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Ukraine, Democracy and the Most Dangerous Moment in Human History
The End of the Liberal Hegemony I have written recently why I think the West rules, for now https://the-perspective-pool.scriber.to/article/the-tri-polar-world-and-why-the-west-rules-for-now . Having control of the globe’s reserve and trade currencies and international payments gives a significant advantage to the US and to a lesser extent Europe. It remains to be seen whether the sweeping sanctions against Russia will cause other countries - concerned by similar reprisals - to migrate away from a dependency on the US Dollar. It is hard to see that happening any time soon. Crypto may play a part, as some coins become a more frequent means of international exchange, and more companies and even governments accept digital assets on their balance sheets; however we are not there yet, and the USD will be hard to replace as the global “hard” currency of international borrowing, financing and trade. Despite this advantage, the leadership of the liberal capitalist world is increasingly confined to the economic: the West has lost much of its political, cultural and ideological hegemony in the face of growing populations and economies elsewhere. In 2014 Russia was suspended from the G8 (which became the G7) after its annexation of Crimea: it was relatively politically easy for a gang of liberal democracies comprising the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan to expel Russia as a member of their club. In contrast, the G20, which includes China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa (none of which have unequivocally denounced Russia’s actions in Ukraine) did not expel Russia. The US may be very unhappy that President Putin has indicated that he will attend the next G20 meeting due in October, but Putin knows that a decent portion of the crowd is not overtly hostile to him. The US may be outraged, but if it boycotts the G20 it will create yet another large fissure in the edifice of liberal, global institutions. Globalization has ended, and with it much of the power of the post-Second World War geopolitical structures. What has also shattered is the implied linkage between social liberality and democracy. The West’s Foreign Policy Mistakes In the new tripolar world the liberal democracies of the West risk driving their opponents - and sometimes allies - in to the arms of Russia or China. The West had a tendency to believe that exporting democracy was the same as creating a liberal capitalism in its own image. These are a few of the recent examples of messily handled foreign policy issues that have contributed to conflict in Europe on a scale not seen since 1945. EU to the Right: Hungary and France Brexit and Trump were not aberrations of the Anglo-Saxon world, but signs of larger forces of nationalism that are rising again. Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party retained power with a landslide electoral win in Hungary on 4 April, and immediately branded President Zelensky of Ukraine an “opponent”. At least Orban is consistent; he has always been critical of Ukraine, the EU - of which Hungary has been a member since 2004 - immigration, and LGBTQ rights. As France’s Presidential election first round of voting showed recently, as was the case in 2017 Macron’s only challenge will be from Marine Le Pen of the National Front. Le Pen, daughter of the founder of the National Front, has policies that include dramatically cutting immigration, limiting immigrant’s rights to access social services and the outlawing of Muslim headscarves. France’s politics has fragmented in to more extremes, to the detriment of the formerly dominant Socialists and Republicans: 57% of the first round votes we cast for candidates that could be regarded as “extreme”, left or right. The EU is catching up with electoral patterns seen in the US (Trump), Brazil (Bolsonaro), Mexico (AMLO) and several African countries. In India, the world’s largest democracy, the ruling BJP party made further gains in state elections in March, giving Hindu-nationalist President Modi - no fan of the West - an even stronger position. There are now a significant number of democracies around the world that now have decidedly illiberal political inclinations. The Most Dangerous Moment: Ukraine Escalation The great thinker and writer Noam Chomsky recently said that we are fast approaching the most dangerous moment in human history, as we confront environmental destruction and the “grim cloud of fascism”. Chomsky said it reminded him of his first, youthful, publication in February 1939, as he observed the fall of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Barcelona to fascist forces. The constant news on Ukraine, and the shocking nature of warfare projected through mainstream and social media may cause us all to believe the war will be over soon; that it is an intense and bloody conflict that neither side can afford to keep waging. Regrettably this may be wishful thinking. Western arms and finance will keep Ukraine in the fight but not give it command of its own skies, and Russia cannot afford to give up its attempts to take the Donbas and Crimea. Even Biden’s slip in which he implied that Putin needed to be removed from power cuts away some diplomatic routes to an exit. The longer this goes on the more likely the risk of a serious miscalculation. The Greatest Mistake The greatest error made by the West - eclipsing the examples above - is to have assumed that the end of the Cold War or