russia-insider--2020-07-15--Russian-German Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline Could Be Completed Soon

A Russian vessel capable of completing the pipelaying for the Gazprom-led Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project left a German port on Wednesday and entered Danish waters where the last section of the controversial pipeline has yet to be completed .
According to vessel-tracking data from Refinitiv Eikon cited by Reuters , Russian ship Fortuna , sailing under a Russian flag , departed from the Mukran port in Germany on the Baltic Sea and moved into Danish territorial waters .
The move comes several days after the Danish Energy Agency allowed Nord Stream 2 AG to use pipelaying vessels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nord Stream 2 pipelines .
The Danish agency previously allowed self-positioning pipelaying vessels ( DP pipe-laying vessels ) in the construction permit for the Nord Stream 2 pipelines .
With an anchored Russian vessel , Gazprom could complete the construction of the pipeline in Danish waters .
Because of the U.S. sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project from December , Western vessel and technology providers pulled out of the project .
Following the announcement of the sanctions , Switzerland-based offshore pipelay and subsea construction company Allseas immediately suspended Nord Stream 2 pipelay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russian firms can complete the project without the help of foreign partners .
U.S. lawmakers , for their part , have been seeking more sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project , which the United States sees as further undermining Europe ’ s energy security by giving Russian gas giant Gazprom another pipeline to ship its natural gas to European markets .
The U.S. sanctions on the project have divided Europe , with Germany criticizing the U.S. interference in Europe ’ s energy policies and projects .
Germany , the endpoint of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the economic benefits of the project , while the U.S. , including President Donald Trump , have been threatening sanctions on the project and even on Germany over its support for the project .

A Russian vessel capable of completing the pipelaying for the Gazprom-led Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project left a German port on Wednesday and entered Danish waters where the last section of the controversial pipeline has yet to be completed.
According to vessel-tracking data from Refinitiv Eikon cited by Reuters, Russian ship Fortuna, sailing under a Russian flag, departed from the Mukran port in Germany on the Baltic Sea and moved into Danish territorial waters.
The move comes several days after the Danish Energy Agency allowed Nord Stream 2 AG to use pipelaying vessels with anchors for the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipelines. The Danish agency previously allowed self-positioning pipelaying vessels (DP pipe-laying vessels) in the construction permit for the Nord Stream 2 pipelines.
With an anchored Russian vessel, Gazprom could complete the construction of the pipeline in Danish waters. Because of the U.S. sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project from December, Western vessel and technology providers pulled out of the project.
Following the announcement of the sanctions, Switzerland-based offshore pipelay and subsea construction company Allseas immediately suspended Nord Stream 2 pipelay activities.
Russian officials have claimed that Russian firms can complete the project without the help of foreign partners.
U.S. lawmakers, for their part, have been seeking more sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project, which the United States sees as further undermining Europe’s energy security by giving Russian gas giant Gazprom another pipeline to ship its natural gas to European markets.
The U.S. sanctions on the project have divided Europe, with Germany criticizing the U.S. interference in Europe’s energy policies and projects. Germany, the endpoint of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, looks at the economic benefits of the project, while the U.S., including President Donald Trump, have been threatening sanctions on the project and even on Germany over its support for the project.


russia-insider--2020-07-15--Reading Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag' Made Me Realize - We're Creating a Similar Situation in the US

After reading Dostoevsky ’ s The Brothers Karamazov , I decided to tackle all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , which clocks in at about 2,000 pages .
It ’ s a tremendous work that allowed me to understand the full extent of evil that mankind is capable of and how we are in the early stages of duplicating a similar course of events in the United States .
Soviet authorities were paranoid that spies were everywhere The Soviets had no way of knowing whether you were a spy or not , so to be on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they considered suspect into the gulags ( concentration camps ) .
Now , thanks to us voluntary buying gadgets and technology that record just about everything we do , the American government has yet no need to do the exact same .
Political prisoners of the likes of Julian Assange are rare .
They simply monitor everyone and—if a dissident happens to gain too much power—figure out a way to halt his activism , usually by defaming him through the media , shutting him down on social media , or canceling his financial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ technically “ free , ” but the rug can be pulled out from under you at any moment if you threaten the state ’ s agenda .
Minor offenses sent you to the Gulags A half-literate stovemaker used to enjoy writing his name in his free time .
This raised his self-esteem .
There was no blank paper around , so he wrote on newspapers .
His neighbors found his newspaper in the sack in the communal toilet , with pen-and-ink flourishes across the countenance of the Father and Teacher [ Stalin ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gulag ] .
The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin , They bought it .
The bust was big and heavy .
They ought to have carried it in a hand barrow , both of them together , but the manager ’ s status did not allow him to .
‘ All right .
you ’ ll manage it if you take it slowly.
’ And he went off ahead .
The old watchman couldn ’ t work out how to do it for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carry it at his side ; he couldn ’ t get his arm around it .
If he tried to carry it in front of him , his .
back hurt and he was thrown off balance backward .
Finally he figured out how to do it .
He took off his belt , made a noose for Comrade Stalin , put it around his neck , and in this way carried it over his shoulder through the village .
Well , there was nothing here to argue about .
It was an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ten years .
If a man had a brick house in a row of log cabins , or two stories in a row of one-story houses—there was your kulak : Get ready , you bastard , you ’ ve got sixty minutes [ to pack all of your things ] !
There aren ’ t supposed to be any brick houses in the Russian village , there aren ’ t supposed to be two-story houses !
Back to the cave !
You don ’ t need a chimney for your fire !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country : history has never seen the like of it .
Comrade , you sent a tweet in the past that was slightly racist .
I think your employer will have to take punitive action against you .
You wrote an article thirty years ago that was sexist .
Time for you to resign .
I also scanned your social media accounts and , after assigning you a risk score , deem you unfit to rent short-term properties on Airbnb .
There is no right to appeal , but I assure you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pronouncements .
While you ’ re restricted from the marketplace , you ’ ll have plenty of time to improve your thoughts and behavior .
The bedbug-infested box has already been mentioned .
In the dark closet made of wooden planks , there were hundreds , maybe even thousands , of bedbugs , which had been allowed to multiply .
The guards removed the prisoner ’ s jacket or field shirt , and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him , crawling onto him from the walls or falling off the ceiling .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , crushing them on his body and on the walls , suffocated by their stink .
But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur .
Sleeplessness was a great form of torture : it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection—something unheard of anyway—were to strike on the morrow .
The loneliness of the accused !
That was one more factor in the success of unjust interrogation !
The entire apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his arrest and throughout the entire shock period of the interrogation the prisoner was , ideally , to be kept entirely alone .
In his cell , in the corridor , on the stairs , in the offices , he was not supposed to encounter others like himself , in order to avoid the risk of his gleaning a bit of sympathy , advice , support from someone ’ s smile or glance .
The Organs did everything to blot out for him his future and distort his present : to lead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family had all been arrested and that material proof of his guilt had been found .
In the past , I thought I was tough because I was so accomplished with pursuits of the flesh , but I was actually effeminate , a slave to my passions .
I could only simulate being “ tough ” if I knew that it would be followed with a reward of pleasure .
I may know emotional pain and suffering , but I do not know physical pain , and doubt I could handle it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ this time What you learn from the concentration camps Live with a steady superiority over life—-don ’ t be afraid of misfortune , and do not yearn after happiness ; it is , after all , all the same : the bitter doesn ’ t last forever , and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing .
It is enough if you don ’ t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don ’ t claw at your insides .
If your back isn ’ t broken , if your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can bend , if both eyes see , and if both ears hear , then whom should you envy ?
And why ?
Our envy of others devours us most of all .
Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well .
Do not hurt them or scold them , and never part from any of them in anger ; after all , you simply do not know : it might be your last act before your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you are imprinted in their memory !
