The Year of Fukuyama as seen through the looking-glass

Back in early 2014, I published a couple of posts on Russia and Ukraine on my old Wordpress blog which, if I may say so, have held up pretty well. I have reposted them here: “Putinophilia” and “Sochi”. Today, however, with Richard Hanania’s sackcloth-and-ashes post about the surprising strength of western liberalism and the collapse of alternative models offered by Russia and China making the rounds, I want to post my translations of two short posts one prominent Russian nationalist intellectual and Z-supporter made in his Telegram channel (100k subscribers) this week. Over the spring and summer, the guy has called for complete annihilation and absorption of Ukraine and so on, but lately he became uncharacteristically subdued. The first of his two posts is a grudging encomium to the hated Anglo-Saxons, which should be read together with the appropriate paragraphs in Hanania’s post. I have attempted to reproduce the author’s syntax and diction as best I could.

Let's talk about the so-called Anglo-Saxons.

We can scold them as much as we want, but they have a great property which has made them the masters of the world.

They can change.

Quickly and successfully.

They can continuously compete with and criticize each other, pull new ideas, technologies and people out of anywhere, create seeming chaos out of a multitude of voices, companies, communities and political parties, endlessly swap chiefs, mercilessly scold and deride them, jostle and hustle like it's a market, a fair - and all this quick and noisy motion makes them only stronger, and states which are constituted as coalitions of a multitude of private persons and autonomous forces able to reach settlements with each other, prove to be wonderfully stable.

Russia can't do it.

Russian culture is European, but our politics is Asiatic, and every Russian chief wants to be very-very important, the only one in the world, and to be a tzar forevermore, inclining his head in response to good and very good news.

If Russians were to burst into the British Parliament, where everybody shouts and great Prime Ministers sit on narrow benches as if they were proles playing dominoes in the yard, Russians would first of all make everybody shut up, and then announce a billion-dollar tender to replace those chicken perch benches with the most expensive chairs.

But a chief should sit on a chicken perch. Chiefs should not be pagan gods.

Anglo-Saxons are always busy, they have turned almost all the world into an orchestra where everybody plays how they are willing and able to, but the conductor nevertheless gets what he wants. Because this conductor takes notice of talented musicians in time, he knows how to entice them and work on them so that they themselves will want to play what the conductor needs them to, whereas he will modestly, without drawing undue attention to his person, head the proceedings. He might have been puffing himself up with importance instead, but no. He bustles and plugs away at it, and if he doesn't, another will take his place.

Russian chiefs think that in the 21st century America (as well as England, NATO etc.) “hoodwinked and swindled” them: why, here we were sitting nicely, doing business - banya, caviar, Bolshoi theater - and suddenly we are enemies? How? They are incapable of understanding that the world of Anglo-Saxon empires is not an Eastern sultanate, where people give presents, smoke hookah and relax. It is a dynamic system, which notices and catches new communities, new generations of politicians, new demands - ex-Soviet republics, Arabs, anybody at all, even those silly transgenders, even Martians - takes up their protests, educates their leaders, easily dumps old allies, mixes things up, changes the agenda - and therefore remains always victorious. Those who have spent twenty years sitting in the same place and repeating the same things, thinking that they were entitled to eternal “respect” thereby, are left with nothing.

Because backsides have to sit uneasily on chicken perches, you have to grab, grasp whatever is happening - the Industrial Revolution, geographic discoveries, automobiles, mass culture, computers, subcontinental programmers, toppling tyrants, it does not matter what - grab it and do it quickly and well, do it better than anyone else and always be in the thick of things.

This is the enigma of Anglo-Saxons, their open secret, not at all the foreboding conspiracy-minded bullshit which is the approved pastime in sad, cobwebbed sultanates.

Hustle. Sit on the narrow bench.

Be ready to push anybody off it, but also to be eventually pushed off yourself.

Take the best from everywhere.

And most importantly, don't be stingy. Invest your money and your effort. Put more tea into the teapot[*]. Then you will have a real five o'clock English tea.

[*] This is a reference to a popular, probably pre-1917 Russian joke: One old Jew was famous in the neighborhood because he brewed the tastiest, most flavorful tea. Dying surrounded by his loving relatives, he is asked by one of them: “Uncle Solomon, you've always brewed such tasty tea, but you've never divulged your recipe. At this last, will you not share your secret with us?” The old man motions everybody to bend close to his lips, and whispers: “Jews, don't stint on the tea leaves!”

His next post basically agrees with my 2014 assessment of the extent of Russia’s advertised traditionalism:

I have to admit that for many years I've been pissed off at our official Duginist rhetoric about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and shit, with the bad West and the Euroatlantic civilization. There are two problems with these ideas.

First, it's all a lie. There is no “tradition” in Russia - not in the sense of an historical tradition and canon, but in the sense of a “living” tradition here and now. Russia is the country of total divorce, low birth rates, abandoned old age, an absence of elder men (and thus zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (unless we count DIY paganism and DIY esotericism as such), mass (not only elite) aping of any foreign fashions, torn historical and familial memory, indifference to everything national, concrete high-rise construction with no feel of the earth or a feeling of being masters on the land, and most importantly an extreme lack of trust in all social and collective institutions.

USA is an infinitely more “traditional” country than Russia. In USA, almost every other man has read the Bible - and will quote from it. But whatever, the second thing is worse.

The rhetoric of struggle with the West raises the bar of the current confrontation to an obviously impossible height, because there can be no victory against the “West”. At least there are no precedents of this in world history; even the Bolsheviks failed. Moreover, having put the question in such a radical way that any answer is bound to be unsatisfactory, Russia is diligently painting itself into the role of world evil from the point of view of the other side (not their leadership, but the Western world as a whole), putting forward vague menacing claims which do not presuppose a rational exit - all the while having no resources for such a confrontation.

That is, the Duginistic pathos of “civilizational struggle” - one that completely lacks foundation in practice, and blows up a real problem [i.e. Ukraine - C.] to unsolvable cosmic scale - is ideal for defeat. But people like it. Because it's solemn, theatrical, grand. It says, we aren't just here, we stand for a reordering of the whole world, for good against evil and no bullshit.

Very sad...