J.R. Nyquist Blog

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The minute the KGB was back in power, the idea that the United States was trying to destroy Russia, that America was enemy number one, [comes] back again.

Yevgenia Albats [i]

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Imaginative oblivion deforms consciousness. The confusion of language in the wake of the millennial movements is the syndrome of a disorder that has grown in contemporary Western society to the proportions of an established … state of unconsciousness – not to forget the global extension of the disorder [to the East] through the power dynamics of Western ecumenism.

Eric Voegelin [ii]

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In both East and West, communist ideas permeate church, state, and culture. Communism is a philosophy, a series of party organizations, a movement, an octopus made up of countless front groups, which has hijacked and perverted political groups across the globe. Intellectually, communism represents a revolt against classical wisdom and middle-class values. It was also a revolt against Christian civilization. In the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Atheistic Communism we read, “This modern revolution … has actually broken out or threatens everywhere, and it exceeds in amplitude and violence anything yet experienced in the preceding persecutions launched against the Church. Entire peoples find themselves in danger….”[iii]

The characteristic effects of communist doctrine, as described by Pope Pius XI, are clearly visible today in the institutions of many countries. False fronts, like the Russian Federation and the World Economic Forum, push collectivist narratives that degrade and diminish the individual. As Pope Pius XI said, communism “strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.” He added that,

such a doctrine logically makes of marriage and the family a purely artificial and civil institution…. Communism is particularly characterized by the rejection of any link that binds woman to the family and the home, and her emancipation is proclaimed as a basic principle. She is withdrawn from the family and the care of her children, to be thrust instead into public life and collective production under the same conditions as man. The care of home and children then devolves upon the collectivity. Finally, the right of education is denied to parents….[iv]

Here is the essence of communism. And its core principles have become common practice in East and West. Both East and West are caught in a downward spiral, having absorbed a fatal poison. The result is a “race to the bottom.” Look at birthrates in Russia and the West. As childlessness accelerates, each generation has fewer and fewer people. If the attitudes and doctrines that have produced this demographic collapse are not reversed, and if these doctrines remain unquestioned, mankind will die out. Yet this is only one dimension of the problem; for communism is an orientation which negatively affects morality, economy, culture, and government.  

Presently there is confusion about communism in conservative circles. In terms of the war in Ukraine, some conservatives have decided that the “former” KGB officer Vladimir Putin represents traditional or Christian values (or, at least, he is not as wicked as Presidents Biden and Zelenskyy). With despair, many conservatives look at a leftist Pope in Rome, and leftist politicians in the West, as the most blameworthy malefactors. The alienated conservative no longer locates the head of the octopus in Moscow or Beijing. For example, conservatives tend to identify the World Economic Forum, or George Soros, or corporate America, as the head of the octopus – as if Marxism-Leninism and Moscow Center had never existed. They imagine the events of 1991 erased the entire communist organization in Russia, and its intimate ties to all other communist organizations, as if by magic. Thanks to Russian disinformation and active measures, conservative rage is almost entirely focused on personalities and organizations closer to home, or to imaginary conspirators, or intermittently to the “Chinese threat” (as if to exclude Russia and the rest of the bloc countries from the larger equation). Our conservatives do not see the World Economic Forum as a communist front, or the dubious George Soros as an immigrant from the communist bloc. Sometimes they are diverted by belief in an Illuminati conspiracy (which leads them away from an examination of real communist organizations).

The documented connections of Joseph Biden to KGB agent Armand Hammer,[v] or his work with communist fronts like the Council for a Livable World, are never mentioned by major conservative pundits. We ought to ask how Biden’s Soviet and communist connections can be reconciled with his support for Ukraine. Some have said that Biden has “dragged his feet” in supporting Ukraine’s war effort. Not one American tank was sent to Ukraine in the first year of the war. Biden denied Ukraine’s initial request for HIMAR rocket artillery. And no fighter aircraft have been sent to Ukraine (yet). As time drags on, however, Biden is compelled to do what America’s allies and popular feeling dictates. One must remember how the Democrats bashed Trump for being a “Russian puppet.” In this context, a bribed politician might offer condolences to his patron by saying, “You did not pay me well enough to cut my own throat.”

Except for the choice of opting out, an agent of influence is not a maker of strategy. He receives “friendly suggestions” from collegial bodies staffed by Russian and Chinese policymakers. Our conservatives have not realized how this works. Change agents are stooges, obliged to paint by the numbers – to abide by ridiculous left-wing narratives. The strategy of the communist bloc was crafted in the late 1950s. Since that time the bloc’s strategy has been continuously amended and updated, a process that depends on Moscow and Beijing. The communist agents within the American Democratic Party (and the Republican Party) are constantly asking for patience. “We do not have the power to do what you ask,” they explain to their Russian and Chinese colleagues. “We are obliged to win elections.”

