The Iron Triangle Is Back

You may not be interested in determinate negation, but determinate negation is interested in you...

The traditional Russian Iron Triangle consists of three parts: Intelligence Services, Military, and Political legitimacy. These are abstracted because it is an ancient system going back at least to Ivan Grozny (The Terrible). He is the one who instituted Oprichnina (https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Oprichnina) and employed thousands of Oprichniks to spy on boyars and maintain control over Russia. By the 20th century, the system evolved into FSB, MOD, and President's office. There is almost no information on this online. Fortunately, I originally read about it in one of those cool 1980s books written by Soviet defectors (Bezmenov being my favorite). Sadly, I lost it long ago, but I always remembered being astounded by its thesis: that even the USSR had checks and balances. The author's name was a pseudonym and if anyone knows, could you please post it in the comments section?

For the Iron Triangle to work, the three sides need to have cooperative goals and adversarial goals. They need to cooperate so that the system doesn't fragment into feudal factions. They need to be adversarial in order to compete and check defects in the other branches. The military is the monopoly on violence, the intelligence agency is the monopoly on information, and the government has the monopoly on legitimacy. They all benefit from coordinated government policy, the actors obtain status and power, and the state is able to maintain a stable, yet highly militarized status. What is the downfall? See the USSR: going broke.

Despite the West trying to influence Russia into adopting our institutions (From the end of Communism to the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky), it is the West that has adopted Russian institutions. (https://www.studysmarter.us/explanations/politics/political-participation/iron-triangle/) This is of course the nature of dialectic: to defeat the enemy one must absorb the enemy. In order to defeat Nazi Germany, America had to emulate aspects of the Nazi political economy and the American Military Industrial Complex was born. In order to defeat the Soviet Union, America had to emulate aspects of Soviet intelligence services and the FBI, CIA, and DIA began to resemble the KGB and GRU. Once these special interests were established, they grew symbiotically. Once big money corrupted the major political parties and academia, there was no more opposition.

We see the Iron Triangle in action in the United States with the Uniparty (https://www.extremelyamerican.com/uniparty)(https://www.conservapedia.com/Uniparty)(https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-uniparty-keeps-americans-in-the-dark-on-ukraine-aid/), big money which subsumed the Military Industrial Complex (https://rollcall.com/2023/03/14/watershed-1-trillion-defense-budget-on-the-horizon/)(Some evidence that Washington knows Russia is spending 25 trillion rubles on the war)(

One Trillion Dollars In 2023: How Russia's Military Came To Outspend The United States Part 3

), and intelligence agencies (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/)(https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/17/michael-isikoff-steele-dossier/). Journalists could help fix this, but they don't because they are dumb, lazy, and crooked. As my own personal experience with American censorship has shown, media owners keep anyone difficult away from the profession. Just like with the USSR, the MIC and intelligence agencies have grown to subsume non-military production. Media is owned by big finance which has evolved into a feudal special interest group (not surprising since internal corporate structures are autocratic) that has conjoined with the MIC. The game plan is to take everything. There will be the owners and the impoverished. You will own nothing and they will be happy (https://survivingtomorrow.org/you-will-own-nothing-and-be-happy-is-just-feudalism-2-0-ee15cefa9f1b). They are happy to team up to hyper-inflate the currency because assets track inflation and only plebs like us work for wages. As I mentioned yesterday, their new plan is to take everything and reduce the bulk of humanity back down to medieval peasants. The thinking class will be down there with the peasants, because we can just be mined for training data and earn nothing in exchange.

Anti-Humanism Is THE San Francisco Value

Montesquieu may have articulated a theory of the separation of powers, but probably could not conceive of how his model would inspire two diametrically opposed systems that would later merge together. In America, “...by 1787, the Spirit Of Laws had become an 'American' classic.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv21d632f.12?seq=4) Meanwhile Catherine the Great had learned lessons Montesquieu did not intend to teach: “From Montesquieu she had learned lessons of liberalism... the Instruction was, paradoxically, an autocratic interpretation of the liberalism of the authors who inspired it.” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41052100) Hegel could have probably predicted that America and Russia would work out internal contradictions via determinate negation (https://philpapers.org/rec/STEHDO-5) and come up with a new autocratic structure that cuts out vox populi. Isn't it a shame that the answer is just lying out in the open in history books? Is our only hope that the system will run out of money and expertise and finally collapse? Or will the future be more war? Or is it a boot on the face of humanity forever?