The Russians are coming! Ooooh! I'm really scared!

Off-Topic Off Topic - Militaria
#1

Russia sends warships towards Australia before G20 meeting

David Wroe
Published: November 12, 2014 - 8:30PM

Russia has sent a fleet of warships towards Australia in an apparent display of muscle-flexing ahead of the G20 meeting amid tensions between the two countries over the MH17 crash.

Defence announced late on Wednesday it is “monitoring Russian naval vessels that are currently transiting through international waters to the north of Australia”.

It stressed: “The movement of these vessels is entirely consistent with provisions under international law for military vessels to exercise freedom of navigation in international waters.”

Defence Force chief Mark Binskin confirmed Defence was watching the fleet. In a reference to the fact it was a considerable distance for the Russian navy to travel, he noted one of the ships was an ocean-going tug, which tows other ships.

“Their confidence? One of them is an ocean-going tug,” he said. “It’s just part of their operation. They are in international waters. They are allowed to do that. They are in our approaches and we will continue to surveil them with air and maritime assets.”

Defence noted that Russia had sent naval battle groups to international meetings previously.

“Russian naval vessels have previously been deployed in conjunction with major international summits, such as the APEC meeting in Singapore in 2009. A warship from Russia’s Pacific Fleet also accompanied former Russian President Medvedev’s visit to San Francisco in 2010,” its statement said.

Defence sources said the Australian Defence Force had sent two frigates, the Stuart and the Paramatta, and a P-3 Orion surveillance plane to monitor the Russians.

It comes as Prime Minister Tony Abbott had a sharp meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing on the sidelines of the APEC summit, during which they discussed the MH17 crash.

Asked if it was a show of force, Air Marshall Binskin said: “You’d have to ask the Russians.”

Russia’s TASS news agency reported late last month that the battle group, led by a Slava-class cruiser that is capable of carrying nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, left from Vladivostok on October 23.

The fleet is made up of the “Varyag” cruiser, a destroyer named “Marshal Shaposhnikov”, a salvage and rescue tug and a replenishment oiler.

It is understood the Russians have in recent years increasingly been making such gestures and it is widely regarded in defence circles as a way of Moscow flexing its muscles and showing that it can project force around the globe.

Defence said in its statement that all further inquiries should be referred to the Russian authorities.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy could not be reached for comment.

This story was found at: Russia sends warships towards Australia before G20 meeting

Ladeeeees and Gentleeeeemen, here are the contestants.

In the red corner we have Vlad the Inhaler, boss of the big Russian thingy with his frightening rod of power.

vladimir-putin1.jpg
vladimir-putin1.jpg940×626 48.4 KB

In the blue corner, we have the Mad Monk, boss of the little Australian thingy with his discreet rod of power.

BIgLPAGCAAAwH8I.jpg

You pays your money and you takes your chances, but if it comes down to rods of power, Putin looks a little puny.

Separately, as noted by our defence chief, Russia doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the magnificence of its naval force by including a tug as one of four ships in its ‘fleet’.

Be that as it may, and I confess that this is giving away vital intelligence to Vlad the Inhaler and his crew, we have these thingies called planes or something which apparently can sink ships and thingies like what the Japanese did with the Repulse and Prince of Wales.

Seriously, why do nations do these pointless chestings?

Try it in a nightclub or street here against the wrong bloke and there is a bloke on the ground heading to ICU or the morgue.

Why do nations think they’re special?

