“No blind faith or fanatical sentiments, and we may yet win this war!”
– Cirok Apo.
On February 17th, 2015.
We’re at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good lucking shall we call it’ journalist?’ My friend, Abu Hamza, a Kurdish patriot, and also a waiter chain smoking and watching the telexcreen nervously. I hold a book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’. The order to evacuate Erbil were given just an hour ago.
“Total chaos,” says Abu Hamza.
Just outside the city, to the South West, in the darkness are literally gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of nearly unlimited violence. Perhaps many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows. Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The hord is at the gates. The City is understandibly in a total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds.
The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This a city on the very edge of an oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.
The defense of the City, managed by two factions of Kurdish Peshmerga and the CIA will revolve around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring.
On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents, actually. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialzie, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.
“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan”. From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.
ABU HAMZA:
The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I take a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.
Abu Hamza looks a little dower. Probably calacualting how defensible the City is, base don how many Pesh Merga militia have fled, or will soon flee.
JUSTINE:
“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”
One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have to always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let’s try to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!
The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of homes. People who own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own the arms, or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear are of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kids drive are all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank G-d the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium-scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course, the West allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived.
We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it’s a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It’s hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In reality, we all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands at populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second-biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about it in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. So America is a back and forth two-party state and Russia is a multiple-party, one-party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.
China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.
For over 2/3rds of the human race, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other, or the long-running Sunni v. Shia wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods, and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free-market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters, periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But, it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in human nature is self-interested, violent, and cruel. But, we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919 and it is irresponsible to pretend that it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be very small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there couldn’t be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming, and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long-running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather than the West-armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Americans created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001 and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in the 1990s where one in seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
ABU HAMZA:
“Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni-oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.”
Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity, it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But, now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is pretty fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.
JUSTINE:
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter.”
Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petro-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. Frankly, the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in, is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, most intolerant, male-dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
ABU HAMZA:
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Sometime around 0-400 there were the mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the hord, the incursion. Followed by death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilomters from the outer most ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtully defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had fled. If not for the Coalitio nairstrikes Erbil would have fallen in hours.
Alan Medved, an intellectual, also a Ukrainian gangster.
Dmitry Khulushin, a businessman.
Maria Silverstova, “a journalist”, perhaps also a spy.
Shoresh Kesk, an anarchist.
Anya Campbell, a lovely martyr.
Errdal Old Newey, A poltical prisoner.
Peter Saint Reed, a dead colonial marine.
Anna Belle Rhubarb, a courtisan and mystic.
Abu Hamza, an intrepid fixer. A Kurdish Patriot.
Cormade Mountain Rock, a Professional soldier.
Comrade Spirit of War, a Georgian guerrilla.
Daria, sometimes called Dasha, sometimes called Goldy, “a consort and a Courtesan.”
“A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN”
ACT ONE
SCENE 1
SET IN:
NEWYORKGRAD
Sebastian Adonaev enters the Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks. They meet eyes.
SONG PLAYS:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I survived to say the most and do the least.
We are the ones who held the barricades
I just returned,
On a shuttle from the fires of the Middle East,
I survived, I survived by happenstance,
This I know!
When dozens that I slept beside are now in coffins,
In the ground below.
This revolution is a first, and perhaps also the last chance.
Their fearless faces,
Are now martyr posters on a wall,
Reports are now coming in, the Turkish Army is fast advancing;
Rojava will most likely fall!
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I walk in concentric circles, I try to tell our story,
A story etched upon my brain.
I tell the tale to many scared civilians, they look at me like a mad man,
A foreign person. A person gone insane!
Thanks to the fallen, the Islamic State is now defeated.
Thanks to the YPG and YPJ these bandits have retreated.
Now raise the glass or the flag!
For what we’ve done!
American thanks, still it remains unsaid.
There was a clear and present danger,
A vile Jihadist menace,
Lives lost, flags flown high, the dead cannot mourn the dead.
Thanks to my training:
I can stay awake for days,
Here I am!
Here I am.
I’m alive, I’m alive but my friends are dead,
Find me the means, count me in all the ways!
Back in this fortress of a city,
In the heart of the Empire,
Make a stand;
You know the way!
This is your land.
What we gave and what we lost is a nightmare that forever will replay!
On the very soil of my homeland,
the total safety of this place,
I beg my God, I beg my family and my lovers,
Give me bullets!
Let me not die in disgrace!
In my adopted not-a-country Kurdistan,
The enemy advances
The Turkish Army kills my people, burns our cities,
Aims to defeat our revolution,
What are the odds,
What are the chances?
I know forever I will carry, the faces of my dead friends, dagger etched inside me the on the innermost compartment of my mind,
There was so much hurry up and waiting, there were bodies on the road,
40,000 died for Kurdistan!
Everything around you could explode!
There was fire on the mountains there, there was bloody murder in the streets,
There was marching, there was dying,
And defeating
There was attacking,
There was terror,
There was going forward then retreating.
Thanks to my training,
I can take apart a rifle. I can put it back together.
Thanks to my training,
I can engage in democracy, I can believe we can do better.
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive! I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I was hiding in that Tavern,
then Adonaev said:
ADONAEV:
During our border reentry run from Rojava back into here, most of our column was blown apart in missile strikes. We hid in a P.K.K. dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death off of me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever, and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria alive!
I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaimaniya. Yet, not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani”, is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated North Western Iraq. A liberated, but unrecognized country politically divided by two city states.
The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague, balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at an airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then a 24 hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then with no questions asked I was in JFK.
Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! The war and the ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time’.
By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind isn’t where I had thought I’d left it and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It’s March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me, actually. I just want to kill myself.
I showed up at the Tavern very early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor is my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call on a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I think I’m just too late.
I think I’m being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I don’t have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again.
Well anyway, there’s only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me that is to say. Not Medved, he’s buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he doesn’t give a fuck!
In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is actually from the glorious nation of Bulgaria.
ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia.
SILVERSTOVA
Why hello my very strange one! My wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you naked.
ADONAEV
I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day.
She gave me a good price. There are 70 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people “I’m from Moscow”, though of course I am not.
My waist is tight and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am a very good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I’m looking for Medved.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medved, he looks for you, droogy.
SILVERSTOVA:
Sasho said, “try and make him happy”.
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, maybe they encourage him. Giving him a refuge.
Adonaev doesn’t remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sort him out some work and some papers.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a real mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And almost was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria how goes the life of night?
SILVERSTOVA:
I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your ruble.
SILVERSTOVA:
There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV:
More good was done than any evil. By my Otriad anyway. I’m sure the others killed more Jihadists and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. But really, few of my single serving friends have survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Turkey rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA:
What Otriad did you serve in? I’m a little familiar with actors.
ADONAEV:
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA:
Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE?
ADONAEV:
The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA:
Freedom fighting and or U.S. Imperialism, maybe both? Same, same; not different?
ADONAEV:
We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Turkey was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking from Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from who offers them in that kind of situation, nu.
SILVERSTOVA:
So, on the news tonight. Turkey has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is almost completely overrun and Mambij is next and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned.
ADONAEV:
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone to pay to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we french kissed, it all just makes me pity you a lot.
You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no good job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. I and she and others like us have to think about papers.
ADONAEV:
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal!
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain to me your motivation!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV:
Tovarish Maria,I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in green dollars.
SILVERSTOVA:
Your money Tovarish, they say is no good here. You can’t pay for a bullet or a dance. You can’t pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars.
You can buy time with or without sympathy.
ADONAEV:
Sympathies with the resistance?
SILVERSTOVA:
Sympathy with an American Mayakovsky, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV:
You do in fact know what!
SILVERSTOVA:
You know I don’t partake in the lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod as well as a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is actually 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I don’t think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV:
I don’t have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA:
Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV:
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA:
It’s worth less than a lap dance.
ADONAEV:
I need her, you know.
SILVERSTOVA:
Oh that we all know that story.
“It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.” Old American saying?
ADONAEV:
I don’t follow your pretty little allegory.
SILVERSTOVA:
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your mask falls off.”
ADONAEV:
That one I understood, perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA:
As if I was making reports in Russian, or Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and also Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been without any doubt ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.”
Well I guess you didn’t die in the war.
ADONAEV:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and totally useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little rumor I heard?
ADONAEV:
A rumor?
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor.
ADONAEV:
Go on.
SILVERSTOVA:
I heard that the same people that did 9.11 basically created the Islamic State from scratch.
Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace.
MEDVED:
Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction.
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in; hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and perhaps some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air!
SILVERSTOVA:
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVED:
One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.
Shall I call them “American secret police?”
His voyage, quest perhaps, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Daria.
ADONAEV:
What news do you have about Daria?
MEDVED:
Listen, man, not again. She’s all cleaned up. Singing on Broad Street. Has a nice place in Midtown.
ADONAEV:
She wrote to me…
MEDVED:
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV:
Da.
MEDVED:
They have apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them, or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV:
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can get figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
Medved:
You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you’re in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV:
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce?
MEDVED:
What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems.
ADONAEV:
I need to see her tonight.
MEDVED:
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV:
Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly, possible.
MEDVED:
Leave her alone. If you know what’s good for her. Also for yourself.
ADONAEV:
I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war.
MEDVED:
Nope. You do not! In a month, or less, you’ll have another woman. Or girl if you want. In the meantime is Daria even talking to you?
ADONAEV:
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago.
MEDVED:
Prosto, that’s it. You too were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way. But really, that Suka is a curse.
ADONAEV:
She’s only with whoever she is with for some money and the green card.
MEDVED:
And you actually want a paperwork marriage and a world of work?! You’re not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride.
You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars.
You cannot afford a woman like Daria, I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things.
ADONAEV:
Not yet.
MEDVED:
Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?
With additional statements or reports and writings from Polina Mazaeva, Bahaa Ilyas, Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi,Gareth Bronwne, Ismet Kayhan, Rebecca Grant, Agah Hazir & Heval Macer Gifford.
Dedicated to the Martyrs of Rojava
Dedicated to Shahid Peter Reed
Written 2017-2018
An Introductory Email from Friends
Dem Baş Heval,
We are glad to hear that you want to come to Rojava and support the YPG.
This is a standard procedure we follow in order to determine whether you seriously consider coming here. In order to proceed to our communication, you are expected to answer the questions below. If we know you better, we would figure out how you would help us during your stay here. This is not a one sided phase. The more we know you, the more you will be informed about our principles, our expectations and about the challenges you will face. We do not want you to be disappointed and frustrated here. We highly value those who want to offer their solidarity and struggle with us shoulder to shoulder against the enemies of humanity in the name of freedom and justice.
The YPG strives for a democratic, ecologic, and anti-patriarchal system of self-organization; it takes its power from the people and fights for the people. We struggle to defend the dignity of being a human when there is no one around to defend it and to create an ethico-political society in order to realize ideals of equality, justice, freedom, and self-determination. We wage a war against all forms of fascism and capitalist hegemony that try to enslave the peoples and destroy the nature. We get our inspiration from the philosophy of Serok APO whose ideas have become a torch in the jungle of oppression for the poor and the downtrodden; not only in Kurdistan but also in all around the world.
The YPG is more than a military force. It is a revolutionary organization that protects the transformation towards the ethical-political society against its external and internal enemies in accordance with the principles of democratic confederalism. So its fundamental mission is to defend the people and the Rojava Revolution. Based on the philosophy of Serok APO, the YPG struggles for a free and democratic Syria where tolerance towards other political views, religions, sects, ethnicities, cultures, and languages is a fundamental value. In this sense the YPG is democratic and legitimate self-defense force against hegemonic assaults of capitalist modernity and against pathological ideologies such as ISIS that had been produced by capitalist modernity itself along with a deep crisis in the Middle East.
The YPG is one of the forces in the Middle East that offers an alternative to capitalist modernity and its freakish products: the solution of democratic modernity. This alternative solution is not an abstract formulation; nor is it a salaried speculation. It offers ‘economic community’ as an alternative to capitalism. It confronts the industrialism of capitalism through an ecological-economic community. It contests nation-statism through an ethical-political society. This, however, radical and realistic position the YPG defends militarily, creates enemies more than it creates friends. The Turkish state in the north for example is cooperating with ISIS. The KDP as the representative of the primitive-nationalist and petty-bourgeois line in the Middle Eastern political spectrum cooperates with the Turkish state, and tries to suffocate.
Rojava with closed borders and with embargoes, and even attacks to Kurdish people in collaboration with the Turkish state. If the Assad regime does not attack the YPG now, it is because it has powerful enemies around itself that wait for an opportunity to strangle
it. Despite the defensive position of ISIS, it seems that it will take more time to defeat these murderers completely. But that the YPG struggles with enemies of humanity and defends the transformation of Rojava in the direction of a democratic modernity is being appreciated every day more and more by many. Dozens of the YPG martyrs from Germany to Australia and of the internationalist revolutionaries who fell fighting shoulder to shoulder with the red star of the YPG and of the YPJ are proof that the Rojava Revolution has already become an internationalist revolution that would never be extinguished.
To achieve a revolution is hard work, to protect it is harder; if not the hardest of all ethical-political activities. If a revolution does not gain a global dimension by establishing a network of solidarities everywhere, it is bound to be defeated by the reactionary forces and byproducts of capitalist modernity. Hence, as Serok Apo points out in “Democratic Confederalism” that has been translated by International Initiative, “We need to put up a platform of national civil societies in terms of a confederate assembly to oppose the United Nations as an association of nation-states under the leadership of the superpowers”. So, people from all around the world, those who think that another world is possible and that one has to fight and confront the monsters to make another world possible, would contribute to the platform that would spread the revolution of peace and justice.
You can download the books below and learn more about Serok APO’s ideas that inspire us. Please let us know about your opinions on the books that are expressed in the four works by Serok Apo we are sending you below.
If you want to support the YPG in Rojava you should then do this for the values of humanity, and not only for your own agenda. You won’t be fighting here for money. We won’t tolerate those who only seek fame through our struggle. What we can offer you is the possibility to join an honorable struggle for the values of humanity in the search for the truth and the right way of life and the possibility to learn more about the most important progressive revolution and struggle right now on the planet.
We prefer to have people here who want to be part of this for the right reasons. We don’t need people who think that they are Rambo – and please no Fascists. Rojava is not an adventure park, this war is not a Hollywood film and the YPG is not a PR-Agency. The YPG is not a place for people who like to kill people because of their beliefs and identities. We won’t tolerate people here among us in the YPG who are actual members of police, army or intelligence services. There are other channels for these institutions to contact with the political and military institutions of the Rojava Revolution.
Supporting the YPG in Rojava is hard work, and you will need much effort and patience. Rojava is not a place for exotic holiday trips or for adventures. Supporting the YPG is not a game, and no fun activity for bored people. Read this text carefully, these are the most important basics that you have to know and understand if you want to support the YPG in Rojava. When you have read this text and you are still willing to come to Rojava to support the YPG then you should answer the questions below.
These are the characteristics that people should have who wish to support the YPG in Rojava:
1. Serious in thinking, speaking and acting.
2. Honest and determined.
3. Respectful for different ways of thinking and living, cultures and beliefs of the people in the Middle East and ethical and cultural values of the YPG.
4. Willing to integrate into the system of the YPG and willing to learn, work, and live in a collective way.
5. Disciplined, sincere, and modest.
6. Patient and able to build up strong social relationships.
7. Open-Minded and ready to criticize and to be criticized.
8. Positive thinking and constructive acting.
9. Respecting the idea of womens’ liberation and its practical organizations.
10. Willing to embrace defending and serving the people as the most important principle.
You do not need to be ex-special forces, even not a former soldier, but of course military experience would be helpful. We appreciate people who share their tactical and technical knowledge and people with experiences and constructive criticism, but you should keep in mind that we are not amateurs. Our six years of experience against our enemies would easily prove this. However, we are always open to learn new things, to develop ourselves, to work with a self-critical approach, and to overcome our failures for better outcomes.
People with special skills and knowledge would do a plethora of things here in Rojava and in the YPG, but to be able to do that you have to learn a basic level of Kurdish and you have to understand some basic things about the Rojava Revolution and culture, history, ethical values and mentality of the people of the Middle East. Besides, you should have some understanding of political, economical, social, and military situation of Rojava, Kurdistan and the Middle East. You will find a completely different reality here. Without a certain level of understanding of all this, a sense of frustration would be inevitable. In order to prevent this, basic training will be provided for you.
If you are physically and mentally fit and healthy, open-minded and patient, willing to respect our culture and values, and ready to learn, to work, and to fight constantly for a minimum of 6 months in a war-torn Middle East country; then you would support the YPG in Rojava. Do not expect Western standards of material luxury and prepare for a life without internet and smart-phones. Do expect harsh conditions concerning food and sleep. Be aware of the fact that you will have to adapt to a foreign cultural and ideological context and military standards and rules.
What we want to know about you:
The following questions can be a help for you to write a text which is able to show us how serious and realistic you are with your decision to support the YPG in Rojava. The last part of the questions, you just have to answer with yes or no. Copy and paste and write your answers next to the questions.
UNDERSTANDING ANTAGONISMS BETWEEN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA POST-2015.
Walter Sebastian Adler, NREMT-P
Development Analyst
Heller School for Social Policy & Management,
Brandies University
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Contents
PROFILE
GAME THEORY
P A R T 1
POWER BLOC PROFILES
POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT WHAT IS THE NATION STATE
WHAT IS THE WORLD SYSTEM
WHAT IS THE CORE
WHO ARE THE CORE CONTENDERS
WHAT IS THE SEMI-PERIPHERY
WHAT IS THE PERIPHERY
WHAT IS A FAILING STATE
WHAT IS A FAILED STATE
WHAT IS THE WILDERNESS
WHAT IS THE ABYSS
P A R T 2
WHAT ARE THE EMERGENT ISSUES
POLITICAL ISSUES
ECONOMIC ISSUES
SOCIAL ISSUES
ACTORS
USA
RF
PRC
OUTLIERS
IS THERE A HISTORY OF CONFLICT
WHAT ARE THE CONFLICT AFFECTED AREAS PROXIMATE CAUSES
TRIGGERS
DYNAMICS
TRENDS
FACTORS PROLONGING CONFLICT
FACTORS FOR POSSIBLE PEACE
CONCLUSIONS
ANNNEX
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Profile
The wide array of structural problems within the intrinsically interconnected fields of development, humanitarian relief, human rights advocacy, peace building and coexistence work are rooted in that they attempt to treat a disease [conflict, war and endemic global poverty] by diagnosing wrongly and then prescribing inadequately remedies for singular systems of the global body; namely the states. They proscribe their treatments as if the national unit was an isolated system that needed critical care in imagined isolation. As sub-system after sub-system are sucked into a violent pathology it is still wrongly presumed in the West that this collectively atrocious mass behavior is in our very nature (Konner, 2000); that it is the normative clash of civilizations and states (Huntington, 1993); or that policy premeditation of this planned atrocity on behalf of poly oligarchic elites is not a feasible hypothesis (Fitzduff, 2014). This analysis attempts to provide the reader with a more holistic diagnosis of the world conflict. For if any nation and its people are to ever be healthy and secure we must frame our interventions on relevant causality; not provide treatment based on partial data and imagined regional motive. Nor on faith in national particularity or the misunderstanding that the parts of a whole are supposedly independent of each other.
Game Theory
It is my hypothesis not that some oligarchic collective controls all world events, instead that three competing poligarchic blocks (Oligarical Collectives) unleash war and trade policy into a world system that synergistically amplifies their carnage throughout the state system. This theory of [ inverse consiationalist republicanism ] runs as follows; within each nation state a
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hierarchy of local oligarchs called dismissively as elites forms a network around shared culture, educational experience, business ventures, military and or family ties. The more developed a nation is has less do with the actual wealth of this national oligarch collective than how much it can leverage the state architecture to enrich itself and how efficiently it can shield its wealth from taxes and scrutiny (Winters, 2011). As well as how it can accumulate that wealth in assets and amassed capital. On the state level these oligarchs are all in conflict with each other to control means of capital accumulation and they vie for control as well over politicians, opinion makers and religious leaders. According to inverse consiationalist theory; eventually the arch oligarchs arrive at a collective bargain where by sectors of the population and special interests within a nation are pitted against each other to keep the social sphere of a society unstable, unable to effectively coalesce into a resistance movement.
Taken to the world system level we arrive at three particular groupings with particular interests at stake. The Euro-American Oligarchy, the Post-Soviet Petro-KGB Oligarchy and the Princelings Oligarchy; all of which function under the basic rules of this nine principle theory1.
1. Elite groupings in each nation form combines to enhance wealth and pit population ethnicities and value groups against each other.
2. Elite groupings diversify their portfolios by washing their money in foreign banks and investing in venture capital, infrastructure, real estate and extra-legal enterprises.
3. Elite groupings utilize their wealth to control overt political authorities.
4. Elite groupings from Oligarical Collective frameworks to direct state policy to their advantage and default high degrees of control over states and power blocks.
5. These three paramount Oligarchic Collectives are in direct competition with each other but there are relative bounds to the degree that they will destabilize each other’s domains, rules to the game as it were.
6. All major conflict hostilities will be limited for the most part to a resource control axis that falls within the under-developed and developing world and fought through proxy whenever possible. Incursions and terror attacks outside of that zone are to be avoided.
7. All Oligarical Collectives are rational actors with power and profit as their uncomplicated bottom-line. Ideologically, ethnically and ethically dissimilar they do not all share normative values about property rights, collateral damage and social policy. They are all however alarmed by Jihadist tendencies of Political Islam2 which is an adversarial ideology not compatible with any of the three block interests that threatens all three blocks asset controls.
8. All of the blocks encourage and amplify conflict violence on a variety of levels. Violence as psycho-social methodology directed outward at rivals interests and inward towards each other’s populations is implicitly linked to the conduct of each block.
9. Crucial to the maintenance of power inside each core and core contender’s powerbase is the paramouncy out the Westphalian state system. More important than any other identity variable the belief in the sovereignty of nations and nationalism fuels all other subordinations.
1 The Euro-America Oligarchy being oldest is more traditional. It’s organized in social clubs and exercises the most control via campaign finance, control of banking and media sectors and longevity of control. The predominant coordination points for this Oligarchy are Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg Group and Davos. The Princeling Oligarchy is a direct familial link between blood descendants of the Eight Immortals called princelings; an estimated 147 people in charge of the most important aspects of the Chinese political and economic architecture. The Russian Petro-KGB Oligarchy is the newest grouping based upon various KGB
2 Which can be loosely sub-divided into Sunni Wahabi-Salafism (Spread by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) and Revolutionary Shi’ism (Spread by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).
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BRIEFING PART ONE
Power Bloc Profile
There are three major power blocs that while they differ in their development theories, national cultures, state ideology and psycho-social interpretations of international relations as well as each other; they are all firmly vying for core dominance of the global economic system. They are via their foreign policies, trade relationships, consumer cultures, militaries and intelligence services responsible for virtually all ongoing 35 medium-large scale armed conflicts3. They fuel the vast planetary degradation via their rapid and massive scale industrialization drives. They have in differing capacities triggered the underdevelopment of half of the human species; 3,500,000,000 people living today at and below $3.00 a day. At least 1.2 billion on less than $1.25 a day (World Bank, 2014) (UNDP, 2014).
The political leaderships of these blocs are pragmatic and non-ideological, even if their political classes are varying degrees to the left or right of center in embrace of liberal democracy, democratic oligarchy and state capitalism with a socialist face. They cannot be purely referred to by the respective nation state that officially marshals them: The United States of America (the declining Core hegemon) is financially coupled with the European Union, Switzerland, the Holy Sea, New Zealand, South Korea4, Australia and Japan. The Russian Federation (the defeated core Contender) relies on a co-dependent fusion of resource clientalism and extra-legal mafia cronyism rooted in the now defunct KGB to exert varying degrees of control over former Soviet nations and former satellite states. The People’s Republic of China (the emergent Core hegemon) has massively invested in African nations, trade relationships in the Pacific and $ 11 trillion of US bonds and debt. Simplifying as such would be a gross minimization of the US’s integral allies, especially in the European Union & Switzerland. Or the more nuanced post-Cold War cooperation between RF its Post-soviet former satellites where 20 million ethnic Russians reside (cite); and its Middle Eastern allies like Egypt (prior to 1971), Syria, Iran, and before the US invasion and its complete disintegration; Iraq. Or even more significantly the PRC’s investment in nearly every country in Africa regardless of political tendency or crime against humanity5. These blocs cannot also be purely gauged by their military alliances, trade pacts, or proclaimed ideologies as repeatedly stated. For while the US-EU-NATO alliance is normatively neoliberal, democratic and pro-market its participating governments have funded overtly and covertly all manner of dictatorship, non-aligned oligarchy such as arming Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1980-1988); as well as helping to establish the training bases, weapons supply and advanced training of proto-Al Qaeda Mujahidin formations attacking the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989).
The Russian Federation is a vast oligarchic transnational mafia state. Over the course of the Cold Wars Russian provided a wide array of military and technical aid to numerous
3 See annex for listing of the 35 Conflicts, casualty counts & durations.
4 The USA has been invited to occupy Japan since 1945 serving as its default army and the Korean peninsula since 1950 buffering the South from the massive North Korea army.
5 Chinese oil purchases and arms shipments to Sudan are directly responsible for the Darfur & Khortofan genocides.
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developing countries fostering incredible regional loyalty particularly in Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The People’s Republic of China is state capitalist authoritarian regime lead by the Communist Party. It’s interventions in North Korea and Vietnam played pivotal roles in both nation’s independence. It has intermittently provided military and intelligence aid to a wide range of Asian and African groups. Each block rarely has aligned foreign policy except perhaps in regards to Islamic terrorism and the environment. Each core tender also faces long running internal ethnic antagonisms with minority groups at their country core; African Americans & Caucasians in the USA, North African & Turkish immigrants in the EU, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China and a wide range of Turkic and Central Asia minorities in Russia [notably Chechnya].
Each block is governed quite differently with varying adherence to rule of constitutional law. Kleptocratically in Russia, Nepotistcally in China and via Legislative Capture6in the USA. Through a variety of arrangements rule by a diffuse elite of oligarchic collectives networked around shared financial interests as stated, but each extracts wealth and exerts influence quite differently (Princeton, 2013)(Winters, 2011). As well as direct accesses chains to the the national policy makers. In the USA and EU they utilize campaign finance structures quite overtly and constitutionally allowing state sanctioned bribery. In the RF a more direct cronyism based on shared Soviet networks is in place. In China elite privilege is enabled by direct family relations. The elites are all beneficiaries of the existing financial order regardless for the most part of which of any of the three existing blocs hold the core. A critical core shift from USA to China will not radically effect the holdings of the most prominent oligarchs.
It was estimated that 85 members of this elite are worth cumulatively what that bottom 3.5 billion poorest of humanity are worth combined (Oxfam, 2014) and this bears some repeating because state relations between the USA, the RF the PRC and their allies, proxies and clients are not beholden purely to political interests; but by it is this Oligarchical Collectivism that governs the world system and drives its subsequent carnage (Piketty, 2014). While it is highly tempting to believe these oligarchies cannot properly coordinate nor can the governments they set up in power; it is crucial to understand that what a government perceives it is doing in its own national interest is often a directive, a pre-written policy package drawn up by the national oligarch collective. Or individual oligarch with the means to do so.
The fundamental question is what are the likely chain of conflict, development and economic events that will result in the next ten years due to the core shift from USA to PRC. It is those predictions that is subject of this analysis. And while the US-EU media and political apparatus has been quick to declare the irrelevance of Russian Federation; this defeated core contender is an integral player in upcoming core transition and conflict.
Political, Economic and Socio-Cultural Context
The World System Analysis, as developed by Immanuel Wallerstien posits that the world’s nation state system as an arbitrary socio-political patchwork of cultivated identities that divide humanity presently into 206 manageable, unmanageable and mismanaged units for the purpose of aligning their economies to the benefit of the Core Hegemonic power block. Before
6 Legislative capture is a system of elite control via campaign financing.
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1500 CE it was impossible for any singular national unit to completely dominate. The globalization of trade and warfare via industrialization, slavery, colonization and the World War had by 1945 erected an architecture of trade regulations, protectionism, direct foreign investment, banking, lending, development and ensuing dependency that all but two Superpowers; the USA and the USSR were aligned in varying semi peripheral and peripheral dependencies back to either power. With the exception of the People’s Republic of China which after its 1949 Revolution, Cultural Revolution and 1978 economic realignment has emerged as the logical core contender after a period of unipolar USA hyperpower hegemony which lasted from 1991-2001. A mere ten years.
The 1945-1989 Cold War was a global engagement between the intelligence, development and military forces of these two blocks which the PRC for strategic and practical reasons did not align directly or over commit to the subsequent proxy wars. After directly engaging the USA on the battlefield in the 1950-1953 Korean War proxy struggle the PRC has quietly built its formidable base via the non-aligned movement, all of whose members over the course of the Cold War aligned, realigned or disintegrated. The key conflicts in checking the United States were Vietnam (1950-1975), Afghanistan (2001-ongoing) and Iraq (2003-2012). The key conflicts for checking the RF (then USSR) were Afghanistan (1980-1989) and Chechnya (1994-2010). The PRC has not had to pay for a costly confrontation since the Korean War in which it instead had to long term subsidize a costly and inefficient failed state.
Let us for analysis remove the national borders of the Peter’s world map the one where all things are represented at their actual presumed size. Let us examine it inverted. Let us look at it East on top West, then South on top of North. Note the arbitrary placement of not only national borders but also spatial embarkations and hemispheric directions. As if the sun still was through to revolve around the earth or that the earth was clearly fat. Let us again for analysis abolish those markings too. Let us turn it from a two dimensional boundary maven into a three dimensional sphere, then pull up like a hand on a cloth the developed northern nations as if into a the shape of a mountain, a mountain where the OECD countries are the core on top and down the mountain are arrayed the middle income than low income town the bottom of this precipice.
