Eso’s Chronicles 232/ 3
The Krsuk salient 03
© Eso A.B.

What a title horriblis! It spells ‘Kursk’ backward. I beg the reader’s forgiveness; it is meant to show just how screwed up things have become. Latvia, like it or not, represents the enemy on the salient’s left flank.

While the Latvian government hopes that in the event of WW3 NATO will send its armed forces to defend it on its northern flank, most everyone in Latvia knows that a Russian attack is not imminent except for deliberate provocation of anxiety by the Latvian government, a descendant of the Soviet communist apparatchiks, whose majority fear being short-circuited and having to suffer the consequences of their surrender of the Latvian nation to the combined interests of Western powers—all the while blaming the Russians.

In spite of such propaganda tactics working on its own population, it is likely that the Western powers, with Germany in the lead, know of the economic abyss and difference of identification that prevails between the Latvian government and its people. If cooperation with the Russians may not be in the interest of the NATO cabal as a whole, it is not in the interest of the Germans (though it may be in the interest of the Scandinavians and the Latvian government may be counting on it) to join any military type NATO interference in the Baltics. As far as the interests of Germany are concerned, it need not fear that Russia is anxious to engage it in another bloody conflict, when between the Germans and Russians there exists a tradition, despite the nightmare of Hitler, of economic cooperation many hundred years old.

The real threat to peace today is a consequence of U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s support of Israel in the Middle East against the interest of the Arabs, the people indigenous to the Middle East. The threat comes not from the people of Israel as such, but is the result of nearly a half a century of expansionism and repression of Arab interests by a Zionist government, which has been attempting to establish itself in the image of an eternal government of the Israeli people. Some success of its internal policies are attributable to the fact that through Zionism Israel provides direct religious support for capitalism as an everlasting economic order.

In short, a major source of the tensions in the world today arises from the government of Israel; and it is the Middle East or the right flank of the Krsuk salient of the Zionists (rather than eager Latvian. Ukrainian, and Georgian former communist apparatchiks) that threatens world peace.

Even as world leaders are meeting in Geneva to try to forge a nuclear treaty between Iran and the rest of the world http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24877014 , the Israeli leader Netanyahu said (see link) that he "utterly rejected" such a deal with Iran, and that his country would not be obliged to abide by it. Defense analysts have speculated the Israelis may take military action to disrupt Iran's program.

In short, seeing their long-term goals dismantled by a treaty of peace, the Zionist government and its allies are likely to seek a casus belli to once again set it back on track.

If by some miracle, however, no casus belli is triggered, the change would be no less dramatic than an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale. Many years of negative precedents would begin to be overturned; not least the gradual adaptation of Israel to a culture that must live within its means, and a refusal of the Israeli people to follow the aggressive Zionist government.

Unfortunately, the casus belli is likely on order and should be in the news relatively shortly.

When we think of all the potential for catastrophes, we realize that it is not only casus belli that is a threat, but that life on our planet is faced with a whole series of causa morti or gifts of death. Next to

1) Casus belli, the other deadly gifts are:

2) catastrophic radiation release at Fukushima that renders Japan uninhabitable for humans;

3) sends lethally irradiated human beings as refugees to all parts of our planet;

4) releases radiation poisoning over the entire Pacific ocean, which results in

5) the birth of grotesque life forms;

6) winters without heating or engine fuel, because the war is likely to destroy the infrastructure of modern society;

7) the stink of corpses emanating from all cities;

8)  not to mention soylent meat (the last capitalist enterprise) at low prices from assisted suicides by de facto legalization of narcotics;

9) instantly worthless money.

The conference on nuclear weapons with Iran stopped short of a deal. The next round is expected on November 20th. The following are links that lead the eye to the movement under the rug:

1] The Israeli leader Netanyahu said that he “utterly rejected” a deal with Iran http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24877014 , and that his country would not be obliged to abide by it. Defense analysts have speculated the Israelis may take military action to disrupt Iran's program.

