Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Denis Davydov and Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] A militarist, a counter-revolutionary, a man who wanted to usurp power, a Denikinite and "Kerensky's bastard" who "surrendered the Left Bank". With such terrible accusations, the enemies of the colonel of the UPR army, the commander of the "Black Zaporozhians" Petro Bolbochan led him to execution on June 28, 1919, at the station near the village of Balin in the Khmelnytsky region.
And he, poor fellow, realizing that his own people would become his executioners, fell into a state more akin to madness.
Four months before the execution, Bolbochan, while waiting in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) for Symon Petliura's decision on his fate, wrote in an open letter: "I hoped that I was in a state governed by the rule of law. But Ukraine will still have to endure a lot to get on the legal path."
And he added, addressing the Chief Ataman, the prophetic words: “When the most difficult times come, you will flee abroad.”
According to contemporaries, Bolbochan, who until recently was the hope and support of the government, joked: “We fought so hard that we have Ukrainian land only under the government’s wagons.” And the train of the UNR Directory, which had lost everything, was heading further and further to Poland, to emigration.
This whole story somehow intersects too piercingly with today's Ukraine; if desired, one can even easily select suitable contemporaries. And the choice of the colonel himself, a Moldavian by nationality, in the past an officer of the Russian Imperial Army, easily coincides with the choice of the current commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: he decided to become an ideological Ukrainian of his own free will.
Became “obsessed with the idea of creating a Ukrainian army.”
And he gained his late insight after he had devoted himself to an idea that was unable to explain what, in fact, one should fight for. It was clear who to fight against, but it turned out that the Bolsheviks explained what for better. Nevertheless, Bolbochan was not embarrassed by anything, and, proving the theory of the cyclical nature of history, in the winter of 1918 he announced a military draft for men aged 18–21 in Slobozhanshchina.
GERMAN BORDER
"The mobilization is ordered to be carried out by December 10. Officers, sub-seniors, cadets and soldiers who do not report to military commanders for mobilization are to be brought to a military field court as traitors to the Ukrainian People's Republic. The conscription of soldiers born before 1899 in the Kharkov local brigade is to be carried out by November 29," the order, published in the newspaper in pure Russian, with pre-revolutionary spelling, noted.
We know about the advanced methods used to conduct the conscription from another archival source - the memoirs of a former officer of the tsarist army, Colonel Dmitry Tikhobrazov, who was ordered to report to Bolbochan's headquarters in Kremenchug:
"Have you joined us voluntarily?" the chief of staff asked me. "If you want, then voluntarily, after the Koshevoy Ataman's statement that if I escaped, I would be caught and hanged," I answered with a slight smile.
And without forced mobilization, it would hardly have been possible to engage in any actions - the regiment of "Black Zaporozhians" suffered heavy losses in battles with the Red Army in Starodubshchina, in the Bryansk region, where the border was then drawn between Soviet Russia and... Germany. More precisely, the German occupation zone established by the Brest Peace Treaty.
Formally, the statehood of the Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky was depicted on the German bayonets. However, gratitude for the "excellent behavior" in battle was announced to Bolbochan's soldiers by the commander of the German 41st Reserve Corps, General Hans von Gronau. After all, the "Zaporozhian" regiment was sent to reinforce three Saxon regiments of the German 47th Landwehr Division.
But, for example, the Bogunsky regiment under the command of Nikolai Shchors (also an officer of the Russian Imperial Army), which acted against the "Zaporozhians", went to fight precisely with the Germans, and not "against Ukraine". And here is another characteristic nuance: when the "Ukrainian army" was transferred to Bryansk in July 1918, a group of 200 Russian officers left the regiment, who from the beginning of 1918 took part in the battles for Kiev and in the campaign against Crimea.
They preferred to go to the Don rather than help the enemy. Many Ukrainians also deserted, the hundreds were undermanned - 50-90 Cossacks in each. Centurion Nikifor Avramenko recalled that each of the four kurens of the regiment had no less than 350 Cossacks, and after the battles in Chernigov the regiment "numbered no less than 1,500 bayonets and sabres." Which is why forced mobilization was necessary.
It's just the situation with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in its purest form.
