Gefira 86: Sapere aude

Freedom of speech is not what characterizes humanity, human societies. Only rarely does it surface, for a historically speaking short moment, and then disappears. Why? There’s always a ruling group that holds power, and in order to hold power as long as possible, this groups needs not only to have control over the finances and the law enforcement, but also of the collective mind. It is the mind where seeds of opposition can be sown and where they can sprout, it is the mind that sparks dissent and opposition, it is the mind that leads people to rise up against their rulers. That is the simple reason why genuine freedom of speech, freedom of expression is unthinkable. It is unthinkable because it is impossible, because it sooner or later undermines the authority. That is why freedom of speech must be controlled, channelled or otherwise influenced. The rare moments when freedom of speech resurfaces are those historical times of equilibrium between a descending and an ascending ruling grup.

In the modern world censorship has become a word evoking the worst possible connotations. Dictators resort to censorship, Communists used to apply censorship, but democracies are all about freedom of expression… except that they are not. What do democracies do to simultaneously have censorship and not have it? The solution is easy and as old as human history. Democracies abolish the word censorship without abolishing censorship itself, democracies invent new ways of censoring content without having to resort to the old primitive methods of physically gagging someone’s mouth are imprisoning someone for his words. Democracies invent terms like combating disinformation or misinformation, like protection of the populace against malicious or inciting false news and ideas. That’s it! Censorship in a democracy? God forbid! Yet, you will agree that lies need to be suppressed, will you not?

Humans instinctively want to know the truth and wish to be able to pass correct judgement. In order to know the truth and in order to be able to pass correct judgement, one needs information, one needs varied information coming from different, politically or ideologically opposed sources. Only then can truth be discovered, only then can correct judgement be passed. Hence the need for consulting various information sources. Audiatur et altera pars, as the Romans used to say: let also the other party have a fair hearing. An argument can only be accepted as binding if it has been confronted with opposing arguments and stood its ground, when the argument turned out to (more closely) correspond to reality, to truth. How otherwise can we justly and impartially decide about anything?

How about misinformation or disinformation? If misinformation or disinformation are allowed currency together with information, in the long run the last mentioned will win out. Truth always wins out. As someone said: you can’t deceive all people all the time. Conversely, if information is suppressed under whatever noble pretexts, if you are punished or intimidated or ridiculed for wanting to consult various sources of information, then you may rest assured that those who want to punish, intimidate or ridicule you have been feeding lies to you and are now afraid of you exposing their mendacity. That’s a litmus test available to all of us. You don’t need to be an expert on anything, you only need to be vigilant: if the powers that be don’t want you to look for other sources of information, it clearly means that they want to conceal something and are afraid of being confronted with the truth.

Quid est veritas? was famously asked by Pilate. Yes, what is truth? It may not be easy to discover truth, but one thing is certain: we will never discover it without consulting varied sources of information, without exposing our minds to varied, opposing arguments. At least that much is true. It may be that you do not wish to investigate into various phenomena, events and news: why, it takes a lot of time and effort, and we all have our lives to live, our work to perform, our families to take care of, our vocations to fulfil. Nothing wrong with that. That is why societies delegate few individuals – like journalists or historians – to do the job for the rest of us, to present us with the results of their research efforts. That’s the way it ought to be. The only task that we – the consumers of someone else’s investigative work – are set with is to familiarize ourselves with the investigations done by others with this however sound principle that we must consult opposing sources of information and argumentation. The moment we are denied it, we know that we are being lied to, we know that we are being separated from truth.

There are many, many people who are in favour of global peace. Many of them join organizations and take part in demonstrations in support of international peace. Yet, these are usually empty gestures. It is not enough to yell, Give peace a chance; what needs to be done is to encourage all of us to give the other party to a conflict a fair hearing. Peace disappears when only one argumentation is heard and, consequently followed. Peace disappears when one argumentation deemed as correct makes it impossible for us to understand our opponents. One argumentation turns us into reckless automatons who believe they know reality, who are certain that they know truth while they don’t. If you want to give peace a chance, encourage people to listen to and read what the other party to the conflict has to say; if you want to give peace a chance, declare war on those who suppress selected sources of information and argumentation. Once you learn the argumentation of the other party, your belligerent attitude will almost always be done away with, or at least significantly reduced. Contrarily, if you clam up in your own world of allegedly true ideas, you are going to end up in a vicious conflict of attrition so much so if the other party to the conflict does the same.

