Western Snactions turn McDonald’s in Russia into Vkusno i tochka
Published: 22 June 2022 ~ McDonald’s restaurants in Russia reopen under new name
Whilst the UK media hovers indecisively over what to replace its run of good fortune with, as interest in and editorial enthusiasm wanes for Ukraine ~ in the past two weeks there has been a flitting back and forth from woke stories about schools no longer allowing boys to wear skirts (have I got that wrong?) and hopes that a new strain of coronavirus may see the swift return of lockdowns, masks and vaccinations ~ Russia has been celebrating the replacement of the McDonald’s chain of restaurants with the inauguration of its home-grown version.
🍔McDonald’s, which had been selling burgers in Russia for more than 30 years, switched off its friers and suspended its business shortly after the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine before griddling off into the sunset. For some, the loss of McDonald’s in Russia was palpable.
Speaking entirely for myself, McDonald’s, or rather the fanfare that surrounds McDonald’s, has always been a mystery to me. In my day, old McDonald had a farm, not a burger bar. Or was that McDonald’s father?🍔🍔You probably won’t believe this but until the launch of Russia’s McDonald’s and the publicity it has generated, I had no idea what a powerhouse of Americanism McDonald’s was. To me it was up there, or down there, depending upon your point of view, with Wimpy, KFC, Little Chef, Burger King and the rest, all lumped together under the ‘frie’s’ umbrella, poor colonial-cousin substitutes for good old English chips and the good old English chip shops via which they are purveyed. Give me a portion of proper, thick-cut, chunky English chips any day than those itty-bitty American fries, that was my motto! In fact, it was the word ‘fries’ that actually did it for me in the sense of not doing it for me at all. Nothing in the world of fried foods, especially chips, has ever been the same since my brother rebranded chips and by extension British cafes with the decidedly unflattering nom de guerre ‘fatty fries’. However, as a patriot, resolutely opposed to continental affectations in all walks of English life, especially the realm of grub, words in fancy dress such as the now ubiquitous ‘French fries’ are pure anathema to me.
Another reason for avoiding McDiddles was possibly my conversion at a relatively early age to vegetarianism and a delicate constitution in the guts department. Given these two influential factors you can probably understand how blown-up images of Big Macs and Triple Cheeseburgers with an extra portion of fries on the side and a generous helping of onion rings had me longing for a lettuce leaf and reaching for the Gaviscon.
My apologies to die-hard McDonald’s fans:
*From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring—
*Edgar Allan Poe’s Alone (How much more Alone would he have felt had McDonald’s existed in his time and then like life itself ceased to be?)
With McDonald’s exit stage west, you would have thought that here was the perfect opportunity for Russia to turn off Americanisation and surge ahead with a nationwide chain of resturants selling wholesome, healthy, traditional Russian nosh. Obviously, there is no such thing in Russia as McDonald’s-phobia.
Conversely, a Russian equivalent of McDonald’s working in the West would have been tarred and feathered by now, which rather proves the point that there really is no Russian analogue to the West’s anti-Russian hysteria.
McDonald’s restaurants in Russia reopen under new name
In the absence of a McDonald’s phobia and facetiousness aside, I do understand both the historical and symbolic significance to Russia of the McDonald’s take-over.
When the first McDonald’s restaurant opened in Moscow on 31 January 1990, for some it must have seemed like the ultimate stamp of the American invasion but to others, to a new, western-enthused generation, it must have embodied the hopes if not of a brand-new beginning, then at least of a new Brand-named beginning.
What I did not know was that the first McDonald’s restaurant which opened in Pushkinskaya Square (Bolshaya Bronnaya Street, 29) Moscow in early 1990 lays claim to being the most frequented McDonald’s restaurant in the world. It is said that in its 30 years of existence it catered literally for more than 140 million patrons1.
Whilst the McDonald’s empire is a hegemonic feat of fast-foot globalism, the ability to fill its big Yankee boots in a few short weeks is a success story in its own right. It is little short of amazing that they, a consortium consisting of the Moscow government, federal authorities and the business community1, managed to take on the abandoned McDonald’s empire, rebrand, refit, restructure and rescue it in the time it would take for me to say, could I have a veggie burger please?
The 850 former McDonald’s outlets spanning 62 regions of Russia will open at a pace of 50~80 restaurants a week under the new Russian name of Vkusno i tochka (‘Tasty and that’s it’ or ‘Delicious full stop’), says the new owner, Alexander Govor2. A timely intevention that will not only re-establish the fast-food market in Russia and navigate its new course but also secure employment for thousands of people across the country.
When you take into consideration that the special military operation in Ukraine commenced a few weeks ago, on 24 February 2022, during which period the West has subjected Russia to economic warfare on an unprecedented scale, the transformation of a moribund McDonald’s into the rebranded Vkusno i tochka stands in testimony to the resourcefulness, resilience and ability to endure, which Russia as a nation has adroitely exhibited throughout its challenging history.
In stark contrast, I think it will be a long time if possibly not an eternity before I can procure equivalent success in the UK with Mick Hart’s McBorschkee’s chain of restaurants. Until then, its back to peeling spuds and heating lard for the chip van.
Updated: 22 March 2023| First Published: 12 April 2022 ~ Eastward Expansion of the West the Real Reasons? {Regularly updated}
Introduction
A daily brief, updated whenever I feel like it, providing links to news that you won’t see much of, if anything, in the UK about the US-UK confederacy and what it is up to and why on Russia’s borders.
Here you will find links to Russian news sources, commentators’ comments, snippets, video links, embeds and random musings updated on a daily basis but mostly not always.
Please feel free to share the links, embeds etc that appear in this post with your friends and colleagues as an antidote to excessive amounts of suspect UK downstream media. Like the vaccine, I suggest that you come back regularly for a series of boosters as long as your arm.
Keep the Faith and remember the maxim: The Truth Will Out in the End!! ~ Mr History
Quote> “The diplomat [Polish Ambassador to France Jan Emeryk Rosciszewski] is convinced that the Ukrainian crisis is a battle for the basic values and culture of the West, which is why “it is so important to win.” Comment> The inverse thus naturally follows that the Ukrainian crisis is a battle for the basic values and culture of Russia, which is why “it is so important to win.”https://ria.ru/20230319/polsha-1858972477.html?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop
Quote> “Twitter users criticized the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who said earlier that the European Union will make every effort to reduce the military potential of Russia.” Quote> “Help EU states to become prosperous again instead of spending our money on Ukraine and fomenting conflict,” wrote a Twitter user. Ursula von der Leyen criticized for saying about Russia’s military capabilities – MK
Quote> “There was no response from the Western ‘peacekeepers’ to Putin’s accusations against the West that the supply of weapons to Ukraine is inflaming the conflict, turning it from local to global, they preferred to remain silent.” https://regnum.ru/news/polit/3782811.html
The reason for the special operation in Ukraine was not the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin, but the attempts of Western countries to drive Russia into a corner by expanding NATO, political scientist John Mearsheimer said in an interview with the American magazine, The New Yorker. In the US, the main myth about Putin was dispelled – RIA Novosti, 20.11.2022
Comment [Mortimer, RT News article] > The world seems to be at an inflection point, like when a curve changes direction. So many formerly rock solid countries seem to be fragile and on the verge of collapse. The USA, most of the EU, and Israel – always fragile, is looking shaky as well. This feels like just before the fall of the Soviet Union, but this time it is the west’s turn. https://www.rt.com/news/564839-medvedev-warning-israel-ukraine-weapons/
Quote (Vladimir Putin)> “The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation. This is why total de-sovereignisation is in their interest. This explains their aggression towards independent states, traditional values and authentic cultures, their attempts to undermine international and integration processes, new global currencies and technological development centres they cannot control. It is critically important for them to force all countries to surrender their sovereignty to the United States.” https://www.rt.com/russia/563827-putin-speech-colonial-west/
Headine> Russia has dismissed any Nord Stream leak accusations against them as ‘stupid’
Quote> Accusations have flown across Europe and the world following the leaks, with Ukraine arguing Russia is to blame. Moscow dismissed the accusation on Wednesday.
“It’s quite predictable and also predictably stupid to give voice to these kinds of narratives — predictably stupid and absurd,” Peskov said. “This is a big problem for us because, firstly, both lines of Nord Stream 2 are filled with gas — the entire system is ready to pump gas and the gas is very expensive … Now the gas is flying off into the air. Are we interested in that? No, we are not, we have lost a route for gas supplies to Europe,”
Biden’s neoliberal administration is bringing the world closer than it has ever been to nuclear conflict. Tucker Carlson of Fox News nails the West’s insanity, noting that the United States could, if it wanted to, bring the conflict in Ukraine to a peaceful resolutionalmost overnight, but …
Quote> ‘Should the Donbass regions declare themselves as part of the territory of Russia, attacks upon them by Ukraine (as has been the case since 2014) would then be classed as attacks upon Russia. That carries far more serious repercussions in terms of the Russian constitutional statements about its ability to protect itself.’ Quote> ‘The implications are extremely serious. Russia has written into its constitution that the use of heavy and potentially nuclear weaponry is permissible should it need to defend itself. That will become clear should the Donbass regions declare independence and decide to align with Russia rather than Ukraine. At this point the opinion of the West ceases to matter. Ukraine attacks, especially those supported by Western provided military will be seen as acts of war which then permit the use of weapons of mass destruction.’ https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russia-on-the-brink-of-war.html/
Comment in RT article by reader ‘Shivermetimbers’ “The west is again at it mincing and spinning Russia’s nuclear doctrine. Russia has repeatedly stated that they’ll use any means to their disposal if and only if she is under threat of losing it’s identity as a state under pressure from western forces. Meaning they’ll not put their hands up in case US/NATO seem poised to win a conventional war against it and violate Russian territory or place Russian troops under pressure.”
Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
Comment> Looks like Daily Mail readers are a few jumps ahead of their liberal counterparts in their assessment of what people want from their politicians, ie putting their country and their people first! Elementary my dear Truss
Medvedev quote re Truss > “She will quarrel with everyone, fail everything and leave in disgrace, like her predecessor, shaggy Boriska. Well, in Britain, famous for its traditions, it seems that another one is appearing,” Medvedev concluded.” 🤣
‘According to Medvedev, the “new prime minister” Truss is an incompetent and mediocre Russophobe who has no elementary ideas about politics, but wants to defeat Russia in everything. In addition, according to the deputy chairman of the Security Council, the new head of government “mows” under Margaret Thatcher- the first woman to hold this post in the UK – but does not have her abilities, and also intends to overcome the energy crisis and food inflation, which became the consequences of her own “delusional sanctions exercises”. < https://lenta-ru.translate.goog/news/2022/09/07/feminitiv/?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
Oh dear, the inevitable has happened, the UK has been Trussed!
Headline> What’s wrong with politicians in the West?
Quote> Professor Chossudovsky notes that Western politicians are quite capable of taking a fatal step for the planet, because [their ignorance and stupidity are] controlled by money.
As an example of a politician of a narrow-mind, the author of the article cites the head of the British Foreign Office, Liz Truss , who said that, if she becomes prime minister, she would not hesitate to give the order to use nuclear weapons .
Claims that Russia has been sanctioned by the world appear to be 85% short of the truth, with only the ‘world’ as defined by the neoliberal globalist collective participating.
RAND advises the US and its allies about the explosive situation on Russia’s borders and its need to proceed with caution and diplomacy. Quote> “RAND risk analysts note that Russia today has more than enough reasons to think of NATO as an aggressor. In response to this, the West will receive preventive strikes from the Russian Federation – and to say that this will be unjustified Russian aggression will no longer work.” https://military-pravda-ru.translate.goog/news/1731238-rand/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
Headline> Candidate for British Prime Minister, Tugendhat, offered to expel Russians from the country
Quote> Tugendhat (Is that his real name? Check his passport!) said: “People who pose a threat and undermine the security of the kingdom will not find shelter.”
Comment> Does something tell you, as it tells me, that this is probably not the best time in history for Boris Johnson to be replaced by anyone of a sabre-rattling disposition with ex-military connections and delusions of imperialist grandeur. In spite of its political tragedy, I’m quite fond of that little bit of land in northwestern Europe. Aren’t you?
Bottom-pinching country at rock bottom (Gay Pride is obviously not just for June!)
Comment> People in high places pinching other people of the same sex’s lower places, the NHS unable to cope because of over-population and the migration fiasco, the government mired in sleaze, ministers losing jobs faster than underwear descending during Gay Pride Month and no money left because its all been spent on exacerbating Russophobia. This, then, is the UK.
Quote> Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman: ““London threw all its forces into countering Russia and participating in hostilities in Ukraine. Huge financial costs, British mercenaries, instructors and key forces of the special services – everything is mobilized for Russophobia.”
Comment> … and now the PM has resigned. Fingers crossed …
Little Miss Bossy Boots, Liz Truss (aka “Look mum, I’m the foreign secretary!”), appears to be groping about for a way of mitigating the British government’s freezing of Russian assets (which could be described as daylight robbery) by transforming Number 10 and herself into a merry band of Robin Hoods, or should that be Robin Hoodies (innit!), who rob from the rich to give to the poor. Except in this case, it has nothing to do with the poor and needy and all to do with a needlessly poor excuse.
There’s nothing toxically masculine or even vaguely masculine about Johnson and his western cohorts
Thought of the day> When the British Prime Minister has nothing left in his arsenal (I think I’ve spelt that right) except the cringe-worthy lingo of liberal-lefty woke and feels impelled to resort to terms like ‘toxic masculinity’, you know the bell has sounded for the final miserable act in the comedy of transexualised errors which Britain has become. Boris, you have been fatefully cast: the UK is badly in need of restoring and conserving. A strong traditionalising Conservative leader is needed, not a neoliberal-pandering appeasing soggy cream poof! [Audience (Labour) clapping: “You’ve got to hand it to him, as gender-neutral cream poofs go he certainly looks and sounds the part!”]
Headline> ‘Reuters: Western politicians were surprised by the Russian salad on the menu at the NATO summit’
Comment> The symbolic significance of Russian salad on the NATO summit ‘Smart Food & Drinks’ menu says it all ~ isolating Russia is not an option! Apparently, the dish was so popular that it sold out in the first two hours!
Comment> Ukraine has provided the UK with the perfect opportunity to spend the sort of lolly on beefing up its military that the liberal-lefty lobby at last feels helpless to oppose. But who’s going to pay for it? Can we really afford it? And, more to the point, is it all a waste of tax-payers’ money? Quote> “Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in May that Moscow does not want war in Europe and that it is the West that ‘constantly insists that …Russia must be defeated.’ The end of the military operation in Ukraine, he said, would stop Western attempts to undermine international law and promote a unipolar world.” https://www-rbc-ru.translate.goog/politics/28/06/2022/62babf329a7947852ccbffe2?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
Are you spinning like a top? If Western media spins anymore it will bradawl itself up its own … Headline from RT > Western media celebrates ‘Russian default’
Comments at end of article > tchort says: “The main stream media should worry more about losing their subscribers, than Russia’s default. Western media is now nothing but a comedians’ theater trying to validate its ridiculous narrative, and where investigative journalism has all but disappeared from the nation’s commercial airwaves.”
TANK says: “This stupid western game is like me going to the bank with the money, during normal opening hours, and they just won’t let me into the bank so I can give them the money. And then they blame ME for it. What a bunch of dimwits.”
Quote> German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, ““Putin appears to be afraid that the spark of democracy might jump to Russia …” Quote> The representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, commented on the words of Scholz, noting that “German sparks” spread to Russia a couple of times. “We won’t allow any more fires,” she assured. Comment>The problem with the leap-frogging ‘spark of [liberal] democracy’ is that other rather unwanted things tend to jump about with it, such as social engineering, anti-social behaviour, rampant street crime, state-backed terrorism, BLM riots, loss of cohesive culture and identity, historical revisionism, degradation of sovereignty and patriotism, political correctness, woke and so much digitalisation and transsexualization that before you know where you are or who’s behind you, you are well and truly up Queer Street and on your way to a famous creek with no paddle ~ although the boats to Dover can do without as they’ve got the Royal Navy. Whatever spark it is that German Scholz is talking about, it’s not the spark of truth or decency. https://www-rbc-ru.translate.goog/politics/20/06/2022/62b0a6bb9a7947606308e96a?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
‘”The European Union has completely lost its political sovereignty, and its bureaucratic elites are dancing to someone else’s tune, accepting whatever they are told from above, causing harm to their own population and their own economy,” Putin said.‘
‘“Such a detachment from reality, from the demands of society, will inevitably lead to a surge of populism and the growth of radical movements, to serious social and economic changes, to degradation, and in the near future, to a change of elites,”’
Now see (below) Neil Oliver’s videoed summation of the State of play in the UK today: ‘The State is no longer working to serve us and to protect our shared heritage‘
“The first act of violence in [Ukraine] was actually the Western-backed mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s lawful government in 2014” ~ Peter Hitchens, UK Journalist, Twitter, 22 May 2022
Quote> The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which unites the most developed economies in the world, called the UK the main victim of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. https://lenta.ru/news/2022/06/08/loser/?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop Letter>Dear Mr Johnson, has the UK government taken complete leave of its senses …?
Comment>Who is Bishop Richard Williamson? Well, if you do a Google search for him you discover that he is a renegade, a ‘Holocaust denier’, an extremist, an ‘inciter of hatred’ etc, etc, etc. That alone should tell you that he is a branded enemy of the neoliberal one-world state. The Pope doesn’t appear to like him because he has openly condemned the Roman Catholic Church for selling out to liberal secularism. The western globalist cabal don’t care much for him, possibly because when he refers to the leaders of western governments he does not use sugar-coated terms like humanitarian, tolerant, democratic or free-world loving philanthropists but criminals.
When I first saw the, let’s face it, badly edited video embedded below, my initial reaction was, is this something from Monty Pythons, but there is no mistaking the sincerity and clarity of Williamson’s take on our liberal masters and what they are up to in Ukraine ~ and everywhere else for that matter. There are other illuminating videos out there in which Williamson describes and lambasts western society’s planned and steady moral decline. His accent on traditionalism as an essential pillar for social stability and his unfashionable view that respect for authority is an essential prerequisite of that stability is tantamount to heresy in the ‘progressive’ world of Woke, and I do not suppose for a moment that his rational beliefs that women attempting to adopt the roll of men or to become men is tragic and that it is parents who should rule their children not children rule their parents wins him any plaudits among the usual suspects.
In the video that follows, Bishop Richard Williamson states that Russia is the last obstacle to the One-World Order. Note, you will see that whoever made the video has captioned it, “You won’t believe your ears!” In fact, not everyone’s ears, eyes and minds are intimately connected to their television licence.
