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Kamil Galeev Profile picture
@kamilkazani
Jan 23, 2024 • 6 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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Do you realise that the Moscow Kremlin is the largest Italian fortress in the world? Far surpassing anything you can find in Italy, Europe or elsewhere? That its construction in the late 15th c. required around 200-250 million bricks, making it a project of Albert Kahnish scale? Image
Do you also realise that Moscow Kremlin is only *one* of the fortresses Italians built in these god forsaken lands in around 1500? There were more, see the Kolomna Kremlin for example. Don't look at the architecture, think about the insane quantity of bricks it took to build it Image
Obviously, original Kremlin was significantly larger. Moats and outworks were all destroyed in the 19th c. The sheer size, the speed of construction (-> material production) suggests the concentrated efforts comparable with Stalin's industrialisation happening in around 1500Image
So let's get this straight. You are let's say a skilled architect from Bologna. You sort of have customers and orders in Europe. But a brutal savage warlord in the far Northeast can concentrate resources at a far greater scale (& commission a larger construction) than anyone Image
What you don't get is that savagery and brutality of the Russian state is not a bug. It's a feature. A perk. Facing no checks, having no legal or institutional constraints, the northern warlord can just rob the country and concentrate resources for your megaproject right now Image
It is the brutality, savagery & absence of legal or institutional constraints that turns Russia into the dream customer of a European industrialist that has a nice defence related project to sell. Kremlin. A tank plant. An integrated manufacturing solution

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More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Nov 2
For decades, any resistance to the Reaganomics has been suppressed using the false dichotomy: it is either “capitalism” (= which meant Reaganomics) or socialism, and socialism doesn’t work

Now, as there is the growing feeling that Reaganomics don’t work, the full rehabilitation of socialism looks pretty much inevitable
I find it oddly similar to how it worked in the USSR. For decades, the whole propaganda apparatus had been advancing the false dichotomy: it is either socialism, or capitalism (= meaning robber barons)
Now, as there is a growing feeling that the current model does not work, we must try out capitalism instead. And, as capitalism means robber barons, we must create robber barons

We have to distribute all the large enterprises between the organized crime members. This is the way
Read 4 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Oct 29
Truth is: the words like Rus/Russian had many and many ambiguous and often mutually exclusive meanings, and not only throughout history, but, like, simultaneously.

For example, in the middle ages, the word "Rus" could mean:
1. All the lands that use Church Slavonic in liturgy. That is pretty much everything from what is now Central Russia, to what is now Romania. Wallachians, being the speakers of a Romance language were Orthodox, and used Slavonic in church -> they're a part of Rus, too
2. Some ambiguous, undefined region that encompasses what is now northwest Russia & Ukraine, but does not include lands further east. So, Kiev & Novgorod are a part of Rus, but Vladimir (-> region of Moscow) isn't

These two mutually exclusive notions exist simultaneously
Read 6 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Oct 27
The greatest Western delusion about China is, and always has been, greatly exaggerating the importance of plan. Like, in this case, for example. It sounds as if there is some kind of continuous industrial policy, for decades

Which is a huuuuuuge misrepresentation of reality
It is more like:

1. Mao Zedong dies. His successors be like, wow, he is dead. Now we can build a normal, sane economy. That means, like in the Soviet Union

2. Fuck, we run out of oil. And the entire development plan was based upon an assumption that we have huge deposits of it
3. All the prior plans of development, and all the prior industrial policies go into the trashbin. Because again, they were based upon an assumption that we will be soon exporting more oil than Saudi Arabia, and without that revenue we cannot fund our mega-projects
Read 14 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Oct 9
Yes. Behind all the breaking news about the capture of small villages, we are missing the bigger pattern which is:

The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper
If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk (that is here) and Rabotino, you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person Image
The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast
Read 6 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Sep 7
Yes, and that is super duper quadruper important to understand

Koreans are poor (don't have an empire) and, therefore, must do productive work to earn their living. So, if the Americans want to learn how to do anything productive they must learn it from Koreans etc
There is this stupid idea that the ultra high level of life and consumption in the United States has something to do with their productivity. That is of course a complete sham. An average American doesn't do anything useful or important to justify (or earn!) his kingly lifestyle
The kingly lifestyle of an average American is not based on his "productivity" (what a BS, lol) but on the global empire Americans are holding currently. Part of the imperial dynamics being, all the actually useful work, all the material production is getting outsourced abroad
Read 8 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Sep 1
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other

"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education

Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s
Read 10 tweets

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