György Varga, NachDenkSeiten:

Seit Jahren hören wir – vor allem als Rechtfertigung für den Ausstieg aus der russischen Energierohstoffversorgung –, Russland nutze die Energieressourcen für Erpressungen. In den westlichen Medien ist dagegen nicht zu lesen und zu hören, dass die USA das Dollar-System zur Erpressung nutzen und die betroffenen Länder sich davon abkoppeln mussten.

Ω Ω Ω

Im Zeichen der Verabsolutierung des Krieges in der Ukraine hat der globale Westen neue Regeln aufgestellt:

• Es besteht keine Notwendigkeit, die Unantastbarkeit des Eigentums zu respektieren, wenn das Eigentum russisch ist.
• Es besteht keine Notwendigkeit, den freien Zugang zu Informationen zu gewährleisten, wenn die Informationen russisch sind. Niemanden interessiert, dass die Verfassungen der meisten Länder im Wortlaut einen „uneingeschränkten“ Zugang zu Informationen garantieren. Das bringt den Westen auf das Niveau von Nordkorea, wo die Gesellschaft vor negativen äußeren Einflüssen „geschützt“ wird.

:

„Kein kluger Weg“ Michael Müller
warnt Berliner SPD vor Linksruck

Der SPD-Bundestagsabgeordnete und ehemalige Regierende Bürgermeister Michael Müller hat seine Partei davor gewarnt, sich einseitig links zu profilieren. Es sei wichtig, unterschiedliche Milieus sowie unterschiedliche Wählerinnen und Wähler anzusprechen, sagte er dem Fernsehsender Welt TV. Nur dann sei die SPD stark.

Alexander Dugin, Arktos Journal:

Alexander Dugin argues that the nation’s sovereign heart calls for crushing liberalism while unleashing the creative and patriotic spirit of the Russian people to affirm their imperial destiny.

In my view, domestic policy should combine two principles:

1. Total intolerance toward treason, Russophobia, liberalism, espionage, foreign agents, proponents of the toxic woke ideology, and corruption;
2. Openness to any form of creative exploration, experimentation, freedom of imagination, impartiality, non-dogmatism, and leaps into the unknown.

So what I want to do here is to be open to impartiality and non-dogmatism while at the same time showing total intolerance toward proponents of the toxic woke ideology. 🙂

Mark O’Connell, The Irish Times:

For Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, speaking in the wake of his country’s decision this week to close its embassy in Dublin, it’s all very straightforward: the Irish government’s policies toward Israel – its recognition of a Palestinian state, and its intervention at the International Court of Justice in South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, requesting a broadening of the court’s interpretation of genocide – are intolerably “extreme”, and our taoiseach Simon Harris is “anti-Semitic”.

No intellectually or morally serious person could view this claim with anything other than contempt; it reflects a grotesque effort, by a state on whose prime minister the International Criminal Court has placed an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, to smear anyone who dares point out the obvious. And this, in turn, reflects a grim historical irony of our era: the global norms in which criticisms of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are based exist because of the recognition of the lethal danger of anti-Semitism, and of the Shoah as a crime that must never again be countenanced. That edifice of global norms (international law, human rights), built in the aftermath of the second World War and the Holocaust, is now collapsing into smoking rubble in Gaza, buried beneath the silence and complicity of what used to be called “the international community”.

Washington, D.C., December 18, 2024 – A now-legendary but long-secret 70-paragraph telegram written by the top political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in March 1994, E. Wayne Merry, criticizing the American policy focus on radical economic reform in Russia, was published in full today for the first time by the National Security Archive.

Merry could not get the critical message cleared for government-wide distribution at the time in 1994 because of Treasury objections (“It would give Larry Summers a heart attack”) and ultimately resorted to the Dissent Channel instead, according to Merry’s retrospective commentary, which was also published today by the Archive together with the actual “long telegram” and other declassified documents.

Reminiscent of George Kennan’s Long Telegram of 1946 in the depth and scope of its analysis of Russian realities and almost as prescient in its prophecies, the Merry cable only reached the public domain as the result of a National Security Archive lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The State Department denied a copy to Merry himself, claiming public release of dissent messages would provide the wrong incentive for future Foreign Service Officers.

Titled provocatively “Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect,” the Merry long telegram argued that radical market reform was the wrong economic prescription for Russia, with its history of statist direction of the economy, uncertainty of political transition and extreme challenges of geography and climate. The message described “shock therapy” as so visibly Washington’s program that the devastating austerity already evident in 1994 was blamed on the U.S., and the long-term consequences would “recreate an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.” Plus, Merry warned, “we will also fail on the economic front.”

The one-page official response from the State Department, required by State regulations to come from the Policy Planning Staff, did not even reach Moscow until Merry had already left the Embassy that summer. Merry read the formal response for the first time only this year, after the National Security Archive obtained both his original Dissent Channel cable and the State response as part of a FOIA lawsuit. The State response, signed by then Director of Policy Planning Jim Steinberg, commended Merry for his constructive use of the Dissent Channel, accepted some of his criticisms of U.S. aid programs in Russia, but, in a tone-deaf passage displaying no knowledge of Russia, told him he was wrong to separate markets from democracy as policy goals, because the former were essential to the latter.

“In my experience, Washington seeks to understand other countries by looking in the mirror (a common human failing),” comments Merry in his contextual essay.

This really fits very nicely with Ungar’s piece from yesterday.

Gert Ewen Ungar:

Das Problem ist nicht, wie Putin die Welt sieht, sondern wie man in Deutschland auf die Welt blickt – mit einem stark verzerrenden deutschen Filter vor den Augen.

Der Unterschied ist zudem, dass man sich in Russland der Begrenztheit der eigenen Sicht durchaus bewusst ist. Man spricht von der russischen Welt, der russischen Zivilisation. Die erstreckt sich zwar über einen weiten geographischen Raum, ist aber nicht endlos. Außerhalb der russischen Zivilisation gibt es andere Zivilisationen mit eigenen Wertesystemen, eigenen Traditionen, eigener Identität und einem sich daraus ableitenden Recht auf So-Sein, auf Existenz und Souveränität.

In Deutschland ist das anders. Da hält man die eigene Sicht für universell.

How do I want this book to be read? My answer may sound surprising and perhaps like wishful thinking. I would like this book, with its rolling analysis of the beginning of the armed conflict in Ukraine, to be read first and foremost because it records reactions to globally relevant processes.

Ω Ω Ω

First, the late Soviet and post-Soviet leadership became seen as nothing more than a corrupt, self-serving elite. The atomized masses responded with frequent but poorly organized and amorphous protests that, when successful, only reproduced and intensified the underlying crisis. Unlike social revolutions, the maidans did not bring radical transformations in favour of the popular classes; they typically only increased social inequality. The maidan revolutions did not even build a stronger state but only destabilized the existing one, allowing domestic and transnational elite rivals to seize the opportunity to advance their interests and agendas. The post-Soviet elite responded only with more coercion, which eventually escalated into war. This set the stage for the flourishing not of developmental national ideologies but of regressive neo-tribalist identities. There was no strong force from below to counteract this dynamic. The processes of the escalating crisis of hegemony are universal, but their manifestations in the post-Soviet space are of a rather unique magnitude.

—Volodymyr Ishchenko, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, (London: Verso, 2024), xiv, xxviii-xxix.

When I first read Ishchenko’s suggestion studying post-Soviet Ukraine provides useful insight into globally relevant processes I didn’t feel I understood what he meant, however the more I read Ishchenko’s work the more I get the feeling that as with John Dunlop’s writing on the late Yeltsin and early Putin years what is being described very much does provide a guide into processes currently shaping the West.