No Checkered Board......Rather A Book

         I don't know if Vladimir Putin is an avid chess player or not....I can't find any evidence of it, but he is Russian and chess has been a huge part of Russian life. Chess may have begun in Asia and resided in Islam for a long time but it took up permanent residence in Russia and was part of the life of Tsars and peasants, literary giants and murderous Communist tyrants. Castro and Che played chess as did Marx, Lenin and Stalin. So whether or not Putin plays the game, he probably thinks about the world as a chess board.
         I'll recommend a book on this topic.....White King And Red Queen by Daniel Johnson. It was published in 2008 when Vladimir Putin was on his....way out. One of the author's main themes is that chess is one of the areas that the Cold War was fought. Bobby Fischer has a major part in the book as does the "epic seven year's war" of Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, that culminated in, as the author writes, Kasparov turning from "reformer to revolutionary." Kasparov knew what many in the West missed, that the Cold War may have ended but the ideological problem, the brutish tactics and totalitarian goals remained. Near the end of the book, Daniel Johnson gives us this to think about "Eight years after Yeltsin defeated the KGB coup, he was handling over power to Vladimir Putin, a representative of the same sinister fraternity...."
         Kasparov considered 2007 to be the "middle game" for Russia but as for Putin he said "it is the beginning of the end." He was wrong in this. The current situation with Putin and the Ukraine may not be a chess game in progress but it revolves around something that has used chess in an attempt to mold an entire people and thus the world.... communism....which is no game, has no rules, and gives no quarter.        
         God is America's only hope and we are in the midst of relegating His commands to being mere "social issues" to be bartered if necessary. The temporal outlook for America is bleak but it is of eternal consequence where our individual hope rests. We have no checkered board that must be navigated, rather a book to read, and therein is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path!