*
Postcards from Europe:
He fell from the window
Defenestration
is an honorable art,
says the assassin
who pleads his honor.
Meanwhile people keep falling
as into a well
of air. This is Prague,
declares the despot. Windows
let in too much light.
Look how we close them.
~ George Szirtes
“The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). Though already existing in Middle French, the word defenestrate ("out of the window") is believed to have first been used in English in reference to the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of a window of the Hradčany Castle and wrote an extensive apologia explaining their action. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, defenestration was not uncommon.” (Wiki)
New Town Hall, Prague
*
ANOTHER RUSSIAN BUSINESSMAN FALLS OUT A WINDOW
~ Uh, oh. Another prominent Russian businessman has taken a header out a window after speaking out against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This time it’s Ravil Maganov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Russian oil giant Lukoil. That brings the total to five titans of Russian industry since the Ukraine invasion kicked off in February.
TASS printed a short article this morning stating, "The incident occurred around 07:00 am Moscow time in the Central Clinical Hospital. The man fell out of the sixth-floor window and died as a result of his injuries.”
But the board of Lukoil released the best official statement. "We deeply regret to announce that Ravil Maganov, Chairman of PJSC LUKOIL Board of Directors, passed away following a severe illness. Ravil Maganov immensely contributed to the development of not only the Company, but of the entire Russian oil and gas sector.”
Yep. That falling-out-of-window disease will get you every time. No known cure for it.
RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned domestic news agency, quoted a law enforcement source who said the businessman "most likely committed suicide.”
Maganov is the second Lukoil employee to die under mysterious circumstances. In May, Russian media reported that former Lukoil manager Alexander Subbotin had been found dead in the basement of a house outside Moscow.
Here’s a recent photo of Chairman Maganov with his pal Putin. ~ Izzy Luggs, Quora
Oriana:
Putin is more likely to be remembered as Putin the Poisoner than Putin the Defenestrator. The main reason for that, however, is that “defenestrator” is such a mouthful, and unfamiliar at that.
Mary:
I think they want you to know these are political assassinations. Otherwise why be so obvious and so repetitive. It's a warning.
Oriana:
Yes. Otherwise it would seem that Russians are incredibly clumsy and just can’t help falling from windows and balconies. Or smoking next to ammunition depots.
*
EE IN THE USSR
A 1931 trip to Stalinist Russia helped hone ee cummings’ aversion to collectivism
~ Born in 1894, E.E. Cummings—poet, painter, playwright, novelist—is known for his innovative idioms, very unconventional punctuation and experimental forms. He is less remembered for his staunch commitment to philosophical and political individualism, in the tradition of 19th-century transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, which found its fullest expression in his opposition to the ascendant Marxism and communism of the early 20th century.
Cummings was raised by Unitarian parents around Harvard Yard (his father taught at the university) at a time when the chief modes of transportation were not yet by automobile. The ebullient young poet enjoyed his academic milieu with its residual transcendentalism. Even the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an allegedly cold realist then serving on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, acknowledged Emerson as his inspiration and wrote about “an echo of the infinite” and “a hint of the universal law.”
An urban center for publishing and speaking and all varieties of expatiation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was at the time home to American intellectuals such as William James, Josiah Royce and Charles Eliot Norton, as well as to the nascent pragmatism that would eclipse republicanism, Unitarianism and other New World paradigms in its importance to the identity of educated Bostonians and Harvard highbrows. Burgeoning industry generated prosperity and energetic commercialism in Boston and its surrounds. The Civil War had tempered the optimism of earlier generations, but vibrant efforts to fashion a uniquely American culture and to break free from the constraints of European customs and traditions continued to shape the growing market for newspapers and books.
In this stimulating climate, under his parents’ care, young Cummings cultivated his creative talents, especially for poetry. He entered Harvard University in 1911, published his first poem in 1912, graduated in 1915 and earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1916. As a college student he became, according to biographer Susan Cheever, “a new man, an archetypal questioner, and with this newness would come a different kind of poetry.”
Originality was the hallmark of American writing long before Cummings. The national literature, such as it was, sought discontinuity and inventiveness. The crass humor of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), the gothic grotesqueness of Edgar Allan Poe, the bold activism of Margaret Fuller, the caustic realism of Edith Wharton, the performative independence of Henry David Thoreau, the shocking obscenity of Walt Whitman—each contributed to the paradox of the emergent American canon: its derivative novelty and mimetic resistance to outside influences.
Strictly rhyming meter and syntax in American poetry gave way to a rebellious free verse and democratic improvisation. The ostentatious vocabulary and syntactical pretensions of upper-class Europeans were not suited to rugged American prose, which—as in Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”—featured common speech, plain diction and vulgar colloquialisms. But how far could writers push boundaries? How could they transcend the inescapable past or reimagine inherited orthographies? Could language exist without recognizable precedents, rules or structures? What approaches had not been tried? What poems could satisfy the endless aspiration for American ingenuity?
STRETCHING THE LIMITS
Cummings may have stretched the limits as far as they could go. His anarchic, avant-garde style signaled his rogue, rollicking individualism, which, in his view, defied the dehumanizing forces of collectivism. This is not the space to examine his extensive oeuvre or undertake close readings of his thousands of brilliant poems. Yet two acclaimed examples suffice to show the lyric distinctiveness of his curious method:
the coming of my love emits
you should see when i turn to find
what is that the hurdy-gurdy’s playing
[in Just-]
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
In the first poem we experience a traditional theme: tender, romantic love. The second, with its evocative images, vague figures, fragmented lines and unusual, disruptive punctuation, is like the scene of an abstract painting or photograph, a rendered moment, the sounds purely imagined.
Cummings famously embraced lowercase font (or, if you prefer, infamously avoided capitalization). The spatial arrangement of this poem—large gaps between words, for instance, or the swaying effect of differing line lengths—lends the impression that the wind has blown the letters and words back and forth, together and apart, and that the ominous perspective is that of a child who is unable to articulate clearly or cogently the evanescent flurry of activity he beholds.
Emerson coined “individualism” for the American lexicon to capture the “individualisme” that Alexis de Tocqueville recorded in the early 1830s in his observations while touring the United States. The individualism that Cummings developed was more than merely a youthful sense of bravado and self-importance that would moderate as his testosterone receded with age. It was deep-seated, rational and enduring—in a word, Emersonian.
Lasting beliefs earn staying power through lived experience; trying circumstances force people to validate or renounce their convictions. Two pressing events reinforced Cummings’ individualism, which he exposited with an ever-maturing understanding of the dangers of totalitarianism.
One was his detainment during World War I, right out of college. He and novelist William Slater Brown had volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance service in France. Charged with espionage because of cryptic comments in their letters home, they were imprisoned for three months in holding cells at a military detention camp in the French town of La Ferté-Macé. Meanwhile the U.S. Department of State erroneously notified Cummings’ parents that he had been aboard the SS Antilles, which a German U-boat had torpedoed and sunk.
Cummings was released from confinement without commotion or fanfare shortly before Christmas 1917 and was stateside again by January. He would later portray this period in his autobiographical novel “The Enormous Room,” which biographer Richard S. Kennedy describes as a “symbolic attack upon all governmental structures whatsoever.”
LENIN’S TOMB
The other belief-affirming event was Cummings’ five-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, which hardened him against communism and its American supporters. During this trip Cummings kept a diary that became his second prose book, “Eimi.” The title is Greek for “I am.”
In his 1958 preface, Cummings wrote, “To devotees of the Old Testament, this may suggest Exodus III, 14—‘I AM THAT I AM.’” Cummings’ signature “i,” rendered in lowercase throughout his poetry, lacks the grandeur and majesty of the Hebrew God. Yet, paradoxically, it seems mighty in its diminutive size: a sign of individuality that draws attention to itself, its power made perfect in weakness.
First published in 1933, “Eimi” abounds with bitter, biting critiques of collectivism and of its corollary, a planned economy. This diary-invective can be obscure, its plot sequencing at times difficult to follow. Guided by a derisory version of Virgil, Cummings—the mocking and mythical narrator, a 20th-century Dante—undertakes a depressing, disturbing passage through the “unworld,” Stalinist Russia: a nightmarish hell of senseless bureaucracy, unimaginative ideology and brutalizing oppression.
His first stop on this journey: “A singularly unbanklike bank: outside,mildly imposing mansion; inside, hugely promiscuous hideousness—not the impeccable sanitary ordered and efficient hideousness of American or imitation-American banks, but a strictly ubiquitous whenwhere of casual filth and aimless commotion and profound hoping inefficiency.” Such bleak, odd imagery and frank disgust anticipate the surreal, satirical episodes he later sees and records: propaganda plays, indoctrination speeches, a plethora of comrades, secret police, a socialist jail. The neologism “whenwhere” emphasizes the managerial pointlessness of Soviet administration, which homogenizes society into a monotonous, mechanistic mass of inept, brainwashed automatons.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Harry” Dana (grandson of the renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had died in 1882), a union-loving advocate of labor causes, a Harvard habitué and a lively expert on Russian drama, happened to be in Russia when Cummings arrived there. With entrée into Russian cognoscenti society, Dana was Cummings’ Virgil, introducing him to the glitterati, the literati and local theater. Anti-authoritarian to his core, Cummings was unimpressed. He “went to the Soviet Union with his eyes open and without an agenda,” explains biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, but “his experiences there, in which he witnessed first-hand the privation and sadness of the Stalinist state, certainly helped him develop an agenda.”
In “Eimi,” Cummings allegorizes his haunting visit to Lenin’s mausoleum, calling it the “Vision of Satan.” The revulsion with which Cummings illustrates the procession of bodies to the grave is palpable. Too lengthy to quote here, these lines scramble with intensity in the manner of the mourning throng—a “number of numberlessness”—which mobilizes toward “the Tomb of Tombs,” toward “Lenin our life!” and “Lenin our hope!” The tomb, discussed much earlier in the narrative, is “a rigid pyramidal composition of blocks; an impurely mathematical game of edges.”
The picture here is religious, or irreligious—the hallowed Lenin in his sacred space, wholly consecrated, absolutely revered. If Lenin is God, then his state—his government—is holy. Nothing could have been more frightening or distressing to Cummings.
Kennedy asserts that the concluding lines of “Eimi” attempt to “express something similar to an Emersonian transcendental experience, a mystical union with the creative force”:
silence is made of
(behind perfectly or
final rising
humbly
more dark
most luminous
whereless fragrant whenlessly erect
a sudden the!entirelyblossoming)
Voice
(Who:
Loves;
Creates,
Imagines)
OPENS
Notice the emergence of sound from silence: the voice a mode of agency, a source, a genesis, a conception. The result is as if to say, “You, reader, are now released from Soviet censorship, restraint and restriction; you have ended that chapter and may close this book; the future is yours to make.”
STANDING ALONE
Kennedy explains that the self-celebrating and increasingly embittered Cummings sometimes “felt isolated from other literary contemporaries, mostly leftists who shunned him because of his strong anticommunist views.” True Emersonian self-reliance means standing alone, if necessary, in the face of hostility and to the chagrin or ire of the naysaying multitudes. Cummings, “no base imitator of another,” struck out on his own, taking great risks with his poetry despite harsh charges that his writing was indecipherable, esoteric or impenetrable.
His acrobatic, often puzzling techniques represent aesthetically the prevailing motifs of his romantic, nonconformist individualism: imagination, life, emotion, instinct, spontaneity and love. His liberating eccentricity contrasts with the crushing, repressive and absurd Soviet system. “Eimi,” a sustained indictment of Marxism and communism, depicts the all-encompassing despotism of mobs as well as a cruel and implacable government run by myriad comrades who lack character or personality because they are subservient sycophants: dispensable units within an indiscriminate superstate of interchangeable agents and functionaries.
When the idiosyncratic Cummings died of a stroke in 1962, he was a household name, his stature secured by the blooming hippie, hipster subculture that, dissatisfied with current affairs, followed his lead in rejecting establishment standards and submission to authority. His obituary in The New York Times, published the day after his death, commences on the front page and, because of its length, extends to another section. He was a force, a giant of his time, a modernist trendsetter whose trends were insuperable, a transparent eyeball, the “i” and the person he decided to be, the Whitmanesque “me myself” who would not capitulate to badges, names, large societies or dead institutions. He was e.e. and E.E., living truly, seeing truly, acting singly. There can never be another.
Oriana:
I think many of us go through an ee cummings phase, and then outgrow it. A handful of his poems are simply ravishing ('just spring' is one of them). But an average ee poem, with its repetitious stylistic tricks, can be annoying. At a younger age, we may find it playful and charming. As we read more poetry, we may find ee's rebellion against convention simply mannered and artificial, an arrested childhood that doesn't even fully enter adolescence.
Is he a great poet? His main weakness is lack of powerful content. Or perhaps his rebellion against Puritan repression seems old hat by now, its power to shock reduced to a shrug: "What else is new?"
But if we yawn at the idea of even more sexual liberation, it's in part because we are a product of a culture that edward estlin cummings helped shape. And some of his lines have both charm and speak what I'd call a "lyrical truth."
*
WHY GORBACHEV IS LOVED IN THE WEST AND HATED IN RUSSIA
If you ask a Russian living in deepest Russia what he thinks of Gorbachev, there is a great chance that he will answer this:
"Gorbachev liquidated our USSR and killed our future; Putin rebuilt Russia and gave us back our honor.”
You can see here the comparison between Gorbachev who brought down the USSR and Putin who, in the eyes of many Russians, restored the image of Russia in the world since the early 2000s.
By making Russia a major military power again, Putin has given back a certain pride to the Russians. Russians have forgotten their ever more difficult living conditions due to Putin's lack of economic reform.
However, what has happened since February 2022 has changed the Russians' vision of Putin. Of course, this concerns only those Russians who manage to get real information from outside, since all the Kremlin propaganda continues to talk about a special military operation.
