The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  There prevails currently a liberal imperative to be anti-Russian. And yet, the revolutionary events in Ukraine in 2014 were seldom described for what they were: an illegal coup of an elected leader, President Yanukovich. Overzealous with its imperialist ambitions, the EU supported regime change in Ukraine, and as such unreasonably provoked Russia. It continues to do so to this day, having given Ukraine (not a member of the EU) 1bln Euros of financial assistance in 2018. The EU always defends its stance by invoking the discourse of sovereignty, but hypocritically represents itself a body that wishes to do away with national sovereignty.

  The US was also quick in its support. It likes to remind us of its noble intentions of spreading liberal democracy, but it is never about that. The objective, be it Egypt (2011), Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), Chile (1973) or Ukraine (2014) is always to put in place a pro-American Government, and the US does not hesitate in facilitating ‘regime change’ of democratically elected leaders in order to achieve this. Ukraine is also rich in natural gas, and the US wasted no time in getting their hands on it. The EU’s moves were fully supported by Joe Biden, the US Vice-President who liked to go to Ukraine to lecture on corruption. At the same time, his son was elected to the Board of Burisma Holdings, the largest independent natural gas company in Ukraine.

  With the Bucharest Declaration in 2008, the West had broken the promises agreed between Gorbachev and Reagan, with its intention of expanding NATO membership to both Ukraine and Georgia. Russia made it perfectly clear after the announcement that this would be wholly unacceptable to them, and indeed after the Declaration there was war with Georgia in that very year. Subsequently, NATO placed its nuclear warheads and US$800 million missile shield in Romania aimed at Russia, all in the name of a spurious Iranian threat.

  NATO expansion was the deep cause for the crisis. Ukraine is of absolutely key strategic interest to Russia, and great powers are always sensitive about their security. One just has to look at the American response in the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) when Russians placed nuclear weapons in Cuba, but only after Americans had deployed nuclear weapons to Italy and Turkey in 1961 and aimed them at Russia. The US assumes that the world believes it to have benign intentions, but that is not the Russian and Chinese opinion. And so, under Putin and in the face of such provocations, Russia had of course to respond. If China were to hypothetically form a military alliance with Canada and Mexico and then place its weapons on the American border, one can be rather sure that the US would not respond by saying that these countries had a right to form a military alliance with anybody they wanted, as the US said about Ukraine. Despite this, the conventional wisdom in the West remains that Putin is responsible for the crisis in Ukraine. One might not want to condone the accession of Crimea, but the West had created an extremely dangerous situation: they provoked the key strategic interest of a country (Crimea is the only ice-free naval port for the Russians) with thousands of nuclear weapons, and followed it up by imposing economic sanctions. It is an act of folly for the US to put a nuclear power such as Russia into a corner over Ukraine, a country that is no strategic interest to the Americans. The provocations by the West since 2008 have been deliberate, unnecessary and continue to this day.123

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  The Stalinist-styled Hotel Ukraine commands the perfect position in Kiev,— overlooking the central Maidan Nezalezhnosti and the broader skyline: a curious juxtaposition of the dehumanising Lego of Kruschchyovka, obelisks, Byzantine glory, stucco candy-floss and magnificent Baroque churches. The hotel, State owned, is pure Soviet nostalgia: the Rosa Klebb-like offiziante that man each landing with poker-like faces, the bugged bedrooms and tapped telephones of former days, the enormous reception and dining rooms built to serve Soviet delegations that just weeks later would tragically become morgues for the protesters.

  In the final days of 2013, barricades blocked the entrance to the square, groups of men gathered around fires and sung Ukrainian songs throughout the night. Ukrainian nationalists climbed up onto the stage and addressed the crowds in increasingly fiery rhetoric that boomed out across the city centre. Just weeks later, charred pavements would be ripped up for ammunition, and the unease would escalate into a full-blown revolution.

