As you are aware most of the western world has imposed sanctions against Russia and begun a campaign to try and wage a proxy war against it in Ukraine. What this means is interpreted differently by different people. Some, many of them on this website reading this right now, will argue that Putin invaded Ukraine just because he felt like it one morning or some other reason that ignores every year from 2014 to February of 2022 and all the diplomatic lead up to the war in Ukraine. Others like me argue that the war was part of a long running strategy of the United States expanding NATO to encircle Russia and create an untenable security situation for that country, with the eventual goal of regime change.
Regardless the subject of this thread is not the lead up to the war in Ukraine but what I think is the "Crusader mentality" of liberalism today where Russia is identified as an enemy which not only must be defeated, but must be totally destroyed. A "Crusader Mentality" is what Neoconservatives had in the lead up to the Iraq war, and I would say is characterized by the need of the person who is afflicted by it to push their values on other countries and peoples and if they refuse those values (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.) to destroy them in what can only be called campaign of genocidal interventionism and war mongering. This is a tendency of liberalism in particular today because it uses the ideology and language of American liberalism to support an objectively imperialist political project that means the break up of the Russian state which has existed for hundreds of years into ten or so states that are easier for the US to destroy and manipulate. To support the idea that this is the case I cite an arm of the US government itself, and American intellectuals.
https://www.csce.gov/international-impa ... ing-russia
This video is long so I will instead cite a news story in The Atlantic to prove why I think liberals have this crusader mentality;
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ya/639428/
"The U.S. had an opportunity to unwind the Russian empire before. In September 1991, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, President George H. W. Bush convened his National Security Council. In the lead-up to the meeting, the White House seemed unsure how to handle the splintering superpower. Some of Bush’s closest advisers even called for trying to keep the Soviet Union together.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was not one of them. “We could get an authoritarian regime [in Russia] still,” he warned during the meeting. “I am concerned that a year or so from now, if it all goes sour, how we can answer that we did not do more.” His end goal was clear: as Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates later wrote, Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”
Bush demurred. Rather than accelerate the Soviet disintegration, he tried to avoid antagonizing Moscow, even as President Boris Yeltsin’s administration began pushing the anti-Ukrainian animus that Putin now embodies. For years—as Russia stabilized and eventually prospered, and as Cheney masterminded some of the most disastrous American foreign-policy decisions in recent decades—many believed that Bush had selected the better strategy. Armageddon, as one historian phrased it, was averted."
Here the liberal intellectual writing this seems to align with neoconservatives on foreign policy.
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"Chechnya, for instance, endured multiple horrific wars after declaring independence in the early ’90s. Yet when Chechen leadership turned to the West for aid, U.S. officials looked the other way. Many across the West remained blinded by the “saltwater fallacy,” which posits that colonies can be held only in distant, overseas territories. Instead of viewing places such as Chechnya as nations colonized by a dictatorship in Moscow, Western officials simply saw them as extensions of Russia proper. So rather than recognize the Chechens’ struggle as part of the global push toward decolonization, American President Bill Clinton compared them to the Confederacy and backed Yeltsin despite his brutality. Clinton’s position not only effectively sanctioned the horrors unleashed on innocent Chechens, but it showed Putin, then a rising bureaucrat, that Russian force would go unchallenged by the West. As former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar said, Western pressure could have prevented the violence in Chechnya. Analysts agree. Yet Washington twiddled its thumbs, and Grozny was flattened.
Chechnya’s story is one of many. Nation after nation—Karelia, Komi, Sakha, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Kalmykia, Udmurtia, and many more—claimed sovereignty as the Soviet empire crumbled around them. Even regions that had been colonized by the Kremlin for centuries pushed for independence. In a 1992 referendum in Tatarstan, nearly two-thirds of the population voted in favor of sovereignty, even though Soviet authorities had drawn the republic’s borders to exclude some 75 percent of the Tatar population. As election observers wrote, the republic was motivated by “years of pent-up resentment” against Russian colonialism, and saw “huge support” for the referendum in ethnically Tatar regions."
Here he's doing apologia for literal terrorists. I thought the republicans were the guys who liked aiding terrorists! Furthermore, he's going off about how these places which have either had no independent existence of their own ever before or last did before the United States even existed are real countries which deserve recognition. Note how he provides no actual arguments about Russian colonialism, only liberal phrase mongering.
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"Russia is not the only polyglot nation that has failed to address its legacy of colonization. China currently oversees the largest concentration-camp system the world has seen since the Holocaust, dedicated to eliminating Uyghurs as a distinct nation. And much of the U.S. still refuses to view its own history as one of rote imperial conquest, from the Founding Fathers seizing Indigenous lands to the ongoing colonial status of places such as Puerto Rico."
Liberal language again weaponized against an enemy of the United States. It is interesting how he uses the same argument against his own state here, which I think is more of an attack on the remaining institutions of the American Republic than a real criticism of any historical crimes. A lot of these people obsessed with indigenous sovereignty that use similar language (such as the LandBack foundation funded by Jeff Bezos) are basically in favor of privatizing all land and dissolving whatever remains of American republican institutions because Native Americans were massacred by the expanding American state more than a hundred and fifty years ago.
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"Decolonizing Russia wouldn’t necessarily require fully dismantling it, as Cheney proposed. The push toward decolonization could instead focus on making the kind of democratic federalism promised in Russia’s constitution more than a hollow promise. This would mean ensuring that all Russian citizens, regardless of region, would finally be given a voice in choosing their leaders. Even simply acknowledging Russia’s colonial past—and present—would make some difference. “As much as decolonizing Russia is important for the territories it formerly occupied, reprocessing its history is also key for the survival of Russia within its current boundaries,” the scholars Botakoz Kassymbekova and Erica Marat recently wrote."
Here is the disclaimer that "actually i am not calling for total war against Russia". He knows what he is saying, and includes this to try and discourage claims against him I think. In practice what "decolonization" he wants either amounts to the total destruction of Russia or the control of it by western funded NGOs who will try to use minorities as a weapon against an independent Russia.
The crusader mentality is everywhere. Change some of the language and I think this could be written by a neocon. It comes from public intellectuals, from the US government, and even from users on this website. I think that this mentality and the institutions that propagate it are bound to be defeated because they're fundamentally alien to the people they claim to want to enslave in the name of liberation. Stirring up ethnic problems will not work in states like Russia or China because both of them have had their core territories for hundreds of years and even the Siberian peoples will serve in Russia's Army and call themselves Russians even if they aren't ethnic Russians, just like the Uygurs see themselves as Chinese even if they aren't Han Chinese.
Your thoughts, NSG?
