For Putin’s inauguration Moscow was a tale of two cities. One a city of arrogant power and decadence the other of resistance and struggle.
On Sunday to the virtually everyone’s (possibly even the organisers’) tens of thousands of people, came out on the streets in the March of Millions to show their opposition to the inauguration of Vladimir Putin’s third term as president. Estimates vary of the number of participants between 8,000 (the police) to 50 to 100 thousand (media sources and organisers). Predictions of the end of the mass opposition movement after the presidential elections were clearly premature. The weekends events also mark the movements development into a new stage of development.
The protests were also the worst clashes seen in the city since the 1990s. Not that the previous protests were entirely peaceful, but he violence was pretty one sided. This time as police tried to block the demonstration and arrest organisers demonstrators resisted. However more than 400 were arrested including country’s best known opposition blogger and anti corruption activist Alexei Navalnyi and leader of the Left Front, Sergei Udaltsov, both of whom who were seen being roughly bundled away by police.
Many had predicted the movement would fizzle out once Putin had been elected to power once more. The movement, provoked by alleged fraud in December’s parliamentary elections, seemed unable to sustain itself without a focus. The immediate post election rallies were much smaller and were easily swept off the street by the police as the regime found its feet again. The “Days of Freedom” seemed to be over.
The movement also seemed to suffer a certain split as the more moderate sections turned to attempts to participate in electoral activity, despite the lack of any real reform of the political system and the watering down of even the most modest changes promised by then President, Dmitry Medvedev, in December.
The return to the streets were led by those who rejected compromise with a regime that clearly does not which to do so. As such the March of the Millions mark a radicalisation of the movement. Large numbers of young were in evidence, throwing off two decades of disengagement with politics. Nor, as the pictures clearly show, was this just a demonstration of Moscow’s metropolitan middle classes, a characterisation of the movement the Western media has been so keen push.
They also seem to be moving to the left. This time the orange flags of the liberals and black-yellow-white of the monarchists were drowned in a sea of red. And though the liberals stuck to their “political” demands for new elections and against corruption many of the demonstrators also took up slogans against privatisation of education and health and for workers rights. The rise of a new left and its reclaiming of the imagery and symbolism socialism could also been seen in banners declaring “Down with the Presidential Autocracy” which hark back to the slogans of a previous generation of revolutionaries who struggled against Tsarism.
So police attempts to block the march were likely to lead to trouble, and that is what happened. As the police and OMON, a force dating back to Soviet era, known as “Cosmonauts” for their space man like riot helmets, blocked the demonstration pushing and shoving turned to violence. Snatch squads moved into to make arrests and beat demonstrators with truncheons.
The protests were ignored by state television.
The other Russia on show the day after was that of the rich and the powerful.
Putin was inaugurated for third term as president in a city empty of people, his convoy swept along deserted highways as the old Soviet leaders did. Their followed a ceremony in the gold encrusted surroundings of the Kremlin palace in front of a hand picked audience of oligarchs, bureaucrats and such international luminaries as Silvio Berlusconi.
After a private prayer with the Patriarch of All Russia there followed a lavish banquet said to have cost a million dollars all washed down with an estimated 5,000 bottles of champagne.
The weekend’s repression though even then could not stop the demonstrations. Still people dared to show their public opposition and more than a hundred were arrested.
An arms race is going on Asia, one that is as expensive and dangerous. The start of the 21st century is witnessing something that would be rcognisable to someone a hundred years ago.
The recent failure of North Korea’s satellite launch/ballistic missile test (depending on how you look at it) got plenty of air time in this country. Almost completely ignored was the following tests which followed, of what were unashamedly ballistic missiles, by two of Asia’s powers.
First India tested its Agni V rocket. Not to be outdone Pakistan then tested its own Shaheen 1 missile. The two countries are of course deadly rivals and have been since their bloody separation in 1948. They have fought four wars since then. Both, of course, also now have nuclear weapons to put atop their missiles and threaten 1.3 million people with destruction.
In another of Asia’s flash points, last week the US staged an exercise on an obscure island in the China Sea. the point of which being to show that they have the ability to invade an small uninhabited island. Everybody kind of knew that before though.
This would not seem of any great importance if there wasn’t a face off going on between thte Phillipines and Chinese navies at the disputed Scarborough Shoal. How serious tensions are on the waters of the South China Sea can be seen in the fact that the Scarborough Shoal is are not even a group of islands. They are just a set of submerged rocks. A total of five countries dispute this area which, funnily enough, also contains rich, and mostly untapped, oil and gas fields.
It is hardly surprising, given that Asia is now not only the most populous but also the richest region of the world, that the US four yearly defence review published in January announced a shift in focus from Europe to that region.
It all rather looks like a hundred years ago in Europe, when newly industrialising countries, such as Russia, and putative global powers such as France and Germany, rubbed up against each other and the dominant superpower of the day, Great Britain.
