practically insurgent

I've been pondering having an opinion on the Russia/Georgia thing for a few days now and finally after churning it through my mind I came up with a vision of clarity and concision that totally encompassed my feelings on the great geopolitical issue of the moments.

I don't really have an opinion at all really.

Like, I suppose, formally, I agree with Dave, it's a sort of classic inter-imperialist spat that you'd hope would finish as quickly as possible, with the smallest number of people and homes destroyed as is possible. I suppose if I were a Russian dissident I want them to lose, because any damage to the Kremlin's prestige is all good shit. On the other hand, since Georgia are the NATO/EU proxy state in the region, them winning just moves the boundaries in the other direction, strengthening their reach over the various regions in the former Soviet bloc/Warsaw Pact.

But let's face it, how many people is this going to exercise enough to actually do anything? One of the fucking weird things about the internet is that everybody's opinions interact without them leaving their room, they fire off their missives into cyberspace assuring themselves that they've fought the good fight into the global opinion war. There's never a question about a practical outcome from anything. It's enough to fire off your salvo, you don't have to do anything.

I mean, try telling your friends down the pub that it's important they condemn Russian atrocities in Guli, or note that Georgia initiated the conflict by shelling Tskhinvali (are Georgian 'T's silent by the way? I'm sure their UN Envoy was saying Bilisi the other day). Why should they have an opinion, it doesn't affect them and there's nothing they can do about it. It's not like NATO can go to war with Russia over one of their little gangsters doing something stupid.

But how then can I justify an interest in the goings on of the Middle East, or Haiti, Venezuela, Bolivia or any other million and one topics I get exercised about? I suppose because there's an obvious side to take, an obvious global process to oppose/support. I dunno, maybe just that they relate better to arguments we make at home about living under Empire or existing in capitalism. Probably they're just as irrelevant to changing the world, which depends more on our everyday politics, on building communities of resistance, than it does on documenting the struggle in far off places.