Essence of Time. Chapter 3

(If you haven’t already, please read Chapters 1 and 2 first)

February 15, 2011

I would rather not spend time on preliminary remarks before the main topic, because it is very important. However, I want to make these remarks, because they are also extremely important.

My humblest thanks to those who supported and continue to support out position in “Judgment of Time”, and on “Duel” [a Russian political debate show], and on those broadcasts which will likely be shown on TV in the future. Many thanks to all these people, and my endless gratitude for their support. We don’t divide people into good and bad, smart and stupid. We see people as whole, no matter how simple they might be, or even how far away from us they might be on some issues, but they still love their country, and they are ready to support those who also love it, because they sense that this love is sincere.

We very much value the process, which has begun, of drawing more and more people into an ascending movement of changing their own self-evaluation, of understanding that they really have to come out of their slumber, of realizing that they were, at one point, robbed of their history, and they have to return it to themselves.

But for us, it is very important that something else take place in parallel with this large ascending process which is very important to us. I don’t know whether it has come to your attention that our opponents are now even proud of being a minority, a cohesive and compact minority which can give orders to the majority. As long as they are better structured, and the structuredness of any movement means that it doesn’t just have a periphery, but also a core, and that this core is structured even more deeply, deliberately and in greater detail than the movement as a whole, until we create a such a core, all of these increases in our numbers won’t be worth a plugged nickel. This massiveness would be formless, and it would lead to nowhere.

In order for this massiveness to lead to somewhere, we must form a core. This is not a core of chosen ones. To get in is absolutely free. There is only one admission pass: the desire to take on a certain complexity, the uncertainty of what is happening, its depth. To somehow connect one’s self with it precisely in this way: through understanding, through depth, through some kind of emotional passion inside. People tell me all the time that the word “passion” can be understood in different ways. I don’t know. Brodsky wrote “But what on earth is stronger, but what is stronger than passion?” Passion is love in its highest form, in that form when it becomes a fire, which indeed can remelt, which can give a new quality, which can change people.

This is the only admission pass. Not exclusivity, not closeness, not an attempt to create a small field of chosen ones within a large field, who would then try to manipulate all of this massive energy within their own aims in mind. There’s only one question: are you ready? Welcome, the entrance is open. You have to pay with yourself. This is what the program “Essence of Time” is being created for.

I’ve already stated that the program “Essence of Time” is not a repeat of the program “Judgment of Time”. “Judgment of Time” was a well-made show, but a show nonetheless. The program “Essence of Time” wants to be an ANTI-show. The difference here is the same as between a Play of Daniel or a catholic mystery, and an open air theater or a public spectacle. Both are different genres. There was the great genre of the Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), and there were the Eleusinian Mysteries. What, in the grand scheme of things, is the difference between one and the other? I did a great deal of thinking about this, as a theater director who has dedicated his life specifically to the paratheater, in other words, to a theater that is capable of playing out contemporary mysteries.

The difference is in that a theater spectator has to find performance interesting, and everything depends on the quality of this interest: “interesting”, “most curious”, “just curious”, “amusing”, etc. That is a theater spectator. That is a spectacle. Such a spectacle could be intellectual or anti-intellectual, profound or two-dimensional, highly emotional and spiritual or repulsive, but it is still a spectacle. Those, however, who come to a Eleusinian mystery, who make their way to it walking barefoot through snake-filled swamps, who are compelled to make this journey, do not find it “interesting”, or “curious”, or “amusing”. For them, it is NECESSARY. Profoundly necessary.

If you have what is called an ear for semantics and an absolute perception of wherein lies the difference between words in your native language, then open your ears to this. “Necessary” and “interesting” are different. “Necessary” and “amusing” are different. “Necessary” and “curious” are different.

The main goal now is for this “necessity” to emerge in this core which we are forming, which our adversary has already formed. Not “curiosity”, not “amusement”, and not even “interest”, but “necessity”. And in this sense, it is quite acceptable that part of “Judgment of Time’s” viewership will back away from “Essence of Time”, while other people will find themselves drawn to it.

This does not mean that we are setting one against the other, that in “Judgment of Time” we were engaged in falsifications and playing to audience, and now we are quietly cooking a different kind of soup here. It just means that if an internal core doesn’t form within the movement (such a core exists in any political movement capable of action), then the whole process will die out, and it will die out very quickly. People will stop understanding each other. They will not go deep. They will not reach the ultimate foundations. They will be unable to convey anything to the wide masses, because they will have nothing to convey. Sooner or later, the enemy will feel out the weak spots in our position. It is already trying to feel them out. And then any attempts to really gather forces for a great war of spirit, ideology and worldview will turn out to be attempts with useless means. This is why we are continuing the program “Essence of Time”.

I stress once more that it is both a successor and something entirely different from the program “Judgment of Time”. This is very important to understand.

I apologize in advance to those for whom it seems that I am speaking in a way that is too complex. Yes, it’s complex. But unfortunately, the processes which have taken place in our country and in the world are complex. I also understand that some feel hurt. It seems to them that everything is so simple: it is clear who the enemy is, and that we are all the good guys. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but if one does not articulate some of the simplest issues together with the complex, then a very strange situation will emerge. I will transition to one of these most simple of issues.

You see, there are people for whom the Soviet Union and everything that was Soviet is obviously not good, but evil. What was the Soviet Union, its ideology which was called “communism”, and so forth? For some, it was evil. Everything is clear for them, because they freed themselves from evil. “Yes”, they say, “we freed ourselves at a very high price. Yes, much had to be destroyed along the way. Yes, people were harmed during this. But since this was absolute evil, and we freed ourselves from it, then this is something joyous! We freed you from absolute evil!”

These are enemies, or opponents, or people with opinions different from our own; call them what you want, but they aren’t us. They are different.

And then there’s us. We, who say that the Soviet Union, its ideology, its historical path are good. And don’t tell me that it’s “a little bit of good and a little bit of evil.” Clearly, any entity has both one and the other. You have to pick a position. Is it good? Yes or no? If no, then don’t watch our broadcasts. What for? But if it’s good, then the next and most simple of questions is why was it taken away. Why? For this good no longer exists. We lost the country. It’s our country; we love it, so why did we lose it? Is it possible to move forward without answering this question?

Some say that evil forces took it away, enemies. Excuse me, but I know too much about this era! I’ll present but one example. Do you remember the “Tbilisi incident” when, allegedly, a certain part of the demonstrators was killed using spades, and “the brutal army” did this, the paratroopers? Frightful screams started because of this. There were two investigations. One was led by Prosecutor General’s Office, which said that according to the International Red Cross, the bodies had no lacerations of slashing injuries, that the people died from asphyxiation, from compression of their rib cage. They sat down on the ground, and then the mob ran them over. This was the version from the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the Prosecutor General wrote a corresponding report.

 

Photos of the April 9, 1989 Massacre victims on a billboard in Tbilisi.

 

And there was Sobchak’s version, according to which the army was criminal, and the servicemen were blood-soaked butchers who chopped peaceful civilians into pieces.

