It is my *huge* pleasure to share with you an analysis written by American Kulak. I got it a few days ago exactly as he describes: no questions, no warnings, no heads-up, nothing but the article itself. I *love* this "just do it" approach as it makes it easy for all sides to make good things happen. And good his piece really is. When I read it the first time I was absolutely delighted. Not only was this first-rate analysis, it was also "deep". AK draws an absolutely correct and spiritually valid parallel between Scotland and Novorussia and I can confirm that Russian history also records the ancient events AK mentions. And, of course, any mention of the past of Europe when it was truly united into one Christian world by such figures as Saint Andrew, Saint Patrick, Saint Ambrose, Saint Martin (the Pope), Saint Bede or Saint Gregory and many others is dear to my heart and I rejoice each time their real lives are remembered in the West (and not only during Saint Patrick parades!).
I hope that American Kulak will contribute more articles to this blog on this immensely interesting and important topic or on any other topic he wants to look into.
Enjoy and kind regards to all,
The Saker
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by American Kulak
This is my first contribution as a guest to the Saker’s blog and hopefully will not be the last. It is submitted in the spirit of the Saker’s admonition ‘if you want to do something [constructive to this online global community], just do it!’
My topic today is the Anglo-American or Western media’s increasing unease if not outright opposition to the looming independence vote in Scotland, where credible polling shows the momentum is clearly increasing behind a ‘YES’ vote for secession. A ‘NO’ vote in this case would mean the continuation of the United Kingdom and the union between Scotland, England and Wales passed by the English parliament in 1706 and ratified by the Scottish parliament of 1707.
Although many in the ‘Better Together’ campaign against Scottish secession have insisted in recent days that Scotland can receive more autonomy and control over its local tax revenues while still retaining the economic and military benefits of staying in the UK (this will sound familiar to those Saker readers who are reading Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s boasting that Novorossiya will remain in Ukraine and his government will not cede on square meter of 1922 Bolshevik ‘gifted’ ‘Ukrainian land’), it appears that hope is weak sauce. Fear of economic disruption or of long term subversion of the (Atlanticist, read what Saker calls ‘Anglo-Zionist’) European project is already being ramped up as the pro-unity forces in London and Brussels become more desperate.
On the one hand, Scotland’s push to secede has very little to do with the war in Ukraine and for Novorossiya. On the other hand they seem to have every bit to do with it because Catalan, Basque, northern Italian, and even Novorossiyan independence supporters are all backing Scottish independence on social media like Facebook and Twitter. The lone exception I’ve identified thus far being Graham W. Phillips, the British reporter who was expelled from Ukraine after being held hostage by the Kiev regime who slipped back across the border into Lugansk. Mr. Phillips identifies himself both as a supporter of Novorossiya and a Scotland-born British patriot, seeing no contradiction between the two. Graham remains opposed to Scottish secession and has expressed his opposition on his Twitter feed.
In spiritual and symbolic terms, there is indeed a connection between Novorossiya’s flag and that of Scotland -- the ancient cross of St. Andrew which is called the saltire or Scottish flag, a white X cross on dark blue. This flag also makes up Scotland’s contribution to ‘the Union Jack’ which mixes Scottish blue with the red of England’s St. George’s cross. St. Andrew the Apostle according to ancient Christian tradition dating to the undivided, pre-1054 Schism Church stretching from Ireland’s County Kerry in the West to Kiev in the East and Ethiopia and India to the South preached the Gospel from Spain all the way to the Greek-colonized Scythian lands that later converted to Orthodox Christianity under the Rus Prince Vladimir near what is today Kherson in Ukraine. The Holy Apostle Andrew according to tradition was martyred in Achaia (modern day Greece) on an X-shaped cross, because like St. Peter who died in Rome on an upside down Cross Andrew did not consider himself worthy to be crucified in the same manner as the Lord Jesus Christ. The X also corresponds to the Latin numeral for ten which in Biblical numerology derived from the ancient Hebrews represents the Ten Commandments God gave the ancient Israelites on Mount Sinai, symbolizing God’s Holy Law.
