And In Kiev We Have an Uncle !

     I don't believe Winston Churchill's confession about Russia appearing to him a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  It was play-acting, putting on he did not understand that Stalin was a Bolshevik, who signed a pact with Hitler to postpone an ideological war against Russia which both he and Churchill knew was coming. Winston showed he had firm grasp of the historical strategic interests of Russia in the next few sentences of that broadcast on the day Hitler invaded Poland:

......but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe,  That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.
Thus, my friends, at some risk of being proved wrong by events, I will proclaim tonight my conviction that the second great fact of the first month of the war is that Hitler, and all that Hitler stands for, have been and are being warned off the east and the southeast of Europe.

    Winston Churchill knew his geopolitics; the gynocracy that rules the latter US State Department does not. They say things to Russians for which the Moskali have a clever old saying that goes like: "In the garden we have edelberry; and in Kiev an uncle".  The adage does not lend itself to an easy translation. It is a mocking paraphrase of someone who is full of herself, puts on airs, talks nonsense, gets lost in her own fantastic schemes.  It seems tailor-made for the US/EU posturing on Ukraine.
     

 

 

      Most Americans, in their arrogance and ignorance do not quite appreciate how lucky they are to have someone like Putin calling the shots in the Kremlin and not, some swell-head driven by an ideology, politically or religiously in a fundamental conflict of values with the West, and seeing himself the chosen figure to bring in a messianic kingdom, the Mahdi's rule in the end of days or a historically inevitable workers' paradise.  Of course, this appears to be talking edelberry to the likes of Susan, Samantha,Victoria or for that matter, to the martyred first lady and feminist presidential redeemer to come, Hillary Rodham-Clinton.  Ergo they, and their drone John Kerry,  will reply by pledge of support to their uncle in Kiev.

          The Ukraine narrative of the State Department and the MSM did not make any sense to begin with. The few wise old owls in the States and in Europe said so from the start in February and never wavered. Kissinger pointed out that this foreign policy adventure (like some others recently) lacks a clear objective, a clear-headed end strategy. Klaus (yes, him again) thinks this the unfolding of events in Ukraine are the greatest political tragedy of post-WWII Europe.  The former Czech president and the anti-EU conservative maverick calls the late  western lying about Russia monstrous.  If one may put it more politely, they are stupid. 

         Not always stupid, mind you. The reports of mass graves with hundreds of bodies of Russian-speaking civilians that Churkin and Lavrov claimed last week seem greatly exaggerated and one of the war tales that take on life of their own. There were dozens of civilians reported shot by the Ukrainian paramilitaries in Maiuopol last May.  It turned out to be less than a dozen.  But the fact remains that Donetsk and part of Lugansk have been shelled by the Ukrainian military and the Kiev paramilitaries since the ceasefire in what appears to be deliberate targeting of civilians.  That part cannot be denied or obscured by obnoxious formulas that makes the two sides equally guilty of violations. There is also the shameful silence on the hugely disproportionate number of Russian-speaking civilians among the victims. This omission looks like a sly suggestion that the innocent dead are victims of the pro-Russian "terrorists" who are in reality militias protecting the Russian speakers against the politics of ethnic cleansing (whether by intimidating them to leave for Russia, or by anti-Russian legislation that would deprive of political rights and their ethnic identity). That this is not some Moscow brewed propaganda kasha would be apparent to anyone who listens to debates in the Ukrainian parliament for one hour or less. 

       In no country which is a member of the European Union, or aspires to be one, a brutal suppression of an ethnic minority would be tolerated.  Unless of course it happens to be one which is Serbian or Russian. To those two, different sets of rules apply. Before the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 there were approximately two hundred thousand Serbs in Kosovo. There are twenty five thousand left today. The tragic fate of the Kosovan Serbs prompted even an deep-in-the-wool Serb hater like the ITCY prosecutor Carla del Ponte to revise her view, and speak out against the NATO sponsored Atrocity-aspiring-to-be-a-European-State that is Kosovo.

