"There is no iron law of history that says that if you do not repel an aggressor from the territory they have just seized, then they will go on to seize more. There are no iron laws of history at all, in fact, and anyone who pretends there are is a fool."
You don't have to believe in iron laws of history to be worried that if Putin is not halted in Ukraine, the Baltic States will be next. Putin has made no secret of his desire to re-absorb them into a reconstituted Soviet Empire, with himself as Emperor.
It's easy to say that a shifting of political boundaries is not worth dying for, and there are plenty of examples where that's true. But you acknowledge that Putin is a nasty fucker. After Putin and Trump have finished dismembering Ukraine, life for Ukrainians is going to be awful, with on-going reprisals in the name of 'de-Nazification'. It will be the same in the Baltic States if Putin is permitted to take them over. That's a lot more significant than a mere shift in boundaries.
Yes, that worries me too. I still think we might get more creative in thinking up ways to ensure that that not happen, beyond “kill more Russian conscripts and risk cataclysmic escalation.” What troubles me is that even the suggestion or encouragement to consider alternative paths (if any in fact exist) is effectively mooted by an Atlanticist majority that interprets the search for alternatives as capitulation.
My impression is that Putin has tried everything in his power to contain the Ukraine situation and to avoid it.
He's a legalistic, bureaucratic capitalist at heart.
He doesn't even want to control all of Ukraine, but every Western escalation has meant that the eventual line-drawing is moving westward to the Dnieper. The heavier the price Russia has had to pay, the more it is obligated to stick to it's original goals.
I don't see how the public record of Putin's behaviour supports any of these assertions.
The biggest thing that Putin could have done to contain or avoid the Ukraine situation was not to invade and annex Crimea in 2014, and not to invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022. He chose to do both of those things. Far from avoiding 'the Ukraine situation' he is more responsible than any other single individual for creating it. He absolutely intended and expected to control all of Ukraine, and was only prevented from doing so by the bravery and resourcefulness of the Ukrainian defence, in combination with the incompetence of his own military.
'legalistic' and 'bureaucratic' suggest a person who likes to do things by the book. Putin has sent agents to foreign countries to murder his critics, and he has used radiological and biological weapons to do so, heedless of the dangers to others. In Russia itself his domestic critics are frequently murdered by the state security apparatus, like Anna Politkovskaya, or arrested, subjected to show trials and sent to the gulag to die, like Alexei Navalny.
'capitalist' suggests a commitment to free enterprise. But Putin runs Russia as a feudal oligarchy, and using a combination of confiscation and extortion, has enriched himself to the point where he is the richest man in Russia.
What is especially confounding is that a "reverse Kissinger" of peeling Russia away from China to make a US-Russia bloc is simply not plausible. It's certainly not worth trashing all existing alliances of the US to try for such a doomed hope.
One of my longtime dreams was to cross Russia on the trans-Siberian railway. Sigh. Thank you for taking me across the steppes, to Tatar country even. We can all dream of peace and a universal recognition of the value of each human life, but I'm afraid territorial conquest is more the mood of those who get to decide these things, or who try to force their macho vision on the rest of us.
It's confounding to me that so many of my well educated boomer friends and colleagues, who were once so politically active resisting Reagan's "evil empire" mentality and policies, are now rabid supporters of endless war in Ukraine. Thanks for such a thoughtful and historically grounded essay.
Re: Jeffrey Sachs, I am curious as to the principle that has protected this guy’s career—that of failing upwards—also applies in France. I assume it does …
Recall that Sachs—along with Larry Summers and Robert Reich and God-knows who else—was responsible for a policy that was bad on a world-historical scale. Yet all of these guys have been richly rewarded, and Reich has the sheer brass neck to re-invent himself as someone on the “left”.
Sachs is now claiming that it is not his fault, but every functional adult should know that this is bullshit. The UCC (the Uniform Commercial Code) codifies the notion of “foreseeable misuse” and this idea has been a part of the law for over 100 years. To claim that there was no way of knowing that all of your banker pals and all of those freedom-loving nascent “biznez-men” were in fact perfectly normal (that is to say greedy) people is either terminally naive or a self-serving fabrication.
