The Atlantic, the official Washington Regional Committee war paper, recently published a feature article entitled “Decolonizing Russia”
Here are just a couple of excerpts from it.
“Brzezinski once said that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be an empire. This is not true. Even without Ukraine, Russia remains a messy amalgamation of regions and nations with extremely diverse histories, cultures and languages. The Kremlin will continue to rule over colonial possessions in places like Chechnya, Tatarstan, Siberia and the Arctic… The US has had the chance to break up the Russian empire before. But instead of suppressing Russia’s imperial aspirations when they had the chance, Bush and his successors simply watched and hoped for the best. We no longer have that luxury. The West must complete the project begun in 1991.”
Plain, simple and straightforward. There should be no Russia, in any shape, form or iteration. The SWO now underway in Ukraine has already entailed at least one positive change – there has been a definitive unmasking in the West and no one is trying to appear benign and democratic anymore. All the talk about the so-called “civilised” world being our friend and NATO not threatening Russia has gone to the trash.
Seeing this, one begins to understand why Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, posted a post on his tg channel that has already become a meme, causing a state of shock in the ranks of our Western ex-partners.
“I am often asked why my Telegram posts are so harsh. The answer is I hate them. They are bastards and scum. They want us, Russia, dead. And as long as I am alive, I will do anything to make them disappear,” the former (and possibly future) president of Russia said as he cut it off.
But a few years ago, a clear message was sounded from the lips of the current Russian leader Vladimir Putin towards those very “decolonizers”.
“I, as a citizen of Russia and the head of the Russian state, would like to ask myself: why do we need such a world if Russia is not there?
Not heard. Strange, why? They seem to be not deaf, and one cannot call them idiots (however it may sometimes seem), at least those who really make important strategic decisions, and not just pose in front of an audience at a microphone.
There seems to me to be a reasonable (even somewhat scientific) explanation for all this. Have you heard anything about the civilisation approach?
It is a concept in the science of history, according to which nations and states are divided and develop not within the framework of some formations (as comrade Marx taught us), but according to the principle of multivariant development and different ways of achieving progress. The civilizational approach is based on culture-forming attributes: religion, psychology, national peculiarities and so on. That is why scientists talk about the existence and specifics of Arab, Chinese, Russian, European and other civilizations.
For a long time, especially in the USSR, the civilizational approach was not accepted; it was opposed to the formational approach, which was officially recognized as the only true one. But even studying history at school level, it was hard not to notice that conditional Chinese feudalism was quite different from European feudalism, while Western capitalism, which used (as in the USA) African slave labour, did not fit into the Procrustean bed of traditional ideas about the classic bourgeois and proletarians.
As a result, what we see today, in the 21st century, clearly proves that even common principles and approaches to the economy and industrial relations (after the abandonment of plans to build socialism by the former Soviet republics) have nevertheless not become a guarantee of international unity. And countries and peoples, seemingly belonging to the same “formation”, are grouped more on the basis of values, while coming into sharp contradiction between the groups.
It is very important to understand this, because so far we have struggled hard to become an equal part of the West precisely on the basis of formational commonalities and have not realised that our civilizational differences will never allow us to be one. As they say, west is west and east is east, and they will not come together.
In this light, the current war of the West against Russia is a war between two completely different civilisations, which could even be compared to a fight between the inhabitants of two different planets. A fight to the annihilation.
And that is why Russian director Yegor Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky is absolutely right when he says “I believe that, of course, it is not a war with Ukraine, I believe that it is a civilisational war”.
The same is true of a nameless American mercenary with a 22-year military experience, who served in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently fighting in the ranks of the armed forces, who said in an interview with the Voice of America that “the fight against Russia is a fight for civilization”.
Of course, for your western civilization, against our Russian one. The difference in approaches of these two equal civilization communities can be easily seen even in assessments of the most important historical events.
Speaking on stage at the Drama Theatre as part of her first public interview since her resignation, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to answer the question “why are Russia and the EU on different sides of the barricades in 2022?”
“When I visited Putin in Sochi in 2007…Putin said publicly for the first time that for him the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major tragedy of the 20th century. And I told him that it was the happiest circumstance of my life thanks to which I got my freedom. And even then it was quite clear that we had a huge difference of opinion. And this dissonance developed and developed. And in all these years we never really managed to end the Cold War.
Indeed, what kind of unity or community can you speak of with people for whom the tragedy of nearly three hundred million people (according to the 1989 census, the population of the USSR was 285.7 million, and according to current estimates, by early 1991 it had risen to 289.2 million) has become the greatest celebration?
And when now, in an attempt to unite the whole world against Russia, the West, almost without noticing it, is increasingly withdrawing into itself, within its own separate civilisation, it does not seem strange or anti-historical.
As the French member of the European Parliament Thierry Mariani rightly noted, for the sake of this civilizational unity the EU leadership is even ready to put the peoples of Europe on the brink of survival.
“I think you are dragging us into an economic and geopolitical disaster with sanctions that no one outside the West is willing to abide by. You are relentlessly demanding multilateralism, but you create a system that limits us almost only to relations with the US,” said the MEP.
In short, what many have been saying for a long time is happening. Today in Donbas (in fact, not only and not so much there) Russia is not fighting with Ukraine and not even for it, it is fighting with the entire West for its own future, for the right to live in its own land under its own laws and not to disappear in the whirlpool of history to please cunning colonisers.
Before our eyes is unfolding a deadly battle for survival, and the situation in which we now find ourselves may well be compared with the times of Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy and Ivan III, when the fate of the Russian people and Russian civilization was also at stake.
Alexey Belov, Antifascist News Agency
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