Today the St. Andrew’s cross is visible in the red and blue battle flag of Novorossiya seen on the shoulder patches of the Donbas soldiers, and on the naval ensign of the Russian Federation which flies over Sevastopol. This symbolism has not been lost on the Empire’s more clever shills. Indeed, when Novorossiya first debuted its flag two months ago paying tribute to both St. Andrew and the Anglo-Scottish industrialists who founded Donetsk as a coal-mining center in the 18th century Russian Empire, there was a great deal of snark on Twitter about it resembling the battle flag of the Confederate States of America (CSA). The snarkists, of course, having no idea about the St. Andrew’s heraldry preceding the CSA by centuries and inspiring the Scots-Irish settlers of the American South who chose it as their battle flag and whose war-like settler/soldier traditions were highlighted in former US Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb’s folk history, Born Fighting.
While there are many Saker readers who maintain that absolutely no geopolitical shifts can take place without a full consensus among the globalist Western elites that Saker refers to collectively as the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ empire and whose confabs at Bilderberg, Davos, and the recent NATO summit in Wales are well documented, the increasingly shrill propaganda directed against Scottish independence suggests otherwise. The BBC in particular has led the charge against a ‘YES’ vote, calling into question its phoney pretense to objectivity and highlighting ‘Auntys’ total subservience to the British Deep State. But the BBC and other British media have to be careful not to excessively offend their Scottish audiences. Meanwhile, American and Atlanticist ‘think tank’ agitprop against the Scots has often been crude and pathetic.
The online magazine Business Insider (which the Washington-based independent investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has linked to a smear campaign run against Madsen in mid-2013 by an ex-National Security Agency officer named John R. Schindler) recently ran an article claiming the departure of British nuclear ballistic missile and attack submarines from their base at Faslane, Scotland could leave the peninsula open to a Russian invasion. The article was widely panned in BI’s comments section as ridiculous propaganda. [http://www.businessinsider.com/scottish-independence-and-russian-submarine-invasion-2014-8]
The former London-based Henry Jackson Society neoconservative front man Michael D. Weiss, who now runs the pro-Kiev propaganda site The Interpreter Mag, tweeted “if Scotland secedes, then Europe can expect to see a foreign-policy Venezuela created overnight on the North Sea. Putin will rejoice.” [https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/508962026690187264]
Not surprisingly considering their overlap on issues of anti-Russian foreign policy, NSA surveillance, and other matters, Weiss tweets a link to a more Business Insider article warning that Scotland will have to win ‘four bets’ to avoid being doomed to poverty as an independent state. [https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/508961378678214656]
The World Affairs Journal, the bimonthly publication of the ‘former’ Central Intelligence Agency operative run quasi-NGO Freedom House, published an article by former Time magazine journalist Roland Flamini titled “European Disunion: Cameron, the EU and the Scots” which concluded with the lament: “If separatism triumphs in the referendum, David Cameron will be remembered as the prime minister who lost Scotland. He also faces the further prospect of being the man who led Britain out of the European Union.” [http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/european-disunion-cameron-eu-and-scots]
Note the prominent use of the word ‘separatism’ which has become a dirty word in Atlanticist circles since the Novorossiya uprising began in March. The same September/October issue of World Affairs Journal featured Peter Pomeranstev saying, “The channel [RT] has its fans in the West and has been nominated for an Emmy for its reporting on the Occupy movement in America. And it’s not just the left that’s applauding. Nigel Farage of the right-wing non-parliamentary [not for long - American Kulak] UK Independence Party is regularly featured in its newscasts.” Farage of course has been a vocal critic of the EU’s relentless eastward expansion, which he has blamed for sparking the Ukraine crisis and antagonizing Russia. Farage also believes the EU’s policies towards Romania and Bulgaria have led to an influx of impoverished job seekers from these countries at a time when the UK is already facing high unemployment and is one of the most crowded countries in Europe.
