The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1051: An Overview of the First Chechen War w/ Lance Legion

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

58 MinutesPG-13Lance is a book publisher and the host of Lance's Legion. Lance joins Pete to go over the contents of Alexander Prokhanov's book, "Chechen Blues." Lance uses its contents as a jumping-off point to talk about the Chechen people in the greater Russian Federation and to give context to the First Chechen War. Chechen BluesLance's LinksDVX PublishingVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad free, head on over to freemam Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star. Three, there's Patreon.

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How are you doing, Lance? I'm doing great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me back. Yes, no problem. Let's jump right into this. I was looking at the, I was looking at for some books to read about the 90s, Russia. And Anilip Hill had this book called Chechen Blues by Alexander.

How do you pronounce his name? Is it Prokhorov? Prokhanov, I think. Prokinov, yeah. And, yeah, I have trouble with those Russian names. But I started reading it, and I was like, oh, man, it would be really nice to have Alexander come on the show. And I reached out, and I think Taylor was like, yeah, that's not going to happen. But one of us could, or Lance knows the book really well.

And I was like, well, Lance just being on the show, he's the guy. So let's jump right into this because we've only got about 60 minutes. So how did this book come on your radar? I know that you're the military guy. You're the war guy that a lot of people go to. How did this one make it to your radar? Well, it started like a long, long time ago, even when I was in high school, just studying about the Chechen wars and using it as a template to understand

or maybe overcome some of the insurgent problems that we were having during GWAT, you know, global war and terror, which is, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan. because where the Americans failed, the Russians succeeded. And insurgency is one of those interesting things where, you know, the conventional arms of the, you know, of any occupying force comes into close contact with the civilian, especially because that is where the political basis of gravity is. So the center of gravity is something that you have to actually take into account, especially something that Americans fail to do and thus it's why.

they failed to, I guess, successfully install a new regime. And so obviously, I was studying a lot about the reports that were coming out of Chechen Wars, and I heard about this book by proxy. Only recently was it translated. Back in the day, I used Google translate it page by page just to see what it said. So it's pretty interesting. All right. Well, can you give some background on exactly what's the deal here?

I know this is December 1995. I know that we have a Russian troops going to, going to Chechnya to one specific town. What's the background you can give us? So the historical background is this. 1989 to 1991 is the dissolution of the Soviet Republic, right? And that's a massive thing. I mean, the bulwark of international communism is fundamentally undermined. And of course, the PRC, the People's Republic of China still exists, and ostensibly it is communist.

However, it's not the vanguard state in the same way the Soviet Union was. And so the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe. I mean, not namely for all the different people in the Soviet Union, but namely for the core ethnic majority, which are the Russians. Now, to give you context, what was happening after the dissolution was that the Soviet Union had been subdivided, into a bunch of autonomous republics. A number of these are a place that we know, for instance, Ukraine, Belarusia, the, you know, the Baltic states, and so on. However, there are also internal republics, which are independent within the federation of the Russian Federation, that weren't previously Soviet republics under the Soviet Union.

So what does this mean? So for instance, North Abkhazia or the Chechen Republic or Dagestan, for instance, the these were all incorporated under the Russian Soviet. Why is this important? Well, when the Soviet Union fell, a number of these other republics were breaking away. And then finally, the impetus, the kind of domino effect, had finally started to affect even the eternal republics

who were clamoring for independence as well. This is a major crisis point for the Russian Federation, precisely because, you know, imagine yourself, you're a Russian, and you had dedicated the last seven or eight decades of your national life to the idea of communism. And seeing this all fall away, along with the security of your personal life and the life of your country at large, you kind of don't know why you're fighting, especially if you're not a Russian ethnic. And therefore, the war that was happening in Chechnya was something that was

kind of a crisis point, a self-reflection of the Russian people, whether they were to assert themselves in their power or whether they would become victim to the onrushing liberalization of their country. And to give you context specifically, Russia in the 90s was, I mean, it was just a disaster. There was gang violence all over the place, economic disaster. Like, your average person was in grinding poverty. Meanwhile, mafia's of individuals had, you know, snapped up

what had been previously state economic sectors, entire sectors of the economy, into oligarchies and their cronies. And so it was ultimate crony capitalism. And this was the context that 1995, the first Chechen war, was fought over. Basically, a country that didn't know itself that was waking up from the stupor of communism,

with oligarchs and, I guess, subversive types that were reigning in Moscow, gang violence, and no clear directive or, how do you say, I guess, overarching mission for people to graft onto. And so it was really a come-to-Jesus moment in the crisis of the Russian people in recent history. Yeah, well, when you start really looking into that, and you start nailing it, nailing down what was happening there. the extent of the just the corruption and the graft and the the oligarchs, the ones that Putin had to basically put to heal in order to do anything in the country. Yeah, you really start to understand it was definitely not a place that a person would want to live. From what I understand,

the average age started to decline, but it was in like military age men. So it was like military military-aged men and men of, you know, men who would be having children. So it was a really bad time for Russia and for its people. They needed somebody. They needed a savior to come in. Now, this book specifically is described as fiction. It's a work of fiction. But I think that, what would you call it?

