Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s particular take on politics has created many memes on the Russian Internet. His personal frustrations having to negotiate and deal with the West are very relatable to the Russian masses who also want to normalize relations. His crestfallen yet visibly angered words “F’n Morons” have become the stuff of meme legend throughout Russia, although few realize that it was actually said during discussions with the Saudis and not America or Britain as most would assume. But this statement so resonated with the pure frustration that Russians have been feeling, that the populace just sort of shifted the target of his words to the ultimate source of their dismay that started the Maidan Color Revolution in 2014, which has been spiraling downwards ever since. Foreign Minister Lavrov has proved not to be a one hit wonder and his recent trolling of his British counterpart Liz Truss exploded over the Russian internet. This interesting strange moment in the endless and pointless battle of The West vs. Russia is a real microcosm of the nature of how both sides see themselves and the other and demands a full breakdown.

So the situation looks like this, again an annoyed and worn down Lavrov tried to prove a point about how little the West actually understands about the Ukrainian Crisis with some verbal fencing…

MOSCOW, February 10. /TASS/. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss refused to recognize Russia’s sovereignty over the Voronezh and Rostov Regions at talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday, a source close to the negotiations told TASS.

After Truss’ statements urging Moscow to move its forces, located on Russia’s soil, away from the border with Ukraine, Lavrov asked his British counterpart if she recognized Russia’s sovereignty over the Voronezh and Rostov Regions.

According to the source, Truss insisted that the UK would never recognize Russia’s sovereignty over these regions.

Although the Russian internet was smugly proud of this quippy achievement there is a level of pure honesty in the reaction from the British that most Russians simply are incapable of seeing. The Russians are all laughing at her answer taking it as a literal reaction, but metaphorically she told the God’s honest truth from an Anglo-Saxon perspective.

Truss clearly refused to recognize two regions of Russia as being part of Russia out of willful ignorance. There are fine lines between idiocy, ignorance and willful ignorance, but behind the latter of the three there can often be a very crafty and hateful intelligence. No truth pith-helmeted British colonizer would dare to learn anything about her barbaric adversaries, and in this display of pure willful ignorance she perfectly articulated the view of the West towards Russia – they don’t recognize any of Russia’s concerns, demands, leadership or even statehood as legitimate, nor do they need to justify their positions with facts and knowledge when dealing with Untermenschen.

The reaction of the British Foreign Secretary was an unintended act of pure and total dominance. Can you imagine, just how low she and her colleagues must view the Russians as to be charged with dealing with them and yet know absolutely nothing about their country, their geography and the nature of the Ukrainian Crisis? Discussing a situation that has killed thousands of people yet choosing to learn zero basic information is “alpha-chad” to say the least.

Truss answered like a Roman general forced to lower himself to speaking to unwashed Barbarians, who has zero concern for any details about these subhuman animals and their pathetic pseudoculture. All the Roman needs to know is that the allied Barbarians in Ukraine are right and the enemy ones in Russia are wrong. What town or river is where doesn’t make any difference. This Roman attitude of seeing the world as one of civility vs. barbarity hasn’t gone anywhere, and a true sign of a “civilized person” is having zero knowledge or tolerance for the ways of the backwards.

Although Russians may find tricking Anglo-Saxon counterparts into revealing how ignorant they are as a coping mechanism for losing the Cold War, they forget that the supposedly 80 IQ gender-queer limp-wristed twits on the other side of the line have beaten them time and again. My Russian children, living in Russia, have already asked me numerous LGBT-related questions yet have not once asked anything about Multipolarity, Traditional Values or Orthodox Christianity. Russians may find narcissistic joy in mocking the English-speaking world for being ignorant, but apparently being able to quote Pushkin doesn’t win 21^st century info wars now, does it? When you’ve got Hollywood, the entire Mainstream Media, Big Tech and so on, you don’t need to know where anything is on a map. The Anglo-Saxons have plenty of knowledge, they just feel they don’t need to know a damn thing about you Russians. That is the nuance the Russians cannot perceive on their mental radar.

This trolling by Lavrov really shows that the joke is actually on Russia. The Russians continue, after years of failing, to try to reason with those who see them as subhuman animals. Perhaps we are moving towards a Multipolar World due to economics, geography and the West shooting itself in the foot, but as far as cultural/info wars are going if you look at the youth around Moscow you can clearly see who is winning.

Perhaps it is actually Lavrov’s side who is ignorant as to how to deal with the Romans from a Barbarian standpoint, and simply cannot wrap their brains around the fact that no progress can be made until the West either sees the Russians as equals or at least fears them enough to create respect like they did in the Cold War. It would also help if the Russians would wake up to the fact that they are considered Barbarians, the fact that Hitler killed millions of them due to his belief that they are racially inferior, just won’t sink in for some reason.

Russia continues to step on the same rake over and over again by seeing itself as equal to the West and believing that the stress between both sides is caused by some sort of cultural misunderstanding. The real intellectual question the Russians should be asking themselves is by what means could a Germanic Barbarian chief convince a Roman general that they are equals? How could they make him see the villages and culture of the Rhine as just as human and glorious as Rome? This first step to this particular negotiation is really the necessity for the Russians to hack through layer-upon-layer of Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority that creates the type of willful ignorance displayed unabashedly by Liz Truss. Although it is hard to formulate a winning strategy for this problem, it surely lies in the fact that deep down the Civilized man will always secretly envy the freedom and uncastrated status of the Barbarian, but that is a topic for another day.

Russian historian and distinguished public intellectual Dr. Natalia Narochnitskaya was spot on in her Christmas homily delivered to cultural notables in Kaliningrad a few months ago when she said that “The world needs Russia precisely for being Russia, and therefore Russia must remain true to herself!”

“In our time,” she pointed out, “when beauty and adherence to norm are denounced as something vulgar and annoying, while sin and perversion are touted as symbols of sophistication, when all spiritual and historical sanctities of our people are being trampled underfoot, it is more vital than ever to avoid falling into perfidiously set traps. A huge role in this belongs to the Orthodox Church – the pillar and foundation of the Truth, but as well to all who are engaged in the fields of education and enlightenment.”

“Our mission,” Dr. Narochnitskaya continued, “is to pass our historical heritage on to future generations. Contemporary Russia, which is in the process of re-establishing its national and religious substance, is slated to become the world’s major powerhouse on the spiritual stage.”

These solemn thoughts call for serious reflection in the West, on the part of those at least who are still capable of it. Dr Narochnitskaya is, of course, just a prominent private citizen, but her views nevertheless reflect the thinking and the temperament of Russia’s establishment and, more importantly, the ordinary people. The contrast between the vision for her country that she espouses and the nihilistic meanderings of the paladins of what remains of Western culture and spirit is stupendous.

Most strikingly, she does not project Russia’s “superpower” role on a geopolitically reconfigured planet in terms of military and physical dominance, but primarily as a free spiritual gift to a wounded world. To anomic Western ears her discourse necessarily sounds archaic, putting in the centre of her conceptual framework long forgotten and by now nearly incomprehensible notions such as sin, beauty, truth (and with upper-case T, no less), norm, and perversion. And, most shocking of all, she upholds what in the contemporary West is the laughable concept of nurturing and passing on to coming generations a common core of spiritual values rooted in their country’s cultural and historical experience.

Several decades ago, James Burnham wrote his famous treatise “Suicide of the West.” While blaming liberalism for the West’s decadence, Burnham argued that it was what in 1964 he saw as an American retreat from empire and the role of global policeman that signified the weakness and decline of the Occident. He was partially correct in his analysis, insofar as he foresaw the corrosive impact that the encroachment of what he termed “liberalism” would have on the West’s vitality and will to survive. Hence the “suicide” diagnosis featured in the title. But with all his acuity, Burnham was still unable to step out of the brute power matrix typical of Western reasoning ever since the Schism. Never mind all the “shining city on the hill” sanctimonious cant, for noble Burnham also the ultimate and fundamental test of a civilization’s viability was its ability to physically dominate and crush others.

We can only speculate how Burnham would react, if he were alive today, to political correctness, cancel culture and other proliferations of the liberal scourge he so feared and warned against in his day. How would he comment on a Canadian father being jailed for refusing to use a male pronoun in addressing his “trans-gender” daughter, or on the introduction in the California ethnic studies school curriculum of mandatory obeisance to an Aztec human sacrifice divinity as a counterweight to alleged white racism, or the initiative in Oregon to do away with “correct answers” in mathematics classes because they promote “white supremacy”? Or the production of limited edition (only 666 pairs) Air max 97 Nike sneakers dedicated to the Evil One, complete with a pentagram and a drop of human blood in each shoe? How is that for the resounding triumph of “liberalism”?

Foreign Minister Lavrov had a point in a recent interview when he said that within an amazingly short period of time the East and the West seem to have simply switched places.

In this confrontation that is deontological, or in the realm of values, rather than about who has the better hypersonic missiles or can win an arms race, Dr. Narochnitskaya has made it very clear what spiritual legacy she expects to be bequeathed to Russia’s future generations. What will be the inheritance of their misgendered Western counterparts? Satanic sneakers?

The dead-end reached by the West in the deontological competition was keenly noted by Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov in a recent Serbian “Sputnik” interview. “What is in progress is a clash between people and nations who support normal human values and the part of the Western elite which preaches post-human values.” Speaking for his country Karaganov pointedly stressed that “we stand for human values and that is potentially a far sharper disagreement than what used to exist between communism and capitalism.”

Has Russia any sympathizers in the West?

“Yes, of course she does,” Karaganov was quick to respond. “Not just in the West but throughout the world, ninety percent of which consists of normal people who share belief in normal values, who wish to live and bear their children in peace, for elders to be respected, and that people should be free to devote themselves to what they most highly cherish – family and fatherland.”

Such unapologetically bold and refreshing talk has not been heard in the West in a very long time.

The Donald Trump administration opened the door for quirky and crazy cults to dominate political discourse in the United States. Never before in the history of the United States has a political movement combined a cult of personality – that surrounding Trump – with a crackpot political conspiracy – “Qanon” – and fundamentalist “prosperity gospel” Christianity, the latter best described as the unauthorized use of Jesus’s name by a gang of money-grifting charlatans. This toxic brew has been used as a convenient vehicle for right-wing politicians to build a base of donors and supporters. The truly dangerous nature of the Trump political movement, which nested in the Republican Party to the point that Trumpists now control the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower, was demonstrated in the January 6 takeover by Trump supporters of the U.S. Capitol building.

Today, alarming numbers of Americans believe in the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, including those that undermine the American political system, including its electoral process. This is not only an American problem. The political cults nurtured under the Trump administration are being exported to other countries, including Brazil, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and others, where they are not only being embraced by rank-and-file citizens but by political leaders of the far-right.

