Imperialism never died, by James Higham

With all the wonderful political capital afforded by the "Russian menace" in America and "the U.S. menace" America, let alone China, it's as well to remember that imperialism never died - it's been going on in the modern era since at least the 1700s.

The French in the New World of America, the Spanish, the French sniffing around Australia and beaten to it by the British in 1788, the Dutch there also on the other coast a century earlier, the Chinese ten years ago in Africa - it's going on the whole time, as the Germans can attest.

In my time in Russia, the British were "known" over there for using the British Council for its purposes and I was caught up in the wash in 2008 when the BC was expelled from Vladivostock.  

And so it goes on and on.  Exxon in Sakhalin is another example.

This one below is from the heart of "the enemy", the European Council on Foreign Relations and I'd say it's par for the course:

https://www.ecfr.eu/amp-article/commentary_russias_hired_guns_in_africa

The murder of three Russian journalists in the Central African Republic in July 2018 raised new concerns about Russia’s presence in Africa. Because the reporters were investigating the activities of Russian private military contractors (PMCs), there has been widespread speculation that they were killed at the behest of a Russian state determined to expand its presence on the continent. This explanation is plausible: after years of irrelevance in resource-rich but politically unstable central Africa, the Kremlin has heavily relied on PMCs – a cost-effective and efficient tool for hybrid confrontation – in making its return to the region.

Putin publicly supported the creation of mercenary groups in 2012 but, officially, they remain illegal in Russia. Although the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge their existence, PMCs have become an essential tool of Russian foreign policy. This has been apparent in both the Ukraine conflict and the Syrian civil war. By employing irregular armed groups, Moscow has gained the luxury of plausible deniability: the ability to simultaneous be and not be party to a conflict, thereby escaping public accountability for casualties of war. The Kremlin’s response to the decimation of a Wagner Group unit in Syria in early 2018 provides a good example of this.

I could equally write of the US and NATO in the Ukraine through their puppet Poroshenko - let's be evenhanded here. And now we have the spectre of the EU Army:

It rather undermines talk of the nationalism versus patriotism which Macron went on about on the 11th at the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by flags and the military.  It's not my intention to get into party politics in this post, only to point out that nationalism and imperialism has never died and all the EU is is a new artificial nation, not unlike Belgium, its headquarters.

Sackerson sends these two links which delve into this matter of the Merkel Army:

13.11.18 - https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/merkel-europa-111.html

03.06.18 - https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/merkel-eu-interventionsarmee-101.html

Sackers' further comments:

Or does [Frau Merkel] mean merely to start it off as that until the EU is a full nation and can indeed boast its own national armed forces?

Alerted to it by John Vasc's 02:02hrs comment on Raedwald

Spanish sovereign debt and JPM

James Higham writes (also on Orphans of Liberty):

A couple of money men I know said, in 2010, that the big issue at that time was sovereign debt and China is cited as one of the main players.

I wrote years ago about Peabody and how there was an induced grain crisis in America in the mid-1800s, out of which the eventual JPM did very well indeed and JPM is a topic upon which many on left and right do agree.

Our site’s JD wrote to someone who knows money, asking:

I don’t understand money as I wrote a few years ago here-

http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2012/01/money/

But I was reading this today-

http://www.elmundo.es/economia/2014/11/07/545bf1f2268e3e634d8b4586.html

I can’t find any English report on this so far but it looks as though JPM are telling their clients not to buy Spanish debt. (I have never understood how or why anyone would want to ‘buy’ a debt, presumably these are the famous ‘junk bonds’ which were at the root of the recent financial problems?)

Their reasoning is that were Podemos to reach a position of power in Spain then a lot of the debt would be cancelled. Podemos are preparing an audit which will decide which debts are legitimate and which are not and the latter will be written off.

JPM in their analysis also consider the bizarre situation that PP(right wing) and PSOE(left wing) could form a coalition after the next election to prevent Podemos forming a government. I have seen elsewhere that polls suggest that if an election were called tomorrow Podemos would win!

So my question is – what are the implications of a Debt Jubilee, the Biblical idea that all debts should be written off after seven years? (Not just in Spain but everywhere) And who would lose by such a Debt Jubilee? Not me for sure, I have no debts. Rarely use a credit card and pay cash for whatever I need.

