Russian Civil War Quotes

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!

The White Guard, written in the twenties and dealing with the nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of war in all of literature.

The Russian Civil War lasts almost six years and ends in victory for the Bolsheviks. It claims the lives of more than 10 million people—five times more than the number of Russian casualties in the First World War, which the Bolsheviks promised to end. Of that figure, 2.5 million are killed in battle, another 2 million fall victim to the Red (and White) Terror, while around 6 million die from hunger and disease. On top of that, approximately 2 million emigrate.

In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn't mean anything anymore. Civil liberties, so dear to Nina Kupina and people like her, resulted in monstrous egotism and total moral degradation: I do what I want and don't give a damn about others.

His Bolshevik revolution had not brought peace to Russia, but a terrible civil war in which 28 million Russians had lost their lives. The principles of socialism which Lenin had forced upon the people had not brought increased production as Marx had promised, but had reduced production to a point where even in normal times it would not adequately clothe nor feed half the people.

Maid of Baikal tells the story of how the White Russian Armies might have deserved to win the Russian Civil War, and thus might have won, in a better world than ours. For despite the Whites’ manifold sins, the best among them strived mightily to achieve a free and democratic Russia, and most of these suffered a worse fate than what they deserved. --Preston Fleming

The Communist Party, a seeming haven for the radical intelligentsia and apparently uninterested in the ethnic and religious origins of its members, became the sole refuge of certain marginal Jews, who believed it would bring a great and true salvation to the world, a revolutionary universalism in which the destructive differences that divided humankind would once and for all be forever dissolved. It mattered little to most Russians that these Jews were no more Jewish than their non-Jewish atheist party comrades; that they did not speak for or identify with Jews, and indeed were often the enemies of Jews. Further, because many Jews stepped into the vacuum created by the disintegration of the tsarist bureaucracy, it now seemed to many Russians that Jewish government officials were everywhere. Their sudden appearance, concurrent as it was with the Revolution and the Civil War, forever linked those events in the minds of Russians, for whom the Jew now became the evil cause of the Fatherland’s unutterable misery.

The toll from the two attacks: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies. People in Khas Uruzgan felt what Americans might if, in a single night, masked gunmen had wiped out the entire city council, mayor’s office, and police department of a small suburban town: shock, grief, and rage.

The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Konstantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark. Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’ But how could you keep it there if there really was only one true way, one line, and it is blocked? ‘I have gone where you did not want me to go.’ In

Trotsky's assault on Kronstadt in March 1921 marked a point of no return. There was no longer even a whiff of pretense that the Communist government had the support of the people over whom it ruled. The Red Terror had been aimed at "class enemies"; the Civil War was a struggle against "imperialists and White Guards." Even the peasant wars had pitted, in theory at least, proletarians against "capitalist farmers." But now the world's first "proletarian" government had begun slaughtering urban proletarians, too. It is no wonder that "Kronstadt" became, in addition to a black mark on Trotsky's record, a byword of Bolshevik betrayal for European socialists who refused to bow to Moscow.

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon’s power. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent. At least, that was what Freud might say. At least Arutyunyan had read him. Future generations of Russians might not be so lucky—if there were any future generations of Russians, that was. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

The hardships of the Civil War were forgotten. But we will never forget that each of us was motivated by the firm belief in the justice of the ideas proclaimed by Lenin’s Party in October 1917. British General Knox wrote to his government at that time that it was possible to crush a million-strong Bolshevik army, but when 150 million Russians did not want the whites, and wanted the Reds, it was futile helping the former.

Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today. Of course not all of them are radicals. The majority of them are peaceful people. The radicals are estimated to be between 15-25%, according to all intelligence services around the world. That leaves 75% of them - peaceful people. But when you look at 15-25% of the world Muslim population, you're looking at 180 million to 300 million people dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. That is as big as the United States. So why should we worry about the radical 15-25%? Because it is the radicals that kill. Because it is the radicals that behead and massacre. When you look throughout history, when you look at all the lessons of history, most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis drove the agenda. And as a result, 60 million people died, almost 14 million in concentration camps. 6 million were Jews. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Russia, most Russians were peaceful as well. Yet the Russians were able to kill 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at China for example, most Chinese were peaceful as well. Yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Japan prior to World War II, most Japanese were peaceful as well. Yet, Japan was able to butcher its way across Southeast Asia, killing 12 million people, mostly killed by bayonets and shovels. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. On September 11th in the United States we had 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States. It took 19 hijackers - 19 radicals - to bring America down to its knees, destroy the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon and kill almost 3000 Americans that day. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. So for all our power of reason, and for all us talking about moderate and peaceful Muslims, I'm glad you're here. But where are the others speaking out? And since you are the only Muslim representative in here, you took the limelight instead of speaking about why our government - I assume you're an American (the Muslim says yes) - As an American citizen, you sat in this room, and instead of standing up and saying a question, or asking something about our four Americans that died and what our government is doing to correct the problem, you stood there to make a point about peaceful, moderate Muslims. I wish you had brought ten with you to question about how we could hold our government responsible. It is time we take political correctness and throw it in the garbage where it belongs.” - Brigette Gabriel (transcript from Benghazi Accountability Coalition - Heritage Foundation)

