The Moscow-controlled Communist International, and the Communist Party of Germany, made Hitler’s rise to power possible

Soviet-Nazi Collaboration and World War II


by Alexander J. Motyl


As May 9th, Victory Day in many post-Soviet states, approaches, decency demands that we celebrate the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and honor the millions of soldiers and civilians who gave their lives to rid the world of the scourge of Nazism.

At the same time, if we truly want to honor the dead, we must take heed of the historical lies that the Kremlin, both in its Soviet and post-Soviet hypostases, promotes about the USSR’s relationship with Nazi Germany.

For starters, the Moscow-controlled Communist International, and its sidekick, the Communist Party of Germany, made Hitler’s rise to power possible, if not indeed inevitable, by tarring the German Social Democrats as “social fascists” who threatened to split the proletariat and were, thus, a greater evil than the Nazis. Had the German left remained united against the real threat—Nazism—Hitler might not have come to power. (Many leftists make a similar mistake today, preferring Vladimir Putin’s fascism to American capitalism and thereby promoting war in Europe.)

And then there’s the matter of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The part that obligated Nazi Germany and the USSR to nonaggression vis-à-vis each other is arguably defensible in light of Moscow’s desire to ward off a possible German attack.

Completely indefensible is the secret protocol that led to Poland’s partition in September 1939 and the subsequent Soviet attack on and incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. That was imperialism, pure and simple, though, naturally, the Soviets claimed that they were “liberating” the territories from “fascist” rule (sound familiar?).

More than indefensible—indeed, profoundly criminal—was Moscow’s kowtowing to and enthusiastic support of the Hitler state and economy in 1939–41, at precisely the time the Nazis were killing Poles, segregating Jews, and laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. Because the USSR collaborated with the Nazis, it bears a large part of the responsibility for World War II and the enormous destruction that Germany brought to Eastern Europe in general and Eastern European Jews in particular.

By the way, during the two years the Soviets ruled Western Ukraine (the former eastern Poland), they destroyed civil society, dismantled all political and civil rights, deported hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians to Siberia, and then, to top things off, massacred some 20,000–30,000 political prisoners in the week after the Nazis attacked in June of 1941. (About 70 percent were Ukrainian, 20 percent were Polish, and over 5 percent were Jewish.)

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Read motre: www.worldaffairsjournal.org

Like most Freemasons, Benjamin Franklin had a spiritual blind spot.

Blind Benjamin Franklin
by Dwight Longenecker

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth”  - Pope St. John Paul II

Apart from his rejection of wigs and the incident with the kite, the key and the lightning bolt, I’m afraid I have never been impressed or attracted to Benjamin Franklin. There was too much of the old-world rationalist and deist in the new-world inventor and sage. Despite his accomplishments, there was something as dull about the man as his po-faced portrait staring from the hundred-dollar bill. Franklin was utilitarian and unitarian, practical and puritanical, materialistic, mechanical, efficient, economical, sensible, and sincere… and dull.

Like most Freemasons, Franklin had a spiritual blind spot. There was nothing wild and mystical in his life. Passion and romance in religion were alien to him. His creed was one of common sense, mild-mannered good works and human virtue. As such it was not only blind. It was bland.

I came across a quotation of his the other day which sums it up. He wrote, “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” It is the sort of sophomoric bromide one expects from rationalist, and it doesn’t stand up to even the mildest of objections.

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Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

Comment meurt une civilisation - conférence à Versailles - le 6 mai

6 mai : conférence de Michel de Jaeghere à Versailles

Source: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

Chiunque di noi sa la “dannata” Verità, quando fa quello che non dovrebbe e non fa quel che dovrebbe

L’uomo è sempre assediato dalla Verità, che ha il volto di un uomo. Il Figlio dell’uomo

di Pier Giacomo Ghirardini



Sul rapporto fra Verità e Ragione – e soprattutto fra Verità e Violenza – condivido la visione di René Girard, che potrebbe essere banalmente scambiata per radicale o fondamentalista, ma che invece è solo razionale, naturalmente fino a prova contraria. Chi ama la Verità non può avere paura della prova contraria. Mai. Quando sento parlare di ricerca della Verità mi viene sempre da sorridere, perché l’uomo è assediato dalla Verità e se uno vuole vedere la faccia del nemico che lo cinge d’assedio, basta che si affacci sugli spalti del proprio castello, che ha eretto contro la Verità, con i suoi merli, i suoi barbacani e le sue torri.

