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TALLRITE BLOG
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August 2008 |
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ISSUE #181 - 31st August 2008 [397+ 352=749]
Click here for PDF Version of Issue #181 (132 kb) |
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Putin - Czar of the New Russian Expansionist Empire
“That
which we call an empire by any other name
would smell as foul.” Even as Russia deplores the internationally endorsed breakaway of Kosovo province from Serbia, Russia’s military invasion aimed at breaking two provinces away from the sovereign democratic country of Georgia, should really come as no surprise. One might have thought that a breakaway province was either good or bad. But Russia and its leadership have, over the centuries, never been able to resist the drug of imperialism, and it still intoxicates today, more headily than vodka. Thus
Russia, like that other Security Council big power China, has never allowed any piffling interference such as “international law” to stand in the way of what it wants to do. That is something for countries like America and Britain to worry about and be eternally castigated over. In the long years of the cold war, there was only one kind of imperialism that the world heard about – Western imperialism, or its constituents such as American imperialism, British imperialism, French imperialism. And who were the commonest utterers of these curious, pejorative phrases – none other than the two most dedicated totalitarian imperialist powers of the age, the Soviet Union and China, aided and abetted by countless “useful idiots” (to misquote Lenin) in the West and elsewhere. The Soviet Union was comprised of what is now known as Russia, plus an array of neighbouring countries that it managed to acquire in the rubble of the Second World war. Thus were the Baltic states and eastern Poland subsumed, against their will, into becoming an integral part of a foreign “country”, whilst swathes of Eastern Europe, without the consent of their populations, ended up as de-facto vassal states of that country. The Romans would recognize the Soviet Union for what it was – an old-fashioned empire, run by the emperor (Stalin and his successors) in the Kremlin, for the sole benefit and satisfaction of him and his cronies. China was and is, in essence, no different. It has been an empire since time immemorial comprising territory and peoples with alien languages and cultures, acquired through mainly military means. Yet notwithstanding the formal end of imperial rule in 1912 under Emperor Puyi of the Qing dynasty, it has remained an empire in all but name, for it has released none of its acquired territories. Moreover, after the Communists came to power in 1949 its imperialist expansion resumed under the all-powerful de-facto Emperor, Mao Tse-Tung, when the following year he conquered and occupied Tibet, a massive piece of real estate bigger than all eleven countries gobbled up by the Soviet Union in 1945 combined.
By contrast, America has never been a recognisable empire, while Britain, France and other European nations spent the early post-war decades divesting themselves of their imperial acquisitions in a massive liberation movement that swept across Africa and Asia. That is the irony of imperialistic Soviet and Chinese leaders propagandising about so-called Western imperialism. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1990 following economic impoverishment brought on by gross administrative incompetence and by trying to match America’s arms build-up of the 1980s, coupled with a string of peoples’ revolts starting in Poland. The vassal states broke free, as did several constituent Soviet states: the nations in the Baltic and in the Caucasus, as well as Ukraine and the Stans in central Asia. What was left was today’s Russian Federation. However it too is the result of imperial conquest back in Czarist days. Today it comprises 22 constituent republics, from Adyghaya to Udmurt, each with its own flag, anthem, history, traditions and often language, each supposedly a “voluntary” member, though the populations have never been asked. And each is headed by a chief executive or governor appointed by ... the Kremlin. Most are members of the “federation” because they were swallowed up by Russia in its ever-expanding and colonising empire of the 16th century (Czar Ivan the Terrible) and onwards, either through military conquest or focused marriages or both. Indeed, Russia was proud to call itself the Russian Empire until the Communists overthrew the Czar in 1917. The Reds loved the concept but hated the name, so they called their inherited empire a “union” and in due course annexed or subjugated those eleven European nations. In recent years it has become clear that the latest Russian leadership also loves the empire concept but prefers the name “federation” as it