Based Camp - Russia is Not the Country you Think it Is

00:00:00.000 This also shows me that the argument that this is about self-defense for Russia is wrong or that this is about defense against NATO is wrong.

00:00:06.560 Oh, yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self-defense capacity that they have.

00:00:11.900 Yeah, if he was actually worried about self-defense, he would have stopped the war a long time ago.

00:00:17.800 Leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group. 0.64

00:00:25.560 Yeah.

00:00:26.240 Which is what he is putting in place.

00:00:28.560 You see, kill bots have a preset kill limit.

00:00:31.700 Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.

00:00:37.620 Like we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine.

00:00:40.280 Like, whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being like funneled back into Democrat politicians' pockets and stuff like it?

00:00:46.900 It's like, yeah, all of that is true.

00:00:49.480 But you know what we're not sending to the Ukraine right now?

00:00:52.040 Our own people.

00:00:52.840 Because it's neutralizing what was once a non-trivial threat.

00:00:56.840 Not a non-trivial threat, the single greatest threat to America's geopolitical power for the last century.

00:01:04.480 Would you like to know more?

00:01:06.860 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:01:07.760 I'm excited for you to bring some stats to the table.

00:01:10.060 Stats episodes are always the best.

00:01:12.100 But I also want to apply sort of geopolitical knowledge to a world issue that I've noticed, especially within right-leaning communities.

00:01:19.940 There's a lot of misconceptions about what's going on and what the motivations are of various players. 0.95

00:01:25.680 Yeah, I titled our stupid stream yard room, Russia. 0.96

00:01:30.180 I do not think that country means what you think it means. 0.99

00:01:33.380 Which is the thing that came across my inbox this week, which I thought was fascinating.

00:01:40.100 So a very underrated substack called Axis of Ordinary by Alexander Kruhl is a daily part of my reading routine, even though I have cut pretty much everything else out, sadly, due to workload and whatnot.

00:01:55.320 But y'all check it out.

00:01:56.900 It's great.

00:01:57.580 He has a lot of spicy links.

00:01:58.840 A lot of it's AI.

00:01:59.740 A lot of it's Ukraine.

00:02:01.120 And then a lot of some of it's psychology and science.

00:02:04.140 He'll share a roundup of links with short summaries.

00:02:07.020 Very great substack.

00:02:08.380 It's free to subscribe.

00:02:09.980 And he's a very thoughtful person, though I've never talked with him.

00:02:12.420 I don't know him.

00:02:13.600 But on a recent roundup, a daily roundup that he shared, he shared this about Russia, which very much surprised me.

00:02:22.460 So he starts with a quote from Vladimir Putin.

00:02:25.920 Russia's cultural and ethnic diversity is Russia's strength.

00:02:29.200 Our state was built around the values of multi-ethnic harmony.

00:02:33.200 Then Kruhl proceeds to write.

00:02:35.440 Many people on the political right admire Russia and see Putin as the savior of white Christendom.

00:02:41.400 What they don't know is that Russia is a higher percentage of Muslims than, say, Germany, and it's not because of an open border policy.

00:02:48.600 Worse, instead of building a wall, Putin has sacrificed thousands of Russian soldiers, not only to keep Muslims in Russia against their will, but to give them Russian passports, which has led to numerous major terror attacks, such as the Beslan school massacre that ended with the deaths of 334 people, which I haven't even heard of.

00:03:06.300 At an official event where Putin gifted a copy of the Koran during a visit to a mosque, he noted that the desecration of the Koran is a crime in Russia.

00:03:15.020 Nikita Zurelev, a teenager who burned a Koran, was extradited to Chechnya under Putin's watch.

00:03:23.000 There he was tortured and beaten on camera.

00:03:24.960 In 2015, Putin inaugurated the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, a city where tens of thousands of Muslims fill the street for Eid prayers.

00:03:34.180 Russia has also introduced the Islamic banking system.

00:03:37.760 P.S., one of Russia's most famous TV hosts, the Jewish Vladimir Solovyev, recently chanted Alo Akbar in front of Russia's Islamist mercenaries.

00:03:47.160 So, I think the biggest thing that really surprised me here was this note about Germany, that there's a higher percentage of Muslims in Russia than Germany.

00:03:59.140 Wild.

00:03:59.760 Because everyone, you have this vision of Russia, which is these flound bombshell women and these stoic statuesque men, right? 1.00

00:04:10.040 Well, the vision, I mean, I want to be clear, and this is where people get Russia wrong.

00:04:14.160 They get it wrong for a few core reasons.

00:04:16.200 One is they are aware that there is this superficial view of Russia that was the way we painted them as our enemy in the Cold War.

00:04:24.340 Yes, yeah.

00:04:25.000 And then there's the new view of Russia, which is coming because of Putin's psyops campaigns in the West.

00:04:32.440 Specifically, he wanted to appeal to right-leaning political groups, and he did that by acting as if he was like this.

00:04:40.800 And keep in mind, we've got nothing against Muslims or anything like that.

00:04:43.980 But what I would say is that the image that a lot of people have of Putin is not correlated with his behavior at all.

00:04:51.820 Yeah, he represents a bastion of, well, they say Western culture, Western civilization, but really people are referring to broadly Christianity, if I have that right.

