I would like to quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous Harvard Commencement Address delivered in 1978. He said that typical of the West is “a continuous blindness of superiority” – and it continues to this day – which “upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present-day Western systems.” He said this in 1978. Nothing has changed.

Over the nearly 50 years since then, the blindness about which Solzhenitsyn spoke and which is openly racist and neocolonial, has acquired especially distorted forms, in particular, after the emergence of the so-called unipolar world. What am I referring to? Belief in one’s infallibility is very dangerous; it is only one step away from the desire of the infallible to destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to cancel them. Just think about the meaning of this word.

Even at the very peak of the Cold War, the peak of the confrontation of the two systems, ideologies and military rivalry, it did not occur to anyone to deny the very existence of the culture, art, and science of other peoples, their opponents. It did not even occur to anyone. Yes, certain restrictions were imposed on contacts in education, science, culture, and, unfortunately, sports. But nonetheless, both the Soviet and American leaders understood that it was necessary to treat the humanitarian area tactfully, studying and respecting your rival, and sometimes even borrowing from them in order to retain a foundation for sound, productive relations at least for the future.

And what is happening now? At one time, the Nazis reached the point of burning books, and now the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” have reached the point of banning Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “cancel culture” and in reality – as we said many times – the real cancellation of culture is eradicating everything that is alive and creative and stifles free thought in all areas, be it economics, politics or culture.

Today, liberal ideology itself has changed beyond recognition. If initially, classic liberalism was understood to mean the freedom of every person to do and say as they pleased, in the 20^th century the liberals started saying that the so-called open society had enemies and that the freedom of these enemies could and should be restricted if not cancelled. It has reached the absurd point where any alternative opinion is declared subversive propaganda and a threat to democracy.

Whatever comes from Russia is all branded as “Kremlin intrigues.” But look at yourselves. Are we really so all-powerful? Any criticism of our opponents – any – is perceived as “Kremlin intrigues,” “the hand of the Kremlin.” This is insane. What have you sunk to? Use your brain, at least, say something more interesting, lay out your viewpoint conceptually. You cannot blame everything on the Kremlin’s scheming.

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Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, New Left Review:

Analyses of climate change, in particular, demonstrate how intimately the history of capitalist development is tied to the extraction of fossil fuels. Many authors point out that saying human actions cause climate change or that we have entered an Anthropocene age, as if the species as a whole was equally responsible for the decisions that created our present predicament, masks the fact that a relatively small class of capitalists in the dominant countries are really responsible. As these studies make clear, a necessary precondition for any project to preserve the long-term health of the planet is challenging and overcoming the primacy of capitalist rule.²⁹

Susan Watkins, New Left Review:

In March, Kiev’s position at the Istanbul peace talks was for (hyper-guaranteed) neutrality and the retreat of Moscow’s forces to pre-invasion lines. In April, the us pulled the rug out from under the Russian–Ukrainian talks, delivering the message that, for the West, Putin would not be a negotiating partner.²¹ Today, Kiev demands the full Ukrainianization of Crimea. Moscow wanted a treaty with nato and has ended up in an all-consuming war. Washington aimed for the painless extension of its hegemony across Eastern Europe and instead has had to grapple with inflationary fuel prices, as key congressional elections loom. Looking at the abstentions and no-votes on Ukraine at the un this October, Brzezinski could have pointed out that Washington is precisely losing support in Eurasia—India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well as the Central Asian republics, China, Iran, Vietnam and Laos—and two-thirds of Africa, from Algeria, the Sudans and Ethiopia to the dcr, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The us was left with the nato and asean states, plus (most of) Latin America.

The result of the escalatory dynamic has been, firstly, a disastrous deepening of the Ukrainian civil conflict.

Ω Ω Ω

Unless there are dramatic new developments before the winter, Russia’s war of territorial conquest seems set to freeze into one of defensive attrition that will eventually take a high economic toll. At the same time, unless the us radically changes its game, Ukraine does not appear to have a military strategy to recover the lost fifth of its territory. If, as Zelensky now claims, its aim is the reconquest of Crimea, Kiev’s war will take on a neo-imperial character too, subduing rebel regions. So far, the Biden Administration’s only tactic for achieving regime change in Russia is to drag out the war. Meanwhile, nato’s truly chilling 2022 ‘Strategic Concept’ document brigades its thirty-odd member states behind Washington in the stand-off against Beijing.

