Aurelien, you have again (indeed, as always) eloquantly expressed what has been hidden in plain sight- that our "leaders" stumble about among the detritus of their unexamined assumptions as much as the rest of us. That politics is no more rational than the actors in a play - they speak their lines from a composite script whose familiarity is taken for truth. I wonder if perhaps that's why modern empires tend not to last so long as in the past. The ever deeper layers of sediment emitting ever less coherent bubbles of decaying assumptions, thicken the noxious mental fog we seem to be stuck in. Simple answers are an illusion, but in the press of life, we grab onto them. What a ruddy miracle it is that we've survived so long as it is!
Proverbially, on traces and sediments: It's less what you don't know that's a problem than what you know for certain—or pretend to—that's plain wrong.
Recall what catbird-seated Karl Rove (allegedly) told journalist Ron Suskind: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." What happens when narrative über alles comes into kinetic contact with a renascent superpower on its border? We're seeing it, and it is a sorry and disturbing sight, like Titicut Follies in pricey suits and stylish scarves.
Are the Atlanticist institutions madness factories or finishing schools? Answer: trick question.
It is an interesting story and very well written and uses Derrida's deconstructivism as a nice scafolding/metaphor.
However, while it might very well represent the bumbling Europeans, it definitely leaves aside the elephant in the room, the US. Wasn't the US that kept pushing for its hegemony and unipolar moment to announce in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. Which then emboldened Georgia later in 2008 and started the war? Wasn't the US that strongly supported the Chechen Wars? Then all the Ukrainians color revolutions.
You cannot really apply the same measure to the US actions against Russia as you do with the bumbling reactions of Europeans. Also, Germany's economic seppuku is rather hard to explain by the sediment. More like the assiduous cultivation of US, especially after the rebuke of European states of the Iraq invasion, of a new elite beholden to US, and that will move lock in step with the US.
Why is that the Russians don't give any attention to European countries any longer? Because they don't matter any longer. It seems that right now they are just sediment, America's sediment...
I'd like to add another piece of sediment. Western think-tanks specialising on Russia are actually very reluctant in hiring Russians. There is no shortage of Russians willing to join them, especially after the start of SMO. And yet they hire Ukrainians, Kazaks, citizens of Baltic states -- anyone but Russians. And people from post-Soviet republics have a very, very funny ideas about Russian and Russians due to sediment of late Soviet and post-Soviet anti-Russian propaganda.
The sediment that buoys a policy does run silent and deep.
I agree that these accumulated debris would make for an interesting research project. I dabble in computational linguistics and have thought that analyzing political discourse over the span of my life time from 1953 onward to be a interesting project.
In a much narrower application than this essay I find the U.S. defense munitions design process to be a morass of inexplicable complexity. The much mocked simple Russian munitions are devastating the Ukrainian army daily. On the other hand our vaunted weapons are not doing all that much to Russian Forces. Reasons for this lack of performance deal chiefly with design that did not account for a possible lack of air supremacy and also, the conditions of the battlefield terrain. (For enlightenment, search for videos showing the steps necessary to launch a salvo of HIMAR missiles. The time, complexity and mass of auxiliary vehicles necessary is daunting. Then comes the Patriot...)
The only conclusion that I find sane is that our weapons are designed for trade shows, not war. Buttressing this bad choice is the faith based allegiance to "markets".
Let's hope that our come to Jesus moment is not Ms. Condoleezza Rice's specter of a mushroom cloud.
Having served at a very low level in the Federal government on foreign policy matters, I think that if anything you are understating the problem. I saw a lot of ambitious but callow bureaucrats scamper from crisis to crisis. The lack of a national strategy other than “contain everyone” didn’t help.
The sediment you describe is analogous to the complexity ratchet Joseph Tainter describes - adding layers is easy and stripping them off is hard, so eventually you get to a point of crisis where you are so bound by the past you can’t face the future clearly. What is needed is for someone to cut the Gordian Knot. Some place their hope in Trump to do that on the American side, but he is, to put it mildly, no Alexander.
The other issue that makes this worse is the different goals and means of the various NATO countries. Russia has the distinct advantage of not having to coordinate with allies (aside from trying to not make the Chinese look too bad).
A very interesting article. I wonder though where you got the idea that the mass rapes of German women at the hand of the red army didn´t take place? When even the Yugoslav Communists complained to Stalin (read Milova Djilas "Conversations with Stalin"), that the Red Army raped and plundered during their short stay in the Voivodina to such an extent, that it tarnished the reputation of their Yugoslav comrades. Stalin famously answered, why be so prudish when his soldiers were having a little fun.
