<nettime> Stormy weather?

[Brian Holmes]

I wonder how nettimers from different perspectives around the world see the current, remarkably tense international situation? Where do you think all the anxieties of war, economic competition, natural disaster and climate change are going to lead in the near future? How do you think one should intervene?

-- There's a war on in Europe, which is a proxy war that pits NATO against Russia, via the fighting force of Ukraine. Definitely check out the list of equipment which the US alone has sent: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites (list begins in paragraph 3)

-- There's likely to be a second refugee crisis in the EU due to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria as well (I mean, added to the exodus from Ukraine).

-- There are rapidly rising tensions between the US and China, with this week's US airspace-defence operations visibly influenced by domestic get-tough politics, and a lot of uncertainty as to whether China will try to use a nationalist, rally-around-the-flag effect to quash the social protest and state-delegitimation brought by the zero-covid fiasco. As part of all this, an industrial re-orientation is being attempted from the US side (CHIPS act, electric-car subsidies for nationally made products). I am not clear if the EU, and especially Germany, participates in this reorientation, or not.

-- Lower-income countries dependent on international finance have had to absorb the interest-rate consequences of pandemic inflation in the rich countries, leading to stalled development and left-right conflicts.

-- Fires, droughts and floods have made climate change into an openly admitted crisis, an economic factor in its own right, and a crucial element in strategic economic military planning.

-- And in parallel to all that, another technology shift is coming through the application of AI to existing industrial and communications technologies.

I think those are undeniable factors whose spillovers must affect most people somehow, wherever you live, so I'm totally curious what you make of this conjuncture.

From my viewpoint, I think that the neoliberal model of society has now irretrievably broken down, leaving vast psycho-social disarray and increasing conflict as state and corporate actors begin trying new strategies. Currently there is a lot of happy talk about "solving the climate crisis" with solar panels and electric cars, and I'm glad about it too, but I think this masks the enormity of the changes ahead. On the one hand, the reason of state calls simultaneously for protective reterritorialization (nationalism, militarized borders, renegotiated alliances) and, in a diametrically opposite way, for intensified international regulatory and planning regimes, as well as a certain coordination of production to achieve energy transitions. On the other hand, populations at all class levels seem to sense that these changes will again be highly disruptive (I mean, as they were in the 80s-90s when neoliberalism came in) - so you have an incredible repositioning going on at the molecular level, not only politically but above all, psychologically. It's noteworthy that in the US, almost none of the sprawling social-welfare package that was originally intended to accompany the Green Capitalism legislation made it through, and more broadly, I don't think capitalist societies have overcome their basic social contradictions. Instead they are being exacerbated, which makes it much, much harder to steer the big ships of state...

It all adds up to stormy weather ahead, and I was just interrupted by a friend telling me that NORAD had closed the airspace over Lake Michigan. That's right out my window! They just opened it again, no explanation yet, but it seems like a good place to end.

curious what you think, Brian

[Allan Siegel]

# Nettime 12/02/23
Dear Brian and other nettimers.

It is not an understatement to say that we are at the doorstep of a potential apocalypse; tragically following on the lingering residue of COVID and all the social trauma that continues to follow in its wake.

The neoliberal paradigm is a global phenomenon, with few exceptions; it mobilizes an array of economic and political permutations selling the same lies and false promises. It represents  and promotes a materiality of false consciousness window dressed in seductive paraphernalia.

What confounds us at this moment is  the sense of political impotency; not because of ignorance, the present political conflicts have been well described and analyzed.  Yet, the vehicles of resistance appear incapable of deterring  a global political elite that has walled itself off from meaningful discourse, criticism or a necessary change of course. Within this neoliberal paradigm democracy becomes nothing more than a hollowed out commodity with a rapidly deteriorating shelf life.

Nevertheless there exists a few grams of optimism: As in the past the capacity for progressive change arises at the local level where people’s voices can be validated collectively; where forms of resistance are imagined and made real. Otherwise our fate is left in the hands of a corporate elite and their political enablers who abandoned any moral compass long ago.

allan

[Stefan Heidenreich]

Hi Brian,
thank you so much for this very reasonable request for comments. I've
had already written off nettime (as "NATO-shit-list" .. as one
participant used to frame it).

Your bleak view looks very likely, but it's not the only possible
outcome. So, against all odds, let me sketch a vaguely 'positive'
possibility.

- the fact that most of the world does not align with the "West" makes
it possible to a) avoid the NeoCon-project of a war against China (bcs
it is already lost) and to b) overcome the phase of finance colonization
that exploited most the world for the last 60 years.

- the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western Euroipe
(not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive "liberal"
fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of independence.)

- inflation could remain a one-time price shock (after having cut living
standards by 15%), switching back to debt deflation. (bad enough)

- the US could see a replacement of the failed NeoCons by ... I don't
know what ... either Isolationists for the better ... or worse the
MAGA-Bannon-Trump-Armageddon fraction.

- a post-hegemonial multi-polar world could finally create the
conditions to get together and to tackle the real problems like climate
change.

- it increasingly looks as if AI is at the top of its current hype cycle.

What to do: align with the South to overcome Western oligarchy.
Re-create democratic conditions in those countries that like to call
themselves "democratic".

However, my impression is that there are very many people whose doubts
about neocon nato-ism keep growing.
Stefan


Am 12.02.23 um 20:50 schrieb Brian Holmes:

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[Felix Stalder]

On 12.02.23 20:50, Brian Holmes wrote:
> -- There's a war on in Europe, which is a proxy war that pits NATO
> against Russia, via the fighting force of Ukraine. Definitely check
> out the list of equipment which the US alone has sent:
> https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites
> <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites> (list
> begins in paragraph 3)

I know this is not your point here, but to see this only as a proxy
war really reductive and reeks of a "great powers" analysis in which
some countries/people are just have to accept the fact that they are
subordinate.

The author of the NLR article comes right out with this world view:

> Ten years ago, nobody could have imagined that Europe would risk
> such a catastrophe for the sake of the Donbass – a region that few of
> us would have been able to locate on a map.

I'm sure most Ukrainians knew already 10 years ago where the Donbas was,
but why bother with their view. Also, the war in the Donbas started
2008, so not to know where the Donbas was in 2012 is really an act
of metropolitan ignorance. It happens, nothing to be proud of.

So, this war is primarily one of Ukrainian survival. I'm sure that many
in the US security apparatus see it also as a proxy-war, but I think
also Biden's theme of democracy-vs-authoritarianism plays a role. I
don't think it's a given that a republican administration under Trump
would have done the same (even if some in the military would still have
liked to fight a proxy war).

On 13.02.23 08:45, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:

> - the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western

> Europe (not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive

> "liberal" fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of
> independence.)

Oh my, what this is supposed to mean, only chatGPT can explain.

--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |

[Stefan Heidenreich]

>> - the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western
>> Europe (not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive
>> "liberal" fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of
>> independence.)
>
> Oh my, what this is supposed to mean, only chatGPT can explain.
>

well, people who think that this war does not primarily serve as a proxy
war, may indeed also consider chatGPT a reliable source ... :)

[Ana Teixeira Pinto]

surely not mutually exclusive, most wars of independence were both struggles for self determination and proxy wars between the great powers,

there are always many wars within each war...

Oh my, what this is supposed to mean, only chatGPT can explain

fies aber lustig

x Ana

[KMV]

> - the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western
> Europe (not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive
> "liberal" fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of
> independence.)

I also wondered what you mean, given that Russia has its own awful colonial history and has been open about intending to keep all current territory as well as expanding into more.  The people of Moldova and Estonia aren't happy at that prospect, not to mention those in Ukraine, who face extermination if they insist on keeping their own culture and heritage.

Then there is also the problem of Russian homophobia, which is codified in Russian law; it stands in sharp contrast to the more tolerant attitudes of Ukraine, Estonia, etc.  

A useful outline of Russian colonialism can be found here: https://twitter.com/maksymeristavi/status/1495323069539405826?s=20&t=rbKDO_x5af0zzCRUyIo63g  

I agree that to see resistance to Russia only as a proxy war with NATO countries is to ignore the human rights of numerous other states, and categories of people. I don't see how it is a defensible stance.

--

Kim De Vries

http://kdevries.net/blog/

[Brian Holmes]

Felix, I understand what you're reacting to, and to be clear, I support the Ukrainians in their war against Russian aggression. I think it's a necessary war for NATO to engage in, as I've said before. I also agree the term "liberal fascism" is meaningless, btw.

But this is also a great power war, fought with NATO weapons in Ukrainian hands. Up to now that's been called a proxy war, but if there's a better term, I'll take it. The point is definitely not to wallow in outdated concepts, but to grasp what's happening now. 

I think this war is perceived by US and other Western strategists as the means for the installation of a new global security system in the face of increasing challenges to the post-WWII order. That order, originally defined by the US and cemented by NATO, is now fundamentally threatened by climate change and by the rise of East Asia. The intense bellicose signalling between China and the US reveals the larger stakes. Putin attempted to take advantage of this situation by establishing a partnership with China, but he failed.

