The Armenian Genocide

"He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian." -Woody Allen

After living with the Armenians for 8 months I have come to know them fairly well. I've slept in their houses, ate at their tables, worked in their schools and spoken their language. For someone from California who spent the previous several years mostly living in Europe, Armenia is remarkably homogeneous country; both ethnically and psychologically. They are a big Caucasian tribe that the collapse of the Soviet Union unexpectedly turned into a country after centuries under the heel of great empires. 

A prouder people I have never met, nor one more obsessed with their history. They tend to wallow in it more than they revel in it sadly. As a historian I don't really think any people have the right to say they had it so much worse than other peoples that they deserve special sympathy. Sometimes, it almost feels like they love their misery and tragedy, that it gives them strength, binds them closer together, makes the hardships of the present easier to bear. Nationalism is a complex beast, and it definitely doesn't take to all lands equally. By channeling centuries of getting the shit end of the stick, they have, if nothing else, firmly defined what it is to be Armenian; and suffering is a fundamental component of it. Even the Armenian Diaspora, whose tie with their roots is often merely conceptual, have proven remarkably loyal to the national identity.
All this was on full display as these people observed their 100th anniversary of the most recent round of large scale slaughter in their history, which is widely known as the Armenian Genocide. After a massive display of unsatisfied rage they convinced the Soviet government to build them a memorial after the 50th anniversary. Thus is there now a massive basalt fortification surrounding an eternal flame with a big obelisk next to it meant to signify something that is suitably somber and serious.

So now, a 100 years after the Armenian population living in the late Ottoman Empire got caught up in the most violent period of human history (1914-1945) and as a result got slaughtered en masse, the Armenian Nation meditates on death. I think the horrific truth of the matter is that the Turkish leadership knew they would lose the war and with it their Empire, so they figured they might as well purge as many Christians as possible from their future country; it would just make things simpler in the long run. Given that Europe had colonized hard in all non-Christian lands, their ruthless extermination of Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians was as pragmatically in line with the logic of the time as it was savage.
Nowadays, after all those people who lived through those dark days in 1915 are taking their eternal rest, the holiday has become a very odd combination of honoring the fallen, pretending they can get retribution from modern Turkey, and just an all out nationalistic frenzy. For a country of 3 million with no natural resources and an economy that is just plain broke(n) to speak belligerently about the 90 million Turkic peoples living on either side of their country takes some balls. Most people here really seem to have a deep seated passionate faith in the cult of Blame-the-Turks. Their most recent confrontation with Turkic speaking people has rather ironically led to them actually gaining some territory, that of Nagorno-Karabakh, from neighboring Azerbaijan in the early 1990's. Of course that now means that Azerbaijan has been spending double the GDP of Armenia on its military and bidding its time until it sees a moment ripe for reconquest. Only thing really preventing it now is Armenia being satellite state of Russia, whose forces control the border with Turkey. 
The horrid truth is that to the south of Armenia things have become more barbaric and war torn than usual, and north of the Caucuses a tense ceasefire barely keeps Ukraine for resuming its civil war and potentially getting Armenia's protector, Russia, bogged down in so much shit that it wont be able to come bail out its little buddy if the Azeris make their move. Given the half assed response of the West to the rise of the Islamic State, pretty sure they wouldn't do a damn thing to a good old fashioned blood feud in the Caucuses. 
Its an amazing thing to get to know a people who are so cognizant of the horrors they have suffered but still willing to antagonize its larger more powerful neighbors all whilst being seemingly unaware of what terrible costs they might incur by doing so. Guess after so many times going down the consequences-be-damned road its almost instinctual for them.

"History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club."

-John W. Campbell Jr.

Insanity means you believe in sanity.

It's a bit insane. I'm ready to admit that right up front. I read the news and I like it. 

I know, that is not a socially acceptable response to the current state of affairs. You are supposed to read it, be indignant about the stories found therein, then go about your daily life slightly depressed that you took the time to inform yourself about the most recent chapter in this rambling tragedy called human history. 