[http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/yes-russia-matters-putin%E2%80%99s-guerrilla-strategy]
The connection between Farage, who has half-heartedly campaigned for the ‘No’ side in Scotland this past week, and the Scottish secession vote isn’t clear. Except when one considers that Scotland’s secession will weaken the British Labour Party’s position in parliament, thereby allowing more Tories to split with their EUrocrat leadership and defect to UKIP. But the broader concern for the Empire’s ideologists is that Russia sympathizes with almost any group of European nationalists who wish to deviate from the NATO or EU party line, and European nationalists from Hungary to Greece are returning the favor by empathizing with Russia’s position on Crimea and the Donbas. It is noteworthy, for example, by its absence that Anglo-American media are not interested in reporting the foreign fighters fighting for Novorossiya, including a half dozen French veterans of combat in Afghanistan and Chad [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1suDxke9jBQ], nor in interviewing the Swedish Nazi Mikael Skillt fighting for the openly Nazi Wolsfangel-armband-wearing Azov Battalion. The BBC did do one report that curiously even mentioned Novorossiya Armed Forces’ (NAF) allegations that Polish military contractors are fighting for Ukraine, a charge the Polish government denies, but this story was the exception that proved the rule. The internationalization of the Novorossiya war, the possibility that it could become a second Spanish Civil War if it drags on for months or years, is not something either Washington or London wishes their propaganda outlets to emphasize. Why? Perhaps Mr. Pomerantsev’s essay provides a clue.
After getting in his digs at Mr. Farage from his perch in London, Mr. Pomerantsev like many Russian liberals (who some Russians like Mark Sleboda refer to as liberasts for a perennial pedestal-lization of the West dating back to the late 19th century St. Petersburg liberals lampooned by Dostoevsky [https://twitter.com/MarkSleboda1/status/508675733489995776]) gets to the heart of his complaint about Russia’s support for nationalist parties dissenting from Anglo-American Empire politics in the West. That complaint is that the Kremlin is trying to cast doubt on whether it is Washington or Moscow that maintains ‘Captive Nations’:
“It is no accident that a recurring feature of RT programs is conspiracy theories, ranging from tales of the Bilderberg Group to lurid reporting on how Western media cover up their governments’ crimes. Appealing to the conspiracy mind-set (read: anti-Washington, anti-Anglo-American empire, and anti-central banking) reinforces the Kremlin’s underlying message that the Western model of democratic capitalism is a failure and a sham [hence the urgency with which people like Pomerantsev invoke Western economic ‘recovery’ from the crash of 2008 and the myth that the US and EU could crush the Russian economy with sanctions if they but had the will to do so]. In a recent paper titled “The Conspiratorial Mindset in an Age of Transition [transition to what, Eurocrats?], which looked at the rise of conspiracy theories in France, Hungary, and Slovakia, a team of researchers from leading European think tanks showed how supporters of the far-right parties the Kremlin supports in Europe are also the ones most prone to believing in conspiracies [read: any facts or events outside or parallel to the Anglo-American led media Narrative, like the evidence that Ukrainian forces shot down MH17], and that this factor was becoming more pronounced as trust in the power of national governments is eroded by globalization [read: people don’t trust governments that have completely handed over the people’s sovereignty to banker-led globalists by design] and populations turn to outlandish theories to explain crises [meaning Westerners no longer believe the mainstream media explanations or cheery economic numbers, but believe ‘their lying eyes’ that things are deteriorating culturally and economically across the Western world].”
