The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[W. Niederhut]

Alexei Navalny sentenced to nine years in the Gulag-- after surviving a KGB assassination attempt by poisoning.

Remember when Trump insisted that any investigation of Navalny's poisoning needed to be conducted by Russia?

Then, after doctors in Germany reported that Navalny had been poisoned, Trump said that he had doubts about the medical report?

Can't make this stuff up.

https://www.axios.com/putin-critic-alexei-navalny-sentenced-to-nine-years-in-prison-0b682bee-4ee3-42cf-b292-04ac4e35e700.html

[Bill Fite]

44 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Alexei Navalny sentenced to nine years in the Gulag-- after surviving a KGB assassination attempt by poisoning.

Remember when Trump insisted that any investigation of Navalny's poisoning needed to be conducted by Russia?

 

yep.... remember this?

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4485932/user-clip-bush-trusts-putin

Edited March 22, 2022 by Bill Fite

[Douglas Caddy]

Today's selection from When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut. The use of drugs in the last days of World War II: "In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the poopoo leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany's production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. 'An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane,' a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war. "The German writer Heinrich Boll wrote letters to his family from the front asking them to send him additional doses: 'It's hard here,' he wrote to his parents on November 9, 1939, 'and I hope you understand if I can only write you every two or three days. Today I'm doing so chiefly to ask for more Pervitin ... I love you, Hein.' On May 20, 1940, he wrote them a long, impassioned letter that ended with the same request: 'Can you get hold of a bit more Pervitin for me, so I can have some in reserve?' Two months later, his parents received a single scraggly line: 'If at all possible, please mail me more Pervitin.' Amphetamines fuelled the unrelenting German Blitzkrieg and many soldiers suffered psychotic attacks as they felt the bitter tablets dissolve on their tongues. The Reich leadership, however, tasted something very different when the lightning war was extinguished by the firestorms of the Allied bombers, when the Russian winter froze the caterpillar tracks of their tanks and the Führer ordered everything of value within the Reich destroyed to leave nothing but scorched earth for the invading troops. Faced with utter defeat, staggered by the new horror they had called down upon the world, they chose a quick escape, biting down on cyanide capsules and choking to death on the sweet scent of almonds that the poison gives off. "A wave of suicides swept through Germany in the final months of the war. In April 1945 alone, three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin. The inhabitants of the small town of Demmin, to the north of the capital, some three hours away, fell prey to collective panic when the retreating German troops destroyed the bridges leading west, leaving them stranded on their peninsula, surrounded by three rivers and defenceless before the dreaded onslaught of the Red Army. Hundreds of men, women and children swallowing it: 'Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,' said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life. The liquid form of the poison, known in Germany as Blausäure or blue acid, is highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celsius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which not everyone can distinguish, as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity. This evolutionary caprice makes it likely that a significant number of the Jews murdered with Zyklon B in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Mauthausen did not even notice the scent of cyanide filling the gas chambers, while others died smelling the same fragrance inhaled by the men who had organized their extermination as they bit down on their suicide capsules."   author: Benjamín Labatut   title: When We Cease to Understand the World   publisher: The New York Review of Books   date: Copyright 2020 by Benjamín Labatut   page(s): 9, 14-15

[Ron Bulman]

On 3/21/2022 at 12:47 PM, W. Niederhut said:

Steve,

      I consider myself an expert of sorts on the history of Russian (and Soviet KGB) Orthodoxy-- a subject that most Americans know almost nothing about. 

      IMO, Putin's KGB-controlled ROC Moscow Patriarchate is a pseudo church-- a cynical tool of Putin's fascist police state.  Kyrill Gundyayev and his MP heirarchs own the ROC buildings, chalices, and the vestments, but it's all for show.  They are, in fact, the non-canonical successors of Stalin's KGB agent heirarchs -- including the late Patriarch Alexei II Ridiger, who was the KGB agent "Drozhdov" overseeing Putin's seizure of the free Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 2007.

      The current heirarchy of the ROC MP was never free of the NKVD/KGB/FSB.  It was always a tool of the state-- merely transitioning from service to Soviet communism (and atheism!) to servicing Putin's fascist police state.

      As we can see from Putin's current campaign of war crimes and mass murder in Ukraine, the man is no more "Christian" than Joseph Stalin.  He makes a show of lighting candles in the ROC buildings, while his ROC MP priests and bishops, literally, bless Russian missiles and assault rifles!  It's pseudo-Christian fascism, somewhat similar to right wing Protestant Evangelical fascism in the U.S. today-- where the focus is on a kind of hypocritical, Puritanical tribalism, rather than on compassion and love for humanity.

      I used to chant services in Russian and English on the ROCOR kliros for a number of years here in Denver before Putin and his KGB-controlled Moscow Patriarchate seized the ROCOR in 2007.  It was the end result of a multi-year, carefully orchestrated KGB op in Western Europe and North America.  For many years, our ROCOR parish here in Denver was comprised about 50-50 of American converts and second and third generation "White" Russian refugees from the Bolshevik revolution.  Since 2007, it has been comprised of recent Soviet emigre/Russian nationalists under the control of Putin's MP/KGB pseudo-church.

