Putin’s last speech well recapitulates the central paradox of the current Russian project: a mixture of historical resentment with the post-Cold War world situation, based on a convincing and fair description of Western hypocrisy (from anti-Soviet revisionism to the history of World War II to NATO expansionism and its support of fascistoid nationalisms in Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the former USSR) with increasingly megalomaniac and spiritualist rhetoric against the “satanic” decay of the West, backed by the conservative traditions of ancient history tsarism and the Orthodox Church, see the increasingly frequent citations to the reactionary philosopher enemy of the Russian Revolution, Ivan Ilyin.

The difficulty for Western leftists, whether those who make the mistake of following Russian nationalism or those who support the “democratic” roguery of the Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev axis, lies in the inability to understand that Putin is both: reaction to the deteriorating economic and cultural status quo of Yeltsin’s vassal and neoliberal years through an increasingly significant appropriation of Russia’s cultural legacy, including both the past as a military superpower with high levels of education, technological development and collective well-being, and the historically anti-modernist and anti-revolutionary role (including the calculated absorption of a certain obscurantist esotericism) of the old Great Russian nationalism. Defining a fair position in the face of this situation involves rejecting both the line of US and NATO propagandists and hawks, who see Russia as the supreme Evil, and the “third-world” charm of the nostalgic delirium of a nationalist and religious militarism disguised as anti-imperialist struggle. Source: https://www.facebook.com/dgfgnds?mibextid=ZbWKwL