The SMO as a major event in world history

Many are beginning to realise that what is happening cannot be explained in any way by the analysis of national interests, economic trends or energy policy, territorial disputes or ethnic tensions. Almost all the experts who try to describe what is happening with the usual pre-war terms and concepts appear at least unconvincing and often simply stupid.

To even superficially understand the state of things, one has to turn to much deeper and more fundamental categories, to everyday analyses that are hardly ever called into question.

The need for a global context

What is still called ‘Special Military Operation’ in Russia, and which is in fact a real war with the collective West, can only be understood in the context of large-scale approaches such as:

• geopolitics, based on the consideration of the deadly duel between the civilisation of the sea and the civilisation of the land, which identifies the final aggravation of the great continental war;
• civilisation analysis – the clash of civilisations (modern Western civilisation claiming hegemony against the emerging non-Western alternative civilisations)
• definition of the future architecture of the world order – the contradiction between a unipolar and a multipolar world;
• the culmination of world history – the final phase of the emergence of a Western model of global dominance facing a fundamental crisis;
• a macro-analysis of political economy built on the fixation of the collapse of global capitalism;
• finally, religious eschatology describing the ‘last times’ and their inherent conflicts, clashes and disasters, as well as the phenomenology of the coming of the Antichrist.
• All other factors – political, national, energy, resource, ethnic, legal, diplomatic, and so on – although important, are secondary and subordinate. At the very least, they do not explain or clarify anything substantial.

We place SMO in six theoretical frameworks, each of which represents entire disciplines. These disciplines have received little attention in the past, preferring more ‘positive’ and ‘rigorous’ fields of study, so they may seem ‘exotic’ or ‘irrelevant’ to many, but understanding truly global processes requires considerable distance from the private, the local and the detailed.

SMO in the context of geopolitics

All geopolitics is based on the consideration of the eternal opposition between the civilisation of the sea (thalassocracy) and the civilisation of the land (tellurocracy). A vivid expression of these beginnings in antiquity were the clashes between land-based Sparta and port-based Athens, land-based Rome and maritime Carthage.

The two civilisations differ not only strategically and geographically, but also in their main orientation: the land-based empire is based on sacred tradition, duty and hierarchical verticality led by a sacred emperor. It is a civilisation of the spirit.

Maritime powers are oligarchies, a trading system dominated by material and technical development, they are essentially pirate states, their values and traditions are contingent and ever-changing, like the sea itself. Hence their intrinsic progress, especially in the material sphere, and, conversely, the constancy of their way of life and the continuity of the civilisation of the mainland, the eternal Rome.

When politics became globalised and conquered the entire globe, the two civilisations finally became spatially embodied. Russia and Eurasia became the core of the land civilisation, while the pole of the sea civilisation is anchored in the Anglo-Saxon zone of influence: from the British Empire to the United States and the NATO bloc.

This is how geopolitics sees the history of the last centuries. The Russian Empire, the USSR and modern Russia inherited the baton of land-based civilisation. In the context of geopolitics, Russia is the eternal Rome, the Third Rome. And the modern West is the classical Carthage.

The collapse of the USSR was the most important victory for the civilisation of the sea (NATO, the Anglo-Saxons), and a terrible disaster for the civilisation of the land (Russia, the Third Rome).

Thalassocracy and Tellurocracy are like two communicating vessels, which is why those territories, having left Moscow’s control, began to come under the control of Washington and Brussels. First, this concerned Eastern Europe and the secessionist Baltic republics. Then it was the turn of the post-Soviet states. The civilisation of the sea continued the great continental war with the main enemy, the civilisation of the land, which suffered a heavy blow but did not collapse completely.

At the same time, the defeat of Moscow led to the creation of a colonial system in Russia itself in the 1990s – the Atlanticists flooded the state with their agents placed in the highest positions. This is how the modern Russian elite was formed: an extension of the oligarchy, a system of external control by the civilisation of the sea.

Some former soviet republics began preparing for full integration into the civilisation of the sea. Others followed a more cautious strategy and were in no hurry to break their historically established geopolitical ties with Moscow. Two camps were thus formed: the Eurasian camp (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Armenia) and the Atlantic camp (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan). Azerbaijan, however, moved away from this extreme position and moved closer to Moscow.

This led to the events of 2008 in Georgia and then, after the pro-NATO coup in Ukraine in 2014, to the secession of Crimea and the uprising in the Donbass. Part of the territories of the newly formed units did not want to join the Sea Civilisation and rebelled against these policies, seeking Moscow’s support.

