cheese it, the cops!

But, I digress for an entire column...

 I actually started this about the Amnesty International Campaign to free Pussy Riot, but digressed...part II which will be about religon and Pussy Riot and the silliness underlies Putin's version of the Surveillance/Big Brother state will be tomorrow or the next day...tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. 

 

Post Script

I also posted this at Veterans Today which was interesting when I looked at the initial comments. I recommend visiting that site and reading the comments. I responded  perhaps more gently than I should but when the comments indicated that I was prostituting myself for the Jewish-Communist-Lezbo conspiracy to pollute the precious body fluids of true Christian Americans, I thought I'd take the high ground. Your comments are welcome.

I am proud, proud I say, to prostitute myself in the service of the Lezbo-Jewish-Commie-Irish-American-Sein Fein-Marching Band and Chowder Society. In fact, I think I'll have T-shirts made. See if I can get some in Staid Francais Rugby colors. (Black and Pink...mainly Pink.)

Enjoy. More to come -- http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/07/23/theocratic-totalitarianism-in-the-new-russia-or-putinesque-is-not-a-style-of-spaghetti/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKtEJOsz9k 

(This is a bribe. Complete Dylan Concert with the Band...)

 

if there were ever a justification for terrorism, then the chechens have it: they have been subjected to genocide. the reasons that chechen terrorists are 'black widows" is because the russian state has annihilated - frequently, tortured to death - their fathers, husbands, sons. however, let me say this: that does not make it right or sensible to attack random subway passages. i personally would not quibble with any chechen attacking any real state target: anything involved in the "security" apparatus of the russian dictatorship. blowing up non-combatants, though, is monstrously wrong and also not in any way sensible or effective: as i say often: an act of expression, not a strategic or tactical action.

the basic idea of statism is that the government is all of us, making decisions collectively. if that were true, then any chechen would be justified in killing any russian at any moment. but it's not true. the people responsible for the chechen genocide are the actual individuals who directed it and the actual individuals who participated in it.

day of rage.

Konstantin Doroshok, one of the protest leaders, said he negotiated with a Moscow official who agreed to allow a peaceful demonstration as long as participants refrained from calling for Putin's resignation. But Doroshok said the official later flew to Kaliningrad to tell him the deal had been overruled by others in Moscow determined to provoke bloodshed and portray the protesters as radical separatists.

so let me get this straight: if you call for putin's resignation, you are subject to violent reprisals. you know i could point to the press repressions, the assassination of critics (esp re: the chechen genocide). but the story linked aboove is plenty for you to understand what sort of regime is in control in moscow.

gotta admit i'm glad that they're still fighting back in chechnya.

good piece by fred hiatt. it's worth saying that every one of these murders traces back to the chechen genocide . and i think it's a bit disingenuous really to take seriously the notion that the murder campaign is being conducted by some coincidence of underlings or vigilante group or whatever. there's basically one person with everything at stake in keeping the truth wrapped: vlad, the thermobaric barbarian.

i suppose it's right that the defendants in the politkovskaya trial were acquitted, considering that that the guilty party is, um, putin.

murders by the russian state continue apace, all moving back to the chechen genocide:

here and here.

because the pictures from grozny post from so long ago continues to garner comments, i'm creating a chechnya category, so no one is in any doubt what i believe: it was a genocide by the putin regime, latest in a long history of unconscionable brutality directed at the chechens.

I do hope the Obama administration takes some action on Darfur, and takes a more active role in combating genocide. The Albright commission writes: "Genocide is not the inevitable result of 'ancient hatreds' or irrational leaders. It requires planning and is carried out systematically. There are ways to recognize its signs and symptoms, and viable options to prevent it at every turn if we are committed and prepared." And, we might add, in the modern era it is always perpetrated by states. The Post piece points out that "Most modern U.S. presidents have had to confront some mass violence against civilians, from the killing fields in Cambodia during the administrations of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter to the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda during the Bill Clinton years to the Janjaweed militia attacks on villages in Darfur during the Bush tenure." I would add Chechnya, actually as clear a case as Rwanda or Cambodia.

