Russia Surrounded
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padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
Interestingly by the the Machiavelli was writing, the condottieri he was referring to were in serious and terminal decline as independently powerful forces for a number of reasons, but you can find better parallels in either the later Roman Empire as suggested above, or in the warlords of the late Roman Republic (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, etc) who took nominally state forces, made them their own private armies and then used them to seize power. Wagner seems to be a quasi-official force somewhere between state and private - vs say Blackwater (currently known as Academi), which operates closely within the U.S. military-industrial complex but is still clearly a private contractor - so you can see Prigozhin as a kind of farcical Sulla. or actually, someone less competent like Cataline.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I also think, from what I recall of Machiavelli, that his main points were that mercenaries were essentially military opportunists and didn't have nearly as much of a stake in the wellbeing of the nation-state as traditional troops did. But I don't think Machiavelli got into how one of the benefits of using mercenaries is the sort of plausible deniability which nation-state actors have when contracting them, IE state officials could enlist mercenaries to do dirtier work, and it wouldn't reflect as squarely on the nation-state. Anyway, I gather that sort of benefit is one of the main reasons private military contractors are used in some of these operations.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I still need a better sense of Machiavelli's actual geopolitical context. I assumed there weren't forces quite like private military contractors in his day, but are you saying there were? I also am vaguely of the understanding that the main geopolitical actors at that point weren't quite nation-states, but something like proto-nation-states which were more like rough confederations of kingdoms and fiefdoms and whatnot, no?
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
another thing that this and the submarine story have really hammered home to me is that there is an entire section of society, or at least Twitter and however much that translates to society, for whom no news is real and everything is a psy-op unless it's on a topic they care about ("wokeism" and/or Hunter Biden's dick or laptop, basically). they don't have takes, or rather their take on literally everything is "this is fake and you're a dupe if you believe it". it's a totally fucking crazy worldview, maybe even crazier than QAnon etc, bc things that at least have an internally consistent logic of sorts even if it resists on numerous unhinged pillars of belief. this is just a kind of nihilistic (the bad kind, not the good kind) refusal to believe that anything outside of your worldview is real. it's a logical endpoint of conspiratorial thinking, I guess. instead of believing everything, you believe nothing. also a kind of extreme solipsism - that there are vast forces out there consistently churning out fake global news events to distract you from whatever you're narrowly focused on.
I feel like that sometimes, not in the sense of everything being an 'op' but in the sense that it's all just stuff happening and I have no way of really knowing anything about it. And yeah, it is nihilistic. I also think it's an organic development from being immersed in 'news' and 'content' on a daily basis. You can eventually just glaze over, everything becomes noise.
wild greens
Well-known member
If we are talking about Machiavelli then the real example will be of the Florentines and their inaction to exact violence/revenge leading to the destruction of Pistoa. The town hacks itself to pieces because the rulers hesitate; if Putin fails to act then does Moscow fall, probably not, but the longer baldy lives the greater the chance that inaction proves his undoing
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Yeah personally I find that paranoid/solipsistic epistemology fascinating, because on one level it seems borne of a widespread and largely warranted distrust of institutions, but on the other hand it also seems to involve an unwillingness to actually process information and arrive at informed opinions. I suspect it is also attributable to something like a societal growing pains with globalized information overload, EG its easier to keep track of your neighborhood events than global events.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I'm really interested in getting a better historical/sociological understanding of how this portion of society emerged, the portion padraig is referring to, a sort of middle-class-and-upward content-consuming perpetual peanut gallery where events are effectively reduced to talking points and signifiers for someones values/tastes/etc.
I think it has something to do with consumerism becoming more of an economic base (EG user data becoming a resource which consumers inadvertently produce), the technological trend of telecommunications and the internet enabling more people to lead nominally well-adjusted lives from physical solitude, the detachment of the real economy from the speculative economy (the latter of which pertaining more to the web of "bullshit jobs" and other entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial-derivative occupations), and also just postmodernism as a general widespread cultural change wherein no source of truth is infallible and nihilism creeps in.
I think it has something to do with consumerism becoming more of an economic base (EG user data becoming a resource which consumers inadvertently produce), the technological trend of telecommunications and the internet enabling more people to lead nominally well-adjusted lives from physical solitude, the detachment of the real economy from the speculative economy (the latter of which pertaining more to the web of "bullshit jobs" and other entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial-derivative occupations), and also just postmodernism as a general widespread cultural change wherein no source of truth is infallible and nihilism creeps in.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
well, that's a complicated question so this simplifies some thing, but
Machiavelli lived thru the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, and a key part of that in Europe was the rise of the centralized state in places like France, the Habsburg domains, and England. Italy itself didn't unify until the mid-1800s but it did experience a degree of centralization from smaller city-states to a handful of kingdoms (Florence, Milan, etc). Warfare in the city-state era had been largely carried out by mercenaries called condottieri (lit. "contractors") bc many of the northern Italian cities - Genoa, Milan, Venice - were exceedingly wealthy from trade but lacked manpower reserves, hence mercenaries. Bc both sides in a conflict were often mercenaries for whom war was business, a culture developed of minimizing risk and maximizing profit - stereotypically, long series of almost ritualized maneuvering and minimal bloodshed, as well as, bribes, changing sides (today's enemy == tomorrow's employer or vice versa), etc. By Machiavelli's time, that culture had been begun to be eclipsed by two main things, 1) centralized state 2) technological changes in warfare.
