Watching this cheered me up.
Jerusalema is a gospel-influenced song in the Zulu language produced by South African producer master KG and performed by the vocalist Nomcebo in 2019.
In February, 2020, Frndómenos do Semla, a dance group in Angola, recorded themselves dancing to the song while eating and not dropping their plates.
Since then the Jerusalema dance has gone viral. People all over the world are doing it. (But I only learned of it day before yesterday.)
THE BETROTHED by Alessandro Manzoni (1827) translated by Bruce Penman (1972)
Recently I got around to reading an old paperback copy of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. I picked it up years ago because I read somewhere that it is a classic greatly beloved by Italians—much as The Pickwick Papers is beloved by the English and The Three Musketeers by the French.
The setting is northern Italy, around the end of the 16th century. It is about the misadventures of Renzo, a good-hearted but foolish young workman, and his sweetheart, Lucia.
I enjoyed it. The author was a good storyteller and also a witty observer of the foibles of human nature.
I also liked it because it gave me a glimpse of another time and place. This helps remind me that today’s crises are not uniquely bad and that the way I and my friends see the world is not the peak of human wisdom.
Renzo and Lucia are eager to marry, but the local parish priest, Don Abbondio, keeps putting them off because he is afraid of the wicked local nobleman, Don Rodrigo, who has designs on Lucia.
The two sweethearts flee, with the help of another Catholic clergyman, the Capuchin monk Father Cristoforo. The two become separated, and Lucia takes refuge in the convent of the notorious Nun of Monza.
The Nun of Monza was a real person. She was a member of an aristocratic family, pressured to take vows as a nun, more or less against her will, for dynastic and inheritance reasons.
As a nun, she lived a life of luxury and self-indulgence. She look a lover, gave birth to a stillborn child and murdered a nun who threatened to tell about it. But, in the novel, she takes a liking to Lucia.
Then Lucia falls into the clutches of an even more powerful and evil nobleman, the Unnamed. He supposedly was so terrifying and ferocious that nobody, in his lifetime or after, dared refer to him by his real name—something like Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. He also was a real person, although his name, Francesco Bernadino Visconti, is known to history.
Renzo meanwhile finds himself in Milan, where riots are going on because of a shortage of bread. Manzoni observes that the authorities think they can increase the supply of bread by holding down the price, while the street mob’s solution is to burn down bakeries.
Our hero shoots off his mouth, and a police spy decides to finger him as the ringleader of the riots.
Renzo is arrested, but gets away. Lucia is freed because of the intervention of the saintly Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Frederigo Borromeo. He, too, was a real person, the first cousin of St. Charles Borromeo.
Vladimir Putin in Western eyes.
The USA in Russian eyes
The U.S. government depicts its current clashes with Russia and China as a struggle of freedom vs. despotism.
This is a half-truth.
Russia and China do not accept historic Western ideals of human rights and limited government.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin lives in a billion-dollar palace built with embezzled funds. The man who revealed this was poisoned and then imprisoned.
In China, President Xi Jinping is introducing a new “social credit” system that is intended to monitor the actions of every Chinese and reward or punish them for what they do. It is a model for authoritarian governments all over the world.
But the USA cannot claim to be a defender of human rights. It prosecutes Julian Assange and other truth-tellers for revealing war crimes, occupies Iraq against the expressed will of its government, uses economic sanctions to starve opposing nations into submission, etc.
Instead the U.S. government has adopted a new concept of human rights based on racial and sexual identity and the sexual revolution.
I of course believe that everyone is entitled to equal justice under law, and no-one should be persecuted or prosecuted for being what they are, so long as they don’t harm third parties and so long as they recognize my right to be what I am.
But reasonable people can differ questions of kindergarten sex education, eligibility for men’s and women’s sports teams, male and female bathrooms, etc. These are not human rights issues.
Leaders of many nations, not just Russia and China, reject U.S. cultural influence, and with reason. They think U.S. influence means more pornography, consumerism (the idea that increase of material possessions means happiness) and an undermining of the traditional family.