Such is Fascist planning-the planning of those who reject the ideal postulates of Christian civilization and of the older Asiatic civilization which preceded ti and from which it derived-the planning of men whose intentions are avowedly bad. Let us now consider examples of planning by political leaders who accept the ideal postulates, whose intentions are good. The first thing to notice is that none of these men accepts the ideal postulates whole-heartedly. All believe that desirable ends can be achieved by undesirable means. Aiming to reach goals diametrically opposed to those of Fascism, they yet persist in taking the same roads as are taken by the Duces and Fuehrers. They are pacifists, but pacifists who act on the theory that peace can be achieved by means of war; they are reformers and revolutionaries, but reformers who imagine that unfair and arbitrary acts can produce social justice, revolutionaries who persuade themselves that the centralization of power and the enslavement of the masses can result in liberty for all. Revolutionary Russia has the largest army in the world; a secret police, that for ruthless efficiency rivals the German or the Italian; a rigid press censorship; a system of education that, since Stalin "reformed" it, is as authoritarian as Hitler's; an all-embracing system of military training that is applied to women and children as well as men; a dictator as slavishly adored as the man-gods of Rome and Berlin; a bureaucracy, solidly entrenched as the new ruling class and employing the powers of the state to preserve its privileges and protect its vested interests; an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country and within which there is no freedom even for faithful members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as their own members are concerned. Not so the Russian Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Committee acting through the Political Department, can override or altogether liquidate any district organization whatsoever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. But where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipulations of the social structure are pushed through against the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruthlessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet planning-well-intentioned, but making use of evil means that are producing results utterly unlike those which the original makers of the revolution intended to produce.

18. A third powerful factor in the diffusion of communism is the conspiracy of silence on the part of a large section of the non-Catholic press of the world. We say conspiracy, because it is impossible otherwise to explain how a press usually so eager to exploit even the little daily incidents of life has been able to remain silent for so long about the horrors perpetrated in Russia, in Mexico and even in a great part of Spain; and that it should have relatively so little to say concerning a world organization as vast as Russian communism. This silence is due in part to short-sighted political policy, and is favored by various occult forces which for a long time have been working for the overthrow of the Christian Social Order.

Israel’s constant drone surveillance over Gaza also impressed President Vladimir Putin. Moscow needed reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia. Tbilisi had used Israeli drones, and years later Moscow decided to follow suit. Having seen Israeli operations over Gaza, Russia licensed the Israeli Aerospace Industries Searcher II, renamed “Forpost” by its new owners, and it became a key asset in Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.33 Israel trained Russian pilots to operate the drones. Russia and Israel maintained a close relationship during the Syrian civil war despite the former supporting Assad and the latter worrying about the growing presence of Russian allies Iran and Hizbollah in the country. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Naftali Bennett) to routinely attack Iranian and Syrian military positions in Syria to stop the transfer of weapons to Hizbollah. However, Moscow usually turned a blind eye to these attacks, assisted by a de-escalation hotline between the two governments.

...but in 1917 we had no cares except the mundane ones of starvation and occupation and civil war, and for those of us in our armored trains traveling up and down the front waging brilliant campaigns, or for our young Natashas and Alyoshas experiencing the education and class steeling of the Komsomol for the first time, learning to ask in every historical situation: How many workers are there? how many peasants, intellectuals? how do they stand on this issue? it was a very exciting and romantic period; what I am getting at is that probably no one felt alone as Bug had felt alone; for everyone worked together and loved each other- oh, I hope that that was true. For if life is worth living at all you can have your cake and eat it, too (съесть ее тунцом as the Russians say, и ее мудак- literally to eat out her tuna and her asshole); when you fight together you feel together; love and politics go hand in hand, and I can demonstrate this feasibly with another linguistic point. A girl's cherry is her tsélka. Raskobót cya kak tsélochka, to pop like a little cherry, means in fact to crack under interrogation. I want to draw your attention, comrades, to that highly significant trope.

