1. The Moscow terakts. Frankly, there is little point to me adding more to the excellent coverage / meta-commentary provided by Mark Adomanis (1, 2, 3), Sean Guillory (1, 2, 3, 4), A Good Treaty (1, 2), Leos Tomicek (1), and Gordon Hahn (1). I’ll just give the conclusions: 1) This tragedy is not an indictment of either Putin or his Caucasus policy, 2) nor is it a threat to the Russian state in any sense whatsoever, and 3) it is funny and unsurprising to see “Western chauvinists”, be they “liberal interventionists” or neocons, spill crocodile tears for the plight of Islamist separatists in Russia, while studiously avoiding applying the same analytical framework to Israel or the US.
2. Some Westerners like to condemn Russians for their ambivalence towards Stalin, since he killed far more Russians than Hitler! (This is a constant theme of anti-Stalin* and general Russophobe propaganda). Quite apart from this being simply wrong according to all objective estimates, Russians themselves say they suffered far more under four years of the Nazi assault than twenty plus years of Stalinism.
According to polls, 50% had a close relative die in the Great Patriotic War (33% – injured, 16% – missing in action). Only 14% say that nothing particularly bad happened to a close relative during the war. These answers are in line with the statistics on wartime demographic losses – some 27mn Soviet citizens died in that war (13mn Russian), of them 8.7mn soldiers (5.8mn Russian). In contrast, in response to the question, “Did anyone in your family suffer from the repressions shortly before or after the war?”, 22% of Russians said “yes”, while 63% said “no”. (Furthermore note that “suffer” does not imply death, since contrary to the popular anti-Soviet mythology most Gulag inmates survived).
* And before some fanatical ideologue comes out with the cheap “You’re a filthy Stalinist!” card, I would note that it is quite possible to condemn Stalin on the basis of his real crimes, without resorting to neo-Goebbelsian propaganda about “62 million victims of Communism” or “Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler”. If anything such rhetoric actually encourages the rehabilitation of Stalinism.
3. Related: The illiberalism of anti-Putinism (Mark Adomanis). Now make no mistake – as of now, I think he is one of the best, if not the best, “popular” Anglophone bloggers on Russian politics. Of course, I don’t agree with everything he writes, sometimes quite forcefully. Such as the following:
In short, if you’re willing to believe that, by virtue of opposing Putin, Russian communists aren’textremely nasty and scary people, you’re the sort of person who will believe anything.
Myself, I find it arrogant, narrow-minded, and frankly presumptuous to label a major stratum of a population as “extremely nasty and scary”. As another commentator pointed out, this is very similar to the rhetoric of the Russian “liberals” whom Mark attacks as conceited and illiberal. But instead of hearing it from me, feel free to go to the discussion in question and make you own conclusion.
4. The Return of the Reich watch. Carrying on from Sublime News #6, more from Stratfor on how Germany is becoming a “normal country” and unsettling traditional European arrangements in the process. First, Germany is no longer willing to underwrite EU stability, i.e. see the punitive terms of the bailout offered to Greece. Down the road, this might result in acrimony over the Common Agricultural Policy (benefiting France and the new Visegrad members) and the UK rebate, since a resurgent Germany is unlikely to want to pay for them as before. Second, the traditional Bismarckian policy of Germany is to “make a good treaty with Russia”; together with Nord Stream, this should increase the distance between Germany and Poland. A future consequence may be to reinforce the Visegrad-US relationship at the expense of EU integration.
Timothy Garton Ash has a quite brilliant historical overview in Berlin has cut the motor, but now Europe is stalled which I can’t help but quote in extenso:
On Saturday Helmut Kohl, the “chancellor of German unity“, will turn 80. To mark the occasion the chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many others in Germany will deliver nice tributes to old king Kohl; yet his country’s current approach to Europe, and especially to the embattled eurozone, risks dismantling his European legacy. If you ask why the European project is faltering today, one of the main reasons is that the German motor has stalled. And if you ask why that has happened, the short answer is: because Germany has become a “normal” nation, like France and Britain. Assuming, that is, anyone in their right mind would call us normal.
In the steps of his mentor, Konrad Adenauer, Kohl tirelessly insisted that German and European unity were “two sides of the same coin”. That coin eventually became the euro. Kohl, like most of his predecessors, was committed to European integration for two reasons: because, out of personal wartime experience, he believed in it; and because he understood that it served the German national interest. Only by reassuring Germany’s neighbours that Germany had changed, and was utterly devoted to integrating itself into Europe, could the Germans hope to achieve their national goal: the reunification of Germany in peace and freedom. It worked. When the chance came, unexpectedly, in 1989, Kohl seized it with both hands – and all Europe has benefited. We could not have a Europe whole and free without a Germany whole and free in its centre. …
Had he been chancellor today, Kohl’s response would surely have been to take the next step: putting the long-term politics of European unity before the short-term cost, but also moving towards a stronger fiscal, and by extension political, union. In the meantime, however, this has become a different Germany. Until unification, Germany wanted to be super-European, for reasons of personal memory, idealism and historical responsibility; but it also needed to be, in its own national interest. After unification, at last a fully independent, sovereign country, it no longer needed to be. Everything would now depend on the inner power of wanting.
Students of Germany then watched with interest to see if it would continue the exceptional European commitment of the Adenauer-to-Kohl Federal Republic. Or would it become a more “normal” nation state, like France and Britain, pursuing its own national interests, through European channels for choice, but on its own account, even at the expense of others, when it considered that necessary? The special relationship it developed with Russia, including the bilateral securing of its energy needs, gave a clear indication which way post-unification Germany was leaning. Now its response to the first historic crisis of the eurozone makes the conclusion definite.
