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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-025
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
> CF: Do they want to take on our global dominion and hegemony role? No, but we assert that they do. We posit that China thinks and behaves like us: “We had Manifest Destiny and it took us across the Pacific to the Philippines. Therefore, China must have a Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny in mind.” This is wrong. Things don’t work like that. So I would argue that we have inhaled our own propaganda, and we are living in the appropriately stoned state that that produces. If we have sound policies, we can out-compete anyone. But we’re not looking at sound policies; we’re looking at pulling down our competitor. <
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Other issues:
Of the container ship Stuck In Mud in the Suez I wrote:
[T]he losses for Egypt add up. The hundreds of ships which are currently blockaded and the owners of their cargoes may also ask for compensation.
The ship is insured for probably up to 140 million. That will not be enough to pay for this incident. Many court claims will be made. The Japanese owners of the ship, the Taiwanese charterer, the German company managing the ship, the pilots and the crew will all be asked to pay for every penny that is not covered by the insurance.
On April 2 WaPo reported that the ship will have to stay in Egypt until the bills are paid:
[F]reeing the ship was a costly and time-consuming endeavor, and Egypt says it should be heavily compensated for the incident.
On Thursday, the Ever Given’s owner filed suit against the ship’s operator in the United Kingdom’s High Court, the Lawyer first reported. An early stab at limiting the owner’s liability, the lawsuit highlights the labyrinthine ownership structure of container ships, and how difficult it can be to determine who should be held responsible when something goes wrong at sea.
Flagged in Panama, the Ever Given is owned by two Japanese firms, Luster Maritime and Higaki Sangyo Kaisha, which are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and are both subsidiaries of holding company Shoei Kisen Kaisha (itself a subsidiary of Japanese shipbuilder Imabari.) It is being leased by Evergreen Marine Corporation, a Taiwan-based conglomerate listed as the defendant. On top of that, the ship’s technical manager is Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a German entity that isn’t a party to the lawsuit and was responsible for hiring the Indian crew.
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That doesn’t mean that the company is willing to shoulder the financial burden alone. On Thursday, Shoei Kisen Kaisha declared “general average,” appealing to a principle of maritime law that states that the owner of cargo on board a ship should contribute to the cost of rescuing the vessel during a major casualty event, according to industry news site gCaptain.
Use as open thread …
Very good article as an introduction to financial capital:
Financial fictions: the old ones
Recommend the read.
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For the surprise of zero persons:
General of the Armed Forces of Ukraine admitted that the United States will not fight for Ukraine
Just remember what Trump said about helping the Poles sometime in the first years of his reign (that he wouldn’t send Americans to fight for the damn Poles or something like that).
If the USA isn’t willing to help Poland, it isn’t going to help Ukraine. It’s that simple.
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Bizarre piece of propaganda:
“The death of an empire” – back to the past, so as not to be repeated in the future
For the second week the TV channel “Russia 24” has been showing the documentary series “Death of the Empire. Russian Lesson” – the author’s project of Metropolitan Tikhon of Pskov and Porkhov. Ten episodes have already been released – more than half of the 18-episode project.
“Metropolitan” is an Orthodox clerical office. Thus this is a revisionism of History by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Either way, the assassination of history begins outright in the review of the “analyst” Peter Akopov, who’s a far-right ideologue from the Yeltsinite era:
The theme of the current film is not accidental for the Metropolitan – back in 2008, his first “Death of the Empire” (“Byzantine Lesson”), dedicated to the Second Rome, the great Orthodox empire, of which Russia became the heir, was released. Moreover, the Russian Empire perished just at the moment when it was more than ever close to becoming the geographical heir of the Romans – to plant a cross on Hagia Sophia, to seize Constantinople. The debate about what destroyed the Russian Empire continues today – but without agreement on the main causes of that catastrophe, we will not be protected from its repetition in the future.
Wait, what? Russia is the heir of the Roman Empire in the East? Besides becoming the center of Orthodox Christianity after the fall of Constantinople, I don’t see any connection between the Russian Empire and the Byzantine Empire.
But the even more bizarre part comes at the end of this quoted paragraph, as Akopov states that “the Russian Empire perished just at the moment when it was more than ever close to becoming the geographical heir of the Romans – to plant a cross on Hagia Sophia, to seize Constantinople”. My friend, if you didn’t become the geographical heir of the Romans 400 years after the fact, you’re not becoming that after 450 years. By the way, for an “anti-woke”, “anti-globalist” self-proclaimed conservative, Akopov seems to be very imperialist, as Constantinople was never Russian territory, and Orthodox Christianity is not synonymous with Russia. This sounds like a Russian version of the Manifest Destiny to me.
This is not the first time I read about some Russian talking about their country as the heir to the Byzantine Empire. I hope this is not a thing among the Russians nowadays, because, if it is, we’re doomed for a lot of bad things in the near future.
