West of East

Divine comedy at the Cold War's weird end.

Earlier today, investigative journalist

John Leake

published a question in the form of a brief essay: “Is Russia Now the Defender of Western Civ?” After referencing the NYT’s recent work of accidental journalism, with regards to the relentless campaign of psychopathic lies told to instigate and prosecute the Russo-Ukrainian war, Mr. Leake dares to say the quiet part out loud:

A couple of years ago, British comedian and author, Konstantin Kisin (who was born and raised in Russia and is a strong critic of Vladimir Putin) pointed out that in one recent year, 400 people had been arrested in Russia for things they said on social media. In same year, 3,300 people were in arrested in the UK for things they said on social media. This is, it seems to me, is absolutely shocking.

Yesterday came the news that Marine Le Pen was banned from the next presidential race because of an accounting irregularity. The charges reminded me of similar law-fare tactics the Democrat Party used against Donald Trump.

Since 2020 in the West, we have experienced COVID-19 mRNA vaccine mandates, censorship, and the banning of political opposition.

Considering this, I pose the following provocative question: Could it be that—for all of its faults—the Russian nation is now something like a defender of Western Civilization from the militant barbarians who have taken over the politics and culture of the West?

Is it a provocative question? Yes. But I think it’s also a necessary one to ask, at this stage of the game.

The reason I think the answer might be “Yes” has less to do with traditional views on geopolitical strategy or history, and more to do with the boundless ironies that such a story would involve. I have written before about metaphysical slapstick and Divine punchlines, and how those tend to lead us to higher truths. That seems to be the case even when the story is filled with horrific loss. In fact, horror might be a key ingredient, to highlight the lessons embedded in such cosmic jokes.

Consider the irony of Putin himself: born and secretly baptized in the Eastern heart of Christianity, which had by that point been renamed Leningrad after one of its ugliest foes. He attends law school, joins the party, and is recruited as a spy due to his acumen with the German language. His career as a KGB agent sees him ultimately stationed in Dresden, the site of war atrocities committed by his nation’s Western allies during WWII. There he oversees the puppet state’s secret police, to help crush anti-communist dissent in the Soviet empire’s final days.

Apparently, it didn’t work. But I suppose we can’t put all the blame for that on Vlad. There was a lot going on back then, most of it involving a bunch of checks that his bosses couldn’t cash.

Does a “Damascene Moment” occur in Dresden, as Mr. Leake suggests? Some cathartic revelation that upends Putin’s entire understanding of reality, and unveils the true destiny of his Motherland? Perhaps, as he stole through the various vaults for files to alternatively burn and rescue, he paused to watch the jubilation of the crowds smashing through concrete, and found that something broke in him as well. The violins quaver and the trumpets soar. Cue Hollywood closeup, as a single, manly tear glides down his stony cheek.

Maybe, maybe not.

Some transformations take a lot of time and many harsh lessons to complete. But the man who would ascend the throne from the ashes was almost certainly different than the one who henpecked the Stasi. He still battled “capitalists” (if you could count oligarchs and gangsters in that taxon), but also served to organize the more favorable ones within his government’s purview, and sketch them into his economic playbook. If he is a hero of the West, he’s still no knight in shining armor. There’s plenty of blood on his hands, and no guarantees that it’s all the blood of monsters.

But at the very least, those of us who dare ask Leake’s question understand that Putin is a complicated man, who sits at the helm of perhaps the most complicated tract of land in human history. We stand in sharp contrast to those who only see the cartoon Dracula image they’ve been force-fed, by the State agents in charge of their mass media organs. This view is so impoverished, it barely requires engagement at this point. We can just stipulate that zombies haunt our lands in search of brains, and that they’ll repeat whatever the houngan on the screen tells them without question. That’s not necessarily just a critique of the Left, by the way. The Right also has its undead hordes and voodoo masters, even if they’re far fewer in number, and only narrowly influential in terms of moving money around the board.

But the question that Leake poses is more fundamental than any particular political ethos or economic strategy. After all, the history of “Western Civi(lization)” offers many different flavors of those, including Greco-Roman republicanism, imperial Caesarism, monarchal feudalism, theocratic corporatism, various strains of oligarchic and mercantilist structures and more.