2] An interesting verbatim Press Conference by Prince Saud al-Faisal and John Kerry: http://www.voltairenet.org/article180878.html  

3] E Meinel at EMSNews as always provides an interesting background to Western orientation and interests: http://emsnews.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/france-working-for-netanyahu-scuttles-iran-nuke-talks-in-paris/  

4] RT, as befits the current Russian stance, takes a laid back perspective: http://rt.com/news/iran-nuclear-program-deal-487/  

5] Whether a casus belli will occur before November 20, the date set for the next stage of the conference is anyone’s guess, but this observer has few doubts that work toward it proceeds at a feverish pace.

This series attempts to put the present events in the context of the Battle of Kursk (1943) in the Soviet Union, the loss of which by Hitler brought the Soviet Army into Latvia within a year. The preparations for that event went on for a long time. The events in the Middle East are brewing even longer. The pressure valves on the kettle are whistling loudly.

Eso’s Chronicles 231/ 2
Urban Blitz 02
© Eso A.B.

Any geopolitical overview of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries especially, runs up against a glass shield that has been firmly placed between the economic realities as they are for the majority of the Balts with their boots on the ground (formerly the sod), and the intelligentsia (political and literary), the passive support of the perma frosted urban mindset and brain activity that guars urban life at the expense of life on our planet.

The link between the urbanite and the intelligentsia (intelligence services?) goes back a long way, perhaps as far back as Buddha, when his maharajah father had the castle guards open the gates for the young prince to go visit a young maid named Amrita, who lived in a leaf hut in a subtropical wood. The maharajah was anxious to debrief the young prince upon his return—not about his sexual escapades with Amrita, but about what sort of weapons the brothers of he maid had stacked against the walls of the shack.

The reason why the maharajah needed to have this information was because he planned to increase the size of his castle grounds by another 1500 housing units. To get this done, he needed to cut down a sizeable area of the wood that surrounded his castle. As it was likely to happen, Amrita and her family, too, were to lose their humble abode. The maharajah authorized his son to offer the family a shack along the outer walls of his court if they offered to provide him with information about possible resistance.

When the maid learned from the young prince the reason for his questions, while young Buddha’s head lay in her lap, the young maid placed a long nail against his ear and hit it hard with  hammer. This was the end of Buddha who was innocent and in no way to blame. Unfortunately, this marked only the beginning of the forest peoples’ troubles, who were immediately labeled ‘terrorists’. As soon as the maharajah recovered from his shock, he sent his army into the surrounding wood and cut down all the wood that grew around the castle at least a hundred yards deep. A famous story from India recounts what actually happened on the day when the maharajah sent his soldiers into the wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khejarli .

This terrible story repeats itself to this day. The Latvian State Forestry Service relentlessly advertises that the Latvian Wood is in fine shape, while all around the countryside, wherever the people have trees on their private property, the trees are relentlessly disappearing, because the people are forced into cutting them to cover the increasing taxes that force them out of their homes. The urbanites offer them subsidized apartments in the city, which are—as thousands of elderly people are discovering—without heat, health services, or any chance of escape other than by alcohol, or death, or both, hopefully, into a kinder parallel universe.

The urbanites are a dogmatic people, who once inside the gates of a castle become so dependent on the price’s graces, that they side with ever increasing vehemence with the prince and set themselves against subsistence gardeners in the wood. No mercies can be expected from urbanites by countryside people then or now. The countryside persons today, whether in Latvia, Russia, China, or America are completely subject to urbanite exploitation, illustrated by their treatment of horses during WW2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_II.

The pathological behavior or urbanites is vigorously denied by human rights activists, who justify their self-righteous behavior by arguing that they manifest humaneness to the highest degree. Actually, it is simply carrying on with the traditions of brutality behind an additional curtain.

Whenever anyone wonders why the Balts are so passive in opposing the dogmatic orientation of their governments, one ought to remember the characteristics of urbanism. The orientation of the Latvian government—of a Parliamentary nature--so obviously runs against the economic interests of the common people, that its very humanity is in question.

