The Brown New Deal, Part IV

The transition from the now defunct Green New Deal to the new Brown New Deal — European militarism, that is — requires an enemy, and the only candidate seems to be Russia. But Russia has zero interest in attacking Europe. Russia is interested in trade, tourism, cultural exchange, but certainly not war! It is therefore necessary to stage provocations in order to keep the myth of "Russian aggression" alive in the minds of Europeans, in the hopes of convincing, and, failing that, coercing them into accepting high levels of defense expenditure, just as they accepted high levels of spending on "green" energy — for the European ruling elites to pocket.

However, it turns out that halfhearted provocations such as unceasing Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian cities and industrial sites are hardly enough to keep the myth of "Russian aggression" alive, never mind making it sufficiently compelling to motivate scores of true believers to queue up at recruitment centers, eager to die on the Eastern Front battling aggressive Russians Ukrainian style. Luckily, halfhearted provocations are not all that the collective West has to offer: there are also efforts being made at constructing a compelling image of the enemy.

These efforts are quite extensive. Russia's warlike image is being cultivated on a fertile substrate of anti-Russian bigotry and Russophobia that is many centuries old, dating from the late 16th century when Ivan was declared to be Terrible. The contemporary efforts include a fanciful rewriting of history that consigns to oblivion all the episodes that fail to portray Russia in an entirely negative light while playing up all the negatives that can be found, including in works of fiction by, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his fictional magnum opus The GULAG Archipelago.

To make such a radical falsification of history seem more believable, Eastern European governments have been working assiduously to destroy some of the 4,000 war memorials to fallen Red Army soldiers that stand atop their mass graves throughout Eastern Europe. These soldiers, who died while liberating these countries from the German Nazis and their allies, are now being recast as invaders. The pathetic Baltic statelets and rabidly Russophobic Poland have been particularly active in destroying these memorials and have even taken to desecrating the graves. On the other hand, no such outrages have been reporded in Hungary, Slovakia or Germany.

Topsy-turvy historical revisionism conveniently helps to hide the truth that virtually all of Europe lined up behind the Nazi German "Drang nach Osten" — the eastward onslaught — and pitched in with the disastrous effort of invading the USSR: Finland helped out with the blockade of Leningrad; forces from Italy, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania pitched in during the battle of Stalingrad; and remnants of the Charlemagne Division, officially known as the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and made up of French volunteers, served as some of the final defenders of Adolf Hitler's bunker in Berlin in May 1945. Some nations stood out more than others: nearly 50,000 "Germanic" volunteers joined the Waffen-SS from various Northwestern European countries, helping make Fascism a pan-European project.

All of this makes possible a final, spectacular revision of common historical knowledge: instead of the fact-based historical narrative wherein the Soviet Union's Red Army first fought off an unprovoked invasion by Nazi Germany and its many allies, then went on to liberate half of Europe from Fascism, it is now declared that Europe was invaded by "Russians" — and that these same barbaric "Russians," genetically predisposed to unmotivated violence and destruction, not to mention uncivilized and uncouth, are invading Europe once again.

They started with "unprovoked aggression" against the formerly Soviet Ukraine (which is, all of a sudden, Europe) but in the fullness of time will surely go on to invade the rest of Europe, for that is their nature. And they won't be stopped unless Europe undertakes a program of rapid militarization, never mind the cost, never mind the damage to society! It is either that... or Russian enslavement!

The enslavement would be personally carried out by the dread dictator Putin. His steady as a rock public approval rating of around 80% is taken as obviously fraudulent: since the Russians are assumed to be Putin's slaves, it naturally follows that they are being forced to answer public opinion surveys exactly as Putin wants them to. Those who refuse are shot or sent to the Gulags (plural).

Painting Putin as a dictator is part of a standard Western colonialist political toolkit: the nations to be colonized by the West are portrayed as barbaric and bereft of the gifts of civilization such as liberal democracy. That is why they are invariably ruled by bloody tyrants who need to be expeditiously dethroned, if such nations are to be civilized, and replaced with bloody tyrants who are subservient to the West.

What this means in practice is that the population of any nation to be colonized is assumed to consist of slaves — property of the tyrant who rules them — and once the tyrant is overthrown, ownership of the slaves automatically passes to the colonial administration. After all, lacking any tradition of self-governance, these hapless, ignorant natives need to be ruled with an iron fist — which can be that of another dictator, provided he eagerly executes the wishes of the Western colonial administration.  Western colonialist strategy is thus based on the following oxymoronic dictum: "Anybody who does not follow Western dictates is a dictator."

Or, better yet, several dictators, because another key piece of the Western colonialist toolkit since Ancient Rome is "divide et impera," often wrongly translated as "divide and conquer." The Latin verb "imperare" means "to command" and does not automatically imply conquest. Based on this well-worn technique, the plan for Russia is to break it up into several smaller countries by exploiting geographic and ethnic divisions, thus making each piece easier to command from Brussels or from Washington.

Once it has been established that anybody you don't like is automatically a dictator, the path is open to drawing an equal sign between various dictators. After all, aren't they all a bit dictatorial? It thus becomes possible to establish a Red-Brown Equivalence: Hitler was a dictator and Stalin was a dictator, so what's the difference?

Of course, there were some notable differences. Hitler was a nationalist (as all Fascists tend to be), his color brown and his motto "Deutschland über alles!" — Germany above all, used by the Nazi regime to assert German superiority over all other nations. Stalin, on the other hand, was an INTERnationalist, his color red and his motto "Workers of the world, unite!"

Hitler was a German Fascist who ruled Germans (as his citizens and constituents) and other peoples as colonial subjects a result of conquest. Stalin, on the other hand, was a Georgian Communist who ruled a maddeningly diverse country where approximately 49% of the population did not speak Russian as its native language (while 29% of it spoke Russian as a near-native or a second language). But please don't let such nuances and complicated details stand in the way of the Red-Brown Equivalence! Thus, Stalin = Hitler.

The next move is to establish that all Russian dictators are the same (glossing over the tiny detail that Russian ≠ Soviet). Therefore, since Stalin = Hitler and Putin = Stalin, it follows naturally that Putin = Hitler, QED. And since Hitler invaded all of Europe, it follows that so will Putin — unless the Europeans draft everyone and arm themselves to the teeth.

Unfortunately, there is no money left for any of that and that is really, really too bad because the Achilles' heel of any kleptocracy is having nothing left to steal. The newly hatched European militarists are all dressed up with no place to go. Their leaders hold endless conferences where they discuss pilfering Russian sovereign wealth accounts at Euroclear in Belgium (bad idea) or somehow cajoling the Americans to throw more money at the Kiev regime so that the European leaders can once again start taking the night train to Kiev to haul back suitcases full of cash.

But even if none of that works out, European militarism and the phantom of "Russian aggression" might still be useful as a way of distracting European populations from their plummeting living standards, rampant deindustrialization, growing unemployment, ridiculously high energy bills, migrant mayhem in the streets or the dire state of European finances. Judging from how popular Alternative für Deutschland or Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National have grown, or recent electoral victory of Andrej Babiš in Czechia, the populace is proving to be rather difficult to distract. The Brown New Deal, as brain-dead as the Green New Deal ever was, may turn out to have an even shorter run. Enjoy it while you can!