As to NATO and all these international organisations and their institutional inertia: very interesting look from within. Fact though is as well that the US military was wanting a new base "camp bondsteel". And as to what is happening in Ukraine: for many years any close reader of Russia - Western relations knew that Nordstream was the project to watch. It was opposed by the US from the very start and it was amusing (nor not so) to watch how the Germans tried any kind of subterfuge to enact the project. They were wiggling like worms to somehow escape the clutch of big brother who didn´t want Nordstream. Only by provoking the war in Ukraine did they finally manage to put an end to German-Russian cooperation.
Auelian helps us understand the muddy hydrology of the PMC -- how sediment production and accumulation correlates with mass and inertia over time. To quote this essay, such things as " ...NATO headquarters...permanent staff...Defence College and... and... and... " form impressive infrastructure for creating and processing sediment. The sediment factory has numerous and complex accretive processes, such as self-hypnosis, self-programming, ingrained bias, political buffoonery, etc. Add in big budgets and the amplifying effects of corporate media, and you have a self-sustaining chain reaction for production of sediment. We are all coated with it.
Aurelian helps us wash it off, but it's pretty sticky stuff.
At this point NATO countries can’t even decide if they want to support Ukraine and, if they do, how they’ll go about it. Pure sable rattling with Russia watching and laughing. The EU, as far as I know, still requires each member nation to adhere to a balanced budget with, ideally, a 2% growth economically per year. How would increasing the production of armaments for Ukraine factor into this? What part(s) of each nation’s growth would be sacrificed?
No, as you mention so well, each member of NATO sees the Ukraine conflict in its own way and, for those very reasons, will likely react differently than any of the others.
If NATO can’t bring itself to decide what the conflict is about collectively, how to defend it or not, how to negotiate with Russia which doesn’t want to do so and how to satisfy Ukraine and not sell it down the river it shouldn’t be there.
Bigger is by no means better or stronger for that matter.
“ The result is a confused, scared and over-stressed ruling class that has started something it now cannot control and which it knows, at some level, will end badly. But it cannot understand the mistakes it made, it’s not very sure how it got into this mess, and it literally cannot envisage any other set of policies apart from continuing the current funeral procession.”
This has been my take since nearly the beginning. Although it is clearly getting much worse by the day. They created a historical moment that is far too big for them. Everything since the failure of a half-thought plan A has been reaction. Each reaction is more counter productive than the last.
This sounds like you are speaking about ancestral kamma, which has been prevented from coming to full reckoning and reconciliation by the suppression of vengeance by the overlay of words and abstractions.
The Indigenous Australians never needed empire amongst amazing tribal and linguistic diversity because they knew how to manage and utilise vengeance. Vengeance acts without the need for vocabulary.
"The first to do so will be ostracised from the club. So the conference held in Paris over the last couple of days, in the post-Avdeevka panic, was apparently predicated on the requirement that “Russia must not win,” and so fantasies of sending handfuls of western troops were (perhaps) discussed, on the basis that it gave the leaders something to talk about instead of the inevitable Russian victory."
With all due respect, you are high if you think that that the intervention will be limited to "handfuls" of western troops, and certainly not after the first batch gets chewed up.
Anyway, everyone knows that NATO campaign starts with lots and lots of air strikes. Preferably delivered using standoff weapons.
I don't think that the question regarding "the historic distinction between the regions of Yugoslavia that had been part of the Habsburg Empire" and the others was a sediment in the Yugoslavia crisis. Rather that all Europeans and USA (and Russia) leaders were well aware of this at the time. But Germany was the European leader then, no one would seriously object against its will (well, I think Spain to a certain extent did, it's a country with lots of important "sediment", by the way).
In the Ukraine crisis, meanwhile, Germany achieved the remarkable feat of ceasing to be important (for the moment, at least). So, Macron's meeting yesterday was his attempt for France to take the lead (it won't work). But crisis always end one way or another, don't be so pessimistic :). In this case, I have the feeling it will be sooner rather than later. They will find an honorable excuse to abandon the Ukraine project (Trump perhaps?). And even to get the pipeline working again. I may be wrong, of course.
Thank you, once again, for much to think about. You mention that "Shorn of its decorative vocabulary, Derrida’s argument is easy to understand". It's the decorative vocabulary that repels me from reading him - is there another credible source I can read to understand these ideas in more detail?
