Re: The War to come ...
An interesting discussion, but I’d like to come at it from another angle. My father was born in Lviv—then known as Lemberg, Galicia, Austro-Hungary, pre-WWI–and one of my new granddaughter’s other grandparents was born in the same city —then Lvov, Ukraine SSR. In between it was Lwów, Poland. It’s substantial Jewish population has been emptied out twice, once via Holocaust, once via emigration in the face of Soviet anti-Semitism. Now it has somehow been partially refilled again. All this points to incessant flexibility of where and who Ukraine actually is; with seemingly any empire able not only to cut and shape it to fit but to decide just who belongs in it. All of this turns it into a key fulcrum of international relations (of which, distantly, I am one). That helps explain why it looms so large as a country to sympathize with on the part of Westerners. It’s vital to peace that all boundaries are inviolate; it’s vital to democracy that elections not be trampled on by outside dictators; it’s vital to nationhood that countries can define for themselves who they are (unless that involves persecuting minorities—or even majorities). (Brian, please don’t lightly speak of new borders, as if such changes meant nothing; they have to be honored or we’ll have a hundred Ukraines.) Another element I’ve missed in this discussion is Syria, especially Aleppo and Homs, bombed to smithereens by Putins’s planes to keep Assad in unloved power. Does the bombing of Libya excuse that? Best, Michael > On Mar 10, 2022, at 10:45 AM, Brian Holmes > wrote: > > Thanks for your response Prem. I am glad to hear an outside perspective in > the first person. We are entering a geopolitical age where new borders and > spheres of influence will be set up whether one likes it or not. When war > becomes a whole-of-society effort, as it is now, the consequence can only be > the formation of blocs in which language and belief are tightly controlled. > In this dangerous context I agree with Ted that one has to make the best out > of what exists, although that could include getting rid of some things... One > cannot make the best by ignoring all the rest. Your critique of the US is > broadly the same as mine - for example, I live in the farm belt and am > painfully aware of the subsidy structure you point to, with the ecological > damage it does at home and the radically unequal commercial relations it > supports abroad, in the most sensitive of all existential arenas: food. But I > do perceive a big difference from your perspective, because no country is > monolithic, and in the US, those who are inching toward change are under > attack by a set of ideologies that are supported by Russia. These are white > nationalist, homophobic and military/sovereignist ideologies and it's no mere > detail. The worst of revanchist White Russian thought has now been translated > into both military force and internationalist ideology, by a leader and a > ruling clique who seem to be possessed by a powerful affect of historical > humiliation. That feeling could, and does, spread to other cliques and > associated groups who see themselves losing hegemony. When I see the most > ignorant and aggressive types of Americans appealing to a particularly > bellicose state that has just brutally invaded another one, it changes my > perspective. Particularly when major appeasement efforts have actually been > made, in the wake of Georgia and Crimea, and also in terms of extensive trade > integration on relatively favorable terms, which was supposed to, and did > not, keep the peace. It should be taken on board by people in the West that > war represents a failure. At the same time, I support the Ukrainians in this > war. > > Nato has reasons to be perceived as an imperial, or at least, Euro-American > war machine, to the extent that Afghanistan was a Nato war. The recent > unilateral seizure of Afghanistan's foreign-exchange assets by the US (and > this is the Biden admin that I have to support, in view of the other side) is > a typical abuse of the supposed rules-based framework, with the results of > starving millions of people. The attack on Kyiv is terrifying, but so was > Fallujah, and indeed, the whole war in Iraq. If the citizens of the US - and > I think also, in many respects, of the EU with its extractivism and its > sealed borders - don't understand that some of their actions are not only > arbitrary projections of power, but also, recognized as such by others, then > it becomes a major problem in the geopolitical age and it contributes to the > threat of wider war. In a context where there is an emerging Russia-China > relationship, this is not a problem that will go away. Russia is now > committing crimes on the scale of the Americans, and that too needs > recognizing. Again I agree with Ted that the typical Left debates on > geopolitics are always useless, because when you examine
Re: The War to come ...
