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I know it's beating a dead horse at this point, but this whole Prigozhin situation made one fact crystal clear: American dissident right (and "anti-nato left" by extension) is extremely solipsistic, much more than other factions in American culture war. Just take a look at some of those takes which are prevalent among this crowd
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Essentially, their model of the world looks like: here we are, honest god-abiding Americans, and then there are "elites" — Biden, Hillary, DNC, Podesta, Bill Gates, World Economic Forum. How then do you view something that lies outside your usual experience and ideology? If you are dumb, you deny it altogether:
"Ukraine War is fake, all of it is CGI, Zelensky and Hunter Biden siphon gajillions dollars from American taxpayers to buy mansions in Bahamas"
For those people Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Finns, Prigozhin, Zaluzhny, Macron, Scholz, ... do not exist.
If you are smarter, you align yourself with perceived enemies of the elites: Putin, Xi, Orban, .... You say things like:
totally oblivious of cases like this
https://zona.media/online/2023/06/22/sko
being a regular occurrence in Russia, when a girl is sent to prison for putting anti-war slogans on price tags in a shopping mall. Of course they'll have prepared a long list of grievances with "elites" that are intended to persuade you that whatever happens in the US is much worse than repressions in Russia or China. And, sure enough, all of it "glownigger propaganda" anyway.
You might say: "Well, I don't care about anti-Putin Russians, unfortunate pro-Putin Russians who became victims of the regime, neutral Russians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, ... all I care is that my children don't get castrated and turned into trannies". Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
Whatever patience I had with American "anti-establishment" right-wingers, it ended. I guess Hanania is the only one I keep reading/listening at this point.
«What does this have to do with Lenin?»
Nowadays, John Locke is considered to be the founder of English liberalism. But Locke became widely popular only in the 19th century; in the 17th-18th he was scarcely read or quoted. Algernon Sidney was the ruler of minds at that time – it was his ideas, for example, from which the founding fathers of the United States drew. Sidney was an active participant in the English Revolution and a staunch Republican, so after the establishment of Cromwell's dictatorship he resigned from all posts. After the Stuart restoration he went to the continent, first to the Netherlands, then to France, unsuccessfully trying to organize a mutiny against the king. After an amnesty he returned to England, where he was arrested for treason. Two witnesses were required for a conviction for treason, but the authorities found only one. Then Lord Jeffreys did a feint and brought in Sidney's own book, Discourses on the government, as a second witness. The fact that the book had not even been printed and was kept in Sidney's desk failed to deter the judges and they sentenced him to execution. So Sidney became the chief martyr of the Whig movement and an icon of English liberalism and republicanism.
Much later, documents were published proving that the tyrannicidal Sidney lived on the money of the main tyrant of Europe and the enemy of England, Louis XIV, and sought money from him to organize a rebellion. The only thing they did not agree on was the price – Sidney wanted one hundred thousand ecus, but the king agreed to give only five times less.
This publication caused a furor. One of Sidney's friends said he could not have been more ashamed if he had seen his son fleeing the battlefield with his own eyes. The liberal historian Macaulay wrote that few things hurt him as much as seeing Sidney's name on Louis XIV's list of pensioners.
However, let's look at the situation from the other side. Suppose you are a revolutionary and want to overthrow the regime. How exactly are you going to do it? By crushing it with authority? You basically have no choice but to turn to other regimes that are enemies of yours. Simply because loners don't solve anything in this world, only corporations do. Meanwhile, in the second half of the 17th century it was the states that became the strongest corporations on Earth, and in the second half of the 18th century they subjugated or destroyed all their rivals. So it turns out that opposing one state you are forced to turn to others for support, with no options.
So the moronic lamentations about Lenin and the money of the German General Staff just don't make any sense. Of course Lenin would have taken money from the devil, the alternative would have been to sit in Switzerland and smear snot on his face for the rest of his life.
Kamil Galeev, May 18, 2018
This, like a great deal of Galeev's old writing, says more about his own life strategy than about history. Nevertheless, his facts seem correct. And Lenin, after all, succeeded.
You appeal to principle, but that's a principle of peacetime, not of genocide time. Would you have given the same counsel to, ah, Ukrainian soldiers siding with unironic Nazis? Or anti-Chinese Uighurs receiving support from hardcore Muslim movements? No, «the arrow doesn't turn», «this is different»? (Of course I won't say «siding with the US» because that's axiomatically righteous).
Let's not pretend that this is about anything other than objective incompetence and subjective lack of merit of the ideology. Right-wingers (more to the point, nationalists of any stripe sans the most shallowly «civic») are thoroughly routed in the West, same as in Russia incidentally. Russian rump looks to Ukrainian Nazis for guidance, Western one seeks salvation in Baste Putin. It's desperation tactics. Both right-wing camps understand their situation as genocide, slow or rapid, open or concealed. The same way Galeev understood the condition of Tatars before going to Washington DC.
Many camps assert to be driven by fear of genocide. It's the absence of attempts to unscrupulously find external sponsors that gives the lie to all the hand-wringing.
Jefferson, at least, read Locke.
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Soliciting external sponsors with domestic elite support is revolutionary, but attempting to find external sponsors with no elite support is being a traitor. It's concern-trolling to say that if right-wingers actually believed in the gravity of demographic change then they would become traitors for no strategically beneficial reason, and that nonsense should be denounced as it is among many in the DR.
Fostering radical politics within the inertia of European political and cultural integration is the right course of action for Right-wingers. You aren't a traitor if you work to foster pan-European ethnic consciousness because it aligns with the basic nature of the EU and NATO. Does petty nationalism and local populism, much less civic nationalism, have any credibility at this point? 2016 and the failure of Trump and Brexit show that's a dead end.
The liberals are taking on the headwinds of political and financial integration of Europe, the institutions capable for the task are being built for us. The Right wing should not turn traitor for no reason, they should say "Evropa!"
Well that depends on the object level. For the longest time, Putin's structures actually provided some morsels of support to the European far right. So I'd say it did seem like they had a strategic reason to stan him.
They sure can try to own this trend.
Just like every Greek and Levantine state had reason to support the Roman Republic, before they all came under the rule of the Roman Empire.
You are missing the point of Galeev's parable, I'm afraid. Far right dissidents are not representatives of their states, nor do they recognize the legitimacy of incumbent representatives. Of course the specific project of European identitarianism (or local populism) was still doomed, but the idea of shaping conditions for sovereignty via alliances of convenience with repulsive outsiders is well-supported by historical track record in the Old World. Indeed it's not even reputationally costly – you can fight for communist tyranny and then become heroes to some of the most anti-communist people on the continent, to have wistful songs composed in your honor. (Or you could fight for Nazis, so long as you have some cute songs to the effect that Fuhrer sucks). How does that work? A Russian pig dog slave won't understand, this is very subtle stuff. Freedom is best, and hard choices, after all. Unironically.
If anything, DRs are unusual in their tendency to justify their allies and sponsors ideologically as well, and to sincerely buy and propagate those excuses; it took the war to snap them out of it – incompletely, at that.
It’s because DR vision isn’t just about mercenary funding; if it was that then they might as well seek it from China and yet, with the occasional Spandrell exception, they hate China. The vision is that they are obsessed by the insecurity that there is not one huwhite country in the world that is led according to their general ideological impulse. This is not in itself an insurmountable problem, in 1917 communism had existed for 70 years but had only ever been tested for a very short period in the Paris commune (and then only partially). But it is irksome. Orban is about as conservative as someone on the right wing of the British Conservative Party, much as Dreher wants to pretend otherwise, and is in general primarily devoted to enriching his friends from his home village. And Hungary is also very small, it’s like progressives pointing to Luxembourg or libertarians to Monaco or something.
The Russia obsession was more about trying to imagine baste Putinist Russia as white rightist country (even though, as you made clear, it never was) to prove ‘it’s possible’. Any material support was secondary to the psychological support.
Ah, yes, I missed that.
It's more than irksome. Communism inherently sells itself as the vision of the future, only ever an experiment at attaining perfection (even though I agree with Shafarevich that it's a millenia-old failure mode, a sort of naturally occurring cancer, equipped with the evergreen pretense at having noticed the skulls); reactionaries are, well, drawn to tradition. Russia the third Rome, Russia the eternal based no-nonsense Czardom, Russia the bulwark against degeneracy, the shard of the right-thinking world that had been, a living link. Was silly in Nietzsche's time, vastly sillier now.
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for readers not familiar with Russian memes: «the arrow [of the oppression] doesn't turn» is about who oppressing whom, and once it was established, the oppressed cannot become the oppressor no matter what.
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