Counter-Currents
2,468 words
[Without cotton] . . . Old England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her . . . No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on Earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king. — Senator James Hammond of South Carolina
The famine will start now and they will lift the sanctions and be friends with us, because they will realize that it’s impossible not to be friends with us. — Margarita Simonyan, Editor-in-Chief of Russia Today
Since I live in Europe and find myself on the political Right, this past week or two (who the hell even counts anymore?) I’ve found myself completely inundated with dire warnings that I’m going to freeze to death this coming winter because our governments have angered The Gas Gods, or because I’ve refused to accede to the erasure of the Ukrainian nation by a post-Communist multiethnic empire falsely claiming to be Russian. There’ll be no respite from the cold, no warmth, no life, because we’ve dared anger The Gas Gods by supporting “ukro-fascism” and “hohols.”
Personally, I’m usually fascinated by every freaky cult I encounter, but this one seems less freaky and more reeking of desperation. Even more than desperation (which I can understand, having stared down despair and spat in his face more than once), it reeks of shallow thinking about destabilizing equilibria.
The prophets of doom foresee a dark and cold winter for Europe until it pleases The Gas Gods by discontinuing its blasphemous “sanctions” and “weapon deliveries to the UkroReich.” Then, if Europe does that, The Gas Gods, and more specifically the head Gas Deity, a bald godhead known only as “Based Putin,” would condescend to turn their blessed flatulence Europe-ward, thus putting an end to our cruel, cold winter through their strange multipolar magicks.
In truth, we’d been hearing a lot about how gas exports to Europe make the Russian Federation geopolitically unstoppable for many years now, both in the form of warnings from people who foresaw (or know from bitter experience) that Moscow would use energy exports as a weapon, and in the form of boasts from Russian or pro-Russian trumpeters, but it is only now that the pro-Russian side’s pronouncements have taken on a febrile pitch, screamed — insofar as one can scream while typing over the Internet — in a mad cacophony that seems more designed to reassure the pronouncer than discomfort the European listener. That this coincides with the Russian armed forces getting a bloody nose on the Kherson front and a ten-foot barge pole up the rear on the Kharkiv front is probably not of any significance, or so the Gas Cultists tell me. But let’s leave them by the wayside for a while and talk about cotton.
It’s the late 1850s in America, and it is obvious that the country is a house divided. The issue of slavery, unresolved at the country’s founding, seems less likely to be resolved peacefully and amicably between the North and South. There are other issues between the North and the South as well, each quite pressing to those concerned and all pertaining to a very old conflict between Yankees and Quakers on the one hand and Virginia gentlemen and Scotch-Irish hillbillies on the other. This is a war as old as the English people themselves, a war between Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, between Lancaster and York, and between Alfred the Great and Guthrum of East Anglia. Indeed, it seems that all is not well in the happy land of America, and the great gentlemen of the South are now seeking to secede from that Union which has become for them a prison.
When cooler heads raise the warning of the proposed new country’s economic viability, the great gentlemen of Virginia slam their fists on the table and cry, like Senator Hammond, that King Cotton will see them true. What will the industrial economies of Britain, France, or indeed the accursed Yankees do without King Cotton? The textile industry, the workhorse of the mid-nineteenth century industrial machine, will not be denied its cotton — and what joy, Old Dixie has completely structured her economy to serve and export King Cotton. Having done that, Old Dixie believes King Cotton will condescend to help her in her hour of need. Who makes war on Dixie, makes war on King Cotton, and he’ll rouse his dependents in England and France to rush to Dixie’s aid and destroy the damned Yankees.
Old Dixie puts her faith in King Cotton, but King Cotton has other plans. In the first year of the War of Northern Aggression, Dixie ceases all exports of raw cotton in an effort to rouse England and France into action, but finds them roused to action in a direction Old Dixie hasn’t predicted. England begins aggressively importing cotton from India and Egypt. Brazil and Argentina develop their own cotton-growing capacities to feed the voracious European industrial economies. The Russian Empire invades the Bukhara and Tashkent khanates in what is today called Uzbekistan, in part to establish itself as a cotton producer, both for export and its own industrial needs. The world has one lean year in which textile mills work at reduced capacity, but adapt the very next year. Dixie loses her source of revenue. King Cotton found other mistresses — Egyptian, Bukharan, Indian, Brazilian — leaving her alone to be ravaged by Lincoln’s marauding hordes.
