Probably should edit my bio a bit. I'm a truth seeker. Truth teller. Hopefully well read. Political with emphasis on the Natural Law and pre VII Catholic teaching. Cultural. And I think I have a sense of humor. Belloc, Chesterton, Fr Fahey. Abp. Lefebvre.
Neo-Pagans have sometimes forgotten; when they set out to do everything that the old pagans did, that the final thing the old pagans did was to get christened.
This short clip from @RandPaul is the most important minute & fifteen seconds you’ll watch this year, maybe this century. If a majority understood this, we could begin to fix what’s gone horribly wrong in this country. Bravo. pic.twitter.com/Xg71VG2XS2
They only hurt the poor and the ordinary citizens of the countries they are used against. They are totally ineffective against the rich and the leaders they support.
I have visited South Carolina, mainly Charleston, a few times in the past, and will be sorry if, thanks to idiots like that, a nuclear missile lands on its nearby naval base…
Above, the areas I knew in Charleston, South Carolina.
If it happens, and if some of us survive, we must make it our duty to —later— seek out and destroy those who are (at present) calling for war with Russia, and/or are cheering on that terrible prospect.
Late tweets
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” ― George Washington #FreeSpeechpic.twitter.com/1sdN4AebMA
Thus proving that General Patton was intelligent as well as martial, and that the cowardly poseur and scribbler, Ernest Hemingway, was pretty stupid, as well as, in effect, a fellow-traveller with Stalin.
If someone is going to support Stalin, I prefer a genuine out-and-out Stalinist to a fake pseudo-revolutionary champagne socialist and “useful idiot”. At least the hard-core Stalinist of the recent past was honest in his views.
Incidentally, the existence of the likes of tweeter Daniel Kovalik shows that the day of the socio-political idiot is as yet not extinct. I agree with him that the USA should stay out of the Ukrainian conflict, though.
The most alarming aspect of the dictatorship starting so obviously to envelop us in the West is that the vast majority of people are absolutely complacent about it, if they even realize that it is happening.
Firstly monks settled on these 'columns of sky' from 11th century. 24 of these monasteries were built, at time of great revival of eremetic ideal in 15th century.
Their 16th-century frescoes mark a key stage in development of post-Byzantine painting. pic.twitter.com/DI8pMI3CHz
— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) May 10, 2022
One of the warmongering gay intellectuals at neo-con GBNews is shocked that Ukrainian soldiers are often happy to talk with their Russian opposite numbers. Hey, Tom, if you want a war, Ze wants foreign volunteers. Off you go, I'm sure the #Azov Nazis will find a use for you! https://t.co/tFyEzqsilU
Surely calling those idiots “intellectuals” is a little too kind? That horrible little blot, Harwood, was recently sharing, on Twitter, his revelation that Italy, on a map, looks like a boot!
FEMA has told Americans who are victims of a nuclear explosion to wear face masks and maintain social distancing. No, this isn't a joke.https://t.co/jvl8iX7RMV
Almost as good as the “advice” given to the British public in the 1980s by constipated civil servants, to the effect that, in the event of nuclear attack, British people should shelter under a stout table, “protected” by a tablecloth or blanket, and should not forget to keep safe their pension books and bank documents!
COVID Passports are just the beginning; they really want your bank account AND YOUR IDENTITY; Step out of line, you cease to exist as a functioning part of society—the ultimate means of social control for the .001% Billionaire Class . . . https://t.co/WYsoVWAITI
As previously blogged, the aim in the medium-term is to get as many people as possible microchipped, probably on the arm or wrist, and get them using that system for all everyday uses: NHS, shopping, travel. Those refusing will be gradually marginalized and, ultimately, probably, detained indefinitely.
Only extreme resistance now, or soon, will prevent this in Western and Central Europe, North America, Australasia, and elsewhere.
As a control mechanism, “the virus” has done most of its job. The majority of the (eg) British population have been proven to be sheep, easily corralled and controlled; in effect, brainwashed. The facemask nonsense was key in doing that.
Of course, a properly-run society would properly punish the likes of Professor Ferguson (or, indeed, laugh at him from the start, and certainly not take him seriously).
Stray thoughts about the increasingly acrid Ukraine situation
Had the Russian forces mounted a properly-planned Blitzkrieg from the start, and thus achieved their main strategic objectives within days, toppling the Jew-Zionist Kiev regime and installing a puppet government de facto over the Kiev region, over that part of Ukraine east of the Dnieper, and over the Black Sea littoral, there would have been no time for the creation of a civilian resistance, and no time for the NWO/ZOG powers of the EU, UK, and North America to respond effectively. Also, the Ukrainian civilians would not have suffered harm, certainly not on the scale that looks likely now.
In the ancient cult of Magna Mater, the candidates for initiation had at one point to wade through a literal bath of blood. Metaphorically, that is where Putin and the Russian forces now are.
Unless they are going to abandon the operation completely, which would not only be humiliating for Putin personally but disastrous for Russia strategically, they have to press on to victory, even though any victory now will be horrible and bitter.
NATO, the EU, even usually-neutral Sweden, and others, are funnelling serious armament into Ukraine now. It will be placed at the disposal of the Kiev regime.
The ground-to-air armament flooding in may deny Russia command of the skies before very long. Even now, Russia’s air force does not seem to be being used as effectively as it could be, and certainly not as ruthlessly as the Americans use theirs.
This situation can only worsen for Russia over time. The only answer will be for Russia to destroy the Kiev regime very soon, whatever it takes. The key players have to be captured or eliminated.
I tremble for the remaining civilian population of Ukraine (and their companion animals). This should never have happened, certainly not in this way.
Supplies of food and fuel must be running out in Kiev. The odds are still in favour of the Russian invaders, if they press forward.
The Russian Army has been hugely upgraded over the past 15 years, but has shown itself incapable of proper staff work and planning. It dithered for weeks (that may have been Putin’s fault), then launched an unimpressive, sluggish and “bitty” invasion that seems to have lacked elan and rigour.
In a way, this incipient debacle is reminiscent of what happened in Karelia in 1939-40.
Stalin would have been shooting generals by now. Putin cannot do that, but he has to reinvigorate this operation before it becomes a manifest and historic defeat.
How is it that a country with (one reads) 4,500 fighter aircraft cannot dominate the skies of one that has fewer than 100?
If Putin and his generals do nothing, or if they withdraw behind Russia’s frontiers, The Kiev regime will be resupplied, its forces upgraded (all paid for by NWO/ZOG states), and before long there will be NATO or NATO-proxy forces stationed only 300 miles from Moscow (Moscow is 300 miles from the Ukrainian border at the nearest point).
The logic of the above is that the Kiev regime must now be toppled by massive force, even though a victory bought at such a price in destruction and suffering could not be other than bitter and even sickening.
[Wanda Landowska with Tolstoy, at Yasnaya Polyana]
Ukraine— possible developments
What if Russian forces manage to control the whole area east of the Dnieper, as well as the Kiev area and the Black Sea coast? What then?
If there is a relocation of the Kiev regime to Lvov, with control over the western part of Ukraine, then NATO and the EU will flood it with arms and training staff. Russia, and Putin especially, would then have the choice of coming to some accommodation with that government, or fighting it. The Western allies would presumably keep referring to it as the Government of Ukraine de jure, even if the Russians install a Ukraine government, de facto, in Kiev.
In fact, both such regimes would only, de facto, control about half of of the whole country. Both would be supported as “de jure” governments of the whole by, and only by, their individual patron-states.
It is hard to see any such Lvov regime accepting Russian rule over a third to a half of present Ukraine, and including Kiev. On the other hand, and on present evidence, the Russian forces would seem incapable of taking the whole country, let alone holding it.
It is easy for many to talk about Ukraine as if it is smaller than it is, but Ukraine is about the same size as France. Huge. Nearly three times the size of the whole UK.
As for Kiev, with its 3 million inhabitants, it is —depending on where administrative boundaries are drawn— about the 7th-largest city by population in Europe. Indeed, if one excludes Istanbul, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, the 4th-largest.
