Roger Cohen's Russian Think Piece in NEW YORK TIMES Begs the Question: Was Gerry Maxey Right about Russia TEN YEARS AGO?

 This Blogger respects Russians; as Frederick the Great stated:” It takes two bullets to take a Russian soldier out; one to kill him and one to  stop him.”

This Blogger  likes Russians; even though once, in Moscow, during the Soviet era, his incredibly attractive tour guide, aka KGB agent, told him and his brother  that they were in danger of being hit, fatally, by a Soviet car crossing a Moscow street.

This Blogger’s brother told her that he had ridden in a Soviet Car, the LADA; and that he could damn well survive any hit by that piece of junk.

She laughed.

That night, this Blogger’s brother slept in his room, under his bed, drunk.

This Blogger admires the way Russians do business; when Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in Lebanon, the KGB paid the ransoms immediately, without complaint.

Shortly thereafter, Beirut was flooded with Soviet agents and Soviet bribes; the kidnappers were identified. They were abducted, tortured and  castrated; their dead bodies strung from lamp poles, with their detached members dangling from their necks.

This Blogger believes no Soviet nor Russian diplomat has been kidnapped or abducted since.

This Blogger is fascinated by Russians; they never fought a Civil War, like America,  over ending serfdom, their version of slavery. But, they did fight over how many fingers to use in making the sign of the Cross, two or three?

Russians are like Native Americans to this Blogger; like Native Americans, they have made atavism into an art form; communion with nature a human right.

This Blogger is amazed by Russian barbarism and awestruck by their art, literature, music, and science.

Russians are a great……complicated people.

On December 26, 1991, this Blogger’s generation, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush accomplished one of the greatest feats in recorded history; it brought down the Soviet Union, without a war.

After Churchill won World War II, his people kicked him to the curb, wary of heroism. After the demise of the Soviet Union, Americans kicked the winners of the Cold War to the curb, for that pain feeling Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton was a very savvy politician, with a fatal flaw as a statesman. He thought, with all his intellect; he was smarter than History.

He decided to kick the remnants of the Soviet Union, Russia,  around.

Spearheaded by his arrogant Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright,  the United States humiliated Russia at every opportunity.

History has shown that was not a good idea.

On August 7, 2023, the NEW YORK TIMES gave major space in its first section to a very profound article by Roger Cohen on Russia.

This Blog will quote that article; with commentary from a decade ago by Gerry Maxey predicting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intents and ambitions; borne to fruition in 2023.

“In Moscow…..Western sanctions appear to have had little effect beyond stores such as Dior, which have signs saying, “Closed for technical reasons,” and the comical renaming of departed Western businesses, such as “Stars” for Starbucks.

….“Our values are different,” Tolstoy said. “For Russians, freedom and economic factors are secondary to the integrity of our state and the safeguarding of the Russian world

When I asked him how Russia proposed to pay for a prolonged war effort, he shot back: “We pay for it all from our sales of oil to Europe via India.”

This was bravado, but it had some truth to it. Russia has rapidly adjusted to the loss of European markets with oil sales to Asia — and India has sold some of it on to Europe in refined form.

….…The subway is spotless; restaurants offering a popular Japanese-Russian fusion cuisine overflow; people make contactless payments for most things using their phones; there is a ridiculous concentration of luxury cars; the internet functions impeccably, as it does in all of Russia.

….The vindictive fever churning inside the Russian leader (Putin) came to a head on the eve of the war in Ukraine. The loss of Crimea, in particular, as the Soviet Union broke up was a festering wound because of the widespread Russian sentiment that it is a core part of the country’s history.

“Putin was obsessed with justice, as he saw it,” said Alexei Venediktov, whose popular Echo of Moscow radio station was shut down soon after the war began. “He told me in 2014, ‘You might not like the annexation of Crimea, but it’s just.’”

The United States, Europe and NATO are now consistently identified as sources of “outright Satanism,” in the recent words of Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

Being ideological, the war is doubly intractable. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, told me. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”

Anti-Western invective has attained phantasmagorical proportions. It is part of an emergent state ideology that is setting a course for possibly decades of confrontation.

Thirty years after Russia — in the midst of the ardent liberal hopes of the 1990s — adopted a constitution whose Article 13 said, “No ideology shall be proclaimed as State ideology,” Putin’s Russia is hurtling toward a new official ideology of conservative values.

