It is also known for the Amber Legend, a novel and attractive restaurant cunningly constructed on a split-level plan.
Built on a fairly steep incline, the pavement entrance to Amber Legend accesses what is effectively the upper ground floor, while the doors at the rear of the building lead to the lower level.
Externally, the building is invested with more than a touch of the neoclassical. It follows a simple but imposing geometrical outline, with dominating rectangular upright supports, a balustrade balcony traversing the width of the building and a matching balustrade parapet. After an introduction of this calibre, anything less internally, both upper and lower level, would be disappointing, but happily this is not the case: aesthetic integrity and continuity are safely, indeed inspiringly, assured.
The question is, however, why did the proprietors of the Amber Legend not call their establishment ‘Blue Flag restaurant’, ‘good clean air’ or ‘split-level neoclassical eatery’? Why the ‘Amber’ and why the ‘Legend’?
There are two possible reasons, one lesser known to some and the other, one trusts, obvious to anyone who has frequented the restaurant in person. The first most conceivably has to do with Yantarny’s massive amber reserves. Approximately 90 per cent of the world’s amber resources are sitting in Yantarny. They are mined upon an industrial scale using the open-quarry method.
The second, inspired by the first, has visible connotations, since both the exterior and interior of the building are lavishly decorated with variegated stones of genuine polished amber. Inside the restaurant the precious ancient resin is taken to another level of artistic meritocracy, as richly inlaid amber panels of many different hues sharing geometrical space with amber art assemblages. (Thanks for the word, Vit!) vie for your attention.
There are amber trims to the seats; amber-studded back rests; inset amber wall plaques; the bar is adorned with amber; and the ceiling-suspended lamp shades, bowls of amber inlay, are interwoven tiffany style.
Of particular note are the broad wooden panels, chain-hoisted close to the ceiling, each containing a window of different coloured amber stones lamp-backed for illumination.
Confoundingly, when we visited the restaurant, it was during the daylight hours, so that although in the room’s darker recesses some of the lamps were lit, the full effect of the interplay between light source and amber creation was lost in the dilution of overpowering, brilliant sunlight. However, the upside to this was in the excuse that it presented, which was as good as any that I could invent, for returning on an evening to witness what most assuredly must be a lighting display of artistic splendour.
Another sphere of artistic splendour, according to my wife, who had dined at Amber Legend before, was lurking in the toilets, and this, she said, was something that I must see.
Amber Legend Yantarny legendary toilet
Now, contrary to what you may have been told, I am not in the habit, not even rarely, of taking a camera into the toilet, but called upon by my wife to do so, strictly on account of the brilliance of the interior décor, I cast caution to the wind, in a manner of speaking, and made an exception on this occasion. The result of this promiscuity is documented here in two revealing photographs, illustrating the continuation of the amber theme, both in the ornamentation surrounding the wash basins and, more spectacularly, in a glass-windowed chamber recessed within the toilet floor, where chunks of amber of novel shapes and some of prodigious proportions turn everyday humble toilet into a veritable natural history museum, even at the inconvenience of others wanting to use the convenience.
You may have liked the loo, but do you like the blue? In my humble opinion, the TARDIS-blue woodwork that repeats itself throughout the restaurant, including the toilet, creates the perfect frame for the amber displays. It is just neutral enough without subsiding into plain and functions as a recall feature of Amber Legend’s personalised style. I call the colour TARDIS blue because recognisably that is what it is, which is why I should imagine we chose this colour for our TARDIS, the one that we built at home. But then, I suppose, it is not that unusual; just the colour of choice for everyone’s TARDIS.
At this point I would normally add a footnote about the food, so why disappoint. But first a caveat. As you probably recall, whilst making allowances for having been called gormless ~ and who wouldn’t want to be, for it is such a lovely word ~ gourmet I am not. Beer needs volume; food needs volume. There is only one winner. But, when we visited Amber Legend I was feeling rather peckish, so I did partake of the pizza, which was pretty good as pizza goes. However, my fellow patrons, who needless to say were more adventurous in their choice of dishes than I, as most normal people appear to be, reliably informed me that their meals were most enjoyable. And I have no reason to doubt their sincerity.
The verdict is, therefore, that when visiting this coastal jewel in Kaliningrad region’s amber crown (remember the name, Yantarny) make sure your experience is complete: Discover the Amber Legend!
Essential details
Amber Legend 66A Sovetskaya Ulitsa Yantarny Kaliningrad Olblast Russia
Published: 27 April 2022 ~ By Volga to Yantarny Russian Easter and Beautiful Coast
Whilst the French were masochistically (or should that be Macronistically) condemning themselves to another five years of neoliberal arrogance in which cash is king but people and culture are, according to their president, there to be p_ _ _ _ d on, we, here, in Russia were celebrating one of the most important holidays in the Orthodox Christian Calendar, Easter ~ a time for observing sanctified traditions, passing those traditions on to the next generation and uniting family and friends.
Easter eggs play an essential role within the Christian ethos of this holiday, not the chocolate variety, but actual eggs, hard boiled and dyed typically red using onion skins. I recall one Easter in the UK when my wife Olga and her English class decorated hard-boiled eggs in a variety of elaborate and brightly coloured patterns; a labour of love no doubt but a formidable task no less. Nowadays, modern techniques make it possible to cheat just a little, using decorative highly coloured and often illustrated bands that once applied to the egg wrap themselves tightly around it.
Hand-painted or not, the eggs, which symbolise resurrection and new life, are blessed in the church and presented as gifts to relatives and friends. Other blessed Easter gifts include bought or home-made cakes and fortified Church wine. We received and gave such fare from and to our friends and neighbours.
The blessing of Easter Gifts in Kaliningrad 2022
By Volga to Yantarny Russian Easter and Beautiful Coast
On Easter Sunday, 24th April, our friends, Arthur and Inara, invited us to be driven in style in their 1970s’ Volga to the seaside resort of Yantarny.
Yantarny is much smaller and further away from Kaliningrad than the increasingly popular resorts of Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk. I had not been there since my brother visited Kaliningrad in May 2019.
As then, the weather today was superb ~ a gorgeous and perfect spring day ~ just right for lounging near the sea and taking snapshots.