Again, reasonable people can differ about these things. But it behooves us Americans to have some sensitivity to other cultures, and accept the fact that we’re not in charge of the world.
The best way for us Americans to champion human rights is to set a good example.
Richard Hanania, an international relations scholar, said the difference between the Russia and the USA over Ukraine is that Russia has an objective and a plan, and the USA has neither.
Instead, he wrote, U.S. policy is the result of conflicting political forces—the interests of foreign governments, the national security bureaucracy and weapons manufacturers, and also U.S. culture wars, including the conflict over gay rights.
Russia is not one of the 71 countries that outlaw gays, Hanania said. But, in 2012, the Russian government sentenced two members of Pussy Riot, a lesbian performance art collective, to three years in prison for sacrilegious acts during Sunday religious services in a Moscow cathedral. And, in 2013, Russia passed a law outlawing gay advocacy to minors.
This was the start of Vladimir Putin being defined as an enemy of Western freedom and democracy, Hanania said. Of course Putin never was a champion of freedom and democracy, but he was no different in 2014 from what he was in 2012, when President Obama’s re-election campaign ridiculed Mitt Romney for trying to restart the Cold War.
Hanania said Russia and also Hungary provoke the ire of the American liberal elite because they claim to be defenders of Christian civilization against secular liberalism. Unlike persecution of gays in, say, Saudi Arabia, this plays into the U.S. culture war at home.
That’s only one factor, but I think it is a real one.
THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL by Anne Bronte (1848) with an introduction by John Weeks (1979)
Most educated people have heard of the Bronte sisters—Charlotte Bronte, who wrote Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte, who wrote Wuthering Heights. I didn’t know there was a third sister, Anne Bronte, until one of her novels was selected by my novel-reading group.
Her best-known novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a shocker in its day, which is why Charlotte didn’t want it to be republished after Anne’s death.
What made it so shocking? The heroine was a wife who’d run away from her husband.
Marriage then was an iron-clad contract. Indeed, someone who broke off an engagement could be sued for breach of promise. Once married, the woman was transferred from the authority and protection of her father to the authority and protection of her husband.
England in those days was a patriarchy—a real one.
Married women could not own property. Everything a wife owned, including what she earned herself, belonged to her husband. The husband could even take her children away from her.
Marriage was the transfer of the woman from the authority and protection of her father to the authority and protection of her husband. The only truly independent women were, like Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, fatherless, unmarried and in possession of sufficient property to support themselves.
Many Victorian novels tell of unhappy marriages and abusive husbands, but the wife, if she is to expect any sympathy from the reader, must do her best to put up with it. Freedom only came when the abusive partner died, which, iIt must be said, very commonly happened in not only in novels, but in real life.)
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We begin with reminiscences of Gilbert Markham, a classic unreliable narrator. He’s a nice young man working on the family estate, oblivious to what is going on around him, but providing enough information that the reader can see what he is blind to.
For example, he is unaware of how his mother and sister cater to his needs and wishes because the man of the house comes first. He doesn’t notice how the desperately the young women in his circle want and need to get married. What for him is an amusing flirtation is, for them, a question of their whole futures. The women in my novel-reading group said his is typical male behavior.
Gilbert’s attention is captured by a mysterious Helen Graham who has moved into a remote, previously-vacant house called Wildfell Hall with her small son. She is cold and stand-offish, especially to men, but also lonely.
They gradually grow closer, despite his blunders, based on his tendency to act impulsively after jumping to false conclusions.
Finally she gives him a diary that tells her back story.
When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned, I didn’t know what to think. Not that I thought about it too deeply.
It seemed to me that if the Russian deep state had really wanted to kill him, they would have succeeded. Also, I was hung up on the definition of “novichok.” But most of all I didn’t pay attention because I was preoccupied with the lies of war hawks in the American deep state.
The video above shows detective work by Navalny, Maria Pevchikh and other Navalny supporters. It proves that the Russian government was behind Navalny’s poisoning. It is in Russian with English subtitles, and was released in June, 2021, but I only became aware of it a couple of days ago. I’m posting it on my blog by I suspect most Americans aren’t aware of it either.