Gunpowder and the rise of the state are closely linked. That's a whole book topic in itself, but basically gunpowder armies require significant centralized administration to manage production and logistics, which requires greater taxation, which drives further centralization, and so on. It also democratizes warfare, so to speak. To become a man-at-arms (i.e. an armored cavalryman) requires years of training and a significant amount of wealth. Almost anyone can be trained to use a gun. The ritualized, chivalric warfare of the condottieri was swept away. You get larger armies fighting larger, more impersonal battles. Mercenaries - especially the Swiss and their German landsknecht imitators, as well as technical experts for artillery and siegecraft - are still important, but they're truly just contractors rather than powers in their own right.
It was a long process, so Machiavelli lived thru the waning of the condottieri but yeah by the time he wrote The Prince they were basically done. And all of those changes were being demonstrated, in fact, specifically in Northern Italy, which was the site of a 60+ year long series of superpower wars - the Italian Wars, not a creative name - between Valois France and Habsburg Spain, that began in 1494 (i.e. when Machiavelli was in his 30s, about 20 years before he wrote The Prince), so he saw it up close and personal.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I know the usual types were yelling "CIA coup!" about the Wagner thing the other day - because heaven forfend that anyone who isn't American could have sentience or agency, right? - but I hadn't seen anything about Titanic tourism sub being a 'psy-op'. Did you get any impression of what the They supposedly responsible for it were meant to be getting out of the exercise?
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I'm sure the monied interests in Big Cruise weren't thrilled about the tourism industry latching onto one of their biggest blunders.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
The condottieri were true independent contractors, able to switch employers at will
Whereas Prigozhin and Wagner are more like, as I understand, subcontractors to the Russian state. Like, Wagner wouldn't take a random contract for the U.S. DoD. Blackwater/Academi would be somewhere in between - can take independent contracts but wouldn't do something to harm U.S. interests (or whatever Erik Prince thinks those interests are)
So you can't really draw a 1:1 between 15th C mercenaries and modern PMCs. There are truly independent modern mercenaries, but they're more like ex-military guys being hired to do security for [x corporate installation] somewhere. Another thing you didn't have historically was corporations hiring mercenaries, bc there were no corporations in the modern sense. You definitely had smaller units subcontracting out to a larger mercenary general contractor, but that larger contractor would then be in the service of a king or a duke or whatever.
Whereas Prigozhin and Wagner are more like, as I understand, subcontractors to the Russian state. Like, Wagner wouldn't take a random contract for the U.S. DoD. Blackwater/Academi would be somewhere in between - can take independent contracts but wouldn't do something to harm U.S. interests (or whatever Erik Prince thinks those interests are)
So you can't really draw a 1:1 between 15th C mercenaries and modern PMCs. There are truly independent modern mercenaries, but they're more like ex-military guys being hired to do security for [x corporate installation] somewhere. Another thing you didn't have historically was corporations hiring mercenaries, bc there were no corporations in the modern sense. You definitely had smaller units subcontracting out to a larger mercenary general contractor, but that larger contractor would then be in the service of a king or a duke or whatever.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Consider, perchance, the prospects of a Viking Cruises CMO feeling unsettled at the notion of not only a competing tourism subsector, but one which undermines the public's trust in cruises. Perhaps this Viking person thought about hiring the Wagner group to destroy OceanGate's C-suite personnel, but then opted for the subtler attack vector of technical sabotage.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
And this is before I have access to classified documents!
wild greens
Well-known member
Not sure a parallel to Putin making a weird empty speech the same day Prigozhin makes an incendiary one talking about "this is how we should have taken Ukraine" then Lukashenko pulling his own press conference in response can be found anywhere in The Prince, mind
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
on the one hand I'm sure that's true, information overload until it's all noise
otoh, events happened before the Internet and social media
like it's one thing to say "the CIA orchestrated a coup" and another to say "the coup didn't happen, it's a made-up psyop to distract us"
it's like an extension of Baudrillaud - there's no event on which a simulacra is based, just the simulacra itself
like every event is being produced Wag the Dog style, by nefarious powers, for reasons, unless you decide it's real
as always, 9/11 seems like the basic breaking point with reality from which this kind of worldview culturally flows
Oh, yeah. Those people are nuts. I'm talking specifically about a general detachment from and mistrust in the reporting of events.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
distraction from whatever matters to these people, which as I said is basically "wokeism" and whatever other nonsense
the basic idea I think is that Biden admin/global elites/lizard people/whoever is continuously making up fake events to distract you from their nefarious activities, unless it's a story that reflects badly on them in which case it's real (and despite controlling everything they're unable to prevent such stories from coming out bc...who knows?)
I don't see it directly, more in quote tweets of people being like "this is fucking crazy"
Wonder whether they ever have moments, or even a single moment, of clarity where they snap out of it and realise how nuts their worldview is.