Requiem

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

—Анна Андреевна Ахматова

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1919

This outcome of the war between the Reds and the Whites determined the result of most of the many armed conflicts elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. In the Transcaucasus, the Georgians contended against the Armenians; the Armenians also fought the Azeris. And each state in the region had internal strife. For example, battles and massacres occurred in Georgia between Georgians and Abkhazians. Consequently the armed struggle in the lands of the Romanov dynasty was never merely a ‚Russian‘ Civil War. Indeed it was not just one Civil War at all: there were dozens of civil wars after 1917, wars in which the Red Army was able to intervene after its defeat of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 113.

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CNN:

President Joe Biden addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2024, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool) Evan Vucci/AP

“Here I am,” he added. “That’s what’s so special about America.”

The president then walked out to the Rose Garden, where he addressed hundreds of White House staffers who walked over to the executive mansion to see Biden and share ice cream with him.

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Mother Country 1969


After command module pilot Michael Collins returned to Earth after the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, he famously said that future flights “should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher, so we might get a much better idea of what we saw.”

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Ecce homo – trosko kraujo


Behold the man! It is our enemies who crave blood, not we. This goes without saying.

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Vilnius


I told the bartender I was surprised to see the sticker and he asked why. „Because Lithuania is so much in favor of the war,“ I said. He said „No, Lithuania is against the war.“ „But it has been sending a lot of weapons,“ I said. „Not as much as other countries, like Germany,“ he replied. This seemed to prove his case, but I went ahead to ask why they were sending weapons if they are against the war. „Because you have to send weapons,“ he said, with a „this is obvious“ air – „if you don’t send weapons then you lose.“

So here, „No war“ means „War until total victory“.

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Craig Murray:

In his address from the White House, Biden did not mistake Trump for Frank Sinatra or forget why he was there. It is thus touted as restoring his position. It was however a typical Biden performance, snide and partisan, particularly in restating his 6 January narrative as though that were a serious threat to democracy and not a stupid, isolated riot.

That democracy in the United States is meaningless is plain from the choice offered to the electorate between two incredibly flawed individuals. It is a scenario you could not make up.

If you were to put Donald Trump and Joe Biden into an entirely random yoga class in Oklahoma, neither Trump nor Biden would be the person in that yoga class best suited to be President of the United States.

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Riga

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The Latvian Riflemen

The Latvian Riflemen received orders to arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Their preliminary duty was to liberate Dzierżyński from the hands of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who had taken him hostage. The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic was clearly not yet a properly-functioning police state if this could happen to the Cheka’s chairman.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 103.

This statue is not far from the river, in front of the Occupation museum, and is surrounded by tourists taking photos of the statue, photos of each other in front of the „Riga“ statue. I very much doubt many visitors have much of an inkling what part the Riflemen played in consolidating Bolshevik power in the early Soviet state.

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