It's hard to get the penny out of the fuse box. Circuit breakers are overrated.
top of the heap to third world status in one generation
- Thread starter Gry
- Start date
It's hard to get the penny out of the fuse box. Circuit breakers are overrated.
lack of, penny indeed. much younger then, dumber too, lol. did it TWICE before my father caught on to what i was doing...a miracle that many of us made it to the age we are now.
"shock therapy"
REIIMAHG THE ENORMOUS ME262 TURN-KEY FACTORY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyOAbB3vT3A
One of the largest factories to move into above ground shelters during the second world war, was the huge ME262 factory, sponsored by Goring, constructed in huge above ground reinforced bunkers and tunnels, In the very heart of Thüringen not far from SIII and Dora Mittlebau. This was a turnkey assembly line jet plane factory where materials would arrive at one end and literally jets fly out the other. I share the story of the site and go through the remains of the huge bunkers, with graphics showing what is no longer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyOAbB3vT3A
One of the largest factories to move into above ground shelters during the second world war, was the huge ME262 factory, sponsored by Goring, constructed in huge above ground reinforced bunkers and tunnels, In the very heart of Thüringen not far from SIII and Dora Mittlebau. This was a turnkey assembly line jet plane factory where materials would arrive at one end and literally jets fly out the other. I share the story of the site and go through the remains of the huge bunkers, with graphics showing what is no longer.
Trump has been on Putin's side in Ukraine's long struggle against Russian aggression
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/06/politics/trump-putin-ukraine/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/06/politics/trump-putin-ukraine/index.html
Three Berries
Active member
And some iodine tabs.....
Three Berries
Active member
St. Phatty
Active member
Looked it up, biggest US nuclear test was in 1954 at the Bikini Atoll.
Was supposed to be 6 Megatons, ended up being 15 Megatons.
The material fused was Lithium Deuteride (similar chemically to Lithium Hydride). The radionuclide doing the Fusing was Plutonium 239.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
Was supposed to be 6 Megatons, ended up being 15 Megatons.
The material fused was Lithium Deuteride (similar chemically to Lithium Hydride). The radionuclide doing the Fusing was Plutonium 239.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
Has been an abundance of decent outfits that have left Russia since this started.
Dr. Bronner’s, the Soap Company, Dips Into Psychedelics
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/health/ketamine-bronner-bros.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Under the leadership of the founder’s grandsons, the company has become a big financial backer of efforts to loosen government restrictions on illegal drugs.
VISTA, Calif. — Dr. Bronner’s, the liquid soap company best known for its teeny-font labels preaching brotherly love and world peace, would like you to consider the benefits of mind-altering drugs.
The sentiment is promoted on limited-edition soap bottles that sing the praises of psychedelic-assisted therapies, and through the trippy pronouncements of David Bronner, grandson of the company’s founder and one of its top executives, who is not shy about sharing details of his many hallucinogenic journeys.
“Let’s face it, the world would be a far better place if more people experienced psychedelic medicines,” said David, whose company in January became among the first in the United States to offer ketamine therapy as part of its employee health care coverage.
Perhaps less well known is Dr. Bronner’s role as one of the country’s biggest financial supporters of efforts to win mainstream acceptance of psychedelics and to loosen government restrictions on all illegal drugs.
Since 2015, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps — yes, that’s its official name — has donated more than $23 million to drug advocacy and research organizations, according to corporate documents. They include scientists researching the healing properties of the club drug Ecstasy, activist groups that helped decriminalize psilocybin “magic mushrooms” in Oregon and Washington, D.C., and a small nonprofit working to preserve habitat for peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus central to some Native American spiritual traditions.
Over the years, the company has also spent millions on efforts toward cannabis legalization, including litigation that in 2018 helped reverse a federal prohibition on the cultivation of industrial hemp.
Although Open Society Foundations, the left-leaning philanthropy founded by George Soros, has quietly spent millions on drug policy changes, it is rare for a company to embrace an issue as contentious as loudly as Dr. Bronner’s has.
“When it comes to corporate philanthropy, you’d be hard-pressed to find another company with the courage to publicly back an end to the war on drugs,” said Rick Doblin, who runs the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a research and advocacy group. It has received nearly $6 million from Dr. Bronner’s, with an additional $1 million pledged for each of the next five years.
The Bronner family’s increasingly high-profile largess comes at a pivotal moment in the decades-long campaign to ease the nation’s just-say-no attitude toward illicit drugs. The changes have been seismic, from bipartisan congressional support for drug-sentencing reforms to the cascading state-by-state embrace of recreational marijuana.
Ketamine therapy for depression has become a billion-dollar industry, and scores of states and municipalities are seeking to join Denver, Seattle and the dozen other cities that have decriminalized psychedelics. Researchers say another watershed moment is on the horizon: the Food and Drug Administration is considering approving MDMA, or Ecstasy, for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The University of Texas, Johns Hopkins and Yale are among the stolid institutions that have created divisions to explore whether psychedelic compounds can advance the treatment of anxiety, depression, addiction and a range of other mental health disorders. “We really are at an inflection point where the whole paradigm about these drugs is shifting,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is helping to set up the school’s new Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Emanuel Bronner, who founded the company in 1948, gave out bottles of his product after delivering lectures about mankind’s need to save “Spaceship Earth.” But he soon realized most people were more interested in the free soap.Credit...Dr. Bronner's
Founded in 1948 by Emanuel Bronner, a German-Jewish immigrant and a third-generation soap maker, Dr. Bronner’s tingly peppermint soap became a favorite in the 1960s among counterculture peaceniks who were enamored with its all-natural provenance and Bronner’s “All-One-God-Faith” dedication to ending the tribalism behind so much human suffering. One apocryphal origin story credits Woodstock for expanding its distribution. “The joke is that it left the festival in three times as many VW microbuses as it arrived in,” his grandson, Michael Bronner, said.
Emil, as he was known, was a bracing, free-spirited renegade whose loquacious genius often danced on the edge of madness. (He was not, in any way, an actual doctor.) In 1945, not long after learning his parents had been murdered in Nazi death camps, Emil landed in a Chicago mental asylum, forcibly committed by his sister, where he was administered electric shock therapy, according to his family. After making an audacious escape, he hitchhiked to California, where he began his lifelong, peripatetic crusade to heal mankind.
Bronner would hand out bottles of his product after delivering his idiosyncratic public lectures about humanity’s need to save “Spaceship Earth,” but he soon realized most people were more interested in his free soap than his spiritual ideology. His remedy? He began printing those philosophic ramblings on the labels, which also explained the 18-in-1 uses for his concentrated liquid Castile soap. (Teeth cleaning! Dishwashing! Dog shampoo!)
Though a suggested birth-control use has since been discarded, the Bronners have left much of the label’s 3,000-word verbiage untouched, a decision that reflects the family’s deep reverence for a man whose zany presence is inescapable more than two decades after his death at age 89.
The patriarch’s writings and his image are scattered throughout the company’s headquarters in Vista, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Diego. A frighteningly large blowup of his grinning face greets visitors in the lobby. Nearby, a papier-mâché figure wearing a leopard-print Speedo is a goofy homage to his predilection for conducting business in skimpy swimming trunks. (Fun fact: For decades, the phone number printed on soap bottles rang through to a collection of red rotary phones that Emil Bronner answered at all hours from his living room recliner.)
The company remains a family affair. Michael, the self-described “buttoned-up brother,” is president; his sister, Lisa, helps promote the brand’s work on environmental sustainability and fair-trade issues; and their mother, Trudy, is the chief financial officer. David, the eldest child, is C.E.O. — Cosmic Engagement Officer.
Last year Dr. Bronner’s earned nearly $170 million in revenues, according to company documents, up from $4 million in 1998, several years after the company emerged from bankruptcy with an assist from Emil’s two sons, Jim and Ralph.
That near brush with corporate death was tied to Emil’s decision to register his company, “All One God Faith, Inc.” as a religious nonprofit. The Internal Revenue Service was not pleased, and levied a crushing fine.