Some critics blame Merkel personally for this. The former foreign ministerJoschka Fischer quips that the one-time Ms Europe seems to have become Frau Germania. Indeed, this cautious, consensus-building “chancellor of the centre” does not have the strategic boldness of an Adenauer or a Kohl; but even a bolder leader could only go so far against the grain of domestic opinion. And from the shrieking headlines of the tabloid Bild newspaper to the costive judgments of the German constitutional court it is plain that the Germans are not prepared to make any more sacrifices for the sake of “Europe”. For preference, they would probably rather have the D-mark back. Or, failing that, a right, tight little north European “nordo” (or perhaps “neuro”), leaving the feckless south Europeans to cope with a weaker “sudo” (or “pseudo” – hat-tip to the former Barclays boss Martin Taylor for this coinage). The economic ramifications are complex and uncertain, but this spring may yet be seen as the beginning of the end of the eurozone – that final, most daring step of postwar German Europeanism. …
So instead of complaining I note this final irony. Twenty years ago Eurosceptic British Conservatives shrieked with alarm at the prospect of a united Germany imposing a federal European superstate upon us. Some even cried: “A Fourth Reich!” Today, as Eurosceptic British Conservatives edge back towards power, we can see that the unintended result of German unification has actually been the emergence of a more British Europe: dramatically enlarged to the east, inter-governmental rather than federal, with Germany too calmly pursuing its own national interests in its own national way, like Britain and France. Come to think of it, Margaret Thatcher is the one who should be posting a message of thanks on Kohl’s 80th birthday website. Whether the old man would appreciate it is another question.
5. Lou Grinzo of Cost of Energy offers a useful graph summarizing the estimated cost / effectiveness ratios of various geoengineering options.
See also Hacking the planet: who decides?
6. Energy & climate blast.
- Copper Peak (Jean Laherrère) projected at c. 2020. (Gold peaked in 2000).
- James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change - ”Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.” Welcome to the ecotechnic dictatorship!
(But really, kudos to Lovelock for having the balls to state this obvious but unpalatable fact). - How Close will the U.K. Come to Running Out of Natural Gas in Storage this Spring? Britain’s minimum natural gas storage levels have seen a steady pattern of decline since 2005, in large part due to the depletion of its indigenous gas sources. Soon there will have to be additional LNG and Russian gas imports to prevent Britain from freezing during late winter. See also Power crunch looms for Britain. It is important to note that the UK is not only one of the most fiscally overstretched European nations (10%+ budget deficits for the next two years assuming reasonable growth), but also has one of the most precaurious energy situations.
- Riddles in the Dark (John Michael Greer)
- Our Future and the End of the Oil Age: Building Resilience in a Resource-Constrained World – a presentation by Dmitry Orlov.
- It’s STILL the coal, stupid (Lou Grinzo), or in other words, the brouhaha over Obama’s loosening of restrictions on offshore oil drilling is somewhat misplaced.
- The Copenhagen Accord at Three Months: 110 Countries Now Support a New Global Effort to Achieve Climate Safety. With interactive map.
- Koch Industries’ diabolical 20-year campaign to discredit AGW.
- Climate-row professor Phil Jones cleared of charges as anyone familiar with the situation would have expected from a neutral jury (note the hysterical denier rage in the comments). See the detailed write-up by Climate Progress.
7. Pavel Podvig writes on the New START treaty in numbers. The main conclusion is that the reductions are in fact very modest. See reproduced table below.
Russia
| July 2009 Old START | 2010 Actual operationally deployed launches (total launchers) |
ca. 2020 New START operationally deployed launchers (total launchers) [estimate] |
ca. 2020 New START warheads [estimate] |
|
| ICBMs | ||||
| SS-25 | 176 | 171 | ||
| SS-27 silo | 50 | 50 | 60 | 60 |
| SS-27 road | 15 | 18 | 27 | 27 |
| RS-24 | 85 | 255 | ||
| SS-19 | 120 | 70 | ||
| SS-18 | 104 | 59 | 20 | 200 |
| Total ICBMs | 465 | 367 | 192 | 542 |
| SLBMs | ||||
| Delta III/SS-N-18 | 6/96 | 4/64 | ||
| Delta IV/SS-N-23 | 6/96 | 4/64 (6/96) | 4/64 | 256 |
| Typhoon/SS-N-20 | 2/40 | 0/0 | ||
| Borey/Bulava | 2/36 | 0/0 | 4/64 | 384 |
| Total SLBMs | 268 | 128 (164) | 128 | 640 |
| Bombers | ||||
| Tu-160 | 13 | 13 | 13 | 13 |
| Tu-95MS | 63 | 63 | 63 | 63 |
| Total bombers | 76 | 76 | 76 | 76 |
| TOTAL | 809 | 571 (603) | 396 (396) | 1258 |
The United States (UPDATED 02/29/10)
| July 2009 Old START | 2010 Actual operationally deployed launches (total launchers) |
ca. 2020 New START operationally deployed launchers (total launchers) [estimate] |
ca. 2020 New START warheads [estimate] |
|
| ICBMs | ||||
| Minuteman III | 500 | 450 | 350 | 350 |
| MX | 50 | 0 | ||
| Total ICBMs | 550 | 450 | 350 | 350 |
| SLBMs | ||||
| Trident I/C-4 | 4/96 | |||
| Trident II/D-5 | 14/336 | 12/288 (14/336) | 12/288 (14/336) | 1152 |
| Total SLBMs | 268 | 288 (336) | 288 (336) | 1152 |
| Bombers | ||||
| B-1 | 47 | 0 | ||
| B-2 | 18 | 16 (18) | 16 (18) | 16 |
| B-52 | 141 | 44 (93) | 32 (93) | 32 |
| Total bombers | 206 | 60 (111) | 48 (111) | 48 |
| TOTAL | 1188 | 798 (897) | 686 (797) | 1550 |
8. Military blast.
- All Raucous On Cyber War Front
- China buys air defense systems from Russia. Some 15 S-300 batteries for around 2bn $. This sale isn’t detrimental to Russia, since 1) the Chinese already have a similar system in the HQ-9 “adapted” from stolen Russian and American data anyway, and 2) Moscow has the S-400 with incipient anti-ballistic missile capabilities and is developing the S-500 which is supposed to be a full-fledged ABM system.
