White House and white coats

How the Russian opposition uncritically accepted the leftist agenda and decolonized itself

The editors may not share the author's opinions.

A ghost is wandering the world. This is the specter of neo-Marxism.

He waves Hamas flags on the Berkeley campus, throws Jews into a river in Amsterdam, and forces American corporations to introduce DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) departments.

And don’t think that he didn’t reach our latitudes. In essence, most of everything that preceded and accompanied the Russian-Ukrainian war is the result of the destructive effect of this neo-Marxist ideology on both the Ukrainian and Russian intellectual elites. We have always strived to steal the most advanced, the most left-wing, the most progressive from the West and use it to build the most progressive GULAG. And this remark concerns both Ukrainian propaganda and the Russian foreign opposition.

What is neo-Marxism in the West? It is a philosophy ideally suited to a wealthy society, a sprawling bureaucracy, and universal suffrage. These three ingredients make a deadly cocktail: a new church of people in white robes who know exactly what is Justice and what is Oppression, what is Good and what is Evil, who is the Victim and who is the Aggressor.

Oppression is when someone creates something. Produces. Creates. You think that he produces spaceships, creates vaccines, and so on. In fact, he takes something away from someone, oppresses and deprives them. He Poisons the World with CO2. He Discriminates against the Oppressed.

And Justice is to explain to all those who are not creators that they are victims. And divide in their favor what has been created. To do this, it is also necessary to convince the producers that they are to blame.

Marxism 1.0 considered the proletariat to be the victims. He claimed that the bourgeoisie was robbing him of his surplus value. It was on this energy of the oppressed proletariat that he wanted to come to power and build the Gulag.

But today there is no proletariat, and the one that exists is not at all inclined to vote for neo-Marxists. Therefore, instead of the proletariat, neo-Marxism relies on a broad coalition of individuals who have been told that they are victims, or better yet, turned into victims.

It could be black people (you were slaves). Migrants (you were colonized). Muslims (Europe has taken the lead, and therefore owes you). Palestinians and, of course, transgender people. Transgender people are a very important part of the socio-political equation, do you know why?

Right. The fact is that at the very bottom of the pyramid of victimization in neo-Marxism is the Young Rich White Male. He is a representative of the most unreliable demographic sample. He is a representative of White Patriarchal Sexism. But not every young teenager from a prosperous family, born with a golden American spoon in his mouth, is pleased to find himself a genetic exploiter. He would also like to be a Victim. He, too, would like the whole world to owe him.

And he can easily do this by changing his gender. Not long ago you were the Patriarchal White Male; You were in 40th place in the university swimming competition, and any student could cancel you if you looked at her the wrong way. But you changed your gender, and now you are the Main Victim. You win every women's swimming competition and you're also a Victim. If your rivals try to complain, you will cancel them yourself.

Neo-Marxism has several important differences from its ideological ancestor. The fact is that neo-Marxists are not winners, but parasites. They are professional Victims.

They understand that if they take and abolish all the capitalists completely, then sand shortages will begin in the Sahara. Therefore, their task is to parasitize capitalism. Create DEI departments. Demand the appointment of commissioners in all government bodies. Start a multi-billion-dollar industry of seminars at which Aggressors, Colonizers and Oppressors will repent before the victims, just like Mao in Yannan, during party purges, party members repented before the collective. Without a piece of paper from this seminar it will be impossible to get a job.

Therefore, neo-Marxism has three important features. One is that he needs not only a Victim, but also an Aggressor. But in a special Aggressor. The aggressor, who was explained that he is the Aggressor. Who understood his sin. Who is ready to pay for his redemption. Just as the process of electrolysis needs a cathode and an anode, so the neo-Marxist process of milking grants and reparations certainly needs not only a Victim who understands that everyone owes her, but also an Exploiter, an Aggressor and a White Patriarchal Male who understands what he owes. Otherwise, the process will not start.

The second feature - and we have already partially mentioned it - is that the process of realizing oneself as a victim is transferred from the material plane to the emotional one. You are a Victim if you feel like one. You are a Victim if you feel like one. If you consider yourself a victim, then finding the basis on which you were discriminated against is the tenth thing. If there was a Victim, there would be discrimination.

The third feature is that neo-Marxism does not create anything. It only redistributes. Even if it creates some additional markets somewhere (for example, the market for medical services for gender reassignment or the market for anti-discrimination seminars), then all these markets are deeply secondary. Neo-Marxists do not create space rockets, new vaccines or computer programs. They only explain to their creators that those Exploiters should share.

