Russia today

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 04, 2023 2:36 pm

Russia’s New Foreign Relations Concept will usher in a fundamental change in the balance of its domestic politics

On Friday, 31 March, Vladimir Putin signed into law a new Foreign Policy Concept which will guide Russian diplomacy in the years to come. It replaces the Concept promulgated in 2016 and sets out on 42 pages in logically organized form what we have been witnessing in Russia’s behavior on the world stage since the launch of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine and subsequent nearly complete rupture of relations with the US-led Collective West.

I found few surprises in the document precisely because it restates what I have read in speech after speech by Vladimir Putin, what I read in the lengthy Joint Declaration issued at the conclusion of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow on 20-22 March.

We see here familiar clusters of words like the ‘multipolar world’ which Russia is striving to midwife in a joint effort with the People’s Republic of China. What is at issue is the creation of a new post-Cold War order that is more democratic, attaches greater weight in international institutions to newly emerged economic powers and is more respectful of the different cultures and solutions to governance of countries around the world than the ‘rules based order’ which Washington is fighting tooth and nail to preserve, since it is a nice cover for American global hegemony. The new world order will be built on international law as agreed within the United Nations and its agencies. The new security architecture will be all-inclusive and leave no country out in the cold.

The new Concept enshrines the strategic alliance with China and extends a hand of friendship to what we used to call the Third World. It clarifies relations with what are now ‘unfriendly states,’ meaning the U.S.-led Collective West. The door is left ajar for improvement of relations with the West. We are told that they are not enemies, as such. But the page has turned and the age of banging on the doors of the West for recognition and treatment as equals that characterized Putin’s foreign policy for more than twenty years until the Special Military Operation has definitively passed.

These aspects of the Foreign Policy Concept document have already drawn the attention of serious analysts. Even the Russian media outlet RT has produced a useful overview for those who want a quick guide: https://www.rt.com/russia/573945-russia ... ncept-key/

Once they get their footing, Western experts will no doubt be producing reams of commentary in which they discover in this document what has been plain as can be for anyone following the speeches of the Russian President and Minister of Foreign Affairs over the course of the last year. But then again, very few Western analysts actually read or listened to those speeches, which they dismissed out of hand. Anyone, like myself, who dared to publish summaries and commentaries on those speeches was systematically denounced as a ‘stooge of Putin.”

Now, when confronted by a concise and logically consistent unifying Concept, the mainstream experts will be compelled to do for the big picture what they just did with respect to the little picture, Russian-Chinese relations, following Xi’s visit. In the past week they have been writing about this strategic alignment as if it were suddenly newsworthy, when others, myself included, wrote three or more years ago that the Russian-Chinese entente was about to change the global power balance.

And our economists and bankers will be concentrating their minds on the point in the Foreign Policy Concept that concerns them most directly: de-dollarization, meaning commercial exchange between states using their own national currencies. That idea has been around for a good long time but was until now said to be an impossible dream of would-be disrupters of the rules based order because of restrictions on capital flows by the issuing countries and due to shallow liquidity. Commerce not passing through the dollar was said to be something that might occur in future decades, not tomorrow. However, the petrodollar is being swept away as we speak, and even dollar loyalists like the Financial Times have recently taken note.

For those who want to go to the source document and try to make sense of it for themselves, an unofficial translation is available on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry: https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/fundam ... s/1860586/

What I propose to offer here will look at a wholly different dimension of the Foreign Policy Concept: what it means for Russian domestic politics. Why is that important? Because there are key elements of the Concept that indicate Russia is reviving certain Soviet traditions that served them well. But let no one be mistaken, there is no hint of reconstituting the USSR.

*****

Before proceeding, I am obliged to say a few words about the organization of the new Concept document. First, unlike earlier editions which seemed to be only positive and constructive, this Concept has a very large defensive or reactive component. Many of the tasks it assigns to Russian diplomacy are to counteract hostile acts of the countries identified here as ‘unfriendly.’ These acts range from sanctions on Russian state and private economic actors to hybrid war in all its manifestations. Russian diplomacy is instructed to act to protect Russians living abroad and to facilitate the immigration into the country of bearers of Russian culture who are subject to Russophobic persecution where they live abroad.

A large part of the text is a recitation of tasks of Russian diplomacy generally. The Concept document gets interesting only when it reaches the section on “Regional Tracks of foreign policy.” This section roughly sets down a descending order of priorities, from those areas closest to Russia’s national interests to those areas which are hostile to Russia’s national interests.

The closest circle of nations for attention is the immediate neighbors in the Community of Independent States, i.e., the former Soviet republics, otherwise called “The Near Abroad.”

Then comes Asia, with particular mention of China and India. This is understandable given that these two countries are what saved Russia from collapse of its hydrocarbon exports during the past year. India alone increased its Russian imports by 22 times. The safeguarding of these strategic partnerships is obviously at the top of things to do for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Also in Greater Asia, special mention is made of the Islamic World, specifically Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt. For anyone following the daily news this past year, it is patently obvious that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have also been of greatest importance in keeping the Russian economy humming and resisting the effects of American led sanctions.

Next comes Africa: “Russia stands in solidarity with the African states in their desire for a more equitable polycentric world and elimination of social and economic inequality, which is growing due to the sophisticated neocolonial policies of some developed states towards Africa.”

After Africa, we find Latin America and the Caribbean. With respect to all of these states, we read that Russian foreign policy aims to strengthen friendship with them and to help them resist American hegemonic demands. With the exception of Brazil, none of the states in Latin America or Africa can be major markets or partners in overcoming the effects of Western economic pressure on Russia. However, maintaining ever closer relations with them is critical to another mission of Russian foreign policy which is not mentioned in the Concept, namely to gather votes in support of Russia in the UN General Assembly. What we have here is an important exercise in Soft Power and Public Relations. It is important because the Concept places great reliance on the United Nations as the source of International Law that can and must normalize international relations and keep the peace.

Next in order of priority we come to the ‘unfriendly states’. These are Europe, about which we read: “Most European states pursue an aggressive policy towards Russia aimed at creating threats to the security and sovereignty of the Russian Federation, gaining unilateral economic advantages, undermining domestic political stability and eroding traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, and creating obstacles to Russia’s cooperation with allies and partners.”

Finally we get to the villain in the piece: ‘the U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon states.’ Here we read: “Russia’s course towards the U.S. has a combined character, taking into account the role of this state as one of the influential sovereign centers of world development and at the same time the main inspirer, organizer and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West, the source of major risks to the security of the Russian Federation, international pace, a balanced, equitable and progressive development of humanity.”

Turning from statements of principle to the specific vocabulary used in the Foreign Policy Concept, I point to several words which I would call ‘dog whistles,’ because behind their use there are world views that are held by specific political actors in Russian domestic politics.

The first key word here is ‘neocolonial.’ This designation for the Collective West would have suited Leonid Brezhnev just fine. It assumes an approach to identification of the moving forces in history that any student of Marxism-Leninism would feel comfortable with. It is a dog whistle to the Communists.

The other dog whistle term that I see here is “Anglo-Saxon states.” Ask a Frenchman who is responsible for all the world’s woes and he is likely to speak of the Anglo-Saxons. The same is true of patriotic minded Russians, including those in parties on either side of United Russia. This is not a term one would see bandied about by United Russia, because so many of their friends considered London to be their second home.

*****

In an essay that I published on 2 January entitled “Wars make nations,” I pointed out that the Ukraine war has consolidated the Russian nation in a patriotic, rally-round-the-flag phenomenon as one would expect given the existential threat the country is facing as it squares off not merely with Ukraine, but with the whole of NATO that is supporting Ukraine with money, arms and military personnel.

Perhaps as many as one million Russians left the country after the launch of the military operation in Ukraine. Among them were, of course, many draft dodgers. But they also included television and music industry celebrities, as well as journalists and prominent business people. From the standpoint of the Kremlin, and also of the vast patriotic majority of the population, their departure was a godsend, since they were viewed as a fifth column, as a contingent working against the country’s economic and political sovereignty. Symptomatic of the rats leaving the ship was the departure from Russia of Anatoly Chubais. He was the head of the scandalous privatization program under Boris Yeltsin and the evil genius behind the 1996 fraudulent presidential election. No sooner was he gone, just ahead of arrest warrants being served, than Chubais was finally publicly reviled for the thief and saboteur of the country’s priority investments in technology that he had become.

On the other side of the ledger, a good many Duma members, regional administrators and simple citizens have volunteered and gone to the front in Donbas to fight alongside the contract soldiers and mobilized reservists. Without any doubt, at the war’s conclusion these veterans will rise quickly both in government and in the Russian business world. President Putin has said as much. We may anticipate that when they come to power, they will show little tolerance for the hedonism and personal excesses that have flourished among the creative intelligentsia in Russia’s major cities. But it would be a mistake to draw facile conclusions on where the patriotic forces that will come to enjoy political and economic power after the war is over stand on the usual Right-Left political spectrum, especially given the specifics of Russian-Soviet history, which I will get to in a moment.

Meanwhile, the new Foreign Policy Concept has the potential to transform Russian political life even more dramatically by making official what has been implicit: the neo-Liberal preferences for cooperation with European and American capitalism which underlay the legislative, budgetary and military reform policies of the ruling party, United Russia, are now being replaced by political and economic alignment with the Global South under the very same Left-leaning slogans of anti-colonialism that were the calling card of the USSR. I mentioned anti-colonialism above with reference to Africa, but the slogan also resonates in China, India and in many other countries of the former Third World or Developing World.

The closest that the Concept document comes to making an anti-colonial programmatic statement is found at the very beginning, in point 7 under the heading “Modern World: Main Trends and Prospects for Development.”

Quote

Humanity is experiencing an era of revolutionary changes. A more just, multipolar world continues to emerge. Irreversibly receding into the past is the nonequilibrium model of world development which for centuries ensured the outstripping economic growth of colonial powers through the appropriation of resources of dependent territories and states in Asia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere.

Unquote

Let us be perfectly clear, in presenting itself as a force against the neocolonial powers of the West, Russia is playing a card which we may call its ace in the hole. The Soviet Union’s relations with Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia were for decades based on its financing and otherwise assisting national liberation movements. It was not for nothing that the USSR created a University of the Friendship of Peoples in Moscow and that it was named in honor of Patrice Lamumba, the murdered Left-leaning first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who symbolized the struggle of the peoples of Africa for independence. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lamumba’s name was removed from the institution. And it is no accident that two weeks ago, the Friendship of the Peoples University in Moscow was again given the name of Patrice Lamumba.

Of course, Russia’s cultivation of the Global South today does not ignore some points which the anti-Communist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made repeatedly in recent years: namely that Russian foreign policy must pay for itself, just as the Americans have done, and not be a drain on public finances as was the case during the days of the USSR. The profitable contracts of the Private Military Company “Wagner Group” in Africa and Latin America for security services and also in support of mining operations show that Russia’s outreach to the Global South is not as soft-headed as in Soviet times.

Though over the past few years Russia established good working relations with many countries in Africa and in Latin America which had been close to the USSR, there was always a certain awkwardness in the relations because the Russian Federation had become one more capitalist state closely cooperating with Europe and America. Now that these former “partners” of Russia have all become “unfriendly nations” and now that Russia is a strategic ally of Communist China, we may expect nostalgia to be less of a driver and more “birds of a feather” relations with the USSR’s friends from the past.

*****

In 2024, Russia will have its next presidential election and regional government elections. In 2026 it will elect the next State Duma. How may the processes underway in connection with the new foreign policy orientation and new management approach to the economy affect the votes?

I submit that these changes all put the ruling United Russia party on the back foot given that the principles guiding its foreign and domestic policies have now been abandoned by Putin and his Government.

If we look for parties represented in the Duma, meaning having more than a 5% share of the electorate, which traditionally stood opposed to Russia’s dependent relationship with the West and called for a more muscular, patriotic foreign policy, then we have one party on the Right, the Liberal Democrats (LDPR) and one party on the Left, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). They are the ones who stand to gain from the new policy lines.

In the last federal elections, the Communists polled about 20% and the LDPR polled about 15%. Their share of seats in the parliament were, of course, substantially less because of the way seats are allocated. Each of these parties had greater or lesser support in the various administrative units of the Federation, with the LDPR particularly strong in Siberia, for example.

As the stock brokers like to say, the past is no certain predictor of the future, and the LDPR in 2024 is unlikely to remain a major force. The party was founded and led for more than 25 years by the inimitable Vladimir Zhirinovsky. From the get-go, Zhirinovsky’s LDPR was vehemently anti-Communist. Over time, it became one of those minority parties which the Kremlin assigned the task of draining votes away from the Communists by stealing the Communists’ nationalist foreign policy and socially conservative domestic policy lines.

Zhirinovsky was well educated, an expert on Turkey. He was an exuberant self-promoter through use of scandalous rhetoric. He also was a charismatic leader. His untimely death from Covid a year ago left a hole at the top which apparently no one can fill, least of all his successor Leonid Slutsky, who is a clumsy orator.

Under wartime conditions, the leader of the Communists Gennady Zyuganov has already said that his party does not intend to put up a candidate to oppose Vladimir Putin in 2024. But we can be sure they will put up candidates for all regional Dumas and governorships, and I predict they will do very well indeed, taking votes from United Russia and from the LDPR.

For those in the United States, who might be alarmed to see growing political power in the hands of Russia’s Communists, allow me to bring them up to date. Zyuganov has been at the center of Russian politics for more than 30 years. He has been a voice on behalf of the downtrodden majority as Russia lurched headlong into a cruel phase of robber capitalism and pauperization of the masses in the Yeltsin years. He has opposed the rule of the oligarchs. He has always called for greater government control over the economy, for greater state investment in new productive capacities. But he is a committed democrat, a voice of moderation in issues of the constitutional structure of the country. His foreign policy views were never as strident, as hawkish as Zhirinovsky’s.

One may regret that Zyuganov has stubbornly refused to change the name of his party. The reality is that the Communist Party policy positions would, in the West European context, allow it to call itself the Social Democratic Party of Russia. Such a name change would surely win over to its candidates a greater share of young people. But it would cost him many of the old and very old Party loyalists. Nonetheless, even with the existing name, which many Russians disdain, the Party should do well since it has consistently fought for Russia’s place in the sun and has consistently fought for economic and political independence from the West. They will give the United Russia candidates a run for their money, which is all to the good since it will reinvigorate Russian democracy.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/04/03/ ... -politics/

The CPRF ain't no great shakes and in it's current stance more social democrat than socialist, but as a mass party it serves as a reservoir for the return of socialism, perhaps under a different party or a different name. It is the Russian people who cling to the idea of communism and would have a new, improved version. The widespread honor given to Josef Stalin in recent years speaks for itself.

************

THE LEICESTER VILLAINIES — THE LINE THAT RUNS BETWEEN THE DEATHS OF KING RICHARD III, RICHARD MAYNE OF MH17, AND DAWN STURGESS OF NOVICHOK

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

It’s an evil place which keeps evil secrets of murder. Leicester town (lead, logo) is one.

The ancient and the recent secrets in this place form a line between five hundred years of falsification of the death of King Richard III on August 22, 1485; the delayed coroner’s findings on the death of Richard Mayne on July 17, 2014; and the still hidden pathologists’ report on the death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018. The public papers of all three are propaganda concealing the truth of crimes for the benefit of potentates in London, one hundred miles to the south of Leicester.

An almost invisible and crooked line but a direct one connects Leicester, its university, its coronial court and coroner, the university’s forensic professors, and a Leicester newspaper from the Battle of Bosworth Field, to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, and several poisonings attributed by the British Crown to Russian assasssins between March and June of 2018.

This is how to draw the line, and the lesson to be drawn from it.

As putsch and assassination propaganda goes, the London Times, Guardian, and New York Times aren’t a patch on what William Shakespeare did for the Tudor usurpers of the English kingdom after the Battle of Bosworth Field, near Leicester, in 1485.

At that battle the army of Richard III, the English king, was defeated by a force of French, Breton, Scots, and Welsh mercenaries, plus English opportunists, paid by Henry Tudor. Richard was murdered on the field by Henry’s men to prevent his surviving to challenge the putsch which stole his crown and turned Henry into the king. Richard’s body was paraded, stripped and mutilated, through the streets of Leicester, then dumped in a monastery grave. That disappeared when Henry’s succeeding son Henry VIII expropriated the monastery and its lands.

Henry’s successors included Elizabeth I whom Shakespeare dared not offend. Accordingly, he justified Richard’s overthrow in a play which was first staged in 1594 when Elizabeth still had nine years to go. But as the queen had not produced an heir, there was considerable speculation and scheming on who should take power next.

Shakespeare portrays Richard as a physical weakling, coward, pathological killer, sexually ambiguous, ugly and hump-backed. All of this was false. Getting rid of the body and its tell-tale wounds was only the start. Pre-dating the start of Henry Tudor’s rule to the day before the battle, then executing the surviving commanders of Richard’s army, followed. Doctoring portraits of Richard came next. Shakespeare’s Richard III added another 429 years of propaganda to this faking operation.

Until, that is, a woman named Philippa Langley spent twelve years to find Richard’s grave in Leicester; exhume the skeleton; prove the identification; and ultimately bury the king royally in Leicester Cathedral. Langley reversed the criminal and the victim in the history. But in the recent film of how she did it, the lying, scheming rapacity of the University of Leicester and the Leicester City Council have also been exposed publicly.

The film is called The Lost King. Langley’s telling of the story can be read here.

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Left to right: Richard III in the surviving official portrait which X-rays have revealed to have been altered; the execution wounds to the king’s skull as photographed in 2014; the reconstruction of Richard’s face from his skull; an official portrait of Henry Tudor. The forensic analysis of Richard’s skeleton was reported in The Lancet by Leicester university pathologist Dr Guy Rutty and others; Dr Michael Biggs supervised the scanning of the skeleton.

Their report reveals the fatal blows were inflicted on Richard after his battle helmet had been removed. “The injuries are highly consistent with the body having been in a prone position or on its knees with the head pointing downwards. If the head was in a neutral position, it is hard to see how this injury would be caused, because there are no other skeletal injuries; the head had to be forward and flexed from the neck to expose this part of the head and cervical spine… the postcranial trauma was probably delivered after the torso had been stripped of the plates and arming doublet.” This is evidence of execution of a disarmed man. Stab wounds also identified on the body had been inflicted after he had been stripped of his armour. In addition, a sword or dagger wound through the buttocks was inflicted on the king’s corpse when he was strapped across a horse.


Richard Mayne (right) died when the Malaysia Airlines flight he was on was shot down over the Donbass battlefield on July 17, 2014. Mayne was
in seat 18G of the main economy-class cabin. His body was recovered intact, and returned to Leicester with a Ukrainian death certificate. A post-mortem was carried out by Dr Michael Biggs of the East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit of the University of Leicester. Biggs then
testified on the cause of Mayne’s death at the Leicester coroner’s court inquest, presided over by Senior Coroner Catherine Mason.

Mason had opened the inquest on September 2014. The cases of Mayne and four other British passengers killed on MH17 – John Alder, Liam Sweeney, Ben Pocock and Glenn Thomas — were combined. This was the first judicial hearing into the facts of the MH17 shootdown conducted in public according to the requirements of the UK Coroners Act and according to the rules of evidence of Anglo-American law. Mason postponed it immediately.*

She was asked at the time how many MH17 victim inquests she was conducting and their individual names. What circumstances, she was asked, “have you deemed to be appropriate for suspension in these cases? Have you delegated authority for evidence-gathering and forensic testing in these cases to another body, British or foreign? To whom has this delegation been made, and on what authority?” Finally, Mason was asked what post-mortem or autopsy evidence of the victims’ remains she was holdng.

