#when Russia has been 1. doing imperialism for hundreds of years

[goldmanguyperson]

hard to make friends when it’s predicated on threats huh. No mothers making families here

(по-русский)

[whatdoesshedotothem]

Friday 21 March 1840

7 ½

3

breakfast – had my pistols examined – fired of one – the other missed 2 or 3 times – then went downstairs to see about the kibitkas – gave the money 15/. to get a peau black leather for the top contre la pluie which might enter too easily at the top of the doors – then at my journal of yesterday when Madame Boborikinn came at 1 20/.. and A- not coming in left us tête just before our Ataman came perhaps about 2 or after – Madame B- and the Ataman, too, all anxious to see English money – we have left all we have at Moscow – happening to be writing and she, of course, noticed my book – had never seen English writing before – I explained translated what I was writing or rather what just before written about the cathedral – good civil little person she could not understand why it interested me to know how the domes were supported they cannot understand our so great interest in travelling – they would be better satisfied if we were writers and publishers of books – her husband had just before her arrival sent me en cadeau 2lbs. of the best gunpowder – grain as coarse as our common cheapest, blasting powder – the Ataman brought me the marché route he got written out and a paper of what to pay the former well the latter beautifully written in his chancellerie by one of his Cossacks – the courier went to him yesterday morning and at last having nothing better to say said that he had paid what they asked him – the Russians write Ataman the Germans Attaman – will go next year there, or, if prevented next year, the year after to the Caucasus waters – he not très bien portant - rheumatic right arm – cannot go this year – too late to apply for leave – the emperor will probably give him (he generally does on such occasions) 2000/. or 3000/. the army the enfans gates de l’empereur – at all rates, these Enfans gates are reconnaissans – 2 things strike one in Russia – the religion the religiousness of the people and their love of the Emperor – translated to the Ataman what I had just written on the subject of .... vid. line 11 last page – he said had anybody else mentioned the subject he should have called for authority and proof for the thing was too serious – the governor general – above all the emperor très severe on that score – he the Ataman did all in his power against and he really believed his Cossacks too poor to give much in any case of that kind – he said people would calculate where I had been, and suppose whatever I had heard was chez lui – I thanked him for the remark – and assured him I should try to profit by it – the general governor Temirazoff expected this evening – advised above all things our stopping to see Vladicawkass [Vladikavkaz] the fortress – fine mountain scenery – should go into the mountains a hundred versts from there – to ask colonel Grawert for whom General Rebender is to give me a letter – the colonel commandant of Kizlian speaks French perfectly well – is quite un homme comme il faut – but colonel Gurieff will give us all rensigumens as to what to do etc. etc. it was 3 ½ when our good Ataman took his leave – the gold pieces in which our

government paid the Russian troops had a large X upon them in 1814 and were taken at 18/. and they afterwards lost 2/. each upon them he then very young – his older brother also in the artillery went to Paris – he our Ataman did not go beyond the Rhine – his brother still colonel – he was aide de Camp to the prince Jachervil Jachervil pronounced Yashervill and thus got into the guards? and got rank – but the brother will be general next year – the Ataman gone, had the kibitka man – paid him (in full of the 280/. + 15/.) 200/. and gave him ./70 pour boire – then had the courier made all ready for paying him tomorrow morning and gave him 125/. in a/c of podorojna from here to Tiflis = 846 ½° versts – then till 5 ½ wrote up Journal to here – then at accounts till now 6 10/.. and order Semovar – had not been out today fine and sunny as it has been

the demi Imperial that I got at Kazan said general B- this morning = 18/2 ½ paper and = 5/15 silver = demi Imperial Russe a Napoleon = 17/22 paper or 4/92 silver – Madame de Rebender came about 6 ½ or before and sat with us till after 7 – brought us a little pot of butter and 2 little dried tongues (reindeers’?) and 2 pirocks made with sterlet – How good of her! and brought what she said would be of much more us to us, an official letter to the commandant of Kisliar [Kizljar] from her husband desiring that we might have an escort whenever required – and a letter also from the general (Rebender) to colonel Grawert of Kisliar [Kizljar] who would do anything he could for us – to drive up to his house 1st to know where we should lodge – and if not at home then to the commandant – she was just gone and we had just sat down to tea when Madame de Brugen and her sister Mademoiselle Briezmann came at 7 ½ and sat with us at our tea table in A-‘s room till 8 ¾ - brought the Atamans’ address – after less than 25 years service no pension – after 25 years 1/3 – after 30 years 2/3 after 35 years [3/3] i.e. full pay for life the widow always has ½ of the husbands’ pension for life and each child ¼, I think they said, till aet. 21 unless brought up at some of the Imperial Institutions and then, of course, no part of the pension it not being wanted – all this done by the present emperor – before the pensions depended up the pleasure of the emperor – now everything military officer can count upon having as above – the pensions of civil officers, they the 2 ladies do not know – but thought they were larger than the military pensions – will send us a right piroc tomorrow made of viasiga (pronounced veĕ-gă) – will send A- a little bag which she is to fill with shells of her own gathering on the shores of the black sea and send from Moscow thro’ a lady whose address they are to give us as also a letter to their mother at Wilna should we happen to pass that way – Adieu – au revoir at Moscow or St. P- they could live there for 8000/. a year – can have a house that will do for them (not in the Nevski Prospekt [Nevskij Prospekt], but in a good situation) for 1000/. per annum -  Mr. Strannack came at 9 (waited a few minutes till we had done tea) and staid till 10 10/.. – Humboldt here in 1829 and Rose (the great chemist?) with him – they went out in the steamer 80v. beyond the Quarantaine to get into the salt water of the Caspian – would have gone farther but then wood fell short – the water [even] their only brackish – but they had a north wind which keeps the salt water southwards sometimes the water is quite salt 20v. beyond the Quarantaine, and sometimes when there has been a south wind for 2 or 3 weeks the water is so salt even here, they cannot drink it -

SH:7/ML/E/24/00054

wanted to advise us not to go to Kisliar [Kizljar] – the terck to cross twice in going and ditto in returning – thinks it is more than 15v.  20v. out of the road – if there is a strong wind from the Caspian, it will blow the water on to our road at the 2nd station from Kisliar [Kizljar], yet tho’ so near to the sea, we shall not see it from the road – Kisliar [Kizljar] 50v. from the sea – Mr. S-‘s storehouses for flour etc. used be there; but now, the trouble of crossing for 2,000 or 3,000 carts was so great, the storehouses are but ½ way between K- and the Quarantaine – the ships here only brigs of 7 or 8 guns – commanded by Lieutenants and midshipmen – draw 6ft. of water – when S- first here, they had a right frigate drawing 9ft. water – now the water so much shallower there is only draught for 6ft. – the ships used to be built at Kazan, now the wood is floated here – 7 months in the water before arriving and so much the worse for it – the turpentine almost all washed out – that the vessels will only last 7 years – (seven years) – the oaks about Kazan grow in 4 months of the year more than ours do in the 8 months of the year that they grow - .:. the wood is not near so good – in fact, they cut out and lay aside the heart as not fit for use – it is sap they use – I spoke of teak now used for English ships – he spoke of a teak white wood that grows about Arkhangel, and in the government of Perm, and in Siberia nothing else along the left bank of the Lena Irkutsk to Yakutsk – it has a small round leaf life a little birch leaf – no turpentine – deciduous – called in Russian

Listwinishnik (pronounced Lis-wĕe-nish-nĭck) – the terrible business (revolt of the Guards at St. P-) was in Xber [October] (began in 18th n.s.?) 1825 – begged him to give our compliments to Mrs. Steward – meant to have called today – had not had time to stir out at all –

Basso relieve newly invented maps.  the Ataman mentioned this morning the newly invented map at Berlin shewing the heights of mountains by [?] on the map – a sort basso relieve – sold cheap – will fold up in a case as well as other maps – Had Domna – a little wine and tasted Madame de R-‘s biscuits (good) with A- 12 25/.. now when I had just written so far – then counting over money etc. etc. till 2 ½ - very fine sunny day –

daughter of the Rebenders  the daughter of the Rebenders at St. P- 10eme Ligne, Vassiliostrof, Institution Patriotique – count........ who has the affairs of Finland is her uncle – she married unfortunately – obliged to leave her husband .:. glad to have the place above named

[evilelitest2]

Please don't insult Tsar Nicholas II by comparing him to Stalin. Yes, Nicholas had commited many truly vile shit, but... he wasn't an evil person by heart, just an autistic boy who was unlucky to be born in the position of absolute power in the most corrupt and opressive country in Europe. Unlike him, Stalin wasn't born in absolute power. Stalin has many chances to stop going over Old Bolshevic's heads for absolute power and establishing personality cult of himself, but he didn't.

I mean...he killed a lot of Jews dude. Like his secret police wrote The Elders of Zion, one of his long term goals was to eliminate all the Jews in Russia (the imperial policy was 1/3rd of Jews would be converted, 1/3rd killed, and 1/3rd exiled). like there is a reason why I am not a fan of Tsar Nicholas II. My girlfriend's great grandfather had to flee the country because of the pogroms and then again later when he became an activist. In my mind, Nicholas and Stalin are basically two different flavors of horrible Russian autocrat.

Nicholas was certainly a nicer person than Stalin, he was a caring husband and a good father (in a time period when that was not normal) and he was a friendly affable guy to those around him. Meanwhile Stalin was just kinda a dick to everybody at every moment. But when judging a historical figure, how nice they are and how sweet they were personally doesn't really change their policies. Also like...Nicholas was born into the richest family in the world. Stalin was a disabled ethnic minority born into an abusive household in relative poverty, I'm not really sure why Nicholas being from a super privileged background makes him less of a monster? It's true I feel a lot more sorry for Nicholas than Stalin, since his son was a hemophiliac and his entire family is murdered (which for the record I don't consider acceptable) but if we are talkin about autocracy the fact that Nicholas is more likable shouldn't change the fact that again, killed a lot of Jews.

Now Nicholas II was born into power and personally didn't want to be Tsar but...he was given many many opportunities to give up some amount of power and he didn't. He clung to power in the face of the advice from almost anybody who wasn't an arch royalist super conservative. Even if we compare him to other conservative Monarchists at the time, Nicholas is so stubbornly unwilling to share power that it literally gets him killed. In the last two years of his reign he and his wife prefer to lose the war rather than accept aid from the Duma/Worker's Councils. After the disasters Russo-Japanese war (a war that he caused due to his incompetence and lost due to his incompetence) you have the 1905 revolution where after the death of thousand of people and the crippling of the Russian economy finally gets Russia Duma. And then Nikki's Black Hundreds brutally massacre thousands in order to make the Duma largely a puppet organization, and leads a series of nation-wide pogroms against Jews (who he blamed for all of his own mistakes). And what does he do with this absolute power he so furiously clung too? Help get his country into WWI and then does so badly in that war that his dynasty gets overthrown. And when you get into the details of the Russian Revolution, it becomes clear that Russia could have won WWI and the Romanovs could have kept power had Nikki been at all flexible. He is remarkable in that almost every decision he made as Tsar was the worse possible decision he could have made, it's like the platonic ideal of a bad monarch.

Nicholas was an absolute monarch with a brutal secret police and one of the richest men in the world. And under his administration labor conditions were some of the worse in the Industrialized world, political freedom was denied. None of this was for the good of the empire or anyone really other than himself and his rich friends, its just that Nicholas did it under the name of "tradition". Sure he inherited his horrible state whose national motto was "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality" but he was an absolute monarch, he could change it if he so choose. And he didn't, when he oversaw two failed wars, two famines, and two revolutions, at no point does he ever take responsibility for his actions and go "Hey maybe I should take steps to prevent the suffering of my people."

In many ways, that is Nicholas II's greatest crime, he would have been happier as a Constitutional Monarch, but because he was so damn stubbornly conservative he wouldn't even change when it was in his self-interest. All of this was avoidable, had he simply accepted the reforms his people so desperately wanted, he could spend more time with his family, not have to worry so much about his heir, and could leave the governance of the empire (which he sucked at) to people who like....were at all good at it. He would have been great as a Constitutional monarch, he could just sit around and be sweet and then hang out with his family, but instead he stubbornly clung unto power and blamed all of his mistakes on the Jews. All to defend a job he didn't even enjoy. It was all....so avoidable, almost everything under his reign didn't need to happen if he had simply accepted reforms rather than retreat into his little fantasy bubble of pure Russian peasants loving their little father the Tsar.

And again, his secret police wrote the Elders of Zion, which is in competition for "Book with the Highest Death Count in History." And this document was written because Nicholas didn't want to share power. A ton of his loyalists are going to end up working for the Nazis.

Now most of Stalin's crimes came out of malice and most of Nicholas' (again, except the violent racism) came out of incompetence, which does matter in terms of understanding their motives and why they were awful, and I don't think Nicholas enjoyed the amount of death he brought the way Stalin did...but like if your family starves to death it doesn't really matter if it was done because the ruler actively was doing it on purpose or was too fucking stupid to understand how a supply chain worked--you are still dead. And in the case of the Jews, Nicholas was intentionally murdering them by the thousands for its own sake. Stalin was also a racist anti-Semite but you don't have full pogroms under his reign until the last year of his reign (and the Doctor's Plot is no in no way comparable to any of Nikki's pogroms). Again, Nicholas loved and encouraged the "Black Hundreds" who were basically Russian fascists.

And Nicholas wasn't just a raging anti-Semite, he was also a white supremacist and a Russian nationalist. Despite being mostly Danish and German himself, with barely any Russian ancestry, Nicholas got super into the whole Russian supremacy thing, and his empire actively tried to wipe out the languages, cultures and religions of the ethnic minorities in his empire, most infamously in Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia. In fact, part of the traumatic childhood that probably made Stalin so bad was getting beaten for speaking Georgian (his native language) in school. And Nicholas' anti-Asian racism led to him buying whole hog into the Yellow Peril conspiracy theory, the original "White Genocide," which was a huge factor in the disastrous Russo-Japanese war (he regularly referred to the Japanese as "yellow monkeys").

Now Stalin did kill a lot more people than Nicholas over he course of his reign, that can't be denied, so at the end of the Day Stalin is worse than Nicholas in my mind. But not by much: Nicholas' regime would have killed more if he was competent enough to pull it off, and his stubborn stupidity in the face of an empire in desperate need of reform still killed millions of people. And what's more he never seemed to care. So getting up in arms about even comparing him to Stalin is ridiculous, revisionist, and probably a little bit classist, as well as implicitly counting the murder of Jews as less bad than the murder of Christians.

[g-46-stark]

Find Me In Paris: Things I’m still wondering...

So, I really love Find me in Paris, is really funny and original.

I appreciate the way they handle all the time travel stuff... I’ve watched it like a hundred of times, but I’m still wondering:

1-Why no one ever told Lena about the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917?

Really, not even Ines, who’s like the ballerina version of Hermione Granger.

For the ones who don’t know what I’m talking about, or just wants a reminder, I’m going to make a short resume:

From 1904 to 1905 Russia and Japan were fighting a war; Russia lose it, so people weren’t very happy (they also realize some social classes needed some changes);

The Russian army repressed a manifestation in St. Petersburg (some people want to present a petition to zar Nikolai II);

It started a revolution that lasted two years (1905-1907). After it, the zar was forced to create the Duma (a sort of Parliament). Some historicals think that this was the first step of the 1917 Russian Revolution;

During WWI, the social situation in Russia wasn’t all this good, especially for the factory worker. They all unite under the ideals of Lenin, and it started the October Revolution, which led to the abdication of zar Nikolai II;

Due to some political issue (it started a civil war between the new communist government and people that still wanted the zar) Nikolai Romanov and his family (his wife Alexandra, his four daughter Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and his son Alexei) were took in Siberia and then killed.

So, Lena is a Russian princess: some people think is Nikolai daughter, but since it’s not specificated, let’s say she’s his niece. 

She obviously doesn’t know about Russian nobility fate; so, she still thinks that in Russia there would be a zar, who would be one of Nikolai’s descendants.

She says on more than one occasion that she is a princess, who lives in a palace in Russia.

But the thing is this: I don’t think the old Russian nobility still lives in Russia and has all their old proprieties such as palaces.

So no one (not even the teachers) find strange that Lena goes around saying she’s a princess?

This leads me to the next point: why doesn’t Ines tell Lena about Russia 20th century history?

She knows Lena is from 1905, so she knows why she doesn’t know about it.

