The lights are going out...

 I'm reading that Russian maneuver forces have crossed into the southeastern oblasts of Ukraine and are moving towards Donetsk.

Assuming that the Ukranian forces around that city do not retreat we may be seeing war in Eastern Europe for the first time since the early 1950s (if you count the UPA guerilla resistance) or 1944 (if you only count conventional inter-state warfare).

The real question at this point is whether Putin will push his forces into the old Ruthenian heartland of the western Ukraine. The distance from the southern border of Belarus to Kyiv is relatively short, and the temptation for Putin and the Russian Army leadership to try to roll the dice of a "decapitation strike" seems almost too vast to resist.

If in case you were wondering why the Trumpkin reaction to all this Russian invading seems so weird and peculiar, consider that while Putin polls at around 75% negative with self-identified Republicans, Biden polls somewhere around minus-90%.

At least you can't say the treasonous sonsofbitches don't walk their walk...

Update 2/24: It now appears that Putin's goal is full-on subjugation of Ukraine. I'm not sure if this will involve prolonged Russian occupation; if Putin doesn't, I'll bet his military chiefs remember both the Chechen and Afghan nightmares as well as the post-WW2 Ukrainian resistance. But the actual conquest is pretty much guaranteed; the relative strengths of the two militaries all but ensures that T-90s will be parked in the Maidan fairly soon.

My guess is that after a brief occupation and ratissage of Ukrainian nationalists the Russians will leave behind a Quisling government including a mini-KGB/FSB and antipartisan militia to hunt the resistance. How well this will work in Ruthenia is anyone's guess.

Now...my further, and more worried, question is whether the success of this move will embolden Putin to go after his other lust-objects, the pieces of the former USSR. The Baltics? Georgia? One of the lessons of the fascist 1930s is that once a fascist dictator is on a roll he's often unwilling or unable to stop himself. For a long time I thought that Putin was too canny to go full-on Hitler.

Now? I'm not convinced he has. 

But I'm not so sure he hasn't, either.

Update 2, 2/24: Thomas Zimmer has a nice breakdown of the weird Putin-fapping we're seeing from the American Right. Here's the bottom line (but the whole thread is worth reading...):

"Take note: Reactionaries and far-right movements across the “West” are siding with Putin. They see him as an ally in the struggle to uphold white Christian patriarchal rule – the kind of authoritarian strongman that can turn the tide against the forces of “woke” pluralism."

Zimmer had been on this beat for a long time, and his conclusion - one that I can't help but agree with completely - is that the rise of the Trumpkin Right (which long predates Trump and is largely the result of absorbing the Birchers and fundie religious zealots in the GOP) means that "conservatives" will choose to protect their status as ubermensch rather than accept becoming one among many.

Update 2/25: Juan Cole observes that Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure "enabled" the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over at Milpub our reilable commentor Sven makes pretty much the same point.

I have a fair amount of respect for Cole's opinions on the Middle East, and Sven's opinions overall, but I think they overstate the case.

Reassembling the old Soviet Union has been an obsession of Putin's for as long as I've known about Putin. I can't believe that some sort of move to re-absorb Ukraine wasn't on his bucket list for a loooong time; the recent Ukrainian move to try and become more closely integrated with its western neighbors rather than Russia probably moved it up the list as well as making armed force more plausible.

(and, while we're on the subject, who the hell would WANT to be a "Russian" given the current conditions in Russia? Life as an American wage-slave sucks pretty big ass. Throw in open kleptocracy for the discreet American version along with shittier living conditions? Ugh. Our return-to-the-Gilded-Age economy may make life pretty grinding for the 99%, but I can't see voluntarily wanting to swap that for life in the post-Soviet Russia. There's frying pans and there's fires.)

Anyway, I agree with Cole that American foreign policy makes it harder for the U.S. to oppose other's military fucktardry. I agree with Sven that the U.S. and the West has done badly, both in general and in Eastern Europe.

But I disagree that Putin needed any help to decide to kill Ukrainians, or that anyone else deserves to go directly to Hell for that decision.

The U.S. was wrong in Iraq, just as it's been wrong all over the world in places like Nicaragua and Vietnam. Iraq is and was a war crime, making aggressive war, the crime for which the victorious Allies hung Nazi leaders. Dick and Dubya should be in jail, not enjoying a comfy elder statesmen's retirement.