the modernization of the Chinese economy would cause Russia, China (or India for that matter) to adopt Western political, cultural and economic norms. It is particularly true of the political classes in the US and UK that they do not understand the perspectives of anyone from outside their own political village, and assume any “democracy” is fully equipped with all the same complex trappings of longstanding political culture that the US or UK has. As one exasperated Belgian colleague said to me after the 2015 Brexit vote, “You guys don’t get it: we are all trying to run the liberal capitalist democratic model you gave to everyone after the [Second World] War; you know how it works and have the experience and yet you don’t help anyone else understand how to do it”. I conveyed this to one of my connected political friends in the UK, who’s response was “nonsense!”. It is that level of misunderstanding - the unawareness of the loss of the West’s political leadership and the growing confidence of developing countries to choose their own paths - that makes escalation a real risk from here. Yours Duncan Further Reading
Duncan Wales
Apr 12, 2022 · 11 min read
Russia is a Bolshevik State once again
The old Soviet Union may have collapsed, but Bolshevism left its mark The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and all the seismic events around it - including the collapse of governments throughout the former Warsaw Pact countries - passed off with relatively little bloodshed. Yes, there was violence and political turmoil, including the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in Romania and a full-blown coup attempt in Moscow, but these were mercifully brief. The notable and horrifying exception was Yugoslavia, where the collapse of the communist government led to bloody, internecine chaos as the country was torn apart on ethnic and religious lines over several years. As a man still in my 20’s I served in the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, and witnessed how quickly a civilized society, which had so much cultural similarity to my own, could descend into violence and destruction. We are all only ever separated from those dark forces by a paper thin barrier; and that realization shocked me. Despite the blood and tear soaked warnings of Yugoslavia, the collapse of communism and the world’s second largest super-power, engendered a feeling amongst many that liberal democracy had won; and that humanity had found the only really acceptable way to run itself. What the impressively erudite historian and thinker Francis Fukuyama described as “the end of history”. The Bolshevik Highjack of the Russian Revolution Watching the dreadful events unfold in Ukraine, I hear commentators saying Fukuyama may be right, and that the global revulsion of Russia’s invasion will be a reinforcement to liberal democracy. However, what I find troubling about President Putin’s motivations is that they are powered by ideas that are not new, and precede the end of the Soviet Union; in fact his ideas share most with the origins of the Soviet Union. President Putin is the natural inheritor of political predecessors of a century before who would have entirely understood, and empathized, with his thinking. Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades highjacked the Russian Revolution from more “mainstream” communists in a coup in 1917 and made the Soviet Union a regime of iron rule by the minority, banning other communist factions in the process. The takeover was precarious, and the Great War was still raging. Russia was near military and economic collapse, and under considerable pressure to extricate Russia from the War Lenin agreed to end hostilities with Germany and its allies at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk; a treaty that ceded the Baltic States to Germany, acknowledged the independence of Finland, effectively gave Belarus and Ukraine to the Austrian sphere, and Georgia to the Ottoman Turks. Having removed the newly created Soviet Union from the War with Germany and its allies, the Bolsheviks fought a civil war for several more years. The British even sent troops to Eastern Russia to support the assorted coalition of “White Russians” resisting communism, in an effort to remove the Bolsheviks and have Russia rejoin the War effort. The Red Army gained the upper hand by the beginning of the 1920’s. Lenin, the great opportunist died in 1924 after a series of strokes. His decline was not politically well managed, and he was succeeded by the rough but charismatic Georgian revolutionary Stalin; a man that Lenin himself had already identified as entirely unsuitable to the post of General Secretary due to his “rudeness”. Trotsky, the senior Bolshevik who had seemed the likely successor to Lenin, found himself at odds with Stalin’s “socialism in one country” philosophy. Stalin exiled the troublesome Trotsky in 1929 and his contribution was expunged from the official history of Bolshevism. In exile Trotsky was eventually given asylum by Mexico, and in 1940 at the age of 60 - when one would have thought he posed less of a threat - he was assassinated. The Genetics of Putin’s Russia are Bolshevik So why am I recounting those distant events in the context of modern “post history” and ostensibly democratic Russia? It is because Putin’s Russia is powered by ideas that are distinctly Bolshevik: Bolshevism, Russia and Ukraine So, particularly in light of the span of time between the 1917 Bolshevik coup and now, and the great events of