Posted on 03/18/2014 9:10:05 PM PDT by varmintman
I'm not the world's foremost expert on Russia... But I believe I know enough to at least try to clear up a few of the misconceptions I see on forums and have been listening to on talk radio for the past few weeks.
A bit of Russian history for starters... Slavic farmers invited Vikings (Verangians) into what you'd now call Russia and set up the Kievan state which adopted Christianity around 988 AD so that the territory controlled by the city of Kiev was the dominant power in Russia prior to the Mongol invasion in 1236. In other words, they'd fought Polovyetski/Cumins and other nomad tribes to a sort of a standstill which appeared to be a workable state of affairs and then they got run over by a military avalanch and an empire whose military technology was 300 years ahead of the rest of the world.
Russia spent the next 140 years or so under the "Mongol Yoke" before the princes of Moscow managed to win a huge battle over the Golden Horde at Kulikovo in 1380, only to have the white and golden hordes unite a couple of years later and plow Russia under foot again where she would have remained for another century or two, nonetheless shortly thereafter Tamerlane came through and annihilated the Golden Horde. Unlike the situation with Genghis Khan who had utterly competent heirs, Tamerlane's empire began to crumble shortly after his death in the first few years of the 1400s, leaving much of Russia a sort of a shambles and Southern Russia what was called "wild fields". Jews living in what had been the remains of the Khazar kingdom prior to that time finally had enough and started moving to Poland and Germany and for a period of a century or so until Russia started to get organized again, Poland and Lithuania began to look like serious countries on maps. In those days, the Ukraine was part of Poland and one of the biggest if not THE biggest celebrations there ever was in the Ukraine was when Russia took it over in the 1700s.
The Ukrainian language is basically the language of the principality of Kiev while modern Russian is basically the language of the principality of Suzdal and the city of Moscow. At some point, the languages of the various places which comprised Russia must have fused, which is presumably why you have more than one system for verb formations and declension endings. The difference between Russian and Ukrainian is similar to the difference between our English and Chaucer's and anybody in the Ukraine who isn't retarded can speak Russian.
The city of Moscow featured the most paranoid design for a city in the history of the world, basically a system of concentric rings, each more difficult to break into than the last. That is because up to a very late date, Crimean Tatars, remnants of the Golden Horde, used to ride into the city as far as they could get, capture children and stuff them into baskets on their horses and ride off to sell them so that the word "Slav" morphed into "slave". The fact that any Crimean Tatars remain alive at all strongly indicates that Russians are an unusually tolerant people, less given to holding grudges than most.
The official title of the tsars was "Tsar of all the Russias", meaning primarily 'Great Russia' (Russia), 'White Russia' (Belorus), and 'Little Russia' (Ukraine). That is the heart of the Slavic Orthodox world and Ukraine is the breadbasket of that world. The Ukraine could feed everybody from the Volga to the Atlantic and that in fact was Hitler's plan; the idea was to build a super-gauge train to haul foodstuffs from Ukraine to Europe and, as I read it at least, to get Western Europe pretty much out of the food business altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn
"Early plans for routes considered India and Vladivostok as the ultimate goals of the railways, but [b][i][size=150]by 1943 the planning was focused exclusively on European cities.[1] Ukraine and the Volga Basin were seen as especially important targets, as these areas were viewed as the future granaries of the Nazi empire[/size][/i][/b],[1] potentially through the "settlement strings". orSiedlungsperlen of the proposed Wehrbauer settlements within the conquered Lebensraum territories, which would also be linked by the planned easternmost reaches of theReichsautobahn freeway network.[5]...."
But you get the idea. The idea that anybody should have expected Vladimir Putin to just sit there and watch George Soros, Monsanto, and the US state department to just walk off with the Ukraine is idiotic. For that matter, the Crimea had been part and parcel of Russia for at least a couple of centuries before Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine in 1954; it didn't seem to make much difference when everybody was a citizen of the CCCP one way or other, but expecting Russia to just let go of he Crimea under present circumstances is doubly stupid.
Moreover, there is a very big problem with language convergence. Television and the Internet are radically shrinking the world. TV has in fact killed the Southern accent in Texas so that I hear it only amongst people over 60; I expect TV and the internet to kill most of the world's languages in the next 30 years. My guess would be that languages which will still be in use by 2050 will include:
Basically, Ukrainian is a dead language walking and the idiots who just took over Kiev know that, which accounts for at least some of their irrational behavior. Ukraine has a border with Russia, their culture is tied up with that of Russia, and Russian is the main language of those which will survive, with which they are most familiar. My money says that in 20 years, Ukrainian will be spoken only amongst people over 60. The future of the Ukrainian people clearly lies with Russia.