A commenter, The Hickory Wind, who lives in Spain, stepped in to observe:

I’m late to the party as usual, but anyway…

Simon Harris’s original piece is interesting and informative to anyone who doesn’t know much about Spanish politics, but those who do will recognise that he has swallowed uncritically a bit too much of the propaganda. There were two points I would have made to him, but the second annoyed me so much that I didn’t bother.

Firstly, the historical case has very little to do with the modern politcal reality, or with the justice of the cause. Even if the history is properly understood and correctly interpreted, what once was can tell you little about what should be now. It’s not that he does it badly, just that it isn’t particularly relevant.

The second point, the one that made me switch off, was when he described the Popular Party as extreme right. This sis a serious falsehood for someone who is claiming to inform a distant public of an important local matter, and he must surely know that it is false. The PP is partially and indirected descended from some remnants of the old Falange, in much the same way that the Socialist party is descended from a Trotskyist Socialist Workers party (they still have it in their name), but one is mainstream centre right and the other centre left, and they have been throughout their periods of government in democracy. For someone who claims to be an experienced commentator on Catalan affairs to suggest otherwise is little short of a direct lie.

I enjoyed your reply, but you underestimate the historical strength of Catalan identity, although it is true that it has been deliberately whipped up in recent years by politicians who used it to gain a power base, and have now painted themselves into a corner. It is only partly based on language. There is also a sense of a different historical path, which is not entirely correct, but identity is not about truth, and a sense that many of the other regions of Spain (especially Galicia, Extremadura and Andalucia, are completely foreign to them, in their people and their culture, as well as their history.

Incidentally you are wrong to dismiss the Catalan language as just a dialect of Spanish. Although it is easy enough for a Spanish speaker to understand and to learn, it belongs to the Gallic family of Romance languages, which split from the Iberian group 1,000 years ago, and it has a rich literature and tradition of its own dating back to the middle ages. Anecdotally, some of the books that inspired Don Quijote’s madness were Occitan tales of chivalry, still extant.

I think I have droned on enough now, so thank you for your patience

Which gets away a bit on the question of Spanish debt itself but sets the overall scene and on that basis, its inclusion here is argued. Thus, the other party in this collusion of three bloggers, Sackerson, had this piece up at his place, about corruption in Spain, which still does not get us any closer to the issue of JPM’s advice.

This reply from Sackerson is in no way personal advice but touches on the general world situation as he sees it:

There are, I understand, hedge funds speculating in sovereign debt. There’s a City adage “two views make a market” and if they can buy bonds cheaply and guess right then they make a fortune if the government honours its obligation – I understand buying British bonds during and after Waterloo was the foundation of the British Rothschild fortune.

One twist I read about recently was a fund buying sovereign debt that was to be defaulted (partly or wholly) and then using international law to enforce it in full. We are in a time when the rich are making law to suit themselves.

Of course, the speculators could be wrong, but if you’ve previously made a personal fortune in bonuses who cares if the firm goes down? This appears to be the story of the banks.

Goldman Sachs were caught some time ago giving advice one way to their smaller investors and the other way to large and favoured clients. I stopped reading the financial press when none of them foresaw the great financial crisis.

The world is interlinked with finance, debt and speculation. The total value of derivatives – side bets to you and me – appears to dwarf the GDP of the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)#Size_of_market

I am no longer sure what money actually represents, since it’s backed and limited by nothing at all.

The point has been made – by Australian economist Steve Keen, among others – that instead of bailing out banks, the money should have been given to the people to bail them out, because with less debt they would spend more and create jobs for each other.

A debt jubilee sounds great; except that pensions use government bonds to shore up their guarantees to pensioners. And what would happen to house prices if, say there were no mortgages any more? It’s like trying to predict the outcome of a massive barroom fight.

I found this from JPM to its private clients [pdf]

… which seems to confirm that advice JD read that they gave.

Pause for a moment and note that we are divided by language so much. For example, on the Amanda Knox issue, the reason America believed one thing was that their sources were all from one camp, in the English language. However, those reading italian had an entirely different view. Ditto with the bin Laden SEAL killing. Those reading Arabic have an entirely different view to those reading only English.

There’s a piece of advice in that – to really know what’s going on, accepting that the MSM globally is in captcha, to know other languages or to access machine translations is most helpful. Going to a Spanish blogger on these things and getting a machine translation does often given a different perspective.