Would you call it a historical fiction pretty close to the truth? names have been names and places have been changed to protect the innocent kind of thing i think so i think it's very very close to the truth so so much so that you know if you just change a couple key facts or maybe some passages it would just be a historical document um but you know i think people should not they should not uh take the the fiction thing too far the label too far because this is absolutely true. Not only does it encapsulate real events that happen, but it also crystallizes the general zeitgeist of what people experienced at that time, both high and low. So, Brooklyn-off named the book Chechen Blues. What do you think that,

why do you think he named it that just because it sounded cool? Well, obviously it's not just, you know, illuminating the depressive atmosphere that it took, but also it was a homage to the winter blue skies that stretch that are very famous in the caucuses, especially because of how clear and blue and deep blue it becomes during the day and at night. It's just very different serene situation. So for instance, the book opens up and the armored division. which is under the command of a major general, is all formed up and ready to go. So basically there's entire columns of armor, BMP2s and old T72s, and men are equipped and armored and so on. And this is at nighttime, right?

All the engines are being started up. The freezing cold is biting into the hands of the, you know, the protagonist. More still, people are uneasy. And they're remarking on the quality of conscripts, which is the Soviet and Russian Federation heavily relied on the conscript army as far as who was scraped up from the bottom of the barrel willing to fight and die for Russia or had no other choice so for instance you know there are individuals who were very much uh you know i guess criminals there were still others who were you know McNamara's idiots in the sense that they were incompetent

and there were few true believers and the protagonist is one of them who are competent and convinced of the mission ahead. And so when he talks about Chuchin Blues, before the chapter ends, he looks up into the night sky and he remarks the different hue in which things happen. And then the book obviously goes through his experiences and all this stuff we'll get into in a moment. But he also, there is another storyline, which is entirely fictional, but probably accurate as far as the perception of the average Russian of the oligarch, which is this.

individual who is an oligarch who is ruling from Moscow and experiencing the higher up headquarters of the events happening and playing out in Chechnya where the protagonist is writing. So it's very interesting that they both share these blues. And the difference is that the oligarch, when he looks up in the night sky, it's dark and black. And so there's a certain literary mechanism at play which describes someone who is actually living the situation as opposed to someone who is whose darkness within himself encompasses a night back in the capital of Moscow in the heart of Russia. Pst, did you know? Those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about? They're right here at Beacon

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Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Let's give a little bit of background here. Can you describe Chechnya?

What is, where are these people originally come from? What do they believe? What do they practice? Stuff like that. So this is a place geographically in the caucuses of Russia, right? And the caucuses are these massive mountain chains, which basically border between Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, north of Qazian, Ossetia, the southern republics of Dagestan and Chechnya.

And basically, it's this land of mountains. and forests, ancient and old, hardly touched, with the exception of Baku, which is a massive oil field that the Soviets heavily invested. If you're a World War II scholar, that was the location in which people were targeting for, for the Vermacht and the army group South. But the Chechen people are an English people. They are a Caucasian people in the original sense, not the weird sociological sense. And they are fundamentally very ethnically unique in that there are basically Muslims. They are Sunni Muslims by and large. Still further, they are also a highly warrior people. The modes of sociological organization is highly, highly, how do you say, warrior martial

fit out, if that makes sense. So they organize themselves in terms of families, clans, and then finally tribes. And if you look at modern Chechnya, for instance, and you look at Kadyrov, Kedarov is able to actually be a patron of a client system related to his family clan. And so you have to understand this is very interesting, archa futurist situation where men still are, I guess, convinced and live, by a set of mores, which we haven't seen in the West for roughly 1,000 or 2,000 years, but at the same time are armed with AK-47s and all the new armament of a modern military. And so it's just you have to put this into your mind of people who are bloodthirsty and merciless, absolutely ruthless and their their reputation for mercilessness and violence and aggression are

are well earned and we'll find this out as we go through the episode but for sure they're they're definitely a very um i do you say uh formidable people so what is what brings this uh this russian company there to uh to cheschina in the first place So 1995, like I said before, there were a number of republics within the United States, within the Russian Republic that were clamoring for independence. And one of them is Chechnya. Chechnya began this push for independence for a number of reasons. And namely under the Stalinist regime and Khrushchev, a number of the Chechnya had to be.

