Brad > Recent Status Updates

"Custom is the chief cause hindering us from grasping many clear truths. Just as certain actions though harmful will become easy to the man accustomed to them, and for this reason he comes to believe that they are useful; similarly when one has become accustomed to believe false statements from childhood, the habit so formed will cause him to deny the truth." - Ibn Rushd, 12th-century Islamic philosopher

"Environmental matters are separated off into [departments] whose mandates and concerns are often ignored by the pro-development bureaucracies and big business interests that drive them. Water scientists have been muzzled and largely ignored."

Bureaucratic silos and funding for political snake oil at the expense of what technical experts insist is needed...but in a capitalist state, so it's not the system's fault!

"The provisional governments which were put in place under Moscow’s control were left-leaning but not Communist-dominated coalitions. Depending on the country, they were validated by more or less free elections [and] considerable civil and cultural freedom...And yet, almost overnight, in the Western world critics cried out against Moscow’s...drive to turn Eastern Europe into a captive and closed sphere of influence."

"It seems most doubtful that Stalin willfully mounted a genocidal war against, in particular, the peasantry of Ukraine with a view to abort the embryo of Ukrainian nationalism. Indeed, the Irish famine of the second half of the 1840s, in which over a million out of 8 million people perished, is a much closer parallel than the Judeocide of the 1940s."

"Stalin’s impatience with the unbending peasant was peculiar neither to him nor to most Marxists far and near. As we have seen, it was rooted in the Enlightenment."

"ritualized demonization of Stalin...hinders rather than advances the critical study and understanding of the Soviet regime during his close to thirty-year rule."

Onto the provocatively titled final chapter:

"Internalization of the Russian Revolution: Terror in One Country"

1800, after an attempted assassination of Napoleon:

"The Council decided to summarily deport 129 presumed Jacobins to the Seychelles and to Cayenne...Within two weeks Joseph Fouche ́ provided Napoleon with conclusive evidence that ultraroyalists, not neo-Jacobins, were responsible. But the First Consul stood fast, and so did the Council and the Senate."

Targeted by more hardline reactionaries, they blame the left.

"In [the 'pathos of novelty',] the issue was less the 'real' circumstances than the perception and construction of them by the chief actors...issues of principle were crowded out by questions of political strategy, to be resolved in an atmosphere of utmost urgency."

Through this book, applying 'symbolic interactionism' to revolutions adds a crucial dimension and grounding to the chaos of ever-shifting ambiguities.

Bonaparte had “perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution.” In so doing he had “fed the egoism of the French nation” at the same time that he demanded the “sacrifice of bourgeois [interests]” whenever necessary “to advance the political aim of conquest.”

- Marx/Engels, "The Holy Family"

In short, militarist export of 'progress' act as a means to consolidate an internal ruling class.

"Revolution is a peerless forcing house for the primacy of domestic politics."

"Of all the peripheries of the [Russian] empire, Ukraine was the most completely consumed by the creeping anomie accompanying the wreck of political and legal sovereignty. [There} was a resurgent and insurgent nationalism which aspired to autonomy or secession...above all driven by a burgeoning jacquerie of peasants whose latent animus against Russians, Poles, Jews, and cities was easily inflamed and manipulated."

The California-based Pacific Institute says that bottled water is up to 2,000 times more energy intensive than tap water [and] that if the water used to make the plastic is taken into account, it takes three litres of water to produce one litre of bottled water.

Ladies and gentlemen, free market efficiency.

Land grabbing is essentially control grabbing...What is at stake is the power to decide how and for what purposes land and water can be used now and in the future.

Many of the most aggressive land grabbing countries are facing severe water shortages at home.

"The water used to produce food is called 'virtual water', and when [food] is exported, the water embedded in it is exported too...
Canada is a net virtual water exporter...Our net annual virtual water exports would fill the Rogers Stadium in Toronto 37,500 times."

"The escalation of indeterminate and erratic terror into specifically and intentionally political terror was closely correlated with the escalation of the civil war".

The geospatial tracking and timeline of the Terror in tandem with the movements of Denikin, Kolchak, foreign actors and the Bolsheviks respectively has me more convinced than ever of the brilliance of Albert Szymanski's "Human Rights in the USSR".

"The harshness of the terms imposed on the ex-tsarist empire was unprecedented in the relations between great powers."

Even retrospectively, Western narratives tend to give German state actions the benefit of nuance due to the Treaty of Versailles. The Soviets in the wake of Brest-Litovsk get no such caveats.

On the other hand...

"Lenin was wary of the nostrum of a revolutionary war, not least because of his gnawing skepticism about near-term prospects for revolution in Europe, notably in Germany. He was supported by Sokolnikov, Stalin, and Zinoviev, who also shared his concern that to keep stalling [at Brest-Litovsk was to risk the enemy setting even stiffer terms [for peace]."

"When the new regime’s harsh security measures were challenged in the Soviet Executive, Trotsky rejoined that 'demands to forgo all repression in time of civil war were demands to abandon the civil war.'"

The man had his moments.

"the Bolsheviks’ readiness to use the labor of camp inmates in the emergency of 1917 to 1921 was conditioned by Russia’s past experience with [forced labour], just as the harsh living and working conditions in [camps] were due to the extreme rigors of war and civil war rather than to a blueprint for systematic punishment or exploitation, let alone extermination, 'there being no Soviet Treblinka.'"

"Nowhere in Canada is opposition to the Energy East pipeline stronger than in Quebec. This is because three powerful movements -- students, First Nations and environmentalists -- came together to fight the pipeline...They remember the effectiveness of the student strike of 2012 involving a quarter of a million students over tuition hikes. The issue was critical in the defeat of the Jean Charest government that fall."

"It took Environment Canada more than 20 years to collect $2.4 million in fines under CEPA [the Canadian Environmental Protection Act], said Ecojustice, and compared this to the Toronto Public Library, which collected $2.6 million in fines for overdue books in 2009 alone."

As we collectively turn serious attention to clean alternatives to fossil fuels, we cannot assume hydroelectricity is a benign choice. Protecting air by endangering water and human health is not the solution to our climate crisis.

"In the disparity between global economic power and its local political supports, there is surely an expanding space for opposition."