I’ll admit up front that I’m not as well-versed in the strategic wiles of Vladimir Ilych Lenin as I probably ought to be. Thanks to WRSA for the steer to this intriguing JR Nyquist think-piece that provides a pretty good start on rectifying that.

When a strategist can manipulate both sides in a conflict, where each side represents one blade of a scissors, he can use the slicing of the blades to cut his way through anything. The conflict then becomes a controlled experiment in which the contenders, as thesis and antithesis, are used to establish a new thing (i.e., synthesis). In the present case, Russia and China (using their Western agent networks and “useful idiots”) are playing out this strategy. They are attempting to destabilize Europe and America to remake the world. An essential ingredient in this strategy is defeatism.

LENINIST DEFEATISM
Four overlapping “scissors strategies” are playing out, along existing fractures: (1) the Biden regime vs. MAGA; (2) Russia vs. Ukraine; (3) China vs. Taiwan; (4) Western elites vs. the exploited masses (of the collapsing Western economies). Behind these scissors strategies there is a convergence strategy, and all these strategies make use of anti-NATO and anti-capitalist defeatism.

To understand defeatism, it is useful to reflect on Lenin’s defeatism during the First World War. Russia was then fighting against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. As a defeatist, Lenin wanted Russia to lose the war. In that event, he envisioned coming to power in a revolution. As events played out, the war brought Russia to the brink of economic collapse in early 1917. After the abdication of the Tsar in the February Revolution, Lenin’s defeatism led him to collaborate with the German government. The Kaiser, who was desperate to get himself out of a two-front war, provided Lenin with money (sent into Russia through the Bank of Siberia) so that Lenin could overthrow the Provisional Government and give Germany peace on favorable terms. After Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government in the October Revolution, he agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. That treaty broke up the Russian Empire and ended Russia’s participation in World War I. This is how communism was established in Russia, with Defeatism as the key.

An important marker in all this was Lenin’s opposition to “the omnipotence of ‘wealth.’” Lenin was an enemy of the Establishment. He said that capitalism exploited the workers, pauperized them, and even slaughtered them in “imperialist wars.” We notice, today, similar rhetoric coming from mixed groups of right-wing defeatists. We may aptly call this defeatism “right-wing Leninism” because its modus operandi bears a striking resemblance to Lenin’s defeatism. But that is not all. The American right is more and more identified with the working class, and Lenin was a champion of the working class; so the case is more and more curious, involving what the Marxists call “contradictions.” In this context, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon reportedly told Ron Radosh: “I’m a Leninist.” Radosh asked what he meant, and Bannon said, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s Establishment.”

Bringing down the United States Government, of course, would present a golden opportunity to Russia and China. The U.S. nuclear arsenal defends the free world (to whatever extent it is still free). If the United States collapsed in the wake a right-wing revolution to “destroy all of today’s Establishment,” and if the U.S. nuclear arsenal was compromised, who is to say the free world would survive?

In light of that “to whatever extent it is still free” quip above, which is entirely apt and reasonable, can we seriously contend that it DID survive? Onwards.

Setting aside, for a moment, the opportunity that “bringing down the [American] state” represents for Russia and China, it must be admitted that our erstwhile Establishment despises the country’s white working-class. Here we find the blades of one of our scissors – i.e., the Western elites vs. the exploited masses. It is a bizarre irony that the Marxist left, having emerged from its university hatcheries into government, has deployed Critical Race Theory and feminism to suppress what turns out to be the last instinctively American class; that is, the American proletariat. In a comical inversion of political reality, the right picks up the working class as the left picks up the elite. And so, the elitist thing is to be a Marxist of a new type – promoting feminism, open borders, and genderism. The lowbrow thing is to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. It is, in fact, the unwashed masses – Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” – who want to bring manufacturing back to the United States, who want a border wall, and who instinctively distrust the Establishment. Therefore, Bannon is a “Leninist” in the sense that he wants a revolution from below.

One must admit, since 1991, all our political terms have become inverted and confused. Yet there is method in the madness of this confusion. The idea that Bannon might call himself a Leninist goes hand-in-hand with Putin identifying himself as a Christian. As Iago said in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I am not what I am.” Bannon is not really a Leninist and Putin is not really a Christian. But a game is afoot in which, dialectically, the players become interchangeable so that the black and white pieces on the chess board can switch sides, change sides, or converge. As a strategist, I do not think all this is an accident.  

The defeatism that is emerging on the right, having made revolutionary noises, shares Lenin’s hatred of bankers and high finance. And here, we are not talking about Bannon specifically. We are talking about the conspiratorial right. Precision is difficult here; but of all the conspiracy theories infecting the right, most believe that the malefactors of great wealth are the true enemies of mankind. Overthrow the banking cabal and all will be well. And so, the real right-wing Leninists – who make up an ill-defined grouping – have revolutionary aspirations at a deeper level than anybody has yet understood. Whereas conservatism hitherto deferred to Edmund Burke in his opposition to violent revolution, the right-wing Leninists have no such inhibition. Like the dialectical materialists of the communist movement, the right-wing revolutionaries have no transcendental calculus. They are not backworldsmen (in Nietzsche’s sneering coinage); and so, like the communists, they are after power – and they do not care how they come by it.

At this late and most dismal stage of the game, I have reached the point where I have no real problem with any of that; neither the “revolutionary aspirations,” part, nor the “they are after power – and they do not care how they come by it” part. I can’t honestly say the same for the ‘graphs that close out this section of the essay.