This led to the start of the SMO in 2022. Moscow, as a land-based civilisation, became strong enough to come into direct confrontation with the Sea Civilisation in Ukraine and to reverse the trend of strengthening Thalassocracy and NATO at the expense of Tellurocracy and the Third Rome. This brings us to the geopolitics of today’s conflict. Russia, like Rome, is fighting against Carthage and its colonial satellites.

What is new in geopolitics is that Russia-Eurasia cannot act as the sole representative of civilisation on earth today. Hence the concept of a distributed Heartland. Under the new conditions, not only Russia, but also China, India, the Islamic world, Africa and Latin America are emerging as poles of the civilisation of the earth.

Furthermore, assuming the collapse of the civilisation of the sea, the western ‘great spaces’ – Europe and America itself – could become corresponding ‘Heartlands’. In the United States, this is almost openly wished for by Trump and the Republicans, who are aiming precisely at the red and inland states of the continent. In Europe, populists and proponents of the concept of ‘Fortress Europe’ intuitively gravitate towards such a scenario.

The Operation in the context of a clash of civilisations

The purely geopolitical approach corresponds to the civilisational one. But, as we have seen, a proper understanding of geopolitics itself already includes a civilisation dimension.

At the level of civilisation, two main vectors collide in the SMO:

• Liberal-democratic individualism, atomism, the dominance of the techno-material approach to man and society, the abolition of the state, gender politics, in essence the abolition of the family and gender itself, and at the limit a transition to the dominance of Artificial Intelligence (all called ‘progressivism’ or ‘the end of history’);
• fidelity to traditional values, the wholeness of culture, the superiority of spirit over matter, the preservation of family, power, patriotism, the preservation of cultural diversity and, finally, the salvation of man himself.

After the defeat of the USSR, Western civilisation made its strategy particularly radical, insisting on fine-tuning – and now! – its attitudes. Hence the forced imposition of multiple genders, dehumanisation (AI, genetic engineering, deep ecology), state-destroying ‘colour revolutions’, etc. Moreover, Western civilisation has openly identified itself with the whole of humanity, inviting all cultures and peoples to follow it immediately. Moreover, this is not a suggestion, but an order, a sort of categorical imperative of globalisation.

To some extent, all societies have been influenced by modern Western civilisation. This includes our own, where, since the 1990s, a westernised liberal approach has prevailed. We have adopted liberalism and postmodernism as a kind of operating system and have not been able to get rid of it, despite 23 years of Putin’s sovereign course.

But today, the direct geopolitical conflict with NATO and the collective West has aggravated even this civil confrontation. Hence Putin’s appeal to traditional values, the rejection of liberalism, gender politics, etc.

Although not yet fully understood by our society and ruling elite, the Operation is a direct confrontation between two civilisations:

• the liberal, globalist postmodern West and the
• traditional society, represented by Russia and those who maintain at least some distance from the West.

The war thus shifts to the level of cultural identity and acquires a profound ideological character. It becomes a war of cultures, a fierce confrontation of Tradition against the Modern and Postmodern.

The SMO in the context of the confrontation between unipolarism and multipolarism

In terms of the architecture of world politics, the SMO is the point at which it is determined whether the world will be unipolar or become multipolar. The victory of the West over the USSR ended the era of the bipolar organisation of world politics. One of the two opposing camps disintegrated and exited the scene, while the other remained and declared itself the main and only one. At that moment, Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’.

On a geopolitical level, as we have seen, it corresponded to a decisive victory of the civilisation of the sea over the civilisation of the land. More cautious experts in international relations (C. Krauthammer) called the situation a ‘unipolar moment’, pointing out that the resulting system had the possibility of becoming stable, i.e. a truly ‘unipolar world’, but might not hold up and give way to another configuration.

This is exactly what is being decided in Ukraine today: a Russian victory would mean that the ‘unipolar moment’ is irreversibly over and that multipolarity has arrived as something irreversible. Otherwise, the supporters of a unipolar world will have the chance to delay their end, at least at all costs.

Here again, we must refer to the geopolitical concept of the ‘distributed Heartland’, which makes an important correction in classical geopolitics: if the civilisation of the Sea is now consolidated and represents something unitary, a planetary system of liberal globalism under the strategic leadership of Washington and NATO command, then, although the directly opposing civilisation of the Earth is represented by Russia alone (which refers to classical geopolitics), Russia fights not only for itself, but for the principle of the Heartland, recognising the legitimacy of the land.

