Putin, Ukraine and the West: Behind the Mask

Watching clips of the unfolding events in Ukraine takes me back to 1991 and the First Gulf War. I worked at a local printing company as a young backroom assistant to the paper buyer. Every day seemed to revolve around discussion of the war. Sales reps would come in excited about the latest gossipy update they had heard from a ‘reliable source.’ The big boss would thunder through the office triumphally proclaiming massive orders of printed stationery from the RAF (war generates a lot of paperwork, who knew?) And every morning my immediate boss would stagger in bleary eyed after another all-nighter of CNN’s live coverage from Kuwait. I found it all a bit tedious, and quickly concluded that men not only love war, but seek it. Fast forward three decades and very little seems to have changed.

If we really want to understand wtf is going on right now, we have to get past the war propaganda (which comes from both sides) and try to get inside Putin’s head, because it is his head, not heart, that rules him.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on 7th October 1952. This makes him Life Path 7, and an Approach 7. But if, using the English language, you translate all the letters of his first name Vladimir into numbers, then add and reduce you also get the number 7. But that’s not all, for if you do the same to his whole name, middle name and all, you get the same result, 7. So, he’s a Quadruple 7. In numerology repeated numbers always intensify the energy of that number – for good and bad - and this is what leads me to describe him as a Schemer-Dreamer.

7 is the number of the mind, and when present in such intensity produces someone cold and undemonstrative, who plays chess with nations and lives. He lives in his head and is constantly thinking, strategizing and manoeuvring. It is very important to grasp the degree to the which the number 7 – the number of cold logic and theory – runs him. He is not, as war propaganda claims, deranged. He is as rational as they come, to the point of heartlessness. This is the schemer part.

However, when you have 7 so strong the number also tends toward a certain dreaminess. How can someone be both a thinker and a dreamer? Easy, because humans are contradictory. This number makes him, and I am quite certain about this, deeply religious, infusing him with an intense mysticism. I am not the only one who thinks so. This is the dreamer part.

All this is compounded by the presence of the Master Numbers 22 (from the letter V three times in his name) and 11 (from the addition of the vowels of his name). This creates an otherworldly aura around him and drives him on beyond the limits of what ordinary folk are capable of. These Master Numbers increase the likelihood that he is operating, or at least believes that he is operating, on some higher frequency and to some grand purpose. And 7 x 4’s (D, M or V) in his full name fills him with a level of determination / obstinacy / thuggishness that most people will find hard to understand.

If we look at his Personal Year, we see that he is under the energy of restriction and blockage right through to October. It does therefore seem that he is encountering greater resistance, from all quarters, than he anticipated. Quite aside from invasion being the wrong move strategically, morally and ethically, he has almost certainly attempted it at the wrong time. He may have looked outwards and concluded that his opponents were weak, divided and drowning in a sea of woke nonsense, but he has not, I think, sufficiently examined himself.

We might simply conclude from all this that Putin is mad, bad and dangerous to know, and has made a fatal miscalculation which will see him hoist with his own petard. But this would be to misunderstand the forces behind the scenes that have brought us to this place.

First, we have fear. A big part of the Western reaction to the Ukrainian invasion has been born of a deep, primal fear of war. A fear that they – not someone else in a faraway land, but they – might die in war is understandable. The idea of dying from a mystery virus is a bad enough, enough to send half the planet mad with fear, but dying from a war, and maybe a nuclear one at that, well that is just too much for most people to even contemplate. Except that war has been a feature of life on this planet since the dawn of time. In the words of a more enlightened Russian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“At no time has the world been without war…neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the church – none of them have been able to stop it.”

We may wish that this was not so, but it is. So how did we come to believe that this moment in history should be different from any other? We have been deluding ourselves for a long time.

Next, we have been bought to this situation by wilful neglect on the part of our leaders. The West (primarily the US and EU) could, should but did not, contain Putin. Instead, we have seemed intent on wilfully misunderstanding him, and that is why we are where we are. It did not have to be like this, but the West continues to be blind to anything non-Western, and has been actively meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine for more than fifteen years.

Although Putin does a great deal of thinking himself, he has also outsourced a lot of it to a philosopher called Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a complex figure whose works require great concentration. If you do decide to go down the Dugin rabbit-hole you will have to work hard to penetrate the commentators and intellectuals who wilfully distort, or simply do not understand, what he says. The core facts are that he is anti-liberal, anti-globalisation, anti-AI, and anti-woke. It is important to understand that Dugin does not think Russia should be a western style country run by Putin. He thinks the West is broken and degenerate and sees something entirely new and different. He has written that this war is a battle between Light (Russia) and Darkness (the West). Commentators in the West still have not got their heads around this and instead simply accuse him of fascism and antisemitism (quite aside from the fact that he explicitly criticises these things in his books). Dugin wants a society that is more traditional, less capitalist but not communist either. He doesn’t believe in endless economic growth or ceaseless social improvement, and he also believes that Russia should and will expand its territory into other Eastern European countries. If you want to understand a bit more of what is going on here try this.