The Council of People’s Deputies discussed these two versions. Do you remember how it was elected? To a great degree, it was elected according to a so-called corporative principle: from the army, from the Party, etc. It was not a direct election by our citizens according to majority rule or according to party lists. It was a certain corporative-guild principle. Consequently, there was a certain number of generals or military officers elected from the army. I think there were also representatives from the trade unions, and there were certainly ones from the Party. And so, the Council of People’s Deputies of the USSR was supposed to decide which version was true: Sobchak’s version, which humiliated the army, or the version from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

It so happened that my close friends asked me to help the Prosecutor General and all who defended his version. I considered doing so to be absolutely necessary. Once we started doing this, we started receiving the most extreme threats, but we kept doing it anyway. We printed flyers which said, “Demand the truth about Tbilisi”, and these flyers were placed on the council delegates’ desks. We collected materials; we convinced them to make a film (made by the talented TV journalist Nevzorov) in which the Prosecutor General presented his version. We also showed it to the deputies.

The deputies had complete information about these two versions. But what does complete information have to do with this?

For the military, this was about their caste, if you will, this was about their guild, about their army as their native and beloved group. Not even about the country, for it was clear that recognizing Sobchak’s version meant the collapse of the country. But ultimately, this wasn’t just about the country. It was, I repeat, about the community of people in uniform, the corporation, the caste, call it by any other name.

The Prosecutor General’s version, with our flyers, with the film, in a situation of complete information and an absolutely primitive clarity about what is good and what is evil, about what favors the army and what is against the army, about what favors the Soviet Union and what is against it, got the absolute minority of the votes from the military delegation to the Council of People’s Deputies, from generals and officers! And there was a multitude of them. What do you aim to tell me? That they were all recruited by the CIA? That would have been too simple. I can give plenty of similar examples on this topic.

Therefore, this evil was created. It wasn’t some strange villains who took this good away from us. This happened with the serious participation of various groups within our society, and first and foremost, within the elite. I was authorized to participate in the analysis of the source materials in Yeltsin’s 1991 election to the Presidency of the RSFSR. I can confidently tell you that the voting in KGB apartment buildings and in other privileged housing was 92 to 96% in favor of Yeltsin (and at that time, there was sufficient freedom of elections).

I was at the Council of People’s Deputies of Russia when, if you remember, this group of six: Goryacheva, Isakov, and others, tried to remove Yeltsin from the office of President of the RSFSR. My friends from the Party were running through the rows, asking the Obkom [Oblast’ level Communist Party committee – translator’s note] secretaries, “What are you pressing? Which button?” The Obkom secretary would answer “The most important thing is to get rid of Mishka [Mikhail Gorbachev – translator’s note].” “Wait, what do you mean, Mishka? What are you talking about? Don’t you see that Yeltsin is against the Soviet Union?! He’s breaking the country apart; he wants capitalism!” “First we’ll get rid of Mishka, and then we’ll deal with Yeltsin.”

Were all of those people who were pressing those buttons CIA agents?

Did the Party, which was already free from the, let’s assume, Stalin and post-Stalin era yoke of the KGB and other agencies, try to do anything with Gorbachev? It already understood that Gorbachev was destroying it. But it voted for him as the General Secretary during the XXVIII Party Congress. And it did not remove him from office during the plenary sessions between congresses.

I’ll never forget his eyes, how he looked at the delegates of the plenary session. He looked at them with endless disdain. Time after time, they didn’t remove him from office. He performed “Kaa’s dance before the Bandar-log monkeys” in front of them. They weren’t CIA agents; they were “Bandar-logs”.

 

“Monkeys As Judges Of Art” by Gabriel von Max, 1889.

 

How did this come about? How did it come about that a considerable part of the elite capitulated and gave up the country, that society on all levels could not counteract this, that the delegates of the XXVIII Party Congress did not remove the murderer of the Party and of country from office? For it was clear by then who Gorbachev was. But this clearly was not done!

There are many questions. And these are just the simplest of questions. These are questions about the nature of the weakness that society itself demonstrated. Why did it give up the country? And furthermore, we understand that it gave it up without a fight. Do we not clearly see that, across the country, there was an opportunity to resist what was called the breakup of the USSR. And all across the country, this opportunity was not realized. First and foremost, in Moscow. Part of those who came to demonstrate against Article 6 of the Constitution (on the authority of the CPSU, the ruling party) gathered there because the Moscow City Party Committee summoned them there, because an assignment came, an order from the Kremlin. And this indeed was done!

In the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR, the corresponding majority could have solved the problem with Gorbachev many times, but it did not. Our opponents will ask us all the time, “Now, how come the republics voted for sovereignty and against the Soviet Union afterwards?” And so on. And we will spend plenty of time giving clarifications.

But if we can’t put these questions before ourselves even in our exclusive discussion, in the program “Essence of Time”, and we don’t search for deep answers, then what will people be armed with tomorrow, when they enter serious ideological battles? They will wind up absolutely disarmed, just like they wound up disarmed in the 1980s, when it was time to answer many painful historical questions, but they didn’t have any answers, because all they had was meager rations of serenity. This was fine when all they had to do was just live, but it turned out to be absolutely inadequate when the time came to go to war, to fight for one’s own truth.

And so, if the Soviet Union and Soviet ideology were good, then how come this good was

a) given up at all

b) given up without a fight?

And finally,

c) do you understand how laughable the explanation is, according to which only the CIA, the evil foreign powers, the West are the ones who did everything?

This explanation is absolutely laughable; because first of all, it ignores reality. And second of all, it does not answer the question of what KGB was doing, as well as other secret services whose mission was to protect the country. Ultimately, one could say that the CIA and other foreign adversaries were doing their job; sure, it was evil from our standpoint, but they were doing their duty to their countries, which called us the enemy “the evil empire”.

But how did our secret services do their duty? We clearly see the result! Did they even do something? Did they just overlook everything? Were they made up of such unprofessional people back then? Or did they contain a certain elite strategic ambiguity within themselves? Of what sort?

If we will not figure this out and we will not understand why we lost the USSR, then how will we bring back what was lost? If we do not understand this, then how are supposed to fight serious ideological battles? These battles still only await us.

This is what we need the program “Essence of Time” for. We have to recognize what our adversary is saying. It was no accident that Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev said, “We broke its spine” [“…Perestroika, led by Gorbachev, succeeded in breaking the spine of the most powerful monster of the XX century, the totalitarian social order. I think that the global community has yet to completely understand this fact of history, which was so fateful to the entire world.” Yakovlev, A. “Paradoxes of History and the Logic of Actions”. Kontinent. 123. 2005]. Imagine a creature with a broken spine. With good musculature, a clear thinking brain, and a fractured spinal column. This creature can squirm, it can stretch out and reach the voting button; it can even talk about how bad everything is, but it is not capable of effective, powerful action.

This does not mean that I am saying the situation is hopeless. I am simply giving the diagnosis and saying, that if this is a creature with a broken spine, and this means this spine needs to be treated. This is an extremely complicated medical operation (I don’t know, a laser operation, a highly precise operation), but it needs to be cured. And then this creature, having become a people in the full sense of the word, will demonstrate its greatness, as it has demonstrated many times throughout history. But as long as its spine is broken, it will barely squirm, and we will find happiness in the fact that this squirming is becoming more massive, in the fact that the mouth of the creature is cursing those who broke its spine with more or less fury.

But the goal is to cure this spine! For only this can be the goal if we are talking about a real fight, and not sublimations, compensations, shows, or theatralizations. There is no other political goal! And the “core” of the political movement must take this goal upon itself. It must complete this work and give its results to the “periphery”, then to the periphery of the “periphery” and to all of the people.

