Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Published: 30 March 2022 ~ OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad
Article 19: OXATA
I have often seen it, but I’ve never tried it, but when I saw a chap in front of me paying for two bottles of it at the local supermarket checkout, I decided that it was high time that I did. I’m talking about Ohota Krepkoye beer (OXOTA beer), a strong Russian beer from the Heineken Brewery* in St Petersburg with an OG of 8.1% and a label affirming real men, and now me, drink it.
The bottle looks as though its 1.5 litres, but when you check the small print you find that it is 0.15 litres short of the full 1.5. I know a lot of people like that.
The label tells you straight away that this is no namby-pamby, Nancy-boy brew. The bold shadow-highlighted 3-D typeface charges across the bottle against a deep red sash and above it is a man who has an awesome chest with a rifle slung over his shoulder. If you have ever harboured a secret desire to appear really incongruous, try carrying a bottle of this beer whilst attending a gay parade!
Before I had taken my first sip, I knew instinctively that this was the sort of beer that you could very easily get pissed on but not take the piss out of. Excuse my professional beer critic’s language.
The aroma struck me initially as though possessing a spicey, citrus twang, but, before decanting into my trusty Soviet glass, I paused a moment, a little affectedly I thought, took another whiff and changed my mind. It was now, I opined, decidedly sweet and disconcertingly antiseptic.
It poured into the glass with a disappointingly weak head which dissipated rapidly. Once out of the bottle, I was relieved to find that the clinical smell had gone, replaced and overpowered by the sweeter notes.
Not the dark, deep colour I had anticipated but a mid-amber, the beer had, I was surprised to find, not a rich sweet taste but a sweet tart taste laced with a touch of burnt charcoal.
OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad
The quite glutinous finish gives way to a strong throaty aftertaste, which is not at all unpleasant, and, whilst you secretly wonder how it received a World Beer Award in the ‘Silver’ category, as the medallion on the front of the bottle signifies, there is no doubt in your mind, and also in your mouth, that the brew is persuasively moorish.
Affirmation that this is a real man’s drink is not backward in coming forward. I could feel my liver shrinking and my ego getting bigger with each successive sip.
The heady aftertaste taps into your long-term memory, summoning vague recollections of cautionless drinking sessions undertaken in the first flood of youth. How much of that memory would survive intact should you overdo an OXOTA session really does not bear thinking about.
One thing’s for certain, OXOTA is a good buy if you want to say goodbye and rather quickly to that irritating condition otherwise known as sobriety.
Footnote:🦶 I picked up the rumour from somewhere that the Heineken Brewery is one of those companies that virtue signalled their allegiance to the United States-led globalist war on Russia by buggering off. But take heart, Hart, I said. Buggering-off breweries mean a larger share of the market for those that are smart and don’t budge and a chance to expand and diversify for those that seize the initiative.😁
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: OXOTA (Ohota Krepkoye) Brewer: Heineken Where it is brewed: St Petersburg Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre Strength: 8.1% Price: It cost me about 137 roubles (1.06 pence) Appearance: Mid-amber Aroma: Predominantly sweet Taste: Tart, not excessively sweet Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: A big strapper with a large rifle Would you buy it again? If the need so takes me Marks out of 10: 6
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
The Frenzy to Cancel Russian Culture is a Symptom of the West’s Decline
Published: 25 March 2022 ~ Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
Immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and throughout that war, the Nazi’s singled out the Jewish population and subjected them to a sustained and brutal campaign of harassment, persecution and violence. Proscription and marginalisation began in 1933 and were reinforced and legitimised in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws, the sanctions of their day, paved the way for more widespread and incisive discriminatory practices and opened the floodgates of prejudice for the justification of genocide.
Over time, the sustained ideological prohibition on personal liberty, human rights and freedom of religious association escalated. Campaigns of intimidation and terror ran simultaneously with random acts of violence and official decrees which, hampering Jews in their professional and vocational lives, combined economic degradation with societal segregation.
Today, such examples of state-orchestrated social and economic ostracism are endemic in western societies. They may have acquired a new moniker, namely cancel culture, but whatever title they operate under, in application and in effect, it’s Nazi business as usual.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
A prime recent and surprising example of cancel culture occurred in of all places Canada, the epicentre of liberal conformity, when Justin Trudeau, the then prime minister-in-hiding, unleashed his army of robo-cops on an unsuspecting convoy of peacefully protesting Canadian truckers.
As well as being predominantly white and patriots, another cardinal sin committed by the truckers was that they tried to invoke their rights, which unbeknown to them had been quietly and stealthily side-lined. Freedom of speech, even freedom of thought, had been stringently replaced by an explicit demand for mass obedience and unquestionable allegiance to liberal mandates.
Arguably, the social and economic violations enacted by Trudeau against his own people came as more of a shock to them than cancel-culture warfare has to Russian nationals living, working and studying in western countries, where, since Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine to ‘de-Nazify and de-militarise’, Russians experience demonisation on a daily basis.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
It is tempting to postulate that since Russians are no strangers to prejudice from the West ~ they have certainly been the recipients of it for decades, even centuries ~ they would not be unduly surprised or alarmed by this latest round of belligerence. But if the views of Russians with whom I have personally spoken on the subject of cancel culture represent the views of the Russian nation as a whole, then fortunately until now, or so it would seem, no clear comprehension has existed, at least among ordinary Russians, of the vitriol, enmity and hostility harboured against them by the West, nor the blatant disregard of the West for the sovereignty of their country and the sanctity of their culture.
Pervasive as this blind vindictiveness is in the West, nowhere does it assert itself more forcefully than in the United Kingdom. The explanation for this phenomenon might conceivably lie in the efficacy of propaganda, but it is not so much that UK media has got its misinformation and also its disinformation off to such a fine art that Brits can’t tell their arse from their elbow (although the argument in favour of this is strong) as the willingness of Brits to suspend disbelief about what they see on the telly or read in the media, no matter how one-sided it is, how sensationalised or misleading.
Brits believe what they want to believe at any given time, especially during a crisis, when solidarity of thought ~ or should that be solidity ~ offers them a temporary fix for the rifts in British society. That the British establishment endorses and whole-heartedly encourages such deflecting hysteria is unequivocal: Better to bring people together in a media-manufactured frenzy against the goings on in a far-away country about which they know less than nothing, than have them focus too objectively on the grievous problems in their own back yard.
The simpler explanation for the willingness of Brits to jump through hoops when told to do so is that they feel the need to get value for money for obediently paying their TV licence or, no less reasonable or less risible, that the Russophobia they are so keen to champion is inextricably linked to that transatlantic ‘special relationship’ we hear so much about, whilst other countries in the West feel rather less obliged to carry the can kicked down the road by big old bully boy Uncle Sam.
Obliged or not, countries of the EU bloc, including Germany, which is rather good at this sort of thing, are busy pooling their cancel-culture resources. The problem, although obviously not a problem to western governments and the sheeple that they shepherd, is that artists, singers, sportsmen, 19th century literary figures and even Mr Tchaikovsky himself are in no way implicated in the Ukraine conflict, and neither are Russian students nor for that matter Russian schoolchildren, unless the culture into which one is born is considered to be a crime as birth right was for the Jews, according to cancel culture, cancel everything, 1940s’ Germans.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
The castigation and negation of Russia’s cultural class, the hate speech and violent abuse with which Russian nationals have to contend, are the punitive reflex actions of a deeper frustration coursing through the West than can be rationally credited to the events taking place in the Ukraine alone. They are rather a manifestation of the failings within western societies, and the compulsive instinctual need that stems from recognition of those failures that Russian culture must be cancelled as their own cultures have been cancelled, albeit non-consensually, by the leaders that they elected and who have written them off, Trudeau-style.
As the West sinks slowly but inevitably into the great abyss, where eventually all spent empires slide, the beacon of light from Russian culture is an untimely for some and timely for others rather wistful reminder of what the West once was, once had and what it could have been if it had only lived up to and not betrayed the values it espoused.
The task that Russia is faced with now, and the responsibility it owes to its thousand years of history, to its people and to the world, is to shape a multipolar destiny whilst avoiding the fate of being dragged down into the awful vortex of the spiralling West, as it gradually disappears behind the geo-political and moral horizon.
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Examples of Third Reich-style Cancel-Culture Occurrences in Western Europe
In my previous post I provided a treatise on the collective psychology on which cancel culture is premised and the mechanisms by which it works generally in the West and specifically in the UK.
Here are some examples of cancel culture at work today: the perpetrators, western governments, leaned-on western corporations and led-on western citizens; the victims, Russian nationals.