become ethnically profiled and deported to different parts of the Soviet Union. And so they were ethnically cleansed from their home region. But at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they had started to return. Still further, the Afghan-Soviet Afghan War, which had finished in 1989, which had lasted 10 years in Afghanistan at that time, that was the longest conflict Afghanistan had experienced with a foreign invader. Obviously, Tens of thousands of Soviets had died, not to mention the millions of Afghans, which had died as well, but a large number of them were practicing Muslim Chechens, nationalists, and, of course, Islamists, who had returned to their home country and made a stake of independence and armed themselves,

because remember, follow the Soviet Union, there were entire weapons caches of ammunition in arms. I mean, there were people, for instance, there were a mafia, members were able to steal fleets of tanks and sell them on the black market. If you've ever watched this movie, Lord of War, it is no exaggeration. And so this is the situation that the Chechens found themselves is not only do they have a, you know, population motivated with the spirit of independence and revenge, but they have the means to make that actually happen in real life, since they are able to take over the weapons caches that were locally cited.

in the Chechen Republic, as well as be able to take advantage of their large mafia, Chechen Mafia network in Russia. For those of you who don't know, the mafia in Russia plays a huge part, not just in the underworld, but in governance. And so this Russian Federation-wide network of criminal enterprise is able to fund and arm Chechen insurgents for the independence of Chechnya. Yeah, once you start really reading about them and you, my favorite stories, I guess, were that some of the first troops that went into Ukraine in 2022. And the thing that floored me about that when real videos started coming out, you saw these ethnic Russians running up to Chechens and hugging them and saying, like, thank God you're here.

and you're like there's something really different happening right about now especially when you get into that history so so yeah you think that that there is enough to lead into into what we're looking at in the book as far as the book goes and just one last last point here aside from everything else you have to remember that I can't emphasize enough the fall of the Soviet Union 91 The two coup attempts, which happened with, you know, communist hardliner generals that were ultimately defeated.

And the continued enterprise of Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, the independent Russian Federation, fundamentally was a corrupt, alcoholic drug addicted dude who was the puppet figure of the cabal of oligar. namely among them is Kasparov and a number of other different oligarchs that were expelled from the Russian Federation under Putin. So this book takes place before Putin takes power. And it shows a completely corrupt oligarch being held together at the seams by people such as, you know, the protagonist of the story who are there with a bunch of scumbags and people who are, you know, I guess on hard luck situation. fighting for the continued existence of the Russian Federation of the Russian government. That definitely sets the tone for it and brings us right up to it. So yeah, as far as this, as far as this incursion goes, why now? Why this place?

Mm-hmm. So, okay, so the war plans were like this, and it's kind of funny because this this is exactly how the Ukrainian war kind of played out as well, that the higher-ups in Moscow believed that if they just had a show of force, which is to say, okay, if we just send it, you know, armored divisions and take over the major, you know, cities that were in the Chechen Republic, the insurgents would feel, you know, they'd just throw their hands up. They're just simply, they would have no chance and that they would just say, you know, like whatever okay there was a reassertion of Russian authority and this is exactly what

they did like idiots right so they just sent an armored column which is a division-sized element this is 10,000 to 20,000 men with you know tanks vmp2s you know of all the full regalia of the combined arms of the Soviet or Russian military and they just decided to you know what we're just going to roll up into Grozny and we're just going to park all our armor right in the center with no defensive intent at all, no defensive posture, and just set up shop, make contact with the town hall and the mayor of Grosny and, you know, reassert authority. Well, what ends up happening is that they do so eminently. They are welcomed by the locals of Grosny, you know, your average local, old men, old women, young children,

men of fighting agents, et cetera. All the men are welcomed into their homes and given a feast. And this is where things are going wrong. They're eating and drinking and drinking vodka on duty. And if you're a soldier, you know that drinking on duties the worst thing you can do, right? You're dulling your senses and compromising yourself and your teammates, right? And so they're drinking and smoking. And the Alexander is the only dude that's just in,

control of his senses, you know, he's trying not to, he's not, he's very uneasy because he sees a lot of shadows going, you know, back and forth. And suddenly it's the strike of midnight on New Year's Eve, right? This is where it's set. And then suddenly these guys start yelling, Allah,u'Aqb. And they start slicing throats of these Russian soldiers. And you hear sporadic gunfire of people who are just, you know, on their last back heel trying to fight off this obvious ambushade. And you hear RPGs going off and tanks exploding out in the streets and people screaming and dying. And men and women and children stabbing and shooting Russian soldiers. I mean, not just men, women and children too.

