Russia, 1991-2014
*tried every possible diplomatic option but kept being rejected by the West*

Western pundits, 2022:
“Why didn’t Russia try diplomatic options before taking such an extreme step?”

Reds (1981) was a big hit, which had obvious pro-commie sympathies.

Above the level of pop culture, Cold War America tended to be highly respectful of Russian higher culture

Not American, but I always felt the Dschinghis Khan song “Moscow” was lightheartedly mocking Russian culture. (Especially the dancing in the video clip.)

I remember as a kid some comedy tv show’s skit in Australia just prior to the collapse of communism, which did a Soviet “The Price Is Right” parody, with the announcer saying “It’s a new….cow!” (Ie Russians are poor.)

The Russians were ahead of us for the first ten years in the ‘Space Race” and not until Apollo 8 when we orbited the moon were we convincingly back in the lead. Sputnik and Gargarin gave Russia a lot of credibility that made us wonder if our system was truly superior.

Nah, my recollection is the opposite.

I am not sure you recollect right, but, in case you do, wouldn’t that perhaps justify mccarthyism?

Dr. Zhivago ground to a halt when that homely girl was put forward as Omar and Julie’s daughter.
Robert Vaughn was the co-star of U.n.c.l.e., not Robert Morse.

There was that Soviet fashion show in a Wendy’s ad.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t manage to get himself into a rare anti-Soviet movie during the 1980s, appearing only as a Russian cop in Red Heat.”

The character Ivan Denko IIRC was not a Russian – he was from another one of the Soviet Republics but I could be remembering that wrong.

“From the article Steve quotes:

“As a young adult, he was especially influenced by the movie “Red Dawn.” The 1984 film pitted Soviets soldiers invading the United States”

The original invading force was a combination of Soviet and Central American forces, led by a Cuban commander. What’s interesting, is the Cuban commander is much more brutal than the Soviet commander who comes later to relieve him. The Cuban regularly has civilians mass executed and the Soviet commander puts a stop to it. For “some reason” the Cuban is given opportunity to see his own errors and portrayed sympathetically in his final scene, where as the Soviet Commander is killed in the final showdown.

Also – Steve goes back and forth from referring to Russians, then Soviets, then Russians. There is a distinction. Hollywood was clearly sympathetic to the Soviet communists, but not really the Russians themselves.

its part of the overall dumbening of our civilization.

if Huckleberry Finn and the Constitution are discarded as white supremacy abd problematic, do you really expect anyone to understand or appreciate Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy?

(note: tech fights valiantly against the tide, insisting that dumbening is not a word and autocorrecting–slumbering? dumbing?
off to Google dumbing, which I did not thing was a word any more than dumbening)

This whole post was mysteriously uninformed and unhelpful, probably because Steve’s desire to talk about movies blinded him to the almost deliberate stupidity of the writer. Russians per se were almost never the bad guy during this period (and with detente, which Hollywood continued to “recognize” long after it was no longer policy). To the puerile unpoint about Nazis, the bad guy was the organizational man, the follower of orders, the thoughtless enforcer who made no exceptions. For this time period that’s actually what “Nazi” meant (with the confusing result that Jews were criticized as “Nazis,” ie, legalistic but outwardly mercilessly strict). So you’d have a decent Russian/Commie who might help the Western protagonist, or at least be recognized as decent, and you’d have a brainless Nazi-Russian/Commie, who was the bad guy, but not because he was Russian. Maybe movies, much less lazily wikipedia’d discussion of movies, aren’t a helpful source of information right now.

By the same crowd that decided that you cannot expect rocket science from a head that grows blond hair. And the same people who insisted that you cannot tell apart by faces that nationality which invented highly accurate facial recognition technology. Maybe we should stop believing them.

Steve,

I was going to mention Illya Kuryakin, who was much, much cooler than Napoleon Solo, until I saw that you mentioned it. Even my dad, who was intensely anti-Communist, thought the Kuryakin character was cool.

The distinction that the WaPo article misses is that a lot of us did indeed deeply hate Communism, AKA “actually existing socialism,” but did not hate Russians.

I have hated socialism all my life and I still do for a very simple reason: socialism devours the human spirit, it suppresses human creativity and individuality, officially in the name of the broader good of society, but in fact for the benefit of the ruling elite and the apparatchiks who keep the oppressive system going.

I.e., pretty much like the system we have currently in the West.

But most Americans truly did not hate Russians. One group of Russians that you did not mention who were widely celebrated in the West were their elegant figure skaters (e.g., the incredible pair Gordeeva and Grinkov).

What has been shocking to a lot of us who were Cold Warriors back in the day is that it turns out that a significant fraction of our ruling overclass and sycophants of the overcclass did not actually hate Communism but really just hate Russians.

It seems that they hate the Russians not because Communism destroyed the human spirit but simply because Russia was and is an obstacle to complete, unchallenged domination of the world by the Western elites.

Ir will be interesting to see how they refocus when they finally realize that the main obstacle to their plans for a Global Reset is in fact China.

Under masculine Fascism everyone is supposed to be a man. Difficult to find a nice dress when they’re all supposed to be men’s dresses.

I remember my dad and mom taking me to see “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” as well as “The Great Race.” The only characters I remember after nearly six decades are the German with the spiked helmet in “Flying Machines” and the Jack Lemmon villain in “Great Race.” I laughed myself sick in both.

A German anon on 4chan replying to a post about Klaus Schwab (rather belatedly) kicking Russia out of Davos and the WEF — but not kicking out Russia’s allies, and least of all China — remarked that this proved China really does have us by the Eier.

Wendy’s commercial: Soviet Fashion Show (1985)

Moscow Strikes Back (1942) portrayed Stalin and the Soviet Union in a positive light.

This won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1942. Goes from Moscow at peace to Moscow at war with no mention of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or the partition of Poland. https://t.co/5VZ5lKuBcM

— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) March 4, 2022

Eastern European women were put down a lot as frumpy.

A very 1980s thing. By the 1980s the Soviet bloc was becoming a bit of a joke culturally.

It’s interesting that by 2022 America has become more like this commercial in many ways.

Die Hard came out in 1988 during the height of the Cold War, yet Hans Gruber was German.

Martin Cruz Smith’s late Cold War era Russian crime fiction novel, Gorky Park and its sequels went against the grain for 1980s, when movies like Red Dawn started being released.

Steve,
I think you mean Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059797/ which I remember from when my parents took us to a drive-in. My memory is that it was kid friendlyk
And Mission to Moscow https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036166/reviews . For a while I couldn’t turn away because we had discussed propaganda in school, and this was the real thing. But I got bored with the heavy handedness.

Which I saw on some Sunday afternoon TV matinee. Yes, even as a high-schooler it was obvious war propaganda.

The whole thing reminds me of an anecdote I heard about a young American Army officer who sliped up by saying the Soviets were the Enemy His senior officer corrected him,
The Soviets are our adversary, the NAVY is our enemy

I suspect you are conflating the cross channel flying race with the similar time period but ground based Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies made a few years later. I don’t recall seeing it though, so I can’t comment much on the nationalities involved. IMDB shows a Schofield, an Otto Schinckel, Count Levinovitch and a Waleska.

Something strange to me is how the term “oligarch” has come to refer almost exclusively to any wealthy Russian.

We have vast monopoly powers concentrated in our tech/finance/media elite, yet we don’t call them oligarchs.

You never hear about Chinese or Indian oligarchs either.

It is a pejorative term that only applies to the evil Russians.

I remember a couple of years ago a leftist on MSNBC started to call George Soros an oligarch and was immediately cut off and admonished.

You are right about the 1960s-80s, but neglect the 1950s: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/best-anti-communist-movies-50s/

Also https://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341346&p=2303736

I only saw The Americans about a year ago and was, in turn, confused, then disappointed and finally angered by it. I had expected a show about deep-cover Soviet spies doing their best to undermine the US (which it is).

What I had not expected was their portrayal as sympathetic, family-centred patriots who were brave, loyal, smart and omnicompetent. They were depicted as role models rather than as despised agents of a hostile and alien state.

Only after I had finished watching it did I learn that it was created by a nasty little lefty who really despises the US. It says all too much about the CIA that he managed to get a job there for a while.

Robert Vaughan. Not Robert Morse.

The sometimes confused narratives of Hollywood over time was once skewered by the Simpsons, starring their own Schwarzenegger stand-in.

Germans were always cool as villains.

People were anti-communist, not anti-Russian. The fear was not that Russians would land in North America. It was really the international communists, the traitors, and the fellow travels people worried about.

Like with propaganda; I don’t think Russians were very good at it. It was rather their little helpers in the West, often in the media and policy positions, who shaped things in a positive way for the Soviets.

Remember all the anti-war, ban the nukes, nuclear freeze and the hysteria over nuclear winter? That was pushed by the Western intelligentsia in order to hold back American power. It all disappeared as soon as the USSR collapsed (no more need to help them).

Of course, the day after communism fell, all the Reds turned Green.

The hit Bond-style TV spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) started out with an American star Robert Morse as the hero Napoleon Solo, but David McCallum’s Russian (or Ukrainian) agent Illya Kuryakin was so popular that he was promoted to co-star.

Surely, you mean Robert Vaughn. But Robert Morse would have been very interesting in the role. He’s still alive, aged ninety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morse

As is David McCallum, born 1933.

Good, but two fresh memes are as good:
https://postimg.cc/dkr7pzv5
https://postimg.cc/QKB89zxp

As I recall, hit anti-Communist action movies came out of the blue in about 1983 with Uncommon Valor, and then even extended to prestige films like The Killing Fields. But pictures like Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo, and Top Gun were a big surprise at the time.

The election of Ronald Reagan probably had something to do with this. Hollywood and the media just wanted to jump on the zeitgeist of the time.

Red Dawn was the exception. It was an incredibly exceptional movie. You have to go to F-list zero budget nobody saw ’ems such as came from Cannon to escape Hollywood’s forever detente.

The times forgot about The Spy who Loved Me, if I recall correctly one of the highest grossing Bond movies, where kidnapped NATO and Soviet submarine crews fight side by side against the forces of the deranged Soros-like environmentalist trillionaire who wants to depopulate the earth.

This is my cue to remind everyone that in Goldfinger its not even clear that Bond is sent on the mission by the British government – some City of London types appear to send him on the mission to kill Goldfinger, who is buying too much gold.

As did Under The Red Star, Mission to Moscow (which insidiously enough attempted to not only justify Stalin’s purges but to get them started here), and that one where Lawrence Olivier is a Russian nautical engineer in England to develop a new kind of propeller. But Steve will surely and rightly say that the war was an exception. We were formal allies at that time.

Letter to Breshznev was a good movie. Life under Thatcher was no picnic either for the working classes.

Ian Fleming hit on a kind of formula for James Bond after a shaky start. Obviously he could not just continue with West good East bad themed stories, and so invented SPECTRE and Bond became more and more like the Thunderbirds.

I think the first James Bond novels were written with an English readership in mind. During post-war 50’s austerity they offered a taste of a luxurious lifestyle and foreign travel to sunny exotic places in an age before cheap jet travel, but when the books and the movies became successful in the US, the stories were tailored more to US tastes.

I am sure that before the end Fleming was sick of Bond and would willingly have killed him off.

Perhaps the enemies of Bond in the next movie will be L.A.P.U.T.I.N. and the movie will be To Russia With Love. The female love interest will be Onya Nies.

The plot to will involve an American Supreme Court Justice who spies for Russia after being blackmailed over a youthful indiscretion, and a plot to destroy the world with a deadly vaccine.

Minor nitpick: the actor who played Napoleon Solo was Robert VAUGHAN.

Rocky IV and Top Gun aren’t really anti-Russian although they are portrayed correctly as our geo-political rivals. Red Dawn was pretty campy that has kind of lived on in an ironical, “aren’t 80s movies fun”sense like Road House and Point Break.

I bet you could come up with more anti-American movies than anti-Russian ones if you wanted to compare the two.

Nah, my recollection is the opposite. Until the 1980s, when there were a series of surprise anti-Communist movie hits appealing to the male audience, American culture tended to go out of its way to avoid portraying the Soviets as irredeemably diabolical.

If American “culture” means Hollyweird, your recollection is correct.