That brings up an obvius question: what are the people in the US state department smoking? What did they expect to see happen?? Another question is, what reasons could there be for wanting to start a major war over any of this stuff?
A century or two ago the reasons for starting wars were simple: Gold, land, women, treaties... That stuff was heinous enough but it was at least comprehensible. In today's world, unfortunatley, you have to at least consider the most paranoid possibility i.e. that the LaRouche group may be right and that the idiots may actually have in mind to start a nuclear war to reduce the human population of the planet to less than one billion as per their stated ideology, for the glory of Gaea.
It turns out the sniper killings around Kiev a month ago were the work of the hoodlums WE are supporting, and not that of Yanukovich or Russians:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-05/behind-kiev-snipers-it-was-somebody-new-coaltion-stunning-new-leak-reveals-truth
We have now seen two of these false-flag ops in the past six months (Syria and Kiev). At some point, the world has seen this **** one too many times and gets wise to it, and starts to look on Americans as a bunch of lunatics. It's hard not to get the idea that somebody in the US State Department is trying to start a major war.
Aside from that, the world can clearly see that Vladimir Putin is the best Ruler Russia has ever had since Tsar Peter, and that Bork Obunga is just as clearly the worst ruler any advanced state has ever had since Nero and may in fact be WORSE than Nero since I don't view Bork as being bright enough to play a fiddle. More likely we'll get to listen to rap while America burns.
Vladimir Putin is the main force responsible for bringing the global warming lunatics into global disrepute and disrepect. Putin apparently got a number of Russia's best hackers in a room and said something like "Guys, I'm not gonna wreck Russia's economy over a bunch of bullshit, I want you to blast your way into that East Anglia Email Database and spread to the four winds whatever you might find there", and they did that:
http://www.climategate.com
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?221759-Is-Putin-behind-the-leaked-Climategate-e-mails
In other words, aside from needing to learn how to pronounce the guy's name properly, commentators like Limbaugh and Hannity need to understand that Putin is primarily responsible for their not needing to rub sticks together to make fire.
I mean, how many times does that make that Russia has bailed our hiney's out of some really awful kind of ****? Picture living in a world in which Sweden was a major power, i.e. picture yourself cruising in a 57 Volvo:
Guy a half mile up the road had one of those when I was a teenager. The thing was so ugly that just having it parked at the curb reduced housing values within a three-block radius. Tsar Peter saved us from that ****:
I EXPECT libtards and demoKKKrats to be clueless; it's painful to listen to stupid **** coming from right of center commentaters like Limbaugh and Hannity. Again they should start by at least learning to pronounce the guy's name properly:
"vla-DEE-mir POO-Tin" The accent is on the second syllable in Vladimir and nobody swallows a T or pronounces it like a D in Russia.
There is a question of communism in the picture and the thing you have to grasp is that the Soviet state had an absolute monopoly on weapons under the CCCP so that there was no possibility of the people ever rising up and overthrowing that system. That system fell because the people running it finally realized it couldn't work and gave it up. There is zero possibility of Russia going back to socialism or communism.
They ARE however going back to their original Christian roots and aside from building some 200 Christian churches in and around Moscow, they have actually rebuilt that gigantic cathedral which the commies tore down and made into a swimming complex:
Aside from all of that, Putin and the people around him have clearly taken a hard look at the ongoing suicide of the West and determind that Russia is not going to participate in any of that happy horse-****. Not allowing gays to recruit or prosylitize in schools or allowing girl bands to desecrate a church are signs of a recovered righteousness.
I mean, if I've missed anything or left anything important out here or gotten anything wrong, somebody let me know, but this is the picture I'm seeing. I don't see anything not to like with Putin or the vision of the current Russian government.
I’m just curious if Obama would get off his dead ass and defend Poland. If we’re going to go back to the cold war, we need much more competent governance than what we have now.
Well if we actually had a decent government, we would have been drilling like crazy and become the major supplier to Europe.
But the enviro-ninnies won’t allow it.
Yep, I believe pretty soon they will be running the JAG offices.
I think Putin saw an opportunity with the unrest going on in Ukraine and monopolized on it. He invaded with the lame excuse that he was saving “Russians” in Crimea.
