Wake them all up!
And what if they start to swear at me?
Our duty is to let everyone know – let them swear. Tell them that I told you to wake them. One must have a conscience.

—Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 14.

Ingar Solty, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung:

Die politische Klasse hat die Gewissheit verbreitet, dass der ökonomisch, militärisch und natürlich auch zivilisatorisch haushoch überlegene demokratische Westen der Gerechtigkeit in diesem Krieg leicht zum Sieg verhelfen könne – und zugleich die paradoxe Ideologie, das ökonomisch schwache Russland könne militärisch besiegt werden, während gleichzeitig davor gewarnt wird, der Russe könne morgen schon bei Lieschen Müller und Max Mustermann im Vorgarten stehen (also gleichzeitig Verbreitung von Siegesgewissheit, damit die Leute durchhalten, und Bangemachen für die Aufrüstung).

Die westliche Außenpolitik hat außerdem – mit der üblichen Doppelmoral (Stichwort: Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, Grönland) – den Ukraine-Krieg zu einer großen Moritat gemacht: Gut gegen Böse. Endlich konnten die Deutschen auf der richtigen Seite kämpfen. Und nun stehen Deutschland und Europa vor dem Scherbenhaufen eines höchstwahrscheinlich verlorenen Kriegs. Auf diese Kränkung des kollektiven Narzissmus wird mit einer »Dolchstoßlegende 2.0« reagiert: Wer ist schuld? Die Lumpenpazifisten, die fünfte Kolonne der »Putin-Knechte«, sicher. Aber auch der Faschist Donald Trump, der uns »hängenlässt« und darum als eine Marionette Putins erscheint.

Ω Ω Ω

Kurz, wir erleben hier den Aufstieg eines neuen liberalen Autoritarismus als Massenbasis für einen postliberalen Kapitalismus im Westen, der von oben autoritär wird, weil er nach innen und außen nicht mehr hegemonial ist.

Ω Ω Ω

Entsprechend bedarf es hier noch etwas Überzeugungsarbeit in Sachen ­Gen-Z-Opferbereitschaft für ein System, das den jungen Leuten weder bezahlbare Mieten, sichere Arbeitsplätze, eine armutsfeste Rente noch eine gesunde Umwelt und Klimaschutz anzubieten hat.

Solty’s essay lays out an interesting taxonomy for the different strains supporting German rearmament. No one aspect is particularly new, but what struck me while reading this was just how accepted, how banal the paradox incorporated here has become. The insistence The Russians™ are to be easily defeated in Ukraine and simultaneously are scheduled to attempt to conquer Western Europe, inclusive of Deutschland, by 2030, seems mind‑bogglingly bizarre, yet is trumpeted throughout German media. I’ve similarly on several occasions had conversations with various German colleagues who in succeeding sentences profess it given that the climate crisis is both not a significant problem and also that it is too big a problem to attempt to do anything about. Considered at a single remove these postures seem obviously psychotic, but this is psychosis which grips current German society. This seems likely only to deepen in the immediate future.

Wikipedia: It is farther from the sea than any other individual country … Kyrgyzstan is occasionally referred to as “the Switzerland of Central Asia”. Peak Jengish Chokusu, at 7,439 m (24,406 ft), is the highest point and is considered by geologists to be the northernmost peak over 7,000 m (22,966 ft) in the world.

🤔 When I was a kid, you could pretty much take it for granted that an encyclopedia did not contain hallucinated information or fictitious references – that was the kind of thing that made it an encyclopedia.

Maria Stepanova, Equator:

My task is to understand and to analyse what is happening today in Russia – and in the wider world (which is gleefully following in Russia’s stead). This task still seems vital to me, although I know too well that it is unlikely to achieve much. The monumental efforts of the historians and philosophers of the twentieth century have not prevented state violence from resurging.

Ω Ω Ω

The exile must slough off all their identities – of birth and upbringing, the old home and the new one – to simply be who they are. Not a good German, or a good Czech, or a good Frenchman. Rather, a person without the armour of identity.

Ω Ω Ω

In The Human Condition, written 15 years after “We Refugees”, Hannah Arendt rejects the idea of hope, which she feels is a passive and therefore fatal sentiment. Hope is always situated somewhere in the future. It wears the mask of inevitability, and so deceives us. It reduces human life to expectation. By way of an alternative, Arent proffers the concept of natality, which seems vital to me in these new dark times. Unlike hope, natality does not offer a ready template for a future towards which we should strive, nor does it console us with the belief that everything will turn out OK in the end. It’s less an ethical notion than a physiological quality innate in the living creature. Natality is, very simply, the ability to start anew, from the beginning, over and over; without knowing why or to what end; each time being reborn, stubbornly; pointlessly persisting – precisely because that is our human wont.

Craig Murray:

Abandoning the primacy of freedom of navigation is absolutely a radical policy departure for the UK – driven, like so many other changes to traditional British legal positions, by the Starmer regime’s extreme support for Israel.

…

The incredible hypocrisy of Western states pointing fingers at Russia for running “Flags of convenience” is breathtaking.

The West has spent decades building and profiting from the global flags-of-convenience system. Russia is simply using the same system that Western companies created and still dominate.

On the Straßenbahn this morning.

Regime and personal survival are often overlooked as pundits and scholars alike try to build elaborate models of an ideology that drives Russia’s elite. But all the way back to the first unfairly contested reelection of Putin in 2005, perpetuating rule to avoid the repercussions of ill-gotten gains is a much better diagnosis of the regime’s impetus.

…

After the global financial crisis of 2008, Russians saw some of the worst income stagnation in Europe, staggering wealth concentration (far higher than the USA or China), and high levels of extreme poverty. By 2018, real incomes had likely declined by 11 percent since 2014. The true, and staggering, extent of high poverty and inequality levels in Russia is likely not adequately captured by statistics, but it is reasonable to say that as of 2025, incomes are no higher in real terms than in 2013. What makes Russia exceptional is that the post-1991 political economy was designed with wealth concentration in mind.

—Jeremy Morris, “Russia’s Vanguard Authoritarian Neoliberal System”, in Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right, (London: Pluto Press, 2026), 126-127.

Therefore, to make the theoretical assumption that criminal groups do something other than commit crimes, that law enforcement agencies do something other than enforce laws, and that there is no hierarchy among coercive agencies is to posit a Hobbesian state of nature rather than a Commonwealth, the state. In 1995, I was not wholly unjustified in positing the state of nature and its logic as the starting point for sociological research, even though my passport certified that I was a citizen of the Russian state. At that time, those who were supposed to enforce the law—employees of the justice and security systems—themselves acted informally as private enforcers or joined private protection companies. They were as numerous among violent entrepreneurs as their alleged adversaries from racketeering gangs.

…

I suggest that a conscious project of state building, which has become increasingly important in Russia since the end of 1998, was preceded by a consolidation of violence-managing agencies, the capitalization of their incomes, and a partial delegation of their enforcement capacity to state agencies.

—Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism, (London: Cornell University Press, 2002), xi-xiii.

“Moscow is a fairly safe city, provided you’re not an opposition parliamentarian”

—Matthew Stevenson

Russia is in fact the posterchild for full-blown authoritarian neoliberalism and in many respects the neoconservative and neo-traditionalist discourse emanating from the center is intended to distract and displace opposition within the country to the terrible life-chances of all but a tiny, privileged percentage of the population

—Jeremy Morris, “Russia’s Vanguard Authoritarian Neoliberal System”, in Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right, (London: Pluto Press, 2026), 123.

“They” really are “us” – the feeling of familiarity I get in Russia can be disconcerting. It’s like looking at oneself through a sort of distorted mirror.