After six months, some people will start to find time long and perhaps understand that Putin is not telling the whole truth.
Above all, the crushing defeat that awaits the Russian army will show the Russians that the image of power that Putin wanted to convey is only PR. In reality, the Russian army is much weaker than fantasized by some and by Putin in particular.
If this will not restore Gorbachev's reputation in Russia, it may well end up costing Putin his place in the Kremlin. ~ Sylvain Saurel, Quora
Richard McCarthy:
Putin gave the Russian people this:
…and himself, this:
and this, and more (Putin is the richest man in the world)
MISHA IOSSEL ON MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Gorbachev gave Russia a chance to become a "normal" country.
And Russia failed to take advantage of it.
Bush Sr., Reagan, Gorbachev
A moment full of hope.
We will never be this optimistic again, I'm afraid.
*
He was the leader of an unjust political system. If he hadn't tried to preserve the Soviet Union, he would've been replaced by hardliners. History is not a straight line. In the end, he decided not to hold on to power, not to spill infinitely more blood. Without him, the Soviet Union would still be in existence and Lithuania and Georgia and Latvia would still be a part of it, and I for one would still be in the Soviet Union. . . . History is complicated.
At the time I was still a Soviet citizen living in the USSR. Allow me to assure you that in no way, shape or form would the Soviet Union "fall apart" if instead of Gorbachev Chernenko had been replaced by Grishin, Romanov, Gromyko — or almost anyone else. It had enough resources to keep on going in a state of people's habitual misery for decades and decades. It only started "falling apart" (I wonder how you even imagine it: people taking to the streets? really?) after Gorbachev had started trying to reform it — and after he had decided not to hold on to power.
No one — absolutely no one — expected for the country to "fall apart.” There was no mechanism for its "falling apart." It didn't fall apart under Stalin, it didn't fall apart under Brezhnev — it was not designed to fall apart because there was no possible scenario for its falling apart. Soviet people would not rise up, they wouldn't even consider it. Novocherkassk, 1962? The regime had enough bullets to keep on going forever.
Gorbachev was a product of the Soviet Party-system upbringing, and he did try at first, as the General Secretary, to preserve the Soviet Union, by forcible and cruel means, for which he is justly remembered darkly by people of the former Soviet Republics [e.g. Tbilisi, Baku, Riga, and Vilnius].
He was, in the beginning, an unwilling and unwitting agent of history.
But ultimately, his great wisdom was in his decision to relent to the course of history.
By contrast, Putin's catastrophic madness is in trying to reverse it.
*
Rest in Peace, Mikhail Sergeyevich.
You changed the course of world history.
Many millions of people — myself among them — owe you a deep debt of gratitude. ~ M. Iossel, Facebook
Oriana:
Another complication here is that he was outfoxed by Yeltsin. It seems Yeltsin never gets the blame, but it was during Yeltsin's "reign" that life became miserable for ordinary Russians. (Not that Yeltsin single-handedly caused the misery; the Soviet economy had been crumbling for a long time.)
Personally, I agree with Misha that the world owes a lot to Gorbachev.
“Blessed are the peace-makers.”
*
Stalin turned out to be right (in a bad way): Only terror could preserve the Soviet Union.
*
A TRIBUTE TO MIKHAIL GORBACHEV ~ NPR
~ Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a central role in ending the Cold War, died Tuesday, August 30, 2022, at the age of 91.
Russian media reported his death, citing the hospital that was treating him as saying he died of a "serious and protracted disease," without providing more information.
Gorbachev's trademark policies of glasnost and perestroika helped open up the Soviet economy and liberalize society in the late 1980s, confront its past and engage with Western leaders on arms control. He also oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from about a decade-long military campaign in Afghanistan, as well as the USSR's handling of Chernobyl.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he was seen by many abroad, including President Ronald Reagan, as a visionary. But his legacy is complicated at home, where many viewed him as the man who engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He felt he belonged to a generation of children of World War II.
He was born in 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in southern Russia. He was the son of peasants and knew how to operate farm equipment. He also knew the horror of war.
In an interview with the Academy of Achievement years later, Gorbachev said watching the Nazis occupy his village as a boy shaped his life.
"This was all happening right in front of our eyes, the eyes of the children," he said. "Thus, you see, I belong to the so-called children-of-the-war generation. The war left a heavy mark on us, a painful mark. This is permanent, and this is what determined a lot of things in my life.”
Gorbachev never wanted to see global conflict again, leaving him determined to make the world less suspicious of communism.
He was a young star in the Communist Party, and when he was named Soviet leader in 1985, he was already at work engaging Western leaders like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had given him a historic endorsement in 1984.
"I like Mr. Gorbachev," she said. "We can do business together.”
Andrei Grachev, one of Gorbachev's closest advisers, likened that endorsement to a Frank Sinatra song.
"If you use the phrase from Sinatra's song, 'If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.' So if he could say it to himself that he could do it with Thatcher, he would be ready and capable of doing it with anyone else," Grachev says.
Grachev traveled with his boss to Paris in 1985 for a news conference with French President François Mitterrand. Gorbachev's staff was used to distributing scripted questions for Soviet reporters. But Gorbachev did the unthinkable: He fielded whatever questions reporters felt like asking.
"As he said, 'I have my shirt wet, like working in the field. It was really hot for me,' " Grachev recalls, "because he had to answer quite a lot of questions at the time.”
Gorbachev, a son of a poor farming family, had arrived on the world stage.
"That was, kind of, the pride of a peasant who had accomplished something, of which he was proud," Grachev says.
THE GOAL OF NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION GAVE GORBACHEV AND REAGAN AN UNEXPECTED RAPPORT
Gorbachev then set his sights on President Ronald Reagan. The Soviet leader was the world's cheerleader for communism, which Reagan considered evil. But the two men shared a belief they didn't need to point nuclear weapons at each other. Reaching for that shared goal gave them an unexpected rapport.
"Though my pronunciation may give you difficulty, the maxim is, 'Doveryai, no proveryai' — trust but verify," Reagan famously said at their meeting.
Gorbachev's response — "You repeat that at every meeting!" — was met with laughter.
Reagan's sense of ease sent a message that it was OK to like this Russian. Gorbachev and his glamorous wife, Raisa, traveled the world. "Gorby mania" had struck, including on the streets of Washington, D.C., where the Soviet leader left the motorcade to touch the hands of Americans.
Jack Matlock, Reagan's adviser on Soviet affairs, remembers preparing for one of the president's most famous speeches, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1987.
The White House gave the Kremlin almost no warning that Reagan was going to make his historic demand of Gorbachev. But Matlock said there was little need.
"They both understood that they could depend more on their direct conversation with each other than getting too excited about what each said in speeches," Matlock says.
"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate," Reagan said to applause. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
Matlock notes that though Reagan's speech was made in 1987, the Berlin Wall came down in 1990.
"A lot happened in between those two [events], and there was no direct cause and effect," he says.
In fact, a lot happened after 1987 that was not in Gorbachev's plans at all. One misconception about the man is that he favored breaking up the Soviet Union. Not true. Gorbachev believed he could reform the Communist Party and make a more open society, while keeping Soviet power intact. Instead, the republics of the Soviet Union sensed the opportunity to break free.
Inside Russia, Gorbachev's system of perestroika, his push for a more market-style economy and his call for democratic elections were unleashing chaos. Although he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his actions on the world stage, at home, Gorbachev was losing support.
SOVIET HARD-LINERS HELD HIM HOSTAGE IN CRIMEA
Hard-liners from Moscow knew he was vulnerable. In the summer of 1991, they sent the head of the KGB to Gorbachev's vacation home in Crimea, on the Black Sea, to hold the Soviet leader hostage. Gorbachev told his guests they were killing the country.
"The demand was made: 'You will resign.' I said, 'You will never live that long,' " Gorbachev recalled. "And I said, 'Convey that to those who sent you. I have nothing more to say to you.' “
It was a final act of defiance. Gorbachev returned to Moscow, having received the message. He resigned four months later.
Matlock, the Reagan aide, who became U.S. ambassador to Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union, remembers the anger at Gorbachev, the sentiment among Russians that he had dismantled their country. Russians felt weak, hungry; and it all seemed like Gorbachev's fault.
"People do think that way. But it wasn't Gorbachev who brought down the Soviet Union, after all," Matlock says. "He brought them democracy. He brought them choice. And he made one other choice, which was extremely, I think, important in Russian history: He made no attempt to keep himself in office by using force.”
Grachev, Gorbachev's adviser, remembers seeing a different man return from Crimea to step down.
"I saw that something has broken inside him," Grachev says. "He didn't have the same kind of assurance, internal assurance, that he was showing even in the hardest moments.”
Still, Russian society has habits that are hard to break. Since the times of the czars, Russians have relished forceful leaders and were willing to give up freedoms for a sense of confidence and order. In his later years, Gorbachev complained that current Russian leaders have backslid on democratic principles and human rights.
"Even now in Russia we have the same problem," he said in 2000. "It isn't so easy to give up the inheritance we received from Stalinism and neo-Stalinism, when people were turned into cogs in the wheel, and those in power made all the decisions for them.”
Gorbachev added that a lasting democracy will never come without a fight. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/30/1120141650/former-soviet-leader-mikhail-gorbachev-has-died
Jonathan Murphy:
A truly brave man, who faced the requirement to make changes for the long-term benefit of the nation.
He chose a hard path to what would have a more egalitarian and internationally “included” state.
We’ll never know the result of his vision, arguably since the “old guard” didn’t have the courage and leadership to keep on that hard path.
“Uphill to a summit, or an easier valley path to remain in the dark” perhaps?
Always easy in hindsight of course, but in no small part, leadership includes the ability of instilling faith in bold visions.
Curtis Morgan:
I think that Gorbachev saw that the October revolution had come to nothing. 'It's over, let it go'.
Joseph Milosch:
In looking at the collapse of Russia, pundits overlook weaknesses in the Russian educational system that contributed to the mismanagement of military supplies. Many Russians blame Gorbachev for the demise of the Soviet Union. However, these factors led to instability in the states at the borders of the Soviet Union.
Yet, its inability to promote innovative thinking is a weakness. A student needs the freedom to question authority and fail to become inventive. Because job loss or imprisonment is the reward for questioning authority and failure, scientists and engineers became very good at copying western ideas and inventions.
The governmental repression of free thinking leads to an inability to innovate and creates supply chain issues for their military. During the Soviet-Afghanistan War, the Russian soldiers traded their weapons to the Taliban for food. While Russian soldiers starved, the leaders of the Communist Party kept their lockers stocked with food.
The Ukrainian people routinely report that Russian soldiers steal food that they find in bombed houses. I don’t mean to disparage the Russian soldiers. Since Egypt became an empire in 3,000 BCE, generals have said an army travels on its stomach. Russian captive soldiers comment on how well fed they are in prison.
Instead of figuring out a different way to supply Russian tanks with fuel tankers, the Russian leadership added extra fuel tanks inside the vehicle. When anti-tank missiles hit these tanks, the fuel exploded, blowing the lids blew off and earning the Russian Armored Division equipment the nickname Jack-in-the-Box Tanks.
Putin pushes the myth that the Iron Curtain made Russia prosperous and powerful. As WWII
slipped into history, the lack of Russian innovation impeded progress. After Sputnik, this suppression threatened the economy and military. Gorbachev saw this and realized that to sustain power and prosperity, Russia must accept dissent and failure.
Oriana:
*
GORBACHEV: NEVER AGAIN WAR
On March 2, the great Russian peace lover Mikhail Gorbachev turned 91. It was the seventh day of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Gorbachev is the son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother. His wife Raissa was also Ukrainian. He often referred to her affectionately as “My Ukrainian.” Such family ties between Russians and Ukrainians are numerous in both neighboring countries. This also makes the current war incomprehensible and absolutely senseless as any war.
In 2016, together with Mikhail Gorbachev, I wrote the book “Never Again War – Finally Come to Your Senses”. At that time, neither of us could have imagined how dramatically topical this book title would be five years later. Never again war?
Gorbachev: “We are one humanity on one earth under one sun”.
Real peace, he said, “can be achieved only on the condition of demilitarized politics and demilitarized international relations. Politicians who think that problems and disputes can be solved by using military force – even as a last resort – should be rejected by society, they should clear the political stage.” No wonder Gorbachev and Putin could never become friends.
Just a few weeks ago, Gorbachev sent me an article for the newspaper Russia Global Affairs in which he writes: “No challenge or threat facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved militarily. No major problem can be solved by one country or group of countries in an all-out effort.”
In this article, a legacy of sorts, he lists the most urgent problems of our time as: abolishing nuclear weapons and overcoming mass poverty in the developing world, and saving the world’s climate.
When I had the privilege of presenting Gorbachev with a peace prize in Moscow in 2018, he named the three main tasks of our time as “disarm, disarm, disarm”. He meant Russia and NATO. “Only then will peace be possible”.
In response to my question about the danger of a nuclear war, he said, “A nuclear war would be the last war of mankind, because after that there would be no people left to fight another war.” This admonition is his real legacy. Through his disarmament efforts, 80% of all nuclear weapons worldwide were scrapped in the 1990s.
I once asked him during a television interview where he got the strength for his visionary politics. He pointed to his wife Raissa, who was standing behind the camera, and said, “This is where my power is.” She laughed and waved back. For me, the Gorbachevs are the greatest political lovers of our time. We owe the end of the Cold War, peaceful German unity and perhaps even our survival to this couple. Gorbachev was the greatest disarmamentist of all time.
According to Mikhail Gorbachev: “The victor is not the one who wins battles in a war, but the one who makes peace.” ~
https://www.sonnenseite.com/en/franz-alt-en/comments-interviews/mikhail-gorbachev-never-again-war/
WAS GORBACHEV RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION?
