Watching the aftermath of the mine on the armoured personnel carrier in that video, vehicle and body parts strewn like macabre confetti across a wide radius, I am reminded of the absurdity of a war being fought by the Russian soldiers to prop up the narrative pathologies of a political ideology that is positively addicted […]
The horror of war is only ever equivocable to its absurdity. As much as we must negotiate and navigate such catastrophes where and when they occur, I am uncertain that our collaborative historical analyses provide much more than a resonant disincentive to engage with and enter into the wars that appear to be as inevitable […]
Putin’s ideological psychosis seeks to bring a new totalitarian darkness upon the world. Many people in countries distant from Europe do not realise that Ukraine is holding back the hordes of hell for all of us. Ukraine can not, must not, will not fail here because this is much more than a regional war, it […]
The borders and boundaries as definitions and shared narratives which define us become even more valuable and important when they are perceived as under threat. The totalitarian political playbook begins (and ends) with the fabrication and cultivation of profoundly insecure borders, boundaries and differences that allow them to masquerade as strength and certainty, to play […]
There are many words we might say, many ways in which we might offer support and hope to a people and a nation enduring the unrelenting brutality of invasion and war but, as always, someone once wrote a song that says it much better. Thinking of you, Ukraine.
I wonder if these guys would have imagined that the horror they were living through would be repeated again on some European battlefield a little over a hundred years later. The methods and machines may have to some extent changed but the sheer insanity and grinding brutality remain quite the same. Soldiers (and civilians) suffering […]
Human history primarily self-propagates as a function of its errors. The turbulent dissonance and dissembling confusion of our shared experience and memory generates the optimal transmission medium for change, innovation, evolution and – inevitably – also catastrophe. I was watching a French TV series, Ganglands, just now. It is a fictional portrayal of the essential […]
Imperialist wars such as this are the absurd brutalities upon which intergenerational trauma, reflexive fear and the inevitability of future conflicts are anchored. Putin will one day fade away from the world, leaving behind him only the bitter sorrow and haunting regrets of a broken people, on all sides of whichever borders prevail after this […]
Putin’s relationship with NATO possesses the essential characteristics of a pathological psychosis. He is so profoundly shaped by a narrative of fear and insecurity that he can not imagine (or influence) a world without it. He has in effect done everything in his power to ensure the continuity of the “threat” as reflexive self-validation for […]
I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]
The curious thing about those who seek to leverage political capital from conflict is that this represents an atavistic ideological “business model” that in such a deeply interdependent world, all actions and aggressions return – amplified – to the actor. Even more so, in such an intricately entangled social, economic and technological context in which […]
There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]
Daedelus Kite 