Dilip Simeon's blog

Just one bomb releases a slew of toxic heavy metals into Ukraine’s soil and groundwater. Now multiply this by thousands. In the U.S., proponents supporting military expansion and increasing defense spending have prevailed despite the more pressing need to divert all available resources to fight the impending disaster being faced by humanity: climate change. While ignoring the climate disaster, the U.S. is not only spending to boast its own military powers but also providing Ukraine with weapons and other aid in its ongoing conflict with Russia. With the war in Ukraine raging on, the U.S. Senate voted 86 to 11 in May and gave its approval to President Joe Biden’s massive additional aid package of $40 billion to help Ukraine on top of the nearly $14 billion authorized just two months prior. This total financial aid package for Ukraine of around $54 billion is now almost as large or larger than the entire 2021 defense budgets of several countries: France’s military budget was ...

Over the last 30 years, Russia’s principal strategic goal had been to maintain its quasi-imperial dominance in the post-Soviet space. Not any more. Moscow’s inability to quickly achieve regime change in Kyiv has transformed both the Kremlin’s war aims in Ukraine and the very nature of the Russian state. When Vladimir Putin sent Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine in late February, he still presided over an imperial-like polity largely privileging the methods of indirect rule. Four months later, Russia looks more like an aggrieved and aggressive nationalizing state focused on the ‘gathering of lands’ than a benign, regional hegemon. This dramatic shift will have profound consequences for Russia’s immediate ex-Soviet neighbours, the European Union and the world at large.... https://www.eurozine.com/no-empire-without-end/ Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled Don’t cry for me, Dostoevsky Book review: Day of the Oprichnik, 16 Years Later THE CANCELLATIO...

The US has 800 military bases around the world. The rest of the world has 30 outside of its own borders.   Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked or suffering years of austerity, simply to line the pockets of Blackwater, Halliburton, and Raytheon. And all the more so when such a war is sold to them on the basis of a huge deception. So since then, the U.S. has been repackaging its neocolonialism via proxy wars that are a much easier sell. There have been a succession of them: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela and now Ukraine. Each time, a few more leftists are lured into the camp of the war hawks by the West’s selfless, humanitarian instincts – promoted, of course, through the barrel of a Western-supplied arsenal. That process has reached its nadir with Ukraine.... https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/24/a-lemming-l...

When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, had trouble getting the third part of The Quiet Don approved for publication, he appealed to Maxim Gorky, then the supreme authority in Soviet literary affairs. Gorky invited him to his mansion, which had been a gift from Stalin to lure Gorky home from self-imposed exile. When Sholokhov arrived, he discovered that Gorky had company: Stalin himself. Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books by Geoffrey Roberts Reviewed by by Gary Saul Morson Stalin interrogated Sholokhov about ideologically problematic passages but agreed to the book’s publication on condition that Sholokhov also write a novel glorifying the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. Still more important, he gave Sholokhov a piece of paper explaining how to contact Stalin’s personal secretary, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, and providing the number of his direct phone line. Sholokhov’s collectivization novel also ran into trouble with officials t...

More than 70 years ago, Allied victory in the Second World War brought with it a powerful wave of hatred for all things German. Since the end of the war, the Germans repeatedly accepted responsibility for their actions. They made reparations to the Allied nations and lifelong compensation payments to concentration camp survivors. Nevertheless, it took decades for the hatred to subside in countries that had suffered under their occupation. Today, Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, committed in the name of of ‘denazification’ and ‘protecting Russian speakers’, have inspired many Ukrainians to reject everything Russian: to try to forget the Russian language and erase all Russian classical literature – with its imperial flavour and patronising of conquered peoples – from memory. How and in what form Ukrainian culture will retain its Russian-speaking component will become clear only when the war ends. But the longer the war continues, the more Russian-speaking culture will suffer in Ukrain...

‘It’s impossible for the system not to change’     While waging war on Ukraine, the Russian state has intensified its already tight control over the Internet, press, and opposition at home. Meanwhile, the anti-war opposition has resorted to what are essentially guerilla tactics. Many politicians, journalists, and activists were forced to leave the country to avoid being thrown in jail under Article 207.3 — a new law that criminalizes the spread of “fake news” about the actions of the Russian armed forces. Against this backdrop, contemporary Russian society is frequently compared to the late Soviet Union. To put these comparisons in context, Meduza turned to anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, the author of  Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More , a well-known study on the last decades of the USSR. One main mechanism of the Soviet person’s psyche described in your book is “being vnye.”In theory, “being  vnye ” provides resistance to authoritative disc...

