Sins without Recourse, Beast without Remorse

by Norman Ball for The Saker Blog
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“[W]e, as serious people, cannot examine the concrete problems that are thrown when the Russian Federation is accused of all mortal sins without recourse to the processes (norms) created for similar cases,” –from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s October 18th interview with RT France.

In light of this dead-stop, what can only be called an apriori –and fatal– naivete pervades much of the prescriptive analysis we read every day. If Putin would only hop or jump or swagger or dance (it differs from one sage to the next) then, we are assured, the properly calibrated gesture would elicit a jackpot of redemptive good will. Godot would pop over the horizon. The crisis would defuse.

Alas, this is an all-too-human read which, while perhaps befitting of a bygone era, falls short of the present moment’s activated spiritual Principalities.

Speaking of Godot, from the same interview that prefaces this essay, Lavrov resigns himself to a “serious, professional and non-propagandistic” discussion at some later time when the current “outbreak of political rage” abates. Whether or not he believes a terrestrial conclusion will arrive in time, we cannot know. He’s a poet. Is he a Christian? Lavrov, ever the consummate diplomat, is nonetheless obliged to sound the proper notes.

It remained for his boss, on the same day, to access otherworldly coordinates with the most astonishing rhetoric (Radio Free Europe called it, “more biblical than technical”) at a Sochi forum:

Putin is making the remarkable admission that if no honorable approach for Russia remains for recovering a constructive relationship with the West (and since crawling along a contritious path is out of the question), Heaven (or Hell) beckons in the wings for all parties.

For such a circumspect statesman to openly confess to The City of Man’s limitations in world affairs, and allow that God may have to sort it out on the other side, well, that’s a foreboding milestone. One shudders at what information he’s privy to as to warrant such a fatalistic statement of principle. Has the geopolitical tether truly run out?

Archetypes are the prefatory hoops through which all actions spring. With understandable forbearance (some armchair warriors would say belatedness), Putin has finally seized his end of the archetype of the apocalypse. (The gauntlet’s been lying on the ground for some time now; see the late Edward Edinger’s 2002 book of the same name). Nor can an utterances of this sort be retracted by secular communique. There it sits, in the global square, a white-hot psychic ember that must now be contended with.

My fellow prognosticators, this is not our parents’ geopolitics.

Know thy enemy. The snake never alters its stripes, though the prevailing terrain can at times abet its pattern. Like a boa constrictor, the implacable machine (Sartre) always awaits relaxation in its prey as a prelude to further tightening. Demonic eschatology continually splits the distance until it capitulates spasmodically within the claustrophobic space of the capstone. The pyramid is a progressively constricting geometry. There is no placating it. The Beast is an insistent geometric construct.

So it’s a form of madness to continually bemoan the rude particulars of the Beast’s blueprint. Would you kick a car for not being an airplane? The implacability is born of usury, an arithmetic pyramid that must have everything for itself.  Debt-money, eternally ravenous, is cursed to roam the earth paying its keep every minute of every day.

Don’t blame the debt-masters. Pity them. They’re the Machine’s most abject slaves. Witness their propensity for throwing themselves off buildings as a measure of unquenchable Babelian despair:

Master, come to my assistance!
Wrong I was in calling
Spirits, I avow,
For I find them galling,
Cannot rule them now.

–from The Sorceror’s Apprentice, Johann Goethe (tr. Paul Dyrsen)

What Russians must do, and admittedly it’s a problem, is to get out the way of their own country or else prostate themselves atop it. Andrei Fursov outlines the elite’s long-term interest in ‘Northern Eurasia’ (what amounts to Russia), as a post-apocalyptic, resource-rich life raft; what MacKinder might have called, the Heartland of the Heartland.

Mephistopheles comes by way of Sergie ‘the Snake’ Kudrin and his borrowed, if not outright mutinous, prescription.  (Scott Humor translates here):

“Therefore, today Russia’s foreign policy should be subordinated to the reduction of tension in our relations with other countries, and, at least, to the preservation or reduction of the sanctions regime, not to the build-up. Today I would measure the effectiveness of our foreign policy on this indicator.”

Of course selective subordination (of the foreign policy portfolio only) is tantamount to total capitulation further along. Ruslan Ostashko asks the obvious question rhetorically of Kudrin: “What will prevent the West from reinstating these sanctions back, after we make all those changes?” Well yes, what precedent –and please venture beyond Gorbachev’s unilateral dumping of the Brezhnev Doctrine for examples if you must– would compel anyone to think reciprocal accommodations ever arrive?

Anthropomorphic daydreams can never take the measure of the Beast. Left to themselves, human beings rest, commiserate, empathize and trade amicably among themselves with an innate sense of proportionality and fairness. The trouble is Paul’s Principalities, good and evil, never leave us to ourselves. Moreover these forces are vaulting increasingly to the fore as even Putin’s off-world meanderings reveal.

Faustian bargains are the West’s own jealous poison, thank you very much Mr. Kudrin. As such, they’re forever withheld from authentic Russian ingestion. Find your own poison in your own time, we might say, one civilization to another. To jump the tracks for ours would be a form of neo-Petrinism (manifested, in the present era, by doting Atlanticists like, well, Kudrin. Oswald Spengler would recognize him as Petrinism’s “artificial product made of stubborn material”.)

Spengler, more poet than historian, offers the penetrating eye of the stranger. His prescience for the Russian destiny is paraphrased by Kerry Bolton here:

The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called it, the ‘Magian’ of the Arabian civilization, or the Classical of the Hellenes and Romans. The Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by Peter the Great, what Spengler called Petrinism, is a veneer…The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity, albeit not that of the Westerner’s Faustian soul, which becomes enslaved by its own technics at the end of its life-cycle.”

