Russia – Page 9 – praag.org

Anglo-Saxons win a losing battle

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense says that in the latest mobilization, only 20% of those called up for service reported for duty. The Ukranians are not ready for the Neocon war effort, it seems.

But in the last 15 years Anglo-American foreign policy experts and think tank fellows have made compelling cases for armed conflict, called “humanitarian interventions” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and about a half dozen other defenseless nations desperately in need of drone strikes or some other form of Western aid to turn them all into failed states.

More than one million Ukrainian men of military age are now refugees in Russia. Dying in a pointless war against an enemy that doesn’t exist is not popular with many it seems, except with those same Anglo-Saxon policy experts and think tank fellows.

Since the dawn of the internet, the idea that the privileged few urges everyone else to perish for nothing is becoming seriously outdated, but the British are having none of it.

Tradition is still important in the United Kingdom. Well-placed sources tell us that sadism at Eton College is as alive and well as it was 100 years ago when innocent Afrikaner women an children died in British concentration camps.

Writing in the rabidly-leftwing Guardian, Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash has demanded more weapons for Ukraine, and more hostile, draconian measures levied against Russia. Why? Because “Saddam” Putin is a maniac.

“Russian aggression” is the BBC’s meme, devoted entirely to the “Russian problem”. The theme is drummed in relentlessly.

The idea is that Russia presents a huge a growing threat to world peace and stability. Russian bombers are threatening the ‘English’ Channel, albeit in international airspace.

The BBC’s dismal performance on “Russian aggression” reminds one of the run up to the Iraq war, when the BBC was similarly gung-ho in its depictions of Saddam Hussein as a real and present danger to us all, whose ambitions had to be countered by military force.

Britain now also boasts a “famous” sniper to ward off all evil. The Telegraph heaped romantic praise on their best assassin of the dark races recently:

A Royal Marine has been revealed as the world’s most lethal military sniper.

The Briton is understood to have recorded most of his 173 confirmed kills during tours of Afghanistan in 2006/7 and has also served in Iraq.

Most of his killings took place during a six-month tour of Afghanistan and he is said to have hit more than 90 Taliban fighters in a single day, according to The Sun.

His reported death toll puts the corporal, said to be married and from southern England, ahead of US Navy SEAL commando Chris Kyle, who had 160 confirmed kills to make him the most lethal US sniper.

However, sources told the newspaper the British marine’s figure of 173 is “conservative”, with unconfirmed killings believed to take his total even higher

And these are the folks fighting racism… and fascists daily, no less.

The current pro-Anglo-American government in Kiev boasts too many neo-Nazi extremists to ignore. Glamorising violence, racism and war, while denouncing those who are opposed to it, surely has limited appeal, but not to the English and their Neocon brethern.

Gen. Philip M. Breedlove is another one of the advocates of the move to heighten conflict. Breedlove, NATO’s American military commander, is now reportedly leading the crusade to provide lethal military assistance to Kiev to battle the anti-government forces.

Crimea belonged to Russia for over 200 years. “We can’t allow Russia to keep Crimea,” goes the favorite neocon mantra. Why not? Hardly any American can find Crimea on a map.

With Ash loudly cheering for further violence and hostilities in the world, one is reminded of Mark Twain:

As Mark Twain warned long ago:

The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for the war. The pulpit will–warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as earlier–but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and all–will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

A quarter of a century ago the Berlin Wall came down and the West “won the Cold War”. But a quarter of a century later, it’s really hard to see what it won.

By Egon Mess

Soviet-style reactors struggling with US nuclear fuel

Ukrainian energy sector workers are facing technical problems with American nuclear fuel loading into the Soviet-type reactors

China is ready to sell fuel for nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, a China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) source told TASS on Friday on the sidelines of the World Nuclear Spotlight forum.

According to the source, Chinese companies intend to sell the fuel to the countries that operate various types of Soviet-and Russian-made NPPs. Aside from Ukraine, China is viewing the possibility of exporting nuclear fuel to Hungary and Romania.

The source said Ukrainian energy sector workers are facing technical problems with American nuclear fuel loading into the Soviet-type reactors.

At the moment China is actively buying uranium mines with a view to exporting uranium to other countries in the foreseeable future.

Asked about Russia’s possible claims to the Chinese manufacturers of nuclear fuel, he said that “there are no special restrictions.” “Despite the related agreements, the Russian side is unlikely to stop the supplies,” said the CNNC representative.

