Diana Johnstone on the decline of Europe

CIRCLE IN THE DARKNESS: Memoir of a World-Watcher by Diana Johnstone (2020)

Diana Johnstone is an American journalist, a year or two older than me, who has spent most of her adult life reporting from Europe.

This memoir is a rich account of the past half-century of European history.  Its over-arching themes are the erosion of the sovereignty of European nations and of the European left as fighters for peace and defenders of working people.  Another is reality is rarely what the official sources say it is.

It also touches on her personal struggles and family life.  She decided at an early stage in her career to choose freedom to write as she saw things over middle-class security.

I won’t try to summarize her work, which touches on many important events, but I’ll mention a few highlights.

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>> Johnstone was not a supporter of the European Union.  It had been promoted as a way for European nations to unite and make Europe an independent power, setting standards for human rights, social welfare and the environment, which other nations would have to respect in order to engage with Europe or belong to it.

Maybe it was that way in the beginning, at least to a certain extent.  But she pointed out that the proposed European Constitution of 2005, if you read the fine print of its more than 500 pages., committed its signers to supporting neoliberal economics and the NATO alliance.

It the principal objective of the Union was “a highly competitive market economy,” with business competition “undistorted” by state policy.  Public services “of general economic interest” had to be open to competition, including international competition.

The Constitution specified a “common security and defense policy” in which”commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”  It also stressed the need to defend against “terrorist attacks.”

It was put to a public vote in France and the Netherlands and rejected both times.  It was revised in the form of the 2008 Lisbon Treaty, which was accepted by all the member governments except Ireland.  The Irish put it up to a referendum, which was rejected in 2008.

After some minor concessions, the Irish were called on to vote again, and on Dec. 1, 2009, the new treaty became law.  The principle is: Keep voting until you get it right.

I doubt if many of those who voted “yes” understood they were locking themselves into economic austerity and undeclared wars.

> Johnstone didn’t know what to make of the 1968 student uprising in Paris.  It was inspired by privileged students’ desire to overthrow restraints on personal behavior (“it is forbidden to forbid”) and not by any program for improving the welfare of society.

Diana Johnstone on the breakup of Yugoslavia

FOOL’S CRUSADE: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions by Diana Johnstone (2002)

Diana Johnstone is an American journalist, slightly older than me, who has spent most of her adult life in Europe.

Fool’s Crusade is about the lies that justified NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s.  I mostly accepted these lies at the time.

If I had read Johnstone’s book when it was published, I would have understood then a lot of things I have slowly came to understand over a period of years. 

I did realize that Germany precipitated the crisis by prematurely recognizing Croatia and Slovenia as independent countries, and that Croatia’s Franjo Tudgman was as much of an authoritarian nationalist strongman as Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was accused of being.

But I still accepted the propaganda line that Milosevic was engaging in ethnic cleansing in order to create a Greater Serbia.  What he was actually trying to do was to hold together what was left of Yugoslavia and to protect Serbs stranded in other parts of the former Yugoslavoa.

Johnstone wrote that Milosovec could be criticized for his failures as a statesman, and that the Serbs were not guiltless.  But neither he nor they were not carrying out a systematic program of “ethnic cleansing.”  It was the Serbs, more than others, who were driven out of their ancestral homes.

She foresaw how U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia was to set a pattern for future interventions.

• NATO was formed as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union.  But this set the precedent for NATO interventions against nations that were outside the NATO region and did not threaten NATO members.
• The United States led the intervention without any strong commitment of “boots on the ground.”  Instead the intervention consisted of indiscriminate bombings, use of proxy warriors and crippling economic sanctions.
• The intervention was conducted without authorization of the United Nations.  The bombings of civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure were in violation of international law.
• The justification for the intervention was to defend human rights against an imagined Hitler-like foe, who was supposedly so evil that anything was justified to bring him down.
• The intervention was led by self-identified liberals and supported nearly unanimously by the liberal press.  The propaganda included false accusations of rape.  Critics were accused of sympathizing with the supposedly fascist enemy.
• No good came of it.

