The Russian Unintended Abetment of Russian Hatred
An “Absurd” Notion.
The notion that there should exist a country anywhere in the present world that would have itself played an important or even decisive role in the hatred other countries manifest toward it, could, at least at first sight, be considered absurd. Such notion could be dismissed out of hand as the only thing that makes sense to do with it. However, it could be argued, and the case will herein be made, that it is always possible that, despite itself, and so unwittingly, a country could under some historical circumstances create the functional, political space, and facilitate the tools and the themes which those who will, would use for fostering, displaying, and more significantly, acting out their hatred on such country. Herein I will contend that such notion is fitting to the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin.
That been said, it is however necessary, so to speak, to immediately rush to register a disclaimer. None of the above wants to imply that the Russian Federation has done anything specific on account of, and which as retaliation for it, would be deserving of the acerbic hatred the many countries that comprise the combined West so overly and unscrupulously proclaim, and act upon vis-a-vise everything Russian— be it the Russian State, the Russian people, and the Russian language. Indeed, it can safely be asserted that, compared with the hatred the combined West expresses toward Russia, its attitude toward Nazi Germany in its time was a remonstration of pure brotherly love. Yet, in contrast to the deeds of Nazi Germany, the Russian Federation has not been perpetrator of any misdeeds commensurable with the hatred it's been getting.
That makes obvious it's not what you do but what you do not that often can make you the object of hatred. By contrast, it is a matter of public international knowledge that other countries, namely the United States, Brattain, and their European allies, have often carried out attacks, invasions, destructions, and murdering of civilians at a massive scale compared to which whatever Russia can be accused of would be equivalent to a simple political faux pass.
So, not what Russia has done or accused of doing but what it has not done, what it has neglected to do, is what has unwittingly contributed to hatred for it going in a crescendo with every passing day. Tricky situation: whatever Russia has not done is what has, in last analysis, comes down to and turned out to be its unintended abetment of western hatred. The question that must be posed then is what is it that Russia has failed to do that consequently abets the hatred from the combined West.
Some pertinent considerations must first be introduced toward answering this question. In answering, and while moving onward to the answer, attention is herein called to the two époque-making episodes, unmatched in the whole history of the main western powers, which have afterwards and all throughout been the deep wells from which resentment toward the Eastern Europe Bear springs forth. Referred to in the order they took place in history, there is first the humiliating defeat of Napoleon by the Eastern Bear, after invading the Russian nation, in 1812. And second, there is the routing and too humiliating a defeat the Bear of Eastern Europe inflicted on Hitler. Both came to Russia uninvited from the two larger, stronger, and central powers of Western Europe. These to events are remarkable for many other of their features; but as pertains to this writing, they are the two most outstanding times in which Western Europe fielded against Russia the best it could militarily offer, only to be twice defeated and humiliated. These powers, and by affiliation and extension, England and the United Stated, have never been able to bring themselves to understand or accept that the Russians could have been able of pulling off such feats. The Russians— who from the Seventeenth Century onward in places like Paris, London, Berlin, and much later after them, in Washington, have been put down and dismissed as retrograde uncivilized barbarians.
Guided by resentment, the West has ever since sought to find pretexts, to enact the narratives, and to try to set convenient scenarios to attempt avenging and redeem themselves for their defeats. Thus, it is such historical, civilizational, and in last analysis, psychological resentment that feeds the animosity of NATO toward the Russians.
Nonetheless, before it grew into a full-flung, expanded hatred through the West, this animosity first started strictly as "neighborly" hatred. For one, surrounded by so many geographically puny countries, the sheer geographical size of Russia couldn't but be experienced as a menace by them even if their larger neighbors would have done nothing to instill fear. Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania— in accordance with the psychology of fear they would have felt that, if ever it wanted to hurt them, the puny size of each one separately but also of all in unity could do nothing to stop a Russian pounce. After all, there is not much a flock of sheep can do if a bear decides to lean or sit on it. As corresponds to the psychology of fear, because they feared Russia merely on account of its size, they felt threatened by it independently of whether the bear was up to no good. And because they felt threatened by their own fear of the bear, they gave birth to the epic myth of a permanent and inevitable "Russian threat."
