Zimbabwe, Who Wants to be a Trillionaire?

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Economics and society,, Racial politics, Regional History

It was ten years ago to the decade this happened. We had done what we wanted to do on the Zambian side—dog-paddled from Livingstone Island across the Zambezi River blissfully oblivious of crocs and hippos, summoned up the courage to take the big leap down into the deep but small Devil’s Pool on the precipice, inches away from an unthinkable 208 metre drop to the rock-strewn bottom of the great falls. We had seen what we wanted to see on the Zambian side—the best viewing points to survey the majestic Mosi-oa-Tunya from; the statue of explorer/evangelist Davie Livingstone. Now, having wrestled with our ethical demons and overcome them, we decided to buy a day tripper visa and cross the bridge into Zimbabwe, swayed by the lure of it supposedly having superior vantage points for seeing Vic Falls.

(Photo: www.victoriafalls.net)

As we approached the checkpoint at the Zambian end we skirted round an African kid waving copper bracelets in our face (copper bracelets are one of the few items dirt-poor Zambian youngsters have to barter in exchange for South African rands). After completing the immigration stuff we didn’t dilly-dally around at the check-point, I had read that the local troop of baboons here could be quite aggressive with tourists (just before we came to Zambia 🇿🇲 I had read that one unfortunate tourist had fallen over the falls to his doom trying to avoid the pressing attentions of a baboon who had taken a fixedly determined interest in the bright orange bag he was carrying).

(Map: Lonely Planet)

We tip-toed very cautiously onto the bridge, avoiding eye-contact with the bulky and menacing guard on border duty brandishing an AK-47, save for a single furtive glance in his direction to catch his cold, expressionless countenance. There was none or minimal passing foot traffic as we did the 1.8km bridge trek into the Zimbabwe tourist township. This bridge apparently is famous for being the site of a formal “pow-wow” between the white UDI regime representatives and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF rebels which signalled the end of the long Rhodesian Bush War (I could be wrong about this as it might be the other one, the nearby railway bridge, where the icing was put on the cake of peace?)

Not long after passing the customs point, having got a set of fresh new Zimbabwe stamps in our passport, we encountering our first Zim local keen to barter with the tourists. We managed to out-walk most of these but finally we relented and stopped for one particularly persistent guy who just wouldn’t take ‘NO!’ for an answer. As it turned out this Zim street trader did have something we were interested in – some Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 bank notes. These were not any old legal tender that you might get back in change at the nearby Victoria Falls Town shops when you buy some souvenirs of Zimbabwe, these were examples of the fiat currency that the Mugabe regime was infamous for!

So, after a very short bargaining session, in exchange for a handful of wrinkled RSA rand notes✳, we walked away with three crisp, new looking Zimbabwe bank notes. They were, respectively, a Z$20 billion note, (which we discovered was merely petty cash compared to) a Z$50 trillion note and, la crème de la crèam, a mind-boggling fresh, ‘new’ Z$100 trillion note! Talk about collectors’ items! When I enquired of the street trader what exactly could I buy with the Z$100 trillion note, he produced his default smile and replied, “one loaf of bread”! But I can happily report that on checking later I discovered he was wrong…for the Z100Trn note I could get three loaves of bread – at least…and probably a few buns thrown in as well!

Yes, I had heard about Zimbabwe’s notorious mega-inflation. Back in high school history classes I had learnt about the troubled Weimar Republic in the 1920s and it’s crazy, runaway hyperinflation which led to workers being paid every day, twice a day (morning and afternoon) and having to cart away their ‘soft’ mark currency notes in wheelbarrows! But I didn’t appreciate the full dimensions of Zimbabwe’s economic calamity until I came here. In 2008 the country’s insouciant and haphazard economic mismanagement had resulted in a tsunami of hyper-inflationary escalation which peaked at a staggering 231 Million percent. At its year’s worse, prices were doubling every 24 hours [‘Where is the next Fiat Currency Revaluation?’, (Andrew Henderson), Nomad Capitalist, Upd. 28-Dec-2019, www.nomadcapitalist.com]. A worthless, disposal nappy of a currency. Zimbabwe – welcome to the world of the “starving billionaires” as the Zimbabwe cynic (ie, realist) would put it!

