Faker of the Vinyard Is 5th Column, Has Russian Blood on His Hands
As an ethnic Russian was working with Islamist warlords, CIA, ISI and Reagan to cause Russian mothers grief
Six months ago in March the untalented boomer, Faker of the Vinyard, attempted a hatchet job against me. In a cringe piece, he first erected an unconvincing defense of his promotion of a ridiculous cope map, then went to complain that his spreading of a Fake News map was being called out by websites whose "goals are purely financial", are "serving the interests of the 5th or 6th column" and whose "real owners are Western PSYOPs".
Faker — the gutless dweeb that he is — omitted to name me, but the piece is clearly about my website since I was precisely the person who had called out his promotion of a garbage, ludicrousy unrealistic, and copey map in a text titled Red and trash: Readovka Confirms Their War Map Was Garbage All Along. But You Knew That Already. He even uses the nickname for the Readovka map that I coined in the piece, "the red map". — He clearly read my piece which prompted him to pen his poor attempt at slander but couldn't even gather the guts to properly identify me.
The three pillars of his text are:
1) his defense of a fantasy-land map,
2) his allegation of a materialistic motivation behind my work, and
3) his placement of me in something called "the 5th column".
I will address these one by one and show how this is a matter of extreme projection and how these actually apply to him.
Then I will briefly address a few of his less important remarks.
1. The Map Stuff
I don't want to spend too much time on this since the case is clear-cut and the stakes are so low anyway.
During the opening stages of the war the maps that were floating could wildly contradict each other. So I wrote a post highlighting some of the better pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian ones (the ones that were applying some criteria to check their inherent biases at least a little), but I also highlighted a few of the most blatantly false, wishful-thinking, propaganda maps (again from both sides).
Some days after this The Faker made a big announcement on his site that he would soon publish a map that would paint a radically new different view of the conflict. This great fanfare was followed up by him posting precisely the most laughably false and garbage map of any from the Russian camp by a country mile that I had warned against.
Someone thought this was too funny and sent me the link, and I called The Faker out on his spreading of garbage fake news.
There is no doubt that in calling the map he had posted garbage I was 100% correct.
The admission of this came from the very Readovka team that was behind it. Several days after my critique, Readovka made sweeping revisions to their graphic adding far more Ukrainian-controlled territory. This didn't make the revised map correct (not by a long shot), but it did serve as a tacit admission of just how garbage their work had been up until then. (To be perfectly fair Faker shared their map after they had made the revisions, but still.)
Actually, my post was primarily about the moderate improvement of the Readovka garbage. My swipe at The Faker for touting it was just the very final part of the article. One where I also noted that we were not in direct competition, because I was in the selfish pursuit of studying the world as it really was, and he was in the health industry selflessly dishing out group therapy.
My remark may not have been taken in a flattering manner for The Faker soon unfurled a piece denouncing those who dared question His Holiness the Ayatollah, and his choices of maps as "5th or 6th column" with "purely financial" goals.
As for the map, The Faker defended it by claiming absurdly that the map he promoted and the map I recommended were exactly alike, and that his readers are too dumb to read the map I was touting anyway.
The maps were emphatically not alike. For example to the West of Dnieper in the north around Kiev his map showed the Russians in a possession of a giant continous blob with good strategic depth on the flank, and one that had already swinged to the south of Kiev in force.
My map on the contrary correctly showed that the Russians had advanced along a narrow corridor which had outrun its flank security and had zero buffer on its right flank to the west which got stuck early. And that the Russian blockade of Kiev from the west and the south-west wasn't part of some continuous mass but hinged on a couple of isolated and exposed outposts.
In general, my map was very good in showing that the Russians had established a continuous front-line in the southeast and held everything behind that continuous front. But that beyond the Dnieper at Kherson and in the north this was not the case, and that here they were fragmented among outposts and pushes that were not in contact and that their hold of the north was at the time still precarious. Faker's simply depicted giant continuous blobs (with generously defined borders) in both cases, and was thus insanely misleading.
Maybe Faker is too dumb to read a map and discern the difference but the difference was radical.
Not contended to call my and his recommended maps one and the same he then unrolled a third map, an absolute monstrosity and proclaimed that this map (a map that did not even try to map Russian progress but was just trying to calculate and depict how much space the Russians would be occupying if they took entire Novorossiya plus all the remaining left bank) was also exactly alike as the two maps we had touted.