Alexander Ovechkin, National Hockey League star and Washington Capitals captain, cancelled from advertising campaigns by insurance firm sponsor
Russian and Belorusian athletes and officials cancelled from international sports federations
Journalists working for or on behalf of Russian state-backed media outlets cancelled by the EU
Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, temporarily cancelled by the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Italy, but reinstated after a public backlash
Russian cats cancelled from competitions by the International Feline Federation
Russian dogs cancelled by Crufts dog show
Russian football team cancelled, including ban on taking part in Word Cup 2022 qualifying matches
Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev cancelled by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra
The chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, cancelled in Germany
Wimbledon, UK, considers cancelling Russian players who do not denounce the role of their country in the conflict in Ukraine
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Examples of Nazi-style discrimination, abuse and aggression towards Russian nationals in western countries
Russian students have been expelled from universities in France and Belgium and there are reports of Czech teachers and professors refusing to teach Russian students and ordering them to leave lecture theatres
In Washington, a Russian restaurant was attacked and anti-Russian slogans daubed on the walls
In Germany a restaurant owner banned Russian nationals
In Holland, Russians have received threats of physical violence.
In Britain, acts of violence and harassment are occurring against Russian nationals
In England Russian students studying both in state and private schools are subject to bullying, intimidation, destructive acts of personal property, mockery and violence
Social media sites allows calls for violence against Russians in violation of anti-genocide laws enshrined in the UN Convention of 1948
A recent article from RT headlined ‘Western cancel culture has gone nuclear in targeting an entire country’, no doubt led many Russians to ask, “what exactly does ‘cancel culture’ mean?” I’ll get to that in a minute. First, let it be known that cancelling Russian culture is not a new thing for the West. Indeed, the UK establishment has been at it for years, long before the term was coined, in fact at a time when neoliberalism and its all-consuming globalist dream was nothing more than a distant twinkle in the eyes of rapacious imperialism.
Unlike Russia, whose socio-cultural model is based on tradition, traditional heterosexual family values, respect for Russian history and pride in and preservation of sovereignty ~ all of which makes it a perfect target for the cancel-culture West ~ British culture has been eroded over time and replaced by something sub-standard and counterfeit. For 30 years, at least, the UK has been the victim of a systematic cancel-culture campaign, cynically inflicted upon its legacy citizens by self-interested globalist aspirants masquerading as humanitarians.
The result of these policies is that today’s UK is a pale shadow of its former self. Once proud and united, British society today is riven with cancel culturalists, who repeatedly turn to woke to further their neo-fascist agenda.
As with ‘cancel culture’ any attempt to define woke using Google will inevitably return a left-leaning prejudice. Woke began life as a liberal buzz word, incestuously applauding a supposed awareness of racial or social discrimination. But with its increasing application as a virtue-signalling means of cancelling culture, principally by preventing alternative views and expression, it rapidly acquired pejorative connotations as a psychological/emotional weapon wielded by subversives against the UK’s indigenous culture. Found out, it rapidly turned pejorative, censuring the sanctimony for which it was designed and the subversives by which it was wielded.
Cancel culture and woke are closely related, in that both instruments depend for their projected legitimacy on claiming the moral high-ground; both are designed to shut down free speech and subvert target cultures; and both belong exclusively to the doctrines of liberal fascism, which singles out ancestral cultures, infects and erodes them by stealth and then when sufficiently weakened rapes them of all decency.
In the UK, woke, which is the bastard child of political correctness, and cancel culture, which is too nice a term for cultural genocide, were brought to fruition by two coalescing engineering programmes: first, social engineering and then gender engineering. Historically, the two overlap, but I have separated them out here, since the degree to which UK media in both its corporate and social forms obsesses on them displays a slight shift of late in favour of gender, although race and racial woke remain the cancel-culture bedrock.
The first of these programmes, and the one that is still paramount, is concerned with state-aided and abetted third-world immigration, with its predisposition to dilute host culture and disrupt and fracture cohesiveness. The second, gender engineering, challenges and inverts biological, cultural and morally acceptable norms that are of innate and long-standing importance to the host-country’s culture. Taken together, both experiments have produced a bizarre and troubled social construct, comprising CMUPs (Culturally Mixed Up People) and GMUPs (Gender Mixed Up People), both of whom we are led to believe can comfortably co-exist with traditional values-oriented, non-deviant ‘normal’ people. Only, of course, they don’t.
The socially engineered migration programme, not be confused with natural migration, ie that which occurs for various reasons over any number of years, has been purposefully devised in a relatively short timeframe in accordance with the diversity tenets of the Kalergi Plan, an early 20th century cancel-culture blueprint routinely, if not conveniently, dismissed by western liberals as a conspiracy theory of the far right. (PolitiFact, which is a liberal ‘fact checker’ tells you it is a conspiracy theory, so make of that what you will!)
Both programmes serve a mutual purpose, which is to radically weaken, alter and diminish the traditional values of the host culture until it devolves to such impoverishment that it can be parasitically usurped and ultimately replaced by a macabre and distorted otherness,
It must be understood that cancel culture in the UK is at an advanced stage, brought about not by external forces but perpetrated from within by the very people that we have elected to safeguard our culture and heritage.
The extent to which cancel culture has been promulgated in the UK, and how insidious it has become, can be evaluated from the fact that the UK’s education system is nothing more than a factory of woke. Whatever goes in at one end by the time it comes out at the other, like a limp stick of Brighton rock, it has ‘liberal-lefty’ stamped all the way through it.
Naturally, or unnaturally, depending upon your point of view, the contribution of the UK’s media to this woeful state of affairs is incomputable. Suffice it to say, however, that it is not only corporate news and social media that is stoking woke and cultivating cancel culture, documentaries and popular dramas also play a part.
The BBC, the main offender, is little more than a revisionist joke. It routinely distorts British history by writing black, gay and other PC preoccupations into historical contexts where they never existed and, given the norms of the periods in which the dramas are set, would never have been allowed to exist. Watching these hysterical-historical dramas it is easy to believe that a gender-studies female Dr Who (a tick in the box for gender woke) flounced back in time in her fictional TARTIS and altered something in the past to justify the woke that is the unreal real reality of 21st century UK. If not this, then what other explanation is there for the degradation of common sense and the unfolding cultural catastrophe?
It has already been noted that cancel culture in the UK is at such an advanced stage that the prognosis for the patient is not at all good, but, like every disease, it had to start somewhere. Fortunately for Russia and its citizens, the outbreak of cancel culture that it is contending with today is little more than a rash (and proving rash for those who conceived it). It is the work of hostile foreign powers and as such has limited consequences outside of Russia itself. Cancel culture only becomes existentially dangerous on a creeping subversive level when it takes hold within a country, and this it can only do with the full connivance, collusion and treachery of a facilitating government.
In Britain cancel culture began with what you could and couldn’t say, and that rule still applies. Opening your mouth without first having your thoughts rubber-stamped liberal is liable to expose you to a frenzied barrage of insults, or, at the very least, to instigate typical ‘stop’ words, such as ‘racist’, for example, or the currently trending ‘misogynist’ or any number of logic-turned words with ‘phobia’ strung on the end. Fortunately, over time, these words have become overworked, overused and resultingly less effective and always have been less than successful at stopping you thinking what you think and what you truly believe.
However, as we know to our cost, from tiny microbes nasty diseases grow, especially when they are cultivated. For example: Flying the nation’s flag is racist; wearing poppies, the traditional emblem signifying respect for British service men who gave their lives in two world wars and also in later wars, is racist; celebrating Christian Christmas is an offence to other religions, it is inciting religious hatred, thus Brits should rename it Christmas Lights or something like Winter Holiday; flying the flag of St George, now that is really racist; whilst the use of terms like ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘boys and girls’, even ‘mums and dads’ is incredibly offensive to gender neutrals. I am sure you get the picture.
It would be nice to say that these idiocies only exist in the phantasmagorical world created by UK media, but no. For liberal lefties this is reality, and they zealously want to change your reality to make it fit unconditionally into their narrow mixed-up rainbow spectrum.
Obviously, as time goes by the effects of cancel culture and woke grow worse ~ much worse. Perhaps one of the best of the worst examples of cancel culture of late is the obsequious, cringe-making response of government and corporate media to the Black Lives Matter riots. These riots caused millions of pounds worth of damage in the UK (billions of dollars in America) and resulted in many injured and dead but were described almost without exception by creepy liberal media outlets as ‘a largely peaceful protest’.
No sooner had the BLM rioters begun to destroy people and property than Facebook’s mindless minions were busy changing their avatars to ‘I support BLM’, whilst everyone from football clubs to the metropolitan police force were subserviently ‘taking a knee’. For what? In support of an anarchistic, subversive mob inspired and backed by Antifa brownshirts. You might as well have taken a knee to the balls of western culture, which is precisely what they did.
So, having established that western globalists want to cancel the founding cultures of their own countries, why would they want to cancel Russian culture?
The simple answer to that in relation to the ongoing special operation in Ukraine is that they want Russia’s cultural elite to feel very cross with their government for taking the action it has taken. On a deeper level, however, they are attempting to shame Russian citizens into feeling bad about who they are and the culture to which they belong. Alarm bells!! This is the thin end of the cancel-culture wedge. This is how it starts and started for us in the UK.
