LRFotS Abeer Yusless provided an interesting musing to my recent poast, about how woefully and inadequately prepared the Western military leadership class is for an actual, really-for-real shooting war with the ROOSKEES:
It’s a shame that so many in the west feel the need to treat Russia with such disdain and contempt. There’s no reason why they can’t (at the very least) be a reliable trade partner, or even more. But, no.
It is a very good point. In theory, Russians and Westerners of a European descent should have a very great deal in common. But they do not. Europeans hate and fear Russia in a way that they do not hate and fear almost anyone else. It is a very weird complex; Russians are predominantly White, Christian, and overwhelmingly European to a very great degree and extent.
On the surface, at least, Westerners – and especially Americans – should, in theory, be able to get along very well with Russians. But they do not, and have not been able to do so for well over a thousand years.
And they never will.
Why is that?
Here is a video – which is very obviously AI-generated and AI-acted, and which for some reason I cannot embed – that goes a long way toward helping explain why Europe hates and fears Russia, and always has.
The video, despite being Abominable Imbecile slop, is actually pretty comprehensive and quite good in terms of its explanations. But it does skip over large segments of the history between Russia and Europe, and those segments are vitally important.
We must understand, first and foremost, that “Russia”, as we understand it today, WAS NOT the original Russian state. The Russia of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and today’s Russian Federation, grew over the course of a full thousand years, from its roots in the Kievan Rus’.
That original kingdom came from the union of Prince Rurik of the Rus’ – essentially, a tribe of Varangians, originally from what is today the coast of eastern Sweden. According to both tradition and the best recorded history we have, he married Princess Anna of Kiev and founded the city of Novgorod in 862 AD. This is usually considered to be the founding of the Киевская Русь (Kievan Rus’), and the Rurikid Dynasty, which defined the history of the Russian state for more than 700 years.
The reason why I bring this up, is that it shows the very European origins of ancient Russia.
For it is a fact that Slavic folklore and traditions have quite a bit in common with Norse myths and legends – right down to the popular Russian drink, квас (kvas), the name of which probably derives from the old Norse edda about the life and death of Kvasir, the god of wisdom. His death is HARDCORE – like most Norse legends. (There is also a rather good song on the latest AMON AMARTH album by the name of “Kvasir’s Blood”, which goes into the legend.)
You would think, then, that with a history like that, wherein the Russians have literal blood relations with the ancient Swedes and Scandinavians through genealogy and intermarriage, Europe and Russia would be on good terms – especially considering the fact that, for much of its Imperial history, the Russian court spoke French, not Russian, as their language of choice.
But no. They never really have been friends, and they never could be.
The video up top that I watched, goes into some detail as to why, and notes that religion plays a major role. That is unquestionably true. Russia became an Orthodox nation, thanks to the Baptism of the Rus’ under Prince Vladimir the Great in 988 AD. One cannot exaggerate the impact of this change; by adopting the Greek traditions and Russianising them, Russia carved out a separate and completely distinct identity from the Western church, which followed Rome.
Both the Roman and Orthodox traditions claim that their particular brands and branches of Christianity, are rooted in the practices and beliefs of the early Church fathers – going all the way back to the first disciples of the Apostles. In my personal opinion – and that is all it is – the Orthodox Church has a much stronger claim to this, than the Catholic Church does, but that is a matter for real theologians to argue about.
The differences between the Roman and Orthodox traditions were, and to a certain extent remain, profound. They are not mere differences of emphasis or doctrine – they are fundamental, going all the way down to whom the distinct branches consider as saints, what they practice, how they observe feast days, which calendars they use, and so on and so forth.
More importantly, both branches lay claim to being the TRUE faith that Jesus Christ came down to Earth to preach.
And, as that video upstairs points out so well, if you define yourself as having the right religion, then by definition, anyone else who is wrong, is an existential heretic.
The Great Schism of 1054 AD put this difference into stark contrast. And the Western, Romanised, tradition has never stopped trying to impose its version of the truth on everyone else.
