Metamorfose significa mudança.
A transformação de um ser noutro outro. De uma forma noutra.
No sentido figurado metamorfose é a mudança considerável que ocorre no caráter, no estado, na aparência, de uma pessoa individual, ou colectiva.
A Metamorfose em epígrafe é a mudança considerável que está ocorrendo na pessoa colectiva usualmente conhecida por Sociedade Internacional.
 — adaptado de “Significado de Metamorfose” em Significados.

Metamorfose

Retomamos aqui o editorial do Al-Watan em que Thierry Meyssan apresenta aos leitores sírios a retirada das tropas dos EUA do seu país. Este artigo contem várias informações que foram ignoradas pelos média ocidentais e lançam luz sobre a maneira como a decisão foi tomada pelo Presidente Trump, com os seus aliados sauditas e catarianos, e seus parceiros russos.

Thierry Meyssan | Rede Voltaire | Damasco (Síria) | 8 de Janeiro de 2019

A Síria fora transformada em campo de batalha pelas nações do mundo inteiro. Aí, os Estados Unidos e a Rússia confrontavam-se. A 20 de Dezembro de 2018, Washington decidiu retirar-se sem compensação.

Esta data irá contar na história mundial como a mais importante desde 26 de Dezembro de 1991 (dissolução da URSS). Durante 27 anos, o mundo foi unipolar. Os Estados Unidos eram a primeira potência económica e militar. Eram os maestros exclusivos dos acontecimentos.

Há três anos, perderam o seu estatuto económico e foram ultrapassados pela China. Depois, perderam o seu estatuto de primeira potência militar convencional face à Rússia. Acabam, agora, de perder o de primeira potência militar nuclear face às armas hipersónicas russas.

Virginia Military Institute removes statue of Confederate Gen. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.jpg

Adapted from remarks given at the 19th American Renaissance conference, November 20, 2022.

The other day I ran across something Nietzsche said: “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” That made me think of white people. There aren’t that many of us, individually, who are locked up in the nuthouse, but sometimes I think the entire race ought to be.

You wouldn’t be in this room if you didn’t know what I mean by the madness of white people, so I’ll give you just one example. A few weeks ago, a woman named Julie Powell died. She was moderately famous for trying, in a single year, to cook every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook. Her story was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

From her Twitter postings, you can see Julie Powell was a typical white liberal, who despised anyone who voted for Donald Trump. But she also wrote this: “White people are fucking horrible. Murdering all of us would be a totally sound decision.” And also this: “I really can see the argument for slaughtering white people in the streets.”

Julie Powell didn’t explain why she wrote these things. I guess she thought she didn’t have to. Why would a moderately successful, not-obviously-insane white person write such things? My guess is, her thinking came from the same murky depths as Susan Sontag’s observation that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Sontag wrote that in 1967. She despised white people before it was even cool.

It’s the same impulse that led to the destruction or removal of 36 statues of Columbus during the George Floyd riots. If white people are cancer, Columbus was patient zero in the Western hemisphere. Americans used to think we had Negro problem. Now, according to official government policy: We are the problem; we have a white people problem.

The great tragedy in this hatred for whites, that whites now express so casually, comes from a craving for virtuousness — a thirst to be righteous. White people thrive on the feeling that they are morally superior, and today, the best way to prove superiority is to say horrible things about their own people. Is this a contradiction? No. Ever since the middle part of the 20th century, moral superiority for whites means making loud noises about caring — deeply — for the underdog. And who are the most deserving underdogs? Black and brown people, especially black people.

To repeat: White liberals aren’t happy unless they can think they are benevolent and humane, and for that, they have to believe in equality and compassion. Justice for the oppressed. And since we, white people, are the world’s only certified oppressors, and since the race gurus tell us our racism can’t be cured, what better service to the world than to slaughter us all? I think if you had asked Julie Powell to explain herself, you’d have got something like that.

In itself, the urge to help people is not a bad one, but in whites — and only in whites — it has become a death wish.

Some of you remember Harvard instructor Noel Ignatiev. In the 1990s, he was editor of the magazine Race Traitor. It’s goal was to “abolish whiteness by any means necessary.” That sounded like an extermination campaign, but he always said, “No, I want to destroy the privileges of whiteness, not white people.”

Maybe he meant it. But now, people like Julie Powell aren’t beating around the bush. Just kill us all and be done with it.

My question today is this: What is it about white people that makes them think and say such things? Why do they turn so violently against their own people? Today, I’m not talking about non-whites. They’re simple. They’ll take anything and everything we give them. That’s all you need to know about them.

But white people? No one else in history ever thought it was virtuous to turn their countries over to aliens, and tell them they had every reason to hate us — even to kill us. We’re unique. Any Chinaman who talked that way about the Chinese would be a candidate for the psych ward. But Julie Powell was just a slightly overexcited progressive. Nothing remarkable.

The fact is, the impulse behind this isn’t new. White people have a habit of tearing each other apart in the name of equality, in the name of helping the underdog. That’s what the French Revolution was supposed to be about. Liberty, equality, fraternity, with the emphasis on equality, and mass murder if that was what it took to get it.

The famous French Encyclopedist Denis Diderot said at the time: “Man will be free only when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Let us rephrase: “There will be justice only when the last white man is strangled with the entrails of the last white woman.” Isn’t that just a more colorful way of saying what Julie Powell said? Isn’t this the final solution to the white people problem?

We have not yet gone as far as the French. They massacred the aristocracy, purged the priesthood, established 1792 as Year 1 of the Revolutionary Calendar, and changed the names of the months. We haven’t yet named the months after Frederick Douglass or Cesar Chavez, but as Sam Francis used to say every year, “This is Black History Month, once known as February.” It’s the same sentiment that gave us Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth. And, as many of you know, the state of Georgia recognizes February 23rd as Ahmaud Arbery Day. State rep. Sandra Scott said that was because he was “one of Georgia’s most distinguished citizens.”

