Friday 27th of December 2024
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masters of the world...

pulling faces

We all have motivations. Some of these are irrelevant to the social construct, but most, overtly or subconsciously are shaped to fit the general social endeavours. 



The many motivations, including those that lead us to buy this fish or this lemon at the fish market, are based on habits of choice with a twinkling of inconsequential uncertainty that we call the freedom of choice. In general this freedom of choice is bracketed. It is framed by acceptable limits of our synthetic social necessities and the stylistic movements of the time. 

Democracy is one of these modern movements. Though it was well established at the time of the Athenians, we still struggle with it. It’s our ideal of achieving equality between each of us, but human nature anchored in the instinctive deceit of survival often lead to psychopaths taking over the lead. 

Democracy arose from the idea that we are equal in any respect and equal absolutely. All are alike free, therefore we all are free absolutely... The next is that being all equal, we can claim equal participation in everything. 

Public offices in democracy are allocated by chance ballot. When they are filled by election, public offices soon become oligarchic.

In Athens, "democracy" was thus in opposition to those supporting a system of oligarchy. Athenian democracy was characterised by being run by the ordinary people who were allotted to the committees which ran government. Pericles make this point at a Funeral Oration: "It is administered by the many instead of the few; that is why it is called a democracy.”


Hopefully, despite this worthy equality quest, the saving grace of humanity is its diversity, hopefully again in equality of race, gender and origin. Yet, the great Satan (we know who you are), is trying hard to peneplanise all of us into consumers for the benefit of a few Roburs. Peneplane is a levelled land surface showing an advanced stage of erosion, no more disturbed by crustal movements. No more revolutions. No more thoughts. Everything is flat.

Diversity is cultural, but culture is also linguistically ingrained and so evolved. It is my personal view (don’t hang me for it though) for example that English is a simplistic lazy baby language. It used to be not. Shakespeare and others took the language into sophisticated elegant turns of phrase worthy of poetry that has now got lost into the computer language labyrinth. Expediency and making a buck are the motivations underlying present-day US English. It is raw, twangy and full of tweeting twits.

The Russian language is far more beautiful. It still has a human voice. Here we could visit a study by Paul Robinson of a “cultural" article by Vladislav Surkov, long considered as a 'Westernizer’ among Vladimir Putin’s advisors. He is apparently now fed up with the West. In an article published on April 9 in Russia, Surkov declares that Russia is neither of the West nor of the East. Instead it stands alone.

"Russia moved East for 400 years, and then moved West for another 400. Neither the one nor the other took root. We have gone down both paths. Now we need the ideology of a third path, a third type of civilization, a third world, a third Rome … And yet, we can hardly be called a third civilization. Rather, we are dual one, a mixture of both East and West. Both European and Asian at the same time, and thus neither completely Asian or European. Our cultural and geopolitical identity resembles that of somebody born of a mixed marriage. He’s a relative everywhere, but nowhere is he a native. He’s one of his own among strangers, but a stranger among his own. … Russia is a western-eastern half-breed country.”

Here we cannot pass, the famous words of the French writer, Alexandre Dumas, who had black Caribbean ancestry, in his response to a man who insulted him:

My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) had barely started to shake the apple tree…

In a posthumously published (1993) novel “Paris in the 20th Century” (written 1863 about 1961), Jules Vernes was so dark and so pessimistic about the outcome of technology that his publisher refused to publish. It you think that Orwell’s 1984 was weird and somewhat frightening, this is stunningly surreal, before surrealism was “invented”. Actually Hieronymus Bosch had given us lessons in the weird inventions of our dreams, but when applied to the technological future already going “full-steam” ahead in mid 1800s, we’re in for a few social mad derangements with Jules Verne’s “Paris” in which a young man struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced, but culturally backwards world. The work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological future civilization.

Michel and a friend dream of becoming soldiers, but this is impossible. Warfare has become so scientific that there is no need for soldiers — only chemists and mechanics work the killing machines. But even these professions are denied to them, because "the engines of war" have become so efficient (read automated) that war is inconceivable. All countries are at a perpetual stalemate.


Michel and Lucy are in love. Michel discusses women with his friend, who sadly explains that there are no such things as women anymore. Mindless, repetitive factory work, careful attention to finances and sciences, have turn women into cynical, ugly, neurotic career people.

