The Homecoming of EU chickens

The most recent rounds of EU expansion- or the better medically-sounding term for this condition, the “enlargment”, is far more appropriate, were purely political undertakings ( actually perhaps not the most recents ones but all the new “acquistions” since 1990 except perhaps for EU’s Anschlüß with Austria). These acquisitions did not benefit the cause of the long term European unity. Some ethnofascist states were “adopted” as long as they were rabidly Russophobe and equally rabidly pro-American (apparently the only criteria that mattered at the time) like the tiny Nazi statelet of Estonia. Many long term political issues were unresolved, grievances and historic injustices (like the Benesch decrees in the Czech Republic) were not addressed. It was done because the EU really wanted the new members and little dwarfs that run it from behind the curtains thought that this is the historic moment and they are the collective Charlemagne or the Charlemagne collective. This whole thing was just hastily pushed through as if it were a land grab which I guess it was. It seems the best option for the present day EU would be to suffer a major catastrophe and die hopefully a not too painful death. A reform from within is something I wouldn’t expect though I do passionately believe in Easter bunny.

Being smoke free, no triumphant feelings

 Today is my third day without cigarettes.  It feels awful. I quit twice in the past. The longest I stayed smoke-free was for about a year. I also did not drink anything (anything worth drinking that is ) during that miserable year and yes stimulant-wise this period of self-induced ascetism was most abysmal. 

Why did I not drink? For me alcohol in any form is the most powerful smoking trigger I can think of. No drink, no smoke. On the other hand I enjoy drinking. There is no particular reason I quit this time. So why did I quit this time? My father does it perpetually. Now in his 60s, he quits intermittently, every second month or so he goes off the hook, then stays tobacco-free for a month or two and then lights up again. 


A few observations.

Smoking cessation guides of which there is a legion out on the Internet all claim that physical withdrawal symptoms disappear after 72 hours.  In reality, those symptoms got much worse.  Actually the first 24 hours were tolerable, the next 24 barely tolerable and the craving for a cigarette after 72 hours became almost unbearable.

I’ve got vast quantities of wine, whiskey, brandy stashed in the house and cigarette packs lay around all over.  

Lack of concentration -  it is next to impossible to concentrate on anything,. Even writing this sentence requires an enormous effort. I can’t see how I can do any kind of work in the next few days. Screw that. Perhaps doing menial tasks like laying bricks or driving one of my Fiats around, pointlessly while listening to something upbeat and inspiring might be the only sort of thing I can do now. Talking of upbeat and inspiring - just got a fabulous CD with a recording of Le Triomphe de la République, the 1792 work by François-Joseph Gossec, with Swiss Radio Choir, good stuff,  so beautifully French, so alien, so remote, so upbeat, so inspiring. On the CD cover there is a reproduction of a painting depicting some proud common man, un citoyen, someone who stood up in defense of the republic no doubt. The man is smoking a pipe.

A poll of the failed 1991 Soviet Union "coup"

Interesting opinion poll of the so-called coup of 1991 in Russia:
http://www.5-tv.ru/video/506466/

if time could be reversed, in 1991 would you:
1) man the barricades (support "democracy")
2) support the coup (support elemination of Gobrachev, Eltsin /Yeltsin and forcible if necessary restoration of the Soviet Union)
3) just stand aside - I don't care

1) 10%
2) 82%
3) 8%

Russian junta's love for all things German and the Little Nasty Dwarf to run a show race for anti-Russian statelet's presidency

The opinion poll (Levada center, 2011), use translate.google.com
http://www.levada.ru/press/2011060103.html

(http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.levada.ru%2Fpress%2F2011060103.html)

The results are clearly schizophrenic.

Out of five top "allies" the top  three - Kazakhstan, Belorussia and Ukraine - are parts of Russia, historic territories of the Russian state, separated as artificially created "national republics" during the long night of the Bolshevik captivity.

The fourth state is... Germany.

Something that I find hardly comprehensible or rather totally incomprehensible.