We caught a glimpse of this sort of thing when President Barrack Obama, speaking privately with Russian President Medvedev in March 2012, failed to notice that an open microphone was nearby. Believing he was alone with the Russian leader, Obama said, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” The Russian president leaned closer to Obama and spoke in English, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” Obama placed his left hand gently on Medvedev’s right wrist. This was strangely intimate for two presidents engaged in a formal meeting.[vi]

People have forgotten how close and friendly Obama was with Russia. His policy was called the “Russian Reset.” It included such gifts as the Uranium One deal. Then there was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aggressive work to raise investment capital for Russia’s Skolkovo project.[vii] But then, in 2012-13 the Democrats did an abrupt about-face – changing from Russia’s little helpers to Russia’s nominal enemies. This about-face must have been insincere on the part of Obama and Clinton. For both American leaders were on the hook to Russia, having compromised themselves in the past. As a youth Obama was mentored by a card carrying Communist, Frank Marshall Davis. Hillary also had extensive connections with pro-Soviet communists and socialists in her early career. Imagine what the KGB files on Obama and Clinton have to say.

If we look at an event timeline, to find when the Obama Administration switched from a pro-Russian to an anti-Russian stance, we find a curious incident three months after Obama’s gaff with Medvedev on the open mic. We find that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a two-hour private meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in St. Petersburg on 29 June 2012. After that meeting, Lavrov became provocative. The circumstances of the Clinton-Lavrov meeting were related by U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul:

[Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov took Clinton’s elbow and steered her to a small room for a private chat. Because Lavrov speaks flawless English, no translators were needed. For the next two hours or so, they spoke alone…. None of us in Clinton’s delegation were happy…. We wanted to hear the conversation. We wanted to offer guidance and support to the secretary as needed.[viii]

This meeting between Clinton and Lavrov was not scheduled. It was not witnessed. Why would Secretary of State Hillary Clinton need to speak with the Russian Foreign Minister alone, in secret – hidden away from the eyes of fellow Americans? McFaul was disturbed and puzzled by this. After this private meeting Clinton and Lavrov sat down to dinner, seemingly satisfied with their conversation. But then Lavrov began to provoke the Americans, complaining about U.S. policy in front of everyone. This was a dinner party, not a television performance. Lavrov called Clinton’s press spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, the “Minister of Disinformation.” He accused Ambassador McFaul of being “undiplomatic.” In short, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov intentionally insulted and poked the Americans. And this, after a very special, intimate, private conversation with Hillary Clinton. Later, when speaking to the press, Lavrov curiously described his meeting with Clinton as “one of the most productive” ever. He jokingly said that Hillary Clinton had changed her position.[ix] Everyone assumed he was talking about the Syrian Civil War. What if Lavrov was pointedly reminding Clinton that she must adopt an anti-Russian stance? Was his rudeness at dinner an attempt to facilitate this switch? Was Hillary – a Saul Alinsky acolyte and pro-Marxist activist – given new marching orders by Moscow Center? Two days later, in Geneva, Lavrov and Clinton began to quarrel publicly over Syria. Had it all been prearranged?

McFaul described Lavrov as uncharacteristically exuberant after the St. Petersburg meeting. He also said that Hillary Clinton was “churning.” He wrote, “I had the impression that she did not like what she had heard from Lavrov in their one-on-one.” But this does not make sense. Hillary was the Secretary of State of the more powerful country. Why wasn’t Lavrov churning? Why wasn’t Hillary exuberant? After all, she had all the power in the relationship. How could it have been the other way around?

McFaul wondered what kind of game Lavrov was playing. In the coming days, a joint communique was released by Russia and America in Geneva, regarding Syria, “It soon became apparent that Lavrov and Clinton were interpreting the communique very differently.” Here was the beginning of the post-Cold War split between Russia and America. It occurred within weeks of Obama’s chummy and obsequious comments to President Medvedev caught on the hot mic. What was going on here? Had Russia come up with a plan to cover the Obama administration’s tracks? If so, then the time had come for the Democrats to play a different game; that is, to play-act the role of Russia’s enemies. McFaul wrote, “In forty-eight hours, we had gone from ‘the best meeting ever’ between Clinton and Lavrov in St. Petersburg to sparring again in Geneva.”^[x]

To go from the Russian reset and the Uranium One Deal to the denunciation of Putin as a criminal, requires more of an explanation than the Syrian Civil War; for the invasion of Georgia did not produce this change in the Democrats, neither did Putin’s brutality in Chechnya. The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, did not register with these “bleeding heart” liberals at all. The about-face regarding Russia, and the subsequent accusations leveled against Donald Trump, only happened after Obama was caught on a hot mic in South Korea.

There were also future strategic moves to consider. The long-range communist deception strategy had come a long way. Moscow and Beijing were looking to the future, to open warfare with the West. The time had come to think of their “friends” in the Democratic Party. How could these friends be protected in time of war? After all, having powerful “friends” in Washington would be more important during a war than in peacetime. Only one method of protection would work. The leading Democrats, who were keen on the Russian reset under Obama, needed to reposition themselves as anti-Russian. By doing this, they could not be attacked from the right as “unpatriotic.” Rather, they could accuse the right of being unpatriotic, especially if Putin presented himself as a Christian nationalist, winning adherents among American conservatives (like Patrick Buchanan). Coincidentally, Putin began to make conservative noises after Lavrov’s meeting with Clinton.