The major financial press is not all that helpful. Bloomberg reports that Black Rock is buying Spanish short-term [early October, 2014] but that still doesn’t touch on sovereign debt.

Why should JPM advise that way when S&P had advised that it wasn’t all that bad, Spain’s sovereign debt as an investment, in May, 2014?

Not sure this Spanish govt advice is helpful. Nor this.

Perhaps this will help:

The European Central Bank bought covered bonds for the first time since President Mario Draghi unveiled an asset purchase program last month.

The ECB acquired short-dated French notes from Societe Generale SA (GLE) and BNP Paribas SA as well as Spanish securities from other lenders, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Draghi said he intends to expand the bank’s balance sheet by as much as 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) to stave off deflation in the euro area.

Policy makers are under pressure to take action as euro-area inflation slowed to 0.3 percent in September and the International Monetary Fund said the region has as much as a 40 percent chance of entering its third recession since 2008. Growth will reach 1.3 percent next year, slower than he 1.5 percent pace predicted in July, after a 0.8 percent gain this year, the IMF said Oct. 7.

“From today we will begin to know how aggressive the ECB will be in bidding for bonds,” said Agustin Martin, head of European credit research at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA in London.

It’s blindingly obvious I’m no money man but am, I think, a reasonable political thinker. Podemos represents a cry for help from the Spanish and may be behind the Catalan call of ‘let’s get out of this mess now’. Whether their leadership has been promised funding upon Spanish break-up [don't forget the Muslim push into Spain as well, history revisited] is an unknown.

Podemos is left wing academic intellectual. As such, it is ignorant and it’s only solution is to nationalize. Not playing by the international money rules does seem attractive to many Spaniards – see their polls and is the leftwing alternative to what Nigel is doing over here.

The difference is that things still have to be financed over there, even nationalized, e.g. public sector salaries and a wildly freefall Spanish currency is not going to help with that – at least such a thing has not helped before [see Russia 1997/8, through which I lived in that country].

Nigel’s solution is to stay within capitalism but trade with other countries free of the EU toxicity. And the notion that Europe would cease trading with the UK is not borne out by stats on inwards and outwards movement of money – the UK is still attractive as an investment. Only the unelected “leadership” of the EU is trying to talk up the opposite.

Therefore, in the light of Podemos and the possibility of nationalization, JPM is ambivalent but cautious. Most major players say go short for now and see what happens.

Which still doesn’t answer the question of who owns Spain or will in the near future.
 

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It's the lawlessness plus the militarization of police - together

First, two pics from the link below:

 

Then the link: http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/11/protests-turn-to-free-for-all/

Additional material, via Barry Ritholtz:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/turning-policemen-into-soldiers-the-culmination-of-a-long-trend/376052/

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/americas-weaponized-police-force-could-benefit-from-one-more-weapon-cameras/376063/

Then you might look at this link on police exceeding their legitimate authority:

Rogue policeman who tried to get DNA sample from young girl to prove she was daughter of kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch is sentenced to prison

 ... which might tie in with this:

The missing children ... which is getting a little tangential to the main theme of this article.

Sackerson asks us to look at the second pic above, more so than the first.  Sorry, methinks both must be viewed in conjunction in order to make sense of what's going on.

Whilst I'm with him on the second and will write on it below, the issue of the top pic and the lawlessness the society has fallen into due to corrupt politicians, left-captured judiciary which condones criminals but incarcerates the minor, especially non-PC, offender and the overall weakening of the institutions of society, actually ties in with the increasing militarization of the police.

In old left-right terms, there's one of each issue in this tale, which raises the question, if both left and right are concerned, then what are we concerned about and the answer to that is the State.

And as has been shown in posts passim, almost ad infinitum, the State is not only encroaching but the hidden group behind it - I hesitate to call it a ruling class - is going down the same path as near the end of the Weimar Republic.

Whilst the left, through its organs Scientific American, MSNBC, the Cato Institute, the Atlantic and others zeroes in on the militarization, the right's American Thinker zeroes in on something different:
  http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/08/obamas_call_to_calm_in_ferguson.html#ixzz3AoT6K1QF

The president’s interest is, or should be, the health of our nation, and the totality of its people, to include the people of Ferguson inclusively, but not exclusively. He should adamantly reinforce his support for the “rule of law”, for either we have justice (true justice, premised on findings, not emotion), or we have chaos and anarchy.