In theory, the major European states could have balanced with Russia against the us after the end of the Cold War, insisting on a more accommodating, globally multiculturalist frame­work that would have made room for rising powers, as some American strategists were suggesting. Blocking that outcome was not just the conviction of the us foreign-policy elite that the alternative to its rule was global chaos. After fifty years of sapped sovereignty, European states lack the material and imaginative resources for a counter-hegemonic project. Germany in particular has been further shackled to Atlanticism with each new crisis: Yugoslavia, the financial crash, Ukraine. ‘Sleepwalkers’ was the indelible term coined by Christopher Clark for the descent of the great powers into World War One. In the 2020s, the Europeans are wide awake, smiling and cheering, exulting in their ‘strategic autonomy’ as they are frogmarched towards the next global conflict for us primacy.

Jemand fragte den Kapitän in der nächsten Reihe vor Schuchow: »Wie kommt es, daß du so viel über das Leben in der britischen Marine weißt?«

»Ja, schau an, ich habe fast einen ganzen Monat auf einem britischen Kreuzer verbracht und hatte dort eine Kajüte für mich. Ich war bei den Geleitzügen dort, als Verbindungsoffizier. Nach dem Krieg hat mir dann ein britischer Admiral, dem ich mehr Verstand zugetraut hätte, ein kleines Souvenir geschickt, und da stand drauf: ›In Dankbarkeit‹. Ich war wie vor den Kopf geschlagen und fluchte wie verrückt. Und so bin ich nun hier im Lager, mit all den anderen. Es ist kein Vergnügen, hier zusammen mit dem ganzen Bandera-Pack zu sitzen.«

—Alexander Solschenizyn, »Ein Tag im Leben des Iwan Denissowitsch«, (München: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt, 1963), 173.

Full transcript and video

Borrell says „I suppose that all of you have been reading and re-reading the latest speech of Putin when he declared the annexation. That is a must. Every European citizen must read this speech – and you, in particular. You have to explain to the world what does it mean, what does this approach against the West mean, and which are the real reasons of this war.“ Notice Borrell says „every European citizen must read this speech„, not „every European citizen must read what US or European mass media or some government spokesman says about the speech“.

During sentencing, the prosecution attempted to show that I was a narcissist with a superiority complex.

—Chelsea Manning, README.txt, (London: The Bodley Head, 2022), 216.

As the trial began, the courtroom was filled with press; older activists with shaggy beards and tie-dyed shirts; groups like Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Occupy Wall Street; and the Chelsea Manning Support Network, a nonprofit organization that helped raise funds for my legal defense and subsequent appeals. Many of the activists in attendance were older—boomers with a lifelong, Vietnam-related commitment to pacifism. They gathered outside Fort Meade, in groups of fifteen or twenty, holding up signs with messages such as i support manning, and cars going by would occasionally honk at them in support. I appreciated the sentiment, but inside the court­room, they were loud in their civil disobedience, sometimes interrupting and slowing down the proceedings. I watched Judge Lind get more and more irritated, and worried it would turn her against me. At that moment, I was laser-focused on trying to win the court-martial: for me, this wasn’t a great symbolic action, it was my life.

—Chelsea Manning, README.txt, (London: The Bodley Head, 2022), 203.

Photograph: Camila Falquez/The Guardian. Dress: Balenciaga

The prison guards were children. They were soldiers, eighteen or nineteen years old, never having so much as sniffed a deployment but given a badge of authority.

—Chelsea Manning, README.txt, (London: The Bodley Head, 2022), 188-189.

Interestingly Manning’s longtime partner Dylan was introduced on page 95 as „eighteen, just finishing high school“ (presumably also never having sniffed a deployment). On page 113 Dylan, now a freshman at Brandeis and perhaps nineteen, wears „a pin that read army wife.“ Was Dylan then a child bride?

I was, and remain, a voracious reader, of all kinds of books, on all subjects, written from disparate, sometimes even abhorrent, perspectives. At that time, I was preoccupied with processing what I had seen in Iraq. I read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. I loved YA novels, and was especially taken with a series of epistolary novels told through the text messages of teenaged detectives. I must have read 150 books in my time at Quantico.

—Chelsea Manning, README.txt, (London: The Bodley Head, 2022), 181-182.