Navalny fell sick on an airplane flight from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, 2020. The plane was diverted to Omsk, where Navalny was rushed to a hospital for treatment. After two days, he was transported to Berlin for medical treatment.
Hospital patients in Russia, as in most countries, have the right to see their medical records, but the Omsk hospital refused to release Navalny’s. In November, two Navalny lawyers, Ivan Zhdanov and Vyacheslav Gimadi, bluffed their was into the Omsk records department and took unauthorized photographs of the records.
They indicated that a biochemical blood test showed that Navalny had a deficiency in cholinesterase, which is a neurotransmitter, and the presence of organophosphate agents, which are a cholinesterase inhibitor. In other words, Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent.
A month later, the Omsk hospital released what they said were Navalny’s medical records. All references to cholinesterase and organophosphates had been scrubbed.
Poisoning by nerve agent was confirmed by physicians in Germany and by a Russian physician. The German officials said it was a new type of nerve agent, deadly but slow-acting. Navalny would be dead if the pilot hadn’t diverted the plane and his supporters hadn’t got him moved to Germany.
Navalny’s clothes were confiscated by the Omsk hospital and never returned. Navalny tricked an FSB agent, Konstanin Kodryavstev, into confirming that his underpants were poisoned. Impersonating an FSB official, Navalny phoned Kodryavstev and debriefed him on how he obtained Navalny’s clothes from the local police, carefully cleansed the underpants of any chemical agent and returned them.
The poison probably was added to Navalny’s underwear in his hotel room in Tomsk. The room is under video surveillance, but no video footage of the room has been released. There’s more evidence in the video, but you get the idea.
After having proved his government. had tried to murder him, Navalny returned to Russia in August, 2021. To me, that was an incredibly brave thing to do. He was promptly arrested, and is in prison now.
Over the weekend I watched two astonishing videos produced by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s supporters. Here is what I learned.
Vladimir Putin has a luxurious palace on the Black Sea on a 17,000-area tract of land, which allegedly cost $1.35 billion (in 2021 dollars) to build.
Construction was financed by money siphoned from Russian state-owned enterprises. The land is owned by Russia’s Federal Security Service, but is leased to shell companies owned by Putin cronies.
The complex includes an amphitheater, , an underground hockey rink, an oyster farm, an arboretum that employs 40 gardeners, a Greek Orthodox Church that was dismantled and moved from Greece, two helipads
Inside the palace itself are in indoor swimming pool, a theater with a stage, backstage and dressing rooms, a hookah lounge, a casino, a slot machine room and what appears to be a pole-dancing stage.
The furniture comes from exclusive Italian manufacturers. It includes a $19,700 chest of drawers, a $17,000 bed and $10,500 chairs—also $700 toilet brushes.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Alexei Navalny in the past, but now I see him as a hero, like Vaclav Havel or Julian Assange. The top documentary was produced while he was in a hospital in Germany, recovering from a poisoning attempt.
He decided he would only release it after he returned to Russia, because it would be dishonorable to expose his reporting team to perils he himself did not share. He did return. He was promptly arrested and is still in prison. That took a lot of guts.
Navalny, Maria Perchikh, Georgy Alburov and the other members of his team are not only brave dissidents. They are outstanding investigative reporters.
They also have excellent presentation skills. As a rule, long videos don’t hold my attention, but I couldn’t look away from the two I have embedded.
There had been reports and rumors about Putin’s palace going back to the early 2010s, but it took Navalny and his team to nail down the facts.
Their opportunity came in August, 2020, when the builders discovered that the whole structure was riddled with leaks and mold, and had to be completely remodeled.
Somebody sent Navalny architects’ drawings of the structure. The drawings specified the furniture in each room.
Navalny’s team obtained catalogs from the furniture suppliers and manufacturers. These enabled them to created computer-generated images of the various rooms. This part starts at the 59-minute mark in the top video.
They could have got things completely wrong. But workers sent pictures of the actual interiors and, according to Pevchikh and Alburov, they were surprisingly accurate.
