Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Published: 30 March 2022 ~ OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad
Article 19: OXATA
I have often seen it, but I’ve never tried it, but when I saw a chap in front of me paying for two bottles of it at the local supermarket checkout, I decided that it was high time that I did. I’m talking about Ohota Krepkoye beer (OXOTA beer), a strong Russian beer from the Heineken Brewery* in St Petersburg with an OG of 8.1% and a label affirming real men, and now me, drink it.
The bottle looks as though its 1.5 litres, but when you check the small print you find that it is 0.15 litres short of the full 1.5. I know a lot of people like that.
The label tells you straight away that this is no namby-pamby, Nancy-boy brew. The bold shadow-highlighted 3-D typeface charges across the bottle against a deep red sash and above it is a man who has an awesome chest with a rifle slung over his shoulder. If you have ever harboured a secret desire to appear really incongruous, try carrying a bottle of this beer whilst attending a gay parade!
Before I had taken my first sip, I knew instinctively that this was the sort of beer that you could very easily get pissed on but not take the piss out of. Excuse my professional beer critic’s language.
The aroma struck me initially as though possessing a spicey, citrus twang, but, before decanting into my trusty Soviet glass, I paused a moment, a little affectedly I thought, took another whiff and changed my mind. It was now, I opined, decidedly sweet and disconcertingly antiseptic.
It poured into the glass with a disappointingly weak head which dissipated rapidly. Once out of the bottle, I was relieved to find that the clinical smell had gone, replaced and overpowered by the sweeter notes.
Not the dark, deep colour I had anticipated but a mid-amber, the beer had, I was surprised to find, not a rich sweet taste but a sweet tart taste laced with a touch of burnt charcoal.
OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad
The quite glutinous finish gives way to a strong throaty aftertaste, which is not at all unpleasant, and, whilst you secretly wonder how it received a World Beer Award in the ‘Silver’ category, as the medallion on the front of the bottle signifies, there is no doubt in your mind, and also in your mouth, that the brew is persuasively moorish.
Affirmation that this is a real man’s drink is not backward in coming forward. I could feel my liver shrinking and my ego getting bigger with each successive sip.
The heady aftertaste taps into your long-term memory, summoning vague recollections of cautionless drinking sessions undertaken in the first flood of youth. How much of that memory would survive intact should you overdo an OXOTA session really does not bear thinking about.
One thing’s for certain, OXOTA is a good buy if you want to say goodbye and rather quickly to that irritating condition otherwise known as sobriety.
Footnote:🦶 I picked up the rumour from somewhere that the Heineken Brewery is one of those companies that virtue signalled their allegiance to the United States-led globalist war on Russia by buggering off. But take heart, Hart, I said. Buggering-off breweries mean a larger share of the market for those that are smart and don’t budge and a chance to expand and diversify for those that seize the initiative.😁
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: OXOTA (Ohota Krepkoye) Brewer: Heineken Where it is brewed: St Petersburg Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre Strength: 8.1% Price: It cost me about 137 roubles (1.06 pence) Appearance: Mid-amber Aroma: Predominantly sweet Taste: Tart, not excessively sweet Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: A big strapper with a large rifle Would you buy it again? If the need so takes me Marks out of 10: 6
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
The Frenzy to Cancel Russian Culture is a Symptom of the West’s Decline
Published: 25 March 2022 ~ Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
Immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and throughout that war, the Nazi’s singled out the Jewish population and subjected them to a sustained and brutal campaign of harassment, persecution and violence. Proscription and marginalisation began in 1933 and were reinforced and legitimised in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws, the sanctions of their day, paved the way for more widespread and incisive discriminatory practices and opened the floodgates of prejudice for the justification of genocide.
Over time, the sustained ideological prohibition on personal liberty, human rights and freedom of religious association escalated. Campaigns of intimidation and terror ran simultaneously with random acts of violence and official decrees which, hampering Jews in their professional and vocational lives, combined economic degradation with societal segregation.
Today, such examples of state-orchestrated social and economic ostracism are endemic in western societies. They may have acquired a new moniker, namely cancel culture, but whatever title they operate under, in application and in effect, it’s Nazi business as usual.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
A prime recent and surprising example of cancel culture occurred in of all places Canada, the epicentre of liberal conformity, when Justin Trudeau, the then prime minister-in-hiding, unleashed his army of robo-cops on an unsuspecting convoy of peacefully protesting Canadian truckers.
As well as being predominantly white and patriots, another cardinal sin committed by the truckers was that they tried to invoke their rights, which unbeknown to them had been quietly and stealthily side-lined. Freedom of speech, even freedom of thought, had been stringently replaced by an explicit demand for mass obedience and unquestionable allegiance to liberal mandates.
