February 30

HIATUS

I'm putting this blog on hiatus temporarily (though I'll probably try to keep the sock puppets going). I don't know how long it will last, maybe a few days, maybe weeks. See you some time in the future.

What stupid celebrity are you destined to kill? by daydreamer8852
Name
Birthdate
You killed
With a
On	July 23, 2016
Created with the ORIGINAL MemeGen!

I'm usually immune to the charms of the online quiz but I couldn't resist this one, not when the results were so accurate (even if the data I submitted was not). How did they know?

(Via Peter Briffa)

He's gone.

LUKASHENKA ON THE CARDS

In Belarus a pack of cards is apparently circulating clandestinely, based on the one the US army had made in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. Except Belarusian dissidents have replaced the Iraqis with pictures of the ruling clique in Minsk. The joker is, of course. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The ace of spades is the procurator general Viktar Sheiman, accused of arranging the disappearance of several opposition figures. The queen of spades is the head of the Central Electoral Committee Lidia Yermoshyna, suspected of vote-rigging. Amongst the cards is a picture of a composer who wrote a song for Lukashanka called "Comrade President". (From Gazeta Wyborcza.)

The latest from Ajaria: there have been anti-Abashidze protests on the streets of the capital Batumi, prompting suggestions that Abashidze might be forced to leave the same way Shevardnadze did back in November and Ajaria will have its own "Rose Revolution". However, Abashidze's loyalists claim they have mined the oil terminal in Batumi so it's too early to say whether it will all end without violence yet.

For more coverage read The Argus.

AJARIA THE NEW ATLANTIS?

"It's worse than we thought," says Trevor of Kaleboel, referring these shocking new developments (according to News 24):

Georgia, Adjara - Militia in Georgia's renegade province of Adjara on Sunday blew up the main bridges linking it to Tbilisi as Georgian warships circled overhead in a new escalation of violence in the diplomatically sensitive region.

Apologies for not posting recently. I've been too busy- and when I've not been busy I've been too lazy. Meanwhile the situation in Ajaria is worsening:

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has threatened to sack the leader of the rebel Ajaria region unless he meets a string of demands within 10 days.
His warning came hours after Ajarian forces blew up two bridges linking the region to Georgia.

The regional leader, Aslan Abashidze, said he feared Georgian soldiers on exercises nearby were about to invade.

Mr Saakashvili said Ajaria had to start disarming and to comply with the Georgian constitution.

"We have decided one last time to give a deadline to Aslan Abashidze," Mr Saakashvili said.

"We will give him 10 days to return to Georgia's constitutional framework, stop violations of law and human rights, and start to disarm."

He said he would dissolve Ajarian local institutions, remove Mr Abashidze and call new elections, if the deadline was not met.

WAR WITH AJARIA?

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's anti-corruption drive looks like it might be taking a military dimension as he threatens to remove the head of the rebel republic Ajaria, Aslan Abashidze, by force:

President Mikheil Saakashvili has dramatically intensified the conflict with Abashidze, who is refusing to recognize Tbilisi's authority over his region. He has declared that the leader of the rebel republic has offered him "a thousand times" "all the money he wants if we will only leave them in peace and let them continue to pursue their dirty dealings.They have everything. Drugs, and property, and palaces in the world's major capital cities -" affirmed the new president of Georgia, adding that his predecessor Eduard Shevardnadze had allowed the leader of Ajaria to do anything he wanted, since they had "certainly bribed him."

"If we want to be a strong and united country, we must stand together against brigandage, crime and the drug barons. There are those who say they do not want confrontation. Such pacifism is a betrayal of our national interests", claimed Saakashvili.

A few weeks ago Abashidze, the scion of a family which has ruled Ajaria since 1463, distributed arms among the inhabitants of his republic. He is now warning that an invasion of Ajaria might lead to intervention on the part of neighbouring Turkey. In his view Turkey could do this according to the terms of an old treaty signed by Turkey and Russia in the 19th century. Saakashvili regarded the mention of the treaty a provocation.

It's hard to say whether Georgians are ready to move from words to actions, which would threaten a war similar the the one Tbilisi waged in the early 1990s with another rebel province, Abkhazia.

It's hard to say too whether the authorities in Tbilisi have sufficient forces at their disposal. A few days ago General Poman Dumbadze, the leader of the 25th Motorised Rifles Brigade refused to take orders from Tbilisi and put himself under Abashidze's command.

The leaders of the small (area: 2,900 square km; population: 400,000) Black Sea republic have turned Ajaria into a "free trade zone", also known in Georgia as a "black hole" or a "free smuggling zone".

OH THE HUMANITY!

Last Saturday saw the centenary of the French communist newspaper L'Humanité (nicknamed L'Huma), whose history is recalled with considerable lack of affection by former dissident Leopold Unger in Gazeta Wyborcza.Its title wasn't quite such an exercise in Orwellian irony in the early days. It was founded on April 18, 1904 by the French socialist leader and Dreyfusard Jean Jaurès. By 1920 however it had become the mouthpiece of the French Communist Party (PCF). Unger writes:

The history of L'Huma would be pathetic were it not so full of hatred. "Ideologues" from Thorez and Marchais to Castro and Ho Chi Minh wrote for it; it published writers and artists: Aragon, Eluard, Neruda, Picasso, a long gallery of conscious or manipulated "fellow travellers". For all of them, L'Huma was the great tribune of communist and pro-Soviet propaganda in the democratic West.

Unger says the central "drama" of L'Huma was "its insane idolatrous cult of Stalin and the USSR". This led the newspaper to follow the Kremlin's line slavishly "during the Moscow [treason] trials, when Stalin liquidated the old cadres of the party and the army, or at the time of the "friendship" between Hitler and Stalin, regarding Kravchenko*, a 'firsthand' witness of Stalinism, the author of I Chose Freedom, accused of being a CIA agent*, or regarding the Soviet invasions of Budapest, Prague and Afghanistan or 'heresies' like Solidarity".

The newspaper's popularity peaked in the years immediately following World War Two when the PCF was the first or second largest political party in France. Its fortunes declined as that party gradually lost credibility and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, its funding dried up. It currently has a circulation of 50,000. Unger says that until recently L'Huma was so cash-strapped it wouldn't have been able to afford one hundred candles for the cake let alone champagne to celebrate its one hundredth birthday. In the comments below the article one wag recalls the old joke: "Why is L'Humanité more expensive than Pravda?" "You have to add the translation costs."

(* Victor Kravchenko, Soviet apparatchik who defected in 1946. His book I Chose Freedom exposed the truth about the USSR, including the camps system. He was accused by a French Communist journal Les Lettres Francaises of being a liar and CIA stooge and a famous libel trial ensued, in which Kravchenko cleared his name by bringing in dozens of Eastern Bloc refugees as witnesses).

ACADEMIC BLOGGING

Gimme Tenure! is in serious need of an update, so I'll see what I can do this week. Starting today in fact.