If I know that one of my dearest friends is a time traveler from 1900’s Russia (and part of the nobility), one of the first thing I would say to them it would be: “If you ever go back in your century, stay away from Russia! Move to the US and don’t go anywhere else!”.

I understand Ines wouldn’t say that for all the “don’t change the past because you don’t know how it could affect the future” thing, but seriously… Lena always said she wanted to go back! You don’t want to even warn her?

And later, in season 2, Lena said to Max all the truth; and she also said she wanted to go back so she could save Ines.

All Max has to say on it was: “Oh, ok. I’m really sad that you’re leaving, but that’s ok. Let’s create the most transgressive choreography that Paris Opera has ever seen.”.

And I was like… Ehm…hello?? The girl you claim to love just said she wanted to go back at the beginning of a disastrous century!! She’s leading herself into two revolutions and probably her death, but ok, let’s dance through it.

No one there knows anything about 1900’s Russian history?

And besides that, what about the history lessons or the history teacher?

What do they teach students in that school?

Oh, right...

2- Max's family: What happened between Max and Ruben     (Reuben?)? What happened between Armando and his wife? And, more importantly, where is she?

I know that since Lena is the main character, we should be worried about her background story, but really… you can’t throw us some hints about Max's dysfunctional family and then just walk away.

I mean, maybe it’s just me, but I’m still confused about something.

If I get it right (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong):

Ruben is not Armando biological son: he was adopted in Spain;

He was a street boy, who was an extraordinarily talented dancer;

He and Max were inseparable;

At some point, their mum took them to London, where she wanted them to attend a boarding school (Arrow? Harrow?);

Max was accepted, but Ruben wasn’t;

So, Armando took the boy with him to New York (where he presumably worked for the Imperial Ballet) since their mum “can’t take care of him”;

Then something bad happened between the two brothers;

The result was that Max was expelled from his school and his relationship with Ruben was ruined;

Max said that Ruben came to visit him at school and started “acting like himself”: he made something bad, but we don’t know what;

After “breaking his mother’s heart” for being expelled (words from Armando), Max won a sort of scholarship for a European ballet school and chose to go to Paris;

Then, it happens all Lena’s stuff;

At a certain point Ruben comes back in Max life, “stealing” is brother baroque choreography and going at his school (and dancing with his chica);

In a dialogue, we discover that he and Max made a promise, but one of them broke it;

I think it was about not “entering in the other's territory”? Like, Ruben couldn’t go to Max boarding school and Max couldn’t go to a ballet school/found a hip-hop crew? 

I don’t know if I missed something or I just misunderstood things, if you can explain it to me, I’ll be happy to listen. 

Anyway, I have some main question about Max family: 

WHERE IS HIS MUM??

I mean, I assumed she lives in London, her son lives in Paris, it’s like an hour's flight… why she never shows up? 

Not even for his shows at Garnier? Not even when her son injured himself so bad that he ends up in the hospital and had surgery?

Is she dead? Is she ill? Like does she have cancer or something so bad that she couldn’t take a plane to go to visit her hurt son? In that case, I’m sorry for my cruel judgment.

But otherwise…I know that the others character parents never go to visit their children (the only exception were Dash and Thea’s mums), but I think that every parent would have shown up in case their child end up in a hospital.

Is she totally unaffectionate?

Because the quote from Armando: “I took Ruben to NY because he wasn’t admitted at Harrow and your mother couldn’t take care of him” sound pretty bad.

What happened between Max's parents?

I know that married couple living in different city/country due to work isn’t uncommon, so it wouldn’t have bothered me if some word in Max and Armando’s dialogue in season 1 hadn’t been said:

Armando said that his wife decided to take the boys back to London, and it sounded to me like he didn’t totally agree with that decision.

Max said something like “don’t speak about mum” as it hurts listening to his dad talking about his mum.

So, maybe I’m seeing drama everywhere, but it seems to me that something happened with Max's mum and/or between the parents.

My interpretation of that, after seeing that scene, is that Armando and his wife were divorcing, so Mum took her sons and moved to London (without Dad's consent, maybe, it’s sadly common in some difficult divorces). Both the boys were obviously traumatized by that, so Ruben started acting badly (so he wasn’t admitted at school) making his mum desperate and unwilling to take care of him? And maybe Max was angry with his father for leaving mum and them (and after, for taking Ruben to NY and leaving him in a boarding school)? 

Why are Ruben and Max hating each other?

Okay, they’re brothers, but we’re going a little too far, don’t we?

Maybe Max’s a little jealous of Ruben's talent and (again) because he was taken to New York with their father while he was in a British all-male boarding school and blah, blah, blah… okay, we get it.

But Ruben?

Maybe he is jealous because he’s not Armando's biological son? Because he thinks Armando would always choose his “real” son instead of him?

It could be, but I’m totally plotting things on this point

We know that probably Ruben was the reason for Max's expulsion from his old school, and I presume that their parents thought it was Max’s fault, but I don’t think that’s all the story.

I mean, I personally want to know more about this.

In conclusion, dear producers: you can’t just toss at us two brothers that literally want to punch one another without a real explanation and expecting us to just walk away with that.

So…tell me what you think. 

Sorry for the long post, and thanks for reading it! 

[snow-wind-and-all-we-will-find]

Hi! My names arthur and im working on improving my word and building my story, which currently has no name haha! I have a myriad of characters who ill try to list out and give brief descriptions of, aether is technically my main character and some of the characters who are up for question are dead in canon. But you can still ask them stuff, itll just be set before death.

When asking characters questions, rememeber to include the name, their age if theres diffrent ages, i dont mind repeated questions, but if you see the question try not to ask it again lol. If you cant find it with a quick scroll just ask it, although i dont know if this blog will even get that big.

Aether

He comes in three evolutions lol, technically, theres four but idk if i would count 7 year old aether.

Ages: 13 yo - colder, hasnt gotten used to emotions, there are two to this as well, pre-rev and then post-rev 13 yo aether, remember to specify lol.

16 yo- a bit more out there, still kinda disconnected and figuring things out, a bit more defensive

22 yo- lax, hes sorta figured shit out, hes not going to go grazy, hes just gonna be chill lol.

!The gaggle Ghosts!

Yurei

Her personality is very, ehhh, becuase i havnt done work with her, and i havnt completly figured out who she is fully yet, shes 18 yo when aether is 22 yo

18 yo- pretty oblivious, somehow still a bit cynical, very nice and sometimes motherly

Kakoku

Few thousand- mean, likes to bully yurei as he huants her, lowkey a simp for yurei but he wont admit that. Kinda cynical and likes to bring others down, generally a bully

Tamashi

19- emotionless, has to be a really strong emotion to make her emote, tends to stray away from other people, likes to be alone, blunt

Gunnar

A few thousand- sweet, warm and welcoming, tries to be very fatherly and a trusted figure, is very busy most of the tiime unfortunatly though.

!The greek gang!

Argus agapov

16- unstable, pretty baby, protective over friends and family

Mythos agapov

23- whore. He also loves his family, lowkey, hes a trad wife

Perceus

15/16- timid, intrested in posiosn and acids, generally quiet, likes to eat leaves, scaredy cat

Diogenes

14- germ of phobe, kind of a brat, more just a bitch, will yell at you if he sees your hands were dirty from gardening or something while you’re walking to the sink, other than that hes fine, picky eater

Herodotus

15- disorginized, trys his best, likes to write stuff down, helps plato with his writing and grammar in general, gullible, likes record data, has a nice typewriter with tha good clicky clack

Plato

8- sweet baby boi, loves his older brother (socrates), idolizes him even, not a good idea though. He writes down everything socrates does, sometimes he imitates his brother as well.

Socrates

17- dumb of ass, also just dumb, held back a grade, feral child, bites alot of people, soft aestechic but hed stab as a warning

Heracles

30- also dumb of ass, loves cars in that ‘mah babeh’ kinda way. Hates motorcycles, he thinks they’re ugly. Chaotic but he utilizes it to be the weird and cool uncle/cousin thing

Zeus

46- too tired for this shit, is a dad, went out to get milk, jk jk, dissapeared for a hot few years, probably got captured by some gang dunno, it happens. Very serious, would make the dumbest jokes with his brothers with a straight face

Hades

50- lowkey the neglected middle child, soft goth lookin ass, loves his kid, tries his best to raise his kid, sometimes gets help from esme

Poseidon

57- proud stay at home dad, buff but does the typically wifely duties, makes sure his children get enough love, nutrience and care

Lillith

54- very active, the money maker, kinda soft, both her and her husband poseidon are so just in love with their kids, dote on them constantly, very extroverted, always makes time for her kids

Esme

51- tired of zeus’ shit, does her best to make sure no one dies, still treats mythos as her ‘little baby boy, tired mom vibes.

!the Eden gang!

Eden is a fictional country that i slapped onto the globe. It is where aether is from, technically aether is apart of the eden gang as well. Everyone here, if they have an age option, the first age option is the age they are when aether is 13, and the second will be when aether is 16 unless stated otherwise

General kyelli

49- fatherly, thinks of most of the gang as his children, calls everyone ‘son’, as a general rule. If you ask for another nickname, he will do his best. Has a bad knee, and is kinda of bad at existing physically

52+- fatherly still, loves almonds, always has a bag of almonds, dont test him. Enjoys travel, might adopt people he meets along the way, still has pains but now he sees doctors, wants to stay active

Indigo

13- sweet, optimistic, always looks on the brightside and tries to see the good in others. Little heater, understands that sometimes fighting is the only option

Akrano

16- lively, very loose and relax, can get serious when needed though, always making jokes and trying to lighten up the mood

19- a bit more, mellow. Still quite lively and childish, but with two signifigant-others you have to settle down sometimes

Ekrano

16- lively, more stern than akrano and kinda worried, but ultimatly also very loose and bright

Lilliana

16- serious, seemingly colder towards everyone, gets along great with psycho-lops, makes him new eye-patches to pass time, actually just very monotone and blank most of the time, although she does care

19- she doesnt change much, she got a bit more expressive, likes babysitting howl

Psycho-lops

16 1/2- always looks determined, actually kinda scared of conflict, likes to help out with healing though, very proficient in it as well, sounds intimidating while talking about how cute puppies and kittens are

19/20- still the same, is considering studying medicine and medical practices to become a doctor.

Bark

17- bright, incredibly lively, loves to joke around and tease and sometimes bully the others, targets aether primarily, hangs out with his brother most of the time, he can fight for himself but he likes the backup, especcially since he is kinda glass-jawed, being that hes a twig

Bite

17- quiet, intense eyes, always sounds vaugly confused when he speaks, deep voice lol, likes to train, doesnt understand barks need to tease others, likes to read to the children

20- quiet, intense eyes still, more so nervous sounding, slightly paranoid, cluastrophobic and cant stand dusty places, usually in his house or at the docks, doesnt really go anywhere else

Hanelle

17- loud, headstrong, adamant about her opinions, gets along well with bark, she tries alot to be intimidating, not a twig, but not very big, pretty friendly and sociable

!the band of pirates!

Aklea

A few hundreds of years- kinda bored seeming, loves blood, technically cannibal, but not really since he isnt human, to an extent. Despite being fine on the ocean, he gets very car sick very easily. Actually quite nice, very easily triggerd into violence, especcially by something that could be used as a good murder weapon, blood makes him jittery and more lively

Nerone

21- calm, too calm, deals with akleas bullshit wonerfully, he just stands there, blank smile on his face as aklea beats the shit outta someone, unintrested in most anything, likes to draw, but hes a much better pastry chef.

!the shakespears!

Midem(pink boi)

33- lively, loves to work with kids, very creative, likes to make things, mainly art, mainly carvings. Often make little minitures of scenes from midens writing, loves his twin, does anything it takes to fund midens intrests. Very loving to those hes close to

Miden

33- calmer by alot lmao, pretty introverted but he can hold a long conversation without becoming too drained, enjoys writing and making stories, also makes plays for fun, runs off little sleep cuase he stays up so late to write, and gets up early to write.

!gods!

Gideon

9 billion- confused boomer, loves his ‘children’, hates to be hated, always tries to help in anyway he can, despite making them, always curious into what mortals are doing, loves the universe he created and does anything he can to protect it

Merik

7 million- sore loser, does get a little salty, ultimatly bounces back and becomes a very good sport, always will adopt tactics, whatever it takes to win within the rules, keeps most all of his trophies from random feats hes done

Ventus

5 billion - calm, straightforward, tends to disregard others and do things himself, likes to sit on cliffs and watch the ocean

Kyle

Hes been around since 776 bc- very loud, lively, bright, tries his best to educate people on proper form, workout regime i intesne, doesnt allow others to take it, makes custom workout regimes for free, owns a gym, dude bro but hes nice, baby

Horo-sha

Her age technicaly is not accurate, shes like, 2 billion? Since dima was made right after her death. But since her history still lives, ima count it

5 billion but older than ventus- bitter, violent, former god of justice, fucking dead haha, hates mortals, primarily humans

Dima

Also not super accurate, hed only be a few centuries of being an active god before being sealed, but since hes technically, concious and has cognitive function hes counted

3 billion- mean lol, likes blood and gets even more violent when it starts getting messy, ‘new’ god of justice, uh, pretty bad at it like the last one, but worse, will kill over slight misdeameanors, everythings a crime smh

!misc!

Ivan

24- softspoken, from imperial russia, died young, he no longer feels his face is his own, has a mask that he likes better, has the sickness, but since he was human it killed him, can control it post mortem, is strong enough to be seen, but weak enough he can go invisible and go through solid objects.

More ocs will be added when i remember them, or create new ones, characters i dont really have built at all are not included

[alexanderpusheen]

what frustrates me the most abt this china narrative is that the US created al qaeda and ISIS, those groups are recruiting and causing terrorism in xinjiang, china has been trying to handle the situation with re-education programs often suggested by westerners, and its still being treated as this major human rights violation. there are actually dozens of countries with several robust anti radicalization programs that are just as strict, like singapore, colombia, yemen, bangladesh, saudi arabia, and indonesia. this paper ive linked to was even funded by the DHS so like...why has detaining someone and basically reverse brainwashing them out of being a terrorist been so acceptable for so long but now its an issue? 

if you take issue with chinas program, you have to prove its somehow exceptional to these other programs. since we really dont have any way of knowing what is truth or reality thanks to the enormous disinformation campaign going on, you fucking cant. we dont even know what the programs entail because even googling it gets you exclusively hyperbolic concentration camp accusations. 

what i will say is that relations between the han majority and the uyghur minority have been strained since at least the 80s. link is the notoriously conservative and pro US intervention human rights watch, so dont say im using pro commie sources or anything. every time i do any bit of research on this i seem to find an attempt from major news outlets in the early to mid 2000s or late 20-teens to prove this all started or became dramatically worse now, but things have always been tense. and its not really a surprise that things really got bad after the collapse of the soviet union, an event that was geographically close to china and the xinjiang region and also just like, a fucking major global event in general.

what i find to be very odd is just how dramatically the narrative has changed. the diplomat, one of my favorite periodicals, went from taking very nuanced and balanced positions on xinjiang that i almost completely agreed with to being just as aggressive as outlets like the BBC and CNN in the span of five years. they have eleven pages worth of articles on xinjiang, mostly covering the terrorism and beijings response (which i agree is too harsh) and xinjiang muslims’ relationships to the greater muslim world. 

an example is how this article talks about the conflict at the time which warns of escalating violence as a result of han chauvinism and beijing being unable to deal with the extremism holistically. it points out how there were uyghurs captured among taliban ranks in afghanistan and how many might have even been working with ISIL.

The threat will not be an existential one to the Chinese state, as most Uighurs would prefer a peaceful accommodation. But even if only 1 percent of Uighurs hold extreme views, there are 10 million in Xinjiang and even for a state security apparatus as formidable as China’s, 100,000 or more angry people present a tough challenge.

i think its totally right that china does not allow people in that area to have cars, woodcutting tools, and amonium nitrate (which is used in bombs) is very strictly regulated. i completely agree that this is not how you combat terrorism. most people do not want war and broadly punishing these people is itself a human rights violation that went unnoticed until now.

however, in that same year, the diplomat also published this article about the infamous turkestan islamic party. members of TIP are like, literal jihadists lmfao.