This is why Russia embodies a multipolar world order, in which the West is entrusted with the role of a single region, one of the poles, with no reason to impose its own criteria and values as something universal.

The Special Military Operation in the context of world history

Modern Western civilisation, however, is the result of the historical vector that has developed in Western Europe since the beginning of the modern age. It is neither a deviation nor an excess. It is the logical conclusion of a society that has taken the path of desacralisation, de-Christianisation, rejection of the spiritual vertical, the path of the atheistic man and material prosperity. This is what is called ‘progress’ and this ‘progress’ includes the total rejection and destruction of the values, foundations and principles of traditional society.

The last five centuries of Western civilisation are the story of the struggle of modernity against tradition, of man against God, of atomism against wholeness. In a sense, it is a story of struggle between West and East, as the modern West has become the embodiment of ‘progress’, while the rest of the world, especially the East, has been perceived as a territory of Tradition, the sacred way of life preserved.

Western-style modernisation was inseparable from colonisation, because those who imposed their rules of the game ensured that they only worked in their favour. Thus, gradually, the whole world came under the influence of Western modernity and, from a certain point onwards, no one could afford to question the validity of such a ‘progressive’ and profoundly Western world image.

Modern Western liberal globalism, Atlanticist civilisation itself, its geopolitical and geostrategic platform in the form of NATO, and ultimately the unipolar world order itself are the culmination of historical ‘progress’ as deciphered by Western civilisation itself. It is precisely this kind of ‘progress’ that is being challenged by the conduct of the SMO.

If we are faced with the culmination of the West’s historical movement towards that goal that was outlined 500 years ago and is now almost achieved, then our victory in the SMO will mean – no more and no less – a dramatic change in the entire course of world history. The West was on its way to its goal, and at the last stage Russia obstructed this historic mission, turned the universalism of ‘progress’ as understood by the West into a local private regional phenomenon, deprived the West of its right to represent humanity and its destiny.

This is what is at stake and what is being decided today in the trenches of the SMO.

The SMO in the context of the global crisis of capitalism

Modern Western civilisation is capitalist. It is based on the omnipotence of capital, the dominance of finance and banking interests. Capitalism became the destiny of modern Western society from the moment it broke with Tradition, which rejected obsession with the material aspects of being and sometimes severely restricted certain economic practices (such as interest growth) as something deeply ungodly, unjust and immoral.

Only by ridding itself of religious taboos has the West been able to fully embrace capitalism. Capitalism is inseparable neither historically nor doctrinally from atheism, materialism and individualism, which in a fully spiritual and religious tradition are not tolerated at all.

It is precisely the unbridled development of capitalism that has led Western civilisation to atomisation, atomisation, the transformation of all values into commodities and, ultimately, the equating of man himself to a thing.

Critical philosophers of the modern West have unanimously identified nihilism in this capitalist explosion of civilisation. First there was the ‘death of God’ and then, logically, the ‘death of man’, who lost all fixed content without God; hence post-humanism, AI and man-machine fusion experiments. This is the culmination of ‘progress’ in its liberal-capitalist interpretation.

The modern West is the triumph of capitalism at its historical apogee. Once again, the reference to geopolitics clarifies the whole picture: the civilisation of the sea, Carthage, the oligarchic system and were based on the omnipotence of money. Had Rome not won the Punic Wars, capitalism would have arrived a couple of millennia earlier: only Rome’s valour, honour, hierarchy, service, spirit and sacredness could have stopped the Carthaginian oligarchy’s attempt to impose its own world order.

The successors of Carthage (the Anglo-Saxons) were luckier and in the last five centuries have finally managed to accomplish what their spiritual ancestors failed to do: impose capitalism on humanity.

Of course, today’s Russia does not even remotely imagine that SWO is a revolt against global capital and its omnipotence.

And that is exactly what it is.

SMO in the context of the End Times

One usually looks at history as progress. However, this view of the essence of historical time has only recently taken root since the Enlightenment. The first comprehensive theory of progress can be said to have been formulated in the mid-18th century by the French liberal Ann Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781). It has since become dogma, even though it was originally only part of liberal ideology, which is not shared by all.

