The Avatar or zeitgeist of post-Cold War thinking may still prove controversial
Sometimes if you have to fly kites or drones for INTEL you have to 'risk assess' the value versus the loss of collateral damage!
It's almost as if the Russian Soviets were able to extricate itself by such methods to objectively review its own pastiche of itself in order to accept that Sovietism was just 'self-harm’! How things changed from the 2nd decade of the 2oth century when Soviet Art was a global leader to the Dickensian dysfunctional obsolete unsustainable sucker and loser of the 1980's, barely held together by a crumbling Socialist realist Art put on ice and in remediable decline. In post-Soviet Russia it will always regret and over-compensate for its international standing, or is it actually experimenting with Capitalism and democracy to counterattack?
We have seen this avatar experiment before but never so distanced from preventing Capitalism being so animated by its own brand of democracy that has nevertheless proved to be volatile and inexperienced in unstable consumerism, corporate Oligarchy and a breeding ground for social discontent that even flirts with the idea of a Russian Trojan Horse!? What? How? By manipulating its newfound wealth and status in the global markets to subvert, poison and destroy the very fabric of global Capitalism. this would fit a profile of an aggressor who prefers his enemy to lose than to win himself. Such cabin fever and passive -aggressive behaviour is a heady mix that can flare-up into conflict with little provocation just to break-out and break-free!? Welcome to the new invisibility cloak of superpower and not ideological wars that involve third or more parties and lots of crashing and burning counter attacks! Or should we cut Russia some slack because unlike the West, it is still evolving and is still in its post-Cold War relative infancy, and unlike the West it has been under the shadow of Sovietism for 70 odd years and cannot be expected to not make errors of judgement when it's known nothing but 70 years of totalitarianism! But it doesn't also know how to not invade Ukraine and not be met with a tsunami of Ukrainian resistance!
But Russia isn't the only victim in its divorce from the Cold War and the rest of the international family! Such a divorce with the past for the West, (especially the USA) has led to a transition involving both national pride and issues of identity and reconciling its past has divided the USA! It is still a haven for immigrants as an immigrant society, but issues of indigeneity versus a new broom in an economy and society of constant change where its role in the world is without the binary simplicity of the Cold War and where American leadership as the entrepreneurial capital of the world have transformed its nature in which it has to juggle more plates at home and abroad that it would ideally have chosen. Americans are divided as never before in this century, and they too are spun-out a bit by new terrain and new responsibilities as a result of the West not quite knowing how to embark on this new era too! Sometimes winning a war can drain you and disorientate you more than losing one!?!
But first let's play devil's advocate: Was the end of the Cold War an experiment to embrace and espouse a new era of Communist non-violence by the success of the Velvet Revolution within the now ex Warsaw Pact countries and not the collapse of the Soviet? Absolutely No! But didn't this event actually /wither away totalitarianism and the state apparatus, and was this conducted without military interference to an original Communism by popular national and international consent across the Iron curtain? Nothing came to her like the leaving of it? But this Velvet revolution had little to do with Communism! If you argue otherwise, then to my mind that is a bit of a stretch coupled with a paradox compounded with an unlikely Soviet self-sacrifice (self-sacrifice was deemed a 'narcissistic bourgeois act of Capitalist degenerate egotism' which the Soviet's would never have conceded unless in full ideological and economic retreat! However I think that many in the West would prefer to think that rather than Soviet largesse it is quite a trophy from a senile exhausted failure of a beaten Soviet bear! But in its death-throws the Velvet Revolution it worked on many levels, and it was so successful that both Mandela ditched apartheid and the Arab Spring ditched dictatorship whilst being inspired by its unique value to broker transition! But it did establish the principle that only Soviet failure could 'wither away' and not mutate and provide a transition of openness and in a blink of an eye showed the world that Communism needed to fail before the next stage of political evolution could reunite a new dynasty of the three pillars of freedom: individualism, Democracy and Capitalism! Welcome to the East of Europe once so shackled by Sovietism, and after transition your new freedom will upgrade enlightenment in Democracies with more miles on the Democratic clock.