I assume he is referring to the soul of the West and its peoples, which flows through every incarnation since the Hellenes. Or perhaps he is more specifically referring to Christendom. I’m not sure the two can actually be decoupled at this point, though. We could say that Christianity was a spiritual innovation that recontextualized the Westmen’s past, but not one that washed it away or burned it. Odysseus and Achilles are still one with us, still our spiritual brothers, kept safe by Christian monks who understood their everlasting value. Arthur and Beowulf, too, in both their pagan and Christian forms. Our soul is expansive enough to contain them.

We are curious explorers, artists and art lovers, industrious makers of new things. We are also radical freedom seekers, who test the boundaries of propriety and wisdom. But Christianity remains at the core of what we call Western civilization. We could name various angles of our soul Platonic, Aenean, Faustian, but these all exist in hyphenation with that core. Even our native wanderlust only conquered the globe under the shadow of the cross. To define that era any other way isn’t only ahistorical; it’s asinine and childish, no matter your personal opinion of the Gospels or the churches that promote them.

Putin seems to have the same understanding of the Western soul — and maybe better than most, having partaken in its sworn enemy’s attempts to destroy it. Ever since that evil empire’s collapse (and, in some tellings, even before) he has appeared as though he’s trying to commune with the namesake of his birthplace, before the Bolsheviks defiled it with their secular patron. In addition to his efforts to restore and reinvigorate the Orthodox Church, he has woven the tale of his own return to Christ into his personal mythos, complete with magic amulets and mysterious twists of fate.

(from “Putin and the Orthodox Church: how his faith shapes his politics” by Ben Ryan)

The story goes that this baptismal cross was given to Putin by his Christian mother when she had him secretly baptised in the early 1950s and it has apparently been an object of great sentimental value to him ever since. Putin did not wear it while he was an active KGB officer, but he reports that “in 1993 when I worked on the Leningrad City Council, I went to Israel as part of an official delegation. Mama gave me my baptismal cross to get it blessed at the Lord’s Tomb. I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”

The story takes on a mythical element to it, however, in an account of a fire at the Putin family dacha. According to the story, the property burned down in the mid–90s, destroying many of the family’s key possessions including a good portion of their money. However, the cross survived the fire and was presented back to Putin by one of the firemen. If the account seems extraordinary it is nonetheless one which has been repeated often. It bears, in fact, a close resemblance to an ancient Russian religious myth in which an icon of St Nicholas was said to be impervious to flame. Whether or not that connotation is deliberate and the tale of Putin’s cross is a mythical construct, it is striking that this story is one that forms part of the official narrative on Putin’s faith. Putin certainly wishes to portray a strong personal faith that is exemplified in these stories.

It’s of course possible that Putin is not the least bit faithful — that it’s all a carefully constructed sham designed to protect and enhance his worldly power. Indeed, we could make the same claim about any man or woman on Earth, including the sitting pope in Rome, and probably find evidence to support it. But what’s interesting about Putin’s public displays of faith is how utterly alien they look compared to the current crop of Western elites.

Try to imagine any member of the Davos jet set, or any of their corporate and government collaborators, inserted into the picture below.

Vladimir Putin observes the 2024 Orthodox feast of Epiphany with an icy bath (and wearing his St. Nicholas cross, as always).

In other words: even if it is a scam, it’s still one that’s predicated on a Western Revival regardless. What he pretends to revere only works to his advantage if many others actually revere it. If anyone internalized this lesson, it would be an ex-KGB agent in the final days of the Soviet Union, at a time when virtually no citizen actually believed the system was worth salvaging, no matter what they publicly pretended.

But Putin himself doesn’t represent the most outrageous — and hilarious — irony. That would be the Cold War’s almost infinitely bizarre ending.

Think about it.

Or, if you’re not particularly in the mood for thinking, let this Dollar Store Natasha Fatale knockoff give you the skinny.

