Gorbachev, the Americans and the end of the world as we know it.

Friday, October 03, 2008 0403 EST. Got up far too early, but I write better prose when I do. I sit here in my green bathrobe, puffing vile cigarette smoke at the ceiling, ignoring the haruspices of CNN poring over their debate dial meter readings. I contemplate the world through Google Earth. I scroll over Central Asia from 4,000 miles above our planet, watching the labels wink into view and consider the men and women of Central Command watching their feeds from the National Reconnaissance Office as satellites swoop overhead at orbital perigee, giant cameras opening shutters at the Line of Apsides. The sum of all forces will equal mass times acceleration. What laws apply to the men and nations below? It is all perturbations and differential equations of a political sort, giving rise to a yet another fit of BlaiseP logorrhea.

Mute the TV. Listening to Tangerine Dream I recall the Emerald Table, come down to us through the medieval alchemists, probably from an Egyptian prayer to Thoth. I insert it as I learned it, for no particular reason, simply because I find it beautiful.
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True, without falsehood, certain and most true,
That which is above is the same as that which is below,
And that which is below is the same as that which is above,
For the performance of miracles is of the One Thing.

Therefore let all obscurity flee from thee.
This is the strong force of all forces,
Overcoming every subtlety and penetrating every solid thing.
So the world was created.

My essays always start out like some gargantuan James Michener book, which all begin with the primordial ooze and Neolithic men hunting on what will later become the Chesapeake or Poland or Bergen County. This one seems be no exception.

Rewind the clock to the year 1919 and the Russian Revolution. Since the 1830s, the Russian and British empires had been warily circling each other in Central Asia, enclosing territories as the maps were drawn.

Friedrich Engels probably makes the first reference to the nation of “Afghanistan” in 1919.

The geographical position of Afghanistan, and the peculiar character of the people, invest the country with a political importance that can scarcely be over-estimated in the affairs of Central Asia. The government is a monarchy, but the king’s authority over his high-spirited and turbulent subjects, is personal and very uncertain. The kingdom is divided into provinces, each superintended by a representative of the sovereign, who collects the revenue and remits it to the capital.

The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only, eschewing trade and commerce, which they contemptuously resign to Hindus, and to other inhabitants of towns. With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits.

The Afghans are divided into clans, over which the various chiefs exercise a sort of feudal supremacy. Their indomitable hatred of rule, and their love of individual independence, alone prevents their becoming a powerful nation; but this very irregularity and uncertainty of action makes them dangerous neighbours, liable to be blown about by the wind of caprice, or to be stirred up by political intriguers, who artfully excite their passions.

The two principal tribes are the Dooranees and Ghilgies, who are always at feud with each other. The Dooranee is the more powerful; and in virtue of their supremacy their ameer or khan made himself king of Afghanistan. He has a revenue of about £10,000,000. His authority is supreme only in his tribe. The military contingents are chiefly furnished by the Dooranees; the rest of the army is supplied either by the other clans, or by military adventurers who enlist into the service in hopes of pay or plunder.

Justice in the towns is administered by cadis, but the Afghans rarely resort to law. Their khans have the right of punishment even to the extent of life or death. Avenging of blood is a family duty; nevertheless, they are said to be a liberal and generous people when unprovoked, and the rights of hospitality are so sacred that a deadly enemy who eats bread and salt, obtained even by stratagem, is sacred from revenge, and may even claim the protection of his host against all other danger. In religion they are Mohammedans, and of the Soonee sect; but they are not bigoted, and alliances between Sheeahs and Soonees are by no means uncommon.

The Great Game ran from roughly 1813 and the Treaty of Gulistan to the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. The Treaty of Gulistan ended a long-running war between Persia and Imperial Russia. Russia got much of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Dagestan. Iran got nothing. Curiously, the British ambassador Sir Gore Ouseley, a great friend of the Persian king negotiated the treaty. Britain was meddling in Persia, but Britain was meddling everywhere. Modern Iran views the Treaty of Gulistan the way we might regard Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Accords. There was no peace in our time nor was there in 1813. The Great Game would have far-reaching consequences, right into modern times.

Peace is a pretty illusion. War is the reality of man’s relationships to other men. Peace is only a hudneh, a cease-fire, clearing the battlefield, regrouping, rearming.

The Great Game ended with a de-facto partition of Persia into a Russian zone in the north, a British zone to the south and a no-man’s-land in the center. Afghanistan was delegated to the British. Tibet was allotted to China. Persia’s parliament rejected the treaty outright. The Afghan khan cheerfully ignored it. The Chinese would later use this to their advantage in their subjugation of Tibet.

Though I do not play Diplomacy here, I would presume all the players know of the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. With the end of the Great Game and the tidying up of loose ends between Russia, France and Britain, the stage was set for World War 1.

Friday, October 03, 2008 2252 EST.

Russia, ever the abode of schemers and plotters, began the Great Game anew in 1919. The Tsar was gone, but the geopolitical realities had not changed. Why do people and nations think these things ever change? One people cannot rule another any more than a master can truly own a slave. The conceit of it all!