Aurelien, you have again (indeed, as always) eloquantly expressed what has been hidden in plain sight- that our "leaders" stumble about among the detritus of their unexamined assumptions as much as the rest of us. That politics is no more rational than the actors in a play - they speak their lines from a composite script whose familiarity is taken for truth. I wonder if perhaps that's why modern empires tend not to last so long as in the past. The ever deeper layers of sediment emitting ever less coherent bubbles of decaying assumptions, thicken the noxious mental fog we seem to be stuck in. Simple answers are an illusion, but in the press of life, we grab onto them. What a ruddy miracle it is that we've survived so long as it is!
Proverbially, on traces and sediments: It's less what you don't know that's a problem than what you know for certain—or pretend to—that's plain wrong.
Recall what catbird-seated Karl Rove (allegedly) told journalist Ron Suskind: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." What happens when narrative über alles comes into kinetic contact with a renascent superpower on its border? We're seeing it, and it is a sorry and disturbing sight, like Titicut Follies in pricey suits and stylish scarves.
Are the Atlanticist institutions madness factories or finishing schools? Answer: trick question.
It is an interesting story and very well written and uses Derrida's deconstructivism as a nice scafolding/metaphor.
However, while it might very well represent the bumbling Europeans, it definitely leaves aside the elephant in the room, the US. Wasn't the US that kept pushing for its hegemony and unipolar moment to announce in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. Which then emboldened Georgia later in 2008 and started the war? Wasn't the US that strongly supported the Chechen Wars? Then all the Ukrainians color revolutions.
You cannot really apply the same measure to the US actions against Russia as you do with the bumbling reactions of Europeans. Also, Germany's economic seppuku is rather hard to explain by the sediment. More like the assiduous cultivation of US, especially after the rebuke of European states of the Iraq invasion, of a new elite beholden to US, and that will move lock in step with the US.
Why is that the Russians don't give any attention to European countries any longer? Because they don't matter any longer. It seems that right now they are just sediment, America's sediment...
I'd like to add another piece of sediment. Western think-tanks specialising on Russia are actually very reluctant in hiring Russians. There is no shortage of Russians willing to join them, especially after the start of SMO. And yet they hire Ukrainians, Kazaks, citizens of Baltic states -- anyone but Russians. And people from post-Soviet republics have a very, very funny ideas about Russian and Russians due to sediment of late Soviet and post-Soviet anti-Russian propaganda.
The sediment that buoys a policy does run silent and deep.
I agree that these accumulated debris would make for an interesting research project. I dabble in computational linguistics and have thought that analyzing political discourse over the span of my life time from 1953 onward to be a interesting project.
In a much narrower application than this essay I find the U.S. defense munitions design process to be a morass of inexplicable complexity. The much mocked simple Russian munitions are devastating the Ukrainian army daily. On the other hand our vaunted weapons are not doing all that much to Russian Forces. Reasons for this lack of performance deal chiefly with design that did not account for a possible lack of air supremacy and also, the conditions of the battlefield terrain. (For enlightenment, search for videos showing the steps necessary to launch a salvo of HIMAR missiles. The time, complexity and mass of auxiliary vehicles necessary is daunting. Then comes the Patriot...)
The only conclusion that I find sane is that our weapons are designed for trade shows, not war. Buttressing this bad choice is the faith based allegiance to "markets".
Let's hope that our come to Jesus moment is not Ms. Condoleezza Rice's specter of a mushroom cloud.
Well put.
Having served at a very low level in the Federal government on foreign policy matters, I think that if anything you are understating the problem. I saw a lot of ambitious but callow bureaucrats scamper from crisis to crisis. The lack of a national strategy other than “contain everyone” didn’t help.
The sediment you describe is analogous to the complexity ratchet Joseph Tainter describes - adding layers is easy and stripping them off is hard, so eventually you get to a point of crisis where you are so bound by the past you can’t face the future clearly. What is needed is for someone to cut the Gordian Knot. Some place their hope in Trump to do that on the American side, but he is, to put it mildly, no Alexander.
The other issue that makes this worse is the different goals and means of the various NATO countries. Russia has the distinct advantage of not having to coordinate with allies (aside from trying to not make the Chinese look too bad).
A very interesting article. I wonder though where you got the idea that the mass rapes of German women at the hand of the red army didn´t take place? When even the Yugoslav Communists complained to Stalin (read Milova Djilas "Conversations with Stalin"), that the Red Army raped and plundered during their short stay in the Voivodina to such an extent, that it tarnished the reputation of their Yugoslav comrades. Stalin famously answered, why be so prudish when his soldiers were having a little fun.