On this mountain and its foothills live roughly 7 billion humans broken into 206 national plantations. Identity driven work camps each with their own flag and imagined identities. Half (3.5 billion) are living below 2.50 a day in a range of miserable impoverishment. While extreme poverty according to Millennium Development goals has been halved via China and India; extreme poverty is actually expanding in Sub-Saharan African and Central Asia. A full 5 billion humans live at around and below 10 dollars a day bound for most of their lives to their wage slavery in a range of industrial or agricultural tasks (World Bank Data). The rate of environmental exploitation and pollution have gotten so egregious that disastrous climate change has begun resulting in more catastrophic climate disasters than any time in recorded history( ). Over the course of the Cold War there were no less than 17 documented genocides and 23 major proxy war engagements (cite) as well as 37 democidal purges7. In 35 of 206 plantations violent conflicts have broken out and are spreading, but only at the base of the mountain. They
7 Please see attached annex of Proxy War listings and Democide Listing. A democide is defined as a state unleashing it’s military against its own people in ethno-political purge of civilians. While the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is the oft cited example there have 17 subsequent genocides (such as Former Yugoslav Rwanda & East Timor) and 37 total including Democides (Duvalierist Haiti & Argentine Dirty Wars)
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increasingly are to be fought intra-state with ethnic cleansing, criminal profiteering, and the targeting their own repressive and failing state systems (Kaldor, 2013).
In the year 1492 CE the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand of what would become the nation of Spain instituted a massive purge coupled with torture, expulsion, and general atrocity directed against the Muslim and Jewish populations of that emerging nation. Simultaneously they sponsored the imperial expedition of Christopher Columbus which would alongside the Portuguese conquests of Brazil and West Africa would trigger an unprecedented bloodletting over the next 500 years of slavery, colonization, decolonization, World War, Cold War and Global Jihad. All of these manifestations based on manufactured identities (Anderson, 1983) as well as local greed and grievance variables ( ). Most importantly these endless conflicts were harnessed for the control of the means of local production and the profiteering off of trade routes. All of which raised the capital necessary for the formation of the nation state system.
By 1500 CE the social, economic and environmental underpinnings of human civilization were consolidating around the dominance of a world system (Wallerstien, 1974). The globalization of markets with an ever more authoritarian institution of sovereign states were the logical evolution of capital accumulation (Marx, 1887). Humanity would be subjugated, brutalized and reduced via these emerging nation states into more manageable social units for economic exploitation and administrative consistency. Although ideology, normative rights, cultures and religious mobilizations would vary tremendously by the year 2014 the World System had in affect crystalized around three primary trade & power blocks or hegemons; USA EU, Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. The Global Core, under a steady evolution of socio-political justifications has passed from Netherlands, to England, then finally to the United States of America. After the defeat of the German contestation for core power in 1945 a series of unending proxy conflicts began under the mantle of decolonization, but were more particularly a battle over markets, extractive resources, commodities and trade relations between the USSR lead by Russia and NATO allies lead by USA. The Chinese experiments with Maoist communism via their 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution resulted in the deaths, starvation and purge of and x and removed them from hegemonic position until in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping and the Party embraced state capitalism (Gao, 2008). After the economic defeat of the USSR in 1989 American neo-conservatives posited a strategy for a New American Century (CITE ) which involved amongst other things redrawing the map of the Middle East and by default controlling the life blood of the globalized transport system; oil & natural gas. By 2001 directly advising the Bush Presidency in USA they began implementing this reconsolidation package. As the Russian Federation accelerated theirs under President Putin (Politkovskaya, 2005). However, by 2001 the US-EU had reached Peak Hegemony.
All nations have their national mythologies and state ideological narratives in varying doses and degrees. The world system is based on which ever power or power block can marshal the supply lines and coerce with aid and trade all other powers into economic dependency. According to Immanuel Wallerstien; the architect of world system analysis there are core nations that via conflict, development and hegemony impose an economic order which sub serves semi peripheral and peripheral national oligarchies to organize their economies around core needs and enrichments. Semi peripheral nations such Cuba, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, and Iran have achieved moderate independence through some strategic action or relationship but remain irrelevant to shaping the world systems supply lines, trade relations and core economic demand.
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Peripheral nations such as Sudan, Egypt, Ecuador, and Bangladesh are organized to supply labor and commodities for the economic wellbeing of the core.
What is the Nation State
The Nation state is the macro unit of global economic harvest (Proudhon, 1876). The natural resources, the commodities, the manufactured goods and most importantly the human capital; their labor and their tax base are bound via this system into manageable units for exploitation. (Gellner, 2008). Under the guise of order the state system crystalized dynamic ethnic relationships and power differentials into control zones. As of 1 January, 2015 there are 206 such units, loosely organized into three major power blocs; divided into five world system dependency zones claiming sovereignty over shifting swaths of geographic turf. The cultivation of false consciousness (Engles, 1893) subsequently divides humanity further into dominant and subservient genders, ethnic groups, religions, nationalisms, political tendencies and sexual orientations; all with imagined identities that are wholly constructed via socialization and neuroscience for the purpose of disunity.
While almost all nation states have relative sovereignty; constant and repeated foreign and domestic assaults on this sovereignty lock each unit into a dynamic hierarchy of the world system. The metaphor of the world system; the mountain is subject to power shifts; thus via culture, warfare and economics the dominance of the core has shifted. Each nation state’s Oligarical collective controls its political leadership with few outliers regardless of proclaimed ideological tendency. Nation state level oligarchs enrich themselves by aligning the human and resource capital of their nation with economic prerogatives set by the core nations at both international forums such as Bretton Woods, Davos and the United Nations. As well as at closed meetings for oligarch coordination such as the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove. Ultimately whether the nation state takes the guise of authoritarian, theocratic, military junta, or trapping of socialism or democracy; via elite consensus, think tanks, policy groups, campaign contributions, as well as encouragement of soft or hard repression; the elite cluster in each of the 206 nation states formulates their capital accumulation in relation to taxes, labor management and trade relations with other states. The three power blocks; US-EU-NATO, PRC and Russian Federation have since 1945 engaged in ceaseless proxy conflict at the semi-periphery and periphery (Lebow, 1994). Endless coups, interventions, wars, genocides and clientalisms have ensued. Their antagonism has led to vast destabilization of the state system. Because the nation state unit harnesses the competing identities of its implied constituents; those within its border are locked in combative contradiction between the citizens and the immigrant others; as well as a hierarchy of access, alienation and proscribed benefit ascribed to the citizens based again on arbitrary privileges; male over female, dominant ethnic identity over proclaimed outsider ethnic groups, citizen over foreigner an so on. With very few outlying examples most of these alienations and privileges have mutated or been purged via conquest, revolution and ethnic cleansings and have largely solidified their false conscious paradigm since 1945. Because every aspect of the world system is inherently an architecture for reducing us down to a profitable economic unit and telling us that our hard ‘work will set us free’.
The nation state rests its legitimacy on being a protector and provider for its citizens. It’s justification for being no matter upon what superstructure of ideology or identity it rests upon is
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to fulfill the obligations spelled out normatively in the nine human rights instruments. In reality it has to meet two more basic characteristics; secure collective needs, enable satisfaction of individual wants and provide security. If any of those elements begin to drastically disintegrate via warfare, invasion, occupation or pervasive corruption and impoverishment the nation state government loses legitimacy to rule.
The Nation state is predicated on the cultivated false conscious belief that the state of nature is inherent self-interest and that security for a minority from some necessitates endless war for the majority.
What is the World System
The World System Analysis as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein consists of a core,
semi-periphery and periphery; shifting zones that are defined by their economic relationships to each other. As stated in his volumes of analysis Wallerstein outlines a multi-disciplinary modal that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstien, 1974). While previous empires such as the Romans, Persians, Islamic Caliphates, Mughals, Aztecs and Chinese Han dynasties had been trans-regional powers capable of expansive influence and trade; none had, until the construction of the world system, been able to fully project hegemony upon the full mass of the species living in all continents. Advanced weapons, epidemiological resistance and industrialization allowed the Europeans a competitive advantage in outward conquest (Diamond, 2005). The epochs of conquest, slavery and colonialism allowed an unprecedented capital accumulation to take place in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had modernized these societies and subsequently organized their social hierarchy into that of global power administrators. This is not to say class and race and gender were not thoroughly established in internal hierarchies. The conquest of the rest of the world was an outward disposal of the mediocre into pursuits of war and profiteering. Inevitably according to this analysis the hegemonic power passed from Spain, to the Netherlands, to England and after a series of World Wars ultimately between Germany and the United States to a bipolar world of the US-NATO Block against the USSR. While the 1989-1991 implosion of the Soviet Union defeated authoritarian Communism. The Russian Federation, with the world’s second most powerful military, a comparable stockpile of nuclear weapons and the largest reserves of natural gas and oil on the planet is checked but not defeated. As stated the People’s Republic of China was only a minor antagonist within this struggle for core control, but is emerging as the most serious contender.
To understand the world system beyond the allegory of the mountain we must break apart the zones Wallerstien and dependency development theorists categorized to establish what is it is these ceaseless proxy wars, all this diplomacy, defense and development spending seeks to acquire. A false construct such as nationalism or ideology is a superstructure disguise for it means to acquire core control. As stated, the Oligarical collectives have a limited range of coordination and span of control. While an oligarch in the core may in fact collude with an oligarchy in the semi-periphery or periphery; the closer asset control and resources allocation is exerted to a core political and economic process; the richer and more powerful the fruits of the gain.
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What is the Core
The guiding features of the core include a unified financial architecture and banking system, stable governance which can safe guard property rights and currency valuation and can upkeep the impressive military and intelligence forces needed to coerce compliance to its economic directives. Out of these 26 nations, 1 Religious City State and 1 newly re-absorbed financial hub (back into PRC two-systems one state in 1997); all participants align their economic and political directives with the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; The United States is the dominant hegemon in this block, supported by the financial prowess of the European Union lead by German and the economic strength of Japan. Interestingly these nations are all of the primary belligerents of the World Wars and hold all seats of the United Nations Security Council; excluding the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.
The following nations, under the stewardship of the United States of America compose the modern nucleolus of core control according to Babones and Alvarez-Rivadulla (2007). Logical incorporation of South Korea and Taiwan have been amended to listing.
Australia Austria Belgium Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Greece8 Hong Kong9Iceland Ireland Israel10 Italy Japan Luxembourg Netherlands New Zealand Norway Singapore Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States
Taiwan South Korea Vatican City
Who are the Core Contenders
People’s Republic of China (Emerging)
Russian Federation (Defeated)
8 Greece went bankrupt and was bailed out twice in 2010 and 2012. Greece is only a core country by virtue of its inclusion in the European Union.
9 Hong Kong was territorially reabsorbed in 1997 into the PRC, but will retain financial linkages and independence until 2047.
10 Israel due to its military and intelligence linkages to the United States since 1976 is more nuanced in that is an independent state possessing no hegemonic capacity, however under direct US Clientalism projects vast region power on behalf of an in tandem with the USA.
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A Core contender is an economic and military block lead by a robust, well populated and resource endowed nation state with the military, diplomatic and economic capacity to challenge the hegemony of the current core block central power.
From 1945-1989 there was a bi-polar world dominated by the US and the USSR each with their own competing systems of dependency. After the 1950-1952 Korean War in which the PRC directly battled the US-NATO block a combination of the Cultural Revolution and Den Xiaoping’s embrace of state capitalism pulled the PRC largely out of Cold War confrontations.
The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows.
As of 2014; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.
What is the Semi-Periphery
The elements of the semi-periphery include; on-going and expanding industrialization; modernization of political architecture in that whatever system is place efficiently provides critical aspects of governance; participation as intermediaries between periphery and core; manufacture and export of goods and are typically able to act as region hegemons over peripheral powers. Excellent examples of semi-peripheral states are Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam, India, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and South Africa. Colombia is slowly emerging from a civil war raging since 1964 that have taken the lives of between 4,744,046–5,712,506 people (Silva, 2011). Mexico has been recently plagued with drug cartel killings that are directly related to its proximity to the Southern US border. However, trade relations with the US have made both integral parts of the semi-periphery albeit unstable ones.
All of these nations are middle-income developing nations that have vital intermediary roles in global trade or possess vital energy resources. China which prior to 1949 was a peripheral nation largely of peasants has advanced progressively since to assume a position of semi-peripheral transition to core contention. Russia which was a feudal semi-peripheral monarchy (Czardom) until its socialist revolution in 1917 has fallen something short of a super power contender but is still with is military and oil reserves a far more formidable power than any listed above. Interestingly as yet another death blow to the neo-liberal Washington consensus; of the nations listed above; only Argentina and Mexico followed much of the IMF/World Bank policies. The primary success stories are the four Asian Tigers; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. China and India which cumulatively halved global extreme poverty by some 680 million persons and rapidly increased their economic growth did not follow nearly any of the consensus policy.
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The key element of the semi-periphery is that enables the relationships of trade and mediates between core contenders as well as between periphery and core. While semi-peripheral counties (so-called middle income) may in face have largely impoverished populations, the semi periphery does not depend as completely upon the core as the periphery does and can make a range of independent policy decisions. Cuba is particularly good example through its interventions in Angola and Ethiopia as well as its current policies of medical diplomacy. So is Saudi Arabia in its international support of fundamentalist Wahabi-Salafist Islamic terror groups.
The Semi-periphery (like all of the five zones) compose a spread. There are nations such as India and Brazil that are quickly closing economic ground on core contenders Russia and China. There are relatively independent semi-peripheral powers such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates that utilize their extractive resource wealth to further ideological policies of their respective elites. There are other nominally nation’s such as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago that play little important role in international relations.
The semi-periphery is ultimately a structural buffer zone that unlike the illusion of the middle class described above, does not actually experience significant differentials in mass development. Most of the world’s 1.2 billion living below $1.25 a day live in middle income countries and within the semi-periphery. The local oligarchy of a given state if it can position the political elite of its nation to arrange the economic activity favorably can expect exponential capital increases but their nation achieving a semi-peripheral zone standing. Suffice to say in the 2014 list of Forbes billionaires Carlos Slim, a Mexican citizen is second from the top right below American Bill Gates. Here is listing of Semi-Peripheral states:
India
Brazil
Colombia
Argentina
Mexico
Cuba11
Iran12
Vietnam
Poland
Turkey
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
What is the Periphery
What was once called the third & fourth world13, or currently the developing world is a legacy of the colonial system. It lacks infrastructure, it is poorly industrialized and its governance
11 Cuba is an anomaly in that it is one of only five surviving Communist states and the only one that still largely applies full Socialist policies. That has made it a semi-peripheral power is its unusual projection of development technology particularly in the Healthcare sector to be a ‘Medical Internationalist’ power abroad disproportionate to size or resources.
12 Iran is a second interesting anomaly as it is the only Shi’a Islamic State and been locked in proxy warfare with the United States since its Revolution in 1979.
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systems are little better than a mix of dictatorship, military rule and out right corrupt practice. The peripheral nations should not be counted as such by GDP or HDI because they are peripheral in their importance to the world systems functioning. According to Collier there are fifty nine states (Sudan and South Sudan were not separated when he wrote his Bottom Billion report) in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti which show decline and dysfunction. Global economic convergence, the convergence of the developed and developing world has not proven itself as a valid reality.
The periphery has a disproportionately small share of global wealth and most of its capital and resources flow out of the country. Agriculture, cheap expendable labor and natural resource extraction make up most of its economic activity. Most of its population lives in extreme or relative poverty. Some peripheral states might be middle income, but do have and substantial role to play in the functioning of the world system. Peripheral state political systems are weak and they are often easily sucked into lengthy conflicts to control domestic uprisings or fight drawn out wars with their neighbors. A key element is their relative powerlessness to the rest of the state system. Most if not all of the periphery were former colonial holdings of the European powers. Their GDP and HDI often, although not always have improved the earlier they were liberated from the colonial system; Latin American countries are all much more developed than their African counterparts except for the Republic of Haiti which exhibits health and development indicators closer to Sub-Saharan Africa.
The following is a listing of Peripheral states:
13 Those without their own recognized states such as the Kurds, Basque, Yazids or Palestinians.
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Africa:
Togo
Gambia
Burkina Faso
Namibia
Benin
Kenya
São Tomé/ Príncipe Uganda
Zambia
Asia& Pacific
Palau
Mongolia
Papua New Guinea
Fiji
Post-Soviet/ Former Socialist
Belarus
Macedonia
Bulgaria
Montenegro
Kazakhstan
Abkhazia
Georgia
Uzbekistan
Latvia
Transnistria
Hungary
Kyrgyzstan
Kosovo
Estonia
Turkmenistan
Croatia
Bosnia and
Ghana
The Gambia
Botswana
Senegal
Zimbabwe
Cameroon
Congo
Gabon
Guinea
Bhutan
Thailand
Indonesia
Laos
Herzegovina
Albania
Romania
Czech Republic Moldova
Lithuania
Nagorno-Karabakh Tajikistan
Serbia
Mozambique Ethiopia
Tanzania
Angola
Vanuatu Nepal
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Middle East & Maghreb Jordan
Morocco
Kuwait
Algeria
UAR
Oman
Qatar
Tunisia
Northern Cyprus Cyprus
Latin America &
Caribbean
Grenada
Suriname
T&T
Bolivia
Belize
Dominica
Costa Rica
Paraguay
Ecuador Dominican Republic Panama
Saint Vincent
Saint Lucia
Saint Kitts and Nevis Venezuela
Barbados
Chile
Guyana
Antigua and Barbuda
What is a Failing State
In a failing state conflict is combined with under development to set in motion a series of degenerations. During this period, interventions of core and semi-peripheral powers will largely shape what social and economic orders emerges from the chaos. Periodically such as in the cases of Somalia and Yugoslavia the state collapses completely in recognizable form into total anarchy and long term dissolution.
Ukraine is currently a failing state. It is an ethnically divided energy pipeline hub for pumping Russian energy resources into Europe. Its (recently annexed Crimea) region is a major warm water strategic port for the Russian Navy; it has highly fertile soil, it is linguistically and ethnically similar to Eurasia not Europe; and it was until 1991 an integral part of the former Soviet Union. As part of the Second World (former Soviet Socialist States) Ukrainians have enjoyed economic, social and cultural rights markedly higher than the developing world even after collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991. However, following political re-ordering and oligarchic expropriation of energy assets and infrastructure across the former Soviet world; President Putin began a low intensity war to reclaim what in the Russian political consciousness
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is within the obvious and legitimate sphere of interests of those who run the Russian Federation. Specially all of the former Soviet Union and former Russian client states such as Cuba and Syria. After the uprising in Maiden Square which looked likely to topple the pro-Russian president Russian military and intelligence operatives seized and annexed Crimea and triggered separatist warfare in the three eastern provinces. Organizing via its intelligence service the FSB (former KGB) the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin is replicating the exact tactics it had previously used in Moldova, Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Georgia to eliminate political order that sought to align those countries with NATO and the West. As there are 20 million ethnic Russians living in a wide range of former Soviet states such a rubric of ferment sedition, infiltrate intelligence operatives and fighters, provoke crisis, occupy and annex has spread to Ukraine made even more valuable because of numerous pipelines and the Crimea Naval base.
Because of these escalating actions heavy sanctions have been applied against Russia, but over 1/3 of Ukraine remains by default in Russian control. As in the cases of Moldova and Georgia, it is highly unlikely that any Ukrainian government will ever take back that territory. Russian Oligarchs and President Putin and his advisors have very little respect for the nation state system which due to Cold War strains, crippled Russia temporarily as a super power and core contender.
A failing state is state that due to corruption, bankruptcy and fiscal-social mismanagement an internal revolt or foreign intervention is predictably about to cause collapse state collapse and failure. A long running low intensity insurgency is not criteria for this classification. That insurgency, internal unrest or foreign invasion must produce a high likelihood of the citizens being left without a coherent political leadership and social services. In the cases of CAR civil unrest has developed into ethnic civil war ravaging large swaths of the population and leading to heavy violence against civilians. In Nigeria and Egypt mounting corrupt practices coupled with long running insurgencies place them here. In states like Malawi, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mali and Lesotho government corruption on such an endemic level have deprived the populations of even the most basic services. A failed state is caught not in a “poverty trap” by Collier or Sachs description of such they are deliberately placed into a downward cycle of under development. Peripheral and failing states slip into failed state status based on the following twelve variables.
The Failed State Index (FDI) weighs in via twelve major indicators found within a territory indicating state failure:
1. Mounting Demographic Pressures 2. Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons
3. Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance 4. Chronic and Sustained Human Flight 5. Uneven Economic Development
6. Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline
7. Legitimacy of the State
8. Progressive Deterioration of Public Services 9. Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law 10. Expansive Security Apparatus
11. Rise of Factionalized Elites
12. Intervention of External Actors
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Failing States include:
Myanmar
Mauritania
CAR
Egypt
Lesotho
Mali
Cote d’Ivoire
Ukraine
Chad
Guinea-Bissau
Sri Lanka
Niger
Yemen
Nigeria
Honduras
Malawi
Burundi
Lebanon
Bahrain
What is a Failed State
A state where its government has collapsed expect perhaps for diplomatic purposes in the capital and a few major cities; lost control of its territory; has ceased to provide social services and is at war with its own population can be described as failing state.. A secondary arrangement of this scenario zoning is when the state fully and indiscriminately unleashes its military against its population as occurred in Rwanda, Sudan and Syria. Where and when this occurs the population is at the full mercy of invading armies, militia groups and banditry. A sustained condition of state failure results in conditions best described in Thomas Hobbes book the Leviathan; a nasty, brutish and short life truncated by extreme violence and early death. The deployment of peacekeepers and NGOs can prolong the existence of a government presence; but the inevitable result of state failure is lasting underdevelopment coupled by internal human rights violation on a massive scale, war and atrocity (Rotberg, 2010). Failed State are also hot beds of opportunism for both oligarchs and criminal middle men to utilize the defunct governmental infrastructure to launder money and serve as transshipment hubs for bulk currency, narcotics, weapons, conflict minerals, expropriated oils and human cargo. Haiti is a primary port of illegal transshipment into the United States (Farmer, 1994). North Korea operates the largest and most sophisticated printing operation of duplicated $20 bills. Failed states are also breeding grounds for terrorist organizations and revolutionaries (Rotberg, 2002).
The following is a list of failed states:
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North Korea14
Yugoslavia (collapsed in 1991)
Rwanda15
Sudan
South Sudan
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Haiti (collapsed 2004)
Palestine16
Libya
Syrian Arab Republic
What is the Wilderness
The Wilderness is a state of anarchic non-governance differentiated from failed state in that large swaths of its territory are no longer under the control of government or under rule of law. The people unfortunate to live in these regions are not only severely impoverished they are subject to arbitrary and criminal attack and rights violation by marauding bands, rival militias, warlords and various social predators. Currently large swaths of the following failed states meet this description; the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) since 1998, 1/3 of Syria since 2012, 1/3 of Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia which has not had a central government since 1992.
Somalia (collapsed in 1992)
Afghanistan
Iraq
DRC17
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Rwanda along with a variety of other African countries invaded Zaire (DRC) in 1998. Somalia collapsed after a CIA funded insurgency topped its government in 1991. Afghanistan was previously occupied by the Soviet Union from 1979-1989 where mujahedeen and political Islamists recruited trained and financed by the CIA, Pakistani ISI and Saudi Arabia (including Osama Bin Laden) were sent to give the USSR ‘its own Vietnam’. This pivotal military intelligence
14 North Korea in whatever ideological rendering it casts itself is little more than a criminal oligarchy exerting pure authoritarian control over its citizens imposing massive deprivation, famine and human rights violations while maintaining the fourth largest standing army, nuclear weapons and active participating in global counterfeiting and human trafficking.
15 Rwanda experienced a much analyzed genocide in 1998 where a Tutsi invasion triggered a Hutu launched genocide that cumulatively killed over 800,000 civilians over three months. What is less understood is that Rwanda’s newly victorious Tutsi minority then spear headed an invasion of neighboring Zaire which toppled the Mobutu government, provoked the African World War which sucked in over 17 countries and left an estimated 5.6 million dead; followed by Rwanda’s exploitation of the genocide, Western guilt and strategic placement to profit off of the conflict mineral trade flowing out war ravaged DRC.
16 Palestine has never been recognized officially as a State but both the Fatah government’s corruption and Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel have facilitated the continued occupation of Palestine. 17 It is estimated that 5.5 million citizens of the former nation Zaire have perished horrifically since 1998.
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operation was critical to both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of Wahabi-Salafist Islamic militant ideology which would later in 2011 culminate in Arab Spring (bringing down the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria); ultimately resulting in the Islamic State (ISIS)’s control of vast swaths of Iraq and Syria. (Blum, 2003). Since most of these states collapse near the fault lines of hegemon power proxy struggle or near and around energy resource fields another term for the failed state wilderness is a killing field where those that don’t die of poverty will perish in war.
What is the Abyss
The Abyss is in essence what all development and progressive resistance to the callous greed of the oligarch collectives are attempting to avert; the total collapse of the world system with no alternative in place, disastrous climate change that results in famine and displacement and all-out war between Core powers like what occurred between 1914-1945. In essence the
Abyss can be likened to Peak Development; a point of core hyperdevelopment that overloads and overwhelms our social, economic and environmental thresholds to the point where irreversible trauma is inflicted upon the human & planetary condition (Adler, 2015). In Peak Development the governments of the core trigger any of three probably catastrophic events; all of which are likely if the World System continues on the current trajectory.
1. (Environmental) Disastrous, irreversible climate change proceeding until a 5 degree rise in global temperatures raising sea levels and triggering massive climate migrations, causing wide spread famine as a result of crop failure and exacerbate the periodically growing list of climate disasters.
2. (Economic) Peak Oil which we are expected to hit in 2020 levels off petroleum production paralyzing global trade and military function last, but first dramatically affecting the means in which we are supplied energy; which in turn leads to less power availability; which in turn limits internet connectivity. Peak Water which occurs in 2050 leads to new destructive conflicts over decreasing supplies. Wealth accumulation continues along the lines of Thomas Piketty’s analysis and the rise of an overtly elite class subsumes new levels of power and privilege. Critical divergence occurs with a micro-faction of the arch-oligarchic collectives gathering in secure citadels with a global degeneration of development reverting most of the human race to barbaric living conditions.
3. (Social) Multipolarity expands creating a more equalized power differential between the three primary core blocks. Proxy war heightens in the semi-periphery and periphery over resource scarcity. Inevitably all three of the core contender get sucked into a more direct confrontation which results in nuclear exchanges, genocides and democides.
The result of any of these catastrophic events being allowed to occur; permanent environmental damage, unmitigated oligarchic capital accumulation and or a more grisly and protracted series of World Wars will irrevocable trigger the degeneration of our species to sub-human conditions and inevitable extinction.
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BREIFING PART 2
What are Emergent Political, Economic and Social Issues?
• POLITICAL ISSUES
Because of incredible, unprecedented access to media and data on a global level via mobile phones and the internet; a wide range of global communities can coordinate their economic and political participation circumventing traditional, government controlled forums.
Democracy has been broadly exposed to be as prone to oligarchic control as authoritarian one party state (Winters, 2011). Civilians no longer have to rely on one or two corporate news sources to distil the events of the day. Ideological bankruptcy has caused widespread contempt and condemnation of political tendencies that have hardly ever reflected domestic or international conduct. While it has been said democracies don’t go to war with each other (because largely of intertwined financial systems); nothing has stopped them from going to war with their own populations or fueling war through a proxy or series of proxies.
The current political context is that history doesn’t repeat itself at all. It structurally evolves the world system with each major disturbance. Since the critical year of 1789 following the revolution in France and its parallel manifestations in the USA (1776), Haiti (1791), Latin America (1810), Europe (1848); a violent and expansive ideological confrontation began between proponents of [normative human rights] liberal or leftist and [realist authoritarian state sovereignty] monarchist, theocratic, authoritarian or fascist. This political battle was merely a rhetorical explanation of economic systems that by 1968 had established themselves rather evenly over half the world’s nations; command economy socialism, free market capitalism and theocratic amalgams. The World War from 1914 to 1945 had solidified USA as the Core Hegemon of the free market system. But that core status was thoroughly contested until the end of the Cold War(s)18 which went on from 1945 to 1989 resulting in the defeat of the Revolutionary Socialist USSR; the primary ideological and structural core contender. It has also resulted in a supra-national confrontation between various proxy and emerging powers whose oligarchic elites and revolutionaries declared themselves any number of political shades in the process. Nationified best in the form of the People’s Republic of China which became a Socialist nation in 1949, attempted Communism in 1967 and in 1978 made the shift from failed Communism into State Capitalism. Subsequently pulled 680 million humans out of poverty (UNDP, 2014) as well as enhanced semi-peripheral power like India, South Africa and Brazil.
China is the clearest contender for control of the global core (French, 2014). While it has long been described as an unlikely probability of some meaningful alliance to emerge between Russian Federation and the PRC; BRICS is making that more and more likely. Should they succeed in coordinating a development bank they would not be a far cry from better coordinating a military pact.
18 Both Immanuel Wallerstein and other historians agree the Cold War was a series of ongoing concurrent wars not a singular static period.
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• ECONOMIC
Trade has driven the World System since 1500 CE. Trade, Humanitarian Imperatives and Imperial Warfare have been used to justify subjugating vast segments of the human race to extract their labor for free [or inexpensively] as well as to bring to the Global Core goods unavailable to the upper middle classes and elites of those nations. After the World Wars19 the Bretton Woods Institutions notably the World Bank erected a vast financial architecture that would craft dependency in deep and intrinsic ways. Preferential access into semi-peripheral and peripheral nations for Core firms; heavy loans and debt; literal structural adjustment of economic systems and of course flows of raw materials and near slave labor of the export processing zones.
The current economic context is that as Core power dominance is slowly re-aligning axis from the USA to the People’s Republic of China. In all nations regardless of development, regardless of world system supply placement’ capitalism have triumphed as the dominant economic order. The BRIC economic alliance and development bank is as of 2014 the only counterbalance to the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank/ IMF). This Multipolarity will simply be a far more sophisticated hegemony organized by China and implemented via regional hegemons Brazil, South Africa, India and the Russian Federation. This alliance represents nearly 3 billion people, a combined GDP of US 16.039 trillion, and 18% of the global economy (French, 2014).
In a very limited reconsolidation window there is a unique possibility of severing the control lines of dependency, re aligning local economies to allow greater indigenous planning and utilizing development as means to break dependency from Europe and the USA, without realigning with China and BRICS.
This idea of self-reliance cannot take the form of inefficient command economies but instead rely heavily on shared economy modals. The informal sectors that manage resource exchanges while circumventing taxes. The tax base of most countries excluding the advanced welfare states is a means of extracting wealth from citizens without compensating them adequately in social services or political representation. An economic re-alignment behind the BRICS Bank and China will not mean a more just and equitable world. China and Russia have never shown moral scruples about arming human rights violators. India manages a state where 74% of the population is living below $1 a day and 24.9% of Dalits and tribal minorities are exploited as fourth class citizens. Brazil and South Africa both struggle from deep ethnic divides, rampant corrupt practices and meaningless populist sloganeering. What is crucial in the economic context is to divest as much tax base from governments as possible and block trade policies which take resources out of peripheral nations fare below value. Or reduce peripheral and semi-peripheral populations to race to the bottom wage slaves turning out consumer goods for the North West and soon China.
