by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted on Asia Times
Future historians may register it as the day when usually unflappable Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov decided he had had enough:
We are getting used to the fact that the European Union are trying to impose unilateral restrictions, illegitimate restrictions and we proceed from the assumption at this stage that the European Union is an unreliable partner.
Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, on an official visit to Moscow, had to take it on the chin.
Lavrov, always the perfect gentleman, added, “I hope that the strategic review that will take place soon will focus on the key interests of the European Union and that these talks will help to make our contacts more constructive.”
He was referring to the EU heads of state and government’s summit at the European Council next month, where they will discuss Russia. Lavrov harbors no illusions the “unreliable partners” will behave like adults.
Yet something immensely intriguing can be found in Lavrov’s opening remarks in his meeting with Borrell: “The main problem we all face is the lack of normalcy in relations between Russia and the European Union – the two largest players in the Eurasian space. It is an unhealthy situation, which does not benefit anyone.”
The two largest players in the Eurasian space (italics mine). Let that sink in. We’ll be back to it in a moment.
As it stands, the EU seems irretrievably addicted to worsening the “unhealthy situation”. European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen memorably botched the Brussels vaccine game. Essentially, she sent Borrell to Moscow to ask for licensing rights for European firms to produce the Sputnik V vaccine – which will soon be approved by the EU.
And yet Eurocrats prefer to dabble in hysteria, promoting the antics of NATO asset and convicted fraudster Navalny – the Russian Guaido.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, under the cover of “strategic deterrence”, the head of the US STRATCOM, Admiral Charles Richard, casually let it slip that “there is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state.”
So the blame for the next – and final – war is already apportioned to the “destabilizing” behavior of Russia and China. It’s assumed they will be “losing” – and then, in a fit of rage, will go nuclear. The Pentagon will be no more than a victim; after all, claims Mr. STRATCOM, we are not “stuck in the Cold War”.
STRATCOM planners could do worse than read crack military analyst Andrei Martyanov, who for years has been on the forefront detailing how the new hypersonic paradigm – and not nuclear weapons – has changed the nature of warfare.
After a detailed technical discussion, Martyanov shows how “the United States simply has no good options currently. None. The less bad option, however, is to talk to Russians and not in terms of geopolitical BS and wet dreams that the United States, somehow, can convince Russia “to abandon” China – US has nothing, zero, to offer Russia to do so. But at least Russians and Americans may finally settle peacefully this “hegemony” BS between themselves and then convince China to finally sit as a Big Three at the table and finally decide how to run the world. This is the only chance for the US to stay relevant in the new world.”
The Golden Horde imprint
As much as the chances are negligible of the EU getting a grip on the “unhealthy situation” with Russia, there’s no evidence what Martyanov outlined will be contemplated by the US Deep State.
The path ahead seems ineluctable: perpetual sanctions; perpetual NATO expansion alongside Russia’s borders; the build up of a ring of hostile states around Russia; perpetual US interference on Russian internal affairs – complete with an army of fifth columnists; perpetual, full spectrum information war.
Lavrov is increasingly making it crystal clear that Moscow expects nothing else. Facts on the ground, though, will keep accumulating.
Nordstream 2 will be finished – sanctions or no sanctions – and will supply much needed natural gas to Germany and the EU. Convicted fraudster Navalny – 1% of real “popularity” in Russia – will remain in jail. Citizens across the EU will get Sputnik V. The Russia-China strategic partnership will continue to solidify.
To understand how we have come to this unholy Russophobic mess, an essential road map is provided by Russian Conservatism , an exciting, new political philosophy study by Glenn Diesen, associate professor at University of Southeastern Norway, lecturer at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, and one of my distinguished interlocutors in Moscow.
Diesen starts focusing on the essentials: geography, topography and history. Russia is a vast land power without enough access to the seas. Geography, he argues, conditions the foundations of “conservative policies defined by autocracy, an ambiguous and complex concept of nationalism, and the enduring role of the Orthodox Church” – something that implies resistance to “radical secularism”.
It’s always crucial to remember that Russia has no natural defensible borders; it has been invaded or occupied by Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, the Mongol Golden Horde, Crimean Tatars and Napoleon. Not to mention the immensely bloody Nazi invasion.
What’s in a word? Everything: “security”, in Russian, is byezopasnost. That happens to be a negative, as byez means “without” and opasnost means “danger”.
Russia’s complex, unique historical make-up always presented serious problems. Yes, there was close affinity with the Byzantine empire. But if Russia “claimed transfer of imperial authority from Constantinople it would be forced to conquer it.” And to claim the successor, role and heritage of the Golden Horde would relegate Russia to the status of an Asiatic power only.
On the Russian path to modernization, the Mongol invasion provoked not only a geographical schism, but left its imprint on politics: “Autocracy became a necessity following the Mongol legacy and the establishment of Russia as an Eurasian empire with a vast and poorly connected geographical expanse”.
“A colossal East West”
Russia is all about East meets West. Diesen reminds us how Nikolai Berdyaev, one of the leading 20th century conservatives, already nailed it in 1947: “The inconsistency and complexity of the Russian soul may be due to the fact that in Russia two streams of world history – East and West – jostle and influence one another (…) Russia is a complete section of the world – a colossal East West.”
The Trans-Siberian railroad, built to solidify the internal cohesion of the Russian empire and to project power in Asia, was a major game-changer: “With Russian agricultural settlements expanding to the east, Russia was increasingly replacing the ancient roads who had previously controlled and connected Eurasia.”
It’s fascinating to watch how the development of Russian economics ended up on Mackinder’s Heartland theory – according to which control of the world required control of the Eurasian supercontinent. What terrified Mackinder is that Russian railways connecting Eurasia would undermine the whole power structure of Britain as a maritime empire.
Diesen also shows how Eurasianism – emerging in the 1920s among émigrés in response to 1917 – was in fact an evolution of Russian conservatism.
Eurasianism, for a number of reasons, never became a unified political movement. The core of Eurasianism is the notion that Russia was not a mere Eastern European state. After the 13th century Mongol invasion and the 16th century conquest of Tatar kingdoms, Russia’s history and geography could not be only European. The future would require a more balanced approach – and engagement with Asia.
Dostoyevsky had brilliantly framed it ahead of anyone, in 1881:
Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans. We have served Europe too well, we have taken too great a part in her domestic quarrels (…) We have bowed ourselves like slaves before the Europeans and have only gained their hatred and contempt. It is time to turn away from ungrateful Europe. Our future is in Asia.
Lev Gumilev was arguably the superstar among a new generation of Eurasianists. He argued that Russia had been founded on a natural coalition between Slavs, Mongols and Turks. The Ancient Rus and the Great Steppe, published in 1989, had an immense impact in Russia after the fall of the USSR – as I learned first hand from my Russian hosts when I arrived in Moscow via the Trans-Siberian in the winter of 1992.
As Diesen frames it, Gumilev was offering a sort of third way, beyond European nationalism and utopian internationalism. A Lev Gumilev University has been established in Kazakhstan. Putin has referred to Gumilev as “the great Eurasian of our time”.
Diesen reminds us that even George Kennan, in 1994, recognized the conservative struggle for “this tragically injured and spiritually diminished country”. Putin, in 2005, was way sharper. He stressed,
the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. And for the Russian people, it was a real drama (…) The old ideals were destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or simply hastily reformed…With unrestricted control over information flows, groups of oligarchs served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty started to be accepted as the norm. All this evolved against a background of the most severe economic recession, unstable finances and paralysis in the social sphere.
Applying “sovereign democracy”
And so we reach the crucial European question.
In the 1990s, led by Atlanticists, Russian foreign policy was focused on Greater Europe, a concept based on Gorbachev’s Common European Home.
And yet post-Cold War Europe, in practice, ended up configured as the non-stop expansion of NATO and the birth – and expansion – of the EU. All sorts of liberal contortionisms were deployed to include all of Europe while excluding Russia.
Diesen has the merit of summarizing the whole process in a single sentence: “The new liberal Europe represented a British-American continuity in terms of the rule of maritime powers, and Mackinder’s objective to organize the German-Russian relationship in a zero-sum format to prevent the alignment of interests”.
No wonder Putin, subsequently, had to be erected as the Supreme Scarecrow, or “the new Hitler”. Putin rejected outright the role for Russia of mere apprentice to Western civilization – and its corollary, (neo) liberal hegemony.
Still, he remained quite accommodating. In 2005, Putin stressed, “above all else Russia was, is and will, of course, be a major European power”. What he wanted was to decouple liberalism from power politics – by rejecting the fundamentals of liberal hegemony.
Putin was saying there’s no single democratic model. That was eventually conceptualized as “sovereign democracy”. Democracy cannot exist without sovereignty; so that discards Western “supervision” to make it work.
Diesen sharply observes that if the USSR was a “radical, left-wing Eurasianism, some of its Eurasian characteristics could be transferred to conservative Eurasianism.” Diesen notes how Sergey Karaganov, sometimes referred to as the “Russian Kissinger”, has shown “that the Soviet Union was central to decolonization and it mid-wifed the rise of Asia by depriving the West of the ability to impose its will on the world through military force, which the West had done from the 16th century until the 1940s”.
This is largely acknowledged across vast stretches of the Global South – from Latin America and Africa to Southeast Asia.
Eurasia’s western peninsula
So after the end of the Cold War and the failure of Greater Europe, Moscow’s pivot to Asia to build Greater Eurasia could not but have an air of historical inevitability.
The logic is impeccable. The two geoeconomic hubs of Eurasia are Europe and East Asia. Moscow wants to connect them economically into a supercontinent: that’s where Greater Eurasia joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But then there’s the extra Russian dimension, as Diesen notes: the “transition away from the usual periphery of these centers of power and towards the center of a new regional construct”.
From a conservative perspective, emphasizes Diesen, “the political economy of Greater Eurasia enables Russia to overcome its historical obsession with the West and establish an organic Russian path to modernization”.