The strategy here should be obvious. In the event of war between Russia and the United States, the party sympathizing with the Russian side might be suppressed as “the Party of Treason.” If they denounced Putin, the Democrats would be free from suspicion, even though they had been Russia’s biggest helpers all along. If negotiations took place after a war, America’s ruling Democrats could make significant concessions to Russia at the negotiating table. Here the scissor’s strategy would reach its mature stage.

With the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014, followed by the Russian annexation of Crimea, the stage was set. To be sure, Obama would take no serious action against Moscow. In fact, he never sent any weapons to Ukraine. But Obama and Clinton would make anti-Russian noises. In 2016 they would accuse Donald Trump of being a Russian puppet. Obviously, when Russia’s armies moved into Ukraine everyone thought the fighting would be over within days or weeks. Here we find a classic case of the Democrats becoming Russia’s “controlled opposition” in the Great Game. Biden did little to help Ukraine in the first critical weeks of the war. Unfortunately for Russia, the Ukrainians fought well and inflicted heavy Russian casualties. Because of Ukraine’s battlefield success, President Biden would find himself in difficult position. Biden delayed sending heavy weapons to Ukraine for as long as he dared. He delayed sending tanks and aircraft. Thanks to Russia’s deception strategy, however, his own party had been shifted into the anti-Russian camp. Here the Kremlin built a trap for the West and fell into it themselves.      

It’s Communism, Stupid

Most observers have made the war in Ukraine about Vladimir Putin and his “paranoia.” They would prefer to say that Putin is in the traditional Russian imperial mold rather than in the communist mold. They have not understood that the communist mold is extremely flexible, even as communist tactics are flexible. It should be recalled that Stalin even aligned himself with Hitler, going against the sentiments of his own followers. How was this explained at the time? Stalin said that the main enemy of socialism was capitalism. Hitler was not a capitalist. The French and British were. Therefore, Stalin would side with Hitler. Later it became strategically necessary for Stalin to align himself with the West. Fascism once again became a term of abuse.

The tactical flexibility of the communists often requires that communists deny they are communists. Since 1991 communists around the world began calling themselves social democrats and even democrats. This is especially true in the former Soviet Union.

Readers may suppose that communism no longer exists in Russia, that Russia’s rulers are nationalists. People may debate this point, but the Communist Party is the second largest political party in Russia today. The United Russia Party, which is the largest party, is full of “former” communists. It should be obvious that both the leading parties in Russia are one party. This fiction of two parties, with the smaller being overtly communist, is a classic communist deception.  More significantly, the old communist elite of the USSR governs the country and dominates its institutions under non-communist slogans, behind the façade of the “oligarchs.” Western liberals portray Putin as an empty “grey man,” corrupted by power. But he has surrounded himself with people who either share a Marxist-Leninist perspective (like Igor Sechin), or worked for the KGB, or both.

I was just listening to Jonathan Fink, of the Silicon Curtain Podcast, interviewing Mark Galeotti, who said “Putin’s autocracy is not Stalinism.” And this much is true. Such statements, however, are nuanced nothings. Going through expert interviews you will hear these nuanced nothings repeated, one after another. It is not surprising, therefore, when Galeotti says that Russia’s actions have defied the predictions of analysts for many years. One might ask what the predictive value of a nuanced nothing might be. Most analysts are clueless regarding Russia’s real rulers. They somehow missed Moscow’s support for communist regimes around the globe. They somehow missed Russia’s support for North Korea and the CCP in China. Once we understand that the communists are still running Russia, Putin’s policies and actions become understandable, and sometimes predictable.

It was KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn who predicted the collapse of communism in 1984. He said it would be part of a deception strategy. He said that the communists would give up power in Russia, but they would remain in control behind the scenes. In Golitsyn’s second book, The Perestroika Deception, published in 1995, we read of a “military/nationalist option [for Russia] as the third course upon which the Kremlin strategists might embark in future to adjust the style and leadership of a new government if, for example, Yeltsin was considered to have exhausted his usefulness in extracting concessions from the West.” Golitsyn presciently added, “In this context, the Chechnyan ‘crisis’ can be seen not as a likely cause of a military coup, but as a possible planned prelude to a change of government. The new [post-Yeltsin Russian] government might be military or nationalist. Certain indicators that this is envisaged, are apparent.”[xi]

Golitsyn therefore predicted the nature of the post-Yeltsin regime in Russia, and how it would present itself to the world. A renewed Chechnyan “crisis” did indeed occur in 1999, and prefigured Yeltsin stepping down in favor of KGB Lt. Col. Putin. How could Golitsyn have guessed the circumstances of Yeltsin’s resignation so accurately? How did he guess the nature of the coming regime? While all the other pundits and analysts were wrong, Golitsyn was right again. Yet almost everyone ignored him.

One of Golitsyn’s suggestions was that any risky strategy, like Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1989, would obligate China to “play it safe.” As one bloc country takes a chance, the other must retrench. Even as Moscow let communist regimes fall in Eastern Europe in 1989, Beijing smashed the protesters in Tiananmen Square. Consider, by way of analogy, what is done in cataract surgery. You do not operate on both eyes at the same time. This is why the Chinese refrained from blockading Taiwan last year, even as they prepared to carry out a blockade. The action would only take place once Russia had secured Ukraine. By the end of last summer, however, the Russian offensive had failed. The Ukrainians were successfully counterattacking. China did not start a war in the Far East because that would be doing cataract surgery in both eyes at once. And so, Golitsyn’s rule of thumb proved right as China drew back from war at the end of summer 2022.  

