#technocratic terrorism

[prettiestboytoy2]

Fun fact:

In Cyberpunk 2077 universe, United States states entered period of so called "paranoid isolationism" and started to become increasingly hostile to its former partners in Europe and Latin America. USA implemented protectionist tarrifs against Europe because of perceived harm that European produce was inflicting upon US economy. European Union, naturally retaliated with its own tariffs which ended up harming both economies. European and Asian powers put thier differences aside with goal of humbling overreaching America.

Advent of new technologies created increasingly bigger class of impoverished masses and increasingly small class of financially affluent technocrats benefiting from said innovations. USA de-facto ruled by oligarchs and corrupt intelligence officers embarked upon bloody and costly campaign of pacifications throughout Latin America. Unwinnable war supported by antagonized Europe and Asia, has waged on, as world's economy was burning. US cities administrations were declaring bankruptcy one after another, quickly followed by collapse of local government structures. Culmination of such policy was Market Crash that wipped out most of the US economy.

Corporations and various government agencies has lunched thier last desperate effort to keep thier power, implementing nation-wide martial law. During incredibly bloody reign of terror, government and armed forces - strained with permanent war and policing - kept declining, with secessionists, gangs and foreign corporations growing bolder every day. As result, US entered mid 21th century decimated, losing most of its armed forces, economy, land and population. Completly isolated and marginalized, it remains as an rump state under quasi-democratic government sustained by handful of weapon manufacturing corporations.

Thankfully, its only silly sci-fi story that has nothing to do with reality or any recent statements on behalf of American rulling class! Gee, imagine that!

[thetimesofindia]

In battle of the delegations, real story lies in what went unsaid

Following a military clash, Indian and Pakistani delegations engaged in a diplomatic duel in global capitals, particularly London. India, emphasizing cross-border terrorism as a policy response, sought international understanding, while Pakistan pushed for dialogue and highlighted Kashmir. Both sides faced scrutiny and inconsistencies in their narratives.

In the aftermath of their recent military clash, rival delegations from Delhi and Islamabad converged on various global capitals, each aiming to shape elite opinion, win sympathy, and control the post-crisis narrative. Having witnessed some of the exchanges in London firsthand, the diplomatic duel across briefing rooms, think tanks, and diaspora events was as revealing for what was unsaid as for what was spoken.Messaging starts with messengersThe difference in delegation profiles was notable. India’s all-party parliamentary mission carried symbolic weight and cross-party legitimacy, including senior figures like Ravi Shankar Prasad and Pankaj Saran. Pakistan’s team leaned more on technocrats and veteran advocates of global engagement, such as Sherry Rehman and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. India’s group projected cohesion and resolve; Pakistan’s aimed to influence narratives and broaden appeal.India’s cautious caseIndia’s delegation framed Operation Sindoor as part of a broader shift: limited cross-border retaliation to terrorist acts as policy, not aberration. They emphasized terrorism as a global threat whose response merits international understanding—not moral equivalence. The delegation linked India’s counterterrorism struggle to challenges faced by Western democracies, with Pakistan as a common denominator.In my observation, Indian representatives appeared quietly frustrated that while many countries expressed sympathy after Pahalgam and tacitly accepted India’s right to act, few explicitly condemned Pakistan. Though confident in their message, their delivery often felt restrained. In think tanks, the tone was formal, even stiff; diaspora engagements were reportedly more fiery.Though most accepted the delegation’s basic premise, some observers noted the irony in Delhi resisting calls to frame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a shared threat but now seeking solidarity on Pakistani-based terrorism.Crucially, the delegation faltered when pressed on domestic radicalization. Two of the Pahalgam suspects were reportedly Indian nationals. Asked how New Delhi planned to prevent disillusionment turning to violence, the only response was that “things today are better than in the 1990s.” This was a missed chance to demonstrate nuanced understanding of the challenge.Other inconsistencies emerged. India’s representatives rejected “re-hyphenation” with Pakistan, yet much of their messaging focused on Islamabad. While stressing the quarrel was with Pakistan’s military, not its people, questions about suspending the Indus Waters Treaty complicated that distinction.Many briefings took place inside the High Commission, with diaspora members complaining to me that they thought too much political outreach was aimed at UK politicians of Indian heritage. Playing it safe has a certain logic, but may have limited engagement with new or skeptical audiences.

Pak’s polished—but problematic—pitch

If India played it safe, Pakistan opted for smooth. Their delegation turned up at major think tanks eager to engage and keen to appear misunderstood. With assistance from lobbying professionals, their narrative was tightly crafted for European audiences: Pakistan sought peace through dialogue, emphasising Kashmir as the “unfinished legacy of Partition,” terrorism, and water. Pakistan said it wanted talks, a neutral investigation into Pahalgam, and accused India of refusing cooperation or prove culpability.This narrative of peace sat uneasily beside claims of military success and personal attacks on Indian leaders. Critique of Indian media spin might have bolstered believability had it not been accompanied by other factual distortions: legal sleight-of-hand over Kashmir, misreadings of UN resolutions, and claims that India admitted culpability for terrorism in Balochistan.The most convincing moment came on the Indus Waters Treaty, where the stark picture painted of the consequences struck a chord, even if significant action has yet to follow.A key question remains: what was the objective? If persuasion abroad was the objective, the reliance on longstanding misrepresentations made it a difficult sell to informed audiences. If the goal was domestic signaling, that focus likely came at the expense of deeper foreign engagement.

Simpler sell, harder ask

Ultimately, the Indian delegation framed all terrorism as emanating from Pakistan; Pakistan framed it as emerging from Kashmir. The narratives didn’t just clash—they barely shared the same terms of reference. As performative exercises providing content for domestic media, both probably succeeded on their own terms.In the battle to move international opinion, outcomes were uneven. India may have achieved more, but it also had the easier task — framing terrorism as a universal threat aligns with European security narratives. Pakistan, by contrast, asked outside actors to invest political capital in corralling New Delhi back to the negotiating table — a much harder sell. Yet neither side escaped contradiction. India’s claim to strategic clarity was weakened by deflection on domestic aspects of terrorism in Kashmir. Pakistan’s message of peace was blunted by triumphalism and tired tropes.In diplomacy, silence often speaks louder than words. In London last week, the most telling signals were what each side omitted, ignored, or performed for the audience they believed mattered most.Ladwig III is a senior lecturer at the department of War Studies, King’s College London

[good-old-gossip]

Zionist Degenerates HARASS a Palestinian kid for showing the reality of surviving a GENOCIDE

Abdullah al-Yazuri is 13 years old and has witnessed death and devastation on a scale that most could never imagine.