They act like the church, which in medieval Europe never took power into its own hands. Others ruled, raped, robbed and fought. And the church condemned all this in every possible way. And she sold indulgences. The Church has always had absolute knowledge of what is Good and what is Evil.

And, of course, the most important part of this emotional socialism is the position that the Victim is Allowed. The victim is always the Sons of Light. Aggressors, Colonizers and Oppressors are always Sons of Darkness. Aggressors and Oppressors are not people. People are only Sons of Light. By definition, everything good and eternal is concentrated in them. And the Sons of Darkness, by definition, must be nullified in order to ensure the victory of Good and Light. This not only frees the Sons of Light from the need to engage in various colonialist and oppressive scientific disciplines such as mathematics, but also gives their every action an alluring aura of moral perfection. The Sons of Light do not rob stores - they demand reparations.

In a world of universal suffrage, it is not difficult to create a coalition of people who feel they have been shortchanged. There are always more people at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid than at the top.

At first glance, neo-Marxism is a disease of a developed society. Fighting Global Warming, Patriarchal Sexism, racist science mathematics, etc. - these are all the entertainments of emotionally unstable young wasps from Berkeley, who chose as their specialty the study of gender equality in Anglo-Saxon literature of the 6th century. n. e. based on the example of the poem "Beowulf" and are vitally interested in the existence of grants on this topic and DEI departments - because they cannot find work anywhere else.

In fact, almost everything that we see now - both in Ukrainian propaganda and in Russian foreign opposition - is simply a translation of the general principles of neo-Marxism into Russian and Ukrainian.

Let's start with the Ukrainian part of this equation. When three party bigwigs, in order to overthrow Gorbachev, divided the USSR into fifteen pieces and each put them in their pockets, Ukraine inherited the sweetest piece. Better soils; better climate; better network of railways and roads; European territory, 52 million population - Ukraine received almost all the fruits of the centuries-old expansion of the Russian Empire to the West, from the southeast, which once belonged to the Crimean Khanate and the Golden Horde, to the western regions, which a century ago were part of first the Austrian Empire and then Poland . The three former voivodships of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - Kiev, Chernigov and Bratslav, which entered into an alliance with Moscow at the Pereyaslav Rada and otherwise would probably have been assimilated long ago and disappeared without a trace in great Poland - received a rich dowry, which they generously, however, paid for, for Russia would never have become an empire without uniting with them. Like England and Scotland, so too Ukraine and Russia built an empire together.

But modern neo-Marxist discourse, as we know, does not like winners. He needs a Victim. Every new state must certainly be a Victim of the terrible colonial past. If people do not consider themselves victims, they must be made so. They began to make Ukraine into a country that was enslaved by Moscow colonialists and imperialists. A certain Ukraine, from Crimea to Lvov, existed from eternity, and if some parts of it spoke Russian, it was because the colonialists imposed their culture on them.

Long before this idea became a state ideology during the war, it penetrated into universities, in imitation of the same Princeton and Berkeley, and

those teachers who had previously scribbled Marxism-Leninism on paper, now, in the days of food poverty, received grants to fight the colonial past.

These grants flowed in a wide river not because somewhere in the depths of the insidious State Department there was an ominous department for the separation of Ukraine from Russia. No, they were simply a side effect of the ideological war that was flaring up in the United States itself. That gigantic grant-sucking apparatus of Democracy, Decolonization and Diversity, the main goal of which was, of course, power in the United States itself.

Absolutely the same applies to the current Russian foreign opposition. At first glance, we may be very surprised at the sight of the opposition, which - in the prevailing conditions on the battlefield - demands the 1991 borders and the payment of reparations, and calls any Russian military man who crossed the border of Ukraine, like Ilya Yashin, a war criminal.

At first glance, it is not clear to whom this opposition is addressing. Such a position will cause amazement among Russian voters. Not a single serious international player demands Putin to withdraw troops. But Yashin’s statements are still not enough for Ukrainian national decolonizers.

But everything will fall into place if we remember the main feature of emotional neo-Marxism. He desperately needs representatives of the class of Oppressors and Colonizers who recognize themselves as such. Let us remember that Robin DiAngelo, the inventor of the term “white fragility” and critical race theory, of which Ukrainian BLM is a model, is white. Emotional neo-Marxism needs Russians Robin DiAngelo.

If you want to be part of the Great Progressive Agenda, then you must stand for all this - for the decolonization of Ukraine. Beyond the borders of 1991. For the return of Crimea. And there is no need that even the White House is not asking for it. Your reference group is not the White House. These are White Coats. These are people who know exactly what is Good and what is Evil.

