Agree with your reading of the development of this history. Always good to get the perspective of folk who have actual experience of going to Russia. There is so much stupid in the world today and the death of the international art of diplomacy and replacement with brute force and impunity is a seriously dangerous trend which risks everything.
Indeed Leah and as a teen I too was enchanted by Russian literature and culture. I think it was probably something about the vastness of the land and the richness and diversity of her story that attracted me. My Dad served on the Arctic Convoys of WW11 as a young conscript. He was one of the few still alive in 2011 when the Westminster government finally allowed Russia to honour these men with the Uskov medal! Russia’s highest naval medal, is awarded only to those who had risked their lives for Russian freedom and is awarded to nationals and non nationals alike. The ‘British’ were the last to receive their awards- all other governments having accepted the Russian’s gracious offer to their men by 1954! So sad for those young men of my father’s generation that Westminster denied them this great honour. The interaction my father and our family had via the Russian consulate in Edinburgh was humbling in its sincerity and generosity. The Russians explained to the men, by then in their 90s, that Russian children are still taught of the sacrifices they made. I’m so glad that my Dad lived long enough to experience that in 2011, because it did a huge amount to help him come to terms with that awful time in his young life which had haunted him and the others since the 1940s.
What an amazing story, Sheila. I’ve always found the Russian people to be warm, welcoming and curious about westerners. They never held the actions of my government against me.
Good to hear your dad finally got that recognition Sheila. There is now the Russian Arctic Convoy Museum at Aultbea. Also, we took a wee stravaig west along the coastline from the memorial site at Cove and came upon the memorial to the US ship William H Welch wrecked at Camus an Aiseig in 1944, remains of lifeboats still on the shore, utterly gut-wrenching. So really Leah, so much destruction caused by a compulsion to willy-wave, the beneficiaries being the arms industries.
There's a modern movie about those brave lads, I think it's name might be "The Convoy"? It just came out and looks top quality. That unknown bit of history has been memorialized now in film and story, all honors due the brave that they might not be forgotten.
Excellent piece, Leah. England has regressed to the 1840s. They’re still fighting the Crimean War. We Scots have had no such enmity towards Russia. Another reason to revoke the Union, asap.
Once again Leah, you open the eyes of the general population, to what's really going on with the War Mongering English & US Cabals to use Public Money to invest in and Supply Arms to Countries, who should have no need for them!!! At the same time, creating Austerity measures to their own population, and telling them their is no money to invest in the NHS, Public Services & Infrastructure projects!?
So different from what the media and politicians claim to be the reality. More people need this awareness so to better judge the realities of the world we live in.
Such an understanding as apposed to political dogma is the only way to achieve peace. I recall my visit to the USSR and the reality of all the missiles aimed at families who were just trying to live a decent life.
The Seven Asian Tigers were brought down when George Soros, an agent of both the City of London and the Intelligence/NGO Community, collapsed the Thai baht (the Thai currency.)
I mention this in light of the "It was just the fact that Russia was big ...This is why China is vilified - it’s also a big country" summation. The Western bankers didn't wan't Russia or Asia to to get too independent, that is, to gain a multipolar order instead of a Western-dominated order (as we now see with the attempt by the BRICS.)
The consistent strategy since at least Mackinder's 1904 Heartland thesis seems to be disrupting potential competitors; this can be done directly, or indirectly by upsetting a region, trade route, or bloc in order that a competitor might not be able to take advantage of or feed off of it.
Note that this is how small, coastal sea-going powers can leverage their reach to counter and contend with much larger land-based powers. In fact, Mackinder's strategy had the goal of preventing the large land powers of Eurasia, or the peer competitors in Europe, from completing rail corridors that would lessen the need for seaborne cargos.
His fear was that should Russia, say, link the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea for example, the need for English shipping would be much less. The Great Game, the race to convert one's ships and trains from coal to oil boilers (thanks to the discovery of Middle Eastern oil), had visions of globalist trade with India and Asia dancing in their heads...and fears that multiple Trans-Siberian railroads would obviate those sea lanes.