The possibility of an amendment rescinding Article 13 has been raised by Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko, among others.

This anti-Western ideology is based around the Orthodox Church, the fatherland, the family and the “priority of the spiritual over the material,” as laid out in Putin’s decree on spiritual and moral values issued in November.

The enemy, it proclaims, is the United States and “other unfriendly foreign states,” intent on the cultivation of “selfishness, permissiveness, immorality, the denial of the ideals of patriotism” and “destruction of the traditional family through the promotion of nontraditional sexual relations.”

If the West was portrayed during the Cold War as the nightmarish home of ruthless capitalism, it is now, as Russia sees it, the home of sex changes, the rampages of drag queens, barbaric gender debates and an LGBTQ+ takeover.

“For how long should Russia tolerate open warfare from the West using Ukrainian meat?,” Sergei Karaganov, a well-connected Russian foreign policy expert, asked in an interview……

…..“There is a high risk of nuclear war, and it is increasing,” he said. “The war is a prolonged Cuban missile crisis, but this time with Western leaders who reject normal values of motherhood, parenthood, gender, love of country, faith, God……..ROGER COHEN, NEW YORK TIMES.”

On August 23, 2013, Gerry Maxey, published his insight on Russia’s evolving opinion of the West. He published the following: Answering Harvey Fierstein: “Why is Putin Going Nazi on Russia’s Gays?”  Putin Intends to Reverse the Outcome of the Cold War

The following is excerpted from that Blog: ‘Because of the Repeal of DON’T ASK/DON’T TELL, Putin sees rot in the American Military, a military incapable of dying for its culture. He sees a ripe chance to reverse the Cold War defeat by being more anti-Gay and pro-God than his Western opponents.

They (Ex KGB agent Putin and his cohort of former KGB agents) are calculating that there will be so much support in the heartland of America, from their fellow Christians, that they can reverse the defeat of the Cold War with impunity.

When I had dinner in East Germany with KGB Gleb (his nom de guerre), I picked up the tab. When Gleb came to America, he picked up our dinner tab and smiled,” Gerry, your nation and culture is doomed, and we now know how to bring it down. No Orthodox Jew, fundamentalist Christian, devout Muslim will give up their place in Heaven by supporting Gay Rights. We will revisit the Cold War and this time we will win, because now Russia is the most religious Christian country in the world.”

Memo to Harvey Fierstein, that is the answer to your question, what is Putin’s agenda? To win the Cold War-this time…THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.”

 

“The first was that Putin would be replaced somehow, and that a period of reform would start, as under Nikita Khrushchev after Stalin.

“The second option, which is more realistic, is that the regime stays in place and Russia will be slowly dying,” Orlov said. “It will fall behind other countries, and to make this regime stable, the level of repression will rise.”

Putin almost certainly has enough of his country, and enough cash, behind him to pursue the war for at least another 18 months to two years, three Western ambassadors to Russia told me in Moscow.

“We did not see the Putin who was on a historical mission of revenge,” he told me. “We thought he was a corrupt guy from a poor family who wanted yachts and palaces and girls and money. We did not see the KGB officer who thought the loss of the Soviet Union was unjust. We thought he was a cynic. In fact, he was a romantic…….ROGER COHEN, NEW YORK TIMES.”

In December, 2013, Gerry Maxey noted that Putin had self-declared himself a Cromwellian or rather Cromwell was a Putinite. That is VERY HISTORICALLY ROMANTIC.

 “ This month, December, 2013 President  Putin gave a news conference in which he called Cromwell, “cunning.”"Russian Leader Believes Cromwell was a Putinite....theguardian,  December 2013"….THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.”

“I asked Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, if Russia sought more Ukrainian territory beyond the four provinces annexed.

“No,” he said. “We just want to control all the land we have now written into our constitution as ours.”…ROGER COHEN, NEW YORK TIMES.”

On September 11, 2013 Gerry Maxey  published this:  Obama vs. Putin. “….Watch for Putin to seek the division of the Ukraine, into two parts, Russian Orthodox Ukraine and Nationalist Catholic Ukraine, with an eventual game plan of absorbing Russian Ukraine  back into Holy Mother Russia”

There are no astute observers left in the American Intelligence Services, nor in the American Foreign Policy team, nor in the American Ruling Class. 

