My Corner by Boyd Cathey

May 9, 2022

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The HARD TRUTH Podcast: the Global Managerial Deep State, the End of the American Century, and the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict

Friends,

Back on Wednesday, May 4, I was privileged to join widely-syndicated columnist Ilana Mercer and David Vance, a UK Unionist political leader, author and well-known broadcaster, for a wide-ranging interview on the regular podcast HARD TRUTH (the episode was aired on May 5, and then syndicated to various publications and online journals, including WorldNetDaily, the New American, and The Unz Review, as well as Mercer’s own Web site, IlanaMercer.com).

Although the interview was titled, “Bleeding Russia Dry and Then Next Color Revolution,” the hour-long conversation ranged over a variety of interrelated topics, including the rise of powerful American (and global) managerial elites, the post-World War II American-supported suppression of traditional European political and cultural traditions, the corruption of American education in both colleges and schools, and the increasing canceling by dominant “woke” forces in our society of any real legitimate opposition and of genuine liberty and free speech.

The Russian incursion into Ukraine, beginning on February 24, and NATO’s response, were the central topics in the interview. And the subsequent discussion considered that action from several different viewpoints. More specifically strategically and prudentially, indeed, whether the grinding and bloody conflict in that part of eastern Europe was not, ironically, something anticipated, even desired, as a means of—to restate the podcast title—“Bleeding Russia Dry.” Or, in the words of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in his recent trip of Kiev to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky (Monday, April 25), as quoted by The Washington Examiner: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. So it has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

And, thus by such drawn out action the formal United States policy is to facilitate the long-desired Neoconservative and globalist design of regime change in Moscow, another “color revolution,” just as American-inspired and supported revolutions have overthrown governments in Ukraine (back in February 2014), in the Republic of Georgia, and elsewhere; in each case to establish a government subservient or at least dependent on American policies.

During the interview references were made to pathbreaking works by Chronicles magazine editor, Dr. Paul Gottfried (e.g., The Strange Death of Marxism, on the rise of an authoritarian post-Marxist Left in Europe), to the late author and philosopher Dr. Samuel Francis (e.g., Leviathan and Its Enemies, dissecting the growth of and control by the managerial state), and on the present Ukrainian conflict, to works by Drs. John Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen (e.g., War With Russia?) and Richard Sakwa (e.g., Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands), plus the detailed interviews by Oliver Stone of President Vladimir Putin (here and here). For a fuller understanding of the conflict, its background and context, these sources are essential.

Some readers may have already seen the podcast, which can be accessed directly via Rumble.com. But I provide as follows the information and podcast directly from my friend and columnist, Ilana Mercer, with her introduction. Additionally, I second her request that you subscribe not only to the HARD TRUTH podcast on Rumble.com, but also to Ilana’s always-interesting regular columns:

BLEEDING RUSSIA DRY AND THEN NEXT COLOR REVOLUTION

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2022/05/bleeding-russia-dry-next-color-revolution/

Ilana Mercer, May 5, 2022

In “The Illusion of Liberal Democracy—America’s Long Record of Destruction Continues,” Dr. Boyd Cathey deploys the term the “long march,” generally associated with the Communist Chinese Revolution of Chairman Mao, to describe decades in which successive American administrations have romped through other countries’ institutions in an unabashed quest to impose universal “freedom and equality” à la America.

The use of force in furtherance of American “liberal democracy” was enthusiastically touted by famed neoconservative writer Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. Indubitably, such a contradiction in terms has become the guiding principle of the American foreign-policy establishment. The resulting recreational wars of choice prosecuted over some 70 years, and the regime-change exercises pursued, have caused great, if not permanent, damage to American institutions themselves.

Citing [Chronicles Magazine editor] Dr. Paul Gottfried, foremost scholar of the European and American Right, Dr. Cathey traces today’s illiberal Germany, where expression, public and private, is heavily circumscribed in law (in the name of “protecting our [German] democracy”), to the Marshall Plan and to the “denazification” humiliation of 1945, courtesy of the American-dominated Allied forces, during which any expression of German tradition and heritage came to be conflated with fascism.

Cathey laments the party duopoly’s enthusiasm for injecting American boys into conflicts, far and wide, most recently in Ukraine, although sympathy for members of a military that has become a fully coopted global force for misadventures is questionable. It could be argued that it is in the nature of the Anglo-American man to want to be a hero, a rescuer. It can be posited, moreover, that, in his own country, this American, military-minded protector would be maligned and molested were he to patrol his neighborhoods or his nation’s borders. So, off he goes to slay dragons abroad and leap to his death in a lemming’s lunacy. Even so, this generic American grunt does so knowingly. Listening to ex-military officiating as commentators on Fox News—one hears the self-righteous zealotry of the fully converted Global Citizen.

Vladimir Putin, argues Dr. Cathey, has rejected the West’s culturally, racially and sexually decadent ways. For this reason, the Russian president has been targeted by the United States for an excruciatingly slow demise. Led by the US, Russia is destined to be bled dry by the West, the eventual outcome being “regime change” in Moscow (another “color revolution”).

A trickier question for those of us on the Old Right is this: Putin is a Russian patriot. This in-depth interview with the Russian president amply evinces that. He adores and is deeply acquainted with the nation’s “ancient faith,” its history and traditions. But could it be that we of the Old Russell Kirk Right, nostalgic for the very same things absent in our own societies, are romanticizing the Russian people? This writer shares Dr. Cathey’s love of Tsarist Russia’s great culture before communism. (Boyd adores Rachmaninov’s second symphony; I say Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique.” His Symphony No. 6 is a singularly intense and sublime expression of the agonies of the individual, caught between salvation, sin and love of Mother Russia.) But is this same sensibility present in younger Russians? No doubt, Putin is steeped in Russian culture. But do younger Russians share his traditionalism? True, very many hate communism, but that hatred is devoid of a civilizational dimension. I fear younger Russians are already in the market for a Western life filled with sexual titillation and consumerism.

Finally, although it is possible to justify Putin’s war with reference to the more statist scholastic Just War Theory—the libertarian axiom of non-aggression won’t permit such justification. Putin’s war in Ukraine is a war for which there are plenty reasons, all of them vindicating Russia; Russia is in the right. Reasons for war, however, are not the same as justification for war. A war of aggression is seldom justified.

ON THE HARD TRUTH PODCAST this week, David Vance and yours truly are joined by fearless and learned dissident scholar Dr. Boyd D. Cathey, for a wide-ranging discussion on the decline of America and the aforementioned US plan to bleed Russia dry. While Americans, from their Ukrainian-manned vantage points, seem willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has vowed that Russia “would never accept the global village under the command of the American sheriff.”

Let’s see.

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