Arguably, the social and economic violations enacted by Trudeau against his own people came as more of a shock to them than cancel-culture warfare has to Russian nationals living, working and studying in western countries, where, since Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine to ‘de-Nazify and de-militarise’, Russians experience demonisation on a daily basis.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
It is tempting to postulate that since Russians are no strangers to prejudice from the West ~ they have certainly been the recipients of it for decades, even centuries ~ they would not be unduly surprised or alarmed by this latest round of belligerence. But if the views of Russians with whom I have personally spoken on the subject of cancel culture represent the views of the Russian nation as a whole, then fortunately until now, or so it would seem, no clear comprehension has existed, at least among ordinary Russians, of the vitriol, enmity and hostility harboured against them by the West, nor the blatant disregard of the West for the sovereignty of their country and the sanctity of their culture.
Pervasive as this blind vindictiveness is in the West, nowhere does it assert itself more forcefully than in the United Kingdom. The explanation for this phenomenon might conceivably lie in the efficacy of propaganda, but it is not so much that UK media has got its misinformation and also its disinformation off to such a fine art that Brits can’t tell their arse from their elbow (although the argument in favour of this is strong) as the willingness of Brits to suspend disbelief about what they see on the telly or read in the media, no matter how one-sided it is, how sensationalised or misleading.
Brits believe what they want to believe at any given time, especially during a crisis, when solidarity of thought ~ or should that be solidity ~ offers them a temporary fix for the rifts in British society. That the British establishment endorses and whole-heartedly encourages such deflecting hysteria is unequivocal: Better to bring people together in a media-manufactured frenzy against the goings on in a far-away country about which they know less than nothing, than have them focus too objectively on the grievous problems in their own back yard.
The simpler explanation for the willingness of Brits to jump through hoops when told to do so is that they feel the need to get value for money for obediently paying their TV licence or, no less reasonable or less risible, that the Russophobia they are so keen to champion is inextricably linked to that transatlantic ‘special relationship’ we hear so much about, whilst other countries in the West feel rather less obliged to carry the can kicked down the road by big old bully boy Uncle Sam.
Obliged or not, countries of the EU bloc, including Germany, which is rather good at this sort of thing, are busy pooling their cancel-culture resources. The problem, although obviously not a problem to western governments and the sheeple that they shepherd, is that artists, singers, sportsmen, 19th century literary figures and even Mr Tchaikovsky himself are in no way implicated in the Ukraine conflict, and neither are Russian students nor for that matter Russian schoolchildren, unless the culture into which one is born is considered to be a crime as birth right was for the Jews, according to cancel culture, cancel everything, 1940s’ Germans.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
The castigation and negation of Russia’s cultural class, the hate speech and violent abuse with which Russian nationals have to contend, are the punitive reflex actions of a deeper frustration coursing through the West than can be rationally credited to the events taking place in the Ukraine alone. They are rather a manifestation of the failings within western societies, and the compulsive instinctual need that stems from recognition of those failures that Russian culture must be cancelled as their own cultures have been cancelled, albeit non-consensually, by the leaders that they elected and who have written them off, Trudeau-style.
As the West sinks slowly but inevitably into the great abyss, where eventually all spent empires slide, the beacon of light from Russian culture is an untimely for some and timely for others rather wistful reminder of what the West once was, once had and what it could have been if it had only lived up to and not betrayed the values it espoused.
The task that Russia is faced with now, and the responsibility it owes to its thousand years of history, to its people and to the world, is to shape a multipolar destiny whilst avoiding the fate of being dragged down into the awful vortex of the spiralling West, as it gradually disappears behind the geo-political and moral horizon.
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Examples of Third Reich-style Cancel-Culture Occurrences in Western Europe
In my previous post I provided a treatise on the collective psychology on which cancel culture is premised and the mechanisms by which it works generally in the West and specifically in the UK.
Here are some examples of cancel culture at work today: the perpetrators, western governments, leaned-on western corporations and led-on western citizens; the victims, Russian nationals.
Alexander Ovechkin, National Hockey League star and Washington Capitals captain, cancelled from advertising campaigns by insurance firm sponsor
Russian and Belorusian athletes and officials cancelled from international sports federations
Journalists working for or on behalf of Russian state-backed media outlets cancelled by the EU
Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, temporarily cancelled by the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Italy, but reinstated after a public backlash
Russian cats cancelled from competitions by the International Feline Federation
Russian dogs cancelled by Crufts dog show
Russian football team cancelled, including ban on taking part in Word Cup 2022 qualifying matches
Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev cancelled by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra
The chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, cancelled in Germany
Wimbledon, UK, considers cancelling Russian players who do not denounce the role of their country in the conflict in Ukraine
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Examples of Nazi-style discrimination, abuse and aggression towards Russian nationals in western countries
Russian students have been expelled from universities in France and Belgium and there are reports of Czech teachers and professors refusing to teach Russian students and ordering them to leave lecture theatres
In Washington, a Russian restaurant was attacked and anti-Russian slogans daubed on the walls
In Germany a restaurant owner banned Russian nationals
In Holland, Russians have received threats of physical violence.
