J.R. Nyquist Blog

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“According to the opinion of foreign specialists, air bursts [of nuclear weapons] permit the more complete utilization of the shock wave and thermal radiation for the destruction of the enemy who is deployed in the open and in the cover of field fortifications, the destruction of targets on a large area, and the avoidance of radioactive contamination of the terrain. It is believed that such bursts assure freedom of maneuver and create more favorable conditions for the actions of the attacking troops. Therefore, it is recognized as advantageous to use regular air nuclear bursts to destroy enemy defensive objects on the direction of attack of the podrazdeleniye [companies, platoons] and chast’ [regiments, battalions].”

A.A. Sidorenko
The Offensive

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“Go ahead, make my day.”

Dirty Harry Callahan
Sudden Impact

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Introduction

The grand strategy of Russia and China, partly formulated during secret Sino-Russian meetings^[i] in 1991-2, aims at the destruction of the United States. Most observers and analysts find this assertion outrageous. But the testimony of defectors is clear; and the word “destruction,” in this context, is not an exaggeration. Consider the warnings of SVR Colonel Sergei Tretyakov, who said, “I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions.” According to Tretyakov, the Russian SVR is working “to destroy the U.S. … even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.”[ii] I have quoted Tretyakov before. It is a statement that bears repeating. As this former spy explained, Russia’s rulers did not change their views after the fall of the Soviet Union. If anything, their hatred for the United States has intensified. At the same time, several high-level Chinese defectors and intelligence officers also say that China is working to destroy or displace the United States as a world power.

General Ji Shengde (former People’s Liberation Army Intelligence Chief) became entangled in a massive purge which led him to disclose that China’s communist leaders view America as its main enemy and not as a “strategic partner.” Ji oversaw covert operations to funnel millions of dollars into the 1996 U.S. presidential election and to subvert American policy from the inside. Then there was Ling Wancheng, who defected to the United States in 2015 with intelligence showing that China’s internal military posture is aggressively offensive towards the United States. Another defector to the United States, Ma Ruilin, was a deputy party secretary in the secretive United Front Work Department. His warnings about Chinese communist subversion were identical to Tretyakov’s statements about Russia’s intentions. Chen Yonglin, a Chinese diplomat, defected from the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, Australia, in 2005. His testimony before Congress exposed China’s global strategy of infiltration and subversion, which is nearly identical to Russia’s Cold War strategy. It should come as no surprise, then, that Russia and China are aligned and continue to share the same objectives.

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The Argument

In the 1980s, defectors from the communist bloc warned of a false liberalization and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact Alliance. These warnings were given before Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party Soviet Union. We find these warnings in statements made by Jan Sejna (Czech Communist Party official), Anatoliy Golitsyn (KGB), and Ladislav Bittman (StB). Almost no one of importance commented on their statements, or on the testimony of lower-level defectors like Czech cinematographer Robert Buchar (among others). In the case of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, we have a man who was thoroughly maligned in the press and by the media. In the early 1980s he wrote a book about a coming deceptive liberalization in the USSR. And here is the thing nobody can dispute: Golitsyn’s 1984 predictions about the coming of a liberal Soviet leader came true. Even more impressive, his predictions about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, with the Communist Party giving up power, also came true. Golitsyn warned that if the West was fooled by the false liberalization in Russia, the post-Cold War era would be one of Western disarmament. In that event, Russia and China would rearm and unite together into “one clenched fist.” The West would be unable to correct the resulting power imbalance.

Except for Russia’s heavy casualties in attempting to force Ukraine back into Union with Russia, everything has played out in a way that vindicates Golitsyn as someone who understood what Western military analysts were incapable of understanding. It is not so strange that he knew what would come to pass, since he had been a KGB counterintelligence officer in Moscow when the KGB was reorganized to carry out this false liberalization. According to Golitsyn, the grand deception strategy (of false liberalization) was officially put into action in 1960. They hoped this strategy would play out by the year 2000. Decades of disinformation would be required to set the stage. According to Golitsyn, a false split would be arranged with China, controlled dissident movements would be created in various communist countries if only to assure that any transition to democracy would be supervised by agents of the secret police. The liberalization was set to begin following the death of Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev. It would rely on secret agent networks, and on the ability of communist cadres within existing organizations to transform themselves into “liberals.” The names of cities and streets would be changed. Political prisoners would be released. Anyone can read the book Golitsyn wrote, as its publication date was in 1984. It was titled New Lies for Old.

How could the Russians have carried out a strategy when Golitsyn had already let the cat out of the bag? It is very simple. The deception was safe because it was easy to convince conservatives and liberals alike that Golitsyn was paranoid and crazy. The leader of the conservative intellectuals, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote columns and books attacking Golitsyn along with the former head of the CIA counterintelligence staff, James Angleton (who supported Golitsyn’s testimony). The anticommunism of the conservatives, as Vladimir Bukovsky would later observe, was unserious and shallow. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bukovsky told Buckley and a room of full of conservatives that they were like the drunk who was walking through a village with a sock on one foot and a shoe on another. The villagers shouted at him, “You are missing a shoe! You are missing a shoe!” The drunk shouted back: “I have found a shoe!”

A KGB colonel once told me about the mood in his office when they watched the Soviet Union falling on TV. Everyone was worried until they saw that the massive bronze statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky. It was not destroyed by the Moscow protestors. Instead, it was carefully removed and preserved. The KGB officers in his office realized that everything was under control. This same KGB colonel was thereafter summoned to see General Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Chief Directorate. The colonel asked Shebarshin if the Soviet Union had suffered a strategic defeat. “We have had a few setbacks,” replied Shebarshin, “but everything is still on track.” Shebarshin then asked the colonel how many KGB agents were still active within the Austrian banking system.[iii]  

The KGB was very active during the fall of the Soviet Union. Although they were sworn to defend the USSR with their lives, they did not come out in force to defend socialism. Many of them became democrats and, like Putin, worked for democratic politicians who had, only weeks before, been Communist Party officials. There was a great deal of fuss during the August Coup of 1991, but the coup plotters were all incompetent. A communist official named Boris Yeltsin emerged as the President of the Russian Federation. The West immediately believed that he was a good democrat, especially since he played the part of a democrat. If Boris Yeltsin had been a democrat, however, he would not have appointed a former KGB officer as his successor. And Putin made no secret of his pro-Soviet inclinations. “Above all,” he said during his 2005 State of the Nation address, “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin was famous for saying, “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.” Putin has always been a furtive apologist for the communist regime (a regime that murdered tens of millions of innocent people). The communists killed priests, monks, farmers, intellectuals, aristocrats, and businessmen. If we look closely at the details of Putin’s career, we can see that he has always worked for the eventual restoration of the Soviet Union. It was always a matter of finding the right moment. The moment came, of course, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and furious accusations that the West had betrayed Russia. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 for the purpose of restoring the Soviet Union.

Few bothered to follow Vladimir Putin’s early speeches with diligence. Putin has always been a Soviet person, a Soviet functionary following a strategic blueprint passed down by the system’s collective leadership. This blueprint is not a conspiracy. It is an instituted policy carried forward by Stalin’s epigones, encouraged as they are by Stalin’s victory over Hitler. This victory is celebrated by Putin with solemnity every year. No empire or anti-empire can achieve anything of importance without honoring past achievements. On the sixtieth anniversary of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, in June of 2001, Putin likened NATO to Hitler’s Reich in its intentions towards Russia. In making this speech, Putin was remaining faithful to the Soviet Union. The strategists of the USSR enumerated three basic “directions” for preparing the population for an all-arms nuclear war in peacetime. We can see that Putin’s policies have kept faith with these “directions,” which include the following:

• The political preparation of the morale of the people
• The preparation of the population to protect itself from weapons of mass destruction and to deal with the aftermath of such an attack, usually called civil defense preparation [which is nonexistent in most Western countries].
• The military preparation of the population, so that the population understands “as much as possible about modern infantry weapons, antitank weapons, and other military equipment.”[iv]

In Putin’s speeches and on Russian television we constantly see a “preparation of the morale of the people,” which the text of Soviet Military Strategy says is “of decisive importance in present-day conditions, since the use of weapons of mass destruction in war imposes exceptionally high and unprecedented demands on the political morale of the population.”[v] Love of the motherland is a major theme, along with “instilling … the readiness to bear any of the hardships of war in the name of victory.” This preparation of morale may seem crazy to those Americans who are stylishly demoralized, yet it was Napoleon who famously said that “Morale is to physical force and three is to one.” This three-to-one is not a precise measurement, but underscores the fact that morale is a force multiplier. Therefore, Russian strategists are not mistaken in emphasizing patriotic education and “preparation of the morale of the people.”

