Common Sense

What I like most is that the fans of the platitude ‘Biden surrendered Ukraine, and that wouldn’t have happened under Trump’ are now lying low and keeping mum. After all, in just the first week of his new term, Donny has reneged on his promise to stop the war in twenty-four hours and accused Zelensky of daring to resist a bigger opponent. Most importantly, Trump gave the Gopnik back his handshake and the spotlight by inviting Putin to meet with him as an equal.

And that’s it! As if the Kremlin serial killer had not not murdered hundreds of thousands of people for no reason. As if Washington had forgotten that the Russian Federation always uses negotiations as a weapon, and never honors agreements. Everyone swallowed the convenient wording about the ‘two parties to the conflict’ and seemingly forgot for a moment that [post-Soviet] Russia has been at war for the thirty-four years of its existence, and always in foreign lands. But Donnie felt sorry for ‘60 million Russians’, whom he plucked from thin air.

I am not a fan of Biden’s, but at least he called the murderer a murderer, and under his administration the Gopnik was designated an international criminal and an arrest warrant to that effect was issued for him. Under Trump, however, the Swiss authorities are already willing to work around the ICC ruling and grant the criminal diplomatic immunity ‘so that the meeting between the two leaders can take place’.

Oh, yes! Before that, Donny threatened his friend Vovan with new ‘sanctions and tariffs’ if he didn’t want to sit down at the negotiating table.

I took a look at the hemp and blubber which the U.S. has continued to purchase from Russia, although it’s strange that this is still happening at all. U.S. imports from Russia until recently mainly consisted of enriched uranium and fertilizers. Biden banned buying nuclear fuel from Russia last year, so only the fertilizers remain. But if they get more expensive, then you know who will pay for it: the very same electorate who have not forgiven Biden for the high price of eggs.

The same consequences apply to deliveries of uranium, if they are still somehow continuing. More expensive procurements mean higher costs for the electricity generated by American nuclear power plants. Basically, if you yourself continue to buy goods from a seller under sanctions, then you need his business more than he does. How can you threaten tariffs if you depend on these goods?

As for the threat of new sanctions, that is a joke. The only painful and effective ban would be on oil, but a full embargo has been impossible for now. China and India (and Turkey, by the way) will offer to buy Russian oil, bypassing sanctions, as they did for many years with Iranian oil, and later have done with that selfsame Russian oil.

The guys in the Kremlin are ghouls, of course. But they are certainly not idiots who can be intimidated with fake threats. Trump tried to scare a hedgehog with his bare ass, basically.

I live in one of the poorest states in the U.S., where seventy percent of the locals have consistently voted for Trump. But I have yet to meet a single American who is openly glad about the rounding up of immigrants or the banning of diversification policies. Those English-speaking friends whose opinions I have asked about the events of the last week are in indescribable shock over what Trump has been doing.

But I do have to hear Russian speakers’ admiring comments about the first steps taken by their adored leader, and the squeals of delighted emitted by Mikhail Veller and his ilk. It took me a long time to understand why it is my former compatriots who idolize Trump are unwilling to brook any arguments against him. I think it works like the imprinting of ducklings: the first silhouette they see in life is so imprinted in their minds that it becomes their image of the mother for life. Soviet people (not all of them, of course, but many of them) seemingly have subconsciously detected in Trump that strong hand, the profile of the supreme leader or the tsar (which are the same things), of the big boss under whom they were shaped. Only to their delight, unlike Putin, Trump is marked with a plus sign. In their dreams, Trump does to people who are ‘bad’, ‘despicable’ and, most importantly, more defenseless than they are, everything they would like to do to them but don’t have the means or the guts to do. Trump and Musk are their subconscious heroes, the guys who make the underdog’s dreams come true. Those two make our people feel like bad motherfuckers in the ‘greatest’ country in the world, and in return for this euphoria they are willing to turn a blind eye to Ukraine and to all of Trump’s lies.

As one such immigrant said to me, ‘You have to OBEY Trump because you are a nobody here, while he was elected by American citizens!’ To my objection that I didn’t move here to obey, and that any president is only a politician who has been granted four years to do his job, the man called me an anarchist. But I don’t understand how you can treat a politician like a deity and wait on his every word as if it were a revelation.

I understand that there are people who chose Trump for more balanced reasons. I don’t judge them: it’s their business. But what about the fact that Trump has turned his aggression and determination against Mexican mothers and gays, rather than against the Russian goon with nuclear balls?

You can blame Ukraine for its ‘short skirt’ as much as you like, but when Putler attacks Estonia and Poland in three to five years, because he has been ‘appeased’ and starts World War Three, it will be too late to find someone to blame.