America's unique rise probably stems from the fact that it became both a strong sea power *and* a large land power, thanks to the innovation of its transcontinental railroads combined with its inherited British tradition of maritime prowess.
Can't deny the truth of NATO and Western intrigue laid bare by Leah and of course Colin Fox of the SSP in his publication: War and Peace in Ukraine. We all remember the triumphalism of the Thatcher/Reagan axis as the new Russian Federation dissolved into economic chaos where ex-KGB and the new oligarchs helped themselves to that country's resources. That was the beginning of the ''mafia state'' as that fledgling democracy gradually became a one-party system. But yes the West particularly the U.S. could have assisted a ''transition'' but chose exploit anti-Russian sentiment among the once independent satellite states for their own ends it seems. Regardless of CIA meddling (a global phenomenon) and NATO deceit, the majority of the populations of former European states seem to wish to engage positively with the EU and adopt Western ''values''. They have recent and ''folk'' memories of living under brutal Soviet rule which was only marginally better than Nazi rule for many.
By his own admission the ambition of Mr P. is to restore the greatness of Imperial Russia by whatever means. He will use whatever ''cannon fodder'' and materiel resources he can to throw at Ukraine to cynically win this ''Holy War''. The injustices against ethnic Russians or just Russian speakers, might have origins in Stalin's replacement and ethnic cleansing as he attempted to Russify much of Eastern Europe.
True, there are few ''good guys'' in all of this but to appease Mr P. could be a terrible mistake? He also is in a position where if he backs down there might be retribution from his ''hard liners''. Any settlement will have to be seen as a net gain for Putin and the Kremlin.
At the end of the day, Ukraine will be concerned to preserve its civilians and soldiers and for the West, their materiel support; Mr P. will have no such concerns.
I must strongly disagree that the occupation government in Ukraine cares the slightest whit about preserving its civilians and soldiers. No, its job is to ethnically cleanse the place for its paramours Blackrock, Monsanto, and Raytheon, and most especially for the neocon cabal that still dreams of asset-stripping Russia.
Rich Ukrainians are sallying all over the Swiss Alps dropping a million dollars a day at Hermés on luxury shopping sprees; the illegal dictator Zelenksyy is skimming $30 million per month for his services to the American neocon cabal that pulled off the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2014 Maidan coup.
Zelensky's neocon backers want to repeat what they did in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is turn Christian Slavic Europe/Eurasia into a slave plantation.
The Isles, and the EU, face the same fate with the migrant overseer class being imported into their homelands. Those mercenaries will scratch and claw to maintain their privileges over the native Europeans. Mercs imported while NATO- responsible for protecting Europe from invasion!- blithely watches with a jaundiced eye.
I very much agree with the gist and body of your post; the Ukrainians view this in the light of both the Holodomor, and of Stepan Bandera's Gallician SS corps- the Nazis found them so repellent they executed its leader and tried to disband its diehards, whose grandsons reformed as the Azov Battalions, Right Sektor, and suchlike under neocon direction as Zelensky's shock troops.
Russia views this in the light of, what to them, was the Great Patriotic War, as they call WWII.
They've been invaded too many times to let this one one slide, and Putin is the moderate trying to hold his hardliners back.
The American neocons' roots are in Donetsk/Lugansk, the former Pale of Settlement. Their ancestors murdered 5 reformist Tsars to get to the Revolution, and they will. not. stop. During the Munich conference- this last week!- mystery drones hit radioactive Chernobyl.
The trick of it is, the powers behind the throne don't get blamed. Britain gets blamed. America gets blamed. Russia gets blamed. Ukraine gets blamed. The secret of the trick is this: a gangster culture, a permanent minority, it doesn't kill its enemies. No.
*It gets its enemies to kill each other.* In this, a Slav-on-Slav brother war.