Faker:
These three maps do not contradict each other, at least not in a significant way or, should I maybe say, not in a significant way for you.
What a fucking drug addict!
2. The Finances
I absolutely love that The Faker opened the question of my "purely financial" goals. Why do I love it? Because now I can do the same for him.
To what extent his readers back The Faker, and on what terms, is entirely between them. For me to make any kind of observations on that would have been extremely low-brow and would have justifiably opened me up to accusations of envy.
But since it is he who started it, he now doesn't get to object when the same is done for him.
So let's take a look and determine how strong is the case that how The Faker runs his blog is dictated by what keeps the greenback flowing.
On his blog, The Faker periodically organizes donation drives for what he calls "ammo", but famously never publicly declares how much money he is looking to raise, and never reveals how much was raised.
His readers have in the past suggested that he post a 'money thermometer' so that they may see how much money he is aiming for and how much is flowing in. It is a suggestion he dismisses claiming that secrecy is needed to keep "powerful enemies" from exploiting that information for their nefarious needs:
I also want to mention another thing here: I regularly get suggestions that I should put up a (usually red) “thermometer” to show who much donations already came in and how much is needed to “plug the holes”. This is a very popular idea, and its intention (transparency) is good, but it has a HUGE flaw: it lets the enemy know how our “ammo stocks” are doing. Bad, very bad idea. First, it does not really work (I am still not quite sure why). Even worse, it exposes the blog too much to more targeted attacks. There is a very good reason why the very first step of any resistance movement is to let your enemy guess what you can, or cannot, do/afford: keeping the enemy guessing is crucial, especially when the enemy is more powerful by many orders of magnitude: So it is crucial that we keep out detractors in the dark about many things, including what our IT posture looks like, how much funds we have, where we get our info (especially about them!) or what our potential weaknesses might be.
Faker is very obscure on what these forces he has to hide his earnings from are. First he says "the enemy is more powerful by many orders of magnitude" suggesting he might be talking about forces like secret services, but then the only enemies he can actually name are "detractors".
Are people really this naive?
Almost every blog, podcast, and website which raises money provides transparency with the 'money thermometer'. Do none of them have detractors or "powerful enemies"?
What could a "detractor" possibly do with this information? Share it? And it stands to reason that if a blog has immensely powerful enemies that these do not need your 'money thermometer' to know what you're taking in, but have this information at their fingertips if they want it.
The Occam's Razor explanation is that The Faker is not transparent with his fundraisers because he wants to hide his earnings — not from poorly-defined, mysterious "powerful enemies" — but from his supporters. Likely because he fears that if they knew how much money he was getting the fundraisers would become less successful. Likely he fears (justifiably or not) that if they knew how much he was earning some of the supporters would feel he was already getting more than enough given his workload and value provided.
With my experience with fundraising and with working with a large site and then a small one I estimate that The Faker considering his traffic is able to fundraise about $50,000 annually, albeit anything between $25,000 and $150,000 is possible. I would estimate that his lifetime earnings from the blog are approaching $500,000.
So I am going to posit that the way The Faker handles his fundraisers — by dispensing with transparency and then lying about the reason as to why — is purely financially motivated.
What about his content? His content is bizarre enough that I am willing to believe it is a reflection of his personality unfiltered by financial motivations. Or at least that it is an unfiltered reflection of his true personality from say 5 years ago.
However, there is one glaring exception. Namely COVID. As the COVID quagmire dragged on The Faker was faced with the problem that his audience had turned against the madness but he remained a cultist through and through.
I am guessing that he was dying to take the site on a full-on pro-vax crusade but made the business decision to let it lie and preserve his earnings. We can assume this because on a few occasions his Covidian rage got the better of him and he went on demented anti-anti-vax rants including the time he wished misery upon 55% of Russians.
I also suspect that his hatred of Lukashenko and pro-regime-change advocacy, which he couches in geopolitical terms, is actually about him detesting the man for defying the Covidian cult.
What about me? Am I "purely financially motivated"?