In Britain, acts of violence and harassment are occurring against Russian nationals
In England Russian students studying both in state and private schools are subject to bullying, intimidation, destructive acts of personal property, mockery and violence
Social media sites allows calls for violence against Russians in violation of anti-genocide laws enshrined in the UN Convention of 1948
A recent article from RT headlined ‘Western cancel culture has gone nuclear in targeting an entire country’, no doubt led many Russians to ask, “what exactly does ‘cancel culture’ mean?” I’ll get to that in a minute. First, let it be known that cancelling Russian culture is not a new thing for the West. Indeed, the UK establishment has been at it for years, long before the term was coined, in fact at a time when neoliberalism and its all-consuming globalist dream was nothing more than a distant twinkle in the eyes of rapacious imperialism.
Unlike Russia, whose socio-cultural model is based on tradition, traditional heterosexual family values, respect for Russian history and pride in and preservation of sovereignty ~ all of which makes it a perfect target for the cancel-culture West ~ British culture has been eroded over time and replaced by something sub-standard and counterfeit. For 30 years, at least, the UK has been the victim of a systematic cancel-culture campaign, cynically inflicted upon its legacy citizens by self-interested globalist aspirants masquerading as humanitarians.
The result of these policies is that today’s UK is a pale shadow of its former self. Once proud and united, British society today is riven with cancel culturalists, who repeatedly turn to woke to further their neo-fascist agenda.
As with ‘cancel culture’ any attempt to define woke using Google will inevitably return a left-leaning prejudice. Woke began life as a liberal buzz word, incestuously applauding a supposed awareness of racial or social discrimination. But with its increasing application as a virtue-signalling means of cancelling culture, principally by preventing alternative views and expression, it rapidly acquired pejorative connotations as a psychological/emotional weapon wielded by subversives against the UK’s indigenous culture. Found out, it rapidly turned pejorative, censuring the sanctimony for which it was designed and the subversives by which it was wielded.
Cancel culture and woke are closely related, in that both instruments depend for their projected legitimacy on claiming the moral high-ground; both are designed to shut down free speech and subvert target cultures; and both belong exclusively to the doctrines of liberal fascism, which singles out ancestral cultures, infects and erodes them by stealth and then when sufficiently weakened rapes them of all decency.
In the UK, woke, which is the bastard child of political correctness, and cancel culture, which is too nice a term for cultural genocide, were brought to fruition by two coalescing engineering programmes: first, social engineering and then gender engineering. Historically, the two overlap, but I have separated them out here, since the degree to which UK media in both its corporate and social forms obsesses on them displays a slight shift of late in favour of gender, although race and racial woke remain the cancel-culture bedrock.
The first of these programmes, and the one that is still paramount, is concerned with state-aided and abetted third-world immigration, with its predisposition to dilute host culture and disrupt and fracture cohesiveness. The second, gender engineering, challenges and inverts biological, cultural and morally acceptable norms that are of innate and long-standing importance to the host-country’s culture. Taken together, both experiments have produced a bizarre and troubled social construct, comprising CMUPs (Culturally Mixed Up People) and GMUPs (Gender Mixed Up People), both of whom we are led to believe can comfortably co-exist with traditional values-oriented, non-deviant ‘normal’ people. Only, of course, they don’t.
The socially engineered migration programme, not be confused with natural migration, ie that which occurs for various reasons over any number of years, has been purposefully devised in a relatively short timeframe in accordance with the diversity tenets of the Kalergi Plan, an early 20th century cancel-culture blueprint routinely, if not conveniently, dismissed by western liberals as a conspiracy theory of the far right. (PolitiFact, which is a liberal ‘fact checker’ tells you it is a conspiracy theory, so make of that what you will!)
Both programmes serve a mutual purpose, which is to radically weaken, alter and diminish the traditional values of the host culture until it devolves to such impoverishment that it can be parasitically usurped and ultimately replaced by a macabre and distorted otherness,
It must be understood that cancel culture in the UK is at an advanced stage, brought about not by external forces but perpetrated from within by the very people that we have elected to safeguard our culture and heritage.
The extent to which cancel culture has been promulgated in the UK, and how insidious it has become, can be evaluated from the fact that the UK’s education system is nothing more than a factory of woke. Whatever goes in at one end by the time it comes out at the other, like a limp stick of Brighton rock, it has ‘liberal-lefty’ stamped all the way through it.
Naturally, or unnaturally, depending upon your point of view, the contribution of the UK’s media to this woeful state of affairs is incomputable. Suffice it to say, however, that it is not only corporate news and social media that is stoking woke and cultivating cancel culture, documentaries and popular dramas also play a part.
The BBC, the main offender, is little more than a revisionist joke. It routinely distorts British history by writing black, gay and other PC preoccupations into historical contexts where they never existed and, given the norms of the periods in which the dramas are set, would never have been allowed to exist. Watching these hysterical-historical dramas it is easy to believe that a gender-studies female Dr Who (a tick in the box for gender woke) flounced back in time in her fictional TARTIS and altered something in the past to justify the woke that is the unreal real reality of 21st century UK. If not this, then what other explanation is there for the degradation of common sense and the unfolding cultural catastrophe?