Russia and China have been actively developing co-operation in the nuclear sphere for many years. For example, State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom and CNNC signed a protocol to launch the discussion of possible formats of co-operation in the sphere of construction of nuclear power plants in third countries.

Russian, Turkish media hint at Paris false flag

Conspiracy theories are swirling around last week’s terror attacks in Paris, and beyond the customary fringe websites, they are being aired by Turkish politicians and mainstream Russian and Iranian media outlets.

Those making – or hinting at – the claims would have the world believe that U.S. or Israeli intelligence services were behind the attacks on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a kosher supermarket, which together with a street shooting left 17 victims and three terrorists dead over three days.

A mass circulation Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, ran a front-page headline Monday asking whether “the Americans” were behind the Paris terror attacks.

In the related story, a political analyst, Col. Alexander Zhilin, linked his theory to differences between the U.S. and European Union over sanctions against Russia in response to the Ukraine crisis.

Zhilin, who heads a body called the Moscow Center for the Study of Applied Problems, said immediately after French President Francois Hollande on January 5 raised doubts about continuing with the sanctions, he – Zhilin – had predicted that terror attacks could now be expected in France.

The U.S. needed a way to consolidate U.S.-E.U. unity over the sanctions, he said, and planning a terror attack was a “cheap and effective” option.

Separately, Komsomolskaya Pravda interviewed Russian economist Mikhail Khazin, head of a consulting firm called Neoconomics. He wondered who benefited most from the Paris attacks, and concluded that the primary beneficiary was the United States.

“Let me add that in the elite of the United States there are several groups, each of which has its own opportunities to promote and organize such attacks,” he was quoted as saying.

Khazin went on to list others who, in his view, could also benefit from the attacks, including Britain, Saudi Arabia and “Islamic State, al-Qaeda and so on” – although he added that the latter possibility was “the least likely.”

Other reports in the paper highlighted skepticism expressed by some quarters over the attacks, with one headline highlighting a comment by an Arab café waiter in Paris: “Someone needs a war between Muslims and Christians …”

In Iran, the Press TV broadcaster ran on its website an article by Paul Craig Roberts, a columnist, former U.S. Treasury official, and 9/11 conspiracy theorist, who wrote that one way of seeing the attack on Charlie Hebdo “is as an attack designed to shore up France’s vassal status to Washington.”

“The suspects can be both guilty and patsies,” said Roberts. “Just remember all the terrorist plots created by the FBI that served to make the terrorism threat real to Americans.”

On Roberts’ own website, he also highlights reports from other sources suggesting that the Paris attacks were a “false flag operation” – that is, a covert operation designed to point a finger at a purported perpetrator, while the actual mastermind’s identity remains hidden.

“Whether or not it is a false flag operation, the shootings are being used for a wider purpose or purposes,” he said.

Those purposes could include “bringing France back into Washington’s orbit,” stifling “the growing European sympathy for the Palestinians,” and countering “the rising opposition in Europe to more Middle Eastern wars,” Roberts charged.

‘A plot against the Islamic world’

Meanwhile Melih Gokcek, the veteran mayor of the Turkish capital, Ankara, raised the specter of the Mossad’s involvement, while speaking at a youth congress of the Islamist ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Sunday.

According to a report by the official Anadolu news agency, Gokcek laid the blame on Israel’s security agency, charging that Israel was angry by a recent vote by French lawmakers supportive of Palestinian statehood.

“Israel certainly doesn’t want this [pro-Palestinian independence] sentiment to expand in Europe,” he said. “That’s why it is certain that Mossad is behind these kinds of incidents. Mossad enflames Islamophobia by causing such incidents.”

Turkish lawmaker Ali Sahin, a senior AKP member, was quoted as saying in Twitter messages that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was “staged like a scene from a movie,” by forces determined to discredit Islam.

The most senior figure to insinuate that all was not as it appeared in the Paris attacks – although he did also condemn them – was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Take note that the acts of terror are not carried out in a vacuum,” he said during a joint press conference in Ankara with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas “The acts follow a predetermined script and we should be alive to a plot against the Islamic world.”

Erdogan, an arch-critic of Israel and key supporter of Hamas – a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization – also used the opportunity to slam Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s participation with other leaders in a mass anti-terror rally in Paris on Sunday.