Their update is in the second video. Both videos are in Russian with English subtitles. The two reporters said that when they went wrong, it was in underestimating Putin’s lavishness and bad taste.
I have a friend who, like me, is tired of the propaganda that passes for news nowadays. He wondered how things would seem to our counterparts in Russia and China—say, to a retired school teacher born in the 1940s.
I can only guess at the answer. I have no first-hand knowledge of these huge, diverse nations. But there is no harm in speculating.
For one thing, such people would have had more radical upheavals in their lives than my friend and I did.
A Russian retiree would have experienced the period of stagnation under Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev, the euphoria and collapse of the economy under Boris Yeltstin and the slow rebuilding under Putin’s corrupt oligarchy.
A Chinese retiree would have experienced the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, rebuilding under Deng Xiaopeng and now the tightening up under Xi Jinping.
They would remember the economic collapse in Russia in the 1990s and the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. I imagine their main desire would be to keep these traumatic events from happening again.
We Americans may be heading into our own versions of a Yeltsin-style economic collapse and a Mao-style cultural revolution.
Our economy primarily benefits a small number of super-rich individuals and monopolistic corporations. The USA never really recovered from the Great Recession of 1980. Governmental policy props up the banks and financial markets, but does little for average American wage-earners. This is very like Russian economic policy under Boris Yeltsin.
What’s propping up the U.S. economic is the power of the almighty dollar. The fact that the whole world needs dollars in order to do business enables the U.S. government to continually cut taxes for the super-rich and finance a huge global military establishment.
The end of dollar supremacy will leave the U.S. in the same position as other nations with big trade and governmental deficits. We as a nation would have to raise taxes, cut spending, raise prices, cut wages and sell national assets to foreigners, just like Greece. But our banks and big corporations may well come out all right.
The other problem with news coverage is what is called “woke-ness,” a blanket term for evolving taboos about what you must and mustn’t say in public about race, gender and sexual orientation. The mentality in many ways is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China in order to dismantle potential opponents and reassert control. Big U.S. corporations, universities and government agencies allow woke-ness free rein because it diverts attention for their abuses. In China, the movement got out of control. The same could happen here.
George Orwell is remembered as an enemy of fascism and Stalinism and for his totalitarian dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
But, a friend of mine asked, what was Orwell’s utopia? What did he advocate?
It’s important to remember that Orwell was not only a hater of tyranny and lies. He also was a hater of inequality and of social and economic class privilege.
George Orwell
His idea of a good society was a society of equals, which honored the moral values of the working class.
In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his book about coal miners and the unemployed in England in the 1930s, Orwell drew a word portrait of a working class family—dad reading his racing form, mum doing her sewing, children happily amusing themselves and the family dog lying before the fire.
Provided dad had steady work at good wages, that was probably as good as life got, Orwell wrote. It was better than typical middle-class life, with its status seeking, worship of success, fear of poverty and lack of solidarity.
But he said his picture of a working class family sitting around a coal fire after kippers and strong tea was something that could only have existed at this particular moment in time.
He said it would not exist in the imagined utopian future of 200 years hence, with no coal fire, no manual labor, no gambling, no horses or dogs, everything hygienic, sterile and made of steel, glass and rubber.
But such a home could not have existed in the medieval past. There would have been no chimney, moldy bread, lice, scurvy, “a yearly childbirth and a yearly death” and “the priest terrifying you with tales of hell.” (Orwell, by the way, had no use for religion.)
Orwell regarded class distinctions are inescapable, something baked into the nature of British consciousness. He accepted that he himself was a middle-class person and that he could never make himself think and behave as a working-class person did.
But he did not agonize over it, as many white liberal Americans nowadays do over their inescapable “whiteness.” And in other writings, he celebrated middle-class virtues and the widening of the British middle class.
In Homage to Catalonia (1938), his book about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, he said he experienced for the first time a society truly committed to equality
When he arrived in Barcelona, he said, he was in the midst of a true workers revolution. Every building had been seized by workers and draped with Communist or anarchist flags. Every church had been gutted and its images destroyed.
