Five fine things found on Facebook (4)

 

“The Nutcracker”, Tchaikovsky; The London Royal Ballet Source

Bone-Titla. San Carlos Apache. 1913 Source

Built in the 18th century, this is one of the oldest buildings
in Hattfjelldal municipality in Norland, Norway Source

King Tutankhamun's shoes Source

Everest Source

The real battle, by Sackerson

Why Ukraine? Why now? Why at all?

It’s not about fighting Communism - the battle against the USSR was won in the 1990s.

Or are we to be persuaded by racialism? It’s worked before: see the WWI US recruiting poster by Harry Hopps, where a drooling monster ape in a German Pickelhaube helmet holds a despairing young woman – boobs out, lads, look! – under the title ‘Destroy This Mad Brute.’ 

Today the target is not the Hun but the Slav, appealing to what Peter Hitchens has just called ‘the ridiculous cartoon idea that Russia is like Mordor in Lord Of The Rings, an utterly evil country ruled by a Dark Monster.’ https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/02/peter-hitchens-granny-gets-her-gun-from-a-bunch-of-shamelss-neo-nazis-not-that-the-bbc-would-ever-te.html Do Slav lives matter?

Our propaganda may be as crude as that of a century ago – see last Friday’s Mail article describing President Putin as a ‘Snarling rat backed into a corner’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10525223/Vladimir-Putin-snarling-rat-backed-corner-writes-IAN-BIRRELL.html - but the quality of our politicians actually seems to have declined. Think of our Foreign Secretary, who can’t distinguish between the Baltic and the Black Sea https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/vladimirputin/video-2604297/Video-Liz-Truss-confuses-Baltic-Black-Sea-700-miles-apart.html and goes into a meeting with Mr Lavrov unaware that Rostov and Voronezh are Russian regions https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-cites-truss-error-evidence-west-doesnt-understand-ukraine-conflict-2022-02-11/ If she wishes to channel Mrs Thatcher she should imitate Maggie’s diligent preparation.

Perhaps our representatives are counting on the dumbing-down of a populace whose imagination has been fed by the fascistic violence of Marvel comic heroes and a secular religion figureheaded by an autistic teenage activist I call the Swedish Frightingale or Joan of Aargh.

Are we fighting for democracy? Let’s not look too closely at how the current regime in Ukraine was installed. For that matter, is the EU a democracy? If it is, why did we leave?

Is the UK a democracy? Actually, no; we have a constitutional monarchy and are subjects not citizens. When John Dunning proposed his 1780 motion to curb the influence of the Crown https://libquotes.com/john-dunning/quote/lbj9i1o he may have thought that Parliament was belling the cat; instead, power has simply passed down to the Privy Council, of which the PM and all the Cabinet are automatically members. Tony Benn, a socialist but a Parliamentarian to his bootstraps, warned many years ago - and I'm sorry not to have found a link - that our freedoms could be swept away in an afternoon by Order In Council. PM Blair knew this very well, for one of his first acts in government (3 May 1997) was to use the Council to make the Civil Service subordinate to spin doctors https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/247039/response/605821/attach/3/3%20May%201997%20Civil%20Service%20Amendment%20Order%20in%20Council%201997.pdf?cookie_passthrough=1.

The Opposition in Parliament is our safeguard against tyranny, but it has failed. A touchstone for this is the way that on 19 October last year Parliament renewed the extraordinary powers of the Coronavirus Act without so much as a division. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/watch-mps-extend-the-coronavirus-act-without-a-vote The Covid episode has taught the State that there is almost nothing it cannot do to the people, provided the Opposition colludes in the hope of getting their turn soon and the Fourth Estate sings loyally from the State’s hymn sheet. We see this again in Canada, where Prime Minister Trudeau has invoked emergency powers merely to deal with trucker protests he himself has provoked by his high-handed Covid mandates.

Even the American Presidency is tending towards autocracy – remember how back in September Biden, speaking to his country about the Covid vaccination program, said ‘this is not about freedom or personal choice… my job as President is to protect all Americans… we’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7chQfQ67SM There as here, government has invaded our daily life so far that the new wine of super-power threatens to burst the old skins of restraining constitutional arrangements; for example, President Biden’s role is set down in Article Two of the Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution and there his protection was defined in military, rather than medical terms.