If you go down to the woods today …
Since I was last in Yantarny, a number of municipal improvements had been made, and in the coastal woodland, a picturesque pre-sea descent, landscape-sensitive work of both a practical and embellishing nature abounded, including more woodland paths, eclectic artworks and non-obtrusive visitor facilities. One among these is the installation of a wooden-decked observatory, enabling unimpeded views across the white, sandy beach and rolling expanse of the Baltic.
Looking out across the Baltic Sea
On the coastline itself a series of attractive and much-needed chalet-style café’s interlinked by wooden platforms, each offering inspiring views of the sea, have been tastefully constructed, and it was in one of these that we would stop a while to take advantage of their hospitality.
Sitting outside beneath the shade of the broad eaves, I was befriended by the cafés’ resident stray. No, not that irritating and passively (if you are lucky) aggressive stereotype that blights the British pub and whom everyone tries to avoid, but an old moth-eared and fur-matted cat, slate-grey and socially promiscuous. He obliged me by sitting on my knee and then, after 10 minutes, possibly dissatisfied that no grub had come his way, decided to bite the hand that hadn’t fed him. Ahh well, I thought, if you can’t be bitten by a curmudgeonly old cat over the Easter weekend when can you be bitten by one?
Bitten or not, I was content. I had good friends, good beer, the gentle sound and sight of the sea and was suffused with such a sense of complete and utter relaxation that it seemed to transcend almost everything, even philosophical thought and the quiet reflection with which it is nurtured. Effort was redundant, and effort, for the moment, had been effortlessly put aside.
We ~ as I perceived a communion among all present not only within our small group ~ remained thus for some time, gazing out across a sea that seemed at peace with its gently rippling self as much as we were with ourselves.
We remained this way for over an hour until the sun, shimmering silver across a broad swathe of sea where the surface seemed nearly smooth, challenging the visibility of my 1940s’ sunglasses, prompted us with the realisation that the afternoon was giving away to evening and that we would have to make a move. Alas, the time had come, as it always does; and for all that we had put it on hold, the ebb and flow of our own tide eventually carried us back into town.
The departure was sweetened, however, by calling in for lunch at Yantarny’s Amber Restaurant. What a remarkable place! I think we’ll give it three exclamation marks ~ !!! If you are curious as to why they call it Amber Restaurant, there’s no perhaps about it, you simply need to visit.
Hopefully, I’ll write a little more about it at a later date. For now, however, let’s just say that if the combination of amber, atmosphere, good food and brilliant beverages is something that appeals to you, the Amber Restaurant is the place!!!! There, I’ve gone and given it four exclamation marks. See > Amber Legend Yantarny
Fed, beerified and tripping up the step as I left ~ I always do that, it’s not because I was squiffy ~ we walked the short distance to the local church.
In German times Yantarny Church was Lutherian. The restored church is now Orthodox, The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, and belongs to the Kaliningrad diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Mellow and mesmerising, it is difficult to imagine an environment more conducive to an appreciation of all that is dear ~ your loved ones, friends, the life you have lived and the current life you are living. Yantarny Church is not just for Easter, or any other special date on the religious calendar, it is an open sanctuary for thought and reflection, a quiet, hallowed place in which to take pause from the daily static of our estranging modern existence.
We had spent approximately three hours in Yantarny. It had been nowhere near enough and the need to return was incipient. I could definitely feel a weekend break coming on. But first there was the question of how we would leave today.
On emerging from the church, we discovered that Arthur had left the Volga lights switched on, which wasn’t so good for starting the engine. As ordered, I put my shoulder to the front of the big old car and gave it all that I could. Miraculously ~ you might say ~ the lovely old lump (not Arthur, I mean the car) fired up, and although praised for my efforts, and also praising myself, I was secretly reflecting on the mysterious ways in which things move, are moved and how they move us and the wonderful gift of having spent a perfect Easter day.
A review of the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad by Mick Hart
Updated 20 August 2022 | First published: 25 April 2022 ~ Drinking Beer in the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad
After a two-year coronavirus hiatus that, give or take the odd sortie, dissuaded me from drinking in bars, I allowed myself to be willingly seduced into returning to my sinful ways. The establishment we visited recently is not entirely my sort of place. It is a modern café-bar, all plate glass and open-plan, but as it is one in Kaliningrad that I was unacquainted with, and a place dispensing beer, to resist would have been inexcusable if not altogether futile.
The Premier Café Bar (aka Prem’yer Minstr Kafe Bar Magazin), Kaliningrad, is located inside a substantial building with the main entrance off Prospekt Leninskiy. It divides neatly into two parts: one side functioning as a ‘liquor store’ (they like this Americanisation in Kaliningrad); the other as a bar.
The off-licence facility (English off-licence sounds so 1950s’ corner shop, don’t you think?) has an impressive upmarket feel about it. Behind the low-level counter, the custom-made floor-to-ceiling shelves are stocked with an astounding array of imported spirits, including Jim Beam, my favourite bourbon, but in a series of flavoured variants of which my palate is virginally ignorant. In fact, many of these exotic imports I had never heard of and might not try for some time to come, considering the average price per bottle is a budget-busting 30-quid.
This disinclination to shell out unreservedly on something the price of which others might willingly accept may have its origins in my youth. There was a time in England when we could buy Jim in half-gallon bottles from the Yanks at the local airbase on a bartered goods and ‘at cost’ basis. In comparing the prices today, and taking into account the diminutive size of the bottles, I realise nostalgically that far from living a mis-spent youth, I had lived a youth well-spent or in the last analysis was a youth who knew how to spend well.
In addition to the well-stocked top-drawer spirit brands, Premier also boasts a regiment of chilling cabinets, which contain more varieties of beer than Russia has sanctions, if that is feasibly possible, and hosts a good selection of quality wines from vineyards around the world.
Premier bar
The other half of Premier is where the bar hangs out. It is a proper bar, with wooden stools lining its front and opposite a conforming row of fixed seats and tables, markedly similar in style to the sort of thing you would expect to find in a 1950s’ retro diner.
As I come from England (note, I never say from the UK because that would be too shameful), I have a natural predilection for bars which actually have bars in them, as opposed to bars where there is no bar, only table service. I liked this bar because it had a bar, and it had one with Premier written across it, which is something that I also liked because it helped to solve the mystery of where I was, as I had missed the name of the premises when we entered the building. It also had something unusual going on at one end of the bar, the leading end: an inbuilt feature resembling a truck or trolley. The significance of this embellishment was something that escaped me then and continues to elude me now, but as bamboozling as it was, it did not prevent me from liking it.
