While the words are getting tougher over Trump's bombardment of an air strip that, um, didn't actually take said strip out of action, the usual jockeying among senior government figures here is taking place in the background.
Take the news this morning that Boris Johnson, our most over-hyped but under-powered of politicians has cancelled long scheduled talks with his counterpart, Russian foreign secretary Sergey Lavrov. Apparently Johnson instead prefers to potter around the G7 to come up with a united response, though none of that is stopping Rex Tillerson of Trump Tower from flying to Moscow later this week. Unsurprisingly, Labour, the SNP and LibDems attacked him for his reticence on this Sunday morning's reduced schedule of political programming. On Sophy Ridge, John McDonnell slated him for passing up an opportunity of holding Putin's government to account. Tim Farron accused Johnson of having his diary managed by Washington, and Alex Salmond on Andrew Marr mocked him for not having the full confidence of his boss. No disagreements with those assessments here.
From day one of the Trump era, Theresa May has clung to the feet of the new administration, partly to mitigate the train wreck of Brexit. And so if the Americans want the limelight, May is happy to give it to them. Less an order cabled to Downing Street, and more a 'working towards the Fuhrer'-style approach. When that figure the Prime Minister is working towards is the man destined to be the worst president in American history, it's a concern.
You might also recall how, in an act of pettiness that is quintessentially Tory, how May appointed the "Three Brexiteers" - the hapless Johnson, David Davis, and disgraced former (now serving) minister Liam Fox - to the key Brexit portfolios. There was a great deal of comment about making them "own" the miserable situation they created while the man ultimately responsible enjoys retirement. Yet there were a paucity of views on whether any of them can do actually their jobs. That Johnson has been removed from the equation of a potentially serious crisis in relations with Russia. After all, it's not supposed to be the job of "Handbags" Fallon to issue sternly-worded rebukes to the Kremlin. His lot is to oversee the bean counting at the MoD and attend military parades. Foreign affairs, funnily enough, belong at the Foreign Office. Salmond is right to call Theresa May's faith in Johnson's competence into question.
It wasn't long ago that May was beholden to two deeply average but posh hoorays who treated government like cramming for an exam. She, like pretty much anyone else not dazzled by the buffoon celebrity knows Johnson is cut exactly from the same cloth. Lazy, opportunist, cynical, he is definitely not a man to turn to in a crisis. Yet what is worse is he is a perfect fit for a section of the foreign policy establishment who, for the last 25 years, have grown indolent thanks to not having to face up to a geopolitical challenge to the global supremacy of the United States. Egged on by blowhards nostalgic for the them and us certainties of a cold war, Johnson, like them, has absolutely no interest in understanding the Russian government's point of view. Indeed, while Johnson might not be guilty of this, there are plenty who write on foreign affairs always surprised to learn other states have interests too, and are quite prepared to pursue them as they see fit. Walking in your opponents' shoes, which should be an ABC of of domestic and international politics, is entirely absent not only from the Conservatives, but across the parties here and is the default setting for other western foreign policy establishments. It happens that Johnson offers a distillation of it.
And so May will carry on letting him play foreign secretary as long as no harm is done, which will mean removing him time and again from crisis and near-crisis situations. The question is how long can Johnson survive without the spotlight on him?
"Something has to be done!" goes up the cry every time an abominable war crime surges over the newswires, but the question has to be what and how. Throughout yesterday, following Donald Trump's bombardment of the Syrian government airfield apparently used for the chemical attack on Idlib province, we saw implacable foes of the White House freak show rush to back up the US administration. "Today was the day Trump became the president" went one egregiously arse licking headline, and all of a sudden the investigation of the dodgy links to Russia, and the awful domestic programme are compartmentalised and held in abeyance. Colour me surprised? Not in the slightest.
Let's get one thing out of the way with first. The attack on Khan Sheikhoun in which at least 80 people were killed did happen. It's not some fakery cooked up by the bureau for dirty tricks at the State Department (which, under Trump, barely has budget enough for staples let alone elaborate ruses). Just because it might be convenient as it directs the media spotlight away from Trump and his troubles doesn't mean it must be a US conspiracy. If you look at any Western government during the last seven years and the difficulties besetting them, the distraction of air and missile strikes has and always will appear to be convenient. Nor is it a hoax perpetuated on the ground by rebel factions, most of which are now little more than ragtag and bobtail outfits with Kalashnikovs. The mode of delivery and the multiple sources for the story point to its being true. So let's knock the conspiracy theorising on the head now.
The key question in time like these is how to enforce "accountability". We know that the White House and 10 Downing Street are compromised as enforcers of international law. That no one has been sacked, let alone charged for supplying weapons to Israel and Saudi Arabia as the former engages in chemical attacks of its own and the other presides over famine in Yemen is disgusting. How governments with great ugly question marks hanging over their repeat and unaccounted-for interventions in the Middle East are expected to apply the law always cruises under the radar of sundry Officially Concerned politicians and pundits. This matters because why it might not concern the people who matter here, hypocritical rhetoric and action certainly does matter to those who live there. Worried about winning hearts and minds? A dose of introspection would be most welcome.
Even if we put that out of our minds, we have to consider whether Trump's missile strikes are the means for enforcing the chemical weapons "red line". If he was genuinely moved by this outrage and wanted to help, then why not rescind his ridiculous attempts to enforce a travel ban? If this was about degrading the capacity of the Syrian air force, then why does the Shayrat airfield runway remain undamaged? And, while it might have been essential to notify Putin to get Russian personnel out of dodge (who after all wants a wider war?), it's naive to assume that the courtesy call's information wasn't passed on to the regime, which was then able to quickly shift some of its assets. The regime says nine people were killed, but these were civilians hit by missiles that fell short of the target or went awry - though these claims come with the necessary caveats. What then was the purpose of this escapade? A punishment that has done nothing to curb the military capacity of the Assad air force, but put on a show of liberal interventionism that has won Trump new friends. It's almost as if the response to Thursday's outrage was contrived this way. And it's reasonable to conclude that Assad and Putin are of like mind.
Meanwhile, the bloody grind and morass that Syria has become carries on. "Doing something", which is how this is being justified, should not be an excuse for doing anything.
I'm definitely not a fan of the Stop the War Coalition. It has a legion of problems, rooted in a rather reflex anti-imperialism that leaves it open to claims of soft soaping dictators, and providing cover for whosoever incurs the displeasure of the State Department and Whitehall. That said, some of the criticisms thrown at the group over the last couple of days strike me as stupid and disingenuous. Such as Boris Johnson's argument that it should be organising demonstrations outside the Russian embassy against the vile atrocities committed in Aleppo.
First things first, Stop the War was set up to oppose the war drive against Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Building on the organisation that came together to protest the bombing of Serbia in 1999, it put on flesh in the demonstrations leading up to and during the first phase of the Iraq War. It has also been very clear the Coalition's strategy is about building anti-war public opinion against the British government because, well, it's a Britain-based outfit. It aims to change British foreign policy by putting pressure on its democratic institutions via mass mobilisation, civil disobedience, influencing MPs, making the case against military adventurism, and so on. Furthermore, as even my cat knows, Britain is part of a web of alliances and strategic military partnerships. It has particularly close ties to the United States, and in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Wherever these states are involved in military activity, it is usually with the tacit or practical support of the British government. The 2006 Lebanon War, the 2009 and 2014 war on Gaza, and current commission of war crimes by Saudi Arabia in Yemen incur the opposition of Stop the War because of our complicity. For Israel, UK and US companies have happily furnished them with armaments to drop on largely defenceless populations. For Saudi Arabia, not only are we providing ordinance but also "military advisors", thereby exposing British military personnel to possible war crimes charges in the future.