Every restaurant had a sign saying it had been collectivized. There were no private automobiles; they had all been collectivized, too.
Nobody called anybody “señor” or “don,” just “comrade.” Nobody said “buenos Dias,” just “salud.” Nobody wore suits, just overalls or other work clothes or a militia uniform. Waiters looked their customers in the eye and took no guff from them..
“I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for,” Orwell wrote. Later he served in a Spanish militia, in which officers had to argue with troops to get them to agree to follow orders, but the troops fought bravely. He admired this, too.
Time for something a little lighter. [Hat tip to kottke.org]
The fundamental fallacy which is committed by almost everyone is this: “A and B hate each other, therefore one is good and the other is bad.“ [==Bertrand Russell, in 1956 letter]
Vladimir Putin
I oppose the war party in the United States, I don’t consider myself pro-Putin or pro-Russia.
Vladimir Putin is the authoritarian ruler of a corrupt oligarchy. I never denied this.
I guess I am pro-Russia in that I sympathize with the long-suffering Russian people, but I’m not an admirer of their government.
Thomas Piketty, the French economist known for his studies of inequality, wrote that the degree of economic inequality in Russia is at least as great as it is in the USA.
He wrote that half of Russia’s financial assets are in tax havens abroad. The Pandora Papers revealed that a large chunk of those assets are held by a crony of Putin’s.
Alexei Navalny
A friend of mine with contacts in Russia told me of a businessman who has to make kickbacks to three entities—the tax collector, the FSB (Russian FBI) and local organized crime.
This friend also tells me that, except for Moscow and a few other big cities, Russia is a sea of misery and discontent.
Opponents of the regime have a way of dying mysteriously or being killed by unknown persons. I wrote five years ago that Putin is a killer, and I have no reason to take this back. Admittedly, not all cases are clear-cut, but unmistakable victims include Anna Politovskaya, Alexander Litvenenko and Boris Nemtsov.
The big human rights issue currently in Russia is the poisoning and imprisonment of anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny. He fell sick while on an airplane flight from Siberia to Moscow in 2020. His supporters arranged for him to be flown to Germany, where he was placed in a medically-induced coma. Medical authorities determined that he had been poisoned. Later, Navalny said. he tricked Russian agents into admitting they placed toxins in his underpants.
Early in 2021 Navalny flew back to Russia, where he was imprisoned on charges of parole violations. He had been convicted of embezzlement, which his supporters say is a bogus charge.
But now the Russian authorities have reportedly labeled him a terrorist and “extremist,” and are going after his supporters. Evidently the Navalny movement has them worried..
President Vladimir Putin has threatened “appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures” if the USA does offer written guarantees of no military activities in Eastern Europe, no NATO membership for any post-Soviet country and no new military bases on the territory of former Soviet states.
This is what President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker promised President Mikhail Gorbachev in return for allowing reunification of Germany and withdrawing Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.
Subsequent U.S. presidents said this was just an informal verbal agreement and not binding. Russia had to submit because it was weak. Since then Russia has become powerful and is in a position to demand that the former promise can be kept. And this time put it in writing!
For Russia, this is a matter of national security. For the USA, it is not. For us Americans, it is a question of avoiding humiliation, not a question of survival.
Russia does not now threaten the U.S. homeland. But this could change.
Russia has not ruled out putting troops and missiles into Cuba and Venezuela, nor deploying submarines with its new hypersonic nuclear weapons into North American coastal waters. What is much more likely is that Russian subs would be allowed to refuel in Cuba or Venezuela.
There is no reason to think Russia plans to invade and occupy Ukraine or any other country. That would be foolish.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken does not claim Russia threatens the U.S. homeland. He says Russia is a threat to the new “rules-based international order.”
Russia, along with China and Iran, do threaten this U.S.-dominated international order. But ordinary Americans have no stake in it. This new international order does not benefit American working people. It does benefit the managers and stockholders of those countries.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
I am not an optimist. I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends toward justice. It bends toward entropy. I often feel discouraged about the state of the world, and my own country, the USA, in particular, and I think I have good reason.
