Self-Destruction of the Nations

Every nation is to blame for its own decline and destruction. Will Durant, an American writer, historian, and philosopher said: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

Lying to thyself and/or others usually precedes the period of development of the nation’s inner hatred and/or the hatred to other nations. He who raises the sword of hatred dies from the hatred. It spreads in society, reaches a phase of active anger and spills over into civil (internal) or invasive (external) war, followed by disintegration. This is how nations destroy themselves.

Thus, the formula is actually simple: Big Lie + Hatred = Self-destruction and disintegration of a nation.
There are historical examples of this.

Self-destruction of Germany in the past.

Adolf Hitler used Big Lie about international Jewish conspiracy which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I against Germany. He aroused hatred of the Germans to the Jews and justified Holocaust as the retaliation.

Then Hitler’s Big Lie went to the next level: the Nazis proclaimed the “Third Reich” as a direct successor of the Holy Roman Empire, the Germans were appointed “the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race” and their hatred was turned against other nations. All Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russians) and Romani people were declared «subhumans».

A. Hitler sought for an extra “living space” for the Germans and found it in Central and Eastern Europe, that’s why he sent his troops into Poland on September 1, 1939 and thus started the World War II. It ended with Germany's surrender in May 1945 and division of the country into Eastern and Western parts. The Nuremberg Trials established the final truth, accusing Nazism of crimes against humanity. An estimated 70 to 85 million people died in that war. That was the price humanity paid for the madness of German nation.

Later, Germany sincerely repented of the crimes it had committed and the whole world saw in December 1970 German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the German occupation-era Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland. I think that's when the rest of the nations finally forgave everything and accepted the new Germany back into their community.

Self-destruction of Russia in the present.

V. Putin regularly employed the infernal combination of Big Lie + Hatred throughout all his political career. Many researchers believe that he as then-Prime Minister of Russia orchestrated the bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and two other Russian cities in September 1999. More than 300 people were killed and about 1,000 injured. Chechen militants were blamed for the bombings, despite their guilt never being conclusively proven. In this way Mr. Putin has created a casus belli and ordered the air bombing of Grozny, the Chechen capital. House explosions have given rise to a wave of fear and hatred to Chechens in Russia, boosted Mr. Putin’s popularity and helped him much to attain the presidency within a few months.

Then there was a lot of lies: about the sunken "Kursk" submarine, murders of journalists, businessmen, former KGB officers, political opponents, persecutions of the scientists, tortures and abuses of people by law enforcement officers, elections, and even substitution of the urine samples of Russian athletes to pass doping tests at Sochi Olympics in 2014.

It could be said that modern Russia is built on lies and therefore sees reality differently than everyone else. No wonder that in 2014 German Chancellor Angela Merkel told to then-president Mr. Obama by phone that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure whether he was in touch with reality.

There is a famous expression of Abraham Lincoln: “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time.”
I wonder if 145 million of fooled citizens during 23 years of Putin's lies are enough for Russians to see they are fooled.


In August 2008, Mr. Putin has started the war against Georgia under the false pretext of «peace enforcement operation» to prevent “genocide” of the population of Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, to which Russia had been farsightedly issuing Russian passports since 2002 despite the objections of the Georgian government. The world said nothing in response.

After that Mr. Putin accused Ukraine of "reviving of fascism" and began to direct hatred of the Russians to "Ukrainian banderites", using a long-standing animosity toward them and World War II terminology. Then, relying on this nationwide hatred, Mr. Putin took Crimea from Ukraine and unleashed a proxy war in Donbass in 2014 also under the motto of "protecting" the local Russian-speaking population. In both Crimea and Donbass, Russia also has handed Russian passports over to local residents for their subsequent "protection" and annexation of their land.

The world has limited itself to condemning and imposing some toothless sanctions.

And Mr. Putin kept lying and spreading hatred of Ukraine and the West. He intervened in Syrian civil war in 2015, in the US elections in 2016 and every time the collective West politely yielded to the flood of this aggressive lies. It would be correct to say that the collective West has long been creating Mr. Putin by its tolerance and laziness.