With the Republican Party now fully under the control of Trump and his base of Trump cult members and Qanon conspiracy cultists, the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Republican arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is positioned to spread far-right conspiracy-laden propaganda in countries where it maintains a presence. Coupled with Trump fanatics who burrowed their way into the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors entities – Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio and Television Marti, Alhurra, and Radio Sawa – control of the IRI provides a mechanism for Trump and Qanon conspiracists to spread their neo-fascist and neo-Nazi venom to foreign political parties and media outlets.

The international repercussions of Trumpism as a fascist political ideology are being felt in Latin America, where Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s Adolf Hitler- and Benito Mussolini-admiring president, Jair Bolsonaro, serves as a linchpin in Trump political adviser Steve Bannon’s global “Fascist International,” known as “The Movement.” Eduardo Bolsonaro was placed at a meeting of a Trump “War Council,” which included leaders of the Qanon conspiracy, in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC on the evening of January 5 of this year, the eve of the armed and violent attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Congress. This represents the type of internationalization of the fascist movement not seen since Hitler’s “Deutsches Ausland-Institut” in Stuttgart recruited the far-right in other nations to organize their own Nazi political organizations and parties. Authorities in the United States and Brazil must be on guard against efforts by the IRI and its parent organization, NED, to provide material support to the Bolsonaro family’s new far-right political contrivance in Brazil, the Alliance for Brazil (ALIANÇA). Just as the entire Trump family, including his offspring, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Tiffany Trump, have laid claim to the stewardship of the U.S. Republican Party, Bolsonaro’s sons, Federal Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, Rio de Janeiro councilor Carlos Bolsonaro, and Sao Paulo Chamber Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, along with their father, control ALIANÇA. And, just as ominously, Eduardo Bolsonaro currently serves as the chairman of the Brazilian Congress’ Foreign Affairs Committee.

The combination of far-right cultism and nepotism have had a damaging effect on the democratic systems of the United States and Brazil, especially considering that the bases of political support for Trump and Bolsonaro in their respective nations are found in the cultist Christian fundamentalist sects, from where Qanon and related conspiracy theories are generated and propagated, including those related to the coronavirus pandemic. Bolsonaro ally and Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo has falsely called coronavirus a plot by “Communists,” referring to the virus as the “comunavirus.” He has similarly described global climate change as a “Communist plot” designed by the government of China. Araujo and the Bolsonaros have also falsely re-written history to claim that Nazism was a “leftist” movement and Adolf Hitler was a “socialist.” Those sorts of conspiracy theories are also predominant in the Trump Republican Party, where two Chinese conspiracy cults, Falun Gong and exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui’s “Himalaya Supervisory Organization,” constantly traffic in conspiracies about Chinese development of Covid-19 as a biological super-weapon, fanatical tripe that is gladly spread by Qanon and other far-right conspiracy outlets.

It is noteworthy that Araujo’s father was the notorious Henrique Fonseca de Araújo, the Attorney General for Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship, who personally interceded to prevent the extradition to Germany of Gustav Franz Wagner, the deputy commander of the Sobibór extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. As part of the Nazis’ Operation Reinhard, as many as 250,000 men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis at Sobibór, the fourth deadliest of Nazi concentration camps in terms of mass exterminations.

The IRI, now under Trump’s control, can have its wings clipped by convincing its financiers to cut off its funding. These include, in addition to the NED and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), themselves problematic entities, the governments of Canada and Australia, the U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEP), and the British High Commission in Islamabad. IRI’s partners, if they truly support democracy, should sever ties to the IRI. Its partners include the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, the Arab Women’s Leadership Institute, the Asian Network for Free Elections, the Arab World for Research and Development, the ARI Movement of Turkey, Avanza Chile, the Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Bhutan Foundation, the Bush Institute at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, the Carter Center, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), Center for Research Transparency and Accountability, Centar modernih veština of Belgrade, Center for New Initiatives, Center for Research and Security Studies, Centro de Estudios sobre la Enseñanza y el Aprendizaje del Derecho (CEEAD) of Mexico, Election Administration of Georgia, CEVRO in Prague, Community of Democracies, Consejo Civico of Monterrey (Mexico), Civil Initiative Support Center of Ukraine, Eastern European Studies Center, Eduardo Frei Foundation of Chile, Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE) of Pakistan, Education for Democracy Foundation, Economic Forum of Poland, European Endowment for Democracy, European Institute for Gender Equality, Electoral Institute for Sustainable Development in Africa, European People’s Party, Inicijativa F5 of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Freedom House, Forum of Federations, Fundacion Colosio of Mexico, Fundacion Rafael Preciado of Mexico, Generation Democracy, Georgetown University Institute for Women, Peace and Security, Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, Georgia Institute of Politics, Guyana National Youth Council, Health Policy Institute, (U.S.) House Democracy Partnership, Hudson Institute, Institute of Economic and Social Studies of Slovakia, the Institute for Inclusive Security, Istanbul Aydin University, Institute of Political Education of Ukraine, Institute for Public Opinion Research, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, ICMA-ML of Mexico, International Center for Democratic Transition, International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Internews, Kavkasia TV, Leadership Trek, Instytut Lecha Walesy of Poland, Libertarian Club of Serbia, Libertad y Desarrollo (LyD) of Chile, Assembly of the Republic of North Macedonia, Macedonian Women’s Lobby, MESA 10 of Slovakia, Movimiento Pro-Vecino of Mexico, National Democratic Institute (an arm of the U.S. Democratic Party of which President Joe Biden is the titular head), Mreža za Političku Odgovornost (MPO) of Serbia, Network of Democrats in the Arab World, Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), Peace Education and Development (PEAD) Foundation of Pakistan, the Polish Institute of International Affairs, Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation (PAUCI), Political Academy of the Austrian People’s Party (PolAk), Argentine Network for International Cooperation (RACI), Sally Women’s Institute, Search for Common Ground, Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO, South African Institute of Race Relations, Syrian Emergency Task Force, Uganda Youth Network, Wilfred Martens Center, Parliamentary Club of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Women’s Democracy Network, Youth Coalition for Unity and Development of Cambodia, Youth Council of Cambodia, and Youth of the European People’s Party.

The question that should be put to these organizations is a simple one. Do they stand for democracy or will they continue to partner with an operational arm of the Republican Party, which now stands for fascism, white supremacy, and misogyny? That should not be a hard question to answer, even for NGOs that appear to be nothing more than Central Intelligence Agency fronts.

The forces of democracy should be on vigilant guard against dangerous far-right cults and political movements today as much as they were during World War II. After witnessing neo-Nazis and white supremacists laying siege to the U.S. Capitol, various U.S. state capitol buildings, and almost seizing control of the German Reichstag in Berlin last summer, it is clear that the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7, 1945 was not actually a surrender but a cease fire. The Nazis have returned only this time they have penetrated the very halls of democratic political power in the United States and Brazil and are attempting to do the same in Germany, France, Britain, Canada, Australia, Italy, and other nations.

As a country that has seen total systemic collapse twice during the 20th century, Russia was watching the leadup to the U.S. presidential inauguration with just as much anticipation as the most ardent Trump/Biden supporters and fervent conspiracy theorists. It looked from Moscow, like Trump, after having been blatantly cheated out of the presidency, might just decide to flip the rigged game table over consequences be damned. Whatever chaos would ensue from such a move would surely give the Russians the freedom they’ve been dreaming of (via distraction) from Washington’s omnipresent gaze and Soft Power vice grip. But this did not occur. Trump’s cryptic language and social media hinting amounted to nothing as he willingly accepted losing the election that he won.

And so the big question being discussed in Russia is… “what’s next?”. So let’s break down what the near future is going to look like and how a theoretically sovereign Russia should respond to these challenges presented by a Joe Biden White House.

Context: Trump’s legacy will be actively erased but how does that affect Russia?

The period in American history that Trump oversaw, if viewed objectively, was an attempt to make a titanic shift in policy, economy and mentality in America that failed. Why it failed is not important, but what is important is to acknowledge all of the achievements or new foundations that he laid in office are already being deleted by the new old Establishment.

The U.S. is headed right back into the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement and various other international bureaucracies and forms of caring with taxpayer cash. “The Wall” will give way to the return of laissez-faire immigration policies that will lead to more forced diversity and migrant crises. The successful Populism of the Republican party will be reverted into a business focus, becoming repulsive to minorities again, pushing the U.S. towards a factually one party system deleting the Populist vs. Globalist dichotomy that the Trump era brought about. Biden’s early rhetoric made it clear that the Pax Trumpa is over and we could be looking at a full scale invasion of Syria. The cutting of the Keystone XL pipeline is also a big signal that energy independence is no more. American energy will come from its traditional source during a Biden presidency – the colonies.

The main thing to understand is that everything Trump did or tried to do is being dismantled and with the storming of Capitol Hill, his Big Tech enemies have the casus belli they need to deplatform and factually silence everyone who does not agree with the Progressive Agenda including the then President of the United States Donald Trump himself.

For Russia, this means this deletion of the last four years can be interpreted very literally. U.S.-Russian relations will look for the foreseeable future exactly as they were during the Obama period – increasingly hostile. The only key difference is that the real American Right and Conservatives have had the blindfold removed and see that they are on the losing end of a war for their very survival. The battle for power in America just got very real, the political pro-wrestling of previous generations is over. From a Right Wing American perspective the election was stolen and their voices have been officially and bluntly silenced, this will also have large ramifications for Russia.

The Poisoned Olive Branch: A brief refresher on the Obama era.

Putin’s big speech in Munich in 2007 declaring the rise of a Multipolar World, in which one of those poles would be Russia, was essentially a declaration of war against anyone with a Monopolar Globalist Agenda especially those in Washington. So it is no surprise that when Obama came to power soon after this historic speech, Russia became a top priority and still is to this day.

Just a few months after being in office Obama’s new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton infamously presented the Russians with a red “reset button” with the incorrect translation written on it making it an “overload button”. This big PR stunt was very telling as the supposed desire to start a “reset” period in U.S.-Russian relations was a hollow attempt by the American side trying to overload the Russians with the organized chaos of the Maidan in Kiev. The nightmare scenario that played out in the Ukraine has been the single hardest blow to Putin Era Russia from which it may never recover. As Zbigniew Brzezinski said ‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire’.

The Obama period also saw Russia react to provocations in Syria forcing (or allowing) them to return to the role of major player militarily far beyond their borders. Obama’s time in office was also a period of inflation for Russia and large sanctions that may have actually hurt Europe more so than the officially declared target. This is probably due to the fact that the Washington Status Quo sees no difference between 2010 and 1980 Russia, thus being confident that the same tactics should yield the same results.

Clinton’s cheap plastic button was the perfect symbol for this 8 year period – fake attempts at peace with smiles hiding Washington’s true plans to put Russia back in its place. This is the reality that Russia is returning to, in fact, there are already Washington backed “protests” in Moscow in support of Navalny and not surprisingly the Establishment sees zero disconnect between supporting violent protest in Russia while denouncing violent protests at Capitol Hill.