Of course, if one includes suburbs outside strict city limits, London and Paris have even larger populations, but that would still mean that Kiev would be the 5th-largest city in Europe (excl. cities in European Turkey and European Russia), after London, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin.
The international situation can only go down from here. On the periphery, biding its time, China…
Time to repost my blog thoughts about the potential necessity of founding a new civilization on the rubble of the old…
"…we do not only fight for the Ukraine, we fight for the New World Order. We are the shield for Europe." Look at the WEF website! https://t.co/SOSlhatIBt
As that person is saying, Russia is not, as yet anyway, flattening everything in Ukraine, whereas the American idea, seen repeatedly, is to flatten whole cities, regardless of civilian harm.
In any case, Putin does not want to take over a flattened wasteland.The way things are going, though, he may have little choice.
Again, the cold logic seems to lead to a massive attack on the locations of the Kiev regime itself, i.e. on central Kiev, with the aim of decapitating the present government and thus starting to end any mass resistance.
Dictatorial “lockdown”, mishandled Brexit, continuing mass immigration (though slowed by some voluntary repatriation over past months), collapsing real economy, sliding real estate values in London. Mass unemployment. Huge divides opening up, socially, culturally and politically.
There is no “revolutionary situation” in the UK. Not yet. By 2022, there may be, or at least the start of one.
Tweet seen
Can we just go full 1940 and lock these 5th Columnists up already? Bored to tears with their fluffing for fascism https://t.co/pUVZMuUwgr
“Dr” Louise Raw, prolific “antifascist” tweeter, fantasizing about being able to arrest, have arrested, or see being arrested, those with whom she disagrees socially or politically. Not “just” those she and her type label “fascist”, “Nazi”, “neo-Nazi” etc, but also persons such as American alt-Right journalist Andrew Ngo, or London radio loudmouth Julia Hartley-Brewer.
On the other hand, to compare “Dr” Raw or her like to Trotsky or Stalin (or Dzerzhinsky for that matter) would be even more silly than her labelling of others. As Marx commented in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the “first time tragedy, second time, farce“. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Louis_Bonaparte.
As I have often noted in this blog, “socialism” died around 1989 and has been replaced by the grotesqueries of “Black Lives Matter”, LGBTQXYZ nonsense, “trans” nonsense, “antiracism” nonsense and all the other socio-political absurdities we now see around the self-describing “Left”.
Silly people such as “Dr” Raw tweet about locking people up for their views, but she at least seems (?) to have enough awareness to realize that she and her cohorts cannot actually do that. She and they are reduced to bleating that the State, or someone, or anyone, should take such measures.
The self-describing UK “Left” is now the haunt not of the scoundrel, not solely anyway, but of those in a comfortable, unthinking, and mutually-supporting niche, who want to be told what to think, say or do by the EU, official bodies, “Covid marshals” etc. Thus they love Twitter, and their greatest joy is to see someone of whom they disapprove expelled from Twitter. They put forward no programme, have no political traction, and are basically irrelevant.
I might add, “ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee“…
Incidentally, Kim Philby [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby] was a great admirer of Eighteenth Brumaire. I expect that he would have known the fact noted below:
“In the preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx stated that the purpose of this essay was to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”[1]” [Wikipedia] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Louis_Bonaparte. [my bold emphasis].
Is that how Philby secretly viewed himself? As a “grotesque mediocrity” nonetheless able to play a role arguably (in Philby’s mind?) “heroic”? Was that one reason why Philby drank so much, that dissonance?
I suppose that we shall never know. In any event, I myself am sceptical of the (supposed) importance or significance of Philby, despite the books which continue to be churned out about him, mostly in the UK.
As a matter of fact, I once (in fact more than once; several times) met someone who had once met Philby, or at least had heard him give a lecture. I should have been more curious and asked about that person’s impression of the “great spy” and/or “great traitor”.
More tweets
This thread should terrify anybody who cares about liberty or democracy. The government is killing off legal aid criminal law solicitors. Without them, the rule of law crumbles. https://t.co/9G9JXuy1Up
One of the most telling ways in which the Jew-Zionist lobby has poisoned the UK is in the “denial” label. First there was “holocaust” “denial”, aimed at anyone, whether professional historian or not, questioning the “holocaust” narrative in whole or part (even the ludicrous “gas chambers” nonsense).
After that came climate change “denial”, a term aimed at anyone questioning the causes or effects of what was originally termed “global warming”. As with “holocaust” “denial”, it turns out that the “deniers” have at least the preponderance of fact on their side: Prince Charles and others were wrong when they said, in 2009, that humanity had 3, then 5, then 7 years “to save the planet”.
It turned out that the “experts” were not only wrong but actively mendacious in saying that the Himalayan glaciers would soon melt completely, resulting in the Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra all running dry.
‘Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 2003 issue of Nature magazine, “Although it’s tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests’ humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.”‘ “
Well, now we have “Covid-19” “denial”! Anyone questioning the origins of “the virus”, anyone saying that the World Economic Forum and others are using the virus as a means for a “Great Reset”, anyone questioning the utility of repressive government measures such as facemask-mandating, “lockdowns” etc is a “denier”, a kind of heretic, probably a criminal or even a murderer…
This is that happens when it becomes a heresy to question officially-supported fact-narratives. Beware.
More tweets
Well, @djflatwhite, in free countries, you have to win debates if you wish to right wrongs. Its a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition. https://t.co/2pYIGflXQ0
Peter Hitchens still regards the UK as sort-of “free”. Debatable?
The U.K. had a perfectly good plan for a pandemic, 70 pages of experience, knowledge and common sense, drawn up in 2011 – and ditched in the great panic of March 2020 pic.twitter.com/ngbj5MN2sy
Easily @plasfron@johnrentoul. Pol Pot's policy was unhinged, Mao's Great Leap Forward was unhinged, Hitler's massacre of Europoean Jews was unhinged. Burning down your house to get rid of a wasps' nest is unhinged.Problem is to know it, and be able to point it out, at the time. https://t.co/6KSngk1xUA
Hitler’s policy was resettlement of Jews. Millions did leave Germany, millions left Europe, in the 1930s and early 1940s. USA, UK, Australia, Palestine, and other places too.
What was “unhinged” was the UK and France offering Poland a “guarantee” in 1939 which was not worth the paper on which it was written. That spurious “guarantee” triggered WW2 as surely as the mass mobilizations of 1914 had triggered WW1.
More accurately, the “guarantee” to Poland, when not just ignored by the UK and France on the fateful days of 1-3 September 1939, triggered that disastrous war.
Why is nationalism okay for Jewish people, for black people, and for indigenous Americans but not for ethnic British people and whites in general?
HnH is yet another unaccountable anti-white group that blacklists books and supervises our speech. It has no place in our society. pic.twitter.com/zzpCYlcq0C
I lived in Cornwall for two years or so (and another two on the Devon side of the Tamar), having from 2002 to 2004 a lease of one of the largest country houses in North Cornwall (seen below in a 1940s photograph):
[above: same house in a more recent photograph]
The immediately above photograph shows me standing by the ballroom carriage entrance. Incidentally, I am not giving a “Hitler” or “Roman” salute, but merely trying to pose “casually” for the picture, as if resting my hand on the stonework. I am not (it goes without saying) a natural photographic subject…
Cornwall offers few people well-paid work; small businesses such as the Cornish Cheese Company (I am not a shareholder, by the way!) need encouragement to succeed or even survive. The geographical location of Cornwall, its relative isolation, increases shipping costs, and so on.
More tweets
Dismayed to read the reports from Bristol. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer is becoming an increasingly inept, anti-democratic, and frankly corrupt political machine.
I have no idea what shenanigans are going on in the Bristol Labour Party, but what might have been expected from Keir Starmer? It amuses me to see the parallels between him and that little pissant, “Conservative” Party Cabinet minister, Robert Jenrick: both completely in the pocket of the Jewish lobby, both married to Jewish wives (both of whom are property lawyers), both having children all being brought up as Jewish (eg celebrating the Jewish supremacist religious holidays etc).
