dell’imperatore “costantinianeo” rifiorì in Russia. Eppure, anche il mito dell’imperatore-filosofo trova una sua espressione nella storia russa: Pietro il Grande, nel 1721, abolì il patriarcato ortodosso di Mosca, proclamò la tolleranza religiosa e assunse il titolo latino di Imperator; il mito imperiale-filosofico eclissò, in quel momento, il mito dell’imperatore costantinianeo.

Caterina II, amica dei philosophes e imperatrice-filosofa, si presenta come Minerva o Astrea rediviva e riporta in terra il regno di Saturno come Augusto. Ella educa, però, il nipote da principe bizantino e per porlo sul trono si allea con Giuseppe II, l’imperatore-filosofo dell’Occidente.

“I due miti, il costantiniano e il filosofico – scrive Zolla – sedurranno alternativamente gli Zar che si troveranno sempre tutti impediti all’ultimo di raggiungere il Bosforo: Nicola I, Alessandro II, Nicola II” (p.105.)

La soggezione all’archetipo parve interrotta con la rivoluzione bolscevica del 1917 in cui Zolla coglie la manifestazione, su un piano materialistico, dell’archetipo romùleo, ossia l’irruzione di un modello di violenza e di forza distruttrice e creatrice, come Romolo si era affermato fondatore di Roma uccidendo Remo. In realtà, l’interruzione dell’archetipo fu solo una maya, come direbbero gli Indiani.

“Lo stemma bolscevico ripropone gli dèi delle rifondazioni, l’astro rosso di Marte, il martello di Vulcano, la falce di Saturno coi mannelli del suo regno restaurato. Il cranio sfondato di Trotzky conferì allo Stato proletario la compattezza che a Roma era venuta dal cadavere di Remo. Si compirono molte mosse simboliche oscure: la capitale riportata alla terza Roma, la Chiesa ortodossa ricostituita in patriarcato, il Fondatore mummificato come un faraone” (p. 105).

E ancora Zolla ricorda come l’ossessione del Bosforo rimase intatta nei colloqui fra Ribbentropp e Molotov.

Riguardo ai simboli arcaici presenti nel bolscevismo, Evola e Guénon avrebbero sicuramente parlato – come del resto fecero – di segni di una contraffazione contro-iniziatica. Gli archetipi di Marte, Vulcano e Saturno agirono nelle forme di una religione rovesciata, il “credo” dell’ateismo.

Il filo rosso della storia russa è, dunque,  il costante richiamo al modello della romanità nella duplice e oscillante versione dell’imperatore costantinianeo e dell’imperatore-filosofo, fra Bisanzio e la Grecia classica, fra l’impero assolutistico di stampo più orientale e il modello romano-occidentale più tollerante e pluralista.

Comunque, pur in questa oscillazione, la Russia scelse consapevolmente di connettersi all’Impero Romano d’Oriente e di raccoglierne l’eredità, pur avendo la possibilità storica di accogliere altri modelli, come quello religioso giudaico scelto dai Kazari nel IX secolo d.C., o quello turco-islamico.

E tale costante è fondamentale per inquadrare la vocazione storica della Russia e la sua anima, nonché le basi della sua comunanza culturale con l’Europa.

G. A. Zjuganov: “Il nostro Paese non può esistere senza un’idea nazionale”

G. A. Zjuganov: “Il nostro Paese non può esistere senza un’idea nazionale”

Traduzione di Luca Baldelli

Ex: http://www.statopotenza.eu

Il giorno 20 settembre, anticipando la prossima sessione plenaria della Duma di Stato, G A Zjuganov, Presidente del Comitato centrale del Partito comunista della Federazione russa, nonché capogruppo comunista presso la Duma, ha commentato il discorso tenuto il 19 settembre dal Presidente della Federazione Russa, V. V. Putin, al 10° incontro del Forum Internazionale di dibattito “Valdaj” .

