>>Nikos
>> What’s the country’s ratio of ethnic Russians to ethnic Belarussians?
The ratio is approximately 60 to 40. Interesting enough, with two state languages, Belarussian and Russian, more then half of the population consider Russian language as their native, mostly due to a) the centralized Soviet education system which limited Belarussian language curriculum up until 1980s, and b) large number of immigrants relocated to Belarus from all over the Soviet Union after the second world war.

There’s a new book out by Yale’s Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. Among other things (that’s an understatement), it takes up the notion that the “MSM” no longer serves society’s information needs, if it ever did, and that the Internet is poised to pick up the torch through “social production.”

Indeed, in addition to Open Source, social production experiments are popping up like, well poppies. Here’s one of my personal favorites (the proprietor, Kent Bye, is also a great interview).

The book’s drawn blurbs from such blogospheric heavies as Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jack Balkin and Larry Lessig, and Crooked Timber says it “fizzes with ideas,” and it really does. It also practices what it preaches: it’s freely available and open for input.

After indulging myself in Benkler radiant optimism, I went looking for a cold bucket of water. I found a damning and brilliant indictment of the new Internet sociopolitical ideal by Berkeley’s Hubert Dreyfus. He deploys Kierkegaard’s unique critique of the Habermasian public sphere:

Kierkegaard would surely argue that, while the Internet, like the Press, allows unconditional commitments, far from encouraging them, it tends to turn all of life into a risk-free game. So, although it does not prohibit such commitments, in the end, it inhibits them. Like a simulator the Net manages to capture everything but the risk. Our imaginations can be drawn in, as they are in playing games and watching movies, and no doubt game simulations sharpen our responses for non-game situations, but so far as games work by capturing our imaginations, they will fail to give us serious commitments. Imagined commitments hold us only when our imaginations are captivated by the simulations before our ears and eyes…

The temptation is to live in a world of stimulating images and simulated commitment and thus to lead a simulated life. As Kierkegaard says of the present age, “It transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.” And he adds that “[when] life’s existential tasks have lost the interest of reality; illusion cannot build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness which ripens to decisions.”

Ouch. I resemble that remark. I think it’s worth wrestling with.

And this guy David Marples, who is he exactly? What does he know about Russians and from where? I never met a Russian who wants “to control” Belarus, the general opinion is to let it go and not spend money (or other valuable resources) on it. I don’t meet people from Kremlin, etc., I’m talking about my friends who span the range from workers to intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn isn’t representative of russian people in any meaningful way, at least not anymore. And I’ve searched through the russian internet and didn’t find a single place where names Solzhenitsyn and Lukashenko are put together in any meaningdul way, the same for words Solzhenitsyn and Belurus, etc. Go figure…

Vlad, “In our case, it’s really four OR five people, at least, that Lukashenko PROBABLY ordered to kill”, it seems you are not too certain, are you? That’s brainwashing by hearsay, my dear, it won’t wash with serious people… Go find the facts first, then talk on the radio. Colin Powell in miniature…

And this guy Pavol is simply amazing, his switching from “spreading democracy” language to “spheres of interest” one is just short of laughable. These are different discourses, my dear, and for different audiences, one for elites, another for hoi polloi, and they don’t mix. Study from Bush administration, determine your target audience, learn the message (talking points) and stay on message (parrot). Good luck!

“Russians in the Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn mold, Marples said, are reformers and liberals to the point when, faced with the loss of Ukraine, they become reactionary nationalists.”

Wow, and you tell us that Marples believes that Solzhenitsyn would have voted for Lukashenko – that’s a startling statement. It inspired me to do some Solzhe searches and I found his famous Harvard Commencement speech from 1978

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

It’s called “A world split apart” and much of it is prescient to today. I find the speech both insightful and befuddling. Most of all though, it reaffirms the divide between East and West perspectives.

An excerpt: “But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.â€?

Thanks Chris for sending me down this road – I also just ordered “Demonsâ€? from Amazon, I’m excited to read it – I LOVE Dostoevsky!

If anyone feels outrage about how the election was defrauded in Belarus, the media controlled, and the good people of that suffering nation hoodwinked should read, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 election and Why They’ll Steal it Again, a well researched and documented expose by professor Mark Crispen Miller about how Bush/Rove/Cheney rigged the last election right here.

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/-/world/eastern-central-europe/belarus/

And Condi Rice has the nerve to excoriate Belarus???

Is their any great literature coming out of that region now?

Putin is Czar there and in Moscovy.

Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea! Who owns those adorable pipelines that run through Belarus?

I hope you will touch on the “Putin Doctrine� and how that affects the dynamic in the region. I’m new to this but the Putin doctrine has eerie similarities to the Bush doctrine.

However, cultural forces might also have a role. The Tatars are ethnically and culturally distinct from Russians; this has fueled popular support for more autonomy from Russia. Belarusian culture has been largely subsumed into the Russian; it’s possible this will diminish any Belarusian impulse to get out from under Moscow’s thumb.

Belarus is the ideal retirement spot for our neocons.