W/r/t Eastern-Bloc Rock-n-Roll, a college pal of mine quit his law job to start a record company … cool! What kind of music? “Czech Rock and Roll”. As a contemporary Rykodisc CD had it, “No Commercial Potential”!
But so what? He sponsored the first US tour of The Plastic People of the Universe and I got to meet the Czech Ambassador and his wife at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. She was fun, she sported a Debbie-Harry goes to Art School vibe and she danced in just the sort of same inept undergrad way as the rest of us. At the afterparty one of the Plastics explained to me that there are three basic Czech food groups: potatoes, sausage, and beer.
In the matter of decontextualization of art-forms, this evening was like traveling backwards in time to the late ’60s, before everyone became so fucking serious. A lesson, perhaps?
Really interesting piece: one of the few I have saved. It made me think of what has been described of the post-Napolean nihilistic revolutionary ethos and the established political order coalitions to counter. I could create a narrative that that era was a struggle between the power of industrial power and those unable to have and possess it. Our era seems to be a struggle between technological power and those that use it but have little to no ownership or power over it (cloud and platform power). I really liked how the author pointed out the universal desire to want to show the individuals production and uniqueness; and how technology is supporting that. Maybe this does temper the potential of political aggression. It feels a little Hannah Arendt. Technology is creating more displays on "Plato's Cave" that we watch and listen to, but do the author's example of content creators offer a glimpse of other people that have climbed out of the cave and show an individual that is facing, seeing, smelling, and touching something more real than made up shapes on the cave wall (the internet and media of today)? A more organic environment for the individual. What is really happening in regard to the relationship of people and political power? The pos-industrial revolutions tried to create greater political powers. These ideas and powers had to live amongst the ideas and ethos of liberalism (restraints on power) and republicanism (mutual restraints on power). The ideas and ethos of restraints on power seems more real, not generated reflections on the cave wall but can be seen, touched, smelled, and heard by all people: an individual can appear to another individual on opposite sides of the world; that is really something!
I know Sachs has recently distanced himself from those policies, saying that at the time he recommended something akin to a Marshall Plan, but his Wall St. colleagues went for loot and squander instead.
As usual, I much enjoy the sweep of any essay that combines the Pixies, the silver mines of Potosi and Putin (and that is just the "P" category!). And as someone more or less the same age as you, I have lived through the transformation of Brezhnev's USSR to what is now Putin's Russia, with minor appearances by the Andropovs, Gorbys and Yeltsin. I recall the huge relief of the post-1989 disintegration of the Evil Empire (pace Ronnie Reagan) meant that we here in the US could use a "peace dividend" to stop funding mutal assured destruction between the Stars& Stripes led "First World" and the Hammer & Sickle led . . . "Second World" I guess? But it was just over a decade later when we found a replacement enemy after the 9/11 attack of the neo-Caliphate (to accord greater historical weight to Osama and his minions and offshoots than they will likely earn in future history books. But that 1990s interregnum (when you were apparently misaligned with the local notion of an exchange program!) was a time of great optimism about the End of History and the triumph of the rules-based Western order [insert wry laughter here]. I recall friends and professors headed to Eastern Europe post law school to help the new democracies create consititutions that, at a minium, respected property rights and occasionally free speech too. After watching it fall apart both here and there in the last 30 years, I am far more cynical than you -- I cannot remotely believe that this Trump-Putin amounts to something like detente or even its antecedents and is far more like a couple of the heads of the five families agreeing to territories where they get the control the numbers rackets, the prostitutes and the drug dealers. And the key here is "territories" - even in the internet besotted world, we all still need to find a place to sleep, eat, crap and even try to reproduce (that last being something on the decline everywhere, but a topic for another time). We want a safe and secure home, at least most of us bourgeois folk in the Western world and increasingly those in Asia and, based on immigration to North America from Central and South American and into Europe from Africa wannabe bourgeois from the rest of the world. The Blood and Soil types driving part of the American President's grievance politics understand this, as do the AfD jackboots in Germany and various nutters from LePen to Cedergren. But they have neither the correct diagnosis nor the correct prescription and it will end badly if they all continue to accrete power. They need to be stopped. And so does Vlad the Annexer. This is a longwinded way of saying that Putin's incursion into Ukraine matters, the territory grab matters, and who fricking started it matters -- and those blaming Ukraine, whether global realists tut tutting them for wanting to join NATO or the Orange Menace and his tiny minded, dough-faced Reichsmarshall, are just utterly and completely full of crap. I share your disgust at the bodies being sacrificed and I hope like hell there are more choices than Chamberlain or Churchill here . . . but I am not gonna hold my breath because we don't have anyone capable of winning a normal chess game here, much less the 4-dimensional chess the delusional attribute to Trump. It is like the fat Brando scene in Apocalypse Now, where Marlon's Col. Kurtz asks Sheen's Willard if the former's methods are "unsound" -- Willard's response: "I don't see any method at all, sir"