First, we were made to feel bad about our colonial past; then we were made to feel bad for feeling patriotic; then we were made to feel bad because we spoke out about the immigration invasion; then we were made to feel bad about not feeling bad enough, and before we knew it we are where we are today, going down on one knee, begging forgiveness for being ‘white-privileged’ and for wanting to live our lives in the culture that is our own country. Well, what a silly, stupid, nation, I can hear you saying. And yes, you are perfectly right. But remember what I have told you. Cancel culture has to start somewhere; like poison ivy it has to take root.
The nature of Russian culture, with its reverence for tradition and with the Orthodox church at its centre, does not fit comfortably into the neoliberal cultural jigsaw, and it doesn’t help any ~ help belligerent states that is ~ that Russia is the world’s largest country with abundant resources that the West does not have, not the least of which is oil and gas. Therefore, both for economic and cultural reasons the demagogues of the West want to take you, Russia, off the board, trim you to fit their agenda and then replace you in their image.
Why this cancel culture programme has grown so vehement and aggressive towards Russia now is that events both within western countries and globally have forced the globalists to play their hand. It is not just Ukraine that has spurred them on. Cancel culture as it pertains to Russia, and to anyone else in the world, is a manifestation of a deeper malaise. Things are, to put it mildly, not at all well on the western front. The past three years have seen Brexit, the EU splintering, cynical manipulation of the so-called coronavirus pandemic and a sneaking slide into totalitarianism, which came to a head with Justin Trudeau’s cruel oppression of his own people, who unlike BLM, were genuinely peaceful protestors. Perhaps they were just the wrong colour? (Why they call him Justin Turdeau, I guess I’ll never know?)
As I noted at the beginning of this post, casting Russia in the role of enemy number one has been long-time in the making. You would be hard pressed to find a positive report, article or feature written about Russia in the UK media in the past 10 years. That media, on instruction from the British establishment, has been slowly but methodically poisoning the UK’s collective mind, such as it is, in readiness for an event such as the one which the West created and is exploiting and perpetuating on Russia’s southwest border.
One way of understanding the relationship between the British public and its media is to think of Brits as little clockwork toys, their springs wound up to bursting point from two years of psychological warfare waged on them by corporate and social media in the name of Covid restrictions and cyclical mass vaccination.
Come Russia’s special operation in Ukraine to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’, all that the UK media needed to do was to shake their toys out of the box and then sit back and watch as they jumped up and down in mad delight frothing, foaming and chattering inanely but still with the presence of mind to change their Facebook avatars.
I am not being unduly hard on my fellow countrymen. It is a sad but true fact that we Brits are all too generous when it comes to resisting disbelief at what we read in our media. Sadly, the British are so terribly vulnerable to the machinations of the so-called free press. They have yet to recognise how effectively corporate media and social media has manipulated them through Brexit, the BLM riots, Covid restrictions, mass vaccination and how each of these events have been exploited to chip away at their values and cancel their cultural heritage.
The only people who appear to be blessed by this ignorance, are compulsive Facebook avatar changers, who ran to change their Facebook icons to ‘I support Ukraine’ on the crack of the media ringmaster’s whip, never mind that less than a week before hardly anyone in the UK had heard of the Ukraine, and even those who possessed the vaguest knowledge of it had no idea of what has been happening to the people of Donbas there, or the intransigent NATO threats and still have no idea. ‘Mind the gap!’ they cry when you travel the London Underground; mind the gap, indeed. But if the society in which you live has no cohesive identity, and especially after two long years of Covid division and terror, you will grasp at a chance of solidarity however unlikely the cause and by whomsoever offers the straw.
Whether or not you define a joke in this pathos, cancel culture is no laughing matter. One of the more invidious repercussions of cancel culture, which we have seen in the media recently (not in corporate media), is that it impels mindless people to commit mindless violence. This phenomenon is evident in the disturbing rise in hate speech, harassment and violent attacks against Russian interests and Russian nationals across western Europe.
Facebook, which has got far too big for its Big Techy boots, emboldened by the success of its recent unchallenged censorship in which UK users have been accused and arrested for inciting racial hatred, blocked for supporting Brexit and re-routed to biased fact-checker sites for posting ‘wrong’ views about Covid, decided that it was Russia’s turn to be victimised by its double standards.
Like the illusion that exists between racial discrimination and positive racial discrimination, Facebook invented the split-hair concept of hate speech and positive hate speech. Say boo to a liberal or black on Facebook, look out here comes plod. But drench the whole Russian nation with hatred, thus inciting acts of violence against the people of that nation, that’s all Facebook well and good.
Although Schicklgruber, whatever his name is, achieved what he set out to achieve, Facebook was forced to rescind this unbelievable Nazi-like policy due to a public backlash, after which, thank heavens, Russia proceeded to ban Facebook along with its SS Instagram chum.
Why does the West want to Cancel Russian Culture?
In answering the above question, it is important to realise that the events unfolding today are fundamentally existential. On the larger board, in the larger picture, a struggle is taking place between the sanctity of tradition, history and sovereignty and a world of dehumanising digitalisation in which economic supremacy outweighs moral and human values, a new world order in the making in which CMUPs and GMUPs grub about divisively in the darkness of misinformation, controlled and morally diminished by aloof financial elites.
It seems to me that yet again the world has reached a pivotal point in its history. The Great Reset is on its way, but it may not necessarily be the one outlined and wished for in Klaus Schwab’s book. We will not know what shape or what form it will take, until it has happened to us.
I do know that in looking back at the degradation of British culture, I look back with a sense of sadness, realising, possibly more than I have ever done before, how rare the commodity is and that should we squander or sell it out we do so at our moral peril, even at the expense of our very existence.
There are many things in life that are negotiable, culture is not one of them. Once it has gone, it has gone forever.
“It’s all bollocks!” Brits shout. But they don’t know whose …
Published: 9 March 2022 ~ Sanctions Backfire as Brits do Bollocks on Social Media
Frustration and impotence of western leaders attempting to punish Russia for its military operation in Ukraine has boiled over into social media. Brits, in particular, appear to have taken a direct hit from WMS (Weapons of Mass Stupidity), either that or perhaps they are simply reacting badly to something in their vaccines. Meanwhile, enlightened, tolerant, liberal EU states, weary from months of doubling down on authoritarian Covid measures, turn to Russia instead in a concerted attempt to cancel its culture.But not everything is bad news, at least Russia has gone and banned Facebook.
I must say that I could not have picked a more historic time to be in Russia since perestroika.
Only a couple of weeks ago, I was writing from the perspective of a ‘Self-isolating Englishman in Kaliningrad’, now I find myself in the peculiar position of being an Englishman in Kaliningrad sanctioned by the West.
Following Russia’s special military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’ Ukraine, protect the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) from alleged increasing aggression and Russia itself from the threat of nuclear weapons, my wife, Olga, asked if she could copy something I had written in my diary pertaining to these events and post it to Facebook (that’s Arsebook to me). At first, I thought not, for I knew that by doing so we would unleash a barrage of banalities and insults from the UK’s armchair Arsebook experts, those who presume they know everything but in fact know bugger all.
However, the Imp of the Perverse got the better of me, it came to pass and before you could say Russophobia my prediction had come true.
The comments incited by my Facebook post ranged from off-topic, anti-Russian hysteria to amusing expletive-laden tirades or, where the commenter was seriously lost for words as well as articulation, good old-fashioned personal abuse. One astute fellow, who must surely have a master’s degree in political analytics, put: “Thank you for writing so much, but it’ all bollocks.” 😁 Well, I say!
You’ve got to value a response of this kind, if only for its effortless nature and the potential universality of its application. I have read and heard the same summation used in a variety of analytical contexts, such as in the critical acclaim of the works of Johannes Brahms (‘It’s all bollocks!’); the paintings of John Constable (‘It’s all bollocks!’); the poetry of John Keats (‘It’s all bollocks!’) and the essays of Kant (‘It’s all bollocks!’).
Thus, should you be told that your Arsebook post is ‘all bollocks’, not to be confused with ‘It’s the dog’s bollocks’, which has entirely different and inverse implications, not only will you have the satisfaction of knowing that you share the honour with some of the world’s most accomplished people but also that your opponent, who has nothing constructive to say, has put his mind, such as it is, to bed and wrapped it up in a big white flag. Ahh, the incomparable joy of Arsebook one-upmanship, or should that be ‘up yours’!
Sanctions Backfire as Brits do Bollocks on Social Media
To be honest, writing anything above three short sentences on Arsebook is counter-productive if not resoundingly futile. The platform is full of people with lots to say about nothing, usually in impoverished English, which races away from their keyboards before their brains are properly engaged.
