#(as someone living in a country bordering Russia — and as someone living closer to the Russian border than the majority of the country)

[hiraethwrote]

just woke up to see the results. sending all my love to my american friends. i hope you manage to stay safe despite everything

[moontheoretist]

When Empire supports a wannabe Empire

War in Ukraine and Genocide in Gaza are two examples of how USA as a country chooses who to support. Ukrainians and Gazans are both victims of oppressors that want to KILL them all. If USA was a normal country that cares about people, they'd support Gazans as much as they do Ukrainians. But unfortunately, USA is not such a country, and it was known long before now. USA as a country only supports those that suit their political and capitalist agenda at the time. USA hates Russia, so they support Ukraine, but I can as well imagine that if USA was ever in a good relationship with Russia and had a lot of money to make from supporting them, they wouldn't support Ukrainians at all, just like they don't support Gazans dying in the most horrifying act of genocide we saw in recent history. Israel is shooting at civilians, who they call "human animals" and USA's president is proud to support it.

Israel and USA want to create Greater Israel together at the cost of civilian lives of innocent Palestinians, because they only care about power and power alone. They don't see Palestinians as people at all.

Israel spreads propaganda about Palestinians that says they are less than human, that Israel should have been ashamed to even create, because it's the exact copy and paste of nazi propaganda that killed THEIR people around the world, and USA stands and claps at their genius ideas. But I guess they don't care as long as Israel can acquire that land for their precious country and USA can get someone in the Middle East that they can use to control it. I don't know & can't even comprehend how both USA's government and Israel's government can live with themselves knowing that they are building their alliance and political presence in the region on genocide of innocent people.

Oh, and if you doubted my Russia = Israel comparison, then know that Israel is doing something fishy on Lebanon/Israel border. Specifically, they're lighting fields and mountains on fire, not letting firefighters in to put down those fires and are killing anybody who comes closer.

And you know what is the most annoying? That if Americans don't use the narration of "our tax dollars pay for it" then they won't have enough people actually caring about the issue. For some unfathomable reason people care more when they know their money was used to do this. Because people think that taxes are stealing the money from people, and hell, maybe in USA that's real, looking at their shitty healthcare system, education system etc. but it's still vile to some extent that some people can only care if their money were taken from them and used to do something horrible, and wouldn't care otherwise. Wouldn't care that bombs are dropped on innocent people if those bombs were not funded by their money. And funnily the exact same argument can be used against them to make them despise helping Ukraine, because "why should their tax dollars go to some foreign country", yes? I saw people like this. I don't know what is wrong with those people at all.

Are there better ways to use American dollars than to help genocidal maniacs? Of course, but maybe don't make it a core of your argument when people are dying. It distracts from the real issue: the genocide.

Still, it's important to stop the USA from funding this genocide. Not because American citizens' money were taken, but because funding genocides is evil. Nobody should be doing that, especially not the country that is supposedly standing for freedom. The most powerful country in the world could destroy many other countries by simply funding the wrong people, and we can see that now in Gaza. USA's help is contributing to saving Ukraine, but in Gaza the same kind of help offered to Israel is a reason why this genocide happens so quickly. The reason why Gaza is leveled into rubble as we speak. It's terrifying.

And yet...

USA's president is denying the genocide. He is claiming that people are lying about how many Palestinians were killed. To the point that the Health Ministry in Gaza had to release a 212 pages long document including all the names of victims of Israeli attack (and those don't include people that are missing or whose bodies can't be identified).

The UN Security Council voted recently on a resolution to condemn violence against ALL civilians, while calling for humanitarian pauses to the fighting in order to get aid into Gaza. You know what was the ONLY country that voted against it? Yes, United States of America.

USA vetoed the resolution that was supposed to help people.

USA's government doesn't care about people. They are caring only about their own interests. And I'd really want to say that EU is better, but it's not when the EU's President Ursula von der Leyen claims that "Europe stands with Israel" to the absolute outrage of people and European countries like for example Ireland whose EU representative almost screamed that von der Leyen doesn't speak for her country and doesn't speak for Europe. She doesn't. There are people in Europe who deny the genocides too. People of my own nationality saying shit that makes me ashamed I share the country with them. Because how can someone say something like this when innocent people are dying? Do they have no empathy, no heart? I can only hope there are more people who care than those who fall for propaganda and spread lies.

Israel now cut off internet in Gaza, so we couldn't see what they are about to do to the people. They were targeting journalists and their families before that... but now? They are going to keep bombing the innocents. And if someone is still alive after, that feels like it will be a miracle. Imagine you live in Gaza and know you may not survive what is going to happen and have no way to say goodbye to your family living abroad, or a way to tell your story before you are gone.

Is that really "justice" USA fights for? Because it doesn't feel like any type of justice. If they support what Israel is doing right now, they're not supporting justice. They're supporting genocide of innocent ppl. And I will say it as many times as it's needed. Because it's the truth.

I'm loosing hope in humanity, but we need to keep it alive. Because if not we, then who will stop those govs from committing crimes? We're powerful, but often don't realize how much power we wield. We have to use it to help in any way we can. Scream, show them we all care.

Here are some links that may help to stop it all:

https://linktr.ee/nooraldayeh

https://linktr.ee/justgraciegrace

[sa7abnews]

GREG GUTFELD: Kamala Harris has done nothing, and she does it better than anybody else

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/16/greg-gutfeld-kamala-harris-has-done-nothing-and-she-does-it-better-than-anybody-else/

GREG GUTFELD: Kamala Harris has done nothing, and she does it better than anybody else

All right, Donald Trump just did what Kamala Harris is apparently unwilling or unable to do. He gave an interview. And it was with someone Kamala definitely wouldn’t talk to – Elon Musk. The interview took place on X, formerly known as Twitter, formerly known as the place where fans asked for pictures of my feet. After a 30-minute delay, Trump and Musk chewed the fat like lions, eating The View. I’m sure Kamala was listening to see which campaign promises she could claim as her own. She’s been mimicking Trump so well she’s getting stalked by Stormy Daniels. The two men discussed many issues, including the border crisis. I wonder, are they coming from Africa or are they coming from Asia? Are they coming from the Middle East? Are they coming from South America? Are they coming from everywhere? And how many of them are really bad ones?DONALD TRUMP: They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from South America. They’re coming from everywhere. And there are a lot of really bad ones.Yep, I knew it. Trump put the blame right where it belongs– on Biden’s border czar.DONALD TRUMP: She could close it up right now. She tries to pretend like she’s going to do something. She was the border czar and you…and people can’t allow them to get away with their disinformation campaign.That’s the great thing about Kamala’s vice presidency. She’s done nothing, and she does it better than anybody else. Trump and Musk also discussed inflation, which is a problem if you’ve been to a grocery store or a gas station lately, or so I’m told by the orphans who do my shopping.DONALD TRUMP: Four years ago, five years ago, people were saving a lot of money. Today, they’re using all their money and borrowing money just to live. Trump blames the cost of oil, a direct result of Biden’s disastrous foreign policy. Russia invaded Ukraine, Hamas attacked Israel, and the U.S. left Afghanistan in tatters. I’d say this happened on Joe’s watch, but who am I kidding? Joe wasn’t watching. He was napping. Iran is even closer to nukes, and Saudi Arabia won’t even take Joe’s calls, even when he says he’s calling to warn them that their cars’ extended warranty is about to expire. But Trump? He knows Putin. He knows President Xi. He knows Kim Jong-un.X MELTS DOWN AFTER TRUMP-MUSK INTERVIEW ‘SPACE’ IMMEDIATELY CRASHESDONALD TRUMP: I know Putin, I know President Xi, I know Kim Jong-un of North Korea. They’re at the top of their game. They are tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious, and they’re going to protect their country. When they see a Kamala or when they see, Biden, Sleepy Joe, they can’t even believe it.He also warned Iran not to mess around.DONALD TRUMP: And I don’t want to do anything bad to Iran, but they knew not to mess around. What’s Harris going to do? Cackle them to death? Deploy a crack squad of Hollywood D-listers? Have Kathy Griffin parachute in and the mullahs will want to cut their own heads off. So is Kamala a radical left lunatic? DONALD TRUMP: She’s a radical left lunatic. And if she’s going to be our president… very quickly, you’re not going to have a country anymore.No more country. Isn’t that what the radical left wants? But you wouldn’t have heard any of this if the media had its way. Time-traveling hacks slammed the chat before it started, even though three years of watching Joe Biden crossing over caught them by surprise.REPORTER: Misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue. It’s a, you know, it’s an America issue. What role does the White House, or the president have in sort of stopping that?CNN ANCHOR: Musk’s rise as a Trump backer comes as X has turned into a haven for the spread of misinformation. Sometimes that information has been boosted by Musk himself. It’s amazing that we live in an era where reporters are asking if we don’t have enough censorship. Meanwhile, an EU regulator warned if the chat contained misinformation that they would take legal action, which in itself told us that a) this is why America has a First Amendment, and b) the next time Europe needs us to save them in a world war, they can go **** themselves. But all in all, we didn’t really learn anything about Trump that we didn’t know already. The bigger story is that the most important figures in the world agree about the world, three, if you include me. The greatest tech genius ever and the most consequential political figure today talked on an equal footing. It was like me talking to a mirror. Trump knew everything Musk brought up – energy, AI, economic development, and he didn’t cackle like a glue-sniffing hyena once. And zero questions about ice cream. No other politician could engage on future problems like this. Most would need a staff of ten doing packets of research for each topic, and they still would have no idea what to think. Trump joked that Biden or Kamala couldn’t do this, but the fact is, not many people could. By the way, Musk also says he’s happy to host Kamala on an X Spaces, too. PRESIDENT BIDEN ADMITS PRESSURE FROM DEMOCRATS CONTRIBUTED TO DECISION TO DROP OUTIt’s an open invitation, like the one I have to Kudlow’s hot tub. But you think she’d ever sit down with Musk? Nah, she’s too busy listening to her favorite up-and-coming rapper. Team Kamala put out a statement about the interview: “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Musk and himself, self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class.” Yeah, self-obsessed rich guys. One who’s exploring space, mass-produced electric cars, created a device to help paralyzed people communicate, using devices that harness brain activity and many other things to better our world. And the other guy – he could be enjoying his retirement, and the billions that he earned building things, but he took a bullet while working a job he agreed to not get paid for. You really got him pegged. Just a bunch of self-obsessed rich guys. Maybe to progressives who think meritocracy is a bad word and achievement is conflated with oppression. Self-obsessed, my gorgeously sculpted a**. All right, you can applaud. Again, could Harris do any of this, much less discuss it? Here she is explaining artificial intelligence as the AI czar. KAMALA HARRIS: I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing. It’s first of all, two letters. It means artificial intelligence. But ultimately, what it is, is it’s about machine learning.I’d say Harris could benefit from Musk’s neural implants, but you need actual brain activity to get it to work. 

[straightlightyagami]

I mean, as someone in most respects ideologically closer to communists than to anarchists or liberals I do understand that view. However, one must understand there are different forms “critical support” can take.

Consider the case where you are working on policy in a socialist country. You have to trade with someone because in practice attempts at complete autarky will result in shortages of goods, as it is essentially impossible to produce everything a population needs within the borders of one country, doubly so for a smaller country, again doubly so for a country with limited existing infrastructure, and again doubly so during or preceded by a period of substantial instability (as a “newly socialist” country will generally be). The US and its allies will most likely refuse to trade with you (or only trade if your country to enacts their desired economic measures). If the only available trade partners left are bastards like Putin, it is morally better to engage in trade with them than to allow your economy to go to shit. Similarly, if, say, Putin offers support to your liberation effort, even though clearly he is doing that not because he cares but as a counter against the US, it is reasonable to accept if the terms are acceptable in your view. (You still should, however, understand that he is not your ideological ally and it is a matter of convenience.)

However, if you live in the imperial core, there is not really a situation where you need to “critically support” fascists like Putin. “Critically supporting” socialist countries (or liberation struggles) by pressuring your government to lift sanctions or change policy can make an actual material difference. But if you go around talking about how Putin is “anti-imperialist,” that makes your movement look bad and useless, actively sabotaging it for no reason; is factually incorrect; and is also disrespectful to both people in countries affected by imperialism by the Russian Federation and killed by their wars and to the Russian opposition who have been imprisoned, beaten by police, or even killed by Putin’s orders. It is a case of purposefully antagonizing everyone for no reason.

Of course (again if you live in the imperial core), constantly focusing solely on bad stuff other countries are doing is also counterproductive, as you are in a better position to influence your own country than Russia. But that does not equate to “you should spread Putinist propaganda.” That is just actively being an apologist for war crimes and right-wing dictators, completely the opposite of what your movement should be doing, and will also make an average person who otherwise agrees with you not want to join you. It’s a bit frustrating that some of my supposed ideological comrades do not understand this.

ok I think the liberals overestimate the degree to which this is prevalent, but it absolutely is a problem in some leftist circles that people think “everyone who opposes the US = good.” unironically saw someone say something like putin is an important leader of the global anti-imperialism movement.

like idk what to tell you. the russian federation is not part of the imperial core yes but it still engages in imperialism. most principled leftists from former eastern block countries will tell you so. most principled russian communists (≠cprf types) will tell you so. sometimes there are conflicts between different imperialist capitalist states, a shock to some of you, I know. I just don’t understand this whole thing.. it seems contrary to what these people claim to believe. do you lick the boot of any far right anticommunist fascist as long as he opposes the US?

[blackswaneuroparedux]

ltdan2288 asked: As a fellow veteran of the Afghan Campaign, might I ask if you have any thoughts about the imminent end of Allied air support & combat-advisory operations over there? The fall of large swaths of the country to the Taliban is already underway, which can only be seen as an unspeakable tragedy for the people there. From a strategic perspective, there’s no reason to believe that we won’t have to return in some capacity of AQ or ISIS reestablish themselves under Taliban sponsorship. At the same time, it’s not clear to me that our presence did anything beyond kick the can down the road and delay this inevitable outcome. As someone with such a deep knowledge of military history, I’m curious if you have a different perspective.

I have been avoiding answering this post for a while now because Afghanistan dredges up so many conflicting emotions inside me. I wrestle with so many memories of my time there with my regiment to fight in a war that we all didn’t really understand what we were fighting for.

Deep breath.

Almost two decades of conflict in Afghanistan has cost British taxpayers £22.2billion, or $31.3 billion according to UK government figures. As British troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the 20-year deployment bill could be even higher. As of May 2021, the total cost of Operation Herrick (codename for the deployment of British soldiers to Helmand province) is £22.2billion. There were 457 fatalities on, or subsequently due to, Op Herrick. Of which 403 were due to hostile action. During the operation between January 1, 2006 and November 30, 2014, there were 10,382 British service personnel casualties. Of these 5,705 were injuries and the remainder being illness or disease. The UK’s remaining 750 troops in Afghanistan, involved in training local forces, started exiting the war-devastated country in May. Most of them will return home by the end of July.

They, like every one of us who went to fight in Afghanistan, will ask the same questions, ‘Why did we go there?’ ‘What was the real purpose of the mission?’ ‘Was it worth it?’

Both my older brothers fought there with special distinction and I later fought there too. I have very mixed emotions when I think about my time in Afghanistan. For all its faults and tortured history, I love that country and love its many ethnic people. I even started to learn Pashtu as I already had a spoken command of Urdu because I had been raised partly in both Pakistan and India and it’s where many Afghan refugees living in the UN camps for over a generation had learned Urdu too.

It’s not just that my family has history in Afghanistan going back to the days of the East India Company but I had a sincere respect for its culture and history as one of the central hot spots for great civilisational achievements, but also as a stubborn and unruly country who proudly defied the Great Powers to bend the knee and turned it into a ‘graveyard of empires’. Most of all I think of the friendships I made there and how my perspective on life changed as a consequence of knowing such resilience and fortitude in the face of catastrophe and death.

I’m sure like everyone else I wasn’t too surprised by President Biden’s announcement that he was announcing the imminent withdrawal of all American troops in Afghanistan. He wanted to pivot to something else when asked about it. “I want to talk about happy things, man!” He said. Who could begrudge him given that America has been at war in Afghanistan for a better part of 20 years and has nothing to really show for it. Except of course the loss of its brave service men and women as well as the death of thousands of Afghan civilians. It spent more than $2 trillion to kill Osama bin Laden, the architect behind 9/11 attacks and failed to convincingly snuff out both murderous terror groups, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

When the Secretary General of Nato announced back in April 2021 all alliance troops were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, it was made to look like a nice, clean, enunciation of a joint decision. The end date was set for 11 September, 2021 - 20 years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington - and it was in line with the oft-repeated alliance maxim: we went in together; we will come out together. Except that, on closer examination, it was all rather messier.

This was partly because the withdrawal from Afghanistan had actually been Trump’s policy, so here was Joe Biden, the anti-Trump, co-opting a policy from his predecessor (a policy Trump had been so keen on that he tried to accelerate the withdrawal after he lost the election). Biden then tried to detach it from Trump by slowing down the withdrawal date a little and expressing it in terms more comprehensible to the Washington establishment and to US allies.

Where Trump had essentially done a deal with the Taliban and set a withdrawal date of 1 May, Biden left the Taliban out of it and invoked the totemic date of 9/11. This does not mean, of course, that the withdrawal will not be completed a good deal sooner - once you announce a withdrawal, you might as well get on with it.

In fact, Biden had to make a decision one way or another, given the rapid approach of Trump’s 1 May withdrawal date. And, whether it came from Washington or Nato, it was pretty low key for an announcement that a 20-year military involvement that had cost 4,000 allied lives was ending. Indeed, many people beyond Washington and Afghanistan might not quite have registered the news, given the considerable noises from Nato’s simultaneous dire warnings about Russia massing troops on the Ukrainian border, the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in the UK, and the Covid pandemic everywhere.

And distractions were needed not just because Biden was implementing a Trump policy. It was also because he was ordering an unconditional withdrawal – which he justified, correctly, by saying that setting preconditions would mean that the troops could be there forever. It was a risk Biden knew all too well, given that Barack Obama had been persuaded by General David Petraeus – against his election pledges and his better judgement – that what Obama really wanted was not a withdrawal, but a ‘surge’ with conditions attached before a withdrawal could take place.

