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In this essay I address Russia’s current round of self-defence against the hostile incursions advanced by most of NATO’s 32 countries. The newest NATO country is Finland on the western boundary of Russia. Some would like to see Ukraine become the 33rd NATO country.
NATO’s incursions have grown and proliferated ever since the Cold War ended in 1991. I write as a Canadian who wants to see my country engage in friendly and constructive bilateral relations with Russia, a polity much like ours in many respects.
See this.
In seeking to move beyond the ugly impasse that currently casts Canada and Russia as warring protagonists, I shall explain the rise of an international movement whose enthusiasts seek to counter the antagonisms of the horrific military cataclysms already well underway. The aim of this movement is to help lay the groundwork of peace by studying and emphasizing the deep and vibrant contributions of Russia, a country whose cultural and artistic contributions are inestimable.
Russia and Canada are no. 1 and no. 2 in the world in terms of territorial size. Both polities are enormous in scale. Both have important cities as well as very large expanses of sparsely settled land. Our land base includes long oceanic coastlines that, in Canada’s case especially, are adjacent to massive archipelagoes.
Canada and Russia have neighbouring circumpolar claims to arctic sovereignty at the very top of the world. Not only do we share similar geographies, but Canadians and Russians are both blessed with many rich and diverse natural resources. The people and government of Canada could learn much from Russia by studying how its people, government and corporations are developing its resources to the great advantage of the Eurasian country both domestically and internationally.
Canada is a founding member of the Northern Atlantic Treaty Organization established in 1949 to counter militarily what would become the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The US-led military entity, NATO, has wandered very far from its original mission. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are no more. The Canadian government would be well advised to disentangle itself from the vile US preoccupation with destroying the Russian Federation as if this mission constitutes some sort of left over business from the Cold War.
Put plainly, Russia and Canada share many attributes in common, a phenomenon that can and should form the basis of friendship and close collaboration across many fields of endeavour. For starters, the governments of Russia and Canada share the imperative of finding ways of helping their citizens to live fairly comfortably with some of the most severe winter climates on Earth. The imperative of both surviving and enjoying winter in Canada and Russia is epitomized by our shared prowess and preoccupation with hockey.
The Decline of Canada Under the Drag Queen Obsessions of Justin Trudeau
Canada is becoming a decrepit society in rapid economic and cultural decline. This rapid fall in virtually every measure of economic well being is because of the catastrophically bad and corrupt government of the regime headed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Trudeau Liberals are backed up by a few feckless MP’s like the NDP followers of Jagmeet Singh. Singh’s group continues to bolster the Liberal Party’s longtime minority status in Parliament.
Part of Trudeau’s style of woke subservience to the climate change fraudsters presently dominating the West is manifest in his obsessive punishment of the oil and gas industry centred in Alberta. The citizens of Alberta, the main instigators of the Truckers’ Convoy movement, have consistently withheld giving electoral support to the minority government of the federal Liberals.
Russia’s rapid ascent as the current capital of an economically dynamic multipolar world order, stands in stark contrast to the Trudeau government’s stupor as much of the world passes Canada by. Under Trudeau’s Drag Queen-obsessed guidance, Canada is becoming a totally subservient colony to the imperial cabal that has made Ukraine a primary site for the most rank forms of underground crime.
As is well documented by the prolific West Point graduate, Joachim Hogopian, the criminal activities that thrive in the underground realm of the Ukrainian hotspot include prolific trafficking in child sex slaves and the marketing of their organs once they are used up by predators. The underground finances of the Ukraine crime capital buttress the wealth and power of many Western elites including of the notorious family that embody much of the corruption swirling around the current US President.
See this.
Countering Russophobia with Learned Russophilia
I offer my support to the Congress of the International Movement of Russophiles. This organization recently brought together in Moscow people from 40 countries. These self-declared Russophiles sought to counter the pervasive campaign of Russophobia currently being avidly promoted throughout the West. At the founding event at the Pushkin State Museum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained, “We were ready for sanctions. But we did not expect that athletes, representatives of culture, actors, and journalists would fall under the [censorious] actions.”
