On 16 Maijs, 13:31, hol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Eugene Holman) wrote:
> In article
> <2685c05f-c958-4e7f-b35a-4cd5d0cac...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>
=3D?ISO-8859-13?Q?P=3DE7teris_Cedri=3DF2=3DF0_=3D28Peteris_Cedrins=3D29?=
=3D
>
>
>
> <cedr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > On 15 Maijs, 18:10, hol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Eugene Holman) wrote:
> > > In article
> > > <7eaa172c-f699-4176-80c9-6c6540dae...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> > >
=3D?ISO-8859-13?Q?P=3DE7teris_Cedri=3DF2=3DF0_=3D28Peteris_Cedrins=3D2=
9?=3D
>
> > > <cedr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > > > On 13 Maijs, 22:44, Dmitry <dmitrijsfedot...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > > > > On 11 May, 10:43, hol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Eugene Holman)
wrote:
> > > <deletions>
>
> > > > Western and especially American intervention in Latvia in 1919 was
> > > > really awful, too. I mean, British war****ps killed the people, and
t=
he
> > > > Americans brought food with all of those strings attached. Woe is
me=
..
>
> > > Back in those days the "bad guys" were easy to identitfy and
eliminate=
.. It
> > > should be clear after some seven years of conflict that intervening
in=
> > > Afghanistan is a great way to help some of the people in Kabul but
pur=
ely
> > > dysfunctional as a strategy for containing or destroying al-Qa'ida.
>
> > > Warfare with amorphous, supranational, rag-tag, leaderless
organizatio=
ns
> > > whose sup****ters have no regard for human life, not even their own,
is=
> > > quite a different prospect than war with states that have
infrastrucur=
es
> > > to maintain, populations to feed and protect, and a technologically
> > > advanced military to concretely project power.
>
> > > Regards,
> > > Eugene Holman
>
> > And your last paragraph doesn't describe the Bolsheviks? Ask Black
> > Monk.
>
> It does indeed. The Bolsheviks, a network of ideologically driven
> political thugs, were not loyal to a state, but to an idea, the goal of
> which was the erosian and demise of states. Living in a world in which
> states were the dominant form of complex human organization, they had no
> choice but subvert a state and usurp its resources for their own use.
>
> From the standpoint of political theory, the Bolsheviks represented the
> wave of the future when considering the development of so-called
> fourth-generation or asymmetrical warfare. Being on cusp of the
> transition, they could only prevail by, ironically, becomong more
statist
> than the statists. Al-Qa'ida has done a far better job of prevailing and
> frustrating the efforts of traditional states than the Bolsheviks, whose
> heirs were not above teaming up with a rigid and ultraconservative
state,
> Nazi Germany, ever did.
>
> The Soviet Union, as a rigid and, in many respects, conservative state,
> had extreme vulnerabilities, something that Nazi Germany tried to
exploit
> with its sneak attack and intended Blitzkrieg of June 22, 1941. If the
> Nazis had concentrated their efforts on taking Moscow rather than trying
> to add insult to injury by utilizing a resource diluting three-pronged
> attack aimed at insulting the Soviets by taking their two cities at
> opposite ends of the map named after im****tant leaders, Leningrad and
> Stalingrad, they might well have prevailed. As it was, the sttack wound
up=
> evlving into a traditional symmetrical military conflict of state
against
> state and ilitary against military.
>
> This is quite different from the asymmetrical conflict between the
United
> States and its coalition with their militaries and state-of-the-art
> technology, and al-Qa'ida's virtually invisible, low-tech, improvised,
> leaderless, nihilistic, suicidal combatants. They have no state,
> infrastructure, supply lines, or military to destroy, thus the quagmire.
>
> Regards,
> Eugene Holman
But back to my earlier sarcasm -- your response to my mention of
Latvia in 1919 was --
> > > Warfare with amorphous, supranational, rag-tag, leaderless
organizatio=
ns
> > > whose sup****ters have no regard for human life, not even their own,
is=
> > > quite a different prospect than war with states that have
infrastrucur=
es
> > > to maintain, populations to feed and protect, and a technologically
> > > advanced military to concretely project power.
=2E..and my asking about the Bolsheviks was in order to suggest that the
intervention in Latvia back then was also an intervention that took
place in what was basically an arena of chaos. There were three
governments pretending to legitimacy simultaneously: Stu=E8ka's Soviet
Latvia, Niedra's German-backed reactionaries, and Ulmanis' British-
backed Republic. The Republic did not even possess the slightest patch
of soil for a time (when Ulmanis' government was confined to the
steamer Saratov). These weren't the only actors, either -- Bermondt-
Avalov is most often described as an "adventurer," for example, and
the Russian prisoners of war who formed part of his force were
essentially apatrides.
