The Devil Hates Russia Plus He’s Bringing Brimstone Back

By Norman Ball

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” –Ephesians 6:12

[This essay has appeared previously at Counterpunch and The Pennsylvania Review often in radically different forms]

Invisible, non-material forces wear the pants on this planet while all that appears before our eyes is a dogged and compelling illusion. Cold clinical stares are diversionary accomplices to the dark powers that employ materialism to conceal their best behind-the-scenes work. The implications are inescapable: Plato is the spiritual forebear of the conspiracy narrative. 

Occasionally, a professional onlooker, a journalist, will ally his powers of observation with a sympathetic inward compass. A dialectical third narrative is forged from what our eyes would have us believe and what our hearts know to be true. 

Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar seemed to have his x-ray specs on recently as he plumbed the murky realms of Oppenheimer regret, the covert alchemy behind rocket science and the CIA’s demonically-laced appetite for destruction. (See ‘How Twin Peaks Unveils Our World’, Asia Times, September 7th, 2017).

Speaking to the occult’s deep involvement in the military industrial apparatus, Escobar implicitly furnishes his own rationale for a pen that oscillates between adroit commentator on global realpolitik and globetrotting Bhagavad Gita-man.

First of all, Pepe’s not cracking up. He’s coalescing. The world needs more intrepid piercings of the veil. This is the dot-connecting our divide-and-conquer overlords take great pains to obscure lest the ulterior source of their power be laid bare. Some excerpts:

• “Enter the critical connection between ritual magic and modern science”
• “the US deep state tapped into occult, uncontrollable forces as it opened unknown time-space portals” 
• “the cryptic, autocratic US deep state/industrial-military complex, via the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945, opened a “crack”, a vacuum, a chasm (“between two worlds”) that allowed infernal/ metaphysical forces to enter our sphere of existence”

Meanwhile, Perpetuators of the Rift promulgate fear in order to forestall a broad-based and comprehensive understanding. With the onset of alt-media this is becoming a tougher diversion to sustain, at least among a key and potentially decisive vanguard.

When it isn’t cobbling war consensus, the MSM proffers a diversionary parade of Godot-esque Groundhog Days propped up with whispers of Big News to Come. Interwar periods (to the extent they exist anymore) call for little more than mass distraction and broad consumption. Until the war drums beat again. Which they are so clearly doing now.

Hence the Russian obsession, as cheerleaders for the Bernaysian mono-narrative –the Blitzers and Tappers of Tele-Pharisaic CNN-world– struggle to install the Next Clear and Present Danger via talismanic repetition: Russian influence! Russian influence!

The forces of Perdition are probably right to demonize what many regard as the advent of the ‘Third Rome’ (Moscow). Having weathered the ravages of Bolshevism, a re-Christianized Russia presents a counter-cyclical phenomenon that casts molten lead in the Devil’s one good eye; counter-cyclical because Babylon must first consolidate power on earth before giving it all back again at the end of history.

Might the Russia of Dostoevsky’s imagination be on the cusp of its special Christian mission, retaking perhaps the spiritual void left in the wake of a ‘multi-acculturated’ Europe, i.e. as a counterforce to Islamic jihadism? That would displease many dark princelings of this world. Acting as an agent of restraint on the spirit of Antichrist (a phenomenon Paul in Thessalonians calls katechon), Russia can influence—and work to brake–a world hellbent on godless chaos. Oswald Spengler spoke of the Russian soul coming of age at some future propitious time. [In ‘Spiritual Roots of Russo-American Conflict’, Kerry R. Bolton offers an authoritative and fascinating examination of this subject matter.]

The virulence pointed at Russia is commensurate (‘suitable’) only in the context of its game-changing spiritual mission and the threat it poses to the Principalities of darkness. Russophobia expresses a spiritual aversion to which geopolitics acts merely as frontispiece. The stakes are existentially high, transcending empires and ideologies. Is it any wonder our Controllers sputter and fuss? Armed with the most tepid forensic evidence of Russian influence, they are charged nonetheless with pressing a spiritual war on ostensible geopolitical grounds, loath (for tactical, demonic reasons) to expose their first-order spiritual affiliations. Invisibility indeed!

If, as Nicolas Berdyaev claimed, “independent Russian thought was awakened by the problem of the philosophy of history”, America’s purveyors of wickedness glossed our version of the history problem by vexing us to the restive sleep of irresolvable terror.

Certainly our Cold War synthesis was attenuated into a false proposition such that Bolshevism must be reengaged, this time on domestic soil. (Commentator Ben Shapiro likens America’s current schism to a reenactment of the Weimar’s Brown Shirts versus Reds; though in fairness, the latter is well-evidenced, the former less so.)