sounds, well, friendlier. And indeed was friendlier to its own people and to the rest of the world in the Boris Yeltsin days when it tried to embrace, however clumsily, constitutional democracy and individual freedom for the first time in its history. But that has changed dramatically under Vladimir Putin, truly an old-style Czar, whether he calls himself president or prime minister. A one-time KGB boss, he was gifted the Russian presidency by a barely compos mentis Boris Yeltsin on the eve of the new millennium. No-one really knows why, but there are suggestions that in exchange Putin agreed not to pursue Yeltsin for financial shenanigans. Mr Putin lost no time in flexing muscles, exerting authority and centralising power. A dreadful, unsolved bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow provided him with a flimsy excuse to mercilessly flatten Grozny and much of Chechnya, with no regard for human rights, for daring to seek independence. He pretty soon reversed many of Yeltsin’s democratic reforms; in particular, powerful regional governors were no longer to be elected by the people they would serve, but appointed by himself. Troublesome individuals were assassinated, whether journalists exposing Russian misbehaviour in Chechnya such as Anna Politkovskaya, or outspoken critics in exile like Alexander Litvinenko. Wealthy businessmen with political aspirations were ruined, notably the boss of Yukos, Russia’s most professional and ethical oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now banished interminably to Siberia on manufactured charges of tax evasion and fraud. As former components of the Soviet Empire such as Ukraine became more democratic and opted to cosy up to the West, Mr Putin showed his displeasure and power by cutting off gas supplies, a move that had repercussions throughout the Russian gas supply chain that stretches across Europe. This was all in keeping with his appalling observation that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and his obvious desire to recreate that benighted empire. That’s one reason he resurrected the Soviet Union’s anthem extolling “Communism's deathless ideal”, an admittedly stirring musical ditty which had supposedly been consigned to the dustbin after the collapse. Russia’s invasion of Georgia finally makes clear the objectives of Czar Putin. It is no less than to expand the ancient Russian Empire to once more engulf as many fragments of the Soviet Empire lost in 1991 as possible. The reasons are twofold.
The converse of this imperialism is of course Russia’s terror at the thought of its own fragmentation, with Chechnya but the first in line of subject countries yearning to escape the Russian yoke. And it explains its horror that Kosovo has successfully broken free of friendly Serbia, setting a dangerous anti-Russian precedent, which its own 22 constituent “republics” have been watching carefully, many wondering when their own chance of independence might come.
Meanwhile, Georgia was just the first step in Russia’s new imperialistic Already, Russia has recognized the “independence” of both South Ossetia and Georgia’s other Russophile enclave Abkhazia. It is surely only a matter of time before they are both reabsorbed into the new Russian Empire. Then look around Russia’s borders and speculate who might be next on the Russian Empire’s menu. For instance, Ukraine has eight million ethnic Russians plus a wonderful port in Sevastopol which houses Russia’s fleet under a lease agreement expiring in 2017. Is it conceivable
Most of the former Soviet states have big Russian populations, largely the result of forced colonisation to embed them better into the erstwhile Soviet Empire. Such territories, bordering on the current Russian empire, are therefore tempting targets for expansion. It is unreasonable to expect Czar Putin not to explore ways to reabsorb them, by fair means or foul. Russian imperialism is undoubtedly the new realism the world has to get used to. There are only two responses to it:
But has the West got the stomach for the second alternative? What Rumsfeld derisively called “Old Europe” made a wobbly start, but “New Europe” further east, which knows from bitter experience exactly what being under a Russian imperial thumb is like, did not. The Czechs and the Poles rapidly signed up to America's anti-missile system, ostensibly aimed at Iran. The Baltic and Ukrainian leaderships rushed to express their support for Georgia and its territorial integrity. This seemed to stiffen the spines of “Old Europe” somewhat and threats followed of excluding Russia from bodies such as the G8 and WTO and other measures. For the thought of constant expansion of Czar Putin’s modern Russian Empire is just too awful to contemplate for the tens of millions of independent citizens that this would place under subjugation. Everyone has a moral duty to resist, object, cry “foul”. For foul indeed is this new imperial enterprise.