Victory in Ukraine would reestablish uncontested Western military superiority at the global level, and allow the NATO countries to organize the next phase of capitalist development, just as the Gulf War did at the outset of neoliberalism in the 90s. But the world is now far more unstable than in the 90s. The Ukrainians are pushing for total victory,  which is hard to imagine without Putin's fall. I doubt it is possible to achieve regime change in Russia without NATO troops on the ground. 

My point is that this is a dangerous time with immense future consequences. It would be important to analyze the new security system as it emerges. Support for the Ukrainians does not mean turning a blind eye to what the most powerful countries are doing. The international system that emerges from this war will be the one that deals with the existential challenge of climate change. 

Thoughtfully, Brian 

[Stefan Heidenreich]

it makes a difference though if it's proxy war or not:

- if it's a struggle for a nation's survival, one should probably follow
the advice of RAND and go for negotiations asap (as the war looks
increasingly unwinable, according to their recent report).

- if it's a proxy war, the West may keep sending as many weapons as
possible with the aim to "ruin Russia" (Baerbock). Regrettably, this
entails the sacrifice of many more Ukrainian soldiers, most likely
without achieving the goal.

To get back to what De-Colonizing Western Europe could mean: for example
the sovereign freedom to choose one's sources of energy, and to sue
so-called "friends" for damage compensation for the pipeline blown up in
an act of state terrorism.

Or one may ask chatGPT for a more comfortable geopolitical assessment.
s

Am 13.02.23 um 18:52 schrieb Ana Teixeira Pinto:

> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org <http://www.nettime.org> contact:
> net...@kein.org <mailto:net...@kein.org>

[hans christian voigt]

Dear Brian, weapons, munition and tools are coming from NATO states _and_ non NATO states. 

Since you shared this weird opinion piece of D’Eramo just for the list of equipment which the US alone has sent, I would think it makes sense to keep in mind that this amount is just a fraction of what the US sent to the Soviet Union from 1941 on after Hitler Germany assaulted the up to this point ally in Stalin. I doubt you’d argue this made the UdSSR's war against Hitler Germany a proxy war. 

After being raided the Ukraine to my knowledge had to buy lot of equipment from arms dealer for months for inflated prices. On the, I suppose, free market for weapons. This is to a good extend because before the Ukraine was not allowed to buy equipment from "the western". 

Besides weapons, if we are talking involvement of the US, I presume the intelligence provided by the US is probably as significant as the now not anymore totally refused weapons delivery. Does the sharing of information that another regime is amassing troops, that an echelon is coming from these coordinates and one from there, does that, as it is vital for the course of the war and for defeating Russian troops, does that qualify the term of a proxy war or is that fair warning and vital help.

I see Putin's Russia very much as an imperial death cult the likes that Theweleit was analyzing so ingeniously. Yes, a defeat of Russia certainly will change the global security system. On the one hand I wonder why that is viewed as something bad and something one can intervene with and something that we can influence with anti-americanism while thousands die in the trenches and civilians get attacked constantly. Anyway, a defeat of Russia comes with huge risks for sure. As well as a defeat of the Ukraine. And there's all the other undeniable factors whose spillovers affect most people, as you wrote. At least there seems to be a larger-than-zero chance that one very powerful imperial death cult in our world might discontinue. May this cult crumble soon and it’s followers be forced to face it’s life-hostile ugliness. 

On the other hand, no, I don’t think it’s so easy as to extrapolate from what was the NATO up until a while ago and expect uncontested Western military superiority. Even less so in the form as US superiority and the means to enforce the neoliberal capitalism the way it was enforced till f.e. the punishment of Greece (by Germany). 

There are more countries joining NATO (Sweden and Finnland, possibly Ukraine and Georgia) and in the last year already it was the baltic states and Poland beside Scandinavia that were pushing "the west". The power structure inside NATO, inside "the west" seems to have changed quite a bit and where will it go from there? The same "west" has not just one but many countries that are on track of their own fascisms (imperial death cults included). As far as we experienced, fascism might be chaperoned with isolationism and even with strong opposition to NATO. 

So, while NATO might grow in number it looks to me as it could get weaker and might disintegrate from within. Then there’s China that emerged clearly as more powerful than Russia. Russia as an empire might dissolve. But it’s not a given whose colonies the parts of the remains with all those resources will become. BRICS seems broken and the change from Lula to Bolsonaro back to Lula should be another reminder of the volatility of this world. Modi in India seems just as damn scary to me as the Arabic powers. Pakistan is huge, has nuclear weapons as well and faces a near future where most of the country will be to hot to survive is. Speaking of petro power, as an example, Austria’s chancellor looks to have opposed a gas-price brake (even on EU level) only because the emirates wealth funds have a big enough stake in the Austrian energy providers that his alliance lies with the emirates. Even against his voters.

Certainly dangerous time with immense future consequences. Feels like this is building up decade over decade honestly. A foreseeable future with huge areas of the planet made uninhabitable. Fascism permeating everywhere. A few times already made me cower in fear. 

I remember specifically a period from 2007 to 2009 where I was struggling a lot with this paralyzing vista and it’s influence on my psyche. I same time found that immensely dangerous in itself. Dangerous and honestly very self centered. Since then I believe that this chilling effect is very dangerous for the individual psyche and our collective thinking. (Like D’Eramo who seems to argue that criminals with atom bombs should be allowed free terror reign because, well, they have the nuclear threat and look how stressed they are. I mean, it’s clearly not going the way he dreamed it up. Now that is making D'Eramo afraid and wouldn’t that be understandable? Poor fellow. Fuck real victims, I have my own problems, I am shitting myself.)

Sorry. Well, I absolutely second that it is important to analyze the new security systems emerging. Even more so as I guess they will not be very stable. In analyzing I hope we are wary of carrying forward outdated projections, bogeymen and conceptualities … and emotions. That, btw, in my world certainly does not come with amnesties for past crimes or historical misrepresentation of what NATO, the US and the likes did. 

sry for my English

ps: pretty sure there was a positive reference to Daniel Ganser in D’Eramo’s text when I read it first that is not there anymore. Talking about dangerous. These men and women who make big bucks and a wealthy living in the business of conspiracy theories. They are thriving.

[Sean Cubitt]

One more war nested in the Donbas/Ukraine war: Putin wants to believe this is a civil war.

Despite everything the West threw at revolutionary Russia, despite its own errors and catastrophes, despite the devastation of the Great Patriotic war, Russia emerged in 1945 with a greater landmass than when it kicked out the czars and created the 20^th century. Take that sentence as broadly accurate historical generalisation or as the basis for an entire mythology. Either way, in the mind of Putin's faction, Russia is still the union of republics and anyone who leaves is a traitor.

Meanwhile:

A: the neo-liberal hegemony, fundamentally the USA's hegemony, is entering a phase that looks distinctly like decline (this can take a century - look at Britain). There's no secret the rising hegemon is China. Two questions remain: (1) neo-liberal economics still rules (eg to explain the collapse of successive COP conferences just look at the Fortune Global 500 top ten) but as a political creed it is falling apart. There are many possibilities leading towards a new economics of the commons but I can't see a credible political alternative, certainly not in the PRC. 

(2) who comes next? By rights it should be India, but Modi may blow it., politically, militarily and  - this would be a great place to learn more from better placed nettimers - through https://digitalindia.gov.in/ which looks likely to exclude the poor entirely from all aspects of civic life. So if he blows it, and Iran has already blown its chances, Putin is smart to place Russia in the pecking order.  But ...

B: everything else, notably ecological catastrophes in every continent and ocean and the accelerating distance between rich and poor says there's nothing much to win if there's no future to enjoy it in. Add your favourite crisis. I'm fascinated by the suicidal culture war education policies being adopted in the Anglosphere, a recipe for stagnation. ChatGPT is a symptom, not a cause: it triggers panic because  AI is coming for white collar jobs [no-one cared much when it only replaced service industry employees]. It is intelligent in the way a job-ready graduate is intelligent: it can perform normative functions (grunt coding, civil service consultancies) that efficiently displace expensive and unreliable humans. What it can't do is create tasks that don't have names yet. Without them, any moment now the whole shithouse, in WS Burroughs memorable phrase, is about to go up. Or rather fall down.

This helps explain what otherwise seems so bizarre: that the (un)civil war is not for influence, population or resources. It only has a veneer of ideology (unlike say Modi's undeclared war on Islam). It is a war for territory. This makes it hard to place in relation to other wars, but gives it a comprehensible place in Russia's military history (and brings back the shadow of Theweleit raised earlier in this discussion). This time, however, the entire population of the planet, non-human and human alike, ends up inhabiting Scorched Earth. 