Comment> There is not much that western governments are good at. Telling the truth is particularly hard. But where they do excel is in their attempts to cancel culture. I should know, I’m English and we have hardly any culture left. That’s probably one of the reasons I like living in Russia. Quote> [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] ‘“The West has declared a total war on us, the entire Russian world. Now no one hides this, it reaches the point of absurdity, to the very culture of the abolition of Russia and everything connected with our country. Under the ban of the classics: Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky , Tolstoy, Pushkin. Figures of national culture and art, who today represent our culture, are also being persecuted … healthy patriotic forces have consolidated [in Russia, and President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy is based on] … broad national consensus”’ https://www-vedomosti-ru.translate.goog/politics/news/2022/05/27/923932-lavrov-zapad?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
Why does the UK media treat the British public as if they are stupid? Is it because they have insurmountable faith in their own duplicity?
Comment> Wonders will never cease, but considered journalist Peter Hitchens may have rocked the neoliberal globalist boat with this one. The last thing the UK wants to be accused of is that it has within its midst journalists of integrity and independent thought. Time for the UK masses to disappear quickly back under the bedclothes, behind the biased safety of their learnt-by-rote media mantras or (where they seem to dwell perpetually) up their own …
Quotes from Mr Hitchens’ article in Mail Online> “Not since the wild frenzy after the death of Princess Diana have I ever met such a wave of ignorant sentiment. Nobody knows anything about Ukraine. Everyone has ferocious opinions about it.”
“Look, I respect those who take Ukraine’s side in this war. They have a valid point of view which I happen not to share. But what I object to is the wholly one-sided nature of public opinion here. It is so bad that it is a positive disadvantage to know anything about the subject.”
“The UK media coverage of this event strove mightily not to mention the neo-Nazis and to avoid using the word ‘surrender’.”
Comment> America is projecting itself as an exceptional power and an indispensable force for good in the world, but Russia intends to save itself from this ‘goodness’. It is not the first time in history that we have saved ourselves from totalitarian ideologies – Nazi Germany, the Napoleonic Wars, the Tatar invasion. And it does not matter that Russians are routinely disparaged by Western Europeans as savages and barbarians. We want to protect our beliefs and values, which are based on Christianity, no matter how outdated and how outvalued such ethics are held by the West. We mean to and will save ourselves from the threat of the West’s satanic globalism, from its mass consumerist self-absorption and twisted posthuman delusions. And so it is with my head held high in the midst of Western Russophobia that I am glad and proud to say that “I am Russian.” (Thank you Yorshik for your contribution to my blog. MH)
The Eurovision Wrong Contest It’s come to a pretty pass when all you’ve got left in your ammunition chest is the Eurovision Song Contest. Should it be renamed the Eurovision Pong Contest, because something certainly stinks. It smells a bit like ‘past its sell by date’, but at least it shows that the world (the western world that is) of entertainment is singing from the same song sheet as UK/US western media. Obviously, Sandy Shaw got it right when she won the Euro-must-be-daft-to-watch it Song Compost in 1967 with the aptly and prophetically named ‘Puppet on a String’.
‘Make It Up as You Go Along’ Western Media The most unsurprising of eventualities regarding Russia’s 9th May Victory Day was that contrary to the West’s media predictions that Vladimir Putin would announce mass mobilisation to facilitate total war in Ukraine, it didn’t happen. Nevertheless, this did not stop my brother from advising me by email that I should get a sick note from mum, as I used to do when I was at school, explaining to Mr Putin that I was very sorry, but I couldn’t possibly march in army boots with a bad leg like mine. As this expedient turned out to be unnecessary, I was able to reflect more fully on what it was that the West could learn from the sincere and heartfelt devotion of the Russian people to the sacrifices made by former generations of their countrymen during WWII in the interests of preserving their country’s sovereignty and for Russia’s right to continue to live without interference and threat from the West. This exercise in cogitation brought forth the simple but inevitable conclusion that it was not so much what the West could learn as what it should remember, not only about the facts pertaining to WWII but to any and every period enshrined in the past. The greatest and unforgivable crime against the inalienability of history is the immoral attempt to rewrite it, however futile such an attempt unavoidably proves to be.
Headline >The Guardian: Britain is using Ukraine for a disgusting game Johnson using Ukraine as a diversionary tactic to refocus the public’s attention away from his failings as Prime Minister and the Conservative party’s internal conflict for change of leadership. That’s a take on the role that Britain has assigned to itself with regard to Ukraine that we can all relate to. You cannot blame the British public for their willing participation in this game. It is not often that they get the chance to rattle the sabre and wave the flag. Patriotism and white flight are outward bound third class, making way for boat loads to Dover and the pathetic and steady accretion of woke. Link>https://www-pravda-ru.translate.goog/world/1703851-konservatory/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
Quote: ‘US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Washington would “keep moving heaven and earth so that we can meet” the military needs of the Ukrainian government, while urging other countries to also contribute to the cause.’
Comment: That’s very altruistic of the US. Let’s hope that it does not eventually lead to Earth being raised to Heaven ~ or at least in that direction …
Desperately trying to be more zany than each other is the sort of thing that gets alternative media sources a bad name. You might conclude that if they cannot take themselves seriously who is going to take them seriously (snigger). However, once you’ve cut through the silly voices, pop-video props and comic-strip presentation, nuggets of interest and sometimes rich seams of mind matter seldom mined by western masses are there to be had and processed. Forget how he says it, but listen and reflect upon what this chap has to say (see video below): https://rumble.com/vw8q9n-ukraine-and-russia-what-the-media-wants-you-to-think.html
Now here’s a chap from America who claims that the conflict in Ukraine didn’t start recently but is in it’s eighth year (see video below). I wonder what the BBC and fact checkers make of that! 😉
“Sanctions are a tax on independence.” ~ Sergey Lavrov
There is something so solid, reliable and dependable about Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia. It’s such a treat when you contrast his cool, sometimes blunt but always level-headed presentation with, for example, the comic braggadocio of our Boris, the shop-window plasticity of US politicians and the smug narcissism of oily Turdeau clones. My wife tells me that Lavrov is also fond of cigars. You cannot fault a man who supports the noble art of cigar smoking!
At the end of this panel there is an article link featuring an interview with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, conducted by TV channels RT, NBC News, ABC News, ITN, France 24 and the PRC Media Corporation, which took place on 3 March 2022, regarding the situation in Ukraine.
Four quotes by Lavrov from that interview:
“Each country has the right to choose alliances. However, no country can strengthen its security at the expense of the security of any other country. No organisation can claim dominance in the Euro-Atlantic space, which is exactly what NATO is doing now.”
“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the thought of nuclear war is constantly running through the minds of Western politicians but not the minds of Russians.”
“No one has listened to us for 30 years. The West is perfectly aware of our concerns. Endlessly ignoring them with such arrogance has not worked and will not work. Only naive people could have thought otherwise.”
“I assure you that we will deal with whatever problems the West creates for us out of its determination (I emphasise once again – not to ensure their own security, this isn’t about the security of the West at all) to use Ukraine as a tool and a pretext to prevent Russia from pursuing an independent policy. There are few countries left on Earth that can afford such a luxury. Sanctions are a tax on independence, if you like.”
If you only ever read one article published in Russian about the situation in Ukraine, then make it this one!
“There are only a handful of Western journalists on the ground in Donbass, while the Western mainstream press is rubber-stamping fake news about the Ukrainian crisis using the same templates it previously exploited in Iraq, Libya and Syria, says Dutch independent journalist Sonja van den Ende.”
Since Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine to protect the republics in the Donbas region of Ukraine and its own country by negating the potential for NATO to use Ukraine as a base from which to attack Russia, Russian media as well as Russian posts and comments on social media relevant to the Ukrainian situation have been banned in the UK, presumably for the purpose of concealing the West’s involvement in the events that led to the conflict and to present a one-sided version of that conflict in order to influence public opinion and to promote and maximise mass hysteria. All that we are seeing now is a continuation of the West’s policy to subjugate and marginalise Russia, everything else is just a means to an end. ~ comment from reader of my blog expatkaliningrad.com
Eastward Expansion of the West the Real Reasons?
Katie Hopkins, political commentator, proving once again that she has the balls to say “what other people think but are too scared to say”:
Published: 10 June 2022 ~ Victor Ryabinin Pushes Boat Out with Bronze Aged Fisherman
At last, on Saturday 4th June 2022, the memorial plaque that we commissioned in 2021 linking Victor Ryabinin, friend and Königsberg artist, to our physical representation of his famous painting ‘Boat with Flowers’, which occupies pride of place next to the Soviet fisherman statue, was given a home. The reason it never got attached last year was that we could not make up our minds where the plaque should go. The original plan was to include it within the boat and statue ensemble, possibly secured to a large flat-surfaced rock, screwed to the side of the boat or mounted on some plinth or other. I was easy with any of these three options, but Olga opined that the plaque would be hidden, which would rather defeat the object.
Thus, the location of the plaque was put to the vote, resulting in the unanimous decision to secure it to the side of the house, beside the garden gate. Our friend with the drill and bolts, Mr Chilikin, performed his side of the operation, whilst I, having just returned from the shop with two bottles of beer, provided inestimable assistance by holding the plaque in place.
Victor Ryabinin
When you lose someone as dear and as vital as Victor, time has a perplexing way of flying and standing still at the same time. This July will see the third anniversary of Victor’s death. It seems like only yesterday, ten thousand days or more.
I am not ashamed to say that once the plaque had been placed, I did shed a few tears, but being a real Englishman, not a cheap British counterfeit, in order to maintain the myth of the stiff upper lip, I managed this in private.