Mason refused to answer. A source at her court said Mason was deferring “while inquiries are conducted abroad.” The source implied the British government had decided to rely on the Dutch for evidence.

In fact, Mason was getting her running orders from London and her evidence from the Metropolitan Police’s special officers covering Russia, who were in turn coordinating with MI6 and other security agencies. Mason was no stranger to these operations. Before she became a coroner, Mason had been a captain in the British army’s nursing corps; a specialist in burns and explosives; she had done a tour with British combat forces in the Middle East and after a vehicle accident she was reassigned by the government to the Leicester coroner’s court.

Mason reopened the Mayne inquest on July 1, 2022, combining it with inquests for Alder, Sweeney, Pocock and Thomas. At that time, the Dutch court had concluded its hearings but had not delivered a verdict. That did not come until four and half months later, in November 2022. The final public presentation by the Dutch investigators followed in February 2023.

The Anglo-American rules of evidence are far stricter than the Dutch court and law allow. Secret witnesses and secret reports in The Netherlands are not permitted in a British coroner’s court. The UK statute — like the Australian one* — is also prohibitive: “a determination under subsection (1)(a) may not be framed in such a way as to appear to determine any question of— (a)criminal liability on the part of a named person…”

Ignoring this, for her evidence in the inquest on Mayne and the others, Mason took hearsay from the police and MI6 in London. This came from Dominic Murphy, who is reported to have testified in Mason’s court last July 1. Murphy’s official title is Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS) in the Counter Terrorism Command of the Metropolitan Police (Met). In operational terms, he is charge of the Met’s war crimes team; this has publicly announced it is gathering evidence from the regime in Kiev for alleged war crimes committed by Russia. According to Murphy, he is supporting the British prosecution of President Vladimir Putin at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Murphy has also been directly involved in the alleged Novichok attacks of 2018 on Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the investigation of the death of Dawn Sturgess. For that and related work he was rewarded by the government with a Queen’s Police Medal in December 2019. In the same awards list, three of Murphy’s Wiltshire and Thames Valley police colleagues also engaged in the Skripal-Sturgess cases were given rewards – Francis Habgood, David Minty, and Paul Mills. Follow the medals here.

Forensically and legally, in the Mayne inquest Mason had the duty to cross-examine both Murphy’s police evidence indirectly sourced from the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and the medical evidence taken directly at autopsy by the pathologist Michael Biggs.

At Leicester University, Biggs is a friend and colleague of Dr Guy Rutty. Together, they have co-authored forensic research papers. They also collaborated in the analysis of Richard III’s remains, concluding from the pattern and nature of the pre-mortem and post-mortem wounds that most likely he had been executed after surrender and his corpse mutilated.

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Left: Associate Professor Michael Biggs supervising scanning of Richard III’s remains. Centre: Detective Chief Superintendent Dominic Murphy at Scotland Yard; right, Senior Coroner Catherine Mason.

Rutty is one of two government pathologists responsible for the post-mortem of Dawn Sturgess. This means that Biggs’ and Rutty’s reports are the principal sources for the conclusions already announced by government officials of Russian state culpability in the deaths of Mayne and of Sturgess. Rutty did not testify at the Sturgess inquest before it was converted last year into a public inquiry, though part of his report had been referred to earlier in the coroner’s record by Baronness Heather Hallett in March 2021. Hallett was then replaced and the coroner’s inquest turned into a public inquiry which has postponed open hearings for at least another year. Click to follow.

By email at his Leicester office Biggs was asked this week “whether you found evidence of an earlier post-mortem by the Ukrainians at the Kharkov mortuary and/ or by the team at the Dutch Hilversun mortuary after the bodies were first repatriated? Did you record evidence of shrapnel or other metal in the post-mortems you carried out in Leicester? What cause of death did you record? What cause of death did the Ukrainian death certificates record for the British subjects you assessed?”

Biggs was also asked to explain a newspaper report of what he had said to Mason in court last July. “You are quoted as saying: ‘There may have been people in the aircraft killed by the missile.’ What was the evidential basis for your reference to the missile? Were you relying on the court testimony of DCS Murphy?”

Biggs refused to answer. Instead, through a spokesman he claimed: “We are not permitted to release post-mortem reports, as although we produce the reports they effectively belong to HM Coroner, and only HM Coroner can authorise their release. The specific office who dealt with these cases can be contacted via Similarly, when it comes to answering specific queries then all such enquiries need to be made via HM Coroner’s office, as they must be kept informed of all communications relating to their cases…It may also be worthwhile contacting the journalist who wrote the online article in your provided link, as they may have made notes of additional details during the court discussions that are not included in the online article.”

The reporter Biggs was referring to was Tom Mack. This is his report in the Leicester Mercury from the coroner’s court on July 1, 2022. Mack was asked four questions about what he had heard in court:

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Mack has refused to reply.

Coroner Mason was asked for the status of the postponed inquests because an internet search of her court’s case archive had returned the response: “no matching records found”. There was no answer from Mason.

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Source: https://coroners.leicester.gov.uk/

She was then asked to provide the records of her public hearing of July 1, 2022, including the witness list, the police, pathologist and other witness testimony, and a copy of the inquest findings.

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There has been no reply. This is unlawful concealment of a public record.

Apart from reporters present in the Leicester court who have published part of what they heard, the only official record which has been unearthed of Mason’s MH17 inquest is a 5-paragraph, single-page “Record of Inquest”:

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Section 5(2) of the Coroners and Justice Act authorises Mason to “ascertain[ing] in what circumstances the deceased came by his or her death”. This did not allow Mason to assign criminal responsibility to “Pro-Russian Separatists” for causing the deaths of Mayne and the others. Mason lacked legal power to accept and adopt by implication the named accused in the Dutch trial who were identified by the Met policeman in his court testimony.

Murphy had said, according to the Leicester Mercury, “Russian-backed separatists had been coming under fire from Ukraine’s air force and so a Buk missile system was sent to the separatists from Russia to shoot down Ukrainian bombers. Instead, the system was used to shoot down flight MH17… Detective Chief Supt Murphy said a report by Dutch investigators concluded the missile’s warhead had exploded just above the cockpit, killing the three crew members immediately before the plane broke up in the air, falling from a height of 33,000ft to the ground below. Fragments inside the wreckage helped identify the type of missile used and photographic evidence was found showing the system being transported from Russia.”

Murphy’s references to “a report by Dutch investigators” and “photographic evidence” have been traced to the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and discredited as inadmissible in an Anglo-American court of law; in secret, Australian police had told the Dutch prosecutors this much in early 2016. Corroborating satellite pictures from the US have failed to substantiate the claims; Dutch military intelligence reports also do not substantiate Murphy’s evidence. Follow the book of evidence in the Dutch trial.

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Left to right: the newspaper of Leicester owned by Trinity Mirror, also known as Reach Plc, one of the largest newspaper groups in the UK and virulently anti-Russian. Its share price has collapsed by 67% since the war began. Centre, Major-General Onno Eichelsheim, who was head of the Dutch military intelligence agency (MIVD) in 2016, when he reported there was no radar or satellite intelligence from a US or NATO source to corroborate the firing of a Russian BUK missile at MH17 from a location on either side of the Ukrainian border. Right, the only book published in English of the forensic evidence in the case and the attempts by the Dutch court to exclude or ignore it.

But Mason repeated the fabrications in court, announcing: “what we do know is that a Buk missile system was brought into eastern Ukraine and that a surface-to-air missile was fired. I am satisfied that MH17 was shot down by a Buk missile fired by pro-Russian separatists.”

Mason’s conclusion has been turned into state propaganda for the war against Russia. Dramatising this, the Leicester Mercury and the Guardian aren’t up to the Shakespearian standard for falsifying the evidence of the crime. The new Leicester fabrications aren’t buried as deeply as Richard III; it may happen they may be uncovered and exposed more swiftly.

[*] Following Mason’s 2014 postponement, only two other coroner’s court inquests for MH17 victims have followed. On December 15, 2015, in Melbourne, Australia, deputy coroner Iain West took sworn evidence from an Australian Federal Police officer and a state pathologist. Follow the evidence here. In his 11-page coroner’s ruling the next day, West said: “I find that each of the 17 Victorian deceased died of injury sustained in a high altitude disruption.” The coroner did not identify weapon, perpetrator, or criminal cause. “Whilst the evidence before me enables me to find that the deaths of the 17 Victorian residents were the result of the actions of another person or persons, I am not able to make any findings as to who caused the deaths. I note that the criminal investigation of the crash is ongoing. It is the role of the criminal investigation to assign criminal responsibility or blame for the deaths.” Click to read in full.

The legal and propaganda differences between West’s inquest findings and Mason’s inquest record are obvious. Mason’s document is a fabrication against the law.

There was a second Australian coroner’s court inquest; this took place in Sydney in May 2016. In that case, the coroner overruled a legal warning from the Crown Solicitor not to draw conclusions of criminal responsibility from inadequate evidence. The coroner then classified the evidence he had relied on as secret. Read the details here.

https://johnhelmer.net/the-leicester-vi ... more-87754
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 05, 2023 12:06 pm

Journalist, Spy Or Cyber Front Warrior?

Last Thursday, March 30, Russian authorities arrested the Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershovitch:

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was “acting on instructions from the American side to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes a state secret.” Gershkovich, who was arrested in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains region, will be held until at least May 29, according to Russian judicial officials.
The Wall Street Journal said it “vehemently denies” the allegation and demanded that Russia release Gershkovich, who has lived in Moscow for six years and was accredited by Russia’s foreign ministry. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison.


Would the Wall Street Journal even know if the CIA hired one of its journos for a side job?

But fear not, the CIA would never do such:

The arrest shows that Moscow is “increasingly treating the United States as an open belligerent in a war against Russia,” according to George Beebe of the Quincy Institute, who previously led Russia analysis at the CIA.
Citing a 1977 law that banned CIA recruitment of journalists, Beebe argued that it is “very unlikely that Gershkovich is a U.S. intelligence asset or that his reporting was directed or influenced by the U.S. Intelligence Community.”


Surely, the CIA would never ever break a law, says a former CIA analyst ...

But why then is the U.S. Secretary of State calling Russia for a talk about the man?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday held a call with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to discuss Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and US citizen who was detained in Russia last week over spying allegations.
According to a State Department readout of the call, Blinken expressed the US’s “grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a US citizen journalist” and called for his “immediate release.”

According to the Russian side, Lavrov told Blinken that a Russian court will decide Gershkovich’s fate. “In light of the established evidence of the US national’s illegal activities, his future will be determined by court,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed that Gershkovich, “acting at the behest of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of an enterprise within Russia’s military-industrial complex.”


May be I am naive, but what Gershkovich inquired about was way too much on the questionable side than to be called journalism:

Kevin Rothrock @KevinRothrock - 17:15 UTC · Mar 30, 2023
Journalist @kolezev, who spoke on background to @evangershkovich before his trip to Yekaterinburg, says Evan hoped to intercept employees (literally in the street) leaving the UralVagonZavod plant in Nizhny Tagil or the NPO Novator missile factory in Yekaterinburg, planning to ask them how they feel about the invasion of Ukraine.

This more than the WSJ’s Wagner Group investigation seems likeliest to have triggered the FSB’s “espionage” paranoia. Evan knew the risks but apparently hoped that the FSB would let him be, given that war sentiment isn’t a state secret.

https://t.me/kolezev/13266

Колезев ☮️
Мария Захарова заявила, что «то, чем занимался в Екатеринбурге сотрудник американского издания The Wall Street Journal, не имеет отношения к журналистике». Марии Захаровой, конечно, виднее, ей в ФСБ...


Tass summarizes the accusations:

US citizen Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for the Moscow bureau of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), was detained in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Region, in the Urals region of Russia, on suspicion of espionage.
According to the FSB, the journalist was collecting top-secret data about an enterprise within the Russian military-industrial complex in the interests of the United States.
The American was detained while trying to obtain classified data.[/i]

Yekaterinburg has been a the metallurgical center of Russia for 300 years:

Yekaterinburg was founded on 18 November 1723 and named after Yekaterina I, the wife of Russian emperor Peter the Great. The city served as the mining capital of the Russian Empire as well as a strategic connection between Europe and Asia.

The city grew during the second world war when Russia moved its heavy industry away from the frontline to behind the Ural. UralVagonZavod is the largest tank manufacturer in the world. It is currently producing the T-90 tanks for the Russian army. NPO Novator is making anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons like the Kalibr cruise missiles which are currently in high demand.

To ask workers of such factories how they feel about the U.S. proxy war waged against Russia while that war is ongoing seems a bit off to me.

What would have been the offer by Gershkovich to any worker who would have spoken against the war?

Also, this was about more than just asking random workers:

The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was interested in operation of military-industrial complex facilities in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Region Legislative Assembly deputy Vycheslav Vegner, whom the reporter interviewed earlier, told TASS Thursday.
"[During the interview, Gershkovich] started asking questions regarding the military-industrial complex of Yekaterinburg, he named one such enterprise - ‘Novator’- and so on," Vegner said.

According to the lawmaker, the reported cited the experience of other regions on industry conversion and asked about the Sverdlovsk Region experience - for example, whether the enterprises change their profile, how many shifts there are, and if they are appropriately staffed. Vegner noted during the interview that he is not authorized to answer such question.


Anything about weapon production numbers or related issues are of course state secrets, at least during times of war. What then do we call such inquiries if not espionage?

Gershkovich also inquired about the lawmaker’s communication with Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin - to which Vegner answered that he is familiar with this issue, because he received applications from convicts who desire to volunteer.

The Wagner founder seems to have been of special interest:

In an interview with Kommersant, Yaroslav Shirshikov, a local public activist, said he spent two days with Gershkovich in Yekaterinburg. The main objective of Gershkovich’s mission "was to analyze society’s attitude toward Prigozhin. He wanted to find out whether public support for the special military operation was growing or dwindling," Shirshikov said.

The questions Gershkovich asked surely deserved some scrutiny from the Russian authorities. One wonders what else they found with him.

But don't look what Gershkovich has done, say some. Obfuscate it whenever possible.

Jason Rezaian @jrezaian - 3:17 UTC · Apr 2, 2023
When reporting on Evan's ordeal, avoid repeating the Russian narrative. The fact that he is a hostage is the story, not the supposed charges against him. Constantly humanize Evan.
Drop all our notions of competition and steel ourselves for a potentially long ordeal. #FreeEvan

Quoted Tweet:

Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof - Apr 2
Replying to @jrezaian @MtthwRose and @WSJ[/i]

Jason, you've been in Evan's situation. What would you suggest that the journalistic community do to support him?
Jason Rezaian indeed has experience with the situation. He had been imprisoned in Iran for espionage when he worked there as 'journalist'.

Not that the CIA would ever hire such ...

On Sunday, April 2, the Russian war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, real name Maxim Fomin, was killed in a terrorist attack in St Petersburg.

Russian authorities arrested the woman that had brought the bomb which killed Tatarsky. While the man was more of a warrior or grifter than a journalist the Russian public is likely to connect the cases. It will demand harsh punishment for Gershkovich. The Ukrainian secret service, which likely was involved in the assassination, may well have intended such.

Craig Murray - @CraigMurrayOrg - 18:04 UTC · Apr 2, 2023
My first thought is that terrorism killing a Russian journalist is really going to make things worse for Evan Gershkovich.

Then I realised that it is in Ukraine's interest for US/Russian relations to deteriorate further over Evan Gershkovich.

Russian pro-war military blogger killed in blast at St Petersburg cafe
Vladlen Tatarsky, who had over 560,000 followers on Telegram, dies in explosion that injures 19 people


But is this really in Ukrainian interest?

Gonzalo Lira - @GonzaloLira1968 - 19:41 UTC · Apr 2, 2023
Terrorist attacks like this one do nothing — except harden the Russian public’s resolve to smash the Kiev regime and take all of Ukraine.

It ensures that Russian public sentiment will never support a cease-fire or negotiated settlement.

In other words, this hurts Ukraine

Intermarium 24 @intermarium24 · Apr 2
💥 An explosion occurred in St. Petersburg, Russia during a meeting organized by Pro-Russian military blogger - Vladen Tatarsky. The cafe was owned by PMC Wagner chief Evgeniy Prigozhin. Unknown woman gifted Tatarsky a small statue with explosive device. 1 killed, 6 injured.… Show more


The unknown woman who 'gifted' the statue was Darya Trepova:

Russia media reports say Ms Trepova, 26, handed Tatarsky a statuette which was believed to contain the explosives that killed him and injured more than 30 people. Later in a video released by the Russian Interior Ministry, she is seen admitting she brought the statuette to the cafe where the blast took place.
...
Her husband Dmitry Rylov suggests she may have been duped.


Whatever happened, going forward Darya Trepova will not have an easy life.

Victor vicktop55 @vicktop55 - 13:37 UTC · Apr 4, 2023
Evgeny Prigozhin gave an exclusive interview to SHOT.

"Vladlen Tatarsky is a sacred symbol of Russia's struggle against external evil.

This attack was staged to remove the "voice of Russia" in order to weaken our struggle. But there will only be more resistance.

For people like Trepova, the death penalty should be brought back. Put her against the wall and drill a hole in the head. She is an enemy. Her employers are enemies. The fight against enemies must be absolutely merciless.

Now there are more attacks on journalists than on government officials. Because journalists are active people. They are the voice of the public. We need such active people to defend Russia in their field.

Unite is the first thing to do to fight the recruits. Society must reject any attempt to side with the enemy."

The cafe where the explosion occurred belongs to Yevgeny Prigozhin. He will hand it over to the Cyber ​​Front office. It will be renovated and everything will be furnished as it was on the day of Tatarsky's death.

"Cyber ​​Front - these are the people who defend Russia's interests in the information space. Cyber ​​Front will work even more actively. Nobody is afraid."

Prigozhin will provide material assistance to the victims of the terrorist attack from personal funds.

"Our task is to ensure that the patriotic movements that exist in our society continue to grow."
https://t.me/vicktop55/14271


Dima of the Military Summary channels suggested that the terror attack that killed Tatarsky was a planned diversion. It is supposed to move the public eyes away from the fact that the Ukrainian army is currently getting removed from Bakhmut. The fight there had been lost months ago but the Ukrainian army is only now giving up. Ten thousands of Ukrainian soldiers died there in vane.

One hopes that one day the people of Ukraine will hold those responsible who had needlessly sent those soldiers into such fate.

Posted by b on April 4, 2023 at 14:32 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/04/j ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 06, 2023 12:03 pm

TOSSING RICE AT THE MARRIAGE OF THE OLIGARCHS WITH THE STATE

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Everyone who has ever heard rice go snap, crackle, and pop! knows that eating the grain is good for your energy.

At the front, Russian soldiers are eating more rice, on per capita average, than any other soldier in Europe, twice as much as the Ukrainian troops. And the rice the Russians eat is Russian grown; in fact, Russia is a net exporter of rice to bigger rice-eaters in Turkey, Mongolia, Jordan, and Belarus.

Russians don’t eat their rice like the really big consumers of China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Vietnam. They don’t cook it into risotto, noodles, paella, biryani, nasi goreng, pudding, or krispies. Instead, it is served up as kasha for breakfast or plov for dinner.

