Clarissa's Blog

Since the words “war” and “peace” have been outlawed in Russia, Tolstoy’s famous novel will now be titled “xxxx and xxxx.” Or maybe “beep and beep “

https://twitter.com/MaximEristavi/status/1495919485764710408?s=19

Or maybe the Russians were so traumatized by the perspective of the NATO expansion a century later that they just went and genocided all these people. I know that Americans are somehow to blame because they always are, so there’s that.

Today I had a chance to be a mini-Arestovich for a friend. She’s devastated over Ukraine (she’s from Belarus) and is going through a difficult moment personally at the same time. But after hanging out with me, she says she started smiling again for the first time in weeks.

I’m taking classes at Arestovich’s online academy and will soon be able to calm ocean waves by staring at them.

You know how sometimes you need to end a relationship but aren’t managing to disentangle yourself emotionally? (I’m not talking about N, everybody, please calm down. It’s a different kind of relationship). There’s still the feeling that you need to explain something, there are inner monologues directed at the person in question, there’s waiting for phone calls and text messages. I know on a logical level that it’s time to let it go but it’s hard, it’s hard.

I’ve given the relationship every chance for 42 days. Not any old 42 days but the 42 days of the war. I know I should stop hoping for a miracle. If somebody who’s not from Russia and has absolutely no connection to Russia has chosen Russia over me, this simply means she’s not that into me, right?

From past experience, I vaguely remember that what helps to sever attachment is to find a replacement object to attach to. (Ideally, not a person because that’s unfair to the replacement individual). I’m not seeing what that could be right now because my life is pretty full at the moment.

It feels stupid to whine about something like this when there’s a war going on but it still hurts.

Alexei Arestovich is a key figure of Ukrainian resistance. Millions of us fall asleep and wake up with Arestovich whispering in our ear, “It’s ok, everything will be fine.” Young (he’s my age which is young for a political leader), brilliantly educated, a career officer, a successful businessman, and an intellectual with his own school of philosophy. To complete the setting for the story I’m about to tell, I have to mention that he has an unusual last name. Which means that there aren’t many Arestoviches running around.

Arestovich is hated in Russia. For all of the above reasons but also because nobody can accuse him of being a Ukrainian nationalist. I mean, you can accuse him but it’s going to be silly. Arestovich is a Pan-Slavist, which means all Slavs should be best friends forever, kiss-kiss, hug-hug.

So finally here’s the story. Arestovich’s nephew spent 39 days under occupation. All that was needed for him to not survive was for somebody to say his last name. Imagine what the Russians would have done to him. But nobody did. Nobody said his name. Not out of spite, not out of carelessness. The nephew survived and his town was liberated the day before yesterday.

It’s a good, happy story to bring some cheer into the bleakness.

In order better to restore the feeling of being a student again, I printed out the syllabus of the course I’m taking, dug out an old 3-whole binder from my student days, and started taking notes for the class by hand.

It feels so great, folks. There’s no spa in existence that could make me feel this renewed.

Bleeding-heart liberalism is very annoying. All of this crawling on the knees for BLM, all of the exaltation of the victimhood du jour. Annoying.

However, the bleeding-heart variety of liberalism exists for a reason. It’s the only alternative many people see to the neoliberal alienation. They need to care about something outside of themselves. And it’s completely unimportant whether the caring is genuine or performative. Any performance becomes at least somewhat genuinely felt after a while.

Remember Maslow? After you satisfy your basic needs, you conceive a desire to move to a higher plane of existence and do something more transcendent than worrying about your next meal. The capacity to care about something other than basic survival is what makes us human. When there are no healthy ways to seek transcendence, people use debased, ridiculous forms of doing it.

Based on the number of readings in the course I’m starting to take, I’m going to get at least 4-5 articles and book chapters out of the material I will learn there. And then people will be asking, “how do you manage to publish so much?” I made a decision to set aside two hours every Thursday morning for the next 3 months (plus whatever it takes to do the readings) to expand my working base. That’s how it’s always done. Make a decision and chip away at it little by little.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia who currently serves as deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, announced today that the true goal of Russia’s war against Ukraine is “an open-border Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” Ukraine and its attachment to the nation-state border is an obstacle.

For years, I’ve been trying to explain to people that Russia is at the forefront of globalism. Will Medvedev’s own words finally help demonstrate that this is true?

Truly, Russians will be standing over the smoldering ruins of Lisbon – which, please mark your calendars, they openly announced as their goal on April 4, 2022 – and here in the West (or what will be left if it) we’ll keep repeating how it’s all our own fault for war-mongering, being sinful and imperfect and provoking the little darlings with our imperfections.

A SWAT team from the Russian city of Krasnodar was sent to Ukraine to fight. Twelve of the officers refused to go. They were fired. Their lawyers are suing.

That’s all that happened to them. They weren’t tortured, cut into pieces, or even arrested. They refused to go and now their lawyers will haggle over a severance package for them. That’s all it took to avoid raping and murdering Ukrainian toddlers.

Everybody else agreed to go.