The Fringe

When one is interested in humanity and makes an effort to learn things about it, you come across some pretty disparate chapters that seem hard to believe. One such crazy corner of history is Cambodia from 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge decided to take social engineering to new levels of insanity. Making a go of collectivization, liquidating class enemies and trying to demolish cultural traditions were the nuts and bolts of 20th Century Communist revolutions. In quite a few cases, this process went a bit off the rails and things degenerated into state sponsored bloodletting. Even so, what happened in Cambodia is singular. The Khmer Rouge probably had the least developed country to attempt Communism with, but regardless of this, the leaders threw caution to the wind and attempted to make reality conform to their wildest socialist fantasies.

As with all the horrid pieces of history, of which there are a great many, it seems most common to just shudder slightly within one's soul when hearing of it and then go get some ice cream so as to not give up all hope. As a student of history I for some reason like to stare into the abyss of human insanity, ostensibly in order to discover the reasons such things happen. A big part of our modern world seems to be predicated on the belief that we have somehow gotten better as a species, that we no longer have the same predilection for the ultra-violence. In my opinion, this is the metaphorical ice cream we feed ourselves in order to hide from the terrifying truth.

After gaining independence from France through essentially nagging and public shaming, King Sihanouk led his little kingdom into the Modern Era with panache and relentless demagoguery. He had many faults, but he did seem to love his country and its people a great deal, even if he didn't think they were ready to have a say in government. He vacillated between the West, the Communists and the non-aligned movement before eventually taking a fairly anti-US Imperialism stance as the war in Vietnam escalated and threatened to engulf Cambodia. Over time he became more and more autocratic as a nascent intelligentsia began to question his decisions, if not his overall leadership. Although still pretty damn popular with the common folk he was eventually deposed by some of his subordinates while abroad because he had managed to alienate most of the elites. The new rulers of the country immediately joined the American side of the Vietnam war and attempted to dislodge the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces that had essentially overrun the eastern provinces of the country. This didn't work because by this point the Vietnamese Communists had essentially embraced spartan levels of martial discipline, courage and skill. Once it became clear that they would never defeat the Vietnamese the government came to rely heavily on US B-52s to do the killing for them. This obviously also led to thousands of Cambodians dying as well, not to mention the majority of the countries elephants. Just as in Vietnam, this bombing campaign turned large segments of the population against the government in Phnom Penh. The deposed King Sihanouk had aligned himself with the  Communists because they were the only ones really challenging the new government that had betrayed him and also because his hosts in Beijing, where he had taken residence, probably pressured him to do so. His voice on the radio urging the people to join the Communist insurgency to crush the traitorous regime managed to turn a rag tag bunch of idealists who were little more than a Vietnamese proxy force into a large scale uprising with genuine popular support. It also gave the Khmer Rouge greater legitimacy in the eyes of many observers. After all, the man who was essentially seen as Cambodia incarnate was supporting them, he surely knows best.     

The war that followed was brutal and long. America did to Cambodia what they had to South Vietnam- made it dependent on copious amounts of US dollars and weapons, enabling their governments to become heinously corrupt to the point where victory was utterly impossible. When corruption has gotten to a level where generals in your army are selling weapons to the enemy instead of giving it to their own troops, defeat is only a matter of time. When the Khmer Rouge finally entered Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975 a great many Cambodians were ready for a change in government and society, even if they were a bit fuzzy on the details of what sort of change that would be. At least the war would end, they reasoned. It couldn't possibly be any more corrupt or incompetent, they thought. How horribly wrong they were.
The Central Committee of the Cambodian Communist Party (CPK) was one of the weirdest, most deranged bunch of lunatics to ever wield power in the modern era. First of all, they didn't even admit that they ran the country for a long time, instead just calling themselves 'Angkar' and ruling the land through mysterious messages, the source of which was a closely guarded secret. They also thought modern medicine and education simply weren't necessary, cities ought to be abandoned and Vietnam could be militarily crushed with relative ease.
What one thinker called the 'tyranization of practice at the hands of theory' is a good way to describe how Democratic Kampuchea was governed. Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and a handful of others thought they would succeed where so many other revolutions had failed, not by going carefully and thoughtfully deducing lessons from the past, but instead going full tilt towards classless agrarian Communism based on autarky. The barbarity of what followed, even by the fucked up standards of the 20th Century, are hard to fathom. Rough estimates are that a quarter of the country died (somewhere in the realm of 1-2 million people) in the under 4 years the experiment was conducted.