In a society without war — nor musical nor artistic progress — there is no news, so Michel can't even become a journalist. He ends up living in his mate’s empty apartment while writing poetry, surviving on synthetic foods derived from coal. Michel writes a book of poems entitled Hopes which is rejected by every publisher in Paris.


By end of 1961, Europe enters a winter of unprecedented ferocity. All agriculture is compromised and food supplies are destroyed, resulting in mass famine. The temperature drops to thirty degrees below, and every river in Europe freezes solid. 

Desperate, Michel spends his last cash on little flowers for Lucy, but finds that she has disappeared from her apartment, evicted, as her grandfather, the university's last teacher of rhetoric, had lost his job. 

Unable to locate Lucy amongst the million of starving people in Paris, he spends an entire evening stumbling around, deliriously, convinced he is hunted by the Demon of Electricity that he is unable to escape. Heartbroken, Michel, now bereft of friends and loved ones — as the narrative becomes more surreal  — unconsciously circles an old cemetery and finally collapses in its snow.

In Master of the World, one of the last novels by Vernes, Robur has perfected a new machine, which he has dubbed the Terror. It is ten-meter long vehicle, capable of operating as a speedboat, submarine, automobile, or aircraft. It can travel at the (then) unheard of speed of 150 miles per hour on land and at more than 200 mph when flying. 

Some people laugh at this “frightening” technology which becomes lighter as its speeds up, contrarily to the theory of relativity that came later on. Though it was well known by then that the energy needed to speed up was to the square of the velocity, Vernes imagination was not too scientifically accurate, though he read a lot about sciences, but one could argue that his view would be possible with anti-matter. 

And now the self-appointed Masters of the World have their own machine — the US army complex and their own ideology — the American Dollar promoted by propaganda from media. Consumerism is a machine, with complex cogs, from the lies of the CIA to Army discipline  plus a host of inventions that “democratise” yet control the people, such as the internet and debt.

More to come…

Gus Leonisky
M ot W-ish….



the wandering jew...

Isaac Laquedem is an unfinished historical novel by Alexandre Dumas Senior, initially serialised in the newspaper Le Constitutionnel from 1852. Being too controversial for the Catholics and the Jews alike, the government soon banned the publication. 

This is the summit of Alexandre Dumas' work: a fresco of the history of humanity, around a hero representing the myth of the wandering Jew. Under cover of fiction, the novel is a strong dissertation on myths, ancient and modern.

 

More about the "Master of the World" to come... 

 

Note: picture at top (by Gus Leonisky) from an underpass in Perth, about good kids representing the future but being mischievous nonetheless...

fuckers of the world...

The more time passes since the allied attack against Syria on 14 April 2018, the more the available information reveals the amplitude of the disaster. While the United States still mange to prevent leaks from their armies, those from France are irrevocable. Washington, Paris and London clearly demonstrated that they still intend to rule the world, but they also showed that they no longer have the means to do so.


One week after the allied attack against Syria, very many questions remain unanswered concerning the objectives of this operation and its implementation. And the few established facts contradict the official Western declarations.

The objectives of the bombing

According to the Western version of the story, these bombing attacks were not aimed at overthrowing the Syrian Arab Republic (which they call « Bachar’s régime »), but to sanction the use of chemical weapons.

However, no proof of the use of such weapons has been published. Instead, the three allies each broadcast evaluations based on the original video published by the White Helmets [1] — a video which was itself later contradicted by many of the people who appear in it, as well as the personnel of the hospital where it was filmed [2].

On the contrary, we are justified in asking whether the real objective of these raids may indeed have been to overthrow the Republic. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that missiles were fired at the Presidential palace in Damascus. This is also the interpretation by Russia, for whom the real Allied objective was to counter the « success of the Syrian armed forces in the fight to liberate their territory from international terrorism ».