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant .
You were constantly in a rush .
And you were constantly short of time .
And now you have time with interest .
You are surfeited with it , with its months and its years , behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience .
You are ascending… Formerly you never forgave anyone .
You judged people without mercy .
And you praised people with equal lack of moderation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the basis of your uncategorical judgments .
You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others .
And be astonished at another ’ s strength .
And wish to possess it yourself .
The stones rustle beneath our feet .
We are ascending… With the years , armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin .
You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer .
Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for easy oscillation .
Your eyes do not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do they darken with grief .
For you still have to verify whether that ’ s how it is going to be .
And you also have to work out what is gladness and what is grief .
And now the rule of your life is this : Do not rejoice when you have found , do not weep when you have lost .
Suffering builds virtue while material excess destroys virtue .
Suffering makes you stop and think about your life .
It removes all trivialities , all inane chatter .
Orthodox @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cancer , which kills you slowly , is a gift from God .
It takes you away from the world to focus on your life and mortality , opening the door to repentance and salvation .
Whether you ’ re facing the gulags or cancer , you will have more time and motivation than before to examine yourself and the source of your creation .
Without God , how can you endure suffering ?
How can you put it into context ?
Your life would be nothing more than a losing lottery ticket @ @ @ @ @ @ @ try , and how many years you work , the things you show for it would be pitiful .
What do you have to brag about ?
A McMansion and an expensive plastic automobile ?
A few notches under your belt of “ hot ” girls who long ago forgot about you ?
A few thousand internet followers who move on as soon as a new viral sensation is dangled in front of them ?
Unless you devote yourself to family and God , your life will have no meaning .
You will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distraction and pleasure to the next .
If the U.S. Federal Government decides to prosecute you for a crime , you are as good as guilty .
93 % of Federal cases result in conviction .
Why even bother spending the money for your defense in what will amount to a show trial , a farce of justice ?
Violent criminals were proxy soldiers for the state Blacks and homosexuals are the proxy warriors of today .
They are allowed free reign in American cities to spread violence , destruction , sodomy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your mouth for anything that may criticize their behavior .
Have you involuntarily gone a day without food ?
I ’ m sure you ’ ve dieted or fasted in some way to become more desirable , allowing you to feed your pride or better sate your lust with attractive sex partners .
We put ourselves into a state of hunger to be better able to sin , but the kitchen is never far , and it is always full of food .
The hunger will end as soon as we want .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ And women who were not at all young turned out to be involved in this too , even placing the jailers in a quandary : out in freedom no one would ever have considered such a woman !
And these women did not seek passion , but to satisfy their need to look after someone , to keep him warm , to sacrifice their own rations in order to feed him up , to wash and darn for him .
The common bowl out of which they ate was their sacred wedding ring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sleep with him , but in our beastly life , in which we curse each other in the barracks the whole day long over the bread ration and over rags , I keep thinking to myself : Today I must mend his shirt , and boil his potatoes , ’ one woman explained to Dr. Zubov .
But the man at times wanted more , and it was necessary to yield , and right then the supervisors would catch them .
And that was how , in Unzhlag , the hospital laundress Auntie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ early , who had subsequently been alone all her life , and who had later helped out in a church , was caught at night with a man at the very tail end of her camp term .
Women who were already elderly could not sleep nights because of a chance smile , because of some fleeting mark of attention they had received .
So sharply did the light of love stand out against the dirty , murky camp existence !
What amazes me today is that even in an intense climate of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , men and women are still getting married and doing the best they can at raising a family .
Maybe their marriages are difficult , but the fact that people are walking down the aisle instead of satisfying every carnal delight that is presented to them is a testament of our God-given nature to bond with the opposite sex .
No matter how much Satan tries , he will not destroy this bond completely .
Women had it easier if they agreed to be concubines A system that made you fearful of helping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same time most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly , but just not to notice the doomed person next to one , not to help him , to turn away one ’ s face , to shrink back .
They had arrested a neighbor , your comrade at work , or even your close friend .
You kept silence .
You acted as if you had not noticed .
( For you could not afford to lose your current job ! )
And then it was announced at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the person who had disappeared the day before was .
.
.
an inveterate enemy of the people .
And you , who had bent your back beside him for twenty years at the same desk , now by your noble silence ( or even by your condemning speech ! )
, had to show how hostile you were to his crimes .
( You had to make this sacrifice for the sake of your own dear family , for your own dear ones !
What right had you not to think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrested had left behind him a wife , a mother , children , and perhaps they at least ought to be helped ?
No , no , that would be dangerous : after all , these were the wife of an enemy and the mother of an enemy , and they were the children of an enemy ( and your own children had a long education ahead of them ) !
It ’ s not an accident that Bolshevik communism was a complete inversion of the Gospel .
It featured authority from below @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up high .
There was faith in the man leader ( Stalin ) instead of the God-man ( Christ ) .
There was purported equality instead of divine hierarchy .
And in the above excerpt , there was fear and avoidance of one ’ s neighbor instead of love .
Everyone was on their own in a little island , with few bonds to speak off .
One fact that is absent from Solzhenitsyn ’ s three volumes is describing who was primarily responsible for the human tragedy of Russian communism .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his book Two-Hundred Years Together , but for some reason it has not been picked up by a New York City publishing house for translation into English .
I don ’ t think I ’ ve ever heard of a Nobel Prize winner not having one of his major books translated to the most dominant language in the world .
We can only speculate as to why that is .
I don ’ t believe that an exact carbon copy of the gulag will come to the United States , but we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , especially in the virtual sense on the internet .
If the elites do lose the ability to control public opinion through propaganda , they will tighten the screws .
We must put on the armor of God , because nothing short of that will allow us to endure being attacked like the Russians were in the 20th century .
Learn More : Soviet Defector Yuri Bezmenov Accurately Predicted How America Would Decline

After reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I decided to tackle all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which clocks in at about 2,000 pages. It’s a tremendous work that allowed me to understand the full extent of evil that mankind is capable of and how we are in the early stages of duplicating a similar course of events in the United States.
Soviet authorities were paranoid that spies were everywhere
And who noticed the thirty thousand Czechs who in 1939 fled from occupied Czechoslovakia to their Slavic kinfolk in the U.S.S.R.? It was impossible to guarantee that a single one of them was not a spy. They sent them all off to northern camps. (And it was out of those camps that the “Czechoslovak Corps” materialized during the war.) And was it not, indeed, in 1939 that we reached out our helping hands to the West Ukrainians and the West Byelorussians, and, in 1940, to the Baltic states and to the Moldavians? It turned out that our brothers badly needed to be purged, and from them, too, flowed waves of social prophylaxis. They took those who were too independent, too influential, along with those who were too well-to-do, too intelligent, too noteworthy; they took, particularly, many Poles from former Polish provinces.
The Soviets had no way of knowing whether you were a spy or not, so to be on the safe side, they threw anyone they considered suspect into the gulags (concentration camps). Now, thanks to us voluntary buying gadgets and technology that record just about everything we do, the American government has yet no need to do the exact same. Political prisoners of the likes of Julian Assange are rare. They simply monitor everyone and—if a dissident happens to gain too much power—figure out a way to halt his activism, usually by defaming him through the media, shutting him down on social media, or canceling his financial and e-commerce accounts. You’re technically “free,” but the rug can be pulled out from under you at any moment if you threaten the state’s agenda.