Surprising court judgment
Kids Company judgment is out!! RUPERT BUTLER (acting through Leverets) and Natasha Jackson (instructed by Leverets) successfully defend Camila Batmanghelidjh in the 10-week directors disqualification trial before Falk J.
It is not for me to say whether or not that peculiar woman, Camila Batmanghelidjh, was in some measure a fraud, or whether what she did was in any measure fraudulent. All that can be said was that very large amounts of State funding were spent and probably wasted on a “motley crew” of inner city London ferals. She was in charge (supposedly).
All one can say for sure is that the government of the part-Jew, David Cameron-Levita, was a complete mess.
@johnrentoul. Sweden messed up its care homes (especially in Stockholm) , much as we did. The other Nordic countries did not. The interesting thing about Sweden and the UK is that their outcomes have been so *similar* , despite diverging approaches. https://t.co/Ghb28ZQTnW
3,250 have now commented on the Great Lockdown Debate between me and @dpjhodges and more than 100,000 have watched it. See the comments, watch it and make your own contribution here https://t.co/QKniy0dZK7
The satirical singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, is still under attack from the Jew-Zionist element. The latest news is that she will be on trial at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday, 26 October 2020. Her application to dismiss the charge(s) on strict legal grounds will then be heard, presumably as a preliminary matter.
There is a strict limit on what I, even as uninvolved observer, can say at this time, the matter being quite shortly before the court, but I shall keep readers of this blog informed as to any developments of which I become aware.
I happened to have to visit the small local hospital (not as patient) yesterday. As on another recent visit, the place was almost deserted. Patients all have to book appointments, that hospital has no A&E department, and no visitors are allowed (with the exception of a few like me). I was briefly seated in a waiting area with two muzzled ladies, one very old, the other maybe 70.
The very old lady started to talk about how terrible the “virus” situation was, and how it was “worse than the War“, that old chestnut. Well, she was about 80-90, so would have been either a baby or a small child, at most about 10-15, during that huge and unnecessary conflict. Anyway, she then droned on until I tentatively suggested that there are 8 thousand million people on the Earth, and 1 million have (supposedly) died from “the virus”. The old lady seemed bemused until I elucidated: one “virus” death out of every 8,000 people. Even then, I am not sure that she quite understood how few people have died worldwide from the virus, though she nodded, but the other lady then interjected, “I think that there is a lot of hysteria about all this“… Then I was summoned by a nurse, so the conversation ended there.
Anecdotal, and statistically meaningless. No argument about that. Still, when you see various people masked and quiet, you might think that all accept the System’s narrative. In reality, there may be many dissidents hiding behind those facemasks.
As for the “advisers” such as Professors Whitty, Ferguson etc, Stalin would already have had them shot. Here in the UK, we do not usually take such sanguinary measures, but those turbulent scientists should at the least be put back in their box.
So far, in 7-8 months, a total of 127 people under 40 have died from or with “the virus” in the UK. Out of 70 million people…The average age of death from/with “the virus” is 82.
I liked this comment from a Daily Mail reader: “Politicians are doing amateur science, and scientists are doing amateur politics.”
The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right. Lockdowns are killing countries all over the world. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. Open up your states, Democrat governors. Open up New York. A long battle, but they finally did the right thing!
Breaking! After judgement against #GoldenDawn, Slovakia's nationalist leader Marion #Kotleba has just been sentenced to 4 years and 4 months in prison.
As with the lawfare, UKIP safety valve & infiltration destruction of the BNP, their real crime was providing an alternative.
Whatever the true statistics might be, the point is that the “virus” situation has been folded in to the mix required by the international conspiracy, other elements being the whole “Greta Nut” climate panic, the LGBT-etc farrago, and the “Black Lives Matter” campaign. The conspiracy wants to get this rolling by 2022 and all stops are being pulled out to make it happen, from “holocaust” “memorials” (propaganda centres) constructed to dissidents arrested and/or repressed.
What is more extreme? -Importing millions of immigrants, many of them hostile without asking the native population. -Being opposed to that.
One might add that that is connected with the danger of relying on “social media” or any part of the Internet for a political foundation. As even the “controlled opposition” “alt-Right” wastes of space have found, the System can take away your prominence, even visibility, and Internet income very very quickly, leaving you an “unperson” of the digital age. Inter alia, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, “Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) etc.
The most well-known and arguably most useless of these “paper tigers”, “Prison Planet” Watson, has had most of his outlets restored to him, so long as he toes the line…He has never defended my free speech rights, nor those of Alison Chabloz (persecuted and prosecuted) and Jez Turner (imprisoned). Oh, and Watson is always saying how much he loves the Jews…
(((Controlled))) opposition.
Only yesterday came the news that Facebook (i.e. the Jew Zuckerberg) will ban “holocaust” “denial” with immediate effect. Even that does not satisfy the Jewish lobby, who now want any and all criticism of Jews or their behaviour to be banned, under cover of the spurious “International Definition of Antisemitism” which in fact has been adopted by only about 20 out of about 200 states worldwide.
The only thing that matters is to command boots on the ground.
Musical interlude
Late tweets seen
Keep seeing line about big public appetite for tougher lockdown. YouGov today showed on current lockdown:
40% say measures don't go far enough 19% say they’re about right 15% say they go to far
That’s 40% want to go further. But 34% don’t. Before economic impact is felt.
It’s quite incredible that we’ve now reached the stage where the response from those who demand we “follow the science”, to the question “we need evidence a circuit breaker will work”, is “no you don’t”.
This is the issue. When you ask for evidence of the effectiveness of proposed lockdown measures, people simply point to rising infection rates. Providing evidence of a problem is not the same as providing evidence your proposed solution will solve that problem.
Seems like Jew-Zionist troll and snoop “@badscooter” (aka “OG ABU POCH”) has finally gone up the chimney (though as yet only the Twitter chimney, sadly), following in the footsteps of his frequent (((interlocutor))) “@nathanjoseph198”, who went up the chimney a week ago. Both expelled from Twitter now, for casting dark (though empty) threats around. “What goes around comes around”…
This is unquestionably the case. HMG figures now suffering from ‘Bikini effect’ once common in Kremlin stats. What they conceal is as important as what they reveal. https://t.co/9cc73avPS7
What do you think? Does it look like Liverpool really needs its hospitality sector to be shuttered again & people forbidden from mixing with other households?
Or does it look like we have the nastiest, most deceitful Government in our history? pic.twitter.com/C2eNV4dkmn
This Sunetra Gupta interview in ‘The Times’ should be read by everyone interested in serious thought, politics, science and our current crisis:https://t.co/iPovQ1fntw
So councils are to get bonuses for agreeing to collaborate with the #covidcrimimal Johnson regime in the destruction of businesses and liberty. https://t.co/EbKvVPkQxO
I’m not going to look up all these people, because well they’re scum and I’ve already wasted enough time with you idiots(putting it nicely) but If you’re expecting sympathy for people who deny the greatest tragedy in human history based off conspiracies, don’t hold your breath.
Ecce the usual type of idiot useful to the Jew-Zionist lobby! That’s assuming that “John Sullivan” is not a Jew using a non-Jewish surname, of course.
“John Sullivan” is “not going to look up all these people” (of whom he has obviously never heard), because those people are (he assumes) “scum“! Idiot.
“John Sullivan” is, according to his Twitter profile, in California, but his method of expression sounds like someone with a British background.
At any rate, he is typical of the brainwashed who hate the fake history being questioned.
I predicted quite a while ago (about 7 or 8 months ago) that any serious Parliamentary opposition to this government of clowns would eventually come —and have to come, in a Parliament where the Government sits on a majority of 80 mostly inexperienced MPs— not from enfeebled and compliant Labour under Jewish lobby puppet Keir Starmer, but from within the Conservative Party itself.
Beria was not alone in the Politburo. Other members had doubts about various core Soviet policies: Collectivization, mass repressions etc. After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev, himself one of the harshest Stalinist repressors in the 1930s and 1940s, arranged (with the rest of the surviving Politburo) to release most of the prisoners of the GULAG labour camp system [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag], and made his famous”Secret Speech” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences] in 1956, after which he appeared internationally as the figurehead of the post-Stalin wave of “the Thaw”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev_Thaw.
