I mean, I can’t imagine a more on-the-nose sign that the leading edge of the culture war dialectic is emerging from thesis and antithesis to new synthesis than Sady Doyle writing an essay about how Dudes Rock
So after all this time I can say I finally know someone who got COVID (one of my high school buddies) but for him it was 3 days of coughing just clearing up and keeping himself occupied in quarantine, so I still don’t know anyone who got it got it
there was a skirmish on the ARM-AZ border back in july - large in the context of the very low-level friction that usually happens across the border, because it actually resulted in one hilltop position changing hands, but still very limited in scope. in this case it’s actually very unclear who started it but the important thing is AZ lost outright
even though it was a tiny conflict this made it in some ways worse for AZ than the four-day war, or april war, of 2016, in which AZ completely failed at penetrating NK with a massive combined-arms assault but did take 2 hills so at least they could pitch that to their population as having won something. that didn’t happen in july
the AZ failure in july was followed by mass protests on the streets of baku criticising the government for not taking a hard enough line on ARM and not following through on 25 years of promises to return NK. although the protests only lasted a couple days, this probably contributed to a sense of pressure on AZ leadership to do something that would get results
this dovetailed neatly with a suddenly heightened interest on the part of TU in heating up the NK conflict. traditionally TU has rhetorically strongly supported AZ, but has avoided intervening directly. their only intervention has come in the form of closing their border with ARM for the last 25 years, and in the credible threat that they will invade ARM if ARM so much as glances the wrong way at nakhchivan, the AZ exclave that borders TU. this has historically just had the effect of removing nakhchivan from the conflict entirely
but starting in august, TU:
started recruiting syrian mercenaries through its intelligence agency and private contractors, and airlifting those mercenaries to AZ; this was initially dismissed as rumor but became credible through september as more and more sources emerged with similar accounts
started supplying AZ with massive amounts of ordnance, especially TU-produced bayraktar TB2 drones, which have played a key role in the current fighting as well as in AZ propaganda (coincidentally, these propaganda vids serve as excellent advertisements for the TB2 itself, which happens to be produced by a company owned by erdogan’s son-in-law)
held joint military exercises in AZ but left thousands of personnel there after the exercises concluded; these personnel are believed to consist of senior military advisors, trainers, drone operators, and possibly some special forces
in the week or two before the war started there was also additional evidence in AZ of preparation for an attack, including the large-scale movement of armor and vehicles to the front line and the alleged commandeering of civilian pickup trucks for “wartime purposes”
all of this was more or less known to the public via the international media and therefore certainly to ARM and NK intelligence. so when AZ actually attacked on 9/27 absolutely no one was caught off guard
and that all, i hope, should provide a very clear-cut answer to the question of who started it this time. there is one immediately responsible party here, and it is AZ with the assistance of TU. AZ was relatively forthcoming about this and only presented its attack as a response to the general AM occupation of NK, rather than trying to fabricate some thin story about shelling from the NK side as they did in 2016 (that attack was also entirely one-sided and premeditated)
furthermore, the war crimes committed by AZ so far in the current war have been completely egregious, largely gratuitous, and completely out of proportion to anything done by either ARM or NK. we’re talking about:
use of cluster bombs in dense urban areas
consistent shelling of civilian settlements with heavy artillery over a period of weeks
public execution of captured civilians
intentionally bombing a church and then double-tapping it to target journalists
reports of beheadings (still not 100% verified)
their goal in the NK conflict overall is expressly the ethnic cleansing of armenians from the claimed territory of AZ, and they are pursuing a military strategy that is consistent with that. NK has shelled AZ cities a few times, and i’m not saying that’s right, but it’s completely out of proportion
but all of that aside, this war doesn’t have good guys in it. the central thrust of the AZ narrative here is that NK did some pretty fucking horrendous things in the war in the ‘90s that have never been made right, and that’s entirely true. for many years AZ had more IDPs per capita than any country in the world. there has never, ever, ever been any acknowledgement from the ARM/NK side that ethnically cleansing 300,000 non-armenians - as happened from NK and the surrounding, now occupied, territories alone - in order to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the 150,000 armenians living in NK is maybe not an entirely morally robust position
but the entire AZ perspective and narrative fixates around that. it’s the reason there’s near-universal support for the current war, it’s the reason there’s been near-universal support for every single round of fighting since the end of the first war, it’s the reason the public bought the government’s narrative around ramil safarov (who was the son of an IDP). i’m not saying there wouldn’t be grievances without this One Big Grievance, but there is a total underestimation on the ARM/NK side of just how terrible and inhumane the thing they did was and how much it animates their enemies
which is funny for a group whose national identity revolves entirely around the long-term trauma inflicted by ethnic cleansing but you know whatever
i mean, you can go back further than this. did AZ start the NK war by launching government-sponsored pogroms against its resident armenians, or did ARM help spark those pogroms with the intense nationalist rhetoric surrounding NK and the ethnic cleansing of azeris from parts of ARM, and so on and so forth. in pretty much every direct comparison AZ comes off as clearly worse, but there has always been a commitment to a pattern of mutual escalation. and since kocharyan took over in ARM in ‘98 there has always been a total lack of interest on both sides in avoiding another war because they both figured they would win it easily
Long-term a major theme of the Trump Era will prove to have been that he goaded the left into fully revealing they had intentions incompatible with the current system before they had the necessary strength to replace the current system