The bad guys were Nazis and boring, bigoted, narrow-minded, intolerant, flyover country white people and of course Macarthyite anti-communists.

The good people … take a guess.

During my Dance Sensation days I always enjoyed encounters with Russian dancers. They were physically beautiful and great dancers. Partner dancing instruction must have been an integral part of their education.

I also like my Fed 2 rangefinder and fondle it often, though it may have been built in Kiev.

And what heterosexual man can resist a Russian aviation documentary?

So, in conclusion, I am skeptical about anything being reported in the popular press right now regarding Russian perfidy.

My formative years occurred after the end of the Soviet Union. I have very vague memories of the Cold War. I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on a 9” TV with my father. He was transfixed by it and didn’t dare get up. That’s how I knew it was a BFD, and that’s also about all I knew about it.

My general experience post-Cold War was that there was an admiration of Russian culture and pity shown towards their population regarding Communism. Russian literature was especially prized. Generally, everyone just seemed happy during the Clinton years that we didn’t have a gun to our heads anymore. I learned more about Hitler and Germany than about Russia during formal schooling. This deficient education seems to contribute towards the tendency to portray Putin as Hitler, rather than, say as Nicholas I.

“Science fiction tended to posit that the Cold War was just a misunderstanding that would blow over: e.g., in Star Trek, navigator Chekov was in training to be a captain himself.“

Nerd alert: In Star Trek the Klingons were proxies for the real “Russians”. In fact, Star Trek VI is a parable about the end of the Cold War.

No mention of the Cold War classic Spies Like Us?

Or Firefox? Man, I am dating myself!!

Obviously, Hollywood was not anti-Communist. To this day, there is no Gulag movie equivalent of something like Sophie’s Choice. That shows you where priorities were. If Hollywood had really wanted to portray the USSR as an evil empire, they could have made a drama about show trials and forced labor camps. As far as I know, the closest they came was Star Trek VI, which gives us a Klingon Gulag.

If Putin loses in Ukraine, probably he’ll soon be ousted and globohomo will absorb the Eastern Block. But if he wins, we are in for Cold War II, complete with its own Top Gun movie (arriving in theaters soon–great timing!). In that case, maybe we’ll see a movie about the Holodomor, or the Hungarian 1956 revolution.

Western discontent with its Soviet enemy of old

Is it really Western discontent as such? Not to put too fine a point on it, but a grand unified theory that has occurred to me about the recent resurgence (or surgence, anyway) of US anti-Russian enmity is that it’s mostly proceeding from an ancient wellspring of Jewish hostility toward all things Slavic.

American culture was far more anti-Russian during the Cold War than the Russian culture was anti-American.

BTW, for a Russian perspective of how the Russians were portrayed by Hollywood, watch the first 5 minutes of this video. Turn on English subtitles.

The rest of the video is an amusing review of the 2018 movie Red Sparrow. It’s worth watching as well if you can spare 40 minutes.

One thing’s for sure. The WaPo had better writers then.

American star Robert Morse as the hero Napoleon Solo

No, Robert Vaughn. Solo once being described by either Illya or Waverly (Leo G. Carroll) as a “Swinger”. “Someone who is manic depressive but not depressed.”

Cold War II would also be a great excuse for a Sidney Reilly renaissance. He was the original Ukrainian working for the West. Maybe Zelenskyyyy can portray him.

My guess is it took generational change–true believers/fellow-travelers dying-off, retiring or just being replaced by younger more American people–for the change to take place.

This process was delayed by the Vietnam debacle–American Cold Waring looking pretty crappy.

But the “reassessment” seeds had been planted with Hungary, the Berlin Wall and the crushing of the Prague Spring, then after our Vietnam angst was beginning to ebb, were watered with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of Solidarity.

Of course, when Soviet thuggery was to be dealt with the template was pretty simple:

the bad guys were the boring, bigoted, narrow-minded, intolerant, flyover country Russian white people–“conservatives” and “reactionaries”–parallel to our own and if we didn’t have them, the global cosmopolitans would shuffle up a world of rainbows and happy trees.

Well, the Physicist and nother Dad pretty much wrote my opinion.

Americans rightfully hated Communism but most (not all) understood that that system was not the idea of the Russian people of the time. I did also wondered why they couldn’t overthrow the whole thing … until I got older and realized how things work. Perhaps the confusion is that Americans said “The Russians” when they meant “The Soviets” and “Russia” referring to the USSR with no idea about the old Russia.

Yeah, and Hollywood is not the culture, but since that’s what the post is about, I will add the 2006 movie The Lives of Others. The Cold War was long over, but this was a realistic depiction – great movie.

There was a period, maybe from 1990 to 2010, when there was hardy anyone in America, even the left, who would defend Communism, and many on the left even made fun of it (a day late and a Ruble short). In “Christmas and Communism”, Peak Stupidity has this old Seinfeld clip:

And there were also pseudo-White Russians like Michael Romanoff, owner of the Romanoff’s Restaurant

Then there are the real, non-former-pants-presser ones, who do actually exist: Michael Ilyinsky, styled Prince Michael Pavlovich Romanov-Ilyinsky, went to my suburban Cincinnati high school five years ahead of me and is the real deal. Good guy.

And of course the White Russians who famously took the Oswalds under their wing in Dallas back in the day, who either were or were not good guys…

I remember this one. You and Steve are right. There was lots of fun made of East German woman weightlifters and the like. Who knew it would NOT BE OK to make fun of American ex-men freaks later on? I could see a Wendy’s commercial in modern Russia …

The original common American idea was to avoid foreign alliances that might embroil us in a war, as Washington mentioned in his farewell address and Jefferson in his inaugural address, and large overgrown permanent standing armies. This lasted until the twentieth century.

Once we started having overseas allies, then their bad guys became our bad guys too. Our eastern seaboard elites were Anglophiles, so the enemies of Great Britain tended to end up being our enemies also. Britain’s main goal was to prevent a dominant continental power. Previously that had been France but by the twentieth century had switched to Germany.

You also had an increasingly leftist artistic and intellectual class in the U.S. in the nineteen thirties. You saw writers like Lillian Hellman and Dalton Trumbo turn on a dime and go from being anti-war to pro-war when Germany and Russia went from being allies to opponents. After the war, the left tried to paint people like Mao and Castro as Jeffersonian democrats who we should support while the increasingly National Review dominated right wanted us intervening on the other side. The old idea that we just shouldn’t be on one side or the other in foreign squabbles and should focus on our own domestic problems practically disappeared.

As for Hollywood and Commies vs. Nazis, for history movies, they mostly skipped the horror of the USSR because they had Communist sympathies and well, Jewish Hollywood and the Nazis …

My Dad introduced us to lots of those WWII movies, but obviously, it was silly to make the villain the Germans in any movie that wasn’t based on WWII times (Die Hard just picked a German guy because of the accent and they were already too PC to do the Libyan terrorist thing, such as in Back to the Future, from 3 years earlier. Oh, and maybe a crack Middle Eastern terrorist wouldn’t be believable, haha!)

This is why the left HATED HATED HATED [/Whisky] Red Dawn. It was finally a movie about the real enemy of the day, and the one that had been for 35 years already. Thing is, the real Commies didn’t have to parachute in. They’d been marching through the Institutions for decades already.

AIACC.

Moscow, Tverskaya Street in 1896

Regarding Rocky and Bullwinkle: Boris and Natasha’s boss was Fearless Leader. Wikipedia describes him as well as I could: “Fearless Leader’s accent seems more in keeping with the Prussian militarist German stereotype. His monocle and sharply-angled features closely resemble Erich von Stroheim and characters from a 1942 anti-Nazi propaganda poster circulated during World War II.[a] He uses some German such as “Achtung” and “schweinhund,” typical of German stereotypes in film and TV.”

There was almost no contact between the USSR and the US economy. As a child I remember Pepsi starting selling stuff in the USSR was considered a triumph of détente. The sale of Belarus tractors was also a big deal at the time. The only thing they could come up with in the 70s was the boycott of the Olympics. These days you can threaten McDonald’s if they do not shut their stores in Russia, which seems stupid as McDonald’s involves Russia paying America for something, but whatever.

I also do not remember the use of FOREIGN AGENTS REGISTRATION ACT as frivolously as it has been done recently.

https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara

https://nypost.com/2022/03/09/who-is-accused-secret-russian-agent-elena-branson/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina

Equating US culture with Hollywood is rather questionable. A large segment of the left was unwilling to condemn the…excesses of Stalin. Another segment argued the US and USSR were really the same. The overlap between those people and leading figures in Hollywood is left as an exercise for the reader. My take is a larger segment of society was not happy with the Russians. Who were we “duck and covering” from?

Re: Tom Clancy. I have to wonder if you or the article authors ever read a Clancy novel? He’s decidedly not anti-Russian. They are sometimes the bad guys, but never in a mindless way and they’re usually pursuing reasonable objectives . One of the catchphrases Clancy has the CIA often use when they figure out the plan is “No one ever said Ivan is stupid.” In some of his books the Russians are portrayed sympathetically; e.g., Sum of all Fears; Red Storm Rising. Heck, Red Storm Rising was about the Soviets attacking NATO, and I came away thinking “that seems reasonable given the circumstances.”

And what about Hunt For Red October, Acchie? Too implausible, in spite of all the Hollywood heavies? That one is getting short shrift in this thread somehow.

Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo

Just a few additional notes. Russians were not sympathetically portrayed in Patton, although Patton himself seems to be going off the rails at that point. Ice Station Zebra‘s message seemed to be moral equivalence between the West and the USSR, with a Russian officer talking a US soldier out of shooting him.

Slightly off topic, but George Kennan was firmly anti-communist, but spoke Russian fluently and liked both Russia and Russians. Anyone who actually fought the Germans in WWII, or who even knew something about the war, had to have a tremendous respect for the Russians;

The “choice” thing is obviously the point, but one aspect of this that makes it work is that everyone–ok almost everyone–naturally finds the big bossy fat lady in charge to be deeply unnatural and repulsive.

Now such women–and “women”–are in charge and busy bossy people around all over the West.

I grew up in mid-20th Century Sea Cliff NY which has a lot of White Russians. Even back then my friends still spoke Russian amongst themselves and at home. They also used different names at home versus outside. For example my best friend John Poushine was “Vanya” at home. Russians build beautiful churches.

Minor correction Robert Vaughn was Napoleon Solo not Robert Morse.

The glamorous female agent was a standard Commie character. Wearing a fur hat and 1963-style kinky boots was enough to tell audiences that she was a bad lot, though she tended to redeem herself by falling for the American hero.

The hit Bond-style TV spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) started out with an American star Robert Morse as the hero Napoleon Solo, but David McCallum’s Russian (or Ukrainian) agent Illya Kuryakin was so popular that he was promoted to co-star.

Robert Vaughn. IIRC, the show was sort of camp.

Ir will be interesting to see how they refocus when they finally realize that the main obstacle to their plans for a Global Reset is in fact China.

Most of them are too busy taking money from the ChiComms to ever realize that. Confuscious Institute, for example.

It is our moral imperative to spread LGBTQWERTY+ freedom to Ukraine, even if we have to fight to the last Ukrainian to do it.

Die Hard just picked a German guy because of the accent and they were already too PC to do the Libyan terrorist thing, such as in Back to the Future, from 3 years earlier.

Actually, I don’t totally agree with you.

Die Hard was based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and the gang in the book was German:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Lasts_Forever_(Thorp_novel)

Don’t waste your time with the book, the main character is much less likeable and the written geography of the action is continually confusing.

+1 on The Lives Of Others and the Martin Cruz Smith books.

1988 was not the height of the Cold War.

The Cold War peaked twice – once in the early ’50s and again in the early ’80s. (In the 1970s, during the era of détente, news articles referred to the Cold War in the past tense.) In both cases tensions eased after a generational change in Soviet leadership – Khrushchev succeeded Stalin and Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko.

Détente, which began with Richard Nixon’s visit to Moscow in May 1971, ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a few days after Christmas in 1979.

A low point in East-West relations came in September 1983 after Soviets shot down a Korean Air 747 near Sakhalin Island. A few weeks later, NATO was conducting a military exercise when the Soviet early-warning system indicated that a nuclear attack was in progress. Low-level officers correctly interpreted the apparent attack as a glitch in the system and chose not to inform their superiors.

