If we were to paint the current situation with a broad brush, we would receive the following simplified picture. The European Union is split into two camps: the old and new member states. The West is split across the Atlantic: it is – roughly – Washington against Paris and Berlin. The world is split into three rivalling superpowers: the United States (strong military and strong economy), Russia (strong military, weak economy) and China (weak military, strong economy). Western Europe gravitates more to Russia than Eastern Europe does; Eastern Europe in turn gravitates more to the United States than Western Europe does.

The state of affairs on the Old Continent is as follows.

[1] Germany wants a stable energy supply in the form of natural gas and from among a number of providers it has decided on Russia because

[2] Russia has large natural gas deposits and being in need of hard currency is willing to sell its energy resources to any bidder.

[3] Germany and Russia countries entered a commercial agreement which resulted in the construction and completion of one pipeline laid on the bottom of the Baltic: NordStream 1.

[4] Since the capacity of one pipeline was not sufficient to satisfy the needs of Germany and other West European states, another agreement was concluded to build a second pipe along the bottom of the Baltic – NordStream 2 – which is now near completion.

[5] Both pipelines sidetrack eastern European countries – Ukraine, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia – which makes them alarmed because soon Russia will be able to cut off its gas supplies to and through those countries – the Yamal (Poland, Belarus) and Brotherhood (Czechia, Slovakia, Ukraine) pipelines – while continuing the provision of gas to Western Europe, thus breaking the economic solidarity of the European Union.
Continue reading →

The well-orchestrated Arab Spring that toppled many a government in a few countries also hit Libya, a country that for forty-two years was under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, under whose governance the country’s people counted as the most prosperous in the whole of Africa. The ensuing and up to now incessant civil war created a power vacuum with various players vying for control over the country, which is rich in crude oil and natural gas. From the almost ten years of strife there have emerged two major rivals: the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HOR). The former is supported by Turkey and the United Nations, which by the way helped form the GNA, while the latter is backed by Russia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Turkey’s chip in the game appeared to have turned the scales in favour of the GNA. Up to Ankara’s involvement the Libya National Army (LNA) commanded by General Khalifa Haftar, the supporter of the HOR, had conquered most of the country and was about to advance on Tripoli. Turkish intervention came just in time to save the GNA and repulse LNA’s approaching units back to their previous positions. Why is Ankara interested in the region?

Libya (i.e. the provinces of Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica put together) for centuries used to be a part of the Ottoman Empire, so naturally Turkey’s policymakers gravitate to the regions where Turkish rule has historical precedent. They are trying to extend their influence in the Balkans – in Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina with their significant Muslim or Turkish minorities, in Albania, which is predominantly Muslim – in Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, in Syria and Iraq and lately in Libya. Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been more and more intensively making attempts at expanding its international leverage and freeing itself from the constraints imposed on it by the Western powers after the First World War, especially in the form of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which limits Ankara’s control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits and thus its sovereignty. In an attempt to shake off these restrictions, Turkey has elaborated and been implementing the doctrine of the Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan)) which envisages the expanding of the country’s maritime exclusive economic zones.

Turkey-Libya Agreement on Maritime Boundaries, Turkey’s Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan) and the EEZ boundaries in East Mediterranean. Source: reddit.
Continue reading →