1.) In March 2020 when the COVID madness hit I came out against it as soon as it started. At the time this was a lonely position to take even in the alternative media. Unlike so many others I didn't sit around waiting to guess which way the wind would blow, or trying to guess what my readers wanted or did not want to hear. I spoke my conscience and my radically uncompromising case against the brain disease right off the bat, and come what may for my support.
Gradually over the next 2 years anti-madness became the "orthodox" position among the alternative, but in March 2020 nobody had a way of knowing this, which is partly why numerous other "alternative" outlets didn't speak out for months and even then only in the most mealy-mouthed ways. (The other reason is that many are run by morons and normies who themselves had initially caught the mind virus.)
2.) Throughout 2020 and 2021 I periodically reported on a phenomena I had deemed "Russian faucism". The little-known fact that on the COVID Mind Disease the Russian government was no better than the West. My audience is largely anti-lockdown and largely fond of Russia so a section of it had a very difficult time accepting this and made no secret of it. I could have opted not to speak of it and spare their feelings and assure myself of their support, but it was the truth, and that it was little-known and actually actively resisted made it important, so I hammered on.
3.) From December 2021 through February 2022 I was growing increasingly concerned that a large-scale Russo-Ukrainian war was indeed on the cards and in the works and tried to warn readers to please take the possibility seriously. As it turns out I was right, but because official Russia was denying its preparations my valuable warnings were received with howls of hatred from a section of my own disbelieving readers. If Putin hadn't gone and vindicated me on February 24, my regular spring funding drive the next month would have probably been my first to ever fail (as it was, it raised $1200 of the $1500 target).
4.) As soon as the war kicked off I started to see many ways in which the Russian effort was ill-conceived and under-resourced. I wasn't quite as critical as Strelkov but among the English-speaking blogs which cover the war and are fond of Russia (or claim to be) I was the most cautious (and the most perceptive I would dare say) by a country mile (and still not enough as it turned out). Mine was a lonely voice that wasn't offering up triumphalism— but pointing out that ahead lay human loss, uncertainty, and gradually, a real danger of quagmire.
Now gradually more and more Russia well-wishers are coming to the same view, particularly those who already closely followed the Syrian war. But because at the time I was alone (ahead of the curve) in the English-speaking alt-space, this again — for the nth time — earned me the hatred of a section of my own long-time readers. The outcome was that my summer funding drive in June was the first to ever fail and was abandoned after 1st week in which I raised under $200.
So LOL, which part of this record indicates that I am "purely" motivated by money? Is this the record of someone who seeks approval and the support that comes with it?
If anything this is the record of someone who is utterly reckless with his writings, and probably has no business working in a field where fantasy-land fluff is rewarded and being the messenger of the cold hard truth earns you snowflake scorn.
The fundamental problem of writing about Russia for an alternative Western audience is that almost nobody has any stake in Russia. They want to hear about Russia's exploits because it brings them an emotional kick to see their own Western governments humbled, but they are in no way tied to the future of Russia or its people.
Russians have no choice but to stay realists and grapple with bad news because the future of their children and of their nation depends on it. But ostensibly pro-Russian Westerners don't need to. As soon as the story you're telling becomes anything but the feel-good narrative of unadulterated 5D ownage of the West by Moscow they can tune out, find a more positive-sounding source and pay no price for it.
At the end of the day, it is entirely human. They have enough of their own problems. If the Russia story isn't going to be a feel-good one then why pay attention? They have enough of their own depressing and ambiguous stories right at home. They don't need to be adding someone else's misery on top of their own.
This has the consequence that in the market there is a steep price for telling gritty stories even when they are true, but no price to be paid for telling outrageous garbage as long as it is positive in the sense that it offers hope that Western leaders are being humbled by 5D Vlad.
It is a good-news-only kind of market, and the outlet that will outcompete the others is the outlet that can weave the most Putin Triumphant Once Again kind of tale, and deliver the most emotional relief for an alternative crowd enduring under a constant avalanche of defeats at home and crying out for something, anything at all positive. — Even if it comes from distant shores, and even if it sounds too good, too cartoonish to be true.
I know this to be true yet I continue to serve up gritty realism that I know will get me nowhere. It must be because I am "purely financial motivated" LOL.
