Do remember WHAT Ike said about the Military-Industrial Complex… and do remember WHO he was… one of the most successful generals and war leaders in American History. He wasn’t a spineless draft-dodging coward like Willy Romney or Donald Trump, nor was he a vacuous foolhardy firebrand like John McCain or Ted Cruz. I rest my case…
BMD
THIS was the REAL USSR… any questions?
When I first visited Russia more than 30 years ago, it was still part of the USSR. The idea of any independent or critical press, of open debates in a parliament, or of popular demonstrations against government policies that would bring scores of thousands of people into the streets of Moscow, was inconceivable then. Today, Russia has many critics in the West, who accuse it of sliding back into dictatorship. What is their proposed solution? Usually, it is to criticise Russia and its leaders and try to strong-arm them into adopting policies of greater democracy and alleged greater respect for human rights.
These attitudes stem from a pervasive faith shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the USA that’s so pervasive, that its greatest believers are totally unaware of how much they’re in thrall to it. They believe that democracy is the only acceptable political system around the world, and that, consequently, the USA should wage a ceaseless ideological crusade, not resting until, at least, all the major nations of the world share the same limitless blessings of a perfect democratic system.
Now, I’m all in favour of democracy myself… I prefer living within a fully-democratic system rather than under a communist, fascist, or repressive theocracy. However, I’m against waging wars to imposing the American, or any other, democratic system, on other nations. I’m equally opposed to a purely-ideological foreign policy that would treat the governments of the world purely according to how Freedom House and similar bodies grade them according to how it assesses their freedoms. This is hardly an anti-American position. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and modern Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, and Bill Clinton believed and acted exactly the same way.
Ironically, the history of the West and the USA over the past three-quarters of a century exposes the dangerous folly of such self-righteous fantasies. Britain and the USA only won World War II against Nazi Germany because they were allies with the USSR under Iosif Stalin. I believe that not one in 100,000 Americans alive today knows or remembers that it was the Red Army, not the American or British forces, which liberated the Nazi extermination complexes of Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland.
Nor did Western pragmatism… or hypocrisy… end with the destruction of the truly-evil Third Reich. Many still hail President Nixon as an American statesman and peacemaker for his détente policy with the USSR and his outreach to China. Not all the repercussions of the Watergate scandal that forced him to resign can take that away. Yet, Nixon, like Reagan after him, supported the two most corrupt régimes on the planet for decades, which ground hundreds of millions of their unfortunate peoples into degradation and despair. These were the kleptocratic dictatorships of Indonesia under President Suharto and Zaïre (today called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under President Mobuto Sese Seko.
Russia has come an amazingly long way since I first visited it in the spring thaw season of 1982. That doesn’t mean its political system is the same as those of the USA or the major nations of Western Europe. However, it’s no Indonesia under Suharto or Zaïre under Mobutu either. What’s more, the USA never had any trouble getting along with them. All the moral lecturing of Russia by Western critics misses two crucial points.
First, even if Russia were to relapse back into some form of strict authoritarian government… and so far it hasn’t… that wouldn’t make war or conflict with the USA or the West inevitable. The USA, the British Empire, and the communist USSR were reliable and exceptional successful allies to each other throughout World War II. Then, the USA and the USSR successfully steered clear of any direct conflict in the 44 years of the Cold War from 1945 to 1989. It wasn’t easy; at times, they came dangerously close to war. Second, ensuring Russia remains a democracy won’t be a guarantee of peace with Russia, even if such a starry-eyed, ill-defined, reckless, and irresponsible policy such as intervening in Russia’s internal affairs could ever succeed. For throughout modern history, democracies have often waged war on other countries, including on other democracies. The idea that the best guarantee of world peace is a world filled with, and dominated by, democracies is just another myth.
What the USA and Russia really need is a serious dialogue between their top leaderships aimed at defusing tensions and managing real and unavoidable conflicts of interest. Both nations need to work hard on identifying their areas of mutual interest, and expanding them. The last thing American and other Western leaders need to do is to cave into the mounting hysteria from the think-tanks and the armchair strategists churning out their endless morally-outraged columns for the op-ed pages, and embrace a policy of ideological criticism and name-calling against Russia. The two thermonuclear superpowers need to respect each other and improve their cooperation… the peace of the world demands it.