have y'all thought about the cyber-rape of estonia? i'm telling you, we're going to wake up one day and realize we've got a monster regime in our midst with a nuclear arsenal: vlad, arrchitect of the chechen genocide, a program of covert murder around the world, etc. and each time he is not called to account, it gets worse. one problem: there's no actual way to call him to account. but people had better at least start calling murder murder.
and check this.

what you have to understand about the rise of totalitarian/proto-fascist russia - potentially a world disaster - is that it has all been driven by chechnya. in a way, this could have been a remote, obscure independence movement. but yeltsin tried to put his foot down: it was the almost-arbitrary point at which he decided to stop his empire disintegrating. the russian army, the russian nation, and the russian president were humiliated there in the way a tiny, fierce, cohesive people can humiliate a decaying empire. that humiliation led to the election of putin, and to the route he has taken to creating and preserving power: a crypto-fascist nationalism. his fundamental early strtategy was to do absolutely whatever was necessary to crush chechnya, a task he accomplished with a brutality which, even at this late date, was notable: russia literally leveled and depopulated groszny with thermobaric weapone, set up a string of blacksite torture/internment facilities and associated mass graves, emptied the area of much of its population, displacing the women and children (they killed most of the men) into neighboring provinces, then displacing them from there. meanwhile, putin used the terrorist response, both the real paroxysms of violence of a dying people and the agent provocateur simulations, to create a police state in russia's cities, seize control of the media, economy etc. each new killing in the worldwide campaign of murder will, one finds, trac e back to criticism of the chechen genocide, or to revelations of the reality. the extremely unfortunate thing is that this coincides with a boom in the russian economy, which floats putin essentially above any international criticism. by the time we really take stock, we will have a world fascist superpower to contend with.
    an odd fact is that the nationalist crypto-fascist mood has been mirrored in washington through this decade, and if anyone can understand putin, it's bush: the oil, the money, the flag, the militaristic assertion of national pride and vengeance, the secret prisons. it's a little like the little nascent signs of fascism in thirties america: huey long and father coughlin, lindbergh, the bund, etc, though these people never got control. but these things do sweep the earth as a mood. at any rate, i vibe the us turning away, though the consolidations of executive power will hardly be reversed. on the other hand, one possible response to the iraq debacle would be: we are now going to level your cities with thermobarics. but in russia you have a truly grave situation for wthe world and for one thing, every murder that putin commits with impunity will make him grin and commission five more. we're goling to wake up one morning and suddenly see that the russian army is a lot, lot better than it was in 1992. 

just in case you thought the putin administration had lost its taste for killing.

oh and then there's this.

and this.

a column pitch i just made to the latimes:

ok. i've pitched you many times. once more with a fresh angle. obviously, the ideological divide between left and right should be thrown into question, blown up by some external force, trance-channeling ambrose bierce. but we might also think about the form itself of the op-ed column, which is immensely exhausted. i propose to you an avant-garde, transformative opinion journalism: experimental, strange, provocative in terms not only of what but how it speaks. so below are some of the formal experiments i've tried over the years. occasionally i remember notes like these: "we think you've lost your mind. sincerely, cherry gee." i think i could do this *every week.*ideas might include: writing in a persona, perhaps that of a senator, or ann coulter, or satan, or kofi annan, or a chechen rebel, or an inanimate object; the meta-op-ed, in which we assess the state of the art and its practitioners; the op-ed consisting entirely of a quotation from anne hutchinson or michel foucault; the list; op-eds in the form of obituaries for living people or fictional characters, or a sports column covering the senate, or a press release from the internal revenue service; surealistic op-eds which are composed through "automatic writing"; the two-word or two hundred word or two-thousand word column; etc.

