The bombings, the massacres, the lies, the repression, the abject ideology, the violence on all levels, the ugliness of feelings, the crass vulgarity, everything was there, embodied by a man and his cohort of slaves, a midget bloated, patriotic, racist, sexist, uneducated by habit of lying, liar by breathing, all my contempt for years which swells with invasions, corruptions, attacks, my contempt then my hatred of communism, and laughing to contain it , put up with it, my hatred of Sovietism, call it what you want or Stalinism in its purest form, a father like that, lousy, the impression of knowing them by heart, by filiation, speaking with a Romanian philo-Semite that the word communism asphyxiation, I can’t believe that the Russians, that all the Russians… because I loved a Russian, well, he called himself a Tatar, and it was Perestroika, I didn’t even know where it was, the Tatarstan, and for good reason… it was Moscow, in 1990, the city was touching, like a beaten dog, it licked its wounds, in the community apartments, the kids in the cities left the gas on the stove because they didn’t had no more matches to light their cigarettes, it was the fire war in HLM, a good memory, and others which have been wasted, especially since the assassination of the children of Beslan by the special forces (already special ) Russian.
All that, all that, and then the total, massive war, it’s been two years, in Ukraine, with the irresistible lacks, prudence and timidity, the guilty blindness of “the West”, the cowardice of the reasonable, not to mention the sold-out , I knew one, a pitiful idiot, an ambassador of Nazi-Putinian ideology under horse cover. He sends me his cynical trip report to Leningrad where life is good, the terraces full, the youth happy, not upset by the laughable sanctions of the West, he sneers. Last hope, little excuse: that he gets paid well to tell his bullshit. Not even sure. But what to do ? What to say ? Lamenting, sending paltry money, reading and recommending to friends Benoît Vitkine’s articles, edifying, depressing, oh the little misfortunes of a Parisian bourgeois, saying at dinner parties in town “It’s war, what is -what we expect, to lose it at the moment of understanding!” Mézigue so badly placed, reformed P4, and at my age, to go there, die of ridicule while playing the bugle.
But to be ashamed: we have money, we have weapons, we must crush the villain and we try to coax him. We set red lines to move them back year after year. In Syria, I saw Russian soldiers sightseeing on Fridays in the souk of Damascus. They wanted to be filmed, not their commander who wanted to steal the camera. The war was everywhere, we couldn’t even hear it, all the beautiful translators were called Nathalie. So I was disgusted. It was a conviction, opinions, but the other day, the death of Alexeï Navalny, it’s personal, it’s no longer an abstraction, it’s no longer a stain on the map of operations which delights me or discourages me depending on whether it grows or shrinks. It is the assassination of an imprisoned man. Can we be more cowardly, easier, more degrading? The Soviet potentates will have committed the lowest crimes; they did not have the megalomaniac and narcissistic gigantism of the National Socialists, they were much smarter… so that it could last like this for more than a century.
Navalny, this morning, it’s personal, it’s so serious that I find myself believing, in order not to collapse and despair, I find myself imagining that this death will finally wake up “the Westerners”, the elected officials, presidents, and people… but I haven’t counted on them for a long time… Am I wrong? Ah good ? I would love to be wrong. Please prove me wrong! Fight the war before you lose it. Call a fascist by his name and make sure he doesn’t pass, as they used to say.
Christophe Donner, writer
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