Having survived Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, which has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians so far, Abdullah’s dream is to study journalism in distant Britain, where his father got his PhD.

But in recent weeks, Abdullah has found himself at the centre of a national row in Britain, triggered by his role narrating a BBC documentary on Gaza’s children, Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone.

Speaking to Middle East Eye this week, Abdullah described spending hours being filmed in the besieged enclave during the war.

He said that he had hoped that the documentary could “spread the message of the suffering that children in Gaza witness.”

Instead, just four days after the documentary aired on 17 January, the BBC pulled it from its streaming platform, iPlayer, after an intense campaign by pro-Israel groups and rival British media outlets.

Their criticism centred over revelations that Abdullah’s father, Ayman al-Yazuri, is a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government, which is administered by Hamas.

Yazuri has been widely labelled a “Hamas chief”, “Hamas official” and “terror chief” by commentators and news organisations in Britain.

But MEE revealed on 20 February that Yazuri was in fact a technocrat with a scientific rather than political background and had previously worked for the UAE’s education ministry and studied at British universities.

“It was pretty disappointing and sad to see this backlash against me and my family, and this harassment. Some anonymous people, let’s say, had tried to hide the true suffering of Gaza’s children by attacking me and my family,” Abdullah said.

He told MEE that the affair has caused him serious “mental pressure” and made him fear for his safety. Now, he says, he holds the BBC responsible for his fate.

✍️ Khaled Shalaby and Imran Mulla

[collapsedsquid]

To use Hegel’s terminology, the world of business and commerce is “Civil Society” or “Bourgeois Society” and is defined by self-interest and self-assertion, it is the realm of particular interests. What fascism and radical libertarianism both want is the subordination of the state to “Bourgeois Society,” not as a sociological category, but as a type of social activity, namely unmediated productive self-seeking and self-interest. Fascist politics and radical libertarian politics are both resolutely anti-political: they reject the legitimacy of the parliamentary political process and both “seek to replace the political sphere with a technocratic rejection of politics as such.” Some of the most incisive observers of fascism do not even dignify the fascist political entity with the word “state:” Franz Neumann in his famous analysis Behemoth described Nazi Germany as not being unified by a single legal, rational order, but instead as a chaotic collection of competing power centers, that ruled through terror, arbitrary decree, and personal patronage.

[eretzyisrael]

by Lee Smith

The Biden team’s offer to trade Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to be the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, for guarantees that the Israeli military stay out of Rafah points to two disturbing truths about the current conflict in the Middle East. The first is that the U.S. knows plenty about what the Hamas terror group is doing and has done. The second is that Washington has been keeping key information—like the terror leader’s whereabouts—from the Israelis, thereby prolonging the war that it claims to decry.

The implications of the administration’s offer, relayed in a recent Washington Post article, has Israelis and U.S. pro-Israel activists livid. Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for instance, posted on X, “I am shocked and sickened by reports that the U.S. is withholding from Israel vital information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. Is the administration still our ally?”

The Biden administration is making the offer because all its efforts to end Israel’s war have failed and if Rafah falls, Hamas is likely to fall, too. It seems there’s no other way to preserve a pillar of what the White House calls “regional integration”—a euphemism for the U.S.-Iran alliance system that Barack Obama has tried to impose on the Middle East for the last decade.

Leaks that the Biden administration is withholding actionable intelligence on Hamas’ paramount leader in Gaza confirm that, as Tablet reported shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the administration had a wealth of intelligence on the terror group and its plans. If U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that they know where Sinwar is squirreled away now, in the chaos of wartime, they also knew what he was doing in the lead-up to the massive attack.

Biden and his aides have formulated their scenario: Hamas ‘technocrats’ will constitute the Iranian-backed component in a unity government with the U.S.-backed faction that now rules the West Bank. Hamas is a pillar of the U.S.-Iran condominium.Share

The administration’s efforts to disclaim any foreknowledge of the attack were always absurd. The U.S. has not only its own unrivaled collection of signals intelligence but also significant intelligence channels in Qatar, where Hamas leaders are based; in Lebanon, where Hamas fighters trained under the supervision of Iranian officials; and Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and allows Hamas to smuggle weapons through the terror group’s extensive tunnel network. Further, detailed open-source reporting, especially in The Wall Street Journal, months prior to the attack showed that top Iranian officials were visiting Lebanon to coordinate major operations with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.

And yet, according to reports shortly after Oct. 7, there was no evidence U.S. spy services shared with Jerusalem their intelligence on Hamas. The Biden administration rationalized its failures by claiming there was nothing exceptional about its findings, much of which was gathered in areas where the U.S. prevented or discouraged Israeli intelligence from operating. As one U.S. source told the press, “I think what happened is everyone saw these reports and were like, ‘Yeah of course. But we know what this will look like.’” In other words, the Biden administration knew there was something big in the works; the only question is whether it had any indication of the full scope of the Oct. 7 operation.

Read the whole thing.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Tree of Liberty, parched for far too long, requires sustenance for upkeep.

Thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s prescription two hundred fifty years ago, we have the recipe for its supper.

Thus I pray fervently for — but don’t necessarily expect — (metaphorical) rivers of tyrannical technocratic blood come 2025.

My fantasies regarding the fate of FDA bureaucrats are several tinges darker than allowing them to peacefully pack their bags and hit the road, but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth; the following proclamation from RFK Jr. cuts much further in the right rhetorical direction than the constant fellatio they received in the corporate media the last four years, and I understand why, strategically and electorally, we might not want to go full Reign of Terror on them just yet.

