​Greetings!
Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues!

Congrats!
Let me congratulate everyone with the Thanksgiving Holidays! And never forget about our predecessors in America, the native Indians!

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Right away, read two outstanding reviews of two outstanding books by two outstanding peace champions.

​Professor Michael Brenner reviews Edward Snowden's book "Permanent Record" 

There was a time in America when a Snowden would be celebrated as the model of an idealistic young man whose devotion to principle placed justice before self-interest. Nowadays, the baying pack of scoundrels,  careerists and bumblers who run the country howl for his traitorous hide.  Obviously, there are exceptions. Yet, one is hard-pressed to identify voices raised on his behalf. 

http://www.raga.org/news/edward-snowdens-permanent-record-book-review-by-prof-michael-brenner-must-read

​How to Save the Planet and Ourselves

Now Chris Hedges reviews Roger Hallam's New Book
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author  

If you read only one book this year, it should be Roger Hallam’s “Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse.”
Hallam’s lucid and concise book, which echoes Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” says what many of us now know to be true but do not say: If we do not replace the ruling elites soon we are finished as a species. It is a cogent, well-argued case for global rebellion—the only form of resistance that can save us from ecosystem collapse and human-induced genocide. It correctly analyzes the failure of environmentalist activists in groups such as 350.org to understand and confront global corporate power and thus make a meaningful impact as we barrel toward ecocide. “Common Sense for the 21st Century” is a survival manual for the human species. “The corrupt system is going to kill us all unless we rise up,” Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, bluntly warns.  https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-to-save-the-planet-and-ourselves/  

PeopleNow.org Newsletter #1  

Ron Fisher www.dfpa.org,
doing business as PeopleNow.org
Fisher@PeopleNow.org
703-725-7849
Arlington, Virginia
Ron Fisher Bio  

​More opinions

Gordon M. Hahn: Fables of Ignatius
Nov 24, 2019 08:47 pm
It is now important for every American to realize that he or she can get little to no reliable news from the US mainstream media on Ukraine, Russia, or even the United States itself.With it becoming ever more clear that the US government and media have been covering up especially the Democratic Party’s collusion with Ukraine’s government in order to facilitate the self-enrichment of DP leaders’ family members, undermine the presidential candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump (however unpresidential he may be) and foment liberal-socialist revolutions globally, the participants are moving into high gear propaganda mode. A recent piece from David Ignatius is a good place to begin to highlight the intensification.... 
https://gordonhahn.com/2019/11/22/fables-of-ignatius/

25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia
November 19, 2019 • Caitlin Johnstone discredits a CNN listicle on Trump’s “softness” towards Moscow. In fact, she writes, the U.S. president has  actually been consistently reckless towards Moscow, with zero resistance from either party. 
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
​
CNN has published a fascinatingly manipulative and falsehood-laden article titled “25 times Trump was soft on Russia,” in which a lot of strained effort is poured into building the case that the U.S. president is suspiciously loyal to the nation against which he has spent his administration escalating dangerous new cold war aggressions.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/19/25-times-trump-has-been-dangerously-hawkish-on-russia/  
​
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/11/18/for-wall-street-russia-has-become-bullet-proof/#75f5c706ffd4  ​

Covert Operative In Ukraine Controversy Revealed To Be Associated Press – OpEd

November 15, 2019 By William Dunkerley
CONCLUSION:At this point it is necessary to reflect upon what AP is up to. What kind of role is it playing in bringing vital political news to American voters? A quote from Walter Cronkite can help put this into perspective: “We all have our likes and our dislikes. But… when we’re doing news — when we’re doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we’re doing the daily news, covering politics — it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.”  I can’t think of a rational argument that would support a notion that AP is practicing even basic journalism. It has exploited the presumptive trust enjoyed by its Stylebook — a bible in the journalism field — to covertly propagate one-sided “background” to its unsuspecting readers. If one accepts Cronkite’s concept of journalism, there no longer seems to be reason to trust AP’s Stylebook. It’s wrong on the political issues. It’s even wrong on the simple matter of how to spell the Ukrainian president’s name. The Stylebook might more honestly be termed a political document that manifests an insidious propensity to propagate false and misleading information. What a sad and troubling conclusion that is. 
https://www.eurasiareview.com/15112019-covert-operative-in-ukraine-controversy-revealed-to-be-associated-press-oped/  ​

Inconvenient Truths.  Alarming things we have learned under Trump, but not always about him.
By Stephen F. Cohen  NOVEMBER 6, 2019
The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here—a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation of Russiagate allegations—and that in turn requires learning how such allegations originated.  
https://www.thenation.com/article/inconvenient-truths-2/  

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Impeachment Pantomime
The political theatrics that begin Wednesday raise several questions. For starters, will Joe Biden be investigated for mounting evidence of corruption? And why is the  corporate media turning the CIA “whistleblower” into a phantom in plain sight?
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/12/patrick-lawrence-the-impeachment-pantomime/

John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force - Could it become Obamagate?
By Philip Giraldi
November 12, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52532.htm

RAGA.org thinks the "Neo-Con" title says it ALL. Cheers to David Stockman for saying it. Vladislav Krasnov
Up In Smoke: The Neocon Assault on Syria Is Finally Over
By David Stockman
October 24, 2019 "Information Clearing House"  

...Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that the Arab Spring and the conflict in Syria were the result of external intervention and subversion....   

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52440.htm  

​Is Ukraine vital to U.S. security?
By Edward Lozansky - - Wednesday, November 27, 2019
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The ongoing impeachment inquiry of President Trump can certainly compete with Hollywood’s most successful drama or comedy shows. However, when we deal with national security issues one expects the actors, in this case members of Congress and witnesses, to tell the truth. In this case, some do, but some regrettably do not. The whole picture, said House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican, looks like a “Soviet-style” event.  ...In this political atmosphere, anyone who calls for resumption of U.S.-Russian dialogue is labeled as Mr. Putin’s bootlicker or useful idiot at best. It was French President Macron who pronounced NATO’s brain to be dead and has come up with some ideas on how to avoid, in the words of former Sen. Sam Nunn and many other serious analysts, the process of “sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe.”   Will Washington listen? Chances are not good, but what is the alternative?
⦁ Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/27/crosstalk-is-ukraine-vital-to-us-security/

Everyone Is a Russian Asset
America laughed at Hillary Clinton’s remarks about Tulsi Gabbard, but her ideas fit perfectly in the intellectual mainstream
By MATT TAIBBI

Hillary Clinton, not long ago the nominee of the Democratic Party, had some choice words about the state of American politics Friday.
  “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said on a podcast with former Barack Obama aide David Plouffe. “She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
  Clinton appeared to be talking about Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran. She wasn’t done, teeing off on former Green Party candidate Jill Stein:
  “[Jill Stein’s] also a Russian asset… Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/clinton-gabbard-russian-asset-jill-stein-901593/

​Hillary Clinton Is A Psychopath And A War Criminal: Prof. Francis Boyle
Dialogos Radio Interviews Prof. Francis Boyle
   The transcript of Dialogos Radio’s interview with international lawyer and professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois. This interview aired on their broadcasts for the week of February 18-24, 2016. Find the podcast of this interview here.
    MN: Joining us today on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series is international lawyer and professor of international law at The University of Illinois Dr. Francis Boyle. Boyle has served as legal counsel to the Palestinian Authority, to Hawaiian independence groups, and served on the legal team which led to the conviction of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes. Professor Boyle, welcome to our program today.
https://www.countercurrents.org/boyle020316.htm

Pepe Escobar: The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War was Won
​Oct 23, 2019 10:58 am
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer.  

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/18/pepe-escobar-the-road-to-damascus-how-the-syria-war-was-won/  ​
​

Everybody Betraying Everybody in Syria
After some eight years of civil conflict, the situation in Syria is basically reverting to the pre-conflict norm, writes Graham E. Fuller.
By Graham E. Fuller
grahamefuller.com
Just what have we witnessed in the recent events in Syria? It’s hard to know, given the avalanche of superficial and over-the-top headlines in most U.S. media: betrayal of the Kurds, handing Syria over to Russia, caving to Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, bestowing a gift upon Iran, allowing ISIS to once again run wild, end of U.S. leadership.
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/16/everybody-betraying-everybody-in-syria/

Restoration of the Monastery of St. Dimitry of Rostov
https://www.rbth.com/travel/331320-rostov-iakov-monastery

Comparison of early 20th-century photographs in the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) with photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection  (National Gallery of Art) . 

232nd article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
General link:  https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia

Monumental art in Yaroslavl: Church of the Prophet Elijah
https://www.rbth.com/travel/331251-yaroslavls-church-prophet-elijah
​
Comparison of early 20th-century photographs in the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) with photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection  (National Gallery of Art). 

231st article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia

Rebuilding a masterpiece of wooden architecture. the Intercession Church from Ankhimovo:
https://www.rbth.com/travel/331188-intercession-church-petersburg

Comparison of early 20th-century photographs in the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) with photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection  (National Gallery of Art) . 

230th article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
General link:   https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia

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BBC News: The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev full interview
The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that current tension between Russia and the West is putting the world in “colossal danger” due to the threat from nuclear weapons.
In an interview with the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, former President Gorbachev called for all countries to declare that nuclear weapons should be destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYVsKoQXATY

Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
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​Resume: Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.

After more than a year since we first heard the BBC “breaking news” about the “Russians Poisoning the Skipals”, all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government’s bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia. Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the “evidence”, presented in the usual clipped, “authoritative” British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC “journalist” and the two “experts”, colluded to transform false allegations into “facts”… fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our “special US-UK relationship”, Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny “cell” at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.

There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.

My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, “Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy” by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated “by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media” (preface p. XIII)

Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria” (2017). There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization” goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, “Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World”. Therein, Lifton states: “More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims.” (p.3) And Mettan’s analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations “realist” in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: “The Roots of Liberal Hegemony”, “The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony” and “The Case for Restraint”: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/john-j-mearsheimer-liberal-ideals-and-interntional-realities with his book, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities” published in 2018.

​But what about “Russian Aggression” in Ukraine & Crimea?

In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated “facts”.
Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa’s book, “Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order”, 2017, we turn to the section on “Reality Wars and American Power” on p. 217 to read: “It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes.” And he continues on p. 218: “Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks.” Adding that these “are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today.”

Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now; we create our own reality.”
​
[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush—identified later as Karl Rove, Bush’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff—told him, “We’re an empire now, we create our own reality.”]
Thus, we’ve become trapped in a contrived “reality” promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal “democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists” to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable “Liberal World Order”. However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: “If a foreign power is considered to have violated ‘international order’, then it can be overthrown” as a rationale for American “regime change” anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico…as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our “Bay of Pigs” invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great…except for an interval in the ’50s when Crimea was” gifted” to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.

“Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia”

And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over “the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media.” And he went on to say that “the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.

“That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.

“The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian ‘Westernizers’ and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.
“He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered.” Mettan, pp. 15-16 in “Creating Russophobia”.

Russophobia: akin to Racism

From another perspective: Mettan’s chapter on “German Russophobia” set me thinking that this “Western Supremacy” political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and “justifications” in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?…that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside…and found a book in the library: “South of Freedom” by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down…at least in my mind.

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?

So, here’s a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy… and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe’s neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. These are not poor “niggers” from the Eurasian ghetto we’ve been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of “The Liberal World Order” dominated by US; they’re nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules…nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged “Russian poisoning” was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness…with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media…led by the once esteemed BBC. And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba’s war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”, Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists…were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers’ war propaganda.

Regime Change Comes Home

Never-the-less, after a very long run of American “regime change” abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil…on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile…to name a few of our interventions…we were back for a second round with “coalitions of the willing” or not? in the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya…before breaking down in Syria. Until now it’s been brought home again, renovated and renamed “RussiaGate” for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, “Felt”, another “Watergate” re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between “Felt” and Mueller? And despite the media’s commemoration of its 44-year-old “moment of courage” with the movie “The Post” to promote Trump’s ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to “regime change”, didn’t the our “ruling elite” read Jane Mayer’s “The Danger of President Pence” in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s’ “ruling class” was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew…before “regime changing” Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.

A Florentine Epiphany

But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a “heretic”, during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under “villa arrest”, from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: “The world does not turn on an American axis!”

The 21st Century Inquisition

So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers…such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age “Solzhenitsyn?” in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our “justice” system for revealing our government’s surveillance of US! 

Any Good Sense Left?

So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.” - “Walden” 1854

If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:

For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony “for, by & of the people” NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.

© Jean Ranc | 2019

Originally published: 
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/13/russophobia-wmd-weapon-mass-deception/

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

THE HIGHLIGHTS

As I set my foot on the American soil, I was delighted to read Professor Gary Saul Morson’s outstanding review of Solzhenitsyn’s “March 1917”, the third and last part of Solzhenitsyn’s majestic “The Red Wheel” trilogy about Russia’s downfall, finally published in the US.[i] “In Russia, history is too important to leave to the historians,” writes Morson.  “As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”  

In truth, the Horrorcost of the Bolshevik totalitarian rule for the Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Muslims, Christians and all Non-Bolsheviks by far exceeds anything what the accolades of the Jewish Holocaust during WWII could master. Above all, it was not the Germans exterminating Jews and other “racial inferiors” during a fierce war, but Jews and Russians killing Jews and Russians—and all other—deviant from the Party Line. The bosses of the GULAG, often Jewish, were killing the “Trotskists,” “Zionists” and other former comrades because the “party line” kept on changing. This made Vasily Grossman ( 1905 –1964), a Soviet (Jewish) writer, wander in his proscribed novel  Life and Fate (1960): Was Marxist “class struggle” morally superior to the Nazi race war? Grossman’s novel waited twenty years before being published in 1980 abroad.[iii]
 
Most recently, Dmitry Bykov, the famed Russian poet and literary critic, speculated that “Hitler would have won over more in the USSR if he'd dropped the Antisemitism.” Remarkably, after a huge “patriotic” uproar, the lawyers decided that Bykov’s remarks do not constitute “disrespect for society” or “profanity against Russia’s military glory.” It was a huge victory for the freedom of speech in Putin’s Russia. Bykov was also off the hook for “rehabilitating Nazism,” disappointing those who were convinced that Bykov had crossed the line. (Meduza,  5 March 2019).[iv] An admirer of Solzhenitsyn, Bykov wrote a brilliant article about the failure of modern Russian nationalists to understand either Solzhenitsyn or Dostoevsky.[v]

On March 29 I had a breakfast with Jon Utley in Washington Harbor. The publisher of The American Conservative, Jon has been a peace-maker and my personal friend since the 1990s. In 2005, I helped him find out what happened to his Russian father Arkady Berdichevsky, a Soviet trade mission official, who was arrested alleged for “Trotskitst” sympathies in Moscow in 1936 when Jon was 2 year old. He got a “light” 3-year sentence. But then all correspondence with Freda Utley, Jon’s mother, stopped. As it turned out, Arkady was sent to a GULAG camp in Vorkuta, re-tried there for organizing a hunger strike and sentenced to die. We found a general location of mass executions site where he was executed along with hundreds of others in March of 1938. You may want to read my article about Jon[vi] or see Documentary: Return to the Gulag: Jon Utley’s Search for His Father.[vii]         

Learning of my forthcoming trip to California, Jon Utley asked me to give his warmest to Ron Unz, who preceded him as the publisher of The American Conservative and now publishes The Unz Review, one of the best alternative web-zine in the country.

On March 29, I visited the Library of Congress to hand a number of books to Grant Harris, a former graduate student of mine at the Monterey (now Middlebury) Institute of International Studies and now the head of the LOC’s European Division. Several books were from a Russian professor and Solzhenitsyn scholar from Krasnoyarsk University whom I had met during Solzhenitsyn’s Centennial Conference at Northern Vermont University in September 2018.

[i] https://www.amazon.com/March-1917-Center-Culture-Solzhenitsyn/dp/0268102651 
[ii] (“Solzhenitsyn’s cathedrals” by Gary Saul Morson | The New Criterion. Vol. 37, No. 8 / April 2019).
[iii] About Grossman’s novel read https://www.thenation.com/article/maximalist-vasily-grossman/
[iv] https://meduza.io/en/news/2019/03/05/russian-poet-is-off-the-hook-for-saying-hitler-would-have-won-over-more-in-the-ussr-if-he-d-dropped-the-antisemitism)
[v] http://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/o_tvorchestve/articles/general/index.php?ELEMENT_ID=1965
[vi] http://www.raga.org/news/john-basil-utley-at-80-he-is-one-of-us-memoirs-of-two-trips-to-russia
[vii] http://www.hacer.org/hacers-exclusive-video-channel-in-youtube/

As president of RAGA, I feel my duty to help cultural exchange between Russia and the US, the little that remains of it due to the ongoing russophobia of leading US media. In that I am guided by this utterance of James Billington (1929-2018), the former Library of Congress director: “If Americans cannot penetrate into the interior spiritual dialogue of other peoples, they will never be able to understand, let alone anticipate or affect, the discontinuous major changes which are the driving forces in history and which will probably continue to spring unexpected traps in the years ahead. To put it another way, if we   cannot learn to listen to others as they whisper their prayers, we may well confront them later on when they howl their war cries.”
    
The above is from the article “Russia’s Mission” by Professor NICOLAI N. PETRO, my former colleague at the Monterey (now Middlebury) Institute of International Studies. He has been one of the most perceptive and honest observer of Russia-US relations. He sees “Russia’s Mission” in President Putin’s efforts to engage his NATO opponents in “civilizational realism” in the hope to “forge a new and more ‘congenial’ world order”. (NOV 14, 2018).[i]
 
Arriving at San Francisco on March 30, I called Ron Unz. Upon receiving Utley’s greetings from Washington, he kindly invited me and my daughter Vera for a lunch at Jing-Jing Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto. Based on a number of his articles, including the one stressing the support of Jewish American bankers for the Bolshevik revolution, I had already welcomed him as one of RAGA authors.[ii] (). 

Now in front of me sat an introspective, polite, almost shy man eager to listen and understand rather than talk and blame anyone. We agreed the surest way for the United States to survive as a viable democracy and a beacon of hope for the downtrodden is not to force “democracy” on others but start by respecting their sovereignty. Domestically, let people of different persuasions engage in a friendly dialog. Be they Conservative or Liberal, Right or Left, Capitalist or Socialist—as long as they eschew violent, vile and offensive means of propagating their ideas—all are welcome.

[i] Petro’s article https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/russias-mission
[ii] http://www.raga.org/news/welcome-ron-unz-and-american-pravda

Ron and I agreed that we should promote polyphony and the art of mutually beneficial dialog, as Socrates practiced it. And be mindful that sometimes democracies TOO get out of hand, turn demagogic and brutal, just as the Athenian populace condemned Socrates to death. Ron and I agreed that generally conservatives have upheld best the banner of liberty. The nearby Hoover Institution was just about the only anti-Communist US think-tank where Solzhenitsyn found a plenty of materials on the brutality of Communism in Russia. I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Hoover Institution for publishing my book “Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List”.[i]
 
It just crossed my mind that one of Jon Utley’s close associates, the Austrian philosopher Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909 – 1999) suspected, as the ancient Greeks did, that DEMOCRACIES have the tendency to degenerate into a mob rule and tyranny. His self-description as a "conservative arch-liberal" may sound self-contradictory, but actually is not. The best ways to preserve the foundations of civil order in the world is not forcing “democracy” on the “benighted” nations but rather, while respecting their sovereignty, show them the advantages of liberal attitude toward censorship and human rights. A polyglot who mastered several languages, Kuehnelt-Leddihn exerted considerable influence on the conservatives in the USA. See Lee Congdon’s article “Kuehnelt-Leddihn and American Conservatism”.[ii]

The conservatives, like Utley, Kuehnelt-Leddihn or Unz should not be confused with their opposites, the aggressive and dogmatically pro-Zionist Neo-Cons. According to Wikipedia, the ascendance of the Neo-Cons in US foreign policy has to do with The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank founded in 1997 in Washington by  William Kristol and Robert Kagan under the motto: "American leadership is good both for America and for the world."[iii]
 
However, in a bold 2006 article “The Israeli Lobby” (later a book, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy) Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt traced the origin of anthe Neo-Cons to an earlier event. In 1996 a group led by Richard Perle submitted to Benjamin Netanyahu, the then Prime Minister of Israel, a report titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The insisted on a new approach to solving Israel's security problems in the Middle East via a propaganda campaign to emphasize Israel’s affinity with "Western values." The report pushed an aggressive policy, including the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and dismantling of Syria by proxy warfare. Thus, at least since 1996, the US global strategy has been in alliance with and—some would say—subordinated to Israel’s security needs as perceived by the right wing Zionists.