More about Russia's impending demographic calamity
The more I read about and watch Barack Obama , the more I am reminded of Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, 13:1:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,
and have
not love, With his soaring rhetoric, Mr Obama certainly speaks with “the tongues of men and of angels”, but It is unfair to suggest he lacks love. He clearly loves his family and has many friends. And it is after all not he but his wife who has trouble with the concept of loving America. But the talk of “an empty gong or a clashing cymbal” strikes a chord, so to speak, with me. Even after more than a year of vigorous campaigning it is impossible to know what he would actually do were he to be elected. Not that he hasn't told us, he has told us plenty, but he keeps telling us different, contradictory stuff. So what are people supposed to believe? Does he even know himself what he believes?
Over the long campaigning months, his uplifting speeches and (rare) debates and interviews have at different times adopted both sides of these questions, and many others, in what almost amounts to Orwellian doublespeak. His big nomination speech last week didn't add much light, and for much the same reason. For example, how long will it be before he “clarifies” what he means by, say, his trumpeted tax cuts? So let's see if what we can learn about him from other aspects of his life sheds any light. Views about people are often formed by what they have achieved in their lives. But Mr Obama's career before this campaign has thrown up no accomplishments of note, other than two biographical books that are, admittedly, earning him millions of dollars, though more because of his rock-star status than their content.
So you certainly can't evaluate him by his achievements. An “empty gong”? So how about the people he mixes with? They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps. But some of Mr Obama's friends (that we know about) look decidedly odd.
These are the kinds of people he likes to hang out with, so what does that tell us about the future behaviour and sympathies of a President Obama? Anyone can make a mistake by choosing a friend who turns out to be a knave. But six of them? Then, contrast this motley, awkward and embarrassing coterie of buddies with his intoxicating speeches. A “clashing cymbal”?
But you be the judge. In fact here's a better idea. Let the American people be the judge this coming November. Full Disclosure: I have no vote
Irish American Election - the role of beer The Irish consider Ireland to be the 51st American state (though not while George W Bush is in charge, obviously) but are unable to understand either the election process or why the Irish aren't allowed to vote in it. In this context, the following e-mail has been doing the rounds in Ireland and parts of the US.
Hat tip: Ted M in Uganda
In the interests solely of prurience and cheap publicity, let me share this photo with you.
It shows a Peruvian model, dancer and singer called Lacey Zamudio, also known as Leysi Suarez. She recently got into hot water, but not for her Lady Godiva impression (“Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride / To show the local gentry there colour of her hide”). After all, it's not as if she is unclothed: look at that cowboy hat. No, her sin is that she is using Peru's sacred flag as her saddle, for which she was recently arrested and faces charges that, amazingly, could put her in jail for up to four years for offending patriotic symbols, as this is apparently a violation of Article 344 of the Peruvian Penal Code. Judicial hearings began in August, though she has already said she is sorry. When not out riding horses, her main job is singing and dancing for the all-girl pop-group Alma Bella, or Beautiful Soul, which seems to specialise in a lot of wiggling female backsides.
When the horse photo was splashed on the cover of D'Farándula magazine it caused a political uproar because it was just days before the 187th anniversary of Peru's independence from Spain, a deeply solemn day in Peru apparently. Ms Suarez herself believes she was in fact expressing a patriotic gesture: “I haven’t committed a crime. I love Peru and show it with my body and soul”. I'd be on Lady Godiva's side on this one. Oh, and the rest of that verse? It's from the first stanza of “The Engineers' Song”. “And the only one to notice that Godiva rode a horse Full disclosure: I am an engineer,
Issue 181’s Comment to Cyberspace Only one minor scribbling during the past few weeks when I have been out of action.
- - - - - - - US ELECTION - - - - - - -
Mr Obama plays race card
Barack Hussein Obama plays the
race card. I guess that makes me a racist too.
Mr Dean also plays the race
card
Howard Dean, failed Democratic
presidential nominee in 2004,
I guess he never heard of Colin
Powell or Condoleeza Rice,
McCain smart remark
Republican US presidential hopeful Senator John McCain Quote: “You need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans.”
Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans - - - - - - - R U S S I A N I M P E R I A L I S M - - - - - - - Quote: “This is not 1968, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can invade its neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.” Condoleezza Rice on military clashes between Russia and Georgia.
