A World Without Russia

I think the problem we are having with Russia at the moment is that it exists. I mean, I know we all know Russia exists, but it’s not supposed to occupy space on the planet we inhabit. It’s like those other countries, Kazakstan, and Tajikastan and Uzbekibekistanstan: we know they exist somewhere, but we’re never supposed to hear about them. We permit them their existence so long as they do not intrude upon our consciousness. When they do, I’m pretty sure the pat answer is to bomb them. Isn’t that what we do with any country we’ve never heard of and don’t care about when it suddenly is mentioned in the media? Would Afghanistan mean anything to anyone if we weren’t bombing and droning the crap out of them? Would any of us visit Afghanistan, or any other country for that matter, if we weren’t paid to put on a uniform and kill people there?

That’s the problem with Russia. They serve no useful purpose to our worldview. They are not part of Europe, at least not the Europe we like to think about, those countries that fought as allies with us against the evils of Nazism and Fascism.

 Well, granted, The Soviet Union fought against the Axis powers too. I mean, if you want to get technical about it, the USSR had more casualties than all the rest of the Allies combined. And if you really want to get out the fine tooth comb, we can say that they killed more Nazis than every other country combined, but this is just the sort of train of thought that gets annoying. Mention this on Facebook and you risk getting your page banned. Better to stick with cute puppy pictures (unless you’re from Russia, in which case puppy pictures are considered propaganda). But I digress.

Russia is comparable in our minds to those tiny—or simply remote—nations that exist despite the fact that their existence is inconsequential to our narrative. Nations like Senegal, that participated in the European wars and lost tremendous amounts of their young males fighting European battles for European purposes. They exist for our pleasure, like Japanese had their pleasure women, who were disposed of when they had served their purpose.

Russia is not part of Europe, not really. Nor is it part of Asia, not the way we think of it: after all, they provide us with neither televisions nor cheap plastic goods. 

It is a place holder, a blank spot on the map. Like Nigeria or Greenland, it pads out a globe. Without such countries, we’d only have a hemisphere, containing The United States and Western Europe. Come to think of it, we really have no use for the Southern Hemisphere either, do we?

  

Russia did serve a purpose for a time, did play a part in our narrative. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the war machine needed a raison d’etre, and the Soviet Union was the perfect excuse for increased military spending. It’s good to have an evil empire. One cannot have a military industrial complex without an existential threat.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was only a matter of time before we found another existential threat to justify a constant state of warfare. Seeing no major threats, we had to latch onto terrorism as the ultimate evil. Initially, it wasn’t up to the task, we had to guide it along, encourage it. In order to puff terrorism into a legitimate threat, we had to poke various countries until they reacted in the only way minor powers can react to the violence of major powers: through terrorist tactics. Eventually we provoked them enough—through our military presence in their countries and our support for brutal regimes--that they hit us back in a rather impressive fashion. This was a goldmine for us, as it gave us carte blanche to unleash the full military money-making machine upon them. It was the ideal situation in that we were at war against not a nation that could be defeated but an idea that could never be defeated. The mere fact that we killed people in distant nations and occupied their lands guaranteed that we would perpetuate terrorism, giving us the endless war we had so long desired. And there were no boundaries! We had an excuse to attack anyone we wanted anywhere in the world and justify it by calling them terrorists.

There was only one problem: as much as we liked our war against terrorism, we also liked using terrorists to advance our own agenda in overthrowing governments we did not like. It was hard to use terrorism as the existential threat against which we had to place all our energies when we were simultaneously using terrorists against other countries and governments. It all hit the fan in Syria when, in the midst of our attempt to overthrow a government with the use of terrorists, Russia stepped in on the side of their ally, using the claim that they too wanted to combat terrorism. America’s hypocrisy was suddenly exposed for all to see. And like any other hypocrite, America was not very happy to have its hypocrisy exposed. America was in the very difficult position of having to pretend that they weren’t supporting the terrorists which they claimed were their mortal enemy while at the same time trying to overthrow the government of Syria using internal organ-eating monsters as “freedom fighters”. What was a poor empire to do?

Pivot. That’s what we do best. That’s what spinmeisters, crisis management teams, marketers and propagandists are trained to do. If the current ad campaign isn’t moving product, move on to a new one. If we can no longer sell terrorism as the excuse for our inexcusable behavior, simply move on to a new paradigm.

Ladies and gentleman, let me introduce to you the newest model existential threat to the United States (and its democratic institutions which are the envy of the world): Russia 2.0. Forget for a moment that Russia is no longer the Soviet Union and that the Soviet Union wasn’t the threat to our nation the Military Industrial Complex and its intelligence agencies made it out to be. It is the land to the East, where the shadows lie (i.e. it is a country we know nothing about because our media is busily telling us about the Kardashians). The great eye of Putin, lidless and wreathed in flame, looks always to the west, hateful of all that his nation can never be: bright, glorious and free.

This, this is what your great heroes sacrificed their lives to deliver you from, people like John Wayne and Rambo, who put aside all thoughts of personal gain so that you might bask in the glorious sun of liberty. Will you now turn away from the eternal battle against darkness? Will you not pick up the weapons which warriors like Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson once so courageously carried into battle?

If Russia has the impertinence of existing, then they damn well better exist on our terms. Like any other nation you care to think of that attempted a degree of self-rule, Russia needs to be put into its place until it can once again be a nation we never speak of or are forced to acknowledge. If they must suffer, let them suffer in silence, as they did when IMF-imposed austerity programs forced the elderly into poverty and the young into homelessness and prostitution during the nineties.

 Russia is not a communist nation anymore, but it is something just as bad. Russia is now an oligarchy, which as we all know is a very bad thing. At least when we aren’t talking about the one in our own country. Which we never do. Let us not contemplate how the United States oligarchs imposed oligarchy on Russia by imposing “reforms” on Russia so that they might have an economy that mirrored our own.

Let’s put all that aside and focus instead on what is needed of us: hatred. Let us put aside all that we have done to Russia and think only of what anonymous sources from intelligence agencies tell us Russia has done to us. Let us blindly trust them as we did during the days leading up to the Iraq War.

Hate is all that is required of us. You can even use gay-shaming as a means of expressing hatred as long as it is applied to Vladimir Putin. The hatred demonstrated against Putin is at least as strong as it was in the case of Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega or any other figure we used as an excuse for war. Hatred has stopped you from being able to evaluate Russia or Putin in any sort of rational way.

Don’t believe me? Ask yourself, what could Vladimir Putin say that you would not immediately assume was the worst kind of sinister lies? Name me one person you don’t like who you would defend from collusion charges if nameless sources insinuated their guilt. Tell me one thing the United States has ever done that wasn’t fair to Russia or may have been to blame for our poor relationship with them.

Envision for yourself a healthy Russia with a government that worked for the Russian people and their interests. What would that look like? Could you ever see them being equal partners with the U.S. in a military alliance?

Is this your idea of ideal Russian leadership? 

I know, it would be so much simpler if Russia didn’t exist. But they do. It is a large country, large enough to demand a spot on the world map, powerful enough that we cannot control it or bomb it into submission. The imperialist model we have been using for the last quarter of a century cannot continue indefinitely. It was, in fact, a bad idea to begin with. We will have to find another way for our country to interact with other nations, or our future will be darker than we will permit ourselves to imagine.