Read about the hollow invocation of past glories to preserve specific market relationships in post-Soviet wars. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… … read about Global warming on a red planet.

What would be the state of the planet by 1980 if industrialization was spread voluntarily by adoption of democratic control, rather than through market forces? Writing at The New Statesman [[link removed]], Leah Phillips picks the attempted and failed German Revolution of 1918-19 as the point of departure, but in the realm of alternate history several paths could lead to the same imagined future. One in which, following socialist revolutions across the industrialized countries of Europe and then the rest of world, the means of production are held democratically, and bent to serve the needs of people. This is done largely by coal-powered electrification, likely causing global warming earlier through greater industrialization. This experiment sidesteps the political forces countervailing against economic incentives, and assumes openness in data across socialist economies. But, as Phillips then argues, under socialism “once any ecological threat from a technology is discovered, the main barrier to switching away from that technology is the speed with which scientists and engineers can develop alternative technologies that don’t cause the identified harm while still delivering the same benefit.” That is, rather than thinking of socialism as an economic system that would never produce warming, it’s worth looking at as a coordination tool that could better allow countries to tackle the inherent externalities in global warming.

Brothers in Harms

Solidarity can come from staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. Taiwan, despite not being recognized by Ukraine, has aided that country’s war effort with supplies of medical training, drones, and even a handful of volunteers. The country has also halted the export of semiconductors to Russia.

“Taiwan's biggest assistance to Ukraine's plight is thus not so much in what it delivers to Ukraine, but what it currently isn't delivering to Russia,” write analysts Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans [[link removed]], who are tracking donations from Taiwan to Ukraine.

As Taiwan, too, is a nation with a shared and separate history from a massive neighbor, the ability to coordinate aid for sovereign independence comes with added emphasis.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] ACT Fast

There is, now, a routine to a pandemic. Early reports of distant infections, a precise dating of a handful of first cases in a new country, and then in the window between identification and government action, thousands of new infections, spread through the routine course of human activity. Writing in The Baffler, Benjamin Weil draws parallels [[link removed]] between the international response to Monkeypox, and lessons learned following the spread of AIDS/HIV in the 1980s.

While aware of the cultural concern, amid a reactionary homophobic moment in the United States, of having another plague identified publicly as primarily a disease among gay men, Weil argues that best medicine is medicine, administered rapidly, by a state eager to reduce harm and with hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses on hand.

“It is this form of bigotry — manifest as state neglect — that allows viruses to spread, unchecked, among marginalized communities and that has historically structured the unequal pattern of epidemics,” writes Weil.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Imagining Empire: Part I

On Feb. 21, three days before Russia launched its long-telegraphed invasion of the whole of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin said in a televised address that Ukraine as a modern entity traced its origin back to Russia’s 1917 revolution, and specifically the actions of Lenin. This was not, exactly, a critique of Lenin, as in the same statement Putin both condemned Ukraine for removing Lenin monuments and promised a greater decommunistification. No one goes to war over a statue who wasn’t already planning to go to war.

What Putin’s speech suggests is not that post-Soviet Russia was going to war for the legacy of communism, but because what Putin found praiseworthy in the lost USSR was its commitment to the territorial integrity of the Russian empire, won through blood in the Civil War and again in World War II. Russia’s wars of the 1990s and especially the 2000s have been, with the notable exception of a client-support mission in Syria, largely wars of restoring territorial integrity, of quelling independence movements, and of constraining the autonomy of constituent parts.

In “The Postcolonial Moment in Russia’s War Against Ukraine,” [[link removed]] Maria Mälksoo calls on the field of international relations to take seriously Russian wars as Imperial Wars. And, in so doing, it provides a framework to understand Ukraine’s war for survival as a postcolonial war.

“Ukraine is also among the most flagrantly neglected cases of Soviet colonialism due to the allegedly insufficient applicability of the label “postcolonial” to the former Soviet/Russian imperial space,” writes Mälksoo. One reason for this, Mälksoo continues, could include the limitation of colonial studies focused on European-imposed racial hierarchies of overseas colonies. Another is that the independent nations of Eastern Europe, who declared independence from the Russian Empire in 1917 only to lose and regain sovereignty between 1945 and 1991, are seen as distinct from national populations held subject within Russia.

If studies of Ukraine in the past have failed to place it in Eastern Europe, or have felt that Ukraine’s history is a subset of Russia’s history, a post-colonial understanding of the present war instead offers a way to understand the war as driven by both Russian imperialism against Ukrainian national independence. This is a framework that Mälksoo deliberately sets against the limitations of “spheres of influence” or “realism,” neither of which can adequately explain why Russia picked a war, the domestic concerns driving it, or why Ukraine has fought against it so intensely.

Through this lens, the war is not just about the relative power of two countries, but about Putin’s Russia seeking an answer to the collapse of Soviet empire in 1991 by rebuilding that empire, leaning on the what Mälksoo identifies as “heroic myths of its Second World War/Great Patriotic War-experience as the saviour of Europe.”

While the war is fought in Ukraine, the ideological terrain of the conflict is Russian identity as an imperial power, the part of the Tsarist legacy that Lenin kept and Putin in turn has worked to retain.

Concludes Mälksoo, “The least the onlookers can do is to learn to empathize better with the perspective of the murdered, and not of the murderers – politically, analytically and disciplinarily.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Daniel Ofman uncovered [[link removed]] the struggle of translating Ukrainian literature in light of the ongoing war. The war has disrupted existing supply chains, making paper and printing materials more expensive. It has also made the work of printing more difficult, as for years much of the material printed in Ukrainian was printed in Russia. While the war leaves Ukrainian printers threatened by missiles and bombs, it’s also spurred interest in more works in and out of translation. ““I’m contacted every day by an author or a publication asking for a new translation, asking to consult about translators, it’s been really incessant, it’s also been extremely encouraging,” Boris Dralyuk, an LA-based Ukrainian translator, told Ofman.

Tara Villalba spoke [[link removed]] about the great displacement that comes from lives seen as secondary to the development of nuclear weapons. The history of nuclear weapon development in Washington state is one informed by colonial power and racist structures at every turn. This includes the expropriation of native land for the Hanford reactor to the way the Black workers that built Hanford were forced to live in substandard housing while paying higher rents out of equal wages. “Those of us who were born after these devastating weapons were made didn’t get to choose a world unharmed by nuclear weapons,” wrote Villalba.

Kelsey D. Atherton reported [[link removed]] on the Archbishop of Santa Fe’s effort to bend his diocese towards the work of nuclear disarmament. The boundaries of the diocese expand to encompass Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as the Kirtland Munitions Storage Complex, making it both the heart of nuclear modernization efforts in the United States and home to up to 2,000 warheads. The heartfelt call, which came from both profound faith in the immorality of the weapons and the fallibility of humans, was paired with an understanding that the same skills that assemble nukes are needed to dismantle them.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

New meaning to “ library partition [[link removed]].”

This is just to say [[link removed]]… the former president had WHAT at his resort [[link removed]]???

Collective punishment, or being mean to no end [[link removed]].

When it comes to the future, there’s no higher yield investment [[link removed]] than thermonuclear warheads.

An extraordinary rendition of mindfulness [[link removed]].

Do I hear an Umberto Eco in here [[link removed]]?

Occam’s razor suggests years of lead, not civil war [[link removed]]. Speaking of razors, let’s take a moment to pause this podcast and thank our sponsor.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]