00:04:59.520 Yeah, they're referring to like an old school, like homophobic, which Russia is, I should be clear about that, white-centered Christian. 0.98

00:05:07.820 And a lot of people, as we point out, I mean, racists are generally dumber than the general population. 0.91

00:05:13.820 So it's very easy to confuse them with these sorts of tactics. 0.96

00:05:17.180 And a lot of them have actually been swayed into believing this iteration of Putin and believing his motivations around this war.

00:05:25.180 Because I think the question could be, because you could say, well, why is Putin doing all this, if his goal is the savior of like old European values and a return to, you know, Christendom and a return to Esno states?

00:05:39.180 And it's because that's not what Russia is doing. That is not why they are invading the Ukraine. That has nothing to do with it.

00:05:46.880 This idea of they're not, and a lot of people on the right, I've actually seen believe this, like right-wing conspiracy theorists, that there are like Nazis in the Ukraine, which there were.

00:05:56.940 There were Nazi sympathy groups in the Ukraine that were bigger than in other regions, but they were not, like it wasn't like the country was about to become a Nazi state or something like that, right?

00:06:06.140 This would be the same way that the left will find, you know, somebody making okay signs at a rally and then be like, oh, we're going to go attack them or Chan.

00:06:16.820 This is a long story about how this became a thing in the U.S.

00:06:19.380 But there are occasional Nazis in like U.S. rightist groups as well, right?

00:06:24.420 We allowed that to be used as justification for the extermination of those entire populations. 0.78

00:06:31.260 Like that's quite another thing.

00:06:33.120 And that isn't his justification because that that's not what he's fighting for, right?

00:06:37.620 He's not fighting for a return to this whole system.

00:06:39.900 If you're wondering just how little Putin cares about Nazism as a serious threat, here is the guy who named the Wagner group, the primary fighting group he has in the Ukraine right now, covered in Nazi tattoos.

00:06:53.860 Here is a Wagner soldier covered in Nazi tattoos.

00:06:57.420 So the question is, what is he fighting for?

00:06:59.720 Like what motivates Russia's foreign policy decisions?

00:07:04.740 Well, when you look at Russia's recent history since Putin came to power, and even before that to an extent, it becomes clear what's motivating Russia.

00:07:14.720 The mistake is seeing Russia as a nation state because it doesn't think, act, or is motivated like a nation state.

00:07:25.340 It is motivated like a oil and gas cartel, really like a mob that makes the majority of its money from oil and gas.

00:07:33.060 And when I say the majority of its money, over 50% of the state revenue in Russia comes from oil and gas.

00:07:39.540 That's huge.

00:07:40.620 It motivates their every decision.

00:07:42.840 Like I can't overstate how big that would be if 50% of your state's revenue and the state was a totalitarian state, was a single leader, was coming from one industry.

00:07:54.140 Basically, that means that that state leader is basically CEO of a company in that industry with no laws that apply to them, interested in advancing the cause of that industry.

00:08:04.460 And we can see this because of how much money Putin has been squirreling away.

00:08:07.560 He hasn't been using the money that he's generating to improve Russia's quality of life or anything like that.

00:08:13.200 He has been taking huge, huge amounts and squirreling it away for his descendants.

00:08:17.180 So the question is, well, where do you see this in foreign policy, right?

00:08:22.540 Well, so first, when the Soviet Union broke up, their first goal – and I'm going to put a video here. 0.71

00:08:30.420 There's a great video if you want to go into this in great detail where they go over this in way more details, but I'm just going to give you the top notes.

00:08:36.000 If you find these topics interesting and want to go much deeper on them as well as look into sources, I strongly suggest a video called Russia's Catastrophic Oil and Gas Problem by Real Life Lore, which is one of the best summaries of this particular subject I've seen on the internet.

00:08:50.900 There's a huge problem with a lot of oil in Kazakhstan because that could be a competitor to Russia.

00:08:56.460 So they made a point of owning 42% of their oil pipelines and industry, and they're basically a client state, so they don't really worry about them.

00:09:04.160 And then they ensured that all of the oil that was going out of Kazakhstan was being shipped through Russia, through pipes that go through Russia and out of Russia's port.

00:09:11.720 So Azerbaijan also had a lot of oil in the region, but Azerbaijan could only get its oil out without going through a Russian-controlled area or one of their enemy areas by putting a pipeline through Georgia.

00:09:25.080 What happened immediately after they put this pipeline through Georgia?

00:09:27.960 Russia invades Georgia.

00:09:29.380 Okay.

00:09:30.620 Let's go a bit further into the future.

00:09:32.260 Wait, what about all that news coverage about Putin having this obsession with Russia's history and this narrative?

00:09:41.500 We're going to hit that in a second.

00:09:42.640 I'm just going over the data first.

00:09:44.620 All right.

00:09:45.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:45.480 This is interesting.

00:09:47.200 All right.

00:09:47.720 So then a discovery gets made in the Ukraine.

00:09:51.040 The Ukraine controls Europe's second largest known reserves of natural gas.

00:09:56.180 And almost 80% of that is east of the Dnipro River, which is important.

00:10:00.380 So they were then in talks with, they had a deal signed with Shell, Exxon, and Mobil to come in and produce that gas.

00:10:08.900 Well, that was a huge chunk of that that was under those contracts was in the Donbass.

00:10:14.260 That was the region that Russia first annexed a while back.

00:10:17.940 That ended up invalidating all of the contracts that they had signed to improve this.

00:10:22.760 And to give you an idea of how much this would matter to Russia, right now their primary competitor in that space is in Scandinavia.

