WIth Nick Hauselman out of action, Jared Yates Sexton flies solo in this episode, tracing Russian history from the Crimean War to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, how the New World Order conspiracy theory led to this mess, and whether we're looking at a nuclear war or the end of Putinist Russia. To access the bonus Weekender episodes on Friday, and participate in live shows and Q&A sessions, become a patron at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
So we're going to spend a little bit of quality time together, you and me.
Um, it has been a rough few days.
Watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been an exercise in frustration and anger.
It's really been surreal as much as it's been predictable, unfortunately.
Before we get going, just to go ahead and start on a different kind of note before we get into the nuts and bolts of what exactly is happening right now and where everything is leading, which is, of course, going to be the discussion of the day.
I want to start back in the 19th century, the middle of the 19th century, actually back in 1853.
And I want to start by talking a little bit about Russian history, particularly the Crimean War.
And the Crimean War was an incident that involved Russia.
The other belligerents included the Ottoman Empire and France.
And a part of this entire war and situation was Nicholas I, a czar who made a mistake.
And by mistake, I mean that he believed his own propaganda.
He believed his own garbage, so to speak.
And, you know, Russia had lived for many years on this reputation of being a nearly invulnerable, invincible fighting force.
Well, let's just say that Russia got served in the Crimean War.
And what became obvious over the three years that this war raged was that the perception that Russia was this elite, unstoppable giant came crashing down.
Now, Nicholas I didn't survive the Crimean War.
He died shortly before it ended.
But what happened in the wake of that loss profoundly changed Russia for forever.
What occurred was A shattering of these illusions and these myths that had held Russia together.
This idea that all meaning and purpose and power sprung forth from not just the Tsar, but also this fearsome military.
As that loss set in, all of a sudden, There was a new opportunity for the people to imagine alternatives.
Now, there had been opposition to the czars and opposition to the autocracy that ruled Russia.
There had been plenty of uprisings that had been crushed, plenty of political dissidents who had been beaten down.
After all, that's what authoritarians do.
But the loss in the Crimean War.
The embarrassment of the loss of the Crimean War as it shattered this illusion.
Suddenly there needed to be an explanation.
Some sort of a story or some sort of a shift in thinking that made it possible to understand exactly how Russia had arrived at that point.
Now there was a push to reform Russia, there was a push to change things, to sort of maybe move forward a bit or to start to modernize Russia.
But on the other side of that, There suddenly was an uprising in revolutionary energy.
There was an uprising in thought that started to push back against the official story and the official narrative.
One of the things that started to take hold was nihilism.
This idea that you can't just assume things from the past.
That things either needed to be proved through other measures or maybe that nothing could be proved whatsoever.
And what happened here was that there was a schism.
All of a sudden, the things that people used to believe in, including Russia's invincibility and strength, as well as the strength and the authority of the Tsar, started to crack.
And these nihilists started to say, how are we supposed to believe this?
Why are we supposed to believe you?
Obviously you have lied to us.
Obviously the story that you have told us For years and years and generations and generations wasn't true.
And the space that started to emerge from this destruction of that mythology made it possible later on.
For Marxist.
And Soviets.
To overtake the system.
Which of course would birth.
The USSR.
So let's flash forward.
Let's get into the modern day, where of course now we have another autocrat.
We have another dictator in the form of Vladimir Putin.
Just to get everybody on the same page, and I'm sure that we've all been paying attention, Vladimir Putin massed his troops on the border of Ukraine, over 100,000.
Everyone who was paying any attention knew that it was likely that he was going to invade Ukraine.
He then created a false crisis saying that these breakaway pro-Russian separatists that they needed his help and that the government of Ukraine had been overtaken by drug addicts and Nazis and you know his hand was being forced.
He knew full and well that this wasn't true and anybody else paying attention knew this wasn't true.
It was simply a story that he could tell.
One of many stories.
The invasion of Ukraine began.
Russian forces swept in.
And what has happened over the past few days has been pretty remarkable.
