By irkutyanin1

Incessantly, we hear complaints from the right about the inadequacy of even elite universities to give even the most rudimentary of a higher education. The university, of course, is a natural and necessary target, it’s sprawling departments overspecialized and teaming with ideologues well versed in programming the youth with the ideology of self-annihilation. As constantly noted in our circles, the annihilation of history is more than an act of national self-denial, it has also been the instrument of infantilizing the public and the would be “elite” of the country, making them completely incapable of understanding historical context, and hence, how to construct a foreign policy. Enter the late Dr. Walter Laqueuer, long time member and one time chair of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and prolific Zionist and right wing hate group historian with a classical education from Weimar Germany and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr. Laqueuer has gotten to teach at Harvard and John Hopkins despite only holding honorary doctorates, he’s open about this, and openly scorns pseudo-scientific historical methodology and other such jargons that have effectively cowed the “social sciences” that used to be the Humanities. Instead, he has been both simultaneously outside the professional academic framework, while being inside the institution itself, providing most of those kids (who, of course, would have disproportionately identified with his in-group) with the only metaphysics they would likely receive, that of messianic Zionist liberalism. For most questions, the detriment of having a man teach the future State Department, NSA chiefs, and NGO chairs would be obvious, but the most serious problem presents itself in his second to last book, “Putinism: Russia and It’s Future with the West”.

You see, despite being an adamant life long shill for Israel, Laqueur is not poorly read at all, and quite the opposite, grasps the central task and concept of being a historian, that is, constructing a believable image of empirical history that conforms to the overarching metaphysics. This is more difficult than it initially would appear. Your dozens of absolute garbage shitstain Putler biographies written by Masha Glenny or Lev Golinkin might tie over the Barnes and Nobel or B-college crowd, but in order for someone who might actually ask questions somewhere down the road, you need substance, and substance Laqueur provides.

Through the course of his book, he takes apart the entire history of the Russian far right, the Eurasianist movement of the 20’s, popular conservative historians like Proto-Spenglerian Nikolai Danilevsky, Russian emigre theological heavyweights like Soloviev and Berdyaev, and the interwar philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who worked with Joseph Goebbels and who Putin personally reburied. All of this history of ideological evolution is carefully laid out, and attacked where he can attack, (shockingly it’s with Dawkins tier assaults on the sincerity of Orthodoxy, who would have guessed) but fundamentally it seeks to build a case for concrete actions against Russia through greater sophistication by incorporating existing Russian historiography and putting the Liberal messianic spin.

However, Laqueur is critically not a positivist. His outlooks are all tempered with restraint, which makes him readable. He does not expect that a color revolution is immediately possible in Russia, and that potentially decades of economic sabotage is needed, which an exhausted and fragmenting West will not be able to provide. In many hints throughout the book, he is more concerned with Western demographics and implosion than the external threat of “Francoist” Russia, not because of the people in these countries will become minorities, but because as they are dying, he fears that the electorate will probably turn to the right for extreme solutions.

Laqueur, in many ways, is highly reflective of the intellectual “establishment” right embodied by men like Henry Kissinger and Niall Ferguson, a class that has mostly dying or dead from age, that imagines a liberal western continuation on the lines articulated in the Post-War. In his the recently scanned and uploaded thesis, The Meaning of History, Henry Kissinger revealed himself as a Spenglerian and hater of scientific history. That Kissinger does not particularly have high hopes for the West, thinks that American leadership means that it’s already collapsed, and only wants to avoid a third world war. It’s on libgen, and I highly recommend the download. He drops the n-word thrice in his Harvard Thesis, describing jazz and negro dances as unmistakable signs of cultural decay into decadence. One wonders what he makes of the West now.

I mention this because, for Kissinger, in contrast to Laqueur, the West’s decline and the war which define the 20th century. Kissinger sees himself as fundamentally a part of Western Civilization despite or perhaps because he served in the war and had to administer German speakers as a part of his duties as a translator. Laqueur, on the other hand, has Hitler and the NSDAP as his central definition of the 20th century; he’s only part of the West, so long as it never even considers embracing those fascist traditions ever again.

Despite this obvious position he’d have a Zionist, his run down on Russian is fundamentally stronger than typical prole outrage fare. It’s not marred into obscurity by jargon to obfuscate its points for fear of losing his job, a la Richard Sakwa and most Slavic Studies Departments. Laqueur is explaining to the future intelligence in-crowd the real historical development of Russian rightist thought while manufacturing consent preemptively on what to think on this entire tradition of thinkers that brought us to the loose philosophy that constructs the current Russian government and philosophical-philological sphere. Why, you don’t even have to read any of those guys, even in translation, but if you do, you’ll sure know what to think!

This, like many other modern foreign policy mistakes being made, stems from the intentional weakness that serves the programmatic function of academia, it is but one maggot on the corpse of the American humanities, but one which is easily countered. While we will of course need an “anti-laqueur” primer of Russian history and thought, actually reading his cited Russians will eliminate the need. Go ahead, take a look, and see for yourself. Recreating history for ourselves is the only cultural jammer we will have against narrowly guided institutional assault.