Nina Kouprianova

The Southern Poverty Law Center is going after Russia Today for providing a forum for “extremists” and encouraging “the burgeoning Patriot movement.” Over the past five years, RT had become a welcome alternative news source for many. In fact, this anti-RT campaign was launched around the same time as that television channel made it to Youtube’s Top 100, while the ratings of several American news networks had plunged.

And the SPLC is not the only one. The Independent described how

Even before the recent spy scandal about Russian "illegals" in the United States, western intelligence services have been wary about Russia Today's correspondents. One journalist, posted by the Russian channel to a western capital, recalls that she was called to a meeting in a local café by the country's interior ministry before being given her accreditation.

"This guy showed up, and he had a dossier with loads of information about me and my past," says the journalist, who does not want her name revealed. "It was pretty obvious he was working in intelligence, and eventually he came out and asked, 'Is Russia Today a front for a spy network?' I thought it was hilarious, but he was serious."

Both parties seem to have grossly underestimated the viewers’ intellectual capacity. After all, those who watch international channels, particularly via Youtube, are already politically curious and web-savvy enough to gather a variety of conflicting information in order to make sense of it all.

Such viewers are certainly aware of the fact that every news source should be taken with a grain of salt. They know that certain underground blogs offer worthwhile analysis, but are rarely there when “the news breaks.” Large networks like BBC are decent in the area of concise reporting from around the world, but normally adhere to the politically correct “party line.” Al Jazeera offers a very different perspective on recent American wars, but leaves much to be desired when it comes to immigration-related issues in Europe. Russia Today provides great coverage of a variety of subjects – from economics to multiculturalism, but don’t look for the “ins and outs” of Russia’s own politics on that channel. Even local newspapers demonstrate which crucial subjects don’t make it to national-level media and offer clues as to the reasons why.

Broadcasting motivations are not difficult to gauge by following the money trail and critically evaluating the content. RT’s pursuit of pro-Russian agenda is not much different than BBC being a publicly funded entity. Furthermore, the idea that private ownership of massive media conglomerates somehow guarantees objectivity is simply utopian -- to state the painfully obvious.

Speaking of which, if CNN weren’t so eager to tell us what fashion experts thought of yet another couture dress worn by Michelle Obama and actually reported the news, for a change, maybe then RT would have less of a niche to fill.

They say that love is a disease. If so, then so is sports fandom. The latter is perhaps best expressed through a Russian idiom. When you cheer for a certain team, you say, “ia boleiu za tu komandu” -- “I am sick for that team.”  This phrase is exclusive to competitive scenarios rather than fandom per se. It certainly describes the temporary state you enter when witnessing a competition: your abnormal heart rhythm and your hopeful anticipation.

I only bother with sports at the national level. I feel emotional about Russia’s performance in many athletic fields, because I see it as a small-scale expression of national triumph or failure.  I am just a spectator, so why does that matter? Minor national triumphs motivate me to contribute to my culture in my own way. Back when people were inspired by winners rather than victims, this used to be called “nationalism.” When it comes to sports, futbol, err, soccer is the magnificent exception in my life.  It is the only sport to which I pay attention (sort of) at the club level, because it is a beautiful game of endurance and strategy.

To me, soccer is Family: I fondly recall watching matches as a child with my father and grandfather. My father, tired from working all day, dressed in striped Adidas track pants, energetically reacted to toy soldier-sized men in funny shorts perpetually running back and forth on a small black-and-white television screen. Spartak! CSKA! Team USSR!

A new Orthodox-Catholic model of global development will replace the last 600 years of colonial liberalism -- in the long-term. In the short-term, the U.S. is still about to collapse. This is not another conspiracy theory from the blogging depths of the internet, but the newest interview with Igor Panarin in a recent issue of Economic Strategies (Ekonomicheskie Strategii 4 (2010)).

Igor Nikolaevich is a political scientist, an academician at the Russian Military Academy, and a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He holds PhDs in psychology and political science. Panarin has made a career of long-term geopolitical commentary, much of which has been far less rosy than that by a standard talking head on a major news network. Last year Panarin shocked the North American press: one of his predictions regarding the imminent collapse of the U.S. was widely publicized. That forecast was actually ten years old, but it suddenly made waves in the context of the deepening global economic downturn, in general, and the American bailouts, in particular.

In the interview with Economic Strategies, Panarin suggests that what we are seeing today is the crash of a 600-year cycle of global development. This cycle is based on two major components -- the drug trade and the slave trade -- the foundation of all European colonial empires, especially the British Empire. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the near-exhaustion of this particular geopolitical model.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the screening of The American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein, directed by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, at a documentary film festival.  I wondered whether this project is worth reviewing. After all, I am a complete amateur when it comes to the given subject: while I am generally aware of this scholar's work, I have not actually read any of Finkelstein's books. Even so, this biography was a welcome addition to my usual Russian and Japanese picks. Above all, the film demonstrated the limits of academic freedom in a rather brutal fashion.