The history of the relation of the geographically puny countries surrounding Russia going all the way back to Peter the Great, down to Stalin, and presently to Putin, has been cushioned and predicated on such fear. And this even though feudal Russia is not straightforwardly translatable to Soviet Russia, and even though the present Federal Russia stands in opposition to practically everything the Soviets stood for. In its turn, this fear has undergone one important transformation, after getting "transferred" from Russian's smaller neighbors to the combined West, its result so far being the war we are currently witnessing in Ukraine. We will get back to it down below.
On the other hand, none of the above is to suggest that Russia would have always been in its best behavior toward its puny neighbors— but who has always been so to theirs? For sure, not the United States. At any event, were this the place for it, we would not need to look too long to find dozens of examples of actions by the Russians that would have been inductive of fear even when those actions would have not, in themselves, been threatening. As far as the psychology of fear goes, the mere fact that the Russian people have throughout history enjoyed an overabundance of good health; that their abundant good health has made them more joyful and daring, and that, as the French found out in due (die) time— that they have for the most part been blessed with a strong will and stoic indifference to pain only matched by barbarians and the noblest of beasts, that too would have alone sufficed for them to be perceived as a threat by its geographically puny neighbors. To insist on this, because of the Russian defeat of Napoleon, what first was neighborly fear got transferred as the psycho-mythology of a Russian threat to the totality of the combined West. For, it is a fact of human psychology that fear is contagious. And now as it was then, fearing itself is what is really threatening.
Moreover, it is also truth that the "neighbor," as this concept is understood today, is of recent invention. In the long past, nations had no neighbors; they had either allied or enemies, and one could very easily turn into the other. In the long past, nations played by a different set of rules than they do now, and the political and geographical confusion and realignments brought about by the decline and dissolution of old major powers (the Roman Empire, and in its time, the Ottoman, for example), almost continuously set the stage for creating new forms of danger, and consequently, new rules to play by. For, who is to deny that for instance, those two single events justified some behavior by the Russians that by necessity had to be threatening to countries they were not allied to? Although this is in no way an academic point, those geographically puny Russia's neighbors have never taken it fully into consideration, if at all.
Nations that have consistently recognized the point I am making and have therefore taken the truths derived from this fact of History into account in the fashioning of their foreign policies, have been moving forward as they forge their future. But those which have not, keep their sight glued to the past and has moved evermore backwardly. Grudge and rancor are ways of remaining in the past. Thus, the puny Russian neighboring countries, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which continually remind themselves of their own old fear in which they felt a Russian threat, are in the latter group; Russia, in the former. Whereas Russia has been leaving his political past behind, its puny neighbors never left theirs.
But, leaving out of a count the Long Past... Events taking place historically much closer us did intervene to transform the Baltic neighborly “Russian threat” fear into outright Russian hatred as it transferred to the West. It is demonstrably true that in more recent times, during the long decades of the Sovietization, Russia did become explicitly “threatening” to its neighbors, to the point that many of them, to all intents and purposes disappeared from the world map inside the Soviet Union, to no obvious gains or advantages for either of them, including Moscow itself. Nevertheless, what up to now has been taken to be self-evident is that the absorption into the Union of Russia's puny neighbors and the Sovietization of others, much larger countries within Russia's sphere of influence, was perpetrated by the Soviet as the logical imperative of a country that sought to gain hegemony by exporting its social system and imposing it over the will of the populations of those countries. But how much truth there is in this myth?
