Addendum 5—Ecce
©
Though at this time Russia appears to have chosen the capitalist road
to recovery and President Putin appears to be opposing the U.S. and NATO
incursions into the territories of Russia’s former Empire as a reactionary and
face-saving measure, perhaps for that very reason it carries little weight with
anyone who looks at the future of capitalism with a critical and skeptical eye.
Likewise, the current demonstrations in Kiev ,
Ukraine http://rt.com/news/ukraine-protests-court-ban-538/
, in opposition to Ukraine
1)
on a superficial level centralization seems to
have its advantages in the sense of being able to impose its authority over a
wide area and, therefore, has wider support at least among the elite groups who
share benefits with the center. However, its authority is weak, and appears to
be choking on a fish bone stuck in its throat, because all the economic
measures governments appear to be able to take involve diminishing returns for
the public at large;
2)
while the EU and the West as a whole appear to be
putting their bets on a future that continues to reflect an urbanized ‘Pop’
culture, there are good reasons to believe that this era of our ‘future’ has spent
itself and is about ready to drop dead;
3)
from the geopolitical point of view, it is hard to
deny that it appears that the West is expending an enormous amount of its
resources in an attempt to surround Russia and China with military bases, and
that it behooves the self-interest Russia and China to push back, even if at
the expense of the nations along their borders, which, for reasons of their
own, may prefer to be in the Western camp.
It is for reasons like the above why this writer, whose family roots
are deeply set and identified with the spiritual, cultural, and economic
recovery of one of these ‘border’ countries –Latvia—looks with expectant eyes
more to the East than the West. At the same time, I see the call of some
Ukranians for a “Revolution” http://rt.com/news/ukraine-protests-court-ban-538/
as nihilism of the nondeveloped (Paul Virillio’s term; see previous blog)
readily subcumbing to capitalisms advertisement for itself as a result of overexposure
to an urban lifestyle.
The fact that the city has replaced the nation (see blog 243) has set
the stage for a Civil War, except that the war cannot be waged in terms of
defense (because that war has already been lost), but must be waged to win. To
win this civil war means for one of the sides to wait for the circumstances
when the present victor falls to his knees through a lucky stroke delivered by
an existential circumstance that is fortuitous for the health of our planet and
decisively persuasive of the failure of liberal capitalism as an
incontrovertible economic necessity. Of course, if one is able to analyze the
existential weakness of the opponent with sufficient perspicacity http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-30/russell-napier-we-are-eve-deflationary-shock
for it to be persuasive, then the stroke
against the back of the opponents’ knees may be delivered before the
‘act of God’ happens.
My readers know that for a long time now I have put the city and the
wood at opposite poles. This is because I perceive the wood as a cross of
animal and human characteristics, while I see the city as an artifice, where
the latter is escaped (to some degree) only by the ruling elites, because these
can indulge their animal instincts, whereas the majority of the city’s
inhabitants are either slaves-castrates, soldiers, priests-astrologers, or
concubines. It is in the artifice of the latter elite that politics has its
beginnings as a dream-remembrance of life in the wood. Unfortunately, in the
city the dream of democracy, unlike democracy in the wood, must always remain
an ideal and beyond anyone’s ability to actually achieve.
Interestingly, life in the city imposes itself and imitates reality so
persuasively that—even if the individual has spent his-her early years in the
wood or the countryside—the community presumes its self-absorbtion to be
natural and to always have been so. It is for this reason why the difference
between life in the wood and the city does not become immediately apparent to
those who live in one or the other sphere exclusively.
The above was dramatically illustrated by the Bolsheviks vs the
peasants in the Russian Revolution, and is ever so briefly mentioned in the
movie “Stalin” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxP7FNX2nqk
(57-1:2.30), starring Robert Duvall. We note that as far as Stalin is
concerned, it is the city people who have the priority over the people of the
countryside and the wood. Though one can argue, with justification, that the
reason the city had priority was because it was in the city that the factories
were located and factory workers lived, and these had priority, because unless
the Soviet Union industrialized quickly the West would soon take the
opportunity to destroy it, yet an opposite perception was never advertised or
allowed to surface either in the Soviet Union or in the West. The only
‘revolutionary’ deed enforced by the Bolshevik Party is that it never permitted
consumerism (a capitalist priority) to ever take hold in the Soviet
Union . Nevertheless, the prioritization of the city over the
countryside and the wood became so ingrained in the Soviet mentality that as
soon as the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the consumer mentality of its city
people by way of Khrushchev seized the day, and party apparatchiks became the
billionaires of ‘renewed’ Russia
Even today, the Russian Times (RT), an
internet news service, assumes that post-Soviet Russia is essentially in the
capitalist camp, re: http://rt.com/op-edge/globalization-us-china-rivalry-478/
“…both Russia and China
understand(ood) that as an economic, political and social program, Western
Marxist ideology does not work, and both did well to rid themselves of it, even
if in different ways.”
Which raises the question: Is an economy
distinguished by whether it is East, West, North, or South, or whether it is
between those who live in the wood or the city?
No comments:
Post a Comment