     After the Bolsheviks gained control of Russia, by 1925, they murdered the last legitimate Patriarch of Moscow, St. Tikhon, and used what was left of the ROC in Russia as a tool of the Cheka/NKVD.  In the process, thousands of Russian Orthodox hierarchs, clergy, and laity were murdered and/or sent to concentration camps-- beginning with Solovki, which Solzhenitsyn accurately described as the "grandfather" of Stalin's Gulag.

     Most Russian Orthodox churches were dynamited by Stalin, or turned into gymnasiums and skating rinks.

     Stalin re-opened some ROC church buildings after the N-a-z-i invasion in 1941 in a cynical appeal to Russian "patriotism"-- but the Stalinist MP "church" was always a KGB-controlled propaganda tool-- analogous to Eisenstein's WWII Soviet propaganda film, Alexander Nevsky.  

      If you watch Alexander Nevsky, notice that Stalin and Eisenstein never show any Russian Orthodox crosses, priests, or bishops in Novgorod or Pskov.  They show the golden domes of the Russian Orthodox church buildings, but the appeal was solely nationalistic and pragmatic -- defending the Russian land from the nefarious Teutonic knights and Roman Catholic monks.

I thought W in particular, maybe Steve and Kirk too might find this article interesting.

Russian talking point: Blaming US for Ukraine church split (msn.com)

[W. Niederhut]

On 3/22/2022 at 4:23 PM, Ron Bulman said:

I thought W in particular, maybe Steve and Kirk too might find this article interesting.

Russian talking point: Blaming US for Ukraine church split (msn.com)

Ron,

    My wife and I met Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (the Greek Orthodox "Pope") at the Phanar in Istanbul in the summer of 2000.  While we were waiting for an audience with his grace, Archdeacon Tarasios, there was an Estonian Orthodox priest in the waiting room, and we learned that Bartholomew had recently become the titular head of the Estonian Orthodox Church independent of the Moscow Patriarchate.  It is common knowledge that the MP had been infiltrated and controlled by the NKVD/KGB since the 1920s. 

     As far as I know, the situation in the Ukraine was similar to that in Estonia.  Many Ukrainian Orthodox Christians did not want to be under the thumb of Putin's Moscow Patriarchate.  So, Patriarch Bartholomew granted them autocephaly as an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2019.

     I seriously doubt that NATO or the U.S. had anything to do with Bartholomew's actions, but I could be mistaken.

   

Edited March 24, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[Benjamin Cole]

3 hours ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Today's selection from When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut. The use of drugs in the last days of World War II: "In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the poopoo leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany's production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. 'An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane,' a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war. "The German writer Heinrich Boll wrote letters to his family from the front asking them to send him additional doses: 'It's hard here,' he wrote to his parents on November 9, 1939, 'and I hope you understand if I can only write you every two or three days. Today I'm doing so chiefly to ask for more Pervitin ... I love you, Hein.' On May 20, 1940, he wrote them a long, impassioned letter that ended with the same request: 'Can you get hold of a bit more Pervitin for me, so I can have some in reserve?' Two months later, his parents received a single scraggly line: 'If at all possible, please mail me more Pervitin.' Amphetamines fuelled the unrelenting German Blitzkrieg and many soldiers suffered psychotic attacks as they felt the bitter tablets dissolve on their tongues. The Reich leadership, however, tasted something very different when the lightning war was extinguished by the firestorms of the Allied bombers, when the Russian winter froze the caterpillar tracks of their tanks and the Führer ordered everything of value within the Reich destroyed to leave nothing but scorched earth for the invading troops. Faced with utter defeat, staggered by the new horror they had called down upon the world, they chose a quick escape, biting down on cyanide capsules and choking to death on the sweet scent of almonds that the poison gives off. "A wave of suicides swept through Germany in the final months of the war. In April 1945 alone, three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin. The inhabitants of the small town of Demmin, to the north of the capital, some three hours away, fell prey to collective panic when the retreating German troops destroyed the bridges leading west, leaving them stranded on their peninsula, surrounded by three rivers and defenceless before the dreaded onslaught of the Red Army. Hundreds of men, women and children swallowing it: 'Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,' said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life. The liquid form of the poison, known in Germany as Blausäure or blue acid, is highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celsius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which not everyone can distinguish, as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity. This evolutionary caprice makes it likely that a significant number of the Jews murdered with Zyklon B in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Mauthausen did not even notice the scent of cyanide filling the gas chambers, while others died smelling the same fragrance inhaled by the men who had organized their extermination as they bit down on their suicide capsules."   author: Benjamín Labatut   title: When We Cease to Understand the World   publisher: The New York Review of Books   date: Copyright 2020 by Benjamín Labatut   page(s): 9, 14-15

Man, I have not seen the name Heinrich Boll in decades and decades. I had no idea  he was addicted (justifiably, given the circumstances) to drugs. 