For example, no sooner had I posted my take of the situation in Ukraine on Arsebook than some opponents to my views decided to jump into their time machines. Returning to the 21st century a split second later, they then proceeded to make half-baked connections between past events in Soviet history and the current situation in Ukraine which, by time and circumstance, had no bearing whatsoever on the current state of affairs and made me wonder if, in their desperation to make such connections, they had not wilfully set out to short circuit the world of reason.
But at least comments of this nature require some imaginative flair, which is more than can be said for run-of-the-mill insults.
Facebook personal insults can be fun. However, whenever I am confronted by them, I have to put myself on a short leash (It’s just something I do at the weekends.) or risk even the faintest trace of diplomacy evaporating in an irresistible eagerness to lock horns.
The upside of personal abuse on Arsebook is that given time it eventually reveals that certain unpleasant something about the Arsebook ‘friend’ that you always suspected but could not quite put your finger on. Now you can use your boot! Goodbye Arsebook ‘friend’!
In my previous post I wrote about unfriending people on Facebook as a last resort. To that I should have added, except in circumstances where the level and frequency of stupidity becomes a burden on one’s time and intelligence, at which point san fairy ann is essential. As an adjunct, particularly joyful is when someone who you have longed to unfriend announces that they are unfriending you. Thank you, Lord! Thank you! Come to think of it, I wonder why I never opened a Facebook account myself, just to ‘make friends’ to unfriend.
For the present, and possibly for a long time to come, Arsebook issues and its petty little world have been put on the back burner or even taken off the boil. In response to the sweeping, and in most cases backfiring sanctions, imposed on Russia by the West for its special operation in Ukraine to ‘de-Nazify and demilitarise’, Russia has given Arsebook the big heave ho. Isn’t it amazing that what you always knew you could live without you can? This applies to most things liberal.
According to the West, the sanctions that it is feverishly unloading on Russia will mean that we who live here will have to do without a lot of things. Most Russians of a certain age are no strangers to hardship, and even I, brought up in that materialistic nirvana the UK, started life with one stern tap, no hot water and an outside bog, so although it may be hard it may also be nostalgic.
On a day-to-day basis watching the sanctions as they are announced is a lot more entertaining than watching BBC news, even though the lack of credibility shares some common ground. Joe and Bojo throwing a tantrum as they take back their lollipops because no one wants to suck on them in exchange for vassal status has a certain pathos, don’t you think? Especially when you factor in the value-added knowledge that those who make the sanctions are effectively sanctioning themselves. Such is the way of the global world created by the globalists.
However, you’ve got to hand it to the double act, the rabbits that Joe and Bojo are pulling out of the sanctions hat is a wonderful way of distracting from their recent and ongoing failures.
As for the sanctions themselves, most of those rabbits are old hat, which is possibly why for the Russians the act contains few surprises.
Those sanctions that fall into the economic warfare category, ie sanctions relating to the banking and finance industry and threats about cutting one’s SWIFT off are only to be expected as is anything to do with Big ‘Gates’ Tech, as these are the standard stockpiled weapons of the neoliberal globalists. (However, let this be a salutary reminder to any country out there who is thinking of joining their club: he who sups with the globalist should indeed have a very long spoon!)
But this is typical grist to the mill. The more interesting sanctions are those, which after years of implanting Russophobia into the composted minds of the West, have grown in psychological stature to a point where they can be used to suffocate and to cancel culture. Or so the attentive gardeners would like to kid themselves.
I am talking here about those sanctions that are aimed at cultural organisations and at talented individuals, which, in recent days, have seen Russian sportsmen ostracised, top-draw Russian musicians sacked and even Russian cats barred from international competitions for not choosing their place of birth more carefully.
In New York scheduled performances by a famous Russian opera singer were cancelled because she refused to withdraw her support for Russian President Vladimir Putin. A simple case of extortion.
In Italy, the celebrated 19th century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky narrowly missed being removed from the University of Milano-Bicocca’s syllabus, and would most certainly have been had not the Italians taken to social media and called on the head of the university (I believe his name is Dick) to back off and go and grow a pair! “It’s all bollocks!” I hear the Brits shout. No, it’s called cancel culture.
If Russians seem surprised by this behaviour, it is not surprising because they live in Russia and not in the West. The English, what is left of us, are no strangers to cancel culture; it is what globalist governments do. They socially engineer societies in such a way that the indigenous culture (in the UK white culture) is systematically trashed in preference for third-world imports. Take note! If they can do it to their own people, then they will certainly do it to you, especially if your cultural values run counter to their freak show and its carnival stalls of woke.
Ironically, sanctions in a globalised world are unreliable tools of oppression. Their effectiveness depends ultimately on their ability to penalise without incurring penalty. Unfortunately and ironically for the globalists, a good many of the sanctions that they are implementing will have, and already are having, a boomerang effect. The obvious one, refusing Russian gas, is already translating into higher energy prices in Europe and especially in the UK at a time when the income of the average Brit is squeezed right down to the peel.
There are many examples of backfiring sanctions, which I am sure will come to light in the measure and fullness of time. For now, however, my personal favourite is the projected world shortage of fertiliser.
“It’s all a load of bollocks,” bellow the brainwashed Brits!
“You won’t be saying that,” I say, “when all you are left with is bullshit!”
And don’t forget to broaden your horizons by clicking on the following link:
Published: 1 March 2022 ~ Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a Good Thing
Now, you may think that the reason I haven’t posted anything in the past few days is because as events have unfolded in Ukraine I have been hiding behind my settee. But nothing could be further from the truth. Until recently, that spot was reserved for one person and one person only, Justiceless Justin Trudeau. However, having clubbed, gassed, rubber-bulleted and horse-trampled his native citizens into undemocratic pulp using armed and armour-plated riot squads, he now emerges in his new role as the West’s Democracy Ambassador, slamming (I believe that’s the popular western media word for it) the military operation in Ukraine as an attack on freedom and democracy. Something mind, which western leaders and their collusive corporate media conveniently forgot to accuse him of.
Following President Putin’s announcement that he was recognising the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as independent, I asked my Russian friends during a social evening what they thought about this development. After two attempts to solicit their thoughts on the subject, I was politely reminded of the social, cultural, historic and spiritual ties between Russia and Ukraine. Someone referred to the plight of Russians living in the stricken regions, but my friends were too diplomatic to allude to western interference and how it was fanning the flames.
When the news broke, 24 February 2022, that Russia had launched a military operation, I stayed schtum. After all, I didn’t want to become the Kaliningrad version of John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty. So, I did what everyone else was doing in Russia and around the world, I took to corporate, and corporate social, media.
It was touching, at first, to receive messages via my wife’s Facebook account from UK friends asking if we were alright. Silly question: being alright is never something that I have been accused of, but then, when I borrowed my wife’s Facebook account and voiced my opinions, opinions which did not strictly coalesce with the western narrative, I was subject to howls of outrage and the usual Aresebook abuse.
“I might have mentioned Woke. But I think I got away with it!”
Not that I was surprised by this reaction, because, quite frankly, many people in the UK seem to have lost the fundamental ability to think for themselves, if, indeed, they ever possessed it. It was not that I was being radical, at least not anymore ‘radical’ than people judge me to be, I was merely expressing my usual antipathy towards the unilateral viewpoint of the world as packaged by western media and, in answer to the Russophobic slurs doing the rounds on Facebook, drawing my fellow Brits’ attention to the glaring socio-political flaws of living one’s life in Britland, a subject which, quite evidently, they did not want reminding of, such was their joy to escape the plandemic and immerse themselves in a new hysteria.
As for Ukraine, I am more than sure that until this week hardly any Brits had heard of it, let alone know where it is, and those that do know would not have the slightest notion of its history, either ancient or modern. They would certainly possess no knowledge of the symbiotic relationship between Ukraine and Russia, of the intertwined history of both cultures and know even less about what has been happening in Ukraine over the last eight years, although, with respect to the latter, this is an ignorance they cannot be blamed for as the neoliberal corporate media has been rather more than sparing when it comes to telling the truth.
Nevertheless and suddenly, every Brit under the sun (and there’s not much of that in Britland, either actual or metaphorical) is an expert on Ukraine, at least everyone on Facebook.
I often wonder on those few times that I visit Arsebook whether anybody on there knows anything more than nothing. The site is littered with all sorts of bizarre claims and even more bizarre counter-claims, and it seems that everyone, almost without exception, is snapping at the others’ heels like little yappy dogs.
Facebook is full of know-it-alls who quite obviously don’t know the difference between knowing it all and bugger all, but what they don’t know they are more than willing to share with you. On the bitchometer scale, Facebook is beneath Twitter, just. But I cannot help thinking that Mark Shutulbugger, whatever his name is, could have chosen a more apt name for his argumentative, politically censored and deplatforming media site. Arsebook fits the bill, but Megaphone would have been better or failing that what about Bitch-Brag?