It takes intellectual courage to think. Yes, genuine thinking is an act of courage. It is an act of courage to admit a thought that my attitude to an event, my belief in an idea, my evaluation of reality are perhaps not quite correct, are perhaps wrong, or perhaps downright wrong? It is an act of huge courage to admit that perhaps my opponent is not quite wrong, that my opponent is maybe right, maybe… absolutely right. It is probably easier to go to physical war and fight in the trenches than to subdue your own ego and surrender your own cherished beliefs. It was not without a reason that Romans used to say, imperare sibi maximum est imperium, or, to rule yourself is the ultimate form of power. It is really much easier to command troops in the field, or to withstand hardships than to admit that what you hold as sacred truth is not true.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #86 is available now

The two ways of the Rus’ian world
Which way, Russia?
A still more striking analogy
What way does a political class choose

Musket Wars

Prior to being taken over by the Europeans, mainly the subjects of the British Crown, New Zealand was inhabited by Māori, a conglomerate of a number of tribes who had settled the two islands in the 14th century. Just as it was common in the Americas among Indians, the tribes waged wars for territory and resources and slaves and supremacy. The way of all flesh, everywhere and always on the planet Earth. Due to the primitive forms of weaponry, the hostilities were not very much devastating. When, however, white settlers began to trade muskets for the goods that the Māori could offer, those muskets became a game changer: the tribe with a larger number of muskets had a significant military edge and felt encouraged to wage war with other tribes, hoping for a swift and easy victory. Wars were also waged because of the past wrongs suffered at the hands of a neighbouring tribe. Vengeance was also a driving force. And yes, those tribes which were equipped with muskets gained the upper hand in the battlefield. The vanquished, however, would soon learn their lesson and purchase muskets from the Whites, thus tipping the scales in their favour. The mutually devastating wars lasted for almost half a century, roughly between 1806 (in 1805 Napoleon won the Battle of Austerlitz) and 1845 (in 1842 the first Opium War ended). Thousands of Māori men and women died in those hostilities, while whole tribes were decimated. The winning party would enslave the beaten tribe and work the slaves to death so as to have new produce to trade with the British settlers and buy more muskets and wage more wars. The beaten party, too, would do anything in its power to sell whatever they had to the Whites – including land – in order to acquire the firearms, resist the aggressors and – naturally – take revenge. A never ending story. While the Māori tribes would mutually annihilate themselves, the European settlers would enrich themselves and get rid of some of the indigenous population in the process. To put it differently, the Māori simply made room for the British colonizers while reducing their own numbers in the ceaseless feuds. Just one of the many historical examples of one party setting the other two or more parties off against each other and enriching itself in the process. One of the many historical examples of ethnically related nations, states, tribes letting themselves be used against their ethnic cousins by total biological and cultural strangers.

Nothing has changed since then. True, we do not encounter culturally backward tribes as we did in that time, but we do encounter nations and ethnicities whose development is not very much advanced and who let themselves be easily pitted against their ethnic cousins. Recently we could observe the same phenomena in the former Yugoslavia and in the former Soviet Union. Thus Croats were set off against Serbs, whereas Ukrainians – against Russians. Just as Māori received weaponry and other equipment from the West so are Ukrainians receiving it; just as Māori traded most they had for the weapons and equipment, so are Ukrainians selling their land and running up enormous debt; just as Māori were hellbent on killing other Māori to please the third party so is one Slavic nation hellbent on killing another Slavic nation to please a third party. The similarity is striking. The same might be said about Croats and Serbs, and, indeed, about tens and hundreds of conflicts worldwide. It turns out that there are nations with a huge inferiority complex that let themselves be politically and militarily exploited just like American Indians or new Zealand Māori tribes. There are nations – present-day Indians or Māori – that are willing to act as gladiators: they are willing to please the managers of the world by killing their neighbours and cousins so as to get a pat on the shoulder and so as to prolong their own life for a couple of months or years. There is no shortage of nations and ethnicities that are willing to buy muskets, to sell whatever they have, and to wage wars on their neighbours, simultaneously bending backwards to those who provide them with the muskets (Abrams, Challengers, F-16s, satellite intel) and collect from them their resources and grab their territory.