My next appointment was an April 5, 2019 radio interview with Dr. Kevin Barrett about Solzhenitsyn, Gandhi, and Peace in the World https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/tag/vladislav-krasnov/ Kevin is an American dissident and former university professor who lost his job for sticking to the “irreverent” view that 9/11 was an inside job for mobilizing public opinion in favor of US military offensive in the Middle East, North Africa, and vis-à-vis Russia. My interview followed that with Richie Allen, a popular Irish radio show host opposing censorship in UK. [iv]  

The key note for my own 2nd hour interview- Listen HERE - with Kevin was Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic utterance:

[i] https://www.hoover.org/research/soviet-defectors-kgb-wanted-list
[ii] https://www.crisismagazine.com/author/lee-congdon
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
[iv] https://sarahwestall.com/richie-allen-speaks-censorship-insignificant/.

In placing this quotation in front, Kevin was just on cue. His mission is the pursuit of truth. That’s how he presented me:  Vladislav Krasnov, a.k.a. George Krasnow, discusses his recent articles “Solzhenitsyn’s relevance today” and “Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn, the Two Giants Who Blessed the XXth Century.” The latter article serves as a spring board for advocating a new Paradigm for Global Relations, including an alliance of Civilizations to save the Planet from Nuclear destruction.”  Listen HERE   (remember I am in the 2nd half of the scale)

​There is no need to text the radio voice. But a brief overview might save your time. Kevin and I started with my book Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth written when I was still professor of The Monterey Institute. Appearing just before the end of the USSR in 1991, the book was not only predictive of--but also aimed at preparing both American and Russian public opinion for-- the emergence of a New Russia. In fact, I presented a copy to Boris Yeltsin right after he had squashed the August 19, 1991 Communist coup attempt and replaced the Red Flag of Communism with Russia’s national tricolor. 

Starting with Solzhenitsyn’s vision of post-Soviet future, I presented a number of Soviet and some Russian émigré authors who took advantage of a relative freedom of expression under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ to argue that the country should abandon the straitjacket of Marxism-Leninism and go “beyond” Communism. Solzhenitsyn was of primary importance. I discussed a number of his essays that pointed toward Russia’s post-Communist future, such as “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” (1973), REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS (1973), Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. The last one was widely published in the USSR in August 1990.

Solzhenitsyn was also important as I employed his polyphonic method in selecting authors of different persuasions. In the subtitle I used “National”, not “nationalist”, rebirth. This is because “nationalist” smacks of possible xenophobic and chauvinistic tendency which Solzhenitsyn and the majority of my authors deplored. If they were “nationalist”, it was only in a positive sense of adhering to the best of national traditions. The majority of my authors favored a national, now I would say identitarian alternative to Communism--that is restoring Russia’s traditional pre-1917 national identity, her historical roots, religious beliefs and customs--to replace the official Marxism-Leninist ideology which by 1991 seemed to have fallen into a coma. Having returned to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn refused to support Boris Yeltsin and the “shock therapy” reforms that brought the country on the brink of anarchy and civil war. Only with the 1998 ascent of Yevgeny Primakov as Prime-Minister and then Vladimir Putin as President did Solzhenitsyn feel reassured that Russia has regained its national sovereignty.

During these post-Soviet years I found myself in agreement with Solzhenitsyn’s dissatisfaction with Yeltsin’s government. Having moved from California to Washington DC, I founded the Russia & America Good Will Association (RAGA.org) to help overcome an enormous cultural gap between the USA and post-Soviet Russia still plagued by the vestiges of Soviet mentality. My chief advantage was the familiarity with both, plus my ability to travel back and forth, as well as across the States, often as a contract interpreter for the USDS.

As RAGA president, I tried to help A New Russia get on her feet.
* In March 1998, published in The Washington Post a paid ad with the greeting to Russia’s Prime-Minister Yevgeni Primakov when he turned his plane back when the US had started bombing Yugoslavia;
* In March 1999, wrote an Open Letter to Bill Clinton protesting US interference in Russian reforms; it was signed by over a hundred American experts http://www.raga.org/news/raga-open-letter-to-clinton;
* In 2001, warned “Don’t Count Russia Out,” in a polemical article welcoming Vladimir Putin’s assertion of Russia’s sovereignty; http://www.raga.org/dont_count.html
* In 2008, I wrote a comprehensive article Did Shock Therapy Help Russia?, describing the collusion between of the Gaidar-Chubais group in Russia and the Harvard clique of Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, who got the contract on doing reforms in Russia without competitive bidding. As the two got involved in illegal investments, Harvard University was forced to pay the largest penalty in its history. In my research I was greatly helped by Janine Wedel’s book Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989-1998.[i]
* Then came “Obama’s Perestroika Challenge: US & Russia”, by W.George Krasnow, 7 January 2009, insisting on “Abandoning the fantasy of U.S. unipolar world domination and recognizing Russia's legitimate national security concerns” among other recommendations;[ii]
* When President Obama failed to reset US-Russia relations and continued George Bush’s policy of confrontation, I engage him in a letter exchange suggesting that, instead of vain demagogic efforts to spread “democracy” throughout the world, the USA should, first of all, honor the right of each nation for “sovereignty”.[iii]

In 2014 my book was published in translation, Новая Россия. От коммунизма к национальному возрождению. [iv] In its Preface Professor Aleksei Lyubimov, the editor of a Duma magazine[v] and member of the Diplomatic Academy, recommended the book as “balanced and dispassionate”. He also praised it for offering a number of different, even opposing viewpoints, “for calling for societal consolidation, and a civilized dialog and polyphonic interaction between the Westernizers and Slavophiles, the advocates of free market and socialists, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews. In his opinion, the whole world needs to cooperate with independent, free, prosperous and peace-loving Russia”.

My book was the last of a series of four publications undertaken by the Center of Contemporary Russian Studies which Dr. Nicolai Petro and I founded around 1988 at the Monterey Institute. We deliberately used “Russian” to challenge numerous Soviet Studies think-tanks across the States. As soon as Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed glasnost’, that is a degree of freedom long suppressed in the USSR, we felt that the Communist Utopia will not last long. We felt that US academic establishment needed to prepare for a New Russia for which the recovery of its historical, cultural, and spiritual identity was essential. That’s why the book was dedicated to the Millennium of Russia’s baptism in the year 1988. I did not expect that the millions of Soviet atheists would overnight confess Jesus Christ. Nor did I expect that the New Russia would abandon secular freedom of conscience. But I expected that all its citizens, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, would feel free to confess their convictions.

The main thrust of the book was antithetical to that of Professor Richard Pipes (1923-2018) who once headed Russian Center at Harvard. The difference was that while we in Monterey looked upon Russia’s re-emergence with a hope, Pipes felt that the USSR must be feared precisely because it retained too much “Russianness” from its past. In a sense, my book was the extension of my 1979 debate with Pipes in The Russian Review in the USA and Encounter magazine in UK. See “Richard Pipes’s Foreign Policy Strategy: Anti-Soviet or Anti-Russian?”[vi]

In his writings Pipes entirely dismissed the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideology on the behavior of Soviet leaders. Moreover, he failed to see how powerful pro-Communist and pro-Marxist forces outside the USSR, including “Cultural Marxism” and “Catholic Marxism,” were facilitated Soviet strategy throughout the world.  

In fact, one of the reasons for the West’s current hostility toward Russia today is the failure to recognize during the Old Cold War that Communism was not just a Russian, Chinese or Cambodian event, but a common, West-centered, affliction of humankind with the virus of violence. It was advertised as the most effective, quick, scientifically “required” cure of all injustices of the world. I call it “West-centered” because Lenin and his Bolsheviks always prided themselves that their Marxist ideology was based on the ideas of French Revolution, German philosophy, and British labor movement. But the “Russian proletariat” was called upon to spread these Western ideas for the sake of world revolution. As to the terror of French Revolution, its degeneration into Napoleon’s wars of conquest, Lenin dismissed as non-consequential. Thus the October Revolution of 1917 was driven by the desire of the Bolsheviks to re-play the French Revolution and be more “Western” than the West.

The prominence of Jews in the Bolshevik leadership, a taboo topic for many years, has been lately elucidated by a number of authors, especially by MARK WEBER.[vii] Ron Unz himself shed light on the assistance to the Bolsheviks from Jewish donors from overseas.[viii]

What remains overlooked is that the Bolsheviks, whether Jewish, Russian or Latvian, were largely deracinated individuals who were hardly representative of their ethnic or religious group. Karl Marx himself, though from rabbinical families on both sides, was baptized and acted as an ardent Christian in his youth. But then, denouncing “everyday Jews” as misers and blood-suckers, he turned into fanatical atheist and God-fighter. His denunciation of all religions as the opiate of the people is well-known. Anti-religious fanaticism of the Russian Bolsheviks was just as stark. Lenin was as much an anti-Christ as Trotsky anti-Moses if not anti-Yahweh.
One might say that the totalitarian tendencies of early Bolsheviks were inspired less by Lenin’s mixed Jewish and “Mongolian” or Stalin’s “Asiatic” Georgian background, but rather by the complex of inferiority they felt vis-à-vis the West. The brutality of their early Soviet regimes largely stems from the desire to surpass the West in the most “progressive” Western idea of a violent world revolution as a short-cut to a socialist paradise on Earth. The Bolsheviks succeeded in surpassing the anti-clerical and anti-Christian ardor madness of the French Revolution. Professor Talmon was right in tracing “The Origines of Totalitarian Democracy” to the French Revolution. According to the book-selling site, Jacob Leib Talmon[ix] (1916 –1980) was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied the genealogy of totalitarianism, arguing that political Messianism stemmed from the French Revolution, and stressed the similarities between Jacobinism and Stalinism. He coined the terms Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messianism.

“The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy” was first published in 1952, re-published in 1986. I read it some thirty years ago while working on “Russia Beyond Communism”. But the book did not become dated. If anything, it is even more relevant now. As the book-sellers say, This study is an attempt to show that concurrently with the liberal type of democracy there emerged from the same premises in the eighteenth century a trend towards what we propose to call the totalitarian type of democracy. These two currents have existed side by side ever since the eighteenth century. The tension between them has constituted an important chapter in modern history, and has now become the most vital issue of our time.

In my dialog with Kevin Barrett I argued that the issue is especially inflamed now when the USA and its allies declare themselves so much in love with democracy that they eagerly impose it on any country, allegedly, for its own benefit.

