Category Archives: Nationhood

Blood Brothers, The Ukraine And ‘The Enduring Schism’

English, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Russia

Blood brother is a perfectly good, if colorful, phrase to denote fealty between like-minded men. Yet in the land of the terminally stupid, linguistic flourish can become a liability; the use of a phrase “proof” of a Nazi mindset, whatever that means.

Hush. Don’t tell our deracinated neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, stateside, but “blood brother,” a perfectly proper appellation deployed by Ted Nugent to describe his affinity for “Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful Greg Abbott,” works as well to explain many a conflict in Europe (and the US).

What I take away from Nebojsa Malic’s fascinating historic insight into the complex dynamics that undergird “present-day trouble in Ukraine” is that it stands in stark contrast to the simplistic paradigm with which Anglo-American neoconservatives rape the same reality.

Malic, who is now at the The Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies, Writes:

… can be traced back not to the Mongol invasion that destroyed the first Russian state, but to the 1595 Union of Brest – when, under tremendous pressure of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, some of the Orthodox clergy decided to submit to Rome. These “Uniates” have been the driving force behind the creation of a separate, anti-Russian, “Ukrainian” identity at almost every point in history since. They allied with Poland during the civil war that brought the Bolsheviks to power and reorganized the tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union; likewise, they allied with Hitler in 1941, and were sheltered by the British after 1945 as “good Catholics and fervent anti-Communists” (see here). Since Ukraine became an independent state in 1991 (following Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of the USSR), they’ve sought to dominate its politics, which culminated recently with the “Maidan” coup. …

… While other factors – such as Islam, or geopolitics – have certainly played a role, the millennium-long history of Catholic hostility towards the Orthodox is the key to understanding the conflicts in Europe’s East. Not surprisingly, it is also the explanation least mentioned and examined. It doesn’t take a genius to see why.

MORE.

UPDATE II: Go Seahawks! (What Are We Doing? Winning!)

America, Drug War, History, Nationhood, Sport, The Zeitgeist

Go Seahawks! Go Richard Sherman; do whatever it is that a cornerback does. Remember: “Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning throws ‘ducks.'”

I probably botched that one up. What I know about American football is dangerous, other than that it originated in the game of rugby (Go Springboks).

I grew up mostly with basketball and real football—the kind Pelé played with no dog muzzle and some real hot footwork. Nevertheless, I am rooting for my home team, the Seattle Seahawks.

Why? It occurred to me that the football fetish in the US has arisen in the context of a country whose inhabitants share very little other than The Game. The host country’s history and founding documents have been turned into a liability by its educrats. The language has been dumbed down and demoted as the number of non-English-speakers clamoring for official recognition for their respective tongues rises. And the faith that once united those who fought to establish the republic has been banished from the public square and confined to the shopping mall, where adherents shop for God.

I love The Evergreen State. However, bar a few of them, I do not love its inhabitants. I share almost nothing with the pinko statists, except for the Seattle Seahawks, my adopted team.

So go Seahawks!

UPDATE I: (2/1): How could I have forgotten the other vital thing I share with residents of the Evergreen State? My bad. Drug legalization. Stop the drug war. “VICES ARE NOT CRIMES.”

UPDATE II: Anthem sung by a real singer, Renée Fleming, not by the likes of the wailing Beyonce and her booty. Gorgeous. Some real cuties on the respective teams.

We’re winning. Sharon Smith Fox is keeping score on Facebook. She writes, “Yes! and we just scored another touch town! Ilana. The score now is 29 to 0 (our favor) Go Hawks!!”

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

Read the complete column. “A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is on WND.

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Dreaming Of The Dreams Of Our Founding Fathers

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Founding Fathers, History, Nationhood, Race

Who thronged to hear black America’s president speak today, at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall? See for yourself. A sea of people from which the majority is almost entirely absent. At least as evinced from this picture:

As to MLK, he has a day; our founding father don’t. Even MLK’s speeches have their own dedicated commemorative days in the nation’s calender.

I’ve heard just about enough about MLK. And at least one lady would have agreed with me wholeheartedly: “the nation’s most engaging first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.”

On the day “marking the exact time that Martin Luther King spoke on 28 August 1963,” I too “have a dream.” It is that the dreams of our Founding Fathers be restored—and certainly not stigmatized and criminalized, as they have been by the traitors and haters that festoon our governments (Dem and Republican).

So I’ll excuse myself from the charade to dream of the dreams of America’s Founding Fathers.