The spy thriller genre veers closer to the truth

By William T. Hathaway and Paul Cartine
For The Greanville Post

In Syriana, a 2005 geopolitical spy thriller starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Christopher Plummer and other stars, Hollywood got as close to the reality of murky Middle East politics as a liberaloid plot would allow, which is not much, but it did reflect some of the sordid maneuvers and betrayals entertained by the Western spy agencies, as suggested in books by Greene, Le Carre, Ludlum, and Stewart. Card-carrying Obama sycophant Clooney plays a CIA operative, not far from his real-life role as propagandist or useful idiot for Deep State imperialist interventions.

While Bush probably would have approved, many shady intel ops could have escaped his knowledge. Clandestine police and intelligence activities are today so extensive that they constitute a form of power accountable to no one, except their own internal bureaucracies, and perhaps not even that.

Gaither Stewart’s The Trojan Spy [Punto Press, 2012] takes the thriller genre an important step forward, advancing it from the work of his predecessors John le Carré and Robert Ludlum. Le Carré and Ludlum rebelled against the conventions of the classic spy thrillers, which assumed that we’re the good guys who are under attack by bad guys so evil that we’re justified in bending the rules to save ourselves from them. In that world, lies, deceit, sabotage, and even murder are sometimes necessary to defend peace, justice, and the American (or Western) Way against (pick one, depending on when the book was written) Nazis, communists, or terrorists.

Le Carré and Ludlum made the genre less predictable in terms of identifying the bad guys. Instead of these being agents of the particular ennemi du jour, as in the simplistic 007 stories, they gave us plots revolving around corrupt politicians, rogue secret service agents, and insider conspiracies—as in the film Syriana, or le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. The perennial theme of many of le Carré’s stories is the callous amorality of secret services—especially the American and British ones—who routinely betray others, even their own agents, for very questionable ulterior motives. The good guys—whether civilian or secret service—are often sacrificed for political or operational ends.

In Ludlum’s “Bourne” series of books and films the suggestion is that the hero, Jason Bourne, has been subjected to mind-altering techniques which largely erased his original persona, replacing it with that of a programmable assassin. There are clear links here to secret government-sponsored programs such as MKUltra—which were more than likely used in a number of recent faked “terrorist” bombing incidents, notably those of the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the December 2010 “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—both of whom were described by witnesses as appearing confused and disoriented, with glazed eyes.

Le Carré’s 2008 novel, A Most Wanted Man, is among those books and films which have taken on the issue of so-called “extraordinary rendition”—the entirely illegal abduction, removal to secret locations and subsequent torture of alleged “terrorist suspects,” though in most cases no charges are ever brought. The tactic was openly admitted in the US, even praised, and justified as a necessary part of the bogus “war on terror”—in reality a war of terror on both the post-1990 newly coined “enemy,” radical Islam, and on the general public, which has to be convinced of a non-existent external threat to allow the inexorable expansion of the “national security state” and the concomitant loss of civil liberties.

Rendition and state-sponsored torture—and more recently the equally illegal and barbarous high-tech “assassination by remote-controlled drone” which is fast becoming the favorite “toy” of Western military and secret services (with surveillance drones already operating in some urban areas)—are of course subjects which deserve to be exposed by writers of conscience. Until Gaither Stewart, however, no major thriller author confronted the issue which underpins and lends spurious legitimacy to the whole “war on terror”: large-scale state-sponsored “false flag” terrorism, the well-attested reality of the major incidents of alleged Islamic fundamentalist terrorism since the first, FBI-assisted World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, part of the concoction of the new “enemy” to replace the then defunct “Red Menace.”

This is puzzling, in view both of the incontrovertible evidence assembled by assiduous independent researchers, and of the extent of the “collateral damage” caused by the lies. However disgusting rendition and torture are, the number of their victims is relatively small. But the lies which lent spurious justification to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and to the expansion of the war into Pakistan have left a trail of death and destruction of major proportions—perhaps as many as six million dead and the lives of many more millions blighted, with no end in sight. The bogus war continues to spread, with large parts of Africa targeted, accompanied by derisory claims about all manner of alleged “al-Qaeda linked” terrorist entities supposedly threatening the West.