Minor offenses sent you to the Gulags
A half-literate stovemaker used to enjoy writing his name in his free time. This raised his self-esteem. There was no blank paper around, so he wrote on newspapers. His neighbors found his newspaper in the sack in the communal toilet, with pen-and-ink flourishes across the countenance of the Father and Teacher [Stalin]. Anti-Soviet Agitation—ten years [in the gulag]. […] The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin, They bought it. The bust was big and heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand barrow, both of them together, but the manager’s status did not allow him to. ‘All right. you’ll manage it if you take it slowly.’ And he went off ahead. The old watchman couldn’t work out how to do it for a long time. If he tried to carry it at his side; he couldn’t get his arm around it. If he tried to carry it in front of him, his. back hurt and he was thrown off balance backward. Finally he figured out how to do it. He took off his belt, made a noose for Comrade Stalin, put it around his neck, and in this way carried it over his shoulder through the village. Well, there was nothing here to argue about. It was an open-and-shut case. Article 58-8, terrorism, ten years. […] If a man had a brick house in a row of log cabins, or two stories in a row of one-story houses—there was your kulak: Get ready, you bastard, you’ve got sixty minutes [to pack all of your things]! There aren’t supposed to be any brick houses in the Russian village, there aren’t supposed to be two-story houses! Back to the cave! You don’t need a chimney for your fire! This is our great plan for transforming the country: history has never seen the like of it.
Comrade, you sent a tweet in the past that was slightly racist. I think your employer will have to take punitive action against you. You wrote an article thirty years ago that was sexist. Time for you to resign. I also scanned your social media accounts and, after assigning you a risk score, deem you unfit to rent short-term properties on Airbnb. There is no right to appeal, but I assure you that there was no mistake in these pronouncements. While you’re restricted from the marketplace, you’ll have plenty of time to improve your thoughts and behavior.
Methods of torture
The bedbug-infested box has already been mentioned. In the dark closet made of wooden planks, there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bedbugs, which had been allowed to multiply. The guards removed the prisoner’s jacket or field shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawling onto him from the walls or falling off the ceiling. At first he waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur. […] Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection—something unheard of anyway—were to strike on the morrow. […] The loneliness of the accused! That was one more factor in the success of unjust interrogation! The entire apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and inhibited will. From the moment of his arrest and throughout the entire shock period of the interrogation the prisoner was, ideally, to be kept entirely alone. In his cell, in the corridor, on the stairs, in the offices, he was not supposed to encounter others like himself, in order to avoid the risk of his gleaning a bit of sympathy, advice, support from someone’s smile or glance. The Organs did everything to blot out for him his future and distort his present: to lead him to believe that his friends and family had all been arrested and that material proof of his guilt had been found.
In the past, I thought I was tough because I was so accomplished with pursuits of the flesh, but I was actually effeminate, a slave to my passions. I could only simulate being “tough” if I knew that it would be followed with a reward of pleasure. I may know emotional pain and suffering, but I do not know physical pain, and doubt I could handle it.
There was no way to prepare for this time
From childhood on we are educated and trained—for our own profession; for our civil duties; for military service; to take care of our bodily needs; to behave well; even to appreciate beauty (well, this last not really all that much!). But neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares us in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives: being arrested for nothing and interrogated about nothing.
Living in the Gulag
They didn’t distribute rations to individuals but to units of ten. If one of the ten died, the others shoved his corpse under the bunks and kept it there until it started to stink. They got the corpse’s ration. […] Even one mere year, whew, how long it lasts! Even in one year how much time is left for you to think! For 330 days you stomp out to line-up in a drizzling, slushy rain, and in a piercing blizzard, and in a biting and still subzero cold. For 330 days you work away at hateful, alien work with your mind unoccupied. For 330 evenings you squinch up, wet, chilled, in the end-of-work line-up; waiting for the convoy to assemble from the distant watchtowers. And then there is the march out, And the march back. And bending down over 730 bowls of gruel, over 730 portions of grits. Yes, and waking up and going to sleep on your multiple bunk. And neither radio nor books to distract you.
What you learn from the concentration camps
Live with a steady superiority over life—-don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory! […] Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience. You are ascending… Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself. The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending… With the years, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash with gladness over good tidings nor do they darken with grief. For you still have to verify whether that’s how it is going to be. And you also have to work out what is gladness and what is grief. And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.
Suffering builds virtue while material excess destroys virtue. Suffering makes you stop and think about your life. It removes all trivialities, all inane chatter. Orthodox elders have taught that a disease like cancer, which kills you slowly, is a gift from God. It takes you away from the world to focus on your life and mortality, opening the door to repentance and salvation. Whether you’re facing the gulags or cancer, you will have more time and motivation than before to examine yourself and the source of your creation.
True faith was revealed
N. Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbor on the Butyrki bunks in 1937. They kept on interrogating her every night. Two years earlier, a former Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, who had escaped from exile, had spent a night at her home on his way through Moscow. ‘But he wasn’t the former Metropolitan, he was the Metropolitan! Truly, I was worthy of receiving him.’ ‘All right then. To whom did he go when he left Moscow?’ ‘I know, but I won’t tell you!’ (The Metropolitan had escaped to Finland via an underground railroad of believers.) At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman’s face, and she replied: ‘There is nothing you can do with me even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing me.’ (They would lose contact with the underground railroad.) ‘But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute.’
Without God, how can you endure suffering? How can you put it into context? Your life would be nothing more than a losing lottery ticket, for no matter how hard you try, and how many years you work, the things you show for it would be pitiful. What do you have to brag about? A McMansion and an expensive plastic automobile? A few notches under your belt of “hot” girls who long ago forgot about you? A few thousand internet followers who move on as soon as a new viral sensation is dangled in front of them? Unless you devote yourself to family and God, your life will have no meaning. You will be continually hurtling from one moment of distraction and pleasure to the next.
No justice, no truth
And in 1942 Strakhovich cried out during a session of the military tribunal of the Leningrad Military District: ‘But I could not have been recruited by Ignatovsky when I was only ten years old!’ But the presiding judge barked back: ‘Don’t slander the Soviet intelligence service!’ The whole thing had been predetermined long before: each and every one of the Ignatovsky group was to be sentenced to be shot. Some man named Lipov got included in the group, but no one from the group knew him and he knew none of them either. Well, so, all right, Lipov got ten years. […] At the Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945 they greeted the prisoners with a roll call based on cases. ‘So and so! Article 58, twenty-five years.’ The chief of the convoy guard was curious: ‘What did you get it for?’ ‘For nothing at all.’ ‘You’re lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.’
If the U.S. Federal Government decides to prosecute you for a crime, you are as good as guilty. 93% of Federal cases result in conviction. Why even bother spending the money for your defense in what will amount to a show trial, a farce of justice?
Violent criminals were proxy soldiers for the state
The most inveterate and hardened thieves were given unbridled power on the islands of the Archipelago, in camp districts, and in camps—power over the population of their own country, over the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia; power they had never before had in history, never in any state in all the world, power which they couldn’t even dream of out in freedom. And now they were given all other people as slaves. What bandit would ever decline such power? The central thieves, the top-level thieves, totally controlled the camp districts. they lived in individual ‘cabins’ or tents with their own temporary wives. (Or arbitrarily picking over the ‘smooth broads’ from among their subjects, they had the intellectual women 58’s and the girl students to vary their menu.)
Blacks and homosexuals are the proxy warriors of today. They are allowed free reign in American cities to spread violence, destruction, sodomy, and AIDS while you have to watch your mouth for anything that may criticize their behavior.