Then as now, there were those who saw the penetration of capitalism into every corner of the world as bringing a new dawn of universal prosperity and peace. The turn of the last century, was if nothing else, a hopeful time. Of course they were all to be disabused of this idea by the slaughter of the First World War, which no one saw coming.
Likewise the end of the Cold War in the 1990s saw the New World Order and the so-called McDonalds Doctrine: a foreign policy maxim based on little more than the rather facile observation that no two countries with branches of the aforementioned fast food chain (no one ever mentioned Burger King) had ever been to war. This conceit lasted but until 2008 when Russia went to war with Georgia.
The New Globalism also had its proponets on the left. Blair and Brown though had their, rather more intellectually accomplshed predecessors, in the Second International. First out of the blocks was German socialist Edouard Bernstein with his predictions that the integration of capital would make the wars that Europe had long suffered less likely.
Bernstein was of course met with gales of denunciation, most congently and cosistently in the form of Reform or Revolution , a short book by the great Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg.
Such illusions though are perennial and within not much more than a decade and a half some of Bernstein’s previous accusers were working their own variations on his theme. It was the so-called “Pope of Marxism” Karl Kautsky who came up with its latest incarnation: Ultra-Imperialism. He contended that the divison of the market by large cartels might end in a peaceful carve up of the world by the grat powers. War was not good for business and so would be avoided. His was a Gloomy Bernsteinism.
Rarely has a theory been so rapidly disproved. By the time the the article had come off the presses in September 1914, the opening hostilities of the First World War were already going on.
The war would not only prove the wrongness of that particaulr theory, it also exposed the rotteness of the underlying political reality of Social Democracy. After years of rhetorical denunciation of Imperialism by Kautsky and the leaders of the other mass workers parties, the advent of war meant that they all found reasons to support their own nations’ war efforts.
This crisis of the socialist ideas meant that people had to go back to basics to explain the World War. In 1915 Nikolai Bukharin published his seminal work Imperialism and the World Economy. In it he set out how competition between firms led to cartels and monopolies in individual countries whilst on a world scale internationalistion of capitalism raised competion between different capitals to the level of military competion between states. Thus ever greater closeness between capital and the state meant the erosion of democracy by militarism at home, and an arms race that would lead to war abroad. The next year Lenin wrote a popular exposition of these themes in what would become one of the classics of Marxism Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Supporters of capitalism might today point to the fact that disputes between large European states have not led to war for some decades. What they ignore at their peril is that flash points of inter-state capitalist competion have merely moved. Old European capitalism is declining, the new fulcrum of the world economy is Asia. The new powers of Asia, such as India and China, however are many times more populace, and posses infinitely greater means of destruction than ever did Wilhelmine Germany or Edwardian England.
The revolution in Egypt is moving ahead at the speed of the internet rather than the speed of the telephone or the newspaper.
Apparently people are already cursing the army.
The police in most countries are not very popular. They are seen as a repressive arm of the state. The “Dixon of Dock Green” (a ludicrously pro-police TV show from the 1960s) image of British police is unusual.
In revolutions the police are usually the states first line of defence. They are the ones to try and get the people off the streets. But if they fail, they usually disappear. They are either withdrawn to barracks by their superiors or they go to ground.
In Russia for example in 1917 the hated “pharaohs” (as the police were known) simply disappeared and never reappeared. The police just went to pieces.
It is however the former that seems to have happened in Egypt.
Mubarak seems to have gone for the second line of defence, the army, almost immediately.
As the army goes into the streets they are normally greeted by the people as saviour and people give them tea and flowers. When the British army went into Northern Ireland in 1969 it was cups of hot tea from Catholics house wives which greeted them. In Portugal in 1974 people put carnations in rifle barrels.
There are so many more other examples of this, too many to start listing.
Why is this?
Unlike the police, who are generally known to be the servants of the state, the army is usually seen as the servants of the people, of the nation. They are not usually used for internal repression.
A second reason they are welcomed is that revolutions, when they start, are broad movements for the improvement of “the nation.” It usually takes time for the different sections of society start to struggle for power and for it becomes clear that there is no homogenous “nation” all that we all have the same interests is a myth.
It is only once the army goes onto the streets and starts to maintain “law and order” (or rather the status quo), that the scales fall from people’s eyes.
This often happens quickly, as unlike the police, the army are not used to dealing with confrontation with people at close quarters. Furthermore they they are not trained in crowd control, they are trained to kill, something they end up doing.
The soldiers greeted with flowers and tea end up hated. Usually the state tries to crack down and withdraw them before this happens. If they still remain on the streets they then just have to use so much force to smash the movement that they end all resistance.
