Joe Biden said in 1997: “The only thing that could provoke a vigorous and hostile reaction by Russia would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states.”

Exile and Hellenization After the Roman wars, Jews scattered across the Near East: 🔸 Mesopotamia (Babylon) - the largest community, where the Babylonian Talmud was written. 🔸 Egypt (Alexandria) - a major center of Jewish learning and Hellenistic culture. 🔸 Asia Minor, Syria,

After 135 AD, Judea ceased to exist. Under Byzantium, the land became the Christian province “Palaestina.” - Palaestina Prima – Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria - Palaestina Secunda – Galilee - Palaestina Tertia – Negev and the south By then, most Jews were gone. The region was

Judah under Empires 🔸 Babylonians (586–539 BC) – destroyed Jerusalem, took the elite captive. 🔸 Persians (539–332 BC) – allowed Jews to return and rebuild the Temple. 🔸 Greeks (332–140 BC) – spread Hellenism; later came the Maccabean revolt. 🔸 Hasmoneans (140–63 BC) – brief

Babylonian Conquest (586 BC) When Assyria collapsed, Babylon took over. King Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem again. After repeated rebellions and refusal to pay tribute, the city was destroyed. The Temple of Solomon burned, and the elite: priests, warriors, officials, were

No Jewish state for 2,534 years. The fall began the day Judah knelt to Assyria. In the 8th century BC, Judah came under pressure from the Assyrian Empire. After the fall of the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, Assyria became the absolute power in the region. King Ahaz (ca.

In 1939, Moscow didn’t demolish a building that blocked a major street but it moved it. Building No. 20 on Tverskaya stood in the way of an expansion, so Soviet engineers slid the entire structure 40 meters down the street. No one was evacuated. People slept, lights were on, gas

🇷🇺 🔥🤝Honor and duty — a powerful moment between Putin and Russia’s generals, heroes of the Free and Multipolar World.

Nicolas II daughters: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, ca. 1906

Meanwhile, in that same “enlightened” 19th-century Europe and America: 🔸 British colonies ran on forced labor. 🔸 France exploited African and Asian workers in conditions far worse than any Volga barge hauler. 🔸 The U.S. South had just ended slavery, but “debt peonage” kept

And guess what? Europe had the exact same thing. 🔸 In Germany they were called Treidler, they pulled ships on the Rhine until the 1870s. 🔸 In France – haleurs on the Seine and Loire. 🔸 In the Netherlands – trekschuit boats, literally “tow-boats,” pulled by people or horses. 🔸

🧵 It’s always funny when someone posts Repin’s painting of 1873 were men who pulled boats as “proof” of Russian backwardness, or even more silly...calling them slaves. Every time, the same - facepalm. Those men weren’t “slaves.” They were seasonal, paid laborers, hauling ships

The post-WWI plan for Europe wasn’t made in Berlin or Paris but on Wall Street, with a wink from London. During WWI, J.P. Morgan Jr. gave $500 million to Britain and France. After the war, they couldn’t pay it back, so they made Germany pay instead. That crushed Germany’s

Imagine getting a free apartment: small, plain, but finally yours. That was the Khrushchevka: the mass-produced Soviet apartment block that gave millions of families private housing for the first time. The idea wasn’t Soviet at all. It started in postwar France and Germany as

The Greatest Leader of All Time — Putin 🇷🇺🤩

@xah_lee @rinalu_ Broadly accurate. Modern European national identities, as unified political and cultural entities, indeed crystallized in the late 18th and 19th centuries through Enlightenment ideas, the French Revolution, and Napoleonic Wars, which inspired unifications like Germany's and

Nicholas II, others, 1905.

Olga Romanova, sister of Nicholas II, lived modestly for decades while Western banks held on to the Romanov family’s fortune. She never received a single ruble of what rightfully belonged to her.

As you probably remember, Romans used to fill their treasury with a “urine tax” first imposed on public urinals by Nero and then re-enacted by Vespasian, and this is where the phrase “Money doesn’t stink” comes from. But that was long before the EU… The treasury of modern-day

French PM Raymond Poincaré even tried to turn the Ruhr and Rhineland into zones under French control, just like they did with the Saar region. Germany was being carved up. When French troops took over the Ruhr in 1923, Germans were furious. The whole country went on strike,

German industry broke down. Industrialists began sabotaging reparations. France and Belgium responded by sending 100,000 troops to occupy the Ruhr region in 1923, Germany’s industrial heartland, home to 72% of its coal and over 50% of its steel. The region was taken as