Because rice is a traditional part of the Russian cuisine and diet, rice growing is an important agricultural business, especially in the Krasnodar region, along the Black Sea coast, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the annual harvest of over one million metric tonnes, according to the Russian Rice Union and reports from the US Department of Agriculture.

Naturally, growing consumer appetite will turn into growing demand for the agricultural land required for cultivation of the rice crop. Water is the next most valuable input to rice growing; if water is in short supply, no amount of special seed breeding, fertiliser, manual and machine labour on the land can lift both yields per hectare and total production for milling.

When the irrigation of Krasnodar’s rice paddies stopped in April 2022, following the collapse of the Fedorovsky hydroelectric dam, production fell sharply, and so did exports. Imports increased to compensate. The rice harvest had been growing from 1.099 million tonnes in 2019 to 1.142 mt in 2020, 1.076 mt in 2020, and 1.099 mt in 2021. But drought last year cut the harvest to 797,600 mt – a loss of 27%. To hold down the price, keep up supply, and protect domestic consumers, the government banned rice exports starting in July of 2022. This restriction has been extended until at least July of this year.

The dam failure was the result of long delayed state spending on repairs and upgrades. The effect on rice growers of the ensuing drought has been to the advantage of the largest, best capitalised farms in the region. The rice oligarchs, in short.

Dmitry Arzhanov owns more than one grain of rice out of every five harvested in Krasnodar and southwestern Russia.

His AFG National holding was formed in 2013 with the merger of the Angstrom Group – the leader in sales of packaged cereals in Russia — and the AF-Group, which was the leader in rice cultivation and processing. Combined, the holding’s assets now include four plants in the Krasnodar Krai (territory) with a total production capacity of about 300 tonnes of rice cereals per day; two elevators with a total storage capacity of up to 100 thousand tonnes of raw rice; over 70,000 hectares of farm land in Krasnodar, as well as in Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod, and Novgorod regions. Rice is grown on more than 50,000 of these hectares – 22% of the available rice-growing lands in the Southern Federal District; this administrative area now includes Crimea and the newly incorporated Donbass regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaphorozhye.

MAP OF THE PRIME FARMLAND REGIONS OF SOUTHWEST RUSSIA

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Left: the Southern Federal District; for key to the regions, click.

Before Arzhanov entered the rice business, he was making a fortune out of the distribution and retail sale of electricity. Before that, it has been reported in the kompromat media that he had been convicted of robbery and served a prison sentence. This past February it was reported in Moscow that in 2020 he was under official investigation for a scheme of diverting offshore the revenues his company collected from regional electricity consumers and then failing to pay the supply price of the electricity from the national grid company, Rosseti (“Russian Grids”).

The published allegation against Arzhanov is that his retail company TNS Energo had diverted Rb5.5 billion between 2011 and 2020. Arzhanov had headed TNS Energo between 2012 and 2017, when his shareholding amounted to 53%, controlled through a Cyprus entity called Sunflake Ltd., which had been created in 2004. In 2020 Arzhanov sold half his stake in TNS Energo to the state Russian Technologies (Rostec) holding, and the electricity company passed into the control of Rostec, together with VTB, the state bank, and Yevgeny Giner; Giner has also been an electricity trader who is now investing in the Russian tomatoes business. Follow Giner’s career here.

Arzhanov’s AFG National now includes three production and logistics complexes for turning rice into packaged cereals for the shelves of groceries and supermarkets. Altogether, AFG turns out 220 different products; these fill about 20% of the Russian packaged cereal market, 45% of the retailer private-brand market, and a significant share of the export market. Arzhanov has been diversifying out of rice and into vegetables, including potatoes, carrots and beets. Securing and co-financing these projects the Russian sovereign wealth fund RDIF has also been recruiting Saudi and other Middle Eastern investors.

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Left: Dmitry Arzhanov of AFG National. In 2015 Arzhanov announced a plan to add to his rice and grain crops, production of apples replacing pre-war imports from Poland. He also said AFG was investing more than $600 million in new production of potatoes, also to replace imports. In 2016 the state’s Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announmced a $4 billion fund with Middle Eastern investors to grow more rice and vegetables in Russia. Centre: Yevgeny Giner, whose profits from electricity in the Ukraine have been invested through offshore entities in Russian sports and now vegetables; click to read more. Right: Alexander Tkachev.

Alexander Tkachev has been moving in the opposite direction, diversifying into rice from other cereals and other foodstuffs. A Krasnodar deputy in the Russian parliament (1995-2001), Krasnodar’s governor (2001-2015), then federal agriculture minister (2015-2018), Tkachev retired from politics to become, with other family members, one of the largest oligarchs of farmland and farm production, especially in his home region of Krasnodar, but also in the new Russian territories which were formerly Ukrainian.

RUSSIA’S LARGEST FARMLAND OWNERS IN 2021, RANKED BY LAND VALUE

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Tkachev’s land holding is rated by Forbes to be the most valuable in the country though it’s not the largest. It rated much lower in the 2014 rankings before Tkachev left politics. Sugar oligarchs, Igor Khudokormov of Prodimex (No.2) and Vadim Moshkovich of Rusagro (No. 6), can be followed here. Third-ranked Miratorg is owned by the Linnik brothers and is principally a pork producer; read more. The Steppe holding (No. 4) belongs to Vladimir Yevtushenkov, whose businesses have been analysed here.

Another ranking as of mid-2022 by land area, instead of land value, reshuffles the order of the leaders; it also reveals significantly more land for Tkachev’s Agrocomplex than the Forbes tabulation:

RUSSIA’S LARGEST FARMLAND OWNERS IN 2022, RANKED BY LAND AREA (thousand hectares)

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In this study, 71 companies with a minimum land bank of 100,000 hectares were included in the rating. The total land bank of the companies represented amounted to 16.7 million hectares, 1.3 million hectares more than in 2021; in that year 66 companies made it into the top ranking, over the 100,000-ha threshold. The five leaders did not change, but their total land accumulation increased by 258,000 ha, with Tkachev’s Agrocomplex the biggest gainer in percentage terms. Outside the top-10, significant changes are under way as relatively smaller Russian groups invest their surplus cash into crop land and livestock businesses. In part, this is a war outcome. Because of worldwide sanctions against Russian bank accounts and assets, the funds which earlier flowed abroad are now remaining at home. With state protection for domestic food production and state budget subsidies and incentives to investors, the demand for farmland has triggered price increases per hectare in the central and southern regions of up to 50%; in other regions, the price of land has almost doubled. Mergers and acquisitions have also multiplied as larger holdings have taken over smaller ones. Of the total arable land area in Russia of 123 million ha, the largest cropping regions are Krasnodar and its bordering regions to east and west. In these regions, the size of the farming units is getting steadily larger and larger by crop area. For more, read this.

In Russian business Tkachev is as controversial as Arzhanov, though not for the same reasons. Tkachev’s tactics for asset accumulation drew protests at first from small farmers, and then from Russian kompromat reporters. Their reports have been cribbed by the anti-Russian think tanks and the US government’s propaganda organ, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In 2014 Tkachev was sanctioned by the US Treasury, the Swiss and European Union governments.

His Agrocomplex holding has been expanding across the Ukrainian border, the US and Ukrainians say — without mentioning that the Ukrainian owners had illegally privatised their land since the Kiev putsch of 2014.

In a report on the US promotion of land “reform” in the Ukraine – one of the conditions for financing from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – the Oakland Institute concluded in August 2021 that “imposing the creation of a land market in Ukraine will further concentrate control of land in the hands of oligarchs and large agribusinesses, while favouring the interests of foreign investors and banks. It is unfortunately the vast majority of Ukrainian farmers and citizens who will have to pay the cost.”

American and Canadian investors have been behind the Ukrainian oligarch takeover of farmland and agro-industry since 2014. For more on the Ukrainian oligarch group known as Kernel, read this. Next to Kernel, the US investment group NCH has been the largest Ukrainian landholder. NCH is based in New York; Harvard University is one of its largest unit investors.

Astarta, a major Ukrainian farmland holder, has a large Canadian investor, Fairfax Financial Holdings. Fairfax is the largest property and casualty insurer in the Ukraine. Since the putsch in Kiev in 2014, Fairfax’s share price on the Toronto stock exchange has more than doubled. At the same time, the group reported that it was excluding from its insurance loss balance-sheet “net losses of $67.7 (approximately 84% incurred but not reported losses) in 2022 relating to the Ukraine conflict primarily within the political risk and terrorism lines of business.” Underwriting profit in the group’s Ukrainian business increased by 46% at the same time.

In last week’s Kommersant, Tkachev was reported to be diversifying into rice growing. Following the drop in Krasnodar’s rice harvest last year, Anatoly Kostirev reported that “the large holdings are increasing assets in this sector. So, the structures associated with the agricultural complex of the ex-head of the Ministry of Agriculture Alexander Tkachev have acquired about 3,000 hectares in the region, where more than 15,000 tonnes of rice can be harvested per year. It will be difficult [for Tkachev] to increase the share in the domestic market, but it is possible to increase the export of products after the lifting of the ban on its export.”

Tkachev’s Agrocomplex bought out the regional rice grower Totriss from the Krasnodar company Agrochem LLC, which has operated the Mariansky rice processing plant in the region. Kommersant reported its sources as speculating that the sale had been forced on Totriss because it had run out of cash. In 2022 Totriss had planted just under 21,000 ha of rice, and harvested 149,000 tonnes – a drop of about 30% because of the water shortage. With the takeover of Totriss, Tkachev is likely to add 10% to his harvest area, or about 24,000 ha. This compares with 27,800 ha planted by Arzhanov’s AFRG National.

Since the start of the Special Military Operation, the flow of fresh water from the Dnieper River to the Crimea has been restored, and the Ukrainian blockade lifted. This has enabled rice growers to announce that this year in Crimea they will be sowing 3,500 ha for a target production of about 30,000 tonnes. This is five times more than the harvest of last year, the first since the reopening of the North Crimean Canal. It is not known who are the main growers.

As of last month, Russian agro-industry sources claim, the price of rice processed into groats (kasha) had risen 24% year on year to Rb64,130 ($855) per tonne. Unmilled rice was selling in January at Rb34, 140 per tonne, up 52% on the previous year. Price growth attracts investors; it deters consumers, and so even if Russian rice consumption slows to a halt, the restoration of irrigation water to Crimea and Krasnodar should lead the government to lifting the export ban in three months’ time. This is what the rice oligarchs want.

When the rice can be exported once more, the state investment in breeding special Russian rice varieties will be directed to the quality and taste of rice demanded by consumers abroad.

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The main Russian rice brands on the domestic market; at right, Orgtium is a brand of organic rice grown in Russia. Source: Komsomolskaya Pravda rating of recommended rice brands including Russian and imported rice for 2023. Russia eats 600,000-620,000 tonnes of rice a year, according to the Institute of Agricultural Market Conjuncture (ICAR). Imports have ranged between 190,000 and 240,000 tonnes annually, while exports were running between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes until the export ban was imposed last year. With a harvest of about 770,000 tonnes in 2022, there should be no shortage this year or domestic consumers. Source: https://www.kp.ru//

Dmitry Rylko, Director General of the Institute of Agricultural Market Conjuncture (ICAR) in Moscow, told the Kommersant reporter “that rice production remains promising. There is a certain share of imports in the domestic market, which supports prices, and export channels to Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa have also been established…Andrei Sizov, Director of Sovecon [said] Agrocomplex is planning on an increase in exports after the lifting of restrictions [July 2023], noting that the domestic rice market is saturated, and the holding does not have a strong brand in the category.”

Rylko, Sizov and the National Rice Union head, Mikhail Radchenko, were asked to say if in the present conditions there is a process of accelerating concentration of growing area, capital, and ownership, and if so whether Arzhanov and Tkachev are gaining at the expense of other rice farmers, or at each other’s. They refused to answer.

https://johnhelmer.net/tossing-rice-at- ... more-87766

It will be a happy day when they all are expropriated.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 10, 2023 1:53 pm

The Proryvist newspaper is seven years old!
No. 3/79.III.2023

Our newspaper has come a long way of becoming in order to appear before readers in the form in which it has existed in recent years, earning the respect of thinking readers and causing a bile-allergic reaction of opportunists and leftists.

Exactly seven years ago, on April 10, 2016, several supporters of the Proryv magazine created the Proryv Supporters newspaper. At that time, we set ourselves the task of propagating the breakthrough line, attracting and organizing novice authors, and by deed, not words, to achieve recognition from the Editorial Board of the Proryv magazine that we were correctly and consistently working in the wake of communism. We have always been guided by the breakthrough slogan about the priority of the theoretical form of the class struggle .

Initially, the publication was hosted on one of the blogging platforms and was not called a newspaper, but a propaganda leaflet. However, from the very first material, our work was carried out with an eye to the propaganda of the theory. Having become acquainted with the first articles on this site, which were subsequently organized into the first issues of the newspaper, you can get an idea of ​​​​the very beginning of our journey. Those articles do not differ in the necessary sharpness of wording and depth, but on the whole, they are not ashamed of them even today.

Gradually, dozens of views turned into hundreds, and a small but stable readership was formed. Since 2017, the publication has expanded the composition of the authors, took shape in the newspaper and moved to a separate website with an address, which after some time gave rise to the initially unofficial nickname of the newspaper "Breakthrough", and its activists "breakthroughs". So the representative offices of the publication in social networks were named.

A long period of conquest of a wider readership began due to the growth, first of all, of the quality of publications. We, as authors, developed and directed our efforts not at replicating materials, but at the depth of propaganda of the breakthrough position and the study of the theoretical problems of communism. In accordance with the concept of scientific centralism, the quality of work, including personnel, was put at the forefront , and not its quantitative parameters.

It was decided, along with current publications on topical issues, to prepare, based on the generalization of the content of the key articles of the journal, a number of fundamental materials that could act as something like a textbook on the theory of Marxism-Leninism. The first stage of the implementation of this decision resulted in the creation of the Breakthrough Dictionary , as a collection of preparatory quotations on the most important categories, and the Breakthrough Minimum , a collection of articles, the study of which gives a preliminary idea of ​​​​the theory of Marxism-Leninism of our days on the whole spectrum of issues: from diamatics to party building and building a communist society.

At the same time, our leading authors and some activists were co-opted into the Editorial Board of the magazine, and thus the newspaper gradually earned the right to organizationally join the Proryv magazine. In 2020, the publication was renamed "Prorivist".

Around the middle of 2019, the newspaper had a more or less stable audience of about five thousand readers, the lion's share of which are people not only sympathetic to communism, but also not afraid of the difficulties of mastering communist theory. The growth of the newspaper's audience slowed down, having reached the objective quantitative level of interest of the most advanced proletarians. Almost all people who are substantively and deeply interested in Marxist theory inevitably become our readers on the basis of the principle “who seeks will find”.

Throughout the existence of the newspaper, a normal process of personnel development has been going on, some of the authors and activists themselves fall off, some are removed as opportunists.

Regarding interaction with the widest audience, the following should be noted. Along with the fact that a hundred of our activists and supporters, on their own initiative, carry out tireless daily propaganda work on the Internet and not only, revealing to interested proletarians the essence of certain phenomena from the point of view of Marxism on various platforms and in various situations, the newspaper managed to distribute some of its materials to the widest possible audience. Thus, B. Rozhin, a Marxist-oriented blogger well-known in patriotic circles, kindly replicates some of our articles, which gain tens of thousands of reads. On the Zen platform» on our channel there were materials that gained hundreds of thousands of reads and thousands of comments due to the recommendation algorithm used. But neither of these results in the explosive growth of our readership. The majority of our people, who in general are still the bearers of leftist views and Soviet nostalgia, are still interested in listening to all sorts of Semin, Platoshkin and other goblins, and not reading our materials. And this is normal and logical, and should not confuse our supporters. This only confirms that the masses will not follow either bare ideas or individual publications, they need an authoritative political organization that can really take power.. Until such an organization is formed, left-wing entertainment, semi-kitchen blogger chatter rules the ball. In this sense, we should compare ourselves with publications of parties such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the RKRP, the RPR, the OKP. Everyone can be convinced that, unlike the Breakthrough, the latter are lifeless, superficial newspapers and websites that have nothing to do with the prospects of the struggle for communism.

The sharp change in the foreign and domestic political situation in connection with the intervention of the Russian Federation in the civil war in Ukraine in 2022 stirred up society and caused a rather sharp influx of authors and those who declare themselves to be our supporters by our standards. Including from abroad.

Why our business is moving so slowly was explained in the newspaper back in 2019.

Firstly , among us there are no geniuses of the level of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but we work on ourselves and educate ourselves in order to meet the objective requirements of communism.

Secondly , our enemy has grown considerably wiser since the Great October Revolution, and the severity of the defeat of communism in the USSR has become an important hindering factor in the formation of a revolutionary class. And if we consider the history of the emergence, formation and victorious march of Bolshevism, then it took the first Marxists 20 years to create a party, and then another 14 years to take power, taking into account the monstrous world war and the crisis of tsarism. The bourgeoisie learned from the lessons of October.

“On the one hand, the bourgeoisie’s control of the material situation of the broad masses has blunted the power of the old slogans, made it impossible to spread communist ideas through a mere appeal to solve the problems of poverty, poverty, unemployment, and so on. Moreover, now almost all bourgeois parties are shouting in unison about the fight against the ills of capitalism and the consequences of exploitation. On the other hand, the role of deeply theoretical propaganda has critically increased, proving in an accessible way the scientific invincibility, the truth of Marxism-Leninism and the communist future of all mankind ... It is not surprising that not only the Breakthrough fails to repeat the successes of the Bolsheviks, but also no one in the world. The situation has changed significantly, something has become simpler, especially in technical aspects, but the main thing has become more complicated - we are confronted by a much more competent enemy in the person of the oligarchy (corporations), its army of propagandists (scientists, journalists, ideologists), the police state and its leaders. Lenin, as you know, said that in a backward country it is not as difficult to overthrow the power of capital as in a developed one, but it is much more difficult to move on to building communism. So, now we live in a developed capitalist country, where it is even more difficult to overthrow the power of capital than in England or the USA at the beginning of the 20th century, but on the other hand, it will be possible to move on to building communism in just a few months.

Thirdly , the leftists do not recognize scientific centralism, including in the Leninist-Stalinist experience of Bolshevism, and are guided by an opportunistic approach to organizational building, which makes it simply impossible for them to create a viable organization and form a revolutionary working class. They are waiting for power to fall to them of its own accord from the hands of the bourgeoisie, moreover, having neither the ability nor ideas how to exercise it. In this sense, we have to act alone, overcoming the resistance of the most inveterate opportunism in the form of the Left's love of democratic centralism, or even just democracy.

Therefore, fourthly , there is no uniform understanding of the theory of Marxism-Leninism among people who consider themselves Marxists. This is primarily due to the fact that

“Left activists, members of parties and participants in movements read Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin diagonally, do not study party documents, do not think with their own heads. The practice of communication shows that the majority of leftists lack the skills of theoretical work and self-education. Therefore, let it be said not to offend them, but some half-educated people listen to other half-educated people or misguided opportunist theoreticians. Hence the result ... the revolutionary literary and revolutionary educational traditions, laid down in our country by the populists, have been largely lost, they mostly disappeared during the Khrushchev-Brezhnev USSR. Read the products of the left parties, this is 90% squalor. Theoretical content is generally at least one hysteria and loud slogans. And now in video format. See how the left learns Marxism,

The Proryv magazine and our newspaper following it are trying to revive the Bolshevik traditions of forging personnel, to form a galaxy of strong Marxist propagandists, agitators, and organizers. And to do this on the basis of scientific centralism, that is, on the basis of a uniform understanding of Marxism-Leninism and the highest level of discipline. Of course, taking into account the negative experience of Bolshevism, when all sorts of Trotskyists and other carrion infiltrated the party in order to harm and spoil. Unlike other left groups, no difficult situations, like the transformations of the Russian bourgeois state or the outbreak of war , requiring the highest manifestation of diamatic thinking for their scientific assessment, have led to a loss of unanimity and splits in our ranks.