Another article in the same issue, hidden behind a pay wall, written by Woodrow Wilson International Center scholar Alina Polyakova, laments “Strange Bedfellows: Putin and Europe’s Far Right”. [http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/strange-bedfellows-putin-and-europe%E2%80%99s-far-right ] In the portion of the article that isn’t pay-walled, Polyakova confidently calls Marine Le Pen and the Front Nacional in France “a far right party”, despite Le Pen now drawing more support from likely voters than current French President Francois Hollande if run-off elections were held this week. [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6ecbb6c4-34d5-11e4-aa47-00144feabdc0.html]. Ms. Le Pen for her part has deflected the ‘radical right wing/fascist’ charges by appealing to socialist voters with calls for the preservation of France’s social welfare state, and insisting France can no longer remain a poodle of US foreign policy when it comes to Russia {her real crime in the eyes of the same Atlanticists who constantly downplay the anti-EU fascist elements in Ukraine so long as their members are fighting Russia’s proxies in Donbas]. She has also tied her anti-immigration and ‘France out of the EU’ positions to the defense of French secular values in the face of Islamism and EU political correctness, appealing to both the left and the right.
In the most telling sign that Ms. Le Pen believes she can win the presidency of France, she has even sent FN representatives to Israel to distance herself and the party from her father’s anti-Israel views, openly courting the votes of French Jews. It is of course, no accident that Ms. Le Pen is gaining support across the French political spectrum, if only as a protest candidate, while the US government is fining France’s BNP Paribas to the tune of $10 billion and trying to block the sale of the Mistral warships to Russia. Gaullism whether left or right wing is stirred up when French banks are used as Washington’s doormat and the creaky financial stability of France is put at risk by Washington and Brussels’ fanatical attachment to keeping the impoverished Greek, Spanish and Portuguese economies trapped in the euro straight jacket.
Perhaps in the back of their minds, the Empire’s ‘political technologists’ still hold that old bugbear of anti-Communism in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, the domino theory. If Scotland successfully votes to secede from the UK, and Britain’s pound sterling and banks take a beating in the subsequent fallout. With Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank and other rotten derivatives-stuffed houses on the brink, the dominoes of rotten financial and political structures start to tumble across Europe. After Scotland, comes Catalonia. After Catalonia departs as the richest and most innovative part of Spain, the Spanish cry ‘no mas’ to continued Depression era levels of unemployment. The Lombards and Venetians move to more than symbolic independence. The Greeks, spurred by the Spanish example, finally throw out their austerity imposing eurocrat Quisling overlords, if necessary exiling Greek ‘technocrats’ with charges of massive financial fraud and embezzlement. Portugal’s too big to fail banks led by Espiritu Santu are finally allowed to fail, with rumors about the solvency of French and German banks including the aforementioned BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank running wild.
The secession of Scotland is going to bring home awkward questions of identity to Britons: what does England now stand for, besides total subservience to Washington in return for ‘a seat at the table’ and a bloated financial sector in the City of London? What does it mean to be English in an age of open borders and mass immigration? How can English identity be preserved even if the faces or colors of those holding to the ideals that made the British Empire successful change, when so many young Muslim men are rejecting the UK’s diseased postmodern values in favor of fighting for ISIS in Syria?
On this side of the Atlantic, the question will continue to be where does the USA go from here as the cries for regionalism, Southern and Western state government defiance of Washington’s executive orders, and increasingly assertive ethnic identities roil the USA in places like predominantly black Ferguson, Missouri or an increasingly Mexican Los Angeles ruled over by a shrinking white elite? On the topic of immigration, for example, Texas is placing its National Guard troops on the border with some Texan lawmakers denouncing President Obama’s ‘executive actions’ on the non-deportation of undocumented Mexican migrants as unconstitutional, and thereby null and void. Meanwhile, California’s governor is basically nullifying the southern border through the announcement of ‘sanctuary cities’. The point is not which state is right or wrong. The point is both states are making policy assertions that contrast with either federal law either as it is written or as an administration chooses to (not) enforce it. This can only lead to further proclamations of the United States being more united than ever while real disunity festers along class, racial and regional lines.