The Ukrainian people have fought back in one of the most amazing displays of courage that the modern world has seen.
They have fought tooth and nail to maintain their territory, to keep Russians from overtaking the government and installing their own puppet regime, which We now know was the plan all along, including going in and assassinating and decapitating the government of Ukraine.
As that has happened, the Russian army has suffered thousands of casualties at this point.
It really depends on which source you're looking at to determine whether it's 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 at this point.
But Russian forces have been completely and utterly thwarted at this point.
And I want to say something that I had brought up last night in my Bourbon Talk livestream.
I think there's a couple of things that are happening here.
I think that the Ukrainian people are putting up a hell of a fight, but I also think in this situation particularly, you have a lot of conscripted Russian soldiers who don't want to be there.
They have no reason to want to kill Ukrainians.
There wasn't even a gesture at some sort of a false flag attack that would give them a purpose to go in and kill these people.
And you see these quotes from these Russian soldiers who say, I, I, these people are just like me.
Why am I doing this?
Obviously, if somebody were to invade my town and threaten my family, I would fight back.
So I think there are, A lot of conscripted Russian soldiers who are simply unwilling to go all the way with this thing.
Although I think that undoubtedly there are members of the military and members of the upper echelon in the Russian military who are more than happy to go all the way, and we've been seeing more and more of that.
A quick note.
I find it really disturbing the way that the discourse has covered this particular arena of the situation.
Our mass media is fetishizing warfare.
We're suddenly Aggrandizing the idea that children and senior citizens and women should be in the streets firing off automatic rifles and dodging artillery.
It's a really disturbing thing.
And then on top of that, to watch on social media as discourse has moved to sexualizing President Zelensky in Ukraine.
Talking about him as if he's a celebrity.
Obviously, he was a celebrity before he became president, but in this situation, it's very, very odd.
And meanwhile, we're pretending or certain aspects of the media are pretending as if this is the only invasion that has happened since World War Two.
They've turned an absolute blind eye to what the United States has done in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As well as the treatment of other people around the world who deal with this stuff constantly.
In some cases, the people saying that can't even help themselves.
They have to talk about how the Ukrainian people have blonde hair and blue eyes.
It is a startling expression of white supremacy that people should know better than.
I'll just say that.
I think also the fetishization of the Ukrainian resistance also is a matter of sort of letting Western powers off the hook because we are in a situation where they have to sort of thread the needle.
They can't go in and put boots on the ground.
They can't necessarily establish a no-fly zone.
They have to allow Ukraine to be by itself as opposed to risking the possibility of World War 3.
And this is being held up by some people as proof somehow that the neoliberal global order is a perfectly constructed apparatus, and look how it's resilient, and look at how it's handling this, and oh my lord, what a beautiful game that's being played here.
Meanwhile, you have people who are just dying.
Civilians in Ukraine who are just dying.
Conscripted soldiers who are just dying.
People suffering left and right.
And this situation, this quagmire of a mess, has been created because of those structures of the neoliberal global order.
That allowed, by the way, Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs surrounding him to infect the capitalist system with their corruption, welcomed him into the fold, and let that corruption grow, let them organize right-wing authoritarian movements around the world, and threaten our democracy, which is something that people are turning a blind eye to right now.
The Western powers have leveled sanctions.
That's been well documented at this point.
These sanctions have been focused at Putin and the oligarchs and the Russian economic system.
As of today, I'm taping this on Monday, February 28th.
Uh, the, the ruble has more or less crashed.
There is an economic panic taking hold in Russia.
The people are making runs on banks.
They don't know if they're going to be able to get the things they need to survive.
They're having a hard time going from place to place.
They have been isolated as much, if not more than Putin and the oligarchs.
And it's important to point out that that strategy is focused very largely on fomenting unrest.
On increasing the temperature in Russia in regards to the people and their distrust of Putin, their distrust of the government, and hopefully pushing this to some sort of a resolution.
And by resolution I mean regime change or some sort of internal pressure that could possibly bring the war to an end and possibly bring the Putin regime down.
