Again, sort of says it all. A monument to the fallen in Katyn Forest, 1940. Russia’s Legacy of Cruelty, Ruthlessness and Treachery
by Don Clasen
April 8, 2022
Far too many Americans today, especially those who are younger, are not aware of Russia’s history of cruelty, ruthlessness and treachery. A lot of the blame for that lies at the feet of the Republican Party and Evangelicals who have fallen for the siren song of Russia as a “family friendly country,” due to their knee-jerk impulse to oppose all things liberal.
Eight years ago during the Maidan uprising in Kiev and his intervention in the Syrian war, I myself sympathized with Putin’s resentment of Western hypocrisy. I still think the US was too heavy-handed in its interference of Ukrainian politics at the time, and our two-facedness in fighting terrorism in Syria was just abominable. But I see now why US planners have been so eager to liberate Russia from leadership like him and the mafia kleptocracy he represents.
It’s been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and at no time was this more the case than in the temporary alliance the United States made with the Soviet Union in World War II to defeat Hitler and Nazism. Hitler rightly understood that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the biggest threat to the culture and traditions of Western Europe, and of all his war time objectives, destroying the Communist regime in Moscow was his top one.
His problem was that his Nazism was an equal but opposite right-wing extremism based on totalitarianism, Aryan mythology, racial supremacy and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power. This is why the United States, just years after the end of the war entered into the Cold War with Russia because we also rightly saw Communism as the biggest threat to Enlightenment and Reformation values. We saw the same thing Hitler did but through the lens of the democracy and freedom paradigm.
An Inverted View of Reality
Vladimir Putin as we’ve noted before, called the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union “the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th Century,” in spite of the fact that the rest of the world saw it as a great victory for humanity. He claims what he meant by that was that it left the United States as the sole super power in the world, a status Russia used to share with the US.
This was a great source of pride for a nation that was but a shell of the US in almost every way. Like I’ve said, Russia is a land of 11 time zones, yet less than half the US population, 1/5th the GDP, and dysfunctional in almost every way. And now we find out that their military is a joke too. The only thing that made them a super power back then was their nuclear arsenal, something that’s still a great threat.
Putin now claims that what he meant by America as a sole superpower was that their defeat has left the US a dangerous and arrogant nation since the 1990s, and to some degree he is right. In the 1990s instead of turning Russia into a friend and a trading partner like we did Germany and Japan after the war, the US allowed vulture capitalists, Wall Street and a Harvard University project no less,[1] to come into Russia to buy up state enterprises for pennies on the dollar. Essentially, we joined in with Russia’s own mafia elements to privatize huge, formerly-state-owned enterprises through corrupt, insider deals.
The turning of Germany and Japan into friends in contrast, was according to Keynesian, New Deal economics and Christian moral philosophy (turning enemies into friends). This looting of Russia was according to Republican “supply-side Reaganomics” forced on Bill Clinton by that Wall Street Zionist trio represented by Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers when he became President in 1992.[2]
Putin of course has no moral authority to complain about this since no one else in Russia has profited more from the looting than he himself. Vladimir Putin is not some mere front man for Russia’s oligarchs. It’s the other way around. He used the power of the state to force them to heel, and it remains so to this day.
Putin’s Complaint
Nonetheless, he had other complaints too. How can the US condemn him for attacking and occupying Ukraine when we did a worse thing to Iraq on even flimsier excuses in both 1991 and 2003? Likewise, he points to the US pretending to fight ISIS while secretly using them to overthrow Assad in Syria, where Russia has a military base. And it is true that this shameful strategy of pretend warfare in the Middle East was again at the behest of Israel’s neo-con plan to reduce seven of their neighbors down to failed states in five years, and to get the Americans to do their dirty work for them.
All of these “blunders” are from Republican economic philosophy, Republican “shock ‘n awe” military doctrine or Israel’s undue influence over our foreign policy. The progressive Democratic desire to spread democracy and the freedom paradigm to the far-flung ends of the earth is in contrast a good thing, even though how to implement this ethically is often a great dilemma.
But one thing is for certain, and that is that Vladimir Putin is in no position to lecture the West about our hypocrisy. He may insinuate in his typically-devious way that the Soviet Union itself was a great disaster, but his actions betray his profession. He is and always has always been a Soviet man, and now he can’t hide it.
Getting A Feel For Vladimir Putin
One of Bill Clinton’s last acts as President was to travel to Moscow to meet this new Prime Minister his good friend Boris Yeltsin had picked. Clinton wanted to just “get a feel” for this man, and what he experienced disturbed him very much. Putin obviously disdained Clinton and put on his best tough guy, mockery face he’s so famous for.