Relevance of century-old observations

“The Germans long before …14 sought to destroy the unity of the Russian tribe forged in hard struggle. For this purpose they supported and boosted in the south of Russia a movement that set itself the goal of separation of its nine provinces from Russia, under the name of Ukraine. The aspiration to tear away from Russia the Little Russian branch of the Russian people has not been abandoned to this day. XY and his companions, the former protégés of the Germans, who began the dismemberment of Russia, continue to carry out their evil deed of creating an independent “Ukrainian state” and fighting against the revival of the United Russia (Единая Россия).”

Sounds familiar? This remark was made more than a hundred years ago by General Anton Denikin, one of the four most recognizable leaders of the anti-Bolshevik Russia during the civil war of 1917-1921. The other three were Alexander Kolchak, Nikolai Yudenich and Pyotr Wrangel. General Anton Denikin fought for a few years in the south of the former Russian Empire against the Red Army, but after some initial successes, he was forced to leave his fatherland. It was at that time that the West was very much interested in disrupting Russia. The two revolutions – the first one, often referred to as the bourgeois revolution, took place in February and the second one, the Bolshevik revolution, took place in October 1917 – were sparked off with the support and blessing of the Western powers. The British had a hand in dethroning the tsar in February 1917, the Germans substantially supported the Bolshevik party in October 1917: the leaders of the coup d’état that was to take place in October were transported in a sealed train from Switzerland across Imperial Germany to Sweden, from where they made their way to Petrograd (that’s how in 1914 the German-sounding Saint-Petersburg was renamed after Russia began the hostilities against Germany). Americans, too, chipped in. While Vladimir Lenin enjoyed German protection, travelling across Germany, Leon Trotsky, having spent a couple of years in New York with his family and two sons, was financed to cross the Atlantic and be on time in Petrograd to disrupt the Russian state. It was not only the financial and political support that helped the revolutionaries of all persuasions to bring about the collapse of the empire: national or ethnic resentment was also exploited, with the Germans advancing the idea of a Ukrainian nation as separate from Russians.

There were a number of Ukrainian leaders at that time, with Symon Petliura being one of the most recognizable. He was backed by the Germans, he was later backed by the reborn Polish state. The Polish troops together with some of his Ukrainian units advanced towards Kiev and even occupied it for a week or two in 1920. Quite a Maidan, was it not, even if short-lived? These are the events that General Anton Denikin referred to in the text at the opening of this article. The full date the part of which we intentionally deleted was 1914, while the letters XY stand for no less a person than Symon Petliura.

In 2014 we saw a kind of historical repeat. The Western powers made themselves felt in Ukraine, but especially in Kiev, and caused the legitimate president to flee the country. Also, a crawling civil war commenced in the Donbass, while Russia in response to all these events reclaimed the Crimean Peninsula, all of which led to the war that broke out eight years later. Today Anton Denikin might write something like this:

“The collective West long before 2014 sought to destroy the unity of the Russian tribe forged in hard struggle. For this purpose they supported and boosted in the Ukraine a movement that set itself the goal of antagonizing Ukrainians and Russians. The aspiration to tear away from Russia the Little Russian branch of the Russian people has not been abandoned to this day. Volodymyr Zelensky, Yulia Tymoshenko, Leonid Kravchuk, Petro Poroshenko, Vitalii Klichko (you name them) and their companions, the protégés of the West, who began the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, continue to carry out their evil deed of creating an independent “Ukrainian state” and fighting against the revival of the United Russia (Единая Россия).”

by the way, the phrase United Russia (Единая Россия) that Anton Denikin employed overlaps one to one with the name of the “Putin” party, which holds power in this largest post-Soviet republic.

This time, too, it is the United States, Germany and Great Britain along with Poland that are busy playing Ukrainians off against Russians. This time, too, they have found present-day Petliuras ready to serve them. Today, too, war is being waged, and today, like yesterday, it looks like Ukraine is on the losing end. So it goes. Will we be witnesses to yet another historical repeat in… 2114/2124?

During World War Two, after the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union, they approached General Denikin, who lived at that time in France, with a proposal of backing the Third Reich against the Bolsheviks. Anton Denikin was very much opposed to the Bolshevik rule in Russia, which is putting it mildly. Yet, he did not for a moment think it right to ally himself with the enemies of Russia, even Red Russia. Anton Denikin flatly refused and warned those Russians – and especially Ukrainians – who were willing to serve the Third Reich against the Bolsheviks. Anton Denikin tried to convince them that they were going to be miserable tools at the hands of the Germans, to be discarded the moment they were not needed.