Golitsyn predicted, before anyone else, that Russia and China would never become capitalist democracies. When most pundits expressed optimism about the changes in Russia and capitalism in China, Golitsyn was issuing warnings. The capitalist dalliances of Moscow and Beijing were part of a communist strategy, he said. There was no change of heart in either country.

In 1995 Golitsyn wrote, “The US military should pull back from partnership with both the Russian and the Chinese armed forces and should revert to regarding them as their long-term adversaries rather than unwittingly helping them to implement their strategy.”[xii] This is what our policymakers are only now realizing. But it was foreseen, decades ago, by a man who was denounced by the media as “paranoid.”

Belling the Cat

Deception is intrinsic to communism, and as the communist movement gains more and more control in various countries, wearing its many disguises, one deception will be piled on another. The strategists in Moscow and Beijing, who represent the movement at its highest organizational levels, do not want people in the West to use the “c” word. This would complicate their plans. There is a KGB proverb that says, “A cat with a bell cannot catch mice.”

And so, the cats have been catching mice. Communism is being taught to school children, right now, across America. Only, this education does not call itself communist. Once again, there is no bell on the cat. Communist ideas without the communist label are now accepted as “mainstream” ideas. Anything opposing these ideas is labeled “extremist” or racist or sexist. So, America has a growing Marxist element inside of it while anticommunism has been marginalized. The bell has been taken off the cat.

The Marxist element in our society has been rising to prominence through academia, entering government service through the bureaucracy, appearing in electoral politics, and is dominant within the boards of many corporations. One might say that we are all Marxists now. The telltale is that anti-communists are not welcome anywhere. In fact, conspiracy ideology has replaced anti-communism on the right. Only last week, I was roundly cursed by callers on a conservative talk radio show for saying that the threat to this country is coming from the communists. A far-right caller said I was a “McCarthyite.” Another caller said I was “a dinosaur.”

Communist strategy aims at something called “convergence.” This means that the narratives of the right are being reshaped so that right and left can be merged. This is more than taking the bell off the cat. It effectively puts the mice directly in the cat’s food bowl. Many years ago, I noticed the first indications of the right-left convergence when conspiracy theories accepted by the right began matching up with leftist conspiracy theories. The enemy, in both cases, was capitalism and the “evil rich” (who allegedly control everything that happens).[xiii] This matchup was not an accident. It is a long-term, carefully orchestrated, strategy that Golitsyn warned us about.

The Politics of the Last Man

Meanwhile, mainstream liberalism and neo-conservatism (i.e., the vast middle ground of politics) have been out to lunch. While there are thoughtful pundits in the center, they have not been thoughtful enough. For many years they have been spoon-fed false information. Specifically, our centrists have bought into four disinformation themes of the communist long-range deception policy: (1) China and Russia are enemies; (2) Russia is no longer our enemy; (3) China is our trading partner; (4) America is the only superpower. What we come to find out today, is that Russia and China are allies, Russia is our enemy, China is our enemy and has been using trade as a weapon against us, and America is not the only superpower.

It should be emphasized, in this context, that a shift has occurred in the nuclear balance of power. Russia and China have more nuclear weapons than America has, and they are presently threatening us with a nuclear war. Russia and China have new nuclear warhead types, and new strategic missiles. America has been lagging far behind.

Why did our liberals and neocons, so dominant in our halls of power, allow this to happen?

If we look at matters sociologically, there has always been a problem with the liberals and neoconservatives. It may be argued that they are part of the “race to the bottom,” like the Marxists. The problem with liberalism and neo-conservatism comes down to the question of what the world would look like if liberals and neocons won all their wars, defeated all the anti-liberal regimes, and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” arrived. Would enmity between man and man be at an end? Would small “d” democracy prevail on every side? Would mankind then create the ultimate ecumenic empire, embracing a secular faith – with all men as brothers belonging to the same tribe?

To imagine this market hedonist’s happily-ever-after, in political terms, is the favored tendency of non-socialists who believe in “progress.” Many are those who believe life on Earth will get better and better, until everything has been perfected through the advance of science. But those who have read history, especially modern history, know this is not how history reads. Those who have read the ancient Greeks and Romans know that history is cyclical, that nations rise and fall. There cannot be a liberal “end of history.”   

If an intelligent person stops for a moment, and thinks more carefully about the prevailing political narratives, he may begin to see that several frauds have been perpetrated. Liberalism is false, socialism is false, scientism is false, and globalism is false. It is disturbing to see that liberalism is, little by little, turning into totalitarian socialism.

How can this be explained?

Joseph Pieper’s little tract, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, says that tyranny is established using two methods. The first method is brute force, the second method involves “cajoling, wheedling, and flattery.” Pieper wrote, “The common element in all of this is the degeneration of language into an instrument of rape. It does contain violence, albeit in latent form.”[xiv]

Pieper explained that the degradation of man through acts of physical violence begin almost imperceptibly “when the word loses its dignity.”[xv] Our very contact with reality depends on the rightness of our words. To discourse dishonestly, to confuse the issues at hand, is to move from reality into madness. It is to betray freedom, to overturn reason, and level everything.

