Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Am í lcar Cabral  As leader of the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral sought to unite the indigenous people of Guinea-Bissau and the more educated inhabitants of the Cape Verde islands in a joint struggle to bring an end to Portuguese colonialism in West Africa. In practice, Cape Verdeans (such as Cabral himself) furnished the PAIGC’s intellectuals and party leadership, while Guineans bore the brunt of the guerrilla warfare waged on the mainland – a differentiation that worsened the already-existing tension between the two populations, culminating in Cabral’s assassination by Guinean PAIGC militants in 1973. Longstanding ethnic resentments, moreover, were not the only limitations with which Cabral had to contend in attempting to forge a modern and disciplined militant movement. Cabral’s biographer António Tomás writes that, “more than Cabral wanted to admit, China served as the template for the military uprising in Guinea”:...

  “Civil War” was trending on Twitter a few hours ago, as it sometimes does these days – an apt occasion to say something about Andrei Martyanov’s recently published work, Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse . Martyanov, a Russian transplant to the US who served in the Soviet Coast Guard and has worked in the aerospace industry, blogs at Reminiscence of the Future and is the author of two previous books, Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning and The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs . Martyanov writes of America’s “disintegration” – economically, militarily, culturally, and demographically – not just as something beyond the horizon, but as an already evident and daily observable process. Much of the book approximates the experience of reading typical articles at Russia Today , with the awesomeness of Putin’s Russia juxtaposed with the embarrassing dysfunction of the arrogant and putatively hegemonic US. For Martyanov, Am...