Worldlings

At the top of the CBC radio news this morning: word that Russia sent some of its so ugly-they're-beautiful bombers over the Bering Sea on Tuesday. Or if not bombers, then video of them taking off, flying around, then returning to base. I just now checked CNN and found no mention of any of it. Conclusion? Even CNN doesn't buy it.

Does it matter if these bombers didn't take off for it to mean something? We are told that Putin wants to make Russia great again, a superpower, and that can never be true, because Russia is its own thing, neither European nor Asian. Like Egypt is to Africa, or the Phoenicians were to the Romans, except Moscow is not Carthage, nor is Putin Dido, the Queen of Carthage, who, though born in Lebanon, was Greek. Like Cleopatra was Greek (Macedonian). 

Dido and Cleopatra were interesting people. Putin was too -- a lover of the arts as much as he was a soldier -- until he got caught up in the kleptocracy. In a recent speech to Russia's Duma, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the future of Russian foreign policy is to end the dominance of the west in international life. I'm all for that, as I'm sure many of North America's indigenous populations are too.

In Alaska today there are a number of distinct indigenous groups. Among them, the Tlingt, the Haida, the Tsimshian, the Inupiats, the Yupiks, the Eyaks, the Aleuts and the Athabascans. The first "westerners" to "visit" what is known today as Alaska and British Columbia were the Russians. In fact, Russia owned Alaska until 1867, when it sold it to the U.S. for $7.2M. A far better deal than what the Dutch East India Company "paid" for Manhattan, in 1626. We never talk about this anymore, and I wonder why. Because it wasn't "ours" to buy or sell?