Many of those ‘technics’ fall under what Spengler called “money-thinking”. At the twilight of its life-cycle the West threatens to withhold its toxicity from all those who don’t ‘play fair’, plying its financial sanctions like an overused tool-set: fractional reserve banking, impudent debt-money that arrives ex nihilo seeking its keep from God-knows-where, leverage that belabors ever-narrowing denominators of intrinsic value.

When the Beast cannot steal, its existing purloined cache is re-leveraged, pacing frenetically until it can steal again. Somewhere in the bowels of the NY Fed behind iron-clad doors, guarded by an ogre, sits a Leverage Machine, Chartered Accountant to the Beast. The lights are flashing red. How do we know this? Because the 24/7 Russian Demonization Campaign tells us so. The manically repetitive narrative is an audio loop cued to the red-lit console.

The West’s sanctions subtract from its own beleaguered base. The ‘cure’, ever more green-fields, serves only to postpone the patient’s demise. The demands are satanic and mutually self-negating:  If you don’t bleed like me, I promise I will kill you.

The various sanctions regimes harbor no rapprochements and coax no favored outcomes. They are nihilistic in spirit and anti-Christian by design. Spengler spoke of Russia’s peculiar historic mission. Could that mission be Armageddon itself?

The stakes, as we like to say, are incalculably high. The potential recoil, fatal. But then, People of the Book already know this.

Might the intelligence complex incite WW3 as a diversionary alternative to exposure and dismantlement? That’s a reasonable bet. After all, where on this planet today are rumors of wars not breaking out in earnest?

There’s a well-ensconced clique on the planet that views WW3 as the crucial next step. Putin seems to have joined them. In lieu of elaborate WMD contexts perpetrated on a sanguine populace, war planners might prefer a war that’s over almost before it starts. Inhuman velocity curtails the need for consensus-building.

NATO’s provocations are endless. However conventional force border-posturing is simply the aperitif. Nuclear escalation will occur with lightning speed.

In his grim but essential work, Eric Zuesse speaks to the current provocations in Ukraine and its Donbass region and the toss-up potential of a nuclear first strike being strategically ‘rationalized’ and perpetrated by either the Americans or the Russians. How perilous and frightening is that? Both sides are strategically obliged go nuclear first, although Putin seemed to remove a Russian first-strike from the table last week, a very noble and statesman-like assertion, to be sure. Who fully understands the dynamic between he and his Defense Minister? Sergei Shoigu might, on strictly military grounds, beg to differ.

Here’s Zuesse:

“Either way would likely produce from Russia a nuclear blitz-attack to eliminate as many of America’s retaliatory weapons as possible, so as to beat the US to the punch. In military terms, the side that suffers the less damage ‘wins’, even if it’s a nuclear war that destroys the planet. The side that would strike first in a nuclear war would almost certainly suffer the less damage, because most of the opponent’s retaliatory weaponry would be destroyed in that attack. Trump is playing nuclear “chicken” against Putin.”

Nuclear Primacy had been America’s post-MAD doctrine since 2006. (Here are the same two idiot-savants, Drs. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, on paper, proving once and for all that intelligence is a circle.) The Russian nuclear detection system is horribly antiquated and, in an effort to tamp down the reigning madness, US officials are talking naval blockades and preemptive first strikes. Language is always the first bullet fired. America’s nuclear arsenal is to be upgraded over the next thirty years at an estimated cost of $1.2 trillion (October 2017 CBO report).

Paranoid much? You’d have to be a fool not to be. In fact you’d have to be an irreligious fool not to think thermonuclear exchange isn’t poised to occur in some demented parody of well-considered premeditation and forethought.

It’s the midnight after midnight and Doomsday’s tired of walking around the block. The Beast wants Russia either polishing boots in Basel or moving its Orthodox frontage to Mars. There is no middle ground. There is no dialectical accommodation. People are a temporary impediment to the wealth beneath their feet. Bankers eat birthrights for breakfast.

The inestimable trove of raw goodies under Eurasia must be secured or else the leverage-cubed that’s holding up the leverage-squared is going to collapse in a calamitous heap of non-real numbers and exhausted exponentiality.

Before he exited Stratfor, some say for a surfeit of candor, George Friedman laid out the last hundred-years of the game-plan. Mind you (and our German friends too), it’s nothing personal. It’s primordial, which is to say, quite equally of the future, an ‘interest’ that will not abate.

As Sheikh Iman Hossein insists, the repatriation of Crimea represents a huge and rare setback for the Beast’s cordon sanitaire strategy of containment (constriction?) Sixteenth-century Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (popularly known as the Vilna Gaon) acknowledged much the same:

“When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, the ‘Times of the Messiah’ have started, that his steps are being heard”

There are not enough dimensions frankly to deploy the appropriate chess game. But then we’re not in a chess game. We’re in an end-game. Finesse is an Enlightenment affectation. In a kingdom of hammers the adroit tactician is just another nail.

So enough please of rehabilitative measures, improved behaviors and well-considered countermeasures. No behavior under the sun will do until nuclear winter blots the sun from the sky. We’ve been staring down the barrel of Oppenheimer’s Shiva ever since some vanguard of Molochian butt-worshippers decided there’s life for them on the back-end of nihilistic cessation.

There is a war on against what Spengler termed, “the world-historical fact of Russia itself”. Putin seems finally to have risen to the existential occasion.