Where was the most significant opposition to Ceaucescu in Romania? In the highest councils of the State itself. Who ordered the execution of Ceausescu and his ghastly wife? Revolutionaries? No, not as such. Palace revolutionaries carrying the rank of general or minister.
Where is any opposition in North Korea? Among peasants and industrial workers? No, they are far too downtrodden, poor and frightened even to think of rebelling. The opposition, as far as it exists at all outside people’s own heads, exists in the higher ranks of the military machine and State officials. Which is why Kim Jong Un has had some (including his own relatives) shot, cut to pieces, fed to dogs etc. He knows where the opposition to him lies.
Reverting to the UK, now staggering under the weight of the governmental mistakes of 2020, we see the same. There is no real opposition from the Labour Party. Those feeble “me too”, bent-knee bad jokes have swallowed the whole “Coronavirus will kill everyone” thing whole. All they do is support the Government or say “do it more!” Nothing can be expected from Labour. In any case, Labour has no power even in potential, having only 202 MPs out of 650.
So we see that opposition to the absurd dictatorship of the clowns now starts to grow from within the Conservative Party itself, from previously-supportive newspapers etc. It may be that the courts will now turn to the illegality of several of the measures that have been taken.
*One* member of the liberal elite finally wakes up. 'Parliament surrendered role over Covid emergency laws, says Lady Hale' – and, do you know, she is dead right. 🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️https://t.co/AQKVf4mOAk
Tory backbench leader Sir Graham Brady says on BBC R4 the government is ruling by decree, and that the national mood is changing. I believe he is right about both. *You* now have a role in amplifying and reinforcing that change, and ending rule by decree.
Painful listening to @BBCR4Today's Martha Kearney repeatedly trying to interrupt Sir Graham Brady as he voices reasoned opposition to rule by decree. Yet the absurd Hancock, as he stomps abut wrecking jobs, lives and freedom, is treated with sycophantic deference by the BBC.
Yes, I too noticed that Martha Kearney, that ridiculous BBC drone, was trying, repeatedly, to close down Sir Graham Brady, and to weaken what Brady was saying about this dictatorship of idiots pretending to be a government.
Daily Mail main main editorial accuses PM of 'administering the shackles of authoritarianism too enthusiastically', asks 'Isn't it time Parliament had a say? Asks 'What will draconian curbs actually achieve?' Things are shifting.
I effectively never use the railways now, but was talking to a lady who travelled from Hampshire to London then (after taxi transfer) to the “****hole of England” (the Kent estuary) recently. She said that the First Class from Hampshire to Waterloo was empty, and the Kent suburban service almost empty.
How mad is the Government, to keep pumping money into this black hole? It continues to depress the economy by its actions, makes the public scared of their own shadows (or of those nearby), then is surprised that the working masses do not want to commute or attend offices!
Just remember that, out of 8,000,000,000 people in the world, 1,000,000, i.e. 1 in every 8,000, have died from (or, more accurately, with) Coronavirus. That puts this whole “panicdemic” in proportion.
Yes, but 60+ years divided (albeit unequally) among 7 defendants means about 9 years each, so they will be out, averaged, in about 4.5 years…Idle thoughts? Covert elimination…
Eventually, a real government will have to thoroughly clean our Augean Stables.
No, Pfeffel is saving his energy for his Tuesday evening Presidential broadcast, when he will tell us to tell us we must all hide under our beds, shave our heads, and wear flippers, gauntlets and gasmasks, to save our grannies. It really is true there is no P*** left to take. https://t.co/TJJuj0E3zC
Why does this chart start on August 1, when a longer base would clearly show that these recent figures are nowhere near those of March and April? Well, why do you think? https://t.co/0L9euSh4Fb
Why does this chart have a vertical axis that stops at 200? Because if it went UP to 3,000 and BACK to March you might spot what was actually going on. https://t.co/CUhJRtNXzThttps://t.co/YRnjnN2VpW
If this is not a prediction, and they say it si not, then why was it made? Who will take responsibility foir it if it turns out not be accurate? https://t.co/uM9tC0Ay8D
They say this is not a prediction. So why are they pubishing it at all? It's a blatant attempt to panic us, as we were panicked in March, so that MPs will vote to renew the shameful Coronavirus Act. https://t.co/uM9tC0Ay8D
1/2 Remember, remember, the 30th September is the day they plan to renew the repressive Coronavirus Act. This is the actual reason for all this sudden exaggeration of danger.
Post-socialist intimidation and emergent chaos in the USA
Does anyone know how this ended? The seated woman shows considerable courage in the face of the mob screeching 'put your fist up!', but the episode is full of menace and foreboding. This is regime change. https://t.co/lJAkfhQFHM
Reminiscent of the Red Guards during the so-called “Cultural Revolution” in 1960s China. Dissidents or random victims being targeted, bullied, assaulted, even killed.
The only silver lining is that those cruel and fanatical bullies probably starved later! “Enjoy your meal!“
(slightly off-topic, I have blogged before at the oddness of the apparent inconsistency: we are told that, on the national or ethnic basis, the Chinese have the highest IQ in the world, even higher than white Northern Europeans, and yet I myself have to say that almost all the Chinese I have encountered in my life have been dimwits. Anecdotal evidence, and so proving nothing very much? I wonder).
Is that a proper use of police in a free law-governed country where the government supposedly maintains police for the protection of citizens from crime? Looks more like a state militia to me. https://t.co/Y4XeRxL1bB
Australians are like the British from which most of them still have descent: most of them are more interested in whether their “national” teams (even if non-white) win football, rugby, cricket (etc) matches or athletic medals on the other side of the world than what is happening in their own societies. Politically blind, so easily enslaved.
Well, you obviously are @rudyfarrleander. Perhaps you don't actually think it's rubbish, or why does it make you dso cross? Muzzle zealots can't *stand* criticism. It voices their own secret doubts. https://t.co/vJBNkcnk1B
This outburst of deluded optimism by @oflynnsocial seems to be based on a slight uptick in the tiny poll ratings of the Brexit Party. It is by grasping at such straws that Britain's supposed 'right-wing' ensure their continued impotence. The Tories are now *worse* than useless. https://t.co/n3UxlZLqOW
Patrick O’Flynn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Flynn] was one of the more intelligent of the “Prominenten” in UKIP. In the end, though, just a scribbler making his way. Politically irrelevant. In fact, politically rather silly.
An enemy
Hope everyone is enjoying their Last Night of the Proms culture war. Utterly fucking irrelevant brain-sapping dogshit, pursued by people who can't even aspire to mediocrity.
“People who can’t even aspire to mediocrity“? Is this a case of projection?
I seem to recall that Dunt tweeted a few times about me when I had a Twitter account. He seems to be very interested in Jewish matters, “antisemitism” etc… I recall that he was supportive of the Extinction Rebellion nonsense in London (at least, that is how his tweets appeared to me). My view: he is an outright enemy of the British people, as can be seen plainly in the tweet above.
I suppose that one might just ignore the views and even the existence of someone of that type, but this person is Editor of Politics.co.uk (supposedly “impartial” political website), is sometimes seen on TV, and has at least some peripheral influence, if only because of that. A symptom of the socio-political degeneracy afflicting the UK (though not the UK alone).
Another enemy
As much as you can attribute millions of death specifically to communist regimes, they pale in comparison to those who've died under unrestricted capitalism.
An “antifa” cheerleader now based in Stuttgart, who claims, risibly, to “work three jobs” but in fact travels around Germany enjoying himself and tweeting when not sitting in cafes. Raised nearly £12,000 via GoFundMe with his collaborator “@antifashwitch” of Derbyshire, ostensibly in order to sue Tommy Robinson.
