hey, you pull no punches and that is great because otherwise, what is the point of writing?
"war works hard" poem, banal as it was reminded me of mother courage and the discussion about the virtues of war in that play. there, the arguments in favor of war were genuine and can even be said to be relatively convincing. the power of that argument comes from the intuition that the ruling classes probably actually think that way but they are not honest enough to declare their convictions openly.
of course, writers & poets' complicity goes much further than the figures you mercilessly exposed. rushdie, naipul, pamuk and many others basically function as the publicity wing of imperialism. they are all so vacuous and superficial that it is funny how revered they are among the so called intellectuals. their "style" is the sole refuge they have from their own banal reality. they are salespeople and functionaries, not "intellectuals".
it is a great thing you did by quoting saddam's last poem. I've watched an interview with the foremost "saddam expert" for the american invading force and that person also spoke with saddam hussein many times while he was waiting to be hanged. he actually admitted that they got him all wrong and in reality saddam was an honest and honorable leader. even an official servant of armed imperialism can admit his error but apparently not the high minded and free spirited poets.
Classically what makes psychopaths dangerous is their projection of their interior life onto others, their assumption that everyone else's mind works like theirs does. You see the same thing play out so often where the imperialists assume their enemies are just as callous and uncaring as they are, and assume everyone else is just out for power. I wrote another piece on here about Vietnam (the link, if you're interested: https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/kim-thuy-imperialist-apologist ) which includes a clip of an interview with a South Vietnamese bureaucrat who was shocked upon meeting a Viet Cong soldier in captivity that he actually BELIEVED IN what he was fighting for and willing to DIE for his cause, something which she finds completely shocking. But of course she finds it shocking, the imperialist can't understand this, they're self-interested and assume everyone else is out for themselves too. Her family's only goal was to maintain its own privileges at the expense of their countrymen, while their enemy was fighting to liberate their country at the potential expense of THEMSELVES.
I've listened to this story from peter kuznick. one of his friends who was a marine in vietnam went back there years after the war and met with a viet cong soldier. the meeting was cordial and both men respected each other as soldiers. vietnamese man talked about how their generals approached the war; viet cong soldiers read american newspapers, poets and novels to understand the americans. they read steinbeck and faulkner in their camps at night. he then asked his american counterpart, "which vietnamese novels or poets have you read to understand your enemy?" kuznick said the american ex-marine laughed so hard that he almost passed out.
Very interesting anecdote. Reminds me of an old National Geographic article I read once where an American journalist went to East Berlin. He is shocked to find that there's some vitality there, a lot of normal, content, happy people, witnesses festivities, even encounters some open political discussions, very unlike the black and white picture he'd had in his head -- at one point he gets in an argument with an East Berliner who, while both defending the GDR as well as admitting its flaws, eventually tells the journalist: "we know all about you, you know very little about us."
They were definitionally *not* concentration camps because nothing was "concentrated" -- a "concentration camp" is for the purpose of concentrating specific population groups, that's what the name means, whereas the gulags were more general penal colonies, there was no target population(s) to fill the camps with. They were penal colonies, and much of the infrastructure was pre-USSR in origin, defeating Kaminsky's entire point, both because they were, again, not concentration camps, and also not a purely Soviet phenomenon. Some of those same gulags are still penal colonies today, just with updated infrastructure, and penal labour is still practiced.
Those nationalities were not mass deported to be concentrated in camps. Having disproportionate representation is not "concentration," specific individuals were singled out. But many of those groups simply DID have higher predilections of threats and reactionaries, I've written a post on this very blog ( https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/why-is-npr-celebrating-a-historic ) which goes into well-researched detail about the prevalence of proto-fascist ethno-nationalist thought in Ukraine as an example prior to its incorporation into the USSR. And what happened next? Tens of millions of dead Russians, many of them at the hands of these very nationalist reactionaries. Bandera himself is also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles. They should have sent him and his friends to Siberia when they had the chance.
Sure I do, I've got the full facsimile edition of the collected issues of L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E sitting on my desk right in front of me. We even publish some of my "taste" here on the blog via the Fellow Travellers series, or any of the zines we publish in print (some of which are also on the blog).
Ideological congruence in art only matters to me insofar as the art is trying to "do" something political. That being said, I should also point out that I never say Mikhail's poetry is "bad," I'm critiquing what it "represents." I like plenty of poets who were outright fascists, some who I even *love* -- Pound, for instance, or Marinetti -- but they could likewise face similar scrutiny when discussing them "in-context" as I do here with these two. I also happen to think the abstract expressionists were all CIA props, this doesn't keep me from revering Rothko. The only "taste" judgement I made here was when I said I think Kaminsky's work is bad (and it's bad not for its political content but bad because it's cloying and ham-fisted).
hey, you pull no punches and that is great because otherwise, what is the point of writing?