In the meantime, we have to remember there are human beings who are being affected here.
If this were to take place in the United States of America, if something like this were to happen in which the military-industrial complex oversteps its bounds, let's say that we have another Iraq war, another Afghan war, something along those lines, we need to remember that the mirror image of this
Would be you not knowing if you would be able to pay your rent, you not knowing if you'd be able to get food, you not knowing if you would be able to take care of your kids or your family members.
This is not a victimless crime.
It is not a situation in which Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs are the ones who are necessarily feeling the brunt of this.
Meanwhile, The Russians have called for peace talks.
No one is particularly hopeful that these talks are real.
As Ukrainian officials met with Russian officials, I believe today it was a six-hour meeting that didn't get much of anywhere because Russia is still more or less demanding the demilitarization of Ukraine and Basically asking for Ukraine to cease to exist as a precondition to peace.
As that took place, fighting intensified.
We've already seen that Russia is starting to really ramp up its attacks, including on civilians.
We're seeing residential neighborhoods, residential areas just absolutely bombarded by missiles, cluster bombs, you name it.
Meanwhile, Putin has continually threatened nuclear war.
And this is something that we have to talk about and we have to discuss and.
You know, I did my bourbon talk last night and one of the questions that was asked from a lot of people was how serious of a threat is this?
And I hate to tell you this, but it is a threat.
There is the possibility that this thing could escalate to the point of nuclear conflict.
And as I say that, I am absolutely leveling a critical eye at the people who want to clap and sing the praises of this neoliberal global order and these institutions.
To pretend like mutually assured destruction.
And I want to sit with that for a second.
What Mutually Assured Destruction is, I want to define it.
I want to make sure that we're all on the same page.
Mutually Assured Destruction is a game theory idea.
And during the Cold War, as the United States and the Soviet Union peered across the globe at one another, You had a bunch of theoricians.
You had a bunch of game theorists who decided that the best possible way to stave off the apocalypse, a nuclear annihilation, was to go ahead and chance the possibility of annihilation and a nuclear apocalypse.
One of the theories in this Is this idea that there are two people, and these games that the game theorists always play, I mean, it's pretty brutal.
But the idea here, the strategy here, with mutually assured destruction, it's the idea that when you have two players, because it's always a game, right?
When you have two players standing near a cliff and they are chained to each other.
And a reminder that the cliff is overlooking nuclear annihilation.
If one of the players wants to ensure that they won't go over the cliff by accident, Then they need to gesture that they could possibly be the one to jump over the cliff, which would go ahead and inspire the other person playing the game to run away from the cliff.
Because the entire idea of mutually assured destruction and game theory is that you could never possibly trust anyone.
So as a result, we have created a system that is based on a thought that we won't have nuclear war because anybody who could ever carry out a nuclear war would be much too worried about themselves dying.
Well, here we are.
It's 2022.
It's been... It's been 30 years.
And we are playing this game again.
We should have ended the scourge of nuclear warfare.
We should have de-armed.
We should have demilitarized.
We should have moved forward.
Instead, we continued this game and we built this neoliberal global structure that has allowed this situation to rear its head once more.
Only now, the stakes have a new twist to them.
We have an individual like Vladimir Putin, who is absolutely a cornered rat at this point.
I think that he continues to threaten nuclear war, both as a warning to Ukraine, but also it's part and parcel of being a nuclear power in the face of conflict on a global stage.
He's reminding the Western powers, hey, we've got nuclear weapons too.
And what we're hearing from Russia right now is that Putin's more than willing to use these things.
On top of that, propagandists are all over the airwaves.
They're printing all kinds of things in which they're telling America, listen, we've got 500 nukes that we could just let go at any moment.
So back off.
Part of this is gesturing.
Part of it is acting.
Part of it is bluffing.
But no, we need to understand that we are in danger.
And that brings me no joy to say that.
And a large part of the reason that we are in danger is because this situation doesn't exactly have an obvious off-ramp at this point.