Pit raises all the right questions. To add: neo-liberal dogma is the only game in town but it is failing economically as well. Accelerationism left or right runs into the same Anthropocene barriers of over-use of energy and over-production of waste (this may be because - as in culture wars against critical humanities – hard labour and job-ready graduates and validated over enjoyable and fulfilling work that leaves metals in the ground)  There is the possibility of sharing out the unemployment - but only as soon as we have embraced politically the economics of leisurely survival and creation - and that can only happen if the actuality of accumulation and inheritance stops motivating key political actors in past, present and emerging hegemonic regions. Which suggests - in the hard light of recent seismic events - that we should be manoeuvring away from territorially based hegemon and towards a stratigraphic model: is it cool yet to say we don't need wars between or within hegemons: we need class war?

Seán

---

*****************************************

[Alex Foti]

The polycrisis Brian is detailing (the end of peace, neoliberalism, human history) in my view makes a shared ideological understanding necessary for all those forces that are critical of capitalism and have long abandoned the marxist-leninist redux (which can justify repression of hong kong and putin's war crimes). The basic contradiction as kohei saito and the monthly reviewers have been saying is between capital and nature - labor can unseat capital if it works with those forces that wanna overthrow fossilism and patriarchy.

we can debate whether this is gonna be a red black green thing or a pink black green thing - autonomist and/or anarchist - eco+trans+fem and in many other ways - and we feel that the congress for climate justice in milano could start sketching a horizon, strategies, campaigns in a sort of First Internationale of movements against fossil capitalism and petrofeudalism which we hope will then be replicated in other cities around the world to constitute what the Transnational Social Strike Assembly has termed "the radical faction of the climate front".

neoliberalism is dead but oligotech is very much alive and the fascists are threatening america and brazil, while italy has succumbed to nazipopulism threading on the footsteps of hungary and poland. social democracy is unable to create a modern statist alternative to the crisis of market globalization, while the greens are emerging as the middle-class and young alternative to conservatism and reaction, but are unable to push reform of carbon-intensive capitalism to the level that's needed to stave off catastrophe (see Luetzerath, where Greta and FFF converged on the direct-action disobedience tactics of the German autonomist movement - Ende Gelaende - while the greens shamefully defended the deal with cdu and spd to save coal and ditch nuclear). Much as social democracy was about industrial fordism, ecological democracy is about green capitalism - problem is capitalism will never decarbonize fast enough to prevent thermal death for a billion people - it's promethean and cannot control scale even if everything went water, wind and solar.

So the problem of a modern, genZ-relevant anticapitalism becomes a civilizational challenge and we wanna do that with 20somethings as well as middle-aged activists like me. Hope that you can sign the call like Brian Holmes did and you can bring your ideas and strategies to Milano. There will be around 300 delegates from many parts of the world, and we'll be subsidizing travel for African and Latin American activists. Nettimers will be given a preference;)

best ciaos to friends near and far,

Alex

PS updated list of individual signatures:

Alex Foti, Milan – Penny Travlou, Athens/Edinburgh – Tadzio Mueller, Berlin – Eric Collard, Liège – Lissy Romanow, Brooklyn – Nicola Carella, Berlin/Bari – Francesca Coin, Lugano/Milan – Gianluca Grimalda Kiel/Milan – Al Mikey, London – Bruno Montesano Rome/Turin – John Sinha, London – Giulio Fatti, Jinjiu – Emanuele Leonardi, Parma – Emanuele Cozzo, Barcelona – Slim Essaker, Liège – Kaz Sakurada, Osaka – Andreas Malm, Lund – Francesca Maremonti, Berlin – Joshua Eichen, Portland – Peppe Allegri, Rome –  Nicola Villa, Milano/Rome – Lorenzo Teodonio/Romea – Federico Scirchio, Milan – Enrico Pirovano, Milano – Jacopo Pallagrosi,  Roma/Pavia – Micol Meghnagi, Roma/Dublino – Dario Bassani, Roma/Torino – Simone Caputo, Rome – Maria Chiara Franceschelli, Florence – Marco Spagnuolo, Paris – Elisatron Valtolina, Milan – Ferdinando Pezzopane, Turin - Giorgio De Girolamo, Lucca/Pisa - Veronica Pecile, Zurich – Abo Di Monte, Milan – Francesco Sticchi, Oxford Brookes University – Mathias Wåg, Stockholm – Teo Colò, Milan – Marco Palma, Bologna – Sisco, La Spezia – Cedric Jonckheere, Liège – Emanuele Braga, Milan/Berlin – Alessandro Delfanti, Toronto – Francesco Fortinguerra, Milan – Caterina Orsenigo, Milan – Luca Trada, Milan – Marco Pitò, Brussels – Manu Louis, Berlin/Valencia – Francesca Sconnessioni, Milan – Daniele Molteni, Milan – Nicola Vallinoto, Genoa/Rome – Aidah Nakku, Kampala – Joshua Omonuk, Kampala – Lorenzo Velotti/Barcelona, Andreas Petrossiants, e-flux, New York – Caterina Orsenigo, Milano – Bani Brusadin, Barcelona – Brian Holmes, Chicago – Elena Climate Social Camp, Turin – Michael Hardt, Durham – Teo Comet, Brussels

[mp]

War!

On 13/02/2023 17:39, Felix Stalder wrote:
> On 13.02.23 08:45, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
>
>> - the defeat of NATO could lead to a "decolonization" of Western
>> Europe (not that this by itself leads to positive results. Repressive
>> "liberal" fascism remains as likely an outcome as some sort of
>> independence.)
>
> Oh my, what this is supposed to mean, only chatGPT can explain.
>
>

It just spoke, right there. See how deep inside "us" all it is?

As for the war, three elements come to mind:

1. Wheat to sustain the continued destruction of food autonomy in "the
colonies". Ukraine has a lot of it. Control food supply, control people.

2. Minerals to make batteries and other components for the electrical
paradigm. Or, as Miller calls it: Chip War: The Fight for the World's
Most Critical Technology -
https://www.christophermiller.net/semiconductors-1 - lots of it in Ukraine.

3. Trade routes to move those things to and from China/Europe. Ukraine
is in the middle.

The rest of the analysis is simply complexity in the battles between
global elites and capital movers and shakers, and whatever perspective
applies: it's in the eyes of the beholder.

Want to see NATO imperialism, then you are a certain type of lefty.

Want to see attacks on "their" freedom, then you are a certain type of
liberal.

Want to see attack on "our" freedom, then you are another type of liberal.

Want to play with new brain candy to tickle your intellectual fancies,
and come up with "new logics", then you are, well, what, fiddling while
the world burns?

Anyway, that war thing, there were all those tanks standing about being
out of date for the electrical paradigm and drone and info wars. Got to
get them monetised. Job done. Good stuff.

...
..
.

[Michael Guggenheim]

Dear Nettimers and Hans-Christian,

D’Eramo’s NLR sidecar article indeed contained a reference to Daniele Ganser, but it was a little bit more than a reference (I copy the whole passage into the email further down below). As you can see from the passage, D’Eramo does not just cite Ganser, but really advertise Ganser, and seems to be well aware of who he is: “Swiss Historian”, book available in x-languages but “not yet in English”. 

For those outside the German speaking world: Ganser is a notorious conspiracy theorist, anti-semite (The unvaccinated are like the jews in Germany in the 1930s), anti-vaxxer etc. He indeed used to be a “historian” or rather a security analyst at ETH Zurich, and lost his job there over his conspiracy theories. Since then, he has built an online business model, selling “courses” on “inner peace” “content: Denigration, Digital Detox, Forest, Hope” or “Consciousness creates Peace” “content: Values, Deception, Corona, Awareness”. You get it.

If you want more info, begin with his German wikipedia page here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniele_Ganser

Or read this article in a respected Swiss left weekly (before he went completely off rail during COVID): 

https://www.woz.ch/1703/wahrheit-und-verschwoerung/das-ganser-phaenomen

The book that D’Eramo is referring to indeed contains a mixture of left hits: Everything is NATO’s fault, combined with highlights of the right behind all of this, maybe, are the, you know, Bilderbergs.

There would obviously have been plenty of better serious historical sources that D’Eramo could advertise that critically discuss the role of NATO, the US, and the CIA during the Cold War.  

I sent an email to NLR alerting them to this quote. Maybe I was not the only one. I was hoping, and suggesting, they would add a comment to D’Eramo’s text, explaining who Ganser is, and maybe asking D’Eramo to explain to the reader why he included the passage. Instead they deleted it, without leaving a note as to the alteration of the text. 

I understand that the editors of NLR may not know who Ganser is, and that they cannot be expected to check every reference in every text. 

Given the passage in the text, I doubt that D’Eramo does not know who Ganser is. 

I would have hoped that the editorial standards of NLR go beyond simply deleting the passage.

best

Michael

Deleted from: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sleepwalking-elites

And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict. (To get an idea of the Atlantic Alliance’s ‘pacifist’ vocation, it’s worth reading Swiss historian Daniele Ganser’s 2022 book NATO’s Illegal Wars, available in German, French and Italian, not yet in English). In today’s world, we rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’ – to pilot us through perilous waters with their superior wisdom. 

Passage now reads: 

And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict. In today’s world, we rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’ – to pilot us through perilous waters with their superior wisdom. 

nett...@mail.kein.org

[Stefan Heidenreich]

if you wanted to have a good example of what I referred to as
"liberal fascism", it's here:
self empoewered thought police feeling entiled to go for a witch-hunt to
cancel voices off the mainstream.