That entity - because the Federal Republic of Germany is the direct legal heir to the Prussian state, to the German empire and to the Nazi Third Reich (unlike the GDR which had explicitly nothing to do with those criminal entities) has a peculiar track record - it  destroyed Russian state in 1917 - something that was never restored, unleashed Communism on the Russian people, invaded Russia twice in the space of 40 years, unleashed Nazism, murdered more Russians than were otherwise killed or died from epidemics in the course of the world's entire history, destroyed vast number of cultural objects and landmarks, at a junction in time the criminal state of Germany was partitioned but  most tragically it was again re-united unconditionally by Gorbachev-Eltsin gang and as the ultimate gesture of ingratitude German leadership did everything to enlarge the EU with new anti-Russian statelets (especially the ethno-Nazi statelets in the Baltics), expand NATO (which was a German initiative), and support Islamist militancies in the Balkans and Caucasus: Germany has the largest Chechen population now, thanks to particularly receptive and openly anti-Russian asylum policies. German visas are among the most difficult to get for the Russian nationals - far worse than Spanish, French or Finnish Schengen visas. I would rank Germany as the most anti-Russian state in (old) Europe, after Britain and Sweden. Germany in today's form is however a new state (unlike say Austria), so I am unsure about placing it entirely with the old Europe (with Russia and France), perhaps its personality is split as it has a lot in common, spiritually at least, with the ethnostate which emerged on Europe's periphery in the course of the 20th century.

Although it was nominally democratic Czech(-oslovak with Slovak part being pretty much a nobody, not even the second fiddle) state committed horrific crimes against its German speaking citizens and indirectly against Germany, in Russia it was all the other way around as the number of Russian victims is disproportionate to German and Nazi ones. This said I find that Czech attitudes toward Germany today are far more reserved than what one sees in Russia, where jubilant and slavish Germanophilia is the norm especially when it comes to monstrous merchandise churned out by Teutonic industries.  An example would be the extraordinarily overpriced German Siemens   fast speed trains that run now on preposterous (from economic and societal perspective) Moscow to St. Petersburg route. Although the French built TGV and Italian  faster versions of FIAT Pendolino (the train unit is also owned by Alstom) offered to do the same for a fraction of the price and although unlike Siemens Alstom has experience of fast trains in Arctic (in Finland), the junta chose German because it was German. Likewise the junta created a cult of German car - both government and mafia (both are essentially the same in Russia) drive Mercedeses and BMWs - I can't see French president drive or rather be driven in a piece of German junk). Since Germany is a biological enemy of everything Russian, the choice to me is both puzzling and  revealing.

Name five countries which you might call the closest friends and  allies of  Russia ...? * (Responses ranged from last measurement)

	2005	2006	2007	2009	2010	2011
	V	V	VIII	III	V	V
Belorussia	46	47	38	50	49	35
Kazakhstan	20	33	39	38	32	33
Ukraine	17	10	11	3	20	21
Germany	23	22	24	17	24	20
China	12	24	19	18	16	18
India	16	15	14	12	14	16
Cuba	-	-	-	8	10	13
Armenia	9	14	15	15	15	11
France	13	8	9	9	11	9
Azerbaijan	5	7	5	10	8	9
Bulgaria	11	10	9	9	8	9
Italy	6	7	8	5	8	6
Venezuela	-	-	2	8	10	6
Kyrgyzstan	5	7	7	9	4	6
USA	11	5	6	2	7	5
Tajikistan	3	3	7	9	4	5
Egypt	2	1	2	2	2	5
No such	10	13	10	13	11	11
Difficult to answer	14	15	18	14	12	15

* Contains the first twenty countries in descending order


Here is how Belarussians view the world (2007, though I don't believe much changed since then), use translate.google.com
http://www.eurasianhome.org/xml/t/socials.xml?lang=ru/&nic=socials&pid=38



Despite massive propaganda campaign unseen since Stalin era and unprecedented monopolization of media attention, the "rating" of Russia's appointed   tyrant, Medvedev, is at humble 44% while Putin's inflated approval is at 49%, a figure I find myself difficult to believe in as it should hover somewhere in the low 10s.  I haven't met anyone who voted or would vote for the cockroach.

On top of that comes the news that two-bit tyrant Putin decided to put his phony candidacy up for mock elections.

Photos from the protests in Israel

Protests in Israel, huge, massive, incredible, totally unreported by the media as they are not even taking place. How big are Israeli protests? They are same as if 10 million people demonstrated in Moscow.  The CIA paid "opposition" in Russia rarely gathers 100 people for its demonstrations, never mind millions, but those puny laughable theatrics attract massive media attention while massive demonstrations in Israel, miraculously, go on unnoticed. Here are some incredible photos from Israel which the media does not (do not) show you.

http://cryptome.org/info/israel-protest/israel-protest.htm

On Magnitsky, dissidents and Syria

The US is upset about Magnitsky (Magnitski), a scummy lowlife that died in custody in the Russian Federation. In fact the haughty Fourth Reich even introduced visa sanctions on Russian officials while meek and timid Russia Federation does not possess the testicles to respond in kind or in better   by say kicking Coca Cola and Ford out of the country.  One has to remember though that in the United States thousands of innocents are murdered every year in police custody and the official count is over 650. Now the US government and the state department is apparently not bothered by the deaths of  thousands of its citizens in the police custody, but is shocked, just shocked, at the  demise of a single treasonous lowlife that was in employ of Wall Street interests and died of natural causes while in police custody in the Russian Federation.

