cheese it, the cops!

Gunfire and Gummy Bears, Hand Grenades and Horseshoes

 

I published this piece yesterday over at Veterans Today and at The Defeatists. While I get more readers at Veterans Today, the software doesn't allow for music to be openly displayed which means the pieces lose some integrity; more than that, a lot of the comments I get there are really out to lunch.

My last post about Paul Ryan the Gombeen Man got a lot of interesting responses...and then the Irish guy made it all about him and was upset because I didn't get it that the IRA bombing campaigns were bad for Ireland. He also blamed the Famine on the Catholic Church and the dumb Irish peasants who had too many babies causing the land to be exhausted. Politely told him to feck off, as they say, and tell the folks in Connemara or in any pub in Dublin about his great theories...anyway, this is about the Crimea. 

I've been searching for a metaphor, and the one that historical orientation past, present, future might go a long way toward explaining the disconnect between the Russian Federation and the rest of the world...In struggling for my own metaphor, I had thought that Barrack Obama is a digital guy dealing with a digital universe and Putin, the Tea Party, and so on analog guys dealing with reality as an analog creation. TMind over matter, you don't mind, it don't matter. In Putin world, what we can do doesn't matter because he doesn't care. Frankly, the cited article in The Guardian really added so clarity and the KAL cartoon also made a big difference. 

 

choose: fascists or assholes

while people lob little hitlers at each other and casually call one another fascists, try this thought experiment: quick, without looking something up, sketch out the basic positions of fascism. oops you don't know what it means. now look it up, guess what, you still don't know what it means. as a real historical political ideology it was just a grab-bag of random elements, completely incoherent, and at this point it has no more content than "asshole" or whatever. ok ok! i've done it too.

but you are my favorite non-existent person

of all institutions, both among those that are and among those that are not, i am least impressed by "international law". i quote peter simons' review of tim crane's the objects of thought (tls, february 28): "But Crane, in line with both common sense and Husserl, denies that there really are any non-existent objects." a controversial position indeed! and yet perhaps illustrated by this case.

crazy man, crazy

so now the line is that putin is "crazy", a "wild card", a "loose cannon", "out of touch with reality" and so on. amazing how the media will just mirror the crap officials are spouting, just as though they are incapable of thought. maybe it's all part of the attempt to scribble a little hitler mustache on the man. it's ridiculous, and i also don't see strategically how it's part of a sensible approach. for one thing, it keeps up the idea of extremely underestimating putin, which i feel might, in retrospect, not be seen as having been the best approach.

in fact, putin's finding fascists everywhere too, while people ask whether it's the cold war again, etc etc. i think one should respond to the facts on the ground now, not mount fantastic recapitulations of the ideological idiocies of times gone by.

those who remember history are condemned to simulate it

meanwhile, hillary, zbig and many others are using hitler in the 30s to understand putin now, or rather to pursue some propaganda aim that is rather hard to fathom. surely the only possible idea in going all hitler/appeasement is to mobilize europe for war. is that your idea? because if not what you're saying is idiotic. now, it's easy to think that if you want to deal with the present you have to know the past, if you forget it you'll repeat it, you have to learn the lessons of history, and a dozen other cliches. but really history blinds as much as it reveals: some dude on al jazeera was saying putin's stuck in the 30s, but he was himself just doing that 30s hitler thing. people pull out things like 'sudentenland' first of all to establish their credibilitty by bewildering non-historians, and second to have various manipulative propaganda effects. you think if you place what's happening now in 1937 or 1856 you'll understand it. no, you'll just be talking about 1937, and not even that. you'll blind yourself to what is happening in the unique now. you want a slot to stick it in, no matter how badly it fits: you're trying to understand what's happening now a priori without engaging it at all. it's all ideological blinders; it's all digression, distraction, misdirection. 

on the wrong side of history (and sanity)

kerry says that putin is engaged in a 19th century act. obama says that putin is on the wrong side of history. many's the time i've said this: this is a completely ridiculous structure of thought. history has no particular goal, and if it did it would not be the contemporary welfare mega-state or however obama of hollande envision it. no, you can't turn time around and commit nineteenth century acts. really the complete conceptual impossibility and anti-empirical a priori horseshit of this basic stance has got to go. if obama is sure that he knows the direction of history, which is for the world to become whatever he thinks it should become, this would be described in other contexts as psychotic. time runs in one direction at one pace and history, as far as we can tell, could end up anywhere or nowhere at all. 

putin on the hits

really, i have not taken sides on ukraine so far, and in the first post where i sort of predicted an invasion (feb 27), i speculated that the us, faced with a similar situation, would consider military intervention too. but now let me point out a few things about putin. he consolidated his power and established his reputation with the chechen genocide. people claimed to be worried about security at the olympics, but there is no one you'd rather be handling your security if you don't care how it's done. he used tried and true techniques: rounding up the young man of, e.g., dagestan, torturing them, and dumping their bodies in shallow graves. he may be the richest man in the world, with all the feeling of impunity such a status bequeaths. he has no significant internal opposition, or threat to his political status; by a hundred techniques he has eliminated or isolated opponents. i don't regard him as a classic semi-cracked conqueror a la hitler or napoleon; but he is cagey and extremely aggressive and brutal when he wants to be. there is liable to be again something well-described as an empire when he is done.

