Behind the brutal invasion of Ukraine, curled inside Putin’s false consciousness, is a narrative that supports the Kremlin’s pretense  of legitimacy.  Hence the importance of waging Spiritual Justice Warfare against Putin: to undermine the pretense of legitimacy and the power that derives from that.

The Lesser Coat of Arms of the Russian Empire. Public Domain, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The better to help us understand and confront The Adversary, Dina Khapaeva, the director of the Russian-studies program at Georgia Tech’s School of Modern Language and the author of The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture probes the spectral narrative haunting Putin and, through which Putin haunts the civilized world at the Atlantic .

Excerpt:

“No one can read Vladimir Putin’s mind. But we can read the book that foretells the Russian leader’s imperialist foreign policy. Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 utopian novel, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, anticipates—with astonishing precision—Russia’s strategy of hybrid war and its recent military campaigns: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the incursion into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the same year, and Russia’s current assault on Ukraine.

“Yuriev’s book, like Putin’s war with Ukraine, is an expression of post-Soviet neo-medievalism, a far-right, anti-Western, and antidemocratic ideology that assigns “Russian Orthodox civilization” a dominant role over Europe and America. Yuriev, a businessman and former deputy speaker of the state Duma who died in 2019, was a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party, which envisions an essentially feudal social order overseen by a political class that rules through fear. Putin and Yuriev knew each other. The Third Empire is rumored to be popular and highly influential in the Russian leader’s circle; one Russian publication described it as “the Kremlin’s favorite book.”

…

“In The Third Empire, Russian geopolitical ambitions force the United States and the European Union to declare war. Yuriev imagines that Russia has a secret weapon that makes the country invincible to nuclear attack. … Ultimately, the Americans and Europeans surrender. The world comes under Russian domination. The high point of the novel is a parade on Red Square. Among the forced participants are:

“representatives of the American elite: President [George] Bush III and former presidents Bill Clinton, Bush Junior, and Hillary Clinton; current and former members of the cabinet, the House, and the Senate; bankers and industrialists; newspaper commentators and television anchors; famous attorneys and top models; pop singers and Hollywood actresses. All of them passed through Red Square in shackles and with nameplates around their necks. … The Russian government was letting its own citizens and the whole world know that Russia had fought with and vanquished not only the American army but the American civilization.

“With such scenes, Yuriev offers important insights into the mentality of the Kremlin, the way Putin and his circle think about the West, and their attitudes toward neighboring countries. Perhaps Putin doesn’t really expect to haul the Clintons in chains through Red Square. But when Volodymyr Zelensky warns that if Ukraine falls, war will move farther into Europe, he should be believed.”

As William Butler Yeats prophesied, 101 years ago:

Hence the imperative of Spiritual Justice warfare.

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