Johnstone’s book is a model of what journalism should be.  She based her reporting on what she saw and on on-the-record interviews with named sources, plus her extensive background knowledge of the history and politics of the region.  None of it was due to inside information that the reader has to take on trust. 

Is this true? Is it a problem?

According to this survey, one in seven adult American men and one in 10 adult American women have no close friend.  Is this something to worry about?

LINKS

The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges and Loss by Daniel A. Cox for the Survey Center on American Life.

Men are rapidly losing their close friends, poll finds by Brigid Kennedy for The Week.

Who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines?

Stopping the Nord Stream pipelines has been a central goal of U.S. policy for a decade. The Russians spent billions of dollars and years of work bringing the pipelines into existence. Potentially they are a source of both wealth and political leverage to Russia.

So who would be most likely to sabotage the pipelines? We the American people are being told that Russia is the most likely suspect.  This video by Matt Orfalea illustrates the great “mystery.”

Navalny faces 30 more years in prison

Alexei Navalny, the best-known of the critics of Vladimir Putin, is serving a nine-year-sentence on charges of fraud, contempt of court and parole violations.

Now he faces additional charges of terrorism, which, according to his lawyers, could add up to 30 more years to his prison sentence.  He remains defiant.

The Meduza news service reported that Navalny, who is currently serving a nine-year term at the Sixth maximum-security facility in the Vladimir region, says that the Investigative Committee has just opened yet another criminal case against him. He wrote on Twitter:

I’m a criminal mastermind.  Professor Moriarty is smoking jealously in the corner.  You thought I was isolated in prison, but it turns out that I’m actively committing crimes.  It’s a good thing that the Investigative Committee remains vigilant, and misses nothing.

Got an official notice that a new criminal case has been opened in my regard, connected to the fact that, while in prison, I: promoted terrorism and made public calls to extremism; financed extremist activities; rehabilitated Nazism.

The investigators are framing Navalny as a criminal leader responsible for promoting terrorism and extremism by running the Popular Politics YouTube channel.  That channel is, in fact, run by Navalny’s associates.

According to Meduza, the court in February, 2021, found Alexey Navalny guilty of defaming the World War II veteran Ignat Artyomenko, Meduza reported.  Navalny’s prior suspended sentence in the fabricated “Yves Rocher” case, in which he was accused from embezzling from his own organization, was replaced by a real prison term.  Combined with the defamation penalty, this resulted in a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

Following the defamation trial, Navalny was charged with contempt of court. Later, the prosecution merged the contempt case with a fraud case initiated in late 2020, Meduza reported. On March 22, 2022, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security penal colony.

He said his lawyers estimated he could now face a cumulative sentence of 30 years, Al Jazeera reported. There was no immediate official confirmation of the new case from Russia’s Investigative Committee.

Navalny, who rose to prominence during mass anti-Putin protests in 2011, built a huge social media operation exposing the corruption of government officials.  He used witty and slickly produced videos that drew huge audiences.

Two of the most noteworthy were two videos about a billion-dollar palace built for Vladimir Putin with public funds.

Navalny was subsequently poisoned on an airplane fight from Tomsk to Moscow in August, 2020.  He was rushed to Germany for treatment.  He and his supporters published a video pinning the blame for the poisoning in the Russian security services.

He then returned to Russia and was promptly arrested.  To me, that was an incredibly brave thing to do.

His supporters continue to produce videos documenting corruption and criticizing the Putin administration.  There is a YouTube site for the videos with English subtitles.  They’re well-done and worth a look.

Anybody who admires Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for what they’ve suffered in order to tell the truth about high-level crimes has to admire Alexei Navalny.  And vice versa.

LINKS

Alexei Navalny YouTube playlist.

Alexei Navalny official biography and Wikipedia biography.

New criminal charges threaten Alexey Navalny with 30 years in prison by Meduza news service.

Alexey Navalny faces  ‘terrorism’ charges; 30 years jail by Al Jazeera

Navalny facing fresh charges and up to 30 years in prison by Deutsche Welle.