For that is only true in appearance and looking at the surface of things and whatever truth thereof, is only partial and oversimplified. Rather than exporting its brand of Soviet communism per se, Russia needed around itself Soviet-like societies to function as buffer-zones to protect itself from the machinations and the on-stand-by threat coming from the United States and allied countries. Far before the Bolsheviks came to power Germany, Japan, the United States, France, and the Slavic mini-powers, like the former Czechoslovakia, had made dangerous incursions into Russian territory, which the Russian communists under Lenin's leadership had to fight off and finally kick out, as it happened in 1918 to the American occupying troops. Thus, it was not because dogmatically aggressive Russia sought to export the socialism/communism system to its neighbors that it propagated "Sovietization." As it turns out, the nations where versions of "communism/socialism" have triumphed do not embark in outsourcing it to other nations; on this China is the best example. In the fundamental principles guiding China's international policies, a prohibition is written to this effect. Then again, China was never in need of buffer zones.
Even before the Sovietization of Russia, the West on one side, and the Japanese on another, but at times together, made no secret of their design on Russian geographical integrity and natural resources, which they attempted to rob in repeated forays into the country under Nicholas I, Nicholas II, and under Kerensky, and subsequently, under the Bolshevik replacement of Kerensky. In short, it is the West that historically has posed a threat to Russia even before it has any ideological system it would have liked to export. And this threat posed to Russia never went away all throughout the very end of the Cold War; only the tacks and the tactics changed; but their endgame remained the same. Poor and mostly unindustrialized; having yet to fully recovered from the scope-wide destruction to infrastructures and to society caused by the combined factors of Nazi Germany war and Stalinist politics and policies, the West always considered Russia underserving of so much and so diverse natural wealth, and was not willing to countenance the Soviet refusal for instance to allow US capitalist investments in the Russian economy. That was in the end what was always at stake; this was the oil fueled the Cold War, literally. Not paradoxically, such endgame only turned things hotter, as we now know.
The Reprising of an “Absurd” Notion.
Here, the reader will be quick to notice this account has not gone as far as to offer any explanation nor any example to substantiate the initial proposition of a shared Russia responsibility in, or rather, of the unwittingly abetment, by Russia itself, of the hatred coming to them from the West. Sure enough.
But now, to say it with utmost brevity: Up to the present, Russia has been for too long allowing itself to become the object of western hatred by not being direct, clear, and unhesitant in declaring to the concerned parties that there is a price to eventually be paid for their attitude toward it. In terser words: Failing to communicate in the most effective way, as it often does, Russia has abetted hatred toward itself not by doing but by not doing or by doing only half-way, and even inconsistently, what mostly likely than no would have put its adversaries on notice that the time was inevitably going to come when their irrational, unjustified and gratuitous hatred toward everything Russian was going to be righteously countered. And by not spelling it out to them that although a Russian reaction was going to do nobody any good, some would come out of it worse off than others.
In the same vein, it would have seemed that Russia has never seriously undertaken educating the large public outside its territories, for instance, alone the line sketched in paragraphs above, on the complexity of the history, circumstances, geographical, political, and economic factors, and the respective national psychology that has motivated the deep-seated hatred coming East from the West. To my knowledge, but since I am not thoroughly well-informed and well-versed on Russian affairs, it might not mean much for me to say that Russia has for the most part never made a deliberate, concerted effort (educative, cultural, and otherwise) to edify peoples and nations of the historical truths on the subject hand. To be sure, Russia goes to great lengths to generate and disseminate information, mainly through Russian Today and Sputnik. But information is not education. Maybe they exist somewhere; but I have missed out in the dozens of books, movies, conferences, lectures, and multi-language international Russian magazines which I can find nowhere.
