Opening Moscow's Bag of Political and Strategic Tricks
Commentary for 9 September 2014

Political correctness was invented by Marxists to destroy Western society from inside…. And in Russia, there is no political correctness at all! The reason is that Marxists do not need to undermine the Russian society from the inside, because it is already Marxist. 
                 – Konstantin Preobrazhensky, “How the West Was Fooled by Vladimir Putin”

In order to understand what is happening in Ukraine it's useful to consider Moscow's bag of political and strategic tricks. It is our failure to understand these tricks that causes us to misread Russian moves and intentions. As an aside, we might ask if our current approach of threatening economic sanctions is entirely realistic given Russia's agents and friends in our midst? There is something odd, after all, in an economic system as vulnerable as ours going after a state (Russia) with a long history of semi-autarky.

The sanctions against Russia are undoubtedly necessary, but is big business willing to give up on the Russian market? Would any politician act against the interests of big business in this regard? Again, we must not underestimate the influence Russia has within our own economy. Furthermore, even if sanctions are politically feasible against Russia, the West has made itself vulnerable to Russian counter-measures; for Russia is the capital of international organized crime and, as such, it is an international clearing house for the blackmail of politicians, the corruption of banks through money-laundering, the infiltration of the CIA and FBI, and is the center of a conspiracy to weaken U.S. dollar. One might ask, given the tools available to the Russian strategists, how can they fail? 

Then there is Russia’s military potential. With regard to major opponents, the West seriously underestimated its enemies twice during the last century: first in 1939 when the Allies believed they had boxed in Nazi Germany with their “guarantee” to Poland; and again, with sanctions on Japan in 1941. In the first instance Germany smashed Poland and crushed France. In the second instance, Japan destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, defeated the U.S. forces in the Philippines and captured the British forces in Singapore.  

Some may argue that Russians are not as capable as Germans and Japanese. After all, Russia is a backward country; the Russian economy stinks; Russian equipment is obsolete and their people are demoralized. Even more egregious, Russian commanders are political stooges. But wait! Russia put the first man into space. Russia launched the first satellite. Russia built the first operational version of the hydrogen bomb. Let's not make the mistake of underestimating Russia.

Adolf Hitler underestimated Russia. Oh yes, in 1942, out of the mouth of Hitler himself, in a recorded conversation with Baron Mannerheim, we find the following words:

Mannerheim: What they had in their stocks!

Hitler: Absolutely ... well ... if somebody had told me that a nation [the USSR] could start with 35,000 tanks, then I'd have said: 'You are crazy!'

Mannerheim: [surprised] Thirty-five?

Hitler: Thirty-five thousand tanks.

Another voice in background: Thirty-five thousand!

Hitler: We have destroyed - right now - more than 34,000 tanks. If someone had told me this, I'd have said ... ' You are crazy; you see ghosts.' This I would have deemed [not] possible. I told you earlier we found factories, one of them at Kramatorskaja, for example. Two years ago there were just a couple hundred [tanks]. We didn't know anything. Today there is a tank plant, where - during the first shift a little more than 30,000, and 'round the clock a little more than 60,000 workers would have labored - a single tank plant! A gigantic factory! Masses of workers who certainly, lived like animals and...

Russia had 35,000 tanks in 1941? This unimaginable number was several times greater than all tanks possessed by the combatants of World War II up to that time. And what is more interesting, before the Germans made their unpleasant discovery nobody had any inkling that such a number of tanks was possible let alone real. It was only by the successful surprise attack of 22 June 1941 that these tanks were destroyed and captured. Had these tanks been used to deliver a first strike against Hitler, the whole of Europe would have become Soviet territory. 

If any expert today says he knows the real military strength of Russia, or claims to understand Russia's military capabilities, he is likely to be wrong. And let us not dwell on tank numbers. Tank armies are no longer decisive. Missiles are decisive. Terrorists are decisive; that is to say, “terrorist armies” converging on the oil fields of the Middle East. Mind control drugs are decisive. A new biological weapon may be decisive.

Consider, then, the strategic weakness which exists on the American side. The strategic position of the United States has long been compromised by the idiocy of America’s ideological hobby-horses – global warming, feminism, homosexual rights, multiculturalism and internationalism. The way policy is run in the United States, political correctness comes first and national security comes second. This goes for the economy as well, where Political correctness has bankrupted us. And it is this same politically correct country, with its increasingly fragile economy, which is now called upon to confront Russia after a period of military dismantling and downsizing.

