Thanks to James Meek for his long report Excerpts The Western companies that make the best prostheses are working flat out. One of them, the German firm Ottobock, is supplying both Russia and Ukraine, a fact Ukrainians blame for the delay in the supply of spare parts, although I wondered if the Palestinians and Sudanese also have a place in the line. despite efforts at reform, the mobilisation system is corrupt, with the rich and influential able to find ways round it; that the army doesn’t value skills, but is only looking for cannon fodder; that if you lose limbs, you can’t count on being looked after. The situation is a miniature of the tridentine internal politics of Ukraine since the Orange Revolution of 2004: the archaic, populist, nationalist-patriotic tendency; the geeky, bourgeois strand, people who aspire to what they see as a liberal European ideal of personal freedom, communal fairness and the rule of law; and the cynical, apolitical, transactional, personal loyalty-based m...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51