Of course, once the plaque had been ‘unveiled’ a toast ensued involving vodka, after which an intuitive silence fell on those of us present, the shared but unspoken thought being that had Death not exercised its non negotiable right to inopportune subtraction, doubtlessly Victor would have been with us today, and no plaque would have been necessary, just another glass. Life goes on, as they say, though never quite in the same old way.
This year our boat is not looking anywhere near as well-stocked and verdant as the one in Victor’s painting, so project two is to rectify that discrepancy as soon as humanly possible.
Before getting down to the serious task of celebrating what was without argument the most glorious summer day this year, Mr Chilikin also made good his promise to turn our fisherman bronze. You may remember that last year’s restorative work on Captain Codpiece, our statue, had garnered criticism from a certain outspoken babushka, to wit that his new coat of paint appeared to be designed to make the feeble minded do something remarkably silly, like go down on one knee. Hence, there was nothing for it: either we had to delete one letter in the ‘Codpiece’ name and add two more in its place or pursue the original plan, which was to make him bronze.
The latter option being the best in good taste all round, though the former was chucklingly good, Mr Chilikin got to woke, I mean work, and with the catalysing infusion of a couple of homemade vodkas gave Codpiece a new look that would make any alchemist jealous.
In the 1960s, the fisherman had been silvered, but that was long ago. The Soviet era passed, the silver wore away and the fisherman’s concrete superstructure began seriously deteriorating. We repaired him, coated the concrete in a special sealant and weather-proof solution and painted him in a dark matte ground with hints and highlights of bronze. Finally, succumbing to the criticism that he was as dark as a midnight mushroom, we turned up the bronze, although some might say that relative to the new beginning he is fullfilling an act of destiny and turning into gold.
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” ― Oscar Wilde
Published: 6 June 2022 ~ Word War III the Latest Media Plandemic
So, do you do it and, if the answer is yes, do you do a lot of it? I do ~ musing, I mean.
And isn’t there just so much to muse on?
Let’s take Ukraine, for example. When I say take, I don’t mean as in takeaway ~ which, someone suggested, is what the Poles want to do ~ I use the term figuratively, as in example1.
I am sure you will agree that it is an excellent example, as it is virtually impossible these days whenever the need for musing arises not to have a muse or two about what it is the West is up to out there in Ukraine.
The one place where you won’t find that out is in the British media, because Britland’s media is far too busy making (you could say ‘manufacturing’) news than reporting it. They did it to you with Brexit; they did it through the Plandemic; and now they are doing it to you again with Ukraine. Why does the British government and its media lackies want to scare you shitless?
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The simple answer, but not the whole story, is to get you to buy newspapers and to click on their websites, thereby enabling them to fleece gullible advertisers. Terror sells ~ but there is more to it than that.
It is ironic don’t you think (well, do you think?) that UK media is obsessed with speculation as to whether the crisis in Ukraine will result in World War III (it has certainly resulted in Word War III), which, incidentally, should it happen would make it hard to find the UK on the global map (not trying to frighten you, or anything), but continues to support UK government policy to pump shipment after shipment of arms to Ukraine, thus bringing the threat of Armageddon closer. Such irresponsible profligacy costs the British taxpayer dearly for something that to all accounts gets itself blown up soon after it arrives on foreign soil2.
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If the Labour Party was not so riddled with woke, someone ~ someone who is not scared to be called misogynist ~ could come right out with it and tell the foreign secretary ‘Liz don’t Trusst her’ that she is not fit for purpose and that perhaps it would be better for everyone if she just went home where she could try to do something useful like whip up a batch of scones. That something from the Labour party could then add that the money the UK is throwing away on its latest imperialist misadventure could be put to better use, such as donated to its favourite political hobby-horse the NHS, if only to finance the extra burden that will soon devolve to this commendable institution from the influx of merry migrants that keep grinning their way on boats to Dover. The logic is elementary but fundamental: more people in an over-populated country means less NHS to go round.
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I know that there are an awful lot of Brits musing on the immigration fiasco, most of whom will never go beyond musing as they are afraid to voice their opinions, and I fully understand why. It is all so tiresome, is it not, having to prefix every honest syllable you utter with, “I’m not racist, but …” And after all, why should you bother? It is obvious that Britain’s political elite don’t or else the little overcrowded boats would not keep bobbing in. But then the difference between Britain’s political elites and you is that when the sh!t hits the fan, which it will (look at Sweden!) the elite will be going the other way and you’ll be left in the line of fire.
This tragedy is no longer one which is waiting to happen. It is already underway. But let’s not muse on that. Our current muse turns on the question: Is the British establishment placing the lives of every citizen in the UK at risk by openly suppling weapons to Ukraine, by its bellicosity towards Russia and by playing lapdog to the United States?
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When nuclear war was first mentioned, which, in case you didn’t know was by the West and by the Brits, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, had this to say:
“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the thought of nuclear war is constantly running through the minds of Western politicians but not the minds of Russians.”3
Since then, however, the unthinkable, which also used to be the unspeakable, makes guest appearances on a regular basis throughout the UK media, so much so that if it wasn’t for Britain’s endemic violence and the UK’s cops losing the fight against street crime, the possibility of nuclear war would even eclipse these subjects.
Given the extent of the media-led psychosis and the paranoia it has imbued, it is hardly surprising that there are people in the Russian Federation who have begun to respond in kind4.
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Time, do you think (well, do you think?) for British people to stand up for themselves, to instruct their ‘democratically elected government’ and its malignant media that enough is really enough.
There are, however, other ‘atomic bombs’ that haven’t gone off as planned, for example sanctions.
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only one that the West has sanctioned! Recently, someone sent me some money from the UK, and it arrived in Russia worth half as much as it was before the liberal globalists set out to cripple Russia’s economy! Am I missing something here ~ apart from half my cash? Did the West unleash sanctions deliberately to make the rouble stronger? Last month, the pounds weakness in relation to the rouble meant that I could only buy half the amount of beer that I would normally buy? Now, that is serious! Meanwhile, according to my family and friends in Britland, the cost of living is soaring and the standard of living collapsing. Ahh, but I hear you say, there is madness in our government’s method.
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We all know by now, or should know, that the sanctions have been successful, at least in punishing every Tom, Uncle Tom, Dick and Leroy in the US and UK, but not, it would appear, in Russia. The civil unrest hoped for and orchestrated with the assistance of a certain ‘philanthropic billionaire’ has not materialised, and Russia’s special military operation appears to be going as planned. Political analysts opine that whilst the West may delay Russia’s progress in Ukraine, it will not stop it from achieving its goals5.
The extent of the West’s frustration is encapsulated in the ever-self-explosive rhetoric embarrassingly evacuating from the oratory orifice of the Polish prime minister, who appears to have ordained himself as the Archbishop of Anti-Russian Hysteria. Notwithstanding his ‘personal shame’ ~ ‘the personal shame of the Polish Prime Minister’6 ~ at least he looks good with his 1960s’ hairstyle and specs, but even those have not proved sufficient to dissuade neither US nor British governments from continuing to spend billions on military equipment bound for Ukraine, where off it goes to get blown up. Someone commenting on a media site waggishly asked, wouldn’t it just be a lot less trouble and considerably less expensive to blow these shipments up before they leave the US and the UK, thus saving the price of the postage?
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Every crisis known to man {LGBTs, Its and Others} ~ or should that be ever manufactured by man? ~ has been a godsend for profiteering of one kind or another.
Evidence suggests that the UK establishment is profiting from the conflict in Ukraine by using it as a cover for the miss-management of its economy7: terror and hysteria make superb attention conductors. The strategy is not new. It’s merely a resuscitation of the old Theresa May ploy, “It’s ‘highly likely’ the Russians have done it!” Move along, please, nothing to see (or believe in) here.
But even exploitation, or so it would seem, is not what it used to be. I must say I am rather surprised that someone in high office has not yet implemented Plan A as a means of reassuring Brits that should the UK government over play its hand in Ukraine, thus sparking a global disaster, surviving a nuclear holocaust may yet be possible providing that mandatory lockdowns, mask-wearing, compulsory vaccinations ~ and WHO knows what ~ are rigorously adhered to.
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I am convinced, however, that the endless stream of third-world migrants pouring into Dover is a crucial component of the UK’s defence strategy, guaranteed, I imagine, if not to act as a shield against incoming missiles to effectively deter any kind of invasion other than the migrant one, which the UK establishment appears to support. For surely nobody in their right mind would want to take possession of a country ravaged by migrant unrest and migrant-related violence, plagued by woke, cancel culture and, buggered if I know what else, ahh that reminds me, gay parades.
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I’m not suggesting that lockdowns, mask-wearing and mandatory vaccinations would be any less effective than they have proved to be for anything else, but better the devil you know than the ones that make work for idle minds.
Celebrating Victory Day across the Kaliningrad region
Published: 15 May 2022 ~ Triumph and Trips on the 9th of May Kaliningrad
The weather was so gorgeous on this year’s 9th of May morning and there was so much of it, that I thought it must have been something the West had sanctioned.
The sun was shining like a bright new stable rouble and the sky so blue that had it not been for the exculpatory fact that everyone was as happy as Larry, it could have been mistaken for the Polish Prime Minister’s temperament (Well, he never felt more like singing the blues, did he!).
As it wasn’t ~ the sky as blue as the Polish Prime Minister I mean ~ and before Arthur Eagle realised that he was standing in sabaka gavnor (that’s dog’s s!!t to you), planted on the verge no doubt by an expelled Polish diplomat (they can be very temperamental, those Poles), there was nothing for it than first to be thankful that we were not all standing where Arthur was ~ I called it in the West ~ and then to drink to Russia’s Victory and, of course, to Victory Day.
