Print this page
|
|
| Recent Publications by New English Review Authors |
 |
Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline
by Theodore Dalrymple |
 |
In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas
by Theodore Dalrymple |
 |
Defending The West:
by Ibn Warraq |
 |
Nations, Language and Citizenship:
by Norman Berdichevsky |
 |
Romancing Opiates
by Theodore Dalrymple |
 |
Which Koran?
by Ibn Warraq |
 |
Our Culture, What's Left of It
by Theodore Dalrymple |
 |
What The Koran Really Says
by Ibn Warraq |
 |
Life at the Bottom
by Theodore Dalrymple |
 |
The Origins of the Koran
by Ibn Warraq |
 |
Why I Am Not Muslim
by Ibn Warraq |
 |
Spanish Vignettes: An Offbeat Look Into Spain's Culture, Society & History
by Norman Berdichevsky |
 |
Leaving Islam
Edited by Ibn Warraq |
|
Monday, 11 August 2008
Those Tin-Pot Irrational Machiavellians In The Kremlin
 Putin has attacked the most advanced and in many ways most winsome state in the Caucasus, the state that is the surest friend -- in its essence -- of the West, and by the West one includes those Russians who reject Putin and his KGB-cum-crooked-capitalism state and who, though they have not been able to rouse their morally somnolent countrymen, all so delighted with Putin as a "strong man" (just like any old General Beranger, if General Beranger had been in the KGB), deserve to be listened to, even elected, deserve to instruct and to properly -- not criminally and improperly -- protect the people and culture and state of Russian. And forget, just for a second, that Saakashvili may not be the perfect leader of Georgia at this time, may even be lacking in proper breeding and Georgian charm ("durno vospitan" claims Russian writer Grishkovetz in a verisimilar article). That shouldn' t get in the way.
Georgians were victims, over many centuries, of Muslim raiders, who found Georgian women and girls, in particular, just the thing to bring back to Muslim -- Arab and Turkish and Persian -- harems. Even the memory of Griboedov -- he is buried on a holy mountain, in the most hallowed cemetery, in Georgia, because his wife was Georgian -- reinforces resentment toward the Muslims, for it was a Persian mob that beat him, Griboedov, to death in Teheran for daring to protect Christian women from Muslims.
To the south of Georgia is Armenia, another historic victim of Islam. Below Armenia is an insufficiently secularised, and therefore permanently worrisome -- will it go this way, will it go that? -- , Azerbaijan.
But what do those tin-pot irrational machiavellians in the Kremlin, eager to prove a point, and to protect the redoubt for money-laundering by Russian Mafiosi that northern Ossetia is reputed to have become (with a certain Kokoiti involved as local suzerain in Ossetia for Russian interests), know about all that? They are, if such is possible, even dumber than the Americans, throwing their money away on Tarbaby Iraq and on Tarbaby Afghanistan, the two so-called "central fronts" in what is billed as a "war on terror," when the war is something else, and has no central fronts.
Does the Russian government, supposedly peopled with those their admirers think of as "patriots," think that weakening the most solid anti-Islam redoubts in the Caucasus is a clever idea, an act of farseeing geopolitical cunning? We'll all see about that. Posted on 10:17 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Comments
12 Aug 2008
John M. J.
I think I'd want to be remembered for more than having a smelly, backwater canal in Petersburgh named after me - if anyone will ever remember me, that is!
Look, there are parts of the world where other influences hold sway and have rights - rights, I'll grant you, born out of brute force, but rights, none the less. Russia, no matter what so ever Tsar may reign, Sir (Vicar of Bray springs to mind), has such rights in the Caucasus. Georgia is Russia's back garden and no matter what abuses she (Russia) may commit there, we do not have any right what so ever to interfere.
The problem, if a problem exists at all, is that you Americans see so called 'human rights' as taking precedence over the realpolitik. You are applying twenty-first century Western values to situations which are seventeenth and eighteenth century problems and only capable of resolution in seventeenth and eighteenth century terms.
What you fail to grasp, dear Hugh, is that the world has NOT moved on - only some parts of it have. In Georgia, in Russia, the battles fought over the last three-hundred years are having to be fought again and again. The technology of killing might have changed but the ideology behind the fight, the reason for the fight, has not and never, ever will.
Possibly you see progress and change but they don't. All which they see is skirmish after skirmish. The men and women who appear to us to be significant appear to them to be, well, what, exactly? Nothing, mere footnotes in a never ending fight, perhaps! Alexandr Griboyedov isn't even a dim memory for Russians or for Georgians.
