The Book of Henryków is the earliest document to include a sentence written entirely in what can be interpreted as Old Polish – Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ty poziwai, meaning „let me grind, and you have a rest“, written around 1270, here highlighted in red. The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of the Henryków monastery, noted „Hoc est in polonico“ („This is in Polish“).

Pozwól, że ja będę mełł, a ty odpocznij.

FAZ:

Das Oberhaupt der Nordkaukasus-Teilrepublik, Sergej Melikow, äußerte, Proteste, die am Sonntag in der Hauptstadt Machatschkala ausgebrochen waren, seien „aus dem Ausland vorbereitet und gelenkt“ worden. Im Zentrum der Stadt hatten sich zunächst einige Dutzend Frauen versammelt, rasch schwoll die Gruppe an. Bilder zeigten aufgebrachte Frauen, die auf einen Polizisten einschreien, der sie auffordert, den Platz zu räumen. Ihre Stimmen gehen durcheinander. „Wir gehen nirgendwohin!“ – „Warum sammelt ihr unsere Söhne ein?“ – „Wir haben doch die Ukraine angegriffen!“ Und immer wieder: „Nein zum Krieg!“

Transparency International ranks the UK as the eleventh least corrupt country in the world on their corruption perception index. Ukraine on the other hand is ranked 122nd out of 180 countries.

The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine that may appear ideological, ethnic or linguistic are often ideational/political, effective and manipulated rather than causal, and can be interpreted as structural ruptures necessitated by shifts in the balance of power within and between social blocs, classes and their fractions, which I have documented in the previous section. The true conflicts are class formation and accumulation struggles between foreign and domestic capital, that is, oligarchs, the EU, the USA and Russian business and their indirect engagement in Ukraine’s policy making via various forms of advisory and financial ‘support’ organisations. The Maidan protests, also, were not ideological but counter-ideological, reactionary movements.

—Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

Michael Thumann, Die Zeit:

Sie stehen da, als ich vom Einkaufen aus meinem Supermarkt komme. Russische Protestierende, die „Njet wojne“ – „Nein zum Krieg!“ rufen. Mehrere Dutzend Moskauer haben sich auf der Fußgänger­zone des Alten Arbat versammelt, mehr Frauen als Männer. Sie stehen fest untergehakt vor dem ehemaligen Restaurant Praga, schräg gegenüber vom Generalstab der Streitkräfte. „Nein zum Krieg!“ Das ist mutig. Sofort sind Polizisten zur Stelle und reißen einen Menschen nach dem anderen aus der Kette heraus. Schleppen sie, während sie „Nein zum Krieg“ rufen, fort in einen Polizeitransporter. Fahren sie weg.

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„Die Männer verstecken sich wohl zu Hause, falls die Feldjäger kommen“, mutmaßte mein Freund. Er selbst hat weniger Angst, weil er gerade 62 Jahre alt geworden ist. „Aber ganz sicher bin ich mir auch nicht.“ Er redet vor allem von seinem Sohn, der 25 Jahre alt ist und in Russland Karriere macht. „Wir reden jeden Abend und ich bitte ihn zu gehen.“

Ich lasse das noch mal sacken: Der Vater bittet seinen Sohn, das Land zu verlassen.

Die Zeit:

Polen bekräftigt Absage zur Aufnahme russischer Kriegsdienstverweigerer

Russlands Präsident Wladimir Putin hat eine Gesetzesnovelle unterschrieben, die zu Zeiten einer Mobilmachung bis zu zehn Jahre Haft für Soldaten vorsieht, die desertieren oder vor dem Feind kapitulieren. Die Änderungen des Strafrechts sehen zudem vor, dass Befehls­verweigerung künftig ebenfalls mit bis zu zehn Jahren Haft geahndet werden kann. Putin unterzeichnete auch ein Gesetz, das die Einbürgerung von Ausländern beschleunigt, wenn sie sich zum Kampfeinsatz verpflichten.

Die polnische Regierung will Russen nicht in ihr Land lassen, auch wenn diese vor der Einberufung in den Krieg fliehen wollen. Außenminister Zbigniew Rau sagte auf die Frage, ob Polen es Russen erleichtern sollte, sich dem Militärdienst zu entziehen: Sowohl aus sicherheitspolitischer als auch aus moralischer Sicht sei es „höchst unratsam“, eine größere Zahl an Russen aufzunehmen. „Wir haben beschlossen, die derzeitige Erteilung von Visa an Bürger der Russischen Föderation einzustellen und damit die Touristenvisa abzuschaffen“, sagte Rau.

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Alle Tage

Der Krieg wird nicht mehr erklärt,
sondern fortgesetzt. Das Unerhörte
ist alltäglich geworden. Der Held
bleibt den Kämpfen fern. Der Schwache
ist in die Feuerzonen gerückt.
Die Uniform des Tages ist die Geduld,
die Auszeichnung der armselige Stern
der Hoffnung über dem Herzen.

Er wird verliehen,
wenn nichts mehr geschieht,
wenn das Trommelfeuer verstummt,
wenn der Feind unsichtbar geworden ist
und der Schatten ewiger Rüstung
den Himmel bedeckt.

Er wird verliehen
für die Flucht von den Fahnen,
für die Tapferkeit vor dem Freund,
für den Verrat unwürdiger Geheimnisse
und die Nichtachtung
jeglichen Befehls.

