One of the rockets certainly hit the ship — it went through the side of the liner into a passenger’s suite. The couple were in there at the time so it was a bit of an unpleasant experienceI would have thought they would have been spread thinly over the bulkhead, but perhaps it didn't go off.
Blogging a noisy and socialistic view on politics, security, and whatever may take my fancy. "All the world now is in the Ranting humour" - Samuel Sheppard, 1647
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Pirates! Break out the...
...cutlasses sonic blasters and prepare to repel boarders! Cruise ship attacked by RPG-wielding Somali pirates, fights back with a device that blasts the buggers with noise. More traditionally, the captain attempted to run down the pirates' boat, too. Dunno what to make of this, though:
Too close to the text
One thing about the Internet is that it's very easy to overfocus on points of language that would rarely disturb you otherwise. Take the French police trade union chap who used the word "guerrilla" with regard to rioting recently. Everyone you'd expect to latched onto this as proof, proof! that the decadent Yurpeans were doomed to collapse into a Taliban society (you can probably fill the rest in by now), and John Robb's comment threads immediately lit up with earnest discussion of how the Global Guerrillas model might apply to the evident decline of the French state.
Nobody seems to have questioned what, concretely, "guerrilla" meant in this connection. After all, throwing rocks at policemen and running away is always closer to guerrilla activity tactically than industrial warfare. This is, I think, both obvious and trivial. In fact, "guerrilla" here was a message from a very right-wing interest group to a supposed patron, Sarkozy, and could have been better read as "scary brown people, send money and more police powers". Equally, very right-wing French politicians like to talk about "intifadas" as a way of provoking themselves and (they hope) aligning with George Bush.
Rioting is at least as much a French tradition as croissants, in fact more so, as jacqueries occurred long before the pastry was introduced from Austria in the 1700s. My point? All this is serving certain people's purposes. M. Sarkozy made his pitch for the racist vote and more budget, the police trade unionist made profile with his members in the provinces and at Sarko's office, the rioters are venting, and the "Eurabia" types are convincing themselves further. But, this requires more context than you get with one word, usually quoted at third hand. Pah.
Nobody seems to have questioned what, concretely, "guerrilla" meant in this connection. After all, throwing rocks at policemen and running away is always closer to guerrilla activity tactically than industrial warfare. This is, I think, both obvious and trivial. In fact, "guerrilla" here was a message from a very right-wing interest group to a supposed patron, Sarkozy, and could have been better read as "scary brown people, send money and more police powers". Equally, very right-wing French politicians like to talk about "intifadas" as a way of provoking themselves and (they hope) aligning with George Bush.
Rioting is at least as much a French tradition as croissants, in fact more so, as jacqueries occurred long before the pastry was introduced from Austria in the 1700s. My point? All this is serving certain people's purposes. M. Sarkozy made his pitch for the racist vote and more budget, the police trade unionist made profile with his members in the provinces and at Sarko's office, the rioters are venting, and the "Eurabia" types are convincing themselves further. But, this requires more context than you get with one word, usually quoted at third hand. Pah.
Bang!
Inconsequential: last night, Guy Fawkes' Night, the Railway Hotel not far from my flat burned off four hundred quid in fireworks, the good stuff..green flashes, golden and purple rain, and explosions. Yes. Bangs so good they hurt, and triggered the burglar alarms on all the blank-windowed Thatcherite Heathrow-corridor office blocks, setting the RIM building squealing at Axon Software and them bleeping at some other shuttered geekfarm like sheepdogs in the winter night. Standing behind the boozer, a lad breathed in "Ohh...that don't look safe!" with a sort of glee as a rocket as fat as the handle on a tennis racket hurtled by.
A fine way to celebrate the demise of a frenzied religious terrorist and the beginning of 400 years of Protestant hegemony, no? I especially liked the way this insane tribal fire binge annoyed the security systems on those buildings.
A fine way to celebrate the demise of a frenzied religious terrorist and the beginning of 400 years of Protestant hegemony, no? I especially liked the way this insane tribal fire binge annoyed the security systems on those buildings.
Confusing the disease and the cure
Stand well back, please, because I'm about to bloviate a tad. In the last few days I've been participating in a couple of fascinating comments threads, over at Phil Carter's Intel Dump, where they've been having an open Iraq thread, and also on John Robb's Global Guerrillas with regard to the Palestine Hotel attack and such. Now, the upshot, I think, is that it's a good moment to review some of the ideas we're getting perhaps too used to.
John Robb's ideas on "4th Generation Warfare", distributed development as applied to war, systems disruption and such are now well enough spread around the Internet that I don't think I need to go into great detail, and anyway, those of you who are unfamiliar with them can get them from the horse's mouth here. Equally, Thomas Barnett's so-called "Pentagon's New Map" has already nearly reached the status of conventional blogosphere wisdom (he has a blog here). Barnett and Robb essentially agree on the importance of functional networks rather than territorial views of strategy, but essentially differ on the role of the state and the dynamics involved. Robb believes that the national state is doooomed, Barnett divides the world into the highly connected, economically integrated "core" and the dirt-poor, chaotic zone without the walls - think Raymond Aron's world of order/world of chaos dichotomy, with the Internet.
My point is that I think Robb is right on most things, especially the role of open development models, networks and such, and the growing capability of non-state forces to do things that in the past only states (and powerful ones at that) could do. But, I suspect he is confusing the disease with the cure when, for example, Robbo advocates "outsourcing counter-insurgency to Shia and Kurdish loyalist paramilitaries". Imitating the enemy seems like a good idea when they are winning, but it can also be a dangerous source of strategic delusion. After all, the mix of largely independent small groups, open communications, low-cost technology and the ability to create an unofficial war economy (think VB) that we are all going on about and that has proven so deadly is, if anything, specialised on manufacturing the chaos in which it can survive. Robb speaks of "controlled chaos" as an exit strategy from Iraq, but a continuing semi-failed state in Iraq will be poison to everyone involved, and anyway I doubt whether the chaos can be controlled. We've already seen (see Ranter passim) that a variety of highly profitable mercenary and criminal networks have moved into Iraq, as well as the jihadis. What happens when the class of people created by the war start exporting their revolution from the economic base Iraq gives them?
Throw in the problem that neither the Shia nor the Kurds really have an incentive to destroy the insurgents (after all, the insurgency is creating the conditions under which they can pursue their own political aims and seems well on the way to getting the Americans off their backs - the controlled chaos strategy works both ways), and this sounds like the second engine on the plane whose role is to get you to the crash -site.
