Alastair Crooke Interprets Putin

Yesterday, toward the end of their conversation, Judge Napolitano asked Alastair Crooke (the former UK diplomat and MI6 officer) for an assessment of the Tucker - Putin interview. Crooke, of course, is far more of a Middle East specialist, although his interests these days have broadened due to the global nature of the conflict the West has initiated. To lead into Crooke’s quite brief, but incisive, comments I’ll present an exchange from the Tucker - Putin interview that sets up Crooke’s own analysis:

Tucker Carlson: Do you think it is too humiliating at this point for NATO to accept Russian control of what was two years ago Ukrainian territory?

Vladimir Putin: I said let them think how to do it with dignity. There are options if there is a will.

Up until now there has been the uproar and screaming about inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield. Now they are apparently coming to realize that it is difficult to achieve, if possible at all. In my opinion, it is impossible by definition, it is never going to happen. It seems to me that now those who are in power in the West have come to realize this as well. If so, if the realization has set in, they have to think what to do next. We are ready for this dialogue.

Now, here is Crooke. Whether he had the above passage specifically in mind, I think you’ll see how Crooke’s views relate to it. However, Crooke does start off by addressing the first 20 minutes that I’ve gone on about:

It was a tour de force of an erudite and a very smart man, explaining the situation. What people missed probably was why he gave the sort of 20 minutes of history, which obviously irritated in the west. We're not used to history and we're not used to attention spans of that length, but what he was trying to say, I think, was really two things.

• One was that the question of Ukraine and Russia has been brewing for a long long time. It is, if you like, a civil war that has been underway. So don't think that it's simple and that it's just black and white.

• The second thing was the most important point. What he was trying to say--particularly to the American neoconservative establishment--is, Listen, we have been Russia, the state of Russia since 933. We've been attacked by Hungary, by Lithuania, by Poland, etc., etc., and at the end of it there has always been the Russian state. It has stayed together and so if you think that a little punch at Russia and we'll all split into factions and we'll all disintegrate—look at history.

I think that’s a fair assessment, but I want to take it apart a bit.

Putin is unquestionably a smart man, and his lengthy time in office has provided him with a wealth of experience in geopolitics. It would be foolishness to imagine that he doesn’t understand what’s driving the West in its war on Russia.

Is Putin “erudite”? He may or may not be but, as I’ve written at length, his historical narrative, his presentation in the inteview, provides no basis for such a view. What he presents is pretty standard Russian nationalist special pleading to justify Russian hegemony over a wide variety of nations—including, especially, Ukraine and Belarus. His narrative, as I’ve suggested, is definitely slanted—but that doesn’t mean that the core of Russia’s case against the West (and the West’s Ukrainian proxy) is invalidated. Russia does, in fact, face an existential threat, and the Kiev regime has allowed Ukraine to become a key part of that threat.

However, it is advisable to separate historical narratives that serve a political purpose from the specific rights and wrongs of this conflict. Crooke fails to do so by accepting that Putin is “erudite”—basically suggesting that Putin’s narrative is to be taken at face value. One quick example for today will suffice.

Crooke presents Putin as telling the West: Listen, we have been Russia, the state of Russia since 933. I think that’s a fair summation, but it isn’t actually true. Russia, as we know it, is the state that is centered in and grew out of the principality and then the Grand Duchy of Moscow, and became the Russian Empire. To achieve that unchallengeable and predominant status Moscow had to overcome all rivals—both cultural and political. That process started in the basin of the Moskva and Volga rivers. The destruction of Kiev by the Golden Horde (mid 13th century) assisted that process, but it wasn’t until 1478 that Moscow annexed the Republic of Novgorod. Putin, in the interview, glosses over the timeline—933 to 1478—and instead seeks to associate “Russia”, meaning, the state centered in Moscow, with Novgorod’s prestige as the origin of the organized Russian state. This map will give you some idea of that process:

Territorial expansion of the Principality of Moscow, 1300–1547

  Core territory of Muscovy, 1300

  Territory of Vladimir-Suzdal, acquired by Muscovy by 1390

  Territory acquired by 1505 (Ivan III)

  Territory acquired by 1533 (Vasili III)

Please note that by 1533 Moscow had not yet begun to impinge on the Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth (as it became).

Again, I’m not suggesting that this history somehow invalidates or delegitimizes the Russian state centered in Moscow. I’m simply pointing out that when Putin goes on to maintain that all the Slavs who are now under Moscow’s hegemony are Russian he is greatly oversimplifying matters. History is not static, as Putin suggests. During all those centuries from 933 to 1547, when Russia began its aggressive expansion to the West, the East Slavs in what we now know as Belarus and Ukraine were developing culturally. To say that they were all simply “Russians” is an oversimplification, and we shouldn’t regard it as dispositive in any way as far as the current state of affairs is concerned. As I said above, I believe Russia’s actions in its Special Military Operation are amply justified by the existential threat that it faces from the American Empire and its proxies/vassals.