National Review Online makes a good point:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/385656/grossly-exaggerated-militarization-police-critique-ferguson-rich-lowry

It was ridiculous and wrong for police snipers to train their weapons on peaceful protestors in Ferguson. But, when you get right down to it, the militarization of police has had basically nothing to do with events there, even though the Left and parts of the Right have wanted to make that the main issue.

It's too convenient that this over-militarization, as opposed to its bobby on the beat function, should coincide with all this rank lawlessness.  It's almost an invitation to FEMA and the days of the new heavy-handed police reaction.  Well maybe not new - you'll recall the miners' strikes. NRO again:

So now Governor Nixon is calling in the National Guard, or in other words, “militarizing” the response. What Ferguson needs is the restoration of basic order, and the absence of it has never been the fault of the police, but of a small, lawless fringe of protestors bent on mayhem.

See, we swing left, we swing right and never really look at BOTH sides of the issue together.

We don't focus on the real culprits who even condone the lawlessness, whilst militarizing the police. And as that article says, Ferguson is only one small part of the issue which has been going on for quite some time.

But the point is, all these new threats are conveniently arising, in order for the stormtrooper reaction.  ISIS for a start is a faux-Islamist group - see Operation Cyclone for background.

Let's not go too left-field but there still is the little matter of the Patriot Act quickly following the "convenient" 911. We've also seen the innocuous FEMA holding camps with the inturned barbed wire tops of fences which are explained away as training barracks and whatever.

Trouble is, the left will bring that up and the right poo-poohs it, then the right will bring up the failure of police to act on the lawless and feckless in Ferguson and the left will say no, no, it's all the police's fault, ignoring how this lawlessness is spreading and threatening ordinary people.

Thus both sides fail to agree - we can't even agree on which photo is more important - and thus we fail to combine to stop the whole phenomenon of the game of these people I call Them, for want of a better term.

In other words, the power behind the politicians who both appoint the pollies and run them from behind the scenes.  In the case of Cameron, one of them can be named immediately - Barosso.  If you need another name - Sutherland.

This is where the issue is.  If you go through those links, the pattern is not only clear, it's worldwide.  Australia is also doing these things, and Canada.


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Population density and house size

By Sackerson.

James Higham reproduces a graphic from Amfortas re house size in selected countries:

... which got me thinking.

I looked up the ratio of arable land per person (average of 2009-11), and then added Amfortas' statistics:

As you see, the smaller the amount of arable land per capita, the smaller the house - except for Australia, which is still a young country in terms of immigration and development, and also has limited water resources.

Taking it one step further, I divided the house size by the arable land per person:

 

We now have two outliers, Australia and the UK. The real story here, I think: Britain is far too crowded and dependent on imported food.


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The encroachment of the State can't be stopped if people increasingly give it the justification

The case after case listed at the Ron Paul site is interesting, not just for the encroachment of the police state but for the stupidity and/or borderline criminality of the punished anyway:

Whether it’s the working mother arrested for letting her 9-year-old play unsupervised at a playground, the teenager forced to have his genitals photographed by police, the underage burglar sentenced to 23 years for shooting a retired police dog, or the 43-year-old man who died of a heart attack after being put in a chokehold by NYPD officers allegedly over the sale of untaxed cigarettes, the theater of the absurd that passes for life in the American police state grows more tragic and incomprehensible by the day. 

In Georgia, a toddler had his face severely burned when a flash bang grenade, launched by a SWAT team during the course of a no-knock warrant, landed in his portable crib, detonating on his pillow. Also in Georgia, a police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who answered the door, reportedly with a Nintendo Wii controller in his hands. The cop claimed the teenager pointed a gun at her, thereby justifying the use of deadly force. 

Then there was the incident wherein a police officer, responding to a complaint that some children were “chopping off tree limbs” creating “tripping hazards,”pulled a gun on a group of 11-year-old boys who were playing in a wooded area, attempting to build a tree fort.