It’s a funny thing, but when I read reports and articles from media sources from around the world, I never go to those sources with prejudice aforethought, hoping to read something that will bolster my opinions or prejudices. I read and then after I have finished reading, I think about what I have read, and then to what extent I agree with it or, conversely, to what extent I bring it into question. I think it is called critical judgement: The ability to be able to read or discuss something, analyse it, extrapolate from it, digest it and then, if possible, reach a conclusion. It might not be the right conclusion, if ever there was or is such a thing, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I arrived there of my own volition, after considering different points of view, rather than jumped onto the bandwagon and allowed my mind to be hijacked as an echo chamber for the corporate media.
Most Facebookers, however, seem either to go off half-cock, so to speak, make it up as they go along or present evidence to support their prejudices with flagrant disregard for the maxim that ‘There’s always two sides to every story [at least]’. The remaining Arsebookers are just insulting ~ to everyone else and their own intelligence, that is presuming they have some hidden away somewhere.
The Facebook Bully, showing how it’s done in a real free-speech democracy!
When people say ‘utter bollocks’ on Facebook (Oooh, and they do, don’t they!) and shout the odd word or two that they have picked out of the Daily Mail or Guardian or from sitting in front of the goggle box, it generally makes me laugh.
I know I should have more sense than to reply to the numpty heads, but who can resist a little bit of fun. When someone on Facebook assumes that they are asserting the unassailable truth (and Facebook has many of them) and is able to do it in three words or less from something they read or heard yesterday, ie “It’s all propaganda!”, I cannot help but admire the obvious confidence they have in themselves and in their incisive powers of ratiocination.
By stark contrast, it took me about 30 years to realise that the political system in the UK is rigged and that the Establishment is rotten to the core. Like Neil Oliver, historian and author, I, too, had been brought up to believe that we, the Brits, the West, were the ‘good guys’. It was only after working on a number of political publications that it slowly began to dawn on me that I, and my generation, had been played, that our neoliberal masters had sleep-walked us into a completely different and, from their point of view, completely indifferent era.
I began to question the lifelong orthodoxy that we were in fact the ‘good guys’ but could not easily make the transition from this long held and internalised view to something that I would rather not admit, not even to myself, namely that the West had gone bandito. But sadly, events in recent years have proven that this is the case.
Whilst our neoliberal lords and masters run around the world causing untold havoc in the self-appointed role as crusading missionaries, bringing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to countries that don’t want it ~ at least not the woke kind that we are peddling ~ and branding it nicely for public consumption (it says ‘intervention and regime change’ on the tin), on the home front they are insidiously busy, eroding and destroying everything that we hold dear, our history, our sovereignty, the security of our ancestral home, our heritage and all that they would have us believe the West has always stood for, such as personal freedom, freedom of speech, decency and humanity. And you’ve got to hand it to them, they are doing a very good job.
Meanwhile, the UK’s armchair political pundits and Facebook’s keyboard warriors, those who know everything in the two seconds that it takes to see it on the telly or read it in The Daily Neoliberal, are child prodigies in reverse.
As such, being unfriended by them is a breath of fresh air. Where friendship is concerned, real friendship, not the kind that comes with a screen-tick or a silly little ‘like’, the collateral damage from airing your opinion on social media and then being ‘slammed’ (there’s that word again!) by your ‘friends’ before they ceremoniously unfriend you, is nothing to be ashamed of; on the contrary it is without doubt a most excellent way of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a Good Thing
One fellow-me-lad (It or Other) on Facebook, accused me of being ‘brainwashed’? Who was he confusing me with, if not a high percentage of the UK population? I replied:
“Hello Chris, Not brainwashed. I was fortunate to go to school at a time before the UK education system became the liberal-left academy of Woke, so I am still capable of independent thought. Another point in my favour is that I threw the TV (that’s television, by the way, not transvestite) out 25 years ago. After all, as I could never bring myself to pay the TV license to sponsor the BBC’s liberal-left bias I thought it only fair. Furthermore, having worked in the media for years, I have a healthy disrespect for everything I read in the media, no matter where it comes from. And everyone who knows me knows that I would never wind anyone up … All the best.”
A good many Arsebook commenters are what I would call ‘last worders’. They are not interested in the slightest of soliciting a meaningful response. Their remarks are typically childish, clearly intended to provoke and insult rather than engage and the last word is truly paramount.
As I reach the end of this post, I am almost inclined to let my brother have the last word. He has always had a way with words, as you can see from his email yesterday.
“I just have to say I’m sick of hearing these c! *! s on UK TV slagging off Mr Putin.”
My brother should think himself lucky that he does not do social media, although I have a feeling that if he did, he would really do quite well.
Whoops, sorry, must dash, there go those sanction sirens!
On 18 February 2022 (a day that will live in infamy) the Canadian Prime Hider, Trudeau, unleashed his SS stormtroopers onto the streets of Ottawa: Operation Narcissism had begun. Dressed in body armour and heavily armed, Trudeau’s brave troops were taking no chances. They faced a formidable foe. Racists, white supremacists, terrorists, extremists, otherwise known as truck drivers, were honking horns in Ottawa. It clearly had to stop. They could be heard all over Canada, in fact all over the world!
Trudeau’s SS moved in. They had their instructions: ‘Clear the streets of Ottawa. The sounds of honking horns are driving me insane! Use every Nazi means at your disposal!’ Not a woman, child or bouncy castle was to be spared.
The great big men in black, heroes every one, squared their shoulders in readiness for the challenge that lay ahead. What brave men they are! They will live with their exploits forever! The stories of their courage and bravery will be passed down to their children and their children’s children. Their contribution to freedom and democracy will go down (and down, and down …) in history. I think we can safely say that they and their leader, Reichsführer Trudeau, will never be forgotten.
Converging upon the truckers and their families, on the men, women and children, Trudeau’s SS, looking like invaders from another planet ~ the planet Indifference that Trudeau is on ~ pushed them to the ground. They struck them repeatedly with batons. They charged them with their horses and trampled them underfoot. They fired at them with rubber bullets, tossed tear gas into their midst, smashed the windows of their trucks, bludgeoned them to the floor and dragged them handcuffed, bruised and bleeding into their waiting wagons. Like their 1940s’ SS counterparts, they were ‘only following orders’.
It was, however, too much, too late. In spite of western liberal media’s collusion and the deafening silence of no condemnation from any government in the western world, Trudeau’s inability to mimic the role of statesman, his inability to overcome his narcissism and to maintain his Jekyll image, let loose his inner Hyde, at the same time letting Neoliberal, the greedy globalist cat, well and truly out of the bag (And what a mangey old cur it is!).
Canadian Truckers Beacons of Hope in a Nihilistic Liberal World
The Canadian truckers had reluctantly taken their big trucks to Ottawa in a last-ditch attempt to have the voice of reason heard above the oppressive noise of lockdowns, the perpetual wearing of masks and mandatory vaccination. They asked for nothing more than to be given their freedom back. They went cap in hand to a liberal government, the self-styled champions of human rights, to ask for the Covid mandates, which have ruined and taken so many lives, and which continue to do so on a daily basis, to be annulled, to be revoked, so that they could return to their jobs and their families return to the life that they once had.
Instead of dialogue they were demonised. Instead of debate, disparaged. Trudeau fled. Hid. And from his hiding place, branded the honest truckers, including their wives and children, with the usual liberal humbug: “Racists, Extremists, White Supremacists,!” he cried. And then, when all of these liberal tricks had been exhausted, embarrassed and humiliated in the eyes of the world for his lack of diplomacy and statesmanship and for his little-boy feet-stomping tantrums, in an uncontrollable fit of pique he committed the unthinkable, indeed the unforgivable ~ he invoked the Emergency Act, when the only emergency Canada faced was that it needed a real prime minister.
A few days later, the head of Canada’s junta, Tantrum Trudeau, sent in his goons. Having intimidated, beaten and imprisoned the truckers, Trudeau the Neoliberalist then used his globalist financial connections to wage economic warfare on them. He froze their bank accounts and imposed all sorts of financial hardships, the likes of which only exposed and frightened globalists would do. ‘Shame on You! Shame on You,’ came the cries of Canada’s citizens. A cry, which like the honking horns, echoed around the world.
When the peaceful, harmless truckers gradually began to disperse, glad, if the truth be known, to return at last to the comfort of their homes but with their trust in the constitution of their country and in their democratically elected leaders shattered beyond redemption, they left with their heads held high ~ brave, selfless, sincere, indomitable and, above all, good natured to the last.
They had arrived in Ottawa as truckers and left as heroes ~ role models, not just for Canadians but for all those people around the world who place freedom above tyranny and the collective good of the common people above the sordid machinations of a power- and money-obsessed elite and their one-world globalist fantasy.
As for Trudeau the Terrible, like a uniformed traffic warden (a job for which he is suitably qualified and might well conceivably take up on his now inevitable retirement) eventually he moved the trucks parked on the streets of Ottawa but at a price that he and his globalist overlords have already begun to pay dearly for.
