Maru (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yakalskovich) wrote2009-08-28 03:27 pm
yakalskovich) wrote2009-08-28 03:27 pm
Georgia on ma-ma-ma-ma-mah mind!
Since the Great LiveJournal Outage of August, I have been chewing on the lessons from that remarkable Saturday, and the fact that LJ can filter input.
By now,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cyxymu's journal as been restored, and we're allowed to say 'Sukhumi' again. But things go much deeper; they reach into the early 1990s, all the way back to Stalin, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and in fact the Scythians, because these areas in the north and east of the Black Sea were where the ancient civilisations of the west (Greeks, mostly) traded with the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians that in turn went all the way to China. In fact, you should very much not underestimate the role of the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians* within the course of Old World history. Master Urban and I have long been theorising about the influence of Buddhist monks from Mongolia on the development of Western monasticism in Coptic Egypt and the Near East in the last years of the Roman empire, and the amazing similarities between Orthodox Christianity and the Tibeto-Mongolian branch of Buddhism. They came down the Silk Road, of course, and into the Late Classical world through Zeugma; but they came through the Scythian corridor just as much, and that is Georgia. The Georgians are Orthodox, in their own somewhat odd and immensely old-fashioned way, too.
But I digress. Let me put in a picture and then, a cut.
Click on the picture to get more of a background; all in all, that seemingly peaceful scene seems to illustrate that country pretty well. Texans hack road signs to warn about zombies; Georgians do it to forbid Russian tanks on their motorways.
Georgians are a very stubborn people, and an incredibly old one; the world's oldest win-making equipment and the worlds oldest gold mine have been found there, and I think that tells a lot about them. The country is Colchis from the Greek myths and ancient accounts, after all. The Golden Fleece stands for access to a rich and bountiful land on a hinge point between East and West.
And like any rich and bountiful land, their bigger, badder neighbours have always wanted it, so there have been lots of wars there. 'Scythian corridor' refers to the fact that the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians used to come over certain Colchidan/Georgian mountain passes to raid along the Black Sea, if they felt like it; not just just to peaceful trade and cultural exchange, which of course happened as well. And in later times, the Persians/Parthians and the Roman and Byzantine empires, then the Ottoman empire and Muscovy/Rus, were forever at each other's throats there.
Under Soviet rule, Georgia was doing comparatively well, and was comparatively independent, and didn't have lots of people deported to settle in Siberia, as had other mixed-up little places around the Black Sea. Part of a reason for that was the fact that Stalin was originally Georgian. Some people in Georgia are still uncritically proud of that fact, which is of course incredibly off for western sensibilities, as if Braunau in Austria was proud of being the birthplace of Adolf Hitler**. Then, after the Chernobyl incident and the fact that a Polish cardinal was elected pope, along with the processes of Glasnost and Perestroika, crumbled the Soviet bloc from the corners, Georgia was among the first states to secede, after the Baltic states, because (Stalin or no Stalin) they were always fiercely independent, and had millennia of practice in leveraging larger neighbours against each other. Faithful allies they never were, say sorry.
Gorbachev's foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze*** was Georgian, and later ended up a president of independent Georgia, but was kicked out foe being too authoritarian. During his rule, in the nineties, Georgia was embroiled in a war with Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhasia, and that is where Sukhumi comes in.
Sukhumi is the capital of Abkhasia, and what would be a generally pleasant little sea port on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, if it didn't have a natural deep-water harbour that would make it interesting for oil tankers, or as a new home for the Russian Black Sea Fleet which is going to lose the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol during the next decade, as per treaty. Sukhumi looks good for that, and even Russian news sources have begun speculating about it -- unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an English version of that crucial article.
It is almost amusing that 'Sebastopolis' used to be a former name**** of Sukhumi. The port changed hands several times during Justinian's Persian war, the great big bone-mill in the east that gobbled up mercenaries and materials while he has Belisarius and Narses splat the Vandals and Goths in the west and south. These Germanic peoples were always just a secondary front; the main front for Byzantium lay in the East, with the Persians. What would have really happened to any Goths that survived Narses (had he not let them go in the end) would have been that the men would have been summarily conscripted, and sent as auxiliary troops to the Persian front, and that is why they really fought to the bitter end (sorry, Felix Dahn and all your 19th century hero worship!): - they didn't want to end up as ballista fodder in the sieges of Sebastopolis and the like, and preferred to die at home if they had to die anyway.
