24 Thursday Feb 2022
“War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Bliss” plus Putin’s own additions: “Chaos is Order / Life is Death”.
Early today, Vladimir Putin AKA “Vladolph” AKA “Putler”, Russia’s President by way of assassinations, defenestrations, detentions, and rigged elections, launched his invasion of Ukraine, a young democracy on its western flank, turning back the clock to the 1930s and and further to feudal-medieval barbarism.
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08 Tuesday Feb 2022
Snyder, Timothy. “1989: Poland Was First!” The New York Review of Books, December 9, 2009.
Polish History Museum. “The Solidarity and the Fall of the Iron Curtain”.
Wikipedia. “Soviet invasion of Poland”.
Wikipedia. “Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939-1946)”.
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12 Friday Feb 2021
Tags
Cold War Information Resource, Hungary, Open Society Archives, Soviet Post-Soviet Russian Dominance
Central European University | Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Unlike the underground of Czarist times, today’s samizdat has no print ing presses (with rare exceptions): The K.G.B., the secret police, is too efficient. It is the typewriter, each page produced with four to eight carbon copies, that does the job. By the thousands and tens of thousands of frail, smudged onionskin sheets, samizdat spreads across the land a mass of protests and petitions, secret court minutes, Alexander Solzhenit syn’s banned novels, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984,” Nicholas Berdyayev’s philosophical essays, documents of the Czech Spring, all sorts of sharp political discourses and angry poetry.
Parry, Albert. “Samizdat is Russia’ Underground Press.” The New York Times, March 15, 1970.
An appeal from the Inconnu Independent Art Group for funds to produced wooden grave markers to be erected in June 1989 at Plot 301 in Budapest’s New Public Cemetery, the assumed resting place of Imre Nagy and other leaders of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, on the 31st anniversary of their execution.
Inconnu Independent Art Group/Tamás Molnár, Open Society Archives, June 16, 1989. The page features a woodcut of a totemic grave marker.
Wikipedia. “Inconnu Independent Art Group”.
According to the report’s methodology, Hungary is now a “hybrid regime,” having lost its status as a “semi-consolidated democracy” due to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s continued assaults on the country’s democratic institutions. https://70868d36203bc22d88a087b52c71fd8c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
The adoption of an emergency law that allows the government to rule by decree indefinitely, brought in after the coronavirus pandemic struck, “has further exposed the undemocratic character of Orbán’s regime,” the authors wrote, adding that “Hungary’s decline has been the most precipitous [they have] ever tracked.”
Gehrke, Laurenz. “Hungary no longer a democracy, Freedom House says: The NGO describes ‘a stunning democratic breakdown’ in the Eastern European country.” Politico, May 6, 2020.
Related: https://freedomhouse.org/country/hungary .
Wikipedia. “End of Socialism in Hungary”.
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01 Monday Feb 2021
Tags
Khazar Kingdom, Russia, Russian anti-Semitism, Russian history, Turkic Khazar Jews, Turkic Khazar v Arab Muslim War, Varangian v Khazar War
Nazism inflicted history’s most horrendous crimes against Jews. But Germany has by no means been history’s top purveyor of global antisemitism.
That distinction goes to Russia, which spread antisemitism more widely and durably.
Heinze, Eric. “Russia is the global leader in Jew-hate.” The JC. February 24, 2017.
Emphasis added to the above quotation from Eric Heinze’s analysis in The JC.
Rise of Rus
Originally the Khazars were probably allied with various Norse factions who controlled the region around Novgorod. The Rus’ Khaganate, an early Rus polity in northwestern Russia, was probably heavily influenced by the Khazars. The Rus’ regularly travelled through Khazar-held territory to attack territories around the Black and Caspian Seas; in one such raid, the Khagan is said to have given his assent on the condition that the Rus’ give him half of the booty. In addition, the Khazars allowed the Rus to use the trade route along the Volga River. This alliance was apparently fostered by the hostility between the Khazars and Arabs. At a certain point, however, the Khazar connivance to the sacking of the Muslim lands by the Varangians led to a backlash against the Norsemen from the Muslim population of the Khaganate. The Khazar rulers closed the passage down the Volga for the Rus’, sparking a war. In the early 960s, Khazar ruler Joseph wrote to Hasdai ibn Shaprut about the deterioration of Khazar relations with the Rus: “I have to wage war with them, for if I would give them any chance at all they would lay waste the whole land of the Muslims as far as Baghdad.”