  I saw with my own eyes those demonstrators on Maydan Square, many of whom were anarchist thugs. All the media in the UK painted a picture of a suppressed people fighting a vicious regime. They did not tell you that the EU was supporting militias of neo-Nazis, or that the accession of Crimea was entirely peaceful. In Kiev, policemen had fireworks thrown in their face night after night just because they were trying to protect the elected parliament. EU officials had been meddling more than the Russians, and yet it was never presented that way.

  Ukraine must be free to decide its future (or futures in the event of a split), but it is undeniable that culturally, linguistically and in every other way, Ukraine is much closer to Russia than anywhere else. Russia has been provoked for years by the West as NATO has pushed further and further East until it came right up to the Russian border. The problems facing the world in the first instance are the work of the West (and in particular the US as global aggressor), not Russia. The demonisation of Russia and the response to the conflict in Russia is another chapter in the bigger ideological clash between liberalist multiculturalism and its cultural nihilism on the one hand, and the preservation of cultural-national identity structures in the face of a globalist threat on the other.

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  The ‘progressive liberalism’ of the West is beginning to appear autumnal; many in the West have lost their faith and convictions, and the Brussels politicians swaddled in this ideology are busy trying to deny the remnants of our culture. Western traditionalism has been in pell-mell retreat for decades, and until recently there was almost no opposition to the prevailing ideology. Liberalism in conjunction with mass digital communication is everywhere, so omnipresent that people have forgotten it is a system of beliefs. Believing that we must ‘delegitimise the Eurocentric heritage of Western nations, which is thought to transmit a reactionary consciousness’ (Drummond, 2014: 174) does not have to be the norm. Putin’s Russia is fighting for a multi-polar world where there can at least be some alternative to secular liberalism and the modernising form of secular consciousness which some believe to be inherently unstable (Eliot, 1939; Berdyaev, 1933; Scruton, 2014). This consciousness is nihilistic in its emphasis on individuals selecting their own values.

  Putin’s Russia is preserving its self-consciousness and culture, and for that at least it should be respected and its leader should be listened to. After years of totalitarianism, post-Soviet Russia has again found its soul even whilst the European soul is being dismantled. Europe might want to learn from Russia, a country whose Christian identity was systematically undermined under Communism. By insisting on a one-world liberal secularist ideology, we will only create more terror and warfare. The crisis of globalisation is that the alternatives are constantly disrespected. It has to be that way because the essence of globalisation is that there is only one ideology. But, thankfully we have not got to the point where that is acceptable to everyone.

  In Putin’s Russia, there is of course a very close link between the Government and the Orthodox Church, and this should be rightly viewed with some suspicion. There has been a focus on Orthodoxy as opposed to ‘Christian churches’, implying that the Orthodox Church is somehow beyond-Christian. A Wikileaks report describes the Orthodox Church as a ‘Government agency’.124 All the criticism of the implied corruption and Patriarchal politics is no doubt justified, but the fact remains that under Putin, the Church has been revived at a physical and psychological level in a way few imagined. The State and the Church share a sacralised vision of Russian exceptionalism, and according to Forbes (May 21st, 2015) around 25,000 Russian Orthodox Churches have been built since the early 1990s, many with money from the oligarchs.

  It is also clever politics: Russia is able to use the Orthodox card in discussions with countries such as Ser
bia, Macedonia and Greece, and it acts as a bond with former Soviet states that have become Westward-looking, such as Georgia. It acts as a useful bond at a time when Russia is trying to reassert itself. The clue is in the Patriarch’s full title ‘Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all the Rus’. It also enables Putin to tap into the social trust that the Russians had invested previously in the Orthodox Church.

