The Russian-Georgian conflict is the result of a series of interlinked factors, some old and some much newer, with none of the parties entirely innocent, but for which the lion's share of the blame must rest with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his backers in the United States and NATO. Georgian Tanks
Pepe Escobar: Georgia is a strategic client state of the US with close ties to the Bush administration
F William Engdahl: There are far bigger stakes being played out in Georgia than a territorial dispute
The US government has persistently claimed that its decision to bankroll the overthrow of Afghanistan's government in the final days of the 1970s was a response to the invasion of Soviet troops. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's National Security Advisor at the time and now advises Barack Obama, finally admitted the truth in 1998: covert US intervention began months before the USSR sent in troops. "That secret operation was an excellent idea," he crowed. "The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."Presidents Saakashvili & Bush
I want to push through
To the very essence of everything:
Straight to the core of days gone by,
To what made them,
To the foundations, to the roots,
The heart of the matter.
– Boris Pasternak
The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on August 3, 2008, wrote in his most autobiographical novel The First Circle, that "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That is why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones." The writer as the conscience of the people has a long tradition in Russia both in Czarist and Soviet times. Turgenev was compelled to live much of his life abroad, and many of his works were suppressed. Chekhov felt this duty of public conscience so strongly that, even though suffering from tuberculosis, he insisted on making a long journey to the Sakhalin Islands to report on the conditions of exiles there. Leo Tolstoy was regularly censored and finally excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church which banned any prayers at his funeral.
The Nazis did not kill them all, but racists in Eastern Europe and Italy are intent on making life miserable for those that are still around. I'm speaking about a people variously known as Rom, Roma, Romany, Sinti, and Gypsies. The slaughter of the Roma by the Nazis is poorly documented; figures from 200,000 to a million and a half have been cited, which may have amounted to as much as 80% of their population in Europe at the time. Their ongoing persecution has led to a burgeoning demand for refugee status in Canada. Gypsy Boy in Kosovo
On July 13, in the Grand Palais, an ornate meeting hall built for the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, the Mediterranean-Black Sea Union ship was set to sea with many good wishes from the assembled 44 heads of State or Government. How sea worthy the ship is and what it will carry is too soon to tell.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019