Kaliningrad

The Russians have poured over 10,000 troops, an air and missile defense system, and various warships into Kaliningrad as well perhaps as short-range nuclear-capable missiles. It’s all part of an overall Russian military buildup in recent years that, combined with NATO downsizing, gives Russia conventional military superiority in the Baltic. Whether Russia’s aim is strictly defensive, an aggressive move against the three former Soviet Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), an attempt to humiliate and weaken NATO or some combination of the above is for the West a matter of debate—and of worry. How not, after Russian moves in Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria? Military historians, however, might focus on the ironies.

Moscow and the Nazi International

Alexander Dugin, the Russian geopolitical theorist and advisor to President Putin, has said that the twentieth century was “the century of ideology.” It was, as Nietzsche predicted, a century in which ideas (and ideologies) warred against one another. The three warring factions were, in order of their appearance: liberalism (of the Left and Right), communism (as well as social democracy), and fascism (including Hitler’s National Socialism). These three ideologies fought each other “to the death, creating, in essence, the entire dramatic and bloody political history of the twentieth century.” According to Dugin, liberalism came out the winner by the end of the last century. Yet victories of this kind are rarely permanent. In fact, Dugin tells us that liberalism has already disintegrated into “postmodernity.” With its focus on the individual, Dugin argues that liberalism has led to globalization, and globalization means that man is “freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity….” This happened because a mass of human beings, “comprised entirely of individuals, is naturally drawn toward universality and seeks to become global and unified.” Even now this impetus toward globalization coincides with the glorification of total freedom “and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, morality, identity … discipline, and so on.” The result, says Dugin, is Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History.” But let us not be fooled, Dugin explains. History doesn’t really end. What has really happened, in fact, is the realization that liberalism’s triumph has been a disaster for humanity. It is a disaster for the individual because the individual has lost his moorings. It is a disaster for freedom, because we are now under the “tyranny of the majority.” It is a disaster for our economy, because spoliation is the emerging market principle. And those who wish to preserve their racial, national, or religious identities are set down as enemies by a political correctness as deluded as it is bloodless.