Podcast | When History Becomes War: Transcending the History Provocation troll (Ep 2)

My new Historical versus Real russia lens has been tested before.

In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border.

“…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…”

The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.”

That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real russia of the future.

If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical russia discourse, we can help correct it.

The question to put to every voice in Future russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final?

For their own good, and within the law

If russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come.

So unless Future russia learns what the Real russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical russian troll.

What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law.

Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022.

Why we need to start now

The reason to learn the difference now, before Future russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes.

The archetype of russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical russia.

The Historical russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable russia. They still are.

The limb is gone. The Historical russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea of the Historical russia. That idea must be smited and replaced with the Real russia idea. That is the purpose of this piece.

The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture.

The History Provocation

Historical russia knows how to work on that feeling. It’s like an AI agent coming to infect your minds, our minds, the minds of our countries, and our feelings of security. Then it comes over the borders and kills people, and does horrific things, all as an instrument of history. Its instrument is history, brainwashing.

I call it the History Provocation. A state talks about the past, loudly and for years, until its target, and everyone watching, are arguing about the past too. Before you know it, we’re fighting over stuff which isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it doesn’t matter.

What matters today is our future, and building and developing our human communities, educating our children, and building safe communities and a knowledge economy.

It doesn’t matter if the history we’re arguing about is stolen, invented, or even perfectly true. What makes it a provocation is what it does to us and our minds. It sets the agenda. The History Provocation pulls attention away from the present. The History Provocation gives the state’s surrogates, the Historical russia’s surrogates, a part to play.

In October 2025, I put it bluntly: Putler’s “history stuff is just a way of establishing character for his surrogates and to hypnotise”.

The record of the last History Provocation

The record of the last History Provocation is in the European Union’s own database of russian disinformation. “Ukraine is an artificial state created by the Russians”, 9 June 2016. “Ukraine has never existed as an independent country”, the next day. “Ukraine is not a real state because it has no real territory, no single language, single economy and single population”, September 2018. “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, on the day Putler’s essay on the subject appeared, in July 2021.

On 28 February 2022, four days into the invasion, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” was offered as a reason to murder hundreds of thousands of native russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. Supposedly, in order to protect them.

Of course, the Historical russia is nonsense, from start to finish, as a casus belli.

Some in the West read the warning

Some in the West read the warning. I was one of them. At the beginning of January 2022, Germany’s chancellor’s advisers were some others. They met four leading experts from Germany on russia. Die Zeit reconstructed the meeting that June.

One expert found the questions very strange. Chancellor Scholz and his people were “not particularly interested in the current troop build-up. Instead, they asked about Russian colonialism, Putler’s politics of history and Russian fascism.”

In mid-February, Chancellor Scholz was flying between Kyiv and Moscow to try and stop the war. In front of journalists, he kept returning to what Die Zeit called “Putler’s historical treatise”. He kept wondering whether Putler was concerned not with the Donbas or NATO at all, “but rather with an imperial project”.

He was right to read the history. But he was very slow in understanding what Historical russia means. He read it far too late. Years too late. Hundreds of thousands and millions will die because of that failure of cognition.

That is the cognitive failure I am trying to address, by inserting into our minds today this distinction between Historical russia and Real russia.

Two ways to meet a History Provocation

There are two ways to meet a History Provocation. One is to read it as a statement of intent. The other is to argue with it.

Every group of people that answers “one people” by debating the baptism of Rus’ in 988 has taken the road of Historical russia and historical provocation. The argument can be won on the facts. It can be lost on the a…

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