The first casualty of that declaration was not German—but the British ocean liner Athenia, which was sunk by a German U-30 submarine that had assumed the liner was armed and belligerent. There were more than 1,100 passengers on board, 112 of whom lost their lives. Of those, 28 were Americans, but President Roosevelt was unfazed by the tragedy, declaring that no one was to "thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields." The United States would remain neutral.
As for Britain's response, it was initially no more than the dropping of anti-Nazi propaganda leaflets—13 tons of them—over Germany. They would begin bombing German ships on September 4, suffering significant losses. They were also working under orders not to harm German civilians. The German military, of course, had no such restrictions. France would begin an offensive against Germany's western border two weeks later. Their effort was weakened by a narrow 90-mile window leading to the German front, enclosed by the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium—both neutral countries. The Germans mined the passage, stalling the French offensive.
The containment of the Soviet Union depended upon the credibility of NATO and its forces. The Soviet Union imploded as our containment policy worked. If the Russians don't believe that NATO's commitment is real, then there is a real danger of war. And unlike 1939, both sides have nuclear weapons.
“Yeah, well, how did that alliance with England and France work out in 1939?”
Not very well. They declared war to Germany, but French army sat on Maginot line without firing a shot, and England try to get in Europe ended with the catastrophe at Dunkirk. One year later, France was occupied and Germans launched the blitzkrieg against England. Not a single Brit or French soldier ever reached Poland territory.
And I believe Poland can go toe-to-toe with Russians on their home turf. I think their soldiers are more professional, than the Russian conscripts, and they are definitely more motivated.
Meanwhile, Poles saved Britain’s bacon in the ‘Battle of Britain’, fought in all theaters (Monte Cassino). And what did they get? Sold out to Uncle Joe.
And the Russians would also be bankrupt as their economy would be devastated without the sale of oil and gas to Europe. They don’t have the infrastructure in the short term to sell the same volume to China or Japan.
We need a leader who leads from the front.
March17, 2014 - “To the surprise of most speculators gas and oil pipelines crossing Ukraine have operated normally since the incursion, according to officials from Gazprom and OAO Transneft, Russia’s oil-pipeline operator. Russian crude flows through Ukraine via the southern branch of the Druzhba pipeline, which carried about 300,000 barrels a day last year, according to data from Ukraine’s energy ministry. That’s a fraction of the 3.05 million barrels of crude and 1.02 million barrels of refined-oil products that Russia exported daily to Europe last year”
Can the US provide Europe with 3 million barrels of crude and 1 million barrels of refined-oil products per day, and 40% of its natural gas needs, THAT is the question.
We put a man on the moon...Went from having virtually no Army to kicking Nazi and Jap butt in the span of a few years.
We can do anything we set our minds to, if we just have the will.
Regarding Poland & baltics getting most of their energy from Russia...
This country needs to slap itself awake to the national security importance of energy independence for ourselves and our allies. This would avoid all kinds of terrible future entanglements, compromises and sacrifices.
It also would mitigate our risk from unpredictable developments in the middle east and avoid unsavory deals with the devil with countries like Saudi Arabia.
Obama shutting down our coal industry was insane, when the USA has an incredible advantage in huge coal reserves. Invest in cleaner coal burning tech.
We have an oil boom thanks to fracking, despite Obama trying to put as much lands off limit to drilling and slow walking on permits. Open more to drilling with the urgency of our national well being depending on it.
Our country is one of very few with huge reserves of Uranium. Dramatically expand nuclear energy output with safer reactors like the French have. We already are maximizing and expanding existing reactors because it’s impossible to build new ones. Germany shutting down all their nuclear plants was idiocy. The chinese are building plants like crazy right now.
This would also have the side effect of creating a booming economy with lots of jobs and drastically shrinking the national debt. All while strengthening our allies.
Russia production of natural gas was of 668 billion cubic meters in 2013; 500 billion cm were exported to Europe.
The US sent 0.1 billion cubic meters of liquefied gas to Europe in 2013.
Ridiculous. But that's our government for you.
Which is fine and dandy. Nobody’s dissing commerce.
Should this give Russia a license to just go rearranging countries every time it feels like it? Some demur.
“We put a man on the moon...”
And?
And now American NASA astronautes rely on Soyouz rocketry in Baikonur, to reach the ISS.
America has some catch-up to do.
And fine. This may be a bee under its bustle to do just that.
“Should this give Russia a license to just go rearranging countries every time it feels like it?”
The precedent was set when the USA bombed the hell out of Serbia to strip Kosovo from it’s sovereign territory.
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