Unfortunately, in our propensity to denounce all “the reactionary,” “arch-conservative” and “rightists” defenders of status quo while bathing in the self-satisfying glory of all-atoning “progressivism” we forget that the defining watershed of modern age was the Bolshevik coup-d’état in October 1917 which lead to the longest totalitarian rule in history. If the Oliver Cromwell revolution and civil war turmoil in England lasted two decades (1642- 1662), the French Revolution just ten (1788-1999) and then degenerated into Napoleon’s dictatorship and wars of conquest, the October1917 Revolution in Russia drugged on for nearly 73 years (1917-1991).

Alas, it distinguished itself not just by unusual longevity but also by its counter-productive result as it ended with re-introduction of capitalism it vowed to destroy. It was counter-productive in achieving the goals it set: the liberation of working people, first in Russia and then the rest of the world, from exploitation and abuse by capitalists, money bags and the latter day imperialists. It did expropriate the capitalists and other money bags in Russia in 1917-1919. But when the Communist party rule evaporated at the end of 1991, socialist economy was quickly replaced, often by former Party functionaries, by crony-capitalism just like in the US, except the taxation in Russia is not progressive and anti-monopoly laws against the oligarchs are largely ineffective.

The Bolsheviks were right in never calling their revolution “Russian” because they conceived it as the beginning of world revolution and knew that its essence was rather anti-Russian.

Toward the end of the hour Kevin and I discussed my translation into Russian of John Andre Morrow’s book:

Six Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of His Time: The Primary Documents[x]

Dr. John Andrew Morrow (Imam Ilyas ‘Abd al-‘Alim Islam) is a Métis Canadian Muslim scholar who embraced Islam over thirty years ago at the age of sixteen. He has studied the Islamic sciences for over three decades at the hands of both traditional Muslim scholars as well as Western academics. He completed post-doctoral studies in Arabic in Fez and Rabat and considers Morocco to be his second home. He worked as a university professor for two decades, retiring from teaching after reaching the rank of Full Professor. He has authored a vast body of work, including over one hundred academic articles and thirty scholarly books.[xi]
Intrigued by early Muslim-Christian cooperation, John discovered it was based on a number of the Prophet Mohammad’s early agreements with Christian communities. One such Covenant, with the Christians of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, had been known in Tsarist Russia. But in the atheist USSR, historical record of Muslim-Christian cooperation became a non-issue. Agreeing with John that anti-Christian attitudes of Islamist extremists, such as the ISIL (Daesh), do not reflect the mainstream Muslim tradition, I translated John’s booklet to Russian and had it posted on a Russian site.[xii] Later my friend from Azerbaijan had it translated into Azeri.

Diverse authors and publications: 
*--On Thursday March 28, Dan Lieberman, a good friend of mine for many years, a journalist, playwright, and, sometimes, a tennis partner, treated me with lunch downtown Washington. Dan is a tireless publisher of Alternative Insight.  And “Alternative” it really is! Dan never fails to challenge US policy toward Russia, as well as its subservience to Israel’s interests in the Middle East. This time he was especially upset with The New York Times publishing an Oct. 19, 2018 article by Adam Goldman, "Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections," which Dan finds erroneous. His attitude to the Mainstream media is articulated in his article The Media is the Mischief
 
*--My Californian son-in-law Sammy presented to me Thomas Cowan’s book, Human Heart, Cosmic Heart: A Doctor’s Quest to Understand, Treat, and Prevent Cardiovascular Disease. [xiii]I read the book on the Aeroflot flight back to Moscow.  I find Dr. Cowan’s argument compelling, especially since it is buttressed not just with careful medical research, but also with the anthroposophist philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) with its holistic approach to all sources of knowledge: heart, blain, and soul.  

*--John, my lawyer, whom I have known since mid-1990s when he registered RAGA.org, has always delighted me with his broad interest in Russian arts, ballet, music, and architecture. During a coffee break with him I was pleasantly surprised that it was he who emailed to me Gary Saul Morson’s profound review article about Solzhenitsyn that made me so happy on the first day in America. It seems, the academic establishment here begins to recognized that by writing The Red Wheel, (including March 1917), Solzhenitsyn created a credible non-Communist version of Russian history distinct from both Russophobic and pro-Marxist mainstreams. 

*--Another associate from Solzhenitsyn’s Vermont Conference suggested I read a book on russophobia by a Swiss journalist. I am happy to recommend it to all RAGA readers: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria by Guy Mettan.[xiv] “Why do the USA, UK and Europe so hate Russia?” wonders the book seller rephrasing Mr. Mettan. “How it is that Western antipathy, once thought due to anti-Communism, could be so easily revived over a crisis in distant Ukraine, against a Russia no longer communist? Why does the West accuse Russia of empire-building, when 15 states once part of the defunct Warsaw Pact are now part of NATO, and NATO troops now flank Russian borders ...”

        It is one thing when a Russian like me or Putin complains about russophobia, but to hear it from outstanding journalist in Switzerland, the oldest republic in Europe, known for its neutrality and tri-lingual peaceful co-existence is a lesson to all who aspire to a membership in a civilized world, and that includes Ukraine!
 
*--An exceptional book from Eastern Europe is GRAND DECEPTION: The Killing of William Browder” by Alex Krainer. Alas, it is NOT carried by the foremost book-seller in the world, Amazon.com. As Krainer explains, “My book, published only last month (August 2017), was starting to get some traction and in its first four weeks gained very positive reviews from readers (seven 5-star reviews and one 4-star review). That’s when Browder’s legal counsel Jonathan M. Winer stepped in. He contacted CreateSpace and demanded that my book be delisted alleging that it contained defamatory content. CreateSpace promptly obliged, suppressing the book and instructing me that I needed to, “work with the disputing party until a resolution is reached.” [xv]

       Now Krainer’s book Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax may be purchased here.[xvi] The book seller explains: “Suppressed and banned by the CIA's supplier, Amazon, “The Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax” is a highly intelligent, frank and entertaining take-down of one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the US public and the world – The Magnitsky Act. Krainer’s study of Bill Browder’s book and actions is a riveting, unflinching expose of one of this decade’s big hoaxes.”

   If Mettan is a neutral Swiss, Krainer hails from Monte Carlo, Monaco. Moreover, born in Rijeka, Croatia, he is supposed to be hostile to Russia. But he is not because he is belongs to The Truth Alliance and proudly proclaims: “We aim to inspire public debate and open minds for a dialogue. We reject false “truths” telling that we need to be afraid and “protected” and that the “other” needs to be demonized and, ultimately, killed or otherwise destroyed. We reject lies and propaganda for those who deny us our own dignity and our own humanity.”

     It is easy to see in this a challenge to the New World Order, more specifically, to “The New American Century” proclaimed by the Neo-Cons in 1996. I hope this challenge will be sustained by, first and foremost, the peoples of Eastern Europe who, like the peoples of Russia, have carried the main brunt of Communist totalitarianism. Most appropriately, Krainer quotes Václav Havel, the dissident Czech writer who went to the office of president virtually straight from his prison cell.  “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed — be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable.” Not for nothing, Havel was called a “Czech Solzhenitsyn”. “The catastrophe” Havel feared is now even more imminent than in his time and it can hardly be avoided without Alex Krainer’s The Truth Alliance as long as  the US and its European allies vilify Russia.
 
There was a disappointment on my trip too. Next day after my arrival at Washington on March 25, Benjamin Netanyahu was to speak at the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) meeting at the Walter E Washington Convention Center. The JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), of which I am a non-Jewish member, called for a rally to protest against Netanyahu’s belligerent and uncompromising attitude toward Palestinians. 

At least, since Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s 2007 book The Israeli Lobby and the US Foreign Policy, I have been acutely aware of the problem. That’s why some years ago I joined the JVP as a genuine pro-peace human rights organization favoring a compromise between the Jews and Palestinians in Israel and elsewhere. I have admired JVP’s Non-Violent tactics, including participation in BDS actions against Israel across the USA. This time I responded to JVP’s call to protest against Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington as I hoped to meet JVP Washington area members. However, I saw none: either I was a bit late or they called off the protest as Netanyahu failed to appear sending instead a youTube pep talk. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called Netanyahu's pep talk “a knife in the heart of the U.S.-Israel relations”.[xvii]
 
Well, my disappointment was soon compensated by JVP appeal to Madonna to cancel her appearance at Eurovision contest to be held next month in Israel. As the JVP newsletter says, “...Israel shouldn’t even be hosting Eurovision in the first place. The core values of the contest – inclusion, diversity and unity – are the polar opposite of Israel’s unequal laws, apartheid roads and numerous human rights violations.”
Choose Freedom: Boycott Eurovision, Madonna!

[i]  http://janinewedel.info/collisionreview_ForgnServ.html
[ii] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/obama-s-perestroika-challenge-us-russia/
[iii] http://www.raga.org/news/to-mr-barack-obama-potus
[iv] https://www.labirint.ru/books/438669/)
[v]  Lyubimov http://www.pvlast.ru/glavred/
[vi] Krasnow vs Pipes Debate  https://www.jstor.org/stable/128605?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Also The Russian Review vol.38, no.2, 1979; also the Encounter (April 1980).
[vii] See Weber’s article “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime. Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism.” http://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__the-jewish-role-in-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-russias-early-soviet-regime/ 
[viii] See his “The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath,” 8/27/2018.
[ix] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3400147-the-origins-of-totalitarian-democracy
[x] Morrow’s book https://www.amazon.com/Covenants-Prophet-Muhammad-Christians-Time-ebook/dp/B00VTWYERS
[xi] https://www.islamicity.org/by/john-andrew-morrow/
[xii] https://books.google.ru/books?isbn=1527509672
[xiii] Thomas Cowan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30006169-human-heart-cosmic-heart
[xiv] Guy Mettan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34237648-creating-russophobia
[xv] https://thirdalliance.ch/krainers-take-amazon-ban/
[xvi] Alex Krainer https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JabbaQ Price: $14.99 USD. Words: 79,970. Language: English. Published: September 2018. 
[xvii] Dana Milbank https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-republicans-chutzpah-at-aipac/2019/03/26/21c12356-4fff-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html

The JVP is not alone in defending Palestinian rights in Israel, and – the right of free speech guaranteed to Americans by the First Amendment.