I was literally the muscle behind the mastodont that was Russia Insider for 4 years. (One of those years together with Edward Slavsquat and one with another gunslinger who then likewise moved on to RT). If anybody knows the Western har-har Russia stronk market — what plays well with it and what sends them into a tailspin — it is I. (In the 4 years I fired off something like 15,000 headlines at it so I'd say I have an idea.)
Yet I've not even tried independently challenging the boomer High Priests of Kremlin worship at their game of profitable hagiography. Why not?
While it would be tempting to present reasons that would paint me as some kind of martyr for truth the real reason is far more selfish. I am aware of my own mortality. One day not too long from now I will be dust. So I will be damned if I will spend the short time I have left as a lifeform, serving up feel-good group therapy for Western boomers. I'd much rather spend it on my own Slavic self. To satiate my own selfish desire to discover the world as it really is.
In doing the work of delivering soothing lies to Western alt-boomers, the Faker is doing important humanitarian work. This compels us to treat him with a measure of generosity.
Thus I will say that the fact that I'm approaching the news from the point of view of what is the truth here and The Faker is approaching it from the point of view of what is the most 5D spin I can give this does not prove that I am more morally upright or even just more stubborn.
This is because I have never been tested in the way The Faker has been. Sure he was tested and he failed, but I was never tested to start with so the only thing that our differing approaches conclusively show is that our circumstances are different.
The Faker is in possession of a profitable Russia stronk blog. After starting out as an internet weirdo he, owing to his drive and eccentricism, wrote himself into a position where he unexpectedly had a profitable piece of internet real estate in his possession. But it is a piece of real estate that will remain profitable for only as long as it remains a good-news-only site dispensing group therapy.
To risk and sacrifice such a sure earner on the altar of reality would be a big ask for even the most nonmaterialistic of individuals, and we already know that The Faker is not such an individual from the lack of transparency with which he handles his fundraisers. (And from the way he tied his tongue on Covid.)
So yes, while I know the formula of how to build a Russia stronk site and perhaps have the talents to build one (the views Russia Insider was getting may suggest this) I was never in possession of one. So all I am giving up is a potential, hypothetical earner. The Faker would be giving up one that is already running and whose comforts he has already gotten used to.
It's easy for me as a poverty blogger to speak my mind. The Faker actually has something to lose. I have nothing that I owe to the market and can't be held hostage by it. The Faker has.
For me to have been tested in the same way as The Faker has been, the devil ought to have offered me an ownership stake in Russia Insider in 2019 when I was leaving. That would have been the true test of the kind The Faker has been subjected to. If I had a large Western audience thirsting for the next feel-good 5D fix to satiate, would I still be quite this uncompromising in my truth-speaking, or would I little by little start to censor myself, and rationalize it all away as my first responsibility being to provide for my family? We will never know, and that's a good thing. As we say: lead us not into temptation.
Who knows how Faker's thinking would have developed if he had remained obscure. Without a profitable Russia stronk empire with its own needs and demands. He was always eccentric (a polite way of spelling "off his meds") but there was little to suggest in his early writings that he was hopelessly naive.
When the Russo-Ukrainian war kicked off he fired off a few rants then found himself unable to write anything for three months (during the most important time for his blog in his lifetime) ostensibly for health reasons. Cognitive dissonance has been known to cause discomfort and stress.
Of course, I do not suggest that Faker has ever consciously massaged his message. But I do know that the intuitive part of the brain is extremely attuned to what is the most advantageous course of action, and has ways of nudging the intellectual, verbal part of the brain to the "correct" (self-interested) course without the intellectual part of the brain ever becoming the wiser. It is the gut part of ourselves that is really in control, and the verbal part of us is only our lawyer. The gut part knows that the lawyer part of the brain will do its best work if it believes the client to be righteous even if the full truth is a little murkier than that.
All of this to say that I am not necessarily setting myself up as more virtous than he (at least not in the context of his money-grubbing), but that there is sweet delicious and absurd irony in a Group Therapy guru who hides the level of support he is getting from his own supporters, attempting to style a proven poverty blogger of three years of being "solely motivated by finances".
Of course, we all know what really took place there. The Group Therapy guru said something stupid (as is his job), was called out on it, and then tried every ad hominem in the book as a distraction. It is hopelessly stupid, but for the people who rely on his weekly doses of la-la land hopium for their mental perseverance, it's probably good enough. Their tastes lean toward trash in the first place.