La Verità ci cerca. Qualunque persona in buona fede lo sa. Qualunque persona di qualunque fede o di nessuna fede lo sa. Chiunque di noi sa la “dannata” Verità, quando fa quello che non dovrebbe fare e quando omette di fare quello che dovrebbe fare. Chiunque. La Verità ha sempre il volto di un uomo. Del Figlio dell’uomo. Di un bimbo dalla testa teneramente grande in braccio a sua madre. Di un uomo sputato in faccia dalla folla. La Verità è sempre in uno sguardo veloce come un lampo che incrocia l’occhio tumefatto di Cristo, tradito e consegnato. Perché la Verità eccita sempre la Violenza. Sempre. Per capire dove sta la Verità basta volgere lo sguardo verso dove si sta accanendo la Violenza. Non soltanto quella omicida e genocida, ma anche quella dei piccoli e dei grandi linciaggi quotidiani che si consumano nelle famiglie, nei luoghi di lavoro, nelle chiese, ovunque, fra noi, in questo momento. Perché lì Cristo ha preso volontariamente il posto della vittima innocente, una volta per tutte e per sempre, per dichiarare la falsità della “nostra” verità, fondata sulla Violenza.

Come ci ricorda Pascal nelle Provinciali: «È una strana e lunga guerra quella in cui la violenza tenta di opprimere la verità. Tutti gli sforzi della violenza non possono indebolire la verità, e non servono che a innalzarla maggiormente. Tutti i lumi della verità non possono nulla per arrestare la violenza, e non fanno che irritarla di più. Quando la forza combatte la forza, la più potente distrugge la minore; quando si oppongono i discorsi ai discorsi, quelli che sono veri e convincenti confondono e dissipano quelli che hanno soltanto vanità e menzogna: ma la violenza e la verità non possono nulla l’una sull’altra. Da ciò non si pretenda però di concludere che le cose siano uguali; perché vi è questa estrema differenza, che la violenza non ha che un corso limitato dall’ordine di Dio, il quale ne conduce gli effetti alla gloria della verità che essa assale; mentre la verità sussiste eternamente, e trionfa infine dei suoi nemici, perché è eterna e potente quanto Dio stesso».


Leggi di Più: www.tempi.it

Dante Alighieri compie 750 anni - Beatrice: l’amore posto in relazione con il Creatore...

Rileggere la “Vita nuova” e scoprire un amore robusto come la realtà

di Laura Cioni


Celebrare Dante rileggendo l’opera con cui si conclude la sua giovinezza. Un passaggio illuminato dall’incontro straordinario con Beatrice. E da quello «spirito soave che va dicendo a l’anima: Sospira»


Per celebrare i 750 anni dalla nascita di Dante la cosa più bella è tornare alla sua prima opera compiuta, La vita nuova. È il libro, in prosa e in versi con cui si conclude la sua giovinezza. L’opera, difficile, può essere letta a diversi livelli: come raccolta e sintesi della produzione giovanile del poeta, come racconto del suo amore per Beatrice, come riflessione sulla sua poesia lirica, come congedo da essa in attesa di altri modi di espressione.

È dunque un’opera feconda per la critica, che su di essa si è ampiamente esercitata. Di certo una lettura ingenua è impossibile: troppa è la distanza dal forte apparato di simboli, dai numeri ai colori, che la caratterizza, troppi i riferimenti biblici e stilnovisti che la corredano, troppa la ricerca di un significato che oltrepassi il dato biografico per poterla paragonare, anche da lontano, a una sorta di romanzo di formazione.

«In quella parte del libro della mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello, e se non tutte, almeno la loro sententia». Questo l’avvio, con l’immagine tutta medievale della memoria come di un libro in cui sono scritti i ricordi e, dopo poche pagine, il titolo scritto in rosso di un capitolo che segna l’inizio della vita nuova, della vita rinnovata da Amore. Dante manifesta l’intento di trascrivere le parole della sua giovinezza e, se non di raccontare tutto, almeno di trarne il significato. Ha trent’anni allora: il libro della memoria gli offre esperienze non remote, ma trascorse tanto da poter essere guardate col necessario distacco per coglierne il valore.