"war works hard" poem, banal as it was reminded me of mother courage and the discussion about the virtues of war in that play. there, the arguments in favor of war were genuine and can even be said to be relatively convincing. the power of that argument comes from the intuition that the ruling classes probably actually think that way but they are not honest enough to declare their convictions openly.
of course, writers & poets' complicity goes much further than the figures you mercilessly exposed. rushdie, naipul, pamuk and many others basically function as the publicity wing of imperialism. they are all so vacuous and superficial that it is funny how revered they are among the so called intellectuals. their "style" is the sole refuge they have from their own banal reality. they are salespeople and functionaries, not "intellectuals".
it is a great thing you did by quoting saddam's last poem. I've watched an interview with the foremost "saddam expert" for the american invading force and that person also spoke with saddam hussein many times while he was waiting to be hanged. he actually admitted that they got him all wrong and in reality saddam was an honest and honorable leader. even an official servant of armed imperialism can admit his error but apparently not the high minded and free spirited poets.
Classically what makes psychopaths dangerous is their projection of their interior life onto others, their assumption that everyone else's mind works like theirs does. You see the same thing play out so often where the imperialists assume their enemies are just as callous and uncaring as they are, and assume everyone else is just out for power. I wrote another piece on here about Vietnam (the link, if you're interested: https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/kim-thuy-imperialist-apologist ) which includes a clip of an interview with a South Vietnamese bureaucrat who was shocked upon meeting a Viet Cong soldier in captivity that he actually BELIEVED IN what he was fighting for and willing to DIE for his cause, something which she finds completely shocking. But of course she finds it shocking, the imperialist can't understand this, they're self-interested and assume everyone else is out for themselves too. Her family's only goal was to maintain its own privileges at the expense of their countrymen, while their enemy was fighting to liberate their country at the potential expense of THEMSELVES.
I've listened to this story from peter kuznick. one of his friends who was a marine in vietnam went back there years after the war and met with a viet cong soldier. the meeting was cordial and both men respected each other as soldiers. vietnamese man talked about how their generals approached the war; viet cong soldiers read american newspapers, poets and novels to understand the americans. they read steinbeck and faulkner in their camps at night. he then asked his american counterpart, "which vietnamese novels or poets have you read to understand your enemy?" kuznick said the american ex-marine laughed so hard that he almost passed out.
Very interesting anecdote. Reminds me of an old National Geographic article I read once where an American journalist went to East Berlin. He is shocked to find that there's some vitality there, a lot of normal, content, happy people, witnesses festivities, even encounters some open political discussions, very unlike the black and white picture he'd had in his head -- at one point he gets in an argument with an East Berliner who, while both defending the GDR as well as admitting its flaws, eventually tells the journalist: "we know all about you, you know very little about us."
Jfc youre a piece of shit. And yes gulag was a system of concentration camps.
No they weren't <3
I feel sorry for you
They were definitionally *not* concentration camps because nothing was "concentrated" -- a "concentration camp" is for the purpose of concentrating specific population groups, that's what the name means, whereas the gulags were more general penal colonies, there was no target population(s) to fill the camps with. They were penal colonies, and much of the infrastructure was pre-USSR in origin, defeating Kaminsky's entire point, both because they were, again, not concentration camps, and also not a purely Soviet phenomenon. Some of those same gulags are still penal colonies today, just with updated infrastructure, and penal labour is still practiced.
They did "concentrate" groups - political prisoners, nationalities etc. Stop being a pedantic idiot.
Those nationalities were not mass deported to be concentrated in camps. Having disproportionate representation is not "concentration," specific individuals were singled out. But many of those groups simply DID have higher predilections of threats and reactionaries, I've written a post on this very blog ( https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/why-is-npr-celebrating-a-historic ) which goes into well-researched detail about the prevalence of proto-fascist ethno-nationalist thought in Ukraine as an example prior to its incorporation into the USSR. And what happened next? Tens of millions of dead Russians, many of them at the hands of these very nationalist reactionaries. Bandera himself is also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles. They should have sent him and his friends to Siberia when they had the chance.
"Many of these groups did have higher predilection of threats and reactionaires"
Jfc, youre not just a sociopathic commie scumbag but piece of shit racist too. Fuck off you neo Nazi twerp.
Is the only poetry you read the kind that’s ideologically congruent? Or do you have literary taste of some kind?
Sure I do, I've got the full facsimile edition of the collected issues of L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E sitting on my desk right in front of me. We even publish some of my "taste" here on the blog via the Fellow Travellers series, or any of the zines we publish in print (some of which are also on the blog).
Ideological congruence in art only matters to me insofar as the art is trying to "do" something political. That being said, I should also point out that I never say Mikhail's poetry is "bad," I'm critiquing what it "represents." I like plenty of poets who were outright fascists, some who I even *love* -- Pound, for instance, or Marinetti -- but they could likewise face similar scrutiny when discussing them "in-context" as I do here with these two. I also happen to think the abstract expressionists were all CIA props, this doesn't keep me from revering Rothko. The only "taste" judgement I made here was when I said I think Kaminsky's work is bad (and it's bad not for its political content but bad because it's cloying and ham-fisted).