Anacondaleeza, she’s my baby..

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She’s rich, she thin, she’s smart as a whip. But she’s black. She’s Denzel in a dress. Which changes everything. It colours every judgement, jaundices all opinion, undermines her stature as Secretary of State. There’s no candid comparisons with Kissinger, no contrasting her with Madeleine Albright, not even with Colin Powell.

You remember him, tall fellah, black, used to run the biggest army in world history. Now just another footnote in the ghastly nightmare tale of George Dubya Dimwit. Just another “Yass’massa.” caricature undone by trusting a rich white boy from the south. And that never works out well no matter how clever, how well informed, how well educated you are. Harvard, Yale, West Point, wherever you go, they just don’t have an antidote for working for a stupid boss with ideas above his generation.

And Condie is finding out now, on the biggest stage of all, just how maddening that is. Bush isn’t just a lame duck Prez, he’s a duck that’s been shot, mounted and stuffed by Vice-Prez Cheney. Left dangling in the wind created by the flapping of his own jowls. A man who just wasn’t in charge of the space between his own ears when push came to shove and the CIA came grovelling to the table with the requisite lies.


Russia is feeling it's oats. (and I'm not above saying I told you so). Gone are the humiliations of the 1980’s, the long dark night of the soul of the drunken 1990’s. Putin is back. He’s never gone away. Twisting the constitution into a an arse-rag to suit the cut of his well-tailored trouser, borne aloft by money, power and ruthlessness he’s the glorious past become the bully-boy future. The musclebound macho-man that they all want to be, never having to be polite, never having to ask, consider, negotiate, be equal. Tanks mean never having to say you’re sorry. And the Russians love it, wallow in it, idolise him for it.

This week it’s Georgia. Once the lesser of two Soviet republics with a Black Sea port. Now a country sliced in two with vicious violence, being torn into smaller pieces as the days pass, ready to be preyed upon by the Soviet Rasputin. Putin’s Georgian gamble has made real the desperate urge of a bedraggled generation that wants it’s day in the sun, want’s it’s own chance to strut the world stage again, invading neighbours and overthrowing governments at will. Just like the good old days.

And it’s Condie who has to force the bastards back over the pile of bodies, to bring her uptight moral indignation to bear on the bear in her perfect unaccented Russian. She’s the gal we have to cling to, in this time of American flaccidity, of European nervous-nellying, of endless chatter in too many languages. She’s the one who’s personal power, moral stature, and hard-nosed skill we have to rely on. Sarkozy’s a headline and a hairstyle. The UN was made irrelevant by the Iraq war, a toothless menagerie of paper tigers.

And Boris Badenov knows that Moose and Squirrel have shot their bolt until the new President is chosen. The slack-jawed clown in the White House has no credibility anywhere, morbidly bumping his gums in a pale parody of Reagan in the November years, listened to by none, laughed at by the Russians, not respected as the Leader of The Free World thinks he should be. The right time to practice the withdrawal method is before things are completely fucked. Bush’s best headlines now are when he’s receiving the political largesse of another black man.

It’s starting to look like the big question of the twenteens will be can Black America save White America from the consequences of hubris, self-indulgence and a Cold-War hangover.

The demure Ms Rice is too smart not to know that her country’s military power is just not an option. Indeed, there’s no chance of it doing more than rushing ahead with it’s Star Wars missile creep into Poland, Ukraine, et al. The facile idea that Iran is the only target for this is laughable. What it does do is ramp up the pressure on all the countries unlucky enough to share a border, or even a region with Russia.

NATO is about to be put to the hardest test of it’s existence. For Europe is about to find out some serious truths about it’s military capacity and ability to mount a united front against good ol’fashioned Soviet/Tsarist imperialism. Putin is clearly a man who will shuffle the troops around on other people’s chessboards at will while using Medvedev as a glove puppet. Let’s hope the little lady can find some nice Euro-generals to put the muscle where her mouth is. And hope that it doesn’t lead to the nasty free-for-all that Putin keeps threatening.

.oOo.

PS: A of M is moving house this week, so expect little news for a while.

Gori: How do you turn a trench into a mass grave?

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Answer: Just keep digging.

“You started it!”

“No, you started it!”

“Liar! You started it!”

“Criminal scum! You started it!”

“Genocidal butcher! You started it!”

Such is the essence of the claims being slung safely back and forth between the Russian and Georgian political leaders. Safely for them, that is. They’re nowhere near the shitty end of the stick. Putin may well be with his troops, but he’s definitely holding the neatly varnished extremity. Others aren’t so lucky. The picture below could be a South Ossetian mother and child, or a Georgian mother and child, or just another La Pieta of the twentieth century. I say twentieth because genocide as a term was coined then. Genghis Khan massacred the entire population of Turkey (give or take a handful) but that wasn’t new even then. Labelling it as a crime was, and that happened in 1945.