TIP fighters call on the world’s Muslims to join the jihad against Western countries in internet videos. Perhaps most worringly for China, the TIP believes that Muslims may fight locally using various means instead of coming to Syria and Iraq to conduct a “holy war” against the “infidel” Western regimes.  

yeah i definitely want to hear more about what these guys have to say. the article is really good because i think it highly illustrates just how dangerous these people are. theyve killed hundreds of people across china and want to establish a fascist religious state in xinjiang. while the article speaks for itself, i believe the last paragraph really highlights why china is being singled out whereas countries like france and canada are considered allies to muslims for whatever reason:

However, as experience has shown, China takes a passive position in the struggle against global Islamic jihad in Syria and Iraq. Beijing has not sent its troops to the Middle East to fight ISIS and has instead confined itself to diplomatic support for Russia and the United States. The Chinese government uses the attacks of Islamic jihadists to persuade Western countries to support Beijing’s position on Xinjiang and turn a blind eye when the freedom and rights of Uyghurs are harshly suppressed by Chinese security forces. Therefore, China is not perceived by the West as a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism. [emphasis mine]

im just a little surprised to see that a lot of these violent attacks from extremists throughout the years have targeted not just han chinese but also other uyghurs. in the west people do not typically sympathize with terrorists as freedom fighters, even on the left, because we know that no matter how angry or how seemingly justified the violence might seem, terrorism is unacceptable and it grossly misrepresents islam. it is a fascist act because those terrorists often follow an extremely right wing version of islam. also, we know that those who carry out terrorist attacks even outside of the west are middle class and professionals in some way, not poor and marginalized people. the level of nuance afforded to terrorists outside of xinjiang is pretty staggering. 

yet in china, there seems to be this excitement than they are killing chinese people, even if some of those chinese are other uyghers or otherwise muslims. those who carry out attacks in xinjiang dont get any nuance or analysis because theyre justified.

ive referenced the diplomat earlier but this article from 2013 says it perfectly: Call Tiananmen Attack What It Was: Terrorism. except terrorism is bad. and the west wants you to support the uyghurs. and make no mistake, they do not want you to support the millions of uyghurs who want to live peacefully, free of any repression, american or chinese. they want you to support the jihadists randomly blowing up chinese and tourists alike because you are meant to sympathize with their plight.

terrorism isnt something to be romantacized or cheered on. it is something someone or someones do when they feel they have no other option. people do not want to kill even those they feel they have every right to because thats a line you cant uncross. murder changes you, justified or not. see the last chapter of wretched of the earth for this.

terrorism is great, however, for destabilizing a region or a country, and xinjiang is resource-rich. establishing a US-friendly regime, no matter how good they are on human rights, is the goal. the US does not care about muslims. they do not care about human rights. china, also, does not really seem to care about muslims or human rights either. but we’ve seen this since vietnam, and the US has learned since vietnam. the vietnamese were sympathetic. they were minding their business. 

after vietnam, merely being communist isnt enough to warrant invasion. theyre killing their own people. nevermind that bolsonaro kills his own people and no one wants to invade (yet--biden has mention sanctions wrt us which is scary but again, thats got everything to do with making sure latin america is loyal to the west, not HR offenses). korea, although it was before vietnam, was less publicized and learning from vietnam gave the US a valuable lesson: always blame the victim. and thus, the US blames the victims of its violence. even if its ‘justified’, even if its ‘true,’ as was the case with saddam hussein, invading and occupying was the nightmare no one but the imperialists anticipated. because they dont broadcast what occupying forces do to the occupied. i am old enough to remember abu ghraib. have it seared in my memory forever. you perhaps are also old enough to remember, but also think millions of abu ghraibs and guantanamo bays are always worth it, always justified. 

i know people arent going to read this and remind me really rudely that they didnt read it but i want to really emphasize how one of imperialism and colonialisms features is ethnic and racial separatism. how the rwandan genocide couldnt have happened without previous belgian and french rule. how yugoslavia wouldve remained a single country had it not been for NATO. i think its easy to diminish the role of the colonizer in all of this, but it is actually one of its goals: divide and conquer. exacerbate the existing conflicts to the point of genocide. 

and if the west succeeds in balkanizing china, you will get more racism rather than less. you will see more violence against muslim minorities rather than less. they will feel less empowered rather than more. china has to learn that they are also to blame in a way that will be catastrophic for over a billion people. han chauvinism and outright racism must be addressed beyond window dressing.

wrapping up, china is in the wrong here. what theyre doing is racist and humiliating a population that has to be empowered. and the one child rule, even for the han majority, is imo fucking evil lol like sorry tankie tumblr im tankie too but i cannot for the life of me accept that as a good thing.... but i also dont buy the accusations of genocide, because even tho a lot of these articles are kind of glossing over it, china is trying to handle the terrorism in the region. imo theyre feeding into it by getting more han in the area, but also having more han but forcing them to take worse jobs would be a show of good will. idk, this situation is extremely complex and frankly, most uyghers do not want secession. 

i also take extreme issue with people saying that adrian zenz is somehow reliable. not only is he a nazi crackpot, hes also literally the only source for almost all of what we know about this in the west. that is not how you do journalism. i dont understand how people are saying ‘yeah hes an extremely fascist grifter but also i believe him because hes anti communist and also anti china’. thats also not really the point? the point is that hes also the ONLY SOURCE on almost all of this, which is alarming. 

i also find it very startling that in order to keep interest in the story, every few weeks the US has to remind people that the chinese are also doing what the US is doing to women in its own camps. forget that the US is separating minors from parents (since 2008). forget that the US is sterilizing women en masse (since 2017). forget that the US is raping women at the border (since there was a border). forget the US even has camps because now they arent even called that anymore. this is not that ‘you can be angry at two things at once’ but a clearly cynical attempt to get its citizens to forget that the US is detaining, deporting, sterilizing, and raping, and gassing non US nationals. 

they are not ‘your own people.’ they are me. the other. i am an immigrant to the US, currently in my country of birth, so i am the other to you, the american. the chinese are doing the evil crime of killing their own. but the americans could never kill their own because they dont consider black americans to be their own. latin american nationals are not their own. bombing millions globally is not their own. thats always justifiable. there is clearly an element of racism in how these crimes are perceived as more or less evil.

the way immigrants and black americans are brutalized in the US is almost naturalized. like its the way things are supposed to be. you can live with that. its upsetting that you have to hear about antiblackness and the like but you know thats just how life is. you dont necessarily call for the US to be sanctioned or bombed by other countries because you believe in the inherent goodness of white america. but countries like china and iran and north korea deserve to be starved and killed for their crimes. and you can never say ‘maybe bombing and starving a country isnt the answer’ because it means you agree with it. you can never say ‘this is clearly propaganda to make me hate another race so much’ because it means youre a genocide denier. im sorry, but again, i remember iraq in 2003, i remember libya in 2011. i dont buy it.

finally, theres been a lot of attacks on asian people in the US lately and if you cannot see the violent way the US talks about china the country and how that influences people to harm asians within the US then idk what else to tell you. people will really believe this shit and say the chinese are all blood thirsty islamaphobes and thus need to be harmed. ‘im not like that! i defend my asian friends from racism!’ thats nice and all but idk how spreading some sinophobic propaganda designed by the US to make you support some kind of violence against one billion chinese people isnt inherently racist. also its unhelpful because sanctions dont really solve problems. but ive spoken too much.

[orthodoxydaily]

Saint&Reading: Sun., Nov. 8, 2020

Commemorated on October 26_Julian calendar

The Holy GreatMartyr Demetrios of Soluneia

     The Holy GreatMartyr Demetrios of Soluneia was the son of a Roman proconsul in Thessalonika (the present day Salonika, which in the Slavonic is termed Solun', [anglicised as Soluneia]). Three centuries had then already elapsed, and Roman paganism, – spiritually shattered and defeated by the multitude of martyrs and confessors of the Crucified Saviour, – intensified its persecutions. Both the father and mother of saint Demetrios were clandestine Christians. In a secret house-church at the home of the proconsul, the child was baptised and raised in the Christian faith. When the father died, and the child had reached the age of maturity, the emperor Galerius Maximian – having ascended the throne in the year 305 – summoned him, and confident in his education and military-administrative abilities, appointed him to the position of his father as proconsul of the Thessalonika district. The chief task expected of this young commander consisted in the defence of the city from barbarians, and in the extermination of Christianity. It is interesting, that among the barbarians threatening the Romans our ancestral Slavs occupied an important place, in particular by intentionally settling upon the Thessalonikan peninsula. There exists even the opinion that the parents of Saint Demetrios were of Slavic descent. In regard to Christians the will of the emperor was expressed simply: "Put to death anyone who calls on the name of the Crucified". The emperor did not suspect in appointing Demetrios, how wide a swath of confessors acts he had opened up for the clandestine ascetic.

    Accepting the appointment, Demetrios returned to Thessalonika and in front of everyone immediately confessed and glorified our Lord Jesus Christ. Instead of persecuting and executing Christians, he openly began to teach the inhabitants of the city the Christian faith and to extirpate pagan customs and idol-worship. The compiler of his life, Metaphrastes, says that in his teaching zeal he became for Thessalonika "a second Apostle Paul", particularly since "the Apostle to the Gentiles" once founded at this city the first community of believers (1 Thes., 2 Thes.). The Lord also destined Saint Demetrios to follow the holy Apostle Paul to a death by martyrdom.      When Maximian learned, that the proconsul newly appointed by him – was a Christian, and that he had converted to Christianity many Roman subjects who were influenced by his example – the rage of the emperor know no bounds. Returning from a campaign in the Black Sea region, the emperor decided to lead his army through Thessalonika, filled with the desire to make a massacre of the Soluneia Christians.      Learning of this, Saint Demetrios opportunely ordered his faithful servant Luppos to distribute his wealth to the poor with the words: "Give away the earthly riches amongst them, for we shalt seek for ourselves heavenly riches". And he gave himself over to prayer and fasting, preparing himself for the accepting of a martyr's crown.      When the emperor came into the city, he summoned Demetrios, who boldly confessed himself a Christian and denounced the falsehood and futility of Roman polytheism. Maximian gave orders to lock up the confessor in prison, and an Angel came to him in confinement, comforting and encouraging him for the act. The emperor meanwhile concerned himself with a foul gladiators spectacle, esteeming as his beloved champion a German by the name of Leo, who made a challenge for a Christian to struggle with him on the platform over the spears of the victorious soldiers. A brave youth from the Soluneia Christians, Nestor by name, went to the prison to his advisor Demetrios and requested to be given the blessing for single-combat with the barbarian. With the blessing of Demetrios and through his prayers, Nestor prevailed over the fierce German and hurled him from the dais-platform onto the spears of the soldiers, just as the murderous pagan would have done with the Christian. The enraged commander gave orders to immediately execute the holy Martyr Nestor (Comm. 27 October) and dispatched a guard to the prison – to run through with spears the one who had blessed this deed, Saint Demetrios.      At dawn on 26 October 306 soldiers appeared in the underground prison of the holy saint and ran him through with spears. His faithful servant, Saint Luppos, gathered up on a towel the bless of Saint Demetrios, and he took from his finger the imperial ring, – a symbol of his high status, and likewise dipped it also in the blood. With the ring and other holy things sanctified by the blood of Saint Demetrios, Saint Luppos began to heal the infirm. The emperor gave orders to arrest and kill him.      The body of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios was cast out for devouring by wild animals, but the Soluneia Christians took it and secretly committed it to earth. During the reign of holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Constantine (306-337), a church was erected over the grave of Saint Demetrios. An hundred years later, during the construction of a majestic new church on the old spot, the incorrupt relics of the holy martyr were uncovered. From the time of the VII Century beneathe the crypt of the GreatMartyr Demetrios was found a miraculous flowing of fragrant myrh, in regard to which the GreatMartyr Demetrios receives the church title "Myrh-flowing". Several times those venerating the Soluneia wonderworker made attempts at a transfer of his holy relics, or part of them, to Constantinople. But invariably Saint Demetrios secretly made apparent his will to remain the protector and defender of the people of Thessalonika.      Advancing towards the city, pagan Slavs were repeatedly turned by the apparition of a threatening radiant youth, going the round of the walls and inspiring terror in the enemy soldiers. It is therefore perhaps why the name of Saint Demetrios is particularly venerated among the Slavic nations after their enlightenment by the light of the Gospel truth. On the other hand, Greeks regard Saint Demetrios in terms of being a Slavic saint merely an arbitrary preference.      The very first pages of the Russian Primary Chronicle, as foreordained by God, is bound up with the name of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios of Soluneia. Oleg the Wise threatened the Greeks at Constantinople (907), as the Chronicle relates: "The Greeks became terrified and said: this is not Oleg, but rather Saint Demetrios sent upon us from God". Russian soldiers always believed that they were under the special protection of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios. Moreover, in the old Russian barracks the GreatMartyr Demetrios was always depicted as Russian by descent – thus this image fused with the soul of the Russian nation.      Church veneration of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios in Russia began with the time shortly after the Baptism of Rus'. Towards the beginning of the decade of the 70's of the XI Century belongs the founding of the Dimitriev monastery at Kiev, known afterwards as the Mikhailov-Zlatoverkh monastery. The monastery was built by the son of Yaroslav the Wise, – GreatPrince Izyaslav, baptised Dimitrii (+ 1078). The mosaic icon of Saint Demetrios of Soluneia from the cathedral of the Dimitriev monastery has been preserved up to the present day, and is located in the State Tret'yakov gallery. In the years 1194-1197 the GreatPrince of Vladimir, Vsevolod III Bol'shoe Gnezdo (Great-Nest), – baptised Dimitrii, "built at his court a beautiful church of the holy martyr Dimitrii, and adorned it wondrously with icons and writing" (i.e. frescoes). The Dimitriev cathedral also reveals for the present the embellishment of ancient Vladimir. The wonderworking icon of Saint Demetrios of Soluneia from the cathedral iconostas is located even now in Moscow, at the Tret'yakov gallery. It was written upon a plank of wood from the grave of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios, brought in 1197 from Soluneia to Vladimir. One of the most precious depictions of the saint – a fresco on a column of the Vladimir Uspenie cathedral, is from the brush of the Sainted Iconographer Andrei Rublev.      The veneration of Saint Demetrios continued also in the family of Saint Alexander Nevsky (Comm. 23 November). Saint Alexander named his eldest son in honour of the holy greatmartyr. And his younger son, holy Nobleborn Prince Daniel of Moscow (+ 1303, Comm. 4 March), raised up at Moscow a temple in the name of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios in the 1280's, which was the first stone church in the Moscow Kremlin. Later on in 1326, under Ivan Kalita, it was taken down and in its place was erected the Uspenie (Dormition) cathedral.      The memory of Saint Demetrios of Soluneia from of old was bound up in Rus' with the military, patriotism and the defense of the Fatherland. The saint is depicted on icons in the guise of a soldier in plumed armour, with a spear and sword in hand. On a scroll (in later depictions) is written also a prayer, with which Saint Demetrios turned to God about the salvation of the people of Soluneia: "Lord, let not the city nor the people perish. If Thou do save the city and the people – with them I shalt be saved, if they perish – I too perish with them".      In the spiritual experience of the Russian Church, veneration of the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios of Soluneia is closely bound up with the memory of the defense the Native-Land and Church by the GreatPrince of Moscow, Dimitrii Donskoi (+ 1389). "An Account of the Life and Repose Great Prince Dimitrii Ivanovich, Tsar of Russia", written in the year 1393, already regards the GreatPrince as a saint, as also do other old Russian histories. GreatPrince Dimitrii was a spiritual son and pupil of the Sainted Metropolitan of Moscow Alexei (+ 1378, Comm. 12 February), and a disciple and associating also with other great figures of prayer in the Russian Land: – the Monk Sergei Radonezh (+ 1392, Comm. 25 September, Dimitrii of Prilutsk (+ 1392, Comm. 11 February), Sainted Theodore of Rostov (+ 1394, Comm. 28 November). GreatPrince Dimitrii "about the churches of God he worried much, and the territory of the Russian land he held by his bravery: many the enemy risen against us he conquered, and his glorious city Moscow he protected with wondrous walls". From the time of the building of the white-walled Kremlin (1366) by GreatPrince Dimitrii, Moscow was called "Belokamenna" ("White-Stoned"). "The land of Russia prospered during the years of his reign", – testifies the "Account".      By the prayers of his Heavenly patron the holy warrior Demetrios of Soluneia, GreatPrince Dimitrii gained besides his brilliant military victories also the preordained further prominence of Russia: he repelled the onslaught against Russia by the Lithuanian armies of Ol'gerd (1368, 1373), he routed at the River Vozha the Tatar army of Begich (1378), and he smashed the military might of all the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo Pole (Kulikovo Field) (8 September 1380, on the day of celebration of the Nativity of the MostHoly Mother of God), set between the Rivers Don and Nepryadva. The Kulikovo Battle, for which the nation calls him Dimitrii Donskoi, became the first all-Russian national deed, rallying round Moscow the spiritual power of the Russian nation. To this auspicious event of Russian history is dedicated the "Zadonschina", an inspiring historic poem, written by the priest Sophronii of Ryazem (1381).      Prince Dimitrii Donskoi was greatly devoted to the holy GreatMartyr Demetrios. In 1380, on the eve of the Kulikovo Battle, he solemnly transferred from Vladimir to Moscow the most holy effect of the Vladimir Dimitriev cathedral – the icon of the GreatMartyr Demetrios of Soluneia, written on the plank from the grave of the saint. At the Moscow Uspenie Cathedral was built a chapel in the name of the GreatMartyr Demetrios. In memory of the soldiers, fallen in the Kulikovo Battle, was established for all-church remembrance the Demetrios Parental-Ancestors Saturday. The first time this panikhida was held was at the Trinity-Sergiev monastery on 20 October 1380 by the Monk Sergei, Hegumen of Radonezh, in the presence of GreatPrince Dimitrii Donskoi. From that time it is served annually with a solemn remembrance of the heroes of the Kulikovo Battle, in which number are the Schema-monks Alexander (Peresvet) and Andrei (Oslyab).

