Hubris and the End of the War in the Ukraine

Posted with thanks to Batiushka, the author

Introduction: Hubris

The dictionary defines hubris as ‘excessive pride, arrogant self-confidence and overweening self-belief’. In Biblical terms, it can simply be called pride (the one that goes before the fall). If we look at a little history, we can indeed see that hubris is always the sign of the Loser. For example, there are some 200 competing theories as to why nearly 1600 years ago the mighty Roman Empire fell to westwards-invading Germanic barbarians. However, whatever the minutiae of the details of the political, social, economic, military and strategic reasons for its fall, there is no doubt that hubris, overweening self-confidence, played an overarching part in all those areas. Let us come up to date with some more examples of hubris.

The European Losers

In Europe, more recently, there was the case of Napoleon. Having conquered most of Western and Central Europe after a string of brilliant and prestigious land victories and basically crowned his genius self Emperor of Europe, he decided to pay a visit to Russia. His utter humiliation and the rout of his Great Army in the retreat from Moscow in 1812, leaving 500,000 dead Western troops, is history. Though Moscow burned, he won nothing and lost everything. Less than eighteen months later and Napoleon deposed, Russian troops liberated Paris intact. Hubris.

Hitler’s story was similar. Having essentially become Emperor of Europe from the Arctic to the Aegean, even though he was intensely aware of the need not to repeat Napoleon’s error in invading Russia, in 1941 he did. Why did he fail to conquer the USSR, even with 3 million troops? Simply because he overestimated himself. Good at fighting lightning wars in the tiny countries at the Western end of the European Peninsula, he failed miserably in a war of attrition in the vast plains of European Russia against Slav patriotism, carried by the huge Soviet industrial war machine. Hubris.

In just 42 years, between 1914 in northern France and 1956 in Suez, the British experienced the same. Although forewarned by humiliations at the hands of the Boers in 1899-1902, the British Empire on which the sun never set, found the sun did set on it. You may think that you are greater than the Sun, but in fact you cannot fight against sunrise and sunset. The Earth turns without you. Despite its concentration camps in the Boer War and again in the 1950s in Kenya and Malaysia, the invincible British were vanquished and found that they could no longer rule the waves with gunboats. The others also had gunboats and bigger and better gunboats. And who needs gunboats when you have aircraft to sink them? As a result, by 1945 it was clear that the only use of the UK was as an unsinkable US aircraft-carrier off the coast of mainland Europe. Hubris.

Between 1979 and 1989 the Soviet Empire also met its nemesis in that graveyard of empires, Afghanistan. The classic combination of the overweening self-confidence and ensuing overreach of an atheist empire could not resist the faith of those whose identity lay in the belief system of Islam and age-old tribal identities. However powerful they may be on paper, those who do not believe in anything always lose against those who believe in Something. Hubris.

On the back of ‘the Western victory over Communism’ in 1991, the combined forces of Brussels, the US-invented EU, twin sister of the US-invented NATO, decided to take over Central and Eastern Europe. The European Empire of Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler was going to be reinvented, only this time it would not fail because its only armies would be armies of bureaucrats. Brussels thought that it could impose its homogenous north-west European template on all Europe, including its margins. It could not. First, Greece started to collapse and the word Grexit appeared, then the UK, never part of Charlemagne’s or Napoleon’s or Hitler’s European Empires, left in Brexit. Frankly, the extent of the EU delusion that one day the ’Western Balkans’ and then the Ukraine could be absorbed into its Franco-German machine needs psychiatric examination. Hubris.

A reader of my previous article, published on this site on 22 March, The American Empire (1945-2022) RIW (Rest in War), has asked whether Russia should give Europe a last chance and save it. I am afraid that that question would presuppose that today’s Russian Federation suffers from the same hubris. It does not. Europeans, save yourselves! In other words, others have to sort out their own problems. Europe has been on an urgent suicide quest ever since 1914. Five generations of it: 1914, 1939, c. 1964 (the EEC), 1989 (the fall of the Eastern bloc) and 2014 (the overthrow of democracy in Kiev). Only Europeans can decide that, in the end, they do not want to be lemmings, obey their leaders and commit suicide after all. Hubris.

The American Losers

Now comes the American Empire. Having received fair warning in Vietnam, the US equivalent of the British massacre of the Boers in search of gold and diamonds three generations before, the US still grimly went on to Iraq and Afghanistan in search of oil and gas. Here the ‘Taliban’, in fact ordinary Afghan resistance fighters, defending their Muslim identity and tribal homelands from infidel invaders, defeated the US in a two trillion-dollar rout. $250,000 humvees were no match for $1 sandals. Hubris.

