Russia And A New Cold War

By Rich Kozlovich

Peter Hitchens published a wonderful and insightful article about modern Russia and this whole idea there's a new Cold War being waged by Vladimir Putin, Russia's current tyrant,  entitled, "The Cold War is Over". To get the full appreciation of what he's saying the article needs to be read in full.

After going over some personal history he makes a great many observations of how Russia has changed and why, but I'm going to focus on this important point made by him: "The comparison of today’s Russia to yesterday’s U.S.S.R. is baseless", as he notes while in Russia, "There was nothing much, really, between me and China but a failing power".

Life in the Soviet Union as a result of attempting to create a "new man" via scientific socialism was a nightmare. He notes:

This was life as it was, harsh beyond belief to us, normal to them. Our Russian friends thought we were ten years younger than we were. We thought they were ten years older than they were. Even births (annually outnumbered toward the end of the U.S.S.R. by abortions) were fiercely regimented. In terrifying maternity hospitals, short of necessary basics and none too clean, newborn Russians were snatched away by nurses, wrapped tightly, and brought back at set times for feeding, then snatched away again. Fathers were not allowed to visit for many days, and mothers would hang strings from the windows, bearing notes pleading for bars of chocolate or other comforts and giving news of the baby’s progress

And the "life expectancy of Soviet men was wretched".  He goes on to say:

I traveled to the once-closed city of Sevastopol, an August Soviet Sparta, the chief station of the Black Sea Fleet and heart of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s attempt at a global navy to rival the U.S. Navy. In every creek and inlet lay wrecked and scuttled warships, billions of dollars of warlike power, half-sunk and rusted. The dragon was dead in its lair. There could be no doubt about it: The two twin horrors of Soviet power, Marxism-Leninism at home and expansion abroad, were corpses, irrecoverably dead.

He further notes:

There is much to criticize in Russia’s foreign policy, especially if one is a Ukrainian nationalist, but the repossession of Crimea does not signal a revival of the Warsaw Pact. It is instead a limited and minor action in the context of this conquered and reconquered stretch of soil, the ugly but unexceptional act of a regional power.

Not only is this a military issue. He discusses the how Soviet policy caused a massive deterioration in that which is foundational of every successful society. Family! He states:

Family life, once begun, was precarious and fraught. Divorce had been made very easy by the family-hating Bolsheviks. One wedge-shaped Wedding Palace was known as “the Bermuda Triangle” because all the marriages contracted in it disappeared so quickly. I do not think I ever met a Soviet couple with two children who were full brothers and sisters. Invariably, it was a merger of two broken marriages into one new one. And no wonder. All the things that keep families together were absent or weak. Rents and prices were devised to ensure that even the educated middle class needed two full-time salaries to pay the bills. Unless there was a retired grandmother around, children were inevitably abandoned in early infancy to state nurseries and became the state’s charges.

Has this deteroriation of the family been fixed? No! Russia is a society foundationally disintegrating. I've said for some time - all this stuff about Putin is a deliberate misrepresentation of what's happening and why it's happening. Putin's broke. No matter what saber rattling he may be doing, his military is a mess. Russia is filled with disease ridden drunks - I've forgotten what percentage fills those categories, but it's a substantial part of his population - who are breeding themsleves out of existance, and at current rates of birth ethnic Russians may be a minority in their own country by 2040.  That may seem a long way off, but look at it this way. That's only 24 years away, and Russia has seven defensive gaps it has to maintain. And even now they've only enough manpower to defend three, and two of them are around the Ukraine.

Putin's trying to survive as Russia's pseudo-commie Tsar....for life. Everything else is smoke and mirrors on both sides of this argument, but bluff, smoke and mirrors has been Russian policy going back to Stalin. Everything they say is a lie with just enough truth to make it seem credible to those who fail to understand what's happening.

The fact he's an amoral monster in his own nation is immaterial to the economic and social paradigms of Russia and it's ability to impact the rest of the world. We need to get this...and this author touches on it.....Russia's foreign policy from their Imperial days was to create buffer zones between them and the rest of the world. That's what Putin's now attempting to do with the former Soviet states, Turkey and Iran. There's no cold war here. He can't afford it! Russia's broke, economically, socially and morally.

When the inevitable civil war breaks out in Europe over Muslim immigration Europe's economy will totally collapse, Russia will follow them down the drain right along with China. There's no cold war here, in spite of a desperate need by some to create another ultimate bogeyman to mobilize against.

As for Trump's comment about not being a part of NATO.....that impressed me. We've come to an end of the Bretton Woods era of thinking. We're not only going to walk away from NATO, but we're going to walk away from a great many foreign policy concepts, and no matter who's in charge they're going to follow Trump's lead on this because we're broke.

Actually I was impressed he understood that.