This period was also the height of the anti-nuke movement. Hollywood and the news media gave their full support to this crusade, culminating with ABC’s much-hyped airing of The Day After the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Reagan claimed to have been deeply influenced by the widely-seen movie, which depicted the effects of a nuclear attack on Kansas City.

Tensions between Moscow and Washington began to ease shortly after Gorbachev took office in March 1985. Reagan and Gorbachev met at the Geneva summit that November. They failed to reach an agreement at Reykjavik in October 1986 but signed an important treaty in Washington in November 1987. Reagan visited Moscow in May 1988. Gorbachev visited New York in December 1988. (This trip was cut short by the Armenian earthquake.)

The “official” end of the Cold War came in early December 1989, when Gorbachev and Bush the Father met in Malta just days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union lingered on for another two years.

The ABC miniseries Amerika, depicting the plight of American citizens under Soviet occupation, was promoted as the conservative counterpart to The Day After. It debuted in February 1987. By that time relations with the Soviet Union had improved to the point that the show was seen as irrelevant.

OT: Hey Steve, didn’t you have the idea of giving pot shops to blacks? New York State is effectively going to do just that.

https://commercialobserver.com/2022/03/new-yorkers-previous-marijuana-related-convictions-retail-licenses/

This was a war of (Putin’s) choice. There was no compelling reason why he needed to invade Ukraine. Everything was going just fine. No one was planning to invade Moscow.

Isn’t it funny that diplomacy works for every other country EXCEPT Russia. “Why are the other kids always picking on me?”, the bully asks. “It’s their fault that I had to punch them in the nose.”

Putin today has threatened to nationalize all of the companies that have pulled out of the Russian market. Putin views the world of his youth as the ideal time (as many people do) and he is consciously and subconsciously trying to reconstruct the USSR of that era, complete with a grim state owned economy cut off from the world trade system. Soon a pair of Amerikansky blue dzins in Russia will be a prized commodity again. Samizdat literature will make a comeback. Everything old will be new again.

My mother in law once took a Soviet domestic flight during the Communist era, probably a Tu-104. She was going from visiting cousins in Kiev (as it was known in those days) to Moscow. There were no overhead bins, just open racks like on a train (must have been fun during turbulence). The pilots were all ex-military and when the plane got to the end of the runway he pulled the plane into an uncomfortably steep climb. The Soviet jet engines were incredibly noise (the turboprops were deafening). At one point during the flight, a mechanic in coveralls (in Soviet terms an “engineer”)came rushing down the aisle with a screwdriver in hand, which was rather alarming. Later the stewardeskas came down the aisle with a tray full of chicken and plopped a piece onto everyone’s plate. In those days you still got a real meal service on American planes but I guess today a piece of free chicken would be an improvement.

There were a handful of pro-Soviet Hollywood movies during WWII. Paul Johnson says there were only three: Message to Moscow (which portrays Stalin’s show trials as the epitome of justice(, The North Star, and Song of Russia, although there were also some more minor pro-Soviet movies from major studios, with the exception of Paramount.

Don’t forget Days of Glory with Gregory Peck. And I believe it was Mission to Moscow, and it wasn’t just “pro-soviet” – it was pure, full-throated pro-Stalinist propaganda.

The current anti-Russian hysteria is unprecedented. I remember some movies with strong anti-communist themes from the 50s and 60s (The Secret Ways, Man on a Tightrope, Topaz), but none of the anti-communist movies were really anti-russian.

Maybe this is partly due to a general dumbing-down of historical literacy among a whole generation of people who view the World through a lens of comic-book movies and crap-history documentaries of the kind that the “History Network” traffics in – where everything is “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi”. General Patton fought “The Nazis”, etc. Nobody in the actual WWII generation talked that way. They said that they fought “The Germans”.

But aren’t you perhaps over-thinking it, Steve? Isn’t it possible that the current anti-russian fervor owes a lot to a particular group that has an outsized influence in the media, many of whose ancestors left Russia a century ago or so, and has actual holidays commemorating ancient historical grievances? And sure there are hangers-on and domestic knuckle-heads who get swept up in that (like John “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country” McCain).

What is interesting is that that group – which has had an outsized influence on the media over the whole last century (or more) – didn’t seem quite so anti-Russian in the past. Perhaps that is the effect of the fourth and fifth generations stoking up ethnic resentments that even their grand-parents didn’t feel the need to cultivate.

My recollection is that high culture was not hostile and was to the contrary embracing of Russia, whereas low culture was reflexively anti-Russian/Soviet.

There has been something of a reversal recently.

I tried to find polling data for “during” the cold war, but apparently these do not exist. The polls on attitude about Russia begin at the END of the cold war – – around 1991. So, all one can do is examine the movies, novels, and personal anecdotes. My own views were very sympathetic, formed by the details of the Martin Cruz Smith Arkady Renko novels: respectable, resigned people waiting on long lines for rationed food allotments, their cars breaking down, all the while helpless against humiliating, arbitrary and corrupt bureaucrats, …and the same for those dispensing the groceries.

Minor correction Robert Vaughn was Napoleon Solo not Robert Morse.

Robert Morse as a James-Bond like spy would have been pretty funny.

The first Rambo movie featured a Pacific Northwest sheriff’s department as the bad guys. It was pretty faithful to the book and a pretty decent movie. A lot of the early eighties war movies had a theme of Vietnam vets being betrayed by the USG. POWs left to rot in Vietnam, that kind of thing.

What we are seeing now is the intersection of: (a) anti-Russian hysteria; and (b) anti-Western Civilization “woke” hysteria, with anything high culture seen as representing it and therefore open to attack.

Orchestra drops Tchaikovsky for being ‘inappropriate’

The Cardiff Philharmonic removes Tchaikovsky from its program in light of the conflict in Ukraine

https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/551615-orchestra-cancels-tchaikovsky-concert/

(You may need to use the Brave web browser to reach the site)

Completely right about Putin. But, most Russians don’t want that shit of a so-called life again.

Robert Morse as Solo. Hilarious. Morse was the gap toothed comedic singer who starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Camp was kind of in at that time. Batman the TV show was even more campy, not dark like the Batmans of our era. The Joker really was a joker and not a psychopathic mass murderer. The Avengers were also campy. I think that the threat of actual nuclear war in real life was so scary that they preferred to play it light on TV. Also the TV shows of the era were aimed at the massive baby boom audience who were mostly teens or pre-teens. Neither of the UNCLE stars was ghey in real life.

Vaugh is dead. McCallum and Morse are still with us, but it’s a little shocking to see the icons of our youth as wrinkled and gray old men who are barely recognizable.

It’s one thing having Clint Eastwood steal a Russian plane in 1982 at the height of the cold war – you just had to look at a picture of Brezhnev to get the message that the Russkies were bad. But when twenty years later a PC stricken Hollywood find it necessary to replace middle eastern bad guys with the ever lurking Nazis in Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears I must spit in their general direction.

You have to distinguish between the cultural (“Russian”) vs. the political (Communist/Putinist). In high culture, things Russian have always been popular – Russian composers, Russian novelists, Russian ballet, etc.. In low culture, never that I can think of. Americans like hot dogs. They don’t even know what Doktorskaya sausage is. French fries beat kasha every time. Russian culture is just too different from American to be appealing on the mass level. And yet it is not alien enough to be exotic like Japanese culture. Raw fish is cool. Pickled fish (pickled everything!) is strange.

In politics, even though Communism was the party of the working class, in the US (and the UK) it was more appealing to elites than actual working men. Putinism appeals to no one except a few anti-globohomo haters on the far right.

leftists were rooting for the Soviet Union, so obviously no. fun cold war movies were made about fighting the Soviets, that was about as far as any sustained movement went. we got a couple good decades worth of those. in the meantime, literally millions of communists in the US operated freely and did their march thru the institutions.

since the late 1950s, US culture starts to move towards whatever a critical mass of leftists want. most republican politicians are cowards who go out of their way to avoid confronting leftists. or greedy cowards who just want to make money. so there is no effective resistance left, since maybe the late 1980s. those Christian groups in the mid 80s trying to keep the country moral were the last organic, not political party associated thing anybody was ever doing to stop leftists. NRA was highly effective against leftists on their single issue, until about 10 years ago, when NRA effectively collapsed on their own, ending the last well organized resistance to the left on any issue.

Early in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), American scientist Heywood Floyd encounters a group of his Soviet counterparts aboard the space station. They are shown to be on friendly terms. There is no hint of any deep animosity between the two countries.

2010 (1984) features a joint American-Soviet mission to Jupiter against a backdrop of a major confrontation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The characters express their anguish over the prospect of an imminent nuclear war. At one point the director of the American space agency – a Magic Negro, by the way – makes an anguished appeal to God to intervene. The conflict is headed off at the last minute by the miracle of the Monolith.

The political crisis was the invention of director Peter Hyams – it was not part of the Arthur C. Clarke novel. Evidently Hyams felt that it would add dramatic tension. (He was wrong.)

At one point a character is seen reading Time magazine. The cover of the magazine shows the American president (Clarke) and the Soviet premier (Stanley Kubrick).

While we’re on the subject of bad science-fiction movies, Meteor (1979) goes to great lengths to portray Soviet scientists as level-headed voices of wisdom who are only too happy to collaborate with their American counterparts on a matter of great importance to humanity. Their main antagonist (besides the big rock hurtling toward the earth) is an American general – a paranoid control freak who’d rather let the world be destroyed by the meteor than allow a group of Ruskies access to a restricted area.

A major plot point is that the Soviets and the Americans must save the world together by firing all of their orbital missiles at the meteor. Naturally, the two governments are reluctant even to admit that such missiles exist. The American president (Henry Fonda) manipulates his Soviet counterpart by publicly announcing that the missile systems were deployed for the purpose of defending the planet against threats from outer space.

In response, the Soviet president remarks (in Russian): “The Americans have elected an alchemist as president. He turns hypocrisy into diplomacy.”

Fonda was an anti-nuke activist in real life. It’s ironic to see him featured in a movie that features such weapons as the saviors of mankind.

Natalie Wood plays an alluring Soviet translator who kills time by flirting with brilliant astronomer Sean Connery. At one point Connery makes an impassioned plea for her to defect:

You’d like it here, you know. We’ve got everything. Power cuts, strikes, unemployment, race riots, and a terrific crime rate.

Wood is gracious enough not to point out that there are no such problems in the workers’ paradise.

Another 1979 release, The Concorde … Airport ’79, is one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies ever made. The plot is that an American-owned Concorde on a flight from Washington to Paris and Moscow encounters difficulties en route.

The movie makes frequent references to the upcoming Moscow Olympics. (Obviously, this was before Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan and Carter’s decision to boycott the Games.) Among the travelers on the ill-fated flight are a group of Soviet wrestlers returning home after a goodwill tour of the United States. Their coach, a big goofy bear of a man played by Avery Schreiber, brings his deaf daughter along for the ride. (Oddly, he communicates with her using American Sign Language.)

When asked about his impressions of the United States, he shrieks with delight, “So many children! The wonderful, happy children!”

(Ah, dem Ruskies are a sentimental lot.)

Another Soviet character is a lovely figure skater who falls in love with a handsome American TV reporter. At one point they have an intimate encounter in a hot tub. Her disagreeable old bag of a coach (Mercedes McCambridge, who did the voice of the devil in The Exorcist) does her best to derail the relationship.

The big baddie in this movie is wealthy industrialist Robert Wagner, whose girlfriend (Susan Blakely), also a TV reporter, discovers that he has been making illegal weapons sales. After she boards the Concorde with a cache of incriminating documents, Wagner dispatches ballistic missiles and rogue fighter jets to destroy the aircraft and silence her before she can broadcast news of his treachery. Those dastardly capitalists!

Precisely..!!