As well as adding naughts to the money denominations at an alarming rate of knots, Zimbabwe in a currency-printing frenzy went paper money crazy – they started issuing notes for all the coin denominations too. At one point they even had a one cent note! In the hyper-inflationary swampland that is Zimbabwe, imagine the lunacy of printing a 1₵ note! Then again, perhaps we are underestimating the government’s capacity for irony…or maybe it was an artistic statement, theatre of the absurd, surreal farce, that sort of thing!

Within two years the out-of-control inflation reached even more embarrassing stratospheric heights – 89.7 sextillion percent. Finally the Zimbabwe government arrived at a solution of sorts, it jettisoned the worthless local dollar currency for the US dollar. It began trading principally in US$ and South African rands (today the country accepts up to eight other foreign currencies as legal tender—including the Botswana pula—in place of the valueless Zim $).

Sadly, the economic situation in Zimbabwe today is not much better. In 2019 the economy took another sharp downturn and hyperinflation rose again like an exploding thermometer…at this point Zimstat (the Zimbabwe stats office) stopping releasing inflation data (in a desperate attempt to cover the government’s own scandalous ineptitude). However the IMF put the level of Zimbabwe inflation in August 2019 at 300 per cent. Bread was now something like US$10 a loaf. The annual inflation rate as at December 2019 was sitting around 521 percent! Venezuela could happily reclaim second place in the world’s worst stakes [‘IMF: Zimbabwe has the highest inflation rate in the world’, (29-Sep-2019), www.zimbabwesituation.com; ‘Zimbabwe Inflation Rate’, www.tradingeconomics.com].

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000……

Footnote:Trillions, Quadrillions, Sextillions, Septillions, Octillions, etc.—ultimately it’s a numbers game of theoretical interest only

The dubious honour for having printed the world’s highest numerical value banknote goes to postwar Hungary – 1 sextillion pengö back in 1946. Zimbabwean financial control suddenly doesn’t look quite so bad!

𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠

✳ and my wife’s plastic tube of hand-sanitiser gel, which the guy’s infant kid had taken a fancy to

The Red Underground’s War on Bourgeois Capitalist Europe: Euro-terrorism in the 1970s, West Germany and Italy

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Comparative politics, Political History, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

From the end of the Sixties the militant Weathermen in the US rode a global wave of youth and student rebellion against “the establishment” (see blog, 17-Jan-2020). Their emergence was in part a direct consequence of the student protests and violent clashes with the police and security forces that shook the leading cities of Europe and elsewhere in 1968 (the “Generation of 1968”). That same wave that gave impetus to the first stirrings of violent resistance by the Weathermen also ushered in other paramilitary organisations in Western Europe around the same time. The two of these that gained the most publicity/notoriety are discussed below.

⫸ West Germany: Red Army Faction (Ger: Rote Armee Fraktion) AKA Baader-Meinhof Gang❉

Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, anti-Zionist

The radical student critique: The West German “fascist state”

West German youth by the late 1960s were experiencing a sense of alienation from the Federal Republic (BDR). The source of this disquiet lay in the nature of West German society and politics. The BDR that they had grown up in was now prosperous, but it was moving away from the direction of liberalisation and reform toward a polity that was increasingly authoritarian under the veneer of democracy. The postwar West German government, allying itself to the US and to NATO, and with Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was charting an increasingly illiberal course, as the country’s politicised youth saw it—the West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956; the police had violently over-reacted to student protests killing one unarmed student activist; the Brandt government had introduced the Radikalenerlass (German for “Radical decree”) law in 1972 barring radicals (as defined by the state) and those with a ‘questionable’ political persuasion from holding public sector jobs. Many in the student left railed against what they saw as hypocrisy from Bonn—assuming the guise of an advanced liberal democracy while at the same time hosting visits from ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran, not to mention it’s other politically uncomfortable associations [‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki), http://military.wiki.org].

