Putin and the Neoconservatives

Last Days Watchman ^ | Julio Severo

[juliosevero]

Putin and the Neoconservatives

By William Pfaff

Comment by Julio Severo: This article was kindly sent and recommended to me by a Pentecostal minister in the U.S. Its author, William Pfaff, said, “The resemblance of President Putin’s ambitions for his Russia to those of the neoconservatives in the contemporary United States bear a striking formal resemblance in the wish of both to recall a romanticized past.” For pro-family Christians, the important point is whether a president supports a pro-family agenda or anti-family agenda. We supported George W. Bush because of his generally pro-life stances, even though his neocon decision of invading Iraq, not Saudi Arabia (where the 9/11 terrorists came from), resulted in complete disaster for Christians. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were over 2 million Christians. Today they number less than 300,000. Could not Bush have been concerned about the Christian fate over his invasion? Could not he have intervened to help them? Politicians will always have political interests. But our interests are very different. We much prefer pro-life and pro-family neocons than pro-abortion and pro-sodomy neocons. Likewise, we much prefer a pro-life and pro-family Putin than a pro-abortion and pro-sodomy Putin. The problem is, while Russia under Putin has consistently opposed abortion and sodomy in the United Nations, there is no similar example of American neocons opposing abortion and sodomy in the United Nations. In fact, in spite of the massive power of American neocons, the U.S. has become the main exporter of abortion and sodomy around the world. Putin and U.S. neocons are free to build their “romanticized pasts.” But they should remember to oppose abortion and sodomy in the United Nations and around the world. And they should denounce and take measures against Christian genocide by Muslims. Here is Pfaff’s article:

Russia and the United States are engaged in a profound ideological confrontation—one that isn’t widely understood in Western Europe or even at the White House.

It began in February a year ago. President Vladimir Putin of Russia found himself engaged in what seemed a simple defensive battle against American intervention in Ukraine. He is now under siege by the U.S. and NATO. The Western powers promoted the advancing “color revolutions” in states neighboring Russia, culminating in the coup in Ukraine and the small war that followed. Events did not go as the State Department and NATO planned, and now they are looking for revenge.

Germany and France intervened at Minsk to block a further American intervention with new arms for Kiev. A truce prevails for the moment. However, NATO has launched an exceedingly imprudent program to encircle Russia with demonstrations of force.

This includes shows of military power in recent days in Poland and the Baltic states, continued last week in Romania, and scheduled to be staged in the near future in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Washington has also been reaching out to Turkey, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan with political and economic inducements meant to block Russia’s Eurasian trading and development ambitions.

The Russian president claims that his real political ambition is to restore to Russia the culture, religion and historical mission of its past. Reunion with Crimea was a prize offered him by a clumsy American intervention in Ukraine. It was not an invitation to aggression but rather an opportunity for Putin to advance his mission at Washington’s expense. He wishes to remake the “New Russia” that existed at the end of the Romanoff era.

He has restored the Orthodox Church to the primacy it then occupied, and interestingly enough has distributed among his senior officials the works of Christian philosophers of the pre-revolutionary period (and later, of those in exile), including Nicholas Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin, and has promoted philosophical-historical reflection among these officials, summoning them to a major conference last year in the period following the seizure of Crimea. The subject of the conference was the destiny of Russia.

Putin has denied that he wishes to impose a religio-ideological state doctrine in the place of Marxism, but he does wish to sponsor the reintroduction of Russian elites to the national past and its historical culture. He wishes to see a sovereign democracy that is “qualitative” rather than arithmetical or quantitative. This is not likely to find willing listeners in the West today.

The French writer Michel Eltchaninoff suggests a comparison with the “new state” created by Antonio Salazar in Portugal between 1933 and 1974, usually called fascist but, while authoritarian, should more accurately be described as conservative, religious and nationalist. It is a response to what Putin views as the decadent and “anthropocentric,” or egoistic and materialistic, modern West.

