[CAF Note: At last, the sequel to The Essential Saker II is available from the Vineyard of the Saker. You can purchase here in both hard copy and PDF form. I wrote the forward and have permission to republish it here.]
Foreward to The Essential Saker II
“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
Today I journeyed from Dhaka in Bangladesh to a beautiful tropical lake for a picnic with former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, now a professor of political science here. Accompanying us were some students from two of her classes – Leadership & Organizational Change and Entrepreneurship. Our lively conversation was focused on how to create a more prosperous economy and a more human society.
Our topics ranged from the transport infrastructure of Dhaka to the rivers that flow from the mountains of Nepal; from the legal structures of the Bangladesh stock market to the leadership of the sovereign wealth fund of Norway; from the struggles of small farmers in my home base in Hickory Valley, Tennessee, to those of farmers here in the Asian subcontinent
As the picnic commenced, Cynthia started to enjoy a large, ripe pear. She asked, “Where is this pear from?” The student who had shopped in the fresh fruits and vegetables market that morning said, “South Africa.” “South Africa!” exclaimed Cynthia in surprise, wondering how such a large, delicious, pear came all the way from the southern tip of Africa to the street markets of Asia. To which her student replied, “ Yes, that is the kind of globalization that we want to happen.” Which is to say, this kind of globalization occurs when people are free to transact when and with whom they please. Marvelous things can happen, like so many pears grown in South African orchards that make their way through many hands (while still delicious) to tiny Bengal delta street stalls, where students can buy them in the early morning.
One of the students asked me for my favorite sources of information about globalization and geopolitics. Soon Cynthia and I were telling the students about the Saker and his website, The Vineyard of the Saker.
Born and raised in Switzerland by Russian émigré parents who were refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, the Saker studied in the United States and became a European 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 Neocon rise to power and the ongoing destruction within Europe, the Saker as an analyst reacted to these new important events and started to write about them.
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 across Eurasia to Manchuria. Indeed, his viewpoint is Eastern…and Western, as well. The 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 the moment or event and then he rises back onto the widest geopolitical horizon.
As the Neocons accelerated the unraveling of the world order, the Saker’s analysis ended up having a far more profound impact than when the Establishment was paying him. It would not surprise me if his former employers now pay someone else to read everything the Saker says and writes.
Pressured by his growing global audience, he edited years of his commentary into his first collection: The Essential Saker: From the Trenches of the Emerging Multipolar World.
I purchased this collection in electronic form. Before checking the length, I forwarded it to my assistant and asked her to print it out for me and leave it on the ottoman in my den. Imagine my surprise the next day to find almost 1,000 pages stacked neatly on the ottoman. Undaunted, I decided I would grab the top inch of paper at each lunch and dinner and steadily work my way through. Thus began a process of dining with the Saker.
Americans are taught to see the world in very simple terms. One of my colleagues always reminds me that J.S. Bach composed with 24 or more tracks, but in America we listen to the drumbeat – just one or two tracks. Our news for the most part is fake news – oversimplified and dumbed down.
The globalization that we want to happen is multipolar and multitrack – there are many cultures, many languages, and many landscapes. This world is rich, complex, and fractal. A mind looking to escape death by drumbeats and fake news can find refreshment here.
The insights in Saker’s first book 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 define covert warfare in our world — that I found myself looking forward to my “Saker breaks” at each lunch and dinner. The day after I finished the book, I literally felt a deep sadness as I walked into my den and saw the ottoman empty. There was no more Saker to roar into my life, to fill it with humanity.
Throughout our world we face a great separation – between those who choose an inhuman way forward and those who chose a human future. This is an age-old battle – at the root a spiritual battle – between the forces of good and evil made more dramatic by powerful new technology and the weapons it creates.
The Neocons and their allies do their very best to persuade us that their power is complete – that resistance is hopeless in the face of the demonic. However, as you read the Saker, you realize that the world is full of many worlds, each full of extraordinary people committed to a human future, all pushing back in powerful and creative ways. They remind us of the English poet Shelley, who wrote, “Ye are many, they are few.”
This is the secret – we are not alone. Quite the contrary – there are allies everywhere. You will meet many of them in the Saker’s pages and marvel at their strength and goodness. You will remember the great truth from scripture, “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I.” Not only are we not alone, we can call on the greatest power on our planet to help us.
In 2015, I asked the Saker to join me for quarterly Solari Reports, to discuss the emerging multipolar world. The Saker talks geopolitics and military intelligence, and I talk money, and as we sort through our different jigsaw puzzle pieces, we keep looking for those opportunities to shift our audience towards creating that multipolar world – one that engages and attracts our young people. It is the same conversation that Cynthia and her students and I were having here in Bangladesh. The global “invention rooms” are everywhere.
For many months I have asked the Saker, “please do publish a new book.” At last, here it is. If you got this copy when it first came out, then you know that there is a large stack of papers on the ottoman in my den. I will be dining with the Saker and laughing my head off until they are gone.
June 30, 2017
Dhaka, Bangladesh