00:10:30.040 But this coming onto the market would represent 3x what Scandinavia is bringing to the market in terms of a competitor.

00:10:36.080 This is actually sort of existential for Russia to stop because – and a lot of people are like, yeah, but they're not – like they do the math.

00:10:44.040 They're like, okay, but even if they capture all of these reserves and then start selling them, it doesn't – like it doesn't add to their bottom line budget that much.

00:10:53.880 And it's like, bro, you're completely misunderstanding their goal here.

00:10:57.280 Their goal is not to sell it.

00:10:58.860 It's to prevent it from entering the market.

00:11:02.400 When Russia attacked, they had just gotten – the Ukraine, they had just gotten another pro-Rest president. 0.70

00:11:10.120 And things were beginning to look stable enough for the oil companies to begin investing and developing these assets, which would have been really catastrophic for Russia.

00:11:19.960 And we need to – you know, to get an idea of how much Russia thinks about this sort of stuff.

00:11:24.460 For a while, I think it was up until – yeah, as late as 2005, 80% of Russian oil went through the Ukraine Brotherhood Network.

00:11:31.300 And this was always causing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine because the Ukraine would ask for, like, charge fees on this.

00:11:37.680 And a lot of conservatives are like, well, the Ukraine was just robbing Russia, and so it makes sense that they had to go in to gain control of this network, right? 0.54

00:11:44.820 But that's actually false.

00:11:46.900 Russia had already built, by the time the war had started, the two Nord Stream pipelines and a separate pipeline that went south around the Ukraine,

00:11:55.620 and they weren't shipping nearly as much oil through the Brotherhood Network anymore.

00:11:59.300 So, no, it was not about access to those pipelines.

00:12:02.620 Anyone who is telling you that is lying to you.

00:12:05.000 That wasn't what was causing the conflict anymore.

00:12:07.180 The conflict was the development of these new natural gas.

00:12:10.260 And so being an oil company that also runs a state, you know, they would – something like this makes sense if you fundamentally do not care about your citizens.

00:12:18.920 And this is where it gets really interesting and where what Russia did becomes so absolutely insane in the light of what you're hearing.

00:12:27.140 Like, oh, are they building – like, I've heard that he really cares about the history and everything like that and blah, blah, blah.

00:12:32.960 Russia has a desperately low fertility rate.

00:12:35.140 Ukraine has a desperately low fertility rate.

00:12:37.420 He's basically killing an entire generation of young men.

00:12:41.360 And much more –

00:12:42.140 And you must know it.

00:12:43.080 He can't be blind to this for sure.

00:12:45.340 Much more than you would have in a historic context.

00:12:48.900 So it was really fascinating.

00:12:50.520 Like, this is the first time in history a nation is essentially genociding itself through something that is really, really interesting about the world.

00:12:57.740 What one is, is either, like, two of the most culturally aligned groups in the world, right?

00:13:01.940 Like, he's killing his own people with his own people. 0.98

00:13:04.860 Like, if you care about, like, the Slavic nationality, this is the very last thing you would do if you had an eye to fertility rates. 0.99

00:13:11.700 I'm – Peter Zaihan's theory, we'll get to it in a second.

00:13:15.040 It's also probably super wrong.

00:13:18.420 I don't agree with everything Peter Zaihan says.

00:13:20.380 I think he's smart, but I think he's wrong.

00:13:22.240 This is being – well, I'll just get to the theory right now.

00:13:24.460 Okay.

00:13:24.560 Yeah, dive into it.

00:13:26.020 Peter Zaihan thinks that the reason that this war is happening is twofold.

00:13:30.720 One is Russia wants additional population, and this is their last chance to really make a play for these resources, demographically speaking, which is true. 0.97

00:13:37.980 And the second is, is they're trying to capture choke points, which are important for invasions into their territory.

00:13:45.020 And they think that by capturing the region of the Ukraine, they can capture more of these choke points, and so they're sort of forced into this war.

00:13:51.280 I do not think that is it. 0.99

00:13:52.860 The truth is, is while Russia pretends that NATO wants to attack it all the time, anyone who has the barest context of reality knows that NATO is a bunch of pussies. 0.99

00:14:03.100 They are not going to wage an aggressive war. 0.97

00:14:05.540 They may – like, if they were able to loop Ukraine into their dealings, it was because Russia was threatening Ukraine.

00:14:13.660 Like, NATO couldn't even get Sweden and Norway in, right, because of Russia's saber-rattling. 0.54

00:14:19.540 You really think they were going to get the Ukraine in, realistically speaking? 0.89

00:14:23.560 No.

00:14:24.200 Like, it's just silly, silly, silly argument there that they were forcing to do this because he had kept Sweden and Norway from even joining NATO, which are, like, hugely culturally aligned with Europe.

00:14:35.740 Until he did this, which then gave them the cover to join.

00:14:38.940 So, no, that would have – and very obviously that would have been the consequence of this attack. 0.99

00:14:43.180 You know, so, no, that was stupid as well. 0.99

00:14:45.040 That is not why he was doing this. 0.99

00:14:46.600 But then the second thing is to Peter Zyhan's play.

00:14:50.300 Okay, so he's going out there and he's trying to capture these choke points.

00:14:52.980 But choke points don't matter in the type of war that he needs to defend against.

00:14:57.580 The type of war that he needs to defend against are people coming in and assassinating him or people fermenting unrest within his population.

