The leftist subversives need to be talked to more harshly

The reality of modern life is increasingly forcing us to answer the question: what to do the person you are talking with is blatantly rude and crude, and does so with a sense of self-imposed moral superiority?

When Western politicians and diplomats try to talk "nicely" to their Russian counterparts, it is quite clear to those of us who speak Russian and know Russian mentality that this approach will achieve nothing, because Russian insolence only grows. The well-known political commentator Anne Applebaum writes about this very aptly in The Atlantic these days.

"Tragically, the Western leaders and diplomats who are right now trying to stave off a Russian invasion of Ukraine still think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate." She concludes: "But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy; it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination, a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late."

When this is said about Russia, it is somewhat clear to many. Russia understands only tough language from a position of strength. But when conservative politicians or public figures try to debate with their leftist domestic counterparts, we see a similar picture. While the left openly mocks "traditional values" and demonstratively tramples on the sacred parts of former times, conservatives rather timidly argue from a defensive position, trying to be correct and restrained. I think this defensive strategy should be abandoned - the sooner the better.

On Saturday night, the Supernova final took place. Among the finalists was the musician Ralfs Eilands, who is known for his active, rather aggressive ideological position. During the interview, he was wearing a T-shirt, which was deliberately blurred in the video broadcast. When his ideological associate Mārtiņš Stabiņģis posted on social media that he would not be able to sleep if he did not find out why this inscription was censored, Eilands posted a photo of the shirt. Russian chauvinists, known as vatniks, wear similar shirts. Only instead of "your mom", it's Obama, Americans, Ukrainians, a swastika, "we can do it again" or something like that. What to say about this demonstration of Eilands' "civic position"?

The image of humiliating the mother on the left wing of Western culture once emerged as a reaction to the debate about whether/how much it is acceptable to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Since the left couldn't surprise anyone by blaspheming religious sanctities, they began to demonstrably blaspheme what is most sacred to every human being - people's own mother.

Eilands' friend/acquaintance and well-known Twitter cretin, the crude joke-thrower Kārlis Langins, once tried to bring this style to us. He tried to deliberately insult people whose posts he considered ideologically incorrect by including that he had slept (in cruder terms, of course) with the mother of the author of the disliked post.

As you could tell, Langins himself thought it was extremely stylish and progressive. We can ridicule everybody, including your mother, and that's okay. Eilands has been doing the same thing for a long time. Of course, it's so childish that it's hard to believe that none of the "insiders" has ever said to them - you look like little kids who heard a rude word you don't understand from the big boys in the backyard, and now you repeat it in every possible place, thinking that it will make you look bigger.

I once had an acquaintance in Russian times who threw all the garbage, rubbish and packaging on the ground in the street. When I reprimanded him, he said, "But everybody does that in New York." Needless to say, he had never been to New York, because in those days you couldn't go abroad at all. But he was convinced that by throwing wrapping paper on the street he was bringing Riga closer to the "modern culture" of the West. Eilands' shirt is from the same provincial opera. A man puts on an idiotic T-shirt and thinks: now this is how I'm going to show our backwater losers what sophisticated "Parisian" manners are like today. In the end, however, he has shown himself to be an inadequate fool by blindly imitating something. An infantile cretin without brakes (à la Kaimiņš, Gobzems & Co).

I do not think it is possible to talk politely with these "garbage throwers on the street" and "mockers of the sacred". Why do I equate them with Russian reprobates? Because, just like Russian diplomats, they only dare to show their insolence where they are spoken to in a civilized language. In Beijing, these diplomats would not dare to say that they sh*t on the sanctions, as they have just done in Stockholm. As soon as they are vigorously countered, their guts are gone. Let us remember that the wild Kaimiņš also became an obedient lamb of the Saeima as soon as the Damocles sword of criminal liability appeared above his head.

But just as Western politicians have recently begun to speak to the Kremlin in harsher tones, the time has come for some of Latvia's more intelligent people to stop indulging the leftist "tradition-breakers". The wearers of such T-shirts need to be told to their face who they really are. Not even halfwits. Just fools and petty bastards.