By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Russian laughter has weaponised – and that’s no joke.

Nor is it new. This month is the 185^th anniversary of the first stage performance of The Government Inspector (Ревизор, Revizor), the work launching the fame of its author Nikolai Gogol. The laughter which the play, then the book drew from May 1, 1836, was followed by this autobiographical acknowledgement from Gogol six years later, when his equally famous book, Dead Souls  (Мёртвые души, Myortvyi dushi),  appeared.

“Lofty ecstatic laughter,” Gogol said, “is quite worthy of taking its place beside the loftiest lyrical gust and…it has nothing in common with the faces a mountebank makes. The judgement of [the author’s] time does not admit this and will twist everything into reproof and abuse directed against the unrecognised writer; deprived of assistance, response and sympathy, he will remain, like some homeless traveller alone on the road. Grim will be his career and bitterly will he realise his utter loneliness.”

Against US warmakers like President Dementia (старый маразматик  “Old Marismatic”  ) and the Blin-Noodle Gang, Chancellor Merkel,  Prime Minister Johnson, and their president-in-waiting-for-Russia, Alexei Navalny, Russian joke-making is a weapon against which the allies have nothing comparable, no counter-measure. Exceptional Gogol believed Russians to be, compared to Germans, French, British,  or Americans. Exceptionalist the latter believe themselves to be, compared to Russians. Still, the one uniquely exceptional weapon Russians wage in war is their laughter at their enemies. The others caricature or cartoon the Russians, but they hate too earnestly, so they can’t laugh at them.

The pranksters Alexei Stolyarov (lead image, right) and Vladimir Kuznetsov (left) – Lexus and Vovan are their respective stage names — explain that making jokes at the expense of those in power inside Russia had been worth doing until war was declared against Russia. Now, they say,  their jokes aim at laughing at those who are much worse.   Gogol didn’t get so far.

by Editor - Sunday, May 9th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When Alexei Navalny and his aides met in Germany in January with the US, British and German intelligence services, they agreed that Navalny would cease to be what he imagines himself to be, the front-running candidate for president of Russia, if he followed Boris Berezovsky and  Mikhail Khodorkovsky into permanent exile abroad. The agents also reminded Navalny that his two predecessors could count on more of their own personal cash to pay for the standard of living and attention to which they were accustomed, than Navalny could.  On account of his vanity and their cash, they had Navalny over a barrel.

So return to Russia he must, they decided. They also agreed that if that happened, Navalny would go to jail.

Navalny was assured that if he could accept that, the western allies would do their best, as publicly as possible, to make his stay in prison as politically powerful as possible – and shorter than Khodorkovsky’s ten years.  Navalny was complimented that President Joseph Biden, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised personally to say his name aloud,  not to mention the leaders of Estonia, Lithuania,  Latvia, and Australia, whose names and influence Navalny esteemed less. Turning the courtroom and then his jail cell into Navalny’s new political platform, he was convinced, was the necessary new stage since Operation NOVICHOK and Operation PUTIN PALACE were fizzling out.

Not for the first time, Navalny has miscalculated.

by Editor - Monday, May 3rd, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

by Editor - Friday, April 30th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

At the conclusion of their most recent meeting in Tehran on April 13, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (lead image, right) said of his Iranian counterpart, “we have held good talks with my friend, Foreign Minister of Iran Mohammad Javad Zarif [left], in a traditionally trustful and friendly atmosphere”. Lavrov didn’t know that, a few days earlier, Zarif had told an Iranian interviewer in a confidential tape-recording that there was nothing trustful or even friendly about his attitude towards the Russians, especially Lavrov.

According to Zarif, whose remarks leaked to the New York Times and other media on the weekend, “Russia did not want the agreement to succeed and ‘put all its weight’ behind creating obstacles because it was not in Moscow’s interests for Iran to normalize relations with the West.” To that end, Zarif claimed on tape, “General [of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem] Soleimani traveled to Russia to ‘demolish our achievement’, meaning the nuclear deal.” 

If that is what Zarif said, and that was all he said about Russia, and about Soleimani’s trips to Moscow in 2015-2016, Zarif is lying.

by Editor - Tuesday, April 27th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In a few days’ time,  it will the 91st  anniversary of the first appearance in print of Jules Maigret, who began his first case as a detective chief inspector of the Paris Flying Squad, and was later promoted to  Commissaire de Police Judiciaire; in his day that was the senior detective supervising crime investigations throughout the city.

It will also be the anniversary of my reading the 75^th and very last of the Maigret books by Georges Simenon.  Between the first, published on May 26, 1930, and the last, published in 1972, forty-two years elapsed; they included World War II; the Korean War; two Vietnam Wars; the Algerian war; three Israel-Arab wars;   three India-Pakistan wars; and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Simenon ignored every one; Maigret never read, thought, or said a word about them.