And it speaks to the barbarity or rather the fighting spirit of the Chechens in that the entirety of society was galvanized together to do this kind of. of red wedding situation and to lure the Russians into their homes and kill them by the fireside and so Alexander escapes the situation by you know the you know the the hairs on his chin and the you know his luck and is he manages to basically reconnoiter and re up with five other dudes who take over an abandoned home which is occupied by a Russian ethnic So if you're in Russia, everyone is Russian, quote unquote. However, there are terms to delineate between a Russian citizen and a Russian ethnic.

This lady that they take over an abandoned home, which is ostensibly an abandoned apartment building, is inhabited by a Russian ethnic citizen. So does that make sense? So she's not a Chechen woman, right? Yes. And it talks about their drama and the effects of battles. So for many people that don't know this, when you're in the heat of battle, your adrenaline is pumping and your blood is up and you're just absolutely in flight or fight mode, which in this case is fight mode, especially. And when your adrenaline finally exfiltrates from your system, your nervous system starts to re-center, you get the shakes. And sometimes some men, especially if they're not well adapted biologically to the tremors of battle, they start becoming, well,

what's it called, you know, it's not shell shock per se. It is, you know, like hysteric. And so it talks about some of these guys who are hysterical, but later on show their bravery and a number of different elements. But I think I want to leave it there and answer any questions you may have, Pete. Well, I guess when you're looking at the fact that they were, I mean, how do you take the fact that they were naive enough to accept the invite? And why do you think that was?

Because they're, because they aren't true believers, because there are, you know, there are very few men there that, you know, want to be there. Or maybe want to be there is not the right term, but feel a duty to be there. Do you think that's what it has to do with? I think it's too, you know, it's multifaceted, right? So on the one hand, you have dudes that also don't want to be there and Chechens don't want them there. And so I assume that there's this sentiment that's like, I'm just here for the paycheck and some food, which by the way, in that time, even the Russian army wasn't able to make the correct requisitions for food. And so they had to resort to foraging, which is precisely why these Russians accepted the hospitality of the Chechens because there was no food. the logistical chain had already broken down.

Still further, a lot of Russian, I guess, nationalist slash people that believed in Russia, who are Russians themselves, they don't see that a lot of the subject peoples of the Russian Federation fucking hate the Russians. They believe that,

like, everyone loves Russia, kind of like Americans. American good old boys, they go to Afghanistan or Iraq the first time. They're like, I don't know, like,

They love us, man. We're bringing freedom. We're just do here to do the right thing. And they don't realize that, you know, they are part of the team that killed their uncle, their mother, their daughter, their brothers, their sons, and so on. And, you know, with a grudge that's extended 200 years into the past, to say nothing, of course, of the Gulags that many of the Chechens had been sent and been freed from after the fall of the Soviet Union.

So there's an incredible amount of bad blood between. the Russians and the Chechens, which the Russians are completely oblivious to. It is only after calamity strikes, specifically with the first, you know, military deployments, right? Assertion of authority within Grozny and the, you know, succeeding, the succeeding ambush that bad blood starts to harden their hearts against the Chechens and obviously their higher ups, too, that led them to this calamity. Because if you don't know, the correct thing to do in a military setting, if you're taking over a city, for instance, and especially if you're an armored division, right? So you have armored pieces. You don't send your tanks. You don't send your armored units inside the streets of the city. First, what you do is establish a cordon, which is to say you encircle it. You have a certain security posture. And you send for the mayor or a number of other leadership of, civilian infrastructure to come out and meet with your commander. Should they surrender, that is finally when you start to come into the city under very strong protection without any of your armor or if you have some ones that are able to

give you your infantry an advantage and you take over key government buildings first. And you make sure that your defensive posture is always up. And it's especially stupid to do so in the middle of the night. You do it during the day. So that way, you know, you understand where things stand. You can see if someone's about to ambush you. You can understand where your, you know, RPG fire, for instance, is coming from or could come from, et cetera, et cetera. And so there are a number of different military mistakes that weren't meant as mistakes,

but they were just gross and competences from the hires up. so from the general staff. And this gross incompetence is also doubled by the sentiment that the generals are very much, they're corrupt, incredibly corrupt. I mean, so much so that many of the armored division that Alexander takes part in, his unit lacks basic food. Why? Because the general had sold all their stores.