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The gentlemen of Old Dixie are stumped. They were proud, they were noble and of ancient blood, and they allowed themselves to be stupid. They were blinded by liberal ideology and its lure. They did not listen to their countryman George Fitzhugh when he counselled that the South in general and Virginia in particular should industrialize its economy, and do so by utilizing the state’s immense power working in concert with local interests while safeguarding the working class’ well-being, as is being done in Germany. His warnings went unheeded and Dixie has thus retained her old agrarian economy, unwilling or perhaps unable to industrialize, naïvely believing that it can dictate terms to England, France and even the damned Yankees due to its control of cotton. Old Dixie then loses the war with the damned Yankees and suffers all the woes of the vanquished.
The year is now 2022, and once again a resource-extracting country is attempting to use resource exports as a cudgel in international politics. Having supplied relatively cheap gas to Europe for the better part of the past 20 years, Russia has now ceased deliveries through Nord Stream 1 and will likely end all gas deliveries until its demands are met: Europe and America must end all sanctions against Russia and stop supplying Ukraine with weapons and resources. It has done so not expecting that the countries it supplies with gas — indeed, the countries its entire economy is structured around supplying with gas — will seek out alternative sources of gas and energy. While it is true that there will be an adjustment period where Europe will have less gas and will pay more for it, this is only until the infrastructure of the new trade routes is further developed. Gas from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Argentina, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, and America will rush into Europe to fill the gap, locking Russia out of the industry and bringing the Western coalition closer together.
Before the Russo-Ukrainian War, my friend John Morgan penned an article claiming that Putin would gain far more from not invading Ukraine than from invading. While Washington and London were sounding the alarm for rooskies on the horizon, such cries were dismissed as dangerous paranoia in Paris, Berlin, and even Kyiv. In not attacking, Russia would have dispelled the American narrative about itself. Instead, when it attacked Ukraine and followed up by threatening to withhold gas sales from Europe, it confirmed every aspect of that narrative. When it failed to break the Ukrainian resistance and bogged itself down in an inadequate offensive, it even managed to confirm the McCain/Obama consensus that it is nowhere near as tough as it appeared. In attacking Ukraine and failing to defeat it quickly, whilst simultaneously threatening to stop the flow of gas to Europe, Russia painted itself in the very unenviable role of a bully who is nevertheless weak, and everybody loves a weak bully, since it means you can easily beat on him while facing no moral sanction for it.
What’s curious to me is that it seems intuitive, and one would say self-evident from the facts at hand, that Russia has far more to lose if the Europe-Russia relationship is severed. Europe may need gas, but Russia needs the European market. It lacks the infrastructure to deliver gas or even oil to its new trading partners in Asia, and these trading partners are not exactly paying fair market value for the oil they are purchasing. They can’t even purchase gas, due to the fact that the vast Russian pipeline infrastructure runs to Europe and therefore new pipelines, over rough terrain and without the aid of European technology under the sanction regime, would have to be built to service Asia. Europe has options; Russia’s main rival in the gas and geopolitical game, for one. Russia hasn’t got much in the way of options. Where Old Dixie put its faith in King Cotton, Russia now clings to President Gas, as Mark Gullick so eloquently put it. I love our good Mr. Gullick; he’s a philosopher and a poet (though he knows it not), but he gets it wrong there. Systems move when exposed to stress.
But if a retired philosophy professor can be forgiven for being naïve and thinking one-dimensionally about global energy trade, the Russian government cannot. Surely they must have known what would happen. Surely they didn’t all believe, as the lunch-stealing Mx. Simonyan does, that Europe will elect to be friends with a country that thinks it can dictate European foreign policy by withholding energy exports. It boggles the mind, but it bears repeating that modern government is not particularly well-staffed. The Russian government, consisting as it does of FSB thugs and organized crime figures, may not have the best and brightest Russians in its employ; many of them are probably part of the hated pro-Western liberal class, Moscow/St. Petersburg hipsters, or one of the Rodina’s many expatriates. Hey, they tried going against the empire-killer, what can I say? There’s a lesson there for would-be imperialists: You can’t out-empire liberalism.
Let’s be charitable and outline three scenarios here. Scenario A: The Kremlin believed Ukraine would break quickly enough so that sanctions could be avoided. Scenario B: The Kremlin believed Europe would not respond to the invasion. Scenario C: The Kremlin actually believes it can break European resolve by withholding gas. None of these scenarios is particularly charitable to the great, bald heads of the Russian Federation, but let’s consider them nonetheless. Personally, I believe that Scenario A is the one they are following, and that everything that has happened since the February/March Kyiv offensive stalled out has been the result of the Russian state flying by the seat of its pants. Of course, I could be wrong, since this is the course I would have taken if I were in charge of the Russian government, but then again I would not have attacked Ukraine if I were in charge of the Russian government. Scenario B is less likely, but let me address it along with scenario C, because they derive from the same root assumption.