Politically, Putin is moved by pan-Slavism and the Eurasian attachments of historical Russia, and seeks alliances and support from West Europeans of the politically incorrect persuasion, which to some extent he is finding. All this has nothing to do with the “Hitlerian” comparisons and accusations of aggressive war and expansionist intentions toward the West of which he was accused by Western governments and press during and after the Ukrainian crisis.

Against him stands the American foe. The energy behind the coup in Ukraine and the proposals to deploy Western arms there and relaunch the crisis is generally, and I think correctly, recognized as the work of the neoconservative alliance in Washington to which President Obama seems to have sub-leased his European policy.

This group includes the European affairs office in the State Department, senior Defense Department and NATO officials, certain Washington think tanks and elements in the national press.

The nature and aims of their program are fairly well known in American political circles, but not in Europe. Anne Norton’s 2004 book, “Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,” provides a splendid introduction.

Intellectually, neoconservatism has been a movement that embodies, among other influences, ideas of two German philosophers, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. Strauss, born in Germany, a classicist, migrated to America and taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, having a great influence upon students who were to become important enemies of the prevailing secular liberalism in American intellectual and political life.

Schmitt was an influential political scholar who defended the concept of the unlimited power of the state. He became a Nazi Party member in January 1933 and held important academic posts in Germany during the Second World War. His work enjoyed a revival in America during the George W. Bush administration and after. It influenced that administration’s controversial concepts of “unlawful combatants” exempt from international legal rights, the practice of “enhanced interrogations,” among others.

The foreign policy ambitions of the movement have been expressed in various efforts to build a political movement to create “a new American century.” Although this no longer is made explicit, the programs of the neoconservatives in Washington envisage the United States becoming a “New Rome,” exercising its unmatched military power “against civilization’s opponents” in order to revive classical values and eventually establish a universal American dominion—a New Rome.

The resemblance of President Putin’s ambitions for his Russia to those of the neoconservatives in the contemporary United States bear a striking formal resemblance in the wish of both to recall a romanticized past. The means they are willing to use resemble one another as well. That is a troubling conclusion.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.

Source: TruthDig, via Last Days Watchman

Recommended Reading:

Russia vs. the LGBT Globalists

Christians’ Love of the Warfare State Is Killing Other Christians

[FreeReign]

Russia and the United States are engaged in a profound ideological confrontation—one that isn’t widely understood in Western Europe or even at the White House. It began in February a year ago. President Vladimir Putin of Russia found himself engaged in what seemed a simple defensive battle against American intervention in Ukraine. He is now under siege by the U.S. and NATO.

And I stopped reading this nonsense right there.

[dp0622]

I don’t think Russia would have suffered such a large numbers of dead if Ukraine was indifferent to the situation or even pro Russian. It seems like they have fought pretty valiantly so far. and if neo-cons were truly in charge of anything I would assume there would be a strong border here

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

People who idolize Putin and Russia as some kind of a moral utopia are idiots who probably know nothing about Russia or spoken with an average member of their degenerate population. Russia’s “moral crusade” is mostly directed outside to nationalists and right wing groups across the world, and not really something they do in their own country. It is part of Russia’s larger disinformation strategy to seduce the right wing in order to enable further Russian aggression against its neighbor. “Why should we oppose Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Ukraine, or the Baltics? Clearly he is a Christian nationalists just trying to protect his people from the globalists and homosexuals!”

Russia, in fact, not only has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, not only has rampant homosexual rape and forced prostitution in the military, all winked at by the officers; but also is a major hub for the global sex trade. Women are routinely abducted or conned in Russia and forced into sex slavery, even transported all across the world to work in brothels. In fact, the entirety of Russia is run not as a government of law and order as we know it in the West, but as a giant Mafia state. Even simple things like a license to drive cannot be done in most cases but by bribery. Businesses are encouraged to break the law, and, when successful, are subject to looting from local mafia crime lords who are also the official law enforcement and justice system.

Russia is not too far removed from Liberia or other African-states when we look at it from this angle. Even many Russians live in filthy soviet style apartment complexes, taking craps in the hallways, because most of the people there are unemployed and living off of government handouts.