The life and afterlife of Stepan Bandera

STEPAN BANDERA: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist – Fascism, Genocide and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe (2014)

Stepan Bandera is the national hero of Ukraine.  He also was a fascist who collaborated with the Nazis..   

The founders of the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists, which Bandera led, was modeled on the Fascist and Nazi parties.  Bandera sought Hitler’s permission to set up a Ukrainian puppet fascist state during World War Two.  His followers conducted massacres of Jews and Poles.

I read this book in order to better understand why Ukrainians, who were marked by the Nazis for extermination and enslavement, could admire him.

Grzegorz Rossolinki-Liebe is a German-Polish historian affiliated with the Free University of Berlin.  His long and exhaustive book answers the question.

The short answer is that most Ukrainians don’t know, and don’t want to know, the truth about Bandera.  They see him as a patriot who bravely fought both Hitler and Stalin, did nothing against Jews and cared only for the welfare of his people.

Unfortunately, there also is a small but strong faction in Ukraine that admires Bandera for what he really was and wants to put his fascist ideas into practice.

This is has become a moot point, because Ukraine’s current plight does not originate from within Ukraine, but from the fact that Ukraine is a bone of contention between the USA and its allies on the one hand and Russia on the other.

What I did get from the book was a better understanding of the history central and eastern Europe, the widespread appeal of fascism and the nature of historical trauma.

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Rossolinki-Liebe spent many pages wrestling with the definition of fascism and the distinction between fascism and other right-wing authoritarian nationalist ideologies that flourished in the period between the two world wars. 

I need not dwell on this.  The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was fascist under any definition of the term. 

It arose after World War One in the province of Galicia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became part of the newly-independent Polish Republic.

Poland was ruled by nationalists who tried to impose national unity by suppressing non-Polish cultures and the use of languages other than Polish.  The OUN was formed in struggle against the Polish, not the Soviet, government, although they also were anti-Russian and anti-Communist.

Ironically, Ukrainians suffered the kind of oppression Poles themselves had suffered under the Russia Empire, and the kind of oppression the Ukrainian government imposed on Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority after 2014.

Its founders admired Mussolini and Hitler and took the Italian Fascist and German Nazi movements as role models.  Like the followers of Mussolini and Hitler, the OUN believed in absolute loyalty to the nation, to the nationalist movement and to the leader of the movement.

OUN ideology combined ultranationalism with racism, mysticism, antisemitism, anticommunism, authoritarianism and a cult of war and violence. Its followers hated Poles and Russians as oppressor nations, and Jews as supposed agents of the oppressor.

But its leaders had a grudging respect for the methods, although not the goals, of Polish nationalists, Bolsheviks and Russian nihilists in 19th century Russia.  

Stepan Bandera was born in Galicia in 1909.  He was raised by a Ukrainian Eastern Rite Catholic priest who was dedicated to Ukrainian national independence.  Ukrainian nationalism was the young Bandera’s religion.  

He was brave, self-sacrificial, and uninterested in personal financial gain.  As a young student, he trained himself to endure pain by burning himself with matches and like means, so that he would not break under torture.  He joined the OUN in 1929 and rose rapidly in the ranks because of his zeal and organizational ability.

The universe’s strangest substance

Water has many strange properties, including a high surface tension, an ability to dissolve more things than any other common liquid, and a solid state (ice) that floats.  These strange properties come from water’s simple structure.   Its atoms form a chevron shape with a slightly negatively charged oxygen and positive hydrogens.  This allows water to bind to and dissolve both negatively and positively charged molecules.

Meanwhile, the hydrogen of one water molecule is attracted to the oxygen of another.  Within a liquid these attractions briefly hold the molecules together, generating the high surface tension.  This network is frozen in place when the water is cooled, leaving large gaps. As a result, the sponge-like ice floats on the liquid. In contrast, other chemicals form tightly packed solid crystals that are more dense than the liquid and so sink.

Why is water so strange? by Dr Mark Lorch for BBC Science Focus Magazine.

Water: the weirdest liquid on the planet by Alok Jha for The Guardian.

Why is this?

The new American power structure

My friend Steve from Texas sent me a link to a good article calling attention to the connection between “woke-ism” and oligarchy.