Barnett's response, of course, is to argue that the answer is to expand the "core" of highly integrated states - which, in a mad way, might have been what some people hoped for from the invasion itself. I personally think that the best we can hope for is to prevent too much damage to the core from this ill-advised intervention outside it. In a sense, what the Barnett partisans really want is an economically and technocratically integrated world of interlocking alliances...or, to put it another way, enlargement of the European Union to include Japan and South Africa. Seriously, I don't know if Barnett had this in mind when he coined his "new map", but his arguments are uncannily like those of Jean Monnet. (TYR to Rumsfeld: your new favourite intellectual is a Eurosexual! Ka koi cauchemar!)
I don't necessarily think there's a basic contradiction between the guerrilla networkers and the new mappers, though. Even Robb agrees that anyone who isn't smoking crack would choose the expanding core over the weakening state. If the national state is losing importance after its unnerving post-1989 revival, that importance doesn't have to transfer to al-Qa'ida or some shadowy western terrorist structure, a sort of White International redux. International integration and cross-border democracy has something to say in this debate. The question: how to use the tools of the Robbites to extend and maintain the world of order?
Although you can get together over the Internet to swap more effective IED designs, you can also prepare satellite maps with disaster relief data or trace arms dealers' aircraft through open development. The most promising areas for change, I think, are exactly the ones that are most dangerous right now - because it's exactly where the nig networked systems that make up the "core" lap over the edges of the political environment, the society of states, that makes them possible that the problems emerge. It's at this frontier, the interface of the two, that a maximum of creativity is possible, whether for good or bad - organising terrorist attacks or collaborating on alternative energy devices, trading in weapons or in help.
The last thing we should be doing, though, is anything that promotes the development of the dark networks, which is why "controlled chaos" is a bad, bad idea.
Right, I think that's enough bloviation..
John Robb's ideas on "4th Generation Warfare", distributed development as applied to war, systems disruption and such are now well enough spread around the Internet that I don't think I need to go into great detail, and anyway, those of you who are unfamiliar with them can get them from the horse's mouth here. Equally, Thomas Barnett's so-called "Pentagon's New Map" has already nearly reached the status of conventional blogosphere wisdom (he has a blog here). Barnett and Robb essentially agree on the importance of functional networks rather than territorial views of strategy, but essentially differ on the role of the state and the dynamics involved. Robb believes that the national state is doooomed, Barnett divides the world into the highly connected, economically integrated "core" and the dirt-poor, chaotic zone without the walls - think Raymond Aron's world of order/world of chaos dichotomy, with the Internet.
My point is that I think Robb is right on most things, especially the role of open development models, networks and such, and the growing capability of non-state forces to do things that in the past only states (and powerful ones at that) could do. But, I suspect he is confusing the disease with the cure when, for example, Robbo advocates "outsourcing counter-insurgency to Shia and Kurdish loyalist paramilitaries". Imitating the enemy seems like a good idea when they are winning, but it can also be a dangerous source of strategic delusion. After all, the mix of largely independent small groups, open communications, low-cost technology and the ability to create an unofficial war economy (think VB) that we are all going on about and that has proven so deadly is, if anything, specialised on manufacturing the chaos in which it can survive. Robb speaks of "controlled chaos" as an exit strategy from Iraq, but a continuing semi-failed state in Iraq will be poison to everyone involved, and anyway I doubt whether the chaos can be controlled. We've already seen (see Ranter passim) that a variety of highly profitable mercenary and criminal networks have moved into Iraq, as well as the jihadis. What happens when the class of people created by the war start exporting their revolution from the economic base Iraq gives them?
Throw in the problem that neither the Shia nor the Kurds really have an incentive to destroy the insurgents (after all, the insurgency is creating the conditions under which they can pursue their own political aims and seems well on the way to getting the Americans off their backs - the controlled chaos strategy works both ways), and this sounds like the second engine on the plane whose role is to get you to the crash -site.
Barnett's response, of course, is to argue that the answer is to expand the "core" of highly integrated states - which, in a mad way, might have been what some people hoped for from the invasion itself. I personally think that the best we can hope for is to prevent too much damage to the core from this ill-advised intervention outside it. In a sense, what the Barnett partisans really want is an economically and technocratically integrated world of interlocking alliances...or, to put it another way, enlargement of the European Union to include Japan and South Africa. Seriously, I don't know if Barnett had this in mind when he coined his "new map", but his arguments are uncannily like those of Jean Monnet. (TYR to Rumsfeld: your new favourite intellectual is a Eurosexual! Ka koi cauchemar!)
I don't necessarily think there's a basic contradiction between the guerrilla networkers and the new mappers, though. Even Robb agrees that anyone who isn't smoking crack would choose the expanding core over the weakening state. If the national state is losing importance after its unnerving post-1989 revival, that importance doesn't have to transfer to al-Qa'ida or some shadowy western terrorist structure, a sort of White International redux. International integration and cross-border democracy has something to say in this debate. The question: how to use the tools of the Robbites to extend and maintain the world of order?
Although you can get together over the Internet to swap more effective IED designs, you can also prepare satellite maps with disaster relief data or trace arms dealers' aircraft through open development. The most promising areas for change, I think, are exactly the ones that are most dangerous right now - because it's exactly where the nig networked systems that make up the "core" lap over the edges of the political environment, the society of states, that makes them possible that the problems emerge. It's at this frontier, the interface of the two, that a maximum of creativity is possible, whether for good or bad - organising terrorist attacks or collaborating on alternative energy devices, trading in weapons or in help.
The last thing we should be doing, though, is anything that promotes the development of the dark networks, which is why "controlled chaos" is a bad, bad idea.
Right, I think that's enough bloviation..
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Black Site Flights
After yesterday's revelations in the Washington Post that the CIA was keeping detainees in "several Eastern European democracies", today has seen an unseemly scramble of mutual accusation. Anyone familiar with recent politics could have prepared a shortlist of ex-communist states closely allied with the US that might have been candidates, but the exact degree of complicity is surprising. First up, Human Rights Watch accused Poland and Romania of being the culprits. They based the accusation on details they apparently have of a flight by the notorious 737 bizjet, N313P, to Szymany airfield in the Masurian Lakes. I'm not clear what the basis of the Romanian allegation is.