    Or Ukraine.  Russia is that country's small problem. The much bigger problem is essentially a lack of a vision that could make it a functioning, prosperous modern state. What continually destabilizes Ukraine is not Russia but its internal identity crisis, a series of obsessive campaigns to redefine itself as a monolithic national whole. The only sustained theme of this struggle is a desire to be "not Russia", which is of course what all countries once dominated by Russia want to be. In the family of the Slavic nations perhaps only the Southern Slavs, namely the Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgarians do not have a built-in defense reflex against Russia's quest of Euro-Asian hegemony.  There are two problems however which make Ukraine's version of it more prominent. One, the cultural and historical bond with Russia is much longer lasting than other nations', with the Russian state actually originating in the Kievan Rus and pushing eastward. Second, there is a large Russian speaking minority in Ukraine, and beyond that another, much larger segment of people who are ethnic Ukrainians who speak both languages but prefer using Russian for business and convenience. It is estimated that around 50% of the country stills speaks Russian or both languages at home.  Culturally also, Ukraine appears to be joined to Russia at the hip, with a number of Ukrainian writers and playwrights still preferring Russian. In the Galician (western Ukrainian) version of national identity, people who do not write in Ukrainian would not be considered Ukrainians, but that is not the view of most other compatriots. There are ongoing squabbles about Nikolai Gogol's nationality, even though all of his celebrated work was in Russian. The Bard of Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko composed in both languages, though his diaries and most of his personal correspondence was in Russian. 

          So, to begin with, the project of some ethnically pure laine Ukrainian nationality is a dubious undertaking which will be resisted by vast segments of the population, whether it be enshrining Russian as a second official language of Ukraine (Yanukovich's project which he abandoned) or, conversely, drastically curtailing the toleration for the use of the Russian language.  However, the language question is only scratching the surface.  In an able brief on the major political challenges the country faces Vaclav Klaus pointed to the artificiality of the state, stitched together as it were from different ethnographic regions, with varied historical loyalties and religious affiliations.  This goes beyond different dialects of the Ukrainian language. There does not seem to be a uniting motive other that essentially the negative theme of not wanting to be Russian, or to be dominated by Russia, or to be dismembered by Russia, in short of seeing Russia as the source of all of Ukraine's current misery. In a telling little incident in the Ukraine parliament not too long ago the current mechanics of destabilization have been beautifully illustrated.   They have nothing to do with Russia. The two actors are both anti-Russian: the one punched in the face a well-known political provocateur hurling insults at the bigger guy telling him to go and fight terrorists in Donbas. The puncher is affiliated with the supporters of the most prominent of the anti-Russian oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoiskij. 

       Which brings us to the biggest problem of Ukraine since it emerged as an independent state in the post-Soviet era.  It is a country dominated by oligarchs and political operators. In many ways it resembles Russia under Yeltsin, dragged into interminable fights for dominance by the top dogs, out to get as much of the piece of action as possible. The MSM in the West have no inkling of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvering of the political blocks around the huge concentration of money in the country. Or perhaps the do but they are not telling. At any rate, the system is well-known to people who follow events in that part of the world.

      How do the Russians see all of this ?  In absorbing several discussions on Rossiya 1 TV channel from the last month, I was surprised to find out that there is a general consensus around key issues. The Russian hyper-nationalists (who want "re-unification" with the cradle of Great Russia) were generally held in check. Most participants (well known figures in Russian political debates, academics and writers), seem resolutely against any kind of  "pan-Slavic brotherhood" of the sort that is falsely imputed to Putin by the western politicos and their media butlers. They are nearly unanimous in supporting the idea of a federated Ukraine, as they are against the continuation of the war in the East.  Surprisingly, one of the loudest "hawks" in Russia, the vice-chairman of the State Duma, Vladimir Zhirinovsky showed up consistently as a peace-maker and made a really uncharacteristic statement that "the worst peace (!) with Kiev is better than war".  (I think this was posturing but all the same !)  In the exchanges with the Ukrainian guests, there were some heated debates. The rep of Putin's party was attacked for the alleged use of Russian troops and for supplying the rebels with heavy weaponry. The response was predictable: "prove it !"  The argument that I did not hear before was that much of the heavy weapons which the militants flashed late in July, in the offensive in the South, was supposedly bought on the Ukrainian black market (where, the story goes, anything is available). But it was greeted with derision by the Ukrainians, and funny faces by the Russian guests. Everyone with any brains in Eastern Europe would not waste any time on arguing about this. In the unspoken rules of the Cold War, the opposing sides fight through proxies. Putin cannot agree politically to the hare-brained scheme of Nuland and Powers to restructure the country with the Galician hyper-nationalists and integrists calling the shots through violence and political repression. The scheme would turn Ukraine against Russia and destroy its influence in the region permanently. Such ideas can only breed in the heads of people who have no sense of reality.    

A Message for Sarah Palin

September 14, 2008

Dear Ms Palin,
tried to contact you through your governor’s office but could not get past the ID panel as my address is outside of the US. So I have decided to post my message to you on my blog instead. I remain confident that if you are meant to receive it (both literally and figuratively), God will arrange for it.

I am a Canadian, and of course our two nations being so close, and the US so much bigger and powerful than us, we will be with the U.S. wherever the U.S. goes, whether or not we actually want to go there. That is why I think you should be exposed to as many views from Canada as possible, even the seemingly ‘Neanderthal’ ones such as mine.