If the US were committed to genuine democracy, the Republicans would not find so many ways to make it harder for the underclass to participate in elections – redrawing constituency boundaries into fantastical politically-motivated shapes, siting polling stations far from left-voting population centres and so on; and the Democrats would not be turning a blind eye to, if not encouraging, an influx of poor immigrants whose ballots they hope may be counted on for a generation, or even allowing non-citizens the right to vote. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-allows-non-citizens-vote-controversial-law

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the real theme of what is happening domestically and internationally is simply the acquisition, concentration and retention of power. Former President Carter’s foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński reflected on this in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,’ https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf  published in 1997 - five years after the Soviet collapse. In this work, the term ‘freedom’ appears ten times, ‘democracy’ 25 times but ‘hegemon/y’ 56 times; what he calls ‘the game’ is played out using a string of ‘perches’ for American forces around the globe.

Brzeziński worried that the EU might become more independent of US influence, even friendly with Russia:

‘… any ejection of America by its Western partners from its perch on the western periphery would automatically spell the end of America's participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space.’

Well, here we are, 25 years on.

In playing this real-life board game – more like Risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game) than chess – I think our leaders have lost the plot. What good will it do us?

For it is ‘the economy, stupid.’ After a decade (the 1950s) in which the Soviet economy had been growing twice as fast as Britain’s, PM Harold Macmillan wrote (December 1960) to President Kennedy:

‘What is going to happen to us unless we can show that our modern free society – the new form of capitalism – can make the fullest use of our resources and results in a steady expansion of our economic strength… If we fail in this, Communism will triumph, not by war, or even subversion, but by seeming to be a better way of bringing people material comforts. In other words, if we were to fall back into anything like the recession or crisis that we had between the wars, with large-scale unemployment of men and machines, I think we would have lost the hand.’

-          Quoted in ‘Macmillan: The Official Biography’ by Alistair Horne (Macmillan, 1988)

For me the word that stands out there is ‘new’; capitalism old-style and protected by a very limited franchise was what fuelled the indignation that threatened to tear apart our ‘free society’; Lloyd George was forced to emasculate the House of lords in order to advance even his relatively modest welfare reforms.

Despite universal adult suffrage in the UK (still awaiting its centenary) the economic strains have begun to return as Western elites gave globalist bankers and traders their head. The tensions this has created at home are now being contained with high-handed government and unprecedented data-driven spying on and suppression of the people, abetted by an Opposition whose principal concern is its own welfare, and a complaisant mass media.

It’s not the Russians we need to sort out.

WEEKENDER: Kamila Valieva - a Pawn in the Game? by Wiggia

The young Russian figure skater caught out in the Olympics for drug use is currently getting a soft ride from both the IOC and the press. It cannot be a coincidence that her age is a factor in all this and the fact she is currently the world's Number One in her sport.

Should we care? Sport in general has not covered itself with glory when it comes to tackling difficult issues, such as footballers who insist taking the knee is a worthwhile practice, when the BLM is being exposed as an organisation that not only has ulterior motives away from race but is also a launching pad for the founders to fleece the public funds coming their way... millionaire row beckons.

Yet the players in our PL carry on as if this totally misguided gesture is actually having an effect on perceived racism, when in fact telling everyone every week they are racist just creates resentment for something that has been in decline for years; now, thanks to their agitation, it is headline news again.

It is and has been said that sport and politics do not mix, though the truth is politicians have used sport to their advantage for decades, and the fundamental principles of the Olympics as laid out by Pierre de Coubertin in 1898 have been jettisoned in favour of a flag-waving exercise. The Olympic movement is all about money and more of it, the amount poured into the IOC coffers to seal an Olympic bid are proof of that.

Nations and politicians all want to bask in the glory of having spent more than the last Games or World Cup to seal their place in history. The coming World Cup in Qatar  has to be one of the most ridiculous decisions by a sporting body in history: a country that has no interest in any sport other than importing a few Africans to boost their non-existent medal tally has only political reasons to bid for a major sporting event.  

The truth about how the stadiums have been built with the equivalent of slave labour with a death rate that has been deliberately hidden away was revealed very early on but ignored by FIFA and all the countries competing including our own kneeling team; the manager who believes kneeling sends the ‘right message’ is very quiet about competing in Qatar - why could that possibly be?