Mr. Putin has got the impression that all this would work forever. Since October 2021, he amassed a large number of his troops near the Ukrainian border and gave the West an ultimatum in December: do not accept Ukraine into NATO and remove NATO forces from Poland and the Baltic states. He demanded the impossible, knowing it. The West has refused. In response, Mr. Putin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, despite the Russian officials repeatedly lied about their unwillingness to attack Ukraine.

Ukraine unexpectedly rebuffed the aggression. The collective West waited a bit to see if the Ukrainians were serious about defending themselves and began supplying the Ukrainians with money and weapons. The collective Southeast (Turkey, China, India) took a largely neutral stance.

Western aid to Ukraine is very necessary and useful, but not sufficient, a former US ambassador in Ukraine and senior director of the Eurasia Center of the Atlantic Council John Herbst says. Unfortunately, the collective West and every country are also divided in their attitude to Russia's war against Ukraine. This is what Mr. Putin is counting on and hoping to wait for his moment. The stakes in this game are high, the energy of confrontation and hatred is shrinking, and when the explosion occurs, it will definitely sweep something off the world map. Hopefully, it will be Russia, but there is also a chance for Ukraine, which would have already lost the war without the Western support.

The collective West must finally understand that it is economically more advantageous to give Ukraine the required long-range weapons immediately and simply equalize the chances of the warring sides, without any regard to the possibility of a nuclear response by the Russians. There is no way for the West to avoid taking risks completely here. It is better to cut off the tail at once rather than piece by piece. Russia must suffer a final defeat on the battlefield, only then there is a chance that the Russians see the crimes they have done under Putin's leadership and repent.
If Russia is not completely defeated in this war, everything will be repeated soon under the next Russian "Führer”.


The International Criminal Court (ICC) has recently considered an appeal of Ukraine and on March, 17 issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin for the proven transportation of the Ukrainian children to Russia. This is a genocide act.

This arrest warrant does not seem to mean anything special – Mr. Putin cannot be arrested and tried while he is in Russia. And yet it means a lot - the international community through the ICC has declared the current head of a nuclear state and a member of the UN Security Council a criminal.

Bravo. It is very important to call things by their real names because that greatly clarifies vision and understanding. Mr. Putin cannot be dealt with at all right now. He is an internationally wanted criminal now. This truth has been established by an internationally respected court. Putin's Big Lie has failed.

In the near future, this war of conquest will greatly exacerbate the internal conflicts of the heterogeneous Russian Empire and break it apart. The main detonator of the change of seeing for the Russians will be the loss of the war and, as a consequence, the realization of the complete discrepancy between the imagined and real role of Russia in the world, i.e. the conflict between Putin's Big Lie, imposed by him on all Russians, and reality.

Self-destruction of the US in the future.

I think the US now has all the prerequisites for self-destruction and disintegration of the state:
1. the Big Lie about "stolen election", firmly planted in the minds of at least 253 key political leaders.
2. growing hatred among political opponents in the elites.
3. growing hatred of political opponents among the people.

The country is being divided into parts, and “when partners find no more consent their business isn’t worth a cent”.
Rep. Greene explicitly calls for a «national divorce”.
The good news here is that the democracies break down into viable pieces while the authoritarian regimes collapse entirely.


An objective trial of Mr. Trump can restore the truth and reduce the degree of hatred in the country. However, it is also a painful process because Big Lie and Big Dislike have been maturing in American society for quite a while, and now they are exacerbated by inflation, fear of a banking crisis and other domestic problems of the US.

Former President Trump broke many political taboos, but he is the first US president who violated the major unwritten rule of the elites in any democratic country – not to humiliate and, most importantly, persecute opponents from the other party because sometime down the road the parties will have to swap places at the helm of the country.

Mr. Trump has created many lies. The Guardian says that lies and cheating are his way of life. Not surprisingly, he has sown a lot of hatred around him, and as the president of the US he did that both domestically and internationally. With Mr. Trump's ascension to the presidency in 2016, lies and hatred toward political opponents and free press have made their way into the daily life of the US, and his Big Lie about ”stolen election” and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 became the culmination of his tenure.