The Wirtschftswunder (the West German “economic miracle”) and its creator, economics minister Erhard 🔻

Students and those on the left generally viewed the postwar denazification of West Germany with justifiable suspicion, it’s outcomes were ineffective and at best incomplete. The policy was breached repeatedly, eg, Chancellor Adenauer’s appointment of a former Nazi-sympathiser to high political office; even more alarmingly, Kurt Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, rose to the republic’s top political post, Bundesrepublikkanzler, in 1966; and many ex-Nazis were still able to walk into government positions at the local level up. Many on the left in the BDR were convinced that the republic’s conservative media, controlled by Axel Springer, was biased in favour of the establishment, while the more liberal press in BDR was heavily censored by the government. At the same time radicals looked on aghast when the two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, formed themselves into a “Grand Coalition” (‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki).

As the succeeding generation, many students were left with a feeling of war-guilt as inheritors of the nation’s Nazi past. Added to this was the disillusion many Germans felt at their country being associated with a blatantly imperialist war in Vietnam. All of these dilemmas coalesced into a conviction for many on the left that the BDR government lacked legitimacy and was tantamount to a “fascist state”. Hence the collective call of West German youth for radical social change. The radicalisation of many in the republic’s student movement was partly fuelled by healthy doses of Marxist economic theory (it should be remembered that in 1966 the BDR economy had gone into recession—for the first time in 15 years) [‘German students campaign for democracy, 1966-68’, (Global Nonviolent Action Network), http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu].

BMG – terrorising the BDR

Student disaffection and that of other activists in the West German New Left was rife, many protested their disapproval, some turned to more violent and direct ways of voicing their opposition. Into this turbulent milieu came, among others, the first incarnation of the Red Army Faction, better known courtesy of the media’s tag, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG), at the end of the Sixties. Its founders and main leaders were Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler.

BMG started by engaging in arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and graduated to bomb attacks on US military facilities, German police stations and media outlets controlled by the Springer press. To bankroll their terrorist activities the gang robbed banks and kidnapped VIP hostages for ransom✫ [‘The Red Army Faction and the Stasi’, TELOSscope, 24-Oct-2016, (Review of Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals), www.telospress.com; ‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki)]. Among BMG’s victims were symbols of the BDR regime (individuals from the political and economic elites), US military personnel, as well as a number of unfortunate bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite killing some 34 people during its urban guerrilla ‘career’, RAF managed to elicit a measure of support from within West German society. For scores of disillusioned young West Germans at the time, there was support for or at least acceptance of RAF’s actions…(as Siegel put it), owing to the (still recent) Nazi legacy many “guilt-ridden liberals saw (RAF’s) panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s boring bourgeois life”. There is evidence also that there was collusion between BMG and East Germany and specifically the DDR’s Stasi (secret police) (Neaman). BMG also underwent some guerrilla training from the Palestinian al-Fatah in Jordan – which didn’t go exactly to plan. Andreas Baader, the group’s leader, deliberately cultivated an outlaw image, likening himself to Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde criminal infamy) [‘The Romance of Evil’, by Fred Siegel, City Journal, 18-Sep-2009]§. Baader, Meinhof and their close associates were arrested in 1972 and the leaders died in custody within a few years—apparently by their own hands (though some are skeptical that these were in fact suicides).

Eponymous leaders of BMG 🔻

With the founding members in prison, a “second generation” of RAF cadres emerged, sympathetic to the group’s cause, picking up the terrorist-guerrilla baton where the incarcerated pioneers left off. This “RAF 2.0” was proactive between 1975 and 1979, especially during what became known as the “German Autumn” of 1977. They held personnel hostage at the West German embassy in Stockholm, perpetrated hits on public prosecutors and bankers, kidnapped industrialists, etc. ). In the 1980s and 1990s a” third generation” of RAF materialised and was intermittently active for some years, but since 1998 RAF has been considered to be moribund.

