"Ukraine is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space."
Putin's argument is a good one. Kiev Rus' from the 10th century Viking Volodymyr established the Orthodox religion. Although a thorough-going pagan with hundreds of concubines, he forged trade-routes and captured a princess of the Byzantine empire (legitimately).
On the other hand, is he paying lip-service to Orthodoxy as a way of establishing a universal order of his own choosing? Religious faith is a struggle that becomes a strength. Blood symbolism and warrior monks are nothing new, but faith is something that does not need to change God's plan, that takes the world as it is.
Monks chant and meditate in surroundings of solemnity and power. Monks also grow herbs and vegetable gardens. The physical reality is a strength of the body that feeds the head ('White Rabbit')
Putin and his cohorts, surrounded by cameras and computers (the mirror that convinces the ego with straight-line logic and charts) live inside an illusion of the head.
Somewhat like the European Right, they are good at verbal - and that's all it is. One can't invent psyche because it comes out of organic strength. All one can do is play wargames based on a myth. The force is nostalgic, and harks back to the Soviet era.
is folkloric Pushkin made into an opera by Rimsky Korsakov. Written just following Russia's disastrous defeat by Japan, it tells of the mythical Czar Dodon, who's astrologer makes a golden cockerel to warn of approaching enemies.
Dodon is reassured, and decides to go off to war with his sons. Bruised and bloody, they reach the fabled realm of Shemakha who's Queen seduced them into decadent ways.
In this production, the Czar and his sons wear phallic hats, with staging and costumes by Japanese. Duly married to the insurgent Queen, Dodon returns in triumph, only for the Queen to vanish and the cockerel to stab him to death. The astrologer sings in the
The 'pure illusion' is conquered by decadence (a possible reference to the goat-like Rasputin), and this is a very apt description of the modern illusion. Decadence is the idea that things are left to be, and indeed to decay and become overgrown.
It's the world of fertility, which in nature is strength. Storm-damaged trees, for example,
..break down at different rates and.. that's good for the invertebrates and the general ecosystem and the carbon is restored to the soil. (DT)
Deadwood is an ideal habitat for bugs.
There are literally thousands of species of beetle and other sorts of insects that need decaying wood for at least part of their lifecycle.. The newly formed clearings also allow new trees to develop.
Human civilization cannot develop away from nature and become pure ego. Once that happens, psychic weakness is inevitable. The rebellious spirit is the natural way of saying no to an ordered universe of zero psyche. This occurs throughout Russian history. The Tatar Cossacks were more or less mercenaries employed by the Czar (Gogol writes of a Ukrainian uprising against Polish aristocracy in Taras Bulba.)
Cossack mercenaries were employed by the Persian Shahs and became the Caucasian (or Circassian) brigade that established the Pahlavi dynasty (toppled by the Ayatollahs).
These historical accounts are the struggles between differences that become strength, that produce psychic luster. Without the struggle, pure order is just a pure illusion.
This is so throughout history. On the very borders of Russia was the Hanseatic League of Baltic and German cities. Warlike merchants established trade-routes as far as Novgorod.
Without the struggle that has a psychic strength and without the disorder that speaks of decadence and debauchery, there is only the mental weakness of order (see Euripides The Bacchae where bestial rites tore Pentheus to shreds.)
The disorder of the underworld is always there, but the strength of decadence is denied by those who live by dogma. Zest and the children of Dionysian rites are lost in the quest for the neutralizing dragon of endless sameness. Putin is more dogmatic in his quest for the mythical creature than the West, but in the end will it really matter?
Putin makes a good case but the problem is, if you win you've already lost. With the dual-note illusion of efficiency (P210) that ineluctably draws the ego toward ordered sterility.
In the parallel reality where the psyche is more and more out of reach, Putin is trying to reach an anachronism, a state of mind that is on the wane. A social milieu that is the microcosm of a cosm of divine rhythms that mysteriously imbue the psyche.
We live in a confused state of distorted rhythms or what you could call the Relativity paradigm (HB209). A calculated war is ineluctably drawn further into that state of confusion.