Therefore, one should not complain about speed, one should not rush to establish the Party of Scientific Centralism. Be guided by the wise instruction of Valery Alekseevich:

“We just need to work, work and work in our direction, and the result will come.”

The editors continue to call on sympathizers, supporters and activists to rally around the newspaper and the magazine!

Readers, start writing!

Writers, write better, deeper and more often!

Everyone, distribute our materials, diligently study the theory of Marxism-Leninism from primary sources, support us organizationally and financially!

Happy seventh anniversary of our newspaper, comrades! Hooray!


REVISION
10/04/2023

https://prorivists.org/not_7y/

Google Translator

Red added because that point cannot be stressed enough.

the priority of the theoretical form of the class struggle . ain't the only thing, but it is a very big thing largely ignored, especially here in the West.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 17, 2023 2:19 pm

RUSSIAN CHAMPAGNE ISN’T FIZZLING — IT’S SPARKLING AND NOW IT’S FROM CRIMEA

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

There’s one way of winning a war while keeping the home fires burning as normally as possible; and another way of losing a war while keeping the home fires burning as normally as possible.

The first way is to stock up on champagne, as they are doing in Moscow.

The second way is Washington’s: that’s to send armoured units, combat uniformed police, and media reporters in helicopters to a village to capture a boy in his night shorts. You already know all there is to see – if not to know — about the second. Here is what to know in addition.

In Moscow, the news just in, according to Tass, is that “in the first quarter of 2023, the production of champagne in Russia increased by 14.4% to 2.5 million decalitres relative to the indicator of 2022”. Also, “the government did not support the idea of posting a warning on every bottle, on ‘Alcohol is your enemy!’”

In this war, Russians know exactly who and what the main enemy is, as they keep telling the domestic pollsters. It’s the US.

WHO ARE RUSSIA’S ENEMIES – LEVADA POLLING FROM 2018-2020

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Source: https://www.levada.ru/ reported in November 2020. Earlier polls are reported here. The most recent Levada poll, published in February of 2023, shows that since the special military operation began a year ago, Russian identification of the US as the principal enemy has jumped to 73%. Sentiment has also hardened against the European Union and the Ukraine which are now judged enemies by 69%. On the positive side, Belarus and China lead as Russia’s friends – 92% and 85%, respectively.

On the course of the war itself, however, Russians are very reserved. They are reluctant to talk to pollsters; they refuse to discuss the war around the dinner table.

By contrast, there is deep and also measurable public optimism about the position the country is currently in, and the direction in which it is headed. This optimism has been rising steadily through President Vladimir Putin’s term; in February of this year it was at its highest level since the polling began in 1996 – 68%.

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Source: https://www.levada.ru/

Americans by contrast are approaching historical highs in their reported pessimism towards the direction the country is going – between 75% and 63%, last July to this month.

Is the drinking of champagne the Russian way of expressing confidence without minimizing the painfulness of the topic?

Follow the archive of reporting on the ups and downs of the Russian champagne market since 2012 here.

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Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

Vadim Drobiz, the expert on the Russian alcohol market and director of the Centre for Federal and Regional Alcohol Markets (TsIFRRA), explains the commercial dynamic: “The demand for sparkling wines has risen since 2020 by about 25%, so have the sales volume and the imports. Last year the production in Russia was about 220 million litres. The reason is in the decision in 2020 to abandon the category of ‘sparkling wine drinks’ which were very cheap and of low quality. Moreover, consumers of wines – mostly the middle class – have started to prefer sparkling wines instead of still wines. The rise of production and consumption can be seen in all price segments. If to speak of of the regional shares of this sparkling wine production, the picture is as follows: the Krasnodar region – 57%, Crimea and Sevastopol – 14%, St. Petersburg – 13%, Dagestan – 6%, other regions – 10%.”

Production figures for the January to March quarter of this year show that while output of alcohol drinks was roughly stable – up 0.1% for 38.5 million dal (excluding beer and cider), vodka production dropped 8.5% to 15.9 million dal, cognac down 1.1% to 1.9 million dal. In January and February, according to the state alcohol market authority, Rosalkogolregulirovanie (the Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation), there was an increase in wine production acorss the country of 10.2% to 3.4 million dal. Champagne production for the same period amounted to 1.7 million dal, an increase of 25.8%.

In parallel, the Russian wine market was defeating US and European sanctions and increasing imports of wine, especially from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany. The volume of wine imports from France was virtually unchanged compared to 2021. Italian imports jumped 19% to lead the wine import market by a very large margin over Spain and France.

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Source: https://www.rbc.ru/

In this analysis by RBC, published in February, the effectiveness of parallel imports schemes to evade sanction is plain. “Despite the problems with logistics and restrictions, the volume of wine supplies to Russia not only did not decrease in 2022, but even increased. Italy is still the import leader, Uzbekistan showed the fastest year-on-year growth in supplies. Based on data from the Federal Customs Service (FCS), which was provided to RBC by one of the participants in the alcohol market, in January—December 2022, distributors imported 405.1 million litres of wine into the country – still, sparkling and fortified wines. The volume of imports was 10% more than in the twelve months of 2021. The aggregate data concerning the volume of supplies and the largest importing countries were confirmed by two other market participants.”

Because of the war conditions, and to deny the enemy information on how the sanctions war is being defeated, the Federal Customs Service does not respond to questions about the wine import trade. Customs suspended publication of export and import data from the end of February 2022.

The press service of the FCS did not comment on the substance of RBC’s request for compliance with data on wine imports in 2022, recalling that they temporarily do not publish data on foreign trade operations. The publication of FCS statistics on exports and imports has been suspended since the end of February 2022 “in order to avoid incorrect estimates.”

The biggest losers in the Russian import market have been American and Australian wines. The Europeans have simply evaded their government sanctions by exporting to Russia through Turkey, Dubai and other trading hubs.


The head of the Wine Retail Information Centre, Alexander Stavtsev, noted with some irony that for Russian wine importers and consumers, Italy remains “systemically important” with what he calls the “rule of the three Ps” – Prosecco, Pinot Grigio, and Primitivo — which are always and plentifully available in all types of retail outlets, from the premium supermarkets to the cheapest cash-and-carry stores. Stavtsev also recalled that one of the significant events for wine importers in 2022 was the way in which they compensated for the sanctions disruptions by changing their planned delivery schedules so as to amass stocks earlier in the buying season than usual. In August to October advance stocking caused a 43% jump in wine imports from the European Union countries in 2022, compared to the year before.

Usually, the surge in Russian wine imports takes place in the fourth quarter — well before the New Year holiday season. But now alcohol sales have surged earlier and then returned to normal only in the last two weeks of 2022. This indicates that suppliers have formed a very sizeable back-up in stocks to guard against war disruption risks. At the same time, this encourages more intensive competition for retailers to promote turnover when demand has been lagging as it usually does in the year’s first quarter, Stavtsev says.

There are less optimistic forecasts for this year. “The growth rate of wine imports, Alexander Lipilin, Executive Director of the Fort wine trading company, also expects a continued increase in the import of spirits in the conditions of replacement of the brands which have exited following sanctions. However, he also believes demand is dropping as consumers try to save their money and spend less on consumption. The trend may become clear at the end of the second quarter, when consumers may switch lower priced alcohol drinks.”

Sugar content and bottle price — these distinguish between the main types of champagne on the Russian market. The main areas for vineyards and harvesting are the North Caucasus and, above all, the Krasnodar Territory. The champagne factories, however, are close to the consumers in the large cities — Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov, etc. The two main types of champagne are the traditional Soviet champagne, which has kept the sweetness which was characteristic of the original French champagnes, and the newly established dry Russian champagne varieties. In the production of Russian champagne, it is allowed to use wine materials of non-champagne grape cépages, as well as imported wine materials, if they provide the established level of quality of champagne. The best known Russian champagne label is Abrau-Durso. Follow its business trajectory here.

The best of the dry Crimean champagnes are Novy Svet and Zolotoya Balka’s Balaclava (lead image). Like the French producers of sparkling wines in the Loire and Rhone regions, and the Italians producing prosecco in Veneto, the Russians have worked out that consumers prefer the grape varieties which go into their bottles to those of the designated Champagne region.

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Visit the Novy Svet vineyard at in Crimea. And the Fanagoria vineyard in Krasnodar. For background, read this.

These market dynamics, especially the sanctions war, give an advantage in the Russian market to the best capitalized and largest retailers at the expense of smaller groceries and specialized distributors. According to the results of the past year, the X5 Group, Russia’s largest food retailer controlled by Mikhail Fridman, became the largest importer of wine for the first time. Based on the data available to RBC, in 2022 the company increased its own supplies by 62% to 34.9 million litres overtaking alcohol distributors Luding Group and Simple Group. They, in turn, increased imports in kind by 3% and 19%, respectively: Luding imported 30.1 million litres of wine; Simple about 21.2 million litres.

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The wine display at an X5 Pyaterochka supermarket in Purpe, a remote Yamal-Nenets town in Siberia. The licensing and other trade restrictions on the supermarket trade in wines in the US do not apply in the freer Russian market.

TO SANCTIONS WAR, CHEERS!

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In an expert rating by Wine Guide of Russia for the best domestic sparkling wines in December 2022, these are the four best, left to right: High Bank Riesling, Mishako Cuvée, Aristov’s Cuvée Alexander, and Terroir of Kuban. Read more, with prices, here. Here is a rating of the four best Russian champagnes.

https://johnhelmer.net/russian-champagn ... more-87825

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Vladimir Kara-Murza received 25 years in prison
April 17, 11:59

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Vladimir Kara-Murza (not to be confused with historian Sergei Kara-Murza) received 25 years in prison for treason and spreading fake news about the Russian army.
Previously recognized as a foreign agent. Now we won't see him for a long time.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8297810.html

The fifth column is worried
April 17, 14:46

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Liberals are confused. How so, our accomplice was given https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83185 25 years in prison, and maniacs and pedophiles are given less. How so? For what?
Silly people do not understand that from the point of view of the state and society, this public now looks worse than maniacs and pedophiles. Because maniacs and pedophiles are sick people who commit criminal offenses, and people like Kara-Murza are enemies who deliberately carry out their activities aimed at the destruction of society and the state, as well as openly collaborating with enemy countries and the Nazi regime in Ukraine. And in this in terms of they represent a greater danger (especially in a war, where the enemy aims to destroy Russia within its current borders) than ordinary maniacs and pedophiles (which does not negate the need to lift the moratorium on the death penalty for maniacs and serial pedophiles).

And a quarter, this is not even a hint, but a signal that the time for half-measures and sentimentality is over. Now already. Looking back at this case, other representatives of the open fifth column, who are not yet in prison and have not dumped abroad for some reason, can also receive long sentences. I am sure that this is not the only "chetertak" that we will see. Both internal and external.

PS. To the heap. Speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIP6q_RJ8PM Kara-Murza in Arizona calling for the supply of weapons to Ukraine. Under Stalin, this is immediately the 58th and at an expense.
PS2. The British passport of Kara-Murza does not work in Russia at all - the Russian Federation does not have https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83195 agreements with Britain on the recognition of dual citizenship. So the Russian Federation is unlikely to be disturbed by the hysteria in London.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8298256.html

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 18, 2023 2:44 pm

Russia in the world news today: visit of Chinese defense minister, high alert naval exercises in the Pacific and charm offensives in Brazil and India

It would appear from today’s news about Russian activities on the world stage that the country’s leadership is fully capable of walking and chewing gum simultaneously, unlike the leaders of some countries that we will not embarrass by mentioning here.

Western mainstream media have given greatest attention to the visit to Moscow of China’s Defense Minister, General Li Shangfu, which began yesterday when he was received by President Putin for discussions together with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu. The photo opportunity exchange of courtesies in which Putin and Li both confirmed the close ties of their countries following on the Putin-Xi Jinping friendship was given air time on Euronews, the BBC and other broadcasters who normally are openly hostile to the Kremlin and do it no favors. The significance of cooperation in defense of these two superpowers is news too big to ignore.

Many Western observers reminded their audiences that Li has been under U.S. sanctions since the Trump presidency for his “close cooperation” with Russia back then. But what did that cooperation consist in? Li was responsible for acquiring military hardware, and he signed the contracts to buy Russia’s world beating air defense system, the S-400, and its most advanced fighter jets. It would not be surprising if during his 4-day visit Li continued his pursuit of other world-beating Russian equipment that could be very useful in any pending military clash with the United States over Taiwan. It would also be logical for Li to be discussing which Chinese hardware could be supplied to Russia if and when the clash with NATO over Ukraine escalates to a new order of risk and China decides to abandon its present caution and throw in its fate with Russia. None of these questions, of course, figure in the reports of Western media today.

Today’s activities of Li in Moscow got far less attention in Western media, though they say a lot about what close relations between the two defense establishments mean. He visited the Military Academy of the General Staff, which in the past took in many Chinese students who went on to make serious careers in the PRC. It is reasonable to expect the numbers of Chinese students in this and other Russian military schools to swell once again, forming the cadres that ensure mutual understanding and coordinated defense programs for decades to come.

On Russian television today it was a very different ongoing event which took center stage: the snap high alert exercises of the Russian Pacific fleet. That this was coming figured in reports of many Western media outlets ahead of its start. Their reports today are far less numerous and content is minimal. Meanwhile TASS today has the most informative text account (online), drawing on the report which Defense Minister Shoigu made to Vladimir Putin for the television cameras. We are told that the exercises involve over 25,000 personnel, 167 combat ships and support vessels, including 12 submarines, 89 aircraft and helicopters.

However, the television coverage of the military exercises on Vesti tell a far more interesting story. We were taken aboard the ships, which are nearly all newly constructed, compact, with a sharply reduced radar profile, packed with the latest design cannon and rapid fire artillery such as we otherwise see daily on the battlefields of Donbas. And they are carrying Russia’s hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, which proved their worth in the devastating attack on a bunker used by NATO officers near Lviv on 9 March. We were told today that the Kinzhal also serves as an unstoppable and highly accurate destroyer of enemy aircraft. That it sinks ships to the scale of aircraft carriers was never in doubt.

I make no pretense at having competence in military affairs, but even a layman like myself could be shocked at the comparison between these new Russian surface vessels taking part in the Pacific Fleet exercises and the antiquated, bloated German vessels that today’s Western newscasters showed participating in NATO naval exercises in the Baltic.

As for timing, shall we say it is not fortuitous that the Russians decided to call their Pacific Fleet exercise, which operates in particular near the Kuriles and in close proximity to Japan, at the very moment when the G7 foreign ministers are meeting near Hiroshima. Nor can one ignore the close sequence between the Russian exercises and China’s massive show of naval strength last week in the waters around Taiwan, including exercises of planes on one of their aircraft carriers, to show their displeasure with the visit of the Taiwan president to the USA just days before and her talks with the Speaker of the House.

Finally, with respect to these two sets of exercises, looking at the map we see that they take place at either end of an arc running from Kamchatka down to the sea off Vietnam. These are two claws of a potential Russian-Chinese pincer entrapping the US and allied naval presence in between. Is this by chance or by intent a clear message to Washington?

Now let us move on to the charm offensives. Today’s Vesti carries video reportage of the arrival of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Brazil for the start of his Latin American tour that will also include visits to Venezuela and Cuba.

Perhaps taking a cue from the dressing down that Annalena Baerbock displayed several days ago when she descended from her plane in Beijing in sports trainers, the usually dapper Lavrov descended in Brazil wearing jeans and white sneakers. But he was in a finely tailored suit for his meetings with top Brazilian officials later in the day. We may assume they have a great deal to discuss following President Lula’s visit to Beijing last week. Topics may well include the Brazilian position with respect to China’s 12 point peace plan for Ukraine, the question of creating a new BRICS currency for trade between its member states and the plans for further growing the New Development Bank in Beijing. The NDB is the BRICS’ answer to the IMF and World Bank. It is part of the new architecture of global institutions that China, and Russia, are building to underpin multipolarity. It is relevant to Lavrov’s discussions that Lula’s former protégé Dilma Rousseff was recently elected as the Bank’s president by its Board of Directors. Since 2021 the NDB has among its members Bengladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay. There surely will be many more members to come.

Lastly, Russian news today is carrying extensive text and video reports on the talks that Denis Maturov, RF Minister of Industry and Trade, is having in Delhi, where he heads a substantial Russian corporate delegation. The Indian Foreign Minister is shown warmly receiving Maturov with words to the effect that Russia and India share the ambition to establish multipolarity in global governance.

Per Rossiiskaya Gazeta, one of the key tasks of Manturov’s delegation is to sway the opinion of the Indian government in favor of granting Russia a further contract to build a second atomic power station. The online news agency AEX tells us that Manturov is in talks to expand direct air links between the two countries to better facilitate business exchanges and tourism. Vechernaya Moskva informs that Russia and India are working to create a reinsurance company to provide coverage for oil deliveries by ship.

In the latter regard, if I properly caught the figure given by Vesti on the fly, Russian deliveries of oil to India are now running at the extraordinary volume of 1.5 million barrels a day. This has driven up the level of bilateral trade by 50% versus a year ago. To date the figure is 45 billion dollars.

Other subjects for trade talks include closer ties in the pharmaceutical and automotive industries. An agreement for a free trade zone is under discussion, as are legal protections for capital investments.

As Western businessmen know, India is not an easy market for foreigners, and the Russians will have to be very hard working and patient to succeed in all the vectors now under discussion. But they clearly have political relations on their side.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/04/17/ ... and-india/

*************

VZGLYAD – “IT’S TIME FOR RUSSIA TO CHANGE ITS POSITION IN THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT”

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

The title of an op-ed piece by a Moscow academic, published this week in Vzglyad, bellwether of Russian security analysts, requires reading between the lines. Every Russian knows how to do this since the tsar’s chancellery posted bulletins outside the Winter Palace on how well the Russian Navy was doing in battles against the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904.

Neither the gap nor the remedy has been the point of any communiqué issued from the regular meetings of the Kremlin Security Council, nor has it been discussed publicly in the state media, including the Valdai Club.

The Vzglyad headline refers to the one international conflict on which President Vladimir Putin has said so little since the start of his term, and done so much – this is Israel’s war against Palestine.

The gap was made visible once by the General Staff; that was in September 2018 after the Israel Air Force caused the shoot-down in Syria of a Russian Ilyushin-20M electronic reconnaissance aircraft (lead image), and the killing of all fifteen crewmen on board. At that time the Russian military expressed a loss of confidence which had not been seen in public since President Boris Yeltsin countermanded orders for Russian military aid to Serbia under NATO bombing between March and June 1999, dismissing Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on the US demand.

Read the first report of the evidence in the Il-20 case on September 18, 2018, and the second report on September 24, 2018. The third report two months later revealed what happened after Putin had what the Kremlin spokesman called “a short talk” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Paris on November 11, 2018. The next day, the Security Council notice of November 12 reported Putin had “informed the permanent members of the Security Council about several of his brief meetings on the sidelines of the events in Paris.”