They were running alone in ammunition even before they had gone into Grosny, precisely because the general had already sold their ammunition. And guess who they sold it to? The Chechens. And so it was just this crazy situation that existed and happened in real life. That was definitely true. And so we see this echo happened also in the Ukraine, where Russians such as Putin and good old boys,

they think, oh, Ukrainians are just like us. It's as if they hadn't been brainwashed by NATO for the last 20, 30 years. like, you know, they expect it to be a cakewalk and, you know, you just, you just, you just, you just send big force. You go to the middle of city, you assert force. Everything will be fine. And then, of course, shit hits the fan. They get their shit pushed in and a similar situation unravels. The Russian military reputation has always been they go to war and immensely unprepared and immensely overconfident. They get their shit pushed in. And finally, they, they, they, they, they, they, They become determined and hardened, and after many men have died on both sides, they are ultimately triumphant, and nothing will stop them. And you see this in the course of the event of the book. So go ahead. Well, one of the things you said there was, like, good old boys go overseas and think they're bringing them freedom and they're going to be loved. I think there's a lot of people in this country to don't realize that there are enemies within this country that hate them, want them dead.

and they look just like them. They probably share, they probably share a bloodline back to, you know, back to England and back to Northern Europe. I mean, that's, that's, to believe that within your country, within Russia at that time,

knowing how many, knowing how much, how many different, basically, ethnicities and peoples there were that they would accept them, that they would, oh, we're just all brothers. I mean, that's the height of naivete,

especially after the last 75 years. Is that right? Of course. And the interesting thing is that, yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing which you hear, so it's not just Alexander Proklenov, but there's another similar accounts of the Chechen Wars, both Chechen Wars,

and this is a autobiographical book, which follows the, I guess, misadventures of Alexander Babchenko who is a Ukrainian fighting in the Russian national forces. And remember, at this time, Ukraine had already asserted its independence. So it's very interesting. But this individual was a lawyer. He was a law student and later became a journalist by, I don't know why,

but he just ended up becoming so and dedicated to the Russian Federation. This individual, by the way, is in exile right now due to official pogroms. He's been listed as a persona non grata in Ukraine for some reason. I don't know why, but just an interesting individual. But it corroborates a lot of the events which happened in a fictionalized way in the Chechnya, in the Chechen War. And like you said, they're being sent by people who, you know, they ostensibly are friends and who are cohabitants for, you know, centuries, you know, basically blood-related individuals. But the interesting thing about Chechen Blues is that it follows. the second story. So obviously Alexander Proklov is down in Chechnya fighting the Chechens. But if you zoom back, there's another

tether or another, you know, line of the story which follows an oligarch who is a Jewish guy. And he basically has this Russian woman who he rapes and mistreats. And, you know, he is the cause for everything that's bad happening in Chechnya. And it reveals, a lot of his personal, I guess, convictions as to why he's interested with things happening in Chechen. And it shows that he's double dealing, for instance. He's making personal political moves by playing the Chechens off the Russians to solidify his personal position within Moscow. And this is something that we are probably too naive in the United States. And for whatever reason, people think naivete is a good thing.

It reveals a good person. No, it just makes you a chump. As the Romans say, a fool deserves to be fooled. And therefore, this is part of the dynamic of the book, is that many Russians who go fight in Chechnya, and the Chechens themselves, they feel fooled. How do they feel fooled? Well, by certain inhabitants in Moscow,

who cause this bloodshed for nothing. You know, at first they cause it from the Chechens point of view under false guarantees of being able to be given independence by this oligarch. And then secondly, by these Russians who are sent to Chechnya, who are sent there under the pretense that it would be a peacekeeping mission, and therefore they wouldn't be engaged in killing a massive amount of these people. And so it kind of, I guess, encapsulates many of our experiences beyond simply the insurgency that was happening in an insurgent conventional arms perspective. It reveals a political, cultural situation, which we have many different allegories to, where, the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., are not the good old boys being sent to Iraq, nor are the Iraqis who themselves, under Saddam Hussein, were misled by people from the State Department in D.C.

when they invaded Kuwait, who had been given the green light. It seems that there is a common pattern of people who live, you know, gravitate towards the poles of power, who play two sides off each other to, I guess, to assert their own personal aims and political ends. That's definitely a rabbit hole we could go down, but let's stick with the Chechens. Yeah, absolutely. I know at one time Eastern Orthodox Christianity was popular among them. They even had their own pagan religion, but it seems like Islam started to spread.

Do you think that the adoption of Islam, do you think it had anything to do with them being a naturally warring people, and they felt like that that was the, that was more like went more to their what they would consider to be their nature yes and here's my you know here's my conviction and i hope i know you're christian and a lot of the listeners are so are our followers so when i say the following please take it in good faith as it is meant to be construed especially when it comes to eastern orthodoxy of course you can show me a number of incidental of great warriors such as, you know, Constantine the Great who are enshrined as saints and defenders of the Christian church, which, you know, the Greek Eastern Church, right, the Byzantines. And, but most people don't understand that Christianity itself is a very, pacifist is a wrong word because that's too strong of a word, but it is inclined heavily towards pacifism, of course.