A poorly-drafted “letter before action” was sent to “Stephen Yaxley-Lennon” (Robinson’s real or original name) in November 2019 by a one-man Pakistani law firm in the North of England, but Robinson never was sued (I doubted from the first that he would be: see my blog posts), and it is not known what happened to the monies donated by nearly 700 mugs: https://www.gofundme.com/f/sue-tommy-robinson
Other tweets seen today
Why does @ChtyCommission allow Zionist groups to ‘police’ UK citizens using tactics synonymous with The Cheka police. How long before ‘volunteers’ claim leather coats on expenses? Make no mistake #Chekism is alive and well just watch Joe Glasman’s video. https://t.co/zZvuGe5HWg
We are always told it’s ‘anti-Semitic’ to say that Zionists control our media …so why are all reports about Israel’s latest war crimes against Palestinians gagged? @BBCBreaking@SkyNews@Channel4News@itvnews@LBC
Have I missed @lisanandy calling for Israel to halt the attacks on Gaza? Perhaps I’ve been in a coma for ten days and missed it. Is she still the Shadow Forrign Secretary or did I imagine it?
— Kevin Pascoe #PoliticsOfFairness #Ex-Labour (@KevinPascoe) August 25, 2020
That’s Lisa Nandy, part-Indian Westminster “Labour” MP and (needless to add?) a member of Labour Friends of Israel…
A dubious account about which verifiable information is hard to come by. Their "following" list is a horror show of all the most infamous pro-Israel/anti-Corbyn accounts on twitter. Wouldn't be surprised if it were a hasbara account with no actual Muslim connections. pic.twitter.com/8NWdkzUn2a
Don’t imagine that Europe is different, that the UK is different. If there were, scaling it up, tens of millions of Jews in or near the UK, we, the British people, would be the ones directly suffering in an open-air concentration camp and being rocketed for the slightest resistance.
More tweets
BBC "comedy" writer @Sara_Rose_G is a libellous fool.
Now I know why Dead Ringers, The Now Show & HIGNFY are shadows of their formerly funny selves. Lying about people to smear them is not satire. It is evil.
Not sure about that “shadows of their former selves“: admittedly, I have never seen Dead Ringers or The Now Show, and have only seen Have I Got News For You a couple of times, but that was years, even decades ago, and I thought it pathetic and contrived then. Is it even less interesting now? Perhaps it is. The least funny or witty? Paul Merton. Yet they all get paid millions. Just a completely rotten system overall.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to tweet for Palestine tonight. I'll leave you with this x pic.twitter.com/wFZl9OfwB1
Coronavirus The latest “virus” nonsense: a group of about 30 teenagers went to a Greek island from Plymouth. On returning, they were tested and nearly half had been infected. A few had sore throats, the others no symptoms at all. None need or needed hospital treatment. This “outbreak” was reported as major news by the BBC! “Soviet radio”…In fact I think that Radio Moscow in its most propagandistic phase might have been no worse than the BBC now is.
More tweets
But don't blame them; blame those who opened the gates and those who despise and tax you to fund such policies. pic.twitter.com/dl88LEGBi9
The caption left out the last few words, “and never will contribute anything to this country.” They and their descendants will be, at best, a millstone round the necks of the British people; at worst (quite likely) also enemies of the British people.
The police kneel to #BLM Marxists but draw batons for British veterans. Overpaid, over-educated and overdue their come-uppance. pic.twitter.com/uBArYTDYLR
Not sure where Griffin gets “over-educated” from! The few police with whom I have had any contact in the last decade have been laughably under-educated in any real sense, though it may be that Griffin refers to the paper “degrees” that everyone and his dog now has. After all, to take but one example, the half-caste “Conservative” Party MP, James Cleverly (now a Minister of State, no less!) has a “degree” in “Hospitality Management” from some degree mill or other.
What happens when a part-Jew public entertainer poses as Prime Minister? Well, now we know:
“One official said ministers were right to act at speed, despite allegations that the gradual rise in cases could have led to smoother communications. “Given how quickly the virus can transmit, it doesn’t do to wait.”
Apart from the mixed messaging and brainless policies (the facemask nonsense, the shutting down of the economy, the cheap gimmicks— “£10 off a Wetherspoon lunch!”, “free bicycle repairs!” etc) around “the virus”, we now have a House of Lords farce as well!
It would take a brave novelist who had this as the plot of his political thriller: a part-Jew “British” maverick MP, son of a kind of careerist con-man, is born in the USA and brought up in both USA and Belgium, but nonetheless attends both Eton and Oxford and thus is able to take on the mantle of “the English gentleman”, though in exaggerated or cartoon form.
That charlatan, over the years, becomes both Mayor of London and MP. He does his best to create a pseudo-Churchillian persona, even to the extent of hamming up a hunched posture and a gruff voice on occasion.
Many are fooled by the charlatan MP. Those who are not fooled by his am-dram Churchill impressions are amused by his after-dinner speaking ability or his schoolboy plans and ideas, some of which he puts into practice as Mayor of London: a cable-car over the Thames (a failure); bendy buses that are unpopular (abandoned); water cannon that are bought but never used (abandoned, then sold for scrap); new “Routemaster”-style buses that however have no rear platforms, no openable windows, no ventilation and no air-con (all style and no substance, like the Mayor?); a bridge from Scotland to Ireland (not built so far); an artificial island in the Thames with a new huge airport on it (not built so far); another “garden” bridge over the Thames (abandoned) and so on.
The MP in that non-existent novel becomes Leader of the Conservative Party when most Conservative MPs back him, thinking that he will be an electoral asset, and when the only people able to vote, 140,000 Conservative Party members, mostly over retirement age (in a total UK population of nearly 70 million), support him.
As Prime Minister, the main character imposes a shutdown of the economy, ruins it and society for decades to come, and possibly indefinitely. He also forces the population to wear facemasks or muzzles on trains, planes, buses and in all shops, but not in pubs.
Finally, the dystopian novel ends (?) when the “Prime Minister” charlatan appoints all sorts of odd people to the House of Lords, including his own brother and the son of a Russian…former…KGB officer!
The charlatan “Prime Minister” even elevates, as a “baroness” in the House of Lords, a woman who applauded the IRA bombing at Warrington in 1993, which killed two young children. No, now that surely would be too implausible to put into a novel…
No, that proposed plot for a novel is just too far-fetched…
Isn’t it?…
Tweets seen
Yesterday I tried to book a room at the 4 Star Bromsgrove Hotel & Spa, but it was closed to the public.
Turns out it’s accommodating 147 illegal migrants and we’re all paying for it. pic.twitter.com/9A2fubjYTx
German prosecutors said they arrested a former police officer and his wife who they suspect of having sent threatening emails to politicians and other public figures across Germany, signing them off with a neo-Nazi reference. https://t.co/1wqEVPAeUs
Sadly, simply sending the enemies of white Northern European culture and civilization emails or tweets (“threatening” or otherwise) will change nothing.
This report has been up more than an hour, but doesn't have a single comment. Tells me the moderators/censors are busy deletng a wave of fuck offs…https://t.co/KCkcGcuggS
That Whitty person strikes me as one of the worst enemies of the British people at the present time. He may be merely incompetent, but I begin to think that he is or may be actively malicious.
On paper, Whitty is extremely well-qualified in both medicine and economics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Whitty) and yet seems unable or unwilling to see the huge damage that the “lockdown” (shutdown) and the facemask nonsense is doing to this country’s economy and society. Or is he an “insider” in some wider global conspiracy? I note that he was or is tied up with Bill Gates and/or his Bill Gates Foundation (refer to Whitty’s Wikipedia entry).
In fact, the international conspiracy, in its various aspects, is becoming blatant, and yet the British “rabbits” are all walking about as ordered, in facemask muzzles. If ordered or socially-pressured, they would, many of them, still be out clapping like idiots at their own impoverishment and at the destruction of the future of their children and grandchildren.
See this article, which confirms that there is no, available, evidence that masks work. It seems that, mask wearing surgeons, do so, because of tradition. https://t.co/iVkcH6UkGT
Interesting. I knew that surgical masks are not exactly the same as most of those now imposed upon the shoppers of Britain, just as SAS urban-operational clothing is not ordinary black clothing but is made specifically for its likely use in dangerous situations; very tough and also flame-retardant. I certainly had no idea that surgical masks are not actually necessary at all.