There is no abasement of others in these words. Professionals must do this work. We are gathering them and saying, “This is the problem for the nationally-minded intelligentsia. It is most difficult, but it must be solved. For if we do not solve it, then it will be the end of the people, the end of the country, and a global catastrophe.”

Osip Mandelstam, 1914

There exists artistic imagery, which is sometimes much more valuable than analytical reports. I will talk about two images. The first one belongs to Mandelstam.

The age. The layer of lime in the sick son’s blood

Hardens. Moscow sleeps like a wooden casket.

There’s nowhere one can run from the despot age…

The snow smells of apples, as in the old days.

…Could I possibly betray to gossips –

The frost is smelling of apples again –

The oath I swore to the Fourth Estate

Vows solemn to the point of tears?

 

Mandelstam talks of an oath to the Fourth Estate. If anyone doesn’t remember, the Third are the bourgeoisie, then the Fourth are the downtrodden, the proletariat. And here are perhaps the most important lines:

 

I want to escape from my own house.

But where? It is dark in the street,

And my conscious gleams in front of me, white,

Like salt scattered on the pavement.

 

And here is the central thing, what everybody probably remembers:

 

My age, my beast, who will ever
Look into your eyes
And with his own blood glue together
The backbones of two centuries?

 

Here, Mandelstam is an anti-Yakovlev. Yakovlev cheerfully says, “We broke its spine”. On the other hand, Mandelstam talks about the oath to the Fourth Estate and about the need to glue together “the backbones of two centuries” with one’s own blood. In other words, to heal the broken spine.

There is another image which is also well-known to everyone. The topic here is not a broken spine, but about the time which is out of joint. Hamlet says this. At one time, I memorized this monologue in English, and I can say that Shakespeare quite often uses very common and crude language. And if Hamlet’s words were to be translated more or less accurately, then it would not be “the string which tied the days together has broken, how shall I reconnect their shreds?” [Boris Pasternak’s translation] or “the chain of times has torn” [Duke Konstantin Romanov’s translation], and not “the age has shaken itself apart” [Mikhail Lozinsky’s translation]. Hamlet literally says, translated to Russian, close to this: “And why has the lot to fix this friggin’ time fallen on me?” [“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” – original]

“Hamlet Sees The Ghost Of His Father” by Eugene Delacroix, 1843.

He’s talking about the same thing as Mandelstam. Here, “the time” which “is out of joint” and “the broken spine” which needs to be healed, are one and the same. Therein lies the problem for the program “Essence of Time”. And we will solve it. For those who want to solve it with us: come and watch our broadcast. Those who do not will come later, when we will show our results, when we will gather the core, and when we will be able to present these products. And in parallel with this, we will talk about the same thing in different genres and in different programs. I’ve just taken part in the program “Duel” (Channel “Russia-1”, February 10, 2011).

I repeat, if this core will not be assembled, then all of our work is as useless as a knife without a blade. And the scariest part is that no one has been assembling this core for the past 20 years. I am not telling you that I know how to assemble it. And ultimately, I could care less who assembles it, me or someone else. Let us assemble it together; offer your advice on how to do so.

But understand that, without this, no country will be restored. In that case, everything we are talking about is nostalgic sniveling, and not a serious conversation between men. A conversation between men now has to start here, among our own, in the program “Essence of Time”, to set the time right, as Hamlet said. To counter the scumbags who broke the spine with our ability to heal this spine and to create the possibility of a political movement in the full sense of the word.

There is no such possibility. If it had existed, then the situation would have been corrected not now, in 2011, but much earlier. But it has not been corrected; it is being exacerbated, and it will continue to be further exacerbated. Therefore, my diagnosis is correct. Perhaps very unpleasant, but correct. And until everyone understands this, the situation will continue to worsen. Let it be so that few understand this. What is important is that these few gather together and start working. That they start working on what we are discussing.

And here I transition to the most important. To that, which had I put off to the side for this extended preamble. Unfortunately, without such a preamble, it would have been impossible to keep talking.

And so, I transition to the paramount, to the Soviet heritage. The Soviet heritage has several layers: the facts, the meaning of these facts, the unapparent layers, and that which was not completed. What is the Soviet heritage in its fullness? Is it only our base for moving forward? Or does it contain a certain future in and of itself?

In the program Duel, which I mentioned, Mr. Kapitsa [a Russian physicist, demographer and the host of a popular science TV program] spoke about how everybody is arguing about the past, but it is necessary to go forward into the future. Of course we need to go forward into it.

But first of all, it is somewhat naive to point to the necessity of talking about the future in a program whose topic is the discussion of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Soviet Union’s catastrophe.

Secondly, it is somewhat naive to think that, without repairing the past, any future is possible at all.

Thirdly, we have fallen so far behind that the past has become the future. “Remembering the Future”, this is what we could call our broadcast.

And finally, fourthly, this past contains the seedlings of our future. We must discover them and then jump into this future . But in order to do this, the past must be repaired. It must be conceptualized in its four components: the facts, the meaning of the facts, the unapparent aspects, and that which was not completed.

Why has our past become so important for the future? The response to this question depends on whether or not we understand what is happening in the world. Events of catastrophic proportions are unfolding in front of our eyes. Everything that happened now in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and so on, is a global process of immense significance.

Unfortunately, people have an insanely hard time when they don’t understand the meaning of what is happening. Even when they have facts laying on the table in front of them, which, it would seem, one could easily examine with the naked eye, no microscopes or telescopes; even then people remain unaware of these facts. The great scientist Noam Chomsky said, that when the brain lacks matrices, a person can have something obvious in plain view and not notice it.

Events are unfolding in front of our eyes, which everyone seems to be talking about, but no one is comprehending. Moreover, no one is comprehending what these events have to do with a) the Soviet heritage which we are discussing, and b) our future.

The tragedy of our era lies in the fact that when even the elite, the intellectual part of society, its inner core, receives the most obvious of facts, when these facts get put right on the table, and they hear “Look at what’s happening,” they still remain prisoners of their conceptions, and sometimes quite primitive ones.

One of these primitive conceptions is that radical Islamism is the enemy of the United States. And since the United States are Russia’s most terrible enemy, then radical Islamism, being the enemy of our enemy, must be our friend.

I agree that the United States are a terrible foe, that today’s world is unipolar, and that just because one pole is going mad, going insane, it doesn’t mean that the world has become multipolar. No one has yet challenged the US, and the US is still spinning the process wherever it would like. And it is spinning it in a frightening direction.

It’s something else that I disagree with; that the United States of America and radical Islamism are, don’t you know, such irreconcilable adversaries, and if one of them (radical Islamism) is our enemy, then the other one just has to be our friend. It’s a trap! But traps are one of the explanations for why Russia and the Russians were so badly “licked”.

I explain. Russians are undefeatable in war. Probably, the Russians are the strongest people when it comes to war. I won’t examine small peoples, like Pashtuns and the like. I won’t talk about the Vietnamese. Some say that the Germans are quite comparable to the Russians. It seems to me that the Russians are stronger than everyone when it comes to war. But have you read Richard Nixon’s book Victory Without War? What is victory without war? If there was no war, then what was there?

There was a game, a very delicate one, very cold, with many moves, which was much more complex and much more important than war. No one could have beaten the Russians in war. But it was a game. And the game is played with the hands and brains of people, who have grown accustomed to domination over hundreds of years.