Gennadij Andreevich Zjuganov
Presidente del Comitato centrale del Partito comunista, capogruppo del Partito comunista nella Duma di Stato della RF.
“Le dichiarazioni che Putin ha reso ieri al Forum “Valdaj”, le ho personalmente attese per 20 anni – ha affermato, condividendole, Gennadij Zjuganov. – Ciò dal momento che, a partire da Gorbaciov, i leaders che si sono avvicendati alla guida del nostro Paese non hanno detto nulla di tutto questo. A mio parere, questo discorso si sarebbe dovuto tenere prima davanti all’Assemblea federale e alla Nazione tutta, non solo davanti al ristretto pubblico dei rappresentanti stranieri. Credo che esso meriti particolare attenzione nel contesto della discussione che si terrà alla Duma” .
“Putin ha dichiarato, per la prima volta, che il nostro Paese non può esistere senza una idea nazionale – ha sottolineato il capo dei comunisti russi. – La Russia non può esistere senza proseguire nel solco delle sue migliori tradizioni, senza un serio dialogo tra le varie forze politiche per la costruzione di programmi e proposte articolati nell’interesse di tutti i cittadini, non solo di singoli gruppi sociali, per non parlare dell’oligarchia”.
G. A. Zjuganov ha inoltre ricordato che ricorre in questi giorni il 20° anniversario dei fatti che coinvolsero il Soviet Supremo della RSFSR (il colpo di mano di Eltsin, ndr), con tanto di attacco militare alla sede istituzionale. “Poche persone per 50 giorni resistettero alla costruzione dell’autocrazia presidenziale. Si è ripetuto e si continua ad affermare da più parti che lo Stato non dovrebbe avere la loro ideologia, la loro cultura, la loro visione dei fatti. Uno Stato senza forma né anima, uno Stato – mostro, ecco quello che da più parti si vuole; uno Stato che ha dato origine alla corruzione selvaggia e al terribile degrado della società che è sotto gli occhi di chiunque voglia vedere” – ha incalzato, con toni indignati, il leader del Partito comunista.
“Oggi si pretende di porre davanti alla storia il compito di inventare un’idea nazionale. A tal proposito, vorrei ricordare a Putin che l’idea nazionale non è né può essere il parto della testa di qualcuno. Eltsin incaricò Burbulis, Shakhraj e altri come loro di plasmare quest’ idea. Le grandi idee, però, quelle in cui le persone credono, sono sempre nate dalle lotte, dal lavoro, dal dolore, dalle vittorie, dalle sconfitte, dalle scoperte geniali” -  ha rimarcato G. A. Zjuganov.
“Abbiamo creato un’idea nazionale in mille anni di storia. L’essenza di quest’idea è rappresentata da uno Stato forte, ad alto contenuto spirituale, dal senso della comunità, della giustizia naturale. Noi – il popolo della Vittoria – siamo stati in grado di sopravvivere, nella nostra storia, grazie ad una serie di trionfi che ci hanno garantito la libertà, il diritto alla terra, la tutela delle nostre credenze e convinzioni” – ha ricordato  il capo comunista russo.
“Abbiamo iniziato con la grande vittoria sul lago Peipus, presso il quale sono stati sconfitti gli stessi Crociati che, in precedenza, avevano saccheggiato Costantinopoli e la Palestina. Abbiamo quindi affermato il diritto di professare la nostra fede e di sviluppare la nostra cultura. Dalla Battaglia di Kulikovo è sorto lo Stato russo; da Poltava è fiorito l’Impero russo. Abbiamo dimostrato di essere in grado di sviluppare i nostri spazi aperti, basandoci sulle nostre proprie forze” – ha continuato Gennadij Zjuganov.
“Sul campo di Borodino, poi, abbiamo dimostrato di poter battere un avversario forte che aveva raccolto sotto le sue insegne “crociati” di tutta Europa.  Le tre grandi battaglie della Grande Guerra Patriottica – Mosca, Stalingrado e Orel/Kursk -  hanno deciso l’esito della lotta contro le forze oscure del fascismo. In quella guerra uscirono vittoriosi l’Armata Rossa e gli ideali della Rivoluzione d’Ottobre. Voglio suggerire a Putin che è bene lavorare tutti insieme, non dimenticare una qualsiasi di queste pagine di storia. Questa è storia vera, altro che i cascami e la poltiglia del liberalismo che, imperanti per anni, hanno imposto al fondo di tutto la russofobia, l’odio verso tutto ciò che era sovietico, nazionale e genuinamente democratico”, – ha detto il leader del Partito comunista.
“Oggi, la politica interna del governo Medvedev non ha nulla a che fare con l’idea dello Stato-Nazione, con gli ideali che ci hanno assicurato la vittoria e il successo. Non ci può essere uno Stato forte quando l’ultimo immobile viene venduto, quando il 90 per cento delle grandi proprietà sono sotto il controllo degli stranieri. Lo Stato dovrebbe dare l’esempio a tutta la società nel far rispettare la legge, in primo luogo ai membri del Governo”- ha detto Gennadij Zjuganov.
“Non possono esistere uno Stato collettivista e un popolo che lo supporta e lo anima, se si dà la stura ad ogni forma di individualismo. Se tutto è predisposto e studiato per non far lavorare le persone, per deprimere le energie vive della società, se si punta tutto sulle lotterie, sui bagordi, sul gioco d’azzardo, sulle carte, come ci si può meravigliare di ciò che accade? – ha affermato G. A. Zjuganov – Inventano un programma su uno dei più importanti canali televisivi, ed ecco quel che avviene: quasi tutti si siedono in poltrona e giocano del denaro. Un Paese in cui si rincorrono ricchezze virtuali è destinato alla sconfitta. Un Paese può conoscere il successo a una sola condizione: la sua gente deve essere in grado di imparare ed inventare, affermando la propria dignità e dormendo così sonni tranquilli. Tutto questo non è contemplato nelle linee guida della nostra politica interna. Nessun Paese può sperare in qualsivoglia successo se la giustizia sociale viene calpestata. Da noi, il 10% più ricco dispone di un reddito 40-50 volte superiore a quello del 10% più povero. Un divario simile non si riscontra nemmeno nei Paesi dell’Africa. In questo senso siamo diventati lo Stato più ingiusto che esiste” – ha detto Gennadij Andreevich.
“Il nostro Paese non può essere certo prospero e solido, dal momento che il Governo di Medvedev è composto da persone che non se ne intendono di industria. Essi distruggono un settore dopo l’altro. Hanno distrutto il settore dei macchinari, quello dell’elettronica, quello della fabbricazione di strumenti di precisione. Hanno condotto alla prostrazione l’agricoltura, con il risultato di 41 milioni di ettari di terra arabile ricoperta da erbacce. Il sistema dell’istruzione, della formazione, dei tirocini è corrotto a livello di ogni scuola e tutte le famiglie ne sono coinvolte. Si è fatto di tutto per provocare l’indebolimento e la distruzione dell’Accademia delle Scienze, senza ascoltare gli scienziati e l’opposizione politica” – ha sottolineato il leader comunista.
“Purtroppo, dobbiamo registrare un divario enorme tra le parole e le azioni dei capi della Nazione. Per l’affermazione di un’idea nazionale proclamata con lo scudo e la bandiera della Federazione russa, si impone la necessità di una politica saggia ed equilibrata. Servono un nuovo corso e una nuova compagine di governo. Valuto pertanto il discorso di Putin come la giustificazione politica e ideologica di un cambiamento tanto necessario che dovrà essere portato avanti nel corso dell’anno, con le dimissioni dell’attuale Governo. Vediamo cosa accadrà . E’ importante che le idee espresse ieri da Putin siano concretamente realizzate nella vita pratica di tutti i giorni. Se così sarà, siamo pronti fin da adesso a fare la nostra parte, appoggiando il nuovo corso” – ha dichiarato, concludendo, G. A. Zjuganov.

Putin saluta il tradizionalismo, nucleo dell’identità nazionale della Russia

Putin saluta il tradizionalismo, nucleo dell’identità nazionale della Russia

RIA Novosti & http://www.statopotenza.eu

Il presidente russo Vladimir Putin propaganda il tradizionalismo come cuore dell’identità nazionale della Russia, lamentando minacce come la globalizzazione e il multiculturalismo, l’unità per un “mondo unipolare” e l’erosione dei valori cristiani, tra cui un esagerato concentrarsi sui diritti delle minoranze sessuali.

“Senza i valori al centro del cristianesimo e delle altre religioni del mondo, senza norme morali plasmate nel corso dei millenni, i popoli perderanno inevitabilmente la loro dignità umana“, ha detto Putin, rivolgendosi a diverse centinaia di funzionari russi e stranieri, studiosi e altre figure pubbliche in una conferenza promossa dal Cremlino nella Russia nordoccidentale. In un discorso e una sessione aperta della durata di oltre tre ore, Putin ha criticato aspramente “i Paesi euro-atlantici“, dove “ogni identità tradizionale,… tra cui l’identità sessuale, viene rifiutata.” “C’è una politica che equipara le famiglie con molti bambini a famiglie dello stesso sesso, la fede in Dio alla fede in Satana“, ha detto durante la 10.ma riunione annuale del cosiddetto Valdai Club, trasmessa in diretta dalla televisione russa e dai siti di informazione. “Il diritto di ogni minoranza alla diversità deve essere rispettata, ma il diritto della maggioranza non deve essere messa in discussione“, ha detto Putin.

Putin si orienta verso una retorica conservatrice da quando è tornato al Cremlino per la terza volta, nel 2012, dopo un periodo di quattro anni come Primo ministro. Ha promosso regolarmente i valori tradizionali nei discorsi pubblici, una mossa che gli analisti politici vedono come tentativo di mobilitare la base elettorale conservatrice di fronte al crescente malcontento pubblico e al rallentamento dell’economia. Molti valori liberali criticati nel suo discorso sono stati associati alla classe media urbana, forza trainante delle grandi proteste anti-Cremlino a Mosca, dopo le controverse elezioni parlamentari alla fine del 2011.

Traduzione di Alessandro Lattanzio

Myth, Utopia, & Pluriversal Realism

Myth, Utopia, & Pluriversal Realism

By Leonid Savin 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Georges Sorel divided social and political formations into two types: (1) those which had a myth as the basis for their ideology, and (2) those which appealed to utopian ideas. The first category he attributed to revolutionary socialism, where the true revolutionary myths are not descriptions of phenomena, but the expression of human will. The second category is utopian projects, which he attributed to bourgeois society and capitalism.

