Cat Show. 5/21/2021

VG: What a strange world we live in! Cruel April is over, everything is in bloom, vaccinization of the world is almost complete, there are people’s faces in the streets and restaurants, economy is picking up so that hundreds of totally incompetent people are hired, while hundred of decrepit houses are being grabbed from the market before they have a chance to collapse on their own. Yet, instead of joy we have violence in Israel and tremendous anger generated by this violence everywhere else. Do you make any sense of this?

ALICE: Who cares about flowers in bloom; besides I always have allergies from them – when there is bombing of the innocent? We, the people of good will have to protest. We’ve tolerated the mean-spirited autocratic politicians for too long. Trump, Berluscone, Netanyahu, Putin. For how long would these dirty old white men crush everything young, different, and progressive. If they want to do that, let them crush flowers. But if Republicans and conservative Democrats in the pocket of AIPAC want to forward our hard earned money to the genocidal entity in the middle east, I am totally against it, and so should you, Vladimir.

HOBBS: If this show is the chance for Alice to impersonate AOC, I am done. I don’t want to hear her lecturing me about sublime and beautiful right here on the show, when I have enough of this nonsense in real life. She is the one who is quick enough to grab and torture mice, but when a mice is half dead and I pounce on it, she runs to you and denounces my animal cruelty. And now she doesn’t want to pay taxes. How courageous! She was OK paying taxes for endless NATO expansions, for rehabilitation and proliferation of nationalists and Nazis in the former Soviet Republics, for endless bombing campaigns against "evil" Serbs, Iraqis, or Afghanis, but now she wants to draw a line.

ALICE: Can’t believe this black cat is not getting it. You are so slow, no wonder you can’t capture mice. Palestinians are the new blacks. LGBT/Trans are the new black. Females are not quite new, nor would I call them old. So they are middle aged black. While the old conservative black cats are the new white. And so are the old conservative Jews. Brave new Jews in Tel Aviv, NYC and SF, are the new black as well. It is our time now on NPR, and NYT, and Internet. The time of the new International Socialist CrossSectionality, if you want to use color-blind terms.

VG: That’s a strange new alliance you’ve described, Alice. A far cry from a true solidarity. Do you think it will hold? What about Muslim world? Who are Iranians, or Syrians, or Egyptians, or Turks, or Saudis? Old or new? White or Black? Cross-Sectional or Unisectional? Or is it depends on whom we want to bomb or don’t want to bomb at the moment. So Syrians, who are bombed by NATO and Turkey are old whities, while the Syrians who are bombed by Assad and Russian forces – are the new black? That’s pretty confusing, and I doubt that the alliances formed by the ignorance and greed of State Department or by the fashinistas of NYC and Tel Aviv has any lasting value.

HOBBS: Who needs brain, when there are fashion, Instagram, and a chance to run around and scream that you are against oppression because you come from the family of Holocaust survivors, as if any Jew who came from Europe after the war, is not? Do you, Alice, really think that dogs when they attack cats, care if you are grey or black? Do you really think that the racists, anti-Semites and other thugs, when they come for Jews in synagogues or butcher shops all over the world from Pittsburgh to Paris, really care, that you marched under Palestinian flag near your flat in the IIIe arrondissement?

ALICE: Say what you want about fashions – and I know that keffiyeh does highlights the beauty of my eyes and hair --the fundamentals are fundamentals. Bombing & killing people in the world's largest prison camp where they can't leave nor move is a disgrace. And it is a disgrace not to you or me, but to humanity, it is a modern day Nazism, and no wonder that young all over the world protest it. Don’t forget that people in Gaza have no meaningful existence. It is XXI century after all; you cannot perpetrate a Nazi genocide against a helpless people and get away with it. Remember what happened to the Nazis at Nuremberg. The judgement day is coming!

HOBBS: Judgement for whom? And what do you mean, you cannot perpetrate genocide? Turks did it. Belgians did it. Brits did it. Americans did it. Do you live in the real world or not? Wiping out more than half a million Tutsis in Rwanda is not a genocide? And how do you call what NATO had practiced ever since the collapse of Soviet Union. Destroying Libya, and Iraq, and Yugoslavia was not genocide against helpless people? Unleashing ISIS upon the world is not a genocide? With the exception of a German army crushed by Russians, and a few Nazis caught in Nuremberg, most of the perpetrators got away with it. Hiding in Honduras, and Canada, and US. Furthermore, many are even celebrated nowadays in places like Ukraine, Baltics, and Canada, presented as noble fighters against the evils of communism. Why is creation of stateless, hated, and unprotected people out of those living in Donetsk and Lugansk is not a apartheid? Since 2014 coup in Ukraine, we are talking about more than ten thousand people killed there. When people in Gaza shoot their rockets into Israel: it is a brave act of resistance. When people in Donbass region put up a fight—and mind you: we’ve never heard of a single rocket from Donbass landing in Ukraine and damaging anything – the world screams of the Russian aggression, instead of the genocide of innocent civilians of Donbass.

VG: Alice, approaching life from the perspective of how it should be and not how it is, is the recipe for disaster. Isn’t road to hell paved with good intentions? Critics of Israel, complain that they are silenced by the accusations of antisemitism. But what about its defenders? Are they not silenced by the accusations of genocide, and Nazism, and Nuremberg? Of course, for purists of this world, there is nothing to defend. Israelis simply have to jump into the sea from shame, or come back to Russia, Germany, Poland, France, or USA, where some deranged hater will mow them down with the scream, “you will not replace us.”

When I lived in Russia under the semi-senile, semi-thuggish regime of Brezhnev, there was plenty of injustice and oppression for many people, but it wasn’t genocide. I couldn’t go to the college of my choice, or have a wonderful career or marry some hottie with KGB generals or diplomats for parents, because it would have derailed their “precious career,” but so what? At least, I had an opportunity to emigrate, as opposed to many others, locked within the borders of what many loud mouths like Alice, also called, “the biggest open air concentration camp in the world.”

ALICE: Well, all these stories of other places is just the plain old whataboutism, or relativism. We have to concentrate on the issue at hand and solve it. This slaughter of innocent has to stop.

HOBBS: Well, I remember Vladimir telling us the story of Don Quixote who sees the owner of the tavern beating up a young servant. Don stops it, threatens the owner, and demands him to treat the servant right and pay him all the back-pay that the owner withheld. Having done that, Don leaves proud of his noble act. It so happens, though, that a couple of years later, our noble knight stops at the same town, and sees a young man looking angrily at him. Why, he asks. Turns out, it is the same servant, who ever since Don left, had been mistreated by the owner ten times worse than before. “So please, —says the young man —don’t interfere on my behalf again. My back simply won’t take it.”

VG: Great story indeed. In other words, if you want to do the right thing, make sure that 1. You know what the right thing is. 2. You have all the mechanisms to maintain this right thing going. Otherwise, bombing Serbs on behalf of Albanians, or Kaddafi on behalf of Libyans, or Saddam on behalf of Iraqis, results only in explosion of chaos and violence.

ALICE: So you are promoting utter passivity? I am militantly against it. We, the people of good will…

VG: Sorry, Alice, our time is up.