NORA HOPPE—Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was written in 1941, primarily during the Siege of Leningrad by the Nazi forces. When it had its premiere in the war-torn city on 9th August 1942 – performed by the emaciated, surviving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra that was supplemented with military performers, before a starving but euphoric audience – it was hailed as a universal beacon of resistance to barbarism. The conductor, Karl Eliasberg, concluded that “in that moment, we triumphed over the soulless Nazi war machine”.
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THE SAKER—An analysis of the infiltration of Western cultural ideas into Russia with the object of subverting its hard-won sovereignty. Many youths and intellectuals have played a role in this dangerous project in which the West’s pop culture “soft power” is used to create centers of resistance and “anomie”, and political destabilisation, against the Russian government.
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ANDREI MARTYANOV—I am on record, remember? US and NATO cannot do strategy, they never could after WW II. It is a cold hard fact of life. Sure, they love to use the term “strategy” but very few in the military-political top in the US have a grasp of what it is. So, what can I say–I already get flack for my pointing out that John Mearsheimer has no clue about strategy, Russia, and balance of power–he doesn’t have a toolset, as wouldn’t any political “scientist”, to grasp it. His early 1970s background from USMA at West Point and a few years in the USAF are radically not enough, especially lacking serious military engineering background, for understanding modern operations.
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It is not Russia that is “wasting men and equipment”, it is the Ukraine, because no matter what the Ukraine does, it is unable to change the outcome of the current conflict. At this point it will surrender unconditionally or be utterly defeated. Adding weapons to the mix will simply cause more Ukrainian deaths and destruction, and a greater financial burden on those counties provisioning them. The US has expensive but vulnerable bases and interests all around the world. The cost of defending all of them from any possible attack is astronomical, while an attacker need to find only one weakness at one point at one time to inflict a major defeat on the USA.
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RE POLAND—So the Polish government formally refused the only security agreement that would have prevented WW2 and saved Poland. That government went out of existence when the Nazis defeated it, a week before Soviet troops entered what had been Eastern Poland. It was a BS fiction of the British to have an “exile government” in London. In 1944, it was another British BS fiction to have an early uprising in Warsaw that cost the lives of thousands of Polish patriots, merely in order to do damage to the Soviet Army and its reputation