Morale can be prepared through truthful statements about a foreign threat, or by lies calculated to inspire hatred of a certain country or bloc of countries. The Russian authorities generally lie about America, NATO, and Ukraine, because this is a more reliable method of convincing the Russian public that their country’s cause is just. Truth be told, neither America nor NATO nor Ukraine want a war with Russia and would prefer to trade peacefully with them (given the possibility of buying minerals, gas and oil from Russia). This is not acknowledged by the Russian state media. Always, the West is depicted as aggressive and warmongering. At the start of the Ukraine War, Russian media claimed that the “Special Military Operation” was necessary to stop an alleged genocide against Russian-speakers in Donbas. This was a propaganda fabrication which people in many countries have believed. A similar claim was made at the start of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. Russian television also repeats the claim that Russia is fighting fascism in Ukraine. Such claims are in accordance with “chronographic suturing,” in which the past and present are knitted together (as Putin did in his 2001 speech marking the sixtieth anniversary of the German invasion of the USSR).

Most Russians grow up watching movies about the Great Patriotic War in which the Russians are fighting Nazis. “Chronographic suturing” weaves the past into the present, so that Ukraine (or NATO) is depicted as an aggressive genocidal enemy cast in the mold of Hitler’s Germany.[vi] Russian state-controlled television also strives to depict a Russian victory as inevitable. This is also important for morale, since it dispels pessimism and cynicism about the practicality of Russian war aims. Leading politicians in the Russian State Duma show their belief in Russia’s inevitable victory by opposing negotiations with Ukraine.[vii] Why negotiate with people who are about to suffer defeat? As everyone knows, the Allied policy against Hitler was “unconditional surrender.” We should not be surprised that this is the Kremlin’s policy toward Ukraine (however disguised by Russia’s supposedly reasonable demands).

The preparation for global nuclear war, which the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have long kept in view, can only be justified by an intensive propaganda. Mobilizing a country is not easy without preparing the people. According to the Soviet strategists, mass mobilization must begin before nuclear weapons are used. The only problem is how to carry out such a mobilization without alarming the Americans who might begin to use nuclear weapons to prevent a mobilization. There are two ways around this problem, which the Russian strategists have available to them:

(1) If a Russian mobilization is preceded by a long period of peace during which NATO has abandoned the practice of maintaining large reserves, a Russian mobilization can take place without the possibility of a matching Western response.

(2) If Russia is ostensibly engaged in a civil war (i.e., war between Ukraine and Russia), any large mobilization of Russian troops might be explained as something other than a preparation to invade Europe. Furthermore, Iranian, North Korean, and Chinese mobilizations could be timed to tie down American forces in other theaters during Russian mobilization.

According to V.D. Sokolovskii’s text, which is titled Soviet Military Strategy, mobilization marks the transition from peace to war. His team wrote that the “mobilization … of the armed forces means their conversion from a peacetime to a war-time footing in accordance with a war plan.”[viii] Mobilization for a nuclear world war is so massive an undertaking that it cannot be concealed. It can only be announced by government decree and carried out openly. Consider, then, how convenient the war in Ukraine is for the purpose of camouflaging a larger war preparation. If not for the war in Ukraine, a full Russian mobilization could only signal an intention to attack NATO and/or Japan. But in the present situation, the war in Ukraine provides a degree of cover, transforming an observed general mobilization into something that is supposedly less dangerous. The war in Ukraine, which the Russians have carried out using poor-quality troops armed with obsolete equipment, becomes decidedly suspicious because (1) It is fought using criminals, foreigners, and other undesirables; (2) Russia’s air forces have been sparingly used; and (3) Russia’s nuclear forces have been kept in reserve.

In a real war, following a mass mobilization involving millions of men, Russian military doctrine calls for mass air and nuclear strikes. Such strikes have not been carried out in Ukraine so far. But that may be about to change. According to recent joint briefings from Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) and Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia has drafted a plan to mobilize 600,000 additional men over the 2026-2027 period.[ix] If this plan is carried out, we may expect the mobilization to take six months and to be larger than 600,000 men. It is unlikely that the United States will attempt to match this mobilization. Certainly, Europe cannot match it.

The coming Russian mobilization will supposedly entail a “phased rollout” in which men are recruited in two waves of 300,000; one in late 2026 and another in early 2027. Of course, the Kremlin is denying any intention to mobilize. But we cannot believe such denials because satellite imagery tells us otherwise. Russia has been building new military bases and expanding drone encampments directly along its border with NATO. In fact, Finnish and Nordic intelligence officials estimate that while Russia’s immediate combat power remains committed to the war in Ukraine, Moscow aims to eventually deploy up to 114,000 fighting troops along the Baltic and Nordic borders. Why would the Russians be preparing for such a redeployment when the war in Ukraine is still raging? Obviously, Russia expects to win the war in Ukraine and rapidly move its victorious forces to the border with NATO. But how can Russia win the war in Ukraine without a significant mobilization?

Since the 1930s the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have had something called “invisible divisions.” According to GRU defector Viktor Suvorov, the Kremlin leadership can expand the fighting strength of its armed forces much faster than anyone realizes. “In peacetime,” he noted, “every divisional commander has not one but two deputies.” The reason for this is simple. The extra deputy is secretly designated “Divisional Commander – Second Formation.” The chief of staff of the division also has two deputies, as does the brigade and battalion commanders. Imbedded in every division is the staff for leading two divisions. After the old division receives 10,000 reserve soldiers the division becomes two. Suvorov then asks, “But where does the equipment for so many new divisions come from?” The equipment comes from storage (i.e., because everything is always mothballed for reuse).[x]

A Western military expert might be tempted to sneer. What are such formations worth in today’s battlefield? Fat reservists equipped with obsolete weapons count for nothing. What could these troops be good for? The answer is, they do not have to be good. Intense training is not necessary because the rifles, tanks and artillery of these formations will only be used for mopping up and taking prisoners after nuclear strikes have destroyed strongpoints of resistance. The process is outlined by A.A. Sidorenko in a book titled, The Offensive.

“With the appearance of nuclear weapons, the capability arose to neutralize … the enemy defense … without the preliminary concentration of large masses of artillery close to the enemy. The complete motorization of the troops permitted moving the [regiment-sized formations] out quickly, launching an assault from the march, and exploiting the results of nuclear strikes swiftly.” [xi]

Going by the text of Soviet Military Strategy, Russia’s armed forces are obliged to employ nuclear weapons if they want to defeat Ukraine. This has always been the case, since the Russian Army was designed, under the Soviet flag, to fight a nuclear war (rather than a purely conventional war). The writings of Soviet military strategists and the testimony of defectors is clear on this. Former Kremlin advisor and political scientist Sergei Karaganov, head of Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, is openly advocating the use of nuclear weapons to defeat Ukraine. He says that a stalemate in Ukraine is unacceptable. It is therefore necessary to launch preemptive nuclear strikes against European and Ukrainian targets, forcing Ukraine to capitulate. While this advocacy is exaggerated for the sake of frightening Europe, there is no way Ukraine’s conventional forces could hold out against mechanized infantry supported by tactical nuclear strikes. According to The Officer’s Handbook, “Soviet military doctrine has an offensive character…. The Soviet Union will conduct the war which the enemies impose on them in the most offensive manner in order to attain the smashing of the enemy in a short time.” This handbook goes on to explain, “Soviet military doctrine allocates the decisive role in contemporary war to nuclear missile weapons. At the same time it considers that along with the nuclear missile strikes of a strategic and operational-tactical character, the armed forces will employ conventional armament.”[xii]

The Russians have never thought of nuclear war as a mere exchange of nuclear missiles. It is an all-arms nuclear war in which massive armies fight on a nuclear battlefield. The Russians believe that air-bursting nuclear weapons will not contaminate the ground, though mistakes may turn some areas to desert. Whatever happens, key objectives will be captured. The enemy will lose his army. The reality of nuclear war is fully accepted, as shown in the following excerpts:

“armed conflict in theaters of military operations will be characterized by great violence, the … colossal destruction of troops, and the formation of broad zones with a high level of radioactive contamination.