Slow starvation
Hunger, which forces an honest person to reach out and steal (“When the belly rumbles, conscience flees”). Hunger, which compels the most unselfish person to look with envy into someone else’s bowl, and to try painfully to estimate what weight of ration his neighbor is receiving. Hunger, which darkens the brain and refuses to allow it to be distracted by anything else at all, or to think about anything else at all, or to speak about anything else at all except food, food, and food. Hunger, from which it is impossible to escape even in dreams—dreams are about food, and insomnia is over food. And soon—just insomnia. Hunger, after which one cannot even eat up; the man has by then turned into a one-way pipe and everything emerges from him in exactly the same state in which it was swallowed. […] Sometimes the entire body of a man dying of starvation is covered with blue-black pimples like peas, with pus-filled heads smaller than a pinhead—his face, arms, legs, his trunk, even his scrotum. It is so painful he cannot be touched. The tiny boils come to a head and burst and a thick wormlike string of pus is forced out of them. The man is rotting alive.
Have you involuntarily gone a day without food? I’m sure you’ve dieted or fasted in some way to become more desirable, allowing you to feed your pride or better sate your lust with attractive sex partners. We put ourselves into a state of hunger to be better able to sin, but the kitchen is never far, and it is always full of food. The hunger will end as soon as we want.
The bond between man and woman remained
And women who were not at all young turned out to be involved in this too, even placing the jailers in a quandary: out in freedom no one would ever have considered such a woman! And these women did not seek passion, but to satisfy their need to look after someone, to keep him warm, to sacrifice their own rations in order to feed him up, to wash and darn for him. The common bowl out of which they ate was their sacred wedding ring. ‘I do not need to sleep with him, but in our beastly life, in which we curse each other in the barracks the whole day long over the bread ration and over rags, I keep thinking to myself: Today I must mend his shirt, and boil his potatoes,’ one woman explained to Dr. Zubov. But the man at times wanted more, and it was necessary to yield, and right then the supervisors would catch them. And that was how, in Unzhlag, the hospital laundress Auntie Polya, who had been widowed very early, who had subsequently been alone all her life, and who had later helped out in a church, was caught at night with a man at the very tail end of her camp term. […] Women who were already elderly could not sleep nights because of a chance smile, because of some fleeting mark of attention they had received. So sharply did the light of love stand out against the dirty, murky camp existence!
What amazes me today is that even in an intense climate of hostile propaganda aimed at dividing the sexes, men and women are still getting married and doing the best they can at raising a family. Maybe their marriages are difficult, but the fact that people are walking down the aisle instead of satisfying every carnal delight that is presented to them is a testament of our God-given nature to bond with the opposite sex. No matter how much Satan tries, he will not destroy this bond completely.
Women had it easier if they agreed to be concubines
In certain camps a polite procedure was preserved: The women were conducted to their barracks—and then the well-fed, self-confident, and impudent trusties entered the barracks, dressed in new padded jackets (any clothing in camp which was not in tatters and soiled seemed mad foppery). Slowly and deliberately they strolled between the bunks and made their choices. They sat down and chatted. They invited their choices to ‘visit’ them. And they were living, too, not in a common-barracks situation, but in cabins occupied by several men. And there they had hot plates and frying pans. And they had fried potatoes too! An unbelievable dream! The first time, the chosen women were simply feasted and given the chance to make comparisons and to discover the whole spectrum of camp life. Impatient trusties demanded “payment” right after the potatoes, while those more restrained escorted their dates home and explained the future. You’d better make your arrangements inside the camp compound, darling, while it is being proposed in a gentlemanly way. There’s cleanliness here, and laundry facilities, and decent clothes and unfatiguing work—and it’s all yours.
A system that made you fearful of helping your neighbor
The mildest and at the same time most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbor, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed. (For you could not afford to lose your current job!) And then it was announced at work, at the general meeting, that the person who had disappeared the day before was . . . an inveterate enemy of the people. And you, who had bent your back beside him for twenty years at the same desk, now by your noble silence (or even by your condemning speech!), had to show how hostile you were to his crimes. (You had to make this sacrifice for the sake of your own dear family, for your own dear ones! What right had you not to think about them?) But the person arrested had left behind him a wife, a mother, children, and perhaps they at least ought to be helped? No, no, that would be dangerous: after all, these were the wife of an enemy and the mother of an enemy, and they were the children of an enemy (and your own children had a long education ahead of them)!
It’s not an accident that Bolshevik communism was a complete inversion of the Gospel. It featured authority from below (the working class) instead of up high. There was faith in the man leader (Stalin) instead of the God-man (Christ). There was purported equality instead of divine hierarchy. And in the above excerpt, there was fear and avoidance of one’s neighbor instead of love. Everyone was on their own in a little island, with few bonds to speak off.
A work of persecution
I must explain that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time! ln September, 1965, when work on the Archipelago was at its most intensive, I suffered a setback: my archive was raided and my novel impounded. At this point the parts of the Archipelago already written, and the materials for the other parts, were scattered and never reassembled: I could not take the risk, especially when all the names were given correctly. I kept jotting down reminders to myself to check this and remove that, and traveled from place to place with these bits of paper. The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature. Take the book for what it is.
One fact that is absent from Solzhenitsyn’s three volumes is describing who was primarily responsible for the human tragedy of Russian communism. He did share that fact elsewhere, particularly in his book Two-Hundred Years Together, but for some reason it has not been picked up by a New York City publishing house for translation into English. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Nobel Prize winner not having one of his major books translated to the most dominant language in the world. We can only speculate as to why that is.
I don’t believe that an exact carbon copy of the gulag will come to the United States, but we’re already seeing shades of it, especially in the virtual sense on the internet. If the elites do lose the ability to control public opinion through propaganda, they will tighten the screws. We must put on the armor of God, because nothing short of that will allow us to endure being attacked like the Russians were in the 20th century.
Learn More: Soviet Defector Yuri Bezmenov Accurately Predicted How America Would Decline


russia-insider--2020-07-17--Unz.com Traffic Continues to Soar, Adds Amren's Jared Taylor, Gregory Hood As Regular Columnists

Our website traffic easily broke all records for the month of June , and these high levels have now continued into July , suggesting that the huge rise produced by the initial wave of Black Lives Matters protests may be more than temporary .
It appears that many new readers first discovered our alternative webzine at that point , and quite a few have stayed on as regular visitors .
This represents a sharp turnaround after May , when our near-simultaneous banning by both Google and Facebook at the beginning of that month caused our previously strong traffic to decline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ longer-term factor that may be strengthening our position is the unprecedented wave of ideological purges that have swept our country since early June , with prominent figures in the intellectual and media firmaments being especially hard hit .
When opinion-leaders become fearful of uttering even slightly controversial words , they either grow silent or only mouth the most saccharine homilies , thereby forcing many of their erstwhile readers to look elsewhere for more candid discussions .
And our own webzine is about as “ elsewhere ” as one could possibly get .
Take @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Times , more than ever our national newspaper of record .
For the last few years , one of its top figures had been Editorial Page Editor James Bennet , who had previously run The Atlantic , and he was widely considered a leading candidate to assume the same position at the Gray Lady after next year ’ s scheduled retirement of the current top editor .
Indeed , with his brother serving as U.S .
Senator from Colorado—and a serious if second-rank presidential candidate—the Lifestyle section of the Washington Post had already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saviors of the American establishment .
But then his paper published an op-ed by an influential Republican senator endorsing President Trump ’ s call for a harsh crackdown on riots and looting , and a Twitter mob of outraged junior Times staffers organized a revolt .
The mission of the NYT Opinion Pages is obviously to provide a diversity of opinions , but Bennet was quickly purged .
A similar fate befell the highly-regarded longtime editor of the Philadelphia Inquirerafter his paper ran a headline considered insufficiently respectful to black rioters .
Michigan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the accepted narrative of black deaths at the hands of police , and physicist Stephen Hsu , the Senior Vice President who had supported their work , was forced to resign his administrative position as a consequence .
Numerous other figures of lesser rank have been purged , their careers and livelihoods destroyed for Tweeting out a phrase such as “ All Lives Matter , ” whose current classification as “ hate speech ” might have stunned even George Orwell .