But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination—we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television—compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future.

Socialists have always condemned war between nations as barbarous and brutal. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the Anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created; and we also differ in that we fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. We Marxists differ from both the pacifists and the Anarchists in that we deem it necessary historically (from the standpoint of Marx's dialectical materialism) to study each war separately. In history there have been numerous wars which, in spite of all the horrors, atrocities, distress and suffering that inevitably accompany all wars, were progressive, i.e., benefited the development of mankind by helping to destroy the exceptionally harmful and reactionary institutions (for example, autocracy or serfdom), the most barbarous despotisms in Europe (Turkish and Russian). Therefore, it is necessary to examine the historically specific features of precisely the present war.

He wrote to Alexander on the 20th, as autumnal rains finally quenched the fires, which in some places had burned for six days. (The letter was delivered by the brother of the Russian minister to Cassel, the most senior Russian to be captured in Moscow, which shows how thorough the nobility’s evacuation of the city had been.) ‘If Your Majesty still preserves for me some remnant of your former feelings, you will take this letter in good part,’ he began. The beautiful and superb city of Moscow no longer exists; Rostopchin had it burnt … The administration, the magistrates and the civil guards should have remained. This is what was done twice at Vienna, at Berlin and at Madrid … I have waged war on Your Majesty without animosity. A letter from you before or after the last battle would have halted my march, and I should have even liked to have sacrificed the advantage of entering Moscow.37 On receipt of this letter, the Tsar promptly sent for Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador, and told him that twenty such catastrophes as had happened to Moscow would not induce him to abandon the struggle.38 The list of cities Napoleon gave in that letter – and it could have been longer – demonstrates that he knew from experience that capturing the enemy’s capital didn’t lead to his surrender, and Moscow wasn’t even Russia’s government capital. It was the destruction of the enemy’s main army at Marengo, Austerlitz and Friedland that had secured his victory, and Napoleon had failed to achieve that at Borodino.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today. Of course not all of them are radicals. The majority of them are peaceful people. The radicals are estimated to be between 15-25%, according to all intelligence services around the world. That leaves 75% of them - peaceful people. But when you look at 15-25% of the world Muslim population, you're looking at 180 million to 300 million people dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. That is as big as the United States. So why should we worry about the radical 15-25%? Because it is the radicals that kill. Because it is the radicals that behead and massacre. When you look throughout history, when you look at all the lessons of history, most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis drove the agenda. And as a result, 60 million people died, almost 14 million in concentration camps. 6 million were Jews. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Russia, most Russians were peaceful as well. Yet the Russians were able to kill 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at China for example, most Chinese were peaceful as well. Yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. When you look at Japan prior to World War II, most Japanese were peaceful as well. Yet, Japan was able to butcher its way across Southeast Asia, killing 12 million people, mostly killed by bayonets and shovels. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. On September 11th in the United States we had 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States. It took 19 hijackers - 19 radicals - to bring America down to its knees, destroy the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon and kill almost 3000 Americans that day. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. So for all our power of reason, and for all us talking about moderate and peaceful Muslims, I'm glad you're here. But where are the others speaking out? And since you are the only Muslim representative in here, you took the limelight instead of speaking about why our government - I assume you're an American (the Muslim says yes) - As an American citizen, you sat in this room, and instead of standing up and saying a question, or asking something about our four Americans that died and what our government is doing to correct the problem, you stood there to make a point about peaceful, moderate Muslims. I wish you had brought ten with you to question about how we could hold our government responsible. It is time we take political correctness and throw it in the garbage where it belongs.” - Brigette Gabriel (transcript from Benghazi Accountability Coalition - Heritage Foundation)                              

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

For the Russian Communists, this meant that not only did they inherit a multicultural space in which Russian was spoken by less than half the population, but they also took over a state in which the tsars for at least two generations had attempted a policy of Russification and modernization of their non-Russian subjects. Many Russians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including some who became Communists, believed that their country had been endowed with a special destiny to clear the Asian wilderness and civilize the tribes of the East.

Though the historical Cossacks ceased to exist in the eighteenth century, they lived on powerfully in the Ukrainian imagination. The anarchic peasant armies of the Russian Civil War called themselves ‘Cossacks’, as do a few fringe nationalists today, turning out in astrakhan hats and home-made uniforms at anti-communist rallies. Khokhol – the name of the long pony-tail, worn with a shaven head, which was the Cossack hallmark – is still derogatory Russian slang for a Ukrainian.