You think that the world has changed but it hasn't.
Those who occupy the Kremlin today are not 'Tin-Pot Machiavellians', as you would characterise them, but people who see very clearly exactly where Russia's best interests lie - and, no, I cannot forget, and neither should you, that Saakashvili is an idiot who seems to believe in 'Georgia or Death'. Sorry, but that should, must, get in the way.
The problem is, my friend, that you simply haven't given up your knee-jerk, cold-war reaction against Russia. For you, everything that Russia wants must be wrong and Russia has no rights in anything. You neglect history and villify Russian money-laundering 'mafiosi' as if that was some sort of new phenomenon instead of the perpetual state of affairs which we have lived with for the last three-hundred years - not excluding the Communists!
Oh, and by the way, Georgia is not ' a solid anti-Islam redoubt' as you would have us believe. Georgia is, first and foremost, a bandit state the administration of which is headed by Sakashvilli with the permission of the Mkhedrioni, a secretive Mafia-style organisation financed and armed by whom exactly? which blatantly rigged the ballot, did it not? You would not be comfortable with the answers to those questions, would you? Then again, perhaps you would be! The money for the Mkhedrioni, according to The USA CIA came from Saudi Arabia. Make of that what you will! 12 Aug 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
You have completely misunderstood me. I wrote not a word about "human rights" and not a word about "interference" by America. And I have nothing against machiavellianism, just against "tinpot" machiavellianism. I am aware that Saakashvili has lost the support of others, and I tellingly mentioned, early on in the piece, a devastating criticism of him, Saakashvili, based on observations in an emptied-out restaurant, by the Russian playwright Grishkovetz, whose comments on Saakashvili based on personal observation can be found here:
I was under no obligation to deal with every aspect of this matter. For example, I did not say much about the American contribution to the conflict, including the repeatedly ill-considered comments of Condoleezza Rice that contributed to the misreading of the situation by Saakashvili, and possibly emboldened him. I did not dwell on American inattention to Russia, in its mad pursuit of this “war on terror” instead of a calm, and in the end much more effectively ruthless pursuit of alliances among all those states, including Russia, whose alarm about domestic Muslim threats should be not discouraged but exploited, and alliances of convenience formed with all those states that sense a Muslim threat – and that’s a lot of states. I did not go into how the American support for an independent Kosovo which certainly enraged not only the current KGB regime in Russia, but many Russians who found themselves. as a result, more accepting of that regime's conspiracy theories about the West. Many of Saakashvili's former supporters, including such former cabinet ministers as Salome Zourabishvili, did not support but opposed him when he ran for a second term. There must be reasons for that, reasons I am trying to discover. But they have all rallied around him just now, for obvious and temporary reasons.
My brief comment was about one thing: since in the not-very- long run, Russia will be forced to recognize that it shares interests with Georgia that are much more important than what now divides them – to wit, whether those calling themselves Ossetians, (and in both North and South Ossetia there are many ethnic Russians, and in South Ossetia there are ethnic Georgians, and the population figures are inaccurate on all sides) are to be denied some of their desired political "rights" by the Georgians under Sakashvili, or by whomever follows him, or by the Russians under Putin, or by whomever follows him, surely the Russian regime should have found some other means to display its displeasure (it had a total economic boycott at its disposal) and chosen another place to show that it was not to be, as it apparently thinks it has been, trifled with. My point was that the Russian regime is as short-sighted, and its policies just as hobbled by some of the same things – rigidity and stupidity – as the Bush Administration. And I don’t understand your dismissal of Georgia, and apparent lack of dismay, at the same time, of the regime now ruling Russia for its own purposes. Despite all the talk about these KGB men being “Russian nationalists,” they remain heedless of the real threats to Russia’s continued existence, the threats to a Russian future for Russia.
12 Aug 2008
John M. J.
Dash it, this is the second or third time I've fired off a comment only to realise that I didn't quite grasp your meaning correctly, after you explained it further. My apologies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Announcing the First Annual
New English Review Symposium
Roots of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
& Strategies for the Future
May 29th & 30th
Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel
Nashville, TN.
Speakers Include:
Richard L. Rubenstein
Ibn Warraq
Hugh Fitzgerald
Nidra Poller
Andrew Bostom
Rebecca Bynum
Norman Berdichevsky
Jerry Gordon
Bill Warner
& Brian of London
|
Most Recent Posts at The Iconoclast
Search The Iconoclast
The Iconoclast Posts by Author
The Iconoclast Archives
RSS Site Feed
|
|
