Russia Is a Suicidal Slave State with a Terrible Culture

Putin is only a symptom. The moral values of the nation are the disease.

Mar 16, 2024

Thomas Sowell laughing in the style of R. Crumb

This is the 22nd installment of the new “Axis of Genocide” series at this Zionist Substack, the successor to the “Antisemitism and Culture” series which can be read in two 30-essay collections here and here.

This new series will document and analyze the antisemitic genocidal war waged against Israel by the Hamas terrorist group and its primary supporter, the Islamic regime in Iran. The accomplices in this attempt at a second Holocaust — Vladimir Putin’s criminal-gangster state in Russia and the authoritarian regime in China — will also come in for scrutiny and loud condemnation, as will the non-state actors supporting them, particularly the international Muslim Brotherhood propaganda network, and radical activists of both the far left and the far right. Other evil states and terrorist groups will also receive scrutiny. You can find a list of previous installments at the end of this post. Thank you for your support.

I am a cultural capitalist. I believe firmly in the concept of “cultural capital,” as defined and popularized by economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell, one of my biggest influences the last 15 years.

Simply put, some cultures are better at creating value and nurturing human happiness than others.

Here’s an interview Sowell gave to Forbes in 1998 explaining this, my emphases added. Apologies for a longer excerpt than usually preferred, but, damn it, he just says so much good stuff:

When economists talk about human capital, they're usually thinking at the individual level. But I would go further and add cultural capital. Attitudes exist in societies that can be beneficial or harmful. Standing in line in England-you don't find that in Italy.
Respect for the law. Just plain old honesty. In Paraguay farmers would send money into town with a German rather than with another Paraguayan.
The spirit of cooperation. Edward Banfield's book [The Moral Basis of a Backward Society] on a village in southern Italy reported they just could not get people together to do things.
These things matter enormously. Russia's got abundant resources and know-how. But there is no reliable law and no ethic of honesty.
Investors have no idea if they're going to get their money back. And the losers are the Russian people as a whole.
A few years ago some Nigerians visited Stanford. They asked me: Why do we have so many military coups? I said: Military coups occur all over the world. Why shouldn't they occur in Nigeria? Anybody who's got guns can walk into the presidential palace and take over.
The real question is: How come, in a handful of countries, they don't do it? And the answer is cultural capital. There are traditions ingrained in the soldiers themselves. If an American general says, listen, we're going to send a battalion over to the White House and take over the country, when he gives the order, they'll arrest him and put him in jail.
I think we grossly underestimate how much is determined by what's inside people's heads.

I was just looking for a quick paragraph from Sowell summarizing cultural capital. I wasn’t expecting him to drop a nuclear truth bomb on Russia, laying out the thesis of what I wanted to say today so well.

Vladimir Putin exploding in a nuclear blast in style of R. Crumb

A statistic came out this week that struck me as both very revealing and rather disgusting.

It’s not just the mass murderer Vladimir Putin who wants a genocide of the Ukrainian people, but also the Russians themselves who broadly support his iron-fisted gangster leadership and its corresponding illegal imperial war of conquest:

In a Russia at war, there is only one real candidate and only one winner: Vladimir Putin.
As Russians cast their ballots in the March 15-17 election, the 71-year-old former KGB lieutenant colonel's popularity is high amid strong support for the war in Ukraine…
Putin's approval rating is currently 86%, up from 71% shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, according to Levada Centre, a respected Russian pollster. Putin's rating also jumped during the 2008 war with Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

The problem with Russia is not Putin, it was not Soviet Communism, it was not corrupt, brutal tsars. It is Russian cultural attitudes that go back centuries.

The Russians just have a fuckin’ terrible culture.

They had some great artists, sure! Appreciations for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Tarkovsky made some great films. There’s some great ballet and some intimidating chess. There were plenty of great Russian classical composers:

But when it comes to moral values and promoting freedom and honesty — Russian culture is fucking terrible.

