Russia’s Remarkable Renaissance | New Eastern Outlook

Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it’s quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This despite or in fact because the West, led by the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington, is trying everything including war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and paint Russians generally as bad. In the process, Russia is discovering positive attributes about her culture, her people, her land that had long been forgotten or suppressed.

My first of many visits to Russia was more than twenty years ago, in May, 1994. I was invited by a Moscow economics think-tank to deliver critical remarks about the IMF. My impressions then were of a once-great people who were being humiliated to the last ounce of their life energy. Mafia gangsters sped along the wide boulevards of Moscow in sparkling new Mercedes 600 limousines with dark windows and without license plates. Lawlessness was the order of the day, from the US-backed Yeltsin Kremlin to the streets. “Harvard boys” like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden’s Anders Aaslund or George Soros were swarming over the city figuring new ways to rape and pillage Russia under the logo “shock therapy” and “market-oriented reform” another word for “give us your crown jewels.”

The human toll of that trauma of the total collapse of life in Russia after November 1989 was staggering. I could see it in the eyes of everyday Russians on the streets of Moscow, taxi-drivers, mothers shopping, normal Russians.

Today, some two decades later, Russia is again confronted by a western enemy, NATO, that seeks to not just humiliate her, but to actually destroy her as a functioning state because Russia is uniquely able to throw a giant monkey wrench into plans of those western elites behind the wars in Ukraine, in Syria, Libya, Iraq and well beyond to Afghanistan, Africa and South America.

Rather than depression, in my recent visits to Russia in the past year as well as in numerous discussions with a variety of Russian acquaintances, I sense a new feeling of pride, of determination, a kind of rebirth of something long buried.

Sanctions Boomerang

Take the sanctions war that the Obama administration has forced Germany, France and other unwilling EU states to join. The US Treasury financial warfare unit has targeted the Ruble. The morally corrupt and Washington-influenced Wall Street credit rating agencies have downgraded Russian state debt to “junk” status. The Saudis, in cahoots with Washington, have caused a free-fall in oil prices. The chaos in Ukraine and EU sabotage of the Russian South Stream gas pipeline to the EU, all this should have brought a terrified Russia to her knees. It hasn’t.

As we have earlier detailed, Putin and an increasing number of influential Russian industrialists, some of the same who a few years ago would have fled to their posh London townhouses, have decided to stand and fight for the future of Russia as a sovereign state. Oops! That wasn’t supposed to happen in a world of globalization, of dissolution of the nation-state. National pride was supposed to be a relic like gold. Not in Russia today.

Complete story at - Russia’s Remarkable Renaissance | New Eastern Outlook

Vladimir Suchan: Logos politikos: On Mark Sleboda's Wittenberg Church Post or Why I Am Still a Believer and Optimist

The situation in Donbass has not been easy, and Moscow's policy was obviously to upset and anger the Empire bent on her existential destruction and demise as little as possible, which, in practice, means and meant giving in to the Empire as much as was possible at a given moment.

Mark Sleboda's piece should deserve an honest response (i.e., honest, not PR rebuttal and not silence) from someone co-responsible in Moscow for the situation. The point is that the Russians and also Novorossiya's supporters do need some honesty and a demonstration of true leadership. Honesty is what restores trust and what also serves as a good reason to forgive. Lying to the nation in vital, fundamental matters on which life and death depends in a Machiavellian fashion does not work and is disgraceful.

At the same time, the events now unfolding in Donbass show very clearly that the previous course was not sustainable and that things are no moving unto a new ground.

At the same time, I would like to stress one important thing, which seems to get lost. The struggle of the working people of Donbass for Novorossiya is real and its effect is already going to be profound. For, in this struggle, a new stronger Russian character is being forged. In other words, despite all, I am and remain a believer and optimist. I believe in the Russian character and the strength of the Russians. Thus, instead of "dying" I see a very difficult process of birth or rebirth, in which Moscow has served so far as a much hapless midwife who, till now, believed that her business is not this midwifery, but something more akin to the old "profession" or let's say a continued "professional" or "business-oriented" courting and flirting with her "Western partners" who are playing a role of Herod to Russia's new birth.

Nevertheless, while Moscow (or at least Lavrov) is trying to look for "pacifist" fascists or Banderites among the leaders and US puppets of the Maidanite junta (something as plausible as "moderate terrorists" in Syria with whom the West vows to change the Middle East and make them into "tolerant democrats"), the people of Donbass and many Russians are leading a heroic struggle in which a new, true Russia, her rebirth, is being forged.

Complete story at - Vladimir Suchan: Logos politikos: On Mark Sleboda's Wittenberg Church Post or Why I Am Still a Believer and Optimist