“Why So Much Fuss About A Conference In North Carolina?”
APRIL 24, 2019  By LARA FRIEDMAN

The attacks on the UNC-Duke conference—alongside continuing efforts to pass laws defining criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism—demonstrate that, although the president clearly has something else in mind when he talks about protecting free speech on campus, the truth is that campus free speech, when it comes to Israel, is very much under attack today—by those who want to shut down all criticism of Israel.[i]

About Julian Assange’s predicament
The best comment on Julian Assange’s dangerous predicament was by Caitlin Johnstone, “The Prosecution of Julian Assange Is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange” Caitlin Johnstone Tue, Apr 23, 2019

'They’re trying to win this fight against Assange in brutal fashion to ensure that they win all future fights as well'

Caitlin adds… “The other day I published a massive mega-article attacking the major smears about Assange I’ve encountered. There are 27 of them in total so far, and I’ll be adding more soon. This mountain of smears exists because instead of paying attention to the world-shaping dangers I just outlined which threaten to make it impossible to oppose the leaders of the US-centralized empire who are marching us towards either extinction or dystopia, people are babbling about Assange’s personality, or whether or not he cleaned up after his cat while at the embassy.” [ii]

Personally, I cannot add much about the Assange case to what I have already said about Ed Snowden.  To Defect or to Integrate? The USA vs Edward Snowden.[iii] Unless the US learns to integrate peaceful dissent and welcome dissidents to open public dialogue, it will disintegrate and go the way of the USSR.

The Notre Dame Cathedral and Russia
Then there was the Notre Dame Chathedral fire. It may need some time before we could put it in a proper perspective. The best comment I have seen so far was by Charles Mills who writes for the same conservative, but not dogmatic site Fitsgeral Griffin Foundation, where I also write.  “The blood of martyrs is still there to water Paris, but it will not do so as long as official and Paris-run France persists in glorifying Bastille Day, the Tricolor, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and the Marseilles as national symbols, not as symbols of the Terror”, writes my FGF colleague. Read Notre Dame de Paris by Charles G.  Mills.[iv]

Although I am not as “Catholic” as Charles is, and am not as familiar with French history, I see his point as I do know that the French Revolution inspired the October Revolution in Russia where the Bolsheviks tried hard to surpass the French Revolutionary in their anti-clerical and anti-Christian fervor.

In 1931, led by Lazar Kaganovich (1893-1991), one of Stalin’s Jewish henchmen, the Bolsheviks blew up the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the largest church building in Moscow. In a tragic irony of history, this Cathedral had been erected as a sacred memorial to the defeat of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812.  Napoleon’s aggressions against the established order of Europe were born out of the God-fighting spirit of the French Revolution whose ideals of Equality, Brotherhood, and Liberty Napoleon also betrayed.

Remarkably, one of the first major construction projects in Moscow after the fall of the atheist USSR was rebuilding the destroyed and desecrated Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This was not an easy task because the previous building was not just destroyed, but its foundation was dug out to make a huge public swimming pool under open sky. One way or another, currently the Cathedral serves as the spiritual center for all of Russia where the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church presides over the liturgy during major events of Russian religious history.

It appears then that, after having suffered the greatest persecution of Christians since Nero, Russia rebounded and restored its spiritual health while retaining a secular state with freedom of conscience for denominations. The question is whether France and other countries of Europe can successfully guard and preserve the spiritual heritage of Western civilization without taking into account Russia’s newly gained spiritual experience?

[i] Lara Friedman https://lobelog.com/why-so-much-fuss-about-a-conference-in-north-carolina/#more-48412
[ii] Caitlin Johnstone https://russia-insider.com/en/prosecution-julian-assange-infinitely-bigger-assange/ri26841
[iii] Krasnow http://www.raga.org/news/to-defect-or-to-integrate-the-usa-vs-edward-snowden
[iv] Charles Mills http://fgfbooks.com/Mills-Charles/2019/Mills190419.html
​

Presidential election in Ukraine
Can Zelensky Make Ukraine Great Again? April 22, 2019

Is the ouster of Petro Poroshenko a turning point in Ukraine's crisis or just another disappointment? By Nikolas K. Gvosdev.[i]

  Outgoing Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is to be commended for presiding over an election that was generally free and fair and, more importantly, in accepting the outcome. Privately, however, he may be breathing a sigh of relief that he will not have to take responsibility for some of the major decisions Ukraine is facing—decisions which will prove to be difficult and unpopular.

 His successor, comedian Volodomyr Zelensky, fits squarely in the mold of anti-establishment populist candidates who have been winning elections all throughout Europe—and his attractiveness as a presidential candidate for having played one on television carries echoes of how Donald Trump’s public persona in The Apprentice likewise helped to boost his presidential prospects.

...Zelensky is going to find he won’t have much of a honeymoon—either within Ukraine or with Ukraine’s main foreign partners and its key rival. How much leeway he will get remains to be seen—and it is way too premature to determine whether his election marks a turning point in Ukraine's crisis or another disappointment.

Nikolas Gvosdev is professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College and the former Editor of the bi-monthly foreign policy journal, The National Interest. Wikipedia

US decision on Golan Heights violates UN Security Council resolutions – Putin. Published 8-04-2019

 The US’ decision to recognize Tel Aviv's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights region violates UN Security Council resolutions – a position that Moscow has already made clear, Russia's president said.

The US’ decision to recognize Tel Aviv's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights region violates UN Security Council resolutions – a position that Moscow has already made clear, Russia's president said.[ii]

The Orchestration of Russiaphobia Is The Prelude To War.
April 22, 2019 | By Paul Craig Roberts

…The Russian government’s naive and gullible response to Washington played into Washington’s hands. By responding to Washington’s orchestrated Russiaphobia as if it were some kind of mistake based on bad information, the Russian government allowed Washington to keep the process of demonization alive and thereby contributed to the ongoing demonization of Russia. If, instead, the Russian government had denounced the demonization of Russia as Washington’s act of preparing Americans for war with Russia and had taken a belligerent rather than a complaining stance, the realization that Washington’s policy had serious cost would have spread throughout the US and Europe and voices would have arisen against Washington’s dangerous and reckless policy. Today in place of the uniformity of voice against Russia, there would be dissent opposing Washington’s irresponsible provocations.[iii]

RUSSIA’s KULTURA TV channel
The most significant event in Russia right now is on a state supported KULTURA TV channel. It is a multiple one-hour series program called Propovedniki (Evangelists).[iv]

It is about the suppression of dissent in the USSR and Soviet bloc countries within the officially allowed but unofficially controlled and abused Christian Orthodox Church. So far I have seen four documentary programs: about Archpriest Alexander Men, Professor Sergey Averintsev, Archpriest Paul Adelheim, and Metropolitan (of the Orthodox Church in Montenegro) Amphilohie (Radovich).

The three Russians were not political dissidents, but they held the light of spirituality alive in a country where Marxist-Leninist materialism was the ruling ideology. Archpriest Men helped hundreds of Soviet intellectuals return to Christianity by preaching and writing books distributed by samizdat in overseas editions. He also helped Alexander Solzhenitsyn hide a GULAG manuscript. However, in 1990 he was assassinated, and his assassin was never found. Archpriest Pavel Adelheim himself spent three years in the GULAG camp where one of his legs had to be amputated due to abuse by the guards. He was assassinated in 2013 by a lunatic who came to him for a “cure”. Sergei Averintsev was university professor and a world authority on Byzantine, but secretly he served as a reader in a parish that attracted many Soviet intellectuals.

Metropolitan Amphilohije started his spiritual assent in Communist (and officially atheist) Yugoslavia. He studied in several seminaries abroad. Once when he was in Greece he met Solzhenitsyn whom he awarded a special personal cross for his devotion to truth. Metropolitan Amphilohije still devotes his mission to the unity of Slavic and non-Western peoples against the encroachments of the materialistic West. See his extensive interview THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IS STANDING IN THE WAY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER. [v]

There are more documentaries about modern evangelists to be shown on Russian TV channels for there were many martyrs in the USSR who held the hope for Russia’s rebirth alive. However, Russian TV channel is secular and does not engage in religious proselytizing. It has been running a number of programs devoted to the remembrance of the events of Russian history that were distorted or silenced during the Soviet period. A number of programs are devoted to cultural achievements and events—in arts, music, movies, and theater--in all countries in the world, from Japan and China to ancient Egypt and modern Europe. In view of Western sanctions against Russia, the current emphasis on strengthening cultural ties with Asian countries, especially India, is understandable. TV Channel Kultura, for instance, has run for several months an Indian production of the ancient Indian epic “Sita and Rama”.

Russia’s Outreach to India—and the World
Not all efforts to strengthen cultural ties with foreign counries, especially non-allied countries of the East, are sponsored by the government. Dr. Leo Semashko of St. Petersburg, a peace activist, has created Global Harmony Association (GHA) 15 years ago entirely on his own. Now he is an Honorary President because he entrusted the leadership to its current President Dr. Subhash Chandra of India. But Leo remains active, always trying to build a global outreach. On the GHA’s masthead there are the winners of Nobel Peace Prize Dr. John Avery of Denmark and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland, GHA Vice-Presidents Susana Roberts of Argentine, Surendra Pathak of India, Delasnieve Daspet of Brazil ; and Ayo Amale, GHA Africa President.[vi]

A couple of years ago Leo, upon reading some of RAGA Antidote newsletters, Leo invited me to join the Global Association which  I gladly did. No doubt, similarity of our backgrounds helped. I graduated from Moscow State University in history; he went to graduate school in philosophy of the same university. Both of us got fed up with Marxism-Leninism and became dissidents. Both of us have felt a great attraction to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of Non-Violence. When the GHA president declared the year of 2019 “Gandhi World Year”, Leo invited me to submit something to honor Gandhi’s 150th anniversary. Which I did, by writing Mahatma Gandhi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Two Giants Who Blessed the 20th Century.[vii] Learning of my participation in the Vermont conference on Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary in Spetember 2018, the GHA site posted also my article “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today”.[viii]

Yesterday, April 26, 2019 I went to the English Language Club of Moscow to hear the lecture by  Dr. Leena Sareen of India about Economic Development of India. She teaches Theory of Intercultural Communication at the Department of Psychology of Moscow Region State University  and has 10 years of experience in multinational companies as a coordinator between Russia and India. It was interesting to learn that out of India’s 1,364 million people  666 million use the internet, and 126 million of them use English. Now I am even more proud that some of my articles found their way on the site of my email pal and friend Sandhya Jain.[ix]

HAPPY EASTER GREETING--from Bethlehem, Palestine
In conclusion I am glad to transmit a HAPPY EASTER GREETING from Bethlehem, Palestine. It is authored by Dr. who describes himself as follows
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://palestinenature.org

I have been receiving Mazin’s elucidating newsletter for quite some time and pasted them on my FB page. A Christian Palestinian of mixed origin, he celebrates Easter twice, according to both Gregorian (as in the USA) and Julian (as in Russia) calendar. In 2014 I was fortunate to visited Israel/Palestine on a Russian Orthodox pilgrimage tour, and seeing Bethlehem was one of the highlights.