Of course, the Kremlin policy is utterly mad. Even with the help of useful fools like Gen. Butler, Moscow’s strategists are bound to fail (in the long run) – especially in Europe; for the natural instincts of sensible people are bound to awaken. However grim the situation may look, however horrific the military disasters to come, the circus clowns will be forced from the stage. Fear of death has a way of focusing the mind, and the threat of enslavement rallies many whose timidity would otherwise be assumed. It does not matter that these people are “late to the party.” As war grows closer, more observers will see the situation for what it is. Shortly before her death last year, a Russian historian wrote to me as follows: “Moscow is performing substantial war preparations. Training both military and civil defense [personnel] including the Moscow Metro, every day; medicine is in full readiness for [the coming] emergency….” J.R.Nyquist

There’s more in it than that,” Ludwik broke in. “We’ve got to admit that the Bolsheviks have raised the nation considerably. Russia under the czars was comparable to the Middle Ages; its slavery had no equal in Europe. The ignorance of the masses, the illiteracy, the clerical witchcraft, subordinated to the demands of the czarist regime, were terrible. Conditions today are far better than they were before the Revolution. Illiteracy is being fought with good results, and people are becoming a little more civilized. Slavery of masses of peasants under one landlord no longer exists. The industrialization, the development of communication, motorization, and education are all worthy of admiration. “On the other hand, communism has bred a new prototype of a Russian slave, the slave of the party, of a regime without scruples. The iron police system of NKVD is a thousand times more terrible than the Okhrana (the czarist police). The NKVD holds in its power the life and death of every individual in Russia. Without giving reasons, it sends men and women to prisons and forced-labor camps in the most damned and godforsaken places in the world, where they spend ten to twenty years rotting to death, often not knowing the nature of the crime for which they are being punished. On the rare occasions when a man is freed after ten years of torture, he is informed briefly that his arrest was a mistake. “If now, faced by war, the people are

Challenged by the surge of nationalisms in many parts of the former Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks showed a great deal of political skill and flexibility. Their apparent willingness to make significant concessions to the nationalities, in sharp contrast to the White forces’ uncompromising dedication to a “one and indivisible Russia,” was a contributing factor to their victory in the Civil War.

Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers! I am happy to greet in your persons the victorious Russian revolution, and greet you as the vanguard of the worldwide proletarian army… The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe… The hour is not far distant when the peoples will turn their arms against their own capitalist exploiters… The worldwide socialist revolution has already dawned… Germany is seething… Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. The Russian revolution accomplished by you has prepared the way and opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!

A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the “realist” concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Mearsheimer totally ignores. While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Mearsheimer’s statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest of Ukraine leads him to support Ukraine’s having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, promote substantial economic assistance and other measures to help maintain Ukrainian unity and independence, and sponsor contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine.

is true that liberty is precious- so precious that it must be rationed.

My Russia My Responsibility (The Sonnet) Moya Rossiya, moya lyubov, I am sorry, That the world has turned its back on us. But can you really blame them when, We accepted a terrorist as a leader of ours! Awake, arise, my brave comrades, Drink deep from the valor of Volga. I say, enough with apathy, for it is high time, To sanitize our land against all domestic virus. We let a terrorist loose on our neighbors, And all that bloodshed is on our hands. Even now if we don't mend our horrific error, One savage will turn our world into a wasteland. Mnogo te obicham, for you are still my home. To humanize our home is the duty of none but our own.

Моя Россия моя ответственность.

leader Gennady Zyuganov, who looked likely to defeat Yeltsin, threatened to reverse privatizations that constituted the basis of the oligarchs’ fortunes. “If Zyuganov wins the Russian presidency . . . he will undo several years of privatization and this will lead to bloodshed and all-out civil war,” thundered longtime Yeltsin aide Anatoly Chubais in 1996.39 Chubais convinced the oligarchs to set aside their disputes and mobilize against the Communists. They poured millions into Yeltsin’s campaign and—to everyone’s surprise—Yeltsin won a second term.

Among history’s greatest literary figures, Dickens’ name is listed alongside Shakespeare’s. He was the most widely read author of his time. Soldiers in the American Civil War carried his books to read aloud around nightly campfires. He was more popular in Russia than many of the great Russian novelists. His twenty novels are all still in print, and he remains popular today.