The Rus warlords Oleg of Novgorod and Sviatoslav I of Kiev launched several wars against the Khazar khaganate, often with Byzantine connivance. The Schechter Letter relates the story of a campaign against Khazaria by HLGW (Oleg) around 941 (in which Oleg was defeated by the Khazar general Pesakh; this calls into question the timeline of the Primary Chronicle and other related works on the history of the Eastern Slavs.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
“Khazars”. Wikispeedia. McGill University.
The Roman Empire had never been Europe’s only organizing power.
The Germanic tribes, the Norse, the Mongols, and many others had been crossing that landscape for political community, trade, and war for centuries. However, it appears to have been the Varangians — descendants of the Vikings — who corrupted the Turkic Jewish Khazar, and when the protective kingdom thought better of looting some of its own villages (Muslim) in concert with the Varangians (and sharing the loot), the Varangians made war on the Khazar and destroyed the kingdom. Legends about that warfare — and the Jews — MAY have floated across northern, central, and eastern Europe for generations. Combined with Christian supersessionary ambitions for subscription and the elimination of Judaism as a contemporary religion, the seeds for Russian (and Greek Orthodox) anti-Semitism may have flourished.
Encyclopedia Britannica. “Khazar People”.
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20 Monday Mar 2017
Open Letter of European security experts to Federica Mogherini:
Please start taking the Russian disinformation threat seriously!
The aggressive actions of the Kremlin are unprecedented in the modern era.
Invasion of neighbouring countries, massive bombings and killings of civilians, and the first annexation of a foreign land by force in Europe since World War II, constant violations of other states’ borders, kidnapping foreign citizens, harassment of foreign diplomats, or massive cyber attacks are all in Russia’s current regime toolkit.
(Photo credit: copyright by World Economic Forum, Photo by Remy Steinegger, CC BY-SA 2.0).
All these offensive incidents are accompanied by a massive, persistent, ongoing, brutally aggressive disinformation campaign.* A campaign that has been active in Europe for at least three years, establishing its channels, finding the right amplifiers and multipliers for its message – which is aimed at destabilising our societies, meddling in our elections and referendums, misleading our political leaders and breaking up the EU unity by supporting those who want to destroy it. It has been building a wide range of communication structures in most of the EU Member States, platforms that have already been functioning for a long time and have reached considerable results that cannot be erased without significant long-term counter-effort.
Read the whole thing — Open Letter of European security experts to Federica Mogherini: | European Values Think-Tank — and consider signing the petition.
*Bold and italics added by BackChannels.
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09 Friday Dec 2016
The balloon: The thought that Trump might cede Crimea for piffle in debts or other trade.
Ridiculous.
Welcome to the New Dark Ages.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/08/ftac-trumps-choice-and-moscow/
I could wag the finger all day in the direction of Putin and his inner circle and the Phantoms of the Cold War (arisen from the Grave of Communism as Ultra-Nationalist Fascists), and I would still have to deal with the resistance posed by 15 years of the greater population dwelling on “Islamic Terrorism” with nary a look back at the Cold War, much less a look forward to Russia’s transformation into an ultra-national neo-imperial state.
BackChannels achieves some compression of ideas and observations, and it has broad reach — it’s accessed annually from more than 140 nations — but it barely “pings” in the Foreign Affairs, International Relations, Political Science] communities . . .