The big, old wooden beam above the bar, which acts as a suspended lighting console, and the ceiling-mounted wagon wheels in the room opposite, also have quirk appeal, but by far the most interesting and memorable difference that Premier bar possesses is that at the end of a long wide corridor, lo and behold there’s a bike shop! Now, this is a novelty, to be sure. Consider the possibility: one could stop at Premier for a bevvy or two, buy a bike and cycle back home. And I bet you’ll never guess what ~ this is precisely what I did not do.
Perhaps I would have felt more adventurous had I not been so busy admiring the chevron-tiled floor and, where retro posters are not covering it, the good old-fashioned brickwork. These accentuated traits compensate a little for Premier’s lack of old worldliness, which given the choice is the kind of environment in which I really prefer to drink and where once I am inside it is virtually impossible to prise me out.
Generally, Premiere’s décor both in the bar and off-sales, eschews the modern industrial style. The absolute connection between wagon wheels, hanging beams, rusticating trolleys, exposed ventilation tubes, art gallery sliding spotlights, exposed brickwork and retro posters may not be immediately apparent and may remain that way forever, as the Premier name offers no clues, unless, of course, it has something to do with what is invariably touted as the greatest invention of all, the wheel ~ as in wagon wheels? trolleys on wheels? Premier meaning first? Perhaps not.
To add to its collection of ideas, Premier fashionably utilises a range of different light fittings which flaunt the latest trend in visible filament bulbs. Who would have thought even a decade ago that the humble pear-shape light bulb with its limited choice of white or warm glow would morph so quickly and so dramatically into the numerous shapes, sizes and colours available today and all with their once latent elements proudly on display?
Visually, the Premier has more than enough going for it to fulfil the need for an interesting dining and drinking backdrop, which is good as it offsets the dreadful din clattering out of the music system. To be fair, this obtrusive and perfectly unnecessary adjunct is by no means exclusive to Premier; most bars seem compelled to inflict this modern excuse for music on their unsuspecting and long-suffering customers with little or no regard for conversation or atmosphere.
Of course, the problem could lie with us. After all, we are not in the first flush of youth. But call us wrinklies with hearing intolerance or people of discernment fortunate to have been born in and therefore to have lived through the age of pre-mediocrity, the fact remains that boom, boom, boom and lots of squiggly noisy bits iterating repetitively at ‘What did you say? Speak up!!’ volumes are more annoying than a slap on the arse, if not infinitely less surprising. Eventually, one of our august company, ex-Soviet Major V Nikoliovich, marched across to the bar and asked for the racket to be turned down. Oh, he can be so masterful!
He also evinces considerably more trust in fate than I could ever muster. For example, another of Premier’s novelty features is the under-floor display unit, containing various curious and random artefacts. The glass panel at floor level is something I carefully avoided, whereas VN exhibited an almost perverse and mischievous delight in deliberately perching his weight on top.
Where our paths, VN’s and mine, do converge is that we like to sample different beers. Today we were on the Švyturys, a once renowned lager first brewed in Lithuania by the Reincke family at the latter end of the 18th century but which in more recent times has become part of the Carlsberg stable, one of those foreign breweries that perfunctorily closed its doors in Russia after the sanctions had bolted. I’ll lay odds on favourite They Wished They Hadn’t.
As we had already eaten, I cannot comment on Premier’s cuisine, although a quick whizz round the internet reveals that Premier receives consistently good reviews for its international fare and its excellent pizzas. My friends ordered some light snacks, which they seemed to enjoy, and although forever conscious of the need to prioritise volume for beer, I did permit myself to nibble upon a couple of cheesy balls, which seemed to go well with Švyturys.
Throughout our stay at Premier, the staff were attentive and accommodating, but why did I have the impression that they were on the verge of crying.
I forgot to look back when we left the cafe to see if the sight of a bunch of old farts who routinely complain about tasteless ‘music’ exiting the premises had wreathed their faces in much-needed smiles.
Had we have been in the States, crying or not, we would still have received a white toothy grin and a just as fictitious ‘Have a nice day’, which of course we wouldn’t have wanted and of course we would not have appreciated. C’est la vie, I suppose!
Essential details
Prime Minister Café Bar Kaliningrad Prospekt Leninskiy 7 Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast Russia, 236006
Updated 18 April 2022 | First published: 2 March 2021 ~ Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
[INTRO} I wrote this piece over a year ago, at a time when western media had nothing better to do than push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the coronavirus pandemic; now, apparently, it has nothing better to do than to push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the situation in Ukraine. Bearing this in mind, I dutifully revisited my post to see if anything had changed regarding my opinion of life in Russia and to what extent if any western media had succeeded in convincing me that I would be happier in the UK than if I remained a sanctioned Englishman living in Kaliningrad. I am pleased, but not surprised, to say that other than one or two grammatical improvements, there was nothing to revise! Here’s that post again …
We left the UK for Kaliningrad in winter 2018, but things were far from settled. Over the next twelve months I would have to return to the UK three or four times to renew my visa and to obtain official documents and then return again to pay an extortionate sum of money for a notarised apostille, a little rosette-looking thing verified by a notary that once clipped to the official documents could be used to complete my Leave to Remain in Russia. It was expensive; it was a rigmarole; but obtaining Leave to Remain meant that opening visas would be a thing of the past.
The last time that I was in the UK was December 2019. I returned to Kaliningrad just in time for the New Year celebrations and a month or so afterwards was granted Leave to Remain. We had intended to return to the UK in April for a month, as we had some business to attend to, but before we could do that coronavirus came along and the rest, as they say, is history.
In a previous article I revealed the circumstances which persuaded us to leave the UK and move to Kaliningrad. Now, with December 2019 to the present date being the longest uninterrupted period that I have been in Kaliningrad, it would seem appropriate that I pause to reflect on what it is about Kaliningrad that drew me to it and continues to endear and fascinate.
Our friend, the late Victor Ryabinin, used to refer to Kaliningrad and its surrounding territory as ‘this special place’, and I am with him on that. Whether it is because I see Kaliningrad through his eyes and feel it through his heart, I cannot rightly say. Certainly, his outlook and philosophy on life influenced me and my intuition bears his signature, but I rather imagine that he perceived in me from the earliest time of our friendship something of a kindred spirit, someone who shared his sensibility for the fascination of this ‘special place’.
Nevertheless, my feelings for Kaliningrad are in no way blinkered by a Romanticist streak, which, yes, I do have. If Victor could describe himself as a cheerful pessimist, then I have no qualms in describing myself as a pragmatic Romanticist. But I am no more or less a stranger to Kaliningrad’s flaws and imperfections than I am to my own.
When we arrived in Kaliningrad on a very cold day in winter 2018 to make arrangements for moving here, we were thrown in at the deep end. Early in the morning, still tired from our flight the night before, we had official business that would not wait, which meant trekking off to one of the city’s less salubrious districts. We had given ourselves sufficient time, allowances having been made for the usual protracted queuing, but on reaching our destination discovered that the office we were bound for was working to a different timetable than the one advertised, and consequently we had a two-hour wait before we would be seen! Asking some kind people if they would reserve our place in the queue, we ventured out to a small eatery, a cubicle on the side of the road, for a coffee and a bite to eat. I wrote in my diary:
“Outside, we were confronted yet again by downtown Kaliningrad at its ‘finest’: those ubiquitous concrete tower blocks, stained, crumbling and patched; pavements cracked, ruptured and sunken; kerbstones akimbo; grass verges churned by the wheels of numerous vehicles so that they resembled farmyard gateways; small soviet-era fences rusting and broken; and roads so full of potholes that I began to wonder if it was 1945 again and looked anxiously above me to check for the presence of Lancasters.
When I returned to Kaliningrad from England in December 2019, I wrote: “I am not sure whether I love Kaliningrad in spite of its imperfections or because of them”.
Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
They say that it is people that make places what they are, and it is a difficult-to-disprove logic. In the UK, for example, left-leaning commentators, liberal media editors, state-blamers and apologists are continually referring to ‘disadvantaged’ people from ‘deprived areas’, whereas in my experience it is people who deprive areas not areas that deprive people and the only disadvantage is yours, if you should wander into these areas by mistake.
Case in point: Back in the 1990s I had a female acquaintance who lived in a notorious concrete citadel in south London’s Peckham; her reputation I was assured of, but when I visited her one late afternoon in autumn, my knowledge of the Badlands where she lived was incipiently less important to me than my amorous intent. Ahh, the follies of youth!
When it came time to leave, I was ready to phone for a taxi. It was then that she informed me that after dark taxis refused to enter the estate, in fact the entire area! I suggested hailing a black cab in the street and was told that black cabs were as “rare ‘round here as rocking horse s!*t!”.
There was nothing for it: I would have to walk. I cannot say that I was unduly perturbed by this prospect. I was young, well relatively young, and these were the days of my London-wide pub crawls, which would take me to every corner of London no matter which corner it was.
On this particular evening, I had not walked far before I espied my first pub. I was still some distance from it, and though the light from the one or two working streetlamps was dim, the building was easily distinguished as the front was bathed in a low, lurid glow.
As I drew closer, I discovered to my surprise that someone had propped a large mattress on the side of the pub wall and had set light to it. It must have been very damp, the proverbial piss-stained mattress I suppose, because the conflagration was limited to a slow, puthering, smoulder.
Being the Good Samaritan that I am, I popped my head around the pub door and called to the chap behind the bar, “Hey, did you know that there is a burning mattress strapped to the side of your pub?” I need not have felt so daft for saying this, as, barely looking up from his newspaper, the barman grunted in reply, “It’s not unusual around here, mate.”
I had not walked far from The Burning Mattress pub before I found another: The Demolition Inn. All of the windows on the pavement side were smashed, and one pathetic light shone miserably through the broken glass in what otherwise would be a superb and original 1920s’ doorway. I couldn’t just walk past!
The place was empty and quiet, but it had not always been. Evidence had it that not too long ago it had been extremely lively. In one corner there was a pile of broken furniture and that which was still standing had bandaged legs and strung-up backs. The mirror behind the bar was bust, western-film style, and all of the more expensive bottles, the shorts, had been removed from the shelves and the optics, presumably for their own safety.
I never did ask what had happened. It just did not seem the polite thing to do. I just ordered a pint from the man behind the bar, who had a lovely shining black eye and his arm in the nicest of slings, and spent the next thirty minutes on my own in this disadvantaged pub, philosophically ruminating on the nasty way in which bricks and mortar and the wider urban environment deprived people to such an extent that there was nothing they could do but set light to piss-stained mattresses, smash up backstreet pubs, terrify London cabbies and (a popular sport in London’s predominantly ethnic areas) mug the hapless white man.
So, what can we conclude from this? Most large towns and cities have rundown areas, but the difference between the rundown areas in Kaliningrad and those that we know and avoid in London and other UK cities ~ the ‘deprived areas’, as they are called ~ is that you are less likely to be deprived of your possessions, your faculties even your life, whilst walking through the Kaliningrad equivalents of the UK’s infamous sink estates. Although, to be precise, such equivalents do not exist.
Thus, without sounding too fanciful, let us agree that it is people ~ the way they act, talk, behave, dress and generally conduct themselves in public ~ that makes a place what it is. An observation that applies to anywhere ~ be it a 1920s’ terraced street, a 1970s’ concrete estate, a pedestrianised city centre, anywhere ~ from region to region, country to country.
I am not about to make any silly sweeping statements about what Russian people are really like. I could not accomplish this with any degree of validity if someone was to ask me to ‘sum up’ British people (not the least because true British are lumped together with people from foreign lands, who in appearance and behaviour are anything but British, and yet have a stamp in their passport that contradicts good sense) simply because every individual is different no matter where he or she hails from. What I can say hand on heart is that in the 22 years that I have been coming to Kaliningrad, I have had the good fortune to meet, and in some instances become friends with, people of the highest calibre in this small corner of Russia.
It is true that in June 2019 we lost Victor Ryabinin, which was and still is an inconsolable loss, and tragedy would overtake us again in November 2020, when our friend and Victor’s protégé, Stas Konovalov, who helped us through the emotional period of Victor’s death and with whom we shared so many good times, died also. For the second time in less than two years, irreplaceable people had been taken from us. We continue to miss them both.
As it had been for Stas and Victor, history plays an important part in my relationship with Kaliningrad. There is, of course, my own personal history of Kaliningrad, an interaction that stretches back over two decades, and then the energy of the greater past that flows from antiquity into the present. In Kaliningrad, and its region, the past and present parallel each other. There are times and places where the past seems so close that you feel all you need to do is reach out, pull back the curtain and take its hand in yours.
“There is something magnetic in this city; it pulled some of the world’s most significant people into it as it has pulled me. I cannot explain this magic, but I know that this is my city.”
Victor Ryabinin
For some, this confluence of the past has more disturbing connotations. My wife’s mother, who is attuned to the ‘otherness’ of our existence, complains that although she likes Kaliningrad, there is something inescapably ‘heavy’ about it, defined by her as emanating from its dark Teutonic and German past. And I am inclined to agree with her. But I do not share her more gloomy interpretation of the dark side or its negative affect. For me, the cloud has a silver lining: it is profundity and, at its core, cultural sensitivity, interlaced with creative energy. Indeed, creativity and creative people thrived and flourished in Königsberg and that legacy, I am pleased to say, lives on to this day.
Königsberg ~ the retrospective world of artist Victor Ryabinin
Whilst the bricks and mortar of Königsberg’s ruins ~ the haunting landscape in which Victor Ryabinin spent his susceptible childhood ~ may have largely been replaced, the spirit of the old city and the spirits of all those who passed through it, whether peacefully or violently during times of war, are ever present. And I earnestly believe that the energy of our two departed friends, Victor and Stas, walk among the living here as countless others do who were brought to this place by fate.
Königsberg after allied bombing ~ the childhood landscape of Victor RyabininKaliningrad 2019
Victor wrote that “there is something magnetic in this city; it pulled some of the world’s most significant people into it as it has pulled me. I cannot explain this magic, but I know that this is my city.”
I was told by someone, not by Victor himself, that Victor believed that no matter how we felt about the past, we have to live in the present. I never did get chance to ask him whether by that he meant that we had no choice but to live in the present or that we each had a moral imperative to do so, but whichever version you choose, I would qualify both by adding that to a certain extent we can pick and mix, take what we need from the past and present and leave the rest behind.
In my case, the past and present converge, and I am attracted to modern-day Kaliningrad as much as I am fascinated by its East Prussian, German and Soviet history.
When English people call me out, asking pointedly what it is I like about Kaliningrad. I reply, glibly: “What’s not to like?”
Of course, I start with the historical perspective ~ it would not be me if I didn’t ~ referring to the Teutonic Order, ancient Königsberg, Königsberg’s fate during the Second World War and its Soviet reincarnation. I emphasise what a fascinating destination it is for those who are interested in military history and woo antique and vintage dealers with seductive tales of dug-up relics, the incomparable fleamarket and colourful descriptions of alluring pieces hidden away in the city’s antique shops.
Relics of Königsberg & Soviet Kaliningrad’s past
Then I go on to say that Kaliningrad is a vibrant and dynamic city, a city of contrasts, of surprises; I talk up its superb bars and restaurants, the variety and price of the beer, the museums and art galleries, the excellent public transport facilities, the attractive coastal resorts that are a mere forty minutes away and cost you two quid by train or a tenner by taxi, the UNESCO World Heritage Curonian Spit, the small historic villages, how friendly the natives are to visitors and, when the wife is not about, the presence of many beautiful women.
Above: Kaliningrad region’s main coastal resorts: Svetlogorsk & Zelenogradsk
*********Editorial note [18 April 2022]******** In the paragraphs to follow, I refer to the onerous restrictions which at the time of writing were impacting international travel in the name of coronavirus. Since then, you will have probably noticed that we have entered a new, dramatically more restricting chapter in the history of international travel, thanks to the West’s anti-Russian hysteria and its sanction-futile attempts to isolate the largest country on Earth. This ill-advised and not very well thought through economic warfare programme has added multiple layers of estranging complexity for global travellers everywhere, not just for potential visitors who want to leave the West to travel to Kaliningrad. From a purely selfish standpoint, these self-defeating impositions have merely made the ‘special place’ that Kaliningrad is to me that little bit more special, its taboo status, difficult-to-get-to location and mythicised risk to westerners making my ‘secret holiday destination’ even more enticing, albeit, ironically, somewhat less secret since in the latest round of Russophobia it has been singled out as a strategic military obstacle to the New World Order aspirations of neoliberal globalism.
You will also find in my later comments evidence supporting Russia’s assertion that the West’s attempts to stigmatise and degrade its international standing and denigrate its culture did not start with Ukraine. The events that we see unfolding today have been a long time in the making and by comparing my honest depiction of life in Kaliningrad with life as you know it in the UK, you should begin to understand why Russia’s traditional cultural ethos inflames the rancour of the West and why it fuels a burning desire in its governments to corrupt, transform and replace that culture with something sub-standard resembling their own. All I can say is Heaven forbid! *********End of Editorial note [18 April 2022]********
Admittedly, as with everywhere else in the world, access to Kaliningrad and accessibility with regard to its facilities have suffered restrictions through the outbreak of coronavirus, but hopefully it will not be long before the borders are open again. Before coronavirus struck, I was looking forward to excursions into Poland and to Vilnius, Lithuania ~ one of my favourite cities ~ and I want to make that train trip across Russia to Siberia.
As I say, what’s not to like?
Above: Scenes from Kaliningrad and its Baltic Coast region
I realise, of course, that this is not what most English people expect or even want to hear. The UK media has done a good demolition job on Russia over the years, especially Kaliningrad. True, each year that goes by, as things improve here and grow inversely worse in the West, the UK media is finding it increasingly difficult to slag Kaliningrad off. Who can forget its failed propaganda coup in 2018, when it pulled every trick in the book in an attempt to terrify British fans from travelling to Russia for the World Cup?! The plan backfired spectacularly, since the fans that trusted in their own intuition and came to Kaliningrad in spite of media hype were later to report how immensely they enjoyed themselves. What an ‘own goal’ for the West and an embarrassing one at that!
Nevertheless, UK and American liberals continue to bang their conspiratorial heads against the door of this nation state, taking solace in the belief that should they ever run out of tall and sensational stories, there’s always Kaliningrad’s ‘military threat’, to latch onto. Simultaneously, they promise to bestow on Mother Russia ~ as if she is an ‘it’ or an ‘other’ (now, isn’t that just typical!) ~ the rights equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and all for the knock-down bargain price of Russia becoming a vassal state of the New World Liberal Disorder.