In the Russian Revolution, for example, we could expect to see mainly the reaction of the patriarchal feudal society to the challenges of modernization. However, the victory of the countryside and the peasant masses over the westernized city turned out to be a Pyrrhic one, since it threw the already backward country into the backwoods of civilization. Petlyura-style nationalism differs from European nationalism in that the latter aimed to strengthen the national state in the name of modernization and progress, while the Petlyura (and later Soviet) variety fulfilled directly opposite functions and had no constructive, civilizing content, being instead a particularly destructive phenomenon — the expression of a nation's frustration at having failed to come together. This failure, in Bulgakov's opinion, was also due to the fact that this nation did not exist (he saw nothing in it but comical rustic bandura players and petty bourgeois who suddenly "remembered" their Ukrainian-ness and began to speak in broken Ukrainian); or else because the nation was not ready for statehood (which offered nothing except bloody pogroms); or else because its aspirations to statehood were historically and politically unjustified. Ultimately, Kiev was for Bulgakov a Russian city. Historically, it was in fact the "mother of Russian cities," the cradle of Russian state-hood, and the capital of ancient Kievan Rus. Bulgakov's refusal to recognize the rights of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian aspirations in Kiev was even demographically justified: in 1917, more than half the population of Kiev was Russian, followed by Jews (about twenty per-cent), and only then Ukrainians (a little more than sixteen percent), with a significant Polish minority (almost a tenth of the population). But who remembers today that even Prague, for instance, was at that time a German-speaking city? In the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, many eastern and southern cities (among them such first-rate cultural and industrial centers as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Iuzovka, Ekaterinoslav, and Lugansk) had never been Ukrainian at all. One should also consider that western Ukraine (the primary base of present-day Ukrainian nationalism) was once part of Poland. All of this made the aspirations toward Ukrainian "independence" highly questionable. Ukraine began where the city ended, and Bulgakov considered the city the basis of culture and civilization. Ukraine in Bulgakov's world is "the steppe" — culturally barren, not creating anything, and capable only of barbarian destruction. The Ukrainian national elites understood this perfectly when, as early as the 1920s, they demanded that Stalin ban The Days of the Turbins because, ostensibly, "the Whites movement is praised" in it. But in fact it was because the attempt to create a Ukrainian "state" was depicted by Bulgakov as a bloody operetta.

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).

The same year, both the Russian and the French governments adopted a plan to rifle all of their old smoothbore muskets. And of course, during Jefferson Davis's tenure as secretary of war (1853-57) the Americans produced what today might be termed an unauthorized knockoff in the form of the Springfield rifle.

The French Revolutions were not the only wars operated by the Illuminati other conspiracies, wars and revolutions were also directed by them. The conspiracy behind the December Revolution of 1825, the revolutions in Italy in 1848, the Philippine uprising of 1896, the revolutions in Portugal in 1907, the fall of the Russian throne in 1917, Austria-Hungary in 1918, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the disappearance of the monarchies and nobility, the Second World War and the Cold War, which divided the world into two blocs, and finally the collapse of communism in Europe, and the attacks on September 11, 2001, all were led with absolute certainty by the Order of the Illuminati. As we will see all these wars, tensions and problems were knowingly created and are part of the Illuminati plan.

Wherever she went. So many languages, so many countries. Her passport: Achilles’ fiancée. Into the depths of Asia. Along the entire route of Alexander the Great. A little further down from Samarkand as far as Tashkent, where Achilles had fled to after the civil war. Ташкент as it is written in Russian, with one letter that looks like the trident of Poseidon but without the handle. “Later,

The peasant rebellion against collectivization was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. In 1930, more than two million peasants took part in 13,754 mass disturbances. In 1929 and 1930, the OGPU recorded 22,887 "terrorists acts" aimed at local officials and peasant activists, more than 1,100 murders.

He acknowledged that in the muckraking days, he would have shared their anger and quit, but his thinking had changed since the Russian Revolution. “I was sure that it was useless—it was almost wrong—to fight for the right under our system; petty reforms in politics, wars without victories, just peace, were impossible, unintelligent, heroic but immoral,” he wrote. “Either they and we all should labor to change the foundation of society, as the Russians were doing, or go along with the resultant civilization we were part of, taking care only to save our minds by seeing it all straight.

The Russian civil war was won in 1919, but sealed the fate of the revolution, as the victory over the Whites was achieved without communising society, and ended in a new state power.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy was framed by his hostility to Western democratic leaders and a bizarre attraction to former KGB agent and current Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump let pass no opportunity to undermine NATO, a bulwark against Russian aggression since its founding. Trump also, in effect, ceded Syria to Putin, giving Russia its first beachhead in the Middle East since 1973. And his constant attacks on America’s most faithful ally during the Cold War, Germany, led to the American president playing into Russia’s hands again by withdrawing troops from the country. While Trump’s “America First” theme initially struck a nerve with voters, his ignorance of history and lack of diplomatic skill prevented

The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.19 It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, sub-continental famines, squalid civil insurrections, blood-lettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.

