Who, beyond Clown Prince Zelensky, is supplying the Argentinian with his mis-information?
Pope Francis is at it again. This time, as reported by the British state-controlled BBC outlet, Pope Francis believes that Chechens and Buryats serving in the Russian Armed Forces are half-savage Orcs.
Citing an American Jesuit magazine, the state-controlled BBC has Pope Francis, who is also a Jesuit, claiming he has “much information about the cruelty of the [Russian] troops” and that “the cruellest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on.”
Although Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has predictably condemned the Pope’s uninformed comments, she does not go half far enough in asking who, beyond Clown Prince Zelensky, is supplying the Argentinian with his mis-information. As Latin Catholics comprise less than 0.5% of the Russian peoples, they are not to blame. And nor this time is the Vatican-aligned Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who are to be found mostly in Western Ukraine.
Step forward my old Tokyo chum, Gillian Tett, Oxbridge educated and now chairperson of the Financial Times Editorial Board (USA). As Gillian did a PhD on some anthropological mumbo jumbo about Tajikistan, the Financial Times believes she is eminently qualified to opine on Buryatia, which is some 3,500km from Tajikistan, the very same distance London is from Timbuktu. Just as London and Timbuktu are identical peas in a pod for the Financial Times, so also, for Tett’s paymasters, are Tajikstan, which is almost exclusively Muslim and Buryatia which is, at heart, rock solid Buddhist.
There are a number of lessons in this. First off, Gilian Tett should stick to explaining the finances of Hello Kitty. Secondly, not only should Pope Francis ignore those like Tett whose forte is Hello Kitty but he should neither read nor take advice from anyone who reads the Financial Times or any similar NATO propaganda sheet. The fact that a Jesuit Pope does not know any of that or that he should not routinely malign the Russian Orthodox Church is, not to put too fine a point on it, troublesome.
As regards the Jesuits, with whom I worked closely for ten or so years in Japan, they are no longer the force they were and if Adolfo Nicolás, our common friend, who was the Black Pope until recently, has not acquainted him with their shortcomings that stretch all the way from beside Tokyo’s Imperial Palace to the CIA’s Georgetown spy factory and onwards to Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, I shall be happy to brief him
I will also gladly tell him how such attacks on Chechens, Buryats and similar minorities are straight from the Abwehr’s playbook, which the CIA adopted and which are clearly spelled out in Ian Johnson’s classic, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West.
Although the Chechens, like Druze, Gurkhas and countless other impoverished mountain people, have a formidable fighting reputation, that is as much due to sociological factors, such as their esprit de corps and their clannishness, all of which rulers have encouraged right back to the days of the Praetorian Guard of 2,000 or so years ago.
Although Tett links the Russian army’s 64th Motorised Rifle Brigade, which hails from the Buryatia region of Siberia with alleged atrocities in Bucha last March, I personally do not believe on the evidence they perpetrated those atrocities. Rather, I believe that such atrocities as occurred in Bucha were the direct result of war crimes committed by Ukraine’s ubiquitous Nazi regiments, their home grown Einsatzgruppen, who have considerable form in this regard and on whom Christ’s Vicar on Earth has far too little to say.
Although Tett refers to “An activist group called the Free Buryatia Foundation [that] is appealing to the Buryats’ sense of identity and calling on its soldiers to withdraw from Ukraine,” as this is an expatriate group that has no roots in Siberia’s 500,000 strong Buryat community, it is most likely just another MI5 astroturf job.
As most likely is Olga Tsukanova, the founder of Russia’s Council of Wives and Mothers, who is demanding, on that same BBC page, that Russian President Putin meet her and her Russophobic clique. As Tsukanova’s interview was conducted with Holland’s NOS group, their equivalent of the BBC, Putin’s answer should be a very firm Nyet for the simple reason that one cannot simultaneously serve two masters, that one cannot be loyal to Russia and be maidservant to NATO’s propagandists at the same time.
Although Tett is correct that “the blame game [against Buryats} also reflects racism”, she gets this the wrong way round, “even if “Buryat” is now a shorthand for all Asian-looking soldiers,” just as all Scottish soldiers might be nicknamed Jock or Welsh soldiers Taffy.
As the 64th Motorised Rifle Brigade is an integral part of the Russian Armed Forces, they would not be outliers when it comes to war crimes as they are just one other bunch of Rooskies, Ivans or whatever one wishes to call them. But as Tett just wants to call these Ivans/Rooskies/sub human Orcs whatever suits the aims and objectives of NATO’s war machine, she is no different from other Anglo-Americans who threw similarly racist slurs at the Chinese (Chinks), Japanese (Japs) and Vietnamese (Gooks) when that served Uncle Sam.
Gillian Tett, for all her faux Oxbridge mannerisms, is but a NATO maidservant. Though Pope Francis should aspire to be something more than that, as long as he keeps shtum on Gurkha war crimes against Argentinian conscripts in the Malvinas and Ukrainian war crimes against Russians, he should shut up about “Chechens, the Buryats and so on”, so that he may only be thought to be a NATO puppet, rather than speak and prove himself to be not only a puppet but a very contemptible one at that.
