Russians don't think like us. Why should we expect that Putin does?

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This is a bit of a repeat - I reformulated and expanded a post with the idea of publishing it on an alt-right blog. The new stuff appears after the paragraph starting “Winston Churchill”.

The war in Ukraine pits two quite different civilizations and sets of values against one another. Many on the right in the United States, despairing of the progressives, the wokesters and OneWorlders  in the West, took Putin's claim that he represented the opposite at face value.

This war has shown it not to be the case. As somebody said long ago, you can trust the Russians… to be Russians.  Putin is a Russian. It is time to analyze the deep meaning of that observation.

Razib Khan recently published an article entitled Getting a Sense of the Russian Soul. Whereas Ukrainians are genetically homogeneous and very European, the Russians are more diverse – and on average not quite so much. An understanding of the Russians themselves may help to understand what Putin is up to.

Luigi Cavalli Sforza of Sanford started the analysis of genetic differences among peoples four decades ago. Genetic analysis not being available, he initially used blood types. His work with crude tools has been validated by genetics. The technique of factor analysis allows a statistician to extract principal components to describe the differences between two sets of data. These are used as factors in linear equations. The first component explains the greatest amount of difference, the second the second greatest, and so on. Two-dimensional graphs are useful for depicting these first two principle components.

In Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, Charles Murray used Cavalli Sforza and others' analysis to produce this diagram of the genetic differences among the peoples of the world:

The orientation Murray chose tracks human migration out of Africa – first north through the Mideast and Europe, then East through Asia and on to Oceania and across the Bering Straits to the Americas.

This depiction gives visual confirmation to the commonsense notions of human races. Africans, Europeans and East Asian populations cluster. Individuals within these populations are similar to each other, and the measured average differences between the populations are sufficiently great to validate the evidence of our eyes.

Khan's point is that there is a great deal of diversity within the Russian population. Superimposing his diagram, below, on Murray's diagram you see that the Russian population spreads genetically from a concentration in Europe towards both East and South Asia.

84% of the human genome is dedicated to the brain. That's what separates us from the lower animals.  Our bodies are similar but our brains are 3 ½ times the size of those of chimpanzees. Temperament, of course, is a function of the brain. Humanity has long known (though the woke would have us forget) that different populations tend to think differently.

Turning back to Russians, they have always had hierarchical government structures.  Thirty years ago Geert Hofstede thoroughly and accurately describe the differences in his "Cultures and Organizations – Software of the Mind."  It now appears that the differences may be hardwired – we evolved to think the way we do.

Winston Churchill said that " Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."  Very hard to understand. It may be that our brains don't work the same as theirs.

Some of the books that have made the deepest impression on me over the last few years are The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, by Ricardo Duchesne; Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, by Kevin MacDonald; and On Genetic Interests by Frank Salter. Earlier books that led into these themes are The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker and At Our Wits End, by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley.

We Europeans overcame our tribalism, our parochialism, to learn how to cooperate in increasingly large organizations. We managed to institutionalize trust. This led to the rule of law and corporate structures through which we were able to vest our trust in people that we did not know. We developed a high opinion of ourselves, and the tendency to expect altruism and other-directedness in people we did not know.

We failed to notice that for all we projected these virtues on other peoples of the world, they have seldom been reciprocated. Everybody else looks out for themselves, whereas we generously look out for everybody. That is why we have been persuaded to be at the forefront in fighting all of the world's ills, more recently largely supposed and invented by those who wanted to manipulate us. Which they have successfully done.

With regard to the Russians, the Marquis de Custine wrote in his 1839 "Letters from Russia" that the Russians are not whatsoever trusting. They are a servile people, constantly kissing up to the echelons above them, at the top of which hierarchy stood the Tsar. Custine said that though he was the most powerful potentiate in the world, people could not afford to tell him the truth. The entire court apparatus was staffed with sycophants.

He also noted that Russians are plagued with a superiority/inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe.  They feel morally superior to the libertine Europeans, but also feel a gnawing inadequacy when confronted with the accomplishments of European science, business, and writers.

Continuing on the theme of business, Custine said that there is a lack of creativity, of innovation among the Russians, which dooms them to be perpetual imitators.  Entrepreneurship is feared and suppressed, and with it the evolution of business.

The invasion of Ukraine could be explained by Putin's sense of superiority over the decadent West – he goes on all the time about the homosexuals and so on – and his being out of touch with the realities about his own military. Since he has stolen a great deal from the Russian people, he has to turn a blind eye as his underlings do the same. Unscrupulous military contractors have been around since Roman times. Lincoln complained about them. One can imagine that the only difference in Russia would be the scale of the theft and the depth of the layers of deceit.