Image: The former U.S. ambassador to Moscow said “citizens of Russia today, good job!” about the Navalny protests when it concerns American citizens things are much different.

We should not forget that Navalny who in theory fled Russia for his life, flew right into the arms of those who supposedly wanted him dead right as Biden was taking office. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. Navalny is a joke and the West’s overwhelming support for him despite some extremist Right Wing rhetoric is very telling.

The key thing for Russia to understand about Joe Biden’s Obama Era 2.0 is that the clock has turned back to the point when they were enemy #1 in the Beltway’s eyes. They have a powerful enemy that will again be attacking them on all fronts, traditionally via proxy war, economically via sanctions and other financial trickery, and culturally via Hollywood + the NGO/grant-industrial complex. There is no hope for a “reset”. Russia has to either thrive or capitulate.

So what must Russia do in order to thrive during the next 8 years of Obama 2.0?

1. Putin must select and promote his heir.

Putin is getting on in years and the fact that his time seems limited intellectually opens the door for change. It would be in his best interests to make sure this is a controlled change and not a Color Revolution that would surely be the final nail in the Russian coffin. If Putin and team select a large, forty or fifty year old, tough, silovik type of gent to get the push from United Russia in the next presidential election, then he will utterly smash all opposition hopes of breaking the system. This will essentially remove an “end of Putin” election scenario from occurring.

Some of the worst periods in Russian history happened due to an unclear transfer of power (the Time of Troubles, the Overthrow of the Tsar that opened the door for the October Revolution) and this must be avoided at all costs. Putin needs to send the signal that after him, the nation will stay on the same course and there is nothing you can do about it for another 12 years under his successor. Vladimir Vladimirovich has always pushed for stability, now it is time for him to select and promote an heir to lock down two more terms of national stability more or less on the current course.

Image: It is time to undo the madness this man unleashed on Russia 300+ years ago.

2. Russians must overcome 300+ years of their inferiority complex.

It is difficult to briefly describe this aspect of Russian culture and just how much it blocks any hope of Russia ever becoming a superpower again. When Peter I came back from Europe with lovely ship building technology, he mistook certain superior aspects of European tech and economy with an absolute and total European cultural superiority. The Russian aristocracy’s obsession with France and French, followed by Communist Khruschev returning to Russia from Capitalist America saying everything there was vastly better, and Gorbachev’s final decision to submit to the superior West have all bred a horrible self-defeating attitude in the Russian speaking world that sees itself as vastly inferior to the White men of Europe.

Russian intellectuals love to point out that it was the Austro-Hungarians and then the United States that promoted and created this idea of a seperate Ukrainian language and culture distinct from Russia (Russians see Ukraine like Americans see the South – a bit different but still the same people). But these thinking man’s patriots fail to go to the next step to try to figure out why this was so. How was it that they could turn millions of people with a certain accent into anti-Russian nationalists so easily? Because the Ukrainian Russians were and are sure that the West is superior. The offer of becoming a new anti-Russian ethnicity closer to the West, that if given the chance to be free of its evil Russianness would achieve prosperity, was a very pleasing offer to many subconscious minds of the region. This is the real source of the Maidan – the belief that the West is inherently superior and that submission to it will allow those Russian-speakers to become part of the chosen people of God.

This inferiority complex is also responsible partially for the culture of corruption that cannot be stamped out. When one hates their own people and nation why not steal?

This is a huge topic, but it is a major ideological hurdle that needs to be overcome by an inverse Peter I attitude forced onto the Russian elite, which leads to the next point.

3. Russia needs to develop a coherent, publicly accepted but not mandatory ideology.

Russia is the home of the ideas that are challenging the Western status quo, the problem is all this talk of Illiberalism, Traditionalism, Multipolarity, Land Empires and so on has been left without structure or apologetics and exclusively in the minds of the intellectual elite.

Despite Russians being disgusted by the Cultural Masochism at play in Europe, they are unable to explain to themselves just why this is bad, or what sort of alternative in the course of human development they could take in contrast to the West’s slow suicide. Russian ideas lack structure, lack apologetics for the common man to use them and most certainly lack any form promotion. If Russians cannot answer why Russia exists or for what it exists and for what purpose they themselves exist, then Russia will never become a great power. A great civilization requires a few big things, one of which is an understood idea to justify and define its existence.

3 -> 5 Transform the previously stated ideas from point 3 into actual policy/practice.

 Laws and policies within Russia that blatantly contradict this must be removed.

4. Create an entertainment Soft Power alternative to Hollywood.

As I have said time and time again over many years, “Russia will never be a superpower until it can make a movie that people will actually watch”. Russia has had major success with news media as well as some children’s entertainment but there is no Russian Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or any other major hit movies that shape the way young people see the world globally. Ideologically, Russia does not aggressively project, but submissively receives and this needs to end.

Image: Russian speakers rose up in 2014 and Moscow did little in return publicly. This is the biggest of a few black marks on Putin’s legacy.

5. Solve the Ukrainian issue in a way that the Russian masses will approve of.

The Ukraine is a macrocosm of all the conflicts on former Russian territory – Transdniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Color Revolution fallout (Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan). So if this problem can be resolved the solution could apply to many other regions or start a domino effect.

Russia’s tone has been changing towards at least the Donbass part of this failed state. Recently major media and political players went down south to support the “Russian Donbass Doctrine” that essentially states that the Donbass will integrate with Russia and take back all of its territory one way or another. This visit from important players in Moscow, especially from the news media, declaring that the Donbass “is Russian” is a radical departure from previous softer submissive positions.

Since all hope is lost with dealing with Washington, Russia may finally do what it should have done in 2014 and carve up the Ukraine into friendly and hostile regions, absorbing the friendly ones outright. They have already been handing out Russian passports like candy in the Donbass so this process could have already been soft started. Bringing some of the “motherland” back home would secure Russian stability and push back any ideological questions or criticism of Putin and his successor for a decade at the very least.

Image: The time for smiles has long since passed. Until something radically changes in the power balance of the world, discussion should be blunt, brief and hard hitting with zero faith in a fairy tale ending.

6. Russians need to act like the bad guys they are portrayed as in the West.

Part of Russia’s inferiority complex manifests itself in their foreign policy “mannerisms”. Russians deeply want the approval of the West and that is why Russia is shockingly polite and open minded towards those sworn to destroy them. Russian politicians need to stop with the handshakes and start spitting cold truths in the face of the madness coming out of the mouths of Western politicians. They also need to learn how to accept being rejected from things like “Eurovision” as a badge of honour and not a reason to renegotiate or engage in double-standards at home.

Americans do not respect polite snivelling toadies. Russian diplomats and other politicians need to be more “cool heelish” in their behavior to actually have an impact. Russians whine about always being portrayed as the bad guy, but very often the bad guy is cooler and tougher, than the wimpy white toast good guys. Since the West has thrown reason out the window Russia is free to be a harsh but fair voice of reason in the 21st century. The days of smiles and handshakes need to end, things need to get “real” in U.S.-Russian relations.

Russia will never be accepted by the West and must learn to accept this fact, furthermore stop acting with respect towards Russophobes that see them as subhuman.

7. Millions of American Conservative dissidents were just born. Russia is their only natural ally and needs to accept them.

The probably faked election, along with the Big Tech witch hunt for anyone on the Right including the leader of the United States has probably signaled final defeat for at least half of Americans. These shattered and oppressed Deplorables and their worldview are perfectly politically correct within Russia both on and offline.

Immigration to Russia from America will surely rapidly increase and this repressed group has a lot of wealth and businesses that Russia could absorb. Ironically it was the fake Democrat witch hunt for Russian collusion that will probably expose huge numbers of Conservative Americans to Russia as a new land of freedom.

Russia can certainly use this new type of “dissident” to its advantage bringing capitol home to roost in a country where you are free to make an anti-abortion group on VK. America helps Liberals all over the world out of self interest, meaning Russians can do the same with Conservatives.

8. Washington will not relent, nor should anyone in Russia expect it to.

All of the Color Revolutions, sanctions and Soft Power tricks of the Obama era will continue. There is no way for Russia to stop this other than growing its own power to become strong enough to render these strategies ineffective or build the means to counteract them. There is no hope of a diplomatic solution. And this Russian idea that US-Russian relations are terrible because of a “lack of understanding and communication between peoples” needs to finally die out. When we remove wishful Disney style thinking from the equation Russia can make much better decisions in terms of its interactions with the United States.

9. NATO will engage new targets and ignite old flames.

Syria will flare up and every president besides Trump was able to push U.S. troops somewhere new to die. Biden will likely repeat this tendency.

10. Sanctions and Soft Power Pressure will continue – the olive branch is poisoned.

11. Russophobia in Washington, mostly but not exclusively, from the Democrats will continue.

11. Europe will march in lockstep with America while the rest of the world will continue warming up to Russia in various areas of cooperation.

Even if being wooed away by Russia would benefit Europe, this will not happen. Russia must look away from the Golden Billion when seeking for partnership on a governmental level. The EU will only smile at Moscow when and if the United States faces a crisis so big that it can no longer manage Europe. 

13. Western businesses will continue to “condemn” Russia while operating and expanding within its territory just as they have been for the last decade.

In conclusion:

In short, the next 8 years will be a time for Russia to look inwards in order to project outwards as there is really no means by which a change in attitude in Washington can be achieved in the short term. Furthermore, Russia’s real challenges have been proven by sanctions and other Soft Power attacks to be essentially internal.

The Second World War brought the true flowering of the USA’s soft power; from the cargo cults of Melanesia to the cargo cults of Europe, GIs brought the dream to everyone. The USA won the war in a way that no other power did – it emerged immensely stronger and richer into a world in which its natural competitors had been impoverished. At Bretton Woods and San Francisco it shaped the new world to a degree that no other power could. And, understandably, it shaped it to its own benefit, quite convinced that it had every right to do so as the victor and exemplar of the better future. Only the USSR and its sphere grumpily disagreed.

These were the glory times of American soft power. I often think of the movie Roman Holiday in which the American reporter is civilised, polite, doesn’t take advantage of her but gives her confined life a moment of fun and freedom. The best kind of propaganda. (And, interestingly, one of the screenwriters had been blacklisted. Which gives another layer to this intensely pro-American movie, doesn’t it?)

To a friend who grew up in England before and during the Second World War, everything about the USA was exciting. That was soft power in action: bright new future. I would argue that American soft power stood on four pillars: the attractiveness and excitement of its popular culture, its reputation for efficiency, rule of law and the “American Dream”. Every American could expect that his children would be better off – better off in every respect: healthier, longer-lived, better educated, happier, richer – than he was. Some of this was image and propaganda but enough of it was true to make people believe. The wrappings of freedom, wealth and excitement made the package almost irresistible.

