[Peter] Reddaway has emphasized that modern Russian political life cannot be understood without reference to “political technology,” which represents an extreme form of political consultancy involving manipulation of individuals and large-scale deception. Since, Reddaway explained, at the core of any “political technologist’s” plan, there lies a conspiracy, any good analyst of Russian politics needs to be a conspiracy theorist as well. Conspiracy theorists, he noted, are usually mocked in countries with transparent political systems. But a system becomes more prone to conspiracies if the ruler remains in power for a long time and controls large parts of its wealth. Russia and Iran, he observed, would be two examples of present-day countries with conspiratorial politics.

—John B. Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999, (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2012), 17-18.

Я делаю домашнее задание. Я делал домашнее задание. Я буду делать домашнее задание.

Nika Dubrovsky, CounterPunch:

Impossible not to have a view on Israeli government policy these days, but Artem’s views are not so different than those held by the mainstream Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In which case, the question is what has Artem done and why has he been sitting in a Shin Bet prison without habeas corpus for a week?

…

To arrest Artem is to make private individuals afraid and to make them internalize their penguin-like condition, to shut up, and sit quietly in the corner. Arresting a bespectacled writer with a narrow audience is both easy and makes for a perfectly instructive example. Before Artem was arrested, it seemed to many of us – me included – that there were ‘anomaly zones’ out there: in those anomaly zones, one could be somewhat safe from arbitrary arrest. It was felt that as long as you did not cross certain well understood line, you could write, read, and speak about pretty much anything. Don’t join a party, don’t donate to certain organizations, don’t say certain things. But the lines that seemed to exist have now been erased and what you whisper in your kitchen can now get you into a prison cell.

The everyday curdles into a nightmare. The kitchen and the prison are becoming the same room. We have become like frogs that do not notice that the water in which they are swimming has started to come to a boil. We have made straightforward cannibalism normal.

When Artem was arrested, his old blog opponents said, what did he expect, going to Israel, when he could have sat quietly in Petersburg and minded his own business. Sorry. That’s just the attitude of the frog. There are no safe places left. There are no crags left to hide a penguin. Artem is not the hero-petrel. He is much more like the penguin. And so, it is now getting clear to us, that the penguin hunt has begun. Anyone at all can be picked up and tossed into the darkness.

Gorky did not know much about penguins. Although they look defenseless, they can stand their ground as a pack and peck their way out of trouble; in water, penguins are agile and fast, forming ‘rafts’ to beat adversaries and escape. Artem needs his penguins to act in unison. Please make noise for him.

Most of this essay really spoke to me. Reading news of journalists, historians, writers, being arrested in Russia and Israel, Jacques Baad, a retired Swiss colonel having his bank  accounts frozen in Belgium for his writing about Ukraine, a Russian journalist being expelled from France for her views on Ukraine, a Turkish journalist having his banking frozen here in Berlin for his writing on Gaza, with the justification that by writing on Gaza he was serving Russia, British citizens being arrested, and in fact en masse, by the hundreds, simply for voicing support for Palestinians, all of these expose societal myths about free speech, democracy, due process, as what they are: myths.

What really stood out for me, though, was her conclusion, where she continues her analogy to say that humans, like penguins, can “stand their ground as a pack and peck their way out of trouble”, or form “‘rafts’ to beat adversaries and escape”. Here, for us, there seems to be little ability to peck our way out of trouble. Escape seems for many people to be the possibility that remains, however escape does not alter the threatening environment.

Rzhanitsky had three unspent bullets left in his revolver but, maddened by his failure and perhaps, in his agitation, forgetting that they were there, he flung his Browning against the rocks.

—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, (London: Vintage, 2002), 320.

I used to own a Browning, as one of a number of classic weapons. Browning handguns and machine guns were certainly present in Russia – Stolypin after all was assassinated with a Browning – but Browning never made a revolver. I read on social media that while automatics were becoming introduced “revolver” was a term commonly used for any handgun, so one could assume that this was, in fact, a Browning, just labeled “revolver” by Hayward and Harari’s translation, but we were also told Rzhanitsky had earlier fired three shots, leaving three. Now perhaps the suggestion is that he started out with six in his mag, but this to me seems less probable than the idea Pasternak pictured this weapon when fully loaded containing six bullets. It was not a Browning.

Wolfgang Streeck:

Before capitalism will be over, there will a long time of crisis, or crises, of frictions between institutions and expectations that no longer fit together, of contested experiments trying to restore the old order or to introduce a new one, under high uncertainty, with support and resistance from unexpected quarters. Also, dismantling a civilization is one thing; replacing it with another, another. We are not talking about an act of social engineering here, to be completed in one generation, but about a long march into an unknown future, a new social settlement after a long intermission without one, or with only the fragments of one. For a West European, the best analogue might be the end of the pagan Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian civilization of the early Middle Ages, which took about 500 years, depending on how you count. This time, we may hope, it might go a little faster, but clearly not as fast as some impatient people on the Left expect.

…

Warfare Keynesianism may come in the form of an authoritarian regression of liberal democracy under the pretense of a national emergency, justifying democracy being converted into “militant democracy”, domestically and internationally. This is what I see to be underway not just in the United States but also in Western Europe.

…

The ideological framework after 1990 was globalization, neoliberalism, Washington Consensus, rule-based international order, all codewords in effect for the United States ruling the world through US-dominated international organizations and institutions and, not to forget, capitalist mega-corporations. This worked for a while until it, as it were, outlived itself: the United States government neglected its home country in the “War on Terror” and with its willful de-industrialization, while inside the New World Order China and Russia prospered until they were considered by the United States to be too powerful to fit into American political hegemony – just as Germany and Japan were seen by the United States as rivals for industrial hegemony in the 1980s. Now, in what is indeed a “true break”, formulas are sought for a multipolar world and the struggle over how its poles will relate to each other, in particular what the place in it will be of the United States, the Great Power of the thirty years of neoliberal Americanism. Among the many things that I find interesting here is that at least in Western Europe, it is not so much on the fringes that new concepts of political economy arise but at the center. There, a new military-industrial complex is thriving based on quite old-fashioned war propaganda – the designation of existential enemies, like Russia and China – and on attempts to make domestic opponents appear like a fifth column of foreign enemies.

The timespan here to me seems analogous to times for reversing climate breakdown. In simple terms, for the rest of my life, and for the lives of my children, capitalist societies will be failing, as the globe will be warming. Society and climate will break down at an accelerating rate. There will be no replacement for this within my lifetime nor within the lifetimes of my children.

Guardian:

CBS News reported that the US and Israel were planning joint strikes, possibly throughout the weekend, with oil refineries and power plants among possible targets.

This line is buried in the middle of the Guardian article. The US plans to bomb Iranian oil refineries and power plants. Ho hum, just another day in western news. Why is the US bombing Iranian oil refineries? What justifies this? Who allows this? How does this end?