Professor
Liberals AND REPUBLICANS HERE cannot figure out what is going on in Ukraine.
This is because they are Round Table, CFR, NYT, Davosaurs.
All the best
Professor
Liberals AND REPUBLICANS HERE cannot figure out what is going on in Ukraine.
This is because they are Round Table, CFR, NYT, Davosaurs.
All the best
Love that shit!
Why not borrow some Chink Uighurs?
Trust me, Ukrainians do not mind mowing down Bedouins, Muslims, Uighurs, Hindus, or especially negroes!
"Professor
Apparently, BBC, Putin is pursuing a policy of getting rid of his own Hillary Clintonesque Basket of Deplorables, Muslims, negroes, East Asians, etc, the old fashion way, by earning it by using them as cannon fodder for eager and highly racist and self oriented ethnic Ukrainians to dispatch for him!
All the best"
I am for sending Ukraine as much NATO AND AMMO as they can take, to help Putin's ethnic DEPLORABLES problems out, for a long time.
Having seen the handwriting on the wall, I want as much NATO in there as I can get!
I especially want large numbers of NATO Africa troops in there on the ground!
Professor
There is talk, call it propaganda, that Putin has pulled back from Kiev, because a deal between Putin and Zalensky may be in the works.
Here was CrocodileChuck, above, quoting Dan Neil: "Good propaganda fools the people who read it. Great propaganda fools the people who make it." -- Dan Neil, The Los Angeles Times, 2007.
In my judgment, and I may be wrong, Putin feels about Zalensky more or less like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia felt about Khashoggi.
All the best
The last thing any West Europeans and Anglophone Dominions want are societies that ape and are dominated by the NYT BLM, and the spectacle of Academy Awards Cancel Culture.
Professor
The goal for the West is now to decapitate all developmental states, leaving the fragmented rumps of each to serve us as our vassals to dominate briefly the starving undevelopmental billions until they starve naturally, Malthus style.
All the best
Biden also wants to decapitate the Rogue Russian Bolshevik Empire.
Why not!
Get Samantha Power to go in there and drum up a multiplicity of grass roots democracy US vassal self determinators!
This post is dedicated to Croc.
AND INTO AMHERST COMMON LANGUAGE GUIDE LGBTQ AND GLOBALIST US LIBERAL LEFTISM AND GLOBAL LEFT CANCEL CULTURE.
'And, despite Sweden's global reputation for championing gender equality, anti-feminism and bigotry are also common themes in the kinds of forums attackers and their sympathisers are often part of.
'"Since I do follow the [radical online] forums, I see that there are quite a number of people posting messages related to this last event, explaining it by 'the boys in Sweden… are feminised and are not allowed to be boys.' So this is a discussion that we obviously need to have."' BBC
Professor
Having finished Weingerg's two Volume Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany, and into The World At Arms, Hitler was far and away the most brilliant successful and popular Democratic figure, and from 1933 until 1940, the same duration almost of FDR. FDR failed to have much effect on the depression. Hitler turned Germany into a powerhouse during it!
All the best
The problem with the League of Nations, UN, EU, NATO, etc.
It turns a small Slav civil war into a really really big one very quickly.
A World At Arms, p. 21, WAS NO DIFFERENT FROM AMERICAN ROGUE COLONISTS' relentless expansion across North America, punctuated by wars with Indians, French, and Spanish, and done contrary to British policy of establishing a peaceful border to colonial expansion West. The Louisiana Purchase was a Pollyanna departure, but was predicated on Napoleon's loss in war in Europe, a war in which we joined against Britain.
The Mexican-American and Spanish American Wars followed on re lebensraum, etc.
One difficulty with Weinberg's analysis is that he adopts a Whig interpretation of the origins of so called societal racialism, tying it in terms of lineage to the concept of crude social darwinism, as an ostensibly recent anti assimilative aberration to Marx's concept of class struggle, by substitution of race struggle for that of classes. Different races in different populations are analogized to different classes within a single population.