This makes giving the months names like Germinal, Floreal, or Fructidor sound poetic.

So — yes — the egalitarian insanity of the French Revolution went farther than the egalitarian insanity of our revolution, but it was over in 10 years. And five years after that, France had an Emperor — it’s hard to think of a more inegalitarian system. It would be as if after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education, just 15 years later the country was being run by the American Colonization Society, which was set up to ship blacks back to Africa.

As I said earlier, our current insanity is grounded in a uniquely white thirst for egalitarian virtue. The first popular mass reform movement in history was the abolition movement in Britain. It got organized in 1787 with the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

It grew into the first broad-based campaign of pamphleteering, lecturing, preaching, lobbying Parliament, and, sure enough, Britain abolished slavery throughout the empire 46 years later in 1833. I would note that it would not have succeeded without mass mobilization by women, and this was well before women even had the vote.

How many of you know what was the first mass social uplift movement in the United States? It wasn’t abolition or prohibition or votes for women. It was opposition to Andrew Jackson’s 1838 policy of Cherokee Removal — trail of tears and all that. That movement didn’t work, but it was, again, almost exclusively the work of women.

That was at a time when it was considered outrageous for women to have anything to do with politics. When a group of women in Maine wrote to Congress about the Cherokee, they apologized for writing at all. They referred to “that delicacy of feeling and the duty of deportment which should ever characterize the female sex, which might forbid the profanity of offending ourselves upon the notice of the United States Congress.”[1] You’ve come a long way, baby.

Egalitarian uplift has always been deeply female. As public affairs become more and more the province of women, they veer more and more into egalitarian folly.

Nowhere was the craving for egalitarian virtue more evident than in the American abolition movement. It had a powerful streak of self-righteous fanaticism that is exactly like what we see today. Nowadays, every abolitionist is considered a hero, but at the time a lot of them were basically psychotic and recognized as such. John Brown was just the most prominent of a whole bushel of nut cases.

Many abolitionists were also followers of all sorts of outlandish cults: Shakerism, phrenology, Owenite socialism. James Russell Lowell, looking back years later with regret on his own fanaticism, wrote: “Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else’s business. All stood ready at a moment’s notice to reform everything but themselves.”[2]

One historian of abolitionists wrote of their “wishful credulity, mistrust of objective reality, and self-dramatization.” Does that sound familiar?

At that time, opposition to slavery united every kind of reformer, just as anti-racism unites every climate change nut, militant nudist, Covid-commissar, every story-hour drag queen, Antifa fanatic, anarchist, or Trotskyite. Whatever else they are, they’re all anti-racists.

Something else that should sound familiar is the outright hatred abolitionists had for their opponents. Many didn’t think much one way or the other about blacks, but they sure hated slaveowners. The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison swindled blacks to get money for his projects, but boy did he hate white Southerners. He called them “Human hyenas and jackals who delight to listen to negro groans, to revel in negro blood, and to batten on human flesh.”

Someone once asked another famous abolitionist, Angelina Grimke, if this were not an exaggeration of the horrors of slavery. She said, “[The horrors] cannot be exaggerated. It is impossible for imagination to go beyond the facts.” Isn’t this what right-thinking people say about us? We are insurrectionists, fascists, domestic terrorists, the number-one threat to America. It’s that 100-proof hate, the dizzying personal luxury of political hate come back from the dead.

I don’t know who first said love makes the world go round, but hatred can make it spin so fast that the machine flies apart and wrecks everything.

And that hate is bolstered by cocksure self-righteousness. Carrie Nation was a young abolitionist before she started smashing bars in the war on demon rum. She called herself “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what God doesn’t like.” She knew what God doesn’t like. She was just like our opponents who truly believe they are “on the right side of history.”

So, you see, white people have a history of compulsion to throw themselves into virtuous reform. Nobody else does it the way we do. Can you think of a mass movement by people of any other race, for the uplift of people of a different race — or tribe or religion? I can’t. Is there a Hindu campaign in India for fair play for India’s Muslims? Is there a movement in China to protect the rights of the Uighurs in Xinjian? Were the Tutsis calling for equal rights for the Hutu? No. They were macheting each other to death. Only white people launch fanatic mass movements in the name of completely alien peoples.

And, of course, the great tragedy is that all this frenzy vents its venom on other white people. Bad white people are the problem, and bad white people have to be destroyed. This may seem new, but it’s not.

Today, there are three kinds of white Americans. First, there are the people who believe — or at least think they believe — the suicidal baloney: Diversity is strength, races are equal, whites are awful.

Then, there’s our group: We haven’t fallen for any of this, and are amazed that anyone can. And third, there’s everyone else. They go from near-zombies to people who can see that something is terribly wrong, but they’re not sure what. Those people come our way all the time.

But, back to the first group. They are the ones who started the craziness and, alas, they have a lot of power. What drives them to despise their own people?

First, they are like the abolitionists. They thrive on righteous indignation. They love the thrill of moral superiority. One of the most interesting things I learned from a book called Pathological Altruism is that the feeling of moral superiority stimulates the basal ganglia, the same way narcotic drugs stimulate that part of the brain.

I wish this were widely known. It would make such good mockery. Someone needs to say these lefties, “You realize, you’re an addict, don’t you? You can’t live without the constant high of righteous indignation. Whenever you glory in telling yourself how superior you are, your basal ganglia are pumping out dopamine, just like a junkie with a needle in his arm.”

We may be convinced we are right, but we have nothing like the exhibitionist self-righteousness of the typical lefty. We understand limits. We understand human nature. We don’t fall for crack-brained, self-glorifying utopian schemes.

You could almost define white people as an excitable subspecies of Homo Sapiens with a special sensitivity to psychological stimulation of the basal ganglia.

This craving for virtue drives all the fads that make lefties feel righteous. They’re going to save the whales, stamp out poverty, protect the ozone layer, stop exhaling carbon dioxide, worship George Floyd, spit on Robert E. Lee, wear three masks during Covid, and they truly believe they are the 21st-century equivalent of the “bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what God doesn’t like.”