The efforts to eliminate the classic literature of the likes of Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov from library shelves and from translation activities has been short sighted and xenophobic at best. At its worst this application of woke cancel culture to some of the great monuments of human literary achievement constitutes artistic vandalism on opioids.
Similar treatment is being meted out to cancel some of the travels and performances of the Bolshoi Ballet. Similarly censorious treatment is being directed at great Russian music compositions and their composers, both living or dead. The targets include the works and the memories of Pytro Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Pyotor Tchaikovsky. Segei Rachmaninoff, and Dmitri Shostavovich, All Targets of Dumbfounding Western Cancel Culture
The wanton censorship of the performances of Russian works of art in many theatres and Philharmonic Orchestra sites across the West is providing a fitting symbol of the arrogance and hubris of the top power brokers aligned in ruthless schemes of war for the self-aggrandizement of a tiny elite of over-entitled kleptocrats. Especially noteworthy is the aggressive cancel culture pointed in Milan, Paris and New York against the great Russian conductor Valery Gergiev. Designated by UNESCO in 2003 as an Artist for Peace, Maestro Gergiev was found to be guilty for refusing to condemn the policies and leadership of Vladimir Putin.
See this.
Archbishop Vigano enthusiastically supported the first session in Moscow on 14 March, 2023 of the International Movement of Russophiles. In introducing the subject, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America asserted,
We cannot be surprised that, after de-Christianizing the Western world, this elite considers Russia an enemy to be overthrown. The Russian Federation undeniably stands as the last bastion of civilization against barbarism, and gathers around it all those nations that do not intend to submit to the colonization of NATO, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and that heap of foundations that have as their purpose the indoctrination of the masses, the manipulation of information, the creation of “colored springs” to destabilize governments legitimately elected and sow chaos, wars and misery as instrumentum regni. The recent pandemic farce – conducted with criminal methods that I have not hesitated to denounce since the beginning of 2020 – has been followed by new emergencies – including the Ukrainian crisis – deliberately provoked with the aim of destroying the social and economic fabric of nations, decimating the world population, concentrating control in the hands of an oligarchy that no one has elected and that has perpetrated a real world coup d’état, for which sooner or later it will be called to answer before the world.
The theorists of this coup have names and faces, starting with George Soros, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates. Those who today declare that Russia is an enemy consider Europeans, Americans, Australians and Canadians as enemies and treat them as such, persecuting and impoverishing them. But while World Economic Forum emissaries in Western governments can legislate against the good of their own citizens and hold world leaders in the palm of their hands, regime change that has been successful in other nations has stopped at Russia’s borders.
See this.
The founding members of the International Movement of Russophiles include Sergey Lavrov, Hollywood Actor Steven Seagall, Charles De Gaulle’s son, Pierre, Russian scholar and philosopher Alexander Dugin, Bulgarian Russophile Nikolai Malinov, Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, and Italian Princess Vittoria Alliata de Villafranca.
See this.
I count myself fortunate to have spent time with several of these distinguished figures most recently at the New Horizon Conference that took place in Beirut in September of 2019.
The Leningrad Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich
Seen in this light, the Ukrainian role in the current debacle is being organized under the auspices of President Volodymyr Zelensky [who is of Russian Jewish descent]. Zelensky is a comedic actor brought to power by the show biz antics of his billionaire handler, Igor Kolomoisky. The Zelensky operation involves the ruthless human sacrifice of Ukrainians on an enormous scale. The real aim of the murderous enterprise is not to protect Ukraine but to provide the pretext for the invasion and destruction of Russia as we have known it.
One means of defending Russia at this stage can be as simple as setting aside some time and energy to deepen one’s knowledge and understanding of the role played by gifted Russian artists, scholars and authors in the edification of humanity’s civilizational heritage. For my initial step along these lines, I have chosen to listen to and observe the making of music by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich lived most of his life as a Russian citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, otherwise known as the USSR or the Soviet Union for short.
I have devoted most of my study so far to Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. This musical composition is deeply bound up with the German Armed Forces 900-day siege of Leningrad, a military action thought to have killed millions between 1941 and 1944. Initiated by the Army Group North, this siege was the first dramatic offensive in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by the National Socialist government led by Adolph Hitler.