It is said that the civil war in the Soviet Union did not end in 1922 – when Denikin, Wrangel and Yudenich were forced out of Russia, while Kolchak was taken prisoner and put against the wall – because the civil war in the form of resentment and a deep division running through Soviet society festered. It only ended when the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany. It was only then that the overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens of whatever political persuasion rallied around the Soviet leaders to defend Russia. Has not the same been happening since 2022 in Russia? Even those Russians who did not hold Vladimir Putin in high regard changed course and rallied around him. War and especially the resultant hardships were supposed to turn the people against the Kremlin: as it is, the opposite is true. Sure, there are some who have betrayed their country – there were some also during World War Two, like General Vlasov – but the majority have expressed their unwavering support for the leadership. Does anyone learn anything from the past? Does anyone study the past?

Insatiable greed

How did Germany fare between 1933 and 1940? The country was on the rise. It regained its full sovereignty after the humiliating Versailles Treaty, it had a strong economy and even stronger army; it had expanded territorially incorporating Austria and parts of Czechia; it had conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France; it bent to its political will Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland; Italy and Spain were its allies; with the Soviet Union it had an agreement that divided the spheres of influence. Germany was on top of the world. Only the United Kingdom challenged it, and this challenge was naturally weak and ineffective. The whole continent was under the German sceptre. What did the Germans do? Did they do their best to solidify their grip on the booty? Did they do their best to guard what they had gained? No. They decided to gamble, to swallow more than they could digest, to put at a risk everything that they had successfully won.

How did the West fare between 1991 and 2022? Just like Germany between 1933 and 1940. The West saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West’s rival of long standing; the West saw the enlargement of the sphere of its influence: all the central European former communist countries flocked to the West’s antechambers and begged to be let in. Most if not all of the former Soviet republics did the some. And to top it all, Russia, the direct heir to the Soviet heirloom, bowed and scraped before the West, and badly wanted to be regarded as a partner, a weaker, younger, smaller, but still a partner, a member of the Western club. The West’s companies took possession of the east European and post-Soviet markets; the West’s mass media and Western culture in general supplanted almost anything that was local and peculiar to post Soviet nations; the Western ideas and lifestyle were slavishly copied by Poles and Romanians, by Croats and Ukrainians, by Hungarians and Russians. For years, Russia’s president Putin kept referring to the Western countries as Russia’s partners. Russia wanted to become a NATO member and wanted to join the European project by creating a kind of commonwealth stretching from Lisbon, Portugal, to Vladivostok on the Pacific. All of Europe, Russia and Ukraine included, along with the post-Soviet Asian republics, prostrated themselves to the West, paid homage to the West’s rule, acknowledged the West’s dominance, bowed to Western hegemony. For all practical purposes the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions, the White House and Brussels set up models of economies, societal organization and what not in the post-Soviet area. It came to pass that one Western author who still is regarded as a scholar wrote the famous sentence about the end of history! What did the West do with all this? Did the West do its best to solidify its grip on the booty? Did the West do its best to guard what it had gained? No. The West decided to gamble, to swallow more than it could digest, to put at a risk everything that it had successfully won.

History really rhymes! The Germans of 1941 – with almost all of Europe – and the Americans along with the European Union of 2022 decided to make a final killing: they both decided to challenge Russia. History really rhymes and history really shows that no one ever learns anything from the past. After a period of military and economic difficulties Soviet Russia ended the conflict by shelling Berlin; today’s Russia, after a period of caving in is perhaps not about to shell Washington or London (although who knows?) but it is about to deal an even more fatal blow: it is about to destroy the American dollar and to lay bare the ineffectiveness of the West’s military; today’s Russia is about to upend the world order that has been so meticulously built by the managers of the world, by the Club of Rome and the Trilateral Commission, by the G7 and the World Economic Forum, by all those Kissingers and Brzezinskis, Albrights and Obamas.

