Fake News from Petersburg 1917

Trotsky's book on the Russian Revolution is exciting reading. He describes the clairvoyant leadership of Lenin in the successive congresses and programmatic papers, how the Vyborg industrial area workers were organized and prepared by the Bolshevik fraction for the insurrection. Trotsky consistently downplays his own importance and paints Lenin - whose contribution was writing position papers in the deep underground - as the giant whose clear vision and hard will pushed ahead the proletariat.

Yet it is clear that the unarmed workers did little and the active forces were front soldiers back from the trenches, thoroughly convinced of the incompetence of the Czarist officer class and its unwillingness to end the war. After it was clear that the forces guarding Petersburg and the Winter Palace, they entered unopposed and arrested the Provisory Government of Kerensky. The insurrection was a military action  led by Trotsky, who was the President of the Military Commission of the Bolshevik fraction.

Basically, the October Revolution was an unopposed military coup. Trotsky avoids ideology and presents no vision of socialism. It is all about destroying the Czarist regime and capitalism, because they are an obstacle to the development of the production. And a primitive army cannot fight the advanced German forces. He predicts the next war against Germany and the need for preparation. Stalin took over and completed the plan.  

Sleeping Well at the RAND Corporation

I was a fanatic follower of the RAND Corp. research publications, about demography and war strategy, but somehow I fell out of the habit. Today I visited their site and found nothing of interest to me. They write a lot about sleeping well, about the economic loss of sleeping badly, and little more. It reminded me of Friedrich Nietzsche making fun of the academic philosophy of sleeping well as the supreme object of life.

Ten times must thou reconcile again with thyself; for overcoming is bitterness, and badly sleep the unreconciled.

Ten truths must thou find during the day; otherwise wilt thou seek truth during the night, and thy soul will have been hungry.

Ten times must thou laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise thy stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee in the night.

Few people know it, but one must have all the virtues in order to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery?

Shall I covet my neighbour’s maidservant? All that would ill accord with good sleep.

Peace with God and thy neighbour: so desireth good sleep. And peace also with thy neighbour’s devil! Otherwise it will haunt thee in the night.

Honour to the government, and obedience, and also to the crooked government! So desireth good sleep. How can I help it, if power like to walk on crooked legs?

Jewish Feygele Celebration

Tel Aviv is the world's gay capital. In these hours 300,000 are parading along the sea boulevard (pic). I am at home working on a four apt. building. Thousands of Europeans are here to take part in the famous sex parties and get to fuck some Jews. With so much cannabis around, everything is peaceful and super-friendly. Our hyper-macho Muslim enemies are wondering how is that these Jewish feygele beat them every time.

This is not what the pioneers imagined, but could be worse.

Homosexuality violates Islamic Law in Iran and is punishable by death. Several thousand people have been executed for homosexuality since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Fire in the Gulf

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday (June 13) that intelligence reviewed by US officials showed that Iran was responsible for attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, a critical waterway for the transit of much of the world's petroleum.

Iran's clerical leadership seemed rational, but firing tankers is suicidal. Something is going on.

The holes in the ships look like caused by small mines. Is somebody mining the Gulf? Iran. It may have been a work accident while maintaining the minefield. 

Destructive Destruction of Israeli Corporations

Only three years ago Israel's economy was dominated by ten or so "tycoons" - self made men who built up business empires. They were nice modest people, like Alovich, Fishman, Dankner, etc.  None had a yacht and none built a palace for their twelve racecars. They were not that kind of people. Yet the focused hate of the media and the left-wing parties succeeded in embroiling each one of them in judicial procedures and paint them as criminals or suspected criminals(pic. the former tycoon Danny Dankner behind bars) .

Government economists argued that the concentration of so much economic power in few hands was deleterious to the country in many senses, not only economical but political and social. So new legislation forced them to dismantle their organizations, sell parts to the public, etc. The resulting situation is that today big corporations have no dominant shareholders, the shares have been dispersed and owned by pension funds and insurance companies that have no interest in the management of the business. So we have central businesses like Bank Leumi, the largest of Israel, Bank Poalim, El Al, Bezeq the phone monopoly, etc. that today have no visible personal owners and are managed by anonymous directories.

I think that this situation is very bad, because the directories (composed by bureaucrats and diversified leftists NGOs) have no enterprising spirit, no sense of business and no desire to expand and improve. In this sense the Chinese Communists were more intelligent: they sold for peanuts their State enterprises to enterprising individuals that developed them into global emporia. And not only that: a physical person knows that he can be sued, is vulnerable and will lose his fortune if he makes mistakes; not like a commission that has no fear of consequences nor responsibility. I am sure the Chinese hate the rich owners of their factories as we do, but they know that factories need to be owned by somebody, and State ownership is the worst. 

Israel Prepared for Missile Attack

Israel is prepared for next missile attack. It has been divided into 17 alert areas, so hen the missile is coming, the targeted area will be alerted while the rest of the country can continue sleeping in peace. I am in the green area, we are not expecting a flying bomb in the near future.  We shall have 90 seconds to seek refuge. 

The Czar Nikolay

Trotsky in his history of the Russian Revolution analyzes the Czar the last of the Romanov dynasty. He was a good looking sportsman, a man without emotions, "'without insides" (said the monk  Grigori Rasputin), a mediocre nobody spending his time in paddling in a canoe and noting down in his diary that he had tea on the terrace.  Probably he was quite stupid, too. All the while his army was destroyed by the Japanese in Tsushima, and later by the Germans. Russia's defeat in WWI produced millions of embittered soldiers who had been brutally flogged "to elevate their fighting spirits" and had witnessed the incompetence of the noble officer caste and were more than ready for a change. They started to doubt the divinity of the Czar and that the Jews had killed the Son of God. The Jews they knew personally had fought courageously and seemed good leaders.

Trotsky describes the vacillating Kadets during the revolution and how the extremist, terrorist left - the Bolsheviks - seized the power. This minuscule political illegal organization was the most virile, daring and decided element in the whole Russian universe. The Czar was unaware of their existence, he did not fight them, he was pleasantly occupied in open air sports, attending the Orthodox Church ceremonies and drinking his tea in the terrace. Soon after the Russian nobility found itself driving taxis in Paris. "Europe had a debt to history, and had to pay it".