This Is...

Project 68-Bis Soviet Light Cruiser Mikhail Kutuzov:

It now serves as a museum in Novorossiisk and it is named after the savior of Russia from Napoleon, Count and Field-Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov. Kutuzov owned Russian serfs and was a rather rich man. So was legendary Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov. Suvorov, apart from being generalissimo was a man known for a very uneasy character, he was a  nobility and among his illustrious military achievements, apart from owning serfs, is (almost) a suppression of Pugachev's peasant uprising. But Soviet Communists somehow decided that not only he (as well as Kutuzov) merited most prized WW II orders named after them, but Soviet Navy had another project 68-Bis light cruiser named after Suvorov. Here she is:

Of course, Soviet Communists continued with this tradition of commissioning ships and naming highest state awards after counts and princes, all those "class enemies" of "proletariat" and owners of serfs. But all that didn't matter--all those noble and very rich people did one thing--they fought for Russia. Nobody cared and cares what their opinions on exploited and suppressed Russian peasants were. Even communists recognized that. The class didn't matter, as long as it was for the greater good. But then again, Russians are so lucky, it is so easy for them--no matter who you are, once Russia was invaded, everything was secondary and the hero, be him a simple peasant or a prince, who could actually own this peasant hero, was and remained a hero. 

Not so, evidently in the US anymore.  

Gen. Milley has weighed in on the subject of military bases whose names are associated with the Confederacy. He also adds some value judgements, presumably his own, regarding Confederate Officers and soldiers: “Like the country it serves, the U.S. military is fighting an internal battle against racism, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Thursday, but old names and symbols of that enemy are present and strong enough to sow division. “Divisiveness leads to defeat,” Milley told the House Armed Services Committee. “There is no place in our armed forces … for symbols of racism, bias or discrimination.” The Civil War was an “act of treason,” he said. The south’s military leaders betrayed their nation profoundly, and still, many military installations bear their names, according to Milley. “It was an act of treason at the time against the union, against the stars and stripes, against the U.S. Constitution, and those officers turned their back on their oath.”He goes on to support the removal of Confederate names and presumably symbols from the defence forces.

Alrighty then. Not that I care in particular about Confederacy and I, certainly, have a natural revulsion towards slavery, but still--correct me if I am wrong--the American Civil War was fought not against slavery. The slavery issue came up well into the war itself not least through the actions of one Russian dude who commanded one Yanks' regiment. The war was about states' rights. Right? So it is rather a complicated issue since South just wanted to go its own way. The consensus existed in the US prior to this woke session by Milley today, that a sort of reconciliation was reached on the issue of the Civil War, in the end Robert E. Lee had enough courage to call for reconciliation--not an easy thing to do for a defeated side. Yet, today, in 2020, the events of 160 years ago still cannot let many people rest just because of slavery? Can you imagine Russians disowning Kutuzov or Suvorov for owning serfs? Peter the Great was a bloody tyrant, granted a genius one, should Russians disown him? Russians erect monuments to him. 

A normal person looking at the United States today will be struck by the scale of self-immolation of the country which loves to proclaim itself to be a shining city on the hill. It is shining, all right, with the bright flames of its burning institutions, from military, to academia, to history to governance. But the flame of cowardice burns with blinding white flame and for such a country, which cannot provide for its historic continuity, for better or worse, there is no future. With George Washington, a slave-owner, waiting to be dethroned, his accomplishments be damned, the US will cease to exist as a viable entity both geographically and in spirit which was too weak to fight for own survival. But then again, I warned about that.

Paul Craig Roberts' Interesting Piece.

I liked PCR's new piece on American Civil War, despite the fact that I disagree that it was NOT a Civil War--it was by all measures of nationality defined primarily for centuries as ethnicity-culture. Yet, it still caught my attention in a sense that United States was a very different country then and people did view themselves differently governance-wise, with states being a much larger players then than they are today.

Robert E. Lee has been dead for 150 years, but the Identity Politics freaks can’t leave him alone. The latest attack on Lee is by CounterPunch music writer Lee Ballinger reviewing a one-sided and utterly false book by John Reeves with the biased title of “The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee.”