Rather than enjoy consuming almost the whole of the continent as it could prior to 1941, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1945 Germany ended up territorially shrunk, politically divided, morally broken and economically destroyed. Similarly, rather than enjoy the fruits of the collapse of the Soviet Union and continue holding a grip on almost the whole post-Soviet area, the West is about to slowly recede and witness its own collapse in terms of economy, society, morals and military. A repeat of the Titanic’s catastrophe: rich conceited people going under, with their big sophisticated project being smashed and crushed by a simple, uncomplicated iceberg. They will soon fight for the seats in the few life-saving boats that are still at their disposal. Something very much similar must have preceded the famous sack of Rome by the barbarians. And mind you, the West already has its barbarians inside, flocking in – day in, day out. When their number exceeds the tipping point, the sack will take place. (We have had smaller sacks in Paris and London, in new York and Los Angeles, rehearsals before the in general and final sack). And you know what? The majority of the populace in the West will continue to live in total denial of reality, just as ancient Romans did, the same Romans who witnessed the sack of their capital city, and just as Germans persisted to believe in their final victory in the months of February and April 1945.

The Germans could have enjoyed their conquests for decades to come and so could the West: both screwed it up. Fools.

It runs in their DNA

It was in the run-up to the Second World War. Czechoslovakia was about to fall apart. It was not only the Sudeten Germans that rebelled and wished to be joined to the Third Reich; it was also Slovaks, one of the two brotherly nations – the other were Czechs – that made up Czechoslovakia. The Slovak and the Czech languages are like two sides of the same coin, i.e. very close to each other. If you master one of the languages – either Czech or Slovak – you will have no difficulties understanding the other while reading or listening. There will even be a specific time drag during which you will not figure out whether you are reading or listening to Czech or Slovak. That’s how close those languages are. And yet, and despite this relatedness of blood and customs, of the DNA and culture, Slovaks, or to be precise, those who happened to be the nation’s leaders, were hell-bent on separating Slovakia from Czechia, cost it what it may. Yes, cost it what the may, because in the process they were willing to cooperate even with Konrad Heinlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei against Prague, they were ready to look for help from Berlin or even to join Slovakia to Poland, a Slavic nation, whose language, however, is not as closely related to Slovak as Czech is. Let it sink in: Slovak elites preferred to ally themselves with powerful Germany in order to destroy Czechoslovakia and harm Czechia without having a second thought that maybe confronted with the Third Reich on their own they would not be long for this world.

The same was true of the then Polish elites. They, too, saw a chance in the fact that Czechoslovakia was coming apart at the seams with the separatist Sudeten Germans supported by the Third Reich on the one hand, and the separatist Slovaks on the other. Warsaw, too, wanted to have a stake in the unfolding events, grab a chunk of Czechia and, possibly, subordinate Slovakia. The Polish elites naively thought and expected to be viewed by Berlin as partners in carving this part of Europe. Before long they learnt it the hard way that not only were they not regarded as anything remotely to being partners: in a year’s time Poland was invaded by Germany and deleted from the political map within a couple of weeks. A disaster that the Polish elites brought upon themselves or rather upon the nation that they had led into the abyss, because the elites for the most part worked or wormed or bribed their way out of hell into one of the Western countries, with most of them never to return.

Fast forwards, Yugoslavia. Slovenians and Croats loathed Serbs so much that they were willing to associate themselves with Muslim Bosnians and Albanians while going to war against Belgrade; they were even willing to trade their political sovereignty with the Western powers for aid in making the life of Serbs miserable. NATO began bombing Serbia into the Stone Age and carving the former Yugoslavia into ever smaller parts, but never mind that! The most important thing that Croatian elites cared about was to do harm to Serbia. That was about anything that mattered. Just like Slovaks in the run-up to the Second World War they, too, preferred the protection of the European Reich. Were they afraid that from then on they would be confronted with a power incomparably stronger and more sinister than Serbia? Nay. Who would have cared?

How about Czechia and Poland who had joined NATO on the eve of the alliance’s strikes against Belgrade? Did it cross the mind of the elites of those nations that one of these days they, too, might be subjected to sanctions and bombings if only they dared not to walk in lockstep with their overlords? Nay.