“A new characteristic feature of the offensive in nuclear war is the conduct of combat actions under conditions of the presence of vast zones of contamination, destruction, fires, and floods.”[xiii]

The Russian spokesmen who are advocating nuclear war in Europe are fronting for a type of war that NATO and the Americans are unprepared to fight. Literally, almost no one in the West believes this kind of war can happen because only a crazy person would start such a war (and we all know crazy persons do not rule countries). Because of assumptions we have made regarding nuclear weapons, we are psychologically unprepared for the sacrifices that attend such a war. Russia’s leaders may suspect that the Americans will refuse to defend Europe if Ukraine is defeated by nuclear strikes. If America does abandon Europe, it is reasonable to assume that Europe will beg Russia for an alliance.

It is evil and logical for Russia to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and to threaten Europe with nuclear strikes. Alexei Zhuravlev, State Duma and Rodina Party leader, has publicly demanded nuclear strikes in high-profile television appearances. Zhuravlev has said, “If necessary, we are obligated to use [nuclear weapons] …. If we must strike, we will strike. And that’s not up for discussion.”[xiv] A similar argument has been made by Leonid Slutsky of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party. State TV hosts Solovyov, Simonyan, and Kiselyov routinely dedicate segments on prime-time state television to simulate the destruction of European capitals, calling nuclear warheads “God’s weapon” – a tool of righteous judgment to save Russia from the West. These Russian TV hosts have consistently argued that it is preferable to invite global nuclear catastrophe than to allow the Russian state to accept an unfavorable settlement in Ukraine.[xv]

All of this is in perfect alignment with “preparing the morale of the people.” It also aligns with longstanding Russian and Soviet military thinking. “Nuclear strikes by strategic missiles will be of decisive, primary importance to the outcome of a modern war,” says Sokolovskii’s text.

“Massive nuclear blows on the enemy’s strategic nuclear weapons, economy, and system of government … and the concurrent defeat of his armed forces in military theaters will permit the attainment of the political aims of war much more rapidly than in previous wars.”[xvi]

In line with present Russian politicians and media figures who say Russia is obligated to used nuclear weapons, Sokolovskii’s text explains,

“In case of war, our Armed Forces will be obligated to employ this form of strategic operation. The aggressive imperialist bloc is preparing a war which will involve general destruction of cities, industrial regions … communications networks, and mass annihilation by nuclear blows of the civilian population throughout the entire territory of the socialist countries.”[xvii]

A Western ready will likely dismiss all this as sheer propaganda. Our people cannot understand this kind of “preparation of morale” because Western authorities would never advocate nuclear war. Not so with the Russians. Things work very differently there. The West is predicated on commercial interests while Russia is capable of a more medieval approach. Western corporate interests, betting on a continuation of peaceful conditions, always discourages nuclear war talk. A pundit or politician who talks about waging a nuclear war has no career prospects in the West. Not so in Russia.

There is a militarist culture in Russia and a consumerist culture in America. Consumerism is incompatible with “preparation of the morale of the people” for a nuclear world war. Because of their exposure to Western commercial imperatives, Western audiences have a knee-jerk contempt for the themes propounded on Russian television. They do not see the realism of the Russian position, which seems crazy from commercial society’s point of view. On the other hand, from the point of view of nuclear war it is commercial society that is crazy – refusing to acknowledge the efficacy of nuclear strikes. The Russian people must be “indoctrinated with the idea of defending their Fatherland” to the death, says the text of Soviet Military Strategy. Russian strategists say that the Russian population must be made to feel that a slack attitude “would be to capitulate to bourgeois ideology and morality, and would increase the danger of war.” The task of indoctrinating the population, therefore,

“is to clearly expose the reactionary essence of American policy and its propaganda, which attempts to present ‘the American way of life’ in rosy hues, to pretend that there is a ‘people’s capitalism’ that is peaceable and humane, to draw a veil over the aggressive nature of its politics, and to present the preparations for initiating war as a defensive measure.”[xviii]

Given all this, it is only natural that Putin’s speeches have often been peppered with allusions to NATO’s aggressive intentions, even though such allusions are easily contradicted in the light of NATO’s near-unilateral disarmament following the collapse of the Soviet Union.[xix] The truth, of course, is not necessary for propaganda to be effective. It is only necessary to orient people towards a designated enemy. Consider Putin’s 2004 speech regarding the Belsan school siege, in which the Russian president blamed the massacre at Belsan on Russian national weakness, famously declaring that “the weak are beaten.” According to Putin,

“Some would like to tear from us a ‘juicy piece of pie.’ Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these aims.”[xx]

It is perfectly clear from this passage that Putin is blaming the United States for the Belsan tragedy. This claim on Putin’s part has been fully weaponized today. Meanwhile, Putin has agents of influence in the West have been echoing this same theme. Consider the conspiracy rhetoric of alt-right pundits like Alex Jones, who claimed that 9/11 was “an inside job.” The 9/11 Truthers were, in fact, interfacing with Russian generals and intelligence agents from the very beginning of their movement, and it is no accident that this brand of conspiracy rhetoric has gradually seeped into the American mainstream through the work of popular broadcasters like Tucker Carlson, MAGA politicians like Margerie Taylor Greene, and so-called “military analysts” like Col. Douglas McGregor (among others). Throughout history, the West has always had stooges of this kind, only now they are enjoying a much greater currency than they enjoyed in the past. The mainstream media is incapable of remembering that communist bloc defectors like Ion Mihai Pecepa long ago outlined Moscow’s longstanding support for Arab and Iranian terrorism. Yet we have alt-right pundits and socialists blaming America for what has essentially been a Russian project of many decades. The War in Chechnya was never understood in the West as Moscow’s “Chechen alibi.” But an alibi it most certainly was. How ingenious it was, then, for Putin to blame the Americans for what was (in essence) a Russian technique (i.e., using Muslim terrorists in false flag terror operations). Always, said Stalin, “when others accuse us of committing crimes (i.e., of using terrorism) we must throw the accusation back in the faces of the capitalists. They must always be shown up as criminals.”[xxi]

Information warfare is never about evidence (in Stalin’s view), since evidence can always be manufactured by the intelligence services. One must relentlessly accuse the CIA and the Pentagon at every turn. One must blame capitalism and America for everything that is wrong in the world. In this context, it is also worth noting that KGB/FSB defector Aleksandr Litvinenko accused Putin of being behind Al Qaeda and the terrorism of 9/11. Litvinenko got a small splash of publicity for saying this, but the following year he was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 on Putin’s orders. On his deathbed, Litvinenko addressed Putin in a written statement: “You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protests from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”[xxii]