Granted, there are profound differences between what is now Latvia at
that time and Afghanistan or Iraq (just as the latter two are very
different from each other) -- there are indeed more differences than
similarities. But that's not what I'm trying to hint at. What I meant
to suggest is that looking into the cauldron in 1919 in Latvia, few
would have said that a viable state would, or could, emerge. There had
never been a Latvia. The infrastructure had been removed or destroyed.
The land was devastated. White Terror followed Red Terror. Ethnic
groups appeared to be implacably at odds. The Reds could be as
fanatical as al-Qaeda. The rampage of Manteuffel's "Blue Devils" was
described as akin to a raid upon "savages in Africa." Bermondt's "West
Russian Volunteer Army" set fire to everything in fleeing.
Also, looking into that cauldron, one could not say where the
sympathies of the population lay -- not until some semblance of order
was restored and elections were held in 1920, and certainly not until
the prospect of being returned to the system that preceded war and
revolution caused the nation to unite against Bermondt. There were
hundreds of thousands of refugees. There were leaders switching their
sup****t or withholding it. There was the tendency of looking at
ideology through a flawed prism -- as I mentioned elsewhere, some of
the Germans looked at all of the Latvians who weren't pro-German
reactionaries as Bolsheviks or "half-Bolsheviks."
The thing is that Britain picked the decent crowd, even at the point
when it rather obviously did not have much sup****t (Britain extended
_de facto_ recognition to Ulmanis' provisional government even
_before_ the proclamation of independence on 18 November 1918).
Part of what I'm playing with is -- imagine it now! The _Guardian_
would be screaming bloody murder, and your buddy Chomsky would have a
fit. Just as the German generals looked upon even exceedingly
conservative gentlemen like Ulmanis as half-Bolsheviks -- so the post-
leftists I call pseudo-leftists like to see everybody in cahoots with
the great democracies, esp. Uncle Sam (we already know from Karlamov
that AmeriKKKa is the most evil country ever to have raped the earth),
as the running dogs of imperialism.
And the reality that emerged in Latvia in 1920? Free elections with a
leftist plurality. On the other side, the radical land reform would
certainly be decried by, say, the _Economist_ today (land reform _has_
been sup****ted by the US and its allies in the past, esp. when the
landowners were the enemy... in Latvia back then, I suppose that's
part of why it flew -- there was not too much sympathy for the Germans
at the time [NB that the minorities in Parliament took the reform to
court in The Hague, and lost]).
I know your opinions re Iraq, and now re Afghanistan. Put them aside,
please, and please don't come back with all of the reasons those
countries or non-countries are different -- I can list all sorts of
differences, too, from Islamism to more effective weapons. What I'm
more interested in is the strange deficit in anything positive or
constructive you and your ilk seem to suffer from. You keep making
ridiculous comparisons between the occupation of Iraq and the
occupation of the Baltics by the USSR, for example. That's simply
absurd -- the US (and the coalition of the unwilling and coerced or
whatever) never had any intention of annexing Iraq, or incor****ating
it, or flooding it with colonists, or lynching its nationalists.
I will again remind you that I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq.
What I can't abide, though, is this endless slipperiness -- the
pretense that democracy is just another ideology, for example, or the
excuses made for unutterable bull**** like "sovereign democracy" in
Russia, which is just another name for the lack of democracy Russian
style. "Back in those days the 'bad guys' were easy to identify and
eliminate." Yeah, right. It ain't easy identifying Islamism as bad? It
ain't easy finding people in Iraq who are committed to decency and
depend upon the sup****t of the coalition? A commitment was made --
you'd like to pretend that those we committed to are non-existent or
puppets, or reduce this debacle to a simple rape, or weasel your way
to the gods no not where. That's my impression.
My mention of the Americans distributing food here isn't an invention
-- it's what they did. The liberating Polish-German-Latvian army was
followed by American humanitarian aid. Personally, I don't plan to
forget that, just like I don't plan to write off the sup****t of the
British or the French in liberating the Latvia I live in. The
Georgians recently made a similar statement re the aid Latvia now
offers Georgia. I think it's a matter of common decency, in the final
analysis.
Regards,
/P
http://lettonica.blogspot.com/
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