For me however, just can't help myself, I really like the news these days. Sure, its some really twisted, convoluted madness and contains many horrors and few hopes, but its reality and its picking up steam. 

I think its horrible and terrifying for most people because they are blissfully ignorant of history, and thus how truly in line recent events truly are with this 6,000 year old adventure we got going here. The further down the road we go the higher the stakes, and the more interesting the wager.  

I'm the first to admit that humanity is strutting itself down a path to almost certain doom in a fashion that is one part supercilious runway model and another part jingoistic goose stepping lunatic. Its a sincerely distressing time and place to take stock of, but I say it must be done. It is just this dire situation that we have gotten ourselves into that makes me think we have some chance to reach escape velocity and launch into a new direction that might not be so savage and hard to accept. 

One thing is for sure though, ignoring/hiding/circumventing what sort of world we live in isn't going to help. So here is a daily dose of reality for you:

People are dying by the thousands at the hands of Neo-Caliphate in Syria, Iraq and Nigeria. As is typical, the West responds to this by aerial bombardment, giving people weapons and denouncing violence as wrong when other people do it. All meteorological indicators show that climate change is officially here and is going to really fuck with how all creatures survive through this century. The war in Eastern Ukraine is clearly escalating and Russian forces are for the first time openly operating there. The plunging price of oil has radically changed the geopolitical scene on many fronts, threatening instability for many nations that rely upon it for staying afloat financially. Its not getting discussed much but this is also likely to  cause some serious problems for America too, because the fracking oil boom is completely dependent upon oil being about $80 a barrel (it's down to below $50 currently) and the companies engaged in extracting oil in this way are borrowing massively to finance it; in so doing they have created another bubble that is certain to wreck havoc in the financial markets. Add to all this that global wealth is now so concentrated in so few people that around 80 people own more than 3 billion.
This is but a taste of the realness, there are many more courses. 

Truth, and that would be a capital T even if it hadn't started the sentence, is crucial at any phase, and especially so right now. My affinity for the news stems from my love of history. Every day I have the pleasure of sitting down to my computer and checking out whats going on in the world is an honor for me. It is possible that this wild ride we are on will end in complete annihilation, but the view out the window is breathtaking. What else you got going on in your life that could be even half as interesting as this incredible point in time where the fate of our species, and really all species, hangs in the balance?   

"Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This my friends, is the crux of our solitude." 

-Galleano

Torture

"The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear." -Galleano

"The coward wretch whose hand and heart

Can bear to torture aught below, 

Is ever first to quail and start 

From the slightest pain or equal foe"

-Bertrand Russell

It never fails to amaze me how the people of the planet seem to have always managed to be surprised at the actions of those who rule them. You'd think sometime during the 400 odd generations of history we would have managed to realize that power is never an end in itself, nor is it in the habit of showing restraint. Guess it's all about that plausible deniability. 

One would also logically think that after The Trail of Tears, Mai Lai, Abu Ghraib and the horrors perpetrated by the many violent regimes the US helped establish, fund and advise, people the world over, and in America in particular, would be incapable of the slightest surprise at the things revealed in the recently released torture report. 

The oblivion that has become the American psyche is so staggeringly impenetrably that it seems almost to be a granite monolith when I think of it. As a historian perhaps it is especially difficult for me to grasp the paucity of memory that so many people today are working with. They sound and seem like senile ostriches that bury their heads in the sand, and when they pull it out occasionally are perpetually shocked at what they see and thus go back to their subterranean safety after making some absurd noises and incoherently running about for a bit. 

Another salient example of this is the drama surrounding the murder of several black folks by the cops, and the subsequent pardoning of the murderers. How incomprehensibly ignorant of the black experience in North America do you have to be to be shocked by this? For fucks sake, sit your naive ass down to read the autobiographies of Fredrick Douglas, Malcom X or Mumia Abu Jamal. Perhaps then you will wake up to the horrendous history that you have apparently managed to stumble through reality without bothering to learn. 