Instead, a tsunami like wall rolls forward on a debris of opinion that the Baltic people have been from the beginning of time oriented toward the West and that they despise the Russians (as heirs to all things Soviet) with every ounce of native spirit they possess. This of course is simply a lie. The very first self-acknowledged Latvian, Krishyanis Waldemahrs, who as a student dared put next to his name the designation: ‘a Latvian’, worked as a journalist in St. Petersburg, led ‘The Young Latvians’ movement, and was among those who believed that the Latvians of his day should be a more or less autonomous community within a united Russia. Indeed, Waldemars was strongly opposed to the feudal system of government then still advocated by the ruling caste of Germans.

With such a gossamer embrace of the West never questioned during the last twenty-one years of ‘renewed’ Latvian independence, the government of Latvia stands 100% for all things urban and Western: membership of NATO, membership and federalization within the EU, capitalism, urbanization, glass and cage-like castles, and elimination of small farms. As for the last, this is the reason why up to 25% of all Latvians have emigrated from the country as economic refugees, which is considerably more than the number of Latvians who fled the advance of the Soviet Army, which returned to reoccupy Latvia within a year after the defeat of the Germans at Kursk.

I certainly do not wish to deny that the Soviet order that followed for the next forty-five (45) years did not traumatize the Latvian sense of self-worth and autonomy. However, I do not wish to diminish the benefits of Latvia’s federalization within the Soviet Union. While the Ulmanis regime of independent Latvia had done much to advance the interests of the Latvian middle class, the economic problems of the country were not to be solved by short=term measures. The occupation of the Soviets was a quid pro quo: on the one hand the Soviets advanced the Latvian underclass, which was extensive, while on other hand, the Latvian middle class suffered a significant decline. The West notably added to this decline, by forcing the Soviet Union to put much of its resources in military armament. While many Latvians excelled in the areas of he arts and academia of the Soviet Union, these breakthroughs were insufficient to advance the awareness of Latvians as a micro community it had been in antiquity or since the revival of the community by the Herrnhuter movement after its collapse as the community following the Great Northern War http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Great_Northern_War_Baltic_Theater.png, which ended in the first decade of the 18^th century.

Not surprisingly, the collapse of the Soviet Union and government put into leading positions not what had been the underclass, because it was insufficiently educated and autonomy oriented, nor anything resembling a Western middle class, but the Soviet apparatchiks, who while not particularly educated, had leadership experience and little in the way of obstacles to prevent easy intrusion into areas occupied, in the West, by the middle class, neoliberal enterprisers, and politicians.

Western intelligence services (it is my guess) did not sleep. The Soviet Union was criticized and belittled at every turn. NATO or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance presumed to oppose the Soviet Union, quickly reoriented itself and attempted to gain further advantages vis a vis Russia. Western corporations attempted to infiltrate or seize Russian businesses by means of the law. Many advisers to such corporations were from Eastern Europe. They were not to be outdone by older advisors such as Zbigniev Brzezinski (see blog 217) from Poland, who served the United States as a National Security Advisor.

As readers of my blogs know, I am neither pro Western nor anti Eastern. If it comes to my preference, I rather chose the East over the West, because to my mind the recent past of the Balts relates closer to that of the communities of the East than the West—even though one would never guess that this is so from the information one gathers in the media and the actions of government.

As the reader can see, this is a long story during the telling of which I have almost forgot that I am supposed to write about the coming New Battle of Kursk, and that the northeast of Europe forms the northern flank of the Kursk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk salient. So, why did I choose the name ‘Kursk’? Because next to Hiroshima, it is one of the great cataclysmic slaughter fields of all time and more is coming.

Eso’s Chronicles 230/ 1

New Kursk 01

© Eso A.B.

 

The following link by “Battlefields” on the battle of Kursk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22xpNBJCS4U  in 1943 is lengthy and leaves something to be desired, nevertheless, it shows how the battle took a long time being prepared by both Germany and Russia. The preparations and their length by both sides are most impressive, not least, because they show that both sides had their apprehensions about coming out on the winners’ side. In this writer’s opinion, another such battle (not necessarily of tanks, which may have become an outmoded weapon) is being prepared for in the Middle East and in the Baltic; in other words, a battle across a very wide front indeed.