Related: FDA Concedes COVID Shots Trigger Baby Seizures, Re-Recommends Them Anyway

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals* and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

The RFK Jr. X/Tweet/whatever

*That’s a hell of a list — all, objectively, on their own, hugely beneficial therapies and lifestyle practices that likely work better than any drug Pfizer could concoct in a lab. Combined, they’re potentially a golden ticket to wellness that would enable us to throw off the biomedical shackles that prey on the chronically ill and desperate — exactly how they want us.

[fipindustries]

One thing i realized about myself is that there is one specific genre of story i always gravitate towards. Ill try to put it as succintly as possible:

Official workers/important people/beaureaucrats trying really hard to handle a chaotic or unpleasant situation to solve a seemingly intractable problem while having to follow protocol, or finding clever ways to circumbent protocol

This is why i really like things like mad men, joeyux noel, succession, the death of stalin, shin godzilla, operation avalanche, the big short, chernobyl, to a certain extent the terror. That is why one of my favourite books of all time is prelude to after the hero. The whole protocol and chain of command were my favourite parts of generation kill. They were also my favourite parts of evangelion, whenever we would cut to central command and we would see ritsuki and misato talking to the three people at the computers assesing damage and working strategies. It was also my favourite parts of the traitor baru cormorant, when it focused on her being an accountant and a technocrat.

This is why i imagine i might really like TNG if i wasnt intimidated by the sheer size of it and by the fact i feel i got every single episode spoiled watching red letter media.

I like the beauracracy of it all, the pomp and circumstance, the systematization of issues. The institutionality of it all. The yuxtaposition of chaos vs order. Of using rules and systems as tools to handle (or cause, as the case may be) disorder and destruction.

You will notice too that a lot of these things are either based on real events or eschew very close to historical authenticity. This is why i am wary of things like brazil or severance, the settings just dont feel grounded enough for me to care and a lot of it feels more interested in its wacky visuals and deeper themes than on actually taking the systems they present seriously. Which is perfectly fine you know, just not for me.

[argyrocratie]

"There were quite a number of Hungarian peculiarities. First, the memory of 1956 (centered on the idea of national independence and a competitive electoral democracy) and the quite exceptional magnitude of the Shoah on Hungarian soil had made the Hungarian Party leadership, like its East German counterpart, extremely cautious in the replacement of Marxism-Leninism with nationalism. The savage nationalism known in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, Russia, China, and Vietnam in the period — which gave each its oppressive edge — was largely absent in Hungary, so there was no official culture with its scary and tedious rituals, which meant fewer taboos, less censorship, more openness, and more fun. Together with higher living standards, the absence of ideological coercion, and a certain undemanding, sly hedonism, Hungary became the envy of the Eastern Bloc. People could travel (I couldn’t because I was a dissident, but in the neighboring countries only dissidents traveled — with a one-way ticket to Western exile) and the press was informative and lively (by that time pretty pro-capitalist, extolling discretely the attractions of the West; the media hero was certainly not Brezhnev or Andropov, but first Willy Brandt, and then Mrs. Thatcher).

It was the Party’s pride that we had excellent literature, a varied and lively arts scene, and high-quality social sciences. Aestheticism filled the gaping hole where revolutionary dogma lay buried. It was all very nice, but desperately empty. The expression “reforms” had already in 1970s started to mean what it does today: market reforms, anti-egalitarian measures, and a reduction of state interference, redistribution, and planning. That, in contrast to Stalinism (terror and the pains of any accumulation, period), appeared progressive, modern, and liberating.

Socialism meant the grey, terrifying, repressive past, robbing it from its traditional advantage: the representation of Newness. A true end to hierarchy — that is, the end to all organized society, to all civilization as we knew it — was the great temptation, the great diabolical hope of communism, a future without coerced labor. If communism is not future in some sense, then it is nothing. And this is precisely what it had become in the 1970s and 1980s: nothing.

(...)

The Party’s policy of demobilization was quite successful. As long as the living standards were improving, the populace was quiescent. However, the center of politics shifted from the Party organizations to the network of reformist technocrats in the Finance Ministry, the National Planning Authority, the National Bank, the appointed reform quangos [quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations], and the various social-science projects under the aegis of the Academy of Sciences. Through the enforcement of loud manifestations of political loyalty and verbal revolutionary fervor the mainstream was characterized by apolitical, technocratic talk. The regime was more and more dependent on Western loans, and therefore had to make concessions to Western political sensibilities and tastes: it had to go soft on repression, especially on the routine persecution of intellectuals. Not only dissidents, but old-fashioned Marxist-Leninists were reprimanded, downgraded, pensioned off, or fired. The regime wanted to get rid of all manner of politics.

After the first wave of pay cuts, the working class started fermenting, so the cautious leadership — unlike in other “real socialist” countries — slowed austerity policies through the accumulation of new debt and the brutal reduction of new investments. The Party feared the proletariat and did not want committed socialist intellectuals who might join in eventual protests.

Thus, it had gradually lost everything from its “workerist” legacy and plebeian identity. Little wonder, then, that nobody had lifted a little finger in the defense of “real socialism.” In its effort to satisfy and pacify everybody and reach consensus through enforced and generalized conformism, the successor regime to the October Revolution ceased to represent anybody except the narrow interests and the self-preservation instinct of its bureaucratic-technocratic elites.

(...)

A great deal has been made of the presence of former Party figures at all echelons of the new institutions. Their presence is a fact. But it would be asinine to think that a wholly different system, a wholly different system of governance, has nothing new because some commanding posts are still manned by formerly powerful persons. Anyway, the great winner — in terms of profit — is not the “nomenklatura bourgeoisie,” although most of them are quite wealthy either as highly placed civil servants, or as business people, or as mafiosi, but the transnational corporations and the power networks that can be loosely called “Western.” These corporations were not interested in the re-launch of obsolete rust-belt industries; they have bought state-owned firms for a song, closed them down, and inundated domestic consumer markets with junk from their old suppliers. Where would people fired from their old workplaces find the money to make these consumer markets lucrative? This is not a question contemporary capitalists ask themselves.