Distractions were also useful for London, where the timing was hardly ideal. Imagine you were in government in London, you had watched the dismal failure of the UK’s Herrick operations in Helmand Province between 2006 and 2014, you knew that your armed forces had suffered 456 deaths in 20 years, with many more severely injured, but you had hung on in there.

Your government had also just released a blueprint for foreign and security policy, setting future priorities even further from home, in the Indo-Pacific, and your Prime Minister was about to make a high-profile visit to India as part of his post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ branding . In those circumstances, an announcement that the US had decided to leave Afghanistan, giving you no choice but to follow, was almost exactly what you did not need. Rather than showing the UK as a powerful, autonomous military actor and a valued ally, it showed the exact opposite.

It also reminded an unhappy British public about a costly conflict it had rather forgotten. And those who did more than bother to remember - like the families who lost loved ones on the battlefield - and who over the years have blamed successive governments for moving the goalposts and lacking an exit strategy (all true too).

All of which might explain why the UK’s Foreign and Defence Secretaries followed the US example by changing the subject to the iniquities of Russia and China, rather than issuing a joyous pronouncement to the effect of: hooray and thank goodness, our boys and girls are coming home.

The UK’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter gave a subdued, unenthusiastic response to Biden’s announcement. I cannot remember such open acknowledgement of UK-US military policy friction in recent decades - or such an abject admission by the UK of its defence dependence on the US. What Carter said was that the unconditional withdrawal was ‘not a decision we had hoped for, but we obviously respect it and it is clearly an acknowledgement of an evolving US strategic posture’. In other words, the UK had opposed Biden’s decision – or would have done, if asked (which is not clear). Also, that it was Washington’s ‘strategic posture’ that had ‘evolved’, not the UK’s. He suggested there was a real danger that progress made could be lost and that there could be a return to civil war, with the Taliban maybe returning to power - again, all true.

Given that the UK officially has only 750 troops in Afghanistan at present, and most of them are there in a training capacity, to dissent from the US position so openly would be considered decidedly rude in the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps to that end, General Carter played the dutiful soldier and had to - through gritted teeth - put a positive gloss on Afghanistan’s future, insisting that the objective in going into Afghanistan, ‘to prevent international terrorism emerging from the country’, had been achieved which was ‘great tribute to the work of British forces and their allies’.

He also said that Afghan forces were ‘much better trained than one might imagine’ and that the Taliban ‘is not the organisation it once was’, so that ‘a scenario could play out that is actually not quite as bad as perhaps some of the naysayers are predicting.’ Blah blah blah. He’s wrong, and I think he knows it but only in the sanctity of his gentlemen’s club might he truly admit it.

I know he’s wrong because the chatter amongst ex-veterans I know is that we’ve made a balls up of Afghanistan yet again - by ‘again’ I mean from the past 200 years of us Brits trying to bring order to chaos in Afghanistan and getting burned for our troubles.

Both my father and my older siblings tell me what their friends and ex-service peers (some very senior indeed) have been nattering over a drink at their gentlemen clubs where ex-veterans haunt the club bar. Many just shake their heads in sighed resignation before burying themselves in the Times crossword or drowning their sorrows with a beer or two at how lock in step we’ve become to the Americans at a time when the British army is re-branding itself as a more independent nimble hi-tech impact army (the creation of a new ranger regiment being but one example).

Still if President Biden wanted to tie a neat bow on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan - saying, as he had, that the logic for the war ended once al-Qaida was gutted and Osama bin Laden killed - then it reveals a stunning lack of introspection about the United States’ role in the conflict that will continue in Afghanistan long after the last American and British troops leave.

Less than three months after President Joe Biden declared that the last American troops would be out of Afghanistan by September 11th, the withdrawal is nearly complete. The departure from Bagram air base, an hour’s drive north of the capital, Kabul, in effect marked the end of America’s 20-year war. But that does not mean the end of the war in Afghanistan. If anything, it is only going to get worse.

It is true that the president had no good choice on Afghanistan, and that he inherited a bad deal from his predecessor. There are never good choices when it comes to Afghanistan: only bloody trade offs.

But in announcing an unconditional withdrawal, he made the situation worse by throwing out the minimal conditions U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had negotiated under the Trump administration. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has delivered to the Afghan government and Taliban a draft Afghanistan Peace Agreement - the central idea of which is replacing the elected Afghan government with a so-called transitional one that would include the Taliban and then negotiate among its members the future permanent system of government. Crucial blank spaces in the draft include the exact share of power for each of the warring sides and which side would control security institutions.

The refrain now from the Biden administration is that the United States is not abandoning Afghanistan, that it will aim to do right by Afghan women and girls, and that it will try to nudge the Taliban and Kabul toward a peace deal using a diplomatic tool kit.

But the narrative ignores much of the reality on the ground. It also ignores history.

In theory, the Taliban and the American-backed government had been negotiating a peace accord, whereby the insurgents lay down their arms and participate instead in a redesigned political system. In the best-case scenario, strong American support for the government, both financial and military (in the form of continuing air strikes on the Taliban), coupled with immense pressure on the insurgents’ friends, such as Pakistan, might succeed in producing some form of power-sharing agreement.

But even if that were to happen - and the chances are low - it would be a depressing spectacle. The Taliban would insist on moving backwards in the direction of the brutal theocracy they imposed during their previous stint in power, when they confined women to their homes, stopped girls from going to school and meted out harsh punishments for sins such as wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music.

More likely than any deal, however, is that the Taliban try to use their victories on the battlefield to topple the government by force. They have already overrun much of the countryside, with government units mostly restricted to cities and towns. Demoralised government troops are abandoning their posts. In the first week of July 2021, over 1,000 of them fled from the north-eastern province of Badakhshan to neighbouring Tajikistan. The Taliban have not yet managed to capture and hold any cities, and may lack the manpower to do so in lots of places at once. They may prefer to throttle the government slowly rather than attack it head on. But the momentum is clearly on their side.

America and its NATO allies have spent billions of dollars training and equipping Afghan security forces in the hope that they would one day be able to stand alone. Instead, they started buckling even before America left. Many districts are being taken not by force, but are simply handed over. Soldiers and policemen have surrendered in droves, leaving piles of American-purchased arms and ammunition and fleets of vehicles. Even as the last American troops were leaving Bagram over the weekend of July 3rd, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers were busy fleeing across the border into neighbouring Tajikistan as they sought to escape a Taliban assault.

As the outlook for the army and for civilians looks increasingly desperate, so do the measures proposed by the government. Ashraf Ghani, the president, is trying to mobilise militias to shore up the flimsy army. He has turned for help to figures such as Atta Mohammad Noor, who rose to power as an anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban commander and is now a potentate and businessman in Balkh province. “No matter what, we will defend our cities and the dignity of our people,” said Mr Noor in his gilded reception hall in Mazar-i-Sharif, the key to holding the north (sounds like Game of Thrones). The thinking is that such a mobilisation would be a temporary measure to give the army breathing space and allow it to regroup and the new forces would co-ordinate with government troops to push back hard on the Taliban.

However this is Afghanistan. The prospect of unleashing warlords’ private armies fills many Afghans with dread, reminding them of the anarchy of the 1990s. Such militias, raised along ethnic lines, tended to turn on each other and the general population.

With America gone and Afghan forces melting away, the Taliban fancy their prospects. They show little sign of engaging in serious negotiations with Mr Ghani’s administration. Yet they control no major towns or cities. Sewing up the countryside puts pressure on the urban centres, but the Taliban may be in no hurry to force the issue. They generally lack heavy weapons. They may also lack the numbers to take a city against sustained resistance. On July 7th they failed to capture Qala-e-Naw, a small town. Besides, controlling a city would bring fresh headaches. They are not good at providing government services.

Perhaps the Taliban have learned their history lesson and might refrain from attacking Kabul this time around. Their best course may be to tighten the screws and wait for the government to buckle. American predictions of its fate are getting gloomier. Intelligence agencies think Mr Ghani’s government could collapse within six months, according to the Wall Street Journal. So clearly the momentum is on the side of the Taliban and they just need to chip away at Ghani’s forces one district after another until the inevitable and hateful surrender of the central Afghan government to their demands.

At the very least, the civil war is likely to intensify, as the Taliban press their advantage and the government fights for its life. Other countries - China, India, Iran, Russia and Pakistan - will seek to fill the vacuum left by America. Some will funnel money and weapons to friendly warlords. The result will be yet more bloodshed and destruction, in a country that has suffered constant warfare for more than 40 years. Those who worry about possible reprisals against the locals who worked as translators for the Americans are missing the big picture: America, Britain and other allies are abandoning an entire country of almost 40m people to a grisly fate.

Nothing exemplifies - at least in Afghan eyes - of all that has gone wrong with American involvement in Afghanistan than in the manner of their leaving.

The U.S. left Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base's new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans' departure more than two hours after they left in the middle of the night without raising any alarms.

They left behind 3.5 million items, including tens of thousands of bottles of water, energy drinks and military MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat ration packs to the uninitiated). Thousands of civilian vehicles were left, many without keys to start them, and hundreds of armoured vehicles. The Americans also left small weapons and ammunition, but the departing US troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not left for the Afghan military was blown up.

Now that is some feat considering the logistics of this mass exodus without drawing any attention. You have obviously been to Bagram and so you will know just how big and sprawling it is. Bagram Airfield is the size of a small city, roadways weaving through barracks and past hangar-like buildings. There are two runways and more than 100 parking spots for fighter jets known as revetments. One of the two runways is 12,000 feet long and was built in 2006. There's a passenger lounge, a 50-bed hospital and giant hangar-size tents filled with furniture. And all those shops to remind Americans of home from familiar fast food restaurants and hairdressers and massage parlours to buying clothing and jewellery and buying a Harley Davidson motorbike (or so I’ve been told).

I’m guessing that the Afghans were certainly outside of the wire and probably had not been inside Bagram Airfield for months. So from the outset they would not have had any reason to think anything was going on until the generators probably ran out of fuel and it started to go a little too quiet. The inner gate was probably discretely left unlocked and when the US stopped answering the radio/phone and then they probably investigated.

Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour's drive from the Afghan capital, Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan troops. Afghan military leaders insist the Afghan National Security and Defense Force could hold on to the heavily fortified base despite a string of Taliban wins on the battlefield. The airfield includes a prison with about 5,000 prisoners, many of them allegedly Taliban members.

I’m pretty sure some bright spark in the US Pentagon public affairs dept convinced his military superiors that it was important to avoid the optics of Americans leaving in the same way they did in Vietnam in case it depresses the American public and the US military. Instead it demoralised its allies, the Afghan national army who are now the only line of defence against the Taliban.  In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area. The manner in which the Americans left Bagram air base amounts to a resounding vote of no confidence in Afghanistan’s future. It just looks bad.

The U.S. choice came with costs attached to each decision. With staying, the cost was potential U.S. troop casualties and a fear that things would not change on the ground. With leaving comes the cost of a deeper conflict in Afghanistan and a backsliding of progress made there over the past two decades. In many ways, the costs of staying seem shorter-term and borne by the United States, while the costs of leaving will be predominantly borne by Afghans over a longer time horizon. Yet, even if those costs seem remote now, history tells us that they will be blamed on the United States.

Biden perhaps reflective of history of Americans getting into quagmires abroad didn’t want to be seen exerting time and energy for a losing cause. His decision also reflects his administration’s foreign policy for the American middle-class paradigm, which focuses on domestic considerations over international ones (and is this so different from Trump’s “America First”? No, it is not). The irony, though, is that the American middle class largely doesn’t care about Afghanistan - their ambivalence gave way to support for this decision once it was announced, but it wouldn’t be hard to visualise the public approving of a scenario that kept a couple thousand troops there for a while longer.

What’s perhaps most disturbing is the narrative the president has presented along with the rationale for withdrawal: that America went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaida after 9/11, that mission creep led America to stay on too long and, therefore, it is time to get out. This takes an incomplete view of U.S. agency in the war in Afghanistan. The narrative implies that the civil conflict in Afghanistan today did not originate with America - that this more than 40-year war began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, preceded America’s interference in Afghanistan, and will follow our departure.

The fact of the matter is that, by beginning the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, who were then engaged in their draconian rule, and installing a new government, we western allies began a new phase of the Afghan conflict — one that pitted the Kabul government and the United States/Britain/NATO against the Taliban insurgency. The Afghan people did not have a say in the matter. That we allied powers are leaving Afghan women, children, and youth better off in many ways after 20 years is due to us, and we should be proud of that. But that we are leaving them mired in a bloody conflict is also due to us, because we could not hold off the Taliban insurgency, and we must all reckon publicly with that.

I have to ask myself why did we fail?

I’m only speaking about us Brits now as I’m sure you have your own thoughts as an ex-Marine officer of what you thought of the American military effort. Yes, I’m copping out of really bashing the yanks because first, I have too much respect for those fantastic American service men and women I did have the privilege to fight alongside with; and second, we Brits have nothing to crow about as we fucked up in lots of ways too, and to make things worse, we should have known better given our imperial history with Afghanistan.

The seeds of our failure in Afghanistan lies in not learning from history. We didn’t have a mission that was properly defined nor did we have a strategy that was clear, coherent, and easily communicated to both its fighting men and women as well as to the British public.

Were we there to get our hands bloody and to root out and destroy extreme Islamist terrorists or were we there to indulge in state building out of some idealistic notions of liberal humanitarianism? This question was at heart of our failure within our government and also within the British army as well as our relations with America and our NATO allies and finally the Afghans themselves.

Although never colonised in the same manner as other central and south Asian countries, the modern Afghan state is very much a creation borne out of great power rivalry. A land occupied by a number of different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, it is a country whose borders were defined by, and whose sense of national identity was forged in response to western great power competition. Its geopolitical position - landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by past great powers and present regional rivals - lends Afghanistan a dual role of geographic obscurity and great strategic significance, and has as such frequently been treated as little more than a buffer state between empires and a proxy of local powers. Its shared historical border with Russia and British India made it an object of imperial intrigue and, by consequence, has been subject to five European military interventions in the last 175 years.

The first three interventions of these occurred during the era of ‘the Great Game’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which Britain and Russia (latterly the Soviet Union) competed for influence and control over Afghan politics in order to protect their respective imperial holdings in India and central Asia.

The fourth and fifth interventions, ranging from the late 1970s to the present day, similarly involved attempts by Soviets and then by an American-led international coalition to remove political leaders acting against their interests and to protect their favoured candidates.

The unifying feature of all these conflicts was the idea of Afghanistan as the site of potential threats to the interests and security of more powerful states.

Britain’s legacy in Afghanistan in particular set the tone for the country’s historical pattern of conflict and political contestation, fuelling both the intermittent emergence of Afghan national consciousness and a fractious political lineage that saw thirteen amirs in just eighty years. Interventions by the Empire during the Great Game set the conditions for the assassination of ostensibly national leaders by their compatriots (Shah Shuja Durrani in the First war) or their exile by the British (Shere Ali Khan and Ayub Khan in the Second).

Despite the British achieving their aim of protecting India in the second and third conflicts by maintaining Afghanistan as either a pro-British buffer state or as a neutral party, the Afghan narrative tends to emphasise successes such as the massacre of British forces retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842, the defeat of British and Indian forces at Maiwand in 1880, and the gaining of sovereignty in foreign affairs in 1919.

Soviet intervention in the late 1970s and 1980s further buttressed this identity of resistance, and the failure and ultimate overthrow of the Communist-backed Najibullah government, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly after their drawdown from Afghanistan, led to a sense amongst the victorious mujahidin of the country as the ‘graveyard of empires’.

Afghanistan’s modern history should thus be seen as inextricably linked to the ebbs and flows of great power politics. Each intervention exacerbated extant internal power struggles between rival elite individuals and groups vying for nominal control over the country. Foreign intervention in Afghanistan was met on each occasion with fierce resistance from tribal militias coalesced around religion; as has been remarked upon by one historian of the country, the threat of external domination has been one of the few means of uniting its disparate population around the concept of an Afghan ‘nation’, and in most cases this shared sense of identity cohered around religion, not nationalism.

Indeed, the presence of intervening powers and the development of the Afghan state may be seen as mutually supporting: whilst most Afghan leaders throughout the last two centuries have asserted their sovereignty over the country, the reality has in most circumstances been one of competing tribal chiefs and/or ‘warlords’ rather than a single dominant leader.

Where leaders have managed to cohere the disparate tribal and ethnic groupings of the country under one banner - most notably under the regime of Dost Mohamed Khan (1826-1839, 1845-1863) – this was due in large part to their diplomatic abilities of compromise and co-optation with Afghanistan’s regional power- brokers. In other cases, such as that of the reign of Abdurrahman (1880- 1901), power was maintained by an unflinching ‘internal imperialism’ and the use of punitive force against rebellious factions.

The challenges of maintaining and projecting centralised power in Afghanistan allow us to see the relationship of its leaders with world or regional powers in the last two centuries as one of mutual exploitation. Throughout the Great Game and the Cold War, whilst the British/Americans and Russians/Soviets would use threats and bribes (and occasionally force) to compel Afghan rulers to comply with their geopolitical needs, Afghan rulers themselves often deftly manipulated those powers to maintain and extend their own power.

The pattern followed by Afghan leaders from the nineteenth century to the present day is remarkably similar in the respect that most have relied upon a rentierist economic model, seeking external aid in order to sustain the cost of security and administration. The plan of modern rulers was to warm Afghanistan with the heat generated by the great power conflicts without getting drawn into them directly. Abdurrahman, for example, used British subsidies to fund his military campaigns against rebellious factions; the Musahiban rulers of the mid-twentieth century used American capital to develop its nascent economic infrastructure and Soviet finance to bolster its armed forces; and, following the overthrow of the last royal leader of Afghanistan, Mohamed Daoud, in 1978, the quasi-communist leadership of Babrak Karmal, Hafizullah Amin, Nur Muhammad Taraki, and Mohammad Najibullah during the late 1970s and 1980s relied in the main on Soviet money and military assistance in its ultimately failed attempt to implement socialist policies and put down the American, Saudi and Pakistani-backed mujahidin.