~ As early as 1982, the CIA already predicted accurately the Soviet Union would either fall within a decade or would start World War Three to maintain its power.
At the time this analysis was highly classified as it predicted the real possibility of a global nuclear war.
Back in 1982 (Gorbachev only came to power in 1985), KGB Officers were already complaining that even they could no longer get hold of “the good stuff”. There were special shops in the Soviet Union where you needed credentials to buy luxury goods.
If KGB Officers can no longer control the black market, you know your country is pretty much finished.
The rot had already set in before Gorbachev was in charge. Trying reforms was the best option given the alternative … war to unite the people. ~
Thierry Etienne Joseph Rotty, Quora
William Wilson:
This analysis was not very classified. US NEWS/World Report did a lead article in the early 1980s that was titled Communism in Crisis. They said the Soviet Union could not survive till the end of the century. It was not Gorbachev’s policies or Reagan’s policies that caused it. It was the policies of Lenin and Stalin and Brezhnev that doomed the USSR.
Tom Condray:
The Cold War was won by the time personal computers became common place. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed in 1991, the PC would’ve been its demise in a few short years. You can’t control the people if you can’t control information. And personal computers were essential to any modern country’s economy by the late 80s. Despite what anyone else might tell you, if you had a PC in the 1980s/90s you were able to bypass all sorts of government’s controls on the Truth.
This would’ve left the Soviets with only two choices: Fall behind in economic development by curtailing use of PCs or allow PCs and see the flood of information from outside the Soviet Union wash over, and awaken the citizenry.
Misha Iossel:
If, as both Russia and Trumpland whine constantly, everyone in the world is your enemy, perhaps YOU are the problem and not the world.
*
NO FULL STATE FUNERAL FOR GORBACHEV; PUTIN WON’T ATTEND
~ Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, will not receive a full state funeral in Russia following his passing earlier this week, the Kremlin confirmed Thursday.
"There will be elements of a state funeral in the sense that there will be a guard of honor. A farewell will be organized. In this case, the state will assist in organizing these funerals," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters according to Interfax.
It is unclear how exactly the funeral service will differ from a full state funeral,
though Gorbachev's rival and the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was buried with full state honors in 2007 after his passing.
Putin, who succeed Yeltsin, also declared a national day of mourning.
Gorbachev – championed by Western nations for helping end the Cold War and awarded a noble peace prize for his efforts to slow the nuclear arms race – holds a legacy that stand at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Mikhail Gorbachev was a politician and statesman who had a huge impact on the course of global history," Putin said in a carefully worded message Wednesday.
Putin’s comments omitted past criticisms he has levied at the final USSR leader’s policies that led to the fall of the Soviet Union – a move Putin has decried as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The Kremlin said Thursday that Putin will not be attending Gorbachev’s funeral service due to scheduling issues, though the Russian president on Thursday paid his respects at the hospital where Gorbachev's body is being held until the service.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/gorbachev-gets-snubbed-full-state-funeral-putin-not-attending
Oriana:
But he will be buried next to Raissa, the love of his life. Would he prefer a "place of honor" at the Kremlin wall, with Stalin and Stalinists? Of course not. He knew what is really important.
*
GORBACHEV WAS SHOCKED AND BEWILDERED BY THE WAR IN UKRAINE
~ MOSCOW, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow's worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter said on Thursday.
Pavel Palazhchenko, who worked with the late Soviet president for 37 years and was at his side at numerous U.S.-Soviet summits, spoke to Gorbachev a few weeks ago by phone and said he and others had been struck by how traumatized he was by events in Ukraine.
"It's not just the (special military) operation that started on Feb. 24, but the entire evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine over the past years that was really, really a big blow to him. It really crushed him emotionally and psychologically," Palazhchenko told Reuters in an interview.
"It was very obvious to us in our conversations with him that he was shocked and bewildered by what was happening (after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February) for all kinds of reasons. He believed not just in the closeness of the Russian and Ukrainian people, he believed that those two nations were intermingled."
President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what he called a "special military operation" to ensure Russia's security against an expanding NATO military alliance and to protect Russian speakers.
Kyiv says it is defending itself from an unprovoked imperial-style war of aggression and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow to try to get Putin to pull his forces back, something he shows no sign of doing.
In photographs of 1980s summits with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the bald, moustachioed figure of Palazhchenko can be seen time and again at Gorbachev's side, leaning in to capture and relay every word.
Now 73, he is well placed to know the late politician's state of mind in the period before he died, having seen him in recent months and been in touch with Gorbachev's daughter Irina.
Gorbachev, who was 91 when he died on Tuesday from an unspecified illness, had family connections to Ukraine, said Palazhchenko. He was speaking at the Moscow headquarters of the Gorbachev Foundation where he works, and where Gorbachev kept an office dominated by a giant portrait of his late wife Raisa whose father was from Ukraine.
While in office, Gorbachev tried to keep the Soviet Union's 15 republics, including Ukraine, together but failed after reforms he set in motion emboldened many of them to demand independence.
Soviet forces used deadly force in some instances against civilians in the dying days of the USSR. Politicians in Lithuania and Latvia recalled those events with horror after Gorbachev's death, saying they still blamed him for the bloodshed.
Palazhchenko said Gorbachev, who he said believed in solving problems solely via political means, had either not known about some of those bloody episodes beforehand or "extremely reluctantly" authorized the use of force to prevent chaos.
Gorbachev's position on Ukraine was complex and contradictory in his own mind, said Palazhchenko, because the late politician still believed in the idea of the Soviet Union.
“Of course in his heart the kind of mental map for him and for most people of his political generation is still a kind of imagined country that includes most of the former Soviet Union,” said Palazhchenko.
But Gorbachev would not have waged war to restore the now defunct country he presided over from 1985-1991, he suggested.
"Of course I can't imagine him saying 'this is it, and I will do whatever to impose it'. No."
While Gorbachev believed his duty was to show Putin respect and support, his former interpreter said he spoke out publicly when he disagreed with him such as on the treatment of the media.
But he had taken a decision not to "provide a running commentary" on Ukraine beyond approving a statement in February that called for an early end to hostilities and for humanitarian concerns to be addressed.
HISTORY’S VERDICT
While conceding that some Russians and people across the former Soviet empire held extremely negative views of Gorbachev for the economic and geopolitical tumult that followed the 1991 collapse of the USSR, Palazhchenko argued that Gorbachev's legacy was substantial.
He had not only helped end the Cold War and reduced the risk of nuclear war, he said, but had voluntarily dismantled totalitarianism inside the Soviet Union and given Russia a chance for freedom and democracy.
"I think that he did remain optimistic about Russia's future," despite his own legacy being "mangled" and what he regarded as "unfair criticism", said Palazhchenko.
"He believed that the people of Russia are very talented people and once they are given a chance, maybe a second chance, that that talent...will show.”
Palazhchenko, who reminisced about Cold War U.S.-Soviet summits and chatting in a limousine with Gorbachev after White House talks, said he and his colleagues now faced the task of going through Gorbachev's papers and books at the late politician's state-owned dacha outside Moscow as there was lots of material that had not yet been systematically catalogued in his archive.
Visibly angered by criticism of Gorbachev since his death by some people on social media whom he called "haters", Palazhchenko said his former employer thought history would judge him rightly.
“He liked to say that history is a fickle lady. I think that he believed and that he expected that the final verdict will be positive for him.” ~
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/gorbachev-died-shocked-bewildered-by-ukraine-conflict-interpreter-2022-09-01/
Oriana:
Unlike so many Russian leaders before him or since, Gorbachev was seen as a decent human being. At the very least, no one would call him evil. He actually thought that reforms such as tolerance for free speech would save the Soviet Union, which was already crumbling. Only another reign of terror would have kept it from collapsing, but Gorbachev was not the kind of ruthless ruler that Stalin was. He had a sense of decency, and he liked people. We probably won’t see the like of him again. It would indeed take fundamental reforms, and no one expects Russia to reform itself.
Luka Trkanjec: GORBACHEV NOT TO BLAME FOR THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION
The things for which Gorbachev is most reviled in today’s Russia — the dissolution of USSR, the criminal privatization and economic predation, and the overall societal collapse of 1990s — are not only things for which he was not responsible himself, they are all things which he actively fought against at the time. USSR was blown up by Yeltsin and the newly elected Russian government in 1991 by singing of Belovezha Accords, which was done precisely to knock out the last vestiges of power from the crumbling Soviet leadership, aka Gorbachev himself. Afterwards, even if he remained completely powerless, Gorbachev nevertheless continued to be one of the more vocal opponents of Yeltsin and his kleptocratic regime all through 1990s.
On the other hand, the reforms which Gorbachev managed to put in place while he was in power through the late half of 1980s were not only successful, they were laudable. His willingness to end the arms race and Cold War through direct negotiations with the USA, his singing on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to limit the number and use of nuclear missiles, his decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan as well as from much of Eastern Europe, him granting basic civic, religious and national liberties to peoples of USSR, and most of all his insistence that he would not use force to maintain Soviet dominion against mounting opposition to it — these were all good and right political decisions in themselves.
That the Soviet empire in the end dissolved with less blood and turmoil than the British one should rightly be lauded as a great success of Gorbachev’s leadership, and not used to denigrate the man as feeble, incompetent or naive because he didn’t drown half of Europe in blood — or cover half the world in nuclear ashes — to maintain a totalitarian system no one even knew what was about anymore. 
*
RUSSIA AND “HIGHER JUSTICE”
~ Higher justice is a concept deeply embedded in Russian culture. Prophets, jesters, fools in Christ, poets and martyrs have long been dispersing threats of higher justice to those in power. Mysteriously, it caught our rulers many times. Emperor Pavel was strangled by his guardsmen, Alexander II blown to pieces, Nicholas II with the family peppered with bullets and soaked in acid, premier Stolypin shot dead in a theater. Lenin was reduced to a vegetable several months before his death, Stalin died in the pool of his own urine, possibly poisoned, Trotsky iced by a pickaxe, and many others from their revolutionary roster died from bullets of counterrevolutionaries and NKVD executioners.
Here is an iconic motif of impending higher justice by Russian painter Vasily Surikov. A prominent aristocrat [Boyarina] Theodócia Morózova is being sent in shackles into exile for her defiant refusal to accept the ecclesiastical reform of Peter the Great’s father, Czar Alexei. She promises heavenly revenge to Patriarch Nikon, his church and the House of Romanovs. Her God’s punishing hand ultimately struck all of them in the shape of Bolsheviks who erased their Czardom and Patriarchate from the face of the Earth.
To the right, there are two noteworthy figures. The somber-looking dark-haired man with a massive staff, lost in his thoughts, and the fool-for-Christ who is blessing Morozova. Fools for Christ were often viewed in old Russia as seers. The man with the staff is the artist himself. Both of them seem to discern that heavenly justice is certain to come. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
*
WILL RUSSIA ALWAYS BE A THREAT?
~ Has Russia under Putin created a reality wherein the only long-term peace available to Europe is through the destruction of Moscow and the Russian Federation? It's a topic being discussed in private among some members of Ukraine and EU parliaments. Reasons for the discussion? Russia will never …
- abandon the goal of military dominance over Europe
- abandon the desire for political dominance over Europe and monopoly of resources within Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
- recognize Kievan Rus’ historical rights to territory
- assume responsibility for war crimes committed under Lenin, Stalin and Putin
Admittedly it’s a tall order to take out a country that just happens to possess the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. But some Ukraine and Euro politicians seem to think such a thing might be possible without direct military confrontation and are actively discussing plans to do so. ~
Izzy Luggs, Quora
*
“One doesn’t become a patriot by just proclaiming slogans. Genuinely patriotic people are prepared to defend their motherland with a weapon in their hands. It's not frightening to die for the motherland. Love your motherland, serve your motherland, the motherland’s happiness is worth more than life.”
An
extract from revised elementary school textbooks being published by
Russia’s State Department of Education since last April. Essentially
what they’re doing is elevating State to the status of Deity. One should
be willing to blindly sacrifice everything, including one’s life,
without question to the Goddess Motherland. It will bring Her
“happiness”. ~ Izzy Luggs
*
SOME SURPRISES IN HOW THE UKRAINIAN WAR HAS CHANGED THE WORLD
Tom Nagorski: Of all the ripple effects and consequences of the war that we’ve seen thus far, which has surprised you the most?
John McLaughlin: Tom, I think there are at least two. The first is how divided the world is on what Russia has done. I think we began, after the invasion, with an assumption that what (Putin) had done was so dramatically a break in the global order that the condemnation of the world would be much more uniform than it has been. In fact, what we’ve seen is condemnation — strong and united — in the West. But if you look back at the U.N. vote in March on whether to condemn his invasion, 59 percent of the world’s population voted either against condemning or they abstained.
Now, if you look underneath that, it was more complicated. A lot of Russia’s close friends actually abstained — Cuba, for example and others. Those who opposed it were very few, and they were the obvious ones — North Korea, China, Russia itself, Iran and so forth. But the point is, the world is not totally united on this, even though to the West and to Europe, and in particular in the United States, it seems like an egregious violation of everything that we’ve come to believe as important and sacred to bond international relations.
Maybe the second thing I’m a little surprised by, though I understand why, is that there has not been more of an overt, clear, detectable protest in Russia. The explanations are, in some respects, obvious. [Putin’s] propaganda machine is thorough. Russians really don’t know how or what to do because Putin in their view, and I’m taking this from Russian commentary, always gets his way.
A fair number of Russians that I expected to leave Russia have indeed left Russia in protest. It’s a mixed picture, but the bottom line as we head into the second six months is that Putin’s control is not seriously threatened.
TN: Josh Keating — what has most surprised you since February?
