Eternity was contingent: if, say, Stalin had not killed Trotsky, but the other way round, then it would have been populated by entirely different individuals.

…

Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn’t understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 5-7.

Spyros Kontomaris, Diomedes Komnenos, Sokratis Michail, Toril Margrethe Engeland, Vasilis Famellos, Yiorgos Samouris, Dimitris Kyriakopoulos, Spyros Marinos, Nikos Markoulis, Katerina Argyropoulou, Stelios Karayiorgis, Markos Karamanis, Alexandros Spartidis, Dimitris Papaioannou, Yiorgos Yeritsidis, Vasiliki Bekiari, Dimitris Theodoras, Basri (Alexandros Vasilis) Karakas, Alexandros Papathanasiou, Andreas Koumbos, Michailis Myroyiannis, Kyriakos Panteleakis, Stathis Koliniatis, Yiannis Mikronis, ¡presente!

What makes a democracy strong, and how can we engage with the past and present in a video game? 🤔

Last Friday, I’d got as far as Indira Gandhi, Moshe Dayan, and Dubček. I mean, there’s nowhere left to go.

–Venedikt Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1997), 87.

Guardian:

In a public statement on Thursday, the state department said it would designate Antifa Ost in Germany, the Italy-based International Revolutionary Front, and two organisations in Greece – Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense – as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists … conspiring to undermine the foundations of Western Civilization through their brutal attacks”.

…

“Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas,” the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in a statement.

Current reading. When the US government says people who ascribe to Marxist ideologies are conspiring to undermine the foundations of Western Civilization, they neglect to recognize the foundations of today’s western European societies solidly rest on the work of 19th and early 20th Century Marxist theorists.

Berliner Zeitung:

Satire oder Straftat? Schüler wegen Meme über Bundeswehr-Offizier angeklagt

Alle sagen: der Kreml, der Kreml. Von allen habe ich das gehört, ihn selbst aber habe ich kein einziges Mal gesehen. Wieviele Male schon (tausend Male), betrunken oder verkatert, bin ich durch Moskau gegangen, von Nord nach Süd, von Ost nach West, kreuz und quer, und wie es sich gerade traf — den Kreml habe ich kein einziges Mal gesehen.

—Venedikt Erofeev, Moskau – Petuški, (Zürich: Kein & Aber AG, 2005), 7.

Kaiser Kuo, The Ideas Letter:

The familiar framing of China as “rising” or “catching up” no longer holds. China is now shaping the trajectory of development, setting the pace economically, technologically, and institutionally. For Americans especially, the deeper psychic shock lies in the recognition that modernity is no longer something they authored and others merely inherit. That story has outlived its usefulness.