I hold no grudge against you, nor do I have a problem with anything you have done or said, nor do I have any opinions about your family or its size in relation to the extent of your public responsibilities. Quite to the contrary, I believe you to be a bright and capable chief executive of the state of Alaska. Nothing else really matters, beyond this and your confidence in accepting the nomination of being a presidential running mate. It is up to the American people to judge whether to entrust the Republicans and you with the office, and how much your own view of your preparedness for it is relevant in making that call.

The writing below is from a discussion I participated in in 1999, on one of the usenet groups. I have decided to share it with you to give you a sense of the complexities of the world on the outside of Alaska you would be facing.

As, I am sure you are aware, Russia is no longer in the state of disarray as I described it nine years ago. If that is so, much credit for it goes to Vladimir Putin who, like yourself in Alaska, took on big oil in Russia and made it serve the people of his country, ….well, perhaps somewhat more forcefully. He has managed to consolidate Russia and make it more confident in its ability to counter American policy if it becomes too aggressive in Russia’s neighbourhood.

FYI, in case you are curious, the former Yeltsin’s National Security Advisor, Alexander Lebed (mentioned below), who in the years of deep decline teased about the possibility of nuclear exchange with the U.S., is no longer with us. He became a governor of the largest Siberian region and later opposed Putin’s policy of one Russia. He died in a tragic helicopter crash in 2002.

I wish you the best, and remain yours,

……..

James hit on a theme which has exercised me personally for some time and which I consider of primary importance in uderstanding the current Balkan events, our failing grasp on reality, and our possible demise as species. It's the problem of 'cultural feminization' (or obversely a 'rapid cultural demasculization') and its destructive power as it projects on the civilizing institutional framework in the West. The lament lies with our emotional brain so brilliantly exposed by Arthur Koestler and so ingeniously described by Oscar Wilde in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: 'each man kills the thing he loves'.

The NATO propaganda in the Kosovo crisis has a strange new and yet familiar clamour about it, a quality of 'protesting-too-much'. The idea of throwing bombs to save lives, or threatening war to produce goodwill, or dropping cluster bombs in 'good faith', all have insanity written about them, yet it is a constitutional insanity of homo sapiens, not individual pathology. Consider Exodus 4.21: And the Lord said unto Moses. When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart , that he shall not let the people go. Well, this is the Omnipotent's idea of negotiations, Madeleine Albright's infallible instinct telling her what comes after Rambouillet: (Exodus 7.3-4) And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders, in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth my armies, and m y people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgements. Of course in Madeleine's Testament Egypt shrinks and Egyptians are exiled, but that's a detail. What is important is 'the idea of having the sentence first', the realization of that we possess the technological means of destroying utterly those whom we don't like without having to worry about the consequences.

In the fifties, the American neuropathologist Paul MacLean postulated the thesis of 'limbic system', to this day unchallenged view that our emotional undercarriage is structurally a hostile reptilian brain which is telling us when to placate by submissive rituals (,or to love,) and when to hate. It is also the unique feature of our mental equipment - which explains a lot about the 'victim-striking-back' mentality - that the agressive expansive infantile feelings are neurologically bound to the fright syndrome. In other words, the sensations of Omnipotence carry along with them feelings of acute insecurity. (I find it fascinating that in all the great religious experiences, Jesus', Paul's, Mohammed's, Gautama's, their godlike ascension is immediately followed by a struggle with the 'devil'.)

Our psychohistory of the last five thousand years can be understood in terms of the struggle of the two brains: the neocortex (the machine) has attempted to exercise control over the inveterate ambivalence of the emotional brain (the ghost) to the proposition of life, and its denial of death. This struggle has taken on the form of cultural competition among the different human tribes for an optimum control of productive resources. Cultures clashed in wars and the one better equipped neocortically to handle life's challenges prevailed and imposed its mentograms on the simpler, more primitive or bashful rivals. In this manner we continued to develop culturally until we reached a stage in which viable competition for better mentograms has come to a screeching halt. We have arrived at the end of History of Francis Fukuyama, although he seems quite innocent of the strange reasons why it happened.

Today, at the end of that road, we do not live in the best possible worlds but in one which is suppressing vertical selective social processes which enable us to develop. The VSSPs, as I call them, have been biologically the domain of human males. We have developed in cultures through the stratifications of males in functional hierarchical societies. The primaeval hunting band and its organization gradually gave way to a multiplex of male hierarchies within modern societies which controlled discrete resources and processes and which assured quality by individual and group male competition and separating its members by abilities into ranks. As a result of this cultural competition of male societies, the neocortical imperative and techniques of resource management have conquered the existing human cultural varieties, interconnected the world in a single communication network, and created technologies and organizational blueprints which can sustain human life almost effortlessly.