Which was timely for a Georgian who had caused the deaths of more than 20,000,000 Soviet citizens in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, Joseph Stalin, born in Gori, Georgia in 1878. As a boy he was first drawn to radicalism by the oppression of Georgians by the Russian Imperialist rulers. A policy he adopted himself when he rose to power, punishing Georgian nationalists ruthlessly. Oh, by the way, the picture shows a Georgian mother and child in Gori following Russian bombing yesterday. Who knows if they’re still alive today?

Plausible deniability.

Russia’s new man of steel, Vlad ‘the Impaler’ Putin, is following the same ruthless line of repression. While Georgian soldiers have undoubtedly murdered Ossetians and Russian soldiers have undoubtedly murdered Georgians genocide has so far been largely rhetoric. Georgian President Saakashvili accused the Russians of it a few days ago and a furious Putin threw the same charge back at Saakashvili earlier today. But today’s news contains a small but important snippet. The Russians are recruiting ‘amateur militias’: young, angry, un-trained men supplied with weapons, vodka and cash to buy a uniform, then let loose on the Georgian population.

It’s a policy the Nazis employed in Russia and Baltic States as part of the mass-murder of Jews. ‘Outrages’ or ‘excesses’ could be blamed on ‘local militias’ outside of German control. Now known as ‘plausible deniability’ it’s a tool of modern realpolitik that’s used universally by politicians in the twenty-first century.

It’s a cynical term when used for any purpose.
It’s evil when used to avoid responsibility for genocide.

There will be a bloodbath in Georgia.
Putin and his thugs will deny all responsibility.

If necessary scapegoats will be found.
By then it will be too late for the Georgians.

Not 1938, 1950.

The invasion of Georgia has been likened to the takeover of Sudetenland by the Nazis, which they followed by swallowing up the rest of Czechoslovakia piecemeal. While Ossetia and Abkhazia could certainly fit the image it’s the wrong historical parallel. A better example is China's conquest of Tibet in 1950.

Military invasion was followed by mass immigration of ethnic Chinese to swamp the local population and reduce them to a minority in their own country. It’s still going on in Tibet today. This is what will happen next in Georgia, or whatever the broken up remnants are called after the war. It won’t be too difficult, there are only 4.6 million Georgians, including Ossetians and Abkhazians. After the war this number will be significantly lower.

Stalin tried it in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia leaving a sizeable Russian minority there that still provides Russia with an excuse to interfere in their internal affairs. Now a small and relatively free democracy will be crushed and reduced to a vassal state of the new Russian Empire, whoops, Federation. And Moscow will host an Olympic games.

President Saakashvili wrote in The Wall Street Journal Europe: "If Georgia falls, this will also mean the fall of the West in the entire former Soviet Union." He may be right, he may be wrong. What’s very clear to countries like Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and others is that Putin and Russia will use any means to force them to toe the Moscow line.

.oOo.

PS: A big thankyou to all those readers who wrote in (0) to point out our “deliberate mistake” in assigning Putin the initials V.I. rather than the official V.V. This was, of course, a tribute to the original V.I. – better known to the world as Lenin.

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Georgia, the whole day through ...

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PUTIN (old-european) ~ a thug, or gangster. Also the masculinised form of puta meaning whore, therefore a pimp, male prostitute or any testosterone-fuelled, hyper-nationalistic, neo-fascist narcissus. Also used to denote a cheap bully-boy drunk on dreams of Tsarist imperial grandeur, or 200 pounds of snot in a shiny suit.

.oOo.

With breath-taking cynicism Prime Minister/President/Grand High Poobah of the Russian Imperialist Federation of Opportunist Stalin-Worshipping Knee-Benders, Lick-Spittles and Bully-Pulpit Fascists has rushed back from an intense burst of world-stage strutting and smile-free peacockery at the Beijing Imperial Smog-Fest to personally lead the insane military adventure of his dreams. It’s one glorious holiday to the next, really, for the man who regards Russia as merely the footstool for his personal world prominence in the type of foul-smelling, toga-clad, orgiastic self-adoration not seen since the glory days of Hermann Goering.

His Excrescence V.I. ‘Just call me Vlad’ Putin, noted for his complete lack of irony and smile-free frozen face, totally serious in the way that mass murderers so often are, could barely sit through the opening ceremony in Beijing’s Rat’s Nest Stadium, so keen was he to spring into action, leap into a helicopter and rush off to the totally unexpected crisis. Which was timed to perfection to merge seamlessly with the Beijing festivities, an orgy of Sino-self-congratulation worthy of his own planet-sized ego.

