An American tourist in Russia
Americans adore the fantasy of plucky rebels, ragtag hyper individualists standing up against tyranny. That fantasy (however selectively) resembled our early history. Revolutionaries kicking out the British Empire, Texans fighting to the last man at the Alamo, American blockade runners to Alaska during the Crimean War, and so on. But eventually, the fairy tale no longer resembled reality, but that didn’t stop us from pretending.
The Irish Brigade by J.F. Holmes, despite being a work of sci-fi, is a sharply written apologetic manifesto for neoliberalism and globalism.
For context, I’ve had a PDF of this book two years ago. However, there was the COVID lockdown, I took too much xanax, and my reviews and other writing endeavors were, ahem interrupted. Now, finally, I read it, and found the experience worthwhile. Contemporary art and literature is worth looking at because it says something about our culture and mood. The Irish Brigade is one such example. It’s a tirade against patriotism and morality.
Actually, just my top ten stories about anything, but it was February/March 2022 that this site first got “big” so it’s the same thing. I try to push a certain style of messaging, and by “messaging” I mean the Russian perspective, which I try to relay the best I can in the most collected manner possible. It’s nice and flattering that I accumulated a decent amount of readers over the past 15 months, but unfortunately, this perspective never quite gained the traction I would have liked. In part that’s because I didn’t post as consistently as I would have liked, but it’s mostly because I said quite a few things that the “pro-Russia” echo-chamber simply does not want to hear. This collection of personalities only want to hear certain things and, frankly, those things do not include what’s true. They want confirmation bias for their own “western civilization” narrative that excuses their own inaction, and conveniently lumps responsibility for action on an imaginary Eurasian alliance. Regardless, it’s good to look back at some topics that were forgotten and sidelined over time.
