Feeling kinda melancholy, fam.
…
Shouldn’t really start my posts like that … I fly too close to the sun with my casual posting style. I can see all my former editors checking in to read this post and shaking their heads in shame. Have they taught me nothing?
Well, here’s the thing guys.
We all have different motivations for writing. Art, in general, is equal parts technical skill and right brain emotional/spiritual stuff fused together to create a product that goes over the heads of most people leading to the chronic poverty of the art-makers. And rightly so. Just because some schizo dreamt something up doesn’t mean it ought to be taken seriously by intelligent people. Modern art, it seems, has become all about indulging the ravings of anti-social schizos who have become the arbiters of fashion and good taste.
Because of that, I get the desire to keep things professional and buttoned-down. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to the free-form schizo blabbering that has become mainstream. See the Saker’s blog for an example of what I mean (heh). But no, writing, like any art, ought to have rules - some structure and form to it. I get that and I respect it. It’s cool when other writers do it and do it well. Me, I don’t take my writing seriously enough to even proof-read the text before pushing publish. Maybe if I was making money doing it … but then, experience shows otherwise, as my former editors will all tell you if you ask them.
Wait.
I had a point I was working towards here.
Stay with me, please.
OK, so the first point I was driving towards is that I write things that I like and that I think you guys will find amusing. Propa’ form and all that kills my momentum and we can’t have that, so we just skip it here on this blog.
The second point is that I’ve been kicked out of Belarus.
Yes.
I was just trying to soften the blow by rambling about how I’m a misunderstood artist, but I’m ready to get into the meat of it now. If you had given up a paragraph ago, you’d never learn the juicy details of Rolo’s latest mishap/adventure.
The good guys apparently want nothing to do with me. First, they detain me in Smolensk, Russia and toss me to the Belarusskies. Then, the Belarusskies get wise to my antics and they give me a stern talking to as well. Yes, the gates of the iron curtain have been slammed in my face and I’m no longer allowed on team Eurasianist-Multipolar-Socialist-Orthodoxy.
It’s a shame, really. I feel like I was close to figuring out what exactly all that gobblygook actually meant. I suppose I’m on team ZOG now?
No, let me be serious here for a moment. I’m a Ukrainian with pro-Russian, pan-Slavist and right-wing views. But none of that even came up at my latest interrogation by the secret police. They looked at my passports and my resume and decided that I was an enemy of the state. As a result, they threatened me with immediate deportation to Ukraine. In effect, they were condemning me to the tender caprices of the SBU and, at best, to conscription and becoming meat fodder for the Donbass front.
Naturally, I tried to explain that, actually, I’m pretty pro-Russian in my views and that it would be cruel of them to act this way towards me. But then, it was naive of me to even think that bringing up a little detail like my pro-Russian views would help me. I wasn’t talking to normal Russians, I was talking to the secret police, you see. The secret police everywhere is an organization with its own agenda which stands apart from and often directly opposed to the interests of the people. They are, first and foremost, a faceless iron bureaucratic meat-shredder that ruins the lives of anyone who is unfortunate enough to find themselves caught in their jaws. Even if I were able to convince the regular officers who questioned me of my pure intentions, quotas from higher-ups still have to be filled and people like myself are easy targets. It is precisely because people like myself have no connections to higher-ups either in the West or the East that makes us easy pickings for the secret police. Believe me, if I had moneyed backers and friends in high places, I would be treated differently.
Threatening to send someone who has broken no laws in your country to his death at the hands of Russia’s enemies is, well, it’s just hmm, what’s the word I’m looking for … yes, I suppose it’s unsportsmanlike, really.
Having been interrogated by the secret police of Europe several times at this point, I thought I’d share some insights that I gleaned into their worldview in this post and the ones that follow. You’re free to make of these vignettes what you will, but I will provide an overarching analysis in follow-up posts as well.
Vignette #1
At the interrogation, we got to talking about the situation between Russia and the West and I mentioned that there were people in the West who were sympathetic to Russia’s position, or who, at the very least, did not believe in the official narrative surrounding the situation in Ukraine.
To this, one of the officers asked me: “you mean the Democrats?”
I realized then and there that not only was I completely fucked, but so too was the entire country. I didn’t elaborate further. I just said, “sure, the Democrats, but also others,” and lapsed into silence.
Vignette #2
“You mustn’t be mad at us,” they said. “You think you’re the first Ukrainian that we’ve had to question? It’s not just you.”
Point taken. Lots of Ukrainians are apparently being subjected to interrogation by the spooks, apparently. With the Dugina assassination (that the FSB did nothing to prevent, mind you) the screws are only going to be tightened. No wonder most of them decided to flee to Europe instead of Belarus and Russia. They probably suspected that they would be welcomed by the tender embrace of the KGB and the FSU and figured they’d have a better chance in the West. Seeing as I’m headed West myself now, I guess I’ll find out for myself what the lot of the Ukrainian is there.
Vignette #3
“Do you know any congressmen or people in the American government? No, shame, it would have helped your case.”
I suppose they wanted to know if the Zoomer vagabond blogger was actually friends with Nancy Pelosi and to ask me to put in a good word for them, or something. Or, maybe, they would have asked me to swipe the letters off her desk like the 1/6 protestors did. Who knows. I told them that most of my friends were internet bums just like myself to their marked visual disappointment.
Vignette #4
“We are an anti-Fascist country committed to tolerance and the ‘friendship between nations,’ idea” they explained.
I told them that I was surprised to learn that. As far as I could tell, Belarus was a 99% slavic ethnostate. They said that this was unimportant - an irrelevant detail, in fact. What mattered was the ideology that they repeated like a mantra, apparently.
It was in the winter of this year that Lukashenko unleashed hordes of refugees from the Middle-East onto the Polish border like bioweapons, mind you. I didn’t mention that either.
Vignette #5
“Don’t tell anyone about this conversation taking place or what we discussed.”
No.
People need to know the truth. I know too many travelers, bloggers and content-creators who have been approached and harassed by the secret police in both the West and the East. We all know that this is a thing and yet, we are all too afraid to speak openly about it. The taboo of silence has to be broken. If people were more aware of just how prevalent and active the secret police is, they’d gain a better understanding of how the world is actually run. As things stand now, people who talk about these issues are labelled schizophrenics and mocked for thinking that they’d be “important enough” to merit attention from the Spook State.
Well, I am literally a nobody. Some of my friends are nobodies too. Regardless, we all got approached by the secret police.
If we remain silent about our experiences, we only contribute to the culture of fear and intimidation that the Spook State seeks to inculcate in the masses that it seeks to manipulate and control.
I’ll have more to say on this problem in the posts that follow. But my main point is this: if you’re not talking about the spook state and its agenda, are you saying anything of any value, really?
“We are an anti-Fascist country committed to tolerance and the ‘friendship between nations,’ idea” they explained.
"You mean the Democrats?"
What was it Sun Tzu said? 'Know yourself and know your enemy'? These boomers are spectacular in their ability to fail at both. On either side of the iron curtain, it seems. WWIII is going to be less gladiatorial death match and more playground slap fight between the fat kids - victory going not so much to the swift or the strong as to the least incompetent.
Wow. Interesting experience. Dugina assassination clampdown.
Allegiance tests are everywhere. No secret police in poland but utter a bad word about the cocaine comic here or worse still a kind word about Putin, and drone swarms emerge from the sky and start shooting yellow and blue flags at you.
Poland is russohysterical and always will be, so I'm off to Hungary. They've secured their Russian gas for the winter.
It's soon to be chess beside a frozen Danube.