Unfortunately, at the very moment of triumph of human intellect comes a strange Moebius-like reversal in fortune. Our progress is killing us with kindness by assaulting the very cultural foundation upon which it is built. The neocortical societies are constructed on the premise of control and supression of strong instinctual drives in its individual members and maintaining a level of discipline which allows them to execute complex social functions. But at a certain point in the development of these societies the high level of material comfort, and its effortless acquisition begin to militate strongly against mental organization based on self-denial, transcendent values and the acceptance of self in a subordinate role within a hierarchy. In the measure that these are defining structural elements of male psychology, these societies become feminized, 'flatten out' as it were, and become transformed from a functional manifold striving for excellence to an endless variations on a theme of catering to the immediate needs of members with an overriding emphasis on security which so characterizes human childhood.

There is an immediate danger lurking in this blueprint. When the pundits asked Einstein what he thought changed with the advent of the A-bomb, he said: ‘everything’. The old method of cultural competition - war - became outdated by the accumulation of military technology.
Of course it did not disappear overnight, but its very nature changed. Henceforth, it was not possible to destroy the 'enemy' in war without certain high probability of destroying life itself. So the purpose of war became self-defeating. Some old warriors just could not grasp it. McArthur, who so volubly echoed Einstein's sentiment in Tokyo Bay on the day of Japan's surrender, ended up cursing Truman for refusing to escalate Korea to a nuclear war with China. But Truman was a 'neocort' man; he calculated that the use of nuclear weapons against China would have opened up the US to a likelihood of nuclear attack from Stalin because in the days before MAD, the first strike conferred a huge advantage on the aggressor. By the time of Vietnam, MAD as the new paradigm of 'war-as- self-destruction' so thoroughly confused the politicians and military planners that it ended up on a note of bitter defeat for the U.S.

Yet as we progress along the path to the matriarchal setup, which by the way has absolutely no idea what to do with the human male, the previous complex technological organization is still capable of delivering the self-destructing blow. The unleashing of a nuclear holocaust becomes a distinct possibility because the male neocortical politics of 'balance of terror' have been taken out, together with the logic of a geopolitical strategy. Russia has been devastated by the Western policy of minimization of her influence, and the internal economic decay brought about by dismantling the old communist planned economy and replacing it with the soft, postindustrial, highly-speculative finance bazaar which now utterly dominates. But Russia's nuclear arsenal still counts 7,500 ICBMs and it has passed into the hands of an increasingly unstable and decaying social and political structure. Given the pathetic decline of the Russian military, and the increasingly derelict state of the society itself, coupled with the famed Russian moribund view of life, the scenario of Russia-as-the-nuclear-Cain has acquired an increasingly probabilistic shape. Russia has become so destitute that nuclear-death blackmail may actually become an attractive option in the postcortical Thatcher-Albright-Amarpour version of Balkanized politics. General Lebed, about whom we should be worried because he is a smart chap who does not scare at all ("he who shoots first, laughs last", he once said), has been making noises about escalating the Yugoslav crisis to a tactical nuclear level. He means business because he knows when people have been pushed down culturally to an apocalyptic stupor where they will not feed themselves, the threat of nuclear craters becomes an alternative promise of liberation. He is a tough cookie (said to be a wife-beater) who sees the Western political elite as a spineless bunch of spoiled-brat Marx-sucking sissies - 'chicken-hawks' as Michael Harris calls them - utterly woman dominated, and personally cowardly men: men without qualities. He just might be tempted to trade "cities" with the Clintons. Perhaps, all it might take is another "bad" winter.

There is another scenario perhaps even more likely to materialize. Benjamin Barber's response to the MacWorld neocort rule takes shape in the classic Jihad's limbic response. Not able to comprehend that the push for world integration comes as a result of a historical process of cultural selection, the Jihad forces, among whom Islamic fundamentalism leads the way, resist furiously the agenda of globalization. The Islamic jihad groups, the political wreck of the Left splintered into an anarchic nebula, and the far-right acephalitic mob, will probably acquire one or more types of weapons of mass destruction (Lebed has already announced that 160 of Soviet suitcase nukes went "missing"), and they will assault the civil society of the West, at random, with total disregard to human life. The pseudo-politics of Osama bin Laden will align with the Theo Kazcynski's and Timothy McVeigh's. It will not be a meeting of minds, but a fusion of the diseased human emotional undercarriage. The new paradigm of war will then announce itself as a 'generalized paranoia in the process of getting rid of itself’.

...............