And that's what I want to talk about today and what I want to get into in this broadcast.
I want to talk about the ideology that has driven this thing and has led us to this point.
And now, in order to do that, I want to give a little bit of a history, just so we're all on the same page here, of one of the defining factors in all of this, which is the mythology of the New World Order conspiracy theory.
Now, the history and the roots of the New World Order conspiracy theory go back centuries.
Since there was the idea of a nation state, there has always been the idea that the nation state is facing two fundamental problems.
One is a threat beyond the borders.
This means that your neighboring countries, this could mean an international opponent, this could mean any number of forces that are taking place somewhere out there.
And in a way, it helps to start thinking about these nation states the same way that you would, let's say, Salem, Massachusetts, around the time of the witch trials.
So here, you're sitting there, and you're in your settlement, your nation state, and it's the darkness out there, it's the wilderness out there, the unknown.
And much like game theorists base their entire ideology around the inability to trust others and that you always have to assume that everybody else is out to get you, the idea of the unknown is really daunting and frightening.
And so here, when we talk about the threat beyond the border, You always have to be on guard there if you're a nation-state, because the very idea that you are a nation-state means that there are other nation-states out there that might mean you harm.
You never know what they're up to, and you always have to assume that everybody else is angling to do something to harm you.
Which is one of the problems that we currently have, is that we have all these nation states that, yes, they can be in alliances, they can have these interlocking parts and world governance bodies, all of those things, but they are still fundamentally terrified that there are people out there working against them in secret.
Meanwhile, there's a threat from inside.
And I asked you to think about Salem, Massachusetts for just a moment.
That's the internal threat, is when the external threat, that evil that lies just beyond your borders, when that evil finds its way inside the borders.
And this is a really handy construction, particularly for right-wing, reactionary, conservative minds and movements.
Because when you believe that there are dangers outside and there are dangers inside, suddenly that legitimizes any sort of violence or oppression that you might want to carry out.
Because after all, you're only doing this to protect people.
Liberal democracy has been seen as almost an opening to allow those outside problems to come in.
This is one of the reasons why the Trumpist and the National Conservatives and all of these people who are, you know, touting the big lie.
This is one of the reasons why the election has been such a huge component of this and why they say China interfered, Venezuela interfered.
I mean, I've lost track of how many countries supposedly interfered in the 2020 election.
The liberal democracy, since it was founded, Has been seen even by the people who found it in the first place.
I mean America in the election of 1800 were terrified of an outside influence.
They thought the Illuminati was pulling strings.
The Freemasons were pulling strings.
Those conservative elements of power believe that they have to control society so that they can save people from the threat on the outside and on the inside they can go ahead and tamp down and stop any of those threats.
Just so happens, by the way, that the people who get infected, the people who are part of the threat, the people who are possessed by the threat, are the people they disagree with politically.
It just so happens to work that way.
It also really helps that, you know, it's a white supremacist idea, and it's people of color, plus it's also a patriarchal idea, so it's women or gay people.
It's really interesting how those things turn out.
Now, because this oppression that we're chronicling right now is inherently a white supremacist project...
This is how it gets laundered.
White supremacy has defined the modern world in terms of how Western European culture and American culture have subjugated people, have colonized people, have exploited people, have committed genocides, have just done outrageously terrible things.
But the way that that's explained Is that these people who push those projects say, well I had to.
There was a danger.
This was on behalf of the race.
This was against this conspiracy.
And what you find throughout history is that that conspiracy theory, this threat on the outside, threat on the inside, and how they interlock, Has been the basis of how white supremacists have time and time and time again legitimized their violence and their oppression and the links to which they have to go to in order to control people in order to protect them.
This has always been scapegoated against Jews because Jews have always been considered a state within a state, the enemy within, right?
And a large part of this has to do with the fact that Christianity and evangelical Christianity have been the basis of How the modern world has been viewed, and as a result, Jews have always been seen as a group in these nation states that don't really belong.
