Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
O eixo central da nova controvérsia geopolítica mundial — ou uma Segunda Guerra Fria — continua sendo a Rússia, a despeito da emergência da China como o real contendor da disputa hegemônica global, pois que é o militarismo autocrático expansionista de Putin que exacerbou o antagonismo convertido em violação aberta e brutal da Carta da ONU e do Direito Internacional, não a competição estratégica da China com os EUA, um processo normal na história do grande jogo interimperial.
A Rússia atual confirma escritos de Marx de meados do século XIX e de George Orwell cem anos depois. Mas se trata de uma linguagem politica dotada de um imenso arsenal, inclusive misseis nucleares, o que ainda não era o caso quando Orwell escreveu sua novela distópica. A ameaça de uma IIIGM vem de Putin, não do atual imperador do novo Celeste Império.
(PRA)
Russian Life Imitates Dystopian Art
Nina L. Khrushcheva sees in the country’s return to absolutism why George Orwell focused on language as a political weapon.
The state in Russia has always tended toward absolutism, and its coercive and penal arms have rarely wielded as much power as they do now. Since launching his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has combined neo-Stalinism and religious fervor, with all of the absurdities that this entails.
MOSCOW – The Kremlin rarely surprises me. When I read George Orwell’s 1984 in the 1970s, at age 10, I immediately recognized our Soviet life. By then, everyone was used to the state insisting that everything was becoming “better and more joyous,” as Stalin had claimed in 1935 when people were dying of hunger and being imprisoned for fictitious crimes.
Later, in the 1970s, when Leonid Brezhnev was touting the Soviet model of “developed socialism,” some 300,000Soviet citizens were defecting to the West. Yet as large as that number seemed at the time, it pales in comparison to today’s figures. The mass exodus following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is more reminiscent of the one triggered by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Between 1917 and 1922, up to three million aristocrats, landowners, doctors, engineers, priests, and other professionals fled the new dictatorship of the proletariat.
Today, even modest estimates suggest that around 800,000 people – IT specialists, journalists, writers, scientists, actors, directors, intellectuals – left Russia in 2022 alone. As in the past, these professionals could see the writing on the wall. They left to escape Vladimir Putin’s increasingly repressive security apparatus. The state in Russia has always tended toward absolutism, and its coercive and penal arms have rarely wielded as much power as they do now.
Of course, Putin owes his authoritarian mandate to Russians themselves. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians – reeling from rapid, profound economic changes and the new culture of consumerist individualism – grew nostalgic for the “strong” state. Their superpower status, historic breakthroughs in space, and grand victories on the battlefield were all long gone. Trading their new freedoms for the promise of renewed imperial glory seemed like a good deal.
They were duped. Those living in Russia today wake up every morning to a new chapter of 1984. “This must be a nightmare,” they tell themselves; yet it is all too real.
Consider the recent charges brought against Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of the Nobel Prize-winning human-rights organization Memorial, for “discrediting the Russian armed forces.” During a courtroom hearing on October 11, prosecutors, appalled at Orlov’s willingness to stand up for his convictions, accused the defendant of having “a heightened sense of justice and a complete lack of self-preservation instinct.” The prosecutors have also resorted to “punitive psychiatry,” by calling for Orlov to undergo the kind of evaluations carried out in the 1970s. They contend that his long career of advocacy (including protesting the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979) must have left him mentally “inadequate.”
MOSCOW – The Kremlin rarely surprises me. When I read George Orwell’s 1984 in the 1970s, at age 10, I immediately recognized our Soviet life. By then, everyone was used to the state insisting that everything was becoming “better and more joyous,” as Stalin had claimed in 1935 when people were dying of hunger and being imprisoned for fictitious crimes.
Later, in the 1970s, when Leonid Brezhnev was touting the Soviet model of “developed socialism,” some 300,000Soviet citizens were defecting to the West. Yet as large as that number seemed at the time, it pales in comparison to today’s figures. The mass exodus following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is more reminiscent of the one triggered by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Between 1917 and 1922, up to three million aristocrats, landowners, doctors, engineers, priests, and other professionals fled the new dictatorship of the proletariat.
Today, even modest estimates suggest that around 800,000 people – IT specialists, journalists, writers, scientists, actors, directors, intellectuals – left Russia in 2022 alone. As in the past, these professionals could see the writing on the wall. They left to escape Vladimir Putin’s increasingly repressive security apparatus. The state in Russia has always tended toward absolutism, and its coercive and penal arms have rarely wielded as much power as they do now.
Of course, Putin owes his authoritarian mandate to Russians themselves. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians – reeling from rapid, profound economic changes and the new culture of consumerist individualism – grew nostalgic for the “strong” state. Their superpower status, historic breakthroughs in space, and grand victories on the battlefield were all long gone. Trading their new freedoms for the promise of renewed imperial glory seemed like a good deal.
They were duped. Those living in Russia today wake up every morning to a new chapter of 1984. “This must be a nightmare,” they tell themselves; yet it is all too real.
Consider the recent charges brought against Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of the Nobel Prize-winning human-rights organization Memorial, for “discrediting the Russian armed forces.” During a courtroom hearing on October 11, prosecutors, appalled at Orlov’s willingness to stand up for his convictions, accused the defendant of having “a heightened sense of justice and a complete lack of self-preservation instinct.” The prosecutors have also resorted to “punitive psychiatry,” by calling for Orlov to undergo the kind of evaluations carried out in the 1970s. They contend that his long career of advocacy (including protesting the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979) must have left him mentally “inadequate.”