I still believe that only personal choice matters. And I believe that there are no big guys who would fix everything like good wizards and make Russia ‘beautiful’ and America ‘great’. Russia’s entire history, in my opinion, is a clear example of the costs inflicted down the road by this culture of adoration. Basically, I am shocked both by Trump himself and by his fans, who treat all his actions like manna from heaven.

That is why I am calling on everyone to help the Ukrainians to survive even before the calling of a ceasefire whose aftermath is still unclear. For example, the gals from Lviv’s Oberig [a ‘group of volunteers making spunbond camouflage netting for the Ukrainian Armed Forces’] have started fashioning cloaks that will protect their country’s defenders from thermal imagers and drones. Let’s help them raise money for the special fabric they use.

Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 26 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

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ZDRAVYI SMSYL AND COMMON SENSE

America makes the weather [sets the tone] in the world, and Trump makes the weather in America. You can complain about it childishly, or you can be a grown-up and say to yourself, There is no such thing as ‘bad’ weather in nature. It’s just that season of the year, then.

We have all been watching Trump’s opening gambits closely. If we strip away the emotions and focus on the substance, what are our impressions at the start? What kind of winds are going to blow? What direction will the branches bend and the leaves fly?

My feeling is that, minus some minor Trumpian eccentricities (like renaming Mount McKinley [sic] and the Gulf of Mexico), everything has been strategically calibrated. The new U.S. president is pursuing the same stance that won him the election: he is sticking to so-called zdravyi smisl [literally, ‘sane, sensible, sound, healthy, commonsensical’ ‘sense’]. In English, this concept has a more apt name than in Russian: common sense. Meaning ordinary, generally accepted, accessible to the majority (but not necessarily ‘healthy’ or ‘sensible’).

For it is clear that Trump rode to victory a wave of irritation against liberalism’s excesses that had built up in mainstream American society.

From a common sense perspective, Trump’s first decrees seem straightforward and reasonable, while fearlessly shedding ‘politically correct hypocrisy.’

Abolish the use of law enforcement for political score-settling? (Yes. Many people had the feeling that Trump was subjected to a witch hunt in an attempt to keep him from running by any means.)

Reduce the influx of immigrants into the country? Clean up the Mexican border? (Out loud, many will say, What a barbaric thing to do! But deep down they will be glad).

Designate drug cartels terrorist organizations? (Yes! Yes!)

Do away with diversity ‘quotas’? (Employers sigh in relief.)

Abolish enforced ‘gender’ policies? (The majority applauds).

Stop wasting American money on international bureaucracy and ill-conceived mega projects? Stop forcibly making everyone switch to electric vehicles? Postpone banning TikTok?

I’m sure these opening gambits have caused Trump’s approval ratings to sore. They’re like common sense on the march. And the pavement for this march was laid by liberal overreach.

Does that mean the liberal system of values is wrong? No, it doesn’t. It means that liberals need to remove from their platform and practice everything that falls into the category of ‘give them enough rope’. That’s what they need to do now: turn toward zdravyi smysl (not just ‘healthy’ sense, but common sense).

On the website (at the link) I’m running a poll on the ‘litmus test’ topics which have irritated common sense the most. I predict the result in advance, although my readers mostly don’t like Trump (I’ve been checking).

Source: Boris Akunin (Facebook), 23 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. Here and below, the italics indicate words that are in English in Akunin’s original or which I have left in transcribed Russian to underscore his point about ‘common sense’. Akunin also published this same text on Babook Book Club, where it was accompanied by this readers’ opinion poll:

After I voted (at 6:30 GMT on 26 January 2025), I was shown the following preliminary results:

DO YOU AGREE

• That the BLM campaign took it too far? – 2618 (13%)

• That transgenderism, LGBT, children’s gender identities, etc., came to occupy too much space on the public agenda? – 2763 (14%)

• That the summary cancellation of famous people on unproven charges, often many years old, has been too much? – 2771 (14%)

• That banning books written long ago for violating current standards of political correctness is censorship? – 3062 (16%)

• That tearing down historical monuments to people who, again from today’s point of view, are somehow uncool, smacks of vandalism? – 2572 (13%)

• That when ‘green’ and ‘climate’ activists protest by defacing artworks it discredits the movement? – 3029 (15%)

• That the ‘collective Greta Thunberg’ has taken an unjust stance during the Gaza crisis? – 2841 (14%)

• NO, THERE WAS NO OVERKILL. EVERYTHING IS COOL. – 86 (0%)