Military Madness > Before Gandhi, there was Tolstoy; Another Billion in Biden's Wealth Transfer Pogrom; and then Another $775 mn

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Before Gandhi, there was Tolstoy

When Leo Tolstoy was 54, he wrote a book about the ethical teachings of Jesus as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. For the rest of his life, Tolstoy advocated the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change.

Gandhi – the person we associate with peaceful, non-violent resistance – was 12 years old when Tolstoy’s book was published.

Martin Luther King – the man who popularized peaceful, non-violent resistance in America – would not be born for another 45 years.

In 1854, during the Crimean War, a British light brigade was ordered to charge the cannons of the Russian Empire.

A “light brigade” carried only light weapons, such as sabers and pistols.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about this famous headlong charge toward certain death:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred…

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian artillery officer in that war and was forever changed by it.

That war – the first modern war – led Tolstoy to the Sermon on the Mount and convinced him of the truth of Jesus’ words.

“Blessed are the peacemakers… blessed are the meek… blessed are the merciful…”

Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 3 times, but each time he wrote to the committee and asked them to remove his name from consideration.

When the public grew angry that Tolstoy never received the Nobel, he confessed that he had privately rejected it and wrote,

“First, it has saved me the predicament of managing so much money, because such money, in my opinion, only brings evil. Secondly, I felt very honoured to receive such sympathy from people I have not even met.”

Tolstoy was loved by everyone except religious leaders.

Remember that book he wrote in 1882 about the ethical teachings of Jesus? It did not appear in Russia for 24 years because it was blocked by the Orthodox Church, the leaders of the Christian faith in Russia. They were worried that Tolstoy might have been talking about them when he wrote,

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”

The religious leaders became angry again when Tolstoy wrote,

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Mark Twain, a contemporary of Tolstoy, may well have been making a joke about religious leaders in America when he wrote,

“By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.”

Tolstoy saw Jesus and his teachings as gold surrounded by the mud of religiosity. He said, 

“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

This reminds me of Michelangelo’s description of how he carved an angel from a block of marble:

“I just removed everything that was not angel.”

I will leave you now, to consider all that you have been told, and wash the mud from the gold, and remove everything that is not angel.

Roy H. Williams

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Crimea

Another billion dollars transferred from taxpayers to the military-industrial complex oligarchs in Biden's wealth transfer program

Pentagon announces $1B in ammunition, weapons aid to Ukraine

By Adam Schrader

Police at the scene after a rocket strike on a residential area in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Monday amid Russia's military invasion.

At least one man was killed during the attack, the chairman of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration Oleg Sinegubov said. Photo by Vasiliy Zhlobsky/EPA-EFE

Aug. 8 (UPI) -- The United States announced Monday it would provide Ukraine with $1 billion in ammunition and weapons systems -- the largest lethal aid package provided to the country since Russia invaded in February.

Todd Breasseale, the acting Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the package put together by President Joe Biden under his presidential drawdown authority is needed to help Ukraine meet its "critical security and defense needs."

"It is the largest single drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment utilizing this authority," Breasseale said.

"This package provides a significant amount of additional ammunition, weapons, and equipment -- the types of which the Ukrainian people are using so effectively to defend their country."

Since August 2021, the U.S. government has now approved around $9.8 billion worth of military equipment and supplies for Ukraine through 18 such packages.

The latest package includes additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and munitions for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems.

It also includes 1,000 Javelin missiles and hundreds of AT4 anti-armor systems, 50 armored medical treatment vehicles and medical supplies, Claymore anti-personnel munitions and C-4 explosives.

Additional ammunition includes 75,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition as well as 20 120mm mortar systems and 20,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition.

Of course, none of this will save Ukraine, but it sure keeps the inventory of war moving in the good ol' USA.

U.S. will send another $775 million in weapons to Ukraine

By Doug Cunningham

   

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pictured in Lviv, Ukraine, on Thursday. The United States will send another $775 million in weapons to Ukraine soon, bringing the total U.S. weapons assistance to over $10 billion, a defense official said. 

Aug. 19 (UPI) -- The United States will send another $775 million in weapons to Ukraine, including missiles, drones, and vehicles, the White House said Friday.

President Joe Biden authorized the State Department to send up to $775 million in defense materiels and training on Friday, according to the White House.

The weapons package will include 16 howitzers and ammunition for them and AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles known as HARM, senior Pentagon officials told The Hill, CNBC and Defense News.

Armored vehicles, 15 Scan Eagle reconnaissance drones are also included in the latest weapons package.

With this latest weapons assistance package, the United States will surpass $10 billion in military assistance for Ukraine. Ukraine appears to be putting the weapons to effective use.

Overnight Thursday and into Friday morning, explosions occurred again in Russian-occupied Crimea and in Russia's Belgorod Oblast. The explosions hit a Russian ammunition depot in Belgorod.

Those strikes followed an Aug. 9 attack on the Russian Saki airbase in Crimea that destroyed Russian Black Sea Fleet warplanes.

"Crimea is the sovereign territory of Ukraine," Ukraine National Security Council head Oleksiy Danilov tweeted Friday. "The issue on the agenda is the step-by-step demilitarization of this territory with its further de-occupation."

Earlier this month, a $1 billion arms package for Ukraine was announced that included more Javelin missiles and hundreds of AT4 anti-armor systems.