WWII, the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union what can this tell us about what might happen next? There are a few points worth reminding ourselves about the Bolshevik mentality and what we see in Putin’s foreign policy: Like the Bolsheviks Putin uses violence to secure Russia’s borders : Putin has at least been consistent: Russian troops blasted Grozny flat in order to prevent Chechnya seceding from the Russian Federation in 1999/2000; Russia invaded Georgia and annexed South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008; it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014; destroyed Aleppo and other towns in Northern Syria in order to prop-up Al Assad in 2016, and has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine to remove its government in 2022. Political assassination is an often-used tool : Putin’s regime attempted to assassinate Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko after he stood against a pro-Russian candidate in 2004, successfully assassinated outspoken former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko by poisoning him with polonium in London in 2006, and the GRU attempted to assassinate Sergei Skripal another former spy in Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok in 2018, killing an innocent bystander, and hospitalizing Skripal and his daughter in the process. One would have to assume that amongst Putin’s high current priorities is the assassination of Ukraine’s President Zelensky. The Putin era, like the original Bolshevik period, has been all about old business and unsettled scores. Putin’s Russia does not care about military or civilian casualties – including their own - in achieving their aims : The military of the Russian Federation are surprisingly akin to their Red Army forebears in a number of respects: commanders are not free to say what they actually think to the Kremlin, initiative is not encouraged nor rewarded at any level, logistics are typically overstretched, procurement is not just inefficient but prone to corruption, and it still relies on destruction rather than precision to succeed. The net effect is that the Russian military only has two plays in its book: roll in unopposed or with minimal resistance (like Georgia or Crimea) or hammer everything and everyone flat (like Syria or Chechnya, and increasingly, Ukraine). Russia may have already suffered more than 10% casualties in its assault - so may the Ukrainian military in defense, with civilian casualties in addition. The reality of the bland sounding percentages are that entire front-line combat units will have been denuded to the point they practically cease to exist, and equates to tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed and wounded in a matter of less than a month. These are terrifying statistics reminiscent of Europe in the mid-20th Century not the 21st. After more than 20 years of Putin’s new Bolshevism, a change in leadership is unlikely to substantially alter the Russian State’s Bolshevik instincts : Putin may have made a serious miscalculation over Ukraine; it remains to be seen whether he survives the full consequences politically, and whether it leads to a Kremlin coup. However, short of a full-scale revolution in Russia it is hard to see the successors of Putin not also inheriting the core of the Bolshevik approach. Western countries – notably Germany – are massively increasing their defense spending to accommodate the new reality of (i) a more reluctant USA in terms of its willingness to underwrite all of NATO, (ii) a demonstrably aggressive Russia, and (iii) a China – sympathetic to Moscow - that is growing in confidence and military capability. Putin retains the Bolshevik habit of resorting to any tactic to achieve political ends, so assumes everyone else is equally untrustworthy . It seems very likely that President Putin genuinely believed that Zelensky’s unpopular government (which let’s remind ourselves only had a 23% approval rating before the Russian invasion) was corrupt, intended to do Russia harm and that Russian troops would be able to swiftly replace his government with one sympathetic to Moscow, or destroy Ukraine as an independent country altogether. It is also very likely that Putin sees all the actions of the US and NATO as motivated by a hatred of and desire to undermine Russia; Russia interferes with Western elections, sponsors cyber-attacks on the West’s infrastructure, poisons its dissidents, imprisons its opposition and assumes similar levels of subterfuge are used against it; and to the extent they aren’t used Putin interprets it as a sign of weakness. In the new geopolitical environment there is capacity for a serious mistake to be made by both Putin and NATO as a result of their perpetual misunderstanding and mistrust of each other. Options and end-game There are no particularly good outcomes from here; more troops and civilians will die and more cities and infrastructure will be destroyed in Ukraine. And the security situation in Europe, and globally, will have deteriorated significantly. Either Putin will succeed in his aim of destroying the government of Ukraine and be left with a counterinsurgency or expanded civil war, or he will be forced to retreat from most of Ukraine with its government intact and content himself with annexing the areas of the Donbas in the East that Russian forces have already taken; a civil war has been bubbling there for nearly 8 years and both sides need that resolved. The latter – i.e. a Ukrainian military “victory” sufficient to cause Russia to agree a peace - is not