You have to confess to a certain ambivalence towards news journalists.*
One of the charges the postmodernists throw at historians of the old school is that they create the illusion of empiricism by the style they employ in their writing. No hint of a mention of ‘I think…’, an attempt to surpass the amount written in [...]
Archive for the ‘Patriotism’ Category
On lies and damn lies.
Posted in History, Morality, Patriotism, Politics, Russia, TV, The Rest of the World, War, tagged Georgia, Journalism, Mikheil Saakashvili, Postmodernism, Robert Mugabe, the BBC, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin on August 12, 2008 | 4 Comments »
On Russia and Georgia.
Posted in Patriotism, Politics, Russia, The Rest of the World, War, tagged Georgia on August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
What she said.
On Solzhenitsyn.
Posted in Culture Shock, History, Literature, Morality, Patriotism, Politics, Religion, Russia, tagged Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Two Hundred Years Together on August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died last week.
You thought the reactions to his death in the West were quite interesting.
Considering that people held in prison by repressive regimes the West disapproves of who subsequently spend a lot of time and energy denouncing the same are usually accorded irreproachable sainthood status, some of the commentators were surprisingly grudging.
For [...]
On 9 Rota.
Posted in Cinema, History, Patriotism, Pregnancy, Russia, War, tagged 9 Rota, 9th Company, Afghanistan, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Iraq, Vietnam on April 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A couple of weeks ago they showed a Russian film about the Russian Afghan war on TV called 9 Rota, or 9th Company.
You actually saw this when it first came out back in 2005 or thereabouts, but settled in to watch it anyway as you remembered it as being quite good, and in any case [...]
On discoveries.
Posted in Britain, Culture, Drink, Family, Food, Holidays, Patriotism, Poetry, tagged Burns' Night, Robert Burns, William Topaz McGonagall on January 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
You are not in the least Scottish.
This has always been a source of faint irritation because you are able to conjure up in almost equal amounts a Welsh background, an Irish one, a Northern English past, a Southern English birthplace and a strong connection to the Channel Islands out of France. So to miss out on being [...]
On the refuge of scoundrels.
Posted in Alonso, Britain, F1, Fernando Alonso, Formula 1, Hamilton, James Allen, Language, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, Patriotism, Russia, Russian, The Rest of the World, Very Fast Cars, Few Women. Who Drive., War on August 5, 2007 | 7 Comments »
As a fan of formula one, your years in Russia were a bit frustrating.
It’s true that the races were generally available on one of the terrestrial channels, although it always seemed to take a few races for a deal for the TV rights to be struck. Missing the opening of the season every year and [...]
On how to produce a good Eurovision entry.
Posted in Britain, Communication, Culture, Culture Shock, ESC, Eurovision, Eurovision 2007, Eurovision Song Contest, Flags, Language, Lasha Tumbai, Morality, Music, Patriotism, Russia, TV, The Rest of the World, Ukraine on May 13, 2007 | 13 Comments »
You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.
In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with [...]
On falling scales.
Posted in Britain, Education, Health, Patriotism, War on March 12, 2007 | 2 Comments »
So you decided you’d better do something towards researching current conditions for armed forces veterans as a result of the ’support the troops’ project described here.
And there you are doing the absolute minimum by rootling around the Ministry of Defence website, when you discover that there is, in fact, a Veterans’ Day. And there has been [...]
On supporting the troops.
Posted in Blogging, Britain, Culture Shock, Morality, Patriotism, Russia, The Rest of the World, The USA, War on March 6, 2007 | 2 Comments »
A chap called Hobgoblin, who you came to via Charlotte and Aphra Behn’s postings on the topic, has requested movingly and persuasively that people blog about what it means to support the troops. This seems like an admirable project, even if it didn’t run headlong into your latest train of thought, so here goes.
It’s not something you feel you [...]
On humanity.
Posted in Books, Britain, Morality, Patriotism, Religion, Russia, The Rest of the World, The USA, War on March 3, 2007 | 8 Comments »
So there you are about to recommend a book in a thread as a result of Midnight Jester’s very thoughtful and sensible post on the nature of responsibility in war. Suddenly you realise that you have done this so frequently over the last few years that rather than wear out the keyboard and encourage people to read it one at [...]
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