Four and a half years have elapsed since then. The Vzglyad headline of April 17 means there is a policy, and there is pressing reason of state to change it now. Inside the text, the point is expressed by its author more tentatively. “Perhaps it’s time to change the approach somewhat? After all, it no longer fully corresponds to both the changed regional situation and Russian national interests.”

Read the original here. The translation into English has not been acknowledged or approved by Vzglyad or its author, Gevorg Mirzayan. The only editing to the original text are modifications of punctuation. Illustrations and their captions have been added for reference.

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Source: https://vz.ru/


April 17, 2023
It’s time for Russia to change its position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
By Gevorg Mirzayan
Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is once again experiencing a stage of aggravation. Clashes between Israeli and Palestinian policemen on the Temple Mount — where the Wailing Wall, sacred to Jews, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, sacred to Muslims, are located — turned into real fighting, including bombing of the Gaza Strip and rocket attacks from the Strip on Israeli cities.

And this is not the end of the holy month of Ramadan, on the last Friday of which the Islamic world celebrates Al-Quds Day, that is, Jerusalem Day. Introduced by the late Supreme Ayatollah of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini in 1982, this day is actively used in the Muslim world to condemn the methods and consequences of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem – that is, to express solidarity with the people of Palestine. In practice, this solidarity is expressed in loud statements by leaders, anti–Israeli rallies and other demonstrations – the exploitation by the Israelis, who have regularly violated the rights of the Palestinians, has always given enough reasons for loud words.

Until recently, Russia, a country with a large Muslim community, refrained from celebrating Al-Quds Day. At best, the leaders of Russian Muslims have spoken about the suffering of the Palestinian people, and academic conferences on the Middle East were held. And this was quite understandable: Moscow adhered to an equidistant policy on the Palestinian issue, trying to maintain relations with both Israel and the Arab world at the same time.

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May 16, 2021: https://johnhelmer.net/

But perhaps it’s time to change the approach somewhat? After all, it no longer fully corresponds to both the changed regional situation and Russian national interests.

By changing the regional situation, we mean, first of all, the processes associated with the Iranian-Saudi normalization. Representatives of Tehran and Riyadh did not just shake hands after the talks in Beijing. They began a real process of resolving bilateral contradictions (in Syria, Yemen, etc.). And this means not only the collapse of Tel Aviv’s (and Washington’s) strategy of using Saudi Arabia for a war with Iran, but also the consolidation of the two leaders of the Islamic world on an issue that concerns the entire Islamic world. That is, simply put, the Palestinian issue.

At the same time, this issue is, in fact, an element of an even larger trend – the struggle of developing countries against the neo-colonialism of the West. A trend in which Russia is not just trying to embed its own security in Ukraine, but also to embed from the position of the new leader of the entire anti-colonial movement. And the leader must be ahead, including in terms of rhetoric.

Moscow needs this leadership from the point of view of its national interests. And, it would seem, they contradict another interest – the policy of neutrality, of equidistance. However, this policy was necessary — necessary and beneficial precisely until Israel took a very peculiar position with regard to the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO). This is the position of the blackmailer.

As part of this position, Tel Aviv is supplying the Kiev regime with various kinds of ordnance and even weapons, but so far is refraining from supplies of high–tech systems. Tel Aviv explicitly says that its decision on these supplies will depend on the level of Russian-Iranian cooperation. Well, well. Or else this depends on the mood of a particular Israeli leader – after all, there is no consensus position on this issue in Israel. If the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes supplies, then his predecessor Yair Lapid (the same one who at the beginning of the conflict accused the Russian army of war crimes in Ukraine) was inclined in favour of supplies. In spite of the fact that the ideological descendants of those who committed the Holocaust are in power in Kiev.

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Israel’s President Chaim Herzog (left) meeting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky (right) in Kiev on October 5, 2021. “How can you not help the victims of such aggression," Zelenksy told Herzog: “I don't how to answer the questions that I always get about how has Israel helped and what else can Israel do.I am grateful to the people of Israel. I am grateful for the sincere and emotional support to the people of Ukraine...but we would like to also get support from your government.” Naftali Bennett was Israeli prime minister at the time. Yair Lapid was alternate prime minister and foreign minister then; he became prime minister between July and December 2022, and was succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu on December 29, 2022.

From a pragmatic point of view, Israel’s position can, of course, be understood – and even excused in some respects. First, Israel’s security largely depends on the United States. Yes, Tel Aviv (unlike, for example, Tokyo) has nuclear weapons. But recent conflicts show that the presence of the ‘last argument of kings’ is not enough to wage large conventional wars. Israel needs an American army, weapons, intelligence resources – and as a payment for access to all this, the Israeli leadership is required to support the foreign policy of the White House. Including in the Ukrainian direction.

Secondly, Israel categorically does not like the current Russian-Iranian rapprochement. Yes, Tel Aviv understands that it is primarily due to Iran’s willingness to provide direct military-technical assistance to Russia within its framework — and Moscow cannot throw away friendship with such countries. Yes, in Tel Aviv they understand that even the SMO did not force Russia to abandon one of its key foreign policy postulates: ‘Moscow is friends with those who are ready to be friends with it, but this friendship is not directed against those who are not hostile to Russia.’ Based on this concept, Russian-Iranian cooperation is not directed against countries which are friendly or at least neutral towards Russia.

Tel Aviv understands all this, but believes that circumstances have changed. That Russian-Iranian military-technical cooperation (forced or not, it doesn’t matter) reaches such a high level that it can no longer but threaten the security of Israel. In particular, according to experts, Iran, with the help of Russian specialists, has created a very powerful layered air defense system, which has reduced the already small chances of Israel bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

However, Russia, also understanding Israel’s position, can draw the following conclusions from this. Firstly, Israel supports the Kiev regime. Secondly, the level of this support will grow (partly due to US pressure, and partly due to the objective development of the Russian-Iranian partnership). Thirdly, it is pointless to make any concessions to the blackmailer.

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Soviet poster of 1978. The text says: “In the Israel occupied territory, Palestinians fighters against aggression and for the sacred right of their people to have their own independent state are arrested and kept in jail."

In regular polling by the Levada Centre of Moscow since 2006, between 2% and 5% of a nationwide sample of Russians has identified Israel as one of the top-5 allies of Russia; and the same proportion has identified Israel as one of Russia’s top-5 enemies. The pollster reports regular surveys showing Russian attitudes towards Palestine growing more positive towards the Palestinians, more hostile to the Israelis. Follow this here. For more on the evolution of Al Quds Day, read this.

That is why, perhaps, the time has come to take a new position on the Palestinian issue. To take the celebration of Al-Quds Day to a new level, as well as to take a more pro-Palestinian position in the Middle East conflict. To stand on the side of those who help Russia within the framework of their own interests (Iran, Saudi Arabia) against those who help our enemies. And thereby to send a very clear signal to the world – a signal that Russia will treat its partners exactly as they treat it. To help supporters – and not to act in the interests of opponents.


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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 21, 2023 2:43 pm

RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS WANT WARTIME VOTE FOR NATIONALIZATION OF POLLUTION, PRIVATIZATION OF PROFITS

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

In the history of the privatization of Russia’s industrial polluters no oligarch has been dirtier, penalized more often, and avoided court and state regulators more regularly than the steel, coke and coal producer, Igor Zyuzin. No one has more faithfully and profitably lobbied for Zyuzin’s benefit in parliament and government than Alexander Shokhin (lead image, right).

Their successful collaboration at prevailing over the declared pollution policies of President Vladimir Putin, the regional governors, and the federal anti-pollution agency Rospriradnadzor (RPN), have been reported since 2017. Zyuzin’s record, including his concealment of his profits abroad through the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Times, and the Financial Times, has been documented for much longer.

In the most recent tale about Zyuzin and Shokhin a month ago, it was reported that a state bank was planning to nationalize Zyuzin’s assets through a bankruptcy court case, and that he and Shokhin were appealing for Kremlin help to stave off that outcome, in part by relieving the group of its pollution liabilities.

Until now, Zyuzin has always seen off the bank court claims, with Shokhin’s help. In this new report, published yesterday by the Moscow business daily Vedomosti – no longer owned by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal — the overwhelming majority of the parliament’s deputies have had no qualms voting approval in a first reading several months ago of another Zyuzin bailout, despite the evidence on their desks that a strong faction of government ministers, agencies and banks want to put a stop to Zyuzin. This faction proposed to State Duma deputies that they vote on much tougher measures this week.

There are limitations in the way the Vedomosti reporter, Nadezhda Sintsova, can compose and can publish this story. But Russian readers know how to read between the lines. Compared to the coverage of Zyuzin’s business in the New York and London papers, the Russian text has meaning in the lines, even more between them. The American and British reporting has printed falsehood on the lines, and corruption between them.

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Read the original here. The translation into English has not been acknowledged or approved by the newspaper or its reporter. The text has been edited to clarify meaning, syntax and punctuation. Illustrations and their captions have been added for reference.


April 20, 2023
Business asked to keep compensatory measures if emission quotas are not reached
The RSPP considers the rejection of them to be an obviously impossible requirement until the end of 2026
By Nadezha Sintsova

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP — in English RUIE) has asked the State Duma for postponement of the adoption of legislative amendments according to which business will not be able to carry out compensatory measures if quotas for reducing emissions of pollutants are not reached by the end of 2026.

This is declared in letters from the President of the Union, Alexander Shokhin, to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, dated April 19 (Vedomosti holds a copy).

New amendments to the law “On conducting an experiment on quotas for emissions of pollutants” have been prepared by the State Duma Committee on Ecology, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection. They were published in the electronic database of the State Duma on April 18. In the first reading, the bill was adopted in November 2022. The second reading of the draft is scheduled for April 20.

Shokhin writes that among the amendments “a decision has been adopted that was not discussed with the business community” and was not included in the bill adopted in the first reading. According to Shokhin, there are a number of methodological problems, the consequence of which was “the establishment of disproportionate and in some cases obviously impossible requirements to reduce emissions for individual organizations.” The current version of the law on emissions, Shokhin emphasizes, allows “flexibility to overcome these shortcomings [pollution law violations] through the implementation of alternative (compensatory) measures.”

According to the government decree of December 24, 2019, compensatory measures may include the development of environmental protection and green areas; the conversion of transport vehicles to new fuels; the reduction of air pollution from thermal power plants and boilers through modernisation and other measures.

If the option of implementing such compensatory measures is canceled, companies will be given a fundamentally different task – “to achieve the established emission quotas regardless of the availability of technical capabilities,” the head of the RSPP concludes.

Shokhin recalls that there are less than four years left before the completion of the experiment on emissions quotas, which is half the “normal investment cycle for heavy industries.” Opportunities to purchase foreign, especially western, equipment have sharply decreased due to sanctions, he writes. In practice, the amendments establish “obviously unenforceable requirements,” Shokhin concludes.

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Top: Chelyabinsk is the headquarters for Zyuzin’s Mechel Group coke colliery and steel plant. This was the winter air in the city on December 3, 2020. Read more on the attempts by Chelyabinsk city residents, environment groups and anti-pollution regulators here. Bottom: Igor Zyuzin, controlling shareholder of the Mechel Group.

A government experiment on emission quotas within the framework of the Clean Air project is currently being carried out in twelve cities of Russia (Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lipetsk, Magnitogorsk, Mednogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, Novokuznetsk, Norilsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Cherepovets and Chita). This assumes a reduction of harmful emissions by enterprises in these cities by 20% by the end of 2026 compared to the indicators of 2017. These cities are mainly home to large metallurgical enterprises.

At the end of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an order to introduce liability for failure to achieve or out-of-time compliance with quotas; the order included a new formula for fines. At the beginning of 2022, the Ministry of Natural Resources proposed to introduce fines of 5%-10% of total revenue of the violating companies for the year preceding the violation (Vedomosti wrote about this on January 31, 2022).

This bill was opposed by the Ministry of Energy and the RSPP. The Ministry of Energy believes that the proposed amount of fines is unreasonably high. In assessing the regulatory impact of the bill, the Ministry estimated the amount of fines at 19-50 billion rubles [$250-$670 million] per year (Vedomosti has a copy of this document).

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Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko (above) said during the government hour [Question Time] in the State Duma on April 19, 2023, that fines would amount to 5% of the gross revenue of enterprises. “If you, as a polluting company, carried out a genuine environmental modernization program and reduced your emissions – that would cost you 0.1% of gross
revenue. If you didn’t do anything – and you and I will discover this in 2027 – 5%,” she said. Abramchenko explained that the initiative has been coordinated, including with the RSPP, and will be submitted to the State Duma in the near future.

According to a representative of the Ministry of Natural Resources, the agency supports the amendments. The source for Vedomosti noted that in December 2022, all large enterprises in the cities of the “Clean Air” Project represented at a meeting with the government confirmed they would implement the plans on time. “There is no need to use compensatory measures,” the ministry source concludes, calling this old formula “non-implemented.”

A representative of Deputy Prime Minister Abramchenko says that compensation measures do not replace the need to achieve quotas. “People in cities with high pollution expect companies to modernize the environment and reduce emissions, and not just to plant trees,” she concludes.

Vedomosti sent requests for comment to the RSPP, the State Duma, the Government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Energy, as well as representatives of companies whose production is located in the cities of the “Clean City” – Norilsk Nickel [nickel], Rusal [aluminium], Severstal [steel], NLMK [steel], MMK [steel], Evraz [steel, coal, coke] and UMMC [copper].

According to a source in one of the industrial companies in a city participating in the experiment, the proposed government replacement of compensation measures changes the rules of the game: enterprises had been planning to implement them if it was impossible to reach quotas on time. “Such important milestones should be discussed with the business in advance,” concludes the Vedomosti source.

Andrei Makarov, manager of the operational risks and sustainable development group of the audit and consulting firm Kept, believes that, potentially, the adoption of amendments could make the idea of upgrading equipment more attractive to companies. At the same time, according to Makarov, in the conditions of sanctions over the short and medium term, it is advisable to strive for a balance between the rigour of legislative initiatives and the interests of business. In long-term planning, it is necessary to take into account the current level of progress in the import substitution for technological (including gas cleaning) equipment and its availability, he clarifies.

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Left: Andrei Makarov. In March 2022 KPMG and other international accountancy and audit firms announced they would leave Russia “to respond to the Russian government’s ongoing military attack on Ukraine”. The Russian staff of KPMG then formed their successor company, Kept.

According to Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline Analytics, because “unfriendly countries” have restricted Russian access to technologies and equipment, the environmental requirements should be as flexible as possible. “The environmental agenda is important. But many enterprises are forced to revise their investment programs, and compensatory measures would be a necessary help for them in meeting the requirements,” the expert notes.

Sergei Grishunin, managing director of the NRA rating service, notes that many large polluters have lost a large share of their exports and are forced to rebuild logistics. Requiring them now to upgrade their equipment is “a kind of shot in the foot.” In general, the expert notes, the proposals of the RSPP look reasonable: if it is impossible to eliminate the damage caused to the environment, it is reasonable to leave the option of compensation for damage through landscaping and the arrangement of recreational areas. Otherwise, there is a risk of an additional decrease in production. It is incorrect to completely remove the task of reducing harmful effects, but it should be postponed to a later date as enterprises adapt to new conditions, Grishunin adds.


NOTE: On April 20, by a vote of 331 with no vote against and no abstentions, the second and final readings of the new law, No. 202708-8, were adopted by the State Duma. Shokhin’s lobbying failed; Zyuzin was defeated. The Interfax news agency has reported that by this action “the government plans that from 2027 it will start collecting turnover fines from enterprises that pollute the environment; these fines can reach 5% of revenue.”

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While the regulatory 'stick' is inadequate it looks as though in terms of the oligarchs getting their way that capitalist Russia is hardly worse than the USA.

Whatever bonapartist shenanigans the Putin government gets up is 'matched and raised' by the naked money politics we suffer.
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:03 pm

The illusion of nationalism, or tautological friendship (Pt 1)
No. 4/80.IV.2023

1. Introduction
In 2023, only the most blind and blinkered person may not notice the flaring crucible of the global crisis.

On the one hand, as the crisis grows, more and more masses of the proletariat choose the path of active solidarity with this or that detachment of the bourgeoisie. This happens because their consciousness is determined by a capitalist being - a being that has already lost the historical opportunity to completely restrain the intellectual growth of the population, but continues to do so through the efforts of the organized politics of the ruling class. The modern bourgeois system of education develops the intellect of the individual only in professional activity and subordinates him to animal instincts of consumption or spontaneous behavioral motives due to rudimentary, undeveloped knowledge of the laws of social development.

On the other hand, the objective conditions for changing formations have long been ripe and overripe, which means that the party of scientific centralism is already visible ahead, which will take on the burden of forming the working class and organizing its struggle against the collective exploiter. An important task of its practice, as well as a prerequisite for its creation in general, is to work with the subjective factor, that is, the formation of competent cadres for the future party. Such a task in a broader sense was formulated by Valery Alekseevich as “bringing individual and social thinking, i.e. thinking of the entire population of the globe, to the scientific and theoretical level, when only that which serves the cause of building communism on the planet is recognized as moral.

It is supposed to develop thinking not among abstract people, but among the most concrete, "living in the next yard"; people with a mature mindset. The deviation of the philistine worldview from a true reflection of objective reality sometimes exceeds the worst expectations and resembles an abyss that cannot be overcome through logical conviction: this worldview is too native, too much suffered through personal experience, observations and habits.

In a series of works, the author tries to discover in the minds of the layman and find a working method for overcoming barriers - specific distortions of consciousness that prevent an adequate study of objective reality and progressive activity.

In this work we will try to explore the illusion of nationalism. Why her? In addition to the mass nature of this phenomenon, it is important to note the strength and dedication of many bearers of this illusion; force, which, unfortunately, as a rule, is directed towards the reactionary goals of the exploiting class. The ability to reforge a nationalist into a Marxist cannot be underestimated.

Nationalism in the works of the classics and authors of Proryv has been studied to the most essential depths, and this work focuses only on the structuring of this knowledge and the development of a method of persuasion. In the process of his research, by applying the method of studying illusions, the author discovered for himself one additional molecule of knowledge about the disappearing substance of nationalism, which helps him in attracting new supporters of the "Breakthrough" through logical work with the worldview of others - in life and online.

To connect theory with practice, the author conducted a series of “laboratory-field”, practical network developments with people, two of which are given at the end of the article. The results of the developments so far are mediocre, which means that the theoretical work should be continued.

The author will be glad to any scientific criticism from readers.

2. Anatomy of the illusion of nationalism
2.1. Description of the illusion
Nationalism, as a special case of the method of uniting people into a social group, is closely connected with the question of the progressiveness of the activity of man and society.

2.1.1. The concept of progressiveness
From a very young age, a person observes the changing surrounding life, including death, intuitively deduces the concept of development for himself and develops the habit of evaluating his activity as progressive or regressive. The psyche of a normal person predictably begins to falter up to severe disorders in the case when one's own activity is regularly assessed as regressive according to subjective criteria. At the same time, there are a lot of examples in history when a mentally absolutely healthy person would be engaged in the destruction of their own kind with a sincere conviction that such an activity brings irreparable benefits to all of humanity. This immediately suggests that the concept of progressiveness can contain content of any degree of destructiveness.

