Tag: the Kremlin

1,867 words

Peter Pomerantsev
Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible
London: Faber & Faber, 2015

Most people probably know the story of the Potemkin villages: When the Russian Empress Catherine toured newly-annexed Ukraine, Grigory Potemkin, her lover and the territory’s Governor, erected false villages and instructed men to act as peasants in order to deceive the Empress and the foreign ambassadors accompanying her about the region’s wealth. Whether the story is historically accurate is a subject of debate. (more…)

Young Republicans. Don’t end up as one of them.

1,988 words

One of the words that has recently seen a lot of use, but I fear is insufficiently analyzed, is “deradicalization.” On its face, it’s self-evident: It refers to the process of abandoning radical beliefs for more moderate ones and adjusting one’s political direction and activism accordingly.

When we say something is a deradicalization op, we mean that this is an operation by any group of enemies aimed at effecting deradicalization of radical white identitarians and Right-wingers, particularly on the Internet. This only scratches the surface of deradicalization as a social and political phenomenon, however. (more…)

1,770 words

Well, friends, we dun goof’d. We predicted, as a movement, as thinkers, that Russia would not invade Ukraine. We are, of course, at the time of writing, into the third week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so it behooves us to look into what happened and where we went wrong so that our analytical apparatus can meet the next crisis better prepared.

For a slice of the wrong predictions in that long-forlorn time of February 2022, you’d do well to read John Morgan’s article about why Russia won’t invade Ukraine (but is still winning) right here on Counter-Currents. (more…)