9 March 2013
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_03_09/Please-don-t-lecture-Russia/
Editor’s Note:
Orthodox people should note that Victor Potapov, Alexander Webster, James Paffhausen, and Rod Dreher have sold out to the American Consumerist Dream and to the American Democratic Fantasy. They’re Sergianists (those who suck up to the powers-that-be for the scraps that fall from the high table) of the foulest and worst sort. They’re part of the “mounting hysteria from the think-tanks and the armchair strategists churning out their endless morally-outraged columns for the op-ed pages, and embrace a policy of ideological criticism and name-calling against Russia”. Potapov was/is an open US government propagandist. Webster and Dreher are “stink-tankers”; Paffhausen is tied to the American Enterprise Institute (one of the most Far Right stink-tanks in the District). In short, these people are traitors to the Orthosphere, and we must treat them accordingly.
You can follow HH and his support of Social Justice… or you can follow the above sell-out jabronies who’re supporters of “Greed is Good” and “The Race Goes to the Swiftest” (that’s what support of the contemporary Republican Party means). I’ve chosen… it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know where I stand… by the way, I’m far from alone…
BMD
The Pentagon is stricken with panic. Dark clouds have gathered in the sky over a programme which has, for a quarter of a century now, generated billions upon billions of dollars for those whom the great President Dwight D Eisenhower described as the military-industrial complex of America. President-elect Barack Obama refrained from pledging continued action under what’s known as the Strategic Defence Initiative. He chose words with utmost care every time he would mention that pet project of his predecessors in the course of his electoral campaign. He said the Strategic Defence Initiative could survive if it could prove its effectiveness. That he sticks to that position was confirmed by his aide Denis McDonough. According to Mr McDonough, President-elect Obama wants the new technologies to prove their effectiveness. The director of the Washington-headquartered Antimissile Defence Agency, Air Force Lieutenant General Henry Obering, was quick to say that existing plans for antimissile defence are feasible and that he’d let Mr Obama know this. I can’t help noticing that a fairly vague word, “feasible”, was used by the definitely-annoyed Lieutenant General Obering. The director of the American anti-missile defence programme refrained from the use of stronger words. It wasn’t that this high-ranking member of the outgoing Administration was afraid of saying the wrong thing to supposedly change-hungry Mr Obama. It’s because the Pentagon is still looking for a way to prove it’s made good use of the decades of painstaking efforts and enormous allocations for its highly-ambitious strategic defence initiative. It’s looking for a way to prove that the USA has an impenetrable anti-missile umbrella.
Ronald Reagan got used to the idea of “Star Wars” in Hollywood, and the great physicist Edward Teller convinced him of the feasibility of the star wars project. The Strategic Defence Initiative was launched in 1983, but, Professor Teller would soon see that he’d made a mistake. An honest scholar, he tried to talk President Reagan out of the highly-demanding project. He tried hard, but got nowhere. The Strategic Defence Initiative landed in the lap of military-industrial corporations, which were only too happy to sign up for it. Fifty celebrated scholars of America, Nobel Prize winners, all of them, tried to use the combined weight of their distinguished personal records in an effort to ditch the ineffective and highly-dangerous Strategic Defence Initiative. They wrote to tell the White House that “no technology exists that’d enable the kill vehicle to keep ahead of improvements to offensive weapons… Even if the next planned test of the proposed anti-ballistic missile system works as planned, any movement toward deployment would be premature, wasteful, and dangerous”. Apparently, the American Nobel Prize winners had every reason to say what they said.
