Highly insightful exposition on Russia's minorities. Preaching to the choir. Going over old emails - July 23, 2014
20230213 and 20240211a
I’d like to share this video link sent by Joel Hay. It takes the long view of Russia’s future. The strongest point is that Russia is a land of ethnic minorities - as much as 70%. These peoples, more towards the east, were conquered over the course of centuries of an expansion that eventually reached California. My parents’ house was near the Russian River. Not named by accident.
Russia has not treated these minorities any better than Ukraine. The brutality shown by Russia’s Chechen and Buryat soldiers here in Ukraine is typical of Russia itself throughout its history. How to hold it all together is a major challenge to Putin. This video examines the various possibilities.
====
There is a lot of bloviating, preaching to the choir to smugly satisfy those of us who already support Ukraine. However cleverly written, it won’t convert the Tucker/Putin people, who just won’t read it. Still and all, this one is a delight.
====
Following my own advice, I searched through my file of email blogs from 2011 to 2017 looking for references to Yanukovych. Almost all of them!
At the time I pulled out those blogs that seemed to address the political situation here, Russia and Ukraine I labeled them 20240211a through 20240211u. Quite a few.
I’m going to simply post them one at a time, in that order. 20240211a included the exchange with Justin Rosengrant, which I have already posted. The rest of it included a letter to a friend Jim Davis entitled “It is not good vs evil,” preceded by an ordinary blog. Here it is.
====
Is it good for the Jews.docx – Who supports Russia in 2014? 7/23/2014
Is it good for the Jews?
Charges of anti-Semitism raises their head in every conflict. The accusation is being thrown around rather liberally in the Russia-Ukraine affair.
Ukraine's president Poroshenko is part Jewish. The oligarch he appointed for Dnipropetrovsk, Igor Kolomoisky, is the head of the European Jewish union. Several other appointees such as Groisman have names that suggest they are Jewish.
The Russians are gloriously inconsistent in smearing the leadership of Ukraine. In one breath they call them Fascists, and the next they tar them as Jewish oligarchs. The fact is, Jews in Ukraine are active in government and supportive of their president.
People accuse Putin of anti-Semitism. He looks more like a ruthless political pragmatist, willing to do whatever it takes to reestablish the Russian Empire. In doing so he associates with very unsavory sorts – the kind of people among whom jealousy and anti-Semitism are endemic .
Modeling himself after the czars, he has augmented his army with Cossacks, Chechens and other quasi-mercenary irregular forces. He usually keeps them at arm's length in an attempt to maintain deniability. They fight without uniforms. Putin shrugs and claims he has no power to stop their looting, shooting down civilian aircraft, or robbing the corpses.
Cossacks, however, have been installed over the past decade to serve as the Kremlin palace guard. These former horse people from the steppes have a history of brutality and opportunism. The Tsars used Cossacks against the Jews – older Jews even in the United States shudder at their mention. Ukraine, where the Cossacks emerged five centuries ago as escaped serfs, no longer has identifiable Cossack populations. Most fled to Krasnodar Krai in Russia and became "registered Cossacks" in the service of the Tsars. They were useful, willing to commit acts that an ordinary conscript could not force his conscience to accept.
Putin's Chechen forces, headed by Kadyrov, chose money over blood as they savagely defy the religious injunction of Muslim fighting Muslim as they indiscriminately killed their own people, predominantly civilians, in a process that shrunk the population by almost 20%.
Six of the seven billionaires to emerge after the fall of the USSR were Jewish. Though a few remain, cowed and quiet, Putin has squeezed most of them out one way or another. Jailed them or forced them into exile.
Putin supports the European nationalist parties, all of which have all been accused, with varying degrees of justification, of anti-Semitism. Despite her strong anti-immigrant rhetoric, anti-Semitism won out as Marine le Pen recently supported Arabs as they rioted against Israel's invasion of Gaza. The sole exception to this support is Ukraine's Svoboda (freedom) party. Although its positions are similar in almost every way to the western parties, though its anti-Semitism is mute to non-existent, Putin rails against them as Fascists and Banderistas. The evidence is that Putin is no friend of the Jews, though he will use them when he can.
The intellectual foundation, such as it is, of Putin's empire-building is a concept called Eurasia. It's primary advocate, and Putin's house philosopher, is Alexander Dugin. Dugin lives in such a different world that it is hard to choose the right adjectives, though anti-Semite is certainly among them. He chose a well-known French anti-Semite, Alain Soral (see Wikipedia for anti-Semetic quotes), to write the forward to his masterwork, "The Fourth Political Philosophy."
Why are American Libertarians coming out strong in support of Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Why are people like Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, Mish Shedlock and Pat Buchanan joining the European nationalists in spouting Russian propaganda chapter and verse? There are several reasons.
· Money comes first. The Russians are generous with their friends.