Please forgive the month-late response to this piece, Justin, but I love when you write about Moscow in the '90s, and I wanted to say as much. While I think your observations about the familiarity of Ms. Kulakovskaya et al. are rich and interesting, I wonder how significant you think it is that Youtube (or whatever the platform in question might be) is your window onto life in Yakutia. This is perhaps a banal observation, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding you point, but we know very well that digital spaces have their own norms of behavior, and it seems quite natural that we should expect a Youtuber anywhere to perform those norms on Youtube. It seems much less intuitive, however, to think that this performance is more indicative of the texture of ordinary life than those elements of "local color" we can see poking through the cracks. Like you, I love Eurasia deeply, and I'm loathe to think of its peoples as anything other than neighbors and friends, but I also know what my actual Russian neighbors and friends here have said about the atmosphere of life under Putin.
At any rate, I hope you don't think of pieces like this one and your recent dispatch on AGI as the kind of mundane takesmanship you'd rather forgo in favor of metafiction. Your interventions into these conversations are quite special, and they're popular for a reason.
PS - We among your fellow Turcophiles who insist on calling it "Altishahr" invite you to join us.
Truly superb – both insightful and beautiful as writing (and witness) thank you for this one!
This is an extremely difficult moment to make sense of, but like you, I am convinced that attempts to go back to old paradigms are just an (ever more flimsy) denial – that deal is broken (and was worn out anyhow). Crazy thing is, I know for sure that some of our hopes are way too big, and some of our fears are also way out of proportion. But worst of all (for our general presumption of the value of reason) – the best and worst of this new phase of history will be emergent things we don’t even know about yet – which will come at us from left-field on a Slow Tuesday Night (always was and will be).
This makes efforts like your own, to find a through-line to carry the reader on a tour a number of different ideas at a number of different scales (time and human) really welcome contributions – a sharp and nourishing contrast to commercial content. So much of Big-Media (Big-War plus Big-Banks) now concentrates all their weight on endless, but also entirely context-free (and so pointless) fretting. Politics as emotional sports-entertainment. (bad for metabolisms to stress all day long - even aside from the constant damage to brains, from being so passionate about such extraordinary levels of ignorance)
Also – bonus thank you for reminding me by fine exemplar about the value of those highly durable memories of distinctive oddness – so often great cryptic clues, which we are too ignorant at the time, to know how to interpret!
(but also outright delicious, as devices to give smart essays genuine unforced narrative warmth)
By the bye, when the time comes for a new pseudonym here at The Hinternet, would you consider your long lost Russian lover? I must say I find her incredibly charming. The odd appearance here and there would do just fine as well.
I keep tabs on the Russian underground experimental music scene, after having met Anna Mikhailova when she toured the U.S. in 2017. For one, I was most impressed -in contrast to around here- at how quickly shows began to be held coming out of the pandemic... even as it was still ongoing, beginning as early as February/March 2021, with a week-long festival Anna organized: the "Unlock Winter Wanted Festival" .... A year later her Trinity opera premiered in unfortunate sync with the launch of "Special Military Operation". I'm afraid I don't know Russian, so I rely on machine translations to get the gist of what's going on... In Moscow there is venue that is a former bomb shelter: BOMBA. Another regular venue, more formal, is the DOM Cultural Center... From what I gather, like your Sakha videos, politics is not discussed, perhaps for good reason.... A couple of weeks ago a folk-punk "bard" was defenestrated from his apartment building in St. Petersburg... Authorities said he committed suicide, but it happened as he was being visited and questioned over his alleged sending of funds to Ukraine .... Meanwhile, on the same day here in Cincinnati, a local and long-time metal musician -didn't know him personally but we have friends in common- was shot dead in broad daylight while being mugged.... So it goes....