But that simply makes Putin just as guilty. 

They all should be sharing a cell in SuperMax, and We the People of the United States should be ashamed for letting them do otherwise.

To those Russians who are trying to stop Putin...I have no words, and doubt I have that kind of bravery. I wish I thought you could succeed. I hate what I know will happen to you

And I'm just sorry, sorry for this sorry world that has so much wrong in it.

Update 2/26: The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...).

My opinion remains unchanged. As much as the U.S. has been a bad actor globally that doesn't excuse this. In the last words of the guys on Snake Island, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."

Krugman has a column that makes a good point, though; for all that fingers are pointing at Putin and Russia right now, there's a mote/beam problem related to our own plutocratic/kleptocratic economies and the malefactors of great wealth therein that emphasizes the degree to which We the People have casually let the very sort of corruption endemic in Putin's Russia become less blatant but almost as endemic all over the West. 

That makes even economic war problematic.

"There are two uncomfortable facts here. First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain. Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.

What this means is that taking effective action against Putin’s greatest vulnerability will require facing up to and overcoming the West’s own corruption.

Can the democratic world rise to this challenge? We’ll find out over the next few months."

Remember the "Panama Papers"? The revelation of the vast coterie of Western vulture capitalists that were thieving and cheating right alongside the cartoon Latin caudillos, African "strongmen", and Russian oligarchs? Remember how many of them we prosecuted, convicted, mulcted of their stolen lucre, and sent to the Crossbar Hotel?

Yeah, me neither.

I'm not saying "Oh, we're just as bad as Russia, so we can't point fingers."  Sure we can - we just need to be willing to point fingers at our own when they go wrong. We haven't done that. The fact that people like Dubya and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and a gajillion Wall Street thieves and, yes, Trump are still walking around free is living testimony to the degree we've failed.

Putin is still a sonofabitch.

We really need to use this occasion of naked kleptocratic criminality, though, to think hard about how much rope we want to give our own oligarchs.

Named in vain

Fascinating.

"Ashkenazic Jews were among the last Europeans to take family names. Some German-speaking Jews took last names as early as the 17th century, but the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in Eastern Europe and did not take last names until compelled to do so. The process began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1787 and ended in Czarist Russia in 1844.

In attempting to build modern nation-states, the authorities insisted that Jews take last names so that they could be taxed, drafted, and educated (in that order of importance)."

Its easy for Americans to forget the vast weight of Jew-gentile history in Europe given the degree to which the Nazi death regime so destroyed the Ashkenazic world. But it is just this history that helps make the present relations between Europeans and Israel so fraught, and still throws out little complications to the relationships between Jews and Gentiles in general.

For centuries the Jews of Europe were in but not of the places they lived, kept apart by a combination of tradition (much of it horrible) and law (much of it unjust and punitive). The tradition of patro- and matronymics rather than surnames was just one small part of that strange world where an entire people were held at lethal distance from their neighbors through generation after generation.

In our own country we can still see the deep scars left by the imprisonment of one race by another, even now, more than a century after the formal dissolution of that bond. What scars did the imprisonment - both physical, in places like urban ghettoes as well as within entire regions such as the Pale of Settlement, and social - of the Ashkenazim leave on both the "prisoners" and their "jailers"?

It is difficult for me to imagine how this must have seemed at the time. Did a man of my age and nature resent being told to take some name that meant nothing to him in contravention of hundreds of years of tradition? Or would he have seen it as just another day in the life that offered little justice and less mercy from the goyische world the surrounded him? Would hearing his new "name" have produced tooth-grinding rage, or a resigned sigh?

We know so much of our relatively-recent past and, yet, things like this remind us that we often know much less than we think we know.

Winter is coming?

My friend Ael had a nifty tagline for the latest anthropomorphic global warming report from the UN and the potential for some life-altering changes it describes:

"Summer is coming".

Any Song of Ice and Fire-themed political references are jake with me, and it has the added encomium of being terse and ominous at the same time.

That's the scary long-game.

In the short-term, however, some people are getting all sorts of up in the Big Whack about Eurasian politics:

"Nato's military commander in Europe has issued a warning about the build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine's border. Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen Philip Breedlove said Nato was in particular concerned about the threat to Moldova's Trans-Dniester region."