Just as a White Patriarchal Teenager can change his gender and become transgender, so can a Russian imperialist and colonialist change his political gender.

To do this, he just needs to say a few magic words. About the borders of 1991. About Reparations. About the trial of war criminals. And, first of all, about the Aggressor, who must be punished.

Yes, yes. About the Aggressor who must be punished. For one of the biggest neo-Marxist cognitive traps that we have been caught in is the words “war of aggression.”

I understand that now some readers will simply shudder. She will say: “How?! Does Latynina already justify an aggressive war?”

But first, listen to what I tell you. I will come from afar - but this “from afar” is of fundamental importance.

One of the things that created Europe more than anything else—than the notorious sanctity of property and the independence of the courts—was respect for the military enemy. What is called chivalry.

It was the chivalric ethic, which emerged around the 10th century, that distinguished Europe from most other cultures, including the time of the Merovingians. Initially, this ethics applied only to other armed knights, that is, members of their own class. They could not be killed outside the battlefield, their prisoners were supposed to be seated at their own table, and one knight could release another knight on his word of honor for a ransom. The chivalric ethic did not apply to commoners - Sir Gregor Cleghane screwed them onto his sword.

Then this ethics went lower. A position has emerged that troops do not plunder conquered populations. Napoleon could travel all over Europe in wars, and tens of thousands died on the battlefield, but the captured cities did not suffer, and if they did suffer, it was an emergency. Napoleon defeated the Prussians and danced with them at the ball, and Prince Bolkonsky admired Napoleon.

This unique attitude towards the military enemy, in fact, saved Europe. Europe was constantly at war - and therefore improved technology - and at the same time, defeat in the war did not mean the complete slaughter of the city. Unlike the East, where not a single commander knew that he was engaged in genocide, because he believed that genocide is war.

In Europe, by the 18th century it was well known what was allowed in war and what was not. There were boundaries - this does not mean that they were not violated. But they were. It was well known who waged the war fairly, according to the rules - that is, did not cut the throats of prisoners and did not plunder captured cities - and who was unfair, not according to the rules.

At the same time - and very important - there was no concept of aggressive war, the concept that the aggressor was wrong . The one who wages war in an unknightly manner was wrong. It would never have occurred to Prince Bolkonsky to consider Napoleon wrong for invading Russia. It would never have occurred to him to say: “He is the aggressor, and we are the victims. And as victims, we are allowed everything.”

This is why the Holocaust was such a shock. It was not just a matter of large-scale, systematic extermination of six million civilians. The point was that it happened in Europe. In the East, the whole story was a complete Holocaust. They took the city and slaughtered it. And what? How else?

And in the 21st century, Marxism 2.0 offered us a different paradigm. The “aggressor-victim” paradigm, with an emphasis on “victim” is his favorite, favorite, key word.

The aggressor is always wrong. The victim is always right. The aggressor is the one who invaded. He is a war criminal. What does Yashin say? All Russians who crossed the border of Ukraine are war criminals. That's it, do you understand? And that sadist who cut off the penis of a captured Ukrainian soldier, and that lieutenant who shielded a Ukrainian girl with his body and was shot by his own people. There is no difference between them. They are all Sons of Darkness. They are all aggressors. The Sons of Light are fighting against them. They are victims. Being the victim, they can't be wrong. The victim is allowed everything.

Remember, as in Dostoevsky: if there is no God, then everything is permitted. The slogan of Marxism-2: if I am a victim, then everything is allowed to me.

And we have just gotten used to this new, sublime paradigm - a paradigm that rewrites the entire history of mankind within the framework of a religious war, a paradigm in which any war turns into a war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, as happened on October 7th. We learned about beheaded babies. About children entangled in barbed wire and burned along with their mothers. We saw women with bloody pants being dragged into cars by triumphant militants, and we saw terrorists loudly celebrating in the middle of the crowd over the naked and mutilated body of Shani Luk. We learned that this was not accidental - some of the terrorists were being trained to commit atrocities, they had detailed instructions on how to kill, rape and cut open their bellies. Another thing is that sometimes they improvised - in order to fry a baby in the microwave, instructions, for example, were not needed.

And before we had time to come to our senses from this knowledge, all these wonderful people stood up. These Pillars of the New Morality. And they said without blinking an eye: but it was all resistance. Resistance is justified. It was resistance. It's justified. And those killed were colonists and settlers. Palestinians are victims. And the victim is allowed everything. Whatever war the victims wage, they are Sons of Light. And Jews are aggressors. They are the Sons of Darkness.