This makes a real Pig's Breakfast of Marx, Darwin, and Hitler.
We fought the only Civil War ostensibly in favor of another race, only then, for 150+ years later, to have American negroes be rejected by whites and by negroes themselves for racial assimilation, and to have them and the rest of the negro and real black Africa world, 1.3 billion of them, piss on the white West as the only racial original sinners, oppressors, and perverts.
Both races forgetting that African chieftans themselves always kept most African negro slaves, and any white slaves they could get, for themselves; and that the slave trade in Africa was run by the time of the Renaissance by only the Africa Muslims, not Western Civilization whites, and not even Africa negroes themselves. ("Indigenous" Africa negro Muslims are not whites, trust me. Swalilis, i.e. Muslim negro mulattoes, is the more correct term.)
Jews in the Russian Steppe were trafficking in white non Jew slav slaves for the Middle East and Africa markets, with Muslim traders, both before and after the fall of Byzantium to Islam in 1453.
The Mamluks, The Abbasid Califate, were composed of this manumitted slav slave soldier ruling class.
See: Thomas Sowell, works, and references.
Professor
Why not take a wild card approach to this Whig account?
What will Slavs think of us, about what I prefer to call the Slav wars that have been unfolding, not what they may think of each other, in the end, after Slav has been fighting Slav, in many places, for many years to come, in Chechnya, Bielorrusia, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic, Georgia, E Asia, Central Asia, etc, etc?
I will tell you what they will think.
They will blame the West, as China has long done regarding the Taiping Rebellion, also known as The Taiping Civil War, or The Taiping Revolution.
We are perfectly willing, as the Simon Says case may be, to attack Slavs fighting Muslims (Clinton), to defend Catholics against Slavs, to send Slavs at the throats of Muslims, Chinks, or Hindus, or to set Slavs against Slavs wherever humanly possible.
All the best
I could not have said it as well.
Zelensky ran for office on a platform of improving relations with RUS. Once elected, &, doubtless at the urging of Victoria Nuland, he did the exact opposite.
What the war is telling the US about itself is that it is once again meddling in the affairs of a country far away that has nothing to do with its security.
Look at a map: UKR is a border state. Rule No. 1 of border states is to cultivate good relations with each of its larger neighbours.
Zelenksy failed miserably.
By dumping billions$ of weapons into UKR, the US is setting itself up for a re-run of of its cheering on AFGHAN against the Russians; this time perhaps involving the Neo-Nazis of Central Europe.
The US State Dept is bereft of ideas, running the Zbigniew Brezhenski Playbook in another failed state.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared the plight of Ukraine with the Brexit vote, saying people's instincts are "to choose freedom every time".
Mr Johnson said he didn't believe people voted to leave the European Union because "they were hostile to foreigners", but because "they wanted to be free".
RE WHAT THE WAR IS TELLING US ABOUT OURSELVES
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT.......
See: The Anglo-American Establishment, (1949) p. 32, for who "us" was then.
https://archive.org/details/empirefutureseri00londuoft/page/x/mode/1up?ref=ol
"Saturday, March 19, 2022
"Americans love defining their foreign policy, but because the world does not easily bend to our will our actual policies always combine our definitions and the reality that emerges when we try to apply them. The New York Times remains the voice of the liberal establishment in foreign policy, just as it has been for the whole of my lifetime, and today's coverage of the Ukraine war illustrates how that establishment sees the world and the united States' role in it today...." DK (my underline, The Anglo-American Establishment , 1949. The NYT was the voice of the liberal establishment long before DK was born.)
Professor Kaiser cannot be both in the liberal, LIEO, All Souls, establishment, when he chooses, but then out of it, as here, when he wants, in a post Milner, Simon Says, reality....
This post is dedicated to JRW, befuddled.
How to describe this thing?