How people can say things like 'Black Lives Matter' and at the same time not even know about the Second Congo War speaks to the profound depths of the ignorance that I find so impossible to fathom. For me the attempt to understand it is mentally like throwing a rock down a well and listening intently for minutes, only to hear nothing but the heartbreaking silence. I suppose it is all part and parcel to the alienation that is the foundation of the modern consumer society. Everything is experienced independently, personally, within an invisible existential cell that renders almost impossible the consideration of the whole overarching reality that dictates our existence. 
I do understand that it isn't easy to stare the brutal soul crushing truth in the face and chart your course from that nauseating point. That it is far easier to psychologically slumber in the organs of the beast that perpetrates the horrors that you occasionally denounce than to wrench yourself from everything easy and comfortable. I just feel that somewhere hidden away among all humans is something commonly called a conscience and that true happiness and contentment will never be possible while that is being betrayed. For me, I think that the first step in dealing with reality, is to admit that it isn't something new, nor is it a secret, but a reoccurring nightmare that has been following us for at least 400 generations. 

"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error that hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all pervasive system." 

-Simone de Beauvoir  

"The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think" -Luther Burbank

Shifting Sands

"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!" -H.G. Wells

Indeed, here it is. Brazen, brutal, barbaric and beautiful, it lumbers on down the sordid path. It doesn't seem that any people could have anticipated it a century ago. Most estimates saw us living in some advanced technology driven utopia or falling off the tightrope of progress into the abyss of oblivion. Amusingly, people today seem even more certain of these two disparate futures, with more favoring the latter as time goes on and our inability to get our shit together becomes starkly contrasted to the challenges we face as a species.    

H.G. Wells had a really interesting theory about what was needed to give humanity a chance. His project was to get all humans to acknowledge our collective history, not as a divided chronology of petty identity, but as a sprawling mosaic that unites us all. Living as he did during an era of unprecedented nationalism, he said "our true nationality is mankind".  

This was coming from an Englishman at a time when England owned an absurd amount of the worlds surface and controlled a staggering percentage of its population. For this reason English is still dominating globally, and the heirs to the Anglophone Empire still hold preeminent power globally in the two things that have always mattered on such a scale- the ability to get what you want and vanquish those who oppose. 

These days it seems to me that nationalism is fraying at the edges, and in some places getting torn apart. It was always a questionable concept, this large scale sanctified tribalism. Especially so when we consider were most of the worlds nations came from. There was a chance during the era of decolonization to build a world more focused on commonality than conflict, but that was very cleverly diverted by the cunning of Western businessmen and the ruthlessness of vested power in the recently liberated regions.

Today there is very little indication we have learned anything from history, but somehow there seems to be a growing awareness in some areas that all the things we were so convinced made us different was all a lie. I find a lot of hope in the message Wells tried to get across all those years ago.  

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress."

Our collective inability to surmount the primordial problem of Oligarchy is surely of primary importance. In connection with this is the need to start working towards eliminating borders, not so much on the ground, although this is important as well, but in our minds. The longer we keep thinking of this person as this or that nationality, or that somehow the border between two countries is anything more than a dirty trick, the more we work against ourselves. 

It's a hell of a struggle to forget what we have been taught for ages and to learn that which is currently only an idea. Somehow I get the feeling that people are starting to realize more and more how stupid most accepted things truly are, and this makes me think that perhaps this absurd political map of the world that one sees so on so many walls will someday be relegated to its rightful home, the museum. 

"There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope."

"A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it."

Dead Dogs

"In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason." -Hemingway

It is a strange direction that modern warfare has taken in the last decade or so. A lot of people saw this coming a long way off, and just hoped we would sort our sick psychology out before things got this far, but such hopes are foolish in the extreme given our past and present. We have officially entered into an era where the machines do the killing for the elite and they will soon not even need the poor for cannon fodder, only enemies for the slaughter.