Whilst the truckers left with their heads held high, Trudeau was left on his knees. He is finished, both as a politician and as a man. Indeed, there is hardly anything left of him to qualify as human. His position as a leader of a so-called ‘free country’ is shot, his humanity soiled, the public office he represents raped of all decency, all credibility lost, defiled, debunked, demolished, and as for democracy, which he and his liberal ilk worldwide pretend to endow with a god-like status, it has been dragged by the feet through the mud, not, admittedly, by Trudeau alone but with the nauseating complicity of his shadowy globalist masters, who by their universal silence have implicitly condoned Trudeau’s barbarity, thus underlining their implication in an illiberal liberal agenda.
Trudeau’s cowardly assault on the truckers, good people who went to Ottawa in the name of freedom, is a sad day for democracy, a bad day for the neoliberal globalists ~ the longest day so far in their lives ~ but an inspiring day for the world.
By holding the line, as they said they would, the Canadian truckers have motivated and galvanised freedom-loving people everywhere. Similar rallies to free the world from Covid-restriction tyranny have emerged throughout Canada, including, but not restricted to, a massive turnout in Quebec, as well as around the world, including the UK, New Zealand, Australia and now, of course, America.
Today (23rd February 2022), America’s own version of the Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy will be rolling across the States, travelling from one side of the mighty continent to the other, gathering supporters and momentum on its way, its final destination being the seat of US government, Washington DC. God’s speed to them we say; but watch out for those dirty liberal tricksters and the radical media that props them up!
In the meantime, let us not forget that for the pioneers of freedom, the Beacons of Hope, the Canadian Truckers, the struggle is far from over. A world-embarrassed and vengeful Trudeau is bound to pursue them, using an evil concomitant of social and economic penalties for exposing him to the world for what he is ~ Nothing ~ (I think we can give him a capital letter for that!) until he and his neoliberal henchmen are toppled, which toppled they will assuredly be. It is only a matter of time, and the countdown has begun.
The globalist mob is on the run, both on the domestic and international front. Their credibility is shot, and to add to their imminent woes, news is now emerging about the wilful negligence, and possibly more, behind the drive for vaccination and of the efficacy and the safety of some of the vaccines themselves. The liberal media, in which we trust no more, (and most of us never did) and their bought and paid for ‘fact checkers’ can shout conspiracy theory as much as they like, and as you know they like! But remember what your grandma told you, ‘Truth will out in the end!’
Until then, thank you Canadian Truckers for Holding the Line for all of us! Freedom is indebted to you!
You have reserved a place for yourselves in the annals of the right-side of history!
1927 Bootleggers’ Cadillac stars in Last Tango in Kaliningrad
Published: 22 February 2022 ~ 1927 Bootleggers’ Cadillac is the Star in Kaliningrad Film
A couple of days agoI wrote a post in which I recounted a recent interview about a forthcoming film in which I play the part of a wartime MI6 officer. Within that post I practised humility by confessing that the only reason I was interviewed and not the star of the film was because cars can’t talk, and even if it could we would have never got it up the steps and into the studio ofBaltic Plus radio.
The star of the film Last Tango in Konigsberg, conceived and written by journalist, author, historian and screenplay writer Yury Grozmani, is a 1927 Cadillac.
Apparently, this particular model was designed for use as an ambulance, but the elongated, tall and rectangular shape of the body made it highly suitable for servicing hotels, representational functions in embassies and consulates and the final ride to the graveyard.
The current owner of the vehicle, a Mr Ivan Zverev, is a well-known collector. In addition to the Cadillac, he owns an excellent collection of household items from the German era and the Soviet period and is the founder and creator of the historical museum in the village of Nizovie, Guryevsky district, Kaliningrad Oblast.
According to Mr Zverev, bootleggers used the Cadillac to transport illegal alcoholic beverages during the prohibition era in the United States, which possibly explains the presence of several bullet holes in the cabin and the body of the vehicle.
I have it on good authority that the bootleggers had just such a car in Billy Wilder’s famous film, Some Like it Hot.
Technical spec Make: Cadillac Series: 314 (One of the ‘Superlux’ models) Manufacture: Cadillac Motor Car Co, Michigan, USA Date of manufacture: 31 December 1927 Engine configuration: V8 Engine size: 5173cc Engine power: 80hp
Published: 19 February 2022 ~ Königsberg in WWII Nazi Spies and a 1927 Cadillac
On the evening of 15th February 2022, my good lady wife posted this droll comment on her Facebook page: “Michael Hart, who stars as Mick Donovan, а senior MI6 officer in a thrilling new film based in war-torn Königsberg, was given his first exclusive radio interview this morning at the Kaliningrad radio station Baltic Plus. Book early for autographs … “
And why not, indeed?
Possibly because I am not the main protagonist. The real star of this short film, which is being produced in Kaliningrad with the support of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, is a 1927 V-8 Cadillac.
Königsberg in WWII Nazi Spies and a 1927 Cadillac
The film chronicles the extraordinary history of this vehicle, which is captured along with Königsberg and the East Prussian region a few hours after Königsberg falls to the Soviet army on 9 April 1945.
The Cadillac, which is discovered by an officer and two soldiers of the Soviet Army, has survived the Battle of Königsberg miraculously intact inside the garage of the bombed-out Consulate of the Argentine Republic.
The Soviet officer offers the car to the first Soviet Commandant of Königsberg, Mikhail Vasilyevich Smirnov, believing that he would be proud to use it as his personal limousine. It turns out, however, that the commandant is less than impressed. He takes one look at the war trophy and exclaims, “A car with wooden spokes! It belongs in a museum!”
The narrative then winds back to the 25 May 1943 to the offices of Britain’s S.I.S. (Secret Intelligence Service), better known as MI6, and the story proceeds from here to depict the part that the Cadillac played in a covert operation to create a rift between Nazi Germany and the Argentine government.
At the end of the film, it is disclosed that in April 1945, the Cadillac, together with any other possessions from the former Argentine Consulate General in Königsberg that survived the storming of Königsberg, was taken to Moscow.
In the autumn of 1946, as a friendly gesture by the Soviet Union to Argentina, some of the property of the former Argentine Consulate, including the Cadillac, was transferred to the Argentine Embassy in Amsterdam.
The Argentine Embassy sold the vehicle to a hotelier, who used it to transport customers, along with their baggage, back and forth from his hotel.
Later, the Cadillac became a museum piece, before passing into the hands of a private collector, where it remained for a quarter of a century.
In 2011, the Cadillac was sold to Mr Ivan Afanasyevich Zverev, a private collector from Kaliningrad, who brought the car back to the city where 70 years ago it had added a dash of style and class to events of intrigue and danger.
Our appointment at the radio station, Baltic Plus, today to discuss the film in which this car stars, The Last Tango in Königsberg, was an early-morning affair. We had to be dressed, motivated and on parade by 8am sharp. I have never had a problem with early mornings, except for falling to sleep at night before they happen, so when we arrived at the radio station by taxi, which is located quite a way from us across the other side of town, I was shell-shocked, bleary eyed and very nearly awake.
To be interviewed live on radio was a first for me, so whilst I was not yet among the living, the adrenaline had started to kick in. It was a double-edged sword, however, for I felt tired and inspired, excited and nervous.
Königsberg in WWII Nazi Spies and a 1927 Cadillac
We made it to the radio station in good time where we rendezvoused with Arthur Eagle (I have used the English translation of his name, because I like it!) and Yury Grozmani.
Arthur is now officially the President of the Kaliningrad Retro Car Club. He is an indispensable fellow. He wears a lot of hats, such as organiser, arranger, enforcer and promoter, sometimes all at once! He also does a great deal of the necessary ‘leg work’, upon which any club or organisation depends.
Yury, who is past President of the Kaliningrad Retro Car Club, continues, nevertheless, to play a large part in the club’s activities. He is a journalist, author and local historian, who can now add script and screenplay writer to his many professional accomplishments, since the film in which the Cadillac stars, Last Tango in Königsberg, was conceived, planned and written by him.
In addition to my two colleagues, my wife, Olga, was also present, dragooned into the fray to act as my translator. As with all radio interviews, we were working to a strict schedule, so my level of spoken Russian, although I am a good student who studies every day, would not, on this occasion, fit the bill.
After some preliminary paperwork and pacing up and down, we were on! We filed into the studio, a small room, and took our respective seats around the table. The situation brought back best-buried memories of university seminars. The old, but not forgotten, intimidation spectre that had stalked me down the years, now, as I took my place in front of what resembled a hedgehog on a pole, which I presumed must be a microphone, jumped back into my apprehension and made itself at home.
As I sat there, trying to repackage myself as someone calm and collected, it occurred to me that there were actually people who loved this sort of thing. In fact, they thrive on it. Whilst I could never be one of them, I suspected that Yury might be. He is such a good wordsmith, a natural speaker, so much so in fact that it is virtually impossible to imagine him doing anything, such as having a shave or riding his vintage bike, without if not actually making a speech at least privately rehearsing one.
