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14.02.1972

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Dark magical spells of February 2025

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Wolfgang Streeck: 2008 was a first warning that this way of life of capitalism — to live on a continuously growing mountain of borrowed money — could not continue forever. And then, of course, came the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The latter in particular, in my view, signified the end of a world which US capital could penetrate at will, to sustain a regime run out of Washington and Wall Street that was meant to include the rest of the world, including Russia and China, and the Global South anyway.

Ewald Engelen: Does that imply that we may have a false conception of what the end of a regime actually looks like?

Wolfgang Streeck: We tend to think that the temporality of regimes is the same as the temporality of human beings, that the regime shifts we see coming will happen somehow during our lifetime. That mistake was made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who expected to witness the end of capitalism in person. The same for Joseph Schumpeter, certainly for Max Weber, and for Werner Sombart, who in the 1930s thought that he was living in “late capitalism.”

So, in that sense one can say that human beings are prone to misread fundamental change. With the war in Ukraine, it comes to mind that the three major historical moments in the reorganization of capitalism were three major wars. There were the Dutch-English wars of the seventeenth century, when the center of capitalism moved from Amsterdam to London. Then there was World War I and the postwar settlement after 1918, which expedited the end of empire, launched a world of nation-states, and prepared another territorial shift, this time from London to Washington. The third was after World War II, with the Keynesian settlement, which embedded nation-states in a United States–dominated global trade regime.

Maybe we now see a repeat in the sense that capitalism adjusts itself to new conditions, in ways that we cannot yet predict. What is coming to an end now is the liberal international order, backed by US imperialism, which was the result of the breakdown of the Soviet Union: in that case the change happened without a war, but related to the arms race of the 1980s.

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President Trump has spoken to Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the phone to try to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war

New York Post:

Trump said he has a concrete plan to end the war.

“I hope it’s fast. Every day people are dying. This war is so bad in Ukraine. I want to end this damn thing.”

Addressing National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who joined him in his study aboard Air Force One Friday night, the president said: “Let’s get these meetings going. They want to meet. Every day people are dying. Young handsome soldiers are being killed. Young men, like my sons. On both sides. All over the battlefield.”

Vice President Vance will meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference next week.

Trump has said he wants to strike a $500 million deal with Zelensky to access rare-earth minerals and gas in Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees in any potential peace settlement.

On Iran, Trump told The Post:  “I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear. I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it. . . . They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.”

“If we made the deal, Israel wouldn’t bomb them.”

But he would not reveal details of any potential negotiations with Iran: “In a way, I don’t like telling you what I’m going to tell them. You know, it’s not nice.”

“I could tell what I have to tell them, and I hope they decide that they’re not going to do what they’re currently thinking of doing. And I think they’ll really be happy.”

“I’d tell them I’d make a deal.”

As for what he would offer Iran in return, he said, “I can’t say that because it’s too nasty. I won’t bomb them.”

„No words“ is an overused comment on social media I think, often lazily taking the place of analyzing an article or statement one objects to. Here, though, I really do find myself at something of a loss for words. Describing Trump as a dangerous buffoon, saying he sounds like a mobster threatening violence if the terms of the deal he offers are not accepted, has all been done. In 2025 these phrases sound trite. What does one say, though? What must it have been like to be Putin on the phone with Trump? I also see this Post interview on social media feeds which view Trump as a well-intentioned peacemaker.

From time to time I remember Noam Chomsky’s address at the 2022 National Solar Conference at the University of New Mexico, in which he detailed his major concerns for human civilization:

The primary concerns have been the growing threat of nuclear war and the failure to prevent lethal global heating.

In the last few years, a new concern has been added. The deterioration of the arena of rational discourse, which is all too apparent. Unless we can use our capacities for thought in an arena of rational discourse, there’s no hope of closing the dread gap in time to save ourselves.

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Glasnost and roads not taken

It was for this reason that Gorbachëv initiated a series of public debates. The policy was encapsulated in the slogan of glasnost. This is a difficult word to translate, broadly connoting ‚openness‘, ‚a voicing‘ and ‚a making public‘. Gorbachëv‘s choice of vocabulary was not accidental. Glasnost, for all its vagueness, does not mean freedom of information. He had no intention of relinquishing the Politburo’s capacity to decide the limits of public discussion. Moreover, his assumption was that if Soviet society were to examine its problems within a framework of guidance, a renaissance of Leninist ideals would occur. Gorbachëv was not a political liberal. At the time, however, it was not so much his reservation of communist party power as his liberating initiative that was impressive. Gorbachëv was freeing debate in the USSR to an extent that no Soviet leader had attempted, not even Khrushchëv and certainly not Lenin.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 448.

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08.02.2003 Fischer is not convinced

Spiegel:

Es sind Augenblicke, in denen deutlich wird: Hier stehen sich zwei Konzepte, zwei politische Ansätze gegenüber.

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Annalena Baerbock is shocked

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Wahl-O-Mat

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Foreign influence and the erosion of sovereignty are all good, as long as it’s us doing it.

Almut Rochowanski, Jacobin:

Under the ruling Georgian Dream party, Georgia might have excelled at adopting the technocratic reforms prescribed by its Western partners, but the latter nevertheless tried to squeeze Georgian Dream out of power. First partially, via a power-sharing scheme devised by the EU; then, after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, increasingly urgently; and finally, before elections in October 2024, openly so. Throughout, Western governments kept funding a powerful and vocal group of partisan NGOs that variously called for sanctioning, ousting, or toppling the government. So in spring 2023, the Georgian government first introduced a law that would oblige foreign-funded NGOs to disclose their finances. After a year of intermittent, large-scale protests, it was adopted.

Once the Georgian government started to push back against the foreign hold on the country’s NGOs, media, policymaking, and politics, it faced shrill accusations of secret pacts with Russia and being under Vladimir Putin’s influence — never mind the lack of evidence.

This double standard is barely ever acknowledged and never questioned, since according to a tacit consensus, the West is in the influence game only because we want what’s best for Georgia and would never seek any advantage from “protecting Georgian democracy” and promoting “reforms” (shorthand for a wide range of legal and political changes favored by foreign partners instead of the electorate). Foreign influence and the erosion of sovereignty are all good, as long as it’s us doing it.

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Putsch

Lukas Hermsmeier, Die Wochenzeitung:

Wie nennt man es, wenn eine Regierung gezielt Gesetze bricht und die Gewalten­teilung untergräbt? Wenn sie Bürgerrechte, Wissenschaftsfreiheit und Medien bekämpft, sodass demokratische Mechanismen immer weniger greifen? Wenn rechtsradikale Privatunternehmer plötzlich das Land lenken, ohne jegliche parlamentarische Legitimation?

Putsch, Verfassungskrise, das sind die treffenden Begriffe. Und so sollte man das, was derzeit in den USA passiert, auch verstehen. Die grösste Industrienation der Welt, in der Macht und Ressourcen sowieso schon abenteuerlich ungerecht verteilt sind, wandelt sich derzeit in einen unverhohlen autoritären Staat.

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David Harris * February 28, 1946 – † February 6, 2023


Between Gulf Wars I and II I clearly remember hearing Harris read from his book Our War on calling Vietnam “a mistake”:

While it may be an accurate conclusion, calling the war a mistake is the functional equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. … In this particular “mistake,” at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans. These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen (talk about cowards!) they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet in the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive with jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumbs, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers. They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of someone who had even less idea than that. … All 3 million died in pain, often so intense that death was a relief. This war was about us. We made it happen. It was ours. And, even at this late date, any genuine reckoning on our part must include assuming the full responsibility of that ownership. Nothing less will do.

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