And in a way that specifically Sunni Islam is not. Further, I guess one of the greatest church fathers of the Eastern Church, St. Fodias himself wrote in the 700s about how a soldier, if he killed in the line of duty, even if it were just, even if it were in defense, and even if it were in a circumstance to where he was compelled, he was banned or prevented from taking the sacrament for seven years after a killing because it was deemed to do. dirty and too unbecoming of the Lord's forgiveness. Contrast that with Islam, which itself spread at the point of a sword as opposed to subversion. You know, also a lot of the liturgy, I guess it's the wrong word to use, but, you know, the theology revolving around Islam is very warlike in opinion. So, for instance, there's the Uma and the realm of war. So the realm of peace and the realm of war. And a lot of this concept, which the English people are, again, these Caucasian Chechens that don't just talk about the Chechens. There's a bunch of other different small ethnicities that live in the nooks and crannies of these massive mountains appeal to them, especially.

And these people have long been Islamists, by the way. I mean, and you can trace their conversion back to the, Turkmen invasions of the Turkic peoples back in, you know, all the way back into 1088 and before. And so they have been, they have been Christian, yes, in small part, but overwhelmingly their history is Islamic. And the most interesting thing about the Chechens and their Islamist influence in the wider Islamic world is that, for instance, places like the Islamic State, al-Baghdadi, this guy, apparently, is a Chechen and a number of different people that we face insurgents in the Middle East, the leaders of the most effective insurgent groups were always commanded by Chechens. It's a very interesting situation that has a corollary with Suleiman, who is an ethnic Kurd,

as opposed to the Arabs, who are the actual ethnogenesis of this religion itself. And so to answer your question in a very circuitous way, yes, I think that, they chose Islam, even though, of course, they're very hypocritical and they drink alcohol, at least not in public, but they do so. They're very much given to this concept, which is a natural warlike state of Islam, which is, of course, not to say that there's a detriment towards Christianity or to imply that Christianity doesn't have its warriors, but Christianity in itself is not a warrior religion in the way that Islam is.

And I know that's probably controversial, but I actually wanted your opinion in that, what do you think, Pete? Well, I mean, I think with the rise of Protestantism, there is definitely that idea. I think it's hard to look at, you know, Rome for centuries there. And, you know, men taking the sacrament and going out to slit throats and then coming back and going to confession. Yeah, I think it just over over the centuries like many many things It's going to be subverted and I think it was I think it was subverted some would say it was subverted from the start And you know arguments could be made there I can see all the arguments for I've read all the arguments and I understand people's you know people's take on it

But you know when the way I look at it is I'm, it's just, you have your faith and there's heaven and then there's the state. And when you're dealing with, you know, we're here that has to be dealt with. And sometimes you're going to have to deal with things in a way that is, seems to be contradictory to what you, to what your sacred texts teach. So. Yes. And no, I agree with you.

And I guess the special point of emphasis is that. There is, you know, of course, there are some aspects that emulate just war theory by Augustine in the Islamic world, especially Sunni, but it's a lot more permissive and in a way that is more legalistic than the emphasis on the spirit of the law, which is a very Western thing, is that we care, of course, for the letter, but it is the spirit of the law, aka in the Catholic tradition, the tradition, which matters just as much as scripture. And of course, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Pete here, but, you know, I think that is the major delineation between the Catholics and the Protestants is that it's not solo scriptura. It's also this emphasis on tradition and the reality of having to live in the realm of Caesar before going to the kingdom of heaven kind of situation. That's the way I understand that. That's the way I live. That's the way I choose to live. So, you know, I know that many, many don't.

I also, I'm hypercritical of anything that I believe. I mean, I've always been hyper, I was hypercritical of Catholicism growing up. When I went to a Protestant church for a long time, I was hypercritical there. I'm back in the Catholic Church. I'm hypercritical now. It's just the way I've always been. So, you know, I see, I can read arguments against, you know, saying, oh, that Christian, Christianity was from the start just in in was a was supposed to be used to

Um, allow Jews to have power throughout the centuries. I read those and I can understand them too. I'm just, okay, well, what do we do now? You know, it's like I hear people saying, well, you've got to destroy Christianity. And once you destroy Christianity. And all I hear is I hear libertarians say, you just got to get rid of the state, bro. If we get rid of the state, all our problems will be fun. You know, the more I live, the more I realize, the substance of arguments do not actually

instantiate one faction or another necessarily, or like, you know, give rise to one faction or another, I think is entirely possible that you can be Christian and that, you know, I guess negates the influence of a certain faction of people, if that makes sense. It's all a matter of, I mean, the way that these people work is by simply warping what is and playing it against itself. So it doesn't matter what you believe necessarily. And the substance of your arguments don't believe. They don't argue in good faith and they always deal in bad faith.