There is no need to relate Dr. Qumsiyeh’s whole letter. You could read it by clicking the links. But the few lines describing the Easter Hope of the Palestinian people are in order:

We aspire to a certain future when refugees are allowed to return and all people of all religions live in equality and justice. Jerusalem/Bethlehem will then become a true light unto the world. We are grateful that there has been tremendous growth of actions by civil society around the world to push for human rights and justice in this “Holy Land”.  This has included some really significant actions for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) from Israel in the same way we did with Apartheid South Africa. Palestine will rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. We believe indeed in a resurrection!

Reading these lines, remember how in 1974, after being thrown out of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn predicted that he and his books will return to a free Russia. My American colleagues did not take him seriously and some thought he was mad. Was it because they did not believe in a Resurrection?               END

[i]  Nicholas Gvosdev https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-zelensky-make-ukraine-great-again-53677
[ii] http://us-russia.org/6130-us-decision-on-golan-heights-violates-un-security-council-resolutions-putin.html
[iii] https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/04/22/the-orchestration-of-russiaphobia-is-the-prelude-to-war/
[iv] Evangelists https://tvkultura.ru/brand/show/brand_id/62714/
[v] https://pravoslavie.ru/81604.html
[vi] Global Harmony Association https://www.peacefromharmony.org/
[vii] Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=884
[viii] Krasnov, “Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today” https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=864
[ix] http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4040

​Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

Peace and Justice to the World. 
миру мир и благоволение в сердцах

 From RAGA site:
"We are an association of Americans who believe it is in the U.S. national interests to foster friendship with Russia on the basis of mutual Good Will and non-interference in each other's affairs. RAGA is a gathering of people who share common interests in Russia's history, culture, religion, economy, politics and the way of life. We feel that Russian people have made outstanding contributions to humankind and are capable of greater achievements. We envision Russia as a strong, independent, proud and free nation and as a partner in achieving peace in the world."

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​Mon Apr 09, 2018 3:29 pm
​
Well the time is approaching, coming close to zero hour. I'm on round two of trying to obtain my Russian visa, first time shot down due to minor technicalities. Sooo, hopefully, by the 17th or so I should have it in hand and will be on my way to SVO. A couple days in Moscow, maybe a side-trip to St Pete then down to Rostov for the trip to Donetsk. Russell Bentley has agreed to meet us at the border to help me get in, my friend Sergey should have no problem since he is Russian. May be a bit of an ordeal for me. We are looking at 2-3 days there to do some documentation that we plan to put on Sergey's channel on YouTube (Real Russia Channel).

Seems like we are on the verge of WW3 with the Zionist republicrats spoiling for war with Russia. I am embarrassed and ashamed to be an American. What a horrible time.

​Fri May 18, 2018 12:48 pm

Okay, just got back from 23 days in Russia and had a very successful trip which included meeting Russell Bentley in Donetsk and Vladislav in Moscow! Really, all want very well considering how many chances there were for things to go wrong. I would have never gotten into DPR had it not been for the help of Russell Bentley BTW. Had long conversations with FSB both going in and coming back out. Luckily, I had been pre-cleared going in or else I never would have made it. We made several good videos which I'll include here:

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Vladimir Putin's Holds Direct Line Q&A Session

​"Yes, every country has its own interests, but they should not be advanced via egotistical political methods," Putin said, adding that many of Russia’s partners are beginning to realize this.

"We need to sit at the negotiating table and not just contemplate but actually develop contemporary, up-to-date mechanisms of international and European security," he said.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/russia/201806071065184890-putin-direct-line-hightlights

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

"Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the country's parliament, speaking about Russia's success in the defense sector, relations with the US and NATO, social and economic development of the country, as well as Moscow's plans concerning the technological advance in big data, AI and cryptocurrency."

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201803011062103713-putin-address-federal-assembly/​

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Following his cautionary analysis on the increasing tension between the US/NATO and Russia, Chris interview Dmitry Orlov this week about the potential likelihood for actual direct conflict to break out between the world powers.

Orlov was born and raised in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States in the mid 70s, He has spent the past several decades traveling back and forth between the two countries, writing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the many similarities he sees between that and the secular decline happening in the West. Orlov recently co-authored a stark warning with a number of other experts on Russia, concerned that the US is recklessly provoking a military confrontation it cannot win:

Article first published on RUSSIA-INSIDER.com
[ http://russia-insider.com/en/its-time-drop-jew-taboo/ri22186 ]   

Russia Insider published a long profile of him and his work in 2016. Much of his work, both paintings and books, dealt extensively with the Jewish role in Russian history.

​1. Introduction

Most people know about, but few are willing to condemn, the strict taboo in the media, of criticizing Jews as a group, using that term. One cannot even criticize a small subsection of Jews, a miniscule percentage of the Jewish population, even when they richly deserve it.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous way to run a publication whose object is to get to the truth, so I am writing this to explain why, from now on, the pages of Russia Insider will be open to articles which fairly and honestly address the influence of Jewish elites, including pointing out when it is malevolent, which it often is, and try to understand it and explain it, with malice towards none.

I have become convinced that unless we break this taboo, nothing will improve in the human catastrophe unfolding in geopolitics. Millions have died over the past 30 years, and if we want it to stop that trend and avoid a cataclysm which seems to be approaching inexorably, we have to have the freedom to criticize those responsible. It is very clear to me, as it is to many others, that much of the guilt for this comes from Jewish pressure groups, particularly in the media.

I can see as an editor, that much of what is written about geopolitics in the ‘public square,’ admirable though it may be in other respects, makes itself irrelevant by tiptoeing around this crucial issue.

I am a newcomer to the media world, unexpectedly thrust three years ago into the role of owner, publisher and editor of this fairly widely-read publication. We get about 10 million visits per month across all of our platforms from a sophisticated audience, and we are widely followed by so-called 'influencers.' We've made a big mark in a short time, and we did it by saying what others were not willing to say. Many subjects which we were the first to speak about on a major platform have now entered the mainstream.

Russia Insider is a grassroots phenomenon, and sometimes resembles a political movement as much as it does a publication. We exist solely because of small donations from readers. We get no funding from major donors, not to mention governments, foundations, or other organized groups. It is all private individuals. Our single largest donation over the past year was $5000, and the median gift is $30. We raised about $80,000 last year. This gives us the freedom to pretty much say what we want, something that can be said of very few publications, even in the alternative media space, most of whom are beholden to large donors.

I see every day how one can influence the public agenda by addressing or ignoring certain topics. One really can make a difference, and I have tried to have a positive impact, as I understand it. It has been a remarkable education in the power of the media, even of our relatively small Russia Insider.

But this taboo is the great exception. It really is quite extraordinary to realize that you can publish about just about anything, except that. As I said, just about everyone knows about the taboo, and I did too in my previous career in business, but it is another thing altogether to enforce it — which I felt, until recently, compelled to do — and to have your nose rubbed in it every day when trying to make sense of world events.

2. The euphemisms

Some try to skirt the taboo with euphemisms. A veritable cottage industry has emerged, ever inventing new ones. Indeed, this is the new trend in the alt-media. We hear a lot about 'Zionists,' 'elites,' 'global elites,' 'globalists,' 'neocons,' 'liberal interventionists,' 'the war party,' 'the Israel lobby,' 'the deep state,' 'bankers,' 'new world order' (I've never understood what that is, actually), 'Bilderbergers' — sounds like a nice man from a central-European fairytale. My friend the Saker goes with 'Anglozionists.'

But none of these terms work, do they? They all obscure the issue, actually enhancing the taboo’s inherent deceit.

Zionists? Really? I've never heard anyone describe themselves this way, or even other people describe them - 'Have you meet Max?, he's an enthusiastic Zionist!' I've never seen it mentioned as an interest in a social media profile (perhaps Facebook should include it as an Emoticon). Maybe Rachel Maddow IS a Zionist, what do I know, although as far as I understand, Zionism was a political movement that lost its urgency once the state of Israel was well on its merry way. Elites? Well, no, I would reckon many Jews are elites, but more Jews are not, and more elites are non-Jews, so no, that doesn't work. Well, you get the idea. These are attempts to slip past the ever-zealous censor, and they serve to maintain the confusion and deception.

No, the only trait that these people have in common is their Jewish heritage. Some are liberals, some are conservatives. Some are religious, some are not. Some are mixed Jewish heritage, some are not. Some care about Israel, some do not. Some support Israel others criticize her. They are politicians, journalists, academics, comedians, actors, or, businessmen. Some stem from Western Europe, others from Eastern Europe, and others from the Middle East.

3. Hostility to Putin's Russia is largely
a Jewish phenomenon

Russia Insider's mission is to explain and describe Russia and her role in the world. As soon as you begin to drill into how other nations relate to Russia, and Russian history, it becomes obvious that the unreasonable hostility towards Putin's Russia, particularly coming from the US and the UK, is very much a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries.

And yes, 'Jewish' is the only term that accurately describes it, and not one of the many euphemisms we frequently see used.

The most vitriolic and obsessive Russia-bashing journalists in the media are mostly Jewish. The publications which push these writers most energetically are ALL Jewish-owned, and as a publisher, I know very well, that is where the buck stops.

On the policy side, the neo-conservative movement, Russia's harshest foe, was conceived of, is led by, and consists mostly of, Jews. And their trouble-making extends far beyond Russia - they are responsible for America's disastrous debacle in the Middle East over the last 20 years - where their crimes have been stymied by precisely one country - Russia. The psychotically anti-Russian recent UN ambassadors, Nikki Haley and Samantha Power, were put there by the Israel lobby, and given an independent brief, in other words, they answer not to their presidents, rather to their Jewish sponsors.

In Congress the biggest Russia-Gate tub-thumpers are noticeably Jewish - Schiff, Schumer, Cardin, Blumenthal, Franken (although not as overwhelmingly as in the media). The Israel lobby routinely enforces legislation hostile to Russia. Bill Browder with his Magnitsky Sanctions - is Jewish.

4. The media

But let's talk about the media - for this is where the real power lies. All other levers and branches of government pale in comparison when it comes to real political influence.

At the two leading newspapers of the land, the New York Times and The Washington Post, both very Jewish in ownership, editors, and staff, have been waging an all-out jihad against Putin's Russia, and are guilty of the most grotesque dishonesty, slander and journalistic malpractice - exhaustively catalogued by one of the most authoritative and admired veteran journalists in America, Robert Parry, winner of the Polk award, among other accolades. You can see an archive of his extraordinary work criticizing these two publications, particularly in relation to Russia, here [ https://consortiumnews.com/tag/robert-parry/ ]. Trump and his supporters are up in arms about these two papers' serial mendacity about him both before and after his election - well they have been doing the same with Putin and Russia for a good 18 years now, and gone much further in their dishonesty, hard as that might be to believe.