[lavaroise]

Putin is leftist when America is to the right and he is to the right when America is to the left, always manufacturing grievances like an abusive btchy spouse

[lavaroise]

Putin is Alinskyesque, that is

[juliosevero]

If America supports pro-family values, I support America. If Russia supports pro-family values, I support Russia. If they do not support these values, I do not support these nations.

[1rudeboy]

Here's what you need to take away from this nonsense:

The French writer Michel Eltchaninoff suggests a comparison [of Putin's "new state"] with the “new state” created by Antonio Salazar in Portugal between 1933 and 1974, usually called fascist but, while authoritarian, should more accurately be described as conservative, religious and nationalist. It is a response to what Putin views as the decadent and “anthropocentric,” or egoistic and materialistic, modern West.

In other words, a little fascist authoritarianism is fine if it opposes the decadent and materialistic West. Just don't call it fascist, but conservative, religious, and nationalist and you'll be ok.

[1rudeboy]

Do you support a person who murders and jails his political opponents as long as he is “pro-family?” How about Fidel Castro?

[faithhopecharity]

oh my, someone other than good ol’ Pat B. is STILL talking about those nefarious “neocons”

gee, we must still be living in 2003 perhaps, or what?

[mac_truck]

We supported George W. Bush because of his generally pro-life stances, even though his neocon decision of invading Iraq, not Saudi Arabia (where the 9/11 terrorists came from), resulted in complete disaster for Christians.

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were over 2 million Christians. Today they number less than 300,000. Could not Bush have been concerned about the Christian fate over his invasion? Could not he have intervened to help them?

Those are very good questions.

[1rudeboy]

And what about the bunny rabbits? Don’t forget the bunnies.

[1rudeboy]

gee, we must still be living in 2003 perhaps, or what?

Well, after all,

The Russian president claims that his real political ambition is to restore to Russia the culture, religion and historical mission of its past.

LOL

[OK Sun]

This is a repost of William Pfaff's column--Putin and the Neo-Conservatives--and I believe it's still under copyright by the International Herald Tribune (iht.com), even though Pfaff has since died.

[faithhopecharity]

The Christians in Syria (dating back to when they were all Jews following rabbi Jesus)....were at least protected under the Assads.
Today, under Obama’s Iranian/Saudi/Qatari-backed ISIS, Christians are not only being driven out, they are getting crucified, bazookaed, and burnt alive in metal cages.

Not good.

[faithhopecharity]

WELL, about Putin....
I am NOT at all confortable with him, not supporting him.

But if any of his talk about Christian faith, Russian culture, etc... is at all accurate, it will be a step for the better.... both for Russia and for our long-term relations with Russia.

provided, of course, Obama’s Transformation of Amerika can be stopped and reversed (repatriation of enemies he’s importing en masse, etc.)

otherwise, Russia may return to Christianity at the very time USA is being Transformed into yet another IslamoNazi Krapistan?

just meandering a bit.
it is late and I am going to bed.
I am not arguing anything, just that the olde gray cell tends to meander as the moon rises, is all.

take it or leave it, its ok. No fights from this quarter.
Good night,
fhc

[Forgotten Amendments]

oh my, someone other than good ol’ Pat B. is STILL talking about those nefarious “neocons”

Oh yeah, there's no "neocons"! No, even though they call themselves "neocons". Their publications are self-identified as "neocon". They are proud to be "neocons". But, no. There are no "neocons".

You sound like the Italian groups saying that the Mafia is a myth.

You think the Weekly Standard and the "conservatives" in the Washington Post and NPR are real conservatives?

Fools like you are what let these ex-communists infiltrate and warp the GOP.

Hope you have as much fun voting for Rubio as you did voting for McCain. And thank those "nefarious neocons". Who don't exist.

[OK Sun]

Reading some of the stuff on the Russian "independent" sites, you find some interesting stories: Vladimir Putin, Frontline Soldier. This one's about Putin's father during the war.

[1rudeboy]

Ahem. Neocons exist. A neocon conspiracy to intervene in Ukraine, and seeking “revenge?” Please.

[faithhopecharity]

I view wash post and npr as 99 percent leftist not conservative. And I have no plans to vote for mr Rubio. You appear to have confused me with someone else. Thanks