The USA owed a great deal of its pre-eminence to sheer luck. Sitting on immense natural resources far from enemies, almost all of its wars were wars of choice and usually wars against greatly inferior forces. But, as Stephen Walt argues, its long run of luck may be ending. “The result was a brief unipolar moment when the United States faced no serious rivals and both politicians and pundits convinced themselves that America had found the magic formula for success in an increasingly globalized world”. Walt is also dispirited about the American reputation for competence which he believes to have been severely damaged by COVID-19. One man’s opinion, to be sure, but he’s not alone. COVID-19 has greatly injured the USA’s and the West’s reputation for efficiency: no better illustration can be given than comparing the confident expectation of October 2019 that the USA and the UK could best handle a pandemic with what actually happened. A big blow to the soft power assumption that the USA and the West were the places where things functioned properly.

One of the biggest casualties has been the promise of the “American Dream”. One graph alone blows this pillar to bits. Until about 1972 wages and productivity were linked – everybody was getting richer together. Since then, the curves have diverged: productivity keeps rising, wages are flat. That’s not what was supposed to happen: the rising tide was supposed to float all boats, not just a few super yachts. The richest one percent owned six times as much as the bottom fifty percent in 1989, now it’s 15 times as much. More significantly, the 50%-90% have seen their share drop seven and a half percentage points. No, your children won’t be better off than you are; and probably not healthier or longer-lived either.

James DeLong discusses the erosion of another soft power pillar with his analysis of Amazon’s decision to deplatform Parler. His conclusion is:

a friend in the investment community likes to remind me that America has a big competitive advantage in the form of the rule of law, or “the insiders aren’t allowed to rob you blind!”. Amazon has decided to prove him wrong.

In the U.S., and the West in general, you are supposed to know where you are – you’re not subject to the ephemeral whims of a tyrant, as in less lawful regimes: transactions are grounded in law and transparent procedure. Perhaps DeLong is making too much out of something small here, but I don’t think he is. We’ve already seen the boasted principle of innocent until proven guilty disappear the moment Navalniy decides to accuse Putin of something; in the revenge of the present U.S. Administration we will see more arbitrary tyranny justified by exaggerated exigencies. If 6 January was a new Pearl Harbor, extraordinary reactions will be said to be justified. But this is becoming the Western norm: where exactly is the rule of law with Meng in Canada, Sacoulis and Assange in the UK, or Butina in the USA? Will more lawfare against Trump strengthen the image of stability and rule of law?

Neither will the 2020 U.S. election and its consequences advance the American reputation of democratic leadership. Some cheerleaders of “American leadership” like Richard N Haass are quite despondent:

No one in the world is likely to see, respect, fear, or depend on us in the same way again. If the post-American era has a start date, it is almost certainly today [6 January].

Consider the image that Biden’s inauguration sent. Rather than using the COVID excuse to plan a modest ceremony, the full panoply was undertaken. But with no supporters and with soldiers everywhere: note the motorcade pompously passing only people paid to or ordered to attend. It looked like the enthronement of a dictator after a coup. Especially now that the opposition is being censored (deplatformed, as they call it); re-labelled as “domestic terrorists“, possibly under the direction of the arch-enemy Putin; “extremists” must be removed from the U.S. military; the Enemy is already inside Congress. Fence-in the Capitol. The soft power claim of the USA to be the citadel of freedom has taken a hit and will take more.

American movies were one of the vehicles of soft power. Consider, for example, 1939’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington in which a straightforward American, James Stewart, successfully overcomes a corrupt Washington with decency and determination. Many Americans, especially Senators, didn’t get it and railed against the movie – but Spain, Italy, Germany and the USSR understood that it was a powerfully pro-American movie and banned it. Its message was that, even corrupt, the USA is better. Frank Capra made a number of movies about ordinary Americans prevailing with their Everyman decency. A very important part of soft power broadcasting decency and freedom against a background of, to much of the rest of the world, an inconceivable prosperity enjoyed by the ordinary citizen. But in today’s Hollywood’s movies there are no more decent Americans showing the way, just comic book automatons blowing each other up. No message there and no soft power either. If, as this piece wonders, China is Hollywood’s future – it’s already the largest market – then why would you need Hollywood at all? There’s no American soft power in Godzilla vs Kong.

Popular culture, competence, justice and values and the dream of betterment may have been the pillars on which the USA’s soft power was based, but the ground upon which those stood was success. Success made the others attractive; success is the most powerful attraction. The West is losing its aura of success – endless wars, divisive politics, COVID failure, financial crises, debt. And ever more desperate attempts to hold power against ever bolder dissent. It’s just beginning. And not just the USA, the West doesn’t present well any more: protests in Amsterdam, London, Berlin; a year of gillets jaunes in France. The world is watching. Not efficient, not attractive, not law-based. Not successful.

As for success, I recommend this enumeration of China’s achievements. One after another of first or second in numerous categories. And it’s all happened in the last two or three decades. What will we see in the next two or three? That is success. That is what used to happen in the USA. But it doesn’t any more. According to numbers provided by the World Bank, the levels of extreme poverty declined significantly in the world (2000-2017), quite dramatically in China (2010-2016), significantly in Russia (2000-2010) but actually increased in the USA from 2000-2016. “Deaths of despair” are not success. Soft power will inevitable follow as other countries – probably not the West, it’s true – try to imitate China’s stunning success. To a large extent, the West is living on its capital while China is increasing its.

In retrospect, the recent Davos Forum may turn out to be an inflection moment: Putin’s speech was a blunt statement that what he foresaw at Munich in 2007 has come to pass – the patent failure of the “Washington Consensus” and unilateralism. Xi Jinping echoed it. Even Merkel promised neutrality between China and the USA.

Soft power is packing up and getting ready to move house: success attracts, failure repels.

Ben NORTON

A shadowy neoconservative website called Coda Story has launched a smear campaign against American journalists who challenge new cold war propaganda. But what this publication has not disclosed is that it is funded by the US government, backed by the European Union, linked to the NATO war alliance, and part of a larger network of regime-change outfits that are bankrolled by Western governments and corporate oligarchs.

Launched in 2016, Coda Story markets itself as a brave counterweight to Chinese and Russian state-backed “disinformation.” This is quite ironic, because the website is itself financed by the regime-change arms of the US government and the European Union, and peddles disinformation of its own in support of Washington’s new cold war on Beijing and Moscow.

A case study of Coda Story’s deceptive smear tactics came in the form of a malicious hatchet job the site published in July, maligning The Grayzone for exposing the extremely dubious sources and methodology of Western government propaganda against China.

The Coda Story hit piece did not dispute a single fact in The Grayzone’s thoroughly documented reporting. Instead, the diatribe relied on superficial insinuations and misleading guilt-by-association tactics, implying that The Grayzone is “fringe” and untrustworthy because its contributors have given interviews to Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets, and because foreign government officials have occasionally tweeted links to The Grayzone articles.

Despite the patent lack of facts, the Coda Story smear piece inspired a similarly McCarthyite article by an avowedly anti-China blogger at the corporate-run outlet Axios, which also failed to challenge any of The Grayzone’s factual journalism. Instead, Axios writer Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian quoted the ranking Republican co-chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, to vilify The Grayzone as “deeply disturbing” and reinforce the Donald Trump administration’s attack on the World Health Organization.

Allen-Ebrahimian also cited the US government-funded Alliance for Securing Democracy, an intelligence agency and State Department cutout, to defame The Grayzone and try to link it to the Chinese government. Not only did she fail to inform readers about the Alliance’s US government backing, Allen-Ebrahimian was unable to point to any data buttressing her dubious claim, despite repeated challenges to do so.

While Coda Story and Axios went to great lengths to imply this outlet is somehow connected to Beijing, the institution attacking The Grayzone is, in fact, sponsored by the same Western governments responsible for igniting a new cold war with China.

Unlike Coda Story, The Grayzone is totally independent; it does not accept funding from any government or any state-backed group.

Coda Story cannot say the same about itself. Although the neoconservative website markets itself as independent and its editor has claimed “we don’t take money from governments,” it is actually financed by the US government’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED is a CIA cutout established by the Ronald Reagan administration during the last decade of the first cold war. One of its primary goals, stated clearly on the NED website, is to promote “free markets.” To do so, the putative “democracy promotion” organization finances right-wing opposition groups, NGOs, and media outlets in countries the US government has targeted for regime change.

A co-founder of the NED, Allen Weinstein, gloated in the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In 2019, the Coda Network that presides over Coda Story reaped a $180,130 grant from the NED. The ostensible mission of the funding was to “bring together journalists and independent media outlets from throughout Eurasia to create high-quality narrative journalism, focusing on a set of key themes related to disinformation.”

This June, the NED’s blog Democracy Digest celebrated its grantee Coda Story winning the European Press Prize for its anti-China content.

The National Endowment for Democracy appears to believe it is getting its money’s worth, because the US government regime-change organization followed up with a post on the official NED website a few days later that again praised grantee Coda Story for its work.

Democracy Digest, the NED blog, frequently promotes Coda Story. It cites the neoconservative website’s articles to portray China and Russia as evil “totalitarian” regimes and “threats to democracy” that spread constant “disinformation.”

The NED also invited Coda Story’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, Natalia Antelava, on its “Power 3.0 Podcast” to discuss “authoritarian technology and disinformation.”

In its description accompanying the podcast episode, the NED misleadingly portrayed Coda Story as an indie underdog operation, selling it as an “award-winning media start-up” — curiously failing to mention that the website was swimming in money from powerful interests like the NED.

NEW POWER 3.0 PODCAST EPISODE: @antelava @CodaStory discusses “Authoritarian Technology and Disinformation” with @ShanthiKalathil @Walker_CT https://t.co/NIDHQvk6Nm pic.twitter.com/UT1kDyUgNp

— Forum @ NED (@ThinkDemocracy) December 17, 2019

Anne Applebaum, a neoconservative pundit and anti-Russian fanatic who frequents hawkish Western think tanks, is also listed as a member of the board of advisers of Coda Story. Applebaum also happens to sit on the board of directors of the NED.

Applebaum’s husband Radoslaw Sikorski is a conservative Polish politician who has filled top roles in Poland’s government, including minister of defense and foreign affairs.

But the NED is not the only Western government regime-change organization that bankrolls Coda Story.

The European Union has a regime-change arm as well, which also funds the website. This EU soft-power organization, founded in 2013, was explicitly modeled after the NED, and shares almost the same name: the European Endowment for Democracy (EED).

Like the NED, the EED uses the cover of “democracy promotion” to destabilize foreign adversaries and advance Brussels’ foreign policy interests.

In the “About” section of its website, Coda Story lists a series of organizations as “partners” and supporters. The first financial sponsor listed is the EED.

The money that the European Endowment for Democracy gives to Coda Story in turn is provided by European countries – making it another form of indirect state sponsorship.

