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Book Reviews
Pilgrims in search of truth
Jeff J. Brown
[box] The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world, by The Saker (2015, Nimble Pluribus, 616 pages, ISBN-10: 1608880583, ISBN-13: 978-1608880584) [/box]
The Saker and I have some key commonalities. We are both older than younger. Until later in life, we both led status quo lives, with socially acceptable jobs. We believed that what our leaders, governments, teachers and bosses were telling us was mostly honest and correct.
We both soured on our traditional career paths and went off into soul searching directions: The Saker began keeping a blog. I began a professional teaching career, then quickly started writing and publishing my first book. We both arrived at this critical juncture in life, due to a growing realization that what Western mainstream media was feeding us was in reality, blatant propaganda, and that events like America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (and many more thereafter), were not really what they were portrayed to be.
As I learned by reading The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world, at almost the same time, about ten years after the fact, we both came to the sickening and gut wrenching realization that the 9/11 “Islamic terrorist attack” was in fact a brazenly massive false flag, perpetrated by the deep state of the US government and Israel’s Mossad. In retrospect, I think this is true for multitudes of people out there: the realization of the truth about 9/11 was the key cipher, which exploded the Matrix we were once ensconced in. It ripped the veil off the Great Western Firewall, exposing all of its slick, Big Brother doublespeak. We all now realize that if they can engineer 9/11 and dupe the world, they are capable of doing anything – absolutely anything – and that in their eyes, the worth of millions of victims around the world is less than dirt.
“How the PGU and GRU tricked Russia’s gluttonous oligarchs into accepting Vladimir Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s replacement, was a politically vicarious pleasure…”
The Essential Saker is a real treat to read, no matter whether you just found out about the author and his website (www.thesaker.is), or have been following him from the beginning, starting in 2007. I discovered The Saker because of the West’s genocidal machinations in the Ukraine, starting in late 2013. A fellow author sent me a link. The Saker readily acknowledges that it was events like the Maidan and Odessa massacres, which exponentially and morbidly increased his readership.
Perversely, this was a good sign. It meant that many thousands of others besides us were outside the Great Western Firewall, seeking the truth. Undoubtedly, for many of them, all the horrific false flags in the Ukraine, culminating in the shocking shoot down of MH17, served as a similar cipher, as 9/11 did for a generation earlier. The Saker quaintly and colorfully calls all of us former, “submarines in the desert”, i.e., people who thought they were alone in realizing the West’s genocidal, enslaving evil, but now knowing we are all members of a growing and lucid movement against occidental empire, colonialism, fascism and racism.
Therefore for me, everything in The Essential Saker which was written before 2014, I read for the first time. Given all that has happened since then on the world stage, I enjoyed just as much reviewing what I had read previously. With over 500 ebook hyperlinks, all carefully spelled out in an appendix for the print book buyer, there is enough follow-on research, to keep anyone enthralled for hundreds of hours of self-education and discovery. I took many notes and will be studying a number of historical and reference points for my writing, such as the CIA’s Operation Cyanide and the BBC’s exposé, entitled Dead in the Water, among many. In fact, given the value of his research, I would recommend he put the appendix on his website, to facilitate print book buyers in their search for the truth.
Being a catalog of his blog posts, from 2007 to the summer of 2015, it necessarily covers a whole range of topics. He warns readers of this in the prologue, that the book is a little jumbled and not as tightly edited as it could have been. But that is OK, as it just adds to its charms and is very readable as is. As with any “diary” of sorts, we can also see the arc of his internal growth and personal discovery. I can relate. When I scan my articles from a year or two ago, I can see how much my perspective and horizons have evolved for the better. The Saker has done this too, with his 9/11 epiphany a case in point.
I read with great amusement about The Saker being forced out of the identity closest, as it were, with photos of himself quaffing a lager, along with an account of the funny saga. He can take solace that fans of uber-underground writer Thomas Pynchon eventually smoked him out. So, instead of adopting a nom de plume, I guess I’ll settle on my real name after all. But The Saker will always be The Saker for me.