In contrast to myth, with its irrational attitudes, utopia is a product of mental labor. According to Sorel, it is the work of theorists who are trying to create a model with which to critique existing society and to measure the good and evil within it. Utopia is a set of imaginary institutions, but also offers plenty of clear analogies to real institutions.

Myths urge us to fight, whereas utopia aims at reform. It is no accident that some utopians after gaining political experience often become adroit statesmen.

Myth cannot be refuted, since it is held in concert as a belief of the community and is thus irreducible. Utopias, however, can be considered and rejected.

As we know, the various forms of socialism, both on the left and right of the political spectrum were actually built on myths, as readily evidenced in their advocate’s works. It is sufficient to recall the Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg, who became an apologist for German National Socialism.

At the opposite end of socialism we also see a mythological basis, although it is analyzed post-facto.  Even while Marx said that the proletariat does not need myths that are destroyed by capitalism, Igor Shafarevich conclusively demonstrated the link of the eschatological expectations of early Christianity and socialism. Liberation Theology in Latin America also confirms the strong presence of myth at work within left socialism of the 21st century.

If we talk in terms of the second and third political theories that have struggled with liberalism, it is pertinent to recall the remark of Friedrich von Hayek, who in his work The Road to Serfdom notes that, “in February 1941, Hitler felt it appropriate to say in a public speech that National Socialism and Marxism are basically the same thing.”

Of course, this does not diminish the importance of modern political myth, and also explains the hatred of it exhibited by the representatives of modern liberalism. Thus, political alternatives—whether the New Right, Indigenism, or Eurasianism—present a new totalitarian threat for neoliberals. Liberals, both classic and neo-, deny us our ideals, because they think they are largely mythological in character and thus cannot be translated into reality.

Now back to utopia. Liberal political economy, as rightly noted by Sorel, is, itself, one of the best examples of utopian thought. All human relationships are reduced to the form of free market exchange. This economic reductionism is presented by liberal utopians as a panacea for conflicts, misunderstandings, and all sorts of distortions that arise in societies.

The doctrine of utopianism emerged from the works of Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, Thomas More, and Jonathan Swift, as well as philosophers-liberals such as the leader of the British radicals Jeremy Bentham. The embodiment of utopia was erected at first on a rigid regulatory policy, which, at the same time included violence as a form of coercion on its citizens. It then switched to colonial expansion, which allowed for the accumulation of capital and the establishment of a single so-called “civilized standard” for other countries. Then liberal utopianism went even farther, becoming, in the words of Bertram Gross, “friendly fascism,” in that it started to institutionalize dominance and hegemony through a regime of international law and regulations. By this time, liberal utopia has itself become a modern myth: technocentric, rational, and totalitarian—emasculating the first utopian idea of ​​a just society and replacing it with materialism and utilitarian law, becoming, in effect, a dystopia.

In the case of both myth-centric societies, and utopias, consistently implemented through experiments with law, economics, philosophy, and politics, there was a major mistake in trying to extend the model globally. Fascism and Marxism fell first historically. However, liberalism has also now been called into question, as presciently noted about 20 years ago by John Lukacs in his work The End of the 20th Century and the End of the Modern Era.

Myth and utopia both drew their strength from the pluriversal world, homogenizing it and destroying its wealth of cultures and worldviews. The pluriversum was the basis on which the superstructure of Utopia was formed. It also where certain modern forces that aimed at implementing violent historical projects drew upon mythological deep mythological layers.

Within pluriversal reality there is space both for myth and utopia, if they are limited to a certain spaces with unique civilizational characteristics and separated from each other by geographical boundaries. Myth can be realized in the form of a theocracy or a futurological empire. Utopia could at the same time strive towards a biopolitical technopolis or a melting pot of the nations, but of course separately from myth-centric orders.

Carl Schmitt suggested the construction and recognition of such self-contained “Big Political Spaces” or Grossraume. The formation of these spaces would require a global program of pluriversalism, appealing to the distinctive myths and cultural foundations of different peoples. But all parties to a pluriversal order must have one thing in common as a prerequisite: the deconstruction of the superstructure of the nascent neoliberal utopia.

 

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L’eredità romano-bizantina della Russia nel pensiero di Arnold Toynbee

L’eredità romano-bizantina della Russia nel pensiero di Arnold Toynbee

Autore: Stefano Arcella

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it

Preambolo

La recentissima iniziativa diplomatica di Vladimir Putin in relazione alla crisi siriana ha riproposto e rilanciato il ruolo internazionale della Russia, dopo un ventennio di declino seguìto allo smembramento ed al collasso dell’Unione Sovietica nel 1991.

In precedenza, con varie scelte di politica interna (l’azione penale contro le Femen, la lotta contro l’oligarchia affaristico-finanziaria, la polemica e l’opposizione al modello occidentale delle adozioni da parte dei gay), Putin si era posto come esponente di un modello alternativo rispetto a quello del “politicamente corretto” di matrice statunitense, differenziandosi anche da altri esponenti della classe dirigente russa che esprimono un atteggiamento più filo-occidentale.

Nella attuale crisi siriana, la Russia esprime ed afferma una visione geopolitica multipolare che si è concretizzata nell’esito del G-20 di S. Pietroburgo, in cui la sua opposizione all’intervento militare USA in Siria ha coagulato intorno a sé i paesi del BRICS (Brasile, India, Cina, Sudafrica, oltre alla Russia stessa). Il presidente russo ha però compreso che non era sufficiente limitarsi a dire no alla guerra nel teatro siriano, ma occorreva mettere in campo un’iniziativa diplomatica che sottraesse ad Obama il pretesto delle armi chimiche per un intervento bellico ammantato da giustificazioni “umanitarie” e legato, in realtà, ad un preciso disegno geopolitico di smembramento e destabilizzazione delle guide politiche “forti” del mondo arabo e dell’area mediorientale in particolare, in moda da garantirsi il controllo delle fonti energetiche (compreso il grande bacino di gas presente nel sottosuolo del Mediterraneo orientale) e consolidare la supremazia militare e politica di Israele.

Questo rilancio del ruolo internazionale della Russia sia rispetto agli USA, sia rispetto al dialogo euro-mediterraneo, unitamente alla riaffermazione di una diversità culturale russa rispetto ad un occidente americanizzato, sollecita una riflessione sulle radici storico-culturali della Russia e sulla possibilità di riscoprire una koiné culturale euro-russa  che investe le origini storiche di questa Nazione e la sua diversità rispetto al modello di un Occidente che graviti sul modello americano.

La diffusione e il rilancio della teoria politica “euroasiatica” (espressa in Italia dalla rivista Eurasia e che vanta illustri precedenti teorici) e la recentissima enucleazione del progetto “Eu-Rus” rendono tale riflessione ancora più attuale e necessaria.

A tale riguardo è molto pertinente considerare un saggio dello storico inglese Arnold Toynbee (Londra 1889-York 1975), dal titolo Civilisation on trial (Oxford, 1948), pubblicato poi in traduzione italiana per le edizioni Bompiani nel 1949 e poi riedito tre volte, fino all’ultima edizione del 2003. Il saggio appare quindi in piena epoca staliniana, quando l’URSS sembrava l’antagonista dell’Occidente nello scenario della “guerra fredda”.

