The Exile could use some help, as well - Putin and his pals have obviously decided that enough is enough, in particular annoyed as they are by the ramblings of Limonov in the paper and have closed the print edition down.

They need at least funding to continue with http://exiledonline.com which has some of their earlier, classic stuff on it. Can't recommend it too highly, as a regular visitor to Russia, the Exile has been an amazingly useful source of insight, as well as filth, whore reviews and the amazingly incorrect but somehow compulsive War Nerd.

By  Anonymous, at Tuesday, August 19, 2008 6:56:00 pm  

I'm guessing that by 'incorrect' you mean not PC, rather than, well, incorrect?

By  Ken, at Thursday, August 21, 2008 11:30:00 am  

Yes, absolutely, sorry for the ambiguity. Limonov is a superb provocateur who writes the most wonderful stream-of-consciousness English, clearly translated on the fly from Russian and says the most appallingly un-PC things.

By  Anonymous, at Thursday, August 21, 2008 8:44:00 pm  

Funny how both the left and right don't understand what happened. They both think it's the Cold War, or act nostalgic for it.

By  Frank Partisan, at Friday, August 22, 2008 6:59:00 am  

I read somewhere on the eXile that Limonov deliberately wrote his rants in broken English, just to send up Western stereotypes. I also think he and the NatBols are, to say the least, well dodgy. But a Russian liberal friend told me the whole thing was a sort of Dada-like stunt. I don't know.

Renegade Eye: people on the right like Mark Almond and Justin Raimondo don't see it that way, and nor do most of the far left.

Two interesting views: Stephen F. Cohen and Michael Neumann.

By  Ken, at Friday, August 22, 2008 1:23:00 pm  

War is, of course, about as un-PC an activity as anyone is likely to indulge in.

By  zhochaka, at Friday, August 22, 2008 2:52:00 pm  

Not if you're an official good guy and you don't call most of them wars, e.g. Hyderabad, Goa, Bangla Desh etc. were all PC (before the term) for India.

By  Anonymous, at Saturday, August 23, 2008 3:36:00 am  

I also think he and the NatBols are, to say the least, well dodgy.

Indeed

By  ejh, at Sunday, August 24, 2008 9:43:00 am  

Here is a different perspective consistent with observed curiosities like why the Georgians didn't close off that access tunnel as part of their opening moves. I also wonder about how many ethnic Russians were in these places only as a holdover from previous creating new facts, as they also are in the Baltic states.

By  Anonymous, at Wednesday, August 27, 2008 2:26:00 am  

Well, and surely I’m perplexed by the tone of these comments, but I suppose that gets back to my one slight problem with Ken’s world, which we see in those space operas which he used as vehicles for reliving the political lives (or posturing, at any rate) of those of us who became “active” in the ‘60s: it’s too clichéd to be part of any better nation. (Not that those books weren't entertaining, mind.)

I won’t go too much into why I think the nation-state is a very bad idea, except for the obvious—that it’s a Metternich-via-Kissinger construct that is essentially entropic. Seán MacBride’s notion of a cantonal, Swiss-style federation that isn't afraid of large make-work projects (such as reforestation) is a small step in the other direction, but even that is wildly different from the same old centralized scarcity game employed by both “Right” and “Left.”

And that’s what we see, all around us, defining the political horizon for the indefinite future—the State, centralized and interminably entrenched—because no one can bloody well imagine anything else! (Well, aside from Iain Banks, naturally, who writes books about societies that don’t use money, having seen it as the rationing system it is…)

So, yeah, Cold War II. But did the first one ever really end? And when did it begin, anyway, with the first Red Scares and anarchist lynchings in the 19th century, or was it Lenin’s train, or maybe Gehlen’s “intelligence” on the Soviets?

Renegade Eye: Why wouldn’t "both the left and right act nostalgic" for the Cold War, when it defined them? What’s a loyal opposition for, if not that?

Most perplexed response, however, goes to P.M.Lawrence, who links Micheal Totten of the Wall Street Journal (!!), calling his perspective on the CIA/Russian crisis “different.” Yeah, that Truth About Russia in Georgia story was different, alright. Here’s a sample of how different this perspective is:

My translator, whose husband works for Georgia's ministry of foreign affairs, made a similar guess that the West helped save the capital. "The night they came close to Tbilisi," she said, "Bush and McCain made their strongest speeches yet. The Russians seemed to back down. Bush and McCain have been very good for us."