The trouble is, the criticism of both sides is justified.  Yes, the SWAT team and female police officer were not only way OTT but they were criminal as well.  On the other hand, the burglar shooting the police dog needed to be put away all right.  But for 23 years? The public itself is making it so easy for the enforcers to get in and do what they shouldn't.  Much has been written about Mentoring programmes and these look nasty. It's become a science with its own sets of qualifications, extending the social service departments of local authorities to almost ravening monsters, ready to step in and remove a child at a moment's notice. The product of Children's Minister Aileen Campbell's backers:

Unfortunately, this dystopian future has arrived a little faster than I imagined, as last week the Scottish Government’s plan to give every child a state guardian from birth was launched. This state-appointed overseer will be a specific, named individual, and every child will have one, from birth. The responsibility for creating this named guardian will fall on the heads of the health boards for the first five years of a child’s life, before being transferred to councils. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this development is that it clearly comes in large part as a mechanism to target and prevent child abuse.

It's not just over here:

Boston Children’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Department of Youth and Families take another child hostage because hospital staff disagree with the parents on the child’s medical diagnosis.  In California, “Baby Sammy” was taken from his parents because they left one hospital to seek a second opinion at another before subjecting the child to open-heart surgery.  In Ohio, an Amish family was forced to flee the country to spare their daughter unwanted and dangerous chemo-therapy, including a cocktail of drugs not approved for children by the FDA. Reports indicate the girl is in remission through natural means, but the Ohio hospital and child services department are livid.

In every case though, there were ostensible justifications which many might agree with.  In other words, there is a new era of parental irresponsibility, particularly with the young and single parent.  Over here, Labour acknowledges the problem but as it always does, tries to sheet it home to poverty because that ties into inequality and that means the rich can be slugged and the middle-class further attacked and eroded to "even the playing field" to that of stagnant mediocrity.

 All the while, state institution administrators draw fatcat salaries - witness the Baby P payout to Shoesmith. So what we have on the one hand is a society progressively debilitated, e.g. by the single parent family on benefits, the rise of gay adoption and so many other factors contributing to the death of the two original parent family which cost considerably less and gave a better chance to the child. Single parent families have issues.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/3235650/Children-in-single-parent-families-more-likely-to-suffer-emotional-problems-report-finds.html

 Even left-leaning publications acknowledge certain facts:
  http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/single_motherhood_worse_for_children_.html

 No one's suggesting it is the only factor - there is the world culture at an earlier and earlier age, dark gaming, children isolating themselves online, whereas once they were part of the family and so on and so on. The point being that the question of bad or irresponsible parenting is increasingly hard to define. It used to be the child found in squalour, with faeces about, having not being fed. But now even middle-class families which might have passed muster before fail on the criteria of increasingly empowered state agencies - hence the issues quoted and linked to above.

 And every one of those defends to the death that the children are loved and are being brought up well, that the parent knows "tons" of other cases where the original parents are abusive to each other and so on. And once again, these people are not wrong. Nor are those pointing the finger at single parents' situations.

They're all correct on their side of the argument. The issues, not cut and dried and fiercely contested, are simply an open invitation for the Mentor Service to step in. The Mentor Service is the foot in the door. It's the Mentor who notices "the problem" and passes it on to Social Services. It is Social Services which take it up from there. Encroachment. It couldn't happen without something to point to and this vanguard of the state does have many things to point to, to justify its intervention.

 Which intervention is, in principle, wrong and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Especially with Common Purpose and its brainwashing present in every council in England near the mayor's office. Common Purpose gets in on everything - witness Leveson. Some try to remove themselves from the State, from the grid but even that is fraught and anticipated. The Ron Paul site again:

Meanwhile if you’re one of those hoping to live off the grid, independent of city resources, you might want to think again. Florida resident Robin Speronis was threatened with eviction for living without utilities. Speronis was accused of violating the International Property Maintenance Code by relying on rain water instead of the city water system and solar panels instead of the electric grid.

Only an American phenomenon?  Blogger Macheath, over here, tells this tale:

Decades ago, in the maternity ward of a hospital later castigated in the national press for its shortcomings, a combination of indifference and brutally rough handling provoked me into expressing my opinion of the ‘skills’ of some of the nursing staff. As the objects of my fury stalked off, another nurse remained behind; “Please be careful,” she said, “if you say things like that, they will report you as having postnatal psychosis and have the Social Services in. They might even take your child away.” Parents, it seems, criticise those placed in power over them at their own peril.

