Ne croyez pas que je sois venu apporter la paix sur la terre; je ne suis pas venu apporter la paix, mais l’épée. Car je suis venu mettre la division entre l’homme et son père, entre la fille et sa mère, entre la belle-fille et sa belle-mère; et l’homme aura pour ennemis les gens de sa maison. Jésus (Matthieu 10 : 34-36)
Depuis que l’ordre religieux est ébranlé – comme le christianisme le fut sous la Réforme – les vices ne sont pas seuls à se trouver libérés. Certes les vices sont libérés et ils errent à l’aventure et ils font des ravages. Mais les vertus aussi sont libérées et elles errent, plus farouches encore, et elles font des ravages plus terribles encore. Le monde moderne est envahi des veilles vertus chrétiennes devenues folles. Les vertus sont devenues folles pour avoir été isolées les unes des autres, contraintes à errer chacune en sa solitude. G.K. Chesterton
Tout se disloque. Le centre ne peut tenir. L’anarchie se déchaîne sur le monde Comme une mer noircie de sang : partout On noie les saints élans de l’innocence …Sûrement que quelque révélation, c’est pour bientôt … Sûrement que la Seconde Venue, c’est pour bientôt. La Seconde Venue ! A peine dits ces mots, Une image, immense, du Spiritus Mundi Trouble ma vue : quelque part dans les sables du désert, Une forme avec corps de lion et tête d’homme Et l’oeil nul et impitoyable comme un soleil Se meut, à cuisses lentes, tandis qu’autour Tournoient les ombres d’une colère d’oiseaux… La ténèbre, à nouveau ; mais je sais, maintenant, Que vingt siècles d’un sommeil de pierre, exaspérés Par un bruit de berceau, tournent au cauchemar, – Et quelle bête brute, revenue l’heure, Traîne la patte vers Bethléem, pour naître enfin ? Yeats (1919)
La Raison sera remplacée par la Révélation. À la place de la Loi rationnelle et des vérités objectives perceptibles par quiconque prendra les mesures nécessaires de discipline intellectuelle, et la même pour tous, la Connaissance dégénérera en une pagaille de visions subjectives (…) Des cosmogonies complètes seront créées à partir d’un quelconque ressentiment personnel refoulé, des épopées entières écrites dans des langues privées, les barbouillages d’écoliers placés plus haut que les plus grands chefs-d’œuvre. L’Idéalisme sera remplacé par le Matérialisme. La vie après la mort sera un repas de fête éternelle où tous les invités auront 20 ans … La Justice sera remplacée par la Pitié comme vertu cardinale humaine, et toute crainte de représailles disparaîtra … La Nouvelle Aristocratie sera composée exclusivement d’ermites, clochards et invalides permanents. Le Diamant brut, la Prostituée Phtisique, le bandit qui est bon pour sa mère, la jeune fille épileptique qui a le chic avec les animaux seront les héros et héroïnes du Nouvel Age, quand le général, l’homme d’État, et le philosophe seront devenus la cible de chaque farce et satire. Hérode (Pour le temps présent, oratorio de Noël, W. H. Auden, 1944)
Just over 50 years ago, the poet W.H. Auden achieved what all writers envy: making a prophecy that would come true. It is embedded in a long work called For the Time Being, where Herod muses about the distasteful task of massacring the Innocents. He doesn’t want to, because he is at heart a liberal. But still, he predicts, if that Child is allowed to get away, « Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions . . . Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old . . . Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish . . . The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire. »What Herod saw was America in the late 1980s and early ’90s, right down to that dire phrase « New Age. »(…) Americans are obsessed with the recognition, praise and, when necessary, the manufacture of victims, whose one common feature is that they have been denied parity with that Blond Beast of the sentimental imagination, the heterosexual, middle-class white male. The range of victims available 10 years ago — blacks, Chicanos, Indians, women, homosexuals — has now expanded to include every permutation of the halt, the blind and the short, or, to put it correctly, the vertically challenged. (…) Since our newfound sensitivity decrees that only the victim shall be the hero, the white American male starts bawling for victim status too. (…) European man, once the hero of the conquest of the Americas, now becomes its demon; and the victims, who cannot be brought back to life, are sanctified. On either side of the divide between Euro and native, historians stand ready with tarbrush and gold leaf, and instead of the wicked old stereotypes, we have a whole outfit of equally misleading new ones. Our predecessors made a hero of Christopher Columbus. To Europeans and white Americans in 1892, he was Manifest Destiny in tights, whereas a current PC book like Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise makes him more like Hitler in a caravel, landing like a virus among the innocent people of the New World. Robert Hughes (24.06.2001)
La vérité biblique sur le penchant universel à la violence a été tenue à l’écart par un puissant processus de refoulement. (…) La vérité fut reportée sur les juifs, sur Adam et la génération de la fin du monde. (…) La représentation théologique de l’adoucissement de la colère de Dieu par l’acte d’expiation du Fils constituait un compromis entre les assertions du Nouveau Testament sur l’amour divin sans limites et celles sur les fantasmes présents en chacun. (…) Même si la vérité biblique a été de nouveau obscurcie sur de nombreux points, (…) dénaturée en partie, elle n’a jamais été totalement falsifiée par les Églises. Elle a traversé l’histoire et agit comme un levain. Même l’Aufklärung critique contre le christianisme qui a pris ses armes et les prend toujours en grande partie dans le sombre arsenal de l’histoire de l’Eglise, n’a jamais pu se détacher entièrement de l’inspiration chrétienne véritable, et par des détours embrouillés et compliqués, elle a porté la critique originelle des prophètes dans les domaines sans cesse nouveaux de l’existence humaine. Les critiques d’un Kant, d’un Feuerbach, d’un Marx, d’un Nietzsche et d’un Freud – pour ne prendre que quelques uns parmi les plus importants – se situent dans une dépendance non dite par rapport à l’impulsion prophétique. Raymund Schwager
An advertent and sustained foreign policy uses a different part of the brain from the one engaged by horrifying images. If Americans had seen the battles of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor on TV screens in 1864, if they had witnessed the meat-grinding carnage of Ulysses Grant’s warmaking, then public opinion would have demanded an end to the Civil War, and the Union might well have split into two countries, one of them farmed by black slaves. (…) The Americans have ventured into Somalia in a sort of surreal confusion, first impersonating Mother Teresa and now John Wayne. it would help to clarify that self-image, for to do so would clarify the mission, and then to recast the rhetoric of the enterprise. Lance Morrow (1993
In recent years, skewering the politically correct and the political correctness of those mocking political correctness has become a thriving journalistic enterprise. One of the more interesting examples of the genre was a cover-story essay by Robert Hughes, which appeared in the February 3, 1992, edition of Time magazine. The essay was entitled “The Fraying of America.” In it, Hughes cast a cold eye on the American social landscape, and his assessment was summarized in the article’s subtitle: “When a nation’s diversity breaks into factions, demagogues rush in, false issues cloud debate, and everybody has a grievance.” “Like others, Hughes found himself puzzling over how and why the status of ‘victim’ had become the seal of moral rectitude in American society. He began his essay by quoting a passage from W. H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being. The lines he quoted were ones in which King Herod ruminates over whether the threat to civilization posed by the birth of Christ is serious enough to warrant murdering all the male children in one region of the empire. (The historical Herod may have been a vulgar and conniving Roman sycophant, but Auden’s Herod, let’s not forget, is watching the rough beast of the twentieth century slouching toward Bethlehem.) Weighing all the factors, Herod decides that the Christ child must be destroyed, even if to do so innocents must be slaughtered. For, he argues in the passage that Hughes quoted, should the Child survive: Reason will be replaced by Revelation . . . . Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish . . . . The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire. “Hughes quoted this passage from Auden in order to point out that Auden’s prophecy had come true. As Auden’s Herod had predicted, American society was awash in what Hughes termed the “all-pervasive claim to victimhood.” He noted that in virtually all the contemporary social, political, or moral debates, both sides were either claiming to be victims or claiming to speak on their behalf. It was clear to Hughes, however, that this was not a symptom of a moral victory over our scapegoating impulses. There can be no victims without victimizers. Even though virtually everyone seemed to be claiming the status of victim, the claims could be sustained only if some of the claims could be denied. (At this point, things become even murkier, for in the topsy-turvy world of victimology, a claimant denied can easily be mistaken for a victim scorned, the result being that denying someone’s claim to victim status can have the same effect as granting it.) Nevertheless, the algebraic equation of victimhood requires victimizers, and so, for purely logical reasons, some claims have to be denied. Some, in Hughes’s words, would have to remain “the butt of every farce and satire.” Hughes argued that all those who claim victim status share one thing in common, “they have been denied parity with that Blond Beast of the sentimental imagination, the heterosexual, middle-class, white male.” “Hughes realized that a hardy strain of envy and resentment toward this one, lone nonvictim continued to play an important role in the squabbles over who would be granted victim status. Those whose status as victim was secure were glaring at this last nonvictim with something of the vigilante’s narrow squint. Understandably, the culprit was anxious to remove his blemish. “Since our new found sensitivity decrees that only the victim shall be the hero,” Hughes wrote, “the white American male starts bawling for victim status too.” Gil Bailie
