Onward, comrades!

Yanis Varoufakis, UnHerd:

The broader tragedy, however, is that this war-as-wealth-transfer mechanism only works so well because the rest of the Western world has lost its capacity to resist. And nowhere is this more painfully evident than in Europe, which suffers the most from the Iran war and understands the least; its leaders stumble about in a daze, mouthing platitudes about “European sovereignty” while doing nothing to achieve it.

Europe’s industries, already reeling from shifting their dependence from cheap Russian gas to prohibitively expensive Texan and New Mexican liquefied natural gas, are being bled dry. They export manufactured goods that require stable supply chains and predictable commodity prices. Alas, the Iran war has sent shipping insurance costs through the roof and rerouted tankers around the Horn of Africa. As oil and gas price volatility cascades directly into European manufacturing costs, the disruption to Gulf energy infrastructure is rippling through every petrochemical-dependent supply chain in Europe.

2026

Also, for the Kazakhs in the novel, China looms as a more menacing and extremist alternative to Soviet power; that is the land of mind control.

—Katerina Clark, Foreword to Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), xi.

Perestroika wasn’t created by the people, it was created by a single person: Gorbachev. Gorbachev and a handful of intellectuals . . .

—Speaker in Svetlanta Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, (New York: Random House, 2017), 21.