The destruction of the pharmaceutical research centre in Barzeh remains a mystery. This installation was in no way secret. It had been created with the help of France. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspected it five times and found nothing that could be linked to research on chemical weapons [3]. According to officials, in the context of international sanctions, the laboratory was carrying out research on anti-cancer products. It was not guarded, and there were no victims in the collapse of the buildings. Neither did the collapse cause the dispersion of chemical agents into the atmosphere. This situation can not help but remind us of the destruction by the United States of the Al-Shifa factory in Sudan. In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered its destruction, implemented by a salvo of four Tomahawk missiles, for a cost of one dead and ten wounded. The US intelligence services had assured that the laboratory was developing nerve gases for Oussama Ben Laden. It turned out later that it was Sudan’s main centre for the production of generic medicines [4]. In particular, it made anti-AIDS medicine without paying the license to Gilead Science, a company directed by Donald Rumsfeld and George Schultz [5].

The implementation of the operation

The Allies claim to have fired 105 missiles, while the Russians counted 103 [6]. The coordination between the different armies was handled by NATO, although it claimed no responsibility [7]. In conformity with its statutes, the Organisation acted with the approval of the North Atlantic Council, although this is not yet certain. Indeed, the Council had not been consulted before the bombing of Tripoli (Libya), in 2011, and no-one protested. The aim of this coordination was to ensure that all the missiles fired, whether from the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the air, would all hit their targets at the same moment. However, things did not go as planned – although the Allied operation was to have been finished within half an hour, in fact it took 1 hour and 46 minutes between the first and final shot.

Prior to the attack, Russia had announced that it would riposte if any of its soldiers were killed. The Allied armies were therefore tasked with the mission of being careful to spare them.

However, the Russian army observed the shots and transmitted the coordinates of the Allied missiles to the Syrian Arab Army in real time, in order to allow the Syrians to destroy them. Besides this, when the Syrians became swamped by the number of allied missiles, the Russian army deployed its system for inhibiting the commands and controls of NATO, which paralysed most of their launchers. This was the first time that the French were confronted with this system, which had already caused problems for the United States and the British in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Kaliningrad.

Besides this, two Russian ships left the port of Tartus to play cat and mouse with a British nuclear attack submarine. [8].

According to the Russian and Syrian staff, 73 missiles were destroyed in flight, a figure which is haughtily contested by the Allied staff. Yet, on the ground, everyone – including myself – could see the activity of the anti-aircraft defense, and no-one saw the impacts of the 105 allied missiles announced.

The Allies immediately specified that any more precise information was classified. However, the specialised forums proffered all sorts of unverifiable revelations about the massive failure of this operation. The most that we know for certain is that a French plane was unable to fire one of its missiles, and was obliged to jettison it out to sea without triggering it [9], and that two French multi-mission frigates suffered a computer failure and were unable to fire their naval Cruise missiles [10] — these are symptoms that are well known by anyone who has had to face up to the Russian inhibitor weapon.

The Syrian defence was over-run by the number of missiles which were fired from every direction. It therefore chose to defend in priority certain targets, like the Presidential palace, and to sacrifice others like the research centre in Bazeh. Since then, Russia has announced that it will be delivering new anti-missile batteries to Syria.

In any case, this operation is clearly the greatest military fiasco since the Second World War.

Western rhetoric

These bombings are certainly illegal from the point of view of international law – none of the three aggressors has been attacked by the Syrian Arab Republic, and their action was not authorised by the Security Council.

The Allies therefore communicated about the legality of their initiative. This was denied by the legal service of the German Bundestag. [11]. Indeed, apart from the fantastical character of the supposed attack in the Ghouta, this type of bombing in no way guarantees an end to the suffering of the civil population.

As for France, it continually stressed that it was not going to war against « Bachar’s regime » - comments that were immediately contradicted by Syria, which returned President el-Assad’s Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur to the Romanian ambassador, who represents French interests in Damascus. « There is no honour for President Assad in wearing a decoration attributed by a slave régime of the United States which supports terrorists », declared the Presidential spokesman.

Some authors close to NATO evoke the « responsibility of protection » (R2P) proclaimed by the UNO. Once again, that’s not the point. In fact, the R2P only applies in order to compensate failed states, which is clearly not the case of the Syrian Arab Republic, whose public services are still functioning after 7 years of war.

Finally, while the United States, France and the United Kingdom showed with this operation that they exist outside of international law, they also showed that their armies are not what they used to be.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 
Pete Kimberley

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article200905.html

 

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US still fighting to overthrow syria’s government...