It is possible to win in a war by possessing professionalism, passion, simplicity, and talent. Some time ago, I had the opportunity to familiarize myself with materials regarding models created based on mathematical strategic game theory. And I can say that when we ran calculations based on these models on a set of operations from the Great Patriotic War, we found that Operation Bagration was executed in a mathematically ideal manner. The people who executed it had been walking in straw shoes not long before. They executed it according to the supreme laws of mathematics, not allowing for a single mistake. I won’t talk about the Kiev Cauldron or about the beginning of the war. I am talking about one particular operation. Our military commanders “licked” all of these highly sophisticated conquerors of Europe: these Reinhards, Tippelskirchs, Jordans, Weisses, etc., like children. They came from simple families, but this did not stop them, because they were intelligent, talented, mobilized; they passionately loved their Motherland; they were professionals. This was sufficient.

But there are things that take a very long time to cultivate. I don’t even know how to explain this, but there is something in the very instinct and spirit of domination which cultivates THIS over centuries. THIS is called the game.

I remember how Alexander Andreyevich Prokhanov [chief editor of the patriotic newspaper “Zavtra” – translator’s note] was trying to convince me to write something about the film “Casino Royale”. I told him, “Sasha, what am I supposed to write about movies for?” – “No, no, I feel something metaphysical there, something insanely important.”

When Gorbachev sat down behind the global card table, he was beaten like a child. But the topic is the global game itself. This game must be learned.

“Small Card Players” by Le Nain brothers, 17th century.

 

Why must we speak about our defeat? Because if you haven’t recognized your defeat, in a game or in a “Cold War”, no matter, then you will never win. Any real revanchism, and we’re talking about healthy revanchism here, starts with recognizing that you’ve been “licked”. And next, a real competitive, wartime, fighting anger emerges from inside you. If this anger does not emerge along with other feelings (but it’s not going to emerge until you recognize what happened), then you will spend all your time living in a half-slumber, engaging yourself with somnolent mumbling. This is unacceptable. This is how you sleep your country away. We already slept it away once.

And so, we must recognize that we lost this game (or this “victory without war”). And in order to win next time, we must learn the game, we must understand it in its complexity. It is very difficult to do this, but it is necessary. Understand: it is necessary! That regular people, our physicists, who have come to their senses, our mathematicians, our technical specialists, and others, start digging through the details of what is happening, that all of these people understand the nature of the game. And this cannot be done without examining real examples.

There is nothing more naive and stupid than the idea that the enemy of your enemy in the game is your friend. There is nothing more naive than the idea that radical Islamism, which constantly curses the United States, is something the United States doesn’t need. The United States needs an instrument and a convenient adversary for the great game. A convenient adversary, a good enemy, the kind one is supposed to be, is sometimes much more useful than a friend.

The United States, in the grand scheme of things, had and has two main stratagems. One is, so to say, the stratagem of the Republican Party, or “The Henry Kissinger Special”, according to which the Middle East rests on the following pillars: Israel, Egypt, partially Turkey, and on stable military regimes, about which it was said “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”, in other words, on secular authoritarianism. The other stratagem, so to say, is “The Zbigniew Brzezinski Special”. It lies in the idea that the United States needs radical Islamism in order to play on all fields. What is the difference between these stratagems?

According to the first stratagem, Kissinger’s one, the United States needs a new world order. I stress that they view domination as order. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski think in terms of American world domination, but Kissinger and his people (I am figuratively referring Kissinger here, as I am figuratively referring to “Republicans”) view domination as a new world order, or as the Fourth Rome.

What is Rome? Rome is when legions stand in the provinces, and when these legions sustain Pax Romana, an order according to which someone can become a Roman citizen, and someone will be his slave; when roads will be built; and at the same time, the local barbarians will submit to Rome. And when all of this has a single center – Ceasar. Order must exist on every territory upon which Rome sets foot with the boot of its legions. The sum of these micro-regional orders is the new Roman order.

The United States has been dreaming of establishing such an order both generally speaking, and especially after the Soviet Union collapsed. It dreamed of it, but it turned out not to have the stomach for it. It turned out that the American people, self-indulgent and asleep in their conformism, don’t want to guarantee this new world order with their own blood. What does the new world order mean now? It’s not just a modernization plan for the countries being conquered, like the one that had once existed for Japan and Germany. It’s the necessity to keep 300-400 thousand troops in Iraq, 500-600 thousand in Iran (because, without that kind of occupation force, any bombing campaign would be the height of stupidity); it is the readiness to deploy forces to Pakistan, and so forth. And it is necessary to offer these countries, I repeat again, something similar to the Japanese or European scenarios for modernization under occupation: The MacArthur Plan or the Marshall Plan.

The United States isn’t ready for this. The American people don’t want to have a 3-million-strong land army, because that would be an army with a compulsory draft. The United States has understood, that it cannot establish an order like that.

But it can’t say no to world domination! First of all, they don’t want to. Anglo-Saxons never say no to world domination. Never! Secondly, it can’t do this for objective reasons. Because the United States has, apart from the high-tech industry, which employs a few million people, but certainly not the majority of the population, only two means of domination: the printing press and aircraft carriers.

The printing press prints money, and it imposes them onto the world, while the aircraft carriers bomb those, who don’t want to take this money, and they take it. No other means exist. If the United States gives up world domination, then the printing press will disappear. And what then will happen to United States? It won’t fall from first place to second! It will wall from first place to fourth or fifth. And once it falls like that, the United States will enter a catastrophe of disintegration. Even if it wanted to give up world domination, it understands that, in such a case, wouldn’t be able to evade a catastrophe. Consequently, it will never do it.

But if the United States can’t and doesn’t want to give up world domination; and at the same time, it can’t guarantee it in the way that the figurative “Kissinger-style new world order” requires, then it has to guarantee it some other way. Hence a new term: “the new world disorder”. Not an order, but a disorder! I first realized the seriousness of this concept when I began to familiarize myself with the works of Steven Mann, who has been working on applying chaos theory to politics since the 1980s, and who then became a high-ranking diplomat to various countries, the State Department’s adviser on the Caspian Sea, etc. It became clear to me that this is quite a well thought out theory, which uses a serious mathematical apparatus, while simultaneously applying itself to the practice of politics.

Brzezinski is different from Mann, first, in that he’s older. Secondly, he is a scholar of the humanities, not a technocrat. And in this sense, he’s always deeper. Ultimately, the questions put forth are simple. If your country stops being attractive for investment, then the investments start flowing somewhere else. But if things turn bad in the place where they are flowing, then things will be good on your end. It’s all relative. What does “good” mean? What does it mean that you’re “good” or “bad”? Excuse me! You, perhaps, are very bad, but if everyone around are horrible, then you are good. And the investments flow to you. Therefore, if things are made bad in other spots of the world, then it will be good for you. Why not aid one’s competitors in worsening their situation? Then your situation becomes good. This is the Brzezinski-Obama Special, which differs from the Bush-Kissinger Special.

But there are two things that the American elite and the global Western elite agree upon. I’ll talk first about the American elite.

The supreme formula of the American realpolitik sounds simply (though many pretend not to understand it): “The main enemy is the country which comes closest to reaching a certain potential which is necessary to challenge American might.” Period. The closer a country comes to reaching the level from which it can challenge American might, the more dangerous it is. And what its ideology is couldn’t be any less important. It doesn’t matter if its ideology is the ideology of freedom and democracy, or an ideology of authoritarianism, or any other ideology (sovietism, for example)! What matters is that you have approached the level from which you can challenge American might. If the Soviet Union has come closest, then it’s the number one enemy. If China comes closest, then it is the number one enemy. If a consolidated Europe comes closest, the it is the number one enemy. Anyone who comes closest to approaching the level, from which it is possible to just challenge American might, becomes the number one enemy. Therein lies the universal law. Republicans and Democrats are united here.