00:15:06.700 You know, that's the way the Western world takes people out.

00:15:10.520 And it's the way the Western world has taken people out for a while at this point outside of countries that are, you know, that have any way to protect themselves.

00:15:18.520 Well, he seems duly afraid of that as well.

00:15:20.780 Well, no, I mean, when we go to countries that, like, when we go to war, right, they're often countries that don't have, like, big formal militaries.

00:15:28.100 They are multiple levels below us in the tech tree in something like Siv.

00:15:33.220 Russia is not like that to us.

00:15:35.860 You know, they have nuclear weapons.

00:15:37.280 We're not going to go in and attack them in that way.

00:15:40.740 And as such, he needs to focus much more on maintaining local support, which he had done pretty well, than he needs to go out and try to capture, like, geographic choke points.

00:15:52.560 He needs to focus much more on the international politics, which he was doing very well.

00:15:56.720 He was bringing the-

00:15:57.340 So what's going on?

00:15:57.880 Is he losing his mind?

00:15:59.900 No, we'll get to it.

00:16:01.020 No, it was all economic play for him.

00:16:03.760 But we'll get to the economic play in just a second.

00:16:05.860 So he's poorly prioritizing, is what you're saying.

00:16:08.120 He's very poorly prioritizing. 0.98

00:16:09.660 And it's actually incredibly stupid prioritization, and we can get to why in just a second. 0.95

00:16:13.900 But, you know, he had won a major victory in turning the U.S. right to become a pro-Russian party and the European right to become a pro-Russian party. 0.96

00:16:23.220 And I think that he lost that with, like, basically all of the sane thinkers who aren't just, like, conspiracy people who believe all the stuff that's being fed to them.

00:16:31.020 And so then we want to talk about, like, the self-genocide of Russia. 0.66

00:16:34.920 So Russia's in a very unique position from a global history perspective in that they are able to genocide themselves. 0.95

00:16:39.820 See, historically speaking, if I was a country like Russia and I was just sending all of my young men to another country to die and they were dying at the rates that they're dying right now, I would have some restraint.

00:16:52.200 Like, I would keep some men home, right? 1.00

00:16:55.660 Because I need to be able to defend the homeland.

00:16:58.620 The way they are acting isn't like that.

00:17:01.260 They are not acting as if they are trying to, it's like that famous scene.

00:17:05.540 How are you doing this, Vincent?

00:17:08.780 How have you done any of this?

00:17:11.360 We have to go back.

00:17:12.880 It's too late for that.

00:17:13.920 We're closer to the other side.

00:17:16.340 What other side?

00:17:17.760 You want to drown us both?

00:17:18.860 You want to know how I did it?

00:17:22.980 This is how I did it, Anton.

00:17:25.020 I never saved anything for the swim back.

00:17:27.820 Except they need them to make babies. 1.00

00:17:30.100 And they are just dying in numbers that you would.

00:17:35.080 And this also shows me that the argument that this is about self-defense for Russia is wrong or that this is about defense against NATO is wrong.

00:17:41.920 Yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self-defense capacity that they have.

00:17:47.260 Yeah, if he was actually worried about self-defense, he would have stopped the war a long time ago and just stuck on what he had.

00:17:55.040 The moment that he realized this was going to be a long slog or last year or at any point, even now, he should stop because his country is becoming weaker and weaker and weaker in terms of if NATO actually did decide to attack.

00:18:07.880 And the rest of the world no longer respects his country as a place to do business.

00:18:12.400 Now, a lot of people can be like, oh, but he went into this war thinking it would be a quick war.

00:18:16.620 Quick war or long war, it still went against his best interests. 0.93

00:18:20.520 And he knew it wasn't going to be a quick war.

00:18:22.480 It was in the first few months of the war.

00:18:24.680 So he should have recalibrated.

00:18:26.900 He should have stopped sending men to die.

00:18:28.900 So you could say, oh, but he's doing all of this for some sort of like ancient reunification goal.

00:18:35.160 Yeah, back to my what I kept reading about him.

00:18:38.260 This had nothing to do with logic.

00:18:39.800 It was about a narrative of Russia that Putin is obsessed with restoring.

00:18:44.380 Yeah.

00:18:44.680 So there is something in wars called Kassia Belli.

00:18:48.140 And anyone who has played, you know, Europa Universalis or Kings, Crusader Kings 2 or 3, Kassia Bellis are very important.

00:18:57.240 You can't just attack a territory without having a reason to attack the territory.

00:19:01.140 Even the U.S. does this.

00:19:02.180 Everyone does this.

00:19:02.980 They make up some logical justification for attacking the territory.

00:19:06.020 He can't say, I need to prevent them from getting these natural gas deals done.

00:19:09.900 So what he says is, and he had a very strong Kassia Belli.

00:19:14.320 Like Ukraine was, from a certain standpoint, unjustly separated from Russia, right?

00:19:19.560 It's very important when you're examining any war that's happening to not misconstrue the Kassia Belli

00:19:26.040 for the actual motivation for going into war.

00:19:30.200 Look at something like Vietnam is a great example. 1.00

00:19:33.400 The Kassia Belli for the war was that we did not want Vietnamese people to suffer under a communist dictator.

00:19:42.800 But the actual motivation for the war was domino theory in fighting against communist expansion

00:19:50.380 where they were our primary geopolitical rivals.