That implies the development of strategic industries; connectivity corridors; financial instruments; infrastructure projects to connect European Russia with Siberia and Pacific Russia. All that under a new concept: an industrialized, conservative political economy.
The Russia-China strategic partnership happens to be active in all these three geoeconomic sectors: strategic industries/techno platforms, connectivity corridors and financial instruments.
That propels the discussion, once again, to the supreme categorical imperative: the confrontation between the Heartland and a maritime power.
The three great Eurasian powers, historically, were the Scythians, the Huns and the Mongols. The key reason for their fragmentation and decadence is that they were not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.
The fourth great Eurasian power was the Russian empire – and its successor, the USSR. A key reason the USSR collapsed is because, once gain, it was not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.
The US prevented it by applying a composite of Mackinder, Mahan and Spykman. The US strategy even became known as the Spykman-Kennan containment mechanism – all these “forward deployments” in the maritime periphery of Eurasia, in Western Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.
We all know by now how the overall US offshore strategy – as well as the primary reason for the US to enter both WWI and WWII – was to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon by all means necessary.
As for the US as hegemon, that would be crudely conceptualized – with requisite imperial arrogance – by Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski in 1997: “To prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together”. Good old Divide and Rule, applied via “system-dominance”.
It’s this system that is now tumbling down – much to the despair of the usual suspects. Diesen notes how, “in the past, pushing Russia into Asia would relegate Russia to economic obscurity and eliminate its status as a European power.” But now, with the center of geoeconomic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it’s a whole new ball game.
The 24/7 US demonization of Russia-China, coupled with the “unhealthy situation” mentality of the EU minions, only helps to drive Russia closer and closer to China exactly at the juncture where the West’s two centuries-only world dominance, as Andre Gunder Frank conclusively proved , is coming to an end.
Diesen, perhaps too diplomatically, expects that “relations between Russia and the West will also ultimately change with the rise of Eurasia. The West’s hostile strategy to Russia is conditioned on the idea that Russia has nowhere else to go, and must accept whatever the West offers in terms of “partnership”. The rise of the East fundamentally alters Moscow’s relationship with the West by enabling Russia to diversify its partnerships”.
We may be fast approaching the point where Great Eurasia’s Russia will present Germany with a take it or leave it offer. Either we build the Heartland together, or we will build it with China – and you will be just a historical bystander. Of course there’s always the inter-galaxy distant possibility of a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing axis. Stranger things have happened.
Meanwhile, Diesen is confident that “the Eurasian land powers will eventually incorporate Europe and other states on the inner periphery of Eurasia. Political loyalties will incrementally shift as economic interests turn to the East, and Europe is gradually becoming the western peninsula of Greater Eurasia”.
Talk about food for thought for the peninsular peddlers of the “unhealthy situation”.
“Dostoevsky had brilliantly framed it ahead of anyone, in 1881:
Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans.”
I think Dostoevsky was only partly correct. The biggest mistake of all that Russia has made in her attempts to be co-operative with those for whom co-operation is a cover word for covert dominance attempts, is in her own refusal to live with the clearest, most unarguable, reality of all.
Just look at a world map.
As the Ancient and Dynastic Egyptians knew well, Russia is not a Western Nation. She is not an Eastern Nation. She is the worlds ONLY Northern Nation. Russia lies between 60 and 70 deg latitude, between the Equator, at 0 and the North Pole. She is the only nation to have settled communities living at these latitudes. A Russian winter is like none anywhere else – and the rigours needed to not only survive it but thrive in it, have helped to form the Russian National character.
In many ways, it is this rugged, strong and fearless character of the people of the Frozen, bitter cold White North which the peoples of easy, softer, lands fear so much. There is – or can be when pushed – something of stone about Russians – as the German Army at Stalingrad learned the hard way.
And there has been the need to grow these characteristics in loneliness. As noted here, Russia has been attacked and invaded over the centuries where she herself has never attacked and invaded. Apart from the many centuries back Mongol invasion, all those attacks have come from the West – and even the Aztecs of ancient Andean Continent avoided the West, as it was held that it was where disease, despair and death came.
We see so much of the evidence that the people of the Collective West cannot still stop seeing themselves as “The World”. I keep reading the defeated writings of learned helplessness, – that so much is happening today is because “they” are going to rule “the world;” the vaccines are to turn “the world “into mutants; the Globalists rule the world — etc etc etc. I have to keep saying “Look guys, The Collective AngloSaxon European West are NOT “the World”. There are billions of people out there who dont identify with you, dont see things as you do and have their own world, their own literature, myths, mind-set and though patterns.
And this “Russia is European, Russia is Asian” is exactly that. It’s a Collective West mindset – and sadly Russia, in her attempts to be conciliating and helpful, and form a common ground for discussion, has fallen for it. Just as she fell for “MacDonalds, Pizza Hut and Starbucks” as the last word in good food and elegant Western dining!!!
I would suggest that Russia needs to wake up to the new world, and stop trying to appease a Collective West which will do nothing but use it as a step ladder to another kind of invasion. Russia needs to see herself for what she is – not some arcane French – German copy and “European”, and not a mysterious unknowable Oriental in the same sense as the Pacific Orientals of China, Japan etc.
She is uniquely herself, purely and solely the Worlds only Northern Nation and Peoples. She needs to not only see this for herself but to then insist that the Collective West sees it too.
Isn’t that a bit of ‘western’ mental habit who feels compelled to explain to Russians who they are and ‘suggest’ what they should do? Russia ‘needs’ to do this, Russia ‘needs’ to do that, we know better what she ‘needs’.
Russia was aware, at least since Peter the Great, that it is the ‘Great Boreal Empire’, and the ‘West’ was aware as well. One should only look at the profusion of chiliastic ‘prophecies’ based on the re-interpretation of the Prophecy of Daniel, that circulated in the 17th century. Think only of Leibniz, of Prince Demetrius Cantemir, who all thought that the Russian monarch had been granted a divine role to play in the unfolding Biblical drama at a crucial culminating period in history, if only for the defeat of Ottoman Empire. Leibniz not only was an advocate of Russia’s expansion in the East, but drew the plans for integration of Siberia in the Russian Empire and looked forward to Russia as a bridge between Europe and China.
“Russia ‘needs’ to do this, Russia ‘needs’ to do that, we know better what she ‘needs’.”
The warrior cop, accutely aware that it would be futile and embarrassing to be seen blowing away somebody obviously smaller and weaker … or socially superior : “You need to… You need to… You need to…”.
Russia is Eurasia and I would also include parts of the Balkans in that concept too. What is Europe? Is it a geopolitical entity, a physical one or a cultural and spiritual one? Obviously a combination of all them. Just as is the entity known as Eurasia. This complex that Russia has of wanting to be part of the Western club is futile for reasons discussed numerous times. The people of Russia include both Europeans and Asians. It is therefore Eurasian. They should celebrate this unique identity and be proud to call themselves that.
Russia needs to be Russia and Europe needs to say thank you. Russia has saved Europe from the Viking, from the Mongol, from the Turk, from Napoleon (unfortunately), from the Nazis and the world from the colonial menace of the Anglo-Saxon and never a thank-you. The Cossack has been your policeman for centuries its time to say thank you.
Pamela
“I would suggest that Russia needs to wake up to the new world, and stop trying to appease a Collective West which will do nothing but use it as a step ladder to another kind of invasion”. Well spoken. Yeltsin, for example, foolishly believed that the West would accept Russia on an equal basis, when the only thing the West wanted was to see the break up of the country. He introduced liberal capitalism and almost ruined Russia, whom Western bankers, corporations and domestic oligarchs looted to the sum of 100 billion dollars a year.
Watching the impending dissolution of the country, Russian patriots united and presented Yeltsin with an offer: If he surrendered his Office to Putin, he would not be prosecuted for treason. Yeltsin accepted, and Putin kept his word. Putin saved Russia, bringing her back on the world stage, to the fury of Western centers of power. Worse, he established a partnership with China, modernized the Russian military and beefed up industry and agriculture. And the West ? It replied with “banana republic” methods, trying color revolutions inside Russia by supporting liberal stooges like Sobchak and Navalny and forgetting that Russia is no “banana republic”. The last pro-Navalny “demonstrations” must have been a shock for both Russian liberals and the West; instead of a mass response, we saw a bunch of kids and teenagers demonstrate, leaving a pathetic impression.
Pepe Escobar has stated: “Of course there’s always the inter-galaxy distant possibility of a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing axis. Stranger things have happened”. This is a rather surprising comment. After Mackinder introduced his Heartland Theory in 1904, we had two world wars. I always argued that they were fought to prevent a German-Russian economic and political alliance, which would have brought in China and inevitably cancelled the British Empire. It’s a well known fact that Bismarck advocated an economic alliance between Germany, Russia and China. The bankers used the Kaiser to remove him from Office, an incredibly foolish decision. Instead of allying its self with Russia, Germany ended up fighting Russia in two world wars, and all for the benefit of Anglo-American bankers.who were and still are dreaming of breaking up and plundering Russia.
And the future ? Yes, I do think that Eurasian land powers will eventually incorporate Europe. It’s inevitable, bearing in mind the problems Europe has and the fact that the US is on the other side of the Atlantic. As analysts have already stated, it’s only a matter of time before a rift occurs between European and American elites.
The last thing Bismarck and the Kaiser wanted was war with Russia. The Kaiser went to great efforts to avoid that, but the Tsar was misguided by the Khazarian agents and mobilized his army. GB, France and Russia conspired to destroy Germany and prepared for WW1 ten ears in advance. Russia was promised the Dardanelles which explains Churchill’s catastrophe at Gallipoli. The Germans were not stupid enough to want war with those three great powers. WW1 should have lasted less than 1 year, but the Anglo-Zionists wanted to bleed Germany white. GB wanted Germany destroyed, and the Zionists wanted Israel. They had to wait until after 1945 to achieve their goals, because Russia pulled out of WW1.