These trends continued into the post-Cold War period in respect to both the Taliban movement (essentially directed and funded by Pakistan), the Northern Alliance (funded largely by former Soviet central Asian states) and the regime of Hamid Karzai (maintained in economic and military terms by the American-led, NATO-operated International Security Assistance Force and the wider international community). In the former cases, occurring in the main in the period of civil war between 1992 and 2001, rentierism was limited to the maintenance of proxy parties and the continuation of conflict.

By contrast, the ISAF mission bore similarities with the Soviet-backed socialist regimes of the 1980s, insofar as it focused huge amounts of capital and military resources on stabilisation and state-building efforts. Both intervening parties made the error of ignoring Afghanistan’s political history and focused their efforts on bolstering the authority of a centralised state, both promoted policies that were deemed ‘universal’ in their application and were, unsurprisingly given such hubris, vulnerable to accusations by Afghan opposition to being alien and imperialistic ideologies, and both expended enormous amounts of blood and treasure in order to sustain the regimes they supported.

The UK’s struggle to locate a coherent strategy for Afghanistan should, therefore, be seen firstly in the light of the historical problematic of Afghan state-building. This is important in narrative terms because difficulties of defining strategy imply similar challenges in explaining strategy. As with its efforts to ‘think’ strategically, Britain’s ability to explain the strategy(ies) for the war in Afghanistan have been frequently criticised by various commentators. The most strategically debilitating aspect of the Afghan campaign has always been the incoherence of the mission’s purpose; indeed the question ‘‘why are we in Afghanistan?’’ has never really been settled in public consciousness. The international community massively underestimated the difficulties of state-building and greatly overstretched themselves in the commitments made to Afghanistan, and that they did so because ‘strategies’ for Afghanistan rested on assumptions of the universal applicability of liberal state-building.

The international community from the start (meaning from the Bonn Conference of late 2001) fundamentally misunderstood the nature of an Afghan society deeply ravaged by decades of conflict, and failed to foresee the malign effects state-building ventures would have on the country. Specifically, the Bonn Conference, which set out the parameters of the post-invasion Afghan state, implemented a centralised state system onto a state whose experience of such was limited, and where the success of such a system in extending its authority beyond the major cities was predicated on coercion and the use of force.

Historically this has rarely been a credible option for Afghan rulers or their international backers, and was even less so under the self-imposed restrictions of liberal war-fighting and state-building. Rather, re-creating a centralised state required Afghan and international actors to enter into the same methods of co-optation and compromise as those of the past; in necessitating these kind of measures – as opposed to implementing a looser, federal system of governance – the centralisation of the Afghan state paved the way for a reconstitution of a ruling order based on tribal elements and ‘strongmen’. This produced something of a paradox for state-builders, as the creation of a strong, central state capable of implementing liberal policies across Afghanistan came at the cost of entering into alliances with ‘warlords’ known for their illiberal and coercive political approaches and illicit economic activities.

Another unintended but unavoidable consequence of centralised state-building identified by scholars is the re-constitution of the rentier state in Afghanistan. Post-Bonn, Afghanistan returned to its historical norm of maintaining the state via the extraction of external security and development rents, without which it would almost certainly implode due to the ruinous state of its economy and taxation system. Studies have shown that his new rentierism differed from previous patronage systems at the state level insofar as it was fuelled by an unprecedented influx of capital and resources into the country. This had the effect of introducing regulated systems of ‘neo-patrimonalism’, where departments were to be distributed as rewards to the various factions that took part in the Bonn conference, and there had to be enough rewards to go around.

In other words, the structure of the post-invasion Afghan state was, to a great extent, defined not by the demands of good governance, the needs of the country or the demands of post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction – the purposes for which the centralised model was chosen to promote – but rather by the first-order need to avoid the derailment of the centralised state by co-opting regional power brokers.

Because of the imperative of shoring up a nascent state by securing support from potential competitors, the gulf between the ends of liberal state-building and the illiberal means required to facilitate its functioning can therefore be seen to a certain extent as inevitable.

A major issue, however, was that the patrimonial linkages created by the state for its regional proxies was not comprehensive, as it did not extend to the Taliban’s Pashtun heartland and, as such, fuelled resentment and alienation as much as they placated and co- opted extra-state power brokers. Key players in the Northern Alliance - the primarily Tajik opposition to the Taliban - received prestigious posts within the state, whilst the predominantly Pashtun Taliban were themselves excluded from such arrangements. Because those rewarded by the state tended to be given ministerial or governorial roles in cities, the conflict dynamic tended to reflect an urban – rural divide similar to that of the Soviet occupation. Along this reading, the neo-Taliban insurgency was in many ways a product of the political miscalculations and deficiencies of post-invasion state- building activities.

Given this starting point, such a view concludes that the strategic problems encountered by the international community in Afghanistan were, to a large degree, problems created by (or at the very least exacerbated by) the state-builders themselves. They misread Afghan politics in a way that reflected their own philosophical assumptions about the state and society.

Strategy in Afghanistan suffered because the coalition effort, comprised of multiple national actors and the United Nations, rarely took on the form of a unified effort. Part of the reason for this was a divergence of opinion between actors as to the ultimate purpose – counter-terrorism or state-building – of the intervention.

In the first years of the Afghan campaign, the United States’ Bush Administration remained staunchly opposed to what it called ‘nation building’ and opted instead to pursue a policy of capture- or-kill missions against suspected terrorists. For the United Nations and most of the United States’ European NATO allies, however, state-building was considered a necessary element of any counter-terrorist strategy. This difference of opinion was manifest from the start by the creation of two parallel missions – the US-led, counter-terrorism-focused Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and the stabilisation missions of the European Union, United Nations (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)) and NATO (International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)) – engaged in seemingly incompatible aims of military prosecution and peace building.

Opinion on the impact of this dual approach varies. Some scholars have noted, along lines similar to those critiquing the state-building efforts of the international community that the approach taken by the UN, EU and ISAF was too ambitious, naïve and unrealistic, and therefore bound to fall short of their liberal political and economic goals. Both Europe and these international agencies ignored the necessity of paring down the international community’s state-building efforts to core, security-centric capacity building within the Afghan National Security Forces. But of course one can make the counter argument, as many have of course, that on the contrary it was the insufficiencies of state-building approaches vis-à-vis OEF’s counter-terrorist approach that led to subsequent failures in UN and ISAF efforts; specifically, that a disproportionate focus on counter-terrorism missions meant that opportunities of peace- building were irreparably compromised.

Within NATO there was a division not just of opinions but also one of mission relating to different political perspectives about the purpose of the Afghan mission and its ultimate referent object – whether it was primarily about the interests of the coalition member states or concerned in the main with Afghanistan itself – and, from that, the methods to be employed in pursuit of one or another objective. This was not merely a debate bounded by strategic necessity, however; rather, such debates stemmed as much from institutional disagreements over who would or could do what in Afghanistan, which in turn arose from the differences in political constitutions and cultural attitudes towards counterinsurgency and counter- terrorism.

These ‘national caveats’ or ‘red cards’ of participation created significant problems for NATO in Afghanistan, both political, in terms of the relations between states and the abiding sense amongst some that others were ‘free-riding’ on the collective security system and, and strategic and operational, in the sense that command-and-control capabilities and cohesion between forces were limited by the engagement restrictions placed on certain armed forces. Indeed, the disproportionate burden placed on combat-oriented states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and several new member states in Eastern Europe led to political statements denouncing Europe’s perceived transgressors of collective security participation; former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates argued, for example, that NATO had effectively become a ‘two-tier alliance’ ‘between members who specialise in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks and those conducting the ‘hard’ combat missions - between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership... but don’t want to share the risks and the costs’.

A lack of strategic unity was the natural consequence of a structural compromise that produced two distinct strategic authorities that were, in many ways, competing with one another. Along similar lines to the political arrangements between the Afghan state and its regional proxies, the NATO alliance structure can be seen (and evidently is seen by officials such as Gates) as patrimonial: states participated on the basis of fulfilling their own interests and along operational lines that were complementary to those interests, for the purposes of securing an alliance structure that accommodated all participants ahead of the imperative of creating a coherent strategy for stabilising Afghanistan. As with the neo-patrimonialism of the Karzai regime NATO’s efforts would be dictated by the limitations imposed upon it by circumstance.

Thus, in the cases of Afghanistan’s and the international community’s internal political dynamics, strategy was confined by the structure of the Afghan state and society, the structure of the international community and NATO, and the interplay between those structures. The implication here is that the agency required for the possibility of a workable strategy may have been illusory from the start.

Leaving Afghanistan was never going to be pretty, but the latest turn is uglier than expected.

No one quite expected the speed of collapse within the Afghan National Army to hold of attacks of the Taliban. I don’t think it’s do with the lack of training or their professional skills is lacking (though there may be some truth in it). A big driver in the collapse is the money for wages, food and medical care for troops is syphoned to Dubai, so the Afghans who want to fight, and there are quite a few who hate the Taliban, get less replenishment than the 6th army in the last weeks of Stalingrad. They have arms, ammo and boots for this season only and that is it. Both money and morale are in short supply for these soldiers.

If I was a trained soldier in the Afghan National Army I would desert. I would say to them abandon the fixed defences these ‘ferenghis’ (foreigners) have gifted you and move to the hills and seek refuge with your tribal clan, who will be glad of the arms and experience you bring. Or get over the border if you are lucky to be in the North, if in the West you hire yourself to the Narcos in the badlands on the Iran border. Most other places it is either a last stand or defection, your Government and their relatives have already got their planes fuelled up in Kabul ready to move to their villa complexes in the UAE.

I’m being a trifle cynical but for good reason. Everyone who has been to Afghanistan sees the veil lifted on the corruption of aid and how the elites protect themselves ahead of defending the masses who bear the brunt of the bloodshed.

The corruption has been endemic from the get go, but the international community ignored it all for 'progress'. Any Afghan politico you hear on the media complaining about the West abandoning Afghanistan has at least $30 million parked in Dubai that should have gone to the soldiers, teachers, doctors, builders etc.

As spectacular as the collapse of the Afghan National Army has been it’s been even more scarier seeing how swift the Taliban has been in taking over vital provincial areas through propaganda, civilian intimidation, and rapid attacks. One by one, the Taliban has been taking over areas in a number of provinces in northern Afghanistan in recent weeks. The Taliban says it has taken control of 90 districts across the country since the middle of May. Some were seized without a single shot fired.

The UN's special envoy on Afghanistan, Deborah Lyon put the figure lower, at 50 out of the nation's 370 districts, but feared the worst was yet to come. Most districts that have been taken surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the Taliban are positioning themselves to try and take these capitals once all foreign forces are fully withdrawn. On a map, it's easy to see the point Lyon is making. A stark example is Mazar-i-Sharif, the biggest city in the north and a significant power centre in its own right. It was the rock upon which the Northern Alliance fought against the Taliban.

It is significant the Taliban are kicking off this offensive in the north, not their heartland in the south and east. The north was the toughest part of the country for them to crack last time. Their expectation is if they have victory there, success will flow much easier in their traditional homelands further south.

The strategy of taming the north extends to emasculating and profiting from trade routes to neighbours. On Monday night they captured the important border town of Shir Khan Bandar, Afghanistan's main crossing into Tajikistan. Earlier in the day, top Tajik government officials had met to discuss concerns about the growing instability next door. There is no indication that the Taliban intend to take their fight north of the border, but in the past Tajikistan has been a vital conduit for supplies flowing to the militants' northern enemies.

The last time the Taliban controlled the city was 20 years ago, when they left hundreds of captives in steel trucking containers to suffocate and die in the scorching desert heat. Now, the militants are back at the city gates once again, as part of a lightning offensive against Afghan government forces that has set alarm bells ringing from Kabul to Washington. So it should worry us all where will all this lead to.

America's drawdown seems to be the game changer. The Taliban have been beaten back several times in recent years, notably from Kunduz in 2015. The Taliban captured it briefly before US airstrikes were called in. Civilian casualties were high but the militants were driven out. The militant group has never been able to withstand the heavy US and NATO air assaults backing Afghan ground forces, but now the US and NATO are leaving, so is much of the threat of sophisticated and sustained air power. And the Taliban are well aware of this.

It seems to me behind the choice of withdrawal by the Biden government lies a bigger assumption that drives that choice. That is the Taliban militants' perceived desire for international recognition. This has been the mantra underpinning the American exit. The logic of the American argument has been simple: The Taliban wouldn't renege on their agreements with the US because they crave international acceptance. The events of this past week and more appear to blow a hole in that assumption.

Another assumption that’s currently being blown out of the water is the US establishing some presence outside of Afghanistan so that if it needs to intervene again to combat terrorism or flush out militants then it can do so from the safety of a neighbouring country. But so far no country has come forward to reciprocate. And why would they? Like the Afghans, no one likes foreign troops with boots on the ground in their country. Only the central Asian republics and possibly Pakistan would come close to allowing that but there would be a political cost those governments would pay with their people. Moreover by welcoming the Americans in, they also allow the militants to target that country too.

Another assumption is the nature of the Taliban support and links to terrorist groups. The U.S. may not face any serious post-withdrawal Afghan support of extremist threats to the United States, even if the Taliban does take over. It is all too true that the Taliban continues to talk to the remnants of Al Qaeda, as do elements of the Pakistani military. It is unclear, however, that these remnants of Al Qaeda focus on attacks on the U.S., and the Taliban does seem to oppose ISIS. It is also unclear that the Taliban will host other extremist movements that focus on attacking the U.S. or states outside the region.

It is unclear that any key element of the Taliban has an interest in such attacks on the United States. Even Al Qaeda now focuses largely on objectives inside Islamic countries, and it is unclear that some other major extremist force will emerge in Afghanistan that do not focus on regional threats and on taking over vulnerable, largely Islamic states.

At the same time, one needs to be careful about the assumption that the U.S. can defeat any such threats by launching precision air and missile strikes against extremist targets. It is unclear that the forces in Afghanistan involved in any small covert attacks on the U.S. will be easy to target and cripple if they do emerge. The Taliban is unlikely to tolerate major training camps and facilities for extremist forces, and any such strikes will present major problems for the U.S. if the extremist threat consists of scattered small facilities and small expert cadres that shelter among the Afghan population.

It is also far from clear that more intense U.S. air attacks on Taliban forces from outside Afghanistan will have any decisive effects. The loss of limited numbers of Taliban fighters as well as some key Taliban leaders and facilities will not offset the pace of their victories in the countryside or enable the central government to survive. A continuing U.S. ability to target and kill some key Taliban leaders and fighters also does not mean that the risk of such strikes will deter future Taliban willingness to let small, extremist strike groups conduct well-focused, well-planned strikes on U.S. or allied territory, especially if such groups in Afghanistan sponsor attacks on the U.S. or it strategic partner by strike units or cadres based in other countries.

At the same time, it does seem more likely that the Taliban, and/or any independent extremist groups, will focus largely on Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China, and the other “-Stans.”

Going forward I think we need to re-evaluate many of our assumptions about the war in Afghanistan.

The objectives of the Authorised Use of Military Force approved by the US Congress in 2001 have long been accomplished. Once Osama bin Laden was killed in Operation Neptune Spear in 2011, the last element of the AUMF was met. The American and British mission in Afghanistan was complete. But America and Britain did not leave because we wanted to do a spot of state building to curb the spread of militant islamist terror. That was a mistake as it turned out.

Post-Neptune Spear, The American, the British, and their  allies’ conventional mission should have been ended, adopting instead a laser focus on intelligence collection and offensive special operations to prevent al-Qaeda (or any terrorist organisation) from re-establishing safe havens and training areas.

What was needed for an acceptable ‘victory’ and a ‘saving face’ withdrawal  was to embrace the use of Afghan Militia Forces the same way the Allies did for our initial entry way back in 2001.

In 2001, Western powers won the initial military engagement in 42 days using special operations forces with local and regional allies - we need to return to this format - and through a combination of special operations and specific information operations efforts, regaining the high ground and influence over ‘centres of gravity’. The issue is not the number of troops, but the mission of the forces there. Once the mission is defined, the number of forces needed would be clear.

It has never been about the number of troops - it’s been about the lack of an achievable mission assigned to our forces in Afghanistan.

The US engaged in ‘nation-building’ for the wrong reasons - and has seen bad results. We installed Hamid Karzai, served as his praetorian guard to protect the new central government and abandon our AMF allies and attempted to build a large, bulky, expensive and ineffective Afghan National Army - a force that is now evaporating before our eyes. It was folly.

Americans will never make the Afghan people more like them - nor will they be able to instil what my American colleagues used to fondly refer to as ‘a Jeffersonian democracy’ in Afghanistan. That day may come but only when the Afghan people wish it to be so. Lest it be forgotten Americans sought independence in 1776; the Afghan people seek self-reliance and independence from foreign influence. This is their defining historical DNA: escape from any outside control.

The Afghan people are not ungoverned, they are self-governed - with no tradition of central democracy and no desire for our version of democracy or ‘prosperity’. By pushing ‘prosperity’ we had become targets for both the Afghan government and the Taliban. This has ended, but we must draw a distinction between the end of nation-building and the continuation of our own interests in Afghanistan and the region.

It is time to adopt a practical policy based on what will work and is in our allied interests, rather than by funding the aspirations of progressive politicians who have no real understanding of Afghanistan.

First, we must establish a clear post-‘state-building’ strategy - with achievable objectives. We must return to the policy and operational format we know will work - cooperation with Afghan tribal leaders and militia. This type of force was used to achieve the initial victory in 2001. Empowered warlords and regional leaders were the force multiplier that worked as the Afghan Militia Forces - and can again, in partnership with our Special Operations Forces work now. Intelligence collection and limited military operations should be our focus.

There is no way around it. One has to play the Great Game. Think tribal rather than central. Afghan nationhood is a liberal Western wet dream.

The central government is weak and corrupt just like all the other rulers of the past. The Afghan National Army is not as strong as it is on paper. It can hardly prop itself up rather than any government. Most of the Afghan National Army troops have stronger tribal loyalties than to the concept of a nation. Since the tribal chiefs play both sides to hedge their bets, it's no wonder 'their' people do what they're told. The Taliban know this because that has always been the Afghan way, so the tribes go with them. Provided the Taliban honour their promises to the tribal chiefs, the Taliban can do what they want.

