Actors in Stalin Purges, Famines still promote Great Experiments
Washington catch cries and rallying calls notably the Defund the Police campaign are supposed to demonstrate officially supported empathy with the deprived and downtrodden. They are received in Russia as indications of irresolution and instability
Russia’s picking off its enemies liquidating them by whatever means wherever they are in the world demonstrates Russia’s horror of internal dissent and the consequent urgency to suppress it.
The failure to comprehend Russia continues to involve the West’s newspapers of record. At the height of the collectivisation- induced great famine of the 1930s the New York Times correspondent in Moscow won a Pulitzer award for claiming that there were no such famines.
Malcolm Muggeridge (pictured) then employed by the Manchester Guardian doubted the New York Times’ bureau head Walter Duranty’s version and went to Ukraine to investigate for himself the plight of the Kulaks. These were the farmers under intense forced collectivisation which caused the starvation known as Holodomor. His reports were buried.
Muggeridge much later toured Australasia and in both countries emphasised how the Russians continuously duped the Western media, and did so through a realisation of the media’s own susceptibility to radicalism combined with its willingness “to be deceived.”
The defund movement in the United States with its clear Administration support conveyed to the totalitarian bloc an officially sanctioned regime of anarchy or Great Chaos as it is known in China
The English speaking realm media/political class consistently fails to grasp the difference between noble-sounding proclaimed priorities uttered in the West and their interpretation when these same concepts make landfall in totalitarian Russia and China.
When the defund the police sloganeering unchallenged by the White House washed up in Moscow the call was taken literally as officially approved agitation of the variety that could be a prelude to a full scale revolution.
Stalin’s Doctors Plot and its ensuing purges was one example. The merest hint, indication, suspicion of a failure to follow the party line, the approved doctrine, triggered the direst of reprisals
Another parallel and another great experiment is the expropriation mooted as far afield as Australia and the Netherlands by the state of farmland in the interests of carbon dioxide/methane minimisation. This chimes with collectivisation. Land seizures in other words.
Similarly the compulsory re-writing of school text books and the pulling down of statues is simply interpreted as a contemporary manifestation of revisionism. The disappearance after a perceived infraction of the official (i.e. party) line from the airwaves of broadcasters in certain Commonwealth countries is regarded in Russia simply as exile.
In the contemporary Cancel culture there is a comparison here with the various purges and plots and show trials in 1930s Russia. The West’s institutional apologies translate as Soviet era Recantations
The current boosted fuel prices leading to increased food prices is seen by the Russians as the inevitable sufferings by the peasantry when such noble experiments as net zero are inflicted on the masses by the intellectual class.
Highbrow political magazines routinely render the useful fools phrase attributed to Lenin as useful “idiots.” This is quite wrong. It is just another example of the West’s tin ear in the Russian intellectual transaction.
“Fools” the original word accurately conveys Lenin’s original and intended meaning. This defines the highly educated and privileged who are anything but idiots. Yet who have susceptibility for unquestioning belief in and a compulsion to promote certain abstract theories.
In this narrow vulnerability only are they Lenin’s fools. The belief that the end of communist Russia in the form of the old USSR was somehow the “end of history” is only one obvious example of the political class’ deliberately encouraged dreamy triumphalism.
Malcolm Muggeridge’s warnings about the West’s institutional willingness to be hoodwinked by Russia have been vindicated by a series of events since the supposed “end of history.”
In 1994 posing as peacemakers Russia persuaded the UK and the US to concur in a scheme known as the Budapest Memorandum which unilaterally stripped Ukraine of all its nuclear weaponry.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea was the first siege stage in land locking Ukraine. All the while Russia encouraged the West in its sacred ideal (which is how Russia sees it) to stop using its own fuel, be politically correct, and depend on Russia’s instead. This allowed Russia to corner the market and set export prices accordingly.
This atmosphere of constant rolling deception slides easily along via an indelible illusion held on the trans Atlantic axis that Germans and Russians remain instinctively at loggerheads. Quite the opposite was and is true. The two races are culturally intensely close.
