Today I was contacted by the author of the video below, Oliviero Martini, who asked me to share it with my contacts. Since I don’t really have a contact list and since I don’t do social media, I decided to post it here to share it with you all. My thanks to Oliviero for sharing his work with us!
Andrei
In the INFO war, all media are valid. The message is clear.
The heroes of Donbass and the victims in Donbass deserve every voice and memorial.
SitRep Rap.
Thank you very much, this is such a treat for a long-time reader.
I am calling on this wonderful community to please put me in contact with any music and media producers you may know:
we need to create contents that reach out to a broader audience than ours – I have been a private tutor for a lifetime and I just do not give up on young people especially.
I am working on more tracks and videos in order to muster a crew and produce lyrics with relevant contents.
I will take some extra space here to provide the Saker’s kind readers with some background:
If any other EU citizens reading this feels like I do, now it really is the time to start making an effort and make contact with the Russian cultural sphere – not institutional or academic links though: we badly need normal, peer-to-peer contacts and that is why we need music as an ideal core, as the greatest and best communicator.
Rap is just a vector – and the only long-text thing people still read/listen to, if you think about it, any style is welcome. I wanted to start a newschannel, but when you see what is going on with hostile algos and outrights censorship, I thought to start using a different approach.
I encourage everyone to watch a very inspiring video, even if you hate rap – it is a dissing, a battle, between one Iraqi American and a Russian Jewish (on youtube: oxxxymiron vs Dizaster).
Bear to watch the whole thing, forget the specific context: it is undeniably refreshing to see such rare meeting, and it ought not to. A friendly outburst of reciprocal hatred is very therapeutic and open the doors to acceptance, which is much deeper and healthy than tolerance. Wouldn’t you want to see so many ruskies and yankees together defusing bias and artificial hatred with irony?
Let me quote you a few topics here below which would be worth developing:
-The abundance of Latin, if disguised, in Slavic languages: I know feel much closer linguistically to the Balkans, you just need to be shown how these roots are now a little masked. We are still subconsciously brought to connect kirilica with the evergreen Russian spy. Kirilica scare Westerners – you know, at this point I even think it is a good thing….
-We know more of the Japanese and the Sumerians and the Masai people than about Bulgarians, Trakians and Scythians. Maybe it is time we fix this, right?
-I have been living in Bulgaria for a year now, and like for Russia, I feel it is clear we need to sit down and talk about a number of topics, all of which have been carefully and masterfully covered here on the Saker:
investigating and understanding to a deep, anthropological level the nature and characteristics of the Slavic-Balkan-Russian peoples; this endeavour though has to faces – on one hand what an Eastern European/Russian may come to realize or believe about his own culture and society: in this case we have an extremely rich set of writers, newsmakers, which I can only begin to fathom since I am limited to what gets translated or is custom made for Western audiences.
On the other hand, there should be an equivalent reflection from the West’s point of view about what is the Slavic-Eastern European- Slavic sphere to us, but:
– The history of the great plains, of the nomads is perhaps too alien to us, in our little cranked up peninsula.
A perception of life which developed along a seamless stream of empirical and academic knowledge flowing from the east and back is perhaps too evasive to our rigid and Lego Descartes system of beliefs.
– The situation in Donbass and Donetsk, the very names Luhansk or Novorossiya…all of this, sadly and tragically, does not really concern Western audiences because we have been subconsciously inducted to consider the Slavic – forgive the broad and arguable term – and the Chinese as basically uncharted/soul-less. Hic sunt leones.
– In some nearby countries, like Italy, in some areas there might be some better understanding and empathy
but certainly Underground by Kosturica could not be enough to have Italians shed away their unbearable and unjustified snobbish attitude, or worse, the Bon Sauvage European trademark of post-colonial sense of guilt. I am Italian and since I hate politically correct, what I do to respect a nation is to shut up, read and watch and learn.
– After one full year in Bulgaria and almost 5 years going back and forth, I am starting to get into the unspoken depths any civilization mostly unawaringly treasures: one very easy example is a nation’s drinking habits. or the word toska, the russian saudade? we need to talk about stuff that makes you interested with each other – the best antidote to mass manipulation.
– Once you are living east of the Balkans, you may come to realize that a very subtle change has taken place:
unlike our hardwired view of life as a linear course where you start and have to reach, must reach the goal – now, lo and behold how here, where the last drops of the blood of the Great Blue Sky touch the warm heart of the Mediterranean, here life is circular, because it is like Asian people, only nobody ever told them they are basically Buddhists and so they *think* they have a problem with alcohol , but actually is that you don’t have to justify yourself in order to live on, you don’t have to reach any goals. The Soviet mind-raping of course enforced the nihilist side of this, but that is an overlay I think.
– The Balkans and Southern Italy weren’t as lucky as Andalucia, and the Islam we did face is not at all the one the Spanish can look back at.
This random items of potential discussion is to show how such 360 cultural leaks and general ignorance we suffer from cannot be tackled by beautiful but lengthy essays, in an age of non-existing attention span.
That is why with music and media we may popularize some hard topics – not so hard per se, but, like a TV series, it is hard to start from the last season, and it is even hard to explain all that has happened before.
Music may generate interest, the key element for wanting to catch up and be aware of the present.
I feel I have taken way too much space,
Thank you for your time
– Hope to hear from you soon, please contact me here:
plovdivbrigade@protonmail.com
Interesting to listen to. When the war first started it was ‘just’ scattered resistance to the orcs coming from Kiev and west orcland. As the orcs shot more and more innocents, the locals armed up and fought back. At the beginning we in Sevastopol offered any and all wounded treatment for their wounds and such. No charge, just come to us.
As a result we had for the first year fair numbers of wounded and sadly too many crippled from the war. Many returned to the fight when they recovered, some did not because they could not. One of my closest friends here is a wounded veteran from that war, to badly wounded to return so with the appropriate help and assistance his wife and two sons came here to live. He is a Warrior Priest and I can offer no other description of him than salt of the earth.
Both of his sons have now reached their majority and both have returned to Novorossiya to serve. They get a few days of leave every few months and both return to stay with their mother and father. I have the opportunity to speak with them, IOW I listen as they talk about things their mother and father do not need to hear. Of late they come to me first, we talk sometimes for hours and often over some very good wine, only after they speak to me (this is men’s talk, my wife busies herself in her embroidery room after she greets them with the traditional three kisses) do they call their father to come get them. Their father, Father Y///////////, has no problems with both sons coming to me first. Father and his wife have often visited us and he and his wife and I and my wife get along rather well.
Auslander
Author
Never The Last One, paper back edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521849056 Never the Last One: a Novel of Spetznaz, opens your eyes to the Russian world not described in American news or fiction.
An Incident On Simonka paperback edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1696160715 NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.
Thank you for sharing this, I will be happy to read more of this, I’ll surely get a copy of both books. From what you wrote here, your style must be interesting, it reads properly dry but heartfelt. Kind of Capote meets Heller, but let me read you first before confirming such a compliment!
Here are some thoughts that came up in my mind reading your comment:
What is really sick is how in Western Europe collective memory has gone down the drain. My interest in the Ukranian situation is not even activism or some messiah syndrome: it is just civic sense, such a dirty old word.
I was a teenager when, from our Italian bases, NATO started carpet bombing here and there in the Balkans.
Not actually sending Italian jets but just let the others do the dirty job is of course an egregious specimen of hypocrisy. That, done by the first LEFT, fully post-communist D’Alema government.
So after a while, the then strong opposition, although piloted by the ex-communists, went on for years and years calling out the politicians who had allowed Italy to take part to this intervention in the Balkans.
Then the movement morphed opposing Afghanistan, but basically after the infamous G8 in Genova all popular movements quickly evaporated.
Nevertheless, we did get so many refugees and immigrants in Italy that the mark of our sin was to become evident to most. Once now I am seeing this happening all over again in Ukraine (and the Black Sea to a lesser degree), one would expect at least a relevant minority in Italy to stand up and immediately say: no, no more Italian soldiers involved – other NATO countries are much more picky about where to send their troops and pilots.