Sadly, I don’t think she’s
right.
Unless the West is prepared to
vigorously resist this trend, - - - - - - - C H I N A - - - - - - - Quote: “I don’t think any other country in the world, apart from North Korea, could get such a quality of performance from its actors as we did.”
Zhang Yimou, a
well-known filmmaker,
Ah yes, the beauty of
Communist totalitarianism. - - - - - - - I R E L A N D - - - - - - - Quote: “A second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty will ‘ultimately’ be required.”
Dick Roche, Ireland's Minister of State for European Affairs,
Despairing of the inconvenience of democracy, Quote: “There's nothing big or clever about being stupid.”
Irish
columnist Donald Clark bemoans
the fact that
But scientists or
mathematicians who
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ISSUE #180 - 3rd August 2008 [455+1192=1647]
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Big-Boss to Fugitive to Captive
In only my second month of blogging, back in the halcyon days of 2002, I wrote a post about the two indicted, on-the-run Serbian war criminals Ratko Mladic and his boss Mr Karadzic. Both had once been big bosses amongst their fellow Bosnian Serbs: Mladic a senior army general and Karadzic the president. During that summer, between long periods of lethargy, the Nato-led SFOR stabilisation mission was having one of its periodic bouts of activity when it would pretend to search for the two fugitives in the mountains of Serbia and Bosnia, the Serbs would pretend not to obstruct them, and the media would use the story to brighten up an otherwise news-free silly-season August. Two years later, as the indictment saga once again hit the headlines and nothing much had changed, I regurgitated much of it in a letter kindly published by the Irish Times.
I
pointed out that being indicted is itself a lifetime sentence whether or not
you are captured. You have, effectively, been charged, tried, found guilty and then
sentenced to a miserable life-long punishment of fugitivism. This is all
done, in absentia, via the presentation of unchallenged evidence to a
faceless committee operating behind closed doors, and without your ever having the chance to put up a defence
or even knowing the details of what exactly you are being accused of.
Your
only way out, if you can call it that, is to present yourself for trial
to the tribunal that has indicted you and hope that the terms of your
imprisonment are shorter than the lifetime sentence you are otherwise
serving as a fugitive.
As an indictee, a life of constant hiding and harassment - real or imagined - lies ahead, spent in mountain hideaways, secret chalets, unknown monasteries, anonymous villages, faceless towerblocks, with no end in sight. Despite how many ill-gotten millions you may have squirreled away, they will not provide much fun -
What we now see of the experiences of Mr Karadzic bears out what seemed pretty self-evident six years ago, at least to me. From the moment that the International Criminal Court, or equivalent body, decides to indict someone, which it does unilaterally though only for the most heinous of crimes, that person's life is effectively over. He must either spend his remaining years
These stark alternatives - fugitivism or captivity - confront every recent indictee I can think of, some now liberated through death.
Either way, Gen Mladic's life has, thanks to the indictment, long been over; he is irrevocably locked into the trajectory from big-boss to fugitive to captive. He is certainly not “getting away with murder” as his many victims might feel.
Ancient Greeks' Astronomical Computer The latest Olympiad, to be held in Beijing, begins, auspiciously, on Friday 8th August 2008, better expressed as 8/8/8, to reflect the root of its auspiciousness in Chinese lore. Single digit numbers are always special for the Chinese, and the more the better, but eight is the most special of all. This is because In Cantonese it is pronounced Bah, in Mandarin Fah, and the word forms part of the expression for “get wealthy”. That's the reason I will be attending a nephew's wedding that day, the date selected because he is half Chinese, and (like the rest of us) hopes to “get wealthy” thanks to 8/8/8. In this context, I was astonished to learn recently of the story of a Roman merchant vessel from the second century BC, whose wreck was discovered in 1901 by divers off the Greek island of Antikythera. It turned out to be stuffed full of Greek treasures, artefacts and bronze statuary, which in due course made their way to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Some months later, an indiscriminate lump of metal split apart, to reveal some small precision gear-wheels and mysterious, indistinct inscriptions. This was clearly a machine of some sort. But its state of deterioration prevented anyone from properly understanding it, until the advent of 21st century technology in the form of 3D X-Rays and modern IT, combined with astronomical expertise and classical Greek scholarship, allowed its secrets to be delicately prised open. The Antikythera mechanism turns out to be a clockwork driven
clock, which is astounding enough for a device over two thousand years old,
but it's not just any old clock.