Josh Keating: I’ve particularly noticed, from my perspective as a journalist writing about the war, just the sheer level of public interest in this as a topic. I’ve written about quite a few international stories, conflicts, humanitarian crises. Obviously, the stakes of this one are extremely high, if not higher, than most of the others I’ve covered.
But the level of media interest, the level of public interest has really lasted. It’s been surprising and significant. There are still Ukrainian flags up all over my neighborhood, at least. And I think that this isn’t just a media story. I think this is important for the course of the war itself. One thing that perhaps Russia didn’t count on, one of Putin’s many miscalculations in launching this war, was the sheer level of global public support Ukraine would receive, and the fact that it’s a relatively easy decision for the Biden administration. It’s a relatively uncontroversial move when it announces a new multi-billion dollar weapons package for Ukraine. Compare that to some of the other priorities that they’ve been trying to get funding for.
This has lasted longer than I expected — probably longer than the Russians expected. When you talk to Ukrainian policymakers, they’re very aware of this. They know they’ve benefited from the amount of public attention they’ve gotten, and they worry about becoming, so to speak, another Syria, another ongoing story in the background — something people find very upsetting and disturbing, but it’s not something at the front of their minds. It’s not something they really want their governments to take strong action on. It’s interesting to me as a reporter, and almost heartening in a way, to see the interest the world has taken in this, but I think it has strategic implications as well for this conflict.
TN: It’s a really good point. John — from almost the first days of the war, there was not only surprise about the extent to which NATO was unified in its response and how robust that response was, there were also predictions that it wasn’t going to last, that the fracture was coming. Can you see any suggestion or evidence that unity may be threatened?
JM: I don’t actually see a threat to the unity. Everyone is aware that as we get into winter, it can be stressful in Europe, but I think they’ll get through that. I think for Europeans, particularly those on the front lines, the shock of this is still fresh.
If you look at what NATO has done, it’s quite remarkable. They’ve increased their forward deployments where they had battalions to brigade level. They’ve increased their troops on emergency alert from, I think, 40,000 to something like 300,000. Bringing in Sweden and Finland is an epic change in NATO. It would have been almost unimaginable in any other circumstances, particularly Finland. And both of those countries are very well equipped. They’re small militaries, but they’re equipped with state-of-the-art equipment. Their coming in basically turns the Baltic into a NATO sea.
The one worry I would have in all of this is actually the United States, because if you look at the billions of dollars we’re pouring into this and the fact that our weapons factories must be going at full tilt, this is yet another significant drain on the U.S. economy. So far, support in the U.S. remains high for this across the board politically, and as best I know, in the public, based on surveys. Nonetheless, it is another very expensive war after a period of 20 years when the U.S. has poured a lot of its treasure into war. I worry.
Within the NATO construct, the largest burden by any stretch is being carried by the United States. A number of the front-line states are spending at a rate that we’ve always wished they would. Their spending and what they’re contributing to the fight are significant, but tiny compared to what the U.S. is doing.
JK: One development I saw recently that was interesting was what’s happening in Italian politics. (Prime Minister Mario) Draghi, somebody who really called for solidarity and sacrifice to push back the Russian invasion, was recently forced to resign. It’s not just because of Ukraine, but it’s not entirely not because of Ukraine, either. There was a lot of dissension in his coalition, and support for Russia is higher in Italy than in other European countries. I think both because of skepticism of the amount of military support Italy’s been giving and because of this economic disruption that all European countries, including Italy, are facing, it’s very much related to this war. You could argue this was the first government brought down partly because of this war and partly because of economic ripple effects related to this war.
I think we may see more of that. If you listen to NATO leaders, they think they’re preparing for a yearslong conflict here. We’re only just beginning to see the economic and political fallout.
TN: Before we leave Europe, I’ll just add that our colleague Nikhil Kumar has done a piece on Germany — the tensions and some nightmare scenarios due to their real dependence on Russia for energy supplies. They’re worried about what winter may bring and what another cutoff of natural gas from Russia may bring. But what’s interesting is that the polling has stayed firmly and robustly behind Ukraine. They’re already taking measures in terms of cutting their consumption and capping up gas storage facilities. It still may be a rough winter, but it’s not as nightmarish a scenario there as it looks.
Leaving Europe for a moment — John, if you would talk for a moment about China. I’ve been struck by not only the rhetoric, but the extent to which China seems to be carrying the Kremlin message.
JM: It’s really interesting. I’d put it in the category of a surprise for me. I thought the war would put China in more of a corner than it has. I don’t think the Chinese have anything to lose here. Unless they were to do something that brought about Western sanctions on China, which they have carefully avoided. The Chinese have carefully avoided doing anything that would provide an excuse for sanctioning them.
Their line has remained fairly consistent throughout the war. They say they want the war to end, and that the West is prolonging the war. Second, they oppose sanctions, and therefore, they don’t participate in them. And third, they say this has no relationship to Taiwan.
The Chinese have always thought of the Russians as their junior partner, and here I think the Russians have become the dependent partner. I know that they’re getting money from selling oil, but China doesn’t really cherish or aspire to have a deep economic relationship with Russia. It wants access to the kind of technical aid that is available through Europe and the United States. It’s walking this line where it tries to preserve that, while also not losing Russia’s allegiance.
TN: Josh, are there some governments where there’s a certain resentment of the West over the war? I think of some nations in Africa or other parts of the world that are maybe not defending Vladimir Putin, but certainly not rushing to walk the line of the West.
JK: I’d say that’s the case. I think that was the implicit message of Secretary (of State Antony) Blinken’s recent trip to Africa. There are a lot of countries that may not support the war, but they don’t see it as beyond the pale or that different from conflicts or atrocities perpetrated by governments that the U.S. either ignores or has supported in various cases.
Biden’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia probably didn’t help on the messaging that the animating principle of his foreign policy is supporting democracy or the global struggle against authoritarianism.
We also have to look at what this war is doing to global food prices and energy prices, and the disruptive effect that it’s having with some of the most vulnerable populations in the world. You can say that that’s Russia’s fault, that these countries’ quibbles should be with Moscow for blockading Ukraine’s ports, but Russia has been fairly effective at spreading the message that it’s Western sanctions on Russia and Western support for the Ukrainian military effort which are having these disruptive effects.
Some of that may be alleviated now that we’re seeing this U.N. deal to resume some shipments of grain through the Black Sea. But as promising a sign as those deliveries are, the global economic impact of this crisis on some of the most conflict-torn, vulnerable regions of the world is going to continue, and they may not apportion blame for that situation the same way that Washington would necessarily like them to.
JM: This goes back to the first point I was making about how the world has reacted. Within the West, and particularly in NATO, there was full consultation on this from Day One but in the rest of the world, there wasn’t a lot of consultation. And that’s another complaint you hear, particularly from the Gulf countries, that this is an important event, but no one was consulting us about it.
And to Josh’s point, if you look at what’s happening in some of these drought-stricken parts of the Sahel or other parts of the world, geopolitics just doesn’t have any relevance when you’re starving. It does, but it’s not what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about where’s that next bowl of rice coming from. Where do I get water for my kids?
The war has really shown us what an incredibly varied world we live in in terms of what people are experiencing and how they think about events. We judge through the lens of traditional foreign policy thinkers, but if you’re a U.S. policymaker, you want to reflect on this and say, “What does this mean for the future when we’re no longer fighting a Ukraine war?” Because this is the world we’re looking at. We’re not looking at a world that responds instantly to American leadership.
If you’re making calculations in some other country about where you stand on events, you don’t have the same kind of metronomic certainty that you always had from the U.S. in international affairs. Josh referred to Italy earlier. I used to do some writing on Italy years ago, and I recall a quote from an Italian philosopher on the left, Antonio Gramsci, who said once in very different circumstances, after World War I, “The old is dead, but the new cannot yet be born.” Which seems appropriate when you talk about how you would characterize global order at this moment.
TN: A question from the audience: “Do you think the Chinese are getting the message as to what awaits them if they invade Taiwan?” Meaning, a message from this war about potential conflict there?
JK: I wouldn’t draw that out too far. The parallels are obvious between the two conflicts, and it’s obvious why people are making these comparisons. But they’re very different circumstances. In terms of the type of conflict that would be, Taiwan would be an amphibious invasion, which makes it more logistically difficult, but also a lot more difficult to supply Taiwan in the case of an invasion. There’s not a Poland next door through which to stream weapons into Taiwan, and China wouldn’t have to tolerate that the way that Russia has.
If you look at the messaging coming out of Beijing, they seem to endorse the Russian premise about NATO expansion — how it was Western military aggression and moving the Western military closer and closer to Russian frontiers that made this war inevitable. They’ve drawn comparisons to U.S. military activities in the Pacific. They see it as the U.S. chipping away at the one-China policy. Most recently with Nancy Pelosi’s visit, they mentioned more and more U.S. military hardware getting into Taiwan.
TN: John, another question from our audience: “Does Vladimir Putin have a ‘last straw,’ something that would make him declare open war on NATO?” That was something some people feared at the outset — some NATO-Russia conflagration.
JM: Well, I don’t think anyone can really read (Putin’s) mind. But I don’t know that I would say there is a “last straw.” What I would say is that Putin is going to become increasingly desperate as the war continues.
I think it’s fair to say that the momentum is currently with the Ukrainians. The latest Pentagon figures say that there have been 80,000 Russian casualties, which includes killed as well as wounded. When you consider his initial force going in was only 190,000, that’s significant.
The Ukrainians are now doing the most harmful thing they can do to the Russians, which is reaching deep into their command and control, and destroying ammunition dumps and portions of their logistics branches and so forth. I don’t know whether this heralds a new approach or counteroffensive, but the Russians are approaching a point where this is going to become harder and harder for them. I don’t know whether that’s the last straw, but when Putin realizes that he’s just not going to win this in any way that is easy to sell with Russia, he becomes less predictable, and the idea of lashing out at NATO becomes more possible.
The final thing that would really be a last straw for him would be something that indicated his power at home was seriously jeopardized. So far, as best we can tell, it has not been. If Putin’s hold on power was beginning to unravel, that’s what would trigger him to do something. I don’t know whether we’d call it an all-out attack on NATO, but to do something that would escalate the war to a level that would challenge NATO in a way it has not been challenged yet. It could come through an attack on NATO supply lines coming into Ukraine. That would be probably the most obvious thing that he could do that would escalate in what people would call a horizontal way. Horizontal escalation. That is a big tough question. But that’s my thinking about it. ~
https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/08/24/how-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-has-changed-the-world-the-biggest-surprises-six-months-in/?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
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WHAT THE WEST GETS WRONG ABOUT PUTIN (Dima Vorobiev)
~ The most consistent inaccuracy I have seen in media outside Russia is picturing President Putin as an all-powerful dictator, with some awesome dashboard before him to control everything that’s happening in the country and beyond.
The truth is much closer to the situation where Stalin found himself right before his death in 1953. He presided over a system where everyone was appointed by him, parroted his vocabulary and style, and praised him both publicly and in front of the bugs in their bedrooms—and yet he controlled less and less of what was happening outside the Kremlin walls. Everything was run by powerful clans of his appointees. They were much less interested in implementing his directives than jockeying for the best position to fight for power once he was gone.
The problem of meritocratic selection based on personal loyalty, the kind that Putin professes to, is that ultimately you find yourself in a bubble of your own creation. Even your spies start telling you only news that they think you will like. Putin tries to break out of this bubble by appointing around him young technocrats that do not belong to any clans. Yet, for them it also often makes sense to start forging alliances with established clans in case President goes down soon.
Another pattern of Putin’s attempts to break out of this bubble is the repeating cycle of inspection tours around the country, North Korea-like, and his protracted disappearances that sometimes last for weeks. This causes a disturbance in the interplay of the bureaucratic and oligarchical clans that may help Putin ferret out some hidden arrangements and alliances that can threaten his power. ~
Robert Jones:
Not really much different then a medieval King, surrounded by a group of courtiers, each representing a noble family, all vying for power.
Boris Yeltsin and his retinue
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DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MARX AND LENIN; MARX: "I AM NOT A MARXIST"
1. Marx was an armchair theorist, while Lenin was a practitioner and in the end took power in Russia.
2. Marx developed his theory watching 19th-century industrial societies in Western Europe, while Lenin adapted Marxism to the realities of 20th-century Imperial Russia where peasants constituted 4/5th of the population.
3. Marx was a lousy party organizer, while Lenin founded one of the most successful political parties in the world.
4. Marx never had a chance to make short work of his enemies, while Lenin did it on industrial scale, culminating in the execution of Russia’s emperor with his family.
5. Toward the end of his life, Marx seemed to drift in reformist direction, and even said “I’m not a Marxist ”, while Lenin made a huge point of never ever straying even a tiny bit from the spirit and letter of the Communist Manifesto.
Below, Lenin greets a rally at the opening of a monument to Marx and Engels in Moscow in 1918.
Due to budget constraints, the figures were cut at the hip level, made of gypsum and put on a wooden frame. The monument earned a nickname “Two dudes in a bathtub”. It quickly deteriorated under the elements and didn’t even last a year. A more permanent statue to Marx was later erected in downtown Moscow. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Marx and Engels, first monument (“two dudes in a bathtub”).
Oriana:
I read that Lenin’s most astonishing achievement was the creation of a charismatic political party. Someone wrote that it would be comparable to making people be willing to die for the Motor Vehicles Department.
Mary: DISJUNCTIONS BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE
In thinking about Marx, that armchair theorist, and how those theories were applied in the Soviet Union and in China, several disjunctions between theory and practice immediately come to mind. Marx was talking about industrial capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century West, and a class system where the "masses" were industrial workers. Russia and China were both closer to feudal than industrial capitalist systems, and the "masses" were not industrial workers but peasants tied to the land. It could be argued even, in the case of China, that her industrial revolution came only after the greater part of the 20th century, and is still developing now.
