With a clear eye ...

Ray McGovern is a treasure. A former CIA agent, devout Catholic and above all else, a really smart guy with integrity, looks at geopolitics from a sense of history and how that history, in conjunction with the inherent vagaries of reality, impacts the actions of the most powerful nations in the world.

If you know a little bit about Russian history, you’re aware that it’s a very sad history. It starts millennia behind other histories. People don’t know that the Slavic peoples who emerged from the area in and around Kiev and what is now Belorussia—they had no written language until the 9th century! A.D.!

Remarkable. Did they have an oral literature?

They had an oral literature. “Slovo o Polku Igoreve” [“The Song of Igor’s Campaign”] was one of their major epic poems. It rivals “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad.” It’s a really beautiful thing, except they had no way to set it down in writing. And so two Greek priests, Cyril and Methodius, go up in the 9th century, and they say, “These people are incredibly bright and prosperous. They’re prosperous—and this is kind of a mind leap for most people—because the Norse, from Norway and Sweden, traded with the East all the way to Istanbul by coming through the series of rivers of which the Dnieper [which flows through Russia and empties into the Black Sea] was one. A great deal of so-called civilization and some wealth had accrued there. So they go up there and they say, “Well, that sounds like kai. Let’s make that sound a kai (or “k”). That sounds like the Latin V. That one sounds like Hebrew. That one doesn’t sound like anything, so let’s manufacture a character for that.” And they put the [written] language together. This we call “Cyrillic,” of course.

Read the Salon post, you will learn a great deal on why so much has gone wrong with intel, the CIA and the erosion of our bill of rights. Addendum: click here to read more about McGovern's take on the CIA and the Deep State.

Ray McGovern