“I also hardly understand how he dared to go there,” Anadolu quoted Erdogan as saying, accusing Netanyahu of carrying out “state terrorism by massacring 2,500 people in Gaza.”

Source: CNS News

Thousand of German spies at risk after leak

Thousands of German spies at risk after double-agent stole list of identities

Thousands of German spies posted around the world could be at risk after it emerged that a double agent unmasked last summer stole a list of their real identities and may have sold it.

The double agent, who has been identified only as Markus R under strict German privacy laws, obtained a top secret list of the real names, aliases and locations of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad, according to a report in Bild newspaper.

But German intelligence sources sought to downplay the incident, briefing that the list in question was out of date and contained far fewer than 3,500 names, the DPA news agency reported.

The arrest of Markus R last summer caused a major diplomatic rift between Germany and the US, after it emerged he had acted as a double agent for the CIA.

He had also approached Russian intelligence and offered to sell them secret information, and there are fears he may have passed the list of German spies’ names to a hostile foreign agency.

It was reported earlier this week that prosecutors now believe the case of Markus R is more serious than previously thought.

He was discovered after an email he sent the Russian Embassy in Berlin offering to sell secrets in exchange for cash was intercepted, and German investigators were stunned when he confessed he had been spying for the Americans.

Prosecutors now believe he was recruited by the CIA a year and a half earlier than he has admitted, in 2010, and was paid €75,000 for passing secrets over a period of four years, according to Spiegel magazine.

Source: The Telegraph

North Korea accepts Russian invitation to Victory Day Parade

Russia has invited North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to attend a May ceremony marking the end of World War II, in what would be Kim’s first foreign visit since taking the helm of the reclusive state in 2011, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily said Wednesday.

Kim would probably meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, as North Korea backs Russia in the Ukraine crisis and Moscow needs Pyongyang’s cooperation in boosting natural gas exports to South Korea, the newspaper said, quoting unnamed diplomatic sources.

It was unclear whether Kim would accept the invitation, the Asahi said.

But the North Korean leader accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on Tuesday.

“North Korea is seeking to deepen both diplomatic and economic ties with Russia at a time when its political relationship with China remains chilly,” the agency said.

North Korea is seeking closer ties with Russia as it faces international criticism over accusations of human rights abuses and its nuclear program.

Putin held talks with Kim’s personal envoy last month and called for deeper ties with North Korea to improve regional security.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said North Korea was ready to resume stalled international talks on its nuclear program.

North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the United States began talks in 2003 to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, but they were suspended after Pyongyang tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.

US President Barack Obama is not going to visit Russia any time soon, Mark Stroh, the National Security Council spokesman told the Sputnik news agency on Monday.

“At this time, the President has no plans to travel to Russia in the near future,” Stroh said.

Brazil and Russia may exit BRICS warns phrasemaker

Brazil and Russia’s membership of the BRICs may expire by the end of this decade if they fail to revive their flagging economies, according to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief economist who coined the acronym.

Asked if he would still group Brazil, Russia, India and China together as emerging market powerhouses as he did in 2001, O’Neill said in an e-mail “I might be tempted to call it just ’IC’ or if the next three years are the same as the last for Brazil and Russia I might in 2019!!”

The BRIC grouping will be dragged down by a 1.8 percent contraction in Russia and less than 1 percent expansion in Brazil, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. China is seen growing 7 percent and India 5.5 percent.

The BRICs were still booming as recently as 2007 with Russia expanding 8.5 percent and Brazil in excess of 6 percent that year. The bull market in commodities that helped propel growth in those nations has since ended, while Russia has been battered by sanctions linked to the crisis in Ukraine and Brazil has grappled with an unprecedented corruption scandal involving its state-owned oil company.

“It is tough for the BRIC countries to all repeat their remarkable growth rates” of the first decade of this century, said O’Neill, a Bloomberg View columnist and former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management International. (GSGEPPA) “There was a lot of very powerful and fortuitous forces taking place, some of which have now gone.”

The growth slump this year isn’t a new normal though and O’Neill sees expansion in Brazil and Russia partially recovering, helping the BRICs average about 6 percent growth per annum this decade — still more than double the average for the Group of Seven nations.

Their share of global gross domestic product will “rise sharply,” he said.