The EED website makes it clear that 23 European governments are responsible for its budget.

Coda Story’s NATO links and mysterious office in Georgia

The US government’s National Endowment for Democracy emphasized in materials praising Coda Story that the media outlet has two offices: one in New York, typical for Western news organizations; and another in the country of Georgia, a former member of the Soviet Union that since the end of the first cold war has become a major hub for Western intelligence operations and “color revolution” coup-plotting.

Following a Western-backed 2003 regime-change operation dubbed the “Rose Revolution,” Georgia effectively became a client state of the United States, NATO, and European Union. Georgia has actively sought to become a member of NATO, and the US-led military alliance boasts on its official website that “Georgia is one of the Alliance’s closest partners.”

Georgia represents a central friction point with Russia, and waged a brief war with Moscow in 2008. Some members of Georgia’s special forces who were trained by the US military to battle Russia in that conflict later went on to join the genocidal Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, including top ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani.

Mikheil Saakashvili, the strongly pro-Western president who assumed power as a result of the color revolution, had been carefully cultivated for a leadership role by US intelligence officials, and was so subservient that he was described as a “Washington pet.”

This son of this loyal US asset, Eduard Saakashvili, landed a job at Coda Story after he graduated from college in the United States.

Eduard Saakashvili worked as an associate managing editor of Coda Story from 2018 to 2019, writing about his personal experiences with “disinformation” concerning his father and Georgian politics. He also oversaw the creation of the blog’s section on “Authoritarian Tech” – by which the neoconservative website means technology largely originating from China, Russia, and their allies, not the West.

Very excited we’ve finally launched Coda’s new Authoritarian Tech edition—the project I’ve been working on for the past few months. And here is our first story! @IamUmer1 on how Twitter helps suppress civil society in Pakistan. https://t.co/0xtlU3MdaX

— eduard (@ThisIsEduard) February 20, 2019

Coda Story publishes some of its articles in the Georgian language. The website also translates pieces into Russian.

Natalia Antelava, the co-founder of Coda Story, is an overtly pro-Western journalist originally from Tbilisi, Georgia. Before becoming the neoconservative site’s editor-in-chief, Antelava worked as the Caucasus correspondent for the UK government-backed BBC, and covered the 2008 Russo-Georgian War from a hardline anti-Moscow perspective.

Name me another country where kids draw @NATO symbols with chalk. Unprompted.Happy Independence Day, #georgia pic.twitter.com/DJrc8lEnxW

— natalia antelava (@antelava) May 26, 2016

NATO has taken notice, and has found utility in Antelava’s viewpoint. In 2018, the Coda Story editor was invited to speak at the NATO-Georgia Public Diplomacy Forum in Tbilsi.

The NATO conference featured Georgia’s prime minister and president, alongside top US government officials. It was organized by Tbilisi’s NATO and EU Information Center, along with the Georgian foreign and defense ministries.

Second day of the #Nato-Georgia Public Diplomacy Forum, The Era of Post Truth and Fake News #NGPDForum2018 with @antelava @annanemtsova @MarkLaity @makuhin @eunatoinfo @NATO pic.twitter.com/Dn0279BgLl

— Irina Shamiladze (@IroShamiladze) May 1, 2018

Antelava participated in a panel titled “The Era of Post-Truth and Fake News.” Joining Antelava on the stage was Oleksiy Makukhin, the director of the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, an anti-Russian organization funded by a long list of Western governments, including the United States, NATO, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands, along with the European Endowment for Democracy.

The other panelist sitting next to Antelava at the NATO conference was Anna Nemtsova, a correspondent for neoconservative website The Daily Beast whose willingness to propagate the most lurid narratives of the new Cold War has made her a favorite at Western confabs.

The moderator of the event was Mark Laity, a NATO spokesperson who directs strategic communications at the military alliance’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

Like Antelava, Laity is a veteran of the UK government’s BBC, which is closely linked to British intelligence and was used by MI6 during the first cold war to spread propaganda.

Coda Story provides neoconservative disinformation warriors with a new home

Natalia Antelava founded Coda Story with a little-known professor of journalism named Ilan Greenberg. Greenberg, who serves as publisher and editorial director of the website, states on his bio that he began discussing the idea for Coda Story with Antelava when he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center is a US government-funded think tank whose offices are located in the government’s Ronald Reagan Building. The organization is dedicated to producing research that advances Washington’s foreign policy interests. It is directed by hawkish former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, whose congressional campaigns were heavily funded by the arms industry, and whose husband, Sidney Harman, was a longtime Pentagon contractor.

Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo is a member of the board of trustees of the Wilson Center. Other members of the board of the elite organization – which claims to be the most-quoted think tank in the corporate media – include Trump’s education secretary, billionaire privatization enthusiast Betsy DeVos, and Trump’s health secretary, the former Big Pharma lobbyist and corporate executive Alex Azar.

In February 2018, Greenberg announced that Coda Story had merged with The Interpreter, an anti-Russian blog that has also relied on US government backing.

The two neocon websites proudly stated they had “entered into a strategic partnership to closely cooperate, share resources, and expand the scope of their journalism.”

Greenberg proclaimed in a press release, “The bridging of Coda’s storytelling and The Interpreter’s approach to explaining Russian politics and anatomizing disinformation campaigns is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and fruitful partnership.”

Our extensive report on the Steele dossier last year for @codastory https://t.co/LYGasFqVW5 pic.twitter.com/GVAKqnsGAt

— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) July 18, 2019

The Interpreter is a pet project of neoconservative operative Michael Weiss. The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal published an exposé on Weiss, showing how the fanatical war hawk has undergone a series of rebrandings, while always pushing the most belligerent line on US foreign policy.

Weiss kicked off his career as an anti-Muslim agitator and moderate Republican who organized rallies with far-right Islamophobe Pamela Geller. Once the Syria proxy war kicked off, he fashioned himself a supposed “Russia expert” and friend of the Islamist Syrian opposition, lobbying for more Western military support for Salafi-jihadist rebels in Syria while demanding the most aggressive policies possible against Moscow.

Weiss has attacked The Grayzone with obsessive fury, and has sponsored less distinguished henchmen to spin out smear pieces.

In fact, when Coda Story asked him for a comment for its hit piece on The Grayzone, editor Max Blumenthal pointed to the editorial role Weiss plays in the neoconservative website. But Coda Story edited Blumenthal’s quote, removing this salient piece of information.

The correct quote was “smarmy warmongering neoconservative fraudsters like Coda Story executive editor @michaeldweiss.”

This deep state digital waste dump truncated my quote to conceal the obvious role of a notorious US regime propagandist in yet another desperate attack. https://t.co/yUqxFuctnm

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 30, 2020

The Interpreter was created by Weiss in 2013 with the backing of former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a staunch opponent of President Vladimir Putin, who was one of a group of men who plundered Russia’s economy in the 1990’s, quickly becoming billionaires as millions were reduced to paupers.

In its early years, the Interpreter blog was overseen by the Institute of Modern Russia, a think tank run by the powerful Khodorkovsky family to push anti-Russia propaganda. Additionally, the blog stated that it was the recipient of a “seed grant” from the London-based Herzen Foundation. Strangely, there are no references online to Herzen outside of its association with The Interpreter.

In 2015, The Interpreter announced that it was being sponsored as a special project of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US government propaganda outlet founded by the CIA during the first cold war to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union.

Then in 2017, The Interpreter became a “media partner” of NATO’s de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council. This notoriously hawkish organization, which is funded by NATO, the governments of the US and Britain, corporate weapons manufacturers, and the fossil fuels industry, has also benefited from huge sums of money from the Burisma Group, the scandalously corrupt Ukrainian gas company that paid former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter $83,000 per month to sit on its board.

The 2018 “strategic partnership” stipulated that Michael Weiss would still remain editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, while also serving as “Consulting Executive Editor” for Coda Story. The press release noted that Weiss “will provide guidance and thought leadership to Coda’s senior editorial management and will contribute his own journalism to both publications.”

If you read Russian, see the new @CodaStory Russian page https://t.co/sRBawEnSku – and follow on Facebook https://t.co/YbOE33gOyz

— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) April 12, 2018

But The Interpreter is not the only neoconservative US organization that enjoys a close relationship with Coda Story. The website also lists hawkish think tank the Center for European Policy Analysis as a “partner.”

Despite its name, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is not based in Europe but rather in Washington. The neoconservative group is made up of a who’s who of anti-Russian, pro-NATO hawks, including Coda Story advisor Anne Applebaum and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

This Coda Story partner is also bankrolled by Western governments, NATO, and the weapons industry. CEPA states clearly on its website that past donors include the NED, the US State Department, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, and the arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Bell Helicopter.

Coda Story did not respond to The Grayzone’s request for comment inquiring about its exact relationship with CEPA.

Coda Story’s singular fixation on non-Western ‘disinformation’

Coda Story’s extensive links to Western governments and neoconservative organizations might explain its obsessive, almost singular focus on China and Russia, portraying them as the roots of all evil in the world.

The website says its bloggers “exclusively cover three subjects: disinformation, authoritarian tech, and the war on science.” Its interest in these topics scarcely extends beyond the realm of Moscow and Beijing to places like Washington or Brussels.

Coda Story offers appetizing fellowships to journalists, pledging to subsidize their reporting with tens of thousands of dollars, as long as they cover one of the blog’s three approved topics.

The Coda Story smear piece attacking The Grayzone was filed under “disinformation.” This is ironic, because the NED-funded blog has demonstrated itself to be in essence an instrument of US and NATO propaganda.

On Twitter, Antelava claimed that Coda Story doesn’t “take money from governments, oligarchs, and tech platforms.” That statement is simply false, as the NED that provides her outfit with grants is an arm of the US government that is funded by Congress.

Lord Evgeny Lebedev Qualification: son of a Russian oligarch. Bright side: all of the other oligarch children at Eton now have a role model. To understand how it screws the rest of us sign up to Oligarchy newsletter by @OliverBullough https://t.co/8b65FZLwOU pic.twitter.com/dOfc1R2H02

— natalia antelava (@antelava) July 31, 2020

Coda Story has other notable sources of financing. When the neoconservative website launched its “Authoritarian Tech” channel under the editorial guidance of the son of Georgia’s pro-Western president, the blog acknowledged that it was provided seed funding by a foundation called Access Now.

Access Now is a pass-through that uses millions of dollars from Western governments and massive corporations to fund “open technology” initiatives targeting countries where the US and EU want regime change.

Coda Story did not reveal who gave Access Now the money to create its “Authoritarian Tech” channel, but in 2019, the year it launched, the foundation reported millions of dollars in funding from the governments of Britain, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as corporate tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Facebook, and Twitter.

Access Now also gets significant pass-through money from other foundation giants, which have historic ties to the CIA and the regime-change industry, such as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations of billionaire George Soros, and the Omidyar Network and Luminate Group of tech oligarch Pierre Omidyar.