When you are dealing with a regime predicated on preparing for a future nuclear war, you should not be shocked that anyone standing in the way should be murdered. Those assassinated by the Russian regime include journalists and opposition politicians, businessmen and spies. Among several others there was the writer Anna Politkovskaya, shot to death by her apartment’s elevator. Then there was Boris Berezovsky, strangled (and made to look like a suicide). Then we must reckon with Alexei Navalny’s underwear, laced with a deadly nerve agent. Consider, as well, the death of Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, shot four times in the back on a bridge near the Kremlin. Then there was Sergei Yushchenkov, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia Party, gunned down outside his Moscow home just hours after registering to run in national elections. There are dozens of names we might add to the list, but let us not forget Denis Voronenko, a former lawmaker who defected to Ukraine in 2017, shot dead in broad daylight outside his hotel in Kyiv. And now that Putin’s military aggression has claimed the lives of over 16,000 Ukrainian civilians, we should also remember that he thought nothing of sacrificing over one million Russian soldiers. “It is extremely important,” says the text of Soviet Military Strategy,

“to convince the people of the justice of the aims which the Soviet Union [Russian Federation] and the entire socialist camp will pursue in war. The people must be deeply convinced of the unshakable unity of the socialist countries, the wise leadership of the communist and workers’ parties, and the economic power of the Soviet Union [Russian Federation].”[xxiii]

It is of no consequence that your aims are just. It is only of consequence that you convince the Russian people. According to Sokolovskii’s strategists, “Hatred of the enemy should arouse the desire to destroy the armed forces and military-industrial potential of the aggressor and achieve complete victory in a just war.” The Russian government has shown its determination in this regard, faithfully adhering to Sokolovskii’s principles. It should come as no surprise, during this period of preparation for nuclear world war, that powerful media figures and politicians are calling for nuclear strikes. Does anyone believe these scoundrels are calling for nuclear strikes on their own initiative? Who in Russian politics operates on their own initiative? Clearly, the Kremlin wants to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They believe the time has come. The mobilization is being prepared. The stage is being set.

We can see what the Kremlin is preparing to do. Furthermore, Russia and China have formed “one clenched fist,” exactly as Golitsyn predicted. “This is too pessimistic,” I was once told. “You cannot say this because it takes away people’s hope.” But hope has nothing to do with the correctness of Golitsyn’s predictions? And now, with minds unprepared for what is unfolding, our leaders grapple with their pathological cult of denial. Last Sunday morning, British defense executives were given a briefing. They were told that they are targets for assassination by Russian military intelligence (GRU).

Is that a reality too pessimistic for the telling?

When the mind of the state itself has degenerated, when corrupt ambition dictates to truth, existential threats are laughed off and ignored. Of course, we have our shopping mall regime. It explains much. During the last three decades the humorous slogan of the Communist Party USA was, “Shop until they drop.” And soon we will have the onset of panic. People will wonder why nobody told them the truth.

The socialist camp is reviving. The Soviet Union is being put back together. Anyone can see that Stalin is being rehabilitated, that statues of the great dictator are being erected in Russia. We may now reflect on hundreds of statues of Lenin in Russia that were never taken down. We see that the founder of the Soviet secret police is also being celebrated, that Soviet symbols are being used by the Russian Army in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Lenin has been lying in state, at the center of Moscow, in his mausoleum. The Kremlin says that burying Lenin is not on the agenda. In fact, Lenin’s tomb is scheduled for waterproofing. The staircases will be repaired and new utility systems added. While pollsters say that 60 percent of Russians would prefer to bury Lenin, the remaining 40 percent still wish to honor him. And everything depends on that 40 percent.

In the Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian, which is labeled a hoax by casual mainstream observers, we find a Chinese communist strategy formulated around a “them or us” conception. Communist China has been organized around the same Leninist principles as the Russian Federation (has in secret). Both countries have followed the track of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Both have adopted “state capitalism” as a screen for masking their war preparations against America. Either the Americans are destroyed, or the Communist Party of China is destroyed, said General Chi. It is them or us. Anyone familiar with Lenin’s writings, or with Stalin, understands this way of thinking. It is fundamental to Marxism-Leninism. It is not a matter of a “rightwing” interpretation of ambiguous communist claptrap. The intentions of Lenin and Stalin were clear, as are the intentions of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. With totalitarian and revolutionary ideologies, the determination to destroy the bourgeoisie coincides with a secret passion for killing; that is to say, these people think killing is fun. As Eric Voegelin explained in his Autobiographical Reflections, “the fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one’s power….”[xxiv]

It is amazing how many people thought the Cold War ended in 1991. Khrushchev famously said, “We will give up communism when the crayfish whistles on the mountain.”[xxv] Robert Conquest noted that Lenin’s followers have embraced

“the idea that the final world philosophy … and theory of society have been devised, and that the nature of the perfect human order which will prevail throughout the future is known and can be realized by theoretically prescribed methods.”[xxvi]

Such is the insanity that animates Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Such is the insanity of the mayor of New York. We are slipping towards the victory of socialism. Who dares stand against the communists and socialists? Who will go to war against them?

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Bad Brains, Empty Heads, and Nukes

The cynical lying of the communists in China and their shadow partners in Russia, and the longstanding self-deception of Western liberals, has led to a decline of intellectual integrity among elites. The habit of lying unhinges the mind. It is related to psychopathy. In fact, lying is one of the most definitive and core behavioral traits of psychopathy. It is erroneously believed that psychopathy is an ingrained neurodevelopmental disorder caused by structural defects in the brain. Yet, it is well-known that behavior restructures the brain. It has also been shown that habitual lying can alter brain chemistry.

It is said that psychopaths have a physically smaller and less active amygdala (the brain’s emotional center). Physicalists begin with the assumption that physical reality is primary over mental and spiritual reality. They therefore assume that brain abnormalities always precede wickedness. What if the brain of the psychopath is smaller and less active because the psychopath has made a choice to lie, cheat, and steal, and therefore (if only to escape the pangs of conscience) has bypassed his amygdala, allowing it to atrophy? Here we encounter the concept of “responsibility,” which materialist ontology, with its focus on strict cause-and-effect sequences in the physical world, denies. However, recent discoveries in physics have upended this kind of determinism, allowing us to recover such concepts as “soul” and “mind” – concepts integral to human dignity.

Why did so-called scientific socialism, as a philosophy and state system (entrenched in China and Russia), produce concepts and leaders so opposed to the dignity of man? The socialist dictatorships are (and were), in the words of Dr. Andrew M. Łobaczewski, “pathocracies”; that is, macrosocial systems of government in which a small minority of psychologically abnormal individuals (i.e., psychopaths and narcissists) seize absolute control over a society of normal people. Łobaczewski developed his definition after surviving Nazi and Soviet occupations in his native Poland. He argued that pathocracy functions like a socio-political disease, systematically spreading through public life until the entire country is run by psychopaths. Łobaczewski realized that ideology (as such) is the natural protective mask of the psychopathic predator, who does not wish to advertise his true nature.[xxvii]

While Łobaczewski was a physicalist in his ontology, his analysis of how evil spreads is based on observation and is therefore invaluable. Łobaczewski’s work suggests that regimes like those in Russia, Iran, North Korea and China have already passed through their hysteroidal cycles and are pathocratically governed. The United States and the West, however, are in the midst of their hysteroidal cycle. These are close to succumbing to pathocracy.

The hysteroidal cycle goes something like this: During periods of long-term prosperity and comfort, societies tend to lose their critical thinking skills and emotional resilience. People begin to repress uncomfortable truths and avoid confronting moral decay. This social complacency leads to a rising collective hysteria with an added element of social confusion. In this environment highly charismatic, pathologically disordered individuals – called “spellbinders” by Łobaczewski – attain high office. Let us say a pathological narcissist is elected president, affirms his own greatness above all previous presidents, whimsically makes policies, unmakes policies, threatens allies, befriends foes, bombs an enemy, gets stuck in a war, grows bored of his job and complains to his staff that he would rather watch television, trade stocks or play golf than attend another policy briefing. Of course, this is Donald Trump.