- China’s DF-21 “carrier killer” ballistic missile and US plans to defend against it.
- F-16 Beats The F-35 – Romania to get 48 F-16C’s over 4.5bn $ by 2020.
- Russia’s fifth-generation tank the T-95 may be outed in 2010.
- RAF jets intercepted Russian bombers flying in British airspace, an increasingly frequent occurrence. AFAIK this is a two-way game – Russians too have complained of NATO aircraft violating their airspace.
- Dam Busting Russian Bombers At Work – apparently Russia uses bombers to blow away ice dams to prevent flooding. Cute.
- Russia begins constructing the 4th Borei submarine.
9. It appears the emerging consensus on the sinking of the South Korean corvette is that it detonated an old North Korean mine, though the hostile torpedo theory isn’t ruled out. Things may become clearer in a month once the ship is recovered and analyzed. Meanwhile, many rumors indicate that the hermit kingdom is now suffering from severe turbulence in the wake of the failed currency reforms.
One of the more damaging stories to spread through North Korea recently was the one about the several billion dollars Kim Jong Il has stashed in foreign banks. Bank secrecy laws in Europe, particularly Switzerland, have been under attack by major world economic powers, and it’s been getting harder to keep money hidden. The fact that Dear Leader Kim has billions stashed overseas, while millions go hungry in North Korea, is not very good PR.
An increasing unstable, and perhaps dangerous, situation. But at least they’ve finally completed Pyongyang’s first skyscraper after 23 years.
10. Serbians say sorry for 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Serbia’s parliament has apologised for the Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 but stopped short of calling the killings genocide, after a debate showed deep divisions over the country’s role during the Balkans conflict.
A document put forward by Belgrade’s ruling coalition of democrats and socialists condemning “the crime” and apologising that “not all was done to prevent this tragedy” was narrowly carried as Serbia continued its bid to become a member of the EU and attract business investors. …
They denied western accusations of mass executions and one, Slobodan Samardzic, warned: “Serbia will sign its own guilt with this declaration.” Another, Velimir Ilic, said that in Srebrenica, “the crime was no greater than in other places”, citing Croatian moves against Serbs.
Why should Serbia apologize for the Bosnian Serbs who were clearly not even under its control? Why apologize for it at all when doing so implies taking responsibility for genocide? I can’t believe the Serbs are naive or stupid enough to do it out of altruism, so clearly short-sighted economic reasons connected to EU membership are the cause. And the funny thing is that this act of false contrition only got them more humiliation from the Europeans.
The European Union, which has been coaxing Serbia into a historical reckoning about its bloody role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, gave a cautious welcome Wednesday to a declaration by the Serbian Parliament that condemned the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica. But it warned that what amounted to reluctant, latter-day contrition about the worst massacre in Europe since World War II was insufficient if Serbia wanted closer ties with the bloc.
I would venture to guess that Germany wants an admission of genocide from Serbia particularly badly. After all, it is weighted down by the unique guilt of the Holocaust, and getting another European nation – in particular the Serbs whom they tried to exterminate in WW2 – to explicitly admit to genocide would lessen the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust and help justify Germany returning to acting like a “normal nation” in the international sphere, as it is already beginning to do (see above).
11. Venezuela / “Rise of the Rest” watch. Putin will help us get nuclear power, says Chávez, causing Western chauvinists to squirm with indignation.
Russia has said that it will help Venezuela to set up its own space industry and develop nuclear energy, the Latin American country’s President announced yesterday. The two have also signed a new contract to exploit Venezuelan oil and are discussing a raft of further military and energy deals.
The deal will allow Moscow to entrench its foothold in Latin America through a deepening alliance with America’s main regional foe. As the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Caracas, Venezuela’s vocal, anti-imperialist leader, President Chávez, said that the allies were building “a new, multipolar world”. …
They discussed a range of military deals and a $2 billion (£1.3 billion) line of credit for weapons purchases secured by Mr Chávez during a visit to Moscow in September… Venezuela has spent more than $4 billion on Russian weaponry since 2005, including tanks, helicopters, Sukhoi fighters and the S300 anti- aircraft missile system. The deals helped Russia to oust the US as the No 1 arms supplier to Latin America. …
Mr Chavez took the opportunity of the anniversary of the Falklands war to demand the UK relinquish this “bastion of colonialism”, cheering: “Long live the Malvinas, they are Argentina’s”. He reiterated that Venezuela would stand beside Argentina in any war although he added “we don’t want conflict”.
A few comments. First, developing a nuclear industry would be highly beneficial for Venezuela. Though it theoretically has a lot of oil, most of it is unconventional heavy stuff locked up in the Orinoco belt that will probably never be exploited on a large scale because of the massive energy and water costs. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s current oil production is in slow decline. Second, Venezuelan arms acquisitions appear to be essentially defensive in nature, and perhaps partly aimed at buying off the conservative officer class. They certainly don’t constitute a real offensive threat to Colombia, whose terrain is unsuited for mobile armored warfare and is defended by a large, experienced army (not to mention 2,000 US troops).