It stings to read about beloved Soviet punk bands in these terms but I think you're right--they fall far short of the experimental loud quiet loud of the Pixies, but then again it was mostly about words for them. And I wholly get behind the sentiment of, what I take as, a necessary and immediate ceasefire, to save real, precious lives. I personally don't buy the virtual idea that Putin is going to march to Berlin (or Paris), if he's not completely defeated. Not Warsaw, not likely the Baltics either.
Except that, originally, Putin seemed keen to move in the direction of Europe/the West, which if I read this fine essay correctly, was the more culturally appropriate impulse. Somehow, following the fall of the Soviet Union, he didn't get the reception he wanted and has been mad ever since, in a way that allowed that disintegration to loom larger, as a catastrophe not so much for the Soviet Union, but for historic Russia. I don't know . . . given the chance, would he not still rather pivot back for a seat at the table with France and Germany to his right and left? I don't know if it's what we ought to wish for or not. It should not come at the expense of our existing alliances. I'm just not sure China offers more for Putin than the Europe he is related to. Blood is thicker than water.
For the last 150 years Great Britain has put tremendous effort to make sure that there was never gonna be in Russian/US Alliance
And if it wasn’t for the city of London financing, the Bolshevik revolution this alliance would’ve I’ve been 100+years old
The Crown city of London sponsoring that Middle East project has been a source of the United States ills for quite some time dictating. It’s foreign policy and western global policy for that matter.
After watching “Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears” decades ago, I find it completely believable that Russians and Americans can find much common ground and peaceful coexistence, given a chance. It’s just that pesky lying leadership they have…and now we have…that gets in the way.
"There is no iron law of history that says that if you do not repel an aggressor from the territory they have just seized, then they will go on to seize more. There are no iron laws of history at all, in fact, and anyone who pretends there are is a fool."
You don't have to believe in iron laws of history to be worried that if Putin is not halted in Ukraine, the Baltic States will be next. Putin has made no secret of his desire to re-absorb them into a reconstituted Soviet Empire, with himself as Emperor.
It's easy to say that a shifting of political boundaries is not worth dying for, and there are plenty of examples where that's true. But you acknowledge that Putin is a nasty fucker. After Putin and Trump have finished dismembering Ukraine, life for Ukrainians is going to be awful, with on-going reprisals in the name of 'de-Nazification'. It will be the same in the Baltic States if Putin is permitted to take them over. That's a lot more significant than a mere shift in boundaries.
Yes, that worries me too. I still think we might get more creative in thinking up ways to ensure that that not happen, beyond “kill more Russian conscripts and risk cataclysmic escalation.” What troubles me is that even the suggestion or encouragement to consider alternative paths (if any in fact exist) is effectively mooted by an Atlanticist majority that interprets the search for alternatives as capitulation.
My impression is that Putin has tried everything in his power to contain the Ukraine situation and to avoid it.
He's a legalistic, bureaucratic capitalist at heart.
He doesn't even want to control all of Ukraine, but every Western escalation has meant that the eventual line-drawing is moving westward to the Dnieper. The heavier the price Russia has had to pay, the more it is obligated to stick to it's original goals.
I don't see how the public record of Putin's behaviour supports any of these assertions.
The biggest thing that Putin could have done to contain or avoid the Ukraine situation was not to invade and annex Crimea in 2014, and not to invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022. He chose to do both of those things. Far from avoiding 'the Ukraine situation' he is more responsible than any other single individual for creating it. He absolutely intended and expected to control all of Ukraine, and was only prevented from doing so by the bravery and resourcefulness of the Ukrainian defence, in combination with the incompetence of his own military.
'legalistic' and 'bureaucratic' suggest a person who likes to do things by the book. Putin has sent agents to foreign countries to murder his critics, and he has used radiological and biological weapons to do so, heedless of the dangers to others. In Russia itself his domestic critics are frequently murdered by the state security apparatus, like Anna Politkovskaya, or arrested, subjected to show trials and sent to the gulag to die, like Alexei Navalny.