I think that's very sad. But I also don't think most of the country should end up unemployed because of it. It's not just shops and pubs that close and lose staff, there's a knock-on effect. I work in insurance, redundancies/pay cuts abound. We've already shut a regional office.
Well, exactly @janinethechef The hatred of freedom, of a free press, of free debate and even of criticism of authority is spreading in our once-free country. Amusing to compare this with the USSR when I lived there in early 1990s. Everyone longed for the freedoms we now despise. https://t.co/caO3Jr35h2
To think I used to want to be in the House of Lords. The list of new peers today (with a few honourable exceptions) must be the worst since the days of Harold Wilson.
Harold Wilson, as PM, certainly appointed or elevated a pack of treasonous Jews as members of the House of Lords; some corrupt types as well. I doubt though, whether he would ever have made “peers” out of the son of a [former] KGB officer, out of pro-IRA women etc. What do the idiots who troop out and vote “Conservative” think of that? Does the news make them think, for once? Just once? Probably not.
You often read of, say, the days of Stalin, and about how the most extraordinary and Kafka-esque social conditions were induced by various methods of State and social pressure. “Couldn’t ever happen here!“, English people used to say. Well, they were wrong; and it will get worse.
True, no-one has been shot yet, but people are already being imprisoned or otherwise penalized for making a public speech (Jez Turner), singing songs mocking “holocaust” fakes and hoaxers (Alison Chabloz), or for putting up stickers in Cardiff (name unknown to me, but whoever he was, he got two and a half years! For putting a few stickers on lamp-posts!).
The above tweet shows other aspects of the same madness. The knee-bending plods would be yet another aspect of that same or an allied madness.
Indeed @julianknoczak, but I think the muzzle zealots are mainly politicians and their media handmaidens and valets, who know little of the issue and (like all people with weak cases) get angry when challenged. https://t.co/VTBlokGJqJ
It is now all too evident that civil unrest on a mass scale is the only thing that will make the Johnson regime stop destroying our society, economy & health at the behest of the #WHO and the other elite criminals exploiting this fake pandemic#Resistancehttps://t.co/JRHvesUc3X
The Daily Telegraph report here below, about the state of the prisons, is merely one of many indications that the UK is descending into chaos. Slowly, yes, but certainly.
There are many other such signs of the times. One is the almost terminally useless state of the police. Yes, if there is a need for a specialized and highly-skilled team to keep surveillance on and perhaps take out a dangerous terrorist, the capability is there. If there is a complex murder case, the capability is there. However, lower down the line, the capability is most certainly not there.
I am not even talking about everyday issues such as anti-social behaviour, small thefts and burglaries (and some forces have stopped even investigating most such crimes), but significant and high-value thefts actually still ongoing when the police are notified! Look at this:
“A YOUNG team of up-and-coming motocross racers are “utterly devastated” after thieves stole £55,000 of bikes and equipment less than two weeks before the start of their season. CCTV captured the break-in on Sunday evening as four masked intruders forced their way through a roof before using crowbars to get into an industrial unit used as storage by Team Green Kawasaki at Milford Trading Estate.”
“Alerted by the alarms, a friend of Jeff arrived just as the raiders were driving off. Police were called but, according to Jeff, did not attend and instead asked him to gather his own evidence and submit any useful CCTV footage.”
“Jeff said: “I’m pretty upset that the police haven’t even been able to send anyone out to have a look. I understand that resources are limited but this isn’t just a pushbike being stolen from outside a shop – it was a properly organised raid. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
Yet the police seem to have resources aplenty when it comes to those, especially Jews, “offended” (more precisely, looking for opportunities to be “offended”!) by social media posts etc. Look at what Alison Chabloz is going through! Disgraceful.
Sometimes societies collapse overnight (one example would be the German Reich in 1945, beaten down by comprehensive and unstoppable military force), but more often the collapse is slow. How slow? How long is a piece of string? Rome’s “decline and fall” took hundreds of years; people are still debating it. The Soviet Union? Again, a matter of debate, but it could be said that the decline dated from the death of Stalin (1953), or Khrushchev’s Secret Speech (1956), to either 1989 or to the formal end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
It seems that the fake “charity” known as “Campaign Against Antisemitism” has lost one of its “co-workers”, who has just been imprisoned for threatening to have Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP, beaten up.
“Joshua Spencer, 25, described Mrs Cooper as a ‘wh***’ before saying, ‘I’m already organising to hurt her, it’s amazing what crack heads will do for £100’.” [Daily Mail]
Ha ha! He must be a total nut! Yvette Cooper is many things, mostly negative, but “a whore” is certainly not one of them (as far as I know)!
“The court heard Spencer made the threat on April 11 while debating with a friend he had previously met on a dating site. His message to Paul Ratcliffe read: ‘She [Mrs Cooper] will pay. I’m already organising to hurt her, it’s amazing what crack heads will do for £100’.” [Daily Mail]
So he met a male friend on a dating site. Very “Conservative Party 2020″…
Seems that Joshua Spencer is unemployed (read “unemployable”) and despite that is the vice-Chair of the Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford Conservative Association! The phrase “scraping the bottom of the barrel” comes to mind.
Like so many pro-Israel (and also “antifa”) fanatics, it appears that the accused has mental health “issues”, and is labelled “bipolar” (etc), according to the rather thick Conservative MP, Andrea Jenkyns (who gave him a character reference for court).
The logo on Spencer’s Facebook profile is that of the “Campaign Against Antisemitism”…
It will be remembered that one of the “CAA” fanatics, the Jew Joe Glasman (brother of “lord” Maurice Glasman of “Blue Labour”), took a couple too many wine gums and shot off his mouth on Twitter recently, talking about his “Maccabees” (fanatic Jew fighters), and how the “CAA” used or uses “spies and intel” (among other “dark arts”) in order to trash Corbyn and the Labour Party. Trouble is, Glasman forgot that the “CAA” pretends to be a charity, which precludes being what the CAA really is, i.e. a pro-Israel pressure group and a malicious snooping political lobby that uses “lawfare” (abuse of the legal system) to (try to) silence critics of the Jews and Israel. That even includes anti-Zionist Jews, including the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, Gerard Menuhin, and the journalist Mira Bar-Hillel.
My rambling overlong outburst of gratitude to everyone who stood up against the antisemitism of Corbyn’s Labour Party. Happy Chrismukah! https://t.co/o6LIkSKK7I
Postscriptum: I was amused to hear on LBC radio (not that I bother with that nonsense station, but someone sent me a clip) that the current Director of Public Prosecutions [DPP] refuses to meet with the “CAA” gangsters. Maybe the CPS and police are belatedly waking up to the kind of criminals the “CAA” pack are. It is a pity that LBC radio is so (((occupied)) by “them”, though. I know which bits of LBC are contaminated.
EU and Brexit
On whether Britons think the UK will ever re-join the EU:
I was just watching one of the seemingly endless re-runs of the early 1970s historical documentary series, The World at War, and in particular the episode named Barbarossa (from Fall Barbarossa or Operation Barbarossa, named after Friedrich I, the Holy Roman Emperor of the 12th Century who led the Third Crusade against the infidels).
I of course remember watching the TV series when it first was broadcast, in 1973. Many will say that it is in many parts contaminated by what amounts to Jew-Zionist propaganda, and I do not dispute that. Others point out, in a connected critique, that every alleged wrong done by the German Reich and its forces is given great prominence, whereas the cruelties and barbarities of the Soviet regime are barely mentioned (I suppose that it could be argued that the most famous chronicles of those terrible times were not published in English until after The World at War was made: GULAG Archipelago, for one). The criticisms are valid, but one cannot write off The World At War because of those flaws.
The strength of The World at War was that many of the leading personalities on all sides, such as German, English and other general officers, admirals etc, some members of Hitler’s circle (eg Speer), and a host of lesser-ranked people, were all still alive in 1973, giving their filmed testimony weight and immediacy.
Anyway, this article is not meant to focus on The World at War alone, but to examine a couple of “what if?” situations, both in the war years of 1939-45 (for Russians and Americans, 1941-45) and at other times.