Our author is a well-informed Orthodox Christian and his comparative and analytical studies of this religion, Catholicism, Islam and Judaism, were fascinating. I really enjoyed learning that today’s Talmudic Judaism is in fact a pretender religion, which supplanted the original Karaism, and is in reality nothing more than an “anti-Christianity” movement, just as Catholicism usurped Christianity from the founding Orthodox church. I have noted his recommended books on this subject and they are in my educational pipeline.
Like The Saker, I have a real respect for Islam, in my case, since I lived and worked in the Muslim world for ten years. For him, it appears to be due to voluminous research on Islam in general, and about Hezbollah and its leader, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, in particular. I agree with him that no one should be intentionally offensive, when it comes to people’s religions and their beliefs, whether towards a rational atheist, devout follower of Buddha or the Goddess Devi.
His parsing of Trotskyism and Leninism, in the communist pantheon, was all new to me, as was his explanation comparing the different parts of the USSR’s and now Russia’s security departments, such as the KGB, FSB, PGU (Putin’s group) and GRU. How the PGU and GRU tricked Russia’s gluttonous oligarchs into accepting Vladimir Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s replacement, was a politically vicarious pleasure. The hopeful result is 21st century history, writ large. I also have the number “5%” burned in my brain, that being the proportion of votes that pro-Western parties consistently garner in Russia’s elections. Behind the Great Western Firewall, you would think they were the solid, noble majority and are just being cheated out of their manifest destiny. Such is the crass power of propaganda, in perpetrating ignorance among the masses.
I was also pleased to read that even though Russia is no longer officially a communist country, the citizens still expect their government to provide socialist institutions, like medical care, free universal education, welfare for the needy and retirement for old people. This is also very true for the Chinese, making these two peoples philosophically, Anti-West allies. This, while Eurangloland is pillaging and destroying their socialist programs as fast as they can defund them.
I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that he too finds capitalism to be total evil, with its inextricable link to war, fascism and colonialism, all anchored in the bedrock of racism. I suspect being a Russian émigré, he probably caught on much earlier in his life than I did, which was only just recent for me.
Along the lines of political dialectics, I smiled during his short, but descriptive section on why he loves and hates Marxism. His biggest complaint is Marxists’ inability to admit that their venerated heroes, such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for the deaths of millions of their own people.(1) Fair enough. But 99% of capitalists are also in denial: since 1492, their leaders, from Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand, Henry VII and Henry III, to Barack Obama, David Cameron and François Hollande, were and are continuing to be responsible for the early deaths of several billion human souls, many times more than Marxists may have killed—if we are, again, to believe the dense lies and bad-faith distortions of context inserted by Western propaganda.
The Saker sees a diabolical battle in the bowels of America’s deep state, between what he calls Ziocons (I love this verbal portmanteau) and Old Anglo-Imperialists. I think this is pretty much the same dichotomy I write about, using the more mundane Fortune 500/Big Banks vs. CIA/NSA/NSC, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff playing the self-serving middleman. The latter half, I learned, is what George Bush 41 calls, “the crazies in the basement”. Unfortunately, these lunatics are ruling and destroying the world.
Russia has a similar, internal, dialectical problem, with the West’s comprador Atlantic Integrationists (Medvedev & Co.) and the multipolar, Anti-West Eurasian Sovereignists (Putin & Crew). Since the beginning of human civilization, conniving aiders and abettors of empire have always been ready to perpetuate the exploitation and enslavement of the masses, while personally profiting from it. China is luckier. Mao and the communists evicted these Western, Japanese and KMT capitalist-fascist criminals. Those who stayed were either reformed or shot. Today, Baba Beijing is fighting like hell to make sure they don’t get embedded in its system of governance. Russians should wish them luck, because now they need each other more than ever before.
The section on Russia and China is too brief. However, it is compensated by the lengthy last section, which is a Q & A with an editor from Hidden Harmonies. Nonetheless, The Saker does state the case, correctly, that these two giants on the world stage have joined together, much like a DNA helix, to take on and overcome the Western empire.