As I wrote in my previous post Victory Day Russia 2022 Brings Record Turnout, our first victory today was finding a square foot of space among the crowds where people weren’t, and then, once we were in it, moving with the multitude onto and into Victory Park. The last time I saw this many people crammed into one place it was on a Royal Navy ship trafficking migrants to Dover. The atmosphere was different, of course; it was not the jubilation of grabbing all that you can get, like a free-for-all in a jumble sale, but a moral imperative fuelled by gratitude and patriotism, which, as you should know dear reader, is a rich resource in Russia and which, like gas and oil, and it would seem most other things, is a sanction-proofed commodity.
Whilst this sincere demonstration of social cohesiveness and high regard for cultural integrity could not be anything else but a source of complete frustration for Soros and Co, that infamous firm of migrant movers and embargoists, it did cause a minor inconvenience for us, as Arthur had to park the Volga some way away. But with the usual dexterity of Russians to turn a potential handicap into advantage, we found our route on foot taking us over the vertical lift bridge, a grand old double-decker design with its roots firmly planted in the industrial age.
This meant photographs, and even an arty farty one (well, almost) shot through the steel and rivetted girders of the bridge, framing two distinctly different periods of architecture and juxtaposing the old and the new both in terms of design principles and the materials employed. If you look closely at the photo below at the inset panel, you will see, in the foreground behind the weather ship, the recently completed World Ocean Museum globe and peeping out behind it to the right the time-honoured turret of Königsberg Cathedral.
The other advantage of Arthur’s parking was that he had found a quiet street where those of us who were not behind the wheel could partake of another quick snifter of delicious homemade vodka ~ vodka distilled with a twist of lemon. It was also a nice street for Arthur’s shoes, as there seemed to be nothing NATO-like for them to accidently stand in.
Triumph and Trips on the 9th of May Kaliningrad
Having made everyone jealous with our improvised boot fare, we then ‘classic-car-d it’ to Mr Zverev’s museum in Nizovie, where, in keeping with the tenor of the occasion, the frontage and grounds to the back of his fine old german building had been requisitioned by the Soviet era.
Out front, a Soviet Capitan was keeping watch. He was wearing the khaki uniform of the Red Army, consisting of an officer’s visor cap; a Gimnasterka ~ loose fitting thick cotton shirt; Harovari, ‘elephant ear’ cavalry-style britches; and thick canvas and leather Sapogi (boots). Around his waist he has a broad leather star-buckled officer’s belt. The gun he is carrying is a ppsh sub-machine gun with drum magazine.
We know all this not from research for this blog but because when we lived in England we were, for a while, members of the Red Army’s 2nd Guards Rifle Division, a re-enactment group that attend 1940s’ historical events at locations throughout the UK and where at some they fight it out with the Germans ~ entirely, I hasten to add, in the spirit of reconstruction.
Mr Zerev’s Capitan now no longer a stranger to us, I said my next hello to the star of Yury Grozmani’s film Last Tango in Königsberg. The swish 1927 Cadillac shared the billing today with two Red Army motorcycles (one pictured below) and, just around the corner of the building, a curious armoured vehicle. I never thought to ask if this is a real military vehicle or something cunningly mocked-up for display purposes. See the photos: what do you think?
Olga Hart with mystery military vehicle
It may look like a cuddle but it is actually a comrade’s embrace!
Mick Hart with no ordinary Soviet soldier. Apparently, when not in uniform he is assisting Mr Zverev with the design of his museum.
Triumph and Trips on the 9th of May Kaliningrad
Off the military scene, but no less interesting, was an old orange Soviet tractor. I do appreciate an old tractor. They always trundle me back in my mind to the farming days of my youth: no cabs, cold metal seats, diesel fumes and dust. Once driven, never forgotten! By the way, the seat on this particular tractor, with its high foam and leatherette back rest is not the original. In the days when tractors like this roamed the earth, luxury was no object ~ there wasn’t any. The original tractor seat stood by the museum wall, all hard, bucket-like and bum-and-back unfriendly. The good old days indeed!
What most of us are conveniently inclined to forget when we gaze nostalgically on these old wheeled vehicles is that the probability of breaking down was considerably higher in ‘the good old days’ than it is for modern vehicles. Perhaps this is why a friend’s classic car from the Kaliningrad Retro Club decided to remind us.
Pushing the Moskvich 1500 was great fun, but like the thrill of the bucket toilet deprived by the modern flush, I suppose such entertainment will eventually come to an end once they invent key-turn ignition.
As the sound of patriotic Soviet music belting forth from two giant speakers faded into the distance, I looked forward to a long woodland walk on the outskirts of the village where relatives of our friends live but had to make do instead with fine beers and a comfy settee whilst watching Moscow’s Victory Parade on widescreen TV. After all, as I said to my wife and our friends, they could tell me all about their long walk when they returned. A personal victory for me on Victory Day!
Published: 12 May 2022 ~ Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout
This year’s attendance at Russia’s annual 9th May Victory Day celebration of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War (WWII), which liberated the world, ensured Russia’s preservation and determined its future role on the international stage, was nothing short of spectacular. In Moscow it was reported that more than a million people took part in the annual procession of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, and a friend, contacting us by VK messenger, said that the crowds in St Petersburg were literally overwhelming.
Here, in my hometown, Kaliningrad, the volume of people making the yearly pilgrimage to Victory Park to place flowers of respect and gratitude on the monuments to their Soviet forbears who had risked and layed down their lives by the millions to free the world of Nazism was a truly phenomenal sight. Russian citizens of all ages from the very young to the very old streamed towards the park, proudly holding aloft placard-mounted photograph portraits of grandparents and great grandparents who had fought and died defending their country.
Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout
Such was the magnitude of the throng that when we arrived at the edge of the park we found further progress impeded by a redoubtable network of crowd-control barriers. However, with a little effort and ingenuity we gradually joined the vast procession as it slowly made its way towards the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen, the city’s foremost war memorial.
Here, the crowds would pause to say a silent prayer, to reflect on the sacrifice made by previous generations and to lay flowers at the foot of the 26-metre obelisk.
The Monument to 1200 Guardsmen is Kaliningrad’s open church. Its landmark obelisk, eternal flame ~ lit more than fifty years ago ~ and spacious square flanked by two figural sculptures depicting Soviet troops storming the city of Königsberg (renamed ‘Kaliningrad’ after the war) is a living memory embodied in stone and bronze of the fortitude and heroism exemplified by the Soviet people in resisting and vanquishing fascism and in lifting the shadow of the dark forces that it had cast upon the world.
Like the eternal flame of which it is a part, the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen is a holy place of patriotism. The crowd brought more of it with them. In addition to the portraits of their ancestors, many people carried and waved small commemorative flags and some of the more adventurous full-sized Soviet banners. The Georgian ribbon, a one-time component of military decorations but latterly used to honour veterans who fought on the Eastern front, a symbol of glory instantly recognised by its striking combination of contrasting black and orange stripes, was everywhere. And many people, including my wife and our comrades, also donned wartime pilotkas ~ olive-green military side caps complete with Soviet insignia.
Along the approach road to the obelisk and the entrance to Victory Park music of a patriotic and sentimental nature recorded during the wartime era played through the PA system. People brought up with these songs, and later generations who had been taught them by their parents and in history lessons at school, sang along as sentiment directed, sometimes wistfully, then triumphantly but always with great affection.
The shared respect for historical memory by so many people of so many differing ages was uplifting and inspiriting. It is hard to imagine greater devotion stemming from people of a sovereign country to and for that country. The evocation of pride and faith, unity and belonging is one which westerners seldom encounter; indeed, one which modern western youth deprived of would find alien.
Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout
For Russians, however, the past remains a part of the living present. It is the foundation of their strength, a triumph of cultural values that has transcended generations and continues to transcend, uniting and sustaining them. It is the dove and poetry of the Russian soul; the stoical spirit of the Russian bear. The people of their past are the people of their present and the children of their present is their future. This then is the march of Russia’s Immortal Regiment! <9th May Victory Day 2022>
Updated 18 April 2022 | First published: 2 March 2021 ~ Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
[INTRO} I wrote this piece over a year ago, at a time when western media had nothing better to do than push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the coronavirus pandemic; now, apparently, it has nothing better to do than to push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the situation in Ukraine. Bearing this in mind, I dutifully revisited my post to see if anything had changed regarding my opinion of life in Russia and to what extent if any western media had succeeded in convincing me that I would be happier in the UK than if I remained a sanctioned Englishman living in Kaliningrad. I am pleased, but not surprised, to say that other than one or two grammatical improvements, there was nothing to revise! Here’s that post again …
We left the UK for Kaliningrad in winter 2018, but things were far from settled. Over the next twelve months I would have to return to the UK three or four times to renew my visa and to obtain official documents and then return again to pay an extortionate sum of money for a notarised apostille, a little rosette-looking thing verified by a notary that once clipped to the official documents could be used to complete my Leave to Remain in Russia. It was expensive; it was a rigmarole; but obtaining Leave to Remain meant that opening visas would be a thing of the past.
The last time that I was in the UK was December 2019. I returned to Kaliningrad just in time for the New Year celebrations and a month or so afterwards was granted Leave to Remain. We had intended to return to the UK in April for a month, as we had some business to attend to, but before we could do that coronavirus came along and the rest, as they say, is history.
In a previous article I revealed the circumstances which persuaded us to leave the UK and move to Kaliningrad. Now, with December 2019 to the present date being the longest uninterrupted period that I have been in Kaliningrad, it would seem appropriate that I pause to reflect on what it is about Kaliningrad that drew me to it and continues to endear and fascinate.