But the founder’s unconventional approach to business lives on. Top salaries at the company cannot exceed five times that of the lowest-paid worker with five years on the job, which means Michael and David each earn roughly $300,000 a year. Their 300 employees receive an array of benefits, including up to $7,500 in child-care assistance and annual bonuses of up to 10 percent of their annual pay. The cafeteria’s vegan meals are free, as are the Zumba classes, back massages and solar-powered electric-vehicle charging stations.
The company regularly spurns the kind of buyout offers that have claimed other independent brands like Burt’s Bees (now part of Clorox), Tom’s of Maine (Colgate-Palmolive) and Kiehl’s (L’Oréal). The offers, the brothers say, go right into the trash. In a good year, the company gives away 45 percent of its profits, or about $8 million, according to the company’s annual report. “If we cashed out, we’d be less effective as a charitable engine,” David said.
His own love affair with psychedelics began shortly after college, at a dance club in Amsterdam, where he was introduced to candy flipping — the combination of LSD and Ecstasy. The journey included visions of Jesus, his grandfather and “a dialogue with deep self,” all of which helped him work through what he described as a crippling toxic masculinity and a troubled relationship. “I died five times but it got me out of my dark hole and set me on my path,” said David, 49, a vegan who favors hemp clothing and is especially fond of the adjective “rad.”
He also has a showman’s eye for attention-grabbing gestures, which got him arrested twice; once for sowing hemp seeds on the front lawn of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the other for milling hemp oil while locked in a cage in front of the White House.
The company’s move to tether a large chunk of its corporate identity to psychedelics and the politics of drug reform have not always gone down well, especially with Trudy, 79, a former junior high school math teacher and regular Methodist churchgoer who winces when recalling the excesses of the 1960s. “I had friends who did the trippy stuff and it wasn’t always good,” she said. “On the other hand this country has a lot of mental health issues that need to be addressed.”
Her lingering skepticism was dispelled by Michael’s recent turn to psychedelics. The shift came last year, when the medications he had long relied on to treat his anxiety and depression stopped working. It was then that he decided to try talk therapy paired with ketamine, a legal anesthetic and party drug that has been gaining increasing acceptance among mental health professionals.
He compared the experience to a massage for the brain that helped clear away much of his angst and despair. “I don’t want to oversell ketamine therapy as a miracle cure but it just stripped the rust away, gave me a reset and got me to a really good space,” he said.
So far 21 employees or their dependents have signed up for the treatments, which can cost several thousand dollars.
A battlefield anesthetic that is also used in veterinary medicine, ketamine has only recently gained popularity as a therapy for hard-to-treat depression and suicidal ideation. Though the drug does not have F.D.A. clearance for mental health conditions, doctors are allowed to prescribe it for so-called off-label use when they think it will provide benefits to a patient.
Enthea, the health plan benefit administrator for the treatments, said 10 other companies were already following in Dr. Bronner’s footsteps. Many are driven by the prospect of reduced spending on mental health coverage and also with increasing employee productivity, Lia Mix, Enthea’s founder and chief executive, said.
Emil Bronner didn’t do drugs, and he was distrustful of Western medicine, refusing to see a doctor even as he began losing his eyesight in his 60s. But his grandsons are sure he would have approved of their decision to make psychedelics a central component of the family business.
“Our grandpa was all about shifting consciousness and opening hearts and minds,” David said, pausing for comic effect and flashing a mischievous grin: “He probably would have put LSD in his soaps.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/health/ketamine-bronner-bros.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Under the leadership of the founder’s grandsons, the company has become a big financial backer of efforts to loosen government restrictions on illegal drugs.
VISTA, Calif. — Dr. Bronner’s, the liquid soap company best known for its teeny-font labels preaching brotherly love and world peace, would like you to consider the benefits of mind-altering drugs.
The sentiment is promoted on limited-edition soap bottles that sing the praises of psychedelic-assisted therapies, and through the trippy pronouncements of David Bronner, grandson of the company’s founder and one of its top executives, who is not shy about sharing details of his many hallucinogenic journeys.
“Let’s face it, the world would be a far better place if more people experienced psychedelic medicines,” said David, whose company in January became among the first in the United States to offer ketamine therapy as part of its employee health care coverage.
Perhaps less well known is Dr. Bronner’s role as one of the country’s biggest financial supporters of efforts to win mainstream acceptance of psychedelics and to loosen government restrictions on all illegal drugs.
Since 2015, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps — yes, that’s its official name — has donated more than $23 million to drug advocacy and research organizations, according to corporate documents. They include scientists researching the healing properties of the club drug Ecstasy, activist groups that helped decriminalize psilocybin “magic mushrooms” in Oregon and Washington, D.C., and a small nonprofit working to preserve habitat for peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus central to some Native American spiritual traditions.
Over the years, the company has also spent millions on efforts toward cannabis legalization, including litigation that in 2018 helped reverse a federal prohibition on the cultivation of industrial hemp.
Although Open Society Foundations, the left-leaning philanthropy founded by George Soros, has quietly spent millions on drug policy changes, it is rare for a company to embrace an issue as contentious as loudly as Dr. Bronner’s has.
“When it comes to corporate philanthropy, you’d be hard-pressed to find another company with the courage to publicly back an end to the war on drugs,” said Rick Doblin, who runs the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a research and advocacy group. It has received nearly $6 million from Dr. Bronner’s, with an additional $1 million pledged for each of the next five years.
The Bronner family’s increasingly high-profile largess comes at a pivotal moment in the decades-long campaign to ease the nation’s just-say-no attitude toward illicit drugs. The changes have been seismic, from bipartisan congressional support for drug-sentencing reforms to the cascading state-by-state embrace of recreational marijuana.
Ketamine therapy for depression has become a billion-dollar industry, and scores of states and municipalities are seeking to join Denver, Seattle and the dozen other cities that have decriminalized psychedelics. Researchers say another watershed moment is on the horizon: the Food and Drug Administration is considering approving MDMA, or Ecstasy, for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The University of Texas, Johns Hopkins and Yale are among the stolid institutions that have created divisions to explore whether psychedelic compounds can advance the treatment of anxiety, depression, addiction and a range of other mental health disorders. “We really are at an inflection point where the whole paradigm about these drugs is shifting,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is helping to set up the school’s new Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Founded in 1948 by Emanuel Bronner, a German-Jewish immigrant and a third-generation soap maker, Dr. Bronner’s tingly peppermint soap became a favorite in the 1960s among counterculture peaceniks who were enamored with its all-natural provenance and Bronner’s “All-One-God-Faith” dedication to ending the tribalism behind so much human suffering. One apocryphal origin story credits Woodstock for expanding its distribution. “The joke is that it left the festival in three times as many VW microbuses as it arrived in,” his grandson, Michael Bronner, said.
Emil, as he was known, was a bracing, free-spirited renegade whose loquacious genius often danced on the edge of madness. (He was not, in any way, an actual doctor.) In 1945, not long after learning his parents had been murdered in Nazi death camps, Emil landed in a Chicago mental asylum, forcibly committed by his sister, where he was administered electric shock therapy, according to his family. After making an audacious escape, he hitchhiked to California, where he began his lifelong, peripatetic crusade to heal mankind.
Bronner would hand out bottles of his product after delivering his idiosyncratic public lectures about humanity’s need to save “Spaceship Earth,” but he soon realized most people were more interested in his free soap than his spiritual ideology. His remedy? He began printing those philosophic ramblings on the labels, which also explained the 18-in-1 uses for his concentrated liquid Castile soap. (Teeth cleaning! Dishwashing! Dog shampoo!)
Though a suggested birth-control use has since been discarded, the Bronners have left much of the label’s 3,000-word verbiage untouched, a decision that reflects the family’s deep reverence for a man whose zany presence is inescapable more than two decades after his death at age 89.
The patriarch’s writings and his image are scattered throughout the company’s headquarters in Vista, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Diego. A frighteningly large blowup of his grinning face greets visitors in the lobby. Nearby, a papier-mâché figure wearing a leopard-print Speedo is a goofy homage to his predilection for conducting business in skimpy swimming trunks. (Fun fact: For decades, the phone number printed on soap bottles rang through to a collection of red rotary phones that Emil Bronner answered at all hours from his living room recliner.)