How does one portray a controversial subject in a fairly objective manner? I suppose, it is not unlike writing for this website. At least, that is the impression that one of the film's co-directors, David Ridgen, gave to the audience at the Q&A session after the screening.  He deliberately barely touched on the hottest topic -- the Holocaust Industry book. As a result, thematically, the biography is about Finkelstein's call to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the consequent charges of anti-Semitism he incurs. Ridgen stated that he aimed at a balanced portrayal of this scholar - from Dershowitz to Chomsky and family friends in between.

Maybe I speak as a spoiled European, but the medieval-revival architecture at the University of Toronto is one of the few truly beautiful aspects of this Canadian city. The buildings are especially striking when you pass through Queen's Park -- the provincial parliament on your left and the equestrian statue of King Edward VII on your right -- walk underneath a bridge and finally reach the neo-Romanesque University College and the neo-Gothic lancet windows of the Hart House complex.

The arc beneath the bridge once showcased student murals. They depicted a series of Michelangelo's sibyls as well as a portrait of the artist -- a dark-haired, pale girl -- much like yours truly -- holding brushes and looking onto her creation. Though the paintings were not particularly well executed, the attempt was noteworthy. It certainly reminded me of my own days in art school.

Recently, the mural had been defaced with glued-on newsprint and a very different type of imagery. Where once sat the Delphic sibyl ... is that a dancing Middle-Eastern woman wearing a hijab or a leftist thug ... err ... "street activist" with a bandana covering the face?

“DEVIL DOG KILLED” proclaimed today’s headlines in giant block letters. The newspapers went on to gloat how a pit bull-Labrador mix named Bandit, which attacked a child at his grandmother’s home seven years ago, has been euthanized -- “finally” -- after years of living at a local Humane Society. We can all sleep easy now that an aging dog has been exterminated.

Of course, breed prohibitions are not specific to Canada, nor pit bulls. The latter, however, have the worst reputation in the media. In that country, a number of major cities have put in severe restrictions on pit bull ownership. Winnipeg, Manitoba, for instance, outright banned this breed in 1990, while the province of Ontario followed suit in 2005. Canadian provincial and/or municipal laws in regards to allegedly dangerous canine breeds are worth noting for several reasons. They include a serious lack of research, government band-aid solutions, and questionable implications of breed-specific legislation.

In particular, the August-2005 Ontario law requires that no new pit bulls be bred, transferred, or imported into the province under any circumstances, including temporary military service or tourism. Owners have been permitted to keep “grandfathered” or restricted pit bulls until they die naturally, provided that they have their pets sterilized and use muzzles in public. This “humane” genocide of a breed, if you will, is meant to eradicate all pit bulls from the affected area in a gradual manner.

One spring day in the late 1980s, my mother took me for an interview to my future elementary school in Moscow.  A few standard questions later, a teacher and the principal, active Party members, inquired whether I knew what great national holiday the country was celebrating at that time.

My family had spent the entire weekend coloring eggs and baking paschal cake. That holiday was Easter, of course!

The women's hair pulled into sleek conservative buns got even tighter.

"Little girl, on April 22^nd, we celebrate Lenin's birthday. Do you know who Lenin was?"

"He made the Revolution". I was six years old.

A single raised eyebrow.  "No, little girl. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the leader of global proletariat".

The country was in flux. It celebrated the millennial anniversary of Christianity in Russia soon afterward.

The way in which Europeans idiomatically describe their homeland - the national ideal -- is rather telling. For the French, this ideal is la belle France. Germans take pride in die deutsche Treue. Englishmen praise merrie olde England.

Russians believe in Sviataia Rus' - Holy Russia. This concept already circulated in writing around the mid-16^th century, just after Ivan Gorzny -- the Formidable, not the "Terrible" -- purged the last vestiges of the Golden Horde.  He modified Church ceremonies in order to overtly mimic those of Byzantium: when Constantinople fell to the Turks a century earlier, Moscow became the Third Rome. As a spiritual heir of the vanquished Second Rome, united Muscovy principalities adopted the dual-headed Byzantine eagle.

For me, Orthodox Christianity, national tradition, and family history are synonymous.

The memory of one's own baptism is a very strange thing. While the Church was not outright forbidden in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it was not condoned -- certainly not in the Third Rome. My mother had my baby brother and me baptized in secret. I remember getting onto the subway escalator, my God-mother's hand, the smell of incense, decorative gold flickering in the dark, and what seemed like a giant copper baptismal font.