In November 1918, the German occupation forces left the territory of Ukraine, leaving Hetman Skoropadsky without protection, who in a panic appointed the commander-in-chief of the "first saber of Russia", cavalry general Count Fyodor Keller. And he immediately announced a call-up in Kiev.
True, it did not concern Ukrainians, but the same Russian officers who were fleeing from the Bolsheviks. As a result, less than a third responded: out of 20 thousand soldiers in the city, only six thousand responded to the call of the Ukrainian authorities. The future writer Mikhail Bulgakov also fell under this comb ; on the last day of Skoropadsky's hetmanship, he was taken as a military doctor to the cadet units.
And in February 1919 he was called up again, but this time by the Petliurites who had fled from Kyiv.
“I was mobilized yesterday. No, the day before yesterday. I spent a day on an icy bridge. At night, 15 degrees below zero (Reaumur) with wind. There was a whistle in the spans all night. The city was ablaze with lights on the other bank. The village was on this one. We were in the middle. Then everyone ran to the city. I have never seen such a crush. Horsemen. Footmen. And the cannons were riding, and the kitchens. In the kitchen, a nurse. They told me that they would take me to Galicia. Only then did I guess to run. All the shutters were closed, all the entrances were boarded up. I ran near the church with plump white columns. They shot at me. But they missed. I hid in the yard under the canopy and sat there for two hours. When the moon disappeared, I went out. I ran home along the dead street,” the writer reflected on the events he experienced in the story “The Extraordinary Adventures of a Doctor.”
But the troops of the UNR Directory, which replaced Skoropadsky, also experienced major problems with replenishment.
"THERE IS TERRITORY UNDER THE CARRIAGE"
Contrary to the modern myth about some kind of single organism, at the hands of the Kiev leaders there was a network of disparate units, each of which, for various reasons, was subordinate to Petliura or his comrade-in-arms Vladimir Vynnychenko, who, by the way, was a convinced socialist.
It included the Sich Riflemen, assembled from former Austrian soldiers, the same Zaporizhian Corps of Bolbochan, the Northern Group of Forces of Vladimir Oskilko, and even the division of Nikifor Grigoriev (which went over to the side of the Ukrainian Soviet Army in February 1919) and the division of Danila Terpilo (ataman Zeleny), who became “red” already in January.
Everyone had their own mind, everyone tried to challenge the authority of the central government. “Our only active military force was the intelligent youth and part of the nationally conscious workers… who understood the statehood the same way we understood it,” Vynnychenko admitted.
In such a situation, it would be necessary to rely on the Ukrainian population, to convince them to “fight for Ukraine.” But most often they simply wanted to defend their property from everyone, creating their own armed units, without delving too much into any slogans.
The White Guard commander Andrei Shkuro, who passed through the territory of the Yekaterinoslav province, reflected the mood of the peasants in his memoirs:
“They decisively and unanimously condemned Hetman Skoropadsky.
“It was the king of the lords,” they said, “who gave away land to the lords, but nothing to us.”
They did not share Petliura's separatist ideals at all and were not interested in him at all, considering him to be some kind of eccentric, a psychopath. "We are not Ukrainians, we are Russians," they declared, "only we are Cossacks." The fact is that the Left Bank crests - direct descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks - were proud of their nickname "Cossacks" and dreamed of restoring the Zaporozhian Cossacks."
Well, those who were mobilized by force easily fled their units at the first sign of trouble.
Although the former Minister of War of the UPR, General Alexander Grekov, with childish pathos tells how “in Kremenchug, the reservists at Petliura’s first call came with their weapons and even machine guns and lived in the open air for five days, since due to the incompetence of the local authorities they were not given quarters, and it was mid-December according to the new style, and there were already severe frosts.” But still, no one left, no one wavered, and everyone waited to be sent to the front.
In fact, by the end of the Civil War, several times more ethnic Ukrainians served in the Red Army than in the UPR and the Ukrainian Galician Army that had been created by that time: five to seven times, according to the most optimistic estimates.
And Colonel Bolbochan, the hero of the Crimean campaign, the defender of the "Ukrainian-Russian border", the conqueror of the "Moscow Bolsheviks", the mainstay of the UPR army was accused of preparing a coup d'etat and arrested. Because he allowed himself to express the opinion that the government was filled with cretins leading everyone to destruction.