Neither after it rejected its Soviet Bolshevik past with the foundation of the Russian Federation, nor after the West started to most seriously push for bringing about "regimen change" at the Kremlin, of which the Maidan coup d’état was the first salvo, and not during the eight long years of Neo-Fascist Ukrainian shelling of the civilian population of Dunbass— in neither of these occasions did Russia undertake to mobilize its intellectual resources to educate and prepare its many friends abroad well in advance for what, in retrospect, was inevitable. One can only imagine what not having neglected the education front would have accomplished in advance at the artillery front— that is, if as much intellectual and artistic munition had been deployed around the world as much as the war ammunition Russia has been building and storing after the Maidan coup d’état, in anticipation of what it for sure knew: that, not being able to help themselves, the Americans could not but instigate, organize, fund, and exploit to hurt Russian the most: to help themselves at Russia’s expense.
Now it befits to offer a condensed bullet-point sample of what Russia has not done that has despite itself served as abetment of the hatred of its enemies. To leave no room for easily avoidable misunderstanding, I am pressing forward the three semantically quasi-synonymous words, as I seek to emphasize, underline, and underpin the initial notion that it is what Russian has not done, and not what it has, which has consistently been used by the West to let loose its hatred Eastward. I will also advance that, toward the end of this writing, the accuracy of this condensed bullet-point sample will be confirmed in the authoritative words by Russian Foreign Minister, Mr. Sergey Lavrov, in his most recent speech before the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. And now, the condensed sample. Readers are welcome to add or subtract as it makes more sense to them. But the result will be the same. Here there are, in no especial order:
· Even in the face of, by the Kremlin's own account, more than 45 countries allying and colluding against it, Russia insists on tying itself up in a complex many-clauses doctrine concerning the array of circumstances which would in its eyes justify employing nuclear weapons on them. Here Russia fails to turn the nuclear rhetoric against its enemies, by clearly stating that the one most pressing rationale it has for considering the deployment of nuclear weapons is precisely the large number of countries colluding with each other and antagonizing it. Since Russian is being challenged by so many enemies, it is most logical that its nuclear policy must reflect this reality. It has failed to adopt what can be called a "untied-hand" approach on this issue.
· Russia has convinced itself and has adopted as a its fundamental doctrine that nuclear weapons really are universal all-terrains-all-weathers deterrents to the enemy. It has failed to add to its publicizing of such doctrine that nuclear weapons are effective deterrents only relative to, a) whether an enemy does not itself possesses nuclear weapons but only conventional ones; and, b) an enemy that possesses nuclear weapons finds itself in the factual need of, and has also the resolve to use them. This is to say, it would seem Russia neglects to recognize and to emphasize that it is the resoluteness demonstrated by an enemy to deploy and to use nuclear weapons that really works as a deterrent, and that this resoluteness to use that kind of weapons rests on the magnitude a need may have for them. Neglecting this, Russian diplomacy devotes too much energy in trying to convince its enemies of the intrinsic worth of discussing and signing international treaties forbidding the use of nuclear weapons, even when it should know that treaties can and will be over-written by military scenarios deemed existential by any of the signatories to a treaty, and even when it also knows it is not dealing anymore with a honorable broker, as for example the non-compliance and overt violation by the West of the Minsk Agreement between Russia, Ukraine, and the West has recently shown.
· At the same time, even though it recognizes that a NATO-armed, NATO-led Ukraine is an existential threat for Russia, the Kremlin constantly rushes to clarify and deny, to the benefit of its enemies, that it is contemplating the employment of nuclear weapons in the ongoing war, without at the same time calling up the West's game by publicly asserting that, as it surely knows, such charge by NATO is cynically and disingenuously voiced in part to measure Russian's reaction, to collect more data on the Kremlin's power psychology, and thus to get a glimpse into the resoluteness of the Kremlin to go all the way when and if the nuclear moment calls. At the same time, Russia has failed in asserting in the utmost unambiguous and unequivocal terms that it possesses more than enough weapon systems that are uniquely theirs, capable of yielding results comparable to a nuclear weapon without however being a nuclear weapon, that is, without violating any international agreements that specifically prohibit nuclear weapon use.