But I haven’t lost hope. Optimism is the belief that success is inevitable in the long run. Hope is the faith that failure is not inevitable.
What gives me hope is recalling all the things in the past that turned out better than I thought they would. This means it is possible that things in the present may turn out better than I think they would. Not inevitable. Possible.
Some examples of what I have in mind are:
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The eclipse of racism. I grew up in the USA of the 1940s. This was a time when, throughout the former Confederate states, a white person could kill a black person with impunity. Lynchings of black people were still a thing. My parents, teachers and Sunday school teachers taught me that racism was wrong, but those who spoke against it were in the minority.
The heart of racism seemed to be the loathing and disgust felt by most white Americans, especially Southern white men, at the idea of a black man having sexual intercourse with a white women. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was asked whether I would want one of them to marry my sister—often by people who knew me well enough to know that I didn’t have a sister.
It seemed to me, and to others, that the struggle for racial equality would take decades, and that acceptance of racial intermarriage might never occur at all. But this proved wrong. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s really was a revolution, a cultural revolution. By the 1970s, black students at the University of Mississippi walked around arm-in-arm with their white girlfriends, and nobody said anything about it.
That’s not so say the civil rights revolution solved everything. Racial prejudice still exists. The old-time white-sheet racists have been marginalized, but they haven’t gone away. The black community still has a lot of problems, not all of them directly related to racism. And I happen to think that a lot of what’s called anti-racism nowadays is useless and even harmful.
Still, it is a mark of progress that we Americans are debating reparations and affirmative action rather than voting rights, racial segregation laws and lynchings.
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The eclipse of famine. As a boy and youth, I was influenced by books such as William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948)and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). They said most of the world was doomed to death by starvation because the number of people in the world (over 2 billion in 1948, 3.55 billion in 1968) exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. I took this very seriously.
For the past 40 years or so, the USA has been in economic decline. The proportion of Americans who can’t pay their bills has grown, the industrial base has been hollowed out, wealth has been concentrated at the top, drug addiction and suicide have increased.
Public opinion polls indicate that most Americans understand this, and want something done about it. But each successive administration—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden—has been devoted to propping up the status quo.
Our governmental system is a mess. We can’t do simple things like keep our roads, bridges and electric power grid in repair, provide basic medical care for all Americans or ensure that all school children are literate and numerate.
Again, most Americans are aware of this and would like something better, but nothing happens.
For the past quarter century, the USA has waged a series of wars without a clear goal and without clear results, except to keep the military-industrial complex in existence and the world in chaos.
I think Americans are beginning to wake up to the extent to which their patriotism has been abused and to the need to rebuild at home, but the bipartisan consensus for war continues.
Back in the 1960s, there were leaders who sought to unite Americans for economic justice and for peace. But Robert F. Kennedy snf the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were assassinated and Walter Reuther, the great labor leader, died. Malcolm X, the Black Muslim, and Fred Hampton, the black power advocate, who had begun to turn to a more universalist message, also were killed.
Since then there have been policies from above whose effect has been to keep the peace, labor and civil rights movements apart. The AFL-CIO was split off from the peace movement by funding by the Central Intelligence Agency to support of anti-Communist labor unions abroad. The civil rights movement was split off from the labor movement by Ford Foundation grants to encourage separate black development; the Ford Foundation also is a major funder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Today the majority of college-educated white liberals have given up on equal rights for all, and instead concentrate on affirmative action for more narrowly defined racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. Not that there’s anything wrong, in and of itself, with being anti-Communist, black self-determination or any of these other causes. What’s wrong is the rejection of solidarity by the advocates of these causes.
I think things may change when people high up in the power structure realize that the lack of national unity endangers their own lives and fortunes. They are threatened by COVID-19. They are threatened by global climate catastrophe. They would suffer if the U.S. blunders into war with Russia.
But maybe not. Maybe they’ve come to believe their own propaganda. Then it will be up to we the people to rise above our differences and do what’s needed.
LINKS
The Double Bind of Maintaining The Schismogenesis: A Theory of Wokeness by Howie Klein for Down With Tyranny! Very clear (despite the fancy title) and important.