Likewise, the women seemed to understand what Russian imperialism has always been about -- and not just during the Soviet era. "Why do you think the Russians are doing this in your village?" I said. "They want our territories," Nana said.

It was George F. Kennan, America's ambassador to the Soviet Union, who said, "Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals." Now, Georgia has been all but dismembered. The opening phase of this crisis may soon come to a close, but it is shaping up to be merely the first chapter in a potentially long and dangerous era.

George Bush! George Kennan!!

Good thing America has always allowed its neighbors to choose their own governments, to live free of the odious intervention of evil empires…

You guys are right. No Cold War here. It’s all just so shiny and new!

By  iridescent cuttlefish, at Wednesday, August 27, 2008 8:01:00 pm  

Response to Tottle here.

cuttlefish, I am not nostalgic for the Cold War. If you want a book from me set in a society that has no States or money, you might like to try The Cassini Division.

By  Ken, at Friday, August 29, 2008 1:13:00 pm  

Well, sure, Ken: I didn't mean you in that assessment, but rather the other folks whose comments here so perplexed me, and I have read Cassini, which did more or less wrap up the “political posturing” (please forgive the unfortunate phrase!) of Wilde & Reid that I found a bit disturbing in Stone Canal and Star Fraction.

How do I extract my foot from its throaty depths?

First, it’s perhaps a bit unfair of me to expect anyone to out-Banks Mr. Banks. Nor is the economy of abundance model the only fictional milieu that works for me; the point I think I’m now trying to make is that it really is very, very difficult for us to think outside this bloody box in which our reality model(s) have been incubating, so much so that another prescription/prediction from old Iain quite describes our intangible, if palpable, “limitation” in this regard:

The hand’s grasp near fits the skull, the covering bone by bone enclosed. And saying this, we grasp that.

We each contain the universe inside our selves, the totality of existence encompassed by all that we have to make sense of it; a grey, ridged mushroom mass ladled into a bony bowl the size of a smallish cooking pot…In my more solipsistic moments, I have conjectured that we do not simply experience everything within that squashed sphere, but create it there too. Perhaps we think up our own destinies, and so in a sense deserve whatever happens to us for not having the wit to imagine something better. (A Song of Stone, p.165)

Fact is that even the Culture novels are strangely unfinished or at least un-fleshed for me—not because the rightwing neo-Darwinist head-in-the-sand materialists, like Steven Pinker, with his "Denial of Human Nature/Blank State" hackery (and fraud!), are right, and that we lose the impetus to create when we wash the red from our tooth & claw, but because it’s just awfully damned difficult to think what hasn’t been thought. (Why we always have to look to the pre-Cambrian for the path to the future is another, albeit related, subject…although the “new Biologists,” with their symbiogenetic revival of the Rosicrucian dream are definitely kicking the old guard’s ass…in a completely non-competitive manner, naturally.)

I guess I’m just disappointed that so few of us are willing to let go of the conventional political spectrum, with its phony contention over policy, when both “right” and “left” assume as articles of faith that the only politics are those of centralization and a certain, sickening Malthusianism. Call me paranoid, but it seems rather obvious, to me at least, that:

all conflict is engineered (where profit is the universal motive) and all engineering is conflicted by the confusion between what is possible and what is.

I’m currently burrowing through Alex Comfort’s Reality and Empathy, which is not what it sounds, as “empathy” in his rather hard-nosed usage means something more like “readily apprehended.” When I compare Comfort’s sort of anarchy with the stuff you find today where “anarchy” is to be found through better business models, market forces and bloody banking, it makes me wonder if we’ve all joined Habermas & Baudrillard (wherever they went.) It’s a bit like the inbred recursiveness of Baudrillard's ghost waking up in a Pratchett’s Discworld and not being able to escape because the L-Space that Terry invented went ahead and got itself invented on "the outside:"

"The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books, everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence."

This is no criticism of your work, Ken; I’m an avid reader of everything that you and Charlie Stross and Vernor Vinge and Rudy Rucker et al have ever written (I flatter myself at times in thinking that Rudy even modeled the iridescent cuttlefish in his latest adventure on me—sort of like acid, you eat them to gain access to other dimensions, not that I've ever had precisely that effect on anyone.)

There is, I continue to insist to the dwindling numbers of those willing to entertain such notions, no inherent contradiction between Red and Green, politically speaking. Or could be, if we could get around that whole tragedy being faked "on the commons."

Like Kropotkin did, 103 years ago.

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