Ironically, during his first arrest he was guarded by Galicians from the Sich Riflemen Corps of Yevhen Konovalets, former Austrian subjects who saw Ukraine for the first time as occupiers. And as a thank you for all his services, he received an article entitled "A Viper is a Viper!", published in the central magazine of the UPR army, "Ukrainian Cossack": the former hero was called a representative of landowner-bourgeois circles who were striving to seize power. And he was shot unconscious.
“The poor fellow could not accept with his normal mind the madness that led to his death not from an enemy bullet, but at the hands of the Ukrainian government, to the creation of which he had done so much in critical times…” as the former fighter of the Zaporizhian Corps and the army of the UPR Boris Antonenko-Davidovych wrote.
By the way, for some reason he did not flee to Poland after Petliura, but chose to join the Communist Party and the status of “Ukrainian Soviet writer and translator, researcher of the problems of development and culture of the Ukrainian language.”
Probably, for the same reason: there was a practical meaning and a clear perspective in this. Unlike the fantasies of the "fighters for Ukrainian independence", who were ready to burn any number of people for only one purpose: to preserve their personal power.
Just like their ideological followers in modern Ukraine.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Zakharov
[REGNUM] On February 20, information appeared that the Investigative Committee of Russia (SK RF) began preparations for an investigation into the murder of the poet and writer Mikhail Lermontov. This was stated by People's Artist of Russia, State Duma deputy Nikolai Burlyaev.
"There was a response from the Investigative Committee, the work is possible within the framework of the fight against the falsification of history in the cultural sphere, including in relation to famous cultural figures of Russia," Burlyaev said. "Specific joint preparation for the investigation has begun, including technical ones, we will report on its progress and results."
Earlier it became known that Burlyaev sent an appeal to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation with a request to investigate the circumstances of the death of the great Russian poet. "I earnestly ask you to conduct a modern, honest, unbiased investigation using modern technologies available to the Investigative Committee of Russia," the document says.
According to the State Duma deputy, the investigation conducted immediately after Lermontov's murder almost two centuries ago was unfair. As Burlyaev notes, serious questions are raised by the fact that the bullet that hit the poet's body passed from the bottom up, at an angle of almost 40 degrees - such a trajectory is difficult to imagine on a level dueling ground.
However, Russian law enforcement agencies almost immediately denied the information about the start of an investigation: “The information disseminated by one of the agencies about the investigation into Lermontov’s murder does not correspond to reality,” the Russian Investigative Committee noted.
DUEL BY THE RULES
Mikhail Lermontov was killed by his old acquaintance, retired major Nikolai Martynov, in a duel on July 27 (July 15, old style) 1841 at the foot of Mount Mashuk near Pyatigorsk.
According to the official version, Lermontov shot upwards, and Martynov shot into the poet's chest. As for alternative versions of the death of the classic of Russian literature, such as the idea that the poet could have been shot by a person from an ambush, experts are very skeptical about them.
Candidate of Philological Sciences, Deputy Director for Research at the State Museum-Reserve of M. Yu. Lermontov in Pyatigorsk Elena Krivetskaya notes that there is no detective background to the poet's death. She doubts the need for a new investigation due to the availability of published and studied documents.
"It is on them and the results of the ballistic examination of Soviet researchers that the version is based, which we consider the only correct one, " says Krivetskaya. " Despite many information gaps, it is unlikely that anything new can be discovered in this matter."
According to literary scholar and associate professor of the journalism department at Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov Yegor Sartakov, there is no need to re-investigate the causes of the famous poet's death. According to the expert, the duel was conducted in accordance with the rules in force at the time, which is supported by written evidence.
“If they [the seconds] had even the slightest suspicion that the duel was not conducted according to the rules, and that it was not Martynov who shot Lermontov, but someone allegedly from the other side, then this would be a gross violation of the duel, and, of course, they would have intervened,” Sartakov said.
According to criminologist Mikhail Ignatov, it will not be possible to obtain new serious information during the proposed investigation, and today there are more serious and pressing problems in the country.
