Western-liberalism, rationalism, even the most strenuous efforts of Bolshevik dialectal materialism, have so far not been able to permanently destroy, but at most repress, these conceptions—conscious or unconscious—of what it is to be ‘Russian’. Spengler, as will be seen, even during the early period of Russian Bolshevism, already predicted that even this would take on a different, even antithetical form, to the Petrine import of Marxism. It was soon that the USSR was again paying homage to Holy Mother Russia rather than the international proletariat, much to Trotsky’s lament.
‘Russian Socialism’, Not Marxism
Of the Russian soul, the ego/vanity of the Western culture-man is missing; the persona seeks impersonal growth in service, ‘in the brother-world of the plain’. Orthodox Christianity condemns the ‘I’ as ‘sin’.[7]
The Russian concept of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and of impersonal service to the expanse of one’s land, implies another form socialism to that of Marxism. It is perhaps in this sense that Stalinism proceeded along lines often antithetical to the Bolshevism envisaged by Trotsky, et al.[8] A recent comment by an American visitor to Russia, Barbara J. Brothers, as part of a scientific delegation, states something akin to Spengler’s observation:
The Russians have a sense of connectedness to themselves and to other human beings that is just not a part of American reality. It isn’t that competitiveness does not exist; it is just that there always seems to be more consideration and respect for others in any given situation.[9]Of the Russian traditional ethos, intrinsically antithetical to Western individualism, including that of property relations, Berdyaev wrote:
Of all peoples in the world the Russians have the community spirit; in the highest degree the Russian way of life and Russian manners, are of that kind. Russian hospitality is an indication of this sense of community.[10]…
Whatever Russia is called outwardly, whether, monarchical, Bolshevik, or democratic, there is an inner—eternal—Russia that is unfolding, and whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.
Ironically, the Native American soul as described by Ohiyesa aka Dr. Charles Eastman in The Soul of the Indian is very similar to "the Russian soul" as Bolton describes it with reference to Oswald Spengler, that is, communitarian culture and deep spiritual feeling shaped by the immense space of plains and ever-receding horizons. Interestingly also, it was African-Americans that popularized this meaning of "soul" in American English.
Failure to understand this makes American liberalism illiberal in attempting to impose "the American soul" a universal. It is not going to work, and it has already resulted in huge devastation.
Foreign Policy Journal
Spiritual Roots of Russo-American Conflict
Failure to understand this makes American liberalism illiberal in attempting to impose "the American soul" a universal. It is not going to work, and it has already resulted in huge devastation.
Foreign Policy Journal
Spiritual Roots of Russo-American Conflict
Kerry R. Bolton | Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, Athens; assistant editor of the Academy's journal Ab Aeterno; "contributing writer" for Foreign Policy Journal, and proprietor of Renaissance Press
