Russia: Why Do Weirdos Love It So?

It cannot be true that fear of Communism is the root of all evil, since evil far predates communist philosophy. But it does seem to be true that love of money is the root of the fear of Communism and the love of money is said to be the root of all evil. Including the evil that is Russia today.

Be that as it may, fear of Communism certainly has done some damage – facilitating, among other things, the rise of Nazi Germany, the messes the Western world has made in the Middle East, the McCarthy hearings, the propping up of various evil regimes around the world, the current theocracy in Iran, and any number of things ever so delicately referred to as ‘human rights abuses.’

Ah well. Fear has always been evil’s best friend.

Speaking of communism, why do weirdos love Russia?

So there’s some sort of trend that I don’t understand but maybe you do. The unhinged seem to be mesmerized by and fall in love with Russia. (Remember Lee Harvey Oswald?) What is the pull that vast and forbidding landscape has on the unhinged imagination?

Back in the day, the unhinged on the left romanticized Stalin. In spite of reasons to be skeptical, idealism won over the hearts and minds of many, who convinced themselves Russia was doing something noble and wonderful and useful and gloriously futuristic. Instead of what it was actually doing, which was bleak and stupid and cruel and extraordinarily murderous.

Nowadays unhinged weirdos on the right swoon over the bleak and stupid and cruel and extraordinarily murderous. Like Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.

Romanian Weirdos Love Russia Too!

And that’s just in America. Romanian weirdos love the Russian fascists too. Russia is popular with the alt-right because it’s a bastion of fun things. Like nationalism, fascism, oligarchy, Putin, strongmen, alcohol, and murder. But it also pulls in the mystics like that Romanian weirdo (Calin Georgescu).

And some who make Christianity or Christian nationalism a core part of their identity seem to think that Russia is somehow a traditional Christian paradise!

For the record – it ain’t. You’d be closer to a traditional Christian paradise in Afghanistan under the Taliban than in Russia. (And, by the way, I strongly urge those who are obsessed with being Christian as a political stance to high-tail it over to Afghanistan, a stunningly beautiful country, and make common cause with the Taliban to establish an absolute paradise of religious repression, unsullied by the modernity of places like, you know, Iran.)

Russia, it seems, accidentally stands in for a rejection of the modern world. Almost as if the Russia of imagination had never experienced the Industrial Revolution. As if it had never become capitalist. As if it will be feudal forever, a haven against everything scary that has happened since the American Revolution.

This is crazy in the sense that Russia is in some ways more sophisticated and modern than the US. It certainly is in its mastery of digital propaganda. And in general figuring out of how to use the world zeitgeist and naivete to its own purposes.

Perhaps that’s why some are in love with this mystical, mythical Russia. It seems more competent than a bumbling US. The US has been reeling around like a drunken sailor since 9/11/2001. 9/11 pierced the facade of American invulnerability, but nothing’s pierced Russia’s such facade – in this century at least.

But there’s something deeper at work than that it seems. It’s as though religious faith, susceptibility to charisma, idealism, conspiracy theories, naivete, digital deception and more have coalesced into a pervasive idea that the ultimate manifestation of faith these days – is to call for the absolute ruin of anything left standing of the institutions put in place during and after the American Revolution. It’s a preference for chaos, and it’s apparently driven, at least in part, by a sense of social isolation. As if the chaos of destruction will bring us all together. Which, for all I know, maybe it would.

And somehow or another, accidentally or by some inherent fate, nothing seems to symbolize ruin and destruction more than the vast and forbidding landscapes of Russia.

It’s a land that lures the unwary with a siren song. It lures those who are so beyond being pretty fed up that they’ve become drunk on nihilism. It lures those who seem to long for, and may soon get, permanent winter.