Charles Carroll
Bismarck was not around when the Kaiser went to war. It was the kaiser who removed Bismarck from Office, a catastrophic mistake. As for the Kaiser, he was unfit to rule, to put it mildly, as his personality possessed quite a number of infantile qualities.
Pamela you wrote……The biggest mistake of all that Russia has made in her attempts to be co-operative with those for whom co-operation is a cover word for covert dominance attempts, is in her own refusal to live with the clearest, most unarguable, reality of all.
Agree.
1. Russia has always been drilled by a western foreign factor from within that seek the Russian people to serve them only in their plans. Interests of individuals over state. That is why they deliberately always react slowly and disorganizedly, paying the price by genocide of russian people. I still remember … we defeated them by burying them with our bodies and drowning them in our blood.
2. There is no continent of Europe. It is a Greco-Roman patent. Which western people imposed on the rest of the world during the colonial era. The continent is separated by an ocean, not mountain and a river. We are talking about Atlantists. Rome is not only Western Europe, but crossed the Atlantic 200 years ago. Fake role-models for few in Russia which even today, after all, refer to Russia as the “third Rome”.
A distinctive, unique geograpy-based defintion of Russia as a Northern nation. Congratulations.
Mr STRATCOM talking about nuclear war. Russian specialists exposing how russia would deal with nato in Europe in case of war. US destroyer entering in russian territorial waters in the Pacific. Russian bombers similulating attacks against US destroyers in the black sea.
The EU and the US openly promoting new sanctions against Russia. Chinese bombers simulating attacks against US aircraft carriers in the China sea.
All of this stinks a lot.
Anyway some will say that everything is fine because when we speak about these things we “do not comprehend Russia”.
Anyway some will say that everything is fine because when we speak about these things we “do not comprehend Russia”.
Yes, as it’s long been said “there are none so blind as those who will not see”.
If it doesn’t fit your world view, you refuse to see it, and then say you dont understand, with the unspoken corollary that it’s Russias’ fault you dont understand.
I think Russia is coming round to saying “if you can’t understand us, that’s you’re problem – dont try making it ours”.
I live in Montreal, Canada, self-declared second French-speaking city in the world. As everyone knows, the province of Quebec is what was left with a French majority after the French were defeated by the British in the Plains of Abraham in 1759. Still, and maybe for that reason, the French of Quebec have kept very strong ties to the country they consider culturally their Motherland, which allows foreigners to have a very close and direct taste of France, its political and artistic culture above all, without having to travel to the old continent, This character of Montreal as shop window for French culture has allowed me to get a good taste of what the French intelligentsia has been cooking for the last few decades. Now, for someone familiar with the enormous contribution of French philosophers, writers, politicians and artists in History, one would think that for the last four decades France should have been offering the world more of the same. Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case. After having been visiting for decades Montreal libraries and bookstores, from time to time, perusing at the books in the French section, I have come to the conclusion that thinkers and writers of France have been all affected by a virulent infection that knows no bound in its corrosive effects: that of a deep hatred of everything Russian and Soviet too. That is the sad truth; for the 3 decades, we may say since the end of the Cold War, all what most French authors seem to have been able to produce is rabid anti-Russian/Soviet pamphlets. It is amazing, isn’t it, that the descendants of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Malraux, Paul Sartre, Camus, aren’t able to produce anything of any value anymore and that all what Cultural France is able to give the world by the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI centuries is nothing but their foaming at the mouth, their hysterical rants about Communism, about the Fall of the Soviet Union, about corruption in Russia and the dark secrets of the Kremlin, about bloody dictator Vladimir Putin and how he mistreats and assassinates his pro-democracy opponents, about Stalin and his Gulags and so on. That is why, for one, I have absolutely no doubt that Putin and Russia have nothing good to expect from Old Europe, as Rumsfeld called it; that what lies West of the Russian border is, it has always been and will always be, a desolate land of rabid anti-Russian barbarians, even more so considering that since their Revolution the French have considered themselves “le peuple le plus eclairé de l’Europe et du monde” (didn’t they use to say that “every man has two motherlands, theirs of origin and la France…”?), the ones who refused to drink the American Kool-Aid after WW2 and managed to keep their distances with the empire for at least a couple of decades. We know that as soon as he saw his country liberated from the Nazis, General De Gaulle told the “American” military to pack and leave, but that was long time ago and anyway, since he was toppled by the CIA in 1968, for the insolence of wanting his country to be sovereign, France is just one more of the pack of Western U.S. handled hyenas howling at the Russian borders.
There was a nice song about Montreal in the 1960s, around the time of the Sound of Music musical. Weren’t the “Singing Nuns” also from there. My other memory is the television show, perhaps the first I ever saw, Sol et Gobbelet.
I believe the nuns were from Belgium. The song about Mtl was probably ‘Canada’ for the expo 67 .
….being Canada’s centennial year.
I wasn’t still here myself but if the song was about Montreal it was most likely the official anthem of Expo 67, Un jour, un jour. that you can find in YT in several versions.
And it wasn’t The Singing Nuns, but the Singing Nun, Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers, which became world famous in the early 1960s with her hit song Dominique (also available in YT) and no, she wasn’t from Montreal but from Belgium.
In their attitude towards Russia the French have never been able to raise above the anti-Russian Polish-French forgery “Aperçu sur la Russie”, better known as ”The Testament of Peter the Great”, prepared in view of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia and which introduced the theme which would become perennial: “Europe is inevitably in the process of becoming booty for Russia”. They couldn’t get over the fact that Napoleon’s defeat in Russia brought the Russian troops in the heart of Paris.
The animosity against Russia made the success of another anti-Russian pamphlet ‘La Russie en 1839’ of the notorious ‘pédé’ Marquis de Custine. The book was deservedly forgotten until 1946 when the French writer Heri Massis, known for his ‘defense of the West’ rediscovered it. The CIA and Cold War Warriors like American Cold Warriors such
as George Kennan and General Walter Bedell-Smith promptly promoted it to the status of the most prophetic book on the “Russian soul”.
On the other hand the French ‘intelligentsia’ is totally dominated by various ‘Glucksmans’, all descendants of ‘refugees’ from Russia, fleeing the ineradicable Russian ‘antisemitism’.
Gatobart, being a Francophile like you, I share your decades-long disappointment over French decadence. But it seems to me that culture has become impoverished over the EU$A as a whole. As a student 60 years ago I was startled to hear that Russians did not approve of a person being “не культурный” (not cultured); startled because even in those early days of Yankification, young people were beginning to flaunt their Democratic Lack of Culture. Then “elitism” became a dirty word. And by now, “elite” means simply the “chosen” filthy rich 0.001% (Fr. Les Elus, the chosen).
For French knowers: Les Elus sont ‘Les Elus Cohen’!
The only fly in the ointment of Eurasian Integration is Chinese Ideology. Russia and Putin have no ideology. That is why the big ideas are coming from Putin. His articulation of how the planet should be managed, how sovereign nations must be cooperative, why the US can no longer “lead” and which institutions need to be abandoned and which need to be reformed are the hallmarks of philosophical thought not ideology dogma.
For now, President Xi, the penultimate ideologue has kept his ideology to domestic affairs. China has not required or even suggested their ideology for others. But, once the realization that Russia is no junior to any partner, what happens?
If Russia is ever freed from sanctions and the liberals monkey-wrenching the economy and some of the blood sucking oligarchs are relieved of their hold on major resources and corporations, Russia will grow into an economic power unthought of.
Right now and for the coming decade this should not be a hindrance to co-leadership of the Eurasian Integration.
The US-UK cauldron stirrers will keep China and Russia cozy and coordinating as the West tries relentlessly to stop Tomorrow’s Sunrise. It rises in the East. There’s nothing they can do to stop it.
“Larchmonter
The US-UK cauldron stirrers will keep China and Russia cozy and coordinating as the West tries relentlessly to stop Tomorrow’s Sunrise. It rises in the East. There’s nothing they can do to stop it.”
More true words are seldom said. A new dawn is coming and it will rise in the east of Russia/China just as surely as the sun will come. What this sun will see is The Hegemon willingly and viciously tearing itself to pieces as we watch. More is the pity for that, what could have been, should have been and won’t ever be is a tragedy of world proportions. Those whom the gods will destroy first make mad.
Auslander
And here we have the septuagenarian soon to be octogenarian, ruler of the ’empire’ the one and only Don Quixote tilting at windmills as his cabal of Obama’s exiles try and instruct him to string a few words together to form a sentence that perhaps will make sense to anyone who has the patience to wait. Guess who is Santos?
https://youtu.be/aVN_rH7zXsc
If you read Cervantes’ book, Don Quixote – insane or not – was a man of almost incredible courage, willing to risk his life over and over against what even he recognised to be overwhelming odds. (During the celebrated windmills episode, for instance, he imagined he was charging a horde of evil giants.)
Bidet is just a senile corrupt war criminal puppet. He isn’t fit to clean the dust off Don Quixote’s horse Rosinante’s hooves.
Completely agree. Many thanks for the comment.
Some great images there, regardless of whether Don Joe is viewed as a hapless hero or hapless tool.
Katherine
Many thanks Katherine.
there is another aspect overlooked illustraing the unconscious terror and desperation in washngton.
geography, for 200 years has nurtured and protected the usa from invasions and wars which devastated pretty much everywhere else. the great oceans which protect america from harm turned it into a powerful sea going force.
now with global war pretty verboten lest it go nuclear and the concomittant rise of eurasia those same oceans which protected america for trouble will now in 20 years time isolate that same america from the center of invention and progress rising in russia and asia.
in a nut shell america is on the cusp of becoming a geographic backwater, a political buenos aries…. terminally corrupt politically unable to find its way out of the bathroom wedded to a continent size violent social cultural slum as widely found in large brazilian cities.
the growing irrelevance is what washington is desperate to avoid and terrified of becoming
America has the good fortune to be the second-last continent to be colonized by homo sapiens (the last being Antarctica). As such it is still under-populated and relatively unscarred. There is no reason why humankind should not continue to move from East to West — either overland via West Russia (as the original North Americans did) or by sea and air over the Atlantic and Pacific (as some of the original South Americans may have sailed).
