Thursday, August 28, 2014

The Guns of August 2014

It begins.

One hundred years after imperialism triggered the slaughter of the Great War, the archaic, obsolete monster of national imperialism is having its last stand on the plains of Eurasia.

I did not think things would come to this pass. But they have. And progressives must draw the consequences.

Russia, a petro-plutocracy afflicted with a deindustrialized, third-string economy, and run by a fourth-rate gangster, has openly invaded Ukraine.

Roughly 5,000 Russian soldiers with at least 500 Russian army tanks, APCs and artillery pieces have seized a series of border towns and villages in eastern Ukraine. Tens of thousands will follow.

Putinism has launched an outrageously criminal, utterly illegal, and completely insane war of imperial aggression on its Slavic neighbor -- a neighbor which has never attacked it, damaged it, or threatened its security in any conceivable way. Incidentally, the regions of Luzhansk and Donetsk which Russian soldiers are currently occupying are 70% ethnic Ukrainian. The only way they will ever become Russian provinces is by murdering the 5 million ethnic Ukrainians who already reside there. Stalinism already tried and failed to do this, and Putinism won't succeed, either.

I shudder to think of the Ukrainian and Russian blood which will be spilled.

And yet if anticolonial war must come... let it come.

Ukraine has inherited the long and illustrious mantle of anticolonial national revolutions. The United States and Haiti were founded by the very first of these revolutions; then came the revolutions of the South American nations. More recently, in the 1940s, it was the turn of the Indonesian and Chinese revolutions. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the turn of the Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions, among many others. In 1989, it was the turn of the Eastern European nations. Now Ukraine has joined this long and storied list. It has decided to break free of the shackles of the Russian empire. Forever.

Putinism is in for an extremely unpleasant surprise. Ukraine will now fully mobilize a people's army of 1 million soldiers. It is a war Putinism cannot win, because it does not have the manpower or resources to defeat Ukraine. The United States had 305 million people in 2003 and spent almost $2 trillion on the invasion of Iraq, but its army could not defeat a rag-tag Sunni insurgency of al-Anbar province, sustained by only 5 million people and minimal weaponry. By contrast, Ukraine's 43 million citizens have copious supplies of deadly Cold War weaponry, and will shortly be receiving massive arms shipments from the European Union.

If anticolonial war must come... let it come.

Putinism's war will be a military, economic, and social catastrophe for Russia.

Ukraine's war will be its crucible of freedom.

Putinism will lose its War of Idiotic Imperialism.

Ukraine will win its War of Independence.

Putin will end just like his French forebear, Napoleon III: friendless, reviled and detested.

Ukraine's story is just beginning.

I grieve for every single life which will be lost in the war.

But if anticolonial war must come... let it come.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Today's Videogames Have Polish Heart

Shouts out to the gamers and digital artists of Poland, described in this excellent series on Polish videogame culture by Polygon. For a range of good geopolitical reasons, the zone between Poland and Ukraine is generating some of the most amazing forms of digital creativity today. More on this in the future...