So, yes, capitalism is not now what Marx saw, and has been changing for a long time in the West — many of the worst abuses have been ameliorated, through regulation, unionization, the changing nature of industry itself. The worst abuses exist now largely in the third world countries, where sweatshops and heavily exploited workers suffer without even minimum regulations of working conditions. Life for most in the West is more comfortable, richer and healthier for most than in all previous history. We still face serious problems: inequality, violence, homelessness, climate change, racial injustice, the threats of fascism and totalitarianism, misogyny, an ever widening gulf between the rich and the rest of us. These are not problems Marx could solve.
It reminds me of what religions do — take a text produced by a particular culture and a particular time in history, like the Bible or the Koran, and force present circumstances into that form. It is an ahistoric and unreasonable effort, doomed to failure, certainly doomed to produce nothing like the results promised by the “holy text.” Dogma, religious or political, doesn’t serve reality well.
Oriana:
One of my first adult insights was that no ideology is ever even approximately true, but all seem to be driven by the need to subjugate our mysterious once-per-universe individuality.
I agree that modern Western capitalism has resulted in unprecedented prosperity for most. But human problems will never be completely solved: we’ll always have some unhappy love, bad marriages, the wrong people dying while those we want gone hanging on (I’m thinking of Putin in particular, and Trump too).
And yes, Marx would be totally flabbergasted if he were to know what happened to his ideas. He trusted them way too much, for all the disavowals about not being a Marxist.
And to think that this "armchair philosopher" ended up changing history! In a way, I'm glad that his theories got tested (however inaccurately) -- and now we know that no ideology will do. It's all fiction.
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DIMA’S FAVORITE LENIN STATUE
~ Below, my favorite Lenin statue in St. Petersburg enhanced by an explosive that an anonymous performance artist attached to the man’s crotch a decade ago. Sadly, the city authorities didn’t appreciate the artwork and patched over the gaping hole at the strategic place in the Communist leader’s jacket.
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WHAT LED TO THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST PROJECT IN THE SOVIET UNION?
END TO PURGES
After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet rulers concluded a pact with each other: no more purges. Power games were going on all right. But imprisoning the losers and killing them was now off limits.
The result was an epic gentrification of the Soviet political landscape. By the 1970s, this almost totally abolished the meritocratic rotation of the elites. Social elevators got clogged by the Stalin’s wonderboys (Brezhnev, Kosygin, Gromyko, Ustinov, Grechko, Suslov) and their proteges. Vertical mobility stopped.
By the mid-1980s, hundreds of thousands of middle- and lower-level Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries realized that they were treading water in their careers. No matter what they did, they got nowhere fast. Something had to change, here and now. That’s how Perestróika came about.
BUILT-IN INEFFICIENCY OF THE SOVIET ECONOMY
Marxism strives to abolish Capitalist competition. Sharing is caring, competition is not. Once the Marxists win, competition gives way to cooperation, a planned economy, and the scientific distribution of resources.
What the Marxists in the USSR didn’t expect when abolishing competition was stagnation.
People are lazy. As long as fear, hunger, and wars keep kicking our a$$es, we perform. The first three and a half decades of Soviet rule were driven by these three horsemen of revolutionary change. However, once they dismounted their fiery horses, humans slowed down and started taking it easy.
DEMOGRAPHIC BURNOUT
The recipe of Real Socialism in the 20th century was brilliantly simple: force millions of people from low-productive farming into industry. The transfer itself multiplies the national GDP. On top of that, mandate universal education and health care. This multiplies the human capital at hand in less than a generation.
The Marxist plan worked like magic. Not only in the USSR. It was replicated in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and other places. The GDP went through the roof everywhere.
However, in the process, Stalin burned out the demographic fuel of Russian civilization. (Hitler played a hand in 1941–45, too.) Our women stopped making enough babies to man the ever-proliferating industrial work stations. And the Communists failed to crack the code of increasing productivity (see p. 2 above). GDP slowed down and hit the wall as petroleum prices collapsed in the 1980s. In a few years, the USSR went bankrupt.
THE OUTER PARTY BECAME DISILLUSIONED WITH COMMUNISM
In the late 1960s, our rulers changed tack in their struggle for peace and progress in the West—the post-WW2 term for Communist transformation. They decided to strangle the Imperialists in a friendly embrace. This was our grand plan behind the Detente.
However, the wealth of interpersonal contacts and information across the Iron Curtain brought with it an unintended consequence. The mass of middle- and lower-level Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries got a close view of the shiny marvels of life in the West. Not only secret operatives and diplomats—millions got a glimpse of sweet unbridled consumerism. The impact was slow, but profound.
Toward the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, millions in the USSR figured out that it makes more sense to be middle class in the West than the upper crust under Soviet rule. The Communist project was picked apart from the inside.
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Below, Soviet schoolgirls in the mid-1970s outside a poultry farm where they had their mandatory “Manual labor lessons” (uróki trudá). Variations of that were a part of the curriculum for all of us at the time.
A simple look at the girls suggests than hardly any of them is going to become a “poultry farmer.” The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why do we need to subject our kids to this stupidity imagined by a 19th-century hirsute armchair theorist?”
Below, a Soviet grocery store in the 1980s. Apart from the onions in the net sacks, and cabbage down the aisle, everything is canned food. [Oriana: OMG, not even potatoes?]
The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why do we need to bust our backs for entry into the Nomenklatura class where the shelves are always well-stocked if we can have full-stocked shops at every corner like they have in the West?”
Soviet grocery store, 1980s
Below, the ground floor of the main shopping gallery in the USSR, GUM, in the late 1970s. The number of people waiting for the shops to open in the morning greatly surpasses the items worth the sum on the price tag.
The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why do we need to always chase the clothes and food we want to have, when outside the perimeter these goods are chasing customers?”
Below, a film crew is shooting a jazz band playing for the TV. This is the Karl Marx Street a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in the early 1960s.
The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why, in our country, do only the rulers and TV studios have convertibles, when under Capitalism, anyone can take a loan and buy these beauties right here, right now?”
Below, the first Soviet author who published his fiction in the New Yorker Magazine, Sergéy Dovlátov, enjoying the company of his friends in some forest outside Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). He later emigrates to America.
The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why is it that even talented people in our country can’t buy an apartment large enough to hold a party? Why do our cool people need to take the fun to a nearby forest—when under Capitalism, anyone can take out a mortgage, buy booze in colorful bottles, and smoke cigarettes that don’t need to be dried on the radiator before enjoyment?”
Below, a teenage girl takes care of her brother while their mother stands in a queue inside the shop for some item of food or clothing. This is most likely a provincial family in transit through Moscow who use the occasion to procure something that almost never appears on the shelves in their neck of the woods. The netted sacks to the left suggest the foraging is progressing nicely.
But the mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries in the provinces asked themselves: “Why must we go to Moscow every time we need tasty sausage or nice clothing when in the West you can buy anything just down the block or two from your place?”
Below, people check out the newsfeed in newspapers fixed on glassed stands around the town. The thickest of the dailies was the flagship of our propaganda, Právda, a broadsheet with six pages.
The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why do we have to live with thin pieces of paper with nothing but empty ideology pieces when under Capitalism they would bring to you broadsheets thicker than our magazines, for almost the same price? Why do we need to listen to Capitalist broadcasts to know what’s going on, while our own media keep mum or spin silly tales? Why don’t we have interesting advertisement for all kinds of good stuff?”
The mass of Soviet bureaucrats and Party functionaries asked themselves: “Why can’t we take our kids to Spain or Greece or some other warm place like the Germans and the British do? Why are we locked inside our cold, grey perimeter for life? Why is it that only the luckiest of us ever get to see the Caribbean blue and hear the wind in swaying palm trees?” ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Michael Lopez:
You also have to give credit to the Reagan Defense build up. So not only would the West have a technological advantage, Reagan was pushing also for either numerical parity, or numerical advantage. When Brezhnev tried to match that, he began to completely bankrupt the Soviet economy. It could only go so far before it collapsed.
I would add that Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev had a personal affinity. While this is not supposed to enter into international relations, it does. I also heard a quote from Gorbachev, although I do not know if it is apocryphal or not. At their first meeting, Gorbachev and his associates arrived bundled against the cold, appeared like the way they were depicted in Hollywood movies, drab disgruntled old men, while Reagan, even though older, bounded down the stairs without a jacket or coat to meet them. Gorbachev is reputed to have said at that moment he knew they were lost. Appearances matter.
Dan Rosenberg:
The price of oil fell from $30 in 1984 to $10 in 1986. That is a collapse in my book, and contributed a lot to the Soviet Union’s economic troubles.
Edward Bullerwell:
The USSR could never compete with the much larger western democracies and it destroyed itself trying. As well, radio and television showed the average Soviet citizen how much better off economically the average citizen was in the West. Their biggest mistake was in not realizing that the Capitalism that Marx was fighting against bore very little resemblance to modern Capitalism. They were fighting against a system of exploitation that really no longer existed.
Marx marveled at the innovations of capitalism when he saw an exhibit of 50+ different kinds of hammers at the Great Exposition in London. The attempted implementation of some of his ideas would have disgusted Marx. Capitalism in the mid-1800’s was totally different from capitalism after the 1930’s and, while capitalism changed and adapted, the Soviet Union and the other communist states were too rigid (dogmatic) to solve their inherent problems.
Tony Fisher:
Another item sometimes quoted is the consequence of the Soviets’ Vietnam-like experience in their failed attempt to colonize Afghanistan.
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WHY DID THE SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY LAUNCH A CAMPAIGN AGAINST ITS JEWISH CITIZENS?
~ The Communists did that against most groups: Ukrainians, Tatars, Germans.
In the case of the Jews there were 2 major campaigns. Plus one potential campaign that was stopped only by Stalin's death.
In the 20's, after the revolution, there was a campaign to destroy the Jewish religion. Plus a campaign against Zionism as a rival political faction.
The reason? A part of general anti-religion campaign and consolidation of Soviet power.
Communists of Jewish descent shut down synagogues and Jewish religious schools. They eliminated kosher food and circumcision. They made the Sabbath and the Hebrew language illegal. They sent Rabbis, Hebrew teachers, and Zionists to the Gulag.
A pro-regime Yiddish language school system and cultural life was set up.
In the late 40's and early 50’s, the Soviets acted against the Yiddish culture and schools that they themselves had set up.
The reason? The regime saw Jewish ethnicity as artificial and something to be slowly eliminated as the Jews were russified.
Yiddish newspapers were shut down. Writers were killed. Yiddish language government schools were phased out; children were shifted to Russian language schools.
Then propaganda and persecutions against Jews as Jews began.
The reason? Pure hatred from Stalin.
Stalin then started a propaganda campaign against "Rootless Cosmopolitans". Plans were made to deport all 2 million Jews from European Russia to the woebegotten little Jewish zone that Stalin had set up in the farthest reaches of Siberia.
Then Stalin was murdered [Oriana: with rat poison]. Whew! The deportation was called off. ~ Andrew Lenihan, Quora
Soviet city of the future, 1930s
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Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind, in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt. ~ Immanuel Kant
Kaspar Friedrich, Wanderer above a sea of fog (not the way we dress today for a mountain hike)
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ALEXANDER DUGIN IS ACTUALLY PUTIN’S CRITIC; WANTS “TOTAL WAR WITH THE WEST”
~ While some nationalists condemn Putin for launching a war against a fellow Slavic people, Dugin is among those nationalists who criticize Putin for not pursuing the war against Ukraine more aggressively. His most recent article — likely written before the car bombing and published on a nationalist website on Aug. 21, the day after his daughter's death — calls for regime change in Russia, arguing that the present system cannot survive more than six months.
Dugin complains that ordinary Russians are going about their daily lives "as if nothing was happening," and urged Putin to step up the war in Kyiv against the "Atlanto-Nazi regime," a phrase coined by Dugin to claim Zelensky is a Nazi and a Western puppet. He ridiculed the Kremlin's concerns about managing the Russian presidential election in 2024, suggesting it should be postponed. He concluded ominously: "Let the old regime bury its dead. A new Russian time is coming. Relentlessly.”
Dugin has long been a gadfly for Putin. In 2014, Dugin was an enthusiastic supporter of the annexation of Crimea and the pro-Russian uprisings in Ukrainian cities of the Donbas. He advocated the creation of Novorossiia, or New Russia, throughout eastern and southern Ukraine, and said in a video to followers, "I think we should kill, kill, kill [Ukrainians], there can't be any other talk.”
Dugin and other Russian nationalists were dismayed when the Kremlin rejected that plan in 2014. Putin refused to openly commit Russian troops to defend the Donbas, and instead pursued a policy of negotiating autonomy for Donbas within a sovereign Ukraine (the Minsk accords). Because of his criticism of Putin, Dugin was fired in July 2014 from his position as a professor at Moscow State University and was largely kept off the main Russian television channels. (Today, he mostly appears only on the Russian Orthodox-nationalist TV channel Tsargrad.)
It was not until Feb. 21, 2022, that Putin changed tack and formally recognized the Donbas "people's republics" as sovereign states independent of Ukraine. Dugin welcomed the invasion of Ukraine, but along with other nationalists he complained that the war was not being pursued aggressively enough.
Hardline nationalists were angry that the Kremlin tried to calm the Russian population, insisting that it was not a "war," just a "special military operation." Putin has not ordered a general mobilization, which would have called up millions of reservists. Instead, the army is relying on contract soldiers, lured by salaries of $4,000 a month. Dugin and his acolytes want total war with Ukraine and with the West.
As the war drags on, with no sign of a clear victory for Russia, Putin must be concerned about preserving political stability in the face of mounting economic problems. Arrests of street protestors and strict media controls have kept public dissent to a minimum. But in social media, such as Telegram, and on some web pages, hardline nationalists are allowed to vent their anger with the Kremlin. Presumably Putin resists shutting down these voices for fear that it might trigger open resistance, or perhaps because they have supporters within the armed forces.