© 1996-2001 by translator Fr. S. Janos.

ohn 21:15-25 (11th 

15So when they had eaten breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?" He said to Him, "Yes, Lord; You know that I love You." He said to him, "Feed My lambs."16 He said to him again a second time, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me? He said to Him, "Yes, Lord; You know that I love You." He said to him, "Tend My sheep."17 He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me?" Peter was grieved because He said to him the third time, "Do you love Me?" And he said to Him, "Lord, You know all things; You know that I love You." Jesus said to him, "Feed My sheep.18 Most assuredly, I say to you, when you were younger, you girded yourself and walked where you wished; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish." 19 This He spoke, signifying by what death he would glorify God. And when He had spoken this, He said to him, "Follow Me." 20 Then Peter, turning around, saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following, who also had leaned on His breast at the supper, and said, "Lord, who is the one who betrays You?" 21 Peter, seeing him, said to Jesus, "But Lord, what about this man?" 22 Jesus said to him, "If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you? You follow Me." 23 Then this saying went out among the brethren that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, "If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you?" 24 This is the disciple who testifies of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true. 25 And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.

2 Timothy 2:1-10

1 You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. 2 And the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. 3 You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 4 No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enlisted him as a soldier. 5 And also if anyone competes in athletics, he is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. 6 The hardworking farmer must be first to partake of the crops. 7 Consider what I say, and may the Lord give you understanding in all things. 8 Remember that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from the dead according to my gospel, 9 for which I suffer trouble as an evildoer, even to the point of chains; but the word of God is not chained. 10 Therefore I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

[kathrynethegreat]

THE RAPE OF EUROPA: Hannibal AU Season 2                                              by Kathrynethegreat

SUMMARY

When Molson James Verger, owner of a meatpacking empire, famous art collector, and founder of the world-famous M.J. Verger Collection suddenly finds his museum under fire for fraud, tax evasion and forgery, Clarice Starling and the F.B.I. Art Crime Team are asked by the I.R.S. to help with the case. Their investigation into the provenance of several pieces takes them across the globe, but tensions are high – with a war in Iraq and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. imminent, Clarice soon finds the topic of art restitution a more complex issue than she could have imagined. When her travels again throw her into the path of Hannibal Lecter, Clarice discovers that for many, some wars have never really ended and that the question of forgery versus authenticity reaches far beyond the art world and into the very fabric of her life – leaving her to question who she really is. 

LOCATIONS

U.S.A., France, Belgium, Iraq, Russia, Lithuania, The Netherlands, England, Cyprus, Sardinia

 EPISODES

Season 2, Episode 1: Chiaroscuro

When an anonymous tip brings M.J.Verger's museum under suspicion for numerous crimes, including forgery and theft, the F.B.I. Art Crime Team is brought on to investigate the case. The United States Military asks Clarice to consult with American Archaeologists to identify important sites to avoid in the upcoming invasion of Iraq.  A shocking piece of information continues to keep Clarice from revealing Dr.Fell’s true identity, and an unwelcome phone call from Paul Krendler leaves her worried for her future.

 Season 2, Episode 2:  Wiedergutmachung

Clarice is called to London to help consult on the newly formed Art Loss Register. While there, she takes the time to meet with M.J. Verger and his long-time curator, Pierre Trebeleaux at Verger’s English country home, where Agent Starling is vaguely aware of an undercurrent of resentment and anger between Verger and his daughter, Margot. One piece in Verger’s collection brings out the interest of an old acquaintance. Hannibal Lecter asks for Clarice’s help in uncovering information about a painting from his past.

 Season 2, Episode 3: The Spoils of War

When several ancient statues of questionable origin come up for sale on the open market, Miranda Pilcher gets in touch with Clarice, believing the pieces may have recently been looted from sites in Iraq during Desert Storm. M.J.Verger and Trebeleaux have a disagreement. Johnny has a confession for Clarice.

Season 2, Episode 4: The Director of Idolatry

The art world is horrified when an  Iraqi Art Museum is destroyed and its curator is murdered while attempting to smuggle several important pieces of art to safety. Clarice is surprised when she receives a letter from the curator, written just before his death, detailing the hiding places of each piece. The F.B.I. Art Crime Team must work under dangerous conditions to recover the hidden pieces and get them to safety before they are found and destroyed, but their actions leave the entire team to question all that they knew about the protection of art.

Season 2, Episode 5: Nécessaire

Russian Business Tycoon Aleksandr Sokolov, working hard to restore Russia's lost heritage by acquiring every Imperial Fabergé egg in existence to display at the Hermitage enlists Clarice Starling's team to help him track down the Nécessaire, which was last seen in England in June of 1952 when it was purchased by an unnamed stranger.

Season 2, Episode 6: Still Life

When 20 paintings valuing over $100 million are stolen from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, Clarice's team joins up with local authorities in a race to find the paintings before they cross the border. (Note: Episode is in real-time)

Season 2, Episode 7: The Forgery 

When a French Billionaire purchases a painting from Christie's that is later deemed a fake, Clarice must again go undercover as Elizabeth Chase to determine what happened to the real painting. When Ardelia is hired by Christie's to investigate the same case from their end, a conflict of interest arises. A letter from Hannibal Lecter brings painful truths, leaving Clarice to question the nature of her alter-ego, Elizabeth Chase.

Season 2, Episode 8: The Plunder

When the National Gallery is robbed during a massive city-wide power outage, leaving the museum with no security footage of the theft, Miranda Pilcher asks Clarice to investigate. The only problem is, nothing seems to be missing. Clarice consults with Margot Verger’s software company regarding the software employed by the museum's security and is surprised at what she finds. Clarice and Margot come to an agreement.

Season 2, Episode 9: Craquelure

After going undercover as Elizabeth Chase and befriending a gang of thieves believed to have stolen a priceless piece of art, Clarice must put herself in a difficult and dangerous situation in order to authenticate the piece before ordering a raid.

Season 2, Episode 10: The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

When the Bishop of Ghent asks the F.B.I. to open a cold case regarding the theft of a panel from the famed Ghent Altarpiece, a 57-year-old note from the suspected thief Arsène Goedertier not only helps Clarice’s case, but may also be the clue Hannibal Lecter needs to help solve the mystery of the resting place of several important pieces stolen from Lecter Castle years before.

Season 2, Episode 11: Operation Atilla 

When a seven-hundred-year-old church collapses in Cyprus after an earthquake, Clarice knows Hannibal Lecter will not be far behind. The rubble of the ancient church brings surprises for them both. Trebeleaux argues passionately for the preservation of art. Lecter and Clarice reluctantly strike a deal, but Clarice worries if the Doctor will be able to keep his promise.

Season 2, Episode 12:  Ein Männlein steht im Walde

World history unfolds with the fall of the U.S.S.R., but when a plane goes down carrying a priceless piece of art over the border of Russia, Ardelia must battle the legalities of the situation between two nations. Hannibal Lecter visits his ancestral home. Clarice receives an extraordinary birthday gift.

Season 2, Episode 13: Whoso List to Hunt

A deer hunt at M.J. Verger's English country home, a lost Holbein sketch and a necklace containing emeralds once owned by Caterina Sforza brings Johnny to a realization about Clarice and Dr.Fell. As evidence mounts against Trebeleaux, M.J. Verger vows to do whatever he can to help bring about justice. Clarice struggles to reconcile her feelings. A grisly discovery is made in the woods.

Season 2, Episode 14: The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

Trebeleaux exacts revenge on M.J. Verger from the grave. Dr.Lecter acquires one of the last missing pieces from the collection from Lecter Castle, learning some interesting information in the process. Margot Verger is kidnapped and held for ransom while bringing home two pieces of artwork from Greece. With the United State’s Government’s policy to not negotiate with terrorists, and M.J. Verger unwilling to pay the ransom, Clarice and Johnny use the recovery of the artwork as a ruse to rescue Margot, unaware that Hannibal Lecter is not far behind.

Season 2, Episode 15: The Persistence of Memory

When the mission to rescue Margot Verger goes terribly wrong, Clarice learns far more about Hannibal Lecter than she ever imagined. Margot, Hannibal and Clarice must work together to escape to safety. 

OVERVIEW

SEASON 1 SUMMARY | SEASON 1 DETAILS

SEASON 2 SUMMARY | SEASON 2 DETAILS

SEASON 3 SUMMARY | SEASON 3 DETAILS 

SEASON 4 SUMMARY | SEASON 4 DETAILS

[alexsmitposts]

It is All about Race, Awful Hypocrisy Hypocrisy to Say it’s Not! While I am following closely various discussions on Western mass media and social media, simultaneously engaging in several direct exchanges, one overwhelming leitmotif that I see is clearly emerging: “What is happening in the United States (and the UK, France and other parts of Western Empire) is not really about the race. Let us protest peacefully, let us not allow ‘rioting’ to continue, and above all, please let us not single out the white race, Western culture as a sole villain. Let us have peace, love each other… Then things will miraculously improve; terrible occurrences will soon go away.” I have worked and lived on all continents, from far away island nations of South Pacific (Oceania), to Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Of course, I lived in Europe and North America, too. Colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism – these are all my topics. Seriously! I have been studying them, investigating them; I wrote and made various documentary films about them. On several occasions I came very close to losing my life, confronting them. My conclusion after all that I saw and experienced and survived? You can probably guess it: “To claim that the race is not what has been, for centuries, dividing our Planet, is outrageous hypocrisy. Or deranged wishful thinking. Or something much worse: it is calculated blindness that serves only the ruling, white group of people.” To make it blunt: Our Planet has been reduced to only two races: White and “the other”! On top of it, the color of one’s skin is not always identical to what the West, in general, perceives as the Caucasian/white race. To be “white” is the state of mind. It means: belonging to the culture which perceives itself as “superior”. The culture which sees itself as ‘exceptional’, and somehow ‘chosen’ to judge and advice the entire humanity. It also means ‘a state of indoctrination and obedience, as well as lack of intellectual courage’. All this, in exchange for the privileges; fabulous privileges! “Plunder the world, and live well above your means; live grotesquely plush life! And while you are living it, do not forget to whine, demand more, and keep repeating that ‘you are also exploited and, actually, a very poor victim’”. Denying the privileges is part of racism, too, as it demonstrates unexpectable spite for the real victims! Or, perhaps, self-imposed blindness. Citizens of some countries, such as Russia, Cuba, and Turkey, may look mainly ‘white’, but they are actually not. They are not invited to the ‘club’, because their mindset is different because they are not submissive because they think on their own. *** Such conclusions may not be popular in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. Especially not now, when the United States and the entire West are in turmoil. The culture which was built on blood, bones, rape, and theft, ‘culture’ shaped by more than 500 years of colonialist terror, is now turning, twisting, and trying to justify itself. It tries to survive while staying in a driving seat. Countless editorials penned by both ‘conservative’ and so-called ‘liberal’ scribes are carpet-bombing the pages of newspapers at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Fear of perhaps mortally injured beast – Western regime and its citizens – is delectable by its repulsive stench, and it stinks for miles. Suddenly, most of the so-called ‘progressive’ publications do not want to hear from those writers and thinkers who are shooting powerful projectiles in the form of highly uncomfortable truth. Actually, in the West, there are hardly any true “left-wing” sites or magazines left, of course with some shining exceptions. What is really progressive these days? I don’t want to name the sites or publications here, but you are most likely aware of which ones I am talking about: they almost exclusively carry the stuff written by the Western/white men, for other white men’s consumption! They never cross the line: their criticism of the Western white-dominated world is half-hearted, “peaceful”; in short cowardly. A white man is an individual who has been brought up and indoctrinated in a certain way, who thinks, speaks, and writes in a manner that is expected from him or her by the Western regime. And all these ‘non-whites’, all over the world, including the minorities in the Western countries, are expected to sit on their asses, shut up and listen to him or her, but mostly him. And of course, to obey. Or else! Or else: they will be verbally attacked and humiliated, eventually, they will get sanctioned, their governments were overthrown, countries invaded. There will be corpses all over, the stench of burning flesh, overflowing mass graves. And ‘at home’, in the West? Bullets shot at their eyes, or necks squashed by military or police boots. So, what actually happened a few weeks ago to Mr. George Floyd, has been constantly happening to non-white people all over the world, to the entire communities and countries. Then, suddenly, people, all over the world, had enough! Almost everywhere, not just in China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Enough of being treated as some lower, subservient races. Enough of being treated like a scum; brutalized, killed like Mr. Floyd! *** Now, in the West, both liberal and conservative media is making noises, claiming that Mr. Floyd was “not a saint”, that he used to serve some time in prison. What can I say? People, in general, are not saints. People and countries. Very often, circumstances make them behave in a very nasty matter. But if you are raised as a second-class citizen, if you are beaten, day and night, by your own regime, are you expected to turn out to be a romantic poet? Get real! Our countries, non-Western ones, are not always behaving like saints, either. But they are still better, much better, than those that have been murdering hundreds of millions in their colonies! Don’t they understand, in Washington, London, and Paris, why those millions of people, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, from Africa to Asia, are now marching in support for the African-American people? It is because all of us, outside Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, are somehow related to Mr. Floyd! Yes, we read those phony essays. We observe those cynical little smiles on the faces of the people who are denying racial and racist division of the world. Individuals who are defending the status quo, the rule of that tiny minority over the planet, so they could maintain their advantages. Some defenders of status quo are now going as far as claiming that the rebellion against the white rulers is actually some sort of dark conspiracy theatre, triggered by the well-concealed business elites, or that it is connected to COVID-19; but above all, that it is not spontaneous at all. It is clear, where they really stand and what they want to achieve. It is never “them”. It is always somebody else. They keep pointing fingers at some invisible bankers, or the minorities in their own countries. You know precisely what I mean. As long as it is not them! But it is all much simpler: most of Europe and North America are constructed on white racism. And so is imperialism, colonialism. Citizens in the West are voting right-wing scum, voluntarily, and consistently. Can you imagine a genuine North American or European “internationalist”? Maybe a few. Perhaps 1%. Not more! So, the proverbial gold keeps flowing in. And billions of non-whites are rotting alive, in all corners of the globe. My friends, my comrades, all over the world, are now opening their eyes, realizing what is happening in the United States and its colonialist daddy: Europe. Many of them, of course, already knew. At least they knew something. But those who did not, are now wide awake, getting well aware of the brutality of the Western regime, as well as of the racist nature of the “global arrangement”. Those who were, for centuries, manufacturing consent, justifying and glorifying colonialism, imperialism, racial discrimination, as well as Western supremacy, can suddenly do nothing to stop the avalanche of awareness. This may be the beginning of the end of segregation, of global apartheid. Just the beginning of the true struggle for equality. A knee of a beefy white racist cop in Minneapolis, which had cut the supply of air, killing an African-American person, somehow managed to trigger that avalanche. Nobody wants to live like this. Oppressed nations do not want to be threatened this way by those white Western cynics and nihilists: like Clinton and Trump, Navarro, Pompeo, and others. What a hellish troop of third-rate violent people! Oppressed minorities inside the empire, be they of African descent, Hispanics or Chinese, are sick of the vicious and repulsive racism. Mostly, they are frightened to speak. But now, day by day, they are gaining courage. *** The United States of America has been built on the genocide of the non-white people. The great majority of native folks had been slaughtered so the small number of the first and brutal European settlers could thrive. This is “to some extend” known fact, but learning in-depth what really happened to the original inhabitants of ‘America’ has been thoroughly discouraged. Word ‘genocide’ is hardly ever uttered, in connection with the first chapters of U.S. history. Actually, it is taboo. Slavery has been turned into folklore. Millions, tens of millions of broken, methodically destroyed human lives, is hardly ever presented in its real, nightmarish authenticity. People in Africa were hunted down like animals, tortured, raped, killed, and shipped like cattle to the so-called ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ “New World”. Does a country constructed on such macabre foundations have really any moral right to call itself ‘free’? Can it be allowed to police the world? It is as if you would allow that murder cob who killed Mr. Floyd, to run a nation! And those states which are now forming Europe? Their citizens are the descendants of those who were hunting down millions of human beings. Offspring of those who perpetrated and then got rich on such mass-slaughters as those of the Namibians, or people who used to inhabit what is now known as Congo. When dragged to the broad daylight, it is all very, very uncomfortable, isn’t it? Better to sweep the truth under the carpet, and talk about “love”, “goodwill”. And then keep robbing and murdering as before, far away from the cameras! This way, nothing would ever change. Repeating over and over again: “race does not matter; it is actually all about class”, could make those who are in control of the world feel good about themselves, even sometimes sorry for themselves, which is actually their favorite state of mind. But it is a terribly hypocritical and deceptive position. And it has to be unveiled if there is ever to be justice! *** On 3 June 2020, UN News, published an essay condemning the situation in the United States: “Voices calling for an end to “the endemic and structural racism that blights US society” must be heard and understood, for the country to move past its “tragic history of racism and violence”, the UN Human Rights chief said on Wednesday. “The voices calling for an end to the killings of unarmed African Americans need to be heard”, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a statement. “The voices calling for an end to police violence need to be heard”.” Ms. Bachelet, a Chilean, knows precisely what she is talking about! She knows what it is to have someone’s knee choking your aorta. Her father, an army General during the socialist era of President Salvador Allende, was murdered after the US-sponsored coup led by Augusto Pinochet. Ms. Bachelet herself was kidnapped and tortured. She looked ‘white’, but obviously not ‘white enough’ for Washington and its local assassins. What is truly significant is that even the United Nations (usually subservient to the US) is now unwilling to remain silent. *** Race ‘issues’ have to be addressed. Racism, inside the national boundaries, as well as on the global scale, has to be fought against, by all means. The depressing state of our planet is a result of racism. Look at the map of the world at the beginning of the 20th century, and you will see: a great majority of the nations were colonized by the West. Colonialism is one of the most evident forms of racism. It humiliates victims, it robs them of everything: of culture, dignity, land. To a great extent, most of the world is still being colonized. Even right now, as this is being written. Almost the entire Planet is brutally controlled by the racist West-centric education system, and by the mass media which is controlled by the White boy’s Western narrative. Things have been arranged, so that the people in non-Western countries have been ‘learning’ and ‘getting informed’ about themselves from the Western curriculums and the fraudulent sources disseminated by the US and British media outlets. That is grotesquely racist, isn’t it? Close to 10 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in just a quarter of a century. It is because they have coltan, uranium, and other essential raw materials, desired by the West. But also, because to the West, their black lives matter close to nothing. My film, “Rwanda Gambit”, is clearly addressing the issue. But who cares? In the West, they rather watch porn, instead of learning the greatest genocide of the 20th Century, which they helped to trigger! And who cares about the West Papuans, who are murdered with almost the same intensity by the Indonesians, on behalf of their Western masters? After all, the West Papuans are blacks, therefore matter nothing. On those millions, mountains of corpses, huge companies, and even entire countries are thriving, prosper. While their CEOs and Presidents are talking rubbish about some ‘corporate responsibility’ and love for democracy. And most of the white Europeans, Canadians, Australians, have to sacrifice very little, in order to live their obnoxiously luxurious lives. Isn’t this racist? The entire arrangement of the world is! Soon, it will be impossible to hide behind all those lies. I work at the frontlines. Where human bodies are crushed by all that “love” of the white colonialism and racism, directly but also indirectly. Racist violence is the most repulsive and the creepiest thing on Earth. I want it to end; once and for all. I don’t care if some shops get looted or trashed in the process. Peaceniks who are crying over them are mostly sitting in their plush living rooms, watching censored news. They do not see those tens of millions of victims of racism rotting in tropical heat, floating on the surfaces of polluted rivers, thousands of kilometers away! Images of Mr. Floyd being murdered, slowly and sadistically, is as close as they ever got to reality. For centuries, they did all they could in order not to see. Now they are running out of excuses. Not to see, not to fight against the endemic global racism is a terrible crime. A crime that has been taking place for more than 500 years. The crime against humanity.