I think that the changes (or at least my impressions of the changes) in the narratives concerning China are telling. During the 60’s, it seemed that everything you heard about China in the media was bad. For example, they “Assanged” real journalists, they “January sixed” dissidents, etc.. Then, after they became the great replacement for the American workforce, all the news out of China was good. Recently, however, it is clear that the gang that runs China (as well as the gang that runs Russia and, of tremendous importance, possibly even the gang that runs India) is not going to easily submit to the gang that runs the West (evidently, it takes a gang to effectively resist a gang). So now all the news out of China is bad. We hear about how they treat the Uighurs in the same way that some in our power structure long to treat our deplorable right wing “domestic terrorists.” We hear about poor working conditions, pollution, etc.. Funny how that seems to work.

Another interesting cultural event was the 1960 tour of the US by Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter in which he played concertos with a couple of different orchestras and gave a series of eight different solo recitals in Carnegie Hall–all in the space of a couple of weeks. This was, of course, in the middle of the Cold War and there was no mention whatsoever of “cancelling” Richter, probably the greatest pianist alive at the time with the possible exception of Vladimir Horowitz.

The Russians as such were never the popular culture villains in the sense the Germans were. There were anti-Communist movies in the 1950s in which the Soviet Union was the enemy.

From Russia with Love (1963), the best James Bond movie, had an air of cold war tension. In Fleming’s novel, SMERSH was the villain. In the movie six-seven years later, SPECTRE was.

“But Fleming himself chose in 1961 to replace SMERSH [Death to Spies!] with the international apolitical SPECTRE”

SPECTRE was a stand-in for the Nazi International that appeared, with British and American connivance, after the war. SS superstar Otto Skorzeny was the nominal head of the web of corporate fronts and financial entities that comprised Die Spinne. Wernher von Braun — glamorous, great-haired and famously of NASA — was a charter member of the Nazi International. Allan Dulles hired Skorzeny to kill JFK. In Fleming’s novel Moonraker — nothing like the “silly” film with handsome bath Bond Roger Moore — the Nazi International is a subtle backdrop.

The totalitarian Nazi (not Commie) mindset still resides within the flesh shells of Western political leadership. That’s what Putin meant by “de-Nazification.”

Some of our culture czars back then were sympathetic to the ideals the Soviets were espousing so they sometimes went easy on the Russians, and particularly the regular Russian man on the street.
Today all of our culture czars have gone full Jack D on the Russians.
– The Russians are not allowing gay pride parades or drag Queen story hours.
– Western oligarchs are no longer allowed to do Yeltsin-era plundering of Russia. Only selected native Russian oligarchs are allowed to loot the country.
– Many Russians are openly practicing Christianity. When the Soros sponsored subversive group Pussy Riot disrupted church services they were not only stopped but some of them did prison sentences. Most Westerners wouldn’t have seen this, but at the beginning of the annual Victory Day military parade Defense Minister Shoigu even kicked the parade off by standing in his limo at the entrance to Red Square and solemnly crossing himself. Horrors.
– Many of of our culture czars are suddenly remembering those stories of how their Great-Grandmother was raped by Cossacks and Great-Grandfather had his usury business ruined by the Czar.
-The Russians have escalated the Ukrainian Civil War and invaded Ukraine itself causing the death of non-Russians.
– Despite all those Central Asians and Caucasians living in Russia, the country is still too “Hideously White”.

Isn’t it funny that diplomacy works for every other country EXCEPT Russia. “Why are the other kids always picking on me?”, the bully asks. “It’s their fault that I had to punch them in the nose.”

lmao that isn’t how bullies think. It’s more like “I’m gonna take this twerp’s lunch money because I’m hungry and it’s funny to me”.

You know, kind of how the US government and Globocorporate America behave.

Yes, Camp was in during the mid-60s. The Man From Uncle TV show caught on with the boomers circa 1965.

The Batman show was called Camp in that “it is so bad it’s good.”

“The ABC miniseries Amerika”

I was discussing this teenage cultural artifact with my writer friend. Utilizing the villains of today — Western oligarchs, Steve’s friends in Science — something similarly stirring can be be put in script form. And there it will remain, in script form. Even if I could get the great and elderly Kris Kristofferson to play the wise old warrior living in the mountains role. The heroes and villains of the Hollywood Dream Factory just don’t comport with the outlook of me and my writer friend.

This vapid WaPo girl reporter Roxanne Roberts is almost 70 years old.

She’s a panelist on NPR’s ‘Wait wait…don’t tell me’ which is the perfect phrase for lefty sophisticates who think they know everything. But this sloppy nonsense is the best she could come up with. You’d think a lady of her certain age might have read a Le Carre novel or two, or at least a Robert Ludlum. It goes without saying she’s never seen Red Dawn.

Never mind that Hollywood and American pop culture has been producing pro-Commie garbage for as long as there have been Commies. There’s an argument to be made that their disillusionment with the USSR came when they moved away from Stalinism.

But at least liberals in the 80s had a sense of humor about anti-Russkie silliness, unlike now when they talk about Trump and Tucker being Russian agents with a straight face. And give me Joe McCarthy over Max Boot and Victoria Nuland and the other neocon psychopath war profiteers any day.

HUAC found actual Soviet agents deep in our government, and destroyed the American nazi movement for that matter. John Brennan with his top security clearance actually voted for Gus Hall! In 1980!

These lunatics hate patriotic Americans as much as they hate Russians, if not more so.

The hit Bond-style TV spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) started out with an American star Robert Morse as the hero Napoleon Solo

Ha- a bit on the nose? That’s like naming your kick-a$$ main hero Caesar Einstein, or Dylan Attila Geronimo, or…

D’oh!

Let me correct myself: the Cold War peaked thrice – in the late ’40s/early ’50s, after the Berlin crisis and the Soviet atomic-bomb tests, with tensions easing after Stalin’s death; in the early ’60s, after the U2 spy incident and the Cuban Revolution, with tensions easing after peaking during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and in the early ’80s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with tensions easing after Gorbachev took office.

There was a brief thaw in September 1959, when Khrushchev made a two-week tour of the United States. (He sought permission to visit Disneyland but was turned down, allegedly due to security concerns.) For a time the superpowers seemed on the verge of détente. But then in May 1960 the Soviets shot down an American spy plane (the aforementioned U2) and Eisenhower canceled his planned trip to Moscow. Relations continued to deteriorate after Kennedy took office and approved (but refused to support) the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961. The nadir came in October 1962 during the Missile Crisis.

In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. It is striking that this crime, (allegedly) carried out by a man who had recently lived in the Soviet Union, had no serious immediate effect on American-Soviet relations. There was no public outcry against the dastardly Ruskies.

If you believe the official story, Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the U.S.S.R., returned home with a Russian wife in tow, and then brutally murdered the president in cold blood … and the American establishment accepted at face value (more or less) the Soviets’ claims that they had nothing to do with it.

The had the best uniforms.

Putin is increasingly described as “rogue” because columnists are drawing upon the public’s conception of what a rogue wave is. But actually, the definition of a rogue wave is that it is at least twice as tall as the surrounding waves. Thus, a wave that is 2 feet tall qualifies as a rogue wave if the reference waves are one foot tall.

No it wasn’t. You are just Russian so you get really weepy and mad about slights but think it’s ok to endlessly shit talk others.

They’re still at it. The group that runs “The Doomsday Clock” moved it closer to midnight under Trump for “reasons”, but declined to move it again despite news that Putin moved the Russian nuclear forces to a higher alert status.

I loved the Sidney Reilly miniseries with Sam Neill. Lots of skullduggery. Leo McKern playing Sir Basil Zaharoff was so much fun!

“from Cannon”

The goofy Chuck Norris vehicle Invasion USA is an overripe Reaganite jelly bean that goes well with a beer bong.

When the Soros sponsored subversive group Pussy Riot disrupted church services they were not only stopped but some of them did prison sentences.

Pussy Riot came to prominence in 2012 when five members of the group burst into Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral to protest ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Their protest — the performance of a song they described as a “punk prayer” — took place as Putin was campaigning for his return to the presidency.

Alyokhina and another member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were convicted on a charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in a penal colony.

Yep, 2 years in a Russian penal colony for a brief political protest. Seems fair to me. Apparently, one of Soros’s sons once had a Pussy Riot member as a guest to his Hamptons home. This makes Pussy Riot “Soros sponsored” in the RT crowd playbook. What kind of sponsorship do you need to sing in a church?

Based on your comment, I don’t think too many Jews today are anti-Russian based on what happened 120+ years ago but apparently there are some people here who are anti-Semitic based upon some kind of even older hatred. Your statements are more telling about your own anti-Semitism than they are about any imaginary anti-Russian feeling on the part of Jews. If this thing was based on things that happened in the past, Jews would have more reason to hate Ukrainians than they would to hate Russians. Cossacks themselves were more Ukrainian than Russian and since the Pale of Settlement was in Poland and Ukraine, any unpleasant family memories of interaction with “Russians” more likely involved Russian speaking Ukrainians. When my mother was exiled to Siberia, the Russian people there had literally never seen a Jew before in their life.

My mother’s experience in Russia came before the Soviets took an anti-Semitic turn in the late Stalin period. She experienced little anti-Semitism by the Soviets. They treated everyone shittily. Most of the people who were exiled along with her to Siberia were non-Jewish Polish citizens. The Soviets didn’t really care what religion you were or weren’t when they arrested you – they would falsely arrest anybody regardless of race, creed or color.

Dalton Trumbo was a talented writer with a strong tendency to subordinate his talent to the Communist party line.

He suppressed Johnny Got His Gun from 1941 to 1945. In 1937 he was anti-war and it was OK to publish it, but in June of 1941 he became very pro-war because the Soviet Union was under attack. He admitted so in the preface of the re-print.

He did the script for Spartacus, a truly great sword & sandal epic. Trumbo was blacklisted, Spartacus did a lot to breakdown the blacklist. Ostensibly, it was an adaptation of Howard Fast’s self-published novel. Fast claimed the book was too leftist to find a publisher. I think it was just too boring (could not finish it). Trumbo did Fast a big favor by ignoring his book. I think Fast had renounced Communism by that point anyway.

One of Trumbo’s earlier novel/film works is The Remarkable Andrew filmed with Brian Donleavy as the ghost of Andrew Jackson and William Holden as his 1940s descendant. Apparently Ol’ Hickory comes back to earth to tell his descendant that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement is good thing.

Thanks.

You know, if you “Copy image address” from the context menu, you post the memes directly here, rather than just linking them:

I dunno, she was always a hottie!

https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/r__/images/2/2f/Natasha_ftale.png/revision/latest?cb=20161019150956&path-prefix=rockyandbullwinkle

It always struck me as a bad omen, the Hollywood cliché that the first thing these highly trained, committed, and lethal Russian alpha females wanted to do was to jump into bed with some sloppy American Clark Griswold type. There is a big blind spot there that affects many aspects of American culture. In retrospect, you can see it as America forecasting its own decline.

Dudley Moore’s Arthur is an almost exact copy of the great Jack Lemmon playing Prince Hoepnick.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jack+lemon+the+great+race&atb=v314-6&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DKzbP9VIh-IM

“*tried every possible diplomatic option but kept being rejected by the West*”

If your “diplomatic option” is so pathetically lame that a basket of Victoria Nuland’s pastries is enough to send the Ukrainians running towards the West, you got some pretty awful diplomacy. You want to blame someone? Look WITHIN.

I mean, not everyone is convinced by “diplomatic options” like these:

(Admittedly, it was never made clear who dosed Ukraine’s President with dioxin, but if everyone assumes it was the KGB/FSB, or their holdovers , and subsequent polonium and poison-umbrella incidents only confirm the suspicion, well, there’s your “diplomacy” problem right there. Trying to get away from that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable course of action.)

In fact, Star Trek VI is a parable about the end of the Cold War.

To quote Spock in the film: “There’s an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China.”

Russians!

Looks like those Europeans are looking at those Russkie soldiers marching through Ukraine and thinking… yeah, we better do something to make ourselves less palatable to Putin and friends.

Some comments on the YT:

The interest towards reservist courses, rifle courses etc has surged within two weeks in Finland.
I’ve heard lots of lamenting over not getting gun permits years ago – we need a separate permit for every gun.

Living in Brno, my local shooting range is providing free training/firearm familiarization to Ukranians. Lots work here and many are returning to fight. Firearm ownership and practice is quite popular here and in Slovakia. I’m sure this is a trend that will increase. Slovakia in particular has the type of terrain (mountains) to make the kind of startergy discussed in this video viable

Anecdotally, but a friend in Germany who works for the city mentioned that he’s received more gun permit applications in the past month than he did in all of 2021.

