Opinions, art, debate
Everybody knows that the Russian uprising is led by the same mercenaries who prevented Nicolás Maduro from fleeing Venezuela and forced him out of the airplane that was going to take him into exile, right?
That’s why Venezuelans are the only Latin Americans who are passionately supportive of Ukraine. The rest are still in the throes of their perennial socialist dream.
Not true but still very funny.
Would that it were true one day.
As usual, N and I have completely different interpretations of what’s going on.
He thinks Prigozhin is acting on direct orders from Putin with the goal of giving Putin an excuse to declare a state of exception.
And I think that Prigozhin got upset and is acting out without much of a plan.
You can see the cultural differences at work right here.
The best part of the Russian circus is the complete indifference of regular citizens to the tanks and heavily armed mercenaries known for their extraordinary brutality. A normal person would run away and hide but they just stand there and gawk.
These people don’t know what’s real anymore. They’ve embraced the postmodern.
I deeply dislike Douthat but he gets it:
Reader Jim asked me to write about what’s happening in Central America, and I’m glad to do it. Thank you for the question, Jim!
The region has been made unlivable by the gangs. Life in Ukraine is a lot more comfortable, secure, and civilized than in supposedly peaceful El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. It’s absolute horror. It’s not new horror but that doesn’t make it better. Two and a half million people have already left the tiny El Salvador, and over 60% of those who are still there are planning to leave.
The young Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele has been cracking down on the gangs, causing massive hissy fits among lovers of democracy who live in opulent countries and have no understanding of the extent of the problem in Central America. Other Central American countries and even Ecuador have timidly followed in Bukele’s footsteps. He’s suspended many of the civil freedoms, declaring a state of exception in the country.
Hispanic countries have a very poor track record with democracy. Spain finally got it right after 1975. Of course , Spaniards have already tried to tear up their brand-new constitution since then but at least there’s been no violence. Mexico achieved an actual democracy in 2000 but let’s be thankful it’s had no dictatorships in a century. The rest of Hispanic countries hobbled from dictatorship to a civil war to a junta until 1990s. Then most have managed to piece together something that resembled democracies if you squinted hard and looked at them at just the right angle.
Understandably, after witnessing Latin Americans raping each other with severed limbs of infants for a century, everybody is very nervous about any sign that Latin American “democracies” are losing even the formal characteristics of being democratic. But look, to have a democratic country, you kind of first need a country. El Salvador was fast losing everything that made it one and turning into a failed state.
I don’t know if Bukele can save El Salvador but I’m glad he’s trying. The Western belief that formal signs of democracy – elections, constitutions, political parties, electoral debates – will somehow magically turn people who love tearing each other to pieces for fun into a functioning society is a delusion. Nobody can make things better for Central Americans. I say, let’s leave them in peace to figure it out. If they want to Bukelize, let them try. It can hardly get much worse than it is now.
In the meantime, Putin has joyfully congratulated Russians with the Day of Youth, the regular Russian army is preparing to carpet bomb a large Russian city, and I’m back to my regularly scheduled programming. I totally take requests, though. Nothing is off limits.
That’s not hard to understand. Russia is gigantic. Even if Prigozhin’s mercenaries burn the city of Rostov to the ground, neither Putin nor anybody in the rest of Russia will care. People in Russia get off on violence and destruction of what they see as “the collective West.” That’s all they care about.
This one is very old but it never really gets old, if you know what I mean:
Even though there’s sadly no coup, what’s happening in Russia is so entertaining that I pity people who are wasting time and energy on an enormously less interesting Titanic submarine. The submarine is an equivalent of a traffic accident. It’s sad, it’s a bad thing to have happened but only a completely dead news feed would stay on something like it for days.
N’s sister called him to announce that:
A. She’s getting divorced again.
B. There’s a coup d’etat in Russia.
I checked the news, and sadly there’s no coup. I now wonder if the divorce is real.
After almost 3 months of daily writing of my very first completely honest and direct work of scholarship in Ukrainian, I have no idea how I will go back to the cautious efforts to sneak in some glimmer of truth that the scholarship in English always is and the scholarship in Spanish is becoming more and more.
I went to lunch with a friend and she asked what if nobody wants to publish my book in Ukraine. I said I don’t even care at this point because the experience of writing complete, unadorned truth is nothing short of narcotic. It’s like being in a loveless, stunted marriage, and then falling in love and discovering what heights human love can reach.
Of course, the irony of having left Ukraine 25 years ago to experience freedom of the intellect and now having to go back to Ukraine in search of it isn’t lost on me.
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