The Transformation of America: Lesson for the Rebirth of Russia, Part I

I had the chance to study and work in the U.S. from 1992 to 2009. Arriving in America for a professional conference, it seemed to me — having just finished at the Moscow Aviation Institute — that I would see a country which in many ways might serve as an example for my homeland, which was at that time just starting along its path of democratic reforms, as they declared to us then. Later, I began to discover America for myself, beginning to study at university and then working in my specialty. Gradually, it became apparent to me that American reality is absolutely not what the biased media broadcasts to the whole world. Now many understand that America is seriously ill; its economy is broken, its debt grows exponentially and the outlook for the country as a single cultural and national entity is unclear. Having lived there for 17 years and having observed how America has changed, I can report that the gradient of these changes is actually negative.

Moreover, Russia is now straying down that same self-destructive path.

Ashes of the “Liberal Experiment”

Many commentators explain the current problems of the U.S. exclusively in monetary-economic terms. This seems completely superficial to me and hardly reflects what has happened there in reality.

Financial and economic problems are only the consequences of a real cultural and worldview transformation, imposed upon American society by liberals over the course of the past few decades. The liberal revolution began in the U.S. as early as the 1960s, and since that time two generations of people have already grown up, whose will is completely paralyzed by that liberal ideology, which has brought America to today’s intractable contradictions. This transformation is already so irrevocable, that to turn back the negative tendencies and restore strength to America is practically impossible. Unfortunately, I see that the liberal reforms imposed in Russia today, and the algorithms by which they are carried out, are very similar to what I observed in America. I would even say that the States serve as a kind of laboratory, in which one may observe what kind of future awaits Russia in the not-so-distant future, if the order of things doesn’t change in our country.

I would not want Russia, which has already been fed a diet of liberalism for 20 years, to be brought to the same condition that America is in after four decades of liberal direction. What makes me believe that it is possible to prevent this? The fact that in Russia, despite 20 years of catastrophic reforms, a process of deconstruction of traditional morals, atomization of society and destruction of people’s self-awareness as part of a nation with a shared historical fate, we have still not gone so far as what has happened in America. This is confirmed by recent events, when protests against the unjust system established in Russia after 1991 spilled out into innumerable rallies throughout the country. Many people have already recognized Russia’s fatal path. These people, whose minds are not yet distorted by liberal propaganda, could synthesize a new philosophy aimed at the rebirth of Russia.

It is obvious that the liberals, suspended from power by the current ruling regime, are attempting to recapture the initiative by using popular discontent to regain power for themselves. If the liberals are successful, then they will continue the same fatal course as the current regime, the only difference being that instead of “national identity” they will use American patterns of liberalism, from which our native imitators draw their inspiration. And the course of the current regime, which has turned Russia into a mixture of raw materials belonging to the West and to the financial oligarchy, and the establishment of an American-style “multicultural society with a post-industrial economy” — of which home-grown, pro-West liberals dream — are both worse, since they are the two sides of the same liberal monetarism.

In this article, on the basis of my own observations of life in America, I would like to talk about how America was changed by that same liberal monetarism, the entry of the country into the WTO, the establishment of a trade union with Mexico and the resulting massive immigration of cheap labor from Mexico and other Latin American countries into the U.S.

This gives some idea of where, in principle, the current regime’s course is headed in Russia, or — little different from that — the American-style course which “our” pro-Western liberals would like to follow in their zeal for power.

Then, I would like to examine the means by which the liberals transformed the U.S., using free-market principles, globalization, political correctness and tolerance as the instruments of that transformation. The result is that America — which, as recently as the 1970s, was based on European and Christian culture, controlled a powerful industrial sector and was the world’s main lender — has been turned into a country of “multicultural society,” “post-industrial economy” and impoverished middle class and become the world’s main debtor.

If the liberal course in Russia is preserved, or continues under a new guise, the result will be the loss of the remnants of Russian sovereignty, the final destruction of national industry, the decline of the population’s standard of living, the gradual replacement of the indigenous people of Russia on account of massive immigration of outsiders, large-scale inter-ethnic conflict as a result of that, and the final result: the end of Russian statehood.

The only alternative capable of turning Russia from this fatal course of liberalism, at this stage, could be those patriotic forces who wish to revive Russia as a sovereign state, prioritizing our national interests, which guarantee the historical perspective of both the Russian people and all other indigenous peoples living in our country.

New York as a Premonition

In August 1992, I arrived in America to participate in the International Astronautical Congress. At the student session of the Congress, where I gave a presentation on the basis of which my graduation thesis was accepted, I became acquainted with representatives of the Mars Mission Research Center, organized by NASA at North Carolina State University, with the goal of preparing young specialists for the Space Exploration Initiative, which was announced in 1989. At the Center, they suggested that I apply to graduate school. I was glad of their suggestion, because it gave me a chance for further study in my specialty, and then for participation in a NASA project, with the stated end goal of sending a man to Mars. They accepted my application, but it soon became clear that because I was a foreign student, NASA could not pay for my studies and that if I still wanted to study at the Center, I would have to pay my own way. My visa was still valid, so I applied for a temporary work permit as a student whose application to study at the university was already approved.

My first real impressions of life in America came from New York, where I lived for two years, earning money. New York is really a city of contrasts, in which one may see many interesting things — some beautiful, some not. There is no point in speaking here of things typical of that city; for anyone who is interested, it is easy to get the desired information from the Internet, books, stories of friends who have been there and so on.

What made the biggest impression on me in New York was that it was practically a parallel world, populated by immigrants from all parts of the globe. It is completely natural that people tend to settle among ethnic, language and economic groups comfortable to themselves. Therefore, different areas were populated by different ethnic groups of immigrants, who reproduced in New York the cultures of those parts of the world from which they came. Sometimes the dividing lines between these areas might be just one street, for example, 96th Street, which divides the fashionable part of Manhattan from the infamous Harlem. What they show to the whole world, in movies and magazines, as a postcard of New York, is that part of Manhattan between Harlem and Chinatown, where the headquarters of transnational corporations, the U.N. and other international organizations are located, and which is mainly populated by wealthy Americans.

In the rest of the city (about 80 percent of its area), you will feel like you are in some third-world country. For example, the major part of Brooklyn and Queens is populated by African, Asian and Caribbean immigrants. The Bronx is almost completely filled with immigrants from Mexico and Latin American countries. One could say that New York imagines itself as an enormous likeness of the U.N. General Assembly, where representatives of the various peoples of the earth are collected together, having neither a common language, nor a common culture, nor a common moral code. I recall that more than once, I was surprised to hear from Americans that, well, New York is not America. If you want to live in the real America, then you need to go to some small town. Later, the meaning of what they were telling me became obvious.

New York is its own sort of laboratory, where they tested the technology of the transformation of European and (basically) Christian American civilization into an egalitarian society of all races, religions, cultures and tribes, having nothing in common among them except economic interests. However, in the process of this transformation, New York completely lost its American character and identity. It is obvious that this did not happen by accident. Time showed that New York is a prototype of what the liberal elite is gradually turning the whole United States into, and into which they would like to turn the rest of the world.

Tomorrow: “American Heartland,” part two in a three-part translation of Roman Jits’ “The Transformation of America: Lesson for the Rebirth of Russia.”