On April 22nd, an anonymous U.S. “Senior Administration Official” told a press conference in Toronto, that the only possible circumstance under which the U.S. Government will agree to pay anything for the harms (bombings of infrastructure etc.) it’s doing to Syria, would be if Syria will agree to cede, to U.S. control, a portion of its land:

QUESTION: When you say no reconstruction money for areas that are under Assad’s control, there is some reconstruction money that’s currently frozen or under question for areas that are not under Assad’s control?

MODERATOR: That’s stabilization, which is different from reconstruction, just to clarify.

“Stabilization” is the solidification of control by the U.S. Government, via its proxies (‘rebels’ trained by U.S. and financed by the Sauds) who are fighting to overthrow Syria’s Government; and the U.S. won’t pay any reconstruction unless it’s “stabilizing” that particular part of Syria. If America’s 7-year-long effort at regime-change in Syria turns out to be a total failure (grabbing no part of its territory), then the U.S. won’t pay even a cent for restoration of Syria from its 7-year-long war to control that country via installing there rulers who will be doing the bidding of the royal Saud family, Saudi Arabia’s owners, who have been America’s direct agent all along in Syria to ultimately take over its Government.

America’s other main ally demanding regime-change in Syria is Israel, which is a Jewish theocracy; and, of course, no predominantly Muslim nation would accept being ruled by Jews of any sort — nor by any Christians. Consequently, the U.S. has been using the fundamentalist Sunni owners of Saudi Arabia — the Saud family (the world’s richest family) — as its agent to fund Syria’s ‘rebels’, and to select which of the ‘rebels’ constitute, at the U.N.-sponsored peace talks for Syria, the ‘opposition’ who are negotiating against Syria’s elected Government to rule the country.

The other participants, along with the Sauds who own Saudi Arabia, are the Thanis who own Qatar, and the six royal families who own United Arab Emirates — all likewise being fundamentalist Sunnis. Syria’s Government is committedly secularist and opposed to Sharia (Islamic) law. By installing a Sunni Sharia law government, the Sauds would take effective control over Syria — the U.S. would conquer that land.

On March 16th, the Washington Post bannered “Trump wants to get the U.S. out of Syria’s war, so he asked the Saudi king for $4 billion” and reported that “In a December phone call with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, President Trump had an idea he thought could hasten a U.S. exit from Syria: Ask the king for $4 billion. By the end of the call, according to U.S. officials, the president believed he had a deal.

The White House wants money from the kingdom and other nations to help rebuild and stabilize the parts of Syria that the U.S. military and its local allies have liberated from the Islamic State.” The U.S., in actual fact, had ignored ISIS in Syria until Russia on 30 September 2015, at Syria’s request, started bombing it and other jihadists there. After that, opposing ISIS became America’s excuse for its earlier and continuing demand that “Assad must go,” and America’s objective then became bombing and totally destroying ISIS’s Syrian headquarters in Raqqa so as for America and its allies to gain access to Syria’s oil-producing region. The U.S. had never bombed any of ISIS’s oil tanker trucks in Syria until it started doing that on 17 November 2015, after Russia had on September 30th begun its bombings in Syria.

Ever since 1949, America’s real target in Syria has been to replace Syria’s Government, and this goes back long before ISIS even existed, anywhere; and Barack Obama had entered office in 2009 hoping to be the U.S. President who would achieve that decades-long U.S. and Saud and Israel objective. So, for the U.S. Government, Syria is to be conquered, never to be restituted unless and until, and only to the extent that, it is conquered.

On April 16th, the Wall Street Journal headlined “U.S. Seeks Arab Force and Funding for Syria: Under plan, troops would replace American military contingent after ISIS defeat and help secure country’s north; proposal faces challenges.” This report said that, “The initiative comes as the administration has asked Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to contribute billions of dollars to help restore northern Syria. It wants Arab nations to send troops as well, officials said.”

The article closed: “Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. have helped pay the stipends for the Syrian fighters the U.S. is supporting, American officials say. Administration officials are calculating Arab nations will respond more favorably to a request from Mr. Trump, who already has asked Saudi Arabia to contribute $4 billion to restore former Islamic State-held areas of Syria.” 

America’s plan also includes taking control over the dams that supply water to the rest of Syria; so, the goal remains strangulation of Syria’s Government, even if outright conquest of it remains beyond reach.