The latest economic developments show that an integral and highly important element of the arms race, which was re-started by the Bush Administration, the anti-missile defence programme, weighs down as an unbearable burden on the economy of the United States of America. Attempts to spread the arms race to outer space and plans for the opening of new missile bases explain the latest turn to the worse in international relations. This is what the fifty prize-winning scholars talked about eight years ago. However, the White House has, in defiance of facts and the elements, forced the Pentagon to hold one anti-missile test after another. Most of those tests were anything but successful, which brought celebrated physicist Andrew Sessler and other highly-qualified experts to declare that the system in question would, if it ever got fielded, prove dysfunctional.
The arrogant stubbornness of Washington, which kept pushing on with its pet project, placed a very heavy and incessantly-growing burden on the American economy. The federal government expects the final cost of its antimissile defence program to top 150 billion dollars (4.189 trillion roubles. 118.455 billion euros. 97.665 billion UK pounds). The federal government repeats what the godfathers of this programme say. Nevertheless, other knowledgeable people see that far-from-small sum as the tip of the iceberg. They expect the highly-questionable anti-missile defence program to cost from 800 billion to 1.2 trillion dollars (22.423 to 33.514 trillion roubles. 632 to 948 billion euros. 522 to 782 billion UK pounds). That cost estimate gives American policy-makers much food for thought. Alarmed voices were heard on Capitol Hill way before the eruption of the current crisis. It’s worth pointing out that the running mate of Barack Obama, Senator Joseph Biden, was one of those to doubt the advisability of additional allocations for the anti-missile defence program. Now that the American economy has come to face new problems, it’s only natural for increasingly-nervous Americans to start losing confidence in the ruling élite. After all, the Pentagon can’t dispel people’s fears with convincing figures and argumentation.
28 November 2008
Valentin ZorinVoice of Russia World Service
http://www.ruvr.ru/main.php?lng=eng&q=35727&cid=170&p=28.11.2008
Voices from Russia 
Ike on the Dedication of the Islamic Centre in DC… It’s NOT Trump the Chump… Mutual Respect, Not “Multiculturalism”, That’s the Ticket
Tags: christians and muslims, District of Columbia, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, Ike Eisenhower, Islam, Islam in the USA, Muslims, political commentary, politics, Religion, Religion and Spirituality, United States, USA, Washington DC, Washington DC metro area
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It’s a privilege to take part in this ceremony of dedication. Meeting with you now, in front of one of the newest and most beautiful buildings in Washington, it’s fitting that we re-dedicate ourselves to the peaceful progress of all men under one God. I’d like to assure you that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Centre, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is, indeed, a part of America, and without that concept, we’d be something else than what we are.
The countries that sponsored and built this Islamic Centre have for centuries contributed to the building of civilisation. With their traditions of learning and rich culture, the countries of Islam have added much to mankind’s advancement. Inspired by a sense of brotherhood, common to our innermost beliefs, we can here together reaffirm our determination to secure the foundation of a just and lasting peace. Our country has long enjoyed a strong bond of friendship with the Islamic nations; like all healthy relationships, this relationship must be mutually beneficial. Civilisation owes to the Islamic world some of its most important tools and achievements. From fundamental discoveries in medicine to the highest planes of astronomy, the Muslim genius has added much to the culture of all peoples. That genius has been a wellspring of science, commerce and the arts, and has provided for all of us many lessons in courage and in hospitality.
This fruitful relationship between peoples, going far back into history, becomes more important each year. Today, thousands of Americans, both private individuals and governmental officials, live and work… and grow in understanding… amongst the peoples of Islam. At the same time, in our country, many from the Muslim lands… students, businessmen, and representatives of states… enjoy the benefits of experience amongst the people of this country. From these many personal contacts, here and abroad, I firmly believe that there will be a broader understanding and a deeper respect for the worth of all men, and a stronger resolution to work together for the good of mankind.
As I stand beneath these graceful arches, surrounded on every side by friends from far and near, I’m convinced that our common goals are both right and promising. Faithful to the demands of justice and of brotherhood, each working according to the lights of his own conscience, our world must advance along the paths of peace. Guided by this hope, I consider it a great personal and official honour to open the Islamic Centre, and I offer my congratulations to its sponsors and my best wishes to all who enter into its use.
Dwight D Eisenhower
President of the USA
1953-61