The gospel revelation gradually destroys the ability to sacralize and valorize violence of any kind, even for Americans in pursuit of the good. (…) At the heart of the cultural world in which we live, and into whose orbit the whole world is being gradually drawn, is a surreal confusion. The impossible Mother Teresa-John Wayne antinomy Times correspondent (Lance) Morrow discerned in America’s humanitarian 1992 Somali operation is simply a contemporary manifestation of the tension that for centuries has hounded those cultures under biblical influence. Gil Bailie
L’erreur est toujours de raisonner dans les catégories de la « différence », alors que la racine de tous les conflits, c’est plutôt la « concurrence », la rivalité mimétique entre des êtres, des pays, des cultures. La concurrence, c’est-à-dire le désir d’imiter l’autre pour obtenir la même chose que lui, au besoin par la violence. Sans doute le terrorisme est-il lié à un monde « différent » du nôtre, mais ce qui suscite le terrorisme n’est pas dans cette « différence » qui l’éloigne le plus de nous et nous le rend inconcevable. Il est au contraire dans un désir exacerbé de convergence et de ressemblance. (…) Ce qui se vit aujourd’hui est une forme de rivalité mimétique à l’échelle planétaire. Lorsque j’ai lu les premiers documents de Ben Laden, constaté ses allusions aux bombes américaines tombées sur le Japon, je me suis senti d’emblée à un niveau qui est au-delà de l’islam, celui de la planète entière. Sous l’étiquette de l’islam, on trouve une volonté de rallier et de mobiliser tout un tiers-monde de frustrés et de victimes dans leurs rapports de rivalité mimétique avec l’Occident. Mais les tours détruites occupaient autant d’étrangers que d’Américains. Et par leur efficacité, par la sophistication des moyens employés, par la connaissance qu’ils avaient des Etats-Unis, par leurs conditions d’entraînement, les auteurs des attentats n’étaient-ils pas un peu américains ? On est en plein mimétisme.Ce sentiment n’est pas vrai des masses, mais des dirigeants. Sur le plan de la fortune personnelle, on sait qu’un homme comme Ben Laden n’a rien à envier à personne. Et combien de chefs de parti ou de faction sont dans cette situation intermédiaire, identique à la sienne. Regardez un Mirabeau au début de la Révolution française : il a un pied dans un camp et un pied dans l’autre, et il n’en vit que de manière plus aiguë son ressentiment. Aux Etats-Unis, des immigrés s’intègrent avec facilité, alors que d’autres, même si leur réussite est éclatante, vivent aussi dans un déchirement et un ressentiment permanents. Parce qu’ils sont ramenés à leur enfance, à des frustrations et des humiliations héritées du passé. Cette dimension est essentielle, en particulier chez des musulmans qui ont des traditions de fierté et un style de rapports individuels encore proche de la féodalité. (…) Cette concurrence mimétique, quand elle est malheureuse, ressort toujours, à un moment donné, sous une forme violente. A cet égard, c’est l’islam qui fournit aujourd’hui le ciment qu’on trouvait autrefois dans le marxisme. René Girard
Notre monde est de plus en plus imprégné par cette vérité évangélique de l’innocence des victimes. L’attention qu’on porte aux victimes a commencé au Moyen Age, avec l’invention de l’hôpital. L’Hôtel-Dieu, comme on disait, accueillait toutes les victimes, indépendamment de leur origine. Les sociétés primitives n’étaient pas inhumaines, mais elles n’avaient d’attention que pour leurs membres. Le monde moderne a inventé la « victime inconnue », comme on dirait aujourd’hui le « soldat inconnu ». Le christianisme peut maintenant continuer à s’étendre même sans la loi, car ses grandes percées intellectuelles et morales, notre souci des victimes et notre attention à ne pas nous fabriquer de boucs émissaires, ont fait de nous des chrétiens qui s’ignorent. René Girard
L’inauguration majestueuse de l’ère « post-chrétienne » est une plaisanterie. Nous sommes dans un ultra-christianisme caricatural qui essaie d’échapper à l’orbite judéo-chrétienne en « radicalisant » le souci des victimes dans un sens antichrétien. (…) Jusqu’au nazisme, le judaïsme était la victime préférentielle de ce système de bouc émissaire. Le christianisme ne venait qu’en second lieu. Depuis l’Holocauste, en revanche, on n’ose plus s’en prendre au judaïsme, et le christianisme est promu au rang de bouc émissaire numéro un. René Girard
Les événements qui se déroulent sous nos yeux sont à la fois naturels et culturels, c’est-à-dire qu’ils sont apocalyptiques. Jusqu’à présent, les textes de l’Apocalypse faisaient rire. Tout l’effort de la pensée moderne a été de séparer le culturel du naturel. La science consiste à montrer que les phénomènes culturels ne sont pas naturels et qu’on se trompe forcément si on mélange les tremblements de terre et les rumeurs de guerre, comme le fait le texte de l’Apocalypse. Mais, tout à coup, la science prend conscience que les activités de l’homme sont en train de détruire la nature. C’est la science qui revient à l’Apocalypse. René Girard
La religion doit être historicisée : elle fait des hommes des êtres qui restent toujours violents mais qui deviennent plus subtils, moins spectaculaires, moins proches de la bête et des formes sacrificielles comme le sacrifice humain. Il se pourrait qu’il y ait un christianisme historique qui soit une nécessité historique. Après deux mille ans de christianisme historique, il semble que nous soyons aujourd’hui à une période charnière – soit qui ouvre sur l’Apocalypse directement, soit qui nous prépare une période de compréhension plus grande et de trahison plus subtile du christianisme. (…) Oui, pour moi l’Apocalypse c’est la fin de l’histoire. (…) L’Apocalypse, c’est l’arrivée du royaume de Dieu. Mais on peut penser qu’il y a des « petites ou des demi-apocalypses » ou des crises c’est-à-dire des périodes intermédiaires… (…) Il faut prendre très au sérieux les textes apocalyptiques. Nous ne savons pas si nous sommes à la fin du monde, mais nous sommes dans une période-charnière. Je pense que toutes les grandes expériences chrétiennes des époques-charnières sont inévitablement apocalyptiques dans la mesure où elles rencontrent l’incompréhension des hommes et le fait que cette incompréhension d’une certaine manière est toujours fatale. Je dis qu’elle est toujours fatale, mais en même temps elle ne l’est jamais parce que Dieu reprend toujours les choses et toujours pardonne. (…) Je me souviens d’un journal dans lequel il y avait deux articles juxtaposés. Le premier se moquait de l’Apocalypse d’une certaine façon ; le second était aussi apocalyptique que possible. Le contact de ces deux textes qui se faisaient face et qui dans le même temps se donnaient comme n’ayant aucun rapport l’un avec l’autre avait quelque chose de fascinant. (…) Nous sommes encore proches de cette période des grandes expositions internationales qui regardait de façon utopique la mondialisation comme l’Exposition de Londres – la « Fameuse » dont parle Dostoievski, les expositions de Paris… Plus on s’approche de la vraie mondialisation plus on s’aperçoit que la non-différence ce n’est pas du tout la paix parmi les hommes mais ce peut être la rivalité mimétique la plus extravagante. On était encore dans cette idée selon laquelle on vivait dans le même monde : on n’est plus séparé par rien de ce qui séparait les hommes auparavant donc c’est forcément le paradis. Ce que voulait la Révolution française. Après la nuit du 4 août, plus de problème ! (…) L’Amérique connaît bien cela. Il est évident que la non-différence de classe ne tarit pas les rivalités mais les excite à mort avec tout ce qu’il y a de bon et de mortel dans ce phénomène. (…) il n’y a plus de sacrifice et donc les hommes sont exposés à la violence et il n’y a plus que deux choix : soit on préfère subir la violence soit on cherche à l’infliger à autrui. Le Christ veut nous dire entre autres choses : il vaut mieux subir la violence (c’est le sacrifice de soi) que de l’infliger à autrui. Si Dieu refuse le sacrifice, il est évident qu’il nous demande la non-violence qui empêchera l’Apocalypse. René Girard
L’avenir apocalyptique n’est pas quelque chose d’historique. C’est quelque chose de religieux sans lequel on ne peut pas vivre. C’est ce que les chrétiens actuels ne comprennent pas. Parce que, dans l’avenir apocalyptique, le bien et le mal sont mélangés de telle manière que d’un point de vue chrétien, on ne peut pas parler de pessimisme. Cela est tout simplement contenu dans le christianisme. Pour le comprendre, lisons la Première Lettre aux Corinthiens : si les puissants, c’est-à-dire les puissants de ce monde, avaient su ce qui arriverait, ils n’auraient jamais crucifié le Seigneur de la Gloire – car cela aurait signifié leur destruction (cf. 1 Co 2, 8). Car lorsque l’on crucifie le Seigneur de la Gloire, la magie des pouvoirs, qui est le mécanisme du bouc émissaire, est révélée. Montrer la crucifixion comme l’assassinat d’une victime innocente, c’est montrer le meurtre collectif et révéler ce phénomène mimétique. C’est finalement cette vérité qui entraîne les puissants à leur perte. Et toute l’histoire est simplement la réalisation de cette prophétie. Ceux qui prétendent que le christianisme est anarchiste ont un peu raison. Les chrétiens détruisent les pouvoirs de ce monde, car ils détruisent la légitimité de toute violence. Pour l’État, le christianisme est une force anarchique, surtout lorsqu’il retrouve sa puissance spirituelle d’autrefois. Ainsi, le conflit avec les musulmans est bien plus considérable que ce que croient les fondamentalistes. Les fondamentalistes pensent que l’apocalypse est la violence de Dieu. Alors qu’en lisant les chapitres apocalyptiques, on voit que l’apocalypse est la violence de l’homme déchaînée par la destruction des puissants, c’est-à-dire des États, comme nous le voyons en ce moment. Lorsque les puissances seront vaincues, la violence deviendra telle que la fin arrivera. Si l’on suit les chapitres apocalyptiques, c’est bien cela qu’ils annoncent. Il y aura des révolutions et des guerres. Les États s’élèveront contre les États, les nations contre les nations. Cela