Today the deluded – and demented – ‘in charge’ in Washington face the nightmare of the war of attrition in the Ukraine. Attrition is the worst possible outcome and the Russian Federation knows it. This is not just a meat-grinder, but also a metal-grinder. Stocks of Ukrainian men are running dangerously low, just like stocks of NATO weaponry. Russia is in no hurry. Let them collapse all by themselves, we will just keep sending in the drones, missiles and artillery shells until there is nobody to fight and nothing left to fight with. Kiev Ukrainian and mercenary losses are 200,000-300,000 troops (and about 7,000 civilians caught in crossfire, most of them killed by Kiev) against 16,000-20,000 pro-Russians (many of them not Russian). And the Russian Army has not even been engaged yet, only the Wagner contract force and the local Donbass militias have fought directly. Still worse, this whole war is going on against the background of political and economic alliances which outmatch the bankrupt US and its bankrupt vassals. Hubris.

BRICS, about to expand, will soon be much greater than the G7 US club. It will soon number six billion people and its GNP will be much greater than that of the G7. The linchpin is the Russian-Chinese Alliance, confirmed by this week’s lovefest in Moscow. The G7 is a club that admits of only one cultural template, the US. It admits only of the American language, of Hollywood, Coca Cola, MacDonalds, Google, Apple, LGBT and covid and climate change propaganda. BRICS, however, includes Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Africanity, Latin Americanity, Orthodox Christianity and soon Iranian Shia Islam and Saudi Arabian Sunni Islam. This is multilingual and multicultural multipolarity, multilateralism, polycentrism. We can get on perfectly well with each other. We do not want to impose any civilisational template. We just want to co-operate. Sadly, this is a concept unknown in the millennium of the ever-exploitative Western world’s exceptionalist crusading ideology of, ‘God is on our side’ and ‘We are right and you are wrong’. Or as the bully President Bush said: ‘Are you for us or are you against us’? Hubris.

What the US Empire did not realise (I phrase this in the past tense already), is respect. All it ever knew was intolerance. Chinese, Hindu, African, Muslim, Latin American and Orthodox Christian are able to get on with each other. The sons of 17^th century Puritans who fled England because they could not tolerate the differences of others never learned about tolerance. As a result, they slaughtered millions of the native peoples (as well as 60 million bison) of North America, stole huge territories from Mexico and built their unity on the blood of 600,000 of their own in a civil war (1861-1865). Hubris.

But from sea to shining sea was not enough. They started to build their empire across the oceans in islands in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and the Pacific (Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines – the US used genocidal concentration camps, killing half a million) and then in its ‘backyard’ – all Latin America. And still it was not satisfied. The Pacific had to be seized from Japan. Europe had to be seized from Europeans. Korea from Koreans. Iran from Iranians, Vietnam from Vietnamese. Russia (even though you may call one corner of it the Ukraine) from Russians. China (even though you may call one corner of it Taiwan) from Chinese…Hubris.

The old US aggressive ideology of Puritanism, which is the obsessive and ever-hypocritical moralistic lust for sexual purity, was itself always a crass deformation of Christianity. Puritanism had been condemned more than a dozen centuries before at the Church Council at Gangra in 340. For unlike Puritanism, Christianity is about voluntary spiritual purity, of which moral purity is only a by-product and sexual purity a possible further by-product. However, the post-Puritan US, like all the other post-Puritan countries in North-Western Europe, is fanatically concerned with aggressively imposed purity. Only now it is about ecological purity, ‘Greenness’, and politically purity, ‘Wokeness’, and the aggressive witch-hunt against any who do not conform to the tenets of the New Puritanism. The new secularist witch-hunts of the New Puritans are just as vicious and censorious as the old misogynist witch-hunts of New England. Ask anyone who refused to wear a mask during the recent covid witch-hunt and was beaten, arrested, fined or imprisoned by the Fascist thought-police. Hubris.

Conclusion: When Will the War End?

Question: Why have I spent most of my words on hubris and not on the question in the title that interests much more, when will the war end? Answer: Since the first Iraq War and the fall of the USSR in the same fatal and fateful year of 1991, the US has been controlled by the Neocons. And who are they? They are Trotskyites, for mainly of the same race as Trotsky, as secular Zionists, universal messianists, they too want a universal empire. Hubris.

In 1992 the Neocons celebrated their victory over Communism, partly as their revenge for Stalin’s assassination of Trotsky. Neoconism, just like Communism, just like Nazism, is a Western-born Ideology. Just like the Communists and the Nazis, the Neocons claim that their universalist messianism is unique. They are representatives of the Exceptional and the Indispensable. I have news for them. The graveyards are full of indispensable people. As the English poet Gray wrote in 1750: The paths of glory lead but to the grave. Hubris.

The point is that the war in the Ukraine will end when its instigators, the Neocons, have been cast out of the neo-classical Temple in the New Jerusalem of Washington and their money-changing tables overturned. The present banking crisis is the first stage of this process. As the Neocons never had any humility in their ‘victory’ over Communism, their victory was not a victory and turned swiftly into defeat. You may have the most advanced cruise missiles, electronics, stealth technology, satellites and drones, but you have nothing if you do not take into account the human factor. If the human factor is infected and sick with the virus of hubris, it will receive retribution. In ancient Greek tragedy, hubris means the defiance of the gods, which leads to nemesis. Nemesis is what is happening in Washington today. Defy the gods at your peril. Hubris.