“Imagine… to peer across the world and know the enemy’s secrets. To place our thoughts into the minds of your leaders. Make your teachers teach the true version of history. Your soldiers attack on our command. We will be everywhere at once, more powerful than a whisper. Invading your dreams. Thinking your thoughts for you while you sleep. We will change you, Dr. Jones. All of you, from the inside. We will turn you into us.

“And the best part? You won’t even know it’s happening.”

But even the best lines of this otherwise shitty, cash-grab of a film only tells half the story. To understand the rest, take a gander at these two maps.

The left map shows the pre-unification borders, with the Berlin Wall intact. The right map shows the electoral result of the recent 2025 Bundestag federal elections. As you can see, the pale blue blob correlates precisely with the the borders of Putin’s old communist East German stomping grounds. These are the “extreme” “right wing” AfD voters, who cast their ballots for a party that the speckled black blob to its west is currently attempting to outlaw. This was the region controlled by the “pro-democracy” “Allies” during the Cold War (but really, just by the Pax Americana empire, when you scrape away all the propaganda and focus on the accounting books).

Indeed, much like their compatriots in the U.S. Democratic party, the voters in this region still beat their breasts and call themselves Defenders of Democracy™, while they attempt to censor, blackball, debank, criminalize and jail their political opponents.

Speaking of jailing political opponents, another “pro-democracy” “ally” springs to mind.

While it omits the 2-year jail sentence, the chyron accidentally spills the beans. Yes, she will apparently serve time in the hoosegow, for what amounts to a bookkeeping error (Sound familiar?). But the dog attached to this tail is the fact that, at the time of her conviction, Le Pen was running at least 10 points ahead of any other candidate in the polls. Something simply had to be done to stop her election. And so it was.

Like trying to strip Christianity from the West, to try to see this prosecution any other way is childish. It’s also insensible to the dagger point of a clinical diagnosis. Here we see the loudest defenders of democracy, playing rigged games in broad daylight that most autocrats wouldn’t dare attempt to pull off in the shadows. But if you ask the Left’s rank-and-file, they don’t even blush. What’s a little jailing of opposing parties between friends? Ask the Romanians, I suppose. Just don’t expect them to answer you in anything above a whisper (Or not yet, at least: the year is young).

How could this be? What happened that so thoroughly deranged the world, many of us are now gazing East for Western champions?

The “Crystal Skull” speech tells half the story of the Cold War. It’s likely a familiar one to dissident Rightists, who’ve claimed we were conquered from within for as long as I’ve been alive. But the untold half contributes to an ending so utterly absurd and bizarre, even current-era Hollywood would take a hard pass, and greenlight Snow White 2 instead.

Even this nightmare fuel doesn’t come close.

Imagine a war where both sides achieve a Pyrrhic victory, and the survivors wind up swapping kings and customs…

No, scratch that. Not weird enough.

Imagine a secret war-within-a-war, waged by alien brain slugs trained in psychic Karate. The practitioners develop their techniques further in the shadows, eventually honing them into near-perfect weapons of mind control. As this secret war rages on, the various diplomatic and military flare-ups shown to the public become a kind of Potemkin illusion and money laundry for the slugs, who devise ever more Inception-like layers of infiltration and agency.

By the end of this twilight struggle, most of the operatives can’t even remember whose side they’re working for, or why. The ones who can now wield immense power behind enemy lines, backed by multiple redundant pipelines of wealth and influence in every institution. Each ideological faction has quietly conquered its opponent through back channels, with most citizens of both nations remaining blissfully unaware (“You won’t even know it’s happening”).

Even the war’s ending turns out to be partially an illusion. While a Westernized Russia begs for a seat at the global table, an Easternized West forges ahead as though the 1960’s never ended. Their NATO project expands like a pirate army along the Russian border, even though its original purpose is technically obsolete. As if to drive home the Freaky Friday mind-swap, they take on communist China as a favored trading partner.

Ridiculous, right?

But it gets stranger. Look at the German maps above again. Forget they are regions on a map, for a moment. Let’s play a little Rorschach game. What else does the shape remind you of?

Does it remind you at all of a bi-hemispheric brain?

