THE IMPLICATIONS OF THAT RECENT RUSSIA-AFRICA SUMMIT

As most of you are aware, Russia recently played host to a variety of African nations in St. Petersburg.  What may have been missed, however, was the seismic shift that it indicated, and the considerable degree of message-sending that was being resorted to by hosting such an event in the one-time capital of Russia built by Tsar Peter the Great...in a swamp. The message Piotr Romanov was sending was, for those willing to read the symbolism, was unmistakable: as Venice was founded in a swamp and grew into a major capital of western financial, cultural, and commercial power, and similarly exported its "methods" to another banking city founded in a swamp (Amsterdam): Russia meant to be a large and not insignificant part of that "system". Peter's "turn" was away from what had been "traditional" Russian policy since Ivan the Terrible: the "collection of the Russian lands" and the creation of a huge buffer to the east to protect the Russian heartland from any further marauding hordes.

In other words, viewed from the large perspective and context of the long and vast extent of Russian history, Ivan might be reasonably viewed as the "first Eurasianist", and Peter the Great as the first "Euro-Atlanticist".

These shifts were, for Russia, as much cultural as they were geopolitical. Indeed, in the ways of Russian history, the two are not as distinct as they are for the West.

Now we have witnessed, according to this article from RT, a similar equally huge and equally long-term shift of Russian cultural orientation and with it, a similar geopolitical shift:

Dmitry Trenin: Russia is making its biggest geopolitical shift for 300 years. Here’s how it’s playing out.

While the article's focus is on geopolitical and financial policy, I suggest that there is a third motivation, one hinted at in the following paragraphs:

Essentially, the meeting, with the bureaucratic preparation and the wide public coverage it has received within Russia, testifies to a sea change in Moscow’s worldview and international positioning toward the world’s rising non-Western majority, as laid down in the recently adopted Foreign Policy Concept.

St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a 'window to Europe,' and last week, it served the same purpose for Africa.

Eurocentrism, of course, is still deeply embedded in the Russian elite’s thinking and aspirations. Nevertheless, the failure of Russia’s long travails of Western integration in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union has now exploded into the proxy war against the United States and NATO in Ukraine. This has produced a historic shift in Moscow’s policies, comparable to the time of Peter the Great in its significance, though in a wholly different direction. For the foreseeable future, the universe of Russia’s foreign policy will remain divided in two large parts: the house of foes including Europe, North America, and the rest of the Anglosphere, and the house of friends elsewhere. The dividing line between the two is a country's position in relation to the sanctions regime against Russia.

Africa, in this regard, is largely on the right side of that divide. 49 nations out of the continent’s 54 were represented in St. Petersburg. True, only 17 of them participated at the top level. No longer a curious and skeptical observer, as during the Sochi summit four years ago, the West this time made a determined effort, advising, cajoling or threatening African leaders against going to Russia and dealing directly with President Putin. As a matter of fact, Western pressure scored some points (the number of top leaders in St. Petersburg was about half of what it was in Sochi), but failed to undercut the event. What was lost in the status of representation was compensated in intensity of interaction. The amount of time Vladimir Putin personally invested in the event – that actually lasted three days rather than two – was impressive and noteable. (Emphasis added)

While all of this is true, I suggest that this is only a part of the motivation for post-Soviet Russia's pivot back to Africa. Significantly, Russia alone of all the European colonial powers as no record of colonialism in Africa, its overseas colonial  reach being confined to its North American missions and outposts, where, again very significantly, I would argue that it has a very different track record vis-a-vis native American Indian populations than do the other European powers.

This point  brings me to what lies concealed within the article and within Russia's third major historical pivot, and that is hinted at and suggested by the comment that Russia sees essentially a binary world, one of foes, and one of nations that are not members of the Anglosphere and the "house of foes", with the "dividing line between the two" being "a country's position in relation to the sanctions regime against Russia."

This accounts only for the financial and geopolitical aspects of the Russian pivot, but it ignores what must never be ignored in Russia's case, namely that one may never separate the cultural from the geopolitical and financial.  The West's biggest mistake in this regard was its own role in helping to impose the Soviet-Marxist system on Russia and thinking that the old pre-revolutionary cultural institutions and attitudes could never return.

What the summit thus means is that, after years of trying alternatively to woo and then to warn the West, Russia has concluded not only that the West is not friendly, but that it is "not-agreement-capable" because it has lost its mind, and thus lost whatever common cultural identity and similarities that once tied it and Russia together.  In short, the West is well advanced in the process that was once the Soviet Union; it is lost in a swamp not just of godlessness, but of a virulent anarchical anti-morality and anti-tradition that would make even a Lenin or, better, and Antonio Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse blush.

So Russia's  pivot toward Africa is entirely predictable: geopolitics always follows culture, and with its pivot back to some of its pre-Bolshevik traditions and institutions, it is also thus pivoting toward those nations and cultures that embody such traditions, and deliberately away from the increasing insanity gripping the west and its leadership. If this pivot is successful, one area in particular that will manifest slowly and over time profound long term effects and implications: African Christianity tends to be, for the most part, more traditional than the addlepated jumble of modernist mumbo-jumbo  effecting (and empyting) churches in the West.

In short, Russia hasn't said no to the West's geopolitics or finance. Those are just the things that matter to the empty shells that pass for the rich and powerful, the leaders - the Gateses, Soroses, Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, Bai Dens, &c &c -  in the West. What Russia is really saying HET to is to the whole baby-killing purple-haired swamp that the West has become under the "leadership" of these ghouls.

Russia is still emerging from the long national nightmare that was the Soviet Union. It still has a long way to go, and it has come far.

But I am envious nonetheless, because we in the west are entering an even worse nightmare that not even those that were responsible for the nightmare called the Soviet Union would recognize.

See you on the flip side...