Thanks for your response Prem. I am glad to hear an outside perspective in the first person. We are entering a geopolitical age where new borders and spheres of influence will be set up whether one likes it or not. When war becomes a whole-of-society effort, as it is now, the consequence can only be the formation of blocs in which language and belief are tightly controlled. In this dangerous context I agree with Ted that one has to make the best out of what exists, although that could include getting rid of some things... One cannot make the best by ignoring all the rest. Your critique of the US is broadly the same as mine - for example, I live in the farm belt and am painfully aware of the subsidy structure you point to, with the ecological damage it does at home and the radically unequal commercial relations it supports abroad, in the most sensitive of all existential arenas: food. But I do perceive a big difference from your perspective, because no country is monolithic, and in the US, those who are inching toward change are under attack by a set of ideologies that are supported by Russia. These are white nationalist, homophobic and military/sovereignist ideologies and it's no mere detail. The worst of revanchist White Russian thought has now been translated into both military force and internationalist ideology, by a leader and a ruling clique who seem to be possessed by a powerful affect of historical humiliation. That feeling could, and does, spread to other cliques and associated groups who see themselves losing hegemony. When I see the most ignorant and aggressive types of Americans appealing to a particularly bellicose state that has just brutally invaded another one, it changes my perspective. Particularly when major appeasement efforts have actually been made, in the wake of Georgia and Crimea, and also in terms of extensive trade integration on relatively favorable terms, which was supposed to, and did not, keep the peace. It should be taken on board by people in the West that war represents a failure. At the same time, I support the Ukrainians in this war. Nato has reasons to be perceived as an imperial, or at least, Euro-American war machine, to the extent that Afghanistan was a Nato war. The recent unilateral seizure of Afghanistan's foreign-exchange assets by the US (and this is the Biden admin that I have to support, in view of the other side) is a typical abuse of the supposed rules-based framework, with the results of starving millions of people. The attack on Kyiv is terrifying, but so was Fallujah, and indeed, the whole war in Iraq. If the citizens of the US - and I think also, in many respects, of the EU with its extractivism and its sealed borders - don't understand that some of their actions are not only arbitrary projections of power, but also, recognized as such by others, then it becomes a major problem in the geopolitical age and it contributes to the threat of wider war. In a context where there is an emerging Russia-China relationship, this is not a problem that will go away. Russia is now committing crimes on the scale of the Americans, and that too needs recognizing. Again I agree with Ted that the typical Left debates on geopolitics are always useless, because when you examine their structure, there is simply the pretense that one "imperialist" actor is wrong, and the others are on the side of "liberation." That's idiotic and needs to be cut short, but I don't think that's what either you or I have been engaged in. I wanted to draw you out a little in hopes of going beyond that structure of debate. I also used the word "imperialist" in awareness that the question of outdated leftism would arise. Your point that a logic of exclusive, class-based technocratic development is at work across the planet is undeniable, and it's worth asking, right now, what this could become in a truly multipolar world. It will not be the same - because neoliberalism was an attempt to set global rules for exactly that kind of development, and the attempt has clearly failed - but the class-based exclusionary approaches will continue, and new forms of population management are already coming into the picture, not just in China (eg https://bit.ly/35O1TMf ). I don't think these things are going to be changed by brave hackers taking out control systems, or by citizens sitting down in the public squares and repeating vague notions about equality or imperialism. Both political ideals, and really existing forms of governance and interstate/intercultural relations have to be rethought in the age of geopolitics overshadowed by climate change, and the thought has to become effective and embodied by large numbers of people or it's just useless. For that reason I would like to hear your thoughts on new forms of mobilization (that would deserve its own thread). Inventing new structures of evaluation and debate has a greater importance than may be obvious to those wrapped up in the horrible immediacy of war.
Is Russia losing in Ukraine? Indian army generals respond (Times of India video)
नमस्ते , "When India speaks, the world listens" -Jawaharlal Nehru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwj3WtrQZaw (20m46s) (with thanks to Harv S) सत्यमेव जयते ! p+7D!# distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The War to come ...