Again, this moral exaltation is a specialty of white people. Non-whites raise hell for their particular interests, not for larger causes and certainly not for anybody else. How many blacks or Hispanics worry about the ozone layer or the spotted owl? As for global warming, Third-World countries care about it only if it means whitey is going to write them a check.

Non-whites never make a fetish out of opposing their own people. Look what happens to the occasional black who points out that blacks are responsible for their own problems. After Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas must be the most hated man in America. Only white people have ever built up a huge head of steam for the idea that their own people are no good.

Why do they choose their own people? It’s a kind of inverted white supremacy. There’s no liberal thrill in thinking you’re better than blacks or Hispanics. White people have to aim high if they are going to be truly superior. The most thrilling of all thrills is to think you can look down on tall, handsome, blond German Nazis! You’ve got to be flying high to be able to spit on them.

To take inverted white supremacy even further, it’s incredible narcissism to think that white people don’t even have to lift a finger to oppress a whole race of people. White silence is violence. All it takes is a few impure thoughts in big white brains for black people to start shooting each other. White people are so cosmically powerful, they can wreck the lives of millions of people without even trying. Nutty whites seem to have no idea that this reduces their beloved non-whites to the significance of insects.

There is also a colossal intellectual arrogance in being an anti-racist. Wise progressives understand things beyond the grasp of the rest of us — beyond the grasp of anyone who ever lived. They have discovered “systemic” racism, “colorblind” racism, “unconscious bias,” and “white privilege.” It takes special gifts to detect and fight these sinister forces, and the gifted ones love to despise white rubes who make the laughable mistake of saying, “I just try to treat everyone fairly.”

What ignoramuses those white people are! They are the same boobs who don’t realize that race is a social construct. So not only are anti-racists virtuous, they’re the smartest people who ever lived. Did Plato or Kant or Newton understand systemic racism? No. But progressives do. And anyone who disagrees is both immoral and an idiot. What a splendid feeling!

Of course, a lot of people just go along with the rubbish because most people always just go along. The trouble is, the people most likely to go along are the ones with influential jobs. They went to college where they swallowed gallons of fashionable nonsense. Going to college makes people believe they can think for themselves, while ensuring they will never have an unfashionable thought in their lives. College graduates love to parrot the latest nonsense on subjects about which they know nothing.

They are smart enough to have figured out what you have to say to get ahead, but as they move up the ladder, many of them are seeing their careers wrecked by anti-white chief diversity officers. They don’t dare complain, but some of those people are coming our way.

What about the white people in between, who don’t groan under the burden of a college education? They are the ones who suffer the most. How many hard-working white fathers take second jobs so they can send their children to college, only for the daughters they love to come back home and tell Daddy that he has benefitted all his life from ruthless white privilege and that he’s unconsciously propping up the cis-hetero-white-supremacist patriarchy? These must be some of the most agonizing, embittering conversations in the history of the world.

END

Russians have strong grievances against West and North Germans as well as West Slavs, grievances which they tend to interpret in religious terms, constantly invoking the Great Schism and the Northern Crusades. Furthermore, it seems to me that they do not distinguish the Latins – whom they know poorly or not at all – from the West Slavs and West and North Germans, whom they know well.

The Last Crusade, Part I

Dmitry Orlov
C l u b  O r l o v | ideas to blow your mind
December 20, 2022 at 15:38 | Has readers’ comments | For subscribers only | Here or here 
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December 21, 2022 before 10:25 | Has readers’ comments | For everybody | Here

Crusades

There is a marked divergence of opinion on ways to characterize the military action currently unfolding in what remains of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: is it a Russian special military operation to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukraine, or is it an unprovoked Russian invasion leading up to World War III, a nuclear exchange and the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAKI for short)? Perhaps it’s a little of each; or perhaps it's none of the above...

And is Russia winning or is the Ukraine losing? On the one hand, Russia just officially expanded its sovereign territory by a hundred thousand square kilometers and a few million citizens and has launched on a massive building spree, fixing up its new territories, which are a bit run down after decades of late Soviet and post-Soviet neglect followed by nine years of Ukrainian shelling. That would indicate that Russia is winning.

On the other hand, the US just promised to give the Ukrainians some Patriot air defense batteries (or not; details vary). Are these the same Patriot batteries that failed so embarrassingly over Saudi Arabia when they couldn’t shoot down ancient Soviet SCUD missiles fired by the Yemenis? And are these the same Patriot batteries whose operators, in Poland, recently failed to see incoming Ukrainian missiles (which were also of venerable Soviet vintage) and only learned of them later from news reports? Never mind that! They cost $1 billion per launcher and $3 million per rocket, so they must be good for Raytheon, and what’s good for Raytheon is good for America, or something like that. So what if they don’t stand a chance against any of the Russian state-of-the-art weapons? Don’t be negative!

As arguments flew back and forth, Henry Kissinger, the grizzled veteran of Western geopolitics, poked his head out of the dinosaur egg in which he has been hiding for the past 70 million years and opined that the Ukrainian conflict has to be concluded at the negotiating table. Never mind that everything he proposed was pure twaddle and a nonstarter; what’s important is that for him to offer this opinion at this time his delicately quivering geopolitical nose hairs must have told him that the US is not going to prevail in this conflict no matter what, and so it’s time for it to stop fighting and to start talking. Clearly, it made no difference at all to anyone, least of all the Ukrainian regime, whether the Ukraine itself would succeed or fail—it was slated to fail since at least the Orange Revolution of 2004, or, rather, to be sacrificed on the altar of US hegemony by being thrown at Russia.