As going back to this book, you know, it shows. And Chechen Blues is so important and seminal work in Russia to understanding modern Russia, okay? Because the reason why is a lot of the calamities, which had befallen the Soviet Union. And this late Soviet Union is often attributed to this faction of people that Alexander portrays in his book. And, you know, if you read Putin, for instance, people think that Putin, like if you're a boomer, you think people think that boomer is this like crypto communist. But remember, when the counter revolution or the counter coup happened in 1993 on the behest of the Communist Party to reinstall the Soviet Union,

Union, he was on the other side. He was fighting for Yeltsin and for the dissolution and continued existence of a Russian Federation as opposed to the communist one. And, you know, maybe he has some personal sympathies towards the Soviet state. However, I think it's important that we delineate. He's not a true believer in communism. What he loves and what is the perception of many modern Russians is that the Soviet Union was a Russian empire with a coat of paint, a hammer and sickle and a false doctrine of communism superimposed upon what the ethnic reality was, which is an evolution of the Russian Tsardom, right?

And, you know, I have my personal critiques on that. I don't think that's necessarily true, but I think that is the best way to model the understanding of how Russians feel themselves and how they feel of their Soviet history that had preceded the Russian Federation. And so, for instance, we can see a bunch of Russian nationalists that somehow are also Soviets or whatever. And the reason why is because I think as conservatives generally are, they're willing to be hypocritical and contradictory because they don't believe in the substance of what these symbols

mean. They just simply associate it with the incidentals of what they hold highest. And I don't know if I'm making sense here, Pete. I'm sorry if I'm kind of just speaking in time. here so please stop me if making no sense here no it's perfectly fine um i think it's a lot of background and if there's not some kind of rabbit trail in this show i don't think i don't think anybody would recognize it so let's let's do this we got we got about uh 15 15 and 20 minutes left um can you can you can you and you can take all the time you need and just go and run with it um

how does this all with everything that happens in the book, how does this all end up and prepare itself for what we see in the mid 2000s, happening in the mid 2000s in Czechia? Perfect. Okay. So I'm not going to spoil it because there are many individual parts and it would take too much time to relay them in a way that would actually emotionally resonate with people. So I'll say this.

The way it ends militarily is ambiguous. It shows, for instance, the defeat of the Russian forces. And, you know, an interesting thing is in the West, especially if you're an American or Anglo, defeat is final. Defeat is a breaking, spirit-breaking event. However, for the Russians and the Russian, I guess, content of their soul, defeat isn't defeat. Defeat is almost a fatalistic understanding that one must come back and avenge oneself. It is almost a reinforcement of the will to overcome.

And so you see this a lot in memoirs from World War II of Soviet soldiers who had been Russian, of course, and, you know, experiencing great loss in the beginning of the, you know, Second World War and using it as a, as the fire of resolution of a deadly fatalism that they are already dead men walking, but they will achieve their mission. And this is exactly how Alexander Proklenov ends his book. He ends it. in defeat, ostensibly, materially, but spiritually, it is a victory. It's a spiritual victory for Alexander, the protagonist, but most importantly, most importantly, the protagonist is the archetype of the Russian. The protagonist is a greater projection or crystallization of what the general zeitgeist of the Russians feel, which is this resolution of winning, and this resolution of revenge against people from above who betrayed them and of course the enemy the immediate enemy the

Chetians and the book also ends with the oligarch almost happy but he rapes his wife his pregnant wife and mistreats her in a way and and remember a lot of these are allegories you know these characters are allegories for the greater convictions and meta archetypes of what people believe in which is to say you know, this woman who is impregnated by this man who is clearly evil is a symbol of Russia who has been gestating this poison and betrayed and ravished and hurt by people who ostensibly we should be trusting, who we entrusted with leadership, who we entrusted with power. And it's Alexander himself at the end who resigns himself to the mission, which is to say he,

He makes it a foregone conclusion that he will be back in Chechnya and succeed. And he will be back in Moscow and Russia will succeed in Moscow. And this is precisely what we see in the mid-2000s. So the second Chechen War takes off in 1997, in the last, the major war, you know, stems from 97 to 99. And of course, there was an ongoing insurgency until like 2008. But it is the second war, which is started by Putin, who consolidated. his power and is the, I guess, champion of the Russian people. And this is where a lot of oligarchs

get expelled. So Kasparov or whatever is a multi-billionaire who was exiled from Russia, who was going to be assassinated because he didn't want to play game, right? Remember that video of Putin coming into a room with a bunch of corrupt people and setting them straight? Well, there are a number of oligarchs that fell off a very tall building. And a score of them were able to exfiltrate to the United States who themselves are, you know, patrons of certain newspapers. I won't mention which. But the point being is that this book is almost a consecration, a telltale experience of what