Even without immigration the American population will continue to grow and develope. Human beings have always shown tremendous creativity (Homo Faber), and I see no reason why the growing irrelevance of Washington (or of the U$A for that matter) should isolate America from the centres of invention and progress elsewhere in the world. Admittedly it took 10,000 years for some inventions — the wheel, the horse, the alphabet and arithmetical zero — to arrive in America, but I see no reason why America should not some day change the world with some invention of equally brilliant simplicity. After all, Americans have already produced the tomato, the potato, and maize; in this respect America has already shown itself capable of progress and invention to match those continents which produced the turnip, wheat and rice.
But the world today moves much faster, and is far more connected. I think the problem is how to reconcile this increasingly technological inter-connectedness with Russia’s and China’s concept of “a Multi-Polar World”. Because the global campaign of Medical Fascism which I call Con-19 shows that “invention and progress” could imprison the entire human race inside an electronic web of coercion and deceit unless we curb the lust for power wherever it rises in government (or even in private, for that matter).
One of the huge problems in store in the future is the China Russian border in the Harbin area. China is extrememly resource poor, though not short of space. The trouble is the Chinese mentality w.r.t the resources they do have has been to use them up, just as in USA and just about e/w else. Rusia has a depopulated land of enormous size and her population is still shrinking. In Irkutsk Region, huge numbers of Chinese have crossed the borders of Mongolia and are clear felling lasrge areas of forest on the southern fringes of the taiga, around Baikal and to the west. Russian villagers are powerless to stop it and are very very unhappy with their local politicians. Mr Putin himseld flew uot last summer and wagged his fingers at e/o. Not sure how much that helps, but seriously needs people (and NOT boers) and to clean up regional politics in a big way. Noo amount of canvassing by what’s his name will help (Mr Putin’s latter-day economic advisor and now ambassador plentipotentiary to the eastern regions. I’ll recall his name in a mo. Sergei R
Not trying to be anti-Chinese, I will probably move there soon at this rate with degradation of the West, there or my beloved Siberia. They are being given 99-years leasehold over the land to grow food for Chinese consumption, trouble is, they haven’t learnt, for all their Tao and Confucianism, and Mao’s nook, to respect the world like Buddhists do (argh, not the vile Sri Lankans and what they did to Tamil woman and children in the Peninsula, nor the Vile Tibetan Pope, not he vilest of all, the Burmese Monks( to respect the soil, that land, the water, the trees, cats, dogs and bushmeat. No I don’t for one tiny minute believe anything about the wet market, see Brett Weinstein and many others from the wordGO for the true story, which shall emerge.
There is a law which stipulates that Russia is going to abolish all timber and low level of wood products exports.
At a same time Russia is launching the country wide forest surveillance system along with tree tracking based on drones and AI technology where each tree is going to be tracked by unique id based on AI (automatic scanning and tracking).
At a same time there are huge investments in wood processing industries in the Russia’s far east to meet coming demands (that is the reason for delayed implementation of the law, processing industry is not prepared for the challenge).
So Petra don’t you worry the things are going to change … drastically :)
I, too, worry about the obvious synergy—an undesirable synergy—between vast empty resource-rich Russia and teeming resource-poor Chinese. That comment about what nature abhors. My natural sympathies lie with Russia and the preservation of forests, habitat, etc. from human depredations.
I foresee this general circumstance as a locus of potential tensions between Russia and China in the future.
OTOH both govts should, with the help of AI, be able to control land-hungy elements, if they want to do so. But what if in the end China becomes a source of a Drang nach Westen?
Katherine
What if the meteorite strike Earth? ;)
Historically for, I don’t know, 3.000 years Chine ha never been expansionist power even when it was far more technically advanced than any peer power at the time.
So I wouldn’t worry that much … but just in case we have mister Shoygu, Russian army, navy and air force as a small insurance.
Don’t worry Petra, China is also very resource-rich. E.g. 40% of the global rare-earth deposits and up to 90% production of the world’s rare-earth. Abundant oil and gas in Xinjiang and the South China Sea. Huge (flowing) fresh-water resources in South West China, and also other important minerals like uranium. And don’t forget flammable ice in the South China Sea. Etc. And now also fusion energy.
China also has enough fertile land. China can now optimize the climate and rainfall over vast swathes of even desert (both hot and cold) land for agriculture.
But the most important resource that China has is human resources. Its talented people have been continuously revolutionizing food production.
China does not consider itself the Middle Kingdom for nothing. Above all, this means that China has a deep sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
So don’t worry, China is not eying any land that does not belong to it; especially NOT on land now owned by Russia – having already fully settled the boundary with Russia long ago.
Where is this “Chinese Ideology” bit coming from? To characterize China’s historically successful political centralism as “dogma” reflects an ignorance of its dynamism. The weakness of a proper dogma is that it cannot adapt to new realities.
Meanwhile, Chinese political thought has been unbelievably dynamic over the last century, from colonial backwater to revolutionary Mao Thought to practical Deng Thought to ambitious Xi Thought. Notably, the Communist paradigm shifts having been executed without inducing massive instability. That is unheard of in the West, which still reflects a dogmatic attraction to their monarchies and “perfect” constitutions, and views political evolution as synonymous with head-rolling.
Do not confuse democratic centralism for dogma!
Thanks for summing up China’s position so well. Deng’s “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black so long as it catches mice” stood Mao’s Little Red Book (and his Cultural Revolution) on its head.
The single most compelling answer to ”Why Russia drives the West mad”, mentioned in Pepe’s submission, is this observation of Sergey Karaganov’s:
It’s plain to see that Sergey Karaganov deserves a much better reputation than being likened to a Western genocidalist, and it’s his perfectly accurate observations above which drive Western imperialists bonkers. 30 years ago, Russia was believed to have been vanquished forever, never going to stir up any more trouble to the West’s global tyranny of perpetual mayhem and murder. Putin and Russia have turned the tables, and the criminals who thought they had achieved ”End of History” are despairing as they see the writing of the wall.
I made the same observation.
It’s like you are all the time sensing that something is wrong, but you can’t really put a finger on it or connect all the dots and then suddenly the fog became almost transparent and all the peaces fall in place … that was my feeling after I read the quoted paragraph.
The last few weeks of ‘international diplomacy’ have witnessed a sea change. While I have no doubts that President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have displayed the patience of Job, methinks that this last week was the icing on the cake. I have no doubts that officially nothing will change in the verbiage, SehSha will still be ‘our partners’, EuselessU will continue to be ‘our friends’, but reality has become reality and the general consensus of opinion hereabouts, aka Russia, is, to roughly quote, SehSha/europe are incapable of honoring anything they sign or anything they say.
I also have no doubts that Russia will do almost anything to prevent a war with ‘the collective West’, but the days of putting up with insults piled on insults and sanctions piled on sanctions are over. The last 15 years of having our boots urinated upon at every opportunity have bought incalculably valuable time, the time Russia needed to rebuild her armed forces, to rebuild Russian economy and to invigorate Russian culture.
Russian armed forces are configured as defensive. President Putin has stated often enough that never again will there be war on Russian land and for this reason the entire force structure of the Army has been changed and renovated top to bottom. ‘Defense’ is, to some, a confusing term and should not be construed as defeatist, willing to trade ground, and civilians, for time. Any attack on Russia on the western borders will immediately run head on in to First Guards Tank Army, and their task will be to hold the lines in an aggressive status while other units are moved in to position to support First Guards and expand the defenses. Local attacks will be made to stop any invasion and these attacks will take foreign territory as is normal in combat, but a full blown drive to take Paris will not happen, if for no other reason than Paris ain’t worth the trouble, nor is Berlin or even Warzawa. Let them bleed themselves white as their armed forces suffer attrition the likes of which they can not comprehend. The few US nato troops, there’s not enough of them to make any difference whatsoever beyond filling a few small POW camps or graveyards. The German Army is but a shadow, a joke of what it once was. France, who cares? Italy won’t react at all and UK is a toothless old alley cat on it’s last legs, mainly troubled with wind and not much else.
The Russian Navy is a ‘green water’, a coastal, navy, not configured for aggressive actions far from home shores. The only tiny fly in this ointment is the Russian Boomers who, if a war goes nuke, will totally destroy SehSha in 20 minutes. If it does not go nuke, then the key to winning is civilian infrastructure. All one has to do is obtain a road map of any SehSha coastal state and one will understand within minutes the choke points of commerce and utility supply. The US day to day economy, and to a great extent the EU daily mess, is based on a ‘three day’ system, IOW only three days of foods, POL and sundries are on hand, there is a steady stream of transport bringing all that is needed to feed and keep moving vast sections of US and EU. Drop selected bridges and rail intersections with conventional munitions and both entities will fall apart in less than a week. If one wants to get particularly hard core, selectively destroy electric, water and sewer facilities and in four days civilians will be fighting each other in the streets for food and water, let alone petrol, toilet paper and the ability to flush a toilet. I would be willing to bet that these thoughts have crossed the minds of those whose vocation is to plan for such things, but as far as SehSha/eu are concerned, it is impossible to plan for such disasters. In Russia it is possible.
These 15 years of tolerating urine on our boots have given the time for Russia to perform quantum leaps in weapons technology and at this time only a fool would push Russia to the point of war. Russians stance for 15, almost 20, years has been pray and push for peace but prepare for war. One can always pray for peace and peaceful solutions, but there comes a time when one can no longer step back and swallow one’s pride and protection of one’s country. That day seems to be ever more nigh, and for us personally it won’t matter, the very first salvos of dozens, or hundreds, of cruise missiles fired against Russia will be targeted at our beloved city of Sevastopol, simply as a point of honor for us preventing SehSha from basing their planned American Black Sea Fleet in our city and tossing out on their ears the few nato officers comfortably ensconced on Ulitsiya Simonok on north side. So be it, we knew this then and we know this now. Nobody ever said life was fair.