impossible: Russia has committed 190,000 or so troops to its assault of a vast country, while the Ukrainian military is significantly larger than that. Estimates of the size of Ukraine’s military vary, but assume that it has 200,000 trained personnel available, plus an army of volunteer militia. Ukraine is also supplied with man-portable antiaircraft missiles, very simple to use anti-tank weapons and UAVs, which provide a force multiplying effect. Military planning typically assumes that for an assault to be successful the attacker needs 3x the troops of the defender: that ratio goes up to 5x for an enemy that is well prepared and dug in, and maybe 8x for an assault on a city, where complex street fighting is involved. This implies Russia would need an invading force of 1,000,000 troops - or be prepared to use chemical, biological or tactical nuclear weapons against cities - to be confident. At least from the desktop perspective, Russia simply does not have the fighting power to overwhelm all of Ukraine or even take and hold Kyiv. It seems unlikely that Russian public or political opinion would then turn against Putin sufficient to bring about his downfall. If there is any Kremlin unease at the actions of Putin he still has a number of tools to preserve his position (purges are another Bolshevik favorite). Unless illness carries him off prematurely – like Lenin his notorious Bolshevik predecessor – Putin could remain in power for some time. Even if Russian troops withdraw as part of a compromise peace deal, Putin can claim his victory if Ukraine more formally confirms its current intention not to join NATO, and accepts the permanent annexation of the Donbas and Crimea. That would leave a bruised and lesser Ukraine facing a bloodied but more dangerous Russia in a Finland-like standoff. Putin’s Russia has recast geopolitical reality. Invasion and conquest is a - costly but viable - tool once again at the disposal of totalitarian and/or nationalist countries seeking to redraw disputed borders. It was notable that in the United Nations vote to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine held on 2 March 2022, both China (a single party communist state) and India (the world’s largest democracy) abstained. Those are the two most populous countries in the world. Other abstainers included countries with close ties to China, particularly in Africa but also Pakistan, or close ties with Russia, particularly in Central Asia. Most of these countries have disputed borders, in some cases where military skirmishes have already taken place; notably China with Taiwan, and some of its border with India, India with China and Pakistan. Those all involve unresolved business. Western cultural, economic and military power, and the paternalistic liberal democratic model that seemed so dominant for many decades after WWII, is being replaced with an Orwellian multi-polar world, where liberal doesn’t necessarily mean democratic, and democracy doesn’t always guarantee liberality. History may be back with a flourish. Yours, Duncan Further Reading
Duncan Wales
Mar 23, 2022 · 12 min read
The Tri-Polar World and why the West rules, for now
The Tri-Polar World The “tri-polar” concept is not new; Dr Parag Khanna wrote an influential essay titled “ A New Tri-Polar World Order ” in advance of his book “ The Second World ” on the coming of a new tri-polar world order in 2008, not long after the Global Financial Crisis. Khanna identified the US failure to capitalize on the post-Cold War peace dividend, and the rise of the European Union and China as creating a “big three” of geopolitical superpowers. In Khanna’s words, “ Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov ; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.” However, it was my friend and colleague, Jay Pelosky, who created a structured Tri-Polar World investment strategy model, and who has written extensively on the investment implications of having three powerful and diverse economic centers of gravity. Jay described the concept in 2011 and - in light of current events - it seems more prescient than ever (emphasis added): We are now more accepting of the idea of three regions with political and economic centers of gravity, their own currencies, and populations large enough to be both the producers and consumers of large quantities of products; not to mention the ability of people to buy goods and services from anywhere on their smartphones. However if we cast our minds back 35 years (not a long time in geopolitics), Germany - now Europe’s economic engine, and Eurozone lender of last resort - was two separate and very different countries, having been smashed to pieces by WWII and cut in half by the Iron Curtain and Cold War that followed. China was a mainly agrarian, hardline communist developing economy, where it was illegal to have more than one child and student protests were crushed with machine gun fire and tanks. There simply was no “Europe” the way we think of it now, and there was no “China”, the way we know it now. Putting the dramatic changes of the last three decades in to measurable numbers via total GDP, the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the creation of the Euro in 1999 accelerated Europe, and technology businesses accelerated the US; but it is the dramatic economic surge of China since the turn of the century that catches the eye: Gazing at those GDP graphs it is impossible for economics to change so radically without political consequences. The Lessons of 1984 So, you might ask why have I chosen a picture