With a Labour Party forever divided on questions of war and peace, someone has to take up the cudgels of making the case against Britain's wars.
Oh, but what about Russia and Assad? Sure, there are tankie nostalgics in Stop the War, but backward glances of this kind are very much a minority interest. The reason why the coalition doesn't protest against Russian militarism is a political calculation: what would such actions achieve? In the first place, picketing the Russian embassy is unlikely to change the minds of the Kremlin clique. With its reputation mud in most NATO countries, the kind of actions Stop the War undertake aren't going to have an effect. Whereas, say, a big march on the Saudi Arabian embassy has the potential of giving our government pause. Second, and most obvious - too obvious for our Boris Johnsons - if Stop the War begin agitating against Putin, that contributes to the case for war. Imagine, if half a million on the streets gives a British government jitters over its support for the latest US action, then the same number protesting the bombing of an aid caravan on Aleppo's approaches might encourage them in its Syrian no fly zone idiocy. Having Stop the War co-opted for a war drive kind of defeats their purpose.
I don't particularly like Stop the War's politics, but it is what it is. Instead of griping, there is nothing stopping Boris Johnson and his Progress cheerleaders organising their own gathering in Kensington Palace Gardens if they felt so strongly about "doing something". But they won't, which makes their criticisms of Stop the War sound like hollow point-scoring.
A guest post from my friend and comrade, Trudie McGuinness. She is a member of Labour’s National Policy Forum and sits on the International Policy Commission. In 2015, Trudie stood as Labour’s Parliamentary Candidate in Staffordshire Moorlands. Here she gives a flavour of the discussions on the IPC.
You are a leadership-defying Blairite war-monger who is happy to nuke children. Or so it might be claimed if you were one of the 140 Labour MPs who voted on Monday night to renew Britain’s at-sea Trident nuclear deterrent.
The Tories did not need to secure the backing of Parliament to progress fully with the plans that are already underway for the successor nuclear deterrent programme. They did so because they wanted to pick at the scab of the wounded Labour Party. The newspapers dubbed the vote the biggest rebellion against the Labour leader to date. Yet conversely, it could seen as the biggest rebellion of a Labour leader against his party’s policy in nearly one hundred years. The vote was designed to ferment further division. We are vulnerable to attack and the Tories – indeed, all onlookers – know it.
What is also clear to see is that Labour Party members, supporters, MPs, MEPs and councillors are increasingly being judged in binary terms. We ourselves in the Labour Party are some of the harshest accusers. Blairite (nearly always pejorative), Brownite (shades of dull) and Corbynista (depends on your stand point and we only allow two) are the confetti currency of discussions.
In contrast, the reality of life is that it is full of nuance. Nuance sits also at the heart of the nuclear deterrent debate. It is not, as Ken Livingstone when he was Chair of the International Policy Commission declared, a division between the war-mongers and the pacifists. Our unity is in wanting a nuclear-free world. Our debate is in how we get there.
Labour’s NEC gave the International Policy Commission on which I sit the specific focus of reviewing party policy regarding Britain’s defence and security priorities. For the past six months colleagues and I have met and listened to fifteen experts giving insights into international strategic context, nuclear deterrence and Trident renewal and the defence sector and jobs. Their knowledge and experience carried weight. Their words and arguments carried nuance.
We were all seeking answers. We all have own starting point, with our own history and prejudices. My own starting point, as a child of the Cold War, is an abhorrence of nuclear weapons. Colleagues and I were all agreed on that. The idea of one nuclear bomb going off, let alone a full nuclear conflict, reminds us anew of the need to inject pace into securing a nuclear-free world. I was not sure, though, that replacing Trident was compatible with that. Lisa Nandy MP shares this view and reasoned to vote against Trident renewal on the basis that it sets back multi-lateral nuclear disarmament.
But does it? In Policy Commission meetings I have actively sought to challenge my own bias and have asked lots of questions along the way. It was notable that some of the experts, the majority of whose party political views remained unknown, looked deeply uncomfortable at the prospect of Britain failing to secure a replacement for Trident when it finally faces decommissioning. James Nixey from Chatham House and Malcolm Chalmers from the Royal United Services Institute warned of a resurgent Russia seeking to flex its military might. They warned months ago of the danger of Brexit and the impact that this would have on the strength of the EU and, by association, NATO in meeting the strategic challenges that Russia will present, especially now that it has form in Ukraine – a country which forfeited its nuclear deterrent.
Insight into the changing nature of nuclear weapons possession came from RAND Europe’s Paul Cornish. Stockpiles of nuclear weapons amongst known nuclear powers have reduced significantly in the past two decades, yet more states are seeking to acquire them. The risk of the use of a nuclear weapon by a rogue state has grown. The de facto understanding on which nuclear deterrence has worked is that of mutually assured destruction. This same assumption is being applied to rogue states. With rogue elements, this is applied in hope rather than expectation. So whilst there is a high probability that nuclear weapons will deter a potentially aggressive Russia, the same surety cannot be applied to non-states. Nuance emerges.
Whilst some have wavered on renewing our nuclear deterrent either on the basis of jobs lost or overall cost. I will push for a defence industrial strategy and want to see a default policy of using British workers to meet the UK’s defence and security needs. But unless a piece of equipment is needed, there can be no sensible argument for its manufacture just to keep people in jobs. As for overall cost, actual spend must be scrutinised against forecast spend. But since the defence and security of its people is the primary duty of the UK government, then if something is fundamentally needed in order to secure that aim, then it must be supplied. The central question for me was always, Is it needed?
I have come to the view that it is.
I want to see a nuclear-free world. I want us to fast-track efforts to secure multi-lateral nuclear disarmament. I do not, though, believe that scrapping plans for the successor programme will expedite that. I actually believe that right now it would make us more vulnerable to attack.
Not since I was that girl of the Cold War have I felt that our world to be so dangerous. We face terrorism and we must meet it. We face potential conflict from global warming consequences and we must be prepared. We face cyber and technology attacks and we must scramble to stay one step ahead. We face as yet unknown threats and yet we must be ready for them. Our complex world requires complex answers. It needs nuance.
While the contributions ring out in the House tonight, Dave's scheme for Syria has finally taken on some flesh. Well, that assertion is perhaps too generous. Vapours would be more accurate. But a plan of sorts exists, which is more than bombing for appearance's sake, or bombing and hoping for the best.
Dave's grand strategy got a full airing on this evening's Channel 4 News via his Philip Hammond appendage. Those 70,000 figments of his imagination have now assumed form. They comprise some 20,000 Kurds and 50,000 assorted moderates, apparently. The RAF's unique capability to smash IS forces and installations accurately and without civilian casualties in the complete absence of reliable, on-the-ground intelligence is something this army needs if they're to smash their way into Raqqa and liberate the town of the blight that befell them.