On one hand, the tribes won't now be too bothered by central government and have a large pool of Western-trained troops to prop them up. On the other hand, they now have to do business formally with the Taliban again. Largely in order to get their hands on Western-supplied aid that will surely follow after the Americans leave.

Second, we must accept the reality of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan - and work with the Pakistanis to counter al-Qaeda and the other militants now attacking Pakistani targets within Pakistan. Pakistan has made great advances in securing the tribal areas on the other side of the border and they have always been the de facto control of much of the Taliban force capacity, such as the Haqqani network. Working with Pakistan is the best option within the current circumstance.

‘Endless wars’ are not an American value. The use of the US military must only be used in response to genuine threats, when American interests are at stake or lives in danger. Withdrawal of conventional military forces and discontinuing nation building is in the US interest: leaving Afghanistan is not.

Third, make Afghanistan China’s problem. Afghanistan could easily become a hotbed for growing Islamic extremism, which would to some extent affect stability in Xinjiang.

It is not without reason that Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires”. The ancient Greeks, the Mongols, the Mughals, the British, the Soviet Union and most recently the US have all launched vainglorious invasions that saw their ambitions and the blood of their soldiers drain into the sand. But after each imperial retreat, a new tournament of shadows begins. With the US pulling out of Afghanistan, China is casting an anxious gaze towards its western frontier and pursuing talks with an ascendant Taliban. The burning questions are not only whether the Taliban can fill the power vacuum created by the US withdrawal but also whether China - despite its longstanding policy of “non-interference” - may become the next superpower to try to write a chapter in Afghanistan’s history.

Beijing has held talks with the Taliban and although details of the discussions have been kept secret, government officials, diplomats and analysts from Afghanistan, India, China and the US said that crucial aspects of a broad strategy were taking shape. An Indian government official said China’s approach was to try to rebuild Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure in co-operation with the Taliban by channelling funds through Pakistan, one of Beijing’s firmest allies in the region. China is Pakistan’s wallet.

It has been reported that Beijing has been insisting that the Taliban limit its ties with groups that it said were made up of Uyghur terrorists in return for such support. The groups, which Beijing refers to as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, are an essential part of China’s security calculus in the region. The ETIM groups were estimated by the UN Security Council last year to number up to 3,500 fighters, some of whom were based in a part of Afghanistan that borders China.  Both the UN and the US designated the ETIM as terrorists in 2002 but Washington dropped its classification last year. China has accused the ETIM of carrying out multiple acts of terrorism in Xinjiang, its north-western frontier region, where Beijing has kept an estimated 1m Uyghur and other minority peoples in internment camps.

In a clear indication of Beijing’s determination to counter the ETIM, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, exhorted counterparts from the central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan this year to co-operate to smash the group. “We should resolutely crack down on the ‘three evil forces’ [of extremism, terrorism and separatism] including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” Wang said in May according to Chinese news media which I follow.

The importance of this task derived in part from the need to protect large-scale activities and projects to create a safe Silk Road. Silk Road is one of the terms that Chinese officials use to refer to the Belt and Road Initiative, the signature foreign policy strategy of President Xi Jinping to build infrastructure and win influence overseas.

An important part of China’s motivation in seeking stability in Afghanistan is protecting existing BRI projects in Pakistan and the central Asian states while potentially opening Afghanistan to future investments. China would have to more actively support efforts to ensure political stability in Afghanistan. So make them work for it. Western powers need to leverage China’s problems in Xinjiang to be more active in Afghanistan.

International media outlets and intelligence agencies worldwide have been circulating reports pointing toward the creation of a Chinese military base in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province for a while now. Although China has not embarked on militarisation programs on foreign soil historically, and has profusely denied the rumours about building an Afghan “mountain brigade,” China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti provides an example of China’s newly adopted strategy of leveraging economic influence to further its strategic objectives. There’s even some chatter amongst Chinese officials that Beijing may entertain the idea of being part of a future UN international force should one be needed in Afghanistan (a bad idea but hey, let China find out first hand for itself).

The Afghan government was able to maintain a measure of stability largely because of the superiority of US air support. The drones, gunships, helicopters and heavy air artillery were unmatched by the Taliban. But when the US leaves, that advantage will evaporate. China’s imperative to create overland trade routes to Europe and the Middle East may draw it inevitably into Afghanistan’s domestic strife.

Of course China’s forward policy in the Wakhan Corridor needs to be assessed with a critical eye. Although on one level it seems to be motivated primarily by the threat of radicalisation, China’s interest in the region is also contingent on the strategic role that Afghanistan is capable of playing in the larger scheme of things. Despite China’s vehement denial, there seems to be sufficient evidence available indicating a definite military build up in the region, which provides China with an opportunity to showcase its ability to transform into a balancing force in the regional dynamics. I think that is a trade off that both America and Europe can afford to concede under the current circumstances.

In conclusion In the face of failure, there is an impulse to move on and not ask “what led to this?” But to avoid a reckoning with our follies is to risk their repetition, or worse.

it is probably too late to salvage either the civil or military situation in Afghanistan. It almost certainly is too late to salvage it with limited in-country U.S. forces, outside U.S. airpower and intelligence assets, and with no real peace agreement or functional peace process. Limited military measures are not the answer, and neither is simply reinforcing the past processes of failure. Tragic as it may be, withdrawal may not solve anything and may well make conditions worse for millions of Afghans, but reinforcing failure is not a meaningful strategy.

I do feel strongly that both the American and British governments must establish a clear path of redemption so that those who served and the families who sacrificed loved ones know that their loss was not wasted. At the same time our civilian governments must limit missions to intelligence collection and counter-terrorism missions that will prevent the metastasis of al-Qaeda or Isis in the region should the Afghan government fall. How we balance these two is going to be very interesting to follow in the next chapter in Afghanistan’s tortured history.

I apologise for the length of this post. This has been a hard post to write because of the subject matter and the many conflicted emotions and memories I have of my time in Afghanistan. I wish I had all the answers but I suppose the beginning of wisdom would be to know how to ask the right questions. Because we didn’t ask the right questions when we went in, we ended up making a real mess of it.

There is an understandable desire to bring all our allied troops home safe and that not another life is lost there. Yet I doubt this policy of withdrawing all troops will bring peace to anyone, not to us and most of all, the Afghanis themselves. As always in war it is the native population that will bear the real cost of war, in this case women, girls, and others brutalised under Taliban rule. What lies for them if the Taliban regain power to govern the country in their image is something I care not to imagine but retain a deep foreboding of their continued suffering. Ordinary Afghanis just want a respite from war and have a chance to live in peace, but without having us foreigners or the Taliban around. It is hard to imagine that happening at all. Our desire to save our soldiers’ lives set against ordinary Afghanis being left at the mercy of the Taliban is one of those humbling and brutalising trade offs that any war can only offer.

Near the end of his famed novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described two of his privileged characters, Tom and Daisy, as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures” and then “retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

That description applies to America as a whole but also to we Brits and other Europeans, especially when we tire of a misguided war. Americans and we Brits are a careless people. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we smashed up things and human beings with abandon, only to retreat into our materialism. No scratch that, returning soldiers retreated into themselves struggling with PTSD whilst the rest of our citizenry carried on with their own material struggles and their insipid culture wars. The point is we always leave others to clean up the mess in a very bloody fashion that never troubles our conscience.

Count on us, probably sooner rather than later, doing precisely the same thing in Afghanistan. Again.

Thanks for your question

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Outlanders: How Jinjer survived a revolution and built their own world

Jinjer’s resilient spirit was forged in the civil war that erupted their native Ukraine in 2014. As the groove metal quartet prepare to unleash their fourth and most complex album to date, singer Tatiana Shmayluk relives the turmoil that shaped them. Cue: one of modern music’s most remarkable tales of survival, resistance and sheer determination…

It was when the first fighter jet flew overhead that Tatiana Shmayluk realised she had to run.

For the past few months, the mood in Ukraine had been growing increasingly tense. As a former USSR state, in spring 2014 the country had only had independence from Russia since 1991. Many citizens had wanted then-President Viktor Yanukovych to sign an agreement aligning the country closer with the European Union in November 2013. Plenty of others wanted to stay close to Russia. Protests began across the country. Then violence. Then Yanukovych was ousted from office in February 2014. Then more violence.

“There was a revolution,” says Tatiana. ​“There were huge riots in the main square of Kiev. In the end, our president, his ass was kicked out and he left the country. That was crazy. And then everything turned into chaos. And that’s when people really started hating each other.”

That April, following a highly suspect vote on whether to stay or go which resulted in a widely disputed declaration of autonomy for the region around Tatiana’s home-city of Donetsk in the east of the country, on the border with Russia, armed conflict commenced, involving Russian troops, tanks and air power. So began what Tatiana calls ​“a civil war – Ukrainians attacking Ukrainians”, with those loyal to their former Soviet masters on one side, and those wanting to break free, and have independence and closer ties with the EU on the other.

You may remember news footage of protesters banging dustbin lids at lines of soldiers and riot police. The politics of the situation are obviously layered and complex, but the simple version is: imagine a turbo version of Brexit that actually tore the country in two and resulted in one region declaring an independence that’s somewhat disputed by most of the world that isn’t Russia. And with a lot more violence. And a conflict that’s still piling up bodies now.

Tatiana was having a barbecue when she realised what was about to happen. ​“We were at a picnic, not far away from my building where I lived,” she says today from her flat in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. ​“We were just chilling on the grass, eating food and stuff. And we heard this loud sound in the sky – we looked up and saw a jet. And that was that. We just grabbed our stuff and ran home, and we started figuring out how to leave before it was too late.”

Had Tatiana and her friends – including other members of her band, Jinjer – waited much longer than they did, their passage to Lviv some 1,300 kilometres to the west, where bassist Eugene Abdukhanov and his wife were already living, might have been much more hazardous. Even as they ​“packed all our shit into a van” and made a break for it, the country was starting to change shape around them.

“Already there were borders built being built around our region,” she says. ​“And I remember when we were crossing it, we were met by a guy, a soldier with a weapon. And then we heard [machine gun fire] somewhere very close to us.”

As she describes this, Tatiana makes an almost amusing machine gun noise, but she is painfully aware that even seven years on, the situation remains a serious one. ​“There’s no way out for this problem,” she says, ​“No solution. And that’s really, really sad.” If one needed an example of the lasting effects here, her parents have remained behind in what she calls, with almost mundane succinctness, ​“the war zone”.

“There’s an actual border between Ukraine and the former parts of the country, and it’s all blocked. And due to the pandemic, they have no chance to cross borders,” she explains. ​“They cannot receive money from the government, their pensions. I always tell my mom, ​‘Hey, mom, just try once to do this, make really big effort and cross this border, even [if you have to go] through Russia. Just come here and stay here. I can help you in any way possible.’ But she is old school. And when you have been living on this earth for over 60 years, it’s really hard to change your way of living.”

But that’s what Tatiana and Jinjer have had to do. And growing from such trying circumstances has only made them more rigid in their resolve. Because literally having to run for your life will have an effect on a person. ​“Growing balls, maintaining your balls,” is how she puts it.

“Of course, it makes you stronger,” she says. ​“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Today, Tatiana has lived in Kiev for more than five years. As Jinjer’s singer, she is one of the rising stars of European metal, and made her living visiting countries as far-flung as Argentina, Australia and Japan to play her band’s music. Next week, the band release their fourth album, Wallflowers, a furious, razor-sharp work of metal that will delight fans of Cradle Of Filth and Conjurer alike, and will add nicely to streams that, in total, already sit at over 100 million.

Though she says that she’s only been recognised around town a handful of times, and that she probably gets noticed more for the tattoos that cover her arms and neck (“Old women who were born in the Soviet Union really reject people with tattoos,” she says. ​“They look at you like you’re a prisoner, or a prostitute…”) than for her music, at 34 life for Tatiana is very different to what she knew growing up. As a kid in the early ​’90s, after the collapse of the USSR, her family were, she says, ​“average”, but there were clues that the Shmayluk family were not one of society’s ​‘haves’.

“I remember that we couldn’t afford meat,” she recalls. ​“After the Cold War ended we got a lot of American food, like veggie burgers. It looked like oatmeal with brown [fake] chicken that you make into patties, and then you fry them. You eat them as kind of meat, but it’s not. It’s just some shit, like some very plastic stuff. I realised how poor we were. And I was crying, ​‘Mom, I just want some meat. I don’t want to eat this.’”

Elsewhere, though, Tatiana remembers her childhood as being ​“great”, a time she looks back on with fondness. ​“We didn’t have internet and stuff, so we just played outside all day long. And school was awesome.” The food imports post-Cold War might not have been the most brilliant thing she had ever seen, but the new order also brought with it more western culture. MTV introduced six-year-old Tatiana to hip-hop (“I’d practice dancing like MC Hammer”), but via going through her brother’s room and raiding his tape collection – often bootlegs – she also got turned on to Nirvana, Metallica and The Offspring.

“We had this family tradition that every evening we had supper together around the same table,” she remembers. ​“When I discovered The Offspring, I put Smash on my huge headphones. I was sitting in a chair, eating, and I wasn’t talking to anyone from my family, just listening to music. And then when I finished, I just sat back and just enjoyed the music, doing nothing.”

Her ability to both lose and find herself in music turned into doing something more significant at high school when, after years spent doodling herself playing guitar in a band with other girls in a sketchbook, Tatiana performed her first gig as part of a talent contest, doing covers of songs by Limp Bizkit and German metallers Guano Apes (“No-one voted for us,” she laughs). Her first gig as an audience member, meanwhile, came a few years later, when Soulfly played in Kiev. Despite the fact she didn’t actually get to see Max Cavalera and his band onstage, it was an experience in itself.

“I traveled from Donetsk to Kiev, like, 700 – 800 kilometres,” she says. ​“My parents were very protective, they didn’t want me going anywhere on road trips or anything, and they didn’t give me any money to spend. I only got to watch maybe 30 minutes of the show, because my boyfriend got drunk and started a fight with someone. Security grabbed him and threw him out of the club. It was quite a shitty day!”

In 2010, aged 23, having completed language studies at university, and working briefly at a dating agency, Tatiana joined Jinjer. Two years later, they self-released their debut EP, Inhale, Don’t Breathe. A year after that, they played outside Ukraine for the first time, in neighbouring Romania. ​“That gave us a push to move forward, because we really liked it,” she says. ​“And although we didn’t bring any money back – we didn’t earn anything – we realised that we want to do this, and we’re going to overcome any obstacle that is waiting for us.”

Eight months later, this would be put to the test by fleeing the war. Having moved to Lviv, Jinjer – Tatiana, Eugene, guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov and then-drummer Yevhen Mantulin – then all moved into what the singer describes as ​“a summer house” just outside the city. Soon, the band became a full-time concern. They still had nothing, but it was a more fun nothing.

“We were all just hoping for the best, touring just with money that we had, earning nothing, like one euro,” she says. ​“Sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat, basically, because we were broke, because everyone had just quit their jobs. We just had some coins to buy a beer. That was intense. But I remember those years only with a warm heart. That was fun. That was a really huge challenge for just people who had never done that before, but we happened to overcome all this shit because we stayed together.”

But as touring became a more regular thing and things for Jinjer seemed to be on the up and up, the band once again found themselves faced with bad luck that most will, mercifully, never know. On tour in 2014, they had a long drive to Russia for the next run of shows. Stopping at a friend’s house in Kiev for the night, Tatiana took a taxi back to her own place, leaving everyone else to continue partying and drinking. At 4am, she got a phone call about Yevhen.

“They said, ​‘You have to come here because he’s broken his spine,’” she recalls. ​“He fell out of the window. Everyone [had gone] to sleep, and he stayed there in the kitchen, sitting on the window frame, smoking. And then he fell asleep, and fell from the third floor. They heard someone screaming in the middle of the night, but they didn’t realise – they thought that it was maybe a dog or something. And then someone checked the kitchen and he was not there. Then they looked down and saw him just lying there.”

By some miracle, he survived, though he no longer has use of his legs. Tatiana says she and his bandmates were ​“in shock for many years”, and that, ​“I remember we were all around him, toured with him, just hanging out, and then he’s just like… bam.” But even this incident, which left him in a wheelchair and unable to return to the band, is talked about in the same spirited, fighty way that Tatiana talks about every challenge.

“He seems very positive,” she says. ​“He’s doing music and he tours around Russia with a band. It’s kind of a hip-hop band, and he plays guitar. He’s still doing tours, so that’s awesome.”

Should you ask Tatiana to describe to you the Ukrainian national character, she’ll tell you that they are “stubborn”, and that as a whole they feel “we have nothing to lose”. She’ll also tell you that, “Ukrainians are very passionate people. Not like Italians [are passionate], for example, or Spanish people. We are passionate with a straight face, you know, not smiling – more like Russians.” When it comes to danger, meanwhile, she says that “we take risks easily”.

Surprisingly, despite the above description matching the impression you get of Tatiana from her story, she doesn’t think of herself as ​“a typical Ukrainian”. She does, though, nod in confirmation when asked if she sees playing music as a form of resistance. Before any of the bigger events and challenges, this spirited defiance started with becoming a musician at all, at home.

“The first time I resisted something that really prevented me from doing what I love was my parents,” she says. ​“Mostly my mom, who didn’t want to see me as a musician. In Ukraine, it’s kind of a big thing. If you’re a musician, it’s not respected. From 17 to 23, I was protesting [her], silently. I didn’t, like, yell at her; I didn’t fight with her. I just said, ​‘Yeah, yeah,’ and I did my own thing. That’s when it started, and it’s still going this way.”

An example: on Wallflowers, there’s a song, Disclosure, in which Tatiana vents about treatment at the hands of certain media outlets in her homeland. Even being used to internet haters, giving the band shit for everything from daring to escape a warzone, to daring to have a female member, to daring to become successful, the experience left her boiling.

“Earlier this year, in March, me and Eugene went to some studio to do an interview with a Ukrainian guy who is a YouTuber, and he used to work on Ukrainian TV channels,” she says. ​“So there was a tense atmosphere, and very angry vibrations between us. And he was so manipulative. We had differences in our political views and stuff, and he didn’t want to accept that. So he really wanted to show us in a very bad, bad way. I was pissed off for three days after that, and wrote the song about it.”