∝∾∾∾∾∾∝∝∾∾∾∾∾∝

⫸ Italy: Red Brigades (It: Brigate Rosse)

Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist

As with their West German counterpart, the Red Brigades (BR) had its antecedents in the massive-scale student protests of 1968 against the state, and the workers’ struggles in Italy in 1968-69 to bring about social and political change. The militant organisation was formed from a leftist student group at the University of Trento in Italy’s north set up by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. BR claimed a membership of up to 1,000 strong at its peak (others have put it at about 400 to 500 full-time members) plus an indeterminate number of supporters [“Years of Lead” — Domestic Terrorism and Italy’s Ref Brigades’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, www.adst.org ; Sundquist, Major Victor H. “Political Terrorism: An Historical Case Study of the Italian Red Brigades.” Journal of Strategic Security 3, no. 3 (2010) : 53-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.3.3.5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss3/5].

CDP-PCI’s “compromiso storico”

In Italy BR was able to tap into the prevailing student and worker discontent with the government (at first through it’s grass-root activism in northern industrial cities like Milan and Turin). Many radicalised sections of Italian workforce were disillusioned by the ‘historic’ coalition formed between the conservative Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and a belief lingered that PCI’s deal with the main bourgeois party would not ultimately represent the interests of the country’s working class (Sundquist) (cf. the CDU/SDP coalition in West Germany).

Red Brigades in “the Years of Lead”

From the early to the late 1970s BR unleashed a series of terror strikes, a chapter in what became known in Italy as “the Years of Lead” (It: Anni di piombo), which was a longer period of postwar social and political turmoil in Italy characterised by terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups. Material help for BR was forthcoming from the USSR and Czechoslovakia (weaponry). After the arrest of Curcio and Cagol in 1974, a “second generation” of radicals took up the ‘war’ against the Italian authorities. The act most associated with the BR Mach II (now led by Mario Moretti) and earning it its greatest opprobrium was the kidnapping and eventual murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro in 1978. BR’s murder of the highly popular Moro lost it much public support, including that of some sections of the left.

The assassination of Moro galvanised the national government, the Italian security forces and the Carabinieri into launching an all-out war against the leftist terrorist organisation☌. With a more concerted counter-terrorist strategy including intelligence from paid informers, the authorities were ultimately successful in capturing the leaders and a large chunk of BR cadres, effectively eliminating the threat to the country during the 1980s◎. [‘The Red Brigades’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘Years of Lead (Italy)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Sundquist]. Despite its eventual failure and demise, BR was lethally effective in its methods – between 1973 and 1994 the terrorist group killed 223 people in its assaults (Global Terrorism Database, University of Maryland). One academic calls it “the most menacing radical group in Italy‘s post-WWII history”, [‘Learning from the Past: Case of the Red Brigades in Italy’, Daniela Irrera, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. Vol. 6, No 6 (JULY 2014]. International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26351263].

Methods of the “Red Euro-terrorists”

Both RAF and BR used similar tactics and strategies – primarily sabotage, arson, bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations. The human targets were generally politicians (almost all right-wing), senior police, judges, industrialists and bankers, though BR also went after trade union officials in Italy which eventually helped undermine its support. Initially, BR refrained from lethal violence, often inflicting the punishment of aginocchiare (kneecapping) on its selected targets. But, as the Seventies rolled on, they were taking a more direct and extreme retribution on the capitalist state expanding the scope of terror to murder.

RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)

These two far-left European terrorist groups according to their pronouncements shared roughly the same broad, radical objectives as the Weather Underground – to destabilise the state and bring down the country’s capitalist regime◘. The two, also like the Weathermen, took great inspiration and more than a few tips from the Tupamaros urban guerrilla group of Uruguay. The Weather, BR and RAF all pursued a avowedly violent strategy against the authorities, but the Weathermen, when compared to BR and RAF, were “terrorism-lite”. Whereas the Weather targeted material damage only, meticulously avoiding the endangering of human life, the two European terrorist groups had no such compunctions or qualms.