And the Russians themselves know it, as evidenced by their country’s notorious culture of drinking. So many Russians hate their fucking terrible culture so much that they need to blind themselves to it and destroy their lives with alcohol.

A sad painting of a Russian man drunk and crying

Seriously, they’re the worst in the world:

Below are the top countries in the world with the high rate of alcohol use disorder in males:
Russia (16.29%)
Hungary (15.29%)
Lithuania (13.35%)
South Korea (13.10%)
Latvia (11.54%)
Belarus (11.43%)
Estonia (11.09%)
Niue (10.58%)
Colombia (10.33%)
Thailand (10.18%)
Russia and Hungary have the highest rate of alcohol consumption in the male category, and Thailand has the lowest rating with only 10.18 per cent.
These countries also reported the highest levels of alcohol use disorders. The global status also included the leading alcohol-related conditions such as mental health disorders, fetal alcohol syndrome, liver cirrhosis, premature death, and transmission of infectious diseases.
The United States is not included in this category.

Need more measures for how America is objectively better and more powerful than Russia? (Seriously: we are going to finally beat these motherfuckers at some point. The Cold War was only a temporary victory.)

Let’s consider education levels and wealth. Russia is a much dumber country than America and also a much, much poorer one. From U.S. News and World Report:

vs.

For those of us who are not economically inclined, here's a simple description of GDP per capita and what it means:

Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is an economic metric that breaks down a country's economic output per person. Economists use GDP per capita to determine how prosperous countries are based on their economic growth. GDP per capita is calculated by dividing the GDP of a nation by its population. Countries with a higher GDP per capita tend to be those that are industrial, developed countries.

Is it starting to come together for you? The Russian people are content to live as slaves in service to Putin’s genocidal war machine, obscuring the truth about what their nation is doing and why, by drowning themselves to death in vodka.

Now consider: is this population really all that deeply different from the Palestinians?

The percentage of the Palestinian population that supports what Hamas did on Oct. 7:

75

Further:

In total, 87.7% of the Palestinians in the West Bank have a positive sentiment toward Hamas. Only 10.2% of the Palestinians living in the West Bank have a negative sentiment toward Hamas.

For those wanting to learn more about how terrible Russia has been for centuries, I would encourage you to check out the books of the late Harvard historian Richard Pipes, who has most influenced my views on this rotten country. Here’s a summary at The Independent Review of a chapter from his 1999 book Property and Freedom, which gives a pretty good summary of his approach (again, with my emphases added):

The history of Russia is so different from that of England, Pipes argues, largely because of the historically weak tradition of private property in Russia. Pipes uses the Weberian concept of a “patrimonial” state to describe Russia. Unlike their counterparts in England (or, indeed, in western Europe in general), the Russian monarchs historically considered themselves and were considered by others as not only the rulers but the owners of their realm. Although private property existed, it did not exist independently of the state, but “emanated from it” in the form of isolated, sometimes even arbitrary, grants by the ruler to individual subjects (p. 161). Because the Russian nobles (and everyone else, for that matter) held their property at the sufferance of the state, the czars had no great incentive to work with a parliament. In Pipes’s formulation, the lack of a strong tradition of private property led to a retardation in the development of the idea of individual liberty and to the absence of powerful representative institutions for most of Russian history.

For those wanting to learn more about how terrible Russia and its ally Hamas are today, I would encourage you to just watch daily what both are doing today in their genocidal imperial wars to annihilate the Ukrainian and the Jewish peoples.

Free societies which prize individual liberty are at war with suicidal slave states.

The conflicts are so deep-rooted that they go back centuries. Prepare yourselves: this is only going to get worse as technology grows more powerful and information continues to move faster and faster…

An army of American robots fighting Vladimir Putin in the style of R. Crumb

The previous pieces in the “Axis of Genocide” series:

Click here to read Volume 1 of the “Antisemitism and Culture” series and volume 2 here. Ten of the most important installments from this series for better understanding this Substack’s approach to fighting hate include:

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