• SOCIO-CULTRUAL
The socio-cultural context is that a considerable majority of the human race has not ever left its nation of birth, but a mass exodus has begun away from the violence prone periphery (Collier, 2013). Macro-level political and economic systems mean very little in the face of the
19 Wallerstein argues in his Analysis that it is inconsistent to separate World I and World War II into separate events because they involved the same core belligerents triggering the worldwide warfare for Core Control transfer from England to either Germany or the USA.
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daily battle for survival that half of humanity is facing, yet the economic and the political drivers shape every single regional conflict now ongoing. It is the common person not the economist or ideologue that suffers under the mounting global attrition. The basis of false consciousness is that imagined identity and nationalism subsume human solidarity. Profoundly different from the issue of class consciousness is human solidarity founded on conscious thinking. Because of incredible deprivation and imposed scarcity; race, religion and gender become key instruments the local Oligarchic Collective uses to impose meaning on socio-cultural bonds. Male supremacy over women. Ethnic pride and power over ethnic other. The use of unseen, imaginary deities based on written testaments transcribed at times before objective data was possible encouraging the murder and subjugation of whole other groups of non-believers20.
Because most of humanity is physically fighting to survive, breaking down these imagined identities has been highly difficult and outside major cities it is uncommon to have poly-ethnic communities living in peace. However, rapid urbanization and climate migrations will increasingly thrust new groups into greater proximity. This will not necessarily result in the aggressive coexistences of places like New York or London, each secured by a small armies worth of police and precarious at best.
It is integral though to any successful element of resistance to the intended re-alignment to foster deeper bonds of human to human solidarity thus coupling efforts of development to those of resistance. As can been seen in Russia, China and India; an elite ethnic configuration has in each country clearly denoted the extent of privileges based on race and ethnicity. The Han in China, the Slavs in Russia and the Brahman Caste in India.
ACTORS
United States of America (U.S.A.)
Population: 319.2 million people
Primary Strategic Alliance: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.) Active US Direct interventions: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria. US Total Economic & Military Assistance: $50.6 Billion, FY 2013.
US Proxy Conflicts: Israel (directed against & Iran), Saudi Arabia (directed against Iran), Colombia (directed against Cuba & leftist insurgency ELN & FARC-EP), South Korea (directed against PRC); numerous via War on Terror.
US Sanctions/ Embargo: North Korea, Syria, Russian Federation, Iran & Cuba21.
20 Certainly tendencies within Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are by the far the most aggressive. 21 Lifted by President Obama on 16 December, 2014.
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Primary US development & military aid recipients (FY 2012 highest to lowest): Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Haiti, Palestine, South Sudan, Russia, Somalia, Tanzania, Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Mozambique, Ukraine, Yemen, Bangladesh and Liberia.
Strategic Allies: England & Israel.
Primary Clients: Israel, Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, Colombia.
Russian Federation (RF)
Population: 144 million people
Primary Strategic Alliances: Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Active Russian Direct Interventions: Ukraine & Georgia.
Russian Proxy Conflicts: Syria (against Israel& Saudi Arabia), Eastern Ukraine (against EU), South Ossetia (against Georgia)
Russian Sanctions/ Embargo: none.
Primary Russian development & military aid recipients: Cuba, Syria, Belarus, Turkmenistan, other former Soviet states.
Primary Clients: Armenia, Belarus, Transnistria, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan, Serbia and Syria.
People’s Republic of China (PRC)
Population: 1.36 Billion
Primary Strategic Alliance: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)/ Shanghai Pact (SP) Total Economic & Military Assistance: $ 189.3 billion FY 2011, (RAND estimate) in 93 different countries.
Chinese Direct Interventions: [ None openly, regular clashes with neighbors over South China Sea]
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Chinese Proxy Conflicts: none openly.
Current Chinese development & military aid recipients: Pakistan, Myanmar, North Korea & 93 countries predominantly in Latin America & Africa.
Primary Strategic Allies: Pakistan, Russia & India
Primary Clients: North Korea & Myanmar.
Outliers
Cuba: A former Russian client turned into a Medical Superpower now has over 38,000 MDs working in its International Medical Brigades with comparable numbers of teachers, nurses and construction workers on infrastructure projects. Cuba alongside Venezuela are attempting to build ALBA as a counter weight to the hegemony of the three blocks.
Iran: Is beholden to no great power’s full influence though it is a nominal ally of RF and PRC. It is the only Shi’a Majority Shari’ah State. It is exporting revolutionary violence systematically throughout the Shi’a world particularly Bahrain and Lebanon. It has a long view of history and remembers clearly the US-English Coup against Mosaddeq, US-Israeli support for the Shah and US support for Iraq during the grisly Iran-Iraq War. It trusts none of the three power blocs but is clearly willing to sell oil to Russia and China. Iran has the most potential to disrupt or collaborate with the upcoming core shift and is integral to the Middle East’s strategic dimensions; it contains Syria, props up the Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi states; and is the only regional force besides Israel that can stand up to ISIS (Baer, 2008)(Nasr, 2007).
India: Alongside China as a possible future Core Contender, India is far more unstable. 74% of its population lives belie $1.25 a day. Over 16% of its population is classified as Dalit untouchable and marginalized & exploited. It has a growing Maoist insurgency to its Center East and an ongoing Islamist Insurgency to its North West fueled by Kashmiri occupation and its natural antagonist Pakistan. India will likely work closely with China, but it is the most serious of the economic and demographic contenders besides those listed.
CAUSES
• What are the structural causes of conflict?
The structural cause of the conflict as stated in oligarchic greed and their influence upon political leadership to expand foreign markets for goods/ resources; and dominate the weaker powers of the semi-periphery and periphery. Nominally each Core power seeks to protect and enrich the middle classes and upper classes of their respective nations. Nominally each seeks to exert maximal leverage over the rest of the global populace to adopt its stated ideology, state ideology. To that end these is only a finite amount of resources to fuel industrialization and expansion. Natural resource completion is only a factor, albeit an important one. Market expansion allows stronger powers to off load goods upon weaker ones. While the World Bank has held an almost undisputed monopoly on lending to peripheral and semi-peripheral nations BRICS Bank will make a far less invasive lending base available, certainly less interested in the trappings of human rights and democracy.
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Therefore structural competition is also about banking. Who can lend the money the developing world needs to industrialize effectively.
A third structural source is arms sales. The resources such as fossil fuels, natural gas, extractive metals, coal and soon water might be a driver. As is the ability to loan the billions the developing world requires without debt to the North West. Arms sales however are drivers for those oligarchs with shares and control of the arms industries which sell to every developing nation to fuel the relentless conflicts throughout the world.
A fourth structural cause is inequality. As Thomas Piketty has illustrated in his work Capital in the 21st Century; the rich are getting much richer. Salary wealth is out pacing inheritance. Conspicuous consumption and corrupt practices have fueled demonstrations and uprising across the world. The internet now connects people like never for and the Arab Spring has emboldened students, unions and radicals all over the world to confront their state systems. It has not ended well so far. The government of Tunisia merely tinkered with the constitution. The US backed Egyptian dictator Mubarak was toppled, but shortly after a coup brought the military back to power in Egypt. The Libyan people with Western backing through airstrikes toppled and executed Kaddafi and plunged Libya into anarchy, nothing functioning well except besides the oil wells. Protests in the United States were suppressed. In Brazil and Bulgaria coopted. Yemen has become a low intensity civil war. Protests in Ukraine over the former President Yanukovych’s subservience to the Russian Federation have devolved into a Separatist war in the three eastern states and the Russian annexation of the Crimea. Non-violent protests in Syria have erupted into nearly 3 years of civil war with over 202,354-282,354 dead (December 2014 SOHR estimate) and the emergence in July of 2014 of the Islamic State which as conquered 1/3 of Syria, 1/3 of Iraq and has declared an Islamic Caliphate and is now just twenty miles from Baghdad, holding back largely because of the Shi’a Militias backed by Iran (Nasr, 2006). In newly independent South Sudan the US backed embattled Salva Kir government is fighting rival ethnic militias and waging low intensity war with the Bashir government of the north fully armed with Chinese bought weapons and advisors.
The fighting now present in all of these struggles is based on similar lists of grievances, but fueled by very different alignments of state interests. The PRC has refrained from being involved overtly in any of the above conflicts, the US and PRC have sold arms and clandestinely supported via their intelligence communities the client of choice in each conflict. Syria has been a Russian client since X; Russian arms shipments have firmly buttressed the Bashar Assad regime even after he used chemical weapons against his people.
Structurally we can dedact the world system in 2015 to the following six primary structural causes:
1. Legislative Capture & Oligarchic Control
2. Resource & Market Competition
3. Imposed Scarcity
4. Control of Economic Development Banks
5. Arms Proliferation
6. Rampant multilateral Human Rights violations
7. Rapidly growing inequality
• What issues can be considered as proximate causes of conflict?
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While it is highly unlikely any of the nuclear armed super powers or core contenders will engage in direct warfare, each has Bar Lev line that will unnegotiable trigger another World War. Because no power is irrational, and each is very familiar with the losses that would result in such a confrontation; each will continue to fight each other via proxy and intelligence operations. These Bar Lev lines are inflexible, however proxy war in the resource axis will intensify. Here is a summary of the proximate cause of conflict for each bloc.
USA-EU: The Bar Lev line for the US is the most flexible. After the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan the American people are war adverse. Their adversity is flexible. Large scale terror attacks on US soil are certain to trigger counter strikes and imperial reprisal. The policy course of the period since 2001 is all most a play book reconstruction of war plans drafted by the Project for a New American Century. It called for aggressive American action abroad after a “Pearl Harbor type event” and for conquest of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and assertive action abroad to safe guard the Jewish Colony Israel. Israel has been completely reliant on US aid since 1976 and could not maintain its sophisticated army and nuclear arsenal without such aid. Israel has long provided the US with sophisticated weapons and communications systems, as well as valuable intelligence. The Bar Lev line for the US is existential threats to Israel, terror attacks on US soil above 100 casualties and any invasion of Europe. The US-EU is largely underinvested in Africa and is unconcerned what transpires there. It’s investment in South Sudan is a foil to China who’s ally Sudan supplies it with oil. It’s investment in Rwanda is in relation to Rwanda’s regional intelligence and its role as an export point for critical minerals coming out of the DRC conflict. The USA-EU has invested a good deal of money in Colombia not falling to its Marxist rebels the ELN & FARC-EP. It has largely succeeded in supporting the right wing Colombian government, making Colombia the primary US ally in all of Latin America. While the CIA did everything in its power to halt the rise of Latin American Socialism through coup, right wing paramilitaries, torture and assignation of leadership (Blum, CITE)(Silva, 2011). This hasn’t done much to actually stop the spread of left wing ideology. The US is a fading imperial core power and it is propping up a European elite that doesn’t have the population or the military strength to defend itself.
What Conflict Prone/ Affected Areas can be situated within the Context?
Following the World Wars even the staunchest hawks of NATO (US-EU) and the Warsaw Pact sought to avoid direct confrontation between superpowers understanding that nuclear weapons would result in a zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. Therefore warfare beyond espionage would focus on proxy conflict. The metathesis of the Cold War strategy into the modern framework of international relations still adheres to basic set of rules:
a) Avoidance of any direct military confrontation with another power block, particularly those with weapons of mass destruction.
b) Prevention of semi-peripheral powers from acquiring nuclear weapons or other technology to prevent interdiction in their affairs by core powers.
c) Propagation of continuous violence at the peripheral level via proxy.
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The economic realignment of China in 1978 and Russia in 1989 have not affected this conflict variable. The misunderestimation of ethnic and identity and the sheer level of extreme poverty found in the peripheral nations have resulted in the so-called New Wars; the civil conflicts unleashed since the Cold War ended. But these so-called low-intensity conflicts that are spreading so explosively are still fueled by economic prerogatives of the contested core.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the predominant global military alliance but recent discussions in Dushanbe in June of 2014 to merge the Collective Security Treaty Organization22 with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization/ Shanghai Pact23 an alliance which at its core will unite the military responses of Russian Federation, PRC and tentatively Iran and India.
History of Conflict
The following conflicts listed on International Alert & UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database have been grouped around their continental geography, resource supply and patron axis. Some state that there are 35 ongoing conflicts. We have tabled up a minimum total of 64 major sub-state conflicts. Surely many are under-covered or overlapping. Each warrants a rigorous examination of drivers, spoilers, causes, grievances and psycho-social motivations, and
22 Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—signed the Collective Security Treaty. Three other post- Soviet states—Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Georgia—signed the next year and the treaty took effect in 1994. Five years later, six of the nine—all but Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan—agreed to renew the treaty for five more years, and in 2002 those six formally agreed to create the Collective Security Treaty Organization as a military alliance. Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO in 2005 but withdrew in 2012.
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such have been conducted at length. What this micro-briefing will seek to demonstrate is that each is a result of Core and Core contender planning. Examining each we note that while triggered by basic human rights violations each conflict expanded most dramatically when Core support or intervention occurred. This is not to suggest none of these conflicts could not have occurred in isolation based on grievances present; they could not have however resulted in such massive loss of life and functional infrastructure.
Where a causality chain is present the conflicts have been linked into a Conflict Axis.
North America & Europe
The War on Socialism [Red Terror & Cold Wars]: During the 20th century, peaking in the 1950s-1980s anti-Socialist hysteria reached a high pitch in the United States. Politicians, particularly Nixon and Reagan utilized the US Military and CIA in previously unprecedented destabilizations of foreign governments thought to be Socialist, or Socialist leaning. Why this is relevant in 2015 where all but 4 Communist governments remain in power (China, Vietnam, Laos & Cuba); is that to achieve that political result the US gave aid to some of the most unsavory, human rights violating regimes throughout the world appearing flatly hypercritical as a proponent of democracy. And fostering a multi-generational hatred for the USA that would result in the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.
War on Terror [Wahabi-Salafist Islamic Jihad]: It is actually impossible to declare war on a tactic of war, but in 2001 this is exactly what then President George Bush, Jr. and his Neoconservative cadre of advisors did as they unleashed a global war against Wahabi-Salafist Jihadists. This War has expanded to the full invasion and occupations and state collapse of Afghanistan & Iraq resulted in x casualties and resulted in widespread domestic surveillance under PATRIOT ACT 1 & 2. Allegations of widespread use of torture and drone strikes against civilians have stoked anti-American sentiment across the world.
War on Drugs, Crime & Illegal Immigration [Minorities in the USA ]: The underlying grievance is that throughout the rise of the US Empire Native Indigenous American Indians, African Americans, People of Color and newly arrived Immigrants have all been shut out of patronage networks and lack basic social services granted to the Euro-American majority. Undocumented immigrants have been periodically exploited for cheap labor as well as rounded up and deported. Various pretexts of terrorism, criminal justice, policing, drugs and human trafficking have all been used to militarize the police force in America. While all of the roughly three dozen low-casualty domestic terror attacks were home grown operations; none appear to have been financed or directed by foreign operatives with the exception of the highly irregular 2013 Boston Bombing Recently. Against the back drop of mass incarceration, NSA mass surveillance and the alleged killing of a person of color by police violence every 72 hours; a new civil rights movement has catalyzed in the months after the shooting of Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown (cite).
Minorities in European Union: In the capitals and cities of the Old Empire the populations are aging and birth rates are declining. Debt crises and the War on Terror have heightened tensions against Muslim minorities from Turkey and North Africa, as well as to the Roma Gypsy population. Terror attacks in London, Madrid and Paris have heightened xenophobia against
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Muslim communities as have regular riots in the suburbs of Paris over police violence against North Africans.
Eastern Europe & Central Asia
Russia (North Caucasus Insurgency): Since 1994 Russia has been fighting a protracted to put down separatists movements in the Caucuses. There have been two atrocious wars in Chechnya and a range of rebel incursions and terror attacks post-2000 throughout the Russian Federation including the grisly school Siege at Beslan and the Nord Theatre (insert dates). The insurgency has been largely neutralized
Russia & Moldova (1992): Since its independence from the Soviet Union, the Russian military has held onto a defacto independent strip of Eastern Moldova called Transnistria running along the Eastern bank of the Dniester River.
Russia, Armenia & Azerbaijan (1993): The Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast: a defacto, mostly unrecognized independent state within a region which is majority Armenian & land locked inside Azerbaijan has been a long running low intensity war that the RF has generally backed Armenia militarily which is Orthodox Christian like itself although attempted mediation on behalf of both former Soviets.
Russia & Georgia (2008): Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and occupied two States; South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia continues to occupy both states which are nominally ‘independent’ but now for all intents an purposes annexed to the Russian Federation.
Russia & Ukraine (2014): After pro-western demonstrations and a national uprising toppled the pro-Moscow regime Russian Special Forces and military have sense annexed Crimea; and set up separatist governments in Ukraine’s three Eastern provinces.
Asia & Pacific
PRC-Hong Kong: Hong Kong will remain fiscally tied to the North Western economic order until 2047. That has not stopped it from being the new epicenter of Pro-Democracy, Arab Spring-Occupy Wall Street tactics which have surged since September of 2014. The PRC must maintain a tight grip over this global economic mega-city in such a way that it can suppress the protests without hurting economic activity or creating Martyrs.
PRC-Tibet-Uighurs: The PRC has been waging a rather brutal campaign of repression to secure it two Western provinces. The Tibetan Buddhists have largely embraced exile, immolation, social media, passive resistance and leader worship of the Dali Lama. The Muslim Uighurs have declared a Separatist Jihad and been actively exchanging violence with the Chinese State. Both provinces which make up more than 2/5 of PRC territory also contain energy reserves the Core Contender will need to sustain growth. The Tibetans and the Uyghurs are two of several hundred ethnic minorities in the PRC; they are the two most likely to cause protracted difficulty in differing tactical capacities for the Han dominated Chinese state.
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PRC & Taiwan: US Client and home to the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang; the defeated politico-military party which retreated to the island in 1949. Over 2 Million defeated soldiers, sailors, intellectuals and business elites fled there from the mainland advance of Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolutionary Armed forces. They took with them most of China’s gold and foreign currency reserves (Dunbabin, 2008).
PRC & Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos: PRC helped facilitate the 1975 American defeat in Vietnam but now regularly clashes with communist leaderships in Vietnam and Laos which are wary of the explosive growth of their longtime patron. Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia from 1978-1989 removing the ultra-violent, democidal regime of Khmer Rouge; a then Chinese proxy which killed over a million of its own citizens. China and Vietnam fought a War in 1979; the third Indochina War. Currently all three of these nations fall into the Chinese sphere.
PRC& Nepal: China has quietly aided the Maoist guerrillas which after a lengthy war are taking part in the newly allowed elections and hold 239 of 575 seats in the Nepalese Constituent Assembly (largest party). This has been the PRC’s intelligence and supply line to supply Indian Maoists with weapons and support via proxy.
PRC & Myanmar (Burma): Due to internal Buddhist pressures, ethnic strife, 2008 Cyclone Nargis which may have killed upwards of 200,000 Burmese; the highly isolationist Chinese backed military Junta collapsed and elections were held in 2010. The Union for Solidarity & Development (liked to the Military and China) ruled until 2014 when power supposedly changed top the National League for Democracy. Civil Wars have long raged in Burma; particularly the Kachin & Rohingya tribes against the various governments. As well as the Shan, Lahu and Karen ethnic groups. Two of the three biggest parties (in opposition) are funded by the military. Both China and India have been heavily invested in the Myanmar energy sector before the advent of ‘democracy’.
PRC & Bangladesh: The Bangladeshi oligarchy maintains a precarious balancing act between India, China and the US companies it manufactures and assembles textiles for. Bangladesh is highly strategic leverage point for China on India because when occupied it can easily sever India into two zones. Bangladesh also deploys more UN Peacekeepers than any other nation and while supposedly non-aligned is often ideologically in the Socialist camp.
North & South Korea: In 1950 the US pulled its war allies into a direct confrontation with the PRC in the Korea Peninsula; by 1953 USSR, China and the North Koreas had lost an estimated 367,283-750,282 soldiers; the US lead international coalition had lost 178,426 soldiers and over
2.5 million Korean civilians were slaughtered. North Korea under PRC protection built the 4th largest army on earth and 29,000 US troops are still stationed along the 38th Parallel line. The North is a nuclear armed failed state that cannot feed its own people without Chinese support. The South is vibrant developed nation that is an integral US ally.
India-Kashmir-Pakistan: India has occupied Muslim majority Kashmir since 1948 and despite innumerous rounds of overt & covert war with Pakistan; it remains a veritable breeding ground for Islamist insurgency directed against India from the North West.
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India-Naxalites (Communist Party of India); in 2004 a coalition of Maoist and Communist groups emerged in Central India; they now effectively control most of Central & Eastern India’s red corridor, the poorest most densely populated area of the country. The insurgency is regarded by the Indian government as its greatest existential threat (after the Pakistani ISI & the Kashmir rebel groups); the Naxalites are operating in an estimated 77-83 districts across 10 Indian states with an estimated resistance army of 47,000 volunteer fighters and are supply networked to the Nepalese Maoists & Chinese intelligence services.
Afghanistan: Has largely been a full blown war zone under British imperial rule, Russian communist occupation, War Lord Feudalism, Taliban Sharia and now a bloody US military occupation. This ungovernable country appears to have its insurgency fed via Pakistan’s intelligence service the ISI.
Pakistan: There is something truly alarming about a nuclear armed, terrorist training ground, with a sophisticated intelligence service, with war time excesses against India and Bangladesh that amount to genocide; fully run by its military; a major recipient of US aid money; but strategically aligned to PRC overtly. China is Pakistan’s largest supplier of weapons and third largest trading partner. The ISI aids China in combatting its internal Tibetan, Taiwanese and Uyghur threats. There is a free trade agreement between the two countries.
Latin America & Caribbean
Latin America is a highly important theatre of this core shift because it is a comparatively stable group of nations with middle income growth, far fewer active insurgencies yet with growing Socialist power in almost all countries. The Mexican-Cartel Wars are getting increasingly bloody along the traffic routes into the USA. The Honduran-Cartel Wars are the bloodiest and Honduras may have the highest non-political conflict related homicide rate on earth. US-Venezuela antagonisms are growing and sanctions may be immanent. Venezuela is Cuba’s energy supplier and life line. The Colombian Civil War may be winding down with renewed peace mediation talks in Havana. Brazil has emerged as the regional power and will be the BRICS continental player. ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America) launched in 2004; is the Venezuelan & Cuban led alliance between Antigua & Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines and Saint Lucia with Suriname & Haiti pending entry and with Syria & Iran as observers. Honduras was dissuaded by the US from joining the emerging bloc bilateral trade deals are conducted in a cyber-currency known as the SUCRE. NAFTA, ALBA and BRICS will all be competing for Latin American hearts, minds, dollars and Oligarch support.
The government of Nicaragua has just authorized the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND Group) to build a “new Panama canal” that will be in direct completion with the US controlled Panama Canal in just five years (2020). The US can expect a great deal of competition in a region already very hostile to it.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Both RF and USA, because of cultural legacies of racism have limited military and strategic ties with African nations. Russian Federation is seen more favorably due to its Cold War support of anti-colonial Independence movements. PRC is the dominant power.
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The PRC & Africa generally have seen unprecedented growth in development aid and trade. China is involved in the economic affairs of virtually every country on the continent. In Sudan the Chinese military support has led to the genocides in Darfur, Khordofan & South Sudan. Ethiopia has moved from a USSR client to after its war with Eritrea; a current US client. Somalia, a former USSR client has been without a government since 1992; Puntland & Somaliland are defacto independent states. Somali piracy is on the rise throughout the shipping lanes of the African horn. Central African Republic has devolved in Christian-Muslim ethnic warfare. Endemic corruption is exacerbating the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamist insurgency.
South Africa has been tapped by BRICS to be the focal point of development. USA Rwandan relations enable the protracted genocide that has killed up to 6 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo; fuel by extractive metals being moved out of Rwanda on the black market (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002).
Middle East & North Africa
Israel & Palestine though getting a great deal of attention is minor conflict which exacerbates all regional tensions, but doesn’t cause them. The more serious antagonism is a Sunni-Shi’a one between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Jordan is a pliant US client and military staging area alongside Israel. It is 74% Palestinian and would collapse quickly without US and Israeli intelligence and aid. Libya has completely unraveled into low intensity civil war. Egypt, another unusual US client has broken the back of its secular revolution and Islamist electoral victories and returned to defacto military rule and full US dependency. The Muslim Brotherhood and local opposition has by no means been destroyed. In Lebanon Iranian proxy Hezbollah governs much of the country and has been instrumental in the invasion of Syria to shore up the Assad regime. Bahrain with its Shi’a majority is well within Iranian influence and its Sunni leadership will eventually crumble. Iraq for all intents and purposes is a proto-Kurdish para state, a Shi’a Arab adjunct to Iran and an ISIS control zone. Saudi Arabia the birth place of virulent Wahabi-Salafist, fundamentalist Islam is using its US backer to protect it from Iran while spreading that money across the region to Jihadists. United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman surely wish they could build higher walls and sit things out. Yemen is amid civil war, Syria as stated has gone from being a multi-ethnic, developed Russian client state to a civil war zone with over one hundred factions fighting. Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons as leverage but also a pragmatic safe guard from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Turkey continues to be a staging point for Syrian opposition to Assad and Kurdish revolutionary nationalism.
What Triggers Could Contribute to the Outbreak/ Further Escalation of Conflict?
Major Flashpoints:
Israel Palestine; is a demographic, nuclear armed time bomb. Arab Israeli Palestinians now make up over 20% of the total Israeli population and that number is growing. Regardless of outcomes of Statehood for the West Bank of the ongoing Hamas-IDF battles in Gaza; time is running out on the Jewish state by birthrates. Over the next fifty years the Jewish Colony will get uncomfortably authoritarian as they attempt to hold the apartheid. This will place a pressure upon the American Jewry to lean harder to protect Israel despite its mutation into a racial
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apartheid regime oppressive and bankrupt; neither fully Jewish nor able to sustain the mythology of Post-Holocaust impunity (Chompsky, 1983)(Blumenthal, 2013).
Syria; Syria is Russia’s Cuba of the Middle East one of its longest regional allies. Syria supplies Russia with its only Mediterranean port and naval base. It is also a long running recipient of Russian aid and weapons. Although the Assad government has control over only 1/3 of Syria. There is no way the RF will let that regime fall. In the meantime Syria and Iraq will escalate as multi-state proxy battlefield and dozens of combatant groupings. RF will continue to arm Assad’s government; Iran will continue to support its ally Assad via Hezbollah and the IRGC; Qatar and Saudi Arabia will back various constellations of Sunni Militants; the US and Israel will back the Kurds and Turkey will back the Syrian Free Army. This will be a quagmire that continues for some time Lebanon in the 1980’s x ten.
Ukraine; the Russian Federation is interested in restoring as much of the USSR territory under its hegemony as it can. It sees piecemeal engagements as a means to retake territory; especially warm water port or resource rich territory. As with Syria, the Russian Federation will not lose warm water ports. It is far easier to rely on the 20 million Russians abroad for intelligence and operational support than to realistically think the world will accept these conquests. However, while RF may succeed in getting defacto control of Crimean and the three eastern provinces; a combination of sanctions and general antagonism will drive RF into closer collaboration with the PRC.
ISIS & Iraq; is now effectively three para states. Kurdish North autonomous and under siege from ISIS. The Shi’a majority region directly collaborating with Iran. And the Sunni Triangle now largely under the control of ISIS. Iraq and Syria will effectively cease to be states as warlords, Jihadists and proxy armies’ battle for control of the oil. If Baghdad falls the following scenarios are likely:
1. Give ISIS claim Statehood
2. Trigger previously unimagined sectarian warfare in the Islamic world.
3. Give ISIS theocratic legitimacy as a Caliphate.
4. Trigger a Sunni Jihadist convergence around its Wahabi-Salafist World view 5. Everything between Israel, Kurdistan and Iran will fall shortly after24.
Taiwan; any assault on Taiwan would likely trigger a direct US PRC confrontation. It is however an integral objective of the PRC to recapture the island and they believe they can do so in 48 hours. This assault would have to take place while the USA was occupied with a conflict which ties down its navy. Or would be negotiated beforehand.
North-South Korea; the regime in North Korea is a Chinese client. But it is reckless and heavily armed. It fails at even the most basic dietary needs of its population. It has recently acquired nuclear weapons and acted erratically amid its third dynasty change. M53ost problematic is that it is the precise fault line where the USA and PRC fought a war between 1950-1953. 48,000 troops so close to China is an ongoing irritation.
24 These are the general observations of political scientist Thomas Poole
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Shi’a Revival: The central hypothesis of political theorist Vali Nasr is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps will build up Hezbollah type para state organizations in the Shi’a communities of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Afghnistan and will successfully merge Bahrain and 1/3 of Iraq into a larger Shi’a Islamic State. Iran will develop a nuclear weapon deterrent to the core powers and trigger a larger, more organized Islamic revival to match the three Blocks already formed. It will defeat its regional nemesis Saudi Arabia and come to terms of detente with US backed Israel, largely because both will possess nuclear weapons and have equal antipathy for ISIS. Sunni Jihadist ideology will slowly lose ground as it has been a bankrupt tactical failure and a Shi’a Revival will occur in Islam (Nasr, 2006).
African Spring: as unlikely as it sounds there is a rumbling from the continent that the Chinese will trigger with their investments and speculations. African spring may be several decades away but when it comes it will serve to cut every outsider off from the resources in the continent. Likely trigger locations for African Spring are incredibly hard to predict since most of Africa is already caught in a combination of conflict and poverty traps not leaving much room for non violent opposition anti-oligarch movements to form. However, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia & Ethiopia would be good bets as they have larger more educated Middle classes.
What New Factors Contribute to Prolong the Conflict Dynamics?
The United Nations: While it may appear that the United Nations is an incredible outlet for ongoing negotiations towards human rights and global governance; it is in fact an enormous charade. While there are certain benefits to having several alternative channels open for alternative track negotiations; the UN, its development mechanisms as well as its Peacekeeping forces are a mockery of the values it claims to be upholding. All three Power Blocks hold veto votes as Permanent members of the Security Council; China, Russia, and the Great Powers of the World Wars USA, United Kingdom and France. 10 non-permanent members are hardly any kind of counterbalance. Peacekeeping missions in Haiti25 Kuwait, Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the DRC can only be described in highly nonacademic terms as ‘a series of fubar shit shows.’