O’Neill had previously estimated average annual growth of 6.6 percent for the BRICs this decade, a pace it was close to achieving through last year mainly because China exceeded the 7.5 percent annual average growth he estimated for the first three years, he said.

Unlike Brazil and Russia, China is embracing economic change while India, after the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister and benefiting from low oil prices and a young labor pool, may have brighter prospects this decade than last, O’Neill said.

With China and India spurring growth, the BRICs will remain the most dominant and positive force in the world economy “easily,” said O’Neill.

China growing at 7 percent will add about $1 trillion nominally to global output every year, O’Neill said. When measured by purchasing power parity, China’s growth adds twice as much as the U.S.’s, he said. India expanding at 6 percent will add twice as much as the U.K. in those terms, he said.

Source: Bloomberg

Russian blames Western-backed funding for Paris attack

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday that last Wednesday’s attack on a French satirical magazine was committed by militants who had fought in Syria for the West-backed aim of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

“Cooperation [with the West on counter-terrorism] has been suspended. Meanwhile, terrorists do not suspend cooperation with each other. Terrorist activity knows no bounds,” Lavrov said. “The two brothers who attacked the editorial office of the Paris magazine had mastered ‘the art of terror’ in Syria, fighting with those who had been trying to oust Bashar al-Assad – an aim supported by our Western counterparts,” he added.

Seventeen people were killed in the French capital and its neighbourhoods in the terrorist attacks last week. Among them were ten journalists from the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, three policemen and four visitors of a kosher grocery store.

A video of supposedly Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered the five people, has emerged online. He swears his allegiance to the Islamic State in the clip and attempts to justify the wave of terror attacks.

The man much resembling Coulibaly talks of being a “soldier of the Caliphate” and states that he coordinated his plans with the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who perpetrated a bloody massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

The man asserted that ‘France is a legitimate target.’ He is referred to as Aboü Bassir AbdAllah al-Ifriqip and wears military body armor, displays an array of weapons and does push-ups.

He pledges his allegiance to “Caliph Ibrahim”, also known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State and speaks about the attack on the policewoman in the past tense, suggesting the attack had already been completed.

In the background of the video, radio news is already documenting the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices.

All the jihadists belonged to the same terrorist cell, according to French police. The man in the video discusses how they coordinated with one another.

Vilification of Germany’s PEGIDA

Actually it’s more than that. It has now come to falsification and censorship. Says Udo Ulfkotte, German maverick journalist and whistleblower

Is there a Nobel Prize for media falsification, lies and betrayal of readers? Judging by the way German mainstream media are covering PEGIDA there has to be one, argues Udo Ulfkotte in his latest piece for KOPP online, his publisher’s news website.

The tactics honed against Russia are now being put in place to defame PEGIDA – those Dresden conservatives who dare peacefully to protest uncontrolled immigration and Islamization, as well as the creation of parallel sharia tribunal in Germany, among other things.

PEGIDA also has a soft spot for Putin’s Russia, judging from some of the placards seen during their demos.

MDR is Germany’s first channel in the Eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. On Jan 06 it asked its viewers „Do you think PEGIDA damages the city of Dresden?“.

Some 10,958 viewers took part in the snapshot survey.

Surprise surprise. Only 7% agreed with the preset answer: „Yes, because it casts the city in a false light“, while 92% of respondents chose: „No, why? At last somebody dares to speak the truth“.

Be it Iraq, Crimea or PEGIDA, ordinary Germans just will not think the way the media tell them to. Journalism (asking people what they think) and propaganda (telling them what to think) are increasingly hard to reconcile in the age of social media, as journalists found out during the Ukraine crisis.

What to do with these embarrassing survey result? What to do?

It could not be blamed on Russian propaganda. Nor on Kremlin trolls. So there seemed to be no way out… Germany’s first channel had apparently shot itself in the foot again.

Wait: what about a little censoring? After all, it is for a good cause, the MDR editors must have thought. So the snapshot survey quietly disappeared from their website, hoping nobody would notice. Except that lots of people did. And they resorted to protesting on Facebook.

The result: after apologizing to their angry viewers MDR put the survey back online. It seems some media hacks occasionally dislike what they see in the mirror.

The survey and its censoring having gone wrong, German media have now started to make unfounded claims against PEGIDA. Apparently it has been „infiltrated“ by Nazis.