Although no one knows how Trump will embark on his newly informed foreign affairs journey, everyone knows that this may be Trump’s first “real job” in a long time, and it’s not, as we say here in the U.S., “at will”: the President will be stuck with the Oval Office and answering to a government far greater and more powerful than himself, not to mention the people it represents.
My glance at the headlines suggests you may have been disinformed.
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/309509-senators-urge-trump-to-be-tough-on-russia-in-ukraine
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/12/08/senators-urge-trump-to-provide-lethal-aid-to-ukraine/
It looks to me like Tass has been typing with rose-colored glasses:
It really underestimates how well the American professional political community — analysts, scholars, politicians — see Moscow as Putin has rebuilt it and sustained so much Soviet Era baggage and its inability to chart a middle course anywhere — but it may please those less engaged in politics.
This morning, I glanced at a Foreign Policy (Magazine) headline on how democracies fall apart. I should get to that article, but the official state remains quite robust. Trump may do the right great American things despite himself and, to lay in Churchill’s observation, without having to try all the wrong ones first.
This is a dangerous period for everyone as Putin with Khamenei and through Assad has chosen to demonstrate a depth in callousness, cruelty, dishonesty, and madness in Syria beyond anything witnessed anywhere else in the world in recent memory.
For five years or so I have seen repeated in untold visual analogs the image of a child’s hand gripping a mother’s forearm — no bodies — in relation to the indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants in Syria. Such murderers seem to be begging to be stopped — and maybe that would be a mercy — but the just poking along western response has been to watch the Russian economy wither while Assad burns Syria into an unsustainable nothing — except, perhaps, as a base for Russian military presence — and neither Moscow nor Tehran get anywhere with horrifying the world.
I’ll probably copy my response to an “FTAC” post on the blog. It has in it the prayer that the state prove stronger than its leading statesman, and I think the odds fair that it will do that if a President — any at any time — embarks on a dictator’s mission.
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31 Monday Oct 2016
Posted in Also in Media, Eastern Europe, Hungary, Russia
Several small extremist groups are active in Hungary, but MNA is unique in that it has extensive ties with Russian military intelligence. I dealt with this extremist group only once, in September 2014. It was in connection with a lesser-known right-wing portal called Hídfő (Bridgehead), which broke the story that Hungary was secretly supplying tanks to the Ukrainian army. Soon enough the Russian foreign ministry published an official statement stating that “weapons supplied to Ukraine by the EU-member countries … violate legally binding obligations—the Arms Trade Treaty.” The Russian foreign ministry was well-informed on the details: “Hungary’s Defense Ministry is supplying Ukraine with armored vehicles, including T-72 tanks, through a ‘proxy agency.’” It turned out that Hídfő was the official website of Magyar Nemzeti Arcvonal. For some time it has served as a vehicle of Russian disinformation, a growing concern in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, by now, at least according to national security officials, Hídfő is entirely under Russian direction, either directly or indirectly. The best summary of the history of MNA and its activities can be found in an investigative piece written by András Dezső and Veronika Munk of Index.
Source: Russian military intelligence and the Hungarian National Front – Hungarian Spectrum – 10/27/2016
The National Bureau of Investigation ( “National Bureau of Investigation,” the Hungarian FBI) was Supposed to search Stephen Györkös’s house Earlier this week, but When The officers Showa up at his home the 76-years-old man opened fire at THEMIS , and the 46-years-old police officer died in the shooting immediately.
Russian Diplomats and members of the Russian military intelligence, GRU have been around the the Hungarian SubCulture militant for years, albeit not only around MNA. This started well before the eruption of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The Russians Were Trying to do it in a smart, less ostentatious way.
http://index.hu/belfold/2016/10/28/russian_diplomats_exercised_with_hungarian_cop_killer_s_far-right_gang/ – 10/28/2016.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/11/14/a-note-on-hungarys-progressive-relationship-with-iran/
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25 Tuesday Oct 2016
The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), Illinois Division, joins our fellow Americans, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, and friends of Ukraine throughout the world, in condemning Putin’s military aggression in Ukraine. October 14 has been designated as a day of protest, calling upon the world community to “Stop Putin – Stop the War in Ukraine.”