That is just a fact – sorry, Marists and rosary-rattlers, it’s just TRUE. Christian Crusaders under Roman Catholic authority sacked Constantinople in 1204 AD – thereby fatally weakening the eastern church – and occupied the city until 1261 AD, when Michael VIII Palaiologos finally recaptured the city.
It was Western Teutonic knights who ultimately answered to Catholic authority, that invaded the principality of Novgorod and fought (and lost) against Aleksandr Nevskiy at the Battle of the Ice in 1242.
It was the Catholic Rzeczpospolita – the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, basically – that conquered large parts of western Russia in the 17th Century, and which occupied Moscow in 1610.
It was the Protestants, under Charles XII, that fought the twenty-year Great Northern War against the forces of Peter the Great – and which helped cause a serious rupture in what is today known as Ukraine, due to the betrayal and oath-breaking of the traitor (from a Russian perspective), Ivan Mazepa. Ukrainians, by the way, especially the ones brought up under the warped post-2014 teachings of Banderite ideology, revere him today, which rather explains a lot about how backward and broken 404 – Country Not Found actually is.
And it was (nominally) Catholic France, leading a huge army of basically the whole of Europe – including Prussians, Hessians, Romanians, Poles, and others – into Russia under Napoleon Bonaparte. That led to the Battle of Borodino and the burning of Moscow – culminating in the total defeat of the Grande Armee.
Over and over again, the forces that trace their roots back to the Church of Rome – and yes, that includes Protestants, because the Reformation was a split within the WESTERN tradition – attacked and invaded Russia. It almost never worked the other way around.
By contrast, except for the campaigns of Belisarius and Justinian in the 6th Century, the Byzantines never really tried to impose their way of life on Europe – indeed, during their brief liberation of Rome from the Goths, the Byzantines made very little attempt to interfere with the rites and works of the Pope and their Western counterparts.
So you can see, from a Russian perspective, that Europe is not a friend. It is instead a source of constant threats. And, as that video points out, the border between Europe and Russia is essentially indefensible. It consists of a huge, empty, featureless plain in what is called today – you guessed it – UKRAINE.
That video above also skips over a major reason why Russians are paranoid about Western invasions. It presents the Russian march into Paris in 1815 as though it happened in isolation – that is nonsense. The Russians did that in response to Napoleon’s invasion of their country. They marched through Berlin in 1945 in response to a genocidal war launched by the Germans against them. Throughout it all, Russians have seen themselves – rightly AND wrongly – as liberators.
Europeans don’t see it that way, for rather obvious reasons. And they become more passionate about those reasons, the closer you get to the Russian border. Just ask a Pole, or someone from the Baltic Chihuahuas, what he thinks of Russians, and you will get a stream of invective that will make you blush – even though many older Poles actually have some degree of nostalgia for the days of the Soviet Union, they still recognise Russians as “the other”.
The European perspective is no less antagonistic and hostile. To the Europeans, Russia is this vast, unknown, weird place – and IT IS WEIRD. You have to go to Russia to truly understand just HOW different the place really is. Russians are a multiethnic, multilingual bunch of people, living in an immense, resource-rich, extremely cold, highly inhospitable territory that stretches across the entire top of the Asian continent, and which butts into the European landmass.
The Mongol invasions into Russia did set the country on a fundamentally and totally different course from the rest of Europe. While Europe went through the Renaissance and the Reformation, no such impulses ever touched Russia – they were too busy dealing with the Mongols from the 12th to the 15th Centuries, and their Orthodox faith had absolutely no interest in what they saw as the rather weird and anti-Scriptural tendencies of the Protestants.
Indeed, when the Protestant nations tried to send embassies to the court of Ivan the Formidable – that is the CORRECT translation of Грозный, NOT “Terrible”, as Westerners keep saying – he basically told them to get bent. He had no patience for them, at all. The Reformation never found any space to grow, because Orthodoxy has a totally different structure and hierarchy to Catholicism – which is monolithic and singular in its claim to authority under the Magisterium and the Papacy. Orthodoxy, by contrast, operates under different autocephalous churches, which all have national identities and hierarchies – there is no single Grand Beardy Todger Poobah in a funny hat and strange robes making pronouncements ex cathedra that everyone has to obey, the way there is among the Papists.