It is an absolutely horrifying development that chills me to the bone and makes me realize how truly unforgivable the system that produced it is. The USA has invested a genuinely incalculable amount of resources into becoming the preeminent purveyors of death on this silly little space ball we call home. This led to some truly impressive stuff like nuclear weapons, stealth technology, weapons orbiting our planet and now the rise of the drones.

Drones are historically a very significant development. This is especially the case as they have been introduced not in a time of actually full blown state warfare, but during an era in which the West is trying to maintain its dominion over humanity through a complex web of fabricated states, economics and selective violence. It is almost certain that already fully automated drones roam the skies of areas deemed hostile and have programming on who to kill. I assume this because usually any time the US military makes a point of saying they wont do something it means they are already doing it.

The way I see this developing drones will mostly replace human soldiers for rich countries fairly soon. This will lead to an extremely brutal war of genocidal proportions as the global haves make sure the have nots don't fuck up their centuries long orgy of excess. As fresh water gets privatized like all other resources have been and climate change severely disrupts food supplies it will become necessary to foster many wars in order to keep people from directing their anger and action towards the root cause of such catastrophe. The fact that such wars can now be waged using robots on the side of the haves will make such a proposition far more acceptable for the American public (I'm not so sure about all the European nations for I suspect some of them have developed a conscience).

Killer robot armies is a huge deal in the places where death rains down without warning or even the decency of a declaration of war or admission of guilt. Recently John Oliver's show ran a proper story on the subject, perhaps the first in mainstream media. This was surely seen by millions of Americans, and every damn one of them probably got upset, maybe even downright indignant. Then they all promptly went on with living their lives, paying their taxes and letting such atrocities be carried out in their name. 

Why you may ask, because it was simply easier than doing otherwise. As early as 2011 an American citizen, a minor none the less, was killed by a drone overseas. This should have been a big deal, but it was not. Modern history has seen a lot of people killed like dogs for no reason, but the ruthless reasoning behind theses drone deaths rot my heart and make me feel that the end is closing in on us, and the curtain must soon fall on this ferocious phantasmagoria of an era we all live in.   

"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power other than self interest backed by force."     -GB Shaw  

                                      

Dominos of Destiny

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat." -Elizabeth Bowen

It is funny to think about how the modern world developed. The twists and turn of outrageous fortune that have gotten us into this current economic and political system that for better or worse manages to maintain damn near 7 billion humans on the epidermis of Earth. Most of my mental activity over the course of my 30 years here has been directed at gaining some sort of idea about why the world of the humans is the way it is. Far from academic and equally far from being unbiased or even disciplined, this has given me a lot to mentally masticate over the years. Like anyone who seeks to understand, it is a fluid process that is not given to absolute notions or permanent 'truths' beyond the rules of constant change and organized chaos that is the Universe at large. Even so, I'd like to share some random thoughts about how things got to their present point.

Colonialism, Imperialism, overly enthusiastic socializing on an epic scale, however you want to think of it, Europe's rather spectacular 500 year run of revolutionizing human existence on our planet is fascinating. Perhaps most important at present, is the invention, implementation and solidifying of what we commonly call countries. Originally they were just administrative units. You can bet your ass that no Spanish Viceroy or cartographer thought that the random lines they drew on imprecise maps would one day dictate the formation of nation states across Latin America. Equally ignorant were the British and French attempts to bring order to the timeless and transient formations in Africa and Asia. It was just expedient in order to govern these huge areas to break them up into different bureaucratic entities. The Sykes-Picot agreements that drew the borders of the Middle East, or the Durand line that divided the Pashtun people, or even the borders drawn by Soviet officials in Central Asia and Eastern Europe were done in what can only be described as a temporary administratively expedient manner that clearly had no intention of worrying about the future.