00:19:54.060 To put it another way, a Kassia Belli is how you explain the war to your heart.

00:19:58.860 But it's not logically why you're actually spending the billions of dollars that it actually costs to go into a war.

00:20:06.880 Nor the lies of your people during the war.

00:20:09.780 Now, if an individual is looking at this and they're like, come on, a major world power wouldn't go to war just over oil and gas.

00:20:19.460 And here I just have to, like, what world have you been living in in the last century?

00:20:26.580 If you think that oil and gas was even a major motivator in some of America's recent wars,

00:20:33.440 consider that over 50% of our government's income is not funded by those industries directly, okay?

00:20:41.140 In Russia, it is.

00:20:42.800 And the guy who owns all of those companies, practically speaking, is also the guy who runs the entire government.

00:20:50.380 Like, I am not actually against his justification for the war.

00:20:55.160 The justification does make, like, a historic context of why you can declare wars.

00:21:00.340 It makes logical sense.

00:21:02.120 There was a Russian population in the Ukraine.

00:21:04.080 There was political unrest in the Ukraine that could be tied to Nazi groups.

00:21:08.680 Like, all of that can look very aesthetically good.

00:21:10.740 The problem was, is that as soon as he realized the actual cost of the war, even with all of that justification,

00:21:19.780 leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group.

00:21:27.760 Yeah.

00:21:28.440 Which is what he is putting in place.

00:21:31.740 I mean, he will be remembered in history as the man who killed the Slavic people in the Slavic world. 1.00

00:21:37.540 It is that anyone, and this is where, like, I'm often, like, people are like, oh, but he's sort of winning at times.

00:21:46.240 And it's, like, his theory for war, and we've literally seen this, is the Zack Brannigan theory of war.

00:21:51.960 The Killbots? A trifle. 0.92

00:21:53.880 It was simply a matter of outsmarting them.

00:21:56.060 You see, Killbots have a preset kill limit.

00:21:58.580 Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.

00:22:04.620 Kiff, show them the medal I won.

00:22:06.460 And that's basically his strategy right now, is just wave after wave of a scarce and increasingly scarce commodity for Russians,

00:22:14.680 which is human beings which are dying out in Russia.

00:22:19.180 And you could say, well, you could fix this with some form of, like, polygyny or something like that among the remaining Russians. 0.84

00:22:23.800 And it's like, it doesn't have a cultural background for that, and I don't see him as implementing that.

00:22:29.760 I don't see that working. No.

00:22:30.900 Yeah. What's going to happen is they've already lost, like, basically all of their talent, which is hugely important.

00:22:37.900 If you create an action that makes every man who is, like, a competent programmer or a competent worker in any extent, leave the country, which largely happened.

00:22:48.320 And the exodus of young men from the country was catastrophically large.

00:22:52.920 You have made your country, like, in terms of, like, genetic and cultural selection effects, markedly less competent and less able to compete in where the future of the world is going. 0.93

00:23:03.100 And so, you know, I'll title this episode something ultra-provocative, like, Putin is more of a – or people who sent for Putin are, like, more pathetic than the people who sent for Biden. 0.90

00:23:12.880 Because in truth, Biden is a better leader than Putin. 0.92

00:23:17.840 With as bad as Biden is, at least he's not genociding his own ethnic group, you know.

00:23:23.020 And I'd also point out, now, a lot of people are like, why is the U.S. fighting here?

00:23:27.700 Like, we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine.

00:23:30.420 Like, whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being, like, funneled back into Democrat politicians' pockets and stuff like it?

00:23:36.740 It's like, yeah, all of that is true.

00:23:39.460 But do you know what we're not sending to the Ukraine right now?

00:23:42.040 Our own people.

00:23:43.440 And people are like, what?

00:23:45.320 The U.S. fight Russian interests? 0.50

00:23:47.860 That would never happen.

00:23:49.300 Excuse me.

00:23:50.220 Like, is history not taught anymore?

00:23:51.920 Our last, like, two giant bloody wars, both Vietnam and Korea, were about fighting Russian interests.

00:24:01.280 Well, even the last war that was, you know, really, really big in society was the Cold War, you know?

00:24:08.280 Yeah, all of it.

00:24:09.700 And Russia, if you look at my sister-in-law, actually worked in counterterrorism within Georgia for a while.

00:24:16.120 To clarify, she is an American without any Georgian sympathies.

00:24:20.440 She was just working in Georgian terrorism because that is where there were more active terrorists when she was trying to learn her chops.

00:24:28.880 And I mentioned the Georgia part to show just how much she knows about the geopolitics of Russia specifically.

00:24:35.420 And she's an expert in the space.

00:24:37.340 And she's like, look, all of the, like, if you look at the actual, like, probability of war between countries, the probability of war between the United States and Russia is still by far the highest in the world of, like, any major power.

00:24:48.900 Like, we-

00:24:49.240 Just because of the nuclear arsenal?

00:24:51.020 Is that-

00:24:51.340 It has to do with the state control structure, the economic interests that we have, and the lack of economic ties that we have.

00:24:58.980 Whereas something like a war with China, unless they, like, literally just go crazy, is much less likely because they are so reliant on imports for, like, basically economically surviving.

00:25:10.260 Whereas the same isn't true for Russia.

00:25:12.420 I mean, you could see, even with all the sanctions, they, because so much of their state is dependent on oil, they-

00:25:16.480 Isn't Iran, then, in a similar, Iran, in a similar position?