Even as I do not agree with some stuff the Ganser says, I would always
defend his right to speak, as in "die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden"
(Rosa Luxxemburg).

with these kind of interventions we drift towards some type of liberal
... I don't know what to call it: totalitarianism ...

S

Am 14.02.23 um 10:48 schrieb Michael Guggenheim:

> historian Daniele Ganser’s 2022 book /NATO’s Illegal Wars/, available in

> German, French and Italian, not yet in English). In today’s world, we
> rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’

> <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/iron-musk> – to pilot us

> through perilous waters with their superior wisdom.
>
> Passage now reads:
>
> And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of
> its responsibility in producing the conflict. In today’s world, we rely
> on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’

> <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/iron-musk> – to pilot us

> through perilous waters with their superior wisdom.
>
>
>
>
>
> nett...@mail.kein.org
>
> On 14 Feb 2023, at 00:25, hans christian voigt <soz...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Brian, weapons, munition and tools are coming from NATO states
> _and_ non NATO states.
>
> Since you shared this weird opinion piece of D’Eramo just for the list
> of equipment which the US alone has sent, I would think it makes sense
> to keep in mind that this amount is just a fraction of what the US sent
> to the Soviet Union from 1941 on after Hitler Germany assaulted the up
> to this point ally in Stalin. I doubt you’d argue this made the UdSSR's
> war against Hitler Germany a proxy war.
>
> After being raided the Ukraine to my knowledge had to buy lot of

> equipmentfrom arms dealer for months for inflated prices. On the, I

> suppose, free market for weapons. This is to a good extend because
> before the Ukraine was not allowed to buy equipment from "the western".
>
> Besides weapons, if we are talking involvement of the US, I presume the
> intelligence provided by the US is probably as significant as the now
> not anymore totally refused weapons delivery. Does the sharing of
> information that another regime is amassing troops, that an echelon is
> coming from these coordinates and one from there, does that, as it is
> vital for the course of the war and for defeating Russian troops, does
> that qualify the term of a proxy war or is that fair warning and vital help.
>
> I see Putin's Russia very much as an imperial death cult the likes that
> Theweleit was analyzing so ingeniously. Yes, a defeat of Russia
> certainly will change the global security system. On the one hand I
> wonder why that is viewed as something bad and something one can
> intervene with and something that we can influence with anti-americanism
> while thousands die in the trenches and civilians get attacked
> constantly. Anyway, a defeat of Russia comes with huge risks for sure.
> As well as a defeat of the Ukraine. And there's all the other undeniable
> factors whose spillovers affect most people, as you wrote. At least
> there seems to be a larger-than-zero chance that one very powerful
> imperial death cult in our world might discontinue. May this cult
> crumble soon and it’s followers be forced to face it’s life-hostile

> <https://www.dict.cc/?s=life-hostile> ugliness.

>> <http://felix.openflows.com/> |

>> | for secure communication, please use signal |
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[Lorenzo Tripodi]

Thank you Michael for the useful warning about Ganser.  Nevertheless I am left  from your intervention with two curiosities.

First -  and let me preface the I am in totally favour of vaccination and with any no vax sympathy - how the (absurd and offensive) suggestion that the unvaccinated are like the jews in Germany in the 1930 would be “anti-semite”.

Second,  to what extent being D’Eramo formulation that "Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict” contaminated by the agreement of a notorious conspiracy theorist and anti vaxxer makes it indeed false. 

I wonder how much of what Giorgio Agamben  (just to name one of many) has produced should be now scraped out of meritorious opinions given the circumstances…

Lorenzo Tripodi

[Michael Guggenheim]

Dear Lorenzo,

Regarding the jews: OK, let us not call it anti-semitic as a statement, but anti-semitic in its context (in the sense that many people, including Ganser who make this statement prove to be anti-semites in other ways as well. Plus obviously Ganser is one of the super slick people who never says anything really, directly anti.semitic, but laces his works with a complex yarn of the usual stereotypes). Plus simply ask: Why would Ganser, and others who make this statement, make this comparison (Balotelli: Why always me?)?  So yes, let’s go with your more precise: “Absurd and offensive”. 

Second: My point, as I made very clear, is not whether D’Eramo’s formulation is false, but that there would be other sources critical of NATO, but coming without conspiracy theory baggage, to make the same point (it would not change its truth value one bit. If anything it would improve its truth value precisely because it would shed its conspiracy ballast).

It is precisely my intention to ask the NLR and D’Eramo: why include Ganser to make this point, if you could easily make this point without Ganser? 

And if Stefan Heidenreich thinks that alerting people to who Ganser is and suggesting the NLR gives context to the person and works (rather than champion him or delete references altogether) amounts to totalitarianism and liberal fascism then I am very happy to be a liberal fascist. 

I invite Stefan to explain what he suggests we should do instead. 

best

Michael

[Stefan Heidenreich]

> I invite Stefan to explain what he suggests we should do instead.

nothing.
Let people make their own judgement and cite whomever they want to cite.

Best
Stefan

[José María Mateos]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 01:21:54PM +0100, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
>>I invite Stefan to explain what he suggests we should do instead.
>
>nothing.
>Let people make their own judgement and cite whomever they want to cite.

And by all means complain when someone provides additional context.

--
José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org

[Michael Guggenheim]

If he only would “complain”: “liberal fascism” and "totalitarianism” is now the minimum charge.

Just in case you want more context, Ganser now (as in: last week) likens himself to Sophie Scholl, another person he thinks, who, like him, needed courage to say the truth and to fight against war.
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3HdoLppnTI
From minute 5.15 onwards
“Even if you have truth on your side, you can be killed”.
“It is a good life: You meet other people who have courage…”

(And in case you need context (I know, I know, another liberal fascist misstep) to the YouTube platform “Mutigmacher” (the guys who interview Ganser): one of the two people is Dirk Helwig, who was a core member of “Widerstand 2020”, a farcical short-lived right-wing corona-sceptic party in Germany.

But let’s all stop giving context to stuff, it will only lead us directly into fascist and totalitarian hell. It’s so much better to be the Scholls of our time and fight the dark forces and shed light on the hidden networks of power! And how can I be an anti-semite, when I am the intellectual and activist heir of Sophie Scholl?

Cite whomever they want to cite.

m

[Stefan Heidenreich]

so you call it
"giving context" (which would be ok)
when in fact you try to silence an inconvenient voice
(make links disappear, erase references, suppress ...)

that's a euphemism I've never came across so far.

Admitting Ganser can be edgy. you want want to cancel everyone "edgy"?
where do you start? where do you end?

s

Am 14.02.23 um 15:33 schrieb Michael Guggenheim:

> If he only would “complain”: “liberal fascism” and "totalitarianism” is now the minimum charge.
>
> Just in case you want more context, Ganser now (as in: last week) likens himself to Sophie Scholl, another person he thinks, who, like him, needed courage to say the truth and to fight against war.
> Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3HdoLppnTI
> From minute 5.15 onwards
> “Even if you have truth on your side, you can be killed”.
> “It is a good life: You meet other people who have courage…”
>
> (And in case you need context (I know, I know, another liberal fascist misstep) to the YouTube platform “Mutigmacher” (the guys who interview Ganser): one of the two people is Dirk Helwig, who was a core member of “Widerstand 2020”, a farcical short-lived right-wing corona-sceptic party in Germany.
>
> But let’s all stop giving context to stuff, it will only lead us directly into fascist and totalitarian hell. It’s so much better to be the Scholls of our time and fight the dark forces and shed light on the hidden networks of power! And how can I be an anti-semite, when I am the intellectual and activist heir of Sophie Scholl?
>
> Cite whomever they want to cite.
>
> m
>
>
>
> On 14 Feb 2023, at 13:32, José María Mateos <ch...@rinzewind.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 01:21:54PM +0100, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
>>> I invite Stefan to explain what he suggests we should do instead.
>>
>> nothing.
>> Let people make their own judgement and cite whomever they want to cite.
>
> And by all means complain when someone provides additional context.
>

[Ted Byfield]

On 14 Feb 2023, at 4:48, Michael Guggenheim wrote:

> I sent an email to NLR alerting them to this quote. Maybe I was not the only one. I was hoping, and suggesting, they would add a comment to D’Eramo’s text, explaining who Ganser is, and maybe asking D’Eramo to explain to the reader why he included the passage. Instead they deleted it, without leaving a note as to the alteration of the text.
>
> I understand that the editors of NLR may not know who Ganser is, and that they cannot be expected to check every reference in every text.

