Re: <nettime> World at War? Counter-revolution and Unbalanced Multipolarism

[Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@well.com>]

Alex,

While the elements of what you describe are probably mostly valid,
lumping them together as you do seems arbitrary at best. Placed in
the context of other wars over the last few decades, including the
Iran-Iraq war, the wars over Chechnya, the Balkan wars, and repeated
fights between Israel and Palestine, what is now happening seems much
of a piece rather than instantiating anything fundamentally new. It is
true that during the Cold War, the alliance system somewhat dampened
hostilities, but still, the were Korean and Vietnam wars, the Soviet
war in Afghanistan , three hot episodes of India- Pakistan war, etc.

"Unbalanced Multipolarism" is no more true now than it was then as far
as any evidence you've presented.

Counter-revolution in the mid east context is also hardly new.
Consider Algeria, right after independence, when Ben Bella was ousted,
as well as later when Islamists won an election, or Iraq after the
king was toppled, etc.

As for the "heartland", which used to mean something much closer to
Ukraine than the Mideast, that' sa concept better left dead than
resurrected IMHO.

Ugly things have happened and are still happening. There are no
Utopias springing into view. But not necessarily any significant geo-
political turning points either.

Best,
Michael

Sent from my iPad

> On Aug 26, 2014, at 8:25 AM, Alex Foti <alex.foti@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> dear 'timers,
> 
> we are living in a William Gibson novel and it ain't pretty:
> hypermediatization, random cruelty, aberrant irrationality, political
> and ecological disintegration seem to rule the world.


<...>




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org