The Specter of Russian Nationalism

The Specter of Russian Nationalism

August 23, 2008

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848

The fallout from the Russian invasion of Georgia continues. The Daily Mail reports that “Across the region, newspapers, commentators and politicians drew parallels between Moscow's operations in Georgia to Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968 to crush their attempts to leave Moscow's orbit.”

The LA Times did its bit, with a photo op-ed piece titled “All too familiar” juxtaposing photos from Czechoslovakia in 1968 with photos from Georgia, 2008.

But there’s a huge difference. As we pointed out in “Neocons versus Russia,” Russia under Putin is committed to Russian nationalism. There is no evidence whatever that Russia is committed to Communist internationalism and its ideology of world revolution. Those days are over (thankfully).

Russia stands out among the white-majority societies of the world because it is not dominated by elites bent on managing the dissolution of the peoples and culture that created them.

Russian nationalism is on display in a variety of ways. The LA Times reports on “a patriotic concert” in Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia: “In front of a badly damaged government building, a Russian orchestra performed pieces by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich as 1,000 or so residents held up candles and the flags of Russia and South Ossetia, the catalyst in this month's conflict between Russia and Georgia.”

Nationalism in a white country—a frightening prospect indeed for Western elites. For the neocons, not surprisingly, it conjures up images of National Socialist Germany: Neocon Robert Kagan lost no time in comparing the Russian invasion of Georgia to the German occupation of the Sudentenland in 1938. Neoconservative rhetoric is steeped in the language of Munich, Neville Chamberlain, and the “lessons of appeasement.”

The good news is that Russian nationalism is real. Consider Putin’s appointment of Dmitry Rogozin, a Russian nationalist politician, as Ambassador to NATO. Rogozin is described as “one of the founders of the Congress of Russian Communities, a political movement dedicated to voicing the concerns of ethnic Russians and pushing nationalist causes.” In 2003 he became head of the nationalist Rodina [Motherland] coalition. After being forced out of that position, he became involved with the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, "championing the rights of ethnic Russians and organizing nationalist demonstrations.” While head of Rodina, the party put on a television ad starring Rogozin:

The video shows three surly Azerbaijanis eating watermelon and throwing the peels on the ground; to make their nationality clear, Azerbaijani music is playing in the background. A dignified Russian mother is walking by pushing her child in a pram, stepping on the peels. One of the Azerbaijanis insults the Russian lady. All this is witnessed by Rogozin and his vice president; this time Terminator music starts playing in the background. They ask the Azerbaijanis to “clean the space”, but the Azerbaijanis ignore them. Then Rogozin puts a firm hand on one of the Azerbaijanis, and demands of him: “Do you understand Russian?” That’s when the logo of Rodina appears, and the words below the logo say “We will clear Moscow of the dirt”. [Emphasis in text; See the video.]

The imagery of defending a Russian woman and her baby against foreign men is particularly striking. Imagine a similar ad aired by a US political party directed against immigrants being aired on the major television networks.

It goes without saying that if an American or European politician were associated with such a video, he or she would be condemned to the extremist fringe of political life, with no chance whatever of obtaining power or influence. The powers that be would make it difficult for him even to find employment. But in Russia, Rogozin has been elevated to an important, high-profile foreign policy position where he can express his nationalist views to NATO whose actions have been a sore point with Russian nationalists for years.

This point has not been lost on observers. Rogozin’s appointment “was seen as an extension of President Vladimir Putin's combative tone with the West and NATO, specifically. As a strong voice for Russian interests and nationalism, his tenure has been marked by little shift in tone but a continuation of Putin's rhetoric in principle."

Maybe, just maybe, Russia under Putin and Medvedev gets it. The Russian elite seem to understand that ethnic nationalism is healthy and natural, even for white people. They acted decisively against the Jewish oligarchs whose loyalties lay elsewhere and whose behavior threatened to produce a Russia subservient to the West. They have also failed to welcome non-Russian immigration—much to the chagrin of Jeff Mankoff, a Zionist writing in the international edition of the New York Times. (We won't bother to dwell on the hypocrisy of those whose primary loyalty is to a country with a biological standard for immigration lecturing the West about the moral imperative of mass multi-ethnic immigration. And to think such ideas would appear in a publication of the New York Times. Shocking!)

Their own experience of being a victimized ethnic majority dominated by a hostile Jewish elite in the early decades of the Soviet Union (see Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century) may well have reinforced their own sense of ethnicity and made them immune to the ideologies of victimhood—and especially Jewish victimhood—that permeate the West.

Indeed, it is interesting that one of the first Russian responses in the wake of the invasion of Georgia has been to initiate talks with Syria about providing advanced anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. The Russians obviously have a grasp of the reality of American foreign policy as centered around the interests of Israel, and they seem bent on punishing Israel for its military and political ties to Georgia. Russia continues to provide Iran with nuclear material as well as weaponry designed to protect its nuclear installations.

Neoconservatives and other elements of Western elites will do all they can to destroy Russian nationalism. As noted above, we have already seen that neocons have compared the Russian actions in Georgia to the actions of Germany in the 1930s.

Such a comparison warrants the most extreme and violent response because National Socialism is the epitome of evil in the current Western lexicon. A nationalist, ethnically conscious white nation is the worst nightmare of these elites because it represents a shining counterexample to their managed destruction of white racial identity and the traditional culture of the West. We can expect that these elites will respond with all of the power they can muster.

A white, racially conscious Russia is dangerous to these elites because it may well become a shining city on the hill while other Western nations sink into multiculturalism and whites become minorities victimized by affirmative action, anti-white crime, and ever more hostile coalitions of the non-white majority.

Imagine a world in 20 years when whites in the US are on the verge of becoming a minority. (The Census Bureau recently moved the year of whites becoming a minority to 2042, and this landmark event will doubtless be ratcheted down as the pro-immigration forces gain yet more steam). But imagine also at this time a Russia that is prosperous and proud, technologically advanced, and energy independent; with a birthrate that has rebounded from its horrendous decline; that has remained ethnically Russian and has resisted the many pressures to open the floodgates to other peoples; and that has retained its culture and its sense of peoplehood.

No doubt the chattering classes in the West will continue to condemn it and continue to complain about its lack of democracy. But the glaring differences between the fate of whites in Russia and in the enlightened, multicultural West will become too obvious to ignore. This would indeed produce a crisis of epic proportions.


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