We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
While rootling around yesterday for links concerning the Arcelor story, which has a Russian angle because Russians were also trying to take Arcelor over, I came across this story, from Mosnews.com (whatever that is):
Scientists from the Russian city of St. Petersburg have announced they had managed to develop a new, drug-free variant of cannabis which, if grown on industrial level, would cross with wild growing hemp end eventually force it out of existence.
Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Sergei Grigoryev of the Russian Plant Institute as saying that the amount of psychotropic substance in the new variant of cannabis is practically zero. When the new plant is crossed with the wild growing hemp the amount of psychotropic substance in the latter will gradually become less and less. If Russian hemp is grown on industrial level, it could even force the cannabis that is used for making hashish and marijuana out of existence.
This has got to be the perfect Samizdata news story. It has drugs, scientific progress, lots of US foreign policy angles, massive opportunities to disagree about its truth, implications, etc. It has everything we want.
My pennyworth is that, in the event that there is any truth to this story (which I do not assume), then this may be only the first step in a new drugs war, this time between scientists trying to develop and improve this Just Say No cannabis, and scientists working to strengthen the ability of your real, drug sodden cannabis to resist the attentions of Just Say No cannabis, and if anything to become even more drug sodden. Sort of like red squirrels versus grey squirrels but with gazillions of dollars to back each colour of squirrel against the other colour of squirrel.
Far out, man.
Putin is sending shivers through the world with his attempts to strong-arm the Ukraine back into the Kremlin’s zone of influence and no doubt more and more column inches are going to be directed at this emerging crisis.
Yet it seems to me pretty obvious that that Russia, circa 2006, is almost hilariously weak to be throwing its weight around. The Russian economy is pathetic for a would-be imperial seat of power, running about half the size of India based on purchasing power. Its GDP per capita is about the same as such mighty global players as South Africa, Mexico and Trinidad. The antics of its kleptocratic and economically illiterate former KGB leadership makes the place less attractive to investors by the day. Frankly you would have to be crazy to put your money in Moscow. Even its military has repeatedly demonstrated that it is inept and corrupt in equal measure. All this talk of Russia’s importance is vastly over-stated. In short, Russia needs to be treated with respect, but only the sort of respect you give a drunk with a knife as he staggers down the street.
The price of gas sold to the Ukraine is currently below market levels but the cackhanded way Russia has handled this makes it pretty obvious that markets are the last thing on Putin’s mind. But perhaps he is to be applauded for massively strengthening the hand of pro-nuclear power advocates with his preposterous posturing. Even the turgid political class of western and eastern Europe can now have few illusions that it makes sense to rely on an unstable place with delusions of grandeur for their energy supplies. Methinks it might be time for those with some spare dosh to invest some of it in nuclear energy stocks.
It is splendid news that the trapped Russian submariners have been rescued from the dreadful fate that overtook the Kursk a few years ago. Fortunately the Russians did not stand on their pride as they did the last time they suffered a sub-aquatic disaster. This time they seem to have fairly quickly accepted the help that was offered to them by many navies around the world.
Although the Royal Navy’s robotic sub was the prime mover of this rescue, it was really a very international effort with the USA and Japan providing vital assistance in the rescue. Hopefully this more enlightened approach by the Russian government and military authorities admitting they could not effect the rescue themselves is a sign of institutional change at the top, but the cynic in me wonders if it was not just a domestic political calculation that the embarrassment at having to have their submariners rescued by Western naval personnel represented less political damage than another scene on the television of angry family members on the dockside grieving over their dead sons.
Yet another Russian firm, Rambler Media, a search engine, has listed on the small-cap AIM stock market in London, preferring to hold its IPO in Britain rather than back home in Mother Russia. The story in the Daily Telegraph here gives a fairly sketchy outline of the listing but neglects to explore a possible broader reason for the listing.
Let me have a stab at it. Russian entrepreneurs are turning their backs on their home turf because they are worried about the possibility of their wealth being grabbed by the Russian state. Political risk is driving many Russian-owned firms to run their business affairs offshore.
Perhaps one should call this the “Yukos Effect.” In many respects the seizure of the oil firm’s assets by Putin’s Russian state is not quite the terrible smash-and-grab raid portrayed in some quarters – its owner was a decidely shady character – but it has certainly put a big chill into investors, pushing Russian shares down compared with their emerging market peers.
Expect to see plenty more launches of Russian firms on the British and other western stock markets for a while yet.