Endnote: RAF and BR – red militants in a crowded field of left-wing Euro-terrorists

Neither RAF in Germany or BR in Italy were sole traders in the leftist-terrorism game in their respective countries, such is the splintering nature of ultra-left, extremist groups. There were a string of other terrorist groups operating at the same time, the most consequential of these were Prima Linea (Italian for “First Line”) in Italy and the Revolutionary Cells (Ger: Revolutionäre Zellen – RZ) in West Germany—the latter having a lower profile than RAF but actually perpetrating more bomb and arson attacks on the state than it (Military Wiki).

◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘

❉ sometimes also called Baader-Meinhof Group. Red Army Faction was its official organisational name

✫ BR went one better in fund-raising it’s revolutionary mission, getting involved in drugs and arms trafficking which included doing business with the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra (‘Red Brigades’, Wiki)

§ a trait shared by the Weathermen

◘ BR also had another, more specific objective of wanting to force Italy to leave NATO

☌ this did not stop BR Mach II from making one more high-profile kidnapping, that of American deputy chief of staff of NATO (General Dozier) in 1981. Italian police managed to rescue the general unharmed and Italian and NATO security forces executed successful retaliatory action again BR (Sundquist)

◎ BR though didn’t entirely disappear…after it split into two separate groups in the early 1980s, the more hardline splinter group continued into the 2000s (amounting to a third organisation claiming to represent BR)

Forecasting a Violent Reprisal on the Home Front: The Weathermen, the US’s Own Home-grown Proto-Terrorists

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Politics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Society & Culture

I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding name triggered my curiosity. As the Pears editor noted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’ in the United States of America“⊡.

What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.

(Source: Yale University)

The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.

Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻

1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.

1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues

The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.” Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].

A giant fail

The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪

Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].

Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.

🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)

The middle-class dilemma

The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicals and authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).

Weather logo 🔺

A junket of romance and fantasy

Students of the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].

🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd

Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).

PostScript: Weather Underground, fade to black

Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].

⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉

❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields

⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song

✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO

✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it

₪ Prairie Fire was the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)

⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time

Republica Moldova, a Not Very Well Known European State in Post-Soviet Space: The Disadvantages of Being Geographically Contiguous with a Latent Russian Hot Spot

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Political geography, Regional History

Geo-coordinates: 47°0’N 28°55’E. Area: 33,851 sq km. Pop: between 3.5 & 4 million (2018 est). Languages: Moldovan (Romanian), Russian; (minority languages) Gagauz, Bulgarian, Ukrainian. Capital: Chișinău (Rus: Kishinev)

Moldova is a small, basically flat, landlocked country situated on the Moldavian plateau, which forms a part of the Sub-Carpathian mountain system, bordered on its west by Romania and on its east by Ukraine. Most of Moldova’s territory lies between the area’s two main rivers, the Nistru and the Prut.

Moldova (or as it is formally titled, the Republic of Moldova) is one of Europe’s least known countries, it is just about the antithesis of turismo centro on the continent’s ratings board! Of the 44 sovereign countries in Europe recognised by the UN, it was the least visited country in 2016 (UN World Tourism Organisation). Historically, small and nondescript Moldova has tended to be a pawn shifted around from one competing imperial power to another over the centuries, valued only by the big power players for its geo-strategic importance in the region.