Our friend, the late Victor Ryabinin, used to refer to Kaliningrad and its surrounding territory as ‘this special place’, and I am with him on that. Whether it is because I see Kaliningrad through his eyes and feel it through his heart, I cannot rightly say. Certainly, his outlook and philosophy on life influenced me and my intuition bears his signature, but I rather imagine that he perceived in me from the earliest time of our friendship something of a kindred spirit, someone who shared his sensibility for the fascination of this ‘special place’.
Nevertheless, my feelings for Kaliningrad are in no way blinkered by a Romanticist streak, which, yes, I do have. If Victor could describe himself as a cheerful pessimist, then I have no qualms in describing myself as a pragmatic Romanticist. But I am no more or less a stranger to Kaliningrad’s flaws and imperfections than I am to my own.
When we arrived in Kaliningrad on a very cold day in winter 2018 to make arrangements for moving here, we were thrown in at the deep end. Early in the morning, still tired from our flight the night before, we had official business that would not wait, which meant trekking off to one of the city’s less salubrious districts. We had given ourselves sufficient time, allowances having been made for the usual protracted queuing, but on reaching our destination discovered that the office we were bound for was working to a different timetable than the one advertised, and consequently we had a two-hour wait before we would be seen! Asking some kind people if they would reserve our place in the queue, we ventured out to a small eatery, a cubicle on the side of the road, for a coffee and a bite to eat. I wrote in my diary:
“Outside, we were confronted yet again by downtown Kaliningrad at its ‘finest’: those ubiquitous concrete tower blocks, stained, crumbling and patched; pavements cracked, ruptured and sunken; kerbstones akimbo; grass verges churned by the wheels of numerous vehicles so that they resembled farmyard gateways; small soviet-era fences rusting and broken; and roads so full of potholes that I began to wonder if it was 1945 again and looked anxiously above me to check for the presence of Lancasters.
When I returned to Kaliningrad from England in December 2019, I wrote: “I am not sure whether I love Kaliningrad in spite of its imperfections or because of them”.
Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
They say that it is people that make places what they are, and it is a difficult-to-disprove logic. In the UK, for example, left-leaning commentators, liberal media editors, state-blamers and apologists are continually referring to ‘disadvantaged’ people from ‘deprived areas’, whereas in my experience it is people who deprive areas not areas that deprive people and the only disadvantage is yours, if you should wander into these areas by mistake.
Case in point: Back in the 1990s I had a female acquaintance who lived in a notorious concrete citadel in south London’s Peckham; her reputation I was assured of, but when I visited her one late afternoon in autumn, my knowledge of the Badlands where she lived was incipiently less important to me than my amorous intent. Ahh, the follies of youth!
When it came time to leave, I was ready to phone for a taxi. It was then that she informed me that after dark taxis refused to enter the estate, in fact the entire area! I suggested hailing a black cab in the street and was told that black cabs were as “rare ‘round here as rocking horse s!*t!”.
There was nothing for it: I would have to walk. I cannot say that I was unduly perturbed by this prospect. I was young, well relatively young, and these were the days of my London-wide pub crawls, which would take me to every corner of London no matter which corner it was.
On this particular evening, I had not walked far before I espied my first pub. I was still some distance from it, and though the light from the one or two working streetlamps was dim, the building was easily distinguished as the front was bathed in a low, lurid glow.
As I drew closer, I discovered to my surprise that someone had propped a large mattress on the side of the pub wall and had set light to it. It must have been very damp, the proverbial piss-stained mattress I suppose, because the conflagration was limited to a slow, puthering, smoulder.
Being the Good Samaritan that I am, I popped my head around the pub door and called to the chap behind the bar, “Hey, did you know that there is a burning mattress strapped to the side of your pub?” I need not have felt so daft for saying this, as, barely looking up from his newspaper, the barman grunted in reply, “It’s not unusual around here, mate.”
I had not walked far from The Burning Mattress pub before I found another: The Demolition Inn. All of the windows on the pavement side were smashed, and one pathetic light shone miserably through the broken glass in what otherwise would be a superb and original 1920s’ doorway. I couldn’t just walk past!
The place was empty and quiet, but it had not always been. Evidence had it that not too long ago it had been extremely lively. In one corner there was a pile of broken furniture and that which was still standing had bandaged legs and strung-up backs. The mirror behind the bar was bust, western-film style, and all of the more expensive bottles, the shorts, had been removed from the shelves and the optics, presumably for their own safety.
I never did ask what had happened. It just did not seem the polite thing to do. I just ordered a pint from the man behind the bar, who had a lovely shining black eye and his arm in the nicest of slings, and spent the next thirty minutes on my own in this disadvantaged pub, philosophically ruminating on the nasty way in which bricks and mortar and the wider urban environment deprived people to such an extent that there was nothing they could do but set light to piss-stained mattresses, smash up backstreet pubs, terrify London cabbies and (a popular sport in London’s predominantly ethnic areas) mug the hapless white man.
So, what can we conclude from this? Most large towns and cities have rundown areas, but the difference between the rundown areas in Kaliningrad and those that we know and avoid in London and other UK cities ~ the ‘deprived areas’, as they are called ~ is that you are less likely to be deprived of your possessions, your faculties even your life, whilst walking through the Kaliningrad equivalents of the UK’s infamous sink estates. Although, to be precise, such equivalents do not exist.
Thus, without sounding too fanciful, let us agree that it is people ~ the way they act, talk, behave, dress and generally conduct themselves in public ~ that makes a place what it is. An observation that applies to anywhere ~ be it a 1920s’ terraced street, a 1970s’ concrete estate, a pedestrianised city centre, anywhere ~ from region to region, country to country.
I am not about to make any silly sweeping statements about what Russian people are really like. I could not accomplish this with any degree of validity if someone was to ask me to ‘sum up’ British people (not the least because true British are lumped together with people from foreign lands, who in appearance and behaviour are anything but British, and yet have a stamp in their passport that contradicts good sense) simply because every individual is different no matter where he or she hails from. What I can say hand on heart is that in the 22 years that I have been coming to Kaliningrad, I have had the good fortune to meet, and in some instances become friends with, people of the highest calibre in this small corner of Russia.
It is true that in June 2019 we lost Victor Ryabinin, which was and still is an inconsolable loss, and tragedy would overtake us again in November 2020, when our friend and Victor’s protégé, Stas Konovalov, who helped us through the emotional period of Victor’s death and with whom we shared so many good times, died also. For the second time in less than two years, irreplaceable people had been taken from us. We continue to miss them both.
As it had been for Stas and Victor, history plays an important part in my relationship with Kaliningrad. There is, of course, my own personal history of Kaliningrad, an interaction that stretches back over two decades, and then the energy of the greater past that flows from antiquity into the present. In Kaliningrad, and its region, the past and present parallel each other. There are times and places where the past seems so close that you feel all you need to do is reach out, pull back the curtain and take its hand in yours.
“There is something magnetic in this city; it pulled some of the world’s most significant people into it as it has pulled me. I cannot explain this magic, but I know that this is my city.”
Victor Ryabinin
For some, this confluence of the past has more disturbing connotations. My wife’s mother, who is attuned to the ‘otherness’ of our existence, complains that although she likes Kaliningrad, there is something inescapably ‘heavy’ about it, defined by her as emanating from its dark Teutonic and German past. And I am inclined to agree with her. But I do not share her more gloomy interpretation of the dark side or its negative affect. For me, the cloud has a silver lining: it is profundity and, at its core, cultural sensitivity, interlaced with creative energy. Indeed, creativity and creative people thrived and flourished in Königsberg and that legacy, I am pleased to say, lives on to this day.
Königsberg ~ the retrospective world of artist Victor Ryabinin
Whilst the bricks and mortar of Königsberg’s ruins ~ the haunting landscape in which Victor Ryabinin spent his susceptible childhood ~ may have largely been replaced, the spirit of the old city and the spirits of all those who passed through it, whether peacefully or violently during times of war, are ever present. And I earnestly believe that the energy of our two departed friends, Victor and Stas, walk among the living here as countless others do who were brought to this place by fate.
Königsberg after allied bombing ~ the childhood landscape of Victor RyabininKaliningrad 2019
Victor wrote that “there is something magnetic in this city; it pulled some of the world’s most significant people into it as it has pulled me. I cannot explain this magic, but I know that this is my city.”
I was told by someone, not by Victor himself, that Victor believed that no matter how we felt about the past, we have to live in the present. I never did get chance to ask him whether by that he meant that we had no choice but to live in the present or that we each had a moral imperative to do so, but whichever version you choose, I would qualify both by adding that to a certain extent we can pick and mix, take what we need from the past and present and leave the rest behind.
In my case, the past and present converge, and I am attracted to modern-day Kaliningrad as much as I am fascinated by its East Prussian, German and Soviet history.
When English people call me out, asking pointedly what it is I like about Kaliningrad. I reply, glibly: “What’s not to like?”
Of course, I start with the historical perspective ~ it would not be me if I didn’t ~ referring to the Teutonic Order, ancient Königsberg, Königsberg’s fate during the Second World War and its Soviet reincarnation. I emphasise what a fascinating destination it is for those who are interested in military history and woo antique and vintage dealers with seductive tales of dug-up relics, the incomparable fleamarket and colourful descriptions of alluring pieces hidden away in the city’s antique shops.