Beatitudo, Beatrice, il Salvatore

L’incontro con Beatrice, quando entrambi avevano nove anni, è per Dante l’inizio della vita nuova. Nove anni più tardi il nuovo incontro con lei, sempre a Firenze, in una città non descritta, ma riconoscibile nonostante l’atmosfera rarefatta. L’insistenza sul nove conduce al mondo complesso della simbologia dei numeri. Simbolo di perfezione (3×3) il nove rimanda a Dio. L’amore è dunque subito posto in relazione con il Creatore, ha la sua stessa cifra. E anche questo è molto medievale, non scade in un gusto vagamente mistico o letterario, ha la robustezza della vita.
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Leggi di Più: www.tempi.it

I know that non-religious people do not like talk like this. And I know that religious people find it frustrating because for real believers the question will always be, “Why do you not just believe?”

Is The West's Loss Of Faith Terminal?

by DOUGLAS MURRAY


It is as well to admit when your enemies are onto something. Today the antagonists of Western culture and civilisation throw many accusations at us — almost all of them untrue. They say that our history has been especially cruel, whereas it has been no crueller than any other and significantly less cruel than most. They claim that we act only for ourselves, whereas it is doubtful if any society in history has been so unwilling to defend its own or more ready to assume the opinions, and fill the pockets, of its detractors.

But on one single thing it is possible that our critics are on to something. They do not identify it well, and when they do identify it they prescribe the worst possible remedies. But it remains a problem worth identifying, not least in order to raise ourselves to answers.

The problem is one that is easier to notice and feel than it is to prove, but I would suggest that it is something like this: that life in modern liberal democracies is to some extent thin or shallow. I do not mean that our lives are meaningless, nor that the opportunity liberal democracy uniquely gives to pursue our own conception of happiness is remotely misguided. On a day-to-day basis most of us find deep meaning and love from our families and friends and much else. But there are questions which remain, which have always been at the centre of each of us and which liberal democracy on its own not only cannot answer but was never meant to answer.

“What am I doing here? What is my life for? Does it have any purpose beyond itself?” These are questions which human beings have always asked and are still there even though today to even ask such questions is something like bad manners. What is even more, the spaces where such questions might be asked — let alone answered — have shrunk not only in number but in their ambition for answers. And if people no longer seek for answers in churches will they find them in occasional visits to art galleries or book clubs?

Jürgen Habermas addressed an aspect of this in 2007 when he led a discussion at the Jesuit School of Philosophy in Munich titled, “An Awareness of What is Missing”. There he attempted to identify a gap at the centre of our “post-secular age”. In 1991 he had attended a memorial service for a friend at a church in Zürich. The friend had left instructions for the event which were closely followed. The coffin was present and there were speeches by two friends. But there was no priest and no blessing. The ashes were to be “strewn somewhere” and there was to be no “amen”. The friend — who had been an agnostic — had both rejected the religious element and was also publicly demonstrating that non-religious burial had failed. As Habermas interprets his friend, “The enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rîte de passage which brings life to a close.”


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Read more: standpointmag.co.uk

Ukraine and Russia: Hybrid war, how it works, and how it doesn´t?

‘Hybrid War’ and ‘Little Green Men’:

How It Works, and How It Doesn’t


By Mark Galeotti

In an age of interconnected economies, expensive militaries, and the 24/7 news cycle, if anything the fusion of a range of different types of conflict will become the norm.

This article was originally published by E-International Relations on 16 April 2015. It is an excerpt from E-IR’s Edited Collection “Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives”.

When Russian special forces seized Crimea at the end of February 2014, without their insignia, but with the latest military kit, it seemed as the start of a new era of warfare. Certainly, the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that Moscow, in a bid to square its regional ambitions with its sharply limited resources, has assiduously and effectively developed a new style of ‘guerrilla geopolitics’ which leverages its capacity for misdirection, bluff, intelligence operations, and targeted violence to maximise its opportunities. However, it is too soon to declare that this represents some transformative novelty, because Moscow’s Ukrainian adventures have not only demonstrated the power of such ‘hybrid’ or ‘non-linear’ ways of warfare, but also their distinct limitations.

The Genesis of the Idea

The essence of Russia’s tactics was precisely to try and avoid the need for shooting as much as possible, and then to try and ensure that whatever shooting took place was on the terms that suited them best. To this end, they blended the use of a range of assets, from gangster allies to media spin, in a manner that draws heavily on past political operations, not least the aktivnye meropriyatiya (‘active measures’) of Soviet times (Madeira, 2014).

