Better in their words…

Jacques Baud has been on a sort of virtual book tour, promoting his new book by appearances on popular Youtube platforms—The Duran, Daniel Davis’ Deep Dive, Judge Napolitano’s Judging Freedom, and probably more. Baud is a prolific author on the topic of warfare and he has the background to write compellingly on the current war of the West on Russia—as those who have listened to some of his interviews will know:

The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat

Alastair Crooke has written a review of the book which I want to highlight, because Crooke’s theme addresses issues that we’ve discussed repeatedly. Here is the link to Crooke’s review article:

The Art of War: Different Thinking Systems

Crooke works from a lengthy excerpt from Baud’s book that appeared in January at The Postil. Crooke acknowledges Baud’s fundamental insight, which is deceptively simple: Russia understands the West better than the West understands Russia, which is what gives Russia such a decided advantage. This “blinkered approach” to war, Crooke argues, is symptomatic of deeper problems in the Western response to reality. He begins his review by quoting Baud’s presentation of that thesis (follow the link to The Postil for the extended excerpt):

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.

The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military expertsis their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model….

The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…

Another way to put it might be to say that the West approaches war the way it approaches all reality—in a fundamentally Kantian way. Kant’s ideological approach to reality—the culmination of the Platonic – Augustinian tradition of the West—posits reality as unknowable in its essence. What we know is the product of our minds, shaped by “categories” of thought. This has led to the rise in the West of demonic ideologies that seek to impose “our reality” on the recalcitrant reality that is supposed to buckle under to our desires, our will to power. This is the truth of most of our politics, and it’s an approach that is the sea in which we, the fish, swim—most people of the West are unaware that they see things in this out of touch and inevitably self defeating way. From the Greek movement of the soul out of a love for the order of the cosmos, expanded by the Israelite God’s love for his creation, and the Christian triune God who is a community that so loved the world he created, this is what the West has descended to. (To read lots more on all this, Admin: The Earlier Meaning in History)

Note that for the West to extricate itself from this debilitating ideology would require an historical understanding of how we got to this point—from Plato’s radically insoluble framing of the question of human knowledge of reality, throught the Augustinian ‘theologized’ “solution” that descended into the nominalist dissolution of the Western tradition of philosophy, and on to the Kantian rejection of reason and philosophy itself—a product of the Enlightenment that issued into the various forms of liberalism and Marxism that are the basis for all modern ideologies. What all this has in common is the programmatic rejection of the relevance of history. If Kant is correct that we impose order on reality, rather than intuit that order from a meditation of the world we know, then history is irrelevant in principle.

Here’s how Crooke puts that idea, drawing on the French thinker Emmanuel Todd (see The Defeat Of The West and Is The West Headed For A Planned Cataclysm? for previous discussions of Todd’s most recent work):

Baud, in his book, gives an excellent account of the military evolution derived from this western ‘thinking system’. Nonetheless, the explanation is somehow incomplete. Yes, the ‘Others’ do have an ‘organic’ and ‘process’-linked understanding of crises,  yet there is more to it than that.

The French philosopher, Emmanuel Todd, in La Défaite, suggests that — with a US in constant revolt against its own past – the West has fallen to nihilism and to “a breath-taking dogmatism across the spectrum of Western élites – a kind of ideological solipsism preventing them from seeing the world – as it actually is”.

Two points are necessary to clarify what Crooke is saying: First, if the US is in revolt against its own past, which it is, that is because it is part of the West and the entire West is now self defined by that revolt—the Fall into nihilism; Second, the dogmatic refusal to see the world as it actually is embraces the dogmatic refusal to acknowledge the relevance of history, which is a major factor in forming who we are and who we can become. The fundamental nihilism of the West is encapsulated in the conceit that we can become who or what we will to become. Quintessentially in the West, Americans are the people who invented themselves, the propositional country, on whose very currency the profession Novus Ordo Seclorumappears—the exceptional, indispensable nation for which history can have no relevance and upon which history can have no hold.

Don’t doubt this. Crooke continues:

I recall having once asked former Secretary Madeline Albright why she forbade Yasser Arafat from consulting various Islamic authorities on the radical US proposal to divide the sovereignty under Al-Aqsa Mosque horizontally, so that the topsoil sovereignty would stay with the Islamic Waqf, but the ‘beneath’ would be Israel’s sovereignty. She said firmly that it was a matter of principle at the US State Department to ignore all religious dimensions – and to remain secular.