The worldwide disintegration of labor had taken the form of political transition in Eastern Europe. It was the irrefutable end of the proletariat as a political subject, even mythologically, and it was the end of its — surely fraudulent and vacuous — representation. Its end was soon followed by that of its historical rival: social democracy in the Western liberal states. The rise of China has shown that this representation can be continued, and that the name of this continuation is capitalism."

-"The Left and Marxism in Eastern Europe: An Interview with Gáspár Miklós Tamás" by Imre Szeman (2009)

[nicklloydnow]

“Ukraine’s current stalemate with Russia has frustrated many people, including the former’s military chief. A largely stymied counteroffensive this year gained little ground, especially as Ukraine still lacks certain technology that could help with meaningful breakthroughs. But one important aspect of the struggle against Russia has been surprisingly absent from the recent debate on how Ukraine can win.

I’m talking about the Russian economy—and the people who hold it together, like Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank of Russia. It’s tempting to say that Nabiullina is often overlooked because she is a woman, but then again, talented Nazi economist Hjalmar Schacht is not exactly the star of many documentaries, either. Economists may keep the wheels of a war machine greased, but because they’re not the people in snappy uniforms, it’s easier to disregard them.

As an economist, Nabiullina has a long track record of saving Russia from sanctions following Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2014. Her decisions, which included inflation targeting, and, more specifically, floating the exchange rate, earned her fawning interviews with the International Monetary Fund even as her bosses continued to kill Ukrainians prior to the mass-scale 2022 invasion. She was furthermore praised as an effective communicator of Russian economic policy—thus helping prevent panic.

Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Russian sources rushed to tell Western journalists that Nabiullina tried to resign but was not allowed to do so by President Vladimir Putin. Gossip, as ever in Russia, resulted: as I heard the stories, Nabiullina had been blackmailed, people close to Putin terrorized her, they showed her pictures of her husband in bed with another woman in order to break her spirit, and so on.

A lot of the more salacious information was later deleted from gossip websites, which makes it seem more plausible. I found this exercise in PR very interesting, as it echoed the narrative of Schacht himself—whose defense at Nuremberg rested on his insistence that he was not powerful enough to stop Hitler, and that he furthermore was in touch with the resistance.

I don’t buy the narrative of a trapped and martyred Nabiullina. She has done her job too well for it to be reality. I spent the first year of Russia’s war analyzing tension between the Kremlin and the Central Bank—the Kremlin being where the blood-crazed fascists are, and the Central Bank being where the pragmatists who don’t want to see the Russian economy destroyed are—and there’s plenty of evidence that the Central Bank had room to sabotage the Russian war machine if it had chosen to do so.

A lot of that evidence was shown to me by anonymous sources who don’t want to get snatched by the Russian secret police, but you don’t need to be speaking to terrorized economic experts on a burner phone to see just how hard Nabiullina has fought to keep the ruble afloat. Her strategy has included bold rate hikes and constant communication with the Russian public, as she knows the cost of panic. As she executes her vision, Nabiullina suffers constant attacks from conservatives and religious extremists in Russian politics and media, but she has not let that deter her.

The struggle to keep the ruble afloat is one that the Central Bank will likely lose, but not fast enough. Innocent Ukrainians continue to die, while demagogues and Putinists alike are seizing this moment in the war to call on Western governments to abandon Ukraine entirely.

But the gap between the Central Bank’s relative technocratic efficiency and the demands of the war machine is there—and can be exploited. The Russian fear of slipping into poverty is a powerful force. Millions of Russians are already there, of course, with many more joining them constantly—the zealous falsification and manipulation of data on that front belie the problem.

Even many of the older Russians who live relatively comfortable lives today retain painful memories of defaults and economic chaos in the 1990s, the same chaos that helped Putin seize power. The devaluing of the ruble is a particularly triggering scenario for them, but potential defaults even more so.

This fear finds its way into everything, from political rhetoric—as Putin and his minions regularly seek to remind Russians that they were “saved” by his administration—to Russian popular culture and beyond. It is evident in wealthier Russians’ fanatical, embarrassing love of obscene luxury. It can be both a motivating factor and a destabilizing factor. They may support the war, but economic anxiety makes their contract with the Kremlin a fragile one.

This fragility is evident in the deep suspicion most ordinary Russians exhibit toward economists, technocrats, and other people they consider unreliable. These societal fissures are deepened by the fact that Russian economic statistics are already completely unreliable.

The Kremlin boldly lies about its economic prospects both to the West and its own people, but it’s Russians who are actually more capable of recognizing the lies. They know the duplicity their government is capable of much better than most Western analysts. This knowledge creates additional opportunities for instability, because the groundwork for mistrust and rebellion has been laid by the Kremlin itself.

The Central Bank and the Kremlin are in league. But there is a paradoxical element to their relationship, wherein the Central Bank wants the Russian economy to be more transparent and to function normally, while the Kremlin is in a protracted fascist spiral that threatens these goals. Emphasizing those discrepancies, and tightening the screws on the economy, can cause the fissures in the relationship to fracture.

Conservative Russian zealots will be eager to blame Nabiullina once even falsified economic data can no longer distract the population from what’s happening, but as financial hits continue to pile up, both the Kremlin and the Central Bank lose. There are political wedges here to widen in the meantime, as ingrained mistrust of the Central Bank makes its position fragile, and fragility exists to be exploited in a time of war.

Conflicted or not, Elvira Nabiullina should not get to have her war and keep her economy.”

[mariacallous]

Ukraine’s current stalemate with Russia has frustrated many people, including the former’s military chief. A largely stymied counteroffensive this year gained little ground, especially as Ukraine still lacks certain technology that could help with meaningful breakthroughs. But one important aspect of the struggle against Russia has been surprisingly absent from the recent debate on how Ukraine can win.

I’m talking about the Russian economy—and the people who hold it together, like Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank of Russia. It’s tempting to say that Nabiullina is often overlooked because she is a woman, but then again, talented Nazi economist Hjalmar Schacht is not exactly the star of many documentaries, either. Economists may keep the wheels of a war machine greased, but because they’re not the people in snappy uniforms, it’s easier to disregard them.

