HISTORY

Over the past few years, at the slightest deterioration in the relations between Bulgaria and Russia, the Russian-language segment of the Internet, as a rule, explodes with indignation. Moreover, this indignation is very standard: “We liberated them, and they betrayed us”, “both in the First and Second World Wars they fought against us” … All this is said without a shadow of doubt, and each of those couch experts, without noticing, drives in a wedge into the kinship of the Bulgarian and Russian peoples.

The Grayzone hosted its first YouTube livestream of Pushback with Aaron Maté, featuring Ben Norton. We discussed the Syria war, the withdrawal of US troops, and the Turkish invasion.

Chronicles of surprising and often terrible events: Mega Disasters – Amsterdam Air Crash Seconds from Disaster. The story of El Al 1862 the Israeli 747 cargo plane that, loaded with weapons, crashed in an Amsterdam suburb.

The United States encouraged and aided the breakup of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in an effort to weaken its main political and economic rival. An important ideological weapon in this effort was the demonization of the Soviet Union generally and especially of the Stalin era. Since then the United States and NATO have engaged in wars and killed civilians on a scale that no one could blame the Soviet Union for – a million civilians, mostly children, by the war and then boycott on Iraq from 1991-2003, and another several hundred thousand at least since then. This boycott and these invasions would have been impossible if the USSR and Soviet bloc had still been in existence.

HUGO BARDI—Dmitry Orlov wrote “The Five Stages of Collapse” as an article in 2008 and as a book in 2013. It was an original idea for that time that of comparing the fall of the Soviet Union with that of the United States. Being an American citizen born in Russia, Orlov could compare the two Empires in detail and note the many similarities that led both to follow the same trajectory, even though the cycle of the American Empire is not over, yet.To strengthen Orlov’s analysis I thought I could apply the same five stages to an older Empire, the Roman one. And, yes, the five stages apply well also to that ancient case. So, here is my take on this subject.