On 10 June 2017, a meeting was held in Syria’s northeastern city of Qamishli, which borders Turkey, and where Syrian tribal leaders met with America’s allies and with U.S. Colonel John Dorrian (shown here holding a press briefing on a different occasion), at which, according to the Turkish newspaper reporting the event, “Representatives agreed on a pipeline route. Radical decisions were made regarding the extraction, processing and marketing of the underground wealth of the Haseke, Raqqah and Deir ez Zor regions, which hold 95 percent of Syrian oil and natural gas’ potential.”

However, as of yet, Trump hasn’t been able to achieve the type of deal that he is aiming for. On April 18th, that same Turkish newspaper bannered “US to build Arab force in NE Syria as part of new ploy: The US is seeking to amass an Arab force in northeastern Syria comprised of funding and troops from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.” So, perhaps there will be a portion of Syria that the U.S. will “stabilize” or even, just maybe, restitute for damages done in the effort to conquer it.

Whitney Webb has provided an excellent comprehensive view on which Syrian assets the U.S. Government is hoping to win.

The reconstruction costs to restore Syria were initially roughly estimated at $250 billion, but Syria’s Government now estimates it at around twice that figure.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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hypocritical US "ethics"...

American leaders like to portray the United States as an exemplar of ethical conduct in the international system. The reality is far different, and it has been for decades. Throughout the Cold War, the United States embraced extremely repressive rulers, including the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s Somoza family, Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, all the while portraying them as noble members of the “Free World.” Such blatant hypocrisy and double standards continue today regarding both Washington’s own dubious behavior and the U.S. attitude toward the behavior of favored allies and friends. 

The gap between professed values and actual policy is especially evident in the Middle East. U.S. officials routinely excoriate Syria and Iran, not only for their external behavior, but for manifestations of domestic abuse and repression. Some of those criticisms are valid. Both Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Iran’s clerical government are guilty of serious international misconduct and human-rights violations. But the credibility of Washington’s expressions of outrage is vitiated when those same officials remain silent, or even excuse, equally serious—and in some cases, more egregious—abuses that the United States and its allies commit. 

Following the Syrian regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons in early April, President Trump painted Assad as an exceptionally vile enemy. He immediately issued a tweet describing the Syrian leader as “an animal” who gassed his own people. In his subsequent address to the American people announcing punitive air and missile strikes, Trump charged that the incident confirmed “a pattern of chemical weapons use by that very terrible regime. The evil and despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air. These are not the actions of a man. They are crimes of a monster instead.” The president also blasted Russia and Iran for their longstanding sponsorship of Assad. “To Iran and to Russia, I ask: What kind of a nation wants to be associated with the mass murder of innocent men, women and children?” 

TAC’s Daniel Larison provided an apt response to that question. “Trump should know the answer, since he just hosted one of the chief architects of the war on Yemen that the U.S. has backed to the hilt for the last three years. Britain welcomed the Saudi crown prince earlier on, and France just hosted him in the last few days. All three have been arming and supporting the Saudis and their allies in Yemen no matter how many atrocities they commit.”

 

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/too-many-foreign-policy-...

 

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a third rome, by vladislav surkov...

In the top article, I mention a reference to Vladislav Surkov, who also writes under the name Natan Dubovitsky...

 

The Loneliness of the Half-Blood

 

There are various kinds of work. Some kinds can be undertaken only in a condition somewhat distinct from normal. Thus, the proletariat of the information industry, the ordinary supplier of news, is, as a rule, a feverish person with a disheveled brain. It’s not surprising. The news business requires haste: find out quicker than everyone, communicate earlier than everyone, interpret sooner than everyone.

The agitation of those informing is transmitted to those being informed. This arousal of agitation often resembles a thought process and replaces it. Concepts long in use, such as “convictions” and “principles”, are squeezed out by one-time “opinions.” This results in the complete bankruptcy of interpretation which, however, embarrasses no one. Such is the price of fast, fresh news.

Few can hear the mocking silence of fate drowned out by background media noise. Few are interested that there is also slow, mass news, emerging not from the surface of life, but from its depths, from where geopolitical structures and historical epochs move and clash. The meaning of this news is late in reaching us, but it is never too late to learn from it.