PBS, with its lily-white image as purveyor of Masterpiece Theater and other highbrow offerings, is wholly dependent on donations from wealthy Jews. Like some Gentile starlet submitting to Harvey Weinstein, that station has allowed itself to be used, churning out a relentless stream of the most ridiculous anti-Putin propaganda that would be funny if it wasn't so effective among the gray-haired, non-flyover denizens of America, and their deep pocketbooks. CNN, a deeply Jewish company, has been pushing Russiagate like a religion, to the point where their brand has suffered severe damage.

Rachel Maddow, the nation's most popular and influential liberal political show host is Jewish. She has gone so overboard demonizing Russia and pushing Russiagate that she has become a figure of fun. On the print side, the list is the same - the ones shrieking the loudest are mostly Jews, and disproportionately female - and there is an important lesson there too - Masha Gessen, Anne Applebaum, and Julia loffe, to name a few.

The refrain from the male chorus is no less strident. David Remnick, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer. Even comedy news hates Russia - John Oliver, Jon Stewart (previously), Bill Maher, all Jews, go to great efforts to convince Americans that Putin's Russia is, quite literally - and this term is frequently used - 'Hitlerian.'

Jewish-owned high brow magazines have been leading the charge against Putin - the Newhouse's New Yorker, the NY Review of Books (the management of this venerable magazine is obsessed with the subject). The New Republic, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and the Rothschild-owned Economist pump out story after story full of what can only be called lies, in a massive campaign to demonize Russia and Putin.

Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, and Michael Weiss, the neocon firebrand whose website, The Interpreter,  is funded by the exiled Jewish oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are two more prominent figures in this phenomenon.

The Economist deserves special mention with Ed Lucas leading the charge (previously), (he is the great nephew of Charles Portal, allegedly Jewish [1] chief of the air staff in Britain during WW2 who was allegedly a relentless proponent of fire-bombing German civilians and is thought to be [2] behind the burning of Dresden). I suppose having a purported war criminal in the family means never having to say you are sorry. Equally vitriolic are the writings of Ben Judah and his father, Tim.

But to draw attention to all this, or to investigate whether there is something about their Jewishness that makes them so hostile to Russia, is simply, verboten. Inevitably, when I point out this overwhelming ethnic imbalance, people say, well what about the many critics of the hostility to Russia who are Jewish? – the eminently admirable Glenn Greenwald is a prominent example, and there are many others. The answer is, that the exception to a trend doesn’t disprove it, and can often serve to mask it.

[1]https://beam-truth.livejournal.com/667584.html
[2]http://blacksun666.ucoz.ru/publ/real_holocaust/vsesozhzhenie_nemeckikh_starikov_zhenshhin_i_detej_realnyj_kholokost_3/3-1-0-18

5. A de facto violation of free speech

The truth is, that in a nation which frantically pats itself on the shoulder for enshrining ‘free speech’ in its national credo, and ceaselessly lectures others on the subject with pompous sanctimony, speech is not de facto free on this crucial and world-threatening subject, a remarkable, and dangerous, state of affairs. I will not be clapped into prison for publishing this article, but the taboo works like a charm to keep the topic out of public discussion. Who needs repressive laws when you can con people into censoring themselves? In Germany, the dominant power in Europe, and in other European countries, I could be locked up for it – another shocking thought, for this son of Germany.

The Jewish dominance of the Russia-bashing phenomenon is far more extensive than I can convey in a couple of short paragraphs, and I urge someone to do this in a more systematic way. I will be happy to publish it.

6. Shutting down an honest examination of Russian history

One of the most spectacular aspects of the taboo is how it whitewashes one of the most extraordinary events in the history of mankind, the Russian revolution.

Many White Russians fleeing the revolution believed that it was mostly a Jewish coup d’etat, financed by wealthy bankers in New York and London who were sworn enemies of Christian Tsarism. Indeed there is strong evidence to suggest that this is true. This view argues that the terror visited on Russia during the civil war and its aftermath, continuing well into the Stalin years, for he could not really control it either, was a Jewish one. Cursory evidence also suggests that this is so, if only because so much of the Bolshevik leadership was Jewish, in particular, Trotsky, but also many other vicious personalities, especially in the secret police which so terrorized the Russian people.

Henry Ford was heavily influenced by this view, which he heard from Russian emigres, augmenting his anti-semitism, and it has been well-documented [1] by liberal mainstream historians that the German National Socialist movement became radically more anti-semitic in reaction to this interpretation, which they adopted, strongly influenced by an influx of White Russians finding refuge in Europe. But one doesn’t hear a whisper about all this in mainstream historical articles, even to debunk it, presumably because someone might have their ‘feelings’ hurt.

This all reverberates to this day. The virulent and entrenched anti-semitism in today’s Ukraine is a direct heir of this White Russian view. This is because the Nazis had long-standing subversive programs implemented by their White Russian allies inside Ukraine and the Baltics, which were heavily German in ethnicity. The famines of the 30s increased the sentiment. When Hitler invaded, this work paid off magnificently, and Western Ukraine enthusiastically welcomed him and fought with his armies, as did many in the Baltics. After the war, German intelligence, in return for clemency, traded this network to the CIA, which continued the program to destabilize the USSR, and these programs, representing significant financial and institutional support continued right through the cold war, and into the present day.

What happened in 2014 in the Ukraine had a 100-year provenance, and is inextricably linked to alleged Jewish culpability for the revolution. But for all the gallons of ink spilled about the events of 2014, this crucial background is left largely undiscussed, even in the alternative media (I of all people, can attest to this).

Such is the reach and devastating effect of this taboo.

The enormity of the omission is mind-boggling. The suffering of the Russian people in the decades after the revolution was extraordinary – and here there is little agreement – modern revisionists insist that the revolution and its aftermath claimed perhaps 2 million victims, others say it reached into the 10s of millions. And it is not just the number of people, but the way it was carried out – families ripped apart, fathers hauled off in the middle of the night, churches blown up, priests tortured and subjected to ritual murder, phony confessions beaten out of innocents, summary executions without trial, an enforced culture of snitching, millions sent to slave labor camps – a nation was held in terror for decades, traumatized to this day. If there is even the slightest suspicion that this was in essence, a Jewish pogrom against ethnic Russians, surely it deserves some public examination.

But no, it seems people think observing the taboo is more important.

We try on Russia Insider to give exposure to this view of events, which I believe deserves a hearing – I am not enough of an expert to say whether it is correct - but so effective is the taboo, that there is little of quality available. There is a very substantial body of work available about this in Russian, most of it written since the fall of Communism, - in contrast to the West, this is a widely discussed view inside Russia – so the heavy lifting has been done – it just needs to be rendered into English.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Roots-Nazism-Socialism-1917-1945/dp/0521070058/

7. The best alt-media journalists are neutered

One of the things we do at RI is to scan the alternative media for what we think are the best articles about Russia, and republish them with a link to the original. We also keep an eye on what we think are the most dishonest articles - and critique them, and it is this comprehensive surveying of the writers and the publications that gives me such a strong understanding of the Jewishness of the hostility. The casual reader’s awareness of it may be anecdotal – I can assure you, it is more pronounced than people realize. When you read, catalog, analyze, track, and critique this river of thought 8 hours a day it becomes starkly obvious.

I am routinely and happily amazed by the fantastic writing about Russia, left, right, and center, in the alternative media, which comes from a most impressive cast of characters, the bulk of it about geopolitics. The intellectual heft and scholarship is extraordinary. Borrowing from this brilliance, we put out a deeper and more thorough analysis of things Russia-related than news organizations with 20 times our budget.

Some of these men are true heroes, speaking truth to power, fighting back against a system gone horribly wrong, brave, selfless, often sacrificing career and financial well-being - but there is one line they won't cross.

8. Much of what is written about Russian relations and history becomes meaningless and deceptive

Sadly, a lot of what they write, is, meaningless, and almost amounts to professional malpractice, because the Jewish push for confrontation with Russia is, by far, the most significant factor. Excluding it from a discussion of geopolitics is ignoring the elephant, not in the corner, rather the one dancing a Mazurka in the middle of the room. We should not forget that willful omission is a species of lying, and is recognized as such in a court of law, and this case is no different.

The omission is misleading, and sows endless confusion, for it compels writers to place blame where it does not really belong - the list of culprits is endless: 'Democrats,' Liberals,' sometimes it is 'America did this,' or 'Americans did that,' or it is Trump, or Obama, or Hillary, or Rex Tillerson, or John McCain, or the Military-Industrial-Complex, the Deep State, the Intelligence Community, and on and on. Yes, these individuals are complicit, (except ‘America,’ it is a ridiculous notion that we 350 million souls collectively agree on anything) but it is not their spineless treachery that is of prime importance, rather the powerful Jews in American politics and media who so easily compel them to dance to their tune.

9. A lesson in relevance from the Alt-Right

The Alt-Right is helpful in understanding Russia, because it has intellectual heft, and produces a lot of good writing about Russia and Russian relations, much of which is spot-on. We follow the Alt-Right media and republish the occasional article, and they are invariably very popular on Russia Insider – largely, I think, because they are offering a fresh point of view, and talking about vitally important issues others refuse to address.

The Alt-Right is a youth movement. Its leaders are mostly in their 30s, and the rank and file, which is large indeed, running, by some estimates, into the 10s of millions globally, seems to mostly range from mid-teens to mid-20s. Much of the Alt-Right has completely discarded this taboo and revels in flouting it, indeed, trampling on it, as is the wont of young people regarding the more tedious and preposterous conventions of every era.

It is axiomatic, I think, that one way youth benefits society, is that they question what the old men are saying - shake things up a bit, make them examine their assumptions. It is no coincidence that in the Emperor With No Clothes children’s story, it is a child who points out the obvious, what the adults are so desperately pretending not to see, because it will impair their material well-being.

Pointing out the pernicious effects of the influence of certain Jewish elites on many aspects of American and European society and politics, as the Alt-Right does, greatly assists in understanding how politics really work.