It has even here my left leaning father abhors my ownership of assault style weapons (AR15 -AK) and with the advent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and seeing civilians take arms has re lit his interest and desire to own firearms again.

—

In Czech republic we have new official government-acredited training programs (taught by private training companies, like CZ or HardTask) specifically for civilians. Training for various things:
MV101 – (Defense Basics) First aid, calling the police after a defensive incident, legal considerations, everyday situational awareness/avoiding conflict
MV102 – (Shooting Basics) shooting basics, shooting and movement, FXSimunition training
MV 201 – (Situational Basics – civilian context) Active shooter response, preventing/stopping a terrorist attack
MV301 – (Situational Basics – military context) 300M long range shooting, ballistic vest use, team tactics

Only requirements are a weapons license (which is about as difficult to acquire as a regular driver’s license – so not great, not terrible)
The government then sponsors fully-trained individuals with yearly ammo donations, forever.
We established these programs about 6 months ago, so not because of Ukraine – but now more countries will join…

Speaking of alleged microwave attacks on Americans overseas, Russkies were bombarding the US Embassy in Moscow decades back to power a passive microwave resonant cavity listening device.

[3:35]

I happen to have been watching a stack of old Man From UNCLEs the past few months and musing on how Ilya became such a popular character. So sad we’ve taken a huge step backward now, wiping out decades of cultural detente.

UNCLE generally did not dwell on the Cold War — THRUSH was the enemy, pretty much a typical global corporation, just intent on ruling the world rather than selling diapers or burgers. A retiring THRUSH agent even mentions the nice health benefits and stock options, and a common trope was THRUSH agents battling each other for promotions and favor from “THRUSH Central”

Russia is hardly ever mentioned, in fact. The only cultural contrast or tension between Solo and Kuryakin is that Ilya is all business and does all the dirty work, while Napoleon is busy wooing the babes

Opinion among the respectable, “too-proud-to-fight” post-Puritans and those who aspired to their cultural cachet was that America had no standing to condemn the Soviet Union, that Western capitalism had its own issues, and that the future would ultimately belong to some syncretic social system that managed to transcend both- i.e. STAR TREK’S quasi-socialistic technocracy. RED DAWN, ROCKY IV, TOP GUN, etc. were considered gauche, jingoistic, and embarrassing among the East Coast literati.

This attitude was captured in an early SIMPSONS episode, where even communist Albania (one of the weirdest, most f’d up members of the Warsaw Pact- basically North Korea on the Adriatic) still had lessons we’d be wise to heed-

What has been shocking to a lot of us who were Cold Warriors back in the day is that it turns out that a significant fraction of our ruling overclass and sycophants of the overclass did not actually hate Communism but really just hate Russians.

Agreed. It’s pretty surreal. People who would throw you in a re-education camp for suggesting blacks have higher rates of criminality have these weirdly bitter grievances in their heads against Russians.

I remember being mystified when all of a sudden the French became “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” when they wouldn’t join the US in a pretextual war in Iraq. The French can be a lot of things, but they are not a cowardly or pacifistic people.

Same with World War I propaganda, where the US government had Americans believing that Germans were all thick-lipped, hairy gorillas.

Speaking of stereotypes:

Ukraine really is hilariously corrupt.

Hard Bass School will always have a prominent place in my workout mix:

Did you mention the most crucial Cold War series: Mission Impossible. Russia or any other country was never mentioned by name, but the IMF Team’s sting operations were often aimed at regime change in “small but crucial” obviously Balkan or Eastern European nations. Or protecting a pro-Western leader from nefarious would-be tyrants in his midst.

The bad-guy tyrant would never be assassinated, by the way, but the IMF plot would psychologically lure him into humiliating and discrediting himself. If series creator Bruce Geller and his writers were coming up with this stuff in the late 60s, you have to wonder if the US had real IMF teams, and just how far would they go?

Oddly enough, while MI was obsessed with Eastern Europe, Peter Graves and his team never tangled with China. Hawaii 5-0 on the other hand was obsessed with Chinese attempts at world conquest, and of course McGarrett’s main foil was the Chinese super-spy Wo Fat

“Something strange to me is how the term ‘oligarch’ has come to refer almost exclusively to any wealthy Russian.”

Maybe because they buy up big obnoxious yachts and well known football clubs in the West more so than Chinese or Iranian oligarchs do? And I’m not surprised, given the sanctions now targeting Russian oligarchs, they dominate the term as of late.

However, if you type “oligarchy countries” into a search engine, you see things like this:

Several modern countries could be described as oligarchies, including Russia, China, and arguably even the United States.

So you want to call Soros or Zuckerberg or Bezos oligarchs as opposed to “mega-rich”? Fine. They didn’t get their fortunes by being friendly with the President-for-life who is the real owner of their loot, so there are some “cultural differences” to consider, but whatever works. I certainly wouldn’t dispute it.

They treated everyone shittily. Most of the people who were exiled along with her to Siberia were non-Jewish Polish citizens. The Soviets didn’t really care what religion you were or weren’t when they arrested you – they would falsely arrest anybody regardless of race, creed or color.

They were equal opportunity paranoiacs.

Yep, 2 years in a Russian penal colony for a brief political protest. Seems fair to me.

Was it any less egregious than the January 6 protest? What kind of sentences are those people getting? How long is the guy who “desecrated” Nancy Pelosi’s desk getting?

Communism didn’t fail. It’s just never been tried.

Reds (1981) was a big hit, which had obvious pro-commie sympathies.

Yes, that was a surprising omission from Steve’s list of counter-examples.

And it wasn’t just pro-commie sympathies, it was essentially commie propaganda—or more particularly, propaganda for the special Westerners who were commies and commie apologists.

It won a slew of awards from the film community, even as recently as 2008. Nevertheless, it was a pretty crappy film. It had no sympathetic—or even interesting—characters. Sour-pussed shrew Diane Keaton was a strikingly repugnant leading lady. A lot of the dialog is written in jarringly anachronistic late-1970s lower-Manhattanisms, which somewhat gives away the sources and motives of the screenwriters.

The movie unwittingly demonstrates how the classical leftist/communist movement was so intellectually vacuous and socially destructive: it portrays fashionable anarchy, sexual corruption, moral hypocrisy, and political obtuseness with an almost touching naivety that the filmmakers believe that they are depicting something praiseworthy.

It also confirms the rightwing insight that prominent journalists have long exploited the moral cover of being “objective observers” when they were in fact always rabid activists for deeply unpopular and highly destructive causes.

(Amusingly, this movie promoting communist heroes for the laboring classes was delayed by problems with labor unions, and was ultimately only rescued from financial ruin by a sweetheart loan from Barclays Bank as part of a tax-shelter plan.)

So it is a meaningful historical document in the sense Steve describes: a document not of the time and place it purports to portray, but a document of the place and time in which it was made—Western lefty bien-pensants in the late stage of Communism. Perhaps somehow aware of the impending collapse of their hollow worldview, they needed to commit their vision to film as a lasting justification before the jig was up. Unfortunately for them, with hindsight the justification looks just as stupid and worthless as the movement it was meant to justify.

Once the media got around to having bad people involved in running communist states, they need to describe such people:

Officially approved terms:
“right wing”, “hard liner”, “conservative”

Unapproved terms:
“devoted communist”, “rent-seeking bureaucratic parasite”, “left wing”

In the comedy Heartbreakers, Sigourney Weaver played a con artist pretending to be Russian “Olga” needing a green card to stay in the US, and tried to con rich old tobacco heir billionaire (played by Gene Hackman) into marrying her so she could take all his money when he dies. This one scene where she played an American pretending to be Russian singing an American song about Russia with a Russian accent is classic, her accent is spot on:

My vague recollection is that Ludlum was more into conspiracy theories, but I could be wrong.

Ludlum wrote WAY more about conspiracy theories than about evil Russians. In the The Matarese Circle a KGB agent sacrifices himself to save our American hero and his girl-friend. The bad guys are an evil cabal. The assassin Carlos the Jackle is the bad guy for the Bourne Identity. Lots of conspiracies. Very few US vs Russia.

I would add another thing, the Russians confiscated property belonging to Jewish billionaire gangster Ihor Kolomoisky after they annexed Crimea in 2014. Kolomoisky is alleged to be the real ruler of Ukraine.

You just don’t take a Jewish billionaire’s property. That’s a literal pogrom, a Shoah, and means the world must end.

So, in conclusion, I am skeptical about anything being reported in the popular press right now regarding Russian perfidy.

You mean, after the last two years past six years two decades you’re skeptical of popular press reporting regarding Russian perfidy? No way!

but it’s a little shocking to see the icons of our youth as wrinkled and gray old men who are barely recognizable.

I’m a lot younger than you, but it’s very shocking (and unpleasant) to see how old Patrick Stewart looks in the Picard show. He’s ten years younger than William Shatner, but if you saw the two men standing together you’d think it was the other way around.

Can you fly a propeller aircraft all the way from Mt. Rushmore to the Soviet Union?

The 28th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, based at Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota, used to do that before U2s took over the job. Flying B-36s, which had six — count ’em! — propellers, with a much lighter wing loading than the MiGs that tried to intercept them, at their 55,000-foot cruising altitude all they had to do was make a few gentle S turns to cause the MiGs to stall out. It was the good old days before SAMs, of course.

I haven’t seen all the movies you mention, but I did see The Russians are coming! and it depicted the Russians as a bunch consumer-goods-deprived swell guys who meant no harm and it was the Americans who were a bunch of fraidy cats scared of red boogymen. Generally, it seems the Cold War was depicted as a sort of misunderstanding caused by American warmongers. The Russians were really harmless. But them krauts. Hoo boy. Every one a Nazi and bad to the bone!

Back when Russians were communists, they were the bad guys. Now that we are the communists and Russians turned into conservatives, they’re plain evil.
For American liberals, Stalin was just a new dealer in a rush but today Putin is a Nazi on the move. Although there are more real Nazis in Ukraine than anywhere else. Go figure.

The character Ivan Denko IIRC was not a Russian – he was from another one of the Soviet Republics but I could be remembering that wrong.

I forget what republic he was from but when he’s asked if he’s Russian he replies with a terse, “Soviet”.

Of course Hollywood was soft on the Reds. After all, many of their relatives were hard core commies, and didn’t we just love old uncle Mortie.
They even financed an old folks home for Party members, LA’s Horizon House.

Re. Reds: inside baseball is that Beatty made the movie because he had the hots for Julie Christie (Red) at the time.
I know I would too.

A diplomatic option for decades was to quit expanding NATO. Who in the US voted for for an alliance with an enlarged collection of 30 Countries?

Russia said for years that they wouldn’t tolerate NATO in Ukraine. The US is incapable of tolerating a non aligned Ukraine. They refuse to abandon this objective.

The US bent to German pressure/realism to delay the admission of Ukraine, but never once agreed to stop inviting Ukraine to apply.

And repeated this on Nov 10, 2021.

https://www.state.gov/u-s-ukraine-charter-on-strategic-partnership/

Alliances may be said to be benign, but one of the causes of WW 1 is commonly said to be entangling alliances.

It’s like the ‘blob’ is addicted to this fantasy. Ukraine was made a strategic partner….junior member of NATO. And we are heavily sanctioning Russia, an extremely hostile act. Not war, but the next best thing.

Sadly, that seems to be the opinion of the under-30 crowd, judging by Twitter and Reddit

The Man From UNCLE was much more serious in its first season, I think. Then the Batman show was a huge hit and they realised that David McCallum was extremely popular with teenage girls. It should be said that “camp” in the sixties-TV sense didn’t mean homosexual, but jokey and colourful and gimmicky.

As I’ve said before, it’s not an accident that the words Soviet, communist, and Stalin do not appear anywhere in the dialog of the movie Payton.

I remember watching that Rocky in the theatres as a young boy and thinking that Ivan Drago would have beat the fuck out of Rocky IRL.

They didn’t make Drago ugly and unlikeable — they made him a a total savage badass whom you wouldn’t want to meet your girlfriend b/c she might jump ship instantly.

My guess is that Dolph Lungren got more tail than he could handle after that movie.