Auslander
Author http://rhauslander.com/
An Incident On Simonka paperback edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1696160715 NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.
Never The Last One, paper back edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521849056 A deep look in to Russia, her culture and her Armed Forces, in essence a crash course in who and what Russia is.
“All one has to do is obtain a road map of any SehSha coastal state and one will understand within minutes the choke points of commerce and utility supply. ”
Very true Auslander – moreover I understand that there are the same few “choke points” of power supply. I remember reading in an article by a professional in that field that were America to be, for example facing a Solar Flare of the Carrington size which might take out 3 – 5 major substations, and America would be gone for power for years – for they have no way now to re-built the burnt out stations.
The would be so easy for Russia to hit.
One doesn’t even need missiles, three or four determined groups of ‘agents’ can create massive problems and with plausible deniability, IOW if a group gets caught, the official statement will be ‘we have no idea who they are, perhaps you should check your own homegrown terrorists….you know, antifa, blm and such.’
Russia only needs to aim for power hubs. E.g. nuclear stations. The rest will be history.
At the same time, the defense of the common folk in Russia has to be considered. There should be underground facilities that can house a considerable population
To Auslander
“UK is a toothless old alley cat on it’s last legs, mainly troubled with wind and not much else.” Perceptive. Last weeks “Daily Mail” newspaper (right wing) led on the front page that none of the British armies remaining 33 infantry battalions (Yes, there’s only 33 left!) had sufficient personnel to be able to deploy for military operations. That is they have to beg and borrow men and equipment from each other to be able to deploy units at combat strength. This practice has been going on for a long time, so friends and relatives in the army have told me, their experience going back to the 1991 Gulf war and since. So even 33 battalions are not 33 battalions! The UK will do nothing on its own except name calling, and if it goes along with USA aggression it will contribute little. The UK is best ignored, it has a political class that still think they have some importance in the world, but nobody else does, here or elsewhere. And hopefully with Scots independence the UK will disappear leaving just little England trying to Trumpet its self importance, with the rest of the world laughing.
PS I’m English. My observation of the world is that countries that focus on looking after their own people are better places to live than those that like to tell others how to live, or let others tell them how to live. Sovereign democracy indeed!
“leaving just little England trying to Trumpet its self importance, ”
Well, England is the best place for rambling.
I do hope they come to their senses soon from the extreme covid craziness so that one can visit fair England and hike and enjoy the incomparable landscape and gardens.
I quote you: “only a fool would push Russia to the point of war”. Unquote.
The USSR’s armed forces were arguably more powerful than the US’ at least from the mid-sixties onwards. That was why Nixon came to Mao supplicating for help in 1972.
But the USSR was still defeated without a shot being fired. Its nuclear weapons were useless to prevent its collapse and disintegration.
So modern warfare is more economic competition and political subversion, and a match of internal strength, political-diplomatic skill and stamina.
Only a fool will want to provoke a kinetic nuclear fight with Russia today. Same with America. Same as was the case with the USSR. But the real ‘fight’ then and now, is a Sun Tze-Go ‘fight’ not a Clauswitz-chess fight.
Defeat in this sort of ‘fight’ will result in national collapse and economic calamity. Casualties from population collapse resulting from the economic-social collapse are comparable to kinetic warfare.
And even the possession of the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal will be useless to avoid such a national disaster. Such was the case of the USSR.
The US is not stuck in a Cold War v2? Give me a break.
US elites live in the unreality of their supremacist attitudes.
The US is a fascist rogue state – and I am having trouble distinguishing it from the Nazis.
There are are in fact two very different species and there is this irrefutable way to prove it:
The Nazis were patriots at heart, nationalists, or so they saw themselves, who felt that they were fighting for their fatherland, to preserve their national identity, their values and the very existence of their nation.
The U.S. elites are just a parasitical species stuck to the body of mankind which is now fighting to be able to keep sucking the blood of billions. In a perverse way they are also fighting for their existence, but in their case a useless, parasitical existence.
Thank you. Excellent description.
Hitler’s Mein Kampf indicates clearly that the Nazis weren’t nationalists like in other countries, they were tribalists. Their view was the tribal view, where the nation state is equal to the tribe. Multi ethnicism and cooperation is incompatible with tribalism.
Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was most probably construed on or out of ideas he had gotten imbued with during his one and a half year stay in Manchester and London just after WW 1 . Takes no Einstein genius to figure out by what branches of which kingdom’s deep state’s propagandists and secret serviced.
There is absolutely no actual verifiable evidence that Hitler ever visited England, let alone lived in it for a year and a half.
Hitler ended WW1 as a basket case, blind and not expected to live. He certainly did not travel, and if he had been able to Britain would have been the last place he would have gone.
The Nazis were not nationalists (they hated the nationalists and vice versa).
The Nazis were social Darwinian fascists and globalists.
It was the Nazis who invented the slogan “European family of nations” and promoted it, before the EU used that slogan.
The USA today is fascist with elements of cultural marxism and techno neo-feudalism.
“The US is a fascist rogue state ” – true, but you need to add racist white to the supremacist attitudes.
http://www.jim.secretcove.ca
Great photos there Jim. Thanks.
“Jim Miles: true, but you need to add racist white…” Sorry to disagree with you, my friend, but I call ‘bovine scatology on this statement.
Don’t forget the US is merely a minor part of Israel. Before declaring hostilities they will need permission!
Strangely Biden seems not to have Jewish family connections I could find yet Kamala is married to a Jew. When she becomes president I hesitate to consider the influence of Israel with its (already) Jewish cabinet in the white house and what may happen in the Middle East. Of course Israel had nucelar weapons which is why Iran wants them to create the stalemate. I made a short satirical video using the Roman Empire analogy:
This video looks froward to what lies in store for those who live under such a Caesar and his followers, supporters and those observing from elsewhere.
https://youtu.be/9lzIhR-AGR0
”/…/ to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together”
The latter part of the quote is a bit rich, coming as it does from the very godfather of the scourge which we know today as ISIS. Anyway, it must have broken his heart (or whatever) in his final days watching hishow his adorable moderate head-choppers found themselves to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together
It doesn’t seem to be just geoeconomic sectors anymore.
Below is one of the most important sentences to appear in a long time.
In general, the strategic partners Belarus and China will jointly resist external threats.
https://www.tvr.by/eng/news/politika/telefonnyy_razgovor_liderov_belarusi_i_knr/
Reminding countries that China’s relationship with Russia extends to external threats might hammer home the severe implications of this alliance for the West.
I can’t wait until Beijing sends Ukraine their notice.
There is an article on InfoRuss of an interview given to A & F {Argument and Fact} of Russia by the icon singer Oleg Gazmanov.
In it he explains his open antipathy to Navalny and his cohorts – that he is “my enemy”. He talked of the need for the “coming together” across Russia to resist these Western attempts at cultural hegemony over the land.
One statement was “Gazmanov has repeatedly said that it is time for Russia to stop looking to the West and develop its culture and values independently.
Better let the West copy us. If it can, he said in an interview with “Arguments and Facts”.
This is all the more important at a time when the pressure of the United States and partners on Moscow has increased, the musician emphasised. However, Oleg Mikhailovich stated that this even benefits the country, because the pressure of the West is giving Russia an impetus to revival. ”
His last statement interested me especially because it occurred to me that perhaps this Hegemonic dominance of the AngloEuro cultural dominance – and from a character most domineering – which insists on seeing the world only it’s way, and forcing this way on nations who dont want it — might be a good thing in the end.
I suspect it just might work, as Oleg says, to drive Russians together to resist this “you are what we say you are, you must accept your self identity by the definition and labels we give you”.
In an interview on RT about the development of Vladivostok, [where, on being questioned a young post graduate student told me “Look. Whats wrong iwith you people? We are NOT European and we are most certainly NOT Asian. We are just us, Russian OK?? Get that?? ” ] a young ship yard worker said “Peter the Great opened a window to Europe. We here, now, are opening a window to Asia”
The wording is very revealing. I hope – and indeed suspect it may be so – that the young of the country are learning to do as Oleg says – leave all Western definitions of them to the Collective West, and start to make their own culture and life for themselves.
And this, I think, is going to cost the Collective West. They totally fail to understand Russia now – just imagine in a few years time with Russia turning more and more inward in culture and even better, Self Identity, even as she turns more and more out to the world in trade and diplomacy.
That really will drive the West crazy – if the term isn’t completely redundant by then. :-)
A lurking animus against Peter the Great and the desperation to present the Sino-Russian relations as basically confrontational, obscures the fact that he opened also the window to China through the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), preceded by numerous Russian embassies to Beijing and followed by a number of other treaties, even a formal alliance in 1896.
Yes, the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, quite important as I vaguely gathered when studying these things years ago. I also gained the impression that Russian relations with the Ching were distinct from European relations in important respects. For example Europeans were forbidden to enter the Forbidden City but the Russians were allowed to have their Orthodox chapel just like the Tibetans had their temples. The Russians were generally trusted because they knew the rules and played ball. Unlike the Euros. I’m not confident that I have my facts strait but I do put some importance on these things. The stability of the world coming to be depends upon mutually respectful and beneficial relations between the old Asiatic empires, now revived and altogether forming the world to come – which Europe will have to deal with, though not from any position of advantage. In all this I think it helps to be able to reflect on 300 years of relative peace and mutual respect – for the most part – between the drivers of the world here considered: China and Russia. When Kissinger published his ‘China’ some years back he recycled the old judgement to the effect that China was ‘exceptional’ and had no real relations with peers until the Brits forced the door. Such liars. It’s not true; the record needs setting strait. If you can address this matter it would be good. Thank you.
And Russia was allowed to freely trade with the Qing China, then the richest country in the world by far. No other country was given this privilege.