As to NATO and all these international organisations and their institutional inertia: very interesting look from within. Fact though is as well that the US military was wanting a new base "camp bondsteel". And as to what is happening in Ukraine: for many years any close reader of Russia - Western relations knew that Nordstream was the project to watch. It was opposed by the US from the very start and it was amusing (nor not so) to watch how the Germans tried any kind of subterfuge to enact the project. They were wiggling like worms to somehow escape the clutch of big brother who didn´t want Nordstream. Only by provoking the war in Ukraine did they finally manage to put an end to German-Russian cooperation.
Auelian helps us understand the muddy hydrology of the PMC -- how sediment production and accumulation correlates with mass and inertia over time. To quote this essay, such things as " ...NATO headquarters...permanent staff...Defence College and... and... and... " form impressive infrastructure for creating and processing sediment. The sediment factory has numerous and complex accretive processes, such as self-hypnosis, self-programming, ingrained bias, political buffoonery, etc. Add in big budgets and the amplifying effects of corporate media, and you have a self-sustaining chain reaction for production of sediment. We are all coated with it.
Aurelian helps us wash it off, but it's pretty sticky stuff.
Thank you Aurelien🙏
At this point NATO countries can’t even decide if they want to support Ukraine and, if they do, how they’ll go about it. Pure sable rattling with Russia watching and laughing. The EU, as far as I know, still requires each member nation to adhere to a balanced budget with, ideally, a 2% growth economically per year. How would increasing the production of armaments for Ukraine factor into this? What part(s) of each nation’s growth would be sacrificed?
No, as you mention so well, each member of NATO sees the Ukraine conflict in its own way and, for those very reasons, will likely react differently than any of the others.
If NATO can’t bring itself to decide what the conflict is about collectively, how to defend it or not, how to negotiate with Russia which doesn’t want to do so and how to satisfy Ukraine and not sell it down the river it shouldn’t be there.
Bigger is by no means better or stronger for that matter.
“ The result is a confused, scared and over-stressed ruling class that has started something it now cannot control and which it knows, at some level, will end badly. But it cannot understand the mistakes it made, it’s not very sure how it got into this mess, and it literally cannot envisage any other set of policies apart from continuing the current funeral procession.”
This has been my take since nearly the beginning. Although it is clearly getting much worse by the day. They created a historical moment that is far too big for them. Everything since the failure of a half-thought plan A has been reaction. Each reaction is more counter productive than the last.
Peace,
This sounds like you are speaking about ancestral kamma, which has been prevented from coming to full reckoning and reconciliation by the suppression of vengeance by the overlay of words and abstractions.
The Indigenous Australians never needed empire amongst amazing tribal and linguistic diversity because they knew how to manage and utilise vengeance. Vengeance acts without the need for vocabulary.
Peace.
"The first to do so will be ostracised from the club. So the conference held in Paris over the last couple of days, in the post-Avdeevka panic, was apparently predicated on the requirement that “Russia must not win,” and so fantasies of sending handfuls of western troops were (perhaps) discussed, on the basis that it gave the leaders something to talk about instead of the inevitable Russian victory."
With all due respect, you are high if you think that that the intervention will be limited to "handfuls" of western troops, and certainly not after the first batch gets chewed up.
Anyway, everyone knows that NATO campaign starts with lots and lots of air strikes. Preferably delivered using standoff weapons.
One could say their consciousness of the truth has gone rotten .
Overripe with hubris is worse than
A bruised banana for your morning breakfast.
Poor diet?
I don't think that the question regarding "the historic distinction between the regions of Yugoslavia that had been part of the Habsburg Empire" and the others was a sediment in the Yugoslavia crisis. Rather that all Europeans and USA (and Russia) leaders were well aware of this at the time. But Germany was the European leader then, no one would seriously object against its will (well, I think Spain to a certain extent did, it's a country with lots of important "sediment", by the way).
In the Ukraine crisis, meanwhile, Germany achieved the remarkable feat of ceasing to be important (for the moment, at least). So, Macron's meeting yesterday was his attempt for France to take the lead (it won't work). But crisis always end one way or another, don't be so pessimistic :). In this case, I have the feeling it will be sooner rather than later. They will find an honorable excuse to abandon the Ukraine project (Trump perhaps?). And even to get the pipeline working again. I may be wrong, of course.
Thank you, once again, for much to think about. You mention that "Shorn of its decorative vocabulary, Derrida’s argument is easy to understand". It's the decorative vocabulary that repels me from reading him - is there another credible source I can read to understand these ideas in more detail?