Cardinal Richelieu explains Vladimir Putin
by Spengler April 2, 2022 - Asia Times
▻https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/cardinal-richelieu-explains-vladimir-putin
“Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.”
The ghost of Cardinal Richelieu was singing the old children’s rhyme to the tune of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” in his Maurice Chevalier accent. The scratchy sound of an old 78-rpm record buzzed through my earbuds as Richelieu’s avatar danced a few steps of soft-shoe to accompany the song.
We stood, or rather hovered, in a Metaverse reconstruction of the Cardinal’s palace on the Place de Vosges. It was creepier than the ossuary of the Carthusians many levels below the sewers of Paris where I had first conjured Richelieu’s ghost.
Still in beta testing, the Metaverse already was infested with ghosts. The Oculus headset that I obtained from a software engineer who wore the habit of the Capuchin monks projected Richelieu’s specter in cheerful 3-D.
“You are aware, Spengler, that the ditty comes from the Thirty Years’ War in Germany,” said the Cardinal’s ghost: “’Maikäfer flieg! Der Vater ist im Krieg. Die Mutter ist in Pommerland, und Pommerland ist abgebrannt.’ Or in your barbarous language: ‘Ladybird, fly! Father’s gone to war. Mother is in Pomerania, and Pomerania is burned to the ground.’
“Eminence,” I stammered, “I know the rhyme, but what does that have to do with Ukraine?”
“That, Spengler, should be obvious to a scribbler who writes so confidently of the extinction of civilizations. Dilettantes like the Americans think of eliminating a regime. Real connoisseurs of power arrange to eliminate entire provinces. I understand Putin; in a way I envy him. When Charles De Gaulle flew to Moscow to meet Stalin in 1944, he wondered what he might have achieved had he commanded a country like Russia rather than the mere nation of France.”
Richelieu gloated: “With half the population ruled by the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs, allied to Catholic Germany, France ruined its enemies during the Thirty Years’ War. Imagine what I could have done with Russia! The Swedes whom I bribed ravaged Pomerania and left it without people. Children still sing of it. Yet three generations later Peter the Great broke the pride of Sweden, in 1709, at Poltava in Ukraine.”
“But Eminence,” I protested, “Russia has done poorly in its war on Ukraine. It is bogged down with high casualties and missed its chance for a quick victory, and it has succeeded only in uniting the whole of the West against it.”
“I expected better from you, Spengler, than to repeat the nonsense one reads in the newspapers,” Richelieu spat back. A glowing blob of ectoplasm stuck to my Oculus visor. “A quick victory, indeed? And what makes you think that Putin ever wanted a quick victory?”
That stumped me. “Pardon my effrontery, Eminence, but if Putin didn’t want a quick victory, what did he want?”
“Time,” said Richelieu, “is the ultimate weapon. I understood this, and Putin has learned his lesson well. Clausewitz was in general correct when he said that war was the continuation of policy by other means, but there are occasions when war itself is the policy. Here is what Aldous Huxley wrote in his book The Grey Eminence, a profile of my chief of intelligence, Father Joseph de Tremblay. Huxley is quite accurate, as well he should be, for he heard the story first-hand from me, in the ossuary of the Carthusians below the sewers of Paris: (...)