However, as both countries have troops in Iraq and the USDOD has talked a lot about basing in either Romania or Bulgaria, it would make a degree of sense. The Poles kicked off a denial storm when the presidential spokesman stated that no al-Qa'ida detainees had been held in Polish military bases (note that he didn't issue a total denial). This was followed up by the specifics from HRW, and a denial of any knowledge of such activities from Romania.
Next to deny were Hungary and most other countries, with Estonia saying they were "fairly certain" there were no detainees on their territory. Then it got gnarly. Denmark said an aircraft with prisoners on board had passed through its airspace en route to Hungary. The Hungarians denied even harder. And the Czechs, meanwhile, said they had been asked to hold prisoners but had refused. However, the dread N313P (now N4476S) has been photographed in Prague. It may be worth remembering that the Chalabi Boys trained at Taszar airbase in Hungary before the invasion of Iraq, or it may not.
The EU has said it wants to investigate, but seeing as the Justice commissioner is Franco Frattini, a close collaborator of Silvio "What intelligence? Iraq? Where's that?" Berlusconi, I'm not confident.
Although googlers for various aircraft regs have driven traffic through the roof, I currently have no information on any VB aircraft in the places concerned, although anyone who can shed light on Boeing 727 P4-MMG, s/n 18368, now with "Larvelon International" of Aruba and formerly of "International Development Group" and the "Mohamed al-Mojil Establishment" is welcome to do so. The German who googled for "women fart fas fetisch" and arrived is less welcome. Getting back on-topic, according to the original report there have been secret prisons in 8 countries. Afghanistan, Thailand and Cuba we know about. Poland, Romania, and who?
However, as both countries have troops in Iraq and the USDOD has talked a lot about basing in either Romania or Bulgaria, it would make a degree of sense. The Poles kicked off a denial storm when the presidential spokesman stated that no al-Qa'ida detainees had been held in Polish military bases (note that he didn't issue a total denial). This was followed up by the specifics from HRW, and a denial of any knowledge of such activities from Romania.
Next to deny were Hungary and most other countries, with Estonia saying they were "fairly certain" there were no detainees on their territory. Then it got gnarly. Denmark said an aircraft with prisoners on board had passed through its airspace en route to Hungary. The Hungarians denied even harder. And the Czechs, meanwhile, said they had been asked to hold prisoners but had refused. However, the dread N313P (now N4476S) has been photographed in Prague. It may be worth remembering that the Chalabi Boys trained at Taszar airbase in Hungary before the invasion of Iraq, or it may not.
The EU has said it wants to investigate, but seeing as the Justice commissioner is Franco Frattini, a close collaborator of Silvio "What intelligence? Iraq? Where's that?" Berlusconi, I'm not confident.
Although googlers for various aircraft regs have driven traffic through the roof, I currently have no information on any VB aircraft in the places concerned, although anyone who can shed light on Boeing 727 P4-MMG, s/n 18368, now with "Larvelon International" of Aruba and formerly of "International Development Group" and the "Mohamed al-Mojil Establishment" is welcome to do so. The German who googled for "women fart fas fetisch" and arrived is less welcome. Getting back on-topic, according to the original report there have been secret prisons in 8 countries. Afghanistan, Thailand and Cuba we know about. Poland, Romania, and who?
German Mess Update
Quick update on the German political mess. First, Franz Müntefering has confirmed he's still going to take up his seat as Minister for No. Second, the SPD has picked Matthias Platzeck, the minister-president of Brandenburg, as its leader. Third, the CSU has apparently fallen out with Edmund Stoiber after his decision to not join the government. Andrea Nahles has said she won't be general secretary, so Hubertus Heil, an MP from Niedersachsen, will take the job whose loss to Nahles precipitated the crisis.
What it all means is unclear (although one of the FDP folk has been talking about resurrecting the so-called Jamaican option, which will not happen). But if they can't elect a government by November the 22nd, there will almost certainly be more elections.
What it all means is unclear (although one of the FDP folk has been talking about resurrecting the so-called Jamaican option, which will not happen). But if they can't elect a government by November the 22nd, there will almost certainly be more elections.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
1003 Posts
This post is the 1003rd item on TYR, in 856 days since the 10th of June, 2003. That makes 1.17 posts per day on average.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Things fall apart
Well, the Fiendish Müntemerkel didn't last long. German democracy makes a lot of things explicit that are assumed in the UK - for example, where the British assume the leader of the largest party will form the government, and know that if not he or she can be disposed of through a vote of no confidence, the German parliament has to explicitly vote in the new government. Before that, the parties have to reconfirm their leaders, something that we also spare ourselves. This all meant that getting the frankly unlikely Müntemerkel government into office would be a little like a convoy of fuel tankers heading up Highway Eight to Baghdad.
Only after the successive pitfalls of agreeing on the cabinet, and then the programme, and getting the party leaders re-elected, and getting the policy of joining the coalition confirmed, and finally confirming the new government with a vote in the Bundestag had been dodged could they finally turn their backs on a road of RPG teams behind every tree, roadside bombs and fake police checkpoints in the calm security of the yellow-black zone.
Well, as it happened, they got past ambushes 1 and 2 before the insurgents scored a hit. Franz Müntefering, the SPD general secretary and new party chairman, who was meant to become vice-chancellor and minister of labour, the SPD's guarantor in the government, has resigned as party chairman after his candidate for the general secretaryship (which as chairman he must vacate) was soundly beaten by the left's candidate, Andrea Nahles. With Müntefering out of the party chair and the Gen Sec's office, and unlikely to take up his seat in the cabinet, the whole balance of power in the new government goes out of kilter.
The SPD tried at first to deny it, saying that the coalition negotiations were proceeding "normally", but it didn't last. In the morning, the rowing between the CDU-appointed minister for education and research and the CSU leader-cum-minister of the economy was on the point of settlement as the CDU gave up the research programme on nanotechnology, optics and optoelectronics, microelectronics and production processes to Stoiber's Economics Ministry. But by the afternoon, Stoiber was out too, heading back to Bavaria with the comment that "it's an entirely different SPD".
Don't say I didn't warn you..
Only after the successive pitfalls of agreeing on the cabinet, and then the programme, and getting the party leaders re-elected, and getting the policy of joining the coalition confirmed, and finally confirming the new government with a vote in the Bundestag had been dodged could they finally turn their backs on a road of RPG teams behind every tree, roadside bombs and fake police checkpoints in the calm security of the yellow-black zone.