Finally, one big, ongoing thing in Venezuela is the electricity crisis. This is due to a confluence of several factors: 1) a severe drought that has severely reduced water levels on the three dams that generate 70% of its electricity, – caused by this year’s El Nino and seen in China too, 2) the big rise in electricity demand during recent years, fueled by Venezuelans’ rising prosperity, while investment into the electricity-generating sector was slow to react. (Charmingly, one of the measures used to contain the crisis is to get soldiers to give out free energy-efficient light bulbs). This is all of course highly inconvenient for Chavez, but there is very little likelihood that it will topple him.
12. Interesting tidbit on Poland. In Sublime News 3, I referenced a discussion I had on Adomanis’ blog on Poland’s demographic and economic future. One of the major reasons for pessimism is that even if Polish fertility rates climb back up, labor demand from aging Western European states like Germany will only result in an accelerating exodus of young Polish workers, which will undermine any hopes of “convergence” to German levels of income. I disagreed with this:
I am not a big fan of the idea that West European labor shortages will prove an irresistible magnet to East-Central European laborers.
First, the economic disparity is no longer as big as it once was. Poland already has nearly 60% [AK edit: actually 52%] of Germany’s GDP per capita, and is more economically dynamic (because it is catching up). And Poland is one of the poorer Visegrad nations.
Second, migrants are drawn to economic dynamism – the highest inflows in the last ten years went to Britain, Ireland, Spain, etc, not Italy or Germany (which are demographically worse off). You say that Germany, Italy, etc will face labor shortages. But that assumes economic growth and growth of demand for labor can sustainably continue there. I think that assumption is questionable.
Why work in foreign nations who look down on you and where you pay a large chunk of your (stagnant) salary to support their elderly, when you can work in a still-growing Poland?
Article from March 22, 2010: Germans travel to Poland for work. “Unemployed Germans have begun travelling to Poland in search of jobs – in a dramatic reversal of the usual trend for immigrant workers.”
13. Russia watch. Detailed GDP stats revealed for 2010 (7.9% decline). In summary: agriculture 0%, extractive -3%, manufacturing -15%, construction -17%, retail -9%, finance 2% (!), government expenditures 2%. As shown in the graph below, the crisis essentially knocked Russia back to 2007.
Nonetheless, the emerging consensus is that it was a short-lived shock. Russia – Europe’s Bright Light of Growth. Not a headline you normally expect from CNBC, but with most commentators now predicting growth of 4-6% in 2010, there you go:
As the investment community gains confidence in the likelihood of a sustained economic rebound, Russia has emerged in far better shape than many other European markets. In fact, with low debt, inflation under control, a large consumer base primed to buy goods and services, and the price of oil recovering, Russia may well be the most dynamic place on the continent.
14. More on Eurasia.
- Russian Leader Meets Burjanadze: What is on Putin’s Mind? (Jamestown)
- Имя модернизации — социализм – Zyuganov, KPRF chief, on Medvedev’s modernization plans.
- Govt OKs Stalin Monument, Flirts With USSR 2 (Ukrainiana)
15. Ever wonder why Afghan insurgents love IED’s so much? The Weakness of Taliban Marksmanship…
16. Not often that I agree with Daniel Pipes, Iraq’s Cosmetic Election is an exception…
“It takes a cynical mind not to share in the achievement of Iraq’s national elections.” So writes the Wall Street Journal editorial board today. I’m no cynic, but my mood about Iraq could variously be described as depressed, despairing, despondent, dejected, pessimistic, melancholic, and gloomy.
That’s because the Iraqi regime (along with those of Afghanistan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority) is a kept institution that cannot survive without constant American support. As long as Washington pumps money and sacrifices lives to maintain the Baghdad government, the latter can hobble along. Remove those props and Iranian-backed Islamists soon take over.
17. Floatsam and Jetsam.
- Я “живущий в США российский экономист”.
- Check out Alexa Meade’s art. Normally, paintings try to imitate photography. Here, photography tries to imitate paintings!
- Google Shows How HTML5 Can Run Quake In The Browser.
- Krugman: GOP taken over by nutters.
- I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch. “Pocket books called Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the conservative Israeli society of the early 1960s. Though it was claimed that the Stalags were translated from English, they were actually created and written by Israelis.”
- Briton recalls his risky view of Auschwitz horror
- The Sex Scholar: Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps
- Pfizer ordered to pay up over ‘AIDS-like’ virus infections; creates dummy corporation to do it as to as not interrupt its relations with Medicare and Medicaid. Quoting a commentator, “Wow, I wish I could create a dummy corporation to take the rap for any illegal activity that I could get involved with.” (h/t eXiled Online)
- Welcome to Flatland! Way out of line…
18. Хрїстóсъ воскрéсе! Воистину воскресе! (My recommended Paschal reading: Three Versions of Judas by Jorge Luis Borges).
Related posts:
As usual, the Sublime News gives me much to chew on. Comments on selected points:
2: Just to add some personal perspective. During my years of hanging out in Russia, Ukraine, and post- Soviet space generally, and inquiring about people’s family histories, I found it was common for a family to have lost people both to the war and to Stalin. While the former was more common, the latter also happened a lot. I think of my teacher in Kiev, whose grandfather was shot in the 1930s for “Ukrainian nationalism” even though he wasn’t a Ukrainian nationalist at all, just a typical victim of Stalin’s paranoia. Spending time in the Gulag, or having an ancestor who was “de-kulakized,” or just generally having to keep your head down and avoid attracting attention due to your politically suspect “class origins,” are very common stories I’ve heard from people I know. Maybe fewer people wound up dead from Stalin than from Hitler, but it is difficult to overstate the Wise Father and Teacher’s ability to warp lives.