Modern bourgeois "philosophy", nurtured in an ultra-liberal key, allows us to interpret any concepts as exclusively subjective, that is, when each individual can define the concept as he pleases and all individual opinions about the concept are equal in weight. However, if the concept of progressiveness is presented exclusively as a subjective one, then it will become an oxymoron, because contradictions in personal assessments of progressiveness will inevitably lead people to clashes: everyone will defend their activity as the only correct one. Therefore, we should adhere to the general rule of scientific thinking, where the quality of any concept in the mind of the subject is proportional to the accuracy of the reflection of objective reality. Thus, the task of identifying the concept of objective progressiveness, that is, independent of the consciousness of the individual, arises.

Recall that the concept of objective progressiveness has long been explored and is determined solely by the degree of scientific knowledge about the development of human society, that is, the possession of diamatics and valuable cultural heritage and knowledge developed by mankind in previous eras.

The subjective concepts of an individual do not appear out of thin air, but are brought up by society and arise in the conditions of society, because only in society can a person form in his human quality and form ideas about the world around him. The fact that the concepts of objective reality are determined solely by the degree of scientific knowledge means that the progressiveness of a social group is determined by how scientifically it educates its members. In the future fully scientific society, only one group will remain - the whole society - and the progressiveness of the knowledge of this society, as well as the knowledge and activity of the individual, will be determined in a scientific way.

Thus, thanks to the new quality of scientific competence, the sphere of consciousness becomes leading in relation to the sphere of feelings and allows filling with adequate content two natural feelings and aspirations of a person: the need to assess the progressiveness of one's activity and belonging to society . If the sphere of feelings is the leading one, the motivation of a person regarding his activity in society is determined by blind faith in any meaningful content that some class community offered him. If the intellect and reason are the leading ones, these feelings are saddled by the motivation of the perceived need to constantly check one's own and social activities through scientific conscientiousness for compliance with its objective laws of social development.

2.1.2. Progressiveness in non-scientific societies
Mankind develops inhomogeneously, and therefore we have the opportunity to study many social groups of varying degrees of non-science.

What can be said about such communities? Being unscientific (that is, not having a fully scientific system for educating people), they are overwhelmingly exploitative societies, which means they are in competition with each other. Competition motivates them to identify themselves, build defense systems and try to extend their existence indefinitely. This requires a worldview basis : self-identification around a set of non-scientific features, a fictitious concept of progressiveness, a false link between magical identification and fabulous progressiveness, and an education system that mercilessly pulls an owl of historical, geographical, linguistic and other texture, typed by the positivist method, on the globe of illusory progressiveness, that is selectively.

What can be said about people brought up by such communities? The above natural feelings, which determine the motivation of a representative of such a community, remain exclusively in the sphere of feelings and are fed by false ideas about the surrounding reality. This forces a person, firstly, to blindly take on faith the worldview basis developed by “their” community, and secondly, to constantly confirm belonging to it under the threat of exclusion.

Here are examples of such societies. A racial, ethnic or national community is characterized by ideological foundations from a combination of anthropocentric, physiological and geographical factors. Religious, democratic, and similar cult communities are characterized by ideological foundations from invented metaphysical codes of conduct and a set of values. Representatives of a certain race can consider such easily observable features of anatomical constitution as the basis for their unconditional progressiveness, such as skin color, eye shape, and others, and representatives of a certain religion can consider their own religious code sent down by a “higher power”. At the same time, even the brightest representative of a certain race will become an outcast if he doubts the unconditional progressiveness of people only of his, say, skin color.

The situation is somewhat special for a nation, but first let's define an illusion.

2.1.3. Illusory ideal object
In the most general case, the illusory ideal object under consideration is a social group that has received a distortion in the mind of the observer in the form of the property of unconditional progressiveness of its knowledge and activities. Since the group exists in an unevenly developed society and opposes itself to other groups, self-appointed progressiveness usually comes with the additional property of being invincible against the rest of the less progressive world.

In the mind of the observer, a person brought up by the indicated social group is also distorted: he has the opportunity to inherit the illusory property of unconditional progressiveness. At the same time, a person's belonging to this group is necessary, but not sufficient for the manifestation of this property; the sufficient condition is the recognition of this belonging.

Separately, we note: when we talk about an observer, we mean a person who belongs to a certain community and recognizes this belonging.

2.1.4. The nation and its progressiveness
The secret of invented progressiveness is revealed quite simply, given that we are talking about stable communities. The stability of the community is naturally perceived by its representatives as a criterion of success. “Only the viable can live,” they assert, which automatically gives the activity of the community a positive connotation. The next step in this logic is the natural urge to do good to all of humanity by sharing with them the wisdom about the reasons for their own stability. At this moment, society begins to perceive itself as already grotesquely good and unconditionally progressive. Thus, the very concept of progressiveness in an unscientific society is a reflection of animal joy about its vitality, which makes it necessary to search for its causes in one's own activity and self-identification. Hence,the substance of this illusion, i.e., which particular signs of its identification it associates with vitality and progress.

Let's focus on what signs can be presented to us by outstanding thinkers of an objectively existing stable non-scientific community of people. We have already seen that the racial community considers anthropological features as such signs, while the cult community considers some acquired or constructed code.

National-patriotic thinkers take their first steps based on science.

In a notorious work, Stalin defines a nation as "a historically established, stable community of people that arose on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and mental make-up." At the same time, the state community is not identical with the “national community”. For example, the nation was absent in the "great state of Cyrus" or in Austria. The essential criteria of a nation are a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a national character.

The national-patriotic thinker now sets the task: to interpret the above essential criteria in such a way that as a result the nation would be defined not just as a stable community of people, but as a stable progressive community of people - as opposed to not so progressive other stable communities.

However, in none of the criteria separately, as well as in any of their combinations, magical justice does not appear and cannot appear, because ... it objectively does not exist there. At each historical stage, any community of people is simultaneously and is not objectively progressive, that is, scientifically built on the principle of expanded reproduction of society: it is, but only in the formation, and not, because it still goes through periods of being in exploitative formations of varying degrees of regression.

When considering each of the criteria, the national-patriotic thinker firmly rests on the fact that any criterion can change beyond recognition, and can also unite several nations. At these moments, the progressiveness sent down ceases to bless his nation, but our Don Quixote continues his assault.

How can one find progressiveness in a common language (our nation is progressive because it speaks a certain language)? This is well suited to the case where the nation exists as a single nation, despite the fact that in different parts of it there are slight deviations in dialects. However, at the same time, there are situations when different nations within different states can speak the same language with slight deviations in dialects. And then you have to fence supranational constructions like the “Russian world”, “great Turan” or “great Finland”, etc., which go beyond the linguistic framework. In addition, on the territory of the state there may be different nations speaking different languages. And under them, too, one has to somehow adjust the concept of progressiveness.

How can one find progressiveness in a common territory (our nation is progressive because it lives in a certain territory)? On the same territory, several nations can coexist, equally considering themselves more progressive than the rest. In addition, the map of the world changes significantly with historical development, and different nations with different ideas about their own progressiveness can appear on the same territory (how will a Russian national historian determine progressiveness in Finland or Poland during the time of the Republic of Ingushetia? How to determine the progressiveness of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a known territory? The understanding of the progressiveness of one nation on the basis of a common territory is shattered by civil wars,

How can one find progressiveness in a common economic life (our nation is progressive because it is bound by a common economy)? But the commonality of the economy does not prevent each republic of the former USSR from considering only itself progressive, and not the entire USSR. The concept of progressiveness is unevenly distributed by different nations that are part of empires as internal or external colonies and have a common economic structure. There is also a problem with the search for progressiveness during the formation of the nation, as, for example, with the Georgians, who until the 19th century lived in different economically isolated principalities on the same territory and did not form a single nation.

How can one find progressiveness in a national character? This area is most prone to hoaxes. The national character does exist: for example, the Irish speak the same language as the English, inhabit the same territory and live a common economic life, but have a "peculiar mental make-up." But even here the same dilemma manifests itself: the character of a nation changes dramatically in different historical periods (again, let us recall the Germans; or the peoples of the Republic of Ingushetia, either entering or leaving it), and it will not be possible to reduce everything to religion, since a nation can be multi-confessional, and one nation can include peoples with different national characters and at the same time coexist on the same territory with other nations - like the above-mentioned Irish with the British. How to determine the source of progressiveness in this mess;

A number of national-patriotic thinkers stop there. For example, why should a representative of some small stable mono-ethnic and mono-linguistic nation with a quiet multi-hundred-year history and a minimum of territorial redistributions move further in the development of the idea of ​​progressiveness? It is enough to accept the above essential criteria from the scientific definition of a nation as a substance for its national illusion and season it with a pinch of magic: declare the nation progressive, correct history a bit, introduce press censorship. And if there was no stability, mono-ethnicity and mono-language, then they can always simply be invented.

However, having despaired of finding progressiveness in each of the criteria separately, another national-patriotic thinker still does not give up and begins to thickly mix a cocktail of historical myths, territorial claims, anthropological features, religious codes, and so on and so forth. In an attempt to combine various essential and non-essential criteria of a nation, a civilizational approach (CP) appears - an anti-scientific theory that displays civilization as a feature of specific people living in a specific territory. For example, each ethnic society is unique - Russian, Chinese, European, American civilizations. Scientists such as Jean Batisto Vico, Godfried Herbert, Simon Balanche, François Guizot, Charles Renovier, Joseph Arthur Gobineau, Nikolai Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, tried to find signs of civilizations; Arnold Toynbee singled out as many as 30 civilizations, and Lev Gumilyov tried to substantiate the foundation of the emergence and disappearance of civilizations - passionarity. This approach is the brainchild of the colonial policy of the 18th-19th centuries, which the Europeans tried to describe and legitimize. Of course, the CPU was crushed by practice, since German fascism became its extreme form. However, the CPU is still often used by strong countries to justify their dominance, and by weak countries as a defense mechanism against enslavement. The weakness of the CPU is in its idealism. There are no criteria by which civilizations can be convincingly singled out. For example: cultural-religious (what about a mixture of religions), cultural (what about one culture - different languages ​​or one language and different cultures), based on mentality (which is generally a form of objective idealism, when ways of behaving and ways of thinking are arbitrarily assigned to strata of people). Yu. I. Semyonov studied all civilizers and singled out 22 conflicting definitions of civilization. So, for example, inside a large people, country, ethnic society, trying to define its civilization, there are always smaller communities, cultures, peoples that do not fall under this definition. Expansion of the definition will only lead to the fact that other civilizations will also fall under it.

It is characteristic of such cases that the substance for the illusion disappears because it can no longer be defined. And in the absence of substance, the social group begins to define itself in a somewhat tautological way. “We are ours,” say members of such a group, “because we belong to a group called “ours.” In other words, any person can become a part of a group just by fully recognizing the existence and progressiveness of this group. In turn, the group exists only because its representatives recognize its existence and progressiveness. In this case, buckets of magical powder are poured out already on the specific criteria that are used in the definition of civilization, and on the justification of the very existence of this illusory social chimera.

Outcome.

The study of the illusion of an unscientific society is the study of its substance, that is, a set of signs of its identification, which it associates with its stability and progress.

The illusion of nationalism can take various evolving forms in several stages. Evolving in a negative sense, since there is a consistent estrangement from objective reality.

At the first stage, its substance is limited to the scientifically developed essential criteria of an objectively existing nation. And the illusion itself only adds to them the non-existent property of progressiveness, which is defined extremely tautologically: a nation defined by such and such criteria is progressive, because it was the set of these criteria that made this nation progressive. If, in order to simplify the understanding of the illusion, we mentally remove all the complexity and diversity of the criteria of language, territory, economic structure and national character, then it will become similar to progressiveness invented by a race with a certain skin color, for example: “violet people are progressive, because violet is the basis progressiveness."

At the second stage, an illusory concept of civilization appears, which, on the one hand, is wider than the objective concept of a nation, and on the other, defies any scientific definition. As we move away from the concept of nation to the concept of civilization, the substance of illusion is lost more and more, reaching its complete absence. And then a terrible thing happens: non-substantiality is not limited by anything and therefore gives birth to the most monstrous chimeras. In this form, not only the illusory property of progressiveness is tautological, but the very community of people becomes defined in the utmost recursive and tautological way. Society in the representation of the bearer of the illusion becomes a kind of embodiment of a just deity. Any person can become a part of the group only upon full recognition of the existence and progressiveness of this group. Such is obtained tautological friendship.

However, it must be understood that the national liberation struggle at certain moments in history was relatively progressive, as it destroyed old survivals, established relations more appropriate to the level of development of the productive forces, and led to liberation from foreign oppression. But this objective progressiveness has nothing to do with the illusory national concept of progressiveness.

In conclusion, let us say that all further research is focused on the bearers of the illusion of bourgeois nationalism, who are not representatives of the bourgeoisie itself, in any case, of that part of it that absolutely consciously and without any illusions acts in order to extract profit, that is, in an antisocial manner.

2.2. Incorrectly reflected objective phenomenon
Nationalism is an erroneous attempt by an uneducated person to discover and reflect in the mind social relations of a certain nature.

In order not to reinvent the wheel, here is a quote from the Manifesto:

“The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, landowner and serf, master and apprentice, in short, oppressor and oppressed, were in eternal antagonism to each other, waged an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open struggle, which always ended in a revolutionary reorganization of the entire public edifice or in the common death of those fighting. classes.

In previous historical epochs, we find almost everywhere the complete division of society into various classes, a whole ladder of various social positions. In ancient Rome we meet patricians, horsemen, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages - feudal lords, vassals, craftsmen, apprentices, serfs, and besides, in almost each of these classes - there are also special gradations.

Coming out of the depths of the lost feudal society, modern bourgeois society has not eliminated class contradictions. It only put new classes, new conditions of oppression and new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, differs, however, in that it has simplified class contradictions: society is more and more splitting into two large hostile camps, into two large classes opposing each other—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

And to it we add Redin's explanations :

“The most important thing about the nature of classes is not that they are different or even opposed, but that these large groups of people continuously reproduce their differences on an extended scale and struggle to maintain the differences they have won. The proletarian exploited mass as a class is a mentally limited appendage of the bourgeoisie, the source of its wealth and luxurious life.

Those readers who need an extremely brief and simplified description of the scientific foundations that led to the above conclusions, the author refers to the work " I-not-in-the-house ".

In reality, a bourgeois nation is a historically established, stable community of people, which, due to the socio-economic structure of capitalism, is formed around a small organizing group of the national bourgeoisie, which, firstly, exploits the amorphous masses of the proletariat in order to extract profit; secondly, it diligently supports the social science ignorance of the masses in order to keep them in a submissive state; and thirdly, it enters into the inevitable competitive relations inherent in capitalism with the rest of the nations—with the bourgeois groups of other bourgeois nations and with the socialist nations. The division of people into nations is a fundamental condition for the existence of capitalism.

In turn, the illusion of nationalism is such a reflection of national and interethnic relations, where the scientific content of competition and conflicts - industrial relations and class struggle - fall into the blind zone of the observer, as a result of which his search for an explanation of apparent conflicts becomes essenceless and limited to superficial observations. Observing the communities of people, the bearer of the illusion looks for the causes of the conflict in their apparent difference, and the less he is burdened with scientific knowledge, the more simple to detect signs he is limited to, attributing to them the strangest magical properties and causes of interethnic enmity.

2.3. Causes of the illusion
Like the illusion of commodity fetishism , the illusion of nationalism is based on two main objective factors: on the relations of commodity production and exchange that prevail in the current section of history, and on the accompanying mass social science ignorance, which, from the subjective side, is served by the entire dominant bourgeois culture.

However, such an indication of reasons is not quite concrete without considering the very basic motivation of a person, which makes him explore society, using his mental apparatus, traumatized by social relations.

Man as a biological being has a number of motives - instincts, reflexes, feelings that do not contain an appeal to reason and reason. Further, in the process of development, a social person is already prompted to action by motives associated with a rational reaction, that is, through an appeal to the thinking apparatus. It can be said that the feelings that have arisen pass through this apparatus, which either extinguishes them or shapes them into conscious actions. The quality of this design corresponds to the scientific quality of education that society can give a person.

When describing the illusion, we found two feelings that can be defined as the basic motivation of a person, when referring to a poor-quality mental apparatus, it gives rise to the illusion of nationalism.

The feeling of the need to evaluate the progressiveness of one's activity makes a person explore the very concept of progressiveness. Scientifically developed thinking determines the progressiveness of a social group by how scientifically it educates its members. If it is simpler and more meaningful, then that which brings communism closer is progressive. Ignorant thinking blindly defines progressiveness as a unique property of some particular social group, in this case, a nation.

The feeling of the need to belong to a society compels a person to explore that society itself. Redin and Borovykh write :

“Patriotism is a feeling of love for the motherland, which arises from attachment to native places and people ... Patriotism acts, firstly, in the form of a feeling, that is, an unscientific spontaneous attitude to the motherland, to the native national culture, language and, ultimately, to economic and political conditions of their country and region. Secondly, in the form of an incentive motive, ordinary motivation for liberation, protection of honor, development and improvement of the homeland. From this it is clear that patriotism in “capable hands” can indeed be a powerful factor in the class struggle of the proletariat. The converse is also true, that in the service of imperialism, patriotism is fascism and semi-fascism, that is, also a powerful factor in the class struggle, but already in the clutches of the oligarchy.

It should also be added that fear, which is an obligatory attribute of competitive relations, especially during periods of crisis, greatly enhances the illusion of nationalism, forcing a person at times to turn almost into an animal.

2.4. The form of the illusion and its properties
The study showed that the illusion of commodity fetishism was formed through simplification : thinking, deliberately left in a low quality by the educational system of an exploitative society, striving and not being able to describe the complexity of social relations, ascribes to things the causes of human interactions. So, to questions about the source of poverty, hunger and wars, the layman answers that it is gold and money that make people infinitely greedy and power-hungry.

The illusion of nationalism is formed by the wrong focus of attention: the educational system of an exploitative society educates a person in such a way that the essence and scientific content of competition and conflicts - relations of production and class struggle - fall into the blind zone of his attention. However, the social essence of a person requires him to react to an observed threat to society, search for its progressive parts and associate himself with them. Thus, in the conditions of competitive capitalist relations, even in the quietest periods, the inhabitant, 1) driven by a sense of attachment to his native places and people, 2) passes it through his imperfect mental apparatus trained by the bourgeoisie, 3) determines, by superficial observations, the community of people to which he belongs to, and the communities of people opposing it, 4) using the same method of superficial observations, highlights the signs of “his” nation (for example,

In the form of the illusion of nationalism, two essential properties can be considered.

Property one: the power of motivation

The social essence of a person endows him with the greater power of motivation, the more he understands that the general is higher than the particular. At the same time, this force can have different points of application and consequences, depending on the quality of a person's thinking. Everywhere one can observe pronounced cases when a spontaneously selfless person with a low quality of thinking reacts to a significant crisis and enters the struggle, identifying as an enemy ... an equally selfless person of another nation. And this happens only because he used magic to identify "friend or foe" and reinforced it with randomly selected facts from historical and current events, instead of scientifically identifying a class enemy. It is in this way that the noblest impulses of the ignorant result in activities that are destructive of society. As history shows,

Property Two: Selective Blindness

General blindness in social science is compensated by the addition of magic, and all magic requires active worship. This worship is expressed in a cultivated blindness in relation to factual information, in relation to people who do not share exactly this magic, and in relation to the future.

First, since only the positivist method of research is available to the national patriot, all information from the past and present that comes to his eyes is carefully filtered for compliance with the hypothesis of the progressiveness of his nation.