The two points coming out of that are the danger and that it has been going on for a long time in the background in this country, only now it is coming to a head and reaching the press. The Ron Paul site again:

Now we can shrug these incidents off as isolated injustices happening to “other” people. We can rationalize them away by suggesting that these people “must” have done something to warrant such treatment. Or we can acknowledge that this slide into totalitarianism—helped along by overcriminalization, government surveillance, militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors, privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what we saw happening in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power. 

When all is said and done, what these incidents reflect is a society that has become so bureaucratic, so legalistic, so politically correct, so militaristic, so locked down, so self righteous, and so willing to march in lockstep with the corporate-minded police state that any deviations from the norm—especially those that offend the sensibilities of the “government-knows-best” nanny state or challenge the powers that be—become grist for prosecution, persecution and endless tribulations for the poor souls who are caught in the crosshairs.

The people themselves must shoulder much of the blame for what they have become. They're almost inviting the State in with their irresponsibility and excessive self-centredness or even being innocent and finding themselves drawn into things made easy for them to be drawn into.  The kindly offer of help.  The kindly pay-day loan people.  The kindly Mentor.  Plus the infantilization of society in which parents would even countenance such things.

So who or what is to blame for this bureaucratic nightmare delivered by way of the police state? Is it the White House? Is it Congress? Is it the Department of Homeland Security, with its mobster mindset? Is it some shadowy, power-hungry entity operating off a nefarious plan? 

Or is it, as Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt suggests, the sheepish masses who mindlessly march in lockstep with the government’s dictates—expressing no outrage, demanding no reform, and issuing no challenge to the status quo—who are to blame for the prison walls being erected around us? 

The author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt warned that “the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

How many of the people described above are going to be remotely aware of what is happening? And of those who are aware, e.g. readers of this blog - how many dismiss it because it might criticize them either directly or obliquely?

 So therefore, what chance that anything can change and halt the advance of the State via the backdoor route of bureaucracy at local level?  The enormous danger is that the root causes are so diffuse, so hard to pin down, so removed from events further along the chain and so many people have bought into them that there is an inert but still collectively massive barrier to anything being done.

 If, for example, the "all must have prizes" paradigm in schools is but a tiny issue on the surface of a wider malaise and a group of teachers have bought into that, those teachers are not going to support any connection made between that and the malaise of society which allows a portal for the State to move in, even if the case can be made.  There's something for these individuals to lose here.

 And that's how Them operates.  It brings in legislation piece by piece via the backdoor, in response to some need perceived by people.

When they see that contrived need addressed, they're hardly likely to see that they have just enabled further totalitarianism.  When the State publishing organ - the MSM - brings up obesity and paedophilia and smoking and this and that., it wants the people who love banning things to all speak up.

 And slowly, the State, on the say-so of such people, bans this, then there's a new crisis and it bans that and onwards and onwards and then it extends it to everyone, just to be on the safe side, as in that Scottish Children's Ministry Mentor Number for all.

 And there we are.  Ninety Eighty-Four for a new age.

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Russia: Driver etiquette

(Bonus footage for grown-ups!)

Former Tatarstan resident James Higham gives his experience of motoring among the Ivans:

Jesse's running a vid on Russian roads and drivers: http://youtu.be/hlxHPJAONpE. There is a quite violent part in the vid where the driver jumps up, beats a pedestrian who has fallen over and drags him off the road before returning to his car. As a reader noted:

He didn't "trip". It's a common scam in Russia for people to do that in front of cars, then claim they were knocked down. The driver clearly isn't falling for that nonsense and... makes it clear. Good on him.

Jesse speaks of dashcams and it's true we used to run all manner of equipment. One of the most important was the radar detector on the dash or windscreen, afterwards made illegal. It was basically war over there between drivers and the GAI [afterwards renamed], i.e. the traffic police, and between drivers themselves. The GAI would take to hiding behind roadside kiosks and the like and spring out at you after having tracked you with radar guns. So there was this phenomenon where traffic as a whole would go at breakneck speed, slow to 40 kph - the whole road full of traffic, not just some cars - and then speed up again - that's how people got around.