I think the writer, David Samuels, is basically right in his contention, but there’s more to be said about it.  Here are highlights of his article, with my annotations and comments.  

America has transformed itself from a country in which most citizens proudly imagined themselves to be “middle class” into a bi-coastal oligarchy.

The hallmarks of this new republic’s politics are the sorts of pathologies that used to be associated with the countries to America’s south: a wildly unequal distribution of wealth, choking bureaucracy, paranoid mass politics, the weaponisation of the security apparatus, and the merger of monopoly capital and invasive state bureaucracies.

[snip]

At the top of the narrowing social pyramid is a tiny class of mega-billionaires who personally own and control a staggering percentage of the country’s wealth, resources, and power, and make their money from the globalised economy.

Then comes the professional class that services the billionaires, ranging from highly paid lawyers and investment bankers to chefs and fashion designers and real estate salesmen.

Below them is the servant class of bureaucrats, teachers and other lower-status employees whose salaries are paid by the state or non-governmental organisations and foundations, who funnel money back to their political patrons in the Democratic Party in the form of free campaign labour and contributions.

Finally, there are the working poor, many of whom formerly considered themselves “working class” or “middle class”, but who are now forced to rely on government programs and subsidies covering everything from rent, to school tuition, to health care, to food. 

The glue that holds this power vertical together is the Democratic Party, which now regularly outspends the Republican Party — an incoherent mix of Trumpists, Christians, and other socio-economic losers — by margins of three or four to one. 

In addition to being an oligarchy, the new American social pyramid is also a gerontocracy, in which both political power and wealth are wildly skewed in favour of people above the age of 60. Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82) lead the Democrats, while Trump (76) and Mitch McConnell (80) lead the Republicans.

Where the average American over the age of 55 has a net worth of somewhere between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, the average American adult under the age of 35 is worth approximately $75,000, with the vast majority having no significant assets at all.

I don’t think most elderly Americans have millions in savings.  “Average” is calculated by dividing total wealth by the total number of people in the age groups.  That doesn’t account for inequality within the age groups.  “Average” is not typical.  Having said that, I think Samuels has a good point.

Understanding the new America as a decaying oligarchy run by old people is essential to understanding the increasingly bizarre mutations of Left and Right in American politics.

Happy [Colombus][Indigenous Peoples] Day!

Scott Alexander Siskind  posted an imaginary conversation on his blog between Adraste, who celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and Beroe, who celebrates Columbus Day.  Here are some highlights.

Adraste: …okay, surely we can both sketch out the form of the argument we’re about to have.  Genocide, political correctness, moral progress, trying to destroy cherished American traditions, etc, etc.  Would you like to just pretend we hit all of the usual beats, rather than actually doing it?

Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating marginalized groups.  President Benjamin Harrison established it in 1892 after an anti-Italian pogrom in order to highlight the positive role of Italians in American history” count as one of the usual beats by this point?

Adraste: I would have to say that it does.

Beroe: What about “Indigenous People’s Day is offensive because indigenous peoples were frequently involved in slavery and genocide”?

Adraste: I’m not sure I’ve heard that particular argument before.

Beroe: But surely you can sketch it out.  Many indigenous peoples practiced forms of hereditary slavery, usually of war captives from other tribes.  Some of them tortured slaves pretty atrociously; others ceremonially killed them as a spectacular show of wealth.  There’s genetic and archaeological evidence of entire lost native tribes, most likely massacred by more warlike ones long before European contact.  Some historians think that the Aztecs may have ritually murdered between 0.1% and 1% of their empire’s population every year, although as always other historians disagree.  I refuse to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, because I think we need to question holidays dedicated to mass murderers even when they’re “traditional” or “help connect people to their history”.

[snip]

Adraste: Maybe?  I’m not sure I think about it in quite those terms.  To me it just feels like your objection is an annoying motivated fake argument that you’re coming up with to mock Indigenous People’s Day because you don’t want to celebrate it, rather than genuine concern that it’s offensive to the descendants of the Aztecs’ victims.  Or are you really worried that if we normalize the Aztecs’ misdeeds, then the youth might start sacrificing people with obsidian daggers on top of giant pyramids?