00:25:20.340 Yeah, Iran is in a similar position.

00:25:21.800 And there is a high likelihood of war between the U.S. and Iran, which is one of the reasons we're always so, like, feisty with them. 1.00

00:25:27.280 But yeah, so there was a high likelihood-

00:25:28.660 They haven't been very feisty with them.

00:25:30.580 There was a high likelihood of a future war with Russia.

00:25:35.420 And the fact that Russia has now- 0.57

00:25:38.400 And in terms of what wars cost, like, I would encourage you to look at the cost adjusted, like, what did the Korean War cost us?

00:25:44.940 What did the Vietnam War cost us?

00:25:46.600 You're too lazy to go and check this.

00:25:49.240 The entire Ukraine war so far has cost us half of what we would spend on the Vietnam War in just one year.

00:25:57.600 And keep in mind that the Vietnam War lasted ten years.

00:26:02.240 And that war wasn't even directly about weakening Russian interests or killing Russians.

00:26:08.920 In this war, Russia is literally depleting their own military potentiality permanently.

00:26:16.800 Now, here you might be saying something like,

00:26:19.300 Well, that's quite monstrous of you to use, you know, Ukrainian fighters for U.S.'s long-term geopolitical interests.

00:26:26.700 And it's like, they're choosing to defend the territory on their own.

00:26:32.100 Russia choose to attack the territory on their own.

00:26:36.160 And if you're like, oh, the U.S. goaded Russia into this, not really.

00:26:41.800 This was almost an entirely self-imposed mistake on Putin's part.

00:26:46.940 The U.S. up until this point was just being a fairly normal, rational, geopolitical actor in this space.

00:26:55.520 Doing the same types of one-sided, self-favored deals that we do all over the world every day.

00:27:02.640 This was Putin self-owning himself in an attempt to maintain control of the oil and gas market

00:27:12.320 while doing something that he felt worked from a, you know, Kosciabelli situation.

00:27:18.340 I do feel for the pain of the Ukrainian people who are in this war.

00:27:22.300 But also, rationally speaking, if you just look at Russian client territories,

00:27:29.180 if Russia does win this war, the Ukrainian people will live worse lives than they will live if Russia wins this war.

00:27:37.960 Like, they are not fighting for nothing.

00:27:39.720 They are fighting for something meaningful.

00:27:41.960 Whether or not you support Russia, this is just a rational and obvious truth.

00:27:46.460 And I want to be extremely clear here that I have no antagonism against the Russian people

00:27:51.520 as humans or as an ethnic group or as a cultural group.

00:27:55.680 In fact, I have a number of ethnically Russian friends and even friends who live in Russia.

00:28:00.460 That said, none of the friends that I have that are in Russia or ethnically Russian support the war

00:28:06.360 and most of them, actually all of them, have fled the country in response to this war

00:28:11.760 that was not directly caused by the United States.

00:28:15.040 That we can utilize this war to deplete the part of Russia who will fight for an autocrat 0.99

00:28:22.480 for stupid, made-up reasons is not a terrible thing even for the Russia people 0.94

00:28:29.680 if we are going to have any chance at the sane part of the Russian population, 0.99

00:28:35.340 i.e. the sane ones who see through Putin's bullshit and are willing to take risks to stand up against it, 0.97

00:28:40.720 repopulating what is left of the husk of the country when Putin is done with it. 0.99

00:28:46.560 For pennies on the dollar, we basically tricked Russia into genociding itself 0.88

00:28:52.140 because of a massive miscalculation that they're making.

00:28:55.260 I don't care if 90% of that money is going to graft.

00:28:58.160 I don't care if 98% of that money is going to graft.

00:29:02.020 Because it's neutralizing what was once a non-trivial threat from the national security standpoint.

00:29:08.540 Not a non-trivial threat. It's the single greatest threat to America's geopolitical power

00:29:11.820 for the last century.

00:29:13.860 Like, I just, people have short memories.

00:29:17.100 They're familiar with who our most recent enemy is

00:29:19.540 and a threat that is likely in the future going to become an extremist Muslim power.

00:29:25.880 And a lot of people are like, what?

00:29:27.700 I'm like, just look at the demographics, man.

00:29:29.440 Like, all of the infrastructure in Europe,

00:29:31.700 like, if that's who you're afraid of from those stats that Simone was talking about,

00:29:34.720 if you're afraid that Germany is going to become an extremist Muslim power,

00:29:37.840 Russia's already, you know, getting people, like, beaten to near death 1.00

00:29:41.720 for burning the Koran at, like, the executive level. 0.74

00:29:45.020 They already have more Muslims per capita.

00:29:47.060 And I, again, have nothing, like, Muslims come in many different stripes. 1.00

00:29:51.740 And there are lots of groups of Muslims that are very useful to a country

00:29:56.160 and can work well within pluralistic societies.

00:29:58.260 But there are also lots of groups of Muslims that can't. 0.93

00:30:01.480 The ones in Russia are the ones that keep doing the terrorism. 0.97

00:30:05.000 How do I know that?

00:30:05.900 Because they keep doing the terrorism.

00:30:08.140 It's a huge problem that Russia already has. 0.80

00:30:10.600 There are already efforts to overthrow the government

00:30:12.340 among Muslim extremist groups.

00:30:14.620 And they're often some of the biggest organized military powers within the Russian regime.