As if Germans had not seen enough real Nazis, supported by the USA and the EU, doing real Nazi things, from burning people alive in Odessa to cluster bombing civilians in Donbass.

As if, ignored by Western media, a real Nazi parade had not been staged as recently as Jan 1 in Kiev!

But this time we don’t have to worry: PEGIDA alleged infiltration is being carefully monitored by never heard before „constitution protection groups“. After all, Nazism is illegal in Germany – unless it operates near Russian borders that is.

According to Ulfkotte, the message is clear: „dear citizen, don’t get involved with PEGIDA if you don’t want to be monitored by the constitution protectors“.

Sounds vaguely Orwellian, doesn’t it?

Finally, Ulfkotte proves the bias of German media with a recent example.

A God-hater whom the media called Moroccan badly damaged a Church in South Tirol, Italy’s only German-speaking province:

„Imagine if a Christian or an Atheist had damaged a mosque in a German-speaking region,” says Ulfkotte, “there would be candle-lit demonstrations all over the country, and you could not turn a television on without hearing about it.”

“But it was a Muslim who did it, and in the name of the Koran. What has happened then? You can see for yourself. Nothing”

“Next time a journalist assures you that Islamization is not taking place, please remember them that the Moroccan in question, who had damaged churches before, never spent a single day in jail for it. He was placed under house arrest instead”.

One needs not agree with Ulfkotte about the link between lenient treatment by the Italian judiciary and alleged Islamization. But the more general points he makes about German media are correct and have been vindicated time and time again.

MDR is part of ARD, a public network of public broadcasters known in Germany as “Das Erste” or the first channel.

When, in June 2014, ARD’s own advisory board released a report, defining ARD coverage of the Ukraine crisis as “inadequate, one-sided and biased”, news of the report took three months to begin circulating in the… wait for it… alternative media.

And it never did in the mainstream media.

Source: Daniele Pozzati

Putin’s favorite white philosopher

A rundown of beliefs espoused by Ivan Ilyin, Russia philosopher who most influenced the current Russia president

By Paul Robinson

In his speech to the Russian parliament on 4 December, Vladimir Putin quoted philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who died 60 years ago. Putin supervised the repatriation and reburial of Ilyin’s body in 2005, and has laid flowers on Ilyin’s grave.

He has quoted him several times before. Ilyin’s Our Tasks (Nashi Zadachi) was one of three books distributed by the Kremlin as recommended reading to regional governors and senior members of the United Russia party in early 2014.

And on December 22nd of this year, members of the Duma, Federation Council, and Presidential Administration will meet in Moscow for a round-table discussion of his work.

If Putin has a favourite philosopher, Ilyin seems to be the man. So who was he and what did he believe in?

Born in 1883, Ilyin studied law at Moscow State University and completed his thesis The philosophy of Hegel as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and humanity in 1916.

Resolutely anti-communist, he was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 along with some 200 other intellectuals on the infamous ‘philosophers’ steamboat’.

He then took up residence in Berlin, where he made contact with members of the exiled White army of General P.N. Wrangel, who nicknamed him Belyi (White) on account of the pure belizna (whiteness) of his opinions.

Ilyin became the unofficial ideologist of the White Army in exile, and much of his work thereafter was as much political as it was philosophical, and was aimed at a wider audience than other philosophers.

Ilyin’s work covered a large variety of subjects, including the philosophy of Hegel, law, politics, the ethics of violence, the nature of the Russian nation, and the tasks incumbent on Russian émigrés.

He was in many respects a religious philosopher, in that he regarded spiritual matters as more important than material ones. He believed that the Russian revolution was a product of the spiritual failings of the Russian people.

Russia’s resurrection depended on the revival of the correct spirit, including a love of God, a love of Russia, respect for the law, a sense of duty and honour, and devotion to the state and the common weal rather than personal or party interests.

It is difficult to reduce the writings of such a complex thinker to a few lines, but three themes stand out: gosudarstvennost’ (statehood); pravosoznanie (legal consciousness); and natsionalizm (nationalism).

Gosudarstvennost’. Ilyin was a firm believer in a strong state. Gosudarstvennost’ can be viewed in purely descriptive terms as meaning the system of government, but it is also a value-laden term.

It implies a belief that the interests of the state should come first. In this sense it can be contrasted with obshchestvennost’, which is often translated as ‘public opinion’ but more accurately describes the liberal stratum of Russian society and its beliefs, and it can be contrasted also with partiinost’, the ideology of the Communist Party, which placed the interests of the party first.