Now, even if Putin has only absorbed a fraction of Dugin’s works then we can still see that what we have on our hands is not as simple as what is being portrayed. If Putin is following Dugin then he is not going to care about sanctions, or casualties, because he is engaged, he would say, in what amounts to a holy war. Neither Dugin nor Putin recognise Western values of progress and modernity as universal values, no matter how much the West insists that they are.

To understand what might motivate Putin is not to agree with him, though it might enable us to understand what happens next. Dugin’s rejection of wokeness and the hypocrisy of democracy is not wrong, nor is his calling out the terrors of AI and the soul-sucking emptiness of the quest for endless economic growth. But this is not me apologising for Putin or justifying his actions. It is me recognising the depth of the problem the West faces. Globalisation has been a boon for the super wealthy and those in the so-called knowledge economy who can just as well work from an office as they can from the beach. But it has been a disaster for almost everyone else. It is for this reason I simply do not accept that Putin is another World Economic Forum stooge helping to usher in the Great Reset. If anything, he has gone rogue from the New World Order, not acted as part of it. We do not precisely know the degree to which Putin listens to Dugin, but we do know that Dugin has close ties to the Russian government, has provided training for the Russian military and has featured prominently on Russian media. And we also know that Dugin is has been very clear in his opposition to the Great Reset.

All killing is bad, the end of every life a tragedy. And by causing this on such a large-scale Putin automatically becomes a bad guy. But he is not the only one who should be in the dock. The 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal under international law, and have we so quickly forgotten that WMDs, the pretext for the ruinous War in Iraq and over a million casualties, were never found? The West does what it likes and calls it ‘efforts to preserve the international, rules based liberal order’ but then Putin does what he likes and suddenly he is Hitler? Give me a break. Western leaders care only for their own status and position, they certainly do not care about you. I know memories are short these days, but have we already forgotten the absolute contempt displayed by Western leaders to ordinary people over the last two years?

Putin is deep in the wrong, but the West is far adrift on the Sea of Hypocrisy, a place where Justin Trudeau can, without a shred of irony, accuse Putin of authoritarianism. For those who do not remember this is Trudeau, the man who granted unto himself the power to freeze Canadian citizens bank accounts, by decree, without a court order or due process. Putin is a bad man, but Western World thy name is hypocrisy. I do not want to live in a world run by Putin or Dugin, but are we quite sure that what we have here so great? It certainly was, once, but we have thrown it away. It is sad to me that still so few see what has been lost. But they will. The West is corrupt, soul-less and not just un-spiritual but in many places actively anti-spiritual, run by self-absorbed, narrow-minded fools, who outsource policy to corporations and special interests.

Many people have asked me what they can do about all this. Well first, awareness is always the key to change. You cannot do anything differently until you are able to think differently. So, we have to recognise the timeless maxim, that the first casualty of war is truth. RT is lying. Russia 1 is lying. The BBC are lying. CNN are lying. And if they are not lying, they certainly are not telling the truth. It may be possible to cut through the noise with some crowd sourced news, but even that I would take with a pinch of salt.

All war is a symptom of human failure to think through the consequences of our actions. Putin is in trouble, at least in the short term, because he miscalculated, stopped thinking and started dreaming. Dugin’s works have more than the smack of a thousand-year-Reich about them. But whatever the outcome we are in equally deep water because many (though not all) of Dugin’s criticisms of the West are spot on. We have lost our way. We no longer want to think, and instead now believe that feelings are everything, not just part of the mix but everything. No society can survive if it is ruled by feelings, for feelings change, sometimes very quickly. Being heart-centred is no good unless that heart is accompanied by a working mind. People forget that for every feeling of love or compassion felt by you, someone else, probably not very far away is feeling anger, betrayal and resentment. When feelings are prioritised, then all feelings are prioritised, and when they are experienced without the balance of the mind then all hell breaks loose.

The problem with the West today is that we care more about appearance than reality. We are more interested in hashtagging for freedom somewhere else than we are in defending our own freedom at home when it comes under attack by an aggressive bio-security state. This hypocrisy will be our undoing. Sooner or later we are going to have to wake up and reconnect with reality. If conflict with Russia does not wake us from our delusions then something altogether more serious, maybe with China, will.

The combination of malice and idiocy displayed by world leaders, alongside an almost total ignorance on the part of most people as to what is taking place, is toxic for the West. The West has lost its Soul, cut off from the divine by its worship of technology and addiction to outrage. We desperately need a new direction. We do not need a world run by Putin or Dugin, but more of what we currently have simply will not do. It may be that in Putin’s weakened state his plans will implode from within, but if the West interprets this as a triumph for its vision of the world then we are in big trouble. Contrary to all that the media tells us, life in the West does not work for most people who live it. Oppose, resist and defeat Putin by all means, for he is way out of line. But do not believe for a second that this will resolve any of the 1001 problems that existed the day before this all started. In fact, without some serious soul-searching on the part of our leaders it might even make things worse.