"History has already reached a fat point, why look for a black cat in a black room if it is not there?" Ignatov said. We will never find out who the third person could have been, besides the duelists and seconds, who could have hidden behind a tree and fired a shot. Everyone just wants to become participants in a world sensation and rewrite history a little."
SUSPICIONS ARE CONSTANTLY BEING BORN
On the one hand, Nikolai Burlyaev's interest in history from the distant past can be explained by personal motives. 40 years ago, he made a film about Lermontov (with himself in the leading role), but the film was not released.
According to the director, those in charge at the time “did not like the image of Lermontov, cleared of the layer of lies and slander that followed his tragic death in a duel.”
However, Burlyaev was not the first to draw attention to the circumstances of the poet's life and death. Back in 2007, British scientists suggested that Lermontov's descendants conduct a DNA analysis to answer the question of whether our compatriot had Scottish roots.
Researchers have suggested that the Lermontov surname was derived from the Scottish one. The poet himself was also interested in the origins of his family and even dedicated the poem "Desire" to possible distant ancestors from Scotland.
However, Mikhail Lermontov is not alone in the company of famous writers and poets whose biographies are periodically attempted to be clarified and supplemented. In particular, examinations have been conducted more than once on the subject of the authorship of anonymous libels with insults addressed to Alexander Pushkin, which became the reason (or pretext) for the fatal duel between the classic and Georges Dantes.
Sergei Yesenin's suicide was disputed, there were rumors that Maxim Gorky had been poisoned, and the hand of the OGPU was seen in Vladimir Mayakovsky's death. Abroad, the controversy over whether Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death was natural continues to rage. The circumstances and reasons for Edgar Poe's death are still the subject of speculation.
However, it is hardly worth reducing such theories and searches to conspiracy theories: serious scientists have hope for new discoveries in archives and the help of advanced technologies.
Just the other day, artificial intelligence was used to decipher crossed-out fragments of Pushkin's draft manuscripts. And who knows, maybe in the future it will be possible to shed light on the secrets of great people that have long excited the minds.
[TWZ] Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will soon sign a minerals agreement with the United States potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said Friday. That move is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to end the war with Russia and a deal the American leader says will recoup billions in military aid provided to Kyiv.
“Here’s the bottom line: President Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term,” Waltz said during remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to The Guardian.
During his evening address on Friday, Zelensky hinted that a deal could be close.
“Today, teams from Ukraine and the U.S. are working on a draft agreement between our governments,” he said. “This is an agreement that can strengthen our relations, and the key is to work out the details to ensure its effectiveness. I look forward to the outcome – a just result.”
An agreement could be signed as soon as Saturday, “although it is not yet complete, people briefed on the talks said,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The exact terms could not be learned. Asked if this would go through, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Friday: “I think they want it. They feel good about it.”
U.S. and Ukrainian officials negotiated all night into Friday morning to ink an agreement and end the souring Zelesnky-Trump relations, Axios reported, citing a U.S. official and a source with direct knowledge of the issue.
The pending deal would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s deposits of critical minerals including aluminum, gallium and titanium, Waltz said. As we previously reported, Ukraine possesses materials that are essential components of microchips and electric vehicle batteries and have significant military value. Trump has been touting this as a way to reduce the burden for supporting Ukraine, with Waltz claiming US aid to Kyiv has exceeded $175 billion, The Guardian reported.
That figure, as we have explained before, contradicts information compiled by the Kiel Institute For The World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker, which shows that the U.S. has provided Ukraine with a little less than $120 billion from the U.S. More than half – $66.5 billion – was for direct security assistance in the form of donated weapons, according to Pentagon figures.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was “very upset” with Zelensky over the deal, claiming the Ukrainian leader misrepresented the outcome of a meeting he had with Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Zelensky said he wanted to make the deal but needed the approval of his legislature, Rubio said.
However, “I read two days later that Zelensky is out there saying ‘I rejected the deal. I told him, No way that we’re not doing that.’ Well, that’s not what happened in that meeting,” Rubio explained. “So you start to get upset by something. We’re trying to help these guys.”
As we previously noted, it’s one thing to strike a deal, but something else entirely to extract and process the resources.