· Greed comes second. The gold bugs' theory (which I happen to believe) is that evil rulers and central bankers of the US and Europe have artificially depressed the price of gold for three years now. Gold will soar when an ascendant Russia and China dump their US bonds. All the named players have a strong interest in gold.
· Indolence comes third. If the Russians will write your articles for you, saying things that appeal to your readership, why work?
The final question is, why should Jews support Putin? To make a short-term killing in the gold market? If that entails standing silently by as the Russians massacre Ukrainians, including their fellow Jews, and take over their country it is definitely blood money.
Jews have never fared well attempting to choose winners among despots. B'nai Brith's slogan is "Never Again!" So why are they doing it again?
====
It is not good vs evil 7/22/2014
It is not good vs. evil, truth vs. falsehood. It is who is lying about what.
Both Russia and the West lie profusely. They lie, however, about different things.
The West has been lying about the state of their economies; they lie about their ability to meet entitlement expense obligations; they lie about levels of immigration, legal and illegal; they lie about the levels of crime and social expenditures associated with that immigration. Lastly, politicians lie more and more brazenly about their personal conduct, corruption and sexual peccadillos.
The West shouts down anybody bold enough to utter yesterday's common sense. They do not want to hear that our ancestors were mostly honorable and well-intentioned, at least no worse than the rest of humanity. Homosexuality and feminism are antithetical to sustaining a population. People, and races, differ in temperament and average ability. The Christian religion is only one belief system among others. It must be taken on faith, and those who take things on faith sometimes go overboard. Just like Greenpeace activists or Scientologists. Christians are not unique in this way, and certainly not uniquely evil. There is a stripe of irrationality in just about everybody's belief system.
Lying has a long and illustrious history in Russia as well. Read two current books, the Marquis de Custine's "Letters from Russia," first published in 1839 and Pat Buchanan's recollections of Nixon's dealing with Khrushchev and Brezhnev in "The Greatest Comeback." The Russians are the world's master propagandists, from Potemkin showing entire fake villages to visitors in the times of Catherine the Great to Stalin totally snowing the Western press, most infamously Walter Duranty, on just about everything, especially the forced starvation in Ukraine.
Russia is attempting to annex part of Ukraine. They have taken Crimea and they are working on Novorossia, "New Russia," the oblasts of Lugansk and Donbas. Russian propaganda says that "Freedom fighters" or "separatists" are attempting to "liberate" predominantly Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine where the natives are supposedly oppressed by "Fascists" and "Banderistas." Or something like that. The story is constantly shifting. The fighters are foreigners and thugs. They are not motivated by idiology, mainly their own personal gain… the money Russia pays them, the opportunity to loot, and the hope of the leadership of some Russian satrapy. The governorship of Crimea went to Sergey Aksyonov, a small-town heavy.
Russian speakers make up a majority of the Ukrainian population. Russian is the dominant language in every large city except L'viv. Russian is the language of everyday business here in Kiev, although almost everybody speaks both. They nonetheless loathe Putin. They have no desire to be part of Russia. They have long and bitter memories. The Communists starved millions of Ukrainians to death, used them in preference to real Russians as cannon fodder in WWII, constantly derided the Ukrainian language as "not a real language" Ukraine as "not a real country," and Ukrainians as bumpkins. These threads are very evident in Russian propaganda as they attempt to slice off part of Ukraine today.
Russian propaganda is massive and unrelenting. It is also transparently false. Yet, many conservatives in the West are willing to believe it and even to publish it. Why?
Ukraine has no friends. It has essentially nothing to offer the West. No energy and no unique natural resources. Ukraine has been difficult to deal with for all of its two decades of independence. The politicians have been deeply corrupt, and at loggerheads with one another. The West has long suffered "Ukraine fatigue." They are reluctant to accept that Maidan was a genuine revolution and there is now a government they can trust. Also, dealing with their own impending bankruptcies, they do not find it convenient to discover a country worthy of financial and political support.
The Western democracies are so bankrupt, financially, morally, socially, and Western conservatives – Europe's nationalist parties and America's libertarians - so anxious for the charade to end that they welcome Putin as a savior, no questions asked. Putin claims to support traditional values. He is encouraging Christianity, discouraging feminism, and banning gay propaganda. His rhetoric supports white people (though curiously, on his watch, Moscow has become about 25% Muslim). He appears willing to take down the hollowed-out, over-valued, overborrowed dollar and Euro. These are all on the conservative agenda.
All Putin has to do to satisfy Western conservatives is to create enough of a fog of lies and disinformation that people like Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, the bloggers at zerohedge and elsewhere have some cover when Russia's stories become impossible to defend. Russia is doing an adequate job of that. The ironic, the tragic outcome is that the groups in the West that are most concerned about their own loss of freedom are the very ones who are willing to write off Ukraine's freedom.