If Maigret was politically partisan, it was only slightly in favour of the FBI; slightly against Scotland Yard; the Belgian, Dutch, German, and Italian police he treated as ciphers.  He dealt with only one Russian character, to whom Simenon gave the first name Vladimir but omitted the second. He had been a cadet in the imperial Russian Navy; during the civil war he was on the losing White side, and ended up a nondescript in French exile.

Everybody in the Maigret stories is a nondescript to varying degrees, especially Maigret himself. As a magazine for London intellectuals once reported, Maigret was “one of literature’s most exceptional characters. Or, rather, one of literature’s most unexceptional characters: the most exceptional unexceptional.”  

by Editor - Monday, April 26th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

It has been 46 years since the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon. Not since then have US  forces under the direction of the State Department suffered such a defeat in the face of superior defending military force. Until these days.

by Editor - Thursday, April 22nd, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is the slogan of a global movement with which we agree;  and with which those who disagree don’t dare to say in public – in many places because it is a crime to say so.

Australian Lives Don’t Matter (ALDM) is a slogan no one dares to say although it is Australian state policy. On the 106^th anniversary of ANZAC Day later this week, the country and its officials will celebrate the policy which, beginning over nine months of an attempted invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula of Turkey (then Ottoman Empire) between February 1915 and January 1916,  killed 8,709 and wounded 19,441, for a casualty total of 28,150.

By contrast, over the past year, from February to December 2020, as direct result of the coronavirus pandemic, there were 909 Australian deaths and a total of 24,408 casualty cases.  In addition, approximately 50,000 Australians were liquidated abroad; that’s to say, forbidden by the government in Canberra to return to the country and their homes; they were officially classified as  constitutionally dead. Total casualty rate, 74,408.

The casualty rate per hundred thousand of the national population for the ANZAC campaign in 1915 was 563; the casualty rate per hundred thousand for the COVID-19 campaign in 2020 was 286.   

The national sacrifice for state policy on COVID-19 was three times more numerous in Australian lives than for ANZAC. Converted to the comparable rate per civilian life, it was half as bad. The state policy is the same, unchanged.  What has happened in the interval is that the last line in the Ode to the fallen of 1915, repeated at every annual ANZAC memorial service, turns out to be false:  

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.   

In point of fact we don’t. Not only have we forgotten, but we keep repeating the lie of state policy.

by Editor - Monday, April 19th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Russia-hating Russians have long made a business of selling their bile to Americans with a  profit that makes Israel-hating Jews, Greece-hating Greeks,  and Cecil Rhodes-hating South Africans quite envious, though not quite as lucratively as Russia-hating Ukrainians have been selling since they lost the last war in Europe.    

Sergei Lebedev (lead image, right) — “arguably the best of Russia’s younger writers” says a British historian with a history of regime-changing opinions – is doing well at this business. With a blurb endorsement by Anne Applebaum as “one of Russia’s most interesting young novelists”, and a translation into English by the former chief executive of the Soros Foundation in the Soviet Union, Lebedev’s place is assured in the market for information warfare against Russia.

His book, released in Russian as Дебютант (synonym Новичок, “Novichok”) by the Eksmo publishing group in 2020, was published in English this past February as “Untraceable”; the publisher is Head of Zeus. Eksmo, the beneficiary of Lebedev’s book sales in Russian,  is owned by Arkady Rotenberg, one of the better known friends of President Vladimir Putin who is sanctioned by the US. Head of Zeus is a branch of IPG, an international book distributor based in Chicago.  The book is the latest reprise of the CIA’s and MI6’s Nobel Prize-winning OPERATION BARRY PARSNIP (Boris Pasternak).   

by Editor - Sunday, April 18th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The release by the Dutch prosecutors of their presentations last week in the MH17 trial before The Hague District Court reveal the extent of the incompetence and negligence of the two Dutch lawyers paid by Moscow for the defence – Sabine ten Doesschate (lead image, centre) and Boudewjin van Eijck (right). The two lawyers, whose previous experience of criminal defence trials has been limited to defending the Dutch police, are keeping secrets which not even the prosecutors are concealing now.

by Editor - Sunday, April 18th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Dutch Government’s  trial of the Russian Government for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 reached new lows on Thursday when it was revealed in court that the US Government continues to conceal the satellite evidence alleged to show a BUK missile firing at the aircraft; that the release on Dutch television of thousands of telephone taps of one of the  Russian soldiers accused of the shoot-down was the work of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU)  and by a source among the Dutch police and prosecutors;  and, finally, that an investigating judge has decided in secret to prevent any cross-examination of the Dutch government experts responsible for reports allegedly proving the prosecution’s case.

That investigating judge was acknowledged in court yesterday to be playing a more decisive  role than the president of the trial, District Court judge Henrik Steenhuis. Her name is being kept a state secret.

by Editor - Thursday, April 15th, 2021
No Comments »