In a recent documentary shown on German television entitled “Russia in a Vise,” and in a book of the same name, the German military expert and journalist Peter Scholl-Latour expresses his certainty that Russia will soon cease to exist as a sovereign entity—that it will be “erased from the map.” According to an article at NEWSru.com, his conclusions are based on a trip to Russia in the summer of 2005. In the film he says that, despite current favorable conditions of international trade, Russia is inexorably headed to its doom.
In Scholl-Latour’s view, the main problem facing Russia today is its catastrophic depopulation. “The number of Russians is falling drastically, while the number of non-Russians (primarily Muslims) is rising just as dramatically,” he points out.
That’s one jaw of the vise. The other is China, which will absorb the rapidly emptying Far East and Siberia. These regions “will fall into China’s lap like ripe fruit, without a shot being fired.”
It would seem those US strategists who want a weak Russia will get their wish—but not necessarily what they wanted.
Whether or not Scholl-Latour’s prognostications are accurate, the German journalist has bad news for them as well. In a previous book, Superpower in Quicksand, Scholl-Latour suggests that US action in the Middle East is actually weakening the moderate forces of Islam while fuelling revolutionary movements bent on a “clash of cultures.”
And as the numbingly repeated catchphrase “War on Terrorism” continues to wear away our sanity and subvert our liberties, he reminds us in an interview that “[t]errorism isn’t an opponent, it’s a way to wage warfare. It’s something like the Blitzkrieg. No one fought against the Blitzkrieg. They fought against Hitler. Instead of a fight against terror, we should speak of a fight against what I call the Islamic revolution. And there’s no end in sight there.”
I think Scholl-Latour would want to clarify that Islamism ≠ Hitler, and thus the methods used to contain it must be different. But that’s another story for another day.
