Jeffrey Sachs, The Expert

Why - oh why - Russia keeps getting invaded by the West?

Jeffrey Sachs is a controversial economist, whose specialty is helping developing countries to eradicate poverty. Some authors - such as Paul Theroux and Naomi Klein - argue that the countries blessed with Sachs’ help ended up only worse.

This note will NOT be about this, but following everything I can on the war in Ukraine, I couldn’t help but notice Sachs activity in this field. Since Putin’s invasion, he suddenly became a self-proclaimed expert on Russia.

He appears in many outlets, repeating the same message (incidentally, quite similar to the Kremlin propaganda). I use here as an example his appearance at Piers Morgan show - with auto-generated captions, so you can see I’m not putting my words in his mouth.

I just can’t help but think that the best caption for this screenshot is “Dumb and Dumber” (via Youtube channel of Piers Morgan Uncensored)

He says that “Russia throughout its history has always believed in keeping some safety from the West which has repeatedly invaded Russia”. Therefore, Russia has the right to enslave its neighbouring nations in order to create a buffer zone to be protected from the next invasion.

Why does the West keep invading Russia? Actually Sachs fails to provide an answer. For some reason, the West plainly “hates Russia” and even if the Youtube caption suggests that Sachs can explain why it is so - actually, he does not.

His reasoning boils down to tautology. The West hates Russia because it is evil. It is evil, because it hates Russia.

It is only due to this hatred that the West “repeatedly invades Russia”. Russia does nothing to provoke these invasions, it is just minding its own kolkhoz.

Why? Because it is being ruled by a satano-masonic conspiracy willing to force everybody to change their gender and - no! - recycle their trash (oh the humanity!). What did I won? Via the Youtube Channels of Judge Napolitano.

As an example of such unprovoked invasion, Sachs mentions the Crimean war and Lord Palmerston. Unfortunately, while Morgan pretends to disagree with his guest on some minor issues - in reality just providing him softball questions to keep the conversation going - he never calls this obvious bullshit out. Probably he is even more clueless about Russian history than Jeffrey Sachs.

How on earth can you present the Crimean War as an unprovoked invasion of Russia by the evil West? What does one have to have in their mind instead of a brain to imagine this?

Was it like Lord Palmerson woke up on some sunshine day and said to himself - “goddamn, it’s been so long since we last invaded Russia!” So he called his friend, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and he agreed, “sacrebleu, ou la la, j’ai la proposition: allors invadons le Crimea!” “Good idea, old chap, see you in Dardanelles!”.

The Crimean war was a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The latter was crumbling at the time and it was justly perceived by the European powers as an easy prey.

A non-lesson on non-history, with one student non-learning (via Youtube channel of Piers Morgan Uncensored)

The war started with Russia invading the Ottomans in the area of what is now Romania and Moldova. The reason was bogus - Russia said it has to protect the Orthodox Christians, although the Ottomans, trying to avoid the war, already declared that they respect the religious rights of all Christian denominations.

As it happens with many wars, the initial invasion went well (Bucharest in 3 days), but England and France did not want Russia to grow too strong. At that time European politics was all about balance of power, so Paris and London reluctantly (nobody there wanted to die for Turkey!) ended up allied with the Ottomans. Their intervention turned the initial Russian victory into a decisive Russian defeat.

But the point is, Russians started this war. If not for their initial invasion, there would be no French and British intervention, no “charge of the light brigade”, no Florence Nightingale (or rather: a different Florence Nightingale), no battle of Balaclava (meaning we would probably have to invent another word for, you know, a balaclava), etc.

Everyone was reluctant to take part in this war. England and France were not happy to send their troops to the other part of the continent. And the Turks would certainly prefer not to have been invaded in the first place.

After all, maybe some sort of censorship of pure idiocy would not be such a bad idea? (via Youtube channel of Piers Morgan Uncensored)

Yes, this is true that Russia was sometimes invaded by some Western countries. But it was never uncalled for, not even in World War II.

In 1938, the Soviet Union actually did have a chain of smaller European states, separating them from the Nazi Germany. Some of them had a non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia (e.g. Poland) and most of them would be very happy to remain neutral in the upcoming bloodshed. But Soviet Russia invaded them one after another in 1939-1940, either destroying them or turning into enemies.

And of course, Germany would not have had the army to invade Poland if not for the Soviet-German military cooperation that started already in the Weimar republic (1922). For almost two decades the Germans bypassed the limitations set by the Versailles treaty, secretly making tanks and planes in Soviet factories and training their soldiers and pilots in Soviet facilities.

Most of the Western invasions on Russian soil were of the “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” category. It frequently started with Russia noticing that a neighbour seems weak, so the tzar or general secretary decided to invade, only to cry later “boo-hoo, why is everybody picking on me!”.

Alternative histories are always a tricky business but this is fairly certain that if it wasn’t for the secret military part of the Rapallo treaty of 1922, when Hitler came to power, the German army would be considerably weaker than it was in our continuum. So even if they attacked Czechoslovakia or Poland, they would get bogged down in some WW1 trenches quagmire.

In this scenario, nobody even thinks of “invading Russia”. They brought it on themselves, as always.

If you really know a first thing about Russia, you will know that “throughout its history” (if you count the entire history, since Middle Ages) its main enemies were to the East (Mongolia, China, Japan, Siberian Nations), to the South (Turkey, Persia, Circassia, Caucasian Nations) and to the North (Sweden). The West wouldn’t get the “#1 Russian Occupier” badge simply because…

...and this is the stupidest part of Jeffrey Sachs blabbering: because until 1945 “The West” did not exist as a political or military entity. Ever since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, most European wars were fought between VARIOUS Western countries.

For the majority of its history, the West did not know that the principality of Moscow (the predecessor of contemporary Russia) even existed. Once the contacts were established in late 15. century, Russia started to participate in the Western European wars as an ally of this or that coalition. So usually when Russia was “invaded by the West”, it was also helped by someone else in the West.

Jeffrey Sachs would have known all that if he ever read any book on Russian history. But they have a saying in Russian, “ya ne tschitatyel, ja pisatyel” - “I’m not a reader, I’m a writer”. It is used to denote authors who are too stupid, too stubborn and too proud to check their sources.

It fits Sachs like a hand fits a glove. But of course he’s not the only one repeating this whole “evil West hating Russia” nonsense. It seems that his “source” (much like that of Elon Musk or Roger Waters) is that nice lady from the Russian embassy, or that Russian businessman who owns a football team, or that cool Russian journalist who somehow can invite you to a lavish party despite all the sanctions.

Why check the facts if that means no further invitations to caviar testing sessions on the yacht “Le Oligarch”?