Sometimes, in cyberspace, messages appear that don’t have a wide resonance, perhaps, due to a lack of an element of sensationalism, or, rather, they’re not obvious, so, they’re not clearly visible to the naked eye. Not long ago, the BBC Russian Service broadcast a seemingly “innocuous” titbit… the French Parliament decided to return a mummified Maori warrior’s head to New Zealand; it had been on exhibit in a French museum. The report stated, literally, “In the 19th century, mummified heads were in vogue amongst collectors in Europe. Museum curators stated, ‘Probably, some Maori were killed for their beautiful tattoos’”. For those who haven’t figured it out yet, let’s repeat it. Until recently, the West, which has always trumpeted its enlightenment and civilisation, which sets itself up as an exemplar for the world, had a “thing” for mummified human heads. They routinely killed people in their colonial territories for the sake of their incredibly beautiful tattoos.
In fact, there was little change in the 20th century. The “fighters for democracy” who hunted down and killed Ernesto “Che” Guevara y de la Sema in Bolivia cut off his hands, they sent them preserved in alcohol to their paymasters… as proof of a job well done. It’s the 21st century… what’s up now? What thoughts came to mind amidst the numerous scandals caused by the appearance of American “photos from the war?” They didn’t come from journalists, for they were “missing” due to censorship; rather, ordinary soldiers posted them on the internet. The images of torture at Abu Ghraib were a small drop in the ocean. The sad thing is that one realises that this was something of a fashion if one judged things by the number of shots posed against a backdrop of corpses or torture. In fact, it’s the same thing as collecting animal skins and human scalps in the colonial era. Are we only talking about a minority of mentally disturbed individuals in the ranks of the new colonialists? However, if such is so, how can we explain the compulsive desire to capture, humiliate, and to destroy, in front of the whole world, political leaders who’ve fallen out of favour with the new supreme arbiter of the world? Why do they pursue not only them, but also their children and grandchildren?
The bombing of Yugoslavia ended with the capture of Milošević, and, in fact, his extra-judicial execution. His captors denied him adequate medical care; the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia didn’t allow him to go for treatment in Russia, despite official assurances from the Russian government. Soon after that, Slobodan Milošević died. American operations against Iraq ended with the public hanging of Saddam Hussein, aired all over the world on television, as well as the killing of two of his sons and a grandson. Now, times appear to have changed, the neocon hawk Richard Cheney (who used George W Bush as a puppet) no longer governs the US, rather, it’s ruled by an outstanding humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama. Nevertheless, the trend remains the same. NATO bombing in Libya killed Muammar Gaddafi‘s son and three of his grandchildren; the NATO forces don’t hide the fact that they seek to destroy the Libyan leader. What are the chances that Gaddafi will survive? We don’t know the answer to this question, but we can make a good guess as to what it’ll be.
How can we explain all of this? Perhaps, the rebirth of medieval brutality perpetrated worldwide by the West comes from a sense of invulnerability arising from the Soviet collapse after 1991. After all, back in the ‘80s, the USA behaved in a more humane manner to captured enemies than it does today. After the invasion of Panama in 1990, the Americans didn’t execute Manuel Noriega; they only put him in jail. Occupying Grenada in 1983, the Americans also spared the life of Prime Minister Bernard Coard. After serving over a quarter century in prison (oh, wonder!), he lived to see freedom again. As you can see, the USSR’s presence as a geopolitical counterweight to the USA mitigated the nastiness of the “scalp hunters”. At present, this is history, but one has to submit that the Globalising West now has to take into account Russia, China, and India as major geopolitical players.
However, it’s scary to imagine what would happen if these players withdrew from the race, if the world truly became unipolar. What would happen to politicians who fell into disfavour with the West? By historical standards, until quite recently, until the 18th century, the Western states burned condemned prisoners at the stake in the public squares. In Paris, in 1757, only two-and-a-half centuries ago, in the Place de Grève (today, the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville), a large crowd of people watched the brutal torture and quartering of the lunatic Robert-François Damien, who was accused of attempting to assassinate the king of France. The last burning of a witch in Western Europe was only in 1782. In future, I wonder if a “tribunal” will revive this practise when it passes the next death sentence on a captured “dictator?”
11 June 2011
Tatiana Tallerova
Vladimir Petrov
Pravoslavie.ru
http://www.pravoslavie.ru/smi/47084.htm
Editor’s Note:
Firstly, note the source… Pravoslavie.ru is a semi-official Church source; Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov has access to both high Church and state figures (he’s the confessor for the Putin family). Ergo, if you see it on this site, it means that the highest Church and state authorities have approved the material. This means that the dezinformatsiya spread by certain American sources (Mattingly, Paffhausen, Dreher, the Coneheads, Potapov, and Whiteford, to name only the most egregious) that the MP or leading elements in the Russian state favoured the NATO aggression against sovereign Libya is a bald-faced, arrogant, and contumacious lie. Most of those named have the “excuse” that they’re ignorant monoglot konvertsy… they don’t know any better. As far as Potapov’s concerned, he’s been an American intel asset for years… he’s a known quantity. Paffhausen’s the worst… he has abilities in Russian, he knows the real situation, yet he’s rebellious and sides with the extreme rightwingers. That means that he’s determined to ram this down the collective throats of the Church. We must not only oppose him… we must remove him, just as in the case of Nikon Mironov in Yekaterinburg (in the end, I think that we’ll find that JP’s just as much a golubiye as Mironov was (what does that tell us of his pals Brum, Eliel, and Tate?)).
You can follow the Church or you can follow the US rightwing. It’s up to you… and do note who’s supporting what… it’ll tell you whom to support in Church terms, too!