Elite Lobbies: A fundamental problem is access. The Oligarchs via their wealth have incredible access to politicians and policy manufacturing. As PRC rises it will avoid being sucked into major wars but remains by far the most stable Oligarical Collective with princeling blood networks founded on the mass understanding the eight immortals and their policies brought incredible progress to China. China is also a one party Communist state that values meritocracy and efficiency despite numerous allegations of inside dealing and corrupt practice. The Oligarchic Collective in the USA is less stable than China, but more than capable of buying off the politicians they need to keep things in their favor. The Russian Oligarchy is unstable but ruthless and access to United Russia Party is not as certain as the American oligarch’s ability to purchase Republicans and Democrats. Periodically the Russian inner Oligarical circle those most
25 Haiti is the only UN Peacekeeping Mission in place without any formal ceasefire in place. It is now widely understood that the Nepalese contingent of the MINUSTAH UN Peacekeeping operation introduced Cholera to the Republic of Haiti.
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tied to the old guard KGB network will kill or imprison and Oligarch previously thought to be untouchable. The European oligarchy will be most vulnerable. China will encroach on numerous post-colonial African holdings, its influence will wade as its population ages, its socialist benefits are lost to increased austerity and USA becomes less willing to engage on its behalf. Expect Fortress Europe and bunker mentality that will involve drafting or recruiting foreign legions to do its dirty work.
The Russian Reclamation: The RF will continue to go after countries from the former USSR leaning towards the West to restore what it believes to be its sphere. It will not be able to re exert power over Poland, Lithuanian, Estonia, and Latvia but gradually via FSB intelligence, Special Forces operations, and interventions on behalf of its ethnic diaspora; or via proxy it will restore its USSR era hegemonic sphere for similar reasons that China will annex Taiwan. Access to warm water ports, historic fear of devastating Eastern (Mongol), Western (French & German) and Southern (Tartar) and demographic dispersion propel Russian foreign policy, not ideology.
The Chinese Expansion: The PRC will act recklessly. It understands America is in decline and understands Russia’s economic disarray and lack of cohesive political identity. Post 1978 the first phase was internal; uplifting 680 million of its own citizens and reestablishing it’s oligarchy of princelings. The second stage was investment in Africa where over 45% of its foreign aid goes. The third stage is BRICS; leveraging a major economic power on each continent (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) to break the monopoly of the World Bank/ IMF. The fourth stage will be to assert financial hegemony in Asia & the Pacific. The fifth stage will be to annex Taiwan and humiliate Japan concurrently or in stages. Make no mistake that the Chinese Political elites will wait until there is no way the US can intervene militarily or with sanctions, but the Chinese are running a dangerous long game that views Taiwan and Japan as enduring humiliations that will be dealt with in time. Unless the USA is awash in domestic crisis, civil war or simply exhausted as world power the PRC will not risk striking at two integral US allies in the Asia/ Pacific region.
The Second American Civil War: There will be another civil war in the United States prior to the physical expansion of the PRC into other Asian countries. It will result in the disintegration of the union into Northeastern, Western, Texan, Mormon, Southern and Middle American states
which will devolve the USA into something between Yugoslavia’s collapse and the USSR’s. The chain reaction of such a civil war will be rapid Chinese conquest and annexation of Hong Kong, Singapore Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Whatever is left of the country after the Second American Civil war will be isolationist. Europe will be wide open to RF expansion. The Global Core will switch to Beijing.
Energy Demands: While all three core contenders have vast energy reserves, industrialization, urbanization and continued modernization and fueling sophisticated armies; USA, RF, and PRC control require a level of energy supply that can only maintained with outward expansion to secure energy fields. That has been a driver of conflict since the World Wars. As we know there is a finite amount of fossil fuels and all of the developing world relies heavily upon them for basic matters of maintain developed world standards of living such as 24 hour electricity, cars and nearly every aspect of the high tech society. While Peak Oil might be 2020 or 2050 or further; energy resources; oil and natural gas in particular will propel conflict. As violence in the
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Middle East escalates the USA will rely more on fracking and shale; Russia (largest energy exporter and reserves on earth) will push further to exploit Siberian field and sell to rising core contender China; driving Europe to be more nuclear dependent. This spells a more isolationist USA and closer economic co-dependency between PRC and RF.
Water Demands & Climates Refugees: Peak Water is theory that by 2025 we will be unable to meet the clean water demands of the earth’s population due to structural supply configurations (Palaniappan, 2008). This will result in wars for water similar to the current wars for extractive energy. This will be less problematic for Russia; a major beneficiary of global warming trends alongside Canada; large swaths of barely habitable tundra will become farmland. This will be a huge issue for the developing world triggering climate migrations of unprecended scale particularly towards Australia and Europe. The net result of the Climate Refugee scenario will be boarder defenses in Europe similar to what exists between Israel and Palestine. By 2050 there will be literal citadel security states throughout what we call the Global North. PRC, USA and RF will absorb some of small percentage these refugees but not to any extent that will alter fundamentally core ethnic demographics.
Drones: Before long PRC and USA will have the capacity to operate mechanized drone infantries when projecting power abroad. Few powers will have this ability but it will be integral to Chinese policing of its African holdings. The PRC will avoid direct military confrontations by any means necessary except in any scenario of US-EU weakness to capture Taiwan. Drones remove a great deal of political pressure of war making. The Chinese ability to use them effectively will be an element of Chinese Neo-Colonialism. The USA will step up drones of all kinds because of how sensitive the US population is to protracted wars. If you are uncomfortable with the volume of drone strikes currently occurring; imagine tanks without drivers.
State Failure: State collapse will rapidly proceed in the Middle East followed by Africa. The New War phenomenon of protracted irregular, semi-or-overtly criminally connected ethnic purging will expand in vile new directions particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Entities such as ISIS will emerge and hold new amorphous territories.
What Factors can contribute to peace?
Aging & Mixing Population: The European World population is greying as are the ethnic majority populations of Russia and Japan. Developed world populations simply have less children. The short life span in Russian Federation for men is comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa. The Russian State is having to provide large financial incentives to induce couples to even have children. What will occur is that populations of Developed countries will become even less ethnically homogenous and the leading ethnic demographics will begin to die out or be sub subsumed via mixed-ethnicity couples. The USA will become increasingly Hispanic and lean left towards Latin America; the EU will become increasingly Muslim and lean towards the Middle East; this phenomenon will create coexistence linkages and diaspora connections that are vital to Cosmopolitanism. The RF will become slowly more Muslim, more Turkic and more Central Asian. Japan with a highly aging population and smallest demographic of integrated minorities will face the greatest challenge and eventually be conquered by the PRC during whatever period of hostilities allows for conquest and annexation of Taiwan. In short, the demographic of the
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American and European Oligarchic; white and Christian is slowly receding. Regardless, the grandfathers of the existing world order must pass and the new generations must be further intermixed. This will effect Africa & PRC the least.
Peak Oil: When the Oil runs out, unless cold fusion or a green alternative emerges such as solar charging more advanced lithium batteries; freighter tanker traffic will slow to bare essentials and most modern armies will revert to warfare strategies closer to the World Wars. Fracking on a mass scale will occur first as well as more extensive use of nuclear power at the core. Because modern armies are so reliant on petroleum, the closer we get past Peak Oil without arriving at an alternative energy source will force a slow down on modern war machines. Although Kaldor makes a very strong case for the rising violent tide of civil wars and intra state killing; the sheer ability of the three blocks to project power and manage trade routes is for now completely tied to a finite supply of natural gas and oil.
Advanced Communications: For the first time in history we are getting real time data about conflicts and political events that would never have been on our radar two decades before. Of course in the developed world this is increasingly part of the state control and socialization system. But, as with the next item these advanced communications allow us to achieve unprecedented solidarity of action and freedom of information.
Shared Macro-Economies: In the same way that technology is letting civilians cut out middle persons and avoid taxes, there is no reason to assume this cannot be done with all kinds of financial matters; as transnational criminals have used BITCOIN and TOR to do for years. The internet is not only a communications, knowledge and data repository; it is of course a means to organize our lives without big banks or big states. Shared Economies, removed from all the escalating conflicts are shown well in organizations such as BRAC; the world’s largest so-called NGO. BRAC couples microfinance with social programs and extends a fascinating array of services to the poor in 14 nations. Coupling together Shared Economic principles with good non state intuitions allows the poorest of the poor the option to sit out some of the upcoming new and old wars.
Core Shift: Any time there has been a previous Core Shift there has generally been incredible interstate warfare between European powers. This will be the first time that the Core is shifting to a non-Caucasian country. The Chinese were once the Middle Kingdom and will be again, but they do not have an historical precedent of slavery or genocide as the Europeans do. This is not to say China will bring an era of tranquil global dominance; simply put it will bring an opening for change in the structures of the World System itself.
Multipolarity: At least until the Core decline of the USA an equilibrium will set in where all three Blocs are relatively equal and own enough of each other’s assets to make interstate war between them unlikely. For whatever period this lasts for; likely until 2100 or the slowdown
effects of Peak Oil; willingness to fight conventional Old Wars will continue to decrease. US-EU will decline and PRC- BRICS will rise.
Supply Side Resistance: SSR is about breaking dependencies from developing nations to semi peripheral and core nations, by shutting down labor and supply routes. Social movements in the
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Resource Axis Zones; the Developing World so-called will have a limited window of 200 years during core shift to either align with PRC-BRICS, remain tied to decline Euro-American powers or fight for self-reliance. Grievances in the developing world are many. Arab Spring is occurring
and African Spring is inevitable. However, whether these continue via armed struggle or other means will decide to what degree the carnage occurs and to who these economies will depend on.
Peacefare: Is militant nonviolence. Quite literally making use of nonlethal weapons against oppressors. Against modern armies this will fail. Against police forces and irregular New War armies this tactic will bring regional oligarchies to their knees. Peacefare is an understanding that developing nations must bring down their own corrupt oligarchic collectives before they can affect those of the three power blocs (Ackerman & DuVall, 2001).
Core Blockade: The final stage of a Peacefare Campaign is to cut the core powers off from a cheap flow of labor, natural resources and commodities of any kind. Starving the core occurs when this is happening throughout the Resource Axis zone and Core nation minority and subversive groups use the reverse sanctions to trigger revolts there.
Parallel States: Throughout the world via solidarity networks, shared economies, deterioration of state social services and as survival mechanism; a variety of Zionist universalisms will come to take shape. Armed entities like ISIS and Hezbollah; non-violent development actors like BRAC and IRC; religious formations like Scientology, Mormons, Baha’i and the Holy Sea; break away states like Puntland; all will better establish Parallel State mechanisms as unrest spreads, new war intensifies and the existing 206 states cannot justify themselves indefinitely.
Conclusion
This is a desperate time and future does look quite bleak if human kind refuses to act in solidarity with its specifies instead of it’s state.
Described over seventy years ago by political scientist George Orwell as Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia (Orwell, 1984) there are three block locked in vicious conflict. The only difference to his futurist predictions is that the USSR never took control of main land Europe.
• What are current conflict trends?
China will rise and US-EU will decline as the Russian Federation profiteers. Few if any developing nations will meet their so-called 2015 Millennium development goals and the proxy wars as new wars will expand. The BRICS will rise the Bretton Woods Intuitions will decline. ISIS will expand, Kurdistan will emerge, Israel will decline and Arab Spring will be joined by African Spring. ALBA will consolidate in Latin America and US will dissolve into a civil war.
• What are windows of opportunity?
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The future rests in the people’s ability to achieve solidarity and utilize new technologies to circumvent states. ALBA represents a fertile ground for a truly multi ethnic civilization to thrive in the dark days ahead, but surely any para state configuration will be aligned to one bloc or another. The best window of opportunity will be in the next 200 years. Either core shift will means opportunity to break dependency or it will usher in one of the most protracted periods of authoritarian rule in history presiding over the death of the planet and human life.
• What actors can be identified as spoilers? Why? Are they inadvertent or intentional spoilers?
The Oligarchs are the worst spoilers of all. They pay for the all the terrible things in this world and reduce us to nothing, powerless wretched nothing. Were it only so simple as to murder them as they in the millions murder us; then we do have a good list. Alas, violence has only bred greater violence and the Oligarchy is so diffuse you would not catch them all easily. Instead of violence we must harness development to be our liberation not our chains. We cannot obsess over the details of the micro-conflict when most conflict has but three primary sources.
Our human objective must be to coordinate a means to support para state development coupled with the objective of starving the core. No matter which power bloc takes control know they will exploit us in various guises. The only solution is to be able to be self-reliant for when the time comes to shut them off from energy, labor and resource flows up mountain. The World System is a killing machine that strips on of their humanity and reduces you to faceless number to work out your life as a slave.
Between an Eagle, a Dragon and a Bear lies our future.
Let us not be left with scraps.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING:
Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2001). A force more powerful: a century of non-violent conflict. Palgrave Macmillan. Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. Amin, S. (2012). Neo-Colonialism in West Africa.
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books. Baer, R. (2008). The Devil We Know: dealing with the new Iranian superpower. Random House LLC.
Biermann, F., & Boas, I. (2010). Preparing for a warmer world: Towards a global governance system to protect climate refugees. Global Environmental Politics, 10(1), 60-88.
Bills, S. (1986): The world deployed: US and Soviet military intervention and proxy wars in the Third World since 1945. From: Robert W. Clawson (Ed.): East West rivalry in the Third World. Wilmington 1986, p. 77-101.
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Bloom, A. D. (Ed.). (1991). The Republic of Plato. Basic Books.
Blum, W. (2003). Killing hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War II. Zed Books. Blumenthal, M. (2013). Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Nation Books.
Brown, L. R. (2009). Plan, B. 4.0: Mobilizing to save civilization. Earth Policy Institute.
Cornell, S. & Jonsson, M. (2014). Conflict, Crime, and the State in Post-Communist Eurasia. University of Pennsylvania Press
Chomsky, N. (1983). Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. India Research Press. Collier, P. (2013). Exodus: How migration is changing our world. Oxford University Press. Deffeyes, K. S. (2006). Beyond oil: The view from Hubbert’s peak. Macmillan.
Diamond, J. M., & Ordunio, D. (2005). Guns, germs, and steel. National Geographic.
Dunbabin, J. P. D. (2014). The Cold War: The great powers and their allies. Routledge. Engels, F. (1893). Letter to Mehring. Marxists internet archive, available online.
Escobar, A. (1995), Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fanon, F. (1965). The wretched of the earth (Vol. 390). Grove Press.
Farmer, P. (1994). The uses of Haiti (Vol. 3). Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon).
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.
Gao, M. (2008). The battle for China’s past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The China Quarterly, 195, 691-718. Gellner, E. (2008). Nations and nationalism. Cornell University Press.
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2008). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Random House.
Huxley, A. (2007). Brave new world. Ernst Klett Sprachen.
Kaldor, M. (2013). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. John Wiley & Sons.
Kupchan, C. A. (1998). After Pax Americana: benign power, regional integration, and the sources of a stable multipolarity. International Security, 23(2), 40-79.
Kolchin, P., & Kolchin, P. (2009). Unfree labor: American slavery and Russian serfdom. Harvard University Press. Levitt, S. (2012) Why Nations Fail? The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. Profile Books, UK. Lebow, R. N., & Stein, J. G. (1994). We all lost the Cold War (p. 92). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Lustick, I. (1979). Stability in deeply divided societies: consociationalism versus control. World Politics, 31(03), 325-344.
Marx, C. (1887). Capital Volumes I & II.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological review, 50(4), 370. Nasr, V. (2007). The Shia Revival. Military Review, 87(3), 9.
Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-colonialism: The last stage of imperialism (Vol. 140). London: Nelson. Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History. Zed Books. Orwell, G. (1990). Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. The Complete Novels, 743-925.
Parry, M., Rosenzweig, C., & Livermore, M. (2005). Climate change, global food supply and risk of hunger. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 360(1463), 2125-2138.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st Century.
Politkovskaya, A. (2005). Putin’s Russia: Life in a failing democracy. Macmillan.
Palaniappan, M., & Gleick, P. H. (2008). Peak water. Pacific Institute.
Proudhon, P. J., & Langlois, A. J. (1876). What is Property? An inquiry into the principle of right and of government (Vol. 1). BR Tucker.
Rotberg, R. I. (2002). Failed states in a world of terror. Foreign Affairs, 81, 127.
Rotberg, R. I. (Ed.). (2010). When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton University Press.
Rummel, R. J. (1998). Statistics of Democide: Genocide and mass murder since 1900 (Vol. 2). LIT Verlag Münster. Taylor C. Boas, Jordan Gans-Morse (June 2009). “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan”. Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (2): 137–161.
Silva, G. (2011). “The price of Colombia’s drug war”. Colombia Reports. Retrieved October 9, 2011.
Wallerstein, I. (1974). The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis. Comparative studies in society and history, 16(04), 387-415.
Wallerstein, I. (2011). The modern world-system I: capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century, with a new prologue (Vol. 1). University of California Press.
Winters, J. A. (2011). Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press.
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ANNEX 1: Resource Axis Distribution
ANNEX 2: Proxy Wars since 1945
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ANNEX 3: Chinese Aid
ANNEX 4: Economic Pacts
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ANNEX 5: Conflict Map A
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ANNEX 6: Conflict Map B
ANNEX 7: Listing of Genocides & Democides since 1945
ANNEX 8: Listing of Major Oligarchs & Highest Net Worth Individuals ANNEX 9: Listing of Major Oligarical Collectives by State
Set on the Onderdonk Fields between the border of Breuklyne and Queens on Friday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. A warehouse district of tumbleweeds, scrap metal dealers, and the smell of burnt fuels.
Newyorkgrad is sizzling with fete and fever. Thousands of people are about to be gunned down in the streets of Breuklyne. They just don’t all know it yet. Most of the high class Blan are still in the countryside. Most of the Neg have a three day weekend they don’t understand. The sun is shining and also baking us all alive. The late summer humidity. It remains oppressive. The Flushing Avenue highway leads from Breuklyne deep into the greener pastures of Queens passing through a vast industrial district along the border. In a sense it and the Dutch Kills creek are the East to West Breuklyn-Queens border. A heat wave of unprecedented proportions has been ravishing the city for the entire three weeks.
They put that little bitch Greta on TV again, to talk about Global Warming. She mumbles something in Norwegian about no longer using airplanes. But really it’s all just Capitalist Modernity. You can only gang rape the earth for so long before she begins to die inside. And then die outside too.
Dozens of multicolored tents have been erected at the top of a green hill whose perimeter is a steel fence. At its north side is a small Dutch historic home and the rest a campground in the badlands of Industrial Bushwhack. A big band stage is almost finished in erection to blare live Gypsy Latin music is being set up and sound tested. A four day proclamation of lawlessness has been posted, but only the social club staff and its regulars will truly be encamping. At forty dollars a day, it’s a rather pricey venture to go camping in a field in the heart of a barren industrial wasteland between Breuklyn and Queens known for salvage yards, construction material stockpiling, biker gangs, and various front operations. A railroad to a poisonous green river called the Dutch Kills Creek separating Breuklyn and Queens officially.
Slavi, stone faced with black hair until he cracks a jovial grin only to those he knows is Sasho’s brother. The sometimes grinning Bulgarian enforcer is at the gate nominally charging people whom he doesn’t recognize as the spoken for “regulars’ ‘. Justin O’Azzello, “the General Manager ” is cooking up “kielbasa” and barking grinning efficient commands on set up.
“What are the kielbasa made of,” asks Viktoria, who has booked all the bands and done much of the production work to make this Bohemian Festival occur.
“What are they made of Pendejo,” repeats her husband Raphael.
“A special type of chicken,” says Justin with his mouth, but ‘people’ with his teeth and she refrains from trying.
At various points Justin Toomey O’Azzello has come and gone as Mehanata’s General Manager. He’s quit, gotten fired, quit, gotten sober, quit, found HaShem, rehired, lost HaShem, gotten wicked drunk, gotten very sober, and now, he seems to be conducting business well enough and is back in the good graces of the management. Which means Sasho, and maybe to a lesser degree in reporting and accounting; Misha Kishbivalli, but Sasho is the boss. The Onderdonk Fields are now held by a colorful gypsy mafia. Sasho and his young son join a game of football game now underway.
Around 16:00 pm Kawa Zivistan shows up. He’s carrying a large red medical tech bag. The big red bag contains various basic life support that should hopefully not be utilized, and also two bottles of red wine. He joins Victoria and Raphael on the top of the hill by the main encampment. Raphael and Kawa comrades embrace as they always do. They grin because they know what is coming in the next 72 hours. Debauchery punctuated with acts of defiance and sedition.
A large and gregarious man rises to introduce himself as Oleg. A slinky, slender dark brown-haired woman at his side does not introduce herself at all. Also seated in the main encampment at the hill top are Lia Monteleone with her big French tits. Georgie Rabanca and Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. Daria ignores his arrival completely, as though she doesn’t know or care who he is. The burly Post-Soviet Oleg with a cropped beard and fashionable dress with a camera around his neck steps up and offers his hand.
“Oleg Medved is my name,” the big Russian fellow says.
“Kawa Zivistan,” Zivistan replies, “this is my ambulance partner Jared Forgetter, medical partner for the encampment, not homosexual lover to be clear.”
Oleg grins and pours everyone drinks. Zivistan takes out a large bottle of Spanish red wine and uncorks it. He passes out real wine glasses wrapped up in socks.
They all then dance and dance and drink and steal and make art and chat about the world. The fearsome, but utterly kindhearted Ukrainian Illubadori gangster Oleg Medved ‘from Boston’ takes a wide assortment of photos of former and Post Soviet models. Victoria has arranged a series of photo shoots and allegedly Alan, who most call ‘Oleg the Bear’ is local celebrity “up in Boston” and he takes tons of fashionable pictures. Kawa in his blue paramilitary-style EMT uniform with a red bandanna arm band is soon dancing the half tango, half salsa with Dasha clad in a yellow mesh cocktail dress with blue Indian war paint under her eyes; it makes for a lovely picture. “I didn’t recognize you in that faded blue uniform and your strange little partisan cap,” Daria exclaims.
The four day Bohemian Gypsy Festival is on Friday day one full swing by evening. It’s a very Old Soul-Old School movement of a moment. They’ve taken a barren camp ground in a bad part of the warehouse district and turned into something of a cross between the Gypsies of Patagonia and or a cold war partisan encampment. Zivistan has little actual medical work to do. Zivistan begins working on a sketch of Georgie and the big French tits on Amelia. Georgie with a laugh mentions he found black and blue marks all over his woman’s body the night she went back to Kawa’s home two weeks prior. ‘The night Dasha nearly killed you.’
“I fell down some stairs,” is all Amelia says. Georgie laughs it all off because he knows Kawa is a very tragic man. A good man but a tragic man. Kawa doesn’t have it in him to have any affairs. We barely even ask anyone to dance. Georgie who is a CUNY Graduate Center professor and also a computer scientist has affairs all the time, but he is not an American, or tragic, or rarely ever sad. However, Amelia’s black and blue marks are from someone fucking her dirty and rough. Not fucking her with love making. Just one week ago. Georgie wonders when it will be that Dasha Skorobogatova gives him the opportunity for a good fuck. How much will that cost? Admittedly such a conquest seems expensive in a few regards. Probably a grand an hour. Georgie feels sad for Kawa at times. He buys him drinks periodically with an ugly Romanian smile. Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Kawa and another regular Tavern mistress, the French girl named Amelia. He was shocked that any beautiful woman could find pleasure with such a sad, broken man. Kawa can’t dance and Kawa doesn’t ever smile.
Low and behold Dasha and Kawa are dancing up a storm tonight. To the Latin Gypsy Ska Jazz Band Escarioka now playing a cover of the ‘DunDunbanza’. Followed by brass jazz of the Sunny Side Social Club. Their front man blows through coke like a champion snow blower. George has never even seen the ‘Kawabumga man’ dance more than two or three highly forced times. No use of hips at all!
Daria is a woman at the tavern that turns all the heads. Even more so than that American girl Jessica who always takes off her clothes and climbs the downstairs stripper poles. Even more than Amelia who has slept with almost everyone. Even more than the Moldovan twins who kiss all the time. Daria arrived perhaps six months ago and now certainly has a very regular card. Kawa turned his card in for some time and has just begun to reestablish it. A Mehanata regular doesn’t just show up early and stay late two or three weekend days open. They make themselves part of the tavern’s ecosystem. They have riotous affairs. They get into fights with the Shqiptarëtis. They make a huge scene to the scene!
“Now I could not have seen that happening,” says George to Raphael, “he never ever dances!”
“She’s just fucking that hot, Prosto,” Raphael says. Prosto is Russian for simple as can be.
Daria Andreavna is never far from the fact that Kawa not only has steel-toed boots and two left feet. She takes him up on his hand to dance over and over. Kawa is so happy to be dancing again. He aims to do it well. He swore to her on the night she almost killed them that he never dances anymore. So that night before the fall, she made him two-step in a mirror as she watched and pressed her weight against his hip until he came correct.
“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”
He almost crushes her bare foot with a steel toed combat boot dip.
Rafael is wearing a gold baseball cap and sits watching with his wife Viktoria manically trying to direct this shit show. Bands not showing up, nothing going to schedule everyone getting more and more furiously drunk. In yesteryear and future years Raphael commanded men, now he mostly makes life. With his music twice a week at the tavern as part of Bordel Dali and he also makes love with his camera twice a week and always maintains a slave job at a boutique blue jeans fashion repair shop where wealthy clients send their favorite expensive jeans for salvage. But, a revolutionary is a revolutionary and when asked by the resistance three weeks ago to activate his cell and raid the big blue tower to deposit the transmitter for the Fire Switch Station to broadcast orders and shut down government coms during the Labor Day Parade, he agreed. Jumping out of planes, carrying out raids and building non-lethal bombs, or taking hostages is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.
“I like to see him pretending to be happy,” says Raphael to Viktoria.
“They are too tricky. A thing moving too fast,” states Viktoria as she watches out of the corner of her eye. Viktoria is very happy with herself for it was she who made this four day festival come together. It is mostly out of control, of course money was never Sasho’s aim this time. She has no idea her husband and most of the Peruvian Ska band Eskariokaare about to stage a raid on the tallest building in Queens. She has no idea that Oleg Medved and Yulia Romanova are poisoning half the camp with vodka based neurotransmitters. She has no idea there is a dead hooker in the tent next to hers. She has no idea that an Iranian sleeper cell is carrying a bomb into the heart of Times Square to black out the city in an electromagnetic pulse early Monday morning. She has no idea that 2 million black women, men and children are coordinating their revelry amid an armed uprising. She just isn’t aware of those things.
Viktoria doesn’t know about all that many of her husband’s affairs. She certainly doesn’t know he used to lead a guerrilla band in Peru. Called the ‘Bolivarian Hotshots’. They had gunned down many capitalists in the Fujimori Years. She loves Raphael, her husband with all her heart. She partially likes Kawa Zivistan as her tragic brother. She loves but also hates Sasho who gives her a platform for her fashion, art and music. She came to this city and got a job at the Tavern as events producer and tavern has taken over most of her life and time. She doesn’t see the world like Raphael does, or Kawa did before his friends put him into sleep. ‘Sleep is the cousin of death’, but not physical death. It is simply reducing the size of the world one can see, third, fourth and fifth and sixth dimensionally.
Kawa and Viktoria can only really see a couple days into the past and future. Whereas people like Raphael, and Dasha Andreavna can see things much further back and forward, see things happening in other realities. It makes them very, very functional in this reality. The more one drinks, the less they see. If Viktoria Contreras was aware of any of the danger near her, she’d have a baby heart attack. Probably move back to upstate New York where the world is a bit safer. Back to her hippy parents’ Alpaca farm. Way out of the coming crossfire.
“She can’t be tamed by any man or any other being,” declares Raphael in Spanish.
“He will try, but when he fails I’ll have to pick up the messy pieces yet again,” states Viktoria. She’s already had to coax him gently from his old Russian geisha Ms. Maria Parsheva. As well as his Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna and then to freedom and then through the affair where he broke the French girl Amelia’s heart. It’s now back to the bondage of his wanton reckless emotions from the look of it. Kawa’s habit of loving early and often is the source of his exceptional art and writing. She admires that about him though, she’s a hopeless romantic herself. It is Viktoria’s shoulder where Kawa does his most cathartic crying over the past three years since they all met on Floyd Bennett Field at the original Bohemian-Gypsy-Tabor festival on the abandoned tarmacs of the abandoned Idlewild airport. A cool breeze breaks the city’s August humid heat wave.
“Spin me even faster man!” commands Dasha. He is under her spell.
She feeds him still more red wine. He can be known to drink in uniform when a General like Sasho gives him the green light to do so. Kawa has at least some discipline, but like a regular rank and file loses this discipline if the drinking lets him and the front seems far. And surely it takes a lot of drink to render him incapable of splinting extremities or dealing with overly intoxicated people, the most likely of injuries. But now, he’s really not good for much but chasing this woman. He knows nothing of Nikolai’s “great big hectic job.”
As a card-carrying ‘Banshee member’ he has several local ambulance crews on speed dial, worse comes to worse. There are endless bottles of wine and vodka miraculously stashed away about the encampment. All need more than tasting.
Kawa Zivistan is no obvious martyr today, or yesterday. Obviously for all his past mountains of zeal he’s built up, he saw the loveliest girl in the camp teach him how to dance and then try and kill him two weeks prior. He cannot be unaffected by the contrasts there. And if he was aware that his closest circle is up to something very large and possibly violent, he “is asleep.” He is out of the chain of command until reactivation after his paramedic graduation. Which is in Nivôse.
After his work in Haiti, they brought him to the bathhouse. They submerged his consciousness in the great waters of a temple buried in the earth; and to keep him safe they closed his eyes and made him aware only of what was around him in a small circle of seeing. A hint that there was a close bout with death has been made. Did our protagonist antagonists actually plummet to death off a rooftop? The night Daria and Kawa boxed ferociously after he yanked the cigarette from out her mouth, she shoved him off a roof. That was two weeks prior from the night before the Blue Moon now. He grabbed out for her and they both died falling into the deadly drop pit. She did shove to kill, but rather than make suicide assembled he pulled her along, to death. They definitively toppled off the roof into that pit of death. But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue, in some form. Only Nanoseconds after lying broken and dead in a pit of death having killed each other over nothing. Over posturing and arrogance and lack of respect for physics. For the pair reality reset. ‘The angels’, on behalf of ‘the spirits’ , took their two souls from their corpses and went back in time five seconds. Put the souls impolitely into two new bodies of Kawa and Dasha, waiting in a clear blue-white chemical bath. It took just five human seconds to reload them. A near-death experience was now a vodka-based-near-life experience. Because ‘the spirits’ were protecting them both.