And because they don't really belong, and because they have been framed and portrayed as if they're untrustworthy and self-serving, They have borne the brunt of this conspiracy theory.
The idea has consistently been that the evil in the darkness, outside of the borders, outside of the boundaries, that that evil has been largely Collaborated through and organized by a Jewish conspiracy that will at times work with communism, that will work with Freemasons, that'll work with the Illuminati, that it will work through international finance, you name it.
These stories, these conspiracy theories, are the same thing over and over again.
Well, now we need to flash forward.
As the Soviet Union fell, a large part of the Russian population started to believe in the New World Order conspiracy theory, in part because they had been told that the Soviet Union was the pinnacle of the world and, my God, how could it ever fall?
They had been taught that Lenin and Stalin were perfect, unimpeachable, that they had been almost gods on earth.
How could that project ever fail?
And the Bolshevik influence in Russia told them over and over again, don't worry, we have this.
And meanwhile, created this illusion that they were all powerful and invincible.
There's this idea that There was a hyper-normalized society within Russia where everybody knew that Russia was falling apart, but no one could really wrap their heads around it.
And something like this happened in the United States as well.
You actually had a ton of experts who were paid to observe the Soviet Union and understand it.
The Sovietologists were paid to spend their entire careers to understand what was going on in Russia, and even they, despite all the evidence that they were given, couldn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever fail.
When it did, it needed an explanation.
The New World Order theory had already started to take off at that point.
It was being used by reactionary conservatives who were witnessing the birth of a all lowercase, by the way, New World Order as phrased by people like George W. Bush.
This was going to be neoliberalism, is what it was.
It was going to be a global free market push in which the governments of the world would stop worrying so much about the social projects and the fates of their own people, and they would spend most of their time spreading capitalism around the world and ensuring that markets remained free and untouched by regulation.
Well, they were successful with that.
Or at least partly successful with that.
This market did go ahead and circle the world, but it didn't work exactly the way that some of the people thought that it would.
In Russia, it succeeded in creating a class of oligarchs and rocketing Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, which always makes me laugh a little bit when we have to call him a former KGB agent because there's really no such thing as somebody who leaves the KGB.
This former KGB agent takes over in Russia and immediately gains power from false flag attacks and fake terrorist attacks in order to create this new dictatorial regime in which this gangster, this criminal, is in charge of the country and more or less decides every single day whether the oligarchs continue to be rich and powerful or, I don't know, if they suddenly disappear and fall out of a window.
The New World Order conspiracy theory was useful for Putin.
Still is.
The story was that the Soviet Union had been destroyed by the New World Order.
That there had been a conspiracy.
And again, notice how this thing just continues to reverberate.
that there had been a conspiracy within the country of corrupt people who wanted to destroy the Soviet Union, and that there were people outside of the country, particularly the United States and the neoliberal order, this New World Order, that had conspired to destroy the Soviet that had conspired to destroy the Soviet Union.
This was really useful for Putin.
And if you're interested in this and you want to know more about it, go and go and just Google up Putin New World Order.
Go and look.
There's like this entire society of paramilitary groups and motorcycle gangs and all of these big speeches that constantly talk about the New World Order.
Vladimir Putin, like other right-wing demagogues, bases his entire power base and structure on promising that he is fighting the New World Order.
He has to have dictatorial power.
He has to stay in power.
Elections shouldn't matter.
You know, whenever somebody comes out with a protest sign, They are obviously being paid by people like George Soros, who is the modern stand-in for the anti-Semitic puppet master.
That's how Vladimir Putin has maintained power.
That's how somebody like a Viktor Orban has maintained power.
Orban's entire thing is going after the New World Order and George Soros.
This is how somebody like a Donald Trump can do it.
Donald Trump wouldn't say the New World Order, he said the Deep State.
The Swamp.
These are stand-ins for the exact same conspiracy theory.
Now, now that we understand the New World Order, what it is, how it works, what it's been about, we need to talk about why that has anything to do with Ukraine and Vladimir Putin and where it is that we're heading.