of British novelist George Orwell to head this piece. Orwell published his masterwork “ 1984 ” in 1949, towards the end of his life, and not long after WWII had ended. It is a dystopian vision of a totalitarian future drawing on the ideology, propaganda and ruthlessness of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; the horrifying incoherence of which - where war, murder and starvation make the population “free” - becomes the “doublethink” in the book. Orwell envisages three competing regions; Oceania (the Americas, the UK, Southern English-speaking Africa and Australasia), Eurasia (continental Europe and Russia) and Eastasia (China). Each is constantly at war with one and in alliance with the other. India and parts of Africa and the Middle East appear to be contested. With wry wit Orwell renamed the UK “Airstrip One”, being an outpost of the Oceania dominated by North America; even then there was a sense that the UK never really felt European, and Brexit made Orwell seem right. In my last essay I noted the United Nations General Assembly vote to condemn the Russian attack on Ukraine, and who voted in support and who didn’t: https://the-perspective-pool.scriber.to/article/russia-is-a-bolshevik-state-once-again . At that vote all of Orwell’s Oceania voted to condemn Russia, as did all of his Eurasia (except Russia itself); while China, India and much of Africa abstained. I note that both the UK’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and her Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov are in New Delhi at the moment trying to persuade India to see the Ukraine conflict from their perspective. That feels like a contest to me. The overlaps with Orwell’s vision and the new Tri-Polar economics and geopolitics is alarming. The West Rules, for Now In the real 1949 the West (Orwell’s Oceania) had won, and won irrevocably, it seemed. When Orwell wrote his masterpiece New York was the biggest city in the world and London was 3rd. Eurasia featured in the top list by virtue of Paris and Moscow. By 2015 New York had dropped to 9th on the list, and Shanghai risen to 3rd. The rest are in Eastasia or the contested regions; Paris and Moscow were out of the top 12 list altogether. City size is just one indicator of economic and social development, albeit a stark indicator of change. Ian Morris professor of Classics at Stamford University constructed an index system for measuring social development across all of human history, beautifully described in his superb 2011 book “ Why the West Rules - For Now ”. Prof Morris sets out the path of humanity in terms of that index system, with West (Western Europe and ultimately the US) compared with East (China), and the levels of observed development in each. Western culture has ups and downs with the rise and fall of classical empires until it hits a high of 42 index points at the apotheosis of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century. The next time humanity would reach 42 points was more than 1,400 years later with the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. In the intervening period the East overtook the West with the great civilizations of China, but industrialization caused the West to leap ahead and stay there until the time of Prof Morris’ book, just. By the time Prof Morris wrote, the West was at 1,000 index points; even the less the mathematically minded of you will realize that represents an exponential growth since 1750. To reinforce the point, the world’s human population has more than doubled in my lifetime, and more than quadrupled in the last century. The Greater China So on a social development basis and on total GDP, China looks like it is overhauling Europe and catching the US. Would this make China more likely to follow Russia’s lead and take back Taiwan or other disputed territory? On closer examination the West still has some economic advantages that should give China pause for thought, and further strategic objectives to reach: As the Western powers have shown by the sanctions imposed on Russia, these advantages are still real enough to exert significant economic pain. However, there are some areas where matters are more balanced: The Tri-Polar World appears to be upon us, seemingly the consequence of the end of globalization. The collective West’s ability to impose robust economic sanctions against Russia shows why it still rules, for now. Although Orwell imagined regions where the populations are cut off from each other, the reality is that that modern technology and communications give us all much greater connectivity. That said, the same technology makes promulgating misinformation much easier, and China is effectively building the “spinternet”, a Chinese only version of the web, with carefully managed search results. 1984 , which seemed for so long as a book of its time and superseded by events, is perhaps worth another read. Yours Duncan Further Reading
Duncan Wales
Mar 31, 2022 · 9 min read
The reason we built Scriber