is to come. And it kind of portented what the future held, and which is to say Russia became once again ascendant. And to many Russians, Putin is a great champion to them, especially because he improved a lot of the circumstances which happened in Russia. Is he corrupt? For sure. However, his corruption was always to the benefit of Russia as opposed to the predations and rapacity of oligarchs who were foreign to the interests of Russia themselves. And so you see them crush the Chechens, reassert authority, able to co-opt certain factions within Russia. Kadyrov is numbers largely

among them and who become part of this new vision of Russia and who, become, it's more like a, I don't know, who become once again an ally of a greater imperial vision that draws a lot of inspiration from the Russian czardom that had preceded the Soviet Union. So this is kind of what I, like, wanted to finish on. If you want to understand Russia and you want to understand why it is they feel, how they feel, and why they're so resolute and why they're willing to throw away tens of thousands of lives and the Ukraine is precisely because of their experience as a nation in Chechnya, this kind of fatal resolution, this understanding that they are willing to die, but they will succeed. And this is their experience in Chechnya,

which is actually the birth, or rather the rebirth of the Russian nation. Maybe we can finish up talking about just a couple questions I had, because I know that not even hard revisionists, but soft revisionists have come to the, conclusion that a lot of the terrorism that you were seeing from the Chechens in the 2000s was because the usual suspects were able to actually put Wahhabists, plant Wahhabis into their ranks. Do you know anything about that? I do. And that is a very, so people have to understand something about politics. it doesn't matter if ideologically you may be at odds with each other, you can always be someone's useful means, right? And so I won't name who did that, but they did, of course, propagate Wahhabism amid the Chechen peoples and the other Caucasian peoples that were Islamic, because Wahhabism obviously is militant. It's destabilizing. It causes splinters within

politics, right? And it's for the same reason why the American state, for instance, makes a strong emphasis against Christianity because these underlying militant religious forces can be incredibly destabilizing, especially for states which don't predicate their legitimacy on a religious background. And even within those states, which are fundamentally religious, you know, for instance, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which we would think the Taliban are extremely hard-line Islamists. They have, you know, ISIS insurgents who are fighting the Taliban because they're not radical enough. And so, you know, it's basically the equivalent of like extremists in the actual sense, in the real sense, in planting them, and trying to destabilize Russia, which had suffered a spurt of Islamic terrorists, attack. And if you remember from a long time ago in your past, the, you know, the hostage taking that took place in Moscow.

Of course. And not to mention, of course, the recent terrorist attack, which happened in the heart of Moscow, you know, is not a new thing. It's not a new thing. And the people that usually back up these networks are the usual suspects. And they're used as weapons. They're just simply means. And it can never actually instantiate their own ends. I mean, for instance, the Islamic state, when it actually had territory, was already crumbling from within, including from without. So these people are just crazy people that they weaponize, you know, America weaponizes to fuck up

Russian Federation, you know? Yeah, you would think that if Putin wanted to get the Russian people to hate the Chechens, he would do something like that. But no, this was this was people who always feel like they can I'll use this terminology control the height of the flame

to try to destabilize I mean they haven't it's not just you know since 2014 and Maidan that they've been trying to destabilize Russia they've been trying to be destabilize Russia ever since Putin got control of it

that's what people really need to understand oh yeah even before him too by the way. And, you know, as soon as the Soviet Union fell, Western powers just looted those ex-Soviet states. I mean, looted it. It was rapacious to an extent that was like unheard of and that actually had real world living conditions that deteriorated living conditions for the local inhabitants, not just Russians, but everyone. And so it has been a long-term solution for the West. What they seek is the dissolution of the Russian Federation as a whole. They wanted to turn to a rump state of many different small republics, because, you know, the classic old saying of conquest,

divided imperia, right? Divide and conquer. They want to turn Russia and make sure it will never again be one of the Soviet Union, never again be an existential threat. And so this has been a continuous thing, a continuous thing. And the reason why they hate Putin so much is because he's so effective against them, just like Lukashenko is against, in Belarusia. Awesome. Awesome. Well, the name of the book is Chechen Blues. It's available at Antelope Hill. You probably get it at other places, but I think it's on Amazon. I'm pretty sure it's on Amazon, but you can get it at other places. And I want to thank you for coming on. Why don't you remind everybody where they can find your work? Yeah, absolutely. So we were reviewing a book by AHP, but I'm not associated with them. I just read the book. I personally run my own publishing house. It's a military publishing house called. dvxpublishing.com. You can also search me on Twitter as Lance's Legion. Further still, if you want to look my stuff up on Telegram, on there too. But you can find me around the block and feel free

Legionaries to send me a message and give me a follow. Thank you, Pete, by the way, for having me on. I appreciate it, Lance. Thank you. Until the next time, I really look forward to it. Take care. Take care.