Panting hard, as if post-coitus she grabbed his right hand. Daria then bit down into his right index finger to draw blood. He made no reaction; his animal soul hasn’t fully absorbed itself into his new body. Then they lay panting by the edge of the precipice staring each other down, bitten hand clasped and bleeding; and then she confessed to him things that were highly unnerving. Some were true. And some were white lies.
Now, back to the festival!
Now, “she remembers nothing” and keeps urging him to explain their first night of misconduct under the good night almost blue moon and tell her what happened on the “roof of the financial district.”
Had they fallen into that pit having no spirits or angel to aid them you could have taken their bodies out a side basement door and it wouldn’t have even been real news. Senseless tragedy only bothers all of the living as everyone is missed by someone. So now they dance and self-seduce, she would say she is incapable he is above it, so they self-seduce. They are engaged in a passionate stare down, but it is more playful than hot. She is very used to drunken men desiring her. He is very used to being a sober gentleman and sometimes also a drunken man.
Viktoria Lynch can see the steam and glow from the tent camp at the top of the hill. It reminds her vaguely of the wild passion that came over her several years ago when she wrested Rafael from the arms of a wealthy temptress and got the ring of marriage around his ways.
Kawa is a marvelously incompetent, albeit enthusiastic dancer. Dasha drags him off here and there and they imbibe relentlessly without even seeming to stagger.
Night comes and the darkness falls.
“Tender to see you saving the life of Sasho’s son,” Dasha had whispered earlier, making a dry Russian joke out of his earlier handy work.
He had put an ice pack on a not that sprained ankle of the eleven year old son of the club’s owner. But, it was a smash hit. Calling an ambulance can cost between $475.00 and $4,000.00 in Newyorkgrad.
“Saving lives is much easier than taking them,” he says with a grin, “in the long run anyway.”
“So what happened again on your fateful roof! Tell me the whole fucking story!” she demands.
“So no one meta died, or really died. Only almost died. Because when dawn broke two weeks prior we were still standing, I called you a cab and we begrudgingly agreed to meet again, only by fated coincidence, as we are both members of the same social club.”
“Fascinating talk!” she says, staring out into the bonfires of the encampment. Pouring perhaps the fifteenth glass of wine. Knowing behind her bluff they were about five three dimensional seconds were warm, bloody broken and dead.
They had gotten quite drunk on wine, then Astika, then Rakia and then Russian Standard Vodka, eventually.
Again she pressed him for, “The whole of the fucking story blat.”
“We boxed out. You drank hard and boxed me harder. Then we fell twenty stories to our deaths in a sub-basement pit,” he explains, “Prosto.”
“And now we dance like two lovers who could have been just two separate funerals, in two separate languages, with Raphael Rafael and Victoria being the only overlapping guests of note,” she notes and winks at him.
The festival has become an alcoholic blur to all involved by midnight thirty.
Dasha and Sebastian dance, dance, and dance like they almost died for nothing just a week before. Under a bog moon taking shape in the night sky above the border between Queens and Breuklyn.
Earlier in the day Oleg Medved took a good many pictures of her and the three lesser former and Post Soviet models from Bucharest, Bulgaria, and Transdeisnester Republic. And also of lovely Victoria who always looks lovely and charming and caring for this rowdy band that gravitates to the tavern. While refusing to let the sometimes dirty laundry of her marriage ever be aired in public views. Though there have been improvements lately.
Kawa kisses Dasha’s hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets an inch from the ground with her long golden locks. It is not a smooth or graceful motion, but he tries the best he can. They nearly topple over.
Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. And they eye into each other, taking in the passion that they are generating without necessarily acting any further on it.
“I will call you Sebastian!” she declares. “My name for you from this point out will be the name on your passport. The name you were given at your Trinidadian birth.”
“I will call you Dasha. As I have from the very beginning.”
“You are like a devil, you have way too many strange names,” she smiles.
Drunkenly they declare what each had planned to name to the other already. Then more dancing, dancing and more dancing; sway and grind like they almost died for nothing. Kawa kisses her hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets inches from the ground with her long golden locks. For the second time now with not much more grace than before.
Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. Again. I could fall for her quite hard, he thinks, but he obviously has thought such thoughts before. A rather ferocious amount of wine first. Then the Russian Standard Vodka Oleg the Bear has in a large Casque and also numerous Astika beers are consumed. These are not amateurs by any means.
“A little party never hurts nobody! An Old Illubadori slogan of the night,” says Oleg.
Finally around 3 am the camp gets quieter, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for Dasha and Kawa to sit almost on top of each other, leaning in, coloring the sketch he’s made of their near fall and of her beauty over two pages of his black archive.
Daria then colors away at his sketches enthusiastically. She smiles radiantly and takes each color rendering his work into a superior rendition via the brightness of the combined war effort. Then they go and dance their asses off.
Finally around 5 am the camp gets quietest, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for bonfire calm without drumming. Rafael , Dasha and Kawa sit at the edge of a terrific fire now also dying down. They are quite drunk. “Derangedely” speaking on the subject of “phantom physics” and “meta-reality”. Kawa is waxing philosophically, as Dasha’s eyes roll, on the theoretical possibility of parallel reality and past lives. He pulls this from somewhere, according to Dasha, “His own ass.”
A little faux-intellectual rant positing his personal theory of existence.
Raphael Contreras nods in agreement, adding his own deductions. His own Mayan prophecies mixed with some Peruvian socialist folklore of the Arequipa Province.
“What if there are other lives running right alongside this one!” exclaims a dazed and inebriated Kawa Zivistan, “other possibilities, other potentialities had tiny little digressions been made on the course we follow in this waking life? What if, mind you, the slightest digression and decision had yielded a vastly different outcome from what we experience now? And, what if there was some way to step from one reality to another. Moving about time, changing your body while keeping your soul and memories intact?”
Ironically, as if he had ten thousand spoons and all he needed was a knife; Kawa Zivistan has in his drunken stupor articulates exactly what has happened to both he and Dasha just two weeks before.
“Fascinating talk boys before we die,” remarks Dasha yawning.
It is to Kawa Zivistan like one of those grand conversations he once one had in the East Village coffee house Yaffa Cafe over red wine when he was younger. Or on the Golan Heights hills in Syria. Sweet and danger-filled mental nostalgia.
“Do you believe in your past lives?” asks Rafael .
“Well certainly! It’s so primitive to think this is all a showdown between god and the devil over souls, one person, one life, one try! How pedantic!”
“So then you believe in alternative realities, and also reincarnation?” Rafael asks.
Dasha makes faces at Kawa as they go on. The fire continues to die down.
“Tovarish Philosopher I’m tired and need to be put to sleep,” she says.
“Soon, soon,” Zivistan says.
“The Old Soul is what I heard it called once,” says Rafael , when I was a boy in Arequipa Province, “the body is but a vessel my father and mother said. Like a suit for the soul strolling across time, across many lives. An Old Soul remembers these lives and in doing so has a mission to accomplish, what the Hindu call a dharma.”
“Boys! To bed!” yells Dasha.
Kawa asks her for five minutes to finish his idea. She scowls and gives him three and takes off in a pout.
Raphael Rafael with a devilish smirk says, “Speak of reality later. Go after her or I will.” Kawa catches up with her mid-hill and takes her hand.
“Lie down with me,” he says.
“That conversation was a lot of bullshit, you know,” she says.
“It’s fun to speak about this bullshit sometimes.”
“Where will there be the best sleep for us?”
“I have a blanket,” he says, forgetting about the inflatable mattress.
Dasha and Kawa sit almost on top of each other at the top of the hill under the trees. He pulls a black and green Arabian blanket from his rucksack. She finds another bottle of wine as if out of thin air. Pours them both glasses. Watch him prepare the bare accommodations. She pages through and returns to late-night coloring the sketch he’s made of their fall and of her vastness over two pages of his black archive.
She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.
“Will you be my sweet Tovarisha for the whole of the festival?” he asks her, “We can share our wine and food and I will watch over you.”
“Ha, ha! Tovarish is gender-neutral. It is not changed to “Tovarish-a” for women. We are not Hispanish! We were all equals in Soviet Russian. Only word in Russian without gender inflection. Also, I need not be watched after. I am always safe!”
“Be my Tovarish then and look after me then.”
“We will see. For now; this is just an okay plan. I will leave you in the morning.
They draw closer into a cuddle and then complete a spoon. She wraps herself within his arms and he holds her like it is his duty, but it is also a thrill of some buried passion. He holds her tight like a little partisan as the trees whisper and the two double blue moons that are out late can blot out reasonable doubt. He likes to hold her. They curl together on an inflatable mattress and a green Arabian blanket. They are both, for a variety of reasons unaccustomed to the perfect fit of a well-intentioned cuddle.
They fall into what passes as sleep, her first. As if on demand.
“We almost died for nothing,” he says.
“What if I just kill all your hope,” she mutters in a foreign tongued whisper.
“What if I love you until you know just what hope is truly so good for?” he responds to her in a muted tone. Possible in Hebrew.
“Don’t speak now of such goddamn stupid and impossible things,” she whispers.
They lie together in that Gypsy camp draped into each other on the air mattress and floating on a dream the only two partisans without tents. He dreams of escaping the struggle against the reaper to be forever in her arms and she dreams of a big black cat with a fiddle while a man on the moon plays the world’s smallest violin just for her little Amerikanski. No, that’s just a romantic little literary device. He dreams of her and she dreams of nothing at all. Nothing at all she will ever, ever talk about to a man. And that nothingness is subjective, but not the objective of her “inebriations”.
A good night for Kawa is not to dream at all; his dreams are clusters nightmares. She has thus rendered him peaceful. A good night for Dasha is to drink and dance until the night is a blur of happy smiling, swirling dance movies and escaping in a peaceful haze. He watches the moon and feels her breathing heavily against him. He is reminded of some great peaceful moment. Whether that is because a beauty lays in his arms, or something more ephemeral, magically real forms an underlying narrative, he cannot say.
“We will leave these bodies and make our way to higher ground,” is the last thing she tells him in primal low Ivory. Almost Aramaic. Strange that she speaks any Ivory at all. Being so fucking Russian and surly. And mad. And also quite Blonde.
She snores at him just a little. Makes unintelligible little cute moans. The last thing he thinks holding her looking up at the huge blue moon is that if some hideous monster or bandit came from the tree line, if bad men, werewolves, monsters or devils came to hurt them, if they sky fell out above them, if the blue moon became a meteor, he’d never, ever leave her behind. He’d fight on whatever level he had to keep this woman safe, to marshal every ounce of his abilities to deliver her from any impending strife.
It all felt like a terrific overpowering déjà vu, as if it happened a few, or perhaps very many times before this very moment. Daria sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard. Daria has survived a nation of thieves to get here and scuttled through a den of vipers since arrival. Sleeping in a park, with or without “protection”, with or without a mattress or a pillow, these are not so high on her hierarchy of concerns.
Amid many other pressing troubles, the Vodka and his many yarns sung her eventually to sleep. The big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of a functionally existential war for what will ultimately be the fate of this backward species. So much work to emancipate a mostly self-interested race of violent monkeys with space guns.
The partisan Kawa Zivistan, named such by the Arabs and Kurds of Rojavawho’s American passport documents say he is also “Sebastian Adoneav ” has also an Ivory name. So does Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova. Amid all the slumbering carnage of the Gypsy encampment, two old souls are reunited. Their breathing synchronizes chest to chest. Their beating hearts match up, and then. Then, there is no beating, no breathing and also no heart beating anymore. Two very attractive husks clasped to each other. As if they had done it so often, for so many lives it was now just a drill. To die and become reborn wherever and whenever they pleased.
Set in the Atlas Park Hotel in Brighton Beach, Breuklyne. You can rent a hotel room with the expectation that no one cares what you do there. That’;s true in almost every part of the civilized and uncivilized world. If you pay by the day, the month or the hour. People stay quiet. You get what you pay for, which is that quiet.
“Make another fucking dirty movie, blyat, or we’ll slow kill your fucking mom,” he said. So she ended up fucking nineteen guys in a series of movies. “I’ll kill her in front of you bitch and make you eat from her fucking corpse.”
In pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia a beautiful woman of the gentry, with a powerful father and a substantial dowry even if she were so inclined, was not able to release thousands of photographs and short videos of her pretty face and enormous ripe breasts indiscriminately to potential suitors, horny aristocrats and common serfs, and petty criminals. The technology simply did not allow it in the 18th and 19th centuries. And frankly speaking then, never mind honor and propriety and the status of women; it would not have been strategic for an adventitious coupling. From a matrimonial happiness point of view, but we are not in the 19th century certainly we are not. It is the future now. Women have no dowry, they have rights! Our gentry is far harder to access but not as bound by protocol and convention.
“Sometimes I’m highly classy lass, and sometimes I take off enough of my clothes over a smile.” That’s what Dasha’s private Instamatic declares. In the City of Penza where she grew up she was a brunette, but now while in America a meticulously dyed blonde. Her name at the agency is ‘Gold Fish’.
So she sits there in her modest Brighton Beach apartment, sometimes in suites paid for by suitors in the then Atlas Park Hotel or the Waldorf Astoria, the Benjamin or the Sofitel. By the hour she has to work, and she takes a lot of pictures of herself. Thanks to technology, thanks to the future over 160,000 men, well they get these pictures immediately. Sometimes with a selfie stick, sometimes on remote, sometimes she has a professional photographer, but it’s hard to make men do things on a long enough timeline without putting them in.
She’s never depicted of course with her john’s only where they take her. It’s sophisticated art showing strangers on the internet that you’re classy and upper-middle-class and unavailable for immediate purchase, but you like things.
She has a shape that wins her many admirers. 176/57 93-61-95, serious measurements to shape her like a highly erotic, but angelic doll, one social media account is more doll and one is more tits. But the modern man, maybe all men like doll and tits in tandem. It’s hard to say whether this venture is actually sustainable, but she is getting popular. It sure beats working. As a student, a model and lover of fitness this has been a good racket so far. She’s just 24 in this life. It’s sensible but not impossible to get the kind of man who will send a 100 rose bushels across town, to you know, buy groceries and pay your rent.
It’s hard to get in her head, that’s the idea. Her smile is a perverse fake smile, it’s not a happy smile, and you have to work real hard to have a good and winning fake smile. Often thanks to technology men in London or Newyorkgrad can see her rub her enormous breasts and do strange little things with her belly, or play with a cat. She does it all from her iPhone, links it into VKontackte and Facebook via Instamatic to two accounts. And then the offers come in. Most of them are just kind of disgusting. Well at least she can afford to fly her mother here once a year.
She’s never walked a European runway, that’s for sure. What she is a student of no one could guess. Her father thinks this is beyond dishonorable, but she’s his favorite daughter. And honestly despite having big baby eyes, and a tiny, tiny waist and ‘tits for days’ as she says, truly massive breasts for a petite figure like hers, and everything is real. Well suggestively is the color she paints with. It’s gotten her an international following.
Because that is how the modern commodification of flesh works, the horizontal voyeurism, but not consumption, of designer curves and suggestiveness. On SUPEyou can get more, shall we say intimate with Daria Andreavna’s form.
“You’re getting way too skinny,” Sergei Abromovich once told her, it was almost the first thing he told her and you have to be careful telling a woman like that she’s anything but perfect. “It’s totally normal” she told him,” and referred him to a website of Russian models, but honestly none were as slim as her.
Sergei supposedly works as an accountant at the Atlas Park Hotel in Midtown. Though that is dubious. He pays for her classes, her rent in the shared apartment, he pretty much pays for everything. He loves her too much to be a legitimate sponsor.
Now no one wants to believe they are exploited, or being manipulated. No one likes to be deceived, you want to get what you paid for, you want out more than you put in, this is capitalism. Exponential reward for diminishing volume of work.
“I worry that in your desire to please your clients you take on dimensions that are unhealthy. And I mean not say this so boldly, you must consider your own health and longevity above the peering eyes and thick wallet of the fans,” Dmitry Khulushin, her top sponsor wrote.
What a stupid, almost Ivoryish thing to say, she thought looking at this message from the Atlas Park Hotel. I am adored exactly how I am. In all my skinny and all my round. I will make someone send my favorite dumplings, she says. Or roses, or new victory bras for my big and beautiful, you know. Maybe Red bottoms, also a new puppy. New Years is coming, options, so many options. Hopefully a brand new life, in a brand new time and place. In a brand new life, everything could be okay. It would all be simply amazing. Should the impossible become possible, the untrue become true and the nightmare somehow transmogrify into a happy dream.
“I’ll tell you what though. Whatever they do, did, are still gonna do to me. My sisters had it much worse in the long run. Because I was eventually allowed to die. They both had to live with what our father was capable of.”
If I give in and I eventually marry Sire Dmitry the Oligarch I can move to the City and put all this, shall we call it; ugliness, behind me. He will be able to secure me. Stupid people say that money cannot ever buy happiness. But it certainly can buy one of all the main options. Thus, with many options you can get about as close to happiness as human life can get. But, when you are cold and hungry and have no green card. Both options and happiness are just abstracts. First comes security at all necessary costs.
Set in another Supper Club over on 189 Chrystie Street. One with a more discerning door policy than having 2 teeth.
“I’m not fully happy with some highly central elements of my life”, thinks aloud Siegfried Sassoon the actor. I cannot exactly say that I am satisfied, though I do have many elements of a good life going; I am not using my human potential; not as an actor and not as a man. Siegfried Sassoon, the Cuban American actor is a begrudging friend of the resistance. He works as a bartender in the nightclub called ‘The Red Fox Box”.
There are only several places where they cannot hear you, see you, record you and file you by number. And these places are not one hundred percent secure, they only make your detection harder and prolong your date of capture.
Bathhouses, fitness clubs, loud electronic music venues, camping & wilderness activities, dancehall parties, and in the back of municipal ambulances.
I take to the woods. There are so many things we forgot to do when we became civilized; we lost innate mechanisms for our self-preservation; we became reliant on government, on governance, on divisions of labor so infinite that we no longer possess any intrinsic individual use. Well, a great deal less anyway.
I am following a new serial on Netflicks and Chill. I have no stomach for film or TV! I was classically trained in Moscow for the stage! For the fucking stage, but that is a dead medium now. I have a bachelor’s in philosophy. I wrote my thesis on the history of time travel. I work as a bartender at an elite supper club in the Isle of Mann. I have a pleasant and attractive girlfriend, she is not as amazing as my last girlfriend, but she makes me happy and keeps things mostly drama-free.
My father works for the military-industrial complex. I rarely see him. My mother is still a hippie. It’s peace, love, and light, and then you marry rich; it’s good for your future, your children’s future. My father has a job I don’t know the details of; his company holds patents to space craft and commercial airlines, it builds them for the United American States; the U.A.S. has been the name of the 87% of the U.S.A. that was not lost to socialism during the Separatist Wars of 2012-2015. The Capital is now in Chicago. The 13% lost is called the Autonomous Administration of North and East AmericaThe Isle of Mann is just over the river from the so-called ‘Breuklyn Soviet’; which is one of the most heavily armed hotbeds of the sedition. The Bronks and Queens are confederated with it; Staten Island is an enormous military garrison, it got very blood for three years, now it’s all quiet. The rebels threatened to use atomic weapons and took hostages. I will tell you what appears to work; terrorism it seems to work every single time. It is actually understood to be far less bloody than conventional war, and a lot less expensive. Who fundamentally funds these rebels is a subject of great debate in the high class circles I run in. Oh yes, the upper classes are composed of big brained thinking men.
My particular club, like many of the establishments in cash rich, high stressed Isle of Mann, high tower living; caters to the millionaires and billionaires that compose what you might call were you to cite rather populist rebel propaganda; the 2%. Wealth in the United States of America and subsequently in the United American States is a maldistributed slope like absolutely anywhere else in the 206 habitation sectors, em, countries. In virtually all 206 national harvest units the distribution is about the same; though there are sharp gradients in the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones; social welfare systems and trickle down economies have enabled most of the 46 Core nations to eliminate all obvious forms of extreme poverty; life below $1.25 a day. Underclasses of course exist; the Muslims in Europe and the Noires and Mestizos in the U.S.; but they are not volatile, starving underclasses, but observe the slope; same in peripheral zone Kenya, as Semi-Peripheral zone Brazil, same are core zone France; a slope of the underclass and “middle classes” that in raw net wealth and assets are not radically disparate. Suffice to say you could call much of the middle class, the working poor. And in any society, the distribution of reported wealth, emphasis on reported wealth would show that with welfare, with subsidy; the majority of the citizens of any county; 80-90% are all on a slope that tapers off at its highest mark at annual earnings of $100,000 per year; then you have a 5-10% of the Bourgeoisie, the Upper Middle Classes, white-collar managers, athletes and celebrities with earnings let’s say between $100,000 to 1 million per year. This still is not a radical accumulation of wealth, not on the scale needed to exercise power. Control of political and productive mechanisms. And then you have a class in itself, what they called in Occupy the 1% is actually 0000.1% of the remaining population; a Kleptocracy; more appropriately called; the Oligarchy. Organized into clubs and factions that see national boundaries as mere human resource brands, or more appropriately the names of various large scale mega plantations.
I did not come to any of that by reading the manuscripts or hearing the speeches of Zivistan, Solomon, DeBuitléirs and other famous and familiar rebel orators. I am no prole, nor were their Partizan songs written with my class in mind.
These Oligarchy men do not even come to my supper club. But I pour their managers drinks. I pour their entertainment drinks. I stay sober sometimes while their supervisors drink and I know about things like robots, clones and the great salt mine. I knew that the ‘new Panama Canal’ had already been built in the 1980’s. I knew this from the mouths of babes. The call girls these lackeys bring around. I have smoked joints with fellow help and shared what we’ve all heard about the great wide world.
Zivistan tried to recruit me no less than twice to twenty three times a year in round about and direct appeals to my level of awareness. I long suspected he would ask to spy for him, or something trickier. I’m a man of privilege, but not impervious. My father is well connected because of his company’s trade in trains and planes and missiles; but if the secret police took me there would not be very much he could do. I have friends too from the Club in which I work; but honestly when they take you they take you away. Your body is found in a tragic accident or a suicide, but that’s not your real body; you end in a container ship and then in a secret prison and that’s all she wrote.
I once wondered if “Kawa Zivistan” could ever analyze the sacrifice of his own privileges. Being white, being raised upper middle class from a family with land. Well his father is no lesser oligarchy but still they were the House of Zivistan! Excuse me, the House Adoneav. An esteemed lesser Ivory house allowed into certain elite clubs, given lands in both the District Financial and the Hamptons. Allowed in professional trades despite being Ivory. Well, suffice to say that house was eventually outlawed and obliterated after the Great Revolt.
They stripped his Ivory father of all his land and military rank. Then they executed his entire extended family. This is all I read in the underground papers. Sometime immediately after the Great Revolt began. The 803 Martyrs of the House Adonaev. They even hunted down and killed and tortured many of Sebastian’s past lovers.
‘The world to come’ is not a much-changing world from all the many worlds before it, though Sebastian Adoneav now more infamously known as “Kawa Zivistan” is still working overtime to make his many enemies pay for their crimes. There are always barbarians at the gates, slaves in electrified sex cages, and bloody bloody unrest in the colonies. It has always been this way, it will always be this way; who am I or Zivistan or any in the Resistance to clamor for ‘a new world and a new way’. Zivistan and I used to sit in the downtown bathhouses and I would hear his yarns. I could hardly believe much of it was real. We were in university together, though I never joined his movement officially. Never took the plot outside the steam room. The House of King and House of Zivistan were of relatively equal social stations. He seemed to disregard my sympathies to him and grew angry as we got older that I didn’t wish to die on some barricade like him; but there are no barricades now; there are only strange events. Strange changes to reality that happen to keep up with the future science and black magic making war.
Nothing is what is what it seems! Are these vast plantation camps or are they so-called developing nations? Is democracy about speaking freely or is it about governing together? Why has the winter not ended for three years in grim Massachusetts? Why do proles take trains to serve others in the Isle of Mann and those trains take 45 minutes, but I know and Zivistan knows that to get from Manhattan of Breuklyn Soviet you need a plane or a 40-mile base jump down a mountain. Are you a citizen or are you a serf? Did America win the Cold War? Why is it half of the lesser, and one-third of the greater oligarchs all have Russian names? What is a Princeling? What is the Bohemian Grove? Who are the Free Masons? When is it time to smoke a joint and join a conspiracy theory, or get your cock rubbed via Netflicks and Chill? How much is human life really ever worth?
Make us a good price! I came to much of these realities during my senior thesis called ‘A History of Time Travel’; which explores the metaphysics behind parallel reality states, fourth-dimensional travel, and such themes of Pre-Soviet parapsychology. My ex, I can’t say her name as it was so painful to lose her. Her father is a well known Greater Oligarch. From she and from Kawa Zivistan and also from the whispers of the lower echelon elites assembled at the Red Fox. I learned that truly nothing is as it seems.
Kawa Zivistan, before he mostly embraced the Baha’i nonviolence teachings of Sheikha Saadiya Usmani and was inducted into the Blue Lodge. He was a killer. I watched him evolve. I saw him go between talk and action over a period of ten years, he was changed by his experiences in the colonies. Palestine first then in Haiti, then Syria, and into the imagined wilds of Greater Kurdistan.
I think almost nobody knows what year it really is. How far in the future we actually are. But this actually was the profound elegance of the New Social Gospel, it is open-ended and egalitarian. Disciplined, principled but wildly inclusive. Most importantly as it tidies up mythology, religion, and science; it grounds all who approach it. Ground you in the now as well as the infinitive continuum of being.
I will not speak to what did or did not happen during ‘the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis’. There are wildly different accounts. I never saw him again after that night when the whole country first learned his name. They say he died. As did thousands of hostages being held all over the country that night! Then calm. Then a great gold mist blew over North America. The internet turned off. The world outside our country was blacked out. In that gold, happy mist huge changes were made. There was no more Zivistan.There was no more United States; the entire population was put to sleep. When we woke up out of the dream, out of the week following the Millennium Hostage Crisis. Some estimated 13 % of America was a wild rebel “free zone”, and 87% was called the “United American States’ ‘, had always been. And you couldn’t take a 45-minute train to Breuklyn, no this violent anarchic thing called Breuklyn Soviet was a 40-mile drop off a cliff where the East River used to be. There was a mile-high wall between the edge of that cliff; and I was still in the U.A.S., which had always been the U.A.S. But, Breuklyn, Queens, and the Bronks were no longer Federal territories. These were now autonomous zones we were prohibited from traveling to. Rebel cantons. Lawless zones of sedition. American Soviets.
I got a letter in the mail from Kawa Zivistan, after he supposedly “died”. I guess a courier moved it across the lines. The letter stated he was interned in a special engineering camp not far from Boston, another recently liberated City State. He told me that shortly his compatriots would be taking him out of the camp ad returning him to “Breukelen Soviet”, which was of course he claimed now ‘free.’ And what did he want, why had he written? Of course, he wanted something. He never was capable of just having a normal friendship. He had taped a micro USB chip to the letter; it contained god only knows what. Nothing would shock me. His letter asked to go to 7th FDNY EMS Outpost in Chelsea. To find a paramedic named Anya Drovtich. To buy her a non-alcoholic drink and give her the chip. Just commit treason. Flatly speaking.
I had met Anya Drovtich once before the letter said. ‘A real bad-ass Muslim sexy Polish chick with dreadlocks and red Hijab.’ That narrowed it down quite a lot. What the rational person would do, despite having knowledge of a highly irrational world, even sympathizing with the resistance secretly. Having bathed and been friends with supposedly dead public enemy number three, behind DeBuitléirs and Solomon, ahead of famed Jamaican Rebel Tabor commander still at large in the so-called Breuklyn Soviet Mickhi Dbrisk. I remembered this Anya, I let them both in the Red Fox Club once on the night against my better judgment. They were planning to take hostages. In the end, they were ordered to stand down. Zivistan got drunk and pole danced for her in a private room. He wasn’t always so dower, unsmiling, and totally humorless.
I look at this letter in my hand and I wonder what I should do. Turning it in means incriminating myself. The televisions have said he was killed in the hostage crisis along with co-terrorist Emma Solomon. This is proof of sorts he is alive; maybe his prints are on this handwritten letter. His security culture is sloppy I know. Maybe throw it away? What’s on this micro USB chip? Should I even open it? Maybe this is all a setup, maybe the Joint Terrorism Task Force is looking at anyone Zivistan used to know and I used to Banyawith him twice a year, he’s been to half my theatrical openings. Maybe it’s another purge. And why would he send this to me? All of these years later. He’s been officially dead for over three years.
Yes, the hostage tragedy happened in 2015? I think so. Or 2017? Maybe, they say never forget, but I do forget. So much happened, so much was changed. So many people died in the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis. I know, what the public doesn’t know is that the rebels were very close to using nuclear warheads against major American cities. Leveraging that was what allowed the Separatist victories. I know that the Department of Security in the Homeland pumped gas into all of the hostage points, four if I remember and that gas killed most of the hostages, not the rebel small arms fire. I know the official story is that Emma Solomon, a citizen of Spain and Kawa Zivistan a dual citizen of the USA and Trinidad, some allege, also Illubador lead some forty terrorists into a packed showing of a new Broadway play and held hostage some 850 people, mostly the Creme de la Creme of the lesser Oligarchy in New York and celebrities; and then coordinated seizures of buildings happened in Las Angeles, Atlanta, Houston and Chicago; and then there was 48 hours five site siege; and the terrorists called for an end to the three-year Separatist Wars and independence for 13 Soviets; 13% of USA’s territory, including all of the Puerto Rico sex colony. Then, blood, fire, gas, and then as if nothing had happened all. Just like a mass shooting or a bombing in Baghdad.
I ask myself, I ask you; what would you do? The world is falling apart, the wars are closer and closer to the top of the mountain; no one is safe. What is on this USB could be highly consequential, or could be a test or a setup. Plot upon sinister plot!