'capitalist' suggests a commitment to free enterprise. But Putin runs Russia as a feudal oligarchy, and using a combination of confiscation and extortion, has enriched himself to the point where he is the richest man in Russia.
What is especially confounding is that a "reverse Kissinger" of peeling Russia away from China to make a US-Russia bloc is simply not plausible. It's certainly not worth trashing all existing alliances of the US to try for such a doomed hope.
https://thediplomat.com/2025/02/the-myth-of-a-reverse-kissinger-why-aligning-with-russia-to-counter-china-is-a-strategic-illusion/
https://chinarussiareport.substack.com/p/attempting-a-reverse-kissinger-will
https://thebismarckcables.substack.com/p/on-the-attempt-to-pull-russia-from
https://thebismarckcables.substack.com/p/steel-man-argument-for-the-reverse
I’m sure you’re right! I’d never support such a strategy myself — I’m just partially convinced it’s what the Trump people are in fact attempting.
Agreed!
One of my longtime dreams was to cross Russia on the trans-Siberian railway. Sigh. Thank you for taking me across the steppes, to Tatar country even. We can all dream of peace and a universal recognition of the value of each human life, but I'm afraid territorial conquest is more the mood of those who get to decide these things, or who try to force their macho vision on the rest of us.
It's confounding to me that so many of my well educated boomer friends and colleagues, who were once so politically active resisting Reagan's "evil empire" mentality and policies, are now rabid supporters of endless war in Ukraine. Thanks for such a thoughtful and historically grounded essay.
Re: Jeffrey Sachs, I am curious as to the principle that has protected this guy’s career—that of failing upwards—also applies in France. I assume it does …
Recall that Sachs—along with Larry Summers and Robert Reich and God-knows who else—was responsible for a policy that was bad on a world-historical scale. Yet all of these guys have been richly rewarded, and Reich has the sheer brass neck to re-invent himself as someone on the “left”.
Sachs is now claiming that it is not his fault, but every functional adult should know that this is bullshit. The UCC (the Uniform Commercial Code) codifies the notion of “foreseeable misuse” and this idea has been a part of the law for over 100 years. To claim that there was no way of knowing that all of your banker pals and all of those freedom-loving nascent “biznez-men” were in fact perfectly normal (that is to say greedy) people is either terminally naive or a self-serving fabrication.
W/r/t Eastern-Bloc Rock-n-Roll, a college pal of mine quit his law job to start a record company … cool! What kind of music? “Czech Rock and Roll”. As a contemporary Rykodisc CD had it, “No Commercial Potential”!
But so what? He sponsored the first US tour of The Plastic People of the Universe and I got to meet the Czech Ambassador and his wife at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. She was fun, she sported a Debbie-Harry goes to Art School vibe and she danced in just the sort of same inept undergrad way as the rest of us. At the afterparty one of the Plastics explained to me that there are three basic Czech food groups: potatoes, sausage, and beer.
In the matter of decontextualization of art-forms, this evening was like traveling backwards in time to the late ’60s, before everyone became so fucking serious. A lesson, perhaps?
Really interesting piece: one of the few I have saved. It made me think of what has been described of the post-Napolean nihilistic revolutionary ethos and the established political order coalitions to counter. I could create a narrative that that era was a struggle between the power of industrial power and those unable to have and possess it. Our era seems to be a struggle between technological power and those that use it but have little to no ownership or power over it (cloud and platform power). I really liked how the author pointed out the universal desire to want to show the individuals production and uniqueness; and how technology is supporting that. Maybe this does temper the potential of political aggression. It feels a little Hannah Arendt. Technology is creating more displays on "Plato's Cave" that we watch and listen to, but do the author's example of content creators offer a glimpse of other people that have climbed out of the cave and show an individual that is facing, seeing, smelling, and touching something more real than made up shapes on the cave wall (the internet and media of today)? A more organic environment for the individual. What is really happening in regard to the relationship of people and political power? The pos-industrial revolutions tried to create greater political powers. These ideas and powers had to live amongst the ideas and ethos of liberalism (restraints on power) and republicanism (mutual restraints on power). The ideas and ethos of restraints on power seems more real, not generated reflections on the cave wall but can be seen, touched, smelled, and heard by all people: an individual can appear to another individual on opposite sides of the world; that is really something!
