Barnett’s On A Roll
Tom Barnett has a fascinating blog, because he has a style here that sounds like what happens when my grandmother emails me from her WebTV–sort of a “great to see you, but how’d you get on the intarweb?” feel. I’m glad he’s got that blog!
Anyway, you can see how he’s thinking through some great ideas, building and pulsing his network, and living his life–he just came back from a trip to China with a new adopted kid, for instance, and stories of that mingle with highfalutin’ Big Think Talk.
….and this Big Think is useful:
Basayev, in that article, was described as a very recent “convert” to Islam. What struck me about that article was that it reminded me how, during the Cold War, many revolutionary leaders “found” Marxism. Why? Typically because they were first turned down by the West or—specifically—the U.S. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh wrote his declaration of independence from colonial master France, cribbing it whole-cloth from Thomas Jefferson’s original. He saw himself as a natural George Washington, and couldn’t understand why Washington could not. We didn’t recognize him as such, because France was a big ally vis-à -vis the Sovs, so guess what? Ho had to become communist and Vietnam suffers that choice to this day.
Am I suggesting we should have sided with Basayev? No way. I see that independence movement as just more fracturing of the Core, as well as historically irrelevant/counterproductive to the larger integration processes of globalization. All I’m saying is that when you can’t join one side, you’re left with the other, and the other right now is radical Islam. When this happens, you’ll see that transnational movement absorb all sorts of cats and dogs, Basayev being one of them.
This article points to the opposite effect: not only are the Basayev’s of the Gap switching their stripes to join the radical Islam camp, but the radical Islam camp is basically accepting all comers.
One Response to “Barnett’s On A Roll”
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October 1st, 2004 at 12:58 am
There’s good and bad to the Ho Chi Minh story about us not supporting him. It sure didn’t help after the OSS allied with him to make it a bad day in the Japanese occupied “bakyards,” then to use formerly Japanese POWs to round up his forces after the signing of the surrender document.
While at The Command and Staff Course, one of our lecturers pointed out Ho spent almost his entire adult life in the Soviet Union before he was in French Indochina harassing the Japanese and had adopted a very Stalanist model of leadership, before he worked with the OSS. It sounds good that he came to us, but I seem to recall many Soviet states had Constitutions that spoke to equality and human rights in the way we do, yet the evidence shows it was a lot of window dressing.