The company remains a family affair. Michael, the self-described “buttoned-up brother,” is president; his sister, Lisa, helps promote the brand’s work on environmental sustainability and fair-trade issues; and their mother, Trudy, is the chief financial officer. David, the eldest child, is C.E.O. — Cosmic Engagement Officer.
Last year Dr. Bronner’s earned nearly $170 million in revenues, according to company documents, up from $4 million in 1998, several years after the company emerged from bankruptcy with an assist from Emil’s two sons, Jim and Ralph.
That near brush with corporate death was tied to Emil’s decision to register his company, “All One God Faith, Inc.” as a religious nonprofit. The Internal Revenue Service was not pleased, and levied a crushing fine.
But the founder’s unconventional approach to business lives on. Top salaries at the company cannot exceed five times that of the lowest-paid worker with five years on the job, which means Michael and David each earn roughly $300,000 a year. Their 300 employees receive an array of benefits, including up to $7,500 in child-care assistance and annual bonuses of up to 10 percent of their annual pay. The cafeteria’s vegan meals are free, as are the Zumba classes, back massages and solar-powered electric-vehicle charging stations.
The company regularly spurns the kind of buyout offers that have claimed other independent brands like Burt’s Bees (now part of Clorox), Tom’s of Maine (Colgate-Palmolive) and Kiehl’s (L’Oréal). The offers, the brothers say, go right into the trash. In a good year, the company gives away 45 percent of its profits, or about $8 million, according to the company’s annual report. “If we cashed out, we’d be less effective as a charitable engine,” David said.
His own love affair with psychedelics began shortly after college, at a dance club in Amsterdam, where he was introduced to candy flipping — the combination of LSD and Ecstasy. The journey included visions of Jesus, his grandfather and “a dialogue with deep self,” all of which helped him work through what he described as a crippling toxic masculinity and a troubled relationship. “I died five times but it got me out of my dark hole and set me on my path,” said David, 49, a vegan who favors hemp clothing and is especially fond of the adjective “rad.”
He also has a showman’s eye for attention-grabbing gestures, which got him arrested twice; once for sowing hemp seeds on the front lawn of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the other for milling hemp oil while locked in a cage in front of the White House.
The company’s move to tether a large chunk of its corporate identity to psychedelics and the politics of drug reform have not always gone down well, especially with Trudy, 79, a former junior high school math teacher and regular Methodist churchgoer who winces when recalling the excesses of the 1960s. “I had friends who did the trippy stuff and it wasn’t always good,” she said. “On the other hand this country has a lot of mental health issues that need to be addressed.”
Her lingering skepticism was dispelled by Michael’s recent turn to psychedelics. The shift came last year, when the medications he had long relied on to treat his anxiety and depression stopped working. It was then that he decided to try talk therapy paired with ketamine, a legal anesthetic and party drug that has been gaining increasing acceptance among mental health professionals.
He compared the experience to a massage for the brain that helped clear away much of his angst and despair. “I don’t want to oversell ketamine therapy as a miracle cure but it just stripped the rust away, gave me a reset and got me to a really good space,” he said.
So far 21 employees or their dependents have signed up for the treatments, which can cost several thousand dollars.
A battlefield anesthetic that is also used in veterinary medicine, ketamine has only recently gained popularity as a therapy for hard-to-treat depression and suicidal ideation. Though the drug does not have F.D.A. clearance for mental health conditions, doctors are allowed to prescribe it for so-called off-label use when they think it will provide benefits to a patient.
Enthea, the health plan benefit administrator for the treatments, said 10 other companies were already following in Dr. Bronner’s footsteps. Many are driven by the prospect of reduced spending on mental health coverage and also with increasing employee productivity, Lia Mix, Enthea’s founder and chief executive, said.
Emil Bronner didn’t do drugs, and he was distrustful of Western medicine, refusing to see a doctor even as he began losing his eyesight in his 60s. But his grandsons are sure he would have approved of their decision to make psychedelics a central component of the family business.
“Our grandpa was all about shifting consciousness and opening hearts and minds,” David said, pausing for comic effect and flashing a mischievous grin: “He probably would have put LSD in his soaps.”
Talking out your ass.
Three Berries
Active member
Three Berries
Active member
Ignorance is self inflicted.
well, in all honesty, his mouth is busy with "other things"...
Must hurt.
The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...f-ukraine-180979672/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
(There were more images in the original content that I was not able to include here)
During WWII, Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as liberators from Soviet oppression. Now, Russia is using that chapter to paint Ukraine as a Nazi nation
The debate over how to remember Ukraine's World War II history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict. Photo by S. Khoroshko / Slava Katamidze Collection / Getty Images
Before Russian forces fired rockets at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv; seized Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident; and attacked Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin shared some choice words.
In an essay published on the Kremlin’s website in Russian, Ukrainian and English last July, Putin credited Soviet leaders with inventing a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union in 1922, forging a fictitious state unworthy of sovereignty out of historically Russian territory. After Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, the president argued, Ukrainian leaders “began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united [Russia and Ukraine], and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”
The “historical reality” of modern-day Ukraine is more complex than Putin’s version of events, encompassing “a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples,” according to the New York Times. “[M]any conquests by warring factions and Ukraine’s diverse geography ... created a complex fabric of multiethnic states.”
Over the centuries, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland, and Lithuania have all wielded jurisdiction over Ukraine, which first asserted its modern independence in 1917, with the formation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Russia soon wrested back control of Ukraine, making it part of the newly established Soviet Union and retaining power in the region until World War II, when Germany invaded. The debate over how to remember this wartime history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict.
In Putin’s telling, the modern Ukrainian independence movement began not in 1917 but during World War II. Under the German occupation of Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944, some Ukrainian independence fighters aligned themselves with the Nazis, whom they viewed as saviors from Soviet oppression. Putin has drawn on this period in history to portray any Ukrainian push for sovereignty as a Nazi endeavor, says Markian Dobczansky, a historian at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. “It’s really just a stunningly cynical attempt to fight an information war and influence people's opinions,” he adds.
Dobczansky is among a group of scholars who have publicly challenged Putin’s version of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the years of Soviet rule it’s sandwiched between. Almost all of these experts begin their accounts with the fall of the Russian Empire, when tens of
thousands of Ukrainians fought against the Bolshevik Red Army to establish the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Ukrainians continued to fight for independence until 1922, when they were defeated by the Soviets and became the Ukrainian Soviet Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). By leaving out Ukraine’s short-lived but hard-fought period of independence in the early 20th century, Putin overlooks the country’s sovereignty, says Dobczansky.
Also omitted from this version of events are the genocide and suppression that took place under Soviet rule—most famously the Great Famine. Holodomor, which fuses the Ukrainian words for starvation and inflicting death, claimed the lives of around 3.9 million people, or approximately 13 percent of the Ukrainian population, in the early 1930s. A human-made famine, it was the direct result of Soviet policies aimed at punishing Ukrainian farmers who fought Soviet mandates to collectivize.The Soviets also waged an intense “Russification” campaign, persecuting Ukraine’s cultural elite and elevating Russian language and culture above all others.
When Germany invaded in 1941, some Ukrainians, especially those in western Ukraine, saw them as liberators, says Oxana Shevel, a political scientist at Tufts University. The Ukrainians didn’t particularly want to live under the Germans so much as escape the Soviets, adds Shevel, who is the president of the nonprofit educational organization American Association for Ukrainian Studies.
“The broader objective was to establish an independent state, but in the process, [Ukrainians] also engaged in participation in the Holocaust,” she says.
The question for Shevel is how to treat this history. From the Soviet point of view that Putin still embraces, it’s simple, she says: The Holocaust aside, Ukrainian nationalists were “bad guys” because “they fought the Soviet state.” Putin and other critics often draw on Ukrainians’ wartime collaboration with the Nazis to baselessly characterize the modern country as a Nazi nation; in a February 24 speech, the Russian president deemed the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine” key goals of the invasion.