Of course, the fiercest fighting taking place is between Assad's forces and that of the rebel groups variously organised under the Free Syrian Army banner. The involve some progressive, secular, and democratic forces. And groups that are not. Yet there's no reason why any of them would break from their fight with the dictator's army and turn their guns exclusively against IS. For the Dave plan to work, that has to happen. Luckily, the plan is underpinned by another plan to solve this thorny issue. The big powers have met with various Syrian opposition figures as part of the Vienna Process. It's early days, but Hammond gave the long-drifted idea that some sort of conciliatory compromise can be struck between Assad and his non-Islamist opposition whereby his dictatorship would give way to an interim administration, followed by democratic government. This would free up these sides to turn their attentions against IS and crush them. According to Hammond, the only man standing in the way of the scheme is one Vladimir Putin. Therefore the British bombing campaign is premised upon a road map that no one, not the Russians, not Assad's regime, and neither the FSA nor the Kurds are signed up to yet.
And what are the chances of such a deal getting struck? By any reckoning they cannot be described as generous. Putin's interest in Syria is the maintenance of a reliable ally in the Middle East. He knows what Russia can expect should Assad remain in power, hence why FSA positions are getting a hammering. The Kremlin is hardly likely to assent to an uncertain transitional government where, at best, a question mark is raised over the fidelity that has with Russian geopolitical interests. From his perspective, under the name of democracy his opponents in Washington, Paris, and London are looking to install a regime more congenial to their designs for the region. And one does not need to be a Putin cheerleader to see that is more or less correct. What, did you think the US bombed IS positions on behalf of the Kurdish YPG out of kindness as opposed to a coincidence of interests? IS are hardly an existential threat, despite their bloody crimes, but they do stand in the way of a permanent settlement in the region what would leave US hegemony unchallenged by Russia and Iran. With diametrically opposed interests, the idea Russia are going to roll over on a perceived strategic asset is thinking more woolly than anything ever uttered by pacifists demonstrating outside the Palace of Westminster.
If Dave didn't desperately want his war, surely military action would post-date, not precede a plan of action. But, again, the war drive draws deep from a desire to be seen to be doing something and, of course, to play the war leader. Dave's plan is fragmentary, vapid, and depends the unfolding of an unlikely scenario. There is no case for bombing.
When you're dealing with the broad sweep of history, of the collective efforts of billions of people as they produce, consume, go to war, and compelled to struggle among themselves for scarce resources, what role for the individual personality? For the majority of us, the point is moot. The vast majority of us will have our latter day three score years and ten, and fade into the background noise of the human story, though the digital footprint we leave behind will probably endure long after our immediate circle of family, friends, and acquaintances have shuffled off too. Some, however, will have names and personalities that live on long after their deaths because of their contributions to their fields of endeavour, or are forever associated with historical events posterity labels pivotal. History isn't a procession of great men - and it's nearly always men - who bend the course of social development to their will, but it sometimes appears that way.
Let's look at a famous example from the Marxist canon, depending where you sit on the Trot/Tankie spectrum. In his masterful The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky pauses his gripping narrative to consider what would have happened had a brick fallen on Lenin's head in between February and October, and comes to the conclusion that the seizure of power by the Soviets would not have occurred. Writing some 30 years later in his equally superlative biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher takes Trotters to task for this observation. Here, the founder of the red army is taken to task for lapsing into idealism and, inadvertently, contributing to the cult of the personality Stalin created around Lenin as a foundation stone for his own legitimacy. Deutscher rightly observes that historical processes are the tectonics of millions upon millions of people moving simultaneously. Lenin did not create the conditions for the revolution, and in all likelihood the momentum of grievance would have made it without him.
Trotsky was more right than Deutscher, however. While it is true that Lenin was frequently in a minority on the Bolshevik central committee over the question of immediate socialist revolution, he had to wage a protracted political struggle to win them and the wider membership over to his famous April Theses. It's reasonable to assume that on the level of myriad micro social interactions and transactions, the figure of Lenin was absolutely crucial - as this otherwise silly right wing counterfactual also concludes. This however wasn't the basis of Trotsky's argument, though it was important. What was was Lenin being more than just Lenin as an individual. He was the figurehead for a real mass revolutionary movement in Russian society, a condensation that was made possible over many years of factional struggle, dissemination of writings and Bolshevik propaganda, and who - with his programme - was able to pull growing numbers of radicalised peasants and proletarians into the orbit of his party. Lenin was just a man, but effectively he was also a social movement, a figure that was the collective property of millions. This collectivity invested a great deal in him, so that his premature death would have constituted a major defeat for that movement.
Let us consider someone who's Lenin's polar opposite: Adolf Hitler. As the subject of more counterfactuals than practically any other historical figure, Hitler is taken as a 'great man' upon which the pivot of history hinged. If only he'd launched Barbarossa earlier. If only he listened to his generals more. If only he hadn't embarked on the industrial extermination of Europe's Jews. If only von Stauffenberg's bomb had got him. However, like Lenin, Hitler sat atop and was the collective property of a social movement. As Nazi Germany started collapsing under a shower of allied bombs and military defeat, the solidity of German society - which in 1944-45 was losing around 300,000 people a month - was maintained by the fuhrer cult. Support for the Nazis even as they were visiting ruin on themselves remained because of the legitimacy initially secured through the attraction of mass support, and then a ceaseless let up in regime propaganda around Hitler's superhuman qualities. In a society denuded of ideological resources save those sanctified by the Nazis, Hitler was less a projection of fear and more a source of hope for beleaguered Germans. Hence his movement had raised him up to the point where his whims and moods was not just life and death for millions of people, but determined the course of history.
The characters of each men say a little something about the movements they personified too. Lenin, by all accounts, was single-minded in his pursuit of socialist revolution. Everything about him was subordinated to that goal. He also, again it is generally agreed, did not have a trace of egoism - he resisted the personality cult, for example. Written into his character were the revolutionary aspirations of Russia's growing proletariat, of a class excluded from what passed for official politics and was ruthlessly suppressed; despite the fact he wasn't drawn from that class himself. Hitler's personality too was suited to the movement that made him. His prejudices, his sense of entitled victimhood, his nationalism, his taste for the high life, these were qualities that commended him to the petit bourgeois, the middle class, and the declassed elements of Depression-era Germany.
What then could these two possibly have in common with the Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps, a man destined to be nothing more than a footnote in this country's political history? Hitler and Lenin are names indelibly linked with the human story. Shapps is a man liable to be forgotten way before he retires from Parliament. Well, this is because what Lenin and Hitler say about their movements, so Shapps sheds light on today's Tory party.
I have had a correspondence acquaintance with Shapps. Back in the day I wrote to him in his then capacity as housing minister. Under his watch Shapps scrapped a particular house building scheme - the name escapes me (it was not Building Homes for the Future) - that saw a nice return to the Treasury for every pound the taxpayer put in. Using the clipped, precise language one uses to address civil servants writing on behalf of their Whitehall masters, I invited him to explain to the constituent for whom the letter was written why he had withdrawn funding from an initiative that was a net contributor to UK finances. The reply that came was the kind of stupidity we've come to expect from the Tories. "We've got to get the deficit down" and, um, that was that. Points not acknowledged, let alone answered. While this was common among Tory ministers - IBS over at the DWP being a particularly egregious example - some did at least try and address the points put. From that point on, I've filed Shapps under D for Dumb.