reflète la violence. Voilà le pouvoir anarchique que nous avons maintenant, avec des forces capables de détruire le monde entier. On peut donc voir l’apparition de l’apocalypse d’une manière qui n’était pas possible auparavant. Au début du christianisme, l’apocalypse semblait magique : le monde va finir ; nous irons tous au paradis, et tout sera sauvé ! L’erreur des premiers chrétiens était de croire que l’apocalypse était toute proche. Les premiers textes chronologiques chrétiens sont les Lettres aux Thessaloniciens qui répondent à la question : pourquoi le monde continue-t-il alors qu’on en a annoncé la fin ? Paul dit qu’il y a quelque chose qui retient les pouvoirs, le katochos (quelque chose qui retient). L’interprétation la plus commune est qu’il s’agit de l’Empire romain. La crucifixion n’a pas encore dissout tout l’ordre. Si l’on consulte les chapitres du christianisme, ils décrivent quelque chose comme le chaos actuel, qui n’était pas présent au début de l’Empire romain. (..) le monde actuel (…) confirme vraiment toutes les prédictions. On voit l’apocalypse s’étendre tous les jours : le pouvoir de détruire le monde, les armes de plus en plus fatales, et autres menaces qui se multiplient sous nos yeux. Nous croyons toujours que tous ces problèmes sont gérables par l’homme mais, dans une vision d’ensemble, c’est impossible. Ils ont une valeur quasi surnaturelle. Comme les fondamentalistes, beaucoup de lecteurs de l’Évangile reconnaissent la situation mondiale dans ces chapitres apocalyptiques. Mais les fondamentalistes croient que la violence ultime vient de Dieu, alors ils ne voient pas vraiment le rapport avec la situation actuelle – le rapport religieux. Cela montre combien ils sont peu chrétiens. La violence humaine, qui menace aujourd’hui le monde, est plus conforme au thème apocalyptique de l’Évangile qu’ils ne le pensent. René Girard
Dans le monde actuel, beaucoup de choses correspondent au climat des grands textes apocalyptiques du Nouveau Testament, en particulier Matthieu et Marc. Il y est fait mention du phénomène principal du mimétisme, qui est la lutte des doubles : ville contre ville, province contre province… Ce sont toujours les doubles qui se battent et leur bagarre n’a aucun sens puisque c’est la même chose des deux côtés. Aujourd’hui, il ne semble rien de plus urgent à la Chine que de rattraper les Etats-Unis sur tous les plans et en particulier sur le nombre d’autoroutes ou la production de véhicules automobiles. Vous imaginez les conséquences ? Il est bien évident que la production économique et les performances des entreprises mettent en jeu la rivalité. Clausewitz le disait déjà en 1820 : il n’y a rien qui ressemble plus à la guerre que le commerce. Souvent les chrétiens s’arrêtent à une interprétation eschatologique des textes de l’Apocalypse. Il s’agirait d’un événement supranaturel… Rien n’est plus faux ! Au chapitre 16 de Matthieu, les juifs demandent à Jésus un signe. « Mais, vous savez les lire, les signes, leur répond-t-il. Vous regardez la couleur du ciel le soir et vous savez deviner le temps qu’il fera demain. » Autrement dit, l’Apocalypse, c’est naturel. L’Apocalypse n’est pas du tout divine. Ce sont les hommes qui font l’Apocalypse. René Girard
Quels sont les grands leaders du monde aujourd’hui ? Le président Xi, le président Poutine – on peut être d’accord ou pas, mais c’est un leader –, le grand prince Mohammed Ben Salman. Et que seraient aujourd’hui les Emirats sans le leadership de MBZ ? (…) Quel est le problème des démocraties ? C’est que les démocraties ont pu devenir des démocraties avec de grands leaders : de Gaulle, Churchill… Mais les démocraties détruisent tous les leaderships. C’est un grand sujet, ce n’est pas un sujet anecdotique ! Comment peut-on avoir une vision à dix, quinze ou vingt ans, et en même temps avoir un rythme électoral aux Etats-Unis tous les quatre ans ? Les démocraties sont devenues un champ de bataille, où chaque heure est utilisée par tout le monde, réseaux sociaux et autres, pour détruire celui qui est en place. Comment voulez-vous avoir une vision de long terme pour un pays ? C’est ce qui fait que, aujourd’hui, les grands leaders du monde sont issus de pays qui ne sont pas de grandes démocraties. (…) C’est une formidable bonne nouvelle que la Chine assume ses responsabilités internationales. On assiste à un changement de la politique chinoise comme jamais on n’en a connu avant. Jamais. La Chine, c’est quand même le pays qui a construit la Grande Muraille pour se protéger des barbares qui étaient de l’autre côté : nous. « One Road, One Belt », c’est un changement colossal ! Tout d’un coup, la Chine décomplexée dit : “Je pars à la conquête du monde.” Alors est-ce que c’est pour des raisons éducatives, politiques, économiques : peu importe. (…) Le président Xi considère que deux mandats de cinq ans, dix ans, c’est pas assez. Il a raison ! Le mandat du président américain, en vérité c’est pas quatre ans, c’est deux ans : un an pour apprendre le job, un an pour préparer la réélection. Donc vous comparez le président chinois qui a une vision pour son pays et qui dit : “Dix ans, c’est pas assez”, au président américain qui a en vérité deux ans. Mais qui parierait beaucoup sur la réélection de Trump ? Ce matin, j’ai rencontré le prince héritier MBZ. Est-ce que vous croyez qu’on construit un pays comme ça, en deux ans ? Ici, en cinquante ans, vous avez construit un des pays les plus modernes qui soient. La question du leadership est centrale. La réussite du modèle émirien est sans doute l’exemple le plus important pour nous, pour l’ensemble du monde. J’ai été le chef de l’Etat qui a signé le contrat du Louvre à Abou Dhabi. J’y ai mis toute mon énergie. MBZ y a mis toute sa vision. On a mis dix ans ! En allant vite ! Sauf que MBZ est toujours là… Et moi ça fait six ans que je suis parti. (…) La question doit être posée comme ça : est-ce qu’on a besoin de la Russie ou pas ? Ma réponse est oui ! La Russie, c’est le pays à la plus grande superficie du monde. Qui peut dire qu’on ne doit pas parler avec eux ? Quelle est cette idée folle ? Je n’avais pas tout à fait compris dans l’administration Obama pourquoi Poutine et la Russie étaient devenus le principal adversaire. Y a-t-il un risque que la Russie envahisse d’autres pays ? Je n’y crois pas. La Russie doit perdre environ un demi-million d’habitants par an, sur le territoire le plus grand du monde. Est-ce que vous avez déjà vu des pays qui n’arrivent pas à occuper toute leur surface aller envahir des pays à côté ? Sur l’Ukraine, je pense que l’affaire n’a pas été bien gérée depuis le début et qu’il y avait moyen de faire mieux. Poutine est un homme prévisible, avec qui on peut parler et qui respecte la force. Nicolas Sarkozy
One must be blind not to see the approach of the terrible moments of history about which the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian spoke in his Revelation. Patriarch Kirill
We believe that Putin is the best and the only leader [for Russia]… He is trying to make Russia the state where Christians can live and can save their souls for eternal life. Konstantin Malofeev
Simply said, the Antichrist will not come before there will not be anymore supporters [of Orthodoxy]… What is the coming of Antichrist? It is secularism. It is modernization. Westernization. Materialism. Scientific development. The concept of progress. Putin is exactly the figure who is resisting the Antichrist on earth. Aleksandr Dugin
Thank God we live in a country where political correctness has not reached the point of absurdity. Andrei Konchalovsky
If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen. n. Russian commander
Putin understands that there is no empire without Ukraine. The first move, I think, is Ukraine. But I don’t exclude a military attack in the Far East. They want to distract American attention, prolong the front of confrontation in order to create a favorable situation for aggression in Europe. If you look at the map, Russia is always helping the enemies of America: deep ties to North Korea, involvement in Afghanistan and Syria, backing Iran, and so on. Antoni Macierewicz (Poland’s defense minister)
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has two overarching goals. First, the Russian people must believe the Kremlin version of domestic and world events (…) that Russia is a super power in a hostile world (…) Second, Kremlin propaganda must discredit Western democracy as dysfunctional and inferior to Russia’s managed “democracy.” Kremlin propaganda has largely failed in this regard. Russians consider their government corrupt, remote from the people, interested in preserving power rather than performing its duties, and lying about the true state of affairs. Nevertheless, Putin’s approval ratings remain high in the absence of rivals, who have fled the country, been indicted, or murdered. Putin, in fact, bases his legitimacy on high approval ratings. To counter the Russian people’s sense that they have no say in how they are governed, Kremlin propagandists must sell the story that Western democracies have it worse. Downtrodden Americans, they say, face poverty, hunger, racial and ethnic discrimination, unemployment, and they are governed by corrupt, inept, greedy, dysfunctional, and feuding politicians who sell out to the highest bidder on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. This brings us to how the ballyhooed Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election has given Putin a gift that keeps on giving—a paralyzed federal government, incapable of compromise, in which a significant portion of the governing class questions the legitimacy of a new president. Russia routinely meddles in the politics of other countries. Despite denials, the Kremlin contributes to pro-Russian political parties throughout the world, gathers compromising information, hacks into email accounts, offers lucrative contracts to foreign businesses, and circulates false news. Given this history, U.S. authorities should not have been surprised by Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race. To date, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted thirteen Russian “internet trolls,” who sowed discord on social media by posting inflammatory, distorted, slanted, and false information promoting the Russian narrative of a deeply divided electorate and a discredited American