http://www.crispinsartwell.com/unanimity.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/helpamerica.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/seminole.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/suicidessris.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/evict.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/desoto.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/jesus.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/waronfaith.htm
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/harmfulbooks.htm

some stuff on chechnya and the russian dictatorship:
an editor gets five years for critical articles.
a piece on the dire human rights situation.
fun with poison.
borat does chechen theater.: All schools in Grozny were invited to participate in the competition under the slogan: "I protect my health keeping hygiene"

the fact that vlad putin's henchmen trot around the globe murdering critics of his regime, in particular critics of the chechen genocide, should tell you all you need to know about his vision of human freedom. on the poisoning front, you might want to recall the dose of dioxin adminstered to viktor yushchenko. litvenenko was investigating the murder of anna politkovskaya.

chechnya

torture in chechnya? seriously?

just in case you were wondering whether vlad putin is a genocidal murderer.

The shooting occurred on Putin's birthday and closely followed the birthday of his anointed leader in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Angry journalists here could not let the coincidence pass.

"Apparently, this was a present for the two leaders," Yakovenko said.

"Why do I so dislike Putin?" Politkovskaya had asked in her book, "Putin's Russia." "I dislike him for . . . his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies . . . for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his first term as president."

 

a column!

In recent weeks, trying to explain the American position on the conflict in Lebanon or to identify the enemy within the mess, President Bush has adopted with ever more enthusiasm the phrase "Islamo-fascism," long popular with neo-conservative intellectuals. It's hard to express how misleading it is.
   And it is intentionally misleading, an attempt to fix public opinion concerning an extraordinarily complex world around a simplistic - or perhaps actually idiotic - dichotomy.
    To see that, begin by asking this: who are the Islamo-fascists that we're supposedly fighting in Iraq, the "front line on the war on terror"? The "insurgency" of al Qaeda, or of Saddam loyalists? Iranian-connected Shia militias? The armed forces of Iraq and connected death squads? To try to toss Chechen nationalists, Afghan warlords, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and (what the hell) North Korea into the mix, while excluding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the government of Lebanon can be expected to yield an entirely incoherent world, and it is at least yielding bad policy.
    We might begin by asking what the term 'fascism' means. It's one of the most elusive terms in political philosophy. Certainly, it implies a totalitarian government. But we might ask ourselves, for example, what people meant when they called Mussolini or Hitler or Franco a fascist.
     First of all, the phrase implies an enthusiasm for interconnected industrialization and militarism. It is distinguished from its perennial enemy communism by leaving capital in private hands and encouraging its rapid expansion. Indeed the dominant corporations of fascist nations have traditionally prospered. Fascism is characterized by a basically secular hyper-nationalism, a la the Ba'ath party.
     At the very heart of fascism, however, was what we might term its aesthetic: its symbol systems and visual languages. Under the aegis of the master designers Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Leni Riefenstahl, fascism developed an aesthetic of neo-classical gigantism: of perfect bodies and intimidating marble edifices, of tens of thousands of people marching and singing in unison. The fascist aesthetic was beautiful (at its best), arid, and designed to intimidate.
     At any rate, trying to understand the Islamic world by throwing around "fascism" is worse than useless. Indeed, the economy of the United States - to say nothing of our nationalism and militarism - are more like Nazi Germany than is that of any Islamic country. And of course, even as we condemn our enemies as fascists we are resorting to secret prisons and a vast secret police surveillance operation. Of the aesthetic developed by Karl Rove and of the architecture of Washington, DC, I remain silent.
    Whatever led to the emergence of fascism in early twentieth-century Europe, it is assuredly not much like what has led to the emergence of radical Islam or of terrorism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first. For this, you are obviously much better off looking at the history of Islam itself and at the effect of Western capitalism on the third world than at the disaffection and decadence of Europe in the twenties and thirties.
    Fascism has nothing to do with Islam's history of heresy and fundamentalism, poetry and philosophy, conquest and defeat, violence and transcendence, incorporation and exclusion, life and its annihilation.
     One might just dismiss the phrase "Islamo-fascism," then. as an infelicity or slip of the mind. But it is deeply offensive, first of all, because it is an indication of how stupid the people who run the country think the people they run (us) are. They think we can handle exactly one opposition, exactly two forces: yes and no, good and evil, capitalism and communism, freedom and fascism. Another way the administration tries to achieve this end is by continuously tossing out the phrase "the enemy." If you think you have a good handle on who they mean, I suggest you keep on pondering.