[evansrussianlitblog]

Ten Interesting Russian Novels

1. City of Thieves

“During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible. By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.” (goodreads.com)

2. The Brothers Karamazov

“The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.” (Amazon.com)

3. Notes from Underground

“Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.” (Amazon.com)

4. Zuleikha

“Soviet Russia, 1930. Zuleikha, the “pitiful hen,” lives with her brutal husband Murtaza and her mother-in-law in a small Tartar village. When Murtaza is executed by communist soldiers, she is sent into exile to a remote region on the Angara River in Siberia. Hundreds die of hunger and exhaustion on the journey and over the first difficult winter, yet exile is the making of Zuleikha. As she gets to know her fellow survivors ― among them an eccentric German doctor, a painter, and the conscience-stricken Commander Ignatov, her husband’s killer ―Zuleikha begins to build a new life far removed from the one she left behind. Guzel Yakhina’s outstanding debut ― inspired by her grandmother's childhood memories of being exiled to the Gulag ―has been translated into twenty-one languages, capturing the hearts of readers all over the world.” (Amazon.com)

5. One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

“In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength. First published in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.” (Amazon.com)

6. Night Watch

“Set in contemporary Moscow, where shape shifters, vampires, and street-sorcerers linger in the shadows, Night Watch is the first book of the hyper-imaginative fantasy pentalogy from best-selling Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. This epic saga chronicles the eternal war of the “Others,” an ancient race of humans with supernatural powers who must swear allegiance to either the Dark or the Light. The agents of the Dark – the Night Watch – oversee nocturnal activity, while the agents of the Light keep watch over the day. For a thousand years both sides have maintained a precarious balance of power, but an ancient prophecy has decreed that a supreme Other will one day emerge, threatening to tip the scales. Now, that day has arrived. When a mid-level Night Watch agent named Anton stumbles upon a cursed young woman – an uninitiated Other with magnificent potential – both sides prepare for a battle that could lay waste to the entire city, possible the world. With language that throbs like darkly humorous hard-rock lyrics about blood and power, freedom and responsibility, Night Watch is a chilling, cutting-edge thriller, a pulse-pounding ride of fusion fiction that will leave you breathless for the next instalment.” (goodreads.com)

7. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

“Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia, Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka. Now an ancient Russian immigrant, Leonka claims to be the last living witness to the Romanovs’ brutal murders and sets down the dark secrets of his past with the imperial family. Does he hold the key to the many questions surrounding the family’s murder? Historically vivid and compelling, The Kitchen Boy is also a touching portrait of a loving family that was in many ways similar, yet so different, from any other.” (Amazon.com)

8. The Russian Concubine

“In a city full of thieves and Communists, danger and death, spirited young Lydia Ivanova has lived a hard life. Always looking over her shoulder, the sixteen-year-old must steal to feed herself and her mother, Valentina, who numbered among the Russian elite until Bolsheviks murdered most of them, including her husband. As exiles, Lydia and Valentina have learned to survive in a foreign land. Often, Lydia steals away to meet with the handsome young freedom fighter Chang An Lo. But they face danger: Chiang Kai Shek's troops are headed toward Junchow to kill Reds like Chang, who has in his possession the jewels of a tsarina, meant as a gift for the despot's wife. The young pair's all-consuming love can only bring shame and peril upon them, from both sides. Those in power will do anything to quell it. But Lydia and Chang are powerless to end it.” (Amazon.com)

9. A Dead Man’s Memoir: A Theatrical Novel

“Best known for The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov is one of twentieth-century Russia's most prominent novelists. A Dead Man's Memoir is a semi- autobiographical story about a writer who fails to sell his novel, then fails to commit suicide. When the writer's play is taken up for production in a theater, literary success beckons, but he is not prepared to reckon with the grotesquely inflated egos of the actors, directors, and theater managers.” (Amazon.com)

10. The Master of Petersburg

“In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost—and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy—Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.” (Amazon.com)

[phroyd]

American presidents lie. They always have. Just Google “Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin,” “Bill Clinton and NAFTA” or “George Bush and weapons of mass destruction.” Even Honest Abe likely told a fib or two.

But no U.S. president has ever lied as prolifically, constantly, insidiously and dangerously as Donald Trump. He never stops. He’s the Energizer Bunny of endless falsehood.

It’s enough to make even Orwell’s head explode.

Trump, who received votes from just one in four U.S. adults in 2016, claimed that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton were it not for the voter fraud of undocumented immigrants. The alleged criminal votes were never cast.

Trump called his 2016 Electoral College victory “The biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan.” It was no such thing.

Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd even as aerial photographs of the event contradicted his boasts.

He has repeatedly and preposterously claimed that the Latinx immigrant population is full of murderers, rapists and gang members. It is not.

Trump claimed that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before his 2016 election victory. They were not.

He claimed to have as president-elect negotiated a deal to “save 1,100 jobs” at a Carrier plant in Anderson, Ind. He did no such thing.

He absurdly concocted a terrorist attack that never occurred, in Sweden, during his first month in office.

He claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his speech was the best ever delivered to the Boy Scouts Jamboree. No such call ever took place. Trump’s terrible oration was widely reviled.

Trump claimed to have fired James Comey because the FBI director mishandled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal prior to the 2016 election, not because he was continuing to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That was another baldfaced lie.

He claimed that white-nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., were “protesting very quietly,” and that liberal and left counter-protesters “didn’t have a [protest] permit.” False and false.

Trump laughably told oil workers in North Dakota that environmentalists “didn’t know why” they opposed the ecocidal, petro-capitalist Dakota Access and Keystone-XL pipelines. Ridiculous.

Trump lied repeatedly and viciously about the number of people who diedduring and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He ludicrously claimed to have led a strong federal response to the devastating storm in Puerto Rico. (He gave himself a “ten.”)

Trump absurdly claimed that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn’t do “anything wrong.” Flynn was later convicted for lying about his communications with the Kremlin during Trump’s presidential transition.

Trump farcically claimed that Paul Manafort never played a major role in his 2016 campaign. (Manafort chaired the Trump campaign up through the Republican National Convention that year.)

Trump falsely claimed that a Justice Department inspector general report exonerated him of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. The report did neither of those things.

Trump ridiculously claimed that Michael Cohen was never a big player in his career or campaign. Cohen was Trump’s longstanding personal attorney and “fixer,” and he too has been convicted on federal charges.

Trump has claimed to know nothing about the illegal campaign finance payoff of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen exposed that lie this summer.

After Cohen turned himself in to federal authorities, Trump said that Cohen pleaded guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that “were not crimes.” False. The violations are indeed federal crimes.

Trump unbelievably claimed not to have known that his son and son-in-law met with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump helped concoct the White House lie that the real subject matter of that June 2016 meeting was U.S. adoption policy.

He says that China “has been attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2018 elections.” There is no evidence to support that charge.

He falsely claims to be a self-made billionaire, something that The New York Times shows to have been a lie. (His father staked his entire business.)

Trump says that he and the Republican Party passed a “middle-class” tax “reform.” He certainly knows that they enacted a plutocratic tax cut, a great windfall for big corporations and the richest 1 percent.

Trump absurdly claimed before the tax cut that “we [U.S.-Americans] pay more taxes than anybody in the world” (we don’t) and that the tax “reform” would “cost me a fortune.”

He absurdly said that “public lands will once again be available for public use” while handing over 2 million acres to private corporations for coal mining, oil drilling, uranium extraction and other environmentally disastrous industrial activities.

He falsely claimed that he was legally compelled to order a “zero tolerance” border policy last spring that separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents.

In defense of his good friends atop the absolutist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime (which sends kill teams to torture, kill, and vivisect dissenting journalists in foreign embassies), Trump claims that Saudis have purchased $110 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S. and that this purchase creates “five-hundred thousand jobs,” later inflated to ““1 million jobs.” ”in the U.S.  His numbers here are absurdly exaggerated.

He claims without evidence that there are “people of Middle Eastern descent” in the latest Central American migrant “caravan” moving through Mexico towards the U.S.’ southern border.

He baselessly insisted that “Democrats are paying members of the caravan to try and get into the U.S. to harm Republicans in the midterms.”

He has sent U.S. troops to guard the border on the absurd lie that the beleaguered caravan constitutes a “national emergency.”

He preposterously claims that it is the mainstream media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” and not him that has created our current climate of hatred and violence—even as he applauds a Montana congressman for body-slamming a young reporter.

Trump’s evasion of responsibility follows a hate-filled campaign and 21 months of ax-grinding in the Oval Office that has seen him call immigrants criminal gang members, murderers and rapists, while maliciously describing his political enemies and media critics and journalists as “evil,” “low lifes,” “low IQ” and “the most dishonest people on Earth.” Along the way, the openly sexist Trump has referred to women as “animals,” “dogs,” “horse-face,” “fat” and worse. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a Jewish synagogue last Saturday was egged into violent action by Trump’s ridiculous and hateful caravan rhetoric.

The Trump Lie Machine is going into head-spinning and soul-numbing overdrive as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump claimed earlier this year that leftist violence will break out across the country if Democrats reclaim Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. The absurdity speaks for itself.

Trump said in Arizona recently that immigrants had illegally taken over a city council in California. The claim was complete nonsense.

Trump has recently and insanely suggested that people are “rioting” in California “to get out of Sanctuary Cities. …They’re demanding to be released from sanctuary cities.” (This may be the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen Trump claim. It is truly bizarre.)

Trump is ridiculously claiming the Democrats will kick seniors off health insurance, abolish insurance protections for people with health problems, destroy Social Security, abolish U.S. borders and (I am not making this up) give “illegal” immigrants “free cars.” That’s right: “free cars” for “illegals.”

Trump repeatedly—36 times across seven political speeches this fall—called the Democrats “radicals.” Of course, the Democrats are a deeply conservative, Big Business-friendly, imperial/pro-military, and depressingly centrist apparatus. There isn’t a single genuine radical in their entire party.

Trump says that the “new platform of the supposedly ‘radical’ Democrats is to abolish ICE” (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). That is flatly false.

Trump lies and distorts so relentlessly and profusely that tracking and fact-checking his false statements has become a full-time job for journalists at home and abroad.

One of these journalists is Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star. He calculates that Lyin’ Don has made four false claims per day since being sworn into the presidency 21 months ago with his hand on the Bible.

When Dale was first assigned the Trump beat in September 2016, he found the Republican candidate “so incessantly dishonest” that his habit of twisting and inverting reality required a specific focus “separate from the day-to-day news coverage I was doing.” Dale looked forward to being “freed from this [ugly] task” of covering Trump’s persistent untruths once Hillary Clinton prevailed, as was widely expected. Trump won “and so, [he] had to continue.”

What accounts for this endless mendacity and rhetorical manipulation? Speaking to “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” anchor and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff last week, Dale theorized that Trump and the Republican allies and outlets who repeat his outlandish and bogus assertions want to drive media coverage and political discourse away from topics they wish to avoid—health care, the Mueller investigation and “anything else the president doesn’t want us to talk about,” such as Trump’s still unreleased tax returns, climate change and the party’s regressive tax cuts.