The killing of the educated, the arming of indoctrinated children, more or less planned famine and even the devouring of its own revolutionary cadre was so staggering that it took years for the outside world to finally accept what had happened. If the Vietnamese hadn't put a stop to it, who knows how much longer it could have gone on. If we take North Korea as an example, potentially many years longer. Most of the West acknowledged the Khmer Rouge government in exile as the legitimate representative of Cambodia all through the 1980s, and they occupied Cambodia's seat at the UN with other exile movements based in Thailand. They weren't even ever really defeated, but eventually just allowed to be incorporated into the Cambodian military and government in the 90s, often not even having to move from the areas they had operated in. Pol Pot lived to the ripe old age of 72 in his quiet corner of Cambodia watching his grandchildren grow up. This is perhaps the most disturbing part, that those who caused so much suffering were themselves allowed to live out their lives.
A major reason for what took place in Cambodia was obviously external and hardly something for which the local population can be blamed. The Cold War and the American war next door were obviously direct antecedents. The Sino-Soviet split also played a major role in what happened, as China was so desperate to find a way to isolate Vietnam, then an ally of the USSR, that they were willing to tolerate almost any government in Cambodia as long as it was loyal to them. Having said all that, there is still a lingering question of how any people could allow themselves to be brutalized on such a monumental level and to then not demand the heads of those who had done it.
When it's a concentration camp or gulag, that is one thing, but damn near an entire society is hard to comprehend. In Bosnia or Rwanda, there were ethnic and religious tensions that made their genocides conceivable, but Cambodia is a different beast all together. When a very belatedly attempt to put some of the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial some years back they actually found it fairly difficult to convict them of genocide, because they had killed overwhelmingly Khmer people and did so without any consideration of race, religion or nationality. It would seem to me that what happened during those dark years was the result of pursuing an idea, one believed to be so intrinsically good, that it justifies any means to achieve it. Add to that the context, America pulling frantically out of South Vietnam as the NVA closes in on Saigon at the exact same time that Phnom Penh falls to the Khmer Rouge and we start to understand why the world didn't really think much about Cambodia during the next 4 years. Another factor worth considering is that Cambodia had been kicked around by stronger neighbors for centuries, and so was rather paranoid about other countries trying to take it over, which made much of the CPK propaganda easily digestible.
These days in Cambodia, the genocide is mostly for tourist consumption it seems. They don't teach about it in public schools so as to not incur the wrath of the government, which is headed by a former battalion commander of the Khmer Rouge who eventually defected to the North Vietnamese and turned on his former comrades. The people obviously still bear psychological scars from this period and trans-generational trauma seems very common. The country has a great many problems, but the people seem to me incredibly resilient. The smiles and the little acts of kindness I see every day gives me hope for this imperiled species we call humans.

The Triumph of Capital

I recently visited the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetary, which in a beautiful twist of fate, charges an entrance fee to see his tomb. While standing over his bones I was wondering what he would have thought of how the great amoral economic juggernaut has evolved. Say what you will of its impact on humanity and the environment, it has managed to sustain a staggering 7.5 billion humans. Considering our historical proclivity towards organized violence, as well as our susceptibility to famine and plague, that is one hell of an achievement. As much as we are ultra cool sentient modern beings, we are still basically just conceited animals, and as such, it is all really just a numbers game. How many of your own species can you spread over the surface of the Earth, that is the real measure of success. I used to despise Capitalism in my youth, dreaming fancifully of its cataclysmic downfall or overthrow. As I get older and see for myself how ubiquitous it has become, I no longer can harbor such absolutist convictions about it being 'evil' or destined to be brought down by the proletariat. Having said that, a bottom of the Ninth comeback by labor to take the means of production right before they all get made obsolete by machines... how cool would that be, right?