Maybe the best is to say it is a slightly modified form b piccolo, with more rounded C bouts than the typical b piccolo, and sporting full size form b f holes, instead of shorter form b piccolo ones.
Its neck and scroll are not original. End blocks, not original. Glued burlap, inside upper ribs, my repairman removed....
Professor
Ukraine would not work just fine, with or without Western intervention, with or without the Russian invasion.
Since Biden and the NIEO, which you fully support it seems, is now using Ukrainians eager to serve, as its stooges and cannon fodder, it will never work in the future just fine, either.
All the best
See VP Biden crowing at a CFR Conference, youtube, extortion, interference in foreign sovereignty, of Ukraine to get a billion.
" He (Ramaswamy) is equally angry that social media decided to block references to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's lobbying activities at the height of the 2020 election campaign--a story that now seems to have been essentially true...." DK
This is essentially a Milner Group publication, one of the very few, MG being the predecessor of such things as the Round Table, CFR, IISS, Bilderbergs, Davos, EU, GATT, Carbon Credits, Foreign Affairs, LSE, WB, IMF, WTO, NAFTA, Inherent Inalienable Universal Equalitarian Human Rights, Self Determination, WWW/Internet, Zionist Israel, UN, NATO, Bretton Woods, etc, etc, etc., the entire farcical wastrel rogue NYT BBC globalist LIEO.
https://archive.org/details/empirefutureseri00londuoft/page/x/mode/1up?ref=ol
They recently pulled Rhodes' statue down from in front of Oxford University, the thanks the BLM WOKE Stokely world of colours is now fully giving them, and us, and our children and their children, for their pains and ours.
Here was the original publication, 1905, by members of the Rhodes Secret Society.
From 1902, Lord Milner assumed the reins from Rhodes.
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6965069M/The_empire_and_the_century
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....."
Sir Michael Howard, Lessons Of History, "1945--End of an Era?"
Reagan had demonized the USSR as the evil empire, but it was an evil Empire that FDR, not Churchill, had invited and allowed it into Eastern Europe to stay permanently, where it did not belong.
Thank you, NYT for making this crystal clear.
"...Here was the key issue: while Britain and France hoped that an anti-aggression front would protect the independence of the states of Eastern Europe that had emerged from the defeat of all the great empires of central and eastern Europe in the World War, Germany wanted to terminate that independence; and it was her willingness to share the spoils with the Soviet Union that decided the latter to opt for agreement with Germany as opposed to simply standing aside…Moscow, like Berlin, had wanted an end to the independence of the new countries, wanted Germany to take the initiative, and was especially interested in terminating the freedom of Poland, and had only waited four clear signs that Berlin was indeed ready to pay for Soviet cooperation by an appropriate division of the booty." Weinberg, V. II, p. 607, 608.
FDR's view were very much consistent with both Hitler's and Stalin's, not Wilson's, or Britain's or France's.
FDR'S Washington, like "Moscow, like Berlin," wanted an end to the independence of the new countries, an end to Wilsonian Self Determination, but wanted Stalin rather than Hitler, "to take the initiative", but also wanted booty at the expense of the old European Empires globally rather than just Eastern European booty, "was indeed ready to pay (and had paid) for Soviet cooperation by an appropriate division of the booty", and was willing to, and did, leave Stalin the lion's share of Eastern Europe and its booty.
Friday, March 11, 2022
When the Vietnam War began in earnest in 1965 I was 18 years old, and like most Americans, I accepted that it was necessary to stop Communist aggression. Within three years I had changed my mind, and decades later, in the 1990s, I wrote a book on how that catastrophic mistake had come about. I supported the first Gulf War in 1991 because it had a clear, limited objective and had the support of nearly the entire world, but I was very skeptical about our attempt to pacify Afghanistan and I totally opposed the decision of invade Iraq in 2003. Regime change to fight dictatorship and terrorism clearly failed there, and it failed once again in Libya and in Syria. Nor is this all. I was skeptical about the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, and a month ago I would have welcomed an agreement to have Russia stand down its troops on Ukraine’s border in exchange for a pledge by Ukraine not to join that alliance. Now, however, events have completely changed my perspective. In my opinion, the NATO alliance should be planning and preparing to intervene to defend Ukraine, certainly with air power and perhaps with more than that. They must not do so without a thorough estimate of their chances of success, but if such an estimate reaches a favorable conclusion, they should go right ahead.