The situation is made doubly difficult by mass media and instantaneous communications. Pieper said that people might be “entirely knowledgeable about a thousand details and nevertheless, because of ignorance regarding the core of the matter, remain without basic insight.” Arnold Gehlen described this condition in terms of a “fundamental ignorance, created by technology and nourished by information.”[xvi] Because of this, noted Pieper, “authentic reality is taken over by a fictitious reality”; that is to say, a pseudo-reality. The public is then reduced “to a state where people are not only unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions….”[xvii] One only has to think of Sean Hannity saying that “Reagan won the Cold War,” or Vladimir Putin showing George W. Bush his Christian cross.   

We like to fool ourselves, and we prefer fantasy to reality. Democracy is considered desirable, of course. But nobody thinks critically enough to ask whether it is desirable to have an ignorant majority voting for practiced liars who talk nonsense. Such a system is more accurately described as an ochlocracy (i.e., mob rule). This form of government is about acquiring power by flattering the public. “What the world really wants is flattery,” wrote Pieper, “and it does not matter how much of it is a lie….”[xviii] What happens, then, to the dignity of man? What happens to freedom?

This sickness, which began many years ago, is getting worse by the day. Our liberals and neoconservatives have been infected with this sickness. Somewhere at the root of their thinking, they have assumed that humanity is headed for “the end of history.” Our liberals and neoconservatives have now merged with a new generation, raised in comfort and ignorance of history. This generation has been taught that the “end of history” is made possible by the emancipation of man through universal equality. But, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, nobody knows what equality is. Furthermore, nobody knows how to establish it.[xix] But that is not going to stop our utopian idealists. The plan, we are told, is to make everyone equal; and those who have the power to make everyone equal will make themselves more than equal.

Where do our politicians, with their flattery and their doctrine of equality, think they are headed? Is this not akin to Henry Adams’s allegory of the train that is going faster and faster down the track? As there is no way to slow the train down, it must either jump the track in a catastrophic derailment or smash up at the end of the line. Our politicians think they are headed to the top as they say what “the people” want to hear. But truly, they are racing to the bottom. A thoughtful man would feel ashamed to affirm what these pandering politicians affirm. Only a criminal poseur would talk as they do. But people keep voting for these poseurs. And this is how the slide into socialism works. The politicians offer us goodies, saying we can afford it; and we vote for them as the debt ceiling rises. Nobody dares tell the truth.

As egalitarian socialism advances, scarcity advances, universal bankruptcy gets closer and closer. Meanwhile, liberalism imagines a world of commerce, where a rising tide lifts all boats. Here we see liberalism and socialism side-by-side – two ideologies that encompass the conceits of Nietzsche’s last man: “The earth has become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground flea; the last man liveth longest.”[xx] But then we find, a few paragraphs later, that the last man likes to drug himself: “A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.” To alter our consciousness, to deform it further, seems to be our inclination. One might say that political correctness is the ultimate miracle drug, promising to eradicate war by eliminating racial and ethnic differences, turning all religions into one religion. And so, there is no reason to fight wars because everyone looks and thinks and worships like everyone else.

Here is where we go wrong; for last man is the very last – with the specifics of his humanity removed. It is a case of mass suicide; for man cannot thrive without concrete relationships, symbols, and meaningful stories. The homogenizers of humanity do not understand what they are proposing when they try to make the world as one. This inverted parody of Hitlerism is apparent when we examine its effects. Humanity is to be one race, one folk, one sex, and one set of leaders (one Führer). It is remarkable how false ideologies borrow from each another, sharing structural similarities. Let us consider where all this nonsense leads. Instead of the intellectual straitjacket of National Socialism, we have the intellectual straitjacket of political correctness. The Nazis of the 1930s could never define the term “race” even as it was central to their racism. Today’s cultural elite is unable to define the word “woman” even as they claim to be feminists and genderists.[xxi]

And how did this arrogant and ignorant elite of ours come into existence? If Nietzsche were here, he might say that a dyspeptic modernity vomited them into reality. These people are a milieu of the half-digested, half-baked, and half-educated. In the West, we do not have “survival of the fittest,” but the elevation of these “many-too-many” hyperactive nobodies – “men of straw,” as T.S. Eliot called them. They do not know history and they have no common sense; and they are dangerous because their vision of how things ought to be involves overturning everything that is. “Let us reinvent the wheel,” one hears them say. “Its circular shape is simply too bourgeois.” And if humanity will not bend to their silly ideals, then humanity will be broken down and remade in their image.

Liberalism was once thought to be the best hope of mankind. Freedom was the thing. But the question always was – freedom to do what? Carl Schmitt, the political theorist, said liberalism was not entirely serious; for politics, he explained, “presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity.”[xxii] Here is where the whole liberal project runs aground. To defend against enemies, a society must build military structures under a unified command. This necessarily limits the freedom of the individual, who now has a duty to defend his kith and kin. Contrary to this, liberalism has come to suggest that all enmities are illusory, that mankind can form a global economic system where we can all get rich together. All we need to do is form a globalist commonwealth for the enrichment of all.  