Michael, I appreciate your conciliatory gesture here, but they *can* be expected to do exactly that. Not every reference, you're right: for mentions of some arcane scholarly debates about Jane Austen or whatever, no. But D'Eramo's piece is a broadside in a debate where counter/charges of antisemitism are rife all around. The piece has only a handful of references — to Financial Times, to Foreign Policy, and to a well-known, decade-old book by an established Oxbridge historian. It's running in a journal in the UK, where the Labour Party has been riven with accusations of baked-in antisemitism. And, as you note, it's an ad for a book with a recent publication date and a title that couldn't be more blunt: D'Eramo's own words were "Daniele Ganser’s 2022 book _NATO’s Illegal Wars_." This is *exactly* the kind of situation where an editor should check that one, odd reference.

For ref, here's a screenshot of the D'Eramo piece before and after, side by side:

https://tldr.nettime.org/@tb/109863202886355396

Checking D'Eramo's reference took a few minutes: Ganser > amazon[dot]de > title > publisher (Westend) > author bio > link to his "Swiss Institute for Peace and Energy Research." And what did I find? The lead story on SIPER's site is about the "9/11 debate," which claims "WTC7 was blown up, says the Hulsey study from 2019. The history of the terrorist attacks must be rewritten." Uh, OK.

Here's my take as an editor: In a journal a closing paragraph should distill what needs to be said. In D'Eramo's piece, the ( ) around the Ganser reference mean *by definition* this doesn't need to be said. They got there one of two ways: either (1) D'Eramo included them, in which case the editor should have said nope, cut it, or (2) NLR's editor *did* take it up with D'Eramo but gave in, then added them. My $5 says (2) is what happened, but it doesn't matter because NLR's later decision to cut the reference without comment works equally well with both.

Since D'Eramo likes to cast his argument in terms of US militarism, here's another: When Clark Clifford, the famously fastidious adviser to decades of US presidents, got caught up in the BCCI scandal, he said, "I have a choice of either seeming stupid or venal." (I was working on the book where he said that while the scandal was breaking and I proposed a draft for that footnote — but not that wording, which became a sort of ur-meme in East Coast power-corridor circles.) That more or less sums up the NLR's predicament here: compromised or stupid — or maybe both.

This 'forensicky' micro-stuff is ridiculous, but for one thing: It suggests that NLR still has at least one foot stuck in the muck of tankie horseshoe nonsense. They aren't alone. In the US, The Nation does too, as Duncan Campbell recently documented in gruesome detail for a less rump-y UK left outlet, Byline Times:

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/

Bigger picture: D'Eramo's list of weaponry — which, after all, is why Brian cited the article to begin with — is the kind of crude "Soviet tank-counting exercise" I would have expected from the Brookings Institution in the mid-'80s. And that's basically D'Eramo's argument, isn't it? But for a war that's almost universally seen as inaugurating a radically new era of conflict — drones — that kind of 'untimely' analysis is itself plainly nostalgic. That says a lot about the school of thought D'Eramo follows: rather than face the future, it faces the past. There are lots of reasons to be pessimistic, but people who actively and explicitly embrace the past so they reduce the present to known categories aren't likely to find much room for optimism, are they?

This is one of the main problems that dogs so much establishment leftism now. The other is a categorical rejection of the use of force to achieve their political ends, a leftover of the excesses of the hard left of the late '60s / early '70s, which the chronically culturalist 'new new left' shares, unfortunately. It's not that force is good, right, or even acceptable; rather, it's that rejecting force as such concedes it to the right, whose vanguard is happily embracing *violence*. Ultimately, if the left wants to achieve more than a sort of meta-NIMBYism, it'll need to get its shit together in terms of its attitude toward the state. A 'lite' anarchism everywhere all at once approach was always a pipe dream, but in the current technological climate it's *really* a know-nothing dead-end.

I used specialize in books about postwar US mil/intel activities, which involved spending too much time in archives that documented those worlds in gruesome detail — and I nearly went into forensic anthropology as a way to cope with what I learned. So I'm under no illusions about the presumptive goodness of the US or the horrors of war. Even so, I somehow managed to avoid falling for the idea (if it even deserves that name) that we can sidestep historical analysis of Russian imperialism by reflexively pivoting to solipsistic criticisms of "the West" is — plainly — the worst kind of whataboutism.

FWIW, here's what I said almost a year ago to the day, when someone sent yet another NLR lopsided broadside to nettime — that one by Wolfgang Streek:

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2203/msg00115.html

The lack of word wrapping in that email makes it almost impossible to read on the web, unfortunately, but I think it stand up well so maybe just cut-and-paste it into something else.

Cheers,
Ted

[David Mandl]

D’Eramo, quoted by Michael Guggenheim <mi...@bluewin.ch>:

I find these now-common disclaimers fascinating:

And <i>Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine</i> doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict.

This shows that what Putin has been doing is so terrible that even his defenders* feel obligated to at least acknowledge as much. The reason seems to be that if/when they're accused of being apologists for genocide they can always go back to this tepid parenthetical remark as proof that they disapproved of the worst of it, and said so. But this is usually one sentence fragment drowned out by thousands of words in which they blame NATO (or Biden, or US defense contractors, or whoever) for the whole thing. It's not unlike corporate CEOs who feel obligated to say that they "accept full responsibility" for mass layoffs--a meaningless platitude.

If the invasion is "unjustifiable" it seems like they could devote a paragraph or two to that, rather than to some Rube Goldberg-ish tale of how someone else forced Putin to bomb hospitals and slaughter civilians

(* Not all his defenders. You can identify the most hardcore of them by their refusal to even acknowledge that the Russians are doing anything wrong in Ukraine.)

   --Dave.

--

Dave Mandl
david...@gmail.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl

[Stefan Heidenreich]

Funny, that mail sounds in tone and attitude to me like something I've
encountered last time in the Berlin Stasi-archive.
The censor has spoken ...

s

Am 14.02.23 um 17:07 schrieb Ted Byfield:

[w]

Don't feed the NATO trolls. They just want to nibble at your pinkie.

[Menno Grootveld]

I'm really sorry, Felix, but I have to disagree here. In a sense this
war is not even a proxy war, but a testcase-scenario for an even bigger
war with China about Taiwan. It is a bloody shame that loads and loads
of people have to be killed (on both sides) and have to be mutilated,
tortured and so on (mainly by the Russians) because 'we' have decided
that Putin is some kind of second Hitler and has to be stopped in his
tracks before it's too late. To my mind this smacks far too much of a
bad replay of 'München' and all of that. Let's not fall into that trap.

Yes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an international crime and all
reasonable measures should be taken to counter that. But we should also
bear in mind that most of these 'special military operations' fail
sooner or later, not so much because of foreign military help, but
mainly because of gross incompetence of the inveding/occupying forces
and succesful resistance at a guerrilla-level by the inhabitants
(Vietnam, Afghanistan). So yes, we have to give Ukraine all the help we
can muster, short of military help.

Op 13-02-2023 om 17:39 schreef Felix Stalder:

[Michael Benson]

Good to see Nettime ricocheting into life again, despite occasional acrimony. But it was always so. Personally in the current Age of Manifest Disinformation I can't see how calling attention to the questionable credentials of a centrally quoted (& evidently quack) expelled former academic equates to Stasism, but maybe that's just me. This is a forum where people point things out. And sometimes they're called out.

In any case to go back to Brian's original set of meteorological questions and observations from Sunday, we're definitely heading at full speed into very dark times. Here in Ottawa, to cite a small but telling detail, for the first time since it opened in 1970 the Rideau Canal Skateway, AKA "the world's longest naturally frozen skating rink," hasn't opened and will not open. It has simply been too warm to produce safe ice. And we're north of Toronto.

There's absolutely no doubt that even if 'we' figure out how to eventually reduce carbon in the atmosphere, the climate crisis will inevitably get far worse before it gets better—producing growing waves of refugees, which in turn will trigger ever larger populist backlashes in wealthy countries. (Why 'we' in quotes? Who're we, anyway? Will 'we' soon encompass AI capable of solving and not just exacerbating global problems? I used to have a techno utopian streak, but lately it's gone AWOL.) Something we've certainly already seen of course, and in fact the climatological backdrop to the Syrian civil war hasn't been sufficiently appreciated, but rather was largely understood as a manifestation of the Arab Spring. And this is worrisome, as I know I'm the first to point out, because it gives grounds for the Marine Le Pens of the world to claw their way to power and the Viktor Orbans and Gioria Melonis to retain it. Which in turn further undermines international efforts to try to tackle the problem. And this is to say nothing of the desperate plight of the people actually fleeing drought and starvation—people whose misfortune was simply to be born in the wrong place. 

Casting a black shadow over all this of course, is Putin's criminal invasion of Ukraine (whoops, I guess I'm a 'useful idiot' for NATO), which has distracted attention away from the most existentially important question of all, namely how to try to turn the temperature down, literally. Add to this Xi Jinping's evident determination to rule for life, something that never works out well (see Putin, Vladimir, above); his fixation on annexing democratic Taiwan in his lifetime (ditto), and the genocide of Xinjang's 12 million Uyghur Muslims, 1 million of whom are still being forcibly "reeducated" in concentration camps, to little apparent lasting international attention—despite eight decades of "never again" rhetoric. 

