CHINA BEFRIENDS PHILIPPINES, INDONESIA, PAKISTAN; RUSSIA BEFRIENDS PAKISTAN

The vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission meets with Sjafrie Sjamsuddin, secretary general of Indonesia's Defense Ministry, in Beijing, in 2009.

A number of countries are growing closer to China, at a time when Pakistan, and others, fear being attacked by the USA and its allies.

(KISSINGER SEES WAR BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN)

There is a fear that the 'Osama incident' in Abbottabad may be used to weaken Pakistan.

This is ironic if OSAMA 'WAS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN'

1. In May 2011, the Chinese Defence Minister has been visiting Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore.

Indonesian Vice President Boediono met with visiting Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie in Jakarta on 21 May 2011.

"Boediono said that the bilateral relations between Indonesia and China have grown rapidly since the two countries established a strategic partnership...

"He said Indonesia attaches great importance to enhancing comprehensive cooperation with China, including the cooperation in defense and security..."

Indonesian VP meets with visiting Chinese defense minister /Indonesia Calls For Strong Defence Cooperation With China

2. "China's Defense Minister General Liang Guanglie will be in the Philippines from May 21 to 25, 2011, having previously visited Singapore and Indonesia as part of his Southeast Asian tour.

"The visit is expected to further advance China-Philippines friendly relations, specifically military exchanges and pragmatic cooperation." (China exec's visit d)

3. According to Webster Tarpley, on 20 May 2011: The USA and Pakistan are near Open War; A Chinese Ultimatum Warns Washington ...

"China has officially put the United States on notice that Washington's planned attack on Pakistan will be interpreted as an act of aggression against Beijing.

"This blunt warning represents the first known strategic ultimatum received by the United States in half a century, going back to Soviet warnings during the Berlin crisis of 1958-1961, and indicates the grave danger of general war growing out of the US-Pakistan confrontation."

4. On whose side is Russia?

Pakistan Allied with China and Russia Islamabad Globe

After the US raid on the 'Osama compound' "the support for Islamabad has come from Beijing, Moscow, Istanbul, Riyadh, and a host of other countries...

"Moscow has signaled superb support to Islamabad, and doubled it up with billions of Dollars of projects.

"Unlike US aid that only corrupts and bribes, and fills the pockets of US contractors, Russian aid has built steel mills and other infrastructures that have benefited the country and provided employment to thousands."

(Many thanks to Entity for some of the links.)

KISSINGER SEES WAR BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Kissinger does not want India and Pakistan to be friends?

What are Henry Kissinger's plans for Pakistan, India, Russia and China?

How can they all be made weaker, to the advantage of the USA?

How about a war; with India and Russia against Pakistan and China?

On 21 May 2011, in the Financial Times, Henry Kissinger talks to Simon Schama

"Kissinger laughs even as he sketches a scenario for ... Afghanistan."

Kissinger suggests that Afghanistan might become split into two parts.

One part would be run by Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban.

The other part would be run by India, Russia and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance.

"What might happen, he says, is a de facto partition, with India and Russia reconstituting the Northern Alliance, and Pakistan hooked to the Taliban as a backstop against their own encirclement."

India, Russia, China and Brazil. How do you break up the friendship?

Kissinger sees the possibility of a world war, sparked off by an assassination.

Schama reports:

"The prospect looms of a centennial commemoration of the first world war through a half-awake re-enactment.

"Not Belgium but Sarajevo."

Kissinger refers to a frightened Pakistan lashing out.

Schama reports:

"Think proxy half-states; the paranoia of encirclement; the bristling arsenals, in this case nuclear; the nervous, beleaguered Pakistanis lashing out in passive-aggressive insecurity."

According to Kissinger:

"An India-Pakistan war becomes more probable.

"Eventually.

"Therefore some kind of international process in which these issues are discussed might generate enough restraints so that Pakistan does not feel itself encircled by India and doesn’t see a strategic reserve in the Taliban.

"Is it possible to do this? I don’t know.

"But I know if we let matters drift this could become the Balkans of the next world war."

~~

Mumbai, the Hoax Phone Call, La Belle Disco

An India-Pakistan war could be like the Iran-Iraq war ...

~~

Libyans killed by French to take their organs for transplant - Blogspot

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Бог Благословляет Святую Россию

I spent a wonderful Christmas in Moscow three years ago, going to the Bolshoi amongst other things. I have friends in the city, people I know from university. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, magical and tragic place, a mighty heart in the great body of Russia.