Now, let’s look at another statement that Crooke attributes to Putin and which Crooke uncritically accepts. I suspect that Putin knows better, but that Crooke is correct that Putin is communicating an image—of Russia’s impregnability—that Putin knows is not indisputable:

We've been attacked by Hungary, by Lithuania, by Poland, etc., etc., and at the end of it there has always been the Russian state.

While it’s true that Putin presents Poland as pretty much the villain of the anti-Russia crusade, in reality Hungary and Lithuania and Poland are a pretty puny collection of enemies, with a fairly dubious connection to the present conflict. Poland’s importance currently is not as a military threat to Russia—that would be a bad joke—but as a conduit for American and NATO weaponry. Russia has faced far more formidable foes, in more recent times, with a more direct relation to the present—and they all go unmentioned: French (Napoleon), French, British, and Turkish (Crimean War), Japanese (1905), Austrian and German (WW1), and German—with Rumanians and Hungarians (WW2).

That recitation, overall, doesn’t present a picture of invincibility so much as a picture of muddling through, helped by geography. From my perspective, WW1 has real importance. For starters, Russia was defeated soundly, and geography didn’t really offer much help. But that was just the start. What’s really important is the coup that followed Russia’s defeat. The Bolshevik coup came about as the unholy alliance of Big Money and Deep States, without much regard for nominal alliances. The goal was Russia’s treasure house of resources. The prime movers were heavily, but by no means exclusively Jewish—this was the world against Russia. The Bolshevik insiders were, likewise, heavily but not exclusively Jewish. The prime mover, with connections to Western capital, was Lev Bronstein—a Ukrainian Jew better known as Leon Trotsky. There were Poles (Feliks Dzerzhinsky) and the odd psychopathic Georgian and criminals of all nationalities included. You can read about it here, but here’s the conclusion:

Wall Street & the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

The Revolutionary Nature of Capital

Should the fact that international capital viewed the March and even the November Revolutions with optimism be seen as an anomaly of history? Oswald Spengler was one of the first historians to expose the connections between capital and revolution. In The Decline of the West he called socialism “capitalistic” because it does not aim to replace money-based values, “but to possess them.” H. G. Wells, it will be recalled, said something similar. Spengler stated of socialism that it is “nothing but a trusty henchman of Big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it.” He elaborated in a footnote, seeing the connections going back to antiquity:

Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i.e. poor) parties necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is as true today as it was for the Gracchuan age, and in all countries . . .[54]

It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchu’s popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to themselves had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed.[55]

From the Gracchuan Age to the Cromwellian and the French Revolutions, to Soros’ “color revolutions” of today, the Russian Revolutions were neither the first nor the last of political upheavals to serve the interests of Money Power in the name of “the people.”

Things didn’t work out too well for Big Money at the time, but they’ve been trying ever since. The end of the Cold War, strangely, brought another Western backed coup in Russia and the establishment of Ukraine as a separate nation. It also unleashed the looting of both countries by “oligarchs”. Once again, heavily but not exclusively, Jews were involved. Ironically—or not—the money man behind the Ukro-Nazi movement is Ihor Kolomoyskyi, a Ukrainian-born Israeli–Cypriot billionaire businessman, once considered the leading oligarch in Ukraine. Then came Putin to spoil things for the oligarchs who were looting Russia’s resources.

Which, strangely, led to machinations by assorted globalists and Neocons—with many—Nuland, Blinken, and others—once again, having a Ukrainian Jewish background. Wait a minute. Did I forget the Poles with Ukrainian backgrounds? Zbigniew Brzezinski, Neocon godfather? Oh, there are more of them, too. It’s almost as if people with an ancestral axe to grind against Russian are leveraging the US government for that purpose. That’s what Michael Hudson says, and he would know. Doug Macgregor says that, too. Between globalists, Neocons, and the Israel Lobby’s ownership of US foreign policy Putin and Russians generally must have an acute case of Déjà vu—all over again. And the Big Money people are all lining up to “rebuild” Ukraine. That’s a code word for “loot”. No wonder our ruling class is desperate to keep Ukraine somehow going until they can talk Putin into a deal. All that “foreign aid” money the Senate is trying to shovel to Ukraine? It’s seed money to save something to be looted. Some things never change.

By now you’re probably wondering: What does all that have to do with 933 AD, Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus’, and all that jazz? Nothing—nothing at all! But I’ll bet that Putin—and Alastair Crooke and Judge Nap and John Mearsheimer, for that matter—know that, too. It’s like the elephant in the room that even Putin and Tucker don’t mention.