     And second, it is a symptom of the mere dualism of the administration's policies: support Israel and condemn Hezbollah, for instance, incessantly, repeatedly, no matter what happens ever. Insist the democracy is succeeding in Iraq and refuse to make the actual compromises required for peace.
    Paradoxically, this may help manufacture the bipolar world that it fantasizes: we will manage to alienate so much of the world so severely that we succeed in splitting it in two: with us and against us.
    We'd be better off with a larger, truer, and less manipulative set of concepts.

basayev

the life of shamil basayev is in some sense beyond tragedy: an idealist shatttered by the destruction of everything he ever loved into a sheer annihilator of life: transformed by evil into nihilism. he killed many people. but vlad putin has killed incomparably many more.

eventually, more and more evidence will emerge of death camps in chechnya.

Stephen Colbert and Vladamir Putin Agree!

On bears. Crusader Mike notes that In further bestiary news, bears are going crazy.  It's like they heard about the alligators and decided, "Oh yeah! Fuck you, lizards. Bring it on". In Canada, an undersized black bear ran down and mauled a bicyclist; in Holland, they caught and ate a monkee that wandered into their cages. Now, the grizzly and the polar bear are mating...It's gotta be the end times...

adopt-a-warzone

and this will entail expunging every trace of the human beings who once lived here.

"Cleanness  must  become a cult respected by all Chechens," Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov told Interfax on Sunday.

i'm off to pittsburgh

for the weekend, where the lovely but unproblematic marion winik is teaching in an mfa program. i'll leave you with this, year-end roundup #2:

2005: The Year in Anarchy
By Crispin Sartwell

Every year since 1648 has been a bad year for us, the anarchists. That was the year of the Peace of Westphalia, establishing the modern European nation-state. Since then history has been a long strange power trip: colonization, wars of incredible destructiveness, genocides: all the happy results of handing unlimited power of taxation and the wondrous weaponry that goes with it to human beings.
    Government separates the world into two sorts of people: those who long above all else to subordinate other people and those who long above all else to be subordinated by other people. The only folks who don't fall into either of these categories are us, the anarchists. By the beginning of 2005 there were six of us left.
     And 2005 was especially bad for us, the anarchists: easily the worst since the fall of communism. All over the world and in New Orleans, people blamed their problems on "failed states," i.e. on insufficient oppression.
    The United States bestrode the world like a brain-numb colossus, and reached a degree of authoritarianism that is the highest in its history. Our beloved government discovered and explored the universal human enthusiasm for internment without trial, torture, and universal surveillance, modeling its new form of government on the charming statecraft of Augusto Pinochet.
    Vlad Putin continued this year to write all the stories appearing in all the newspapers and magazines in Russian, to jail his opponents, and to slaughter the last few Chechens. The rest of the world's governments, as you can well imagine, greeted these developments with enthusiasm.
     The Chinese state, just to prove that it's still a true People's Republic, fired on dissatisfied peasants and repressed unhappy old women, while hiring American internet companies to prohibit their people from Googling "liberty."
    Officials of the New Iraq continued the happy traditions of the Old Iraq, flaying dissidents and calling it democracy.
    The government of Iran lurched into holocaust denial, nuclear armament, and other premonitions of genocide.
    In short, a bad year for us, the anarchists. But there was some encouraging news as well.
    The more moronic and counter-productive state power appears, the more obvious the need for immediate, complete anarchy. The public housing programs of New Orleans and the nimbleness of FEMA were demonstrations, if further demonstrations could possibly be needed, that all government should hang itself this afternoon to avoid further embarrassment.
     However, some perverse enthusiasts for hierarchy managed to conclude from such events that what we need is "more effective government," government capable of preventing natural disaster, curing the scourges of American poverty and racial division, and sending everyone large checks all the time. We, the anarchists, note that these are precisely the arguments that gave us public housing and FEMA in the first place, and we hope that 2006 brings these enthusiasts what they deserve.
      One undeniably encouraging development: in its desire to saturate every aspect of the life of every person entirely, the American government continued a cycle of deficit spending so extreme as to constitute an infinite abyss, a yawning pit into which everyone will one day tumble screaming and fall, fall forever. Except us, the anarchists.
     Scooter Libby got caught this year.
    And one thing that is extremely encouraging every year: there was no sign of an emerging world state, as the United Nations continued to be snickered at by all human beings the world over.
     What will 2006 bring for us, the anarchists? Prediction: a horde of liberty-loving berserkers in styling-salon dreadlocks will sweep implacably down from the Shenandoah National Park and sack Washington D.C..!
    The long nightmare of human enslavement to state power will be over! Or, maybe that will have to wait for 2007.