After the meeting, Clinton went over to see Yeltsin to warn him. He poked Yeltsin’s heart and said, “He just doesn’t have democracy here.” Yeltsin later wrote before he died how much he had come to see what Clinton was saying, and how much he regretted his decision.
We ought to sense this about Putin as well because he chose to glorify and become a part of the very heart of the Machiavellian evil that was the Evil Empire, the KGB. Like I’ve said in the past, anyone with any moral sense could have figured out that the difference between East Berlin and West Berlin was like night and day. But as long as Putin could rule over the suffering masses as a god-like, unaccountable despot, he was OK with it.
And all his actions to this date testify to this. Experts who have actually tracked him over the years have been warning us about the true nature of this man which is now becoming painfully clear. When his dreams of historical legacy, his quest to revive the Russian Empire of Peter the Great spectacularly blew up in his face, what does he do but resort to punishing the civilians of Ukraine, the very thing that Stalin did in the 1930s.
Before the Nazi Holocaust there was the Holomodor where Stalin starved about 5 million Ukrainians to underwrite his industrialization program and punish their nationalism. The borders were sealed by the Secret Police and no one was allowed to escape.
Known as the Holodomor[3] before we ever heard of the Holocaust (and perhaps even more horrific than the Holocaust), Josef Stalin starved five million Ukrainians to death just to punish them for their wish to be a self-determining, independent state. In spite of their separate history and culture, they had no right. Stalin forced them to be a part of Russia.[4]
Looking More And More Like Stalin All The Time
Joe Biden, during a 2011 private meeting—”I looked into your eyes and don’t think you have a soul.”
Vladimir Putin (smiling)—”We understand one another.“[5]
Understanding this about Putin and “the Russian reputation” since 1917 is important. As was said above, far too many Americans today are not aware of Russia’s long legacy of cruelty, ruthlessness and treachery and where it came from. When admiration for Putin among Republicans runs higher according to polls than that for Joe Biden and other American Democrats, you know you’ve got a country in trouble. The annual prestigious CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) Convention is going to be held this year in Hungary, not the US!
As embarrassed as the right-wing and their counterparts there and in other autocratic dictatorships around the world are since February 24, they still are trying to worm their way out of the obvious facts of the case. For some that means stretching credulity to the breaking point where every atrocity Russia now commits in Ukraine is being interpreted as “false flags by Ukrainian Nazis attacking their own civilians to blame it all on Russia”! This convoluted interpretation is typical of Russian propaganda, yet even my friends at VeteransToday are falling for it.
For others it means desperately trying to hold on to Vladimir Putin as the right-wing’s global avatar, since he’s “tough” and not “soft.” This is the Fox News/caveman mindset distilled to its essence, which doesn’t know the difference between “a strong leader” and one that’s vicious and deceitful.
It’s important then to understand some things about Russia’s history that makes them such a danger to the rest of the world and why this war could still so easily metastasize into World War III and the start of the Great Tribulation. I say this in spite of the fact that it’s now only one week before Passover 2022, followed by a week of celebration as I write.
As I tried to explain at the end of my last article, I believe the Great Tribulation is only 3 ½ years long, not 7 years. And since the Feast of Tabernacles is the only Old Testament feast still unfulfilled in the New Testament era, and the Second Coming is the likely fulfillment of this feast, it stands to reason that Jesus Christ will finish up the Great Tribulation with His appearance some year in the Fall. That would mean around some Passover, 3 ½ years earlier in the Spring, is the likely time this terrible era will begin.
To watch the Ukrainian people not only hold their own the last few weeks but actually be positioned to win this war in the long run has been an inspiration I’ve rarely experienced in my lifetime. The moral clarity of this modern-day David vs Goliath story is self-evident. But instead of humbling himself and sitting down with some serious intent to sue for peace, Vladimir Putin, true to his proud heart and in the usual Russian tradition, has been stalling for time and doubling down on evermore brutal tactics.
It started with his clamping down on honest news about the war on his homefront to keep his people in the dark, it continued with attacks upon civilians, and may yet escalate into the use of chemical weapons and/or tactical nuclear weapons to defeat the Ukrainian Army or simply wipe this people off the face of the earth. These are things that could easily force the West to respond. As Putin has said many times, especially since Maidan in 2014, his fight is not with the Ukrainian people but the United States whom he insists “owns” Ukraine like a puppet. But if we did, why would we ignore Mr. Zelenskyy’s impassioned pleas for more and more firepower while only giving some?