  There is of course an anti-globalist connection between Putin and Trump. Beyond Trump and those who surface in his wake, most political leaders in the West are, however, still little more than globalists who prioritise faith in global networks of interdependence over sovereignty and who live under a protective cupola. They see the world as one big, inevitable economic and cultural convergence play. London, that bogey-blackening lost Moloch and global-citizen bubble, is one of the centres of this convergence play, increasingly filled with homogenised globalists funded by multinational corporations with their own distinctive worldview and creed — liberal Christianity without Christ. For many of these political leaders in the West, their primary concern is to secure a seat at the big globalist table and hob-nob with other globalists like Jean-Claude Juncker at the G8, G20, G40 and the EU. Some of them seem to care little about the nations they are meant to be representing. It is the apolitical monarchy with its stable, transcendent legitimacy that cares. It is the monarchy (best epitomised by Her Majesty the Queen of England, and not certain European Royals who have lost their dignity and try to be ‘normal’ celebrities with their tattoos, Pizza and pornographic film appearances) that maintains and symbolises order in society, preventing nationalistic excess.

  Even the all-signed-up Christians in the West today are far less pious than they were just a hundred years ago. The old systems of belief, like religion and morality, exist only at the edge of our consciousness. Christianity was an overarching system that shaped culture in the West for two thousand years. Now, there is just nothingness, an absolute inner emptiness — the secular void that liberals celebrate, a shallow world with its prevalence of base interests, desacralised by science, with no higher purpose than to enjoy consumption and the modern idiocracy of the entertainment world that plays to a dysgenic universe.125 But without an overarching system, society has no organic structure, meaning or unambiguous identity. Liberals, and particularly those at the heart of the EU project, want our nations just to become ‘economic zones’ stripped of identity. If this happens, one might assume we will be left with just decadence, rampant materialism and the cultural decay that comes with this. What is more, unaccountable transnational governance risks superseding centuries of national parliamentary accountability in countries beyond Britain that have denied their citizens a say in the European political union project.

  Liberals are in fact losing their enamoured secular freedom to an increasingly Muslim fundamentalist Europe. The secular jouissance might not be maintained ad infinitum in the manner that liberals aspire to. This truth is being hidden; those with dissenting views are being intimidated by a partisan cultural grammar. We have entered the era of falsity and inverted reality. Our nations are threatened by Islamism and the EU which is enforcing mass immigration on Western Europe. The future will be the history of another people, coming with cultural values that have never been a part of our past. Our notions of ‘belonging’ or more precisely perhaps, Zusammengehörigkeit (with its undertones of ‘belonging’ and ‘togetherness’) will be strained because the sense of continuity will be irreparably broken. Unless man feels as if he ‘belongs’ somewhere, he is overcome by individual insignificance. The foundation of the communities that we have belonged to will not be the same. Those who speak out against it will be ridiculed for living in the past and clinging to outdated concepts and social structures which are a priori negative because they are culturally framed.

  As Schmitt said, liberal states extend rights of membership to those who do not truly belong to the political nation, but being a member of a nation must come with duties as well as rights. Instead of creating functional, pluralistic societies, liberal states such as these will be overwhelmed by external enemies who are more politically united (Schmitt, 2007: 69-79). Liberalism is undermining the political basis of our societies, trying to do away with markers of identity that can ground political decisions.

  It is clear that Europe needs rethinking meta-politically, i.e. at the level of the collective consciousness. As a matter of urgency, national identities must be strengthened with a focus on Judeo-Christian values. Sovereignty, independence, national and cultural integrity should be red-lines for every European country, but instead they have just become marks in the sand washed away by the surf of the European bureaucratic machine. Not everybody wants to see their country thronging with people who either choose not to integrate or who are unable to do so. Muslims tend to identify themselves firstly as Muslim, and not British, Swedish, French etc. This is fundamental, and unlikely to change.

  Western leaders have become appeasers, not defenders of freedom. But we must not forget that freedom is supremely valuable. Freedom is what makes an individual ‘complete’. We cannot let the political system close our minds or cloud our thinking. Following two Islamist massacres in one year, France became a police state in a ‘state of emergency’ for months on end which ‘monitored several thousand people’.126 Such large-scale terrorist attacks are likely to lead to significantly more authoritarianism in the capital cities of Western Europe. Security is becoming increasingly prominent in everyday vocabulary as the role of the State is more and more explicitly that of ‘ensuring security’. In parts of Western Europe, the price for allowing large-scale immigration from countries that have supported terrorism may well be to live in perpetual, authoritarian police states.