I mention China in part because what we really need in my view is a kind of Manhattan Project on steroids in which the financial and scientific resources of the three biggest economic blocs, the EU, the US, and the PRC, are pooled, with some extremely major funding and talent thrown at this problem. But how likely is that in the current political climate? I mean, if ever there was an 'all hands on deck moment,' this is it. But instead of taking that cliche seriously we as a species are doing what we've always done so ridiculously well: fighting amongst ourselves. Rearranging deck chairs. As Brian alluded to, electric cars and solar panels aren't going to cut it, though of course solar and wind are definitely elements of the solution. But what we really need in my view are 'dark satanic mills' capable of reversing some of the damage done by the first ones and their successors, by scrubbing CO2 _out_ of the atmosphere. Instead we're spending 2 trillion dollars annually on armaments, with the US of course leading the way at 732 billion annually. That shoots down a lot of balloons.

Apologies if some or all of the above seems obvious. 

Best wishes anyway,

Michael

--

Michael Benson

Kinetikon Pictures 

michael-benson.net

kinpi...@gmail.com

[mp]

On 15/02/2023 00:45, Michael Benson wrote:

> (Why 'we' in quotes? Who're we, anyway?

"We" are of course the free world - for context from today's paper see
for instance:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/revealed-disinformation-team-jorge-claim-meddling-elections-tal-hanan

As was noted: Taiwan next.

The overarching context - as context seems to be such a hot term - is
trade war and the electrification of consumer civilization.

Making this about "Putin", i.e. a single person and his "unlawful" acts,
is beyond intellectually lazy reductionism. It is ridiculous, even,
unless, perhaps, performed as a deliberate act of distraction from the
bigger picture.

Indeed, it's probably what that chat robot would say....

...
..
.

[d.ga...@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Brian's original Stormy Weather post semed designed to wake up the many
of us who feel we are all sleep walking towards the precipice. I
couldn't help remembering the book “Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War
in 1914” (Christopher Clark. 2012).

The title alone seems an apt way to describe our own political elites.
But the book might also offer something useful in Clarke’s particular
way of engaging differently with the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ in his complex
geopolitical analysis of the road to the “Great War”. In the
introduction he points out that although *how* and *why* are logically
inseparable they lead in two directions. The *how* invites us to look
closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes
[….] whilst the *why* invites us to go in search of remote categorical
causes; imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high
finance…ideas of national honour… [we might substitute colonialism,
neo-liberalism, capitalism etc] “The why brings about a certain
analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it
creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure [….]
political actors become mere executors of forces long established and
beyond their control.”

In contrast Clark asserts that his story “is saturated, with agency” …
decision makers at all levels from emperors to lesser officials (or even
assassins) walked towards danger in watchful calculated steps.” […] His
aim is to let the why answers grow out of the how answers rather than
the other way around… Once we pose the question why responsibility or
even guilt becomes the overriding focal point.

It may not offer us much, but it just seemed that Clark’s approach might
help us guard against us so over-regarding the explanatory power of
large-scale historical forces that we underestimate the importance of
amplifying our own collective and individual agency in confronting the
power wielded by key (or elite) political actors. It might mitigate
against the overwhelming feeling of impotence that sometimes seems to
turn the least and the best us all into sleepwalkers.

[Felix Stalder]

On 15.02.23 11:34, mp wrote:
> The overarching context - as context seems to be such a hot term -
> is trade war and the electrification of consumer civilization.
>
> Making this about "Putin", i.e. a single person and his "unlawful"
> acts, is beyond intellectually lazy reductionism. It is ridiculous,
> even, unless, perhaps, performed as a deliberate act of distraction
> from the bigger picture.

Well, in autocracies, autocrats matters. But of course, not even an
autocrat acts in a vacuum of his own volition but within structural
constraints.

They are, as you say, the end of the neoliberal global order manifested
by the breaking apart of Chimerica, and the accelerating decarbonization
of the energy supply (which is happening, even if too late to avoid
massive damage).

These realities exist for everyone. That is the easy part of the
analysis. What characterizes a deep crisis, in my view, is that large
number of actors have a high degree of freedom how to react to it,
pursuing their own agenda, because there is no overarching system (be it
economic or military) that holds them in place.

Did fossil-dependent Russia have to invade Ukraine because of that? I
don't think so. It could have pursued the smarter strategy of Middle
Eastern fossil-states and capture the COP process to delay the
inevitable, or done something else. But it didn't. Someone, probably
Putin and other members of the elite, interpreted these constraints in a
way that made the invasion seem a smart move. Was he walking into a trap
that NATO created and he was too stupid to see? I doubt.

Why? Because, in my understanding, power doesn't operate by making these
long-term plans that then, miraculously, come to fruition. Power
operates much more often by being able to impose its reading on
unforeseen (or at least unplanned for) circumstances. In the reading of
the US (and Europe), the conflicts of 2008 (Donbas) and 2014 (Crimea)
were regional conflicts, while the 2022 invasion had a clear
geopolitical dimension, with power in Europe and control over the global
food supply at stake. I guess the Ukrainians understood quickly that
aligning themselves with this reading and portraying themselves as
defenders of freedom is their only chance for survival.

On 15.02.23 13:44, d.ga...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote:

> It may not offer us much, but it just seemed that Clark’s approach
> might help us guard against us so over-regarding the explanatory
> power of large-scale historical forces that we underestimate the
> importance of amplifying our own collective and individual agency in
> confronting the power wielded by key (or elite) political actors. It
> might mitigate against the overwhelming feeling of impotence that
> sometimes seems to turn the least and the best us all into
> sleepwalkers.

--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |

[Stefan Heidenreich]

Hi Felix,
there is a problem in your analysis: your framing is only one amongst
many others, equally possible.

For example, from the viewpoint of the realist school (Mearsheimer) or
the geo-economic perspective (M. Hudson) the situation looks very
different. Let me sketch it briefly:

> Well, in autocracies, autocrats matters.

what matters in liberal democratic oligarchies?

> Did fossil-dependent Russia have to invade Ukraine because of that?

did Russia have to invade because of the NATO-expansion and subsequent
weaponization of Ukraine? (for comparison: think of a russian-supported
Ottawa-Maidan followed by a hypothetical weaponization of Canada. How
would the US react?)

Was he walking into a trap > that NATO created and he was too stupid to
see?

Was he clever enough to see that he could turn the Nato-trap into
reverse by invading at a moment of choice, with diplomatic relations
(very little support for Western sanctions around the globe, stable
alignment with China & India), economic conditions (ability to bypass
financial and trade sanctions), and military conditions (war of
attrition overstretching NATO) in his favor?

In the reading of
> the US (and Europe), the conflicts of 2008 (Donbas) and 2014 (Crimea)
> were regional conflicts, while the 2022 invasion had a clear
> geopolitical dimension, with power in Europe and control over the global
> food supply at stake.

In the reading of Mearsheimer 2008 and 2014 were mere defensive steps
against an ongoing NATO-expansion that made it clear to Moscow, that the
US wanted to overextend Russia (cf Rand-Paper from 2019) and that a
bigger war was unfortunately the only defense against the slow-motion
assault.
That veiw follows more or less the reading of Mearsheimer (just to say,
before I am accused of Putinism...)

I guess the Ukrainians understood quickly that
> aligning themselves with this reading and portraying themselves as
> defenders of freedom is their only chance for survival.

Or, the Ukrainians will have to understand that sacrificing their lives
following a deeply miscalculated plan of the Neocons in charge at the
State Dept in Washington they will be doomed.

Just to give another perspective that leads to very different conlusions.
Most likely we can agree, when it comes to Climate Change. But given the
turn of even the Green party from preserving nature to deliver weapons,
one may as well take the coming Climate catastrophe as a given and
prepare for the worst.

s

>
> On 15.02.23 13:44, d.ga...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote:
>
>> It may not offer us much, but it just seemed that Clark’s approach
>> might help us guard against us so over-regarding the explanatory power
>> of large-scale historical forces that we underestimate the importance
>> of amplifying our own collective and individual agency in confronting
>> the power wielded by key (or elite) political actors. It might
>> mitigate against the overwhelming feeling of impotence that sometimes
>> seems to turn the least and the best us all into sleepwalkers.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

[Ted Byfield]

On 15 Feb 2023, at 20:02, Pit Schultz wrote:

> In terms of the green transition, this war is already a huge setback,

The Economist:

> This complexity makes it difficult to discern whether the tumult in energy markets has aided or impeded the energy transition. To assess the overall picture, The Economist has looked at a range of factors, including fossil-fuel consumption, energy efficiency and renewables deployment. Our findings suggest that the crunch caused by the war in Ukraine may, in fact, have fast-tracked the green transition by an astonishing five to ten years.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/02/13/war-and-subsidies-have-turbocharged-the-green-transition

"YMMV"

Cheers,
Ted

[Brian Holmes]

This thread has been fantastically interesting. By launching it, I've somehow come off as an old Stal suffering from reflexive anti-Americanism. Fair enough, I have many difficulties with my home country. But the old Stal part, no.