Two Russian journalists working for a popular pro-Kremlin website filled it with anti-war articles on Monday morning in a rare act of dissent as the country celebrated the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. The articles on Lenta.ru called President  Vladimir Putin  a “pitiful paranoid dictator” and accused him of waging “the bloodiest war of the 21st century”. “We had to do it today. We wanted to remind everyone what our grandfathers really fought for on this beautiful Victory Day – for peace,” said 30-year-old Egor Polyakov, one of the two journalists. During his annual speech in front of 11,000 soldiers in the Kremlin on Monday morning, Putin  sought to justify his invasion of Ukraine , tying the current fighting to the Soviet victory in the second world war. “This is not what Victory Day is about,” Polyakov told the Guardian in an interview. “Ordinary people are dying, peaceful women and children are dying in Ukraine. Given the rhetoric that we have seen, this...

The US and Russia, faded relics of the Cold War, unable to accept their terminal decline, launch futile and self-defeating wars to reclaim their lost imperial power. Blinded by what Barbara Tuchman calls “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,” we are marching ominously towards war with Russia. How else might we explain Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public declaration that the US goal is to “weaken Russia” and Joe Biden’s request for another $33 billion in “emergency” military and economic aid (half of what Russia spent on its military in 2021) for Ukraine? The same cabal of generals and politicians that drained the state of trillions of dollars in the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia and learned nothing from the nightmare of Vietnam, revel in the illusion of their omnipotence. They have no interest in a diplomatic solution. There are billions in profits to be made in arms sales. There is political posturing to be done. There are generals itching to pu...

'This rhythm in Russia, of repression and violent revolution, is well known to Sorokin, who first emerged as a writer under Soviet rule in the 1980s, when he was no less irritating to the Kremlin. He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power. Day of the Oprichnik has almost nothing in common with the earnest Soviet protest novel echoed in its title, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterful One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; instead it’s a fierce political cartoon painted in lashing strokes. Putin himself has been erased from this fictional world, but the pointed humor will be apparent to any Russian...' IN HIS SARCASTIC NOVEL Day of the Oprichnik (translated by Jamey Gambrell), Vladimir Sorokin imagines a wealthy, dominant, ultra-modern but revanchist Russia in the distant Year of Our Lord 2028. A tsar-like monarch has been restored, Communism is remembered as a time of the “Red Troubles”; Red Square, in fac...

By Konstantin Akinsha    In early March, the University of Milan-Bicocca reacted to the Russian war against Ukraine by cancelling a seminar on Dostoevsky. This peculiar stand against Russian imperialism provoked a heated discussion among academics and intellectuals. The seminar was taught by the writer Paolo Nori, who instantly became famous. For a few days, the Italian intelligentsia treated the scrapping of the seminar as an event of utmost importance – eclipsing even the actual war in Ukraine. Those demanding the immediate reinstatement of the seminar had apparently forgotten their literary idol’s observation that ‘the happiness of the whole world is not worth the tear of a child’. Fortunately for everybody, Dostoevsky was quickly rehabilitated and the clumsy censors put to shame. As frivolous as the academic brouhaha may seem, it does raise an important question: what ought we to do now with Russian culture?... https://www.eurozine.com/dont-cry-for-me-dostoevsky/...

To the motives for war in human history, capitalism added another: profit. That motive drove technological advancement and created a genuine world economy. It also built new capitalist empires such as the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Belgian, Russian, German, Japanese, and American empires. Each of these countries built its empire by various means including wars against prior systems operating on their own territories, in their colonies, and in foreign “spheres of influence.” Wars likewise characterized interactions among empires. Global warfare (“world wars”) accompanied the globalization of capitalism and its profit motive. The war in Ukraine is the latest chapter in the history of capitalism, empire, and war. Capitalism means enterprises run by small groups of people—employers—who preside over large groups—hired employees. Employers are driven to maximize profits: the excess of the value added by hired workers over the wages paid to them. Employers are likewise driven to sell ...

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.  They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks - Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be v...

Professor Madhavan Palat's lecture on the Ukraine War: Regional History & Current Crisis was delivered on Tuesday March 29, at Habitat Centre.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PTtMaXOCho Madhavan K. Palat read history at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge. Thereafter he specialized in late Imperial Russian history and took the D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford. He taught history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1974 to 2004, was Visiting Professor in Imperial Russian History at the University of Chicago in 2006, National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla 2010-2011, and Editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru 2011-2019. Chair: Cmde. C. Uday Bhaskar, Director, Society For Policy Studies. ******************************************* Madhavan Palat lectures on Dostoevsky Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival by Madhavan Palat Ser...