It did not surprise me, therefore, that no sooner had the radio presenter counted down the final seconds and stuck his thumb in the air, meaning that we were ‘on the air’, than Yury was away like a greyhound out of the traps.
He spoke at length, which is not unusual, and this gave me time to compose myself. If speech-making or addressing an audience is not your bag, it is never the easiest thing to do; but it is even more difficult when a translator is involved, because of the unnatural pauses that occur in the periodic hand-over from one speaker to another. True, these small intervals can enable you to collect your thoughts, but they can also help you to lose your drift. This, thankfully, never happened today, and by the time Yury had finished expatiating on the concept of the film and the source of his motivation, I was ready to do my bit.
I was not altogether sure whether I should be looking at the interviewer when he asked a question or straight into the mini camera glaring at me from above and behind the large hairy microphone. So, I hedged my bets and did a bit of both. The radio broadcast was live, with, presumably, the videoed version transmitted via the station’s website.
The questions put to me were not at all difficult to answer. I was asked what it was that attracted me to the project and was able to contextualise my answer within my obsession for history in general and specifically my interest in the 1940s’ period, as illustrated by the UK vintage emporium which my wife and I once owned and ran, where we specialised in 1930s’~40s’ clothing, both civilian and military, along with furniture from that era, military accessories, deactivated weapons and other vintage commodities. I explained that our involvement in this field also took us into the living history world of large and small 1940s’ events staged each year throughout the UK. Result: fascination with the 1940s’ era.
I was also asked whether or not I had any acting experience, and answered truthfully, not a lot, but that my wife was constantly telling me that my whole life was a drama.
There was enough time to delineate my role in the film and to mention how Yury Grozmani and I had met, which came about when he interviewed me in autumn 2019 for an article in his magazine. He was curious to know ‘why an Englishman had come to live in Kaliningrad?’
For a first-time radio interview, I think we did quite well. Mind you, there was a collective sigh of relief when it was all over!
With that out of the way, all that we have to worry about now is making the actual film!😊
Published: 16 February 2022 ~ Trudeau Takes the Theory out of Liberal Conspiracy
In spite of Trudeau’s attempts to wage economic warfare, the funds for the truckers keep on coming: ‘F!*k Turdoe just gave USD $ 10 to Freedom Convoy 2022.‘ and the total at 15.55 Kaliningrad time is USD $9,423,510 (18th Feb 2022)
20th February 2022 Update As the police in Ottawa continue to behave like the Nazis that Trudeau accused the truckers of being, giving liberal governments worldwide a crash-course in how to master police brutality in front of a sympathetic and collusive mainstream media, a huge convoy of freedom-loving Canadians has descended on Quebec. Here’s a couple of non-mainstream news videos of that event. One has people from around the world leaving supportive messages on chat and in the video comments section. The other has an interesting suffix, with someone being shouted down in the Canadian parliament for asking an embarrassing question about Klaus Schwab’s infiltration of Canadian politics.
19th February 2022 Update Amazing! After unprecedented police brutality by Trudeau’s robocops, peaceful truckers continue to hold the line and no doubt will continue to do so until they are forcibly removed. Sad day for bogus democracies, but a good day for exposing globalism for what it really is. Keep on Trucking!
18 February 2022 Update Big hefty Canadian coppers handcuff defenceless Tamara Lich, the founder of the Freedom Convoy in Justin Trudeau’s Police State. The liberal Stasi at work!
And now for some good news. Inspired by Tamara Lich and the Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy, the US People’s Convoy is all set to roll.
https://thepeoplesconvoy.org/
Yesterday (16 Feb 2022) Justin Trudeau, with as much finesse as a baby grunting in nappies, sealed Canada’s fate as a basket case for liberal democracy, (See video below), thus becoming the first conspicuous frontman, and no doubt later fall-guy, in the neoliberal power grab by the world’s Fourth Reich.
The systemic process that led to the confirmation that the liberal model of democracy, which was barely alive anyway, has finally kicked the bucket, is articulated in my one-scene play. You may find it all familiar and familiarly disturbing:
The curtain draws across the stage. The scene is set: The offices of a paranoid liberal-left media house in London (London is that state within a state, which is in a dreadful state, in the UK). The Gonewrongistan
Columnist: My God! The Canadian Truckers are generating support and funding from around the globe! What are we going to do!?
Editor-in-Chief: Write any old tosh as usual. Just make sure you tick all the PC boxes.
Columnist: You mean, extreme right, far-right, fascist …
Editor-in-chief: Of course, and don’t forget Nazi. We’ve got a couple of antifa’s standing by. They will do their usual brownshirt thing. Run up and down with a swastika, and we’ll have a photographer on hand.
Columnist (high-pitched effeminate cackle): And we can use the photo to frame the peaceful truckers. Get it chief? ‘Photo’, ‘Frame’.
Editor-in-Chief: If you have to be funny, say Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize or Black Lives Matter riots were all ‘largely peaceful’ …
Columnist: Shall I also accuse the truckers of being conspiracy theorists …
Editor-in-Chief: Of course, and throw in racist and, er, er …
Columnist: Misogynist? That’s pretty popular at present.
Definition of a liberal: Everything that it accuses everybody else of being and nothing that it pretends to be.
Case in point: Coronavirus inspired totalitarianism.
Come coronavirus, the liberal-left ditched everything that they purport to hold dear. Out with civil liberties, human rights, individual freedoms, freedom of speech (although in the UK that went out with Brexit) and in with medical fascism.
For the past two years The Gonewrongistan and The Idiotdespondent have been barking like rabid fascists on heat. Now that the heat is getting too much for them, they are desperately attempting to deligitimise the truckers’ mission to restore normalcy to our lives by framing them as conspiracy theorists. To do this they have had to identify the leading theory, which over the two-year period that Covid restrictions and enforced vaccine mandates have been in place has been steadily gaining traction.
That conspiracy theory is that the neoliberal globalist World Economic Forum is using Covid to bring about the ‘Great Reset’, as outlined in the book of the same name by Klaus Schwab, German Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. The Great Reset is seen as laying out the principals and foundations for an extreme-left world-ruling totalitarian system. Many people who regard this theory as credible suggest that the Forum itself created the Covid ‘plandemic’ specifically for this purpose.
It is good of the liberal media to adumbrate this theory, because you can now read around this and ask yourself the question is the agenda that this theory expounds so improbable or impossible? Indeed, it might help to explain a lot about the ‘plandemic’ that you never understood before. But the crowing irony of writing the truckers into this drama is not that in order to convince you and I that the Truckers and all normal people who are calling for the end to mandates are conspiracy theorists or that the liberal hierarchy have brought into the open a completely plausible explanation of the reason for the pandemic, two results of their actions that are clearly ironic enough, but that they have succeeded in their discrediting process of tarring themselves with their own conspiracy brush. As I say, definition of a liberal (the non-abusive long version as opposed to the one-word succinct one): Everything that it accuses everybody else of being and nothing that it pretends to be.
In two articles designed to smear the Truckers, liberal media comes out covered in the substance that it is throwing, (You’d need to have worked on a farm to understand why shit-spreading up wind on an old tractor without a cab is not the best idea!) revealing an unhealthy preoccupation with conspiracy.
In these articles, all sorts of bizarre links and connections are woven between the peaceful, ordinary, everyday hard-working truckers and their well-behaved families and things that go bump in the night, ranging from shadowy ‘intelligence reports’ compiled for the truckers by a man who is ‘known to the Canadian authorities’ for spreading misinformation, pointed allusions to the truckers’ ‘conspiratorial mindset’ and an unsubstantiated ‘maybe’ that the truckers are ‘tooled up’, ie in possession of firearms, presumably hidden away behind their unaffected goodwill and the bouncy castles on which their children are playing.
Justin Trudeau (Canada’s new Führer) figures extensively in this liberal paranoia. Before becoming the main protagonist in a George Orwell sequel to 1984, he managed to tick almost every box on the liberal-fascist checklist, calling the truckers far-right, Nazis, terrorists, racists ~ you name it. Why not? He did. At the same time endorsing my definition of a liberal: Everything that it accuses everybody else of being and nothing that it pretends to be.
Oh, and by the way and for good measure, good old uncle Justin (Sieg Heil!) also branded the truckers as white supremacists. Really?! Take a look at the two videos below folks and compare the ‘terrorist truckers” behaviour to that of the Black Lives Matter ‘peaceful demonstrators’, none of whom were were ever branded as anything, because the liberal-leftist media was much too busy praising them for being ‘largely peaceful’. Sigh. Where’s that ‘State of Emergency’ when it is really needed?
Did you spot the difference between a peaceful demonstration and a riot?