After reading the long section on Novorossiya (the Donbass), I just wanted to scream out, “Russians, please realize these people’s dreams and just incorporate them into the Federation – now”. Since publication of The Essential Saker, with John Kerry eating public crow about the US needing to work with Russia in Syria, I half thought that maybe Russia was using exactly this threat, to get concessions in the Middle East.
One section of the book interestingly covers homosexuality. Its genesis was the law passed in Russia outlawing gay pride parades in Moscow and the government’s much ballyhooed, “can’t promote homosexuality to minors” legislation. He explains how Russians, being naturally conservative and culturally traditional, generally do not accept homosexuality. The Saker then goes into quite a lot of detail and background to support this position. I learned a new word, paraphilia, which is the catch-all term for sexual deviancies. Until 1973, the psychologists of the world included homosexuality, along with incest, pedophilia, sadism, masochism, etc., in their iconic reference tome, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The Saker also argues that there is in fact, a correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia.
While we are geopolitical and philosophical soul brothers for sure, I have to part ways on this point. As someone who has studied evolutionary biology for years, scientific observation demonstrates that homosexuality is as normal and as common as heterosexuality, only much less frequent. In every animal genus, from fish to amphibians, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, there is a constant, small percentage of the population which exhibits homosexuality. No other creatures, outside of humans, engage in pedophilia, sadism, masochism and all the other sexual “isms”. The only other one that can happen in animals is incest, but it is not by choice, as it is in humans. In animals, it only happens incidentally or when a species group is geographically isolated, and the evolutionary drive for continuation of the species trumps the increased chances of less fit offspring, due to inbreeding.
In humans, homosexuality occurs in about 5-8% of the world population, be they Japanese, Togolese, Peruvian or Russian, which negates any socioeconomic and cultural factors, and clearly points to a consistent recessive gene expression in our species. Anecdotally, I have discussed the matter with a number of homosexual people. Almost every one of them explained that they knew they were different from everybody else, even as a young child, well before puberty. Therefore clearly, homosexuality is highly genetic, just like skin color or gender, and thus should not be discriminated against. There are about as many gay people in the world, as those with blue eyes, and that is not going to change.
Yes, there is the odd exception of a person who decides to adopt homosexuality or bisexuality as a political statement or protest. I have a female friend who, as a teenager, was raped by a cop. For years after that, she channeled her sex drive and sense of security towards women, due to the revulsion of what happened. But most homosexuals, due to horrific, mostly religiously inspired bigotry, live in fear of rejection by their families, friends, peers and societies, with the constant threat of physical violence and even murder. Depression and suicide are more frequent among gays and lesbians, due to this [society-injected] hate-filled mindset. But when people wake up one day and say, “Hey, I think I want to be gay”? It’s laughable.
Yes, I agree with The Saker that if one is not accepting of homosexuality, as is apparently the case for most Russians, then gays flaunting their sexuality can be offensive. But, people who are uncomfortable with dark skin color, or women asserting their socioeconomic rights, have been upset for centuries, by these oppressed groups filling the streets and demanding equality. People usually only march and protest when the system doesn’t work for them, as it should.
It may take decades, but just like other societies, including China, where anti-homosexual prejudices are slowly falling away, I think that Russians will accept gays and lesbians for who they are: a much maligned and historically misunderstood minority group. Why? Because Russians are loving and caring people, with a strong sense of justice and fairness.
The Essential Saker is a highly recommended book for anyone interested in world history and how it relates to our ever evolving current events. As a Russian who has taken the time and the risk to bare his inner soul, this very personal account is also a rare glimpse into the psychology and culture of the great Slavic nation, which spans from the Mediterranean, Baltic and Arctic Seas, to the Pacific Ocean. Like the Chinese, they are molding and moving 21st century humanity in beneficial directions, much to the imperial chagrin of colonial Eurangloland. So, pick up a copy of The Essential Saker, get smart and join the millions of former submarines in the desert, who populate our only home, Mother Earth. For the survival of our species and her ecosystem, the Anti-West must be victorious. All hands on the Sino-Russian led, multipolar deck, brothers and sisters!
