It wasn’t a lecture. It was question and answer with someone who comes from the Caucasus, someone who spent a lot of time there with the people directly involved in the conflict.

“In Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters, which seeks to show her relevance to contemporary politics, Arendt’s bold essays on Israel and Zionism do not merit mention, much less discussion.”

Privileged elites who were forced under the remnants of the Bolshevik Constitution to pay 10% of their wages for rent while greasy factory workers only had to pay 5% longed to undo socialist construction in favor of bourgeois restoration a la Perestroika and viola! — you get ethnic strife.

Same thing in the Balkans, and to a certain extent, same thing in Africa, albeit the material foundations for socialist construction there were always far more precarious, being a Cold War proxy & thoroughly ensqualored by imperialist turpitude & therefore vastly more complicated.

["Ensqualored" is a word I just coined FWIW by combining enslaved with squalor and I think it's apropos for how the white man's bungled up Africa -- for as the old adage goes: when the White's first came to Africa they had all the bibles and the Blacks had all the land. Now it's the other way around.]

[One last note about proxies in general and the cold war in particular: it's an irrefraggable historical fact that the only real aggressor in the so-called "Cold War" (which really started in October 1917 and not 1948 as bourgeois mythology has it) -- was Uncle Sam.]

http://www.douban.com/group/topic/1349877

http://michaelsantomauro.blogspot.com/2010/04/hilberg-accused-arendt-of-plagiarism-by.html

The context for the question was that Derlugian had just spent about 20 minutes explaining about how competing cultural elites within the Caucacus, elites elevated and funded by the USSR pursuant to its nationalities policy, played a prominent role in fueling ethnic violence in the region. So, the question was a reasonable one, as was his answer. I suspect that a lot of people listening to the interview were already thinking about it before I asked it, so I gave Derlugian an opportunity to elaborate upon something that was probably in the minds of the listeners.

I second your recommendation on “Swimming to Cambodia”, it is a great film, beyond the political content, it is a marvelous exposure of political tourism, a cautionary note about the transformation of historic events into entertainment. Gray’s contrast of the lavish meals and accomodations provided to the staff and cast of the film, the joys of frolicking upon Southeast Asian beaches with the violence and starvation associated with the Pol Pot regime is provocative, especially because of his willingness to display is own complicity in it. I saw it on cable about a year and a half ago. It stands the test of time.

—

I think you meant “Unrepentant”, a sign of your illiteracy.

Btw, you should really make an effort to read a newspaper. Franklin Lamb is a drooling imbecile.

The Times of London, May 17, 2013

Islamist fear drives Israel to support Assad survival: Defence officials prefer ‘the devil we know to Syrian chaos’, report Sheera Frenkel and Roger Boyes

Israel would prefer President Assad to survive his country’s bloody two-year insurgency if the alternative were a takeover by rebels infiltrated by Islamic extremists, Israeli officials said yesterday.

Intelligence sources said that an intact, but weakened, Assad regime would be preferable for the country and the whole troubled region.

“Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there,” one senior Israeli intelligence officer in the north of the country said.

Another defence official said that his country had believed that Mr Assad’s regime would collapse sooner. “We originally underestimated Assad’s staying power and over-estimated the rebels’ fighting power,” the official said.

The Israeli reassessment accords with increasing Western doubts that the rebels can win. Meanwhile, the Russian decision to supply advanced antiship cruise missiles to Mr Assad also complicates the enforcement of a nofly zone.

Suspicions are growing of increasing extremist influence on the Syrian opposition.

On Tuesday a video emerged showing a fighter called Khalid al-Hamad from near Homs who claimed to be eating the heart of an Assad fighter. The Islamic fundamentalist group Jabhat al-Nusra has been supporting rebels in Homs.

The result has been an unusual, and perhaps temporary, consensus between the US Administration, Russia, Israel and Turkey — reached in a series of bilateral talks over the past three weeks — that the Assad regime and the opposition should be brought to the negotiating table. A Western intelligence analyst said that President Obama hoped for “a negotiated transfer of power rather than a disorderly change reached on the battlefield”.

Israel shares Turkey’s doubts that Mr Assad will make concessions, but its priority remains to stop arms reaching Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia. “Better that they busy themselves fighting each other than fighting us,” the Israeli intelligence officer said.

Until recently there were confident expectations that the Assad regime would collapse. Qatar, which is believed to have ferried 70 cargo aircraft of weapons to the rebels via Turkey over the past year, counted on multiple defections from the elite.

In the past year Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Defence Minister, and Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad intelligence service, have predicted Mr Assad’s “imminent” fall and given him “months, maybe years” before being killed or expelled from Syria.

Mr Obama, visiting Jordan two months ago, spoke of concern for Syria “the day after” Mr Assad fell.

But they have been reckoning without the changes in Mr Assad’s military strategy, his concentration of forces in the Alawite heartland of northern Syria, the use of some 60,000 militia irregulars trained in part by Iranian advisers and the deployment of Hezbollah units.

Russia has continued to back him, sending not only the anti-ship missiles but 200 S300 surface-to-air missiles, Syrian sources said.

“We see a situation which some people call the ‘Balkanisation’ of Syria as being very realistic, with Assad controlling the vital area from Damascus northwards towards the coasts of Latakia and various rebel groups controlling the rest of the country,” the senior Israeli defence official said.

Israeli fears of a hostile northern neighbour have increased. “You can see that the rebels in Syria are fighting the Army and the Assad regime,” Lieutenant-General Benjamin Gantz, chief-of-staff of the Israel Defence Forces, said in an interview with Israel’s army radio. “But it is clear that there will be another war there. It could be between themselves, but also could be turned against us. I have the impression that we will see both.”

Hardline rebels in control in southern Syria say their ambition is to regain the Golan Heights, conquered by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

This month Syrian officials warned Israel they could “respond to Israeli aggression” if Israel continued air strikes against suspected weapons convoys.

The US is pressing Israel and Turkey to hold back from military action or from calls for regime change in Syria so as not to compromise the chances of an all-party conference that could be held early next month.

The US, Britain and Turkey are urging the Syrian opposition — which will meet in Istanbul next Thursday — to join the talks without setting Mr Assad’s removal as a precondition. Russia has been asked to press the Syrian regime to send senior representatives.

John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, paid a surprise visit to Israel yesterday to discuss the Syrian conflict.

‘Better that they busy themselves fighting each other than us’ Israeli intelligence officer

Franklin Lamb:

“The public reaction in Syria and across the Middle East is substantially
that the “Friends of Syria” non-binding GA resolution contradicts the reality
on the ground, backs terrorism in Syria and hinders the international efforts
to help achieve a political solution to the crisis in this country. Only 107 states
voted in favor of the resolution, 12 against while 59 countries, mostly from
Africa and Latin America, abstained.

One reason the vote fell short of the 130 favorable votes that the basically
same resolution garnered the past two times is that it is widely viewed as
ignoring the crimes and atrocities committed by the armed jihadist groups in
Syria and the flow of thousands of international terrorists backed by the
West, the Gulf states and Turkey who provide them with weapons and
money. According to the Russian delegate, backed by several other speakers,
“the resolutions ignores all the terrorists’ heinous crimes and denounces what
it called the escalation of the attacks by the Syrian government.” Afterward
one Latin American Permanent Representative told Inner City Press that the
count would have been below 100 if not for some “last minute arm-twisting.”
As it turned out, 15 countries didn’t vote at all, opting to “get coffee,” as one
African Permanent Representative put it before the vote.”