All the old Marxist criticisms are of course still completely true. Contradictions abound and monstrous crimes are committed daily in the pursuit of profit. It is a system that is built on the suffering of the masses and it exploits ruthlessly all those who are not lucky or cunning enough to scramble into one of the higher classes. Aside from its human costs, it also completely destroys or alters everything that stands in its way. Growth for growth's sake is the logic of a cancer cell, and that is precisely what Capitalism is all about. Within a relatively short period of time, it has managed to change weather patterns and in just the past 100 years alone obliterate well over half the worlds forests. It commodifies everything. If it is profitable and possible, then it shall be done. 

On the other side, however, how amazing it all is. The global GDP is an estimated $75 trillion and the mean life expectancy is over 70! Even having studied a fair amount of economics, I am still a bit confused about the whole concept of fiat currency and how it can be an accurate measure of economic output, but that is also part of the magic, under close inspection, none of it really makes objective sense, it just works somehow. Granted, every 20 years or so the whole thing wobbles and threatens to collapse, but then modern governments pretty much fulfill the only important task left to them and prop up the market before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. 
Marx wrote that- "Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat."
Well, it has come to pass. With very few exceptions, capital knows no real barriers in this world of ours. People may be stopped from crossing the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean, but money surely is not. The contradictions are indeed many. If you add to these essential incongruities the dizzying level of hypocrisy practiced by a still tenuously dominate West in terms of geopolitics, economics, environmentalism and a myriad of 'ideals', the whole thing becomes almost too insane to even fathom. Yet, somehow, someway, it all rumbles on with no real contender in sight, just critics. 
It is rather sad that Marx miscalculated by so many years, and that the communists failed so monumentally in their attempts to jump the gun. Of course, they never really got a chance to try their theories on a properly industrialized country, merely peripheral states that were far from being anything resembling developed capitalist economies. Regardless of this, the horrors that communism, as a government, inflicted upon the world have effectively removed it as a viable option. 

I'm sure the most difficult to grasp aspect of our time for old Karl would be that the rising star, the lynchpin, in this high noon of Capitalism is the Peoples Republic of China, which still espouses a Marxist doctrine and requires it to be studied by it's billion and a half people. Really don't know how anyone without a highly developed sense of humor can even deal with this world of ours.

New Player in History

Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is now, for all intents and purposes, King of Arabia. He is thus one of the richest people in the world, protector of the two holy cities of Islam and  de facto leader of the Sunnis. At only 32 years of age he is very young by the standards of our day to be in such a position (Kim Jong- Un of North Korean fame is 33). 

As you can see from his stone cold stare above, this guy isn't letting a little thing like his age getting in the way of being a monarch in the old mold. He has already unleashed war against their impoverished neighbors to the south in Yemen, which sends a clear message that he means to use some of the high tech weaponry the country has been buying up for decades. Of course, the humanitarian consequences of the two and half years of military intervention have been fairly horrific in terms of civilian casualties and hasn't really achieved much of anything substantial in military terms, but those are details to a true King. Recently, the embargo has led to large portions of Yemen being on the brink of starvation and to the largest outbreak of cholera (might be something else) in living memory. He also took the move of cutting off Qatar because it was seen as not following the Saudi/Sunni line in the region by doing things like being too friendly with Iran, sponsoring Al-Jazeera and in general having their own foreign policy.  

With so many of the worlds royals just being titular, its good to see someone looking to maintain the ancient tradition of hereditary authoritarianism. 

In my opinion the Saudi royal family is, taken as a whole, the most hypocritical bunch of reprobates that our era has produced. Working in tandem with a psychotically myopic US foreign policy they managed to do more damage to Islam than generations of Imperialism by Europeans and hundreds of years of rule by Turk managed to achieve. Places like Chechnya and Afghanistan have gone from being predominately Sufi, and thus fairly relaxed about religion, to centers of reactionary idiocy based on perhaps the shittiest religion on earth, Wahhabism. Having said all that, MBS has already let women drive and is allowing movie theatres to open up, so maybe he is going to jettison this wretched ideology.