Felix gets it, imo. Not sure about elsewhere, but the 'special relationship left' — the US certainly and the UK as well, I think — has been stuck in a rut. OT1H hard-ish doctrinaire 'anti-imperialist' formations robotically denounce NATO in the monolithic, one-sided terms Felix points out; OT0H milquetoast centrists revert to form and support all kinds of aggressive action, if not outfight belligerence (yet), with little or no introspection about how that relates to their other earlier stances. Both are backward-glancing in a way that Corey Robin put well a week ago on Facebook: > God, I hate left debates about international politics. More than any other > kind of debate, they never have anything to do with the matter at hand but, > instead, always seem to involve some attempt, on all sides, to remediate and > redress some perceived failure or flaw of politics past. I don't think the left will make much progress until it gets over its post-'70s anxiety over the use of force — always coercive, sometimes violent — to achieve its political ends. Until then, it'll necessarily marginalize itself with anti-statist denialism masquerading as warm-fuzzy idealism. The way out? Ditch the genealogical-moral hand-wringing and accept the fact that human institutions, all of them, are deeply flawed, but each in their own unique way. A bit like what Tolstoy said of families: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The question is how can we work with the institutions we have toward *better* (NOT 'the best') political ends — in this case, fostering conditions that help Russian populations (very plural) to try once again to remake their society in more sustainable, fairer ways. If we had more than one major multilateral alliance and were asking which would be better suited to realizing that end, fine, let's debate whether NATO is the better choice; but we don't, really, so scholastic debates about whether NATO is Good or Evil lead nowhere. Are McDonald's and Coke "Good"? No. Is their withdrawal from Russia the right thing in moral and practical terms? Yes. That wasn't so hard, now, was it? Why would we discuss NATO in any different way? Because, being a multilateral entity that's ultimately grounded in democratic national governments it "represents" us more than McDonald's and Coke? Good luck arguing that. Cheers, Ted On 10 Mar 2022, at 7:21, Felix Stalder wrote: > On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote: >> >> Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all those >> Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of those >> states, they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet Union. They >> lived for decades under significant degrees of political repression. Did >> they have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 1989? Looking at the >> brutality of the current war, it seems suddenly obvious to me that they did >> -- and by the same token, I have suddenly become less certain of what I >> always used to say, that Nato is an imperialist war machine that should be >> disbanded. Russia is also an imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two >> owe each other a lot). But maybe China is also an imperial war machine? And >> India, maybe not yet? > > I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The US doesn't > really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in Latin America or Asia. > > NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed at > confronting the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree that this > confrontation was not seen as vital after 1990 (either because the US read > geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans believed in trade leading to > peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant for Trump, brain-dead for Macron, not > worth investing for the Germans. > > For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep historical > reasons, "confronting Russia" remained a vital concern also after the end of > the cold war, hence NATO was always seen crucially important and they entered > NATO voluntarily. > > History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of course not, > because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of geopolitics as unipolar > is certainly a big factor in this. > > But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in Europe, NATO > would have had to deny Eastern European countries membership and work on some > kind of large block-free zone between itself and Russia. I'm not sure such a > project would have been popular in Poland, though. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The War to come ...