It has already been noted that cancel culture in the UK is at such an advanced stage that the prognosis for the patient is not at all good, but, like every disease, it had to start somewhere. Fortunately for Russia and its citizens, the outbreak of cancel culture that it is contending with today is little more than a rash (and proving rash for those who conceived it). It is the work of hostile foreign powers and as such has limited consequences outside of Russia itself. Cancel culture only becomes existentially dangerous on a creeping subversive level when it takes hold within a country, and this it can only do with the full connivance, collusion and treachery of a facilitating government.
In Britain cancel culture began with what you could and couldn’t say, and that rule still applies. Opening your mouth without first having your thoughts rubber-stamped liberal is liable to expose you to a frenzied barrage of insults, or, at the very least, to instigate typical ‘stop’ words, such as ‘racist’, for example, or the currently trending ‘misogynist’ or any number of logic-turned words with ‘phobia’ strung on the end. Fortunately, over time, these words have become overworked, overused and resultingly less effective and always have been less than successful at stopping you thinking what you think and what you truly believe.
However, as we know to our cost, from tiny microbes nasty diseases grow, especially when they are cultivated. For example: Flying the nation’s flag is racist; wearing poppies, the traditional emblem signifying respect for British service men who gave their lives in two world wars and also in later wars, is racist; celebrating Christian Christmas is an offence to other religions, it is inciting religious hatred, thus Brits should rename it Christmas Lights or something like Winter Holiday; flying the flag of St George, now that is really racist; whilst the use of terms like ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘boys and girls’, even ‘mums and dads’ is incredibly offensive to gender neutrals. I am sure you get the picture.
It would be nice to say that these idiocies only exist in the phantasmagorical world created by UK media, but no. For liberal lefties this is reality, and they zealously want to change your reality to make it fit unconditionally into their narrow mixed-up rainbow spectrum.
Obviously, as time goes by the effects of cancel culture and woke grow worse ~ much worse. Perhaps one of the best of the worst examples of cancel culture of late is the obsequious, cringe-making response of government and corporate media to the Black Lives Matter riots. These riots caused millions of pounds worth of damage in the UK (billions of dollars in America) and resulted in many injured and dead but were described almost without exception by creepy liberal media outlets as ‘a largely peaceful protest’.
No sooner had the BLM rioters begun to destroy people and property than Facebook’s mindless minions were busy changing their avatars to ‘I support BLM’, whilst everyone from football clubs to the metropolitan police force were subserviently ‘taking a knee’. For what? In support of an anarchistic, subversive mob inspired and backed by Antifa brownshirts. You might as well have taken a knee to the balls of western culture, which is precisely what they did.
So, having established that western globalists want to cancel the founding cultures of their own countries, why would they want to cancel Russian culture?
The simple answer to that in relation to the ongoing special operation in Ukraine is that they want Russia’s cultural elite to feel very cross with their government for taking the action it has taken. On a deeper level, however, they are attempting to shame Russian citizens into feeling bad about who they are and the culture to which they belong. Alarm bells!! This is the thin end of the cancel-culture wedge. This is how it starts and started for us in the UK.
First, we were made to feel bad about our colonial past; then we were made to feel bad for feeling patriotic; then we were made to feel bad because we spoke out about the immigration invasion; then we were made to feel bad about not feeling bad enough, and before we knew it we are where we are today, going down on one knee, begging forgiveness for being ‘white-privileged’ and for wanting to live our lives in the culture that is our own country. Well, what a silly, stupid, nation, I can hear you saying. And yes, you are perfectly right. But remember what I have told you. Cancel culture has to start somewhere; like poison ivy it has to take root.
The nature of Russian culture, with its reverence for tradition and with the Orthodox church at its centre, does not fit comfortably into the neoliberal cultural jigsaw, and it doesn’t help any ~ help belligerent states that is ~ that Russia is the world’s largest country with abundant resources that the West does not have, not the least of which is oil and gas. Therefore, both for economic and cultural reasons the demagogues of the West want to take you, Russia, off the board, trim you to fit their agenda and then replace you in their image.
Why this cancel culture programme has grown so vehement and aggressive towards Russia now is that events both within western countries and globally have forced the globalists to play their hand. It is not just Ukraine that has spurred them on. Cancel culture as it pertains to Russia, and to anyone else in the world, is a manifestation of a deeper malaise. Things are, to put it mildly, not at all well on the western front. The past three years have seen Brexit, the EU splintering, cynical manipulation of the so-called coronavirus pandemic and a sneaking slide into totalitarianism, which came to a head with Justin Trudeau’s cruel oppression of his own people, who unlike BLM, were genuinely peaceful protestors. Perhaps they were just the wrong colour? (Why they call him Justin Turdeau, I guess I’ll never know?)
As I noted at the beginning of this post, casting Russia in the role of enemy number one has been long-time in the making. You would be hard pressed to find a positive report, article or feature written about Russia in the UK media in the past 10 years. That media, on instruction from the British establishment, has been slowly but methodically poisoning the UK’s collective mind, such as it is, in readiness for an event such as the one which the West created and is exploiting and perpetuating on Russia’s southwest border.
One way of understanding the relationship between the British public and its media is to think of Brits as little clockwork toys, their springs wound up to bursting point from two years of psychological warfare waged on them by corporate and social media in the name of Covid restrictions and cyclical mass vaccination.