00:30:19.740 So if Russia got weak, one very likely thing would be one of the extremist Muslim groups 1.00

00:30:25.220 that is already military and is mad at Putin for killing their young men for no reason

00:30:30.300 if this war fails, might just make a run on the capital.

00:30:33.780 And we saw that with a culturally aligned group with Brugosan.

00:30:37.040 But because, you know, a lot of people in Moscow still support Putin, a lot of people,

00:30:41.740 you would need sort of an outside cultural group to really do this.

00:30:44.580 And that's why it's incredibly likely that if there is some sort of conflict in Russia, 0.75

00:30:48.920 it would be the extremist Muslims to take over. 0.97

00:30:51.640 That would be such an interesting twist in terms of at least how Americans view Russia. 0.92

00:30:58.020 Because it just, it's so out of left field.

00:31:00.560 It's the last place I would have expected to have.

00:31:02.900 You know, I mean, Russia regularly gets taken over by, you know, hordes of nomads. 0.95

00:31:08.900 That's just like a historic thing that come from within its borders.

00:31:12.140 The thing that happens.

00:31:14.580 Yeah.

00:31:15.080 So I think that even if that's your take, it's important to like wake up and realize

00:31:21.200 that Russia is not what Putin paints it as within the propaganda that you are getting

00:31:27.720 as a Westerner.

00:31:28.800 Yeah.

00:31:29.020 And that propaganda is propaganda.

00:31:31.300 It is meant to manipulate you.

00:31:35.380 But I want to hear your thoughts, Simone.

00:31:37.960 I'm just, I'm just so surprised.

00:31:40.280 I don't, I think the weird thing is that despite hearing all this and reading all this,

00:31:44.580 I'm still going to view Russia the way that I did since I was a child watching, 0.94

00:31:51.620 what was that show called?

00:31:52.820 Rocky and Bullwinkle.

00:31:54.140 You know what I mean?

00:31:54.940 It's interesting to me how solidified Russia specifically is in my mind, perhaps because

00:32:03.600 of the Cold War, which we grew up right at the close of it, or we were born right at the

00:32:08.040 close of it, you know, in the very late 80s.

00:32:10.740 So it's just weird to me that this, you can say all this stuff, but it's just not going

00:32:16.920 to stick with me.

00:32:17.720 Russians are still going to be Russians. 1.00

00:32:19.460 It's like a rightist versus leftist thing.

00:32:21.620 So a great example of this is, you know, until fairly recently, a quarter of Germany's power 0.82

00:32:25.160 was coming from nuclear power plants.

00:32:27.180 Coincidentally, right, as they were building the Nord Stream pipelines, the Green Party,

00:32:30.120 which is supposed to care about the environment, decides based on like the urging of Greta Thornburg, 1.00

00:32:34.180 who I have reason to believe gets a huge portion of her funding from Putin and Russian

00:32:39.480 interests, the campaign to get those all taken down.

00:32:42.260 There are many leftist agents, especially within the environmentalist movement, that are

00:32:46.820 specifically being elevated and used by Russia for this, you know, you know, oil goal.

00:32:53.220 It's not like the Russia only supports rightist politicians.

00:32:56.920 They'll support the Green Party in the way that they're attempting to brainwash populations 0.65

00:33:01.180 if that is of utility to them, because like, it's insane.

00:33:05.060 Why would you do that?

00:33:05.640 Why can Russia be so inept with the war effort, with all this stuff, but then nail propaganda 0.91

00:33:12.160 in a way that, at least in our opinion, other nations aren't.

00:33:16.180 And other people who, you know, specialize in national security have been insistent that

00:33:21.140 China is amazing at manipulating. 1.00

00:33:23.580 China is terrible at propaganda.

00:33:25.520 Well, that's what we think.

00:33:26.520 But anyway, so we think Russia is masterclass level at manipulating our perception. 0.94

00:33:30.760 Why are they sucking at everything else and not this?

00:33:33.720 Well, so as to why specifically they're good at propaganda and China is bad at propaganda, 0.91

00:33:38.020 it is twofold.

00:33:40.000 The bigger one is they culturally understand us much better.

00:33:43.180 China thinks that they can undermine the average American citizen's trust and faith in the 0.99

00:33:48.320 government by pointing out to the average American citizen that their government is like corrupt

00:33:52.380 or bad.

00:33:53.120 And it's like, that does nothing.

00:33:54.900 They're like, look, look at your politicians. 0.99

00:33:57.940 They're corrupt.

00:33:59.280 And your average American is like, yes, that's like core to our cultural understanding. 0.96

00:34:05.200 And they're like, no, no, no, no.

00:34:06.180 Look at your country.

00:34:06.920 It did a bad thing overseas.

00:34:08.840 Americans are like, yes, we're taught that in elementary school.

00:34:11.600 The government pays to teach us that.

00:34:13.520 We are very immune to propaganda that is meant because in China, that would be seen as like

00:34:18.080 catastrophic.

00:34:19.820 Our government did something naughty.

00:34:22.260 They did the Tiananmen massacre.

00:34:24.520 Our politicians are corrupt or don't have our best interest at heart. 0.86

00:34:27.820 That would be catastrophic to a Chinese person because they think that way. 1.00

00:34:31.340 They can't model America well.

00:34:32.700 But in Russia and among the populations that Russia uses to do these things, most Russians

00:34:39.720 know that they can't really trust their government.

