“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
~ Arundhati Roy

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Born and raised in Switzerland by Russian parents who were refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, “the Saker” studied in the United States and lived and worked in Europe as a military analyst. Opposed to the destruction of successive countries in Eastern Europe (aka the US/NATO wars), he reinvented himself as a software engineer who now lives in the United States (as he puts it, “the Imperial Homeland”). Frustrated by the ongoing destruction in Europe, he started to blog.

The rest is history. When war in the Ukraine splashed its way across Western headlines, readership at The Vineyard of the Saker exploded.

His handle, “the Saker” comes from the saker falcon, a species of large falcon that breeds from Eastern Europe eastwards across Asia to Manchuria. Indeed, his viewpoint is Eastern…and Western, as well. Saker looks at current events from multiple points-of-view starting with the big “P” of geopolitics. Then, like a falcon, he swoops down to the most intimate personal details of a moment or event and then swoops back.

The Saker’s emphasis is on all things human: spirit, culture and history. So, be prepared for enormous breadth. This is a brilliant man who sees and draws the connections between all things.

The Essential Saker: From the Trenches of the Emerging Multipolar World is a collection of his best blog posts. I asked someone to print it out before I realized that the book was 600+ pages long. So, I piled it up on my den ottoman and proceeded to work my way through it over the next month during breaks, meals or when I just needed cheering up.

The book is divided into the following parts:

  • Russia and the Ukraine
  • Russia and Islam
  • Russia and The West
  • Anglo-Zionism (the Neocons)
  • Je ne suis pas Charlie (The Charlie Hebdo psyop)
  • Syria and Iran
  • The French Resistance (the campaign against Dieudonné’s and Soral)
  • The West And Sex (on the “divide and conquer” game)
  • The Russian Military
  • A section called Varia which includes, “How I became a 9/11 ‘Truther’”

The insights are so rich and the humor so full of belly laughs — pulling no punches on the absurdity of the “official reality” and the endless stream of perversions and dirty tricks — that I found myself looking forward to my “Saker breaks” each day. The day after I finished the book, I literally felt a deep sadness as I walked into my den and saw the empty ottoman. There was no more Saker to roar into my life full of humanity and to remind me of my favorite passage from St. Timothy:

“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

Beware Neocons: you are intellectual mice in the field and the Saker patrols overhead!