If Moscow’s gamble was that Europe would not respond to the invasion, then it’s safe to assume that Moscow considers Europe too selfish and provincial to make sacrifices for Ukraine. Similarly, if Moscow believes it can break European resolve by withholding gas, it means that Moscow assumes Europeans are too dependent on material comfort and will therefore break if pain is applied. This, of course, is a fundamental underestimation of the Northwestern European character, whose first instinct when exposed to pain is to counterattack. Russians think themselves tough and capable of great endurance, but they are little children compared to Northwestern Europeans in the full throes of moral outrage, and as we have already pointed out, by invading Ukraine and failing to break it, Russia has shown itself to be both morally reprehensible (in both the prevailing moral paradigm and in the nationalist paradigm as well) and weak enough to retaliate against without significant pushback.
Contrary to Russian narratives about them, Europeans are neither provincial nor weak. Russia’s Europe-facing propaganda has made appeals to provincialism (why should you suffer for Ukraine?) and to weakness (you will freeze and starve; yield now). But it is trying to propagandize a people who has a vast world-consciousness, even among its common folk, as well as vast strength of moral conviction. We may not like the moral paradigm currently in place, but we must not underestimate the great power that moral conviction arouses in European people.
So, what started as a question of economics has become a question of will. Does Europe have what it takes to keep refusing Russia’s demands, and does Russia have what it takes to survive long enough without the European energy market? That remains to be seen, although my money is on Europe. Historical precedent shows that the European spirit doesn’t break easily and that Europeans do not respond well to blackmail. Distasteful though I may find the absolute demonization of Russia and Russians, I understand that it is being done to activate the powerful European moral instinct in service of this struggle. As for Russia, for all the chest-beating, its will to fight is so low that it’s not even willing to call its war in Ukraine a war, insisting that it’s waging a “special military operation” and denying itself a bevy of foreign policy options as a result of such a stance, to say nothing of solving its chronic manpower problems with mobilization or putting its economy on a war footing.
Man has always been in awe of the fruits of the Earth. We ascribe magical powers to them and revere them as minor or major gods. The gentlemen of Virginia spoke of King Cotton — but cotton was never a king. The neo-Chekists in charge of the Russian government thought themselves possessed of great power in the form of gas, but they forgot that markets are a two-way street and that Europeans are made of sterner stuff than old Soviet propaganda would have them believe. Ultimately, the fate of the world is not decided by resources or by inanimate objects, but by men and their will to fight, live, build, die, and kill. Moscow greatly underestimated the flexibility of Europe’s economy, but more importantly it underestimated European and Ukrainian resolve. They did that because they refused to take either Europeans or Ukrainians seriously — but that’s a story for another day.
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23 comments
Great article! I have only two contentions. One is that he neglects the important caveat of Russian gas being cheap, far cheaper than the alternatives for the foreseeable future.
The other is that he fails to make a reference to Metallica’s King Nothing. (but maybe that was intentional; the association is so obvious as to make it corny, also not from their best-loved of albums)
I’m not a Metallica guy, unfortunately.
The Russian Empire invades the Bukhara and Tashkent khanates in what is today called Uzbekistan, in part to establish itself as a cotton producer, both for export and its own industrial needs.
That was a great tragedy for Türkic Peoples of Central Asia (Orto Asya) in Bukhora, Khiva (Horazm), Kokand etc. The Russians have not only stolen the real sovereignity of Özbeks (and also of Tadjiks), but later transformed those lands to monoculture economics, which still harms the peoples and enviroment there. The Soviet Union has produced very big amounts of cotton, but there were used not for jeans or other clothes. Only for powder for shells and bombs. And the rivers were poisoned, the lands were poisoned, and the people were made sick. Everything for the King Cotton. Cotton for bombs and shells. For the next World War.
This author says Russians are like “little children” compared to Northwest Europeans, but it looks like, by the standards of White Nationalism, Russia is doing a lot better than Northwest Europe at preserving its genome and culture, whatever the faults of its military strategy in Ukraine.
The Russian state arrests and kills white nationalists who point out that white Russians are being demographically displaced by Central Asian and Caucasian minorities who have free rein to engage in crime against white Russians.
The Russian state arrests and kills white nationalists who point out that white Russians are being demographically displaced by Central Asian and Caucasian minorities who have free rein to engage in crime against white Russians.
