882. Oleg the Prophet captures Kyiv and moves the capital of the Viking kingdom from Novgorod to Kyiv. Thus the Rus becomes Kievan.
1703. Peter the Great of Rus-sia established Sank Petersburg as a bulwark against the Swedish Kingdom. The city served as Russia’s capital from 1712 to 1918
Kyiv hasn’t been besieged yet but has already been under heavy bombardment.
I’m Romanian. Romanians don’t have very fond memories of what had happened to their country whenever the Russian soldiers had come by to ‘visit’. As a teenager I read The 900 Days The Siege of Leningrad, 1968, by Harrison Salisbury
And wept.
Now, an already old man, I check out, on the Internet, what’s going out in Kyiv – the former capital of the Kievan Rus.
1. Sow doubt. 2. Drop a loud fact. Or two… This will simultaneously ‘water’ the previously planted seed and act as a ‘foot in the door’ for your next move. 3. ‘Miss-interpret’ another fact. 4. Mention an universal human emotion, inviting your audience to identify itself with the ‘victim’. 5. Squarely state what you want your audience to believe.
1. ‘The Soviet Union didn’t crumple under its own weight. It was dissolved by Yeltsin so that Gorbachev’s position would disappear. Leaving Yeltsin as the top dog of the day. Even if at the helm of a little smaller empire…’
2. ‘After the Cold War had ended, the West should have treated the ‘defeated’ as Germany, Italy and Japan had been treated after WWII. The West should have helped the Soviet Union to overcome the transition hurdles by extending to it an equivalent of the Marshall Plan. Instead of that, the Americans had come up with the Wolfowitz – later Bush, Doctrine.’
3. ‘Gorbatchev was told by James Baker that NATO will not move an inch eastward’
4. “…1998, Yeltsin, late Yeltsin: ‘you promised not to do this! So, how do we trust you, if you make a promise?’ “
5.1. Vladimir Putin has been created by the United States. 5.2. The so called free media in general – and New York Times in particular, cannot be trusted to provide honest information.
Pozner’s discourse is far more ‘byzantine’ than the ‘stream-lined’ version I used to illustrate what skillful propaganda looks like. Skillful maskirovka, more likely?
This post has become long enough. Let me wrap it up.
The main question here being ‘did he actually say it? Did Baker actually promised Gorbachev that “NATO will not move an inch eastward” ‘?
The Soviet Union is long gone, all the states which have been admitted into NATO are ‘in’ because they had asked themselves to join – and are now extremely glad to be protected by the famous 5th article – … while the only (frustrated) ‘agent’ who ever cried foul was Putin. Not only cried foul but eventualy acted out his frustrations!
There’s managing your resources – on your own, while trying to outsmart – out, in the open, your opponent.
And there’s team-work. An attempt to make the most of what lady-luck had put on the table by exchanging information. With your partner and in the presence of the competing team. This time only the conversation is out in the open, the resources themselves remain hidden. During the initial phase of the competition and, partially, during the end game.
Until WWI, war was more like chess than anything else. Resources were, more or less, out in the open. The soldiers had no other role but to do and die. The whole responsibility belonged to the guys who called the shots. One for each side…
WWI had ended indecisively. Hence WWII.
Each of the winning parties – there had been two victors, had learned something different from the experience. The Western allies had learned the value of cooperation while the Eastern ‘block’ had reached the conclusion that brute force trumps everything.
The Americans had started playing bridge with the Brits and taught the game to the rest of the world. The Russians had honed their skills at playing chess. Something they were already very good at. For a while, the Americans have tried to compete with the Russians. Remember a guy named Fischer? Bobby Fischer?
Soon, too soon, the Americans had given up. After building a computer smart enough to outsmart all human chess players…
The even worse part was that the Americans had given up bridge too! And forgot the most important lesson of WWI and WWII. That the victor needs to take care of the vanquished if they want to enjoy peace. To actually win the peace process after they had already won the war.
Which brings us to the end of the Cold War.
Communism – and practically all communist states, had crumpled under its own weight. The westerners assumed it was something they had done themselves. Declared victory. And the end of history…
Having already given up bridge, they forgot to take care of the vanquished… and allowed Russia – the party who had taken most of the blame over their shoulders, for reasons to be discussed some other time, to slide down the slope inaugurated by post WWI Germany. Did I mention that Russia was still fond of chess? Very much in love with brute force? And not very fond of respectful cooperation?
Now, that we all try to peek into the future – attempting to figure out how the current aggression ordered by Putin will end up, we need some people to learn about bridge.
Putin cannot launch by himself the nuclear missiles he had been brandishing lately.