In terms of the theory of progress, modern Western civilisation represents its highest point. It is a society in which the individual is virtually free of all forms of collective identity, that is, as free as possible. Free from religion, ethnicity, state, race, property, even gender, and tomorrow from the human race. This is the final frontier that progress intends to reach.

Then, according to liberal futurologists, there will be the moment of the singularity, when human beings will cede the initiative of development to artificial intelligence. Once upon a time (according to the same theory of progress) apes passed the baton to the human species. Today, humanity, having risen to the next stage of evolution, is ready to hand over the initiative to neural networks. This is what the modern globalist West is directly leading to.

However, if we abstract from the liberal ideology of progress and turn to the religious worldview, we get a completely different picture. Christianity, as well as other religions, sees world history as a regression, as a turning away from paradise. Even after the coming of Christ and the triumph of the universal Church there must come a time of apostasy, a time of great suffering and the coming of the Antichrist, the son of perdition.

This is bound to happen, but the faithful are called to stand up for their truth, to remain faithful to the Church and to God, and to resist the Antichrist even under these extremely difficult conditions. What for a liberal is ‘progress’, for a Christian is not merely ‘regress’, but an unholy parody.

The last phase of progress – total digitisation, migration to the meta-universe, the abolition of gender and the overcoming of man with the transfer of initiative to artificial intelligence – in the eyes of the believer of any traditional denomination is direct confirmation that the Antichrist has come into the world and this is his civilisation.

Thus we get another dimension of the Operation, which the President of Russia, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Secretary of the Security Council, the head of the SVR and other high-ranking officials of Russia, seemingly far removed from any mysticism or profanity, are increasingly speaking directly about. But that is exactly what they are: they are stating the pure truth, which is consistent with the traditional societal view of the modern Western world.

This time it is not a metaphor, that opposing sides of the conflict have sometimes rewarded each other. Now it is something more. Western civilisation, even in modern times, has never been so close to a direct and overt embodiment of the Antichrist’s reign. Religion and its truths have long since been abandoned by the West in favour of an aggressive secularism and an atheistic, materialistic worldview assumed as absolute truth.

However, it had not yet invaded the very nature of man, stripping him of his gender, his family and, soon, his very human nature. Western Europe set out 500 years ago to build a society without God and against God, but this process has only now reached its climax. This is the religious and eschatological essence of the ‘end of history’ thesis.

It is essentially a declaration, in the language of liberal philosophy, that the coming of the Antichrist has happened. At least, that is how it appears in the eyes of people of religious denominations belonging to mainstream society.

SMO is the beginning of the eschatological battle between sacred Tradition and the modern world, which precisely in the form of liberal ideology and globalist politics has reached its most sinister, toxic and radical expression. This is why we increasingly speak of Armageddon, the last decisive battle between the armies of God and Satan.

The role of Ukraine

At all levels of our analysis, it turns out that the role of Ukraine itself in this crucial confrontation, however one interprets it, is on the one hand key (it is the Armageddon camp). On the other hand, the Kiev regime is not even remotely an independent entity. It is just a space, a territory where two absolute global cosmic forces converge. What may appear to be a local conflict based on territorial claims is, in reality, anything but.

Neither side cares about Ukraine per se. The stakes are much higher. As it happens, Russia has a special mission in world history: to thwart a civilisation of pure evil at a critical juncture in world history, and by initiating Operation Military, the Russian leadership has undertaken this mission, and the border between two ontological armies, between two fundamental vectors of human history, lies precisely on the territory of Ukraine.

Its authorities have sided with the devil: hence all the horror, terror, violence, hatred, vicious repression of the Church, degeneration and sadism in Kiev. But the evil is deeper than the excesses of Ukrainian Nazism: its centre is outside Ukraine, and the forces of the Antichrist are simply using Ukrainians to achieve their goals.

The Ukrainian people are divided not only along political lines, but also in spirit. Some are on the side of the civilisation of the earth, of Holy Russia, on the side of Christ. Others – on the opposite side. Thus society is divided along the most fundamental boundary – eschatological, of civilisation and simultaneously geopolitical. Thus the very land that was the cradle of ancient Russia, of our nation, has become the area of the great battle, even more significant and extensive than the mythical Kurakshetra, the subject of Hindu tradition.

The forces that have converged on this field of destiny, however, are so fundamental that they many times transcend any inter-ethnic contradictions. It is not just a division of Ukrainians into Russophiles and Russophobes, but a division of humanity on a much more fundamental basis.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini