Re: [A-List] The Link B/W Chechnya War and Caspian Oil

["Jim Yarker" <sjy_estrien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Honestly, if I have to deal with Russian nationalism, I'll prefer it
> without leftish pretensions.

Oh don?t underestimate yourself.  Your bloodhound-like exposure of the
Russian nationalist disposition of:

Oleg Shein,
Monde Diplomatique
Radio Free Europe and NYT correspondent Carlotta Gall,
IWPR?s Thomas De Waal,
the deluded non-ethnic Russian nationalities of Dagestan and Ingushetia,

among others, has been most impressive, as has as your sleuthing out that
the ethnic-tainted terror against and expulsions of non-Chechens in 1990?s
Chechnya were myths.  Shows once again that a Lexis-Nexis sub, lame
analogies, stilted proclamations, ?theory?, and a stock of wisecracks really
are a serviceable substitute for having the slightest clue what you?re
talking about.

> Who can argue against a "return to socialism"? But what does that have to
> do with the Bonapartist figure who is running Russia today

How inscrutable that Dagestanis, who favour a return to a socialist state
and who voted massively to keep the SU, who?ve voted for Communists more
than any other party over the last decade and a half, much more than the
average across Russia, would also prefer to remain in a multiethnic secular
federation which protects religious pluralism and language rights in a
republic like theirs, which has 30-odd language groups, none of whom form a
majority.

Why wouldn?t they want to throw in their lot with Basayev and his Wahhabist,
CIA- and ISI-trained Chechen sappers instead?  Why did Dagestanis form a
people?s militia to help federal forces rout these liberators?  A failure to
see the issue in ?class terms? apparently.  Perhaps they?ve been exposed to
too much Russian nationalist disinfo and hype about ?bandits? and
?terrorists? and Taliban clones such as we find here?:

http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg06264.html (easy to
imagine what the reaction would have been from you had I or Rozoff posted a
comment and an article like this to A-list in the fall of 2004.  But that
was then, and this is now.  Doubtless there's a "dialectic" to this?)

> And how proper and fitting that you cite R.B. Ware as some kind of big-time
> expert on what the Dagestanis want. This is the same guy who shows up
> regularly in Peter Lavelle's columns and every other media whore for
> Putin's Kremlin. Lavelle, Chris Doss and all these other characters really
> turn my stomach. They went over to Russia as carpet-baggers and have all
> launched careers as stenographers for the people in power.

Thanks for giving us the book on those ?carpetbaggers?, which I see from
Chris Doss?s response
(http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2004w50/msg00012.htm ) was the
product of your usual dauntless research.  Pontificating from a puny
knowledge base on a subject isn?t exactly a rarity on the Western middle
class left but some people are better poster boys for the phenomenon than
others, which is where you come in.

Do you actually think that the left in Dagestan ? socialists and communists
and the class forces who support them - buy your claim to the ?carpetbagger?
Chris Doss that saying Dagestan is part of the Russian Federation is like
Ankara saying Kurdistan is part of Turkey?
(http://www.mail-archive.com/pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg87633.html)  That
Dagestan=Kurdistan? Do you think Dagestani communists and socialists agree
with your claim that ?As far as Dagestan is
concerned, Russia believes that it has the right to intervene [!] against
Islamic radical rebels there as well. I think it has about as much right as
Turkey has to do so in Kurdestan??  (ibid) How does your idea that
critically supporting Islamic radical rebels is some kind of principled
opposition to Russian imperialism and the dismantling of the vestigial
Soviet safety net play with class-conscious workers and leftists in
Dagestan, since this is the obvious and logical inference of what you?ve
written?  Do you have a scrap of data to support this and that refutes Ware,
that this is the class perspective of the left in Dagestan?

I guess these are the ?scholarly standards? to which marxmail aspires.  The
meticulous class analysis.  No campy liberal editorializing here.  No
?facile analogies.?  What a joke.