The drive to Moscow in 1941
When I was first in Moscow, in 1993, my assigned driver, Pasha (an insolent loutish youth, apropos of nothing) pointed out, as we drove into the city from Sheremetyevo airport, the tank trap memorial, 23 kilometres from the Kremlin on the Leningrad Highway (Leningradskoye Shosse). The memorial marks the supposed furthest point of advance of the German forces in 1941. We drove near to the Kremlin only about 15-20 minutes later.
In 1941, the town of Khimki (now effectively a suburb of Moscow) had only just (1939) been administratively created, and was little developed. Now, hundreds of thousands live close by. Even since I drove through in 1993 there has been further development. Indeed, in the photograph below, taken in a recent year, there can be seen an IKEA warehouse. What would Stalin have had to say about that?!
The proximity to central Moscow amazed me. Even if not true (as some say) that some German advance-reconnaissance motorcyclists advanced yet further, to a point where they could see the golden domes of the Kremlin churches, it is incredible to see how close the forces of the Reich came to capturing Moscow.
In 1941, flush with the victories in the West in 1940, Hitler intended to advance in Russia against 3 main objectives: Leningrad, Moscow, and also the Ukraine generally, with its huge natural resources of grain crops etc and (in the Don Basin or Donbass), coal.
Hitler at first prioritized Leningrad, followed by the Donbass, and only then Moscow. His generals disagreed, arguing that only a decisive blow against Moscow could achieve victory. There were cogent arguments for all three main objectives:
Leningrad: reasons based around morale (the city of the two 1917 Revolutions and in particular the second, Bolshevik, one; the city bearing the name of Lenin); also, the city without which the all-weather port of Murmansk could probably not be held. If Murmansk fell, there could be no Allied resupply of the Soviet Union except via the Soviet Far East. At that stage of the war, that alone might sink the Soviet regime;
Ukraine: grain supplies, coal, even oil (should German forces be able to advance beyond Ukraine; also, protection for the Romanian oilfields supplying Germany);
Moscow: in the highly-centralized Stalinist system of the Soviet Union, everything came from the centre. Indeed, in the earliest hours of Barbarossa, Soviet officers were heard in German intercepts begging Moscow for orders: “we are under attack; what shall we do?”…It might be that, were Moscow to fall, the Soviet Union would fall. Hitler himself had said that “all we need do is kick open the front door and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”
I have to say that (of course with the knowledge of the decades since 1941) I would favour the Moscow option. Had Moscow fallen, the bubble of the regime would have burst. In a small way, the open panic of the NKVD and CPSU when they thought the Germans would soon be in Moscow, and which led to open rebelliousness on the part of ordinary Moscow inhabitants, leads me to think that a German capture of the city would have led to a rapid fall of the Soviet regime in all of European Russia and perhaps beyond.
In any case, without Moscow under Soviet control, Leningrad must surely have fallen too before very long.
Hitler thought that it was more important to defeat the Soviet armies in the field. European thinking, thinking from the constricted lands of Central and Western Europe. In the Russian space, those otherwise valid ideas become less valid. New armies can be (and were) raised from the vast areas beyond the Volga, beyond the Urals.
As for going for three objectives at once, it might, under other stars, have worked, but the cautious Russian proverb says “chase two hares and you will not catch one”…
Still, what if? What if Moscow had fallen in 1941? Without a two-front war, Germany could not have been defeated in the West. There could not have been the Normandy Landings of 1944, certainly not successfully. European Russia would have been under German control, and the wider expanses of the Soviet Union would probably have been invaded and taken by a Russian but anti-Soviet army such as the Vlasov Army, which might have been expanded to a formidable force. Also, the forces under Rommel in North Africa would have been able to have been hugely reinforced, with the heady strategic possibility that Rommel might have been able not only to take Alexandria, Cairo and the Suez Canal, but Jerusalem, Damascus and then drive up through the foothills of the Caucasus towards Baku and its oilfields, linking up with the forces of Army Group South driving South-East from Ukraine; German forces did occupy part of the Caucasus and even part of Kalmykia in 1942 (occupying Elista briefly).
Mainland Europe would, in that overall scenario, have avoided most of the destruction of 1941-1945. In time, there would no doubt have been peace made between the German Reich and the British Empire. The calamitous decolonization in Africa etc would have been avoided, at least until such time as it would not have had such terrible effects on human and animal inhabitants. There would be either no State of Israel, or one which would not be the hub of a worldwide Jew-Zionist web. The forces of Stalinism would never have invaded Eastern and Central Europe. There would have been no Korean War, no Vietnam War, no Cuban Missile Crisis, and Castro himself would have been seen as just another Latin American tinpot dictator (which is all he was anyway, once Soviet backup was removed) and unable to pose as a world “statesman” (BBC and Labour Party idiots please note).
What if? If only…
And now for something completely different…
What if…Beeching had never happened? Alternatively, what if rail lines had been closed but maintenance of track continued?
I wonder how many British people of the post-1960s age, let alone the (often vacant-seeming) “millennials”, have even heard of Dr. Beeching, his reports and his “Beeching Axe”? [see Notes, below]. In outline, then:
“The first report identified 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of railway line for closure, 55% of stations and 30% of route miles, with an objective of stemming the large losses being incurred during a period of increasing competition from road transport and reducing the rail subsidies necessary to keep the network running; the second identified a small number of major routes for significant investment. The 1963 report also recommended some less well-publicised changes, including a switch to containerisation for rail freight“. [Wikipedia]
Note those figures: 2,363 rail stations to be closed! Not to mention 5,000 miles of track.
“Protests resulted in the saving of some stations and lines, but the majority were closed as planned, and Beeching’s name remains associated with the mass closure of railways and the loss of many local services in the period that followed. A few of these routes have since reopened, some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes; others now are lost to construction, have reverted to farmland, or remain derelict.” [Wikipedia]
“Beeching’s reports made no recommendations about the handling of land after closures. British Rail operated a policy of disposing of land that was surplus to requirements. Many bridges, cuttings and embankments have been removed and the land sold for development. Closed station buildings on remaining lines have often been demolished or sold for housing or other purposes. Increasing pressure on land use meant that protection of closed trackbeds, as in other countries (such as the US Rail Bank scheme, which holds former railway land for possible future use) was not seen to be practical. Many redundant structures from closed lines remain, such as bridges over other lines and drainage culverts. They often require maintenance as part of the rail infrastructure while providing no benefit. Critics of Beeching argue that the lack of recommendations on the handling of closed railway property demonstrates that the report was short-sighted. On the other hand, retaining a railway on these routes, which would obviously have increased maintenance costs, might not have earned enough to justify that greater cost. As demand for rail has grown since the 1990s, the failure to preserve the routes of closed lines (such as the one between Bedford and Cambridge, which was closed despite Beeching recommending its retention) has been criticized.” [Wikipedia]
The above long extracts from Wikipedia lay out the facts quite well. What is missing is perspective. The postwar period in the UK, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, was one of almost wholesale destruction of old buildings, streets, villages, towns and cities. In fact, postwar redevelopment changed London a great deal more than the oft-cited depredations of the Luftwaffe (most of which bomb damage was concentrated on the Thames dock areas and nearby areas which suffered collateral damage). Naturally, demolitions are sometimes inevitable and sometimes an improvement [see Notes, below], but much that was valuable has gone.
In fact, the 5,000 miles of track closures earmarked by Beeching were in addition to about 3,318 miles of railway track closed between 1948 and 1962 and also a further 1,300 miles of passenger railway between 1923 and 1939! Over 9,000 miles of track!
So “what if”? What if, for example, the rail track had been maintained? That way, were (as now are) different ideas, new technical ideas, possible (eg robot trains, no-staff trains, small ultralight trains, trains made with lighter materials, trains using solar power etc), those tracks could be the basis for new transport links and could be further linked with new track.
The expense of a railway is mostly in the staff pay, pensions etc; after that, the cost of actually running trains (fuel etc); after that, maintenance of trains, track, bridges, tunnels etc. The core maintenance can be relatively little. In the USA, this is the policy (see Wikipedia in Notes, below). Political policy which is also a national insurance policy.