That was why Romanov Russia was able to resist Napolean’ Continental System to shut out Britain from Europe, and had enough money to field a large army to resist Napoleon.
Then as was against Hitler, Russia fought victoriously with critical hidden resources from the East which blind-sided its western enemies.
The Russian also developed their artillery from the Qing cannons used against it at Albasin and
at Nerchinsk.
And now against the US economic sanctions, China bought and is buying huge amounts of oil and gas from Russia to keep the Russian economy afloat.
My take is that Putin ( and Xi) drives the West mad among many reasons because he rejected the Great Reset. The Reset cannot happen unless, and until, every major power is on board with it.
The Great Resetters intend to force their plan. They don’t intend to wait for consensus. They will destroy the governments that resist.
“By whatever means necessary” applies in geopolitics as well as domestic affairs.
You can reset the unwilling other if you go to war with them.
Hard for me not to consider Russia a European country.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, Nabokov, Pushkin, …
Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Scriabin, Khachaturian, Glazunov, …
Baryshnikov, Godunov, Nijinsky, Pavlova, Nureyev, Diaghilev, …
Mendeleev, Tamm, Cherenkov, Landau, Kapitsa, Prigogine, Abrikosov, …
Well, this could go on for many pages, into many other areas.
What made all of these geniuses interesting was that they were not merely European, they were Eurasian.
Dmitry Hvorostovsky, Siberian. One of the greatest voices known to mankind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejtP8DbQQN4&feature=emb_logo
And sadly missed. I real treasure gone too young.
Auslander
He was absolutely brilliant. What a loss, not just to Russia, but to the world. RIP.
They were neither.
They were Russian.
Your comment just exemplifies brilliantly my entire point about this “Eurasian” attack – which came out of Harvard Uni Humanities Dept, by the way, in the 1990’s.
Exactly when Harvard Uni graduates were letting loose their Chilean storm of economic warfare on a collapse USSR and collapsed Russia with it.
It whitewashed out the word “Russian”. Which is exactly what it is intended to do.
LOL Sorry but, you really made me laugh.
There is this statement “Hard for me not to consider Russia a European country.: Followed by a string of Russian names, all of whom brought a distinctly Russian flavour and colour and brilliance to their work that made them diametrically different to anything out of France-Germany-Italy. One has only to listen to the music to know it’s Russian .Can you even har the open bars of “Polyuskho Polye” and know immediately that it’s Russian??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kknx38M02_U
Tell me – what part of that is Franco-German??
It’s like me saying “Hard for me not to consider England a Roman/Italian country. Dickens, Shakespeare, Darwin, Wallace, Sassoon, Austen, Wilson, Shaw, Fonteyn, Olivier.
Lol.
This site draws a blank on Russian culture, it is a shame, As soon as one mentions something, i.e. Europe and Russia, cultural and political history, the “Eurasian tribe” get going, but there is no such place as Eurasia, or Eurasian people, there is Russia, the east, and west, south and north of this vast country of Russia, and then there is Europe, that is many countries, with their own unique languages, traditions and cultures, and Germany central. They are indeed related, in numerous ways, it is only necessary to discover the great and significant connections.
The answer is more time given to study, to read, listen to, all of the above, and from reputable journalists, historians, writers, composers, musicians, artist’s, scientists and thinkers, and live with what you find, for weeks, months, years. The search and wealth is never ending, like life itself.
I think the conflict is with the terms. What you mean by Russian is exactly what Pepe Escobar means by Eurasian. That is the Russian cultural identity. It inherits a mixture of cultural traits of Slavic as well as Central Asian cultures such as the Mongols.
I am sure that one of the problems with the Russian society is certainly not identifying themselves as ‘Eurasian’. I doubt if that is a popular concept in Russia, but I have seen it on the internet and with the few Russians that I’ve met in person that they have the idea that they are ‘European’ and they are trying to be European. Maybe I’m wrong to make such assumptions because I met exchange students.
Russia needs to abandon the ‘European’ mindset and focus on its uniqueness in the cultural sphere and in geopolitics.
I would not bet on Germans coming to their senses if I were you. Germans (West Germans since 1949, and the ex East Germans post annexation, er, “reunification”) have been systematically brainwashed to the point where they are a nation of slaves. I will just give you an example from a couple of days ago.
One of the most genuine military heroes of all time, acknowledged as such even by his enemies, was Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. When WWI started in 1914, he was a colonel commanding a tiny force of German regular troops and African soldiers (askaris) in what is now Tanzania (then German East Africa). Betraying their own agreement to maintain neutrality in colonial Africa in case of war, the Brutish invaded GEA, whereupon von Lettow-Vorbeck’s tiny army handed them their heads on a platter at Tanga, invaded Kenya, and then for the next four years conducted one of the greatest guerrilla campaigns of history up and down Eastern Africa. With his 14000 troops (3000 German, including farmers, settlers, and the crew of the sunken cruiser Königsberg, and 11000 Askaris, who were treated as absolute equals and in many cases promoted to officer rank), von Lettow-Vorbeck, made major general by the Kaiser, fought off twenty times that many Brutish, Belgian, Portuguese, and Boer forces, remaining undefeated and surrendering only in November 1918 after the news of the end of the war in Europe reached him. During his very brief time as a PoW before being repatriated, he compelled the Brutish to abandon their oppressive treatment of his captured Askaris, refusing to leave Africa until they were set free. As the only always victorious German general of the war, he was given a triumphal parade in Berlin on his homecoming in 1919.
Later on, after leaving the army, he entered politics, where he opposed Hitler’s rise from the conservative side. In 1935 Hitler, trying to cash in on his status as a hero, offered him the position of ambassador to London. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s response? “Go f**k yourself.”
In 1953 von Lettow-Vorbeck was invited to Tanzania where his old Askaris greeted him with their marching anthem, “Heia Safari”. He lived to 1964, and two of his old Askari officers were state guests at his funeral.
A great man, wouldn’t you say? Not just a military hero in the field, but someone with not a racist bone in his body (almost incredible for 1914), and with the moral courage to tell Adolf where to stick his job? Someo any country would be proud of?
Not for Germans in the 21st century, he isn’t.
A few days ago as I said I was reading an online discussion about von Lettow-Vorbeck. Most of the responses, from non Germans (including Brits) were adulatory. From the Germans? A sample of those I remember:
“He should have surrendered in 1914 without fighting…he caused hardship to everyone. ”
“His troops stole food from local Africans, it was a disaster for them. ” (This when the Belgian genocide in the Congo was not yet five years over, the Brutish were still seizing land from their original owners in Kenya to compel them to work as labourers, and Brutish famines in India killed millions almost as a matter of course.)
And, I’m not joking,
“Von Lettow-Vorbeck seduced (some woman) on the ship back to Germany in 1919.” Horrors! What a crime!
You can’t expect anything from a nation of people with such low self worth. Russia shouldn’t even try.
As I have said many times: in Europe Russia has no friends and lots of enemies. In Asia Russia has no enemies and lots of friends.
What do you suppose she should choose?
Serbs are Russian friends.
Serbs are “Russian friends”? Are you sure? Where was Russia when Bill Clinton was literally bombing the hell out of Serbia in 1999? Only China stood by the Serbs (and paid a hefty price) then as is now with their desperately needed vaccines. And where is Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines for Serbia?
Simon, Russia was still in imploding stage.
Russia and Serbia are good with Sputnik-5. https://tass.com/world/1250317
And Serbia will be manufacturing as well.
Thanks, amarynth, for the heads up on Russia’s vaccine to Serbia. As for 1999, Russia was still under Yeltsin. So OK, it was not in a position to help Serbia.
Simon, Serbs and Russians share very deep, common ethnic, cultural and religious connections. Much deeper then day to day politics.
Through the history, whenever it could, Russia helped Serbs. Sometimes, in a real desperate situations, when survival was at the stake…
And Serbs never betrayed Russians.
As of China, it is welcome in Serbia.
From Serbs point of view, hope is that Russia and China will work together.
In 1999, I read with increasing dismay the 78-day bombing of Serbia into abject submission. I was surprised that China helped and it was rumoured that the US stealth bomber shot down by the Serbs was shot down through Chinese secret advice. The result was that the US bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade when it was full of Embassy staff and their families sheltering from the near saturation bombing of Belgrade. Dozens were killed although the Chinese admitted only 3 journalists were killed.
At that time, I discreetly remembered that the thought crossed my mind: Now where is Russia when the Serbs, who are fellow Slavs and spoke virtually the same language, need them so badly? Not even a sound in support!
Notwithstanding what amarynth said, a friend in need is a friend indeed. I once lived among the Hakka (a branch of the Chinese nation) Chinese. One of them told me that they would help me if an outsider comes and make trouble for me.
In 1950, China helped North Korea to repel the Americans at great costs and at a time when it is not in a position to help – still recovering from the WW2 invasion by Japan and a civil war which ended in 1949 with Mao’s victory.
Stalin promised to help China in the Korean War but in the end, only provided arms (without air support) at the cost of China letting go of Outer Mongolia (present Mongolia) to sole USSR-Russian influence – effectively ceding Mongolia to the USSR-Russia. China had to slough it out alone against the US superpower and victor of WW2 at great cost.
There are other instances that I don’t want to mention for not wanting to offend Russians.
Suffice to note that the Serbs are not likely to forget the type of ‘help’ Russia can offer even if it can help. That is why Serbia applied to join the EU rather than the EEU.
But I am holding out hope that Russia under Putin has changed.
” … 1999 … 78-day bombing of Serbia into abject submission… China helped … US stealth bomber shot down by the Serbs … “Serbs not likely to forget the type of ‘help’ Russia can offer even if it can help… ”
Serbs were completely alone, from 1991 when Yugoslavia was destroyed. Army equipment was from the 70’s, aging, lack of spare parts…years of economic sanctions and blockade… Small nation of about 7 million against NATO… Regardless, as many times through the history, Serbs fought, against all odds. After 78 days, Serb Army, largely intact, still stood it’s ground. Bombing made huge damage mainly to civilian infrastructure but NATO air force had much less success hitting military. NATO special forces and Albanians failed to get any ground.
