Vovo has no power — nor talent, actually — to build wealth himself although, to be fair, he has asked Big Capital to return to Mother Russia although much of it would rather stay in London–and with democracy and the rule of law–than reside in Moscow and the rule of mafia (and Putin the Pirate).
I would like to make something clear to Christians, Muslims, Palestinians, Europeans, and North Americas (not that I have forgotten Asians or Africans or anyone else): Welcome to the 22nd Century (I’m just a little bit ahead of my time), and we should all be fighting about and for improved Qualities of Living.
And add this ingredient: INTEGRITY!
Oh, Palestinian–may at least one soul recap the historical truth with you–and not against you: for you.
What is Herr Trump’s America’s Grand Old Party of Greed (GOPoG) doing about its very bad case of Greedosis? And what has every European to say about Putin’s “Medievalitis”?
Come 1992, the Cold War was over, according to the United States.
The Soviet Union had dissolved in bankruptcy on December 25, 1991 (I’m seeing a lot of opting for December 26, so, undoubtedly, as to move the west’s “Christmas Day”, a pagan holiday I myself refer to as “Solstice” — a few days late — off the political dates-in-history map).
So the KGB had a nice talk with Ayman al Zawahiri a few years before he and Osama Bin Laden had air crews learning how to fly (not land) big jets.
In diagram–>
KGB-Zawahiri->9/11->(x Reflexive Control) EU/NATO “New Nationalism” & BREXIT + “blood-and-soil” popularity in Hungary, Italy, and Poland + Full Feudal Retreat in Turkey + You-Know-Who (rhymes with “Dump”) in the New Populist United States.
Hmm.
It turns out that was a pretty good strike for the KGB/FSB sons of the Okhrana.
Kraft’s ring now appears on display in the Kremlin’s library, quite a trophy brought home to Moscow by Russia’s Boss of Bosses.
From CNN:
The 4.94-carat ring is in the Kremlin’s library, where all official state gifts are kept, he said. It is worth more than $25,000, according to multiple reports from 2005.
A Kraft spokesman said Sunday the story is a humorous anecdote that Kraft “retells for laughs.”
“He loves that the ring is at the Kremlin and, as he stated back in 2005, he continues to have great respect for Russia and the leadership of President Putin,” said Stacey James, a spokesman for The Kraft Group.
Putin the Pirate has done a few things under the table upside-down and sideways over decades to weaken western political coherence, cohesion, and resolve. Start with the KGB’s handling of Zawahiri over the winter of 1996/7. In connect-the-dots fashion, I believe that stay led to the attack by jet hijacking Islamists on 9/11 that in turn goosed the pride of western states in their Christian and independent political cultures and led to what has been referred to as the “New Nationalism”.
When bees sting and flesh swells, the response has not been called “proud flesh” for nothing.
The popular western response in enmity and fear regarding Islam has not been misplaced in relation to Islamic Extremism and related Islamist Terror, but the same has given rise to blood-and-soil nationalism, authoritarianism, and actual autocracy in some EU/NATO states. Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States (one nation under Trump for a while) have each seen their open democracies challenged by demagoguery or political perversion.
We may also take note of the “01s” in dates: 1991-dissolve of the Soviet Union in bankruptcy following American intercession opposite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (from which Russia was forced to retreat in 1989); 2001-the September 11 attacks took place on Felix Dzerzhinsky’s birthday, quite a gift for a Moscow bent on revenge for its losses in Afghanistan-and, no, Putin didn’t do it–it was obviously radical Muslims assembled and deployed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden; 2011-The Horror taking off in Syria that would send millions of refugees into NATO (Turkey, which today hosts about 3.68 million Syrian refugees), the European Union (0.7 million-Germany), and Scandinavia (0.3 million), another goad for the defense of the rightly ethnolinguistic state cultures settled and enjoying the benefits of, well, being themselves, the only problem being a concomitant drift toward the same feudal-medieval worldviews and fascination with authority held by Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei, and Vladimir Putin; 2021-Russia’s repeated threats by military feint against Ukraine, a young democratic state seeking NATO accession, and, by extension, NATO itself, but not quite as Ukraine remains without accession.
So hey, Bob (Kraft), George and George, Jr. (Bush), where are you today with Putin (the thief)?
***
Where and when are dictatorships to be stopped?
Is it when one or another has engaged in political repression and breathtaking plunder at home?
Should it be when the security service agents and agent provocateur show up within the borders of one’s democratic state?
Should it be when the tanks roll into a neighboring state struggling for its own sovereignty against barbaric force and the possibility of a return to corrupt, kleptocratic, and tyrannical governance?
Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown noted the presence of countless unanswered questions in association with her research into Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita industry. The full accounting of who, what, where, and why would today seem largely absent and sealed by Epstein’s own hanging, but perhaps there’s one aspect that bears further attention in this most distracted age: Epstein’s Russian interests. The powerful personal brands associated with the Epstein vortex range from Alan Dershowitz to Prince Andrew — so how deep and how wide the damage done?
Whether by way of fear of being found out or found guilty of one crime or another, when have the business and political leaders of a nation been compromised enough to accept bridling by the state’s foremost enemy?