Russian history and culture fascinates me; it has for a long time, perhaps more than any other in the world, excepting that of England. I count Dostoevsky along with Dickens as my favourite author. I also love Russian painting, music and folklore.

The recent outrage in Moscow in the metro draws from me a greater affinity and solidarity than ever. I pass no comment on the people responsible for this pointless and murderous gesture; they are beyond all comment.

Because of my name people sometimes ask if I am Russian. Well, today I am. God bless Holy Russia.

Spirits of the Water

I’ve been dipping heavily into Russian folk tales recently, having received a copy of A, N Afanas’ev’s classic collection at Christmas. Some of the stuff I already knew, the tales of the wonderful Baba Yaga, among them, but I’m making fresh discoveries. Amongst these is the Rusalka, the intriguing Russian nature spirits.

Rusalka, exclusively female, are associated with water, fields and forests. Often gathering in groups, they can be young and beautiful or old and scary, but never feeble. If the come as crones they also come with considerable power. They also have shape-shifting abilities.

Coming from the same roots as Rus and Russia, they are sometimes classified as primal Russian or totemic spirits, fertility spirits. Another suggestion is that they are the souls of women who have drowned, by accident or by design, again recalling older practices of human sacrifice. With the advent of Christianity a new explanation was offered: that they were the souls of women and girls who died anabaptised, clearly intended to frighten people into the bowers of the church. Quite frankly, I’m far more attracted to the notion of an eternity as a spirit of water than a soul in the Christian heaven…or hell. :-)

Because of their shape-shifting descriptions of their appearance naturally vary quite widely. Sometimes they are described as beautiful, wild-haired and big-breasted women, always appearing naked, occasionally with poppies in their hair. Other descriptions have them as bloated, pale and ugly like drowned corpses. Here a scene in The Shining movie comes to mind, that where the young woman emerging from the bath turns into a decayed hag!

Rusalka were venerated for centuries as benevolent spirits, but they can also be dangerous. They sometimes live in rye fields as attendants of the Corn Mother, Baba Yaga, acting as guardians of the crop. In the Ukraine they perch on birch trees like birds, where they sit grooming themselves in the spring and weaving linen garments. In other legends they live in underwater palaces in the winter, coming to the surface and the trees in the warmer weather.

Getting bored of the quiet forest life, the Rusalka are said to seduce and kill mortal men. Whether this is a trace of distant human sacrifice or Christian defamation is now impossible to say. They were also said to have come down from the trees at might to perform a circle dance by the light of the moon. Those unfortunate to come across this spectacle are promptly drowned, water being the weapon as well as the home of the Rusalka. So, water is death, but it is also life; their water, taken from secret wells in the forest, was considered to have the power of healing.

Baba Yaga

I’ve been reading mythologies, fairytales and folklore since I was about six years old. I began with Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths in a version especially edited for children. I fell in love with the quarrelsome and all too human Greek Pantheon, from Zeus to Artemis, reading everything I could find. By the time I was eight I had graduated on to Homer!

These explorations stimulated my appetite for new sources of inspiration, new and different tales. I exhausted every library I could find, every anthology that was available, and I do not exaggerate! Oh, how I loved them all, the tales collected by the Grimm Brothers in Germany and Asbjørnsen and Moe in Norway, as well as Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. But the folk tradition that made the greatest impact on me was that of the Slav people, especially the Russians. And the one character in Russian tradition that both delighted and terrified me was Baba Yaga, the great witch herself, the greatest of all the witches.

Baba Yaga epitomises all of the ambiguity of witchcraft, of nature itself, perhaps, malevolent and benevolent by turns. She is for me the most perfect symbol of witchcraft, the most perfect avatar, standing in total contradiction to Wicca, that crypto-hippie cult. She is scary, yes, but she is also grand; she can be terrifically wicked but she can also be just and solicitous.

In Russian tradition Baba Yaga, though the ultimate boogie-woman, represents something more than witchcraft; she is also a residue from pre-Christian days, perhaps the Corn Mother herself, banished to the woods by the missionaries of the new faith. But there she stayed and never went away.

As an underworld goddess controlling life and death, Baba Yaga was the last hope for the infertile. She could also perform miracle cures. But approaching her carried considerable dangers; for she was just as likely to curse as to cure. Yes, she knows all of the secrets of nature, all of the sources of botanical healing. Knowing is one thing; revealing is quite another.