The decline of post-Soviet Russia continues apace and an article on the Weekly Standard site points out that one of the major exacerbating factors in that decline is Vladimir Putin. The crushing of the media, the confiscation of a large company because it was owned by a political rival on trumped up charges, the failed attempt to direct the result of the Ukrainian elections and the pathetic reaction by the Kremlin to the Beslan atrocity are described at the key indicators of the probably terminal decline of the current regime.
The article is summed up at the end from a very narrowly ‘American policy’ perspective but the most interesting point for me was author Ander Aslund’s contention that the Putin regime is not long for the world. Whilst the Russia of 2005 may be a banana republic without bananas, political instability in a nuclear power that may well be unable to protect its nuclear weapons (Russia’s corrupt and famously inept military are somewhat like the ‘Keystone Cops’ with live ammunition) is something that is of interest to the rest of the world. I wonder when the focus of attention will start shifting away from the Middle East…
I had never seen the infamous GULAG system; the Soviet authorities were not keen to document their crimes. But in 1946 they incarcerated an artist, Nikolai Getman, and he survived.
Getman spent eight years in Siberia at the Kolyma labor camps where he witnessed firsthand one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Although he survived the camps, the horrors of the GULAG seared into his memory. Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the GULAG which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.
→ Continue reading: The Gulag
Much has been and will be written about the appalling tragedy of Beslan school and its children held hostage by Chechen terrorists that came to a bloody conclusion two days ago. What I want to remind the western observers just how different the world is on the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain. There is much disregard for human life and for individual suffering or fate. We often complain here about the state’s natural tendency to override the individual and point out where the balance between the two needs to be redresses. But what happens in Russia (and many other non-Western countries) is beyond the finely tuned scale we apply to western governments.
The contempt in which the Russian government and the ruling class in Russia hold individual life is profound. Perhaps contempt is the wrong word since one would need to recognise something has value in the first place in order to deny it to someone out of contempt for them. Individual human life is not intrinsically valued by the Russian society. The lives of the family members, relatives and the loved ones, of course. But it is not expected that the faceless collective will or even should take heed of others’ suffering.
My brother and his two children are in there. His little girl, Lera, is three. His son, Shamil, is nine. They really didn’t have to do this. To storm the building. With all those children inside. They shouldn’t have done it. But they are the government and we are just ordinary people.
This was a cry of one of the relatives waiting outside the besieged school when the Russian troops starting firing their machine guns. Whether he was right or wrong on the Spetsnaz tactics in particular or hostage situations in general is beside the point, it was the acceptance of his or anybody’s powerlessness in the face of the Government.
The ruthlessness of the Russian state and its President is echoed by Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer to work for MI6, in his opinion piece.
Despite all the caring, sympathetic noises he is now making, Putin has a fabulous indifference to human life. When the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk was stuck on the bottom of the Baltic, its 118 crew suffocating and freezing slowly to death, he didn’t even bother to interrupt his holiday. When he was later interviewed on CNN about what had happened to the Kursk, he simply smiled and said: “It went to the bottom.” About the 118 Russians who died he said not a word.
The thousands of deaths in the war in Chechnya don’t move him in the least. He regards them as “normal wastage” – a hardly noticeable price which has to be paid for maintaining Russian control of Chechnya. That is the traditional KGB view, an attitude I remember all too well from my own days in the organisation.
Western governments offered sympathy to Mr Putin and the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the massacre had tested his faith. But the European Union called for an explanation of how this tragedy could have happened. The Russians described the request as blasphemous.
For once, I agree with the Russians. Sort of.
The situation in Beslan in Russia has ended in predictable horror. Whilst Russian behaviour in Chechnya has never been a model of surgical restraint, I have yet to hear plausible accounts of Russian forces rounding up children, blowing them up and then shooting survivors as they try to flee.
The horrors of September 11 2001 have receded into being little more than a ‘televisual curiosity’ in many circles in the USA. However the Russians have been getting regular reminders about the nature of the enemy with whom they are at war, an enemy by no means unconnected from Al Qaeda.
In Beslan, one of the surviving terrorists was kicked to death by enraged civilians after being dragged out of an ambulance and I suspect this is just a hint of what is to come on a far greater scale. The political pressure on Vladimir Putin to move against anyone even suspected of sympathies with Chechen Islamists will now be overwhelming.
Coming on the heels of the destruction of two Russian domestic airliners, a great many Russians will probably see the extermination of Chechnya as simply a matter of survival and I fear Chechen innocents will be given about as much consideration as those Chechen terrorists gave the innocent Russian children of Beslan.
