THE PROBLEM WITH RUSSIA’S CONTINUED PRESENCE IN EURASIA

satireMaskWhile our overpaid and hypocritical punditocracy falls all over itself casting aspersions on Russia and her leaders, the blasted country has the audacity to defend itself. Below, a typical complaint.

 


By Professor Emeticus Loren Muffler Exhaust-Pipes
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[dropcap]O[/dropcap]nce again, for the thirtieth time in as many weeks, our world community braces in breathless expectation, standing by for the imminent cataclysm of all-out Russian blitzkrieg that great prophetic geopolitical analysts such as the late Ronald Reagan and Tom Clancy perpetually warned us about. Failing that, experts agree that the world hyperbole community is groaning under the spectral menace of a neo-Tsarist domination poised to gobble up Eastern Europe piecemeal like a compulsive gobble-guts running amok in the ice-cream section of a supermarket.

This is our eastern Europe, our new frontier freshly liberated from the Soviet yoke, freshly privatised and presumed a safe destination for barrels of toxic waste, pickled gap year students and the sex tourism of middle aged German businessmen. Expert commentators and stipended think tank analysts ask ourselves in our internal correspondence:- how did it come to this? Where did we go so wrong that Russians started imagining a world in which they were entitled to a say in regional affairs? How did we fail to foresee this malaise of objection, tantamount to threats? emerging from the faceless Eurasian hordes? This sea of misery who we were counting on to supply us with sweatshop labour, prostitutes and room service, is not only talking back to us, but expecting us to listen to their unhinged babble concerning menacing delusional constructs of rights and sovereignty. The insistent vulgarity of it is deeply insulting to the natural order of world-primacy that we all accept and understand. Some say the problem is linked to a rising standard of living. While there is some merit in this, I have been handsomely remunerated to see the problem as something far more fundamental.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]The entire Russian population are ballet-addicted idiots, strange and ponderous bureaucrats. Is that what we want for our children? Russians are at least as evil as Serbs, who burn down whole villages before they can even walk, and possibly more evil than that. Parents won’t sleep safely in their beds knowing their children could be infected by inferior cultural models at any time, any day, in the dead of night… Imagine! Our measuring devices maxed out before we could even calculate or quantify the Russians’ perfidy. We had to resort to abstractions within film and literature to accurately depict their unregenerate Slav evil. You could be forgiven for thinking the Russians would have been grateful to have a wonderful vibrant guy like Boris Yeltsin and his capable, inspirational freedom- loving entrepreneurial oligarchs to ransack their inefficient state run enterprises, dissolve their social compact and lower their miserable drink sodden lifespans by allowing massive poverty and unemployment to decimate the unworthy. How on earth did entrepreneurial initiative become so worthless? Do you think they said as much as a single thank you for these advances? Of course not! They spat in our faces, the ingrates.
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Even the Muscovite yuppies rolling in tacky luxury goods expressed no gratitude at all. Well, okay, let’s just suppose for the sake of argument that the ever-petulant, hormonally imbalanced Russians, in their infamous tortured existential malady and confusion, didn’t actually enjoy being pack raped by western financiers for an entire decade; it’s entirely possible they even disliked it and may even have objected on rare occasion. We are impartial about this and open to the possibility. Some people don’t understand free enterprise, we get that. Some people can’t make a cup of coffee for themselves.But you’d still be forgiven for assuming that most Russians would readily agree to the dynamic and free-enterprising future that we’ve selflessly and thoughtfully mapped out for them. Millions of Westerners, after all, readily went to the polls and asked, nay begged to have their nations governed by the sure, steady and capable hands of fearless progressive visionaries and great statesmen, such as the UK’s Prime Minister, revolutionary thinker and social justice activist David Cameron; forward-thinking Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; Australia’s inclusive humanitarian and progressive icon Tony Abbott; and of course, to say nothing of the sagacious entanglements and the wise surgical incinerations of the President of the United States of Military Industrial Complex, Barack Secondrate Martin Luther King Impersonator Obama, to name but a few inspiring examples.
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But oh, no! Perish the thought. Though it’s good enough for us, the stolid and drab Russians will have none of this. Like a recalcitrant drunken gambler, they don’t want to be saved. With pathetic ardour they love their own jailer, authoritarian action man Putin, and his unexciting cute little teddy bear sidekick whose name we can’t quite remember (and who’s not a real politician anyway). They don’t want the fearless captains of free enterprise like Khodorkosvky or the visionary genius of Gary Kasparov, the inspired neo-liberalism of the late Berezovsky or the gutsy topless howlings of the United Torsos of Femen. They don’t even like our picks for Ukraine’s government, punchy dynamic success stories of intellectual awakening such as Klitschko. Russians want statism, that’s what; show them anything else and they recoil in horror, if you take them any higher they fall over with vertigo. Rules and laws, trade protectionism, it’s all as stale and monotonous as the frozen black bread Russians eat. These Russians have Soviet frontal lobes and spinal fluids. They would much rather chomp like bovines on tins of Soviet pickled onions until they puke, the clods. I mean just one look and you know these guys are no fun at all- if someone being a sulky and drab non-homicidal non-pyromaniac in public isn’t a damn good reason to pick a fight with them, who can say what is? Not only did America hold Russia’s hand and help them beat Hitler’s Wehrmacht by showing them up at Normandy; but you can be sure (thanks to having absolutely no idea about the world or anything that happened in it over the last 100 years) that the Russians would have helped Hitler, if Hitler were only badder and less fun-loving. I mean Hitler was a non-smoking vegetarian teetotal, but obviously that wasn’t enough, right? He still liked the opera, women and parties. The life-hating Russians even got rid of their royal family, can you imagine? Simply for involving the nation in a couple of needless and humiliating wars, they dispensed with a magnificent, resplendently autocratic family that represented rococo-encrusted centuries of glorious inbred tradition- fancy that for stupidity! Well, everyone knows that wars and royalty are the defining attributes of any democracy, and the fact that Russia is not game to play host to either speaks volumes.

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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.

 

(Conan Rose)

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