Cat Show 9/4/2020

VG: I guess Cold War and Cold Warriors never die. They just fade away, and then reappear, because they are constantly needed. The world, the West in particular, can’t move beyond the Cold War paradigm. While Russia has oil, and gas, and mighty rivers, and good climate, westerners, who's a already exhausted all their resources, know that the energy of the future is fear and paranoia. So they keep on running on animosity. Evil Putin, evil Russians, evil this or that.

HOBBS: Exactly, just look at Alice. You provide for her, she is pampered and spoiled; yet, all day long, she is fighting her imaginary enemies. Now she runs away from your loud voice, now she is scared of some outside noise. And then she turns on NPR and gets even more paranoid. Have you noticed that every time NPR mentions the name Vladimir, she is shaking in anger? It used to be exposes of all sorts of homophobes, racists, or anti-emigration whiteys. Now it is Vladimir all the time. He interferes, he poisons, he threatens, he bullies, he grabs. When I told her to relax, it is not our Vladimir, she replied, "It doesn’t matter. Today he grabs Crimea, tomorrow – a pussy. I have a full right to be scared."

ALICE: Even paranoid people have enemies, so yes, I’ve never seen anything positive from any Vladimir, except mockery, sarcasm, bullying and occasional piece of fish followed by an extra dose of ridicule. Now it is our time, and NPR knows it. Brazen Russian regime had turned into a total failure. They can’t succeed anywhere, except in authoritarism and incompetence. They are by far worse than my Party in that respect, and that’s why I ignore all your mockery of the only decent party there is, Clinton’s party, also known as the Democrats among the non-initiated.

HOBBS: Yes, that’s exactly what Vladimir meant by “cold war never dies.” Why this endless scapegoating? Endless need to invoke a foreign country? Can’t Americans have their own issues? Why is it always, Russian interference or Chinese virus? And this is just the beginning. If you judge by the vanguard of the West, so called the “New Europe,” that is, Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine, these guys are already banning Russian language, beat up people who speak Russian, take Russian songs and films off the air, and declare heroes everyone who’s killed a Russian in the past. And don’t forget these maniacs are getting the jobs at the censorship centers of social media. All in the name of “defending democracy” and confronting “fake news.” The biggest joke since they assigned us, cats, to guard the mice. If that’s defense, I am getting scared of the offense. Maybe Alice is not off the mark, being scared all the time.

VG: I see Cold War everywhere. No matter what happens, there are political accusations. Flood, virus, fires – you see, that’s the result of “authoritarian mismanagement.” Young people are brainwashed into thinking that the West will supply them with sexy undies, ignoring the fact that the west is also closing their fathers’ factories, dismissing them as socialist smokestacks. Stupid and myopic Stalin kept all the local languages going, creating textbooks, producing “national poets,” – only to hear from ungrateful Ukrainians or Belorussians that evil Russians squashed their national cultures. How so? Is there national cultures or languages in US or England? Yet, we are supposed to feel sorry for Ukrainians and Belorussians, many of whom were ethnic Russians or Jews, forced by Stalin to declare themselves Ukrainians and contribute to the flourishing of ethnic cultures. And now these guys are playing victims, while the West, which has squashed all the ethnic cultures let alone whole national groups with an iron feast, is all gang-ho in supporting it. Why not? Cold War pays.

ALICE: Well, you have to be able to appeal to people. Stalin couldn’t. That’s why people want out. They want to live like Lithuanians, so that one day, they would be able to live like Poles, and one day, maybe in generation or so, they could come to the States, and have a piece of an American Pie freshly baked from tasty Monsanto corn. Don’t forget, we’ve ruined a lot of schools here, due to the Republican under-funding, of course. So we need qualified work force. Needless to say that all the Belorussians who come to the States after they got their free advanced scientific education in their own country, have to learn English, since nobody here gives a damn about their own language. But that’s English, not Russian. It is the language of Freedom and Democracy, not enslavement and oppression. So everyone is more than happy to learn it and give up on their family tongues.

HOBBS: Can’t believe what a secret exceptionalist you are, Alice. Of course, tell it to the Indians or Pakistanis about their language of freedom. Or even Irish, who’ve been convinced by English that Gaelic language has only two words: whiskey and beer, so they’ve been practicing them ever since.

VG: Hobbs, don’t turn into a cold warrior yourself. You see how easy it is to fall into accusations. It doesn’t have to be this way. There was a time, when people wanted to hear the best that other cultures could produce, not the worst. I remember in early 2000s, Navalny was very big in Russia, exposing a lot of crooks and thugs with State connections. That was a bad time in Russia, pretty discouraging, and Navalny’s slogan, “the party of crooks and thieves” in reference to Putin’s party, actually made sense. He was a real deal. Yet, when I suggested to one of my students who worked in one of those ultra liberal and progressive outfits to do a profile on Navalny and his agenda, nobody was interested. You see, the west – along with Putin’s cronies –actively participated in looting Russia, so nobody cared. Only when Putin began to privilege Russian interests, and when he finally put an end to the looting of Russian resources and Russian territories, he became a pariah, and cold war began anew.

HOBBS: Yes, I remember that moment, when Navalny lost all the public support that he accumulated, by condemning Crimean return. Since then, he seized to be a political figure, and became a TV personality. Some sort of Russian Geraldo Rivera, exposing this or that crook on the screen. But what is fascinating is that despite all Putin’s autocracy, this guy had a free reign in Russia. Is there an equivalent figure in the west nowadays? The one who is allowed to broadcast on youtube all sorts of exposes of rich and powerful? Navalny’s shows attracts a couple of millions and nobody bothered to pull a plug, as opposed to Snowdens, Assanges and Mannings, who were very quickly arrested, threatened, and silenced in the west.

ALICE: I see where you are going. You are trying to obfuscate the fact, that Navalny was poisoned by the evil Putin State. It won’t work. Even Merkel knows how the cookie crumbles. Russia has to be sanctioned and their NordStream II closed. That was the decision made by State Department already under Obama, and we are not deviating from that, we were just waiting for the moment to implement it, and now we have it! Russian gas has to be transported through Ukraine only. How else would Ukraine survive if it is not allowed to steal Russian gas? Americans are not stupid to transfer their hard earned tax money to this failed state. We prefer to transfer it to progressive corporations or some progressive states like Israel or Poland.

VG: We are out of time, guys, so let’s return to Navalny saga next time. Seasons might change, but Cold War will go on forever.