Brussels in the Rain In the late Noughties I found myself in a meeting in the grey surrounds of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels, which houses the officialdom of the European Union. It was a dreary day, the rain splattering the windows outside, as I tried to persuade the EU Commission not to overcomplicate its now notorious MiFID II regulation. This was long before "Brexit", and EU regulation mattered even more to the international financial community then, so there I was, sipping lukewarm instant coffee from a brown plastic cup. Those were different times: the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis was still reverberating, Biden was Vice-President, the US and its allies had just poured 17,000 more troops in to Afghanistan, Russia had invaded Georgia, Quantitative Easing was causing huge activity in financial markets, and Boris Johnson was Mayor of London. My suggestions to the Commission were greeted with strong resistance, and as readers with any first-hand experience of it will know, MiFID II became and remains a needlessly complicated set of rules which are in some areas downright unhelpful to the people who's life they were supposed to improve. Amongst other things it inadvertently reduced the amount and quality of investment research available to institutional investors. The Information Game What surprised me was that one of the Commission's key claims was that large financial institutions had inadequate access to financial information. The financial world was awash with information and data, and it was visible to everyone professionally involved in finance; all one needed in those days was a Bloomberg or Reuters (now Refinitiv) terminal and all the information you could possibly wish to see was there. Since the 1980's financial services had been an industry where front line employees used "computers" as a matter of course, and these same networks had dominated the financial information space ever since. However, the Commission's broad stance - irrational though it seemed to the industry at the time - contained a legitimate point: for anyone not sitting in front of a Bloomberg terminal all day - a government trying to regulate finance, smaller investment funds, investment advisors, companies and individual investors - all that information might as well not exist. It was literally invisible, it didn't exist on the Web1.0 version of the internet, and unless you worked in a specific role in a major financial institution such as an international bank or asset management firm you were unlikely to have even heard of Bloomberg, let alone used the eponymous orange and black information network that one needed to go on a course to know how to operate, and employ a specialist IT team to set up. Closed Loops And the other point about that era of financial information was that the origin of the underlying information itself was another part of the same wholesale financial community; so in terms of both access and technology infrastructure there was a closed loop of information creation and consumption within the ivory tower of high finance. As I stepped back out in to the Brussels drizzle to find a taxi and gaze at emails on my Blackberry my mind was preoccupied with who has access to information, and where information comes from. That preoccupation was to last. Let the People In A lot has changed since that moment of realization; mainly, it must be said, due to technology not regulators. For a start we all now have smartphones; the iPhone only became available in June 2007, which for a guy like me feels like yesterday. Armed with that smartphone distribution network, disruptive technology has put the ability to trade shares in to all of our pockets; and not just shares, now also digital assets that reside on the blockchain. The scale and pace of the democratization of trading in investments has been truly staggering: crypto investing platform Coinbase (at last count) had 73million certified users, up from circa 20m in 2018, and share-dealing apps Robinhood and eToro have nearly 50million between them. And all this demographic activity created plenty of noise and heat on the Web2.0 social media platforms; Reddit fueled the meme-stock boom and Twitter is now genuinely a location for serious thinkers and observers to build an investment or business track-record in public. For the hard core DeFI crowd there is Discord and Mirror.xyz, where posts reside forever indestructible and uncensored on blockchain. There are now 1,000x more people with access to democratized trading tools than there are Bloomberg users. So the old system of a closed loop of participation and therefore information has been broken, and broken in an incredibly short period of time. The Insights Multiverse Web2.0 let's us freely give away opinions - be they good, bad or indifferent - but what that has showed is that within the noise there was a growing population of people with thoughtful ideas and interesting observations that might be worth paying attention to. The big banks might still not be willing to give their investment insights to anyone other than their largest institutional clients, but a single person, with big bank experience or equivalent quality can now reach anyone who is searching for guidance on how to think about their personal investments. And what is interesting about the decline in sell-side research (assisted by our old friend MiFID II) and the shifting participation in digital assets in particular, is that the traditional community of finance now needs different sources of information as well. The platform "gateway" model of distributing and consuming information is not dead - Bloomberg and the rest remain highly relevant dispite their cost and complexity - but the self-creator-owner model of Web3.0 will interact with the traditional world: it must in fact. The democratization of trading tools has put personal investing in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, and there needs to be an organized information layer to support their decision making, and indeed manage the information flow from the big-finance