The most annoying people are the ones who bleat, “But why should I care about what’s happening in Ukraine? We have so many problems in this country, maybe we should just concentrate on solving them.”

The problem with this approach is that even if you stop paying attention to the world around you, it doesn’t stop paying attention to you. Only very small children believe that if they close their eyes, nobody can see them. Adults usually know better.

Yes, why should you care that the largest country on the planet is turning Fascist? The same country that has one of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals and that builds its identity around hysterical and massive anti-US and anti-EU propaganda.

Of course, I could start explaining why it makes sense to care about Fascism, but I’m thinking that if the tragic history of the XXth century was not enough to get that point across, I might not manage to be any more convincing.

A colleague whose research has to do with the development of European Fascism said, “There are just two more steps Russia has to make before it becomes a fully Fascist state.”

I studied Fascism but not as profoundly as my colleague, so I asked, “What are the steps?”

“The first one is the collective and massive militarization of regular people.”

“That part of the journey to Fascism has already been traveled,” I said. “Putin recently brought back the GTO norms. They had been created by Stalin in preparation for WWII. Now Putin says they are part of the Russian cultural traditions and brings them back. What’s the second step?”

“People have to accept this militarization enthusiastically and joyfully. This must become a massive, collective ritual everybody engages in with enthusiasm and glee. Have you seen the footage of Stalin-era Red Square parades with gymnasts and all kinds of half-naked athletes? The moment this comes back, we’ll know that Russia has become Fascist.”

This entire time I was betting on the Russian-speakers’ notorious and usually very obnoxious cynicism. After the decades of Soviet propaganda, our people developed a knee-jerk reaction of boredom, contempt and disgust towards anything that even remotely smacks of ideology or even just simply ideas. If they manage to hold on to that skill of distancing themselves emotionally from propaganda, there is hope. But I’m afraid the current wave of ideological conditioning is too strong and the message that is being peddled is too seductive.

Now that Putin has officially invaded Eastern Ukraine (as I predicted weeks ago), the main line of impotent American pundits is that “it isn’t clear” where the Russians will stop.

Nothing teaches these losers. Putin is not planning to stop. He wants global dominance. And he wants the entire territory of Ukraine to be part of Russian Federation.

I totally feel like Cassandra.

The Russian terrorists who invaded Ukraine should keep their mouths shut if they want to maintain the pretense that they are pro-Russian Ukrainians. I just watched several videos where these “Ukrainians” use slang that is incomprehensible to anyone not from St. Petersburg or speak in very distinctly Moscow accents.

A bunch of brainless idiots.

A friend who met Romney in person says he wouldn’t have been any better than Obama on foreign policy because he doesn’t even know where Ukraine is located. Barely recognizes the country’s name, and two years ago had no idea it bordered Russia.

McCain, on the other hand, she says, is very knowledgeable about the region, follows all of the developments, etcetera.

Everybody keeps asking, “But why doesn’t Ukraine deploy troops already and beat back the Russian invaders and provocateurs?”

The Acting President of Ukraine Oleksandr Turchynov said today that finally troops will be deployed in a full-scale anti-terrorist operation.

Of course, the second a single Russian soldier appears with a bloody nose, Russia will invade openly and joyously. There is no chance Ukraine will win a full-scale war with the largest country in the world.

When 14 years ago Russians “elected” a KGB agent as their president, that was the time to ask what was going on with the supposedly democratic Russia. When Russia rigged elections in Ukraine, poisoned Ukrainian politicians, bombed Georgia – that was the time to start doing something.

Better yet, back in 1990 there should have been an ultimatum: no assistance, no trade agreements, no humanitarian aid, no discussion until the Communist Party goes on trial, its leaders get prison sentences, KGB is proscribed and everybody who worked for it testifies publicly about their crimes.

Instead, the Communist leaders and the KGB were allowed to remain in power. How shocking that after taking two seconds to regroup, they continued doing exactly what they were always doing.

Lenin wrote that any lie, any form of pretense in the relationship with the capitalist world was justified, even pretending that you are a democrat and capitalist, even making the pretense last for years and decades. The Westerners are so dumb, he wrote, that they will believe any lie you tell them.

There is, of course, a possibility that the US is letting the USSR be reborn and Cold War re-initiated because it isn’t doing well without a concrete, single, well-defined enemy.

The Arab world is very unconvincing in the role of Enemy #1. The USSR was obviously much more helpful as THE mortal foe. Weak national identities (like the American, the Russian, the Israeli, and others) require a clearly defined, obvious enemy in order to continue existing. The Enemy motivates, holds together, and provides a reason or an excuse for pretty much anything.

After Spain’s dictator Franco died, the former dissidents popularized the saying, “Against Franco we lived better.” Is what we are witnessing now a case of the US leadership quietly agreeing that “Against the USSR everything worked out better?”

Here are photos of Russian soldiers who are blocking all entrances into Sloviansk:

Just so that nobody tells me next week that “Well, if people in Ukraine chose to vote. . .”

All photos are from here.

NPR should just go kill itself against a wall. They are misinforming people in the most egregious manner imaginable:

More than a dozen armed men have seized a police station in the city of Sloviansk, near Ukraine’s border with Russia. The pro-Russian group is one of several that have seized public government buildings in the past week. 

This is not a “pro-Russian” group. These are soldiers of the Russian army who have crossed the border. It takes all of 3 minutes of Googling to find this information.

The article goes on to call the Russian soldiers “separatists.” It takes all of 20 seconds of Googling to find the correct definitions of words “separatist” and “soldier”, but who cares about language when you can just dash off a piece, get paid, and forget all about it?

God, I hate these, lazy-brained, stupid, self-contented and ignorant excuses for journalists. I don’t even want to remember how many news articles I swallowed, believing journalists were responsible professionals and knew what they were doing. I now question everything I ever heard or read by mainstream journalists.

I’m very upset right now, and I guess the best thing to do is just step away from the news stream.