There is one question which I should never have to answer, at least in a civilized world, but which I get over and over and over again. This is this question: “why do you live in the United States and not in Russia, Iran or some other country“? I always get that question from US Americans who mistake my hostility to the AngloZionist Empire for a hostility to the United States and who, frustrated by their inability to come up with a cogent argument, try a little ad hominem to discredit me. What is usually implied in this question is a variation on any of the following ideas:
If the USA are so bad, why am I here? Does my presence here not prove that the USA are actually great? Am I not a hypocrite for criticizing a political system while at the same time benefiting from it? Could it be that I relocated to Florida to be closer to CENTCOM in Tampa or even the CIA in Virgina?
I used to ignore these primitive personal attacks as beneath contempt but now I am coming to the conclusion that such idiocy should be pointed out to those questioners to remind them that the real world is very different from what they imagine. And in this spirit, let me explain why I live in the USA.
Simply put, it is my legal right. I am a Swiss citizen married to a US citizen. When I married my wife she got a “C Permit” in Switzerland and the USA gave me a “Green Card”. These two countries have an agreement, а contract, if you want, which allows US nationals married to a Swiss national to live in Switzerland and a Swiss national married to a US national to live in the USA. This agreement is similar to say, airlines sharing passenger seats or hotels sharing rooms. To make my point eve simpler: I live in the USA because the US government decided that it would be in the interest of the American people to have such an agreement with Switzerland. You could also say that it is my wife’s right to have her husband with her while living in her own country.
None of that implies any kind of endorsement of anything, any big expressions of gratitude or any other ideological or emotional dimension.
In my case, it was really simple: I was blacklisted in my own country and I could not find work. My wife’s degrees were not recognized in Switzerland. So we moved to the USA were she could work and I could homeschool our kids. I am now putting them through college and have no intention of leaving until their personal situation stabilizes.
None of that implies that life in the USA is “better” than in Switzerland in any way. It just means that in my personal case it was more convenient for my family to live in a country I was not blacklisted just like Snowden prefers to live in Russia not because Russia is “better” but because in Russia he is not persecuted by the government.
By the way, I could have applied for US citizenship years ago, but I have no interest or desire to do so simply because I want to remain what I am today a “legal alien” – that status and even this otherwise weird expression suits me perfectly.
As for Russia, I have no more obligation to live there than the millions of Russians which have lived outside Russia for a variety of reasons. This is especially true in my case since I was already born abroad (in Switzerland) and that it was my great-grandparents who left Russia after the Revolution. I am a 4th generation émigré, before me my family lived in Serbia, Germany, Argentina and Holland.
How any of the above could be pertinent to what I write, the positions I take or the arguments I present is beyond me. I suppose that there are the kind of people out there who cannot imagine living in a country without immediately becoming an unconditional supporter of the political regime in power. I strongly suspect that 99% of them have never taken a trip abroad to begin with. I did.
Here is the funny thing: it would never cross the mind of a Swiss person to be baffled by a US resident of Switzerland (there are plenty of those, by the way) being critical of Swiss politics. No Swiss person would ever ask this American why do you live in Switzerland if you are so critical of the Swiss government. This would be seen as self-evidently stupid.
So now it is my turn to ask a question: what in the world makes you ask such an utterly irrelevant question?
The Saker
