We are, most of us unwittingly, bearing witness to a momentous development: the end of the thousand-year Drang nach Osten—the relentless eastward march of the reanimated corpse of the Western Roman Empire, with the Pope as its symbolic head and Vatican as its symbolic capital—known as the Crusades. Of these, the Southern Crusades are far better known in the West, while the Northern Crusades, launched in 1147, are far less widely known. But they were kept going the longest—until February 22, 2022—because, unlike China, India and just about every other non-Western country, Russia has never surrendered to anyone.
The gauntlet was thrown down in 1252, when Alexander Nevsky accepted an official document, called yarlyk, from Khan Batyj of the Golden Horde (part of the Mongolian Empire), allowing him to reign as the Grand Prince of Kiev (and thus the ruler of all of Russia), rather than ask for a blessing from the Pope in Rome, as was required of all Western kings. To these Western potentates, their claim to be ordained by God was based on approval by His head office at the Vatican; to the Russians, the Pope was just some heretic usurper. The religious distinction played itself out over time, but the notion that there is an exclusive club of Western nations who deserve to wield authority over the rest of the world has remained to this day.
There followed a series of onslaughts on Russia spanning many centuries, all stemming from the same simple principle: that which the West cannot control must be destroyed. The Germans and the Swedes kept on attacking it until 1709. Then the French attacked again in 1812; and then the Germans in 1941. The Americans were poised to attack in March of 2022, via their Ukrainian/NATO proxies, but were preempted by Russia’s Special Military Operation. Thus, the last Crusade has been aborted and further attempts seem unlikely, since, at this point, there is no question of destroying that which the West cannot control, and not just Russia but also much of the rest of the world. Even tiny North Korea can stand up to the collective West and wag a finger in its face. The thousand-year show is nearly over.
Over the previous centuries, every time after Russia expelled yet another crusader, some other Western nations would take the lead and attempt to march on Moscow: it was the Germans (as the Teutonic Knights, then the Swedes, the Poles, then some more Swedes, then the French under Napoleon, then the Germans under Hitler, and now the Americans (disguised as some hapless, clueless Ukrainians) under Biden. (Yes, the last act of this drama is most definitely a farce.) But who could possibly rise up as the next crusader du Jour? Nobody! There isn’t anyone left in the West to continue the project.
ClubOrlov 