Whatever criticisms we might offer regarding Carl Schmitt’s political ideas,[xxiii] we must nonetheless grapple with his core argument: “A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.”[xxiv] A political entity, he said, “cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.”[xxv] Therefore, we have borders. We need borders. We must have borders!

But the liberal says no.

Presently we are playing a fraudulent game with ourselves. We embrace diversity and call it anti-racism. We embrace equality and call it anti-sexism. But here in America we have embraced our own very special, inverted, kind of racism and sexism. All cultures are allowed to exist except American culture, which must make way for the immigrant and the minority. This is called “multiculturalism,” which is in fact the denial of the larger culture. All sexes are also allowed to exist, except for male and female. Instead of the crazy project of making “Soviet man,” or the “master race,” we find ourselves erasing man (and woman) altogether. A man whose culture is every culture, has no culture. A man whose nation is all nations, has no nation. A woman who is not a woman, or a man who is not a man, is a neuter. What are these newly constituted types, then? They are nothing but poor sorry defenseless things suffering from an identity disorder.

“Let him be puddy in our hands,” say the social engineers.

Lessons of the Ukraine War

Going back Thucydides and Tacitus, we find that men are always fighting with each other. War is part of human nature, and it cannot be amended. Those who say that war is senseless, who feel the loss of war most deeply, should not confuse the heartbreak and loss of war with meaninglessness. For life and death and struggle are full of heartbreak; yet this heartbreak is not meaningless. As much as we dread war, it is integral to the human experience. Just the same, a prolonged period of peace is often enervating. Look at all the neurotics we have today. Look at the insanity all around us. People imagine that nationalism causes war. Yet if all men belonged to the same nation, they would divide themselves into factions only to fight a civil war.

The idea that there is an “end of history” has obsessed us. The aspiring “masters of mankind” have used this idea as a lullaby. And because of our desire for sweets, and for “good news,” we have been lulled to sleep. We were told that the “end of history” signifies an “end to wars.” But this can never be and has never been. The doors of the Temple of Janus are rarely closed. Nearly all God’s creatures engage in combat of one kind or another. The males of many species fight over females, or fight over territory. Animals prey on one another. They rob each other’s nests. They lock horns. Animals are constantly dueling with one another. “War,” said Clausewitz famously, “is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.”[xxvi]

History is not edifying for pacifists. It does not conform to their ideal. When those people out yonder come for your property, or your life, or your liberty, what are you going to do? The only thing to do, under the circumstances, is to fight. In this context, the ongoing war in Ukraine is one in which the Ukrainian people are asserting their national identity in the face of Russia’s claim that there are no Ukrainians. The Russian propaganda would have you believe that Ukrainians are dying for nothing, that they have been tricked into fighting a “proxy war.” But no, that’s not it at all. The Russian Army came for the Ukrainians. The Russians invaded them and bombed them. Moscow wanted to take their liberty from them and plunder their economy. The Ukrainians are not fighting a proxy war. They are fighting for themselves. They are genuinely fighting for their country – not for America, not for NATO, not for an ideology. And their success on the battlefield is telling. As good as communists are at subversion and deception, the communists are miserable warriors. This is because warfare is not based on deception as Sun Tzu claimed. Warfare is about honor and is based on fighting, as Clausewitz claimed. And while there are ruses and feints, there must be battling. If everything is a ruse and a feint, there is no victory. If you cannot stand up in battle, you will be defeated.   

Here we encounter one of those ironies of inversion where Russia, as an aspiring ecumenical power, is pushing for the unification of East European man by seeking to eradicate a specific human type (i.e., the Ukrainian). To the extent that all humans belong to a tribe, there is no universal man. To some extent, we all belong to a type. We speak a certain language. We have a certain appearance. We think in a certain way. And a violation of our type is always deeply felt (unless, of course, we are deracinated liberals or socialists).

Vladimir Putin would have us believe that “Ukraine is not a real country.” And in this matter, he is very much like the bureaucrats of the European Union. The European Union wants to do away with nations and replace them with this empty idea called “Europe.” And so, it is ironic that “Europe,” with a twinge of instinct peeking out, is backing the cause of Ukrainian independence. If they imagine that “European values” are at stake in Ukraine, they should think a second time. Ask the Ukrainian soldiers whether they are fighting for European values or their homeland.

Eric Voegelin’s statement that “Imaginative oblivion deforms consciousness” is of the utmost importance in this context. A war to preserve one’s integrity, to preserve one’s dignity as a specific kind of person, breaks the spell of deformed consciousness. The wider the war, the wider will be the correction to our deformed consciousness. The West and the East have been under a utopian spell. Ukraine, bursting upward from the middle, is not a utopia. It is a battlefield full of wreckage. The Ukrainians are fighting for something so dear, so precious, that they are willing to suffer blast after blast. They are not trying to get rich. They are not lying to the world about some promised political golden age. They are fighting for their dignity.  