A bit more forwards, Ukraine. In 1992 Ukraine emerged as an independent state with a territory that it had never ever had in its history, with over 50 million inhabitants, a well-developed industry, broad access to the Black Sea and large areas of some of the most fertile soil that the world can boast. Consider it for a moment: Ukraine had a huge territory not because it took it from Russia with the sword or at gunpoint. Ukraine had a huge territory because it so pleased the Bolsheviks to create a large Ukrainian republic, and because it later pleased the leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev to add to it the Crimean Peninsula. The only thing that the responsible Ukrainian elites were tasked with was to preserve that precious possession. What did they do? They acted in ways that were far worse than what the elites of Slovakia and Croatia did. Why worse? Because Ukrainian elites did not need to fight for their independence from Moscow: it was served them on a platter. Slovaks needed to conspire with Berlin and Warsaw against Prague; Croats needed to conspire with Berlin, Washington and God knows who else against Belgrade. Ukrainian managers did not. That is, they were obviously backed by the West, but there was no fight when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Ukrainians took or received Ukraine as a huge chunk of the heirloom after the deceased Soviet Union, and… they did their best to waste it, to bleed it dry, to turn it into the West’s bridgehead against Moscow. What for?

Why did the Slovaks want so desperately to tear their nation awat from Czechs even at the price of allying themselves with Germans and Poles? Why did the Croats (and Slovenians) so badly want to deal a mortal blow to Serbia, again allying themselves with the West, among others with Germany, the same Germany that had invaded and destroyed Yugoslavia a few decades earlier, in 1941? Why did the Ukrainians need to ally themselves with the West to senselessly ruffle Moscow’s feathers? Why could they not be pleased with what they had at the outset, in the year 1991? An independent Ukraine of that large territorial size and so numerous population as it emerged in the 1990s was a godsend and there is no exaggeration to it! Sadly, Ukrainian elites have been ready to fight their Slavic brothers outside and within their borders asking for help not only Germans whose forefathers used to exterminate Ukrainians by the tens of thousands, but also Poles, with whom Ukraine has had a hard time throughout centuries! What for?

Why is it so easy for the powers that be to put neighboring and ethnically closely related nations – Slovaks and Czechs, Croats and Serbs, Ukrainians and Russians – at loggerheads? What have those nations ever gained or what will those nations ever gain by being at loggerheads with each other? The Slovak state that emerged from the ashes of Czechoslovakia was a puppet state controlled by Berlin. As a reward, it was Berlin – Slovakia’s protector – that forced Slovakia to cede chunks of its southern territories to Hungary! Poland, which supported Slovakia in the latter’s separatist policy, was soon – as mentioned above – attacked by Germany and the German army enjoyed the support of the Slovak troops! True, the contribution of the tiny Slovak units was negligible, but the symbolic meaning of the event is gargantuan! The Polish elites were so hell-bent on destroying Czechoslovakia and elevating Slovakia only to receive a nice thank-you from the latter in a few months’ time!

Today Poland supports Ukraine against Russia, the same Ukraine with which Poland shares a history of mutual massacres and wars, and today Poland has been invaded by Ukrainians with the Polish nation growing more and more impatient with their presence. The first signs of conflicts begin to emerge here and there, recently most notably over Ukrainian agricultural produce that has dumped the Polish market. Whose interests does the Polish commitment in Ukraine serve?

Croatia used to be independent from Serbia as early as in 1941, when Germany destroyed Yugoslavia. Croatia used to be independent for a couple of years in name only. Sure enough, it did the biddings of Berlin. Whose biddings is Zagreb doing at present? If, as Croats claim, it was so hard to by overwhelmed by Serbs, how much harder must it be to be overwhelmed by the big European conglomerate of states?

What good do all the mentioned Slavic nations expect from the fact of fighting each other and doing someone else’s bidding? Their elites either did not pay attention during their history classes or… or they are not acting in the interests of their nations intentionally.

Croatia (or Slovenia, for that matter) and Slovakia did not want to send their deputies to the respective parliaments in Belgrade and Prague where their deputies would have held in between a third and a half of all the seats, but they are more than willing to send their deputies to the European parliament where they hold a tiny, negligible, insignificant number of seats. Where’s the sense?

Unlike Belarus, which is allegedly ruled by a dictator, Ukraine has followed the path of democracy made by Washington D.C. and approved by Brussels E.U. Now, the population of Belarus has remained stable for the last thirty years with barely an appreciable change whereas that of Ukraine has been… halved. A loss that is larger than that suffered during the Second World War. Which country has faired better? How about other factors? How about economy, war and peace? In plain English, given the choice, would you like to live under President Lukashenko or President Zelensky and/or his predecessors? Would you like to live under President Putin or President Zelensky and/or his predecessors? An unpleasant thought, huh? An unfair comparison?