—Ingeborg Bachmann, 1952

Guardian:

“The pandemic is over,” the president said during an interview at the Detroit auto show. “We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it … but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”

…

The upcoming midterm elections may have also played a role in the president’s comments, said Dr Celine Gounder, an infectious disease epidemiologist and editor-at-large at Kaiser Health News.

The president was “signaling that the country is not suffering the way it was economically and socially from Covid the way it was”, said Gounder. “To say that we are coping with the pandemic better than we were, but that there’s still room for improvement would have been one thing. But essentially, this is declaring ‘mission accomplished’ when you still have thousands of people dying each week.”

The current rate would amount to about 150,000 deaths per year, which is equivalent to three bad flu seasons, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. (Over the last decade, the highest number of deaths during a flu season was about 50,000, according to the CDC.)

“This ended pandemic is still three times as bad as something we would ordinarily consider pretty bad, and I think that’s important, especially because we expect cases to tick up in the fall and the winter,” Hanage said.

Noam Chomsky, Truthout:

The core issue at stake, I think, is unipolarity-multipolarity. Since the U.S. took over the reins from Britain 80 years ago, reaching far beyond Britain’s dreams, it has sought a unipolar world, and to a substantial extent it has realized that goal, in ways we need not review. There has always been resistance.

In many ways the most significant, and least discussed, form of resistance has been the effort of former colonies to find a place in the international order: UNCTAD, the New International Economic Order, the New International Information Order, and many other initiatives. These were crushed by imperial power, sometimes reaching the level of assassination (the very important case of Patrice Lumumba) if other means did not suffice. Some elements survive, like BRICS [the economic alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]. Most significantly in the modern global scene, rising China leads the effort to develop a multipolar order.

Right now, the long-term conflict is manifested in many concrete ways. One is the intense U.S. effort to impede China’s technological development and to “encircle” it with a ring of heavily armed U.S. satellites. Another is the NATO-based U.S.-run Atlanticist project, now given a shot in the arm by Putin’s criminality, and recently extended formally to the Indo-Pacific region. The major competing element is China’s huge development and investment project, the Belt and Road initiative backed by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, encompassing Central Asia and by now reaching well beyond. At an ideological level, the confrontation sets the UN-based international order against the rules-based international order (with the U.S. setting the rules). The latter is adopted with little controversy or even notice in the U.S.

The important specific issues raised in the question find their place within this broader framework. Their resolution depends on how the broad process of reorganization of the international order develops. A highly uncertain matter, one of great portent.

Not in the distant background is a more fundamental matter, which cannot be put aside. Unless the great powers find ways to accommodate to confront the most important threats that have arisen in human history — environmental destruction and nuclear war — nothing else will matter.

Craig Murray:

As I said at the start, if you are in the west you are being conditioned to support the war, to at least as great an extent as people are being conditioned to support it in Russia.

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The space for truth is very limited, as the world crashes into full dystopia.

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Many of my regular readers are annoyed when I point out that Russia is far too weak a country to be a military superpower that can challenge NATO. It has an economy the size of that of Spain or Italy, and a military crippled by corruption. It has an economy that is not only small but woefully undeveloped and reliant on raw commodity export, be it energy, cereal or mineral.

To historians, the most significant thing about Putin may be his failure to develop manufacturing industry at a time when China raced into world manufacturing domination.

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For my entire lifetime, the western military industrial complex and its national and NATO functionaries have exaggerated systematically the “Russian threat” in order to justify their own bloated budgets. I have explained this throughout the Ukraine crisis and again and again I have said that Russia does not have the ability to conquer Ukraine – it is therefore utterly ludicrous for NATO propagandists to claim we have to squander fortunes to defend against Russia sweeping through all of western Europe.

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The logical fallacy of western politicians cheering Ukrainian advances around Kharkiv, and in the same time saying that still trillions more need to be spent on defence against Russian invasion by the USA, Germany, France, UK and others, would be obvious to a five year old. Yet peculiarly I don’t believe I have ever seen or heard the fallacy queried in the media.

Putin’s reaction appears to be escalation. The conscription is a huge statement internally which probably does make major military reverse not politically survivable, even for Putin. The proposed referenda in occupied districts also make any backtracking very problematic.

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Borders are not immutable. The borders of sovereign Ukraine only lasted 21 years before Russia annexed Crimea. A Ukrainian victory that retakes Crimea from Russia would involve a long war and a death toll rising into the millions.

There really are – and remember I worked over twenty years in British Foreign Office, six of them in the senior management structure – people in NATO, and in all western governments, who have no problem with the notion of hundreds of thousands of dead people, particularly as they are nearly all Eastern Europeans or Central Asians. They are not even particularly perturbed by the risk the conflict could turn nuclear. They are delighted that the Russian armed forces are being degraded and vast sums pumped into western military budgets. That is worth any number of dead Ukrainians to them.

I do not believe the USA, UK nor NATO has any political will for peace. This is a disaster. The question is whether the economic pain their populations will feel this winter will force the western politicians to consider the negotiating table. This war can only end with at least de facto international recognition of Russian control of Crimea, and with some kind of special status for the Donbass. The alternative is a war so destructive as to bring disaster across the entire world economy, with the possibility of nuclear escalation.

„The space for truth is very limited, as the world crashes into full dystopia.“ Several concepts here are quite interesting. „Space for truth“? Is there truth, as opposed to truths? Why is it dystopia is always and inevitably in the future? This is something I see especially in US media, but it’s certainly not limited to the US. Is this, like global heating or species loss, a reality so horrible that it cannot be held in the mind?