In recent days there has been a flood of information pouring out of Ukraine about Russia’s plans, the intricacies of the crisis itself, and what the military clashes between Russian/separatist and Ukrainian patriotic forces have wrought. On Monday there were reports of Russian preparations to invade and capture the important port city of Odessa.

Are the Russians bluffing? We are in the fog of war, so to speak, with glimpses here and there. To understand the larger picture we need to acknowledge three points about Russian policy: (1) Russia's ruling group acts as a conspiracy against everyone, including against Russia itself; (2) Moscow's ongoing references to the evil machinations of the West (i.e., the U.K. and United States in particular) represent a kind of mirror imaging common to totalitarian regimes; (3) the enormity of military aggression against neighboring peoples – first Chechnya , then Georgia, then Ukraine’s eastern and southern provinces is very real. This latter aggression is only understandable when we realize that Ukraine's independence is a fiction to Moscow. “Ukraine is not a real country,” Putin has said. And he is perfectly serious. One day France will not be a country as well, and Germany.

I believe the course of events is dictated by a Leninist and Stalinist political culture which has grown out of the precedents of czarism and Bolshevism, involving a bag of tricks in which six elements are used to achieve political and economic results: (1) provocation; (2) divide and conquer; (3) infiltration of the enemy camp; (4) disinformation; (5) controlled opposition; (6) and strategic deception. Various special formations and ideological sub-weapons have been developed by Moscow to amplify the working power of these six elements, including organized crime, drug trafficking, international terrorism, national liberation movements, revolutionary Islam, free trade, global warming, feminism, the homosexual movement, gun control and multiculturalism.

The government in Moscow has inherited these elements and tools from Soviet times and earlier. The West, on its side, does not comprehend the sophistication of these tools and hardly grasps what they can achieve. To cite the testimony of former Soviet intelligence officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky, the KGB maintained a department whose sole work was the manage heads of state who were Soviet agents.

We do not understand this regime and we have not understood it. A false and distorted history of Soviet Russia has been produced to distract us from vital operational facts. For example, the 35,000 tanks cited by Hitler. World War II was the most misunderstood war of all history because it was the first major war to be waged alongside the Soviet Union's massive deception apparatus. The lies told about this war from the Soviet side, combined with the regular falsifications of the Germans and Allies, leaves us with a collage of myth, and no real notion of why this disaster occured or who initially hoped to benefit. The falsifications run so deep, and have been so successful, one cannot help feeling that we have yet to escape the consequences of these falsifications today.

The Second World War is still important for Moscow. This war lends the regime a kind of legitimacy. The war extended Communist control to central Europe. It broke the back of the British Empire, opening the way to the political correctness. The war also turned the United States into a global policeman when the U.S. elite was not culturally endowed with the necessary competence to perform this new role.

As Diana West has pointed out in her book, our military alliance with the Soviet Union opened the United States to further penetrations and manipulations by Moscow's agents. Nuclear weapons and other technologies were stolen by Moscow. China was set up for a Communist takeover, as well as North Korea. Japan and Germany, the natural military barriers to Soviet exapansion, were militarily destroyed and required protection from U.S. forces. The breakup of the colonial empires, as touched on above, opened a wide field to Soviet mischief.

With all these points to consider we should ask ourselves to what extent the Soviet Union was a prime instigator of the Second World War. A major clue may be found, as noted above, in Hitler's conversation with Mannerheim. A key piece of evidence, which can be confirmed in other sources, is the astonishing number of 35,000 tanks! This number signifies a war preparation that dwarfs all other war preparations. Such a preparation is not simply a phenomenon of the 1930s. It continued to be a crucial feature of the Soviet state until its official demise in 1991. And we must not imagine, even now, that this preparation remains in abeyance.

As Russian military pressure on Ukraine intensifies, as ISIL advances and strengthens, as hackers threaten U.S. banks like J.P. Morgan, we can see a pattern and a larger design. When we learn that a leading commander in ISIL was born in the Soviet Union and trained in Russia, we ought to wonder what is really going on? When we read that cyber-attacks on U.S. banks are thought to originate in Russia, we should stop believing in coincidences.  

There is a bag of tricks, and there are tricksters at work.