If we ignore all that there is fit to ignore in Kissinger’s words of infinite wisdom, all that remains is that the Ukrainian conflict “has to be concluded” and that it has to be concluded “at the negotiating table.” But then it turns out that these two nuggets of deep thought are also highly debatable. First, why would Russia rush to conclude the conflict? It has established a favorable holding pattern and escalation dominance along all possible parameters: military, economic, political and cultural. And second, who is there for Russia to negotiate with? The same people who had promised that NATO wouldn’t expand a single inch to the east when Russia allowed Germany to reunify? Well, then, back it up, and then we’ll talk!

Militarily, Russia has established defensible boundaries within the former Ukraine and is slowly advancing towards the borders of what it now considers its own sovereign territory. It has established pipelines for both men and weapons that can allow it to sustain several Ukraine-sized conflicts simultaneously virtually ad infinitum. It can inflict pinpoint damage to Ukraine’s energy supply and other infrastructure at will and without risk to itself, gradually reducing the Ukraine’s ability to sustain any sort of military campaign and eventually leading to full demilitarization (no industry—no war-making potential) and denazification (all Nazis either dead or run off to Europe or America). Meanwhile, the West’s ability and willingness to continue supplying the Ukrainian military with weapons (two-thirds of which go missing along the way because of corruption) are dwindling. And then there are Russia’s new toys: the newest generation of its strategic weapons, against which the US has no countermeasures, is entering deployment, and while Russia’s no nuclear first strike doctrine remains in place, there is an understanding that it could be reviewed if the situation warrants: “Children, behave!”

Economically, Russia’s economy took a 2.5% hit over the course of 2022, but most of that was during the first two quarters, with steady recovery after that. With many of its international competitors having impolitely excused themselves because of sanctions, Russia’s domestic industry, from automotive to airspace to shipbuilding, is set to blossom. Energy exports, which are quite important for filling the federal coffers, have been redirected away from the hostile nations of the EU and the G7 and toward the friendly nations of Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Export volumes have remained steady but revenues have improved due to higher prices, allowing Russia to maintain a very low debt to GDP ratio and a healthy trade surplus and to invest heavily in infrastructure projects without going into debt. With the planet heading into the next ice age (it is too early to tell whether this will be a mini ice age lasting a century or a full-on one lasting a hundred thousand years) Russia stands to benefit greatly from its huge hydrocarbon reserves and its healthy nuclear industry.

Politically, Russia is now finally in a position to get over the hangover of late-Soviet lassitude, the dissipation and corruption of the 1990s and the consumerist abandon of the 2000s and to get back to its normal communalist self of all for one and one for all. It is rapidly rediscovering its thousand-year history of heroically defending Motherland on the field of battle. The demons of emasculation and of feminism are being exorcised; the men are once again warriors and the women keepers of the family hearth. For the men, there are two honorable options—victory and death, both heroic—and several dishonorable ones: cowardice, treason… Russia’s national character is determined by Russia’s nature: the vast, inhospitable landscape, the huge and vulnerable border, the multitude of tribes, distinct yet combined in fractal ways—but what keeps it in good running order is a periodic bout of war. Normally, some would-be world hegemon, be it Pope Urban II or Genghis Khan or Hitler or Napoleon or (don’t laugh!) Joe Biden, picks a fight with Russia, sometimes as the very last thing he does.

Socially, ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917 (and in St. Petersburg, Moscow and several of the larger provincial towns since well before then) Russia has tilted toward the West. Russia was the first country to introduce equal rights for women and minorities. Over the course of the 20th century, Russia liberalized laws for divorce and remarriage and eventually decriminalized homosexuality and abortion. Along the way, Russia embraced many modernist and post-modernist trends, in some cases going too far too fast, then recoiling in horror. And, perhaps worst of all, Russia became infected with that most pernicious Western ideology, Marxism. Marx offered a valid criticism of capitalism as it existed at the time, but beyond that his theorizing is perhaps the most glaring example of large-scale intellectual failure that ever was.

Meanwhile, in the West the trend toward individual rights went to an extreme, not only tolerating but condoning and celebrating homosexuality and other types aberrant (non-reproductive) sexual behavior, and now insisting on chemical and surgical castration of children. A separate but related transhumanist tangent seeks to erase the boundary between man and machine. The West is also moving in the direction of legalizing pedophilia; euthanasia is already legal in many countries and actively promoted as a solution to old-age poverty in Canada. All that remains after that is the legalization of cannibalism and human sacrifice. What has been lost among all of these individual rights is the right of communities to flog some sense into such individuals.

In a sense, the legalization of cannibalism would make a difference in degree, not in kind. During World War II the Nazis locked up Russian children in concentration camps and bled them to death to provide transfusions to wounded German soldiers. To this day privileged geriatrics in the US and Britain live to be obscenely old by being secretly transfused with the blood of children. And the steady and plentiful flow of mortally wounded Ukrainian soldiers provides an ample resource of donor organs to clinics in Europe and in Israel. These sorts of practices are part and parcel for Western humanism.

As these developments have become more extreme, the demands that such “Western values” be universally accepted have grown more strident and overbearing—and increasingly offensive to the 85% of the world’s population, both inside and outside the West, which is socially conservative. In much of the world, premarital and extramarital sex are both crimes and those born out-of-wedlock are still called “bastards”, marriage is still “’til death do us part,” respect for one’s elders is unconditional, and “death before dishonor” is the unwritten law. These are all evolved universals of human culture, and any deviation from them is temporary and results in biological extinction. This lesson has been formalized in Romans 6:32: “For the wages of sin is death.” But death is sometimes slow in coming and people tend to grow impatient waiting for the paint of the writing on the wall to dry and take matters into their own hands.

This is where Russia is playing a key role: it has thrown down the gauntlet to the collective West, in essence telling it that it can become as degenerate as it wants to, but that it has no right to impose its strange and twisted new rules on anyone else. In the process, Russia has become the world’s champion and defender of conservative society and culture. Certain other countries, especially Islamic ones, have been equally unyielding; for instance, Indonesia has just criminalized adultery: don’t go to Bali without your lawfully wedded opposite-sex spouse, or you may get locked up! But the Islamic approach lacks universality, being based on what is defined as “haram” within Islam, whereas Russia’s claim is to universal sovereignty and freedom from Western cultural oppression.

