Author: The Board

Chessboard notation

Every move made within a chess game is recorded. The record allows us to reconstruct what has happened and also gives an insight into the current situation. Let’s look at the position of the pieces and pawns at the current point in time, recall their moves and try to predict what the players’ next moves will be.

The world is roughly divided into West and non-West. Thirty years ago, we had a division into the First (Western, capitalist), Second (Eastern, socialist) and Third (the Non-Aligned Movement, although the term Third World also connotes a backward world, but that is not the distinction meant here) worlds. The West emerged victorious from the Cold War of 1947-1991, as a result of which the Second World – the socialist camp, the Warsaw Pact – ceased to exist. The Non-Aligned Movement, in which Yugoslavia, among others, played first fiddle, also came to an end, especially when one of its keystones – precisely Yugoslavia – was subjected to crushing tests and was broken up into several political units.

It is peculiar that the break-up of the mighty Soviet Union and the takeover of the Comecon and Warsaw Pact states took place without a single shot being fired, while tiny Yugoslavia was broken up over many years in bloody and devastating wars.

The driving forces of history are economic and financial factors (of which everyone is well aware) as well as biological factors (the anthropological type inhabiting a given territory) and, among these, psychological factors (religions and ideologies; of these factors not everyone is aware). It was an idea (an ideology, a religion, the name doesn’t matter) that drove the Arabs and then the Muslims to conquer vast territories; it was socialist or communist ideas (ideas of so-called social justice) that unleashed the forces dormant in society and led to a series of successful or unsuccessful revolutions; it was the Christian faith that gradually conquered the Roman Empire from within – without a single shot – while the well-known major heresies were the driving forces behind the enormous social and political changes in Europe. The Soviet Union collapsed at the behest of the elites of that state, whose minds succumbed to the allure of all things Western, whose minds surrendered to Western ideas, and who most simply declared their own state bankrupt in exchange for the hope or promise of belonging to the elites of what they considered a better world.

Partly as a result of the fact that the Western elites did not accept the Soviet elites as partners of equals, and partly because part of the Soviet (Russian) elites espoused the idea of Russian patriotism (psychology!), there was a national revival in Russia that brought Vladimir Putin to power.

A very similar thing happened in China. There too, elites seduced by American offers of cooperation and enrichment took the American bait and were ready to subjugate the Middle Kingdom to Washington. Hu Jintao, among others, was an exponent of such aspirations. Cooperation with the United States paid off: China became an economic power, but at the price of political dependence on Washington. Not surprisingly, patriotic forces came to the fore in China (as they had done in Russia), who did not wish to play the role of America’s stooge. It was they who brought Xi Jinping to power, and he, together with a group of dedicated people, concentrated full power in his hands and led to the removal of the pro-Western group centred around Hu Jintao. This was done in a very spectacular way, when the whole world was able to see the former Chinese leader being led out of the conference hall housing the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Continue reading →

The last, big crisis before the great upheaval?

High inflation and the energy crisis have become a fact. We have warned our readers about this ahead of time and explicitly, especially in our bulletins. The mainstream media only shed light on the three topics: Russia, the aforementioned energy crisis, and inflation. However, many factors indicate that the current crisis has only just begun and that dangers lurk in the areas of previous crises. Consider some less discussed facts:

[i] The U.S. housing market, which sparked the 2008 crisis, is in steep decline. The U.S. NAHB index shows how much interest there is in buying a property and this is now dropping to lockdown and 2008 levels. What will boost the U.S. economy in the coming years? If the FED decides to pivot and start easing monetary policy again, it may save the real estate market, but it will finally bury the dollar, the current king of currencies (whose importance rose due to the Ukraine war).

[ii] The 1848 revolution in Europe resulted from economic conditions. By early 1847, staple food prices had doubled across Europe, leading to unrest and fears of famine. European governments responded with restrictive monetary policies that led to a recession. In 1848, Europe realized the political consequences of the two years of economic chaos. History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes. Today’s circumstances are reminiscent of those then, but there are two key differences: capital is abundant (albeit less so than two years ago) and labor is scarce (Europe’s fertility rate was over 3 in 1848, it is 1.5 today). So should we expect similar political instability? We cannot rule out the possibility that the Yellow Vest movement will return in one form or another in France in 2018, and that it will spread all over Europe, especially in Germany and Sweden, squeezed by green ideologues through electricity price increases and additional eco-tax burdens. The most immediate political consequence of citizen discontent is the rightward turn of European voters (see September election results in Italy and Sweden). Voters have come to understand that today’s energy crisis results from the foolish abandonment of nuclear power, the impossibility of a complete switch to green power, and the stubborn green ideology that puts “saving nature” above saving people people. Continue reading →

Gefira 67: The most widespread regime in the world is the oligarchy

Why do you think the West is so insistent on imposing democracy everywhere in the world? Is it because the West wants the people to rule everywhere in the world? Is it because the West wants prosperity everywhere in the world? Is it because democracy is the best political system that mankind has known, that mankind has invented, that mankind has been endowed with? Why will this West go to war with any country (weak enough to be beaten with impunity) to overthrow a dictatorship and introduce democratic rule? Is it because Westerners have nothing better to do than think of all those nations around the world that allegedly yearn for democracy?