As I have written elsewhere, the Russian invasion will be a turning point in the 21st century. If Putin succeeds we will be living in a world where great powers can send troops across their borders (or across water) to extend their territory and influence. Longtime observers believe that Putin covets all the territory of the old Russian Empire—including the Baltic States, Finland, and Poland, as well as huge territories in the Caucasus region and Central Asia. The Baltic States and Poland now belong to NATO, but how can we expect Putin to believe that NATO will actively defend them if it shies away from confronting him in a much larger and more significant country? The Chinese government will also undoubtedly be emboldened to attack Taiwan—which appears much harder for the US to defend than Ukraine is right now. How will South Korea and Japan view their alliances with the US if Taiwan falls?
Analogies to the western powers’ delayed response to Hitler’s moves in the 1930s are certainly appropriate—and they make intervention now even more sensible. To have fought for Czechoslovakia in 1938 would have been a largely symbolic act—it would almost surely have fallen rapidly to Hitler, and could only have been liberated after a very long war. Poland in 1939, for which the British and French did go to war, could offer only a few weeks’ resistance. Ukraine, however—a much larger country with an area the size of Texas with over 40 million people—is putting up heroic and effective resistance against the Russian Army, and might even be able to prevail without NATO intervention. Russia, clearly, was not ready for combat on this scale—and NATO intervention could easily provide the coup de grace. I personally doubt very much that Vladimir Putin would survive a military defeat. The nation that declared itself the leader of the free world 75 years ago should not depend on a Ukrainian victory or a coup in Moscow to achieve a critical objective.
To intervene NATO would have to face the risk of nuclear war squarely, just as Eisenhower and Kennedy did over Berlin and in the Cuban missile crisis. Putin, like Khrushchev in those days, has made nuclear threats—but even at the height of the Cold War, nations contemplating their use generally realized that there is only one critical issue regarding them—the need not to have one dropped on one’s self. If Putin has in fact put Russian nuclear forces on alert, then the West should do the same. Eisenhower and Kennedy understood that the US could not appear to fear nuclear war more than its adversary. It remains insane for anyone to cross that threshold.
Nothing has done more to destroy the domestic prestige of the US government than the failed wars of the last 57 years. So scarred are we by bad wars that we may not be able to recognize a better one. To lead NATO as it saves Ukrainian independence and dramatically shifts the world balance of power would be the biggest international victory the US has won in at least 30 years, and give our own people renewed pride in our nation. It would also take advantage of an entirely new spirit in Europe, where Germany is drastically increasing defense spending and the Finns and Swedes now want to join NATO as well. Intervention, to repeat, must not be undertaken before a thorough assessment is complete. If it can be successful, however, it would secure the most significant military outcome since 1945—and one that the world desperately needs.
ps. This is I think the most important commentary I have written in the 17 + years of historyunfolding.com, and I wanted it to appear in a major publication. I sent it to three such: two of them rejected it without real explanation within a couple of days and the third has declined to reply at all. None of them, as far as I can see, has published anything else taking a similar point of view. I have thought a lot about what this means and may write about that later on. Meanwhile, I hope readers will share it as widely as possible.
You very quickly become the kind of Whig Simon Says Globalimperialist that Woke Daniel Sjursen, BLM, and the entire wrong but greedy and disgruntled World of Color would say you are.