More recently, Sukhumi was the scene of a great massacre in the early 1990s, perpetrated not by Russian troops but by the Chechen militias of one infamous Shamil Bassaev, then allied with the Russians. Later, he became the most prominent Chechen terrorist and arch-enemy of Russia, connected with some of the most awful atrocities perpetrated in that conflict. He's like Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban in that way, who were originally allied to the US in the Russian-Afghan war of the late seventies and early eighties*****. That massacre of Sukhumi, and the memories about Sukhumi by a former resident now living in Tblisi, is what the blogcyxymu is really all about. After those 'ethnic cleansings', the millennia-old mixed population of those Black Sea reason delaminated badly, the Jews went to Israel, the Greeks (still there from the times of Anatolios or Artabanes) to Greece, and so on.
So, all this world history, and the people from the historical WIPs of my friends, suddenly reached out to affect us immediately and lock us out from our favourite online playground for parts of a weekend. Perhaps that is what Cyber-war is like in the Information Age. That is just peanut, like the Cimbri poking the late Roman republic as the first Germanic tribe that had gone a-wandering, looooong before their relatives spelled the doom of the late empire.
I like the internet. But I grew up without it, and if it does go away again one day due to many many many incidents like that, I'll be able to live without it again. Perhaps I'm too pessimistic; I grew to political consciousness in the eighties, with a ginormous arms race hanging over our heads, especially here in Germany, part of the front line of the Cold War. I'm still not over expecting the world to end and civilisation to fail in my lifetime. Perhaps it won't. But I'm not counting on it.-
* Originally, that was a term I used to tease the Little Lady about her favourite dancer in our good old Wiesbaden ballet company that we loved to see because they were OMG fun!!! and did amazing crossover things with all sorts of pop culture. Of course, that can't be tolerated at a publicly financed German Staatstheater, and the Belgian bloke who ran it (and his relatives who'd helped with it) were sacked. Anyway, the Little Lady's favourite dancer was a bloke with one of typical names ending on '-ayev' or '-eev' (damn Cyrillic transcriptiong!!), hence clearly a MASB.
** Stalin being the only person in the history of history that one is allowed to compare to Hitler, of course, without being automatically disqualified and losing the argument.
*** Georgian last names are recognisable by ending on -adze or -shvili.
**** That is what that great shout-out with the names was about; I was referring to the names under which the protagonists ofessayel's and carolinw's works-in-progress would have known the place. And my own Milli!Teja, at that.
***** OMG how dare we think we live in peace!? We live in one of the most bloody eras in human history, we just managed to keep most of the bloodshed off our home soil, but we won't forever: see the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Somewhere, there are Goths and Huns and Alans and Vandals and Parthians out there, and they're gonna get us in the end.
By now,
cyxymu's journal as been restored, and we're allowed to say 'Sukhumi' again. But things go much deeper; they reach into the early 1990s, all the way back to Stalin, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and in fact the Scythians, because these areas in the north and east of the Black Sea were where the ancient civilisations of the west (Greeks, mostly) traded with the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians that in turn went all the way to China. In fact, you should very much not underestimate the role of the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians* within the course of Old World history. Master Urban and I have long been theorising about the influence of Buddhist monks from Mongolia on the development of Western monasticism in Coptic Egypt and the Near East in the last years of the Roman empire, and the amazing similarities between Orthodox Christianity and the Tibeto-Mongolian branch of Buddhism. They came down the Silk Road, of course, and into the Late Classical world through Zeugma; but they came through the Scythian corridor just as much, and that is Georgia. The Georgians are Orthodox, in their own somewhat odd and immensely old-fashioned way, too.But I digress. Let me put in a picture and then, a cut.
Click on the picture to get more of a background; all in all, that seemingly peaceful scene seems to illustrate that country pretty well. Texans hack road signs to warn about zombies; Georgians do it to forbid Russian tanks on their motorways.
Georgians are a very stubborn people, and an incredibly old one; the world's oldest win-making equipment and the worlds oldest gold mine have been found there, and I think that tells a lot about them. The country is Colchis from the Greek myths and ancient accounts, after all. The Golden Fleece stands for access to a rich and bountiful land on a hinge point between East and West.
And like any rich and bountiful land, their bigger, badder neighbours have always wanted it, so there have been lots of wars there. 'Scythian corridor' refers to the fact that the Middle Asian Steppe Barbarians used to come over certain Colchidan/Georgian mountain passes to raid along the Black Sea, if they felt like it; not just just to peaceful trade and cultural exchange, which of course happened as well. And in later times, the Persians/Parthians and the Roman and Byzantine empires, then the Ottoman empire and Muscovy/Rus, were forever at each other's throats there.