For the few last weeks the media in the United States and its vassal states went on an offensive against Syrian president, "the tyrant" Assad,  who allegedly  might have mistreated some of the armed thugs who were sent to destabilize Syria and kill its citizens.

Now in the context of incredible uproar over death of a single treasonous lowlife (a Russian citizen kept  Russian police custody on charges of serious crimes) or how President Assad mistreats armed gangs on the rampage,  I am puzzled because I remember the way how the United States government dealt with its own dissidents and their families at Waco, Texas.  It barbecued, roasted alive, 74 men, women and children although the victims did not threaten anyone, did not steal billions and did not go out to kill people. Read this and watch the documentary clip. However vicious inhuman murder of 74 men and women (who were burned alive to the accompaniment of recorded screams of rabbits being slaughtered) is nothing compared to death of one despicable lowlife like Magnitsky. 

On 20th century Russo-Polish relations

Putin was wrong, criminally wrong, to apologize or say sorry for Katyn events after the plane-load of Russophobes crashed near Smolensk (which should have been celebrated as a national holiday and not a day of mourning for Russophobe lowlifes). Also it is funny that Brzeziński, the Supreme Russophobe, believes that Russia cannot have an opinion on its own history if the rest of the world considers it criminal. By rest of the world he means the USA, East European Nazis and himself - which even when put together hardly represent more than 5% of world's population but do represent the humanity's most inhumane and criminal part. 

The link was originally forwarded to me by Mike Averko, a gentleman who is knowledgeable about Russian Polish affairs and who though an  American  is consistent in his anti-fascist views.

 

 

http://www.russiablog.org/2009/10/russian-polish-history-averko.php

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2011/08/16/revisiting-contentious-issues-of-polish-russian-relations.html

 

