Today is Sunday, so, let’s get away a few minutes from war and suffering and relax with some culture.
Hatred for Russia is fashionable. If you don’t hate Russia or anything that comes from Russia at the moment you are frowned upon at once.
Ignorance has no boundaries.
A University in Italy even cancelled a course on Dostoevsky, one of Russia’s and the world’s greatest writers of the nineteenth century and of all times. And it is only the tip of the iceberg of the results of American efficient campaign of propaganda against Russia and Russians. Including culture, whose importance for the world the US is unable to understand, as they are incapable of seeing its importance..
Looked at differently however, Ukraine is actually turning into a Dostoevsky novel. Here the characters are nations, so they are already larger than life. And they are as passionate, as uncontrollable and as doomed as the people of the Brothers Karamazov.
There is Zelensky, personifying the Ukraine who is undone by desire. He whines to be something he is not: European. Wanting to be European, that is, worldly and sophisticated, is a supposed Russian character trait which European nations and Russian novelists have mocked for centuries. Peter the Great made all his boyars cut off their beards to appear more civilized. An old expression “Scratch a Russian, you’ll find a Tatar” exposes the racism behind it.
Zelensky wants to be European, a member of NATO, so badly, he’s willing to sacrifice his country. And he has.
Then we have the European nations, a coterie of NATO members who fear, admire and follow the United States. They are sycophants. They lack moral conviction. Because they fear their leader and also, like jackals following a lion, they will get something out of it, they will commit deeds they know to be wrong.
There is the United States, powerful and calculating, with its strategy for world domination formulated in the 90s, the malevolent and infamous PNAC, the Plan for a New American Century. In Ukraine, as in Afghanistan in 1978, with the Mujahedeen, the plan is to arm others to instigate or intensify conflict, and lure and provoke Russia into invasion and ruin. In Ukraine, as it had in Afghanistan, it encouraged violence, flooded in arms, built bases and conducted exercises, to compel a fear-driven invasion from Russia.
In the USA the monster war budget gets a growth spurt, and in its satellite American and European countries, hatred is fueled, and propaganda, with great skill, tricks the people into believing the Orwellian creed of War is Peace. Opposite to War & Peace, the magnificent novel by another great, great Russian author which is about Napoleon's invasion of Russia - through Ukraine... - and the relativity of truth, depending on the side of the storyteller, and of history itself, depending on the side of the historyteller.
The US’s and NATO’s sin, in the religious eye of Dostoevsky the most dreadful, is the failure to love or to have understanding and compassion. These values are encompassed in what the Bible calls the greatest virtue of all: charity.
Russia is personified by Putin, a character created by the harsh and chaotic conditions of the Russian history of his life. He is tormented, provoked and threatened, and finally and dramatically loses control and commits the fatal sin, the terrible act of murder, murder of those he loves.
And he commits, in the context of international law, the mother of all war crimes, which only the US and NATO are allowed to commit: launching an aggressive war.
In Dostoevsky novels there are frequently peasants, or serfs, in the background. That’s us, and the rest of the people in the world. We get squeezed for more taxes, or sanctioned or bombed. We are ignorant and have no control over events. We serfs dimly recognize that we are doomed, and we weep.
Dostoevsky novels are usually tragedies, and this one will not end well either. The wounds are too deep and the sins are too mortal. To end it, they can not simply promise to keep NATO out of Ukraine, and recommit to the armaments treaties they broke, as they could have, two weeks ago. before they pushed Putin towards the invasion.
This war is burning up megatons of fossil fuel, warming and polluting the planet, ruining yet another part of earths’ surface, turning hundreds of thousands more into impoverished and rootless wanderers, and creating even more chaos.
People say Putin has gone mad, but NATO and the US have been insane for decades. With no restraints whatsoever.
But, of course, we must keep quiet about that. We must not say it out loud because it is not fashionable. At all.
What IS fashionable is to deprive us of every bit of culture that comes from past and present Russia and accept to be condemned to reading only the likes of Mark Levy... listening only to the likes of Beyoncé and forget all about le bel canto of Anna Netrebko and Aida Garifullina; furthermore, never mentioning the wonderful stage director Dimitry Tcherniakov, or maestro Valery Gergiev, or any Russian great classical composer such as Tchaikovisky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, Borodin, Glinka..., not mentioning the musicians. The best. Or the ballet dancers from the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky. And so on and so forth. Russian has been giving Humanity so much!
The USA&OTAN demand, even try to force, us to allow ourselves to be deprived of culture.
I'm sorry to say that, on these terms, I categorically refuse to be fashionable.
I declare here and now out loud that I am old fashioned. With great pride.
If you too, are old fashioned. Enjoy!
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