Ukraine had a Revolution of Dignity in 2014. It was modest. It was heartfelt. The Ukrainian people said, “Give us a government that is less corrupt. Give us a government that does not beat our children in the street. Give us a government that does not rob us at every turn.” Here was a revolution, for the first time in over a hundred years, that did not promise the “end of history.” Rather the opposite. By choosing to drop the Soviet names of cities and towns, by pulling down Lenin’s statues across the land, by rejecting Moscow’s stooges in the ruling parties, the Ukrainian people opted to enter history instead of proclaiming its “end.”

 Ellis Sandoz wrote: “In an unbroken chain of speculations since the High Middle Ages, the End of history has been proclaimed in a wide spectrum of sectarian, Gnostic, alchemic, apocalyptic, and ideological moods.”[xxvii] A vain quest for peace and prosperity, whether taken up by Marxists in the East or by liberals in the West, has turned us against ourselves. The politics of utopia, or the “end of history,” was a false kind of politics. And Ukraine has avoided this falsity by fighting for itself, for its land, for its existence as a nation. While Western liberals and socialists are embarrassed to defend their own respective national causes, and their own borders, the Ukrainians are showing them how it ought to be done.  

No More Nuclear Blackmail

Doom-chatting with leftist comedian Samantha Bee, exiled Russian journalist Masha Gessen expressed fear of nuclear war. But more than fear of nuclear war, said Gessen, Russians are afraid to disagree with “that enormous force” which is their government. When asked what Russian TV is like, Masha Gessen said, “You turn on the TV and it is war all the time, like on the main Russian state channel. It is a bunch of middle-aged men talking about turning the world to dust…. They love this Putin quote that they repeat on almost every show [from] 2018 when Putin was talking about the possibility of a nuclear strike, and was asked ‘but it will destroy the world’ and he said, ‘Yeah, we will go straight to heaven and they will just croak.’”[xxviii]

What is intriguing, in this instance, is that Gessen’s fear of nuclear war does not dissuade her from supporting Ukraine. She is a liberal and a lesbian, and nuclear war scares her, but she wants Ukraine to win the war. She wants Ukraine and Russia to be free. So, her position is not “peace at any price.” And that marks a very interesting change of attitude on the part of liberal leftists. We have not seen anything like it since 1945. If Ukraine has inspired this kind of thinking, then the West owes a great deal to Ukraine.

One of the most knowledgeable observers when it comes to Putin, Gessen has correctly characterized the Russian Federation as a revived Soviet Union led by a solipsistic dictator who is living in a bubble. As a Russian, she knows that communism was an evil system. She is tired of totalitarian lies, and of the softer authoritarian version of the old system. She knows that Moscow did not change in 1991, deep down. The old system managed to preserve itself behind the façade of the Russian Federation; yet even so, she shows us that this system has declined into a mindless machine led by a stupid man. This flies directly in the face of those who have described Putin as a genius.

Gessen’s book on Putin describes a meeting she had with the Russian dictator in 2012. As a journalist she was called to the Kremlin along with her employer, so that Putin could demand her reinstatement after she had been fired as editor of a magazine that supported endangered species. As it happened, Putin liked the magazine, though he was oblivious that Gessen had written a book against him, and his staff had apparently been afraid to tell him. In his remarks at the meeting, Putin blithely recounted the manifold frauds of his regime as necessary for the greater good. The moment Gessen tried to explain her disagreement, the dictator declared the meeting over without listening to a word, saying he had “enough experience with this,” and coldly left. “What had I learned?” asked Gessen. “That the person I had described in this book – shallow, self-involved, not terribly perceptive, and apparently very poorly informed – was indeed the person running Russia, to the extent Russia was being run.”[xxix]

One could make the same charge against President Biden, to be sure. And this suggests that there is, indeed, “a race to the bottom” in the West as well as the East. Only the West is not as far along as Russia on the path of disintegration. What is alarming is that both sides lack insight into larger problems. What is unexpected, and unpredicted by anyone, is the vitality of the Ukrainian nation. Literally, Ukraine is in the process of being born. It is a new power, which an unnamed renegade KGB analyst foresaw more than a decade ago; and this new power has derailed the long-range strategy of Russia and China. The only question now is whether the Kremlin will resort to nuclear war.

Everything here depends on the fortitude and relative insanity of Russia’s ruling elite. As Col. Stanislav Lunev once told me, “These are not human beings. These are crazy persons.” So all bets are off. Are Moscow’s kleptocrats willing to push the button? Do they have enough Bolshevik ice in their veins to flatten the United States and Europe? Could they survive, physically, in their bunkers?

Maybe we are about to find out.

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Notes and Links

[i] https://www.google.com/search?q=Yevgenia+Albats+%2B+Ukraine+War&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS910US928&oq=Yevgenia+Albats+%2B+Ukraine+War&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160j33i299.19602j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:673303d1,vid:tt-SgfaTX4o

[ii] Eric Voegelin, Order and History: In Search of Order, Volume V (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 59.

[iii] https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html

[iv] Ibid.  

[v] https://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Dossier-Dark-Side-Power/dp/B09NRB41KL?asin=B09NRB41KL&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNxEDomUlXw

[vii] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-clinton-foundation-state-and-kremlin-connections-1469997195

[viii] Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Kindle Edition), p. 339 out of 429.