Ruslan LYNEV | 16.08.2011 | 12:00

Recently RIAN, the key Russian media outlet, hosted a presentation of several books which, based on documentary evidence, shed new light on the past conflict between Poland and the Soviet Union. In the process, the authors – scholars and archive researchers – seemed ready to jointly subscribe to the view that sober assessments are at last beginning to prevail over selfish political motivations in the debates over the history of the Polish-Soviet relations. This, however, was not what I gathered from The White Spots – The Black Spots, a collection of papers by Polish and Russian authors on the same theme. A detailed analysis of the materials can be found in Issue 6 of the Novaya Polsha journal. The ideas expressed therein essentially combine into a fairly unconvincing attempt to build an academic framework around the point set forth by Z. Brzeziński years ago in The Wall Street Journal: the Russian administration, as he believes, has no right to avoid pronouncing a judgment on Russia's past which the rest of the world regards as criminal. The legitimate question in the context is: was Poland constantly an innocent victim of the Soviet Union with no crimes against the USSR on its own record?     Poland, not Russia, unleashed the 1919 Polish-Soviet war and, moreover, most of the fighting at the time was on the territory of Ukraine. Józef Beck, a veteran of the 1919 war who later became Poland's foreign minister and as such a notorious proponent of rapprochement with Hitler recalled „killing everybody and burning down everything at the first suspicion”. The Red Army repelled the aggression and in 1920 launched a counter-attack during which the initial success caused the Soviet top commanders to completely lose touch with reality. As a result, the Red Army suffered a crushing defeat near Warsaw and Moscow was forced to open peace talks which produced the Treaty of Rigagiving Poland large chunks of Belarus and West Ukraine. In part, the talks revolved around the fate of Soviet servicemen who were executed or taken captive by Poland and perished in numbers in Polish camps due to inhumane conditions, starvation, epidemics, and degrading treatment. On September 6, 1921 Soviet commissar for foreign affairs G. Chicherin sent a note to the Polish chargé d’affaires ad interim stating that 60,000 of 130,000 Soviet POWs had died in captivity in Poland. Much earlier, on January 29, 1921 Col. K. Habicht of Poland's medical service who was involved in the Riga talks as an expert submitted to the Polish army command a memorandum of the Russian-Ukrainian Commission for the Repatriation of POWs accompanied by his own comments. One of the latter read: „Since it would be difficult to formulate a meaningful response to the charges we are facing, it makes sense to altogether brush them off with a reference to the fact that generally POWs in Russia are treated no better than in our country”. As a part of the response pressure strategy, Poland confronted Russia with a 1,495,192,042 marks bill for accommodating the Soviet inmates. The Soviets reacted by pressing a four times bigger claim based on the calculation of the costs of the inmates' forced labor, and the material compensations issue was promptly dropped from the agenda. The view broadcast over the past several years by the Polish media is that the isolated incidents of war-time abuse in Poland, albeit real, were nothing compared to the abuse perpetrated by the Soviet Union which for decades pursued the strategy of subduing Poland. Yet, what is being discussed were not isolated incidents. Poland's 1919 war veteran turned foreign minister Józef Beck wrote rather revealingly: „As for Russia, I can't find enough words to describe our hate for it”. Józef Piłsudski's calls for leaving nothing but death or captivity to the retreating Red Army stemmed from the same sentiment. In fact, Piłsudski used to tell that he dreamed to seize Moscow and to leave an inscription on the Kremlin wall saying: „Speaking Russian is prohibited!”. Were the incidents really isolated? In the former Soviet Union, the overarching principle of the approach to the history of Polish-Soviet relations was to maintain complete silence on all potentially divisive issues and to carefully avoid reviving old grievances. Since the late 1980ies, the Polish political elites, historians, and commentators started pushing for such relations with Russia that would stop short of cutting off all ties with Moscow but would, as late Polish president L. Kaczyński suggested, enable Poland to permanently draw benefits from Russia.The „partnership” model affords flexibility in handling historical problems to such an extent that Novaya Polsha could even publish Ya. Podolsky's recollections of the Polish captivity, though the material was tailored to the point of selling the Polish Gulag as some kind of paradise. The death toll among the Soviet POWs in Polish captivity remains the key contentious issue. In a clear attempt to downplay the proportions of the tragedy, Poland asserts that as of October 18, 1920 it held 110,000 Red Army servicemen (Novaya Polsha, № 11, 2005). Some 25,000 immediately switched their loyalty to the Polish army and joined the Cossack and other White Army formations, and 65,797 eventually returned to the Soviet Union. According, for example, to Polish historian Z. Korzun, the rest – some 16,000 – 18,000 people – died in Poland of injuries and epidemics which at the time raged across Europe, or of severe conditions which were justifiable considering Poland's own material embarrassments. Russian researcher T. Matveev holds based on currently available documentary sources that the number of Red Army servicemen taken captive by the Polish forces was 157,000 instead of 110,000. I. Pikhutina puts the figure at 165,550 with a reference to documents found in Soviet and Polish archives. Finally, V. Filimoshin's estimate is 296,877. The significant dispersion is owed to two circumstances. First, the reporting of the delivery of inmates to Polish camps and of the deaths in them used to be extremely incomplete. Secondly, whatever figures available do not reflect those who were left on the battle fields or killed on the spot, which at the time happened routinely. It is an open secret that Red Army captives who were commissars, communists, or Jews were subject to immediate execution in Poland. The number of Red Army servicemen who died on the way from the places of captivity to camps also remains unknown. Overall, the statistics fails to account for what happened to some 40,000-50,000 Red Army servicemen. The calculations performed by military historian V. Filimoshin show that around 82,500 Red army servicemen died in Poland. In 1998, Russia's attorney general asked his Polish counterpart to open a probe into the causes of the deaths but heard back that no investigation into “the alleged extermination of the Bolsheviks taken captive during the 1919-1920 war” would be conducted. In other words, Polandwants the Katyn massacre to be condemned as an act of genocide but the concentration camps it ran in Tuchola, Strzałkowo, Bialystok, and Brest – to be regarded as perfectly normal institutions. In fact, the Red Army servicemen were not the only category of people to face inhumane conditions in Poland. White movement leader A. Denikin recalled that the White Army forces were similarly ill-treated in Polish camps at the time. In the 1920ies, the triumphant Poland launched a sweeping campaign of uprooting all things Russian. When the Russian Cathedral of Saint Alexander of Neva, a shrine with artwork of exceptional value, was looted and destroyed in Warsaw, a Polish newspaper wrote that by this Poland had demonstrated moral superiority over Russia. In contrast, even L. Trotsky, otherwise renown for his ruthless character, wrote in July, 1920 that the Red Army should treat captive Poles generously, the reports of Polish atrocities notwithstanding. These days, the EU intends to observe August 23 – the date of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. It is clear that as a part of the event Moscow will be taking hammering and showered with calls for recanting Russia's past and handing out various compensations, while others will as usual remain insulated from criticism. On our part, it would be a huge mistake to accept the approach to history as a norm.