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]
You can look at it the other way. Putin took the Crimea. Putin promoted the break-away republics. Without him, they would not have happened.
In all the similar cases, the common theme is Putin. He did the same to Georgia as he is to Ukraine. He did the same to Moldova, with Trans-Dniestr.
Were all those governments also reckless? Or were they just unfortunate enough to border Russia?
Putin has been consistently threatening to the Baltic states too. He even sponsored cyber attacks on Estonia. Now it is a long bow to draw that they have been reckless.
No. Putin is the common theme. Nothing Ukraine did, short of bowing to his every wish, would have stopped him. They have not been reckless. They have been desperately trying to deal with a homicidal maniac over the border.
Your argument reminds me of telling battered spouses that they should be more careful, rather than pointing the finger at the violent thug doing the violent things.
– ‘Chester Draws’ taking to task a commenter who accused the Ukrainian government of having brought this upon themselves with ‘reckless behaviour’.
I have considerable respect for the Guardian‘s John Harris. Though a Remainer himself, he was one of the first left-wing journalists to see that the campaign to leave the European Union had popular support, particularly among the working class, and the reason he could see that while others could not was because he and his colleague John Domokos did what others did not and put in the legwork to report from “Anywhere But Westminster”.
Some bits may strike you as not so very unlike Biden’s US.
Of course, it was all investigated. Of course, dishonest CEO of Russian factory was arrested. Fortunately, they found out that the governor was innocent & didn’t know about CEO’s shady schemes. … Fortunately her patriotism and hard work were well-noticed by Putin and he promoted her. Now she’s an Auditor of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation. She’ll be checking the transparency of other branches of government and make sure they use government funds efficiently.
Other parts, however, give examples of how economic activity in places like Russia and Mexico is determined by things that we in the anglosphere are not too familiar with (yet!).
Russians are good in sciences and very good in math. … How come Russia can’t produce anything competitive on the world market? Apparently it’s not a technical skill that is a limiting factor.
Having asked the question, he goes on to provide answers.
A no fly zone is actually pretty similar to zero covid.
A nice “feel good” solution & very easy to demonise anyone who disagrees with it. But as soon as you consider the practicalities, it becomes clear that both are entirely unrealistic without huge negative consequences.
I have lost loads of followers over my comments on Ukraine.
GOOD. If you think Russia “has a point” in its barbarous war on Ukraine, then kindly fuck off and never return.
I’ve seen this idea expressed a couple of times in the last day. Here’s Nigel Farage:
I always thought that we were dealing with somebody who was actually very logical. But I now begin to wonder whether he is.
The Daily Sceptic, which is really branching out now that most Covid-related restrictions have ended – and in ways I tend to agree with – has a whole article speculating that Putin is paranoid about his health and further speculating that this has sent Putin a bit mad.
I don’t think we have to assume a lunatic in the Kremlin to explain what is going on. Imagine for a minute, you are a Russian imperialist. You have no time for this democracy crap. You have no time for this self-determination crap, or this international law crap. You regard it as Russia’s manifest destiny to rule over Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and a few other places. You look at your opposition, the West. These are people who are bankrupt. They argue about whether men should be allowed to use women’s toilets. They have elites who despise the populations they govern and the customs and traditions that made their countries strong. They have universities that have become communist re-education camps. They fritter away their prosperity on wind farms and useless railways and welfare. They spend little on defence and when they do it is mostly on making sure that their forces embrace diversity. Almost all of them are to a greater or lesser extent dependent on your natural resources. And the “leader” of this rabble is at best a stubborn, wishy-washy, incompetent. And you say to yourself “Why shouldn’t I go to war? Who is going to stop me?”
P.S. Having drafted this I tuned into YouTube to find that David Starkey has made much the same point but much more eloquently than I ever could.
That’s Konstantin on Triggernometry’s YouTube on Ukraine. Lots of good, thoughtful stuff on Putin, Western weakness and everything in between. Well, not so much on that country in between, you know, Ukraine which is all the more remarkable when you consider that Konstantin has Russian-speaking family there. But, as he says, he doesn’t think people in the West are particularly interested in what is best for Konstantin’s family.
Update Maybe that title (see comments) should be toned down.
I am seeing a phenomenon being floridly expressed today, but it is something I have observed for many years: nothing happens in the world, at least nothing good, unless the malign USA is driving it.
Yes, the United States is the richest, most powerful nation on earth and it has been since World War II. And yes, it has interfered under presidents of all stripes in pursuit of its perceived geopolitical interests. It has done this for good or ill in a great many places, sometimes benignly, other times with a breathtaking lack of judgement.
But just as the leaders of that great nation often overestimated the USA’s ability to impose its will in far away lands, many people in many places also overestimate America’s influence in world affairs. They largely deny that locals have agency, oblivious to the fact people everywhere are capable of organising politically in ways not directed and driven from an agency in Langley, Virginia. As a friend of mine who was deeply involved in the 2014 Maidan revolt in Kyiv said to me once:
“Woah! I’ve just heard we’re all CIA puppets on Washington’s payroll. There must have been an oversight as me and my friends never got a penny. You know people in America, so can you get me an address to apply for that lovely CIA money I’m apparently due?”
He was of course joking, but Maidan was a golden example of how something overwhelmingly driven and executed by Ukrainians, in Ukraine, in response to Ukrainian political and social pressures becoming intolerable, was nevertheless written off as CIA mischief-making.
That idea was pushed hard by Russia when their pet oligarch was deposed, and it is entirely possible Putin even believes it himself. It is actually more supportive of his worldview than the notion it really happened because millions of Ukrainians loathed Putin, hated his Ukrainian puppet in Kyiv, and reject the malign influence of Russia generally.
But so many people seek a simpler world, a bipolar one in which everything is down to the Big Actors (with America still the biggest at the moment). Understanding that and feeding into it grants profound insight into Russian (and to some extent Chinese) propaganda. Add to that the rightly shattered confidence in Western institutions the last two years has wrought, and it is not surprising otherwise discerning folk fall for it.
Many seek to explain the world through the distorting prism of the Americocentric delusion, rather than face the complex frequently fracturing mosaic that explains the world more accurately. People do things locally for local reason; not everything is about some current iteration of the Great Game.
If the USA (and UK) have a share of blame for what is happening in Ukraine right now, it is not because they ‘provoked’ Russia: Putin has made it clear the very existence of a politically and culturally independent Ukraine is intolerable to him. No, their mistake, their toxic involvement, was when they pressed Ukraine into surrendering the nuclear weapons Kyiv inherited from the defunct USSR in return for meaningless guarantees.
Russia is not attacking Ukraine in response to actions of the USA since then, that’s an Americocentric delusion. This is not happening because Ukraine wanted to join NATO, it’s happening because they are outside NATO, which is not the same thing at all. Russia is not driven by fear of NATO strength, it is driven by perceptions of western weakness. Russia believes the cultural, military and geopolitical balance has tipped in their favour, expecting the west will respond to their invasion of Ukraine today with nothing more than official grimaces. I hope they are not correct about that but we will soon see.
Putin is motivated by oft stated imperial ambitions to Make Russia Great Again, to ‘restore’ Russia to its imperial boundaries with Moscow as the New Rome (yes, they really say that); Ukrainian rejection of that notion and assertion of their own identity is therefore intolerable. But reject ‘the Russian world’ they did, because Ukrainians do not wish to be ruled from the Kremlin even indirectly. That is why they overthrew Russia’s favoured oligarch and sought to chart their own course in the world.
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.
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