The Saker - The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world

T HE E SSENTIAL S AKER

from the trenches of the
emerging multipolar world

T HE S AKER

N IMBLE P LURIBUS

the post-imperialism library

Nimble Books LLC

1521 Martha Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI, USA 48103

http://www.NimbleBooks.com

+1.734-646-6277

Copyright 2015 by

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-1-60888-058-4

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. The paper is acid-free and lignin-free.

For Ak., Anna, Claude, Fred, Jv., Pepe, Scott And Tatiana
Who Believed In Me

C ONTENTS

A BOUT THE A UTHOR

The Saker was born in a military family of "White" Russian refugees in western Europe where he lived most of his life. After completing two college degrees in the USA, he returned to Europe were he worked as a military analyst until he lost his career due to his vocal opposition to the western-sponsored wars in Chechnia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. After re-training as a software engineer, he moved to the Florida where he now lives with his wife, a veterinarian, and their three children. When he does not blog or help his wife at work, the likes to explore the Florida wilderness on foot, mountain bike and kayak or play acoustic jazz guitar.

A BOUT THE S AKERS B LOGS

The Saker is the founder of the Saker Community of Blogs, the only such international and multi-lingual community of blogs . It now features:

• blogs (Main, French, Russian, Oceanian, Latin American, Italian, German, Serbian) written in
• 7 languages (English, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Serbian) on
• 4 continents (North and South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania) with
• 4 YouTube Channels (Main, Oceania, French, Italian)

The main blog alone gets well over one million pageviews per month . The community is composed of about 100 volunteers including professional translators and it collaborates with all the main Englishlanguage blogs about Russia and the Ukraine. Articles from the Saker blog are picked up by Russia Insider , the Asia Times , Information Clearing House and many others news sources and our work has been quoted by Paul Craig Roberts , Sheikh Imran Hosein , Pepe Escobar and many others.

F OREWORD BY P EPE E SCOBAR

Is it a bird? Is it a Sukhoi? Is it a (digital) submarine?

Once in a long while across the vast spectrum of the surveilled, monopolized, sanitized by (alleged) common sense/copyright/control/ conformism Net, an unidentified digital object (UDO) catches our fancy and leads us to dream.

A UDO breaks on through what is already a mode of life, surveillance, production and organization, and crosses over to the other side.

This instance of poetic justice is even more appealing when were talking about a state of the art submarine crossing a digital desert.

Well, the UDO in question happens to view himself as a submarine. But actually, hes the bird.

Dont you know about the bird? as The Trashmen immortalized it in 1963. The bird is the word . And the bird with the words got to be The Saker.

When I first came across The Saker, in one of those endless white nights prowling the Net, I loved it as much as The Trashmen forever changing the face of rock n roll. The Saker was changing the Net forever as far as serious discussion of Russia was concerned.

This was the real deal; a Russian possessing a fine intellect, living in the underbelly of the Empire of Chaos, speaking from the heart, way beyond Left or Right, not to mention the middle. A post-everything Pre-Socratic, a neo-Diogenes searching for truth in the wasteland of the Russia versus The West manufactured crisis. And, crucially, a man of integrity.

Or, in his own words, disrespectful of social dogmas and norms, oppositional and defiant towards authority, rebellious and aggressive by nature, deeply contrarian on an almost knee-jerk level, libertarian in outlook. Whats not to like?

All that fully exposed via his own, inimitable style: straight from the heart marinated in intellectual acuity. As a running commentary on the Burroughs intuition of language as a virus from outer space, here was a UDO spreading a very powerful virus into the Russian demonization hydra.

The audience for this running epic was just there to be captured. So it was a pleasure to see how a one-man-blog steered by an anonymous incarnating a bird ended up morphing into a global community, in myriad languages, helped by tens of volunteers, in less than one year.

The bird? Sukhoi? submarine? has been relentless in deconstructing the Full Spectrum War launched by the usual suspects on Russia and Vladimir Putin.

This collection packs the punch of some certified classics, such as the ground-breaking Saker series on Russia and Islam.

By October 2103, even before the demented acceleration of both the Ukraine and Syria crises, The Saker penned a cracker destined for Net legend: his piece 1993-2013: is the twenty years long pas de deux of Russia and the USA coming to an end?

He was already among the very, very few who unmasked the strategic demonization campaign against Russia, depicted as a threat to the West.

He dove deeper into the fundamental distinction in Russia between those he describes as Eurasian Sovereignists versus the Atlantic Integrationists. Or, to simplify it, the Putin people versus the Medvedev people.

And he was probably the only one to point out how the US under Obama had become so similar to the USSR under Brezhnev.

Its impossible not to admire the trademark Russian passion for ideas and their almost religious reverence for major cultural icons. And then theres Russian genius.

When discussing the Russian national genius, Bakunin emphasized the sense of social justice and spirit of solidarity shared by Russians. So he was right to define Russians as insurgentsbecause they instinctively harbor a sense of justice. No wonder the Pentagon is so paranoid about Russia.

And we must, once again, rely on Dostoyevsky. He emphasized how the Russian sense of solidarity was not about the glorification of the individual; it was about a community linked around a moral exigency and the idea that social justice is absolutely fundamental.

So what the bird? Sukhoi? submarine is fighting for, one article at a time, is justice in ageopoliticalworld gone amok. No wonder, for so many of us, hes a cherished soul mate. So lets get into the game. Time to fly. Or, evoking Eliot, to scuttle across the floors of silent seas like a silent submarine.

Paris, October 2015

P REFACE

This volume is a collection of various articles and essays I wrote for my blog (initially at http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com and later at http://thesaker.is ) between 2007 and 2015. For many years my blog had very few readers, in the hundreds, at best, and most of my writing I, frankly, did for myself. For me, as a former military analyst, it was a much needed psychotherapy: I could write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and in whatever style I wanted. I did not have to look over my shoulder to check whether some boss would approve of what I wrote, I did not have to worry about offending somebody's political sensitivities, and I could basically write the way I speak: off the cuff and with no preparations. Looking back, I see that there were many advantages to this: the writing was spontaneous, informal, sometimes funny and always fast. But now that these articles have turned into a book, they bring with themselves a lot of weaknesses: not just poor grammar and ever-present typos, but also superficial fact-checking, sources given as links (including 'dead' ones) and references to missing images or videos. My heroic editor and Director of Research, Scott, did a fantastic job of cleaning up a very messy collection of essays, but there is only so much that could be done without a total re-write. So, dear reader, caveat emptor : the book you will be reading is, to put it mildly, not up to academic standards. My hope is that for some of you this might actually turn out to be a plus rather than an annoyance. To the others, I present my apologies.