Why did classical Europe never divide wars into “aggressive” and “defensive” (and no, this is far from an outdated stupidity, like serfdom)? Why didn’t she divide the sides into “aggressors” and “victims” and look not at the cause of the war, but at how one side or another behaves in it?

Yes, very simple. Because, as is easily seen in the example of Hamas, any reason for war can be invented. You can always turn around and say that you are a victim. That your war is just, and that you are not an aggressor, but simply defending your legal rights.

For example, you probably think that William the Conqueror captured England? Was it a war of aggression? And William insisted all his life that it was a just war, and that the Saxon king Edward in 1051, during another round of civil strife, bequeathed the throne to him on the good grounds that William was the grandson of his maternal uncle.

War is a costly and difficult thing, and a developed nation has long stopped fighting it over trifles. In World War I, all sides viewed the other as the aggressor—and all sides were right. A modern war never begins from scratch; it is preceded by a long tree of mutual catastrophic mistakes and decisions, forks, at each of which they took a wrong turn.

But neo-Marxism ignores this decision tree. He always has one side - the Victim, and the other - the Aggressor. The victim is right in everything. Her actions are forbidden to discuss. Otherwise you are a Fascist. The aggressor is wrong in everything. He is the Son of Darkness. Any aggressor is a war criminal.

The victim can do anything. Rejoice at the shark that ate the Russian. Promise to carry out ethnic cleansing in Crimea. Calling children killed by missiles “civilian occupiers.” Calling unfortunate pensioners, scamming them out of money, and then sending them to set fire to the military registration and enlistment office. Calling your opponents “a nation of inhumans and murderers, the biological trash of this world.” Do you mind? Shame on you! People are being killed here! Yesterday a rocket flew into a residential building! And then you take offense at the words “biological waste.” Is it possible to compare murdered children and some words on some Facebook?

As I already said, one of the main techniques of neo-Marxism is emotional humiliation. He knows well the magical power of repentance - the emotional humiliation that every member of the CCP experienced in Yannan, when Mao ordered them all to ascend to the podium and repent before the collective for their petty-bourgeois sins.

His other technique is to politicize every issue. He never takes a balanced position. He always takes an extreme left position, absurd, emotionally unbearable, incompatible with common sense, and then declares everyone who disagrees with it to be fascists. This is how he psychologically breaks people and turns them into members of a sect.

A perfect example: the issue of gender reassignment. The normal approach is if you want, change it for your health. But this is not enough for neo-Marxists. They need to create a victim out of a transgender person who believes that everyone owes her,

and from an ordinary person - an oppressor who is ashamed of his fascism. Therefore, the neo-Marxist takes the next step. A man can do more than just change gender. Having changed his gender, he has the right to take part in women's sports competitions.

“Wait,” any normal person who knows that the XY chromosome gives a clear advantage in physical strength will say at this moment, “but this is unfair to women.” This is absurd. Answer: “You are a fascist and a transphobe.”

The same thing is happening in our little corner of neo-Marxism.

A great example: Crimea. The normal approach is very simple. The two countries were divided. It doesn’t matter why, they forgot, they passed. Let's imagine that Ukraine, like Switzerland, protects the linguistic rights of its citizens; whoever lives in which canton speaks that language. Whose Crimea? I don't care. Ukrainian is wonderful. At least there is democracy there.

But no: Crimea, which speaks Russian, discovers that the official language is Ukrainian. Any complaint, any appeal to court - everything must be translated into Ukrainian. Movies are shown in Ukrainian. Russian newspapers and Russian schools are closing. Pushkin is studied at school as a foreign poet. The Russian language finds itself in the position of German in the Sudetenland. Finally, the Maidan happens, and the Crimeans hear the triumphant cry of Irina Farion: let’s pass a law so that everyone who is an official must know Ukrainian. After this, the votes of the residents of Crimea do not even need to be falsified: after annexation, they happily vote to join the Russian Federation.

It would seem, what is the position of a normal person in this situation? Answer: that's it, the ship has sailed. Crimea would be beautiful as part of Switzerland-Ukraine, just as the Sudetenland would be beautiful as part of Czechoslovakia, if it observed linguistic equality.

And let us note that this is precisely the sober position. Even Elon Musk said back in 2022: forget about Crimea. But the virtue signaling position looks different. “You give the borders of 1991,” says Ilya Yashin. Let's return Crimea to Ukraine.

Sorry, but how can this be? According to the current Ukrainian authorities, “biological slaves” live there. Even children there are “civilian occupiers.” And Mr. Podolyak specifically promised them to carry out ethnic cleansing. Answer: “You are a fascist! How dare you when your missiles are bombing peaceful cities!”