On Monday the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, announced that they had found the culprit who had allegedly planted the bomb: a 43-year-old Ukrainian woman, Natalya Vovk, who after the killing fled to Estonia with her young daughter in a Mini Cooper. This was a suspiciously speedy piece of detective work by the Russian authorities, as previous investigations of assassinations took months, often without resolution. The story of this alleged culprit has been denied by Ukraine.
The possibility that Dugin was targeted by someone within the security agencies, to rid Putin of this troublesome critic, cannot be ruled out. Russia has a long and unsavory history of the assassination of political opponents at home and abroad. Some of these killings were carried out directly by agents of the security services, the FSB and GRU (military intelligence); others were committed by hired assassins.
We may never know who actually killed Ms. Dugina. But in a war which has already cost tens of thousands of lives, this may turn out to be the first time that the war has been brought home to Moscow.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/opinions/darya-dugina-alexander-dugin-putin-rutland/index.html
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Looted washing machine on a Russian tank
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CAN TEEN SUICIDE BE PREVENTED?
~ When three fathers set off to walk 300 miles in memory of their daughters, they hoped to raise a few thousand pounds for charity. They ended up raising more than £800,000, and also helped many other bereaved parents. The BBC has spoken to a mother and two fathers who reached out to them.
"This will pass. However bad you feel now, this will pass. You are not on your own, things will likely look different tomorrow, in fact they will likely look different in a few hours."
This is what Pete Kenny would have said to his only child, Jamie, if he had been able to read his suicide note before he died.
Jamie, described as a fit, bright and funny boy by his father, was only 17 when he killed himself in July 2019. He had completed his A-levels and secured a place to study history at university. His death made no sense to his parents.
"There were no signs at all," said his father, speaking at his home in Leicester.
"There's an explanation [in the note] but it's not adequate basically. He's talking about problems in his relationships and feeling bad, that's essentially it. And so that makes sense, you have problems and you feel bad, the next step [suicide] is the thing that doesn't make sense.
"He was into debate, discussion, and I think I would have said, 'What's the logic of this? This doesn't hang together, does it?'"
Jamie was among 1,621 young people under 35 who took their own lives in 2019 in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Suicide is the biggest killer of people under 35 in the UK, which Pete had no idea about until his own son's death.
"I think people imagine that these issues don't affect many people, and one of the things that really strikes me is how many young people end up in that territory," said Pete.
"Because it's a difficult subject people avoid it, or they think it doesn't apply to them. Or they think that you get warning.”
Pete had been struggling to cope with his son's death for two years when he read a newspaper article about three other fathers going through the same thing.
Known as the Three Dads, Andy Airey, Mike Palmer and Tim Owen walked 300 miles in October 2021 in memory of their three daughters. They originally aimed to raise £3,000 each for suicide prevention charity Papyrus. They eventually raised more than £800,000, with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman each adding £10,000 to the total.
"What happened to them was what happened to us," said Pete, who decided to support the Three Dads by joining them along some of their journey.
"It felt like being engaged in something useful.”
Tracey Hargreaves, who also joined the Three Dads for some of their walk, said it helped her “massively".
"As soon as I saw them I just gave them a hug," she said.
"It's like I'd always known them. And they were fantastic. They were just so open, friendly, let me talk.
"It was just talking to three dads who had been through exactly the same, and they just got it straight away. They understood exactly that horrible, gut-wrenching feeling you have every morning, every time you get up in the morning knowing that they're not there.”
Tracey's son Charlie killed himself in May 2020, near the start of the first national coronavirus lockdown. Like Jamie, he was only 17 and his parents had no idea he was feeling suicidal.
"He just lit up a room. He was an amazing lad, everybody loved Charlie," said his mother, speaking from her home in Gedney in Lincolnshire.
“He wanted to go to university and do sports science. In fact he did get into two universities, which he didn't know about, it was too late.
“He had a beautiful girlfriend whom he absolutely adored. He had so much to live for, and I think that's the tough bit, the fact he had a good future.”
Charlie had some counseling a couple of years before he died, and shortly before he died he told his mother he had made another appointment.
“I did say to him we'll get you all the help in the world, because that's what we do, that's what mums do," she said.
“All teenagers or young children go through life where they have their ups and downs, but you never expect this to be the end result. Most of the time he was so happy, he made everyone laugh.”
Tracey now believes suicide prevention should be embedded in the school curriculum, which is also what the Three Dads are campaigning for.
"Our schools use PSHE [physical, social, health and economic] lessons to talk about knife and gun crime, the dangers of drug misuse, radicalization and the terror threat but nothing is said about the biggest killer of young people — suicide," said the Three Dads, explaining the motivation for their next walk on their website.
"Over 200 school-aged children take their own lives every year but we are doing nothing to equip young people with understanding and skills that could allow them to save themselves.”
As part of their campaign, the Three Dads plan to visit all of the parliaments in the UK during a 600-mile fundraising walk, beginning on World Suicide Prevention Day on 10 September.
"You get bullying, you get social media, you get everything thrown at youngsters and they just can't deal with it all," Tracey said.
"Like my Charlie, it was like he was looking for perfection, and I think this is too much on youngsters nowadays, that they need to be that perfect person.
"Well they don't. They don't need to be that perfect person, they need to be real, they need to be them, and I think there needs to be as much help out there as possible for them.”
Martin Tomlinson, whose daughter Tilly killed herself at the age of 26, said her problems started back when she was at school, when she developed bulimia.
"The schools didn't know much about it; they did their best but it was a bit swept under the carpet," he said.
"They are under a heck of a lot of pressure these youngsters today. You don't know what's going on in those little minds at all. Obviously they will try and hide things as well, so it needs trained people in the right places to suss it out.”
Martin Tomlinson, whose daughter Tilly killed herself at the age of 26, said her problems started back when she was at school, when she developed bulimia.
"The schools didn't know much about it; they did their best but it was a bit swept under the carpet," he said.
"They are under a heck of a lot of pressure, these youngsters today. You don't know what's going on in those little minds at all. Obviously they will try and hide things as well, so it needs trained people in the right places to suss it out.”
Talking, he said, is not something he has always been very good at.
"Louise [his wife] used to talk to Tilly a lot but I was more of a 'shut it up and not let it out' sort of thing, which you learn now is completely the wrong thing to do," he said.
"I've learnt to talk things out and try to show your emotions sort of thing. I'm not very good at that sort of thing but just because we're men we don't have to be big, tough and rough.
"I think talking is the key.”
A government spokesperson said: "The death of any child is a tragedy and our deepest sympathies are with the families and friends of those who have died by suicide. We welcome the work 3 Dads Walking is doing to raise awareness of this important issue.
"All children are taught about mental health as part of the mandatory relationships, sex and health education curriculum, which helps them recognize and manage issues to prevent suicide. This includes understanding that experiencing mental ill-health is not uncommon and how to seek support for themselves or someone else. Schools can also teach older pupils about suicide in an age-appropriate and sensitive way.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-62646892
Oriana:
Suicide prevention has to be done in a smart way. Discussing various ways in which people kill themselves, for instance, might provide the wrong kind of "guidance."
There is an interesting book on the multi-stage psychological process (e.g. growing increasingly self-centered in a painful way) that can push people toward suicide, and that's Jesse Bering's Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves.
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SOME LUTHERANS THOUGHT HITLER WAS CHRIST
~ Lutherans who believed that God manifested himself in history not once, in the person of Christ, but repeatedly, were, as one critic put it, “Painfully exposed to the euphoria of the hour.”
“Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler,” said one. ~ (cited by Peter Watson, “Nazi Religions of the Blood”)
~ that puzzling confusion between Christ and anti-Christ. You'd think it would be easy to tell the difference. You'd think. But apparently it was all about the euphoria of making Germany great again, and the millennia-old capacity to divinize the ruler.
SOUTH KOREA’S FERTILITY RATE SETS A NEW LOW
South Korea has again recorded the world's lowest fertility rate with the number sinking to a new low.
The rate in the country first dropped lower than one child per woman in 2018.
But on Wednesday, figures released by the government showed the figure had dropped to 0.81 - down from 0.84 the previous year, and a sixth consecutive decline.
In comparison, the average rate across the world's most advanced economies is 1.6 children.
Countries need at least two children per couple — a 2.1 rate — to keep their population at the same size, without migration.
Fertility rates have "declined markedly" in the past six decades says the OECD - Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
But the trend has been particularly pronounced in South Korea, where family sizes have reduced in the span of a few generations. At the start of the 1970s women had four children on average.
A declining population can put a country under immense strain. Apart from increased pressure on public spending as demand for healthcare systems and pensions rise, a declining youth population also leads to labor shortages that impact the economy.
In 2020 there was widespread alarm in South Korea when it recorded more deaths than births for the first time.
In recent years, economic pressures and career factors have been key considerations for people deciding on children, experts say.
For the 2021 figures, experts cited higher living costs, a spike in house prices and the impact of the Covid pandemic as factors discouraging them from having children.
A crisis is brewing. If South Korea's population continues to shrink, there won't be enough people to grow its economy, look after its aging population, and conscript into its army.
Politicians have known for years this is coming but have been unable to fix it. They have thrown billions of dollars at trying to convince people to have children and are still scratching their heads as to why this hasn't worked.
Money of course is a factor. Raising children in South Korea is expensive, and many young people are sinking under astronomical housing costs. But this is also about opportunity.
Women in South Korea are highly educated, yet far from equal in the workplace. The country has the highest gender pay gap of any rich country. Most of the housework and childcare in South Korea still falls to women and it is common for women to stop work after having children or for their careers to stagnate.
Essentially, many women here are still forced to choose between having a career and having a family. Increasingly they are deciding they don't want to sacrifice their careers.
As one woman put it to me: "we are on a baby-making strike”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62670717
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ABRAHAM? NEVER EXISTED; EXODUS? NEVER HAPPENED — THE OLD TESTAMENT AS MYTHOLOGY
~ “Christians accept certain things as true that are demonstrably false, and it does no one any good to tiptoe around these beliefs as if they are sacrosanct merely because people take the discussion so personally.
And I’m not talking about things we cannot entirely disprove like miracles, or the afterlife, or the power of prayer. We could argue about these things until we are blue in the face, and in the end very few people would ever change their minds. The church has had two thousand years to develop excuses for why these things fail to materialize (they usually involve faulting the believer rather than the beliefs themselves).
No, I’m talking about clearly demonstrable historical facts—facts for which we can apply reliable tools of scientific inquiry in order to ascertain what is real and what is not, what is fact and what is fiction.
This Never Happened
The Hebrew people did not exist before Canaan. They gradually and peacefully emerged as a subset of Canaanite culture somewhere around the 1200s B.C.E.,which is roughly the time we were told they invaded the land. Before that time they simply didn’t. exist.
The violent conquest of Canaan never actually happened. We know this for certain. We’ve gone to the places that was supposed to have happened and we dug our way down to the bottom. Didn’t happen.
The wandering in the wilderness for forty years? Also never happened. That story was made up. We know this for certain. We canvassed that entire region a hundred times now and not so much as a coin or a piece of pottery or anything at all that would signify they were ever there.
The dramatic exodus of millions of Hebrews from Egyptian captivity? We know for a fact that never happened. It’s not even a debate anymore, not among scholars, historians, or archaeologists. The story was undeniably made up. That means that the Passover never happened. Nothing even remotely like it.
There wasn’t even a group of Hebrews in Egypt in the first place. There never was. That whole bit about 400+ years in captivity, with a dozen tribes growing into a large but enslaved nation? Made up out of thin air. We know this for a fact now.
Think about what this means for a second. It means there was no Moses. No Aaron. There was no Abraham, no Isaac, and no Jacob. There was no Sarah, no Rachel, no Leah, no Rebekah, etc. All fascinating stories, yes. And could there have been real life analogues many centuries later that got cobbled together into an origin story for the nation of Israel? That’s certainly possible.
But basically every story and every person which appears prior to Israel’s presence in Canaan around the 12th century B.C.E. is a product of pure fiction. After that, much smaller versions of the stories appear to have happened in real life: for example there probably was a King David, only his “kingdom” was more like a small insular group of technologically challenged herdsmen. But never anything like the geopolitical giant the Bible paints him, or them, to be.
Everything that happened in the first five books of the Bible is pure fiction. And the next few books don’t get much better. They are stories made up to teach lessons and to provide some kind of political basis for competing factions of ancient Israel, quarrels which no longer mean anything to us today but leave us with the mistaken impression that this people group existed many centuries before it actually did.
The Dirt Doesn’t Lie
Back before World War II, biblical historians had a more limited number of resources to draw from in order to ascertain fact from fiction. They had to rummage through the annals of Egyptian and Sumerian and Babylonian historical accounts to see if this divinely favored nation ever got mentioned, but they kept coming up empty handed.
Sometimes they would come across something that sounded enough like a Bible name that they would count that as confirmation and move on. For most of them the standard of verification was very, very low. Quite frankly, in retrospect, they were wearing their desperation on their sleeves.
But instead of finding evidence of a mighty kingdom spreading across a large geographical region governed by legendary kings with hundreds of wives and concubines, all anyone could turn up was an occasional reference to a small confederation of tribal heads inhabiting negligible territories sandwiched between much more powerful kingdoms which were constantly taking them over. And nothing at all prior to their supposedly forceful conquest of the Promised Land.
Biblical Archaeology was a relatively young science at the time, but considering how difficult it was to move around in most of the territories that historians wanted to explore, there wasn’t much we could do. But then the first and second World Wars happened and, after the region underwent a whole lot of forceful territorial reassigning, the “Holy Land” once again became open for business.