In short, Putin seems to be moving towards Stalin’s playbook now. Are there any doubts left as to what this man’s political and moral philosophy really are?
Sympathy For The Russian People
This is not necessarily a wholesale indictment on the Russian people as a people. Not until the coming of the Bolsheviks did they ever have such a reputation for callousness as they have had ever since. This in spite of the fact they are well-educated and accomplished in science and academics, the arts and in many other ways. But they are a people with a brutal climate and a history to match.
You could simplify (and over-simplify) Russian history as a struggle for control by two peoples and two cultures, the Russians and the Khazarians. In the 8th Century A.D., Khazaria was a powerful nation in today’s Ukrainian/Caspian region that created a lot of problems for the Christian Russians to the north and the Islamic caliphates to the south. Although the history is murky, supposedly their king Bulan, under pressure to convert to Christianity or Islam, chose to convert to Judaism to avoid coming under the control of either. To this day, the “European Jews” who dominate Israeli politics are not really descended from any Middle Eastern, Semitic blood.[6]
Sculpture commemorating victory of Ukrainian Prince Sviatoslav over Khazars, 968 AD. On the shield is a “Star of David.”
Broadly speaking, under the Czars the Russians prevailed, but with the Bolshevik Revolution the Khazarians prevailed (or at least a bizarre off-shoot of Khazarian, Talmudic philosophy.)[7] And they brought with them the Talmudic tradition that all truth is a matter of “point of view,” (i.e., subjective).[8] This was the basis for the politicizing of all things and the state’s right to substitute propaganda for independent journalism, the all-important “4th Estate” here in the US. It’s a phenomenon that is presently tearing up the US and the world by “siloing” people into different “points of view” depending on where you get your information from.[9]
In fact, you could trace the global epistemological crisis we are going through now back to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Until then the world or at least the West, was still operating on what could be called the Christian paradigm of absolute truth that the Church people so decry the loss of. The coming of the Bolsheviks marked the beginning of the modern-day totalitarian state, marked by lying, propaganda, psy ops, myth, political melodrama and endless narrative. The Western democratic model in contrast relies on “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” to guarantee its freedom, just like Jesus promised (Jn 8:32).
After the Bolsheviks pioneered this wretched new paradigm, the Nazi Goebbels furthered it with his “Big Lie” theory. The CIA, Mossad, MI6 and other modern intelligence agencies then perfected it into the philosophy of deceit that is the global zeitgeist now, fulfilling Second Thessalonians 2:10-12. This is why the “masses” all over the world who are aware of these tricks are indulging outlandish conspiracy theories (along with some deadly accurate ones), and opening themselves up to manipulation by those far more intelligent and skilled in this art than they are.
It’s a phenomenon that has captured people on both the left and the right, but especially the latter. As mentioned above, it’s not the US Empire’s efforts to spread democracy and freedom around the world that’s America’s problem.[10] The problem is right-wing neo-liberal economics, neo-con foreign policy and Israeli dominance of American foreign policy.[11] Intelligence circles tend to attract uber conservative personalities, not uber liberal ones who are offended by all this deceit and manipulation.
The Trauma of the Soviet System
Soviet government policy thus evolved into one of the most brutal, senseless and chaotic in human history. It was funded by Rothchild-associated banking interests[12] to bring about the destruction of democratic self-determination in the world and turned into a nightmare of abuse of the Russia people themselves. Estimates alone of just the number of people killed during its sordid 73-year history hover around 66 million.
If they weren’t “downtrodden” under the Czars, they sure were for the next 73 years
The trauma this brought to them is incalculable. To this day, as one commentator put it, the Russian people are “cynical about everything. They don’t believe their own government and they don’t believe its enemies either.” If they do believe the absurd narrative that Ukrainian Nazis are targeting their own people to frame Russia for war crimes, it’s only because the price of bucking Putin’s official line could end them up in the morgue.
This is what has made them, as one person once summed it up, one of the most “gruff” and jaded people on the face of the earth. Putin’s official popularity is soaring domestically right now, but who knows how much of it is just his people being afraid to tell pollsters what they really think? Besides, the only TV they are allowed to listen to is state-run. In Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, a guy Donald Trump says he loves, only .01% of the people even use the Internet, and that surreptitiously.