It should be possible to support the Ukrainians and critique the strategy that informs some of the support. The strategy of alliance-building to maintain a global free trade area is now at least 80 years old - it's the why part of the story, to use the categories David Garcia brought up. The Biden administration has pursued it energetically with an aim to breaking a possible Russia-China axis and maintaining a hegemony incarnated militarily by NATO. Many posts in the thread recognize this clearly.

I read the text by Maurizio Lazzarato that Pit sent. It has another list, of all the wars the US has fought since 1989. Those wars, and many others going back to WWII, have not only emboldened the rapacious US corporations, but also saddened and brutalized US society, leaving the country full of angry ex-soldiers who often go to work for the increasingly militarized police. You have all followed the January 6 coup attempt. Pressure from the right now becomes a major factor in the how part of the story, pushing leaders to bellicose actions that support economic agendas. Allan Siegel sent an impressive article by Seymour Hersch on the sabotage of NordStream II, that illustrates this. In the end, if Hersch is right, Republicans representing US gas interests got what they wanted, courtesy of a Navy diving team sent to the Baltic by Joe Biden.

Psychic distress is the phrase I used to describe what it's like to live in a society whose intense grassroots egalitarian movements are constantly contradicted by elite capitalist power plays, and by heavily manipulated racist/nationalist passions. Europeans mostly have to think back to the early 20th century to imagine this, see Klaus Theweleit. Since then, the American military has taken over the effort of maintaining European economic positions, while anti-Americanism has mostly exonerated European public intellectuals from thinking about what their own countries do.

Like Sean on this list, Lazzarato thinks that unless it's possible to articulate the realistic analysis of war with the agency of proletarian revolution, disaster will ensue. That's true, except for the proletarian part. Capitalist elites definitively overcame the 1917 formula of revolution a long time ago, and appealing to the peasant revolutions of the South, as Maurizio does, offers no redemption. Today, under the pressure of climate change, broader fronts are emerging, which include not only peasant and indigenous struggles, but also metropolitan minorities and, crucially I think, elements of the middle classes who see the looming dead-end of industrial modernism - something that has not been very perceptible to the old working classes. These emergent alliances from below are threatened, not only by the police, but even more, by the paralyzing power of psychic distress that Hans Christian Voigt described so well in his first post. Naivete, and the hope that it will all be fine once the war is over, just don't cut it. Intellectuals need to furnish a realistic, updated analysis of the forces that lead to war - and that profit from war - under the present conditions of global competition and interdependence.

Best to all, Brian 

[mp]

Green transition?

On 15/02/2023 15:06, Felix Stalder wrote:
> They are, as you say, the end of the neoliberal global order manifested
> by the breaking apart of Chimerica, and the accelerating decarbonization
> of the energy supply (which is happening, even if too late to avoid
> massive damage).
>

Not sure if you are serious here?

Having been on the fringes of political ecology and similar networks
looking at "green transition" and "the energy transition" for some time,
I can only see this thing you say is happening "too late" as
(dis)concerted efforts to justify burning the last oil with impunity,
while setting up the final extraction movements: deep-sea beds and outer
space for mining of the minerals required to keep on living wastefully.

The Avatar sequel is a great study in that and it's making Elon Musk
richer and will be the total downfall of the critical zone, i.e. life as
we know it. Hopefully the energy transition will not complete.

In a broader (philosophical?) sense, green/energy transition is a
spectacular rewriting of the progress myth, pushing humanity deeper into
the technosphere, and yet another human delusion about a perpetual
motion machine that will somehow reconcile, on the one hand, human
desire for technologically afforded comfort with, on the other, living
on a finite planet and with the need to be embedded in a complex web of
life.

Surely not even the chat robot believes in this? It's the Matrix next,
in that case.

As for the rest, it is in the eyes of the beholder.

This thread has brought all the mansplainers out in full force,
including myself, but it is all just brain candy and wank, insofar as
attempting to talk truth: might is right. (And the chat root has the
best syntax and grammar anyway).

Brian wrote:

"....Today, under the pressure of climate change, broader fronts are

emerging, which include not only peasant and indigenous struggles, but
also metropolitan minorities and, crucially I think, elements of the
middle classes who see the looming dead-end of industrial modernism -
something that has not been very perceptible to the old working classes.
These emergent alliances from below are threatened, not only by the
police, but even more, by the paralyzing power of psychic distress that
Hans Christian Voigt described so well in his first post. Naivete, and
the hope that it will all be fine once the war is over, just don't cut
it. Intellectuals need to furnish a realistic, updated analysis of the
forces that lead to war - and that profit from war - under the present

conditions of global competition and interdependence...".

Endtime prophecies and doom philosophies are of course applicable when
attempting to analyse and control the world from the top down, or from
the bottom up, for that matter.

In my view we live in the meantimes, cf. Bayo Akomolafe.

Always. Things come and go, civilizations come and go. As one falls the
next is already in the making. One can throw oneself in there where one
thinks it will matter in the next world, in the next meantime.

If the Condor and the Eagle will fly together one day, it will be above
an animist culture. There is still hope. It is all there ever was.

...
..
.

[Vesna Manojlovic]

To reply to the Stormy Weather, both as a forecast and as allegory ...

> Brian wrote:
>
> "....Today, under the pressure of climate change, broader fronts are
> emerging, which include not only peasant and indigenous struggles, but
> also metropolitan minorities and, crucially I think, elements of the
> middle classes who see the looming dead-end of industrial modernism -
> something that has not been very perceptible to the old working
> classes. These emergent alliances from below are threatened, not only
> by the police, but even more, by the paralyzing power of psychic distress

... this reminds me of the 2023 book "Deluge" [1] by Stephen Markley [2]
(available @ libgen .rs)

Highly recommended!

I am still reading it, so no spoilers if you've finished it already!

It's a child of "The Road" & "Ministry of the future"... thicker than
both, dark & dystopian & full of love stories...

And here are a few select quotes:

> “We are not at a crossroads,” Pietrus writes in his introduction. “We
long ago took the wrong fork. Now we must do everything in our power,
including sacrificing our comfort, our livelihoods, our economy, and
partial, carefully excised pieces of our democracy, to save our species
and all species.”

> “the biosphere doesn’t give a shit about the craven vicissitudes of
the American political system”

> We are committed to taking capital, and therefore political power,
out of the hands of a fossil-fuel oligarchy. That is the global recipe
to attack a primary source of misogyny, racism, and endemic inequality.
Distributed systems of energy will redistribute political and economic
power faster and more decisively than any other action, period.

... (including Ecofeminism)...

> The history of capital accumulation has also been a history of
women’s subordination and environmental degradation. Those three things
are so intimately connected that you can’t unwind them. We are a
colonized gender. we are in the process of achieving the dream of all
oppressed peoples: we’re moving into the Master’s house, when really
what we should be doing is burning the house down. Instead, we’re
clamoring to be a part of the patriarchal, phallocentric political,
economic, and social ecology: (...) capitalist patriarchy. But there has
to be an “other” for that system to maintain because it sees a world of
scarcity and the only solution is an inequitable hoarding of resources.
Part of that “other” will always be women, and bitches are kidding
ourselves if we think otherwise. If a system views everything in the
biosphere as a resource, whether it’s buffalo, maize, fresh water, a gas
deposit, or our internet data, it’s going to view women as extractive
resources as well”

On 16/02/2023 11:50, mp wrote:

> Always. Things come and go, civilizations come and go. As one falls
> the next is already in the making. One can throw oneself in there
> where one thinks it will matter in the next world, in the next meantime.

... another (un)civilization quote, therefore cross-posting:

> "I could name all the events that have destroyed families and lives
and homes over the past ten or twenty years, but what’s the point? All
of this is only the beginning. That’s what breaks my heart so much.
We’re not here to prevent that future anymore—because we can’t. All we
have left to fight is our own oblivion. Our civilization devouring
itself as we run from storms and fires, as we die starving and thirsty
and fearful and alone."


I also recommend his previous book, "Ohio" -> specially in light of the
recent poison cloud...


Sharing our pains, sharing our joys,

Vesna


[1]
https://www.salon.com/2023/01/31/the-deluge-is-a-climate-nightmare--and-its-based-on-reality_partner/


[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Markley

[Stefan Heidenreich]

> Black Soil
white money

> ... a short summer of the end of the history of
> (neoliberal) globalisation, mediated, of course, by the rise of the
> Internet.
to be followed by an ugly autumn of global warming, pandemic
profiteering, reactionary autocrats challenging the liberal white
oligarch supremacy, neocons blowing up pipelines, social media turned
into deep state cyber-tools of political control ...

winter is coming. what are your predictions?

[mp]

On 17/02/2023 17:24, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
> winter is coming. what are your predictions?
>

A wise woman once said, "...It is difficult to predict, especially the
future".

That is because the future is not yet cooked up, only the ingredients exist.

Plant a tree, save a seed, grow some food and make cultural alliances
with soil communities. Stop big-like-us thinking and get used to living
without White Privilege. Build human community.

Climate anxiety is really just a displacement for fears of consumer
addiction being disrupted by empty shelves.