Moldavia, under the Soviet era ⇩

Pre-independence Moldova: a revolving door of designations and destinies
In 1346 Moldova became the Romanian Principality of Moldavia which included the Duchy of Bukovina, eventually the territory was subsumed under the expanding imperial reach of the Ottomans. In 1812 the sultan ceded it to Russia and it became an outer-lying enclave of the tsar’s empire known as the Governorate of Bessarabia. Freed from Russian rule in 1917 as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution, it briefly became the Moldavian Democratic Republic before being united with the Kingdom of Romania (as a federated part of Greater Romania). In 1924 the entity’s status and name changed again, becoming the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic❅. In 1940, in the wash-up of the USSR/Nazi Germany’s Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin consolidated the territory after a land grab of parts of Romania, forming the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. During the war Nazi Germany together with its Romanian ally captured Moldova and held it until the Red Army launched a successful counter-offensive in 1944. Once again in Russian (Soviet) hands, the USSR implemented a postwar process of Russification in the Moldavian ‘Republic’ (enforced socio-economic reforms, especially urbanisation and migration). The status quo persisted until 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After this seismic political transformation Moldova along with many other Soviet SSRs gained its independence from the Russian empire [The Times Guide to Eastern Europe, (Ed. by Keith Sword), 1991; ‘Moldova between Russia and the West: A Delicate Balance’, (Eugene Rumer), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23-May-2017, www.carnegieendowment.org].

Moldavia – the “Land of Aurochs”
Since 1991 Republica Moldova’s path on the road to a viable and independent democracy has been obstructed by a myriad of challenges. From the start, like other former Soviet SSRs in Central Asia and the Caucasus, its long-term viability was hamstrung by the lack of a tradition of self-government and sovereignty. A major challenge has been trying to find political leaders not tainted by association with the Soviet era. The political inexperience also manifested itself in ongoing constitutional problems for the country. Economics is equally significant a hurdle for the still embryonic democracy…Moldova is a poor, agriculturally-based country, reliance on the former masters, the Russians, has come at a cost. The USSR’s legacy for the new country of a concentration of state and collective farms has made transitioning from a controlled to a free market economy a more rocky passage [‘Moldova’, (KA Hitchins, B Buckmaster, E Latham & F Nikolayevich Sukhopara), Encyclopaedic Britannia, www.britannia.com]. What pre-existing industry there was in Moldova, was concentrated in the Transdniestria corridor (see below).

Multiethnic identities and allegiances
Roughly two-thirds of Moldova’s population is of Romanian descent with the remainder a mix of ethnicities…in the tiny eastern region of Transdniestria there is a block of predominantly Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Moldavia’s experience under the Soviets’ republics policy has included episodes of expulsions of native Moldovans, Gaguaz, Bulgarians and Jews, and the parachuting in of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. One regional specialist has described it as “a product of ethnopolitical-administrative experimentation” (Rumer).

⇧ Old Orhei monastery, Moldova (Source: Calin Stan/Adobe Stock)

The challenge of stable government
Since independence Moldova has managed to establish a reasonably acceptable level of political pluralism…awarded by Freedom House a rating of “partially free” (because of government corruption and deficiencies in the rule of law scoring 58 out of 100) [‘Freedom in the World 2019 – Moldova’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org]. Power has tended to alternate between pro-Russian and pro-European leaders, comprising the (pro-Russian) socialist and communist parties, the centre-left Democratic Party and liberal reformists. At one point the country’s governance functioned for three years without an elected president. Regular changes of government and direction in Moldova reflects public disaffection with the inability of both sides of parliament to address the country’s problems (poor living standards, unemployment, high-level corruption especially involving a national banking scandal✪).

Transdniestria – the crux of conflict within the state
(Image: www.joksankolikot.net)
Transdniestria (officially Pridnestrovskaja Moldavskaja Respublika)
Area: 4,163 sq km.
Pop: 469,000 (2018 est)
Languages: Russian, Moldovan, Ukrainian.
Capital: Tiraspol

The highest profile issue undermining Moldova’s efforts to establish a stable, cohesive national entity has been the lingering problem of a separate Transdniestria. This narrow strip of land within the Moldovan state comprising significant percentages of Russians and Ukrainians□ broke away from Moldova soon after independence. A brief civil war ensued, Moldovan forces attempted to quash the Transdniestria revolt but was thwarted by the intervention of the Russian 14th Army. A cease-fire in 1992 brought the conflict to a halt and a security zone was established with a peace-keeping force (including Russian troops) in occupation. The Transdniestria enclave has continued to assert its putative sovereign independence, however neither Moldova or any other sovereign state including Russia has recognised its claims. Recently, there having been no resumption of the armed conflict, political onlookers have characterised the situation as a “frozen conflict”…some analysts in the West view it as “de facto settled”. Although the dispute remains unresolved, there is a perception that the combatants have learned over the intervening years “to peacefully co-exist” with one another (Rumer).