#2

Maybe they just want to trade you for some Kangaroos, or decent Beer. Give them 100 cases of Fosters, and call it a good trade for their Navy. My guess though is that they are going to negotiate for a closure of the Vegamite Gap. :wink:

sdwvag300h.jpg

#3

The good old “gunboat diplomacy” tradition has been alive and well here in Yerp since WW2, albeit at a low level. France projects itself all over the place, and Britain is given to sending a cruiser over to Gibraltar whenever their perpetual dispute with Spain over possession of the “Rock” flares up particularly. The Soviets/Russians also like this sort of thing, and the intensity of their military “demonstrations” has definitely increased since the Ukraine crisis erupted. One of the less amusing aspects of this involves the intensification of their long-established practice of flying “training” missions of military aircraft close to, or actually inside, foreign airspace, in particular, in north-west Europe. This would not matter, had their aircraft not taken to flying these missions without their locating equipment switched on (a departure from the practice of decades). This is important because it means that civilian air traffic is no longer aware of Russian warplanes in its vicinity. There has already been one well-aired incident where an airliner of Scandinavian Airways (SAS), taking off from Copenhagen Airport, had an extremely near-miss with a Russian warplane which could “see” it, electronically, but which it could not “see”. I am sure that “close encounters” of this sort are now pretty common; since we are unaware of where Russian warplanes are present, it is very difficult to know when a “near miss” incident actually occurs.

As someone who has been aboard a SAS airliner taking off from Copenhagen, I am scarcely reassured. In fact, as someone who uses civilian airliners around Europe from time to time, I am scarcely reassured. Yours from the Transit Lounge, JR.

#4

Seriously, I think it’s just a press beat up. Perfectly reasonable for the Soviets to have a large missile equipped ready force in the region to respond in case our Prime Minister shirtfronts Vlad the Inhaler. http://theguttertrash.com/2014/10/14/abbott-vows-shirtfront-showdown-with-vladimir-putin/

Less seriously, there is something to be gained from this.

Note how the Soviets - sorry, Russian capitalists - and the Chicom -sorry, Chinese capitalists - exercise their military muscle to reinforce claims to disputed islands?

Well, Oz is a very large island. Imagine the bounty which could flow our way if the Russians and Chinese contest their claims to Oz against America’s and, remotely Britain’s, strategic interests.

Moreover, China is our major trading partner, followed by Japan, and Russia isn’t.

If we play this carefully, we can have vast fleets of foreign ships circling our large and distant island while we supply them and their crews with all their needs, until we exhaust them financially and personally with our absurdly high fuel prices and very clean Number 1 prostitutes.

Dare I dream of this looming land of environmentally neutral milk and honey, to replace our long history of chop it down, dig it up, and ship it out?

#5

Reminds me of Alan Coren’s old definition of “non-alignment” - “We’ll take money from anybody …” JR.

#6

We don’t want their navy. For a start, it’s full of Russians.

The Vegemite gap is the chasm between what we routinely spread on bread and toast and biscuits (i.e. hard shallow crunchy things we buy in packets in supermarkets such as the classic Savoy and Salada, not your baked floury things which we call scones and eat with jam and cream) and the Yanks’ inability to grasp that it is possible to eat this black 150% salt axle grease without doing lasting damage to one’s internal organs.

Vegemite is what made my generation of baby boomers the conquerors of the world we are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yA98MujNeM , and trained from birth in military drill by absorbing it with our Vegemite.

Note the final words in the ad in the regulation BBC radio / television announcer diction of the time (which bore no relation to how the rest of us spoke), about putting Vegemite next to the salt and pepper. This was for our parents’ generation, who usually drenched everything in salt before tasting it, largely because our standard cooking practice at the time was to cook everything until it was grey (okay, gray!).

My grandfather made a very tasty canned tomato soup by adding a tablespoon of Vegemite to each bowl.

All of this will be lost on the Russians. They just want us for our cabbage farms.

#7

We’re a much more principled people than that.

Apart from lunatics who give us money for no reason (they being somewhat scarce to the point of non-existent) we’ll take money only from people we think we can exploit successfully to our advantage.

Which, curiously enough, is the reverse of the reason they offer it to us.

That’s pretty much the basis of our major parties political system.

Democracy at its finest!

#8

;)Must try the tomato soup recipe - although I am more likely to use Bovril, the beef-based (allegedly) soup paste occupying the position of Vegimite over here, used to put a touch of beef in many wartime beef-less recipes. Only recently, I discovered that the secret of my father’s beef stew was Bovril - wartime cooking extended over to our “neutral” Free State. Er … could this have implications for international diplomacy ? Should the Royal Navy steam towards the Merry Old Land of Oz to promote the position on the shelves of Bovril ? Yours from the Mechanically-Recovered Meat Plant, JR.