Clearly, this is not a conflict over the Ukraine, which is only the latest, and perhaps the last, pawn in a much larger game. It certainly started well before February 22, 2022, when Russia announced the start of its special operation to demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine. Nor did it start on February 22, 2014, when the Ukraine’s president Yanukovych was forced to flee the Ukraine to Russia as a result of a violent, illegal coup instigated and encouraged by the US State Department. By then, as Victoria Nuland bragged at the time, the US had already spent $5 billion to destabilize the Ukraine politically and turn it into an anti-Russia. It is impossible to pinpoint the date, but the process started perhaps as early as 1945, when Ukrainian Nazis, along with various other Nazis, were whisked away and given refuge and support in the US and in Canada.

An argument can be made that Russia’s conflict with the West extends back in history farther than the eye can see, with minor interruptions. There was a brief interbellum between Victory Day, May 9, 1945, and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946—less than a year! Another, longer interbellum of sorts existed after the Soviet Union was (illegally) dissolved by Yeltsin and his henchmen at Belovezhskaya Pushcha on December 8, 1991 (with president George Bush senior the first to be informed of this fact via a phone call from Yeltsin) and the beginning of the Global War of Terror, commenced with much pomp and circumstance on September 11, 2001 by knocking down three heavily overinsured New York skyscrapers using two Boeing jets.

It is also unclear how far into the future we need to look in order to understand how the current phase of the conflict might be concluded. Certainly, Kissinger’s suggestion that it can be simply negotiated away is nothing if not bogus, especially coming on the heels of former Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s revelation that the Minsk Agreements between Kiev and Donetsk/Lugansk were just a ploy to buy Kiev time to regroup and rearm so as to better be able to attack Donetsk and Lugansk. Why would Russia wish to negotiate if the stated purpose of the negotiation is as a delaying tactic—and a failed one, at that, since the Russians saw through the ruse and used the intervening eight years to… regroup and rearm so as to better demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine when the time came.

Clearly, the time frame in question should extend well beyond the point in time at which Eastern Ukraine once again becomes part of Russia (well, some of it already has!) while the rest of it is turned into a mostly harmless, largely depopulated barren wasteland strewn with the rotting corpses of Polish mercenaries and patrolled by Russian battlefield robots. There is something more important going on, which is that the US has become hungry and must eat somebody right away or its financial house of cards will collapse.

The US is constitutionally incapable of living within its means, but with the petrodollar wealth pump no longer working and much of the rest of the world already bled dry by vampire capitalism, what is left for the US to eat? Why, the European Union, of course! The basis of European prosperity has been the steady of supply of relatively cheap energy from Russia, and by cutting it off the US has rendered Europe’s economy nonfunctional and ready to be plundered at leisure. Now, should Russia want to interfere with this process? Of course not! If the collective West wishes to gnaw off its own limbs, why would that be a problem for Russia? “Never interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake; it's bad manners,” said Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

If we look back far enough, we see that the very first Drang nach Osten was instigated by Pope Urban II on November 27, 1095, opening the door to the Crusades by calling all Christians in Europe to war against Muslims in order to reclaim the Holy Land, with a cry of “Deus vult!” or “God wills it!” That was pretty much just a pompous way for him to say “I am hungry! Bring me somebody to eat!” Sure enough, in 1147 the Germans attacked the Slavs, who were nowhere near the Holy Land but must have seemed tasty at the time, and they kept attacking them for over two centuries!

The Swedes had kept at it until Peter the Great defeated them at Poltava (which is now in the Ukraine) on June 27, 1709. They’ve been quiet as mice for the past three centuries, but now they are making noises about joining NATO (the current Crusader alliance) and so it may be time to send them back to 1709 using some rockets, ridding them of such extravagances as electricity, central heating, running water and automotive transportation. As of this writing, there is still time for the Swedes to make up their minds. This also goes for the Finns, who over the centuries have been conditioned to do whatever the Swedes tell them to do, except slowly.

That’s six centuries of on and off crusades! There are some monasteries in Russia that have been looted and burned to the ground by these rampaging “Christians” four or five times. And then Napoleon attacked a hundred years later, and Hitler a little over a century after that… and now this… But we don’t need to gaze that far into the past to predict with reasonable certainty that this near-millennium of Western crusades is at its end. To do that, we only need to go back as far as September 11, 2001 and the launch of the Global War of Terror. By now, every single ploy and gambit the US has tried in this war has failed, with the Ukraine as its last stand. There is very little knowledge or understanding of these failures in the West, where the mass media is expert at hiding everything that doesn’t fit the winning narrative.

Next week, we’ll review the developments of the past ten years. This is but a blink of an eye in the sweep of history, but sometimes collapse occurs quite suddenly, and we should feel privileged to bear witness to such a momentous series of events.

Dmitry Orlov

source: Club Orlov via Jacob's ladder

The Battle on the Ice, 1242 - Teutonic Knights vs. Alexander Nevsky

The Last Crusade, Part II

Dmitry Orlov
C l u b  O r l o v | ideas to blow your mind
December 30, 2022 at 19:58 | Has readers’ comments | For subscribers only | Here or here 
R é s e a u  I n t e r n a t i o n a l
January 01, 2023 before 09:41 | Has readers’ comments | For everybody | Here

Battle on the Ice

We are, most of us unwittingly, bearing witness to a momentous development: the end of the thousand-year Drang nach Osten—the relentless eastward march of the reanimated corpse of the Western Roman Empire, with the Pope as its symbolic head and Vatican as its symbolic capital—known as the Crusades. Of these, the Southern Crusades are far better known in the West, while the Northern Crusades, launched in 1147, are far less widely known. But they were kept going the longest—until February 22, 2022—because, unlike China, India and just about every other non-Western country, Russia has never surrendered to anyone.