Charlottesville is but an early skirmish against an ideology that might easily have remained consigned to the ashcan of history –-had history been allowed to wash up onto American shores. Had history been allowed to happen. Contrast this avoidance strategy with the Russian experience, an authentically suffered-through and digested historical chapter which delivered that nation, by dialectical necessity, to a more advanced version of itself.

[So, what then of America? Christian evangelist Chuck Missler has postulated that our nation’s striking under-representation in biblical prophesy could stem from God’s ‘abandonment judgement’. No American Christian, including myself, can relish this interpretation. Our love of country notwithstanding, one must ask, Has God responded to our vacating Him by vacating us?]

In a climate hostile to authentic resolution, historical synthesis becomes an impossibility. PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principles serves as apt blueprint to our nation’s conceptual paralysis. Ripe with hubris and devoid of introspection, it forced a triumphalism upon the natural course of the dialectic. As surely as Peter the Great deflected Russia’s historical arc centuries before (Spengler called this artificial overlay Petrinism), Straussianism (with its revolving-door dependency on an enemy) imposed an inorganic trajectory here at home. Vestiges of Petrinism are traceable today in the Russian domestic scene, namely neo-liberal attempts to integrate Russia into the West’s global institutions (a faction known as Euro-Atlanticists). This of course would be yet another imitative and historically inauthentic path for Russia to embark upon.

Thus at Cold War’s end, Americans were presented with the preposterous Neocon invocation to beat their swords into larger swords. The interminable loop of permawar (itself an indigestible bit of ahistorical mischief) became America’s ‘way forward’. As for our supposed adversary, ‘terror’, it offers an inexhaustible emotional response to perils of the real, imagined and endlessly manipulated kinds. The ensuing Neocon catastrophe is a matter now of global record. The peace dividend was purloined by a unipolar will-to-power that metastasized into a monomania worthy of Ahab himself.

International Relations pioneer Kenneth Waltz barely considered unipolarity, thinking it a practical impossibility. Earthly power must lever against one dialectical nemesis or another else it enters a Fukuyama la-la land of static complacency. The Grail-like quest for Full Spectrum Dominance is nothing less than a Babelian, One-World assault on God’s infinite dominion.

Perhaps it’s no irony then that the propaganda onslaught may be reaching a cognitive saturation point as the Russiaphobia narrative founders for lack of anything other than pathological teeth-gnashing. As for the transformational power of the Alt counter-movements in America, that remains still to be seen.

We encounter the same enemy in a slightly different context in Sheldon Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism –furtive, featureless and ubiquitous– that ‘wants everything’. Only a totalism that encapsulates soul, spirit and consciousness can truly be said to have eradicated dissent, as opposed to merely stifling it. Again, static inescapable monism is the quest, nothing less than Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face – forever” wherein the dreaded boot possesses the repressive kickback of an uninterruptible kiss. Love your Master with all the weight of his sole!

A divided perspective is the Devil’s playground. Escobar with Lynch underscores how we contend with Science, no less than Geopolitics, in this world’s shadow-play. Oppenheimer’s dark underpinnings betray his true mistress, CERN’s threshold-greeter, Shiva. Science is in fact an egregoric pact the Enlightenment Lucifer hatched with Man allowing the latter to collaborate, with empirical detachment, in his own destruction. It’s not enough simply to destroy Man. Lucifer will only be satiated when God’s most prized creation actively destroys itself.

Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Better to say perhaps that technology remains a province of magic in both its disclosed and undisclosed forms. Indeed Science’s greatest trick may have been making us believe magic doesn’t exist.

As our eyes were seduced away from the luminous shell, superstition was repealed, souls became Freud’s appetitive egos and haunted eyes were made wards of the Pharma-State. The secular world seeks to steal the spirit world’s singular fire, to anesthetize it into Bolshevist collectivist pap. That old windbag Crowley and his whiz-kid Parsons may indeed have finagled a hole in the firmament. However the Devil wins battles, never wars. Firewalk with that.

Escobar’s cross-pollination project is an attempt to paint the Biggest Picture where inky blackness plays a pivotal role. The Devil it seems made Oppenheimer do it. In fact the former foreshadowed his subtle, new role in Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler (1864). Hinting at his imminent misdirectional ploy, Lucifer aspires to transcend superstition by destroying it.

For a time, the blustery brimstone and tacky red capes of Dante and Milton are to be suspended. Pressed white lab coats make today’s Man of Wealth and Taste, don’t cha know? The Enlightenment relegates lurid displays to the back burner in favor of the progressive flame of Bunsen burners.

Brian Reis has another name for this sly costume change: ‘satanic indifference’ or if one prefers the official euphemistic parlance, secular humanism. Scientists, oblivious to the dark underwriter of their work, insist their paymaster doesn’t exist. Yet Hiroshima (next stop, Pyongyang?) shows us how the wages of science yield a scalable, dissociative sin that one-on-one fornication could never equal for aggregated iniquity.

