MARK ALMOND ON GEORGIA, RUSSIA, AND NATO
Aug 22nd, 2008 by Conor McCabe
The video below is taken from a stop the war coalition meeting in London, 14 August 2008. Mark Almond gives his analysis of the ongoing conflict. (and before anyone makes the joke, no, it’s not THAT Mark Almond.) This is from stopwar.org.uk:
MARK ALMOND, lecturer in History, Oxford University and expert on the Caucasus, provided the meeting with the sort of background information on Georgia so sadly lacking on the BBC.Visiting a Georgian prison he had expressed concern to the prison governor at the possibility that political prisoners may have been tortured. ‘Don’t worry,’ he was told, ‘We torture everyone.’
Saakashvili, far from being a democrat brought to power on the shoulders of an orange, yellow or was it rose revolution, was and is a placeman of the United States. US-educated, he was the last person to win the Enron Prize for Distinquished Public Service.
Georgian troops have been part of the US occupation force in Iraq (hurried back to Georgia in their desert fatigues).
Mark reminded us that it was the Georgians who started the recent conflict with their blitzkrieg attack on South Ossetia and in doing so broke the peace treaty which they had signed with the Russians. The majority of Ossetians wished to be part of the Russian Federation and didn’t want to be embedded in Georgia. But, hey, when it comes to running pipelines from the Caspian basin through Georgia, democracy is not going to get in the way.
Almond is part of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, a most interesting right wing (some would say reactionary) grouping. I think he’s very partisan indeed in a weird British conservative way.
I’m strangely immune to his arguments for precisely that reason.
Fair enough. For myself, when Shane Ross says that there’s cartels running the estate agents business in Ireland, I don’t ignore it if the facts stack up. With Almond, what he’s saying - that this is a return to old style cold war politics - doesn’t seem that wide of the mark.
I didn’t know that he was a member of a reactionary right-wing group, but, listening back to the recording it does make sense. My experience of the far left is that - with the exception of people like Mark Steel - they are useless at humour (Boyd-Barrett, Kieran Allen, Joe Higgins (bless ‘im), Clare Daly (complete humour transplant), etc). In politics, it seems, the devil has all the best jokes.
No, that’s a fair point you make, and like yourself I’d draw on a wide range of opinion. But I tend to prefer that to be from people who’re not players, or at least if they’re players they make their interests in a situation known up front and the BHHRG is a bit opaque about that sort of thing. I don’t doubt he’s got insights, just that the end point of his argument is probably more pre-formed than I like.
True. Still. He’s a funny bastard though.
The whole ‘kerfuffle’ and international alignment around it reminds me more of the Crimean War than the Cold War - Tsar Vladimir the whatever against the world… A Crimean War with hydrocarbon resources to spice it up a bit.
Hopefully the UN will send in some Brit Upper Class Twits on horses to sort it out in a jiffy - just like they did back in Vickie’s day.
Does the other Marc Almond have anything to say about it ? … I actually won an album of him doing covers of Russian standards off French radio one time - so he must have his two kopeks worth to say…
I think you are being a bit unfair to Mark Almond here. He is what Bernard Crick, in his biography of Orwell, calls ‘that rare bird, a Tory anti-imperialist’. In many ways, Almond is a reactionary Tory no less that Johnathan Swift the great satirist ( and from Dublin ! ).
Swift was vehemently against the Whigs of his day and taking England into the War of Spanish Succession as well as greed, hubris and the messianic guff spouted by politicians to cover the shabby pursuit of material interests.
Almond belongs to that tradition, even though it has been forgotten by many, and there are others like John Gray who also dislike a foreign policy based on emancipating all humanity through military regime change and neoliberal economics.
There is a conservative tradition of disliking what we now call ‘humanitarian intervention’ or liberal imperialism or ‘interventionism’ and who, like Almond and myself too, believe that NATO and the policy of expanding it eastwards dangerous and foolish.
this is a total crap!! this guy is talking lies and he confuses the facts. He is giving wrong information and dares to lie in public. probably he is just stupid and does not have enough knowledge, but it;s sad that he also is so impudent to speak up despite of all the wrong, misleading information he has.