In A Most Wanted Man, set in Hamburg, le Carré has his German domestic intelligence agent Bachmann (one of the good guys in this story) express—in a powerfully emotional outburst—his anger and frustration at the supposed “failure” of the German police and intelligence services to round up “the Hamburg Cell” and thus supposedly prevent the 9/11 attacks. As early as the fourth page of the book we have its author repeating the official nonsense of the supposed piloting, by Mohammed Atta, of one of the allegedly hijacked planes, despite the complete absence of credible evidence that any of the supposed hijackers was on any of the planes. It is difficult to understand how an author like le Carré, whose stories are always meticulously researched, can accept the patently absurd official lie in a matter of such grave importance.

Gaither Stewart dares to go where le Carré, Ludlum, and other authors fear to tread. In The Trojan Spy he is not afraid to state the truth that the bad guys are predominantly to be found in the US and its Western allies, whose intelligence agencies are often revealed to be working in a strange symbiotic relationship with groups publicly demonized as “terrorists”—most famously, of course, that creation of the CIA, al-Qaeda, now joined by the agencies’ new tool in North and East Africa: the shadowy “militant Islamist” organization al Shabaab; or in the case of the “Operation Gladio” bombings and murders in the Europe of the ’70s and ’80s, with far-right paramilitary groups trained and armed by the CIA and MI6. Their activities are used to provide justification for further wars of economic conquest.

BUY THE BOOK! HELP LEFT PUBLISHING.

Stewart provides the geo-strategic and political context without which the various elements of the jigsaw puzzle make little sense, with the illegal wars, rendition and torture, ever larger “defense” budgets and the growth of the national security state at home, oppressive and intrusive surveillance and curtailments of civil rights, entrapment and faked bomb plots—all alleged to be responses to the specter of a claimed resurgent extremism in Islamic countries. Acceptance of any part of the official myth of Muslim or Arab blame for the major “terrorist” outrages of the last decade fatally weakens the case against the wholesale demonization of Muslims. If “they” did it, invasion, occupation, torture, and the rest are, in the eyes of many, justified “to prevent them doing it again.” Following the evidence trail instead of the myth, Stewart exposes the hidden agenda of neo-imperialism and the driving force of the fear of the old enemy, Russia, which holds Western strategists in its grip.•

Stewart’s subversive heresy virtually guarantees that The Trojan Spy will be ignored by the propaganda machines of the corporate mass media. It’s a dangerous book, and a very good one—characters with complex personalities who act in unexpected ways, a well-structured story full of surprises, authentically rendered settings, and a direct but graceful narrative style. The writing shares the thoughtful, meditative qualities of le Carré’s and the brooding menace of Ludlum’s. If Stewart had followed the conventions of the genre, reinforcing the myth that the West is Best, The Trojan Spy could have been boosted by the media into a best seller. But it’s a better book than that—a book that tells the truth. Selections of it are posted on the publisher’s website, and elsewhere at The Greanville Post, a publishing sponsor of this novel.

• This article first ran in May of 2012.

BABYLON FALLING by Gaither Stewart
Punto Press Publishing, 194 pp, New York
August 23, 2017

The Hammer and the Chisel

By Patrice Greanville

Gaither Stewart’s Babylon Falling is unusual in that the author has assembled a collection of twenty-four plus one essays, thought pieces and articles, which, taken together, form a step-by-step intellectual autobiography that reflects and relates the story of his own social-cultural-political development. In his proposal to the publisher the author in his usual manner of self-doubt expressed the hope that in this, his attempt to recreate one life, he had not forgotten the essentials as shown by Jorge Borges in his poem La Luna of the man who after he had completed his full summary reconstruction of the world looked up at the disc in the sky and, stunned, realized he had forgotten the moon. These two dozen pieces too will omit many pertinent elements of a life, Stewart warns; yet, he makes a valiant effort to offer the essentials of his own as a possible roadmap to calm introspection according to what Plato, among others, regarded as the fundamental values that constitute a moral person. The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato opined, and in that he was also categorically right. 