Under Soviet rule, Georgia was doing comparatively well, and was comparatively independent, and didn't have lots of people deported to settle in Siberia, as had other mixed-up little places around the Black Sea. Part of a reason for that was the fact that Stalin was originally Georgian. Some people in Georgia are still uncritically proud of that fact, which is of course incredibly off for western sensibilities, as if Braunau in Austria was proud of being the birthplace of Adolf Hitler**. Then, after the Chernobyl incident and the fact that a Polish cardinal was elected pope, along with the processes of Glasnost and Perestroika, crumbled the Soviet bloc from the corners, Georgia was among the first states to secede, after the Baltic states, because (Stalin or no Stalin) they were always fiercely independent, and had millennia of practice in leveraging larger neighbours against each other. Faithful allies they never were, say sorry.
Gorbachev's foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze*** was Georgian, and later ended up a president of independent Georgia, but was kicked out foe being too authoritarian. During his rule, in the nineties, Georgia was embroiled in a war with Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhasia, and that is where Sukhumi comes in.
Sukhumi is the capital of Abkhasia, and what would be a generally pleasant little sea port on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, if it didn't have a natural deep-water harbour that would make it interesting for oil tankers, or as a new home for the Russian Black Sea Fleet which is going to lose the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol during the next decade, as per treaty. Sukhumi looks good for that, and even Russian news sources have begun speculating about it -- unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an English version of that crucial article.
It is almost amusing that 'Sebastopolis' used to be a former name**** of Sukhumi. The port changed hands several times during Justinian's Persian war, the great big bone-mill in the east that gobbled up mercenaries and materials while he has Belisarius and Narses splat the Vandals and Goths in the west and south. These Germanic peoples were always just a secondary front; the main front for Byzantium lay in the East, with the Persians. What would have really happened to any Goths that survived Narses (had he not let them go in the end) would have been that the men would have been summarily conscripted, and sent as auxiliary troops to the Persian front, and that is why they really fought to the bitter end (sorry, Felix Dahn and all your 19th century hero worship!): - they didn't want to end up as ballista fodder in the sieges of Sebastopolis and the like, and preferred to die at home if they had to die anyway.
More recently, Sukhumi was the scene of a great massacre in the early 1990s, perpetrated not by Russian troops but by the Chechen militias of one infamous Shamil Bassaev, then allied with the Russians. Later, he became the most prominent Chechen terrorist and arch-enemy of Russia, connected with some of the most awful atrocities perpetrated in that conflict. He's like Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban in that way, who were originally allied to the US in the Russian-Afghan war of the late seventies and early eighties*****. That massacre of Sukhumi, and the memories about Sukhumi by a former resident now living in Tblisi, is what the blog
cyxymu is really all about. After those 'ethnic cleansings', the millennia-old mixed population of those Black Sea reason delaminated badly, the Jews went to Israel, the Greeks (still there from the times of Anatolios or Artabanes) to Greece, and so on.So, all this world history, and the people from the historical WIPs of my friends, suddenly reached out to affect us immediately and lock us out from our favourite online playground for parts of a weekend. Perhaps that is what Cyber-war is like in the Information Age. That is just peanut, like the Cimbri poking the late Roman republic as the first Germanic tribe that had gone a-wandering, looooong before their relatives spelled the doom of the late empire.
I like the internet. But I grew up without it, and if it does go away again one day due to many many many incidents like that, I'll be able to live without it again. Perhaps I'm too pessimistic; I grew to political consciousness in the eighties, with a ginormous arms race hanging over our heads, especially here in Germany, part of the front line of the Cold War. I'm still not over expecting the world to end and civilisation to fail in my lifetime. Perhaps it won't. But I'm not counting on it.-
* Originally, that was a term I used to tease the Little Lady about her favourite dancer in our good old Wiesbaden ballet company that we loved to see because they were OMG fun!!! and did amazing crossover things with all sorts of pop culture. Of course, that can't be tolerated at a publicly financed German Staatstheater, and the Belgian bloke who ran it (and his relatives who'd helped with it) were sacked. Anyway, the Little Lady's favourite dancer was a bloke with one of typical names ending on '-ayev' or '-eev' (damn Cyrillic transcriptiong!!), hence clearly a MASB.
** Stalin being the only person in the history of history that one is allowed to compare to Hitler, of course, without being automatically disqualified and losing the argument.
*** Georgian last names are recognisable by ending on -adze or -shvili.
**** That is what that great shout-out with the names was about; I was referring to the names under which the protagonists of
essayel's and carolinw's works-in-progress would have known the place. And my own Milli!Teja, at that.***** OMG how dare we think we live in peace!? We live in one of the most bloody eras in human history, we just managed to keep most of the bloodshed off our home soil, but we won't forever: see the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Somewhere, there are Goths and Huns and Alans and Vandals and Parthians out there, and they're gonna get us in the end.