It could have been for 'dishonest' too because he stands out among the cabinet as the shabbiest of Dave's gang of chancers. Take the claims about Shapps manipulating his own Wikipedia entry and making alterations to others, all to the greater glory of, um, Shapps. The denials were issued like clockwork, but are hardly believable. While small beer politically speaking, if you're prepared to be so dishonest over the little things then you can hardly be trusted with the big. but it's not just Shapps's political habits and lying, sorry, "over-firmly denying" his business activities while a front rank Tory politician, but his business activities themselves. Shapps has long been a laughing stock over his Michael Green alter ego (and lying about it too) and the peddling of get-rich-quick schemes. There's also the small matter of dodgy internet marketing, which encouraged his customers to plagiarise others' content. Shapps business is not only morally dubious from the standpoint of online ethics, it's entirely socially useless.
Appropriate, you might say, that such a man can rise without a trace within the latter day Tory party. As the political home of high finance and low pay, of spivvery and huckstering, of stupidity and decadence, that a man who distinguishes himself as a serial fibber and had made millions from digital snake oil should find himself in charge of the party machine is no accident. As it decomposes and frays, as the more forward looking and astute representatives of capital give it a wide berth, so its more lumpen elements come forward.
Hitler and Lenin were condensed and embodied their rising movements. As the Tory party degrades and decomposes on its slow slope to oblivion, it too will find itself represented by people best suited to reflect its decrepitude.
There are some important milestones in video gaming. Like literature, music, and film, it has its seminal moments. What counts are a game's brilliance, their originality and ingenuity, their impact on what came after, and whether they helped shift hardware units attached to them. Very quickly off the top of my head, in the six years between 1985 and 1991 there were three such games. Super Mario Bros launched with the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in the wake of a market crash and widespread suspicion of video games. Mario's scrolling platforming, its gameplay, and its secrets helped turn that situation around and transformed the US into Nintendoland. The second came at the end of this period: Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is important because it demonstrated the power of the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive while Nintendo were still milking their NES cash cow. It broke their market dominance while in Europe the game sealed the doom of the various 16-bit computer platforms. It reinvented the platformer and touched off the 16-bit console wars.
Our third game was conceived in the Orwellian year of 1984 in the dusty backrooms of Moscow's Academy of Sciences. Between the brain of its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, and the Western and Japanese markets where games were big business lay a tortuous path. After mucho shenanigans, court intrigue, and the like, Nintendo secured the rights and packed it in with their newest machine. I am, of course, talking about Tetris, the last game that arguably launched an entire genre of games console: the hand held.
I can still remember its playground debut. The gaming snobs with their PCs, Amigas, Atari STs, and MegaDrives did look down our noses at Nintendo's bland-looking box. A monochrome screen, naff name, and games that cost fifteen to twenty quid? It was like a throwback to a more primitive era instead of marking the dawning of a new one. If it had to be handheld, Atari's ill-fated Lynx and Sega's Game Gear seemed to have the right idea - both offered full colour graphics for starters. And how we larfed when a peripheral-producing firm called Nuby hit the scene. You see, 'Nuby' was a bit like nubby, which was a schoolyard term for crap. Yet for all the opprobrium and snarking the trash talk ceased when a Game Boy got passed around accompanied by Tetris. Whisper it, some of those snobs quietly invested in machines of their own.
It's not hard to see why. Tetris is an utter monster of a game. I didn't understand what the fuss was about until I took a Game Boy and played the bloody thing. Once you press start and the now familiar playfield comes into view with the irritating yet iconic music (which, forsooth, became a chart hit courtesy of Andrew Lloyd-Webber), the first set of tetrimino blocks float down the screen. You move it around this way and that before settling it at the bottom. Then the next comes and then another. All the time you're manoeuvring and cajoling your blocks into place so one complete line spanning the screen is complete and it disappears. Because that's the challenge if you've spent the last 25 years in a cave. You can complete multiple rows at once for megapoints, but the higher your pile of blocks rise the more likely the game will end. Oh, did I forget to mention that the more lines you put away the faster the rain of teriminos gets? Tetris is a game of pure playability, an utterly absorbing video game pathogen of one-more-turn syndrome. It's simplicity was its demon influence, the hook that lured in far more under-age kids than illicit drinking ever did. I haven't played it for years, but just writing about it makes me want to dig my aged Game Boy out and take the cart for a spin. Tetris taught the console-buying public and game manufacturers an important lesson, which has to be relearned time and again. What matters ultimately is not flashy graphics and kick ass sound. As nice as they are, good, memorable, classic games have to be utterly compelling to play. If a system has the best games, regardless of how powerful it is it will win out over its competitors. As the Game Boy went on to prove in subsequent years.
Tetris is an undisputed classic, but it's also a title that exemplifies the difficulty writing about video games. You can write about the history of Tetris, its canonical providence, its gameplay, but that's it. Beyond biographies and reviews the simplicity and the plot-free slotting together of abstract shapes resist further writing and levels of interpretation one might indulge while writing about contemporaneous arcade-style games. I'm going to have a go anyway.
First off, Tetris can be read as an analogy of the state the Soviet Union had always been in since its inception. Stay with me. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the ruinous civil war, the reconstruction and organised chaos of the Five Year Plans and collectivisation of agriculture, and the do-or-die war with the Nazis, and the ever-present threat of nuclear stand off with the states, the USSR was always a square peg to the round hole of great power relations. What Tetris condenses is the anxiety surrounding the Politburo's ceaseless quest for peaceful co-existence in a US-dominated capitalist world. The random falling of blocks are the ceaseless froth of machinations at the UN, the fickleness of third world allies, opposition at home and in the satellite countries, relations with China. Every line made by the player is an accomplishment that temporarily stabilises the play field, which is immediately challenged again by an appearance of the next block. Unfortunately, it's inevitable that previous false moves raise the level of blocks ever upwards as they start falling faster. The contradictions left unresolved in earlier moves accumulate and conspire to sink you. The game emerged at a conjuncture when that was happening to the USSR, a process that had exploded out into the open by the time kids across the West were slotting Tetris into their Game Boys.
The second is a great deal more boring. Tetris can be read as an analogy for life itself. The blocks you twist and turn before you slot them into place are the extraordinary and banal challenges we face in everyday life. The problems mount as you cannot fill the lines, just like the unresolved experiences and situations that potter our individual biographies. And as the games reaches the end, as the blocks touch the ceiling and it's game over, all that's left momentarily is an individual configuration of uncleared blocks before they are erased. Tetris isn't a life and death matter, but it has a good go at representing it.