Wait, wait, I hear you say. Why is this whack, Chief? I hear you say.

After all, Putin is an Evil Emperor, right? Oligarch, Stalin-wannabe, all-around thug and blight on the landscape who wants to grab back all the bits of the old Soviet Union and reassemble the Evil Empire? Why is it whack to be concerned about him waving the Big Red Stick around his western borders?

OK, I'll put it this way; is NATO, and, by inference, the United States, ready to fight Russia over Moldova?

Because that's really the bottom line. Is the West willing to fight (since assuming that the only way to ensure that Putin's ambitions don't mean Russian troops back in Latvia, say, or eastern Ukraine) to contain Russia in its present borders and prevent the reassembly of the Soviet Union? Will we fight to preserve the independence of the Baltics, or the states on the Ruthenian plain?

We weren't in 1945, and that was before the Soviets had nuclear weapons.

We weren't for Hungary in 1956, or for Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Even beyond the question of open warfare, are we prepared for a new Cold War over eastern Europe?

We might need to be, as we were prepared to face off with the Soviets over Western Europe in the last half of the 20th Century.

But if that's the case we, We the People, should really have a serious talk.

Are we ready for another Cold War? What's our goal? What's our strategy? How much are we willing to spend in blood and treasure?

Where do we draw the line where we'll fight the Russians rather than let them cross?

The eastern border of Latvia?

The eastern border of Ukraine?

The eastern border of Poland?

Do we even know?

This isn't a spur-of-the-moment sort of decision, or one that is best made around one individual incident. And, no, I don't like what Putin has been doing in the Crimea and I don't trust his ambitions in the Near Abroad. But to mobilize for a new Cold War is committing ourselves to a winter that might last for generations as the previous one did.

I don't trust GEN Breedlove - or any other serving officer - to make that decision for me. There's a reason that Congress was given the authority to declare war and formalize peace, after all.

Friday Oddity - Bunked Off

Rather fascinating little oddity at Wired about one of the less-toxic legacies of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha; bunkers:

"Hoxha’s suspicions also extended beyond Albanian borders and the bunkers, which number 24 to every square kilometer, and were built in preparation for a multi-front war Hoxha expected from invading countries, East and West. Every citizen in Hoxha’s plan was a reservist. Twelve-year-olds were trained to fire rifles. The bunkers never saw action."

And lucky for the Albanians they didn't; the fucking things look utterly useless from a military standpoint. Worse - small, poorly constructed, either isolated or bunched up these things would have been at best speed bumps and at worst pre-cast tombs for those rifle-firing twelve-year-olds. They don't appear to have been sited with any sort of actual intent to provide interlocking fields of fire or anything else of value; they're just there.

I paged through the slideshow and the thought that came to me was; I think we here in the United States underestimate the way that weirdly random fuckedupness dominates (or influences) the lives of a hell of a lot of people all over the rest of the world. And not the sort of things that we think of as "fucked up" around here: losing your job, getting sick, falling out of love, finding out your kid has gone over to the Dark Side of the Force.

No, I'm talking about REALLY bizarre, genuinely headscratchingly WTF?-sort of fucked up things. Your government forcing you to build a bunker in your gas station.



Some foreign oil company killing off the fish you catch and sell, or, worse, subtly poisoning them (or your water, or your air) so that you and your kids sicken and die. Some official in some quiet office hundreds of miles away making choices that suddenly take away your land, or your home, or your kid, or your husband. Pointless wars that suddenly descend on you for no reason you can imagine. Massive typhoons or earthquakes or tsunamis that devastate your life and leave you scrabbling just to survive because there's no one to help you; the lives of everyone around you are as broken as yours.

I yield to no one in my estimation of the messed-up nature of current U.S. society; we have far too many people making shortsighted choices that will make their and their children's lives harder based on idiotic trivia. But at least our commonest problems are, well, sort of sane. Comprehensible. More-or-less amenable to reason.

The bunkers remind us that out beyond our well-ordered lives, past the tidy subdivisions and strip malls are people in places where there is a madness that has become their sanity, a freakish randomness that is their everyday. And that that random madness is not the product of some malicious external Evil but the firing neurons of the human brain. Which within its bony shell contains things stranger than any bunker in Fushë-Krujë and as horrible as the bronze Dubya raised above it.



(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the link.)