Well, as it happened, they got past ambushes 1 and 2 before the insurgents scored a hit. Franz Müntefering, the SPD general secretary and new party chairman, who was meant to become vice-chancellor and minister of labour, the SPD's guarantor in the government, has resigned as party chairman after his candidate for the general secretaryship (which as chairman he must vacate) was soundly beaten by the left's candidate, Andrea Nahles. With Müntefering out of the party chair and the Gen Sec's office, and unlikely to take up his seat in the cabinet, the whole balance of power in the new government goes out of kilter.
The SPD tried at first to deny it, saying that the coalition negotiations were proceeding "normally", but it didn't last. In the morning, the rowing between the CDU-appointed minister for education and research and the CSU leader-cum-minister of the economy was on the point of settlement as the CDU gave up the research programme on nanotechnology, optics and optoelectronics, microelectronics and production processes to Stoiber's Economics Ministry. But by the afternoon, Stoiber was out too, heading back to Bavaria with the comment that "it's an entirely different SPD".
Don't say I didn't warn you..
Sunday, October 30, 2005
News.
Laura Rozen has news on the Italian end of the Niger-uranium scandal. Apparently, Mr. Martino walked in to the US, UK and French embassies to hawk his documents without success before he finally got them accepted at the Pentagon.
What I'd like to know: what did the Italians stand to gain that was worth pushing dodgy documents to all their allies? If the fakes were rumbled, SISMI's credibility would be gone forever - nobody will ever believe them again, in or out of Italy. They invented the question "who benefits?", after all.
What I'd like to know: what did the Italians stand to gain that was worth pushing dodgy documents to all their allies? If the fakes were rumbled, SISMI's credibility would be gone forever - nobody will ever believe them again, in or out of Italy. They invented the question "who benefits?", after all.
Linkage!
Kathryn Cramer and Co.'s latest Google Earth overlays for the Pakistani earthquake and Hurricane Wilma are up. Just a word: Carlos of No Such Blog has been back to Key West. His home is standing, but the car is dead, and he estimates 60 per cent of his books have been ruined, which is terrible. He claims to have bought a new car on EBay, which doesn't entirely fill me with confidence.
Tom "Green Ribbon" Griffin has filed a Freedom of Information Act request into exactly what the MOD thought it was doing hiring Transavia Export and Jet Line International. Unsurprisingly, the Defence Logistics Organisation won't say, claiming that the request is likely to be "commercially sensitive" under Section 34 of the FOIA, although a final decision won't be out until the 16th of November. Presumably that's Viktor's commercial sensitivities they're worried about? Still, his FOIAR did better than mine, which dropped into the MOD's FOI web form and went straight to File Zero without even an acknowledgement.
Tom "Green Ribbon" Griffin has filed a Freedom of Information Act request into exactly what the MOD thought it was doing hiring Transavia Export and Jet Line International. Unsurprisingly, the Defence Logistics Organisation won't say, claiming that the request is likely to be "commercially sensitive" under Section 34 of the FOIA, although a final decision won't be out until the 16th of November. Presumably that's Viktor's commercial sensitivities they're worried about? Still, his FOIAR did better than mine, which dropped into the MOD's FOI web form and went straight to File Zero without even an acknowledgement.
Mobile earthquake detectors
Indian seismologist says that mobile phones tend to fail 100 to 150 minutes before an earthquake. Going by the details the article gives, the mechanism must be the frequency shifts he describes - if transmissions around 1000MHz are shifted up to 1800-1900 and 2000MHz, that would put them right in two out of four GSM wavebands, close enough to the WCDMA/CDMA2K 2100MHz band, and would include the 850 and 900MHz bands in the freqs getting shifted up to interfere with them.
It's unlikely that preliminary tremors would change much - they might spoil the very finest details of the radio-planning in a fixed cell GSM network, but not by enough to do any damage, and a CDMA system would cell-breathe around it. Point-to-point microwave backhaul links might be affected, but then, those need very tough construction indeed.
It's unlikely that preliminary tremors would change much - they might spoil the very finest details of the radio-planning in a fixed cell GSM network, but not by enough to do any damage, and a CDMA system would cell-breathe around it. Point-to-point microwave backhaul links might be affected, but then, those need very tough construction indeed.
Rugby League Bloggin': The Dread Kiwis
Last night's RL test match, between Great Britain and New Zealand, pointed up something it's easy to forget, thanks to the dearth of internationals. That is how the character of league-playing nations varies. The Australians usually come on tour with three annoying, but transparently gifted stars, but they aren't the point. Neither is their traditional monster thug, the Paul Sironen or Gorden Tallis figure. The killers are the other nine men, who all look the same and have professional qualities and body types such that they can all play each other's positions and occasionally do. They all seem to be called Brad, to be 5'8" tall, about 16-17 stone, blond, and come from Sydney. (The monster thug and the three superstars are more diverse and come from Queensland, either Brisbane Broncos or somewhere in the outback.) Call them the Brad units, fabbed like silicon chips by some mysterious robotising process.
Because of this, British fans tend to underestimate them. You look at the squad list and think - Who are these people? Right, if we can wallop Johns from the word BANG, keep the ball away from Girdler, and test Lockyer under the high ball, Adrian Morley can take care of [insert thug here]. Job's a good 'un.
Two weeks later it's pissing with slate-coloured rain on [thug]'s bleeding cranium and yours as he glares at Morley in the sin-bin, Lockyer on the bench, Johns undergoing medical treatment, Girdler sulking in the stand, and the Brad-units running in their 11th try to make it 70-0. This non-individuality almost makes losing to them palatable..like losing to a computer. The Aussies, of course, both deny this and cultivate it, rather like German football teams used to cultivate the British stereotype of them as an impersonal machine whilst bitching savagely about each other in the German press as soon as they got back to Frankfurt.
New Zealand are very different. The ideal Australian player is a Brad unit. The ideal New Zealander is either Robbie Paul or Lesley Vainikolo. This is extreme rugby, played by men who will never escape identification. There are three types of New Zealand player - tiny scrum halves of a different kind to anywhere else in the world, like Robbie, Gary Freeman or the incumbent Stacey Jones, who I swear made more ground running than most of the forwards last night, wingers bigger than other countries' prop forwards who usually have wild hair and wilder eyes as they charge around, turning up on the opposite wing as often as their own, and terrifying back-rowers with similar hair and worse attitude (Brendon Tuuta and Tawera Nikau, step forward).