Siege of Leningrad, 1941 to 1943
I listened to Shostakovich’s inspired Seventh Symphony playing close attention to an incredible variety of musical renditions which seemed almost jazz-like in one instance. Shostakovich moved smoothly between symphonic amalgams of all the orchestra’s instruments into solo interludes by, for instance, a gifted flute player as well as two maestros of the harp. The Russian orchestra was conducted by none other than Valery Gergiev, an embodiment of the effort to extend the war on Russia to the demonization and cancellation of the country’s most accomplished artists.
Shostakovich began in 1941 the composition of his Seventh Symphony in his hometown of Leningrad, the site of the former and current St. Petersburg. The Leningrad symphony was famously performed in Leningrad on 9 August, 1942 during the height of the siege. With Shostakovich’s friend, Karl Eliasberg, conducting, the symphony was performed however minimally by fifteen surviving local musicians. In June and July of 1942 the Symphony had already been performed by 100-person orchestras in New York and London. Both performances aroused thundering applause and fantastic reviews that lauded Shostakovich’s masterpiece as a stirring response to fascism.
In the eyes of many Soviet citizens the composition and performance of the Seventh Symphony immediately became a call to defiance; an instigation to mobilize in order to halt and push back against the armed invasion of National Socialism. Moreover, German soldiers who listened to the performance on a city-wide PA system throughout Leningrad are said to have been deeply touched even as they lost heart to continue the conquest. With tears in their eyes, many German soldiers realized the intensity of resistance among a captive population capable, nevertheless, of mounting such a bold musical response even in the face of such a murderous assault on Russia’s westernmost metropolis.
IS NATO Carrying the Legacy of Fascist Tendencies Inherited from World War II?
Is Russia being called upon to face down fascism militarily for the second time in its history? This question deserves serious discussion. The question resonates with particularly strange echoes here in Canada.
Canada’s equivalent to martial law was invoked between 14 Feb. and 23 Feb. 2022. During this period, police violence was unleashed against consistently peaceful protestors on Parliament Hill. This police assault was combined with the actions of financial institutions that, under federal direction, seized many of the Truckers’ bank accounts without any judicial oversight whatsoever. Then on 24 Feb., the day after the termination of Canada’s Emergency Act, Russian Armed Forces entered Ukraine to achieve the stated objectives of “demilitarization” and “denazification.” The Russian government was responding to Ukraine’s steady military assault on the Russian-speaking majority in the Donbas region together with its encirclement in the West by hostile NATO members.
The Russian emphasis on denazifying Ukraine unfolded after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau together with those employed in his propaganda apparatus discovered a couple of oddly placed Nazi flags at the Truckers’ parking protest in Ottawa. Some asserted they had reason to believe that the flags were maliciously planted. Often such icons are planted with the goal of preventing peaceful protestors with attractive messages from gaining positive responses from the public. The Prime Minister took the smear campaign further, basically accusing in Parliament all members of the opposition Conservative Party of being in league with Nazi operatives and sympathizers.
Like other Western leaders, Trudeau and especially his Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, were by that time already deeply enmeshed as friends and supporters of neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian government. In the course of the engineered Maiden protests of 2013-14, this new government was dubiously ushered into power by US power brokers. The prominence of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi faction is a legacy of the Second World War, when many Ukrainians sided with the National Socialist Waffen SS against the Godless communists of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Many post-1945 Ukrainian immigrants to Canada as well as some of their descendants continue to share Hitlerian sympathies. These Canadian citizens of Ukrainian ancestry are regularly courted by all parties for votes in swing ridings. Many like Chyrstia Freeland continue to channel their fascist heritage and sensibilities by identifying themselves as Ukrainian nationalists in the traditions established by Stepan Bandera.
Trudeau apparently thought nothing of smearing all the Conservative Party MPs as people who stand with the swastika and then jetting off to Ukraine to continue his close relations with many government officials whose National Socialist proclivities are well known. These officials include Svbode leader, Andriy Parubiy. They also are well represented among the leadership of the Right Sector as well as the Azov Battalion.