The astute have all been driven into exile, ostracized as unhip, replaced by devotees of Modernity, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and every international courtier with divided loyalties. An Administration of Marginal Men cannot foresee what a Patriot will do, for they disdain Patriotic visions as old, déclassé, passé, so 19^th Century darling.

President Obama’s Sublime Porte courtiers can understand makeup and camera angles but cannot make a fire in the woods with two sticks, nor find their way home without GPS, even if their home is across the street.  Putin can do Modernity, but does not need modernity. Putin can use GPS but can also do Dead Reckoning. Putin is a Man for All Centuries.

One of the byproducts of the Ukraine Crisis is the immutable observation: that the American Ruling Class, in the 21^st Century, its Pundits, its Cognoscenti, its Talking Heads, its Leadership, is contemptible in its stultifying ignorance.

The Ukrainian Crisis has also revealed that American Foreign Policy under President Obama is all sloganeering: “We are on the right side of history”, “off-ramp for Putin”, “Putin is a thug”

Seemingly while Putin was learning Realpolitik , Team Obama was learning Foreign Policy from the MONTY PYTHON MINISTRY OF FUNNY WALKS, and sloganeering from Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM and 1984. In fact, Obama’s apparatchiks use slogans not as a shorthand for ideas but as sacred religious chants, which if they chant them enough around the campfire of Fantasy will keep the wolves of reality away.

 “The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, threatened new measures to isolate Moscow “politically, diplomatically and economically” as he denounced the Russian leadership for an “act of aggression” over the deployment of troops on Ukrainian soil.

During a visit to Kiev, he gave full backing to the new government in Ukraine and indicated that Washington could give the country $1bn in emergency aid to ease the impact of a financial crisis threatening it….. INDEPENDENT”

....How can Russia be isolated politically when 75% of Eastern Ukraine speak Russian and identify with the Russian Motherland? Eastern Ukrainians identify not with Lady Gaga nor Beyonce but with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Pushkin, Babel, and Turgenev.

The worst revelation to emerge from this Ukraine Crisis is President Obama’s mantra that “we are on the right side of history.”  Worst still is that President Obama BELIEVES that glib pabulum, much to the detriment of the nation under his stewardship.

There is no right side of history; there is only good Leadership or poor Leadership. There is no right side of history, but there is a right or wrong side of geography. Switzerland is on the right side of geography; Ukraine is on the wrong side of geography.

Ukraine is Mexico.

“Poor  Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!” …Porfirio Diaz

“Poor Ukraine, so far from God, and so close to Russia.”…Gerry Maxey…THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.”

On March 8, 2014  Gerry Maxey offered up a solution not based on the destruction of Ukraine,when he published the following Blog :Gerry Maxey’s Copyrighted 19th Century Solution to the 21st Century Ukraine Crisis

The following is excerpted from that Blog: “ President Obama believes his Modernity can overcome geopolitical facts, geostrategic facts, the Laws of Nature, Jungian irredentism, the Blood Memory of Boris and Gleb, 1500 years of Russian history and 5,000 years of Human History.

The WASHINGTON POST on March 2, 2014, accused President Obama of this: “ President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy...

“FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality…..”Washington Post.”

President Obama is so Modern; he believes nothing Ancient in Statecraft has value, credence, viability, resonance or danger. President Obama has created a foreign policy so stepped in BARON MUNCHAUSEN fantasy that fantasy is no longer a symptom of that policy but is that policy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly has not gotten the TWEET nor has he subscribed to the FACEBOOK page informing him that the old games of geopolitics are no longer valid because it is now the 21^st Century; instead he has seized the Crimea from Ukraine.

John Kerry reacted to Putin’s irredentism by pontificating like a Kindergarten teacher’s assistant explaining the concept of TIMEOUT to a misbehaving brat:” Secretary of State John F. Kerry  on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

The 21^st Century has more in common with 19^th Century Realpolitik than it does with President Obama’s fantasies, or Secretary Kerry’s kindergarten pedagogical exhortation.

America’s intelligence apparatus was caught flat footed about the seizure of Crimea because it is entrenched in  Group Think politically correct Modernity; it is no longer capable of foreseeing that  nations will make war for the reason of Jungian Blood Memory in 2014, as they have for 5,000 years.

“WASHINGTON --… a classified report earlier in the week by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible for collecting and analyzing military intelligence, concluded that Russian military drills with 150,000 troops near the Ukrainian border would not provide a pretext for sending troops into Crimea.