As people with a profile, do you think you’re a target for that sort of thing?

“We absolutely are targets for those people, for haters,” Tatiana says. ​“They hate us for different reasons: for me being a woman, you know. And people think that we pay for [success], like with our money – some of them think that we are hugely rich. My mom is a bookkeeper! My dad worked in coal mining, he was a worker, just working class. But no-one cares. They always find something to blame us for. But at least they don’t do us any harm. Only with words and comments. It’s distant. They’re poison, but it goes nowhere.”

Tatiana Shmayluk is a self-evidently tough woman. She’s also extremely nice. Equally, she’s extremely modest. When she talks about her life’s trials and triumphs, survival and successes, she does so in a manner that almost shrugs these things off, that possibly anyone could do them. Possibly, if pushed by the sight of a war literally kicking off while you have a barbecue, we could. But it’s still surprising that, for someone with more real things to get angry about than most, she describes what she’s putting into Wallflower as simply ​“my whining and insecurities”.

“Every album, I find something to be angry about,” she says. ​“It’s pessimistic, but it’s nothing to do with the pandemic. The pandemic gave me some time to just sit and think about, different stuff that I’ve been going through. And we have to agree that the whole world isn’t getting any better – I put myself into this kind of state of mind that, ​‘Okay, it’s almost the end of the world.’ Maybe the next album will be more optimistic and more positive. Maybe…”

Pessimism or not, none of it makes her story of prevailing against the things she has any less stirring. Never mind the fact that the band she fronts come from a country most tours don’t even stop at. She’s – rightfully – proud of Jinjer’s success, and the work ethic it’s taken to get them where they are, but she’s almost at pains to share the glory with her bandmates. And in part, it’s this that’s carried Jinjer through all this the most. It’s this, she says, that’s helped her both survive, and to thrive.

“I would never do this myself. I wouldn’t be able to work on so many obstacles just by myself,” Tatiana admits. ​“And if I had some type of my own personal career, just a single singer, I wouldn’t even start doing that. I really need those guys. And the guys, I hope they need me. That’s just how it works: all together. Even having nothing in our pockets and empty stomachs, we could work.

“It just depends on how big your dream is.”

[ask-aph-baltics]

Lithuania Headcanon Answers

Asked by @zako-n-czenie !!

What about Religion? Is he a Pagan or a Christian?

- I personally see him as a Pagan with Catholic undertones and some areligious points of view. It’s like, he knows there is Gods, he believes in Gods of nature and he’s a nature lover but he believes in a lot of the morals of the bible and teachings. Not really in a religious way, but in a ‘be good to others’ and the like, way.

What is his cooking like?

- It’s good! He’s not as good as Ukraine or anything but he’s pretty close to good. He can make a lot of different dishes and he can make Polish dishes well. He’s also one of the only people you’d find willing to make Sakotis by himself. Because he’s cooked for Russia, America, himself, and probably Poland at times too, he knows what he’s doing. He probably took a lot of lessons from Ukraine as well. What about his sleep schedule?

- It’s fairly normal but he struggles a lot with overworking himself until he passes out. So sometimes he’ll sleep normal, like 10pm~6am or something, but on days when he’s stressed or trying to combat his own anxieties, he’ll often find himself going over 24 hours without sleep, living off of coffee. Throughout the 1900s it was mostly not sleeping and randomly passing out. In the present day, he’s happier and able to balance a healthier work and life schedule. He still struggles. Is he active or more of a lazy person? 

- He is active. It’s canon that he does Martial Arts so he’s very active in doing that as a primary ‘energy burner’. He also likes hiking and going out into the woods for long periods of time. He enjoys camping and hunting as well as exploring nature and finding new places. He’s not worried about the outdoors, the cold, or having to survive a night in cold temperatures. He’s been through enough. He’s rarely lazy, his brain will not let him be lazy. If he starts to be lazy he gets anxious. Does he still go to therapy? - He is one of the few muses I have that does go to some therapy. He’s been through a lot of traumatic experiences and has to talk to them to someone. He’s presently seeing a historian who specializes in psychology alongside soviet history so he’s able to have a pretty good grasp of who he sees and talks to. They are classified to know what he is and help work out some of the issues he as an individual had to deal with. He’s recovered greatly and has learned most importantly to forgive himself and forgive others. I won't delve much into what goes through his mind, but it’s a dark space and one that the doctor who works with him needs to be very prepared for at times.

What makes proud? - The fight of his people and how he has survived so long. His people are his lifeblood and he hates to see them suffer but he is so proud of their fight.  he’s fought alongside them but he’s so proud of how much they overcame for freedom. It brings a tear to his eyes and is one of the things that helps him not stoop so low into depression.

Does he have self-esteem issues or no? As in; Sometimes it's too high and sometimes too low? - Yes, this is another won't go too far into detail with. After years of objectification, he feels like he’s nothing more than a toy to be played with by others. It eats at him. He’s not a toy. He’s a nation, a country, a full-fledged man. These thoughts, while no longer threats now eat at him. Sometimes he’ll spontaneously break away from Poland only to realize it was all in his head. The shadows of propaganda still coarse through his brain even if Latvia or Ukraine have told him otherwise. He feels useless and pathetic if he’s not doing something to help progress his nation so he’s at the very least, trying to beautify things in his downtime. He’s always near Suwalki with Poland and the two are always working with Germany and America to fight and defend the border. He has so many insecurities, though he does play down his abilities quite a lot. He likes to be deceptive. No one will suspect him if he does something because they think of him as a poor, useless little, post-communist state.

Who does he see as His family?

- He has found family and not an actual family. His partner and rock, not specifically his one true love, is Poland. Despite their hardships, they have very complicated feelings towards one another. They will be at each other’s backs at a moment’s call and they have realized they can grow and trust one another. Next is Latvia and Estonia. While his ties are closer to Latvia on a cultural basis, the three have been through a short but very serious time together. They’re like friends, with Latvia being more of a brother and connector to Lithuania and Estonia. If Latvia ceased to be there. I doubt Estonia and Lithuania would interact much. Then there is Ukraine and Belarus. He has his feelings towards both. He personally enjoys them both, despite the problems in the past. Either way, they’re like found family for him. He low-key considered himself a bigger brother/mentor to America but doesn’t say much on that. This, being America as a person. A lot of early American industrialization only came to be so strong because of the insane amount of Polish, Lithuanian, and Eastern Europeans feeling to the USA at the time for safety and work. What song do I associate most with him? 

- This song is more Lietpol but from the perspective of Lithuania who, has watched and is reflected against his relationship with Poland.

[tavi-hayes]

practice challenge ~ journey to the palace

((whoopwhoop, idk how i managed to write this (given it’s quite long and i usually never ever write stuff this long) also please excuse me again for any spelling/grammar errors i try. alsoooo thanks to these wonderful girls: Bethia @h-hart​, Kat @clara-choii​ and Pia @brookelynnsanders​!))

It was silent at work today. The only sounds were the flipping of pages and the ticking on keys of a computer, followed by a frustrated sigh occasionally.

“Maybe we should get some more flutes?” I said, “they’re not that expensive and they won’t take up a lot of space here.”

Lola, being distracted by her laptop, showed no sign that she had heard what I just said.

“Helllooo, Lo are you there?”

“Huh, what?” she ran her hands through her hair as she looked my way.

I lifted the catalogue to show her the flute page.

“No Tavi,” Lo leaned her head on the back of the chair, doing the accounts must have tired her. “We already have flutes, and no one is ever interested in them. They have been here for decades.”

I rolled my eyes, “maybe that is why no one is interested. They look grim.”

Lo refocused on her laptop, and I flipped another page of the catalogue.

Oeh, the bass guitars. My favourite part.

I ran my finger over the page, paying a lot of attention to each one.

There were electronic bass guitars, but also the semi-acoustic ones. Some were very modern-looking with the brightest of colours, while others go for more of a vintage look.

I don’t know if I would ever be able to part with my own baby. The bass guitar, that I now owned, had been eyeing me every day since it had arrived in the store. It had been love at first sight.

But it was such a big investment and I just didn’t have that kind of money.

A part of my earnings was needed for us to make a living, pay the rent and do the groceries for example. And the other part that wasn’t needed for that, entered our savings jar.

We had been saving money since the day my dad was put behind bars. For whatever reason those bars had been in St. George. Freaking St. George.

The province didn’t even have direct borders with Denbeigh, Ottaro was right in between.

That made a simple, but still long, car ride impossible. Not taken the problems that come with the snowy climate into account.

That same climate also caused issues for our only transportation option.

Denbeigh’s climate was hard to predict at times. It could be a beautiful day with sunshine and a clear sky, but then you wake up the next morning to a thick layer of snow.

And because those snowfalls could happen in at least 8 out of 12 months, a lot of planes got cancelled in those months. The only airport anywhere near Winnipeg was privately owned. So the owners could literally ask the prices they wanted for the plane tickets. And boy, they were only focussed on making a profit.

For a simple family of Fives, those prices were unpayable. Hence why we had been saving money for 6 years now, still nowhere near able to pay for tickets. My mom would need a ticket, Daniel and I would too, and we just can’t leave little Aria and Arlan. My dad should be allowed to see them as well. That’s means we already need the money for 5 tickets. But if we include Daniel’s family, with his wife and little Melody, then that would equal 7 tickets.

So yeah, I would never have been able to buy that bass guitar.

Until Lo had a brilliant idea. They would give it to me as my birthday present for the upcoming 10 years. At first, I couldn’t accept that kind of gift, knowing it would have been a huge investment for the Wood family as well. But they insisted, hinting that they would get an employee discount anyway since you know Mr Wood owns the place. So, the price dropped, and they ignored me, so I had to give in and accept. It was the best gift I had ever gotten.

The stores door busted open, “GIRLS!” Gina’s voice took me back to earth. “they’re about to do the draw!”

“What draw?” apparently Lo shared my confusion.

Gina rolled her eyes and grabbed Lo’s laptop from the table. “Wait, I was working! Save it, save it!”

The laptop was put right on top of the catalogue I had just been looking through. Lo ushered over as well.

“Let me just,” Gina had opened an internet page and started typing in the website address of Winnipeg’s number one news channel, WTV. Such an original name.

The news anchor, some middle-aged woman with very fake looking blond hair, appeared on screen. “What is she wearing?” Lo asked, disgust and confusion both showing on her face.

“A track suit, it’s part of her image,” Gina unmuted the laptop, the crow-like voice of the woman filling the room, “now shush, I wanna hear this.”

“… Cameron Porter has been selected for the Illéan national ice hockey team. The star of Winnipeg’s very own ice hockey team, the Winnipeg Belugas, will accompany the national team to the world cup, taking place later this year in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Last week’s draw concluded that Illéa will have to face the German Federation and New Asia in the group stage. The national team’s training will start next week.”

Lo and I shared a look, “this is what you wanted to see Gina?”

“Since when do you care about ice hockey?” I asked, this was something new.

“Urgh, you guys are intolerable,” she silenced us with her finger.

“… and now we will switch to the royal palace in Angeles, to watch the live draw for Prince Arin’s Selection.”

The draw, of course that was what had sparked Gina’s interest. For some unknown reason, the entire Selection had slipped from my mind.

Nevertheless, I felt a little flutter in my stomach. Nerves. Looking over to my friends, I noticed the tense looks on both of their faces. Lo’s hands were clasped together, while Gina’s had disappeared in the pockets of her cardigan.

“Welcome,” some weird voice-over called.

With that the camera focussed on the prince.

“Urgh,” I rolled my eyes.

Lo poked me in the side, laughing, “oh Tavi your distaste is showing.”

“I don’t understand how you can hate someone who is that good looking. I mean have you seen that jawline? Perfection.” Gina had had a crush on the prince for as long as I had known her.

I rolled my eyes again, “I don’t hate him.” The drawing began before I had time to explain myself further.

“From Allens … Idalia Moretti.”

“He doesn’t look very happy,” I couldn’t help but comment, “or comfortable.”

Gina sighed probably annoyed that she couldn’t listen to the show properly, “his engagement was called off not that long ago. That is a pretty hard thing to deal with.”

“Yeah, I see, it’s so hard that he’s having a Selection. Shouldn’t he like get over the other girl first?”

My friends ignored me.

“From Angeles … Emily Rose White.”

This thing was going to take forever. I just wanted to look at the catalogue again, not at that prince, “he’s making me feel uncomfortable, just by watching him.”

Again, no response from either of my friends.

I took that as a sign to remain silent, knowing very well my friends wouldn’t reply anyway now that their eyes were locked on the prince.

“From Dakota … Brooke Lynn Sanders.”

Gina let out a breath she was holding, “okay now is Denbeigh,” she took our hands in hers, “fingers crossed it’s one of us.”

Her hand palms were sweaty, she must really want this.

“From Denbeigh … Octavia Hayes.”

We were all silent for a minute. Then Lo started screaming, Gina joining her. “Oh my GOODNESS!”

“Tavi! You’re going to the palace! You’re going to meet the prince!”

“Yeah,” I was absolutely lost for words. Meeting the prince hadn’t been the first thing that came to my mind, hell it hadn’t even been the second or third thing.

The first thing I thought was: I’m one step closer to getting my dad out of prison. I will be in that freaking library day and night looking for the book that is going to help me. There must be something somewhere about a second opinion on a court order, or something else to annul the judge’s decision.

“Ohhh, I’m sooo jealous of you right now. You are going to meet the prince! And there’s a chance he will fall in love with you and you’ll have beautiful babies.” Gina pulled on one of my curls, it bounced up and down as she let go of it.

“Uhm, I think that particular chance can be redeemed to zero.” I bit my lip, not even in my biggest dreams had I imagined my name would be drawn.

“Tavi, listen. I know you only applied for those laws books, but you need to be friendly to the prince if you want to stay,” Lo insisted, “or else you will be eliminated.”

“And I have to interact with him?”

“There are girls who would kill for a chance of even being in one room with him,” Gina took over, she sounded very serious suddenly. “You’ll meet him that’s for sure, and if you actually try you might make it far enough to earn a date. Just at least try to be nice, okay?”

“Just don’t insult him,” Lo added, “or his family, or the country. Okay, don’t insult anyone.”

The way my best friends were looking at me brought me right back to the good old school days. That was exactly the way teachers had looked whenever I had done something naughty. Which had basically been at least once every day.

“Do you promise?” Lo asked when I didn’t respond.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll try not to insult anyone.” I sighed, this is going to be so much harder than I thought.

All of a sudden a lot robot-like voice yelled “BREAKING NEWS”.

It just scared the living shit out of me. We turned as one towards the laptop again.

On the screen was that fake blond woman in her tracksuit again.

“Prince Arin just completed the draw for his very own Selection. Some famous girls will be joining him at the palace. Our very own province will be represented by Octavia Hayes. You might have heard of her, given that she is some meekly Five. But her father’s name will ring a bell. Octavia’s father is Caspar H., a dangerous convict in prison for murdering Winnipeg’s beloved mayor Wilfred Wallis. He might have very well passed the criminal gene onto his daughter. Not only is she definitely not a good representative for Denbeigh, but the lives of the royal family might all be in danger.”

“Damn it!” Stupid news anchor. Why couldn’t they just stay out of my family’s business. Now the entire country will be aware of this. My dad’s arrest did make the headlines of some newspapers when all that had gone down. But that had been 6 years ago and I had hoped no one would remember that.

But now it was out in the open. Again.

It didn’t even matter that my dad was innocent. He had already been suffering for it by being locked up far away from our family.

“Tavi,” Lo put her arms around me, “that’s just bullshit, no such thing as a criminal gene exists.”

Gina joined our hug, “you can’t take anyone seriously who wears a tracksuit on live TV.”

*** Couple of days later ***

Dear dad,

My name got drawn for the Selection, I’m going to the palace and meet the prince. Some palace person is coming to pick me up anytime now so I can’t write a lot. Plus, if the mail has already arrived then you will have to wait another month before you get this anyway.

I asked Daniel if he could start writing a monthly letter as well, maybe he can even add a little picture of Melody so you can see her for the first time. He said he will take care of mom, Aria and Arlan as well. Molly will just cook dinner for more people, which she doesn’t really mind doing. At least that’s what she said.

Anyhow I will write to you from the palace.

Lots of love, 

Octavia

Zohl wzw, R’n hxzivw. Tlrmt gl gsv kzozxv, z dslov mvd vmerilmnvmg dsviv R wlm’g pmld zmblmv. Ovzermt nln, vhkvxrzoob mld gszg rg urmzoob hvvnh orpv hsv’h gibrmt gl orev ztzrm. Zmw dszg droo gsv xlfmgib gsrmp lu nv. Droo R gfim rmgl zm lfgxzhg? Zxxliwrmt gl DGE R’n tlrmt gl hozftsgvi veviblmv rm gsv kzozxv, yvxzfhv lu blfi ‘xirnrmzo tvmvh’. Yfg gsv kvlkov dsl olev blf droo zodzbh yvorvev blfi rmmlxvmxv, vevm ru gsv dslov xlfmgib hvvnh gl gsrmp lgsvidrhv. Qfhg pmld gszg dv nrhh blf wvziob. Zmw R droo gib vevibgsrmt R xzm gl tvg blf ivovzhvw. Qfhgrxv zodzbh kivezroh.

*** At the airport ***

The car journey all the way from Winnipeg to somewhere in Sota had lasted for ages. Even though I hadn’t really been aware of that, since I fell asleep as soon as they closed the doors behind me.  

A frustrated voice had woken me up, “can you please stop drooling all over the leather upholstery?”

My eyes flew open, saliva was indeed smeared on the seat. I quickly wiped it off my face, where it had been present as well. “Sorry,” I mumbled, I then realized we had arrived at the airport, I quickly opened the car door and jumped out.

What I immediately noticed was the rain puddle I had landed in. My shoes and socks were soaking wet. Great.

“Maybe you should try to act more lady-like?” the driver said with a very disapproving tone, looking me up and down. He had already taken my guitar case out of the car and was about to put it right onto the wet street. I quickly grabbed the case out of his hands, clutching it close to my body.

The driver sighed, “there’s the entrance to the airport. Inside it will be clear which directions to follow.”

I made my way towards the entrance he had pointed at when I heard him mumble to himself, “why did I had to drive a barbarian?”