Hi Brian, Good to hear from you and to be in an exchange of thoughts with you once again. My thoughts: Let me start with your question on NATO’s eastward expansion. Yes - on principle, one cannot deny the freedom of the Eastern European states to choose their alliances. But the consequences must be dispassionately assessed. Security could be on offer from an alliance toward the West, but security concerns from Russia, as the military power to the East, must be factored in the equation, particularly from the possibility of their destabilising security. This was foreseen in the cable sent by William Burns in 2008 which I cited in my previous email, where he predicted that NATO expansion into Ukraine could provoke a military invasion by Russia, even though such an invasion may not be Russia’s first choice. So what is the net balance of security that is on offer in such a situation? One must factor that NATO is an institution that is primary to allowing the US to keep Europe within its sphere of influence, the eastward expansion appears to spring from a blind belief that Pax Americana is the inherent history of the world to come, and it is necessary to account for the reaction that may be provoked from a military power that has historically been viewed with hostility by the Pax Americana project. What would have happened if there had been follow through on the proposal James Baker made to Gorbachev in 1990: a limitation placed on Pax Americana through a pact between the US, Europe and Russia where the Eastern European states are accepted by all as a buffer zone of non-interference. Of course, such goals are far easier to state in an international treaty than to implement, but that is the case with all international treaties. Could such a treaty have led to greater security for Eastern Europe? Given the hindsight of current events, I suspect that is a likely possibility. I do not think people in the west understand that in parts of the world outside North America and Western Europe, there is little seen in the difference of foreign policy and hegemonic interference when comparing the US, Europe, China or Russia. In India, there may be a greater sensitivity to China because of the proximity, the current tensions on the border, and the memory of a traumatic war in 1962, but Russia, Europe and the US are viewed with equal suspicion in matters of foreign policy. I am always amazed at the conversations I have with people in the US or Western Europe, and how they automatically assume their countries are on the side of the angels. I remember when I was living in the US in the early 1980’s (during the Reagan era and the height of the Cold War), people would react with a mixture of amazement and horror when I would say that I saw no moral difference between the foreign policies of the US and the USSR. They would indignantly ask, “What about Afghanistan?”, and have no satisfactory response to offer when I would ask how that was different from Vietnam. I suspect the reaction would be the same now if I equated Russia and USA, they would indignantly ask, “What about Ukraine?” and would be hard pressed to respond when quizzed about how that is different from the invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War. India is not in a direct conflict with the US, and Iraq and Ukraine are contexts viewed in India from a distance. But even without conflict, and a supposedly good relationship with the US, Pax Americana invades and disrupts our everyday life in ways that are not tied to military campaigns. You have asked for the specificities of a narrative discerned in the view from a place like India. I give a few examples below. The first is the state of agriculture in India. The US has used its dominance in WTO to push for rules that favour it. So direct income support to farmers is seen as a subsidy that is not market distorting, and therefore permitted under WTO, whereas purchases of agricultural produce by the state under a guarantee of minimum prices is seen as a subsidy producing a market distortion and is forbidden. How one is seen as distortionary whereas the other is not evades logic. The US gets away with one of the highest levels of agricultural subsidies, currently estimated in excess of $ 25 billion, with a substantive portion going to large agribusinesses. India is forbidden to give any subsidies unless it is under the same category of direct income subsidies. No weight is given to the consideration that if the Indian state wants to implement redistribution by subsidising food for the poor and hungry, a direct program of public purchase is far more effective than an indirect program of income subsidies. And in a fragmented and complex society with a rigid digital divide, implementing a direct income subsidy program is very hard to do. The result is not only to increase hunger, but a collapse of equitable access by farmers to remunerative markets. Given that
Re: The War to come ...
On 10.03.22 06:02, Brian Holmes wrote: Here's the thing though. Should Nato really have denied entry to all those Eastern European states that requested it? Remember that most of those states, they had been taken over but not absorbed by the Soviet Union. They lived for decades under significant degrees of political repression. Did they have a valid reason to want to join Nato after 1989? Looking at the brutality of the current war, it seems suddenly obvious to me that they did -- and by the same token, I have suddenly become less certain of what I always used to say, that Nato is an imperialist war machine that should be disbanded. Russia is also an imperialist war machine, for sure (and the two owe each other a lot). But maybe China is also an imperial war machine? And India, maybe not yet? I don't think that NATO ever was an imperialist war machine. The US doesn't really need NATO for it's imperialist projects in Latin America or Asia. NATO, it seems to me, was always a "cold war" war machine, aimed at confronting the SU/Russia, primarily in Europe. To the degree that this confrontation was not seen as vital after 1990 (either because the US read geopolitics as uni-polar, or the Europeans believed in trade leading to peace) NATO languished. Irrelevant for Trump, brain-dead for Macron, not worth investing for the Germans. For the Eastern European countries, for very understandable, deep historical reasons, "confronting Russia" remained a vital concern also after the end of the cold war, hence NATO was always seen crucially important and they entered NATO voluntarily. History has born them out, but was that really inevitable? Of course not, because nothing ever is, but the miss-conception of geopolitics as unipolar is certainly a big factor in this. But the paradox is, to develop a real peace architecture in Europe, NATO would have had to deny Eastern European countries membership and work on some kind of large block-free zone between itself and Russia. I'm not sure such a project would have been popular in Poland, though. -- | || http://felix.openflows.com | | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt | # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