Or perhaps a spouse or other close relative had denounced the black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are changing so rapidly that positions which were completely innocuous just a few weeks ago have suddenly become controversial or even forbidden , with punishments sometimes inflicted on a retroactive basis .
I am hardly alone in viewing this situation with great concern .
Just last week , some 150 prominent American writers , academics , and intellectuals published an open letter in Harpers expressing their grave concern over protecting our freedom of speech and thought .
Admittedly , the credentials of some of the names on the list were rather doubtful .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard-core Neocons had themselves led the effort to purge from the media all critics of Bush ’ s disastrous Iraq War , and more recently they have continued to do with same with regard to our irrational hostility towards Putin ’ s Russia .
But the principled histories of other signers such as Noam Chomsky partially compensated for the inclusion of such unpleasant opportunists .
Although the Harpers statement attracted many stars of our liberal firmament , apparently few people read Harpers these days , with its website traffic being just a tenth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reaction in the media itself was a much more important factor , and this seems to have been decidedly mixed .
150 rather obscure activists soon issued a contrasting statement , which major outlets such as NYT , CNN , and the Los Angeles Times seem to have accorded equal or greater weight , hardly suggesting that the ideological tide has started to turn .
Back a couple of years ago , there was a popular joke going around Chinese social media in which Chairman Mao came back to life with all sorts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Among other things , he was informed his disastrous Cultural Revolution had shifted to America , a prescient observation given the events of the last few weeks : The controversial May 25th death of a black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody soon set off the greatest nationwide wave of protests , riots , and looting in at least two generations , and the once-placid hometown of the Mary Tyler Moore Show alone suffered some five hundred million dollars of damage .
Some of the main political reactions have been especially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Black Lives Matter movement have received massive media support for their demands that local urban police departments be “ defunded , ” a proposal so bizarre that it had previously been almost unknown .
Statues , monuments , and other symbolic representations of traditional American history quickly became a leading target .
Hubert Humphrey ’ s Minneapolis has long been an extremely liberal bastion of the heavily Scandinavian Upper Midwest , having no ties to the South or slavery , but Floyd ’ s death soon launched an unprecedented national effort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other Southern cultural traces throughout our society .
Popular country music groups such as the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum had freely recorded their songs for decades , but they were now suddenly forced to change their names in frantic haste .
And although this revolutionary purge began with Confederacy , it soon extended to include much of our entire national history , with illustrious former occupants of the White House being the most prominent targets .
Woodrow Wilson ranked as Princeton University ’ s most famous alumnus and its former president , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the renowned public policy school , while the Natural History Museum of New York is similarly removing a statue of Theodore Roosevelt .
Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant had together won the Civil War and abolished black slavery , but their statues around the country were vandalized or ordered removed .
The same fate befell Andrew Jackson along with the author of the Star Spangled Banner , our national anthem .
The leading heroes of the American Republic from its birth in 1776 face “ cancellation ” and this sudden tidal wave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backing .
The New York Times carries enormous weight in such circles , and last Tuesday their lead opinion piece called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced by a towering statue of a black woman , while one of their regular columnists has repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington suffer a similar fate .
Stacy Abrams , often mentioned as one of Joe Biden ’ s leading Vice Presidential choices , had previously made the destruction of Georgia ’ s historic Stone Mountain Memorial part of her campaign platform , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or two away from credible political demands that Mount Rushmore be dynamited Taliban-style .
The original roots of our country were Anglo-Saxon and this heritage remained dominant during its first century or more , but other strands in our national tapestry are suffering similar vilification .
Christopher Columbus discovered the New World for Spain , but he has became a hated and despised figure across our country , so perhaps in the near future his only surviving North American monument will be the huge statue honoring him in the heart of Mexico City @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a few years ago was canonized as the first and only Latin American saint , but his statues have been toppled and his name already removed from Stanford University buildings .
At the time we acquired the sparsely-populated American Southwest , the bulk of our new Hispanic population was concentrated in New Mexico , but the founding father of that region has now had his monument attacked and vandalized .
Cervantes , author of Don Quixote , is considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language , and his statue was also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the onrushing tide of cultural destruction may begin to recede .
But at present there seems a serious possibility that the overwhelming majority of America ’ s leading historical figures prior to the political revolution of the 1930s may be destined for the scrap heap .
A decade ago , President Obama and most prominent Democrats opposed Gay Marriage , but just a few years later , the CEO of Mozilla was forced to resign when his past political contribution to a California initiative taking that same position came to light , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their jobs at many corporations for expressing such views .
Thus , one might easily imagine that within five or ten years , any public expressions of admiration for Washington or Jefferson might be considered by many as bordering on “ hate speech , ” and carry severe social and employment consequences .
Our nation seems to be suffering the sort of fate normally inflicted upon a conquered people , whose new masters seek to break their spirit and stamp out any notions of future resistance .
A good example of this growing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weeks ago when a longtime blogger going under the name “ Scott Alexander ” deleted his entire website and its millions of words of accumulated archives because the New York Times was about to run an article revealing his true identity .
I had only been slightly aware of the SlateStarCodex blogsite and the “ rationalist ” community it had gradually accumulated , but the development was apparently significant enough to provoke a long article in the New Yorker .
The target of the alleged witch-hunt was hardly any sort of right-winger .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ living in Berkeley , whose most notable piece of writing had been a massive 30,000 word refutation of neo-reactionary thought .
But because he was willing to entertain ideas and contributors outside the tight envelope of the politically-correct canon , he believed that his life would be destroyed if his name became known .
Conservative commenter Tucker Carlson has recently attracted the highest ratings in cable history for populist positions , some of which have influenced President Trump .
But just a couple of days ago , his top writer , a certain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after CNN revealed his years of pseudonymous remarks on a rightwing forum , even though the most egregious of these seemed no worse than somewhat crude racially-charged humor .
Our own website attracts thousands of commenters , many of whom have left remarks vastly more controversial than anything written by Neff let alone Alexander , and these two incidents naturally inspired several posts by blogger Steve Sailer , which attracted many hundreds of worried comments in the resulting threads .
Although I could entirely understood that many members of our community were fearful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media , I explained why I thought the possibility quite unlikely .
Although it ’ s been a few years since my name last appeared on the front page of the New York Times , I am still at least a bit of a public figure , and I would say that many of the articles I have published under my own name have been at least 100 times as “ controversial ” as anything written by the unfortunate “ Scott Alexander.
” The regular monthly traffic to our website is six or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flowed to SlateStarCodex prior to its sudden disappearance , and I suspect that our influence has also been far greater .
Any serious journalist who wanted to get in touch with me could certainly do so , and I have been freely given many interviews in the past , while hundreds of reasonably prominent writers , academics , and other intellectuals have spent years on my regular distribution list .
Tracking down the identity of an anonymous commenter who once or twice made doubtful remarks is extremely hard work , and at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ probably netted yourself a pretty small fish .
Surely any eager scalp-hunter in the media would prefer to casually mine the hundreds of thousands of words in my articles , which would provide a veritable cornucopia of exceptionally explosive material , all fully searchable and conveniently organized by particular taboos .
Yet for years the entire journalistic community has scrupulously averted their eyes from such mammoth potential scandal .
And the likely explanation may provide some important insights into the dynamics of ideological conflict in the media .
Activist organizations often take the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they then pass along to their media allies for ritual denunciation , and much of my own material would seem especially provocative to the fearsome ADL .
Yet oddly enough , that organization seemed quite reluctant to engage with me , and only after my repeated baiting did they finally issue a rather short and perfunctory critique in 2018 , which lacked any named author .
But even that lackluster effort afforded me an opening to respond with my own 7,300 word essay highlighting the very unsavory origins and activities of that controversial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ went back into hiding and have remained there ever since .
