Seven Glimpses of the Multipolar World
Illusions and Deceptions, 18 February 2023
The Burning Archive has always been about history, culture and the emerging multipolar world. And being grateful for and curious about the new global ‘republic of letters’ that is enabled by the internet and digital media with low barriers to entry.
This week’s offering of glimpses into our multipolar world and my mind reflects on some illusions and deceptions both the world and the mind are prey to.
Gratitude
I am thankful to Russians with Attitude for inviting me to contribute to RWA Samizdat.
What I am reading
I have been reading a stack of books on Chinese history. These have informed a set of videos I am making on China-USA War? Seven Insights from Seven Historians. on the Burning Archive YouTube channel. The two standouts of those I have not read before and from which I am learning a lot are Odd Arne Westand The Cold War: A Global history and Rana Mitter Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945. They are both giving me fresh insights on how to find our way back to dialogue and diplomacy in the multipolar world. Look out for my upcoming video on the insights of these two historians.
Governing the unruly multipolar world
The veteran foreign affairs editor of the Australian, Greg Sheridan, described the recent speech by Australian Foreign Minister as the ‘worst and strangest speech’ of her career. Penny Wong accused Britain of not coming to terms with its colonial or imperial legacy, even as she professed slavish loyalty to Joe Biden. The speech has caused a few wrinkles in the relationship. The Afro-Briton British Foreign Secretary, dismissed Senator Wong’s challenge to Britain to wake up as misinformed. Perhaps the Senator thought Liz Truss was still in charge. Or perhaps she just made a bit of a misstep in diplomacy. Watch out for my read on Ms Wong’s speech next week on my YouTube channel.
By contrast, the External Affairs Minister of India, Dr S Jaishankar is an accomplished diplomat, a skilled interpreter of both the multipolar world, and a true reader of the legacies of empires. Check out my video on Dr S Jaishankar this weekend on my YouTube channel.
Using history to live mindfully in the present.
I have been reflecting on the family resemblance between good history and acceptance and commitment therapy. The stories we tell ourselves about our public and our private pasts can torment us, can deceive us, or can liberate us to accept reality, and to commit to action advancing the real deeper purposes of life.
Fragments from the Burning Archive
Chiang Kai-Shek’s diary from his years as Nationalist Leader of China and tyrant of Taiwan remains unburnt but largely secreted, I learned from Rana Mitter this week, at the Hoover Institution archive at Stanford University. Return the loot and the evidence, America.
What surprised me most this week.
This statistic from Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally surprised me most. China lost 14 million people during its Second World War. The British Empire and the USA both lost 400 000 subjects. We really need to save our history from the accumulated illusions of Hollywood’s World War II.
Works-in-progress and published content
I released the pod on my poetry this week, and was very happy with it. You can listen on Spotify here.
Next week on the podcast I tell the story of how I am writing my collection of essays on politics, government and bureaucracy, called 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. It is a reference to the poem by Wallace Stevens, ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’.
I wrote an essay on the Grand Illusions of the Western Democracies in Ukraine. I am weighing up to submit to a online publication or publish here on Sub-Stack.
I released three YouTube videos on China (part of a series of 4 on preventing a war with USA through insights from historians), Dr S. Jaishankar, and the heroes from Indian history who appear at the end of the RRR Movie.
I edited my forthcoming collection, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. From an essay on Vaclav Havel, ‘One the Virtue of Not Knowing’ I adapted a twitter thread on Havel, Ukraine and life after Western democracy. Here it is here.
My focus now is writing, speaking and creating content about stories of the multipolar world - its history, its culture, its geopolitics. And how we can all stay calm and sane amidst the turmoil. I am even preparing an online course on the mindful use of history for life.
I am now doing this for my living, and am entirely reader-supported. Help me build an audience for these insights.
First of all, please subscribe to this newsletter on SubStack.
Please also subscribe to my YouTube Channel. It passed 560 subscribers this week, and I continue to build the range, skills and quality of my videos.
Follow me on Twitter. And you can buy my books
You can buy new book of essays, edited from my blog, here From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
You can buy my collected poems, here Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I trust you have enjoyed this edition of my weekly newsletter providing seven glimpses into my mind and the multipolar world.
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And do remember, “What thou lovest well will not be reft from thee” (Ezra Pound, Cantos)