Because of this, reliability eludes. Nobody in a NZ team is ever content with Brad-unit status. This was why, when the Auckland Warriors were formed to compete in the Australian league, with essentially a complete New Zealand squad, they often disappointed. There's also a small-country issue with people who play in the UK, who are rarely selected. Unless their surname is Paul, of course, but then, genius makes its own rules. Some say the legendary coach, Graham Lowe, managed to overcome this with the great Kiwi team of the late 80s, but I hear they were a pretty wild lot still.
This was why, last night, the beating was so stinging. Not only did the Lions get within four points of them twice in the second half but fail, they then ran amok on us. Losing to Australia is like losing to a computer, or a team of robots. Losing to New Zealand is like a sudden eruption of barbarians, 26-42. Bugger.
Because of this, British fans tend to underestimate them. You look at the squad list and think - Who are these people? Right, if we can wallop Johns from the word BANG, keep the ball away from Girdler, and test Lockyer under the high ball, Adrian Morley can take care of [insert thug here]. Job's a good 'un.
Two weeks later it's pissing with slate-coloured rain on [thug]'s bleeding cranium and yours as he glares at Morley in the sin-bin, Lockyer on the bench, Johns undergoing medical treatment, Girdler sulking in the stand, and the Brad-units running in their 11th try to make it 70-0. This non-individuality almost makes losing to them palatable..like losing to a computer. The Aussies, of course, both deny this and cultivate it, rather like German football teams used to cultivate the British stereotype of them as an impersonal machine whilst bitching savagely about each other in the German press as soon as they got back to Frankfurt.
New Zealand are very different. The ideal Australian player is a Brad unit. The ideal New Zealander is either Robbie Paul or Lesley Vainikolo. This is extreme rugby, played by men who will never escape identification. There are three types of New Zealand player - tiny scrum halves of a different kind to anywhere else in the world, like Robbie, Gary Freeman or the incumbent Stacey Jones, who I swear made more ground running than most of the forwards last night, wingers bigger than other countries' prop forwards who usually have wild hair and wilder eyes as they charge around, turning up on the opposite wing as often as their own, and terrifying back-rowers with similar hair and worse attitude (Brendon Tuuta and Tawera Nikau, step forward).
Because of this, reliability eludes. Nobody in a NZ team is ever content with Brad-unit status. This was why, when the Auckland Warriors were formed to compete in the Australian league, with essentially a complete New Zealand squad, they often disappointed. There's also a small-country issue with people who play in the UK, who are rarely selected. Unless their surname is Paul, of course, but then, genius makes its own rules. Some say the legendary coach, Graham Lowe, managed to overcome this with the great Kiwi team of the late 80s, but I hear they were a pretty wild lot still.
This was why, last night, the beating was so stinging. Not only did the Lions get within four points of them twice in the second half but fail, they then ran amok on us. Losing to Australia is like losing to a computer, or a team of robots. Losing to New Zealand is like a sudden eruption of barbarians, 26-42. Bugger.
Dr Casey Loses the Mojo
According to today's Observer, No.10's Respect Tsar (it nearly spells taser, after all) Louise Casey has turned against one of Blair's brilliant ideas, specifically the scheme to take away "disruptive families'" housing benefit. Apparently she is concerned that the children of such homes have suffered enough without being turned out in the street where, one supposes, their untidy existence will be grounds for an instant Asbo. This is remarkable...or is it?
Ms. Casey has been showing worrying signs of character development in recent months. First there was the speech to top Home Office asbocrats in which she drunkenly berated them for a lack of tolerance of people enjoying themselves. Now this. What on earth is going on? After all, her role so far has been very different.
I think of her as a slightly sinister medic at court, Tony Blair's Doctor Robert. From as early as 1998, when she was commissioned with getting rid of beggars by coercion as head of the Rough Sleepers Unit, she has always had what Blair needs when the sweating starts, the eyes go glassy and the pacing, shaking horrors set in. Then he ducks out of his latest sofa conference for one of the good doctor's injections. 50 ccs of authoritarianism, a hundred units of self-righteousness to run over thirty minutes, cut with liquid pharmaceutical censorship direct from Powderject's Swiss division. Within minutes the drugs begin to take hold and we're all off to bat country as the prime minister hops and tics into action, talking unusually quickly and riffing off the decor. Like so many court doctors who are always there when so-and-so needs some speed, her career was spectacular, hurtling up the civil service ranks, sidestepping from the Home Office to the Treasury, to the Crime Reduction Unit, back to the Home Office, now to the total plexus itself, the Cabinet Office, and at No.10 too.
But, of course, over time the doses just keep jumping. 60, 75, 100 ccs of the stuff - if nothing changes, soon they'll need a syringe the size of a small motorcycle engine. Now, she's holding out on him. You're always early...he's always late/One thing you learn is/You always got to wait, as Lou Reed put it. "I'm sorry, Tony...what you're suggesting goes right outside my professional discretion. Auth isn't a thing to play with, you know. I have my Hippocratic Oath to consider.." Think of the betrayal, the grovelling. But I doubt it will help. Carrying the Leader's syringe is not a business with a great pension plan unless you get out soon enough.
Ms. Casey has been showing worrying signs of character development in recent months. First there was the speech to top Home Office asbocrats in which she drunkenly berated them for a lack of tolerance of people enjoying themselves. Now this. What on earth is going on? After all, her role so far has been very different.
I think of her as a slightly sinister medic at court, Tony Blair's Doctor Robert. From as early as 1998, when she was commissioned with getting rid of beggars by coercion as head of the Rough Sleepers Unit, she has always had what Blair needs when the sweating starts, the eyes go glassy and the pacing, shaking horrors set in. Then he ducks out of his latest sofa conference for one of the good doctor's injections. 50 ccs of authoritarianism, a hundred units of self-righteousness to run over thirty minutes, cut with liquid pharmaceutical censorship direct from Powderject's Swiss division. Within minutes the drugs begin to take hold and we're all off to bat country as the prime minister hops and tics into action, talking unusually quickly and riffing off the decor. Like so many court doctors who are always there when so-and-so needs some speed, her career was spectacular, hurtling up the civil service ranks, sidestepping from the Home Office to the Treasury, to the Crime Reduction Unit, back to the Home Office, now to the total plexus itself, the Cabinet Office, and at No.10 too.
But, of course, over time the doses just keep jumping. 60, 75, 100 ccs of the stuff - if nothing changes, soon they'll need a syringe the size of a small motorcycle engine. Now, she's holding out on him. You're always early...he's always late/One thing you learn is/You always got to wait, as Lou Reed put it. "I'm sorry, Tony...what you're suggesting goes right outside my professional discretion. Auth isn't a thing to play with, you know. I have my Hippocratic Oath to consider.." Think of the betrayal, the grovelling. But I doubt it will help. Carrying the Leader's syringe is not a business with a great pension plan unless you get out soon enough.