Having said that, think about how important these lines have become. I am very suspicious as to why these borders have been so stubbornly persistent, even when it is against a lot of peoples best interest to do away with them. The UN has some 200 countries in it, of which the vast majority were created in their present forms by agreements between white guys hanging out in well furnished rooms sometime in the previous century. This has given rise to a lot of flags, nationalism, border crossings and various levels of warfare. Some people, like the Kurds, Tauregs or Pashtuns were deliberately divided with the result that they have been lobbying and fighting for some revisions of the maps in order to give them what they feel they deserve. The rate of fragmentation has been increasing, with South Sudan, Kosovo, and East Timor coming into existence lately after extensive fighting. This is a dangerous precedent that is clearly being taken to heart by many aspiring nationalists and will likely sow the seeds of greater chaos and violence as places like Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Ukraine has portions of their population attempt to inflict enough death to warrant the creation of a separate state; invariably based on ethnic and/or religious lines.

Another funny quirk of the slings and arrows of outrageous historical fortune is the continued existence of what can only be described as an impressively self serving and predatory financial system that more or less controls international trade, all currencies and to great and lesser extents, the life of every human being on the planet. Even if you are just some tribal person living in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and never touched any modern money your whole life, if someone in a suit in Hong Kong or New York decides to throw enough money at your little piece of the world, they can strip mine your entire life-space into an obliterated wasteland with the ruthless efficiency and automation of an ambitious ant colony. The truly hilarious part about this whole thing is that it has taken on the dimensions of the most complicated religion ever, being so damn esoteric as to be basically incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't spend their entire life reading the economic code, who in their turn are then not really able to communicate what they have learned to anyone who doesn't speak their hermetic tongue. The bottom line is that so much of human life is dependent upon this teetering totalitarian edifice that no government can really be sure it isn't going to completely destroy itself by tampering with it; and thus has it more or less become a passively accepted feature of our modern world.

This all evolved out of a need to have an imperial treasury and to facilitate the extraction of wealth from large portions of the planet by colonial powers. Today however, it has evolved far beyond that and is an entity existing completely independently of any individual region, country or even group of super rich people. It is a sort of global web of greed and need that is getting more complex at a compound rate with technology and a multi-polar economic world in which all forces are being merged into the mega-hive of resource extraction, transfer, consumption and destruction. A lot of people like to denounce one aspect, like whaling or fracking, but that does little to really challenge the pervasiveness of the motive for doing it in the first place. Trying to make people feel guilty for doing what most people on earth are part of is an uphill battle that I can't see being won on the grounds of moral authority. I could write a lot more about the evolution of our economic order, but I lack the clarity of consciousness to make it serve any purpose other than exorcising my own mental demons.

There are a lot of factors that made the world today, and I would argue that all of them are amoral forces operating largely independently of any one group or ideology. If technology doesn't betray us and lead to our complete annihilation, and if the Earth's ecosystem can handle our shitty selfish attitude towards it for a bit longer, there is  hope that we will start seeing some logical thoughtful discussion about what would be a better reality than that which the winds of fate have blown our way. My main fear is that it is going to require the wholesale jettisoning of all our previous beliefs to do so, and that many humans would rather go down with the ship than hop onto a new vessel that requires being built amidst undeniably tumultuous seas.

"Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be great chaos."  -   I-Ching

The Reckoning

It's an arbitrary and fluid world that one sees unfolding before us these days. The fate of millions of souls seems to live and die based on the craps shoot of modern geopolitics. It now seems completely possible that the borders Iraq,  Syria and the rest of the countries invented in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, will very soon descend into conventional full scale warfare in order to see those imaginary lines get redrawn. A lot of people said that the war in Syria could spread, especially to equally sectarian and violence prone Iraq, but the events of the past few weeks took everyone by surprise.