The gauntlet was thrown down in 1252, when Alexander Nevsky accepted an official document, called yarlyk, from Khan Batyj of the Golden Horde (part of the Mongolian Empire), allowing him to reign as the Grand Prince of Kiev (and thus the ruler of all of Russia), rather than ask for a blessing from the Pope in Rome, as was required of all Western kings. To these Western potentates, their claim to be ordained by God was based on approval by His head office at the Vatican; to the Russians, the Pope was just some heretic usurper. The religious distinction played itself out over time, but the notion that there is an exclusive club of Western nations who deserve to wield authority over the rest of the world has remained to this day.

There followed a series of onslaughts on Russia spanning many centuries, all stemming from the same simple principle: that which the West cannot control must be destroyed. The Germans and the Swedes kept on attacking it until 1709. Then the French attacked again in 1812; and then the Germans in 1941. The Americans were poised to attack in March of 2022, via their Ukrainian/NATO proxies, but were preempted by Russia's Special Military Operation. Thus, the last Crusade has been aborted and further attempts seem unlikely, since, at this point, there is no question of destroying that which the West cannot control, and not just Russia but also much of the rest of the world. Even tiny North Korea can stand up to the collective West and wag a finger in its face. The thousand-year show is nearly over.

Over the previous centuries, every time after Russia expelled yet another crusader, some other Western nations would take the lead and attempt to march on Moscow: it was the Germans (as the Teutonic Knights), then the Swedes, the Poles, then some more Swedes, then the French under Napoleon, then the Germans under Hitler, and now the Americans (disguised as some hapless, clueless Ukrainians) under Biden. (Yes, the last act of this drama is most definitely a farce.) But who could possibly rise up as the next crusader du jour? Nobody! There isn't anyone left in the West to continue the project.

There is a curious 100% correlation between the foreign languages the Russians choose to study and the Western capitals they then come to occupy. The Russians studied French—and Russian cavalry rode into Paris; they studied German—and Russian tanks rumbled into Berlin. And now the Russians are all studying English, starting with the second grade. Therefore, we should expect some Russian fireworks over Washington (London is only capable of some minor dirty tricks by now). This correlation is just something to watch out for—in the future.

But we are already in a position to review the history of this the last and final crusade, which is currently nearing its end. To do so, we need to rewind back to 1998, 24 years ago. The Russian economy lay in ruins, the first Chechen War was essentially lost and the West was busy looting what was left of the Soviet economy. Separatist sentiments were rife and the country could have fallen apart at any moment, fulfilling the age-old Western dream of erasing Russia from the political map. But the West couldn't wait and decided to deal Russia a coup de grace by starting the Second Chechen war.

And then something went horribly wrong: instead of drunk president Yeltsin, Putin came to power and actually won the Second Chechen war. Putin's appearance on the world scene had come as a complete surprise to the Western deep state, which then realized that it needed a whole new plan to destroy Russia for sure this time: a new, globalist Drang nach Osten. The main goal of this new onslaught was the continued complete domination by the US of the entire world, assured by dismembering, engulfing and devouring its main geopolitical opponent, Russia. Russia was to be simultaneously attacked from the west (via the Ukraine), the south (via the Caucasus) and the east (via Afghanistan and Central Asia). Russia's trade in oil and natural gas was to be disrupted, its economic connections to the world economy severed, and its politics disrupted by internal protests.

By September 11, 2001 the new plan was ready and launched in grand style by knocking down three New York skyscrapers using two Boeing passenger jets—a sort of latter-day miracle of loaves and fishes that left those hampered by knowing a little too much arithmetic at a distinct disadvantage. This gave the US a carte blanche for suspending civil liberties at home and for inserting its forces anywhere abroad as part of its Global War of Terror, which was, given the engineered nature of the 9/11 event, a sham on top of another sham.

Step one was to prepare a Central Asian incursion by invading Afghanistan in 2001. That effort went famously badly. There were two failed coup attempts—one in Turkmenistan in 2002 and another in Kyrgyzstan in 2005—both thwarted by Russia's special services. The Americans lingered in Afghanistan for an interminable 20 years, having been sidetracked into profiting greatly from the heroin trade, but once American drug addicts started switching to the much more cost-effective Chinese-made fentanyl there was no reason to continue the Afghani heroin business. The last parting present was the attempted coup in Kazakhstan in January of 2022, which was quelled by Russian troops invited by Kazakhstan's president. Thus ended the effort to destroy Russia via Central Asia.

Step two was to prepare a terrorist incursion via the Caucasus. The government of Georgia was overthrown in 2003 and the US, with Israeli assistance, started training the Georgian military. An effort was made to organize yet another round of Chechen separatist mania, with an infusion of Islamic fundamentalists via Georgia's Pankisi gorge. This could have posed a problem for Russia—or not, we'll never know for sure, because on August 8, 2008 Georgia's psychologically unstable president Saakashvili jumped the gun and started shelling Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia. That region was arbitrarily lumped into Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic by the Bolsheviks and then got stuck there after the Soviet Union disintegrated, similarly to what happened to the Donbass in the Ukraine. Russia responded by flushing the Georgian military out of the area and generally defanging it. What Saakashvili did, in essence, was trade a Georgian tactical defeat for a Russian strategic victory. Georgia has remained defanged ever since, putting the southern incursion plan in limbo.

Step three was by far the most successful. The Orange Revolution in Kiev in 2004 was followed up by various other revolutions and coups, culminating with the violent Maidan revolution in the spring of 2014. Inspired by Zbigniew Brzezinski's Russophobic pipe dreams, the US pinned great hopes on the Ukraine and took a no-expense-spared approach to turning it into a sort of anti-Russia. This effort has so far led to Russia expanding by five new regions (Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) while turning the Ukraine into a world class parasite, flooding Europe with eight million migrants and sucking in a hundred billion dollars in aid (used to feather a great many oligarchic nests) and weapons (which are either destroyed at the eastern front or used to flood the international black market). The Ukraine is now a zombie failed state, its economy more than halved, its infrastructure wrecked, its society savaged and its government by far the most corrupt on the whole planet. Although this part of the plan to destroy Russia has gained the most traction, its chances of allowing the US to dismember, engulf and devour Russia are still nil.

