Good Work

Daniel BESSON

Given some of the sources getting the nod at the more high profile of venues, I’m extra glad that someone like yourself is out there to serve as an offset – that includes your noting some valid views which have been downplayed.

For your listening pleasure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_4_RHSxgdY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkDJKnBmLM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg1wsO7GkPc&feature=related

For the PC crowd, I’m well aware of the criticim against Stas. I’m also aware of some of the hypocrisy out there when it comes to the matter of sensitivity. As is true with Stas, I’ve yet to find someone who I agree 100% with. Does such a group exist?

Yes, one of my several degrees was in economics and yes, I at one point did believe in the Western rubbish of Free Trade. However, in my various travels in the military and then for business, I got to see the effects of enforced Free Trade, as well as seeing what it did to Russia in the 90s. As such I, slowly at first, then quickly in my late 20s, became a protectionist. I very much believe first and foremost in open internal markets, with government oversight and key investment for strategic sectors and the banning of monopolies. Free Trade has been as bad a Western import as Serfdom (in Russia from early 1600s to 1861, far shorter than in most Europe) and Marxism.

To say that I am an extremist, even a Slavophile, is far off. For example: I do not like the West, first and foremost, because in one way or another, they are an enemy to us and have been about enslaving, disenfranchising and destroying Russia, our faith, culture and even our very race, for 900 years. However, I also do not believe that 1. the “West” is an actual homogenous unit, which is why I specify the Anglo-Sphere, so often and 2. that we can not learn or pickup key points.

In the “West”, we have much common ground with the Germans, Italians, and others, such as, possibly the Scots and Irish. Even in America, regional elements and possible future free nations such as the Texas, Confederacy and Alaska.

Culturally too, there are few things we can pickup. The Rule of Law is often sited, but I disagree. Our biggest problem with the Rule of Law, going back to the Peter Veliki, is that we have attempted to run the government on a cheap. Thus we have never paid our civil servants a true living wage, expecting them to always make up the lack of money in some other way, which through corruption, they have never failed to do. What I do admire is the fact that Americans in particular, are always (or at least were, though they too seem to have changed) willing to change their position. We as a people are a bit to patient, especially with fools. One’s life can always be improved, even if in small, incremental ways. The lack of this is why so many of our villages look like hell, third world hell. As much as I despise the Soviet import from the West and what it did to us, I can not blame this on Marxism.

On politics, I am a monarchist, a constitutional monarchist with the monarch filling the executive for life roll and a freely elected parliament. Do not mistake this with loyalty to the Romanovs. The present crop has no more claim to the crown than my own boyar family roots, less so since they prefer to sit in France, Britian and America and make occasional visits. A Zemsky Sobor is needed to pick a candidate, regardless of his birth. Let our Faith in the Holy Father guide our choice as a united land. If the people pick Putin, so be it as well. I will honour that choice. The Throne holds a power all its own and a set of constraints all its own.

Not everybody has a strong sense of either family or country identification, but for illustrative purposes it’s helpful to substitute the word “country” with “family” and “my people” with “my loved ones.”

It works for me. I love my family regardless of what. I love my daughter regardless of what. And she will still love me even if I become a petty-thief alcoholic. She’ll feel shame and would want to reform me, and it would certainly be wrong for me to feel that she’s betraying me if she’s expressing disappointment and criticism of my actions. Well, the same with country.

A consequence is that expressing such sentiments was far more “your country”-phobic a hundred years ago, than it is today when such thoughts are considered a norm amongst most Europeans and half of Americans (the Democratic wing).

@Kolya
Thanks for filling me in on poshlost. Strangely, I prefer Nabokov’s literary criticism. Whilst he parodied any comparison between himself and Borges, I think Borges was wiser to use his strong opinions on literature to narrate metafictions and short stories. I shared Nabokov’s dislike of much that is false in art and politics, yet I also think that his views of what made great literature were themselves kitsch. Whilst he had an academic theory as to why his books were better than Dostoyevsky’s people will continue to be thrilled by Brothers Karamazov/ The Possessed when people will be dozing off over King, Queen, Knave.