world to that new and growing community, and vice versa. Think how wrongfooted some hedge funds were by the GameStop saga, despite having access to all the traditional sources of market intelligence that have served them well for decades. The new wave of tech will therefore (a) enable the organized recovery of investment insights from the unstructured and massively growing pool of people who now participate in investing, (b) provide high-quality sources of insight hitherto only available to professional investors to anyone who needs them, and (c) diversify the number of valuable sources of insight and perspective to the large institutions. So all users of information will have much more control and choice about what they need and when they need it; everyone will have their own personalized information universe. Why we built Scriber We already built and own the Tellimer Insights platform, which is a lightweight tech that gives research analysts publication, distribution and analytics tools, and people searching for insights a discoverable route in to investment insights from any device anywhere. Because anyone can sign up to access Tellimer Insights it already spans the old closed world and newly opened community, but we needed to go further to solve the information problem. So we built Scriber as a creator stack for people writing on investing; giving them a professional grade set of tools to write, distribute and paywall their own insights, and to make it discoverable on the web; and in due course interact with their subscribers and generate and link data more easily. We fully expect top writers using Scriber to be able to distribute their content to institutional readers via Tellimer Insights - and even Bloomberg if they wish - as well as to anyone searching on social or the web. We also believe there are opportunities in the future to create a native token to incentivize both writers and readers, and more broadly to make information more available and market participants better financially equipped. And to let more people share in the success of our mission to make difficult to find and understand investment information easier to find and understand. The new information wave is coming, building since that day in the rain in Brussels. This is written using Scriber; it is currently in BETA, and free for you to use. Yours fondly, Duncan
Duncan Wales
Mar 18, 2022 · 7 min read
Victory Day: history repeats itself
The Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany May 9th is Victory Day in the modern Russian Federation, celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany and its Axis allies by the Soviet Union in 1945. It has far greater resonance and political importance in Russia than the often-overlooked “VE” (Victory in Europe) celebrations in Western Europe of the day before. Despite the horrors of destruction, occupation and death suffered in Western Europe, for the Soviet Union the Second World War had been its greatest existential threat: an estimated 27 million Russians, mainly civilians, died in the bitter struggle against the Axis invasion. I have previously written on the paranoia of the Soviet state and its willingness to sacrifice its own people to achieve its political ends; see https://the-perspective-pool.scriber.to/article/russia-is-a-bolshevik-state-once-again , but I have sympathy with the view that the stoic and resilient peoples of the Soviet Union - which included both Russia and Ukraine - saved Europe and maybe further afield from Nazism. May 9 is usually Victory Day in Ukraine as well: this year it takes on a new resonance. The war between the Axis and USSR defies statistics, even if one can encapsulate the magnitude of human suffering in mere numbers. On its own that war was the greatest and most bloody conflict humanity has ever engaged in, with millions of combatants engaged simultaneously, over thousands of kilometers of territory, and killing more people than any other war before or since. This was a “total war” of the ultimately destructive type envisioned by aristocratic Prussian general and military thinker Carl Von Clausewitz more than a century before. Such was the ideological (and ethnic) hatred between the sides that to become a prisoner of either was a near-guaranteed death sentence. For the Soviet Union, and now particularly Russia, the defeat of Germany and the Axis was a nation-defining event, creating a myth around which political and national identify have gravitated ever since. Molotov Cocktails and the Secret Pact Germany and the Soviet Union had not started the War as enemies. They had entered a mutual non-aggression pact in August 1939, not much more than a week before the Nazi invasion of Poland and the declaration of war against Germany by the UK and France. The pact became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany who signed it, although Stalin attended in person. The Pact is made up of seven simple Articles addressing non-aggression between the parties for a 10 year period. However, below the main Articles is a secret addendum with an additional four articles that were not published at the time. The secret agreement divided Central and Eastern Europe in to “spheres of influence” between the two powers, giving control over Finland, Estonia and Latvia to the Soviet Union, some of Lithuania to Germany, an agreement to carve up Poland when it suited them and a confirmation by Germany that it had no political interest in “Southeastern Europe” and “Bessarabia”; what we would now think of as Moldova and Ukraine. Left