When one looks back to the fuss about touring cricket teams during the apartheid years in South Africa and the banning of players who competed there, today's attitude reveals a gap in moral fortitude the width of the Grand Canyon. The difference is money: no money for a breakaway cricket tour in real terms, but huge amounts gained in Qatar.

It was ever thus.

Back to Valieva. The sympathy being shown to the young Russian who is competing with a faux Russian team with the name ROC - a pseudonym for loophole - is being seen in a very different light to those young east Germans years ago, part of the regime's systematic doping program. Russia along with China has been doing the same thing in recent times, not that the USA or others have clean hands in all this during the same period.

Having failed a drug test she should have been automatically excluded from competing. It matters not if she was coerced, though the route to fame and fortune often does not need much coercion; she failed a test and that should have been that. If she wins now, we will now have the sight of other athletes being denied their rightful place on the podium and another sport being forever tainted.

This is the IOCs wording on anyone caught doping in competition at Beijing:

'An anti-doping rule violation in Individual Sports in connection with an In-Competition test automatically leads to Disqualification of the result obtained in that Competition with all resulting Consequences, including forfeiture of any medals, diplomas, points and prizes.'

You would think from that it is pretty cut and dried, but apparently not. They do themselves no favours in using weasel words to allow Valieva to continue.

Coming from a cycling background, I am more than aware of how doping ruins sport, and have written on the subject in a different context before. There is little doubt all sports have indulged in forms of doping. Lax testing and a reluctance to match other sports' doping regimes has allowed hitherto ‘clean’ sports to prosper whereas under the surface it has been going on for years.

Allowing this young girl to compete, along with some decisions deserving of derision in the USA regarding endless numbers of sprinters being found to fail drugs tests yet re-appearing months later in competition, has resulted in empty stadiums. When all sports become tainted with the belief that ‘everyone is at it’ sport loses its value in society. Fraudulent behaviour in sport should never be seen as different from fraud in the wider world, and whether the fifteen-year-old girl was used or was aware of being doped is of no consequence, she should not be there; it perpetuates the whole ‘winning at all costs' mentality that pervades sport these days when money is king.

Also, we must never forget the long term effects that doping has on competitors in many cases, including deaths. During the EPO (Armstrong) era many cyclists died after blood clotting events caused by the drug; again, the real numbers were not issued officially as far as I know, but it was not merely one or two, and again athletes as young as fifteen / fourteen were testing positive. Somehow though, I cannot see it ever being eradicated. Gene therapy is already being touted as the next challenge and we cannot be sure it is not already being trialled; this is very complicated to test for and prove though no doubt in the future it will be possible, but yet again it continues the drug era into the foreseeable future. Money and drugs will always triumph over morals in sport, it seems; a sad indictment of our times.

An article in the Times shows the hypocrisy among national sporting bodies. This runner has just retired:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3e0da814-8f43-11ec-9569-fea923928840?shareToken=2232a4d7cd091518051881a6143f9661

As this article is normally behind a paywall and I read it as part of my ‘free’ sampler I offer you this passage, which sets the tone:

'The US Olympic Committee was understandably disgruntled with the outcome of Kamila Valieva’s case at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. She is only 15, a “protected person” according to the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the latest chapter in Russia’s flagrant abuse of sporting ethics. However, that US Track & Field saw fit to post an image of Justin Gatlin alongside a starry-eyed emoji and the words: “Happy retirement to one of the greatest!” highlighted Olympic levels of hypocrisy as we sank further in the murk.'

FRIDAY MUSIC: Bert Jansch, by JD

"Bert Jansch (3 November 1943 – 5 October 2011) was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s as an acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter. He recorded at least 25 albums and toured extensively from the 1960s to the 21st century.

"Jansch was a leading figure in the 1960s British folk revival, touring folk clubs and recording several solo albums, as well as collaborating with other musicians such as John Renbourn and Anne Briggs. In 1968, he co-founded the band Pentangle, touring and recording with them until their break-up in 1972." 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Jansch
• https://www.bertjansch.com/history

ACOUSTIC ROUTES - Film trailer with Bert Jansch Billy Connolly Davey Graham Wizz Jones

CHASING LOVE - Jacqui McShee and Bert Jansch from the music film Acoustic Routes

Communism's victims, the great country of the dead

 According to the estimates of the 1997 French historical survey Le Livre noir du communisme, Communism has claimed the lives of some 94,360,000 people.