This is not to say that the Russian bear has relinquished its political ambitions or interest in the disputed territory, far from it! Transdniestria—and Moldova as a whole—remain geo-politically important to Russia vis-a-vis the Black Sea (more so after the aggressive Russian incursion into the Ukraine in 2014) and in its proximity to the Balkans. Russia supports a “special status” for Transdniestria (announced by then Russian PM Medvedev from Kiev). Meanwhile patterns of intent can be discerned, Moscow continues to maintain a presence in Transdniestria which it sees as a Russian outpost in that region. And there has been a clear effort to forge a new Soviet-Moldovan identity distinct from the Romanian one, eg, by the promotion of the Cyrillic alphabet in preference to the incumbent Latin script (Rumer).

A secondary separatist movement
Transdniestria is not the only irredentist or ethnic breakaway movement that the government in Chișinău has had to contend with. From the late 1980s the Gagauz halki (people), a Turkic-speaking Christian minority in Russian Moldavia, experienced an upsurge in nationalist feeling. In 1990 the Gagauz, apparently concerned about the preservation of its own cultural identity within the new Moldovan state, unilaterally proclaimed itself an autonomous republic (Gaguazia, capital Comrat), followed one year later by a full declaration of independence. Intriguingly, despite this, the Gagauz are inclined to harbour a nostalgia for the old USSR [‘Moldova country profile’, BBC News, (15-Nov-2019), www.bbc.com]. The Moldovan republic has steadfastly refused to countenance independence for the Gagauz but in 1994 it did grant the region a form of autonomy (as a “national-territorial autonomous unit”) and it’s own governor (bașman) [‘Gaguazia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Gagauzia ⇧

Russia’s role and influence in Moldova
Heavily overlaying Moldova’s attempts to establish good governance and national viability is the gravitational pull exerted on it by both Russia and Romania. Successive Chișinău administrations have—to varying degrees—striven to free themselves from too much reliance on Russia. The relatively undeveloped nation has nonetheless had to acknowledge the economic realities of it’s situation: making a clean break from Russian dependence is something extremely difficult to accomplish. Clearly, the plan of Moldovan reformers was to move closer to the orbit of the EU and this has progressively happened after the country satisfied the EU of its willingness to make democratic and economic reforms. The outcome? Today, the EU is Moldova’s major trading partner (worth US$3.5 bn in 2016), making great strides in turning the country’s international trade matrix around [‘The World Factbook: Moldova’, (Central Intelligence Agency), www.cia.gov]. Nonetheless, economic dependence on Russia—through a complicated set of existing conditions—remains crucial and seemingly unavoidable for the time being.

Remittances, energy and wine
The abysmally low GDP per capital by European standards of Moldovans (US$5,237, 2017) forces large numbers of them into becoming guest workers overseas. Many of these go to Europe especially Italy, but Russia remains the main source of external employment. Remittances by these workers back to their families in Moldova amount to about US$1.2 bn each year (15% of the country’s GDP), the third highest in the world. By far the largest portion of Moldovan Gastarbeiter, about 500,000 guest workers, rely on Russia each year for their income (Rumer; ‘World Factbook’).

Access to energy for Moldova compounds its fragile interdependence. The country is in debt to Russia’s giant Gasprom corporation to the tune of US$6 bn for it’s supply of natural gas (ironically the greater part of this debt to Moscow was incurred by Transdniestria). This energy situation persists because Romania has been able to meet at this time only a small portion of Moldova’s gas needs (‘World Factbook’).