So much for anti-Communist stereotypes.

PS Decades later I found myself eating in a hip Italian place in Venice Beach — I look over to my right, and who is dining two tables away with a mega LA babe 30 years younger than him and is looking incredibly fit for his age?

My man Dolph.

I read it. It’s not that he was unlikable, it’s that he was flawed. But I agree it’s a rare occurrence where the movie was better then the book.

I think you are very confused as to the time line. As long as the Soviet Union existed, Communists were never called “right wing” or “conservative” (sometimes they might have been called “socially conservative” because Soviets were not into hippie type things) – that would have been too confusing.

And in those days “Cosmopolitan” was, in America, the name of a magazine and a cocktail and in the USSR a code word for “Jew”.

It was only after Communism fell that KGB men like Putin were recharacterized as men of the right rather than the left although Putin himself seems not to have changed his ideology at all. Late Soviet Communism was more about Russian chauvinism than it was about the original Soviet spirit of internationalism and after it fell, Putin continued as a Russian nationalist. Communism was just a skin suit that the Russian nationalists wore and it was easily shed when it no longer suited them.

There’s an allegorical Cold War ep from the original Trek as well — the “West” has apparently lost a war, not to the Russians but to the Chinese. It’s apparently been a messy war, since the whites are now dressed like cavemen and the Asians are dressed like yak-herders with rifles. It’s “The Omega Glory” and there’s some surprisingly patriotic malarkey toward the end.

Hollywood was clearly sympathetic to the Soviet communists, but not really the Russians themselves.

I guess its one of those mysteries that just defies any deeper analysis.

What Russia really needs is a coalition of the willing,. This adds credibility.
“List of countries
On March 18, 2003, the State Department made public a list of 31 countries that participated in the US-led coalition: Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.[9]

On March 20, 2003, the White House released a list with the following additions: Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Kuwait, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Mongolia, Palau, Portugal, Rwanda, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Uganda.[9][2] Panama was added to the list the next day.[2] In April 2003, Angola, Tonga and Ukraine were included in the list, bringing the number of allied nations to 49 (including the United States).[2] In October or November 2004, Costa Rica was dropped from the list, so that there were 48 nations left”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
ki/Coalition_of_the_willing#:~:text=The%20term%20coalition%20of%20the,led%20by%20the%20United%20States.

But;Russia needs Hillary and Obama. With those two Russia could start shiit anywhere and no one care.
“Speaking at the National Defense University, Obama used his first televised address since military operations began in Libya nine days ago to outline a moral rationale for intervention in civil conflicts such as the push underway to topple Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-us-had-responsibility-to-act-in-libya/2011/03/28/AF6fkFrB_story.html

What Coalition? Don’t need no stinking coalition.
Russia needs better propaganda headed up by the NY Times and CNN. Because when Obama went into Libya, Uganda and Syria, it was humanitarian. But the coalition would give Russia’s Obama Hillary team ooomph.

Lara Craft

Yep, 2 years in a Russian penal colony for a brief political protest.

There are enhancements for disorderly conduct disrupting a religious service in New York law as well. Two years might be de trop, but time in prison or corporal punishment is certainly appropriate.

The French can be a lot of things, but they are not a cowardly or pacifistic people.

Their performance during the 2d world war rather damaged their reputation. See John Derbyshire on his father’s assessment of the French he’d dealt with personally during his World War I service.

To further the larger point, that US pop culture in general has been vaguely anti-communist, almost neutral toward the USSR in negativity, as opposed to how Hollywood felt vs the Nazis, one only has to look at the James Bond films made during late ’70’s and early ’80’s: The Spy Who Loved Me, (co-starring a Soviet spy), For Your Eyes Only, and Octopussy. These films totally embraced the notion of Detente, then popular with Western foreign policymakers. The not so subtle point was that the Soviets, or at least some of them, could be reasoned with not to plunge the world into a war.

And in the ’80’s, the Western left had, what the late broadcaster Rush Limbaugh coined, a “Gorbasm”. Michail Gorbachev was voted humanitarian of the year in one poll, and was considered to be as popular (if not more among the US’s elites) than President Reagan. This fact was directly mentioned in a throwaway line in one of the late ’80’s smash police hits, The Naked Gun.

Younger Americans tend to forget now, but Gorbachev among the US’s elites was greatly respected and held in high esteem. In anything, it was Gorbachev who was deemed to be the sane, well reasoned, and respected one. The one world leader who wouldn’t make unreasonable demands or start hot wars around the globe. Glasnost and Perestroika became household worlds that were meant to express US-USSR mutual understanding and perhaps, usher in a new world of harmony and peace.

Glasnost and Perestroika went out the window ca.2000.

Putin has been viewed as something different, although the comparison to Hitler didn’t begin until roughly about ten yrs ago, around the time of the first Ukrainian unpleasantness.

Ultimately it must be concluded that the Western elites have never held communism (which is another form of globalism, albeit in a bowdlerized form) in total contempt. What they appear to hold in contempt is nationalism, which in their eyes is what Putin represents. Not a part of a New World Order, or a co-globalist seeking similar goals, but a throwback; a nationalist seeking to look out for his nation’s defined goals at the expense of the world’s consensus.

Hence in the Western elites minds, ultra-nationalism (specifically a Caucasian nation that has great influence) is the problem. And the only equivalent analogy that they can use is to compare Putin to Hitler, as the penultimate example of nationalism run amok.

So ultimately the West was never anti-Soviet or anti-Communist, since those are ideologies. They are now, however, anti-Russian, which is an actual nation with an actual people group. And one that explicitly rejects the New World Order of globalism.

>What has been shocking to a lot of us who were Cold Warriors back in the day is that it turns out that a significant fraction of our ruling overclass and sycophants of the overcclass did not actually hate Communism but really just hate Russians.

I think it is more subtle than the specter of Alexander III in Putin for the Jews or “Slavs are a bunch of primitives” for everybody else, although it’s not hard to detect some of that as well. Go back far enough, and you could easily replace Russians with the more culturally close Germans from the same types of people: well before 1933, or even 1917.

What seems to really distress our elites are when a few factors combine together:

1) They physically look like them. Although you’ll never get them to admit it nowadays-I think this is unconscious-non-white countries are simply not held to the same standards. Look at what Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, and China get away with, for crying out loud.

I think the reason our elites were more distressed by the Germans than the Japanese (it’s especially visible in the 1930s), in stark contrast to the American people as a whole, boiled down to this too. You expected “more”. At least back then people were more aware and open about it.

This isn’t as illogical as it seems: our government is, after all, dominated by geriatrics who had formative experiences well before the 1960s, and people who proclaim cosmopolitanism as a virtue and show theirs off typically are parochial in the same way that teens who are obsessed with flaunting their sexuality to the sticks-in-the-mud are usually virgins.

2) They are opting out of their preferred ideology for not just the US, but the world. This has roots in the progressivism of the pre-WWI era, with its universalistic claims upon humanity.

3) They pose a credible threat, geopolitically. This is where Russia differs from, say, Poland (and you can’t accuse Warsaw of Russophilia!) or Hungary, who got a lot of the same MSM treatment as Russia in 2010s, but without the same shrillness.

So you have a white country that has decided to completely opt out of the progressive religion-and has thousands of nukes, effective intelligence services, and a man in charge from those intelligence services who very clearly holds our elites in total existential contempt, if not horror and fear.

As a side note: when you simultaneously overestimate the threat posed before the war and underestimate the threat posed during the war by the enemy largely due to cultural contempt, things seldom end well.

excellent post

Let’s not forget Rambo III (1988), where Stallone takes on the Soviets.

You have to give Rambo/Stallone credit for being much more evolved and advanced for a pretty crappy action hero. He genuinely didn’t see race or color. Rambo took on American cops (well before BLM! Lol!), the Vietnamese, the Russians, Mexicans, and pretty much whoever else wanted to get some.

>Ukraine really is hilariously corrupt.

I’ve never been, so I can’t really confirm this, but they don’t seem especially bad by the standards of the developing world. In most of the former USSR-the Baltics are the exception-corruption is a fact of life in a way that Westerners often have a hard time grasping, but this doesn’t make them unique or worse than other parts of the world. (People in Vietnam can be baffled when relatives in the diaspora tell them they actually trust the police in America or Germany or wherever, to take one example, or Pakistanis stressing the fact that *any* NGO money is going to end up in the wrong pockets while doing nothing but cementing America’s image as an exporter of godlessness and sexual perversion.)

The problem with this, of course, is that “not especially bad by standards of the developing world” still means that you should expect a healthy amount of any money you give them to be embezzled, and things like Hunter Biden to be par for the course. If the American people had any idea about the corrupt things our elites, corporate as well as political, have done with the Chinese going back to the 90s, and the attention span to focus on that, we’d be having demands for treason trials right now.

“A German officer can do anything with an instruction book!”

The only line I can remember from either movie.

Firefox was great.

This scene about papers is the future we can expect from now on:

But if he wins, we are in for Cold War II…

We can also expect the West to be systematically walled off from cheap, effective fossil fuels, though I’m not sure a Russian win or loss will affect that.

I only saw The Americans about a year ago and was, in turn, confused, then disappointed and finally angered by it.

Supporting actress Annet Mahendru was far and away the best thing on that show:

https://celebmafia.com/annet-mahendru-the-romanoffs-tv-show-premiere-in-ny-1643818/

The ABC miniseries Amerika, depicting the plight of American citizens under Soviet occupation, was promoted as the conservative counterpart to The Day After. It debuted in February 1987. By that time relations with the Soviet Union had improved to the point that the show was seen as irrelevant.

That feels like a mistake on our part because Amerika actually tried to use fiction to highlight some important issues with the US populace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(miniseries)#Social_criticism_and_commentary

Although it aired only two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Amerika implied that American apathy and an unwillingness to defend freedom on the part of many citizens made the Soviet takeover rather easy.

Sounds pretty prescient to me.

Did Warren Beatty act in a single movie that was not somehow ideological?

I remember fondly only “McCabe & Mrs Miller”. Virtually all the rest seem to belong to some kind of preachy in your face indoctrination.

SCTV did a whole show where their feed was hijacked by a Soviet Communications Satellite

The French can be a lot of things, but they are not a cowardly or pacifistic people.

Not at all cowards. The French special forces get in and get a coup done with little fuss. Very efficient so people don’t even realize what happened. Saudi Arabia made good use of them in ‘79

For all the blame the Jews get around these parts for leftism and the decline of the West, it is odd how the French get a pass. French gentiles took part in some of the more ridiculous ideologies that we now have to live with.

Putinism appeals to no one except a few anti-globohomo haters on the far right.

Look in the mirror. You’re the hater (and “globohomo” is full of haters). You’re the one who is bizarrely cheering on the far-right Nazi fascists who hold the Ukraine hostage to their Western-financed and Western-encouraged hatred of Russia.

My father was a sailor during WWII, served on convoy duty in the North Atlantic. He and many other WWII veterans may very well have owed their lives to the sacrifices of the Russian people during WWII. Something like 75% of the Wehrmacht’s losses were on the Eastern Front. D-Day would never have been launched when it was without the Russian advances on the Eastern Front pinning down and destroying the Wehrmacht. Germany and possibly several other German-occupied countries would have been nuked in the summer of 1945 if the Russians hadn’t already reached Berlin by the spring of 1945, so countless Europeans are also alive today thanks to the sacrifices of the Russians.

Mr. Putin’s older brother died in the Siege of Leningrad, and the rest of his family barely survived its horrors. His father was severely wounded during WWII and several relatives on his mother’s side were killed during WWII. A few years back there was a solemn remembrance ceremony in St. Petersburg to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad. Not one of the WWII allied countries sent a representative to show their respects. Not one.

So Putin has a hell of a lot more credibility about the horrors of genuine fascism than people like you.

For someone who had lived through the Cold War, the nature of the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact was nothing short of a miracle of biblical proportions considering how relatively peaceful it was. It was a unique opportunity to usher in a historic, peaceful era in Europe. But no, no no no no no. A bunch of vultures outside and within the new Russian state had to carve the country’s economy up and feast on the remains. Somehow, Putin came to power and tried his best to recover from the damage done by that drunken traitor and stooge Yeltsin. Yet all Putin has ever met with from the UniParty in the USA has been contempt and abuse, even after Russia went out of its way to help America’s military in their ill-fated operations in Afghanistan.