To illustrate this statistic, we can compare it to Worldometer's list of countries by size of population. If all the victims formed a nation of their own, they would be the 16th most populous country on Earth:

Alternatively, we could say that the size of the toll is equivalent to everyone in the globe's smaller 106 States and dependencies (from the Vatican right up to and including Croatia); every living soul in 45% of the world's nations... plus more than half of Kuwait; .

Communism is, of course, not the only ideology that kills in the name of peace, justice, equality etc; but its professed love of Man and pity for his condition seem to have involved an awful lot of destroying him.

I still wonder why the USA continued to back the Chinese Communist Party after Soviet Communism collapsed. It must have been a very sophisticated calculation.

Five fine things found on Facebook (3)

 

A deliveryman for the Home Ice Company hauls
a 25-pound ice block cleaved from a 100-pound block
Houston, Texas, 1928 Source

This Is How Sand Looks Magnified Up To 300 Times
Source

Portrait of a Pacific woman, New Zealand, circa 1870 - 1900
Source

Frozen Lighthouses On Lake Michigan Shore Source

                   The nine different ethnic groups of Bukovina region, (Austria-Hungary), 1902

From top left:
Hutsul, Hungarian, Rom (Romani or Gypsy), Lipovan, Jew, Pole, Schwab, Romanian, Rusyn

Source

Ukraine, the wrong elephant, by Sackerson

George Orwell wrote that as a policeman in 1930s Burma he was called on to shoot an elephant that had gone ‘must’ and killed its keeper. By the time he was armed and there, the animal had become calm and harmless; but the crowd expected him to destroy it, and so he did, cruelly and pointlessly. Let the people’s will be done.

Today, Russia is that Jumbo. Seven years after the Minsk-2 Agreement to regionalise Ukraine, an agreement which the ruling regime has failed to implement, suddenly we are to believe in an imminent assault by the Russians, one that will justify military intervention (possibly indirect) by the West including Britain. The consequences are unpredictable but potentially utterly disastrous.

Where is the public outcry like the one that in 2013 stopped the Cameron government in its tracks over Syria? It has been forestalled by orchestrated drum-banging; thanks to advances in mass communication, the people’s will can be given to them ready-made. For quite some time, we have been regaled with details of Russia’s build-up of forces on the border with Ukraine; though we are told much less of the Ukrainian forces massed since 2014 at the border, not of the country but of the Donbass, that largely ethnically and linguistically Russian eastern part of their cobbled-together nation. The UK’s new Chief of Defence Staff, a Navy man, thrilled the Daily Mail’s readers with details of how the evil Putin could cut vital undersea data cables. The US has prepared us for an attack on the Russians by suggesting that the latter might be planning a false flag attack on themselves.

It feels like the build-up to Iraq Two – the military preparations and jingoistic hoo-ha are getting to the point where it becomes impossible to turn back, even when the justifying pretext has failed to show itself. If the groom doesn’t appear soon we’ll have to do with the best man. What might that be? A local uprising? An assassination?

The hysterical groupthink is such that when Stephen Glover expresses concerns https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10495851/STEPHEN-GLOVER-Putin-nasty-piece-work-comes-Ukraine-hes-got-point.html he has to preface them with ‘Vladimir Putin is a nasty piece of work. But…’ as though one has to apologise for widening the lens to consider context.

Now before I too have to fend off accusations of loving the obviously subhuman Slavs who can’t wait to spit babies on their bayonets (sorry, that was the WWI Huns wasn’t it?) I should say that the raping and murdering Red Army chased my mother’s family out of East Prussia in 1945 and their farm is still sitting in Russian Federation territory; a return of our property would be most welcome, thank you.

However, it seems to have escaped the US State Department’s notice that the Soviet Union collapsed thirty years ago and Russia is no longer the homeland of godless Commies. After over seventy years of State persecution three-quarters of the population is still Christian. Also, despite the outrageous depredations of the post-collapse oligarchs only one-eighth of the seats in the Duma and regional parliaments are in the re-formed Communist party and none of the 31-strong national cabinet is a Communist; if anyone has a reason to hate and fear Red oppression it is the Russians themselves.

