No, this is not a bombed out building in Ukraine. This is an apartment building in the peaceful Russian city of Chelyabinsk where 40 families are living currently. Yes, they are living in the building while it’s in this state. They haven’t had any heating since 1987. Google Chelyabinsk to see what the temperatures are like in winter and understand what this actually means.
Here’s a video of the residents standing in front of the building:
Note that they are all nicely dressed and sober. These are middle-class people with jobs and kids. You can find declassé elements living in bizarre conditions everywhere but these are not the declassé. These are normies. Taxpayers, which they mention specifically in the video.
I could post such stories all day and never run out of material. Not the mentally ill homeless, the gangsters, or the addicts (which abound) but normie moms like me living in these conditions. These are people with TVs and social media accounts who know that there are places where regular folks don’t live this way. They also have a conscience of having a glorious history and a highly spiritual, superior culture that saved the world from Nazism and enriched it with great literature, music, and philosophy. It’s normal for human beings to look for an explanation, a story that would explain this mismatch between what they know about themselves and what their reality tells them they are.
Remember the video I posted recently with the bus in the Russian city of Norilsk? Contrast it with the subway station in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in wartime. If you saw these images in the US, Canada, UK, South Africa or wherever you are, these people have seen them, too. Ukraine was just like that, with those miserable, crumbling barracks and horrible buses. And then it stopped being like that.
It’s got to be absolutely maddening. The neighbor you always knew was just like you but kind of inferior and somewhat dumb suddenly living better – how absolutely unbearable. There are two ways out of this conundrum. You can either accept that something is wrong with you or – and this is always the easier way – you accept that there’s something wrong with the neighbor. Some huge, cosmic injustice might be taking place. And wouldn’t it make sense to go to war to battle this cosmic wrong, especially if what you have to come back to is this building?
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