3: Adomanis rocks as an analyst, certainly; I only object that he is painting today’s Russian commies with too broad a brush. Certainly some of them are nasty and objectionable, but most strike me as late-Soviet relics of no particular relevance to Russia’s further development. I wouldn’t call them particularly extreme, though if they came to power I would certainly consider leaving the country.
4: I think Garton Ash is basically right. I remember vividly the wave of Germanophobia that accompanied re-unification (the highbrow litmag Granta even had an issue devoted to this, titled “Krauts!”). Those skinheads and neo-Nazis coming out of the woodwork didn’t help, either. But the 4th Reich never happened, and Germany turned out to be a peaceful, “normal” place.
12: Believe it or not, I think I read the first “Germans travel to Poland for work” article in the Polish magazine Wprost as far back as 1992. There’s long been a thin trickle of Germans going in that direction.
18: I recommend that Borges story as well.
Re-2. Yes, that’s true – part of my family had been minor dvoryane. But even they for the most part accepted many aspects of Soviet power as legitimate. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how some Russian nobles abroad wrote to Stalin after WW2, thanking him for restoring the Russian Empire and asking to return and serve him. (Stalin didn’t reply).
Re-3. I agree. The KPRF needs new leaders, new cadres, and a new, future-orientated (instead of dwelling on the past) direction so it can appeal to younger people. In particular, they can provide a much-needed focus on things such as social progress, economic justice, and environmentalism / sustainable development, which are lacking in the discourse of the Putin circle.
Re-12. Still, it does demonstrate, I think, that expecting a depopulating flood out of Poland to sluggish Germany once border controls are relaxed is rather unrealistic.
“some Russian nobles abroad wrote to Stalin after WW2, thanking him for restoring the Russian Empire”
I’ve heard similar stories. Whether true or not, when the chips were down the anti-Communist Russian emigres supported the Red Army all the way. The few who didn’t (like Merezhkovsky, I think) were ostracized. But that was about the survival of the country, not ideology.
Have you read Nabokov’s short story “Conversation Piece 1945″? It’s a fascinating little work, dealing with some of these WW2-related issues.
Re the Communist Party: Maybe they should just go out of business and be replaced by a proper social democratic party that doesn’t have the baggage of the past.
Thanks for that Nabokov story reference. http://lib.rin.ru/doc/i/25956p1.html Fascinating.
I’m glad you liked it. The bit you quoted was one of the parts I was thinking of.
Another interesting thing about the story – it makes the point that Holocaust denial isn’t really new; it began just after the war ended.
A.K. – I’ve got one word to say to you with your dreams of an eco-scientific dictatorship – Lysenko!
(now I’ll get back to waffling)
I think Lovelock wants something like H.G. Wells’ “Dictatorship Of The Air” (from “The Shape Of Things To Come”). From Wikipedia:
“Wells… envisages a benevolent dictatorship – ‘The Dictatorship of the Air’ (a term likely modelled on ‘The Dictatorship of the proletariat’) – arising from the controllers of the world’s surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship chooses to murder a subject, the condemned persons are given a chance to take a poison tablet.
Eventually, after a century of re-shaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state “withers away” (as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring). The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges… The ultimate aim of this Utopian world is to produce a world society composed entirely of Polymaths, each and every one of its members the intellectual equal of the greatest geniuses of the past.”
I can’t help noticing a paradox here. Anyone with a Marxist (or Marxisant) world view should be profoundly hostile to “great man” narratives of history. According to Marx it’s the forces of production that really determine history, not Napoleon’s orders to his troops at Waterloo. Yet it’s the self-styled Marxist countries that become most obsessed with “great men” (Stalin, Mao, Castro, Tito etc). Usually these leaders serve massively long terms in power, longer even than medieval monarchs or emperors, and they usually die in office, senile. Sometimes, as in Cuba and North Korea, the hereditary principle even makes a comeback. Meanwhile capitalist countries like Japan and Switzerland have a succession of governments with forgettable, unremarkable leaders who leave no trace on history. And their countries develop a quiet prosperity as a consequence.
How great are these “great men”? The selection process which Stalin won to become Soviet dictator inherently rewarded deviousness, unscrupulousness, and a willingness to murder all your potential rivals. So the USSR got Stalin, rather than Doris Leuthard. The Swiss system rewards candidates with slightly different qualities, I guess.
Neither system tends to favour the super-brainy. Steven Hawking wouldn’t become dictator under either dispensation. And doesn’t the Bernie Madoff saga suggest even the super bright are capable of being conned?
George Orwell suggested there are some ideas that are so stupid only really clever people are capable of the mental gymnastics necessary to believe in them. For instance, whenever I ask an ordinary Catholic to explain the concept of the Trinity to me, they quickly see that it’s incoherent and contradictory as a religious theory. But Catholic intellectuals are very skilled at evasion, and can dress the idea up enough to hide its ridiculousness from mental view.
Finally, I’m with Douglas Adams, in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”: anyone who actually wants to be Galactic President is – by that fact alone – clearly unsuitable for the job.
I agree about the “Great Man” mystique. Being allergic to political enthusiasms, I can never understand how people get emotionally carried away by politicians. The way I look at it, a politician is like the head of a company. Your boss may be better or worse, efficient or incompetent – but do you really want to put a poster of him on your wall? No matter how effective a boss, would you ever consider wearing a T-shirt with his visage printed on it? (eurgh!) That’s how I look at politicians.
They’re not dreams (in the sense that they are happy ones). For a start, personally I would intensely dislike the massive interference in my life that an ecotechnic dictatorship would inevitably, necessarily exercise. I just think the ecotechnic dictatorship is the only sure way of avoiding the global collapse by 2050 that by now I see as 50-75% likely.