I’ll go to my grave admiring Putin. Putin’s far more of a patriot to his country than the current riff-raff in D.C have ever been to America. I think America’s founders would also admire Putin a hell of a lot more than they would ever admire anything about the idiot politicians currently destroying the USA and lusting for WWIII.

If Putin didn’t move now to protect the Russian minority in what we now call “Ukraine” (leaving aside the question of its current and pre-Leninist borders), it would only have been a matter of time before this conflict erupted. Peace-loving Americans do not consider Russia an enemy and do not consider Ukrainian far-right fascists to be America’s friends.

English Premier League clubs are owned by Chinese, Saudi, and American billionaires. Jeff Bezos just built a yacht that required the dismantling of a bridge to put to sea. But somehow only the Russians are oligarchs.

I think the “mega rich” all the world round are able to obtain and maintain their positions by corruptly currying the favor of the political class, by hook or by crook.

New book on the WW1 anti-German hysteria:

Thread on how German culture was destroyed in America during WW1

German dogs were shot, German books were burnt, German composers were banned, and much more

Excerpts from "Burning Beethoven: The Eradication of German Culture in the United States during WW1" by Erik Kirschbaum https://t.co/ue28yZOTUf pic.twitter.com/sZL6Mh3QWr

— LindyScience (@LindyScience) March 11, 2022

Here is an interesting Cinerama movie from 1965 made from Russian films, narrated by Bing Crosby with the blessing of the US State Department.

Trailer for remastered version of “Cinerama’s Russian Adventure”

“not only justify Stalin’s purges but to get them started here”

There was a serious attempt in the form of 1944 Mass Sedition Trial of thirty non-leftist anti-interventionists:
https://www.antiwar.com/justin/j042800.html

The East German athletes were women taking male hormones. They were an Olympics standard.

I don’t know if these women wanted to be men or if the Commies forced them to take the hormones.

Nowadays it’s always men wanting to be women. Aside: Though they win athletic competitions too.

Related: Are there women who want to be men? It doesn’t seem very common.

I think you are very confused as to the time line. As long as the Soviet Union existed, Communists were never called “right wing” or “conservative”

You might be–generally–right about “right wing”. Though i’d never say “never”.

I think the term for the reformist commies was “reformer” or “liberal” or the like.

For the old school commies, i think a common terms were “reactionary” and “hard line”. But i believe i read/heard “conservative” more than once. What you absolutely did not get is people calling them “left wing” and rarely even just calling them “devoted communists”.

There was definitely an attempt to shift the narrative. That the good guys on both sides were “liberals” and the bad guys on both sides the non-liberals–“reactionaries”. Rather than that this left-wing ideology was disaster that had failed.

Russians just seemed like cool enemies. Sophisticated Europeans pontificating about nihilist philosophy after the ballet in Switzerland. Cold-blooded but elegant killers having secret meetings in scenic Cuba. Rocket science. Chess. History. A cynical, dark psychology that was the opposite of American naive optimism.

We’re supposed to pretend that Soros, Zuckerberg, and Bezos are somehow worse than Russian ‘oligarchs’ who are at least accountable to someone?

I have a concept I call the “oil change index,” as in, would you let a stranger change your oil. In the US, you can usually drive up to any Jiffy-Lube and ask them, strangers all, to change your oil. They’ll try to sell you other stuff, but nobody’s going to cut a line and say, whoa sir, did you realize you’re leaking transmission fluid. Good thing you got here.

I’ve run this by Eastern European acquaintances. The consensus seemed to be you’re good all the way to Warsaw, and then trust levels start dropping pretty quick.

My Ukrainian story is a friend whose brother took his large family to Ukraine for missionary work, and she went through a series of care-packages of lower and lower value trying to find something that wouldn’t get stolen en route. When even the sweaters didn’t make it, she told him she’d just start savings accounts for the kids. That was a while back; maybe things have gotten better.

“These lunatics hate patriotic Americans as much as they hate Russians, if not more so.”

Actually, left-liberals do hate patriotic Americans “more so” than they do Russians.

The Passion of Jack D.

Frumpy and butch.

The only good thing about this hate directed towards Russia is that it can (and I hope will) pass quickly. Russian women went from being frumpy and butch to the most beautiful women n the world, in 5 minutes. Russians are now the devil. In a year, when we need them for something….

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10600719/Russian-pianist-Alexander-Malofeev-dropped-Montreal-Symphony-Orchestra-speaking-against-war.html

https://www.opindia.com/2022/03/clinic-in-germany-denies-treatment-to-russians-and-belarusians/

The Cuban paratrooper commander, Col Ernesto Bella, was played by Ron O’Neal of “Superfly” fame.

KGB Major : Do you want to see me?

Colonel Ernesto Bella : Yes… yes. Go to the sporting goods store. From the files obtain forms 4473. These will contain descriptions of weapons, and lists of private ownership.

I bought a guitar in New Orleans 25 years ago. I took it to the Post Office to ship it home, registered mail. It never even made it out of the NO Post Office. Took about six months to get the insurance check.

The Austalian director Peter Weir made a Gulag movie called The Way Back in 2010.

While the storyline at times strains credibility (it was based on a supposedly true memoir by an imprisoned Pole about his escape from a Siberian camp) the treatment is superb. Excellent performances from the likes of Colin Farrell, Ed Harris and Saoirse Ronan.

I don’t have the list handy, but Zelensky’s closest advisors are all his entertainment industry friends. Comedy writers and entertainment lawyers.

Clown world indeed.

“ I don’t have the list handy, but Zelensky’s closest advisors are all his entertainment industry friends. ”

In the US, there isn’t much difference between our law makers and entertainment industry types.

Can you point me to a case where someone in America has gotten a 2 year sentence for a non-violent political protest stunt which disrupts a religious service? 1 year? 90 days? Any actual prison time? Just one case in the last 50 years.

I don’t recall if there was actually a service in progress. I know they did this in a church but in the photos I’ve seen they are the only ones present, aside from police.

One baffling phenomenon of today’s world is the way comedians are considered valid commentators on political and social matters – even someone like Russell Brand, who to me is a professional retard on exactly the same level as Pee-Wee Herman or Timmy Mallett. I presume nobody’s asked either of them what they think about the Ukraine.

E. Europeans have a low view of other Eastern Europeans. When I drove to Ukraine with a Lithuanian friend, his father cautioned us that we would be stopped at phony speed traps in Ukraine and told us the appropriate amount of bribe and how to offer it (I forget the details). In reality we were never stopped or asked for a bribe by anyone.

The closing thing I saw to something shady was more pathetic than criminal. When we were walking around Lviv, a man came up to us and recommended a certain restaurant. We decided to give it a try – nothing much to lose. The restaurant turned out to be sort of threadbare. In Soviet style there was a large menu but when you asked for something they didn’t actually have it. Finally we told them to tell us what they did have. What they had was sort of humble home style E. European food – I can’t say it was bad and the prices were ridiculously cheap in real $. I think I saw the guy who touted the restaurant eating a bowl of soup which I assume was his reward for bringing us there. As I said, the scene was more pathetic than criminal, the kind of thing that goes on in poor countries. That was the most “criminal” thing that happened to us.

In America, the “cut your fanbelt” thing doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but in corporate chains I’ve had them recommend unneeded work many times. You should flush your radiator/ transmission/brake fluid/ whatever. (Never flush transmission fluid – you’ll set particles in motion and really screw things up. The most you should do is just drop the pan and refill even though that only replace maybe 1/2 the fluid). In corporate chain America this is called “upselling” rather than a crime.

Last year I took my minivan for state inspection to one of the chain places because I had some kind of coupon and they failed it due to suspension bushings and quoted me some ridiculous price. I took the van to my usual mechanic figuring that he would do the work for less and he laughed at it – he said that there was nothing wrong with the control arms and gave me the inspection sticker instead. He said that the bushings were overbuilt and maybe in 20 years they would wear out. Even if I had insisted that he install them I don’t think he would have, just out of principle because he is an honest blue collar guy and wouldn’t have the heart to steal from people that way, but in corporate chain America this is called “upselling” rather than a crime.

An Estonian associate something similar about Belarus and his uncle who worked there. To be fair, though, everything I’ve heard about Belarus gives me the impression that it’s the best place to go if you want to see what the USSR was actually like, better than Russia itself. I assume that include Brezhnevite era corruption.

Balts are racially and culturally closer to Germany and Scandinavia (Estonia and Finland are particularly close) than the Orthodox East Slavic world. In the case of Lithuania specifically, I assume this dovetails with the long political partnership with Poland for centuries-perhaps tellingly, they are Catholic historically rather than Protestant like Estonia or Latvia, IIRC. Anyway, it shows. The negative association with Russians is equal parts recent political history and cultural dislike. They can’t escape being part of the former Soviet sphere-VKontakte-but it’s not that shocking, really. Tallinn and Riga were German built towns, and Vilnius was once Wilno. Not Pskov or Kiev.

Anyway, I’ll defer to you on this part of the world. As far as my own experiences go, I felt far safer in Southeast Asian megacities than in Brazil, despite the slums in tbe former being considerably poorer than the latter.

I think the nickname thing is Russian and not immigrant behavior. My friend from Russia also has a different intimate name from his given one.

It makes sense that if you knew Russia and Russians and liked them, you would be more fervently anti-communist. Probably the lack of anti-communist fervor during the Cold War in certain circles was due to indifference to Russians or actual dislike of real Russians.

Hey, don’t slam that. It’s an integral part to his current success, as is his youth. Zelensky understands how the world works in 2022 far better than the verging on 70 year old Putin, who seems to genuinely not get the reality of life with the Internet right now, let alone the approaching 80 Biden. He’s playing his hand well, and I actually think his comic background is part of that.

I just would rather not get involved in WWIII because he’s manipulating gullible or corrupt American politicians, and to be fair, if his interview from the 8th is anything to go by, that’s not what he wants either.

The character Ivan Denko IIRC was not a Russian – he was from another one of the Soviet Republics but I could be remembering that wrong.

“The surname Danko is most commonly occurring in Ukraine”

By the 1970s the favorite movie bad guys, the most pathological and all-around hated, had become Americans, the more square or rednecky the better. See Billy Jack, Deliverance, and so on.

I cannot.

This is the kind of stuff we do:

https://nypost.com/2022/03/10/criminal-indicted-on-murder-charge-freed-without-bail-by-nyc-judge/

A career criminal indicted in February on a murder charge for allegedly beating to death a 67-year-old man was freed without bail by a Manhattan judge on Thursday, The Post has learned.

That’s what we do.

LOL, I was going to put in a good word for him but I got tired. I wouldn’t mind a government headed by the dear departed Norm MacDonald, advised by Seinfeld and Larry David. Entertainment lawyers can be pretty ruthless….

But about Zelensky, I’m worried. He’s got no incentive to do anything at this point other than dig in his heels.

Biden’s a very patient man. I don’t buy the usual contempt for him. He may not be what he was, he may be old, but he’s sly. I think he and Zelensky want this war to drag on because they think it’s bleeding Russia. Maybe it is, but that’s a perilous game.

I was born in 1950 in the rural West. Anticommunism was pervasive. Communism was thought evil. Social liberals were tarred as communists, but people like Hubert Humphrey decisively distinguished themselves with even louder anticommunism. Russians were not evil. We knew that Boris and Natasha were funny in some ways that we did not quite get. By chance, I happened to have a play friend in one Ukrainian family and a Russian teacher for four years who was Ukrainian (refugees, but now I wonder whether they were Nazi Banderists). Ukies were equivalent to Russians, but they did not inspire gossip or disdain. Hitler was evil. We children were fascinated about the most evil being in the world, Nazis were evil too, as were Germans. Up to about 1970 any unconventional left politics made you an evil communist.

Putin was demonized as soon as it became clear that he was ruling on behalf of Russians and threw the neoliberals out. When Hillary wanted to demonize Trump, she linked him to Russia, evil demon Putin, and residual associations of communist tyranny.

