What Difference Does it Make?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the last stanza of “The Battle of Blenheim,” Robert Southey writes:

“But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin.

“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he; “But ’twas a famous victory.”

What did it really matter? The poet was asking of the triumph of the Duke of Marlborough — “Who this great fight did win.”

What brings back this poem about the transience of glory and folly of war — during this week’s struggle over whose flag will fly over Crimea — is a wall chart that just arrived from the UN. 

Patriarch: Faithful Should Have More Children to Repopulate Russia

From Catholic World News

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church has called upon the faithful to have more children in order to repopulate their vast nation.

“What's the good of having economy, if our nation is sick?” said Patriarch Kirill. “How will we reclaim these boundless spaces, vast lands, not only in European part of Russia, but in Siberia as well?”

Heartened by news that Russia’s birthrate has increased, he added, “We hope this tendency will be stable and our people rather than strangers with alien culture and alien faith will inhabit our vast lands inherited from God and our hardworking forefathers and this greatest treasure-- our land-- will be cultivated by descendants of those who merged it to the great Russian state.”

Russia’s population has declined by nearly 7 million since 1991.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Strong healthy nation is needed to reclaim Russian spaces – Patriarch Kirill (Interfax)
• Demographics of Russia (Wikipedia)

Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb

From Georgian Daily
By Nicholas Eberstadt

A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing.

Since 1992, Russia’s human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in Russia, to diminish the prospects for Russian economic development, and to affect Russia’s potential influence on the world stage in the years ahead.

Russia has faced this problem at other times during the last century. The first bout of depopulation lasted from 1917 to 1923, and was caused by the upheavals that transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. The next drop took place between 1933 and 1934, when the country’s population fell by nearly 2 million—or almost 2 percent—as a result of Stalin’s war against the “kulaks” in his forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. And then, between 1941 and 1946, Russia’s population plummeted by more than 13 million through the cataclysms and catastrophes of World War II.

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