THE PROBLEM WITH RUSSIA’S CONTINUED PRESENCE IN EURASIA

.

What you people need to understand as you sit back and enjoy your daily Russophobic beverages is that the Russians, who are not really actual people but a species of morose robotic aliens prone to excessive alcohol abuse, hate everybody, especially themselves and each other. For we intrepid stipended savants who tirelessly write about Eurasia from offices in London and New York for our think tank seminars and for your newspapers, Russia is the world’s largest blank space; an unkempt deserted golf course with no holes, occupied by a bickering, choleric tribe of samogon quaffing wet blankets that are biologically predisposed to authoritarian government. We need you to be aware of our wide range of highly developed modular tropes: for example that all Russians sustain severe and repeated concussions from being incessantly beaten in their statist totalitarian kindergartens that entirely prevent them from developing personalities or attaining decision making capabilities; or that Shouting, Statism, Saluting and Scowling are the only subjects taught in Russian schools, along with planning poorly conducted show trials and bungling the wholesale annexation of Eastern Europe. Or: Did you know that the Russian language, which was created by generations of consonants being hurled into violent collisions with one another, barely has an alphabet? Even the one they do have has an excessive number of letters in it and a ponderous Soviet bureaucracy of grammar. You can see some of it is clearly wrong, like the backwards R’s and the letter for “sh”. All of it is Slavic chaos and slow motion accident. Understand that our mission is to warn you and be thankful to us, just as we are thankful to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Heritage Foundation, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

In fact, analphabetic dyslexia and statist elimination of the imaginative faculties has meant that the Russians have proven entirely incapable of developing life-saving innovations such as the iPhone, which not only revolutionised the English language by shortening words (such as ‘you’ and ‘your’ to ‘u’ and ‘ur’) but also regulates society by allowing people to index social status to a handy, easily portable electronic device, even while being freed from the age-old drudgeries of developing dress sense, polishing one’s social graces or in fact actually needing to communicate with anyone at all. The West has, alone and unaided by anyone except plundered Congolese coltan and indentured Chinese sweatshop labour, led a technological revolution so profound that it enables 12 year olds to tell their parents in the next room to tell them how much they hate them, and also that they want to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, all within seconds. Such educational quantum leaps as the iPhone allow high schoolers to cheat on exams AND send pictures of their not fully developed sexual attributes to their classmates and/or teachers by mistake (And of course we all have a Communist infiltrator, Nabokov, to thank for inventing that perversion). We could wax lyrical on this topic, but most major news publications have a lift-out supplementary section full of attractive pictures where these emerging-market wonders and social revolutions are covered in exhaustive detail every weekend.

Of course, we Westerners, as always, only act out of a spirit of benevolent generosity that enables our unknown, faceless amorphous Eurasian cousins the Russians to be pitied in an appropriately belittling and consistently infantilising way. Russians all just want to be American, like everybody else in the world does; but without the relaxed good humour and fraternal cameraderie that characterises all American interpersonal relationships, from the lowliest elementary school shooter right up to the six-times-divorced billionaire faded celebrity who is addicted to plastic surgery and fifteen types of prescription painkillers. Considering the complexity of social conditions that gave rise to these American success stories, we are compelled to scoff at the Russian chances of success.

Fortunately we advanced Occidentals understand that due to geography, the science which helped Europeans to discover America but not vice versa, understand that unlike these serious Occidental problems, Russia and its innumerable Russians, who continue to obstruct the path to our fully developed Eurasian markets with their presence, are both problems that are both distant and manageable; and if we keep patronising and infantilising them in a consistent and thoughtful way, we can keep them that way until the time is right to entirely restructure them just as we have done to Iraq, Libya and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.