This, I believe, is how the current political climate in Russia can be summed up: We want to be the Soviet Union again. We dont want to be the post-Soviet Russian anymore. We want to go back. Weve had twenty years worth of a taste of your vaunted freedom, and we didnt like it. It may be good for others, but not for us, thank you very much. Its too messy and altogether too complicated. Just as there are those horrendous species of fish mutants living in the extremely polluted rivers of Russias industrial regions which feed on chemicals and non-organic materials and cannot survive and die almost immediately in clean, non-polluted water, so there are the whole peoples in the world, such as us here, whose intoxication with non-freedom had gone on for too long and had been all too massive and all-pervasive for them ever to be capable of reconstituting and readjusting their minds and hearts for the necessities of life in a free, non-repressive society. We want our sweet non-freedom back. We want to be told what to do, what to think. We want to be taken care of -- if only, of necessity, on the very basic level of material comfort -- by our non-elected rulers. We are not stupid: we realize that this move back in time, this seemingly perverse, non-freedom-bound time-travel, will exact the most serious cost on the quality of our lives: there will be no more foreign travel for us, no more variety of food items in supermarkets, and no western-style supermarkets, either; no more readily available foreign-made clothes or readily available anything for us to purchase, period -- well, so be it. Well take privation over... well, over feeling insignificant, yes, humiliated in terms geopolitical. The West has never loved or respected us -- and thats understandable, sure, for there is not much, really, for the West or anyone else to love or respect us for and we dont really love or respect ourselves, either -- and we doubt anyone else in the world ever does love or respect themselves, in any event -- but now it, the collective West, is not afraid of us, either, as it used to, back when we were the mighty Soviet Union, and thats not good. That just wont stand. We want to be feared again! We want to be loathed and reviled and feared! We cannot take any more anonymity, as the worlds largest landmass and greatest country! We want, once again, to feel important and loathed and feared and reviled and loathed and feared and hated! Yes! For that, we would be prepared to tolerate any degree of misery! And so we thank from the bottom of our hearts our president, Vladimir Putin, for reawakening us, with his glorious annexation of Crimea from the wounded and temporarily wayward brotherly fascist Ukraine, to the realization as to what it is we really want. We want to stop having to pretend we love being free people, thats what we want! We want to be the Soviet Union again! Long live our dear leader, Comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 20:02:14 +0000