The Russian military campaign in Ukraine has been woefully inept. It was launched with a lie – that it was a "special military operation" to "denazify" Ukraine.  Consistent with the lie, he had a victory speech prepared to deliver on February 26. After which victory, he presumably would have "discovered" excuses to continue the occupation, fulfilling philosopher Alexander Dugin's nonsensical notions of Russia's manifest destiny. Because, as Custine noted two centuries ago, all of Russia is a pyramid of deceit, the invasion could not have been well planned and conceived.

·       Putin certainly kept information about the planned invasion from the people who manage economic relations, trade relations, diplomatic relations and such for him. He probably kept large elements secret even from the military.

·       Putin's army is made up of men for whom military service is an attractive offer. Those who could not avoid conscription, and the lower rungs of society to whom the money looked attractive. Not the makings of a great professional force.

·       The soldiers did not know they were going to Ukraine. They were told they were going on a training exercise.

·       Russia's traditional lack of trust means that lower ranking officers and NCOs do not have authority to make decisions. They are not allowed to adjust tactics on the fly. Four general officers have been killed at the front because without them the men would have no direction.

·       The soldiers invaded with only three days' supplies, consistent with Putin's delusion that it would be a quick win.

·       The invasion routes followed major roads. They don't have GPS – otherwise they can't find their way. Moreover, armor cannot operate in Ukraine's springtime mud. They should have known.

·       Russian forces were split, attacking from many directions at once, whereas a single, focused thrust might have resulted in a quick victory.

·       Russian intelligence could have had better information about Ukrainian arms and equipment, and more important, about Ukrainian morale. Ukrainians have hated Russia for generations, and especially since 2014. They were not going to roll over.

·       Russians suffered a lot of equipment breakdowns. The equipment had not been well maintained. The maintenance money was probably siphoned off, and the lies were believed right up the chain of command.

That's only a start. Books will be written about the magnitude of this fiasco. As I write, Russia has something on the order of 150,000 soldiers in Ukraine, the majority of them bogged down by mud, blocked roads, lack of fuel and food, and abysmal morale. The Ukrainians are systematically blocking resupply and mopping up those who try to move.  The signs of Russian desperation are many.  Among them:

·       Russia is dismissing prisoners of war from the Army. Taking no responsibility for them, which would mean no pensions and no veterans benefits. These people will be on their own.  Their families without income.

·       Russia has said that soldiers who desert or want to surrender will be shot. This is a Russian tactic going back to Stalingrad and presumably to czarist times. Soldiers are expendable.

·       There are anecdotes such as one about a soldier who was chained to a tree so he could not leave his watch post. Ukrainians found his frozen body.

·       General Shoygu, the Russian minister of defense, has told Russian soldiers that it is okay to steal provisions from and shoot civilians.  

·       Uncivilized, unprincipled foreign troops are used to inspire terror. In the past it was the Cossacks. Then the Chechens.  Now the Syrians

The Russian soldiers very quickly reverted to form. The brutal tactics of the Mongol "Golden horde," as the Ukrainians derisively call them.  Their brutal tactics, and their lack of constraint is reminiscent of Putin's  two Chechen wars.

The American right wing, with their detestation of Biden and the progressives, have turned a blind eye to Putin's faults. Putin gave a speech two months ago at the WEF in Davos, where he had given the keynote speech in 2009. He seems okay with Klaus Schwab.

More dangerous to the Russian people, Putin has established close ties with AstraZeneca to produce the Sputnik Covid "vaccines."  Edward Slavsquat reports that Putin is playing a double game with regard to the jabs. He has publicly said that they are not mandatory, but seems quite pleased that subordinate levels of government are making it so.  Putin buddy Alexander Gintsburg is making a fortune manufacturing them, and is now taking steps to directly import the AstraZeneca jab.

Unlike the United States, where the system is merely corrupt and inefficient, Russia has absolutely no vaccine adverse effects reporting system (VAERS).  Neither does China for that matter. The official attitude is "you will take this injection" despite the fact that a substantial portion of the rather conservative and distrustful Russian population does not want it.

In losing this war, Russia is not only demonstrating that the bogeyman NATO has been opposing for and three quarters of a century is just a paper tiger, but they are exposing the emptiness, corruption and immorality of the entire Russian society and system of government.

The Russians are not European. We cannot trust them to recognize their own self-interest, and we certainly cannot trust them to deal honestly with us as we look out for our self-interest. American conservatives had better look for another champion. Putin's talk about traditional values in Christianity appears to have been as deceitful as everything else about his country. As much as we might have hoped for a foreign champion to advance our cause, it falls back on us of the European tradition to recognize and defend our own self interests.