Come Russia’s special operation in Ukraine to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’, all that the UK media needed to do was to shake their toys out of the box and then sit back and watch as they jumped up and down in mad delight frothing, foaming and chattering inanely but still with the presence of mind to change their Facebook avatars.
I am not being unduly hard on my fellow countrymen. It is a sad but true fact that we Brits are all too generous when it comes to resisting disbelief at what we read in our media. Sadly, the British are so terribly vulnerable to the machinations of the so-called free press. They have yet to recognise how effectively corporate media and social media has manipulated them through Brexit, the BLM riots, Covid restrictions, mass vaccination and how each of these events have been exploited to chip away at their values and cancel their cultural heritage.
The only people who appear to be blessed by this ignorance, are compulsive Facebook avatar changers, who ran to change their Facebook icons to ‘I support Ukraine’ on the crack of the media ringmaster’s whip, never mind that less than a week before hardly anyone in the UK had heard of the Ukraine, and even those who possessed the vaguest knowledge of it had no idea of what has been happening to the people of Donbas there, or the intransigent NATO threats and still have no idea. ‘Mind the gap!’ they cry when you travel the London Underground; mind the gap, indeed. But if the society in which you live has no cohesive identity, and especially after two long years of Covid division and terror, you will grasp at a chance of solidarity however unlikely the cause and by whomsoever offers the straw.
Whether or not you define a joke in this pathos, cancel culture is no laughing matter. One of the more invidious repercussions of cancel culture, which we have seen in the media recently (not in corporate media), is that it impels mindless people to commit mindless violence. This phenomenon is evident in the disturbing rise in hate speech, harassment and violent attacks against Russian interests and Russian nationals across western Europe.
Facebook, which has got far too big for its Big Techy boots, emboldened by the success of its recent unchallenged censorship in which UK users have been accused and arrested for inciting racial hatred, blocked for supporting Brexit and re-routed to biased fact-checker sites for posting ‘wrong’ views about Covid, decided that it was Russia’s turn to be victimised by its double standards.
Like the illusion that exists between racial discrimination and positive racial discrimination, Facebook invented the split-hair concept of hate speech and positive hate speech. Say boo to a liberal or black on Facebook, look out here comes plod. But drench the whole Russian nation with hatred, thus inciting acts of violence against the people of that nation, that’s all Facebook well and good.
Although Schicklgruber, whatever his name is, achieved what he set out to achieve, Facebook was forced to rescind this unbelievable Nazi-like policy due to a public backlash, after which, thank heavens, Russia proceeded to ban Facebook along with its SS Instagram chum.
Why does the West want to Cancel Russian Culture?
In answering the above question, it is important to realise that the events unfolding today are fundamentally existential. On the larger board, in the larger picture, a struggle is taking place between the sanctity of tradition, history and sovereignty and a world of dehumanising digitalisation in which economic supremacy outweighs moral and human values, a new world order in the making in which CMUPs and GMUPs grub about divisively in the darkness of misinformation, controlled and morally diminished by aloof financial elites.
It seems to me that yet again the world has reached a pivotal point in its history. The Great Reset is on its way, but it may not necessarily be the one outlined and wished for in Klaus Schwab’s book. We will not know what shape or what form it will take, until it has happened to us.
I do know that in looking back at the degradation of British culture, I look back with a sense of sadness, realising, possibly more than I have ever done before, how rare the commodity is and that should we squander or sell it out we do so at our moral peril, even at the expense of our very existence.
There are many things in life that are negotiable, culture is not one of them. Once it has gone, it has gone forever.
“It’s all bollocks!” Brits shout. But they don’t know whose …
Published: 9 March 2022 ~ Sanctions Backfire as Brits do Bollocks on Social Media
Frustration and impotence of western leaders attempting to punish Russia for its military operation in Ukraine has boiled over into social media. Brits, in particular, appear to have taken a direct hit from WMS (Weapons of Mass Stupidity), either that or perhaps they are simply reacting badly to something in their vaccines. Meanwhile, enlightened, tolerant, liberal EU states, weary from months of doubling down on authoritarian Covid measures, turn to Russia instead in a concerted attempt to cancel its culture.But not everything is bad news, at least Russia has gone and banned Facebook.
I must say that I could not have picked a more historic time to be in Russia since perestroika.
Only a couple of weeks ago, I was writing from the perspective of a ‘Self-isolating Englishman in Kaliningrad’, now I find myself in the peculiar position of being an Englishman in Kaliningrad sanctioned by the West.
Following Russia’s special military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’ Ukraine, protect the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) from alleged increasing aggression and Russia itself from the threat of nuclear weapons, my wife, Olga, asked if she could copy something I had written in my diary pertaining to these events and post it to Facebook (that’s Arsebook to me). At first, I thought not, for I knew that by doing so we would unleash a barrage of banalities and insults from the UK’s armchair Arsebook experts, those who presume they know everything but in fact know bugger all.
However, the Imp of the Perverse got the better of me, it came to pass and before you could say Russophobia my prediction had come true.