Side note: In one of his novels, Boll depicts a minor functionary who has kept his head down and honored the state, in the usual un-identified Eastern European nation. The functionary keeps a bottle of cognac in his office and hired a secretary to double as a girlfriend. 

A guest visits, and the functionary breaks out the cognac and has his secretary serve the the guest and himself. 

The functionary thinks to himself, "At least this (the hired gal and the drinking cognac in the office), this small refuge, they cannot take away from us." 

Imagine the American executive today who drinks in his office and even dares to proposition his secretary! 

[Benjamin Cole]

 

March 23, 20226:50 AM GMT+7Last Updated 11 min ago

Europe-Reuters 

Russian strikes turning Mariupol into 'ashes' as West plans more sanctions

---30---

Perhaps stronger medicine is required.

But if we word our memos with real vigor, that could be good enough. 

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Ron,

    My wife and I met Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (the Greek Orthodox "Pope") at the Phenar in Istanbul in the summer of 2000.  While we were waiting for an audience with his grace, Archdeacon Tarasios, there was an Estonian Orthodox priest in the waiting room, and we learned that Bartholomew had recently become the titular head of the Estonian Orthodox Church independent of the Moscow Patriarchate.  It is common knowledge that the MP had been infiltrated and controlled by the NKVD/KGB since the 1920s. 

     As far as I know, the situation in the Ukraine was similar to that in Estonia.  Many Ukrainian Orthodox Christians did not want to be under the thumb of Putin's Moscow Patriarchate.  So, Patriarch Bartholomew granted them autocephaly as an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2019.

     I seriously doubt that NATO or the U.S. had anything to do with Bartholomew's actions, but I could be mistaken.

   

So blaming the US would be propaganda.  Using religion to justify mass murder?

[Benjamin Cole]

 

WAR IN UKRAINE 3/21/22

Struggling Russians ‘plant mines’ and dig in for a long war

Retroville mall, a symbol of new Kyiv, is destroyed by ‘cruise missile’

Russian forces are digging in to positions around Kyiv as its troops elsewhere have been accused of deploying mines in a sign that they are trying to keep territory they have gained rather than pushing forward.--The Times 

---30---

Unfortunately, even the bad guys adopt tactics to situations. 

It appears  Russians units, aware that standing in the open is dangerous, are "digging in", literally digging trenches and placing artillery and tanks behind berms etc. 

Winter is receding, so there are months of mild and even warm weather ahead. 

It may be the days of Russian troops blithely advancing and occupying are over, along with the higher death rates. Instead they will dig in and shell from safe, protected positions, and then advance when advantageous. 

Biden/NATO are flatfooted? Seems so. No new plans, no initiatives, no means to deliver some real losses to Russians. 

As they say, a stalemate.  

 

 

 

[Douglas Caddy]

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-military-correspondent-quits-over-ukraine-war-and-says-putin-is-sending-army-to-slaughter/ar-AAVmyI5?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

 

[Benjamin Cole]

Saagar Enjeti: Biden HUMILIATES US In Kowtow To Saudi Arabia

Interesting point of view. Perhaps too harsh...but the US does seem to cater to the Saudis....over and over and over again. From Bush Sr. to the Clintons, to Bush jr. to Obama, to Trump to Biden. 

 

[Ron Bulman]

A month in Ukraine: 'All normal life is gone' (msn.com)

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

So blaming the US would be propaganda.  Using religion to justify mass murder?

     I've been waiting for the ROCOR/MP bishops in America and Western Europe -- one of whom I have taken out to dinner in happier times-- to condemn Putin's invasion of Ukraine.  Thus far, silence.  They would be cutting their own throats to speak up.

   These are the guys who went under Moscow's thumb in 2007.

   I suspect that all of them are privately aggrieved by what is happening in Ukraine, including Moscow Patriarch Kyril Gundyayev, himself, but they dare not criticize Putin.  If they did, they'd probably end up drinking radioactive tea.

   Interestingly, Moscow Patriarch Kyril's own grandfather was sent to the Solovki Monastery concentration camp by the NKVD back in the day.

[Benjamin Cole]

Poland will propose a NATO peacekeeping mission for Ukraine this week-NYT

Poland will formally propose a plan to organise an international peacekeeping mission in Ukraine at an emergency NATO summit in Brussels on Thursday, an idea that is at odds with the alliance’s official stance and one the United States rejected Sunday.

Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski first proposed the idea when the leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia travelled to Kyiv last week to meet with Ukraine’s leaders.

“I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission — NATO, possibly some wider international structure — but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory,” Kaczynski said at a news conference in Kyiv.

---30---

Poland borders Belarus and Ukraine. They are on the front lines, most at risk if a conflagration should spread. 

Prime Minister Kaczynski is showing resolve, imagination, spirit. Probably a good idea. 

 

[Ray Mitcham]

Ben, Perhaps it may be better for the UN to propose this. I know Russia has the Security Council by the throat, but that shouldn't stop it, proposing a humanitarian corridor in Ukraine.

Edited March 23, 2022 by Ray Mitcham