Who has now begun to challenge American might to the greatest degree? China. And the region of Asia as a whole. How can this threat be dealt with? This is what torments the minds of the political intellectuals of the United States. This is the first question.

And there is a second global question, which torments the minds of everyone: “Tell us, please”, they all say, “what are we to do with a world, where the Chinese and the Indians achieve a level of affluence equal to the American one? With a world where, in addition to one billion people, who call themselves “golden”, there will be another four billion, who will also want a house, electricity for their house, two cars, their tanks full of gas, and so on?”

Several times, I have observed various discussions among the international intellectual elite. Anything and everything was being discussed, except for this blunt and simple question. Because it has no answer. Because at that moment, when 4 billion people, making a claim to the same level of affluence as the Americans, will emerge, the world as we know it will collapse. But no one will ever allow them to emerge, both because this emergence would mean that the United States would find themselves discarded and in the zone of an unrecoverable catastrophe, and because what to do with the world is entirely unclear. There are no new ideas as to what to do with the world.

Reasoning stops here, and the next point of this reasoning is simple: the entire global philosophy needs to be changed. For throughout the 18th, 19th, and even the beginning of the 20th century, global philosophy did have an answer to the question of what progress is: humanism, a certain modernization (which is very poorly understood here, and which is confused with technical modernization: with upgrading airplanes, computers, etc. Modernization is a most profound process). It was thought that this modernization should happen everywhere, and that it would end with the establishment of prosperity in all the countries of the world. It was said, “Yes, the Africans and the Indians will get there later, because they’re savages.We must first teach them something, bearing “the White Man’s burden”, as Kipling wrote. But at some later time, they too will rejoice in this same prosperity!” This was the philosophy of global Modernity.

This philosophy, which is roughly 450 years old, has come to a close. An almost 500-year era of a certain philosophy is reaching its end. But almost everyone in Russia, including the highest political elite, believe like children that this era is continuing. And that, consequently, Russia has some place in some sort of modernization.

I’ll clarify. Modernization (or Modernity), if taken as a great stratagem, and not as a way to upgrade airplanes or computers, lies, at first approximation, in the following. There is a traditional society, a society of premodernity (one that is peasant, collectivist, agrarian). And there is the necessity to create a modern industrial society. Material is taken out of traditional society; the peasant, who is decent, hard-working, who lives very humbly, who is quite impoverished, is pulled out of there. This peasant is given a little bit more, and he is put in front of an industrial machine. He is willing to work for this “little bit more”, because the alternative he’s faced with is a pauper’s wage. Therefore, he has a strong motivation to work.

 

“Steel Workers” by Corneliu Baba, 1948.

 

Modernization is a process in which “the traditional society” is thrown into a furnace, like firewood of coal, and thus the train keeps running. It continues to run as long as there is fuel to throw into the furnace, first of all.

Second of all, how does modernization throw this into the furnace? It destroys the collectivist traditional society. It individualizes it, atomizes it, converts it into a contemporary state, forces a different set of regulatory standards upon it, and so on. Read Hobbes, as well as Weber and others.

From this standpoint, modernization today is happening only in The Great Far East, in one of the parts of the world. And furthermore, authoritarian parties, communist and otherwise, are managing this wonderfully. It’s China. It’s a semi-authoritarian India, which is formally democratic, but which has a powerful core. It’s Vietnam, from which I recently returned awestruck, because very soon we will need to talk not at all about catching up to China (this is laughable; at this point, we will never catch up to China, if we shall keep moving the same way).

Very soon, we will have to talk about whether or not we can catch up to Vietnam, which has two or three harvests a year, instead of a zone of high-risk agriculture like ours. Where electronic assembly plants are standing all around Hanoi. Where one can take labor forces out of traditional society in huge numbers (weavers, who are used to doing delicate work with their hands, both women and men), and it is very easy to bring this human material to a state of “nanopurity”, to train it, to put it in front of modern industrial machines, and to organize assembly according to 21st century technologies. There’s a massive amount of these people, and the country is moving forward very quickly. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, with Mao Zedong’s and Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleums. And with a GDP growth of 8-11% over the past year!

The ruling authoritarian party ensures harmony between the rich and the poor. On one hand, it takes part of the generated wealth from the rich, and it tells them, “If you don’t give it up, we’ll beat your head with a stick.” On the other hand, as it gives what it took to the poor, it says, “If the poor demand more, they get a stick upside the head, too.” The balance is built on the capitalist class being able to generate these 8-11% of growth in the national wealth, and that it is in the yoke of powerful parties.

And population growth… Young Vietnamese men and women riding around on mopeds (mostly red ones, they like them) seem to say “We are charging headlong into ‘prosperity’, and we will work as much as is necessary!” And the region grows. This includes communist Vietnam and China, semi-democratic India, as well as the classically capitalist South Korea, Singapore, etc. The entire Great Far East region has become region #1, the region of modernity.

There is a second region, The Great West, which includes the United States. This region has rejected Modernity as such. It has sworn an oath to Postmodernity as a way of life: to immoralism, to the absence of an industrial movement, basing itself not on the traditional society, not on industry, but on the service sector. It’s a gigantic service region. I personally consider half of it to be based on swindlers, but let’s say it’s a finance-service region, an informational-service region. A small amount of high-tech is added here. That’s what kind of region it is.

And now, a third region is taking form in front of our eyes. If the first region is the region of Modernity, if region #2 is the region of Postmodernity, then the third is the region of Counter-Modernity, where people say, “Well, we don’t want your Modernity, unlike the Vietnamese, the Chinese, and whoever. It’s all vile; it’s all evil. We want sand, the desert, a camel, a saber, and a tent. And you can go to hell with your Modernity, and moreover, with your Postmodernity. You are our enemies. We want something different.”

This region is, of course, mostly Islamic. But there exist many kinds of Islam. There is an Islam which is attracted to modernization. There is a semi-secular Islam which is already modernized. And there is Counter-Modernist radical Islamism. I have bookcases full of materials which scream that specifically Western leaders, Western civilizations killed and destroyed the moderate, non-radical roots in Islam. That they are the ones who cultivated the new culture of radical Islamism. That it is artificially cultivated. But either way, the third region already exists.

Why are we only talking about Islam when we should be talking about the region of Counter-Modernity and archaicity as a whole (and regions of a different archaicity exist)? Because, of course, Islamist archaicity is the most powerful. It is a billion heated people who are striving for what they consider to be their virtue and their truth, and they will strive for it with greater and greater power. This is already clear.

And so, there are these three regions. Three regions, let us remember:

Region #1: The Great Far East, Modernity

Region #2: The Great West, Postmodernity

Region #3: The Great South, or Counter-Modernity

Now tell me frankly and in all honesty: where is the place for Russia here? Russia can enter The Great Far East, and it can compete with it in terms of Modernity? It doesn’t have a traditional society! It has already modernized itself three times. It already entered the postindustrial world a long time ago. Now, it has been thrown back out. Our academic centers were progressive elements of postindustrial culture. Modernization was conducted several times: under Peter I, under Stolypin, and under Stalin. And then afterwards, when failing villages were destroyed. We don’t have a traditional society, which we can throw into the furnace of modernization; this is a utopia! We can’t go down this path, because even if we wanted to, we lack the resources necessary for this. Do you understand? We utterly lack them!