electoral system. Mueller’s indictment identifies the Internet Research Agency (IRA) of St. Petersburg as the nerve center of Russia’s trolling operations. Although putatively owned by a private Russian oligarch close to Putin, there is little doubt that the IRA is a mouthpiece of the Kremlin. The existence and activities of the IRA have been known since 2014. It employs hundreds of hackers and writers divided into geographical sections. It is not the sole source of Russian trolling, but it is the most important. Those American politicians and pundits, like Congressman Jerry Nagler and columnist Thomas Friedman, who label Russian intervention an act of warfare on par with Pearl Harbor or 9/11must attribute supernatural powers to Putin’s trolls. After all, the Mueller investigation revealed that Russia spent no more than a few million dollars on its election-meddling versus the over two billion dollars spent by the presidential candidates alone. The IRA’s St. Petersburg America desk constituted some 90 persons. Their social media posts accounted for an infinitesimal portion of social media political traffic and much of this came after the election. (…) that Western democracies, American democracy especially, are rotten, corrupt, and hapless is a cornerstone of the Kremlin narrative. As the Mueller indictment concludes: The stated goal of the Russian operation was “spreading distrust towards candidates and the political system in general.” The Russian trolls, according to the Mueller indictment, used a number of techniques to achieve this end. They encouraged fringe candidates. They tried to ally with disaffected religious, ethnic, and nationalist groups. They discredited the candidate they thought most likely to win. Once the winner was known, they immediately moved to discredit him. (…) The dozen ill-informed operatives indicted by Mueller held poorly attended rallies, had to be educated about red and blue states, and spent their limited funds in uncontested states. It would be almost crazy to believe that such Russian intervention could have made a difference. Why, then, do so many Americans believe that Russia was instrumental in throwing the election to Donald Trump? It may be that some of the President’s opponents actually believe this narrative. But there’s another explanation, too: Russian intervention provides opportunistic politicians and pundits a useful excuse for paralyzing the incoming government of a gutter-fighter President from a show business and construction background with no political experience. In their view, such a person should not be allowed to govern. Hence the paralysis, dysfunction, and chaos of American democracy—long claimed by Russian propagandists—is on its way to becoming reality. What a windfall for Putin and his oligarchs. Paul R. Gregory
Ivan Ilyin, came to imagine a Russian Christian fascism. Born in 1883, he finished a dissertation on God’s worldly failure just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Expelled from his homeland in 1922 by the Soviet power he despised, he embraced the cause of Benito Mussolini and completed an apology for political violence in 1925. In German and Swiss exile, he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s for White Russian exiles who had fled after defeat in the Russian civil war, and in the 1940s and 1950s for future Russians who would see the end of the Soviet power. (…) For the young Ilyin, writing before the Revolution, law embodied the hope that Russians would partake in a universal consciousness that would allow Russia to create a modern state. For the mature, counter-revolutionary Ilyin, a particular consciousness (“heart” or “soul,” not “mind”) permitted Russians to experience the arbitrary claims of power as law. Though he died forgotten, in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today. (…) Because Ilyin found ways to present the failure of the rule of law as Russian virtue, Russian kleptocrats use his ideas to portray economic inequality as national innocence. In the last few years, Vladimir Putin has also used some of Ilyin’s more specific ideas about geopolitics in his effort translate the task of Russian politics from the pursuit of reform at home to the export of virtue abroad. By transforming international politics into a discussion of “spiritual threats,” Ilyin’s works have helped Russian elites to portray the Ukraine, Europe, and the United States as existential dangers to Russia. (…) Ilyin used the word Spirit (Dukh) to describe the inspiration of fascists. The fascist seizure of power, he wrote, was an “act of salvation.” The fascist is the true redeemer, since he grasps that it is the enemy who must be sacrificed. Ilyin took from Mussolini the concept of a “chivalrous sacrifice” that fascists make in the blood of others. (Speaking of the Holocaust in 1943, Heinrich Himmler would praise his SS-men in just these terms.) (…) What seemed to trouble Ilyin most was that Italians and not Russians had invented fascism: “Why did the Italians succeed where we failed?” Writing of the future of Russian fascism in 1927, he tried to establish Russian primacy by considering the White resistance to the Bolsheviks as the pre-history of the fascist movement as a whole. The White movement had also been “deeper and broader” than fascism because it had preserved a connection to religion and the need for totality. Ilyin proclaimed to “my White brothers, the fascists” that a minority must seize power in Russia. The time would come. The “White Spirit” was eternal. (…) “The fact of the matter,” wrote Ilyin, “is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” Arbitrariness (proizvol), a central concept in all modern Russian political discussions, was the bugbear of all Russian reformers seeking improvement through law. Now proizvol was patriotic. The word for “redemptive” (spasytelnii), is another central Russian concept. It is the adjective Russian Orthodox Christians might apply to the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, the death of the One for the salvation of the many. Ilyin uses it to mean the murder of outsiders so that the nation could undertake a project of total politics that might later redeem a lost God. In one sentence, two universal concepts, law and Christianity, are undone. A spirit of lawlessness replaces the spirit of the law; a spirit of murder replaces a spirit of mercy. (…) Writing in Russian for Russian émigrés, Ilyin was quick to praise Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Hitler did well, in Ilyin’s opinion, to have the rule of law suspended after the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Ilyin presented Hitler, like Mussolini, as a Leader from beyond history whose mission was entirely defensive. “A reaction to Bolshevism had to come,” wrote Ilyin, “and it came.” European civilization had been sentenced to death, but “so long as Mussolini is leading Italy and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture has a stay of execution.” Nazis embodied a “Spirit” (Dukh) that Russians must share. According to Ilyin, Nazis were right to boycott Jewish businesses and blame Jews as a collectivity for the evils that had befallen Germany. Above all, Ilyin wanted to persuade Russians and other Europeans that Hitler was right to treat Jews as agents of Bolshevism. This “Judeobolshevik” idea, as Ilyin understood, was the ideological connection between the Whites and the Nazis. The claim that Jews were Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks were Jews was White propaganda during the Russian Civil War. Of course, most communists were not Jews, and the overwhelming majority of Jews had nothing to do with communism. The conflation of the two groups was not an error or an exaggeration, but rather a transformation of traditional religious prejudices into instruments of national unity. Judeobolshevism appealed to the superstitious belief of Orthodox Christian peasants that Jews guarded the border between the realms of good and evil. It shifted this conviction to modern politics, portraying revolution as hell and Jews as its gatekeepers. As in Ilyin’s philosophy, God was weak, Satan was dominant, and the weapons of hell were modern ideas in the world. (…) As the 1930s passed, Ilyin began to doubt that Nazi Germany was advancing the cause of Russian fascism. This was natural, since Hitler regarded Russians as subhumans, and Germany supported European fascists only insofar as they were useful to the specific Nazi cause. Ilyin began to caution Russian Whites about Nazis, and came under suspicion from the German government. He lost his job and, in 1938, left Germany for Switzerland. He remained faithful, however, to his conviction that the White movement was anterior to Italian fascism and German National Socialism. In time, Russians would demonstrate a superior fascism. (…) World War II (…) was a confusing moment for both communists and their enemies, since the conflict began after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany reached an agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (…) as the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union (…) Ilyin (…) wrote of the German invasion of the USSR as a “judgment on Bolshevism.” After the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, when it became clear that Germany would likely lose the war, Ilyin changed his position again. Then, and in the years to follow, he would present the war as one of a series of Western attacks on Russian virtue. Russian innocence was becoming one of Ilyin’s great themes. As a concept, it completed Ilyin’s fascist theory: the world was corrupt; it needed redemption from a nation capable of total politics; that nation was unsoiled Russia. As he aged, Ilyin dwelled on the Russian past, not as history, but as a cyclical myth of native virtue defended from external penetration. Russia was an immaculate empire, always under attack from all sides. A small territory around Moscow became the Russian Empire, the largest country of all time, without ever attacking anyone. Even as it expanded, Russia was the victim, because Europeans did not understand the profound virtue it was defending by taking more land. In Ilyin’s words, Russia has been subject to unceasing “continental blockade,” and so its entire past was one of “self-defense.” And so, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.” (…) Democratic elections institutionalized the evil notion of individuality. “The principle of democracy,” Ilyin wrote, “was the irresponsible human atom.” Counting votes was to falsely accept “the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics.” It followed that “we must reject blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.” Public voting with signed ballots will allow Russians to surrender their individuality. Elections were a ritual of submission of Russians before their Leader. (…) Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined. And yet, his concepts do help lift the obscurity from some of the more interesting aspects of Russian politics. Vladimir Putin, to take a very important example, is a post-Soviet politician who emerged from the realm of fiction. Since it is he who brought Ilyin’s ideas into high politics, his rise to power is part of Ilyin’s story as well. (…) In the early 2000s, Putin maintained that Russia could become some kind of rule-of-law state. Instead, he succeeded in bringing economic crime within the Russian state, transforming general corruption into official kleptocracy. Once the state became the center of crime, the rule of law became incoherent, inequality entrenched, and reform unthinkable. Another political story was needed. Because Putin’s victory over Russia’s oligarchs also meant control over their television stations, new media instruments were at hand. The Western trend towards infotainment was brought to its logical conclusion in Russia, generating an alternative reality meant to generate faith in Russian virtue but cynicism about facts. This transformation was engineered by Vladislav Surkov, the genius of Russian propaganda. He oversaw a striking move toward the world as Ilyin imagined it, a dark and confusing realm given shape only by Russian innocence. With the financial and media resources under control, Putin needed only, in the nice Russian term, to add the “spiritual resource.” And so, beginning in 2005, Putin began to rehabilitate Ilyin as a Kremlin court philosopher. (…) If Russia could not become a rule-of-law state, it would seek to destroy neighbors that had succeeded in doing so or that aspired to do so. Echoing one of the most notorious proclamations of the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt, Ilyin wrote that politics “is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Putin’s promises were not about law in Russia, but about the defeat of a hyper-legal neighboring entity. The European Union, the largest economy in the world and Russia’s most important economic partner, is grounded on the assumption that international legal agreements provide the basis for fruitful cooperation among rule-of-law states. (…) Putin predicted that Eurasia would overcome the European Union and bring its members into a larger entity that would extend “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” (…) Modifying Ilyin’s views about Russian innocence ever so slightly, Russian leaders could see the Soviet Union not as a foreign imposition upon Russia, as Ilyin had, but rather as Russia itself, and so virtuous despite appearances. Any faults of the Soviet system became necessary Russian reactions to the prior hostility of the West. Questions about the influence of ideas in politics are very difficult to answer, and it would be needlessly bold to make of Ilyin’s writings the pillar of the Russian system. For one thing, Ilyin’s vast body of work admits multiple interpretations. (…) And yet, most often in the Russia of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is Ilyin’s ideas that to seem to satisfy political needs and to fill rhetorical gaps, to provide the “spiritual resource” for the kleptocratic state machine. (…) Russia’s 2012 law on “foreign agents,” passed right after Putin’s return to the office of the presidency, well represents Ilyin’s attitude to civil society. Ilyin believed that Russia’s “White Spirit” should animate the fascists of Europe; since 2013, the Kremlin has provided financial and propaganda support to European parties of the populist and extreme right. The Russian campaign against the “decadence” of the European Union, initiated in 2013, is in accord with Ilyin’s worldview. (…) Putin first submitted to years of shirtless fur-and-feather photoshoots, then divorced his wife, then blamed the European Union for Russian homosexuality. Ilyin sexualized what he experienced as foreign threats. Jazz, for example, was a plot to induce premature ejaculation. When Ukrainians began in late 2013 to assemble in favor of a European future for their country, the Russian media raised the specter of a “homodictatorship.” (…) Putin justified Russia’s attempt to draw Ukraine towards Eurasia by Ilyin’s “organic model” that made of Russia and Ukraine “one people. » Timothy Snyder
The last two weeks have witnessed the upending of the European order and the close of the post-Cold War era. With his invasion of Crimea and the instant absorption of the strategic peninsula, Vladimir Putin has shown that he will not play by the West’s rules. The “end of history” is at an end—we’re now seeing the onset of Cold War 2.0. What’s on the Kremlin’s mind was made clear by Putin’s fire-breathing speech to the Duma announcing the annexation of Crimea, which blended retrograde Russian nationalism with a generous helping of messianism on behalf of his fellow Slavs, alongside the KGB-speak that Putin is so fond of. If you enjoy mystical references to Orthodox saints of two millennia past accompanied by warnings about a Western fifth column and “national traitors,” this was the speech for you. Putin confirmed the worst fears of Ukrainians who think they should have their own country. But his ambitions go well beyond Ukraine: By explicitly linking Russian ethnicity with membership in the Russian Federation, Putin has challenged the post-Soviet order writ large. For years, I studied Russia as a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, and at times I feel like I’m seeing history in reverse. The Kremlin is a fiercely revisionist power, seeking to change the status quo by various forms of force. This will soon involve NATO members in the Baltics directly, as well as Poland and Romania indirectly. Longstanding Russian acumen in what I term Special War, an amalgam of espionage, subversion and terrorism by spies and special operatives, is already known to Russia’s neighbors and can be expected to increase. In truth, Putin set Russia on a course for Cold War 2.0 as far back as 2007, and perhaps earlier; Western counterintelligence noted major upswings in aggressive Russian espionage and subversion against NATO members as far back as 2006.The brief Georgia war of August 2008, which made clear that the Kremlin was perfectly comfortable with using force in the post-Soviet space, ought to have served as a bigger wake-up call for the West. John R. Schindler (2014)
Ever since Moscow’s Little Green Men seized Crimea in early 2014, we’ve been in a new Cold War with Russia. To the consternation of wishful-thinkers, as Vladimir Putin’s confrontation with the West has become transparent, the reality of what I termed Cold War 2.0 almost four years ago has grown difficult to deny. Since the Kremlin’s revanchism is driving this conflict, we’re in it whether we want to be or not. Europe is the central front in Cold War 2.0, thanks to geography and history. Putin’s war on, and in, Ukraine continues on low boil, while the Russian military regularly delivers provocations—a too-close warship here, an aircraft buzz there—all along NATO’s eastern frontier, sending an aggressive message. Major military exercises like September’s Zapad mega-wargame demonstrate Putin’s seriousness about confronting the Atlantic Alliance. (…) However, Kremlin provocations extend far beyond the former Soviet Union (…) This assessment sounds alarmist at first, particularly the mention of possible aggression in the Far East, but Western intelligence agencies that track Russian moves have been thinking along similar lines—though they seldom say so in public. Therefore, it’s worth taking a brief look at what Putin’s up to, and where. Russia’s footprint on the North Korean crisis is impossible to miss, and since that’s the world’s most dangerous strategic predicament at present, Moscow’s less-than-helpful role merits attention. Although Beijing is clearly exasperated by the unhinged antics of its semi-client regime in Pyongyang, Moscow seems perfectly pleased with the hazardous games played by North Korea. And why not? Pyongyang creates strategic confusion for the Americans, which the Kremlin always enjoys. Russian military and intelligence support to the increasingly isolated Kim regime is an open secret, while Putin’s sanctions-beating lifelines to Pyongyang are public and deeply annoying for both Beijing and Washington. Although Moscow is no more eager to see all-out war on the Korean peninsula than the Chinese or Americans, keeping the nasty Kim regime in place frustrates and distracts the Pentagon, which is Russia’s real aim here. Not to mention that backing North Korea is viewed in the Kremlin as payback for NATO’s “meddling” in Ukraine. A similar pattern can be detected in Afghanistan, where American-led forces are in their sixteenth year of a seemingly endless counterinsurgency against the Taliban—and it’s not going well. Therefore, Moscow has been giving clandestine support to the Taliban. A few months back, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan admitted that Russian arms were reaching the Taliban. That clandestine Kremlin assistance is costing lives is increasingly obvious. Russian aid has reached Taliban “special” units that launch attacks on Afghan military bases. A recent spate of Taliban assaults on Afghan forces, including nighttime raids, has inflicted unexpected casualties on American allies. Of concern to the Pentagon, Taliban fighters equipped with Russian-made night vision gear have been ambushing Afghan military and police with lethal effects. It seems only a matter of time before American troops are killed by Russian-equipped Taliban special operators. While the Kremlin is in truth no fonder of the Taliban than the West is, this spoiler strategy is inflicting pain on the Americans and our clients in Kabul, which is all the Russians seek here. Not