But would Sovietism be so forgiving if the shoe was on the other foot? Indeed, during the 'true, free and equal spirit of the Velvet Revolution in transition', the Soviet state went into hiding and did not wither away! Moreover, such mellow non-violent transformation may just be a reaction from previous Eastern European countries who may have been invaded by the Soviet Union and were therefore not rioting but celebrating!? That brief experience of hedonism and harmony was probably more indulgent because they may have felt that freedom from any politics was never going to be sustainable so why not make hay when the sun shines? So, the moral of the story may be that only by destroying totalitarian regimes from within and not from without can you prevail, and that only in the last days of Sovietism can people enjoy the end of the struggle with the beginning of the release without any precedent or blueprint for doing so! The immense unbridled freedom for example the Czechs must have felt will never be replicated???!!
But will Russia need to avenge its past both domestically and internationally? 21st Century Russia may be the last place you'd find Fascism or a mutated form of it, but what if it has not prepared for that possibility? Thankfully for us today Russia has suffered such trauma at the hands of the Nazi's that fascism is simply not its Russian DNA! But some may argue that is futureproofing going too far, and it is in the most inappropriate places that extremism lurks unchecked! Indeed, didn't Marx try and 'future-proof' his dialectical materialist inevitability of Communism after the state that would wither away when there was no longer a need for the dictatorship of the Proletariat? Even rudimentary Marxism upgraded to embrace Gramsci's hegemony' of the Capitalist system and a more flexible approach to Marxist notions of the key institutions and prevailing influences cannot guarantee an absence of Stalinism in realpolitik of Marxist Leninism!
Or was the European break-down of Communism by 1990 not a Marxist-Leninist failure at all? Just a European one? But why proffer the end of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat for the invisible hand of global Capitalism, why concede defeat, and then give way to Western theoretical extrapolation of Soviet cynicism and amorality and lead the West into thinking that it had killed-off Marxism unless.... there was another play? Was that agenda actually not capitulating but covertly nurturing designs that were more than just a 'Rainbow coalition' of 'ivory towers' Cold War deniers or those more credible who were ex-Soviet relativists whose Marxist Relativism' that could meekly call a dispensing of Marxist certainty of Science according to Dialectical Materialism as an interventionist pro-Capitalist episode only to be cast aside once the currency could re-float the Russian coffers and rebuild superpower status that would not go under the radar of the West whilst a Soviet revival could be kept under wraps ? Here is your Trojan Horse! Or worse? 19th Century Marxism could actually get an upgrade by an unlikely integration of Nietzsche’s 'eternal return' with a heretical but up to date Communism to reclaim Russia that does not need to put itself at the mercy of history and science of inevitability when it could enforce prejudice, greed, malice and gain vengeance against the West, whilst moonlighting as a Capitalist democracy'?!!? Marxists may well be more orthodox than such an outcome and feel that this 'Russian heresy' may have replaced the Marxist checks and balances of strict Marxist paradigms and chronology of socio-economic conditions suitable for a 'Bolshevik Revolution' that does not need to authenticate and self-regulate but appears more fanatical to be a transition from Oligarchy to state dictatorship and not the guardian of Marxist orthodoxy. Such a substituting of the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' for the 'superior model of Communism by force of advocation and imposition nihilistic cynicism relies upon a selective Marxist memory and values only ideology as a form of power and spin! But what of the Cold War Soviet identity, integrity and logic? Would Communist's trade all that Cold War effort just to spin and bastardize and corrupt its raison d'etre'?
Indeed, why does Russia fixate at being first, not just a characteristic after the Cold War but also excessively competitive in its ruthless need to realise but channel personal ambition to 're-direct Russian energies and therefore add 'great glory to the Russian state' during the Cold War'.? Well doesn't this quality make it ripe for Capitalism in the 'Wild East' meets the 'Wild West'? Is the connector actually a cross-over of a capacity for hard-nosed confrontation as well as conspiracy? In fact, single-mindedness, ambition, and a competitive spirit are qualities found at the top of the food-chain that have been passed down generations to acquire such skill sets. So, either Russians have a propensity to being more of a match for businesspeople in the West, or ...Marxism, in spite of its collectivism, de-individualizing and anti-property and fundamentalism breeds and sublimates hard-core Capitalist values as heavy-weight doctrine and absolutely essential!! So, if Greek logic prevails, one must avoid Marxist-Leninism if you don't want to be the fast-track to Capitalism.. and by extension, Marxism doesn't subvert Capitalism, it's part of a process to evolve it !?! So, when Capitalists have argued that they'll impose Marxism as a punishment, they actually may say that Marxism will shed its skin in order to become the Free-market country out of tough love?!!