Not that the trekking ways, cycleways and nature walks which often have replaced the old railways are not useful too, but most rail track destroyed has been simply ploughed over, built over or abandoned. Pity.
I recently re-read Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness– A Soviet Spymaster, the autobiography of General Pavel Sudoplatov, who was, inter alia, the brains behind such complex secret operations as the acquisition, in the 1940s, of atomic and nuclear technology from the USA and UK; he also oversaw such sanguinary plots as –and most notoriously– the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.
I last read Sudoplatov’s book in 1994, the year of its first hardback publication. On first reading, I did not, perhaps, pay enough attention to the part of the book near the end, dealing with Beria and the Politburo in general after the death of Stalin in 1953.
It might be said that to examine the beliefs and intent of Beria is otiose now that 65 years have passed since his death by summary execution. Also, unsurprisingly, few tears have been shed for him since his death. He was in many ways monstrous: this article is of course limited in scope by reason of, inter alia, lack of space. Beria’s crimes of a political nature were on a vast scale. His more personal crimes were also many and included the regular abduction and rape of women and girls, including some young schoolgirls. Having said that, his swift “trial” (in secret and without defence representation) and the immediately-following execution was a purely political action ordered by those with political records in many ways as bad (Khrushchev, for one).
I start from the following premises:
that Western and/or Westernizing conspirators funded and oversaw the Bolshevik coup d’etat in October 1917 (old calendar);
that the same cabals set up the Soviet system in the 1920s as a quasi-religious movement (in style) which was atheist (in content);
that the quasi-religious character of Bolshevism slowly started to dissipate after the death of Lenin in January 1924, replaced at first by a pseudo-intellectual Marxism-Leninism (incorporating a personality-cult), then by a revival of “Holy Russia” and nationalistic propaganda (mixed with the foregoing) during the war of 1941-45. Finally, there came a late efflorescence of the Stalin personality cult mixed with pan-Slavism between 1945 and Stalin’s death in 1953;
that in the (significant number) 33 years from 1956 (the year of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalinism as a personality cult etc) to 1989, Sovietism continued to decay ideologically, until it finally collapsed into a pile of dust.
Beria, ideologically
Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, which latter was a prosperous resort in late-Tsarist times. His family was not poor. It may be important that (in contradistinction to Russia), the Black Sea littoral was part of the Alexandrine Greek polity and, later, the Eastern Roman Empire. A more cosmopolitan milieu than that of Russia and one which existed for more than a thousand years prior to the first foundation of Kievan Rus.
That area, Abkhazia (geographically a part of Georgia, though historically distinct), was the location of the legendary Golden Fleece and is said to have been the birthplace of wine.
In the Soviet era, peasants were able to (in effect) own their own agricultural or horticultural plots of up to 0.5 hectare (about an acre or so). This was put into law in the mid-1930s. “Special districts” (particularly in Georgia) could have plots as large as 1 hectare (2.2 acres) officially and slightly more unofficially. By 1939, these small plots (only a few percent of the land area of the Soviet Union) produced at least 21% of all Soviet agricultural produce (and a far greater percentage of fruits etc). Some estimates from later times (the 1970s) put the real figure as high as 40%.
The “garden plots” or “household plots” had become important in Georgia/Abkhazia since the end of serfdom in 1865 (serfdom in some parts of the Russian Empire lasted for some years after the formal abolition of 1861).
Beria (b.1899) thus grew up in a milieu quite different from his later Russian and Ukrainian colleagues.
Beria was, as a youth, involved, when a student in Baku (again, a very “capitalist” and cosmopolitan city which, after a long history, had boomed pre-1914 by reason of the oil finds), with both the Bolsheviks and the Azeri anti-Bolshevik Musavat movement, which had Muslim, Turkic and general reformist roots and ideology.
It has been alleged against Beria that he had been involved with British Intelligence in Baku in or around 1919. Not impossible. Baku was of huge strategic importance during the First World War.
Likewise, at his drumhead trial in 1953, it was alleged that Beria favoured soft relations with National Socialist Germany or was even a “traitor” who helped Germany militarily and diplomatically (see the Wikipedia article, below).
Anthroposophy and other Germanic cultural connections
Beria was friendly toward the writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, who was educated partly at Berlin University (graduating in 1918) and spent the war years 1914-1918 in Germany and Switzerland as well as France. Gamsakhurdia may well have met Rudolf Steiner (d.1925) at that time, when Steiner was constructing the First Goetheanum (at Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland).
In the 1920s, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia was for 3-4 years a political prisoner in the Solovki concentration camp on the Solovetsky Islands. He would almost certainly not have survived the purges of the 1930s without Beria’s protection.
The son of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, became President of Georgia in the first democratic elections following Soviet rule. He is generally considered to have been an Anthroposophist, and wrote, among other works, Goethe’s Weltanschauung from the Anthroposophic Point of View [pub. Tbilisi 1985].
Beria’s Preferred Policies
Beria was not an idealist, but a practitioner of Realpolitik, par excellence. This enabled him not only to implement Stalin’s repressions without conscience, but also to see the aspects of Soviet life that were not working.
Had Beria succeeded Stalin,
he would have brought back a large measure of private ownership, or at least operational ownership, into agriculture. That would have hugely improved Soviet agriculture, whereas Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands scheme was mainly an expensive and ecologically-negative failure;
because Beria was not an ideologue, he would have had no qualms in ending the Cold War early. He would have been, to cite Mrs Thatcher’s view of Gorbachev, someone “with whom the West could do business.” That might have meant no Vietnam War, no Soviet support for so-called “Liberation” movements in Africa, no Cuban Missile Crisis, no Berlin Wall;
while Beria would certainly have ruthlessly stamped down on domestic political opposition, he would not have repeated Stalin’s mistaken policy (implemented partly by Beria himself) of arresting millions of people for effectively no reason;
Beria would have (as Sudoplatov notes) allowed the non-Russian republics a greater degree of independence, thus creating an earlier and more feasible “Commonwealth of Independent States” [CIS], albeit that they would not be “states” but autonomous or semi-autonomous republics.
Beria would have concentrated the KGB (its later name) and GRU on useful intelligence gathering and not on playing spy games and fomenting pseudo-Marxist revolts in Africa, Latin America etc.
Conclusion
While it might stick in the craw of many to conclude that Beria would have made a far better ruler of Russia than uneducated Khrushchev with his half-baked huge projects and his bang-shoe-on-table style of diplomacy, the facts speak for themselves.
A British scribbler, one Alex Marshall (formerly of The Guardian, now at time of writing apparently “Europe Culture Editor” for The New York Times) wrote a book called The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule, in which he wrote that “Personally propagating a bizarre Rudolph Steiner-inspired cult of anthroposophy, [Zviad] Gamsakhurdia…[etc]”.
Poorly written, for a start: “Anthroposophy” requires upper-case “A”, just like, say, “Roman Catholicism”. Marshall spells Rudolf Steiner, “Rudolph”, just as those who make fun of Hitler often write his name “Adolph” in petty denigration; also, “a bizarre” should be (if written at all) “the bizarre”.
Marshall’s words sound like a polemic against Anthroposophy, that movement which has achieved so much (though that fact is still not well-known to the masses in the Anglophone countries). To write off Anthroposophy as “a bizarre cult” is itself bizarre: think biodynamic agriculture, Waldorf [Rudolf Steiner] education etc.
I note that Marshall’s book, at least according to some reviewers, contains a number of other factual errors.
In fact, Shevardnadze, who overthrew Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was a ruthless “ex”-Soviet apparatchik who reintroduced large-scale repression into already-chaotic Georgian political life. He was the preferred candidate of the New World Order, completely under the “Western” thumb. I myself was slightly acquainted at one time (c.1995) with one of Shevardnadze’s advisers, who –like me– was on the Committee of the Central Asia and Transcaucasia Law Association [CATLA], a body active in the 1990s and which was supported by the British Government and large London-based law firms with interests in those regions.
Ian Robert Millard 