The comments incited by my Facebook post ranged from off-topic, anti-Russian hysteria to amusing expletive-laden tirades or, where the commenter was seriously lost for words as well as articulation, good old-fashioned personal abuse. One astute fellow, who must surely have a master’s degree in political analytics, put: “Thank you for writing so much, but it’ all bollocks.” 😁 Well, I say!
You’ve got to value a response of this kind, if only for its effortless nature and the potential universality of its application. I have read and heard the same summation used in a variety of analytical contexts, such as in the critical acclaim of the works of Johannes Brahms (‘It’s all bollocks!’); the paintings of John Constable (‘It’s all bollocks!’); the poetry of John Keats (‘It’s all bollocks!’) and the essays of Kant (‘It’s all bollocks!’).
Thus, should you be told that your Arsebook post is ‘all bollocks’, not to be confused with ‘It’s the dog’s bollocks’, which has entirely different and inverse implications, not only will you have the satisfaction of knowing that you share the honour with some of the world’s most accomplished people but also that your opponent, who has nothing constructive to say, has put his mind, such as it is, to bed and wrapped it up in a big white flag. Ahh, the incomparable joy of Arsebook one-upmanship, or should that be ‘up yours’!
Sanctions Backfire as Brits do Bollocks on Social Media
To be honest, writing anything above three short sentences on Arsebook is counter-productive if not resoundingly futile. The platform is full of people with lots to say about nothing, usually in impoverished English, which races away from their keyboards before their brains are properly engaged.
For example, no sooner had I posted my take of the situation in Ukraine on Arsebook than some opponents to my views decided to jump into their time machines. Returning to the 21st century a split second later, they then proceeded to make half-baked connections between past events in Soviet history and the current situation in Ukraine which, by time and circumstance, had no bearing whatsoever on the current state of affairs and made me wonder if, in their desperation to make such connections, they had not wilfully set out to short circuit the world of reason.
But at least comments of this nature require some imaginative flair, which is more than can be said for run-of-the-mill insults.
Facebook personal insults can be fun. However, whenever I am confronted by them, I have to put myself on a short leash (It’s just something I do at the weekends.) or risk even the faintest trace of diplomacy evaporating in an irresistible eagerness to lock horns.
The upside of personal abuse on Arsebook is that given time it eventually reveals that certain unpleasant something about the Arsebook ‘friend’ that you always suspected but could not quite put your finger on. Now you can use your boot! Goodbye Arsebook ‘friend’!
In my previous post I wrote about unfriending people on Facebook as a last resort. To that I should have added, except in circumstances where the level and frequency of stupidity becomes a burden on one’s time and intelligence, at which point san fairy ann is essential. As an adjunct, particularly joyful is when someone who you have longed to unfriend announces that they are unfriending you. Thank you, Lord! Thank you! Come to think of it, I wonder why I never opened a Facebook account myself, just to ‘make friends’ to unfriend.
For the present, and possibly for a long time to come, Arsebook issues and its petty little world have been put on the back burner or even taken off the boil. In response to the sweeping, and in most cases backfiring sanctions, imposed on Russia by the West for its special operation in Ukraine to ‘de-Nazify and demilitarise’, Russia has given Arsebook the big heave ho. Isn’t it amazing that what you always knew you could live without you can? This applies to most things liberal.
According to the West, the sanctions that it is feverishly unloading on Russia will mean that we who live here will have to do without a lot of things. Most Russians of a certain age are no strangers to hardship, and even I, brought up in that materialistic nirvana the UK, started life with one stern tap, no hot water and an outside bog, so although it may be hard it may also be nostalgic.
On a day-to-day basis watching the sanctions as they are announced is a lot more entertaining than watching BBC news, even though the lack of credibility shares some common ground. Joe and Bojo throwing a tantrum as they take back their lollipops because no one wants to suck on them in exchange for vassal status has a certain pathos, don’t you think? Especially when you factor in the value-added knowledge that those who make the sanctions are effectively sanctioning themselves. Such is the way of the global world created by the globalists.
However, you’ve got to hand it to the double act, the rabbits that Joe and Bojo are pulling out of the sanctions hat is a wonderful way of distracting from their recent and ongoing failures.
As for the sanctions themselves, most of those rabbits are old hat, which is possibly why for the Russians the act contains few surprises.
Those sanctions that fall into the economic warfare category, ie sanctions relating to the banking and finance industry and threats about cutting one’s SWIFT off are only to be expected as is anything to do with Big ‘Gates’ Tech, as these are the standard stockpiled weapons of the neoliberal globalists. (However, let this be a salutary reminder to any country out there who is thinking of joining their club: he who sups with the globalist should indeed have a very long spoon!)
But this is typical grist to the mill. The more interesting sanctions are those, which after years of implanting Russophobia into the composted minds of the West, have grown in psychological stature to a point where they can be used to suffocate and to cancel culture. Or so the attentive gardeners would like to kid themselves.
I am talking here about those sanctions that are aimed at cultural organisations and at talented individuals, which, in recent days, have seen Russian sportsmen ostracised, top-draw Russian musicians sacked and even Russian cats barred from international competitions for not choosing their place of birth more carefully.