Marxists have to live in the real world if they want to make it as political leaders. Particularly in times of strife – be they internal class tensions, or resistance to imperialism – the people yearn for a Great Leader. Combining the two – a charismatic leader promising both sovereignty and modernization – and you have the makings of a “great man”* professing Marxism, thus partially resolving the contradiction. That was the case in both Cuba and North Korea**, to an extent even in the USSR (since the Russian Empire was both backward and on the “semi-periphery”).
* Of course, many of these “great men” do not turn out to be so great with the benefit of distance and hindsight, as their promises tend to fall short due to realities in the ground, yet in the unleashed passions of the place and moment, they do indeed appear to be Great Leaders to a people held in thrall.
** Incidentally, North Korea is no longer Marxist even in name. It removed all references to Marxism and Communism in its Constitution in 2009. Now, its ideology is pure Songun.
I like Garton Ash, but he’s wrong on this one. He’s a British Europhile — a lonely thing at the best of times — so it’s particularly galling to him to see the Germans acting “normal” and beating up on the Greeks.
But what’s the alternative? Is it realistic to expect a German government — /any/ German government — to bail out a country that has repeatedly lied about its finances without at least grumbling about it? Helmut Kohl would have hit the Greeks just as hard, thank you very much.
Germany is still firmly committed to a European vision. And, yes, to the euro. I’ll be happy to make a side bet that Germany will still be on the euro five years from now (give you 10-1 odds) or ten years from now (5-1). Also that the eurozone will be substantially intact (5 years, 3-1 odds), meaning it still has at least 80% of its current membership and population.
Bets are cash, BTW, and I’ll go up to 100 euros of my money on each.
Doug M.
“Why should Serbia apologize for the Bosnian Serbs who were clearly not even under its control?”
AK, I like your stuff, but this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen you write. No offense.
Belgrade provided a tremendous amount of support to the Bosnian Serbs: funding, training, weapons, fuel, ammunition, officers, recruits, paramilitary units. In return, Belgrade demanded — and got — a very high level of influence and obedience from Bosnian Serb forces, up to and including countermanding the orders of President Karadzic.
The details of this have been documented pretty thoroughly. Check out the writings of Milan Vego, Roy Gutman or Julian Borger. Or google ‘Military Line’ (Vojna Linija) — that was the informal line of command from Milosevic to the Bosnians, passing through Jovica Stanisic, who was then head of Serbian State Security.
Stanisic, aka ‘Ledeni’, was working with the CIA on the side. As is often the case in the world of intelligence, it’s hard to say who was using whom. But the CIA traded information with Stanisic for several years, and quickly came to realize that he was the go-to guy if they wanted something done in Bosnia. For instance, when the Bosnian Serbs were using captured NATO peacekeepers as human shields? The CIA called Stanisic, and Stanisic told them to stop it at once. Which they did.
This has led to the bizarre circumstance — unique in history AFAIK — of the CIA submitting sealed testimony in the defense of an accused war criminal. Stanisic is currently on trial in the Hague (for, among other things, overseeing genocidal activities in Bosnia), and the CIA is basically stepping in as a character witness: “Whatever else he may have done, he also did a lot of good!”
Anyway. Much of the bag work of the Military line was done by Radovan Stojičić (aka Badža, ‘the Badger’). Stojičić was a ‘Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs’ — in fact, he was a policeman-turned-gangster who was intelligent and discreet enough to be the cutout for much of Stanisic’s work in Bosnia. Alas, the Badger perished in a hail of bullets in an Italian restaurant in Belgrade in 1997, and many of the details perished with him. But there’s still plenty of testimony and evidence left to support a very high degree of involvement by Belgrade in Bosnia. If you want a summary of how this worked in practice — how instructions flowed from Milosevic, through Ledeni, to Bosnian politicians (or past them, directly to Bosnian military commanders) — let me suggest the book _Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel_, by James Ron, especially Chapter 3, pages 57 et seq. It’s slightly dated — a bit more information has come out since its publication, from Hague trials and such — but a good starting point.
(BTW, the prime suspect in the Badger’s assassination? Arkan. Who also worked closely with Ledeni — though Stanisic was careful to keep him at arm’s length; Arkan was too high profile, too colorful — and who also carried out Belgrade’s orders in Bosnia. And who, of course, perished in yet another hail of bullets in lobby of Belgrade’s Hotel Intercontinental a couple of years later, in a crime that has never yet been solved. When I moved to Serbia in 2001, you could still spot a couple of the bullet holes if you knew where to look, high up on the lobby wall where the repair crew had missed them.)
As to the apology: go read the text of it. It is, of course, very carefully worded, and does not explicitly acknowledge Belgrade’s involvement. (Nor does it use the word “genocide”. )
The resolution “harshly condemns the crime committed against the Bosniak residents of Srebrenica in July 1995″ and expreses “condolences and apology to the victims’ families because not all was done to prevent this tragedy”. And… that’s it. You’ll notice that there’s no subject to that last clause, nor any active verb; ‘not all was done to prevent” is all it says. The implication is that Serbia, rather than being actively complicit in ethnic cleansing and mass murder, was just negligent in restraining those crazy Bosnian Serbs.
But to bring it back to the main point: saying the Bosnian Serbs were “clearly not even under Serbia’s control” is just plain wrong. You can argue about /how much/ control Belgrade had over them — and the Hague defendants have been arguing just that — but there’s no question that a control relationship existed.
Doug M.
Thanks for that – I don’t know the detailed, so I bow to your superior knowledge. Just two additional additional comments:
1) Serbia had even closed borders with and embargoed Bosnia at the time. As I understand, relations between Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs were not that amicable. As you say, the extent of Serbian control is debatable. Hence…
2) I still think even the qualified apology is too much as long as the EU/US are pursuing the Srebrenica was genocide line*. “Not all was done to prevent” could easily be reinterpreted as “too much was done to enable”, and will be as long as this issue remains political and not historical.