Łobaczewski specifically defined a spellbinder as a psychologically abnormal individual, typically subject to severe narcissism, psychopathy, or paranoia, who emerges during a period of social anxiety to captivate, radicalize, and manipulate the population. A core tactic of Łobaczewski’s spellbinder is his use of paramoralism; that is, taking naturally destructive, hostile, or self-serving actions which are dressed up in high-minded moral or patriotic vocabulary. The spellbinder systematically places those who succumb to his influence onto a “high moral plane,” showering them with attention and psychological validation. At the same time, anyone who dissents is labeled as an enemy. According to Łobaczewski, the spellbinder fascinates others to the point of temporarily disabling their critical faculties. Please note: The spellbinder cannot succeed in a perfectly stable, emotionally resilient society. Spellbinders require a population already primed by economic anxiety, cultural division, and mass hysteria. The spellbinder does not create the crisis at hand but exploits it by validating people’s grievances. In all this, the spellbinder is not the ultimate architect of pathocracy. According to Łobaczewski, spellbinders are too erratic and driven by their own personal pathologies to competently manage government in the long term. The spellbinder is, in practice, a catalyst who successfully hypnotizes the public and opens the gates of institutions, allowing more calculating, Machiavellian actors to quietly slip into positions of authority where they codify the pathocratic system.

America is not a pathocracy as yet, but we have been marching in that direction for many years. In America, the left has already turned the universities and schools into an archipelago of little pathocracies determined to impose socialism on the country. Many of us feared that socialism was the vehicle for bringing a psychopath to power in America (as happened in Germany, Russia, and China during the twentieth century); but we may have missed the mark, not realizing that the disease exists without reference to any specific ideological school. Pathocracy can take any ideology as its point of departure. As a figure who is ostensibly reacting against the normal population’s aversion to “woke” pathocracy, Trump represented himself as an alternative. And yes, he was an alternative for those who hate the left. However, he is not an alternative for those who oppose pathocracy. As Łobaczewski spells out, a long period of peace and prosperity has made society soft and uncritical, neurotic and emotionally brittle. Hard truths are not welcome, on the left or the right. The emergency of a spellbinder like Trump is therefore a natural occurrence. The spellbinder tells people what they want to hear, and his followers reciprocate with adulation. But the thing is a train wreck.

After a spellbinder has wrecked the system, it only takes a few brilliant Machiavels to establish a new system; that is, a pathocracy. Nevertheless, even the most intelligent psychopaths must contend with a small army of lickspittles and toadies who will, by virtue of their sheer numbers, eventually take control of the state. Even if you start with firstrate criminal masterminds, you end up with a Leonid Brezhnev. And further down the line, you get Vladimir Putin. Functionaries are chosen for their ideological compliance rather than their intelligence. Consequently, incompetence oozes ever upwards.

What we have with pathocracy is an ideology that, by the dogmatism of its acolytes, empowers an arrogant stupidity; that is, a ruling power with an erroneous world view, disastrous policy ideas, and a blackhole where strategic thought might otherwise be found. In the case of Russia, the writings of Marshal V.D. Sokolovskii’s staff (who put together Soviet Military Strategy) represent the last residue of brilliance – the last true light – in the mind of the state. All attempts by the Kremlin to adjust their strategy (in Ukraine), or any attempt to temporize, or improvise, must fail. At the same time, the Ukrainians are free to think, to argue, and discover new and effectively strategies. Therefore, Russia is losing the war and has no forum for debate or discussion regarding an alternative strategy. All they have left are these old Soviet military writings from the 1960s and 70s which offer one answer: Nuclear Rocket War. Imagine this old man, Vladimir Putin, turning to General Valery Gerasimov. What should we do? The texts are ready at hand, and there is nowhere else to turn. Everything was built on the basis of preparing for nuclear war. Putin and his colleagues cannot fail to realize why the Russian Army is so inefficient. It was an army made to exploit nuclear attacks. It was not made to launch attacks on its own. The founding theorists explained this half a century ago. All that remains, therefore, is to use nuclear weapons and enjoy a great victory. Also, if they were not psychopaths, the idea would not be so appealing. But they are psychopaths, as their system is a pathocracy. It is therefore natural that they should begin to advocate for nuclear war.

….

An Idiot on a White Horse

We have now advanced beyond Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin on the one hand, beyond John Locke and Stuart Mill on the other. Putting aside the Political Ponerology of Łobaczewski, it must be admitted that our rulers have left political philosophy far behind, descending into vulgarity. “The radical condemnation of historical and philosophical knowledge,” wrote Voegelin,

“must be recognized as an important factor in the social environment because it is dominated by persons who cannot even be called intellectual crooks because their level of consciousness is much too low to be aware of their objective crookedness, but who must rather be characterized as functional illiterates with a strong desire for personal aggrandizement.”[xxviii]

Such people never quite understand what they have done wrong. All the plans of the old communists come to this. All the hopes of American conservatives come to this. Their grandiose standard-bearers have backed themselves into two respective corners.

Consider the extent of the crisis: The Kremlin bosses must either mobilize, employ nuclear weapons and defeat Ukraine by next June, or lose their hold on power. (This is why Sokolovskii’s text becomes so seductive, so persuasive as an “answer”). On the American side, Donald Trump’s war against Iran also enters its decisive phase. President Trump must either mobilize ground forces to invade Iran, or he must retreat from the region as America loses its reserve currency status (triggering a financial crisis that might well lead to a national unraveling). One may wonder why these two great powers, Russia and America, should find themselves facing destabilization at the same time. The short answer, of course, is the incompetence and outright stupidity of Putin and Trump along with their toad-eating underlings.

On 4 May 2017, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s wrote his last tweet, which read as follows: “Sophisticated U.S. leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse.” This summarizes the situation perfectly. In a monograph touching on Brzezinski’s tweet, Piotr Pietrzak observed that Donald Trump is alternately hawkish and dovish, insensibly choosing belligerence against Iran while plastering sloppy kisses on the fat cheeks of Kim Jong Un. Donald Trump yearns to be all things to all bad men; to be a “peace president” while bombing Iran into the Stone Age. In military theory and grand strategy, consistency is essential; yet Donald Trump is inconsistent. Not only are Trump’s words unrelated to his deeds, but his deeds are unrelated to each other. Many prominent military theorists, historians, and political scientists have written on the importance of consistency in politics because: (1) actions must be consistent with stated policy (2) the right policy must be consistent over time; and (3) military doctrine must be consistent with battlefield reality. But Donald Trump has thrown consistency out the window. He keeps changing his foreign policy while his actions seem unrelated to his stated objectives. His means do not match his ends, while his ends keep changing. He vacillates between ready concessions and harsh ultimatums. And Putin has done much the same.

The observer begins to realize that Trump and Putin are alike in one respect: They are both poseurs, failing to master the essentials of statecraft. Clausewitz famously argued that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” But these two have turned Lenin’s inversion of Clausewitz inside-out. For them, politics is war by other means (as with Lenin), except they don’t know how to win an actual war. They are confused by concepts because they cannot deal with abstractions.

At bottom: Trump and Putin’s purposes are impolitic. Consequently, each is discussing the use of nuclear weapons as a way out of their respective troubles. Of course, this will only multiply their woes.

Notice how confused their actions have been: Trump began his war against Iran with the idea of regime change, then shifted to the objective of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; Putin originally launched his invasion of Ukraine to “protect Russian speakers,” then shifted to a maximalist campaign of absorbing whole provinces into the Russian Federation and wiping out Ukrainian national identity altogether. While Trump assumed a decapitation strike would cause the regime in Tehran to collapse, Putin was so confident of killing Zelenskyy and taking Kyiv within days that he famously told Russian commanders to pack their dress uniforms for the victory parade. Both Trump and Putin have shied away from the word “war.” While Putin euphemistically calls his full-scale invasion of Ukraine a “Special Military Operation,” Trump routinely minimizes intense military operations as mere “excursions” or targeted demonstrations of “peace through strength.” Putin supposedly reacted against the expansion of NATO, but he stupidly drove Finland and Sweden into NATO’s welcoming arms. Trump launched his military campaign to weaken Iran, but Iran has been strengthened by the discovery that she can close the Strait of Hormuz and build a nuclear arsenal anyway. Both leaders have achieved results directly at odds with their stated objectives. It is only natural that they should change their objectives, if only to forestall embarrassment.