I said Russia is doing better than Northwest Europe in relative terms by White Nationalist standards. Sure, there are some Asians in Russia, but nothing like the massive numbers of brown migrants in Northwest Europe taking over entire towns and even close to becoming Prime Ministers. Referring to Russians as “little children” while an Asian almost became Prime Minister of the UK seems strange from the standpoint of WN. It’s only a matter of time before Northwest Europe has its own Barack Obama.
Russia’s government includes the Armo-Jew Lavrov and Tuvan Shoigu, among other choice nonwhites, many of whom are Jews or crypto-Jews. It looks like the UK’s government did in the days of Cameron. But more than that, white Russians are being demographically displaced in traditionally Russian areas, like Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Chechens and Kalmyks aren’t staying in Chechnya or Kalmykia, but are rather pouring into Moscow along with hordes of central Asians.
“white Russians are being demographically displaced by Central Asian and Caucasian minorities”
Only Chechnya (pop. 1.4 million) and a few tiny ethnic groups have above replacement fertility. The rest of the country is ~1.5, plus/minus a few tenth of a percent. It would take millenia to replace Russians.
You are counting the minorities within the Russian Federation and ignoring massive immigration from the former Soviet ‘stans.
Russia possibly will resettle North Kaukasians and maybe even some people from Central Asia to the “liberated” territories of the Eastern Ukraine. So it would get two aims: loyal population on those lands as a result of ethnical replacement, and the neutralization of the population bomb on the North Kaukasus, where the people has not enough lands to live and work, and where the Islam is so strong. The Russians just bring some Kaukasian müslümans to annexed parts of Ukraine.
Russia attacked Ukraine — and continued the delivery of gas and oil to its European partners according to its contractual obligations. It even allowed Hungary to re-sell gas to Ukraine.
It was the EU leadership — at the instigation of the Washington-Warsaw war party — which mandated that EU member states should stop buying oil and gas from Russia.
Compliance would have immediately tanked the economies of land-locked Central Europe, so Orbán — secretly backed by Austria, Slovakia, Czechia (plus German big industry) — negotiated a derogation, but even that is supposed to be phased out in a year or two.
This isn’t any kind of Russian aggression against us. It’s the decision of the EU leadership to prohibit buying energy from Russia.
The rest of the article is similar fantasy literature.
I’ve refused to accede to the erasure of the Ukrainian nation by a post-Communist multiethnic empire falsely claiming to be Russian.
The Ukrainian nation erased itself when it elected Zelensky – and by a landslide, to boot (73% of votes).
That’s an absurd statement.
Greg – I meant that if they couldn’t figure out that Zelensky was not a friend of ethnic Ukrainian people, they deserve their fate. I am horrified by the Ukrainians’ poor judgment. They appear to be unable to see five minutes into the future. That doesn’t make me pro-Russian or pro-Putin. It is just stating the facts. My (now deceased) pa was a Uke.
Mind you, Ukrainians have always been easily manipulated and conquered (a Jew told me that, as if I didn’t know). They – whether as a collection of tribes (“The Ukraine”) or when they were briefly a country – were invaded and/or ruled and/or controlled and dominated by Mongols, Poland, Lithuania, Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, USSR (Russia), and on and on, I can’t remember it all. And now the good ol’ USA. A history as bad as that of Afghanistan in terms of nobody leaving them alone for at least a little while.
Do other white people ‘deserve’ death, displacement, and rape by Hajjis because they voted for Obama, Merkel, etc.? That is a morally toxic stance to take and shows you don’t really care about our race.
I’m supposed to “care” about the insane, am I? I’m just asking that they get out of the way while those of us having the capacity to identify with our race’s interests are trying to figure out what the hell to do.
I am embarrassed to be schooled in Civil War history by a Macedonian, and I salute him for his knowledge. I doubt that I could tell him anything about Alexander that he doesn’t already know.
Nonetheless, I doubt that his analogy is valid. Analogies are convincing when they concern two episodes in the past, whose outcomes you know, like Hitler’s and Napoleon’s invasions of Russia.
Analogies are not so good for bolstering predictions, because there are so many differences in the surroundings of the two situations being compared. For example, there’s that one factor that is not being considered: the South did not have nukes, and mutually assured destruction was not a thing then. That is certainly a factor now. I’m sure, with all the Russophobia swirling around on both sides of the political spectrum, that were it not for MAD, we would be sending troops, along with the container ships of cash. Some on the Dissident Right would be all in on that, too, and be willing to forget the invasion on our own southern border for the greater good of running up the white body count in this skirmish between two kleptocracies.
And I’m not so sanguine about the toughness of Europeans.