When I am asked about Kaliningrad, I respond to the critics by saying that I can only tell it how I find it, from my point of view, and that the Kaliningrad that I know is not the one readily fictionalised by UK mainstream media. They listen, but I suspect that Brits being Brits they routinely dismiss me as a latter-day Lord Haw Haw, even though the only hawing I do is when reflecting on their entrenched dogmas I allow myself a good chuckle.
However, there is one thing about Kaliningrad that has changed decisively for me: When I first came here, I was a tourist. I came for the good times; I had a good time; and then I went home until the next good time. I was a tourist.
Holiday venues are like that, they exist in the distance of your life, somewhere on the periphery. It’s a bit like having a mistress, or so they tell me: you can call round when it pleases you, take your pleasure, vow one day that you will move in together and then return to your life and forget it, until that is of course holiday time comes round again.
The risk is, however, that by returning time and time again ~ to places not mistresses (although …) ~ you develop friendships, and before you know it you have become a part of their life and they a part of yours. Your lives become enmeshed. You learn about each other’s hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, dreams and aspirations. You gain an informed insight into each other’s past and the course your lives have taken, and whilst you are living in each other’s lives fate, which is working behind the scenes, is quietly writing you into its narrative
The point at which you find yourself no longer living on the outside but looking in is indistinct, but it occurs somewhere at that imperceptible juncture where you are not only sharing the ‘ups’ of people’s lives but also the ‘downs’.
This is particularly true when you fall into the raw, barely consolable emotion, grief, in which fused as one by pain and despair, you eventually emerge on the other side less intact than you were but brothers in arms and sorrow. Such experiences are not peculiar to me or to Kaliningrad, or for that matter to any one time and place; they are timeless, universal. But it is these experiences that will ultimately determine which are the stations on your way and which your final destination.
And do you know what is most awesome? It is that you never know where it will be until after you arrive there.
Zelenogradsk in the sun … It’s not always cold in Russia!!
Obviously attuned to my star quality and having absolutely nothing to do with the 1940s’ period pieces that make perfect props for a film of this era, which we brought with us when we moved from England, Yury offered me an interesting part within his historical drama. I outlined the role in my previous posts along with the film itself.
A film set in Königsberg during World War Two
On Thursday 24 February 2022, the film crew assembled at our home to assess the potential sets where three scenes would be filmed and to undertake various technical tests with regard to the lighting and laying of cables.
I must say that the arrival of the production team was exciting, rolling up as they did in three or four vehicles and a large TV van …“
As today was the precursor to actual filming, our involvement was minimal. We arranged furniture, fetched props and assisted when required, but our main contribution was keeping out of the way.
Filming was due to take place on the 27 February, which gave me three days to polish up my lines.
I would like to gild the lily by saying that come the day not only was I word perfect but also as cool as an agorochek, but let’s not be BBC about this. The truth is that I had been rehearsing my two scenes, five minutes of script, for weeks but was still tripping myself up and was nowhere near not as nervous as I pretended to be.
Before my debut on the silver screen, consisting of two scenes both of which would be filmed in the attic, another scene had first to be filmed downstairs.
They say that film and TV work involves lots of waiting and hanging around. Doesn’t it just! It also requires the ability to keep quiet whilst filming is in progress (or during ‘takes’, as we creative types like to say). Hyped up and killing time, this was no mean feat, especially when Arthur Eagle, the show’s enabler, came barging into the dining room looking all hot and flustered. Apparently, moments before, the female star of the show had changed her costume in front of him. Said Arthur, bashfully: “I didn’t know where to look!” Which was a pity, because if I had been there, I could have advised him.
A film set in Königsberg during World War Two
Numerous cups of tea and mental line-rehearsing later and at last we were ready to do it. But it didn’t just happen. Five minutes of filming required so many different ‘takes’ ~ camera angles, close ups, minor scene alterations and object cutaways ~ that by the time we had finished any illusions of glamour that I may have entertained about work in the film and TV industry had vanished, leaving in their place an honest sense of relief that I had not embarked on an acting career.
Whilst relatively pleased with my performance, I think my most convincing role came later when the completed scenes were ‘in the can’, whereupon I played the part of a person who opens a bottle of vodka to toast a job well done!
Musing later on the day’s events and my role in the forthcoming film, it struck me that Yury Grozmani was not only to be congratulated on his multiple creativities but also admired for his plain-speaking honesty. Asked in Baltic Plus radio’s studio last week why he had chosen me for a part in his film, Yury replied that he wanted someone who was distinguished-looking, noble, intelligent, resourceful and who bore more than a passing resemblance to Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas.
The obvious answer to this is, apart from the old Specsavers’ joke, that when he couldn’t find that person, he turned to me instead. But I remain undaunted. As I said on Baltic Plus radio, I consider this film to be the first step on the ladder to stardom. No sooner will Moscow film producers get a load of my performance than my phone will never stop ringing: “Our advice to you is don’t give up your day job, unless you’d like to audition for sweeping the studio floors …”
Ahh, fame, it’s difficult to live with, but I suppose that I’ll get used to it.
UK Sanctions like pinning a target to your own arse
Published: 4 April 2022 ~ Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
Congratulations Viktor Orban on your landslide victory in the Hungarian election: Viktor Orban celebrates victory over “Brussels bureaucrats and the Soros empire”1
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“The Western economic blockade and sanctions of an unprecedented scale are clearly having an effect. The question will ultimately be whether Russians are willing to accept their new status as global pariahs and give up the Western comforts some had grown used to.” ~ CNN article, 14 March 2022, “Here’s how we know sanctions are hurting Russia”
My wife’s response on social media: “Russians are willing to accept giving up ‘Western comforts’, which mainly means the loss of McDonald’s, Zara and IKEA. We have plenty of home-grown products💖. As for ‘global pariahs’, we are OK with this definition too. After all, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky are in our company. 🤣”‘
So there you have it: ‘western comforts’ belong to the corporate-led, consumer lifestyles of material western cultures, which, presumably, cannot survive without them, and the perception of ‘global pariah’ really depends on (a) a limited definition of what constitutes the world, ie the world is the western collective, and (b) whether exclusion from the neoliberal globalist club is something to lament or something to rejoice about.
Quote: “The Western economic blockade and sanctions of an unprecedented scale are clearly having an effect.” Question: On who? and Who says so? Ahh, western media!