“From the start of this work,” Stewart writes in his preface “…my most fervent hope was and has remained to assemble a collection of essays and articles that particularizes some of the stages of one man’s search first for rebirth and then transformation from one life stage to a higher level of consciousness, forever aware however that I was dealing with the same raw material, the same stuff of which I was made as a young man, which I had nonetheless come to believe could be reshaped into an ‘I’ who saw reality for what it was and wanted to contribute to changing above all his own ‘I’ and as a result his own reality. 

Stewart sees a kind of  rhythm in just the bare list of titles that mirrors his choice of the twenty-four plus one pieces of Babylon Falling selected from a short list of thirty-five essays and articles. Some readers might not recognize that same rhythm, he notes, and might have selected other pieces, but he insists on the rhythm created by these.

Essay number 1,“Transformation”, and the last, number 25, “To Be A Communist”, move at an easy and non-complex rhythm, like any prologue and epilogue, literary or musical. In “Transformation” he writes: “The creative individual who does not accept the world as it is is godlike in that like earlier genuine revolutionaries he attempts to not only change it—that is, not only reform it—but to transform it. And there lies a major difference between change and transformation: Change alters the past. Transformation creates the future.” 

Numbers 2-11 then complete what Stewart considers the base, the feet and legs of the sculpture he believes his work resembles, a kind of moral preparation for the frontal attacks that will follow. Speaking of the innocence of Myshkin, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, Stewart writes: “The innocence I am considering in the essay, “Innocence” is precisely Myshkin’s innocence, NOT the ignorance of uneducated, unschooled, unlettered common people. I have in mind instead the ignorance of the sophisticated and educated elite, the specialists, the ignorance of our political and economic leaders and masters who are morally ignorant, incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, the antonym of Myshkin’s innocence of the clean hands of virtue and morality.

However, even in the harder hitting pieces—essays numbers 12-19 which include frontal attacks on the author’s Homeland, The Mother Of All Paradoxes, Americanism, The Impulse For US World Hegemony, Cold War Revisionism, Euphemisms Away—the author does not use a hammer—as other writers might have preferred—but applies a light-weight chisel as if working on a delicate sculpture, which however, he makes clear, is a work in stone. He emphasizes that he seldom uses a hammer to make his points; he prefers to work with a small chisel.

Stewart’s chief message here as elsewhere is a moral one. He makes clear in all his work, fiction and non-fiction, his belief that writing without a moral message is not worth the paper it is printed on. The difference between right and wrong, he says, lies inherent in most of mankind. In his celebrated novel, The Trojan Spy—ironically not actually a spy story, Stewart insists—he notes that Nations commit horrible acts to justify war and since history written by the victors is a lie, we need revisionism, and this revisionism springs from humanity's indestructible wish to see justice triumph, a morality of history, so to speak. Thus, with time, the pain of defeat, subjugation and torture diminishes but morality remains. Just causes, he reminds us, are always and by definition morally superior to unjust ones, no matter how much propaganda the latter employs to stake its claim to righteousness. The reminder is used by Stewart not as a display of fatuous wisdom, since it is a tautology, but as an acid commentary on the manufactured banishment of any operational morality from modern capitalist society, a vice scnadalously evident in contemporary Anglo-American culture. 

A major protagonist in Stewart’s Time of Exile, the final volume of his Europe Trilogy, the Serb resistance leader, Ilya, affirms. “The world is poisoned on evil and seems to like the taste. But now we have reached the tipping point. Not only in Europe, as one might have said during World War Two, but across the globe, everywhere, the evil of willful ignorance reigns. I believe it is time for a total shake-up, a moral realignment, a rethinking of the divisions of our world. My friends, the final battle is brewing.”

