Does the logic fit the facts?

Supposing a nation has mineral reserves that are more expensive to extract than they are elsewhere around the world. Unless supply of that mineral is outpaced by demand and its price rises enough to include the greater cost of extraction, this nation is condemned to leave its resources underground and import the cheaper products from other nations, which will weigh on its balance of payments. Though demand for that mineral is growing, supply is abundant and could literally flood the market. So the aforementioned nation’s logical strategy is to reduce world supply by all means at its disposal.

Conventional oil production in North America peaked four decades ago, but extraction from the vast fields of shale oil could not compete with the light sweet oil that was being pumped up around the Persian Gulf and in the Libyan Desert. In 1980, Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. Iranian infrastructures were damaged and the country has been subjected to various embargoes ever since. In 1990, Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. The result was Desert Storm and wrecked infrastructures in both Kuwait and Iraq, the latter being wrecked again in 2003. Finally, in 2011, Libya was bombed, a dictator was executed and replaced by various armed militia, and oil production almost stopped. The price of a barrel soared after 2003 and has stabilised around the $100 mark. Mission accomplished!

Naked Force

Bertolt Brecht‘s play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” describes how a criminal gang led by Ui takes control of Chicago, then of neighbouring Cicero and ambitions more conquests. This was a reminder of Al Capone’s reign in the 1920s but, in 1940, Brecht had Germany and Austria in mind and named Ui’s associates Roma(Röhm), Giri(Goering) and Givola(Goebbels), with Dogsborough(Hindenburg) and Dullfeet(Dollfuss) as the city mayors. Ui rises to power by causing violence and offering protection, and by intimidating and murdering those who oppose him, which were precisely the methods used by Hitler’s National Socialist Party. However, organised crime’s main activity is the traffic of illegal goods and services, whereas the Nazis were after political power from the start. They adopted gangster tactics but their strategy was aimed at controlling all of society, not just its illicit part. This is the weak point of Brecht’s allegory, Ui is not an ideologue and Hitler was not the boss of a gang of pimps, bootleggers and thieves. What does link them together, however, is their complete lack of scruples. This being so, the Uis, Corleones and Sopranos, and their real life counterparts, are social parasites that can be resisted. The totalitarian state, whether Fascist, National Socialist, plutocratic or Communist, is another matter. When governments rely on murder, blackmail and torture instead of the rule of law, standing up to them is impossible without outside support.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Russian labour camps often mentions the struggles opposing criminal prisoners and political ones, where the former though fewer in numbers usually had the upper hand. The thieves dominated the camps because they banded together, whereas the other convicts often died of exhaustion before they realised what had happened to them. (Solzhenitsyn had been a soldier for four years of fighting when he was arrested in 1945. He found support in the wave of war toughened rank and file, imprisoned like him for not being enthusiastic enough about Stalin’s military genius). The thieves also benefited from the official doctrine that considered banditry to be a minor evil compared to ideological deviations real or supposed. And they colluded with the camp guards, informing them in exchange for favours. So the criminal mind-set contaminated state officials, and the NKVD developed the structures of a criminal organisation. When he was allowed to return to Moscow in 1957, Solzhenitsyn remarked on the number of words and expressions belonging to the thieves’ slang that were being used currently by everyone. He wondered if this linguistic permeation was the sign of a society ruled by a kleptocracy. This diagnosis was confirmed when the USSR was divided up and taken over by a handful of oligarchs who had the profiles of Mafia bosses.

Born in 1952, Vladimir Putin grew up in a rough working class neighbourhood of Leningrad. Being somewhat undersized probably determined his early and intensive practise of judo, which uses the adversary’s weight and strength. His grandfather had been one of Stalin’s personal cooks, and his father had worked for the NKVD during WW2, a background that predestined him for recruitment by the then KGB. State security services are very powerful instruments as they combine police prerogatives and military secrecy. This power is often abused by governments and was by those of Soviet Russia and its satellites. The KGB was the mainstay of Moscow’s rule over the Soviet empire and, when the Communist Party and the Red Army fell apart, it managed to survive the storm with another name change to FSB. Putin resigned from the KGB with the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1991 after the failed putsch, and worked with the mayor of Saint Petersburg (ex-Leningrad). In 1996 he moved to Moscow and joined Yeltsin’s inner circle. In 1998, Yeltsin put Putin in charge of the FSB and named him Prime Minister the following year, just in time to be acting president when Yeltsin resigned on New Millennium’s Eve. Putin’s election to the presidency three months later meant that state security was in control of the administration. An organisation, whose very long criminal record had never been called to account, was back in power with a nationalist programme. It is showing signs that it wants to expand its dominion. Putin was irresistible inside Russia, and it is uncertain whether a divided Europe, a contracting America and a side-lined China, all glued up in a financial quandary, can put up a more solid resistance.