The human towers of Catalonia

From Reuters:

Spain’s biggest human towers competition took place on Sunday, October 2, with some 11,000 spectators packing the bullring in the northeast city of Tarragona to watch the daring Catalan tradition.

Deeply rooted in Catalan culture, human towers, or ‘castells’, are built by ‘castellers’ standing on each other’s shoulders.  They compete in teams – ‘colles’ – whose aim is to construct the highest and most complicated tower.

The team from Vilafranca beat 40 other groups to take the top spot and scoop the 16,000 euro ($15,679) prize at the competition, which takes place every two years. It was the first competition after COVID-19 cancellations.

The youngest and most nimble team members – wearing protective helmets – scramble up the backs and shoulders of their teammates to the top. The highest towers on Oct. 2 were 10 levels high.

“Without kids, there would be no human towers,” sports psychologist Anna Jordand, 30, head of the children’s squad of the Ceballuts team, told Reuters. “They are the boys and girls who have to go up to the top, they have to coordinate the castells, and this is an essential part.”

The nail-biting competition saw some towers precariously wobble before crumbling, their members falling onto those below.  Organisers said 71 people had received medical attention, while 13 were taken to hospital.

Human towers were added to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010 as an “integral part of (Catalan) cultural identity” that provides members with “a sense of continuity, social cohesion and solidarity”.

“We train twice a week normally but… it’s a social activity that goes beyond making castells and training,” said computer programmer Juan Manuel Rodrigues, 39, who was been in his Tarragona team for 13 years.

The first castells competition in Tarragona bullring took place in 1932 and the competition has been held every other year since 1970.

I don’t think it would be possible to start anything like this in the United States, because of the high risk of injury, especially to small children.

But I would guess it is the danger, plus the need to push yourself to your physical limit, plus the dependence on the team, that makes this such an intense experience.  Children who went through this would have learned lessons that stayed with them through life.

It’s also a unifying experience.  Participants say social rank doesn’t matter in a castles team – only your skill and commitment.

The human towers competition answers William James’ call for a Moral Equivalent for War.  It is a competition that calls for commitment, discipline, loyalty and physical courage, but doesn’t ask you to be willing to kill or be killed.

Zelensky favors preemptive strikes on Russia

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky believes that “NATO should make it impossible for Russia to use nuclear weapons.”

“Preemptive strikes are needed so that they know what awaits them if they use nuclear weapons.  Not the other way around, waiting for Russia’s nuclear strikes and then saying, ‘oh, you’ve done that, then get this’,” he said on Thursday, speaking via video link at Australia’s think tank, the Lowy Institute.

NATO, Zelensky said, “should reconsider how it uses its pressure.”

Source: InterFax Ukraine.

You might say Zelensky is willing to fight to the last American.

Chinese expect longer lives than Americans

China’s life expectancy is now higher than that of US by Mary Hui for Quartz.  She says one reason is China’s “zero-Covid” policy, which accounts for half of China’s one-year lead in life expectancy.

No, we’re not done with Covid-19

We Americans aren’t dying at as high a rate as we were last year this time, but a lot of us face long-term organ damage and chronic illness.  It’s too soon to say “mission accomplished.”

Good news: Nord Stream could be repairable

[Update 10/05/2022].  Russian authorities reported that one of the two lines of Nord Stream 2 was undamaged, and Gazprom can resume supplying gas to customers as soon as it is inspected to make sure it is working properly.  

“Resume” is the wrong word, because Germany hAS refused to accept gas from that source.  And the remaining line will not be a complete replacement for the previously operating four lines.  Still, this is potentially good news.  (Note to self: Follow Russian news media more closely.)

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MOSCOW, October 2. /TASS/. It is technically possible to repair Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, though much time and funds will be needed, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said in an interview with the host of the “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin” show Pavel Zarubin.

“No such incidents have occurred yet. Obviously, technically it is possible to restore infrastructure, though it requires time and respective funds. I am confident such possibilities will be found,” he said in the program aired on Sunday.

