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| Has observed Russia countless times from above. |
Despite being the namesake of a famous 80s pop star, George Michael is a professor of criminal justice at Westfield State University, Massachusetts.
In February this year he published an article in Terrorism and Political Violence, a peer-reviewed academic journal that focuses on terrorism and geopolitics.
The article, titled "Useful Idiots or Fellow Travelers? The Relationship between the American Far Right and Russia," was extremely complimentary and cited at some length three essays I had written about Russia.
These included the following:
- THE FAILURE OF PUTIN
- THE MYTH OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN VICTORY
- RUSSIA: THE PARADOX OF THE CORE AND THE FRINGE
The key passage where Professor Michael cites my work is as follows:
Arguably, the alt-right’s most perspicacious observer of Russia is Colin Liddell. The operator of the Alternative Right blog, he believes that both Russians and European-Americans face a similar situation in a world dominated by international humanitarian values. To wit: the multinational state in which the core population oppresses the fringe population is forced to either break up or evolve into the multinational state in which the core population is oppressed for the benefit of the fringe population.
But Liddell has not consistently approved of Putin’s approach to geopolitics. In fact, he has dismissed the notion that Putin is a genius of Realpolitik who has managed to outmaneuver Washington. As he noted, Putin’s gambit in Ukraine was a strategic mistake insofar as it directly challenged the power of the West. According to Liddell, the global dominance of the West is based on the fact that two of the three giant economic blocs are politically aligned. As he correctly points out, as long as the United States and Europe share a similar geopolitical outlook, the West will most likely prevail. Although China has emerged as a major economic counterweight in recent years, collectively, the political and economic influence of the West still far exceeds it. When it is directly challenged, the West is at its strongest. For this reason, Putin ran into stiff international resistance when he began meddling in Ukraine. Liddell counsels that for Russia, Ukraine is a “strategic self-defeating mechanism.” When Europe and North America are bounded together, Russia is relegated to secondary status in any global equation. Instead, he argues that Putin should look elsewhere, to wit, the Middle East, where the viewpoints of the United States and Europe diverge.
According to Liddell, Russia has been dealt a very good hand in the Middle East. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was seen in Europe as an overreach of American authority. Furthermore, America’s wars in the Middle East evoked Europe’s own memories of bombing, invasion, and occupation in World War II and its aftermath. While the United States has close ties to the anachronistic Gulf monarchies, Russia maintains close ties with neo-traditionalist Iran and secular modern Syria. Moreover, Shi’a-dominated Iraq fits well into this alliance as well. Russia’s mission to assist the Syrian government in defeating ISIS was universally popular in Europe. As Liddell avers, only certain American elites, Israel, and the Gulf states looked at this development with disdain.
He also mentions my work in several footnotes, including this one:
Not only that, but as Colin Liddell points out, [Solzhenitsyn's narrative that the Soviet Union was dominated by the Jews] is divisive insofar as many of the elites in present-day Russia have connections to the old Soviet regime including President Vladimir Putin, whose father served in the NKVD. For that reason, Liddell points out that there is “a reasonably strong case for Russia to embrace its long malformed, and unsightly history. In related news, the Elephant Man should take the bag off his head and smile more often.”
Of course it should be pointed out that since 2018, I have not considered myself a member of the Alt-Right, a once promising movement that was subverted by shills, feds, and Neo-Nazis.
You can read the full text of Professor Michael's article here.