to mention that payback against us in Afghanistan, three decades after U.S. clandestine aid killed and wounded thousands of Soviet troops in that country, must be delicious for Moscow, where revenge has always constituted a rational strategic motivation. However, the real fight is in the heart of the Middle East, where Russia and its Iranian allies are fundamentally transforming the region at high cost in blood. Together, Moscow and Tehran are challenging the American-constructed security system that’s an ailing holdover from the last Cold War. Even recent cooperation between America’s two clients, Israel and Saudi Arabia, appears insufficient to turn back the rising Russian-Iranian tide across the Middle East. We only have ourselves to blame for this. Putin has taken full advantage of the blank check written by Barack Obama in September 2013 when our president backed away from his “red line” in Syria, in effect outsourcing that country and its terrible civil war to the Kremlin. As I predicted at the time, the strategic consequences of Obama’s decision have been grave, making Putin the new Middle East power-broker—a message that was missed only in Washington think-tanks. For his part, Donald Trump has been only too willing to let his Russian counterpart and would-be buddy do whatever he likes in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Moscow’s military intervention in the Middle East, begun under Obama, continues to flourish and shows no signs of abating. The balance of power in this vital region has shifted decisively from Washington to Moscow at appalling cost in human life, though none of that troubled President Obama very much, and it seems to trouble his successor not one bit. It would be naïve to think Putin restricts his poking to the Eastern Hemisphere. Closer to our home, the bear’s paw-prints are easily detectable. Take Venezuela, the Bolivarian dictatorship and economic basket-case that’s barely a viable country at all anymore, between currency collapse and serious food shortages. Russian money is keeping this anti-American regime afloat, and last week Moscow’s refinancing of $3.15 billion it’s owed by Caracas gives the flat-broke country a bit of financial breathing room. Without Russia, Venezuela would likely implode, and it’s worth considering whether the Bolivarian regime is actually Putin’s newest satellite state. Although sanctions and low oil prices have diminished the Kremlin’s largess toward anti-Americans all over the globe, the prospect of having a loyal (because utterly dependent) client so close to the United States seems too good for Putin to pass up. Then there’s Cuba, Moscow’s “fraternal ally” from the last Cold War, and apparently the second one too. Just 90 miles from Key West, Cuba has long served as a reliable base for Russian provocations against us, and nothing’s changed. Russian economic aid to that impoverished island is back, after falling off after 1991, and the Kremlin has begun to reopen its military and spy bases in the country, which were shuttered after the Soviet collapse. Western intelligence has detected a Kremlin hand behind the recent rash of sonic attacks on American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba. While Havana flatly denies that anything untoward has occurred, two dozen U.S. diplomats in the country have suffered serious health problems due to this mysterious problem, which remains officially unexplained. However, it’s known that the KGB experimented with sonic weapons, while an attack of this sophistication is widely considered to be beyond the technical abilities of Cuban intelligence. (….) In all, this amounts to a worldwide Russian effort to push back against what’s left of American hegemony. Since Moscow lacks the ability to directly counter NATO and the U.S. militarily, the Russians are provoking and prodding where they can with the techniques of Special War: it’s what the Kremlin does best. This should be considered a spoiler strategy, a strategy of tension—what left-wing Italians in the 1970s termed la strategia della tensione. Vladimir Putin seeks to expand Russian power on the cheap while causing problems for America and our allies wherever he can—without direct military confrontation. John Schindler
One of the more interesting aspects of Cold War 2.0 is the ideological struggle between the postmodern West and Russia—a struggle that most Westerners deny even exists. there is an undeniable ideological struggle between Vladimir Putin’s neo-traditionalist Russia and the post-modern West—one that prominent Russians talk about all the time. In the Kremlin’s imagination, this fight pits the godless, materialistic, doomed 21st century West, too lazy to even reproduce, against a tough, reborn Russia that was forged in the murderous fire of 74 years of Bolshevism. The yawning gap between Russian and Western values can be partly explained by the fact that Communism shielded the former from the West’s vast cultural shifts since the 1960s. Living under the Old Left provided protection against the New Left. As a result, Russians are living in our past and find current Western ways incomprehensible and even contemptible. Take the reaction to America’s present panic about sexual harassment, which is felling celebrities and politicians left and right. In Moscow, this looks like madness, punishing powerful men for doing what powerful men have always done. Their late-night TV uses our sex panic as a punchline, proof that Americans are weak and feminized, held hostage to radical ideology. There is an undeniable theological aspect to this Russian contempt for post-modern Western values. The Russian Orthodox Church, which isn’t exactly state-controlled but is tightly linked to the Kremlin, regularly denounces the godless West and its sins—homosexuality and feminism especially. Orthodox clerics regularly castigate our “Satanic” ways as an example of what Russia must repel if it wants to survive the 21st century. Denouncing the West as godless and decadent is a venerable tradition in Russian Orthodoxy with deep historical roots, and it’s been reborn after Communism with gusto. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the ROC, frequently breathes fire on post-modern Western ways, and a couple weeks back he shared them with John Huntsman, the newly arrived American ambassador in Moscow, in an awkward meet-and-greet that turned into a theology lecture. Simply put, Kirill explained, America today is doing to itself what the Bolsheviks did to Russia: forcing a godless, secular ideology onto society. “Christian values are being destroyed… The West is abandoning God, but Russia is not abandoning God, like the majority of people in the world. That means the distance between our values is increasing,” he stated bluntly. Kirill’s insistence that America and the West are the outliers here, with Russia and most of the world on the side of traditional religion and values, is an important point that merits pondering. The traditionalist nature of Putinism, always present, has grown more intense in recent years as the Kremlin has sought to enshrine an official ideology as confrontation with the West has grown. Whatever Vladimir Putin may actually believe, he has played the public role of an Orthodox believer quite effectively. He has cultivated senior ROC clerics, who provide regime-endorsing soundbites as needed, and the church gives Putin legitimacy in the eyes of average Russians, who aren’t especially religious in terms of church-going, yet they see an Orthodox identity as reassuring and plausible in Communism’s wake. Putin has returned the church’s affection, stating that Russia’s “spiritual shield”—meaning Orthodoxy—is as important to the country’s security as its nuclear shield. In turn, Orthodox leaders portray Putin’s as a God-given figure, divinely sent to bring the country back to faith and great-power status out of the wreckage of atheistic Bolshevism. (…) Recently, Putin has played up the Orthodox nationalist message in a series of public events. He visited Mount Athos, Greece’s famous Holy Mountain, in May 2016 in a pilgrimage of sorts. It was shown live, with great fanfare, in wall-to-wall coverage on Tsargrad TV, and Putin was treated by the monks there more like a visiting Byzantine emperor than as the Russian president. This month, Putin was present for the grand reopening of the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, a sprawling 17th century complex that was destroyed by the Nazis in World War II and was rebuilt from the ground up over the past decade at great expense. It did not go unnoticed that the monastery was originally constructed to glorify the Third Rome idea, the centuries-old religious myth that Moscow is the sole successor to Rome and Byzantium, which has long served as a driver of Russian nationalism and imperialism. Then, last week, Patriarch Kirill warned of coming Armageddon. (…) Adding that the world’s end is in the hands of humanity, and something that Russians and all nations must stop, Krill warned of Earth imminently “slipping into the abyss of the end of history.” These are the comments of a top cleric, not the Ministry of Defense, but it should be noted that the Russian military is now practicing for global thermonuclear war in a manner it hasn’t done since the last Cold War. Last month, in an apparent continuation of September’s Zapad mega-wargame, Russia’s strategic nuclear forces conducted a huge exercise that involved Putin himself. This exercise involved all three “legs” of Russia’s nuclear triad: land-based ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and submarines with ballistic missiles. In all, several cruise missiles were fired while three ballistic missiles were launched—and Putin personally gave the launch orders. This is a rare move, not to mention a violation of our nuclear treaties with the Kremlin, and Moscow was sending a hard-to-miss message. (…) It would be a mistake to directly lump nuclear exercises in with apocalyptic messages from leading Kremlin ideologues. However, it’s hardly encouraging that the Putin regime is pushing propaganda about planetary end-times while indulging in saber-rattling nuclear wargames for the first time in decades. Whatever else this aggressive Moscow messaging means, none of it bodes well for peace. John Schindler
Religions de tous pays, unissez vous !