The five post-Soviet Central Asian republics – Kazakhstan (19 mln inhabitants), Kyrgyzstan (6), Tajikistan (8,5), Uzbekistan (30) and Turkmenistan (5) – making up a joint area of almost 4 million square kilometers (by roughly one million larger than the area of India or Argentina), with the total population equalling 68 million (comparable to that of France or Great Britain) is a very important spot on the globe, landlocked between Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. In the 19th century it was the Russian and the British that penetrated the area and vied for dominance there: the former from the north-west, the latter from the south-east. Their rivalry received the name of the Great Game. The five countries were a sort of colonies of the Russian Empire, though – due to the territorial proximity – incorporated into it. The indigenous populations – confessionally, linguistically and racially entirely alien to European, orthodox Russians – would pose problems occasionally, which twice morphed into an open uprising against Russian rule: in 1916 and in between 1923-24. Both attempts were quelled, which resulted in the loss of many lives and massive emigration. Bishkek, Kyrgyztan’s capital, was then renamed to Frunze, to honour the Soviet general who had vanquished the insurgents. While the people of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan had no political representation in the Russian Duma under the tsars, they enjoyed it during the time of the Soviet Union; at that time they also exercises a sort of statehood, albeit within the framework of the communist superstate. In the 1980s they constituted the bridgehead for Soviet troops invading Afghanistan. The scars left by the Russians did not really heal: they were only allayed for a time. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the five republics declared independence, and began gravitating towards the United States.

Central Asia. Source: Wikipedia.

At present the five Central Asian states are in the cross hairs of such potent players as Russia, China and the United States. Also Turkey, due to the commonality of the religion and the ethnic relationship (notice the overlap of the demonyms Turkey and Turkmenistan), plays a certain role in the region. The residents of this area seek employment in Russia or let themselves be recruited to fight in Syria against Bashar al-Assad backed by Russia. The collective historical consciousness is fraught with bitter memories of Russians fighting against the forefathers of today’s residents of the area and of Russians combating their brothers in faith in Afghanistan four decades ago. That is something that Washington has been trying to skilfully exploit. To this purpose the United States created the C5+1 political initiative that combines the effort of the five countries and those of the United States to stymie terrorism, boost economic growth and foster the human rights in the region, as the official documents and statements say.

Continue reading →

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced the conversion of the Hagia Sophia from the museum to a mosque. The temple, which was built in 537 and served as the greatest Christian orthodox cathedral for a thousand years, was turned into a mosque in 1453 at the fall of Constantinople, Byzantium’s capital. After four centuries in 1934 this mosque was turned into a museum by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who wanted to tout himself to the world as a modern ruler of secular Turkey. President Erdoğan’s announcement met with an enthusiastic applause of the Muslims, not only those residing in Turkey. Much of the Western press denounced the move as Erdoğan’s maneuver aimed at diverting the nation’s attention from the current economic problems. This explanation – Marxist through and through – does not take into consideration at least two factors: psychological (Muslim faith) and political (symbolic message to the world). A nation’s attention can be diverted in a wide variety of ways, so why should it be the conversion of a museum into a mosque?

Turkey’s Hagia Sophia turned back into a mosque, causing a divide, CBC News: Tha National YouTube.

Atheist, deist or agnostic Western analysts typically cannot grasp the phenomenon of religious faith, its palpable reality. In scientific terms faith can be viewed as a psychological phenomenon and psychological phenomena are to be reckoned with just as physical ones or – at times – even more. Man is constricted in his actions by these two: physical reality and his internal psychological automatic pilot, so to say. It is not true that faith can move mountains in the literal sense of the word, but it is not true either that everything is a matter of physical coercion. There are women who turn prostitutes although they have money to burn, and there are such who will never even consider selling themselves despite the fact that they suffer want.

Religious (read: psychological) factor is as strong as economic. Failure to understand it caused the Western liberals to import millions of Muslims to (post-)Christian countries. The liberals regarded religious faith as a mere facet of tradition, culture or heritage, which can be changed at will and which constitutes no serious impediment to liberal ideas. How wrong they were is plain to see today, when religious – mainly Muslim – minorities pose serious social problems. Turkey has a special Directorate of Religious Affairs (known as Diyanet for short) that operates also abroad, especially among Turks dispersed in many West European countries. There is nothing comparable to it in any of the Western countries. The Diyanet has a large budget at its disposal and the word religious in its name obviously equates with Muslim.

Turkey turns Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, TRT World YouTube.