Ideologically, this invasion of Ukraine is seen as one of the theaters
In which Vladimir Putin would strike against the New World Order, dismantle or begin to dismantle the American empire and create what he and some of the people around him, just some, not all, what some of them believe will be a new multipolar world.
Now for those who believe in the New World Order, they see it as an American-led project.
In America, of course, white supremacists see it as America being sold out.
Around the world, they see it as an American project through which these Jewish puppet masters are able to do what they want to do.
The entire point of Vladimir Putin's plan, and this is one of the reasons why he and China have been able to talk about this and obviously sort of cooperate to a certain extent, the idea is that the American order, hegemony over the world, is ready to be challenged.
And by creating a multipolar world, Russia would have its sphere of influence, China would have its sphere of influence, and America would begin to recede.
And there have been so many operations to try and set this in place.
I've talked a little bit about it on the podcast.
I've talked about it a little bit elsewhere.
A lot of this is laid out in the ideology and thinking of a guy named Alexander Dugan, a neo-fascist who absolutely worships at the altar of esoteric Nazism, this bizarre amalgamation of Nazism and Bolshevism.
National Bolshevism, by the way, is what this has been called.
If you want to go look at it and get just absolutely nauseated.
The entire point was to separate Great Britain from the European Union.
Check.
To go into the United States via disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, psyops, and pit us against one another and destabilize the country.
Check.
At some point that eventually involved getting Donald Trump elected president.
Check.
Hurting NATO.
Check.
Going into Ukraine, annexing it, and starting to create the multipolar world.
Well that's where we are.
And I want to be very clear about what that means.
Because there have to, there has to be some people who are listening to this and like, my God, that sounds nuts.
And that's fine.
But the way in which the world and the future of the world is determined is through narrative.
Reality is malleable.
So for instance, what I think and what you think, maybe it intersects and maybe it runs parallel and maybe it goes in opposite directions.
We might not live in the same reality.
There might be somebody listening to this right now who thinks that this is absolute horseshit and there's absolutely nothing to be gained from it.
And I'm living in some sort of a paranoid world, even though all of this stuff is just out there to be immediately found and absorbed and understood.
It just so happens that people in major media outlets either don't know about it, don't care about it, don't appreciate it, or it runs counter to what they think.
But reality is more or less a collaborative effort.
And the reality people live in is determined by what version of reality wins out in terms of cultural, political, economic warfare.
What Putin has tried here is something very bold.
Something very ambitious.
By using the New World Order conspiracy theory, and the idea that American global empire and capitalist global empire, the idea that it is vulnerable,
And that something like this invasion of Ukraine, in which Vladimir Putin believed that he would be able probably to overtake Ukraine in a couple of days, and then force Western powers to accept it, and start to break up the order that lasted before, is something that people have tried over and over again.
If you actually look at something like World War I or World War II, What you see here are moments in which nation-states and the people who lead them decide that the world order is ripe to be changed.
World War I happens because Germany, as an emerging nation-state, wants to shake up the etch-a-sketch of the world order and find its place in the sun.
World War II happens because Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the Nazis and the fascists, decided that it was time to destroy liberalism and liberal democracy forever and institute a new hierarchical trenchocracy in which militant societies fighting on behalf of racial purity and racial superiority were just outright white supremacy.
We're the ones who should determine the future of the world.
Both of those efforts failed.
But they could have succeeded.
And had they succeeded, what would have happened would be that the new reality would replace the old reality.
That's what we're watching right now.
The gambit that Putin has tried to carry out here is wildly ambitious.
And this wasn't going to be the last aspect of this.
This was supposed to be an ongoing project that would change the very basis of the world.
And by the way, you have a lot of people in the United States of America who support this.
Donald Trump is too stupid to understand it.
Tucker Carlson, he wants this.
Parts of the Republican Party, they want this.
The National Conservatives, they want it bad.
Steve Bannon wants this.
There are wealthy people in the United States of America, including Peter Thiel, who wants this.
There are other wealthy people who are paying out their asses to destroy liberal democracy.