Lenin wrote, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell of capitalism, and therefore, once capital has got control of this excellent shell…it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of individuals, of institutions or of parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake this power.”[iv] Similar statements may be found on any number of right-wing websites, and could form the basis for Moscow’s late-game strategy of convergence. The far right and the far left could join forces. After all, they seem to share the same enemy.

It is mind-boggling, indeed, to think that the right and left could combine, that they could agree on a revolution to overthrow capitalism. Of course, overthrowing Wall Street and the banks might destroy the West economically. In practical terms, what could be better for Moscow and Beijing? After the West collapses, the right and left – having defeated the evil “banksters” – could be comfortably merged. If anything should go wrong (and it probably will), the hard reset of a nuclear world war could be used to force the desperate survivors into a socialist survivalism. Should reactionaries and anti-socialists attempt to resist, something akin to the Russian Civil War would play out globally, by bullet and bayonet, enabling the have-nots to overthrow the haves.

Either way, the World Revolution wins.

Um, not quite, no. The mistake Nyquist makes here is that, by declaring that Right and Left are in agreement on the necessity of “overthrowing capitalism,” he conflates the crony-fascism we currently groan under with capitalism, when the sad fact is that it’s been many a long year since there was much of genuine capitalism to be found in the Western world. He compounds that error in the following section.

We may visualize World Revolution as follows: (1) Begin a war in Ukraine that results in a global economic dislocation, either through a Russian victory or stalemate (since Western economic sanctions will apply either way, triggering the collapse of the West’s financial house of cards); (2) extend the economic mayhem by disrupting the West’s vital supply chains as China squeezes Taiwan and mobilizes for war in the Far East; (3) have a Democrat President denounce his Republican opposition as traitors (opening the way to civil war in the U.S., marking the end of U.S. global hegemony); (4) expose the bankrupt and predatory policies of the Western capitalist elite, turning the Western masses against their economic system and governments; (5) break up NATO; (6) bring about the “one Common European Home” advocated by Gorbachev and Yeltsin; (7) make the Pacific Ocean into a Chinese lake; (8) finish off the United States, occupy North America, and rule the world as a socialist commonwealth led by Moscow and Beijing.

No, no, and OH HELL no. What those of us on what he calls the Revolutionary Right—which, again: hey, fine with me, no quarrel with that, really—propose is not to destroy capitalism, liberty, and Constitutional governance, but to reinstate them. Y’know, as opposed the squalid, contra-Constitutional mess we’re currently cursed by. We wish not to join with our enemies, but to vanquish them.

If the Leftist enemy’s repeated, unanswered violence against Heritage Americans must be met with violence in order to liberate ourselves from the raw despotism of a mutant, semi-fascist US federal government, well, so be it then. If said liberation demands that Heritage Americans forsake some portion of their tolerance, their innate willingness to live and let live, their deep attachment to certain fundamental principles of the Founding Fathers in order to prevail over tyranny, then that is what must be done.

The rest of Nyquist’s piece is pretty good, particularly his examination of the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather) con’s roots as a tragically successful USSR ploy to undermine their adversaries in the Once-Free World. His takedown of NASA in-house dunderhead James Hansen is a joy to behold:

For obvious reasons the Soviet strategists became interested in an obscure scientific hypothesis: anthropogenic global warming. Here was a “scientific” theory with strategic utility for the socialist bloc. And then, on 23 June 1988, during a Washington, D.C. heat wave, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies told a committee of the U.S. Senate that, “The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements….” He said there was “only a 1 percent chance of an accidental warming of this magnitude…. The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

Hansen’s statement, on its face, was ridiculous. There is no such thing as “accidental global warming.” Such, however, was the straw man Hansen presented as the sole alternative to the greenhouse gas theory. Scientists have long known that the Earth passes through cycles of warmer and cooler temperatures. In fact, it was warmer in the early Middle Ages than it is now. The Vikings were growing crops in Greenland, which is not possible with today’s cooler climate. Yet anthropogenic global warming has been accepted as true. To this end, facts have been systematically falsified by agents of influence in the scientific community. Careers have been ruined.

To make environmental alarmism credible, nobody was supposed to question the anthropogenic global warming theory. Those who did question the theory were labeled “science deniers,” or they were accused of being paid agents of Big Oil. Yet science is about asking questions. When all this nonsense began, scientists did not even fully understand the mechanisms responsible for global temperatures. Given their ignorance about climate, how could scientists honestly say anthropogenic global warming was scientifically proven? Of course, everyone knows – or ought to know – the sun is a major factor in heating the Earth; but in 1988 nobody realized the role played by cosmic radiation and the sun’s electromagnetic field. In this regard, the work of Henrik Svensmark has proved embarrassing to global warming advocates. Ironically, Svensmark’s work suggests that the world may not be warming. Instead, we may be headed for serious cooling – with dire consequences to global food production.

Despite the future discoveries of real scientists, James Hansen’s 1988 statements before the U.S. Senate lent credibility to what followed. The New York Times’s declared that Hansen had sounded an alarm “with such authority and force that the issue of an overheating world has suddenly moved to the forefront of public concern.”

Because hey, OF COURSE they did. But then, what would anyone expect from the Old Grey Whore—the selfsame Jurassic Media fishwrap that to this day has yet to offer a sincere apology for the lies promulgated in their pages by Pulitzer Prize-holding propagandist Walter Duranty?