High point of the interminable Olympic frenzy was not so much the Long March of the US Olympic Team as the beautiful goose-stepping of the Peoples Liberation Army’s crack robo-thugs, a detail of the vast, overblown farce last seen in Berlin’s Sportspalast in 1936. It’s the little things that say so much. One in particular being Australia’s own sports-cast-dwarf Bruce Macavaney, who’s comment: “They’re comfy shoes.” was a journalistic gem that‘ll not be bettered at these games I’ll wager. But I digress.

Yes, the Imperial Soviet trouser crawlers at the Kremlin timed the first air-strikes on Georgia to coincide perfectly with the exploding giants footprint fireworks over Beijing, like the leaden feet of Mao’s ghost, one too many Banquo’s at the banquet. Russia’s much fabled democracy, which has all the glorious unwashed stench of Rasputin, hides the hard truth that Stalinist authoritarian brutalism, with it’s attendant demons of place-seeking apparatchiks, knife-in-the-back careerist swine, and murderous, heavy-weaponed mass-grave making is still at the heart of Russia’s politics.

How lucky for the Georgians that they live close enough to be invaded first hand, rather than having to watch from a distance like the rest of us. They get tanks by the hundred and soldiers by the thousand poised on their borders, we get to see George ‘What the hell’s a Tiblisi doin’ in Georgia?’ Bush mouth empty-headed platitudes.

We get to see the fireworks in Beijing, the Georgians get Russian jets bombing their capital and strafing their highways. So much more colourful, and with so much more audience participation in a mass-casualties, houses burnt to the ground, mothers, fathers and kiddies lying dead in the streets fun-for-all jamboree.

What vile, slimy, cynical filth Prime Minister Putin is.

What a monstrous, puffed up confection of spittle, spite and second-hand shite.

Not content with continually having journalists murdered at will, notably even abroad with radioactive isotopes, or with having bent Russia’s constitution into a moebius strip that lets him run the joint from any position including swinging from the chandeliers in the Winter Palace.

Not even with having laid claim to the North Pole, nor even with giving away the country’s wealth to a bunch of handpicked servile toadies ruled with a whim of iron, he now demonstrates his total contempt for the rest of the world by farting katyusha rockets into a neighbouring country from the front row of the Beijing Olympic Glorious-Peoples Tienanmin Yum-Cha Knees-Up surrounded by the cream of the world’s leaders.

I mean, Mugabe they kept out, but him they let in? Is it a black thing, we wonder? It certainly can’t be on moral grounds. No, hang on, it comes to me know.. Mugabe rogered the economy to the point at which money became worthless..

In Putinland we can all make money. As long as we let him kill people: Russian journalists, Russians who step out of line or get in the way of money-making, or people we don’t give a toss about in Georgia. The list goes on, and on, and you’ll be on it soon enough.

Trust me, the nasty little man with the cardboard wife and nylon hair may look like just another Russian autocrat with boots deep enough to wade in blood to you, but his ego is big enough to get to us all eventually. And waiting for the next Slavic politi-git to come along and knock him off may take longer than you think. Good ol’Boris Yeltsin was so permanently drunk he was finished the minute his liver staged a coup on his last three remaining brain cells. Putin is different. Putin is sober. Putin believes in himself, and he has an army with a huge inferiority complex after they lost the Cold War to rust and bankruptcy. They need to feel adequate. They need to kill people, win a war of two, just like the Americans.

He has also discovered that no-one in the West is likely to do anything about it. You can thank George Dubya Loser for that. Having squandered his nations money, integrity, political capital and eligible youth in Iraq he has nothing left but a shit-eating grin and the intelligence and firm grip on reality of a toothless spaniel with Alzheimers. And he’s all we have.

What about the world’s press? On CNN Wolf Blitzer (that’s gotta be a joke name, I mean, really) has the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, on live, by satellite, in front of a map pointing out where the Russian army is, where the hundreds of tanks are, where the highways are under air attack. The man is talking to a Nation’s leader as the rockets are flying and the capital’s airport is being cratered.

So what does he do? He goes for the hard-man interview technique, putting the tough questions. Only he can’t get any of the actual regions he’s talking about right. He demands that Georgia withdraw their troops from Abkhazia. President Saakashvili is bemused. There are no Georgian troops in Abkhazia, only Russian troops on the border waiting to invade. Wolf’s confused it with Ossetia. Then he takes the propagandist gibberish spouted by the Russian Foreign Ministry and fires it off straight at the man sitting in front of a map of his country pointing out where bits of it are exploding, or on fire, or … well, you get the picture:

“Extra! Extra! Journalist with inflated sense of self-importance sticks both feet down throat! Gets bronze medal for irony in Beijing! New personal best for rhythmic bombastics!”

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