If you doubt this, then I highly recommend that you listen to a couple of episodes of the most popular Alt-Right podcasts, like Fash the Nation [1], or Richard Spencer’s Alt-Right Politics [2], easily accessible by smartphone. The Fash the Nation hosts are two Beltway policy wonks who sound like they are in their late 20s or early 30s, who spend a couple hours each week talking politics. In their analysis, when relevant, and not over-stating it, they point out when Jewish interests are at play, when politicians, journalists, lobbyists, publishers, publications, foundations, or their main funders, allies, spouses, and backers, are Jewish. The gang at Alt-Right Politics does the same. It becomes very clear what is intuitively obvious - that blotting out any mention of this hampers any serious discussion.

(For Fash the Nation, I recommend episodes with Marcus Halberstram, like this one [3], and for Alt Right Politics, the year-in-review episode [4] was a good one. The Fash the Nation hosts use obscenity on their show, which unfortunately detracts from their credibility, but don't be put off by it, put it up to youthful ignorance - they are worth listening to.)

By blowing up this taboo, the Alt-Right is making itself relevant, and those who cling to it, irrelevant. A taboo only works if it is universally observed - if a sizable number of people begin ignoring it, everyone else begins to look increasingly ridiculous. Liberals spend an inordinate amount of time wringing their hands about the Alt-Right. By refusing to openly and fairly discuss Jewish influence, they are handing them a powerful competitive advantage.

The Alt-Right is doing society a service by addressing an issue that urgently needs sunlight, and by providing an ecosystem of websites and podcasts where authors can be published and critiqued, and points argued back and forth. Much of the discussion of Jewish influence in the Alt-Right is very scholarly, fair and balanced, i.e. the work of Kevin MacDonald [5] or Michael Hoffman.

I believe the Alt-Right will continue to gain traction, simply because they intelligently discuss two sacred cows – the Jewish Question, and, closely linked to it, racial equality in terms of abilities, and the desirability of mixed-race societies. As long as they are addressing these two crucial issues, and no one else is, they will grow.

[1] http://fashthenation.com/category/fash-the-nation/
[2] https://altright.com/author/altrightpolitics/
[3] http://fashthenation.com/2018/01/fash-the-nation-104-shithole-sophistry/
[4] https://altright.com/2018/01/04/alt-right-politics-year-end-awards/
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Critique-Evolutionary-Twentieth-Century-Intellectual/dp/0759672229
[6] https://www.amazon.com/Judaisms-Strange-Gods-Revised-Expanded/dp/0970378483/

10. Malice towards none

Another pernicious effect of taboos is that they can lead to angry outbursts. When problems are not addressed, they tend to fester and worsen, until they become intolerable, and then there is sometimes a sudden and violent reaction. You can see this dynamic in the public discussion of the malevolent influence of Jewish elites. Some people, when they finally perceive its reach and harm, having been misled by people they admired and trusted, lash out in anger – a common reaction when you find out you’ve been deceived about something vitally important. This, I believe, is another reason to be rid of this taboo as soon as possible – it has a way of making things worse.

Obviously, this discussion should be done without any hatred or anger to Jews as a whole. The Jews who are causing the trouble – the ones at the pinnacles of political and media power, are a small group indeed. Anyone who has grown up with and knows Jews well, as I have, knows that they are like people everywhere - basically decent, and this has been my overwhelming personal experience. It is their elite institutions that for some reason are clearly malevolent, and this demands public examination, not the least by Jews themselves.

What I am calling for is criticizing the elites who have given their nation a very bad name, and figuring out why this pattern repeats itself throughout history.

11. The problem extends to all areas of public life

The ongoing sex scandals which grace our front pages seem to provide an exclamation point to the phenomenon. Across the board, from Hollywood to entertainment to media to Washington, the poor sods being called out by the screeching harpy mob tend towards a certain ethnicity, not to mention the leading men in the spectacle. For all the talk and blather and belly button contemplation that the drama is evoking, no one, outside the Alt-Right, mentions this obvious fact, for it would be impolite.

The problem seems to arise when Jews get into positions of influence, i.e., when they join the dreaded 'elites.' Then, for some reason, regardless of their political sympathies or other particulars, they get up to no good - and something goes seriously wrong. Maybe the powerful Jewish institutions - the media, the banks, the movie studios, the music industry, etc, are in the hands of degenerates who demand bad behavior as the price of admission, and then enforce it. I really don't know, but obviously, the question begs for an examination, as the evidence suggests that much of human enterprise dominated and shaped by Jews is a bottomless pit of trouble with a peculiar penchant for mendacity and cynicism, hostility to Christianity and Christian values, and in geopolitics, a clear bloodlust.

Hollywood and TV dramas? A completely Jewish-dominated industry, and a soulless spiral of depravity and cynicism, which only worsens with each passing year. Financial markets? - ditto - just watch the movies The Big Short or The Wolf of Wall Street for a particularly vivid illustration. Pop music and the rap nightmare? - ditto. The state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians? - more of the same. American foreign policy? - an unmitigated disaster which has murdered millions and squandered trillions over the last 30 years.

And I think 'murder' is the right word here - I think if you would ask the relatives of the 2 or so million Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis, East Ukrainians, or Serbs who died in the wars instigated by the largely Jewish-dictated US foreign policy over the past couple of decades, that they would back me up on that.

In each of these cases, one sees a tendency towards dishonesty. Indeed the whole 'Fake News' phenomenon, is fundamentally Jewish. It is the Jewish-owned American and European media which churn out an astonishing quantity of what can only be called lies.

12. We need serious scholarship and analysis

Yes, 1900 years after the exasperated Romans scattered the Hebrew tribes to the four winds, the 'JQ' is still a huge, messy, unsolved problem, and in our age, it is reaching yet another crisis. I can only speak with authority on a subject I know a lot about: Western foreign policy towards Russia, and the Jewish influence there, is nothing short of an extinction-level threat to the entire planet. I am sure experts in Middle Eastern politics would confirm something similar.
All this needs scholarship and serious inquiry, to finally get to the bottom of this ongoing tragedy, a tragedy for both Jew and Gentile alike. Some writers have made important inroads, like Kevin MacDonald, but much more needs to be done to understand the problem.

One serious writer, Michael Hoffman, in his book Judaism's Strange Gods [1], argues the problem is with modern Judaism, which has changed radically from the religion of the Old Testament, effectively hijacked by various Jewish sects such as the New Testament era Pharisees who inspire misanthropic behavior among elites. I really can't say, but it is precisely this kind of inquiry which is needed to figure out, as our president likes to say 'what the hell is going on.'

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Judaisms-Strange-Gods-Revised-Expanded/dp/0970378483/

13. Low expectations from the existing alt-media

I know that many writers and editors in the alt-media, and the alt-lite, privately agree with what I have written here, but we should not expect many of them to break the taboo anytime soon. The reason is that they mostly barely hang on financially, and often work for tiny wages, and any such change in editorial policy would knock out a certain part of their funding (not to mention some of their better authors), making their financial situation untenable. Some are beholden to foundations or governments who would pull support. The needed intellectual work is going to be done on the few platforms whose support base will tolerate it – and this will mostly be on the Alt-Right, or publications that can buck the tide, like Russia Insider.

14. A call for articles and support

I met strong resistance to the ideas expressed here from colleagues, staff and columnists who contribute to RI. I've discussed it at length with many of them. Some of the best writers on the site, and some of the most articulate critics of America's inane policy towards Russia, are Jewish. Some agree with me privately, but say that to do so publicly would so damage their careers that they cannot. Some do not agree.

Russia Insider depends heavily on reader contributions, and I suppose this will curtail donations from some, so if you agree with this article, then now would be a good time to click on the donate button.

Discussion of the Jewish problem (and 'problem' is the right word here) is obviously not going to be the focus of Russia Insider - we try to be primarily about Russia, but I am willing to give space to this issue, and not just as it relates to Russia. I invite all writers, including from the Alt-Right, to get in touch with me directly at charles@russia-insider.com with article ideas, proposals, or anything else, and yes, we will publish articles which use (((echoes))).

It is my great regret that we are not in a position to pay authors for articles. If anyone reading this is in a position to help provide funding to pay writers on this important subject, that would be helpful, because it immediately raises the quality and depth of the writing. If you are interested, please get in touch with me directly.

At the end of the day, I don't care whether other people agree with me on this or not, whether I lose or gain authors or donations, traffic or influence, or whether the big tech platforms try to hush us up (they are already actively doing so). I started this site in the Fall of 2014 to call out a terrible crime, a whopping lie being told, by the media, most vociferously by Jews in very influential Jewish-owned publications, (Andrew Kramer and the editorial board of the New York Times being the prime example) about the conflict in the Ukraine. I didn't see it as a Jewish problem then – I just knew it wasn’t true. I knew relatively little about Jewish influence at the time. But after three years of immersing myself in political analysis and media criticism, it is as plain as day that this is the case.

Russia Insider earned respect by doing our best to tell the truth, and calling out flagrant dishonesty in the media.
​
We're not about to stop now.

Article update: Here is an excellent discussion of this article and its significance on Richard Spencer's weekly audio roundtable podcast 'AltRight Politics' from January 18, 2018.

Charles Bausman
Editor-in-Chief | RUSSIA INSIDER
charles@russia-insider.com
russia-insider.com/en/users/charles-bausman

Article update 1/22/2018: Russia Insider's Article Translated and Published in Russian!

My article of last Monday, It's Time to Drop the Jew Taboo, caused a firestorm of interest, praise, and criticism.

It now has over 110,000 views on RI, has been republished on several other sites, including the Unz Review [1], and has generated a handful of articles both praising and damning it. This is precisely what I had hoped for - the whole point of the article was to say that we, America and Europe, need to discuss this openly - and this now appears to be happening.

Without my soliciting it, a Russian reader sent in a truly excellent translation, which very accurately captures not just the sense of the article, but also the style. I deal with translations every day and they usually serve to mortify prose, but this one succeeds in bringing it alive, for which I am truly grateful. 5000 words is a lot to translate, I can assure you, and I think that this happened so quickly and professionally says a lot. Reportedly a Spanish translation is in the works.

I just published it on the Russian version of our site. We do not maintain that page very actively, only occasionally publishing there. I imagine that the topic should be of interest to the Russian public.

Radio Liberty, which is not a radio station, but a Russian language website put out by the US government info services, did a silly and misleading hatchet job in Russian on the article the day after it appeared: Anti-Semites of the World - Unite! [2], probably not considering that the original would soon appear in Russian. Now the Russian reader can judge for themselves if they made a fair representation.

I would ask readers to please share this excellent translation with their Russian friends and acquaintances.

- Charles Bausman

[1] http://www.unz.com/article/its-time-to-drop-the-jew-taboo/
[2] https://www.svoboda.org/a/28979016.html

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