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May 30, 2023Liked by Richard Kelly

Since the madness began in 2020, I have been reading and watching both dramas and documentaries about Russia's history, believing that there are lessons for our times.

The life and career of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's henchman, is truly chilling, as are the various accounts of the dreadful prewar purges, when Stalin oversaw the trials, banishments and executions of many of the USSR's brightest, best and most loyal, including scientists and army officers.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-memorial-victims-and-perpetrators-of-stalin-s-purges-stand-side-by-side/29679174.html

Some of the most tragic victims' names have stayed with me:

Yevgenia Klemm, who led the Red Army women imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbruck, boostered morale, discipline and belief in the Soviet system, only to be denounced after her eventual release, when she tried to resume her career:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2015/01/30/the-truth-about-the-nazi-camp-my-mum-was-in/

Bronya Poskrebyshova

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronislava_Poskrebysheva

Even following the Nazi invasion, which left Stalin in an unprepared panic, the Soviet system continued to terrorise its own people, in spite of which, those same people found the guts to repel the invaders at enormous personal cost.

Now, as the west falls into decline and disarray, led by the network which appears to have embedded itself so successfully, we find ourselves divded between the compliant and the resistance; where will it end?

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As always, your pieces are super helpful. This is why we see a trend of increasingly vague laws/bills. Even juice media has caught on to this.

Sasha Latypova and Katherine Watt outline a decades long plan to reshape laws to prepare for this war. Meanwhile, even most of the resistance still thinks "they'll set it right".....

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I think it time to reread season me Solzhenitsyn. His books Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich were very haunting. So many echoes of today and the way we are governed.

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https://youtu.be/7fhI9YMyvOo

This is worth watching: The History of the Gulag, especially as several countries -like Australia I believe- started confining dissenters during the lockdown years.

Now that the WHO treaty looms, we should be prepared for more assaults on our basic freedoms, nodded through by our slippery governments.

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All for the good of the whole of society.

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