The Grim Record
At the very least, the Soviet propensity to lie about everything throws some uninformed people off in the West. The right-wing especially, though they’re always lampooning the left for being gullible, have shown exactly that propensity precisely because they perceive Putin as “a strong leader.” But consider more of their history beyond just that of the Holodomor:
–The 1940 massacre of 22,000 Poles mainly in the Katyn Forest. When World War II began with the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sep. 1, 1939, the Soviets, who had an alliance with Germany at the time, also invaded from the east. In 1943, after persistent rumors, the Germans investigated and found mass graves in Soviet-occupied territory, the remains of nearly 22,000 Polish army officers, police, and intelligensia.
For decades the Soviet government claimed it was done by the Nazis themselves, but in 1990 admitted it was the doing of their own secret police, the NKVD, the precusor to the KGB. They were systematically shot in the back of the head, then the executioners were shot by the NKVD so there would be no surviving witnesses. Purportedly, “Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent.”
Polish Army officers. They had a nearly 2 million man army before the war with a million reservists, mostly the nation’s intelligensia. For an interesting theory on how this all came about, check out this article.
I remember distinctly the testimony of Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor who suffered for over 14 years in Soviet prisons for his ministry activities. He said the persecution of the Nazis in Romania were like a warm-up compared to what the Communists were to bring them later.
–The rape of Germany. At the end of World War II, as they made their way into Germany, “Soviet soldiers raped German females from eight to eighty years old…Estimates…have ranged up to 2 million. According to historian William Hitchcock, in many cases women were the victims of repeated rapes, some as many as 60 to 70 times.” Many were mutilated, and Soviet leadership seemed to encourage the violence as a form of payback and mass terrorism.
The chilling nature of this kind of amoral DNA now in so much of Russian military culture especially, was well summed up by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.[13] Just this morning (April 8) on Morning Joe, commenting on a brutal air strike on a train station in Donetsk, killing 30 and injuring 100 he said,
“This is not an aberration; this is a strategy, this is purposeful. He is out to destroy the spirit of the country, he’s out to de-populate the eastern areas of the country…
Obviously, these are war crimes but it’s part of a larger strategy…Part of this is to break the will and the backbone of the country, to basically say, You will not be a viable country.
Again, that’s what began this war. He didn’t want Ukraine to succeed, to represent a Slavic country, which was democratic, with fundamental ties to Europe, ’cause if that took hold, if that succeeded, what about the Slavic people of Russia? Why couldn’t they have a real democracy in a country where they could participate?
So he is out to destroy the idea of Ukraine as well as the reality of Ukraine.”
In other words, if Putin has to reduce Ukraine to rubble, if he has to genocide an entire people to protect his right to make dictatorship the world’s “progressive” future, then so be it. Yet will the American right wing obsess over the Illuminati, the “illumined ones” whose “light” is really darkness, and insist its front is the US Democratic Party!
His Own Domestic Terrorism
-We know he is capable of this because he did the same thing in Grozny, Chechnya in 2000 after he became Prime Minister. It was justified by a wave of convenient apartment bombings linked to his old friends in the Russian security services that terrorized the country. (A third bombing was foiled when they were caught red-handed.) “Then-prime minister Vladimir Putin’s handling of the crisis boosted his popularity greatly and helped him attain the presidency within a few months.” In other words, the Russian people fell for his ruse anyhow because, like us, too many in their population worship “strong leaders.”
When Chechen separatists were promised safe passage out of Grozny, Putin’s army ambushed them, killing many. They then went into the city to finish the job the Russian army had botched a few years before, just like this fiasco in Ukraine. “Many buildings and even whole areas of the city were systematically destroyed…In 2003 the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on earth.“[14]
-We could go on with the Moscow Theater Crisis of 2002 wherein his same friends in the security services attempted to rescue 850 people taken hostage by these same Chechen separatists. They pumped a narcotic gas, a form of fentanyl which is currently ravaging the Ameican heroin market, into the theater, killing all 40 terrorists but also 130 hostages. But at least Putin showed them who’s boss!
In fact, he seems to have a “thing” about poisoning people. It’s one of his favorite weapons for getting rid of dissidents, journalists, political opponents, rival businessmen, etc.
-An even more egregious incident took place with the 2004 Beslan school massacre wherein Chechen rebels took 1100 hostages including 777 children. Just as a negotiated settlement seemed in the offing, a gun battle broke out starting with “shots from outside.” In the end, 333 people died including 186 children from Putin’s (or his officers’) heavy-handed dealings. You can read all about it in this Wikipedia article.