But this is not all. He continues with the lies:
Moreover, the endless induced disputes between “whites” and “reds” are producing an increasingly repulsive and harmful effect, they are becoming like manipulation with unsuitable means, like a deliberate special operation to split society. Mad anti-Sovietists and blind apologists of the USSR, denouncers of the “bloody tsarist regime” and obsessed anti-communists – all together they are not only corrupting our history, but as if they deliberately undermine all attempts to form and recreate national unity, all efforts of the authorities to unite society around national values, contradict the desire of the people themselves for community and solidarity.
Therefore, it is so important that Metropolitan Tikhon proposes a completely different dimension of the events of 1917, capable of cooling both camps, who were being pushed head on. Tsarist Russia was not destroyed by the Reds – it was destroyed by a progressive, advanced, European-oriented society (educated and wealthy).
I don’t know about the state-of-the-art of the “Mad anti-Sovietists and blind apologists of the USSR” in modern Russia, but the fact that the White Army was the first color revolutionary army in contemporary history, made of many foreign elements and funded entirely by the Western and Japanese imperial powers is not disputed. And the fact is the Orthodox Church supported the Whites and, in doing so, sold themselves to the Western powers.
But that lie is useful for his next logical argument:
The best people who dreamed of a “free Russia” and hated the government with every fiber of their soul – it was they who opened Pandora’s box and plunged the country into confusion and chaos. Russia was ruined by February – not October, which became only its consequence. It was the betrayal of a part of the elite – and the advanced public itself was part of the elite and agitated a certain part of the tsarist bureaucracy – that caused the collapse of Russia and the subsequent civil war. And her defeat in the world war – when victory in it was really close.
Good, we’re now in “the WWI didn’t happen” territory. Not satisfied with Holocaust denialists, we now have WWI denialists. Sure buddy, WWI never happened, the Tsar never sent his peasants to die in the meat grinder of Germany, the Tsar never left the survivors starve to death on their way home, it never ruined the Russian economy, etc. etc.
By the way, the first thing the February provisory government did when taking power was to betray the promise they made to the Russian people and decide to continue fighting in WWI. Well, those Western powers that betrayed the Tsar were, at the same time, the powers that defeated Germany, so victory was not only not “really close” – it was impossible, at least from the point of view of the Tsarist Empire.
And it was not Nicholas II who was rotten, not the Russian government, not the domestic service class in the broad sense of the word – it was rotten that which considered itself the salt of the earth, the best, progressive people.
Nicholas II was so rotten that he fell to two virtually bloodless revolutions (February and October). The Bolshevik takeover was so smooth that even rabid anti-communist Solzhenitsyn admitted it in one of his propaganda pieces. The Tsar was so rotten that he was not even a relevant political figure anymore: he was murdered only in 1918, with the beginning of the Civil War (the very bloody counter-revolution).
He then proceeds with fairy tales about how the Russian intelligentsia betrayed the Tsar etc. etc.
Then he finishes with this nonsense:
Soon the Russian tsar and the commander-in-chief were betrayed and overthrown – and rich and liberal-oriented representatives of the “advanced public” came to power. Those who showed themselves to be absolutely incompetent, narrow-minded and irresponsible people – as a result, the country collapsed into turmoil and civil war, losing at the same time a practically won world war. The Bolsheviks (as the most radical part and unloved child of the same “advanced public”) were able to take power only as a result of the reaction of the people who had lost their heads (both literally and figuratively) to the mediocrity, betrayal and weakness of self-proclaimed liberal rulers – but this is already other story. Metropolitan Tikhon spoke about the main reasons for the Russian catastrophe of 1917 – about February.
Let me see if I understood the Metropolitan’s argument: 1) the Tsar fell because his bourgeois bureaucrats betrayed him; 2) they betrayed him because they became too “Western”; 3) this self-destruction opened the path to the rise of the Bolsheviks – who were only able to do so because the “liberal rulers” (bourgeois bureucrats) “lost their heads”.
The problem is this: if the Tsar descended to a point where he depended on the bourgeois to keep himself afloat, didn’t it make him the rotten part? Wasn’t the Tsar who allied with the liberal powers in 1914 to wage WWI? If the Bolsheviks were merely the “unloved child”, then why did the vast majority of the Russian population supported them? The hidden truth is precisely here: the Tsar treated his own people like garbage, disposable things, cannon fodder, a mindless mass.
There is a link in Ria Novosti for the ten published episodes (they’re published in the VK). I really hope the Russian people doesn’t fall for this absurd falsification of history. The whole thing is even more absurd because the Russian Orthodox Church tries to falsify and/or obscure what is the most well documented period of Russian History and one of the most well documented events in History. Thanks to the honesty and democratic spirit of the Bolsheviks (who debated everything in congresses and published everything decided within the committees), we know more about what happened in Russia during 1917 (and even before, from Bolshevik writers up to 1902) to 1928 than about any other country during the same time (even the so-called “Western Democracies”). The cause of the fall of the Russian Empire is not only not a mystery, but one of the most well-known facts we have documented today.
Posted by: vk | Apr 4 2021 14:45 utc | 14
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