In my lengthy analysis of the true history of World War II , I described what I called “ the Lord Voldemort Effect , ” explaining why so much of our mainstream source material should be treated with great care : However , even dread Lord Voldemorts may shrink from a terrifying Lord Voldemort of their own , and I think that this website falls into that category .
The ADL and various other powerful organizations may have quietly issued an edict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ influence from mentioning our existence .
I believe there is strong evidence in favor of this remarkable hypothesis .
Among Trump ’ s surviving advisors , Stephen Miller provokes some of the most intense hostility , and last November the SPLC and its media allies made a concerted attempt to force his resignation based upon some of his private emails , which had promoted several controversial posts by Steve Sailer .
The resulting firestorm was discussed on this website , and I analyzed some of the strange anomalies : Given that Miller ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ posts originally published on this website , the media could have easily associated him with the rest of our material , much of which was sufficiently explosive to have almost certainly forced his resignation .
Yet when the journalists and activists weighed the likelihood of destroying Trump ’ s most hated advisor against the danger of mentioning our existence , the latter factor was still judged the stronger , allowing Miller to survive .
This hypothesis was strongly supported by a second incident later that same month .
We had previously published an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ University , and I read in my morning Times that he had suddenly become embroiled in a major Internet controversy , with a chorus of angry critics seeking to have him removed .
According to the article , he had apparently promoted the “ vile and stupid ” views of some anti-feminist website in one of his Tweets , which had come to the attention of an enraged activist .
The resulting firestorm of denunciations on Twitter had been viewed 2.5 million times , provoking a major academic controversy in the national media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I contacted Rasmusen to see whether he might want to submit a piece regarding the controversy , which he did .
But to my utter astonishment , I discovered that the website involved had actually been our own , a fact that I never would never have suspected from the extremely vague and circuitous discussion provided in the newspaper .
Apparently , the old-fashioned Who-What-Where provisions of the Times style manual had been quietly amended to prohibit providing any hint of our existence even when we were at the absolute center of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Highly-controversial ideas backed by strong evidence may prove dangerously contagious , and the political/media strategy pursued by the ADL , the Times , and numerous other organs of the elite establishment seems perfectly rational .
Since our Bill of Rights still provides considerable protection for freedom of speech , the next-best alternative is to institute a strict cordon sanitaire , intended to strictly minimize the number of individuals who might become infected .
Our webzine and my own articles are hardly the only victims of this sort of strategy—once dubbed “ the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Barnes—whose other targets often possess the most respectable of establishmentarian credentials .
Last month marked the 31st anniversary of the notorious 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre , and elite media coverage was especially extensive this year due to our current global confrontation with China .
The New York Times devoted most of two full pages to a photo-laden recapitulation while the Wall Street Journal gave it front-page treatment , with just those two publications alone running some six separate articles and columns on those horrifying events from three decades ago .
Yet back in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chief of the Washington Post , who had personally covered the events , published a long article in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review entitled The Myth of Tiananmen , in which he publicly admitted that the supposed “ massacre ” was merely a fraudulent concoction of careless journalists and dishonest propagandists .
At least some of our top editors and journalists must surely be aware of these facts , and feel guilty about promoting a long-debunked hoax of the late 1980s .
But any mention of those widely-known historical facts is strictly forbidden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become confused and begin to consider an alternative narrative .
Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal at least as powerful as our own , and the total break in our relations began when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 , targeting important Russian leaders .
Yet none of our media outlets have ever been willing to admit that the facts used to justify that very dangerous decision seem to have been entirely fraudulent , as recounted in the article we recently published by Prof. John Ryan .
Similarly , our sudden purge from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after my own long article presenting the strong evidence that America ’ s ongoing Covid-19 disaster was the unintentional blowback from our own extremely reckless biowarfare attack against China ( and Iran ) .
Over 130,000 of our citizens have already died and our daily life has been wrecked , so the American people might grow outraged if they began to suspect that this huge national disaster was entirely self-inflicted .
And the incident that sparked our current national upheaval includes certain elements that our media has scrupulously avoided mentioning .
The knee-neck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police procedure in Minneapolis and many other cities , and had apparently been employed thousands of times across our country in recent years with virtually no fatalities .
Meanwhile , Floyd ’ s official autopsy indicated that he had lethal levels of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs in his system at the time of his demise .
Perhaps the connection between these two facts is more than purely coincidental , and if they became widely known , popular sentiments might shift .
Finally , our alternative media webzine is pleased to have recently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portions of their archives , which will help to further broaden our perspective .
Larry Romanoff has been a regular contributor to the Global Research website , most recently focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak in China , and earlier this year he published an article pointed to the considerable evidence that the virus had originated in the U.S. , which was cited by Chinese officials and soon became a flashpoint in American-Chinese relations .
After having been viewed millions of times , that piece and several others seem to have disappeared from their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rest of his writings , they are now conveniently available on our own website .
For the last quarter-century , Jared Taylor has probably been America ’ s most prominent White Nationalist writer .
Although Black Nationalists such as Al Sharpton have cable television shows and boast of many dozens of visits to the White House , the growing climate of ideological repression has caused Taylor and his American Renaissance organization to be deplatformed from YouTube , Twitter , and numerous other Internet services .
One of his main writers is Gregory Hood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a regular columnist , together with dozens of his pieces over the last few years .

Our website traffic easily broke all records for the month of June, and these high levels have now continued into July, suggesting that the huge rise produced by the initial wave of Black Lives Matters protests may be more than temporary. It appears that many new readers first discovered our alternative webzine at that point, and quite a few have stayed on as regular visitors.
This represents a sharp turnaround after May, when our near-simultaneous banning by both Google and Facebook at the beginning of that month caused our previously strong traffic to decline by 15% or more.
Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
A longer-term factor that may be strengthening our position is the unprecedented wave of ideological purges that have swept our country since early June, with prominent figures in the intellectual and media firmaments being especially hard hit. When opinion-leaders become fearful of uttering even slightly controversial words, they either grow silent or only mouth the most saccharine homilies, thereby forcing many of their erstwhile readers to look elsewhere for more candid discussions. And our own webzine is about as “elsewhere” as one could possibly get.
Take, for example, the New York Times, more than ever our national newspaper of record. For the last few years, one of its top figures had been Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, who had previously run The Atlantic, and he was widely considered a leading candidate to assume the same position at the Gray Lady after next year’s scheduled retirement of the current top editor. Indeed, with his brother serving as U.S. Senator from Colorado—and a serious if second-rank presidential candidate—the Lifestyle section of the Washington Post had already hailed the Bennet brothers as the potential saviors of the American establishment.
But then his paper published an op-ed by an influential Republican senator endorsing President Trump’s call for a harsh crackdown on riots and looting, and a Twitter mob of outraged junior Times staffers organized a revolt. The mission of the NYT Opinion Pages is obviously to provide a diversity of opinions, but Bennet was quickly purged.
A similar fate befell the highly-regarded longtime editor of the Philadelphia Inquirerafter his paper ran a headline considered insufficiently respectful to black rioters. Michigan State University researchers had raised doubts about the accepted narrative of black deaths at the hands of police, and physicist Stephen Hsu, the Senior Vice President who had supported their work, was forced to resign his administrative position as a consequence.
Numerous other figures of lesser rank have been purged, their careers and livelihoods destroyed for Tweeting out a phrase such as “All Lives Matter,” whose current classification as “hate speech” might have stunned even George Orwell. Or perhaps a spouse or other close relative had denounced the black rioters. The standards of acceptable discourse are changing so rapidly that positions which were completely innocuous just a few weeks ago have suddenly become controversial or even forbidden, with punishments sometimes inflicted on a retroactive basis.