This mystical atmosphere of an ancient ritual is alive inside an Orthodox church, and is most evident during the Easter Cross Procession. Servants of God, clad in white and gold, carry icons and flags like medieval Slavic warriors, and sing hymns a capella in Old Slavonic. The faithful are not far behind, lighting the streets of cities at home and abroad with hundreds of tiny wax fireflies.

I descend from the clerical class of the Russian empire. My great-great grandfather Gavriil was a priest, and so was my great grandfather Ioann.  Orthodox Christianity has two types of clergy - white and black. White priests are limited in Church hierarchy, but are permitted to marry.

If the millennial celebrations of 1988 were an official return to Orthodoxy, then 1938 marked its lowest point through violent repressions.  Clerical affiliation was much like the scarlet letter under early Bolshevik regime.  Ioann was a proto-presbyter of the largest Russian Orthodox church in Tbilisi, Georgia. His son -- my grandfather -- was only allowed to attend evening school: he was a relative of a "socially harmful element" in the 1920s and that of the "enemy of the people" in the 1930s.  An "enemy of the people", my great grandfather challenged the Godless state, refused to recant the Christian teaching, and paid for it with his life.

Not every member of the clergy had that level of integrity - this religious institution was infiltrated by the secret police until the Soviet collapse - but many did. Contemporary Russian Church officially recognizes religious victims of Soviet repressions.  I don't know how Ioann was murdered and where. He is certainly not canonized, but I think of his heroism every time I hear the mention of "new holy martyrs" during evening prayers.

By surviving under Communism and reuniting with the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia after decades of separation, the Russian Orthodox Church became a renewed source of moral and spiritual authority for its followers.  I don't question the motivation of our politicians attending the services, many of whom had traded the red star for the candle. Their presence reinforces Russian Orthodox Christianity as the dominant culture, while the sincerity of their faith is between them and God.

After a rebirth of its own, the Russian Orthodox Church is staunch, conservative, exclusive, ceremonial, and that's just how I like it.

War does not only occur on television in the remote North Caucasus. With Allah's will, the borders of military action will extend to cover the entire territory of Russia, and this year, great successes await us."

~Terrorist Umarov quoted by Gazeta.ru (my translation)

Today's suicide bombings at two of my hometown's busiest subway stations were not simply acts of Islamic terrorism. Rather, they were an attack on the European civilization. One need not side with North American neocon foreign policy or gloss over the Russian regional specifics to see the global dimensions of this escalating East-versus-West civilizations' clash.

In addition to the death toll and gruesome details, news reports everywhere emphasized the fact that one of the subway stations in questions, Lubianka, is the current FSB headquarters, and, thus, is a spit in the face of Russian counterterrorism, after Nord-Ost and after Beslan. Instead, I recalled that the Moscow subway system is one of the most beautiful examples of public architecture in the world. Its central (yes, Soviet-era) stations, rich in marble and mosaics with a variety of neoclassical references, are an aesthetic symbol of European culture.

Perusing some of the latest blogs at Alternative Right regarding the respective roles of Christianity and Paganism in contemporary West, it struck me that there is, in the very least, a general consensus regarding the positive significance of these two intertwined traditions in the context of European culture.

Thank God(s).

It is unusual for the modern secular state in Europe and North America not to destructively interfere with Western cultural preservation by the means of public education and, by extension, popular arts. And, it is just about as rare for the government to actually make a positive contribution to the broad dissemination of this culture.

Rare, but not impossible.

I knew things were not going well for Georgia long before the conflict with Russia a year and a half ago involving the separatist regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. When Sandra Roelofs talked to the press in 2004, she mentioned that her husband, Mikheil Saakashvili, aspired to strong Georgian leadership "like Stalin and Beria." A year prior, Saakashvili held a rally on the footsteps of Iosif Vissarionovich's statue in Gori prior to heading to the capital, Tbilisi. Why Misha-genatsvale chose Stalin as a political role model is between him and his psychotherapist.

Later, he told celebrity journalist Tina Kandelaki that he will go down in history like his nation's renowned medieval ruler, David the Builder. But, Misha's got a long way to go from chewing ties in public and persecuting helpless aging widows to emulating either leader. Tina, an ethnic Georgian, simply called him "Mikheil the Destroyer." 

Being part-Georgian myself, I have a natural interest in this small southern European nation -- one of the oldest cultures of the continent. Myths describe the Argonauts' visit to Colchis (Georgia) in search of the Golden Fleece. The kingdom accepted Christianity five years after the Council of Nicea, and its alphabet dates to a hundred years afterward.