It was a fun ride, but someone else somewhere else was paying all along.

Now the bill is send back.

Pay up.

And if you want accelerate the downfall and get it over with, buy an
electric car and promote the electrical paradigm.

...
..
.

[Lorenzo Tripodi]

On 17 Feb 2023, at 17:35, mp <m...@aktivix.org> wrote:

And if you want accelerate the downfall and get it over with, buy an electric car and promote the electrical paradigm.

I would suggest, share a collectively owned one and use it the less as possible…

Lorenzo

[podinski]

Hi all,

Being a very late arrival to this STORMY thread, I would like to just
try *briefly* point out a few things...

1st, appreciating that a few people are willing to challenge the highly
manipulative corporate war-invested media narratives !

2nd, that so little gender diversity takes part in these nettime
conversations, and when it is such hot planetary ( life+death ) topics,
it becomes even more glaringly and sadly lacking.

3rd, I have been trying to collect some more diverse ( eastern )
perspectives and more feminist perspectives on the Ukraine conflict...
but unfortunately been a bit slow in finding good sources to highlight.
In order to represent diversity it would be much more constructive here
to include more non-english (and non-european) languages...

But one thing became clear, many Eastern and Asian ( and global South )
perspectives seem much more concerned and discerning ( and one could
add: less propaganda-gulping ) in regards to the Ukraine contexts.
Namely that the war ABSOLUTELY DID NOT start in Feb.2022 with the
Russian invasion ! Thus NATO-partners and US agendas meddling in
conflicts in multiple conflict arenas is simply NOT DISMISSIBLE when
trying to understand the war and its ESCALATIONS, nor is it Pro-Putin to
discuss + debate what the root causes are, what the stakes are for all
sides, and how to find the emergency EXITS through NEGOTIATIONS...
sooner than later ! Currently all sides are throwing the Ukrainian
people under the bus, even the current Ukranian leadership !

( Not prepared to share those media links nor spend time to defend them
at this time.  )

But i will add More women, feminist, anti-war, anti-patriarchal, and
anti-statist? anarchist voices...

"War is what happens when language fails" - Margaret Atwood

" The war will end, and leaders will shake hands. That old woman will
keep waiting for her martyred son. And those children will keep waiting
for their hero father. I don't know who sold our homeland, but i saw who
paid the price. " - Mahmoud Darwish

" There is no flag big enough to cover the shame of killing innocent
people." - Howard Zinn

" We need a ceasefire before the anticipated springtime offensives
begin. We need clear calls for negotiations, from Washington and beyond.
Last April’s Russia-Ukraine talks showed diplomacy is possible. To make
it happen, Washington would have to pivot from providing unlimited
weapons to calling for immediate talks.
That means changing today’s political discourse, which characterizes any
call for negotiations as giving in to Russia. Arming Ukraine with ever
more powerful weapons hasn’t forced Russia to stop its carnage, but
opening a channel for talks just may provide new opportunities for
de-escalation.
Both sides need diplomacy. We need to stop the killing. " -  Phyllis
Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at Institute for Policy
Studies

And replying more to Vesna's post below.

All the best !

Podinski

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2023 19:17:54 +0100
> From: Vesna Manojlovic <be...@xs4all.nl>
> To: nett...@mail.kein.org
> Cc: uncivil...@lists.puscii.nl
> Subject: Re: <nettime> Stormy weather?
> Message-ID: <3f01995b-ea47-1d30...@xs4all.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

>
> To reply to the Stormy Weather, both as a forecast and as allegory ...
>
>
>> Brian wrote:
>>
>> "....Today, under the pressure of climate change, broader fronts are
>> emerging, which include not only peasant and indigenous struggles, but
>> also metropolitan minorities and, crucially I think, elements of the
>> middle classes who see the looming dead-end of industrial modernism -
>> something that has not been very perceptible to the old working
>> classes. These emergent alliances from below are threatened, not only
>> by the police, but even more, by the paralyzing power of psychic distress
> ... this reminds me of the 2023 book "Deluge" [1] by Stephen Markley [2]
> (available @ libgen .rs)
>
> Highly recommended!
>
> I am still reading it, so no spoilers if you've finished it already!
>
> It's a child of "The Road" & "Ministry of the future"... thicker than
> both, dark & dystopian & full of love stories...
>
> And here are a few select quotes:
>

> > ?We are not at a crossroads,? Pietrus writes in his introduction. ?We

> long ago took the wrong fork. Now we must do everything in our power,
> including sacrificing our comfort, our livelihoods, our economy, and
> partial, carefully excised pieces of our democracy, to save our species

> and all species.?

Thx for these poignant extracts !!

I like this analogy of NOT A CROSSROADS, BUT A WRONG FORK...

XLterrestrials have often tried to express this in regards to our paths
taken with technodystopian and Anthropocene-Techno-fascism developments.

And we usually get challenged with the standard cliche: But we cannot go
back!

To which we reply: If you've entered a burning building, and you decide
it's not an option to return where you came from... well, then, it's YOU
that made yourself TOAST !

...

( same goes for all those idiotic patriarchal nationalistic imperialist
bonfires ! )

more to respond to below...

but will have to stop here.

>
> > ?the biosphere doesn?t give a shit about the craven vicissitudes of
> the American political system?

>
> > We are committed to taking capital, and therefore political power,
> out of the hands of a fossil-fuel oligarchy. That is the global recipe
> to attack a primary source of misogyny, racism, and endemic inequality.
> Distributed systems of energy will redistribute political and economic
> power faster and more decisively than any other action, period.
>
> ... (including Ecofeminism)...
>
> > The history of capital accumulation has also been a history of

> women?s subordination and environmental degradation. Those three things
> are so intimately connected that you can?t unwind them. We are a

> colonized gender. we are in the process of achieving the dream of all

> oppressed peoples: we?re moving into the Master?s house, when really
> what we should be doing is burning the house down. Instead, we?re

> clamoring to be a part of the patriarchal, phallocentric political,
> economic, and social ecology: (...) capitalist patriarchy. But there has

> to be an ?other? for that system to maintain because it sees a world of

> scarcity and the only solution is an inequitable hoarding of resources.

> Part of that ?other? will always be women, and bitches are kidding

> ourselves if we think otherwise. If a system views everything in the

> biosphere as a resource, whether it?s buffalo, maize, fresh water, a gas
> deposit, or our internet data, it?s going to view women as extractive
> resources as well?

>
> On 16/02/2023 11:50, mp wrote:
>
>> Always. Things come and go, civilizations come and go. As one falls
>> the next is already in the making. One can throw oneself in there
>> where one thinks it will matter in the next world, in the next meantime.
>
> ... another (un)civilization quote, therefore cross-posting:
>
> > "I could name all the events that have destroyed families and lives

> and homes over the past ten or twenty years, but what?s the point? All
> of this is only the beginning. That?s what breaks my heart so much.
> We?re not here to prevent that future anymore?because we can?t. All we

> have left to fight is our own oblivion. Our civilization devouring
> itself as we run from storms and fires, as we die starving and thirsty
> and fearful and alone."
>
>
> I also recommend his previous book, "Ohio" -> specially in light of the
> recent poison cloud...
>
>
> Sharing our pains, sharing our joys,
>
> Vesna
>
>

> ------------------------------

>
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>

> End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 185, Issue 18
> ******************************************

[Brian Holmes]

Reading over some of the Stormy Weather posts, I find Pit Schulz's ideas pretty close to the more jaundiced or realistic side of my thinking, just as Alex Foti's posts respond to my sense of what is to be done. 

Pit wrote:

The decisive factor in the outcome, to use the language of board game
thinkers, is Europe and the bridging role of Germany, so the Ukrainian
war (including the recent debates over tank exports) is mainly about
disciplining Europe to submit to the fading glory of Western world
domination, the result being high inflation, an increasing debt
spiral, tech stock bubbles and derivatives markets at an all time
high, business as usual for the 1% ready to sacrifice more surplus
population for financialised profit.

I'm totally curious about Germany's bridging role - but between what and what exactly? In recent years I saw Germany developing a China strategy comparable in opportunism to the US Chimerica approach,  without the wholesale abandonment of the domestic working class, for sure, but a similar attempt to profit off comparative advantages in tech, high-end manufacturing and capital for foreign direct investment. Germany definitely went for the awful Schmittean 'Land and Sea' geopolitics approach, opting for the land side obviously, banking on the so-called Eurasian land bridge that is central to the Chinese attempt to deal with capital overaccumulation - basically by industrialising all the way along the railroad that goes to Germany, pouring steel and cement and other producer goods along a vast geographic stretch, with the bottomless consumer markets of Europe at the end of the New Silk Road.

Now Germany realigns with the US via NATO, to overcome the old Eastern bear. Aren't the industrial and financial elites quaking in their boots as the Spiegel reveals the (supposed) Chinese plan to sell "kamikaze" (sic) drones to Russia? (See the newspapers if you haven't already) Is the bridge gonna break? Does anyone have a better plan than this awful old geopolitical nightmare?

Curiously, Brian