What is interesting about Tetris is its abstraction. You could make the argument that it is the first entirely abstract video game. Consider all that came before it. Nearly all video games before 1984 owed something to practices that existed outside in other media. Pong was abstract table tennis. Breakout involved a bat and ball that demolished bricks. Space Invaders spaceships and aliens. Even Qix (AKA Volfied) dressed itself up in pseudo-science fiction garb. Tetris, based on the manipulation and slotting together of abstract shapes from mathematics, completely eschews the conventions of in-game representation adopted by predecessors and contemporaries. The only concession made are high scores. Aside from that, it is to gaming what Jackson Pollock was to art: there is no reality or logics beyond the game or the work they depended on for meaning - it is entirely self-contained. To get on with Tetris demands you accept its own simple terms of reference and submit to the purity of its play. It's perhaps the nearest a game has ever got to a work of art, and has done so by accentuating its radical specificity as a video game.
The guns aren't entirely silent, but it appears that the ceasefire in East Ukraine is mostly holding. In a conflict that has claimed at least 5,000 lives and threatened to consume even more, the deal struck in Minsk between the Merkel/Hollande-backed Ukrainian government and the pro-Russian rebels assisted by Putin will hopefully hold and the business of rebuilding the shattered east begin. Yet consistently, perhaps echoing the feeble isolationism of Dave and the gang, comment on what's happening is shockingly poor. It basically amounts to a) Putin being nasty, and b) wanting to expand Russia's border by hook or by crook. Crimea was his Austria, East Ukraine his Sudetenland. If the West don't stand up to him Russian tanks could be rolling down the Champs Elysses this time next year. Nonsense, of course. Putin is playing a dangerous game, but it's not one that remotely invites comparison with Hitler's plans for conquest.
There are three things that strike me about the war in Ukraine. Firstly, I'm not entirely convinced that Putin is in control as much as Western watchers think, and he would like to pretend. The bulk of rebel fighters are Russian-speaking East Ukrainians and, anecdotally, irregulars fighting in a personal capacity, but with more than a nod and a wink from the Kremlin. For example, fighting has continued without pause in Debaltseve, where Ukrainian army units are surrounded by rebels. Was Putin party to a ceasefire he knew was going to hold save for a small and relatively insignificant military target? Or is it the case that fighters on the ground will carry on regardless? Also, what's true of the rebels applies to Ukrainian forces too. Or, to be more accurate, Ukrainian and allied troops. It seems they too have their own irregular detachments, which raises questions about who they are accountable to and whether they're following orders from Kiev or pursuing their own objectives. There is slippage on both sides, and it's that imperiling the ceasefire.
The second is the viewpoint that Putin is reasserting Russia's place in the world, beginning with the near abroad. This is undoubtedly the case. Putin wants to be the man that tears up the post-Cold War settlement a victorious NATO imposed on a pitifully weak Russia. Whereas previously nothing could be done as former client states and allies flocked to the EU and the military protection of the Americans, Russia's new found energy wealth and partial modernisation of its armed forces allowed the projection of power to prevent any further Western encroachment. The bloody morass East Ukraine has become, and the accidental-on-purpose incursions into British airspace and Swedish coastal waters are hardly the most sophisticated semiotica Moscow could have used, but it gets the job done. Yet he needs to be careful. As we know, war is something that can be stumbled into.
The problem is, while Putin was happy to play the high wire act and absorb damaging economic sanctions the collapse in energy prices, whether cooked up by Saudi Arabia in cahoots with the Whitehouse or not, is bad, bad news. Not that the economy was in great shape anyway. All of a sudden, the $720bn renovation of the armed forces is looking shaky. Another of Putin's considerations is that Russia must avoid a damaging, long-running war. Chechnya and Georgia were one thing, but overt military intervention in Ukraine threatens pitting a largely conscript army against a motivated and increasingly well-armed opposition. Shades of Afghanistan? The bottom line for Putin is the security of his own power and authoritarian rule. Confronting the West reaps him some political capital, but further investments threaten diminishing returns as Russia's other problems mount. He doesn't want to add thousands of tricolor-draped coffins to the regime's difficulties.
What then does Putin want? Formed within the internal security bowels of the decaying Soviet state, he's imbibed the objectives of the gerontocracy that used to run the place. He wants firm government, secure borders, a non-violable sphere of influence, and to strut around the world stage like a power not locked into demographic decline and an economy dependent on primary industry.
Unfortunately, the intellectual poverty of British political discourse demands this comes with the customary disclaimer. It is preferable that Ukraine stays together and graduates to EU membership. I'd like to see a thorough democratisation of the Russian Federation and for it to take up a seat at Brussels also. I also believe that what should matter when it comes to recalcitrant national minorities wherever they're found is the aspirations and hopes of the people on the ground, not the convenience or otherwise of lines on maps and spheres of influence for the bigger powers. That also applies to the geographical contiguous Russian minority of East Ukraine and Crimea. No amount of paid-for agitators sent by Moscow can whip up a sense of common identity and hard-done-to grievances if they don't already exist. It has to be said: the job of analysis is always to understand and explain what's happening, which is different to excusing and apologising.
By their friends shall ye know them? This old adage has got some folks feeling a bit uncomfortable as the new Syriza government apparently cosies up to Mother Russia. This is by no means a new thing. Last year Alexis Tsipras provided Putin's interventions in Ukraine with some political cover. Interesting friends of Syriza are by no means confined to the Kremlin, however. Someone else saying warm words is Peter Spence, economics correspondent for The Telegraph. And today out comes an establishment someone else to give Syriza's message succour: Mark Carney of the Bank of England has attacked Eurozone austerity. Whatever next, eulogies in The Sun and Mail? It's only a matter of time before Rupert Murdoch calls for the top 100 monopolies to be nationalised.
Let's separate the economics from the foreign relations for a moment and reflect on the character of capital across the European Union. At one level of remove, all capital is the same. It has certain interests in common, chief of which always and everywhere is the maintenance and strengthening of the system that makes capital possible. Bound up and utterly inseparable from this is wage labour. For capital to reproduce itself as capital, it cannot escape the living labour power resident in the brains and muscles of human beings. It tries, it's always tried. Mechanisation, automation, computerisation, seeks to put distance between accumulation and the production of goods and services, but it cannot. Machinery requires technicians. Computers require programmers and IT specialists. Services require service givers. Because capital is and always will be hopelessly dependent on human bodies, it is in a constant collective struggle with those it employs to render living labour dependent on the dead. Capital is but the accumulated wealth realised by labour power past. As beings who, in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases, lack property to provide a private income we have to sell that labour power in return for a wage or salary in order to survive. Therefore in capitalist societies, the real terms of the dependency are reversed. A society populated by workers without capital can be conceived. A society with capital and no workers cannot.
Yet as we zoom in at a greater level of magnification, there are considerable differences among capital as well. Their common interest is constantly in tension with their individual interests. Bits of capital in certain sectors scrap over markets and resources. Sectors of capital scrap with each other over wider political and cultural influence. Nation-states scrap with each other to further the interests of their capitals in far-flung markets, and so on. An example of this in British politics is how the Tories and Labour are aligned with different fractions of capital. Another is how capital across the continent is divided about the merits of the EU, and/or the relationship it has with the USA, China, Russia, and emerging markets.
Capital is similarly divided about Greece and austerity generally. Some sections, usually the most short-sighted and more likely to either benefit directly from cheap, flexible labour markets, or from finance taking bits of wrecked economies and throwing them into the alchemical fires, are intensely chillaxed about austerity. The more the merrier. Other bits of capital, those whose moments of accumulation play out over the longer term, or profit from state activism in various markets, are less sanguine. This is the section that realises too much austerity sucks demand from economies. Businesses and consumers generally have less cash to splash, thereby threatening a spiral of decline that might threaten the profitability of capital-in-general and lead to unpleasant political consequences.
Mark Carney is of this school. His comments hinge on EU economic integration, of how the dynamic of competition between the different national capitals of Eurozone states has not seen a natural convergence despite the single currency, shared fiscal rules, and the ECB. The next round of quantitative easing, or creating digital money, to buy up public sector debt (repeating again the counter-intuitive act of the government/taxpayer owning government/taxpayer debt) should overcome unevenness and work to float the boats of those economies worst hit by the financial crisis. Piling on the austerity merely deepens problems by wrecking an economy's capacity to grow down deficits and move on to reducing debts naturally. Carney's intervention certainly gives more power to Syriza's elbow when it comes to renegotiating Greece's debt, a welcome coincidence of divergent interests one might say that could expose divisions in the 'official' position and make a worst case scenario for Greece less and less likely.
This section of capital will always try and make the best of a bad situation pregnant with existential threat. Stalinism was denounced by its Trotskyists critics for, among many other things, doing deals with capitalist powers in return for security. It didn't always work out. Likewise, in the event of Syriza-style radical left governments coming to power elsewhere in Europe there will be sections of business that fulminate, rage, disinvest, and attempt to subvert the new state of affairs. Others will seek some sort of accommodation and talk down the threat posed to capital as a whole. Peter Spence's Telegraph piece is in that mould. Writing of Yanis Varoufakis, the new finance minister, the radical creds are played down and his competence as a British-trained economist talked up. He is a "fan of markets in many contexts", we're told. The sub-text is clear, here's a man with which we can do business. Besides, politically speaking, normalising the abnormal knocks edges off any potential threat coming from labour movement and radical parties here taking Greek lessons, and is a salve to oneself too. If we see Syriza as a blip because of exceptional economic difficulties, and they're acting radically within recognisable parameters of governance then there might not be anything to fear after all.
Returning to foreign affairs, what will concern capital across the EU is the relationship being cultivated with Vladimir Putin. It's cause for disquiet among some otherwise left wing friends of Syriza too. Not surprising really. Yet if by some weird quirk of fate, and as distasteful as I'd find it, were I in the Greek foreign ministry it's a relationship worth pursuing, even if it means treating with the so-called National Bolsheviks. Russia's economy is in the merde thanks to collapsing oil prices, but it's still tussling with the EU over Ukraine and other matters. You don't have to be schooled in centuries of diplomatic game playing to see that a visible, some might say ostentatious, warming of relations between Athens and Moscow sends a message to EU capitals. Are Angela Merkel and the austerity die-hards going to block debt renegotiation if it weakens their hand against Putin? Of course not. A good relationship with Russia is a string to Syriza's bow and strengthens their negotiating position. Realpolitik eh?
When all is said and done, Syriza have an incredibly difficult task before it. If it can make use if allies of convenience with the realms of European finance, if it can exploit the tensions between the EU and Russia to carry through its immediate programme of debt renegotiation, they will find no criticism from me. The stakes are high for Greece and, by extension, for us too. Watch. Learn.
A century on and the establishment are still soft-soaping it. So no Dave, no. Britain didn't declare war against Germany for the sake of poor little Belgium, the rights of small nations or for the defence of neutrality. Those then groaning under the weight of our empire might have had a thing or two to say about these matters after all. These were the good reasons. The real reasons, which did not make war an inevitability, was acting to prevent French and Belgian channel ports from becoming German naval bases, and putting the Wilhelmine upstart back into its box. Cold, hard interests carried the day in the lead up to the declaration. Humanitarian concern was so much flim-flammery.
The question is why was this senseless and utterly unnecessary slaughter allowed to happen? Recall the extraordinary Basel Congress of the Second International in 1912. It passed a manifesto declaring the following:
If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
Fine words. Stirring words. This was not the rhetoric of some cranky sect gathered in Switzerland's version of Conway Hall either. The Second International was a mass movement. Its sections ranged from important working class parties to organisations numbering millions of members, affiliates and supporters. The German Social Democrats were the jewel in the crown, and its formal commitment to Marxism provided the International its shared intellectual reference point. Yet with the outbreak of war, Lenin reportedly fell off his chair and condemned his copy of Vorwärts (the SPD's paper) a forgery for reporting that the party's deputies had unanimously voted for war credits in the Reichstag. How did the mighty movement committed to turning imperialist war into class war fall apart? Why did sections of the Second International, with a few exceptions - most notably the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), rally to their national colours?
The contemporary revolutionary opposition lay responsibility for international socialism's betrayal at the feet of its leaders, and the argument has changed little in the intervening century. Rather than doing the right, revolutionary thing, the official Marxists of Germany, Austria and France, and the Labourists of Britain took the opportunist road, of treading the path of least resistance. Yet this was not a failure of nerve. Long before 1914 Rosa Luxemburg was regularly polemicising against the revisionism and opportunism of the SPD line. Her argument was that for a clique within international Social Democracy, their position as party and union bureaucrats invested them in the small gain here, the compromise there. They had become mediators of the relation between capital and labour. When push came to shove they jumped into the nationalist camp of war to maintain their privileged position, and were happy to deliver the factory and battlefield fodder to imperial interests. Lenin had made a not too dissimilar analysis of trade unionism and the class struggle in his maligned and misunderstood What is to be Done?. When he returned to his senses he took Luxemburg's basic position and argued the collapse of the International was thanks to a 'labour aristocracy' encompassing party and union bureaucracies, but taking in all kinds of layers of relatively privileged workers. While also dependent on selling their labour power for a wage, their higher living standards were brought by the "super profits" extracted from the colonies. As beneficiaries from colonialism, they had an immediate interest in maintaining empires and therefore acted as bourgeois contaminants in the workers' movement. As they had extended their sway through those movements, so social democratic and labour parties succumbed to reformism and, latterly, chauvinism and war fever.
This tale, with little modification, still passes for an explanation in Trotskyist and Stalinist circles. It is, however, obviously false. Not only was no evidence forthcoming proving the transfer of "super profits", but it also neglected to mention that Germany's "empire" was economically negligible, and Austro-Hungary had no colonies at all. Their wealth stemmed not from imperial plunder but international markets in economic competition with the other great powers. The second problem is an implied elitism, of assuming that where the leaders go the masses shall meekly follow. Had your Eberts, your Scheidemanns, your Hendersons, et al rallied workers to the class war banner then the July crisis would have grown over into a crisis of capitalism.
