"Project Russia," Unknown in the West, Reveals Putin's Playbook | Hacker News Reader

"Project Russia," Unknown in the West, Reveals Putin's Playbook

washingtonspectator.org

41 pointsapi34 comments

Reading this (and looking at the dates), it struck me that Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) was a shill for Project Russia's narrative. The dates fit well, too.

It's quite bizarre, and a little scary, to start seeing how the threads of a fringe weirdo like Yarvin are starting to weave into the politics of the most powerful country on Earth.

Yarvin -> Thiel + Musk -> JD Vance + Musk, they are basically getting their seat time on the throne, bringing Yarvin's deranged philosophy to it... What the actual fuck?

Why is this flagged? I find this article quite interesting.

HN doesn't like politics, which is not a totally bad thing. I figured it'd get flagged and killed but someone would find it interesting.

Probably because this almost begs for accusations of shill-ing, worthless altercations via comments and generally degraded discussion.

I had heard about the book before, but just found out that they printed 3 millions of them (which is a lot for whats probably mostly ideological drivel)... Distribution via semi-official channels is also concerning.

This is generally an interesting datapoint. I used to believe that 2010s European policy (treating Russia as somewhat flawed democracy, and trying to positively influence via mutual trade) was generally a good idea that could've worked, but have realized that this was probably pretty doomed from the outset and almost negligiently naive from European leaders.

2014 was a wake-up call that Russian imperialism is alive and well, but it was conveniently ignored because Russian gas was such a nice pillar for EU electricity.

Because this is the "Russian Collusion!!!" nonsense all over again.

A more likely influence is "The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia" by Alexandr Dugin.

>...“monarchy” at a global scale, where Putin is effectively “King of the World.”

I can't see a lot of enthusiasm for that.

If I understand correctly, there's a fringe book from 2005 about uniting the world under a single religion led by the "Prince Monk." The article attempts to frame this as the official Kremlin playbook without giving any substantial evidence (other than "some ideas seem to be aligned with Kremlin's"). It also includes speculative filler about Xi Jinping, Trump and Musk, who weren't politically relevant when the book was written. The article, just like the book, reads like a piece of speculative fiction full of wishful thinking.

I posted it because I found it interesting and it was new to me, but I'm skeptical of how influential this is too. This stuff is perhaps the Russian analogue of American think tank outputs like the old Project for the New American Century that received so much press back in the 2000s -- stuff that feeds into the thought processes of certain factions of the state apparatus. In the end the agenda is probably to make money for the oligarchs, much like the US.

In any case if Russia did actually succeed in the first parts of this agenda the beneficiary would be China, which is vastly more powerful, and it would become a Chinese world with Russia as a vassal state. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy and less than half the size of California, its demographics are terrible, and its military is old junk. Who wants to bet on whether their nukes would actually work? Those things require upkeep.

Of course on the flip side -- a formerly proud global superpower fallen on hard times is exactly the kind of place where delusional nonsense gets a foothold. You'll see it in the USA if we actually undergo a partial collapse. You'll see all kinds of crackpot insanity being taken seriously... more than you see now. "How did we get our first Scientologist president?" "Well, after the dollar collapsed..."

The key is the first sentence I suppose. But probably, all in, Dugin's book has been more influential, and here the influence is well-studied.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Also, some aims from the book have already been achieved (like 'The United Kingdom, merely described as an "extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.", should be cut off from the European Union.[9]').

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