Mark: https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/the-wests-birthday-wish-for-vladimir
The West’s Birthday Wish For Vladimir Vladimirovich: Regime Change
Today is Vladimir Putin’s birthday, and well wishers everywhere are wishing him many happy returns. In Poland those well wishers will be singing, Sto lat, sto lat, niech żyje …! May you live for a hundred years! Well, probably not too many Poles, or if they do it will be privately. Nor will the ruling elite in the collective West be wishing Putin any happy returns. They want him gone ASAP.
Today at The Duran there’s a fascinating video featuring the two Alexes appearing on Ania K’s Youtube channel. The video so far—I’ve only listened to the first half—begins with a rather masterful overview of geopolitics following WW2, leading up to the present, by Alexander Mercouris. I’ll embed the video here—there’s a lot of food for thought:
Ania K. is Polish, and I believe she lives in Szczecin, the former German Baltic and Hanseatic port of Stettin. She’s been listening to the drumbeat of nuclear hysteria, and fears that the US will stage a false flag tactical nuclear event in Poland. The point would be to blame Russia and usher in a general nuclear conflagration that would render the Polish landscape a smooth, glass-like surface. Or something like that.
Anyway, Ania’s concerns lead to this interesting exchange with Alex Christoforou. The nuclear false flag concern pops up at the end of this excerpt that I’ve transcribed (with minor editing). What I find interesting is AC’s take on both the nuclear hysteria that’s being ginned up as well as the drumbeat that Russia is losing, is facing military collapse, most of its young men are scrambling to flee abroad, and so forth. All of that fits in with an Alexander Mercouris monologue from this morning, in which he reiterates—using Ukrainian troop deployment numbers—that the so-called Ukrainian offensives are intended first and foremost as PR exercises. He does this by pointing out that by far the greatest concentration of Ukrainian troops—something like thirty thousand—are in the Donbass fortress city of Bakhmut. That’s where the real fighting is going on, and the Kherson and Kharkov “offensives” are mainly intended to paint Putin’s war management in a bad light—partly for Western consumption but very much for Russian consumption. It’s intended to encourage a Kremlin coup.
So, keep that angle in mind as you read this transcript, which begins around the 14 minute mark on the video:
Q: The collective West–what steps will it take and what tools will it use to remove Putin, to create regime change in Russia?
A: Well, they won’t do anything directly. The last ditch plan–I call it the Hail Mary for those familiar with American football terms–is to create the narrative, to create the dynamics so that someone, anybody, in the Kremlin removes Putin. Yesterday I read a variety of articles from collective West outlets that were actually starting to float names, including the Wagner Group head, Prigozhin. They actually floated him out, as a possible successor to Putin!
You see, the collective West is not so concerned with who succeeds Putin–they just want Putin out. Once they get Putin out, whoever succeeds Putin, they can deal with that person afterwards. They don’t have a plan past Putin. Their plan for now is, the only way we can win in Ukraine, the only way we can prevent this collapse, the only way we can save ourselves and keep ourselves is power is if we can remove Putin.
They’re so obsessed with Putin, he’s like the magic pill that’s gonna solve all of their problems. Getting rid of Putin is gonna solve their energy problems, their gas, their oil, their resources, their security, their power, their money, their fiat, their globalist process–this is gonna solve everything, if they can get rid of this one individual. And his whole team, because Bolton also wrote an article the other day in which he said, not only does Putin have to go, but his entire Kremlin administration.
So they just wanna create the dynamics. They wanna create panic, they wanna create the narrative that Russia is getting demolished by the Zelensky war machine, everything is collapsing in Ukraine on the ground, the Russian economy is in tatters–as Ursula (von der Leyen) said, the economy is in tatters, it’s falling apart, the massive failure of mobilization, millions of Russians are fleeing toward Georgia and Armenia and all of these places and Putin has no other option left.
Biden said it yesterday in a speech in New York City. He said, Putin has no other option left but to resort to tactical nuclear weapons. Biden said it. He said we’re facing Armageddon, we’re facing another Cuban Missile Crisis. These are Biden’s words: We’re trying to find an off ramp. Biden is saying, We’re trying to find an off ramp for Putin. This is the US saying we’re trying to help Putin out, and what’s that off ramp? They’re trying to find a way to get Putin out of office, and they’re trying to paint the picture to the collective West that Putin is in complete disarray. The only option left for him is to hit that nuclear button. They’re hoping that all of this will somehow lead to someone somewhere in the Kremlin will say, We’ve gotta remove this guy! That’s their hope.
Q: So do you think they’re gonna stage the event, using Poland …?
A: Honestly, I think that’s all about building the narrative [referring to the US providing anti-radiation meds to Poland].