While not entirely new, their tactics were given a particular novelty simply by the characteristics of the contemporary world, something recognised by the Chief of the General Staff Valerii Gerasimov, in a crucial article from 2013, in which he noted that ‘The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of weapons in their effectiveness’ (Gerasimov, 2013). In what is ostensibly a piece on the lessons of the ‘Arab Spring’ – which Kremlin orthodoxy presents as the result of covert Western campaigns of regime change – he outlines a new age in which:

Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template… [A] perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a morass of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.

There are a variety of reasons why today’s Russia may find itself favouring operations in which, still to quote Gerasimov, ‘The open use of forces – often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation – is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict.’ For a start, despite the still-formidable size of its military, in practice, many of its forces remain antiquated, poorly trained, and scarcely operational. Moscow clearly has the preponderance of military and economic muscle in post-Soviet Eurasia, the region in which it feels it has hegemonic rights. However, not only is this apparent advantage to a considerable extent neutralised by the risk of involving the USA, China, or even the European Union in case of obvious aggression, it is also often not so overwhelming as to guarantee a quick and above all risk-free adventure. Even the five-day war against Georgia in 2008, while a victory, was a sufficiently painful one – with friendly fire incidents, communications mix-ups, and vehicle break-downs – that it galvanised meaningful military reform for the first time in more than two decades (Cohen and Hamilton, 2011).

Non-Linear Instruments

Instead, Russia finds itself in a situation where many of its strengths are either less decisive than it might like, or else are constrained because of economic or geopolitical realities. Put bluntly, a country with an economy somewhere between the size of Italy’s and Brazil’s is seeking to assert a great power international role and agenda. To this end, Russia has turned to this new ‘guerrilla geopolitics’ as a means of playing to its strengths and its opponents’ weaknesses. It has also invested disproportionate resources into the assets most useful for such conflicts.

These are, broadly speaking, three, and they reflect how this is a way of war which even more explicitly than most targets not the opponent’s military or even economic capacity, but their will and ability to fight at all. Of course there is a ‘kinetic’ element ¬– the need to deploy armed forces and sometimes for them to fight – but the forces required for this will tend to have to operate with more autonomy than has in the past been usual for Russian troops, and likewise with greater precision. Thus, Russia has been developing its special and intervention forces, especially its 12,000 or so Spetsnaz. These are generally described as special forces, but they are highly mobile and effective light infantry akin to US Rangers or the French Foreign Legion, rather than true commandos (Galeotti, 2015). Instead, the newly established Special Operations Command (KSO) has perhaps 500 true operators in what in the West would be called ‘Tier One’ akin to the British SAS or US Delta force. Nonetheless, the Spetsnaz, like the VDV Airborne Troops or the Naval Infantry marines, represent an ‘army within an army’ able to operate professionally, decisively, covertly if need be, and outside Russia’s borders.

There is an ‘intelligence-war’ dimension beyond the ‘military war’. The Kremlin has devoted particular resources in its intelligence community. The Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU, military intelligence), and even the Federal Security Service (FSB), which is increasingly involved in overseas operations, are not only agencies tasked with gathering information about foreign capabilities and intentions. Rather, they are also instruments of non-linear warfare, spreading despair and disinformation, encouraging defections, and breaking or corrupting lines of command and communications.

The third particular focus for Kremlin efforts has been its capacity to fight the ‘information war,’ to broadcast its own message and undermine and contest those of others in the name of winning the war in their hearts and minds (Pomerantsev and Weiss, 2014). The RT international television station, for example, has become a crucial player not only in espousing the Kremlin line, but, perhaps more importantly, in challenging Western media orthodoxy with a glitzy mix of genuine investigation, bizarre conspiracy theory, and cynical disingenuousness (Ioffe, 2010; O’Sullivan, 2014). Its 2015 budget is due to increase by almost 30%, suggesting the Kremlin appreciates its role.

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Read more: isnblog.ethz.ch

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Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives

Abstract

The intense and dangerous turmoil provoked by the breakdown in Russo-ukrainian relations has escalated into a crisis that now afflicts both European and global affairs. 

Since the beginning of the confrontation, a lot has been written about its root causes, the motivations of the main actors, and possible scenarios for the future. however, few have looked at what came to be called the ‘ukraine crisis’ from the point of view of Russo-ukrainian relations, and grasped the perspectives of various groups involved, as well as the discursive processes that have contributed to the developments in and interpretations of the conflict.


Download document .pdf here: www.e-ir.info