12.09.24. About geopoliticalGames...
A book dedicated to optimists appeared a fewer days ago Anne Applebaum p. Autocracy. Dictators Who Want to regulation the World (for example Michał Rogalski, Agora, Warsaw 2024). I don't think there's a request to introduce the author. Her books, like The Twilight of Democracy, Gulag is Behind the Iron Curtain thanks to Agora Publishing House, they are constantly present in our readership. And who wants to focus on how different geopolitical games are presently being played in a globalised planet and how this translates into our regular lives, Autocracy Commission should treat as mandatory reading. The extended definition of the title “concern” is given immediately at the outset:
We have any common comic images of the autocratic state. It is headed by a villain who controls the army and police. The military and the service are constantly threatening the public with violence. Among citizens are both mean collaborators and brave opponents.
Only in the 21st century, specified a image has small to do with reality. Today, autocracy is not ruled by single bad people, but by complex networks of power. They usage a kleptocratic financial strategy and a complex safety apparatus – military, paramilitary and police formations. They besides trust on specialist experts who operate surveillance tools, building propaganda and sowing misinformation. Members of specified structures form webs of interconnectedness beyond the borders of individual countries. Regimators are embedded in networks that arise in another authoritarian and any democratic countries. The order forces of 1 country can arm, equip and train akin formations of many another countries. Propagandists besides share resources – troll farms and propaganda media of 1 dictatorship can work for another and repeat the complex motives: the progressive distribution of democracy, the stableness guaranteed by authoritarianism, the evil that America is liable for.
This does not mean that there is any secret gathering place where nothing in the scene with James Bond All the villains come down. The conflict we're in is not bipolar or black and white. It does not constitute “cold war 2.0”. [...] This full group does not bind into 1 military or political alliance known from earlier times. These countries don't form a block, but a kind of conglomerate of companies. They are connected not by ideology, but by ruthless and blind determination to defend individual wealth and power. They make the Autocracy Commission.
Instead of a common thought of the strong-armed leaders of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and most likely respective twelve more countries, there is simply a strong drive to deprive their own citizens of any real influence on the state, to deprive them of their right to vote, to argue transparency and to presume work in any form possible, to persecute anyone and anyone who challenges, at home and abroad. Strong arms besides share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth (The contractor..., p. 10-11.
The titles of the following chapters of the Applebaum book clearly indicate problems that characterise in item the actions set out in the abovementioned definition: Greed That Combines, Cleptocracy has metastasis, Control narration, Operating strategy to be changed, Democrats toss mud. The final chapter concerns certain rescue suggestions: Unification of Democrats.
In this framework, the author puts a number of precisely recognized examples of circumstantial geopolitical games. Examples confirm the universal designation presented in the book and origin a real dizziness.
In this context, it may be worth recalling the books that have been mentioned here before. specified as: New authoritarianism. Fear Policy Gideon Rachman (see besides Entries p. The Times of a Strong Handof 16.02.2023; here, among others, a poem Ewa Lipska Exam, which besides present Records could be repeated without hesitation) and Spin Dictators. A fresh face of tyranny in the 21st century (see besides Entries p. About political disguisesof 04.05.2023).
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When we talk about geopolitical games, however, there is simply a completely different reading that comes to mind, besides this year. It's a two-volume edition of a historian's work. Simona Sebaga Montefiore p.The world. household History Maciej Antosiewicz, Władysław Jeżewski, Wydawnictwo Marka Horizon, Kraków 2024). It deals, as the editorial note rightly states, with a "crazy journey for millennia." A journey that makes the reader witness human activity from the emergence of Homo erectus in East Africa to the United States Tramps, China Xi Jinpinga and Russia Putin.
Montefiore – just in case – is simply a British historian, author published in Poland by Magnum Publishing House: Stalin. The Red Tsar Court Maciej Antosiewicz, Warsaw 2010), Potemkin. Prince Prince Katarzyna Bażyńska-Chojnacka and Piotr Chojnacki, Władysław Jeżewski, Warsaw 2006), Jerusalem. Biography Maciej Antosiewicz, Władysław Jeżewski, Warsaw 2011 and respective novels (SachenkaMaciej Antosiewicz, Warsaw 2011), One winter night (in Polish).
This time Montefiore's focus is on household stories and from this position the past of the planet is shown. We read:
The word “family” has an aura of comfort and love, but in the real life of the household can of course be webs of conflict and cruelty. Many families, whose fates I follow, are powerful families in which tenderness and warmth, concern and love are saturated and distorted by the peculiar and unrelenting dynamics of politics. In powerful families, the threat comes from closeness. [...] The horror co-exists with the serenity. There are many loving fathers and mothers, but there are besides Ptolemy VIII, the “Fatch” who quarters his boy and sends body parts to the parent of the child; Nadir Shah and Empress Irena, who blind their sons; Queen Isabella, who tortures her daughter; Charles the Great, who presumably sleeps with her; the powerful Ottoman parent Kös, who orders her boy to strangle and herself is strangled by her grandson; the powerful Catherine of Medici, who arranges the slaughter at the wedding of her daughter seduced or possibly even raped earlier with her consent by her sons; Nero, who sleeps with her mother, and later murders her. Chaka kills his mother, and then uses it as an excuse to commit the slaughter. Saddam Hussein swindles his sons into sons-in-law. Killing the brothers is common – even today: Kim Jong Un late murdered his brother in a very modern way, utilizing the tv reality show as a scenery and VX paralystic-convulsive agent as a poison (The world..., T. I, pp. 30-31.
And this is not the end of the list. Negligence – emphasises Montefiore – Hegel wrote that past is “a butcher's table, on which the happiness of people is sacrificed” (The world..., T. I, p. 11). It besides happens that Montefiore, describing the past of the planet through household history, uses, among another things, the concept of "geopolitical tournaments". In addition, with the information that Pope Julius II (1443-1513) at the beginning of the 16th century, he described the corresponding actions as “world games”.
It can so be said that geopolitical games are fundamentally as old as the world. Sometimes, as Applebaum notes, their descriptions have a comic character. In today's globalised planet with access to digital tools, they get the characteristics of an autocratic company. They always aim at power and wealth. And they are always a mirror to our humanity. So all the books mentioned present could be said to be read smoothly and pleasantly, if not for the image reflected in the mirrors of history...
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In the final parts of the Applebaum book, we will read about examples of behaviour that show how crucial it is due to geopolitical games to admit patterns of action characteristic of the representatives of autocratic power and how crucial it is to know the results of actions against democracy. This in turn identifies crucial challenges for deliberately organized education. Unfortunately, they are not tantamount to the thought of introducing a patriotic subject to school programs. They besides require careful consideration of the meanings associated, for example, with the concept of creative reasoning that has been changed present by all cases. The characters from the above passage of Montefiore's book Creativity were not lacking...