In that marvellously bonkers publication Pravda, it is being reported that the Ukrainian sports authorities are blaming their lack of medals at a gymnastic event on the fact their Russian rivals brought in people with paranormal abilities to sabotage the Ukrainian competitors.
According to the federation’s governing body, evil-minded Russians hired psychics, people with extrasensory abilities in order to paralyze free will of Ukrainian gymnasts during competitions. Such statement of the federation received wide publicity among Ukrainian media sources, reports PrimaNews.
[…]
The federation also informs that “Russian mobs” brought fifteen paranorms to Kiev, including famous Russian medium Alan Chumak. They were seated in VIP seats on the stadium and somehow paralyzed the will of Ukrainian sportswomen; that is why the latter lost.
To hell with the gymnastics! If they can do such things, then they simply must organise special events in which paranormals compete to see who can paralyse the will of the other first! 
No Officer, I am not drunk, I had my will paralysed by Russian paranormals!
Over at the excellent libertarian group weblog, Cattalarchy, there is a fine and thoughtful collection of articles, which was published a few days ago, to mark the May Day parades of old socialists with a wide-ranging broadside against what communism has wrought. I urge folk to fire up some coffee and take time out to read them all.
With all that fine material in mind, I was stunned to read a screed in the latest edition of The Spectator by ultra-rightwinger Peter Hitchens. As well as saying some decidedly uncomplimentary things about former South African President and anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela, a topic to which I may return later, Hitchens also bemoans what he claims has been the lack of any real improvement of life in countries which have been released from communism.
Really? Have there been no improvements at all? I mean, for a start, surely a declared Christian like Hitchens should be glad that fellow believers are no longer persecuted as they were in the old days of Communism. The Gulag is no longer in operation. Members of the KGB no longer drag you off in the middle of the night. And yes, key parts of the economies of those nations are not just recovering, but offering some of the tastiest investment opportunities in the world today, as this article illustrates.
There is a priceless passage in which Hitchens even refers to the elderly generation in the former Eastern bloc who miss the good old days of guaranteed jobs, even if that era came with bread queues, bureaucracy and compulsory military service. That’s the spirit! None of this messy and vulgar capitalist nonsense, with all that bothersome choice, and ugly advertising, noisy department stores and red light districts.
I honestly do not know what to make of folk like Hitchens and whether he has any coherent political philosophy at all apart from a desire to shock what he thinks is the received wisdom (not always a bad or dishonourable urge, mind). A few weeks back he wrote a superb article shredding the case for state identity cards, of the kind that any libertarian would be proud to write. Yet a few issues later we get a gloomy piece almost pining the days when half of Europe was run by the communist empire of the Soviets.
Weird.
Notwithstanding the result of the Spanish election that David so poignantly blogged about yesterday, one thing that the commentators note is the turnout. Apparently, the extra 3 million voters who turned out to vote were spurred by the terrorist attacks and disgruntled by the Aznar government’s handling of the information in the aftermath. It transpires that the popular opinion in Spain was against supporting the US in the conflict with Iraq and the country’s participation in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’.
The BBC commentators have a field day – the ‘power of democracy’ has been demonstrated and the Spanish voters have chosen a socialist government. It don’t get better than that. It is a dream come true.
Oh, wait. The Russians have elected its President. In an extraordinary and widely predicted result, the former KGB agent crushed his closest rivals by securing 70 per cent plus of the vote, according to preliminary exit polls:
Russians overwhelmingly turned their backs on western-style democracy yesterday, voting for stability and a strong hand at the helm by giving four more years in office to President Vladimir Putin.
Although there was a small chance of under 50 per cent turn out, the Russians were forcefully encouraged to exercise their democratic rights, or else:
Officials are trying to bolster interest with patriotic advertisements showing Soviet-era rockets blasting off and glossy pictures of model Siberian mines. Others exhort parents to vote for the sake of their children.
Some officials have used bribes, threats and other schemes. Last week hospitals in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk put up notices saying they would refuse to treat patients who could not prove they had registered to vote in hospital.
So in one country we have a socialist government taking over as a result of democratic elections that were influenced by terrorist attack whose horror is still fresh in the people’s mind. In another, an overt authoritarian has cemented his already powerful position for another four years. I doubt very much that either election was determined by anything resembling rational discourse. No, I am not naive and do not expect every single voting decision to be rational or even sensible, however, the events of yesterday point to the other extreme.