In questo libro – che è un classico della storia comparata e che pur risente fortemente del momento storico in cui viene scritto (il passaggio all’era atomica, la supremazia militare ed economica americana), lo storico inglese si interroga sulle radici remote e sull’ eredità bizantina della Russia, illuminandone una dimensione profonda che, nel contesto storico in cui venne teorizzata, denota la capacità di trascendere le apparenze e identificare le “costanti” della storia.

Toynbee divise la sua attività fra gli incarichi accademici e quelli politico-istituzionali. Fu docente di storia bizantina all’Università di Londra (e questo è un aspetto importante per capire il saggio di cui ci occupiamo) e docente di storia internazionale alla London School of Economics. Egli fece parte di numerose delegazioni inglesi all’estero e fu direttore del Royal Insitute of International Affairs. La sua opera maggiore è A Study of History (Londra-Oxford, 1934-1961) in 12 volumi, ma ricordiamo anche L’eredità di Annibale, pubblicato in Italia da Einaudi,  in cui approfondisce le linee guida della politica estera di Roma antica e le conseguenze devastanti della guerra annibalica; siamo in presenza di uno storico famoso la cui opera spazia da Bisanzio a Roma antica, da Annibale alle civiltà orientali, offrendo al lettore un grande scenario d’insieme. Egli unisce lo studio della storia all’esperienza diplomatica ed alla conoscenza della realtà contemporanea.

L’eredità bizantina della Russia

In Civiltà al paragone Toynbee dedica un‘ intero capitolo al tema dell’eredità bizantina della Russia e lo apre con la citazione di una massima di Orazio: “Naturam espellas furca, tamen usque recurret” (“Allontana pure la natura; tuttavia essa ritornerà”).

“Quando tentiamo di rinnegare il passato - scrive lo storico inglese -  quest’ultimo ha, come Orazio ben sapeva, un suo modo sornione di tornare fra noi, sottilmente travestito”. Egli non crede quindi alle affermazioni del regime di Stalin secondo cui la Russia avrebbe compiuto un taglio netto col suo passato. In realtà, le radici di un popolo possono manifestarsi in forme nuove, adattate al mutato contesto storico, ma è falso ed illusorio pretendere di cancellare il passato.

Nel decimo secolo d.C. i Russi scelgono deliberatamente – secondo Toynbee – di abbracciare il Cristianesimo ortodosso orientale. Essi avrebbero potuto seguire l’esempio dei loro vicini di sud-est, i Kazars delle steppe – che si convertirono al Giudaismo (v. op.cit., p. 242) – o quello dei Bulgari Bianchi, lungo il Volga, che si convertirono all’Islam nel decimo secolo. Essi preferirono invece accogliere il modello religioso di Bisanzio.

Dopo la presa di Costantinopoli da parte dei Turchi nel 1453 e la scomparsa degli ultimi resti dell’Impero Romano d’Oriente, il principato di Mosca assunse in piena coscienza dai Greci l’eredità di Bisanzio.

Nel 1472 il Gran Duca di Mosca, Ivan III, sposò Zoe Paleològos, nipote dell’ultimo imperatore greco di Costantinopoli, ultimo greco a portare la corona dell’Impero Romano d’Oriente. Tale scelta riveste un senso simbolico ben preciso, indicando l’accoglimento e la riproposizione di un archetipo imperiale, come evidenziato da Elémire Zolla.

Nel 1547, Ivan IV (“il Terribile”) “si incoronò Zar, ovvero – scrive Toynbee – Imperatore Romano d’Oriente. Sebbene il titolo fosse vacante, quel gesto di attribuirselo era audace, considerando che nel passato i principi russi erano stati sudditi ecclesiatici di un Metropolita di Mosca o di Kiev, il quale a sua volta era sottoposto al Patriarca Ecumenico di Costantinopoli, prelato politicamente dipendente dall’Imperatore Greco di Costantinopoli, di cui ora il Granduca Moscovita assumeva titolo, dignità e prerogative”.

Nel 1589 fu compiuto l’ultimo e significativo passo, quando il Patriarca ecumenico di Costantinopoli, a quel tempo in stato di sudditanza ai Turchi, fu costretto, durante una sua visita a Mosca, a innalzare il Metropolita di Mosca, già suo subordinato, alla dignità di Patriarca indipendente. Per quanto il patriarcato ecumenico greco abbia mantenuto, nel corso dei secoli fino ad oggi, la posizione di primus inter pares fra i capi delle Chiese ortodosse (le quali, unite nella dottrina e nella liturgia, sono però indipendenti l’una dall’altra come governo), tuttavia la Chiesa ortodossa russa divenne, dal momento del riconoscimento della sua indipendenza, la più importante delle Chiese ortodosse, essendo la più forte come numero di fedeli ed anche perché l’unica a godere dell’appoggio di un forte Stato sovrano.

Tale assunzione dell’eredità bizantina non fu un fatto accidentale né il frutto di forze storiche impersonali; secondo lo storico inglese i Russi sapevano benissimo quale ruolo storico avessero scelto di assumere. La loro linea di “grande politica” fu esposta nel sedicesimo secolo con efficace e sintetica chiarezza dal monaco Teofilo di Pakov al Gran Duca Basilio III di Mosca, che regnò fra il terzo e il quarto Ivan (quindi nella prima metà del ‘500):

“La Chiesa dell’antica Roma è caduta a causa della sua eresia; le porte della seconda Roma, Costantinopoli, sono state abbattute dall’ascia dei Turchi infedeli; ma la Chiesa di Mosca, la Chiesa della Nuova Roma, splende più radiosa del sole nell’intero universo… Due Rome sono cadute, ma la Terza è incrollabile; una quarta non vi può essere” .

È significativa questa identificazione esplicita di Mosca con la terza Roma, a indicare l’assunzione, in una nuova forma, dell’ideale romano dell’Imperium, ossia la unificazione di un mosaico di etnie diverse in una entità politica sovranazionale, che è – nella forma storica russa – anche l’autorità da cui dipende  quella religiosa ortodossa, così come in precedenza il Patriarca ecumenico di Costantinopoli dipendeva dall’Imperatore di Bisanzio.

In questo messaggio del monaco Teofilo si coglie, inoltre, un esplicito riferimento allo scisma del 1054 d.C. fra le Chiese ortodosse orientali e quella cattolica di Roma, considerata eretica (Toynbee ricorda, al riguardo, la famosa disputa teologica sul “filioque” nel testo del Credo in latino).

Lo storico inglese si chiede perché crollò la Costantinopoli bizantina e perché invece la Mosca bizantina sopravvisse. Egli reputa di trovare la risposta ad entrambi gli enigmi storici in quella che egli chiama “l’istituzione bizantina dello Stato totalitario”, intendendo per tale lo Stato – Impero che esercita il controllo su ogni aspetto della vita dei sudditi. L’ingerenza dello Stato nella vita della Chiesa e la mancanza di autonomia e di libertà di quest’ultima sarebbero state le cause dell’inaridimento delle capacità creative della civiltà bizantina, soprattutto dopo la restaurazione dell’impero di Bisanzio da parte di Leone il Siriano, due generazioni prima della restaurazione dell’Impero d’Occidente da parte di Carlo Magno (restaurazione che Toynbee, da buon inglese fedele ad un’impostazione di preminenza “talassocratica”, considera come un fortunoso fallimento).