As SDW noted:
"If Putin succeeds we will be living in a world where great powers can send troops across their borders (or across water) to extend their territory and influence." DK
Have you forgotten Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq? SDW
to counter the legion of American and European Whig interpretations.
But make no mistake, NYT BLM, and Woke history generally, is Bizarro Caliban History.
BECAUSE THAT IS LIKE CLUBBING BABY SEALS.
P 322.
Even lumping these three together is the act of an intellectual idiot.
Even Hitler, in Mein Kampf, was more rational, about the stab in the back of WWI and its aftermath.
Professor
Daniel Sjursen makes such a Woke Pig's Breakfast of all American and European history, in A True History of the United States, that someone might wonder whether he might be a Russia or China asset!
Post this? Your call!
All the best
Professor Kaiser's flawed Whig interpretation gets mauled by this white Stokely.
Here is David Kaiser's most recent quite justified assault on Sjursen's wokeness ideology, while discussing the work of another author:
This week I have read Woke, Inc., Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam, by 37-year old Vivek Ramaswamy--a book notable both for its content and for who wrote it. Ramaswamy is a second-generation American, the son of immigrants from India.
Here is Sjursen, hot in pursuit of Kaiser!
From the perspective of signalling theory, the main obstacle to the evolution of language-like communication in nature is not a mechanistic one. Rather, it is the fact that symbols—arbitrary associations of sounds or other perceptible forms with corresponding meanings—are unreliable and may well be false.[42][43] As the saying goes, "words are cheap".[44] The problem of reliability was not recognized at all by Darwin, Müller or the other early evolutionary theorists.
Animal vocal signals are, for the most part, intrinsically reliable. When a cat purrs, the signal constitutes direct evidence of the animal's contented state. The signal is trusted, not because the cat is inclined to be honest, but because it just cannot fake that sound. Primate vocal calls may be slightly more manipulable, but they remain reliable for the same reason—because they are hard to fake.[45] Primate social intelligence is "Machiavellian"—self-serving and unconstrained by moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often attempt to deceive each other, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves.[46][47] Paradoxically, it is theorized that primates' resistance to deception is what blocks the evolution of their signalling systems along language-like lines. Language is ruled out because the best way to guard against being deceived is to ignore all signals except those that are instantly verifiable. Words automatically fail this test.[20]
Words are easy to fake. Should they turn out to be lies, listeners will adapt by ignoring them in favor of hard-to-fake indices or cues. For language to work, then, listeners must be confident that those with whom they are on speaking terms are generally likely to be honest.[48] A peculiar feature of language is "displaced reference", which means reference to topics outside the currently perceptible situation. This property prevents utterances from being corroborated in the immediate "here" and "now". For this reason, language presupposes relatively high levels of mutual trust in order to become established over time as an evolutionarily stable strategy. This stability is born of a longstanding mutual trust and is what grants language its authority. A theory of the origins of language must therefore explain why humans could begin trusting cheap signals in ways that other animals apparently cannot (see signalling theory).
WHICH WAS PERFECTLY TRUE.
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT!
had already committed his first cynical political betrayal of those who had elected him to Congress from Illinois, a pro war state, by standing with Clay and against his own constituency!
"One cannot read the record of the discussions in London on these topics without drawing the conclusion that the British government was determined to run no risks and make no sacrifices for those they had urged to sacrifice themselves." Weinberg, V. II, p. 524.
One cannot read the record of the discussions in DC on these topics without drawing the conclusion that the US government is determined to run no risks and make no sacrifices for Ukrainians they have urged to sacrifice themselves. 2022
Cannibalism is the consumption of another human's body matter, whether consensual or not. In the United States, there are no laws against cannibalism per se, but most, if not all, states have enacted laws that indirectly make it impossible to legally obtain and consume the body matter.
Cornell Legal Information Institute
Heading toward a colossal globalized Romanized supply chain train wreck a la the Fall of Rome.
We end up with a World Lit Only By Fire!
