What You Should Know
06/24/23
Insane as it seems, Prigozhin’s doomed march on Moscow is — as of this writing — still happening. Guess that’s what can happen during a war, things get destabilized and unpredictable, people go crazy, internal divisions come to the surface — both on the front and at home.
In his address to the nation this morning, Putin brought up 1917 (as he’s done on multiple occasion when talking about this war). I guess he sees himself as Nicholas II, which is, eh, not an altogether great thing given what happened to poor Nicky and his family. And of course the Russian Revolution would not have happened without Russia’s entry into WWI and also without Russia’s maritime defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905, which first set the stage for internal reforms against the monarchy. From what I understand, both of those wars were supposed to boost domestic Russian morale and boost support for the monarchy. Didn’t go that way. So I don’t know why Putin keeps attaching his identity to one the biggest losers of Russian history…it’s like he’s possessed by Nicky’s ghost or something. Evgenia and I’ve talked about this before.
One more thing: Before launching his, eh, political reform campaign, Prigozhin did a 30-minute address criticizing Putin’s military and security bosses for gross incompetence and corruption and for lying to the president. He shit talks as a man of the people from an ultra-patriotic position, saying the elites were too busy stealing and enriching themselves to care about Russia’s greatness and the greatness of the Russian military — and of course saying all this with a possible ulterior motive: he’s been resisting integration into Russia’s military structure under his mortal enemy, Minister of Defence Sergei Shaigu, and losing his power as a result. Still, a lot of his accusations about widespread corruption and the fact that the 2022 invasion wasn’t necessary sounds to me as ultimately truthful and overlap with a lot of what Evgenia and I have been saying.
“We hit [the Ukrainians], [the Ukrainians] hit us, and this happened all these long eight years from 2014…Sometimes the number of different skirmishes increased, roughly speaking, the exchange of ammunition, the exchange of shots, sometimes it decreased,” he said. “On February 24th. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Now the Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public, is trying to deceive the president, and trying tell the story that there was insane aggression on the part of Ukraine, and that they were going to attack us together with the entire NATO bloc. But the special operation was launched for completely different reasons…”
He’s got some funny bits, too: “The war was needed for Shoigu to attain the rank of marshal, not in order to return Russian citizens to our bosom. And not in order to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. It was needed for the sake of one star with additional embroidery.”
I’m guessing Prigozhin was expecting to get his successful Wagner Group startup corporate raided and taken over by Shaigu and friends? So one way to stop a corporate raid would be to launch your own preemptive raid against your enemies? Kinda suicidal, but who knows what will happen. I stopped trying to make any predictions.
Anyway, here are this week’s links.
—Yasha
Czech president went on the CIA’s Radio Liberty to suggest all Russians abroad should be monitored — monitored and maybe put into camps, just like the Japanese were in America. “All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war,” he said. “I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well…That’s simply a cost of war.” Well our family is screwed.
…makes me think of the forgotten history of Japanese internment during WWII: California’s white farmers were partially behind it. They wanted the land.
Since we’re on the topic, this is pretty good roundup of the latest dumb liberal bigotry against “the Russians.” From RS: “This is the same old nauseating hypocrisy. They are nationalists; we are patriots. Their bombing of civilians reflects a blind urge to destruction rooted in their national character, ours is either purely accidental or an unfortunate part of a just struggle. Their torture of suspected enemies is due to their innate collective savagery. Ours is ‘not who we are.’”
Gotta put this on the reading list: Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, a new book that supposedly has proof that Israel’s secret services did terrorist attacks in Baghdad to trigger Jewish migration from there to Israel. It was written by an Iraqi Jew from a wealthy family that emigrated to Israel and lost all their property. From a review: “Shlaim’s is a powerful and humane voice which reminds us that the Palestinians were not the only victims of the creation of Israel in 1948. He argues that the Zionist project dealt a mortal blow to the position of Jews in Arab lands, turning them from accepted compatriots into a suspected fifth column allied to the new Jewish state. He resolutely clings to his identity as both Arab and Jew, hence the title of this memoir.” This is very much in line with the weaponization of Soviet Jews I’m writing about.
…funny enough, Israel’s ruling elite saw Soviet Jews like me as a counterweight to all the non-European “backward” Arab Jews they had helped import into the country, which they regretted. I wrote about this earlier this month.
The rest is for subscribers only…