Some of them really want it, other ones don't know about it, and my god, they would probably be pretty cool with it if it came about.
This is about establishing a new illiberal world order that would go ahead and take down liberalism and liberal democracy in totality.
We are Really lucky so far that this has been thwarted.
I have to tell you, I think if Putin would have taken Ukraine very very quickly, within a couple of days, if this had not been broadcasted so totally on social media, if the world had not rallied at least rhetorically to the cause of the Ukrainian people, I think there would have been a lot of gnashing of teeth, but the economic world order would have eventually accepted it, and this corrosive influence would have continued.
And as you win these battles, as you score these victories, all of a sudden, your idea of reality starts to gain momentum.
If Adolf Hitler had not been successful in his initial invasions of other sovereign nations, people just would have been like, what a loser.
But as he gained power with those victories, suddenly his version of reality started to become more and more possible.
Now, I hate to tell you this, but we're still very early in this situation.
Ukrainian resistance so far is so laudatory and so heroic, but it also means that what we've seen today, this escalated attack, this targeting of civilians, that's probably going to be the response.
Because a dictator like Vladimir Putin who absolutely relies on the illusion of invincibility and strength, particularly with like a totally fragile male ego.
He's not going to handle this very well.
The other aspect of this, which is really troubling, which brings me back to a lot of what I've already said on this podcast.
Putin's entire power base revolves around him seeming invincible and all powerful.
The oligarchs live in fear of him.
They know at any moment that Vladimir Putin could say, hey, you're done or simply look their direction.
The next thing you know, them and their families are just absolutely disappeared and their wealth taken and basically added to the wallet of Putin.
Those oligarchs.
Aren't necessarily ideological.
They're greedy.
They're self-interested.
They're self-serving.
But that doesn't mean that they believe in this reality-shifting ideology.
It doesn't mean that they're reading Dugin in their time off.
Or they're, you know, desiring an expansion of Russian empire or revitalization of the Soviet Union.
People in the military?
Some of them are into this because I have to tell you that the ideology of Dugan and what's called Eurasianism, which I gotta tell you is really a strange bag.
I mean, Dugan talks about Atlantis, Hyperborean, the Aryan race, runes, rituals, all that dumb bullshit.
Some of the military does read his work and it is taught in the academies.
But that doesn't always mean that they're on board with it.
The esoteric mysticism at the heart of this thing, this pandering ideology, this pandering mythology that Vladimir Putin is a man of history who is going to be able to destroy the world order and bring it to bear and change reality, that's not something that everybody believes.
Sometimes it's just one guy.
It just so happens that he's incredibly powerful and has control over a lot of things.
But in this case, Vladimir Putin might be a believer of one.
He might be a solitary church all of his own.
I brought this up in the livestream last night, but Nazism was a widespread phenomenon.
What kept Adolf Hitler gaining converts and gaining in power and influence was that he was able to convince people to come over to his own religion, his own cult of personality.
Putin doesn't really have that.
He's a KGB man.
And yeah, there are a bunch of pictures of him riding around on a horse with his shirt off, or diving out of planes, or scoring eight goals at a hockey game, which is just such horseshit and embarrassing.
But it's not the same thing.
So, here we are.
In a place that is weirdly reminiscent, in certain ways, of the situation with the Crimean War.
The illusion of Russia and the illusion of Putin are being tested.
There's not much of an off-ramp for Vladimir Putin.
He can't just simply accept defeat.
That embarrassment would almost certainly make him not just irrelevant, but put his life in danger.
I mean, by the time I finish recording this, I mean, I wouldn't be that shocked to hear that he fell out a window.
Or suddenly he, you know, developed a serious illness and he's going to have to step away from power in order to focus on that and his family.
The question at this point, Is where does all of this tension go?
He isn't going to just simply accept defeat, embarrassment, humiliation, emasculation.
And as he is cornered more and more.
And I've talked to experts who know a lot about Putin's mindset and his decisions.
I mean.