Big Brother has discovered the algorithm and the database. That’s why @CodaStory has launched a new channel offering global reporting on the ways technology is abused to promote authoritarian agendas. Sign up, spread the word, tell us what you think! https://t.co/jcIIQffHrI pic.twitter.com/BdlJmlSC04

— natalia antelava (@antelava) February 20, 2019

On its website, Coda Story also lists the Content Fund as a financial supporter. The Content Fund describes itself as “a private law foundation based in Brussels with its office in Kyiv.” Its mission is to spread pro-Western, anti-Moscow messaging in the Russian-language media.

The Content Fund discloses on its website, “Our funding comes from voluntary contributions of like-minded governments, private foundations and international organisations.” Which specific governments bankroll it is not revealed.

Coda Story did not respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone, including a detailed series of questions about its funding sources.

The website is part of a larger constellation of pro-NATO Eastern European media outlets called Coda Network. Other members include the pro-Western Ukrainian website Ukrayinska Pravda, which holds friendly interviews with the US ambassador and is also funded by avowed anti-communist billionaire George Soros, a generous sponsor of regime-change campaigns from Venezuela to Syria.

Coda Story enjoys crossover with another pro-Western website bankrolled by US government-linked regime-change billionaire George Soros: Eurasianet, a project spun out of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) that was created as the media arm of the oligarch’s Eurasia Program, which is aimed at strengthening NATO and the EU and weakening any independent countries that refuse to join the hegemonic US-led imperial bloc.

Eurasianet was in 2016 transferred from OSF over to Columbia University’s hawkish Harriman Institute, a relic of the first cold war that was created by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce anti-communist scholarship on the Soviet Union. Today, the Rockefeller Foundation is headed by the former director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and is historically linked to US intelligence as a CIA pass-through.

In 2018, editor Antelava tweeted, “many thanks to Eurasianet for allowing us to commission” Joshua Kucera, the Turkey/Caucasus editor at the pro-Western website, who produced a lengthy article for Coda Story bashing Russia’s attempt to create a Eurasian Economic Union.

Great set of pieces by @CodaStory on Eurasianism and the what became of the Eurasian Union https://t.co/cDHqhdp4ii

— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) February 2, 2018

Coda Story’s articles are also very frequently reprinted by Rappler, another media outlet funded by the US government’s NED. These pieces, naturally, portray China and Russia as dystopian authoritarian hellscapes, and even try to blame racial tensions in the United States on Moscow. Rappler’s primary funder is Omidyar, the big tech billionaire who also sponsors Access Now.

In fact, editor Natalia Atelava stated that Rappler is an “editorial partner” of Coda Story.

Big Brother has discovered the algorithm and the database. That’s why @CodaStory has launched a new channel offering global reporting on the ways technology is abused to promote authoritarian agendas. Sign up, spread the word, tell us what you think! https://t.co/jcIIQffHrI pic.twitter.com/BdlJmlSC04

— natalia antelava (@antelava) February 20, 2019

These extensive ties reveal Coda Story’s location in the center of an ecosystem of online publications sponsored by Western governments and oligarchs that were established to wage information warfare on Washington’s designated adversaries. And those enemies not only include Russia and China, but also independent US journalists who challenge the hegemonic political line.

Coda Story cites US government-backed Uyghur separatist to smear The Grayzone

Coda Story’s defamatory hatchet job attacking The Grayzone’s independent investigative journalism demonstrate the deceptive tactics that have become a hallmark of the outlet.

Notably, Coda Story did not challenge any of The Grayzone’s factual reporting on its merits. Instead, the neocon US government proxy site resorted to defaming The Grayzone by citing highly partisan anti-China separatist activists who are themselves funded by the US government.

Caitlin Thompson, the Coda Story staffer who authored the article, previously worked at Foreign Policy, another hawkish pro-war website that is closely linked to the US national security establishment. Edited until recently by David Rothkopf, who has moved on to a lucrative gig lobbying for the United Arab Emirates, Foreign Policy is itself supported by the UAE, an absolute monarchy that practices modern-day slavery.

The main source Thompson relied on to smear The Grayzone was Nury Turkel, whom she identified simply as a “Uyghur lawyer and the Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.”

What the neoconservative blog curiously failed to mention is that Turkel is a separatist leader whose anti-China organization is, like Coda Story, substantially funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy.

A fan of Turkey’s authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkel has also collaborated with the Trump administration to ratchet up pressure on Beijing, successfully lobbying for US sanctions on China.

Coda Story used Turkel to maliciously accuse The Grayzone of “providing talking points to the Chinese propaganda machine.” To support this defamatory claim, Coda Story pointed to Chinese diplomats posting a link to The Grayzone’s factual reporting on Twitter.

Turkel, for his part, is a key figure in a network of US government-funded anti-China groups that provide talking points to the Trump administration and corporate media.

Separatist leader Nury Turkel, co-founder of the US government-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project, meets with Mike Pompeo in July 2020

Through the National Endowment for Democracy and other regime-change organs, the US government has poured many millions of dollars into Uyghur separatist groups, who explicitly say that they want to break off China’s western Xinjiang province and turn it into a new state they call East Turkestan.

This is part of Washington’s new cold war strategy against China, which seeks to carve up the country on ethno-sectarian lines, much as the United States and NATO did when they balkanized the former Yugoslavia.

The NED has been bankrolling UHRP since it was founded in 2004. Turkel praised the US government’s regime-change arm in a 2005 press release, which noted that the NED is the UHRP’s main source of funding, providing $126,000 in that year alone.

Since then, US government funding for the Uyghur separatist organization has only increased. A search on the NED grants database shows that the CIA cutout gave UHRP more than $1.2 million in funding in the four years from 2016 to 2019, at an average of approximately $310,000 per year.

The Uyghur Human Rights Project gave its stamp of approval to the Coda Story article attacking The Grayzone by republishing the hatchet job on its website. The UHRP has also reposted other smear pieces against The Grayzone, which never dispute facts and instead rely on baseless insinuations.

As a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel is part of an organization notorious for politicizing religion to advance Washington’s geopolitical goals.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has been widely criticized for racism and bias. Its current vice chair, Tony Perkins, is a far-right Christian extremist who, as The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal first reported, purchased a mailing list from neo-Nazi and former KKK grand wizard David Duke and delivered a speech to the white supremacist Council on Conservative Citizens.

Perkins and other Christian dominionists such as Johnnie Moore and Gary Bauer are seated beside Turkel on this hyper-partisan commission. This July, Turkel hammed it up with Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo – a notorious Islamophobe who once proclaimed that politics is “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

Following his meeting with Pompeo, Turkel lavished praise on the Trump administration for “elevating human rights as a centerpiece on China policy above anything we’ve seen for at least 4 decades.”

Thx to my appt by @SpeakerPelosi to @USCIRF, I was pleased to join @SecPompeo & top advisers @nixonfoundation in his meeting w/ Chinese dissidents. Grateful for elevating #HumanRights as a centerpiece on #China policy above anything we’ve seen for at least 4 decades. pic.twitter.com/QB8IspYbec

— Nury Turkel (@nuryturkel) July 27, 2020

Turkel has also actively lobbied for US government sanctions on China. He has published op-eds writing explicitly, “I urge President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on [China].”

When the Trump administration did impose sanctions on top Chinese officials under the Global Magnitsky Act, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom quoted Turkel, insisting the new punitive measures “represent a major victory for religious freedom and an important step toward holding Communist China accountable for its crimes against humanity.”

While painting China as a dystopian nightmare, Turkel has celebrated Turkey’s repressive leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has jailed more journalists than any country on earth (including more than China, a country 17 times larger than Turkey). In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Turkel portrayed Erdogan as a “rock star,” claiming “Ankara’s concern for the Uighurs has set an example for other democracies.”

Coda Story’s reliance on a right-wing, US-backed separatist figure to attack The Grayzone only proved the point that this outlet elucidated in its reports on Xinjiang: The campaign of new cold war propaganda against China relies almost entirely on opposition groups cultivated and bankrolled by Western governments.

This information warfare is also dependent on a media echo chamber nurtured by Washington, which has been deployed to attack any journalist or public figure that threatens the hostile narrative of the new cold war. Despite its claims of independence, Coda Story is little more than a gear in this vast network.

thegrayzone.com

The American left in the realm of foreign policy suffers from a type of prosocial communal narcissism, based in their own self-appraisal that their best intentions will be realized in the best outcomes for others, as the narcissist has themself defined it.

But the American left is significantly more dangerous and grotesque compared to standard justifications of imperialism, because it frames the discourse in such a way that it is blind to its own chauvinism, and believes itself to speak for the world.

What in other countries is viewed as quite ugly – believing oneself so enlightened and righteous that they can force others into their own image – has become a quintessential aspect of American culture post 1960’s.

We arrive then at our problem; the leftist approach has relied on soft-power tactics which require a lot more imagination, and yet also hubris, to justify. It is based overtly in telling other countries how to manage themselves as being both philosophically and categorically its proclaimed mandate.

It is the most overt form of imperialism, couched in the language of the left’s understanding of human rights and universalism. It rests gently on the ears and upon the conscience if left unexamined, but in actual fact it is far more malignant. Perhaps because they are so over-used, and perhaps here because they appear to be benign, because American society accepts these as just. But the specter of Dunning-Kruger will always rear its ugly head, and the expected outcomes will almost never materialize.

And in typical gas-lighting fashion, the failure of the subject nation to live up to the vision of the narcissist will be blamed upon the subject.

Most dangerously, soft-power tactics situate themselves outside of the founding principles of national self-determination and sovereignty that the UN was established upon in the post-war years, and yet exploits the various corrupt alphabet soup of organizations and agencies that operate under the UN’s umbrella.

Soft-power tactics were born out of a cultural shift within the U.S.., the development of media and later new media, as a form of propaganda and manufactured consent. The role of television media reporting on Vietnam left an American public taken aback by raw images of the terrorism and horror that is war.

Gone forever was the myth of purity of arms. And so a new myth, the myth of soft-power towards regime change, had to be built.

While soft-power tactics may at first appear to be less harmful to the target, because ‘military’ is not used, the socio-economic outcome of such an approach is the very definition of collective punishment and civilian targets, targets which if zeroed in on by the military would qualify as war crimes and crimes against humanity by any reasonable measure.

Enter the Save the World Generation of 1968

The ‘save the world’ generation in America that emerged from the utopian leanings of 1968, in part also out of opposition to the Vietnam War, came to define the left-wing version of American foreign policy.

The popular opposition to the war in Vietnam signaled the need for a new era in American foreign policy development. Richard Falk – the preeminent American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University – wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine in an article titled ‘What We Should Learn from Vietnam’ published in 1970 or ‘71:

“Where there is no formidable radical challenge on the domestic scene, as in India or Japan, the American preference is clearly for moderate democracy, indeed the kind of political orientation that the United States imposed upon Japan during the military occupation after World War II. However, where an Asian society is beset by struggle between a rightist incumbent regime and a leftist insurgent challenger, then American policy throws its support, sometimes strongly, to the counterrevolutionary side.