Over the next couple of decades, archaeologists carried their students and volunteers on hundreds of excavation trips to every biblical place you could imagine, digging down as far as they could go in order, quite literally, to get to the bottom of what happened. What they discovered was disappointing to say the least.
There were no Hebrews prior to their gradual and peaceful emergence within Canaanite culture in the 1200s B.C.E. None of that stuff in the Bible prior to Canaan appears to have ever happened. And even when they did begin to slowly emerge as a people group, they looked and acted almost exactly like their surrounding neighbors, but with a couple of notable quirks: they left behind no pig bones, and they seemed disproportionately fond of one particular member of the Canaanite pantheon, Yahweh, the god of war.
At first, Yahweh (aka “Elohim,” which also may have referred to a whole group of gods) appears to have had a wife named Asherah. We know that the worship of the goddess still continued for centuries into Israel’s history despite many leaders’ attempts to cleanse the land of her memory (like ISIS style, physically destroying monuments and disposing of her corresponding cultus). But subsequent versions of the Israelite religion became increasingly monotheistic, vehemently disavowing all of its polytheistic precursors. Occasionally you will still find remnants of this culture war preserved for us in the biblical texts.
A Valiant Attempt, Thwarted
No one walked through this eye-opening discovery more directly than William Dever, a post-war biblical archaeologist with a Disciples of Christ education who later studied at Harvard and led hundreds of students on dozens of excavations all over Israel. After a lifetime of study and first-hand exploration of the biblical lands, Dever reports:
~ After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible “historical figures.” Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20 years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History. And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness. ~
Remember the story of the wall of Jericho? Didn’t happen. Archaeologists like Dever inform us there wasn’t even a wall in existence during the time the Israelites were supposed to have taken the city. And the city, which by the way was likely abandoned before these invaders were supposed to have gotten there, was in its heyday no larger than the size of a couple of baseball fields side-by-side, occupied by no more than maybe 600 people. Can you imagine a nation of over a million adults marching around such a place, waiting for something miraculous to deliver this small town into their hands? They could have just walked right in and eaten their lunch.
There is not so much as a Late Bronze II potsherd of that period on the entire site…Nor is there any other possible candidate for biblical Jericho anywhere nearby in the sparsely settled lower Jordan Valley. Simply put, archaeology tells us that the biblical story of the fall of Jericho…cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources. It seems invented out of whole cloth.** (emphasis mine)
Try for a moment to imagine millions of Israelites. According to the Bible, there were 600,000 men who left Egypt on the night of Passover. Given that most adult men counted as heads of households would have been married, and given that the Bible stories show each family punching out at least half a dozen children a piece, we are being told that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million people exited a nation of only about 6 million in one single evening, leaving not a single trace of their presence in that country.
So we are to believe that those 3-4 million people spent 40 years in a deserted wasteland (getting their water from a rock, by the way, with their food just falling from the sky every morning) and yet somehow left not a single trace of their presence anywhere. No evidence of their existing in Egypt, no evidence of their dramatic departure, no evidence of their presence in the wilderness for decades, and zero evidence of their forceful takeover of any territories prior to their gradual emergence among the Canaanites several hundred years after the time they were supposed to have first come to be.
In short, none of this happened. The whole story is just made up. We know this.
I found the above citations in my own very conservative seminary’s library, but you’ll never hear any graduates of that institution telling their congregations what those books contain, if they ever even read them.
Instead, devout people will keep sharing links touting older articles repurposed for a younger audience (or are they older?) claiming that irrefutable proof has been found that the Bible stories are absolutely true. A forklift operator from Keynsham, England, who moonlights as a biblical treasure hunter swears he saw a chariot wheel on the bottom of the Red Sea (just one? Where did you put it?) and still a decade later, religious news sources are resharing the story as if anyone ever should have believed it in the first place.
But then no one can top the shenanigans of the late Ron Wyatt, a sort of self-styled Indiana Jones of lost biblical treasures. Before his death, this nurse anesthetist from Tennessee swore that he personally found Noah’s Ark, sulfur balls from Sodom and Gomorrah, the site of the parting of the Red Sea and the giving of the Ten Commandments, the actual Ark of the Covenant, and the exact location of the crucifixion, under which he found a sample of the dried blood of Jesus (preserved for 2,000 years, no less!)
What grabs my attention the most in all this isn’t the fact that the Bible got something so important so incredibly wrong. I got over that a long time ago, even if I continue to be impressed with just how much of this book was made up over time. What fascinates me most is the rationalization process that kicks in the moment a true believer is confronted with these realities. The mental contortions are impressive, and I can’t help but recall as I watch them happen how I myself once walked through these steps as well. I’m trying to remember what it was like to be so imprisoned by predetermined conclusions in my search for truth. ~
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/02/18/none-really-happened/#eFlKUdQrIcrjuzxT.99
Oriana:
Even though mythological, the stories are fascinating and sometimes provide timeless lessons; at other times, they provide a window on ancient mentality (e.g. Abraham and Isaac).
The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio, 1603
Mary: RE-INVENTING A SHARED HISTORY
What I find odd about archeology turning up nothing that backs up the Bible stories of the Exodus, fall of Jericho, wandering in the desert, etc, is that information carried in old oral traditions has been found to be astonishingly accurate. Troy of course immediately comes to mind. But there are also the discoveries that Indigenous Australian oral histories contain real information about changes in territory, changes that happened after the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, when the melting ice led to rising sea levels and the submerging of territories all around the continent. These orally preserved and transmitted stories are accurate and precise about where and when these lands were above water. The oral histories also speak of locations of old now submerged fish weirs, and describe methods for hunting large land birds extinct for thousands of years. The Songlines themselves are a map of routes across the land, highly accurate walking maps, conserved and transmitted orally.
Maybe the difference, and the inaccuracy, or outright fantasy, comes with writing itself, not preserving but re-inventing a shared history. Especially if there's a particular narrative intended to achieve a particular group identity, rather than a simple record that has no such bias...re the story of "a Chosen People" of a particular god, and all the ways He showed His favor.
Oriana:
The Bible has been revised multiple times, always with the notion of what makes sense , what can serve our needs (e.g. a wish for national greatness). But some of this is ancient stuff becomes so embedded and fossilized through writing that there is no way around it — and it drags us down, e.g. branding gay sex as “abomination.” The whole concept of the vengeful biblical god drags us down. But all “sacred scriptures” were written down in the era of kings, emperors, warlords — a much more cruel and inegalitarian era of despotism.
I love to quote Jeremy Sherman: We didn’t fall from grace; we rose from slime. And we are still rising, still trying to preserve the fragile human rights — a concept that didn’t even exist before the Enlightenment.
Still, because of the strange twists of history, it’s amazing that Hebrew mythology has survived, be it in a misunderstood form, while the classical myths, say Zeus changing into a white bull to kidnap Europa, have long ago lost their sacred character. Why Yahweh and not Zeus or Wotan? Historians and scholars of religion have their answers, but a certain core of mystery remains. For instance, at one point Yahweh announces, "I will now hide my face" — why? Because the priests could no longer provide a credible evidence for his existence, so they invented this "hiddenness of god"?
In any case, Yahweh ends up looking like a sulking child.
I’m so glad I’m an outsider ever since my mid-teens; I found religion mostly oppressive and denigrating to women. Standing outside, however, I can see the stories as literature. Some of them are horrible, but others are charming. The wonderful difference is knowing that these are fictional stories, fairy-tales, a special kind of entertainment, with enough ambiguity to keep us interested, no matter that it's already the twenty-first century.
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GUT BACTERIA LIKE A WORKOUT
~Our
guts are bustling with life. Jostling for space and food inside our
gastrointestinal tract are about 100 trillion bacteria, viruses, fungi,
and other single-celled organisms such as archaea and protozoa. Their
roles vary from helping to ferment dietary fiber from out meals to
synthesizing vitamins and regulating our fat metabolism. They also help
to protect us from unwanted invaders, interacting with our immune system
and influencing the extent of inflammation in our guts and elsewhere in
our bodies.
A lower diversity of these gut residents has been
seen in patients suffering from obesity, cardiometabolic diseases as
well as autoimmune conditions. Certain diseases have been associated
with too many or too few of particular species of bacteria in our gut. Lower
than normal levels of one of the most abundant bacteria in the guts of
healthy adults, a rod-shaped bacterium called Fecalibacterium
prausnitzii, has been associated with inflammatory diseases.
Numerous
factors – including our genes, the types of medication we take, the
stress we are under, if we smoke and what we eat – can all interplay to
alter the balance of microorganisms in our gut. The make-up of this
internal community is, in fact, highly dynamic.
But just as
simple lifestyle choices can alter our gut microbes, so can we make
choices that will help them flourish in a healthier way. Eating a
diverse diet consisting of more than 30 different plant foods per week
can help. A good night’s sleep and lower levels of stress can also be
beneficial. Surprisingly, spending time in nature might also have a
positive effect.
It is perhaps more surprising still,
however, that exercise can also influence our gut bacteria. While we all
know how beneficial exercise is for our physical and mental health,
could a post-work jog also be just what we need to keep our gut microbes
in shape too?
"Exercise
seems to be affecting our gut microbes, by increasing bacterial
communities that produce short chain fatty acids (SCFAs)", says
Jeffrey Woods, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and who studies the effects
of exercise on the human body.
"Short chain fatty acids are a
type of fatty acids that are primarily produced by microbes and have
been shown to modify our metabolism, immunity and other physiological
processes," adds Jacob Allen, an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of Illinois who works alongside Woods.
Over
the past 10 years, research looking at both animals and humans has
helped reveal just how powerful this link between exercise and changes
in the gut microbial community is. More importantly, it has shed light
on how it might actually benefit us.
Some of the first clues can be found in studies of animals. Mice
that were allowed to voluntarily run on a wheel when they wanted were
found to have significantly lower numbers of a particular bacteria
called Turicibacter. The presence of these bacteria is associated with
an increased risk of bowel disease, say Woods and Allen, who led the
study. Mice that were sedentary or given some gentle prodding to
encourage them to run had far higher numbers of these bacteria. (It is
thought that forcing the mice to run caused the animals chronic stress
that may counteract the benefits of the exercise.)
The gut microbes in rats also seem to benefit from voluntary running on a wheel.
Researchers have found that the exercise also seems to lead to higher
levels of a particular short-chain fatty acid called butyrate, which is
produced by bacteria in the gut through the fermentation of fiber and
has been linked to numerous health benefits. Butyrate itself plays a
number of roles in the body – it is the primary fuel for our gut cells,
helps to control the gut barrier function and regulates inflammation and
the immune cells within our gut.
The
gut microbe Fecalibacterium prausnitzii is considered to be one of the
main bacteria responsible for the production of butyrate. Butyrate-producing bacteria have been associated with beneficial effects on metabolism in both mice and humans.
In particular, the reduction in numbers of Fecalibacterium Prausnitzii
has been linked to inflammatory bowel diseases, its presence being
needed for anti-inflammatory actions. A number of recent animal studies
have indicated that exercise can increase the abundance of this bacteria
in the guts of mice.
In 2018, researchers also found that if
they transplanted the gut microbes from exercise-trained mice to
germ-free mice, it could reduce the amount of inflammation in the guts
of those mice that received the microbes.
But while these
studies in animals provide some clues as to how exercise can alter the
balance of gut microbes for the better, we are not mice. So what do
human studies tell us?
There is certainly no shortage of studies
in humans that show doing moderate to vigorous exercise such as running,
cycling and resistance training may potentially increase the diversity
of bacteria in the guts. This has been linked to better physical and
mental health. Doing aerobic exercises for as little as 18-32 minutes,
coupled with resistance training three times a week, for a total of
eight weeks could make a difference.
Athletes also tend to have increased gut microbial diversity compared to sedentary people,
although some of this could be due to the specialized diets that
competitors often have too. But a number of studies have shown that the
combination of exercise and diet can boost Fecalibacterium prausnitzii
numbers and the production of butyrate in active women, often with
improved gut function.
"Some, but not all, studies have shown
exercise to increase Fecalibacterium," says Woods. People with low
levels of this type of bacteria appear to be more at risk of suffering
inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and depression, he adds.
Studies
by Woods and Allen have have highlighted that going for a 30-60 minute
run or bout on the treadmill at the gym can have an impact on the
abundance of butyrate-producing bacteria such as Fecalibacterium in the
gut. In one study involving 20 women and 12 men with various body mass
indexes (BMI), Woods and his colleagues set out to determine whether
doing aerobic exercise for six weeks can change the gut microbes in
previously sedentary human adults. They asked the participants to do
three moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic exercise sessions a week,
either by running on a treadmill or cycling for 30-60 minutes. Stool and
blood samples were collected throughout the study, with three-day
dietary controls to ensure their diet remained consistent before each
collection to limit the changes caused by diet on gut microbes.
Their
findings showed that "butyrate producers" increased in abundance with
exercise training irrespective of body mass index. Accompanying the
change in the microbe community, the lean participants showed an
increase in short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate in their stool
samples. Interestingly, when those taking part in the study returned
to their sedentary lifestyle over the following six weeks, the
researchers found the participants' gut microbes returned to their
initial state. It suggests that while exercise can improve the health of the microbial community in our guts, these changes are both transient and reversible.
Another
small study, published in 2019 by a team led by Jarna Hannukainen an
adjunct professor in the department of clinical medicine at the
University of Turku in Finland, noticed more specific changes to the
microorganisms in the guts of 18 sedentary participants who had been
either diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. The participants
either did high-intensity interval training (bursts of 30 seconds of
cycling with four minute recovery between four, then five and then six
bouts) or moderate continuous training (40-60 minutes of cycling), three
times per week over a two-week period. The researchers noticed that
both training modes increased Bacteroidetes bacteria. Bacteroidetes
are a critical group of gut bacteria that play a role in breaking down
sugars and proteins, and induce the immune system into producing
anti-inflammatory molecules inside the gut. Reduced levels of these
bacteria have been associated with obesity and irritable bowel syndrome.