Another hazard was the official cavalcade with the President or a minister and police would clear the highway ahead of them coming through. If you failed to get out of the way, they would physically get you out of the way - never happened to me but did to people I knew. There's a definite hierarchy on the road and people act in character. If you're pulled up [again not me but I was told tales] and instead of trying to placate the officers, you ask, "You really wish to do this, do you?" this is often sufficient to make them think they have someone on their hands they weren't told about. Cars often had separate reg plates to designate who they were and I was once in one of these. When we were stopped, they saw these and the document and waved us through.

Long traffic jams are not unknown either through total, helpless disorganization of the road system. What's unusual here are the orderly lanes - more on that further down:

 

I once [I claim accidentally] ran a Mercedes who was trying to butt in ahead of me off the road. Later, I was told I was still lucky to be alive or not beaten up. I think it surprised the Merc driver. I once tooted the police to get a move on and I think that is not done either there or here. My own position varied - being British bought me a fair bit but it also brought out prejudice in those who saw an easy touch and those wanting to make a point. As my car was a souped up Lada, if they didn't know I was foreign, then I had to conform to the unwritten road code or be stomped on.

The vid above shows people beating on others but that was less the case as far as I saw it than just the sheer number of accidents. On the stretch going into town [6km], it was unusual to see less than three or four bingles of some kind, often a multiple car pile up. There were many reasons for this. Part of it is that the car culture for all was still a relatively recent phenomenon in 1999/2000 and credit was only just coming in to blight the Russian people even further. The result of the influx of new cars on the never-never, along with woeful driver training, women on the roads now and the scam of money under the counter for licences - all these, plus the police corruption in taking bribes for pulling a driver up and fining him or her - these contributed to the mayhem.

Then there were the roads and their state. Designed for a more leisurely era, the cities had to catch up with the C20th and when four or five roads, potholed, pockmarked, with crumbling edges, all converged in one place, when the general population waiting for buses had not taken it onboard that pedestrians should not swarm onto the road when five lanes of traffic were also doing that - there were the conditions for further mayhem.

You can see the converging traffic all trying to get across our main bridge in Kazan:

 

Then there is the attitude of Russians that what they are doing at that time takes precedence over all else, combined with the word "just". So, if you were in heavy traffic and wanted to turn right across traffic into a new supermarket, you just went, you thought you'd just squeeze through that gap, you just expected the traffic rushing towards you from the lights would politely stop and wait for you with a cheery wave of the hand. I think you saw in that clip the cheery waves of hands.

Driving on Russian roads is like our concept of what it must have been like in the wild west. I've seen cars happily driving along footpaths, going up on grassy embankments, going every which way to get through. In fact I developed the ability to get through with applied aggression mixed with caution. It was useful to appear to be a nutter as people would let you through ... or else block you and beat you up. Frankly, with no lanes on most roads because the markings are worn away during winter and under heavy traffic, drivers tend to self-activate lanes as you saw in the second pic above. And equally, there are drivers who ignore all that.

How can all this be? Well, for the reasons given above plus the demoralization of the Russian people over decades. Where they were is where we are going ourselves in the UK but we are still in the early stages where people still care about fines and doing the right thing and all that. In Russia, the laws got to such a ridiculous stage where there were even laws against the laws, to the point where it was literally impossible to drive legally. The very fact that there was a small space ahead only for the whole column of traffic to pass through, meaning you crossed a double line, made you liable to a fine and points. Most times the police would not try to intervene but if they were short of money in the coffers that week, then the police car would be stationed the other side of that gap and they'd randomly pull over motorists in a steady stream of revenue.

 

There was an unwritten rule that you flashed your lights to cars coming the other way if the GAI were hiding back behind you half a kilometre or so and if he flashed back, it was to say thank you. So drivers do work together, it's not total war and in carparks, people tend to help each other out, especially in winter. They made the flashing of lights illegal. The State knew all about this and how it was diverted to private pockets and to be sure, I didn't mind this as I knew my "fine" was going to that man and his family, or else to booze but that was better than to the State.

Defending the State for the moment, it was impossible to keep the roads pothole free - the winter put paid to beautiful road surfaces. There was a year in which a German firm tendered for road repair with a 20 year surface guarantee but the cost was way beyond anything the State was prepared to pay on mere roads which people use.

And so the mayhem goes on, total gridlock at peak hour, frayed tempers and sometimes violence. The clip above is actually Russians trying to sensationalize - the fights are less overall, the actual accidents far more.

 

Brave girls - things can come out of nowhere in Russia:

 

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