As I turned around, the car’s engine had been running again. I wasn’t sure if he could see me, nor I did I really care. I showed my middle finger to the car anyway. Asshole.

Never had I seen an airport before. It was freaking massive, people walking in all possible directions. Some carrying luggage with them, others with balloons that read “we missed you” or “welcome home”.

One day, my fam and I will be waiting at the airport, carrying one of those dumb balloons around. Coming to pick up dad.

I snapped out of my daydream by someone tapping me on my shoulder. “Miss Hayes, please come with me.”

Nodding, I followed the person not really having another choice since I had no clue which way I had to go. Maybe this is some insane kidnapper.

My heartbeat increased; did I just make a stupid mistake?

“Only one girl has arrived so far. You are to wait for the others before you can board the plane.”

Okay, no insane kidnapper then.

Unless.

This is a complete setup created by his crazy brain.

Panic filled my body, damnit how will I get out of this situation.

Okay, if I just push the person onto the floor, that will give me a chance to run for my life.

One. 

Two.

Three.

I took a deep breath in, ready to make the push. But at the last minute the person side stepped which caused me to lose my balance. He looked at me in a very funny way, “please take a seat, the flight attendant will come get you in a few minutes.”

My cheeks turned very very warm, the redness might very well have equalled the red colour of a traffic light.

Trying to calm myself down, I slumped down into a chair. Yikes, only now became I aware of it again. My socks were still wet and cold. Sigh.

After taking a few deep breaths in and out, I noticed the other girl.

“Oh hey, you’re also a Selected?” I started, realizing it wouldn’t be a bad thing to talk to someone.

She turned towards me, “I am Brooke Lynn Sanders, but just call me Brooke please!”

Not knowing what else to do, I waved at her a little awkwardly. “hi Brooke, nice to meet you. My name is Octavia, but please call me Tavi.”

“Nice to meet you Octavia. Did you have a good journey?” I could already tell she did have the lady-like manners I had been lacking.

Oh god, I couldn’t possibly tell her about the drooling situation, so I decided to stick to a vague answer. “Yeah, it was alright thanks. What about your own journey? Which province are you from?”

“My send off from Dakota was a bit bumpy but I am here now. I wish they would have let me take the train though...”

Another girl arrived, also looking very much like someone the prince could end up with. Compared to these two, I was more of a rag doll.

Pushing my feelings behind that wall deep inside me, I waved her over, “oh yeah hi, please join us.”

We chatted some more for a bit, until Haven arrived.

The way she was walking, the only person I had seen walking like that was Long-Beard Logan, the homeless guy who could often be found near New Wave Records. He walked the same way, but he had one wooden leg.

Then Haven opened her mouth, a weird voice coming out, “hi.”

I noticed Brooke shared my confusion, “uhm hello?”

She took out her phone and typed something, it read ‘I’m Haven’.

My confusion hadn’t ebbed away, “are you alright?”

She typed some more, ‘yup:)) just got a bad cold! what are your names?’.

As a response to that we all introduced ourselves again. These girls didn’t seem to be that bad, hopefully the other Selected at the palace were the same. But the chance of that being true was small. Also, why did I care what the other girls were like? I wasn’t there to make friends, with them or with the prince. I had applied for the thing I needed most. Access to the royal library.

“Have you guys ever been on a plane before? This is all very new to me.” I admitted, trying to ease the nerves that had been building up inside me ever since my name had been picked in that draw.

Brooke had a very strong opinion on planes. Private planes more specifically.

Which came as a shock to me. The private plane part. I didn’t know what I was thinking but taking a private plane had never crossed my mind.

In the meantime, Brooke started talking about the CO2 emissions.

“How else would we get to the palace without having an endless journey? It’s not like there’s a teleportation device, right?” I said a little more vicious than I intended. The higher castes used planes all the time, if anyone had a cause in the destruction of our planet it was definitely them.

Brooke definitely had thought of it all, as she mentioned the outstanding quality of the Illéan train system. Clara chimed in to agree with her.

I decided to not mention my exact thoughts about the higher castes, given the fact that I had promised my friends back home not to insult anyone. So I just nodded my head, “yeah okay I understand your point.”

We were able to board the plane shortly after that. Brooke sat down in a window-seat and Clara nestled herself in the seat next to Brooke’s.

I took a chair on the opposite side of the plane, trying to create some sort of privacy for myself without being rude.

Haven sat down in the seat next to me and smiled at me.

The entry door closed; I could no longer contain my nerves. “Here we go I guess.” I tried to calm my breathing, but it didn’t really help. I tried to think of my family back home in Denbeigh, didn’t help either. I heard my dad’s voice in my head, it was like he was actually talking to me, “You are a strong girl, the flight will be over before you know it. Octavia, you can do this.”

A weird sound whisked my dad’s voice away, I looked over towards the source of the sound. It was Brooke choking on her drink. “Please don’t die,” I said. Her dying here would be a shitty start to this whole adventure. Besides, Brooke actually seemed like a nice person.

She coughed, “I am – I am trying.”

Haven mentioned her sibling, how they were close and stuff. She then asked if we had any siblings ourselves.

This provided me with the perfect distraction. I turned towards her, “yeah, I have three siblings. One older brother, a younger sister and a younger brother as well.”

Normally I would never share such personal information with someone I had just met but talking about them was the distraction I so desperately needed from this whole plane situation.

The others talked some more, but I just realized the one and only thing that would get me through this.

Music.

“If you guys don’t mind, I’m gonna listen to some music.” I said as I took my earphones out of my bag. “Haven would you like to join?” I asked her politely, given that she was sitting right next to me and it would have been quite rude otherwise.

She smiled at me and nodded, so I handed her one of the earphones. “I do have a very mixed taste in music so you’re in for a treat.” Maybe I could even make her listen to our own music, you know casually extending Five Whispers’ audience.

As a reply, Haven winked at me, “I love a girl with mixed music taste.”

Oh who would have thought, I had something in common with another Selected. I too liked people with a diverse music preference, since music says so much about a person. The quote ‘You are what you listen to’ was on one of the walls of New Wave Records music store. It was also my own personal life motto.

Clara and Brooke continued chatting, but I didn’t listen anymore. The music had taken a hold on me and it had only released me from its grip when the plane hit the ground in Angeles.

[corporationsarepeople]

Donald Trump and his intimate relationship with organized crime

Let’s talk about Donald Trump and his intimate relationship with organized crime—the only partner he’s ever been faithful to his whole life. (THREAD)

1/ The Russian mafiya is a global crime syndicate, but it’s best to think of it as a lawless business—or, rather, a business where it makes the laws. It is closer to the East India Company administering the entire colony of British India than some slick Scorsese picture.

2/ In Russia itself & other mafia states, the mob runs the show—charging protection for businesses, taking bribes, imposing restrictions on airports, seaports, etc. It steals from the people, and from the supine central government, to keep itself in power.

3/ When the USSR fell, mobbed-up oligarchs raced to gobble up the country’s wealth & natural resources. Untold billions, maybe trillions, of dollars were spirited out of Russia, most to banks in quasi-Western places like Cyprus.

4/ Remember in The Sopranos, when Tony & Co. took over Ramsey Outdoor, extracting all of its value, and leaving the rest to rot? The Russian mob did that to Sierra Leone—a COUNTRY, not a sporting goods store on Route 17. Bribe a dictator, take over operations, steal the diamonds.

5/ The mob requires organization, discipline, logistics on a massive scale. It can’t use law enforcement, so it uses muscle: assassination, extortion, etc. But, like a parasite, it cannot live without a host body that DOES follow the law. Thus it safeguards its cash in the West.

6/ The much-ballyhooed sanctions imposed by Obama hurt because they were on INDIVIDUAL MOBSTERS, not on the country. They cut off the ability of these crooks to safeguard their loot in the West.

7/ The vast fortune stolen from the USSR + the cash generated by the mob’s illicit activities = a mammoth pile of capital—unusable unless it is “washed,” or made legitimate. Money laundering is a necessary cog in the crime machine. What good is cash that can’t be spent?

8/ Some businesses lend themselves well to money laundering. Real estate tops the list. Art dealing, for sure. Entertainment, sometimes. Political campaigns work well, too: “donate” dirty rubles via Super PAC, hire consultant. ALL THINGS TRUMP DOES.

9/ In Western countries, the mob does import/export of illicit goods (drugs, arms, humans)…and it also runs complex operations to defraud various government agencies & big corporations. Tax fraud, Medicare fraud, insurance fraud, and so forth. Stealing from US.

10/ When Trump knowingly sells apartment after apartment to known Russian mobsters, foreign dictators, and other unsavory elements, he is laundering money for the mob.

This pattern is not an accident:

https://twitter.com/Zeddary/status/1155486497451184128

11/ When Trump hires illegal immigrants to do hard labor, ignores laws concerning worker safety, and then stiffs them out of the pittance they were promised, he is behaving EXACTLY as his mob associates behave.

12/ When Trump violates the Emolument Clause to exploit the presidency for personal gain, he is doing what his beloved mobbed-up dictators like Putin do.

13/ When Trump intimidates journalists, erstwhile paramours, FBI agents investigating his Russian mob buddies, and others who stand in his way, he is using straight-up mob tactics.

@CheriJacobus: One of the most terrifying moments of my life was when someone close to Team Trump told me (trying to help) that I needed a squad car in front of my building because Trump had bad guys maybe coming over from Queens to harm me. 11:30 at night.  I didn't leave my apt for 5 days.

14/ When Trump obsesses about the border, and tries to impose restrictions on which foreign nationals can or cannot enter the country, he is emulating Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian mob, who enjoys such control in Russia.

15/ (Sidenote: per Friedman’s “Red Mafiya,” Mogilevich has COMPLETE control of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. So if a self-styled NSA “whistleblower” manages to spend 40 days there avoiding the media, you can be damn sure the Brainy Don authorized it).

16/ When Trump runs afoul of the law, he likely offers to give information to the FBI to avoid prosecution. This is a big Russian mob tactic. They would give up their own grandmothers to escape capture.

17/ And when Trump manipulates his tax returns to game the system, he’s doing what the Russian mobsters do—screwing over the government (which is to say, you and me) to line his own pockets.

So, as @lincolnsbible said long before I did: when we call Trump a mobster, it’s not hyperbole. He is a longtime mob money launderer, among other nasty things.

I know it, you know it, and soon, the entire world will know it.

via @GregOlear on twitter

[mickeylovebot]

gallavich sad/fluffy/happy ending oneshot - Couple’s Therapy #2 | Mexico

Mickey and Ian sat on the couch in their counsellor’s office. This was the second meeting. After the first one had gone well, Mickey’s anxiety about the situation had diminished and Ian was happy to go again. Their love for each other had only gotten stronger after getting their honest shit on the table. They were closer, always cuddling, spending less time staying up at night worrying.

“Well, no offence you two,” Nadine, their counsellor, began, “But after last time, I am expecting a doozy. You two have been through very... specific circumstances together. And I am curious to learn more and excited to help you both through more.” Nadine smiled. She had a look in her eyes that seemed to say that Mickey and Ian were a miracle.

“Glad to hear it,” Ian laughed half-heartedly.

“Now, what should we discuss today, did either of you have any ideas?”

“Uh...” Ian thought. He bounced around ideas in his head, but none of them stuck out.

Mickey, however, “I want to talk about Mexico,” he blurted.

Ian looked at Mickey at first with surprise and then with a somewhat sad, knowing look. “Okay, Mickey,” he agreed, “Let’s talk about Mexico.”

This time, Ian and Mickey were holding each other’s hands for support. Ian gave Mickey’s hand a squeeze... to tell him that he’s listening.

“Mexico? What happened in Mexico?” Nadine inquired.

“It was before Mexico, actually,” Mickey began explaining to Nadine. “I’d broken out of prison. I was on the run from the cops and... fuck, I wanted to be with Ian,” he and Ian both had lopsided smiles, “And when he met me at the docks... even though he had a boyfriend, it was pretty fuckin’ intense, in a good way, if I do say so myself. And he agreed to go to Mexico with me, sorta. He got in the vehicle and we went and... well, shit happened on the way, but that’s not the point. He left. At the border. He wouldn’t go with me.”

“I see.” Nadine said.

“I’m sorry, Mick–”

“No, no,” Mickey interrupted, “I don’t want you to apologize. You had your reasons.”

“Can we step back for a moment and talk about this?” Nadine asked them both.

“Yeah,” Ian said. Mickey nodded nervously.

“Okay, Mickey, can you talk about how you felt when Ian met up with you and when he left at the border?”

Mickey thought for a moment, and then began, “When I thought he was going to Mexico with me, I felt high.” He gave a small laugh, reminiscing, “I felt like, I don’t know, I had everything. I broke out of prison, I was going to flee the fuckin’ country, and I had him there. There was nothing else I needed, you know? Ever since I came out, and I was with him, I felt like it was him and I against the world. No one else got it. No one else could get it.” He looked at Ian proudly, and then his face fell, “And then when he said he wasn’t going... one step before the finish line... I don’t know. I felt... too fuckin’ much. It felt like the opposite of having everything. It felt like having nothing. Going through the border, successfully even, and having a life out of prison felt like I was watching a fuckin’ boring movie. I wasn’t me anymore. I was on the outside, looking in, feeling like a fuckin’ robot with everything I did. And I’m not sayin’ that’s all his fault. I have my own shit I have to worry about. But I felt betrayed, too, you know? Like he was right there. He was going to go with me, and then he wasn’t. And it was like losing the reason it was all worth it after thinking that reason would be coming to Mexico with me. And... fuck. I’ll admit it; I still feel betrayed. And I don’t want to.” He looked at Ian, “Because I love him.”

Ian’s eyes were watering at this point. He was wiping them with his sleeves. Mickey could only look at him for a second more before looking away.

“Thank you, Mickey. Ian, do you hear him?” Nadine asked gently.

“Yes, Mickey,” He looked at him. “I hear you.”

“Ian, do you want to tell us how you felt during that situation?”

“Yeah,” he wiped the remainder of his tears off and nodded, “I really thought I was gonna go with him. I was happy, too.” He looked at Mickey with love, “He was the only person who could ever make me feel that way. Even my other boyfriends, they could never... it was never the same. And as we got to the border, that scared me. I was living a really simple life. And I was scared to get back in the game... back into really being with someone who had that power over me. Mickey and I had never been... stable. I didn’t know if we would survive in Mexico and that was scary. Leaving him hurt, though, and it made me wonder if I’d made the wrong decision. I cried all the way home. And in the back of my head, I was always kinda comparing my other boyfriends to him. I pretended, I lied to myself, saying that we weren’t good together. And maybe objectively most people would look at it that way too, but I knew he was the only person who could bring real feeling out of me. And that scared me. And that’s why I didn’t go with him. I know you said not to apologize, Mickey,” He looked at Mickey again, “But I’m sorry.”

Mickey blinked away the beginning of tears.

“Do you hear Ian, Mickey?”

“I do, but– Can I say something else?” Mickey looked at both Nadine and Ian. Nadine looked at Ian for an answer.

“Go ahead, Mick.” Ian said.

“I guess... the thing that hurts most is that you wouldn’t take a chance on me. You know, I’d, I’d go to fuckin’... Russia for you, I don’t know. I’d flee the country to Russia or fucking... China for you. I’d take that chance. And I just worry that... I don’t mean that to you. And I know it’s a lot to ask, and it might be unfair. But if I don’t mean that to you, I don’t know. It hurts.”

Ian’s heart sunk. He got it now. “Mickey... You mean everything to me. You’re right, okay?” Ian grabbed Mickey’s other hand and held them both. He looked Mickey right in the eyes. “I should have taken that chance. But right now, we’re married, and I’m taking that chance every day, because you could really ruin me. You have all that power over me now and I’m letting you. Letting somebody in like this was scarier than anything I’ve done. But you’re worth it, Mick, you mean that to me.”

Mickey was speechless. His breath was caught in his throat. Ian had a fucking way of making him cry.

“Do you hear him, Mickey?”

Mickey nodded slightly and looked at Ian. “I hear you, Ian.” He promptly wrapped his arms around Ian and hugged him tightly as he cried into his shoulder. “Fuck,” he laughed and pulled back, sniffling and wiping away snot. “Sorry if hugs aren’t allowed in the office or whatever,” he said to Nadine.

Nadine smiled, proud that the two were communicating. “Don’t worry. They sure are. Now, how about we talk about how you two can talk about these things at home when they come up.”

Nadine talked to them about communication, respect, how to step back when things got too heated, how to listen, mindfulness, and how to talk to each other in ways that aren’t antagonistic. Each of them thought some points were cheesy, but still, they listened. And in the coming weeks, they tried to work what Nadine told them into their everyday lives.

To their surprise – it worked.

[milleralexanderauthor]

Let’s talk about cartography and how it can be useful to you as a writer. 

Cartography is the process of map-making. You may have picked up a book in the past and noticed a map in the first few pages, ala Tolkien or Le Guin.

 These reference images help the reader get a better image of the layout and scope of the world of a novel. We’re not gonna talk about that today. What I want to talk about is how cartography can help you, the author, develop an in-depth world. 

First of all, under what circumstances should you spend your time on this? If you’re writing, say, a contemporary novel set in New Jersy, you probably don’t have to worry about this. The genres that benefit from this type of planning are:

-Science Fiction

-Fantasy

There are probably exceptions to this rule, but these two genres require a certain amount of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the process in which you develop the system, rules, and landscape your novel takes place in. In some instances, a novel may fall into these two genres but be set in a familiar setting. The landscape in these instances is still something I think you should give some degree of thought to. Consider how the landscape has changed or will change based on the parameters of your story. 

An example of this is Panem from The Hunger Games. 

Panem exists in a dystopian world in which the country of the United States has not only been divided, but rising sea levels have changed the coastline. This is an example of a familiar landscape that has changed because of the events of a novel or the rules of the world in which it exists. Even if you’re not starting a world from scratch, take into consideration what might alter your world.

Let’s say you are writing a novel set in a different world. Do you need to make a map?

Of course, you don’t NEED to do anything. I’m not your dad, I can’t tell you what to do. Do I think it’s incredibly helpful? YES.

Why? It will give you the same benefits it will give a reader. A more in-depth layout of the world you’re creating. 