As a current fan I am curious how Jeffrey Sachs would respond to your comments. A face to face would be a) fun b)are you kidding??
I know Sachs has recently distanced himself from those policies, saying that at the time he recommended something akin to a Marshall Plan, but his Wall St. colleagues went for loot and squander instead.
As usual, I much enjoy the sweep of any essay that combines the Pixies, the silver mines of Potosi and Putin (and that is just the "P" category!). And as someone more or less the same age as you, I have lived through the transformation of Brezhnev's USSR to what is now Putin's Russia, with minor appearances by the Andropovs, Gorbys and Yeltsin. I recall the huge relief of the post-1989 disintegration of the Evil Empire (pace Ronnie Reagan) meant that we here in the US could use a "peace dividend" to stop funding mutal assured destruction between the Stars& Stripes led "First World" and the Hammer & Sickle led . . . "Second World" I guess? But it was just over a decade later when we found a replacement enemy after the 9/11 attack of the neo-Caliphate (to accord greater historical weight to Osama and his minions and offshoots than they will likely earn in future history books. But that 1990s interregnum (when you were apparently misaligned with the local notion of an exchange program!) was a time of great optimism about the End of History and the triumph of the rules-based Western order [insert wry laughter here]. I recall friends and professors headed to Eastern Europe post law school to help the new democracies create consititutions that, at a minium, respected property rights and occasionally free speech too. After watching it fall apart both here and there in the last 30 years, I am far more cynical than you -- I cannot remotely believe that this Trump-Putin amounts to something like detente or even its antecedents and is far more like a couple of the heads of the five families agreeing to territories where they get the control the numbers rackets, the prostitutes and the drug dealers. And the key here is "territories" - even in the internet besotted world, we all still need to find a place to sleep, eat, crap and even try to reproduce (that last being something on the decline everywhere, but a topic for another time). We want a safe and secure home, at least most of us bourgeois folk in the Western world and increasingly those in Asia and, based on immigration to North America from Central and South American and into Europe from Africa wannabe bourgeois from the rest of the world. The Blood and Soil types driving part of the American President's grievance politics understand this, as do the AfD jackboots in Germany and various nutters from LePen to Cedergren. But they have neither the correct diagnosis nor the correct prescription and it will end badly if they all continue to accrete power. They need to be stopped. And so does Vlad the Annexer. This is a longwinded way of saying that Putin's incursion into Ukraine matters, the territory grab matters, and who fricking started it matters -- and those blaming Ukraine, whether global realists tut tutting them for wanting to join NATO or the Orange Menace and his tiny minded, dough-faced Reichsmarshall, are just utterly and completely full of crap. I share your disgust at the bodies being sacrificed and I hope like hell there are more choices than Chamberlain or Churchill here . . . but I am not gonna hold my breath because we don't have anyone capable of winning a normal chess game here, much less the 4-dimensional chess the delusional attribute to Trump. It is like the fat Brando scene in Apocalypse Now, where Marlon's Col. Kurtz asks Sheen's Willard if the former's methods are "unsound" -- Willard's response: "I don't see any method at all, sir"
Please forgive the month-late response to this piece, Justin, but I love when you write about Moscow in the '90s, and I wanted to say as much. While I think your observations about the familiarity of Ms. Kulakovskaya et al. are rich and interesting, I wonder how significant you think it is that Youtube (or whatever the platform in question might be) is your window onto life in Yakutia. This is perhaps a banal observation, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding you point, but we know very well that digital spaces have their own norms of behavior, and it seems quite natural that we should expect a Youtuber anywhere to perform those norms on Youtube. It seems much less intuitive, however, to think that this performance is more indicative of the texture of ordinary life than those elements of "local color" we can see poking through the cracks. Like you, I love Eurasia deeply, and I'm loathe to think of its peoples as anything other than neighbors and friends, but I also know what my actual Russian neighbors and friends here have said about the atmosphere of life under Putin.
At any rate, I hope you don't think of pieces like this one and your recent dispatch on AGI as the kind of mundane takesmanship you'd rather forgo in favor of metafiction. Your interventions into these conversations are quite special, and they're popular for a reason.
PS - We among your fellow Turcophiles who insist on calling it "Altishahr" invite you to join us.