Inconsistency, inconsistency – always inconsistency. Such is not the hobgoblin of little minds, but the hobgoblin itself. How can Donald Trump, as U.S. President, simultaneously be the friend of Kim Jong Un on the one hand, while being at war with the Iranian regime on the other? This inconsistency becomes more puzzling when we observe that North Korea is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal even as Trump is threatening to reduce Iran to rubble for attempting to build a nuclear arsenal of its own. As Pietrzak also noted, Trump

“has ended up showing a massive resentment towards Iran and eagerly drifting into a conflict with this country that may have very dreadful consequences but, in the meantime, presenting a completely different approach towards North Korea, completely ignoring Kim’s trespasses against regional and global stability.”[xxix]

Nothing here is explicable in terms of Trump’s alleged genius, or his skill at three-dimensional chess. Sadly, Trump’s intellect is incapable of grasping checkers. Trump’s disregard for detailed policy analysis and reading has been widely remarked on by his former associates (like John Bolton and Gary Cohn, where the latter has argued that governing without processing complex data is inherently a form of intellectual negligence). Trump and Putin are both intellectually negligent. While Washington and Moscow have had many brainy analysts, brainpower is no longer brought to bear as it once was. Trump relies on Hegseth, who fires American generals for raising objections. But American generals are supposed to raise objections when presidents want to do stupid things.

A political leader who will not listen, and a general who refuses to contradict, are useless to the country they serve. In World War II Winston Churchill constantly argued with Field-Marshal Alan Brooke, who was then Chief of the Imperial General Staff. At one point Churchill complained that his generals hated him. On hearing this, Field-Marshal Brooke said about Churchill, “I don’t hate him, I love him, but when the day comes that I tell him he is right when I believe him to be wrong, it will be time for him to get rid of me.”[xxx] The relationship between Churchill and Field-Marshal Brooke was productive in its contentiousness. Through the most heated arguments they remained loyal to each other. G.M. Trevelyan noted,

“Napoleon fell because he would never take counsel; his marshals were only his servants, whereas Winston treated his generals as his advisors. This habit of taking counsel, combined with his own personal qualities, is what won the war.”[xxxi]

In their unwillingness to take advice, Trump and Putin are more like Napoleon than Churchill. Only, as strategists they only come up to Napoleon’s knee. Both Trump and Putin have rid themselves of generals and advisors who told them they were wrong. Consider some of the generals cast aside by President Trump; for no first-rate intellect or person of strong character stays long in Donald Trump’s service. For example: General James Mattis (Secretary of Defense); Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (National Security Advisor); General John Kelly (Secretary of Homeland Security and Chief of Staff); and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Excepting Flynn, they have all painted a devastating picture of Trump’s leadership. Unlike Lord Alanbrooke, they would not say that they “love him.” In fact, they all have reason to despise the president they served. General Mattis has said, damningly, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”[xxxii] General H.R. McMaster characterized Trump as an insecure, erratic, and impulsive leader who is highly vulnerable to flattery by foreign dictators. Trump’s inability to maintain a commitment, said McMaster, has led to wild vacillations and policy reversals. “President Trump is not a patient man,” noted McMaster, adding that Trump is now less patient, less thoughtful, and less consistent.[xxxiii] A more disturbing criticism of Trump comes from General John Kelly, in a series of bombshell audio and print interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic. Kelly darkly acknowledged that Trump is “certainly an authoritarian” and “prefers the dictator approach to government.” Kelly described how Trump once excitedly told him, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” As Kelly explained, Trump imagined Hitler’s generals were blindly loyal and totally subservient, which was not always the case. Trump told Kelly that he was frustrated by the independence of the American military, asking Kelly why they couldn’t be completely submissive. Kelly corrected Trump’s misunderstanding about Hitler’s generals, noting that Hitler narrowly survived an assassination plot orchestrated by his generals. But this did not register with Trump. Kelly noted that Trump would sometimes tell him that “Adolf Hitler did some good things….”[xxxiv]

We see from this that Trump misunderstands history and how leadership works. He strangely idolizes Hitler because, like Trump, Hitler was a “spellbinder.” The difference between the two spellbinders might be that Trump’s ideas are childishly simplistic when they are not altogether erroneous. Trump, noted Kelly, is not equipped to govern America because he has no understanding of American institutions. According to Kelly, Trump has “no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of the rule of law” and treats government agencies as personal tools for getting even with rivals. Kelly said that Trump routinely grew angry when advised that he could not legally command the Department of Justice, the IRS, or the military to target his political opponents.[xxxv] As a Gold Star father himself, Kelly was deeply shaken by Trump’s private attitude toward the military. He confirmed on the record that Trump used the terms “suckers and losers” to describe American soldiers who die in combat. Trump is so repulsed by the sacrifice of American servicemen, according to Kelly, that Trump actively dislikes being seen in public next to wounded veterans, telling staff that he did not want amputees or disabled servicemen present at military parades because “it doesn’t look good for me.”[xxxvi]

On his side, Putin’s cold messianic narcissism has led him to fire or suspend between 30 and 40 senior Russian generals. We do not know the details, since personnel changes are made via classified Kremlin decrees. When the initial Russian offensive to take Kyiv failed, eight Russian generals were reportedly fired. Then, front line district commanders were axed after losing territory to the Ukrainians. For example, Lt. Gen. Sergey Kisel was fired for failing to take Kharkiv; Lt. Gen. Rustam Muradov was sacked after failed frontal assaults near Vuhledar. Then came Putin’s post mutiny sweep, when General Sergey Surovikin (General” Armageddon”) was stripped of his command over his ties to mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. After that came the more systematic purge following the replacement of longtime Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. This purge was carried out as an anti-corruption measure. Putin fired or arrested key long-serving general-rank deputy defense ministers, including Pavel Popov, Timur Ivanov, Dmitry Bulgakov, and Yury Kuznetsov. Beyond these changes, the KGB/FSB arrested dozens of senior military brass, logistics chiefs and contractors on bribery and state-secrecy charges. Apparently a large and organized ring of thieves have been stealing state property in Russia’s defense ministry. No one should be surprised. This sort of behavior even happened under Stalin. But now, under Putin, it metastasized into a cancer. No doubt the massive military purges underway in China stem from the same problem. As Łobaczewski noted, pathocracies always contain the seeds of their own destruction. Because the pathocratic system punishes people for telling the truth, rewarding outward compliance over competence, everything ends up in the hands of liars; and, more often than not, these liars turn out to be thieves. The resulting institutional rot leads the top leadership to an understandable paranoia vis-à-vis so many dishonest underlings. Stalin executed tens of thousands of military officers, so great was his paranoia. Stalin’s military purges of the late 1930s were pure prophylaxis, whereas Putin’s purge has come after major damage has been done rather than before. The Russian Army was supposed to have been lavishly equipped by 2022. Two tank armies were supposed to have been outfitted with T-14 Armata tanks. But the tanks were nowhere to be found. In 2023 I had a conversation with one of Putin’s oligarchs who privately told me that Sergei Shoigu’s gang had stolen $30 billion in defense procurement money. Thousands of people were implicated, he said. This was a powerful network of profiteers who never imagined their thefts would be discovered. Perhaps they reasoned that a war would not happen and nobody would be the wiser. The armies would possess new weapons on paper. The Defense Ministry would simply lie to Putin, presenting him with a false picture of the Army’s table of organization. Brigades would be equipped with old tanks, old APCs, and old howitzers. Even if war broke out, they could claim the new equipment was lost in battle. But with the Army’s failure to take Kyiv, these people faced eventual exposure and were compelled to cover their tracks. In the end, of course, their thievery was discovered after mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin led a military mutiny to expose Sergei Shoigu’s corruption. Although Prigozhin later died after his plane was shot down by a missile, somebody must have turned over a rock to find that Prigozhin had been telling the truth! The Russian media outlet, Proekt, has estimated that nearly one-third of the Defense Ministry’s leadership team has been fired or imprisoned in the resulting investigation. If Putin had been supervising his subordinates after the fashion of Joseph Stalin, none of this would have happened. But Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. Rather, Putin is a creature who would follow in Stalin’s shoes while wearing Brezhnev’s bedroom slippers.