“First off, let’s shift this into a UK context, because as we know Britland is the crust on Uncle Sam’s American Pie and everything the yanks say the Brits go along with. So, Brits take note: Brit mentality is not Russian mentality. The entire British hierarchy from the elitist neoliberal classes to the lush-living liberal lefties to the sheep-bleating and avatar-changing minions live in a world that is totally disconnected from Russian thought and feeling. This is one reason, the main reason, why it is so easy for the UK to miscomprehend Russians on the grand and amusing scale that it incessantly does.
But the disconnect between Russian and UK mentality is not the only void; there is another, equally unbeknown to the UK masses, between the style, approach and coverage of Russian media and that of its UK counterpart.
Objective comparison of Russian and UK media coverage of Ukraine immediately reveals that when it comes to news that is straightforward, easy to assess and assimilate, Russian media wins hands down. The UK establishment is frightened of this, which is why at the first sign of trouble in Ukraine they moved to ban Russian media, but not before they had disguised their motive by slapping it with a propaganda notice.
In the UK, views and narratives that do not conform to the official neoliberal one are routinely shouted down. Brexit, the plandemic and now Ukraine, it’s the same old story. It has to be, if not the UK government cries ‘propaganda’, UK media cries ‘propaganda’ and, you’ve guessed it, the UK public cry ‘propaganda’. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? So, they don’t.
Where UK media excels is in the spheres of overt-sensationalism and melodrama. This is not to congratulate but to recognise how it works. People of independent thought, what few there are left in the UK, can see through the deception and the disingenuous character of UK media with the minimum of effort, but cloned and colonised minds cannot and sadly for various reasons the great proportion of Brits fall into this latter category.
Take, for example, the recent media handling and presentation of the situation in Ukraine. Huge, concerted effort was disproportionately assigned by UK media to heartstring-pulling tales about the humanitarian tragedy and the subsequent plight of hapless refugees. I am not knocking the reality of the collateral damage of military conflict but the way in which that reality is deliberately and cynically manipulated.
The UK government and its corporate media are maestros when it comes to playing the emotive fiddle. They can tap into the mythicised tolerance of the legacy Briton mindset without breaking sweat. It is not the first time, for example, that Brits have been asked to feel good about themselves by opening their hearts and borders to ‘asylum seekers’, economic migrants and even genuine refugees.
Think back to the troubles that the US-UK alliance exacerbated in Syria. Remember the cruel images of refugee children, some dead some rescued, on the beaches of Europe when their migrant rafts capsized, images later claimed by some commentators to have been stage-managed but cried down frenetically as ‘fake news’ by liberal fact checkers?
No sooner had these images been published than up went the banshee cry for accepting more refugees and adopting refugee children. Do you remember this? Do you also remember changing your avatar, and whilst you were doing this forgetting to remember the role that the US-UK played in creating the Syrian tragedy? Propaganda they cry! But then they always do.
It is different in Russia. Contrary to UK popular belief, popular because when Brits have no answers they simply shout ‘propaganda’ in the same way that they shout ‘racist’, Russians, unlike Brits, do not believe everything they see and read in the media. Schooled in the hard knocks in life, not the university of ‘I’ve got rights’, am molly-coddled and cosseted, Russian minds have fortunately escaped the deleterious process of homogenisation that has soldered UK minds into one inflexible lump.
The parrot-and-sheep UK hybrid simply does not apply in Russia. Changing avatars as a substitute for intelligence and for touchy-feely membership to the mutual appreciation society is not a natural part of the Russian psyche. A comparatively turbulent history has taught Russians how to endure and overcome and, as a consequence, has enabled them to develop a reservoir of personal and collective fortitude on which they can draw for survival whenever the need arises.
Equipped thus, the ‘pariah’ does not feel like a pariah, if anything it feels exclusive. Hence, the ‘pariah of the global world’ (which actually means the globalised world) sees that world from which it has been excluded, to which it is told it does not belong, as the pariah it can do without. Now, isn’t that ironic?
if you learn but one word in Russian, let that word be Pofick!
To help with your understanding of this, if you learn but one word in Russian, let that word be pofick! In English, pofick equates to ‘And what?’ or ‘So what!’; in French c’est la vie; or universally to a simple shrug of the shoulders. ‘Pariah!’ Pofick!; ‘Sanctions!’ Pofick!; US-UK sissy fit! Pofick!
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
Gone are the days when all Russians clamoured and craved to run to Europe. Some of the country’s arty-farts and techies have left Russian as a virtue-signalling gesture about Ukraine, but let’s face it they couldn’t just up and go unless they had money and property salted, tucked away and waiting for them in Europe, so the general feeling here is that those who have gone were gone already.
The majority of Russians, thanks to the internet, no longer harbour any illusions as to what it is like to live in the West. Once, like many others, they were keen to experience French culture or German culture or British culture but globalism, with the assistance of George Soros’ third-world taxi service, has reduced such norms to nuances. Now very little culture is left in these countries, and what has managed to survive is suffocating beneath legions of creepers and poison ivy.
So, the odds on Russian society being upended by self-reflection as a pariah state to the West are not ones on which you should stake your existence. Sanctions, attempts to cancel culture and general Russophobia are impotent leverage mechanisms for exchanging tradition and love of historic homeland for deviancy and woke.
Another UK government-media myth, borrowed from the US of A, is that sanctions are ‘crippling’ and ‘strangling’ Russia. They are certainly not designed to make life easier but, to quote my Indian friend, who considers himself a great philosopher: “Every problem has a solution”. And this is what we are seeing.
About sanctions, you could say, and many political pundits, economists and political analysts around the world are saying, that the US and its minions have shot themselves in the collective foot, but I prefer my own analogy, which is that the US and its western collective are using their arse for target practice.
The situation into which they have backed themselves reminds me to a lesser extent of one that occurred in a publishing house in which I was employed. Against the advice of his peers and underlings, one of the directors went ahead and implemented a controversial project which, as anticipated, completely backfired. In short it was a financial disaster. A friend and colleague of mine created a little ditty to commemorate this folly, which every time the misguided director appeared my friend would unkindly sing. It went something like this: “We all tried to tell him it just wouldn’t do. It went off half-cock, it hadn’t been thought through”.