Secondly, the national patriot cannot fail to notice that some of the representatives of his nation (or even "civilization") do not show such blindness and adhere to other views. Since their views cannot be scientifically assessed by a national patriot, he is forced to axiomatically declare them outcasts, mankurts, traitors and cultivate a blind hatred of terrible power towards them. In the case of professing a civilizational approach, entire nations can be declared traitors. Worse, a national patriot, especially during the active period of “defending the motherland”, in a conversation with the bearer of a point of view, even to the smallest extent deviating from the blind worship of the nation, can block any arguments and even communication itself, justifying this by saying that “first we must defend ourselves from the enemy, and then we will think.”

Thirdly, the national patriot is forced to follow at the tail end of the decisions of national capital, and therefore his “magic” definitions should be as vague, flexible and justifying the capitalists as possible. This means that the national patriot cannot offer any image of the future, in principle, because outside the present there is a blind zone of unpredictable actions of the bourgeoisie.

2.5. Consequences for society
The true desire of the carrier of the illusion of nationalism is to protect himself from the relations of capitalist competition as part of a certain community. This is already a rather serious step forward from the particular to the general in comparison with the illusion of commodity fetishism, since it implies a certain degree of self-sacrifice in favor of the generality.

However, firstly, due to its nature of the power of motivation, the combined efforts of bourgeois national patriots, brought to life by good intentions, are reoriented by low-quality thinking into a destructive channel. In rare cases of national liberation movements and wars, bourgeois-national activity may still have a progressive vector for some time; on the whole, on the scale of the nations of the entire planet, the regressive and conservative vectors dominate, and the amount of time and effort invested by national patriots of different nations in creating weapons and bringing themselves to extreme fascism in order to fight illusory chimeras and each other, brings the total destructive force to the threat of destruction of the entire planet in world wars.

Second, because of its selective blindness, the illusion of nationalism is extremely persistent and indiscriminate. The bearers of illusion designate as enemies all those who do not share their faith, and the fight against them goes to the death. The national patriot will be equally ready to kill another national patriot, and the appointed "mankurt", and a Marxist - the bearer of scientific knowledge.

2.6. Illusion activity
We have already found out in the study of the “magic of a diamond” that any illusion makes a person with a low quality of thinking act irrationally, contributing to the degradation of society, regardless of the progressiveness of his beliefs and motivating motives. This happens literally with every act of his life, the totality of which can be combined into several behavioral patterns: self-deception, susceptibility to manipulation and a destructive reaction to changes in social relations. The properties of the illusion of nationalism - the power of motivation and selective blindness - add another template: active fanaticism.

Self-deception . The framework of the concepts imposed by bourgeois society and a pinch of unverifiable and, as it were, magic that does not need verification, which showered ideas about the nation, are in the eyes of the bearer of the illusion an iron and rational foundation for his activity. On this foundation, a dilapidated hut was erected from a historical and real-time texture, moreover, a texture selected so that the foundation remains iron. The paradox lies in the fact that the more well-read the bourgeois national patriot, the more full of holes and high this hut, but the less doubt remains about one's own rightness. However, this rule applies to chwans with any illusions in their heads.

susceptibility to manipulation . There is no need to spread much here, it is enough to turn to examples, for example, Germany of the last century or Ukraine of the current century. The possibilities of the bourgeoisie in transforming the socially illiterate masses of national patriots into a monstrous anti-human force are truly limitless. Moreover, the strength of the intellect of these masses, focused in professional areas, and their organization subordinate to the bourgeoisie determine only the technical perfection of the tools with which they are ready to burn out other nations.

Active fanaticism . Being subject to manipulation, the national patriot receives input from his bourgeoisie and, thanks to his sincere feelings of love for the motherland, begins to selflessly engage in the destruction and subjugation of foreign nations, the search for traitors in his own, the active involvement of new supporters in his national sect and no less active defense of his own. faith from scientific knowledge.

Destructive reaction to changing social relations . This template is typical for the activities of the carriers of any bourgeois illusions. When the degradation of social relations reaches extreme forms (extreme degree of exploitation of the population, mass stratification, war) and social forces appear that begin to deal with the root cause through a fierce and extremely intense class struggle, through the forceful destruction of relations of exploitation, relations of private property, the bourgeois national - the patriot will begin to fiercely fight the revolutionary forces for the established state of affairs.

To put it simply, our national patriot is poorly educated, swaggering, led in strategy, active in tactics and reactionary in matters of education.

(Continued on following post.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:07 pm

(Pt 2 Continued from previous post.)

2.7. Getting rid of the illusion
To increase efficiency in talking with the townsfolk about ridding them of the illusion of nationalism, we use the same method that was discovered in the study of the illusion of commodity fetishism.

First of all, overcoming the illusion is generally possible only under two conditions.

The first condition is that a person should not be a complete bastard: for example, a Nazi or an extreme bourgeois. The ordinary tradesman is pompously idle: he has only himself as the center of his ideology, strives for inactivity, in which he should not feel like an empty shell. On this construction, he pulls nationalism, religion, and so on. Distinctive features of "hataskraynik" can, for example, be: endowing people with natural negative properties; a civilizational approach, where a great people will do everything right; hopelessness, in which "only God can fix everything," and so on. The following methods can only destroy the magic of nationalism that has not turned into Nazism, and petty bourgeoisie must be fought separately. Fortunately, a modern national patriot often sincerely cheers for an invented, but still general, and not a private matter.

The second condition is that a person must have intelligence and a desire to use it, despite faith and magic in the head. Fortunately, the modern layman considers himself a rational being, which makes him get involved in a conversation and defend his point of view. Thus, it becomes possible to reveal specific ideological and logical errors.

What gaps does the illusion of nationalism provide us with?

First, general progressive motivation. A Marxist in reforging even the most notorious nationalist can remove all illusory layers from his argumentation and sink into the very basis of his reasoning. And there, as we remember, there is a bright, natural for a person public feeling of love for the motherland, which arises from attachment to native places and people and which is the engine for the “power of motivation” - the property of the illusion of nationalism. Moreover, in the aggressive conditions of capitalism, the national patriot feels a threat to himself and society and reacts to it as progressively as the quality of his thinking allows. Thus, a common point of contact is determined - an understanding of the threat to society, the desire to eliminate it.

Secondly, the general good wishes for "peace in the whole world" of any selfless national patriot rest on a lack of understanding of the way to achieve them; this is the painful point of the absence of an "image of the future." He perfectly sees the thieves-officials and oligarchs, he also sees the injustice of the internal structure of the country and its external conflicts. He invariably fails in his helpless attempts to describe a plausible detailed image of a steadily progressive society and the way to achieve it. It turns out either an unattainable utopia, or nothing happens at all (because, for example, a nation needs to be transferred to another planet and then everything will be fine by itself). Such helplessness is easily explained: when some particular is magically placed above the general, then the task of building universal harmony simply has no solution. Thus, the followinga common point of contact is the need to develop an "image of the future" and a path to this image - a plan for changing society. At this step, it is necessary to give the national patriot hope that such an image is not only possible, but extremely concrete and achievable by the force of the laws of society's development.

Having started a dialogue with the bearer of the illusion around points of contact, that is, having confirmed the general desire for good wishes in relation to all of humanity and the need to build a clear “image of the future” and a substantive plan for its achievement, it is necessary to continue interaction with him in the most rational plane of reasoning.

First, you need to remove from the conversation everything extremely irrational, but not related to nationality, as a rule - religion. With all, so to speak, respect, but persistently. Objectively detectable troubles: crises, wars, deterioration of living conditions, as well as the general understanding that faith has not yet helped to overcome them for some reason, as a rule, contribute to the opportunity to put off the painful topic for the believer about the existence of higher powers for later and concentrate on earth. In addition, one can use the argument that the achievement of the desired progressive goals is impossible without unanimity, and the dispute of two idealists about the ideal will always end in an unresolved question of whose faith is more correct: since the ideas of an idealist require faith, avoid logical verification by reason, are not tested by practice and are subject to endless interpretations, then reasonable arguments will end sooner or later. From which, again, the need at this stage of the conversation is to focus on the material.

Secondly, it is necessary to get rid of the extreme forms of the illusion of nationalism in their negative evolution. As we remember, at the second stage of evolution, an illusory concept of civilization appears, in which the definition of “one’s own” community is completely non-substantial, tautological and recursive. It is necessary to return to the substance of the definition of a nation, that is, to identifying exactly what signs of its identification the national-patriot associates with vitality and progress. To do this, it is necessary to explain the unscientific nature of the civilizational approach, the impossibility of identifying signs of civilization and the failure of all scientific attempts to do so. For example, from the “Russian world” it is necessary to descend in conversation to a specific community of the “Russian nation”, and from “progressive Western civilization” to a specific nation that considers itself part of “enlightened Europe”.

Third, by discarding the extreme forms of idealism, we can use the full force of Marxism against the second property of the illusion of nationalism—selective blindness. The reasoning of the national patriot is always based on selective texture, which is designed to prove the unconditional progressiveness of his nation. It is easy to show that there is no magical progressiveness in any of the individual characteristics of a nation, or in their totality. It is easy to add a “lost” historical texture and prove that the nation acted according to the laws of the formation and did it exactly the same as other nations that were in a similar formation, both in relation to the oppression of their own population, and in relation to conflicts with others. nations, and also that the destructive power of internal and external conflicts depended only on the degree of development of the productive forces. It would be useful to show those fundamental differences between the presence of the same nation in different periods in an exploitative formation and in a non-exploitative formation. And it is quite easy to poke the nose of the national patriot into the obvious degradation in which every modern bourgeois nation finds itself with its stratification, oppression of the majority of the population and participation in international conflicts. This is how the imaginary progressiveness of the nation dissipates, and the national patriot needs to revise his views. In a similar way, with the realization of a new texture, the haze of Hitler's propaganda dissipated, the monstrous irrationality of which was compensated for by its short duration, designed for a blitzkrieg. The ideological voids formed at this stage of the carrier of the illusion should be filled with scientific information about the laws of the development of society, about which he, as a rule,

Recall that, having completed this emotional stage of influencing the national patriot, the Marxist must move to the second level - the intellectual level , where the task is to encourage him to self-study.

2.8. Brief summary
The illusion of nationalism is based on two bright feelings of a person: a sense of the need to evaluate the progressiveness of one's activities and a sense of belonging to society. They, like any feelings, require qualitative understanding in order for the impulse given by them to turn into progressive activity. However, the quality of thinking is not given from above; it is formed by the society in which a person is brought up.

The study of the laws of development of society led to a scientific understanding of the concept of progress. Within its framework, a truly progressive human history can begin only when humanity begins to live according to the law of expanded reproduction of society. However, in an exploitative society, a society divided by classes, in a society of competitive human relationships, the education system of the majority of the population is emasculated in order to reproduce the ignorant and submissive slaves of the ruling class, ready to give their lives for its interests. Light natural feelings now pass through the low-quality worldview of a person brought up by an exploitative society.

The average person of this quality of thinking still has globally positive dreams of “world peace”, but his concept of progressiveness is metaphysical, that is, absolutely static and tied to the community where this person was brought up. In essence, a patriotic person defends his right to be in a group of people defined by signs that are far-fetched and falsely attached to the concept of progressiveness. This is how a person becomes a bourgeois national patriot: he defines his nation as progressive by the fact of its existence; selectively selects the texture to prove this thesis; he defines friends and enemies by the fact of sharing this faith with him; he is absolutely blind in determining that he has to do all this in the interests of the ruling class.

Driven by a deep feeling, a national patriot can act selflessly and very effectively for the sake of a community designated as "one's own". However, the vector of application of this force is determined by the ruling class. And now our "hero" in the name of good "goals" runs to cut the same national patriot from a neighboring country. It is in this way that the noblest impulses of the ignorant result in activities that are destructive to the whole of society. As history shows, with the intensification of crisis phenomena, the power of motivation and self-denial is able to turn a national patriot into a fascist, and within a relatively short time. Thus, the observed phenomenon is a bourgeois-directed and caused by competitive social relations, knocking people into “packs”,

Among the national patriots there are people who are either inveterate philistines, for whom nationalism is only a means to make their lives as comfortable as possible, or devout believers who do not accept any rational arguments, or complete Nazis. Time to convince such characters will be wasted.

With the rest, you should start working from common points of contact. First, with the discussion of the important issue of achieving "world peace"; and, secondly, with the desire to build an image of the future - a plausible detailed image of a steadily progressive society and a substantive plan for its achievement.

The illusion of nationalism is multi-layered, like an onion, and the work to dissuade the bearer of the illusion is the cleansing of layers of varying degrees of illusoryness, in the direction from the outer layer of pure faith to the inner layers of varying degrees of rationality.

The first layer - this, as a rule, the layer of the purest faith - can be, if not removed, then postponed, for the obvious reason that faith in the most obvious way does not help to overcome objectively detectable troubles: crises, wars, deterioration of living conditions.

The second layer is found among the supporters of the civilizational approach and is expressed in the complete non-substantiality of their definition of civilization, in which any person can become a part of a group just by fully recognizing the existence and progressiveness of this group. At this stage, it is necessary to explain the unscientific nature of the civilizational approach, the impossibility of identifying signs of civilization and the failure of any scientific attempts to do so.

On the third layer, we will act in the objective plane of “a historically established stable community of people that arose on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and mental make-up”, and fight against the second property of the illusion of nationalism - selective blindness. Here we must begin by adding a missing texture, proving that there is no magical progressiveness in any of the individual features of a nation, or in their totality. Then the formed ideological voids of the national patriot must be filled with scientific information about the laws of the development of society, about which he, as a rule, has the most misleading idea.

An interested national patriot, our potential collaborator, should be further directed to a school of self-study.

3. Laboratory and field practical work
The theoretical developments were honed by the author in parallel with practical long conversations live and online.

This activity also had a second goal: to discover, if not scientific, then at least pseudoscientific material that forms the basis of the patriotic worldview. However, the maximum mouse that the mountain of theoretical helplessness of opponents could give birth to was the writings of the “holy elders”.

Extracts from two of the brightest discussions, which provided the most useful food for research and in which theoretical recommendations were applied, the author would like to present to the reader's judgment.

The first opponent is a Baltic engineer, a moderate national patriot who started all conversations with the axiomatic accusation of "Russians in Russians". The mythology of the Baltic patriotic (regardless of nationality) population is the national pain of a small freedom-loving nation from the occupation of the “soviet” and preparation for war with the Russian Federation, an unconditional aggressor that is about to suddenly attack, as it just happened with Ukraine. With this opponent, we managed to postpone religious disputes for later, stand on material ground, determine a common goal-setting and put the conversation in a rational direction of scientific substantiation of our positions. The result of a long conversation was the following text, based on which the opponent retired to read the proposed Marxist literature. However, the author does not experience any super-expectations from this.

The second opponent is a Donetsk Slavophil patriot who fought during the national liberation uprisings of the republics in 2014-2015. and now leading an active network information activity from the Russian Federation. The mythology of the Slavophile is civilizational and Russian world. It was not possible to achieve results with this opponent, because he decided not to be distracted by conversations from current tactical activities, although he regularly raises ideological issues, for which he is not able to offer at least something intelligible, except for general good wishes. However, a long study of his activities made it possible for the author to draw a virtual portrait of him, which allows you to get an idea of ​​​​how to use theoretical developments to convince him.

Notes on style. First, the texts of conversations are largely simplified and dotted due to the very genre of online conversation. Second: in two texts, some postulates are duplicated: this was done in those places where the author was confident in the wording and did not want to waste time editing them to suit the specifics of the opponent. At the same time, Appendix 1 is the longest piece used in all conversations to avoid significant duplication.

4. Conversation with a national patriot (Baltic Republic)
This stage of the conversation began with the following question from the opponent: “You deny the need to save your small nation-state (hereinafter - MNG) from the imperialist attacks of the Russian Federation. Can you explain why?"

4.1. introductory
For clarity, let me remind you that the reasoning is based on a certain set of knowledge from Appendix 1 , which, in particular, derives a) the immutable law of capitalism on expanded reproduction and the necessary constantly growing rate of profit that determines the morality and logic of actions of any capitalist of any country, regardless of the fact that he talks about this, and b) the essence of the profit that is derived from the consumption of labor power, that is, exploitation, c) the constantly ongoing class struggle, which is the basis of the movement and development of society.

In addition, it is important to remove dogmatism from the conversation. For example, if you ignore the foundation of these postulates - scientific literature - and simply consider them as axioms and dogmas, then all the following letters are meaningless, because they are a derivative of this foundation. But in order to do so, it is necessary to explain the dogmatism of this foundation and present an alternative scientific system, because the mere declaration of dogmatism is also dogmatism. In the end, it would be a good goal of the conversation - to find out the true state of things, and not what you want to believe.

4.2. A critique of the paradigm that asks questions
The first thing that can be said about the question is that it is being asked in a national-democratic context. That is: “Here is our nation of some kind, with its own sores, but good. Here is a freak neighbor, he took out a club and clobbers right and left. We have to defend ourselves, it's fair, it will restore the balance." However, why some are good and others are bad is completely unclear. The gene of "goodness" and justice in the nation has not yet been discovered.

Therefore, we will conduct a study of national democratic justice in two stages, for which we will look at the situation, firstly, through the above-mentioned prism of the laws of capitalism and class struggle, and secondly, dialectically: we will find the interconnections lost in the national logic, we will consider the situation in development.

We will deliberately limit the study to only two stages, because the subsequent stages may sound too radical and include unnecessary emotions, and besides, this is more than enough for an initial critique of the national justice position.

Stage one. We are returning to the worldview of the national patriot the lost history of the development of capitalism in Europe and the USA, which historically developed faster than other countries and immediately began colonization with its endless number of victims. Since the end of World War II, dozens of wars unleashed by them can be named. I won’t be mistaken if I say that all these wars were motivated as a struggle of civilized democratic humanity against backward (known, for example, as the “white burden”) and tyrannical (designated as such in the 20th century) regimes. If we remove this religious nonsense about democracy (for now, we will leave it as a statement that can be proved later), it turns out that everywhere there was an animal struggle between strong countries in the armed plan against the weak and among themselves for resources. That is, the world of capitalism is the world of a chistogan, that is, the world of the rule of the right of the strong. I note that the MNG (your small nation state) has always supported such international banditry and has never once displayed the flags of Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and a dozen other countries in the assortment, as it does now with the flags of Ukraine. Because these wars were far away and indirectly brought money to the country.

And now - even if we assume (only assume!) That the Russian Federation simply attacked first, then what? Would there be something special in the logic of the world of a purebred, which MNG quite accepted for itself? It seems like “we can, but they can’t”? Or “what are we for?”, as in a well-known anecdote? This is the most striking illustration of the fact that an ordinary national patriot acts within the framework of Hottentot morality and "we can do it, but they can't."

Thus, the first feature of national-democratic patriotism is the duplicity of ideas about justice .

Stage two. Let's rewind the story a bit. The bloc of imperialist countries that unleashed two world wars took advantage of the incompetence of the Soviet leadership and helped to destroy the country in order to eliminate the "communist plague" and obtain new resources for robbery. For decades, the Russian Federation has been losing any influence on the peripheral post-Soviet and not only states, and a strong Western imperialist bloc has increased this influence - this is how a competitive capitalist economy works. It came to Ukraine, in the democratization of which considerable funds were invested, and to suspect Western capitalists of altruism after all of the above, after centuries of unleashing wars, would be the height of idealism. They suddenly stepped on the sore: they created for the Russian Federation the threat of losing influence in the Black Sea (and this influence was obtained in the wars of the feudal-bourgeois period), because the newly appeared renewed independent state decided to conduct a policy without looking back at its neighbors. And here you would understand: if you live in a room next to a healthy bull and suddenly, in a drunken stupor, you decide to shit on the carpet, then the consequences are easy to predict. I repeat, we are considering the world of a purebred, and such things are calculated at a time. When on Monday the drunkard shits, and on Tuesday the bull starts to beat him, then you can yell: look, he beats, this is unacceptable. And here it becomes important: from what day to consider the situation. and such things are calculated at a time.