Now, can those around him reset the chess board on which they are but pawns into a bridge table? And invite the rest of the world into the game?
Will the rest of us understand the invitation? If, and when, it will come?
Let us imagine, for a moment – or longer, than among the already innumerable objects circling the Earth is yet another surveillance satellite. One operated by aliens…
What would they think of the current developments?
One of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the topmost watchdog pretending to guard the ‘normalcy’ on Earth, brazenly attacks its neighbor. Both the aggressor and the victim are members of the organization watched over by the Security Council. But the aggressor has veto power over the Council. And, of course, uses that power whenever it sees fit. Another of the “five permanent members” of the Council chooses to abstain from voting. When the Council is discussing the aggression perpetrated by one of the permanent members of the Council against another fully recognized member of the ‘international community’.
Would the alien observers be laughing their heads off? Would they keep us isolated from the rest of the Universe? Lest we spread our suicidal behavior ‘among the stars’…? Both at the same time?!?
Quite a lot of people around the Internet are considering that ‘Ukraine is of little interest for the US’. Even some of the Europeans are considering that isolating Putin’s Russia from ‘SWIFT’ is a too steep price to be paid, by them, for Ukraine’s independence.
I remind them, all of them, of what Martin Niemoeller had to say on this subject.
Someone asked me a few months ago: ‘These guys who spread misleading information on the internet, whether out of sheer stupidity or out of personal interest, will at some point understand how many people they have killed. Directly or indirectly. How will they feel? In that moment…’
Until then, none of my vaccinated acquaintances have kicked the bucket. Nor seen the inside of any hospital… after being infected with Covid. Among those who have not been vaccinated… the situation is somewhat different… Although the unvaccinated are, among the people I’m personally acquainted to, about 4 times less frequent than the others, 8 of them are missing already. All 8 of them are no longer with us after having been diagnosed with Covid.
I hope you’ll have a ‘light’ conscience when we’ll arrive at the end of this mess.
In the sense that for that person, ratings – a.k.a. ‘money’ – are far more important than presenting an as accurate as possible version of reality…
Hence the public belief that ‘media are not to be trusted’.
A reality created by the greed with which we, as a cultured species, attempt to transform everything into money…., power…, or any other kind of ‘influence’/relevance we happen to covet….
Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan (1898, London); Cassandra in front of the burning city of Troy
“Oh God, please make it so that my prophecies won’t come to life!” “I’m sorry Cassandra, that’s what I made Man for. Now, it’s Their job to heed to your warnings!”
The larger your ‘skull’ is, the more ideas – sometimes conflicting ones, you are able to ‘harbor’.
This guy, a 31 years old father of two, is looking forward for a heart transplant.
Meaning that he, and his family, trust the doctors who are going to perform the surgery. Who are going to open up his chest, take his failing heart out, sew the ‘re-cycled’ one in and patch him up again. Doctors who need to hook him up to various machines and to pump him full of chemicals in order to maintain him alive – but unconscious, during the procedure. And who are going to closely monitor him – and, again, administer him a lot of vital drugs, during the rest of his life.
Meanwhile he, and his family, don’t trust the doctors who tell him he needs to get a Covid jab first.
True enough. Good people don’t need laws to tell them how to behave while the ‘cunningly willful’ amongst us will indeed, time and time again, try to circumvent the consequences of bypassing the law.
Then why? Two and a half millennia after Plato had dispensed this piece of wisdom we still have laws. Is there a possible explanation for this apparent aberration? Are we that thick-headed or there’s something else?
To settle this question – to start attempting to settle it, actually, we must first agree upon the difference between good and bad.
Ooops!
‘Everybody knows what good and bad is’ doesn’t really work, right?
In principle… maybe, but when it comes to putting principles into practice… we need guidelines! Just as ‘good fences make good neighbors‘, a clear understanding among the good about where the realm of the bad starts in earnest makes life a lot simpler. For all of us. And the more visible that line is, the simpler our life becomes.
Only this is but half of the actual explanation. Laws do make our life simpler, indeed. Unfortunately, ‘simpler’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘better’.
As some of you already know, I’ve spent half my life under communist rule. Does ‘Ceausescu’ ring any bells with you?
Under communism, life was a lot simpler than it is now. Presumably, life was a lot simpler under any of the many flavors of authoritarian rules experienced by humanity during its history. This being the reason for no matter how horrible a dictatorial regime had been, there were always some who had regretted when that regime had fallen.
‘OK, so what’s your point? That laws, in general, might be good but the laws which impose an authoritarian regime are bad? You know that you’ve just opened a fresh can of worms, right?’
How do you determine the difference between a good law and a bad one?
