History, whether it chooses to repeat itself or not

 Considering the freakish outcome Yevgeny Prigozhin's armed rebellion has already produced (Prigozhin heading to "exile" in Belarus, Putin actually not killing him and somehow staying in power himself), Vladimir Putin might want to consider a history lesson:

 

On a previous occasion, there a major defeat of non-Soviet military forces caused massive political upheaval in an autocratic Russian government, and it was the Russo-Japanese War. What ultimately followed it was an abortive revolution in 1905, and although it was an abortive revolution it caused opponents of the Czarist regime (ranging from the Constitutional Democratic [i.e., Cadet] party to the Social Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) to double down in their efforts to overthrow (or at least limit) the power of Czar Nicholas II. 

 

Another series of catastrophic failures against the German Army during World War I made things even worse, and although other factors were in play (severe social and economic inequity, the autocratic nature of the Czarist regime, you name it) those military defeats showed what a paper tiger the Russian Imperial army was. Could they suppress domestic dissent during peacetime? Of course. But could they do it after they were obliterated in military combat against the Deutsches Heer? Hardly. 

 

For a number of reasons I outlined above, Putin might be able to stay in power, but his seat behind his desk in the Kremlin is a lot less sturdy than it was in February 2022 when all of this started. And the only person he has to blame for that is himself.

Twenty years ago

The first inkling that something was wrong that morning was a call I received from my friend Paul Carter where all he said was something like "Hey Chris, turn on the TV - you're not going to believe what's happening".

Then all hell broke loose.

And its effects have lasted for two decades afterwards, either directly or indirectly.

At the time, I was in the throes of an extended period of underemployment after I had been cut loose from my previous full-time job in late September of 1998, so I wasn't one of the thousands of people who evacuated downtown office buildings in Chicago after the planes hit in New York, Arlington and crashed after a passenger rebellion over Pennsylvania. I've worked in the Chicago loop for a total of nearly nine years, and I can only imagine how it was that day for people getting out.

A mutual friend of mine and Paul's was downtown that day, though, and what made it worse for Jeffrey Oelkers was that he had been in New York a few weeks before this happened. He had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center firsthand just like anyone else in the area could. And he saw the terrifying footage of them getting destroyed weeks later after he stopped off at a place that had a TV on after being evacuated from work.

Like the worldwide pandemic that we've been living through since early 2020, 9/11 was an event that brought out the best in people - and the worst. A gas station attendant was shot to death in suburban Phoenix by a moronic self-described "patriot" just because he was wearing a turban. Unsurprisingly, the "patriot" didn't know the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim and even if he did, it probably wouldn't have stopped him from doing it. Conversely, there are stories of women going grocery shopping with Muslim friends of theirs because the Muslim women were afraid of reprisals. Events like 9/11 serve as a psychological mirror since they strip away the detachment that goes with the ability to think at a remove from trauma, and this is ultimately how you find out what you are, unwillingly. The long-term psychological trauma of that otherwise sunny Thursday morning is another element of this tragedy that will continue to be studied for decades afterwards.

Two decades have passed since that morning, and although people eventually went back to a semblance of their normal lives many people were permanently changed by what happened: the surviving close friends, relatives and loved ones of the people who died in the attacks, either as victims of the hijackings or on the ground. The first responders who risked their lives and either died in the collapse of the twin towers or suffered long-term health effects as a result of exposure to the now-poisonous air at the site. The countless scores of active-duty troops, reservists and eventual enlistees who fought in Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks. And countless others who saw it unfold in real time.

But the saddest truth is that after all of this, none of what happened then or since will give those 2,977 people their lives back.

Nothing will.

And that might be the hardest fact to swallow of all.

Afghanistan Agonistes

The impending collapse of Afghanistan shouldn't come as a surprise. And everyone's to blame. Everybody.

Why? Well, here's a thought - the US has been in Afghanistan for 19-plus years; the Soviets were there for roughly a decade. They - and the British Empire before that - thought that they could somehow take an intensely tribal, regionalized, backward society into the current century of their choice and make it behave as if any of the previous military interventions had actually worked.

They hadn't. And contemporary Afganistan is your proof.

From our point of view, no less than four American Presidents thought they could do what no one since Alexander the Great had done, which is change that region into something that it's not, or at least bring the Taliban to heel by military intervention (George W. Bush, Barack Obama until 2014) or by delusional "deals" he supposedly made with the Taliban (Trump). By withdrawing US forces, Biden is facing reality. The fact that that reality was hideously mangled by over forty years of civil wars, military intervention, constant butchery of civilians by warlords and different political and ethnic factions isn't strictly his fault. Instead, it's everybody's, going all the way back to 1978.