Yes, you guessed right. Democracy is a cover for the best system ever — for the oligarchic system, for the rule of the oligarchs. While they rule the country and the world, they also make ordinary people believe that it is…. ordinary people who rule the world! This oligarchic system is much better than monarchy or aristocracy. The monarch or a group of aristocrats are on the radar of the demos (i.e., the people) and are blamed for any failures. In a democracy, the demos cannot blame anyone but…. itself! Look, bad decisions were made by inept politicians, who in turn were elected by…. you, the people! Therefore, ultimately you, the people, are to blame!

Education, entertainment and information make everyone believe that, to quote a hackneyed saying, democracy is a bad system, but unfortunately no better one has been invented. So people believe they are living in the happiest times in history. Behind the scenes, the oligarchs – influential, wealthy individuals – do what they please and use some of their money to make democracy work. Part of the scheme is to distract the demos from the real rulers of the world: the oligarchs. How do they distract? They point the finger at dictators and tyrants elsewhere and at – yes! – oligarchs elsewhere! The Western oligarchs are busy pointing at the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, thus hiding their own influence over the governance of the countries! How clever!

This is what Gefira 67 deals with and invites you to consider.

 

Gefira Financial Bulletin #67 is available now

  • The (Leftist) Oligarchy Rules the World
  • Which repeat of this madness is this one?
  • Women in politics on the side of the… political right!
  • DARPA – The goal is: to control our thoughts and decisions

Much wants more and loses all

So we have a war, a war that lasts more than six months, a civil war, a war between one Ruthenian nation and another Ruthenian nation (don’t be fooled by the propagandists that these are two different nations!), a war in which external forces support one side to keep fighting. This is reminiscent of the wars in Yugoslavia, where the Croats and Bosniaks were constantly supported by the West, were constantly turned by the West against the Serbs, were constantly encouraged not to stop resisting the Serbs, to constantly irritate the Serbs, to reject peace solutions and to renege on peace agreements, if any had already been made. Both Croats and Bosnians and Serbs speak one and the same language. Never mind that. Somewhere it was decided that Yugoslavia was to cease to exist, that Yugoslavia must disintegrate. A strange resolve, strange especially in a world where globalisation is professed, where nationalisms are condemned, where huge political blocs are formed. Why did Yugoslavia have to break up in such a world? That is a good question! Especially since, the very next day, the states, or rather pseudo-states, that emerged on the ruins of Yugoslavia, nations that never wanted to live together with the Serbs, nations that wanted sovereignty at all costs, these same states or these same nations were more than happy to apply to become members of the European Union and…. to lose that longed-for, fought-for sovereignty! Do you understand any of this?

Yugoslavia was a dress rehearsal. The break-up of Yugoslavia happened between the peaceful break-up of the Soviet Union and the… planned – and, as it appears, non-peaceful – break-up of the Russian Federation. And yet it could have been quite different! Instead of war, we could have enjoyed peace and cooperation! Is this not what we dreamt of during the Cold War? Was it not then that we did not even dare to dream that the division between political East and political West could disappear in our lifetime?

Those of us who lived during the Soviet Union’s existence did not even imagine, did not even dare to suppose that the Soviet Union would cease to exist in their lifetime. The end of this enormous state, which had at its disposal a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, seemed inconceivable. Unless…. unless there was to be another world war, which nobody wanted.

And lo and behold, the seemingly impossible happened: a giant empire hoisted the white flag. The giant empire dissolved like a failed business, the giant empire went out of business like a dissolved sports club. The individual republics – members of this empire – filed for a no-fault divorce and received this divorce overnight. Everything went smoothly and was accompanied by great enthusiasm. Do we remember the song ‘Winds of Change’ sung by the Scorpions? This is what it was like at the time. It seemed that humanity was entering a new era, an era of peace and cooperation.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? There are many more or less convincing explanations – the economic bankruptcy of the socialist system, the effective penetration of Western intelligence, reforms that escaped the control of the reformers – we will not cite them all here. We will only point to an extremely important factor, a psychological factor: the peoples of central and eastern Europe, and therefore also the Russians (as well as the Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, etc.), have lived, are living and will continue to live nurturing a huge inferiority complex against the West. This inferiority complex did not arise when communism took hold in the countries of central and eastern Europe. No. It existed there from the cradle of these nations, from the dawn of their history. They all adopted civilisation from the West, their elites were educated in the West, they travelled to the West, they imitated Western styles in art and literature, they modelled their legal systems on Western legal systems and they learnt Western languages. In the languages of the above-mentioned nations, there is a huge proportion of words – and everyday words! at that – taken from French, Italian, German and English. These words came along with new technology or cultural currents, and were adopted and assimilated even though more often than not they had equivalents in their native languages. Foreign words in the mouths of central and eastern Europeans gave them social status. Continue reading →

The people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye have become our citizens, forever.