From the Ukrainian side of the debate, the country’s wartime history is more complex. Are the nationalists “bad guys” because they participated in the Holocaust, Shevel asks, or “good guys” because they fought for independence?
For Putin, even raising this question is inflammatory. “Any kind of reevaluation of the Soviet treatment of history is what Putin would consider [a] Nazi approach or Nazification,” says Shevel.
To deny the claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state isn’t to downplay the Nazis’ wartime actions in Ukraine. Natalie Belsky, a historian at the University of Minnesota Duluth, points out that one of the biggest massacres of the Holocaust took place just outside of Kyiv. Between 1941 and 1943, the Nazis—aided by local collaborators—shot around 70,000 to 100,000 people, many of them Jews, at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. According to the National WWII Museum, one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.
While Germans often think of World War II as a fight against the Russians, the majority of the fighting actually took place in modern-day Ukraine and Belarus, as well as large parts of western Russia, says Dobczansky. Under the German occupation, several million Ukrainians were sent to Germany to work on farms and in factories. Still, because the Nazi racial hierarchy placed Ukrainians above Russians, the Nazis made a limited attempt to promote Ukrainian national culture in occupied territories—a move that, in turn, helped bring some of the Ukrainian nationalist movement to the German side.
“Those [nationalist] groups certainly had anti-Semitic elements,” says Belsky. “But [they] essentially felt that, or judged that, they were more likely to get Ukrainian independence under Nazi occupation than under Soviet occupation.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/66/f4/66f4b130-b836-44c8-b1ca-a435a8f2a592/gettyimages-2636041.jpg)
Motorized infantry of the German armed forces advance into Ukraine during World War II. Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images
The Nazis, she says, promised Ukrainian nationalists as much—at least after the war. But even before their defeat by the Allies in 1945, the Germans turned on some of their Ukrainian allies, including one of the country’s most famous independence fighters, Stepan Bandera. In his fight against the Soviets, Bandera aligned himself with the Germans, only to end up in a concentration camp after he refused to rescind a proclamation of Ukrainian statehood in 1941. Released in 1944 to help the Nazis battle the Soviets again, Bandera survived the war, only to be poisoned by the KGB in 1959. In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of “Hero of Ukraine,” but the honor was annulled a year later.
“This [reexamination of Ukrainian participation in wartime atrocities] has prompted a relatively difficult dialogue in Ukraine about the issue of complicity,” says Belsky.
Putin has referenced Ukrainian nationalists in service of his own political agenda of portraying modern Ukrainians as Nazis. Prior to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, many Ukrainians viewed Bandera and other freedom fighters in a less favorable light, says Shevel. After, however, she noticed a shift, with these individuals, some of whom fought alongside the Nazis, being called heroes. The Soviets, once held up as liberators from the Nazis, were now the bad guys again.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/71/22/7122bdbc-e276-4601-a1a2-c18b4129f834/gettyimages-464495524.jpg)
Pro-Russian rebels allegedly move tanks and heavy weaponry away from the front line in accordance with the Minsk II agreement on February 26, 2015, in Chervonoe, Ukraine. Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty Images
Bandera may no longer be an official hero of Ukraine, but his memory and that of other 20th-century independence fighters endure. In 2015, Ukraine passed a series of decommunization laws calling for the removal of communist monuments and the renaming of public spaces in honor of Ukrainian nationalists and nationalist organizations, including those known to have participated in the Holocaust. The legislation has received pushback from scholars who see it as whitewashing, or ignoring the dark sides of these movements and their activities.
Shevel agrees that a complete reversal in framing is “probably not the best outcome.” Although the previous Soviet narrative was very one-sided, she cautions against replacing it with an equally one-sided narrative that labels Ukrainian nationalists unconditional good guys. Either way, Shevel says, the issue is one that should be debated internally, not by a foreign invader: “It’s problematic, but it’s a domestic debate.”
Dobczansky, for his part, believes Ukraine is entitled to its own version of history and that Ukrainians should be allowed to choose how to present their own experiences. He praises local researchers’ efforts to study the Holocaust and open their archives and notes that Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.
“Ukraine has begun the process of confronting the darkest pages of its past,” he says.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/49/d7/49d7d86f-9a02-4b8f-aa9a-595c7282bd40/gettyimages-607389106.jpg)
A crowd holds a demonstration outside of the Soviet headquarters in Kyiv in September 1991, after Ukraine declared its independence. Photo by Alain Nogues / Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
In today’s charged atmosphere, saying anything critical about Ukrainian nationalism or calling attention to Ukrainian nationalists’ involvement with the Nazis can be seen as supporting Russia’s depiction of Ukraine as a Nazi nation, Belsky notes.
This Russian narrative is nothing new. Instead, says Dobczansky, it’s part of a long-term Russian information war on Ukraine. Putin’s ahistorical justifications of the invasion doesn’t surprise the scholar. What does surprise him is the outpouring of support he’s seen for Ukraine, with even “Saturday Night Live” paying tribute to the beleaguered nation.
Dobczansky theorizes that the outraged response to the invasion is tied to society’s relatively recent reexamination of colonialism. Because Ukraine was successfully integrated into the Soviet Union after World War II, Dobczansky doesn’t see the period leading up to Ukrainian independence in 1991 as an occupation so much as a relationship between a colony and a colonizer. By waging war on Ukraine, Putin is, in essence, trying to hold onto a colony.
“[Russian leaders] basically don’t recognize any Ukrainian historical agency except the agency that they imagined for them,” says Dobczansky.
Ukraine—and the world—seem to be imagining something different.
Katya Cengel writes about her time reporting from Ukraine earlier this century in her award-winning 2019 memoir, From Chernobyl with Love.
Katya Cengel |
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...f-ukraine-180979672/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
(There were more images in the original content that I was not able to include here)
During WWII, Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as liberators from Soviet oppression. Now, Russia is using that chapter to paint Ukraine as a Nazi nation
The debate over how to remember Ukraine's World War II history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict. Photo by S. Khoroshko / Slava Katamidze Collection / Getty Images
Before Russian forces fired rockets at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv; seized Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident; and attacked Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin shared some choice words.
In an essay published on the Kremlin’s website in Russian, Ukrainian and English last July, Putin credited Soviet leaders with inventing a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union in 1922, forging a fictitious state unworthy of sovereignty out of historically Russian territory. After Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, the president argued, Ukrainian leaders “began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united [Russia and Ukraine], and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”
The “historical reality” of modern-day Ukraine is more complex than Putin’s version of events, encompassing “a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples,” according to the New York Times. “[M]any conquests by warring factions and Ukraine’s diverse geography ... created a complex fabric of multiethnic states.”
Over the centuries, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland, and Lithuania have all wielded jurisdiction over Ukraine, which first asserted its modern independence in 1917, with the formation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Russia soon wrested back control of Ukraine, making it part of the newly established Soviet Union and retaining power in the region until World War II, when Germany invaded. The debate over how to remember this wartime history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict.
In Putin’s telling, the modern Ukrainian independence movement began not in 1917 but during World War II. Under the German occupation of Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944, some Ukrainian independence fighters aligned themselves with the Nazis, whom they viewed as saviors from Soviet oppression. Putin has drawn on this period in history to portray any Ukrainian push for sovereignty as a Nazi endeavor, says Markian Dobczansky, a historian at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. “It’s really just a stunningly cynical attempt to fight an information war and influence people's opinions,” he adds.
Dobczansky is among a group of scholars who have publicly challenged Putin’s version of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the years of Soviet rule it’s sandwiched between. Almost all of these experts begin their accounts with the fall of the Russian Empire, when tens of
thousands of Ukrainians fought against the Bolshevik Red Army to establish the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Ukrainians continued to fight for independence until 1922, when they were defeated by the Soviets and became the Ukrainian Soviet Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). By leaving out Ukraine’s short-lived but hard-fought period of independence in the early 20th century, Putin overlooks the country’s sovereignty, says Dobczansky.