Meanwhile, a bad harvest in Russia in 2010 provided what could have been a major strategic windfall in what became known as the Arab Spring. Grain price increases in African and Middle Eastern countries which had subsisted largely on Russian grain imports caused major misery there. As a result, social upheaval, sometimes culminating in government overthrow and civil war, gripped Tunis, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrein, Algiers, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Djibouti and Western Sahara.

This situation allowed the US to hatch an entirely new plan for attacking Russia from the south by playing the Islamic radicalism card yet again. It had failed famously in Afghanistan and in Chechnya, and so, following typical US government logic, why not use it again? Radicalized Islamic youth from these various distressed countries were organized into ISIS, a.k.a. the Caliphate or the Islamic State, which was then infused into Iraq, Syria and Libya, provided with weapons , training and lavish media support with Hollywood-style propaganda videos of beheadings of infidels wearing traditional American orange jumpsuits. The execution was not without its comedic elements: at one point the Pentagon ISIS and the State Department ISIS went to war against each other, in what must have been the world's first instance of interdepartmental terrorism.

Syria became the main focal point. The plan was to establish the Islamic State in Syria, then have it spread to Turkey by orchestrating a government overthrow there, and then it would, in theory, be an easy matter to have it spread further north into Russia's Turkic-speaking Moslem regions. Russia neutralized this plan in two steps. First, in 2015 it introduced its forces into Syria and proceeded to bomb ISIS out of existence, allowing the Syrian government to reestablish its authority over much of the country. Second, in 2016, it prevented a US-organized overthrow of the Turkish government and the assassination of Turkey's president Erdoǧan by warning him of the impending action. Erdoǧan then took the opportunity to thoroughly clean house, purging the Turkish government and society of US influence, while strengthening its ties with Putin, to whom he now owes his life. An important gesture in this regard was Turkey's purchase of Russia's modern S-400 air defense system—in spite of the fact that this caused the Washingtonians to cough up blood. To punish Turkey for such disobedience (NATO members are only supposed to purchase US-made weapons) the Washingtonians removed Turkey from its bug-riddled, overpriced and strategically useless F-35 fighter jet program.

This political chasm was recently deepened by the NATO effort to absorb Sweden and Finland, just to prove that NATO can expand anywhere it damn well pleases. Doing so would violate the terms Treaty of Paris of 1947, by which Finland must remain militarily neutral, and automatically return Finland to a state of war with Russia, giving it not just a reason to attac Finland at will but a legal excuse for doing so, but who in Washington has time to look into such details? However, this plan ran into a snag when Turkey refused to ratify this expansion because, you see, Sweden gives asylum to Kurdish terrorists, and Finland won't join if Sweden can't. As a final touch, Erdoǧan (commander of NATO's second-largest army) and president Assad of Syria (targeted for overthrow and violent death by every US administration since Clinton) decided to switch from being enemies to cooperating. Their respective defense ministers just held a successful meeting—in Moscow, of course.

America's other efforts to destabilize and weaken Russia by brewing up trouble in the Caucasus have similarly failed. A US-engineered color revolution in Armenia succeeded in installing the Soros-trained Nikol Pashinyan as leader. But then a few things happened that largely negated this political gain. The guarantor of Armenian sovereignty is Russia; without its support, the small, weak, landlocked country of Armenia would be swallowed up by Turkey and Azerbaijan, who would then joyfully merge into a Turkic-speaking "Turkeybajian" and perhaps do a replay of the Armenian genocide.

To create a teachable moment for this fact, in 2020 Azerbaijan swallowed up Nagorno-Karabakh, a province disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan but occupied by Armenia since shortly after the dissolution of the USSR. To stop the fighting and protect the Armenian population of this region, Russia had to introduce its peacekeepers. An important factoid about Nagorno-Karabakh is that it is Russian imperial territory: Russia got it from Persia via the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and it has been populated by Armenians, Azeris and Russians ever since, with Russian as the definite lingua franca. Thus, the current situation, with Russian troops keeping it peaceful, can be viewed as a partial reversion to norm.

Another important factoid about Nagorno-Karabakh is that it provides a land corridor from Russia, via Azerbaijan, to Iran, adding another, shorter route from Moscow to Iran, and from there the Arabian sea and the Indian Ocean (in addition to the longer one through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan). This north-south corridor provides Russia with access to world trade that neatly circumvents all of the major Western-controlled chokepoints—the Kattegat at the mouth of the Baltic Sea, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles between the Black sea and the Mediterranean, Strait of Gibraltar at the mouth of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.

But Yerevan, Armenia's capital, is home to the largest US embassy in the entire region, and the Americans wouldn't just give up like that. And so they sent Nancy Pelosy, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, on a quick visit there at the tail end of her various other pointless travels. Sure enough, a few days later there was a mini-demonstration in Yerevan, with people waving American flags and demanding that Armenia break with Russia. Stuffing Nancy into a gun and firing it in the general direction of the Kremlin would have been just as effective.

Speaking of Western-controlled chokepoints, another major one is the Strait of Malacca which connects the Indian ocean, via the Andaman Sea, to the China Sea, and through which passes much of China's trade with the world and a lot of the oil that powers the Chinese economy. Not content to just flail miserably at Russia, the US has also made various efforts to make trouble for China by creating tensions between China and its southern neighbors. To this end, it has been attempting to paint China as a threat to them and holding "freedom of navigation" exercises next to Spratly Islands which China has claimed for itself and has developed into formidable fortresses. All of these efforts were negated by a joint Russian-Chinese strategic victory in Myanmar in 2021.