Anya Drovtich who I have met only once. How consequential is her role in the Resistance, how close she is to Zivistan. What should I do? We all know at the Box that the Secret Police are cunning; 17 whole agencies spying on us. You never know when you’re being filmed only when you’re maybe not being filmed; we carry these fucking phones everywhere like the mark of the beast.
In the woods I am free. There are of course cameras in the woods too, there are even cameras I have read inside dogs and cats. Even inside bees! It can make you a little insane to keep reading. There is no conspiracy your rational mind declares! There is no oligarchy! There are just the high, the middle, and the low classes; a product of their merit and work ethics. Whites are on top because they work hardest, we all know that! And life is certainly better in the United American States, which has always been the name of our country; than anywhere. Definitely better than that corrupted, vile violent mafia Federation of Russia. I do live dearly having studied there as an actor for a year. And evil red China with its pollution and one child-woman killing policies, which I do love dearly, my ex the love of actual life being half Russian, half Haan. I digress. Well, most of the proles have never left America. Most of the upper-middle class if they have left America they’ve gone to Europe or the tourist garrisons of the Caribbean. Or banal Costa Rica, the C.I.A. eco-colony-sugar brothel. Who can say they’ve seen the world! Who has laid eyes on the Salt Mines! On Kandahar! On the night train from Beijing to Moscow. Almost none, and thus they cannot believe the things the resistance says are happening, are even real.
One year, maybe it was Gregorian 2010 CE, Zivistan and I went to the Russian bathhouse on 88 Fulton and maybe he liked the Banya so much because we can talk freely. No phones, no hidden mikes, you’d hope, no cameras, you’d hope. Or at least the illusion of privacy in the stream and sweat. He took out an envelope and showed me pictures of the atrocities in Syria. He told me they were preparing to send fighters and medics. Would I go? Would I raise money? Well, I feigned enthusiasm but ultimately contributed nothing. Like when he’d asked me to carry out some operation on the trains they were planning. Well anyway, everyone they sent into Syria was killed. He was shortly after arrested and tortured for sedition. And by Fructidor 1st, Labor Day 2012 the Great Revolt had begun and the rebels soon took over, slash “liberated”Breukelen, Queens, and the rest.
History will absolve almost everyone! I have looked this man dead in the eyes in the steam of the baths and heard him say seditious things and never informed. I am still absolved. One day people may look back at their uprising and say they committed atrocities, they were extremist, anarchists even! They tipped the arch with their fuckery! If you showed me a video of Zivistan executing four men with a shotgun, like the one they played on TV. If you tried to tell me Zivistan was really a Persian sleeper; a Shi’a triple agent. Like they said on TV. I wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe he’s killed a single person. They just seek to ruin him so his words mean nothing.
I ask myself again what on this latest USB? A list of names? I could bring it to Haan Town, they would tell me for a pretty small price. Or maybe I’ll bring it to Anya Drovtich. Hand it over to the Banshee Underground to get it where it needs to go. Those people can move anything.
I want this last thing to be clear. I am just an actor. Like Jews, we are not really supposed to be able to even vote. I am here to capture the human experience and make it relate. But the craft on stage is dying, it’s a bourgeoisie fringe event. That Hamilton brought back black face-white face, claiming to empower people of color, forgive me while I quietly vomit in my hands. I am making the last round of drinks on the Titanic, and knowing what I know, seeing what I saw; you cannot escape the coming war. Too much was accumulated for too long and now, well now I need another drink.
A New Orleans whiskey or a Mescal maybe. Something mega Smokey. I’ll just head to work and if I can think of a clever way to get Ms. Drovtich this token of our mutual friend’s appreciation, I’ll do it not for some cause, not because of the atrocities, not because of anything. Because if Kawa Zivistan is alive, if he’s passing women notes again. Well a loyal droog, and I think myself a loyal droog to him; I will pass his little note along.
I am not an old soul, but I do remember the past. I did write a book on time travel; I know that Kawa is a serious person who has suffered a lot. That he is also a mad man and possibly a terrorist, well cheers he is also my friend.
Comrade, I know you cannot hear me! I know it is not safe or prudent to hand Anya your calling card. I will either follow her after her shift ends on the ambulances, or I will call 911 to fake a medical emergency, have her take me, or some accomplice to the hospital and in the back of the ambulance where we believe no one is filming us; I will hand her the USB.
They used to say on the TV; ‘if you have nothing to hide why do you care if we watch over you’. Then there was fucking Snowden. Who defected to the Russians and testified that every single cell phone call, text, email, even ToR and snap chat was stored in National Security Agency server warehouses. Filed and linked to social security numbers. Even when Patriot Acts I, II and IIIcame out; basically canceling out whatever ‘proud sacred rights’ the Americans thought they had; we said we were not terrorists! Who cares?! Brink booze and watch Sports! Free Netflix and Chill! They used to try and tell us on TV Democrats and Republicans were different somehow. Well, the things they say are different, but now both parties are suspended under the War Powers Act of 2077.
Who’s the President of the U.A.S.? That’s what Anya the N.Y.F.D Paramedic will ask me or my accomplice. After our name and ‘if we know where we are and what day of the week is it. The orientation questions. If she asks me ‘who’s the President of the United States of America’, instead of asking me who is the President of the United American States; well that’s a resistance code.
Kawa told me in the letter, ‘When they take you, pretend you’re very, very drunk, just as the Russians trained us!’
I wonder if I will see my old supposedly dead friend ever back to happiness. What would make a man like him happy? A nice girl. A life on the beach? A fast car? A published book? Well everyone has a price do they not, we all have a price. Sadly, what I think will make my old friend happy, as happy as he can be at this juncture. “Falsify a medical emergency, avoid detection by using some proxy you seduce, and pass off that card to the underground. That would make me so happy.”
Well, he put as much in explicit pamphlet writing: “The aim of the entire Great Revolt, therefore, is to take full control of the means of human development at the most localized levels without using unnecessary violence to do so. Thus we harness our collective might to secure our human rights entitlements once and for all.” But there was something more to what he was doing than all this rhetoric. That’s why people listened to him and risked their lives for his various visions. Albeit sometimes very begrudgingly.
One time he was very, very drunk. Or at least pretending to be so. And he told me about the alleged execution. The highly brutal execution of his first love and first rebel co-conspirator. Some woman named Emma he had known in the Jewish Military Colony when it existed. On the eve of the dark years.
Initially. I helped him because of that story alone. Not any political style idea. I was actually moved. By just how much they had taken from him and how far he was willing to go to hit them back. All the way up the mountain. Into every castle and high tower. Thus my ‘sympathy with the resistance’ was not based on an ‘imagined community’. It was based upon a basic human bond. Something inside me knew this man was going to take this all the way to the most secure Ziggurat, on the highest peak of the mountain, to go as far as he could. And we all need something to believe in.
“We are all very old peoples. We are peoples and tribes who remember. With stiff necks and incredible stubbornness. We all live with memory and tribulation going back several thousand years. This is a treatise co-written by Israeli Zionists; by Kurdish Hevals; by Palestinian Patriots and also the children of Iranian Clerics. By Yemanites, Chechens, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronite and Sunni and Shia Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrian Arabs, Druze as well.
“All who wish to see peace and if not peace, separation and long term ceasefire. If not peace, if not understanding; then trade and normality. All peoples in our region have suffered enough. To survive the wars of the last four thousand years, to stop the wars of tomorrow;
“Enough! Cease fire. Build confidence apart.”
“Let us separate into our respective camps and return to our lands; let us confederate and dash forever the meddling of outside nations that speak of peace, trade in arms and reduce us to barbarism!”
“These authors and practitioners of a fourth track diplomacy call for an end to false, wasteful peace. An end to all outside invasions.
If we cannot pray in the same ways, or speak the same languages; this is no impediment to declare HOLLIS! HUDNA! From our many flags let us become a Middle East Confederation from the Western Maghreb to the Indus River.”
Inner Book Four: A Draft Constitution of the Middle East Confederation
MAPS & ADDENDA……………………………….……………………………………………
TABLE OF AUTHORITIES…………………………………………………………………………………………….
PREAMBLE
الديباجه
Excerpts from the Qamishlo Congress
TAMIDA ARTESH
None of us are “pro-peace”; we are pro-survival. Pro-stability. We are invested in possibilities that by the birth of the Confederation stops the flow of blood thrououghout our lands. We have all been taught an endless amount of mythology, based on very little real evidence. It suggests that what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates, what occurred down Nile was progress. It suggests civilization, and later religion, and even later science all emmanted from our peoples and our lands.
The Ziggurats of the neolithic age tell a story. Civilization began in the creation of castes and the centalizaiton of power into early state systems. The cradle of all civilization began with specializations of labor; chaining early humanity to useful trades; the conscription of worker slaves. The appointment of Kings. It began with tributes to unseen Gods, all powerful oligarchs, and eventially as cast of priests to preside over mythology, then later religions, later still over sience and this all served one thing: to prevent us from rebellion. The unnatural subjegation of all humanity into productive labor is not a unique story to Mesopatamia. This book is not about about insurrection, or economic development. It’t not a rejection of ethnic identity, or the work of athiests. What is clear:
The status quo is not sustainable. It is chaotic uncertainty at best. The entire Middle East is awash in an endless war and has expirienced every measure of barbaric atrocity. This state of modern warfare has proceeded without any actual peace since 1920, but the bloody choas existed a long time before that. Almost in perpetuity for as long as we have ever known. Every nation is vulnerable, every nation is complicit in the killing fields today. The Western powers and Eastern powers have used us. They have handed us sophisticated weapons to murder each other in varying combinations while the great transnational corporations harvest the energy supplies in the ground. This has nothing to do with civilizational clashes, or the competing interpretations of Abrahamic religion. That is just the framework for our terrifying division not the cause ot it. The Modern Middle East must cast off its oligarchy, cast off its foreign domianiton, cast off its ethnic particualrism and embrace a peace on its own terms.
It is not true that the tinderbox of the dying Ottoman erupted via Palestine. Nor is it true that the roads to Jerusalem from Cairo, Damascus, Karaballa, Najaf, Mecca, Medina and Tehran are all guarded by the now flailing American empire. Not all original sins of the region began with Crusaders, Ottomans, Zionists, meddling foreigners and with our oil.
TAMIDA SOLOMON
The truth is, that any peace process is little more than a short term buy off. Allowing the hegemon powers more time to take, to utilize what lies under our sands until it all runs out. Egypt, Jordan, briefly the PLO were paid off to make peace. Now the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and soon even Saudi Arabia are paid to stand down because the Americans and Europeans use Israel in Palestine as a forward operating base. Just as the Russians use Syria and Iran. Of course the Iranians and Israelis have their own interests, of course they have their own regional goals; but without external arms and subsidy they could not sustain such aggressive posturing and mount such adventuristic foreign policy.
It is also a wild deception that the Islamic State (ISIS) has its origins in any normal version of Islam. That its goals were divinely inspired and that its recent defeat brought an end to this type of Wahbai Salafist insurgency. ISIS was an entity countrolled by, supplied by, and supported throughout by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan’s intelligence services.
It is time now for the coming generation of the Middle East to take steps to prevent the interventions of foreign powers, as well as to contain the regressive impulses of theocracy.
In short the road to an actual long lasting peace is not through the conquest of states, the dispersion of the Jews again, or religious fundamentalism. The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, separation into stable units but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders; particularly the meddling of the East and the West; NATO, Russian Federation and rising China. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foriegn aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to diversity of religions and of course prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil.
The academia, the media and the West obsessively have focused on Palestine, because (a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish are at least half European or Slavic in appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkanzi/ European and 4 million are Sefardic/ Mizhahi) (b) Israel is without a single doubt a manipulation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Otremer: a colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. But while accepting or refuting that statement; it cannot be denied that so was Pahlavi Iran until 1979. So has been Jordan and Egypt, and the abomination of Wahbbi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia; as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege; of 8-9 million Israelies: 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders culminating in the holocaust; the Jews have in essense, or at least the Ashkanzi in charge of Israel have decided they will collaborate with Chrisitan Europe against their Semetic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by Romans nearly 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also know a great deal about persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many charchiteristics similar to the Jews. Particularly a feeling of their backs agaist a wall, then the sea. The world’s oldest groups of Christians; the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites have survived endless wars by retreat to the moutnains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secualizism and regressive fundimeantlism; Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan are cught between those feeings. The contradictions of Saudai Arabia and Gulf States are lost on no one.
Thus an unusual realignment is suggested. Five pillars, key stone nations if you will, that if realigned restore the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder and they; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey will be managed one by one.
The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. Each with external pipeline of funds and trade lijking back to a hegemonic power.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers that secure themselves off of endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward Maldevelopment: USA-NATO, Russian Federation and eventually the People’s Republic of China.
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Kashmir.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The virtually complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade less than 100 years. That all of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years and that the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem to Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by Palestinians and trained to organize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish are linguistically and culturally most similar to the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemanis, Bahrainians, Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these Proxies. Finally Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is over 60-70% Palestinian and without American and Israeli support could not exist as a country.
So it is actually not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the lynchpin of peace. Yet in warfare they have drawn in virtually all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire in order for the Israelis to form an alliance with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations that as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires; did in fact reportedly attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. As “Jews’ ‘ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Arameic.
Although all our peoples learn and think in several thousand year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is a historic legitimacy and self-awareness of being largely monotheostic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. Which does not make an argument that Palestinians are actually Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but really are the 20-30% intermised survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews that perhaps as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
TAMIDA TABATABAIE
Essentially speaking we are talking about a confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find common cause for separation and economic development intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Judeans, Persians, Arabs of all religious confessions and Kurds of all poltical types. Not factoring in whether they have states or not recognized by the world state system.
The Confederation is founded by historic tribes, the geographic nation is secondary if not necessary to the parties representing the majority of the tribe who reside in the Maghreb, Middle and Near East. Specifically the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation is based on ethnic cantons that will be self governedby religous law, civil law or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation is based on democratic autonomy; thus a co-gendered leadership, a census and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation will conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict will be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakur, Istambul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestians are not the key element of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is in fact the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade) and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation will pursue non-allignment.
There are critical security, international relations and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, object to calling the separation barrier “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success out this unit’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel is sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistanand Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds who are concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, un-ending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government, but in reality is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb & Middle East since 1920. All of the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, miniscule size of the land and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
A new level of atrocity is coming.
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of possible scenarious with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures wit hencomous cost in human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisraelwhich can broker regional any lasting stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and allaince of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the concioussness of the Sunni Arab majority.
TAMIDA BASHIR
It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting moer banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, amoung the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons of history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya in order to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development and most importantly; Hudna. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Turkey, Iraq and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But, we we envision and call for something so much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made out of sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that won’t render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered in both camps is the notion that it wouldn’t be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land in this day and age. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the contrary. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance.
Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian) and the more bloody melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015 an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives.
Between 2015 and 2023 mutliple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands Palestinians and few dozen Israelis. In the same period the Syrian ivil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to virtually all other ethnic conflicts that is a foot note, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghnistan, Yemen, Syria, and the Ukraine.
Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. The Three Parties of Kurdistan must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, or tribe or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
TAMIDA DEBUTELIERS
The window of achieving polical and military vicotry within our life times is a narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All of of our people no matter waht they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.
TAMIDA AMRASH
We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature t of this plan. By the best calculations of our Party we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reservess run out, but under 40 years to achive the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nations. There is noting n in anyones scripture that calls for this ednless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniorm belief.
TAMIDAH NOORI
Reading from the the Qu’ran:
When the sun (with its spacious light) is folded up;
When the stars fall losing their luster.
When the mountains vanish (like a mirage);
When the she-camels, ten months with young
Are left unattended.
When wild beasts are herded together (In human habitations);
When the oceans boil over with a swell;
When the souls are sorted out (Being joined, like with like);
When the female (infant),
Buried alive, is questioned for what crime she was killed;
When the scrolls are laid open;
When the sky is unveiled;
When the blazing fire is kindled to a fierce heat;
And when the Garden is brought near;
(Then) shall each soul know what it put forward;
So verily I call to witness the planets, that recede;
Go straight, or hide.
And the night as it dissipates;
And the dawn as it breathes away the darkness.
TAMIDA ZIVISTAN
We are going to use code. We are going to use metaphor. We will fight on the low roads and high roads, and from the mountain. We will not contradict myth or religious tenet, we will not offer up science as a God.
Literal translation: take something from a ceiling
Meaning: to make up information, without any real data
“TO TAKE SOMETHING FROM A CEILING”
Sebastian goes later uptown to visit his friend and longtime associate Nicholai Trickovitch to sp.eTk about the Russian woman he’s just re-encountered. On the Upper West Side of the Isle of Mann it’s quiet almost always. Intellectuals are mostly not party animals. The air smells like down river mist, like smoked fish, and bagels. Located about seven miles north west from the District Financial is the Upper West Side is an affluent gentrified ghetto of well-kept, mostly spacious and well furnished apartment homes with door men running from 79th street to around 96th street between Central Park and the Hudson River. The entire island of Manhattan, excluding some small clusters of housing projects in Harlem and lower East side, a smattering of Section 8 and rent controlled units too; the Isle of Mann is the domain of the country’s elite, 2 or 3%. The upper upper middle classes, a new rich financial class, athletes, celebrities and around 57,000 people with net worth above 37 million a piece and up. Sports players, movie actors and celebrities live there too. It’s a fortress of steel and glass. An Oblast requiring 4 peripheral boroughs and over 7 million serfs to service it.
For many many years the oligarchs of other nations laundered money in real estate, particularly along Billionaires Row on 57th street and Central Park South. As well as the ultra-rich gated community of the Hudson Yards Compound.
The wealthiest people; people who own property live in the Midtown, the .pTer West and the Upper East Sides of the Central Park. Looking out over it from above like a big public lawn. This ultra-gentrification of the city took its purest form in the mid 1990’s when the economy was still booming, the police forces were tripled, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and robber barons consolidated wealth alongside globalization and the demise of the Soviet Union. And the lesser oligarchy of everywhere decided to turn the City center into their Eastern American sex playground.
By the time of the Great Recession in 2008, the only working class people living in Manhattan were clusters of Petit-Bourgeois professionals who bought things or secured rent controlled units in the 1980’s. The New York Times, the paper of record suggested that by 2012 there were over 57,000 individuals with net worth above 37 million apiece and greater living in the City! More concentrated wealth than London and only slightly behind Moscow. Hard to count billionaires in any of the leading metropolitans, as most of the wealthiest ones launder away the bulk of it.
Sebastian’s father is a teeth puller. He owns a small practice on Staten Island mostly treating Cops, Firemen and Sanitation worker families. The loft they own in the coop at the North end of the district financial is mostly paid off. Sebastian had never lived in it. He grew up in a rent controlled apartment in Waterside Plaza. He ran away from home at age 14, was locked up in a youth offender faculty by age 15, became a Democratic Confederalist by age 16 and was living abroad for most of 17 and 18; then he came home and lived with his best friend Nikolai Rosetree Trickovitch for a period before chasing rooms for rent in all boroughs besides Staten Island where the rent was less than $500 a room, or a couch or on a floor mat.
There is no person on earth who better understands Sebastian than his best friend, his loyal Droog, his comrade, partner and companion. They are so alike in both genes, upbringing and disposition they can anticipate each other.
The train ride on the 2 Red line from the Financial District historically preserved print shop Sebastian’s family lives in; to the 96th street and Broadway train station is about a twenty minute ride. Nikholai rarely goes downtown. Nikholai has a long memory, he remembers most of the thirteen years of continuous friendship. It has had a lot of ups, downs and misadventures. But Sebastian brings a world of drama and intrigue to Nicholai’s life, which could have otherwise been uneventful. And Nikholai brings Sebastian qualities he utterly lacks; self-analysis, dispassionate reasoning grounded in fact and most importantly; restraint.
Introverted Nikholai is happy in his solitude. Sebastian can never enjoy being alone. The two men have come to need each other, but it is mostly Sebastian who is always in trouble and Nikholai who devises the maneuvers to the next crisis.
They look out over privilege itself. Seventeen stories up, the rooftop deck of the Trickovitch Family Penthouse looks North and West over the Hudson River, the Upper East Side, and also the George Washington Bridge where people who jump always die. There are not one but two private garden terraces. So much light and so much air, all somehow under nine hundred American dollars. Much to the chagrin of the Satmarswho own the building, the House Trickovitch is completely rent controlled.
Most other families in the building were bought or were forced out. The whole building worth tens of millions, the unit they occupy could be sold for 5 million outright.
Sebastian Adonaev is wearing his favorite brown beret scally cap and looking somewhere between manic and marmalade, caught somewhere in between possessed with some inner zeal, and at timed calm, cool and collected. His eyes are strange and happy as though he wishes to recite a poem. Or give a speech, which he frequently does at dinners, on trains and in public parks. He isn’t totally of this time, which is logical having immersed his thoughts in the past to make something better for the future. Although he does not ever smile except behind closed doors he is by all accounts charismatic. On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblesse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner in conspiracy Nikholai Trickovitch.
Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trickovitch since early 1981. That was not such a heyday for New York City as some newly arrived ‘hip’ individuals have come to believe. By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down, there was trash everywhere you could get accosted at knife point in an alley. You could get stabbed to death in a public place with dozens of people watching. That was the old Newyorkgrad.
Located on 95th and Riverside Park, it is now one of the most luxurious and safest of safe houses. Which is to say a lot of small talks happen here on sensitive things. It is rent controlled and guarded by Shqiptarëtis. They are highly warlike these Shqiptarëti s. Good at moving people and things, also safeguarding things for others. Nobody wants to fuck with the Russians, because they send Shqiptarëtis after you.
The place has wall to wall books and a rather large aquarium filled with amphibious turtles. The building has gone co-op, and they are the last remaining holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $1,200 American a month for it, adjusting for utilities and service fees. A good number of Ivoryish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully. The Trickovitch family employs and are related to Ivoryish lawyers as well. It was once a little more of a zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs. Now it is a sad, empty place for plotting with Nicholai’s fraternal twin brothers living in other cities and his parents more frequently at their upstate farm than here, often now for weeks at a time. The apartment has a functioning landline.
Sebastian rarely calls by mobile when he intends to visit. He calls from a subway payphone to the land line and then just shows up. Nikholai was the very first young person they knew with a bulky mobile phone as early as 1998. Nowadays both men don’t carry them very regularly. Both men use quarters, both men have thrown away $10 phones. They both have Sky Pagers, but neither are doctors.
Nikholai, it is rumored is paralyzed with some dark inner depression, some sickness inside him which makes him overly analytical. For a time he was married and playing house in Midwood, Breuklyne deep in the shtetl. Midwood is a place about one hour by train from 42nd Street, Time Square city center. One of the earliest New York settlements in the 16th century, now firmly in one of the largest eleven Ivoryish Quarters of the greater New York area. Nikolai’s father grew up there, as did Sebastian’s as did the populist secretly centrist politician Bernard Sanders currently running for the Presidential Primaries. Midwood is New York City’s most staunchly propertied Modern Orthodox Ivoryish district. Along with Crown Heights, Borough Park and Williamsburg which are the more black hat ultra-orthodox neighborhoods dominated by particular Rabbinic sects that find the entire gentile world profane and unholy. These four neighborhoods are surrounded and slightly intermixed with a sprawling array of Afro-Caribbean and African American ghettos and Fenian slums. The districts toward the Southern Coast are Russian and Italian respectively, but most of the Italians left for New Jersey, Long Island and Staten Island in the 80’s. The Haan quarter of Breuklyne is based in Sunset Park, but the epicenter of the colonization is over in Flushing, Queens. The unofficial population of Breuklyne is around 3-4 million persons, over a million not officially or legally supposed to be there.
Nikholai and his then wife; a Ms. Krissy Kristina moved to District Midwood as it was close to Breuklyne College where they were then going to school. They both had grown up in Manhattan. They lived a happy, secluded and hyper sexual life for more than half a decade out of sight and out of mind.
Then some years later, Krissy completely vanished, and Nikholai returned to the security of parent’s Upper West Side penthouse barely leaving now except for jaunts, benders, mild malingering whoring and occasionally a revolutionary plot, when he must to keep up appearances of being a trusted inner circle man. His connection to so called political activism is not academic or experienced, mostly were he to admit it, he has been sucked into the revolutionary vortex by association; enabling increasingly bold incarnations of Sebastian Adonaev’s little Otriad; their “irregular detachment for agitation, propaganda and freedom fighting”.
“The most striking thing about her is the murder in her eyes. They beg a man closer with the promise of bliss then deny him everything,” mutters Sebastian. He’s always talking about and obsessing about, eyes. Nikholai knows the code though.
Sebastian speaks of “her eyes” so he appears less crudely animalistic speaking of breasts and other luscious fleshy appendages. Behind this charade of romance, knowing Sebastian for so long, since teenage times; Nikholai knows the projected poet, from the lusty rake and barely tamed savage. The periodic excursions into serial monogamy are punctuated with inserting his penis artfully around town.
Nikholai isn’t himself tonight. He’s not even putting on a show of host and entertainer. He seems distracted. Perhaps vaguely annoyed that Sebastian is whore mongering on the eve of a revolution
Looking out towards the George Washington Bridge, Nikholai thinks of suicide, fleetingly but with conviction and plan. Sebastian observes the same Fort Washington district rising as the highest point on the island of Manhattan. There is no suicide in Sebastian, it is removed from his very way of being. He periodically began mentioning to his close confidants, “If you ever here I killed myself, it’s a lie, I don’t have it in me, they finally did it.” But, you don’t kill white people in America. It has to look like something else.
Sebastian ruminates in butterfly flaps of mental headspace. In his wandering mind he sees all the times he’s walked aimlessly around the Fort Tryon Park with a particular lost lover. Holding her little cold hands. One partner, in particular, comes to his mind for Fort Washington District. The Russian Ivoryish quarter perched up in the rafters of New York City. For after her, none of the other previous or subsequent ones had mattered. Her name was Yelizaveta Alexandrenova Kotlyarova. He had fought very hard to keep her love alive in some tantric, flickering form. She had left him for the fortieth time, this time breaking off both communication and sex, and ended all correspondence about six sad months prior. No other woman had even crossed his mind since then. But, then came Daria to kill him. Hardly an improvement really.
But, some neurons fire faster than others, and then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination. All previous lessons were lost. Were Futurist Newyorkgrad anything like more medieval times, both Sebastian Adonaev and Nikolai Trickovitch; are the disgraced sons of Ivory Duke. In layman’s terms, the prodigal children of the Upper Middle Classes of New York Ivoryish gentry. Both blessed with privilege, education, several serfs and white skin coats, cursed with seeming mental illness and evolving, not revolving revolutionary thinking. A product of privilege and perhaps Wikipedia.
Nikholai was briefly in the N.Y.P.D. Under two years. He was purged for his political affiliations. Lately he’s taken work as a hacker and an unlicensed private detective moon lighting also as an accountant. Wiggling his way listlessly through college. Helping cheating wives get their proof of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark Grad, in the New Jersey Oblast. He can get to a lot of things in the dark of the web. He sometimes can be found moonlighting as a driver for the Red Cross in their vast housing and logistics Ponzi schemes. Taking money raised from one catastrophe to band aid, blanket and water supply the next one. They hand out prepaid ATM cards to people who lose their homes to fire or disaster, that’s surely appreciated. He’s cut off a lot of people, he begrudgingly lets Sebastian get him out of the house once or twice a year.
In this year, 2012 he can barely manage to leave this house, but he likes to make short walks into the dusk. He is a mostly functional alcoholic, notwithstanding his inability to hold a job, his failure to get over his disappeared wife, his utter failure to finish university and his paralysis. Haitian Rum Straight. Maker’s Mark Straight. And cartons of Newport cigarettes. Sebastian has never questioned what Nikholai does for work. He does something with the internet, living off his wealthy father and selling pills through Shqiptarëti s to Columbia University students. The children of the elite are addicted to something called Adderall to study and take their exams. The Ivy League is only nine blocks north. Sebastian stays out of his friends’ money. Almost all of his friends have either clean ambulance money or dirty criminal money, and not much in between. Colluding with angels and devils to make an uprising occur, things like that take allies and real dependable, actually won’t run allies take time.
“Go work from somewhere warm, droog,” Sebastian always encourages him, but Nikholai is cold and spiritually long dead. The blackness in him sees reality as it is, not how it should be or could be or filtered heavily through the ego. “Get yourself a new woman! A blonde with big inviting tits!”
But Nikholai never heeds Sebastian’s call to pack up for prettier places or faces and Sebastian never listens to Nicholai’s persistent advice to stay away from Russian women or be less of a committed ‘Democratic Confederalist’.
Back in the year 2000 they both joined the youth wing of the newly formed ‘Communist Party of America’, but both got kicked out for throwing a huge underage drinking party in the national office. Also launching a short bombing campaign connected to slave labor and the garment industry.
Nikholai sees the bridge out there in the pretty lit up night and thinks about sweet surrender. Sebastian, though here to talk about Daria and his near death experience, remembers his Yelizaveta, a fond memory of challenging strokes.
Yelizaveta, who Sebastian met while attending Hunter College, lived in a cute two bedroom apartment on Fort Washington Ave in a six story building above Fort Tryon; the tallest point in Manhattan. Officially her mother was a maid at the Benjamin Hotel and her father allegedly unemployed on disability. But, that was all deception. Not in any way their real jobs or capabilities. For on the outside the family looked like a struggling working poor immigrant story with young Yelizaveta clawing for the Russian American dream via dreams of medical school at Stony Brook University. But Sebastian was privy to the truth inside the truth. Her last name was not really Kotlyarova. It was Perechenova.
“In Russia we were called Ivory. Outside of Russia, we are finally called Russians. We are treated about the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father, Alexander Dmitrievich Perecheveney, “like niggers.”
Yelizaveta was Sebastian’s partner and paramour for the past two years. She met him in the student movement days before she left for Medical School in Long Island. They wrote many months of letters then for two years were partners and rigorous lovers. Then things fell apart. While Daria was igniting some new desires and unsung anthems, Nikholai had heard the songs all before. For years with Yelizaveta and a couple more with several women before her. Now Sebastian and Nikholai, born nine days apart, were both nearly 30, but once they were both wild at age 14. They had loved and lost many times, though Nikholai had loved and lost everything when his wife left him and disappeared into virtual thin air. They knew each other’s love and hateful songs.