The insignia on uniforms inherited from Heinrich Himmler’s Galatian SS tell much of the story.
Trudeau and his entourage revisited Ukraine in May of 2022. The cost to Canadian tax payers of helping to train and equip the partly fascist elements of the Ukrainian police and Armed Forces must by now must have significantly surpassed $ 1 billion.
See this.
Of course any effort to definitively distinguish guilt from innocence, virtue from opportunism, among the various antagonists in World War II is a very tall order indeed. That complex process is well beyond the scope of this essay although a recent development merits some attention in these times of rapid disclosure. Surely the sanctity of lessons from the Holocaust has been cast in new light given the recent revelation that the Nuremberg Code, a product of the Doctors’ Trial, was completely disregarded during the WHO-declared pandemic.
The Nuremberg Code of 1947 is very insistent that medical experiments on human subjects cannot go forward without their well-informed consent and without subjecting them to coercion. Quite clearly neither of these conditions were applied in the insertion of 15 billion jabs injected into well over half of the world’s entire human population.
This failure by virtually all authorities, including those in Israel, to honour the legacy of the apprehended medical atrocity during the Second World War cannot help but introduce a host new question marks. These questions inevitably touch upon the authenticity of a narrative should have been put front and centre as a result of the Russian government’s intention to denazify Ukraine.
Is it not a classic display of fascistic muscle flexing to deploy NATO in a scheme to destroy Russia and appropriate its resources by the forces seeking to maintain and extend the dominant international status of the US dollar? How widespread in the West is the hypocrisy of Justin Trudeau who thinks nothing of deploying the swastika to discredit his political opponents even as he simultaneously embraces the legacy of National Socialism in Ukraine as a weapon to eliminate Russia, one of the world’s great civilizational bastions of artistic, economic, philosophic and political creativity.
A Return to Hockey Games and Ping Pong Matches as We Adapt to the Multipolar World
I do not recall a single instance where the question of war or peace between Canada and Russia has been put before my fellow citizens as a legitimate issue for widespread public discourse. Canadians, rather, were simply informed by public authorities of all kinds that Canada was suddenly at war with Russia and that this conflict is fair, wise and appropriate. I have yet to hear a single voice raised in Parliament demanding answers to the question of what Canadians stand to gain by making Russia our enemy.
Indeed, I see almost nothing happening in the Parliament of Canada from any of the lockstep political parties presenting the stuff or vigorous debate on most of the big global issues we are facing in these unprecedented times. By and large Canada’s Parliament in a woke desert of timid conformity while most of the big decisions are largely imported from, for instance, Davos and Geneva.
The legacy media is apparently in charge of inflicting uniformity on politicians of all stripes wishing to be elected or re-elected to serve in our increasingly useless legislatures all over the world. The legacy media prescribes what can and can’t be talked about thus rendering most of our politicians as glorified actors confined to reading scripts written for them by functionaries serving well-resourced lobbies. The Russian Federation’s Vladimir Putin is one of the major exceptions to this sad rule of political conduct.
Whether one likes or dislikes his positions, Putin serves to remind us that it is still possible for a prominent world leader to leave the teleprompter and speak extemporaneously with clarity, insight and erudition about many important subjects often simultaneously. Putin serves to remind us what we don’t get from most of our own highly-scripted politicians who mostly confine their communication efforts to delivering the goods that come from the highest bidders for government favours.
I end with a plea to my fellow Canadians that we should seriously discuss leaving NATO, an organization that has long since left behind its task of defending the North Atlantic region. Indeed, the North Atlantic region is being put at peril as a result of NATO’s Eurasian adventures.
Why should the citizens of Canada and the other NATO countries agree to go along with facilitating the US domination of Eurasia and Asia? Why buck the inevitability of adapting to the emergence of a multipolar world of peaceful interactions not subject to the horrors of nuclear war with the capacity to multiply worldwide the present suffering of Ukrainians by a million times over? As we move in this direction let’s consider revisiting those gripping hockey matches between our best hockey players, professional or not, in Russia and in Canada. And what about a return to the ping pong matches between the USA and China that proved so exciting in 1971?
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Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