Ilyin believed that to view the state as a balance of competing material interests was profoundly mistaken. The state should work for the general good. To this end, it must be strong.

In Russia, a weak state would result in anarchy. ‘Russian state power will be strong, or it won’t exist at all’, he wrote. Ilyin rejected federalism and demanded a unitary state, ‘dictatorial in the scope of its powers.’ He favoured autocracy, but one filled with ‘creative spirit … a dictatorial-aristocratic-democracy.’

The state should be absolute in those areas in which it had competence. But it should not have competence over everything. ‘At the head of the state must stand a single will,’ he wrote, ‘It cannot and should not regulate everything. The totalitarian state is godless.’ The state had to be bound by law and accountable to the people.

Pravosoznanie: A lawyer by training, Ilyin was a firm believer in the importance of law. One of Imperial Russia’s greatest failings was its undeveloped ‘legal consciousness’, that is to say its people’s sense of what was right and wrong and whether they should obey the law.

One of the most important tasks of the autocratic state would be to develop the people’s legal consciousness until eventually it reached a level at which the people would become capable of self-government.

Until then, however, attempts to impose liberal democratic forms of government would be disastrous. Thus, in The essence of legal consciousness, Ilyin wrote:

‘The political structure and legal consciousness form a living, inseparable unity insofar as not a single reform is possible until a definite improvement in legal consciousness takes place, and any reform that is disproportionate to the state of popular legal consciousness will turn out to be absurd and ruinous for the state. The single true path to any reform is a gradual education in legal consciousness … in its idea the state can be reduced to self-government of the people. However, the sole and objective end of the state is so high and requires from the citizenry such mature legal consciousness that historically the people turn out to be incapable of self government. … Political philosophy must uncover the root of this divergence; state power must find the path to healing it.’

Natsionalizm: Ilyin was a nationalist. Love of country was a central part of his philosophy. Russians he felt, should put Russian interests first. This contrasted with the internationalist philosophy of the communists.

Furthermore, every nation, Ilyin said, should develop in its own way. Thus the West had no right to tell Russians how to run their own country; conditions in Russia weren’t the same as in the West. ‘Western Europe, which doesn’t know Russia, has not the slightest basis for imposing any political forms whatsoever on us,’ Ilyin declared.

At the same time, Ilyin’s vision of Russia was as a multi-national empire. He did not believe that every small nation had a right to self-determination. Ukrainian independence was anathema to him.

But, precisely because Russia was a multi-national country, and precisely because each nation should develop in its own way, Russians should not seek to assimilate the minorities within the country but leave them to develop their own culture.

In 1938 he fled Germany for Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, dying there in December 1954.

This article originally appeared here.

Russians celebrate Christmas today

Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas today.

This year, the Russian president Vladimir Putin celebrated the holiday in Russia’s Otradnoye village near the southern city of Voronezh, where he attended a Christmas service at a local church.

The Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar and celebrates Christmas on January 7.

The Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in the Otradnoye village, accommodating some 450 people, was crowded during the Christmas Eve service.

Putin sent his greetings to the congregation and personally thanked Archpriest Gennady Zaridze, the rector of the church, who helped to restore the building and open a church-run orphanage.

The church in Otradnoye is among the country’s cultural heritage sites. Construction work began in 1893 and lasted eight years. In 1930, the church was closed and used as a grain storage facility. The restoration began only in 1991.

Russian Christmas card from 1912, before the Red Revolution

China starts payments with Russia in national currencies

China will start swaps and forwards between the yuan and the national currencies of Russia, Malaysia and New Zealand on December 29, the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) reported Friday.

Earlier in December, China’s Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng claimed that China could increase the usage of yuan in trade with Russia amid the ruble’s depreciation, which falls in line with China’s intention to increase the usage of national currencies in international payments in order to weaken the US dollar’s dominance in global finance and promote the yuan as an alternative.

In October, the Russian Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China reached a three-year agreement on currency swaps worth 150 billion yuan (over $24 billion).

Both the Russian and the Chinese leaders have repeatedly praised the decision, saying it would bring positive effects for the countries’ economies and currencies.

The main benefits of mutual payments in national currencies are the absence of charges for the conversion of the currencies, direct payments and higher transparency in relations between the banks.