China will try to capitalize on it!
And seeing that, we will cannibalize them!
Before he gets killed defending a BLM rally in DC!
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT
Having Ukrainians within your borders was not pretty then.
It is not pretty now.
Americans, of course, have no idea.
Rather like having fucking Serbs!
It had been a fucking Serb who had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, causing WWI: SLAVIC ENCROACHMENT.
Now the West uses Ukrainian Slavs themselves as stooges against other Slavs, like the NYT uses negroes and white Stokelys against gentile whites.
Kotkin mentions this, but seems to imply friction between Russia and China.
But, he is the one of the legion of dunces here who doubted that Putin would invade Ukraine!
They are getting ready to put the screws to wastrel white Western globalization.
It will be a different for of disorder when they are done, but neither a white male Western one, nor a liberal one.
Professor
The West had needed, certainly by 1905, as I have argued elsewhere, to have maintained its control, in every sense, over the Rest, including developmentally, rather than to have released it, or allowed it to proliferate in the East. The Russo-Japanese War was the event that should have made this crystal clear back then. The Boxer Rebellion was another event that should have opened eyes in the West.
The Rest should not have been boomed or industrialized, or allowed to do so, against the grain of its traditional cultures and economies. It still should not.
This is not an argument about what is or is not good for the Rest, but rather about the course of Western security needs and requirements themselves, and for the maintenance of authority, Western authority, anywhere.
A good example of how this Asian copycat "boom" attempt was done, disastrously, by the developmental Rest itself, but with our help, in both the USSR and China, is the forced collectivizations (5 Year Plans, etc) and mass exterminations by Stalin, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
One can do the same analysis for China developmentalism.
All the best
Postscript
The failure to follow the counterfactual course I outline above has now, 100 years later, become not a discretionary and insignificant matter, but rather one of life and death for the Anglophone Western Civilization, and for its rivals, gathering force against both the West, and each against every other as well:
Professor
I watched Stephen Kotkin a little tonight, Top1000funds.com, and Fridman interview in part.
He is kind of a very well respected dunce.
He didn't think Putin would invade, back circa February 22.
I knew he would invade. I may be a dunce, just not a well respected one.
Kotkin has been in a huge company of ignoramuses in the West.
He even admits, counteerintuitively, that the West has probably a lot more to lose than Putin does by his invading, and by Western sanctions efforts in response.
Hello.
The same goes for things like China and Taiwan, or South China Sea.
Fiona's remarks have all but admitted that they have a strategic alliance.
In my judgment, a fool could see that, too.
All the best
For a Kenyan diplomat, the flames of war in Ukraine resonate with his experience closer to home. Martin Kimani, representing Kenya at the United Nations Security Council, spoke about the flaring of “the embers of dead empires.” He condemned Russia’s actions and made a passionate appeal to uphold the principles of multilateralism.
While Europe, reeling under the shock of Russian aggression, is rediscovering liberal multilateralism, Africa is trampling on its own peace and security architecture, built by painstaking work over 25 years — a double standard graphically depicted by the Kenyan cartoonist Victor Ndula. At the African Union summit last month, the continental organization lived down to the old jibe that it was no more than a trade union of despots.
Kimani’s February 22 remarks, picked up by news outlets around the world, made the case that the multilateral world order, among other principles, is being challenged by Russia in Ukraine. At independence, he noted, Africa inherited arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers. Rather than seeking to redraw them in pursuit of ethnically homogenous countries, which would have condemned Africa to “still be waging bloody wars these many decades later,” he said, the continent chose to “follow the rules of the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations Charter, not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.”
Without naming names, Kimani also called out other “powerful states, including members of this Security Council, [for] breaching international law with little regard.” It was a telling commentary from a nation three of whose neighbors are beset by violent conflict — Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan.