Therefore, talk of classical modernization is nothing but empty words. We can’t make people work like that. We don’t have as many young people as they do, and we can’t make them work the way they work. And we can’t give them as little as they do there, to make them feel happy, because they have already had more. Moreover, we are a northern country. A northern one, do you understand? Here, you need a house, you need fuel, you need some way to heat yourself. We can’t compete in the field of agricultural production with regions that have 100% subsidized agriculture, or with regions that have three harvests per year. This is obvious! We are not the region of Modernity. We are not The Great Far East.

Nor are we The Great West. Everyone who strives to pull us into this Great West is just extremely naive. And these naive attempts have been going on for the past 20 years.

Who are we, then? We are not this South, either.

But then this is a catastrophe! We endlessly need, endlessly love, and endlessly value our Motherland. But from the standpoint of this picture (which is not the only one!), all of the external forces have sentenced it to death. It simply doesn’t have a place on the world map which is taking form! A great global perestroika is unfolding. And the events in Egypt, Algeria, and in other places, are a great restructuring from the format of “Modernity of everyone” to the “tripartite” format.

But that’s not all, because something else lurks within this format. It is, in fact, The Great West which is forming The Great South, in order to strike a blow to The Great Far East, because the region which continues its development is the most dangerous enemy to The Great West, which has stopped in its development. This means China, and India, and prospectively, a coalition of some Great Far Eastern countries. Development continues there. The most nightmarish thought for the Americans is a unification of Japan with China in the process of industrial and postindustrial growth.

We are busy discussing a single Skolkovo, which is completely up in the air as to whether something will come of it. The Chinese have created 1200 state-run innovation super-centers! And they’re recruiting our scientists to come over. And they go, because here they are impoverished, and the Chinese pay more. The Great Far East is developing rapidly, and it will challenge the might of the United States and of the West as a whole. And in order for it not to present this challenge, it must be stopped.

But nobody neither wants nor is able to stop it with a head-on nuclear war. No one will ever dare to wage a direct nuclear war against China, though it is being discussed. And furthermore, “Team B-2”, led by Wolfowitz, discussed this, and it said that the deadline for waging such a war was 2017 [this refers to the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board, and its 2008 report “China’s Strategic Modernization”, which in many ways repeats the methodology and language of “Team B”, a 1976 worst-case scenario competitive analysis project which was launched in response to a perceived underestimation of Soviet nuclear capabilities by the CIA – translator’s note].

We are entering into the stage of uneven development of imperialism, which Hilferding and Lenin described. Essentially, China today is “Germany of 1914”, the United States is “Great Britain of 1914”; and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world is rolling not into World War II, which was a war of ideologies, but into World War I. The Third is an analog of the First, because it is a war to stop the development of “the new Germany”, which is now called China and The Great Far East as a whole.

 

“Chinese People On The Underground — Berlin” by Christian Wilhelm Allers, 1889.

 

Since everyone is afraid of such a war, and The Great Far East is arming rapidly, the only possible decision will likely be made: to use chaos theory, i.e. to throw the entire might of The Great South against this Great Far East. Having created this Great South as a controllable tiger, which can tear into someone else’s throat. This is what it is being created for. This is why the Kissinger model is being traded for the Brzezinski model in front of our very eyes.

I have long been criticized for saying that Bush was better for Russia than Obama, and that this whole “reset” is deceitful. But now, everything has already become clear! Obama has taken off his mask. It’s just that nobody sees it. Why was Bush better? Not because he loves Russia, and Obama hates it. We could care less who loves it and who doesn’t. Most importantly, everyone hates it. There, in the country that we are discussing, everybody hates it, except for individual people, artists (I am talking about the political elite). We don’t care if they love us or hate us, we’re not children. What we care about is that they go to war with someone other than us, while we’re still weak. And, to the degree that this is possible (again, because we are insanely weak), that they raise oil prices. Yes, the curse of oil. But only imagine that oil prices would fall to $19-15 per barrel; imagine what will unfold here rapidly! No new forces will develop here. Something completely different will happen here.

This means that it was important to us that Bush do what he was doing. We had to curse him, and we cursed him. Of course, the most dangerous of all were Cheney and the neoconservatives, because they had already decided to go to war with us in 2008, and this was even more dangerous than Brzezinski. But, if instead of us, they would have gone to war with The Great South, then it would mean that the greatest danger would not have come to pass, when the West allies itself with The Great South. For us, this is the most dangerous thing of all. This is Brzezinski’s project; this is the Afghan story all over again. This is our total demise; this is the strategy of chaos; and now, it is unfolding in front of our very eyes. Precisely this, and nothing else.

Meanwhile, we’re pretending not to see this. Like an ostrich, we’re hiding our head in under our wing, whilst drowning the sober analysis of events, the rational mercilessness of what is happening, and the global essence of what is happening, in sententia. Who we like, who we don’t like… The fate of our people and the fate of world civilization is at stake, and we’re having a discussion in completely different categories. And because we’re having a discussion in completely different categories, then even when absolute evidence is put on our desk, we still don’t want to see it. We still don’t want to understand that this evidence is mercilessly obvious in its nature.

In discussing the merciless proof that the events in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, simply have the Americans behind them, that this is Obama’s new strategy, which is in fact a remake of Brzezinski’s old strategy (and in the context of a new model of world organization, it is even more dangerous than Brzezinski’s strategy), we, first and foremost, are dealing with the famous Wikileaks. All of us had secret documents put on our desk, after which it is simply impossible to say that it was not the Americans who made the events in Egypt.

I’ll make the disclaimer, that there are always natural protests, a natural energy of the popular masses; there are always crimes that regimes commit, especially authoritarian ones, Mubarak’s or otherwise. I’m not saying that the Americans are making this entirely, just bribing every single Egyptian and sending them to the streets. Of course, the process is different. The idea is to turn certain pre-conditions and accumulated energy, into a process going in a specific direction. But how can one deny that the Americans did this, having Wikileaks documents in front of one’s self? How can one do this with, for example, this kind of evidence in front of one’s self?

 

EXHIBIT #1

A document from the US Embassy in Cairo published by Wikileaks and given to “The Daily Telegraph” [The Daily Telegraph. 28.01.2011.]

 SUBJECT: APRIL 6 ACTIVIST ON HIS U.S. VISIT AND REGIME CHANGE IN EGYPT

  1. (C) Summary and comment: On December 23, April 6 activist xxxxxxxxxxxx expressed satisfaction with his participation in the December 3-5 \”Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,\” and with his subsequent meetings with USG officials, on Capitol Hill, and with think tanks. He described how State Security (SSIS) detained him at the Cairo airport upon his return and confiscated his notes for his summit presentation calling for democratic change in Egypt, and his schedule for his Congressional meetings. xxxxxxxxxxxx contended that the GOE will never undertake significant reform, and therefore, Egyptians need to replace the current regime with a parliamentary democracy. He alleged that several opposition parties and movements have accepted an unwritten plan for democratic transition by 2011; we are doubtful of this claim.

xxxxxxxxxxxx said that although SSIS recently released two April 6 activists, it also arrested three additional group members. We have pressed the MFA for the release of these April 6 activists. April 6’s stated goal of replacing the current regime with a parliamentary democracy prior to the 2011 presidential elections is highly unrealistic, and is not supported by the mainstream opposition. End summary and comment.

