1847 “Poshlost” is a wonderful Russian word, untranslatable because of its capacity to signify so many things at once: banality, crassness, cheesiness, crudeness, the whole spectrum of the trivially absurd and the absurdly trivial. The original master of “poshlost” was the 19th century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol whose works featured the absurdity and horror of day to day life among the lower classes and petty bureaucrats. Gogol’s contemporaries inferred from his writing that he had a reformist tendency.
This tragedy has now morphed into a US led and financed coalition of the US vs Russia. And, borrowing from Chomsky, we are fighting it to the last Ukranian. Let's hope that it does not spin further out of control, and that The Law of Unintended Consequences does not prevail.
Yes, American / Western hubris at the end of the Cold War was reminiscent of the winner-take-all Treaty of Versailles, when what was needed was a Marshall Plan that would have allowed Russia both dignity and the means to rebuild their economy within a democratic framework. Instead Ukraine is reduced to rubble, a lose-lose-lose for Ukraine, for Russia and the Western alliance.
Apropos to Kennan's 1997 NYT article is Mearsheimer's recent article in The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
This tragedy has now morphed into a US led and financed coalition of the US vs Russia. And, borrowing from Chomsky, we are fighting it to the last Ukranian. Let's hope that it does not spin further out of control, and that The Law of Unintended Consequences does not prevail.
Yes, American / Western hubris at the end of the Cold War was reminiscent of the winner-take-all Treaty of Versailles, when what was needed was a Marshall Plan that would have allowed Russia both dignity and the means to rebuild their economy within a democratic framework. Instead Ukraine is reduced to rubble, a lose-lose-lose for Ukraine, for Russia and the Western alliance.