Dale is on to something there, no doubt, but the real meaning of the president’s Twitter-amplified Fibby Pulpit is deeper and darker than mere diversion and partisan spin. As Chris Hedges suggests in his latest book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” Trump and his party’s continuing defiance of reality suggests that the United States is sliding into “corporate totalitarianism”:

Trump and the Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are intensified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. … But Clinton did not pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of ‘fake news.’ They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted them with the revoking of net neutrality. … “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed,” Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. …

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. … Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit – only there never was a report. … The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. … When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, and depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s faith in threats and force.

Consistency is discarded. The Trump administration has cited “states’ rights” in trying to roll back federal requirements that out-of-date coal and nuclear plants be shut down, even as it endeavors to federally negate the state of California’s right to enforce comparatively stringent emission regulations.

Republican Congressional candidates run campaign commercials proclaiming their commitment to retaining the Affordable Care Act’s provision prohibiting health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions at the same time that the GOP is viciously challengingthat provision in court.

Trump blames the nation’s bourgeois media and a timid, centrist Democratic Party for the hatred, incivility and demonization that pollute U.S. politics while he calls his opponents “evil” and celebrates violence against liberals and journalists.

It is important to understand, as Hedges does, that the Trump-led assault on veracity, evidence and our very ability to separate truth from falsehood has been able to gain traction only because a decades-long corporate coup has devastated and discredited public education, academia, organized labor and the legal and criminal justice systems. It has done all this and more while turning the Democratic Party into what the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition.

Think of this distinctively American “corporate-managed democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” as the nation’s pre-existing authoritarian condition for the rise of an Amerikaner-style fascism.

In the face of what an authoritarian like Trump and his white-nationalist Republican Party have done over the last two years of one-party rule—an annulment of what’s left of the U.S. Constitution’s much-ballyhooed “checks and balances”—there’s no credible moral argument against the notion that progressives living in contested districts should choose the lesser of two evils in next week’s midterm elections. Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky and Arun Gupta’s warnings about the dangers of a Trump presidency have been richly born out. I, for one, should have paid them more heed.

Still, we on the left, what’s left of it, should nonetheless retain our capacity to be properly nauseated by a yard sign I recently saw in arch-liberal, super-blue Iowa City, Iowa. Surrounded by other, smaller signs with the names of a handful of dismal local and statewide Democratic candidates, it read “MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN: Vote.”

Please. The notion that the richly bipartisan corporate totalitarianism of which Trump is the apotheosis can be reversed, and the nation made “good” simply by voting Herr Donald and the Republicans out of office is a childish fantasy.

That, too, is a Great Lie. As marchers celebrating a rare legal victory over a white supremacist U.S. police state in Democratically controlled Chicago chanted last month, “The whole damn system is guilty as Hell.” It’s the whole damn system that must be democratized from the bottom up. From the dismal dollar Democrats, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, “P”BS, Tom Steyer, the Gates Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, the Obama and Clintons on the so-called left, to the radically reactionary Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, the Sinclair Broadcasting Co., the Federalist Society and more on the actual right, imperialism, racial inequality and class rule have brought us to this menacing pre-fascist moment.

Paul Street

ContributorPaul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

Phroyd

[theculturedmarxist]

The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said, "Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects." [1] Lenin often called this law the essence of dialectics; he also called it the kernel of dialectics. [2] In studying this law, therefore, we cannot but touch upon a variety of questions, upon a number of philosophical problems. If we can become clear on all these problems, we shall arrive at a fundamental understanding of materialist dialectics. The problems are: the two world outlooks, the universality of contradiction, the particularity of contradiction, the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and the place of antagonism in contradiction.

The criticism to which the idealism of the Deborin school has been subjected in Soviet philosophical circles in recent years has aroused great interest among us. Deborin's idealism has exerted a very bad influence in the Chinese Communist Party, and it cannot be said that the dogmatist thinking in our Party is unrelated to the approach of that school. Our present study of philosophy should therefore have the eradication of dogmatist thinking as its main objective.

I. THE TWO WORLD OUTLOOKS

Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical conception and the dialectical conception, which form two opposing world outlooks. Lenin said:

 The two basic (or two possible? or two historically observable?) conceptions  of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as  repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division  of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).  [3]

Here Lenin was referring to these two different world outlooks.

In China another name for metaphysics is hsuan-hsueh. For a long period in history whether in China or in Europe, this way of thinking, which is part and parcel of the idealist world outlook, occupied a dominant position in human thought. In Europe, the materialism of the bourgeoisie in its early days was also metaphysical. As the social economy of many European countries advanced to the stage of highly developed capitalism, as the forces of production, the class struggle and the sciences developed to a level unprecedented in history, and as the industrial proletariat became the greatest motive force in historical development, there arose the Marxist world outlook of materialist dialectics. Then, in addition to open and barefaced reactionary idealism, vulgar evolutionism emerged among the bourgeoisie to oppose materialist dialectics.

The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external. Metaphysicians hold that all the different kinds of things in the universe and all their characteristics have been the same ever since they first came into being. All subsequent changes have simply been increases or decreases in quantity. They contend that a thing can only keep on repeating itself as the same kind of thing and cannot change into anything different. In their opinion, capitalist exploitation, capitalist competition, the individualist ideology of capitalist society, and so on, can all be found in ancient slave society, or even in primitive society, and will exist for ever unchanged. They ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate. They search in an over-simplified way outside a thing for the causes of its development, and they deny the theory of materialist dialectics which holds that development arises from the contradictions inside a thing. Consequently they can explain neither the qualitative diversity of things, nor the phenomenon of one quality changing into another. In Europe, this mode of thinking existed as mechanical materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries and as vulgar evolutionism at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In China, there was the metaphysical thinking exemplified in the saying "Heaven changeth not, likewise the Tao changeth not", [4] and it was supported by the decadent feudal ruling classes for a long time. Mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism, which were imported from Europe in the last hundred gears, are supported by the bourgeoisie.

As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another. As a matter of fact, even mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things. Simple growth in plants and animals, their quantitative development, is likewise chiefly the result of their internal contradictions. Similarly, social development is due chiefly not to external but to internal causes. Countries with almost the same geographical and climatic conditions display great diversity and unevenness in their development. Moreover, great social changes may take place in one and the same country although its geography and climate remain unchanged. Imperialist Russia changed into the socialist Soviet Union, and feudal Japan, which had locked its doors against the world, changed into imperialist Japan, although no change occurred in the geography and climate of either country. Long dominated by feudalism, China has undergone great changes in the last hundred years and is now changing in the direction of a new China, liberated and-free, and yet no change has occurred in her geography and climate. Changes do take place in the geography and climate of the earth as a whole and in every part of it, but they are insignificant when compared with changes in society; geographical and climatic changes manifest themselves in terms of tens of thousands of years, while social changes manifest themselves in thousands, hundreds or tens of years, and even in a few years or months in times of revolution. According to materialist dialectics, changes in nature are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in nature. Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society by the new. Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes? Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis. There is constant interaction between the peoples of different countries. In the era of capitalism, and especially in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the interaction and mutual impact of different countries in the political, economic and cultural spheres are extremely great. The October Socialist Revolution ushered in a new epoch in world history as well as in Russian history. It exerted influence on internal changes in the other countries in the world and, similarly and in a particularly profound way, on internal changes in China. These changes, however, were effected through the inner laws of development of these countries, China included. In battle, one army is victorious and the other is defeated, both the victory and the defeat are determined by internal causes The one is victorious either because it is strong or because of its competent generalship, the other is vanquished either because it is weak or because of its incompetent generalship; it is through internal causes that external causes become operative. In China in 1927, the defeat of the proletariat by the big bourgeoisie came about through the opportunism then to be found within the Chinese proletariat itself (inside the Chinese Communist Party). When we liquidated this opportunism, the Chinese revolution resumed its advance. Later, the Chinese revolution again suffered severe setbacks at the hands of the enemy, because adventurism had risen within our Party. When we liquidated this adventurism, our cause advanced once again. Thus it can be seen that to lead the revolution to victory, a political party must depend on the correctness of its own political line and the solidity of its own organization.

The dialectical world outlook emerged in ancient times both in China and in Europe. Ancient dialectics, however, had a somewhat spontaneous and naive character; in the social and historical conditions then prevailing, it was not yet able to form a theoretical system, hence it could not fully explain the world and was supplanted by metaphysics. The famous German philosopher Hegel, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, made most important contributions to dialectics, but his dialectics was idealist. It was not until Marx and Engels, the great protagonists of the proletarian movement, had synthesized the positive achievements in the history of human knowledge and, in particular, critically absorbed the rational elements of Hegelian dialectics and created the great theory of dialectical and historical materialism that an unprecedented revolution occurred in the history of human knowledge. This theory was further developed by Lenin and Stalin. As soon as it spread to China, it wrought tremendous changes in the world of Chinese thought.

This dialectical world outlook teaches us primarily how to observe and analyse the movement of opposites in different things and, on the basis of such analysis, to indicate the methods for resolving contradictions. It is therefore most important for us to understand the law of contradiction in things in a concrete way.

II. THE UNIVERSALITY OF CONTRADICTION

[crimethinc]

A Century since the Bolshevik Crackdown of August 1918: Tracing the Russian Counterrevolution

Following up on our book about the Bolshevik seizure of power, The Russian Counterrevolution, we look back a hundred years to observe the anniversary of the first time that the Bolsheviks used the Russian military to crush protests from the workers and peasants who had helped to put them in power. If we don’t want tomorrow’s revolutions to turn out the same way, it’s up to us to learn from the past.

August 2018 marks the 100-year anniversary of a bloody milestone in the evolution of the Bolshevik counterrevolution: the suppression of the rebellions in Nizhny Novgorod and Penza. Both of these were protest movements spurred by the Red Army’s policy of “requisitioning” food and other materials they deemed necessary from the common people. The protests and subsequent mass executions carried out by the Bolsheviks took place in a context of growing clashes that saw the Russian Revolution shift into the Russian Civil War. It was the first time the Bolsheviks used mass executions and terror not just against their political opponents, but against the peasants and workers as a class. This terror came to characterize their relationship with peasants and workers over the following years.

Bolshevik apologists justify their actions by citing the extreme violence on all sides, as the White Army sought to reimpose the brutal tsarist regime. Some even go so far as to claim that the peasants who were protesting in the Penza region were White agents. A hundred years after their murders, we have to examine these claims. In order to do so, we must begin by studying what the Bolshevik strategy—their obsession with controlling state power—had done to the Revolution after ten months.

War Communism

The peasant protests were sparked by “requisitioning,” a central part of the policy of “war communism” adopted by the Bolsheviks in June 1918, just two months earlier. “War communism” was a cruel euphemism for wholesale theft by bureaucrats and commissars of everything the peasants had. In theory, the Red Army and Bolshevik commissars were allowed to take the “surplus,” but there were no mechanisms for accountability, and many Bolsheviks had no experience with farming and no idea what constituted a surplus and what constituted the food supply of peasant families. Essentially, party members were given absolute power and impunity to enrich themselves at the cost of the peasants.

What’s more, ignoring the pleas of his erstwhile comrades, Lenin signed a peace treaty with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires in March 1918, ceding them what had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics. This almost guaranteed a famine in Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities, forcing the Bolsheviks to squeeze the countryside to the east even harder. To stomp out dissent and cement his hold on power, Lenin effectively pitted the cities against the countryside, putting the former in acute danger of starvation and forcing the latter to accept total subjugation even worse than what had occurred under the tsarist regime.

To fan the flames and motivate the Red Army to requisition pitilessly, Lenin and his party apparatus spread the myth of the kulak, the wealthy peasant who acted as a rural capitalist, exploited landless laborers, and condemned city residents to starvation. In reality, peasants in a wide range of different circumstances were punished under war communism. A tiny minority of peasants had amassed lands and wealth after the end of serfdom, but the Bolsheviks systematically labeled landless, impoverished peasants “kulaks” to justify arresting and executing them. Lenin himself was largely ignorant of peasant life—he was financed by his wealthy mother throughout his first decades of activism, even in Siberian exile, where he spent the time translating, swimming, and hunting. In his writings, he used the “kulak” as a politically expedient scapegoat.

Unlike the anarchists and Left SRs, the Bolsheviks did not effectively support land redistribution in the countryside, so peasants of all stripes had cause to protest against their rule. And when the “requisitioning” began, these protests only spread. The peasants of Penza and elsewhere had a realistic understanding of their own interests. In just a few years of war communism, millions of peasants starved to death as a direct result of Bolshevik policies. By the time war communism ended and the New Economic Policy was inaugurated in 1923, bringing capitalism back to Russia, the peasants had been effectively crushed as a social force; this is one of the reasons Stalin was able to reorganize them in state “collectives,” essentially a plantation system with forced labor not so different from the ones that provided the basis for value extraction in the American and British models of capitalism.

The peasants were right to protest against war communism from the beginning. In hindsight, we can see that the policy was justifiable neither as an end nor as a means.

Bolshevik anti-kulak poster.

The Revolt

On August 5, 1918, protests against the requisitioning gained momentum among peasants in the Penza region. This movement quickly spread to neighboring areas. Penza had also been a theater of the Pugachev Rebellion in the 18th century, a multicultural peasant and indigenous uprising against serfdom and Russian imperialism. It was a region with a history of standing up to oppression.

Accounts vary as to the nature of the movement. The Bolsheviks referred to it as a revolt, whereas many other sources merely refer to protests. There were certainly armed peasant revolts against Bolshevik power over the following months. It’s likely that the events of August 1918 constituted nothing more than a rowdy protest movement, but that after the Bolshevik response of mass murder and terror, the peasants got a look at the true face of the new state and realized that if they wanted to change things, mere protest wouldn’t suffice.

In any case, the chairman of the Penza soviet, Kurayev, wasn’t particularly concerned about this revolt. He thought that the Bolsheviks should respond with propaganda, not armed force. Lenin disagreed. By August 8, just three days later, Bolshevik troops had crushed the protest movement in Penza. Not content with simply regaining control, Lenin sent a telegram on August 9 to Nizhny Novgorod, perhaps the largest city in which protests had broken out. Claiming that the protests were a clear sign of a “White Guard” conspiracy, and thus denying any agency or claims to survival of the peasants themselves, Lenin wrote:

“Your first response must be to establish a dictatorial troika (i.e., you, Markin, and one other person) and introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds of prostitutes who are causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc. There is not a moment to lose; you must act resolutely, with massive reprisals. Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements.”

On August 11, three days after the protest movement had been suppressed, Lenin sent a telegram to the Central Executive Committee of the Penza soviet:

“Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such actions, for the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must make an example of these people.

(1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.

(2) Publish their names.

(3) Seize all their grain.

(4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday’s telegram.

Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so. Reply saying you have received and carried out these instructions. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.”

Only on August 18, after these instructions went out, did an actual armed uprising break out in the Penza oblast, in the town of Chembar. The uprising was led by Left SRs. It was also crushed.

Lenin’s message demanding the public hanging of at least 100 people.

The White Threat

Communist apologists today justify Bolshevik mass murder on the grounds that imposing “discipline” on the masses was necessary in the face of the far worse White threat. It is true that from early on, the White Army executed anarchist and Bolshevik prisoners and massacred villagers suspected of supporting the revolution. However, the claim that White violence forced the Bolsheviks’ hand is an excuse for a Bolshevik strategy that had already been in progress for a long time. Bolshevik political repression against their opponents dates to the very first months of the Soviet government. Already in April 1918, the Bolsheviks attacked 26 anarchist offices and social centers in Moscow, killing dozens and arresting hundreds, in response to anarchist propaganda critical of Bolshevik power. They also carried out raids and arrests in Petrograd and numerous cities in the interior, such as Vologda, where anarchists had growing support from peasants and railroad workers.

What’s more, the White threat cannot justify Bolshevik repression in Penza in August 1918 because at that time, there was not really a White Army to speak of. In June of 1918, the White Army only numbered less than 9000 troops, and they were based over 1000 kilometers away, having fled to Kuban after losing nearly every battle. Even their supreme commander, Kornilov, had been killed. In August, they were in disarray and on the defensive, rearranging their chain of command and desperately trying to recruit more troops. Until the end of 1918, when Great Britain, France, and the United States began providing significant material support to the White Army and General Denikin began an offensive in the Caucasus after having gained the support of numerous cossack fighters, the chief threats to Bolshevik power came from the Left. Lenin speaks of a “White Guard” organizing the protest movement, but as he well knew, it was the Left SRs, the enemies of the White Army, who were most active among the peasants in the Penza region.