So, there was growing nervousness in the NATO headquarters, campaign wasn’t going as planed. Some members were talking about quitting… So, agreement was made. After that, what NATO couldn’t do military, they achieved covertly – pumping a lot of money in fifth column … all kinds of propaganda and special war technics were tested, developed and perfected on Serbs … Serbia applied to join EU because of enormous pressure from the West. Serbia is landlocked, surrounded from all sides by NATO … finances controlled by EU … media bought and controlled by Western companies…
Russia was in total disarray, led by traitors that brought country to the edge of abyss. They did everything that Washington demanded… Serbs understand what went on there.
In that period, very few countries dared to have friendly relations with Serbs. (Risking punishment from the ” only superpower” and its lackeys). China was one of those friends and that is greatly appreciated in Serbia.
” … hope that Russia under Putin has changed … ”
It most certainly is. Don’t worry about that. As a matter of fact, what happened to Serbs, was awakening call for Russia. Yugoslavia and Serbs were for the West, (among the other things), kind of a laboratory, testing ground for the later interventions in Russia. Yugoslavia was in many aspects sort of miniature Soviet Union and Serbs miniature Russians…
I am aware of some of the past unfortunate disagreements between Russia and China. Those were very difficult times. Both nations came out of devastating WWII, heavily scared. Huge death tolls, enormous material damages, hostile international environment… Immediately attacked by the West from all sides. Korean War came to the brink of nuclear weapons usage from American side. Soviets operated carefully, on the edge. Russian pilots did fly, (covertly), for North Korean Air Force.
In present times, situation is much better for both Russia and China. I think they are now natural partners. I think that I see very close cooperation, double helix. I hope that it will further develop and lead to more just, peaceful and prosperous world.
Russia under Putin did show encouraging signs of generosity with its friends – Putin helped Syria militarily at the risk of being caught in a quagmire of guerrilla warfare – a quagmire the USA is still trying to create with the help of Turkey.
But Turkey now seems to be pulling out of the US’ scheme due to a weak economy and covid-19.
Corto, “a friend in need is a friend indeed”. The Serbs need to rememeber that in the hour of their dire need, only China stood besides Serbia at a great cost in innocent blood to itself. And not be too enamoured by commonalities in ethnicity and religion.
Otherwise history may repeat as a farce.
.. as Diesen notes: ‘the transition away from the usual peripheries of these centres of power and towards the centre of a new regional construct.’ This is the modest but decisive sentence of the text. Russia becomes the new centre of things because the World Island, Asia, is gradually reviving it’s fortunes. For 500 years, as Lavrov has frequently and pointedly observed, the West held the rest of humankind at ransom. But in recent decades the old empires of Asia have recovered much of their former strength and this is the great fact of life that changes everything. Henceforth the world will once more become what it once was, an Asia centred World. Europe will simply have to get on board if they want a share in the future’s prosperity. They will not occupy a position of privilege. Those days are past. The rest of the world would be pleased enough to buy prestige Italian leather goods and attend symphonies in Salzburg conducted by D. Barenboim. Surely Semens engineering will continue to find a market for it’s goods. France has it’s wines and cheese, Belgium it’s beers, Britain has Holland and Holland and Bentley. They’ll live; somehow they’ll manage. But Russia holds the centre. And this is meaningful. Russian diplomacy has done much to date to keep the Asiatic space relatively peaceful despite incessant Nato efforts to destabilise whatever it can. Where I grew up there was this popular old saw: ‘God made all men but Sam Colt made em equal’. These days states that seek equalising technology buy Russian weapons, in quantity. Despite the tensions and conflicts between China and India, or with Vietnam, Iran and Israel, Armenia and the Azeris, Turks and Kurds, Russia is on reasonably good terms with all of them. Hardly anyone notices this, but it’s important. Russia is the leader in hydrocarbon production and sales and has become the worlds leading wheat producer. By its pacifistic diplomacy, always scrupulously keyed to UN resolutions, the quiet dissemination of it’s very advanced defensive military technology, and it’s ability to provide food and fuel to it’s partners, Russia is essentially moulding the present and future security architecture of Asia. In spite of the recent broadside coming from Lavorv aimed at the juvenile diplomacy of Europe I do not expect any change of course vis a vis Europe. The ‘road to Berlin’ is still the path forward. There’s a place for Europe in the new world order. It will not be a privileged place, but a place nonetheless. As for the Rimlanders, I suppose they can always go back to piracy, a sort of back to beginnings play.
Decolonization was the result of US policy (started by Roosevelt) not that of the USSR. USSR only influenced the ideology in decolonized colonies.
yes true so that the US could plunder them instead. Gosh …
The real question is why Russia has to consider solely Germany as a ‘European Partner’.
It doesn’t say much for their view of the world if they wish to condemn a population way bigger than the Russian one to subservient status just to do a deal with the historical trouble maker of Europe, does it?
Could you imagine a ‘grand alliance’ of Scandinavia, France, the British Isles, Iberia, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, the Balkans and the Eastern Europeans who have good reason to view Germany with suspicion standing on its hind legs and saying: ‘Oy, that’s not diplomacy, it’s old school Russian elitism!’?
Add the populations of Russia and Germany together and they are still far less than the rest of Europe, after all….
Diplomacy is slightly more complicated than ‘pick the strongest nation state in Europe and tell them to subordinate the rest’, isn’t it? It’s what caused two world wars in the last century after all…..
That’s a good question and still relevant today.
Putin’s description of “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century”:
“With unrestricted control over information flows, groups of oligarchs served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty started to be accepted as the norm. All this evolved against a background of the most severe economic recession, unstable finances and paralysis in the social sphere.”
Sounds to me like the AZC’s temporary takeover of Russia (Gorbachev followed by Yeltsin) was a trial run for the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 21st century (Con-19 followed by Con-Reset). If so, I have four questions:
1. Will the EU$A recover within a couple of decades, like Russia under Putin?
2. Where is our Putin?
3. Is Putin effective because a product of, or in touch with, the complex Russian soul?
4. Where is the soul of our complex EU$A?
Wow, good article. I read it and said to myself ‘I am going t o start following this guy’, only to learn that it was written by Pepe Escobar! I should have known it. One of the best political columnists I have come across.
I would love to see Russia and China to continue to cement their friendship for the reman index of the 21st century. And Europe will have to move towards them, on Russia’s and China’s terms, as the American empire bankrupts itself. It is only a matter of time until it has to abandon its push for global domination.
The only modern era World Hegemon is not going to abandon its reason for being. Global domination has been in its bloodstream for 150 years.
What it intends now is financial domination and control. It gave up other means of trade and industrial domination.
But it is scrambling to stay even with China on investment and financialization innovations.
Already it is falling behind on cryptocurrency. The Digital Yuan is out, tested and soon spreading into cross-border trade, digital payments, and part of sovereign currency baskets.
There are few arrows left in the Hegemon’s quiver. Thus, war becomes the ultimate and final decision.
What China and Russia have to do to prevent the US and its vassals and proxies from starting a kinetic war, be it conventional or nuclear, and this is what they are doing. Coordination and constant confrontation in diplomacy, on the seas, along the near borders, and in the INFOspace of experts, officials, and bloggers.
The latest barrage of output from the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai, as well as articles from both militaries is indication that the Hegemon’s think tanks and policy blather will not be left unanswered.
Demonstrations of military weapons is another stout statement by Russia and China that anything the US might attempt will go sour in seconds, not even minutes.
Nonetheless, the Hegemon is not abandoning its self-concept. Only the changed reality due to come in the next half-decade will force change. Meanwhile, the delusion persists.
The trick is to get the Monster to collapse in its own footprint, within its own borders.
The recent signs by the new administration is not good. Biden is ready to go hot war in Syria and Ukraine. He is mimicking Trump related to China’s hot buttons of Taiwan, the South China Sea and Xinjiang. Hong Kong most likely is a broken color revolution. Beijing is hellbent on crushing the actors paid for by US and UK Intel services and trained to lead the hoped-for Maidan.
We have no idea yet about Biden and Iran and Biden and North Korea. Likely, soft behind the scenes diplomacy like the Obama and Clinton years will return.
The US economy is solely a project of printing money and direct support payments to corporations and the welfare class (which will grow with ten million more permanently unemployed, especially when Biden opens the border and lets millions more in to destroy the rest of the middle class.)
The path the US nation-state is on can be described as tortuous. It is self-strangulating while suffering a cancerous ideology, atrophied infrastructure and bloated contamination of food and, now, dubious medicines.
One year of daily government officiating over the disaster of Covid-19 has schooled the alert to the total ineptitude of Liberals who man the top government bureaus and departments entrusted with maintaining and securing the General Welfare and Well-being of 330 million citizens.
In a desperate hold onto Power, the government has been forced to use tens of thousands of National Guard to assure themselves that the tyranny of Liberal Fascism can last two years. The next election will test the rebound of the MAGA voters. It will be the last chance for the Republic to be of the People and by the People. For the People requires a cleansing of the Senate and the return of Trump, 2024.
Excellent summary and the way to go. May it culminate timeously — before it is too late.
bluntly i see no scenario where the 2022 election if held will be anything other than replay of the recent massive fraud. those that stole it know well 100 million people if not much much more know they have been defrauded so why not continue on the same path. a thief knows only how to steal.
this is also why sometime soon the biden team will try and gain control over americas privately owned firearms and ammunition. how they think that will actually work out in the real world is wonder since all these people do is pass legislation and demand. this works well enough in a coherent society where the overwhelming mas believes those making and adjudicating the laws are legitimate.
in today’s vengeful current climate i am not so sure half the country thinks that’s still true . it is really not that a big leap from being forcibly disarmed to being rounded up and sent to camps in railroad cars and enough ordinary people understand that.