But why did I mess with Faker if I am not "purely financially motivated"? After all I could have easily left him out of my article. The explanation is very simple. I did it because I don't like the guy and I like messing with him. Actually to say that I don't like him would be a vast understatement. I despise the dwarf and have nothing but contempt for him, and for all of his Covidian pro-lockdown brood. As far as I am concerned 2020 was the Great Bifurcation where it was revealed that there are men and then there are vaguely humanoid-looking bugs. Faker is a mind-diseased bug. The only kindness his wretched, depraved kind can ever ask and receive of me is a cleansing in a death by fire.
Finally, a small piece of advice to donors. Never donate to a poverty blogger such as myself. They are the truth-tellers. To make sure they stay that way keep them poor and feral, with nothing to lose.
But if you absolutely have to donate to someone, donate to someone like The Faker. Someone who has been tested and has proven they know which side of their bread is buttered. Someone used to taking in money and who wouldn't know what to do without it. Someone who is predictable and will speak your conscience. Someone who has already been tamed and castrated.
That's what I would do.
That's what any smart sponsor through history has done.
3. 5th Column
In the list of ad homs Faker spewed to try and hide his shame, one stands out by its seriousness and cartoonishness: "5th column".
The man is obsessed with the "5th column".
Now that I think about it, I've never known anyone to be so obsessed with 5th columns. The dude has always been 5th column this, 5th column that. The dude probably can't order a sandwich without going on about the 5th column lurking behind the counter.
Why is he so weird about this? Why does he speak about treason all the fucking time?
We'll get to the bottom of this.
First, it's incredibly strange how he tries to pin the "5th column" label on me.
It is strange because I am not Russian, I do not work for Russia, and I do not even live in Russia. I simply do not meet the technical requirements to ever be "5th column". I am not associated with Russia, and I technically do not owe Russia anything. I could be the most anti-Russian person in the world and I still wouldn't be a 5th column traitor because I simply aren't Russian. Why is Faker confused about this? Doesn't he know the rules?
That said, while I am not a Russian, I am a Slav. What is more, I am a life-long pan-Slavist. I am one of the last 10 remaining pan-Slavists in the world. That means that I do hold myself to a certain code in regard to Russia (and in regard to all other Slavic countries).
My code is that I will never ever bear arms against any fellow Slavs, participate in any Slav-on-Slav wars, or collaborate with any non-Slavic government against any Slavs ever. That is my honor. The only way I can pick up a rifle in a Slav-on-Slav conflict is if war is brought right down to my street and becomes a direct threat to my family.
So while I am not a Russian and can not be part of any Russian "5th column" I do actually hold myself to a code that would make it impossible for me to be "5th column" even if I were an ethnic Russian.
I grew up in a country that lost 7% of its population (100,000 out of 1.4 million) in WWII resistance to Germans but also in a civil war and in collaboration with the occupier. I live in a town whose most hallowed ground is the mass grave where the Germans dumped 50 hostages in a reprisal killing.
As a result of this WW2 trauma, Slovenians have very stark and very well-developed rules of what is acceptable, and where treason and collaboration start. The rules are very simple. You can oppose any domestic government or faction for any reason and with any means. But if you get in league with a hostile foreign government that is when you cross the line and become 5th column. A traitorous, collaborationist rat.
My education was very clear about this point and I internalized it early and intensely.
As it happens I have never worked for, or with, any government in the world for any reason or toward any goal. So I simply can not be "5th column" to anything or anyone.
As he is oft to remind us, unlike I, Raevski is an ethnic Russian.
Where I am bound to a certain code of conduct toward Russia and its people only by my pan-Slavic worldview, Raevski is bound to a certain code of conduct toward Russia and Russians by his very blood.
A certain code which if he were to break would make him into a traitor. A despicable, collaborationist, 5th column rat.
A certain code which by his own admission he has broken and never showed any remorse for.
I didn't know this, and I was shocked to learn it, but there is an old Raevski text from 2014 in which he casually outs himself as a traitor to his blood.
He explains that in the 1980s while he was working for a Western government he used his contacts to try and secure more European backing for the CIA-backed Islamist warlord Shah Massoud who at the time was killing Russian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Understand this. A Russian working to get more Russian soldiers killed. An ethnic Russian safely in the West, working to wrap more Russian mothers in black:
I also worked with Polish exiles who were assisting Solidarnosc from aboard and I had frequent contacts with a covert representative of Ahmad Shah Massoud in Europe whom I helped making important contacts.