   
   

chechnya

obviously , the chechen "election" is bullshit. unless the jews would have voted enthusiastically for hitler in 1943...

yow

have y'all seen this story ? time for a few home truths: russia is a dictatorship that is still prosecuting genocide in chechnya. there are resistance movements in several corners, in particular the southwest. one thing i would immediately expect: a vicious wave of repression directed against non-combatants in the region.

necklace of ears

i don't vouch for the authenticity of this interview with a russian soldier who served in chechnya, but it is consistent with what is known. he describes horrific events: drawing and quartering a woman, for example, necklaces of human ears. it has the flat ring of truth, in particular because it also describes horrors perpetrated by the resistance.

the interview  with shamil basayev last night on abc was quite a scoop. and it was fascinating for basayev's informaility and complete lack of cant. it was just: yeah i'm terrorist. it's my response to genocide .

In the interview, Mr Basayev - speaking through an interpreter - admitted that he was "a bad guy, a bandit".

"Ok, so I'm a terrorist, but what would you call them (the Russians)?

"If they are the keepers of constitutional order, if they are anti-terrorists then I spit on all these agreements and nice words," he said.

The warlord accused Russia of killing thousands of Chechen women, children and old people in what he described as "a colonial war".

When asked if Beslan-style attacks could happen again, he said: "Of course they can. As long as the genocide of the Chechen nation continues... anything can happen."

the july national geographic has an excellent summary of the history and state of chechnya. their figures are a bit different than those i've published in the past, but fundamentally in the same ballpark, their very open-endedness emphasizing the crackdown on information.

population in 1981: 1.1 million
killed since 1994: 100,000-300,00
currently displaced: 210,000

if you've been following me on chechnya at all, read this and actually get it. it's not that shamayev has been made feareful by the monstrous toll that the resistance had exacted, at least by his own account. it's that he can no longer face the fact that he is a collaborator in the genocide of his own people.

so, every time i give my little anti-state spiel i get a certain stunning reaction. the spiel itself goes something like this. if there is any idea that has been demonstrated to be a bad one in the course of human history, it is the political state. take just the twentieth century. the incredible bloodlettings of the world wars are inconceivable without the political state, without the taxation and coercion that make possible gigantic military machines and vast armies. the culmination of these activities is nuclear weapons and the possibility of the complete annihilation of life on the planet earth. only the political state has the motivation or the resources to make such things and the idiocy to believe that it's in its own interests to do so. the twentieth century will be looked upon as the age of genocide. begin with armenians in turkey, forced collectivization of agriculture in ussr, japanese occupation of china, the holocaust, the killing fields, rwanda, chechnya, darfur: every single one of them requiring and deploying and driven by the incomparable resources and incomparable power and incomprehensible evil of the political state. ok, so that's what i say. then you - my students, my wife, my mother, my colleagues - reply: ok, but it's a trade-off, and the state has done many good things too.  like the progressive income tax! this is a tribute simply to the fact that we are utterly state-ridden, state-addled, that human life has become actually inconceivable without the state. otherwise, otherwise rational people would not be sitting there saying: ok, the holocaust, but on the other hand emissions requirements!