Truly superb – both insightful and beautiful as writing (and witness) thank you for this one!
This is an extremely difficult moment to make sense of, but like you, I am convinced that attempts to go back to old paradigms are just an (ever more flimsy) denial – that deal is broken (and was worn out anyhow). Crazy thing is, I know for sure that some of our hopes are way too big, and some of our fears are also way out of proportion. But worst of all (for our general presumption of the value of reason) – the best and worst of this new phase of history will be emergent things we don’t even know about yet – which will come at us from left-field on a Slow Tuesday Night (always was and will be).
This makes efforts like your own, to find a through-line to carry the reader on a tour a number of different ideas at a number of different scales (time and human) really welcome contributions – a sharp and nourishing contrast to commercial content. So much of Big-Media (Big-War plus Big-Banks) now concentrates all their weight on endless, but also entirely context-free (and so pointless) fretting. Politics as emotional sports-entertainment. (bad for metabolisms to stress all day long - even aside from the constant damage to brains, from being so passionate about such extraordinary levels of ignorance)
Also – bonus thank you for reminding me by fine exemplar about the value of those highly durable memories of distinctive oddness – so often great cryptic clues, which we are too ignorant at the time, to know how to interpret!
(but also outright delicious, as devices to give smart essays genuine unforced narrative warmth)
Cheers!
By the bye, when the time comes for a new pseudonym here at The Hinternet, would you consider your long lost Russian lover? I must say I find her incredibly charming. The odd appearance here and there would do just fine as well.
I keep tabs on the Russian underground experimental music scene, after having met Anna Mikhailova when she toured the U.S. in 2017. For one, I was most impressed -in contrast to around here- at how quickly shows began to be held coming out of the pandemic... even as it was still ongoing, beginning as early as February/March 2021, with a week-long festival Anna organized: the "Unlock Winter Wanted Festival" .... A year later her Trinity opera premiered in unfortunate sync with the launch of "Special Military Operation". I'm afraid I don't know Russian, so I rely on machine translations to get the gist of what's going on... In Moscow there is venue that is a former bomb shelter: BOMBA. Another regular venue, more formal, is the DOM Cultural Center... From what I gather, like your Sakha videos, politics is not discussed, perhaps for good reason.... A couple of weeks ago a folk-punk "bard" was defenestrated from his apartment building in St. Petersburg... Authorities said he committed suicide, but it happened as he was being visited and questioned over his alleged sending of funds to Ukraine .... Meanwhile, on the same day here in Cincinnati, a local and long-time metal musician -didn't know him personally but we have friends in common- was shot dead in broad daylight while being mugged.... So it goes....
It stings to read about beloved Soviet punk bands in these terms but I think you're right--they fall far short of the experimental loud quiet loud of the Pixies, but then again it was mostly about words for them. And I wholly get behind the sentiment of, what I take as, a necessary and immediate ceasefire, to save real, precious lives. I personally don't buy the virtual idea that Putin is going to march to Berlin (or Paris), if he's not completely defeated. Not Warsaw, not likely the Baltics either.
Except that, originally, Putin seemed keen to move in the direction of Europe/the West, which if I read this fine essay correctly, was the more culturally appropriate impulse. Somehow, following the fall of the Soviet Union, he didn't get the reception he wanted and has been mad ever since, in a way that allowed that disintegration to loom larger, as a catastrophe not so much for the Soviet Union, but for historic Russia. I don't know . . . given the chance, would he not still rather pivot back for a seat at the table with France and Germany to his right and left? I don't know if it's what we ought to wish for or not. It should not come at the expense of our existing alliances. I'm just not sure China offers more for Putin than the Europe he is related to. Blood is thicker than water.
For the last 150 years Great Britain has put tremendous effort to make sure that there was never gonna be in Russian/US Alliance
And if it wasn’t for the city of London financing, the Bolshevik revolution this alliance would’ve I’ve been 100+years old
The Crown city of London sponsoring that Middle East project has been a source of the United States ills for quite some time dictating. It’s foreign policy and western global policy for that matter.
After watching “Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears” decades ago, I find it completely believable that Russians and Americans can find much common ground and peaceful coexistence, given a chance. It’s just that pesky lying leadership they have…and now we have…that gets in the way.