Oddly, Russia inserts itself here. Of Orthodox Christianity, Berdyaev noted, “it remained apart from passionate religious battles for hundreds of years…and preserved its eternal truth from the destructive processes of world history.” Thus the Luciferean entreaties (concealed within Science and Reason) that Baudelaire rightly predicts will whittle further away at Western Christianity do not work nearly the same abrasive effects on the Eastern forms. Instead, Russia is held in abeyance in a Spenglerian ‘primitive’ state, that is, with its cultural vigor looming still ahead. Until such time as its spiritual calling comes of age. Until such time as now?

Here’s Baudelaire’s early scoop on the urbane gent soon to become Mick Jagger’s Patron Saint and Jean Luc Godard’s Docu-Marxo-Daemon:

“[Lucifer] complained in no way of the evil reputation under which he lived, indeed, all over the world, and he assured me that he himself was of all living beings the most interested in the destruction of Superstition, and he avowed to me that he had been afraid, relatively as to his proper power, once only, and that was on the day when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than the rest of the human herd, cry in his pulpit: “My dear brethren, do not ever forget, when you hear the progress of lights praised, that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!"

"The memory of this famous orator brought us naturally on the subject of academies, and my strange host declared to me that he didn’t disdain, in many cases, to inspire the pens, the words, and the conscience of pedagogues, and that he almost always assisted in person, in spite of being invisible, at all the scientific meetings.” –from The Generous Gambler [my bold]

At first Lucifer signals wariness at the prospect of invisibility (obsolescence) in the glare of ‘progressive lights’. That’s an affected pose. He knows better. Yet contemporary evidence shows him embracing the Enlightenment for the Deep Cover it affords his ever-constricting grasp. Yes of course David Lynch, it’s the same ole BOB (it’s ALWAYS the same ole BOB) this time under cover of the Scientific Method as his apprentices work to refine the latest spiritual setback invariably cloaked as ‘a technological breakthrough’ but never much more than the latest new and improved invisibility cloak.

And so it was that, in furtive increments, Hell crept upon us, substituting itself for our native surroundings. Absent a telltale imprimatur of arrival, it exemplified the slinking serpent, enfolding us in slow, deadly coils that soon acclimated into ubiquitous atmosphere. The latest generation of frogs love hot tubs and can’t understand why.

Heidegger too saw the tangible yields of science (technology) enveloping us with irresistible convenience. Such solicitousness plays well to our innate laziness and hubris. The agenda was always to beguile and then surpass us once techne could stand unassisted on its own transhuman feet. (Transhumanism is Ray Kurzweil’s rhetorical avoidance for post-humanism. What deep wellsprings of self-loathing compel a man to perfect his artilect executioners?) The plan is for the superstition of soul to evaporate with the advent of the precocious silicon chip.

As evil adopts the stealth of dreary rationalism and consolidates the final lap in an orgy of mushroom clouds and fabric-splitting CERN colliders, many will die thinking it was the Dull March of Science –and Science alone– that killed them. But the Damned know better.

The low-order functionaries of the demon world, unlike Man, intuit the future. In Matthew 8 they ask presciently of Jesus, ‘art thou come hither to torment us before the time?‘ It is a facet of angels, fallen and otherwise, that they are keen readers of the eschatological clock. Even for us, today, the narrowing path is becoming harder to ignore. The hour is late.

Only by acknowledging the renewed fever-pitch of the spiritual plane as it unfolds in earnest behind the geopolitical, scientific and technological presentations can a unified comprehension be achieved. During the walk’s final mile, careful travelers will do well like Escobar and Lynch to keep one foot in the fire of Spirit, the other in the ice of facticity.

As for those with an unambiguous Christian calling—spiritually dispossessed White Anglo-Saxon Americans (such as myself) included—Russia may well be a nation writ indispensably large. So be it. The Eurasian Century beckons and no amount of Western denialism or affronted exceptionalism will stop history’s inexorable advance.

Even if it doesn’t stop at Heaven’s Gate, patriotism should take reverential pause before traversing that threshold. God’s country of souls brooks no earthly borders. Dostoevsky again: “Reduce God to the attribute of nationality?…On the contrary, I elevate the nation to God.”

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As well as being an American loyal to the notion of same, author Norman Ball is a Founding Principal of Giant Steps Press. More of his Baudelarian musings can be found at www.gettheebehind.me. Another of his blogs is Full Spectrum Domino. His Youtube channel is working towards 1.3 million views here. Please pitch in with a click and a like. 

Speaking of views, the ones expressed herein are the author's alone and could not possibly reflect the views of GSP, a press that seeks and extols diverse voices, even if Norm wanted them to, which he doesn't. Need more reasons to come to GSP for all your book publishing and design needs? See here and here.