 

While I cannot give any actual outlines of the battle to come, I will present its rough outlines and raisons d'être in the next few blogs.

 

Just yesterday there was a news item in the Reuters News Service, that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has warned Israel http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/07/us-palestinians-israel-kerry-idUSBRE9A60P220131107  that if it does not join the American-brokered peace negotiations in the Middle East, it was likely to be soon facing a Third Palestinian Intifada and other geopolitical problems in the not too distant future.

 

The Secretary of State’s warning comes in the context of a reassessment of recent American and NATO strategies, which likely caused all the Great Powers who form on what was once Pangaea http://geology.csupomona.edu/drjessey/class/Gsc101/Plate.html , the original land mass of our planet, to tickle their nuclear buttons. In other words, Europe, Asia and all the abutting lands, have for approximately a thousand years been facing a concerted Western strategy to occupy the land whence they themselves originally came from. Wishing to shed the spiritual discipline of their forebears, the Westerners decided that they would create a history of their own, albeit a history of fiction, which would allow them to attack the descendants of the powers that remained in charge of their own ancient homelands.

 

In the thousand years or so since the Carolingian kings the divisions and regroupings occurred among the various powers in the Western lands have been many. The original attacks by the West on the East can be identified with the early Crusades, starting about the 11^th and 12^th centuries of the 2^nd millennium. In these attacks only the peripheral borderlands of the East were chiseled from it, and some beachheads captured, notably at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and northeastern Europe.

 

My own country, Latvia, is part of the chiseled part of the East. Originally, the Germans, part of the great migration of the Goths (first as Vikings to the Black Sea region, then as various tribes of Goths backing away toward the northeast of Europe (the so-called Benelux countries), under the pressure of the advancing Turkic tribes or, as some prefer to call them—Huns. In the Benelux area, the Goths split up in three four main branches: the Germans, French, English, and Scandinavians. Latvia, then part of a geographical area known as Livonia, has its origins in the German desire to be independent of French Rule and the burden of French Paris as their capital city. Thus, early German warriors, known as Teutonic Knights, ventured into the relatively sparsely settled wooded lands of the European northeast, and established a city we now know as Riga. Originally, Riga was slated to become the future capital of Germany.

 

Riga was founded in 1201 by cannon Albert of Bremen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_of_Riga, who was elevated to the rank of bishop by his uncle Hartwig archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg. Bishop Albert also founded the Teutonic Knights with whom he subjugated most of the Baltic tribes native to the area.

 

Though seldom mentioned and for political reasons never pressed, one of the reasons for the founding of Riga was to found a future capital city for the Germanic people.  One of the subtitles that Bishop Albert gave to Riga was Jerusalem, which indicates, at the very least, that in his mind’s eye Riga in the future was ‘up there’ with Constantinople and other major cities of the West and East. Again for political reasons, this high status for Riga remains unrealized and is reason why the subject is deliberately muted. Nevertheless, those powers, which have an eye on the future, of Europe as a federated state, retain an interest in Riga as a city founded by Germans. Not least among these are Latvians come under the Anglo-Saxon influence and are linking their future with NATO, which in one way or another is replacing the Teutonic Brotherhood.

 

Russia, too, has a no less greater interest in Riga than the West. To understand this better, we have to remember the trading history of Russia, which begins above the polar circle in Murmansk, moved south to Novgorod the Great, and later--with the building of St. Petersburg—moved even further south. By the beginning of the 20^th century, Riga, then still part of tsarist Russia, had become the third largest city in Russia. While today Riga has lost its glory, the recent military maneuvers by Russia and NATO http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/tensions-rise-with-russia-as-nato-to-stage-biggest-war-games-in-seven-years-29733358.html  suggest that its geopolitical importance is not being overlooked in the centers of power and is the cause of considerable hubris in government circles of Latvia itself.