Don’t turn off your TV set. Keep watching the “most exciting World Cup ever.” While you do that, actual Russians and some non-Russians (i.e., Oleg Sentsov) are suffering horribly for the near-absolute power Russia’s Emperor of Ice Cream and his retinue have acquired over the last twenty years.
It was this same power (and the money that comes with it) that made it possible for the Emperor of Ice Cream and his pals to buy off FIFA’s bid committee and win the right to host the 2018 World Cup. They invoked this same power to spend more on preparations for the World Cup than any other host country has ever spent.
But instead of doing what enlightened despots have been known to do on such occasions — declaring amnesties, pardons, and ceasefires during Olympic Games and other such celebrations and great sporting events — the Emperor of Ice Cream’s repressive and imaginative secret services have seemingly notched up their civil war against their own people while you stay glued to your TV set, pretending it is possible to separate sports from politics.
Tell that to Yuri Dmitriev, rearrested and recharged for a crime for which he had recently been acquitted. Tell that to the Penza-Petersburg “terrorists,” all of them tortured by the FSB (KGB) into forcing them to give the testimony the FSB wanted to hear, never mind that it is total nonsense, the sick fantasies of the FSB itself, which sees or, rather, pretends to see a “terrorist” hiding under every rock. Tell that to Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and resident of Crimea, sentenced to 20 years in a maximum security correctional facility in Russia’s Far North for the thought crime of opposing Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2018
“The amount of pollution caused by idling cars is incredible.”
—Nigel Havers, “PM,” BBC Radio 4, 29.06.17
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2017. As a blogger quoted on Dictionary.com notes, ‘While there is no exact English translation, the Russian phrase cyka blyat (сука блять in the Russian alphabet) is roughly equivalent to the English “fucking shit” or “bitch whore.” Cyka means “bitch” while blyat is a multifunctional vulgarity along the lines of “shit” or “fuck.” Together, cyka blyat is used to express uncontrollable anger, similar to dropping a series of F-bombs in English.’
It’s frightening how “natural” absolutely neo-Nazi-like racialism has come to seem to so many folks in the Former East. It really beggars the imagination. What went wrong?
And it’s all reproduced and disseminated, whether in private conversation or more impersonal forums like Facebook, with such aplomb and confidence, as if literally no else in the world has thought or could think otherwise. Even broaching, in the most primitive way possible, the idea that races are a “construct” used to dominate some “races” while advantaging others, not something “natural,” will only expose you to instant derision.
What “race” is this bird? Is it white or black? In fact, it’s black, white, and several shades in between. Obviously, this is an absurd conversation, since we superior beings don’t attribute “race” to birds.
But we do attribute it to each other, missing somehow that the whole point, the only point, is power. Natural’s not in it.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2017
One of the keys to successfully translating contemporary Russian avant-garde poetry into English is having absolutely no sense of colloquial English. The translations should sound leaden, awkward, and dull, as if they had been written by a manager in the Flint, Michigan, water department trying to justify his criminal negligence in an impenetrable and evasive letter to the EPA, to wit:
I feel fear. I am afraid of something, but I don’t know what. Wherever you were, you must get from wherever it was to the place from which you left. Why do you assume that your toothache corresponds to the fact that you hold your cheek.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2016
A mace in the backseat of someone’s decked out ride.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2016
I’m totally wired.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2016
Russia’s cultural capital, where nice young men like this one are beat up in broad daylight by fascists, and the police protect the fascists.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2013
More fascists at today’s LGBT Pride event in Petersburg, as photographed by the intrepid Sergey Chernov. He reports that a few of the fascists brought small children with them so that it would be possible to charge the LGBT activists with violating Petersburg’s fascist-inspired law against “gay propaganda” amongst minors.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2013
Fascists posing as “Cossacks” at today’s LGBT Pride event in downtown Petersburg, where all the gay activists were arrested by the police, unlike the 200 or 300 fascists, who apparently enjoy near or complete immunity for crimes that would get anyone else arrested. Photo by one of the few faithful friends of freedom left in Petersburg, Sergey Chernov.
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2013
Source: Thomas Campbell (Facebook), 29 June 2013
Discover more from The Russian Reader
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
The Russian Reader 