Where is the United States of Pindostan?

If you talk to a Russian about the international political situation, sooner or later you will be informed that there is a country in North America that you’ve never heard of. Its name is ‘Pindosia,’ ‘Pindostan’ or, more officially, ‘United States of Pindostan,’ and you will be told that one part of it, called Alaska, used to belong to Russia. Part of the word—‘stan’—stands for underdeveloped state, as in ‘ Pakistan,’ ‘Kazakhstan,’ or ‘Uzbekistan.’ The citizens of this country in plural form are called ‘pindoses,’ in singular—‘pindos.’

There are more than 316 million ‘pindoses’ in ‘Pindostan.’

Today, this country has a black President, and the Russians have a nickname for him too. He is called Maximka—after a character from a popular Soviet movie, made in 1952, which told the story of a black boy saved by the Russian sailors from the cruelty of the vicious American slave-traders who were terribly abusing him and calling him just that—“Boy.” In the film, the saved boy was fed well by the Russian crew, given the name Maximka, and became one of their own in the end.

But by the modern-day Russian legend, Maximka, unfortunately, has grown up into an ungrateful Russophobe.

One can assume that the reader by now has a clue what this country is.

The word ‘pindos’ in Russian is highly offensive, and defines a helpless creature that is a product of a very bad educational system, one who can survive in this world only with the help of various gadgets. The origin of the word is unknown, and the philologists are fighting to establish it. The most popular explanation states that this word was invented by Russian peacekeepers in Serbia with the purpose of describing a NATO soldier, who was seen by them as a strange, clumsy figure with his 90 lbs. of bulletproof vest, weapons, radios, flashlights and so on.

From afar, he looked very strange to the Russian eye—like a penguin.

The Russians have had their favorite, most-hated pindoses. One of them, the constant laughingstock in the media, used to be the US Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul. He was a huge fan of Twitter and if judged by the number of his tweets, spent more time on his gadget than actually doing his job. After more than two years of service there, upon his departure, he received only two words in Russian—via Twitter—from the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs: “Goodbye Mikhail.”

Today his place has been taken by the spokesperson for the US Department of State, Jen Psaki. She has an anti-fan club of haters who consider her not to be very bright—they even invented their own anti-IQ unit called 1 Psaki. One who has 3 Psakis has a brain of a clam. The term ‘psaking’ in Russian political newspeak means to know nothing about the subject while saying something banal and politically correct. She is so popular that when she injured her foot and came in front of the cameras with the cast on, all major Russian TV channels and newspapers reported the event.

Another hated ‘pindos’ is Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), famous in Russia for his periodic tweets to ‘Dear Vlad.’ In 2011, for example, Mr. McCain tweeted Putin, “Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you.” Usually reserved and purposefully polite while talking about his ‘partners from over the Big Pool’ (Big Pool being the Atlantic Ocean ), this time Mr. Putin shot back, saying that Mr. McCain “has a lot of blood of peaceful civilians on his hands. He must relish and can’t live without the disgusting, repulsive scenes of the killing of Gadhafi.” “Mr. McCain was captured in Vietnam and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years,” Mr. Putin added. “Anyone [in his place] would have had his roof moved over.” The last three words in Russian slang mean “suddenly to become insane.”

Today, according to the respected Moscow ‘Levada Center,’ which measures political sentiment in Russian society, 74% of Russians have negative feelings towards the USA. It hasn’t always been like this; in the 1990s, 80% had positive attitude toward America.

Currently, 76% of Russians hate Obama personally and only a meager 2% like him. In 2009 only 12% of Russians had extremely negative feelings towards Obama.

These are the maximum peaks of anti-American feelings in Russia in years but the sociologists believe they could go even higher in the near future.

Anti-American sentiment has been growing slowly in Russia since the war in former Yugoslavia. But the sharp recent increase happened as a result of the US-led sanctions that were imposed on Russia after the ‘Russian annexation of Crimea.’ For example, just last week Visa and MasterCard completely stopped their operations in Crimea, leaving more than 2 million people there without access to their money. 75% of Russians do not believe that their country is responsible for the events in Ukraine. On the contrary, they blame the US.

When the sanctions began, many Russian businesses responded by putting up ‘Obama Is Sanctioned Here’ signs on their doors and windows.

However today they went much farther.