They had all called in chips and put out feelers to find his ex-wife Krissy. No one likes to hopelessly cling to a failing marriage then have it break apart. People like even less when the person they love becomes a vapor. A ghost. When all the leads dried up there was still this terrible hope she was somewhere she could return from. When they almost had every ambulance and every gangster, every bad man, every snitch and every sound bite looking for Nicholai’s ex-wife. All the leads went cold. For many years they held radical meetings in a small Bulgarian Bar on Canal and Broadway. The owner, ‘Sasho’. Yelizaveta’s savage father.
They went together finally to Sasho, by 2004 the most dangerous man in New York City. The father of Sebastian’s favorite ex. A person who according to the IRS was collecting disability from a small rent stabilized flat in Washington Heights while his wife worked full time cleaning hotel rooms.
But, Alexander owned properties all over town. Alexander, born in Ukraine, raised in Bulgaria held a growing empire in disguise. His wife, Yelizaveta’s more Magda Marina; someone that looked exactly like her was indeed cleaning rooms. Someone that looked just like her had raised little Yelizaveta; but nothing was what it appeared to be.
Alexander is called Sasho by those that think they know him well. He is a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his famous tavern Social Club when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted dancing about with a cigar grinning. Sasho is also quite a mastermind. He found himself with a great deal of money at the end of the 90’s. Always plotting and constantly cashing on his plots. A Ukrainian Ivory when he felt like it. A Bulgarian Mobster when he felt like it. The IRS auditor registered him as receiving about $600 a month in disability. The very last man you’d ever want to owe. But Sebastian had owed him several times. But, even Sasho couldn’t find Ms. Krissy. Or that’s what he finally said after getting a lot of free work out of them.
The family safe houses were still ‘too hot’ to talk about anything heavy. There had been multiple police raids to Sebastian’s loft since 2000. The young men were always plotting too and that plotting got them investigated by multiple police and intelligence services. Sebastian had to flee the country for the year of 2000-2001, he moved between London, Paris, Madrid and eventually Tel Aviv evading allegations of terrorism in New York, largely unfounded. He came back in November of 2001 after the towers fell and moved in for a time with Nikholai’s family. Shortly after they got back to plots, plans, direct actions and trouble. As young men causing trouble should do, they both moved deep into Breuklyne in 2005. But while Breuklyne and the Bronx have many alcoves for sheltering rebels and criminals, they always needed a dangerous protector. So since then, their little Otriad has taken shelter under the roof of a loving lesser Post-Soviet Bulgarian Oligarch. And there were a lot of business relationships now facilitated by this.
In 2010 amid a terrible blizzard Sebastian Adonaev had saved the life of his then girlfriend Yelizaveta. Perhaps a lot more had happened that night. But after the storm cleared the Otriad never owed Sasho a thing ever again, the story went. That was the part of the story Nikholai knows. There was some attempt by a rival crime boss to ruin Sasho and his family that night. Sebastian and Mickhi Dbrisk had stacked up some bodies and both cleared town shortly after.
Alexander’s daughter, maybe daughters, also his wife were taken and set to be snuffed. Some rival Voorhi named Kahn. Sebastian and a readily assembled flying column fought their way through a snowstorm to rescue Yelizaveta and most of the family from Kahn’s goons. The whole city was locked down by thick snow and no open roads from a Sanitation Strike. Sebastian and his crew went hard. Grabbed up, Yelizaveta was found with a broken tibia, lying bleeding and hijacked in JFK airport. That night was so pivotal for it was the first time Sasho owed anyone anything and found out about the secret little thing his daughter had going on with Sebastian. But then a lot of other things happened. Sasho was shot five times and nearly died. Another daughter no one knew about with another wife got her arms and legs cut off. The flying column set off a huge explosion at the Plaza Hotel. It was real fucking messy, Sebastian and Co. killed a few people that night. Nikholai partook in the retribution and blood bath.
After that night. Yelizaveta loved him even more, her father respected him and also owned him. But her mother Tanya Marian was simply horrified. Never the same woman again. She worked full time to end the entire relationship. All in just a seven day blizzard. When the Department of Sanitation finally plowed the roads they found the many bodies of decapitated gangsters littered in pink piles.
Sebastian was locked up for a month. Sasho bailed him out. Not for the men he killed, but from lack of sleep. Sometimes when the work he did took over and he wandered around town in big circles engaging the universe and a lot of other people. An ambulance picked him up near Coney Island. He never was held very long before the American Civil Liberties Union or family lawyers got things negotiated. They never killed anyone or blew anything up, that’s what the lawyers always repeated over the years.
Most of the work Sebastian and his outfit did was propaganda. Historical lectures, street theater, speeches and lots of diner salons on topics of subversive relevance. Sebastian’s father was the dentist for a lot of detectives and high ranked cops, which helped some. Sebastian and Nikolai picked up with Sasho, which helped a lot. A lot of the time some standoff happened and Sebastian took himself hostage. The police hospitalized him a lot more than they put him in the tombs. It was easier to get rid of him that way, since they recognized those that knew or heard that he was a city EMT and an affiliated person who never put boys in blue in harm’s way for the most part.
Yelizaveta’s mother ordered her to break the whole affair off immediately in the Winter of 2010. So after a year of hiding and sneaking around, breaking up, fucking hard and making up, then breaking up again in circles; the day after his 28th birthday, giving him a good hard last ride, Yeli decisively ended everything. Sasho was never consulted with or weighed in on the romance between Sebastian and his daughter. He was of course by then aware it was happening, and did nothing. Sebastian never asked permission or asked him to do anything after the final break up. The man being paid to be her disabled father, the double who knew Yelizaveta more than her biological father; well he was the only other person sad about the whole thing.
To the brutal and brilliant ‘Bulgarian’ gangster slash businessman, Sebastian Adonaev amused him. Reminds him of himself as a young man before he lost his Communist style, or Democratic Confederalist type thinking and found over a million ways to make money breaking the law.
Not that any of these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Except to paint the portrait of Sebastian as more hopeless romantic puppy than a stone cold political killer, which he eventually became after losing enough friends in the years of the underground. Sebastian still loves young Yelizaveta, the prim Jappy medical student as ferociously as he ever had. He served her needs and courted her involvement in political projects, and she certainly did quite a lot to assist him. But, her mother wanted her to have nothing to do with a young man so alike to her father, both her real father and the man hired to play her father.
“Well actually the best way to get over a woman is to get under another woman,” said Nikholai. A famous Old Russian saying. Yelizaveta eventually got her mind voluntarily wiped and went to medical school in Havana. Sebastian fucked as many hipster sluts, lap dance whores and floozies he could. But Yelizaveta has a pussy made of gold, a sharp analytical mind and a thick butt.
The two partisans stand on the Penthouse roof deck drinking Vodka and smoking stoags. Cheers to the maddest plots! The great revolutionary struggle! To the Martyrs! To Krissy! To Yelizaveta! The smoke and drink washes them into places before and places to come.
Nikholai traverses a daily memory road with his vanished ex-wife. Wonders did she leave him or was she taken away, and by who? Sebastian is regularly and often existentially dying from his beliefs. Women just distract that he is a committed zealot, let him pretend he wants a ‘normal life’. When his partners reject him and his unstable, if not probably impossible pursuits, he goes harder at them. Which thus magnifies the danger to himself and others. Before this recent anguish over Yelizaveta, there was the big breasted anarchist Hali Viktoria. An artistic Swedish radical to whom Sebastian was for some time engaged to marry. There was also the prim debutante Ukrainian Ms. Maria Parsheva. Less passionate, less muse worthy but certainly highly influential were Polish Democratic Confederalist Yovanna Koracab and his long lost Syrian Sephardic Israeli partner Emma Solomon. Although the sad memory of Emma was always a specter.
Not that the list of other unlisted, less contemplated lovers and girlfriends were of less importance to his human development, but the women who evolved him were their own league, they all attempted to love Sebastian ‘as he was’ and better the quality of his life game.
Maria and Yelizaveta were the two other former Soviet lovers Sebastian had taken as his closest partners in the past four years. It would be incorrect to say he dated “Russian Women exclusively”; as later inferred by the Russian photographer and gangster Oleg Medved. He had merely intimately engaged only just two, one right after the other. And that was enough for him to suspect there was something remarkable about the character of a “Russian woman.” The first, Maria brought such stability and calm to his mind. She made a good home with him in Midwood Canton, she pumped him full of sex. But Sebastian did not love her completely for she did not excite at all intellectually. She would suck on his cock for hours, or take in in uncomfortable places sooner than talk about the ‘emancipation of the negro’ as she called his work dismissively. She never seemed angry or critical. She removed Sebastian from the stresses of Paramedicine and also radical organizing.
“That’s all she seemed good for,” Nikholai once suggested, but he later impressed her on one very particular occasion. She could barely converse on the political-theoretical level, much less cook.
Nikholai remembered the little redhead Maria as something of a “submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit,” complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Soviet in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody staged mess in 2007. That was the time when Nikholai, Sebastian, Maria and a foxy little Chechen named Angelica had to hold off a murderous mob of sixteen working poor white hooligans from Gerritsen Beach with a briefcase, a few prayers, and good Bangladeshi Samaritan. Which got them all over the papers and Sebastian into the ranks of the F.D.N.Y. Though he was purged for his politics after 4 years.
Sebastian Adonaev would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justinian Tomas had once described her. This was a real gesture of flattery on Justin’s part by calling Maria his“Betty Shabazz ” he” he was calling Sebastian an Ivory Malcolm X. Or something to that effect of flattery. Betty, like was a strong woman who stood behind her larger than life man without involving herself in the political melee. Sebastian and Maria lived together for over a year, they broke up on Block Island after one of the clandestine Z.O.B. Congresses. Sebastian had allegedly left her on the beach and swam out into the night.
Nicholai just thought of Maria a Russian Geisha, until he watched her do the train job. At that moment under fire, her realness did in fact come out. Nikh still had no trouble though after the break up confiding “She was just a Geisha, a gold digging off the boat. A stay at home fuck.”
The second significant Russian girlfriend, Yelizavetaveta was headstrong and wild and Sebastian could never forget her. No matter how many women he got under. Yelizaveta, a spoiled daughter of a very dangerous mobster in a subjective reality, a working poor dreamer in another. Hustling to become a doctor to get her parents out of poverty. Pretty much in her mind alone, since two actors were playing the two people raising her while here biological parents lived like the underworld kingpins they are. No one approved of her at all. Though no one really said so while it seemed to make him happy; everyone later told him ‘Yeli’ was walking all over him.
Nikholai remembers young Yelizaveta emerging into the picture. Sebastian’s bedroom as well as club house gossip sometime in early 2009. He remembers her at meetings and social functions. As “a mouthy Americanized Russian Ivory blonde. A know it all little bitch who walked all over you privately and publicly. And privately yet again. She emptied out your pockets, put wild eyed ideas in your head, and reduced you to bawling tears when she eventually left you over her mother’s total lack of approval.”
But Sebastian never saw it like that. He’d held the relationship long past when it should have ended. He left her with a box of letters and she had held on to a diamond engagement ring he’d bought from some Rabbi in a bathhouse.
“Your women are never far from the very center of your goriest war stories,” Nikh notes.
The two comrades Sebastian and Nikholai had been active in the student movement. Later in the underground when the student movement was suppressed. And later in the Party, active in the insurgency and its defense committees since 2000 when Sebastian got out of the behavior modification camps he’d spent a year in. Escaping on Valentine’s Day back to New York from Upstate. The year they did their first job. They both opposed their government’s imperialism as well as the capitalist system generally. Sebastian always put amalgamated Communist type ideology to it, but Nikholai just always felt the government was repressive. The Noires and Mestizos were totally oppressed and the population brainwashed into fat apathy. There have been a lot of great and also “highly mediocre women” and a lot of jobs since then. Jobs, being their little word for resistance operations. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adonaev entered his “Post-Soviet amorous period,” as Nikholai liked to call it, well the jobs had gotten quite a lot more ambitious. The man needed an iron clad muse all assumed. In reality, he simply needed to be loved so that the love he put in the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.
“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly; for the fuck or the love making? The full blown Russian-ness of her” asks Nikholai. As Sebastian had informed him that Daria was fully Slavic and all his other so-called Russian lovers were variations on Ruus Ukrainian or Russ Ivory.
“Referring back to this new lady being a full blown Slav?”
“Certainly. Slav is only one letter from you being a slave after all. And you and I know full fucking well that it isn’t the female who’s the slave in these Cold War flings. Those women walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”
Sebastian had come to believe that Nikholai harbored some rather base prejudices against ‘the Russians’ but had never determined why. Nikholai had come to believe that Sebastian, unable to love himself at all, found himself enslaved by a series of at least partly damaged, somewhat dangerous, quasi gold digging immigrant women. Russian and non-Russian alike. Both men had father’s three or four generations removed from Pre-Soviet Russia with Ivory blood. Both had mothers eight or nine generations American by some distant way of Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and famine. Both men share a political conviction perhaps reflective best of being born Petite Bourgeoisie in the leading city in the last violent flutters of an Empire.
Sebastian had not previously thought of how Dasha performed in bed. It was as if he had known that already, being a man. From first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to find a cocktail.
“She can clearly fuck a man into pieces,” he replies.
That wasn’t up for any speculation on his part. But this was not the immediate attraction, the shapely form and the physical curves, the eyes he keeps talking about and the crazy in her. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. There are poems and songs about that. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Post Soviet partners. He felt a sexual pull, animalistic in nature. But this was a different thing. A Deja-vu about loss and longing.
“I bet she is pretty damn ferocious,” remarks Nicholai.
An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop but four weeks ago.
“I can’t stop thinking about her, actually. She’s made more remarkable not by her sheer dangerousness, but by some feeling I have of having seen her before in another time. I speak not about a blackout in that Tavern. I must confide in low volume about other lives and other worlds. A pure predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”
“Tortured her, did you?”
“I did. With my choice of words.”
“This is your primary instrument of torture Tovarish Adonaev.”
Tovarish is a former Soviet for Comrade. Nikholai is a Russian-Ivoryish-Fenian-German mutt just like Sebastian. Their New-Yorkerness, supersedes all that imagined identity. Neither of their mothers is HalachicallyIvoryish, though Sebastian’s mother Barbara had gone through some motions to convert to the watered down Reform version. So the black hats would, of course, disavow them both as sad losses to the Gentiles. Neither Sebastian nor Nikholai could marry lawfully in Israel either, but that didn’t bother Nikholai as he had no intention of ever going to that particular colony after hearing many of Sebastian’s accounts. Sebastian and Nick both look enough like “the Russians,” but they speak, and they think like children of the American Upper Middle-class intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals. Nikholai’s father is a neurologist, and Sebastian’s a dentist. Both fathers are committed, Ivoryish Atheists. Both gentile mothers being American ‘hippie’, openly minded sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to their lower ‘case communism’ as they’d be denounced as being national traitors over and over. But, they were not ever doctrinaire Communists affiliated to any of the mostly irrelevant, highly decimated American party factions. orthodox Democratic Confederalists, or working in the local Party organs. The nine of which in New York were marginal anachronisms at best composed of the awkward and the elderly. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much-trampled masses out of empathy not necessity. They were only about as Ivoryish as their value for education, but sometimes Sebastian was known to make a rude display of it in the form of Holiday parties.
They typically since 1999 did Rosh Hashanah, the Ivoryish New Year’s, Hanukkah the eight-day gambling potato pancake party, Passover the Exodus Fest; and Sukkot the eight-day tent party feast. And the rest, perhaps about were all causally omitted. As well as poorly understood.
They had met in their freshman year of High School. Sebastian’s home had been robbed, and Nikh had shown up with some weapons and an offer to help him get his honor back, his Rep. They rarely agreed on anything besides opposition to the government, and the greatness of big firm breasts augmenting rough sex, but they were very similar men in disposition. They both enjoyed the drink and could work each other into nights of sheer ethanol rampage. In the City, culture, genes, and habits their cloth was of similar cut. Until the year 2010 though, Sebastian has been married to his varying interpretations of what would come to called the ideological and tactical school of ‘Democratic Confederalism’ via a latent Zionist Universalism while Nikholai had been married to Krissy, not needing angry politics at all. But things fall apart. Sebastian returned from his ‘second homeland’ Illubador in cuffs and Krissy ran out. Then as stated completely vanished. It was perhaps Nikholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied what he had imagined was his occupied homeland or imagined was his destiny that put them back together, leaving them open to suggestion. This led to the expeditions into Ayiti and the beginning of their participation in the armed struggle. Via a machine of networked factions and sympathizers the two had built in tandem over a decade; called initially the Youth United For Equality Movement in the student days, The Organization during the long dark years and after many alphabet soups of shells, splinter and reformations; the Banshee Association, later the Banshee Group and after a merger with the Irish and the Negs; the Z.O.B. Their political club, their own Party.
“And let us all be frank that women can give men any number of tremendous suggestions and wield a power that shapes a man’s deeds. Perhaps you could say women, with more love for the world and more investment in its future can direct the violent ego driven nature of men.”
“She didn’t tell me everything, but enough to conclude she is a victim, a prisoner of sorts. With a dark Post-Soviet past to unravel all of her callous behaviors and the smile she hides behind.”
They had toppled backward together toward the precipice, and in the free fall, he had pulled her with him to collective death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well, it was impossible to know truly, Yelizaveta the young scientist could have explained it, but she was long gone these days.
Rather than tumble into a pit of death, Sebastian grabbing onto Daria altered the trajectory of the plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly, beckoning commands and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.
“How Russian American.”
“So what the fuck really happened on that roof?” Trickovitch asks.
“Well we fought and we toppled and we landed on top of each other half off the edge. Then we just lay there quietly panting. I realized that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me toward death.”
“That’s really hot. And by hot, I mean real fucking stupid.”
“Well, anyway. So hearts were racing and looking down into seventeen stories of death she then grabs my hand and bites down into my right shooter.”
Sebastian shows the little bite shaped wound. There was a literal ring of red bite marks around his right index finger.
“I think I know her from before,” Sebastian finally admits overtly in hushed Ivory.
“Before, eh. Tovarish. You need to take more of your salt medicine.”
“No, I mean maybe. But this was different. I am not making chemical, electrical mythologies droog; I remember Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova Maccluskey from before-before.”
“You’ve always been a sick fuck. A brutalist. It gets worse when you low dose or drop dose, or of course go full Wakefield and don’t go to sleep. And you need not let fourth-dimensional things interfere heavily with the gathering war effort,” Nikholai replies and lights another mentholated smoke.
“Well then she calms down. And we do this kind of half swoon, half cuddle, half makes a reevaluation of an enemy. As she did just tried to push me off a roof and kill me. Daria tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage setup to a man named ‘Maccluskey’. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. She asked me if I wanted to take her on a date. She told me she knew the Financial District very well and could tell me who and what to hit.”
Sometimes Nikholai Trickovitch believes his best friend is a mad Hebrew prophet and a highly inspiring leader over the years, to some. And sometimes Sebastian is pure draining.
“Don’t project and don’t believe any of her Russian lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than it is. The world is evil enough on its comrade story teller. As for her offer to help? Why? What’s in it for her? I think you should ask where this woman came from, question why she ended up meeting you at this very stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. What are you holding? What do you have in the bank? The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation. She tried to kill you man.”
“She told and made most illicit references to what she did to come here. Perhaps she wants out of who holds her paperwork. Or maybe something else,” Sebastian suggests.
“I’m not sure she did anything but prove you’re easier to kill than the rumors suggest, you’d both been drinking and we all know just about anything can come out of a Russian woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie,” Nikholai replies.
“Just about anything can become true or untrue, dangerous or stunning. A top or a bottom. But given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed Daria was alluding to her imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”
“But are they even true? All women lie, and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were storytelling as art or advanced parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You make every single woman around you’re your damsel in distress from Capitalism! You’ve done so time and again. I’ve been here for it all. Remember your truest, most equal partner Hali Viktoria, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in this endless succession, you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”
“Nicholai, you’re making something out of prejudice. I had just two serious partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was only Maria, and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple of short stands in the Stans in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun. My hand gave me greater pleasure,” smirks Sebastian.
“Comrade Hali Viktoria was the kind of woman you need to find again, or just steal her back from that Italian hipster musician she dates or something. You’ve done such things frequently. Not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you, and they’ll never seriously join this cause,” says Nikholai, “Just like Maria and Yeli, Daria will completely reject your ideology, reject your some-what hooligan Bohemian lifestyle and leave you the very minute you become hard to deal with. Which inevitably you are! Incredibly hard to deal with,” says Nikholai.
Nikolai Trickovitch is referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well-suited partner for Sebastian Adonaev. All of his friends, comrades, and co-officers never went so far as to say “Maria Parsheva is a Russian Geisha,” or “Yelizaveta Perechenova is a condescending, high maintenance Ivoryish American princess,” but they all said it when the two women broke off the relationships. Sebastian’s mother was vaguely prejudiced by now of anyone who even spoke Russian.
Hali Viktoria the Fenians-Swedish-American wild rebel. Hali Vik was not a natural fit either though. Her big tits and flirtatious demeanor caused a lot of fights with overly forward strangers. Sebastian remembers momentarily the time Hali cut her risks, and he had to get up to Massachusetts and find her doped up in a roadside motel. He also remembers ‘the Lowell Job’. When they burned down half the Meth Labs in the city and engaged in a running gun fight with the Cambodian street gangs. Which had been a messy overexertion of well-intentioned violence because Hali the Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too?
Part of Sebastian’s condition was that everything was always happening at once in total recall. If he did not take a medicinal salt to lock into the present, he gets overwhelmed by the intensity of everything.
Well anyway, Hali was ‘safe in Italy’ or maybe Texas now, and while there may have been a little bit of torture, murder, barbarism, and war utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.
Nikolai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai knew precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was, in fact, the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Illubabor, Sebastian was in paperwork at least still quite married to Emma Solomon. But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to the firing mechanisms of the inner heart. Was it these four women that had made Sebastian believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and Emma was dead. Or didn’t exist in the same space that everyone else had.
Yelizaveta in a completely separate way was real in his head, heart and phallus. Because she had worked on his body very thoroughly. And he had been employed heavy on hers. They were together for only three months when the storm hit; someone broke her leg, someone tried to kill her dangerous father and Sebastian fixed it all. Then he was imprisoned. There were many lovers, not an inappropriate amount but a good amount still. Sebastian had well ripped the heart out of their young Polish comrade Joanna who loved him as no other woman had or perhaps could but to whom he felt youthful nothing. But that was a decade ago. Sometimes, he felt like all his pain with loving women that couldn’t love him, in the same way, was due to what he did to Joanna.
Sometimes it was too many women to believe any of it was really love at all.
Nikolai had been married to a Syrian Italian Puerto Rican model for seven years named Krissy Kristina Safra. Or just ‘Ms. Krissy’ for cute. She had wanted very little besides children, and she was an agoraphobe. She didn’t leave their Midwood, Breuklyne apartment very many times in the seven years they lived together. The product of near ceaseless sexual harassment and advances on the street, she preferred the life of a managed housewife. Her father was a rather wealthy lesser Oligarch. A Syrian Ivory, who had converted to Christ faith early in life and married a Puerto Rican-Italian mixy; but he remained ethnocentric. Also allegedly connected to something big in the Central Intelligence Agency. The parents completely disowned her for co-cohabitation with a Ivory Ashkenazi. Though Nikh wasn’t even very Ivoryish at all and didn’t even have a Ivoryish mother, or even a Bar Mitzvah. They had gotten married early at age 18 and lived together in District Midwood until their late twenties. Adonaev rarely saw his best man then, but Nikolai was happy playing house, he was domestic in his soul.
Eventually it ended, he wouldn’t bear her kids. She didn’t want one, she wanted 3 or 4. And he didn’t know if his life wanted to look like that. The money wasn’t great at his job, and she was even a little more home bound than he was which seemed extreme. They bargained and fucked, bargained and cried. Then, they divorced and then she completely disappeared, into smoke. As if her father had managed that; which maybe he had. The very last time they saw each other to sign the divorce papers she gave him a parting fuck. He poured olive oil on his cock and put it deep in her ass for as long as he could think to. It was the kind of rough goodbye sex from movies, which passionate, angry people have in real life. It was the kind of sex Yelizaveta and Sebastian had for a year since they broke up about once a week for a year. Nikholai doesn’t like to equate his last encounter with Krissy as sodomy with Italian olive oil. It was a lot more than that. Deeper than rough anal sex. She had completely rejected him and then cut him off.
Nikholai has been fucking and drank his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where. Self-destruction or the arms of a wealthy man, who only knew? In all likelihood, her father probably just gave her a trust fund and sent her abroad somewhere. But dark minds make up the worst possible scenarios about everything. After Krissy, every single woman Nikh was with looked like a lumpy mommy. Nothing to write home about any single one of them. Women that emasculated him even further.
Then Nikh puts out the past with his latest cigarette.
“I am only suggesting slowness and loads of needed caution is required are you to obsess, I repeat the word obsess! Further about another woman you meet by the brink of your crazy pursuit of wild partly damaged women. Joanna was great to you, but you never felt anything and that destroyed her and perhaps forever cursed you if you believe in the dealings of love. Hali Vik was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to you to being unadulterated happy for a brief fuck of time. But let’s not forget just how much we had to burn down and knock around over that little lady, and that you may have saved her life, but she nearly killed you. Maria Parsheva was a loyal little Russian geisha, but between various factors that we need not rehash, that too was doomed. Though, on the train, what a little gangster she was! Perhaps you did faster more far reaching organizing so moved as you were by Ms. Yelizaveta Perechenova, but you have such a way of making women into these wild muses and then yourself into tragic fucking art. And to be frank, Yelizaveta completely emptied your bank account. She also humiliated you on a weekly basis by refusing to give the relationship any stability after you got out of prison. All the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except for Yovanna who you sort of just destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she. She was the only one who followed you into the camps, remember, into the Palestinian territories. She was a very quality woman. But, you were bored and cheated on her left and right!”
Yelizaveta has the most brilliant and scary father. Bulgarian by nationality. Ukrainian Ivory by blood. But he was highly amoral and probably also bipolar. About as high functioning Bipolar as a major criminal/ business man can get. When he arrived in America in the 1990’s the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. Until Sasho had every single paramedic working north of 168th street killed. Had Newyorkgrad Presbyterian Hospital burned down? Made Washington Heights once again since the 1980’s an entirely unsafe place to live. So, it went to reason “that the daughter of a bipolar man carried away by ambulance men should perhaps not marry a bipolar ambulance man.”
That’s what Sebastian’s condition was also called, Bipolar 1, invented medicine for deviant minds. That thing did not really exist. It was simply one more way the Western governments colluded to chemically neuter powerful people.
Firm and logical now, but not always so, certainly not in 2009. After Sebastian secured Yelizaveta and the Perecheveney Bratva during the great blizzard and brought her to a hospital for treatment. After Sebastian, Nikholai and some of their men thwarted a major Euro Mob attack on Alexander with their reign of bombs and knives and terror in the snow. After Sebastian was taken by the secret police for a month and disappeared into torture land. Well, despite the conflicting recent record of heroism, Yelizaveta’s mother Tanya Marina forbade Yeli and Sebastian to see each other, and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end. But, Yelizaveta was a little crazy too and loved Sebastian. So for a year, it was on again and off again, rough and deep, hard and passionate, presents, secret rendezvous and lots of art, poems, dinners, flowers and a lot of time in the sheets as well as in showers, tubs and the floor.
“Dasha is an entire continent to herself. I ask you not to compare and contrast my various past uses of love and longing. I can’t even truly say that I know her well enough to speak anything like love to her. I only felt like I was in the presence of a long lost friend.”
He almost said, ‘murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then actually mock him. As everyone had and would that he suggested something like that too.
“A damn construct man! Do not mistake your fucking black Israelite training for reality or it will consume you, again,” that’s what Nick would yell at him in simulations.
“You love dangerously and often inappropriately. You don’t let go at all. Just remember that Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory, to you being killed by another man, a group of men really over a woman. I suspect that is something you are secretly craving in some reminiscence of an older life.”
“Well, maybe she hasn’t got a man, per say. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past at all; maybe it’s just a mind game. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Dasha has already tried.”
“You might have easily both stupidly died. And truly this time for absolutely nothingly nothing!”
“She claimed to Rafael Ernesto she remembers nothing about that night at all.”
“A back out as a reconciliation for your improvised murder? Prosto, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered it! And you get off on this dangerous trash?”
“A blackout woman thinly hides a dark past in my experience.”
“How now! What of it! I fail to see what, at all, is attractive about her willingness to murder you!”
“This isn’t base lust. Or a strange love. This is something deeply surreal brother. Something I haven’t felt before in the same way. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under three years, but I’ve never seen her before. She never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via her consumption. I’ve never seen her at the social club before, I’m there all the time as you know. I have no idea how I could have missed a busty, wild, sexy thing like her.”
“That my friend is only called a big fat trap. Who’s trap, I’m not sure but a trap certainly none the less. You have many enemies. She is not what you or we need right now. Not at all. She is nothing but big tits coming with some real bad trouble.”
Sebastian would perhaps not have noticed her because for the past year and a half he had weaned himself off that particular den of Bulgarian sin and former Soviet misery by convincing himself no woman on earth could be as angelic and pure as his lost Yelizaveta, his last and most highly imperfect love.
“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” continues Nikholai getting yet another cigarette fired up, up off the last one, “It’s far worse that you’re a perfectly real romantic. You usher in the entirety of the 18th century for the coldest of former Soviet hearts. Some of these poor girls, they have to learn how to protect themselves from whether you’re sure you’re serious or not. More precisely you need to protect yourself from your projections of love and the cowboy like the way you shoot cupid’s arrows off in your artistic yet unpredictable shifting of moods.”
“I’m deadly serious with this one though. And I will not weigh its risks against the others. You are lecturing me about my love life as if I were proclaiming a new love. I am speaking about something else now. Not romance or fucking. I am remembering things that were, shall we say, got deleted. Got mediated away in their hospital camps. Washed down with salt! I am telling you not that I plan to try and bed Daria Maccluskey. Of course, I will try, that is what men do. I’m trying to tell you that with all the sleep, salt and training in the world; I know that woman from before.”
The before. Whenever he spoke of the ‘before’ it made Nikh nervous. Nikh has grounded himself fully here right now.
“All of them! You say things like this madness about all of them. It’s either a blessing or a terrible curse you love so early and so often. You love as you do but I am your stalwart Droog. I know what happens when you speak like this. I suspect a curse upon your entire well-being was laid in this trap. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your energies to live a more basic life. Not that anything you do is basic, but I suspect you’d always be happier as a wandering bard than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”
“I have no idea anymore. I just feel something in the molecules, my friend. I am telling you that what we have been planning for so many years might well hinge on this person. I haven’t written a magnificent poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta, it was because she asked for it and returned it and sucked it out of me on her knees. They are all entirely different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying our human condition.”