#9

Bovril vaguely known down here in my childhood, but my recollection is that it was used to make a sort of tea by dissolving it in hot water. Which could just as readily be done with Vegemite or, the other Vegemite competitor from the UK, Marmite.

Now, this is how we bring this diversion into yeasty comestibles back to the study of military history, for Bovril apparently is the golden thread which weaves its way from Napoleon III to the Nazis and beyond. I don’t know if the following quote is reliable, but it is a good read.

The Secret History of… Bovril?!?
Apr.21,2013

The business history is simple enough: Bovril was developed in 1870 by Scotsman John Lawston Johnston in Canada to solve the problem of how to transport one million cans of beef to the war-front to feed Napoleon III’s army as it fought Prussia.

But where did the name come from? The answer turns out to be something that (with a hat tip to Frankie Howerd’s ever-present ghost, yerssss missus) left my flabber well and truly gasted.

It turns out that the brand name “Bovril” was ub fact formed from merging the genuine Latin word “bos” (meaning ‘ox“) with the made-up word “Vril” – the immensely energy-dense substance controlled and used by the “Vril-ya”, a super-powerful subterranean people described by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his best-selling (1870) novel “The Coming Race”.

Hence, the name “Bovril” is designed to evoke both a liquid beef extract and a fictional energy source powering an race of underground vegetarian supermen.

Now, not a lot of people know that.

In real-life the release of Bulwer-Lytton’s book caused quite a stir, yet the story about what happened afterwards is stranger still. Quite a few people (including numerous Theosophists) believed his wholly fictional account of the Vril-ya to be absolutely genuine; while some even claimed to have met real-life Vril-ya, in broadly the same way that some people claimed to have met real-life Rosicrucians.

As for Vril itself: in the mid-1930s, when the rocket scientist and sci-fi writer Willy Ley emigrated to the United States, he mentioned the existence back in Germany of a certain Wahrheitsgesellschaft (a ‘Society for Truth’) whose members researched Vril to achieve many otherwise impossible things (e.g. perpetual motion machines, etc).

By 1960, the whole story of this hunt for Vril had entered the feverishly conspiratorial imagination of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels: their book “Morning of the Magicians” revitalized the whole Vril issue, by claiming that the Wahrheitsgesellschaft formed a key part of the genesis of the Thule Society and indeed the whole Nazi Party. (In fact, Jacques Bergier was convinced that there was a secret global organization sending teams of “Men In Black” in to cover up such secrets, both about Vril and other “Livres Maudits” [Forbidden Books] such as the Voynich Manuscript.)

And it’s only a short antigravity ride from there to Vladimir Terziski’s “UFO Secrets of the Third Reich”, which insisted that it was Vril that powered the German “RFZ-1″ circular flying machine – the first flying saucer, able to harness Vril’s almost-unimaginable power so as to build underground bases under Antarctica or indeed the moon’s surface.

But as far as I can tell, the Nazis never got round to investigating whether Bovril might be a good practical source of Vril. Perhaps memories of the resounding Prussian victory at the Battle of Sedan (where Napoleon III was captured) in September 1870 had convinced them that Bovril wasn’t actually super-powered. I wonder: if the French had instead used their million cans of Bovril as mortar rounds, might the Prussians have attacked with far less spirit? Having one of those explode over your head would surely be enough to drain anyone’s will to life.

Finally, even though Bulwer-Lytton also wrote the famous line “The pen is mighter than the sword” (which always struck me as terribly Freudian, but perhaps I read too fast), the one line for which he is arguably most often remembered opens opens his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford”: “It was a dark and stormy night“.