Could Marxist thinking actually be part of a 'Western training programme’? Indeed, the USA has been working harder than Russia in this post-Cold War era at retrieving its status as a sovereign nation even to its own detriment. The strain was too self-evident in the last presidential Campaign in which many Americans were unhappy. The loss of perception and a degree of dis-association towards the American identification with the 'American Dream’ seemed to be more exported than retained in America. The perception of America bearing all the load internationally with billions of government money being spent to fund the USA brand abroad but that domestically America was paralyzed with economic drift without being involved or tangentially rewarded for being stoic and unwavering in resisting Communism. The upshot? Fundamentalism was being attributed to the den of iniquity in the form of Washington DC because it was deemed corrupt, attacked by a fundamentalism of over-simplification and fear of information and self-serving economic overload that was by-passing the average hard-working blue-collar family. The 'war against the American psyche and how to nurture it and not lose America's positivistic up-beat resistance to the bully' seemed not a high priority in Washington DC for many! In short, I think resistance is so integral to the US DNA that some Americans felt they would do what America does best: Suspect Politicians first and resist backing the loser by backing the underdog! That meant don't back Washington but expose any energy or commitment that wasn't America's inheritance of spending at home first, and then to its competitors!
But compare the US with overactivity on foreign soil from Putin's Russia where perhaps Ukraine will not believe that Russia is just 'expanding its markets' abroad? Perhaps Putin has put the boot-in because he doesn't recall how the 21st century works without 19th century imperialism!? The USSR embraced superpower confrontation because it thought its system was more advanced and scientifically inevitable, yet in spite of such a failed prospectus there are still areas of continuity with present day Russia!?! Putin believes that he is a better profile with a neighbour who would like to partake in the largesse of Russia's portfolio than the ‘hung-over' post-Cold War West distracted by internecine conflict and trying to embrace the post-Soviet era in the rest of NATO, that is hitherto incomplete? Perhaps just like he believed in materialistic fact that Russia was the first into Space, the first to experience mass naval mutiny in the 20th century, the first to impose Bolshevik Revolution and the first to advance the case for continental rejection of Marxist-Leninism for Capitalism and yet enjoy a Parliamentary democracy! He has added opportunism to his leadership credentials by invading Ukraine and threatening the WMD of restoration of a streamlined free of dead ideological wood and a tenuous residual Marxist-Leninism to propagandize but assert a Communism for the 21st century without any ideological discipline but enforced by self-serving cynical deviance but offering a veneer of respectability with the submission of Ukraine rendered under his thumb and a mutation of progress whilst demanding reassurances and getting the bragging rights of hood-winking the West in their own NATO backyard ! That's not going to happen Mr Putin!
The Chinese Soviet regime will not allow such heresy to prevail especially as it is Soviet China that has endured and formulated its 2-system investment into the global economy partly because Soviet Russia folded under international pressure. Losing a Marxist-Leninist friend such as the USSR and then losing a Russian mutation that's evolving into a dictatorship would be further punishment and breed a new form of international isolation for a China that would not like its policy to be at the whim of anyone let alone to a Soviet slayer! Ideological poison is normally met with a unique Chinese brand of cultural revolution or social 'cardiac arrest delivery system' at home and abroad; what did you think was going to happen when you invaded Ukraine Mr Putin? You've threatened not just the global economy but destabilised China's attempt to avoid its puritanical fanaticism and enlisting anti-Russian feeling already still recovering in some part to the aftershocks of USSR capitulation to the West and its abandonment of Soviet China!! Yes, a flip-flopping Russia could have massive ramifications internationally and ruin much of the stability of the global market keeping the extremists at bay! Such Russian shape-shifting ideological make-over will damage markets and threaten to destabilize and traumatize by splitting Democracy from Capitalism and undermine post-Cold War social liberalism that does support the very bonds of an interactive interdependent liberal free market! Let China rework its network and not punish it for succeeding where USSR didn't Mr Putin. Would any Russian actually prefer global meltdown and incriminate itself rather than choose the progressive continuation of nascent international forms and variants of democracy and its skill set and international predilection to Capitalism? You will not find any answers in your invasion of Ukraine, but you will have to face an international backlash on your return to Russia! Don't ask Ukraine for an answer, ask the question yourselves!
There is no such concept in Marxism for any Revisionism, but ideological spin by Putin that we see in Russia today is new too. We've experienced New Labour etc which defined 'original accountancy by spin', but Putinesque ideological self-harm on such a scale that would bring back national memories before and after the Bolshevik Revolution and at the same time would be a catastrophe on Russia and on Europe, just when an Eastern version of the EU (under the umbrella of the EU) could be internationally possible and unprecedented! But this would bring an ideological build-up on the borders of reason, a vast stretch to the 19th century to a mutant misanthropic hybrid Oligarchy imploding today; is that really what the continent of Europe really wants? In Britain we don't want to be the first to be pulled-under economically if it went flip-flop, and Russia couldn't afford a flip-flop to Sovietism and probably couldn't divorce from Capitalism as easily as the most ardent Russian ideological amnesiac of a pro-Soviet nature would have the international community believe. Would the Russians induce international break-down rather than chase ideological rainbows that are actually manifestations of dysfunctional and turbulent nihilism that would mutate itself over and over again? Why deny the Russian innate skill set and predilection to Capitalism? Why be Perseus holding the head of the gorgon and then make him put it back on its severed head?
Remember, the West would recover from an international economic breakdown quicker than its Cold War adversary. How? Since the end of World War 2, dozens of 'Capitalism in Crises' (Marxist speak for recessions and bear markets) have been the building block of Western Capitalism's preparations for such events. It’s not the bull markets that drive Western Capitalism but the natural occurrence of the 'economic cycle' that can be fully self-regulatory, as well as the self-induced clandestine versions to test ourselves. Add its wingman of prudent reliable short-term precautionary measures (to you and me protectionism via the backdoor of the free market) or economic conservatism. 'Capitalism in crisis' isn't a Marxist term only but denotes 'economic policy and economic recovery' for the international family. This is the reboot of momentum plus choice plus risk rather than 'Capitalist dictatorship or Capitalist distortion!!' It's essential that the global markets who need stability to create confidence are not subverted by a Russia that may be unable to grasp how to move Russia to the next stage of freedom from undemocratic manipulation and refuse or reject global investment into a unique Russia, fearful of the future yet traumatized by its past. A Russian brand, however, does not impose its branding on the backs of its neighbours...period! This is not a choice of an existential nature as much as it is not an ideological one. Ukraine today is a sovereign nation that decides by democratic means with backing of a majority of pro-Russian Ukrainians who can be relied upon for their loyalty to Russia but who have the conviction that Ukraine is an independent sovereign nation rather than in the hands of the Kremlin. Moreover, is progressive evolution and fast tracking both the Nascent democracy and his economic miracle too small an international reflection of Russia's largesse to the rest of the world?? How far will international economic hardship reassure Putin before he withdraws from Ukraine as a 'victor in charge of the direction of the free market global economy' by plunging us all into a spiral of discontent and how far will someone use the same tactic on him now that the gloves are off? Putin is indeed a 19th century imperialist in a 21st century world, but what if the leader that succeeds him is more fundamentalist and thus more dangerous? Putin's legacy all along may be to encourage and stimulate new generations of ideological anti-westernism by deliberately slow rolling his invasion and his withdrawal from Ukraine?! He could devour us all by cynical Machiavellian manipulation by holding all the cards! How is that possible?! Because we've all underestimated him!
Fearless, faithless, and reckless could very well advance the cause of Putin. He could retaliate philosophically by attaching himself to the nihilism and opportunism of Nietzsche emboldening the uprooting of Marxist chronological sequence of conditions for Communism but violently enforce by the superior force of Russia to accommodate his unscrupulous self-serving opportunism by invoking a distortion of existential acts of will over justice by punishing opponents. This is aberrant coercion where there is no mitigation or concession where honour and chivalry are traumatised by the self-anointed misappropriation by stealth and brazen conspiracy. Putin's legacy will be the graveyard where lies, deceit and cynicism to eject the status quo will be nihilistically evaporated and an accession to power that will be seen as the absolute will of a submissive people. Power by violent distortion and state propaganda where self-will self-justifies assault on power, the military and ideological enslavement seems to be what the Ukraine faces as well as the Russian people have had or will have to endure too.
This is the right time to imagine and prevent a scenario involving Putin's successors, if they want to distort and mutate Marx and Nietzsche the consequences would be unimaginable.
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