(Photo credit: AP)

Wine-making, on the surface of it, is Moldova’s one bright light. In 2014 the small southeastern European country was the world’s 20th largest producer of wine (mainly reds). Easily it is—together with remittances—Moldova’s most important export. Again however Russia is at the core of the matter. Up to 90% of Moldovan wine goes to Russia. Good for Moldova’s export earnings sure, but the downside of such over-dependence on Russia is fraught with hazards. This places Russia in the position of being able to inflict damage on the Moldovan economy, were it to harbour a whim to do so. And this is not a purely theoretical consideration: twice this century (most recently in 2013), the Russian Republic banned the import of wine from Moldova with predictable effects on the latter’s economy. Russia offered up a pretext, alleging that the Moldovan wine was contaminated with plastic, but it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see a thinly-veiled warning of disapproval aimed at it’s small regional neighbour [‘Why Russian wine ban is putting pressure on Moldova’, (Tessa Dunlop), BBC News, 21-Nov-2013, www.bbcnews.com; ‘Moldova country profile’].

Closer ties with Romania?
Linguistic homogeneity does bind Moldova closer to Romania but the Moldovans are in no hurry to formalise the nexus through unification with it’s western neighbour. Romania does provide something of a counter-pull for Moldova against the leverage exerted by Russia and a strong Moldovan-Bulgarian nationalist movement has been fostered (Rumer). However, only between seven and fifteen percent of Moldovans have indicated that they are in favour of union with Romania✜ [‘A union between Moldova and Romania: On the cards?’, (Michael Bird), EU Observer, 05-Mar-2015, www.euobserver.com]. Moldovans, it appears, despite the linguistic cord binding them to Romania, don’t tend to possess the sort of irredentist urges that Transdniestrians do for Russia.

The murmurings of unification advocacy have been confined to some sectors on the Romanian side. Even these mostly have tended to be tentative ones. One proposal calls for Romania to reunify with the former geographical entity of ‘Bessarabia’, which is highly problematic – such a union would include parts of present day Ukraine and would exclude Transdniestria! In 2015 a group of Romanian MPs under the banner “Friends of the Union” called for closer economic and cultural ties between the two homophonic countries. Bucharest has, since 2010, started to provided significant amounts of aid to Moldova (€100 M), including for education. For the most part though, Romania’s greatest value to ordinary Moldovan citizens lies in it being a gateway to the EU…since 1991 around half-a-million Moldovans have obtained Romanian passports which allows them entry to the wider Western Europe through the prevailing Schengen arrangements (Bird; Rumer).

PostScript: Sole remaining remnant of the Soviet Union?
Transdniestria is the only political entity in Europe which still bears the “hammer and sickle” on it’s flag—and the only Eastern European entity which still calls it’s secret service the KGB! Tiraspol’s “House of Soviets” proudly honours the tradition of Lenin and Stalin with busts and pictures and the enclave’s various patriotic hommages to the Soviet past lead many outsiders to not take Transdniestria particularly seriously…”a fossilised piece of the former USSR” (Lonely Planet), “a collective hallucination” shaped like a “small worm squashed between two larger creatures” [‘Hopes Rise in Transnistria of a Russian Annexation’, (Alexander Smoltczyk), Spiegel International, 24-Apr-2014, www.spiegel.de/international/]. But dieheart Transdniestrian irredentists were encouraged by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and cling to a (slim) hope that Russia will some day follow suit with Transdniestria, or at the very least, make it a non-contiguous exclave on the model of Kaliningrad (Smoltczyk).

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❅ an “autonomous republic” under the jurisdiction of Ukraine – an “artificial political creation” inspired by Moscow’s ideological rhetoric of “world revolution” [‘Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

✪ the failure of successive administrations to prosecute suspects of a US$1 bn bank embezzlement (‘Moldova country profile’). The scandal is known within the country as the “Great Moldovan Bank Robbery”

□ 34% and 26.7% respectively (2015 census)

✜ Romania presents a perception problem for some Moldovans for who, a less than favourable image of a backward country with a scruffy gypsy culture, persists (Bird)