Thus, when the UK’s Liz Truss, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs of the United Kingdom (Trus her to talk b!**&!*s!) gives it the big one about the impermanence of UK sanctions and proffers the carrot and stick of removing sanctions if Russia will behave itself ~ stop behaving like a naughty boy ~ we between-the-lines readers see a very definite case of ‘Oh dear, we got it all wrong; we didn’t think those sanctions through’. The U-turn is plainly visible; it’s the next bend in the road ahead. But saving face is less easy to see. Quick, shout Propaganda!
For the moment, for the Liz Truss moment, saving face means talking out of your arse. The arse-about-face of it is for Brits that they are to continue fuelling their ego at the expense of rising fuel costs, which are fuelling the cost of living crisis, in the lamentable belief that somehow their little over-populated, socially fragmented and culturally impoverished island holds, by some quaint and curious stretch of imperialistic imagination, the whip hand over Russia, the largest country on planet Earth and also a sovereign superpower.
The attempt to ruin Russia on the part of America and Europe is like two gays trying to conceive a child. The more they try, the more their arses hurt.
A RECENTLY DISCOVERED RUSSIAN ANECDOTE HASH-TAGGED ON SOCIAL MEDIA
I’m sorry fellow Brits, but like everything else with this Ukraine conflict your government is selling you sanctions porkies. But please don’t take my word for it. In spite of liberal revisionism, Google has yet to expunge the date when the British Empire waned.
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
It couldn’t be more obvious than Britain is overcrowded that refusing Russian gas and oil and limiting and/or excluding other essential commodities is akin to wearing a Covid mask in order to spite your face (or is that to spite your intelligence?) or playing darts with your trousers in order to spite your arse. It’s like me saying, instead of buying a packet of crisps from Mr & Mrs Patel’s British corner shop, I’ll buy it from outer Mongolia and ship it in by taxi. Yup, it’s economic madness. It won’t affect the elites, of course, but it will and is already driving down the living standards of your over indebted average Brit. Woops, there goes the heating bills, like a nuclear missile straight through the roof! We’d buy some more insulation, but we haven’t the money to do it with!
Meanwhile, Russia, which has got loads and loads of energy resources, and other resources, is picking up the phone and saying, “Hello India, hello China, we’ve got some oil and gas to flog, are you up for it, mate?”
A similar thing is happening at economic warfare’s sharp and masochistic end, viz with banking and credit card sanctions. “Hello, Russia here. We are in the process of ditching the dollar, how are you fixed for replacing it with the Yuan?”
There are many other import/export sectors where sanctions just aren’t working and where by imposing them the West is on a hiding to nothing, as if using its arse for target practice is not painful enough and only self-flagellation will do.
The level of discomfort that “the Western economic blockade and sanctions” is inflicting on ordinary Russians is, according to CNN, “clearly having an effect”, but it is patently not clear what exactly that effect is because CNN is unable, or unwilling, to tell us, at least with any conviction. I can tell you, as I live in Russia, that the more bellicose and sanction obsessed the West becomes, the more galvanised and resilient is the Russian response. It tracks back to my comment at the opening of this post, the difference in Russian and Brit mentality.
I am sure there are numpty head equivalents here to numpty head UKers, who would rather pay £100 for a T-shirt with a silly brand name on it than a better quality T-shirt with no brand name that retails at a tenth of the price, but that particular extortion has not yet taken hold or replicated itself half as successfully in Russia as it has in the West. If such was the case would the greedy companies selling such tat have put virtue signalling above profit and left Russia so quickly with their tails between their legs? No T-shirt no cry ~ Pofick!
Mick Hart to the rescue! Forever the entrepreneur, to compensate for the loss of brand-name apparel, I am busy working on a new line of clothing for fashion-conscious Russians. These items of haute couture, unisex but not for ‘its and others’ as they are not intended for export, will be designed, manufactured and marketed under the ‘Babushka Brand’ name and will cater for all garment and occasion ranges from woolly socks to evening wear. The prototype is already in the pipeline (which is more than can be said for Russian gas to Europe). The wife is busy knitting me my first cravat in wool.
On the credit card front, true Visa and Mastercard have gone, but they continue to function internally until 2028, or so we have been told, and the Chinese card system, UnionPay, is due to replace the western versions. Incidentally, UnionPay provides access to making payments in over 180 countries. I thought I’d mention that just to remind you that the ‘international community’ to whom Liz Trust-her-not and her dodgy colleagues refer is in fact confined to Usual Suspects Inc ~ the US and its acolytes.
The reality is that in spite of Liz All-Trussed-Up-Like-A-Turkey’s offer to Russia that one day it could be ‘business as usual’, now not only do Russia’s political and business classes know where they stand with the West, but so does the rest of the world. If they had any doubts before Ukraine about the loaded mechanisms inherent in globalism by which suppression and subjugation can be brought to bear on sovereign nation states for the benefits of others and primarily for US advantage, even albeit raggedly and short of consummation, now their application and the risks involved could not be more apparent.
Moreover, there is more than an outside chance that having been ostracised once too often, Russia may never want to return to the West’s unchummy playground no matter how many Western sweeties it is paedo-politically offered. Indeed, leading economists and political analysts the world over anticipate that whatever the outcome of Ukraine, but conspicuously because of it, the era of US and western dominance is rattling to an end.
Symbolic of this move in the right direction is the exodus from Russia of such odious companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken and British American Tobacco, and not-before-time banned Facebook and its incestuous sister Instagram, all of which means for Russians that they will be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and ultimately morally healthier.
And so, we say to these companies, and others of their ilk regarding sanctions and disappearing tricks: “We all tried to tell them it just wouldn’t do. It went off half-cock, it hadn’t been thought through”.
Thus, although in the short-term difficulties are to be overcome, in the long-term for Russia and the multipolar new world order into which we are emerging, it is difficult to imagine a more win-win situation.
Isolation from Globalists is it such a bad thing?
A long time ago, when I was labouring under the delusion that the US and UK double act was, like the words from that well-known hymn (well known if you’ve managed to save something from your culture and past), “All things bright and beautiful”, my friend, a retired scientist, corrected me. Said he, with some impatience: “You don’t understand, Mick, Russia has all those resources and all we’ve got [in the UK] is too many people”
His exact words were, “Too many bloody stupid people!” But I’ll leave you to be the judge of that.
DISCLAIMER: I may have mentioned ‘arse’ once, but I think I got away with it …
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!”
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