But no, not even a recent conflict as the 90s Balkan war, so close to our home, is enough to make people realize that that’s going to happen again if we don’t watch out. We have Italian pilots up on the border with Belarus, and not ONE word about it. “An Italian pilot on the border with Belarus” should only be the beginning of a joke.
You just need to take a step out of the EU to see how everyone on the planet but a handful of brainwashed countries are perfectly aware of what NATO is.
The Russians used to say that the Soviet lied about communism but they did say the truth about Capitalism, right? So at least Westerners in their 40’s like me should start going back in their life and look at what we have been fed.
– starting with how in ancient history elementary and highschool texts anything beyond the borders of Greece is kind of hazy and just worth a 100 words mention. Basically the east begins to exist in our mind with the Bolshevik Revolution or little earlier, while from Hungary to the Balkans, all over the crowns of Saints Venceslav and Stephan, we can clearly see the conscious effort of erasing any awareness and knowledge of there ever being anything worthy mentioning but Keplero, the assasination of Franz Ferdinand and Solidarnosh
– There is no way you can find a decent text on the Soviet era without it ending up being either apologetic or damning.
You literally need to go to the Balkans and collect people’s memories from country to country.Or, I insist on music because listening to the reggae version of the Soviet anthem, sung live by Ukrainians 5nizza or No Escape from Balkans did more to induce me and Western friends to discover more than any media or institution ever did.
When I listen to Oxxymiron, Russian rapper, I can tell how Russia became modern and aggressive and somehow closer to what the US wanted so bad to be in the 80’s perhaps. Only, with way more elegance and, like the Chinese and the Indians, bending foreign styles to the national taste with no shame whatsoever – something we have long forgotten in Italy and most of Europe.
There are for instance Eastern European films that would be key to opening up our minds to the recent history of our neighbours (I recommend Светът е голям и спасение дебне те отвсякъде and Хълмът на боровинките for Bulgaria), would you have something equivalent films I can find for Ukraine?
Few realize the quality of conversation you can have with virtually anyone in the Balkans compared to a zombiefied Europe, by the way.
You can switch from football to ancient history to pretty much anything else. It is not about specific knowledge or cultural level, it is the art of conversating with other human beings.
I think some of it comes from the language itself – generations were taught at least 3 variants of the cyrillic alphabet – standard, small-case and cursive, plus latin characters) and in all likelihood were taught at least Russian.
Now I see an education system which still requires a minimum degree discipline and effort, especially compared to Europe. TV really destroyed a country which already has an extremely elderly population.
Same goes for what I can get of Russian national media: even technically, they overtook us in terms of quaity, coolness, depth…
People still ask me whether here it is full of escorts and so on… like Italy doesn’t have a world-record for clients and prostitutes…. so you may easily picture how Ukraine is way further off in Western perception… what can people ever understand?….
The irony of it all is that I am caught in a 2-front war because at the smeame time, many in Eastern Europe and the Balkans just won’t look at the fact that the new Soviets are coming from the West this time.
Documentaries and books are useful but limited in my experience and they can be so easily buried nowadays. Do you have some media where you read out some passages from your books? If you would like to try, I have a sound tech friend with lots of calm instrumentals apt for a reading session, let me know!
As a final observation, I guess we can all agree that after a comedian in a certain language or from a certain nation has made you laugh or once a song in a certain language has moved you, it instantly becomes a little harder to hate those people and it gets easier to take interest in knowing more about them. these are among the few genuinely effective anti-racist tools available I guess.
Music and human voice have a very quick emotional charge which bypasses cultural and linguistics gaps, though that is why they also ruined sound forever with audio compression and lame herzrate :)
So if you want to help me with some hybrid promotion for relevant contents, I am all ears.
Best and talk soon!
*Perhaps contact me on plovdivbrigade@protonmail.com, I don’t mean to generate huge off-topics here on the Saker!