I don’t claim to understand what’s going on in Kazakhstan, but I think the rebellion there is going to be important for the world, not just for the unfortunate people who live there.
I have a feeling it is a turning point, like the 2014 crisis in Ukraine.
First, Kazakhstan is important to Russia. About 3.5 million Kazakhstan’s nearly 19 million population are ethnic Russians and a large fraction are Russian citizens. If Kazakhstan collapses, Russia would be flooded with refugees—not all of them Russian.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is the heart of Russia’s space program. It is Russia’s main source of uranium. Russia conducts its anti-ballistic missile testing in Kazakhstan. Russia depends on Kazakhstan for uranium for its nuclear weapons and nuclear energy programs.
Kazakhstan is important to China, too. As the largest Central Asian nation in area, it is a important crossing point for roads, railroads and oil and gas pipelines in China’s Belt and Roads (aka New Silk Roads) initiative.
I don’t know what’s behind the revolt. There are many understandable and justifiable reasons why the Kazakh people might rebel. But Russian military and political leaders perceive it as an act of what they call hybrid warfare.
In their eyes, the script is this. Ordinary citizens are encouraged to gather to protest real injustices, often with the advice and funding of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. Then some violent clash takes place, or mysterious snipers start shooting. The protests become an armed uprising, supported by the U.S. and other foreign governments.
I don’t know whether these suspicions are justified. Certainly there are many reasons why Kazakh people would want to revolt against their corrupt oligarchy. I do say Russian suspicions are understandable.
President Vladimir Putin has already said he will not tolerate Ukraine becoming a base for NATO troops, from which they could attack Russia. Presumably that also goes for Kazakhstan.
I am not saying that Putin, backed into a corner, would start a nuclear war, or even risk one. I do say that Russia is the only nation with a large enough nuclear arsenal to wipe out the USA, and I do not want to put Putin’s restraint to a test.
How the Netherlands expanded by reclamation from the sea
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Annual hours of sunshine in Europe and the USA
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The wandering North magnetic pole
Here are links to some articles I found interesting.
The Cuban Missile War Timeline by “Amerigo Vespucci” for altnernatehistory.com.
I remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. I didn’t take the danger of nuclear war seriously at the time because I understood that neither President Kennedy nor Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were crazy enough to start one. What I didn’t understand was how easily things could get out of control.
A contributor to the alternate history web log wrote an interesting speculation as to what might have happened if a few things had gone otherwise than as they did—a U-2 plane shot down over Cuba, a Soviet submarine commander who thought he was under attack firing his nuclear missile.
The writer is well-informed about U.S. and Soviet capabilities, positioning of armed forces and likely military strategies. He presents a convincing account of what a nuclear war would have been like and what the aftermath would have been.
Yes, the USA could have “won” a nuclear exchange. More of us Americans would have survived than those on the other side. I don’t think the Chinese would have escaped unscathed as the writer assumes. Daniel Ellsberg’s book tells us that the U.S. nuclear strategy, in the event of war, was to obliterate the USSR and China both.
All too many people make light of the risks of going to the brink of nuclear war. They say it hasn’t happened yet. Yes, but it only needs to happen once.
Frederick Douglass’s library by Julian Abagond.
When I visit someone for the first time, I always sneak a look at the person’s bookshelf. It’s one way of getting to know them.
Frederick Douglass, the great African-American freedom fighter, had a library of thousands of books. A blogger named Julian Abagond listed some of the highlights. Particular favorites, according to Abagond, included The Colombia Orator, a textbook on public speaking with selections from great speeches, and the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, the poetry of Robert Burns and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
Douglass of course owned and read works by and about black people and their history, struggles and achievements, but his interests were wide-ranging and included history, politics, literature and science. The National Park Service has the complete list.
He had no formal schooling whatever. As a slave, he was not supposed to learn to read. He did it on the sly, by paying a white boy to teach him his ABCs. He went on from there to educate himself. He associated on equal terms with some of the leading intellectuals of his time.