In other words, “religious dimensions”—as a matter of principle—were not part of reality at the US State Department, and therefore must be dismissed also by the rest of the world. Because the American Empire that espoused that flatly wrongheaded view had more power.

There are other examples: Dick Cheney insisted that all that was needed in geo-politics was to understand ‘the underlying nature of people’ (as viewed from the Western perspective).  Facts and history did not matter. As Baud has noted, an image that fits with prejudice is what matters.

Cheney was simply expressing stock classical liberal ideology: All people share the same nature, therefore all we need in geopolitics is the power to apply pressure to force all peoples to conform to that ‘underlying nature’—which is as classical liberalism says it is, fundamentally economic in nature. All people respond to economic stimuli—or to brute force, ‘shock and awe’—not to ‘religious dimensions’.

While Crooke uses the term “prejudice” in that paragraph, he goes on to recognize that what he is describing is an ideology—an ideology that is based on a programmatic refusal to see the world as it is—the refusal is of the very essence of the ideology, it is not a simple mistake but is demonic in nature:

The consequence is not confined to that of failing to see the world ‘as it actually is’, but represents an ideological teleology of refusing to see it ‘as it is’.

Based on these implicit insights, Baud is able to explain:

… at length why the West has been systematically surprised by Russia in Ukraine, and observes how this deep-seated prejudice gives Russia the advantage of surprise — to the point “where the Western narrative led Ukraine to totally underestimate Russian capabilities, which was a major factor in its defeat”.

But then Crooke repeats that Baud’s insights are not limited to military action. They are applicable geo-politics in general. And, I would add, to politics and human life generally:

The key point is that Baud’s insights apply not only to the implementation of military action, as such. They are also applicable as a ‘thinking system’ to mis-construing geo-politics, too.

And finally Crooke turns to the conflict that may prove, in the long run, even more momentous than the war on Russia—the West resolutely refuses to recognize the full reality of the Israeli way of thinking, about themselves as a people as well as about war. Crooke captures the attitude of refusal in the West with his turn of phrase, “firmly ignores”:

Just as the West failed to understand Russia, and was taken by surprise, so it is that the White House firmly ignores the Biblical ‘End of Times’ dimension to the Israeli ‘way of thinking about war’, preferring to stick with its ‘liberal-secular’ image of “Israel”.

So too, the West refuses to understand the Palestinian and Resistance opposition to Zionism, and as Baud observes, “it is an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks – the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking”.

Actually, we could reverse Baud’s argument. The refusal to understand, in a very real sense, precedes the demonization. The refusal to understand is programmatic.

The West thus slips back into old default colonial tactical responsesto what they observe (i.e. towards the Iraq’s Hash’d A-Shaabi, or Ansarallah in Yemen), viewing them merely as ‘rebel’ or ‘mutinous’ disconnected eruptions, to be put down with a firm smack of firepower — i.e. as discontinuous, tactical events.

There is then, no real enquiry into the reasons for these irritating neo-colonial irruptions, nor any interest in whether there is history to them.

Eric Voegelin, in his The New Science of Politics, compares this Western imperial ideology to past forms of imperial ideologies—opposition is simply rebellion. Just as Dick Cheney and our current globalist/Neocon rulers view Russian concern for its security against an advancing imperial West as rebellion against the the Rules Based Order. The embrace of the Rules Based Order is the defining character of the New World Order and thus of the New Humanity—and accordingly all who resist are demonized, both the land and its head of state, Russia and Putin are the Evil pole of a new dualism of Good and Evil. Indeed, to seek understanding becomes itself a form of rebellion—or worse, a betrayal! So too did the Mongols view opposition to their predations as rebellion, to be vigorously repressed, not reasoned with. Likewise, the conquering Islamic forces. One does not reason with a rebel—one calls upon the rebel to submit. Failing that, whatever happens is the fault of the rebel, whose resistance amounts to a renunciation of his humanity. It’s the Holy War ideology that we can see in the Israelite scripture, and that has been resurrected—so to speak—in the Amalek narrative of Greater Israel in its war of extermination.

Our calling is to move beyond. To understand. To reclaim the past of the West, which is not irretrievably lost, which Crooke rightly states that our ruling class is at war with. Our weapons are of human understanding and the reclamation of human nature.

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