Why did Putin invade Ukraine? Question: Why did Putin decided to launch a full scale invasion?

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/why-did-pu...

Why did Yeltsin destroy Chechnya? In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan.

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/why-did-ye...

On the origins of Napoleon Bonaparte The single most important thing to understand about the background of Napoleon Bonaparte, is that he was born in the Mediterranean.

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/on-the-ori...

On the Origins of Bolshevik Party The Marxist movement in Russia started as a primordial soup of socialist clubs, groups and factions, without any clear, articulate ideology or regular structure.

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/on-the-ori...

How I understand the history of China Your life has a limit but knowledge has none.

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/how-i-unde...

What Does China Export? This question may sound dumb.

Still, it would be interesting to know what exactly makes for the size of its exports. What it the structure of this “everything” China is selling to the world. Let’s have a look at what China is exporting

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/what-does-...

And there is, indeed, lots of truth in that. As of now, China is the largest industrial producer in the world, outshining every other country in terms of the sheer size of its output, and, more importantly, of its export

NB: This infographics almost certainly underestimates the exports of China

What does China export?

This question may sound dumb. And if it does, that is because it had been intentionally formulated to sound so. Everyone knows that China is producing everything. Everything you buy, everything you wear, everything you stare in, has been imported from China

How Did China Get Rich? Persons who begin with large capitals do not succeed, generally speaking, so well as those who begin with small ones cautiously administered.

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/how-did-ch...

On the Two Industrialisations of China The rulers of China who initiated economic reforms of the 1980s were Communist, and were thinking about economy in a very Soviet way.

The thing about industrialisation of China is that China had not one but two separate industrialisations. One was chaotic, unsolicited. It started as a deviation from the industrial policy, and brought in the oceans of cash, from which the second was funded

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/on-the-two...

Why read ancient texts? The primary reason would be: things have changed, people have not.

How Did China Get Rich? Persons who begin with large capitals do not succeed, generally speaking, so well as those who begin with small ones cautiously administered.

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/how-did-ch...

Islam and Pessimism

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Long story short, I hope they will enforce some sort of the Act of Oblivion. Which will lay necessary groundwork for ending this civil war, and prevent it from resuming in the future.

I hope that the victorious rebels will show reason and restraint in their victory, that they will abstain from taking revenge for the wrongs of the past, and, most importantly, abstain from unleashing it upon the whole communities.

Rule of thumb: Regimes rejected through the foot voting can't be good. In this case, people weren't just leaving somewhere. They were leaving into the overcramped and not particularly safe "safe zone" 50 kms wide in the far north.

This means the regime has been truly hellish

This one, however, was astonishingly bad. How do we know it? Well, based on the people voting with their feet. Even after the cessation of hostilities, there was a mass exodus of people from the Assad controlled zone, to the zones run by literally anyone else

(Mostly, to the safe zone in the north)

Glad that the Assad's regime has fallen. Not because it was a "dictatorship". In fact, I would say that living under some sort of autocracy has been a normal, default human condition since the dawn of civilisation. Nothing so special about it

How does Russia make marine reactors? How does Russia make marine reactors?

kamilkazani.substack.com/p/how-does-r...

Litmus test in politics:

Can you imagine a good and reasonable person taking an opposite side of yours?

If not, you have a brainrot, because there are plenty and plenty of such people. What you need, is a few weeks of farm labor with no access to the internet.

One peculiar aspect of Russian social structure is that the ruling elite has tons of "Historian Orientalist/Africanist" majors in it, usually with good language fluency. That is because the Oriental Studies departments have been a major recruiting pool for the KGB/FSB.

What is civilisation? In his “Clash of Civilizations” (1996) Samuel P.

You can read the full text here kamilkazani.substack.com/p/what-is-ci...

Now what did unite it then?

The sacred language. The sacred dead language.

In case of Europe, that would be the sacred dead language of Latin. And that is why we call it the Latin civilisation, of all things.

There were tons of vernaculars, everyone was speaking vernaculars, and these vernaculars were highly distinctive from each other. Their actual map would be more webbed, and complicated than what you see on these maps. Vernaculars, if anything, divided the premodern world.

It is important to understand that the linguistic map did not really align with the political one. What is now Southern France used to speak vernaculars very different from those of the north, yet, similar to the Catalan vernaculars in the south.

There was no single standardised French either, but rather lots of Romance (mostly) vernaculars, again, distinctive from each other, often to the point of mutual unintelligibility.

How many vernaculars there were in Europe?

The answer is yes. There were many and many. There was no single standardised German, for example, but rather a continuum of West Germanic vernaculars, distinctive from each other, often to the point of mutual unintelligibility.

Imagine Europe as of 1500. There are lots of polities, large and small. Each polity is populated by the human beings who communicate with each other with the help of sounds. Their means of verbal communication are called vernaculars.

Sound-based languages of the everyday life.

Now the "Latin" does not refer to the languages spoken on the ground. It is irrelevant whether the people speak Czech, Estonian, Gaelic or Basque. What Latin vs non-Latin refers to is the sacred language, the emanation-of-reality language, defining this civilisation historically

The line is real, as everyone who travelled from Helsinki to St Petersburg can testify. The framing is wrong. So how can we improve the framing? My answer: Change “Western” to “Latin” Then it all starts suddenly making sense. "Western" is a poor way to say "Latin".