A separate classified analysis from the CIA said that some signs pointed to a Russian intervention, but that it did not expect one, the officials said….“I think the Russian steps came as a surprise,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), an Intelligence Committee member..…LOS ANGELES TIMES”

What banal claptrap to say no one can predict Putin; every astute observer of Putin’s background as a former KGB agent, Russian Nationalist, Russian Patriot, Russian Orthodox adherent, Jungian Irredentist knows what Putin is thinking; he wants to reverse the results of the Cold War.

Vladimir Putin wants Eastern Ukraine because it is Russian Orthodox in Religion, and Russian by History, language, and culture. Eastern Ukraine is the cradle of Russian Civilization, first home of the Rus, home of Boris and Gleb, the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, the Cossack, and TARAS BULBA. Vladimir Putin does not want Western Ukraine. Western Ukraine is a Bridge too Far for Putin; it is Catholic, Polish or Lithuanian by history and culture, and broke, really, really broke.

So the main question becomes can the United States and the European Union allow, tolerate, and countenance the separation of Western and Eastern Ukraine, and the subsequent absorption of Eastern Ukraine by Russia?

Can the United States and European Union MORALLY allow Eastern Russian Orthodox Ukraine to become a member of the Russian Federation?

This Blog answers that question:” What morality?" 

The United States under then President Bill Clinton and then Secretary of State Madeline Albright had no moral problem in allowing, tolerating, and countenancing the divorce of Kosovo from the sovereign state of Serbia just because the Kosovars wanted it. In fact Clinton and Albright went to immoral war to divorce Muslim Kosovo from  Orthodox Serbia; what is good for Kosovo is good for Russian Orthodox Eastern Ukraine.

There should be no map fetish concerning the sanctity of Ukraine’s borders; Ukraine is artificial, cobbled together after World War II by stealing land from Poland. Eastern Ukraine could be a province of Russia; Western Ukraine could still be the nation of Ukraine, religiously, linguistically and ethnically more homogenized that its current incarnation.

If the Western Allies could split up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had lasted for 1,000 years, they can split up the State of Ukraine which has been in existence for less than 25 years.

This Blog does not suggest that the United States and the European Union just give Eastern Ukraine to the Russian Federation. Ukraine is Mexico;’ Mexico sold land to the United States. The selling of land is a very 19^th Century concept, but it transfers sovereignty without ethnic war, or coups, or ski masked gunmen, all so common in the 21^st Century.

The United States bought land from Napoleon, the Louisiana Purchase; the United States bought Florida from Spain;  the United States bought Alaska from Russia;  the United States bought land from Mexico, the Gadsden Purchase.  Russia should have to buy Eastern Ukraine from the State of Ukraine.

The pro-Western government of Ukraine needs, by its own calculations,  35 Billion dollars to survive as a state until 2016; the State of Ukraine should sell Eastern Ukraine to the Russian Federation for $35 Billion Dollars.

That would clear rump Ukraine’s debt and give them a fresh start as a viable state.

Up to now, President Putin has been Bismarckian in his irredentism, cool, measured, successful. He has been cold steel in his geostrategic approach; however, each day President Putin’s contempt for President Obama grows, in that burgeoning contempt, President Putin will be tempted to over reach. Putin’s contempt of Obama may lure him into jettisoning a sound geostrategic game plan in order to indulge in personal humiliation of President Obama.  President Obama’ slavish devotion to Modernity  and Performance Art and dumb slogans invites humiliation from former KGB agents.

The United States cannot allow President Putin to drift into over reach because of his desire to humiliate President Obama…..The United States should make a statement now that Estonia and the Baltic States are off limits to Russian irredentism; and that statement should be concrete. American soldiers should be based in Estonia now, as a trip wire against Putin’s Alluring Desire to  Over Reach......THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.”

This Blogger’s best advice in trying to understand Russians is that they abhor Modernity; they are Apaches, the Lakota, the Seminole, the Comanche, with nuclear weapons.

The correct solution to this issue would have been Clinton enabling the partition of Ukraine, with the Donbas and Crimea going to Russia; and Ukraine joining the E.U. and NATO in 1993.

Now, there is Bloody stalemate; a war that 19th Century minds could have, would have avoided. Modernity seems unable to find the correct solution to any problem: whether it be in Iraq, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Mass Migration, Water Stress or Climate Change.