Low-information people, whom I do not blame because they are busy with life, blur together evil-communism-Russia-Putin-Trump. It may astonish you to learn that 37% of liberals think Russia is Communist, 41% of moderates think that, and 52% of conservatives. Those who think that Russia is Communist or Socialist: 47% liberals, 55% moderates, 69% conservatives.

https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/aa58ig9d3b/econTabReport.pdf
The Economist/YouGov Poll
February 26 – March 1, 2022 – 1500 U.S. Adult Citizens

That fresh poll has 134 different questions, about 50 on Russia-Ukraine and 50 on Covid. Juicy and disturbing data about what Americans think today, should iSteve or anyone else want to dig around.

You have to remember that they are citizens of Spottsvania, whose only export is meanness. It seems to be a place where any Anti-American lives. They would have a Taliban character nowadays.
I met a Russian immigrant in the early 80s. He liked America, but one thing confused him. He asked why everybody asked him to say “Moose and Squirrel.” I doubled with laughter. I tried to explain it, but he did not understand.

“I think the ‘mega rich’ all the world round are able to obtain and maintain their positions by corruptly currying the favor of the political class”

When the “political class” that needs to be curried consists of one dictator who really owns your cash, to the extent that you take orders from him, get back to us. Until then, really, give it a rest. Digging yourself in deeper is not helping you.

My mother in law once took a Soviet domestic flight during the Communist era, probably a Tu-104. She was going from visiting cousins in Kiev (as it was known in those days) to Moscow. There were no overhead bins, just open racks like on a train (must have been fun during turbulence). The pilots were all ex-military and when the plane got to the end of the runway he pulled the plane into an uncomfortably steep climb. The Soviet jet engines were incredibly noise (the turboprops were deafening). At one point during the flight, a mechanic in coveralls (in Soviet terms an “engineer”)came rushing down the aisle with a screwdriver in hand, which was rather alarming.

When I was in Mongolia, we hired a driver to take us around the countryside. He had an old Soviet-era Russian truck. Part of the engine could be accessed from a box between the two front seats (he told us in winter you didn’t have to get out of the truck to work on the engine–smart!), but that box was so hot that we couldn’t touch it or put anything on it–not great design.

Also, check out this video on the Trabant…

Cold War-y anti-Soviet nostalgia aside, I don’t agree with your comments on Putin’s lack of diplomatic activity. I think it’s pretty clear that the American-led Western block had no intention of giving Russia anything it might ask for.

Victoria Nuland tells a story in which Bill Clinton asks Yeltsin if Russia can join NATO and Yeltsin says no because it would be bad for NATO. This story is of course bunkum and given as an excuse for why it was fine for NATO to expand all the way across Europe–“we wanted to include everybody, but the Russians just wouldn’t join”–and of course Yeltsin’s pronouncements are supposed to be binding on Putin too–“well, Putin can’t complain about NATO because Yeltsin”. All BS from the US neocons.

I’ve been trying to understand why NATO continued. There are only two possibilities: one, that the West really did fear Russian expansion; two, that some internal dynamics of the military-industrial complex and bureaucratic inertia within the NATO structure and member states made it too difficult to disband or change into a less Cold War-y format. One doesn’t seem plausible on its face until around the late 2000s, so what’s the explanation for the two decades 1990-2010? If there is rationale for fearing Russia in this period, what is it? So, two is more plausible. However, if two is the reason for NATO’s continuation, then (a) Putin is correct when he asks what Russians are supposed to believe NATO is for and (b) it’s not plausible that you could negotiate any changes in NATO.

Add to this the fact that US foreign policy has been regime-change oriented for the last 20 years, and not just in the Middle East. How do you negotiate with someone whose ultimate goal is to oust you?

More broadly, how do you negotiate with people as biased and dishonest as Western elites are, anD how do you negotiate at all with a system as dispersed as the Western alliance? Even just taking the US as the single negotiator, who do you negotiate with when the President changes every four years, but the foreign policy is a product of the US deep state?

No, the idea that Putin simply ignored diplomacy for the last 20 years because he is “bad” is dumb. You may disagree with Putin’s goals if they include maintaining his regime and a sphere of influence for Russia, but it is pretty clear that if these are his main goals he has been in a near impossible situation vis-a-vis diplomacy.

“We’re supposed to pretend that Soros, Zuckerberg, and Bezos are somehow worse than Russian ‘oligarchs’ who are at least accountable to someone?”

You mean accountable to a President-for-life dictator whose enemies wind up decapitated, or dead from polonium or poison umbrellas? Yes, of course. Are you really that insane, or just trolling?

The Russian commander is played by the American Actor William Smith, and coincidentally, the villain in Red Heat (who’s character is Georgian) is played by American Ed O’Ross.

Both actors do very convincing “Russian” accents and Smith’s entire dialog is spoken in Russian.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+don%27t+know+how+lucky+you+are+boys+back+in+the+USSR&qpvt=you+don%27t+know+how+lucky+you+are+boys+back+in+the+USSR&FORM=VDRE

The Russians were ahead of us for the first ten years in the ‘Space Race”

Arthur C. Clarke worked with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. One day a group of Russian cosmonauts paid a courtesy call to the elaborate set of the deep space at the studio in England, and Arthur was there. The Cosmonauts looked at the control panel all full of buttons and dials and all labelled in English.

“These should all be in Russian,” one of the Cosmonauts said. Clarke noted that the guy was not being snarky or irate. He just noted that by the 21st century, Russia would be ruling out in space.

I forgot to mention I wouldn’t even classify Red Heat as anti-Soviet. More of a “different teams teaming up to face a common enemy” or something.

It’s pretty much the same idea as Black Rain, but instead the foreign cop is played by Michael Douglas who travels to Japan.

Thank for posting the link to the Daily Mail article about Alexander Malofeev being cancelled.

He has posted on Facebook about the war but hasn’t named Putin so his persecutors are attacking him, even though it’s common knowledge his nuclear family lives in Russia, as he does himself. I have online friends who know him. They all speak very highly of him as a person, as well as an artist.

Just for fun:

If they don’t actually call the shots then it isn’t an oligarchy, but a dictatorship.

According to you a “Russian oligarch” is a contradiction in terms, which basically proves my point.

Thanks my man.

2 years in a Russian penal colony for a brief political protest

It’s not the world I’d like to live in, but do you believe this was representative of the way all political protests are dealt with in Russia or the way all homosexual expression is dealt with? If not, is the regime to be entirely condemned over it? Maybe. I feel that way toward Trudeau for the emergency measures and toward Pelosi over holding J6 meanderers in solitary while charging them with trespassing. In all cases, this is overreach in law enforcement for the purpose of suppressing political dissent. But in all honesty, I have predispositions to hate Trudeau and Pelosi. over

They just have to re-release the miniseries starring Sam Neill. He did a great job depicting the ultimate man of mystery, and the series was outstanding. None of the countries he worked for even knew his real name. The best guess by the Soviets, who may have captured and executed him, was that he was originally Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum. I say may because he worked for so many people at the same time as a double, triple agent, that he might have ended up working for the Soviets and when he disappeared in the Soviet Union for all anyone knows he may have just gone into obscure retirement.
I don’t think Zelensky would be good for the role. Although both men are Ukrainian Jews, Zelensky doesn’t look anymore like Reilly than Neill did.

Look I know you’ve turned into a spokeshole for the CIA, State Department and the rest of the bipartisan Warparty, but I have friends and family members who are Jews and there is still a lingering hostility among some Jews because of the mistreatment their people received from Poles, Russians and Ukrainians. So don’t try to pull that same mind reading crap on me that you use with Putin.
The Ukrainians are looking for volunteers. I’d be happy to donate to a Gofundme for your airline ticket.

In spite of my taking intro to chemistry 101 and 102 in college in the the early eighties, I never heard of Dimitri Mendeleev until about two years ago.

That is astonishing.

It can only be explained by anti-Russian bigotry.

It says all too much about the CIA that he managed to get a job there for a while.

Traitorous thug John Brennan, former head of he CIA, voted for the Communist Party candidate for president when he was in college.

What If they had stormed a synagogue service instead?

Sounds pretty prescient to me.

Indeed.

The whole thing is on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6B42A52B2363A16C

Remember how the Russkies were the good guys in Marooned(1969)?

B-36 scene from Strategic Air Command (1955)

I don’t know if these women wanted to be men or if the Commies forced them to take the hormones.

The latter, apparently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/sports/drug-testing-east-german-steroids-toll-they-killed-heidi.html

In 1979, at age 14, Heidi Krieger began attending the Sports School for Children and Youth in Berlin. It was affiliated with the powerful sports club Dynamo, which was sponsored by the Stasi, the East German secret police.

At 16, Heidi began to receive round blue pills wrapped in foil. This was the steroid Oral-Turinabol, but coaches typically called them vitamins that would increase strength and help the athletes endure the stress of training. In Heidi’s case, the Oral-Turinabol was given in tandem with birth control pills.

Six months later, Heidi’s clothes no longer fit and she felt ”like the Michelin Man or a stuffed goose,” Krieger said. By the time she was 18, she weighed 220 pounds, had a deep voice, increased body and facial hair and appeared mannish. On the streets of Berlin, Krieger said, Heidi was derisively called a homosexual or a pimp. Once on a commuter train, in the presence of her mother, she was called a drag queen. She went home, removed her skirt and never wore one again.

At the airport in Vienna, where Heidi had gone for a track meet, a flight attendant gave her directions to the men’s bathroom. Even later, as she considered a sex-change operation, Krieger said, a psychologist asked, ”So you want to change from a man to a woman?”

The insults stung, but Heidi kept taking the blue pills. She had wild mood swings, from depression to aggression to euphoria. Once, she swiped at a boxer who had taunted her. When she stopped taking the birth control pills, her breasts began to hurt severely. She felt out of place at the sports school and in her own body, but the shot-put was a way to measure up, to fit in. By 1986, she had become the European champion.

Eventually she had sex-change surgery and married another former East German female athlete.

I’m in my 20s, and every single chemistry class I took in Middle School, High School, and University we learned about Mendeleev. My Father learned about him in the 80s as well. This is all in North Texas.

Maybe your college professor was just weird. Or maybe there was a localized anti-Russian culture at the college or areas you went to school in.

Even Rambo II to some extent, the bad guys are CIA agents who send Rambo on what they think is a wild goose chase to not find American POWs, but then he finds them by accident and then they abandon him to the Red Army Spetsnatz guys lead by Steven Berkoff, basically reprising the role he played in Octopussy as a mad Soviet Army officer. Charles Napier as the top CIA guy is the real villain however.

High school chemistry used to begin with the periodic table and a brief biography and nod to Dimitri Mendeleev. I don’t think my high school chemistry textbook (1972) mentioned anybody else, but we finished 9th grade with the impression that he was to chemistry what Newton was to physics. I’m really surprised that you never came across his name.

One more thing: we always referred to them as the Soviet Union, and to their people as Soviets. When I started hearing about Russia (around, oh, 1993) it took me a while to get used to it.

Just as the left is now outdoing McCarthyism, it’s also taking anti-Russian hysteria past anything we saw from the patriotic right and center.

We could do nuance, back when we were a sane country generally.

I heard about Mendeleev in high school chemistry in 1974.

The benefits of not living under one-party-rule.

I was surprised to learn that her father is a Hindu Indian, and that she grew up in Afghanistan.

The B-36 “Peacemaker” was the real star of Strategic Air Command (1955) – with belated apologies to Jimmy Stewart – despite being one of the ugliest planes ever built; like something Howard Hughes might have designed while suffering from DTs.

It’s also perhaps relevant that, during the Cold War, that there was a consensus on European civilization being the pinnacle of human achievement, and that it was our common patrimony. Every humanities major was sure to have had read at least one Russian novel, and everyone, college-educated or otherwise, knew that ballet, classical music, and so on, were areas of our culture in which there were many great Russian names.

Now, to many under the age of 40 or so, the Great Russians are just a bunch of Dead White Males, and many an English Major has a reading list stuffed with names such as Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrisson, Arundhati Roy, and who knows who.

Russophobia today isn’t even nearly the equivalent of commie-hatred in the Cold War. It is hatred of whites, collectively, and Russians and Russia, as a conspiciously white nation and people, are fair game. It’s become sort of affirmatively anti-racist, to hate them.