As an economist, Nabiullina has a long track record of saving Russia from sanctions following Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2014. Her decisions, which included inflation targeting, and, more specifically, floating the exchange rate, earned her fawning interviews with the International Monetary Fund even as her bosses continued to kill Ukrainians prior to the mass-scale 2022 invasion. She was furthermore praised as an effective communicator of Russian economic policy—thus helping prevent panic.

Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Russian sources rushed to tell Western journalists that Nabiullina tried to resign but was not allowed to do so by President Vladimir Putin. Gossip, as ever in Russia, resulted: as I heard the stories, Nabiullina had been blackmailed, people close to Putin terrorized her, they showed her pictures of her husband in bed with another woman in order to break her spirit, and so on.

A lot of the more salacious information was later deleted from gossip websites, which makes it seem more plausible. I found this exercise in PR very interesting, as it echoed the narrative of Schacht himself—whose defense at Nuremberg rested on his insistence that he was not powerful enough to stop Hitler, and that he furthermore was in touch with the resistance.

I don’t buy the narrative of a trapped and martyred Nabiullina. She has done her job too well for it to be reality. I spent the first year of Russia’s war analyzing tension between the Kremlin and the Central Bank—the Kremlin being where the blood-crazed fascists are, and the Central Bank being where the pragmatists who don’t want to see the Russian economy destroyed are—and there’s plenty of evidence that the Central Bank had room to sabotage the Russian war machine if it had chosen to do so.

A lot of that evidence was shown to me by anonymous sources who don’t want to get snatched by the Russian secret police, but you don’t need to be speaking to terrorized economic experts on a burner phone to see just how hard Nabiullina has fought to keep the ruble afloat. Her strategy has included bold rate hikes and constant communication with the Russian public, as she knows the cost of panic. As she executes her vision, Nabiullina suffers constant attacks from conservatives and religious extremists in Russian politics and media, but she has not let that deter her.

The struggle to keep the ruble afloat is one that the Central Bank will likely lose, but not fast enough. Innocent Ukrainians continue to die, while demagogues and Putinists alike are seizing this moment in the war to call on Western governments to abandon Ukraine entirely.

But the gap between the Central Bank’s relative technocratic efficiency and the demands of the war machine is there—and can be exploited. The Russian fear of slipping into poverty is a powerful force. Millions of Russians are already there, of course, with many more joining them constantly—the zealous falsification and manipulation of data on that front belie the problem.

Even many of the older Russians who live relatively comfortable lives today retain painful memories of defaults and economic chaos in the 1990s, the same chaos that helped Putin seize power. The devaluing of the ruble is a particularly triggering scenario for them, but potential defaults even more so.

This fear finds its way into everything, from political rhetoric—as Putin and his minions regularly seek to remind Russians that they were “saved” by his administration—to Russian popular culture and beyond. It is evident in wealthier Russians’ fanatical, embarrassing love of obscene luxury. It can be both a motivating factor and a destabilizing factor. They may support the war, but economic anxiety makes their contract with the Kremlin a fragile one.

This fragility is evident in the deep suspicion most ordinary Russians exhibit toward economists, technocrats, and other people they consider unreliable. These societal fissures are deepened by the fact that Russian economic statistics are already completely unreliable.

The Kremlin boldly lies about its economic prospects both to the West and its own people, but it’s Russians who are actually more capable of recognizing the lies. They know the duplicity their government is capable of much better than most Western analysts. This knowledge creates additional opportunities for instability, because the groundwork for mistrust and rebellion has been laid by the Kremlin itself.

The Central Bank and the Kremlin are in league. But there is a paradoxical element to their relationship, wherein the Central Bank wants the Russian economy to be more transparent and to function normally, while the Kremlin is in a protracted fascist spiral that threatens these goals. Emphasizing those discrepancies, and tightening the screws on the economy, can cause the fissures in the relationship to fracture.

Conservative Russian zealots will be eager to blame Nabiullina once even falsified economic data can no longer distract the population from what’s happening, but as financial hits continue to pile up, both the Kremlin and the Central Bank lose. There are political wedges here to widen in the meantime, as ingrained mistrust of the Central Bank makes its position fragile, and fragility exists to be exploited in a time of war.

Conflicted or not, Elvira Nabiullina should not get to have her war and keep her economy.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Note from Return Fire

It’s time again to confront the authoritarian turn brewing on the fringes of the climate movement, and here Klokkeblomst reminds us why. The essay’s subject – the academic Andreas Malm, who blows hot air about why pipelines should be blown up but also about the need for a new ‘War Communism’ of harsh State interventions in the face of the ecological (or, in his reductive terms, ‘climate’) crisis – can serve as an initial target, but we publish this contribution we received in the hope that it will also speak to the tendency that is latent in the current atmosphere of desperation, which we should expect to grow regardless of the influence of this particular figure. (While seeming less influential as yet in radical circles, Malm is wooed by certain establishment media in his native Sweden where he cuts the figure of the militant parading his support for Hamas and other authoritarian groups for a bourgeois audience; suggesting, as with his fellow academic – and fellow apologist for the atrocities of State communism – Slavoj Zizek, he seeks his main recognition in an arena that is not involved in the complicated dynamics of actually trying to effect revolutionary action.)

While in this case in favour of such actions (purely theoretically) if only they fit into his hierarchical schema, we can place Malm on the same spectrum as the UK academics Paul Gill, Zoe Marchment and Arlene Robinson of Univeristy College London’s ‘Department of Security and Crime Science’, who published a paper last year written to offer clear recommendations to the repressive organs of the State as to how to equate anarchist sabotages – legally and propagandistically – with terrorism: he is an enemy of our struggle. His vision insists on quantifiable movement growth as standard for an action’s effectiveness rather than chaotic flows of desire and affect which these sabotages often spring from, achieve, and unpredictably inspire; instead insisting on seeing their ‘results’ in a vacuum (following the well-trod elitist path of other eco-authoritarians Deep Green Resistance). As such he’s a good example of Leftist (and sometimes Left-anarchist) obsession with what the author of excellent third part of ‘After the Crest’ series – reproduced in a forthcoming chapter of volume 6 of Return Fire – calls ‘geometrical growth’, a logic of accumulation: in resistance like in capital.