Granted, leaving what passes for Afghanistan's political "leadership" out of the blame game is equally daft. According to Transparency International, Afghanistan ranks 165th out of 180 countries in terms of political corruption. Add to this the fact that local military commanders decided to run for their lives or switch sides as soon as the Taliban rolled into town, and what you get is a collapse that was every bit as predictable as it was inevitable. What happens next is up to the Taliban and whoever chooses to fight them in the future, but what will probably happen is that the regime that holds onto Kabul will constitute the "government" and any number of guerilla bands and local warlords will constitute the real political power in the areas they actually control. And if the Taliban decides to shelter another group of Islamist lunatics who killed a shitload of foreign nationals elsewhere as they did with Al-Qaeda, the county will get bombed and invaded all over again. And the common people get to suffer the worst, just like they did in 1979 or 2001.

If Afghanistan ever manages to change - good luck with that idea ever being made a reality - it will be in spite of intervention by world or regional powers, not because of them. Pakistan, Iran and the like have reasons to keep Afghanistan in the current shape it's in, and Pakistan's military establishment in particular has no problems with the Taliban being in charge just as they were up until September 2001. The reality, however, is that the onus is on the Afghani people to fix things themselves. And when you've bottomed out as much as they have, the only direction out is to start to climb back up. Whether they can or not is anyone's guess.

Nothing good can come from this

It's not as if Qasem Soleimani wasn't a son of a bitch - he was, but a very high-ranking son of a bitch, to say the least - but his death on the business end of a US airstrike (and on neighboring Iraqi territory, on top of it) will do nothing to stabilize a region already fraught with sectarian violence and wall-to-wall atrocities against civilians.

But it couldn't possibly be a wag the dog hedge against certain domestic political issues, especially when embarrassing new evidence was about to come to light, could it?

Nah. Of course not.

The content of his "character"

It's been a good long while since I posted here. But then this happened, and as usual the interesting times (in the worst Chinese sense of the word "interesting") we live in forced me to comment.

Donald J. Trump has always been a punchline to me. I considered him a self-absorbed, egotistic boor who I couldn't care less about decades ago when he started gaining attention for himself with his high-profile business dealings (more like business failures,but you know what they say about there being no such thing as bad publicity) and his crass acquisition of mistresses and trophy wives alike. I just couldn't be bothered to care about a man whose main purpose in life seemed to be putting his name on as many prominent buildings as possible because his ego was just that big. He was, on balance, a caricature of the crass, high-living tycoon that shows up in good satire and bad soap operas alike. And I was, at best, indifferent.

And then things changed. 

He got into politics. And eventually got elected President.

And then a whole bunch of other things came to light about him, and he went from being merely unsavory to being outright dangerous.

Donald Trump believes in a wide assortment of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific woo and gives them a level of credence that belongs on a fringe web site. He's effectively used the United States government as a personal business marketing tool more than once, showed his contempt for Constitutional principles and nominated a number of sycophants and corporate lobbyists to positions in his cabinet and got rid of them when they weren't sycophantic enough for his liking.

He got in bed with wonderful international examples of authoritarian-to-totalitarian "leadership" such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Eun and did a number of things of things to insult or destabilize NATO, the European Union and individual allied nations. He uses his adult children as his personal public relations arm and is also dumb enough to personally involve them in his international and domestic political blunders. 

He makes himself out as a cartoonish ubermensch on Twitter, in reports on his physicals that read suspiciously like he personally wrote them and in assertions that he's a "very stable genius". And his racist, sexist and just plain assholish views and practices in and outside of his Presidency are just as well known.

Quite a few of these things are impeachable offenses while others are not, but regardless of whether he ends up getting impeached because of the Ukraine debacle one question remains, and it's a bad one:

How long will it take to clean up the damage he's caused?

Furthermore, will we be able to clean it up?

Fuxit

Unsurprisingly, the continued effects of Nigel Farage's folly are that Theresa May is probably going to go down as the most ineffective British Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain, at least in terms of coming up with a cunning plan to get Parliament to approve a method of letting go of "a far away country..." sorry, Europe.

Farage and the rest of the Brexit supporters hither and yon probably weren't thinking of letting go of Scotland, either, but that's now a real possibility again. It just doesn't pay to be a supporter of nativist-driven initiatives these days - in the UK or the US. Because even if you "win", the unintended consequences won't have to jump very far to bite you in the ass.