Au lendemain d’un nouveau triomphe électoral du Chaisier musical en chef de la sainte Russie …
Dont la participation et le score rien de moins qu’africains ou même soviétiques …
En font rêver plus d’un notre Sarkozy national en tête ….
Dans un Occident ne s’étant toujours pas remis du vide stratégique et des folies migratoires laissés par l’ère Obama-Merkel…
Comment ne pas voir …
Avec l’ex-expert de la NSA John Schindler …
La lutte proprement théologique qui se profile …
Derrière la convergence des revanchismes tant russe que chinois ou musulman …
Et sous la menace d’une probablement inévitable invasion démographique africaine de l’Europe …
Entre sous l’étendard d’une Amérique en proie aux pires dérives du politiquement correct …
La décadence postmoderne d’un Occident désormais livré au plus crasse du matérialisme et de la déchristianisation ….
Et sous la houlette d’un régime poutinien multipliant entre inaugurations ou visites de lieux saints orthodoxes les démonstrations de force y compris chimiques ou thermonucléaires …
Un reste du monde défendant la religion et les valeurs traditionnelles abandonnées par ledit Occident ?
Russia Conducts Nuclear Exercises Amid Orthodox End-Times Talk
One of the more interesting aspects of Cold War 2.0 is the ideological struggle between the postmodern West and Russia—a struggle that most Westerners deny even exists. President Barack Obama, after Moscow seized Crimea in early 2014, pronounced that there was nothing big afoot: “After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.”
Obama’s statement was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now. As I’ve explained, there is an undeniable ideological struggle between Vladimir Putin’s neo-traditionalist Russia and the post-modern West—one that prominent Russians talk about all the time. In the Kremlin’s imagination, this fight pits the godless, materialistic, doomed 21st century West, too lazy to even reproduce, against a tough, reborn Russia that was forged in the murderous fire of 74 years of Bolshevism.
The yawning gap between Russian and Western values can be partly explained by the fact that Communism shielded the former from the West’s vast cultural shifts since the 1960s. Living under the Old Left provided protection against the New Left. As a result, Russians are living in our past and find current Western ways incomprehensible and even contemptible.
Take the reaction to America’s present panic about sexual harassment, which is felling celebrities and politicians left and right. In Moscow, this looks like madness, punishing powerful men for doing what powerful men have always done. Their late-night TV uses our sex panic as a punchline, proof that Americans are weak and feminized, held hostage to radical ideology. Andrei Konchalovsky, one of Russia’s top film directors (including some Hollywood hits), expressed his view plainly: “Thank God we live in a country where political correctness has not reached the point of absurdity.”
There is an undeniable theological aspect to this Russian contempt for post-modern Western values. The Russian Orthodox Church, which isn’t exactly state-controlled but is tightly linked to the Kremlin, regularly denounces the godless West and its sins—homosexuality and feminism especially. Orthodox clerics regularly castigate our “Satanic” ways as an example of what Russia must repel if it wants to survive the 21st century.
Denouncing the West as godless and decadent is a venerable tradition in Russian Orthodoxy with deep historical roots, and it’s been reborn after Communism with gusto. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the ROC, frequently breathes fire on post-modern Western ways, and a couple weeks back he shared them with John Huntsman, the newly arrived American ambassador in Moscow, in an awkward meet-and-greet that turned into a theology lecture.
Simply put, Kirill explained, America today is doing to itself what the Bolsheviks did to Russia: forcing a godless, secular ideology onto society. “Christian values are being destroyed… The West is abandoning God, but Russia is not abandoning God, like the majority of people in the world. That means the distance between our values is increasing,” he stated bluntly. Kirill’s insistence that America and the West are the outliers here, with Russia and most of the world on the side of traditional religion and values, is an important point that merits pondering.
The traditionalist nature of Putinism, always present, has grown more intense in recent years as the Kremlin has sought to enshrine an official ideology as confrontation with the West has grown. Whatever Vladimir Putin may actually believe, he has played the public role of an Orthodox believer quite effectively. He has cultivated senior ROC clerics, who provide regime-endorsing soundbites as needed, and the church gives Putin legitimacy in the eyes of average Russians, who aren’t especially religious in terms of church-going, yet they see an Orthodox identity as reassuring and plausible in Communism’s wake.
Putin has returned the church’s affection, stating that Russia’s “spiritual shield”—meaning Orthodoxy—is as important to the country’s security as its nuclear shield. In turn, Orthodox leaders portray Putin’s as a God-given figure, divinely sent to bring the country back to faith and great-power status out of the wreckage of atheistic Bolshevism.
Prominent here is Konstantin Malofeev, a hedge-fund billionaire turned militant Orthodox nationalist, who created Tsargrad TV, a 24-hour cable new network, to push those values to the public. Malofeev, like the Blues Brothers, thinks he’s on a mission from God, and his network is basically the Russian Fox News, if FNC focused on theology and mystical nationalism instead of blonde newsreaders.
Malofeev’s affection for Russia’s president and his system is clear: “We believe that Putin is the best and the only leader [for Russia]… He is trying to make Russia the state where Christians can live and can save their souls for eternal life.” While the deeply Eastern nature of Orthodoxy means it has little appeal for Western Christians, there’s no doubt that Kremlin messaging is reaching some, especially American Evangelicals, whom Moscow sees as potential allies abroad.
The notorious gadfly Aleksandr Dugin goes further: “Simply said, the Antichrist will not come before there will not be anymore supporters [of Orthodoxy]… What is the coming of Antichrist? It is secularism. It is modernization. Westernization. Materialism. Scientific development. The concept of progress.” He added that Putin is “exactly” the figure who is resisting the Antichrist on earth.
Dugin, it should be noted, isn’t some random flake or religious nut, he’s a Big Idea thinker who’s taken somewhat seriously in the Kremlin, although his real role seems to be Moscow’s ambassador-at-large to the Western far-right. He is close to the Russian security services and he runs a website that pushes his hardline Orthodox nationalist message in several languages, including English. Its name comes from the Greek word for “he who resists the Antichrist.”
Recently, Putin has played up the Orthodox nationalist message in a series of public events. He visited Mount Athos, Greece’s famous Holy Mountain, in May 2016 in a pilgrimage of sorts. It was shown live, with great fanfare, in wall-to-wall coverage on Tsargrad TV, and Putin was treated by the monks there more like a visiting Byzantine emperor than as the Russian president.
This month, Putin was present for the grand reopening of the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, a sprawling 17th century complex that was destroyed by the Nazis in World War II and was rebuilt from the ground up over the past decade at great expense. It did not go unnoticed that the monastery was originally constructed to glorify the Third Rome idea, the centuries-old religious myth that Moscow is the sole successor to Rome and Byzantium, which has long served as a driver of Russian nationalism and imperialism.
Then, last week, Patriarch Kirill warned of coming Armageddon. After a service at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, he made a stunning statement: “One must be blind not to see the approach of the terrible moments of history about which the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian spoke in his Revelation.” Adding that the world’s end is in the hands of humanity, and something that Russians and all nations must stop, Krill warned of Earth imminently “slipping into the abyss of the end of history.”
These are the comments of a top cleric, not the Ministry of Defense, but it should be noted that the Russian military is now practicing for global thermonuclear war in a manner it hasn’t done since the last Cold War. Last month, in an apparent continuation of September’s Zapad mega-wargame, Russia’s strategic nuclear forces conducted a huge exercise that involved Putin himself. This exercise involved all three “legs” of Russia’s nuclear triad: land-based ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and submarines with ballistic missiles. In all, several cruise missiles were fired while three ballistic missiles were launched—and Putin personally gave the launch orders.
This is a rare move, not to mention a violation of our nuclear treaties with the Kremlin, and Moscow was sending a hard-to-miss message. As Real Clear Defense reports, “The most striking thing about the exercise was that it was announced at all and that President Putin was characterized as ‘overseeing’ it and ordering the missile launches. This exercise was conducted in a sensitive period in U.S.-Russian relations. Russia did not have to announce the exercise. It has previously staged major strategic nuclear exercises without announcing them.”
