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".

[David Morris]

Putin (and the world) has *clearly been told* that if he uses a nuke, NATO
retaliation will result in

****EXTREME annihilation****
 (without nukes)

of all Russian military capabilities in Ukraine (and presumably all of the
rest of Europe).

Russia would then still be a *titular* world power (because it still owns
nukes) but without any practical conventional military power.  That seems
to be the direction it’s taking itself anyway, with this war.


On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 1:49 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> To me, The Biden administration has done and continues to perform one of
> the most magisterial
> pieces of diplomacy in the history of the world.....supporting democracy as
> embodied in Ukraine
> fully conscious at every step of the dangers---what will trigger with the
> Putin described--an escalation.
>
> Davis is simply blindly wrong to say the Biden admin is bringing nuke talk
> to the nuke talks....MACRON,
> speaking for NATO we can assume, has even said IF PUTIN escalates the West
> will retaliate as fully as
> possible WITHOUT NEEDING to use nukes......the international community
> thinks that means a full planes and
> tanks and rockets wiping out of every Russian plane and tank and
> unsurrendered Russian in Ukraine.....
>
> NO ONE except those who can't come in out of the cold, some cold
> ideological Marxists and others, are comparing
> the US's actions in this Invasion to Cold War reflexes, for one thing,
> MIKE, may you rest well, this invasion/war is NOT COLD.
>
> Ideologies are mostly blinders and filtered glasses...
>
> 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
> >>
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>