A further note: Catherine the Great was America's ally in both our revolution and the War of 1812, both against Britain. Even so, Queen Victoria, King George's granddaughter, was related to the Romanov Tsars by marriage. (I think her aunt was the Tsar Alexander's wife, forgive my fuzzy memory.)
A side note is that Catherine asked for 20,000 American Amish to come teach their prized farming skills in Ukraine's fertile grounds. They came, and stayed, and all sides prospered. They were the kulaks in the Holodomor.
Also, the Tsar's adminstration in Russia had been traditionally staffed by Germans. Heritage Russia and Germany had long ties to one another, even the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty in Britain, later renamed the Windsors, were originally German. Britain and Germany had deep ties too.
Conversely, Britain and America joined together to save Stalin's impending invasion in WWII. Stalin's massed divisions on the Polish border is what spooked the Germans, who had been gearing up specifically that invasion after aiding Franco in Spain's war against Soviet-backed Communist proxies.
That, and the fact that Soviet-allied kommisars ordered the murder of 58,000 Germans in the historically German city of Danzig, while Poland refused to open a corridor for their emigration to the German Sudentenland, Germany's grainfields and food supply. (Later made Czecho-Slovakia after the forced expulsion on foot in winter, in which 2.8 million Germans died. They had lived there for 500 years.)
What Germany did not expect was for Britain's RAF to start bombing German cities, when Germany reclaimed the Ruhr iron mines taken by France after Versailles. France had fought Britain to save both the American revolutionaries and her holdings from the Yukon to New Orleans. Although Hitler pleaded offering peace treaty after peace treaty, Churchill refused to relent, until the Luftwaffe had to blitz London, trying to make the RAF stop dropping incendiaries on civilians.
(France's help in our Revolution is what bankrupted the Bourbon dynasty, leading to the French Revolution as counterfeiters seized Church properties. The Terror was committed to drive the remaining aristocrats out of their estates, which were 'bought' with counterfeit assignats, then resold along with the Church's at auction for real gold; the gold was stored in Rothschild vaults under the 'City' of London. The purpose was to break the Catholic heart of the Holy Roman Empire, that is, France.)
The question was, why does Britain hate Russia?
The answer is, the British do not. Europe's wars were family feuds, as all of the royal houses were descendants of William the Conqueror. The wars started, and would stop at resolution; no nation sought the extermination of, or to change the underlying demographic of, another. The monarchies, relatives, kept the Westphalian Peace.
The Westphalian Peace had been arrived after a war that killed more Europeans than had the Black Plagues.
No, no, no, I will not continue. Forgive me, and my apologies. I have gone on too long already. Only note that what drives the current animosities is a gameboard, a set of rules, a framework laid down by a culture, an influence, whose messianic vision is a global slave plantation.
This is the latest iteration of the Longest War- the 5000 year war to enslave, wipe out, and replace the 'Indo-Europeans', the White peoples, with itself as master and harvester of all the rest. To do so, you must get the Whites to kill each other.
Why? one would ask. In hope of escaping the Wheel, on the one hand, to hijack the only way out. The drivers of that push and pull is the reason for the biosphere's design, which I forebear.
A closer reason is that Genesis is not the story of the beginning of the world--no, it is the story of the end of it. Of a catastrophe of such epic proportion that the desperate survivors sought its cause. Because of their origins, they found an explanation: We had brought it.
The Whites had brought the wrath of the gods, the near death of mankind.
We were the cause. We must be replaced, by any means necessary, to prevent the Fist of God from striking again. Our women, taken. Our works, claimed.
This is the fulfillment of the Will, as they saw it, baked into their bone and blood. Working with the fragments of a shattered civilization, they learned to write, and wrote their story: the root of a terrible symbiosis that has driven a blood-drenched history.
Agree with your reading of the development of this history. Always good to get the perspective of folk who have actual experience of going to Russia. There is so much stupid in the world today and the death of the international art of diplomacy and replacement with brute force and impunity is a seriously dangerous trend which risks everything.
Excellent Leah. So true. Very informative- and personal. 👏
Thanks, Sheila. Your trips to China have informed your views of that nation which just shows how vital making those connections are.