In May, U.S. Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin said 20 nations agreed to donate critically needed weapons to continue to enable Ukraine to defend itself from Russia's invasion and continuing attacks.

Of course, the Russian invasion was provoked by NATO and the US - a 7 year project, and now Deep State is reaping the benefits in moving their war inventory at a spectacular rate. Tax money going to the military-industrial oligarchs.

Tolstoy's Fascinating Secrets to a Happy Life

We can learn a lot about the art of living from Tolstoy's War and Peace - a 10-hour dramatisation of which is airing on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday. It acutely observes vanity and folly, sexual jealousy and family relationships. But we can also learn from the life of the master novelist himself, writes Roman Krznaric.

Tolstoy, who was born in 1828 and died in 1910, was a member of the Russian nobility, from a family that owned an estate and hundreds of serfs. The early life of the young count was raucous, debauched and violent.

"I killed men in wars and challenged men to duels in order to kill them," he wrote. "I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people…so I lived for ten years."

But he gradually weaned himself off his decadent, racy lifestyle and rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background, adopting a radical, unconventional worldview that shocked his peers. So how exactly might his personal journey help us rethink our own philosophies of life?

1. Keep an open mind

One of Tolstoy's greatest gifts was his ability and willingness to change his mind based on new experiences. The horrific bloodshed he witnessed while fighting in the Crimean War in the 1850s turned him into a lifelong pacifist. In 1857, after seeing a public execution by guillotine in Paris - he never forgot the thump of the severed head as it fell into the box below - he became a convinced opponent of the state and its laws, believing that governments were not only brutal, but essentially served the interests of the rich and powerful. "The State is a conspiracy," he wrote to a friend. "Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." Tolstoy was on the road to becoming an anarchist. He would be the first to encourage us to question the fundamental beliefs and dogmas we have been brought up with.

2. Practise empathy

Tolstoy displayed an unusual capacity to empathise by stepping into the shoes of people whose lives were vastly different from his own. In the 1860s, he not only adopted peasant dress but began working alongside the newly emancipated labourers on his estate, ploughing the fields and repairing their homes with his own hands. For a blue-blooded count, such actions were nothing short of remarkable. Although no doubt tinged with paternalism, he enjoyed the company of peasants and consciously shunned the literary and aristocratic elite in the cities. Tolstoy believed you could never understand the reality of other people's lives unless you had a taste of it yourself.

3. Make a difference

He also distinguished himself from his upper class peers by taking practical action to alleviate other people's suffering, most evident in his famine relief work. After the crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy stopped writing Anna Karenina for a year to organise aid for the starving, remarking to a relative: "I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones." His friends and family thought it was crazy for one of the world's finest novelists to put one of his works of genius on the backburner. He did it again following the famine in 1891, spending two years working in soup kitchens and fundraising. Can you imagine a bestselling author today setting aside their latest book to do humanitarian relief work for two years?

circa 1880: The Russian ladies at a Nobles' Ball in Moscow
gasp at the foreign court dress of a visiting Englishman

4. Master the art of simple living

Following a mental breakdown in the late 1870s, Tolstoy rejected all organised religion, including the Orthodox Church he had grown up in. He adopted a revolutionary brand of Christianity based on spiritual and material austerity. He gave up drinking, smoking, and became a vegetarian. He also inspired the creation of utopian communities of simple, self-sufficient living, where property was held in common. These "Tolstoyan" communities spread around the world and led Gandhi to found an ashram in 1910 named the Tolstoy Farm.

5. Beware your contradictions

This new, simpler life was not without its struggles and contradictions. Tolstoy famously preached universal love yet was constantly fighting with his wife. Moreover, the apostle of equality was never able to fully abandon his wealth and privileged lifestyle. He lived until old age in a grand house with servants. But in the early 1890s he managed - against his family's wishes - to relinquish copyright to a huge portion of his literary works, in effect sacrificing a fortune. Given the privileged position in which Tolstoy started his life, his personal transformation, if not complete, still deserves our admiration.

6. Become a craftsman

Tolstoy recognised that striking a balance between mind and body was an essential part of his creative process. He not only regularly put down his pen to guide a horse-drawn plough across the fields, (a feature of the character Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina) but kept a scythe and saw leaning up against the wall next to his writing desk. In his last years, when writers and journalists came to pay homage to the bearded sage, they were always surprised to find one of the world's most famous authors huddled over his cobbling tools making a pair of boots. If Tolstoy were here today he would no doubt suggest we get some craft into our lives rather than grant so much of our leisure time to tweeting and texting.

7. Expand your social circle

The most essential life lesson to take away from Tolstoy is to follow his lead and recognise that the best way to challenge our assumptions and prejudices, and develop new ways of looking at the world, is to surround ourselves with people whose views and lifestyles differ from our own.

In Resurrection, he pointed out that most people - whether they are politicians, businessmen or thieves - "instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it". Cosseted within our peer group, we may think it perfectly normal and justifiable to own two homes, or to oppose same-sex marriage, or to bomb countries in the Middle East. We cannot see that such views may be perverse, unjust, or untrue, because we are inside circles of our own making.
The writer of this article, Roman Krznaric, might consider practicing what he preaches.

The challenge is to spread our conversational wings and spend time with those whose values and experiences contrast with our own. Our ultimate task, Tolstoy would advise us, is to journey beyond the perimeters of the circle.