As a result, there has been virtually no disposition to question the American decision to support the repressive and reactionary Saigon regime provided that support could have led to victory in Vietnam at a reasonable cost.”

In establishing this as a problem, Falk proposes what he terms a ‘Fourth Position’, one which would end America’s pre-occupation with supporting counter-revolutionary forces in Asia.

We can extrapolate from Falk’s thesis an historical parallel: It was forward looking Gauls inspired by their Roman neighbors who established the infrastructure of roads which Roman legionaries would later march in on under Cesar.

Likewise, allow modernizing and technology oriented communist regimes to flourish in Asia as these would ultimately create the interface with which the U.S.. could pursue its interests in the region.

In Falk’s work we find the kernel of contemporary U.S.. foreign policy and the leftoid soft-power approach, and indeed almost predicts the Nixon-Mao meeting a year or two later.

By now, everyone is familiar with Nye and Ferguson’s ideas on soft-power. By the 1990’s, left-overs from the Cold War’s Radio Free Europe were transformed into more covert projects towards soft-power, outside of the more obvious Radio Liberty and the Atlantic Council’s array of projects. USAID and the NED combined with private philanthropy of the likes of George Soros to establish a ‘legal, peaceful’ mechanism by exploiting international law and the UN’s bodies, known now as the NGO industrial complex.

But what will confound and confuse future historians of the American empire is the mindset of the mainstream left which supports foreign interventionism.

So this is how we have to understand it. If the 70’s was the ‘We’ generation, the 80’s was the ‘Me’ generation – and in came a toxic combination of noble intentions for others taken from the 60’s and 70’s, alongside a particular mission-individualism that gives a person a sense that they are exceptional.

The result was the self-improvement craze of the 80’s and 90’s. And just as self-improvement for individuals becomes a collective norm that others must also be pressured to accept or face ridicule and shunning for being ‘backwards’, the contemporary psychology of human rights (soft power) imperialism is understood.

In short, it opposed American exceptionalism but promoted an exceptionalism of the enlightened community, almost always a liberal of the left, a model that everyone else must also follow.

Something appropriated from Marxism and Christianity, the left has substituted the idea that the nation should rule or that the nation has legitimacy, with the idea that the party with the right values and ideas should rule.

And here is where our final point rests. Alongside the communal narcissism of human rights imperialism which we see in the left’s preference for soft power, we also find this: a belief that just as they as individuals are evolving towards an ever greater enlightenment, so too is America.

This is probably the most complex and dynamic aspect of the problem of the American left’s psychology in foreign policy.

If nations shouldn’t rule others, perhaps they shouldn’t rule themselves, for in each nation are ‘others’ – minorities, historically oppressed identity groups, and so on. America shouldn’t rule them either, the belief goes, but the enlightened ideas which conveniently are determined by a enlightened yoga-practicing vegan community who happen to be American, should indeed rule.

They think this: Assad may not be a threat to his neighbors, but the fact that Syria is a nation and is ruled by a man who exemplifies numerous hetero cis-gendered patriarchal norms, probably means that the U.S.. (not acting as a nation but rather a ‘vehicle of values’) should use soft-power to support any method to remove him.

Other countries are viewed as static, unmoving, non-dynamic ‘regimes’. From the outside looking in, and being a poor cultural anthropologist, all societies appear monolithic and in contemporary parlance, that means ‘totalitarian’. Commonly held beliefs and customs among a foreign people are transformed into top-down mandated values that are imposed upon an unwilling population.

America has deep problems, the liberal soft power imperialist reckons, but the fact that America can overcome and indeed is overcoming them, means that other countries can overcome them too, if they emulate America.

This is perhaps the only way to get on board with something that otherwise would be a flagrant contradiction: America, land of deep problems, ought to be emulated.

It also means imposing American narratives on the rest of the world. If America had a particular problem of racism, land theft, and never ending foreign wars, then suddenly America is nevertheless ‘alright’ since it is in some dynamic process of changing this. Other countries, being governed by static and monolithic caricatures, must have their whole societies uprooted and their governments overthrown in order to overcome the same problems.

America therefore is the ‘expert’ at solving these problems for other countries, not because it has solved them, but because it has developed a model for resistance.

Never mind these are often not problems other countries have. To the hammer of American soft power, all the world is a human rights nail.

Now we see that the U.S.. can intervene everywhere in the world so long as it can paint that foreign land as having American problems. Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya – ethnic conflict, patriarchy, rape culture and a popular uprising (which CNN will color left) means a justified soft power intervention.

There is a saying, ‘All’s well that ends well’. By establishing a conflict thesis of American history, America – in the view of the left – can rectify its past wrongs by righting the same wrongs around the world.

Never mind that these past wrongs aren’t, by their own measure, solved in America. These left Americans see themselves not as Americans acting in America’s interests, but as enlightened people with a right to fix other country’s problems, whether or not those problems really exist and regardless of whether those lowly and unevolved people actually want it. After they are uplifted and re-educated, they will look back and thank us.

This in a nutshell is the mindset of the imperial progressive. This is the sort of thinking that has no place in an international community based on mutual respect and sovereignty.

A good example in the spin behind the story comes when we compare Fox’s and the Guardian’s take on it. They both ran very surprisingly neutral sounding headlines. “Russia sending plane filled with medical equipment to U.S. amid coronavirus pandemic“ and “Coronavirus: Russia sends plane full of medical supplies to U.S.” respectively. Although, the devil lies in the details of The Guardian’s subhead…

“Critics likely to claim Moscow will exploit goodwill gesture as public relations coup”.

This is a very odd statement to make as a news organization, for this is a vague prediction rather than news. Speculation about the future of the economy or an election cycle makes perfect sense, but trying to guess what opinions could be, makes it seem like the Guardian is trying to convince the reader of what they should be. And just who exactly are these critics and why do they matter? Movies have movie critics. Music has music critics. Does international humanitarian aid have its own form of critics? If so that would be by far the most boring content on YouTube.

The only real concrete criticism in the article came from a quoted Tweet from a member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace…

“Hopefully someone will tell Trump that he’s playing right into a propaganda ploy”

Foreign Policy mirrored this attitude with their article…

“Beware of Bad Samaritans – China and Russia are sending medical aid to Italy and other coronavirus-stricken countries, but their motives aren’t so altruistic.”

Not surprisingly Russophobia’s shining light on a hill The Washington Post went with the headline…

“Trump called Russia’s coronavirus aid to the U.S. ‘very nice.’ Putin may use it as a propaganda coup.”

So ultimately as we sift through the Mainstream Media and their pundits’ reactions, we don’t see the old style Russia collusion narrative, but instead a new sort of warning to an ignorant orange skinned Trump about a “ploy” by Putin. After all, Russia’s willingness to help Italy deal with the Coronavirus situation in their country has allowed many impressive photos of Russian military transport and men seemingly moving about the boot-shaped peninsula freely. Other than for some sort of international military parade, it is hard to imagine Russia being able to get their “polite people” to do cooperative work deep in the historical heartland of NATO. But, the Coronavirus situation is a crisis, and any crisis can open up doors for change thought impossible just weeks before.

It must also be noted that the materials being delivered from Russia are commercial products produced within the countries that others could order/buy. The days of the Soviet Union are long gone and the supplies that Washington will receive come from Russia’s private sector but delivered on a government airplane.

Photo: This particular image of Russo-Italian cooperation quickly became iconic across the Russian internet. You can probably guess why.

Perhaps the Mainstream Media and punditry in the U.S. have become spooked by what is happening in Italy and subconsciously fear it could spread to America. This fear is probably doubled in the minds of those who are still convinced that Trump is a Manchurian candidate.

The likelihood of Russian green men being needed to “help out” on American soil is something we will probably never see in our lifetimes. And if you care about America’s national sovereignty you should hope it never happen at any point in the future. But what the punditry/geopolitics wonks really fear is that not only has Russia become an “unshuttable” countervoice in news media but Moscow is starting to take a segment of the humanitarian aid game that they will never give back.

Normally it is the exclusive unwritten right of the USA/West to be the ones to conduct Marshall Plans and send out all sorts of humanitarian aid with or without strings attached. In fact this is such a large part of U.S. foreign policy that we cannot forget that there is an entire official branch of the government that deals solely with it – USAID.

Photo: Washington decided to send humanitarian aid to Georgia right after their 2008 conflict with Russia. Is this pure philanthropy? And does Russia have the right to send aid to America’s unfavored nations?

In fact USAID is a very serious state organ and is funded to almost half of what the Russians pay for their entire military budget. The panicked punditry who are flipping out over Russian aid coming to America are probably afraid that the Russians can do more with less funding like they have done in the news media – budget-wise RT is completely outgunned and yet it is a smashing success that influences narratives even in the West.

There is one other factor that is creating a strong backlash from the mainstream punditry regarding assistance coming from Moscow – pure racism. The U.S. has used foreign aid and assistance to win favor (i.e. as propaganda “ploys”) for decades and this is perfectly reasonable. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the U.S. using its wealth to buy influence and positive views from across the world. This seems like a normal and natural thing to do that America just happens to be better at doing than pretty much anyone else. Good for America!

But, when Russians or the Chinese (or anyone Washington doesn’t like) tries to do exactly the same thing, now it is unacceptable. The logic looks something like “The Russians are sending humanitarian aid? It must be a ploy! They are inherently evil after all.” And this friends is the very definition of racism. Perhaps the geopolitics boys are just tweeting their basic primal fears that some other tribe is stomping on their territory.

What we are seeing in the Mainstream Media’s/Punditry’s reaction to Russian aid being sent to America:

They fear that Russia may shatter the virtual monopoly on foreign aid giving that the U.S./West possesses, in the same way they did in terms of news media.

The #Russiagate narrative is shifting from Trump being a Manchurian Candidate for Moscow to him being duped by Putin’s “ploys”. This leads one to believe #Russiagate may finally have died.

Automatically assuming that Russians providing foreign humanitarian aid is an evil scheme while the U.S. always does so altruistically is pure backwater hillbilly bigotry.

Fox and conservative media are less spooked and actually display tweets from the Russian side. This is another drop of evidence in the bucket, that for the near future the America Left will hate Russia and the American Right will hate China.

Russia was able to get their gesture into the public/media consciousness in the United States. Something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

In many ways, be it a map of military Hard Power, tech industry Soft Power or other metrics the world we live in currently has the US/NATO at the top with a near global projection of power, the Chinese in second place with total control over the influence of their own territory with little effect beyond their borders and Russia in a distant third with some foreign influence including, strongholds on former territory. Using these big three geopolitical players (with Russia being the distant bronze medal holder) we see a picture of the world that reflects the reality in which we live. But when it comes to entertainment Russia is essentially a vassal non-actor.