[ix] Ibid, p. 340.

[x] Ibid, p. 342.

[xi] Anatoliy Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception: The World’s Slide Toward the Second October Revolution (London & New York: Edward Harle, 1995), p. 229.

[xii] Ibid, p. 231.

[xiii] It is rarely pointed out that the “evil rich” make everything you eat, wear, sit on, and enjoy. But right wing conspiracy theorists will tell you that the “malefactors of great wealth” are conspiring to pauperize you. If that has been the case these many decades, it is the most incompetent conspiracy in history.

[xiv] Joseph Pieper trans. Lothar Krauth, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 32.

[xv] Ibid, p. 33.

[xvi] Ibid, p. 34.

[xvii] Ibid, pp. 34-35.

[xviii] Ibid, p. 26.

[xix] Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice (Audible audio book).

[xx] Nietzsche trans. Thomas Common, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Random House), p. 11.

[xxi] See the Daily Wire documentary, What is a Woman? by Matt Walsh. According to the rising left-liberal ideology in the West, experts do not know what a woman is. Gender, for them, is arbitrarily assigned by doctors at birth. Experts suggest that this assignment must be questioned. Or as a therapist told Walsh, “Genitalia does not equal gender.” Walsh facetiously asked the therapist, “With the fluidity of these things, how do I know if I’m a woman? I like scented candles. I’ve watched sex in the city.” The therapist then replied, “That question right there – that question, when it’s asked with a lot of curiosity – is the beginning of a lot of people’s … gender identity development journeys.” Walsh then asked, “What is a woman?” The therapist, who is obviously a woman, bizarrely explained, “I am not a woman, so I cannot answer that.”

[xxii] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 53.

[xxiii] Carl Schmitt joined the Nazi Party.

[xxiv] Schmitt, p. 53.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] From the very first page of Clausewitz’s book, On War.

[xxvii] Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction, Second Edition (London and New York: Transaction Publishers, 2000), p. 239.

[xxviii] https://www.google.com/search?q=Masha+Gessen+%2B+Ukraine+War&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS910US928&oq=Masha+Gessen+%2B+Ukraine+War&aqs=chrome..69i57.9962j1j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:d49d92a5,vid:f7K3wVE2IEQ

[xxix] Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlike Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), p. 304.

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Obituary of Carroll E. Nyquist

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Carroll Emmanuel Nyquist was born on 2 July 1931 in Chicago Heights, Illinois to Victor and Marie Nyquist as the first of two children. He passed away on 10 May 2023 in Petoskey, Michigan. A private memorial service for the family will be held at the Nyquist residence in Petoskey on Friday, 19 May at 2 pm.

Carroll’s father, Vic Nyquist, was an Evangelical Covenant minister. As a boy, Carroll lived in Minneapolis Minnesota, Denver Colorado, and Turlock California. He was an excellent student in school, attending several universities. He received a degree in theology from North Park College and an MA in film production from UCLA. His dream was to serve God by making Christian films.

On 30 June 1956 Carroll married Marion Lindgren, the daughter of the Rev. Earl Lindgren. They were married at the Evangelical Covenant Church in Inglewood, California. They then moved to Elgin, Illinois so that Carroll could begin his career in Chicago as a film editor. While working in Chicago, his talents came to the attention of filmmaker Henry Ushijima, who employed him in documentary film projects. Among his projects, Carroll worked on films about the Chicago police Dept. and was executive producer of a television documentary about the Youth International Party (YIP).

Carroll’s dream was to start his own production company and, after working freelance on various projects, including work with Billy Graham’s Campus Crusade for Christ, Carroll formed Johnson-Nyquist Productions with his business partner Dave Johnson in 1968. Among their many documentary and commercial film projects, Carroll and Dave were contracted by the United States Information Agency to do all on-the-ground filming of the Apollo astronauts during training and after-mission quarantine from 1969-1972.

Carroll and his partner Dave set up their offices in Northridge California, moving their business to Orange County in 1978 when they began working on film and television projects with tennis coach Vic Braden. Johnson-Nyquist produced Braden’s short-lived television series, Vic’s Vacant Lot, which ran from 1982-1984 with 26 episodes airing on ESPN and rerun on Nickelodeon until May 1985.

Carroll retired from Johnson-Nyquist Productions in 1991 to teach film and video production at Biola University during the 1990s. In 1999 he and his wife Marion moved to beautiful Mckinleyville, on California’s north coast. After the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit by terrorists on 11 September 2001, Carroll served as a Federal Officer for TSA at the Department of Homeland Security, working at the Eureka/Arcata airport in Mckinleyville. He retired from Federal service at the age of 83, in 2014.

Carroll enjoyed boating and water-skiing, and was a dedicated long-distance bicyclist. In November 2020, at the age of 89, Carroll and his wife moved to Petoskey, Michigan to be closer to his sons, who became his caregivers. Carroll was a longtime member of the Presbyterian Church. He is survived by his wife, Marion, his sons Jeffrey and Gregory, his daughter Jill, and his sister Caroline. He was loved and will be greatly missed.