March of 2023 is a month of the truth ascertainment not only for Mr. Putin and Russia, but for Mr. Trump and the US as well. The former US president can be indicted by prosecutors in New York, Georgia and Department of Justice with various crimes and may soon have a hearing for alleged hush money payment to a porn actress S. Daniels with Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. In other cases, Mr. Trump may be indicted with unauthorized retention of national security documents, obstruction to official investigation, conspiracy to make a false statement, election code violations, racketeering, incitement for insurrection…

It is interesting to note that, with a wide range of choices, American Themis began the prosecution process from hush money. It is reminiscent of the Al Capone trial in 1931, who eventually was convicted for not paying taxes.


Mr. Trump is not about to give up and declares he will not quit the presidential race even if he is indicted. Ironically enough, he really can run for the president even though he is convicted. Democracy in the US is at such high (or low) level of development that the right to vote is restricted for the felons in many states, but it is allowed for a felon to run for the highest office in the US.


Now, in the run-up to the indictment, Trump and many high-ranking Republicans are presenting everything as “witch hunt” and political persecution of Democrats. Rep. A. Biggs even declared in his Twitter: “If they can come for Trump, they will come for you. This type of stuff only occurs in third world authoritarian nations.”

Well, Trump's trial shows just the opposite - there are no alive ex-presidents in third world authoritarian countries, all sitting ones, and they are usually outside the jurisdiction. And of course, if “they can come for Trump”, they can (and even should) come for any US citizen who breaks the law. Rep. A. Biggs is absolutely right here. That's how the norm of the US Constitution which is called “the rule of law” should work.


The guilt (or innocence!) of Mr. Trump, like that of any other American citizen, must be determined by a court, which is happening now. What is interesting is that Mr. Trump himself has to be interested much in such a trial, if he really "did nothing wrong” as he claimed. An acquittal by the court would add voters to his bid for the presidency in 2024. In the meantime, Mr. Trump and his Republican supporters are challenging not just the conviction of the ex-president, which does not exist yet, but the very possibility of his trial, although the principle of "the rule of law" has not been abolished. It appears that Mr. Trump and many Congressional Republicans oppose the Constitution which they have sworn to uphold.

Most likely, Mr. Trump knows very well what the indictment could be, and his Republican colleagues understand that it could turn into an indictment for the entire RP. They certainly can't let that happen. That's why Mr. Trump is crying out for the protests of the people in his support in order to force Manhattan grand jury to soften the hush money indictment or drop it entirely. If that happens, Mr. Trump will strengthen his position in the fight for the presidency - he is innocent, they could not convict him which amounts to acquittal. If he succeeds on all charges - he will, I think, become president in 2024.

As for me, Mr. Trump as the president has weakened much the position of Republican Party in the country as well as the US position in the world by his extreme behavior, and betting on him in 2024 carries a high risk for Republicans - there is a lot to lose, although there is a lot to gain. As always, the Republican elite will choose the nominee from RP for the highest office 2024, and the "Republican part" of the people supports any proposed nominee as usual.
The intrigue and problem for Republican Party, in my opinion, is that Mr. Trump will not agree to concede the Republican nomination from RP to someone else. He will be scandalizing, calling people to the barricade and can ruin the whole thing by this.


The moment of truth for American nation is coming – whether America as a whole will take the path of recovery or worsening the disease. If Mr. Trump is convicted of his constant lies and outright crimes – it means that American «Deep State» is still strong, America is not completely intoxicated by Trump’s Big Lie, and “the rule of law” still works.

If not, it means that the country is heading to the «third world authoritarian nations», as Rep. A. Biggs correctly said, and Mr. Trump will do to America what Mr. Putin has already done to Russia.
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P.S. Dear Reader! I am very much interested in your opinion on the subject of this article. Please, write a comment or ask a question if you want to clarify something.
Yours,
Igor Chykalov