Shocking, revolting stuff.
Understand, this is not about whether the Soviets were right to be in Afghanistan or not. Maybe you think they were an illegitimate occupation, maybe you think that they were suckered in by the Americans, or that they were at least better than what replaced them. This doesn't matter. This is not the question.
The question is, did Raevski as an ethnic Russian have any business working to secure more backing for a foreigner who was in the business of killing soldiers of Russian blood?
If you were a Russian father from Sverdlovsk in 1985 whose son had just been drafted for Afghanistan. If that was the case, what would you think of an ethnic Russian who was using his contacts from his service for a Western government to secure more finances, arms and moral backing for Ahmad Shah Massoud? The leader of Jamiat-e Islami, one of the largest and most militant factions of the Pakistani-backed "Peshawar Seven" mujahedeen grouping?
It gives me no joy to report this, but that Raevski is a group therapist and an internet buffoon is the least of his problems. He is a living, breathing, bona fide traitor of his kin, with the blood of his own people on his hands. How truly accursed this man is.
Perhaps the Soviets had no business being in Afghanistan. But that was one war that Raevski was bound by his blood to stay out of. Instead, he worked to get the "Peshawar Seven" more European arms and still brags about it to this day.
What the wise man is ashamed of, the fool takes pride in we say in Serbo-Croatian.
Just how incredibly warped this cursed freak (izrod) is.
This is a freak who will try styling you "5th column" for calling out his use of a particularly copey map, while he himself was trying to get more legitimacy for Shah Massoud and more Russian soldiers dead!
I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E!
This freak, this accursed traitor of his own blood, can't shut up about 5th column this, 5th column that, and tries to set himself up as the arbiter of who or what is 5th column while he himself is a particularly wretched form of traitor with actual blood on his hands.
Russian liberals go abroad and then lobby for more sanctions on Russia. They are scoundrels and traitors and 5th column! And Raevski is just like them, worse even! They lobby for sanctions, he lobbied for more arms for a CIA asset at war with Russian Soviet soldiers.
Look, it is one thing to be an exile, and one thing to oppose the Soviet government. But when you get in bed with a project of a foreign hostile government in a way that is going to cause more of your blood to perish then you have crossed the line and lost your soul.
I have probably grown less appreciative of Putin than I may have been in the past. I may have even written a harsh word about him here or there. As I will continue to do in the future. And for this great "crime" Raevski would have me denounced as "5th column" when his own opposition to a Moscow government caused him to work to get European governments to help kill more Russians — something that I would rather die before I would ever do something that wretched.
It's insane.
This man is accursed beyond redemption.
He is a living-breathing Vlasovite. Vlasovites were justified in opposing Stalin but they crossed the line when they got in bed with the Germans to do it. But he is worse than the Vlasovites. The Vlasovites were choosing between service for the Germans and the uncertain fate of Soviet slave laborers. No such stark choice faced Raevski. He wasn't going to starve or be worked to death if he wasn't going to lobby for the "Peshawar Seven". He did that entirely out of his own free will.
Worse, he did it at a time when the Soviet Union was less worthy of condemnation than ever. By the 1980s the Soviet Union had become just another normal state. It was authoritarian, and with an unproductive economic system. But it was a Slavic superpower and was not committing any crime abroad that the Americans whom Raevski was helping had not committed ten times over.
If Reagan planned an invasion of the Soviet Union, Raevski — who writes with pride how he trained a European army to fight the Soviets — would have probably volunteered to lead the spearhead.
This freak is a Russian Ahmed Chalabi.
Imagine if Pat Buchanan did not just oppose the American war in Iraq in his journalism, but was actually traveling to Saudi Arabia to try and get more funding for the Islamic Army and the 1920 Brigades. Of course, this is impossible to imagine, because it would never happen. An American would never dream of such a thing. For some reason, it is only among us Slavs that this traitorous trash can be found among.
Let us think of the Iranians who fled the 1979 revolution. I am sure that among them there were good people. And I'm sure that their continued opposition to the new government from abroad could be justified. But there is a line between legitimate opposition and collaboration. And if you find yourself lobbying for more American arms for the Mujahideen e Khalq then you have crossed that line. This is precisely what Raevski did.