The other major reason why Russia and the West are almost irreconcilably different, has to do with ethnicity.
Russia is the very definition of a multi-ethnic nation that manages, somehow, to work as such. In Europe, that has almost never really worked out. Europe is a patchwork of many different ethnicities that have repeatedly gone to war with each other – often in incredibly bloody and brutal ways. The current nations of Europe are really largely confederations of similar-minded tribes that share ties of language and blood. Russia, by contrast, is a country of over 190 different ethnicities – which is dominated by an ethnic White Slavic majority, to the tune of 86% of the population.
More than that, Russians just do not think the way Europeans do. Because of constant invasions and war over the course of a thousand years – much of it against uppity YURPEENS who keep invading their lands – the Russians think in terms of security first, NOT freedom. To them, the rule of a singular Tsar – their translation of Caesar, or Kaiser, or Emperor, the word that goes all the way back to ol’ Julius hizzself – simply makes sense. Dumbocracy and freedumb just do not register with them; for the Russians, a strong central government is absolutely essential to rule over and keep together such a vast and complex country.
So, the fact remains: Russia and the West are irreconcilably different.
By the way, I can say, without boasting, that I am one of the relatively tiny handful of people, anywhere on Earth, who is actually qualified to say that.
I am not boasting when I say that I have lived in the US, the UK, Asia, and Russia, and I have travelled extensively throughout Europe. So I KNOW what I am talking about when I say that Russia is utterly unlike the West, even though you can find a lot of similarities (on the surface) between Russians and Europeans, especially in the Western cities. If you were to go to Moscow, you would see people drinking coffee and enjoying Western consumer goods (which are actually made in China, but we’ll leave that be). You can see them driving on the wrong side of the road, just like the continental Europeans and Americans do. And you can see them dressing in ways that would not look out of place in Milan, or Barcelona, or Lisbon – at least in the summer.
And yet, they are PROFOUNDLY ALIEN to any Westerner, in ways that, again, I cannot explain to you unless you have actually been there. Anyone who has been to Russia, from the West, will understand exactly what I am talking about, when I say that being in Moscow gives you a sense of something very familiar, yet very different.
This brings me to my final point:
Westerners, especially the European elites, hate and fear Russians. But Russians do not feel that way about Westerners.
There is – or was, until about mid-2022 – a profound admiration of Western culture in Russia. Especially during the 1960s and 1970s, the Russians looked to the “decadent” West with great envy, because many of them could see things like jeans, rock ‘n’ roll, and consumer capitalism, that provided Westerners with a standard of living that they could only dream of achieving. Russians understood very well, even back then, that their own Communist Party was lying to them, and they had a vague notion that there was “something wrong” with their supposed worker’s paradise, when they constantly faced shortages and queues for basic foodstuffs.
After the Hell Times of the 1990s, for many years the Russians wanted to be like the West. Even the MFIC himself, Vladimir Putin, talked often back then of “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok”, and the Russians genuinely meant it. They WANTED to be a part of Europe, because they thought that, since the time of Peter the Great, Europe was the way to go.
Again, go back to the fact that Peter the Great modernised Russia’s military on European lines, because he saw how far behind Russia had fallen. And he succeeded, brilliantly. He turned Russia into a westward-facing continental power, which it has been ever since.
But, today, Russia looks at the West with revulsion and horror. They want nothing whatsoever to do with the craziness and degeneracy of the West. They want to chart their own course – and they just want to be LEFT THE HELL ALONE to do exactly that.
They will now build their own alliances and systems, with their Eurasian partners. They will no longer care what the West says or does. They have no interest in what the West does to them – because the West is impotent.
The Russians will take the best of the West – its art, literature, architecture, science, philosophy, and so on – and will preserve it. But they will chart their own course, as they see fit.
They will survive, and indeed thrive, on their own terms. The West, by contrast, will fall and collapse. And all because we could not bring ourselves to understand and accept a multi-ethnic Orthodox Christian country with profoundly European roots and values.
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Many Americans still think we’re living in Rocky IV.