Signs of the times. Russians will be Russians. mRNA and the spook community.
20221028
This morning at breakfast we lost power again. It was out twice yesterday, including through dinner, and it's out again this morning. An electric company has a fair amount of flexibility in deciding who gets hit by rolling blackouts. I think it is not a bad idea to have us in Kyiv experience them as much as everybody else. It reminds us that there is a war going on.
This is in contrast to the first eight months or so the war, during which our power was if not perfect at least as good as usual. We are reminded that we are dealing with an enemy who strikes at civilians because they are not terribly effective striking at the military.
They kidnap, torture and rape. This has been the Russian way of war since the time of the Mongols. We cannot be swayed to love Russia. We will not believe promises to treat us otherwise than the way they have always treated subject peoples. We were their subjects for centuries. We understand them all too well. We know that life would not be worth living under the Russians.
Therefore our alternatives are to fight them or go into exile. Graphics forwarded from Bob Homans show the extent to which people have fled, and who has helped Ukraine. They say 7 million left. I think that is a high water mark, and the numbers have come down somewhat, but the choices are still to fight, to suffer Russian brutality or to flee.
Fleeing has a long history. A century ago Jews fled Russia for the USA, Canada, and Argentina. During the Cold War all who could fled the Eastern European satellites. After 2014 Ukraine received waves of refugees from Crimea and the People’s Republics. It's amazing that people accept Russian propaganda going the other way.
It should be absolutely clear that the referenda that brought the satellites under communism, then brought the People's Republics and Crimea under Russia were absolutely fraudulent. This year the Russians conquered Kherson and Zaporozhia oblasts and immediately imposed referenda to ask if the conquered people wanted to be part of Russia. Of course they wouldn’t, and didn't. It was embarrassing to Russia how hard they had to work to force people to go to the polls. Turnout was low and even as controlled as the referenda were it was clear that the people didn't want the Russians.
This is the kind of deceit that has characterized Russians ever since the days of the Mongols. The Huns in the fifth and the Mongols in the twelfth century conquered by fear. Those were simple times and being known as an absolute terror served to subjugate the peoples. The 21st century is an era of greater information. People understand the alternatives. More than that, they have the ability to flee. Which is why they are leaving in droves. Basically the Russian mentality has not changed since the Mongols. The Mongols seem to have taken a Western people, the Russians, and made them more like them. More cruel, subduing and controlling subject nations by the use of rape, robbery, torture and kidnapping
Though it was hard to escape from Eastern European satellites during the Cold War, we knew people. Growing up I had a neighbor Alex Hiton from Hungary. He was a spooky, scared guy. He was so weird that we neighborhood boys cruelly made fun of him. The system had traumatized him.
When my Vietnamese wife studied German in Saarbrücken in 1972 we became acquainted with refugee classmates who had many tales about the Russians. Lots of displaced people working for the US Army had been in the Soviet Union. My Hungarian girlfriend in Germany, Livia worked very hard to escape Hungary in the 70s. Their stories were similar, and the urge to escape the Russians the same everywhere.
After the Russians took over Crimea and the People's Republics in 2014 there was an influx of refugees. People who could left everything behind and came to Kyiv. I was active in Rotary at the time and I met quite a few. Most of them had been born in Soviet times and had a very clear idea what they were escaping.
In summary, nobody voluntarily goes under the Russian yoke. The people who are now escaping Kherson headed east are the quislings, the collaborators. They made bad choices. Life will not be good for them either in Russia or Ukraine.
A big difference between Russians and Ukrainians is that successive regimes have taken the spirit out of of the Russians. They are beaten down. They take a fatalistic view, accepting cruel government as their lot. Ukrainians argue with everybody, themselves included. Russians tolerate their tsar. For better or worse, we throw out the rascal in charge at every presidential election.
Russians have put up with Putin. Though many are fleeing the country, they are not for the most part in the streets protesting mass mobilization. Though they try to avoid the Covid jabs, they have not demonstrated against them. Though quite a few think that the war in Ukraine is misguided, demonstrations have been muted.
Compare that with Ukraine. When our “duly elected” president (makes Biden’s election look clean) was robbing the country blind in 2014, we had several months of peaceful protests calling for change. Yanukovych finally took the hint, took his stolen billions and vamoosed to enjoy retirement in Russia.
The Russians have always considered Ukrainians to be troublemakers. That’s a reason that they continue to generate so much propaganda about Banderistas, Right Sector, Nazis and so on. Yes, we are troublemakers in the sense that we will much more vocally defend our interests than Russians. We set a dangerous example.
In a related note, I listened to Robert Malone’s description of the way the pharmaceutical companies have deployed the mRNA technology. I consider it well worth my time. Although there is a transcript which is quicker to read, watching the slideshow gives you time to consider it, let it sink in, and provide you with some useful graphics.
Among other things, Malone says that the defense and intelligence communities were highly involved in pushing the mRNA technology. It is worth listening to the presentation just to understand how and why that might be true. He contends that the FDA and CDC changed and ignored rules under pressure from the spook community. Given that Malone comes from a family with a long history working in the defense industry, and has rubbed shoulders with them throughout his own career, he speaks with considerable authority.
As a throwaway, Malone brought in Ukraine, saying " I'm convinced we have been doing most of the engineering up until this point, and the stuff that is going to come out in Bobby's (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) next book is going to blow your circuits in terms of what we have done in Georgia and Ukraine. We'll park that. These things are being done. "
I'm willing to believe that the US government was doing evil things here in Ukraine. Believe me, we ordinary folk didn't know about it or condone it. The US had a lot of power over what happened here, and Ukrainian politicians are known to be bribable. None of this whatsoever excuses what Russia has done with this war. It is just an opportune excuse for unconscionable actions.
I have been saying all along that Ukraine is fighting two wars, and that the most immediate one with the Russians is perhaps ultimately the less important. I will be first in line to read the next Bobby Kennedy book.
Oksana’s take on Zelensky is that he could have done much more to prepare for this Russian invasion. His priorities were building roads and other infrastructure projects rather than defense. She credits his predecessor, Poroshenko, with having built the Ukrainian army from virtually nothing at the time that Yanukovych absconded to the force that did a credible job of holding off the Russians until NATO rallied and started to give us the assistance we needed.
The BioLabs were in place long before Zelensky came on the scene. Poroshenko certainly had to have been aware of them. I would not be at all surprised to learn that there was a quid pro quo from the United States: we will help you rearm, and you need to tolerate the presence of BioLabs.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is spending more time digesting what other wise people are saying than on his own scribbling. The kids are getting an appropriate amount of my time, and Oksana feels she is coming into her own as a music teacher.