POTEMKIN AMERICA

At dinner at the Cosmos Club here in DC last night, a dear friend of mine who is one of the finest men – and sharpest businessmen – I’ve ever known, held up a butter knife.

"To make this – to make a bottle cap or the side panels of your washing machine, to make any product that requires metal stamping – you need the machine tools my company makes," he explained.  "Thousands of businesses of all different kinds all over America are our customers.  I’m in touch with all of them, and know how their companies are doing."

He sighed.  "Jack, that’s why I know that our economy is in much, much worse shape than the media is letting on."

I gave him a quizzical look.  "It’s so funny you would say that – because I’ll be writing about just that this week.  I’ll call it Potemkin America."

***
Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin (1739-1791) was a dashing 23 year-old officer in the Czar’s Horse Guards, the elite cavalry unit of the Russian Army, when the Czar’s wife donned a Horse Guard uniform and led them in a coup to seize the throne of Russia.

The year was 1762.  For 20 years, Russia had been ruled by the daughter of Peter the Great (1672-1725), Elizabeth Petrovna.  Unmarried and childless, she chose her nephew Karl Peter, son of her sister Anna married to a German duke, to be her heir.

Elizabeth also chose Karl Peter’s wife.  She settled on a 15 year-old vivacious Pomeranian princess, Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, whose father ruled a small principality in central Germany.  Sophie quickly learned Russian, abandoned Lutheranism, and converted to the Russian Orthodox church. 

Sophie and Karl Peter were married in 1745, he 17, she 16.  He was mentally retarded, an always-drunk alcoholic, and refused to consummate his marriage, preferring mistresses instead.  She was utterly brilliant, read Greek and Latin, conducted scintillating correspondence with every great mind of the day including Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, and acquired a number of handsome officers and diplomats as lovers.

In January 1762, Empress Elizabeth died, and Karl Peter became Czar Peter III.  By June, he was so hated by the army and the court that the main army generals urged Sophie to take over.  They gave her a Horse Guard captain’s uniform to wear at the head of the troops. 

Potemkin, riding nearby, noticed that the sword of Sophie’s uniform was missing the tassel so proudly worn by the Guards.  He tore the tassel off the hilt of his own sword, boldly rode out of the ranks and up to her, and with a gallant flourish, presented it to her.  She was entranced.

Peter abdicated, and on June 28, 1762, in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, the Church Synod and Duma (Russian Senate), proclaimed Sophie to be Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias.  As Czarina, she assumed the royal name of Catherine II, embarking on a reign of 34 years (ending with her death in 1796) by which she is known to history as Catherine the Great.

***
 Of her some two dozen lovers during her reign, Potemkin was always her favorite.  After her generals inflicted a series of disastrous defeats upon the Moslem Ottoman Turks resulting in their ceding to Russia, in 1774, an enormous area north of the Black Sea, she put him in charge of developing what was now South Russia.

Potemkin built a Black Sea fleet and established bases for it in the now-Russian harbors of Odessa and Sevastopol;  invited hundreds of thousands of peasant settlers – Russians, Poles, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, German Jews – to found hundreds of new towns and villages, and supplied them with cattle, tools, and seed;  established a score of new cities; and by a combination of force and bribes conquered the entire Crimea (the huge peninsula jutting into the Black Sea claimed by the Moslem Ottomans) for Russia.

Catharine designated him Prince of Tauris (the ancient Greek name for the Crimea after its inhabitants, the Tauri) and governor-general of Novorossiya or New Russia.  In 1787 she went to inspect her acquisitions, accompanied by a huge entourage of Russian nobles, ambassadors from all over Europe, and the personal representative of Austrian Emperor Joseph II, the Prince de Ligne (Charles-Joseph Lamoral).

Potemkin arranged the entire tour.  At Kiev, Potemkin transferred the mobile court onto 87 vessels he had specially equipped to sail down the Dnieper River all the way to Odessa.  Along the way, the dignitaries inspected the new towns and villages Potemkin had founded but a few years before.

