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trick is that you have a number of dying geo-political units converging in this, each with it's own particularities, it's own machinery to maintain as moving in order to maintain the political and ideological orders that enable the ruling factions to maintain themselves as ruling factions. putin's usage of this situation is not different in kind from the president of georgia's which is not different in principle from that of the bush administration--the distinction between the bush people and others a simple function of the discursive position alloted to georgia et environs in domestic political workings. from this viewpoint, georgia appears a danse macabre. jingoism is not new, but in the contemporary context of progressive defunctionalization of the nation-state, it is serving a new function, a new set of functions. the bbc documentary starts off with a little snapshot of this. the idea, though, is to make the category nation appear to have an "essence" by generating immediate identifications between it and individuals---a move that is characteristic of fascist ideologies everywhere---set the nation into movement across a collective Mission which is inevitably it seems military and is inevitably it seems colonial in effect, but justified as defensive or restortative.
this would be easy peasy to think about if there was only the one slow-motion implosion sequence tracking across it--but there's nothing but such sequences.
so it makes little sense to be reductive about things, to cast only one system as that which performs the characteristics of its implosion, which is unable as system to acknoweldge its own imploding status, which pretends to itself that it is doing something else.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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