From cultural critic Mike Davis, RIP. One of his last essays, March 2022. [ after Russia's invasion]. I am esp taken with "nightmare edition of Great Men Make History".

[Mark Kohut]

As Rich said, I cannot agree with everything, even much, of what Davis has
written.

This to me, for example is almost all wrong....I had seen it and would
never repost it....
He gave up following the current administration and the Invasion in
granular real world detail in my opinion....

On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 1:28 PM Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Mark - Thanks for posting this Mike Davis essay. Let's hope that there are
>  other more recent ones that will surface.
>
> Always curious to know who published work of this seriousness, I found a
> lot more by others at what I believe is your missing attribution:
> https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/thanatos-triumphant
>
> Thanks again
>
> -Allan Further!
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 9:43 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> (Let me note, however, the curious example of the speech that Thomas
>> Piketty gave on 16 February at the Pentagon’s National Defense University.
>> As part of a regular series of talks on ‘Responding to China’, the French
>> economist argued that ‘the West’ must challenge Beijing’s rising hegemony
>> by abandoning its ‘dated hyper-capitalist model’ and promoting instead a
>> ‘new emancipatory egalitarian horizon on a global scale’. A strange venue
>> and pretext, to say the least, for advocating democratic socialism.)
>>
>> Nature meanwhile is taking back the reins over history, making its own
>> titanic compensations, at the expense of powers, especially over natural
>> and engineered infrastructures, that empires once thought to control. In
>> this light, the ‘Anthropocene’ with its hint of the promethean, seems
>> especially ill-fitted to the reality of apocalyptic capitalism.
>>
>> As an objection to my pessimism, one might claim that China is
>> clear-sighted where everyone else is blind. Certainly, its vast vision of
>> a
>> unified Eurasia, the Belt and Road project, is a grand design for the
>> future, unequalled since the sun of the ‘American Century’ rose over a
>> war-shattered world. But China’s genius, 1949-59 and 1979-2013, has been
>> its neo-mandarin practice of collective leadership, centralized but
>> plurivocal. Xi Jinping, in his ascent to Mao’s throne, is the worm in the
>> apple. Although he has economically and militarily enhanced China’s clout,
>> his reckless unleashing of ultra-nationalism could yet open a nuclear
>> Pandora’s Box.
>>
>> We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’.
>> Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential
>> cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at
>> the
>> top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and
>> Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power
>> been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero
>> graves
>> of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem
>> Schwarzbard.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>