Turning Putin into Conan

The disastrous proxy war against the Russian strongman has made him stronger than ever

In the film versions of the Conan franchise there is a very simple beginning to the legend of the Cimmerian barbarian in Robert E.Howard’s epic imagining of the ultimate Alpha Male. Conan’s story begins in peace, with the young child Conan living in an obscure village far from the centers of civilization and power. His family have a history of battle behind them, and its clear his people know how to fight, but Conan’s early experiences are of uninterrupted peace. His father is more of a blacksmith and village elder than a warrior. Swords are made and sold, or handed down from father to son, but aren’t actually being used.

They are the almost mystic focus of an old identity, rather than a current reality.

Until the civilized world comes calling. Robert E.Howard had a very definite sense of what civilization was, and it wasn’t a flattering view. Civilization did not mean culture, arts, sophistication and technology. In Conan’s world, the most advanced and developed nations, the oldest and most powerful and most populous, tended to be cesspits of decadence, intrigue, dishonesty and a special kind of lawlessness where the rich, the powerful and favored groups did whatever they pleased to teeming multitudes, including human sacrifice and ritual murder.

Anyone thinking ‘Pizzagate’ about now?

And of course if civilization means all these negative things, then barbarism means the opposite and possesses a host of virtues that civilization has forgotten. In barbarism, men remember what it is to be a man. None of the barbarians are effete, and none of their tastes are unnatural. They have simple and direct pleasures, and speak with blunt honesty. They are in tune with Nature, not in a romantic Noble Savage fashion, but in a pragmatic set of practical skills. They can fend for themselves, and expect to do so. They can hunt, and fish, and make things with their own hands.

Anyone recalling the segment of the Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones interview where both men spoke about their fathers and grandfathers having more practical skills than modern men?

Consistent with these interpretations of civilization as decadence and barbarism as pragmatism, the pivotal event that shapes Conan into a preeminent warrior is his first encounter with civilization. His village is attacked and his father and family slain by a raiding army. Conan is taken into slavery. But it is his years in slavery and his indomitable thirst for vengeance that shapes him, literally sculpting his body into the perfect instrument of war (the famous montage style sequence showing the development of the young boy straining at slave tasks gradually transforming into the Mr Universe (7 times Mr Olympia) bodybuilt figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

It seems to me that what bodybuilding did for Arnie, and what capture and slavery did for Conan, the proxy war in Ukraine, the economic war of sanctions against Russia, and the determination of the Washington led globalists to defeat Putin and carve up a broken Russia afterwards, has done for Putin and the Russian economy.

The civilized world, grown as decadent and perverse as any kohl wearing worshippers of Set in the Conan universe, did exactly what that raid on Conan’s village did. They accidentally built up the thing they intended to destroy.

Here is the Reuter’s news agency admitting the fact:

“Real wages in Russia grew by 7.8% in 2023 and the economy grew 4.6% in the year to January as unemployment hit a record low, according to the last big set of economic data before President Vladimir Putin stands for re-election next month.”

Record low unemployment in a nation where unemployment is still a very big issue that the majority of people view as a marker of government failure or success rather than as a lifestyle choice. That sounds pretty successful, doesn’t it?

And it’s success that has followed the seizure of billions of Russian assets abroad (an act of wanton criminality by western banking and financial institutions and governments that has wrecked the sense of security and rights external investment depends upon).

Like a swooping raid on a barbarian village, the unprecedented western targeting of every Russian asset simply for being Russian showed the true nature of the globalist led West, rather than showing up Russia. Investors outside the West learned that it might not be wise to trust the West with their money and to spend their money in nations where it could be seized based on dislike of their government.

We might call it, thinking of similar officially endorsed criminality elsewhere by the same forces, the Engoron Effect.

And combined with the sanctions and the shutting of Russia out of European markets and European financial transaction systems, it turbo-boosted a Russian pivot to India and China (together with hidden supply to Europe through India as an intermediary) that has only boosted, rather than destroyed, the Russian economy.

The western whip built Russian muscle, just like Arnie toiling at the slave grindstone.

Meanwhile, since Russia is perhaps the most natural resource rich nation on the planet and places like Germany still need to buy gas and oil (crazy Net Zero and blanket millions of acres in solar farms plans aside) all the sanctions have done is turn a legal known trade at low cost into a semi-black market trade with a price increase, draining more money from the West and supplying more money to both Russia and India.

The West has both failed to destroy Russia and increased its own costs, making the economic war on Russia perhaps even more disastrous in the long term (for its instigators) than the failure of the military plan to draw Russia into a quagmire and destroy it that way has been. On both fronts, military and economic, what’s been exposed is western weakness and whats been built is Russian strength.

The West is weaker after two years of the Ukraine war, and Russia is stronger. It turns out that the ‘gas station posing as a nation’ has more real things and actual strength than the western debt bubbles posing as nations possess.

Remember all those mainstream commentators saying how disgusting Tucker was for showing that Russia is doing just fine, perhaps better than us? Well, they were lying again, weren’t they, since even Reuters now have to admit that the Russian economy is thriving.

Remember as well how the West used to laugh at those pictures of a bare chested Putin riding a horse, how smug all the skirt wearing, puppy dog mask wearing sexual deviants were about Putin’s very old fashioned Alpha Male posturing?

Or how easily the same degenerates dismissed Putin’s reasoned, articulate and eminently sensible descriptions of the way the West has gone mad and how this differs from Russia’s sense of what real civilizational values are, rooted in ancient Christian Orthodoxy and traditional views on gender?

The laughs sound a little hollow now, don’t they?