I am hardly alone in viewing this situation with great concern. Just last week, some 150 prominent American writers, academics, and intellectuals published an open letter in Harpers expressing their grave concern over protecting our freedom of speech and thought.
Admittedly, the credentials of some of the names on the list were rather doubtful. After all, David Frum and various hard-core Neocons had themselves led the effort to purge from the media all critics of Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, and more recently they have continued to do with same with regard to our irrational hostility towards Putin’s Russia. But the principled histories of other signers such as Noam Chomsky partially compensated for the inclusion of such unpleasant opportunists.
Although the Harpers statement attracted many stars of our liberal firmament, apparently few people read Harpers these days, with its website traffic being just a tenth of our own. Therefore, the reaction in the media itself was a much more important factor, and this seems to have been decidedly mixed. 150 rather obscure activists soon issued a contrasting statement, which major outlets such as NYT, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times seem to have accorded equal or greater weight, hardly suggesting that the ideological tide has started to turn.
Back a couple of years ago, there was a popular joke going around Chinese social media in which Chairman Mao came back to life with all sorts of questions about the modern world. Among other things, he was informed his disastrous Cultural Revolution had shifted to America, a prescient observation given the events of the last few weeks:
The controversial May 25th death of a black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody soon set off the greatest nationwide wave of protests, riots, and looting in at least two generations, and the once-placid hometown of the Mary Tyler Moore Show alone suffered some five hundred million dollars of damage. Some of the main political reactions have been especially surprising, as the newly elevated activists of the Black Lives Matter movement have received massive media support for their demands that local urban police departments be “defunded,” a proposal so bizarre that it had previously been almost unknown.
Statues, monuments, and other symbolic representations of traditional American history quickly became a leading target. Hubert Humphrey’s Minneapolis has long been an extremely liberal bastion of the heavily Scandinavian Upper Midwest, having no ties to the South or slavery, but Floyd’s death soon launched an unprecedented national effort to eradicate all remaining Confederate memorials and other Southern cultural traces throughout our society. Popular country music groups such as the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum had freely recorded their songs for decades, but they were now suddenly forced to change their names in frantic haste.
And although this revolutionary purge began with Confederacy, it soon extended to include much of our entire national history, with illustrious former occupants of the White House being the most prominent targets. Woodrow Wilson ranked as Princeton University’s most famous alumnus and its former president, but his name was quickly scraped off the renowned public policy school, while the Natural History Museum of New York is similarly removing a statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant had together won the Civil War and abolished black slavery, but their statues around the country were vandalized or ordered removed. The same fate befell Andrew Jackson along with the author of the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem.
The leading heroes of the American Republic from its birth in 1776 face “cancellation” and this sudden tidal wave of attacks has clearly gained considerable elite backing. The New York Times carries enormous weight in such circles, and last Tuesday their lead opinion piece called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced by a towering statue of a black woman, while one of their regular columnists has repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington suffer a similar fate. Stacy Abrams, often mentioned as one of Joe Biden’s leading Vice Presidential choices, had previously made the destruction of Georgia’s historic Stone Mountain Memorial part of her campaign platform, so we now seem only a step or two away from credible political demands that Mount Rushmore be dynamited Taliban-style.
The original roots of our country were Anglo-Saxon and this heritage remained dominant during its first century or more, but other strands in our national tapestry are suffering similar vilification. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World for Spain, but he has became a hated and despised figure across our country, so perhaps in the near future his only surviving North American monument will be the huge statue honoring him in the heart of Mexico City. Father Junipero Serra founded Hispanic California and a few years ago was canonized as the first and only Latin American saint, but his statues have been toppled and his name already removed from Stanford University buildings. At the time we acquired the sparsely-populated American Southwest, the bulk of our new Hispanic population was concentrated in New Mexico, but the founding father of that region has now had his monument attacked and vandalized. Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is considered the greatest writer in the Spanish language, and his statue was also vandalized.
Perhaps these trends will abate and the onrushing tide of cultural destruction may begin to recede. But at present there seems a serious possibility that the overwhelming majority of America’s leading historical figures prior to the political revolution of the 1930s may be destined for the scrap heap. A decade ago, President Obama and most prominent Democrats opposed Gay Marriage, but just a few years later, the CEO of Mozilla was forced to resign when his past political contribution to a California initiative taking that same position came to light, and today private individuals might easily lose their jobs at many corporations for expressing such views. Thus, one might easily imagine that within five or ten years, any public expressions of admiration for Washington or Jefferson might be considered by many as bordering on “hate speech,” and carry severe social and employment consequences. Our nation seems to be suffering the sort of fate normally inflicted upon a conquered people, whose new masters seek to break their spirit and stamp out any notions of future resistance.
A good example of this growing climate of fear came a couple of weeks ago when a longtime blogger going under the name “Scott Alexander” deleted his entire website and its millions of words of accumulated archives because the New York Times was about to run an article revealing his true identity. I had only been slightly aware of the SlateStarCodex blogsite and the “rationalist” community it had gradually accumulated, but the development was apparently significant enough to provoke a long article in the New Yorker.
The target of the alleged witch-hunt was hardly any sort of right-winger. He was reportedly a liberal Jewish psychiatrist living in Berkeley, whose most notable piece of writing had been a massive 30,000 word refutation of neo-reactionary thought. But because he was willing to entertain ideas and contributors outside the tight envelope of the politically-correct canon, he believed that his life would be destroyed if his name became known.
Conservative commenter Tucker Carlson has recently attracted the highest ratings in cable history for populist positions, some of which have influenced President Trump. But just a couple of days ago, his top writer, a certain Blake Neff, was forced to resign after CNN revealed his years of pseudonymous remarks on a rightwing forum, even though the most egregious of these seemed no worse than somewhat crude racially-charged humor.
Our own website attracts thousands of commenters, many of whom have left remarks vastly more controversial than anything written by Neff let alone Alexander, and these two incidents naturally inspired several posts by blogger Steve Sailer, which attracted many hundreds of worried comments in the resulting threads. Although I could entirely understood that many members of our community were fearful of being “doxxed” by the media, I explained why I thought the possibility quite unlikely.
Although it’s been a few years since my name last appeared on the front page of the New York Times, I am still at least a bit of a public figure, and I would say that many of the articles I have published under my own name have been at least 100 times as “controversial” as anything written by the unfortunate “Scott Alexander.” The regular monthly traffic to our website is six or seven times as great as that which flowed to SlateStarCodex prior to its sudden disappearance, and I suspect that our influence has also been far greater. Any serious journalist who wanted to get in touch with me could certainly do so, and I have been freely given many interviews in the past, while hundreds of reasonably prominent writers, academics, and other intellectuals have spent years on my regular distribution list.
Tracking down the identity of an anonymous commenter who once or twice made doubtful remarks is extremely hard work, and at the end of the process you will have probably netted yourself a pretty small fish. Surely any eager scalp-hunter in the media would prefer to casually mine the hundreds of thousands of words in my articles, which would provide a veritable cornucopia of exceptionally explosive material, all fully searchable and conveniently organized by particular taboos. Yet for years the entire journalistic community has scrupulously averted their eyes from such mammoth potential scandal. And the likely explanation may provide some important insights into the dynamics of ideological conflict in the media.
Activist organizations often take the lead in locating controversial statements, which they then pass along to their media allies for ritual denunciation, and much of my own material would seem especially provocative to the fearsome ADL. Yet oddly enough, that organization seemed quite reluctant to engage with me, and only after my repeated baiting did they finally issue a rather short and perfunctory critique in 2018, which lacked any named author. But even that lackluster effort afforded me an opening to respond with my own 7,300 word essay highlighting the very unsavory origins and activities of that controversial organization. After that exchange, they went back into hiding and have remained there ever since.