Also omitted from this version of events are the genocide and suppression that took place under Soviet rule—most famously the Great Famine. Holodomor, which fuses the Ukrainian words for starvation and inflicting death, claimed the lives of around 3.9 million people, or approximately 13 percent of the Ukrainian population, in the early 1930s. A human-made famine, it was the direct result of Soviet policies aimed at punishing Ukrainian farmers who fought Soviet mandates to collectivize.The Soviets also waged an intense “Russification” campaign, persecuting Ukraine’s cultural elite and elevating Russian language and culture above all others.
When Germany invaded in 1941, some Ukrainians, especially those in western Ukraine, saw them as liberators, says Oxana Shevel, a political scientist at Tufts University. The Ukrainians didn’t particularly want to live under the Germans so much as escape the Soviets, adds Shevel, who is the president of the nonprofit educational organization American Association for Ukrainian Studies.
“The broader objective was to establish an independent state, but in the process, [Ukrainians] also engaged in participation in the Holocaust,” she says.
The question for Shevel is how to treat this history. From the Soviet point of view that Putin still embraces, it’s simple, she says: The Holocaust aside, Ukrainian nationalists were “bad guys” because “they fought the Soviet state.” Putin and other critics often draw on Ukrainians’ wartime collaboration with the Nazis to baselessly characterize the modern country as a Nazi nation; in a February 24 speech, the Russian president deemed the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine” key goals of the invasion.
From the Ukrainian side of the debate, the country’s wartime history is more complex. Are the nationalists “bad guys” because they participated in the Holocaust, Shevel asks, or “good guys” because they fought for independence?
For Putin, even raising this question is inflammatory. “Any kind of reevaluation of the Soviet treatment of history is what Putin would consider [a] Nazi approach or Nazification,” says Shevel.
To deny the claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state isn’t to downplay the Nazis’ wartime actions in Ukraine. Natalie Belsky, a historian at the University of Minnesota Duluth, points out that one of the biggest massacres of the Holocaust took place just outside of Kyiv. Between 1941 and 1943, the Nazis—aided by local collaborators—shot around 70,000 to 100,000 people, many of them Jews, at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. According to the National WWII Museum, one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.
While Germans often think of World War II as a fight against the Russians, the majority of the fighting actually took place in modern-day Ukraine and Belarus, as well as large parts of western Russia, says Dobczansky. Under the German occupation, several million Ukrainians were sent to Germany to work on farms and in factories. Still, because the Nazi racial hierarchy placed Ukrainians above Russians, the Nazis made a limited attempt to promote Ukrainian national culture in occupied territories—a move that, in turn, helped bring some of the Ukrainian nationalist movement to the German side.
“Those [nationalist] groups certainly had anti-Semitic elements,” says Belsky. “But [they] essentially felt that, or judged that, they were more likely to get Ukrainian independence under Nazi occupation than under Soviet occupation.”
Motorized infantry of the German armed forces advance into Ukraine during World War II. Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images
The Nazis, she says, promised Ukrainian nationalists as much—at least after the war. But even before their defeat by the Allies in 1945, the Germans turned on some of their Ukrainian allies, including one of the country’s most famous independence fighters, Stepan Bandera. In his fight against the Soviets, Bandera aligned himself with the Germans, only to end up in a concentration camp after he refused to rescind a proclamation of Ukrainian statehood in 1941. Released in 1944 to help the Nazis battle the Soviets again, Bandera survived the war, only to be poisoned by the KGB in 1959. In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of “Hero of Ukraine,” but the honor was annulled a year later.
“This [reexamination of Ukrainian participation in wartime atrocities] has prompted a relatively difficult dialogue in Ukraine about the issue of complicity,” says Belsky.
Putin has referenced Ukrainian nationalists in service of his own political agenda of portraying modern Ukrainians as Nazis. Prior to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, many Ukrainians viewed Bandera and other freedom fighters in a less favorable light, says Shevel. After, however, she noticed a shift, with these individuals, some of whom fought alongside the Nazis, being called heroes. The Soviets, once held up as liberators from the Nazis, were now the bad guys again.
Bandera may no longer be an official hero of Ukraine, but his memory and that of other 20th-century independence fighters endure. In 2015, Ukraine passed a series of decommunization laws calling for the removal of communist monuments and the renaming of public spaces in honor of Ukrainian nationalists and nationalist organizations, including those known to have participated in the Holocaust. The legislation has received pushback from scholars who see it as whitewashing, or ignoring the dark sides of these movements and their activities.
Shevel agrees that a complete reversal in framing is “probably not the best outcome.” Although the previous Soviet narrative was very one-sided, she cautions against replacing it with an equally one-sided narrative that labels Ukrainian nationalists unconditional good guys. Either way, Shevel says, the issue is one that should be debated internally, not by a foreign invader: “It’s problematic, but it’s a domestic debate.”
Dobczansky, for his part, believes Ukraine is entitled to its own version of history and that Ukrainians should be allowed to choose how to present their own experiences. He praises local researchers’ efforts to study the Holocaust and open their archives and notes that Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.
“Ukraine has begun the process of confronting the darkest pages of its past,” he says.
A crowd holds a demonstration outside of the Soviet headquarters in Kyiv in September 1991, after Ukraine declared its independence. Photo by Alain Nogues / Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
In today’s charged atmosphere, saying anything critical about Ukrainian nationalism or calling attention to Ukrainian nationalists’ involvement with the Nazis can be seen as supporting Russia’s depiction of Ukraine as a Nazi nation, Belsky notes.
This Russian narrative is nothing new. Instead, says Dobczansky, it’s part of a long-term Russian information war on Ukraine. Putin’s ahistorical justifications of the invasion doesn’t surprise the scholar. What does surprise him is the outpouring of support he’s seen for Ukraine, with even “Saturday Night Live” paying tribute to the beleaguered nation.
Dobczansky theorizes that the outraged response to the invasion is tied to society’s relatively recent reexamination of colonialism. Because Ukraine was successfully integrated into the Soviet Union after World War II, Dobczansky doesn’t see the period leading up to Ukrainian independence in 1991 as an occupation so much as a relationship between a colony and a colonizer. By waging war on Ukraine, Putin is, in essence, trying to hold onto a colony.
“[Russian leaders] basically don’t recognize any Ukrainian historical agency except the agency that they imagined for them,” says Dobczansky.
Ukraine—and the world—seem to be imagining something different.
Katya Cengel writes about her time reporting from Ukraine earlier this century in her award-winning 2019 memoir, From Chernobyl with Love.
Katya Cengel |
Donald Trump Was Everything Vladimir Putin Could Have Wished For
From the days when the KGB sought to cultivate him 40 years ago to his term as president, Trump was a useful stooge. And if he gets another term, he still can be.
Craig Unger/March 2, 2022
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP/Getty Images
Most Trump, whom the KGB sought to cultivate as an asset more than 40 years ago, who played a role in laundering millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars for the Russian mafia, and who was bailed out of bankruptcy repeatedly by Russian and former Soviet operatives, has, in words and actions, spent four decades trying to implement one and only one overriding foreign policy goal: Destroy NATO. think that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were president. That news comes via a Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris Poll survey released last Friday, which said 62 percent of those polled believed Putin would not have attacked Ukraine if Trump were still in office—numbers that strongly suggest that most Americans still have little understanding about the disastrous ramifications of the Trump-Russia relationship.
Putin, you may recall, famously regards the death of the Soviet Union as the “greatest catastrophe” in history and has the larger ambition of not just taking back Ukraine but also rolling back all the advances by NATO since the collapse of the USSR. And it just happens that the most powerful weapon ever devised to subvert NATO was Trump, who had been doing an extraordinarily effective job of crippling NATO from within and planned to shatter it in his second term.
Indeed, Trump, whom the KGB sought to cultivate as an asset more than 40 years ago, who played a role in laundering millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars for the Russian mafia, and who was bailed out of bankruptcy repeatedly by Russian and former Soviet operatives, has, in words and actions, spent four decades trying to implement one and only one overriding foreign policy goal: Destroy NATO.