"The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam." -Salman Rushdie
  

The Trumpening

The rise of Donald Trump is a phenomenon that has certainly exposed the rancid madness that still lurks in the heart of America. As a historian, I can't help but be deeply impressed at how he and his team managed to game the election and steamroll over scandals that would have sunk any other campaign a hundred times over. He took the trend of political campaigns becoming hollow spectacles and took it to its logical conclusion- running his election bid like reality TV. He pulled in ratings unseen in any election and received wide spread coverage from all media, proving once and for all the old maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Team Trump went all in betting against the intelligence of the average American, and we saw the results of that strategy in November.

 

White supremacists now hold positions of high authority in Trump's cabinet. A president now sits up late at night in the White House watching Fox News religiously, tweeting whatever comes into his mind. The pendulum seems to have swung very far this time and we will just have to wait for it to swing back. Democracy is only as good as the majority of the citizens, and in this last election we saw clearly the consequences of the era of social media. People can now sign up for whatever narrative that suits their particular prejudices, and their version of the internet will happily deliver a constant stream of 'news' that backs up that viewpoint.  

I genuinely thought that the baby boomer generation couldn't do any more damage to America, but I was clearly very wrong. It seems that the most dangerous aspect of all this is that the idea of objective reality has been dealt a death blow after years on the defensive. Alternative facts can be concocted on a as needed basis to support whatever the administration sees as expedient. If the media brings up the truth, they can be called fake news and ignored. That the mainstream media has to a large extent become so exceptionally ridiculous and unprofessional that this tactic could succeed so well is depressing. Watching the supposed opposition consistently behave like childish hacks and rather blatantly try to copy the rights media tactics does not bode well for their return to power. 

On the bright side it seems that as a result of the Trumpining the international order is undergoing a major realignment. Seeing as how we are still basically running off the world order agreed upon at Bretton Woods some 70 years ago, that might not be such a bad thing.  

I can't even begin to fully understand who Trump really is, let alone what he actually believes. He is a Tulpa of extreme potency, and one that has seemingly transcended reality through channeling deep seated paranoia, greed, and a fair amount of xenophobic nationalism that has always been a part of the psyche of any great empire. The fact that a candidate ran openly on build a giant wall on our brown border and 'bomb the shit out of them' as serious foreign policy objectives for a complex globalized world that America ostensibly rules, and won a crushing victory on that platform, speaks volumes. Nobody talks of America being the leader of the free world anymore, and many countries, allies included, have essentially said they think the man is at least partially insane, if not a complete sociopath. Even under Bush, there was a ruthless logic and callousness to what he did, that although horrifying, the world could easily enough understand and accept. The most fascinating thing about Trump, in my opinion, is that nobody can anticipate what he will do. His impulsiveness is already the stuff of legend, and he, more so than any other major leader of this century, is just making it up as he goes along. 

I've never been a fan of the Imperial Presidency, even if it was somewhat justifiable at certain points in our history (Civil War, Great Depression, World War II). I just don't trust the concentration of power, and even less so when it becomes one person. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if any single person alive is capable of administering the world that has evolved since globalization made everything so interdependent. In my opinion, Obama was as intelligent and dedicated a president as we have ever had, and even he watched the deficit double because he got extorted into giving billions to predatory banks and passively observed country after country in the MENA region descended into chaotic bloodletting and civil war. Those were not popular moves for Obama to make, but they were probably the best that he had open to him; the alternatives being complete economic collapse on a 1929 scale or endless land wars/nation building in West Asia and North Africa. 

