Russian troops have entered the small Ukrainian town of Sloviansk and, acting in the same manner as they had in the Crimea, occupied the city:

The city administration of Slovyansk has been captured by an army reconnaissance group of up to 30 people, who came to the city following a forced march. The soldiers’ uniforms and shoes were extremely dirty. These soldiers acted as a coherent military unit, they were armed with machine guns with grenade launchers of the kind not used by Ukrainian  police. This must mean that these weapons couldn’t have been captured by them somewhere in Ukraine and had to be brought in from someplace else. (Translation is mine, the original is here plus photos.)

Putin  is being very kind to Obama and orders the soldiers not to wear the insignia of the Russian army. This allows everybody to pretend that there has been no invasion, no Russian troops are present on Ukrainian territory, everything is peachy, and there is no issue to be addressed. “But if the people of the Donbass region want to vote to become part of Russia, then why shouldn’t they?” we will soon hear.

The mayor of Sloviansk is, of course, a former Communist Party apparatchik and is joyfully welcoming the invasion. It only makes sense for her to want to live in a country ruled by a KGB officer. At the link, you can see the photo of this nasty animal.

Putin, in the meanwhile, is still very kind to Obama and doesn’t call what is happening “a Cold War.”

The whole thing is getting beyond pathetic. And please don’t ask me what should be done now. After Putin was allowed to annex the Crimea just because he felt like it, it’s a little bit too late to ask this question. All we can do is get our heads out of our asses and simply accept that the USSR is back and the Cold War is back. naming the problem is the very first step towards solving it.

Folks, I know everybody hates long quotes, but this one from Tony Judt is too good not to be shared. Judt explains how Fascist rhetoric seemlessly transformed itself into the ultra-progressive one:

Intellectuals, journalists and teachers who before and during the war had espoused Fascist or ultra-reactionary sentiments had good reason after 1945 vociferously to affirm their new-found credentials as progressives or radicals (or else retreat into temporary or lasting obscurity). Since most parties and journals of a Fascist or even ultra-conservative persuasion were in any case now banned (except in the Iberian Peninsula, where the opposite was true), public expressions of political allegiance were confined to the center and left of the spectrum. Right-wing thought and opinion in Europe had been eclipsed. But although the content of public writing and performance was spectacularly metamorphosed by the fall of Hitler, Mussolini and their followers, the tone stayed much the same. The apocalyptic urgency of the Fascists; their call for violent, ‘definitive’ solutions, as though genuine change necessarily led through root-and-branch destruction; the distaste for the compromise and ‘hypocrisy’ of liberal democracy and the enthusiasm for Manichean choices (all or nothing, revolution or decadence): these impulses could serve the far Left equally well and after 1945 they did so.

I’ve only read a quarter of this long book but I enjoy it beyond what I can tell you.

As promised, here are some excerpts from Tony Judt’s great book on how Austria managed to avoid taking responsibility for Nazism:

Indeed, so widespread was the view that ultimate blame for the horrors of World War Two must fall on German shoulders alone that even Austria was held exempt. Under an Allied agreement of 1943, Austria had been officially declared Hitler’s ‘first victim’ and was thus assured different treatment from Germany at the war’s end. This appealed to Winston Churchill’s insistence on the Prussian origins of Nazism, a view driven by his generation’s obsession with the emergence of the Prussian threat to European stability in the course of the last third of the nineteenth century. But it also suited the other Allies—Austria’s pivotal geographical position and the uncertainty over central Europe’s political future made it seem prudent to detach her fate from that of Germany.

Before reading this book, I never even wondered what the situation was in Austria in terms of support for Nazism. I guess, this means that the post-war propaganda worked on me. I had no idea about the following, for instance:

Austrians had been disproportionately represented in the SS and in concentration camp administrations. Austrian public life and high culture were saturated with Nazi sympathizers—45 out of 117 members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra were Nazis (whereas the Berlin Philharmonic had just 8 Nazi Party members out of 110 musicians).

As a result, Austria engaged in collective forgetfulness:

Austrians simply forgot about their involvement with Hitler altogether. One reason for the ease with which Austria emerged from its dalliance with Nazism is that it suited all local interests to adjust the recent past to their advantage: the conservative People’s Party, heir to the pre-war Christian Social Party, had every reason to burnish its own and Austria’s ‘un-German’ credentials so as to divert attention from the corporatist regime they had imposed by force in 1934.

When efforts were made to engage in extensive de-Nazification policies in Germany, Austria fell through the cracks:

The Americans in particular. . . immediately initiated a programme of re-education and denazification in their zone, whose objective was to abolish the Nazi Party, tear up its roots and plant the seeds of democracy and liberty in German public life. The US Army in Germany was accompanied by a host of psychologists and other specialists, whose assigned task was to discover just why the Germans had strayed so far. The British undertook similar projects, though with greater skepticism and fewer resources.

I don’t even have much to say here because all this is very new to me. Now it will be interesting to see how these divergent post-Nazi paths impacted Germany and Austria in their further development.