The
training also decreased levels of Clostridium and Blautia bacteria,
which are thought to aggravate parts of the immune system at high levels
and so increase inflammation. Indeed, Hannukainen and her team saw
significantly lower levels of molecules that indicate inflammation in
the blood and intestines in participants that had been exercising. In
particular there were lower levels of inflammatory markers known to bind
to lipopolysaccharides – components found in the cell walls of gut
bacteria. These are known to cause low-grade inflammation around the
body, as well as playing a role in insulin resistance and the
development of atherosclerosis, which in turn increases the risk of
heart attacks and strokes.
Hannukainen and her colleagues say their work has also shown that exercise specifically reduced gut bacteria that have been associated with obesity.
But
it is still not clear exactly how exercise leads to changes in the
community of microorganisms living in our guts, although there are
several theories, says Woods.
"Lactate is produced when we
exercise, and this could be serving as fuel for certain bacterial
species," he says. Another potential mechanism, he explains, could be
through exercise-induced alterations in the immune system, especially
the gut immune system, as our gut microbes are in direct contact with
the gut's immune cells.
Exercising also causes changes in
blood flow to the gut, which could affect the cells lining the gut wall
and in turn lead to microbial changes. Hormonal changes caused by
exercise could also cause changes in gut bacteria. But none of these potential mechanisms "have been definitively tested", says Woods.
Some
elite athletes often suffer from exercise-induced stress due to the
high-intensity training they do. As many as 20-60% of athletes suffer
from stress due to overtraining and inadequate recovery, according to
some estimates. But the bacteria in our guts could help control the
release of hormones triggered by exercise-related stress, while also
potentially helping to release molecules that improve mood. They can
also help athletes with some of the gut problems they experience.
Further research is however needed in this field.
But there is
still much more we can learn about how our physical activity affects the
creatures living inside our guts, such as how different types of
exercise and its duration might alter the microbial community. It may
also differ from individual to individual, based on their existing gut
residents as well as BMI and other lifestyle factors, such as their
diet, stress levels and sleep.
As
scientists continue to tease out more of the secrets hidden within our
gastrointestinal tracts, we may find new ways to improve our health
through the bustling and diverse communities of organisms that call us
their home. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220825-how-exercise-can-give-your-gut-microbes-a-boost
*
GUT MICROBIOME CAN REJUVENATE BRAIN FUNCTION
~ The study, which was performed on mice, saw scientists conducting, “fecal microbiota transplantation from either young (3–4 months) or old (19–20 months) donor mice into aged recipient mice (19–20 months).” The scientists added that in human years, this would be the equivalent of taking the fecal matter from an 18-year-old and transplanting it into a 70-year-old.
The researchers found that transplanting young poop into an older body helped to “promote the growth of gut microbiota resembling the younger mice’s microbiome.” Essentially, the older mice’s gut started functioning more like that of a younger version.
To further test their theory, the researchers looked closely at the spatial memory in the older mice. To do this, they placed some mice with the fecal transplant and some without, into a water maze, where they needed to plot a route to get to a dry platform.
According to Inverse, the mice with the fecal transplant “found the platform with greater success than the mice without the transplant.” This indicates gut bacteria could impact cognitive function.
Inverse adds some context in relation to the study, by explaining how the brain actually functions. “The frontal cortex of your brain works as the control center to manage learning and memory processing.”
“Another brain area is the hippocampus that works to form and store memories. Both of these regions shrink with age.”
“Aging also comes with decreased production of chemical messengers in the brain known as dopamine and serotonin. These are some of the many reasons why older adults report more trouble remembering names, multitasking, or remembering where they last left their keys.”
Of course, we’re highly unlikely to see a young person’s fecal matter transplanted into an older person in the real world, but the study does highlight just how important the role of gut microbiome has in relation to how our brain works.
According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Fecal Matter Transfer has been used to successfully treat recurrent Clostridium difficile infection in people, and there are “preliminary indications to suggest that it may also carry therapeutic potential for other conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and functional gastrointestinal disorders.”
This recent rodent study is just the latest in research focusing on what causes aging and puts forward potential solutions to help slow the entire process down.
Australian biologist and professor of genetics, David Sinclair has dedicated his professional career to researching aging, and along with his team of researchers, has made major breakthroughs in the space.
The Sinclair Lab at Harvard Medical School has found that “the loss of epigenetic information is likely the root cause of aging.”
“By analogy, if DNA is the digital information on a compact disc, then aging is due to scratches. We are searching for the polish.” David has also theorized that eating just one meal a day can help to slow the aging process.
David surmised that changing our meal frequency could help us live “healthier for longer.”
“We know that if you do these things to animals [restrict eating], in controlled settings, they live longer, a lot longer, sometimes 20-30 per cent longer because they’re healthier,” he said.
“They don’t get cancer or heart disease or dementia.”
[Intermittent fasting is known to enhance microbiome.]
David Sinclair and his team continue to research potential medicine to help slow down the aging process by “manipulating just one central pathway.”
Maybe the Fountain of Youth isn’t such a farfetched idea after all.
https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/how-the-gut-microbiome-could-potentially-reverse-brain-aging
Oriana:
For those of us who find fasting difficult, we can opt for skipping breakfast. Two meals a day is quite doable. For some, eating one meal around 4 or 5 pm works fine. Everyone is different; hence the need to experiment.
You can also alternate higher calorie days with lower calorie days. Some claim that such cycling is more effective than never varying your dietary regimen.
One trick that really works to reduce hunger is to use MCT oil and/or olive oil with your meals, MCT oil being especially effective. (MCT = medium chain triglycerides)
The benefits of fasting were known already in antiquity.
One of the appeals of fasting is that you don't have to restrict the calories when you eat during the allowed time frame. Of course I don't advocate stuffing yourself with junk food. Anything with added sugar is fattening; half of the sugar (sucrose) molecule is fructose, known to be particularly fattening and harmful to the arteries, kidneys, and pancreas.
If you like sweet taste, try sweet potatoes. They are one of my staples. Yes, they do contain some fructose, but glucose dominates. As with everything, moderation is best.
If avoiding fructose is important, there is always the ordinary white potato.
*
GREEN BANANAS REDUCE CANCER BY 50%
~ A trial in people with high hereditary risk of a wide range of cancers has shown a major preventive effect from resistant starch, found in a range of foods such as oats and slightly green bananas. It can also be found in breakfast cereal, cooked and cooled pasta and rice, peas and beans.
The international trial — known as CAPP2 –- involved almost 1000 patients with Lynch syndrome from around the world and revealed that a regular dose of resistant starch, also known as fermentable fiber, taken for an average of two years, did not affect cancers in the bowel but did reduce cancers in other parts of the body by more than half. This effect was particularly pronounced for upper gastrointestinal cancers including esophageal, gastric, biliary tract, pancreatic and duodenum cancers.
The astonishing effect was seen to last for 10 years after stopping taking the supplement.
The study, led by experts at the Universities of Newcastle and Leeds, published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, is a planned double blind 10 year follow–up, supplemented with comprehensive national cancer registry data for up to 20 years in 369 of the participants.
Previous research published as part of the same trial, revealed that aspirin reduced cancer of the large bowel by 50%.
“We found that resistant starch reduces a range of cancers by over 60%. The effect was most obvious in the upper part of the gut,” explained Professor John Mathers, professor of Human Nutrition at Newcastle University. “This is important as cancers of the upper GI tract are difficult to diagnose and often are not caught early on.
“Resistant starch can be taken as a powder supplement and is found naturally in peas, beans, oats and other starchy foods. The dose used in the trial is equivalent to eating a daily [not quite ripe] banana. Before it becomes too ripe and soft, the starch in bananas resists breakdown and reaches the bowel where it can change the type of bacteria that live there.
“Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that isn’t digested in your small intestine. Instead it ferments in your large intestine, feeding beneficial gut bacteria – it acts in effect like dietary fiber in your digestive system. This type of starch has several health benefits and fewer calories than regular starch. We think that resistant starch may reduce cancer development by changing the bacterial metabolism of bile acids and to reduce those types of bile acids that can damage our DNA and eventually cause cancer. However, this needs further research.”
Professor Sir John Burn, from Newcastle University and Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who ran the trial with Professor Mathers, said: “When we started the studies over 20 years ago, we thought that people with a genetic predisposition to colon cancer could help us to test whether we could reduce the risk of cancer with either aspirin or resistant starch.
“Patients with Lynch syndrome are high risk as they are more likely to develop cancers so finding that aspirin can reduce the risk of large bowel cancers and resistant starch other cancers by half is vitally important.
“Based on our trial, NICE now recommend Aspirin for people at high genetic risk of cancer, the benefits are clear – aspirin and resistant starch work” said Professor Sir John Burn.
LONG-TERM STUDY
Between 1999 and 2005, nearly 1000 participants began either taking resistant starch in a powder form every day for two years or aspirin or a placebo — a powder which looked like resistant starch but was inactive.
At the end of the treatment stage, there was no overall difference between those who had taken resistant starch or aspirin and those who had not. However, the research team anticipated a longer-term effect and designed the study for further follow-up.
In the period of follow-up, there were just 5 new cases of upper GI cancers among the 463 participants who had taken the resistant starch compared with 21 among the 455 who were on the placebo.
Professor Tim Bishop, at the University of Leeds, who also ran the trial said “The results are exciting but the magnitude of the protective effect in the upper GI tract was unexpected so further research is required to replicate these findings.”
The team are now leading the international trial, CaPP3, with more than 1,800 people with Lynch syndrome enrolled to look at whether smaller, safer doses of aspirin can be used to help reduce the cancer risk.
https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/green-bananas-reduce-cancers-by-over-50-study-finds
Oriana:
I know what you may be thinking: a click-bait headline. The subjects were not given green bananas at all, but a convenient capsule to swallow. True, that makes it easy to control the quantity of resistant starch that’s being added to the regular diet, but — would it really be the same to eat one green (or greenish) banana a day?
I do occasionally force myself to eat half a greenish banana (a whole one is likely to make me feel bloated). But I’ve discovered a more tasty source, and the kind you can store without worrying about over-ripeness. It’s the purple yam, fortunately carried by my nearby Asian market.
If you can’t find purple yams where you live, there are always alternate source — beans and other starchy foods. You can cook potatoes (including sweet potatoes), then cool them, and eat them cold (reheating will convert at least a portion of resistant starch into ordinary starch).
All those resistant-starch goodies will make you feel at least somewhat bloated (remember, it’s food for your bacteria, not for you; it passes through your intestines, but begins to ferment in your bowel — a feast for your bacteria). But you can find a level at which the bloating isn’t too bad. A little bloating is worth putting up with, considering the benefits of resistant starch.
If you make smoothies, you can increase their content of resistant starch by adding some corn starch or potato starch. Start on the low side.
Plantains are also a good source — as long as you don’t let them ripen. True, then they taste starchy rather than delicious sweet and slightly tart at the same time.
As beans go, white beans happen to have the most resistant starch. And white beans are perhaps the best-tasting of all beans, so at least we’re in luck that way. (If you are concerned about lectins, you can pressure-cook your beans, or use canned beans — which are pressure-cooked for safety during the manufacturing process.)
I strongly recommend the purple yam (or call it the purple sweet potato). It provides not only resistant starch, but also anthocyanins.
If you like powders, then inulin is for you. Technically it’s soluble fiber rather than resistant starch, but the benefits are the same: fermentation in the large intestine and the production of short-chain fatty acids. Inulin dissolves easily in tea and coffee, and/or can be sprinkled lightly over a regular meal. Inulin comes from chicory, which you can also buy in powdered form to enhance the taste of coffee.
*
HEART DISEASE IS LIKELY TO INCREASE DRAMATICALLY BY 2060
Among the general population in the U.S., cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are expected to increase dramatically between 2025 and 2060.
Roughly 55 million more Americans are projected to suffer from diabetes and 126 million more Americans are expected to be obese by 2060. The researchers also predict that rates of stroke and heart failure will rise by more than 33 percent each—impacting a combined 28 million Americans.
What’s worse is that this rise is expected to disproportionately impact all minority groups—with Black and Hispanic populations bearing the biggest brunt of these increases in cardiovascular risks while rates decrease overall for white people. For example, the study found the number of Black adults suffering from diabetes will jump from 13 percent currently to 20 percent by 2060; and nearly 60 percent will have hypertension, a jump from 55 percent now.
This is especially damning considering the fact that advances in medicine should prevent such increases. But according to the study’s authors, the issue is systemic: Minority groups are frequently overlooked and neglected when it comes to health policy. Factors such as food deserts, lack of medical access, and income inequality in Black and Brown communities all contribute to a widening disparity in public health. This is further backed by past research that found that chronic lack of access to healthy food results in higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular illness. The researchers say that the findings outline clear disparities in the U.S. healthcare system and are a call to action to fix them.
“Our analysis projects that the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and diseases will continue to rise with worrisome trends,” James L. Januzzi Jr. a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “These striking projections will disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minority populations in the U.S. Understanding these results will hopefully inform future public health policy efforts and allow us to implement prevention and treatment measures in an equitable manner.”
Remediating this disparity will require more equitable health education and treatment for at-risk populations. Januzzi Jr. and his colleagues argue that health policies and regulations will need to be leveraged to focus particularly on the impact cardiovascular disease has on minority communities.
So, while dire, it’s important to remember that the study is a look at what might happen if we don’t take action. If our history with addressing climate change and environmental issues is any indication, though, we sadly won’t hold our breath. ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/american-heart-health-might-get-much-much-worse-by-2060-especially-for-minorities?source=articles&via=rss
ending on beauty:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
~ Czeslaw Milosz, Ars Poetica?
Luca di Castri: Full Moon
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