La stessa istituzione dello Stato totalitario sarebbe stata invece all’origine della potenza e della continuità storica della Russia, sia perché ne assicurava l’unità interna, sia anche perché tale unità consentiva alla Russia, unitamente alla sua remota posizione geografica rispetto a Bisanzio, di non essere coinvolta nel disfacimento dell’impero bizantino e di restare l’unico Stato sovrano e forte che professasse il cristianesimo ortodosso orientale.

Tale configurazione politica e religiosa implica però che i Russi, nel corso dei secoli, abbiano riferito a se stessi, secondo lo storico inglese,  quella primogenitura e supremazia culturale che noi occidentali ci attribuiamo quali eredi della civiltà greco-romana e – secondo Toynbee – anche quali eredi di Israele e dell’Antico Testamento (ma qui il tema si fa più complesso e discusso, perché il cristianesimo occidentale si afferma storicamente in quanto si romanizza e diviene cattolicesimo romano che è fenomeno ben diverso dalla corrente cristiana di Pietro e della primitiva comunità cristiana di Gerusalemme).

Pertanto in tutti i momenti storici in cui vi sia un conflitto, una divergenza di vedute fra  l’Occidente e la Russia, per i Russi l’Occidente ha sempre torto e la Russia, quale erede di Bisanzio, ha sempre ragione. Tale antagonismo si manifesta per la prima volta in modo plastico con lo scisma del 1054 fra le Chiese ortodosse orientali e quella di Roma ma è una costante che si sviluppa in tutto il corso della storia russa, seppure con alterne vicende ed oscillazioni, dovute ad una componente filo-occidentale che pur è presente, talvolta, con Pietro il Grande e con la sua edificazione di san Pietroburgo, la più occidentale delle città russe.

Questo Stato totalitario ha avuto due riformulazioni innovative, una appunto con Pietro il Grande e l’altra con Lenin nel 1917. Agli occhi di Toynbee, il comunismo sovietico si configura come una sorta di nuova religione laicizzata e terrestrizzata, di nuova chiesa, ma la Russia nella sua sostanza, resta pur sempre uno Stato-Impero totalitario – nel senso specificato in precedenza -  che raccoglie l’eredità simbolica e politico-religiosa dell’Impero Romano d’Oriente. Ciò equivale a vedere – e in questo il suo sguardo era acuto – il comunismo come una sovrastruttura ideologica, come fenomeno di superficie rispetto alla struttura dell’anima russa, rovesciando così l’impostazione del materialismo storico. In quel momento epocale in cui scrive, Toynbee vede un grande dilemma presentarsi davanti alla Russia: se integrarsi nell’Occidente (che egli vede come sinonimo di una civiltà di impronta anche anglosassone e quindi, implicitamente, nel quadro euro-americano) oppure delineare un suo modello alternativo anti-occidentale. La conclusione dello storico inglese – impressionante per la sua lungimiranza – è che la Russia, come anima, come indole del suo popolo,  sarà sempre la “santa Russia”  e Mosca sarà sempre la “terza Roma”. Tamen usque recurret.

Considerazioni critiche

L’eredità bizantina della Russia è, in ultima analisi l’eredità romana, la visione imperiale come unità sovrannazionale nella diversità, visione geopolitica dei grandi spazi e della grande politica, ivi compresa la proiezione mediterranea, perché un Impero necessita sempre di un suo sbocco sul mare come grande via di comunicazione.

Tale retaggio romano (lo Czar ha una sua precisa assonanza fonetica con il Caesar romano, come già notava Elémire Zolla in Archetipi, ove evidenzia anche la componente fortemente germanica della dinastia dei Romanov) è la base, il fondamento della koiné culturale con l’Europa occidentale ed è anche la linea di demarcazione, di profonda distinzione rispetto agli USA.

In altri termini, la Russia è Europa, mentre gli USA risalgono ad un meticciato di impronta culturale protestante e calvinista che è tutta’altra cosa in termini di visione della vita e del mondo, nonché di modello di civiltà.

La teoria del blocco continentale russo-germanico – sostenuta, negli anni ’20 del Novecento dal gruppo degli intellettuali di Amburgo nell’ambito del filone della “rivoluzione conservatrice” – e la visione “euroasiatica” affermata da Karl Haushofer trovano il loro fondamento in questi precedenti storico-culturali, senza la conoscenza dei quali non si comprende la storia contemporanea della Russia, la sua proiezione mediterranea, la sua vocazione ad un ruolo di grande potenza nello scacchiere mondiale.

Sta a noi europei – ed a noi italiani, in particolare, per la specificità della nostra storia e delle nostre origini – ritrovare e diffondere la consapevolezza delle radici comuni euro-russe nella prospettiva auspicabile di un blocco continentale euro-russo che sia un modello distinto e alternativo rispetto a quello “occidentale” di impronta statunitense, sia sul piano politico ma soprattutto su quello “culturale”.

In questa ottica, gioveranno anche altri ulteriori approfondimenti teorico-culturali su temi affini, quali il pensiero di Spengler sull’anima russa, la lettura spengleriana della dicotomia Tolstoj-Dostojevski come simbolo di un’ambivalenza russa, il contributo di Zolla sul rapporto fra la Russia e gli archetipi che essa riprende e sviluppa, l’elaborazione culturale della Konservative Revolution sul rapporto russo-germanico.

Il presente contributo è solo l’inizio di uno studio storico-culturale più ampio.

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation warns against US-led war on Syria

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation warns against US-led war on Syria

By John Chan
Ex: http://www.wsws.org/

The latest summit of the Russian- and Chinese-led Central Asian grouping, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), held in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, on September 13, was dominated by the rising global tensions produced by the US preparations for war against Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted that “military interference from outside the country without a UN Security Council sanction is inadmissible.” The summit’s joint declaration opposed “Western intervention in Syria, as well as the loosening of the internal and regional stability in the Middle East.” The SCO called for an international “reconciliation” conference to permit negotiations between the Syrian government and opposition forces.

As he had done at the recent G20 summit in St Petersburg, Chinese President Xi Jinping lined up with Russia against any military assault on Damascus, fearing that it would be a prelude to attack Iran, one of China’s major oil suppliers.

Significantly, Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani attended the meeting, despite suggestions that his government would mark a shift from former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his anti-American rhetoric at previous SCO summits. Rouhani welcomed Russia’s proposal to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control, claiming that it has “given us hope that we will be able to avoid a new war in the region.”

The SCO explicitly supported Iran’s right to develop its nuclear program. Putin insisted in an address that “Iran, the same as any other state, has the right to peaceful use of atomic energy, including [uranium] enrichment operations.” The SCO declaration warned, without naming the US and its allies, that “the threat of military force and unilateral sanctions against the independent state of [Iran] are unacceptable.” A confrontation against Iran would bring “untold damage” to the region and the world at large.

The SCO statement also criticised Washington’s building of anti-ballistic missile defence systems in Eastern Europe and Asia, aimed at undermining the nuclear strike capacity of China and Russia. “You cannot provide for your own security at the expense of others,” the statement declared.

Despite such critical language, neither Putin nor Xi want to openly confront Washington and its European allies. Prior to the SCO summit, there was speculation that Putin would deliver advanced S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Iran and build a second nuclear reactor for the country. Russian officials eventually denied the reports.