The 14th year of our century is memorable for important and very significant events, about which we all know and much has been said. But the greatest of those events is only know being revealed to us, and the slow, deep-depth news of it only now reaches our ears. This event was the conclusion of the epic journey of Russia to the West, the cessation of numerous and fruitless attempts to become part of Western civilization, to become a relation of the “good family” of European peoples.

Starting from 2014, a new epoch stretches before us indefinitely, call it Epoch 14+, in which we are faced with one-hundred (two-hundred? three-hundred?) years of geopolitical isolation.

Westernization, frivolously started by the False Dmitry and decisively continued by Peter the Great, has been tried every which way for the last four-hundred years. What has Russia not done in order to become now Holland, now France, now America, now Portugal? From what sideways angle has Russia not sought to squeeze into the West? All the ideas originating there and all the earth-shattering developments happening there were embraced by our elites with enormous and perhaps partly superfluous enthusiasm.

Autocrats assiduously married German princesses. The Imperial nobility and bureaucracy were actively replenished with “itinerant foreigners.” But Europeans in Russia became “Russified” quickly and completely, while Russians were in no way “Europeanized.”

The Russian army victoriously and with enormous sacrifice fought in all the great wars of Europe which, from accumulated experience, can be considered the most inclined to mass violence and the most bloodthirsty of all continents. The great victories and great sacrifices brought our country much European territory, but not friends.

For the sake of European values (at that time religious-monarchical), Saint Petersburg emerged as the initiator and guarantor of the Holy Alliance of three monarchies, and conscientiously fulfilled its duty as ally when it became necessary to rescue the Hapsburgs from the Hungarian uprising. But when Russia found herself in a complex position, “rescued” Austria not only did not help, but turned against her.

Then European values were replaced by their opposite. In Paris and Berlin, Marx became fashionable. Certain residents of Simbirsk and Yanovka wanted things in Russia to be like Paris. They were afraid of falling behind the West, which at that time had gone wild about Socialism. They were afraid that world revolution, supposedly led by European and American workers, would bypass their “backwater.” They strove. When the storm of class warfare had subsided, the USSR, created by means of immense and heavy labors, discovered that no world revolution had occurred. The Western world had by no means become a workers’ paradise, but quite the opposite, had gone Capitalistic and made it necessary for the USSR to carefully hide its growing symptoms of autistic Socialism behind an Iron Curtain.

At the end of the last century, our country grew bored with being “taken separately.” Again she beseeched the West. In this regard, apparently, it seemed to someone that scale was significant. We wouldn’t fit into Europe because we’re too big, of too frightening a magnitude. That meant we needed to shrink territory, population, economy, army, and ambition to the parameters of some kind of middle European country. Only then would they accept us as one of their own. We shrank. We began to believe in Hayek as ferociously as we once had in Marx. We halved our demographic, industrial and military potential. We parted with our allied republics, and began to part with the autonomous ones... But even as such, diminished and degraded, Russia was not suited to turn to the West.

Finally, it was decided to cease the diminution and degradation and, moreover, to stand up for our rights. What was to happen in 2014 became inevitable.

Although Russian and European cultural models are externally similar, they have incompatible software and ports. It is not possible to assemble them into a single system. Today, when that long held suspicion has been transformed into an obvious fact, proposals are heard, shouldn’t we maybe dash off to the other side, to Asia, to the East?

We don’t need to. And here’s why: been there, done that.

The Muscovite proto-empire was created in a complex military-political interaction with the Golden Horde, an interaction that some are inclined to call a yoke, others, a union. Whether yoke or union, freely or by force, the eastern vector of development was chosen and tested.

Even after the stand on the Ugra River, the Russian tsardom continued to be, in essence, part of Asia. It willingly annexed eastern lands. It claimed descent from Byzantium, the Asian Rome. It came under the enormous influence of distinguished families descended from the Golden Horde.

The peak of Muscovite Asian orientation came with the naming of Qasim Khan Simeon Bekbulatovich as Grand Prince of all Russia. Historians, accustomed to thinking of Ivan the Terrible as something like an absurdist artist in the cap of Monomakh, attribute this “trick” exclusively to his sense of humor. The reality was more serious. After Ivan the Terrible, a solid party formed at court backing Simeon Bekbulatovich for a completely real reign. Boris Godunov had to require boyars, when swearing fealty to him, to promise “not to want Tsar Simeon Bekbulatovich and his children as sovereigns.” That is, the kingdom was a half-step away from transfer of power to a dynasty of baptized descendants of Genghis Khan, and from the reinforcement of the “Eastern” paradigm of development.