—PG

• BABYLON FALLING Paperback: 194 pages
• Publisher: Punto Press, LLC (August 23, 2017)
• Language: English
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars 6 customer reviews 

Gaither Stewart

R. Nureyev levitating in one of his acclaimed performances.

 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

An indispensable title by Ron Ridenour, especially in our time of manufactured wars. THE RUSSIAN PEACE THREAT —Get it on Amazon or any other leading bookseller. In paperback and kindle. Product details Language ‏ : ‎ English Paperback ‏ : ‎ 564 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0996487069 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0996487061 Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.64 pounds Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.28 x 9 inches CLICK HERE to buy it.

RON RIDENOUR titles by Ron Ridenour can be found on his Amazon page. Another Ridenour important book is Backfire: The CIA's Biggest Burn Thiis is the first book written about the 26 Cuban and one Italian moles, who infiltrated the CIA for Cuba's Department of State Security, and came out in unison in 1987. The book presents testimonies of three of the double agents, including the dean, who led a triple life for 21 years, a summary of the others, revels some of the major crimes and covert action efforts of the Agency, and elucidates the collaborative role the US mass media plays for the covert warriors. Cuba's counterintelligence proves that the CIA never stopped attempting to murder Fidel Castro nor did it give up the vain hope of destroying the Cuban socialist revolution despite U.S. congressional investigations of CIA terrorist activities. The Trojan Spy a welcome revelation. A list of his books can be found on this page.

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Gaither Stewart

Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky^[1]  13 May 1221^[2] – 14 November 1263), served as Prince of Novgorod (1236–40, 1241–56 and 1258–1259), Grand Prince of Kiev (1236–52) and Grand Prince of Vladimir (1252–63) during some of the most difficult times in Kievan Rus' history. He rose to legendary status on account of his military victories over German and Swedish invaders. (Still from iconic film Alexander Nevsky, 1938, which immortalised his victory over Catholic German and Danish knights (Livonian order) and Estonian infantry on Lake Peipus, on the Russo-Estonian frontier.)

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THE RUSSIANS

Native land of enduring patience,

The land of the Russian people!

(Fyodor Tiutchev,(1803-1873), Romantic poet, second to Pushkin)

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All things Russian have always seemed exotic, strange and incomprehensible to Westerners. Russians themselves have long debated the question as to who they are: Westerners or Asians? Or, are they something else? In any case, as reflected in current Russian foreign policy, the history of Russia is also inextricably bound up with Eurasia, the territory between Europe and Asia. Though of primary importance to Russia, the borders with Europe have always been far more rigid than those open borders with Asia itself. Asia for Russia remains an open space. That historical reality is of fundamental significance today in the dispute over Ukraine as well as in Russia’s recent about-face and its primary relations with Asia and the creation of an exchange currency that is no longer Western.

In the same light, again today, Western peoples, in general, are perplexed by the Russia-Ukraine question. What does it mean? Just who are these “ethnic Russians” living in Ukraine anyway? If they don’t like it there, shouldn’t they move to Russia?

Mike Whitney produced an excellent interview with Russian President Putin’s advisor and friend, Sergei Glaziev (see appendix), under the title of “Understanding Ukraine in 15 minutes”. Well, that title appears to me as a journalistic exaggeration for the answers to these questions are complex and reach far back into the history of the Slavic peoples.  Here I have sketched out some of the related problematics, offered a light historical background to the Slavic question, and taken a closer look at just who these Russians and Ukrainians really are.

The short answer is that they do not know themselves who they are. Russians wonder if Russia is an European country or whether she is not an extra-European country, westernized artificially and hastily by an elite of Peter the Great and to the detriment of her true values. Russian intellectuals too have long been puzzled by the problem. “Westernizers” in Russia saw the salvation of their country in a rapid assimilation of western culture; the so-called “Slavophiles” believed Russia could only be true to herself by maintaining and strengthening all that separated her from the West, by remaining loyal to her past values, and the development of a culture in opposition to the culture of the West. The struggle has gone on for eons, marked and distinguished by the Great Russian Revolution.

