🇺🇸JEFFREY SACHS: "I want to take it back to the 1840s, to the real roots of hegemony, which is Great Britain. Never was there a hegemon with such ambition and such a curious view of the world. But Britain wanted to run the world in the 19th century and taught America everything it knows. Recently, I read a fascinating book by a historian named J.H. Gleason, published by Harvard University Press in 1950. It's an incredibly interesting book called 'The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain.' The question is, where did England's hate of Russia come from? Because it's actually a little surprising. Britain has HATED Russia since the 1840s and launched the Crimean War that was a war of choice in modern Parliament—a war of choice by Palmerston in the 1850s—because it hated Russia. So, this author tries to understand where this hate came from, because it was the same kind of iterative hate that we have now. And by the way, we hated the Soviet Union because it was Communist, but we hated Russia afterwards when it wasn't communist. It doesn't matter. So, it's a deeper phenomenon, and he tries to trace where this hatred came from. The fascinating point is, Russia and Britain were on the same side in the Napoleonic Wars from 1812 to 1815, from the Battle of Moscow in Russia to Napoleon's defeat in Waterloo. They were on the same side, and in fact, for many years, the relations weren't great, but they were kind of normal. So, this historian reads every snippet of the newspapers, what's written, of the speeches, to try to understand where the hatred arose. The key point is there was no reason for it. There was nothing that Russia did. Russia didn't behave in some perfidious way. It wasn't Russian evil; it wasn't that the tsar was somehow off the rails. There wasn't anything except a self-fulfilling lather built up over time because Russia was a big power and therefore an affront to British hegemony. This is the same reason why the US hates China: not for anything China actually does but because it's big. It's the same reason, until today, that the United States and Britain hate Russia—because it's big. So, the author comes to the conclusion that the hate really arose around 1840 because it wasn't instantaneous, and there was no single triggering event. The British got it into their crazy heads that Russia was going to invade India through Central Asia and Afghanistan—one of the most bizarre, phony, wrongheaded ideas imaginable—but they took it quite literally. And they told themselves this: 'We're the imperialists. How dare Russia presume to invade India?' when it had no intention of doing so. So, my point is, it's possible to have hate to the point of war and now to the point of nuclear annihilation for no fundamental reason. Talk to each other."
Excerpt from remarks by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and academic, in an interview with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris for The Duran YouTube channel, April 4, 2024. Source: youtube.com/@TheDuran
@nxt888 The best cure to Russophobia is Russian literature and culture. Once you’re hooked, the propaganda never works.
@nxt888 I thought it was a family squabble. Weren’t the British and Russian royalty related?
@nxt888 Saying that the Brits wanted Russia 'cause Russia was big, while they themselves controlled 25% of the world already seems like a stretch. Sure it has natural resources, but size has nothing to do with resources, see the DPRK.
We only have to look at the refusal by the British Royal Family, who were actually requested by the Bolsheviks in a written letter, to take their family members who had been in their care, imprisoned under home arrest for months. Included in that family was a very sick little boy with a life-threatening disease, haemophilia, yet, despite these harrowing circumstances in confinement, the British Royal Crown refused to take them. Why? Well, a number of factors were involved. The King and his Russian cousin were doppelgangers, and the British Monarch was terrified that his Russian cousin would usurp his authority and come to rule in his stead! Perhaps Nicholas had more charisma than George? There would thus be a change in religion for Britain under the Russian Nicholas, who was an Russian Orthodox Christian. George V and Czar Nicholas II were first cousins — the two men bore a remarkable resemblance to one another, something commented upon all their lives when the families vacationed together or gathered for royal weddings. Also, the British King and his family hated the guts of Nicolas' wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, who was German. Was George under pressure from the British government to reject the Bolsheviks request? Well, the Brits at that time had a Constitutional Monarchy, much the same as it is now. Contrast that with the Czarist regime in Russia, which was the cause of the violent uprising and the Russian Revolution. Nicholas was beginning to introduce changes forced upon him, into what was a previously Divine Rule, you might say, a right supposedly conferred upon him by God. A change in King in England would be fraught with political and religious implication, coming as it did during WWI. It was not the time for any kind of threat to the British Crown or Constitutional government. So, when you look at things in that historical setting, you can readily see why Lenin's and/or Sverdlov's hand was forced you might say, given the historic circumstances of an ongoing World War, which had been paused because of the Revolutionary uprising, and the threat that they might lose the Revolution so hard fought and won, the order was given to execute the whole Russian Royal Family. A 2011 investigation concluded that, despite the opening of state archives in the post-Soviet years, no written document has been found which proves Lenin or Sverdlov ordered the executions; however, they endorsed the murders after they occurred. It is, however, difficult to believe such a mass execution of high-ranking Russian political and royal figures would have been carried out without Lenin's direct order.