The owners of the Moscow supermarket “Electronics on Presnya” are using American flag doormats so the customers could wipe their dirty feet off, according to the British tabloid Daily Mail. “Customers have been filmed wiping their feet on the fabled stars and stripes as they enter and exit stores across Moscow, as struggling retailers take a hopeless swipe at their Cold War adversaries,” reports the newspaper. According to the Moskovky Komsomolets Moscow newspaper, the nation’s business owners decided to put the US flag under the Russians’ feet because of the strained relations between the two countries. “New doormats with the American flag were put at every exit so that America would not think that she is allowed to everything,” they say. “From one perspective, of course it is a flag, but from the other, because of this entire situation in the world, regular folks are suffering. All the electronics we import, mostly from China and buy for dollars. We have to work directly so the US would have no chance to manipulate the prices.” (The Russian ruble lost about 50% of its value because of the economic sanctions by the western countries and a fall in the oil price.)

By the words of the shopping center’s attorney Konstantin Trapaidze, the doormats with the American flag do not break any Russian law. “It is very probable that the doormats have a decorative character. Yes, people are walking on them but nobody prohibited this. They produce not only doormats with the flag on them but also furniture upholstery. The breaking of the law would be when someone would start burning such a doormat or real flag demonstratively, or tear it up.”

Major Russian TV channel Vesti eagerly reported that fact. They also added that some Moscow stores were selling the toilet paper with American flag imprinted on it. The pricetag was $1 per roll.

A number of Russian politicians have been working very hard to keep the flames of rage burning. Last week, the Speaker of the Russian Parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, raised the issue of starting an international investigation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings by the US in 1945, as a ‘crime against humanity’ has no time limit. He wanted nothing less than a new Nuremberg trial with the US at the criminal’s bench.

Vladimir Putin, from his side, during his most recent press conference, used the occasion to show his negative attitude toward one of America ’s most popular products. Answering a question about Russian drink Kvass, he said, “I don’t know how harmful Coca-Cola is, but a lot of specialists say that it is, especially for children. I don’t want to offend Coca-Cola, but we have our own national non-alcoholic beverages, and we shall help them to win our stores’ shelves.”

He could have chosen another brand as an example of an unhealthy soda, since there is no shortage of different drinks in Russia’s stores. But to no one’s surprise, the Russian President chose for his attack the very symbol of Pindostan.

Source: New York Observer

China ready to help Russia says foreign minister

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Monday that China is ready to help Russia overcome its economic difficulties.

Beijing is willing to help Moscow and believes that Russia “has the ability and the wisdom to overcome the current economic difficulties,” the minister was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.

Wang did not outline any specific measures, according to the newspaper.

Last week, China’s Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng stated that China could increase the use of yuan in trade with Russia amid falling ruble rates.

Russia has seen a rapid depreciation of its national currency in recent months due to falling oil prices and sanctions imposed by the West over Moscow’s alleged involvement in the Ukrainian crisis.

Russia to launch SA’s spy satellite

The news site www.russianspaceweb.com carries a report on the Kondor-E, a top secret spy satellite for South Africa’s defence department.

Under the headline “Russia to orbit South-Africa’s first spy satellite”, it claims that South African defence intelligence “planned to use the satellite for various surveillance goals, including battlefield reconnaissance”.

It confirms that the satellite would be capable of providing all-weather, day-and-night radar imagery for the military.

The report further speculates on the location of a possible ground station to monitor the satellite.

“It is still unclear where exactly the ground station for Kondor-E was located in South Africa, or even whether it had ever been built.”

It says the two best “candidate sites” are the SA National Space Agency’s Hartesbeeshoek facility, or the Overberg Test Range near Arniston, operated by Denel.

By December 12, Kondor-E was loaded with propellant at Site 31 and transferred to Site 2A for the final preparation for launch, TSENKI announced. At the time, the launch was promised in the second half of December 2014. According to Roskosmos, the launch of the spacecraft identified as Kondor-E No. 2 would take place on Dec. 18, 2014, at 07:55:03 Moscow Time from Site 175 in Baikonur.

The defence department was not immediately available for comment.

Democratic Alliance MP David Maynier said in a statement: “We cannot be sure, but the Kondor-E satellite, which will be launched at 6.55pm SA time, may be defence intelligence’s secret Russian Kondor-E ‘spy satellite’, developed under ‘Project Flute’.”