We're not sure yet what the limitations are in terms of his desperation.
We don't know where that could take us.
We don't know what that could mean for the Ukrainian people.
And by the way, I keep saying this.
I know that we're very excited about how much courage and strength that they have shown.
Things are going to get really, really bad and hard and we need to steel ourselves for that because there's going to be some incredible cruelty on display.
I can't help but think.
There aren't that many ways that this could possibly go.
The tension has to go somewhere.
This whole situation is strange and changing constantly.
Okay, and you know we've talked about this on the podcast before that all of this was building up.
That capitalism had sort of reached this point of saturation in which the world order seemed static and something had to shift or change in a major way.
And those people who are lauding the system as having taken care of the problem, they don't understand that that pressure has to go somewhere.
Something has to give.
And history shows us That that order has to break in some way, shape, or form and capital has to move somewhere else.
It has to constantly shift.
So does that mean that Vladimir Putin is going to change reality on his terms and get what he wants?
Or does that mean that reality is going to update itself to move away from Putinist Russia?
Those are kind of the stakes right now.
And my life, and your life, and the lives of the people that we love and we care about are on the line.
Don't get caught up in the idea that this is a game, that this is a spectator sport to cheer on on social media.
That space, that bizarre, commodified, small and giant space simultaneously, it perverts this.
This isn't a game.
It's not a product.
It's not a sport.
It's not a spectator event.
Things are really dangerous right now, and we're going to keep an eye on this.
But it helps to know what's going on.
It helps to understand where some of these people covering this and commenting on it and adding their voice to it have no idea what they're talking about.
We still don't even know what's going to happen with these fifth columns that have been seated around the world, including in the United States and the other Western powers.
They've yet to totally rear their heads.
Of course, we have Tucker Carlson voicing support for Vladimir Putin and all these other people who are going after Biden and obviously lending support Putin's way.
We don't know what's going to happen if the pressure mounts.
And things start getting weirder and bleaker and all of a sudden favors get called in or things are coordinated.
We don't know yet!
What we do know, though, is that this pressure has built up.
This system has allowed that pressure to build up for that corruption to grow, that authoritarianism that depends on the conspiracy theory that I was just laying out.
That has grown and it has reached a point in which we don't know where it's going to go, but it is built up so much it has to go somewhere.
Something has to shift.
Something has to change.
And here's hoping that it's a better change.
That it makes the world better, it makes us better, that we can look in the mirror and recognize how we got to this point, what it represents, and hopefully find something better.
When Russia went into the Crimean War, they didn't understand what laid on the other side of it.
There was the hubristic notion that the military really was as good as the mythology said that it was.
That their own propaganda said that it was.
They believed their own bullshit.
On the other side of the Crimean War were massive forces that would change history forever.
The question, again, is where's the off-ramp here?
Where does the tension finally find release?
The best case scenario is that Vladimir Putin loses power and that the people gain their independence.
And by the way, do not forget for a moment that the people of Russia are oppressed.
They are victims as well.
For everybody who's throwing out vodka or caviar or whatever Freedom Fries bullshit people are doing, The Russian people are oppressed.
The Russian people are prisoners of this madness of this dictator.
Best case scenario is that his reign, his dictatorial reign comes to an end and that they find freedom and that the world looks at itself in the mirror and recognizes that some things need to change.
But we still don't know yet.
We don't know where all this is heading.
I just want to say good luck to you, good luck to me, good luck to everyone.
We're going to need it.
Alright everybody, that's going to do it for today.
A reminder that we'll have an episode that comes out on Friday, The Weekender, the bonus edition.
Last week we opened that up for free to give people some information about what was developing in Ukraine.
If you want continued access to that, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
This is an independent media venture.
We don't do ads because we don't want to sell out We don't want anybody telling us what type of content and information to get out there.
We abhor that sort of corporateness and you know, this is one of the few places you can get this type of information and it's because you support this show.
And again, that is patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Go over there, get a subscription, help us out, show your support.
In the meantime, if you need us before then you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
