Podcast Episode #100 — Alistair Crooke and Russia’s Real War for Independence https://t.co/9Qcs7NvuSi
— Tom Luongo (Mr. Ungovernable) (@TFL1728) March 15, 2022
Who is Alistair Crooke? Wikipedia states that he is a
CMG, sometimes erroneously referred to as Alistair Crooke, (born 1949) is a British diplomat, the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, an organization that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West.[1] Previously he was a ranking figure in both British intelligence (MI6) and European Union diplomacy. He was a spy for the British Government but retired shortly after meeting his spouse.[2][3
Check out his Strategic Culture Foundation.
What a fantastic interview.
Religious saying pushing himself lies hidden actually in the religious right, if I may say this, racial and cultural overtones that we are missing and we have really properly understood. What we are talking about is something that is much more. . . that is much more profound. It's about the moral sense of, the moral sense of what Russia stood for, and he said this and Putin said this and I quote him, "We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their own roots including the values, the Christian values as they constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principals and all traditional identity: national identity, cultural, religious and even sexual. They're implementing policies that equate large families with same sex partnerships, the belief in God with a belief in Satan. Putin sees his project very much as the rebuilding of the moral basis that underlies the Orthodox nation for Russia. And one of the things that I wanted to underline is that the Maria Meskovic, who is the head of Sociology Institute at the Academy of Sciences in Russia, she was saying that it's quite clear that a large part of the Russian population views the war in Ukraine as a holy struggle wand a war of Russia with the rest of the world. This is a position that many Russians find more congenial than to cooperate with the outside world. In other words, in a sense, the Russians are sensing that it's almost "we alone against everyone" in this struggle. She goes on to say that polls consistently, and generally accurately, and this is the head of the Sociology Department in Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, generally accurately demonstrate this pattern, as well as the widespread belief that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is defending itself against the Western attack. Because of this, Russian support for Putin, his government, and even his United Russia has risen since the beginning of hostilities and indeed it has gone up. So this is the element that we're really sort of missing completely. And the person who constructed much of this, the person who worked the first ideas about what has to upend Russia with their terrible experiment with Neo-Liberalism which brought Russia to their knees, described it in three terms: the most important was the people, the sense that these diverse people, the Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians. In Russia, there are something like 350 different languages spoken. It's not a homogeneous state like some European states. It's diverse, very diverse. But nonetheless, that above all that, above that diversity, there was a sense of the Russian people, the Russian people even as something . . . even if you don't define it too closely was something that you were proud ti belong to . . . that had its culture, that had its language, that had its literature, that had its theater. This was something that was believed to be so important. The second thing is religion, of the moral values. Even today there is a sense, I've heard it from Putin in many ways that what they're trying to do is . . . he feels the west is very nihilistic, very empty of content.
At the 42:30 mark, Crooke explains that Kassem Sulemani was the architect of imploding the west's influence over China. Luongo added that that explains Sergey Lavrov's persuasive charm with Sulemani.