A dispute over taste and tasting

 
Watching TV

I don't watch TV often. Well, no, I actually watch it every day when I come back home from the office, but my attention span is about two minutes by then, so I am the advertiser's dream target. Yet there I times when I sit through a news review. Last time I did, I even learned a few things. The most important bit was about Interenergoservice, the company that the two Russian hostages recently killed in Iraq had worked for. According to Russian Channel 2 (RTR), Interenergoservice had four contracts for rebuilding Iraqi power stations, of which only one was signed before the war. That is--assuming Iraq's electricity industry is government owned, which I suppose is true--it was the post-war administration that signed these contracts with the Russian firm. That would have run contrary to what some US officials proposed, that is, to exclude countries that opposed the war from reconstruction tenders. (Not that Russia was strongly against the war, but it wasn't enthusiastic either.) If true, it's a good sign. The fewer eligible applicants, the higher the resulting price, and it's the people of Iraq (or the US) who have to foot the bill.
posted by Alex(ei) at 3:14 AM

 
Be careful when you say 'democracy'

Masha Gessen writes on Why Russians Want Democracy. I didn't quite get why Russians wanted democracy from her article, but at least she is convincingly arguing they do want it. She doesn't make clear what kind of democracy she is talking about, and that's a problem. Putin, too, is a democrat: why shouldn't he when he enjoys nationwide support? But Gessen also talks about 'the actual democrats' and 'pro-democracy parties' as opposed to Putin and his cohort. The primitive kind of democracy that brought Putin to the top is plebiscitary: it has direct elections of a chief at its core, and not much else. The most evolved and fine-tuned type of democracy is found in the US and Western Europe. Neither protects individuals completely from the tyranny of the majority and the state, but the latter [correction: the latter = that in the US and Europe] is obviously better at that. Gessen seems to mean 'modern liberal democracy' most of the time, but not always--and that muddles her message even beyond its original muddledness.

As long as he manages to pay lip service to democratic values while keeping the actual democrats from forming an opposition force, he will continue to enjoy the support of Russia's increasingly pro-democracy public--even as he eviscerates Russia's democratic gains. This is not because Russians are crazy or hypocritical; it is because the state is far stronger than any institutions of civil society. And the imbalance is only increasing, in part because the state is steadily undermining civil society.

Compare this with what I said a few months ago. A weak society means either a strong state or chaos. If Russian society could nourish, support and trust 'actual democrats', neither Putin nor anyone else would be able to put them down. If the people trust Putin to be a better protector of their liberties than democratic institutions, they may be expressing a preference for a strong state over chaos. They can't do much about their collective failure as society. But--and Gessen rightly puts it--they still fear the state. Even in the most corrupt city, you still trust a cop to protect you from a mugger, but you'd rather not deal with cops either.

Russians are tired of the social and the political; now more than ever, they seek consolation in private life. The nascent middle class is steeped in family values. The irony of it all that to succeed as a nation, Russians need collective--call them social--values that they have seen discredited.
posted by Alex(ei) at 5:16 AM

 
Brown v. Red revisited

Alan E. Brain at a Samizdata discussion:

They [the Nazis] Raped Knowledge. They Defiled Science. Like the Stalinists, they took the finest aspirations of the human soul and corrupted them.

I'd change that to "unlike the Nazis, the Bolsheviks took the finest... and corrupted them." Hitler mostly exploited sentiments and instincts that were either dubious (nationalism), or negative (sore pride) or ugly (ethnic hatred). Lenin sure did play on class hatred a lot, but he and Stalin were particularly good at exploiting--and thus defiling noble and lofty aspirations and values: thirst for freedom, hatred for injustice, willingness to work hard for a better future, sacrifice in defending one's cause and country, etc.

With every transcendent value so discredited, what is to prevail but cynicism? What other form of social organization is to be expected but dog-eat-dog 'capitalism'? It should come as a pleasant surprise that lots of Russians have not given up on the basic values that make society possible, although those who have are frighteningly overrepresented among the nouveaux riches of Russia.
posted by Alex(ei) at 7:36 AM

 
Clarification

My previous post shouldn't be mistaken for wholesale denunciation of the coalition of the willing. I just think the Iraqi operation is suicidal; Russia's Chechen war, too. Not one-shot suicidal, more like slow poison that debilitates first.
posted by Alex(ei) at 1:48 PM

 
An ex-champion speaking

Garry Kasparov (I guess it should be 'Harry' but never mind), the 13th world champion in chess, has produced a piece for The Opinion Journal (i.e., WSJ). It's pretty much the same old neocon propaganda, and as all modern propaganda goes, every reasonable person would find a few statements there that she would agree with. One would think a great chess player--possessing undoubtedly of superior mental capabilities--might invent a few original arguments instead of rehashing old, boring stuff--but never forget this world is built around specialization. And, by the way, how much would you trust Bobby Fischer's political judgment?

I must admit to a personal bias here, though. I have always disliked Garry--'always' being 'since 1984'. Instinctively so--just as I instinctively dislike George Bush, instinctively mistrust Putin, and instinctively liked Yeltsin. There are plenty of conservative and not so conservative writers on both sides of the ocean who have long refuted most of Kasparov's points. Here's something I particularly enjoyed.

At the same time, Al Jazeera isn't examining Vladimir Putin's war against Muslims in Chechnya. All of Chechnya is one big Abu Ghraib, but the Islamic world pays scant attention to the horrible crimes there because Mr. Putin shares their distaste for liberal democracy.