Now like always, justification is never lacking for his politics of ‘emergency’ that would justify totalitarian State measures; once you’ve accepted the price of such intervention as justified and likely to achieve the results you want, in today’s world there’s no shortage of issues to tack this lust for iron-fisted measures on to. The logic of urgency, however, is a poor metric for the ecological struggles we need. The idea that we have only so many years, decades, or “chances” left only obscures the effects of the crisis that are already happening; just disproportionately to the poor, non-Western, non-human. Such clock-watchers base their forecasts on technocratic measures like CO2 particles that are determined on levels utterly out of our participation, leading us directly away from our own judgment and experience: for instance, in the ongoing struggles to defend land and simultaneously rejoin the life of what actually sustains us beyond the supermarket and internet, or against capitalist extraction projects; which such academics and (wannabe-)politicians haven’t been positively contributing to but now want to co-opt and lead, straight into the dust. And, as this reduces the successfulness of these resistances when we let this happen, it gives even more grounds to the authoritarians (Left or Right) who propose their more ‘radical’ solutions...

In Malm’s take, the anti-nuclear movement is ‘naïve’; yet his model rests on technologies that don’t even exist yet in forms that have shown results, and he ignores efforts like re-vitalisation of indigenous lifeways, restorative agro-ecology, commoning, etc. This isn’t surprising for the legacy he likes to see himself as representing: the Leftist project of seizing the reins of a global industrial order, the results of which he hypocritically decries; yet remains utterly attached to its world. This is far from an isolated symptom these days; it hits a nerve for the terrified citizens who buy his books. Furthermore, his strident defence of the State – and insistence on the primacy of its agency vis-a-vis the ecological crisis – comes at a time of a crisis of governance worldwide which anarchists would do well to push away from the State-form; but Malm offers the contenders for the outcome of this power vacuum a new legitimacy, an ‘eco-Marxist’ flavour serviceable for the same project of infinite technocratic accounting that the progressive (we don’t mean this in a positive light) parts of the capitalist system are already clamouring for. He ignores the actual fault-lines like borders – which, as a Statist, he can only favour – which have been and will be some of the first flash-points as ecological collapse gains speed. Each argument for totalitarian responses invigorates others; we can see for example how in Germany among the supporters of the most restrictive COVID-19 regulations was the federal leader of the Green Party, proposing the governance of the state of emergency as “the model” for “the configuration of climate change”, praising Chinese “management of the pandemic”...

While we disagree that the struggles Malm should support instead should be “non-violent (but not pacifist)” because we do not find it to be a useful conception or restriction, as we’ve made clear since our very first chapter, and we’re not sure exactly what “climate justice” would mean in this context, we find it important to extend the reach of this piece as much as possible; including, to the degree we can, to the youth and others recently becoming active in the fight for a dignified life and a flourishing ecology we could call home. Artwork was supplied by the author, with a couple of additions from us. We welcome feedback at returnfire@riseup.net – also, to see the articles referenced by title throughout this text in [square brackets], consult chapters of the current volume of Return Fire (vol.6). PDFs of Return Fire and related publications can be read, downloaded and printed by visiting our website.*

– R.F., Winter Solstice 2021 * returnfire.noblogs.org

[grandhotelabyss]

As someone who appears to have undergone their intellectual formation during the capital 'T' Theory era, closely associated with a chic and predominantly discursive radicalism (the left of the left of the left), how did you begin to grow increasingly skeptical of this milieu and its orthodoxies? In my experience, most of those we now label as "theorycels" feel that abandoning this tradition would equate to a wasted life, especially given the extensive reading involved.

Thanks! It's a big question. In some ways I'm less skeptical of theory now than I've ever been (I assume you mean poststructuralist theory). I entered college with The Western Canon and Sexual Personae under my arm, so I began my tertiary education by being very wary of it. I've always had a dispositional dislike of theory as a literary style: the dogmatic tone coupled with the extreme abstraction, so that the law is being laid down, except that you don't quite know what it says. Even Foucault complained of Derrida's style that it represented "the terrorism of obscurantism." I hated the smug way theory was used in English departments to discredit literature as a machinic combination of preexisting ideologemes, to banish the sense of ineffable inspiration and world-transforming mission so many major writers themselves have always testified to—to discredit literature as one discourse among others, rather than the queen of the discourses, which it is (and if you can't say it is in an English department, where the hell can you say it?).

By the time I entered graduate school, though, theory was on the way out in English departments, to be replaced by various forms of historicism and other kinds of sociological and reductive "cultural materialist" approaches and the digital humanities. These approaches are far more anti-literary than theory ever was—especially if you actually read theory's primary sources, figures like Barthes and Deleuze, and find out how much more romantic and psychedelic they actually are in contrast to their literal-minded, puritanical Anglo translators and redactors. At least theory understands, as historicism does not, that the inner plurality and polysemy of every major text guarantees that the text by definition exceeds, defies, transforms its context, including its past and its future.

Theory has always had a hostility to the state that infuriated Marxists—I take theory to be a late Cold War manifestation of anti-communism—and therefore it made a brave showing against the totalitarian technocracy of the pandemic era, so much so that at least one would-be technocrat wrote a whole book to denounce it (see the link to my review of The Revenge of the Real below). It can also furnish resources to scrutinize the claims of the identitarian left (cf. "Postmodernism Is Good, Actually"). (That it also helps us to criticize the biologism and Social Darwinism now so fashionable on and adjacent to the right today should go without saying.) Its bracing anti-humanism is refreshing in the face of the "therapeutic society." Michel Foucault would not advise us to "trust science" and might be skeptical that we can "have" a gender, and Jacques Lacan thinks our vaunted "trauma" stems from our induction into the order of language and that therefore there is no real treatment except to play with language.