There’s no such thing. No law is above good and bad. For the simple reason that we call laws are made by us. We are fallible human beings and everything we make, including our laws, is, and should continue to be, constantly improved.
‘Then you’re nothing more than a ‘closet progressive‘! I knew it! ‘Constant improvement’… yuck! Not to mention the fact that the most important Law comes from God, not from Man!’
I’ve already disclosed that I’m an agnostic. That I have no idea whether a(ny) god had anything to do with what’s happening around/with us. All I know is that all laws, including the Bible – and all other Holy Books, had been written by people. By Humans, that is.
And I also know that there are two kinds of law. ‘Natural’ – as in noticed by us, and ‘synthetic’.
While all laws are ‘artificial’ – ‘written’ by us, the natural ones had been first noticed and only then put on paper. While all laws had been written on purpose – each ‘writer’ had their own reason for doing it, the ‘synthetic’ ones had been put together with a specific goal.
While observing – and when necessary improving, the natural laws benefits all, the ‘synthetic’ ones serve only those who make it their business to impose those laws upon the rest of the community.
While observing – and, when necessary, imposing them upon SOME, improves the prospects of the entire community, designing and imposing ‘synthetic’ laws upon a community will always bring a huge amount of disturbance. Sometimes fatal for that community. Always fatal for the regime attempting it!
‘How about some examples?’
I’ll give you two natural laws and a ‘synthetic’ one.
The law of gravity. Also known as Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. This law didn’t need Newton to notice it. The Earth had already been orbiting the Sun for a while before Newton told us why.
‘Do not kill’. A subset of the Golden Rule, ‘Do no harm, if you can help it’. Also ‘natural’ but a lot more ‘fluid’. And, strangely enough, noticed and ‘put on paper’ way before the law of the falling objects… Just think of it! The ‘law makers’ have noticed long, long ago that the communities which follow the Golden Rule fare much better than those whose members treat each-other like dirt. Yet only a few short centuries ago somebody ‘noticed’ that things fall according to a constant rule… and bothered to make it into a law. Was ‘gravity’ too obvious? Inescapable, so why bother? While the Golden Rule worked better when enforced? When the formal rule mandated that even the rulers themselves had to obey the rule?
It’s easy to notice that the first two, the ‘natural’ ones, produce consequences regardless of people observing them or not. Meanwhile, ‘synthetic’ laws are, entirely, the figment of somebody’s imagination. And produce consequences only when/if enough people are ‘seduced’ by the perspectives of those laws being put into practice. Communist rule, for instance, could be put into practice only when enough people had been seduced by Marx’s ideal that all property should belong to the state and be managed by a ‘select’ few. Only then, after those ‘select’ few had, somehow, convinced enough followers, could Marx’s ideas be transformed into laws. And put in practice. With the already obvious consequences…
‘OK, but I still don’t get it! Is there a way to tell whether a law is good or bad before-hand? Before its consequences had become manifest?’
That’s a tall order. And you know that!
Actually, no! There’s no fire-proof method of ascertaining anything before-hand, let alone something made by us.
But there is a next best thing. The ‘natural’ laws are natural because they had been first observed. Only then written into law. And because of things proceeding in this order, whenever something changed those who had noticed the change had adapted the wording of the law to the new reality. Simply because those who had to make do with the consequences of the law being put into practice could not wait too long whenever they had noticed that there was a better way.
People have dreamed of flying since god only knows when but they had learned how to do it only after they had been told that everything is pulled to the center of the Earth. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ had been very useful. For a while… Now we use the same principle – do no harm, but we implement it in a more nuanced manner.
People have also dreamed of a fair society. And, frankly, ours is a lot fairer than that of our grand-parents. Because we have constantly improved our ‘manners’. We have not only observed ourselves while living but we’ve also done something when anything went wrong. The problem is – and it’s only one problem here, that not all things can be reversed. Some mistakes can be fully redressed, other compensated … but we’ll have to take with us the consequences of those mistakes. And the longer a mistake is allowed to happen, the more important the consequences. So. ‘Synthetic’ rules are bad not because they have been dreamed up by us. They are bad because those who promote them cannot accept the idea they might have been wrong. The really bad ‘synthetic’ rules were those who could not be changed from within!
Whenever a law maintains that things cannot happen, ever, but in the manner prescribed by that very law, that text is no longer a law. It’s a dictate! It’s dictates that we can do without, not laws. And it’s our job to make out the difference. One way or another.
Disclosure. You haven’t ‘heard’ this from me. I’ve only ’embellished’ some ideas I’ve stolen from Popper, inasmuch as I’ve understood anything from them.
nicichiarasa 