The Russians watch for weakness. The evacuation of Kabul chimed with the United States losing its grip on its own military and this view was confirmed when top operational figures subsequently held onto their jobs. Was Washington afraid to fire them?
Or were they unpurged because they were zealously pursuing centrally-driven social engineering creeds by tinkering with words and their meanings which mirrors the Leninist belief in perpetual revolution at any and all levels, all the time?
Commonwealth Prime Ministers Preoccupied by Ethical Topics Ignored Own Base
Boris Johnson changed his party without formally announcing his switch as he veered across the political divide from conservatism to globalism. He is in good company. Australian prime minister Scott Morrison did the same thing. He swerved from straight laced traditionalism to accepting the full slate of contemporary avant garde values.
The only difference being that Mr Johnson’s U-turn stemmed from the zeal associated with new converts to causes.
Mr Morrison’s rather grim-faced acceptance of such causes was of a rather more operational nature.
He sought to straddle the Australian electorate by appealing to the metropolitan voguish vote while maintaining a grasp on his base in the unpretentious outback and shires.
The outcome for both prime ministers was the same. In seeking to accommodate their fickle metropolitan types they failed to capture them and at the same time lost the faith of their own one-time ardent if less showy-off followers.
For Mr Morrison this became evident in the federal election. For Mr Johnson in two provincial by-elections.
There are much closer links between the conservative party machines in Westminster and Australasia than many realise.
By the time the result of the Australian Federal general election was received it was already too late for the lesson to be learned let alone applied by the freshly dewy-eyed Mr Johnson now surrounded by knee-taking advisors even if he had been capable of applying it, let alone learning it.
When the war came it was too late as Boris in full Churchill mode strode through the streets of Kiev with president Zelensky.
Margaret Thatcher’s war in the Falklands in contrast was at the beginning of her long term in office and allowed her to give full voice to the resolve and decisiveness that is expected from Tory prime ministers as they sweep aside distractions in order to focus on priorities such as a war.
As the various movements and cults swept in from the United States both Morrison and Johnson gave the impression of being captivated by a mood surge of “Hey! What’s this! Nothing to do with us? Never mind. We’ll run with it. Where’s it heading?”
Where now was the jut-jawed Scott Morrison brandishing a lump of coal before the federal parliament and daring his audience to look at it without fainting away in a fashionable swoon?
Where was the growling 80 seat majority Brexiteer Boris so recently renowned for his scepticism on voguish trends?
Like the China plague that black swan-like plummeted into the relatively placid lake of their early days as prime ministers, the cults kept coming in then metamorphosing and mutating.
Scott Morrison already twisting and turning in the familiar winds of career feminism suddenly found himself at the epicentre of a new gender hurricane.
This one centred on gender reassignment which in turn twisted into a tornado centred on the rights of the thus gender re-assigned to compete on equal terms in high performance sports, especially at an international level.
Boris Johnson looks like John Bull. Yet once he had got Brexit done we can see now that he was increasingly drawn to the salons where the globalists like to glow.
Both prime ministers in their different ways we can see now became hopelessly entangled in the notions of a non productive yet noisy ilk.
In doing so they fell into the tender trap, seeking the affection of everyone.
Mr Johnson is viewed now as someone whose sympathies always lay with the a la mode metropolitans and whose true colours only needed ignition.
In Australia there were just a few straws in the wind that prime minister Scott Morrison sensed that he was beset by a swarm of social justice diversions, notably the gender ones.
In a move that still mystifies many Mr Morrison dealt harshly with the female head of a major and successful and difficult federal trading enterprise who dished out bonuses in the form of fancy wrist watches to her high-performing department heads.
Mr Morrison cited first foremost and always as a “marketing” man seemed blind to the incentive value in all this. He made the ceo a public example to all and any other federal employee tempted to do anything resembling a grand gesture off their own bat.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
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Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
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