It's still not my preferred reading material, though—too dry, too abstract (though no more or less than Hegel, Kant, Spinoza; a lot of people who don't like "theory" just don't like "philosophy," and I have my days, too). Paglia's critique of theory was entertainingly external, a stand-up comic's brutal mockery. But Bloom was friends with Derrida and de Man, so I take his criticism more seriously: that theory deadeningly codified the insights it plundered from imaginative literature, which it then turn around (resentfully) and attacked. Derrida was "French Joyce," said Bloom, and Foucault "French Shakespeare." I tried to make this very point in my doctoral dissertation:

The wager of this study is that such novel-theory has, in my view, mistaken its own genealogy. I particularly want to engage the skeptical tradition of novel-theory because I hope to substantiate the claim that its own posture of suspicion toward subjectivity is first articulated in and by the novel of Aestheticism, which will become the modernist novel proper. How, after all, can critics so astutely observe the operations of ideology if they do not claim some distance from its demands, just as Pater and Wilde did when they declared art autonomous from social claims? My argument about the Aestheticist novel as thinking form can be summarized as follows: by declaring its distance from apparatuses of state, church, and market, the novel under Aestheticism claims for itself a privileged vantage from which to produce critical knowledge about these institutions using its own procedures rather than relying tautologically on those of the hegemonic forces it contests. Furthermore, in developing those procedures, it reflects critically upon them too, becoming a recursive form of criticism that examines its own entanglement in the relations it criticizes. Because of this reflexivity, autonomous literature may be complicit with ideology but can never be fully identical to it. In short, the modern novel looks more like the kinds of bold, agential theory written by critics such as [D. A.] Miller and [Nancy] Armstrong than one would guess from reading their works.

Paglia's right, though, that it has no sense of nature and little sense of spirituality and is finally too impoverished a vision. I agree with D. H. Lawrence that the proper place for philosophy is probably the novel. We could talk about exceptions to all my criticisms—Foucault is lucid, Deleuze is wild, Barthes is novelistic—and overall I find the achievement of those thinkers, insofar as I understand it, to be mixed.

Some of my further thoughts on theory can be found in my essay on Foucault and my essay on Lyotard, while my attack on the tendencies that succeeded theory in literary studies and on the American left at large can be found in my essay on Franco Moretti and my essay on Benjamin Bratton. And you probably won't want to miss the chapter in my novel Portraits and Ashes where a company of academic critics spend pages debating the significance of an art installation before it turns out that the installation's purpose is to slaughter its audience—my horror-comedy version, perhaps, of art's superiority to theory.

[raiders2]

Five in Ten 6/2/25: Ukraine Drone Swarm Hits Airfields Deep Inside Russia

A drone attack Sunday reportedly damaged or destroyed 40 Russian strategic bombers, a dangerous escalation in what is now clearly a proxy war between Russia and NATO.

5) Ukraine wins Pyrrhic victory with drone strike; 4) Terror attack by Islamist in Boulder, Colorado; 3) New study suggests former President Biden didn’t know what was being signed in his name; 2) Trump administration building infrastructure for technocratic dictatorship; 1) Education consultant wants UK children taught that not all Vikings were white and that some may have been Muslims.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth J. Frantzman

The Hamas police story is central to the current issues affecting Gaza. For instance, there are many reports of a humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Hamas and many organizations that have worked with it over the last decades have often claimed there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza in order to win concessions for Hamas so the terror group can continue to rule there.

Hamas believes the suffering of Gazans is in its interests, and it profits from their suffering. However, there is also a very real concern about how the current situation in Gaza could worsen in terms of the humanitarian crisis. Hamas may want the situation to worsen and may be using gunmen or its “police” to make it harder for Gazans to access aid.

We can see how this narrative functions through a recent report at Reuters claiming that “masked men in Gaza enforce prices.” The men claim they are merely enforcing law and order. However, usually “law and order” doesn’t need to be enforced by men with masks, sticks and guns.

Relationship between Hamas and law and order

In Gaza, however, there has been a symbiotic relationship between Hamas armed men and the delivery of humanitarian aid. What this means is that the presence of Hamas gunmen is seen as a positive thing by some of the stakeholders in Gaza.

The absence of an alternative to the Hamas gunmen creates this perception of the terrorist group as “law and order.” This is a strange type of law and order because the same terrorist group places weapons in civilian homes; the same group poses as civilians, bringing harm to innocent people, and the same group brought war on Gaza by attacking Israel on October 7. However, those who perceive Hamas as “law and order” appear to systematically ignore the fact that firing thousands of rockets from civilian areas is not usually how “law and order” thrives.

An article at The Guardian in January is symbolic of the way Hamas has inserted itself into the perception that it is a force for good in Gaza via its “law and order.” The article notes “One senior humanitarian official told The Guardian: ‘The technocrats continue to be about but the QB [Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing] you don’t see. You still see Hamas police in different areas who have a grip to some extent on law and order in some places including in the north.’”

[darkmaga-returns]

Hopkins concludes that we are living in a system, a simulation, a “global-capitalist form of totalitarianism”, but he is unaware of Technocracy. The “system” is based on Technocracy because that’s what Technocracy is. Arch-Technocrat Elon Musk has emerged as a cult leader/messiah figure to lead the world into Technocracy while fooling the plebes into thinking they can Make America Great Again. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.

Once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, there was born a global-capitalist empire. It was the first global empire in the history of empires. It dominated the entire planet.

No one knew what to call the empire, because there had never been anything like it in history. It had no external adversaries, so it had nothing left to do but “clear and hold,” i.e., neutralize internal resistance and consolidate its domination of the planet.

So that is what it set about doing.

It did this first in the territories of its final ideological adversary, an empire called the Soviet Union, the ideology of which was known as “Communism.”

This was known as the “Post-Cold-War Era.”

It did this next in the Greater Middle East, where people were still trying to live their lives according to a religion known as “Islam.”

This was known as the “Global War on Terror.”

The Global War on Terror was originally intended to go on forever, and it would have, and it will, but it had to be temporarily suspended, and rebranded, because something unexpected happened.