A little more than half of Ukraine’s mineral resources are contained in the four regions Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed in September 2022, and of which his army occupies a considerable swathe, The Independent reported earlier this month. That includes Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, though Kherson holds little value in terms of minerals, the publication added. The Crimean peninsula, annexed and occupied by Russian forces in 2014, also holds billions in mineral wealth, The Independent added.
[SpikedOnline] The German elites were wrong about everything.
As Germany’s federal elections approach this weekend, chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats (SPD) are bracing for their worst results since 1887. The SPD is battling with its equally unpopular coalition partner, the Green Party, for a humiliating third place, behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The coming bloodbath for Scholz’s government speaks to far more than the haplessness of his leadership or the unpopularity of his party. Germany has just endured two years of recession — the longest economic slump in its postwar history. Industry is in freefall, shedding almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs since the start of the pandemic. A series of terror attacks by Islamists and asylum seekers has made many Germans wonder if the state can do its basic duty to keep them safe. Talk of German efficiency and punctuality now sounds like a sarcastic joke, as roads and bridges fall into disrepair, trains are routinely late and infrastructure projects are plagued by delays and cost overruns. One in five German children lives in poverty. Germany is not merely in an economic downtown — it faces a profound structural crisis, largely of its elites’ own making.
None of these problems began in earnest in the Scholz era. The chancellor is merely the current frontman for a long-running ’consensus’ that has now become unsustainable and unsupportable. Tellingly, at the last federal elections in 2021, Scholz campaigned as the continuity candidate following the long reign of CDU chancellor Angela Merkel, under whom he served as vice-president and finance minister in a ’grand coalition’. He even aped her signature ’Merkel rhombus’ hand gesture to ram this point home. The accusation that ’politicians are all the same’ rings far truer in Germany than elsewhere. Every mainstream party is implicated in this crisis.
Foreign admirers of Germany praise the ability of its politicians to form a consensus, rather than squabble or try to score partisan points. This is what makes Germany a ’grown-up country’, as John Kampfner puts it in his staggeringly poorly aged 2021 book, Why the Germans Do it Better.
A less charitable interpretation of contemporary German politics would be that its leaders are gripped by groupthink. Policies, ideologies, ways of doing things become easily entrenched. The result is that when the ideas of the day are bad, they are shared not only across parties, but also by the broader elites, in business, media and culture. The main challenge to this received wisdom comes from the fringes, and so it can comfortably be ignored. Not even a change of governing party will necessarily lead to a change of course. Long read at the link...
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[FoxNews] Farage applauds Vance's comments to Munich Security Conference as 'ahead of his time'.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, believes a "political revolution" will sweep through Europe as it did the U.S. with the re-election of President Donald Trump.
In answer to questions about controversial comments made by Vice President JD Vance during the Munich Security Conference last week, Farage told Fox News Digital in an interview he "loved every word of what he said" and argued Vance was "speaking ahead of his time."
"He was talking to an audience of a European political class who are on the way out," Farage said at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London this week. "It’s a political revolution, and it swept through America. And it's going to sweep through the rest of Europe too."
Vance, who argued the biggest threat facing Europe was not from Russia or China, but rather from alleged government efforts to silence freedom of speech, drew international rebuke from some who argued his comments were misleading or inaccurate. Others praised his comments, including those who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday, where he was reportedly given a standing ovation.
Farage said Vance reminds him of where he was a decade ago when he served in the European Parliament and remembered "getting up and giving speeches and being screamed at and shouted at and hated."
Farage left the European Parliament in 2020 after the UK’s decision to leave the European Union under the 2016 Brexit referendum, which he ardently supported as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
He then launched the Brexit Party in 2019, before renaming it Reform UK, which he told Fox News Digital has leaped in popularity over the last seven months and is "leading consistently in the national opinion polls."
"It is quite remarkable. It's a reflection, I think, on what we call the Uni-Party," he added, arguing there are no differences between the UK’s Labor Party, which is currently in power under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and the Conservative Party.
"We're upbeat, we're optimistic, we've got a good vibe, and we believe, with the right leadership, we can and will turn this country around," he said.
According to a report by Reuters, Reform UK has just five members of parliament out of 650. But members of the party came in second place in roughly 100 races during the last election in July 2024.
