Winning their current Great Patriotic War is as crucial to today’s Russians as was winning those thrust on their forefathers in 1812 and 1941.
Winning their current Great Patriotic War is as crucial to today’s Russians as was winning those thrust on their forefathers in 1812 and 1941. Because Ukraine is but one of several NATO fronts, victory in Ukraine does not ensure anything unless victory is also won in Russia’s economic and cultural wars as well. All these different fronts are, at day’s end, as one.
Think otherwise? Just look at the most recent targets of the EU’s punitive sanctions, where motor cycle enthusiast Aleksandr Zaldostanov and Russian actors Sergey Bezrukov and Vladimir Mashkov join the EU’s naughty list.
The EU criminalizes Zaldostanov for “actively supporting Russian state propaganda through publicly denying Ukraine’s right to statehood and calling for the ‘denazification’ as well as the ‘de-Ukrainization’ of the country.” Leaving aside the patently idiotic question of what, in this contget, does or does not constitute “Russian state propaganda”, Zaldostanov is targeted for opposing the well documented presence of Nazis in Ukraine. The other cited charges against him are EU disinformation: though no one opposes Ukraine’s theoretical right to statehood, tens of millions quite rightly oppose Zelensky’s stalled ethnic cleansing campaign in Eastern Ukraine. As regards ‘de-Ukrainization’, Borrell and that awful von der Leyen woman should check out the laws and actions of the Zelensky junta against Russian speakers and politicians representing them before they next open their mouths to once again prove their roles as empty headed NATO court jesters.
In so far as Zaldostanov is being persecuted for defending the right to life of those whose mother tongue is Russian, all Russophones should take note as, if it is Eastern Ukraine and Zaldostanov today, it will definitely be them tomorrow no matter in what part of Russia they and their grandmothers live.
And then we have award-winning actors Vladimir Mashkov and Sergey Bezrukov, whose equally heinous crime is they verbally opposed Zelensky’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Eastern Ukraine and that Bezrukov, a Russian, had the temerity to quote from ‘To the Slanderers of Russia,’ a poem by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. Every literate Russian speaker must take due note: because Bezrukov and Pushkin are in the cross hairs of these barbarians, so, first of all, are you. You and your grandmothers have targets on your backs.
And, secondly, it goes much much further than that. Though recent articles highlighted NATO’s seemingly Quixotic war against such world literary greats as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as its campaign to ban world class children’s stories for no other reason than they are Russian, renowned NATO flunkey and horror story writer Stephen King put all this NATO depravity in perspective when Russian journalists pranked him to reveal the demons that possess that Satan obsessed war hawk and his fellow golems.
King freely agreed not only to propagate lies about non existent Russian war crimes in Ukraine but also agreed to help demonize Russians, all Russians because this moron believes that fanning the flames of Russophobia is the right thing to do and, as a corollary, that those, like you and your grandmother, who suffer therefrom are of little human consequence. King has thereby done us a service by revealing the Nazi heart that beats within the American Democrats and that NATO mis information is a real and very dangerous thing to both you and your grandmother.
If Russians are in any doubt as to why NATO funds Pussy Riot,. Femem and similar quasi fascist groups, they need look no further than reptiles like Stephen King, who wants Russia to return not only to the penury that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse but to degenerate into a soul destroying poverty that is devoid of everything that is wholesome in Russia, from Pushkin, War and Peace and the 1812 Overture to Masha and Mishka.
Although Russians who cock an ear to Pussy Riot, Femem and similar fascists might quack back they can do without the stories of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Masha and Mishka, what else can they do without? Can they do without Russia being able to export her oil and gas at a fair and competitive price and the hamburgers, Heineken beers and Ecuadorian bananas that allows them buy?
This is not a pedantic question. It is the stated policy of NATO and its European Union lapdog. Not my words, but those of, amongst very many others, Josep Borrell, the Catalan Clown who is the EU’s current Foreign Minister.
Although a good grasp of advanced statistics is needed to fully appreciate Borrell’s power play, let me instead give you a brief primer. In my previous article, I explained how the Sino-Russian market in strategic resources was on the rise and how Anglo American fixers would have to take a major hit as a consequence. Far from wanting to take a hit, the Anglo Americans, through Borrell, that odious von der Leyen woman and their other puppets want to take all of Russia for themselves. Their method, previously alluded to, deserves much further discussion.
Because the Anglo Americans and their cronies control ship certification as well as much of the re-insurance industry, NATO plans to deny Russian ships or those who trade with them both insurance and re-insurance by denying them the necessary certification. In NATO’s idealized world, that would put the Russian fleet out of business as no one, the Russians included, could afford possible fat tail shocks, the so-called hundred year floods of repeated, unlikely but horrendously expensive shipping disasters, most especially in vulnerable ports like those of Shanghai or Mumbai.
In my earlier example, I deliberately picked Vladivostok as the Russian exit port and Shanghai as the Chinese entry port so that the convoys sailing between them could say konnichiwa to the Japanese navy, which is the descendent of the Japanese Imperial Navy, which gave the American and British navies, then the world’s two strongest navies, a very good run for their money.
Not that this simple transfer of oil and other materials between Vladivostok and Shanghai would lead to blows with either the Japanese Navy or the interlopers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Perish the thought.
Such transactions would be nothing more than an applied statistical exercise between Russian and Chinese statisticians and the insurance and reinsurance companies connected to them. Though their respective navies would have responsibility for their own waters, once the ships were on the high seas between Russia and China, then the nature of their flat tail risk would be further disaggregated.
