Don’t get me wrong: Islam is deadly enough. Moreover, in its consistent enmity to the West, it has seniority over anyone else. More than 1,400 years’ worth of seniority, to be exact.
At present, however, the West is so superior in military muscle that Islam has to rely on guerrilla tactics, such as terrorism and demographic attrition.
These are potentially dangerous, especially since the West refuses to acknowledge both the gravity and existence of the threat. Our newly developed ethos of obtuse egalitarianism doesn’t allow our powers that be to treat a whole civilisation as an enemy.
Even Christendom still receives occasional lip service, although our modern ideological warriors are indisputably committed to destroying it.
Islam, however, has one advantage over Christendom: it fits into the modern cult of Third World victimhood underpinned by exotica. Hence we refuse to acknowledge we’re at war with Islam, only licensing alienated, deranged loners as our accredited enemies.
That’s why we’re on course to lose that war over a long term, but ‘long term’ are the operative words. Yet the threat of Putin’s Russia, just as unacknowledged, is even deadlier and much more immediate.
Interestingly, the same people on the political right who are alert to the Islamic threat tend to ignore the Russian one. Moreover, they long for a strong leader just like Putin, whom they see as a friend.
Well, he certainly doesn’t behave in a friendly fashion. Witness the fact that under his strong leadership Russia unfailingly supports enemies of the West and tries to undermine the West from within.
Recently I wrote about Russia’s contribution to both N. Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programmes. Such N. Korean ‘miracles’ as developing ICBMs and the high-yield hydrogen bomb in record time would have been impossible without a massive transfer of Russian technologies and core modules.
Yet equally worrying is Russia’s support for our other deadly enemy, Islam, specifically the Taliban.
Russian weapons, although so far less cataclysmic than nuclear bombs, constantly flow across the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Still, nuclear bombs so far haven’t killed anyone since 1945, whereas the heavy machine guns and snipers’ rifles supplied by Russia to the Taliban are killing Western soldiers every day.
And such kit isn’t the worst part of it. For the Russians are also financing the Taliban to the tune of $2.5 million a month. The money is laundered white through surreptitious supplies of free oil, which the Taliban then sell and use the proceeds to inflict even heavier casualties on America and her allies.
This is par for the course. Putin is simply acting according to the Sanskrit proverb coined in the fourth century BC: my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
The Russians, both in the Kremlin and at the grass roots, have little affection for the Muslims, or indeed anyone south of Rostov-on-Don. (Except Kadyrov’s Chechen thugs, used to ‘whack’ Putin’s political opponents.) But they recognise geopolitical necessity when they see it.
They recognise something else too, an understanding that escapes so many in the West: the Taliban, Iran and N. Korea are the Russians’ friends specifically because the West is their enemy. And it’s an enemy they engage over a broad front.
Only cowardice prevents our commentators – and, more frighteningly, politicians – from publicising Russia’s belligerent meddling in every Western election, including the recent one in the US.
The facts of meddling are reluctantly accepted. The only argument is about the effect it had on Trump’s election, and about his campaign’s complicity in the electronic sabotage. Germany, France and Austria have similar stories to tell, showing that Putin doesn’t just single out America for his attentions.
And now new facts have come to light, showing that the Russians are using their Petersburg troll factory to foment racial unrest in the US. Over the past two years, a Russian front group BlackLivesMatterUS has funded 40 protest rallies.
More than 100 Americans have been recruited to this cause, mostly using the false-flag stratagem Putin honed to razor sharpness during his time in the KGB. Some of the recruits were receptive to such overtures, having served their time in the seditious Occupy Wall Street movement.
Such tactics aren’t new. Used to undermine the enemy since time immemorial, they are widely regarded as a legitimate wartime ruse.
What is however new is that only one side knows there’s a war on. The other side meekly sits back and listens to the thunder of drums and bugles emanating from Russia.
Putin’s media, which is to say all Russian media, are screaming about the need to revive the Russian and Soviet imperial past. Stalin statues are going up all over Russia, like so many Phoenixes rising from the ashes.
And this is the Kremlin’s official position on another mass murderer, Lenin, enunciated by its official TV spokesman Dmitry Kisilev:
“I believe that his volcanic energy, outstanding intellect and indisputable charisma were inspired by a romantic impulse. He was like an impassioned lover… Within his own moral system, by spilling blood and confiscating property he enforced a higher justice… He built a new morality on the word ‘freedom’ and inspired millions with it… We today can’t, nor should, condemn everything Soviet… Our Lenin. And our USSR. Lenin moved Russia towards realising a megadream…”
Quite. And the essential part of the ‘megadream’ was to conquer the West and the rest of the world. “I don’t care,” the ‘impassioned lover’ once said, “if 90 per cent of our population perish if the remaining 10 per cent live under communism.”
Since that time Russia has occasionally put the realisation of that ‘romantic impulse’ on hold, but she has never abandoned it. Moreover, it has penetrated the nation’s collective consciousness and, under the expert prodding of Putin’s KGB propagandists, is now accepted as an essential part of what makes Russia Russian.
That same impulse is actuating Russia’s current war on the West. You know, the one we pretend doesn’t exist.
Vlad seems to be rather muscular for a man his age? Steroids perhaps? Can make you aggressive and violent not in total control of your faculties? Hmmmmm?