“As of today, we assume it is first of all necessary to find out who did it, and we are confident countries that previously expressed certain views are interested in it.  Both the US, and Ukraine, and Poland said at some point that ‘this infrastructure will not work, and they would do everything for that,” which is why it is surely necessary to find it out,” Novak said.

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This is good news indeed.  A permanent loss of access to Russian natural gas would be catastrophic to the European economy.  No other pipeline serving Europe has the same capacity as Nord Stream 1 and 2.

But a number of things would have to happen before repairs could take place.

The Russians would need assurance that the pipelines would not be sabotaged again a second time.  They have demanded the saboteurs be identified.   And they would need the lifting of economic sanctions that interfere with access to repair equipment. 

Furthermore it’s estimated that repairs would take six months or more.  Russian gas would not be available to help Europeans get through the winter.

And there is a limited window of opportunity to start the repairs.  German experts say that in a few months, sea water will corrode the broken pipes and make repairs impossible.

The U.S. press is almost unanimous in claiming the Russians destroyed their own pipelines.  This is ridiculous.  

The Russians spent years and billions of dollars to construct these pipelines.  They give Russia an importance source of revenue and a powerful lever of power.  

Why would the Russians throw these advantages away?  If they had wanted to cut off Europe’s supply of gas, they could have done this with the turn of a valve.

Suspicion logically falls on the United States government, which has objected to construction of the pipeline and used economic sanctions to try to prevent the pipelines from being built or use.  President Biden in a press conference in February said that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would not go into operation.

On the eve of destruction

I think the world is at the beginning of a major crisis and turning point – something like the eve of the Great Depression or of World War One.  Future generations will look back on our generation and wonder how we could have been so blind as not to have seen the trap we are jumping into.

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines means the destruction of European economies.

The European countries are already in crisis.  Whole industries are being devastated by the direct and indirect effects of the cutoff of cheap oil and gas from Russia.

The destruction of the pipelines means this cutoff will be permanent. Cheap energy was the foundation of the European economic miracle. This is gone indefinitely, unless the Russians can be persuaded to repair the pipelines – the pipelines they supposedly destroyed themselves.

From what I read, I understand there is a window of only a few months for this to take place. After that damage from sea water will be irreversible.

The economic crisis is not confined to Europe.  It is spreading throughout the world.  Failures of key energy-intensive businesses in Europe will cascade to businesses that depend on them as suppliers or customers.  It will be a domino effect similar to the economic crash of 1929-1933.

The destruction of The Nord Stream pipelines takes the NATO-Russia conflict to a new level.

Nuclear warfare, chemical warfare, cyber warfare have all been off limits because there is basically no defense against them, and no nation’s leaders want to be the ones to initiate it.

Attacks on pipelines and undersea cables fall into this category.  A taboo has been broken.  There is no reason to believe that Russia is the culprit.  Why would the Russians destroy an asset they spent years and billions of dollars to build and which is their main means of leverage over Europe?  And Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he blames the USA. 

What happens if there is retaliation?  What, for example, would happen to the world’s financial markets if fiber optics communications between North America and Europe were broken?  We can only hope Putin does not choose to follow that path.

Russia and the USA are committed to a fight to the finish in Ukraine.

Back in late March and early April, Russia and Ukraine were conducting secret peace talks.  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. General Mark Milley reportedly flew to Kiev to tell Volodomor Zelensky that NATO’s goal is to fight on until Russia is defeated.

Zelensky had no choice.  Ukraine is not a sovereign nation.  It couldn’t survive without not only military support from the USA and NATO allies, but also economic support from the International Monetary Fund and other international agencies controlled by the USA.

Vladimir Putin defines the war as a clash of civilizations – a clash between Russia, representing Eastern Christianity, and the secular, imperialistic West.  In his speech of annexation of Russian-occupied Ukraine to the Russian Federation, Putin denounced the USA for its history of slavery and conquest, and also its support of the new gender ideology.

Semper Supra, the new official Space Force song

Space Force unveils official song ‘Semper Supra’ by Svetlana Shkolnikova for Stars and Stripes.