So, Baba Yaga is the Mistress of all Witches, the Primal Mother, nurturing and destructive. But unlike more traditional goddesses or semi-divine figures she was not at all remote, living, rather, deep in the forests of old Russia in a cottage named Izbusha, which stands by tradition on chicken legs. This cottage will move at Baba’s command; Izbushka, Izbushka! Stand with your back to the forest and your front to me.

Izbushka is a fearsome looking place, made of bones collected by Baba Yaga herself. Leg bones form the doorstep; a mouth with teeth serves as the lock; the fence is formed from bones toped by skulls. If one approaches at night the first thing to be seen is light glowing from the eye-sockets. Inside there is a large oven which symbolises the cycles of life, from birth to death.

If the house is fearsome the great witch is even more so. She has iron teeth protruding like the tusks of a boar. Her hands are tipped with claws and she wears a necklace of skulls. She comes through the air not on a broomstick but in a huge mortar which she steers with a pestle, sweeping away her traces as she moves.

It’s while seated in her mortar that she grinds out life and death, just like a Corn Mother. Her flight recalls that of the Goddess Diana on the wild hunt, except her companions are not women but by crows, ravens and owls. Again, according to some sources, she is also like Diana in that she represents the moon. In this form she eats her own body in a cannibal feast and then regenerates, regulating the fertility of women and of the earth.

The moon, the waxing and the waning of the moon, also gives an indication when it is safe to approach her and when it is not. When it is full her door is open, as the witch is replete, happy and pregnant. But when it wanes her womb and belly are empty. Those who approach then are likely to end as her next meal. :-)

Always approach the witch with caution and reverence; always approach with care and understanding. Or else!

Living in the Past; the Illusions of Vladimir Putin

Russia is a proud country with a proud-and tragic past. It is also a country deeply uncertain of itself, uncertain of its future, uncertain exactly where it wants to go. At the moment, under the guidance of Vladimir Putin in the office of Prime Minister, it is drawing continually on historical capital to bolster its self-image, to overcome a deeply rooted sense of inferiority. And some of that capital is not particularly attractive. Stalin, once again, is a great leader, and authoritarianism, not democracy, the prevailing political fashion.

There is also a growing trend in political advertising, that if you say something loud and often enough it might very well be true. One billboard put up recently, depicting a frigate on the ocean, carries the message “Russia is a great superpower.” All of this, these forms of historical and political assertiveness, is, in fact, a symptom of a deeper malaise. For, you see, Russia is dying, literally, not metaphorically.

Yes, I know that this is a bold and alarming statement, one that really requires some substantive support. I’ve been reading a piece by Ben Judah in the latest issue of Prospect (Putin’s empire strikes out), in which he lays out some alarming facts. Russian GDP, for example, slumped by 10.3% in the last quarter, and is now lower than that of Brazil. Life expectancy is lower than that of Pakistan. The average Russian male, moreover, dies at the age of fifty-nine, significantly younger than that of China. The overall population is now lower than that of Bangladesh, with terminations now outnumbering live births. This confirms the projections made two years ago by the UN that by 2050 the Russian population could fall by a third. The decline of the ethnic Russians stands in sharp contrast to the rise in the Muslim population. In panicked reaction to this the Orthodox Church has said that Muslims may outnumber Christians before the end of the century.

The ‘greatness’ of Russia, the mantra of Putin, is based not just on a withdrawal of past capital; there is also a mortgage on the economic future. The swell in Russian power over the last few years has been shaped not by any deep economic strength but by the continuing exploitation of oil and gas reserves. The resources accumulated have been channelled into the ‘Putin Plan', a form of economic neo-Stalinism, vast projects with little in the way of practical results. According to Nikolai Petrov, a former government advisor, the state only has enough money to continue like this for another twenty months at the outside without reforms.

What Russia needs above all is open and rational debate on all of the problems it faces, a debate that will allow finite resources to be directed with greater efficiency, not frittered away on an empty imperial project, one governed by the illusions of the past. But under the Putin system of ‘managed democracy’ open debate is a highly unlikely prospect. So, caught, in the net of his own self-deceptions, he is likely to take the country into ever faster cycles of decay.

It gives me no pleasure to write this because in a way I quite admire Vladimir Putin. He deserves every credit for lifting Russia from the chaos of the Yeltsin years, giving it a new sense of itself, a new sense of its place in the world, a reminder of its place in history. But what was once the solution is now the problem. I wrote in a previous blog that the new ‘Time of Troubles', paralleling the crisis of the early seventeenth century, might not yet have ended. It’s obvious to me now that Vladimir Putin is not Michael Romanov.