Of course, this was the phrase with which Snoopy started all of his novels, including his own Great American Novel. What’s curious is that, by my estimation, the “forty thousand head of cattle” Snoopy mentions would liquidise down to roughly… a million cans of Bovril. Coincidence… or conspiracy? What do you think? And moreover, what about the king?
http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2013/04/21/the-secret-history-of-bovril

#10

RS* - really loved your post regarding “Bovril” and “Vril”. Not that I was unaware of Vril - nobody who does part of their reading on the history of National Socialism around the Internet could fail to be aware of it, given the amount of (generally) rubbish and wild conspiracy theories connected with the alleged “lost (master) race”, allegedly connected with the origins and development of Naziism and neo-Naziism that appears to multiply around the 'Net like spiritulastic rabbits.

I generally take little interest in matters connected with “esoteric Naziism”. I think I would be at one with most actual Nazis - including Hitler - on this. True, the occult Thule Society had played an important part in the very early development of the infant National Socialist Party although, once he had gained control, Hitler moved quickly to break the connection with Thule. Also true, a number of notable Nazis at least took an interest in “esoteric” matters, and some were convinced occultists (including Hess, Rosenberg, Wiligut, Darré and, most notably, Himmler). However, the majority of “practical” Nazis (again, including Himmler) seem to have regarded the committed occultists in particular as cranks or lunatics who had their uses. And neither Himmler nor Rosenberg could be described as committed occultists, even if they did have a strong level of interest in such matters. Himmler, in particular, never allowed his undoubted interest in the pseudo-historical and occult “roots” of the Aryan race or Nazi thought to overcome his basic pragmatism. In this context, I find it difficult to find this conspiratorial mess of Thule, Vril, various fictitious Rosicrutian “commendaries”, Knights Templar “continuation” Orders, Theosophist nutters (I could go on) as boring if harmless irrelevancies - much as Hitler seems to have done.

One curious connection between Hitler and Bulwer-Lytton (though not a particularly consequential one) lies in the fact that the highly prolific Victorian author penned the Novel “Rienzi - the Last of the Tribunes”, a tedious tome about ructions in Rome during the Papal exile in Avignon, which formed the basis of Richard Wagner’s first successful grand opera of the same name. I say “grand opera” because this one was truly “grand”; the first production was played over two nights (to great success). Even the first modern recording of this problematic piece - recorded in East Germany in the 1970s - runs for almost four hours. It is also the most “Italian” of Wagner’s works, and its popularity at the time (first performed Dresden, 1842) was in part because it chimed with the rising revolutionary tide that swept through the European middle classes and literati … before the suppression of the 1848 revolutions slapped the whole movement down (Wagner had to flee the wrath of the Reaction because of “Rienzi”).

It has been suggested the “Rienzi” was Hitler’s favourite opera - and some internal evidence would suggest that it would have appealed to him. This idea was bandied around quite recently, when a Berlin production of the piece was cancelled when in advanced stage of development because of Germany’s Nazi hypersensitivity. Not true, I think. Other works have better claims, notably “Lohengrin” (the first opera seen by Hitler on stage), “Die Walkure”, “Gotterdammerung” and “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg”. It is also notable that, in spite of the fact that the Wagner family had long banned the production of “Rienzi” at Bayreuth, Hitler (a very close friend of the family, and chief patron of Bayreuth during his period in power) apparently did nothing to change this situation. Still, I do believe he liked the piece. One suspects, in this sense at least, the Bulwer-Lytton was (indirectly) more appreciated by the Fuhrer than any amount of the esoteric nonsense in which the likes of Hess and Wiligut had immersed themselves. Best regards, and thanks, JR.

#11

is he also part of Bondie baywatch team? lol

#12

I know this is off topic, but I wonder what people think of Alexander the Great. There doesn’t seem to be much discussion of ancient/medieval warfare but the off-topic militaria section might be a good place to discuss such things.

#13

Why don’t you start a thread then? That’s the best way to start a discussion.

Of course, this is a forum about more recent conflicts than that, but its worth a shot. You may want to find an ancient combat/battles forum and join a discussion there.

#14

They are soulles and savages today like as i read many ww2 books, as around 60 years ago :evil: