Subverting the Seas: Raise the Railways
Raise the Railways
[Image: some blokes who are “leaders”. Borrowed from Caitlin Johnstone’s article.]
Publication date: 2022-10-02
Update 2022-10-05: new references, by Ted Galen Carpenter, Pepe Escobar, Adriel Kasonta and Noam Chomsky, are added.
Update 2022-10-06: a new reference by Patrick Lawrence is added.
A reading of this article is available. The reading does not include the update.
Gauntlets
History is marked occasionally by pivotal political speeches demarcating a transition and capturing a moment. They are momentous.
Russian Federation President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has delivered a speech which meets the bar for momentous. The speech contains only glances at recent events. The vast bulk of the speech addresses a swathe of historical events back towards World War II and times beyond.
Russia has a deep history. Its peoples are well aware of Russia's place in history. She suffered the invasion of Genghis Khan's "hordes" and was ruled by his children and grand children. During the age of colonization Russia expanded her territory under the leadership of the Tsars. Her Tsars are named after the Roman General and Autocrat Caesar. She undertook an experiment in Communist government from 1918 until 1991. During this period she defeated Nazi Germany. She had also defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's attempt at conquering her territory before the communist period. Russia today is a capitalist, socialist democracy.
Russia is a land based power, rather than the maritime based colonial empires of Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands or the USA.
[Image: I love cartographers. Here is an “equal area projection” of our beautiful planet. Cartographers use descriptive names. Equal area means exactly what it says. Other branches of science could learn from the cartographers; I’m looking at you, astronomers! The source of this annotated map is here.]
Heartland
Sir Halford John Mackinder gave a paper on "The Geographical Pivot of History" at the Royal Geographical Society, in 1904, in which he presented his Heartland Theory. The theory is that a land based empire spanning the one major interconnected super-continent of Asia, Europe and Africa is unstoppable. Major cities, and thus places of significant commerce, tend to be located at the mouths of major river systems due to their supply of fresh water, sanitation and fertile land. This provided assistance to the maritime colonial powers. Before they were ascendant, another network of trade had been created as documented by Marco Polo; the Silk Road.
Jarrod Diamond, in his masterpiece "Guns, Germs and Steel", answers the question of why Europe or Eurasia managed to dominate history. The answer which Diamond provides is geography and a little luck. The geographic component is a wide spread of land at similar latitudes. The north American continent possess this, but it is most dominant across the Eurasian continent. This provides for the application of agriculture and animal husbandry to be migrated across the continental space. The "luck" is that this Eurasian landmass had a collection of seed crops and tamable animals which would provide food sources, labour and transport. One can readily acknowledge the importance of wheat and barley. Lesser acknowledged are crops like flax, for textiles. We may think of cows and pigs as sources of protein. Less acknowledged are goats, a hardly and potent mix of both protein and milk, which bear young twice a year. The almost never acknowledged oxen and horses provided labour and transport. This serendipitous collection of plants and tamable animals existed across a half-globe spanning area of similar latitudes. During the short existence of our species, 200 000 years, the continents have not moved much at all, thus providing a stable environment for the use of these core resources.
Momentous
We are now witnessing a change in colonial power. The sea powers are being challenged by a new collected land power, as predicted by Mackinder over a century ago. The key player is China with her "Belt and Road Initiative" to forge transport and trade routes across Asia. Her key partner is Russia. These two nations dominate the land area of Asia. To them, via the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), come India, Pakistan and Iran, the next tier of nations with significant lands in Asia. The collection of central Asian “stans” including the sizable Kazakhstan and Mongolia are also parties to the SCO. Nations seeking to join include Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Mackinder would no doubt be most impressed with this collection of unifying land powers in Eurasia.
It is this effort, this collection, this unity which threatens the sea powers. It is on this point which Vladimir Vladimirovich has based his momentous speech. A point of irony: the invention of railways, largely due to the sea power Britain is the enabling technology for the land based powers.
Mr. Putin is not speaking of the upcoming election in Brazil in which "Lula" is likely to win, and thus raise the prominence of BRICS. He is not speaking of the attack on the Nordstream I and II pipelines whose destruction will deliver de-industrialisation to Europe's industrial powerhouse, Germany. Only minor mention is made of the incorporation of the four former provinces of Ukraine into Russia. Mr. Putin's comments are of history and the sea power colonial legacy.
The Russian President has removed his proverbial mailed glove, thrown it down at the feet of the sea power West, and yelled “Fuck You”.
Sources
Signing of treaties on accession of Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics and Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to Russia, President Putin, Kremlin, 2022-09-30
Pipeline Terror Is the 9/11 of the Raging Twenties, Pepe Escobar, PressTV, 2022-10-04
Patrick Lawrence: The Strong, and the Merely Powerful, Patrick Lawrence, Scheer Post (originally published at Consortium News on 2022-10-03), 2022-10-05
Vladimir Putin speaks at the accession ceremony, Gilbert Doctorow, his website, 2022-09-30
The Global South’s Revolt against Biden’s Russia Policy, Ted Galen Carpenter, Antiwar, 2022-10-05
Serbian Analyst: How war in Ukraine resembles past conflict in Yugoslavia, Adriel Kasonta interviews Dragana Trifković, Asia Times republished by Natylie's Place: Understanding Russia, 2022-10-02
Perfidious Putin!, Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review, 2022-10-04
A Message from Professor Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Antiwar, 2022-10-05
Putin's historic speech finalizes referenda, infuriates Collective West, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, The Duran, 2022-09-30
iEarlGrey: "Eva K Bartlett in Donetsk", Mike (iEarlyGrey) interviews Eva K. Bartlett, both Bartlett and iEarlGrey's youtube channels, 2022-10-01
The Roundtable: Open House, Gonzalo Lira interviews guests including Brian Berletic, his youtube channel, 2022-10-01
Update
The culture section of this article highlights a performance by Willie Nelson, Arlo Guthrie and Dottie West of the Steve Goodman song "City of New Orleans".
The song was first recorded by Arlo Guthrie on his 1972 album "Hobo's Lullaby". Guthrie heard the song played by Goodman at the Quiet Knight bar in Chicago while Guthrie drank a beer which Goodman had purchased for him. This act beautifully summarizes the song.
The song is ostensibly about a train, the City of New Orleans, which returns to and from Chicago and New Orleans. If one listens to the lyrics the song is actually about the state of society in the USA. Today, the disrepair of the USA rail network highlights the prescience of the song.
Mr. Nelson in the included version plays up the lines "Good Morning America, how are you?" Performing artists need to play to their audiences if they wish to eat or cloth their children. The fact that this song is a lament is completely lost on the audience. The song speaks of a sad degradation of "America's" society and core infrastructure. That the audience is unaware sings loudly.
The lyrics are tenderly established with:
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail
The opening verse concludes with:
And graveyards full of rusted automobiles
The chorus opens to nail the observance:
Good morning America how are you?
Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son
The nail is the last question mark and the following statement.
The second verse maintains the narrative:
Pass that paper bag that holds the bottle
And feel the wheels rumbling beneath the floor
And the sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers
Ride their fathers' magic carpets made of steel
Mothers with their babes asleep, rocking to that gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel
The lyrics conclude:
Through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea
But all the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news
The conductor sings his songs again
The passengers will please refrain
This train has got the disappearing railroad blues
It is only by Willie Nelson's great voice and performance that a crowd could be so oblivious to a song's meaning. To prove the ignorance “The Atlantic” published Nelson's 1984 version of the song on October 20th 2016 as their "track of the day", which is doubly amusing.
The included performance was inspired by its reinforcement of the article's subtitle; Railways. Additionally, Arlo Guthrie has been a force in USA social criticism. I mistook the song to speak of a decline in USA rail stock. It speaks, as art so often does, of a social condition which is sadly echoed in the decline of the nation’s infrastructure.
The pure and simple, folk, Arlo Guthrie version is available on youtube:
Please note the backing singers and how they build the recording. They enter at 00:33. The keyboardists excel. Mention needs be made of the rhythym section who quietly hold the song together, echoing a rail tempo.
The backing singers sing us through the graveyards of rusted automobiles on our way to Memphis and New Orleans.
Culture
Willie Nelson, Arlo Guthrie and Dottie West - The City of New Orleans (Live at Farm Aid 1985), Farm Aid, their youtube channel, uploaded 2013-01-18
If you like what you read here, you can please the author by sharing it.
Notification
Subscription is optional. Subscribers can expect notifications for most articles Better is to use RSS, or bookmark the "Archive" page and visit at leisure. If you use Twitter, following @YesXorNo1 is also an effective notifications strategy.
Copyright and Licensing
This work is copyright to the blog's author with CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing. Have fun, reuse, remix etc. but give credit and place no further restrictions. Lets build culture.