***
Should you pick up American Kleptocracy by Casey Michel, you will learn (here cribbing direct from the book’s title) “How the U.S. CREATED the WORLD’S GREATEST MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME in HISTORY”. Forget expensive cars and real estate, at least until one has established sufficient anonymous businesses- as-persons courtesy of Delaware, South Dakota, Wyoming, for a start.
***
Before Maria Butina, the “illegal”, got caught, American Administrations, including Trump’s, had given the boot to Moscow’s spies-under-diplomatic-cover. The question to which only the state, actually the CIA and FBI, might respond would be “How many more Maria’s might there be?” Doing what? How? And where?
***
With respect to East-West Rivalry and Moscow-Washington Relations, just how bad might compromise, corruption, and infiltration serving Russia’s defense and promotion of political absolutism and kleptocracy be here in the United States?
Whatever Washington’s true state of affairs might be with Russia — and a kleptocratic Russia unrelenting in its will to confuse and degrade EU/NATO cohesion and coherence — one may hope the open democracies of the west and their allies will renew their vows (for Americans, see “Basic Training” on this blog) and rediscover and reaffirm their commitments to American and modern civility, ethics, principles, rights, and values without compromise and, always, with compassion, humanism, and reason.
Around the world, Putin’s Russia engages in a spectrum of unpleasant activities designed to destabilize its targets, foremost EU/NATO (for its businesses, democracy, humanism, and rule of law), and control and produce power in its own interests. Also, Russia has been long a state about appearances — military and political theater — and the longest looks backward will fine the Viking, Varangians, Slavs, and Rus, and all perhaps have come together in Putin’s mind and the related diplomacy, leadership, strategies, and tactics devised to perpetuate what he may be believe to be Russia’s essential soul.
Regarding our own rightfully proud nationalism, that too may be traced to 9/11 and the strongly intimated sojourn of mastermind Ayman al-Zwahari in Russia during the winter of 1996 to 1997 (https://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6). He would leave for the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal region to produce the compact with Osama Bin Laden that would then culminate with the attack by hijacked jets on the symbols of American and western power.
It’s All Good — Or Is It? About Information and Popular Public Perception
The American Public, imho, gets the news toward which it gravitates, Fringe Left, Far Left, Left, Center, Right, Far Right, Fringe Right. As we are now familiar with terms like “social media algorithms” and “echo chambers”, we — and others in other nations — may have also an obligation to ask more questions and test and corroborate what we find, so that we ourselves are not digging our own cultural, political, or social holes but rather finding the essential histories and narratives that prove inerrently reliable however criticized or scrutinized.
My own quest as regards perspective: Next Century Post-Modern.
Of course, I hope there is a “Next Century” (not that I’ll be around to care) and that the generations arrive at it with tidily packed away medieval baggage and altogether more appropriate intellectual and language tools as well as integrity (most of all) for addressing the challenges of that day to come as found.
J. S. Oppenheim
Posted to YouTube by HistoryPod, December 25, 2015.
Herewith the response to a lengthy chatyped lecture on FB involving Russia’s disingenuous “justification” for further brutalizing and dominating Ukraine, her businesses, and her people.
1) three-way “superpower” hypersonic missile race between China (Totalitarian), Russia (Autocratic Mafia State), and the United States (Democracy in Disarray);
2) serious East-West Rivalry for global influence and control of other states, whether criminal, elitist, and thuggish or rooted in democratically distributed power and reliably humanist, lawful, open, and secular;
3) Ukraine invaded and now threatened again by blunt Russian force and related brutish and corrupt business and political practices;
4) A test of the strength of the the West’s civilizational commitment to democratic, egalitarian, secular ethics, principles, and values against corruption and dictatorship, whether communist, fascist, nationalist, or socialist.
The post-WWII order has been weakened by decades of nefarious effort on Moscow’s part to destabilize EU/NATO with every disingenuous and, frankly, evil method at its disposal, Active Measures (agitprop; cyberwarfare; disinformation; infiltrations of spies online and off; etc.) and broadest spectrum Hybrid Warfare (starting with False Flag Operations and Little Green Men) but moving also to dominance in Energy and political leverage through it, control of a North Pole air base and related potential threat projection. Moscow’s presence in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and its innumerable “Frozen Conflicts” plus its relations with Iran and Syria and terrorist enterprises (see “Mikhail Bogdanov, Hamas” or “Russian arms, Taliban”) tell of the kind of world Moscow runs already and would love to sustain with Western complicity.
Well, score one for the British breakthrough and deployment in the Hypersonic Missile arena — and for Great Britain’s possession of a still strong spine.
“The U.K. is very clear: any military incursion by Russia into Ukraine would be a strategic mistake,” she said. “The Russian government should expect significant strategic consequences. The cost of an invasion would be catastrophically high.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson last night held a video call with U.S. President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi as Western fears grow.
The videoconference sought to present a “united front” among NATO leaders before Biden holds a call with Putin later Tuesday in which he will warn him against starting another war in Eastern Europe.
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