At a Trump rally after the election, a reporter spotted a pair of Republicans wearing shirts that read, I’D RATHER BE A RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT. Centuries before, George Washington, riding out of thriving Philadelphia toward the lush hills of Mount Vernon, recognized what the failure of American democracy would look like. It looks like them.

Bravado? Recklessness? Irène Némirovsky was accustomed to danger, for she had experienced the Kiev pogrom, the Russian Revolution and the Finnish civil war. She had not been frightened. “I never knew peaceful times,” she explained on the radio in 1934, “I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger.

Моя Россия Моя Ответственность (Сонет Гражданских Прав) Моя Россия, моя любовь, мне жаль, Что мир стал нашим врагом. Но разве можно их винить! Мы сделали террориста нашим лидером. Пробудитесь, встаньте, товарищи мои, Вдохновляйтесь доблестью Волги! Хватит этой апатии, пришло время вытеснить, Домашний вирус и продезинфицировать нашу нацию. Мы выпустили террориста на наших соседей, Кто ответит за это кровопролитие - мы, кто еще! Даже сейчас, если мы не исправим нашу ошибку, Одна первобытная обезьяна уничтожит нашу планету. Моя Россия моя ответственность, это золотой закон. Хватит завоеваний! Пришло время быть человеком.

Russians in Kiev never expected the Ukrainian forces to put up much of a fight. Deliberately ignoring the reality of Ukrainian culture and history, they had taken Ukrainian patriotism as little more than a joke.

Don't be like the nitwit Americans of January 6 who felt threatened by the equalization of the American people, instead, be like those brave Russians who have the guts to stand up for life, liberty and equality of their neighbors, even at the risk of being persecuted as traitor to their country.

All the experts proved what we’ve all known all along. That they are full of shit. They all got it so wrong they needed cover and when they saw something, no matter how asinine, it became gospel to cover their abject failure. Still, the left wouldn’t feel sorry for itself for long. First it picked up the Russian spy story and started pushing it to every devastated reporter who would listen. Then it did everything it had told us the Trump supporters would do if Hillary won. Think about it. For weeks leading up to the election, we had been hearing about all the horrible things Donald Trump would force his supporters to do if he lost. DJT wouldn’t accept the defeat they were all so sure was coming. The editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran many articles warning us about the chaos that was about to ensue. According to popular opinion, Trump supporters were going to riot in the streets, refuse to accept the results of the election, and begin some kind of underground coup against the duly elected president, Hillary Clinton. They would start a second civil war. The streets would become absolute anarchy. And when things didn’t go the way the Democrats had wanted them to go, what happened? Let’s see. They held riots in the streets. (Check.) They refused to accept the results of the election, cooking up one of the strangest spy-movie stories I’ve ever heard in order to maintain their collective delusion. (Check.) Then they formed an underground group of online keyboard warriors called “the Resistance,” dedicated to taking down my father one stupid hashtag at a time. Prominent journalists, liberal activists, and actors have all identified themselves as proud members of “the Resistance” on Twitter. When I’m attacked by an outraged mob online, their voices are usually among the loudest. (And Check.)

Kennan's much younger cousin, the diplomat George Frost Kennan, later wrote that timing was one reason Kennan's writings and lectures had such an impact. The trauma of the Civil War had left the country "disinclined to any intensive, introspective analysis of its own weaknesses," and the Russian exile system appealed to the American public's "curious Victorian capacity for sympathy and indignation over evils that were far away.

like ‘using a broom to sweep back the sea.

It is simply good military practice. War is war. It sounds simple, but many Americans seem to believe that there should be a gentlemen’s code, that war should be fought by soldiers in remote battlefields. Americans believe that war should be sterile, because it has never hit their home soil since the Civil War of 130 years ago, and even then, only in the south-eastern part of the country. Russia has been rampaged for centuries by every would-be world conqueror. Millions of Russians have died on their homeland during wars. This is a feeling Americans do not know. The only way you get an enemy to submit is by bringing the war to its people.