-We could go into the multi-faceted attack on the US election system Putin undertook in 2016, pouring millions of dollars into right-wing candidates,[15] dumping Hillary’s emails, hacking US voter rolls, flooding social media with fake websites and salacious, made-up stories and the like. They were hoping to just give Hillary a bloody nose but were overjoyed when Their Man in Washington actually won. A Senate committee dominated by Republicans no less, issued a report confirming the wholesale Russian assault on the 2016 election. Nonetheless, their boy Donald Trump at Helsinki told the world he chose to believe Putin over 17 US intelligence services.
Again, A Nation of Masochists
This is the guy who right-wingers around the world (except in Ukraine where they hate the Russians) look up to. This is the guy Republicans have been fawning over since 2010 as a “strong leader,” nay, even as a “genius,” “very savvy” and “a great peacekeeper” according to the Orange Menace. Putin seems to aspire to be something of a James Bond villain or a James Bond wannabe, even glories in it, while Trump seems to glory in being The Joker.
But this is the Marvel world fantasy their fanboys are willing to retreat into in order to be spared the effort and pain of admitting they are intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt. In reality, these “tough guys” are just doormats that people like Putin and Trump love to wipe their feet on.
They’re the kind of people who will justify the Putins, Trumps, Kim Jong Uns and other drek of the world and who will, like Mitch McConnell just said in a recent interview, “of course” vote for Trump again. After all, Mitch is a fellow Republican, and a good little German thrown in too I would assume. Anyone who trusts people like that could end up like one of those executioners in the Katyn Forest. “By their fruits, ye shall know them…”
All of this of course assumes that there actually will be a 2024 election. Given Putin’s history of treachery, he may do exactly what Haass and so many other experts are saying—an attempt at something so reckless and provocative, a kind of Hail Mary pass to salvage his ambitions and pride, that the West will not be able to ignore it. There is after all, a mysterious clue about the last days that goes, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety [security]; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (I Thess 5:3).
Which of course could tripwire World War III. Again, his fight is not really directed at Ukraine but the United States. With only two weeks left, things look pretty quiet now, but we’ll just have to see how things play out. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
Update:
To give you an idea of what a mobster/terorist this latter day Stalin is and how he operates, check out this clip from Ali Velshi:
Notes:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development
[2] Clinton was reportedly sat down by the three and told that now that the election was over, he needed to drop all the “New Deal rhetoric,” that this was a new day of banker con man economics, etc. (My words). https://shadowproof.com/2009/10/24/no-foes-to-fraud-greenspan-rubin-summers-owe-brooksley-born-and-the-american-taxpayer-a-big-fat-apology-and-a-ton-of-money/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
[4] One of America’s foremost scholars, Timothy Snyder of Yale, reently gave a lecture about why Ukraine was never “one people with Russia,” a myth Putin has spread throughout the earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oRUfQA6efY
[5] https://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-no-soul/2014/07/22/id/584147/
[6] https://www.eutimes.net/2020/01/new-dna-study-says-jewish-people-are-not-descendants-of-abraham/ This is probably one reason the Israelis are so touchy about “the legitimacy of the Jewish state,” because most of them have no ancient roots in Palestine. Still, they have chosen to identify with “the religion of the Pharisees.”
[7] As my article on Moses Hess argues, Communism took its greatest root in European Jewish circles. According to official Soviet records, of the top 556 officials of the first Russian Soviet government (1919), 457 were ethnic Jews, only 17 were ethnic Russians. The Times of Israel, “Putin: First Soviet Government Was Mostly Jewish,” June 19, 2013. See also http://reclaimingrhodesia.com/banking-mafia-manifested-communism/.
[8] And in contrast to Jesus’ affirmation that truth is objective and can be discovered (Jn 8:32).
[9] In the US, this is mostly the doing of Fox News which pioneered this new wretched reality which has led to such a hopelessly divided nation.
[10] The only problem there is when we’re hypocritical about it, when we go from setting an example as a “city set on a hill” to deliberate manipulation of the internal affairs of other nations. And even that is sometimes fair game if those people are truly oppressed and want liberation. When they don’t want our interference and we still do so, that’s an ethical dilemma.
[11] To that you can add other factors such as self-serving privatization schemes, exploitation of weaker nations, appropriation of nations’ resources and other examples I illustrate in American Babylon, American Antichrist.
[12] https://counter-currents.com/2013/10/wall-street-and-the-november-1917-bolshevik-revolution/
[13] Yikes! The CFR! This is two articles in a row I’ve quoted from him. What has gotten into me? But Armitage is a foreign policy expert.
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny
[15] And often laundered mafia money at that. Thanks due to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision facillitated by the packing of the court with so many right-wing judges. It was this decision that opened up the floodgates of foreign money into US elections.