Relics of Königsberg & Soviet Kaliningrad’s past
Then I go on to say that Kaliningrad is a vibrant and dynamic city, a city of contrasts, of surprises; I talk up its superb bars and restaurants, the variety and price of the beer, the museums and art galleries, the excellent public transport facilities, the attractive coastal resorts that are a mere forty minutes away and cost you two quid by train or a tenner by taxi, the UNESCO World Heritage Curonian Spit, the small historic villages, how friendly the natives are to visitors and, when the wife is not about, the presence of many beautiful women.
Above: Kaliningrad region’s main coastal resorts: Svetlogorsk & Zelenogradsk
*********Editorial note [18 April 2022]******** In the paragraphs to follow, I refer to the onerous restrictions which at the time of writing were impacting international travel in the name of coronavirus. Since then, you will have probably noticed that we have entered a new, dramatically more restricting chapter in the history of international travel, thanks to the West’s anti-Russian hysteria and its sanction-futile attempts to isolate the largest country on Earth. This ill-advised and not very well thought through economic warfare programme has added multiple layers of estranging complexity for global travellers everywhere, not just for potential visitors who want to leave the West to travel to Kaliningrad. From a purely selfish standpoint, these self-defeating impositions have merely made the ‘special place’ that Kaliningrad is to me that little bit more special, its taboo status, difficult-to-get-to location and mythicised risk to westerners making my ‘secret holiday destination’ even more enticing, albeit, ironically, somewhat less secret since in the latest round of Russophobia it has been singled out as a strategic military obstacle to the New World Order aspirations of neoliberal globalism.
You will also find in my later comments evidence supporting Russia’s assertion that the West’s attempts to stigmatise and degrade its international standing and denigrate its culture did not start with Ukraine. The events that we see unfolding today have been a long time in the making and by comparing my honest depiction of life in Kaliningrad with life as you know it in the UK, you should begin to understand why Russia’s traditional cultural ethos inflames the rancour of the West and why it fuels a burning desire in its governments to corrupt, transform and replace that culture with something sub-standard resembling their own. All I can say is Heaven forbid! *********End of Editorial note [18 April 2022]********
Admittedly, as with everywhere else in the world, access to Kaliningrad and accessibility with regard to its facilities have suffered restrictions through the outbreak of coronavirus, but hopefully it will not be long before the borders are open again. Before coronavirus struck, I was looking forward to excursions into Poland and to Vilnius, Lithuania ~ one of my favourite cities ~ and I want to make that train trip across Russia to Siberia.
As I say, what’s not to like?
Above: Scenes from Kaliningrad and its Baltic Coast region
I realise, of course, that this is not what most English people expect or even want to hear. The UK media has done a good demolition job on Russia over the years, especially Kaliningrad. True, each year that goes by, as things improve here and grow inversely worse in the West, the UK media is finding it increasingly difficult to slag Kaliningrad off. Who can forget its failed propaganda coup in 2018, when it pulled every trick in the book in an attempt to terrify British fans from travelling to Russia for the World Cup?! The plan backfired spectacularly, since the fans that trusted in their own intuition and came to Kaliningrad in spite of media hype were later to report how immensely they enjoyed themselves. What an ‘own goal’ for the West and an embarrassing one at that!
Nevertheless, UK and American liberals continue to bang their conspiratorial heads against the door of this nation state, taking solace in the belief that should they ever run out of tall and sensational stories, there’s always Kaliningrad’s ‘military threat’, to latch onto. Simultaneously, they promise to bestow on Mother Russia ~ as if she is an ‘it’ or an ‘other’ (now, isn’t that just typical!) ~ the rights equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and all for the knock-down bargain price of Russia becoming a vassal state of the New World Liberal Disorder.
When I am asked about Kaliningrad, I respond to the critics by saying that I can only tell it how I find it, from my point of view, and that the Kaliningrad that I know is not the one readily fictionalised by UK mainstream media. They listen, but I suspect that Brits being Brits they routinely dismiss me as a latter-day Lord Haw Haw, even though the only hawing I do is when reflecting on their entrenched dogmas I allow myself a good chuckle.
However, there is one thing about Kaliningrad that has changed decisively for me: When I first came here, I was a tourist. I came for the good times; I had a good time; and then I went home until the next good time. I was a tourist.
Holiday venues are like that, they exist in the distance of your life, somewhere on the periphery. It’s a bit like having a mistress, or so they tell me: you can call round when it pleases you, take your pleasure, vow one day that you will move in together and then return to your life and forget it, until that is of course holiday time comes round again.
The risk is, however, that by returning time and time again ~ to places not mistresses (although …) ~ you develop friendships, and before you know it you have become a part of their life and they a part of yours. Your lives become enmeshed. You learn about each other’s hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, dreams and aspirations. You gain an informed insight into each other’s past and the course your lives have taken, and whilst you are living in each other’s lives fate, which is working behind the scenes, is quietly writing you into its narrative
The point at which you find yourself no longer living on the outside but looking in is indistinct, but it occurs somewhere at that imperceptible juncture where you are not only sharing the ‘ups’ of people’s lives but also the ‘downs’.
This is particularly true when you fall into the raw, barely consolable emotion, grief, in which fused as one by pain and despair, you eventually emerge on the other side less intact than you were but brothers in arms and sorrow. Such experiences are not peculiar to me or to Kaliningrad, or for that matter to any one time and place; they are timeless, universal. But it is these experiences that will ultimately determine which are the stations on your way and which your final destination.
And do you know what is most awesome? It is that you never know where it will be until after you arrive there.
Zelenogradsk in the sun … It’s not always cold in Russia!!
UK Sanctions like pinning a target to your own arse
Published: 4 April 2022 ~ Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
Congratulations Viktor Orban on your landslide victory in the Hungarian election: Viktor Orban celebrates victory over “Brussels bureaucrats and the Soros empire”1
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“The Western economic blockade and sanctions of an unprecedented scale are clearly having an effect. The question will ultimately be whether Russians are willing to accept their new status as global pariahs and give up the Western comforts some had grown used to.” ~ CNN article, 14 March 2022, “Here’s how we know sanctions are hurting Russia”
My wife’s response on social media: “Russians are willing to accept giving up ‘Western comforts’, which mainly means the loss of McDonald’s, Zara and IKEA. We have plenty of home-grown products💖. As for ‘global pariahs’, we are OK with this definition too. After all, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky are in our company. 🤣”‘
So there you have it: ‘western comforts’ belong to the corporate-led, consumer lifestyles of material western cultures, which, presumably, cannot survive without them, and the perception of ‘global pariah’ really depends on (a) a limited definition of what constitutes the world, ie the world is the western collective, and (b) whether exclusion from the neoliberal globalist club is something to lament or something to rejoice about.
Quote: “The Western economic blockade and sanctions of an unprecedented scale are clearly having an effect.” Question: On who? and Who says so? Ahh, western media!
“First off, let’s shift this into a UK context, because as we know Britland is the crust on Uncle Sam’s American Pie and everything the yanks say the Brits go along with. So, Brits take note: Brit mentality is not Russian mentality. The entire British hierarchy from the elitist neoliberal classes to the lush-living liberal lefties to the sheep-bleating and avatar-changing minions live in a world that is totally disconnected from Russian thought and feeling. This is one reason, the main reason, why it is so easy for the UK to miscomprehend Russians on the grand and amusing scale that it incessantly does.
But the disconnect between Russian and UK mentality is not the only void; there is another, equally unbeknown to the UK masses, between the style, approach and coverage of Russian media and that of its UK counterpart.
Objective comparison of Russian and UK media coverage of Ukraine immediately reveals that when it comes to news that is straightforward, easy to assess and assimilate, Russian media wins hands down. The UK establishment is frightened of this, which is why at the first sign of trouble in Ukraine they moved to ban Russian media, but not before they had disguised their motive by slapping it with a propaganda notice.
In the UK, views and narratives that do not conform to the official neoliberal one are routinely shouted down. Brexit, the plandemic and now Ukraine, it’s the same old story. It has to be, if not the UK government cries ‘propaganda’, UK media cries ‘propaganda’ and, you’ve guessed it, the UK public cry ‘propaganda’. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? So, they don’t.
Where UK media excels is in the spheres of overt-sensationalism and melodrama. This is not to congratulate but to recognise how it works. People of independent thought, what few there are left in the UK, can see through the deception and the disingenuous character of UK media with the minimum of effort, but cloned and colonised minds cannot and sadly for various reasons the great proportion of Brits fall into this latter category.
Take, for example, the recent media handling and presentation of the situation in Ukraine. Huge, concerted effort was disproportionately assigned by UK media to heartstring-pulling tales about the humanitarian tragedy and the subsequent plight of hapless refugees. I am not knocking the reality of the collateral damage of military conflict but the way in which that reality is deliberately and cynically manipulated.
The UK government and its corporate media are maestros when it comes to playing the emotive fiddle. They can tap into the mythicised tolerance of the legacy Briton mindset without breaking sweat. It is not the first time, for example, that Brits have been asked to feel good about themselves by opening their hearts and borders to ‘asylum seekers’, economic migrants and even genuine refugees.
Think back to the troubles that the US-UK alliance exacerbated in Syria. Remember the cruel images of refugee children, some dead some rescued, on the beaches of Europe when their migrant rafts capsized, images later claimed by some commentators to have been stage-managed but cried down frenetically as ‘fake news’ by liberal fact checkers?
No sooner had these images been published than up went the banshee cry for accepting more refugees and adopting refugee children. Do you remember this? Do you also remember changing your avatar, and whilst you were doing this forgetting to remember the role that the US-UK played in creating the Syrian tragedy? Propaganda they cry! But then they always do.