The Myanmar story is long and twisted, but the short of it is that with Chinese and Russian support, Aung San Suu Kyi (British passport holder, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Western plant) was booted from power and replaced by Min Aung Hlaing, commander of the armed forces, all done in strict adherence to the terms of the constitution of 2008, according to which the army is its guarantor. As a result of this rather limited action, another north-south transport corridor has been unblocked. This one will run through Myanmar, linking China directly to the Indian Ocean, circumventing the chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca. Thus, America's glaring foreign policy failures are by no means limited to its efforts to contain and weaken Russia; its efforts to contain and weaken China are no less spectacular. But I digress.

Back to the topic of the final Crusade, with all of the other venues for disrupting Russia foreclosed, all that remains is the traditional one for Crusades: Russia's western front. On this front, Russia is successfully demilitarizing NATO (having already largely demilitarized the Ukraine by destroying both its army and its Soviet-era armaments) and also successfully denazifying the Ukraine by killing scores of Ukrainian Nazis (and some foreign mercenaries). The kill ratio between Russian and Ukrainian forces is now nearing 1:30 in favor of the Russians: a turkey shoot.

The Russians have recently figured out how to reliably shoot down NATO-provided rockets and how to sneak their rockets past NATO air defense systems. Most interestingly, the Russians now also know how to take out NATO air defense systems by first launching a slow-flying decoy in their general vicinity, pinpointing their location when they shoot it down, and finally taking them out with a precision strike using something they can't intercept—something hypersonic, perhaps. Once the Ukraine is free of all air defense systems, Russia will finally have a free hand in using its air force to precision-bomb the Ukrainian military completely out of existence, as it has done with ISIS in Syria.

Nobody knows quite how long this is all going to take; as I described in a previous article, the Russians are not in too big a hurry. But we can be sure that the American foreign policy and defense establishments are hard at work on yet another plan or two. The most obvious (and stupid) one is to press Poland into service once the Ukraine is finished. To this end, Poland has just announced that it intends to double the size of its armed forces to a quarter of a million men—because the master told them to, their leaders decline to add.

There are just three problems with this plan. First, the Poles all have EU passports and have the option of running for the nearest border to avoid being drafted. Second, although the Poles may be almost as brainwashed as the Ukrainians as far as hating Russia, the Polish economy has been doing quite nicely, especially compared to the rest of Europe, and they just aren't desperate enough to throw all of their young men at the Russian army. Third, it takes energy to attack something as large as Russia, but the collective West is already experiencing energy hunger, which will only get more extreme over time. I will write about the coming energy hunger next.

It's hard to make predictions especially about the future, but I am convinced that there will be no more Dränge nach Osten, or Marches futiles sur Moscou, or Northern Crusades, or other Western efforts to seriously mess with Russia. After all, the more the Westerners try to mess with Russia, the colder and hungrier they will become. But will they ever learn?

Dmitry Orlov

source: Club Orlov via Jacob's Ladder

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Excerpts from the Democrat-to-English dictionary: updated for 2023
Eric Utter • American Thinker • December 26, 2022

Ableism: the idea that ability, competence, achievement, and merit are somehow better than their opposites. A disgusting remnant of a White, patriarchal society that must be eviscerated with all due haste.

Bigotry: opposition to any belief or opinion held by a “progressive.”

Conservatism: an existential threat to our democracy, practiced by bad people. Must not be tolerated.

Diversity: the lifeblood of our democracy, enriching all of us.

Dr. Fauci: a God-like figure who actually exists, and selflessly serves humanity in the blessed name of “science.” Hallowed be His name and peace be upon Him forever and ever. Amen.

Extremist: someone who disagrees with a Democrat.

Fairness: when progressive ideas and/or candidates carry the day. (Antonym, unfairness: when conservative ideas and/or candidates carry the day.)

Far-right: this term is rightfully applied to any individuals or groups who oppose Democratic/woke policies and talking points.

Fascist: someone who disagrees with a Democrat.

God: a mythical figure, created by conservatives to impose their arbitrary version of morality on sexual minorities and non-conformists.

Heterosexual: a boring, old, unhip, and often intolerant group of individuals that cling to outmoded ideas of sexual relationships and complementarity.

Illegal aliens (more properly called “undocumented immigrant”): downtrodden and oppressed, these people must be allowed free access into our country and the freedom to go wherever they like, in any quantity, without restraint. They bring much needed diversity and skill sets to our land.

Invasive species: a dire threat to our land, whose spread must be stopped at all costs. These insidious invaders often overwhelm and supplant indigenous species.

Justice: when Democrats prevail. (Antonym, injustice: when conservatives prevail.)

LGBTQIA+: a diverse and loving community of tolerant individuals who have been the victims of bigotry and injustice in this country due to systemic homophobia and misogyny.

Man: though there is no currently agreed on definition for this amorphous term, all can agree that testosterone-fueled toxic masculinity — and the patriarchy — are very bad things indeed. 

Mentally-challenged individual: someone who disagrees with a Democrat.

Misinformation: any report, data, or information, regardless of veracity and legitimacy, that does not confirm/affirm Democrats’ talking points and advance their agenda.

Pride!: what everyone who isn’t heterosexual should have… and should shove in heterosexuals faces at every opportunity.

Queer: another term for homosexual. Synonymous with Pride!.

Riot: a mostly peaceful demonstration by the oppressed against their oppressors. (As opposed to an “insurrection,” which is when conservatives and patriots question their rightful rulers.)

Terrorist: someone who disagrees with a Democrat.

Threat to our democracy: someone who disagrees with a Democrat.

Tolerance: the highest virtue, one that affords respect to all of us, regardless of our differences.

Uniparty: used to describe the bipartisanship and unity to which we all aspire. Achieved when Republicans cave to our demands. (Which, fortunately, is nearly always.)

Woman: there is no currently agreed on definition for this amorphous term.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.

Readers’ comments here.

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