 

Today’s disputed country of Ukraine lies between Russia to its East and Poland to its West. One should keep in mind that Russians and Ukrainians, together with the Byelorussians of Byelorus just north of Ukraine, are historically one people, each however with its linguistic and cultural differences. For over three millennia these peoples, the Slavs, have inhabited parts of the enormous territory now known as Russia extending from the Black Sea eastwards across two continents nearly to Alaska, and from the North Pole to Persia in the South, an area bigger than the entire North American continent and one-sixth of the world’s land surface. Those peoples are known by the linguistic name of East Slavs. (The West Slavs are chiefly Poles and Czechs, the South Slavs Serbs, Croatians and Bulgarians).

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Prince Alexander Nevsky (r) and his brother stand vigil the night before the great battle on the ice. against the Teutonic knights (Still from Alexander Nevsky, 1938).

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However, as has been said, “geography may set the stage for history; men make history.” (Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia.) And what men made Russia’s history! Giants of men. Throughout the ages and across these great lands, hundreds of non-Slavic nationalities and cultures, European and Asian, Mongol and Persian, ancient Sumerians and the Iranian-speaking Asiatic Scythians from Central Asia have intermingled. Two of the most international rail stations in the world are Moscow’s Yaroslavsky and Kazansky stations serving hundreds of thousands of peoples from Europe to Asia.

Who are the Russians? you still ask. Telling, the answer of the great Russian poet, Alexander Blok, who wrote: “Yes, we are Scythians. Yes, we are Asiatics. With slanting and greedy eyes.”

My close friend, a Russian painter and originally an ethnic Russian from Kkarkov in today’s Ukraine, ( I find it difficult to write the Ukrainian Kharkiv) now for forty years in New York, has those slanting eyes, as do his two children, and to a minor degree, his grandchildren. Scythians, Russians, Ukrainians, Europeans, Americans? As much as my Russian-speaking friend tries to speak Ukrainian just to show off, I who do not know Ukrainian as such understand him perfectly. It’s like hearing English with a thick French accent.

Yet Russia shows that continuity is the real stuff of history. Events like the arrival of Christianity in Russia in the 9th century, the Mongol domination over Russian lands from the early 13th century to the late 15th, the Napoleonic invasion in 1812 and the burning of Moscow, World War I and II, and the Russian Revolution each brought about great change at enormous loss in Russian lives.

In the light of these confusing and historically tremendous occurrences, the thinking person is made aware that it is the relationship of the present with the past that makes a given present meaningful. Without continuity in the histories of Europe, in Russia, China, and also in America, each new generation would have to start over again and again, as, say, in a typical story invented by Jorge Borges. Myths, anecdotes and stories about the Mongol (Tatar) domination abound in Russian literature. The period extending from the Tatar invasion to the unification of Russia by the Moscow ruler Ivan III appears like a black hole in Russian history that historian D.S. Mirsky labels Russia’s “Dark Ages”. The saying ‘Scratch a Russian and find Tatar’ is valid, if only in those slanting eyes of my dear friend.

Here we are most interested in the so-called East Slavs, that is, those peoples who remained in their original territories north of the Black Sea after the Slavs split into three groups in the mid First millennium A.D., some moving south, others more westwards. The East Slavs speak the Eastern variety of the common Slavic. Russian speakers, the Great Russians, have always dominated the East Slavs. Their descendants remain today among those “ethnic Russians” in southeast Ukraine, in Crimea, the country of Moldova and the Transdnestr Republic, whom their brothers in Kiev, seduced by promises of gold from the West, want to expel or exterminate. And their language and culture are Russian.

 

KIEVAN RUSSIA

It is an irony of history that the city of Kiev, today’s Ukrainian capital situated west of a more Asian Russia, was the first Russian state. Kiev, the city where the USA first ruthlessly overturned Ukraine’s legally elected Russian-friendly government and ignorantly installed a puppet government to rule over a phony state with the phony goal of becoming part of the European Union, A phony and impossible state in any case because Ukraine for Russia is like Texas or Midwestern states are to the United States. Russia would never surrender it totally to the West. Enough today for Moscow to turn off the oil spigots to re-establish the order the Slavs have always needed.