However, there was no future for Bekbulatovich nor for the Godunov descendants of the Golden Horde emirs. The Polish-Cossack invasion began, bringing to Moscow new tsars from the West. The reigns of the False Dmitrys (long before Peter the Great upset the boyars with his European manners) and of the Polish Prince Wladyslaw IV, for all their transitoriness, were deeply symbolic. In their light, the Time of Troubles can be seen not so much a dynastic crisis, as a crisis of civilization. Rus’ broke off from Asia and began its movement towards Europe.

And so, for four centuries, Russia went towards the East, and for another four centuries, towards the West, but put down roots in neither. Both roads have been taken. What’s needed now are ideologies of a third path, a third type of civilization, a third world, a third Rome.

 

Read more:

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue764/half-blood.html

 

Vladislav Surkov was born Aslambek Andarbekovich Dudayev in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic and later changed his name to Vladimir Surkov. He is a Russian businessman, former Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and current close advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Under the pen name Dubovitsky, Surkov has published a number of works of science fiction, including the “gangsta fiction” novel Okolonolya (“Near Zero”). Surkov initially denied that he was the author of Okolonolya and wrote a preface to the novel stating, “The author of this novel is an unoriginal, Hamlet-obsessed hack.” Surkov was subsequently discovered to be, in fact, the author.

He is one of the Russian government officials (recently) sanctioned by President Obama. The Guardian quoted his reaction: “The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.”

 

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tupac shakur, allen ginsberg, and jackson pollock...

 

In regard to the article above:

 

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (/ˈɡɪnzbɜːrɡ/; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet, philosopher, writer, and activist. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions.[1] He was one of many influential American writers of his time known as the Beat Generation, which included famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States.[2][3][4] In 1956, "Howl" was seized by San Francisco police and US Customs.[1] In 1957, it attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex[5] at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. "Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.[6] Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"[7]

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York's East Village.[8] One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of the Naropa Institutein Boulder, Colorado.[9] At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poeticsthere in 1974.[10]

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs.[11] His poem "September on Jessore Road", calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless."[12]

His collection The Fall of America shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.[13] In 1979 he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.[14] Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.[15]

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg

 

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Tupac Amaru Shakur (/ˈtuːpɑːk ʃəˈkʊər/ TOO-pahk shə-KOOR; born Lesane Parish Crooks; June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996), also known by his stage names 2Pac and Makaveli,[1] was an American rapper and actor.[2] He is considered by many as one of the best rappers of all time.[3][4]

Shakur was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, but relocated to Los Angeles in 1988. When he released his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991, he became a central figure in West Coast hip hop, introducing social issues in the genre at a time when gangsta rap was dominant in the mainstream.[5][6] Shakur achieved further critical and commercial success with Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z... (1993) and Me Against the World (1995).[7] Later that year, after suffering legal troubles and a robbery and shooting, Shakur became heavily involved in the growing East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry.[8]

On September 7, 1996, Shakur was shot by an unknown assailant in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, and died six days later.[9][10] His double-disc album, All Eyez on Me, which was released under a month prior, later became one of the best-selling albums in the United States.[11] Shakur also became one of the best-selling music artists of all time, amassing over 75 million estimated global sales.[12]

Much of Shakur's work has been noted for displaying contemporary social issues that plagued inner-cities, and he is considered a symbol of resistance and activist against inequities.[13] Five more albums have been released since his death, all of which have been certified platinum. Outside music, Shakur also gained success an actor, with his roles as Lucky in Poetic Justice (1993), Ezekiel Whitmore in Gridlock'd(1997), and Jake Rodriguez in Gang Related (1997) all gaining praise from critics.

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur#September_1996_shooting

 

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Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety; he was a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.[1]

Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.[2][3]

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

 

And by the way, Barak Obama might one day write a work of fiction — his autobiography, possibly in the same vein as the other liars... meanwhile Trump is writing his own biog as he goes along, with Twittering tweets on Twitter...