PS to my other remark:
the key to americas future will be whether military rank and file and police side with the leftists trying to transform the country or with the people to protect them from the state. right now i think those that stole the election are quite legitimately scared the military rank and file and police will NOT abuse the people at the instigation of the federal government.
if the police protect the people things will resolve peacefully if they abuse the people things will get violent.
will it be yeltsin on his tank and the police standing down or tianamen sqaure where the tank rolled over the protester
Already the Sheriffs of America have generally stated bluntly they will defend Constitutional Rights and not obey “orders” to suppress Freedoms.
This is crucial. The profound belief that the Oath to Defend the Constitution is the highest order to obey.
Police Chiefs and departments vary. The closer they are to Red turf, the more likely they will do as the Sheriffs do.
The others will fracture under the Left’s pressure. We see that already in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc.
I am sure glad that the Democrats and Biden have replaced that war criminal Donald Trump!
Instead of the Neocon Republican war criminals like Trump, Mike Pompeo, or John Bolton in charge, now we have NeoLiberal Democratic war criminals like Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Avril Haines, Samantha Power, and Vicky “Would you like to taste my cookies” Nuland in charge.
Republican war criminals BAD.
Democrat war criminals GOOD.
As Biden said, America is Back (because it never really left under Trump)!
Biden admin smears Nicaragua as ‘dictatorship’ for forcing US-funded, coup-plotting NGOs to register as foreign agents
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/11/biden-nicaragua-dictatorship-foreign-agents/
Biden Breaks Deal To Withdraw Troops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGTUYLJGBm4&feature=youtu.be
Biden War Mongering Iran Already!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj9b1Tyv3_A&feature=youtu.be
REVEALED: Biden Wants To Overthrow Venezuela.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBsS6hovWIU&feature=youtu.be
Washington Telegrams China of Red Lines and Aggression
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/11/washington-telegrams-china-of-red-lines-and-aggression/
Behind Biden’s invocations of “democracy,” US military prepares for nuclear war
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/06/nuke-f06.html
Well, he certanly wants a lot.
Question is what he will be able to do. Not much me thinks.
I am reminded of the Spanish king saying “I speak to my God in Spanish, my mistress in Italian, my horse in German, and to diplomats, I speak in French.” Lavrov needs to speak to Europe in German, while Europe and USA have chosen to speak to Russia in French “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country”. What is wrong with the truth?
I find most of the comments a bit too Russia-centric.
Where the article mentions a German-Russian alliance you can in our present era read an “EU-Russian” alliance.
The EU and the US are economically about the same size. That gives the US – with its bigger army, its single language and its historic dominance – the opportunity to be the dominant partner. But its dominance is brittle. The spectre of an evil Russia has to be held up to keep NATO credible and an alliance between Russia and the EU has to be prevented as that would make the EU less dependent on import of raw materials. And the opportunity to interfere in such supplies is yet another source of US power.
Please tell us the last time Russia attacked a European Country unless it was in self-defence? Should I be Anglo-centric England was responsible for several centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and we should love her for that.
Russia = Mongolia. The fact of the matter is that Russia=Mongols=Tartaria. The word “Mongol” does not have a convincing etymological explanation in the Mongolian language but has plenty in the Slavic/Russian/Greek languages. The Russians were considered the direct descendants of the Scythians and of Gog and Magog the first Europeans and they were noted by the name “Mogli” which is a corruption of “Magogli” the sons of Magog which is close to the word “Mongol” and was a designation that was used to describe the main inhabitants of that country for a huge portion of its medieval history. Furthermore the word mongol is close the the Russian words “Mnogo”, “mozhitch”, “mozhestvo”, which means “many”, “might” and “multitude” respectively. Furthermore the word “Mongol” is very close to the Greek word “Megalos” which means “great” so the Mongolian empire literally translates to “the great empire” or “the mighty empire” or even “the empire of many different peoples”. Also if you analyze the situation of what is present day Mongolia in the medieval ages then you would know that it was sparsely populated, backward and underdeveloped and could not launch any sort of world conquest. Another thing of note is that, Mongolian genetics are not found in statistically significant quantities in Russians and no official documents in the Mongolian language was ever found in Russia, there was also no real evidence of any such yoke existing, the wars inside Russia at that time was to unify the country and expand, this fake history was made by German “historians” who had twisted Russian history and turned the Mongols into invaders as well as distorting many other aspects of Russian history.
@Anonymous (the one who wrote): “Another thing of note is that, Mongolian genetics are not found in statistically significant quantities in Russians and no official documents in the Mongolian language was ever found in Russia”.
Thank heavens for some objective evidence. I am interested in your claim that, “this fake [Mongol] history was made up by Germans”. It throws a new light on something I heard on the BBC many years ago. It was one of those accounts of Russian soldiers raping German women, which were popular in the Western press during the Cold War. The German woman said, “He was a Mongol”.
Maybe he really was a Mongol. Or maybe he simply had to be a Mongol because he was a Russian. Like every sneeze simply has to be Covid-19.
Yes well it is interesting to know how propaganda can spread like cancer, the thing is that when the Romanovs came into power a lot of people suspected it was a coup and a lot of members of the old dynasty (Ruric) were killed off and there was a civil war in Russia that eventually would result in their victory, furthermore one of the first things that the Romanovs did was put Germans in top posts of influence all over the country whether it be in education, nobility or the crown, this allowed them to gain access to a lot of the source material of Russia’s ancient past and distort it beyond beyond recognition and put forward their own fake version of history, one such character was the German historian Muller who destroyed many of the old chronicles of the early parts of Russian history and the arrival of the Ruric dynasty, this is how the German historians made the Ruric dynasty Germano-Scandinavian even though all the historians before Muller admitted that Ruric and his tribe were South Balto-Slavic Varangians.
Fascinating, Pepe!
Truly one of your best.
Katherine
A verdade é que o Tio Sam não sabe o que fazer. O império acabou ficando muito grande e complicado – normalmente é isso que acontece com impérios grandes – tornou-se disfuncional e contraditório. A estrutura que determina as políticas imperiais estão inchadas e corrompidas por uma infinidade de interesses contraditórios – típicos de um império muito grande. Ao contrário dos EUA, as estruturas políticas russas foram renovadas após o fim da URSS e a chinesa encontra-se em processo constante de transformação seguindo a revolução econômica pela qual passa nos últimos 30 anos. Conclusão, nós latino-americanos, os russos, chineses, europeus – o mundo todo – precisaremos de muita paciência nos próximos anos, e cuidado, muito, mas muito cuidado para que a coisa toda não acabe num grande incinerador nuclear quando o império atingir o ponto de ruptura e começar a desmoronar.
Google translation,MOD:
The truth is that Uncle Sam doesn’t know what to do. The empire turned out to be very large and complicated – this is usually the case with large empires – it became dysfunctional and contradictory. The structure that determines imperial policies is swollen and corrupted by a multitude of contradictory interests – typical of a very large empire. Unlike the USA, Russian political structures were renewed after the end of the USSR and the Chinese is in a constant process of transformation following the economic revolution it has been going through for the past 30 years. In conclusion, we Latin Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Europeans – the whole world – will need a lot of patience in the coming years, and be careful, very, very careful that the whole thing doesn’t end up in a big nuclear incinerator when the empire reaches the breaking point and start to fall apart.
Their strategy against Russia is simple – like how hyenas get their prey. They are circling the Russian bear, keeping just out of reach and waiting for it to stumble, especially after Putin. And then…..!
How will Russia counter the hyena strategy of the US-EU axis, if such an axis exist?
By being fully aware of it – as she is. And aware of one other thing known of hyenas.
They are cowards. Russia isn’t.
Pamela, a live coward is better than a dead hero. And he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
There are a few strengths about hyenas – they are coordinated, they have patience and bide their time. They have numbers and they attack in a pack when the prey is weakened. If Russia ever weakens, no amount of courage (or even nuclear weapons) will help.
So Russia needs to strengthen its economy and solve its social-political problem well and fast. Time is running out. There is no point chest thumping now or ever.
Time is running out for the states, a debter economy can not solve its financial problems with more debt, the actual problem is only compounded.
So in the end, the west in general wont have anything to show for their covid battles except debt and certainly wont be able to compete world wide for much of anything, as they reel from the debt payback hangover and increased costs of living..
My hunch is that the US will crash first. But Russia will still have China’s help in its economy although hubris and distrust by Russia (Larchmonter445’s sentiments may be a case in point) may cause Russia to go it alone. Now can China help Russia economically without seeming to do so? That will take a good diplomatic effort but doable. Like with the Americans.
But the internal social and political problems, although grounded in economics but not entirely, only Russia can help itself.
Interesting article. However, one thing remains clear. Pepe has very limited knowledge of the USSR’s history.The secret is given away by his following statement: “…A key reason the USSR collapsed is because, once gain, it was not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.”
Understanding the Russian revolution and the civil war is essential to understanding the outcome of the soviet state. The eventual power usurped by Stalin at the head of a conservative bureaucratic caste of functionaries has more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union than the explanation cited above.
I recommend those who may be interested, in reading Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution” as well as “The Revolution Betrayed”.
The problem with Martyanov’s description of Russia’s new weapon comes down to this:
if you read enough military history, it’s a fact that “the unforeseen” in any war, or offensive requires quick-witted military experts to “turn on a dime” with new tactics when new circumstances spring up. A fall back, or fast-forward maneuver can suddenly stop working.
Quote ” finally decide how to run the world. This is the only chance for the US to stay relevant in the new world.”
So Russia is not opposed to anglo hegemony – only objection is why the anglos do not give some crumbs to Russians.
It is this attitude of Russians, rather than any principle to stand on, that makes Russia betray her allies in order to please anglos.
Finally Russia will be left without allies and destroyed by propaganda only as haooend in ’90s
To answer the headline question: Because Russia is like North Korea, but much bigger, with more nukes, and borsch.