  1. (C) xxxxxxxxxxxx expressed satisfaction with the December 3-5 \”Alliance of Youth Movements Summit\” in New York, noting that he was able to meet activists from other countries and outline his movement’s goals for democratic change in Egypt. He told us that the other activists at the summit were very supportive, and that some even offered to hold public demonstrations in support of Egyptian democracy in their countries, with xxxxxxxxxxxx as an invited guest. xxxxxxxxxxxx said he discussed with the other activists how April 6 members could more effectively evade harassment and surveillance from SSIS with technical upgrades, such as consistently alternating computer \”simcards.\” However, xxxxxxxxxxxx lamented to us that because most April 6 members do not own computers, this tactic would be impossible to implement. xxxxxxxxxxxx was appreciative of the successful efforts by the Department and the summit organizers to protect his identity at the summit, and told us that his name was never mentioned publicly.
  2. (S) xxxxxxxxxxxx told us that SSIS detained and searched him at the Cairo Airport on December 18 upon his return from the U.S. According to xxxxxxxxxxxx, SSIS found and confiscated two documents in his luggage: notes for his presentation at the summit that described April 6’s demands for democratic transition in Egypt, and a schedule of his Capitol Hill meetings. xxxxxxxxxxxx described how the SSIS officer told him that State Security is compiling a file on him, and that the officer’s superiors instructed him to file a report on xxxxxxxxxxxx most recent activities.
  3. (C) xxxxxxxxxxxx described his Washington appointments as positive, saying that on the Hill he met with xxxxxxxxxxxx, a variety of House staff members, including from the offices of xxxxxxxxxxxx and xxxxxxxxxxxx), and with two Senate staffers. xxxxxxxxxxxx also noted that he met with several think tank members. xxxxxxxxxxxx said that xxxxxxxxxxxx’s office invited him to speak at a late January Congressional hearing on House Resolution 1303 regarding religious and political freedom in Egypt. xxxxxxxxxxxx told us he is interested in attending, but conceded he is unsure whether he will have the funds to make the trip. He indicated to us that he has not been focusing on his work as a \”fixer\” for journalists, due to his preoccupation with his U.S. Trip.
  4. (C) xxxxxxxxxxxx described how he tried to convince his Washington interlocutors that the USG should pressure the GOE to implement significant reforms by threatening to reveal CAIRO 00002572 002 OF 002 information about GOE officials’ alleged \”illegal\” off-shore bank accounts. He hoped that the U.S. and the international community would freeze these bank accounts, like the accounts of Zimbabwean President Mugabe’s confidantes. xxxxxxxxxxxx said he wants to convince the USG that Mubarak is worse than Mugabe and that the GOE will never accept democratic reform. xxxxxxxxxxxx asserted that Mubarak derives his legitimacy from U.S. support, and therefore charged the U.S. with \”being responsible\” for Mubarak’s \”crimes.\”

He accused NGOs working on political and economic reform of living in a \”fantasy world,\” and not recognizing that Mubarak — \”the head of the snake\” — must step aside to enable democracy to take root.

  1. (C) xxxxxxxxxxxx claimed that several opposition forces — including the Wafd, Nasserite, Karama and Tagammu parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Kifaya, and Revolutionary Socialist movements — have agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections (ref C). According to xxxxxxxxxxxx, the opposition is interested in receiving support from the army and the police for a transitional government prior to the 2011 elections.

xxxxxxxxxxxx asserted that this plan is so sensitive it cannot be written down. (Comment: We have no information to corroborate that these parties and movements have agreed to the unrealistic plan xxxxxxxxxxxx has outlined. Per ref C, xxxxxxxxxxxx previously told us that this plan was publicly available on the internet. End comment.)

And so, this is a classical special intelligence report. Imagine that it contains other names of activists and informants, imagine that it’s talking about bank accounts that don’t belong to oligarchs and politicians from Cairo (or Egypt), but to other ones. Imagine that in place of one country, there is another, and you will see exactly how these plans are cooked up. The opposition activists could have done nothing if they had not been prepared. And now we see who prepared them and how. And after this, one has to be twice as blind, deaf, and absolutely out of one’s mind to not understand who did this and how.

 

EXHIBIT #2

From Vladimir Ovchinsky’s article “Obama, the Web Revolutionary”, published by the “Rosbalt” news agency on February 9, 2011 

 On January 31, 2011, an article called “The State Department’s School for Revolutionary Bloggers” came out in the American publication “The Daily Beast”.

 It states that as far back as December of 2008, training was being conducted on the campus of Columbia University’s Law School (SK: That same Columbia University again!) for young opposition activists from different countries, including the Egyptian “April 6” movement (they were among those who initiated the mass protests against Mubarak in January-February of 2011), as part of the program against “repression, oppression, and violent extremism”.

 Among the “teachers” were Joe Rospars, Scott Goodstein and Sam Graham-Felsen, who are staffers from Obama’s social media team; ABC morning show host Whoopi Goldberg, State Department officials James Glassman and Jared Cohen (an IT and innovation specialist), Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Howcast CEO Jason Liebman.

 Among the “students” were a Colombian who successfully used Facebook to mobilize a march of 12 million people against the FARC Marxist guerrillas, a Venezuelan activist who organized a student protest against President Hugo Chavez, and representatives of various groups (Genocide Intervention Network, the Burma Global Action Network, and a London-based campaign against knife crimes).  

 An NGO called “Alliance for Youth Movements” organized the “course”.

 All this work was being done under the patronage of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In May of 2009, Clinton and acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met with sixteen activists from the Freedom House project “New Generation”. Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy are in the very middle of the rebellion which is currently taking Islamic world by storm.

 There is direct evidence implicating representatives of prominent IT companies affiliated with the White House in organizing the disorder in Egypt. On February 7, a top-manager of Google’s Middle Eastern branch, Wael Ghonim, who was detained under suspicion of organizing mass protests in Egypt, was released from custody. After his release to freedom, Ghonim admitted, during an interview on Dream TV, that he had created a Facebook page against the Mubarak regime back in June 2010. In the beginning of December, Ghonim, using a fake name, called for street protests. By the end of December, the page had about half a million people visit it every day.

 All of this falls into a set of actions which are part of a campaign supporting the White House’s strategy of “fighting dictatorships through the internet”, which Hillary Clinton declared in January of 2010.

All of this exists in open publication! Names, dates, and training centers are being named. How this training was conducted is being described. This is typical, classical, preparatory work for special operations, multiplied by certain factors. And what? One is supposed to see all of this and to say that it doesn’t exist. What for? In order to hide behind some sort of stereotypes, illusions. But when the merciless and terrible facts are crushing one’s stereotypes and illusions, then either these stereotypes and illusions must leave, or one becomes irrational. And not only individuals, but also movements, the political elite… Meanwhile, the interpretation of the facts presented and their being taken into account will literally determine whether tomorrow the people of Russia will live on their land, or if they will lie buried inside it, or rotting on its surface.

But that’s not all yet, because we’re talking about a new factor, that very internet factor, which is partially being ignored.

 

“Bonaparte In Cairo” by Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, 1798.

 

EXHIBIT #3

shows that this is not a local Egyptian process. That this is a grand process, that this is a grand global perestroika, which also involves utilizing new technologies.