Trump is going to face similar tough choices during his presidency, and although he is clearly capable of outmaneuvering American politicians, I doubt he can do the same when going up against Russia, Iran or North Korea. Iran is close to having a land route all the way to Beirut that will create a Shia crescent from the borders of Pakistan to the Mediterranean. This amazingly bold play by Iran and its Shia brethren is being backed up by a resurgent Russia, which is objectively a lot more effective at dissuading Western intervention than any nuclear program the Iranians could have managed. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are desperate to counter the rise of Shia power in the region. They have and will continue to support movements like Islamic State and al-Nusra (now known as Organization for the Liberation of the Levant or HTS) in order to thwart the Shia apostates that they have hated for well over a hundred generations. This is the greatest challenge to the world order that we have seen in the post-1991 era, and has all the makings of an all out regional war, if not a global one. How much of this Trump fully comprehends is anyone's guess. His speech in Saudi Arabia was rather interesting for two reasons. One, he openly said America no longer cares about spreading Democracy, which although something that the US has probably not really cared about since the 1950's, was still a fundamental part of our foreign and domestic propaganda. He then went on to essentially say that regardless of the horrors that radical Sunni organizations have brought to the Levant, the real issue is the fact that the Shia, led by Iran and protected by Russia, are winning on all the fronts, except perhaps Yemen. It is a moment of historic realignment taking place in the crossroads of three continents and no one is in control of where it will lead. 

Trump is a lot of things, but an idiot isn't one of them. He managed to outsmart the Republican Party, then turn around to stomp the Democrats more ferociously than anyone since Reagan. You can hate the guy, and many do, but you should never fail to appreciate the man's genius for grandstanding and his unrivaled penchant for insult. Still, Machiavellian as the man may be, I truly doubt that he can manage the evolving crisis. The fall of the Islamic State is but a small element in the shifting sands of power in the region, and isn't likely to slow the Shia-Sunni conflict at all. The thing that I can't help but love about Trump is that the man is utterly unpredictable and will say absolutely anything that works its way into that strange mind of his. For all we know he could tweet at 3am tomorrow: We no longer need the oil, so why not let the Muslims kill each other and sell weapons to both sides? #jobs #winning #maga 

Let no one say that we do not live in interesting times.

The Stage Is Set

Ever since the guns fell silent in 1945 it seems that many people have been waiting anxiously for another great war to round out the trilogy. Shockingly, however, the United Nations has managed to fulfill its mandate and avert this third-times-a-charm attempt at collective suicide.  Say what you will about the UN's failures to enforce human rights and prevent smaller scale wars, it has managed to achieve its primary goal of avoiding WWIII amazingly well.
When Turkey shot down that Russian jet I couldn't help but physically cringe. We all knew that the shitstorm in the Levant had the potential to spiral out of control, but this situation felt like someone just capped Archduke Ferdinand. The airspace over Syria has become absurdly crowded with American, French, Australian, Russian, Turkish, Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, Emirati, Israeli and Qatari warplanes all vying for the chance to bomb people on the ground. Its no minor miracle that an incident similar to this one didn't take place sooner. Now that Assad is actually winning, various forces are considering even more drastic measures, like giving the mujahideen missiles capable of shooting down airplanes; an idea so stupid even the Americans know its insane, at least this time around.
What once was just a civil war has now evolved into a amazingly complicated sectarian proxy war. It's a pretty classic geographical setting for a showdown of biblical proportions. It seems that all the countries in the world that felt the call to chaos just decided that the Levant was a good convenient meeting spot and have thus turned it into a full on barbarity preserve for atavistic savagery. With the possible exception of the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars, I can't think of any other civil war that involved so many outside powers. Its like a cage fight with multiple people in the ring, and a audience that is constantly throwing weapons into the ring, sometimes to help a fighter, other times to hurt one.
The so called 'refugee crises' in the EU, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon is so classic cause and effect that it blows my mind that no one is owning up to their responsibility in the matter. From the perspective of many regions of the world, the past half a millennium could be described as mass migration of Europeans to all corners of the planet, precipitated by war in their countries of origin and economic pull factors. Obviously that is not how European have spun that story, history being written by the victors and all.
There are no easy answers to the problem of displaced and desperate people migrating when necessity makes them abandon their ancestral lands. Under its veneer of civilized sophistication and social conscience, many Europeans still have a deep seated superiority complex over the rest of humanity. Even though migration from Mexico to the United States has statistically stopped as more are returning than arriving, Trump has whipped up an absolute frenzy of nativist rage that once again has demonstrated the ignorance of the far right in America. Really the entire developed world is showing their true colors and dropping the pretense of humanitarianism, albeit, rather gradually.
We are entering into a pivotal moment in human history in which climate change will present a challenge the likes of which civilization has never before confronted. The reality of this is now at least widely accepted, yet, only half measures and empty promises have appeared thus far. When the hard times truly begin, which judging by the data on water supplies wont be long, the current global migrations of the forsaken will seem insignificant compared to the deluge that comes. As horrible as it sounds, a major war, famine or plague just culling a huge chunk of humanity is the most likely solution for the pressures we are putting on the planets environment. The notion that at the 11th hour the global elites will close ranks and martial their respective thralls to the task of completely reorganizing human society along lines that are somehow sustainable is laughable. Only slightly less likely is that the masses will finally rise up against the system and manage to cobble together a new economic order that will save our species.
I'm not advocating nihilism or despair, quite the contrary. What is needed now is steely eyed realism to stare down what we are facing. Anything that divides us, like nationality, ethnicity and religion needs to be thrown overboard forthwith. If some refuse to let go of this tired and burdensome heritage, throw them over too. As things grow more dire in the years to come I predict rational people the world over will be far more willing to jettison this dead weight when it is becomes clear to them that it is necessary for survival. Of course the assholes that benefit from the myriad of divisions that cut through humanity like terminal cancer will do their best to convince them otherwise. They will obviously have to be dealt with in no uncertain terms if we are going to make it into the next century.

"Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalternable!"             -Brecht

"We shall need a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." -Einstein

Kakistocracy

Its really an interesting to think about how leadership has evolved. For a very long time families, clans and tribes collectively decided who among them was most likely not to get them all killed. Then after that it was whoever was best at outmaneuvering other ambitious sociopaths (frequently their relatives) to take the reigns of state; very often over the dead body of their predecessor. 
That last one is actually still pretty popular in the equatorial regions. 
What capitalism brought to the table is really rather amazing. A public spectacle of ridiculous proportions where the masses are pitted against each other in electoral combat and get into a sporting frenzy about who will wield power. I've never been able to get into it much, cynical bastard that I am. It's rather adorable how flustered some people I know get when they find out that I'm not one of the voters. 
"How can this be?!" they howl indignantly. 
Its pretty awesome actually. I don't like telling kids there is no Santa Klaus or religious adults their is no God, that shit is sad. However, telling an avid believer in democracy, especially the American variety, that its a complete farce intended to placate them into buying into the apocalyptic nightmare into which we are now descending... delightful! 
They'll always fight it, but the facts are an incredible cudgel to beat that nonsense out of people, assuming they don't retreat completely from reality. It almost always ends in the same argument, what I like to call the 'lesser of two evils' dodge. Not a bad fall back position. Much more defensible than the democracy is morally right and the only legitimate form of government position.
The problem with the whole vote for the not so openly evil people thing is that it still leads down the same path, it just lubricates the gears with false hope and naive bullshit instead of fiery nationalism and intolerance.  Obama doesn't speak about the "Axis of Evil" and invade two countries over made up shit, but he does use robot armies to massacre civilians and lock up people whose only crime was to tell the truth. The big difference then is that Obama spoke of hope, gave some people some more rights in the US and was a bit harder to hate as a person. 
At the end of the 8 years though, the world will still be no closer to anything substantial other than complete environmental collapse leading to an inevitable WWIII for sheer survival. 
Which brings me to the crux of my antipathy for the cult of democracy. We live in a world run by money, and the more money you got, the more power you can purchase. The whole voting game is as rigged in the US as it is in Zimbabwe, its just that the people in America have a lot more money spent on them to buy into the system. 
You don't vote for a position, you vote for a party or a person. No one would vote for corporate rule, massive pollution, the bombing of civilians in countries the government doesn't even care about enough to properly invade; yet that is what people vote for over and over again.   
I must concede though, I get pretty caught up in the drama of it all sometimes too. The elections in Turkey next week have me absolutely captivated. Erdogan pretty much started a war against the Kurds in an attempt to get them to lose an election. Ukraine's election that will be tallied and told in a day or two is also pretty good sport, with Pereshenko trying to out maneuver various Oligarchs in order to maintain a mandate to govern the partially disintegrated country. 

"In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme." -Aristotle 
"Democracy is the road to socialism." -Marx
"The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself." -G.K. Chesterson 

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