One day, in the Summer of 2016 — theretofore officially “The Summer of Fear” — the global-capitalist empire noticed that a new form of resistance to its domination of the entire planet had risen up, not in the former Soviet Union, or the Greater Middle East, but throughout the West, right in the very heart of the empire.

And so the War on Terror was suspended, and the War on Populism began.

The War on Populism raged for four years, and culminated in the rollout of the New Normal, officially known as “the Covid pandemic.”

For over two years, i.e., from March 2020 to approximately December 2022, the global-capitalist empire morphed into a new form of totalitarianism, a global-capitalist form of totalitarianism, which was not like any other previous form of totalitarianism.

This period was the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal Reich.

The transition to the New Normal Reich was broadcast throughout the global empire. The message was unmistakeably clear. From now on, there would be a “New Normal.” It would be like a permanent state of war, a permanent state of civil war. And so, from now on everyone would need to pledge their allegiance to the New Normal Reich, and follow orders, or be labelled an “extremist,” a “science denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” or some other type of seditious deviant.

The vast majority of the citizens of the West understood the message, followed orders, and pledged allegiance to the New Normal Reich. But a sizeable minority did not. The global-capitalist empire needed to neutralize this sizeable minority.

The majority of this sizeable minority was comprised of conservative, libertarian, and other basically right-leaning people. It contained a few old-school left-leaning people, but they were a minority within a minority, and so they weren’t really a factor when it came to neutralizing the larger minority, which the empire promptly set about doing.

[boredtechnologist]

Missile Defense 3-D: The Ethics of Pulling the Trigger First

When Missile Defense 3-D hit the Sega Master System in 1987, it offered players a thrilling gimmick: strap on the SegaScope 3-D glasses, wield the Light Phaser, and shoot down incoming nuclear warheads in full stereoscopic depth.

But what players didn’t realize is that they were engaging with a moral Rorschach test, shaped by real-world geopolitical terror. Beneath the vector-blasted visuals and arcade reflexes lies a haunting thesis:

You can’t defend a world that’s already doomed - but you’ll still try.

Enter SDI: Reagan’s Technocratic Dream

To understand Missile Defense 3-D, you have to start with Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) - nicknamed "Star Wars" by critics.

Unveiled in 1983, SDI was the idea of using ground- and space-based systems (like lasers, satellites, and interceptors) to detect and destroy incoming Soviet nuclear missiles. It was a dramatic shift in nuclear doctrine - from Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to preemptive protection.

But it raised huge ethical problems:

Is it moral to seek defense when it might provoke offense?

What happens when one nation claims the right to be invulnerable?

Is nuclear deterrence more stable when no one feels safe?

Missile Defense 3-D channels this philosophical soup into a single mechanic: shoot first, or die second.

The False God View: The Player as Omniscient Protector

When you play Missile Defense 3-D, you’re not a soldier. You’re not even a commander. You are a global targeting system - hovering above cities like a dispassionate AI.

You see every attack in real-time.

You choose which warheads to intercept.

You have no pause, no diplomacy - just reaction time.

This perspective is not empowering. It’s isolating. You aren’t immersed in the war. You are removed from it - a digital god reacting to a constant stream of death. This reflects the core anxiety of SDI:

What does it mean to be morally responsible when your actions are automated, depersonalized, and detached from consequences?

You’re not fighting to win. You’re reacting to prevent extinction - and failing is not a loss. It’s the end of the world.

Cities As Casualties, Not Characters

The cities you defend - San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo - are never named. They’re just shapes on the screen. Once hit, they don’t burn. They vanish. The game moves on.

This is a chilling abstraction of nuclear death. There’s no mourning. No screams. Just a score penalty.

This isn’t just a limitation of 8-bit graphics - it’s a philosophical choice. The game trains you to think of humanity in terms of targets, zones, and survival percentages. Which is precisely how Cold War strategic planning worked:

Human beings became data points in kill probability algorithms.

This dehumanization isn’t accidental - it’s a core ethic of Cold War deterrence logic. You don’t save people. You save territory. You defend value, not life.

The Illusion of Control

The most important design decision? You can never save everyone.

No matter how skilled you are, warheads slip through. You’re overwhelmed by sheer volume, speed, and panic. The further you go, the more certain it becomes: you will fail.

This creates a feeling not of triumph, but of inevitability. No matter how precise your aim, Missile Defense 3-D simulates the ultimate reality of the 1980s:

“Even our best defenses are fragile illusions.”

SDI, for all its ambition, never solved the basic truth that one missile getting through was enough. And the game drives that home with every flashing explosion: you can slow the end, but you cannot stop it.

The Light Phaser as Ethical Instrument

The Light Phaser - a toy gun - becomes an ethical tool. You point it at the screen and fire to “protect.” But with each level, the abstraction wears thin.

You’re not shooting aliens. You’re deciding who lives and who dies.

Fire too slow, and a city vanishes.

Fire too fast, and you overheat and miss.

Fire just right, and you preserve a world that’s already breaking.

The act of pulling the trigger becomes a ritual of guilt, not glory.

Cold War in 3D

The inclusion of 3D glasses isn’t just a gimmick - it’s metaphorical. Missile Defense 3-D wants you to see the war from two perspectives at once:

The thrill of saving the world with laser-precise action

The hopelessness of being unable to stop the inevitable

It’s a bifocal morality - just like SDI itself. A vision of hope blurred by paranoia. A defense system that felt futuristic, but couldn’t escape the past.

And like the 3D tech, it only works if you don’t look too closely.

The Game That Let You Feel Like a Satellite - and a Sinner

Missile Defense 3-D is rarely remembered alongside the heavy-hitters of 1980s game design, but it should be. It’s one of the few titles to directly confront the ethics of real-time apocalypse management, simulating the cognitive dissonance of living under a nuclear sword and pretending you could do anything about it.

It’s not about winning.

It’s about witnessing. Reacting. Compromising. Failing, then replaying, because the alternative is accepting what cannot be undone.

And isn’t that what SDI was, too? A system designed not to save us, but to give us just enough illusion of salvation to keep going?