It is different in Russia. Contrary to UK popular belief, popular because when Brits have no answers they simply shout ‘propaganda’ in the same way that they shout ‘racist’, Russians, unlike Brits, do not believe everything they see and read in the media. Schooled in the hard knocks in life, not the university of ‘I’ve got rights’, am molly-coddled and cosseted, Russian minds have fortunately escaped the deleterious process of homogenisation that has soldered UK minds into one inflexible lump.
The parrot-and-sheep UK hybrid simply does not apply in Russia. Changing avatars as a substitute for intelligence and for touchy-feely membership to the mutual appreciation society is not a natural part of the Russian psyche. A comparatively turbulent history has taught Russians how to endure and overcome and, as a consequence, has enabled them to develop a reservoir of personal and collective fortitude on which they can draw for survival whenever the need arises.
Equipped thus, the ‘pariah’ does not feel like a pariah, if anything it feels exclusive. Hence, the ‘pariah of the global world’ (which actually means the globalised world) sees that world from which it has been excluded, to which it is told it does not belong, as the pariah it can do without. Now, isn’t that ironic?
if you learn but one word in Russian, let that word be Pofick!
To help with your understanding of this, if you learn but one word in Russian, let that word be pofick! In English, pofick equates to ‘And what?’ or ‘So what!’; in French c’est la vie; or universally to a simple shrug of the shoulders. ‘Pariah!’ Pofick!; ‘Sanctions!’ Pofick!; US-UK sissy fit! Pofick!
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
Gone are the days when all Russians clamoured and craved to run to Europe. Some of the country’s arty-farts and techies have left Russian as a virtue-signalling gesture about Ukraine, but let’s face it they couldn’t just up and go unless they had money and property salted, tucked away and waiting for them in Europe, so the general feeling here is that those who have gone were gone already.
The majority of Russians, thanks to the internet, no longer harbour any illusions as to what it is like to live in the West. Once, like many others, they were keen to experience French culture or German culture or British culture but globalism, with the assistance of George Soros’ third-world taxi service, has reduced such norms to nuances. Now very little culture is left in these countries, and what has managed to survive is suffocating beneath legions of creepers and poison ivy.
So, the odds on Russian society being upended by self-reflection as a pariah state to the West are not ones on which you should stake your existence. Sanctions, attempts to cancel culture and general Russophobia are impotent leverage mechanisms for exchanging tradition and love of historic homeland for deviancy and woke.
Another UK government-media myth, borrowed from the US of A, is that sanctions are ‘crippling’ and ‘strangling’ Russia. They are certainly not designed to make life easier but, to quote my Indian friend, who considers himself a great philosopher: “Every problem has a solution”. And this is what we are seeing.
About sanctions, you could say, and many political pundits, economists and political analysts around the world are saying, that the US and its minions have shot themselves in the collective foot, but I prefer my own analogy, which is that the US and its western collective are using their arse for target practice.
The situation into which they have backed themselves reminds me to a lesser extent of one that occurred in a publishing house in which I was employed. Against the advice of his peers and underlings, one of the directors went ahead and implemented a controversial project which, as anticipated, completely backfired. In short it was a financial disaster. A friend and colleague of mine created a little ditty to commemorate this folly, which every time the misguided director appeared my friend would unkindly sing. It went something like this: “We all tried to tell him it just wouldn’t do. It went off half-cock, it hadn’t been thought through”.
Thus, when the UK’s Liz Truss, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs of the United Kingdom (Trus her to talk b!**&!*s!) gives it the big one about the impermanence of UK sanctions and proffers the carrot and stick of removing sanctions if Russia will behave itself ~ stop behaving like a naughty boy ~ we between-the-lines readers see a very definite case of ‘Oh dear, we got it all wrong; we didn’t think those sanctions through’. The U-turn is plainly visible; it’s the next bend in the road ahead. But saving face is less easy to see. Quick, shout Propaganda!
For the moment, for the Liz Truss moment, saving face means talking out of your arse. The arse-about-face of it is for Brits that they are to continue fuelling their ego at the expense of rising fuel costs, which are fuelling the cost of living crisis, in the lamentable belief that somehow their little over-populated, socially fragmented and culturally impoverished island holds, by some quaint and curious stretch of imperialistic imagination, the whip hand over Russia, the largest country on planet Earth and also a sovereign superpower.
The attempt to ruin Russia on the part of America and Europe is like two gays trying to conceive a child. The more they try, the more their arses hurt.
A RECENTLY DISCOVERED RUSSIAN ANECDOTE HASH-TAGGED ON SOCIAL MEDIA
I’m sorry fellow Brits, but like everything else with this Ukraine conflict your government is selling you sanctions porkies. But please don’t take my word for it. In spite of liberal revisionism, Google has yet to expunge the date when the British Empire waned.
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
It couldn’t be more obvious than Britain is overcrowded that refusing Russian gas and oil and limiting and/or excluding other essential commodities is akin to wearing a Covid mask in order to spite your face (or is that to spite your intelligence?) or playing darts with your trousers in order to spite your arse. It’s like me saying, instead of buying a packet of crisps from Mr & Mrs Patel’s British corner shop, I’ll buy it from outer Mongolia and ship it in by taxi. Yup, it’s economic madness. It won’t affect the elites, of course, but it will and is already driving down the living standards of your over indebted average Brit. Woops, there goes the heating bills, like a nuclear missile straight through the roof! We’d buy some more insulation, but we haven’t the money to do it with!
Meanwhile, Russia, which has got loads and loads of energy resources, and other resources, is picking up the phone and saying, “Hello India, hello China, we’ve got some oil and gas to flog, are you up for it, mate?”
A similar thing is happening at economic warfare’s sharp and masochistic end, viz with banking and credit card sanctions. “Hello, Russia here. We are in the process of ditching the dollar, how are you fixed for replacing it with the Yuan?”
There are many other import/export sectors where sanctions just aren’t working and where by imposing them the West is on a hiding to nothing, as if using its arse for target practice is not painful enough and only self-flagellation will do.
The level of discomfort that “the Western economic blockade and sanctions” is inflicting on ordinary Russians is, according to CNN, “clearly having an effect”, but it is patently not clear what exactly that effect is because CNN is unable, or unwilling, to tell us, at least with any conviction. I can tell you, as I live in Russia, that the more bellicose and sanction obsessed the West becomes, the more galvanised and resilient is the Russian response. It tracks back to my comment at the opening of this post, the difference in Russian and Brit mentality.
I am sure there are numpty head equivalents here to numpty head UKers, who would rather pay £100 for a T-shirt with a silly brand name on it than a better quality T-shirt with no brand name that retails at a tenth of the price, but that particular extortion has not yet taken hold or replicated itself half as successfully in Russia as it has in the West. If such was the case would the greedy companies selling such tat have put virtue signalling above profit and left Russia so quickly with their tails between their legs? No T-shirt no cry ~ Pofick!
Mick Hart to the rescue! Forever the entrepreneur, to compensate for the loss of brand-name apparel, I am busy working on a new line of clothing for fashion-conscious Russians. These items of haute couture, unisex but not for ‘its and others’ as they are not intended for export, will be designed, manufactured and marketed under the ‘Babushka Brand’ name and will cater for all garment and occasion ranges from woolly socks to evening wear. The prototype is already in the pipeline (which is more than can be said for Russian gas to Europe). The wife is busy knitting me my first cravat in wool.
On the credit card front, true Visa and Mastercard have gone, but they continue to function internally until 2028, or so we have been told, and the Chinese card system, UnionPay, is due to replace the western versions. Incidentally, UnionPay provides access to making payments in over 180 countries. I thought I’d mention that just to remind you that the ‘international community’ to whom Liz Trust-her-not and her dodgy colleagues refer is in fact confined to Usual Suspects Inc ~ the US and its acolytes.
The reality is that in spite of Liz All-Trussed-Up-Like-A-Turkey’s offer to Russia that one day it could be ‘business as usual’, now not only do Russia’s political and business classes know where they stand with the West, but so does the rest of the world. If they had any doubts before Ukraine about the loaded mechanisms inherent in globalism by which suppression and subjugation can be brought to bear on sovereign nation states for the benefits of others and primarily for US advantage, even albeit raggedly and short of consummation, now their application and the risks involved could not be more apparent.
Moreover, there is more than an outside chance that having been ostracised once too often, Russia may never want to return to the West’s unchummy playground no matter how many Western sweeties it is paedo-politically offered. Indeed, leading economists and political analysts the world over anticipate that whatever the outcome of Ukraine, but conspicuously because of it, the era of US and western dominance is rattling to an end.
Symbolic of this move in the right direction is the exodus from Russia of such odious companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken and British American Tobacco, and not-before-time banned Facebook and its incestuous sister Instagram, all of which means for Russians that they will be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and ultimately morally healthier.
And so, we say to these companies, and others of their ilk regarding sanctions and disappearing tricks: “We all tried to tell them it just wouldn’t do. It went off half-cock, it hadn’t been thought through”.
Thus, although in the short-term difficulties are to be overcome, in the long-term for Russia and the multipolar new world order into which we are emerging, it is difficult to imagine a more win-win situation.
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
A long time ago, when I was labouring under the delusion that the US and UK double act was, like the words from that well-known hymn (well known if you’ve managed to save something from your culture and past), “All things bright and beautiful”, my friend, a retired scientist, corrected me. Said he, with some impatience: “You don’t understand, Mick, Russia has all those resources and all we’ve got [in the UK] is too many people”
His exact words were, “Too many bloody stupid people!” But I’ll leave you to be the judge of that.
DISCLAIMER: I may have mentioned ‘arse’ once, but I think I got away with it …
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.
