You’d think that this guy has had more than enough seconds…
Who’s next? Dennis Rodman?
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We can now see just how wrong Brodsky was, but there are very real consequences for being this wrong. Poets are, after all, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in his 1821 “A Defense of Poetry.” Brodsky’s unwillingness to tar Russia can be connected to the general unwillingness of Russians to grapple with their sordid history, which in turn can lead to such absurdities as Lenin statues being re-erected and Soviet flags being flown in temporarily occupied Ukrainian towns. Brodsky’s utter contempt for the Ukrainian people can be connected to the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin’s far more recent description of Ukrainians as a “race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manholes” whose “genocide” is “due and inevitable.” And Brodsky is not the only offender. We can likewise connect the Soviet-era novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s insistence that Ukrainian was “a vile language that does not exist in the world” with Russian political scientist Sergey Mikheyev truly bizarre contention, voiced in late April 2022 on the state-owned Rossiya 1 television station, that the Ukrainian language “does not exist” and that literally no one speaks it. And we can connect the Soviet-era dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s obsession with a Russian-Belarusan-Ukrainian-Kazakh pan-Slavic superstate, and his assertions that the Ukrainian view of the Stalinist terror famines were informed by “musty, chauvinistic minds” looking to produce “ready-made fables” for Western audiences, with present-day Russia’s imperialistic and ahistorical views of its neighbor.
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Stone has been up Putin’s asshole for a while now… Not sure what he finds appealing… the cult of personality, I guess?
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Oligarch’s aren’t going to coup anything. They don’t have any actual political power any more.
Back in the Yeltsin years, they did, and they could seriously challenge the politicians. Putin has spent twenty years making sure they can’t do that any more, by exiling, imprisoning or murdering anyone who could present a political rival for himself. The contract between Kremlin and the remaining Russian oligarchs is simple: they get to make lots and lots of money, as long and only if they stay entirely away from the politics, and don’t challenge Putin’s authority.
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Russian soldiers were given minimal warning before the war began and weren’t told what the goal of the war was.
If it depends on Mr. Putin, I think that to this day no one knows the purpose of this war. I often joke that the money the Russians have spent so far on this pointless adventure would be enough to buy Ukraine and I bet there would still be change left over.
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Well the amount they will end up paying for it will be a lot more now - to rebuild the country they’ve tried to destroy.
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There will be another battle for Russia to pay war reparations. Despite seeing that many countries managed to resist powerful invaders, this war in Ukraine seems surreal to me. Russia has a powerful army, which scares Europeans to this day, and yet it has not been able to achieve any concrete objective in that country.
Hardly any country will want to buy Russian weapons after this adventure.
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Indeed, there will. And whilst it wont be enough, there are nevertheless a lot of frozen assets that could be confiscated to make some reparation.
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The country will need it.
I have read about the battles in Ukraine, the help the country has received from US and Europe, the disorganization of the Russian military and even psychological profiles of Mr. Putin, but I haven’t read anything about the aftermath of the war (my fault, I know, someone must be discussing it now).
I keep wondering what will happen. What will be left of the two countries? How will they continue to relate? Ukraine can even “win” this war, but it is not possible to move the nation to the Caribbean, for example. They will have to stand by the Russians’ military threat forever. Will the West use proxy means to arm the Ukrainian military, or will it keep peacekeepers on the ground indefinitely?
And the Russians? Will the government get stronger, paranoid or radical? If it gets weak, will the West move further and further towards Moscow?
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After Manchester City won the Premier League title, Ukrainian player Oleksandr Zinchenko wrapped the Ukrainian flag around the trophy and got emotional:
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I feel like I don’t fully understand the author’s use of the word “memes” there. (And maybe I just haven’t read enough previous threads.)
I feel like I don’t understand the distinction between memes and Surkov’s “geopolitical” explanations, which likewise refer to the Russian belief that their pre-1918 borders truly belong to Russia.
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Life on the ground in Russia after sanctions.
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By memes Galeev means the correct political, religious and cultural beliefs. Russia wants Ukrainians to understand that Ukraine is part of Russia and they are Russians, and that Russian language, literature and culture are superior. The Ukrainian language is a mere dialect spoken by ignorant peasants, and Russian is a proper literary language for civilised people. Ukrainians will continue to be bombed until they understand that they belong to the Russian world, not the decadent West.
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Sounds like Dawkins’ original meaning when he coined the term in The Selfish Gene. Cultural “genes”, that spread, mutate and respond to selective pressure.
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It doesn’t matter if you’re “just following orders;” war crimes are war crimes.
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