Western analysts also claim that President Erdoğan has broken with the secular tradition set down by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as the former was creating the modern Turkish state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. They either genuinely fail to recognize that secularism is the same as faith or religion only with the minus sign assigned to it or they intentionally do it to present themselves as those who occupy moral high ground. Why should secularism be something better than religiousness? Being lukewarm Christians at best, the Western journalists are incapable of imagining how serious this psychological phenomenon known as religious faith can be. If they have this inability to place themselves in the shoes of genuine believers, they should at least learn something from psychology. If they could be bothered to do so, that is. Then they would have learnt that religion is anything that constitutes the highest value in a man’s psyche. Hence, it need not be Christianity or Islam alone; religion can take the form of communism, fascism, feminism or secularism for that matter. A few centuries earlier Europeans discovering, conquering and administering foreign territories would bring with themselves the Christian cross and Bible (one of Columbus’s ships was named the Santa Maria); today, Western powers display homosexual rainbow flags on foreign territory and enforce accepting homosexual rights the way they once forced indigenous people to accept Christianity.
Continue reading →

A few days ago a substantial majority of the citizens of the Russian Federation said their yes to the several amendments to the constitution. The turn-out was large enough to legitimise the changes. What are they, these amendments?

We can group them under three headings:
[1] social,
[2] political and
[3] moral.

[1] The Russian Federation attempts to be a semi-socialist state, but since the word socialism has no good press in Eastern Europe, the socialist principle is re-branded as social or societal partnership, which
[a] guarantees the minimum wage and at least
[b] a yearly indexation of retirement pensions.

[2]The new constitution lays strong emphasis on Russia’s sovereignty, which is protected in the following manner:
[a] Russian law has precedence over international law;
[b] individuals holding high state-posts must not have citizenship other than Russian nor bank accounts abroad;
[c] Russians and the Russian language are named as factors uniting other nations into a multi-ethnic nation that creates statehood;
[d] an individual may be the country’s president for two terms with this stipulation, however, that the terms held up to the time when the amendments have come into force do not count, which is a rather clear indication that Vladimir Putin is thinking about continuing as the head of state.

[3] The Constitution, mentioning the belief in God as an important historical heritage, is tasked with
[a] protecting marriage as a union between man and woman along with
[b] guarding the memory about and the good name of the patriots who defended the motherland.

Continue reading →

Every few years an event sends shock waves around the globe:

2001: the attack of hijacked planes on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House;
2008: the financial crisis;
2015: the immigration “crisis;”
2020: the “pandemic;”
202?: …?

There have always been individuals who have questioned the unfolding events and were – yes, you guessed it right – categorized as followers of conspiracy theories. Vigilant and observant people could not understand why a superpower was paralyzed by a group of amateur pilots; why large staffs operating the most important banks did not see the financial bubble; why all of a sudden Africans and Asians began storming Europe and the United States although they had not done so for a millennium; why a type of flu was declared a pandemic and stopped the economic life of almost the whole world; what is being prepared for us within the next few years. No wonder then that also the current “crisis” poses questions.

A number of German and Austrian scientists, physicians, sociologists, experts and others have decided to call into being the Extra-Parliamentary Corona Committee of Inquiry (Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss – ACU) into the so-called pandemic. Their claim is that there is no pandemic, that the wave of corona-induced diseases is comparable to flu waves that from time to time sweep across the globe and that the precautions and measurements taken by the German government were excessive and unwarranted, leading to larger collateral damage than the virus itself. The members of the Committee seem to have been sprung into action by the inactivity of the ruling parties and those in the opposition in this respect plus by their own professional observations and the internal report of the Ministry of the Interior that “90% of all necessary operations in Germany were not carried out” because of the pandemic.

The committee members are afraid that the vaccine that is being designed is dangerous as it an RNA vaccination which is “able to alter the genetic material” and that under the guise of the infection protection laws a “surveillance state with mind control and surveillance apps” is in the making. The grass roots resistance has found its representatives: big calibre people.

Committee members: Bodo Schiffmann, Heiko Schöning and Martin Haditsch. Will they, too, be dismissed as conspiracy theorists?