As of now, Ukraine has already been destroyed (partly even long before the ongoing war); Poland, whose leaders wanted to play big and carve Czechoslovakia in 1938, was mercilessly destroyed a mere year later (today’s Polish leaders, too, want to play big); Slovakia, which separated itself from Czechoslovakia, later took part in the German invasion of the Soviet Union (what for?), and consequently was destroyed and subjugated by the Red Army in a few years’ time; Croatia, having murdered Serbs in concentration camps, was subjugated by Tito’s communists at the war’s end. They all – Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, and Ukraine – have been but playthings at the hands of the powers that be, flexing their muscles and making believe that they want to pursue the policies that they are compelled to pursue, policies like accepting the green agenda or accommodating Third World people or doing away with swaths of their economies or coming to grips with the new normal in morality. The elites of these countries of whatever political persuasion are sure to continue in the footsteps of their predecessors. Croats and Serbs, Slovaks and Czechs, Ukrainians and Russians, Poles and Russians are certainly going to be pitted one against the other also in the nearest and remote future. You just cannot help it. It runs in their DNA.

Turkey, a NATO member, to join BRICS!

The leftist West is getting a blow back!

– The elections to the European Parliament elevated parties that are maliciously referred to as far-right;

– the war in Ukraine is going badly for the collective West;

– in the United States Donald Trump, maliciously labelled as populist is about to win the presidential election;

– France and the United States are being pushed out of Africa;

– de-dollarization is in progress;

– Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico has survived the assassination (how the EU commissioners would have wished he had died!);

– Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is openly against the European Union’s policy of confrontation with Russia; and now – to top it all

– Turkey – has announced its willingness to join BRICS!

What a mess! Turkey, which boasts the second largest army in NATO, is about to seriously partner among others with… Russia, a country against which the same NATO is waging war!

The West is getting blow after blow after another blow. How ungrateful the world is! The collective West has been meaning to

– save the planet from the man-made climate change;

– extend the human rights by bringing to the forefront homosexuals and lesbians;

– eradicate racism by coercing races and nationalities to share the same ares, towns and villages, schools and factories,

and it turned out that the world has remained blind and deaf to all those advances… Goodness me!

All of which might suggest one serious suspicion: out of impotence and a thirst for vengeance the collective West might be thinking about retaliatory steps. What are these going to be? The leftist West needs to disrupt BRICS, to keep Russia at bay, to stop the march of the “far-right” through the institutions (a historical irony, indeed), to thwart Donald Trump from winning the elections, to preserve the dollar as the instrument of global exploitation and dominance, and so on, and so forth. What are they going to do? A wounded and hitherto domineering animal can be terribly dangerous.

The legal case of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presidency

On May 20 Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presidential term expired, which poses a very interesting legal and political case. Russia does not recognize Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s authority any more. Which is not a malicious act on her part. The argument is that any agreement, accord, whatever signed by someone who simultaneously is not the head of a country entails grave political problems. Any next president of Ukraine may either feel bound by the agreement that Ukraine entered into with Russia under the presidency of Volodymyr Zelenskyy or may renege on it as signed by someone who did not have the legal authority to act as the country’s leader. Why should the Kremlin even bother to consider any talks with Zelenskyy if such is the case?

As of now, the West recognizes Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s power despite the expiry of his presidential term of office. Yet, the same legal case might be used by the diplomats in Washington, London, or Paris in any later development of events in Ukraine. They, too, might one of these days make a statement that they do not feel bound to honour any international settlement signed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy if only such a political move suits their purposes.

As is known, it is the interaction of the real military and economic factors that are at the disposal of the international players that matters. Diplomacy is merely a reflection of those real factors. Hence, if the West feels coerced to enter into an unfavourable settlement with Russia over Ukraine, it may intentionally make Volodymyr Zelenskyy sign it with the hindsight that the settlement is going to be revoked the moment the balance of powers tilts in the West’s favour. The fact that the legality of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presidential authority is questionable might be viewed as a wild card in any future diplomatic dealings between the West and Russia if the latter agrees to honour Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s signature.

At present, Ukrainian jurisprudence might recognize the current Ukrainian leader as the country’s legitimate president. That may change overnight. Particular legal provisions can be construed to mean whatever pleases the powerful. We all know that.