It now becomes more clear why this man can't stop talking about 5th column traitors and sees them everywhere. It is because he is an accursed traitor and has been for the past 35 years.
Legal action can not be taken against him because he has never been Soviet or Russian citizen, but the blood inside him must be in revolt against the traitorous executioner of his own people that it is forced to sustain.
When Raevski draws his final breath there will be one less Russian traitor in the world, and some father from Sverdlovsk will finally have his justice.
4. Buffoon
Raevski is an accursed, deformed traitor. But he is also a joke.
I find it most cute how he screams that he is ex-military but his critics are merely civilians. What's up with this boomer credentialism? This is the internet, pops. Nobody gives a shit who or what you are. The only thing that matters is your record. And your record and that of your cronies ain't shit.
Yes, you are ex-military. So do tell me the Grand Marshal of Switzerland, why didn't you or any of your ex-military friends see this war coming? Why did it fall upon this ex-machinist to scream his lungs out to brace for the largest land war in Europe since WWII?
Maybe you were military, but you weren't good at it? Is that it?
It's never a good sign when you have to demand respect. If you got some calls right and wasn't pasting the dumbest maps and posting the cringiest shit in general, maybe you wouldn't need to remind people that you were military every 5 minutes?
Faker can scream that he is a credentialed military analyst but anyone who has ever read a text by the both of us knows which one of us is the more grounded one, and which one has been messing with mescaline.
Also another thing. This dude can't shut up about how he was in the military, how he did analysis for the general staff but the typical Faker piece is a 7000-word wall-to-wall word salad. Do they teach fucking formatting in the military??!!??!!
Is that the kind of shit you were writing up for your generals?
The dude can't shut up about how he used to write military briefings but his texts look and read like the work of a 19th-century mystic.
When I was with Russia Insider I first thought that I have to republish pretty much everything by the Faker because he was kind of a big deal in this corner of the internet already. It was always a major pain in the ass to come up with headlines and subheadlines for his screeds actually fit for human consumption and to highlight the few parts of his text that actually made sense. When the boss told me that I didn't need to bother and that it was fine to just take the odd excerpt if that, it was a major fucking relief and a great day at work.
This man, The Faker is a true contradiction. Like if hypocrisy took human form.
He will make great fanfare about how he will soon post a map — and then pick the stupidest map available.
He will hide his earnings from his own supporters, and lie about why he does it — but he will try calling a proven poverty blogger as being "purely financially motivated".
He sees traitors everywhere, and can't shut up about them — but he actually is a true traitor, not just hyperbolically but a real one.
He is an ethnic Russian — but funneled support behind Shah Massoud, the Shamil Basayev of the 1980s.
He is an ethnic Russian but can't spell Rusian (or Ukrainian) names worth a shit. ("Dnipropetrovsk (aka “Dniepr”)." — Actually it's Dnepropetrovsk or Dnipro, moron.)
He is ex-military but he was caught by surprise by the biggest conventional military operation in Europe of our lifetimes. (Ooops.)
He is an ex-military briefer but the briefs he writes for us look and read as if you fed hard drugs to your village eccentric.
He threatens the world with a Russian "Operation Z+" to "demilitarize and denazify" the entire West and then the planet — but he lives in Florida.
And here's another Faker contradiction that bothers me. The dude is oft to remind us that he is ex-military, but he looks like this:
He looks like a total fucking dweeb. Don't get me wrong, I know it's bad to make fun of people's appearances and some of my best friends are dweeb-looking.* But if you are going to go around reminding people how they are mere civilians but you are Mr. ex-Military, shouldn't you, you know, look the part?
If you're ex-military why do you look like this?? Maybe you are ex-military but if you were my lieutenant you wouldn't fare well. Dude looks like he couldn't command authority in a Sunday School, much less in a platoon. How the fuck are 20-something testosterone militant motherfuckers ever going to follow this guy who looks like a D&D dungeon master and even a D&D character (dwarf) come to life? Forget about the tough motherfuckers I've known in my adult life. If this guy was just our elementary school teacher and we were just itsy-bitsy children we would have made his life hell.
