Culture is alive and well in the Rodina. Tannhäuser is, perhaps, my most fave piece by Wagner… I also have a soft spot for Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen. The conductor for Tannhäuser is the German-based (but Russian-born) D M Yurovsky. A student orchestra in Weimar plays the Rienzi overture.
BMD
Here’s proof that Benedict XVI Ratzinger isn’t only hale n’ hearty, he still enjoys a good litre of brewski. Here, he greets a delegation from his native Bavaria on his birthday. Ninety-years-old and still goin’ strong… will he reach 100? Will he outlive Franky Bag o’ Donuts? Who knows? Maybe, Fr Guido Sarducci has the inside intel (“Finda the Pope in the Pizza”)…
BMD
When CNN’s Christiane Amanpour attempted to counter the arguments of Stephen Cohen, a veteran expert on Russia and the USSR, she used a classical argument deployed by all appeasers and Holocaust deniers. You can judge it for yourself. Professor Cohen said, “There’s a small but resolute rightwing nationalist movement in the Ukraine. It’s quasi-fascist, and it’s dictating terms to this parliament in Kiev… which isn’t legitimate in law, international or constitutional”. Having heard this, Amanpour retorted by saying that one shouldn’t call ALL Ukrainians neo-Nazis or fascists. In this way, she echoed many similar claims from Western political leaders such as Barak Obama to EU chief diplomat Catherine Ashton, who allowed photographers to snap her along racist leaders of the Ukrainian ultra-right.
So, are they all fascists? Indeed, they aren’t. Even in Hitler’s Germany between 1933 and 1945, people with Nazi views might not have made up a majority. The Nazis never won an absolute majority at the relatively fair elections held in Germany in 1920s and the beginning of the 30s. Nevertheless, certainly, it doesn’t remove responsibility from the German people for what happened to their own country and to other European countries in that period. At a certain moment, the Nazis became the most vocal, the most active, and the most determined part of Germany’s political spectrum. However, the deeply immoral character of their movement was visible to all who had even the most limited access to the Nazi agenda and newspapers. Therefore, shame on the German voters of that period and on the governments that whitewashed the ideology of National Socialism, including the well-known Soviet appeaser, Vyacheslav Molotov.
Alas, today, the bulk of Western public opinion behaves worse than Molotov did. Using modern media, we can get unlimited access to the agenda and ideas of the neo-Nazi Svoboda faction, which now controls four ministries in the new Ukrainian junta, as well as the General Procurator’s office. You can find out their programme by reading their material:
These ideas are deeply dangerous, not only for minorities in the Ukraine or for the Ukraine’s neighbours. They are destructive to the Ukraine itself. After 1991, the Ukrainian nation got a chance to build a state on territories that were far greater than the old Ukrainian heartland. It included sizable ethnic minorities, such as Russians in Crimea, Jews in Odessa, and Moldovans in Bukovina. The activities of the Svoboda bloc in the junta erode ethnic peace and mutual trust amongst people of different ethnic groups, which was typical of the region for centuries. Obviously, the fear of Ukrainian nationalism found in Crimea, Kharkov, and Donetsk didn’t start yesterday, nor even the day before yesterday. All 23 years of Ukrainian independence showed people that the Ukrainian ultra-right isn’t a myth and that they’re extremely dangerous. The Western supporters of the Euromaidan simply refused to notice the radicalism of their anti-Russian allies. Now, we see that the time for building trust between the various groups in the Ukraine is gone. The Western supporters of the Euromaidan share responsibility for this tense situation with their brown-shirted Ukrainian allies.
11 March 2014
Voice of Russia World Service
Voices from Russia 
5 September 2015. Franz Kafka on Political Parties
Tags: culture, Franz Kafka, German, German literature, intellectual, intellectuals, literature, political commentary, politics, world literature
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