“Different Sebastian’s have said different things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look at yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing, you’re too lean for my liking and your hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police, torture and imprisonment tend to follow an old friend.”
“You’re being a real Ivoryish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order?”
“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know, who happens to show up, now. Three weeks from the biggest job you’ve ever been a part of. The biggest job ever as far as this country is concerned. And for the love of god: You just got over Ms. Yelizaveta and were beginning to sleep around more casually, so please just don’t get drunk on any more rooftops. Just be cautious of what a wild woman you are dealing with. And please, whatever you do, just don’t tell her you love her until you can pronounce her last name. And have done the homework on the skeletons in her closet. This is a Russian fucking woman after all. They play no games, not with one damn thing. We could sort of vouch for Maria and Yeli, but who is this bitch? Seriously, who the fuck really is this Daria Maccluskey?”
Nikolai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What really happened up on that roof then?”
Sebastian blows out his smoke.
“I died and was immediately reborn, like the last few thousand times,” quietly responds Adonaev puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. We died in a very inglorious real way. Stupidly and drunk. But, miraculously we then awoke panting in the alley way, holding each others’ near death hand. This all happened in the blink of an eye. Then we got up, and I dusted her off, and we walked out as if nothing happened. She gave me her number on a note, and I put her in a cab.”
“And you think you see the soul of your dead wife Emma in her, is that the story?”
“Nikholai, please do not judge me. If I’m so fucking crazy why is anyone following me into this war?” little
“Because we’re all a little crazy too. You’re just a highly persistent man,” Nikholai replies, “perhaps also simply obsessed, even crazed. People need that in a leader.”
But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him for too long because he too knows what it is like to bear forced eternal separation from the one you love. He too is gifted with a long memory and knows what Sebastian first lost that brought him to the revolutionary road. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adonaev is not because Sebastian is at least partly sleeping, still taking the last load of salt drugs they put him on, putting everyone on in lesser doses in the water supplies of the city while Nikholai is completely awake. Drinking bottled water.
They’ve been friends for a very long time. Since when they were young men. Just before Sebastian did his first bid in the camps. The drums of war begin to beat in the wilds of Breuklyne.
In Midtown Isle of Mann Sebastian waits for the omnibus. Sometimes you have to take a step back from the big picture and make sure your troubled friends stay out of trouble. As usual, Michkai Dbrisk was doing the best he could in a poor overall situation for doing business. He was for whatever logistically foolish reason rushing to meet Kawa Zivistan and catch a jitney to Strong Island. Which was last minute and outlandish, but something was clearly going wrong with the long game.
The Z.O.B. underground is composed of several pre-existent overlapping formations. One had been led by Sebastian Adonaev and Trikhovitch; called the Banshee Group. One led by Mara Fitzduff and a defrocked Fenian Priest named O’Sullivan called the Fenian Brotherhood. And a third faction led by Michkai Dbrisk of Crown Heights called the Uhuru Party. Later re-branded several times and merged with other factions and entities into the durably Democratic Confederalist guerrilla force it was on the eve of a bloody revolution in North America.
“I know that man so well I could wear his skin, and you’d be convinced I was he, I know his very heart, I know his small talk and his long game and that crazy fucking Ivory is one of my very best men. The first among equals at our table. He paid dues for a long time, oh he still pays dues, but I trust my children with that man,” says Michkai Dbrisk, the tall, dreaded physician assistant by training, rogue paramedic, a bad man. A real Jamaican.
Explains Dbrisk:
“Kawa Zivistan is of course really named Sebastian Adonaev on his birth paperwork. Everyone who knows him mostly as ‘Kawa’ doesn’t know him at all. He really is only ‘Russian’ by perhaps insertion and appreciation. He speaks less Russian than is appropriate for having a decade of from Russia with love, he’s tried to learn. There were lots of well-meaning flashcards. I mean people have always taken him very seriously. At this point he probably speaks more Russian than old Ivory, which is the useless language of his tribe. He is without a doubt, an Illubadori dual citizen. His father is definitively Ivory, his mother a convert to reform Ivory type thinking. Well, maybe there are some doubts about all that. He suffers from the bipolar condition, prevalent in Ashkenazi Ivory.
Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna, his last serious partner and love interest tried the very best to control the bipolar, but of course one cannot. Why he has this obsession with Russian women is anyone’s guess. Deconstructing it is silly as we love what we love. Yelizaveta was good at many things, though hated by all of Kawa’s closest circle besides Dbrisk. There are so many details Dbrisk knows his man cannot come close to remember. Because his ‘soul’ is partially reloaded each time. The evil science behind the process is confusing to Dbrisk and everyone else aware of it. Kawa however, can die and die and die. But he can be easily reloaded into new bodies someone keeps making for him. Just like the oligarchy does.
Now, you must think Kawa Zivistan is a philanderer and a manipulator and really only in love with himself, hidden behind a revolutionary belief system. So said Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna on so many occasions during the years of the original clandestine training operations in Ayiti. All these Russian women, he must be rich, some thought. Well that was no one’s business, but he dressed in other people’s used clothes, and always kept a very modest one-bedroom apartment in the Midwood district. He was generous with his couch when people were in trouble he always came up with cash. He drove a real basic automobile, the Honda Civic 2009. He upgraded at some point to a Guyanese modified Charger with bulletproof tinted glass. Nothing fancy either except the Guyanese had gotten under the hood. Love, yes love he believed in it. He may have never led a very large Otriad, only ten to twenty, but he did have a following when healthy. They took him many times and tortured him many times and he wasn’t the same man all the time. His memory of his own hardships never seemed to reload with the bodies. He could die, and emerge a month or too later as a new Kawa, but fundamentally the same Kawa, the rebel.
What’s a little torture and possible death when you have all these hot Russian girlfriends? These were very serious trysts some of them. Despite the suspicions ofthe Department of Security in the Homeland, none not one of these lovers were actually F.S.B. agents. None were manipulating the ‘strange abilities’ of Kawa Zivistan. Most of them, truly looking into their hearts, suspected the family estate would be left to anyone other than his blonde brother Benny Zivistan, the respectable Spanish businessman. So the love, when it was love, well it was pure shit each time. Masha-Maria, Yelizaveta Kay, Adelina, Alina, Alina, and Polina ‘the Red Fox’ were mostly free-spirited artists, in love with Kawa’s very old soul perhaps.
They actually loved this Ivory for him, for his strange bearing. His unique vision and also terrible ways.
Thinks Sebastian:
‘Why are Chornay always so fucking late to every single g-d damn thing?’ He waits on 40th Street and Lexington Avenue amid the towers of midtown for the Hampton Jitney, the express bus out to the Hamptons located on the far eastern end of Strong Island. What’s so terrible about sometimes being early? But they had been slaves, maybe still are mostly slaves and thus were excused somewhat from just about anything in his mind thereafter. Only a racist Blan oppressor makes you work for free for five hundred years, reduces you to raped and broken human cattle, and then complains when you’re late, but they were about to miss the bus. But this was no way to regard one’s stalwart ; ‘Chief of Operations’, the Jamaican gangster and medicine man Mickhi Dbrisk. Even if that was a kind of racism to itself. Which clearly it often was. It is impossible to exercise one’s inner racism, you can try so hard and the whiteness still returns. The curse that comes with the skin privilege.
After Daria replied by mobile phone she wasn’t leaving Breuklyn, the night before Labor Day Kawa Zivistan had called his bad man partner in crime Mickhi Dbrisk To escape the city briefly to the country to a place called Montalk for a midnight journey. A day trip, the night before Labor Day proper which locked down Breuklyn with 2.6 million masqueraders and full mobilization of the NYPD amongst other agencies. Each year they flipped a coin over Hamptons v. Jouvert and it was “heads for Hamptons’ ‘ this year. But really only because Dasha was occupied, Mickhi never actually ever wanted to go out during the sometimes gunplay active Juveaurt nor was he ever particularly interested in trips to the Ivory elite Hamlet called ‘the Hamptons’ where the Zivistan family had their dacha. Kawa clearly hadn’t woken up completely. Mickhi was supposed to be on the front lines of the rising tomorrow. It was as if Kawa Zivistan could not even remember the revolution he had helped in no small part to inspire and plan for over a decade.
Surely, they needed to make a long palaver.
Mickhi Dbrisk and Kawa Zivistan had met in the LaGuardia Community College seven years prior in the EMT program. They helped found the Banshee Association together and later the nucleus of the Newyorkgrad command of the Z.O.B. underground. In the seven years that they had known each other Dbrisk had seen his friend through many ups and downs, many treacherous jobs, and many lives saved and thankfully none taken. He had seen just what Zivistan was capable of when he took his little salt pills and worked under the right woman. Dbrisk also had seen his partner fall down real bloody, horror show hard. He’s been to a few of the funerals.
“It feels as though I have awoken again from a no good, terrible, very, very bad dream,” Kawa tells Dbrisk in old Ivory talk. A talk he’s talked about before.
“I heard you say that once just after you came back from the earthquake atrocities in Port-Au-Prince. The next thing I remember is you with a sharp bear knife heading down to settle a score in District Garrison Beach over that attack on the Q train. Then came another arrest, your escape from Lenox Hill hospital and the beginning of the end for your municipal employee status. So forgive me if I worry every single time I hear that again. Last time I checked actually, just two weeks ago Kawa Zivistan, the underground man was quite dead.”
“I’d like permission to completely step out of the chain of command to handle a situation I’m in.”
“Of course you don’t ever need my permission to do something you’ve already done.”
“The full assault on the financial district will commence in seventeen days? The Breuklyne elements will rise tomorrow at noon?”
“So it seems,” mutters Dbrisk, wondering if the Kawa who is also Sebastian truly came back fully this time.
“We have committed all of our best volunteers to serve in the medical detachment. It will raise eyebrows if you are not there,” Kawa explains as if Dbrisk isn’t aware.
“I plan to be there at the uprising of course. I just need to handle something first. Something time-sensitive.”
“Well I plan not to be there tomorrow when shit goes down for real, but you do whatever you want to do. Be wherever you gotta be.”
Mickhi Dbrisk is a six-foot tall, smooth Jamaican paramedic. He quietly leads one of the mightiest guerrilla squadrons of paramedics and EMTs history has ever known with its many bases in Breuklyne, in the highest peaks of Jamaica and also of course in Haiti. The little park occupied in the Financial District’s northern frontier was such a small side show. The public-private park called Zuccotti which a year ago was taken over by students and radicals and has since become the epicenter of a national rising now most regimented and entrenched against the national elites, has always been dis-interesting to the Noire factions.
Dbrisk leads quietly because he is a true gangster. That is how a true gangster leads. He had been held in prison for over a year where he marinated his gangster by refusing to name names of co-conspirators. He now raises three children. Sebastian as Kawa has helped save human lives on three continents as a paramedic adventurer. Dbrisk has faithfully built a resistance movement largely not leaving the borough in which he was born. In the diffuse and decentralized chain of command of the militant human rights movement, Dbrisk holds the position of ‘Captain’, also ‘Chief Operations Officer’ of the Z.O.B. Otriad and underground. The name of the faction he leads alongside Zivistan and a few others is also known as the ‘Banshee’ ‘ or as the ‘Breukelen Bath and Rifle Club’ or the ‘Banshee Association of Newyorkgrad’.
Kawa has been a founding leader and a true knock-around guy. Michkai Dbrisk though is a bad mother fucker but subtle, keeping the home front organized. Managing the awkward alliance inside the Z.O.B. of Jamaican and Haitian gangs, Ivory radicals, Zionists, Garveyites, and Fenian terrorists. A real Shatah, leading from a position of both love and fear.
Dbrisk leads the ‘Special Operations Section’ of Z.O.B., concerned largely with the training bases in the West Indies, the command and control of urban partisans, periodic bombing missions and strikes against rival groups, criminal elements in zones of control and the real enemy; the Oligarchy. Kawa Zivistan, for many years, had been leading the Planning Section. Concerned with the strategy of the clandestine movement. Scott Boltzmann Sevastra led the ‘Communications Section’ specifically the Fire Switch pirate radio station, Banshee newspaper and the affiliation with People’s Television group. Mara Fitzduff co-chairs Communications Section and is the most active deputy concerned with Newspaper distribution which largely solidifies and facilitates the movement’s vast support in F.D.N.Y. fire suppression, N.Y.P.D. uniformed peace officers, Sanitation and EMS in general. Nikolai Trickovitch leads Logistics. Mostly arms acquisition, vehicles and safe houses as well as the underground railroad logistics set up from the ‘grad to the West Indies. Michael Goldbar Allamby is the Chief Financial Officer raising money via control of trucking routes, racketeering, extortion, bootlegging, wine smuggling and other mechanisms. Anya Drovtich leads the Information & Intelligence Section, also dubbed ‘Committee for Public Safety’ with the highly sly Shqiptarëti beauty Erza Pula, the chief legal counselor. It’s the movement’s intelligence body and also the internal affairs secret police.
A very, very big operation in motion. Its moving parts happen as Kawa and Dbrisk speak at that Midtown bus stop, involving short wave transmitters, an electronic magnetic pulse bomb and the full mobilization of thousands of armed partisans.
The core philosophic pillars of the guerrilla movement are inspired by long imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan are rooted in patience, humility, wrath on enemies of the people and gratitude for heroes and martyrs of the struggle. On that note, Dbrisk would of course like to avoid a bus ride to Strong Island, but being patient is his forte. If Kawa is not well, something is wrong with the plan. More importantly Sebastian was his main droog. You look out for your ‘troubled friends’ even on the eve of history.
It is now the fourth whole day of Kawa not sleeping. He was not actually using this new vessel for sleep, during the Bohemian festival he just drunkenly closed his eyes. Dbrisk doesn’t want to go to the Hamptons, but he needs to see what condition Kawa’s condition is in. Something is amiss.
They board a nearly empty 10pm bus and make small talk in a private cabin at the rear of the jitney. They are informed by an attendant it will be a two and half hour ride express to Montalk, the easternmost village in Strong Island. They lock the back cabin door. They take out the batteries of their phones.
“Every time you die, you come back only part way. It makes everyone nervous. Like we’re in a conspiracy with a man who isn’t risking what everyone else is. As far as I know, when I die, I die,” says Dbrisk who takes out a pistol and places it on the table between them. A ghost gun made in America.
“I’m not sure what you’re saying man,” replies Kawa Zivistan.
“I fear that this thing will again destroy you,” says Michkai Dbrisk, “I’ve been at your funeral two weeks ago. You were supposed to die and get reborn somewhere peaceful, take a rest. You’ve been getting fucked up and tortured hard last few years. Emma wanted you to rest. But, not even two weeks go by and you pop up on the radar at some encampment in a park. You call me on an unsecured line and say let’s take a day trip to the Hamptons. The very night everything is about to pop the hell off. Makes me think the secret police know what’s about to happen, them or something worse like the damn meddling Russians.”
“I doubt it will be a clean shot,” Kawa says of the rising.
“Listen droog, I’m on this bus because you are my friend, and I’m worried about you. But, I will have to get off this bus in Breuklyne, before the expressway. As things need my attention now.”
“They say I’m very hard to kill,” Kawa replies.
“There are many fates far worse than death, sadly we both know that.”
“The Rabbis say there are no secrets between brothers. So therefore I know the truth. You suffer from ‘cotard’s syndrome’. You believe you are dead and this is your afterlife, a fucking endless nightmare of plots and struggle,” says Dbrisk using a memorized code statement.
“The rabbis say all kinds of meaningless things,” Kawa replies in Old Ivory, “That’s why most of the Ivory were put to death. Sounds like the words of someone who wants to know a secret, within a secret. The coded word, the symbolic meaning, the seven out of seven translations of the word of the name?”
“I know, I knew, I understood and also over-stand, that you die and then come back. This has gone on for a very, very long time. Who makes you your bodies or uploads your soul, well only HaShem and the devil know all that. I know that you and I have been around since the very beginning, even before the Mede Confederation and the First Great Revolt, we are very very old friends. Regular humans live 36 to 89 years. Every time you watch them die, you feel responsible I think. Though you are not a god, you are a very old man being uploaded into a freshly grown flesh robot over and over for war. When they smile, you smile along, but you don’t feel human happiness anymore I think. Only zealot hate, pure and utter revolutionary revenge. When you are crying, you are imitating a grief that you explicitly do not know how to feel. But, do you ever cry for yourself I have to wonder? Have you become something more like the enemy than like a living dying man. Whether or not you are even actually dead or alive is subject of debate. Are you really Sebastian my friend of over 5,000 years or just an Illubadori golem, a murderous agitation propagandist striking out at those that live at mountain tops and highest towers over lost loves and dead friends, that are mostly murdered over the years because they came to love you.”
Kawa says, “When no one is looking at me except the one who I so totally loved in a real human way, then I am alive for a short period. As for total recall of all my memories. It might scare you to know I remember very, very little before falling off that roof.”
Dbrisk glances at the gun on the table. “If you actually love her so much why don’t you just stop fighting, eh? Like she sometimes pauses to ask you, right. You’ve done so much already and here we are having the same conversation we five thousand years ago, allegedly. Four hundred years ago too. That we will be having again and again it seems. We wage this war epoch to epoch, husk to husk! The trouble with your model is that they upload your soul on part way, and frequently with memories that are not objectively real. Whereas my model is grown on the tree of life. When I come back, I come back whole.”
“If you doubt for one second I’m the man you knew. If you think I’m some hunter-killer upload. You should shoot me in the head,” Kawa says.
“Do you remember the very first job we ever did together in Babylon? The first job we didn’t do right really,” Dbrisk replies, “since the Mede Confederation fell apart completely.”
“You always remember your first job they say,” says Kawa, but clearly he can’t.
“When you leave your body, where do you go?” asks Michkai Dbrisk.
“I go back to Zion.“
“And what are you doing when you get there?”
“I’m walking around on a very long boardwalk. I’m running into many old friends. I’m with my true love and wife and my family.”
“How many times do you remember dying?”
Kawa Zivistan looks up into the eyes of Michkai Dbrisk. They are gray, not the brown-greenHaShem of the eyes he was born with.
“The body is a vessel for the soul. The flesh is a vehicle by which the soul carries out the work of HaShem in the world of man.”
“Don’t recite the New Social Gospel to me, my old friend. Don’t put on your mask when you speak to your brother.”
“Sometimes I look at my face in the mirror. I don’t even recognize myself. I cannot always be clear about what I did in this life or the last that cut me so deeply or burned me so asunder. I have memories that I cannot say match records of objective reality. I would not recognize haShem from the devil except by the conduct of the vessels they occupy. Tell me brother, when you leave your body where do you go?”
“I go back to Jamaica. I don’t die nearly as often as you friend. I’m on the boardwalk. Running into old friends. On my way home to see my wife and my family.”
“What is going to happen at the Millennium Theater?”
Kawa Zivistan, Dbrisk notes, is now talking about the future.
“Well according to the New Social Gospel. You, Ms. Emma and several hundred fighters will go in and for three days hold the elites of the world hostage. They will then pump in a gas. And absolutely everybody will be killed in the fire fight that then follows.”
“I don’t remember anything about it.”
“It hasn’t happened yet. You’re moving way outside of the fourth dimensional plane. I have to follow your own protocol on this matter Sebastian. I might have to take you down again, if you’ve been taken over by the enemy. Tell me the real name of your wife and the town in Illubabor you were born in.”
“So maybe you’re not really you,” Kawa replies in old Ivory. Neither touch the shooter on the table or look at it again.
“What’s your other name then Sebastian. The one you were born with in Illubabor?”
“Zekh’ariah. Hashem remembers you.”
“And your town?”
“Obliterated.”
“What was it called then?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Your wife’s name!”
“Daria Andreavna.”
“No. Man, no! That was definitely not her name at all. That’s a Ruus name. You were not married to a Ruus woman. That is a brand new name someone etched awkwardly onto your book of life! Brother, they are manipulating you.”
“How many times have you been to my funeral Dbrisk?”
“Irrelevant data right now. I’ve never heard that name until right now and I have known you for over 5,000 human years.”
“How many times according to the New Social Gospel?”
“Three times. At least three. Once, when you, Emma and I died in Jerusalem around 2,000 years ago fighting Rome. Two weeks ago, suspiciously right before this new revolt against the Oligarchy when you and this Daria mysteriously fell off the fucking roof. Then had staged deaths organized immediately after, absolutely sloppy Mossad work. And your third funeral is coming. It’s coming in three more years, right before the revolt ends in our total victory! When you and Emma Solomon lead the raid on the Millennium Theater which triggers the world to come.”
“I also know that I died on the night of the Great Blizzard. I died in Ayiti during the revolution of 1791 also right after the 2010 earthquake atrocity. I died on the Q train as the bandits raped my poor Maria. And, many other times. I’m not a hunter killer. I’m not a ghost shirt. I’m just getting this body back online.”
“The other times I cannot speak to. You were taken to the hospital camps numerous times. I have no idea how many. But, I saw your corpse two weeks ago without its head and knew some real fuckery was on. I saw your cold dead grinning mangled body with two alleged shots in it when we buried you in the Bronx. I have read your corpse will be desecrated on national television three years from when the department of homeland security announces all of the terrorists at the millennium are dead. I do not have blind obedient faith, but I believe the very specific prophecies revealed to Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon the long awaited Meshiakh, speak of the man grown on a tree and the man in the gray mask, but they get real damn specific with dates, times and places.”
“Well here I am. How now, can you trust that Kawa is Kawa your droog, your Heval, your brother, your Akhi, or do we have to stay up all night and fact check back all the way to the very beginning of imaginary time?”
“Tell me what’s happened to you, okay. No poetry or metaphor. Tell me about how long until you come back with all your memories intact. How quickly. I know it’s all disinformation about the cloning programs and the neural uploading and the parapsychology program. I know that neither we nor the Illubadoris have the science exactly and we will never have the science to save a man’s soul to some code and transfer his energy with all its memory in the span of a human lifetime.”
“Do you know me Michkai Dbrisk?”
“I know you very well, Akhi.”
“What’s your earliest memory of me then?”
“In the Neolithic Age. You were Zaka. A Levantine farmer. I was Davo. I was an African medicine man and then later a slave in the Babylonian city of Ur. They took our wives to be concubines to the sons of oligarchs. They took our sons and killed them before us for sport. It was a daily ritual publicly killing the sons of the proles. We took the nom de guerre Kawa and Andok and we helped organize theConfederation of the Medes. The very first major uprising against the Ziggurat system. That was perhaps 10,000 measured years ago. Later, many lives and battles in between you were the baddest thief and I was a medicine man. They framed up a thief and they nailed our bodies to the tree of life alongside the promised messiah. Her name was unpronounceable by men, so we called her Emma Rose Maya Sorieya. The mother of the changes. The ever returning hope. The flickering flame. I remember before my body died I looked out on Jerusalem and I saw forty thousand of our people hanging from the very trees. Then I woke up in Africa one hundred years later and the real killing began. I have known you since the days of Ur.”
“And when the body dies the energy of the soul is reborn in another living vessel. Old souls find each other so it seems.”
“Have you no understanding of what it might be like to be like normal men?! I know I do. I know that I enjoy the caress of a woman more than a haShem I have never seen. I know what it’s like to see myself in my offspring and want for them to grow into proud and free beings. I don’t live in the past, Kawa. I live for right now. In several lives I found you and I aided you each time. We have always fought side by side as equals. We fought wars and launched bloody revolutions. We have drafted various documents articulating freedom under god knows how many names. We have protected the very bloodline of the chosen ones faithfully for the past 12,000 years! You tell me brother why you and I can’t just stop. And walk away.”
Kawa Zivistan says nothing.
“Every human is loved by HaShem, by Jah! That love is exhibited in the compassion and solidarity extended by the righteous to the suffering masses trampled on by these cruel devils.”
“I know what that NSG book says. I helped write it didn’t I Don’t quote a prophecy to me. If you please.”
“What are we doing next then?” asks Michkai Dbrisk.
“We’re sticking to the haShemdamn plan.”
“Your plan or HaShem’s plan?! Emma’s plan or Avinadav’s version? The Cuban plan? The Blue Lodge? The Grey Cult? What about the damn Scientologists? The Satmar Hasidim? The Baha’i vision? The Shi’a Muslims or the Tibetan Buddhists’? The Marxists? Who’s plan man? You are my oldest friend. You my brother by blood and by deed, but let me tell you one thing before we set the sky on fire yet again. I’ve seen you die over and over. I’ve seen you get tortured hard body. I’ve seen the oligarchs lay waste to the very best laid plans. Over and over and over and over. I’ve seen them burn our people and our prophets each time we rise. Right now, we are precariously holding two canton districts on a war torn micro republic in North Syria. We hold Cuba and some small parts of the island of Hispaniola. Every single organized government on earth is fixing to break out backs. I need to look you in the eyes, and ask you. How are we going to win this time?”
“I don’t yet know.”
Dbrisk pulls off his tam and lets his thick lion locks drop out. He shakes them more a shudder than any kind of battle roar, and then he says, “Well that’s very discomforting. To say the very least.”
“HaHalom Sheli Likhiot Hofshee,” Zivistan says, “My Dream is to be Free. But it feels like very hollow rhetoric right now, “I need a fast bike with no built in GPS,” notes Kawa as he passes back the loaded weapon. Pushing it finally across the table. A soulful pause.
“I’ll get you a real fast bike. Guyanese. Ramped.” Then a soulful pause.
“I need a sholem with a silencer and the serial numbers filed off.”
“Brother. I will get you a very good piece.”
“You are a dear and trusted comrade brother Mickhi Dbrisk,” states Kawa. Mickhi doesn’t even have to nod.
“I’ve found my long dead wife. Restored in her latest form. It’s gonna be a real mess to get her out of Breuklyne.”
“Kawa. Sebastian. This Miss Daria, at least as you have encountered her this time, is not actually your lost wife. That might resemble her essence. Mimic her body, might mimic her moves. But, it is not her really at all. Just a body all drawn up to entrap you. The first shots of the uprising are really just eight hours away. Don’t get captured up now by ghouls and ghosts. Deceptions and distractions, as well as carnal fuckery.”
“The uprising!” Kawa mutters and he sees a forty mile high view of the city erupting in violence.
Mickhi can sometimes actually hear Kawa think.
“She bit into me,” says Zivistan and shows Dbrisk the bite marks on his right index finger.
“Well that ain’t no good my man.”
“No good at all.” DBrisk looks at his wrist watch.
There’s gonna be a real messy street melee to write home about in history popping and erupting like an avalanche of rage and burning, all day long. Kop Tete, boulay maisons! Cut heads, burn houses.
“So you just need a weapon and a fast ride?” is all Dbrisk asks.
“And probably also a prayer.”
“Well brother we can work with all that.”
The bus stops and somewhere on the very Eastern edge of Queens and Strong Island they both hop off the bus and walk in completely different directions.
Meaning: eloquent, talkative; in possession of the gift of gab
Literal translation:
“THE TONGUE IS WELL HUNG”
Sebastian Adonaev awakes on Onderdonk Fields and Dasha is still in his arms, tits still plump and cutely snoring. Fucking amazing luck, two whole nights! She is warm and breathing deeply. She clutches his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to wine.
It is Sunday and everything would repeat itself again. Indecisive lusty flirtations with nothing to support the imagined memories and Oleg the bear stood by taking pictures. The festival of the Gypsy’s continued as the city braced for Monday’s West Indian Day parade. The dress rehearsal for any insurrection.
Eventually that Sunday evening Dasha and Kawa broke camp and headed towards the underground. They arrive at a small tavern across the street from the faded green light posts of the L underground train in bombed-out warehouse zones of so-called “East Williamsburg”. The tavern is paneled in old wood and is made up like some old school prohibition tavern; the name of the joint is ‘the Cobra Club’. It professes to combine mix-ology and light yoga. Much to the delight of Kawa who cannot think of two activities worse suited for each other than drinking and yoga, perhaps drinking and driving an ambulance.
It was here that he notices that Dasha has a dragonfly necklace and matching wrist bracelet, which he had not noticed previously adorning her. Although not on her person for the previous two and part days of the festival, now they were back on. And that all other times which has been twice before the festival she was wearing some accessory piece with this image it occurs to him. How curious. Or perhaps he’s making another enormous battery of false-positive conclusions based on cumulative sleep deprivation.
“What then does the dragonfly symbolize?” he asks her.
“It doesn’t symbolize anything at all man. I just like the way it looks,” she responds.
It seems to gauge if she is lying, he thinks. After three days of general revelry, they are both a little out of body.
“Your eyes are now green,” she smiles.
“Normally they are…” he starts.
“Hazel Brown as pure bull the shit, I know,” she smiles.
“And yours are now silver where before they were blue.”
“What kind of Amerikanski are you? You’re not like them exactly and yet you are them and you also have certain qualities that are Russian and yet surely not of us, at all. You’re a mad man aren’t you?”
“I am only half-mad,” he replies.
“Do you have anything else you need me to know?”
“I could help you with your anything.”
“But I need nothing from you. Not even some physical help.”
“Where are you and we gonna be when the weekend is finally over,” he asks.
“Complete strangers.”
“You’re an indomitable woman.”
“Are you a jealous man?” she asks. Beware any woman that ever asks that ever in history, it means nothing good.
Never go after a woman who asks that, says his father in his head.
He looks into her thinking; he could learn to be. There had been some deliberation on options, such as her joining him in the Hamptons at the family dacha (country home) or participating in the West Indian Day Parade. Honestly there was a lot going on that weekend, it didn’t matter if he could just keep being with her. Nevertheless, politely she said he could take her number again and call her later since she had to soften the conspicuous blow to her keeper inflicted by two night’s disappearance. One had to have a little, just a little bit of shall we say tact, attention to the protocols. Formalities of fidelity, anyway she doesn’t go into any details for the sake of his fragile ego, all men have a mostly fragile ego.
“I do not know if we shall meet again tonight, or ever, new wild stranger, but I did quite enjoy this time with you,” she explained and then they took the L toward the city and went their separate ways, she to district Brighton Beach and he to the District Financial. In his sketchbook on a drawing they colored together she writes in Russian; “Shame that it all will end.” Though you could translate that several different ways, all were pretty bleak.
Daria later, by about three hours, informs him by telephone later that evening she will be forced to remain on the coast of Breuklyn.
“Have a good time at the Neg parade or in your happy Hamptons, whichever you decide upon this year.”
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WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 