If your characters are staying in the same place throughout the duration of the book, maybe creating a full map of the entire planet isn’t necessary. But maybe making a map of the city could help you. What does you’re city look like? What is the architecture like? What is the economy of your city like? What in the landscape influences that? 

If your characters are going on a Tolkien level journey across your world, you probably need to consider the landscape. Mapping is a good visual way of doing this. It’s also really fun, in my opinion.

“But Miller,” you may be saying. “Why would I go to all that effort if my characters don’t even go to most of these places?”

That’s worldbuilding for you. You will come up with a TON of details over this process that will never make it into your novel. However, the more detail YOU have in your brain, the more detailed your world will feel. 

“Okay, sure.” I hear you say. “But I’m a terrible artist!”

Me too. I’m not saying that the draft of the map you make has to be in your book. In fact, I encourage against that. If you think a visual aid will help your reader gain something or would just be a fun perk, you can refine it or hire a professional cartographer (yes, they exist) when your book is closer to publication. If you’re at that point, I’m not talking to you. I’m encouraging map making as a world building exercise to those of you who are trying to flesh out your worlds before you even commit anything to page. 

It can be an intimidating task, creating a whole world from scratch. I’m happy to tell you that it doesn’t have to be hard.

The first step is to consider the scope of your map. Like I said, only create what you feel you may use. Does your character never leave their home town? Do a map of the town? Does the country your story takes place in come into play during your book? Do a map of the country. Does your character make a grand journey across the world? Make the world. My RECOMMENDATION is to make at least the country your novel takes place in. You probably won’t use every location, but less is not always more. 

Then, consider the context. Are cities in your world trade centers? What are their major imports and exports? What type of climate does your world have? What is the political climate like? Are there physical boundaries that cut one part of your world off from another? These are things to keep in mind before you start making your map because the landscape of a world could have a profound impact on the daily lives of its residents. 

Next, we need to outline. I find countries or continents to be the easiest to do, and you’ll probably see why. Coastlines are honestly really easy to do. This is probably the part you’re freaking out about but worry not. There are some easy methods to get natural-looking coastlines and borders.

A prefer traditional paper and pencil art, so we’ll start with that. By all means, if you just wanna go crazy and come up with something all on your own, I won’t stop you. However, some of you may be intimidated by the idea of just DRAWING A WHOLE COUNTRY FROM NOTHING. There are a couple of things you can do if this is you.

Look at some reference pictures. 

Look at an atlas or a globe. Find borders and coastlines that look cool or fit into some of the ideas for your world and copy ‘em. To some people, this doesn’t feel “creative”. Someone will always look at your map and tell you that it looks like Russia or Italy, so don’t stress too much about it. 

BEANS. 

This will sound weird, but a tried and true method to get nice looking coastlines is to just dump a few handfuls of dry beans or rice onto a piece of paper and move them around until you like the look of it. Then you trace out the masses of beans until you got yourself a country, huzzah!

If you’re working in photoshop, a method I’ve seen used is to import a few images of different countries into it and move and transform them around until you you have a brand new landmass you like, then trace around that. 

Next, we need to fill the world with stuff. This sounds simple, but keep in mind that things don’t happen in a vacuum. 

If you’re building a forest or farmland, consider where a water source would be. 

If you’re adding a lake or rivers, consider how it would flow to the ocean with the force of gravity, starting in mountain ranges.

If you have mountains, consider how shifting tectonic plates would form them. You have to at least know the rules before you can break them. Your world has to make some type of sense and, if it doesn’t, you need to explain why. 

Take a look at the styles of maps to get an idea of how to indicate this on your map. Some maps take a very simplified approach to denoting landmarks, some are very complex. It’s up to you.

Once you know where your forests, mountains, and lakes will be, you can place your cities. 

Your cities should be placed in locations on your map that make sense. Is your city’s major export fish? Put it by the ocean. Is the climate cold? Put it at a higher elevation. Is your city isolated? What type of physical barriers could illustrate this? 

If you didn’t take any of these things into consideration before this exercise, you have now. Let’s say you have a protagonist who needs to get from one town to another, but you need to spice up the journey a little. You made this map, you look at it, there’s a river in between the towns. BOOM! Now your protagonist needs to cross a rushing icy river. Mini conflict, a setback. All because you considered the landscape of your environment.

Obviously, this works on a lot of different scales. How long will it take your protagonist to get from point a to point b? What stands in their way? How do the features of the landscape impact the world as a whole? Now you know. 

Finally, slap some labels on that bad boy. 

If your working on paper, it’s a good idea to do this ALL in pencil first and leave some space for labels. This will make referencing where things are and what they’re called easier. Get creative with it, use crazy fonts. It just needs to be LEGIBLE for your own sanity. Trust me. 

Honestly, doing this at some point in the worldbuilding process has done worlds of good for me. It really gets your creative juices flowing and it’s just another step to a well-rounded world. You can skip it if you’re not a visual person, but I definitely am and I’m sure some of you are, too. 

I just want to reiterate, this is for YOUR benefit only. No one else has to see it, its reference for you. However, if you want to add a map into your published works, consider talking to a professional artist/cartographer unless you, like, are one. Then I’m not sure why you read this much of my post. 

Thanks for reading! I post a wide variety of content on my blog every Friday including writing advice and book updates. Stop by and say hi!

-Miller

[joeys-piano]

if you were to write and publish a book, what would it be about?

TL;DR - I would write a mafia/organized crime story about a man traveling to St. Petersburg to learn/uncover the truth behind an interesting Bratva that doesn’t kill.

Probably, the extent of publishing I’ll do is posting the story online for others to read. I’m not in the market for this story to be on a shelf or in a physical, bounded form. Nor, would I even qualify the story as a book. However, for the sake of this question, I do have a story in mind that has the potential to fit those qualifications.

If I were to write and publish a book, the story would revolve around mafias or in general, organized crime groups. Having grown up watching a lot of police procedural, detective noir, secret agents and spies, and international hitmen movies, this appeals to a niche-area of mine. I feel that for a first novel, it’s probably a good idea to write about something that interests you and it’s something that you’re comfortable working with.

For me, personally, I love watching international films where the characters are going to other countries and working on covert missions there. As one of the main “pillars” of the story, so to speak, incorporating traveling and cultural diversity is huge for me. I would love to explore language barriers and how characters can overcome, negotiate, or use those barriers to their advantage when they communicate with foreign partners/parties. In addition to that, I would love to explore the differences between how different organized crime groups operate, what is the “pecking order”, what skills – if any – do these groups specialize in, some of the coded terminology they use, and how the surrounding culture influences how the group behaves.

Typically when I watch the movies that I watch, there’s almost none or very little distinction between the crime groups. They all feel like they were cut from the mold with the same shape, and the only discernible differences are what the group looks like and where they’re from. Honestly, I feel that there could be more done than just that. I’d love to see how the political environment, the attitude towards authority and law, how ethics and morals are at play if they are at play, and how cultural and regional differences/variances contribute to the “make-up” of these organized crime groups. It would feel closer to real life, I think. It gives these groups a grounded foundation that they can build upon, and it’s easier to juggle with several groups where they’re all uniquely different from each other. That’s probably one of the most important things to consider, ‘cause it’s not fun reading about carbon clones of the same thing – over and over again.

Another reason why I would write a mafia/organized crime story is that I like the thrill, the action, the suspense, and sometimes the comedy that comes along with the entire package. Show me with a raise of hands of how many of us remember the daring feats, the sheer epicness, and the mesmerizing action sequences that come from stories like this. It plays with the adrenaline part of the body and it’s a very tactile experience. As someone who focuses a lot on introspective works but has a flair for dramatic action sequences, this would be a lot of fun for me and it would expand my knowledge/repertoire for writing these kinds of situations.

But while this is all fun and games in the end, it’s very fast-paced. Balancing these quick successions with slower, agonizingly cruel sequences of rich sensory detail in the form of torture or interrogation scenes would appeal a lot to my introspective-side of writing. I’m already comfortable with introspective writing but here, I’ll be able to apply it to a wider range of situations and explore the five-senses in ways that I’ve never been able to in other types of stories.

And lastly, I would write a mafia/organized crime story just because I want to do things differently. It’s as simple as that. Now, my only experience when it comes to reading topics or themes like this come from fanfic. I don’t know how published books go about this but I often notice that at least in fanfic, there’s a lot of attention focused on relationship-dynamics and violence. Arguably, those two are very intimately tied with stories like this. There’s nothing wrong with stories like this that focus on that, but it often feels like the first thing that people come up with. It’s like outside of violence that will scar you for life – figuratively and literally – and relationships (mostly romantic, from what I’ve read), there’s nothing else you can do in stories like this. This is where I want to change things.

I want to explore the story of people finding their purpose in life through the line of work that they do. I want to explore how they’re able to balance between the civilian and the crime life, how they’re able to overcome internal conflicts and personal issues that arise when those two worlds converge, and I want to explore how different people have found themselves working in a mafia/organized crime group and what events in their life led them to choose this life. I can see why not a lot of people explore those areas because they can be slow, they can even be boring, and they might feel out of place for a genre that seems gung-ho on thriller action and living out an epic fantasy at times. For me, I don’t want to approach the mafia or any organized crime group with an idealistic background on what they should be. Maybe it’s just me, but I want to write this as grounded to reality as I can.

There are real, legitimate reasons that people join these groups and why they reach out to seek aid from them. I want to explore that gray area.

Now, after all of that setup and building to the moment, you’re probably wondering what the plot is going to be about. I got you, fam. The story revolves around a Japanese man named Mr. Fukumori. Despite being a low-ranked mafioso, he receives word from his Bosses that he’ll be leaving the country in a few days. Instead of this being a reconnaissance mission or anything fancier than that, Mr. Fukumori learns that his mission is strictly negotiation-based.

He’s tasked to be a spokesman for the Syndicate, and his assignment is to forge a deal or an alliance with a very strange Bratva (Russian mafia group) in St. Petersburg. On paper, the alliance is to be mutually beneficial. However, what the Syndicate really wants is structural information. For the past three years now, this strange Bratva in St. Petersburg has grown in power and prestige – seemingly, overnight as soon as a new Pakhan stepped forward. From the edge of ruins, somehow the group pulled itself together and became one of the most dominant-figures in Russia’s league of organized crime.

Mr. Fukumori’s true mission, if he chooses to accept, is to uncover exactly how the new Pakhan had done it. And if he receives further orders from his Bosses after he attains the information, Mr. Fukumori is aware that there’s a high possibility that he may have to kill the Pakhan. Naturally, as an older individual and bordering on the end of leading an “exciting life” as a hitman, Mr. Fukumori is curious as to why his Bosses didn’t assign this mission to anyone else. Although he asks the question, Mr. Fukumori already has an idea of what the answer is. Despite currently being a low-ranked mafioso, Mr. Fukumori had quite a track record when he was younger. With 145 confirmed kills, 375 reconnaissances assignments, and numerous soft-skills he had perfected during his years traveling in and out of Japan for these sorts of things under his belt, Mr. Fukumori is the most qualified to take on this mission. More so, he’s the most qualified low-ranking mafioso to take on this mission.

Mr. Fukumori is aware that because of his rank in the Syndicate, he can be disposed of or viewed as an expendable pawn at any time. Though it’s never spoken out loud, it’s heavily implied that this is a suicide mission. The odds of Mr. Fukumori coming back alive from enemy territory is dependent on his own skills and how he’s able to navigate and negotiate through everything that he needs to do. With all of this stacked before him, Mr. Fukumori accepts the mission. In a way, he feels that the other reason why his Bosses reached out to him on this is because this will be the first, foreign assignment he’s received in years and will likely be his last. Ever since he failed his last foreign mission, over 12 years ago, Mr. Fukumori fell from his original rank in the Syndicate and has been confined to domestic affairs since then.

It almost feels like this is the Syndicate’s way of forgiving him for the failure he had done in the past, by giving him a suicidal mission that he’s comfortable with. There’s almost a childish glint of youth in Mr. Fukumori’s eyes, there’s a warmth that’s spreading from his chest because he’s finally coming back to the kind of mission that he loves. Safe to say, Mr. Fukumori loves to travel and he feels like a bird that’s finally free from its cage. He knows that if he dies on the mission, at least he’ll die doing what he loves. However, Mr. Fukumori has hopes that he’ll have more foreign missions if he comes back alive. With that as his motivation, Mr. Fukumori begins formulating his strategy plan before he boards a plane and lands in St. Petersburg.

[pastpresentrp-blog]

Hi guys! This is our FAQ to help you understand the Past & Present world a little better. If you have more questions that you’d like clarified, we’d love to hear them! 

Are people aware of what happened during the Void? Very few people are aware of what happened during the Void, as the government has and continues to put a lot of effort into burying the truth. High-ranking members of the government may know parts of the truth, with only a handful knowing all of it. Please discuss with an admin how much your character would know. Who runs the government? Three elite families took control of the government after the Void - however, they prefer to be unknown and operate from the shadows. Their main interest is consolidating power and understanding abilities. To this end, they have given the most amount of power to the Advanced Ability Research division and to Security & Intelligence.

The Directors of the main branches of government all have their own interests and often compete with each other, but their ultimate goal is to preserve their own positions and to keep London walled-in.

What kind of work does Advanced Ability Research do? Advanced Ability Research (AAR) focus is mainly on rare ability research: how does time-travel work? what genes exactly are responsible for research? can those genes be modified? and so on. Very little of it is at all ethical. The division has a lot of power, and there’s very little they are not capable of doing in the name of their research. What are Sweepers? The Sweepers is how people in the outskirts most commonly refer to the Field Division (FD), operating under Advanced Ability Research (AAR). They regularly sweep through the outskirts, taking people, most often babies and young children with rare powers. What happens to the children that are kidnapped from the outskirts?They are taken away either to be raised by the government, some in foster homes, or to be used in the AARs research, meaning human experimentation. How does education work? Education works pretty much as it does in our own world. Kids have to learn algebra here too, sorry, or not sorry if your character likes that sort of thing. The schools in London are better than those in the outskirts, but still there are differences between schools for the elite, and schools for the rest. There are school in the outskirts as well, ensuring that people get an education there too, though they don’t have as many resources at their disposal. Ability training is another thing altogether, and you can read more about that in our ability guide. Industry is a big thing, you say, how’s Mother Nature doing? She’s all right, actually. The Industrial Zone, while not a place for visiting unless one happens to work there, is not the second coming of 19th century London. Environmental policy is considered important, in part to ensure the survival of British agriculture, but also for the overall health of the city’s inhabitants. How often do people see the wall? It depends on where you live. The industrial and agricultural zones are close enough to the wall for it to be visible for the people who work there. For those living closer to the city center the wall is not visible in the horizon. That said, it is not uncommon for people to take day-trips to the agricultural zone to get away from the buzz of the big city for a while. Some schools even organize trips, bringing students out the agrilands and the wall over weekends or during holidays. How does someone get to the outskirts? If you’re a government employee, this is fairly easy - you’ll have access to go beyond the wall, but not too frequently unless it’s related to work. If you’re from Greater London and want to go to the outskirts, you can attempt to do so on your own but it’s risky - you will most likely get caught before you figure out the way. The best way is to find someone in the Safehouse Network or someone from the Underground Movement that can help - the UM acts as guides, helping you through the intricate underground tunnel system to the outskirts. You will be vetted by them too, because they’re not about to risk their hide for some undercover government agent, so having a good recommendation helps. How does London interact with the international community? It doesn’t, not as far as the average person in the street is concerned, anyway, but London does maintain formal, diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, though only the people high up in the government are allowed to leave the country. There are some exceptions, such as people deployed through the military or traveling to represent England in sports championships. Money and the right contacts might make a trip possible too. It's not common and if you have been outside of the country, there is a risk that the memory department may pay you a visit. How the international community interacts with London and England in turn is influenced greatly by the fact that England enjoys overwhelming technical and military superiority. Other countries mostly leave England to its own devices, keeping up tenuous trade agreements. What’s happening in the international world? The world is the world, still divided into the states we know today. It's in turmoil with a great deal of ability-related trouble, as the rest of the world does not have access to the ability regulatory technology that helps keep the precarious peace within London’s wall. The global superpowers are now London, Russia and China - American warfare has led to it being tried at international courts in mid 2020s, and it’s been struggling to recover its reputation and power ever since.  Does social media exist? Yes it does, though inside the walls everything is surveilled by the government, while in the outskirts you can’t count upon particularly good reception and there aren’t as many social platforms as in our day. There are Facebook, IG, Snapchat equivalents, but highly regulated internally. Why does the Elephant Graveyard look so weird? The Elephant Graveyard is a peculiar looking area, few who live there will know why it looks nothing alike anywhere else in the surrounding area, and they are not likely to find out considering the landscape was shaped as such by events wiped from collective memory during the Void. That said, it doesn’t necessarily take knowledge about the Void to start theorizing that powerful elemental manipulators might have been involved in creating the strange terrain, and in that they would be right. So, the mysterious Outlands, could you tell me a bit more? Cities outside of government control are scattered across what used to be Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Many are ruined and few live in them. All are under heavy surveillance by the British military. Military bases are scattered across the British Isles, as are research facilities run by the government, also under heavy military protection. The people living in the Outlands are the descendants of those who chose to stay behind back in 2019, and though they are largely cut off from the rest of the world due to the military controlling the borders, they were not influenced by the memory deletion of 2019, as were all the people whose descendants now live in the inner city and in the outskirts. That said, due to the nature of what happened during those years, most of those who stayed behind and who managed to stay alive would have been people without abilities. Today these cities and settlements exist mostly at the mercy of the British government, but they can defend themselves and must be self-sufficient. Certain settlements and groups are more aggressive than others in face of the military patrols, and clashes happen, often with catastrophic results for both sides. These settlements do have some quality technology to deal with ability based violence and warfare, and some have also proved to be problematic by breaking into research facilities, stealing valuable technology and information. Are sports still a thing? Yes! Inside London, sports are still very much a thing— football (soccer), rugby, cricket, etc. All of these are still popular. Same with in the Outskirts. Internationally, London has Olympic teams which do go and compete, but their memories are inspected and “adjusted” after they return. Is it right that my character can have more than one power? Yes and no. This goes only for elemental manipulation as this is a special category of powers. Elemental manipulators are most commonly born with the ability to manipulate all of the four basic elements, meaning water, fire, earth and air. However, all elemental manipulators will have a clear affinity for one (sometimes two) elements. Mastering two elements completely is rare, though some do, and in those instances two particular combinations may lead to magmakinesis (earth and fire manipulation) or atmokinesis (air and water manipulation). It is far more common, however, for elemental manipulators to master one element only, from which they can develop. Cryokinesis develops from hydrokinesis, while both botanokinesis, metallokinesis and tectokinesis develop from geokinesis as different forms of specialization. In this case, cryokinesis and hydrokinesis will count as two elements, even if they are tied together. A character may not master cryokinesis and also know pyrokinesis, for example. Can I request an ability? If there’s an ability you’d like that’s not on our list, provided it can fall under an ability family, please ask an admin, we can’t promise we’ll okay it, but please ask! We’ll only allow this after site opens. 