This naturally leads us to the question of Putin’s honesty. To what extent is he responsible for his associate’s bad behavior? How many bank accounts does Putin have? How many stock portfolios? How much has he stolen at the Russian people’s expense? As someone who climbed into power with a pretended humility and honesty, Putin resembles a bourgeois parvenu more than a militant Bolshevik. Putin’s palace on the Black Sea features a casino, a strip club, an underground ice hockey rink, and gold-plated toilet brushes. Where went the blue-collar man-of-the-people image? In all this, Putin set the example for his subordinates. And what would Stalin say of Putin’s cosmetic surgeries and use of Botox? Stalin’s own face was pockmarked by scars from the smallpox he had contracted in childhood. “I was not a fashion model,” Stalin might say. “Why should a leader require smooth or youthful skin? If little Putina were known to me, I would have strangled him in his crib.”

Did Putin allow his associates to strip wealth from military-industrial enterprises in exchange for loyalty? Did he look the other way, hoping they would keep their thievery within bounds? Did he realize they were stealing tens of billions? This must have come as a shock. “You stole how much? But where did it all go?!” As Putin’s house was built on greed, why would his subordinates not follow his example? Stalin built his house on mass murder and terrorism. It was not about stealing. When he died, Stalin had 900 rubles in a savings account. Of course, Stalin controlled the wealth of the Soviet Union, had twenty state-supplied residences in which to live, had servants and bodyguards. Yet he cared nothing for wealth as such. Stalin was not interested in making a successor out of his surviving son or passing power onto family members. Putin, on the other hand, is grooming one of his daughters as a successor. If he lives into his mid-eighties, he dreams of elevating one of his illegitimate sons into high office. Stalin would have sneered at such personal aggrandizement.

Rather than appointing someone like Field-Marshal Alan Brooke to keep him honest, Putin surrounded himself with an echo chamber of sycophants, each maneuvering for ill-gotten gains. The false leader finds his natural counterpart in false subordinates. Western intelligence analysts believe that General Gerasimov and other senior Russian generals frequently distort or falsify battlefield reports to keep Putin satisfied. Gerasimov has been seen on state broadcasts presenting highly exaggerated reports about captured territory in Ukraine. What are we to make of a general who falsifies his battle reports? Deception is supposed to be practiced on the enemy, not on your own commander-in-chief!

Putin reputedly punishes failure, so the Russian General Staff feeds him heavily manicured data. This has created a dangerous feedback loop where Putin makes strategic decisions based on false reports. Generals who have attempted to present Putin with a more accurate picture of the battlefield have been instantly removed. For example, when Major General Ivan Popov complained directly about the lack of artillery support and the need to rotate exhausted troops, Gerasimov scapegoated him. This resulted in Popov’s arrest by the FSB.

Whatever their individual differences, Trump and Putin are dishonest men who insist on dishonesty from others. They do not value the truth. Rather, they are “useless men” who possess neither the intellect to think for themselves nor the humility to listen to those who are more knowledgeable. As world leaders they represent a spiritual malaise. It is a malaise that now afflicts two state systems, two countries, and two wars.

In the 1960s James Burnham said that liberalism was “the ideology of Western suicide.” Few realized back then that conservatism was and is a more sluggish kind of liberalism. Call it “slow suicide.” Today Burnham would be shocked at Trump’s presidency. MAGA, which pretends to be conservative, consists of people who have misunderstood the country’s situation or else they are grifters who profit by making this misunderstanding into an ideology. More than a decade ago there were agitators who wanted to keep faith with the Framers of the Constitution; but as Fisher Ames observed in an 1803 letter to Christoper Gore, “all that can be corrupted is corrupting, and all that cannot be perverted is nodding into lethargy.”[xxxvii]

We have come a long way since 1803. The breakdown of federalism as upheld by Washington and Adams succumbed to the egalitarian demagogy of Thomas Jefferson. And now it is all wormwood. America has its own nomenklatura, its own Bolshevik Party, its own system of bureaucratic management, and an emerging dictator class. The renowned conservative economist Thomas Sowell assessed America’s elite as a self-serving, insulated intelligentsia whose policies actively harm the public. Trump became president as part of a popular reaction against this elite. Unfortunately, we now see that Trump is as self-serving and corrupt as his opponents. While it is true enough that Trump is the lesser of two evils when compared with the liberal progressives of the Democratic Party, his ongoing failures make a Democratic victory more likely than not. Some of us made an understandable mistake in assuming that Donald Trump was an anticommunist, that he would save us from socialism. But, as Thomas Molnar remarked some decades ago, “Contemporary rightist ideology is, first of all, not anticommunist, but antidemocratic and antiprogressive.”[xxxviii] Trump may serve as a temporary roadblock to socialism. Yet the mass movement he created is full of Machiavellians who hope to win power for themselves in the wake of this charismatic spellbinder. Is this going to renew conservatism? A Metternich or a Burke would no more recognize Donald Trump as their spiritual descendant than they would recognize Lenin or Trotsky. In fact, Trump has duped conservatives. Yet (to paraphrase Molnar) Trump does not share “in their system of reference, universe of discourse, moral values, and ultimately, their political ideas.”[xxxix]

….

Blind Man’s Bluff: Or, Groping in the Dark

There has always been a reluctance on the part of leading conservatives and liberal politicians, to denounce totalitarian dictators as people we must never do business with. Always, our politicians want to make a treaty, conduct trade, and do business with people who would destroy us if given half a chance. The moral rot we find in our politicians is a corollary of a rising moral idiocy which has spread like a disease to all sides. There is a lack of intellectual clarity in our politics. Winston Churchill, above all, had clarity about the wickedness of dictators. Everyone now sees that mistakes were made when we assumed Russia had changed, or when we assumed that normalizing trade with China would lead to a reform of the Communist Party. But even so, we do not want to adopt measures that are now necessary. We want this profit-taking to continue, even though China’s subversion of America is taking place through this same profit-taking.

Originally, the state was the protector of a nation against its enemies, foreign and domestic. It did not exist to facilitate corporate profits or provide cradle to grave goodies. The task of determining who is a friend and who is an enemy belongs to the state. It is the essence of the state’s reason for being. It seems that this has been forgotten. Carl Schmitt, in his book The Concept of the Political, clarified this issue when he wrote:

“The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any [opponent] of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.”

Schmitt’s critique of liberalism is centered on this, insofar as liberals (and libertarians) fundamentally misunderstand the nature of politics by trying to replace the reality of conflict with endless negotiations and economic “competition.” Here is the core problem with liberalism (which also taints conservatism). Mankind is not a homogeneous mass that can be safely put together in any admixture. Some admixtures are explosive. Look at the Hindus and Moslems of the Indian subcontinent, or the Arabs and Israelis, the Serbs and Croats, etc. Some tribes and faiths cannot live in peace. Yet the liberal imagines a path to peace by turning everyone into a consumer with a homogenized worldview. To understand Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, we must understand his definition of “the political.” Just as ethics consists of distinguishing good from evil, and aesthetics consists of distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly, Schmitt argued that politics is entirely driven by the distinction between friend and enemy. The liberal hates the word “enemy,” and would like to replace it. Here we find an important parallel. Just as a moral idiot hates the word “evil” and would like to leave it out of his vocabulary, the liberal becomes a political idiot by eschewing the word “enemy.” (The one exception to their refusal to use the word “enemy,” of course, is Hitler, whose cause Schmitt ended up joining.) The liberal way, at the present time, is to convert the deadly struggle between political enemies into peaceful competition between economic adversaries. The liberal thinks that if people keep talking, they will inevitably find common ground. A liberal might ask, “Are you willing to die for your way of life?” Schmitt would mockingly retort, “Can we negotiate a compromise?”