According to some sources in the Sunni Triangle, ISIS made a pact with remnants of the Baathist forces and various bellicose Sunni tribes to assist in their blitzkrieg. This was further facilitated by the bribing or coercision of most of the generals in the region to simply leave their posts at this critical juncture, telling their troups to leave their weapons and run for their lives. The end result was that the Sunnis, under the aegis of the black banners of Jihad, are in control of a large and strategically central portion of Iraq, got about half a billion from a bankrobbery and a good deal of quality American made weaponry. They have also tipped the balance of power in Eastern Syria, where a lot of the hardware and money is being redeployed to fight the Shias on that front.

The Kurds seem perfectly happy to have inherited Kirkuk when the Iraqi army dissolved, with the battle hardened Peshmerga being more than capable of fighting off ISIS. They even took the opportunity to sell a million barrels of oil on their own, making their de facto independence looking even more viable. The hilarious side note to that is the oil was sold to Israel, the one country that has nothing to fear from the threats that Baghdad and Washington made about punishing whoever bought this 'illegal' oil. Even more ironic is that Turkey is the one facilitating all this oil moving.

Don't count the Shia out however, despite the utter incompetency of the Maliki government. Qasem Soleimani is a very effective strategist and someone not to be underestimated. He is the commander of the Qods Forces, which is in essence Iran's 15,000 strong version of the US Green Berets. Qasem more or less organized and fostered the development of Hezbullah and has played a very central part in the recent success of the Assad regime against its many opponents. This man is now the one who is rallying the Shia armies to oppose the rise of the new Sunni Caliphate. After being on the shit end of the sectarian stick since the downfall of the Fatimid Caliphate almost a thousand years  ago the Shia leaders are definitely willing to wage all out war to prevent any Sunnis, least of all Wahabist extremists, from challenging their recent successes.

Then of course there is the folks in the Arabian peninsula, who are semi-openly supporting the radical Sunni forces in Syria and Iraq. Militarily Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States couldn't do a whole lot, but they do like throwing money at likeminded religious zealots. Of course the US still guarantees these countries safety, so they can talk all the shit they like from the sidelines and place their bets as they choose. The US for its part seems pretty happy to have bailed on the whole shitshow and are willing to let this one play out. After all, it is going to drive up oil prices and make a lot of capitalists a fortune, not to mention arms sales and the fact that all of a sudden no one seems at all concerned about Israel.

Add to all this that there is actually fighting within Europe, which will surely distract NATO from taking any serious action elsewhere, and you have yourselves all the makings of a proper regional throw down. This reckoning has been a long time coming, 1353 years to be precise.

"Be not fainthearted then; and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand: for God is with you, and will not defraud you of the recompense of your works..." -Quran 

Kyrgyzstan

Aside from being perhaps the most consonant heavy name for a country when you look at a map, Kyrgyzstan doesn't get much attention in the world. It's not a big country, and it is right in the middle of Asia surrounded by other -stan countries and China to the East. It is a very mountainous piece of land that has been the border between civilizations for thousands of years. It is the only place in the region that has a democracy, for whatever that's worth, and is open to outsiders (most people don't need a visa to visit here). It is a country that a little over 20 years ago was part of the Soviet Union, but now is simply struggling to stay afloat financially, socially and psychologically.  

While a Soviet Socialist Republic, it was a very diverse place, with large numbers of Russians, Ukranians, Uzbeks and ethnic Germans living alongside the Kyrgyz, who didn't constitute a majority of the population until the 1980's. After the end of the Soviet Union most besides the Uzbeks went to their respective ethnic territories.  There is still a smattering of Russians, and the language is still predominant in the cities and widely spoken elsewhere, but things are slowly but surely sliding towards the use of Kyrgyz.

Nomadism isn't such a distant memory here, and plenty of the people still ride horses and spend the warm months up in the highlands living in yurts tending to their livestock. The  government has invoked the peoples oral story telling tradition, in particular the epic story of Manas, to create a national identity. So it was that they moved the statues of Lenin to less prominent locations and put up ones like this in its place-

Here are some other random shots I've taken in the past few weeks here. I'll be sure to add some more before the summer is through.