00:34:42.060 They've known this since communist times.

00:34:43.540 This has been like a part, a core thing within Russia for a long time.

00:34:46.620 So the way that Russia ends up doing its overseas political operations is it ends up elevating the

00:34:53.920 extremists on both sides, sometimes with direct affiliation, sometimes without direct affiliation.

00:34:59.400 So that's why they're funding both, you know, QAnon conspiracy theories as well as, you know,

00:35:05.460 Greta Thornburg.

00:35:06.080 That's why they're funding, you know, both far left Green Party people because they're

00:35:10.720 trying to.

00:35:11.420 And this was found in the Trump election.

00:35:13.460 A lot of people are like, oh, the election integrity stuff on the left was all phony.

00:35:19.660 And a lot of it was like, I don't think the, you know, this was a phony campaign on the

00:35:23.840 left.

00:35:24.780 But what was true, and we like have the receipts for this, is that Russian operatives in environments

00:35:30.120 like Facebook would start competing protests and then trick them into like appearing at

00:35:36.900 the same location to try to get them to fight each other.

00:35:40.280 This was what Russia was doing. 0.82

00:35:41.940 They were trying to get you Americans to fall into more extremist positions than fight other

00:35:47.540 Americans.

00:35:48.180 Which is so funny.

00:35:48.600 It's so good.

00:35:49.920 That's, yeah.

00:35:50.760 Well, that's how you trick Americans.

00:35:52.520 You don't trick them by saying your government hates you.

00:35:54.680 You say, oh, the people on the other side, they're actually way more bad than you've been

00:35:59.720 told.

00:36:00.180 And all Americans know this secretly.

00:36:01.660 And they're like, yeah, they are more bad.

00:36:02.820 And here's what you can do.

00:36:04.180 And then they get them in an environment where it causes direct civil conflict.

00:36:07.740 This is, if you look at something like Antifa, like if you are a rightist right now and you

00:36:12.160 think, oh, Russia founded some pro-Trump stuff, I would almost guarantee if you follow the

00:36:16.500 money, almost all of the money that Antifa is getting is coming from Russia.

00:36:19.460 They'd say, oh, it's true Marxists within Russia that are funding them because they're 1.00

00:36:22.320 dumb as bricks. 0.99

00:36:23.780 And they talk about who their funding is coming from. 1.00

00:36:25.780 And we know that it's coming from people who they consider true Marxists.

00:36:28.380 Where do they think that's coming from?

00:36:29.440 These are tankies, right?

00:36:30.840 I don't know if people know what a tanky is.

00:36:32.480 That's a type of progressive that thinks that the Russian style communism is actually

00:36:35.880 good.

00:36:36.940 And yeah.

00:36:37.640 That's so funny.

00:36:39.020 I forgot.

00:36:40.460 And then you said tankies.

00:36:41.620 And I'm like, oh, anime girls.

00:36:43.000 But that's still the same thing.

00:36:44.560 No, no, no.

00:36:44.960 These are people who think like Russia and China.

00:36:46.900 I know, but they also have like their avatars online are almost always anime girls. 1.00

00:36:51.360 Yeah, they are funded by Russia.

00:36:53.360 Yeah.

00:36:53.820 I don't know how you don't know that.

00:36:55.380 In fact, I would argue that more money has gone from Russia to create Antifa than has

00:36:59.420 gone to create the pro-Trump movement.

00:37:01.020 And people who think otherwise are just blind to what's going on.

00:37:03.660 It is a good thing for us, at least, that Putin has decided to get rid of his own people. 0.98

00:37:09.300 Now, it's not that we couldn't have a productive relationship with the Slavic people, but we

00:37:14.180 would need very different politics on the ground.

00:37:17.860 And we'd probably need to turn Russia into a client state of the United States, which

00:37:21.600 I think is the best outcome of all of this, given how weak Russia is becoming, which could 0.98

00:37:27.320 still happen if we play specific cards right, even when the power struggle does come for

00:37:31.820 who takes over after Putin, the U.S.-backed faction wins.

00:37:35.580 Because I think that we've sort of gotten over this whole spreading democracy everywhere

00:37:39.980 and understand that U.S.-favorable dictators within some regions are just going to be more

00:37:46.900 stable and lead to less overall suffering than trying to put democracies in cultures that

00:37:51.380 don't.

00:37:51.940 I mean, Russia is often called a kleptocracy, but it's not really a kleptocracy.

00:37:56.780 It's a stable company.

00:37:59.180 Very interesting.

00:38:03.880 Well, I mean, yeah, this was eye-opening for me.

00:38:08.320 So, fun conversation.

00:38:10.060 Yeah, it's going to really piss off some of our watchers.

00:38:12.120 I know that, because this is one of the things that a lot of people on the right really have

00:38:15.720 their mind made up about. 0.97

00:38:16.740 And it's such a silly thing.

00:38:18.600 Like, and just, you know, like, on other, like, we are super pro-Israel in the Israel

00:38:24.680 war.

00:38:25.080 Like, on other issues, we take the staunchly conservative side, but I don't mind if we're

00:38:29.240 destroying what's left of the communist empire.

00:38:32.760 So, there you have it.

00:38:35.540 I love you, Malcolm Collins.

00:38:36.940 I love you, too.

00:38:37.460 Thank you.

Based Camp - April 18, 2024

Russia is Not the Country you Think it Is

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