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Alexander (l) and a Teuton knight take each other's measure (Alexander Nevsky, 1938). Stalin commissioned the film from S. Eisenstein as a morale builder in anticipation of a Nazi attack, which did materialise in 1941.

Mystery surrounds the establishment of the Kievan state. Its origins are connected with a tribe of people called “Rus”, from which the word Russian derives. Some historians claim the quarrelling Slavs called in Varangians (Swedes) to come and rule over their lands and create order out of chaos. According to many historians the Rus were one of those Varangian tribes; other theories link the Rus to Slavic tribes or people in northern lands or even in the south of Crimea and surrounding territories. Although the name Rus was previously unknown in the West, the name stuck. Rus became identified with the Kievan East Slavic-speaking state. In any case, the Rus formed a large group among them, most certainly Slavic, spoke a language that soon became Russian and established themselves from Kiev northwards to the heart of traditional Russian lands—like Novgorod, Vologda, Vladimir-Suzdal. And finally Moscow—which because of the city’s central position and because its great river, the Moskva, was a principle trade route—became the center of the future Russian empire.

I try not to stray from the subject of who these modern day Russians are but this minor and limited incursion into the complex story of the origins of Slavs and their state is necessary in order to know what we are talking about. Suffice it to say here that the Kievan state has the place in Russian history as does, say, the thirteen original colonies in the formation of the USA. An important and influential world capital in those times appears today as a second-class, boring puppet city-state controlled by a failing and waning US world power, a power with no concept of the significance of history.

As Kievan Russia—the future Russia itself—developed and expanded its borders ever farther eastwards, and became an important state, a new element was introduced into its culture: Christianity. By the early eleventh century, Kiev had become a new Christian civilization, a civilization that added “literary and artistic attainment to the political power and high economic development characteristic of the age.” (Riasanovsky)

Kiev’s rulers over pagan Russians first studied the major religions and according to legend decided against Islam—it forbade alcohol—because “drink is the joy of the Russian”—and against Judaism because it reflected beliefs of a defeated people without a state. Kievan Rus chose to become the Eastern version of Christendom, opening Russia to Byzantine culture and the Christian world at large, thus early on belying its reputation of a closed civilization. However, lest one forget, Christianity came to Russia from Byzantium, not from Rome. Since the break between the two churches the controversy between Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy remains today.

During the late Soviet period I, a journalist, had the good fortune to speak with Alexis II, the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church, at a historic meeting of eleven heads of the various Eastern churches held in Istanbul. To my question about attempts to mend the millennium-old separation of the Eastern and Western churches and of relations with the Vatican, Alexis said clearly: “We are after all Russians.”

With that background fixed in mind, we leap over centuries of wars and pestilence, the Tatar invasion, serfdom, to the last stages of Tsardom. Prior to the Russian Revolution, the ex-serfs were still linked in an economic vise to the land and large property owners from which they had been officially emancipated. While their desire for their own property plots drove the serfs, the Revolution itself opposed the very idea in the name of collectivization. Collectivization in agriculture was not one of the successes of the new Socialist state because the serfs of this traditionally agricultural land, resisted and wanted their own private plots of land. As a result of collectivization in agriculture, the number of families on the land diminished from 26,000,000 to 21,000,000 which meant that 5,000,000 abandoned the land, (Riasanovsky), some moving to urban areas, others to the Far East or elsewhere. In any case, the price was too high and was never really recovered, contrary to Socialist theory and expectations.

SOVIET KIEV

After centuries of silence, Kiev, as the capital city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, became an agricultural giant and regained some small part of its former luster. The Donbass (the Donetz-Basin) in East Ukraine became a major Soviet industrial center. Populated by “ethnic Russians”, it is today the region of the “rebels”, the “terrorists” in American political lingo, the Russian-Ukrainians who have separated from the Kiev puppet state and without which Kiev cannot survive economically.