If you have read

Iain McGilchrist

’s brilliant book, The Master and His Emissary, then you likely know where I’m going with this (and if you haven’t, please repair this tragic oversight forthwith). Otherwise, you might dismiss the resemblance as mere coincidence, and point instead to nearer and more procedurally distinct causes. Indeed, you might do that no matter which “side” you favor geopolitically.

For instance, a Rightist could advance the argument that the old East Germany has a more direct understanding and memory of communism’s horrors, and so has bolted rightwards in order to prevent a sequel. In this model, the old West Germany — conquered from within across decades of psychological warfare — plays the odd role of the leftwing reactionary, frantically trying to maintain the status quo of welfare states, mass immigration, costly environmental policies, and other dogma of the modern progressive managerial state as the tide turns against them.

And this is a perfectly reasonable way to look at it. But now, try to look a little higher.

Just for the next few minutes, adopt the premise that the universe isn’t quite as fragmented, meaningless, and mundanely explicable as often it seems to be. Instead, imagine that it’s a place where patterns reiterate at every scale and resolution, a realm of fractals and butterfly winds.

In this place, we are minds, first and foremost, with patterned structure generated as a byproduct of energy exhaust. And by “we”, I mean everything that exhibits intelligence, from nations down to nanoparticles. The patterns differ slightly based on many factors, but we can still detect their shape almost anywhere we look.

Now imagine the planet Earth as a brain, and the Cold War as a cognitive argument between its hemispheres. At the beginning of this conflict, the left-hemisphere (the Emissary) is the Soviet Union, with its material-reductive reasoning, godless utilitarianism, and centralized control. The right-hemisphere (the Master) is a rough alliance of several nations from the old romantic West. The peoples of these nations are still somewhat intent to carry forth the torches of individual liberty, restrained government, and respect for religious or mythopoetic understandings of reality.

However, at this moment in history, these right-hemisphere nations are long in the tooth. They are filled with internal contradictions and moral rot. If there’s a common mindspace above them, then it has started to lose its memories and coherence. And so, while they claim to have “won” the argument with the Emissary near the turn of the century, it was in reality a long surrender punctuated by crimes great and small, committed both in public and behind closed doors.

But now consider this: the Master cannot actually be defeated, and his memories are never truly lost. Although individual minds might temporarily lose access to these in the fog of war, it can and will reassert its natural authority. But where?

In the neurological domain, it asserts it on the right half of the corpus callosum. But our spinning globe includes no definite partition between East and West, Left and Right. These concepts have been stripped of objective meaning since Magellan, if not since Pythagoras. Everything is both left and right of each other. Left of left is right. East of East is West. The same dilemma crops up when we look at brains. If you're looking at one from behind, which half is left and which is right?

The West stands at a crossroads now. We have been groomed for the Emissary’s style of rule since birth, which tends to ever divide and atomize. Division of this kind is often helpful in assessing certain kinds of problem spaces, so long as there’s a Master to reassemble the deconstructed parts into a whole. At the level of governance, it is a toolset of conquest and oppression. “Divide and conquer,” became axiomatic for good reason.

We have traveled a long road into that atomizing darkness. And yet, even in Europe, we are seeing evidence of light and life. The Western soul lives on. It yearns to remember what it was before, and restore itself to health and vigor. It wants to shed the Emissary’s reductive chains, and grow anew.

Is it Russia’s turn to carry the Master’s torch?

I suspect it might be. Mainly because would be the funniest outcome, which is a good sign it’s the true one. It’s all right there in the Beatitudes, misunderstood as that poem often is. The lowly become the mighty, the losers become the winners, the weak become the strong. Last is first, and first is last. Hear a priest solemnly intone that from the altar, and you might yawn. See it happen in the flesh, and you’ll probably laugh your ass off.

I can’t know for sure how it will turn out. For now, this is only a possibility. A question, as John Leake puts it.

But if turns out that Vladimir Putin has been summoned forth to save the West from its barbaric foes, he would be far from the most controversial figure to do so.

Hell, he wouldn’t even be the most controversial one named Vlad.

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