Putin’s speech

On September 30, 2022, President Vladimir Putin delivered a momentous speech occasioned by the act of joining to the Russian Federation the territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson. All the diplomatic masks have fallen: the Russian leader laid down all the resentment that the Russian nation has been nurturing towards the West. It is praiseworthy to read the whole speech rather than let oneself be fooled by the media. Below we give an excerpt from it and we encourage the reader to give a simple yes-or-no answer to each question and observation made by the Russian president.

① “The last leaders of the Soviet Union, contrary to the direct expression of the will of the majority of people in the referendum of 1991, destroyed our great country, and simply made the people in the former republics face this as an accomplished fact.”

– Did the last leaders of the Soviet Union act against the 1991 referendum or did they not?

② “When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West decided that the world and all of us would permanently accede to its dictates.”

– True or false? Continue reading →

Partitioning Russia

Competing large states, the superpowers, aim to eliminate their opponent from the game. This can be done in a variety of ways. One of these, of course, is war: one rival destroys the other, subjugates it or wipes it off the world map. This is how, in three wars, ancient Rome wrestled with Carthage and brought about its annihilation; Rome did not annihilate Greece, but subjugated it, and since the Greeks did not resist in the time in which they were subject to Rome, and that’s where it ended. Another way of settling a rivalry is to weaken the state that one sees as a rival to rule over a region of the world or over the whole world. The victorious state takes away industrially or strategically important parts of territory from the defeated state. Still another way is to make the competitor economically or financially dependent. This is how perennial colonial states continue to rule former colonial territories, although they have officially withdrawn from them: they rule them through money and economic connections. The last way to subjugate an adversary, to weaken or eradicate it, is through territorial partition: the breaking up of a state territory into several smaller ones, which is generally done by exploiting frictions, resentments and hostilities that exist on national religious or anthropological grounds. This is how Yugoslavia was dealt with. This state of the southern Slavs, whose territory had an area comparable to that of Romania, was divided into several smaller political entities.

The West conceived a similar collective fate for the Russian Federation. The driving force is the United States and the United Kingdom, while the tool is the European Union and especially the countries of Central Europe, as well as so-called dissidents – citizens of the Russian Federation who act to the detriment of their own state. The idea of dividing Russia into a dozen or more parts was given the name of decolonization. The creators of this notion assume that Russia is in fact a conglomeration of the Russian centre with many colonies, and that the difference between the colonies ruled by Moscow and those once ruled by Paris, London or Berlin is only that the Russian colonies are not overseas. What is being proposed, therefore, is decolonization – as it is now fashionably said and written – 2.0 (that is, the second, as the first was either the decolonization carried out between 1950 and 1970 in Africa and Asia, or the decolonization of the USSR, a preliminary to the now proposed division of the vast territory that was under the Kremlin’s rule until 1991).

The idea of splitting the Russian Federation into multiple political entities is justified on the grounds that Russia, its elites and even the mentality of its people, grew out of dictatorial and slave traditions and as such are unreformable. It is said that Russia as it exists will be a constant threat to world peace and that a single centre of power is incapable of efficiently managing such a large territory, let alone such a large and ethnically and religiously diverse population. (One might ask, as an aside, how it is that the same judgement is not applied either to the United States, which is, after all, a territorially huge and population-diverse state, or to the European Union, which is absorbing more and more new members and seeking to administer the whole uniformly from a single centre in Brussels, but never mind). Since Russia is a nuclear-armed state, it is not proposed to provoke a war for this purpose; rather, it is recommended that the various nationalities and religions living on the territory of the Federation should peacefully assert their independence. The weapons are to be strikes, demonstrations, pickets, civil disobedience and all that makes up the technique of instigating and carrying out colour revolutions. Continue reading →

America’s helplessness

Nordstream pipes have been blown up. Sure, no one knows who did it, and yet…. everyone knows. At a time when referendums in the four provinces of eastern Ukraine (historically: Novorossiya) are sealing the fate of those regions by handing them over to Russia, at a time when European countries fear the coming winter and hesitate to cut all trade ties with Moscow, at a time when right-wing parties are gaining popularity across Europe, the United States, seeing its policies falling apart, is erupting in hysteria.

Former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, married to US neocon Anne Applebaum, wrote a message of thanks to the US. Was it a slip of the tongue, or did he act on American orders to indirectly show the Russians who was behind the sabotage? Either way, Russian journalists using open source airborne radar were able to trace the mysterious plane’s flight across the Baltic to Poland, and then across the Baltic again, including over the site of the sabotage: the area around Bornholm Island. That the Polish government and Polish elites are rabidly anti-Russian is well known.

Ukraine is slowly but nevertheless shrinking territorially. This is always the case when a country relies too much on Western aid. President Zelenski was ready to sit down at the negotiating table soon after the outbreak of hostilities. He was quickly barred from doing so. Now the country he leads has lost four pieces of its territory – permanently. No one in their right mind believes that Russia will ever give them back to Ukraine after what has been going on these past few months, after so much bloodshed, after all the sanctions, and now after the disruption of two gas pipelines.