NOIA hit the Palestine Hotel
Well, accounts are now out of the insurgent attack on the Palestine Hotel. Apparently, there were three suicide car bombers...stop-groups in the streets around...and a storming party in the wings to take advantage of the car explosions. It sounds very much like the big assault on Abu Ghraibh that I blogged up in June. This time, according to Robbo, the assault was called off because the third suicide car got entangled in a barbed-wire entanglement and some nameless commander decided to cut their losses and withdraw.
It's especially worrying not just that, as I said in June, they seem to integrate both suicide bombers and break-contact drills. It's also worrying how many of these attacks have been near-thing survivals on our side. The first was in the spring of 2004, in Fallujah, where the Iraqi police were wiped out while the ICDC (now National Guard) were pinned down in their base - without suffering a single casualty. That was a total success. The next widely publicised ones were Abu Ghraibh, then a major police fort in west Baghdad, followed by a break, and then first the Interior Ministry and now this. Those last four all seem to have been cut off short - the Ministry attack went only as far as a shoot-out with the guards, without a suicide bomb being employed.
Now, either they are not capable of learning that these tactics aren't quite getting there, which would be surprising because they are still alive, or something is not obvious. What is it?
It's especially worrying not just that, as I said in June, they seem to integrate both suicide bombers and break-contact drills. It's also worrying how many of these attacks have been near-thing survivals on our side. The first was in the spring of 2004, in Fallujah, where the Iraqi police were wiped out while the ICDC (now National Guard) were pinned down in their base - without suffering a single casualty. That was a total success. The next widely publicised ones were Abu Ghraibh, then a major police fort in west Baghdad, followed by a break, and then first the Interior Ministry and now this. Those last four all seem to have been cut off short - the Ministry attack went only as far as a shoot-out with the guards, without a suicide bomb being employed.
Now, either they are not capable of learning that these tactics aren't quite getting there, which would be surprising because they are still alive, or something is not obvious. What is it?
CCTV Hacking, Part 2
In our last post we discussed watching other people's Axis network cameras using Google's inurl: command. In this post we shall have a look at how to control them.
I now know that the inurl:axis-cgi search isn't new. In fact, it's just one of a wedge of Google searches that bring up plenty of cams - try inurl:view/index.shtml, inurl:liveapplet, and inurl:multiplecameramode for more stuff. The view/index.shtml ones are Axis cams with a more user-friendly html front page. Some of those offer nice little control bars for the event that you might want to steer the camera.
If that's not so, though, a lot of Axis cameras can be remotely steered using CGI commands in the URL. What you need to do is find out if the camera you're looking through has a file called ptz.cgi on the server - ptz as in pan, tilt and zoom. So, open another browser window or tab, paste the URL of the camera into it, and delete everything after /axis-cgi/. Now type com/ptz.cgi?camera=1, where 1 is the number of the camera you're looking at. If there isn't one, or only one camera, just use 1. Hit enter. If a blank web page loads, without requesting a password, you're in. If there is a 404 error, the camera isn't of the type that does CGI commands.
Now, you need the commands themselves. Unsurprisingly enough, rpan pans the camera from left to right, rtilt tilts it up and down, rfocus refocuses it, rzoom zooms in or out, and riris sets the iris to suit the light. The r-commands are relative to the camera's current position..there are also absolute commands, but frankly, who cares? Let's keep it simple. The values in them are numbers in three or four figures, so a command looks like this:
http://camera.address.here/axis-cgi/com/ptz.cgi?camera=1&rpan=1000
This pans camera 1 1000 units left. The opposite movement is achieved by placing a minus sign before the value. Once you've formulated your command, hit enter, then refresh the window or tab that's showing the camera output to see results.
Good hunting.
I now know that the inurl:axis-cgi search isn't new. In fact, it's just one of a wedge of Google searches that bring up plenty of cams - try inurl:view/index.shtml, inurl:liveapplet, and inurl:multiplecameramode for more stuff. The view/index.shtml ones are Axis cams with a more user-friendly html front page. Some of those offer nice little control bars for the event that you might want to steer the camera.
If that's not so, though, a lot of Axis cameras can be remotely steered using CGI commands in the URL. What you need to do is find out if the camera you're looking through has a file called ptz.cgi on the server - ptz as in pan, tilt and zoom. So, open another browser window or tab, paste the URL of the camera into it, and delete everything after /axis-cgi/. Now type com/ptz.cgi?camera=1, where 1 is the number of the camera you're looking at. If there isn't one, or only one camera, just use 1. Hit enter. If a blank web page loads, without requesting a password, you're in. If there is a 404 error, the camera isn't of the type that does CGI commands.
Now, you need the commands themselves. Unsurprisingly enough, rpan pans the camera from left to right, rtilt tilts it up and down, rfocus refocuses it, rzoom zooms in or out, and riris sets the iris to suit the light. The r-commands are relative to the camera's current position..there are also absolute commands, but frankly, who cares? Let's keep it simple. The values in them are numbers in three or four figures, so a command looks like this:
http://camera.address.here/axis-cgi/com/ptz.cgi?camera=1&rpan=1000
This pans camera 1 1000 units left. The opposite movement is achieved by placing a minus sign before the value. Once you've formulated your command, hit enter, then refresh the window or tab that's showing the camera output to see results.
Good hunting.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Irbis: Back in Baghdad
Departing Sharjah 0300 hours for Baghdad. Irbis Air Co. Flight BIS6371. Running on US DOD fuel.
Lord of a Thousand CCTVs
You can be, by following these simple instructions. Background: there is a popular software package for operating surveillance cameras over the Internet, called Axis. This program writes all the stuff coming from the camera into a cgi file which it puts in a subdirectory called /axis-cgi/. Therefore, all the URLs Axis creates in the world have this string in them by default.
Google, the well-known search engine, has a function to look for search terms within URLs by prefixing them with the command inurl: Therefore, we can see all the cameras by searching for inurl:axis-cgi. Try it . Operating notes: most of the camera feeds point to IP addresses rather than domain names, so you will need to do an IPWHOIS lookup to find out whose camera you are looking at. Static images will have the rough format axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi, while streaming video can usually be found by altering the URL to /mjpg/video.cgi. If the video doesn't start at once, click refresh or add "showlength=1" without the quotes to the end of the URL, then hit refresh. Beware that these streams may suck up quite a lot of system resources.