BMD
Voices from Russia 
Silence of the Wolves: The Ukraine and the Moral Stultification of the West
Tags: Barack Obama, EU, European Union, Nobel Peace Prize, Odessa, political commentary, politics, Ramzan Kadyrov, Russia, Russian, Ukraine, United States, USA
______________________________
Although the putschist junta in Kiev and its sponsors in the USA and Europe made all efforts to, by turns or simultaneously, ignore, downplay, obfuscate, and distort the horrific events in Odessa in the Ukraine on Friday, 2 May, what’s indisputably clear is that an estimated 46 people died and 200 forced to seek medical treatment after assaults by pro-government forces culminated in the burning of a trades-union office building.
A French novelist wrote in the 19th century of a curious trait of the human psyche; a person would perpetrate the perfect crime, then, give himself away by bragging it about it to the first stranger he meets in a bar. Such indeed is the dynamic that seems to account for videos appearing on YouTube almost immediately after the carnage in Odessa demonstrating beyond a scintilla of doubt that young thugs, many with military camouflage outfits and plastic and metal military helmets, were preparing firebombs, and, in one clear instance, firing a handgun towards the besieged occupants of the trades-union headquarters, who fled a tent camp they’d inhabited outside for shelter after extremist goons arrived.
One cell-phone video shows what seem to be police walking by and observing several young men getting Molotov cocktails ready and, far from intervening, appearing to nod their approbation. After the assailants hurled several of the handmade bombs into the building, one heard shouts of exultation and triumph, increasing in intensity as the fires caused by the bombs spread through the several-story complex. After the tardy, unaccountably and unconscionably tardy, response by law enforcement forces and rescue workers, the cops arrested several of the victims who survived the onslaught and held them for investigation. There are no reports indicating that the cops nicked the perpetrators and those who incited them.
The American/NATO-backed régime of Arseny Yatsenyuk and Aleksandr Turchinov attempted to deflect attention from the self-evident truth of what occurred, with Turchinov stating the day after the massacre, “I’ve signed a decree on the two days mourning in the Ukraine for the heroes killed during the antiterrorist operation and the people killed during the tragic events in Odessa”. Comparable equivocation and evasion by American and EU leaders echoed his cynical disingenuousness, or he orchestrated it with them. This is as though a defendant himself presented proof of his guilt and not only confessed but celebrated his act, and the prosecutor demanded an investigation, and the judge rendered an acquittal. Western leaders will, after consulting with their PR flacks, shed a couple of crocodile tears, lament the violence on both sides and continue to support, morally and materially, the massive military campaign by their client régime in Kiev against what the latter invariably refers to as terrorists.
As Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov stated in relation to the above, “Not even fascists acted like this. First, to burn people alive by blocking all entrances and setting them on fire, and, then, to tell the whole world that it was the people inside the building who hurled bottles with flammable substance at each other”. Not even fascists, indeed. There won’t be any outcry against the hideous barbarity motivating and characterising the massacre in Odessa in the West; what one of its supporters described on a video as “our May barbecue”. Not one of the 100 US Senators, not one of the 435 members of the US House of Representatives, and no member of the European Parliament will rise to denounce this outrage, more reminiscent of the behaviour of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht seventy years ago and of roaming bands of cutthroat mercenaries during the Thirty Years’ War four centuries ago than what people may have expected in the 21st century, in the post-Cold War epoch, of what President Barack Obama embraced as the reign of “the world’s military superpower” when he received… how truly unimaginative George Orwell has been proven to have been… the Nobel Peace Prize in December of 2009.
Wolves don’t cry, not even stage tears; they howl… and tear flesh.
Editor:
I know why the Odessa massacre occurred. Back in the ’80s, I had contacts with “Ukrainian Catholics” and “Ukrainian Orthodox”… what goes on in these circles is evil and beyond words. No, by no means are all those in these groups goons… emphatically not, in fact. However, the vast bulk keeps quiet when the loud and hate-filled nationalists speak up. No one opposes the strident anti-Russian rhetoric… no one protests hate indoctrination in the most inappropriate venues (Christmas parties and parish affairs). Since the end of World War II, the haters nurtured their hatred… and the American government abetted some of them in an attempt to weaken the USSR. After the August events of 1991, some of these haters got the chance to muck about in the Ukraine itself. We’re seeing the fruit of that today. These people hate “Moskali” (their term for Russians), for what, I have no bloody idea. This hate is boundless… they’ve nurtured it for a long time… with the full approval of the American government. Their forebears murdered Poles, Russians, Jews, Roma, Romanians, Magyars, and dissident Galicians (yes!) without a qualm… and the “Ukrainian” churches glorify them!
You saw the bitter fruit of that in Odessa… you saw it in the Euromaidan terrorism… you saw in the massacres of unarmed civilians in the southeast. If you support the junta in any way or keep quiet about its enormities, you cover yourself with their guilt. By their fruits ye shall know them… yes, indeed… I have to walk away from all this shit. I bit into that fruit, and it’s the foulest stuff that I’ve ever tasted. Have a care with such sorts, some of ’em aren’t wrapped overly-tightly. I’d hope that someone like Senator Sanders would condemn the junta and all of its works… but I’m not holding my breath. All of Washington is cheering on the fascists. God have mercy on us for tolerating such shit. It tells you how LOW we’ve fallen…
BMD
5 May 2014
Rick Rozoff
RIA-Novosti
http://en.ria.ru/world/20140505/189581534/Silence-of-the-Wolves-Ukraine-and-the-Moral-Stultification-of.html