Russian military formations and their surrogates, including advanced weapons systems, continue to pour into the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian defense forces and the civilian population along the war zone are subjected to incessant shelling – over 10,000 have died, thousands more wounded and over 1.8 million have been driven from their homes.
Therefore, we appeal to President Obama and to the international community to force Putin to stop the killing.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/stop-putin-stop-the-war-stop-the-killing-of-our-people/ – 10/25/2016
There are many look-ups cogent to looking over “Crimea, Ukraine, Russia,” starting with “hybrid warfare” and perhaps ending with “frozen conflicts”.
NATO appears so far reactive as regards the Russian investment in low-level fighting with artillery (and observation drones) in Crimea. It has met the Russian presence with its own presence, but it has left to Ukrainian forces the mounting of resistance to Russian aggression.
So far, so good.
However, as Bashar al-Assad continues his destruction of Syria — in that immense piece of political theater this blog has referred to as “Assad vs The Terrorists” — pressure may mount in Moscow to “prove” through force its cooked-up narrative for Ukraine while Russia herself continues descending into economic misery — and as regards that misery –
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-26/russian-economy-takes-hit-fron-putin-s-grip – 9/26/2016.
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/russian-economy-crumbles-according-official-data/ – 9/20/2016.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-economy-kaliningrad-idUSKCN11D1MP – 9/7/2016.
What follows is simply the morning’s compilation of background source material in reverse chronological order.
http://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-defense/2107681-militants-launch-40-attacks-on-ukrainian-troops-in-donbas-in-last-day.html – 10/25/2016.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/stop-putin-stop-the-war-stop-the-killing-of-our-people/ – 10/25/2016.
http://uatoday.tv/society/no-fly-zone-over-crimea-and-eastern-ukraine-792709.html – 10/25/2016.
Ukrainian news website Liga, citing sources from the Ukrainian delegation, reported that during the meeting in Berlin, Poroshenko grew tired of Putin’s insistence on elections and raised his voice, declaring, “No, you should just stop shooting.”
http://www.newsweek.com/poroshenko-told-putin-halt-fire-ukraine-513049 – 10/24/2016.
http://en.sobytiya.info/the-population-of-the-ukraines-region-next-to-crimea-prepares-for-territorial-defense.html – 10/24/2016.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/24/eus-russia-appeasement-over-military-trade-on-disp/ – 10/24/2016.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14804613.Russia_and_the_West_____A_Cold_War_that__39_s_turning_hot/ – 10/15/2016
Posted to YouTube by Vice News, October 5, 2016.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russian-military-forces-staging-near-ukraine/ – 8/17/2016.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/06/27/us-nato-thumb-noses-at-russia-with-massive-war-games-in-ukraine.html – 6/27/2016.
They are creeping across all of Europe; for the time being, they wear suits and, instead of sinking of boats, they use propaganda and espionage, money and servants who help them destroy democracy and freedom. Yet we don’t want them here; we are returning the green men back. It is not possible to overlook the dangers and ignore the crimes committed by Putin. It is not possible to forget the thousands of dead Chechnyans and Georgians, the theft of Crimea and the thousands of dead Ukrainians; it is not possible to ignore the war crimes committed in Syria. It isn’t possible to ignore the despotism exercised against the political prisoners in Russia, be they committed against Russian citizens or against abducted foreigners, such as Nadezhda Savchenko and Oleg Sentscov. Hundreds of thousands of dead, with some – like Nemtsov or Litvinenko – known by their name, but others just grey dead faces on photographs documenting the crimes of Putin, Kadyrov and al-Assad. Putin, take your little green men back, stop waging wars and occupying territories, supporting other dictators and oppressing your own nation.
http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/03/16/little-green-men-returned-back-to-russia-in-prague/#arvlbdata – 3/16/2016.
Posted to YouTube by oMen oMen, March 15, 2016.
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