Nancy Fraser, London Review of Books:
Habermas first lit my path as a critical theorist. I remain deeply grateful for that. But over the years the light he cast flickered and waned – until, with his stance on Gaza, it seemed to go out. Historians will eventually decide whether that stance was an anomaly or the culmination of a long process in which Frankfurt School critical theory turned into a form of liberalism that was too often complicit with US imperialism.
The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.
The Short Course [History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] was truly a history of the party as Stalin saw it and wanted it to be seen.
The end product of Stalin’s efforts was a biased, distorted and simplistic account of the party’s history, one manufactured by omission, elision and rhetorical tricks. Stalin was a past master at using such devices to present versions of events that were self-serving but credible. That doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in the essential truth of his version of the party’s history.
—Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library, (London: Yale University Press, 2022), 193.
Makes me feel young again! Reminds me of 2002-2003 and the fear of Iraqi drones from those stealthy Iraqi drone aircraft carriers off the US East Coast. My Philadelphia relatives were honestly worried then. Americans are amazing people.
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Пора уже признать, что ничего фантастического в проекте Большой Европы от Лиссабона до Владивостока нет. На самом деле, это предложение продолжить путь, начатый европейскими странами после завершения Второй мировой войны.