unfettered by risk of interference from each other, Germany invaded Poland from the West, shortly thereafter the USSR invaded Poland from the East and not many months later the USSR invaded Finland. Molotov said that the invasion of Finland in November 1939 was a humanitarian mission to provide food to the Finns. In another echo of events repeated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Finns resisted more fiercely than their attackers expected and gave the invading Soviet armor a robust petrol bombing. With characteristically dark Scandinavian humor the Finns described those home-made explosives as Molotov Cocktails: an appropriate drink to serve back to the invading Soviets in recognition of their “humanitarian” efforts. Warlords and Oil With the Soviet Union pursuing its own agenda with Finland and Germany and the Axis Powers creating a German Empire and “ lebensraum ” for the ethnically pure in Europe, it was a very dark moment of uncertainty. By the fall of France in June 1940, the UK “stood alone” armed only with the Channel and Royal Airforce as its defense and the Victorian-style political backbone of its new Prime Minister Winston S Churchill. In late 1940 Hitler and the Axis very much had the upper hand. German panzers had swept through Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Low Countries and France; Fascist Spain, exhausted after its dreadful civil war remained neutral, the Soviet Union was occupied with Finland and Poland and the US, although supplying the UK with finance and arms showed no immediate signs of joining the War. There aren’t many single decisions that can be said to have changed the course of world history, but Hitler’s decision to renege on the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal and invade the Soviet Union is certainly one of them. On 18 December 1940, Hitler issued Directive 21, ordering an assault on the USSR. The operation was named after a 12th Century Teutonic warlord Frederick “Barbarossa”. Anointed by the Pope - the last surviving official role of the long-since collapsed Western Roman Empire - in 1155 Barbarossa became the Holy Roman Emperor: a paragon of the warrior emperor that Hitler aspired to be and a symbol of the new German Empire cast in a romanticized (and entirely unrealistic) vision of the past. Op BARBAROSSA was launched in June 1941 on a front more than two thousand kilometers long, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Axis committed 3.5million troops to the offensive, hoping to destroy Soviet resistance quickly, and swiftly took territory across all its axes of attack. Within months Axis troops were within striking distance of Moscow and in the South advanced to Odessa, the Black Sea coast and Crimea, and besieged Kyiv. The lightening panzer tactics of the Germans allowed them to encircle 650,000 Soviet troops in Kyiv, all of whom were killed or captured. Despite early successes by the end of the year, with winter coming on, the Axis assault stalled along all parts of the front, and Soviet counter attacks pushed the Axis forces back. In 1942 the Axis redoubled its efforts mounting more operations, including Op BLAU (Blue), particularly aiming to capture the industrial heartlands and oil fields of the South. Again the armies clashed in increasingly concentrated pockets; the most notorious being Stalingrad (now Volgograd), East of the Donbas in Ukraine, controlling the routes along the Volga river, including to the oil-rich Caspian Sea and strategically influential to the River Don leading down to the Sea of Azov. At Stalingrad in 1943 after months of bitter fighting nearly half of the remaining 600,000 exhausted and starving Axis troops - many of them Romanians - were surrounded by the army of Soviet General Zhukov and eventually surrendered. The Axis commander, the German General Friedrich Paulus who was trapped with his men in the kessel (literally “cauldron”, the word the Germans used for an encircled defense) had urged Hitler to let him surrender to Zhukov some time before, which was rebuffed: instead Hitler made Paulus a Field Marshal, knowing that no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered (suicide would have been frustrating but acceptable). Paulus surrendered anyway, and his captured army of more than 280,000 was marched away to gulags from which hardly any emerged alive (estimates vary but it could have been as little as a few hundreds). By this stage the US had joined the War (late 1941), the Allies won victories in North Africa (1942; my grandfather commanded field hospitals in the desert from the invasion to the Allied victory) and were soon to launch an invasion of Italy. With Germany overcommitted and depleted of men and materiel, the momentum of the War shifted in the Allies favor. The invasion of the Soviet Union, and the inability to win quickly, ultimately proved to be the undoing of Hitler and the Nazis. Lessons for Ukraine Operation BARBAROSSA and the operations that followed it were a failure, for many of the same reasons Russia is failing in Ukraine. By failing to succeed Germany created a national myth and powerful sense of identify and moral self-worth in the Soviet Union, which Russia has inherited. Russia’s actions in Ukraine invoke the memory of that myth - President Putin has described the Russian invasion is a special military operation to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. This conflict, with great and dangerous irony, will create a similar national myth for Ukraine. Further Reading
Duncan Wales
May 10, 2022 · 9 min read