“The problem you Americans have in dealing with us is that you think you understand us, but you don’t. You look at the Chinese and you think: ‘They’re not like us.’ You look at us Russians, and you think, ‘They’re like us.’ But you’re wrong. We are not like you.”
How the Russian leader The American Education of Vladimir Putin – The Atlantic
The event, known in the United States as the fall of Saigon and conjuring images of panicked Vietnamese trying to crowd onto helicopters to be evacuated, is celebrated as Reunification Day here in Hanoi. The holiday involves little explicit reflection on the country’s 15-year-plus conflict, in which North Vietnam and its supporters in the South fought to unify the country under communism, and the U.S. intervened on behalf of South Vietnam’s anti-communist government. More than 58,000 American soldiers died in the fighting between 1960 and 1975; the estimated number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed on both sides varies widely, from 2.1 million to 3.8 million during the American intervention and in related conflicts before and after.
It is time to attempt that hardest of things—to see ourselves for who we are, to see what it is we are doing and what is being done to us.
…Two, there can be no Cold War II because the Cold War as we knew it never ended.
HA!
[Putin] explains that New Russia was created by “the victories of Potemkin and Catherine II […] with its center in Novorossiisk. Therefore [it is called] New Russia. Later, for various reasons, the territories vanished, but the [Russian] people remained there.”
It has been said that Catherine II could make four mistakes in a three-letter word, and here Putin managed to make a dozen in a single sentence. Kharkiv, the center of the Ukrainian Cossack regiment in the seventeenth century, never belonged to the short-lived “province of New Russia.” Since it was the first capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, founded in 1919, it could not have been transferred to Ukraine from Russia in the 1920s. “New Russia” could hardly be conquered from Novorossiisk because the town itself was founded only in the 1830s, when Catherine II and Potemkin were long dead, and, like Kharkiv, it was never part of the region once called “New Russia.” The regions listed by Putin did not belong to Ukraine during the “tsarist period” for the simple reason that there was no “Ukraine” either as a state or an administrative unit in the nineteenth century. Finally, the core of the original province of “New Russia” was the Ukrainian Cossack republic of Zaporizhia, which was destroyed by Russian troops in 1775.
“Putin’s historical illiteracy is nothing unusual in today’s world. He, however, believes that he knows history and is able to draw on “the lessons of history.” One history lesson that I am trying to convey to my students is that fantasies should be taken seriously when espoused by the leader of a large state. In the twentieth century the world community made the mistake of neglecting one leader’s fantasies and paid dearly for this political myopia. We should not step on the same rake again, and revanchist lunatics should not be treated as sensible and pragmatic politicians.”
Andriy Zayarnyuk is an associate professor of history at the University of Winnipeg this is his article, Putin’s Lessons from History, 2014.
The world was stunned when Russia invaded Crimea, but should it have been? Author and journalist Oliver Bullough says President Vladimir Putin never kept secret his intention to restore Russian power – what’s less clear, he says, is how long the country’s rise can continue.
The U.S. once regarded a standing army as a form of tyranny. Now it spends more on defense than all other nations combined.
Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis.
The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint.
Andrew Marr discusses the state of China with the authors Jonathan Fenby and Martin Jacques. Fenby attempts to draw together the whole of the China story to explore its global significance, but also its inner complexity and complexes. Martin Jacques has updated his bestseller, When China Rules the World, to argue that the country’s impact will be as much political and cultural, as economic. But while China’s finances make all the headlines, what of its literature? Ou Ning edits China’s version of Granta magazine, showcasing the work of contemporary Chinese authors, but must tread a careful path to keep the right side of the censors. And the academic and translator Julia Lovell argues that to understand the new spirit of China, it’s vital to read its often contrarian short fiction.
The German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz recently launched a Karl Marx credit card. The bank let people vote online for 10 different images, and Marx was the “very clear winner,” beating out a palace, a castle and a racetrack, among others.
Check out these photos. Daunting!
Robert Service looks at how Gorbachev’s revolution has left an open agenda for Soviet historians. (History Today)
“Soviet Marxism’s death has officially been certified after recent world-shaking events. Mikhail Gorbachev avoided Marxist-Leninist doctrines in his draft party programme in July. Those who plotted the abortive coup against him in August sought to reverse the trend. As the price for Gorbachev’s return to office, Boris Yeltsin secured his consent to the dissolution of the Communist Party and the disintegration of the USSR as a unitary state.
Pictures of Lenin were removed from the Congress of People’s Deputies in September. Nothing more graphically illustrates the end of a state ideology…
Debates on Marxism are encased in the discussions about Lenin. Polemical thrust is followed by counter-thrust, and the interlinked themes of Lenin, the Soviet past and Marxist ideology have an urgency of interest for the general public which is scarcely conceivable in the West.”
Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.
Read this article which is based on a lecture he presented at the University of Chicago.
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
A four part cartoon series chronicling China’s transition to capitalism. Really interesting.
Dmitry Medvedev has warned that missiles could be deployed on the EU’s borders if the US pursues its missile defence plans.
Washington wants an anti-missile shield ready by 2020 but Moscow considers the idea a threat to its nuclear forces.
In this RSA Animate, renowned academic David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
Politicians in Berlin are searching for a suitable way to commemorate the construction of the Berlin Wall. But the most prominent scenes around the former partition are increasingly being exploited by creative entrepreneurs.
The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.
The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran’s long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.
Laurie Taylor discusses what is being called the re-Stalinisation of Russia on today’s Thinking Allowed. According to exiled Russian academic Michail Ryklin, Putin’s Russia is turning the clock back and rehabilitating the most famous demon of the Soviet Union.
In a new book, he claims that although the Soviet Union proclaimed itself an aethist state, communism functioned as its religion, and when faith faded it was replaced by mass terror. But now memories of the terror and bloodshed have receded and Stalin is being reclaimed.
Listen to this 10 minute interview with Ryklin
Opening with a personal anecdote from his experience on the USA Olympic basketball team playing against the Soviet Union, former Senator Bill Bradley provides his thoughts on the past, present, and future of Russia.
George F. Kennan celebrated his 100th birthday earlier this year. The dean of U.S. diplomats is best known for his strategy of containment, which he first articulated in the so-called long telegram that he sent from Moscow in 1946—and soon thereafter unveiled in his 1947 article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published under the pseudonym “X.” Several conferences honoring Kennan have praised his enormous contribution to U.S. Cold War strategy, yet the most fitting tribute would be to apply his seminal theories to our present era—to examine the sources of terrorist conduct.