Russia and China are facing growing pressure from US imperialism, including the threat that it will use its military might to dominate the key energy reserves in the Middle East and Central Asia. The SCO was established in 2001, shortly before the US utilised the “war on terror” to invade Afghanistan. Although the SCO’s official aim is to counter “three evils”—separatism, extremism and terrorism in the region—it is above all a bid to ensure that Eurasia does not fall completely into Washington’s orbit.

Apart from the four former Soviet Central Asian republics—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—the group also includes, as observer states, Mongolia, Iran, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The “dialogue partners” are Belarus, Sri Lanka and, significantly, Turkey, a NATO member, which was added last year.

However, US influence is clearly being brought to bear on the grouping. Before the summit, there were reports in the Pakistani press that the country could be accepted as a full SCO member. Russia invited new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to attend. However, Sharif only sent his national security advisor Sartaj Aziz, and no Pakistan membership was granted.

While the SCO is looking to enhance its role in Pakistan’s neighbour, Afghanistan, after the scheduled withdrawal of NATO forces, Aziz said Pakistan’s policy was “no interference and no favorites.” He insisted that the US-backed regime in Kabul could achieve an “Afghan-led reconciliation” if all countries in the region resisted the temptation to “fill the power vacuum.”

China and Russia are also deeply concerned by the US “pivot to Asia” to militarily threaten China and to lesser extent, Russia’s Far East, by strengthening Washington’s military capacities and alliances with countries such as Japan and South Korea. In June, China and Russia held a major joint naval exercise in the Sea of Japan, and in August, they carried out joint land/air drills in Russia involving tanks, heavy artillery and warplanes.

Facing US threats to its interests in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific, China is escalating its efforts to acquire energy supplies in Central Asia. For President Xi, the SCO summit was the last stop in a 10-day trip to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—where he signed or inaugurated multi-billion-dollar deals for oil and gas projects.

At his first stop, Turkmenistan, Xi inaugurated a gas-processing facility at a massive new field on the border with Afghanistan. Beijing has lent Turkmenistan $US8 billion for the project, which will triple gas supplies to China by the end of this decade. The country is already China’s largest supplier of gas, thanks to a 1,800-kilometer pipeline across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to China.

In Kazakhstan, where Xi signed a deal to buy to a minority stake in an offshore oilfield for $5 billion, he called for the development of a new “silk road economic belt.” Trade between China and the five Central Asian republics has increased nearly 100-fold since 1992, and Kazakhstan is now the third largest destination of Chinese overseas investment.

Xi delivered a speech declaring that Beijing would never interfere in the domestic affairs of the Central Asian states, never seek a dominant role in the region and never try to “nurture a sphere of influence.” This message clearly sought to also placate concerns in Russia over China’s growing clout in the former Soviet republics.

During the G20 summit, the China National Petroleum Corporation signed a “basic conditions” agreement with Russia’s Gazprom to prepare a deal, expected to be inked next year, for Gazprom to supply at least 38 billion cubic metres of gas per year to China via a pipeline by 2018.

With so much at stake, Wang Haiyun of Shanghai University declared in the Global Times that “maintaining regime security has become the utmost concern for SCO Central Asian members, including even Russia.” He accused the US and other Western powers of inciting “democratic turmoil” and “colour revolutions” and warned that if any SCO member “became a pro-Western state, it will have an impact on the very existence of the SCO.” If necessary, China had to show “decisiveness and responsibility” to join Russia and other members to contain the turmoil, i.e. to militarily crush any “colour revolution” in the region.

The discussions at the SCO meeting are a clear indication that Russia and China regard the US war plans against Syria and Iran as part of a wider design to undermine their security, underscoring the danger that the reckless US drive to intervene against Syria will provoke a far wider conflagration.

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Une nouvelle Route de la Soie reliera l’Asie à l’Europe

Une nouvelle Route de la Soie reliera l’Asie à l’Europe

Par Tatiana Golovanova

Ex: http://fortune.fdesouche.com

Les pays regroupés dans l’Organisation de coopération de Shanghai (OCS) pourront rétablir la Voie de la Soie sous forme d’un corridor de transport spécialement aménagé. Comme l’a annoncé vendredi au sommet de l’OCS à Bichkek (Kirghizie) le ministre de la Recherche et des technologies de la Chine Wang Gang, ce projet a trouvé un soutien auprès de tous les pays membres de l’organisation.

Les membres de l’OCS sont prêts à développer les échanges économiques et commerciaux. Durant ces trois mois des spécialistes de Chine, qui a pris l’initiative de faire renaître la Voie de la Soie, ont visité les pays d’Asie Centrale – le Kazakhstan, l’Ouzbékistan et la Turkménie.

La Voie de la Soie rénovée pourra relier la Chine à l’Europe via la Russie et les États d’Asie Centrale

Des ententes ont été conclues au sujet de la réalisation des projets communs pour des dizaines de milliards de dollars. L’aménagement d’un corridor de transport de l’Asie à l’Europe est une étape suivante de l’essor de ces rapports, remarque Sergueï Sanakoïev, secrétaire de la Chambre sino-russe.

« Il s’agit de créer un corridor transnational traversant le territoire du continent eurasiatique. Comme toujours, l’aménagement de tels corridors en plus de rendre possible la circulation des marchandises et des services prévoient aussi la création de grappes d’entreprises industrielles, de nouvelles productions, de technologies de pointe. Cela veut dire que cela ouvre de plus larges possibilités à la coopération dans le cadre de l’OCS lors de la mise en œuvre d’une telle initiative. »

Le projet est censé mettre en place un réseau routier reliant le Pacifique à la mer Baltique, anéantir les barrières commerciales, réduire les délais de livraison des marchandises et augmenter les règlements mutuels en monnaies nationales. L’une des variantes possibles de la future Voie de la Soie est le corridor de transport « Europe –Chine Occidentale ».

Il passera par le Kazakhstan, approchera la frontière de la Russie et se prolongera par Orenbourg et les autoroutes fédérales vers Saint-Pétersbourg et la Golfe de Finlande et la mer Baltique. La longueur de ce parcours pourra atteindre près de 8 500 km. Voici le commentaire d’Alexandre Potavine, analyste de la compagnie « RGS – Gestion des actifs ».
« En regardant la carte du monde et en évaluant les possibilités d’aménager une telle voie, on verra que les marchandises de Chine seront livrées via la Russie, l’Asie Centrale en Europe. Ce projet profite évidemment à la Chine. Il permet de minimiser les frais de transport, étant donnée que la Grande Voie de la Soie est d’environ un tiers est plus court que la voie maritime, contournant l’Asie et la péninsule Arabique. »

Si on réussit de mettre en œuvre cette conception, la Chine réduira les délais de livraison de ses marchandises. Actuellement les frets parviennent à l’Europe par mer au bout de 45 jours, par le Transsibérien – cela prend deux semaines. La nouvelle voie sera la plus courte et ne prendra pas plus de dix jours.

En plus de la Chine le corridor de transport permettra de se développer à d’autres participants. Ils pourront gagner bien sur le transit et la logistique, et vont encore attirer des investissements chinois pour leurs projets de transport, remarque Sergueï Sanakoïev.