Lucille of the Libs by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative.
Rod Dreher, a leading conservative Christian writer, wrote a moving article on the sacrifices required to be a good husband or wife, and a good parent. He drew on the Kenny Rogers country-and-western song, “Lucille”; the movie, “The Secret Life of Dentists”; and an article by Atlantic senior editor Honor Jones about why she divorced her loving husband and father of her children in order to live for herself.
Updated 1/8/2022.
Click to enlarge. Source: Oriental Review.
People in Kazakhstan are in revolt against their authoritarian government and the rich oligarchy it supports.
The revolt was sparked by an increase in fuel prices—surprising, since Kazakhstan is a major producer of natural gas. The CSTO alliance, the Russian-backed equivalent to NATO, has intervened.
The Russian and Kazakhstan governments claim the revolt was instigated by outsiders, and there are reports by U.S. think tanks advocating just such a strategy to hurt Russia.
Which is it? A revolt against a tyrant, or an example of U.S. meddling? Maybe both. You have to read writers of differing views to get a complete picture, and you may not have it even then.
LINKS
Russian troops arrive in crisis-hit Kazakhstan by David Child, Anealia Safdar and Merisha Gadzo for Al Jazeera.
Kazakhstan: Dozens killed as government unleashes military crackdown by the staff of Eurasianet.
Steppe on fire: Kazakhstan’s color revolution by Pepe Escobar for the Strategic Culture Foundation.
Kazakhstan explainer: Who’s in, who’s out as Tokayev tries to take back control by Joanna Lillis for Eurasianet.
CSTO agrees to intervene in Kazakhstan unrest by Joshua Kucera for Eurasianet
The U.S.-Directed Rebellion in Kazakhstan May Strengthen Russia by Bernhard for Moon of Alabama.
Click to enlarge. Source: The Sun.
The way for the United States to avoid a shooting war with China and Russia is to unilaterally stop waging economic, diplomatic and covert war against those two countries, and to stop positioning offensive military forces near their borders.
I use the word “unilaterally” for two reasons. One is that we the American people get no benefit from our government’s Cold War against these two countries. Therefore it costs us nothing to give it up.
The other is that the leaders of these two countries are not going to negotiate with us because the U.S. government has proved itself, in a Russian phrase, “not agreement capable.”
The U.S. government has broken agreements under both Democratic and Republican admininstrations. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker promised President Mikhail Gorbachev that, if he agreed to the reunification of Germany, the NATO alliance would not expand one inch eastward. This agreement was broken by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
President Obama signed a formal agreement, along with five other countries, to lift economic sanctions against Iran, in return for Iran’s accepting restrictions on their nuclear development program. This was a sacrifice on the part of Iran, which looks to nuclear energy as a source of power when the oil runs dry. It cost the USA nothing.
Even so, President Trump canceled the agreement, and President Joe Biden says he will not reinstate it unless Iran accepts additional restrictions. But why would the government of Iran trust the USA? Why would China or Russia?
War hawks argue that President Vladimir Putin is a new Adolf Hitler, who intends to conquer the former Soviet republics first, the former Soviet satellite states next, and, after that, who knows? I don’t see any evidence of this. I don’t see any evidence of Russian troops having a permanent presence in any country where they’re not wanted.
Russian “volunteers” helped the Russian-speaking secessionists in Donetz and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine. But President Putin has ruled out annexing these regions to Russia. He wants them to remain as part of Ukraine, but with autonomy to shield their people from extreme Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis.
Russia did annex Crimea, but most Crimean residents are Russians and Crimea is the long-time location of a vital Russian naval and military base.
If Russia was interested in reconquering former Soviet republics, it would have had a perfect excuse to do so in 1991. Georgia attacked Russian troops in a neighboring territory, and Russians responded by occupying all of Georgia in a swift five-day war. But then the Russians withdrew.
If Russian troops had remained in Georgia, or if Russia invaded Ukraine proper, the result would be a quagmire war, similar to Russia’s war in Afghanistan. I think Russian leaders have learned from experience, even if U.S. leaders have not.
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