According to Schmitt, liberal peace is impossible and dangerous on two grounds: (1) By denying the existence of the enemy, a liberal state loses the ability to clearly identify threats to its existence. It becomes weak, indecisive, and incapable of acting during a crisis; and (2) when liberals fight a war, they claim they are not fighting a specific political enemy; rather, they are fighting “for humanity” to establish global peace. Schmitt noted that whoever invokes “humanity” is cheating. By claiming to represent humanity, liberals must brand their enemies as “inhuman” monsters who stand in the way of universal peace. Consequently, liberal wars become total, brutal crusades where compromise is impossible, because you cannot compromise with an “inhuman” enemy. In the last analysis, fighting collectivities can never find permanent peace because of tribal, religious, and cultural differences. As liberalism infects the West, our leaders tend to think that enmity is an exception – a rare occurrence. But history is about enmity, with nations at war with other nations even as they fall into civil war with themselves.

In relation to this, you may be surprised to discover that Donald Trump is liberal; that is, he believes in negotiations, in talking, in making peace through discussion. Before entering office, Trump bragged about ending the war between Ukraine and Russia in a matter of days or weeks. When a strong enmity has flared up, and soldiers are dying in large numbers, peace is not an easy thing to achieve. And then, ironically, Trump got himself into a war with Iran. Yet he has refused to send ground troops to liberate the Iranian people. After participating in a lethal surprise attack on the Iranian leadership, Trump imagined he could turn around and have a neat little negotiation to open the Strait of Hormuz (which the Iranians closed after being attacked). But the enmity which the Iranian leadership now feels for America has reached a point where negotiations are no longer possible. Many government leaders would prefer peace, but the IRCG and the clerics want to punish the Americans by wrecking the American global trading system. Trump does not understand that his actions against Iran cannot be forgiven so easily. Talking will not make peace in this case. Economic sanctions will not make peace. Sending CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow with threats, saying we will target Russian banks and trading companies unless they “leverage” Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, will not work. The Iranian leadership remains fully prepared to wage war and to escalate hostilities against the United States, utilizing “escalation dominance” to counter American pressure despite the devastating strikes on Iran’s infrastructure. Once again, the only way for America to win is to fight on the ground and break the military power of the IRCG (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps); for Trump has enraged the IRCG and there is no turning back. Trump began the war and he must finish it, or the war will finish him. But Trump is incapable of finishing this war. Someone else will have to do it. This means that Trump’s presidency has opened the way to a serious defeat, with dire consequences for our allies and to our financial system.  

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Links and Notes

[i] These secret meetings were described by GRU Col. Stanislav Lunev after his defection to the United States in March 1992.

[ii] Pete Early, Comrade J: The Untold Story of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007), p. 8.

[iii] Notes from a former KGB colonel whose name must be kept anonymous, taken in private conversations with him in 2012.

[iv] V.D. Sokolovskii, editor, Soviet Military Strategy (RAND Corporate translation), pp. 458-461.

[v] Ibid, p. 458.

[vi] How Russian Television Prepared the Public for War – PONARS Eurasia

[vii] Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma International Affairs Committee, and Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy promote “ultranationalist narratives” and are opposed to negotiations. Military victory is seen as the only path forward. See, Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 26, 2026 | ISW

[viii] Skolovskii, p. 434.

[ix] Russia is preparing to mobilise 600,000 people to fight against Ukraine – intelligence | Ukrainska Pravda

[x] Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Soviet Army, pp. 164-182.

[xi] A.A. Sidorenko, translated and published by the United States Air Force, The Offensive (U.S. Government Printing Office), p. 66.

[xii] As cited by Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., in The Soviet Theater Nuclear Offensive (U.S. Air Force), p. 10.

[xiii] Ibid, p. 33.

[xiv] ‘If We Need to Strike, We Will Strike’: Russian Lawmaker Calls for Nuclear Strike on Ukraine to Force Kyiv to Surrender

[xv] Karaganov’s nuclear rant ought to scare Lukashenko | Brookings

[xvi] Sokolovskii, p. 407.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid, pp. 458-59.

[xix] For example, Germany literally destroyed its Cold War era tanks, neglected its U-Boat forces, failed to properly train its small remaining tank force, and did away with most of its armaments factories. Except for the British and Americans, most NATO countries stopped training the military staff required for the coordination of division-sized military formations. In a discussion I had with American and Canadian general-ranked officers in Toronto, the West cannot compete with Russia or China in terms of conventional armament because we must first rebuild our armament industries. This will prove to be a challenging task because we do not have a trained labor force that can perform the jobs needed. At the same time, we have let our heavy industries go to China (e.g., steel production). A Canadian admiral said it would take three to five years to train the workforce and build the plants needed to keep pace with Russian and Chinese military production. The faces of the general officers in the room showed genuine worry. Military power is based on an abundance of military supply, unit replacement, industrial capacity, and skilled labor. The United States is deficient in all three.

[xx] Address by President Vladimir Putin • President of Russia

[xxi] This is a paraphrase taken from a Soviet lawyer, Simona Pipko, who heard Stalin give a lecture on this subject to a group of law students in the early 1950s. She told me that Stalin’s words carried great authority and made a deep impression on her law school class. We can see, of course, that Putin carries forward Stalin’s method in his speeches. Please see Pipko’s book, Baltic Winds: Testimony of a Soviet Attorney, which tells her experiences in the Soviet Union. (It has been a great honor to have spoken to so many former citizens of the Soviet bloc countries, like Simona, who have bravely, and with great determination, carried the torch of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism, despite being ignored by the American public).

[xxii] Putin ‘Probably’ Approved Plan To Kill Ex-Russian Spy, British Report Says : NPR

[xxiii] Soviet Military Strategy, p. 459.

[xxiv] Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, p. 47.

[xxv] Khrushchev made this statement on 17 September 1955 during an impromptu speech at a banquet in Moscow hosted by a visiting delegation of East German dignitaries. The phrase, “when the crayfish whistles on the mountain” is the Russian equivalent of the English phrase, “when pigs fly.” According to a report published in The New York Times the following day, Khrushchev’s remarks were aimed at Western politicians who believed the Soviet Union’s post-Stalin friendliness meant they were moving away from Marxist ideology.

[xxvi] Editors Brian D. Dailey and Patrick J. Parker, Soviet Strategic Deception (USA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), p. 123.

[xxvii] Andrew M. Łobaczewski, Political Ponerology (Kindle Edition).

[xxviii] Voegelin, p. 49.

[xxix] (PDF) Zbigniew Brzezinski’s last Tweet and Donald J.Trump’s policies on North Korea and theIslamic Republic of Iran

[xxx] Aruthur Bryant, Triumph in the West (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959), p. 6. Special note: Field-Marshal Alan Brooke is official Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke because when Brooke was ennobled in 1945 he could not be “Lord Brooke” because that title was already legally held by the Earl of Warwick’s eldest son. The solution, then, was to fuse the field-marshal’s first and last name into one name, Thus, in September 1945 he was officially gazetted as Baron Alanbrooke, which was upgraded to Viscount Alanbrooke in January 1946. As a peer of the realm, he was formally addressed from that point forward as Lord Alanbrooke.

[xxxi] Ibid, p. 7.

[xxxii] Mattis breaks silence and tears into Trump: ‘He tries to divide us’

[xxxiii] Donald Trump Foreign Policy: H.R. McMaster Explains The Art Of The Deal

[xxxiv] What John Kelly said about Trump’s praise of Hitler and fascist tendencies | PBS News

[xxxv] John F. Kelly – Wikipedia

[xxxvi] John Kelly says Trump is “certainly an authoritarian,” fits the definition of a fascist – CBS News

[xxxvii] Fisher Ames, The Works of Fisher Ames (Liberty Classics), p. 1459.

[xxxviii] Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (New York: Meridian Books, 1961), p. 185.

[xxxix] Ibid.

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