  Since November 2016, French police have conducted more than 2,500 raids. Laws were passed to allow France to censor the Internet and to arrest people in their homes without a warrant, to search people’s devices and copy any data they wish. Living in such an authoritarian regime, freedom and authority dance with one another in an intimate, awkward fashion. Arguably, the only real freedom left is the freedom to consume and spend one’s days lost in the circus of consumerism. France cannot possibly function as its parliamentarians wish: immigrants to France have to, quite correctly, enter into a contract with the OFII (the French Immigration Service). The contract states that the newcomer must respect French values: liberté, égalité, fraternité and laïcité (secularism). And here lies the problem: how can one ask a Muslim from West Africa that prays to Allah five times a day to respect secularism? France is simply creating a subversive pastiche of contiguous dissonance with compartmentalised ethnic groups wallowing in different hierarchies of belonging. The future of Europe might be authoritarian police states and not free liberal democracies, as we assume.

  It is right to stand up for one’s nation. It is wrong to be called a racist for wishing to defend one’s nation and its values. This is persecution. We share a loyalty to our nation, and this political loyalty need in no way be an aggressive one. Nobody can claim to have a loyalty to the EU, a bureaucratic body that disenfranchises the citizens of nation-states. Liberals insist on associating nationalism with aggression and war. This view is absurdly crude. It is a fallacy to constantly equate nation-states with belligerence. One cannot reduce nationalism to a politics of aggressive self-assertion. Nationalism can take many forms: left, right and ambivalent. The Norwegians and Faroese are amongst the most nationalistic people in Europe, but who has ever been threatened by them?

  Instead of standing up for one’s nation, there is a constant attempt to stimulate a specious Western guilt. To defend oneself and speak up for one’s Judeo-Christian values might be deemed nationalistic, and thus anachronistic behaviour. This would represent ‘old thinking’, conservative, and therefore something negative because it cannot map out its objectives in terms of ‘progress’ or rather ‘change’. This guilt and malaise is becoming commoditised and has begun to sound like a kind of anti-Occ
identalist secular confession.

  We must not let the film of political correctness — the contemporary nexus of intellectual life — muddle our minds. The more open discussion and debate is suppressed by the ‘tolerance mob’, the sooner counter-extremism will arise to tackle Islamic extremism (as we saw in the Slovak elections of 2016). Many on the Left do not hesitate to oppose the Christian Right in America. If they are against extremism in all forms, then they must surely rather more conspicuously oppose militant Islam which is a far more immediate threat to our societies than any Christian church. One might ask how the Left can be supportive of gay rights, and yet apparently find excuses for radical Islam whose ISIS members threw gays off roofs into bloodthirsty crowds in Iraq and Syria. If they survived the fall, they were then stoned to death. One cannot promote secularism, but condone in the name of cultural relativism radical Islam at the same time.

  The correct response is one that is rooted in a kind of level-headed common sense that addresses the day-to-day reality of the dystopia that open-borders liberalism is creating. Multiculturalists who are indifferent to their country and culture, and who so frequently double up as Islamic apologists, may be naïvely acting as jihadist facilitators. Certainly, there appears to be an alliance between the two. This is not scaremongering. This is reality. We are living in a time of creeping shari’ah and stealth jihad, and juxtaposing ideologies such as secularism and radical Islam that have immediately conflicting objectives can only end badly.

  We have worried too much about offending the Other. It is time to move beyond Teddy Bear politics. The liberal multicultural consensus must be to some extent a fabrication. Otherwise, right-wing, anti-immigration parties would not be on the rise throughout the West. A true leader will only emerge in a time of crisis, and that time is rapidly approaching. One can see why one might object to him, but Russia has found a strong leader after years of kleptocracy, corruption and systematic collapse under Yeltsin. Putin will defend Russia’s cultural heritage, and will attempt to ensure that it is not undermined by the forces of globalist consumerism: a difficult task.