In New York scheduled performances by a famous Russian opera singer were cancelled because she refused to withdraw her support for Russian President Vladimir Putin. A simple case of extortion.
In Italy, the celebrated 19th century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky narrowly missed being removed from the University of Milano-Bicocca’s syllabus, and would most certainly have been had not the Italians taken to social media and called on the head of the university (I believe his name is Dick) to back off and go and grow a pair! “It’s all bollocks!” I hear the Brits shout. No, it’s called cancel culture.
If Russians seem surprised by this behaviour, it is not surprising because they live in Russia and not in the West. The English, what is left of us, are no strangers to cancel culture; it is what globalist governments do. They socially engineer societies in such a way that the indigenous culture (in the UK white culture) is systematically trashed in preference for third-world imports. Take note! If they can do it to their own people, then they will certainly do it to you, especially if your cultural values run counter to their freak show and its carnival stalls of woke.
Ironically, sanctions in a globalised world are unreliable tools of oppression. Their effectiveness depends ultimately on their ability to penalise without incurring penalty. Unfortunately and ironically for the globalists, a good many of the sanctions that they are implementing will have, and already are having, a boomerang effect. The obvious one, refusing Russian gas, is already translating into higher energy prices in Europe and especially in the UK at a time when the income of the average Brit is squeezed right down to the peel.
There are many examples of backfiring sanctions, which I am sure will come to light in the measure and fullness of time. For now, however, my personal favourite is the projected world shortage of fertiliser.
“It’s all a load of bollocks,” bellow the brainwashed Brits!
“You won’t be saying that,” I say, “when all you are left with is bullshit!”
And don’t forget to broaden your horizons by clicking on the following link:
Published: 1 March 2022 ~ Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a Good Thing
Now, you may think that the reason I haven’t posted anything in the past few days is because as events have unfolded in Ukraine I have been hiding behind my settee. But nothing could be further from the truth. Until recently, that spot was reserved for one person and one person only, Justiceless Justin Trudeau. However, having clubbed, gassed, rubber-bulleted and horse-trampled his native citizens into undemocratic pulp using armed and armour-plated riot squads, he now emerges in his new role as the West’s Democracy Ambassador, slamming (I believe that’s the popular western media word for it) the military operation in Ukraine as an attack on freedom and democracy. Something mind, which western leaders and their collusive corporate media conveniently forgot to accuse him of.
Following President Putin’s announcement that he was recognising the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as independent, I asked my Russian friends during a social evening what they thought about this development. After two attempts to solicit their thoughts on the subject, I was politely reminded of the social, cultural, historic and spiritual ties between Russia and Ukraine. Someone referred to the plight of Russians living in the stricken regions, but my friends were too diplomatic to allude to western interference and how it was fanning the flames.
When the news broke, 24 February 2022, that Russia had launched a military operation, I stayed schtum. After all, I didn’t want to become the Kaliningrad version of John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty. So, I did what everyone else was doing in Russia and around the world, I took to corporate, and corporate social, media.
It was touching, at first, to receive messages via my wife’s Facebook account from UK friends asking if we were alright. Silly question: being alright is never something that I have been accused of, but then, when I borrowed my wife’s Facebook account and voiced my opinions, opinions which did not strictly coalesce with the western narrative, I was subject to howls of outrage and the usual Aresebook abuse.
“I might have mentioned Woke. But I think I got away with it!”
Not that I was surprised by this reaction, because, quite frankly, many people in the UK seem to have lost the fundamental ability to think for themselves, if, indeed, they ever possessed it. It was not that I was being radical, at least not anymore ‘radical’ than people judge me to be, I was merely expressing my usual antipathy towards the unilateral viewpoint of the world as packaged by western media and, in answer to the Russophobic slurs doing the rounds on Facebook, drawing my fellow Brits’ attention to the glaring socio-political flaws of living one’s life in Britland, a subject which, quite evidently, they did not want reminding of, such was their joy to escape the plandemic and immerse themselves in a new hysteria.
As for Ukraine, I am more than sure that until this week hardly any Brits had heard of it, let alone know where it is, and those that do know would not have the slightest notion of its history, either ancient or modern. They would certainly possess no knowledge of the symbiotic relationship between Ukraine and Russia, of the intertwined history of both cultures and know even less about what has been happening in Ukraine over the last eight years, although, with respect to the latter, this is an ignorance they cannot be blamed for as the neoliberal corporate media has been rather more than sparing when it comes to telling the truth.
Nevertheless and suddenly, every Brit under the sun (and there’s not much of that in Britland, either actual or metaphorical) is an expert on Ukraine, at least everyone on Facebook.
I often wonder on those few times that I visit Arsebook whether anybody on there knows anything more than nothing. The site is littered with all sorts of bizarre claims and even more bizarre counter-claims, and it seems that everyone, almost without exception, is snapping at the others’ heels like little yappy dogs.