Now you, too, can be astonished by East Ayrshire council's glaring lack of clue, as shown by the fact their street CCTV appears to be openly available on the web: Camera 1, Kilmarnock, and Camera 2, John Finnie St. Can anyone comment on the Data Protection Act implications? After all, it's one thing to knowingly enter private property, but surely it's something quite different to forcibly film anyone and everyone in East Ayrshire and transfer the results to anyone who asks for them?
Orwells candidate?
Edit: A hat tip is in order to Ray.
Google, the well-known search engine, has a function to look for search terms within URLs by prefixing them with the command inurl: Therefore, we can see all the cameras by searching for inurl:axis-cgi. Try it . Operating notes: most of the camera feeds point to IP addresses rather than domain names, so you will need to do an IPWHOIS lookup to find out whose camera you are looking at. Static images will have the rough format axis-cgi/jpg/image.cgi, while streaming video can usually be found by altering the URL to /mjpg/video.cgi. If the video doesn't start at once, click refresh or add "showlength=1" without the quotes to the end of the URL, then hit refresh. Beware that these streams may suck up quite a lot of system resources.
Now you, too, can be astonished by East Ayrshire council's glaring lack of clue, as shown by the fact their street CCTV appears to be openly available on the web: Camera 1, Kilmarnock, and Camera 2, John Finnie St. Can anyone comment on the Data Protection Act implications? After all, it's one thing to knowingly enter private property, but surely it's something quite different to forcibly film anyone and everyone in East Ayrshire and transfer the results to anyone who asks for them?
Orwells candidate?
Edit: A hat tip is in order to Ray.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Natalco: Slight Return, and Bulgarian issues
As far back as January this year, we were discussing a company called Natalco Airlines, registered in Sao Tome & Principe but really located almost anywhere else. Back then, it was possible for a source to put the Sao Tome CAA on the right track regarding an aeroplane, An-12 S9-BAN, serial no. 402111, that had somehow vanished. In fact it had been reregistered TN-AGQ and then broken up for spare parts in Pointe Noire, Congo.
Now, casually looking up something else today, I came upon one of Douglas Farah's old reports, predating the Ranter and hence unread by me, about the al-Qa'ida diamonds connection with Charles Taylor's regime in Liberia. (You can read it here.) Interestingly, at the same time as the Al-Qa'ida diamond buyers led by Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani were at Taylor's court (also the same period that Richard Chichakli's San Air General Trading was receiving large sums of money from the Liberian shipping registry), an order was placed for arms by one Simon Yelnik, described as an Israeli citizen resident in Panama, to a "Russian arms dealer in Guatemala". This order (for "our friends in Africa") resulted in the procurement of an end-user certificate purporting to come from the Ivory Coast government, made out to "Natalco Holdings PLC" of Bulgaria.
Naturally, PLC is not a type of company that exists in Bulgarian company law. Very probably the weapons (which included RPGs, artillery rockets and portable SAMs) came from there, though, via the well-documented route through the KINTEX state arsenal and KAS Engineering, the Gibraltar-based front company used by the Viktor Bout system to get end-user certificates issued. It's certainly an interesting coincidence, if nothing more, that exactly the same name should turn up in this context twice at the same point in time.
Natalco the airline had/has three Antonov 12s. One of them, strange to tell, is now at Astral Aviation of Nairobi, the firm that turned up in this post and is connected with Phoenix Aviation, GST Aero, Aerocom, Ali Kleilat and Asterias Commercial, not to mention some strangelet entity called "Aerospace Consortium" in Fujairah, UAE. To turn back, briefly, to Bulgaria, though, what about this 1999 HRW report for the UNHCR? (Link.) I'm beginning to think that I ought to read more documentation from before about 2000, when the name "Viktor Bout" became better known, as some of it may include stuff that no-one realised was significant at the time.
In this case, note well the descriptions of deliveries of arms to both sides in Angola and to the Hutu in Rwanda in 1994-1996, coming in cargo aircraft registered in "Ghana, Russia, the Ukraine and other Warsaw Pact countries". I strongly suspect Ghana here means either Johnsons Air, First International Air, or both. If the first, this is a very interesting link indeed. References to deliveries to Yemen in 1994 appear to originate from the Carlton TV report which included an interview with an anonymous pilot who may have been Chris Barrett-Jolley, describing the flights organised by the "old" Phoenix Aviation. If the Bout system was involved in arming the Hutu and the Angolan government as well as UNITA, it would argue strongly for a connection with the French arms dealer Pierre Falcone, a fugitive last heard of in Phoenix, Arizona offering large sums of money to the Republican Party, and the complex of scandal around Elf-Aquitaine, Mitterrand's Africa Cell, and hard-right former French interior minister Charles Pasqua.
Which would be a laugh, no? Unfortunately, although the footnotes include sightings of "Soviet-era cargo planes" and even DC3s, no-one involved seems to have thought to record the registration letters, titles if any, etc. As I said, they didn't realise it was significant.
Update: Doug Farah informs me that another Natalco deal involved importing helicopters from Bulgaria and Russia to Guinea ostensibly for "repairs" but really, of course, for sale to Charles Taylor.
Now, casually looking up something else today, I came upon one of Douglas Farah's old reports, predating the Ranter and hence unread by me, about the al-Qa'ida diamonds connection with Charles Taylor's regime in Liberia. (You can read it here.) Interestingly, at the same time as the Al-Qa'ida diamond buyers led by Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani were at Taylor's court (also the same period that Richard Chichakli's San Air General Trading was receiving large sums of money from the Liberian shipping registry), an order was placed for arms by one Simon Yelnik, described as an Israeli citizen resident in Panama, to a "Russian arms dealer in Guatemala". This order (for "our friends in Africa") resulted in the procurement of an end-user certificate purporting to come from the Ivory Coast government, made out to "Natalco Holdings PLC" of Bulgaria.
Naturally, PLC is not a type of company that exists in Bulgarian company law. Very probably the weapons (which included RPGs, artillery rockets and portable SAMs) came from there, though, via the well-documented route through the KINTEX state arsenal and KAS Engineering, the Gibraltar-based front company used by the Viktor Bout system to get end-user certificates issued. It's certainly an interesting coincidence, if nothing more, that exactly the same name should turn up in this context twice at the same point in time.