Jeff J. Brown is the author of 44 Days (2013) and Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). Punto Press is soon releasing his tentatively titled, China Rising – The Truth behind the Quiet Colossus. For Badak Merah, Jeff is authoring China Is Communist, Dammit! It is due out in early 2016. He is also currently penning an historical fiction, Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping, to be published in late 2016. Jeff is a contributing editor with the Greanville Post, where he keeps a monthly column, Dispatch from Beijing. He also writes a monthly column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff interviews and podcasts on his own program, 44 Days Radio Sinoland, which is also available on YouTube, Stitcher Radio and iTunes.
In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm and Capital M Literary Festivals, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at international schools in Beijing and Tianjin.
Jeff can be reached at 44 Days, jeff@44days.net, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-18618144837. He lives and works in Beijing.
Annotation by Patrice Greanville
In terms of context alone we must ask: who plunged Russia and later the Soviet Union into horrible wars and civil wars, and later organized constant internal and external attacks, culminating in the devastating assault by the Nazis? The answer is clear: the Western capitalist powers, including Japan. Second, western leaders had every card in their hands when choosing foreign and domestic policies: large, mature industrial economies; a large, well-trained urban working class; a plethora of advanced technologies, institutes of learning, and enormous standing armies. In other words all the advantages of developed nations, and we must add to this their imperialist hold over vast expanses of the globe pouring untold riches toward the metropolis. This means the capitalist west had plenty of room and resources to pick and choose whatever policy they wished to implement, the gamut of choice was (and remains) impressively broad. The nascent communist nations did not have such advantages, and besides they were engulfed in the chaos that normally ensues a brutal civil war, and the nonstop machinations and sabotage of the defeated class of landowners and native capitalists in tight alliance with their foreign counterparts. Aside from that, as chiefly conservative, feudalist agricultural societies, they were emerging from centuries of backwardness made worse —as in the case of China—by raw colonialist exploitation. Under such conditions of generalized poverty, underdeveloped economy, and lack of human and capital resources, they were in a hard place to make choices capable of satisfying the most demanding critics sitting comfortably in the West's elegant salons. Thus neither Stalin nor Mao, who literally fought wars of national survival and independence, had at any time the vast policy choices inherent in the globalized power of Western governments. Such profound social disruptions, scarcities, and real threats to the stability of revolutionary governments could and did give rise to errors. Policy mistakes occur under the best of circumstances; even in peacetime, under conditions of great abundance. Just consider how well the US or Britain or France are managed these days. The number of mistakes and outright crimes denoting gross ineptitude, runaway corruption, and built-in depravity in the governance of these nations constitutes a long list. Western critics like to point to famines and other scourges seen in non-capitalist nations during their period of emancipation from the West, but they conveniently forget that such catastrophes were not intentional and that when they struck practically the entire nation suffered on an equal footing. That, contrary to propaganda, often included party cadre who had to lead by example. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there's the little matter of policy purpose. Yes, the ends do matter. What is the purpose of capitalist/imperialist governance if not the enrichment of a puny minority at the expense of everyone else? To conquer and dominate one country after another while spouting brave and hypocritical rhetoric about freedom and democracy? That goal prompts such governments to wage constant war, to mount constant intrigues against any leader or nation charting a course of authentic democracy, national sovereignty and social justice. So, viewed in that light, while the leaders of communist nations may have made mistakes, perhaps even committed crimes, their historical flaws are minor compared to the sheer evil embodied in the Western capitalist project, whose leaders have destroyed entire nations and civilizations, maimed and murdered millions, with no object except generalized exploitation. Such project continues to sow misery across the globe.
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2 comments
Great review of the Saker’s compendium, Jeff! One thing you didn’t mention, which is a great innovation, is that the Saker included reader comments from his blogs.
To Greanville: I long ago made the point that Communism’s crimes were the result of trying to do right by the many, while fascism’s were committed in pursuit of advantages for the few.