* Something I have difficulty wrapping my head around. By those standards, couldn’t the most ridiculous things be argued, such as that the US was guilty of genocide in Nicaragua because of Iran-Contra?
AK, no need to bow. And I’m sorry for being a bit sharp. I just used to live in Serbia, is all, and it makes me a bit quick off the trigger.
Closed borders: yes, Milosevic declared Bosnia “under embargo” in early 1993. This was a PR move meant for Western consumption. It had exactly zero effect on the ground. Serbia continued to supply and arm the Bosnian Serbs with both hands, even while piously decrying the violence. If you google around for articles from this period, you’ll quickly turn up a bunch discussing the “embargo” and just how effective it was (viz., not at all) — fuel, food, ammunition and troops continued to flow freely across the border, even while Milosevic was loudly proclaiming that Serbia had cut off everything but humanitarian aid. At various points in 1993 and 1994 there were initiatives to send an international monitoring mission to watch the Serb-Bosnian border; none of them came to anything, and then the war ended in 1995.
Srebrenica genocide: I agree that the ‘genocide’ label complicates things. Unfortunately, there’s a disjunct between the legal definition (which is broad, and certainly includes Srebrenica) and the popular imagination (which has been powerfully influenced by the Holocaust).
Srebrenica certainly involved the the deliberate and systematic mass murder of civilian members of an ethnic, religious, or national group. So legally it qualifies. Both the ICTY and the International Court of Justice have agreed on this point. You can decry the alleged partiality of the ICTY — if you’re sympathetic to the Serbs, it’s almost de rigeur — but the ICJ is something else again; everyone takes them pretty seriously, and the Serbs have appealed to them to negate Kosovo’s declaration of independence. (Decision expected later this year.)
So, it’s not the “EU/US” line — it’s been formally found such, repeatedly, by the relevant tribunals. If you say that Srebrenica was /not/ genocide, then you have a medium-small mountain of evidence and legal reasoning to get past.
“Too much was done to enable” — well, too much was done to enable. The Srebrenica killers were certainly under Belgrade’s influence and to some extent under its control. A number of them were actually Serbs from Serbia, not Bosnia. Some were paramilitaries, including the famous Scorpions, who were recruited, trained and armed in Serbia and then sent across that “closed” border for the express purpose of killing as many non-Serbs as possible. (A number of the Scorpions were police or ex-police, and it was a fairly open secret that they were operating under the direct instructions of MUP, Serbia’s Interior Ministry). And without Serbia’s direct assistance — fuel, ammunition, training, funding — the Bosnian Serb units would have been incapable of doing what they did.
So I’m not really seeing the problem there. The resolution is very milk-and-water, and doesn’t really do much of anything; it’s another step in the elaborate dance of triangulation the Tadic administration is doing with the EU and its own voting public. In fact, the final language ends up tracking the ICJ decision of 2006 — which found that Srebrenica was genocide, that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Belgrade of it, but that the Milosevic administration did breach international law by failing to act to prevent it. I have trouble seeing how that’s “too much” in any meaningful sense.
BTW: Srebrenica denialism is a small but vigorous cottage industry. In some cases — Lewis McKenzie, Philip Corwin — it’s coming from people who had some direct involvement in Bosnia. In other cases its ideological (Diane Johnstone, who wants to make a point about ‘discourse’.) And then of course there are the Serb nationalists. So there’s a fair amount of disinformation out there. So if you’re interested in this topic — and it is interesting, if not for the squeamish — check all references.)
cheers,
Doug M.
Here is the face of La Russophobe finally exposed:
http://twitter.com/rtybeams
aka RTYB on Streetwise Professor
Otherwise known as the adoption “experts” hated by thousands after she injected hereself itself the debate surrounding Angelina Jolie’s adoption.
Her full name is Rhonda Tatiana Yael Beams and she is a hate-filled Russian émigré to the US.
Read her tweets on Twitter for a full picture of her outlook on life. The repeated sentiments about Putin are telling.
1. RTYB is not La Russophobe – I am near 100% certain of that. Their online characters are worlds apart, despite some superficial similarities like the anti-Putin obsession.
2. I’ve known her true name for some time. A person she attacked mailed it to me. She also sent me hate mail, – granted, under an anonymous name, but since its IP address was correlated with her real address, I can confidently say it was her.
3. Thanks for the link to her Twitter. Really does have a very strong fascination with Putin doesn’t she.
God I just love RTYB. She adores me almost as much as she does Putin.
Looking forwards to more of her fan mail.
I commented on the ROKS Chenoan deal over at my place when it happened. You are going to have to work hard to convince me that it was not a NORK torpedo, given – well given all the link the commentators at ID have pulled up. Comments from the ROK Defense Ministry don’t match up with anything found in the independent reports.
Thank you for the links. I have not been following this story like you have, but evidently it deserves closer scrutiny in the coming weeks. Now the question – if this was a NORK torpedo, is the South going to downplay and ignore it? Or are other options now being considered or planned behind closed doors?
@others,
Thanks for your well-thought out posts. I will respond to them ASAP.
Check this video from Youtube. It says basically the same things that I have been writing here for the past couple of years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqhSnq7wdUo&feature=player_embedded#
Russia is a target of a immoral, destructive drug war which aim is to weaken Russia’s statehood and eventually destroy Russia’s future as a country.
The war has had great success. Russia has almost 3 million heroin addicts and this figure is rising fast. Most of the heroin users are between 18 and 40 years of old.
So far Russia has had no way of defending against this assault.