Consider:
In 1980, the KGB first began cultivating Trump as an intelligence asset when Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned the Joy-Lud electronics store in New York, sold Trump hundreds of TV sets for a new hotel. As I documented in American Kompromat, according to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, Kislin allegedly worked as a so-called “spotter agent” while running the store and identified Trump as a potential asset. (Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.)
Trump had, knowingly or not, just laundered money for the Russian mob.
In 1984, a year after opening Trump Tower, Donald Trump sold five condos in his glitzy luxury high rise in an all-cash transaction of $6 million ($28 million in 2022 dollars) to David Bogatin, an alleged member of the Russian mafia. According to the New York State attorney general’s office, Trump had, knowingly or not, just laundered money for the Russian mob.
In the years that followed, as I reported in The New Republic, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs owned, lived in, and even ran criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
In addition, according to a Buzzfeed investigation, more than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold “in secretive all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.” Anonymity and all-cash transactions are the two essential predicates for money laundering. The total value of the condos sold was around $1.5 billion, but that figure did not even include many other Trump-branded properties in Canada, the Philippines, Panama, Turkey, India, South Korea, and other countries where similar transactions may have been taking place.
in The New Republic, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs owned, lived in, and even ran criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
In addition, according to a Buzzfeed investigation, more than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold “in secretive all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.” Anonymity and all-cash transactions are the two essential predicates for money laundering. The total value of the condos sold was around $1.5 billion, but that figure did not even include many other Trump-branded properties in Canada, the Philippines, Panama, Turkey, India, South Korea, and other countries where similar transactions may have been taking place.
Meanwhile, in 1986, Trump met with Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin and his daughter Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the U.N.’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library, in a job that was widely known to be a cover for KGB operatives. Dubinina and her father told Trump how much they loved Trump Tower and would love to have him develop a Trump Tower Moscow.
In early 1987, KGB Major Yuri Shvets, based in Washington, returned to Yasenevo, the headquarters for the KGB’s (now SVR) foreign intelligence operations, to engage a new recruit from the United States in “active measures,” including propaganda and disinformation campaigns against the West. At the time, according to Shvets, in addition to its ongoing war against NATO, the KGB was disseminating active measures designed to disrupt America’s alliance with Japan.
In July 1987, a few months later, the KGB orchestrated Trump’s first trip to the Soviet Union. According to Shvets, the letter inviting Trump was written at the behest of Ivan Gromakov, a KGB general in the First Chief Directorate’s rezidentura in Washington. In late summer 1987, just weeks after returning from the Soviet Union, Trump began an abortive campaign to win the 1988 Republican nomination and set up appearances in New Hampshire for the primary season.
A few days later, Shvets received a cable instructing KGB agents “to show us examples of craftsmanship in recruitment, in analytical work, examples to follow.” This cable pointed to a successful active-measure operation by which full-page ads voicing KGB talking points were printed in the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times under the headline, “There’s Nothing Wrong With America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure.”
The ads put forth a foreign policy that, for all practical purposes, called for the dismantling of the postwar Western alliance and the end of NATO. They took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
The ad said: “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help. It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
The ads were signed by none other than Donald Trump, as part of his abortive presidential campaign. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations of that time,” Shvets told me in 2020, when I interviewed him for American Kompromat. “It was a big thing—to have three major American newspapers publish KGB sound bites.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Trump had one business failure after another in airlines, football, and other sectors as he overexpanded into Atlantic City casinos and accumulated enormous debt. In 1996, Trump visited Russia again, hoping to revive dreams of Trump Tower Moscow.
In 2002, the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm staffed by émigrés from Russia and the former Soviet Union, began to bail Trump out with lucrative schemes that paid huge sums to license his name for luxury condos. The developments were financed by Bayrock and its associates who had ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence and, allegedly, the mob. Among its projects, Bayrock planned to develop the Trump SoHo in New York and other Trump-branded luxury high-rises in Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, and elsewhere.
In the wake of the 2008 fiscal crisis, Trump expanded into developing golf courses. According to his son, Eric Trump, the funding came from Russia.
In 2013, Trump staged the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, financed and produced by Aras Agalarov, a Putin-aligned oligarch.
On March 29, 2016, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign as campaign manager. Long known as an operative in the so-called “Torturers’ Lobby,” where he and Roger Stone represented repressive governments in Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Manafort had begun working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in 2004. In the ensuing years, his operation received $75 million from pro-Putin oligarchs. Manafort worked in Ukraine with Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik as his chief assistant. In 2010, Manafort acted as the political campaign manager and agent for Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected president of Ukraine but was exposed to be a Putin puppet. He was ousted in 2014 after the bloody revolt in Maidan Square and fled to Russia.
In April 2016, after Trump had won a series of primaries, he staged his first event presenting his foreign policy at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, hosted by Dmitri Simes, a Russian who worked in U.S. think tanks. Yuri Shvets told me that when he was still in the KGB, he crossed paths with Simes at the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow and wanted to recruit him on the spot. “I saw Simes, and he was always lonely,” said Shvets. “Americans didn’t talk to him. Soviets didn’t talk to him.”
Shvets discussed the matter with his superior, who wanted to check it out with headquarters. “And the next day, he calls me saying, ‘Stand down. He’s being taken care of,’” Shvets told me. Translation: There was no need to recruit Simes because he was already a contact of the KGB. Simes currently hosts a political show on Channel One Russia, a state-controlled channel.
Before long, the Trump-Russia alliance went full steam ahead.
Before long, the Trump-Russia alliance went full steam ahead. On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with several Russian operatives, including Emin Agalarov and Natalia Veselnitskaya, in Trump Tower in hopes of getting dirt on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That July, at the GOP convention in Cleveland, Team Trump famously weakened the Ukraine plank of the Republican platform, removing language that called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” and replacing it with the phrase “appropriate assistance.” On July 27, 2016, Trump asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. He added, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
On August 19, 2016, Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign following press articles related to his work for Yanukovych. Later, in a text message that was hacked from her phone, Manafort’s daughter Andrea Manafort Shand asserted that her father’s resignation was merely a ruse to appease the public. “As I suspected, my dad resigned from being the public face of the campaign but is still very much involved behind the scenes,” she wrote a friend. “He felt he was becoming a distraction and that would ultimately take a toll on the campaign.”
On October 11, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. was paid $50,000 plus to give a speech in Paris sponsored by Center of Political and Foreign Affairs, a French think tank that is said to be a Russian front. Afterward, according to The Wall Street Journal, the CPFA’s Randa Kassis told Don Jr. that it was essential to cooperate with Russia in the Middle East. Then she quickly flew to Moscow, where she met with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom, The Guardian reported, she is good friends. As Kassis explained in a Facebook post, “I succeeded to pass [to] Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria.” Later, in 2019, President Trump did exactly as the Russians hoped, removing U.S. troops from northern Syria and leaving Russia as the clear winner.
On May 10, 2017, after firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating his ties with the Russians, Trump celebrated in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. According to The Washington Post, during the meeting, Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russians, making disclosures that jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on ISIS.
In his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Robert Mueller did not charge Trump with obstruction of justice, instead deferring to the policy of not charging a sitting president. Nevertheless, according to CBS News, he cited 10 instances in which Trump may have committed “discrete acts” of obstruction. In addition, the Mueller report concluded that “Trump and 18 of his associates had a least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition,” The New York Times reported.
On July 16, 2018, in Helsinki, Trump met with Putin and defended Russia against the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in America’s 2016 presidential election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Then came the events that led to Trump’s first impeachment. In January 2019, Trump ally RudyGiuliani met in New York with the top Ukrainian prosecutor at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko, in an effort to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. On April 7, on Fox News, Rudy Giuliani asserted falsely that Vice President Biden had pressed Ukraine to stop investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on which Biden’s son Hunter was a board member. There was no evidence to support his claim. In fact, as vice president, Biden called for the removal of then–chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he had been so ineffective in taking on corruption in Ukraine.
On April 21, 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskiy was elected president of Ukraine, and two months later, on June 21, Giuliani tweeted that Zelenskiy was “silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 election and alleged Biden bribery.”