Roughly speaking and without taking into account currency value differences, of the top 10 most profitable movie producing nations on Earth 6 are part of the West combining for roughly $740 billion in worldwide box office. Not surprisingly the lion’s share of this comes from the United States. And as one would expect right behind the Anglo-Saxons are the Chinese in their usual silver medal status.

Russia however is #15 in worldwide box office movie profits and this fact shows a giant hole in Russian defense and any prospects for future development.

In regards to the danger of not having a powerful national entertainment industry an Egyptian colleague once told me something that really hits the nail right on the head…

“Even under the influence of Hollywood from the cradle to the grave, 95% percent of young people remain in the cultural context of their native nation, they may dress Western but they remain at their core Egyptian, however it is the 5% of the national youth who become “Americans” serving a foreign master and this 5% is the critical mass needed to start any color revolution”.

And this is the danger of Russia not having any means of projecting a civilizational vision, someone else is constantly projecting their own onto Russia, and over time given the choice between ideas and non-ideas young people will grip onto some sort of ideas even if they are foreign and alien. Something to believe in is better than nothing.

In the short term it is the lack of any sort of “Russian Dream” or “Project for a New Russian Century” that is much of the cause of the small protest movements around the country. The government has nothing spiritually or ideologically to offer their own population let alone foreigners and this is a massive weakness. Young people hear that they are not free, and freedom sounds nice, and since there is no counter-vision of freedom, their idea of freedom is what the West tells them it is.

Every child on Earth has been indoctrinated to the Liberal values of Star Wars/Disney, everyone has seen some anime (at least as a child) and Facebook is full of silly Bollywood movie clips, yet virtually no one has watched a Russian movie any kind when we look at things globally. Vassal Japan and poverty ridden India are light years ahead of Russia entertainment wise.

The ideas of “Illiberal Democracy”, “Multipolarity”, and the “4th Political Theory” are very much at the core of today’s Russian intellectual discourse and have amazing ideological potential, however these ideas have no PR or means of sharing them as a vision to the masses. Foreigners can almost never put the “American Dream” into words but you can see they have a concept of it in their minds thanks to all the films they’ve watched. Liberalism’s world vision has had absolutely titanic promotion across the world thanks to Hollywood, while Russia in turn has its ideas discussed at round tables by think tanks, who believe that they are making change by writing lots of white papers to share between themselves. The kicker is they see absolutely nothing wrong with this method and scoff at me otherwise when they themselves consume all the garbage that Netflix has to offer on a daily basis.

Russia has the cultural/intellectual ammo to ideologically defend itself and promote a vision that will raise it back to being a superpower, the problem is that it completely lacks any sort of “gun” (entertainment media) to load the ammo into for use. But why is this so, why is Russia incapable of producing a movie with meaning for international success.

• The government and the types who laugh at me for saying that entertainment is an important part of national defense see the world from a technocratic perspective. Nuclear missiles and their “influence” are easy for technocrats to understand, the value in making a movie that casts the Russian soul over the world to woo “5% of the youth” of various countries is too abstract for their comprehension. These are not creative people, they are not people with a vision, they are bean-counters who exist to keep the boat afloat. Theirs is to find a set of laws to optimize how much people consume alcohol, not provide them a ideological reason of why not to drink.
• Russians do not believe that the subconscious mind needs to be addressed. All messages to foreigners should be done officially via professional news media. This viewpoint is in direct contrast to the way advertising and marketing appeal to emotions. Russians refuse to appeal to the subconscious mind through emotional entertainment media.
• The Russian movie making industry is a closed off network filled with Liberals who hate Russia and everything Russian and prefer pumping out art haus movies to meet the applause of a room full of drug addicted degenerates that hand out trophies in Cannes rather than touch the lives of millions or normal people across the globe.
• Russia does not have a canonized or partially canonized ideology/worldview to project. There is no formulated “Russian Dream” or “Russian Vision”. Despite the fact that creating this sort of ideological project could be completed within a few months of work and very limited funding from a governmental standpoint.

Powerful nations project a powerful cultural vision full stop. Russia will always remain, as Obama put it “a regional power”, so long as it is incapable of producing entertainment media which show a Russian Vision or Russian Dream. The true sign of a great power in the 21st century is its ability to produce entertainment that encapsulates is cultural vision. If you can’t make films and video games about your culture then your culture probably isn’t fit for survival in a globalized world.

I can only hope that after a decade of being laughed at by the powerful men in suits about the value of entertainment to defense that one of them will wake up to realize I am right and give me the chance and financing to amend this, but sadly I think I may have a few more decades of ridicule to go as Russia is content on remaining an entertainment vassal of Hollywood/Washington.

Generally speaking anything that is bad for Russia is good for the status quo in Washington. Every dead Russian-speaker in the Donbass, every country that sees its nationalism squarely rooted in anti-Russianism, and every vassal leader that stays elected thanks to Russophobia is like another huge coil of barbed wire keeping Russia from ever expanding back into greatness. After all, one of the key goals of the Project for a New American Century was to “deter (the) rise of new great-power competitor” and backing racism against Russians and making Moscow lose “hearts and minds” on a daily basis is sure a great way of accomplishing this goal without bringing on a nuclear winter.

Russia, despite having a near monopoly on the intellectual weapons needed to combat the global ideological status quo from Washington is using them rather poorly and is at best at a stalemate in the spiritual fight for much of its former territory and spheres of influence. But just because Russia and America are at arms propaganda wise loudly in the media does not exclude a third party from sneaking in from the flank.

In an interview for the “Federal News Agency” former Georgian Parliament member and political analyst Gamlet Chipashvili declared that it is actually the Turks who are moving into Georgian territory unprovoked using good ole soft power techniques like allowing naive youths the chance to study in Turkey and trying to push for religious conversions of locals. Chipashvili is quoted in the FNA interview as saying…

“Turkey has de facto taken Adjara (Adzharia) from us in both religious and economic terms…”

“Tens of religious Islamic organizations, which are financed by Turkey have been functioning in Adjara for a long time. The main goal of their politics is to maximize the number of locals towards Islam (that they can). Representatives of these organizations take hundreds of young men and women to Turkish Madrasas for education. Then they return to their motherland and start to propagandize Islam. In essence this is one of the fundamental strategies of restoring the Ottoman Empire.

This restoration is at times publically brought up by one of its main ideologues, the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”

Turkey has also been accused of being expansionist in the same way throughout Central Asia trying to convince locals that because of some lingual similarities they are far closer to Istanbul than Moscow. They have also made more direct physical pushes into neighboring nations like Syria and Iraq and a few more on minor terms, meaning that even if Mr. Chipashvili is exaggerating, his conspiracy theory is at least very plausible.

So at this moment in history the ancient nation of Georgia finds itself being pulled in three possible directions.

1. Former countrymen in ineffective but familiar Russia.
2. Washington’s global Democracy that thinks their national capital is Atlanta.
3. Ottoman Empire 2.0 that seems them as the next “Armenians”.

A naive person reading this would probably spout that “every people has a right to self determination” and that the Georgians are an independent nation that is standing on its own. That sounds nice, and is pleasant to Western moral norms of people who are ignorant to the way geopolitics work, but tiny helpless nations become vassals, satellites or get more directly absorbed into greater ones. Like it or not that is the nature of things and a truly independent Georgia is unlikely to come into existence or be feasible as a strategy going forward. They lack the manpower, economics, and geography to do so. This is no insult or he Georgian people it is just a reality that cannot be ignored.

And thus Georgia faces itself with a tough choice of with whom they should side…

Submission to the New Ottomans

The Turks are not known for their tolerance and if Georgians want to remain Georgian at all then Turkey is not the best choice for an overlord as they put down hard linguistic and religious pressure over territory they control. Turkey only recognizes a few ethnic minorities in the country (Armenians, Greeks, Jews) but this is only so because they were forced to after losing WWI. Georgians, especially as Christians would be phased out of any real significance as an ethnicity under Turkish control.

Turkey is stable and in many ways on the rise economically and population wise (in contrast to dying neighbor Europe) and there would be some value in joining a winning team but joining that team requires massive fundamental changes beyond simply switching uniforms. If Georgians actually care about their national identity surviving into the future then Turkey must be resisted at all costs. Many nations on Earth right now are terrified for the future of their cultures as globalization and depopulation wears away at them… the Turks are not on this list and should be commended for this success.

Washington Maintains Power

Bowing down to the global hegemon is easy and with the exception of Saakashvili’s bumbling it has worked out okay enough in the public’s eyes. Things look at smell more “Democratic” and “European” across the country providing a feeling of success and many Russians with Liberal leanings praise Georgia for doing the Westernization that they cannot.

It must be noted though that places under the greatest influence from Washington almost unanimously have dying-out native populations. Liberalism + Consumerism + Post Christian Society = Extinction.

Obeying Washington is a great way to keep your head on your shoulders in the short term but it doesn’t seem to offer much of a future on a mental/spiritual level. Consumerism and Liberalism keep people pacified but it also keeps people from desiring to build any sort of future or make any sacrifices for anything other than themselves.

So with Washington, at least you will have nice stuff and no war, that the Beltway can guarantee you for sure. Liberalism will not forbid Georgian culture (unlike a New Ottoman movement) in Georgia which is very good, it will however continue to pump their society with the individualistic consumerism needed for them to wilfully forget it. Washington is a short term win, long term loss.

Back to the Unappealing Russian Fold

No powerful country is worse at selling itself to “consumers” than Russia. With its religious, linguistic, historical and business ties to Georgia over the centuries (and saving them from being wiped out by their Islamic neighbors) it should be impossible to think that Georgians wouldn’t want to side with Russia. But Russia’s bumbling nature as the country that can win any war but can’t make a single successful movie shines brightly in this situation.

Many in Russia are baffled why trendy urbanite Georgians call them “occupiers” and yet want them to still come visit as tourists. This is a reflection of the double-think caused by generations of positive cohabitation with Russia vs. The Hollywood Effect.

Georgia protesting against Russians for Washington is the equivalent of Canadians protesting against Americans for Moscow and yet it is happening, due to Russia’s complete ineptitude of message sending. The Russophobic insanity happening in Eastern Europe should be impossible and yet it is thriving.

Georgians under a Russian bear paw can maintain their culture and religion (as they have for centuries) and freely reject Washington’s bizarre demands like allowing gay parades and open borders. Russians are also able to find Georgia on a map and have eaten khachapuri. Going back home to Russia makes the most sense culturally, economically Russia is nowhere near as juicy as the West, but then again Russia wants to trade with Georgia and the West doesn’t want or need to. The key problem is that Russia makes itself look far less appealing than Washington and until it can resolve this it will still be an “occupier” and non-viable choice as the dominant force over Georgia.