This debate from a major show in India gives a good insight into how the USA has alienated Indian elites. It is one event in an rushing cascade of intellectual revolt against the Anglo-American world, against the Netflix stream of American thinking about the world, diplomacy, democracy, economics etc. The world is saying: America, look at me, I am the captain now.
So much of the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the tragic encounters of the elites of empires and ethno-linguistic national identities. We are seeing a new version of this struggle between confected social media national identities, concealing troubled and exclusive ethno-lingusitic reasoning, and collapsing imperial orders.
A new iron curtain is falling across the “Western” or Anglo-American world. This time curtain is not being brought down by a reincarnated Russian empire. It is being brought down by a failing empire of lies, the media-theatre state of the Global American Empire, spiralling into a dynastic collapse.
The last phase of the Hundred Years (mostly) Cold War. Kingsnorth on the dead liberal order and post-democratic societies. Decisions made in anger will collapse the Western media-theatre state. Letter to Prime Minister of Australia on situation in Eastern Ukraine. Marina Tsvetaeva on poets with and without history.
Descent into post-democratic crisis. John Ionnadis on saving democracy from the pandemic. Canada leaves the democratic nations – an Open Letter to the Prime Minister of Australia. Security crisis in Ukraine and the end of the Cold War – who really wants to invade Europe? The Russian Anxiety and our responsibility to refuse it
American elites wag the dogs of war as the post-democratic theatre burns. Liz Truss in Moscow: the disgrace of the British State. Journalists behaving like spin doctors and government propagandists again. Isabella of Castile and the Spanish Empire. The strangeness of the children of Ash and Elm. The uncontrollability of the world, and the true words of John Donne on public health rulez, OK?
Operation Barbarossa and war on the Eastern Front in World War II and its relevance to popular memory and geopolitics. Joint statement of Xi-Putin summit comments on history of WWII. The Anglo-American illusions of Munich: the edge of war. Russophobia and the collapse of Anglo-American diplomacy.
A holiday of regeneration. The crisis in Europe, Ukraine, the failure of American diplomacy and the end of NATO. The Siege of Leningrad, Vladimir Putin, Operation Barbarossa, and Dmitri Likhachev on the Russian Soul. Elena Shvarts and the Flora of Ukraine. Russian Ark and the survival of culture in the floating hermitage of the Neva.
Elena Shvarts and the burnt archive. Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, and the perils of order in history. The Stranger Effect and the charisma of Messiahs. The Coming of the Third Reich. Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil and the ethics of poetry as gathering flowers of the mind.
Elena Shvarts, New Jerusalem Monastery, Patriarch Nikon and the Resurrection of religious life in Russia. A definition of empire. Olga Tokarczuk and the Books of Jacob. Please consider purchasing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind, and listening to my podcast, The Burning Archive. Best wishes for renewal in the New Year.