As always, time will tell.
that were it not for MAD
There was no MAD in 1930-1950´s, but the West did not attack the Soviet Union. Before the WWII the West financed the Soviet Union, the West built plants in the Soviet Union, the West sold licences for industrial and military products to the Soviet Union. During tehe war the West lend-leased the Soviet Union. After the war the US had A-bombs, and the SU did not, but the US had not attacked the SU. Well, and later the West gave credites to the Soviet Union and sold the grains to it, and again built plants and factories, incl. of military production.
The West has created the Soviet Union and maintained its life more than 70 years. The West even in the year 1991 did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve (only Baltic States were seen as having the right for secession, but not other “Soviet” Republics, neither Asian, nor Caucasian or European). The Soviet Union of yesterday, just like Russia of today was and still is the Golem, created by the West, which however sometimes turned against its creators and that´s why needed to be disciplined, but no way to be destroyed (because still considered to be usable as the Western gendarme of Northern Eurasia).
Russian nukes only mean that the RF cannot be destroyed from without, but there’s nothing stopping it from collapsing inward, unable to weather the stresses of combined economic embargoes and an embarrassing defeat in Ukraine.
Our Tsar is Mukden, our Tsar is Tsushima
Our tsar is a bloody stain.
A stench of gunpowder and smoke
In which reason grows dar.
That was a Anglo-German Tsar. (And, well, that above mentioned war against the Japanese was fought absolutely in the interests of a Russian oligarch named Bezobrazov, the cronie of the Tsar.) The Russians are ruled by foreigners and used by them since the year 862.
Before the Russo-Ukrainian War, my friend John Morgan penned an article claiming that Putin would gain far more from not invading Ukraine than from invading.
Let’s be charitable and outline three scenarios here.
Firstly, it would really be more profitable for Putin not to attack Ukraine than to attack. Secondly, the Ukrainian authorities did not at all dismiss the threat of war, but believed that it would be limited to the Donbass, and did not believe in the offensive against Kyiv and Kharkov, and in rocket attacks on other cities. Moreover, if the Russian offensive were really limited to one Donbass, then it would be much more successful for Russia. And the offensive from all directions only united the Ukrainians and accelerated the provision of military assistance to them. In the event of a limited offensive in the Donbass, such assistance would not have been available.
As for scenario options, I would not rule out Scenario D, namely, that the decision to launch a full-scale offensive was made by Putin either due to the incompetence of his intelligence, which downplayed the strength of Ukrainian resistance, or he received a carte blanche for this offensive from some other, external forces, more powerful than he himself. Everyone says that Putin is a good tactician, but a bad strategist. Does this mean that he makes tactical decisions, but strategic decisions are made by someone else, and this someone else is not necessarily located in Russia itself?
As for the assessment of Europe and its will, I do not agree with the author. If he spoke only about Central Europe, he would be right. But Western Europe is rotten to the core, full of all sorts of degenerates, alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, and migrants, unadapted to even the comparatively mild European winter. And it is run by a gang of red-green globalist traitors. Moreover, it is managed in such a way that many French and Germans yearn for liberation from this gang and will meet Russian soldiers with flowers, and their women will voluntarily give themselves to the Russians right in the towers of their tanks.
I can only hope that in this case the Americans will not repeat their mistake for the third time and will not get into this conflict to “save” the Europeans. They have done this twice already in the 20th century, and each time after Europeans were rescued, the Americans received only spitting and insults from the French and other Western Europeans. The gratitude of the Western Europeans is well known, so it would have been better if Pershing and Ike had stayed at home, allowing the Europeans to kill each other. After all, they like it so much and they have been doing it regularly since the time of the conflict of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.
but they are little children compared to Northwestern Europeans
Maybe, you mean NorthEASTERN Europeans: Balts, Poles, Finns? Yes, then you are right. But what is with NorthWESTERN? The Swedes women are regularly raped by Somalians, and no Swede does something against it. Do you really think they would defend themselves against Russians?
The analogies don’t really add up. The American Civil War was an internal American conflict. Neither the Northerners nor the Southerners in any way threatened the existence or independence of other states, both neighboring and, moreover, overseas. Neither the British, nor the Russians, nor the French, nor the Italians, nor the Germans felt any threat to their existence either from the side of the Confederation or from the side of the Union, so they did not feel any need to actively intervene in this conflict.
I’m curious about who the tough, ready for a fight Northwestern Europeans are? The supine, degenerate Germans who stand idly by while their women are raped? The lazy Franco-Arabs with their short work week? Will it be the Black Belgians saving Europe? And the UK is so politically correct their kilts are ball gowns now. Sorry to report, “Northwest Europe” ain’t what it was.
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