Facebook is full of know-it-alls who quite obviously don’t know the difference between knowing it all and bugger all, but what they don’t know they are more than willing to share with you. On the bitchometer scale, Facebook is beneath Twitter, just. But I cannot help thinking that Mark Shutulbugger, whatever his name is, could have chosen a more apt name for his argumentative, politically censored and deplatforming media site. Arsebook fits the bill, but Megaphone would have been better or failing that what about Bitch-Brag?
It’s a funny thing, but when I read reports and articles from media sources from around the world, I never go to those sources with prejudice aforethought, hoping to read something that will bolster my opinions or prejudices. I read and then after I have finished reading, I think about what I have read, and then to what extent I agree with it or, conversely, to what extent I bring it into question. I think it is called critical judgement: The ability to be able to read or discuss something, analyse it, extrapolate from it, digest it and then, if possible, reach a conclusion. It might not be the right conclusion, if ever there was or is such a thing, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I arrived there of my own volition, after considering different points of view, rather than jumped onto the bandwagon and allowed my mind to be hijacked as an echo chamber for the corporate media.
Most Facebookers, however, seem either to go off half-cock, so to speak, make it up as they go along or present evidence to support their prejudices with flagrant disregard for the maxim that ‘There’s always two sides to every story [at least]’. The remaining Arsebookers are just insulting ~ to everyone else and their own intelligence, that is presuming they have some hidden away somewhere.
The Facebook Bully, showing how it’s done in a real free-speech democracy!
When people say ‘utter bollocks’ on Facebook (Oooh, and they do, don’t they!) and shout the odd word or two that they have picked out of the Daily Mail or Guardian or from sitting in front of the goggle box, it generally makes me laugh.
I know I should have more sense than to reply to the numpty heads, but who can resist a little bit of fun. When someone on Facebook assumes that they are asserting the unassailable truth (and Facebook has many of them) and is able to do it in three words or less from something they read or heard yesterday, ie “It’s all propaganda!”, I cannot help but admire the obvious confidence they have in themselves and in their incisive powers of ratiocination.
By stark contrast, it took me about 30 years to realise that the political system in the UK is rigged and that the Establishment is rotten to the core. Like Neil Oliver, historian and author, I, too, had been brought up to believe that we, the Brits, the West, were the ‘good guys’. It was only after working on a number of political publications that it slowly began to dawn on me that I, and my generation, had been played, that our neoliberal masters had sleep-walked us into a completely different and, from their point of view, completely indifferent era.
I began to question the lifelong orthodoxy that we were in fact the ‘good guys’ but could not easily make the transition from this long held and internalised view to something that I would rather not admit, not even to myself, namely that the West had gone bandito. But sadly, events in recent years have proven that this is the case.
Whilst our neoliberal lords and masters run around the world causing untold havoc in the self-appointed role as crusading missionaries, bringing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to countries that don’t want it ~ at least not the woke kind that we are peddling ~ and branding it nicely for public consumption (it says ‘intervention and regime change’ on the tin), on the home front they are insidiously busy, eroding and destroying everything that we hold dear, our history, our sovereignty, the security of our ancestral home, our heritage and all that they would have us believe the West has always stood for, such as personal freedom, freedom of speech, decency and humanity. And you’ve got to hand it to them, they are doing a very good job.
Meanwhile, the UK’s armchair political pundits and Facebook’s keyboard warriors, those who know everything in the two seconds that it takes to see it on the telly or read it in The Daily Neoliberal, are child prodigies in reverse.
As such, being unfriended by them is a breath of fresh air. Where friendship is concerned, real friendship, not the kind that comes with a screen-tick or a silly little ‘like’, the collateral damage from airing your opinion on social media and then being ‘slammed’ (there’s that word again!) by your ‘friends’ before they ceremoniously unfriend you, is nothing to be ashamed of; on the contrary it is without doubt a most excellent way of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Sanctioned by Facebook Fickle Friends is a Good Thing
One fellow-me-lad (It or Other) on Facebook, accused me of being ‘brainwashed’? Who was he confusing me with, if not a high percentage of the UK population? I replied:
“Hello Chris, Not brainwashed. I was fortunate to go to school at a time before the UK education system became the liberal-left academy of Woke, so I am still capable of independent thought. Another point in my favour is that I threw the TV (that’s television, by the way, not transvestite) out 25 years ago. After all, as I could never bring myself to pay the TV license to sponsor the BBC’s liberal-left bias I thought it only fair. Furthermore, having worked in the media for years, I have a healthy disrespect for everything I read in the media, no matter where it comes from. And everyone who knows me knows that I would never wind anyone up … All the best.”
A good many Arsebook commenters are what I would call ‘last worders’. They are not interested in the slightest of soliciting a meaningful response. Their remarks are typically childish, clearly intended to provoke and insult rather than engage and the last word is truly paramount.
As I reach the end of this post, I am almost inclined to let my brother have the last word. He has always had a way with words, as you can see from his email yesterday.
“I just have to say I’m sick of hearing these c! *! s on UK TV slagging off Mr Putin.”
My brother should think himself lucky that he does not do social media, although I have a feeling that if he did, he would really do quite well.
Whoops, sorry, must dash, there go those sanction sirens!