[moon-mirage]

If you’re doing the Cresswell AU thing still, could you do Anastasia? I’ve just been obsessed with that movie/musical lately. Thanks!

Yay, I have so many thoughts about an Anastasia AU. It would be one I would love to write if I enjoyed writing more. :P But I think I came up with a pretty cool story and I hope you’re going to like it.

— — —

Have I watched the movie? Definitely! Several times. :)

Ideas from the movie I’ll use: A whole lot but I’m pretty sure I’ll come up with a few twists make as to not simply copy everything from the movie.

Ideas from the movie I’ll disregard: The magic stuff mostly (which I think the musical did too), and a few other things.

Background

Though I would love a historic setting I’m not sure that I would pick it for fear of getting a few things wrong (though I could place it in a  fictional country I guess). However, like with the Jerry Maguire AU, I could see it in TLC’s Third Era setting (minus Lunars) - I feel that gives me the opportunity to play with the Earthen countries and technology we have in TLC. So, once again, I would lean towards doing that.

Now, for the setting, I would keep it in the future version of Russia. I had some ideas and I’m glad I could find a passage from the book that kinda agrees with my take. What I imagine is that Russia can be part of both the European Federation AND the Eastern Commonwealth, The country is vast and culturally it can lean towards either Europe or Asia. Now in the books we learn that the “South Russia Province” is indeed part of the European Federation. That is something I personally don’t see depending on what counts as “South”. For me, futuristic Russia would be divided in the (North) Western Province (which is part of the European Federation) and the (South) Eastern Province which falls under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Commonwealth (and its monarchy).

Since I won’t have Lunars and glamour, I think I can be a bit more creative with the time period. Because in 126 T.E., which is when the canon books take place, the Earthen countries are largely at peace. Therefore, I would set the story roughly in the years following the Fourth World War that led to the Treaty of Bremen and Earth being divided into the six regions we know.

So we still have the same characters, technologies, countries, etc - it would just all happen around 100 years earlier.

As for the historic background that sets the things into motion, instead of the Russian revolution, the princess gets lost during the last battle during the Fourth World War between what was formerly known as Russia and China (before the peace treaty comes to pass). The Blackburns were the  former rulers (so they replace the Romanovs in this fic though I wish I could use a non-English name) before the invasion of the Huang line of China. The Chinese army wins the battle, therefore managing to expand the kingdom. What was formerly the Artemisia Palace is now the center of “New” Beijing, the New Beijing Palace. When the war ends and the six Earthen regions sign the Treaty of Bremen, what is left of Artemisia is now within the borders of the Eastern Commonwealth.

Basic Plot Outline

- The story starts thirteen years after the war has ended. Nothing is left of the Blackburn line (no documents, no images, etc) except rumors that the last heir, a daughter, might have survived, taken during the siege by a doctor/scientist in order to protect her. Where she was taken no one knows. Some say she was taken to the European Federation, growing up with the former lover of the doctor. Others think that she is still in the Eastern Commonwealth, raised by the doctor as if she was his own. Others believe she is kept under the exiled queen sister’s careful watch, preventing her from reclaiming her throne. Some say she was badly disfigured during the siege, others that she is a prisoner and others think she doesn’t know her true identity, living the life of a normal girl.

[As you can see and I’m spoilering now, the princess in question could be either Cinder, Cress or Scarlet. Since no one knows who the princess’s father is, there is a possibility that it’s one of the doctor/scientist mentioned here. That would leave either Logan Tanner, the doctor who smuggles Scarlet to France, Linh Garan who adopted Cinder or Dmitri Erland/Sage Darnel.]

- Many tried to find the lost princess, some to reinstall her on the throne, some for the reward money, some to make sure she never comes back in order to destabilise the current monarchy.

- One of the people looking for the lost princess is ex-cadet Carswell Thorne - for the reward money, of course. ;)

- He teams up with the cyborg mechanic Cinder (she takes in some ways the role of Vlad from the movie) who knows New Beijing better, trying to look for clues. Cinder only agrees to find that nebulous princess because Thorne promised her to take her to the European Federation - her only way to escape her stepmother Adri.

[Cinder would also meet Kai, the prince of the Eastern Commonwealth, so there would be some Kaider. ;)]

- Thorne actually has one good lead: A photograph Dr Dmitri Erland, the personal doctor to the royal family, has of the princess. The blue-eyed, blonde child has a remarkable resemblance to the girl he stumbled over at the marketplace earlier that day.

- For Thorne, it’s not important to actually find the princess. It would be enough if everyone thinks he did, earning him money and fame - what more could he ask for? (So, like Dimitri in the movie/musical, he didn’t actually expect to find the lost princess but someone he can pass off as her.)

- He finally finds the girl, Cress, again. She’s an orphan growing up in Mistress Sybil’s orphanage, not knowing who her parents are or where she came from. She’s strangely drawn to the old Artemisia Palace, recognising a few structures that were leftover from the time the Blackburn family ruled but not the ones build after King Rikan ascended the throne.

- Like in the movie, Thorne convinces Cress that while she might not be the princess, there is no reason to believe she can’t be. There is only one way to find out - find the last people connected to the Blackburn line who now live in Paris, France: Levana, the sister of the late queen and her step-daughter, Winter. Cress agrees so she can finally learn more about her past.

- Since Thorne thinks giving a part of the money to Cinder is already more than enough, he doesn’t inform Dmitri Erland. He, Cress and Cinder make their way towards France. [I assume they can’t use the Rampion because Thorne stole it like in canon? And maybe finding the princess is part of getting pardoned? Idk, but using the Rampion would mean they would reach France in ten minutes tops and that’s not enough time to develop my favourite slow-burn Cresswell romance. ^.^]

- Throughout their journey, Thorne tries to help Cress becoming more princess-like like in the movie. She somehow picks up some things quicker than he expected though: Getting Cinder to find out things about the customs and language spoken at the Blackburn court, Cress surprises Thorne by speaking Russian with the dialect of the royals (we know that in canon, while everyone speaks Universal, languages still exist), knowing the outline of the palace and some of the customs and even seems to recognise some people from images. Thorne starts to suspect that Cress is actually the lost princess.

- On their journey, Thorne takes his time showing Cress many things she missed out growing up in an orphanage. Cress starts to question if she really wants to be the lost princess despite having always longed for a home and family. For Thorne, the reward money suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing anymore since it would mean losing Cress. Slowly, Cress and Thorne grow closer, despite Cinder’s warnings, and finally fall in love.

- They are being followed and manage to escape the authorities Adri alerted to Cinder’s disappearance (who legally is her property). Soon, the royal family learns about the fugitive and the cyborg who think they have found the lost princess. While they are now the rightful rulers of the newly-founded Eastern Commonwealth, they know that a heir of the Blackburn line could threaten the stability of their kingdom and send out soldiers to intervene. [This storyline would replace the Rasputin one in some ways and would bring in Kai as a character too who, in canon, was also looking for the lost Lunar princess.]

- In the meantime, Cinder researches more about the lost princess and when they reach France, she separates from Cress and Thorne and makes her way to the small town of Rieux. She finds Scarlet whose grandmother had an affair with Logan Tanner, one of the royal doctors of the Blackburns. Due to the connections and secrets (there are no official birth records of Scarlet who wasn’t born in a hospital but at home), Cinder suspects that Scarlet too could be the lost princess.When special forces arrive to arrest Cinder, she and Scarlet flee towards Paris - and miss the hidden cellar underneath the house. The special forces though find it and send their findings, that Michelle Benoit indeed harboured the lost princess (then severely injured and disfigured in a fire that destroyed much of the old Artemisia Palace) to the E.C. royal family.

[I know Wolf’s heritage is Middle Eastern but I would still love him to be part of the E.C royal special forces. I mean it’s not like people can’t move and work elsewhere. And this way, I can include him in the story. So Wolf leads this operation to find the missing cyborg Cinder.]

- Cress and Thorne still haven’t talked about their future if Cress is the royal princess and what it would mean for their relationship. Instead, they focus on finding Levana Blackburn or Winter Hayle-Blackburn to confirm Cress’s identity.

- Dr Dmitri Erland too arrives in Paris. He heard about Thorne finding a girl that matched the description of the child in the photograph and is desperate to see her. Though he said that the picture showed the lost princess, it’s actually his daughter Crescent who got lost while the palace was attacked. He never lost hope of finding her; therefore, he tricked Thorne into believing that he was looking for the princess rather than his daughter, Crescent.

[I tried to play with the plot twist MM initially wanted to include more into her book series. Since we know TLC, the twist probably wasn’t hard to guess in my fanfic either but I really like that it’s a different take on the Anastasia storyline.]

- Thorne manages to corner the elusive Levana and tries to make her see Cress as he wants her to finally find her family and feels she deserves the life she was always meant to have. He tells her about Cress, Cinder and their journey together, shows images in hopes of convincing her. Levana refuses and gets Thorne thrown out. She then tells one of her henchman (Jacin) to find “Selene” and kill her.

- Winter, who overheard the conversation tries to find her cousin and best friend first and warn her. She and Thorne take off together to find Cress but Winder immediately knows that it’s not her “Selene”.

- That’s when they realise Cress isn’t the lost princess but Cinder. From Thorne’s story and images, Levana  figured it out too (she sees the resemblance between her sister Channary and Cinder) and sent out Jacin to get rid of her.  

- Jacin finds Cinder and Scarlet and they realise that he’s there to kill the lost princess. However, they think it’s Scarlet and Cinder tries her best to protect her but is no match for Jacin.

- That’s when Winter arrives and begs Jacin to spare Selene. The special forces arrive, some of them torn about what to make of finding the lost princess, Selene Blackburn, now a cyborg they have to apprehend. Kai gives the order that nothing should happen to her.

[It would lead to Selene coming back to the Eastern Commonwealth without any ambition to seize the throne. Instead, a Kaider romance would be implied in which she later becomes Empress, joining the two royal lines together.]

- When Dr Erland (Dr Darnel) Cress learns that she’s his daughter and is more than relieved to found part of her family. That also leaves her free to travel the world with Thorne like they did in canon and end similar to the ending of the movie Anastasia.

— — —

I know there are a few plot holes and loose ends but I really love the idea and I was almost tempted to write it. I like how I could mix the world building we have in TLC, and the plot of Anastasia with the one in the books surrounding the lost princess. So thank you very much for suggesting it. :D

[srebrnafh]

#im like starting to suspect that westerners are such apologists when it comes to russia bc they come from post-imperial countries#so their 'historical experience' is much closer to russian than any of other eastern eueopean or post-soviet countries#bc srsly why#russian imperialism#russia is a terrorist state#eastern europe#ukraine

That ^, all of that.

There's a a number of countries that have a long history of being fucked over by historical decisions. And if someone can't guess which ones I mean: I'll spell it our: Central/Eastern Europe.

Partitioned by neighbours (how many countries had that happen to them? in Europe? LOSING the entirety of the country by being divided between two or three VERY imperial looking states next door? Poland - 3 times).

Being included in a federal-ish country by the means of force, coercion, faked elections (in times before good oversight), faked referenda (same), people being transported en masse in, in order to vote? Not sure which of the ex-USSR country was done in by which way, but ask any native of these countries what they think about these times, just ask.

Being included in the abovementioned country and being stripped of the ability to actually sustainably provide for own citizens, up to and including genocide by famine.

Being given away by so-called Western Allies, in a setup between them and USSR, in Yalta convention (and others), to satisfy USSRs demands for more political powers (Poland, Czechoslovakia.... etc etc) becoming a supposedly independent country, still being massively shafted by the situation.

(there were even idiot Westerners at the time, asking in press why, if the USSR-led countries are supposedly so bad and poor and dangerous, aren't there MORE immigrants coming from them - the answer is: no passports, ban on having any western money, everyone going abroad knew that their families could be held as blackmail, border patrols that did actually shoot... check out the Berlin Wall and what happened around it)

Russia was counting on some long-ago animosities between Ukraine and Poland and on both of our nations being unable to let go of 3 generations old issues. And yeah, some on both sides still raise cries like "BUT WOŁYŃ!". But they are in minority. Because while we may have our old dealings, from when each country was biting the other, and Poland had its own ideas about borders... There is no way we would not cooperate when Russia comes and shows their true colours - despite trying to play a civilised, cultured, "western" nation, they are just the biggest bully on this side of the globe.

But if you look at the above and think deeply, honestly about your country's history - and check whether your country was on the side of this shit being DONE to it, or DOING it to others (include cutting up countries on other continents with a straight ruler; moving native population around to fit your country's idea of where and how people should live; stealing part of the native population and jailing/transporting away/killing off their educated/ruling classes to reduce the population's ability to self-govern; starving native population to death by simply taking away whatever they grow and potentially selling stuff back to them for overinflated rate; ordering certain crops to be grown and demanding retribution when they fail even though area was not appropriate for it; damaging local waterways by diverting water and completely polluting the area for variety of harebrained schemes....)

Because if you can't honestly say your country is more like a victim of these than the perpetrator of these... maybe you are a damned imperialist and are trying to excuse Russia because your country is in exactly the same situation. No matter what colour are your victims. You are just the same as Russia.

Okay, as much as I understand the anger of people who are victims of Western media bias against POC, as an Eastern European I feel that we have to explain one thing about the “white people’s war” rhetoric towards the Russian invasion on Ukraine.

This rhetoric still perpetuates the Western ignorance of Russian imperialism & colonialism. It still perpetuates the idea of Russian imperial innocence - which is deadly. Russia is not and never was innocent, period. The first time the name “Russia” (Rossiya) appears in history is when the Grand Duchy of Moscow decides that it is the Third Rome, steals Byzantine symbolism and rhetoric and decides to play new Romans in Eastern Europe, Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. When Westerners see the war in Ukraine, both the left and right sides of the political spectrum see only white Ukrainians, because it is convenient to them. When Eastern Europeans and other post-Soviet people (apart from Russians) see the war in Ukraine, we get flashbacks from Syria and Chechnya. Mariupol literally was given the same treatment as Aleppo and Grozny. C’mon, just Google the Chechen wars and read stories of victims of Russian colonial violence. Read the stories of people who experienced violence in Russian prisons of war. And we fear that might be next.

This rhetoric perpetuates the idea that the Russian invasion of Ukraine hurts only Europeans, in particular, white Europeans, which is simply not true. This war deepens the global food crisis. This war already hurts countries in Africa and South Asia. Those countries cannot afford for the food prices to go up once again, especially after the crisis caused by the pandemic, period. (Unless you wish for more people in Africa and South Asia to experience hunger… but then stop calling yourself an anti-racist).

This rhetoric also perpetuates the idea that all Europeans = white, Western, privileged Europeans and erases the Eastern European experience. And we have experienced too much of white Western b*llshit, believe us.

[arashicz]

The Outside US ask set: 1, 21, 24 ;D (With extra emphasis on 21 XD)

21 is already answered in the previous ask, sowyyyy :D1. favourite place in your country?Macocha abyss and Moravian karst - It is a nature reserve and a tourist attraction near my city and the nature is wonderful here - not to mention the caves underground!

South Bohemia - beautiful region with many ponds, rivers (along with our most important and longest - Vltava). Basically main fisherman region with the closest connection to the bodies of water.

We Czechs usually go on boats in summer and Vltava and South Bohemian region are the most favourite locations. (just this picture makes me wanna grab a paddle!)

Nature is superb and the cities are fairy-tale like and beautiful. Here, have Český Krumlov.

24. what other nation is joked about most often in your country? Russia - they occupied our country for more than 40 years as the Soviet union and many Czech people (mainly the ones living during that time) don’t like them. And when we Czechs don’t like someone or something, we joke about it and mock it.

Germany - basically the same reason as Russia, we lived under their occupation for a very long time since western countries basically sold us to them because they hoped it would satisfy Hitler’s hunger and he will leave the rest of the Europe alone. (well fuck)They are also our neighbors - which makes our countries somehow related. Many Czechs have relatives in Germany (me included) and the number rises when you move closer to the borders. We have common economy and many German companies have their branches in our country.We do love Germans but we make fun of them - German people are krauts, serious, tall, have absolutely killing porn industry, jodel in lederhosen and dirndl all the time, their language sounds like they’re constantly shouting about killing little puppies, listen to ugly brass-band music and drown themselves in great ammounts of beer. There comes the rivality with us - because there is no greater war than the one that occurs when German and a Czech try to compete in the drinking contest.

SLOVAKIA - our dearest “brothers”. We lived many years as the same country or as the part of other bigger complex. Our languages are basically the same, our culture and nature as well. Some of them tend to have little brother complex  - our economy was always slightly better and when our country was growing and living in prosperity, they had crisis. Slovaks tend to immigrate in Czechia - we have better paid jobs, better education, prettier girls. (but Slovak boys are more handsome than Czechs, I have to admit that :) )Many of the economics and industry was placed in our country during the Austria-Hungary pact and Slovaks were the farmers and agriculturalists. After end of the Austria-Hungary pact we had better economics because all the industry branches while Slovakia was still slightly poorer.We love our slovak brothers but we do make fun of them as we make fun of basically anything and both parts kinda enjoy our little “rivality”.Not to mention, their hockey team is worse. ♥ ;)

To make things clear - I love all these nations (my OC Summoner is German after all) but I don’t mind saying a few facts and I hope nobody gets offended with this post. :)