Berliner Zeitung:

Explosionen in Caracas, Kampfjets über der venezolanischen Kapitale: Zur Stunde überschlagen sich die Meldungen. Der Krieg der USA und ihrer Verbündeten um Venezuela hat begonnen. Besser gesagt: der Krieg um die Reichtümer des südamerikanischen Landes.

Seit dem Ende der venezolanischen Zweiparteienherrschaft zwischen Christdemokraten (COPEI) und Sozialdemokraten (AD) im Jahr 1999 – eine Folge der antikommunistischen Containment-Strategie der USA im Kalten Krieg – verfolgen die USA eine bemerkenswert konsistente Strategie: die Wiedererlangung der Kontrolle über Venezuelas Ölreserven – die Größten der Welt mit geschätzten 300 Milliarden Barrel. Was als verdeckte Einflussnahme begann, eskalierte unter Trump zu offenen Besitzansprüchen auf „gestohlenes“ Öl.

I

Es dringt kein Laut bis her zu mir
von der Nationen wildem Streite,
ich stehe ja auf keiner Seite;
denn Recht ist weder dort noch hier.

Und weil ich nie Horaz vergaß
bleib gut ich aller Welt und halte
mich unverbrüchlich an die alte
aurea mediocritas.

II

Der erscheint mir als der Größte,
der zu keiner Fahne schwört,
und, weil er vom Teil sich löste,
nun der ganzen Welt gehört.

Ist sein Heim die Welt; es misst ihm
doch nicht klein der Heimat Hort;
denn das Vaterland, es ist ihm
dann sein Haus im Heimatsort.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

„His team“? This is a new way of speaking about the United States bombing a country.

Branko Milanović in Agenda Pública:

When income and wealth become highly concentrated, political power tends to move toward those who have money, and the system becomes hypocritical: it is an ostensible democracy but such that the rich rule.

I really like this phrase „ostensible democracy“. Americans and Germans often claim/assume they live in a democracy but the speaker’s affect is tentative, wishful. People aspire to live in a democracy.

From the Bundeswehr questionnaire 18-year-old German men are required to fill out indicating their qualifications for and interest in induction into the military. Benedikt Bierhoff, Am Sportplatz 9. This is the organization protecting western European civilization from the ravages of the savage barbarians to the east.

The questionnaire .pdf, which I downloaded from https://www.bundeswehr.de/resource/​blob/​6054406/​3b369d8f38026ea2404454a768c95ffd/​fragebogen-data.pdf, is titled „PowerPoint-Präsentation“. No, I am not kidding. Adobe, for its part, informs me „This appears to be a long document“ and invites me to „Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant“. What would I do with this saved time, I wonder? 🤔

On 7 December 1988, in New York, Gorbachev addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. He announced the withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union also released almost all of its political prisoners. The main sensation, however, was the speech’s ideological message. Gorbachev proposed a new world order based not on ideology, but on the „all-human interests“ of cooperation and integration. This was a rejection of the Cold War order based on antagonism between the USSR and the USA and their respective allies. It was also a rejection of the Marxist-Leninist world view, based on „class struggle“ and the inevitability of communist triumph. The General Secretary declared a principle of renunciation of any form of violence, any use of force in international affairs. Chernyaev, the main drafter of Gorbachev’s UN address, considered it represented not only an ideological revolution, but also a possible farewell „to the status of a world global superpower.“ In essence, the leader of the Soviet superpower proposed to the Western powers an end to the Cold War; the Soviet Union was ready to join all international organizations as a partner.

The address stemmed from what Gorbachev had been calling since 1986 a „new political thinking.“ It was a mix of his neo-Leninist hubris, breathtaking idealism, and abhorrence of nuclear confrontation. Against the background of Stalin’s cynical Realpolitik, Khrushchev’s brinkmanship, and Brezhnev’s peace-through-strength détente, Gorbachev’s project came as a complete breakthrough. It was not a clever camouflage for the start of Soviet geopolitical retrenchment and retreat, as some Western critics asserted. It was a deliberate choice of a new vision to replace the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet geopolitical power. As such, it was probably the most ambitious example of ideological thinking in foreign affairs since Woodrow Wilson had declared his Fourteen Points at the end of World War I. It was this vision that made Gorbachev, and not Ronald Reagan or other Western leaders, a truly key actor in ending the Cold War.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 43-44.

Zubok is not kind to Gorbachev, ascribing the Soviet Union’s collapse to financial catastrophe caused by Gorbachev’s hubris, idealism, gross miscalculations. When I posted a video of Gorbachev’s December 25, 1991 resignation speech on a Russian subreddit people there echoed Zubok’s book reviewers on Goodreads.com with repeated versions of „fuck Gorbachev!“ This makes Zubok’s couple paragraphs above all the more striking, and increases my own interest in researching the begged question „what if?“ 🤔

Is it possible for someone to review Bundeswehr, US military, and Russian military recruiting collateral, and still take the Bundeswehr halfway seriously? How? 🤔 I mean this in all seriousness: in Russia I regularly photograph recruiting posters. The difference between the professionalism displayed in the Russian material vs. the German images is similar to the difference between the professionalism displayed by US high tech workers vs. German high tech workers. This is Steinmeier’s Weihnachtsrede. It’s whistling past the graveyard, and whistling badly.