An animated, functioning copy has been reconstructed on a virtual (computerised) basis, allowing it to be rotated and viewed on a screen from every angle and in great detail. Don Unwin, a master instrument-maker of historic clocks has been commissioned to build a working physical replica, and is clearly excited at the prospect. The original had two calendar functions which have attracted particular attention, with separate sub-dials on the face of the clock from which the ancients could read off the information.
Those involved in unscrambling what amounts to a mechanical computer built by the ancient Greeks describe it as “a complicated model doing complicated and extremely sophisticated things in a design which is pure genius”. In the latest issue of Nature magazine you can find an article explaining the work done to date. But there is an even better, utterly compelling video here, as we approach the “get wealthy” Olympic date of 8/8/8.
Amongst the tragedy and misery of the 9/11 outrage, one particular act of incredible, selfless courage stood out. When United Airlines Flight 93, flying out of New Jersey, was forced by Islamic suicide hijackers to U-turn from its trajectory to San Francisco and start heading back towards the White House, the passengers realised what was happening, because over their mobile phones they had learnt about the the two planes which had already been flown into the Twin Towers. The hijackers on Flight 93 had already killed one passenger and wounded the flight crew. But rather than cower in fear and wait for the “inevitable” to happen, they got together and took action in the American way. A hitherto nondescript IT account manager, Todd Beamer, became a heroic leader. He and a hastily assembled team of other passengers launched a counter attack on the hijackers, which successfully aborted the White House mission, but at the price of crash-landing in a field in Pennsylvania with everyone on board killed. Just before the fateful attack, Todd Beamer was overheard on a mobile phone shouting “Let's roll!”. This later later became a battle cry for those fighting Al-Qaeda, inspiring thousands all over the world - civilians and military alike - to fight back against evil-doers, to this day. One of those was undoubtedly Jake in England. A couple of years ago I wrote about this baby-faced then 12-year-old who, when a 95-kilo thug in a balaclava demanded his mobile phone and threw a punch, delivered to Mr Balaclava a broken nose instead. Young Jake, who turned out to be a karate brown-belt, in his own “Let's roll!” moment dodged the punch and landed a kick squarely on his assailant's nose, which cracked loudly. The man ran away in pain. Shamefully however the police said he should have meekly handed over his phone. Sadly, Todd Beamer's heroic example does not seem to have permeated to all parts of Canada. Last week a 40-year-old passenger on a Greyhound bus in western Canada calmly murdered the 19-year-old man sitting beside him. Garnet Caton, one of 35 other passengers aboard the bus , describes what happened -
From reports, it is apparent that the 35 other passengers calmly allowed the killer to proceed with his grisly business unmolested, but then stampeded off the bus in terror at the first opportunity. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In
fact, the only thing your money is good for is to pay your bodyguards.
Mr 
And
of course, there's Ratko Mladic,
the brutal, murderous Bosnian Serb army general who, in addition to many
other crimes, oversaw the massacre of
6,000 men and boys at Srebenica, whilst reporting to his buddy Mr
Karadzic. With his big-boss phase long over, he is now in his fourteenth
boring year as a fugitive. Because he used to be a
military man, he probably still has quite a following among his erstwhile
soldiers, who doubtless continue to provide physical protection but with
less drain on personal resources than Mr Karadzic could manage. So he might
last a decade or so longer, but he too will one day fall captive into a prosecutor's arms,
unless he simply dies prematurely due to stress, as did Slobodan Milosevic
in 2006 during his own war-crimes trial. 
Its
intricate gears with hundreds of tiny teeth and epicyclical trajectories
betray its true function as a mechanical astronomic computer which uses the
predicted movement of the stars and planets to calculate time and dates.