Another major force on the field was the Czechoslovak Legion, which contained as many as 60,000 veteran fighters who had been recruited during World War I to fight against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (occupier of Czechoslovakia). Caught in Ukraine when the October Revolution broke out, they stayed on the front to stop multiple German advances, while negotiating with Soviet authorities for safe passage to the port city of Vladivostok, so they could be transferred back to Europe and continue fighting on the Western Front.

In May 1918, three months after they had been granted permission to ship out from Vladivostok, the Legion was spread all across the Trans-Siberian railroad. None of them had been evacuated, as Soviet authorities had obstructed the process and requisitioned the Legion’s weapons. A dispute broke out when trains taking Hungarian POWs to be repatriated were given priority—Hungary being one of the countries occupying Czechoslovakia, and, as an ally of Imperial Germany, one of the countries with which Lenin had signed a peace treaty. The repatriation of Triple Alliance troops and the stonewalling of the Czechoslovak Legion’s return to the war via Vladivostok substantiated their suspicion that Lenin was still working on behalf of Imperial Germany, the same accusation made by the Left SRs when they quit the government in March 1918.

Lenin ordered the arrest of the Legion, at which point they rebelled and took over the railroad, constituting an autonomous armed force in Siberia. Only several months later did the Czechoslovak Legion join the White Army, though they consistently supported the democratic factions of the Whites (the ones in favor of the Constituent Assembly) and occasionally opposed the tsarist faction. Their chief political goal was to achieve independence for Czechoslovakia, which led them to follow the directions of the Entente powers and support the Whites.

The Czechoslovak Legion was one of the most effective fighting units to oppose the Bolsheviks; they seized nearly every city in Siberia at some point in 1918. Yet the conflict with them was provoked almost entirely by Bolshevik policies. It was either Lenin’s paranoid distrust of autonomous forces or his secret collusion with Germany that caused him to order the arrest of the legionaries, which is what sparked their rebellion in the first place. The rebellion was spontaneous, going against the orders of Legion leadership and the plans of the Entente to ship them back to Western Europe. Lenin’s use of repression as a first resort helped the White Army to recruit, furnishing them with their most potent force in the first year of the Civil War; this, in turn, encouraged the Entente powers to intensify their interventions in the Russian hinterland.

In any case, the Legion did not get any closer to the Penza uprising than Samara, about 400 km away—at that moment, they were focused eastward on Vladivostok, not attempting to break through to Penza.

Neither the White Army nor the Czechoslovak Legion posed a threat anywhere near Penza at the time of the peasant protests, as Lenin well knew. His claims of a “White Guard” conspiracy represent demagogic manipulation designed to cover up the fact that the demonstrators in Penza were common people protesting Bolshevik authority.

The Left SRs

The presence of Left SRs in Penza after the peasant rebellion had already begun makes perfect sense in context. They were a socialist party that had long championed land reform, retained strong support among the peasants, and had recently been suppressed in Moscow after an unsuccessful uprising.

Whereas the chief objective of the Bolsheviks was to seize power, the SRs had some basic principles they stuck to, although this probably made them less effective as a political party. It could be said that they had maintained a principled opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the disastrous peace treaty with Imperial Germany. When it was signed in March, they quit the Soviet government; in July, Cheka units in Moscow controlled by Left SRs assassinated the German ambassador Mirbach and tried to take over government and telegraph buildings. They hoped their action would sabotage the peace with Germany, and that in the process they could replace the Bolsheviks at the head of the Soviet government. Their revolt was not designed to suppress the Soviets, but to set the revolution back on what in their minds was the right course.

Of course, the SRs were just another political party trying to control the revolution. No one should not romanticize them. Their suppression simply illustrates that the Bolsheviks were more adroit at power plays: they did not hold back from using any tactics to stay in power, nor did they remain loyal to principles that were not politically expedient. If the SRs had come out of the revolution on top, it probably would have been as a result of using tactics similar to those of the Bolsheviks.

In any case, as far as the Penza uprising is concerned, the involvement of Left SRs confirms the falsity of Bolshevik claims. Far from being White sympathizers, the only organized element among the Penza peasants were Left SRs, who had always stood on a platform of agrarian reform for greater peasant autonomy. They were committed opponents of the Whites.

The Red Army

It is also possible that the Left SRs decided to rebel in July 1918 because the preceding month, the Bolsheviks had solidified their control over the Red Army by bringing back an aristocratic hierarchy (led overwhelmingly by ex-tsarist officers), ending any vestige of self-organization, and appointing political commissars as well as a vast network of spies and snitches to ensure political obedience.

For nearly a year already, the Bolsheviks had taken action against revolutionary elements in the military. Foremost among these was the Dvinsk Regiment. To tell their story, we have to go back to 1917.

The Dvinsk Regiment was comprised of tens of thousands of soldiers on the Eastern Front who had engaged in mass disobedience against the war. Alongside the guerrilla resistance in Ukraine, this provided one of the principal examples of the kind of revolutionary warfare with which anarchists proposed to topple both the Russian Empire (whether under the tsar or Kerensky) and the imperial states on the other side of the battle lines.

Cossacks refused to execute the resisters; instead, thousands were imprisoned. The prisoners were released in September 1917 after major public protests. At this point, they constituted a revolutionary regiment. The Bolsheviks tried to take control of the regiment, but instead, the regiment elected Grachov, an anarchist, as its leader. In the October Revolution, which saw fierce fighting in Moscow, the Dvinsk Regiment was at the front of the fiercest clashes, seizing City Hall, the Hotel Metropole, and the Kremlin.

Grachov was critical of the authoritarian direction of the Bolsheviks. He began carrying out a plan to arm the workers on nonpartisan grounds, sending weapons and munitions to factory committees. At the end of November, the Bolsheviks summoned him to Nizhny Novgorod, supposedly to discuss military matters. Away from the rest of the regiment and the anarchist bastion in Moscow, he was shot to death inside the military commissariat. The Bolsheviks claimed it was an accident. Subsequently, Lenin and Trotsky disbanded the Dvinsk Regiment and all the other revolutionary units that had taken part in the fighting in the October Revolution.

Over time, it became clear to the Bolsheviks that eliminating individual figures would not be enough. In June 1918, the Bolsheviks were preparing to introduce war communism. They would need a military fully under their control, capable of carrying out any atrocity—much like the tsarist army that had upheld the old system. So they abolished of worker control, canceled the election of officers, re-instituted saluting, drastically increased the pay and privileges for the officers, imposed top-down discipline, carried out a massive recruitment of old tsarist officers, and fully integrated the Cheka—the political police—with the military. By the end of the Russian Civil War, 83% of Red Army officers had served under the tsar.

While the Bolsheviks convinced many tsarist officers to serve in the Red Army by blackmail, holding their families hostage, others served voluntarily, realizing that tsarism was dead and the Bolsheviks were to become the new defenders of privilege. After 1917, the surest way to hold onto their privileges was by becoming communists.

The revolution did not need tsarist officers to succeed. All the prominent leaders of the anarchist formations in the Civil War—Maria Nikiforova, Nestor Makhno, Fyodor Shchuss, Olga Taratuta, Anatoli Zhelezniakov, Novoselov, Lubkov—were chosen by their comrades according to their abilities. They were workers or peasants, but they were among the most effective on the battlefield, frequently defeating White armies that fielded several times more troops. Trotsky repeatedly called Zhelezniakov and Makhno to the front when the White Army was gaining ground against the Red Army.

Considering the authoritarian changes to the Red Army, it is not surprising that in August 1918, the Bolsheviks sought a military solution to the peasant protests. In June, Lenin and Trotsky had decided to make the basis of their power a hierarchical military and a policy of forced requisitioning and mass starvation. This established them as the enemy of the peasants of the workers, provoking a conflict they could only win through force of arms.

When you topple the monuments, be sure to take down the pedestals as well.

Conclusions

If we are to be charitable and believe that Lenin was a sincere revolutionary, we can only conclude that the problem was his Jacobin theory of revolution—in which it was necessary to seize the state in order to impose the revolution through mass terror. Unless we to take the view of many of his contemporaries, who believed that he was simply a power-hungry dictator, the only explanation for his actions is that, conflating the success of the revolution with the seizure of state power, he was willing to put principles aside in order to do whatever was necessary to increase the power of the Soviet government. Yet the more power his government amassed, the more enemies he made, and the more violence was necessary to preserve his position.

Lenin made an alliance with Imperial Germany as a political expedient to free up the Russian army for domestic deployment against the supporters of the Constituent Assembly, but it caused the Left SRs to rebel. The Bolsheviks had to crack down on anarchists in April 2018 because anarchist propaganda and criticisms of the Bolshevik government were mobilizing increasing numbers of supporters, but this caused anarchists to redouble their efforts. After the Bolsheviks gave Ukraine away to Germany, they need war communism in order to feed the cities without giving concessions to the peasants. But war communism provoked more peasant protests. To stop the protests, Lenin crushed them with military force, and this catalyzed actual popular uprisings against the communist state.

An iatrogenic condition is an illness caused by medical treatment. As the song goes, “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly…”

At the end of August 2018, SR Fanny Kaplan carried out the first attempt on Lenin’s life. Immediately thereafter, the Bolsheviks instituted the policy of Red Terror. They claimed that the Terror was necessary to defend the revolution from a White conspiracy—but in reality, the White Army had not yet begun any effective offensive. The immediate causes of the Terror were the criticisms, protests, and attacks that the Bolsheviks were facing from anarchists, SRs, and the ordinary workers and peasants whose interests Lenin claimed to represent.

The purpose of the Terror was to defend the Bolsheviks from the Revolution. The authoritarian political character of their project becomes clear from a statement in the Bolshevik press: “Anyone who dares spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be immediately arrested and sent to the concentration camps.” This was a reference to the gulag system, already established after just ten months of Bolshevik authority, part of the apparatus of Bolshevik repression that would eventually claim millions of lives.

Today, one hundred years after the Bolsheviks turned their newly consolidated military might against protesting peasants, we can reflect on the folly of their strategy, and any similar belief that the state has revolutionary potential as a tool for liberating the masses. The state can only preserve its existence by controlling and repressing the masses. By very nature, it is a counterrevolutionary instrument.

The Bolshevik party contained many sincere revolutionaries, but they surrendered their free will to the dictates of a hierarchical party. In obeying their leaders, in believing in the revolutionary potential of the state, they became torturers, censors, jailers, and executioners. Those who refused, those who opted for more peaceful approaches or for tactics based in solidarity, were pushed out of the way. Only the bloodiest and most ruthless could rise in the party ranks, egged on by Lenin himself. Just ten months after seizing power, the Bolsheviks already had a functioning system of hit men, secret police, and concentration camps for revolutionaries who refused to accept their authority, and they were ready to use mass murder against the peasants and workers who did not bow down before them.

From there, it only got worse.

Bibliography

Paul Avrich, “Russian Anarchism and the Civil War,” The Russian Review. Vol.27 No.3: 296–306. July 1968.

Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006.

Nick Heath, “Bolshevik Repression against Anarchists in Vologda,” libcom.org October 15 2017

Nadezhda Krupskaya, “Illyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow” Reminiscences of Lenin. International Publishers, 1970.

George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Lenin, “Telegram to the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee of the Soviets” in J. Brooks and G. Chernyavskiy, Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State: A Brief History with Documents (2007). Bedford/St Martin’s: Boston and New York, p.77

James Ryan. Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London: Routledge, 2012.

Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921. New York: Free Life Editions, 1974.

Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Additional Reading

Ilyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow, from Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin”

Bolshevik repression against anarchists in Vologda

April 2018: One Hundred Year Anniversary of the Beginning of Bolshevik Terror

Lenin Orders the Massacre of Sex Workers, 1918

[pamphletstoinspire]

Catholic Prophecy - Part 15

42 Catholic Prophecy

After noting that the Council of Trent was a gift of God to  enlighten and strengthen the Christians of our times, Ven. Holzhauser goes on to say that another Council is to take place at the time of the Great Monarch. (The Ecstatic of Tours says the same.) Yet, strangely enough, Vatican I and Vatican II are mentioned nowhere. Why? I submit that there may be a number of reasons. Obviously, Ven. Holzhauser can mention only the most significant events of the fifth period. Now, Vatican I may in no way be compared to Trent. It did define Papal infallibility, but its work was unfinished.

Vatican II purposely refrained from being doctrinal; the accent was on the pastoral side of things. But even in a "pastoral" Council it is impossible to avoid all references to doctrinal matters. Vatican II got out of the difficulty by compromise and ambiguities. The Conciliar Fathers were so divided on so many vital issues that it could not have been otherwise, short of a Papal intervention. (The Pope, however, did intervene in a limited way). Had the Council wanted to be doctrinal, it could not have done so either, unless, again, the Pope had imposed his own decisions. It follows that, doctrinally, Vatican II is insignificant.

Pastorally, it could have achieved a great deal, but the climate of permissiveness, hesitancy, timorousness (which is so typical of our times) is hardly propitious for the imposition of firm guidelines. In other words, Rome has failed to impose the correct implementation of the Council's decrees. What has been imposed constitutes a mockery of what had been decided, and it has been imposed by the sizeable proportion of Ecclesiastics, in the world and in the Vatican itself, who are currently subverting the Church.

The liturgy is a case in point: Vatican II permitted an extension of the use of the vernacular, while it commanded that Latin should be retained. There is nothing wrong, really, in  extending the use of the vernacular to the reading of the Epistle and Gospel. But when this latitude results in the complete elimination of Latin, when it leads to the abandonment of Gregorian Chant (which is inseparable from Latin), and to the adoption of guitar-playing and hand-clapping, it is then clearly in opposition to what Pope John intended when he wrote his encyclical Veterum Sapientia on retaining Latin.

The result, of course, is here for everyone to see: confusion in the Church, shocking innovations, defections of priests, a sharp drop in vocations and conversions, etc. The Second Vatican Council, therefore, has indirectly precipitated the

Paragraph 46 43

crisis which had been brewing for about sixty years. Far from being a ''renewal", it marks instead the coming end of the fifth period of the Church, mentioned by Ven. Holzhauser.

It must be understood, however, that it is not my intention to oppose in a sweeping statement all the changes which have taken place since Vatican II. Throughout history the Church has had to adopt herself to changing conditions. The changes brought about by St. Pius X, who is now regarded as a Conservative, were unprecedented at the time. Conservatism does not mean immobilism. On the contrary, it implies regular overhauls and renovations. This is so because nothing can be conserved without some work of maintenance and renovation, and the Church is no exception. Obviously, in this changing world of ours some sort of updating was called for. That is why there is no question of rejecting indiscriminately all changes. What is to be deplored, however, is that the wise updating intended by John XXIII has become synonymous with Revolution, and that the necessary changes have become a pretext for a clean break with the past.

Obviously, a Council which asserts nothing doctrinally, at the very time when every doctrine is boldly being challenged, and fails to enforce what it decides pastorally, cannot be a very significant Council in the historical perspective. If we fail to see this just now, it is because we are not yet in the broad historical perspective. We are still in the post-conciliar  perspective — far too close for a correct assessment. Ven. B. Holzhauser, however, cast his prophetic eye on the general historical perspective, and this may explain why he did not mention the Second Council of the Vatican.

|[ 47. Venerable Holzhauser (Continued) . "When everything has been ruined by war, when Catholics are hard-pressed by traitorous co-religionists and heretics, when the Church and  her servants are denied their rights, when the monarchies have been overthrown and their rulers murdered, then the hand of Almighty God will work a marvelous change, something seemingly impossible according to human reason. . .

"There will rise a valiant king anointed by God. He will be a Catholic and a descendant of Louis IX, yet a descendant also of an old imperial German family, born in exile. He will rule supreme in temporal matters. The Pope will rule supreme in spiritual matters at the same time. Persecution will cease

44 Catholic Prophecy

and justice shall reign. He will root out false doctrines. His dominion will extend from East to West. All nations will adore God their Lord according to Catholic teaching. There will be many wise and just men. People will love justice, and peace will reign over the whole earth, for Divine Power will bind Satan for many years until the coming of the Son of Perdition. . .

"After desolation has reached its peak in England, peace will be restored and England will return to the Catholic faith with greater fervour than ever before. . .

'The Great Monarch will have the special help of God and be unconquerable. . ."