La Voix de la Russie

Alexander Dugin on Syria and the New Cold War

Ex: http://www.attackthesystem.com

Alternative Right

An interview with Alexander Dugin on the Syrian crisis.

 

Prof. Dugin, the world faces right now in Syria the biggest international crisis since the downfall of the Eastern Block in 1989/90. Washington and Moscow find themselves in a proxy-confrontation on the Syrian battleground. Is this a new situation?

Dugin: We have to see the struggle for geopolitical power as the old conflict of land power represented by Russia and sea power represented by the USA and its NATO partners. This is not a new phenomenon; it is the continuation of the old geopolitical and geostrategic struggle. The 1990s was the time of the great defeat of the land power represented by the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev refused the continuation of this struggle. This was a kind of treason and resignation in front of the unipolar world. But with President Vladimir Putin in the early years of this decade, came a reactivation of the geopolitical identity of Russia as a land power. This was the beginning of a new kind of competition between sea power and land power.

How did this reactivation start?

Dugin: It started with the second Chechen war (1999-2009). Russia by that time was under pressure by Chechen terrorist attacks and the possible separatism of the northern Caucasus. Putin had to realize all the West, including the USA and the European Union, took sides with the Chechen separatists and Islamic terrorists fighting against the Russian army. This is the same plot we witness today in Syria or recently in Libya. The West gave the Chechen guerrillas support, and this was the moment of revelation of the new conflict between land power and sea power. With Putin, land power reaffirmed itself. The second moment of revelation was in August 2008, when the Georgian pro-Western Saakashvili regime attacked Zchinwali in South Ossetia. The war between Russia and Georgia was the second moment of revelation.

Is the Syrian crisis now the third moment of revelation?

Dugin: Exactly. Maybe it is even the final one, because now all is at stake. If Washington doesn´t intervene and instead accepts the position of Russia and China, this would be the end of the USA as a kind of unique superpower. This is the reason why I think Obama will go far in Syria. But if Russia steps aside and accepts the US-American intervention and if Moscow eventually betrays Bashar al-Assad, this would mean immediately a very hard blow to the Russian political identity. This would signify the great defeat of the land power. After this, the attack on Iran would follow and also on northern Caucasus. Among the separatist powers in the northern Caucasus there are many individuals who are supported by the Anglo-American, Israeli and Saudi powers. If Syria falls, they will start immediately the war in Russia, our country. Meaning: Putin cannot step aside; he cannot give up Assad, because this would mean the geopolitical suicide of Russia. Maybe we are right now in the major crisis of modern geopolitical history.

So right now both dominant world powers, USA and Russia, are in a struggle about their future existence…

Dugin: Indeed. At the moment there is no any other possible solution. We cannot find any compromise. In this situation there is no solution which would satisfy both sides. We know this from other conflicts, such as the Armenian-Azeri or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is impossible to find a solution for both sides. We witness the same now in Syria, but on a bigger scale. The war is the only way to make a reality check.

Why?

Dugin: We have to imagine this conflict as a type of card game like Poker. The players have the possibility to hide their capacities, to make all kinds of psychological tricks, but when the war begins all cards are in. We are now witnessing the moment of the end of the card game, before the cards are thrown on the table. This is a very serious moment, because the place as a world power is at stake. If America succeeds, it could grant itself for some time an absolutely dominant position. This will be the continuation of unipolarity and US-American global liberalism. This would be a very important moment because until now the USA hasn´t been able to make its dominance stable, but the moment they win that war, they will. But if the West loses the third battle (the first one was the Chechen war, the second was the Georgian war), this would be the end of the USA and its dominance. So we see: neither USA nor Russia can resign from that situation. It is simply not possible for both not to react.

Why does US-president Barrack Obama hesitate with his aggression against Syria? Why did he appeal the decision to the US-Congress? Why does he ask for permission that he doesn´t need for his attack?

Dugin: We shouldn´t make the mistake and start doing psychological analyses about Obama. The main war is taking place right now behind the scenes. And this war is raging around Vladimir Putin. He is under great pressure from pro-American, pro-Israeli, liberal functionaries around the Russian president. They try to convince him to step aside. The situation in Russia is completely different to the situation in USA. One individual, Vladimir Putin, and the large majority of the Russian population which supports him are on one side, and the people around Putin are the Fifth column of the West. This means that Putin is alone. He has the population with him, but not the political elite. So we have to see the step of the Obama administration asking the Congress as a kind of waiting game. They try to put pressure on Putin. They use all their networks in the Russian political elite to influence Putin´s decision. This is the invisible war which is going on right now.

Is this a new phenomenon?

Dugin: (laughs) Not at all! It is the modern form of the archaic tribes trying to influence the chieftain of the enemy by loud noise, cries and war drums. They beat themselves on the chest to impose fear on the enemy. I think the attempts of the US to influence Putin are a modern form of this psychological warfare before the real battle starts. The US-Administration will try to win this war without the Russian opponent on the field. For this they have to convince Putin to stay out. They have many instruments to do so.

But again: What about the position of Barrack Obama?

Dugin: I think all those personal aspects on the American side are less important than on the Russian side. In Russia one person decides now about war and peace. In the USA Obama is more a type of bureaucratic administrator. Obama is much more predictable. He is not acting on his behalf; he simply follows the middle line of US-American foreign politics. We have to realize that Obama doesn´t decide anything at all. He is merely the figurehead of a political system that makes the really important decisions. The political elite makes the decisions, Obama follows the scenario written for him. To say it clearly, Obama is nothing, Putin is everything.

You said Vladimir Putin has the majority of the Russian population on his side. But now it is peace time. Would they also support him in a war in Syria?

Dugin: This is a very good question. First of all, Putin would lose much of his support if he does not react on a Western intervention in Syria. His position would be weakened by stepping aside. The people who support Putin do this because they want to support a strong leader. If he doesn´t react and steps aside because of the US pressure, it will be considered by the majority of the population as a personal defeat for Putin. So you see it is much more Putin´s war than Obama´s war. But if he intervenes in Syria he will face two problems: Russian society wants to be a strong world power, but it is not ready to pay the expenses. When the extent of these costs becomes clear, this could cause a kind of shock to the population. The second problem is what I mentioned already, that the majority of the political elite are pro-Western. They would immediately oppose the war and start their propaganda by criticizing the decisions of Putin. This could provoke an inner crisis. I think Putin is aware of these two problems.

When you say the Russians might be shocked by the costs of such a war, isn´t there a danger that they might not support Putin because of that?

Dugin: I don´t think so. Our people are very heroic. Let us look back in history. Our people were never ready to enter a war, but if they did, they won that war despite the costs and sacrifices. Look at the Napoleonic wars or World War II. We Russians lost many battles, but eventually won those wars. So we are never prepared, but we always win.

D’UNE EVENTUELLE RIPOSTE RUSSE AU SILENCE DES DEUX PAPES

 

D’UNE EVENTUELLE RIPOSTE RUSSE AU SILENCE DES DEUX PAPES

 

Par delà des transactions secrètes, quels intérêts pour l'Europe ?