 From Vladimir Ovchinsky’s article “Obama, the Web Revolutionary”, published by the “Rosbalt” news agency on February 9, 2011 

 Barack Obama and his team were not the first to discover internet revolutions.

 The first experience of a “digital” revolution was obtained in the Philippines: on January 17, 2001, two hours after the parliament blocked President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment, citizens of the country sent each other more than 7 million emails with a call to enter the streets and participate in actions of protest. A million protesters on the streets of Manila, and Estrada lost the presidency.

 During the “web” revolution in Spain in 2004, demonstrations organized with the help of email forced Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to leave his post.

 Barack Obama’s ascension to the Presidency of the United States came simultaneously with an increase in using information technology in attempts to organize “color revolutions”: Moldavia (2009), Thailand (2010). The “Twitter revolution” in Iran in 2009 became the most colorful example.

So we see a series of events; we see that they are being prepared according to the same pattern; we see who is standing behind this and where, in broad terms, it is headed, but we’re supposed to say that it doesn’t exist. What doesn’t exist? We know that back in 2005, at the American University in Cairo, Condoleezza Rice, who was then the United States Secretary of State (this isn’t the Obama administration, this is still the Bush administration at its sunset!) stated: The US, for many years, have been acting in the wrong way (i.e. the Kissinger doctrine), basing itself on stability in the region even if it meant interfering with the hard work of the forces of democracy. But the US will never make this mistake again. The old doctrine is thus canceled, and the US will now allow the hard forces of democracy to work everywhere.

However, everyone understands that there are two forces in Egypt: the military and the Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood [organization banned in Russia – editor’s note]), that there simply is no third force. In the midst of a conversation with one Egyptian, I asked him, “Whom will your democracy and your democratic leaders base themselves on if there is no military, and the Muslim Brotherhood, as you say, are a dangerous force? Whom will democracy base itself on?” He looked at me with lamenting eyes and said, “ What do you mean ‘from whom’? From the Constitution!” I’m asking him about the social-political base, and he can’t say anything, because everyone understands who benefits from the unfolding of this process. During the discussion on Shevchenko’s show (Channel One, “You be the Judge”, February 3, 2011) a man who studied at Cairo University said, “The Muslim Brotherhood is one the few organizations capable of reaping the fruits of what is happening now.”

I answered him, “You’re saying, ‘we see that the Muslim Brotherhood will take advantage…’ You see that they’ll take advantage, and John Brennan, Obama’s adviser doesn’t see this; Obama doesn’t see this… Of course they also see who exactly will take advantage of what…”

Some say that Obama did not support the revolution in Egypt. This is a shameless lie, which is disproven by Obama’s own statements.

 

From US President Barack Obama’s special statement on February 2, 2011:

[https://geneva.usmission.gov/2011/02/02/remarks-by-the-president-on-egypt/]

 After his speech tonight, I spoke directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place… What is clear — and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak — is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now…To the people of Egypt, particularly the young people of Egypt, I want to be clear: We hear your voices… There will be difficult days ahead… But I am confident that the people of Egypt will find those answers.

This is a death sentence to the US’ ally, Mubarak. Why? Because he is no longer an ally. Because the Kissinger doctrine ha been dismantled. Because the construction of a new world has begun. And because those who were allies yesterday are now waste, dust, dirt, and they are just brushed off and swept to the side. Mubarak begs Obama, “Just wait a little bit, I’ll give up power!” – “No, this needs to happen now; we hear the voice of the Egyptian people!” And Obama turns to the Egyptian military.

But Obama is not the only one who influences this process!

 

EXHIBIT #5

From US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s interview to NPR (American public radio) on February 6, 2011 [https://www.state.gov/secretary/travel/rm/2011/02/156050.htm]

Today we learned that the Muslim Brotherhood has decided to participate, which suggests that they, at least, are now involved in the dialogue that we have encouraged. We are going to wait and see how this develops. But we have been very clear about what we expect… The Egyptian people are looking for an orderly transition that can lead to free and fair elections. That’s what the United States has consistently supported…Now, the people themselves, and the leaders of various groups within Egyptian society, will ultimately determine whether it is or is not meeting their needs.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an organization created in the 1920s in the area of the Suez Canal. The British played an enormous role in its appearance. It was brought up on the ideas of radical Islamism, global jihad, and the creation of a universal Caliphate. It will never abandon these ideas, and that’s why it is global. It considers nation-states simply to be sinful, to be jahiliyyah. It is an organization which is now trying to put on a mask of peacefulness and which, most obviously, in all regions, wants to build only this global caliphate, i.e. The Great South. Its genesis, its structure, and its orientation are clear to everyone. Everyone understands that it inevitably moves to the forefront once the military are cast aside. And this is what the Americans are doing. Why? Are they so stupid that they don’t understand what they’re doing? Do they not understand what they have done, having dismantled Iraq and having added fire to radical Islamism there? They are creating The Great South.

And here a question arises: if they are creating it for roughly the same goals that we’re talking about… if the impending events will inevitably have consequences for us in Central Asia… if everything is like this, then where here lie the new grim hazards which fill this world which is taking form in front of our very eyes, and which puts a nearly 500-year era of the formal declaration of Modernity to a close?

And where here lies our hope? Why is it that hope for us lies specifically in the hopelessness of this world?

And how is this hope related to the treasure which is contained within the forgotten, unanalyzed, rejected Soviet heritage? What does it contain that can turn for us this world of absolute hopelessness into a world of a great leap, into a world of hope?

This is what we will talk about next time.

 

“Fantasy” by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1925.

 

Source (for copy): https://eu.eot.su/2017/04/21/essence-of-time-chapter-3/

 

Essence of Time: The philosophical justification of Russia’s Messianic Claims in the 21st century

Sergey Kurginyan

Experimental Creative Centre International Public Foundation

 

Essence of Time is a video lecture series by Sergey Kurginyan: a political and social leader, theater director, philosopher, political scientist, and head of the Experimental Creative Centre International Public Foundation. These lectures were broadcast from February to November 2011 on the websites, www.kurginyan.ru and www.eot.su .

With its intellectual depth and acuity, with its emotional charge, and with the powerful mark of the author’s personality, this unusual lecture series aroused great interest in its audience. It served at the same time as both the “starting push” and the conceptual basis around which the virtual club of Dr. Kurginyan’s supporters, Essence of Time, was formed.

The book Essence of Time contains the transcriptions of all 41 lectures in the series. Each one of them contains Sergey Kurginyan’s thoughts about the essence of our time, about its metaphysics, its dialectics, and their reflection in the key aspects of relevant Russian and global politics. The central theme of the series is the search for paths and mechanisms to get out of the systemic and global dead end of all humanity in all of its dimensions: from the metaphysical to the gnoseological, ethical, and anthropological. And as a result, out of the sociopolitical, technological, and economical dead end.

In outlining the contours of this dead end and in stressing the necessity of understanding the entire depth, complexity, and tragedy of the accumulating problems, the author proves that it is indeed Russia, thanks to the unusual aspects of its historical fate, which still has a chance to find a way out of this dead end, and to present it to the world. But, realizing this chance is possible only if this becomes the supreme meaning of life and action for a “critical mass” of active people who have in common a deep understanding of the problems at hand.

Dr. Kurginyan’s ideas found a response, and the Essence of Time virtual club is growing into a wide Essence of Time social movement. In front of our very eyes, it is becoming a real political force.

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