It would be a mistake to directly lump nuclear exercises in with apocalyptic messages from leading Kremlin ideologues. However, it’s hardly encouraging that the Putin regime is pushing propaganda about planetary end-times while indulging in saber-rattling nuclear wargames for the first time in decades. Whatever else this aggressive Moscow messaging means, none of it bodes well for peace.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
Voir aussi:
Europe is the central front in Cold War 2.0, thanks to geography and history. Putin’s war on, and in, Ukraine continues on low boil, while the Russian military regularly delivers provocations—a too-close warship here, an aircraft buzz there—all along NATO’s eastern frontier, sending an aggressive message. Major military exercises like September’s Zapad mega-wargame demonstrate Putin’s seriousness about confronting the Atlantic Alliance.
What Putin wants was the subject of my recent interview with Antoni Macierewicz, Poland’s plain-spoken defense minister. What the Kremlin boss seeks, he explained, is restoration of the Russian empire, to which Ukraine (or at least most of it) belonged for centuries. “Putin understands that there is no empire without Ukraine,” he added.
However, Kremlin provocations extend far beyond the former Soviet Union, as Macierewicz elaborated:
The first move, I think, is Ukraine. But I don’t exclude a military attack in the Far East. They want to distract American attention, prolong the front of confrontation in order to create a favorable situation for aggression in Europe. If you look at the map, Russia is always helping the enemies of America: deep ties to North Korea, involvement in Afghanistan and Syria, backing Iran, and so on.
This assessment sounds alarmist at first, particularly the mention of possible aggression in the Far East, but Western intelligence agencies that track Russian moves have been thinking along similar lines—though they seldom say so in public. Therefore, it’s worth taking a brief look at what Putin’s up to, and where.
Russia’s footprint on the North Korean crisis is impossible to miss, and since that’s the world’s most dangerous strategic predicament at present, Moscow’s less-than-helpful role merits attention. Although Beijing is clearly exasperated by the unhinged antics of its semi-client regime in Pyongyang, Moscow seems perfectly pleased with the hazardous games played by North Korea.
And why not? Pyongyang creates strategic confusion for the Americans, which the Kremlin always enjoys. Russian military and intelligence support to the increasingly isolated Kim regime is an open secret, while Putin’s sanctions-beating lifelines to Pyongyang are public and deeply annoying for both Beijing and Washington. Although Moscow is no more eager to see all-out war on the Korean peninsula than the Chinese or Americans, keeping the nasty Kim regime in place frustrates and distracts the Pentagon, which is Russia’s real aim here. Not to mention that backing North Korea is viewed in the Kremlin as payback for NATO’s “meddling” in Ukraine.
A similar pattern can be detected in Afghanistan, where American-led forces are in their sixteenth year of a seemingly endless counterinsurgency against the Taliban—and it’s not going well. Therefore, Moscow has been giving clandestine support to the Taliban. A few months back, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan admitted that Russian arms were reaching the Taliban. That clandestine Kremlin assistance is costing lives is increasingly obvious. Russian aid has reached Taliban “special” units that launch attacks on Afghan military bases.
A recent spate of Taliban assaults on Afghan forces, including nighttime raids, has inflicted unexpected casualties on American allies. Of concern to the Pentagon, Taliban fighters equipped with Russian-made night vision gear have been ambushing Afghan military and police with lethal effects. It seems only a matter of time before American troops are killed by Russian-equipped Taliban special operators.
While the Kremlin is in truth no fonder of the Taliban than the West is, this spoiler strategy is inflicting pain on the Americans and our clients in Kabul, which is all the Russians seek here. Not to mention that payback against us in Afghanistan, three decades after U.S. clandestine aid killed and wounded thousands of Soviet troops in that country, must be delicious for Moscow, where revenge has always constituted a rational strategic motivation.
However, the real fight is in the heart of the Middle East, where Russia and its Iranian allies are fundamentally transforming the region at high cost in blood. Together, Moscow and Tehran are challenging the American-constructed security system that’s an ailing holdover from the last Cold War. Even recent cooperation between America’s two clients, Israel and Saudi Arabia, appears insufficient to turn back the rising Russian-Iranian tide across the Middle East.
We only have ourselves to blame for this. Putin has taken full advantage of the blank check written by Barack Obama in September 2013 when our president backed away from his “red line” in Syria, in effect outsourcing that country and its terrible civil war to the Kremlin. As I predicted at the time, the strategic consequences of Obama’s decision have been grave, making Putin the new Middle East power-broker—a message that was missed only in Washington think-tanks.
For his part, Donald Trump has been only too willing to let his Russian counterpart and would-be buddy do whatever he likes in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Moscow’s military intervention in the Middle East, begun under Obama, continues to flourish and shows no signs of abating. The balance of power in this vital region has shifted decisively from Washington to Moscow at appalling cost in human life, though none of that troubled President Obama very much, and it seems to trouble his successor not one bit.
It would be naïve to think Putin restricts his poking to the Eastern Hemisphere. Closer to our home, the bear’s paw-prints are easily detectable. Take Venezuela, the Bolivarian dictatorship and economic basket-case that’s barely a viable country at all anymore, between currency collapse and serious food shortages. Russian money is keeping this anti-American regime afloat, and last week Moscow’s refinancing of $3.15 billion it’s owed by Caracas gives the flat-broke country a bit of financial breathing room. Without Russia, Venezuela would likely implode, and it’s worth considering whether the Bolivarian regime is actually Putin’s newest satellite state. Although sanctions and low oil prices have diminished the Kremlin’s largess toward anti-Americans all over the globe, the prospect of having a loyal (because utterly dependent) client so close to the United States seems too good for Putin to pass up.
Then there’s Cuba, Moscow’s “fraternal ally” from the last Cold War, and apparently the second one too. Just 90 miles from Key West, Cuba has long served as a reliable base for Russian provocations against us, and nothing’s changed. Russian economic aid to that impoverished island is back, after falling off after 1991, and the Kremlin has begun to reopen its military and spy bases in the country, which were shuttered after the Soviet collapse.
Western intelligence has detected a Kremlin hand behind the recent rash of sonic attacks on American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba. While Havana flatly denies that anything untoward has occurred, two dozen U.S. diplomats in the country have suffered serious health problems due to this mysterious problem, which remains officially unexplained. However, it’s known that the KGB experimented with sonic weapons, while an attack of this sophistication is widely considered to be beyond the technical abilities of Cuban intelligence. “Of course it was the Russians,” explained a senior NATO security official to me recently about this strange case. “We have no real doubt of that.”
In all, this amounts to a worldwide Russian effort to push back against what’s left of American hegemony. Since Moscow lacks the ability to directly counter NATO and the U.S. militarily, the Russians are provoking and prodding where they can with the techniques of Special War: it’s what the Kremlin does best. This should be considered a spoiler strategy, a strategy of tension—what left-wing Italians in the 1970s termed la strategia della tensione.
Vladimir Putin seeks to expand Russian power on the cheap while causing problems for America and our allies wherever he can—without direct military confrontation. So far, the Kremlin seems to be playing its rather poor hand well at the tables of global power, and Putin’s strategy of tension shows no signs of abating. Although the Trump White House is paying no attention to this new reality, the Pentagon and our Intelligence Community certainly are.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
Voir également:
To beat Vladimir Putin, we’re going to have to be a little more like him.
The last two weeks have witnessed the upending of the European order and the close of the post-Cold War era. With his invasion of Crimea and the instant absorption of the strategic peninsula, Vladimir Putin has shown that he will not play by the West’s rules. The “end of history” is at an end—we’re now seeing the onset of Cold War 2.0.
What’s on the Kremlin’s mind was made clear by Putin’s fire-breathing speech to the Duma announcing the annexation of Crimea, which blended retrograde Russian nationalism with a generous helping of messianism on behalf of his fellow Slavs, alongside the KGB-speak that Putin is so fond of. If you enjoy mystical references to Orthodox saints of two millennia past accompanied by warnings about a Western fifth column and “national traitors,” this was the speech for you.
Putin confirmed the worst fears of Ukrainians who think they should have their own country. But his ambitions go well beyond Ukraine: By explicitly linking Russian ethnicity with membership in the Russian Federation, Putin has challenged the post-Soviet order writ large.
For years, I studied Russia as a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, and at times I feel like I’m seeing history in reverse. The Kremlin is a fiercely revisionist power, seeking to change the status quo by various forms of force. This will soon involve NATO members in the Baltics directly, as well as Poland and Romania indirectly. Longstanding Russian acumen in what I term Special War, an amalgam of espionage, subversion and terrorism by spies and special operatives, is already known to Russia’s neighbors and can be expected to increase.
In truth, Putin set Russia on a course for Cold War 2.0 as far back as 2007, and perhaps earlier; Western counterintelligence noted major upswings in aggressive Russian espionage and subversion against NATO members as far back as 2006.The brief Georgia war of August 2008, which made clear that the Kremlin was perfectly comfortable with using force in the post-Soviet space, ought to have served as a bigger wake-up call for the West.
jcdurbant 