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Ukraine war is surprising. Russians killing past Russians in Ukraine. It just seems so bizarre! It is basically a territorial civil war that has been turned into an international proxy war.

the post-1789 French Revolution period called the Reign of Terror, the post-1917 Russian Revolution period called the Red Terror, the post-1949 Chinese Civil War period called the Anti-Rightist Campaign,

When he got out of the army after the Korean War, John had developed an avid interest in these complex board games, which demanded progressive degrees of skill and cunning over many hours of play. Many of the games had World War II themes, with names like Third Reich and Russian Front. John, when he played with an opponent, always took the German side in these. Others were based on the Civil War, including one of his favorites, Bull Run, which required tactical skill in re-creating the First Battle of Bull Run. In that battle, according to the manufacturer’s description of the game, “Both armies had the strange and fascinating task of defending on one flank while attacking on the other.

The overall pattern of their activity focuses on memorabilia from the Russian Civil War, specifically papers and personal effects from the heirs of White Russian leaders, but they've also been looking into documents and items relating to the Argenteum Astrum, which is on our watch list--BONE SILVER STAR--along with documents relating to Western occultist groups of the pre-war period. Aleister Crowley crops up like a bad penny, naturally, but also Professor Mudd, who tripped an amber alert. Norman Mudd.

Ungern Sternberg died in September 1921, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after Trotsky's soldiers captured him." Choudhury taps his folio again, looking severe: "He was a very bad man, you know! He had a habit of burning paperwork.

Short story: The true and incredible tale of David Kirkpatrick, a Scottish ex-boy scout, and miner, serving in WW2 with 2nd Highland Light Infantry and the legendary elite corps 2nd SAS. A man who becomes a hero playing his bagpipe during a secret mission in Italy, March 1945, where he saved the lives of hundreds just playing during the attack. After he fought in North Africa, Greece, Albania, Sicily and being reported as an unruly soldier, (often drunk, insulting superiors and so on) in Tuscany, 23 march 1945 he joined as volunteer in the 2nd Special Air Service ( the British elite forces), for a secret mission behind enemy line in Italy. He parachuted in the Italian Apennines with his kilt on (so he becomes known as the 'mad piper' ) for a mission organized with British elite forces and an unruly group of Italian-Russian partisans (code name: 'Operation Tombola' organized from the British secret service SOE and 2nd SAS and the "Allied Battalion") against the Gothic Line german headquarter of the 51 German Mountains Corps in Albinea, Italy. The target of the anglo-partisan group's mission is to destroy the nazi HQ to prepare the big attack of the Allied Forces (US 5th Army, British 8th Army) to the German Gothic Line in North Italy at the beginning of April. It's the beginning of the liberation of Italy from the nazi fascist dictatorship. The Allied Battalion guided by major Roy Farran, captain Mike Lees Italian partisan Glauco Monducci, Gianni Ferrari, and the Russian Viktor Pirogov is an unruly brigade of great fighters of many nationalities. Among them also not just British, Italian, and Russian but also a dutch, a greek, one Austrian paratrooper who deserted the German Forces after has killed an SS, a german who deserted Hitler's Army being in love with an Italian taffeta's, two Jewish escaped from nazi reprisal and 3 Spanish anti-Franchise who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War and then joined first the French Foreign Legion and the British Elite Forces. The day before the attack, Kirkpatrick is secretly guested in a house of Italian farmers, and he donated his white silk parachute to a lady so she could create her wedding dress for the Wedding with his love: an Italian partisan. During the terrible attack in the night of 27th March 1945, the sound of his bagpipe marks the beginning of the fight and tricked the nazi, avoiding a terrible reprisal against the civilian population of the Italian village of Albinea, saving in this way the life of hundreds The German HQ based in two historical villa's is destroyed and in flames, several enemy soldiers are killed, during the attack, the bagpipe of David played for more than 30 minutes and let the german believe that the "British are here", not also Italian and Russian partisan (in war for Hitler' order: for partisans attack to german forces for every german killed nazi were executing 10 local civilians in terrible and barbarian reprisal). During the night the bagpipe of David is also hit after 30 minutes of the fight and, three British soldiers of 2nd SAS are killed in the action in one of the two Villa. The morning later when Germans bring their bodies to the Church of Albinea, don Alberto Ugolotti, the local priest notes in his diary: "Asked if they were organizing a reprisal against the civilian population, they answered that it was a "military attack" and there would.

The interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003) has seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognize the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. Firstly, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never-ending civil wars. Secondly, the reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and fourth generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq War of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator in the Asia Times. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US Army conducted the campaign in accordance with the principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned.

