The coming clash of civilizations

https://www.rt.com/russia/541280-clash-civilizations-rivalries-ideologies/#disqus_thread 

 By Artyom Lukin, an associate professor of international relations at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia. Follow him on Twitter @ArtyomLukin

 

All three contemporary great powers – the United States, China, and Russia – are competing for more than material power. Representing distinct ideological faiths, they are also in competition for human souls.

Humanity can now choose between the 1. West’s wokeism, 2. Russia’s neo-feudal conservatism, and 3. China’s slightly dystopian digital socialism.

1. The US now champions a liberal-progressivist ideology, which, in its most extreme version, is known as wokeness. In wokeness, the two main ideological strands of the modern West that have their origins in the European Enlightenment – liberalism and communism – finally reunite. When the opponents of wokeness compare it to radical Bolshevism, it is not without reason. In its fight against structural oppression, wokeness is ultimately about destroying social hierarchies for the sake of justice – and at the expense of order.

In a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, one of the characters, a fiery Bolshevik, was dreaming about a post-revolutionary world in which the borders come crashing down and people intermarry so there are no dominant and oppressed groups any more: “everyone’s appearance will be pleasantly brown – and everyone will be the same.” This Russian Bolshevik from the 1920s could join the woke squads in Seattle or Bristol in the 2020s.

2. China’s is a synthesis of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism blended with traditional Chinese ways, such as Confucianism and legalism, all boosted by advanced digital technology. The West increasingly fears China not only due to the growth in Beijing’s economic and military power, but also because modern China’s hugely successful record of development seems to validate the CCP’s ideology.

China’s system has a dystopian streak, but it is currently the most effective one when it comes to providing material wealth for the masses and protecting human life.

3. Putin, in short, is no communist – in reality, he is more like a neo-feudal ruler. His system of top-down government, which is a hybrid of a traditionalist empire and a modern nation state, is probably the only possible way Russia could continue to exist as a single political entity.

Instead of Bolshevik radicalism, Putin’s preference seems to be the old Tsarist model: No plans to build an overseas empire, just a vast continental autocratic power relying on nuclear weapons, ‘healthy conservatism’, and ‘time-tested tradition’. Putin’s system is utterly opposed to revolution. His rumored spiritual confidant, the Russian Orthodox Church's Metropolitan Tikhon,

for Putin’s state, order is prioritized over justice. Justice, especially the unlimited justice of the ‘woke’, is often messy and even ugly. Order

Another attraction of the Russian system is that, despite being somewhat imperfect in terms of political and civil rights, it probably boasts one of the highest levels of private freedom in the world. The state in Russia is generally reluctant to intervene in the private lives of its subjects,