The report noted the party was "benefiting from a growing anti-establishment" sentiment rising across Europe by which both far-right and far-left parties are seeing increasing support.
"We're in societal decline," Farage said, pointing to statistics relating to knife crime, immigration and the economy. "Now, can it be fixed? Not under this government."
"They're talking us into a recession. We're in for a couple of very, very tough years, but the turnaround will come at the next election," he added.
The U.K. has been dipping in and out of technical recessions since 2023 and has struggled to economically recover from the coronavirus pandemic, a fact that likely cost the Conservative Party its 14-year reign to the Labor Party in July.
Answering the unasked but important question. Especially given that in surveys in the years before the invasion something like three quarters of Gazan young people wanted to leave the Strip, but were not allowed to by Hamas. President Trumo’s proposal is answering a deeply felt need over there.
[RichardPollock] About half of all Paleostinians — six million - voluntarily live outside of Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... and the West Bank. This inconvenient fact is ignored when we discuss where Paleostinians call home. Some choose to live in the Paleostinian territories, but at least half have shunned these lands - and for a very long time.
Up to 300,000 Paleostinians currently reside in Europe. A half million live in Chile and hundreds of thousands more live throughout South America. More than 200,000 are in the U.S. and influenced the 2004 election of Donald Trump ...They hit him with slander, they impeached him twice. Nancy Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address on national TV. They stole an election and put his adherents in jail. They vilified him. They couldn't crucify him, so they shot him. Still, they can't keep him down... In the Middle East, more than 2 million live in Israel as full fledged citizens who can vote and have representation in the Israeli Knesset, the country’s parliament. Others have found successful livelihoods in Saudi Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start... , Bahrain, the UAE, and Leb ...home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade.... and Jordan.
Having established themselves for half a century or more in their adopted homes, few consider going back to the West Bank or Gaza. So living outside of the Gaza Strip isn’t unthinkable. In fact, it has been thinkable for quite some time.
And there is another special kind of Paleostinian expat that has been a well-kept secret. This group consists of fabulously wealthy Paleostinians who are derisively called by the Paleostinian man-on-the-street as the "exiled bourgeoise of Paleostine."
Pamela Ann Smith, writing for the progressive Middle East Research and Information Project in 1986 first described this group of wealthy Paleostinians as the exile Bourgeoisie of Paleostine.
Smith wrote then that the rise of the Paleostinian’s Black September terror organization and the radicalization of its population "led to the emigration of substantial numbers of the Paleostinian middle class, to Cyprus, Amman, Gay Paree and London. As the (Lebanese) war dragged on, many began to build more permanent ties in their new places of refuge. Today Paleostinian firms play a leading role within the Arab community in London and, to a lesser extent, in Gay Paree as well."
As the Washington producer for ABC’s "Good Morning America," I once personally met hundreds of these well-heeled Paleostinians at a 1993 grand soiree in Washington, DC. I’ll never quite forget the experience. They screamed of unspeakable wealth and contrary to Moslem law, enthusiastically crowded the hotel’s well-kept bar.
These Paleostinian expats didn’t reside in the dusty West Bank or in Gaza or in other parts of the Middle East. These exiles called home in places like London, Gay Paree, Geneva, Milan, or Florence. The largest expat community outside of the Middle East was there too, from Santiago, Chile.
Far from the media’s gaze, these are wealthy and highly successful Paleostinians. They are largely invisible, and many have little interest in living in Gaza or in the West Bank.
One wealthy Paleostinian who did attract some media attention about his unseemly riches was the Paleostinian Liberation Organization leader, Yassar Arafat. Just before his death, CBS "60 Minutes" estimated his personal wealth to be between $1 and $3 billion.
CBS reported that a large portion of Arafat’s wealth came from corruption and from secret sweetheart deals that were hidden from the Paleostinian people. They reported, "part of the Paleostinian leader's wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion -- with investments in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands."
His wife, Zuha Arafat, a Paleostinian Christian, married the PLO leader when he was 61 and she was 27. She was already living in Gay Paree, where Arafat eventually died.
The average Paleostinian apparently despised Zuha. The Times of Melbourne reported in 2004," On the streets, Suha is more often condemned as a scheming minx who bewitched the leader and ripped off vast sums of public money to finance a lavish lifestyle in Gay Paree."