Social media users in the Middle East have been quick to accuse the Western media of double standards in their coverage of the Ukraine crisis compared to their depiction of Afghanistan and Syria. There’s also ample evidence for racism in the treatment of non-Europeans trying to flee the war. But in Africa, the double standards start at home.
Since Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations in 1936, when his country was invaded by Mussolini, African leaders have championed multilateralism. The continent’s multilateralism has the unique feature in that it grew from people’s resistance movements and not from a concert of powerful states. Nonetheless when the OAU was established in 1963, with its headquarters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, it adopted a conservative doctrine of national sovereignty. The reason was to protect the fragile independence of newly decolonized countries, fearing that former European masters and white minority regimes would play their familiar divide-and-rule games. It was in this context that African states accepted the inviolability of inherited boundaries.
Over time, however, the OAU’s insistence that its member states should be entitled to conduct their internal affairs as they wished provided cover for despotic repression. By 1990, with pressures for democracy rising and South Africa, the last bastion of white minority rule, preparing to surrender to majority rule, the OAU needed reform.
Intense debates resulted in the creation of the African Union in 2002 — with more ambitious norms, principles, and institutions. Its Constitutive Act commits African states to cooperation in pursuit of peace, democracy, and human rights. It includes the doctrine of “non-indifference” to mass atrocities — Africa’s precursor to the United Nations’ “responsibility to protect” — fashioned in the wake of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
The AU creatively adapted its principles to support democratic uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 — but faced a crisis with the Libyan civil war. The African Union and Russia criticized NATO’s intervention in Libya for disguising regime change under the “responsibility to protect.” They jointly pressed for a negotiated transition, which was dismissed by NATO in humiliating fashion — dividing and damaging the AU as well as fueling Moscow’s enduring distrust.
Today’s African leaders are turning the clock back. A spate of coups in West Africa recalls the dark days of the 1970s. While much of the rot is internal, there’s also a link here to Russia, which has been expanding its influence in the continent, offering weaponry and military services in return for access to minerals and votes at the UN. The Malian putschist Colonel Assimi Goïta turned to Russia’s Wagner Group and its paramilitaries in preference to French troops, and January’s coup makers in Burkina Faso encouraged pro-Russian rallies.
Last October, Sudan’s generals seized power, reversing the country’s democratic gains following the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. The junta’s number two, Mohamed “Hemedti” Dagolo, was in Moscow just last week. Hemedti commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, drawn from the notorious Darfurian Janjaweed Arab militia, which has become a transnational mercenary enterprise linked to the Wagner Group, marketing its “anti-terrorism” services with glossy commercials.
Despite these glaring setbacks, the AU’s summit last month limited itself to pro forma reprimands of military rulers who are violating its foundational principles.
The Eritrean president, Isaias Afewerki, has ruled his country for 31 years without a constitution, rule of law, or parliament and has attacked each of his neighbors. Eritrea is the continent’s largest per capita generator of refugees, as young people flee indefinite forced conscription. Yet Isaias attended the AU summit and was welcomed by delegates who lauded his contribution to peace and security.
Kimani’s remarks about the embers of empire had a special resonance in Ethiopia, which was itself an imperial state, in which kings from the northern highlands conquered other peoples and forcibly incorporated them as their subjects. Thirty years ago, a new federal constitution sought to lay that history to rest, recognizing collective rights to the country’s numerous “nations, nationalities and peoples.” But nostalgia for imperial glory lived on, and, after coming to power in 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed rekindled those flames, with a mystical, religious vision of Ethiopia. Such passions have led Ethiopia into wars of contending ethno-nationalisms, fought in coalition with Eritrea under the terms of a still-secret treaty.
In the war’s early weeks, Ethiopia rebuffed a South African-initiated offer of mediation. Abiy insisted the action was a legitimate “law enforcement operation.” It took six months of bloodshed before he conceded it was indeed a “war” and reluctantly accepted an African Union “high representative” — flirting with, but not yet accepting peace talks. Since last summer, Abiy has imposed a starvation siege on Tigray, which does not appear on our television screens because no journalist is permitted to go there. The AU has not uttered a word of protest.
