And now for some fun international news.

Erdogan is trolling Putin in a really hilarious way. To Putin’s complaint that Turkey didn’t even contact him after taking down the Russian fighter jet Erdogan responded that he tried getting in touch but the connection wouldn’t go through. This reply is so similar to the crap Putin himself loves to dish out that the whole thing is beyond funny.

In a show of gratitude, Ukrainians made a video extolling the armed forces of Turkey that made Turkish people feel so touched and happy that they made a video extolling the armed forces of Ukraine. Peace, love, bubble gum.

Hollande, in the meanwhile, arrived in Russia on a visit that lost all meaning since the escalation between Russia and Turkey. The poor fellow who goes from one embarrassment to another found himself in the unenviable position of having to listen to a litany of Putin’s complaints about the evil Turkey and the even more evil Americans who caused the entire debacle.

From now on, police officers in Chechnya will have to write reports on the number of prayers they say on a weekly basis. All the prayers in each precinct will be summed up and sent to the police headquarters. The Ministry of the Interior will keep track of the number of prayers performed at every precinct and take measures if the praying policemen fall behind the quota.

Nothing is funnier than post-Soviet people who discover religion.

There was so much idiotic hype and so many stupid, superficial reviews of Houellebecq’s novel Submission, that I almost decided not to read it. Houellebecq did the unthinkable and mentioned that which shall not be named – Muslims – which immediately unleashed a tsunami of “Islamophobia!” on the one side and “Scary Muslims!” on the other. Besides, most people have a very low readerly culture and can’t distinguish between a book’s author and its first-person narrator. If the character is not “likeable” and people can’t “identify” with him, the author must be an evildoer deserving of nothing but supercilious dismissal. As a result, reviews of anything more complex than Hunger Games are massively useless.

Houellebecq’s novel is about the terrifying ease with which all gains of civilization can be lost almost instantly and imperceptibly. The culture of consumerism creates crowds of spoiled, infantile people who are incapable of dealing with any discomfort. And preserving civilization presupposes complexity, struggle, and difficulty.

Women’s rights, the welfare state, scholarship, literary criticism, the traditions of intellectual inquiry – all these earth – shattering, incredible gains of the Western civilization can be easily lost to religious fanaticism with its cocooning, imbecilic certainties, to empty blabber about free markets and family values that are supposed to cure all ills, to intellectual sloth, to meaningless pseudo-liberalism of brain-dead multiculturalists.

This is a very angry novel. Houellebecq goes to enormous lengths to provoke and enrage his readers. Most of all, I believe, he banks on provoking women by reminding us how crucial the achievements of the Western civilization are for women who want to have a life of a human being and not an insect.

The great paradox of the Western civilization, points out Houellebecq, is that its greatest achievements – women’s liberation, the rights of individuals to pursue happiness on their own terms – make the civilization more vulnerable. There is no freedom possible without the greatest form of liberty of all: an individual’s right to control what comes in and goes out of her or his body. Bluntly put, a civilization where an individual matters will always be less numerous than a civilization where the concept of an individual has no currency. Producing mindless, patient ants who toil stupidly without a single thought of their own is easy. Creating individuals who find their own meaning and construct their own lives is hard. And mass production tends to overwhelm creative artisanship.

[To be continued. . .]