Michel Lhomme
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Un mémorandum "d’action urgente" publié par le bureau du président Poutine aux Forces armées de la Fédération de Russie ordonnerait une "frappe militaire massive" contre l'Arabie saoudite au cas où l'Ouest attaquerait la Syrie . Selon le Kremlin, Poutine serait devenu "furieux" après une réunion début août avec le prince saoudien Bandar ben Sultan, chef des services de renseignement saoudien qui l’aurait averti que si la Russie n'acceptait pas la défaite de la Syrie, l'Arabie saoudite serait acculée à déchaîner les terroristes tchétchènes durant les Jeux Olympiques d'hiver des 7-23 février 2014 à Sotchi, en Russie.

 

Le journal libanais As-Safir a précisé le contexte de cette étonnante menace saoudienne contre la Russie. En fait, le prince Bandar se serait engagé à protéger la base navale russe syrienne (seul débouché méditerranéen pour la marine russe auquel la Russie tient absolument) si le régime Assad était renversé et aurait alors ajouté pour peser un peu plus dans la discussion : "Je peux vous donner une garantie pour protéger les Jeux Olympiques d'hiver prochain car les groupes tchétchènes qui menacent la sécurité des jeux sont contrôlés par nous". Le prince saoudien est même allé plus loin en précisant que les Tchétchènes qui opèreraient en Syrie ne sont qu’un outil de pression temporaire qui pourrait du jour au lendemain sur simple ordre de Riyad être mis à l’arrêt ! "Ces groupes ne doivent pas vous effrayer, aurait déclaré Bandar à Poutine, nous les utilisons dans le cadre du régime syrien mais ils ne joueront aucun rôle dans l'avenir politique de la Syrie." 

Le London's Telegraph nous apprend que l'Arabie saoudite a secrètement offert à la Russie, sa participation à un vaste contrat pour contrôler le marché mondial du pétrole et du gaz dans toute la région, mais à l’unique condition que le Kremlin accepte de renverser le régime Assad et donc l’intervention militaire alliée qui se prépare. Quelle a été la réponse de la Russie ? Poutine aurait répondu : "Notre position sur Assad ne changera jamais. Nous pensons que le régime syrien est le meilleur orateur, s'exprimant au nom du peuple syrien, et non pas ceux des mangeurs de foie", faisant ici référence aux séquences de l’été montrant un rebelle djihadiste dévorant le cœur et le foie d'un loyaliste syrien !

 

Il va de soi qu’une riposte russe contre l’Arabie saoudite changerait la donne. Elle clarifierait en tout cas le double jeu américano-saoudien dans la région et mettrait les Etats-Unis au pied du mur de l’instrumentalisation faite depuis des années d’Al Qaïda (« la Base » en arabe). Briser l’Arabie saoudite, déjà actuellement en conflit interne, comme riposte à une attaque syrienne, franchement, très secrètement, on en rêve ! L’Irak  n’a toujours pas retrouvé un équilibre, la Turquie est divisée. Une telle riposte aurait le mérite de clarifier le jeu tordu des Saoud depuis des décennies mais il mettrait aussi très vite face à face Israël et l’Iran. On comprendrait alors que mourir pour Damas n’est qu’un petit préliminaire avant de se retrouver dans quelques années tous à Téhéran ou à devoir assurer la sécurité des boîtes branchées de Tel Aviv ! Poutine mettra-t-il son plan à exécution ? Quels marchandages de gros sous (les avoirs russes sont placés dans des banques américaines) pourraient-ils le faire plier ou sera-t-il après tout, lui l’orthodoxe, le sauveur des Chrétiens d’Orient, le nouveau « roi du monde » ?

 

Il est peut-être temps de clarifier notre position: pourquoi avons-nous toujours été sceptiques et interrogatifs sur le problème syrien ? C’est que contrairement justement à nos dirigeants et à toute la classe politique française, nous parlons en Européens et que pour nous, même si cette identité n’est pas exclusive, loin de là,  notre identité européenne demeure en partie chrétienne. Or, le reniement mercantile des Occidentaux en Orient est d’abord le sacrifice des Chrétiens, des Chrétiens du Liban et de Syrie, des Chrétiens d’Irak, des Chrétiens d’Egypte et de Tunisie. Nous sommes peut-être bénis des Dieux : nous avons deux papes mais pourtant, aucun des deux n’a levé le ton sur la Syrie, aucun des deux papes n’a souligné et posé le sort des Chrétiens de Syrie sur la balance, aucun des deux papes n’a défendu leurs intérêts. François 1er,  si avide de voyages ne devrait-il pas de suite s’envoler vers Damas et se poser là-bas en bouclier humanitaire?

Les Chrétiens de Syrie sont condamnés comme le furent les Chrétiens d’Irak. L’Arabie saoudite, ami des Etats-Unis et de la France s’en réjouit. Il est de bon ton dans les revues chrétiennes et même dans les sermons de justifier l’ingérence alliée au nom de la guerre juste. Pauvre St-Thomas ! C’est cela la moraline, oublier la force du réalisme, ne pas comprendre que comme dans toutes les crises du Moyen-Orient, les Chrétiens seront les boucs émissaires de toutes les rancunes religieuses et ethniques, des cibles faciles, isolées et minoritaires. Déjà, le régime d’Assad ne vient plus à leur aide. Si elle a lieu, l’intervention militaire alliée ne réussira pas à renforcer ou à unifier l’opposition syrienne parce que ce n’est tout simplement pas son but. Son but est de « renverser Assad sans le renverser » c’est-à-dire maintenir en Syrie une sorte de chaos généralisé comme en Irak, en Lybie et dans une moindre mesure au Liban, demain en Egypte. 

Pour les Saoudiens et les Qataris, le prochain gouvernement syrien sera sunnite et les Chrétiens seront immédiatement associés aux « croisés» occidentaux c’est-à-dire aux pires infidèles. Ils ne seront plus alors d’aucune utilité et donc massacrés ou contraints à l’exil forcé comme en Irak. Déjà totalement isolés, les Chrétiens syriens font aujourd’hui face à une rébellion divisée. Au sein de cette rébellion, les Islamistes sont chaque jour plus nombreux. Les Chrétiens ont été depuis le début par une habile propagande saoudienne assimilés au régime, ils sont donc l’une des cibles privilégiées de la rébellion. Largués par les Occidentaux, oubliés par la diplomatie vaticane, les Chrétiens de Syrie n’ont pas su ou n’ont pas pu prendre à temps leur distance avec le régime. Ils disparaîtront.

 

Ainsi, pour le point de vue européen qui devrait principalement nous occuper, une intervention militaire en Syrie ne vaut pas mieux qu’une non-intervention, guerre juste ou pas. Le sort des chrétiens de Syrie est scellé : ils sont condamnés. La France ne les aura pas aidés. Toutes les Eglises de Syrie ont d’ailleurs affirmé leur opposition à l’intervention militaire. Mais il faut aller plus loin et comprendre pourquoi les deux papes ne bougent pas : ils sont kantiens. La bévue des internationalistes et des mondialistes, lecteurs avides du traité de paix kantien, sur l’idée nationale et le concept de nation qu’ils sacrifient pour celui de cosmopolitisme, induit aujourd’hui ces apories d’une mondialisation tiraillée entre des principes républicains auxquels on ne cesse d’objecter le respect des différences communautaires, culturelles ou nationales et l’abandon de ces mêmes principes au nom d’une pseudo-démocratie mondiale et d’une ingérence humanitariste guerrière. Les deux papes sont en fait des papes totalitaires.