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.

You ought to be recycled

Scientists and philosophers have advanced a few criteria that distinguish humans from animals. Among these are the fact that humans are bipeds (but also birds are and some mammals like kangaroos), that humans use hands for purposes other than moving the body or catching prey, that humans use tools with which they make other tools, that humans have developed speech that is unmatched by any system of communication that animals have, that humans can think abstractly, imagining or visualizing things that have never been or are yet to come or to be made, that humans have developed religious faith and so on, and so forth. One more threshold separating animals from humans is the fact that unlike animals humans take care of their dead: humans do not leave them behind; rather, they practise funeral rites (religious or non-religious, it doesn’t matter) and bury the dead in special places in a special way. Throughout centuries if not millennia the human body – usually regarded as a dwelling of human spirit, a soul, a divine spark – was accorded special respect. In Christianity it was even compared to or regarded as a temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit i.e. of God himself. Defilement of the body, including defilement of the dead body – even the body of a bitter enemy – has always been viewed as a repellent act of barbarism and primitivism.

Lo and behold the first quarter of the 21st century is taking steps towards regarding the human body as – first – a burden for the planet, for the earth, and – second – as a lump of biological material that can be put to good use. A new bill on natural organic reduction first signed in the state of Washington and recently in California allows dead human bodies to be composted rather than buried or cremated and then as a result of the process known as liquid cremation to be turned into fertilizer for soil. The composting will be done in licensed hydrolysis facilities using heat, pressure, water, and chemical agents.

If two American states have issued such a ruling, others are likely to follow. Bearing in mind the pervasive presence of the climate change and decarbonization clap-trap, the European Union’s countries are also likely to consider such a solution. Why not? After years of making people believe that they are a burden on the planet and that cremation of deceased bodies leaves a large carbon footprint, after years of suppressing any belief in the existence of the soul, humans have lost the due respect to their bodies, especially when those bodies are not alive.

It is interesting to remark that after the long-induced self-hate of white people of European descent who have been made to leave the space that they occupy for non-whites and who have been made to denigrate their own past, culture and heroes the time has arrived for the same people to be made to think low of their own bodies. Already when those bodies are alive you are encouraged to cover them with all sorts of tattoos, to pierce earlobes and lips and tongues, to misshape foreheads and earlobes – a sign of either cultural atavism or disrespect for the body – then why should you pay any respect to this misshaped something after it is of no use to you? You ought to be useful in a material sense of the word after your death, your body ought to be useful the way animal bodies are: you ought to be recycled.

General political observations

In Western Europe we have the United Kingdom comprising England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; we also have the Federal Republic of Germany with its several autonomous provinces complete with their parliaments and governments; on the other hand we had the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with its six autonomous parts, and the Soviet Union with its fifteen republics, in both cases complete with their parliaments and governments. It happened so that the former – the United Kingdom and West Germany – have remained intact while the latter – Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are history.

Observation number 1: Certain federations or unions persist, others do not. Why?

Of the two states that fell apart, one disintegration was bloody (that of Yugoslavia), the other peaceful (that of the Soviet Union). In either case external forces were involved and helped the said states to disappear in thin air. There were separatist tendencies in the United Kingdom – especially in Northern Ireland – and they somehow petered out; contrarily, two German states that had existed before 1989 united rather than fall apart. For all practical purposes in the four countries under discussion – the United Kingdom, Germany, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union – the absolute and overwhelming majority of their citizens spoke one and the same language; it was, respectively, English, German, Serbo-Croat and Russian.

Observation number 2: Some states composed of autonomous parts with separatist tendencies dissolve, others do not. How does that happen?

The separatist tendencies are separatist only in a sense of the word. The autonomous political entities that made up Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia disrupted the corresponding unions, claiming that they were in desperate need of independence only to… willingly give this independence up on the following day and eagerly become parts of the European Union. What sense does it make?

Observation number 3: Some unions of states are desired, others are not. What is the criterion? Who lays down this criterion?

The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was only made possible because national feelings were aroused and exploited. They were exploited by external forces. Simultaneously the national, patriotic, ethnic sentiment of the indigenous populations in other parts of Europe are suppressed, discouraged or ridiculed.

Observation number 4: National feelings are either enhanced or suppressed, depending on what purpose they serve. Who controls those processes? Who decides over them?

Of the warring parties – Serbs and Croats or Russians and Ukrainians – the judgement passed by what is referred to as the international community says that one is – without a shade of a doubt – the guilty party (Serbs and Russians) while the other is an innocent victim (Croats, especially Albanians, and Ukrainians); consequently, the guilty parties allegedly spread lies, the whole lies and nothing but the lies while the innocent parties tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is why the former need to be censured while the others supported by the media of the so called free world.

Observation number 5: How is it possible that a conflict is sparked by exclusively one party with the other being remarkably innocent? Why does the general public buy into it lock, stock and barrel?

The independence of Kosovo has been recognized by many countries and that has been approved of by the international community; the independence of the Donbass republics has been recognized by one state and this act did not meet with approval.

Observation 6: Who decides whether a political move is commendable? What makes a political move praiseworthy?

Gefira 66: Sapere aude!

The summer holidays are over. The war that Russia wages against NATO in Ukraine shows no signs of coming to an end; Europeans are facing ever-increasing energy prices that threaten to either push them on the brink of starvation, poverty, and unemployment or make them take to the streets and overthrow their governments; the new British government has been formed in which the key positions have been assigned to non-Whites; Queen Elizabeth II has died, a monarch who ruled the United Kingdom for seventy years, a symbol of tradition, honour, duty, Christian faith and patriotism.

In ancient Rome augurs would either cut the entrails of animals out or let birds fly in the hope of uncovering signs predicting the future. We may laugh at those practices and yet. And yet there are signs that portend events. When Pope Benedict XVI resigned, a huge flash of lightning hit the top of the dome of St Peter’s Basilica. It was captured on film. Clearly, the Catholic Church under its successor Pope Francis is becoming increasingly different with emphasis being put on ecology, immigrants and of all the religious things on Pachamama! What is the United Kingdom going to look like under Charles the III? He, too, is obsessed with ecology and climate change. What will the Old Continent look like? What does future hold forth when it comes to the Western world?

The Western world, which is hellbent on weakening and subjugating Russia and China; the Western world, which is hellbent on having its population replaced; the Western world, which has very porous borders and simultaneously fears far-off aggressors; the Western world, which is infiltrated by foreigners day in, day out, and simultaneously claims to be afraid of North Korea or Iran… These are some of the legitimate questions one needs to ask, one wants to know answers to. Does the death of the queen mark an epochal change?

Yugoslavia with its few nations each of which enjoyed a measure of autonomy was held together so long as Marshal Josip Bros Tito was alive. It took very few years after his death for Yugoslavia to disintegrate. The United Kingdom is also made up of autonomous regions – England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland – with separatist tendencies. The deaths of the general secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, who acted as real rulers of the USSR – also heralded the end of an epoch. The British people of all political persuasions may have felt loyalty to the monarch who embodied the best in their culture and tradition: will they want to pledge allegiance to Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor of the exchequer, James Cleverly, the new foreign secretary, and Suella Braverman, the new home secretary?

Gefira Financial Bulletin #66 is available now