As I said, neo-Marxism is aimed at two main groups of the population.

One is those who are made victims. In our case, these are Ukrainians. They are explained that they have been victims of imperial Russia for four hundred years. And it’s okay that during this time the territory of the country increased three times and began to include lands conquered by the Russian Empire from the Crimean Khanate, Turkey, Austria and Poland. This is a very seductive philosophy for a huge number of people.

But no less important - even absolutely necessary - is the second side. These are the exploiters, imperialists, aggressors and genetic imperialists who must repent. In the case of BLM, for example, these are the white people who will hang a “We support BLM” sign in their store windows, the white people who will pay $5,000 for repentance seminars at which they will spit in their faces, and those companies that will create DEI departments. Note that a white person can also work as the head of the DEI department and the leader of the repentance seminar. This, in fact, is the only career that he is allowed within the framework of the neo-Marxist sect. He's either a genetic racist or lecturing about genetic racism.

In this sense, the Russian opposition abroad has turned to one large DEI department. They are proving that they belong by demanding 1991 borders, reparations and trials for war criminals. Which, let us remind you, is anyone who crossed the border in an aggressive war.

It is surprising that people who did not bow to Putin break so easily in front of their own. And the point here, I’ll tell you right away, is not at all about grants. Although grants should not be underestimated either. The famous Free Russia Foundation distributed $20,000 in grants in 2018, and in 2023 its income amounted to $5 million, an increase of more than 250 times. And we still wonder where so many decolonizers of dumplings suddenly came from.

But dumpling decolonizers are one thing, real, serious intellectuals are another. And it would be stupid to think that Viktor Shenderovich or Ilya Yashin value their opinion in a grant.

The point here is different: the approval or disapproval of the reference circle. We are accustomed and diligently pretend that educated Russian society is afraid of the authorities. Many, of course, are afraid. But something else is no less important. Ability to walk in a progressive pack. Receive likes and strokes from those you appreciate. The idea that has been ingrained for 30 years is that the West is democracy, peace, friendship, chewing gum, but Putin is a crazy grandfather with paranoia.

Unobtrusive friendly stroking and patting with intellectual tendrils. The inability to reconsider your beliefs since the start of the war. So? Zelensky is not a knight on a white horse? Is Ukraine not a shining elephant tower of democracy? And if Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, and Ivan Ivanovich took a grenade launcher and started firing at his neighbor, this does not make Ivan Nikiforovich a pillar of thought and the father of world democracy.

And what, the democratic apparatus of the White House - did they really do everything to start the war? Were they not going to let Ukraine win for a second, but did everything to ensure that Putin got stuck in a swamp or crashed against a concrete wall? For two nations to waste each other? How is this possible? This is, scary to say, geopolitics. And we were told that geopolitics no longer exists. That territories are not important. That only old paranoid grandfathers in the Kremlin believe in it!

The problem, unfortunately, is that the West is different. There is that “real” West, the West of the market, individual freedom and progress, which was perceived as a sparkling paradise by the Soviet intellectual elite in 1991. He hasn't gone away - he exists. Moreover, he, in the person of Donald Trump, has just won the US elections.

But there is another West - the party machine of grant suckers and cancel culture. And there is a third part of the equation - those very real hawks and neocons, the American ruling apparatus, which coolly increased the power of the American empire in the least costly ways for the empire, and this last process really involved turning Ukraine into a buffer state and erasing Russia from it.

The First West - the West of the market, progress and individual freedom - exists. But the problem is that it does not give grants. Only the other two provide grants.

And these are the topics on which the Russian dependent opposition turns out to be incapable of discussing. It’s much safer to routinely laugh at tin foil hats and express the belief that 20 kg of butter stolen from a supermarket marks the imminent collapse of the Putin regime. And it is absolutely no coincidence that

Trump's victory caused the foreign Russian opposition to have the same panicky reaction as the entire neo-Marxist establishment.

Another thing is that in this case, the foreign opposition completely excludes itself from any future domestic Russian political process - and thank God. Russia needs to return normalcy to the country and end internal terror, return science and technology, increase the birth rate, develop the economy (possibly including using military technology as a locomotive) and provide stability to its elites, not decolonization of dumplings and inheritance taxes.

The tsarist regime, too, as it seemed to the progressive intelligentsia, was not very good, but Lenin, who in Zurich carefully took notes on what seemed to him the advanced achievements of European thought, turned out to be even worse. Lenin, however, at least did not receive grants.