Their only child was daughter Zahwa who was born in 1995 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, La Belle France.Neuilly-sur-Seine is one of the most affluent areas of La Belle France and it’s the wealthiest and the most expensive suburb of Gay Paree.
Zahwa is estimated by Israeli sources to be worth as much as $8 billion. Although highly secretive, she reportedly lives in luxury with prime real estate in London, Gay Paree and Malta. Despite this, she is still considered a "refugee" and is eligible for UNRWA funds — welfare payments from the highly corrupt United Nations ...boodling on the grand scale... Relief and Works Agency.
In 2024, President Biden, along with a dozen other countries, halted payments to UNRWA after it was discovered that members of the relief organization enthusiastically took part in the October 7, 2023 Hamas ..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,... -led slaughter, killing 1,200 and seizing 250 hostages.
Many years earlier, in 1993, I had the opportunity to meet and socialize with many of the Suha Arafat’s affluent contemporaries. In September of that year, Arafat traveled to DC to sign a peace accord with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They did so on the South Lawn of the White House. A beaming Bill Clinton ...former Democratic president of the U.S. Bill was the second U.S. president to be impeached, the first to deny that oral sex was sex, the first to have difficulty with the definition of the word is... stood beside them.
To celebrate the event, thousands of the wealthy Paleostinians filled a deluxe DC hotel then called the "ANA Hotel," named after the Japanese airline.
The ANA was an exclusive, four diamond-rated hotel. When you entered, you faced a three tier Italianate fountain. The ninth floor was a secure floor, isolated from the rest of the hotel for security. There, Arafat and his PLO staff resided.
The Presidential Suite, where Arafat likely stayed featured portraits of George and Martha Washington. The hallways were decorated with portraits of previous First Ladies.
I was asked by my "Good Morning America" bosses in New York to try to book Arafat or one of his top advisors on our morning show.
So, I showed up at the hotel in DC’s affluent Foggy Bottom. The hotel was bustling with the Paleostinian elite’s "beautiful people." They mobbed the hotel’s lobby, bar and restaurant. They were elegant. The women wore sexy haute couture dresses that hugged them. The men wore custom tailored suits.
I knew Hanan Ashwari, the PLO’s central spokeswoman who resided in one of the PLO’s ninth floor suites. She was more modestly dressed than those socializing in the hotel. And she was on her game with American news hounds: friendly, articulate and energetic.
As a news hound and producer, I wanted to understand: who are these well-dressed people swarming throughout the hotel? I spent several afternoons and evenings to meet as many Paleostinian as possible. At first, I naively asked them where they lived in the Paleostinian territories.
One well-dressed young Paleostinian at the bar sneered at me when I mentioned, "The West Bank." He retorted, "I haven’t been to the West Bank in ages." His parents were originally from Ramallah, the West Bank’s capital. Home as it turned out was in London. He was born there.
From then on, I didn’t ask where in the Paleostinian territories they called home. I simply asked where they lived.
As it turns out, they were living in Gay Paree, Florence, Milan, Stockholm, New York, Geneva and Santiago, Chile. Santiago has the largest diaspora community with today more than a half million Paleostinians living there.
And while most Paleostinians are regarded as leftists, in Chile the Paleostinians were opposed to the socialist government of Salvadore Allende and welcomed the military coup that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet, according to Paleostine studies.org.
The idea of population transfers to other countries isn’t new. In fact, it’s what the United States has been built on. Many have added value to other countries and to their families, translating a near-disasters into success stories.
The movement of populations isn’t unique. In fact, it’s the story of our modern time.
As Sadanand Dhume, a Wall Street Journal columnist recently wrote, "Many population transfers have taken place over the past century. In the 1920s, Greece and The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...a NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions... member, but not the most reliable... agreed to a forced population swap: Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey moved to Greece, while Moslems in Greece moved to Turkey. After World War II, millions of Indians and Paks were forced to find new homes, as were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled Indians. Only in the Paleostinian case has the refugee question festered endlessly.
So, I salute the exiled bourgeoise Paleostinians. They are a roaring success to their expat communities and proud members of their adopted countries.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