Then, in July 2019,according to The Washington Post, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. In written testimony, Ambassador Bill Taylor said he was on a video conference with National Security Council staff and other officials that day when someone from the Office of Management and Budget chimed in and “said that she was from OMB and that her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending of security assistance for Ukraine until further notice.” According to Taylor, she said, “The directive had come from the President to the Chief of Staff to OMB.”
Then, on July 25, from 9:03 a.m. to 9:33 a.m., Trump and Zelenskiy spoke in what Trump later called a “perfect phone call.” According to the
Ukrainian readout of the call, the two leaders discussed “investigation of corruption cases.” While on the call, Zelenskiy mentioned his government’s need to purchase anti-tank missiles from the U.S., according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House. Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” He asked Zelenskiy to investigate Biden, and said he should talk to Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr.
On August 12, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, received an anonymous whistleblower complaint alleging that “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
On December 18, 2019, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine to help his reelection bid and obstructing the congressional inquiry by telling administration officials to ignore subpoenas and not cooperate. The votes on the charge were 230 in favor of Trump’s impeachment, 197 against, and one present. In February 2020, however, he was acquitted by the Senate.
When Biden was elected president in November 2020, Putin lost perhaps the most valuable asset the Soviet Union or Russia had ever had—a president of the United States who had been an unparalleled asset for 40 years. Trump had demonized NATO as early as 1987, provided a glitzy and luxurious home away from home for countless Russian alleged mafiosi and operatives for decades, was deeply indebted to the Russians financially, and was, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020, the subject of Russian kompromat about his intimate conduct within Russia.
Trump was everything Putin could have wished for, but now he was gone. And so, in Trump’s absence, Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine, thinking, apparently, that NATO was torn asunder, that Biden was crippled thanks to political divisions sown by Trump, that there would be no internal dissent in Russia, that Ukraine was not united, and that his aggression would be a cakewalk.
To which Trump has replied, “This is genius.… Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.… I know him very well. Very, very well. By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened.”
Or so he says.
In their new book, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker report a more likely outcome, noting that “Trump had privately indicated that he would seek to withdraw from NATO and to blow up the U.S. alliance with South Korea, should he win reelection. When those alliances had come up in meetings with [then–Defense Secretary Mark] Esper and other top aides, some advisers warned Trump that shredding them before the election would be politically dangerous.”
“Yeah, the second term,” Trump had said. “We’ll do it in the second term.”
Similarly, in 2019, The New York Times reported that then-President Trump had said he wanted the U.S. to withdraw from NATO, a move that would have been tantamount to destroying the organization.
But Trump never got his second term (not yet, at least). Putin, no doubt, had planned to rely on Trump to undermine NATO in his second term, and NATO, absent U.S. leadership, would have been far, far less effective in standing up for Ukraine.
Unfortunately for Putin, the greatest useful idiot the Russians ever had was no longer in the White House. So Putin took the gamble without him.
Craig Unger is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of several books, including House of Bush, House of Saud.
From the days when the KGB sought to cultivate him 40 years ago to his term as president, Trump was a useful stooge. And if he gets another term, he still can be.
Craig Unger/March 2, 2022
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP/Getty Images
Most Trump, whom the KGB sought to cultivate as an asset more than 40 years ago, who played a role in laundering millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars for the Russian mafia, and who was bailed out of bankruptcy repeatedly by Russian and former Soviet operatives, has, in words and actions, spent four decades trying to implement one and only one overriding foreign policy goal: Destroy NATO. think that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were president. That news comes via a Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris Poll survey released last Friday, which said 62 percent of those polled believed Putin would not have attacked Ukraine if Trump were still in office—numbers that strongly suggest that most Americans still have little understanding about the disastrous ramifications of the Trump-Russia relationship.
Putin, you may recall, famously regards the death of the Soviet Union as the “greatest catastrophe” in history and has the larger ambition of not just taking back Ukraine but also rolling back all the advances by NATO since the collapse of the USSR. And it just happens that the most powerful weapon ever devised to subvert NATO was Trump, who had been doing an extraordinarily effective job of crippling NATO from within and planned to shatter it in his second term.
Indeed, Trump, whom the KGB sought to cultivate as an asset more than 40 years ago, who played a role in laundering millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars for the Russian mafia, and who was bailed out of bankruptcy repeatedly by Russian and former Soviet operatives, has, in words and actions, spent four decades trying to implement one and only one overriding foreign policy goal: Destroy NATO.
Consider:
In 1980, the KGB first began cultivating Trump as an intelligence asset when Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned the Joy-Lud electronics store in New York, sold Trump hundreds of TV sets for a new hotel. As I documented in American Kompromat, according to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, Kislin allegedly worked as a so-called “spotter agent” while running the store and identified Trump as a potential asset. (Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.)
Trump had, knowingly or not, just laundered money for the Russian mob.
In 1984, a year after opening Trump Tower, Donald Trump sold five condos in his glitzy luxury high rise in an all-cash transaction of $6 million ($28 million in 2022 dollars) to David Bogatin, an alleged member of the Russian mafia. According to the New York State attorney general’s office, Trump had, knowingly or not, just laundered money for the Russian mob.
In the years that followed, as I reported in The New Republic, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs owned, lived in, and even ran criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
In addition, according to a Buzzfeed investigation, more than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold “in secretive all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.” Anonymity and all-cash transactions are the two essential predicates for money laundering. The total value of the condos sold was around $1.5 billion, but that figure did not even include many other Trump-branded properties in Canada, the Philippines, Panama, Turkey, India, South Korea, and other countries where similar transactions may have been taking place.
in The New Republic, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs owned, lived in, and even ran criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
In addition, according to a Buzzfeed investigation, more than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold “in secretive all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.” Anonymity and all-cash transactions are the two essential predicates for money laundering. The total value of the condos sold was around $1.5 billion, but that figure did not even include many other Trump-branded properties in Canada, the Philippines, Panama, Turkey, India, South Korea, and other countries where similar transactions may have been taking place.
Meanwhile, in 1986, Trump met with Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin and his daughter Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the U.N.’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library, in a job that was widely known to be a cover for KGB operatives. Dubinina and her father told Trump how much they loved Trump Tower and would love to have him develop a Trump Tower Moscow.
In early 1987, KGB Major Yuri Shvets, based in Washington, returned to Yasenevo, the headquarters for the KGB’s (now SVR) foreign intelligence operations, to engage a new recruit from the United States in “active measures,” including propaganda and disinformation campaigns against the West. At the time, according to Shvets, in addition to its ongoing war against NATO, the KGB was disseminating active measures designed to disrupt America’s alliance with Japan.
In July 1987, a few months later, the KGB orchestrated Trump’s first trip to the Soviet Union. According to Shvets, the letter inviting Trump was written at the behest of Ivan Gromakov, a KGB general in the First Chief Directorate’s rezidentura in Washington. In late summer 1987, just weeks after returning from the Soviet Union, Trump began an abortive campaign to win the 1988 Republican nomination and set up appearances in New Hampshire for the primary season.
A few days later, Shvets received a cable instructing KGB agents “to show us examples of craftsmanship in recruitment, in analytical work, examples to follow.” This cable pointed to a successful active-measure operation by which full-page ads voicing KGB talking points were printed in the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times under the headline, “There’s Nothing Wrong With America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure.”
The ads put forth a foreign policy that, for all practical purposes, called for the dismantling of the postwar Western alliance and the end of NATO. They took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
The ad said: “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help. It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
The ads were signed by none other than Donald Trump, as part of his abortive presidential campaign. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations of that time,” Shvets told me in 2020, when I interviewed him for American Kompromat. “It was a big thing—to have three major American newspapers publish KGB sound bites.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Trump had one business failure after another in airlines, football, and other sectors as he overexpanded into Atlantic City casinos and accumulated enormous debt. In 1996, Trump visited Russia again, hoping to revive dreams of Trump Tower Moscow.
In 2002, the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm staffed by émigrés from Russia and the former Soviet Union, began to bail Trump out with lucrative schemes that paid huge sums to license his name for luxury condos. The developments were financed by Bayrock and its associates who had ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence and, allegedly, the mob. Among its projects, Bayrock planned to develop the Trump SoHo in New York and other Trump-branded luxury high-rises in Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, and elsewhere.