I know this feeling when "new" history is written by amateurs with ideological agenda, not desire to seek the truth. In this piece Paul Craig Roberts nails it and exposes utter lies by the author. It is about identity politics and about Orwellian reality and it has nothing to do with real history. United States is becoming more and more the nation with unpredictable past. Soviet Union and Russia paid dearly for allowing demagogues and pseudo-historians, many of them being direct operations of influence assets, to "write" Russia's history of the 20th century. Only now Russia finally begins to deal with this baggage of ideological anti-Russian BS perpetuated under the guise of the "fight against communism". The United States seems to be hell bent on repeating this story in regards to own Civil War history, which is a complex history with very many shades of grey in it. 

As late Alexander Zinoviev pointed out, after seeing Russia's catastrophe in 1990s, "we aimed at communism but hit Russia." Same can be applied today to all those so called lefty "intellectuals"--they aim at, allegedly, racism, they will hit America. In fact, the destruction only accelerates--those people have no clue what they are in for. As per real history and what drives it--indeed, who needs facts when they contradict the narrative. It is important to address them since the United States, for all of her major faults and crimes in 20th and 21st centuries, is not the country which can be simply dissolved. Using false narratives to widen already huge split in the society is not the way to address injustices and grievances, many of them contrived, of the past. I will conclude with PCR's conclusion:

It would have been better for the South to say that secession was based on the North’s exploitation of the South. If Karl Marx had published Vol. 1 of Capital in 1857 instead of 1867, the South would have had a popular basis for its exploitation case. But the southern states could not see into the future. The southern politicians did not know that whites would become self-hating people who would empower black Americans and illegal immigrants as victims of white people and misuse southern secession arguments as proof of white racism. The British today have made the identical mistake as the South made by trying to buy their way out of the European Union instead of just leaving on the grounds that membership is a violation of British sovereignty and law accountable to British citizens. Government works to expand centralized control. Lincoln succeeded in shattering the 10th Amendment’s limit on central power. The real achievement of the War of Northern Aggression was to centralize power over the American people. All of them.   

Russia's Non-Jewish History-2.

Continuation from here.

For any Westerner who ever tries to get an honest grasp of the Russian modern history (19^th Century till present) detaching oneself from own historical, Western, in general, and American especially, experiences is a must. Those are absolutely inapplicable to Russia with a sole exceptions of Western liberal influences the way those were consumed, converted, Russified that is, and transplanted by what is known as Russian 19^th century intelligentsia—overwhelmingly Russian in its origin. The ever important Russian issue of the land, serfdom, peasant commune (aka Mir) and backwardness when compared to the West is what drove Russian history in the 19^th century. Of course, Russia's intellectual and art history of a period is very important. As Aileen Kelly noted in her introduction to Isiah Berlin's wonderful collection of essays known as Russian Thinkers:

The view that despotic socialism was no more than Russia deserved would be accepted by many western liberals as not unjust, at least with regard to the 'devils' of Dostoevsky novel, the Russian radical intelligentsia. In the degree of their alienation from their society and their impact on it, the Russian intelligentsia of the 19^th century were a phenomenon almost sui genereis. Their ideological leaders were a small group with the cohesiveness and sense of mission of a religious sect. In their fervent moral opposition to the existing order, their single-minded preoccupation with ideas and their faith in reason and science, they paved the way for the Russian Revolution, and thereby achieved major historical significance.  

What is left to ask, in this case, is WHAT made Russian intelligentsia so "radical"? Western liberal ideas? Sure, in the end, most of this intelligentsia, from radical Westernizers such as Chaadaev, Vissarion Belinsky or Alexander Herzen, to Leo Tolstoy (who actively read Jean Jacques Rousseau while writing War and Peace), to Turgenev, who happened to be the "resident" of Russian intelligence in Paris, were all people who knew Western Europe first hand, lived there for long periods of time and in general had means to dedicate themselves to intellectual endeavors. It matters, of course, that overwhelming majority of this intelligentsia were Russians, not Jews, and many were aristocrats and nobility. Yet, they stood, radically at that, in opposition to "regime".  How so, which is especially notable for the thinking and writing of Nikolai Nekrasov or Leo Tolstoy who were land owners and owned serfs? The answer is in the question.