Though Kiev was one of Soviet Russia’s most important cities, it was already sinking into provincialism. The second rate glory of THE Ukraine, the “bread basket” of former Soviet Russia, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Especially since the Russian Revolution, the Ukraine has been one thing, Kiev another.

History itself opposes the dream of newfound Kievan glory instigated by the USA. That ahistorical dream is destined to boomerang against the rest of Europe itself. For Russia is present … ever present.

Talk about a battle between East and West for Ukraine’s soul is simply linguistic terminology, and at its worst political propaganda. An impossible quandary. Ukraine (the word means “borderlands”- like, say, New Mexico or Southern California in the USA. Ukraine is a geographical term. As such it has no soul. Only a handful of maverick, sold-out Ukrainians (Borderland Russians or Little Russians as they have long been called) can sell their souls. But not Ukraine itself which would be a contradiction of terms. As discussed above, Ukraine IS Russia. Its people are the original Russians. They are basically the same. Many Great Russians to the East do not recognize this as a historical-geographical-demographical reality. Borderlands have no fixed borders. In that sense it is farcical to even speak of Ukraine’s eastern borders. American imperialistic-military planners as well as West Europeans, do not, can not grasp the real Ukrainian story. How can Americans know when they do not even know exactly where Ukraine is and who its people are? Ukraine’s Nazis and Fascists who collaborated with the German Nazi invaders in WWII do not, can not reflect the real Ukraine.

RUSSIA

Moscow responds to Western economic sanctions with counter-sanctions that already loom dramatic for economies of West Europe, especially the major economies of Germany, France, and Italy. Germany’s industrial exports to Russia amount to 36 billion Euros; and over 400,000 German workers are employed in companies exporting to Russia. The sanctions have cost Italy over $1 billion in lost exports, especially agricultural producers whose crops are already rotting in the fields. Big Italian energy companies, with major investments in Russia, face even bigger losses. With the sanctions Italy’s sick economy has lost any chance for recovery. Spanish farmers stand to lose 158 million Euros from the sanctions against their fresh fruit and nuts, or 22% of their total exports to non-EU countries; Greek farmers will lose 107 million Euros. Spanish meat exporters will lose 111 million Euros.

The West cuts industrial exports to Russia, Russia answers: no more Western automobiles to Russia; we’ll use our own; we’ll also eat our own cheese and drink our own beer. And they will. (I’ve drunk a lot of Russian beer and eaten a lot of Russian cheese and was perfectly satisfied.)

The question ordinary Europeans ask is: Why does Europe not rebel against America’s diktat? And that, dear readers, is a key question. It is true that Europe is in decline and that the future is Asia and elsewhere. Yet Europe is still Europe, the cultural home of many of us, and a continent-market of 450,000,000 persons, who export to and import from Russia. So what Europe does in this circumstance is not secondary.

At the same time many Russians want to be part—even if peripheral—of Europe. Even the old de Gaulle dream of a Europe extending from the Atlantic Ocean to Russia’s Ural Mountains and on to Vladivostok is no longer valid; a renaissance of the European idea and resumption of normal Russo-Europe relations has more economic-cultural-demographic sense than a Europe deprived of Russia and hanging onto America’s coattails.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gaither Stewart regularly writes at the intersection of history, fiction, and his own considerable experience as both writer and citizen of the world. This brings a poignancy to his writing, mixed with the very human struggles of self and relationship that frequently occur at historical crucibles such as WWII, the cold war, western imperialism in Mexico and South America  or the contemporary military chess moves - as in his Europa Trilogy: The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll, and Time of Exile. In Signs of the Time, the reader takes a journey with ordinary people who are each extraordinary in their own way. We see the world through their eyes. This is the gift of Stewart’s art and is amply demonstrated in his fine collection of short stories. Stewart is a former associate editor of The Greanville Post.

A P P E N D I X

Interview with Sergei Glaziev, advisor and friend of President Putin
Facilitated by The Saker

Aug 19, 2014

Interview with Sergei Glaziev (MUST SEE!)

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.