This blog is back and coming up will be a demolition of the propaganda-cum-history served up by those like Edward Lucas and his The New Cold War. There is a growing need for real conservatives, social democrats and political liberals to oppose the increasingly insane policy of expanding NATO deep into the heart of Eurasia.
Also important is to stress the conservation of oil and gas and Green issues which have been neglected by militant progressives who believe the world is converging towards a World Order under the USA. This is a dangerous myth as is the Great Game being played out in a rerun not of the New Cold War but in a return to the terrain of pre-1914 geopolitics.
For a few month I have thrown myself into conservation which can be seen in the blog Krakow's New Dragon's which documents the new psychopathology of a rapacious neoliberal model of globalisation where national and local governments are subordinated to the needs wholly of global corporations and not the citizenry of Krakow, especially with land use and property development.
Those who have followed this blog will see the general world process in action at the microcosmic level of Krakow, as documented in the sister blog Krakow's New Dragons, and the crony capitalism that the much trumped "Open Society" was meant to prevent. Instead, though only bands of unrepentant Communists ignorant of Poland's history could pine for the People's Republic, Krakow is controlled by neoliberal corporatism.
This is destroying the city and has its roots in the successor ideology to Communism in another Utopian ideology where abstract doctrines and fundamentalism of the "free market" is, in fact, a rigged one wrecking the city's beauty and architectural legacy as well as creating a Rada Miejska that genuflects before global money power rather than local people and a real civil society.
It's good that CEEW is back up.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned on Krakow heritage about Anne Applebaum's Gulag history. I am reading that right now. Compared to Solzhenitsyns Gulag Arghipelago it is more structured. Solzhenitsyns work was good in a different way, less well strucutred, it bombarded you with anecdotes and opinions, and even managed gallows humour.
Also, Anne Applebaum is married to Poland's foreing minister, Radoslav Sikorski. If I remember correctly in Lucas's New cold war, Sikorsky was quoted as saying that the German Russian energy partnership was an 'energy version of the molotov-ribbentrop pact', which is pretty inflammatory. Would Anne Applebaum approve of such rhetoric considering how she opposes the contemporary trivialising of the soviet union's various inhumanities. If she opposes ostalgia tours and communist iconography still being in vogue, surely she must oppose rhetoric which compares a trade deal with the molotov ribbentropp pact.
Now I can go through your archive. You had an issue with a certain phrase in Lucas' book and had a converstaiton with him here.
More blogs are forthcoming. The next is on Lucas. I have got his book, popular in Poland and will TRY to get it done by Sunday.
ReplyDeleteI also next year want to write books. A New History of Krakow of sorts and A History of Post-Communist Poland. This is a badly needed gap not dealth with by Davies, apart from his supplementary chapter to Heart Of Europ and Zamoyski's Poland A History ( a review of which is in the pipeline as well.
ReplyDeleteGood to see you back.
ReplyDeleteVery pleased to see you back in action.
ReplyDelete@Thanks Olching and Moscow Exile
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