As a side note, I suspect that the point about hyping nuclear hysteria in Poland is to convince the Polish public that they have no choice—no off ramp from their bad decision to wage war by proxy against Russia. If the Polish public begins to waver, the US war effort will simply fall apart, because Poland is the route for virtually all arms transfers to Ukraine.
The dynamic I see at work in the collective West is that the ruling elite realizes that, in Putin, they’ve more than met their match. They’ve thrown all their genius strategery at him, and he has batted it all away like the martial arts master he is. Nothing has deflected him from his campaign. That campaign started years ago with preparations for Western sanctions. Those sanctions have boomeranged and have brought much of the West to its knees—with much worse to follow—while Russia is largely unscathed. And now, with Ukraine in an increasingly dire military position, Putin is gearing up for a much more aggressive defense of the Russian Federation. Thus the full court press to try to encourage a Kremlin coup, because Putin is kicking the collective Western ruling class’ butt.
I suspect a fair amount of this has to do with the globalist elites—having insulted, ridiculed, and demonized Putin for twenty years—having come to believe not only their own press clippings but also their own propaganda. Russia watcher Gilbert Doctorow addresses that, in a way, in a recent essay, in which he laments Putin’s low key and tolerant, almost selfless, approach:
Has Vladimir Putin put the fear of God into the Satanic West?
Three years ago, I published an essay under a ‘fake news’ heading urging Vladimir Putin to put aside ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ behavior and rhetoric with respect to Russia’s supposed ‘partners’ in the West and to slam his shoe on the table in the crude manner of Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations in 1956.
I very much regretted that Putin repeatedly turned the other cheek when his country was treated unceremoniously or when he was personally insulted by hack politicians in the United States including Joe Biden. Nikita Khrushchev was never called a ‘thug’ or a war criminal; Putin has been so described in mainstream media. I insisted that it was much better for nations and statesmen to be feared than to be liked. Indeed, the future of the world depends on mutual respect born of fear, not brotherly love, as 70 years of Mutually Assured Destruction demonstrated.
Hold two words Doctorow uses in mind: “statesmen” and “fear” We’ll address each in turn. And so, the question arises:
Might Christopher Caldwell be right? Would a more dispassionate analysis lead to the conclusion that Putin is “the preeminent statesman of our times”? I encourage one and all to reread Caldwell’s address at Hillsdale College, as well as Pat Buchanan’s commentary on it, which focus on big picture issues, on “the vision thing” that separates Putin from the progressive globalist West:
How to Think About Vladimir Putin
Christopher Caldwell
Yet if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.
Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?
He stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be.
However, rather than quote either of those two well known observers of the world stage, who both address the question of why the Western ruling elites so loathe Putin, I want to offer an excerpt from Big Serge’s recent substack which explains why those ruling elites also fear Putin—which is what’s behind the flip to trying to induce a Kremlin coup. Big Serge is concerned to explain Putin’s “plan” in Clausewitzian terms, but along the way he describes what has elite Western knickers in a tight bunch: Putin’s sheer—seemingly colorless at times—competence. His determinedly methodical approach based on an intelligent understanding of the threats that Russia faces. They see this and they fear, because they see they are in over their heads:
Putin and Clausewitz
Putin the Bureaucrat
It is often the case that the most consequential men in the world are poorly understood in their time – power enshrouds and distorts the great man. This was certainly the case of Stalin and Mao, and it is equally true of both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Putin in particular is viewed in the west as a Hitlerian demagogue who rules with extrajudicial terror and militarism. This could hardly be farther from the truth.
Almost every aspect of the western caricature of Putin is deeply misguided – though this recent profile by Sean McMeekin comes much closer than most. To begin with, Putin is not a demagogue – he is not a naturally charismatic man, and though he has over time greatly improved his skills as a retail politician, and he is capable of giving impactful speeches when needed, he is not someone who relishes the podium. Unlike Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or even – God forbid – Adolf Hitler, Putin is simply not a natural crowd pleaser. In Russia itself, his imagine is that of a fairly boring but level headed career political servant, rather than a charismatic populist. His enduring popularity in Russia is far more linked to his stabilization of the Russian economy and pension system than it is to pictures of him riding a horse shirtless.
Furthermore, Putin – contrary to the view that he wields unlimited extralegal authority – is rather a stickler for proceduralism. Russia’s government structure expressly empowers a very strong presidency (this was an absolute necessity in the wake of total state collapse in the early 1990’s), but within these parameters Putin is not viewed as a particularly exciting personality prone to radical or explosive decision making. Western critics may claim that there is no rule of law in Russia, but at the very least, Putin governs by law, with bureaucratic mechanisms and procedures forming the superstructure within which he acts.
Again, there’s much more at the link—and this happens to be a particularly fine essay.
Econophysics2020 