The IRA studied Americans to understand what made them angry, to learn how to think and speak and write like them and, in the fullness of time, to spearhead a new kind of political warfare against the United States. “Our task,” one of the Saint Petersburg trolls later told a Russian reporter, “was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent.” From the outset, the mission was to incite a civil war within the American political system.

Milos Zeman is the President of the Czech Republic. He is pro-Russian, is friends with Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, endorsed Donald Trump for President, and has ties to Hungary’s Jobbik movement. Zeman has justified the civil war in Ukraine and has denied that Russia has a military presence there. He stated, “I take seriously the statement of foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that there are no Russian troops [in Ukraine].” Zeman had been consistently verbal in his support for the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia and was against EU sanctions on Russia. He was re-elected President in January 2018 with 51.4% of the vote. He won the majority of the rural vote by exhorting a populist anti-immigrant slogan: “Stop Migrants and [opponent] Drahos. This is our land! Vote Zeman!” Zeman’s chief economic advisor is Martin Nejedlÿ, a former executive of the Russian oil company, Lukoil Aviation Czech. Lukoil was once the second largest oil company in Russia following Gazprom. Martin Nejedlÿ of Prague was also owner of Fincentrum, a financial advisory firm with “more than 2,500 financial advisors” on its website with offices in Prague and Bratislava. The firm has a history of alliances with the Kremlin. The Prime Minister of the Republic’s coalition government is 63-year-old Andrej Babiš. He is a media and agribusiness mogul and the second-richest man in the Czech Republic. ANO is the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens Party that was founded by Babiš that holds a center-right populist platform like many European and American conservative right-

Lenin had given it to Soviet Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war when the region, or rather communists here, had declared this to be the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.

For those who fought the Soviets, however, the Afghan War was something else. It was “the first successful resistance to a foreign power,” one Western scholar observed,2 “which was not based on either nationalist or socialist principles” but instead on Islamic principles, which was waged as a jihad, and which gave a tremendous boost to Islamic self-confidence and power. Its impact on the Islamic world was, in effect, comparable to the impact which the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 had on the Oriental world. What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam.

After the Russian Civil War, Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence officers would pride themselves on being nondescript. They wore suits and ties. They shaved. They got haircuts. They were no more tough-looking than anybody else you saw on the street. Under Dzerzhinsky, though, a menacing appearance was de rigueur for a headhunter. That included a heavy beard stubble. All Bolsheviks who weren’t at a top level were supposed to look shoddy, DeWitt Poole later wrote.

The reason for breaking out an old Soviet military textbook is to show that Russia is still following Soviet ideas. At the same time, America does not seriously embark upon war preparations of its own. The American side does not place its key military industries under mountains, and does not teach its population the principles of nuclear civil defense (as the Russians do). Even more critical, the American people have never received any schooling on the Russian threat. With rare exception, American schools do not teach students about the enemies of America. This was not even done at the height of the Cold War. In fact, Marxists were busy infiltrating U.S. schools and universities during the 1970s and 1980s. American students were more likely to receive indoctrination closer to that given in communist countries than to receive any proper orientation about a communist threat to the United States. And so, there was never any similarity between Russian war preparations and American war preparations. This is a fact that ought to make a deep impression, as it dispels the usual propaganda about the all-powerful U.S. military-industrial-complex.

Ezekiel 38 tells us of the evil intentions of Russia when it describes how Ros will be led down to Israel as if a hook were put into its jaw. Ros will come down not for the purpose of peace, but plunder. Today, the Russians are the number one player in the Syrian civil war, and they don’t even try to hide the fact that they are there primarily for the gas and oil. Russia’s only warm-water seaport giving access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East is in Syria. That’s why Russia backs the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.

As early as 839 they had visited Constantinople and had come home through the Frankish Empire. They were established at Kiev in southern Russia about 850. The oldest Russian chronicle tells us that in 859 the Slavs refused to pay any more tribute to the Varangians and drove them away and tried to govern themselves. Disorder and civil war resulted, however, and they then sent to the Varangians or Russ (Rōs is the Slavic name for Swedes) for a king to rule them. This first ruler of Russia was named Rurik and had the title of Grand-Prince and his capital was at Novgorod. Two of his followers set up another kingdom at Kiev, but his successor absorbed it. An Arabian geographer of the ninth century estimates the number of Russ or Northmen in Russia at one hundred thousand, and Arabian historians say that by 900 the Black Sea was called the Russian Sea. The Swedes were also found upon the shores of the Caspian Sea. Ere long they threatened Constantinople and were paid tribute to leave its environs alone. In the later tenth century they served in the famous Varangian imperial bodyguard.