I don't watch Al Jazeera, so I don't really know; and Chechnya is a mess, or so it seems. And Putin may dislike liberal democracy--but if he does, he certainly does it in a very different way from the Muslim world; he does not share his distaste with them because his--if real--is much unlike theirs. This way or that, fighting guerrillas always leads to Abu Graibs, and Russia is proxying for the West in Chechnya, like it or not: not for the modern West, but for what it was 200 years ago. At least Russia is not pretending to be bringing 'liberty' to Chechnya; most Russians see the war as an attempt--futile as it may be--to bring Chechnya back under Moscow's control: as the world recognizes, Chechnya is a legitimate member of the Russian Federation. On the contrary, the US and the UK have no lawful claims to Iraq and were been attacked by Iraq before the war; therefore 'aggression' and 'occupation' are technically valid terms for the coalition's military action. Likewise, Iraqi guerrillas are truly resistance fighters, since their country is occupied by foreign powers. Sad but true.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to pursue a nuclear arsenal and the U.N. Secretariat, France and Russia are busily covering up their involvement in the Oil-for-Food scandal.

I don't see Russia covering up its involvement; Russian companies have never made a secret of it, and they have nothing to be ashamed of. Iraq owed Russia a certain sum, and oil-for-food was a reasonable way to recoup some of it. No scandal there.

If we are to impress the superiority of the democratic model upon the Muslim world we must thoroughly investigate any and all allegations of abuse and clean up our act.

Whether you impress your superiority or not is totally irrelevant. Liberal democracy as we know it is a product of centuries of social development and internecine struggle that shaped modern Western societies with their complex institutions. In terms of social development, Iraq is lagging the West by 1000 years, and Russia by 200 years or so. If Americans manage to foment rapid social change in Iraq, fine (have I mentioned 'accelerated champagnization' before?) but something tells me it won't be the right kind of change.

People like Kasparov should bear a degree of responsibility not only for the death of Western soldiers and workers in Iraq; not only for the death of numerous Iraqis (knowing his type, I suspect he doesn't give a damn), but for thoroughly discrediting those American values that are indeed worth fighting for. This war has produced the deepest disillusionment with America among a huge segment of the public in the West and the East. Unfortunately, common people tend to mix together governments and nations, practices and ideas. Paradoxically, the best way out for the US would be to (pretend to) admit the truth. Stop being hypocrites, guys, and say it loudly and proudly: we are building an empire. It's going to outshine Rome and the Holy Empire and become the true Third One. So don't mess with us, or we'll screw you! (I also like Governo Vargas's slogan, "O petróleo é nosso!")

And still, should Putin try to stay in power in 2008, I'd be with Kasparov.
posted by Alex(ei) at 11:23 PM

 
It was a poem, actually

Translate a poem, word by word, into another language and see if it still makes sense. If it does, that's a good sign for the original thing; not a necessary or sufficient condition of its goodness, but a sign of hope. I'd expect Aaron Haspel to concur.

This poem was originally written in Russian and is typical of its author's early work. I tried to keep the odd parts odd; 'name' and 'to name' in the first couple of lines are a poorer approximation that 'appellation' and 's'appeler'.


Animals have no name:
who told them to name themselves?
Uniform suffering
is their invisible lot.

The bull, conversing with nature,
retires to the meadows;
over his beautiful eyes
white horns are shining.

The river, like a plain-looking girl,
lurks amidst the grasses,
laughs, then sobs,
having buried her legs in the ground.

Why is she weeping? why grieving?
What ails her?
All nature has smiled
like a lofty prison.

Every little flower
is waving a little hand;
the bull is shedding grey tears,
walks around pompous, barely alive.

And on the barren air
a light bird is circling,
for the sake of an old, old ditty
toiling with her tender throat.

Before her, waters are beaming,
the wood is swaying--the great wood--
and all nature is laughing,
dying every moment.

UPDATE: I missed a whole stanza, unintentially--it's now back in.

And the author is...

Nikolai Zabolotsky
1929, Leningrad
posted by Alex(ei) at 2:48 AM

 
The national anthem 2

By December 1991, the USSR was out, and so was its anthem. A year earlier, the Russian Federation adopted its own anthem: a re-orchestrated version of Mikhail Glinka's sketch, known as The Patriotic Song. Glinka, the author of the first two major Russian operas and, if you ask me, a fine composer, seemed the perfect choice, especially since both his operas are as Russian as they get. The Patriotic Song emerged from a piece found in Glinka's archives and first published in the 1890s, believed to be a draft for the Russian anthem composed some time in the 1830s. Ironically, the music came into prominence shortly after WWII, during Stalin's 'Russia the motherland of elephants' campaign.

The problem with Glinka's song was that no one seemed to come up with a decent text. For almost a decade, Russians could not sing to their anthem. Not that it was a terrible thing--even the USSR's old anthem was wordless from 1956, when Stalin was first officially denounced, to 1977, when Mikhalkov finally cleaned up the text. As polarized as the Russian society was in the 1990s, a musical piece could be a better unifier than any poem. But the Duma stubbornly refused to legislatively confirm The Patriotic Song as the anthem, as well as the white-blue-red tricolor as the flag and the double-headed eagle for the coat of arms.

When Putin got on top, he stuck a deal with the Duma: he would drop Glinka's anthem in exchange for their acceptance of the other symbols. It worked, but at a huge cost: the music of the old Soviet anthem--i.e., originally that of the Bolshevik party--regained its official status. For a few months, it was destined to be verbless like its predecessors; there were a great deal of applications--althought few of the better poets would compose for that music--and eventually, guess who was picked to do the job? The venerable patriarch Sergei V. Mikhalkov, of course.
posted by Alex(ei) at 12:24 AM