Indeed Leah and as a teen I too was enchanted by Russian literature and culture. I think it was probably something about the vastness of the land and the richness and diversity of her story that attracted me. My Dad served on the Arctic Convoys of WW11 as a young conscript. He was one of the few still alive in 2011 when the Westminster government finally allowed Russia to honour these men with the Uskov medal! Russia’s highest naval medal, is awarded only to those who had risked their lives for Russian freedom and is awarded to nationals and non nationals alike. The ‘British’ were the last to receive their awards- all other governments having accepted the Russian’s gracious offer to their men by 1954! So sad for those young men of my father’s generation that Westminster denied them this great honour. The interaction my father and our family had via the Russian consulate in Edinburgh was humbling in its sincerity and generosity. The Russians explained to the men, by then in their 90s, that Russian children are still taught of the sacrifices they made. I’m so glad that my Dad lived long enough to experience that in 2011, because it did a huge amount to help him come to terms with that awful time in his young life which had haunted him and the others since the 1940s.
What an amazing story, Sheila. I’ve always found the Russian people to be warm, welcoming and curious about westerners. They never held the actions of my government against me.
Good to hear your dad finally got that recognition Sheila. There is now the Russian Arctic Convoy Museum at Aultbea. Also, we took a wee stravaig west along the coastline from the memorial site at Cove and came upon the memorial to the US ship William H Welch wrecked at Camus an Aiseig in 1944, remains of lifeboats still on the shore, utterly gut-wrenching. So really Leah, so much destruction caused by a compulsion to willy-wave, the beneficiaries being the arms industries.
There's a modern movie about those brave lads, I think it's name might be "The Convoy"? It just came out and looks top quality. That unknown bit of history has been memorialized now in film and story, all honors due the brave that they might not be forgotten.
Excellent piece, Leah. England has regressed to the 1840s. They’re still fighting the Crimean War. We Scots have had no such enmity towards Russia. Another reason to revoke the Union, asap.
Once again Leah, you open the eyes of the general population, to what's really going on with the War Mongering English & US Cabals to use Public Money to invest in and Supply Arms to Countries, who should have no need for them!!! At the same time, creating Austerity measures to their own population, and telling them their is no money to invest in the NHS, Public Services & Infrastructure projects!?
Thank you Leah!
Thanks Leah
So different from what the media and politicians claim to be the reality. More people need this awareness so to better judge the realities of the world we live in.
Such an understanding as apposed to political dogma is the only way to achieve peace. I recall my visit to the USSR and the reality of all the missiles aimed at families who were just trying to live a decent life.
Yes, I think we should put the politicians in a room and let them duke, not nuke, it out. Leave the People alone.
The fact that we are force-fed a bunch of lies by the corporate media makes cutting through with the truth really difficult. But we have to try....
Words of wisdom, if ever I read them. Thanks, Leah.
And to think, in 1990 all we had to do was throw open our arms and tell our Eastern brothers and sisters, "We love you! We have always loved you!"
The Seven Asian Tigers were brought down when George Soros, an agent of both the City of London and the Intelligence/NGO Community, collapsed the Thai baht (the Thai currency.)
I mention this in light of the "It was just the fact that Russia was big ...This is why China is vilified - it’s also a big country" summation. The Western bankers didn't wan't Russia or Asia to to get too independent, that is, to gain a multipolar order instead of a Western-dominated order (as we now see with the attempt by the BRICS.)
The consistent strategy since at least Mackinder's 1904 Heartland thesis seems to be disrupting potential competitors; this can be done directly, or indirectly by upsetting a region, trade route, or bloc in order that a competitor might not be able to take advantage of or feed off of it.
Note that this is how small, coastal sea-going powers can leverage their reach to counter and contend with much larger land-based powers. In fact, Mackinder's strategy had the goal of preventing the large land powers of Eurasia, or the peer competitors in Europe, from completing rail corridors that would lessen the need for seaborne cargos.