Thus, the second feature of national-democratic patriotism is the introduction of meanness into ideas of justice .

After considering only these two stages, we see that the historical arena of capitalism is the struggle of groups of spiders in a jar. Each of them crap the other to the best of their ability, and then scream about injustice. But their justice is two-faced and vile. The national patriot MNG writes with noble fury that his fight against the Russian Federation will be fair because, indeed, on Tuesday the bully began waving his fists. But what justice are we talking about here? After all, if, for example, a Western European partner continues to rob other countries far from the MNG, and the MNG itself will fall into the jackpot from this, then the national patriot will not lead an ear, because it’s convenient to live like that. So it turns out that all the declared desire for balance and justice is limited only by justice in relation to one's own skin.

Let us further reveal the national-democratic essence, going a little beyond the context of the first question about saving the MNG from the Russian Federation. Both stages above were intended to show the duplicity and meanness of the national-democratic position when the bourgeoisie calls on the population to patriotism in order to save itself from the rival detachment of the bourgeoisie. And now let's take a look at the peaceful life of MNG after the collapse of the USSR. We see a demographic decline. We see emigration. We see the “optimization” of medicine and education. We see the actual killing of the country's economy with the growth of profits of monopolists. We see the growth of inflation, drug addiction, unemployment, crime. You can cite an insane amount of texture, behind which are tens of thousands of human tragedies. Guilty - zero. This is the class struggle on the part of the bourgeoisie, and this is a tragedy on a national scale, which requires the deepest competence, courage and activity from everyone to solve it. What does a well-to-do National Democrat do about it in peacetime, from 1990 to 2014? For the most part, nothing: nothing threatens his skin and, as a rule, he considers mass tragedies to be a manifestation of natural selection.

Thus, the national-democratic meanness is not only duplicitous and vile, it is purely selfish, petty-bourgeois . And philistinism is always accompanied by social ignorance, which makes the logic of a patriot accessible to bourgeois manipulation. This is how the National Democrat misses all the previous days, sees the slaughter of the bull only on Tuesday, is sincerely horrified by this (and even then, only because peace has been disturbed and his own skin is in danger) and runs to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie, which has been robbing the entire nation for decades.

Therefore, let us define: the national-democratic path is the path of ignorant, two-faced and vile petty bourgeoisie .

The Marxist way is not like this: he says that “the general is higher than the particular” and therefore justice (progress) cannot affect only part of society (individual, nation and others). If we do not build a society of universal justice, then it will degrade and invariably drown in blood. And in this case, “quite specifically”, when the baton has already been used, one should not defend one’s private (oneself, family, nation), but get out of the capitalist agenda and prepare to build that very communist society of universal justice on the territory of all participants in the massacre and this is the only way out.

Such a position is essentially the opposite of the position "to save your small national state from the imperialist attacks of the Russian Federation."

(Continued on following post.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:12 pm

(Pt 3 Continued from previous post.)

4.3. The Marxist Path in the Current Situation
The logic of the class struggle shows that the main confrontation of the 20th century is the confrontation between communism and fascism.

And this is the starting point for the actions of a Marxist.

4.4. The historical confrontation between communism and fascism
It is known that both national patriots and liberal democrats are now talking about the confrontation between the bourgeoisie (civilized countries) and totalitarianism. However, a tangle of spiders, as we understand it, will justify itself in every possible way. As Biden said of SVB, "That's how capitalism works." Here one would like to know: on what grounds does a society built on relations of private property and propagating the religion of democracy suddenly have anything to do with the words "progressive" and "civilized".

From the point of view of the laws of capitalism, the only thing that separates a bourgeois regime from becoming a fascist one is the size of the concentration of financial capital, the crisis and the corresponding need to maintain the power of one's class. As the practice of the same Germany of the last century shows, the time for fascisation of a population poorly educated in social science (even if it is highly educated in other sciences and arts) is about six years. Now it can happen faster. And thus, there are no civilized countries that oppose some vaguely defined autocracies. There is a monopolized capitalism that retains its power and turns into fascism during crises. And the only reason why this happens is because of the relations of private property, which allow a certain group to appropriate the products of social labor. Communism, which opposes capitalism, denies these relations (quite roughly speaking, for the initial stages, when scientific consciousness has not yet been nurtured in people, these relations are prohibited at the legislative level and no one in a communist society simply can appropriate the products of social labor), and therefore any need for robbery , violence, power and subjugation is alien to communist society. From this, as well as from the difficulties and gradual development of such a consciousness, one should proceed in assessing both communism and the societies that moved towards it.

In the coordinate system discussed above, it is necessary to show how the class struggle has worked historically.

With the end of the First World War, the world was overwhelmed by the contradiction along the lines of fascism-communism, and socialist revolutions swept through. There were civil wars between the "whites/browns" and the "reds" in the countries. This also applied to the most “Western” countries: France and Germany. This even applied to Japan. This was true of central Russia (Putin's favorite philosopher, Ilyin, who nurtured the white movement, wrote that Italian fascism was too weak and weak just because it was neither Russian nor Orthodox). Moreover, the entire territory of the Republic of Ingushetia was covered by this: the Baltics were no exception, as were Ukraine, Finland and Poland. In civil wars, one part of the population relied on the socialist USSR, the second - on fascistized Germany and Poland. It is a class fault line separating antagonistic opposites. All supporters of bourgeois power, like the OUN or the Baltic legionnaires, were smeared with fascism, and their heirs are now in power. All established bourgeois regimes in the pre-war period of the 1930s. established close ties with the European capitalist countries. They did not receive and could not receive any real freedom: blocks of opposing forces were formed - just as it was in the First World War. I recommend this fault lineexplored in a number of popular science works.

On the other hand, we must look at the USSR. In the national-democratic paradigm (including the one in the Russian Federation), it is considered in terms of “repression”, “slavish obedience”, “anti-human crimes” and attract different textures. However, it is a mistake to consider the logic of the USSR from the standpoint of capitalism. One can watch with endless pleasure how one by one the myths about the “bloody scoop”, about its repressions, about the civil war, about the revolution itself, about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, about collective farms, uprisings of workers, about collapse, about Chernobyl, etc., are revealed. These myths are always antilogical, always contain stupidity, their beautiful analysis gives intellectual pleasure. If we put Marxism as a basis, then the logic of the country's restoration after the civil war, the logic of mass education of the population, the logic of bringing millions out of poverty will become clearly understandable. the logic of preparation for the coming world war, shock collectivization and industrialization, the logic of counter-revolutionary struggle. One good historian said: during the civil war in Russia, both whites and reds killed tens of thousands, but some did it so that tens of millions would later get out of poverty, while others so that thousands could live well at the expense of these tens of millions. This is not to mention the fact that the civil war was unleashed by the former landlords and capitalists.

4.5. Confrontation between communism and fascism in our time
Any bourgeois power shows its class essence and legally increases repression as the crisis deepens, and here its logic is completely understandable. That is, tightening the screws in connection with the war objectively takes place on the side of all participants. But for successful activity, it is necessary to find differences along the line of confrontation between fascism and communism. Simply put, a communist can work in an environment where his activities are not prohibited.

It is easy to imagine the work of a conditional Marxist in the Baltics in conditions when it is officially forbidden by law to challenge the official interpretation of the history of the last century and current events. A Marxist needs to gather the backbone of people, conduct propaganda, work with the masses, and educate them. If he talks about civilian life instead of occupation, he will get a term. He will sort out this nonsense about the victims of the Soviet regime (even just compare the demography, economy and standard of living of the MNG under the USSR and during independence) - he will sit down. He will disassemble the official interpretation of history into molecules, because it is impossible to look at it without tears, it has nothing to do with science at all, and he will receive a term. He will tell about the reasons for the current war and the involvement of the MNG authorities in them - he will again receive a term. If he organizes a Marxist circle, he will be persecuted, as the authorities have done this more than once.

You just need to imagine a person who came out of selfish interests, saw how the government drives the population into poverty, embarked on a scientific track and began to engage in at least just propaganda about ways to restore balance. How long will he hold out in the Baltic MNG without stepping on a single anti-communist law? Red propaganda is prohibited by law. And so that no one doubts - the authorities are demolishing (and in their logic doing absolutely right) the monuments of class opponents. Not just because the biggest bond of the MNG - "pain from the occupation" - is a cheap manipulation, but because the communists will take away the stolen goods and the very opportunity to steal.

It was static, but in dynamics we see that society is rapidly becoming fascistized. Yes, the crafty national patriot perceives this as a small number of crazy activists who should be ashamed of normal people of any nationality. But these are the harbingers of a new civil war. This process can be described as movement in the Overton window, because the situation is developing on many fronts, and it began long before 02/24/2022. Popularization in the media is the public dehumanization of a part of the population. More and more government officials allow themselves to speak and do on the agenda of hatred towards other nations (RF, RB). The inculcated slogan about a mono-ethnic country. The murder of Russian education. Demolition of Soviet monuments. Institute of non-citizenship. Honoring Legionnaires. Since the outbreak of the war, official chauvinism has skyrocketed. It's not news news this completely fits into the logic of the heirs of the fascist collaborators, who, as always, are not independent, who are entering a period of crisis and who are no longer restrained in their methods by anything: there is no opposing class capable of mobilizing the masses for struggle, and in connection with the ongoing war, it is possible to dismantle democracy. Recall that the fascisization of the socially illiterate philistine population takes about six years, after which it will commit any crimes. An individual person can be isolated from this process now due to a tolerable financial situation and have a national-patriotic interpretation in which everything is fine, and radicals in the media and government are random lunatics. But class analysis and consideration of events in dynamics is an inexorable thing, and they show a world crisis and an intensifying competitive struggle.

Now about RF. This is the same bourgeoisie, also in crisis, also planting anti-Sovietism and trying to declare itself the heirs of the whites, which means that it is not alien to fascisization, like any other bourgeois country. But, unexpectedly, there is a nuance. Whites never won here until the 1990s, and 70+ years of history cannot be erased. The population was brought up by the communists and, on a historical scale, Hitlerism recently defeated. Everyone in the family has communist heirs, albeit often degenerated. And that is why that same “string” remained - Victory Day, which the bourgeoisie would like to knock off (as they bashfully cover the Mausoleum), but it does not come out, because this day really holds the people together. Therefore, this "clamp" has to be used, introducing a fair amount of schizophrenia even into education, not to mention politics. And that is why the communist movements, as long as they have not turned into a revolutionary party, are not prohibited. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is a bourgeois scarecrow, but it has the ability to teach people Marxism. Any leftist like Semin broadcasts from every iron, the turbo-patriot Goblin calmly analyzes the official interpretation of history with Zhukov and interviews Marxists (what popularization!), all sorts of workers' lovers like the RPR, the FRA publish books, circles - not to count. And this is the Russian Federation, and what can we say about the Republic of Belarus. Yes, the Soviet vaccination against fascism continues to weaken, but it will last much longer than in the Baltic MNG: there is no anti-communism in the Russian Federation at the legislative level.

In addition, the conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO on the territory of Ukraine must be viewed through the prism of global shifts in the world imperialist system. The hegemony of US imperialism is in crisis, it is opposed by the socialist countries and the countries with a socialist orientation. Communism has long been no longer a ghost roaming Europe, but a completely wealthy entity on a global scale, albeit not as powerful as the post-war bloc led by the USSR. The fading of US hegemony is progressive, as it creates a more acceptable configuration of international relations.

4.6. How to act?
The path of a Marxist is the opposite of that of a national democrat on either side. The current conflict and massacres were not started by the communists, on whom little now depends and who have their own agenda. To understand how to proceed, a dialectical study must be carried out, which should show which side will cause the maximum damage to humanity. It is necessary to fight both sides, but so far there is little strength - not to interfere with the small evil to fight the big one and gradually build up communist forces.

What do we see? The crisis again pushes the largest capital to the next redivision of the world, which means another wholesale militarization and fascistization of bourgeois countries for a world war with competitors and shutting off oxygen to the communists, who are the only force capable of fighting this plague. Therefore, it is logical to interfere with all the forces of those who incite a world war. Their actions will lead to the maximum number of victims. It is also logical not to interfere with those bourgeois states that are trying to resist the instigators with their stupid and destructive means, but which do not yet have the goal of fomenting a world war. Their actions will lead to victims, but of a different, lesser order. It is especially logical not to interfere with those bourgeois states that are trying to resist the instigators, who do not have the goal of fomenting a world war and who do not interfere with communist activities. Not to interfere with them does not mean to support them. Not to interfere means to use the opportunity, in our case, while the legacy of the USSR is alive and communist activity is not prohibited, the opportunity to forge a theory and organization that, united with the masses, will disperse this bourgeois anti-human trash from all sides. If you interfere with a less bloody regime that does not prohibit your activities, then you will invariably find yourself on the side of a more bloody regime, which, having won, will prohibit your activities. This is extremely illogical.

5. Conversation with a Slavophil patriot (LDNR)
This text was written for an opponent based on the results of reading his many years of worldview reflections, which ended with the chord “I will continue to ban idiots. Both red and white. My Russia is at war with crests. Whoever wants to fight among themselves is not here.”

5.1. introductory
In recent years, you have been puzzled by worldview questions: about the betrayal of the leaders, about the future of Russia, about the conflict between whites and reds, about real patriots and guardians. Roughly speaking: now, Russia will win this war - and what is its image of the future? And judging by the frequency of such notes, the question is not idle for you, and it is not idle for anyone. And you don’t have an answer, despite the strongest convictions, which means that somewhere in your reasoning lies an error. It would be nice to compare the foundation of our worldviews with you, find mistakes and try to build such an image. To begin with, I tried to make your virtual portrait. I hope that this will be the beginning of a substantive dialogue where we can come to a common worldview.

5.2. Portrait: personality and beliefs
A man whose homeland - Donbass - has been burned by post-Maidan Ukraine for about 10 years. Selfless, authoritative fighter against an existential enemy.

Vision of the conflict: the historical battle of the united West against Russia.

The parties to the conflict are as follows.

West:

- Western countries are leading the Russian Federation to the slaughter and will not agree on this path.

- The West is not monolithic, but the United States uses all the levers in the issue of the destruction of Russia.

- Ukraine is a non-independent Nazi tool - a ram against Russia (anti-Russia).

Russia:

— The most patriotic acting elites are Westerners who are trying to negotiate with Western elites, who, in turn, are not going to negotiate. Due to these agreements, the country is not properly prepared for war.

- The most unpatriotic elites - the liberal ones - want the full power of the West on the territory of Russia. At this stage, they are removed from power.

Characteristics of the population.

– Ideological patriots who dedicate their lives to confrontation with Ukraine and the West and see that the way out of the situation is for the authorities to realize everything and stop making agreements and for the population to organize horizontally, as V. Grubnik, M. Kalashnikov, I. Strelkov and other representatives of the "angry patriots club".

- A minority of the population woke up and joined the fight against the enemy.

- Most do not take the war seriously, but are slowly waking up.

- Stubborn ideological (whites, reds, anarchists and others) are at enmity with each other, instead of uniting in the face of the enemy.

Perception of the development of social movements.

— Slavophiles: a special way of Russia, Orthodox, just, due to a thousand-year history. This conversation is with a representative of this group.

— Westernizers: the path of Russia in merging with Western countries.

- White and red: stoned "ultra-monarchists" against stoned "red kings". Both groups care for the Motherland, but both cannot understand that it is necessary to unite, and not to quarrel in the name of some ephemeral ideas.

The goal is to build a conflict-free, just society, at least in Russia, where the life of every person is important.

Method: analytical rational study of history and contemporary events.

Outcome. Orthodox Slavophil, a sincere patriot of Russia as a unique motherland with a thousand-year history. A supporter of the civilizational theory, within the framework of which it is Russia that is a just civilization. He sees that Russia now has no image of the future, but when the population organizes (here a reference to the Troubles of the 17th century) horizontally and wins the current war with Ukraine, this image will definitely be drawn. In general, it should be built on love for the motherland, Orthodox values, peaceful coexistence with neighbors and strength capable of resisting enemies.

5.2.1. How a Slavophile Patriot Sees the Motivation of Social Groups
The authorities are Westernizers because they think wrong; their movement of thought is such that a better future awaits Russia with the West. The problem of wrong outlook leads them to destructive activity.

The population cannot wake up, because there were well-fed years and now they want to sit out on the edge. People love their Motherland, but not enough. They think wrong: they are under the illusion that the state will cope without them.

The whites and the reds did idiocy a hundred years ago and still, due to their stupidity, they cannot reconcile, because they believe in their fictitious symbols. They think wrongly and cannot understand the idea of ​​unity for the motherland, although they love it.

Slavophiles are patriots: they think right and do everything right, because they love their Motherland and are ready to go to the end in the war with the enemy. At the same time, Orthodox values ​​are beyond doubt: they have been holding the state together for hundreds of years.

Western countries are at war with Russia because they have mercantile values. They think wrongly and do not know how to coexist peacefully with their neighbors, which is confirmed by all history since colonialism.

Russia is a fair Motherland, as the Slavs have always tried to live peacefully with their neighbors. There were different things in history, of course, but in general, the vector of a thousand-year history is much more peaceful and fair than that of the West.

The correct way out in the current situation is to change the contents of all the above heads.

5.2.2. How a Slavophil-patriot sees the worldview foundations on which the motivation of social groups is based
Very conditionally speaking, by the will of higher powers, the civilization of Russia has been fair throughout history, while Western civilization has not.

In such a concept, history moves according to the collision of certain communities of people. Some justice or injustice inherent in each of them is manifested according to how this society sincerely follows the principles communicated by a higher power.

Thus, we have some principles of justice that are constant for all mankind, expressed in commandments, following or not following which forms societies that face in opposition, according to the level of presence of this justice in their culture.

Regarding each person: he thinks correctly if he was born in a society that brought him up on these principles of justice (and from which he took it). A person thinks wrongly if he deviates from these principles. Why people in the same society think differently is the result of some evolutionary leaps applied to a particular individual.

Other ideas - hataskrai, monarchist, pro-Western, red - are false idols (of oneself, the monarch, the west, the union).

5.2.3. Outcome
Simplify. In the worldview of the Slavophile-patriot, there are some eternal values ​​​​that must be followed - and everything will be fine. Such values ​​are professed by Russian civilization.

With what it is impossible not to agree at this stage:

— Method: analytical rational study of history and contemporary events.

- The Russian Federation, which the West is uncompromisingly ready to dismember for further robbery with the help of its mindless Nazi tool. The Russian Federation, headed by Westerners and in which the population does not take the threat seriously.

- The need for the victory of the Russian Federation over the West and Ukraine.

With which it is impossible to agree:

- With the worldview itself with its frozen norms, given "from above".

- With the fact that such a worldview can somehow lead to the goal.

- With the goal set: building a conflict-free, just society, at least in Russia, where the life of every person is important. The goal cannot be a society of justice in such an interpretation, established in a separate territory.

And what is absolutely impossible to agree with is the fact that there is no image of the future. It has been around for a long time and will inevitably be realized (unless, of course, everything burns out in a nuclear fire).

(Continued on following post.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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