A Piece of a Gallic Wit, or How to Conjure One's Inner Idiot

French President Mitterrand known for his quick wit was once asked to provide a TV speech to the youth cautioning them from using drugs. His impromptu conversation was: "Drugs, (commercial) sex and gambling will all lead you to ruin. The most pleasant way is sex. The shortest is gambling. But the surest is drugs." This author does not know whether this speech was ever televised.

The twentieth century created four ideologies advocating unlimited violence in furtherance of Utopian objectives. The first half brought Communism and Nazism. The second half brought Islamic Fundamentalism and Neo-Conservatism. All ideologies, Utopian especially, intend to make an easily manipulable idiot from a sane person. So, the quickest route to idiocy is Nazism. It does not require one to pray five times a day to Mecca or to read even a page from Karl Marx. It is sufficient to declare oneself a representative of the "master race", raise a hand and proclaim: "Heil", indicating your unquestionable allegiance to the Fuhrer. An exact nature of the Fuhrer, be it Adolf Hitler, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter is not particularly important. The only important thing is repeating his/her pronouncements verbatim and, even that, to the degree of one's linguistic competence, and behaving as a master race specimen. Everything else is optional.

The most compartmentalized and easily shed is Communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union there was not a single public revolt in favor of the old system even without a complicated campaign of de-Nazification following the defeat of the Nazi Germany. Old elites capitulated or seamlessly integrated into the new order of things. Neither Visconti's filmmaking, nor Sartre's writing suffered from them being members of the Communist Party, nor Fellini or Camus improved their already formidable artistic skills by severing ties with it.

The most difficult to quit is Islamic Fundamentalism because it has supernatural component and the apostates are punished harshly. But the surest way to idiocy by far is provided by neoconservatism.  Communism and Nazism which were created by the best minds of their civilizations--in Germany, best and brightest of the scientists and engineers were mobilized to work for Reich's armament projects, and the best and brightest in "soft sciences" and jurisprudence, linguist Friedrich and Karl  Schmidt, occasionally also one of the founding fathers of neo-conservatism--were mobilized in service of Reich's ideology and propaganda. On the contrary neo-conservatism was mostly a creation of college mediocrities intended for the consumption by the frat boys and media whores.

Otherwise sane and smart converts to neo-conservatism suddenly become mindless repeaters of its stupidities. Ariel Cohen, who wrote that Georgian troops had no difficulty of dispatching Russians without explanation why after two days of such "victories" in 2008, Georgian army disintegrated and the Russian army went to outskirts of their capital, Tbilisi. Azar Gat with his piece in "Foreign Affairs." What to speak of less prepared minds: Admiral Stavridis, with his concept of the Arctic Ocean as an American lake, Graham Allison, Farid Zakaria, etc. etc. The latest victim of the neo-con religion is Ian Bremmer.

Whole 70% of his recent "Time" piece (March 22) "Why Russia keeps sinking"--it was sinking in the English-language media since, at least, the Battle of Poltava (1709), is based on a beloved Fox meme of chaining probable and improbable hypotheses and then discussing the result as a proven fact--"ethnic" Russians (where--in the US, Israel, Russia, Ukraine?) influenced elections in the US, the influence was material, it was directed by the Russian Government and, finally, by Putin personally. I remind an unbelieving reader that the Mueller investigation started from ostensible, and quite legitimate, leaks from the DNC, which nobody now pretends to remember, and so far the only charge has been that Paul Manafort took money from an Ukrainian oligarch for an unspecified purpose and did not report this properly. There is nothing more to discuss.

The rest 30% are much more interesting--not from the standpoint of political diagnostics--but from standpoint of the diagnosis of neocon derangement of a previously sane political scientist. First, he reassures the "Time" readers that Russia is iffy country with an economy less than Canada's and military spending much less than Trump's changes in Obama's Pentagon budget. As Molotov retorted to Ribbentrop telling him that "England was in her last throes": Why then we are conducting these negotiations in the Berlin bomb shelter? Why indeed then speak about Russia that much?

Second, Russia has only the piffling allies like North Korea (never was since 1950s but neocons were never bothered with facts, historical or otherwise) and Cuba, while America has a mighty NATO. For any military-inclined person, twenty nine armies with their own logistics sometimes recruited from the hostile tribes--who would believe Turks fighting alongside Greeks, and the powerful Montenegrins with equally powerful Albanians--constitute a liability rather than an asset. Who would believe any sane Italian or Spanish Government would send their soldiers (again) to the Volga River or the outskirts of St. Petersburg? And, of course, Bremmer forgets or disparages China and India (1st and 3rd world PPP economies and like 40% of the world population), whose pretty good relations with Russia are being based on a well-reasoned national interest and not on the NSA blackmail and German bribing of their elites, like the most of the NATO countries.

Bremmer also sees inevitable Russian decline in that it lost the approval of Ukrainian youth. Well, in Russia nobody thinks about it more than an average American stiff thinks about Mexican domestic politics. Only the neocons in DC become childishly happy when their puppets somewhere in Estonia or Holland bestow their approval on another gross neocon stupidity such as invasion of Iraq or "regime change" in Libya--and then are reported by the CNN as a proof of wide support of "European" or even "World" public opinion. In Russia, before the current government with its invitation for the US and NATO to take over its Crimean bases and then build some more, which Bremmer conveniently omits from his opus--nobody thought about Ukraine in terms other than "if you are that independent, stop stealing our gas and start paying for it." And so he goes on and on.

Note, that nowhere I assume that Russia cannot collapse, or slide to insignificance, as all great powers eventually do in history. But this is only a remote possibility--do the policy makers in Washington really think that the Russians given their history can be commanded by a Nemtsov/Navalny/Poroshenko type of Quisling? This is especially improbable in the view that they have not been offered anything in return, except for the promise of pillaging their natural resources--but neocon thinking was specifically designed to prevent that kind of questions.