Natalco the airline had/has three Antonov 12s. One of them, strange to tell, is now at Astral Aviation of Nairobi, the firm that turned up in this post and is connected with Phoenix Aviation, GST Aero, Aerocom, Ali Kleilat and Asterias Commercial, not to mention some strangelet entity called "Aerospace Consortium" in Fujairah, UAE. To turn back, briefly, to Bulgaria, though, what about this 1999 HRW report for the UNHCR? (Link.) I'm beginning to think that I ought to read more documentation from before about 2000, when the name "Viktor Bout" became better known, as some of it may include stuff that no-one realised was significant at the time.
In this case, note well the descriptions of deliveries of arms to both sides in Angola and to the Hutu in Rwanda in 1994-1996, coming in cargo aircraft registered in "Ghana, Russia, the Ukraine and other Warsaw Pact countries". I strongly suspect Ghana here means either Johnsons Air, First International Air, or both. If the first, this is a very interesting link indeed. References to deliveries to Yemen in 1994 appear to originate from the Carlton TV report which included an interview with an anonymous pilot who may have been Chris Barrett-Jolley, describing the flights organised by the "old" Phoenix Aviation. If the Bout system was involved in arming the Hutu and the Angolan government as well as UNITA, it would argue strongly for a connection with the French arms dealer Pierre Falcone, a fugitive last heard of in Phoenix, Arizona offering large sums of money to the Republican Party, and the complex of scandal around Elf-Aquitaine, Mitterrand's Africa Cell, and hard-right former French interior minister Charles Pasqua.
Which would be a laugh, no? Unfortunately, although the footnotes include sightings of "Soviet-era cargo planes" and even DC3s, no-one involved seems to have thought to record the registration letters, titles if any, etc. As I said, they didn't realise it was significant.
Update: Doug Farah informs me that another Natalco deal involved importing helicopters from Bulgaria and Russia to Guinea ostensibly for "repairs" but really, of course, for sale to Charles Taylor.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Royal Airlines
Since the first reports of a Viktor Bout-related airline in Iraq, in the spring of 2004, there have been mentions of something called "Royal Air Cargo", "Royal Airlines", or some other combinations of those names. I knew from early on that Royal Air Cargo existed in Pakistan, where it resold the services of British Gulf International Airlines, the not-British, not-Gulf firm whose An-12s were first registered in Equatorial Guinea, then Sao Tome, and then in Kyrgyzstan, all without apparently leaving Sharjah.
Well, it's around again. The Sharjah departure boards show that Royal Airlines Ltd, which is given as a private flight, are operating between Sharjah and nowhere else than Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, a centre of western military activities there and also the alleged locale of many cases of torture. What is Royal? An interesting question.
Originally, a company of that name using the ICAO code RPK operated from Karachi in Pakistan, but every aircraft they used was leased from one or other Viktor Bout firm. Now, the firm is reported to be in Saudi Arabia. No new ICAO code exists, so we have to assume that they are one and the same - especially as both fleet lists include planes from Air Cess (an Antonov An-24RV, 3C-KKH/27307701), Irbis (Antonov An-26B, UN-26582/47313504), and BGIA (an Antonov An-12BP, EX-160/401901). Interestingly, the list also includes UN-26581, 47313503, an Antonov An-26B that was traded through Opa Locka, Florida, home of dodgy dealer Maury Joseph and passing point of the famous missing 727, and an An-26A, serial number 97308205, that went from being a Royal Airlines bird with the registration UR-BWY to nowhere else than Jet Line International, the Moldovan frontco that shared offices with cocaine smugglers Aerocom, as ER-AZR.
Under the ICAO code RPK-, they fly to Bagram and sometimes to Iraq. Very interestingly, many aircrft have appeared in Australia with Aerocom division Airbridge Group at Eagle Farm near Brisbane.
Well, it's around again. The Sharjah departure boards show that Royal Airlines Ltd, which is given as a private flight, are operating between Sharjah and nowhere else than Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, a centre of western military activities there and also the alleged locale of many cases of torture. What is Royal? An interesting question.
Originally, a company of that name using the ICAO code RPK operated from Karachi in Pakistan, but every aircraft they used was leased from one or other Viktor Bout firm. Now, the firm is reported to be in Saudi Arabia. No new ICAO code exists, so we have to assume that they are one and the same - especially as both fleet lists include planes from Air Cess (an Antonov An-24RV, 3C-KKH/27307701), Irbis (Antonov An-26B, UN-26582/47313504), and BGIA (an Antonov An-12BP, EX-160/401901). Interestingly, the list also includes UN-26581, 47313503, an Antonov An-26B that was traded through Opa Locka, Florida, home of dodgy dealer Maury Joseph and passing point of the famous missing 727, and an An-26A, serial number 97308205, that went from being a Royal Airlines bird with the registration UR-BWY to nowhere else than Jet Line International, the Moldovan frontco that shared offices with cocaine smugglers Aerocom, as ER-AZR.
Under the ICAO code RPK-, they fly to Bagram and sometimes to Iraq. Very interestingly, many aircrft have appeared in Australia with Aerocom division Airbridge Group at Eagle Farm near Brisbane.
Friday, October 21, 2005
The Caucasian Front
I'm not sure anyone else didn't spot this; but the name the rebels who invaded Nalchik used is significant. They called themselves the Caucasian Front. The original Caucasian Front was the Soviet army of Marshal Timoshenko, driven back from Rostov-on-Don to the mountains in the spring of 1942, who fought it out there to keep von Kleist's 1st Panzer Army from the oilfields of the Caucasus and the roads south to the Middle East.
When you think that there is really nothing else that no-one can disagree with about Russian history in the modern era, and how much and how rightly the Great Patriotic War makes up a chunk of Russianness...that ought to be ideologically frightening. That way, nothing on Putin's (and our) side is Russian. And the Russians are now the Nazis. Robert Fisk describes in his new memoir, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, how he travelled from Kabul to Kandahar in 1981 in a civilian bus and saw Soviet soldiers from Tajikistan who had torn off the red stars of their uniforms. The full significance took longer to sink in.
When you think that there is really nothing else that no-one can disagree with about Russian history in the modern era, and how much and how rightly the Great Patriotic War makes up a chunk of Russianness...that ought to be ideologically frightening. That way, nothing on Putin's (and our) side is Russian. And the Russians are now the Nazis. Robert Fisk describes in his new memoir, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, how he travelled from Kabul to Kandahar in 1981 in a civilian bus and saw Soviet soldiers from Tajikistan who had torn off the red stars of their uniforms. The full significance took longer to sink in.
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