While the argument is a non-starter, it does avoid having to ask awkward questions about the political capacity of Europe's working class at that time. In Britain, the first six months of 1914, there were over 40 million strike days - only the strikes of 1921 and 1926 saw greater numbers taking industrial action. That July, St Petersburg was paralysed by 135,000 workers taking strike action and calling for the monarchy's abolition. Workers were conscious of their interests and were quite prepared to stand up for them in the workplace and against the authorities. How to explain the about face, of militancy evaporating and millions flocking to sign up? To answer the question is to put a huge question mark over the viability of revolutionary socialist politics. While Luxemburg and Lenin were right that the upper echelons of the labour movement had become integrated into their respective national capitalisms, so had the majority of workers themselves. Far from plain sailing, nevertheless Britain was a representative democracy of sorts and had improved the lot of working people through piecemeal grind here, strike action there. Ditto for imperial Germany and republican France. The parties and organisations of workers had wrested significant concessions from bosses and governments. Allied to rising living standards, pragmatism appeared to work. This was the early phase of the attempted institutionalisation of class conflict, and it seemed to be working. The majority of workers had a stake in the bourgeois state, in their nation. Conversely, despite double-digit growth, Tsarism in Russia and its struggle to maintain the autocracy actively stymied the rise of its growing working class. By denying it a stake in their system, Russian proletarians were more combative, more open to revolutionary ideas, more likely to resist the call to war - and even then they were not totally immune.
As organised labour movements found their feet and successfully prosecuted their interests it's small wonder the increasing sense of advance, of security, of solidarity contributed to nationalism's mass appeal. Hence when declarations of war were met with outbreaks of class peace, it was the case the leaders were following the workers, not the other way round. The Socialist International was not able to prevent the war because the working class enthusiastically went along with it. It wasn't just the lamps that went out across Europe one hundred years ago. The hope European capitalism could be brought down by revolutionary socialism was snuffed out too.
Image: Crowds celebrate in Trafalgar Square after Britain declares war on Germany.
1. You run an authoritarian regime in a vast country beset with economic problems, corruption, and ethnically-based insurgencies.
2. The nation on your doorstep - which formerly used to be an integral part of the multinational state ran from your capital for 70 years - has been intriguing with your long-term opponents in the international arena. Former client states and allies are now under the umbrella of their transnational military alliance and supra-national political project. There is ample evidence they were materially supporting opposition social movements in said neighbouring state.
3. After a mass insurgency, the friendly government of that country conclude an agreement with opposition forces. The very next day the administration is overthrown and replaced by a coalition ranging from the centre right to the fascistic. At least one of these organisations claims historic links to nationalist movements who rose up against your predecessor as it fought for its very right to exist. Furthermore, foreign dignitaries and emissaries flood into the revolutionary capital, get pictured meeting new ministers and touring the barricades.
4. This is a massive foreign policy disaster. But large numbers of your citizens are also resident in the country, particularly in the south and east, closest to your borders. This is part a legacy of forced population transfers in an earlier period, and part internal migration within the departed multinational state.
5. One province, heavily dominated by your citizens and who, in turn, fear that the new regime - particularly the blood-curdling rhetoric of its fascist wing - might bring misfortune down onto their heads unofficially secede and petition for protection from your country. Coincidentally large numbers of troops were in the area and they march in, sparking off an international crisis.
6. Over the next fortnight a great deal of hypocritical cant is spoken at UN meetings. In the international press, your opponents' destabilisation of your neighbour is lauded as democratic, and striking a blow for freedom. There is little to no memory of their pushing their sphere of influence eastward, of threatening to set up missile defence systems all along your borders. You meanwhile have acted out of compassion. You had no choice but to move to protect your people and prevent bloodshed before it began.
7. The population of the break away province vote to join your country. It matters not that the plebiscite had irregularities - the sentiments of all the people appearing in your broadcaster's reports are real enough. Formal annexation takes place.
8. The revolution in the west of the country has stirred up concerns in other provinces where your nationality has an outright majority. Simply stepping with "protection" here would be a step too far.
9. Groupings pledging allegiance to your country take to the streets in a number of eastern towns and cities. Some of these do involve agents provocateurs, but in most cases it's like casting a match into tinder. Mostly the protests have been ineffectual, amateurish and easily put down by the usurpers in the west. But over this weekend a series of loyal militias have taken over key local government buildings in several cities, one proclaiming itself an independent people's republic. The coup government, with their backers, say they're going to mobilise the military and put these uprisings down. While there is little sign of that army yet, events on the ground might force you to send the 40,000 strong protection force you've massed on the borders in to calm the situation down. Your enemies are forcing your hand, so what do you do?
I don't have special insight into the minds of Russia's strategic thinkers, but from Western and Russian media reports this narrative - a mixture of realpolitik and ideological rendering of one's own geopolitical interests - is a model that fits what has been happening on Putin's part so far. I'm sure in the huddled map rooms of NATO, Whitehall and the State Department this sort of thought-building is commonplace. Unfortunately, the media and political coverage falls far short - there's no appreciation of nuance, let alone thought given to how our governments' actions are interpreted.
This is remarkable. UKIP have put out a press release in the name of their national executive committee criticising their best-known (some might say "only-known") member, Nigel Farage. It seems some people on the NEC are uncomfortable to see their leader heap praise on Vladimir Putin as an east-west stand-off builds in Ukraine. A sign of a party in crisis, or a realisation that all its members, to a degree, have to toe the line? Here, make your own mind up.
UKIP Statement on Nigel Farage and Russian President, Vladimir Putin
UKIP leader Nigel Farage apologised this morning for comments that could be taken to encourage Vladimir Putin's recent actions in Ukraine.
Interviewed in this month's GQ, Mr Farage said that he admired Mr Putin "as an operator, not a human being" and singled out Western governments and the EU as mutually culpable for the civil war in Syria and the crisis in Ukraine. Of the latter, Mr Farage noted,
“In the case of the Ukraine, Brussels has for many years been feeding an entirely unrealistic dream of a future as an EU member state and large net recipient of funds.
“This has encouraged brave young men and women in western Ukraine to rebel to the point of toppling a legitimate president and led to the utterly predictable debacle whereby Vladimir Putin has annexed part of the country and now casts a long shadow over hopes of genuine democracy in the rest of it."
In his statement to the press today Mr Farage said
"I apologise unreservedly for creating the impression that the Ukrainian uprising was a crisis cooked up in Brussels and Washington, and making comments that might give succour to the Russian leader."
Speaking for UKIP's national executive, Lucy Bostick and Andrew Moncreiff said
"UKIP welcomes Nigel's retraction. A large number of our members were concerned that he was speaking for the party on this matter when as a libertarian party UKIP has no truck with authoritarian leaders and demagogues. No one is bigger than our party, and that includes the leader."
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Wow!
Who actually wants a war in Ukraine? Despite sending the troops in in the first place, I'm not convinced Putin does. The Russian and blockaded Ukrainian troops in Crimea don't - as these remarkable scenes from earlier show. Russians and Ukrainians East and West don't. The new government, excepting Svoboda (Freedom) and the fascist street militias, don't. And neither does the State Department, Downing Street and Berlin. As no one wants war, and no one has an interest in one, you might naively ask how we ended up here and why negotiations with a view to a settlement aren't taking place?
I want to back peddle a bit. The US, Britain and Russia are party to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity. Now, those are two words that have been bandied about a lot in recent days. What is 'territorial integrity'? Is it just about lines on a map staying once and forever inviolable? It all depends, really. For example, before it occupied land taken from Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War did Israel have "territorial integrity" when Jerusalem was split between two states and was only nine miles wide at its narrowest point? Does present day Germany and Poland, despite having different borders than was the case 80 years ago?
