Fearless Leaders
Overview
Introduction - Section Overview
While this chapter is still in progress, at present it has the following pages:
✊ Fearless Leader of the Global South uses Koch’s Year of Living Dangerously and the French scholar Bertrand Badie in order to contrast the legitimate Indonesian postcolonial aims of the 1960s to the opportunistic Russian colonial aims of the 2020s.
🇺🇦 Golden Bridges (July 2022) looks at the question of blame, sanctions, and double standards, arguing that 1. we need to come clean about the abuses of the West, and 2. we need to make clear, especially to the global South, why these abuses don’t mean that we can remain neutral toward the Kremlin and its illegal, unnecessary, disastrous war.
In 💥 Exceptionalism I and 🇺🇸 / 🇷🇺 Exceptionalism II I focus on the unparalleled entitlement and immunity that get Russia in hot water today, as it got the US into hot water in the past. The concept of exceptionalism largely explains why neither nation will submit to the judgments of the International Criminal Court. This makes it hard to convince non-aligned third parties that Putin must take responsibility for his brutality in Ukraine, given that no one took responsibility for the bombs, napalm, and dioxin flung over the forests and villages of Indochina. The global south has historical memories that ought to be recognized if we’re to succeed in getting them to help Ukraine.
In 🗽Our Lady of the Harbour (2023 & 2003) I suggest that despite needing to arm Ukraine and defend our ideals, we still need to limit all nuclear weapons. Finally, ⏳ AD / BC (July, 2022) is a fictional narrative set in Sumer, Iraq, and Penticton, B.C. It’s also a fictional nightmare, focusing on the worst possible outcome.