The Prince de Ligne wrote in his memoirs that he personally went ashore to see these villages for himself and was impressed by "the superb establishments in their infancy, growing manufactures, villages with regular streets lined by trees."  Yes, Potemkin had shown some "legerdemain" in spiffing up the villages beyond their normal appearance, but on account of his achievements, the prince – who knew every famous person in Europe – called Potemkin "the most extraordinary man I have ever met."

Someone who disagreed was Georg von Helbig, the envoy of the German principality of Saxony to Catherine’s court.  Potemkin disliked him and saw that he wasn’t invited on the sail down the Dnieper. 

In revenge for the snub, and years after Potemkin’s death in 1791 (and Catherine’s in 1796), he wrote a biography of Potemkin where he ridiculed the Prince of Tauris for creating Potemkinsche Dörfer, Potemkin Villages, "composed of façades – painted screens on pasteboard – that were moved along the river and seen by the Empress five or six times."

It was a ridiculous lie which Helbig made up in vengeful spite – yet his book became popular, the myth became accepted truth, and Potemkin’s name, with typical historical unfairness, became a synonym for sham.

***
This lesson from 1787 Russia may serve useful in looking at 2009 America, which has become a Potemkin Village constructed by the Zerocrats and their media cheerleading propagandists. 

Every day without exception, the media (including the Wall Street Journal whose reporting is as left-wing as its editorials are right) disgorges stories about how the US economy is improving because there are "indications" it’s getting less worse.

Yesterday (6/10), the Fed’s Beige Book survey was released, which stated that "economic conditions remained weak or deteriorated further" in all twelve of the Fed regional districts.  Yet the Wall Street Journal’s headline for the story was Recession’s Grip Eases in Parts of Nation — focusing on those few areas where the economy maybe could be "stabilizing" or is "near the bottom" from where it somehow won’t remain.

Examples from the media like this are endless.  The reality is that our economy is falling off a cliff – in employment, manufacturing, exports, retail sales, inflation (oil prices, food prices, mortgage rates, T-bill yields), you name it.  It’s not just that Zero’s government is lying about all of this, it’s that Zero’s fellatrices in the media are lying about all of it all of the time.

This is what you get when guilt trumps reality.  No one would have paid any attention to some Chicago politician named Barack Hussein Obama if he were all-white instead of half-white.  The other half being black – albeit not a drop of American Black, but Kenyan Black instead mixed with a lot of black-slave owning Arab drops as well – was the only thing that mattered.

Zero is America’s first truly racist president – elected only because of his race, elected by whites who voted for him only "because he’s black," elected not because they thought he was the best candidate to secure America’s national security and economy, but only because they thought voting for him would assuage their tribal guilt for their tribal/racial forefathers owning black slaves. 

The result of that guilt is the Potemkin America you see today.  Pretending to be strong when the reality is apologetic weakness, pretending to be economically responsible when the reality is economic destruction, pretending to be patriotic when the reality is treason.

The historical irony is that the actual  "Potemkin Villages" were real, they really existed and weren’t façades – while people today are being conned into believing that the greatest economy and military power the world has ever known still exists.

Actually, it does exist, but only in potential.  The unlimited ability of American entrepreneurs, the unlimited courage and competence of American soldiers is there as always, but they are imprisoned by the ball and chain of Zero’s treasonous fascism.

Thus, the reality behind the Potemkin America created by Zero’s magical misdirection is a reverse Potemkin Village, the real America of strength and enterprise behind the phony set façade of Zero’s America.

It is this real America that Zero and his liberal cohorts in academia, the media, and Congress, are dedicated to destroy.  In its place, they want nothing but a Potemkin America, nothing but painted screens on pasteboard, that they can rule until America’s enemies triumph.  (Yes, liberalism is politically institutionalized masochism.)

It took the American people four years to realize the disastrous mistake they made electing Jimmy Carter their president.  It will take them far less time to realize their vastly greater mistake with Zero.  That time is not far off.  And then Potemkin America will be swept away, and we will have Real America once again.