In the wake of the 2008 fiscal crisis, Trump expanded into developing golf courses. According to his son, Eric Trump, the funding came from Russia.
In 2013, Trump staged the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, financed and produced by Aras Agalarov, a Putin-aligned oligarch.
On March 29, 2016, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign as campaign manager. Long known as an operative in the so-called “Torturers’ Lobby,” where he and Roger Stone represented repressive governments in Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Manafort had begun working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in 2004. In the ensuing years, his operation received $75 million from pro-Putin oligarchs. Manafort worked in Ukraine with Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik as his chief assistant. In 2010, Manafort acted as the political campaign manager and agent for Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected president of Ukraine but was exposed to be a Putin puppet. He was ousted in 2014 after the bloody revolt in Maidan Square and fled to Russia.
In April 2016, after Trump had won a series of primaries, he staged his first event presenting his foreign policy at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, hosted by Dmitri Simes, a Russian who worked in U.S. think tanks. Yuri Shvets told me that when he was still in the KGB, he crossed paths with Simes at the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow and wanted to recruit him on the spot. “I saw Simes, and he was always lonely,” said Shvets. “Americans didn’t talk to him. Soviets didn’t talk to him.”
Shvets discussed the matter with his superior, who wanted to check it out with headquarters. “And the next day, he calls me saying, ‘Stand down. He’s being taken care of,’” Shvets told me. Translation: There was no need to recruit Simes because he was already a contact of the KGB. Simes currently hosts a political show on Channel One Russia, a state-controlled channel.
Before long, the Trump-Russia alliance went full steam ahead.
Before long, the Trump-Russia alliance went full steam ahead. On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with several Russian operatives, including Emin Agalarov and Natalia Veselnitskaya, in Trump Tower in hopes of getting dirt on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That July, at the GOP convention in Cleveland, Team Trump famously weakened the Ukraine plank of the Republican platform, removing language that called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” and replacing it with the phrase “appropriate assistance.” On July 27, 2016, Trump asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. He added, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
On August 19, 2016, Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign following press articles related to his work for Yanukovych. Later, in a text message that was hacked from her phone, Manafort’s daughter Andrea Manafort Shand asserted that her father’s resignation was merely a ruse to appease the public. “As I suspected, my dad resigned from being the public face of the campaign but is still very much involved behind the scenes,” she wrote a friend. “He felt he was becoming a distraction and that would ultimately take a toll on the campaign.”
On October 11, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. was paid $50,000 plus to give a speech in Paris sponsored by Center of Political and Foreign Affairs, a French think tank that is said to be a Russian front. Afterward, according to The Wall Street Journal, the CPFA’s Randa Kassis told Don Jr. that it was essential to cooperate with Russia in the Middle East. Then she quickly flew to Moscow, where she met with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom, The Guardian reported, she is good friends. As Kassis explained in a Facebook post, “I succeeded to pass [to] Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria.” Later, in 2019, President Trump did exactly as the Russians hoped, removing U.S. troops from northern Syria and leaving Russia as the clear winner.
On May 10, 2017, after firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating his ties with the Russians, Trump celebrated in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. According to The Washington Post, during the meeting, Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russians, making disclosures that jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on ISIS.
In his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Robert Mueller did not charge Trump with obstruction of justice, instead deferring to the policy of not charging a sitting president. Nevertheless, according to CBS News, he cited 10 instances in which Trump may have committed “discrete acts” of obstruction. In addition, the Mueller report concluded that “Trump and 18 of his associates had a least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition,” The New York Times reported.
On July 16, 2018, in Helsinki, Trump met with Putin and defended Russia against the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in America’s 2016 presidential election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Then came the events that led to Trump’s first impeachment. In January 2019, Trump ally RudyGiuliani met in New York with the top Ukrainian prosecutor at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko, in an effort to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. On April 7, on Fox News, Rudy Giuliani asserted falsely that Vice President Biden had pressed Ukraine to stop investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on which Biden’s son Hunter was a board member. There was no evidence to support his claim. In fact, as vice president, Biden called for the removal of then–chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he had been so ineffective in taking on corruption in Ukraine.
On April 21, 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskiy was elected president of Ukraine, and two months later, on June 21, Giuliani tweeted that Zelenskiy was “silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 election and alleged Biden bribery.”
Then, in July 2019,according to The Washington Post, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. In written testimony, Ambassador Bill Taylor said he was on a video conference with National Security Council staff and other officials that day when someone from the Office of Management and Budget chimed in and “said that she was from OMB and that her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending of security assistance for Ukraine until further notice.” According to Taylor, she said, “The directive had come from the President to the Chief of Staff to OMB.”
Then, on July 25, from 9:03 a.m. to 9:33 a.m., Trump and Zelenskiy spoke in what Trump later called a “perfect phone call.” According to the
Ukrainian readout of the call, the two leaders discussed “investigation of corruption cases.” While on the call, Zelenskiy mentioned his government’s need to purchase anti-tank missiles from the U.S., according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House. Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” He asked Zelenskiy to investigate Biden, and said he should talk to Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr.
On August 12, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, received an anonymous whistleblower complaint alleging that “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
On December 18, 2019, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine to help his reelection bid and obstructing the congressional inquiry by telling administration officials to ignore subpoenas and not cooperate. The votes on the charge were 230 in favor of Trump’s impeachment, 197 against, and one present. In February 2020, however, he was acquitted by the Senate.
When Biden was elected president in November 2020, Putin lost perhaps the most valuable asset the Soviet Union or Russia had ever had—a president of the United States who had been an unparalleled asset for 40 years. Trump had demonized NATO as early as 1987, provided a glitzy and luxurious home away from home for countless Russian alleged mafiosi and operatives for decades, was deeply indebted to the Russians financially, and was, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020, the subject of Russian kompromat about his intimate conduct within Russia.
Trump was everything Putin could have wished for, but now he was gone. And so, in Trump’s absence, Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine, thinking, apparently, that NATO was torn asunder, that Biden was crippled thanks to political divisions sown by Trump, that there would be no internal dissent in Russia, that Ukraine was not united, and that his aggression would be a cakewalk.
To which Trump has replied, “This is genius.… Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.… I know him very well. Very, very well. By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened.”
Or so he says.
In their new book, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker report a more likely outcome, noting that “Trump had privately indicated that he would seek to withdraw from NATO and to blow up the U.S. alliance with South Korea, should he win reelection. When those alliances had come up in meetings with [then–Defense Secretary Mark] Esper and other top aides, some advisers warned Trump that shredding them before the election would be politically dangerous.”
“Yeah, the second term,” Trump had said. “We’ll do it in the second term.”
Similarly, in 2019, The New York Times reported that then-President Trump had said he wanted the U.S. to withdraw from NATO, a move that would have been tantamount to destroying the organization.
But Trump never got his second term (not yet, at least). Putin, no doubt, had planned to rely on Trump to undermine NATO in his second term, and NATO, absent U.S. leadership, would have been far, far less effective in standing up for Ukraine.
Unfortunately for Putin, the greatest useful idiot the Russians ever had was no longer in the White House. So Putin took the gamble without him.
Craig Unger is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of several books, including House of Bush, House of Saud.
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Yes - I think that you may find this interesting Gry - from my favourite YouTube channel - History Debunked -
The Holodomor; why the Ukrainians have a grudge against Russia dating back ninety years - YouTube
* the comments on that vid are VERY interesting too - talking about how our children are always taught in school and elsewhere about the Holocaust - but not the 3 Holodomors in school - (which murdered far more millions of innocent people - mainly Christians) - makes me think - that's kinda odd - eh?
The Holodomor; why the Ukrainians have a grudge against Russia dating back ninety years - YouTube
* the comments on that vid are VERY interesting too - talking about how our children are always taught in school and elsewhere about the Holocaust - but not the 3 Holodomors in school - (which murdered far more millions of innocent people - mainly Christians) - makes me think - that's kinda odd - eh?
