Category: Politics (explicit)

For a few years now, I developed a theory that America’s cold war worldviews were encapsulated in the psyche of Lee Harvey Oswald, but this relied on my belief that Oswald had so many cover stories, there was no actual person underneath them all. What do we get nowadays? A CIA agent whose operational status no one can ascertain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Russian policy (domestic and foreign) lately. For my magazine this month, I tried to discuss the untenability of running a secret police state in a world where health issues don’t respect borders. I don’t think I was all too successful, but I wrote most of it at 4am before hitting the road for Seattle.

I want to write a longer piece about Russian politics, the KGB-defined worldview, petroeconomics, the meanings of Chechnya, and the question of “deep chrono” as it relates to secrets revealed during the years between the USSR’s collapse and the ascendence of Putin. That is, I could spend the rest of my days writing something that would be out of date the moment I publish it.

The engine for this whole project was my realization that, while we’re engaged in another cold war with Russia and China, this one isn’t driven by the ideological opposition of Capitalism vs. Communism. Rather, it seems to me that the policies of both of those countries are designed to assure the security of their ruling parties.

Now, you could argue that that was the “true” motivation of the cold war itself, but it strikes me as fundamentally different, seeing as how this opposition is stripped down to the concept of retaining power for its own sake. The aspects of socialism that remain in both regimes are geared to sustain autocracy.

I’ll continue ruminating on the subject and offering up occasional impressions. Meanwhile, here’s a piece (courtesy of Andrew Sullivan) from a (sorta) pro-Putin journalist who is freaked out by the number of murdered journalists in Russia.

George Will on the, um, evitability of Hillary Clinton, boredom, and the bs of campaign finance reform:

Bill Clinton has said, regarding presidential candidates, that Republicans like to fall in line and Democrats like to fall in love. Which explains the Clinton campaign’s palpable panic: Democrats have fallen in love, but not with her.

Brendan O’Neill attacks genocide vogue. I think he’s had some previous articles where he’s examined the guerrilla warfare and insurgencies that lead to the conditions that the west labels as genocide, and how that fighting gets ignored in favor of a clear-cut recasting of murderers and victims.

In international relations genocide has become a political weapon, an all-purpose rallying cry used by various actors to gain moral authority and boost their own standing. Anyone with a cursory understanding of history should know that the bloody wars of the past 10 to 15 years — in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur — are not unprecedented or exceptional. Certainly none of them can be compared to the Nazi genocide against the Jews, which involved the industrialised slaughter, often in factories built for the purpose, of six million men, women and children. Rather, the labelling of today’s brutal civil wars as ‘genocides’ by Western observers, courts and commentators is a desperate search for a new moral crusade, and it has given rise to a new moral divide between the West and the rest, between the civilised and enlightened governments of America and Europe and those dark parts of the world where genocides occur.

I have a big problem with laws that make “holocaust denial” illegal, because I think those play right into the hands of the denying set, showing how they’re oppressed by the government, which doesn’t want their viewpoint getting out. It’s a free speech issue, so I wouldn’t expect Europe to be out in front on that.

This article also made me think of the “Everyone has AIDS!” musical number from Team America.