Stay tuned!

I really like it when people respond to my posts with thoughtful, intelligent and profound posts of their own. The linked blogger is really talented and wonderful and I recommend her blog.

Some people can’t get over their Oedipal issues even when their Mommies turn 85. A seriously disturbing story.

In Russia, the most vulgar, horrible people can be found in St. Petersburg (I can explain why, if anybody is interested.) In Ukraine, such a city is Odessa. Here is proof.

Did you hear of the scandal that happened over an honorary award given to Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Brandeis? I still don’t understand what she is being accused of, but here is an interesting take on the situation. 

I was so overwhelmed by the relentless stupidity of this review that I just had to share it: “A proliferation of characters, particularly male characters, who lack empathy probably points to a proliferation of people, particularly men, who lack empathy. . . I do know that women are, overwhelmingly, taught to be caretakers, to be watchful, to adapt their sense of self and the stories they tell themselves to what looks “right.” Whereas men, on the whole, have a certain privilege to just live their lives.”

A completely ridiculous and stupid article about freedom of speech. If you need to get into a combative mood, do read it.

Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP. Jerks.

A great post in Russian about differences between Russians and Ukrainians.

“Have you heard about “microaggressions” that come in the form of “microassaults” and “microinsults” and “microinvalidations?”” No. But I’m guessing they matter a lot to people with microbrains. This is the weirdest achievement of consumer society: people who can’t tolerate even the slightest whiff of unpleasantness or discomfort.

And this is really, really shocking and incomprehensible: “In 2001, a scientist inadvertently discovered that a pain-relief implant could double as an automatic orgasm-maker. Press a button, receive orgasm. Strangely, he continues to have trouble finding both volunteers to test and perfect this system and funding to study and market it.” No, of course, I know why this happens. I just don’t want to accept this sad, tragic knowledge.

“Carefully thinking through Russia’s different tactical options for invading Ukraine would have seemed unnecessarily alarmist as little as a few weeks ago. Today, it seems downright prudent.” And that is why everybody needs to be reading Clarissa’s Blog. I explained all this ages ago.

I love Americans. They are the kindest, smartest, most hard-working people ever. But they also have many funny traits, such as this obsessive need to micromanage everything to death, especially in what concerns human relationships.

One of my favorite writers wrote a beautiful post in Spanish about Cervantes.

The weirdest fashion project ever.

I’m getting more and more disappointed with Australia every day. I used to think it was some progressive paradise because there was this book I read about the country back in the 1990s, and it sounded like the best place ever. But now I’m guessing that either Australie has gone bad or the book wasn’t as good as I thought.

In Spanish, an article about the famous Radio Pirenaica and a book I’m dying to buy.

A very interesting discussion of whether web-surfing is changing our brains in a way that makes it hard for us to read long, complex texts. I’m not experiencing anything of the kind, but that might be because I’m older.

We all know how much I love the inane exercises in “this is just like something else.” Here is one of the more unsuccessful examples of this form of entertainment.

I was trying to reblog this post about Russia’s revisionist history but it didn’t work. It’s a great post, don’t miss it! I’ve heard the line this blogger criticizes too many times to remember and it always made me mad as hell.

And the post of the week and probably even the month. I was yelling, “Yes, exactly!!!” when I was reading it.

You know what? I just realized that I haven’t read anything strictly for pleasure and not work-related for months. And this is just wrong. So here is what I will do. I will force myself to get a really silly, just-for-entertainment book (like this one, for instance) and read it. And I will not feel guilty over the 20+ work-related books I urgently need to read and annotate.

So here is the challenge: read or watch something completely and utterly fun and unproductive.

This will be the hardest challenge for me because April is just insanely busy for any academic and for me especially because I now have a second job. And I need to prepare my tenure dossier. And buy a house. And move. OK, I need to stop freaking myself out now and just breathe. And then:

HAVE UNPRODUCTIVE CAREFREE FUN

So the seller continues to be very unreasonable and obnoxious. I didn’t have any opinion about Bosnian people before crossing paths with this seller but now I’m starting to develop one. And it’s not extremely amazing.

Everybody has conspired to annoy me today, it seems.

Does anybody need a Steam account that contains:

People who buy digital content.

I made a huge mistake of buying several episodes of my favorite show from Amazon Instant Video, counting on being able to watch it whenever I wanted.

But no, it turns out that the way the system works is that I can only access my content when the vendor wants. I haven’t been able to watch my shows for days. I just spent an hour doing my hair without any show to watch.

Serves me right for doing something as stupid as buying digital content.

This is, of course, a pretty minor inconvenience. But imagine a whole university completely cut off from all of its textbooks because something is malfunctioning on a server somewhere. That would not be as minor. >

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued a warning for Russian citizens who are planning to travel overseas. It is best to abstain from leaving the country for now, the Ministry advises citizens, because evil Americans are on the lookout for Russians they can kidnap.

Here is a link in Russian.