Anybody, who ever visited Sevastopol and bothered to visit all of its places of combat glory in Crimean War (1854-56), from Fourth Bastion, where young officer Count Leo Tolstoy served and wrote his Sevastopol Sketches, to a Malakhov Kurgan memorial complex, to a magnificent (stunning really) Roubad's Panorama Siege of Sevastopol at Historic Boulevard, one would be struck, while walking through expositions, with few things. For starters, one is always struck with a small size of the uniforms of Russian soldiers and sailors presented in those expositions. Make no mistake, we all know that people were smaller then, but between stunning Patriotic War of 1812 exposition in Moscow's Historical Museum and those of 1854-55 there is very little difference in sizes. I, personally, was always struck by this fact. And then, of course, the guide who would be taking you through weapons' exposition underneath the main floor of Panorama will tell you, that while fighting combined forces of Great Britain, France and Turkey, trying to defend Sevastopol, Russians were armed with smooth bore muskets. The invaders—they had rifles. Those rifles had a much greater range than Russian muskets. Well, that, plus they were dramatically more accurate. Russia lost that war and abandoned Sevastopol. Humiliating for Russia Treaty of Paris was signed in 1856 and, far from this "radical intelligentsia's" condemnations of Czarism, the voices of condemnation were heard from Czar's own family. As Grand Duke Konstantin stated:

We cannot deceive ourselves any longer; we must say that we are both weaker and poorer than the first-class powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material terms but in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.   

Needless to say, combined naval Anglo-French squadron had more screw driven ships than whole of Russian Navy. Here we come to an important juncture—Russian intelligentsia, which was, sometimes not without the merit, accused of wishing a defeat to Russian Czarism in Crimean War, was not just doing that out of hatred to the regime—it was the means to an end. Obviously, many falsifiers of Russian history, such as Solzhenitsyn, consistently refused, out of faux patriotism, to attribute Russia's humiliating defeat in Crimean War to actual serious economic, material, cultural and organizational backwardness. The fault was squarely placed with those people in Russia who called for this defeat. Fine, many did call for that and that doesn't make them right, but this fact in no way removes, even under constant whining of all kinds of "patriots" about aggressive West (anybody in their own mind blames rain for being wet?) and presentation of myriad of petty excuses for a loss, the fact that when it really mattered Russia had no (with the exception of some Russian naval ships which were first in the world to utilize Paixhans Guns in naval combat) economic and technological wherewithal to deal with premier military and economic powers of the era. Truth was—Russia, for all her creative genius waking up, remained a profoundly backward agrarian society not fit to compete with emerging industrial powerhouses of Europe and North America. Crimean War exposed this sad fact completely. 

In the foundation of this backwardness WAS serfdom (virtual slavery) of Russian peasantry, medieval level of agriculture and cultural set up of Russian village, Russian peasants' Mir—a commune which pursued only one objective, survival of people who were counted for nothing by Russian aristocracy and nobility, who owned them. The warranted, in fact, irresistible question is this case is this: in what sense Jews, who themselves lived in Pales of Settlement, are related to this core issue of Russian history? Sure as hell, Jews didn't invent serfdom. Nor did they invent transition of Russia to absolutism under conditions of evolution to absolute serfdom (see Sobornoye Ulozhenie (Соборное уложение, "Code of Law"—in Russian) and virtual locking Russia into feudal economy, while the West's absolutism was growing together with the growth of industrial capitalist forces. 

Horrors of serfdom and its profound and long lasting debilitating influence on Russia are well documented and require no additional elaboration, enough to start counting peasant uprisings in Russian history, not to mention by far not exceptional cases of Russian serf-owners' sadism towards own "possessions", such as notorious Saltychikha. So, what was, in this case, surprising in the fact that Russia was not ready to enter one of the first industrial age major wars which she lost despite all efforts and heroism of her military leaders and Russian soldiers and sailors, all of who were former Russian peasants? In one of the most important pieces of Russian classic literature, Goncharov's Oblomov, main character of the novel, a lazy day-dreaming landowner has his life changed when dealing with his childhood friend Stoltz who represents new capitalist forces arising in Russia. Stoltz, being a good friend of Oblomov and who honestly tries to shake him from the state now known in Russia as Oblomovshina, inadvertently causes Oblomov a great pain with Oblomov dying in the end—an unchanged man, a personification of 19^th Century Russia. Even when the serfdom was abolished in 1861, the year American Civil War started—a first fully genuine modern war of the industrial age, which also saw many Russians fighting on the Union's side with, in the end, Russian officer Ivan Vasilievich Turchaninov (Ivan Basil Turchin) becoming one of the key figures in the process which led to Emancipation Proclamation. Needless to say, Turchaninov (Turchin) was also a veteran of the Crimean War.  Interesting...

To Be Continued….