His fear was that should Russia, say, link the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea for example, the need for English shipping would be much less. The Great Game, the race to convert one's ships and trains from coal to oil boilers (thanks to the discovery of Middle Eastern oil), had visions of globalist trade with India and Asia dancing in their heads...and fears that multiple Trans-Siberian railroads would obviate those sea lanes.
America's unique rise probably stems from the fact that it became both a strong sea power *and* a large land power, thanks to the innovation of its transcontinental railroads combined with its inherited British tradition of maritime prowess.
Can't deny the truth of NATO and Western intrigue laid bare by Leah and of course Colin Fox of the SSP in his publication: War and Peace in Ukraine. We all remember the triumphalism of the Thatcher/Reagan axis as the new Russian Federation dissolved into economic chaos where ex-KGB and the new oligarchs helped themselves to that country's resources. That was the beginning of the ''mafia state'' as that fledgling democracy gradually became a one-party system. But yes the West particularly the U.S. could have assisted a ''transition'' but chose exploit anti-Russian sentiment among the once independent satellite states for their own ends it seems. Regardless of CIA meddling (a global phenomenon) and NATO deceit, the majority of the populations of former European states seem to wish to engage positively with the EU and adopt Western ''values''. They have recent and ''folk'' memories of living under brutal Soviet rule which was only marginally better than Nazi rule for many.
By his own admission the ambition of Mr P. is to restore the greatness of Imperial Russia by whatever means. He will use whatever ''cannon fodder'' and materiel resources he can to throw at Ukraine to cynically win this ''Holy War''. The injustices against ethnic Russians or just Russian speakers, might have origins in Stalin's replacement and ethnic cleansing as he attempted to Russify much of Eastern Europe.
True, there are few ''good guys'' in all of this but to appease Mr P. could be a terrible mistake? He also is in a position where if he backs down there might be retribution from his ''hard liners''. Any settlement will have to be seen as a net gain for Putin and the Kremlin.
At the end of the day, Ukraine will be concerned to preserve its civilians and soldiers and for the West, their materiel support; Mr P. will have no such concerns.
I must strongly disagree that the occupation government in Ukraine cares the slightest whit about preserving its civilians and soldiers. No, its job is to ethnically cleanse the place for its paramours Blackrock, Monsanto, and Raytheon, and most especially for the neocon cabal that still dreams of asset-stripping Russia.
Rich Ukrainians are sallying all over the Swiss Alps dropping a million dollars a day at Hermés on luxury shopping sprees; the illegal dictator Zelenksyy is skimming $30 million per month for his services to the American neocon cabal that pulled off the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2014 Maidan coup.
Zelensky's neocon backers want to repeat what they did in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is turn Christian Slavic Europe/Eurasia into a slave plantation.
The Isles, and the EU, face the same fate with the migrant overseer class being imported into their homelands. Those mercenaries will scratch and claw to maintain their privileges over the native Europeans. Mercs imported while NATO- responsible for protecting Europe from invasion!- blithely watches with a jaundiced eye.
I very much agree with the gist and body of your post; the Ukrainians view this in the light of both the Holodomor, and of Stepan Bandera's Gallician SS corps- the Nazis found them so repellent they executed its leader and tried to disband its diehards, whose grandsons reformed as the Azov Battalions, Right Sektor, and suchlike under neocon direction as Zelensky's shock troops.
Russia views this in the light of, what to them, was the Great Patriotic War, as they call WWII.
They've been invaded too many times to let this one one slide, and Putin is the moderate trying to hold his hardliners back.
The American neocons' roots are in Donetsk/Lugansk, the former Pale of Settlement. Their ancestors murdered 5 reformist Tsars to get to the Revolution, and they will. not. stop. During the Munich conference- this last week!- mystery drones hit radioactive Chernobyl.
The trick of it is, the powers behind the throne don't get blamed. Britain gets blamed. America gets blamed. Russia gets blamed. Ukraine gets blamed. The secret of the trick is this: a gangster culture, a permanent minority, it doesn't kill its enemies. No.