Comment: Venerable Holzhauser correctly saw three hundred years ago that, in our own times, the restoration of Monarchy would seem impossible according to human reason. It does seem impossible. Yet, if we consider the manner in which a handful of doctrinally well-trained and determined Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917, and if we consider that there exists at present in Europe an equally well-trained and determined association of dedicated Catholics who are sparing no efforts to sow the seeds of renewal and are spreading the sound concepts of Catholic thinkers and philosophers who are just as unknown as Karl Marx was in 1850 — but not less capable, one can see, then, that God has already set the stage for the marvelous renewal which He will work.

|f 48. 1 Bl. Anna-Maria Taigi ( 1 9th century) . "God will send two punishments; one will be in the form of wars, revolutions and other evils; it shall originate on earth. The other will be sent from Heaven. There shall come over the whole earth an intense darkness lasting three days and three nights. Nothing can be seen, and the air will be laden with pestilence which will claim mainly, but not only, the enemies of religion. It will be impossible to use any man-made lighting during this darkness, except blessed candles. He, who out of curiosity, opens his window to look out, or leaves his home, will fall dead on the spot. During these three days, people should remain in their homes, pray the Rosary and beg God for mercy.

jf 48.2 "All the enemies of the Church, whether known or unknown, will perish over the whole earth during that universal darkness, with the exception of a few whom God will soon

Paragraph 48 45

convert. The air shall be infected by demons who will appear under all sorts of hideous forms.

fl 48.3 "Religion shall be persecuted, and priests massacred. Churches shall be closed, but only for a short time. The Holy Father shall be obliged to leave Rome.

fl 48.4 "France shall fall into a frightful anarchy. The French shall have a desperate civil war in the course of which even old men will take up arms. The political parties, having  exhausted their blood and their rage without being able to arrive at any satisfactory settlement, shall agree at the last extremity to have recourse to the Holy See. Then the Pope shall send to France a special legate. . . In consequence of the information received, His Holiness himself shall nominate a most Christian King for the government of France.

fl 48.5 "After the three days of darkness, St. Peter and St. Paul, having come down from Heaven, will preach in the whole world and designate a new Pope. A great light will flash from their bodies and will settle upon the cardinal who is to become Pope. Christianity, then, will spread throughout the world. He is the Holy Pontiff, chosen by God to withstand the storm. At the end, he will have the gift of miracles, and his name shall be praised over the whole earth.

jj 48.6 Whole nations will come back to the Church and the face of the earth will be renewed. Russia, England, and China will come into the Church.

Comment: This prophecy does not add anything new to what we already know from the other prophecies quoted in the twelfth issue of World Trends, but it does bring further evidence concerning the events to come. One might conceivably entertain doubts if we had only two or three different prophecies, but it would be unreasonable to do so when we possess well over one hundred, coming from different sources.

Among the books written on Anna-Maria Taigi, we have Wife, Mother and Mystic, written by Albert Bessieres, S.J., - and translated into English by Fr. Stephen Rigby. In his introduction, Fr. Rigby quotes an interesting passage from Louis Veuillot's book The Fragrance of Rome. This passage is better than anything I could say to acquaint my readers with the extraordinary gifts of Anna-Maria Taigi (I quote):

"Her intellectual gifts were altogether overshadowed by an unexampled miracle. Shortly before she had entered on the

46 Catholic Prophecy

way of perfection there began to appear to her a golden globe which became as a sun of matchless light; in this all things were revealed to her. Past and future were to her an open book.

"She knew with certainty the fate of the dead. Her gaze travelled to the ends of the earth and discovered there people on whom she had never set eyes, reading them to the depth of their souls. One glance sufficed; upon whatever she focused her thoughts, it was revealed to her and her understanding. She saw the whole world as we see the front of a building. It was the same with nations as with individuals; she saw the cause of their distresses and the remedies that would heal them.

"By means of this permanent and prodigious miracle, the poor wife of Domenico Taigi became a theologian, a teacher, and a prophet. The miracle lasted forty-seven years. Until her death the humble woman was able to read this mysterious sun as an ever-open book. Until her death she looked into it solely for the glory of God; that is, when charity suggested or obedience demanded it. Should things for which she had not looked, or which she did not understand, appear she refrained from asking explanations.

"The poor, the great of the world, the princes of the Church came to her for advice or help. They found her in the midst of her household cares and often suffering from illness. She  refused neither her last crust of bread nor the most precious moment of her time, yet she would accept neither presents nor praise.

"Her most powerful friends could not induce her to allow them to favour her children beyond the conditions in which they were born. When she was at the end of her resources, she told God about it, and God sent what was necessary.

"She thought it good to live from day to day, like the birds. A refugee queen in Rome wished to give her money. 'Madame,' she said, 'how simple you are! I serve God, and He is richer than you.'

"She touched the sick, and they were cured; she warned others of their approaching end, and they died holy deaths. She endured great austerities for the souls of purgatory, and the souls, once set free, came to thank her. . . She suffered in body and soul. . . She realized that her role was to expiate the sins of others, that Jesus was associating her with His Sacrifice,

Paragraph 49 47

and that she was a victim of His company. The pains of Divine Love have an intoxication no words can explain. After Holy Communion there were times when she sank down as though smitten by a prostrating stroke. To tell the truth, her state of ecstasy was continual because her sense of the presence of God was continual. . . All pain was sweet to her. . . She went her way, her feet all bloody; with shining eyes she followed the Royal way.

"Behold, then, the spectacle God raised to men's sight in Rome during that long tempestuous period which began at the time the humble Anna-Maria took to the way of saints!

"Pius VI dies at Valence; Pius VII is a prisoner at Fontainebleau; the revolution will reappear before Gregory XVI reigns. Men are saying that the day of the Popes is over, that Christ's law and Christ Himself are on the wane, that science will soon have relegated this so-called Son of God to the realm of dreams. . . He will work no more miracles.

"But at precisely this time God raised up this woman to cure the sick. . . He gives her knowledge of the past, present and future. She declares that Pius VII will return. She sees even beyond the reign of Pius IX. . . She is God's answer to the challenge of unbelief. "

|f 49.1 Fr. Nectou, SJ. ( 18th century). (Father Nectou was Provincial of the Jesuits in the south-west of France. The priests who knew him all regarded him as a saint and a prophet. He died in 1777. The following prophecy was made circa 1760.)

[travelonlinetips-blog]

New Post has been published on https://travelonlinetips.com/boston-to-hawaii-is-this-really-the-worlds-longest-domestic-flight/

Boston to Hawaii: Is this really the world's longest domestic flight?

One of the many benefits of 21st-century media is that readers can heckle within seconds of a story being published online.

So it proved when I wrote a story about a new record for the world’s longest domestic flight: the Hawaiian Airlines link from Boston to Honolulu.

During the route’s first week of operation, two flights took 11 hours 36 minutes to cover the 5,095 miles between the Massachusetts and Hawaiian state capitals, meaning most passengers would have spent 12 hours on the plane. (Travelling in the opposite direction, the jet stream assisted a flight time of about 10 hours.)

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But my assertion that the Airbus A330 flight was an aviation superlative “unlikely to be broken for many years, if at all” lasted about a minute.

Neil Morrow was first to claim supremacy for France, citing the link from Paris to Réunion.

With many others making the same point, Rocco added: “What about the 22-hour flight from Paris to Papeete [the capital of Tahiti]? Would that be considered domestic by the French? They will be voting for their MEP soon.”

They are referring to the “DomToms” – départements d’outre-mer and territoires d’outre mer – which are politically part of France.

So we need to talk about why I believe links between “metropolitan” France and far-flung categories do not count as domestic flights.

First, allow me to despatch the Tahiti services. Air France, Air Tahiti Nui and French Bee all fly from Paris to Papeete. But they refuel in California (the first two in Los Angeles, the last in San Francisco) so I regard them as a pair of international flights rather than a single domestic trip.

Next, what about the non-stop flights to the Indian Ocean “Dom” of Réunion.

If I were to allow this, then France would take not just the first place but second and third too: 

3 – Marseilles-Réunion, 5,456 miles.

2 – Paris Orly-Réunion, 5,802 miles.

1 – Paris CDG-Réunion, 5,809 miles.

Read more

But I don’t count these as domestic flights. Not because the most direct route from Paris to Réunion crosses the territory of Switzerland, Italy, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia – many internal flights use other countries’ airspace, such as Boston-Seattle over Canada and Zagreb-Dubrovnik, which spends almost all its flight over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

I rule out French overseas departments because they are outside the Schengen area (as is the UK) while metropolitan France is inside. And, to quote a traveller who returned to France from Réunion last weekend: “Passport and customs both ways, just like going to the States.”

People are fond of saying that the DomToms are as French as Calais, but that’s not quite the case. (And I would also class links between the UK and the Channel Islands as non-domestic.)

Stefan Paetow objected to my classifying the Hawaiian Airlines flight as a domestic service, because of the time it spends over the Pacific – almost half the journey. According to ICAO, the UN regulation of aviation, international airspace begins 12 nautical miles (14 of the Imperial variety) from the US shore.

“Sorry Simon, but technically you ‘leave’ the country, enter international airspace, then cross another country’s airspace before you re-enter the country,” he writes.

Read more

“Show me the longest never leaving domestic airspace, then we talk.”

The longest flight within Russia is 4,203 miles from Petropavlovsk at the southern end of the Kamchatka Peninsula to Moscow. But if international waters are not to be counted, then it must be excluded. It flies over a patch of the Sea of Okhotsk and (depending on the prevailing winds) a sliver of Arctic Ocean.

Yuzhno Sakhalinsk (on Sakhalin Island north of Japan) to Moscow is excluded for the same reason.

Nicholas Gilroy nominates Vladivostok to Moscow as the longest domestic flights that remains over national territory – and, having made the trip, I concur.

The most direct route from the Russian Far East city would cross into Chinese airspace within minutes of take off, and would fly over the People’s Republic for over an hour. But instead Aeroflot initially follows the route of the world’s longest railway, the Trans-Siberian, which also happens to run from Vladivostok to Moscow.

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The thrice-daily flight spends the first half-hour of the journey flying north-north-east (getting further away from the Russian capital, as a dog-leg to avoid Chinese airspace). The official distance is 3,986 miles, but the reality is hundreds of miles longer – with an average flight time of eight-and-a-half hours on the Boeing 777s and Airbus A330s used for the link.

To round off the discussion: one more category that may bring yet more heckles. Longest domestic flight using a narrow-bodied aircraft? I claim victory for Ural Airlines flight 366 – from Vladivostok via the Siberian cities of Irkutsk and Yekaterinburg to St Petersburg.

You depart onboard an Airbus A320 at 10.55am, arriving four hours later at Irkutsk, where some lucky passengers get off and the plane refuels for the next four-hour hop to Yekaterinburg, the last city before the Urals. One more giant leap, taking three hours, and you are in St Petersburg. The overall journey time: 14 hours 20 minutes, far longer than the scheduled duration of the Boston-Honolulu trip that started this discussion.

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[chesh9496-blog]

Importance of English

English language learning around the world is evolving in surprising and sometimes alarming ways. A few decades ago, the language learning process was either moderated by native speakers (NS) of English or proactively initiated by second language learners who travel to English-speaking countries to study and become proficient in the language. In many language encounters, English translators were also in high demand to facilitate a clearer communication between peoples of diverse linguistic traditions. This is not to say that formal English language teachers and translators have become relics belonging to a bygone era. On the contrary, their function is still very much relevant, but their roles are changing dramatically.

For one thing, the number of language students leaving their home nations to study English abroad is in a rather steep decline according to the most recent reports. That is because English language learning has already become a critical strategic policy among non-English speaking nations that have wisely institutionalized the learning of English in the home front. Given the undeniable role of English as the language of choice in global business, the Internet, and international relations, not doing so will prevent these nations from having any meaningful participation in global discourses.

In much of Asia, including China and India--two of its demographic and economic giants--the learning of English has become an integral component of early education. Meanwhile, given their heritage of British governance, Singapore and Malaysia have also consistently promoted the learning of English such that their English-speaking populations are perhaps the most proficient in the region, based on online tests conducted by some language-oriented organizations. Nearby, the Philippines still holds the title of having the 3rd largest English-speaking population in the world after the US and India.

Given these developments, how has the role of language teachers who are also native speakers of English changed as previously claimed? The simple and alarming fact is that neither they nor their linguistic compatriots in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand own and control English anymore. If numbers were a determinant of language ownership, they are outnumbered by at least 3 to 1 by non-native English speakers. Native speakers number between 300 million to 400 million while speakers of English who also have a first language exceeds a billion.

Of course, language ownership is a tenuous issue and games of numbers are just that. By all indications, English has become a global language owned by all its users--regardless of whether they are native or non-native speakers of it--who will naturally use English within their respective cultural contexts. It is no accident that there is now the so-called Korean English, Indian English and other working variants of the English language. The evolutionary transformation of language by people who use it is in fact, a known and expected linguistic phenomenon. After all, any language that ceases to evolve, like Latin, is a dead language.

Speaking of imperial languages, English too has undeniably become the de facto lingua franca of global commerce, international relations, and the scientific and technological world, much like Latin was during the heydays of the Roman Empire up to the Industrial Revolution. Two very vivid examples of how English is transforming global businesses is the Toyota-Peugeot factory in the Czech Republic and the Nokia headquarters in Finland. While managed by a multinational team and staffed mostly by technically skilled Czechs and Finns, respectively, the enforced medium of communication within the business and manufacturing complexes of both companies is unabashedly English. Elsewhere in Western Europe, the modern Swedes appear to have the highest level of English proficiency among non-English speaking countries largely due to the fact that Swedes believe that Swedish has very little communicative value in a global setting or even anywhere in the world that is not part of Sweden. At the other end of the scale is Spain, which lags behind all other European countries in English proficiency, a fact that may be related to its population's awareness that Spanish is also a formidable language in its own right and is still used as the language of business and diplomacy in Latin America.

However, in a much larger scale, it is English that has become the medium of choice when representatives of the G7, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and ASEAN communicate with each other. Without global English, the inter-relational proximity of different nations would have been very remote indeed, requiring translators that often feed a sense of "separateness" among diplomats. If anything, global English is helping diverse nations become closer together by eradicating previously problematic linguistic barriers to better trade, security and cultural relations.

In the realm of science and technology, English has also helped the global exchange of research data and innovative ideas. Scientific journals and research are now mostly articulated through English, with some estimates placing its use in modern science and technology to as much as 90 percent. Even the Internet, one of the top technological marvels of the previous century, is largely English-based, even when large pockets of localized online content is spreading. Notably, the programming codes that established the World Wide Web and all its amazing functionalities today are also loosely based on the English language. Software programmers from non-native English-speaking countries have very little choice but to get immersed in the rudiments of the English language as used in the syntax of their programming codes.

Given the established dominance of English in the global ecosystem, how will educators of English as a second language (ESL) redefine their roles in the new dynamic? The first is for educators to fully acknowledge that English as used in non-native English speaking countries is not the language of Shakespeare. It has been transformed into a far different variant called Global English, where the millions of linguistic stakeholders are active participants in its continuing evolution. As of this writing, the Asian trend indicates that more people are learning English, and starting learning it at a very early age. In many respects, the method of teaching English has also changed from being articulated as a foreign language to being shared as an acclimatized second language that functions as the local population's link to the rest of the world. According to an article in the Economist, children with ages between 8 and 12 are better language learners than younger ones.

In the same article, Malaysia ranked as the most proficient English user in Southeast Asia based on a global sampling of 2 million non-native English speaking people conducted by the English teaching company, EF Education First. At the other end is Thailand that ranked among the worst five performers globally. The good performance of Malaysia may stem from its Anglicized history as well as its export-oriented economy that required intensive communication with a global market. As previously noted, the spectre of political colonialism--at least in the case of Malaysia--has all but been removed from the teaching of English, replaced by the practical need for Malaysians to learn English in order to maintain their global economic competitiveness.

As if to affirm the status of English as a lingua franca, China has been pushing for state-sanctioned English education years ago, in a similar effort to buoy their vibrant economy. Reportedly, such sustained efforts will eventually empower China to even outperform English-acclimatized India in the services sector that requires extensive use of English. To illustrate the far ranging implications of these developments, the number of Chinese children that are learning English--more than a hundred million--now exceed the entire population of the United Kingdom.

The mandate for English language educators is clear: Global English is a previously unheard of phenomenon but is a contemporary fact that educators, businesses, governments, technologists, learners, and other linguistic stakeholders will be confronted in the next several years. Realigning teaching methods to help steer its evolution into a robust mode of communication that is clearly understood by all parties in global language interactions is of critical importance.

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