· Although Russia has rightly designated more than a handful of countries (up to now a total of 45 by Russia's own account) as "enemy countries," which they are, it has failed in laying down in very precise terms what consequences should they expect for their unfriendliness, so they would know what would or could eventually be coming their way as pay up, and why. A recent clear example of this failure is when it declares, that for example, Germany has crossed a "red line"; but it does not go as far as to state in the same breath the consequences or the kind of response the Germans should expect for their trespassing.
· As much as Russia acknowledges the leadership of the West has only the most damning designs on the Russian Federation, as it has over and again made it all too clear, it has until very recent been referring to this same leadership as "partners," instead of "opponents," "antagonists," or "adversaries," which is how western powers think of Russia, and treat it accordingly.
· It is as if the Russian leadership takes seriously its own public statements as to its hopes that the West will eventually "come back to its senses." Such position reflects a failure by the Kremlin in making the correct psychological assessment of the dire mental state of the western leadership, which is in turn a reflection of the morass moral state of the larger demographics of western societies. It would seem to escape the Kremlin the synergetic relation at work in the psycho-political state of the western leadership both in the US and the EU that has led it to adopt self-harming, suicidal policies, on the one hand, and on the other, the state of moral decline in society, characterized by a incapability to demonstrate reasonable restraint in everything, and by utter confusion in practically everything and at all levels and among all the classes, in all the expressions of public and private life, and in all the structures of the political establishment.
Moving toward the end... As if to reassure the reader of the certitude comprised in every word by this writer, here is the uppermost Russian authority concerning everything that has been going on since the end of the Cold War between West and the Easter European bear. Because what he is saying is starkly clear, one must listen up carefully and from up close to fully grasp what his words are not saying. Here he is, in two fragments of his great speech:
‘"How have Russia’s actions over the past decades actually infringed upon the interests of its opponents? Could it be that they cannot forgive us because it is the position of our country that made the military and strategic detente possible in the 1980s and 1990s? Or that we voluntarily dissolved the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, depriving NATO of its raison d’etre? Or that we supported Germany’s reunification without any conditions and contrary to the positions of London and Paris? That we withdrew our armed forces from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and recognised the independence of the former Soviet republics? That we believed the promises by the Western leaders that they would not expand NATO to the east by a single inch, and when this process started, we agreed to basically legitimise it by signing the Russia-NATO Founding Act? Could it be that we infringed on the West’s interests when we warned it that bringing its military infrastructure closer to our border would be unacceptable to us?"’
‘"Could it be that they cannot forgive us for supporting, at the request of the United States and the European Union, the agreement reached between then President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich and the opposition to resolve the February 2014 crisis? Germany, France, and Poland guaranteed these agreements, but the next morning the leaders of the government coup trampled upon them, humiliating the European mediators. The West simply shrugged and looked on in silence as the putschists started bombing eastern Ukraine where people refused to accept the government coup. They looked on when those behind the coup elevated Nazi accomplices involved in atrocious ethnic cleansings against Russians, Poles, and Jews during World War II to the rank of national heroes."’
As it is made quite patent therein: Russia has been for decades, from the end the Cold War down to very recently, assenting and agreeing to too many items of Western (US) foreign policies. It has done so to the point that it got the West accustomed of hearing it says Yes so often it wouldn't understand or give credit but rather dismiss as a bluff if ever Russia said No to it. Understandably so. For, since Yes is what the combined West is used to hearing from everyone near and far from it, it had the right to assume Russia had only been behaving as expected of it. Thus, giving an almost unconditional Yes practically every time the West demanded one whether justifiably or no; tactically or no; out of fear or prudence, or because it wanted to make friends, or cultivate a good opinion of itself— whatever the reasons and rationales for it, and you can be sure Russia had good ones, the name for that behavior is abetment. And since whoever abets enables… It is quite understandable then if this time around the combined West would have again had the right to expect Russia to continue to do as it has been doing, and to abet them also on NATO's continued provocation in coming ever closer to Russian borders, of its coopting Ukraine as a tool to that end.