In my lengthy analysis of the true history of World War II, I described what I called “the Lord Voldemort Effect,” explaining why so much of our mainstream source material should be treated with great care:
In the popular Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, the great nemesis of the young magicians, is often identified as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” since the mere vocalization of those few particular syllables might bring doom upon the speaker. Jews have long enjoyed enormous power and influence over the media and political life, while fanatic Jewish activists demonstrate hair-trigger eagerness to denounce and vilify all those suspected of being insufficiently friendly towards their ethnic group. The combination of these two factors has therefore induced such a “Lord Voldemort Effect” regarding Jewish activities in most writers and public figures. Once we recognize this reality, we should become very cautious in analyzing controversial historical issues that might possibly contain a Jewish dimension, and also be particularly wary of arguments from silence.
However, even dread Lord Voldemorts may shrink from a terrifying Lord Voldemort of their own, and I think that this website falls into that category. The ADL and various other powerful organizations may have quietly issued an edict that absolutely forbids the media outlets they influence from mentioning our existence. I believe there is strong evidence in favor of this remarkable hypothesis.
Among Trump’s surviving advisors, Stephen Miller provokes some of the most intense hostility, and last November the SPLC and its media allies made a concerted attempt to force his resignation based upon some of his private emails, which had promoted several controversial posts by Steve Sailer. The resulting firestorm was discussed on this website, and I analyzed some of the strange anomalies:
Just as might be expected, the whole SPLC attack is “guilt by association,” and Ctrl-F reveals a full 14 references to VDare, with the website characterized in very harsh terms. Yet although there are several mentions of Steve and his writings, there is absolutely no reference to this webzine, despite being Steve’s primary venue. Offhand, this might seem extremely odd. My own guess is that much of the material we publish is 10x as “controversial” as anything VDare has ever run, and many of my own personal articles, including those that have spent over a year on the Home page, might be up in the 30x or 40x potency range. Moreover, I think our traffic these days is something like 10x that of VDare, seemingly making us an extremely juicy target. Now admittedly, I don’t know that Miller fellow, but the horrifying VDare post that Miller supposedly shared was actually republished by VDare from this website. And that would surely have made it very, very easy for the SPLC to use the connection as a opening to begin cataloguing the unspeakingly horrifying list of transgressions we regularly feature, easily expanding the length of their attack on Miller by adding another 6,000 words. Yet the silence has been totally deafening. Puzzling…
Here’s my own hypothesis… As everyone knows, there are certain “powerful groups” in our society that so terrify members of the media and political worlds that they receive the “Lord Voldemort Treatment,” with mainstream individuals being terrified that merely speaking the name would result in destruction. Indeed, the SPLC is one of the primary enforcers of that edict. However, my theory is that even those dread Lord Voldemorts greatly fear an even more dreadful Lord Voldemort of their own, namely this webzine. The SPLC writer knew perfectly well that mere mention of The Unz Review might ensure his destruction. I’d guess that the ADL/SPLC/AIPAC has made this prohibition absolutely clear to everyone in the media/political worlds.
Given that Miller’s main transgression was his promotion of posts originally published on this website, the media could have easily associated him with the rest of our material, much of which was sufficiently explosive to have almost certainly forced his resignation. Yet when the journalists and activists weighed the likelihood of destroying Trump’s most hated advisor against the danger of mentioning our existence, the latter factor was still judged the stronger, allowing Miller to survive.
This hypothesis was strongly supported by a second incident later that same month. We had previously published an article by Prof. Eric Rasmusen of Indiana University, and I read in my morning Times that he had suddenly become embroiled in a major Internet controversy, with a chorus of angry critics seeking to have him removed. According to the article, he had apparently promoted the “vile and stupid” views of some anti-feminist website in one of his Tweets, which had come to the attention of an enraged activist. The resulting firestorm of denunciations on Twitter had been viewed 2.5 million times, provoking a major academic controversy in the national media.
Being curious about what had happened, I contacted Rasmusen to see whether he might want to submit a piece regarding the controversy, which he did. But to my utter astonishment, I discovered that the website involved had actually been our own, a fact that I never would never have suspected from the extremely vague and circuitous discussion provided in the newspaper. Apparently, the old-fashioned Who-What-Where provisions of the Times style manual had been quietly amended to prohibit providing any hint of our existence even when we were at the absolute center of one of their 1,000 word news stories.
Highly-controversial ideas backed by strong evidence may prove dangerously contagious, and the political/media strategy pursued by the ADL, the Times, and numerous other organs of the elite establishment seems perfectly rational. Since our Bill of Rights still provides considerable protection for freedom of speech, the next-best alternative is to institute a strict cordon sanitaire, intended to strictly minimize the number of individuals who might become infected.
Our webzine and my own articles are hardly the only victims of this sort of strategy—once dubbed “the Blackout” by eminent historian Harry Elmer Barnes—whose other targets often possess the most respectable of establishmentarian credentials.
Last month marked the 31st anniversary of the notorious 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and elite media coverage was especially extensive this year due to our current global confrontation with China. The New York Times devoted most of two full pages to a photo-laden recapitulation while the Wall Street Journal gave it front-page treatment, with just those two publications alone running some six separate articles and columns on those horrifying events from three decades ago.
Yet back in the 1990s, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, who had personally covered the events, published a long article in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review entitled The Myth of Tiananmen, in which he publicly admitted that the supposed “massacre” was merely a fraudulent concoction of careless journalists and dishonest propagandists. At least some of our top editors and journalists must surely be aware of these facts, and feel guilty about promoting a long-debunked hoax of the late 1980s. But any mention of those widely-known historical facts is strictly forbidden in the media, lest American readers become confused and begin to consider an alternative narrative.
Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal at least as powerful as our own, and the total break in our relations began when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012, targeting important Russian leaders. Yet none of our media outlets have ever been willing to admit that the facts used to justify that very dangerous decision seem to have been entirely fraudulent, as recounted in the article we recently published by Prof. John Ryan.
Similarly, our sudden purge from both Google and Facebook came just days after my own long article presenting the strong evidence that America’s ongoing Covid-19 disaster was the unintentional blowback from our own extremely reckless biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). Over 130,000 of our citizens have already died and our daily life has been wrecked, so the American people might grow outraged if they began to suspect that this huge national disaster was entirely self-inflicted.
And the incident that sparked our current national upheaval includes certain elements that our media has scrupulously avoided mentioning. The knee-neck hold used against George Floyd was standard police procedure in Minneapolis and many other cities, and had apparently been employed thousands of times across our country in recent years with virtually no fatalities. Meanwhile, Floyd’s official autopsy indicated that he had lethal levels of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs in his system at the time of his demise. Perhaps the connection between these two facts is more than purely coincidental, and if they became widely known, popular sentiments might shift.
Finally, our alternative media webzine is pleased to have recently added two additional columnists together with major portions of their archives, which will help to further broaden our perspective.
Larry Romanoff has been a regular contributor to the Global Research website, most recently focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak in China, and earlier this year he published an article pointed to the considerable evidence that the virus had originated in the U.S., which was cited by Chinese officials and soon became a flashpoint in American-Chinese relations. After having been viewed millions of times, that piece and several others seem to have disappeared from their original venue, but along with the rest of his writings, they are now conveniently available on our own website.
For the last quarter-century, Jared Taylor has probably been America’s most prominent White Nationalist writer. Although Black Nationalists such as Al Sharpton have cable television shows and boast of many dozens of visits to the White House, the growing climate of ideological repression has caused Taylor and his American Renaissance organization to be deplatformed from YouTube, Twitter, and numerous other Internet services. One of his main writers is Gregory Hood, whom we have now added as a regular columnist, together with dozens of his pieces over the last few years.