*It gets its enemies to kill each other.* In this, a Slav-on-Slav brother war.
A further note: Catherine the Great was America's ally in both our revolution and the War of 1812, both against Britain. Even so, Queen Victoria, King George's granddaughter, was related to the Romanov Tsars by marriage. (I think her aunt was the Tsar Alexander's wife, forgive my fuzzy memory.)
A side note is that Catherine asked for 20,000 American Amish to come teach their prized farming skills in Ukraine's fertile grounds. They came, and stayed, and all sides prospered. They were the kulaks in the Holodomor.
Also, the Tsar's adminstration in Russia had been traditionally staffed by Germans. Heritage Russia and Germany had long ties to one another, even the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty in Britain, later renamed the Windsors, were originally German. Britain and Germany had deep ties too.
Conversely, Britain and America joined together to save Stalin's impending invasion in WWII. Stalin's massed divisions on the Polish border is what spooked the Germans, who had been gearing up specifically that invasion after aiding Franco in Spain's war against Soviet-backed Communist proxies.
That, and the fact that Soviet-allied kommisars ordered the murder of 58,000 Germans in the historically German city of Danzig, while Poland refused to open a corridor for their emigration to the German Sudentenland, Germany's grainfields and food supply. (Later made Czecho-Slovakia after the forced expulsion on foot in winter, in which 2.8 million Germans died. They had lived there for 500 years.)
What Germany did not expect was for Britain's RAF to start bombing German cities, when Germany reclaimed the Ruhr iron mines taken by France after Versailles. France had fought Britain to save both the American revolutionaries and her holdings from the Yukon to New Orleans. Although Hitler pleaded offering peace treaty after peace treaty, Churchill refused to relent, until the Luftwaffe had to blitz London, trying to make the RAF stop dropping incendiaries on civilians.
(France's help in our Revolution is what bankrupted the Bourbon dynasty, leading to the French Revolution as counterfeiters seized Church properties. The Terror was committed to drive the remaining aristocrats out of their estates, which were 'bought' with counterfeit assignats, then resold along with the Church's at auction for real gold; the gold was stored in Rothschild vaults under the 'City' of London. The purpose was to break the Catholic heart of the Holy Roman Empire, that is, France.)
The question was, why does Britain hate Russia?
The answer is, the British do not. Europe's wars were family feuds, as all of the royal houses were descendants of William the Conqueror. The wars started, and would stop at resolution; no nation sought the extermination of, or to change the underlying demographic of, another. The monarchies, relatives, kept the Westphalian Peace.
(cont.)
(cont., pt. II)
The Westphalian Peace had been arrived after a war that killed more Europeans than had the Black Plagues.
No, no, no, I will not continue. Forgive me, and my apologies. I have gone on too long already. Only note that what drives the current animosities is a gameboard, a set of rules, a framework laid down by a culture, an influence, whose messianic vision is a global slave plantation.
This is the latest iteration of the Longest War- the 5000 year war to enslave, wipe out, and replace the 'Indo-Europeans', the White peoples, with itself as master and harvester of all the rest. To do so, you must get the Whites to kill each other.
Why? one would ask. In hope of escaping the Wheel, on the one hand, to hijack the only way out. The drivers of that push and pull is the reason for the biosphere's design, which I forebear.
A closer reason is that Genesis is not the story of the beginning of the world--no, it is the story of the end of it. Of a catastrophe of such epic proportion that the desperate survivors sought its cause. Because of their origins, they found an explanation: We had brought it.
The Whites had brought the wrath of the gods, the near death of mankind.
We were the cause. We must be replaced, by any means necessary, to prevent the Fist of God from striking again. Our women, taken. Our works, claimed.
This is the fulfillment of the Will, as they saw it, baked into their bone and blood. Working with the fragments of a shattered civilization, they learned to write, and wrote their story: the root of a terrible symbiosis that has driven a blood-drenched history.
(comment moved)