Using the army to repress the movement and not succeeding is the most dangerous thing that can happen for any regime. In 1979 the Shah of Iran tried to shoot the movement off the streets, and failed. The result was that the the army and state became so hated that there was nothing the regime could do to save itself. When the insurrection came in February the state was utterly destroyed. The police, the army and bureaucracy simply ceased to exist. They had to be completely rebuilt from scratch. The struggle over how this should happen became the struggle which defined the revolution. It was, as we should note, a struggle won by those around Ayatollah Khomeini and their conception of an “Islamic state”.
That people are turning on the army so soon in Egypt shows the speed with which the revolutionary movement is developing. The decisive moment could be approaching quickly.
On the one hand if he goes they might be able to stem the tide of protest. They may be able to put in a transitional government that can then call for calm, maybe headed by someone like El Baradei. to bring as Al Jazeera puts it the “stability the country so desperately needs;” get everyone to stay at home, and promise elections soon. Maybe they can disorient and demobilise the movement before it gets more radical.
But they fear that once the strongman is gone the whole regime will unravel.
On the other hand they Mubarak might try and stick it out.
Things are moving fast, much faster than say thirty years ago.
Thirty years ago the Shah of Iran, the US backed dictator of that country, stuck it out, he cracked done then offered reform, then cracked down again.
As protests escalated in June 1978 the Shah offered elections. Then in August he cracked down. On 8 September, Black Friday, hundreds were killed in Tehran, an act which more than any other doomed his regime. In October the country was paralysed by strikes.
Finally finally he sacked his government and appointed an old oppositionist to be Prime Minister.
But it was too late. In Febraury 1979 Khomeini returned form exile in Paris and insurrection completely overthrew the state, the prisons were opened, political prisoners released, the army and police disintegrated.
Hanging on and trying to drown the movement in blood only led to the regime becoming so hated that the people tore down every last brick of the state.
These are the choices facing Mubarak and his US backers.
The US has never got over loing Iran. Losing Egypt will be just a whole different world of pain for them.
99 million views on Youtube and counting. That’s the power of post-irony.
“Post ironic” is just about the only way to describe this behemoth of video. Nine minutes long and starring two of the biggest stars in the world, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, it almost defies description.
So blatant is the product placement that at first viewing its seems like a parody. Certainly I thought “Plenty of Fish” was some kind of joke until I googled it.
Love it or loath it, its been hard to ignore.
P.S. Below is her message to the Senate calling for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It has been watched over 2 million times. She has also been on nearly every newscast in America campaigning against DADT. It was repealed on December 22.
This one from a couple of years ago, Ebony Bones’ Don’t Fart on My Heart.
Starting out as an actor on Channel Five’s now defunct soap Family Affairs she reinvented herself as Ebony Bones, one of our more unlikely pop stars, by uploading things anonymously to her my space page.
Her first “hit” was We Know All About You, a vision of an Orwellian surveilance society Britain. This was followed by Don’t Fart on My Heart, one of the best records about an ex ever made.
Her first album Bone of My Bones was realease in 2009 and contained most of the tunes she had done up to that date and some new material including some quite political ones such as In G.O.D We Trust (Gold, Oil & Drugs) and the ”Story Of St.Ockwell” about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
She has been described as being like an “explosion in a crayon factory” and is apparently a great live act.
Well after yesterday’s contribution from My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult I thought something a bit lighter, and a bit newer.
Here is something from this year and the other side of the world, a bit of J-Pop from May J. I saw this on NHK World‘s programme on J-Pop, J-Melo, which the aforementioned May J presents. I discovered NHK on FreeSat and really quite like it. Not only is Japan a very fascinating country, its a real reminder of quite how different the world can sometimes look from elsewhere in it. Also East Asia gets little coverage in our media despite its vast and growing importance.
Anyway this tune is insanely catchy, like nearly all J-Pop, but don’t ask me what the towel thing is about. They did show us how to wave it about in the appropropriate fashion on J-Melo but frankly its significance completely escaped me.
Here’s something from My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult.
They came out of Chicago not long after the birth of House and mixed the electronic sounds of dance music with more rocky and Goth related themes. Much of their early work has references to satansim and other stuff that got the likes of Tipper Gore hyperventilating, but that was only due to her lack of any sense of irony. In reality much of it was rather tongue in cheek. Later they moved to a more dancy and vocally driven sound, as for instance on their album Sexplosion! Maybe I’ will put some tracks from that on a another time.
A Daisy Chain for Satan is one of their more notorious tracks though the title is in fact a name of a pulp novel, which fits more with the B-Movie samples than any actual connection to devil worship.
Well Xmas is usually a time for shit on telly and Bond films. But it seems this year its all the former and none of the latter.
So just as a reminder I though I would post a video of Dave MacAlmont’s rendition of Diamonds Are For Ever. It is by far my favourite version, and his outfits great as well.
Some video of the Student demo against the Government’s hike in Tuition Fees to as much as £9000. Footage of the march, Parliament Square kettle and Police.