Assuming all safety measures were followed to the letter, the main risks would be running aground like the Exxon Valdez or being subject to NATO overt or covert attack under one pretext or another. Although all participating parties would have to put maximum effort into minimizing the risks of an Exxon Valdez, NATO’s invidious hand would have to be watched lest other precedents recurred.
Let’s first of all suppose a Russian oil tanker runs aground in Fukushima or some similarly exotic Japanese location and that the blame lies with the Russian captain who had been hitting the saké a passing Japanese warship gifted him a little too heavily. Well then Russia clearly owes Japan big time so that Japan can clean up Fukushima for all the cuddly whales that live in its vicinity. After Russia takes a leaf out of the Japanese playbook and apologizes profusely (and doesn’t mention that Japan never compensated the women it enslaved during World War Two, or for unit 731’s ecological and human damage), then Russia should barter for a fair, compensatory price, paid mostly from embargoed Russian assets but also with oil and fertilizer over time. Thus, let’s say the agreed damage was $30 bn, then Japan would get $25 bn of Russia’s frozen assets, with the remainder being paid in kind. Win win.
If the Japanese tried to strike too hard a bargain, Russia should remind them of Uniper, the most recent German company to go kaput over their inability to fulfill their gas and oil contracts. After some more profuse Russian apologies, the Japanese should have explained to them that hara kiri and kabuki are both honorable Japanese, not Russian traditions, and that Japan can work with Russia for a solution or get stuffed.
Although NATO, being on the ropes, argues that Russia being its own re-insurer flatly contradicts the basic insurance premise of spreading the risk, Moscow can counter that the damage of events like 9/11 was heightened by NATO not following their own re-insurance risk spreading maxims. Further, we are, in this instance, not talking about global insurance or re-insurance markets but of a single trail between one Russian and one Chinese port, an example, as previously stated, that more resembles forward markets than those other more exotic derivative markets NATO currently grows fat from.
The point there is not to attack the civilized Japanese but to say that a solution to such a disaster can be found without the Anglo Americans and their European Union and Norwegian cronies interloping. Within that caveat, it would be the job of the Russian, Chinese and affiliated insurers to find a fair price for such insurance, subsidized, perhaps by levies on exports to Germany and other punch drunk NATO nations.
Then we have other sorts of disasters needing payouts, disasters such as the mysterious explosion that levelled Beirut harbour or the ecological damage NATO’s invasion of Kuwait and Iraq and countless other NATO war crimes caused in land, on sea and in the air. In so much as any such disaster could be laid at NATO’s door, then compensation would have to be adjusted accordingly and, if say, NATO piracy or some other form of recklessness was responsible for 80% of any such losses, then that sum, together with the cost in increased Russian-Chinese submarine surveillance of relevant troubled waters, would not be deducted from the billions NATO have stolen from Russia, but would be paid from NATO’s own pockets and Russia and her allies agreeing to pay the balance. That would be risk spreading in theory as well as in practice.
Much the same would apply were Russian waters to suffer a disaster akin to BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spil, which cost NATO an absolute fortune to put somewhat to rights. Were NATO to follow through on some of its doomsday threats and cause, either overtly or covertly, Russia to suffer such a calamity, then that would be a disaster not only for Russia but for the world and Russian, Chinese and Russian strategic planners need to have relevant contingencies ready to roll.
Providing for all such contingencies is not only a concern in the South China Sea, which is much more in Russia’s backyard than are the Solomon Islands and similar Pacific nations in NATO’s, but further afield as well. Consider the case of Malta, that charming Mediterranean island which has survived countless invasions from the dawn of time and which the United States is now trying to bully into joining NATO not only for the usual propaganda reasons but to colonize Hurd’s bank, which lies to the east of Malta and which is the site for an informal ship-to-ship network in which oil, chemicals and other goods are transferred between large ships with different destinations, including both to and from NATO sanctioned countries.
And thus, as Russian and Chinese tourists sun themselves on Mediterranean beaches, they should know that their navies must patrol those waters to ensure that not only the sovereignty of Malta and Syria are maintained but that commerce may proceed apace without the interference of NATO’s pirates there or in the waters off Iran.
All that apparent circumlocution gets us back to our original point that Russians, all Russians, are in a war for their very existence as free and sovereign people and that this war rages from the poems of Pushkin to the waters off Malta. To maintain their independence, Russia’s insurers and their partners must develop, as a priority, new fat tails insurance modes to cover the above contingencies.
But all other Russians must step up to the plate as well, with each contributing according to their means to this war’s cultural, economic and military fronts. Russia’s oil and gas conglomerates, relieved of their duties of sponsoring international competitions, can focus on sponsoring local competitions in fields as diverse as poetry, weight lifting and chess. Russian software engineers can, with their Chinese and Indian partners, develop alternative operating systems to those of Silicon Valley and, as with COVID vaccines, their scientists can also begin developing alternatives to Big Pharma’s overpriced money makers.
Although the objective of such efforts would be to move undeserved Microsoft, McDonald’s, Big Pharma and similar rents from American pockets into the Russian pockets where they belong, unless all Russians have their Damascene moment, all will be lost.
Put differently, Russian youth must put down their iPhones and their McDonalds hamburgers and lift up their Pushkin and themselves. We are, as the Chinese say, living in interesting and changing times, the same shifting sands times Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard chronicled regarding the changes the Risorgimento wrought on Sicily, which has been invaded as often as Malta. Whether Russia’s youth can now acknowledge it or not, should their homeland not prevail on the cultural, military and economic fronts in this latest Great Patriotic War, they, their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren will pay an awful price for their lethargy. Though the choice, to stand with Russia, Masha, Mishka and Pushkin, or with Pussy Riot, King and Zelensky is theirs, they should be aware what the stakes are and place their bets accordingly.