Look, I’ve never denied that very dodgy things may well be going on in Afghanistan. The profit margins for the heroin trade are huge and it would not surprise me if some of it were requisitioned by US / Britain intelligence services to fund black operations.
However, your idea that it is a major demographic threat against Russia has no grounding in fact. Take the death rate for 25 year old males in Russia, a demographic group that would be one of the most exposed to drug abuse. In 2000, i.e. before the Afghanistan campaign, it was 0.0060, and it stayed above 0.0050 until 2007 when it fell to 0.0047, and in 2008 fell further to 0.0041. These improvements, one would think, would have been exceedingly unlikely had there been a sudden jump in Russian heroin consumption.
This theory seems to be similar to the ones about how the KGB (or now the FSB) controlled Colombian drug exports to the US to destroy its youth.
Why do you concentrate on 25-year-olds and leave other “most exposed to drug abuse” groups out of your consideration?
About 30,000 people die in Russia every year due to illegal drugs, with (Afghan) heroin being the deadliest of illegal drugs. For comparison, about 15,000 Soviet soldiers died in ten years of Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, the CIA’s involvement in illegal drug trade isn’t a theory but a known fact, look up the CIA-Contras cocaine affair.
1. Because 25-year old males are, I believe it is safe to say, the demographic group that is most exposed to illegal drugs (in that children, women, and elderly are rarely junkies). If you get a major drug epidemic, mortality rates amongst men in their twenties are expected to rise… not fall by 20%.
2. 30,000 from illegal drugs which they freely chose to indulge in…. compared to around 2mn annual deaths in total, of which around a third can be attributed to alcohol over-consumption. The comparison with Afghan War casualties is frankly asinine.
3. Please read more carefully. Quote from myself just above: “it would not surprise me if some of it were requisitioned by US / Britain intelligence services to fund black operations”. As I said, the CIA might well be skimming off the drug profits, but it has better things to do with the money than paying the Chechens, such as funding Iranian separatist groups or plugging up the financial system.
About point #1, I expected a comparison with western reaction to terrorist bombings, but the only comparison, by Adomanis, is with western reaction to Iraqi bombing.
During 2001 I didn’t read foreign media, so what I know about media reactions in the US after Sept. 11th 2001 comes from Italian media, which reported that Americans “rallied behind the President”. I also remember that an US journalist was fired because he stated that the terrorists had a lot of courage to sacrifice their lives to accomplish their objective. I thought that some heads in the US security were going to roll off, but if my memory serves me well, nothing of this kind happened.
If Italian media were correct in their reporting, and I correctly remember their reports, I have to conclude that US media has a much stronger taboo about terrorism than Russian media and most European media (Italy included).
2. That may be true for Russians, but is that necessarily true for non-Russians? A third of the Kazak population died in the famines of the 1930s, and the Soviet occupation during the Second World War was responsible for more deaths than the Nazi occupation, to say nothing of Ukraine, where despite having a younger population far too many people died unnaturally, including a big bump in the 1930s.
http://www.ined.fr/fichier/t_publication/47/publi_pdf1_pop.et.soc.francais.413.pdf
The figure that they use is for Ukraine within its current frontiers, excluding the then-Polish and Romanian territories, making the death toll all the proportionately higher.
11. Alberta has considered building nuclear reactors in order to extract oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta. The good sense of this has seemed to escape me–yes, oil’s more portable than nuclear energy, but what about the costs of investing in the plants–so it’s interesting to see other polities considering this route.
12. Hee.
I just want to comment on point 2. Two of my great-grandparents died and one of my grandfathers was wounded in the war. Both grandmothers had to evacuate with kids from Moscow to Central Asia during the war, which was always remembered by them as a major hardship. Everyone’s life was turned upside down.
I don’t personally know anyone who personally knows anyone who was jailed or executed under Stalin though. Certainly no known family members. In the past I’ve tried to make the same point you made there to people who have no family history in the former USSR. I’m sure they thought I was crazy and/or a liar, which, ironically, told me something about the power of propaganda.
Yes, people were jailed and executed by the Soviet state for political reasons under Stalin. How many people? I don’t know, but it couldn’t have been in the tens of millions. Was it in the millions? One would have to study the actual data, which I haven’t. Talking to people, being immersed in the culture, knowing one’s family history, having some common sense – those things can give you a good idea of the order of manitude of an event, but nothing more than that. The order of magnitude of the currently repeated number of Stalin’s victims is wrong. Common sense tells me that the Revolution and the 1918-1920 Civil War also killed more people than Stalin, though obviously fewer than did the German invasion.
I have a vague recollection of once reading somewhere that Khruschov came up with his own number of Stalin’s victims during his anti-Stalin campaign. Does anyone here know what it was?
When I was growing up, Stalin was not mentioned frequently, but when he was, it was often in the context of nostalgia. I can practically see eyes rolling at this, but it’s the freaking truth. What sort of nostalgia? Let’s say somebody, most likely an older person, is ranting about a piece of shoddy work they’ve just discovered or about bribery or stealing on the job or about someone’s laziness. “Oh, that wouldn’t have flown under Stalin, another Stalin is what this country needs (or “you people need”)”, etc., etc. It was the “trains used to run on time” sentiment. This came from the most ordinary people imaginable. Now, everything, including state authority, can be overdone or underdone. I’m not necessarily endorsing or condemning the trains-running-on-time sentiment here, and I didn’t live under Stalin anyway.
But the modern Western official view seems to deny that such a sentiment could even exist. And I’m sure that if he really did kill 30 million people, then it wouldn’t exist.
Thanks for this insightful comment. There’s archival figures on the Stalinist repressions here. I’m quoting a summary I wrote in another article:
Nonetheless, some ideologues continue pushing the figure of 62mn victims of “the communist dictators in the former Soviet Union”.