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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/19/my-parents-got-me-out-of-soviet-russia-at-the-right-time-should-my-family-now-leave-the-us>
"Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and
favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal
ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters,
the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its
plunge into the sparkling waters below.
This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living
in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite
buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens
in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?)
Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to
give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they
took away any sense of normality, any faith that societies can provide lives
without bold-faced slogans, bald-faced lies, leaders with steely set jaws, and
crusades against phantom menaces, whether Venezuelan or Ukrainian.
I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel,
Vera, or Faith,
is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my
removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future
with fairly good aim in novels such as
Super Sad True Love Story, where
social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when
that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and
change.
But before I wrote that book, there was a period of some optimism where, I
confess, I got things terribly wrong. I imagined, in my least cynical moments,
that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more
habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite
happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch
on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that
will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet
enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who
supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently
Afrikaner. Politicians in all countries lie, but the Russian and American
floods of lies are not just harbingers of a malevolent ideology, they are the
ideology."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
