Sputnik Kaputnik

Weep for joy!

The century begins with wars which are the issue of a corrupted revolution. Which revolution? Pfui! More legitimate, in view of the situation created in Europe, is speculation regarding the course of the events after the war. Nihil-by-mouth.

Yet the task of Japan is already done, the mission accomplished; for one, the ghost of Russia’s might is already laid. The truth is, the Russia of our childhood, our fathers, our advancing middle-age, can do nothing. As a military power it has never achieved by itself a single great thing. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war is the end of what remains of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. The final nail: the war in Manchuria makes an end of absolutism in Russia.

Whoever gets to perish from the shock does so from behind a rampart of dead ordinances, undead manifestoes and fore-announced deaths.

Meanwhile, back at the Oktoberfest hall, the German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more than a third of a century — a great and dreadful legacy left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of Russia’s early might. Those essence-mongers the Germans have been the evil counsellors of Russia on all the questions of her libertarian problems, its saturnalia of troubled freedoms and torrential promiscuity. Now, that sort of folly is beneath notice unless it distracts attention from Europe’s real problem, created by war in the Far East.

The throes of Russian resurrection will be long and painful. Prepare to log a rising ocean of death.

Nihil-by-mouth voices have been sniffed out busily declaiming how the time for reforms in Russia is already past. This is the superficial version of the more august truth that for Mother Russia there has never been such a prodigious or marvellous time in the memory of mankind.

In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its historical struggle with the acidic growth of political liberty. What most satanically corrupts is the evolution of the insidious idea of nationality as concreted at the present time. Plainly, what most threatens general insurrection of mind is the inception of a wider solidarity; the larger-numbered agglomeration of mankind thronging together around the standard of monarchical power, menacing it with criticisms they have no right to utter, for all it is is a many-headed beast, a monster armed by gossip. A subliminal volcano. Blacklist the Eternal Kingdom first. Let them rule a stigmata-dark world if they must.

Our conceptions of legality, patriotism, national duty and aspiration are reared under the shadow of the old European monarchies, which are creations of historical necessity. Russian autocracy succeeds to nothing: it has no historical past and it cannot hope for a historical future.

Néant!

There is a wonder-inspiring sense of infinity conveyed in the word Néant — and in Russia there is no sense.

The revolutions of European states have never been in the nature of absolute protests en masse against the monarchical principle. They are uprisings of people against the tragic degeneration of “divine fiat”; the premature self-immolation of the gods before people are ready to live on their own feet. Revolutions are desperate short cuts in the rational development of national aspirations in response to the breakout growth of such high world-wide ideals.

For the autocracy of Holy Russia the only conceivable self-reform is — suicide.

To Russia it must seem everything.

Wielders of powers purchased by unspeakable barbarous subjection to the Tartar Khans in all their hordes, as well as to their Cossack fellow travellers, the Princes of Russia (who in their heart of hearts have come in time to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe) have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. Not authentically, without tyranny. In whatever form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her end, it will never be through a revolution pregnant with any moral consequences for mankind. Not positive ones, in any case.

Over and above, it will be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of collective wisdom.

There is, indeed, no Europe.

Yet Russia will find two neighbours at her door. And distress signals from the afterlife thereafter.

The era of wars – so eloquently denounced by the old Republicans as a blood guilt peculiar to those with dynastic ambitions – is by no means over yet. But a caution: No war will be waged for an idea. It is not the end of absolutism after all, but an end to its end.

Consequently war becomes one of the necessary conditions of the present-day; its principal condition, in fact. Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men, or reigned with gladder hegemony of their minds. The nations have made an incineration pact.

Look outside: war is with us now, and whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again and again and again and again. Darwinian selection at the point of a bayonet. In the end, the one destiny common to all survivors will be to freely give knee to broken men. Freely because every man shall be your equal in wreckage, so there will be nothing left to lose.

It is absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next will not be a distant war. The Akkadian armies first laid that ghost forever, and the terrorist armies with no sovereign nation have laid that ghost forever again, alpha to omega. So the Russia of the future will not, for the reasons explained, be the Russia of today. Nor will Peace Tribunals garlanded in cherry blossoms and daffodils instituted for the greater glory of war replace it. Sputnik kaputnik.

The myth of Russia’s power is dying very hard — or not dying out hard enough. This deadly combination is taking place, luring the Cossacks of Krasnodar out into the suburbs to assume the rank of Street Captains, into the front ranks of firing squads, into the administrative ranks of Gulags. Such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers still exercises upon the imagination of a people entrained to the worship of force.

Putin – the Father of Skulls – the man with Tsars in his eyes – he who holds the Sun’s birth-certificate in his pocket – clearly behaves as if the goal of all nations is merely to achieve Tsardom. We must pay homage to Russia’s two great neighbours for preparing to stand in the way of this. China and India take a bow. Of the Decommissioned States of America no more need be said.