Conversely, it might be thought that if anyone misses the wicked Soviets it is the American political establishment. When the Nazis had been defeated the Marshall Plan saved Europe from falling apart and becoming a prey to revolution, yet when the USSR died there was no such reconciliation and assistance with reconstruction. The bogeyman’s role was too important to be written out. So it was that when Hillary Clinton addressed the voters of Nevada during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, she repainted the former slavering socialists as the core of a worldwide right-wing conspiracy; Putin was ‘the grand godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism.’ Her chaotic logic could have implied that she herself was an internationalist left-winger; thank goodness that her party had Bernie Sanders to help position her centrally in her triangulation.

If our American friends are so set on the hunt for godless Commies they might look further east, to the country to which they have almost suicidally ceded key US economic resources for decades. Vladimir Putin may possibly have designs on Ukraine, though it beats me why he should wish to venture further into Western continental Europe, historically a pit of mutually antagonistic serpents two of which launched vast raids on Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries; but China, now…

Twelve months after Mao’s 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic of China came the annexation of Tibet, referencing events in 1793. Far from defending the Tibetans, the British Foreign Office at last formally recognised the Chinese claim in 2008 https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/01/we-fight-to-save-drugrunners-yet-sell-a-nation-down-the-river.html . The country is rich in much-needed minerals, woods and water; as is the north Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, which the Chinese consider to be part of the ‘Tibet Autonomous Region’; plus the Aksai Chin region of Kashmir, to which the Chinese also claim entitlement. 

Looking north, in the early 1950s Mao offered Stalin help with developing Siberia’s mineral resources; ‘Koba’ said thanks but no thanks. In the wake of the Soviet collapse Chinese began crossing the Amur river in Eastern Siberia, heading for the city of Blagoveshchensk just across the water. France24 reported https://www.france24.com/fr/20120928-reporters-siberie-terre-chinoise-russie-chine-immigration-blagovechtchensk-agriculture-ouvriers-entrepreneurs-tensions on the growing ‘sinicisation’ of Siberia as long ago as 2012. Russia’s richly-resourced yet sparsely populated east must be a standing temptation to the Chinese, who outnumber the Russian people by nine to one.

Nor have China and Russia have always seen eye to eye ideologically, even before the fall of the USSR. When Khrushchev began his ‘thaw’ with the West, seeking a modus vivendi between the two political philosophies and spheres of influence, it led to the Sino-Soviet Split, China condemning Russia as ‘revisionists’ who had abandoned the principle that all those resisting global Communism should be converted or killed – rather like the extremists of another great proselytising faith who currently threaten world peace. It seems odd that when trying to widen the split, America chose to invest in the country that espoused the purer, more uncompromising version of Marxist-Leninism.

It’s taken the crass macho diplomacy of Joe Biden (or his advisers) to push Putin and Xi together; now, the two eastern nations have (sort of) united in declaring a ‘new era’ in their mutual relations. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/russia-and-china-unveil-a-pact-against-america-and-the-west Yet if the West has the wisdom to pull back, we shall see how deep the new Sino-Russian understanding goes. I would suggest the basis is a wary pragmatism, wise in a world where more than one nation is capable of obliterating human civilisation with nuclear weapons.

As to their plans for the rest of the world, we could take the view that it is not the Russians who are on the march – it seems Putin sees his line of development through a sort of Eurasian EU, negotiating for closer links with countries to his south while seeking to keep religious fanaticism under control. 

China, on the other hand, is more clearly expansionist and although its army is a million strong the tools currently employed are both more subtle and more powerful than mere sword-waving. About the Belt and Road Initiative we read often, but also of the Chinese government’s use of purchases, loans and possibly financial incentives to foreign politicos in the Pacific and Africa; my query is why America has not taken a leaf out of China’s book and love-bombed the same countries. Surely it would be much easier to contain the expansion of the Chinese hegemon with money rather than armies and missiles.

This is especially topical now that China is siding with Argentina in the latter’s claim that her $44 billion loan from the IMF is ‘odious debt’ and ‘China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty on the Malvinas Islands.’ https://kawsachunnews.com/argentina-joins-china-in-belt-road-initiative Doubtless the vast Chinese fishing fleets would love to help Argentina exploit the Exclusive Economic Zones around the Falklands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands; and then there might just be further implications for control (legal and/or military) of some of the potential mineral resources both there and in British Antarctic Territory.

In the midst of this we are supposed to focus on Ukraine, the wrong elephant. I hope that at least the British will not be so easily swayed and that our politicians can ‘get it’, as David Cameron did.