Trudeau Takes the Theory out of Liberal Conspiracy
The accusations and vilification to which the peaceful truckers have been subject, all of which are glaringly devoid of substance, gives an ironic insight into the conspiratorial mindset of the liberal media. Nevertheless, its modus operandi is not without a concealed objective. If and when the police move in mob handed and disperse the Freedom Convoy using violence, the liberal media will spin the offence. It will claim that force was justified, as it was the only way to deal with the ‘white extremists’, whilst trusting in its powers of mass hypnosis to try to ensure that Trudeau emerges smelling of sweet democracy rather than the piles of dung he has smothered democracy with.
In yet another UK corporate media article, reference is made to the ‘global freedom’ movement as a ‘carnival of crank and conspiracy’. This is, perhaps, the first single moment of truth that we have seen in all the charlatan acres of liberal media coverage. Thank you.
Although they have placed the words ‘global freedom’ in inverted commas, at least they, like Mr Trudeau and his cronies, have finally been forced to recognise that the movement is a global one, that millions of people in Canada and, indeed, around the world, want their freedom back, are not prepared to be subject to suspect plandemic mandates, and that writing the protest off as the actions of a ‘small fringe group’ was both embarrassingly premature and already and historically guaranteed to bring judgement down upon them.
As for ‘carnival of crank and conspiracy’, if the word ‘freedom’ had not been mentioned in the same headline, I could have easily been misled into thinking that they were alluding to woke-riven Britain!
The crux of liberal anguish is that the Freedom Movement has grown beyond the reach of media spin. It has spread to Britain, France, New Zealand and Australia. Brussels is struggling to hold back the European version of the Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy and the USA is next.
For the first time since the end of World War II, the radical left’s version of western democracy, which, like the Third Reich was supposed to last for ever, is under serious threat, and for the first time in recent history attempts by its proponents to stem ideological haemorrhaging without subjecting their tarnished image to further collateral damage is beyond the capabilities of a media grown fat and idle on the effervescent cakewalk years, when spin and political correctness was all that was needed to proof the pudding and accusations of racism was the icing on the top.
That was then and this is now.
Eventually, the only way that liberal states will be able to tear the trucker thorn from its trembling corpulent flesh is to resort to the kind of force that they should have used on Black Lives Matter and other leftist riots, which, conveniently, they forgot to use because these riots were ‘largely peaceful’.
When violence against the truckers is authorised, you can be guaranteed that the usual suspects will rely on their pet media to spin the event as a victory for democracy (think about that one, if only for a moment). But the fight for freedom will not go away, it will only dig in deeper and when it finally erupts, as erupt it will, it will do so with such resolution and with such a lasting impact that it will make the freedom rallies of the past few weeks look like a gay parade on a wet afternoon in Islington ~ where, I have every confidence, if you want to witness ‘crank’, you’ll find all and more that you can stomach!
When the Freedom Convoy Truckers disperse, as disperse they must, whether by the friendly ministrations of Trudeau’s Gestapo or by the natural desire to swap their trucks and tents for the comfort of their own homes, they can rest assured in the knowledge that the ripples from the large stone thrown by their gallant stand for freedom into the murky globalist pond will continue to be felt and seen long after Trudeau has been removed.
It is your job to make sure that when the time comes to put your ‘X’ on the ballot paper that you remember who the people are who the truckers have exposed and, more to the point, who and what they represent and what they want to take away from you, your children and your children’s children.
To help your memory, bookmark this: Definition of a liberal: Everything that it accuses everybody else of being and nothing that it pretends to be.
Canadian Truckers restore hope for the future of the 21st century
Published: 12 February 2022 ~ Hold the Line Truckers! The World is Watching!
👍At the time of writing (10.55 Kaliningrad time) The Canadian Truckers’ Freedom Convoy had raised USD $9,052,602, 56% of the USD $16,000,00 target. See https://www.givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022
Hold the Line, Truckers! The World is watching! These are the buzz words that are resonating around the world, as more and more people recognise the selfless historic contribution that the Canadian Truckers are making in the fight for freedom and normalcy.
It could be a long haul (Truckers are used to this), but after two years of misinformation, disinformation, confusion, obfuscation and double-talk from the liberal terrorist corporate media, here is something to warm the cockles of your heart, restore your faith in human nature and bring some much-needed sunshine into your lockdown, mask-wearing and vaccine-mandated lives.
Hold the Line Truckers! The World is Watching!
The comments that follow are just a sample of the thousands of well-wishes and expressions of heartfelt gratitude sent to the Freedom Convoy truckers via the GiveSendGo free Christian crowdfunding platform by freedom-loving patriots, who are donating funds every minute of every hour to the Canadian Truckers’ stand against Covid-restriction tyranny.
To make a donation to the Freedom Convoy, click: https://www.givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022 Note: GiveSendGo has experienced access problems recently due to the high-volume of donator traffic and also from far-left cyber-attacks. If you cannot get through on the link provided, try clicking on the website itself in the search engine and then the logo top centre of the page. On the following page, as well as seeing the donations flooding in, you will find the Freedom Convoy link on the right under the heading ‘Trending Campaigns’.
Messages of goodwill sent to the Freedom Convoy Truckers from $$$ donors
Note: I have retained noms de guerre used by donors but replaced real names with ‘Name supplied’
PS: According to liberal-left media, the following people are far-right and a ‘danger to democracy’ Go figure!
USD $ 500 Anonymous Donor Thank-you truckers for all that you are doing! I fully support your cause and I ask that you courageously hold the line and stay the course. You truly are our proxy protestors and heroes. There are more people than you realize who support what you are doing. Thank-you again from the bottom of our hearts. Let FREEDOM ring all across Canada, and for that matter, all across the world!
USD $ 11 Name supplied Thank you for standing up to tyranny!
USD $ 100 Name supplied We are with you! Thank the Lord for you folks.
USD $ 40 An amazing nurse who wants her job back Thank you for everything you are doing! You are the real heroes. I will see you all soon! Ottawa here we come! Xoxox
USD $ 50 Anonymous Donor Stand The Line!
USD $ 50 Anonymous Donor God bless our truckers!
USD $ 20 Name supplied The world faces a problem of Atheism, NOT racism. Go Truckers
USD $ 90 Anonymous Donor Praying for all of you! That God will lift the black cloud of evil over Ottawa and Trudeau
USD $ 50 Anonymous Donor Canadian truckers and their support teams are showing the world the way in how to peacefully protest and lead positive change with integrity courage and good hearts.
USD $ 25 goodman God Bless you all for standing up for all our freedoms!
USD $ 50 Anonymous Donor Thank you for fighting for freedom. I’m praying for you. ✝️
USD $ 25 Jon Stay the course.
USD $ 50 Capitan You go truckers! You can through for us, and we will come through for you!
USD $ 100 Name supplied HOLD THE LINE!! The world is watching. We support you!!
USD $ 40 Name supplied We’re winning the battle but not the war yet. God bless you all. Thank you fighting for our freedom.
USD $ 500 Anonymous Donor Thank-you truckers for all that you are doing! I fully support your cause and I ask that you courageously hold the line and stay the course. You truly are our proxy protestors and heroes. There are more people than you realize who support what you are doing. Thank-you again from the bottom of our hearts. Let FREEDOM ring all across Canada, and for that matter, all across the world!
USD $ 500 Name supplied Keep up the fight!! Freedom Convoy 2022 is AWESOME!
USD $ 5 Anonymous Donor Cheering you on from Ohio. Thank you for being brave enough to stand up to this.
USD $ 25 Anonymous Donor God bless all the truckers involved.
USD $ 150 Yugoslavian support The world is watching. Shame to GofundMe
USD $ 100 Name supplied There are many people who have not yet felt the devastating effects of the lockdowns. I have. So, I support everyone who is brave enough to stand against the Fascist tactics of this government. The Great Reset is – Fascism at its worst and that is where we are headed.
USD $ 100 Name supplied May God bless each and every one of you and give you the strength, energy, and courage to fight this good fight! We freedom-loving Americans support and stand with you!
USD $ 100 Anonymous Donor CONSERVIATIVE AMERICA STANDS WITH TRUCKERS
USD $ 40 Franz Change is gonna come! Thank you Truckers and all Freedom loving people!
USD $ 20 Anonymous Donor Thank you, stand strong, stand proud.
USD $ 40 Name supplied HOLD THE LINE!!
USD $ 700 Name supplied Freedom is not a right, it is a Law
USD $ 200 Anonymous Donor Thank you, Truckers, and ALL for standing up against tyranny
USD $ 20 Name supplied Go Truckers Go, all the love from Scotland
USD $ 10 Italian citizen is not much but i don’t have much, freedom!
USD $ 18 RodL Thank you for taking a strong stand against tyranny. I stand in solidarity with you and I wish I could shake your hands and thank each and every one of you personally! God Bless you all! Sincerely, Rod L “Your friend from the USA!”
USD $ 50 Give Us Our Freedom We are 100% in support of the Truckers/Brothers of Canada and all Freedom loving and God-fearing people of the USA and Canada and beyond.
USD $ 100 Name supplied You are our Heroes. God Bless You 💗
