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Last week not long after Jeff St. Clair received my article in “Chess as
Metaphor”, he wrote me back informing me that Alexander Cockburn had
written a book about chess in the 1970s. Since chess and Cockburn were
two of my passions, I immediately ordered the book from Amazon.com and
began reading it. The book is not about “how to win with the Ruy Lopez
Opening” but about the politics and psychology of chess players,
including some of the most famous like Bobby Fischer and Mikhail
Botvinnik, the Russian champion who gets discussed in a chapter titled
“Proletarian, Socialist Chess”. You can imagine how that chapter piqued
my interest. As it turns out, there is a section in it that deals with
geopolitics and chess, a subject I referred to briefly in my
CounterPunch article. Cockburn has a somewhat different take on their
relationship but we come pretty close to converging around his idea that
“No game model, such as chess, can in the end tolerate the notion of
total contradiction, since all games accept the idea of rules.” Like so
many articles in this vein, Pepe Escobar referred to chess in his Oct. 1
article titled “Obama, Putin: Checkmate”. But if there is anything that
Syria symbolizes, it is the contradictory nature of geopolitics—one in
which Israel, the USA, Iran and Russia are working together to one
degree or another to prop up the rotting cadaver of Baathism. Since the
war in Syria was always supposed to be a proxy war with Israel and the
USA playing black and Russia and Iran playing white, how do you explain
this new axis of resistance with Netanyahu and Obama joining the axis of
resistance? Maybe if chess was played with a much larger board and the
pieces came in 50 shades of gray, the analogy would hold.
Alexander Cockburn:
A FOOTNOTE ON CHESS, DIPLOMACY AND WAR
“We play poker, they play chess” used to be the adage at one school for
international relations in the United States. It was also, it seems, a
favored phrase of President Kennedy. The thought behind the words was
that the Communist enemy, in all his Oriental cunning, had a strategy
thoroughly conceived and inherently rational: move would be countered by
move; and uncertainty and chance eliminated. “We,” on the other hand,
play poker “We” gamble and bluff.
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2015/10/03/alexander-cockburn-on-chess-and-geopolitics/
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