And for the record, the reason that I am not military is that while I was born in a free country, by the time I grew up the country was already US-aligned and I was under no circumstances going to be signing up for a career in a NATO military. In other words, the reason is that I have actual principles in my life, bounds dictated by my blood, that the renegade nihilist Raevski walked all over in his own.
(*Actually they aren't but I gotta say this so as not to be racist against dweebs.)
5. Sad and Rootless
Raevski is a movie-villain-level traitor to his own blood and thus does not deserve sympathy. It excludes him from receiving Christian love from us.
That is unfortunate because in reading about his personal history what emerges is the picture of a pitiful, sad, empty man without a home, without a people. Rooted in nothing and desperately reaching out into the world to latch onto some foreign cause to adopt as his own and fill the empty void inside him. Someone deeply in need of connection and grounding.
He is of Russian heritage and he happens to be currently backing the Russian cause (in a very comical way), but this is a mere coincidence. It is clear from his writing about his life that this Russian renaissance came only after he had already ceased being Russian.
In 1991 when the USSR fell the exile dream came true. What they had hoped for so long finally came true. Finally, they could return home. Solzhenitsyn did so and lived out his final days in Russia. Raevski, who had never lived in Russia, visited only to discover this was not his country, not truly, and left. But he did more than this. Reading between the lines ("At that point I just turned away in utter disgust.") the picture that paints itself is of a man who gave up on Russia, and dropped out of even following what was going on with her ("And when finally Putin came to power I though "oh God, the KGB is back in command"."). Moreover, some Serbs who worked for Saker in Serbian and then fell out with him report that their research has led them to discover that during the 1990s Raevski was pro-Chechen and anti-Russian. (As he had been pro-Mujahedeen and anti-Soviet in the 1980s.)
Moreover, after retiring in Switzerland he relocated out of that neutral country and of all the places he could have moved to, he picked the United States of America. What a choice for a Russian man!
Of all the countries in the world that were available to him as a Swiss passport holder, he chose precisely the Great NATO Satan. Precisely Russia's greatest foe which never stopped waging the Cold War on Russia even after Moscow had stopped fighting. This is the place he picked to pay taxes in! If for some reason it was crucial for his family that they be in an English-speaking environment why not at least chose non-NATO Ireland, or even New Zealand would have been better.
Look, I don't particularly care where The Faker lives and which awful anti-Russian government he feeds with his taxes. But it is a point for my thesis that somewhere in the 1990s when the miraculous fall of the USSR failed to result in the kind of post-Communist Russia that would meet his demanding standards he turned away from her and for all practical purposes ceased being Russian. Also, this is a dude who can't shut up about the 5th column and wants to set himself up as the arbiter of who belongs to it, while he himself opts to pay his taxes in the USA when he wasn't even born there. Consistency much?
The whole 2014 text where he talks about his relationship with Russia is extremely weird. In one place he is actually falsely pumping up his anti-Russian credentials to the point of LARP. He states that he spent the Cold War training an unnamed European military to fight the Soviets — while omitting to say the military in question was the Swiss army that was extremely unlikely to ever fight the Soviets.
This is a rootless man without a home latching onto causes on distant shores to adopt as his own and give him meaning and home that he does not have. The Mujahedeen, then allegedly the Chechens, then Hezbollah, and now Putin. It is a sad picture. One that humanizes this internet grifter and group therapist and evokes pity. Pity which he would be deserving of if he was only that. Who cares if he is a comical buffoon who is a little greedy to boot? So are many people. He could still be a perfectly alright guy in real life. I would still mess with him if that was the case just to get back at him for the bad that the Covidian bedwetters inflicted on us, but privately I wouldn't really think of him all that badly. But shockingly it turns out he has much more serious skeletons in his closet. He has Sverdlovsk ghosts on his conscience.
He gets to live out his days with his family, but there is a family somewhere in provincial Russia, Ukraine or Belarus who never got their son back from Afghanistan because this motherfucker thought it would be emotionally fulfilling to get more guns for Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Proklet bio izdajica svoje domovine!
Other than that he is fine man! ;-)
An important reckoning. It took me some time to get there myself, but it's good to read it again from someone else.
It should too make you think about the "experts" (Escobar, Martyanov, etc.) , who constantly refer to each other in the Vineyard blog and confirm each other's expertise.