The larger question now is: why, exactly, has the Kremlin abetted the West hatred of them for so long? I foresee that however this question is answered and even if the answer should justify itself on its own right, what follows will be at the bottom of it.
Apart from the fact that for decades and especially after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union Russia found itself too weakened, and in every way badly outfitted to go head-to-head with the combined West, in which case much patience and slow work was necessary to eventually bring itself up to where it is today— it will be discovered that even if only momentarily the Russian leadership lost sight of the true character it was dealing with. "Character" is meant here in both its figurative and literal sense. It lost sight of the totality of the features, traits, of the political psychology, and in one word, of the character-istics of the character of the West. As a result, it began to believe in western "sincerity," "honesty," "well-meaning-ness" and in western "selfless" altruism and in its avowals of universal humanism. But all of this had already begun to perish around the events toward the First World War!
In other words, there has been a lack of instinctive philosopher-psychologists in the centers of power of the Russian society (a society that not inexplicably seems to have stopped producing the kind of genius of a Alexander Herzen or a Belinsky… who could smell the rot miles away). Had this not been the case, the Kremlin would have long ago realized that western diplomacy is just another type of business; that there are no longer any honorable politicians in the West. (There used to be Angela Merkel in Germany; but look at what she allowed to happen to the Mink Agreement and what her failure has brought down upon Europe). A consequence of not realizing that, the Eastern Bear became too trusting and a bit too naive. One could even say that Kremlin trustiness and naivety accrued the closer the world moved toward the end of the Cold War, or what is the same, the farther Russia moved from Stalin. For, Stalin knew the political psychology of the West quite well. He ran circlers around it, looked at it straight in the eyes without blinking, continually set traps for it, put it to the test over and again, handicapped it wherever he could and, in short, at times acting maniacally, in his diplomacy with the West he conducted himself as if though in a battlefield. Sometimes, that’s what it takes…
Having cultivated its resentment for so many years in the wake of the twice Russian defeat of the best the West have sent to the battlefield against the Eastern Bear, never really having digested the true reasons that it had no right to have expected a different outcome; having whipped its resentment into irrational hatred and fed it into all aspects of political, cultural, and societal life; and having done as best it has been able to break, humiliate, and prevail over Russia to no avail, the West would not be one not to be pleased having such a cooperative enemy as Russia has been until very recent. Truth; it seems to have finally come to see there is nothing good to be expected in its dealings with the West. But even as Russia decided it has no other option left but to attack NATO in Ukraine, while going through it the Russian abetment of the hatred coming from its enemies has kept manifesting itself, this time as "restraint," while fighting the most perverse and unscrupulous armed forces Europe has ever known after Hitler's.
But it is not as if Putin showing restraint would swollen the hearts of his western enemies with warm and kinds feelings: for them, he will continue to be the "murderous" and "butcher" they say he is even if he personally undertook to turn Ukraine into a garden. Alas!
Of course. Where the need for restraint in Ukraine comes from, is readily understood. One understands it if one sees in that a reflection of the Kremlin not definitively yet having made its mind as to whether it wants to continue doing deals with the West— whereas the West itself has already in practice decided in relation to Russia. On the other hand, while it is the case that restraint is imposed on Moscow for the need to preserve the lives of the civilians, who in addition are blood relations to the Russians, it is harder to understand why is Kiev still standing intact, and why despite several warnings to the effect, no "decision-making centers" has been visited even by Russian fireworks. The answer to this question in whatever other words is "Russian abetment."
Thankfully, at long last Ukraine would have put Russia on its way to learn how to suppress gratuitous hatred of all things Russian. Namely, it would have learned what should henceforward become the highest of its moral values and its many virtues: to be a true blessing to its friends and a terribly danger to its enemies. For, you see, the Eastern Bear has never before had the need to be dangerous; but now that it has, being at the same time a blessing and a danger is the only way it has to preserve its national sovereignty, its territorial integrity, and its independence.