This implies there's something more to the idea of this concept merely than an irregularly shaped and coloured blot of land in an atlas. In his discussion of what constitutes a state, the classical German sociologist Max Weber noted that a state was an organisation that exercised a legitimate monopoly of violence over a given territory. But this is too neat. Every nation recognises the Mexican government, for example. It is the legitimate, sovereign body for that country. Yet can it be described as having territorial integrity when whole Mexican states are blighted by a vicious drugs war that has killed thousands? Similarly, can a state have true territorial integrity when large numbers of its citizens - especially those from minority nationalities and ethnicities - might not recognise it as legitimate, as per the situation in Ukraine?
For all the Western powers' waxing over territorial integrity, that was fatally undermined when the revolution took place. Revolutions are rarely respecters of constitutional niceties (take note, Vladimir), but in this case Ukraine's uprising was essentially a national-popular uprising by the western Ukrainian majority. As this was and is opposed by large numbers in the east, evidenced by large-scale demonstrations and take overs of state buildings any talk of territorial integrity is a fiction. The presence of Russian troops in Crimea merely underline what was already accomplished.
What now, then? As the earthquake of revolution has shaken open nationalist fissures, a deep and lasting settlement has to begin with those nationalities, not cartographic scribbles. That other Vladimir, Vladimir Lenin has something to commend him here. In a different time and for very different reasons, he grappled with the problem of minority nationalities of Imperial Russia. Sometimes known as the prison house of nations, how was it possible to reconcile the masses of the subject nations to socialist politics when nationalism deeply conditioned political opposition to Tsarism? Lenin's argument was simple: grant subject nationalities the right to self-determination, up to and including separation. The logic was two-fold. By incorporating national rights into the Bolshevik's programme, revolutionary socialists could appear to be the most consistent champions for small nations groaning under the weight of Great Russian chauvinism. This would give them the masses' ear - after all, Lenin did note that nationalism was the outer shell of an immature Bolshevism. The second fiddle to the Bolshevik bow was the belief that granting nations their independence, if the so chose, sooner rather than later drew the sting out of nationalism. The reality of life under the local elites would be no better than life under the Tsar. But without nationalism for those elites to hide behind, the antagonisms proper to capitalism would come more to the fore and make the rapid development of socialist consciousness more likely.
I'm no revolutionary, and a retro replay of the Red October is not lurking around the corner. But when you start thinking through 'what is to be done?' Lenin's position has something to recommend it. Flecked with the blood of pogrom and genocide Ukrainian nationalism might be, its frame is supported by an historic antipathy to Russian domination. Russian speakers, on the other hand, can certainly find no accommodation with a "national" government that embraces the record of Ukrainian nationalism under the Nazis, revokes their language rights, tears down monuments to the war's Soviet fallen and talks about 'one nation' Ukraine. Enforcing "territorial integrity" under present circumstances is a recipe, at best, for persistent social divisions.
Could giving not just Crimea but the whole of East Ukraine the right to determine its future as per Lenin dampen down nationalism and with it the risk of war? Unfortunately, no. Ukraine is caught in a game between the great powers. In the first place separation along national lines is, in reality, the carving up of Ukraine into spheres of influence. Secondly, uncoupling east from west would strengthen the perception of Russian dominance. Separation would be a constant source of nationalist grievance. If anything, Ukrainian politics could get uglier.
Starting from great power machinations tramples on the rights and security of the people caught between them. But proceeding from national rights under these circumstances is a non-starter too. Perhaps, weirdly, Putin's proposal of new elections might diffuse the situation somewhat. After all, the revolutionary government in Kiev are committed to them too. So hey, we have a point of agreement already! Or guarantees to national minorities that they will be protected - if they feel threatened - by replacing Russian with non-EU, non-US UN troops. Unfortunately, an equitable solution for all Ukrainians is highly unlikely because a permanent peace requires removing the US, EU and Russia from the equation. But let's be realistic here. That's not going to happen any time soon. Any agreement is going to be a shoddy compromise, a piece of paper off which hypocrisy drips like wet ink as the great power tussle continues in the background.
End game? I'm afraid it's hardly started.
In his polemic against "anti-authoritarian" socialists, Engels said this of revolution.
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.
Engels goes on to note that the problem with the 1871 Paris Commune was not so much its authoritarian tendencies. Rather that it was not authoritarian enough. But as Engels was talking about the passing of power from one class to another, what relevance does his observations have to 21st century Ukraine where the situation, it appears, was characterised by tension and potential conflict between nationalities even before Putin sent the troops in?
Grasping the character of Ukrainian nationalism means recognising how it sucks nutrients from the devastating memory of the 1918-21 civil war and Stalin's artificial famine. It remembers the deportation of "disloyal" nationalities during and after the war, and had a slow burning resentment toward the USSR's post-war settlement of the east and south by Russians - a feature common to all the subaltern Soviet republics. This sense of grievance, however, is darkened by the browns and blacks of fascism. Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the Nazis when the Wehrmacht invaded in 1941 and some were enthusiastic participants in the extermination of the Jews. Hence Ukrainian nationalism is more than David-vs-Goliath-style nationalism common to small nations who've long been under the yoke. There is a virulent component locked in its historical DNA that could provide cover for pogroms - and worse.
Therefore, it would be a mistake to dismiss the ousting of Yanukovych and his clique simply as a US/EU-backed fascist putsch, as many here have done. The crowds who camped out and fought in Kiev's Independence Square found their grievances in a number of things - the economic situation, cronyism, heavy-handed policing. The nationalist dynamic was fueled by Yanukovych's government cuddling up with and acquiescing to another period of Russian domination of Ukraine. It was basically a populist uprising wrapped in the national colours, and it was one that was never going to be derailed by warm whispers down the phone from London or Washington.
The far right - the Right Sector and Svoboda-aligned militias - were always a very small but highly visible component of the crowds that defied riot police. Nevertheless concentrating their meagre fighting forces from across Ukraine in Kiev and inserting themselves into the most dangerous pitched battles was, politically speaking, an astute move. The fascists have attracted greater numbers of (primarily) young men on the basis of being the revolution's "best builders"; strengthened their hand vis a vis the other centre-right opposition parties with whom they had been in a formal coalition - namely St Tymoshenko's Fatherland party and Klitschko's Democratic Alliance for Reform; and set about inflaming nationalist tensions further. Have no doubts about it, there are plenty of people in the far right who fantasise of making Ukraine this decade's Bosnia. The fascists then, the would-be pogromists are a tendency within the revolution, one whose gains were not inevitable at the outset but are now busily consolidating their position. As the section of the government calling loudest for firm action to be taken in Crimea, they are now seeking to position themselves as Ukraine's only consistent champions.
As a populist uprising asserting itself against Russia, its purchase was always going to be limited among Russian-speaking Ukrainians and other minorities. The revolution dismissed the government by imposing the popular will of west Ukraine on the national state, but it is fantastical to imagine this can be carried through where the rest of the country is concerned. And it is that febrile, incomplete and regionalised character of the revolution that has generated a discernible impulse toward civil war. Engels was right that revolutions are among the most authoritarian social phenomena going. He might have added there can be no half-measures either, but that is what Ukraine is stuck with - a revolution that has changed a government, yes, but risks pouring petrol on smouldering national tensions. Small wonder that the West and now Russia are working to de-escalate the crisis.