AU headquarters is in Addis Ababa, but protocol dictates that when a summit is held there — as it was last month — the host is the AU Commission itself, not Ethiopia. In breach of that principle, the AU invited Abiy to welcome Africa’s heads of state. The thematic focus of the summit was launching Africa’s “year of nutrition.” Abiy and every speaker spoke about the importance of food; none mentioned the starvation crimes perpetrated by their host, even in passing. The AU’s own principles were tossed aside in a show of smug solidarity.
Across Africa, democracy activists are impressed by the speed, scale, and vigor of the American and European response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. If Western nations held these principles and had these instruments to use, they ask, why did they fail to do so in the cases of Mali, Sudan, and Ethiopia? It’s a fair point. But the first responsibility for upholding such principles and using available instruments falls on the AU.
Despite Kimani’s stirring words, Africa is turning its back on the principles of international law so cherished by the founding fathers of independence and the leaders of its renaissance at the turn of the millennium. Twenty-five of the 47 countries that abstained or didn’t cast a vote on the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this week were African. Eritrea was one of the four that joined Russia in voting against. Along with last month’s AU summit, Wednesday’s tally of votes is a sad record of Africa’s rapid retreat from a norm-based international order.
Professor
Nyt has published some hypothetical Presidential speeches.
I wrote an intro which you kindly posted.
You have written this, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
"...There is nothing wrong with the principles of international law, respect for frontiers, and respect for the rights of peoples to choose their form of government for which the United States stands — even though the United States itself has violated those principles for various reasons at various times. The world that Wilson and FDR dreamed of, in which all nations accepted these principles, would be a better one. Yet it is not clear that in a world of three great military powers, one of those powers can force the others to observe them. That is the issue that is now at stake in this crisis, and if Putin does seize Ukraine, we will have to face a new world of superpower competition and continual threats of local limited war...." DK
It would seem to be nice if our principles, here, were right for all men everywhere, as W mouthed, or right even just for us.
The British, then American, colonists did not actually subscribe, as you note.
They gave short schrift to the Dutch, French, Indians; did not include negro slaves, as even Bobbitt admits, as late as Dred Scott.
The ideal of self determination itself has countless problems, derives from American founding ideals of dissent and rebellion from the rhetoric and wars of religion.
It is in some ways the opposite of "the rule of law", and smacks of conflicts of laws, conflicts of religions, more than "law's" rule.
The so called world order was never the world's order in the first place.
Putin's invasion is hardly cause or explanation enough to change something that never was into something else that has long been instead.
All the best
Professor
This was noribori, in your prior Ukraine post,
"...At this point, an alternative version of the course of history should be discussed: what would have happened if Germany had been made a "neutral" buffer state between the blocs after the Second World War, as the USSR envisioned. How long could this "neutral" state have lasted anyway? After all, this is precisely Putin's demand, and also Gorbachev's regret: the states between Poland and Ukraine should have remained "neutral"..." noribori
Nori espousing the US/USSR Morgenthau Plan, not merely a buffer, but a full agrarianization and deindustrialization, for Germany, after WWII.
FDR had been wholehearteedly on board, hated Germany since at least WWI, and this plan was promoted and envisioned (as Nori admits), by Stalin, and put into effect at first (so not fully an "alternative" version of history, but for a time, the real one) by us, by use of Stalin's agents of influence within the US administration itself, especially Harry Dexter White at Treasury, Lauchlin Currie White House, and of course Harry Hopkins, etc. See, for example, Stalin's Secret Agents.
Since FDR had already agreed to give Stalin all of Eastern Europe for free, The Morgenthau Plan was really over egging the pudding! An agrarianized Germany and Austria would have been less a buffer than a further extention West of the Slavic Pale of Settlement.
All the best