[Retiring back to his cave, mumbling something about “emotionally incontinent” times…]
Sometimes when I feel the need to see the world through very strange eyes indeed, I wander over to the Pravda website for a bit of paleo-collectivism using language little different from Soviet days. I am rarely disappointed.
There is a splendid example of entertaining pretzel logic in slightly fractured English called West against Russia. The article discusses that the fact many articles appear in the western media which are critical, unflattering and disparaging regarding modern Russia and particularly Vladimir Putin. The author of the article, Mikhail Chernov makes it clear that the western reports are not just reportage but are a campaign and ‘Russian experts’ know why this is happening:
The main task of the new media campaign is making Vladimir Putin (who will probably be elected for the second term) not legitimate in the minds of Western audience. Meanwhile, some Russian experts believe that toughening the position of the West did not result from Russian political events and certain economic interests in Russia. The EU and the USA increased their criticism of Russia because of the crisis of the “Western” model of social order and simultaneously express their rejecting Russian social order model in this way.
So western criticism actually has nothing much to do with Russia, it is just a facet of the crisis of our social order, hence…
Many Russian experts believe that moving Western politics into anti-Russian direction is inevitable. Director of Pamir-Ural research group Alexander Sobyanin said that there is no special plan to undermine Russia. Western elites do not think bad about Russia and are not going to bring Russia down.
Quite so, there is not much interest in ‘bring Russia down’ anywhere other than Chechnya. In truth, western elites (whatever that means) do not really tend to think overmuch about Russia at all. But the fact Russia is seen as a far of basket case by most western elites is not the thrust of the article at all. Quite the contrary in fact.
According to Mr. Sobyanin, sharp increase of anti-Russian propaganda resulted from the crisis of the Western society elites. “The elites of only three countries were in the mainstream of the global economic and social development in the last century – Russia, the USA and Great Britain. The world entered the stage of changing dimensions – it has to abandon outdate absolute “financial criteria” and elaborate the new paradigm of development. Implementing changes will be accompanied by wars and social conflicts. Anglo-Saxon elites are not ready for this yet”, said Alexander Sobyanin. He believes that there is a chance that Russia can elaborate new, alternative algorithm for global development (in last century it was socialism), and for this reason the West perceives Russia as the dangerous ideological competitor.
Well I did tell you that I go to Pravda because I enjoy reading things that are surreal. This appears to say the thing that is wrong with the Anglo-Saxon model is that it looks at the ecomony in economic terms! And so what is this ‘new paradigm of development’? It is not spelled out so let me guess: economics must be managed politically for fairness and efficiency in order to avoid ‘wasteful competition’? I am just speculating here but who feels brave enough to disagree and tell me this is not at the root of this ‘new paradigm of development’ being hinted at? The notion that Russia is a source of a viable economic algorithm likely to challenge ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism is quixotic to put it politely… laughable to be a bit more blunt.
As Russian civil society exists only precariously, the Russian social model is simply that of subordinating ‘social’ interactions to politically regulated interactions strongly influenced from the top. In short, the Russian social model is ‘people being told what to do’. The socialist ‘ownership’ based method of doing that has simply been replaced with the more effective fascist style ‘control’ based method. Which is to say, rather that nationalising everything, the Russian state simply regulates things and imposes controls on what people can do with what they nominally own.
This is of course also the approach of regulatory statists even in Britain, the USA and elsewhere in the west, but unlike those places, Russia has the ‘advantage’ of a civil society with no significant intermediate organisations between it and the state, moreover it is a society conditioned to a top down approach by centuries of Tsarist autocracy followed by Communist totalitarianism. The article then goes on to talk about how in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ way, it is competition which defines our civilisation:
Western model” implies having certain “agreement” accepted by the society. One of the backbones of this agreement is competition between individuals. Russian tradition does not recognize competition as positive factor because competition awakes low instincts in people and does not improve the quality of products, but, on the contrary, worsens their quality.
Which no doubt explains the huge flood of high quality Russian products sweeping the world. That pesky toleration of individualism will be the undoing of us poor Anglo-Saxons. In reality, that there are any successful businesses at all in Russia is testament to the ingenuity of individual Russians and their ability to operate in spite of the ‘Russian model’.
Quite apart from the fact this utter tosh claims to be ‘reasoned analysis’, the fact that the people who think of themselves as Russia’s elites still think in such delusional terms shows the extent to which things have not yet recovered intellectually from that nation’s poisonous past. Who needs The Onion when you have Pravda? Sorry, but there is only one kind of Russian model that has any interest for the rest of the world.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
