Russian and American patriotism (video)

Joe Bendel (Libertas Film Magazine)

Russians were apparently better 1950's style all-American US patriots.

Even though he was badly hung-over, he knew there was a national crisis. Though the bleary-eyed Russian did not know at the time the hard line Communist coup had deposed Mikhail Gorbachev, he saw that Swan Lake was the only program on television. For some reason, the Soviets always broadcasted the Tchaikovsky ballet during periods of internal turmoil. It is telling details like this that connect the personal to the grandly historical in Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, which screened earlier this year at New Directors/New Films.

A Russophile in high school, Hessman was working for LENFILM, the Soviet film agency based in what was then Leningrad, at the time of the infamous coup. Through her time working and studying in Russia, Hessman developed a keen appreciation for the stoic nobility of average Russian citizens, which is clearly reflected in Perestroika. Using five former classmates as representative everymen, Hessman subjectively presents the last 40-some years of Russian and Soviet history through their reminiscences and home movies. More

Why are we in Afghanistan?

A haunting question so difficult to explain is, Why are we in Afghanistan? Why would the US military be willing to spend a trillion dollars or more in this region? Four trillion are estimated as the cost of current US wars.

• What does the US military-industrial complex, the American Empire, want with it?
• What did the Soviet Empire (USSR) want with it when the CIA was fighting them by funding the Taliban?
• What did the British Empire want with India's Northwest Frontier Area (now Afghanistan and Pakistan)?
• What did the Greek (Bactrian or or Greco-Indian) Empire?

One incredible story in the EU Times describes a wrecked "time machine" embedded in the ground and a labyrinth of underground military bases. That would certainly accord with Buddhist cosmology of ancient astronauts and alien visitation in the region from Sumer (Mt. Sumeru?) to the Hindu Kush range to the Himalayas.



Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald explain the "invisible history" of how the American Empire and previous empires have tried to conquer and rule what we now call Afghanistan. This Zero Line region (squeezed between Iran and Pakistan and topped by former Soviet states now independent "Fill in the Blank-istan" countries) in Central Asia is collectively and loosely called the "Geopolitical Middle East."

Today (listen at Audio Archives, KPFK.org, July 1, 2011, 10:00 AM) on the Michael Slate Show (Pacifica Radio) author Larry Everest provided a brief but compelling explanation of why Obama-CIA and Bush-Cheney before that have had to gain control of Afghanistan at all costs.

• Larry Everest: Afghanistan, NOT a Good War Gone Bad
• Larry Everest: Oil, Power and Empire
• Joyce Riley: Who is Larry Everest?

Control was wrested away from the Soviets, but this has simply been the unbroken rule of the British. This may sound preposterous unless we understand that today's clandestine services around the world (from the CIA, NSA, Mossad, etc.) are structured and headed by Mi6.

• Europeans in India - Greeks (Yavanas) to British
• The First European Involvement in India (p. 348)
  
• A Himalayan Foothills Retreat