Fucking right I’ve keyed cars: moron in a beemer or urban assault vehicle takes up two spots in a lot, or dumps itself in my lane because it’s more convenient than comply like the plebes, I’d key it.
Years ago, I would bicycle home very very early in the morning, and almost every single time, at the turnabout near Petruchkirche in Lichterfeld, there would a vehicle coming to greet me, with someone behind the wheel simultaneously grinning and failing to recognize that I had the right of way. But then they would plow ahead, anyway. I would have loved to key those cars.
Keep in mind this desire to vandalize then was never political, nor was it payback for anything, or championing a cause, nor was it remotely clever. It was me performing the duty of youth: to irritate.
Anyway, years later I was in Belgrade for a NOT ENTIRELY STRESS-FREE appointment, and – look, the city’s planners must have had a fondness for Rococo patterns or random chaos, because it took us for freaking ever to find the place – we parked our sensible, grownup Passat in a totally unorganized-looking lot, perfectly legally, and while we were inside some fun-loving kid decided to run a key all the way along the car’s left flank as the cross-stroke of a big, creepy A.
Which leads one to think about circles closing and a larger form of justice, I suppose, like ethnic cleansing or sending a drone to to blow up your neighbor. Or it could just piss him off, which would explain recent loud explosions in Pskov, Moscow, Tula, Bryansk, Belgorod, Kursk et cetera.
Back to Ukraine.
Timothy Snyder tweets Vasyl Cherepanyn.
The above excerpt reminds me of Day 12, Phase 2, when we started using the adjectives fascistic and genocidal to describe Russia’s 10-year invasion of Ukraine.
Let's say that more than a month after a mass murder devastated Borodyanka, and at a moment when the miasma from the site could still be felt and smelled, a ticket-buying audience finally began paying attention1.
Looking back, those words don’t sound shrill enough.
We re-contemplate Hemingway, Miłosz, Arendt, Vonnegut, Taras, Baradullin, Bykov et al and wonder why it has taken more than a year to build an international consensus among civilized nations to prevent the commission of genocide by a fascistic regime. As if this didn’t already happen in the not-so-distant past. Nuclear weapons comes to mind, but we concluded on Day 14 that what will happen next can’t be avoided, at least in respect to Armageddon.2
Life in Russia and Belarus today is the stuff of someone's bad erotic fantasy. Reading — even thinking — about civilized life there is harmful for immature minds. It’s a complete complete horror show, maybe even worse than occupied areas in eastern Ukraine.
Today’s hat tip goes to Denys Kazansky for this clip illustrating 21st century-style ethnocide, Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukrainian culture while keeping the people.
The Kremlin’s Gauleiter in Lazurne, Kherson region explains to Ukrainian residents why insulin and relief assistance will only be given to people with Russian passports.
Kazansky also posts the link to the above homemade chronicle of death in Mariupol in early 2022.
Day 12, Phase 2. On becoming Ukrainian (April 6, 2022)