restoring calm

yesterday at the white house: meeting of the joint chiefs, defense secretary, cia, etc. what were they discussing? ww3 scenarios, baby. and as they did so, i imagine them sort of sobbing, etc, not because they're sad about the suffering caused in a war, but because they have no realistic way to respond, and to say that the eu is a decadent quasi-state is an understatement; they're drafting capitulation documents right now, which is probably the main contingency plan recommended by the joint chiefs too. you can judge this by the weapon they actually launched, temporarily suspending g8 summit preparations. 

meanwhile ban ki moon urges in his riveting style that calm should be restored to the ukraine. oh that is exactly what putin will be doing over the next few days.

it is absolutely amazing how sluggish the hawking teds are on this. yesterday experts were still doubting, even as the obvious invasion had been in process for a day, that there would be an invasion. a british diplomat on cnn this morning: the solution is for the kiev government to assure its russian-oriented citizens that their interests will be taken into account. by my calculation they have 17 minutes to accomplish that. he says he doubts the russians will go further than the crimea, and he doesn't think they want to annex it. they have already annexed the crimea and the same thing is happening in east/south ukraine that happened there: mysterious armed men, russian flags being raised. i wonder if western experts will notice anything that happens over the next few days, or continue to deal with a reality of their own imagining. 

night wolves

so while i'm in prediction mode: yes, there will further incursions into ukraine, possibly rolling into kiev. no there is no possibility of military resistance. but i'm grooving on the biker gang angle.

unaccountable factors

'war in the crimea!' sure has a sweet late19th/early20th-century-type ring. i wonder what the response will be of the ottoman empire? and what about the habsburgs? there are so many unaccountable factors.

my mealy mouthweapon

i try to avoid i-told-you-sos. but i'm sort of proud i saw that coming. ok, now we proceed to the nothingness of the response. here's one 'threat': no g8 summit in sochi! "that's a big stick" said jane harman on cnn just now, and wolf was all like he couldn't believe they'd be considering such a step: boy, the situation must be bad. this is the problem with 'media' persons: they have lost the rather important distinction between real and merely symbolic events. i blame richard rorty. you deploy helicopter gunships, we counter with a proportionate volley of yacketsmackety. oooh don't make me come over there and murmur nonsense with my mealy mouthweapon! don't make me send john kerry over there to look at you blankly and rehearse a little empty script. words have power, after all. i'm picturing putin, as he coordinates the invasion and thinks about next steps, re-thinking the whole thing under this terrible threat, quailing at the mere thought. anyway, it's going to be all absolute emptiness: it's not in the interests of the ukraine, russia, europe: ok everyone is going to say those words in that order for days now, and yet it is the merest slop. which is all we got, y'all.

he'll pay a price, says obama. so what does that mean? according to experts, putin may just be squandering the good will that was created by the olympics! he really cares about his international standing, you know. but i would say that these are, how you say, non-things, unlike the crimean peninsula, which is a thing. 

pay attention

even as it sort of begins to seem that russian soldiers are 'securing' airports in the crimea, talking heads still seem sanguine: oh, i wouldn't expect a major incursion. dude: why do you think they want the airports? it's one way you stage an invasion. or maybe the idea is evacuation of russian citizens. but i don't really think so. both, perhaps. i just think we're a bit in a possible ww3 situation, and we had better pay attention. so say you have an indigenous pro-russian protest movement. that does not take the form of military vehicles/forces securing the airports. i'd look for a multi-modal russian intervention. today.

here's why it might not be ww3 even if there's an actual invasion: the government(s) of europe and the united states really have no resolve on something like this. all they will do is whine. the welfare-state dependent populations of these countries are not the sorts of people who would fight for anything or really push their governments to do so. putin will kick our ass and then grin sneeringly upon us. we will squawk and accept the new borders.

they say yanukovich is supposed to speak from russia in a bit. and al-jazeera, for example, asked one of its experts whether yanukovich is still relevant. believe it or not, he started talking about polling for the april presidential election. yanukovich is relevant insofar as putin thinks he'd be useful as a spokesman pushing the view that the legit gov has been overthrown etc, as a justification for the seizure of the crimea (to begin with), or as a provisional pres of east/south ukraine. i'd say not, because of the obvious kelptocracy. on the other hand, putin can relate to a kleptocrat. but if he is giving a speech today (scheduled for 8AM eastern), i'd pay attention to that too: it might be moment the russians make their intentions known more clearly, a sort of declaration of war.

uh oh

folks seem remarkably calm about this moment in the ukraine. i would not be so sure that the russian military is engaged in an exercise, and the crimean thing could easily provide or perhaps is being manufactured as an excuse for russian military incursion of one size or another. please remember that we are dealing with a rather swaggering macho leader who is very often trying to show the world his balls. but actually, if it were us sitting on that border with a big american-identified population over there and so on, we would be considering military intervention too. anyway, one fucks up when one predicts, but i would be worried about a blitzkrieg in the next couple of days.