The late Alexander Nepomnyashchy.
Editor’s Note: The arrival of raging capitalism in the former Soviet Union has meant (as usual) wealth for a handful and poverty and insecurity for the vast majority. The unleashed forces of Social Darwinism have taken and continue to take an awful toll. Not surprisingly, the Russian nouveau riche, the native breed of “carpetbaggers”, are now perceived by a new strain of Russian youth, a new counterculture, as the new “Ugly American”—a label that depicts both the marauding American business executive (and his underlings, the meddling diplomats, armies and mercenaries doing the bidding for the global rich), and the local native associated corporadoes. This disenfranchised, embittered youth have embraced the refrain heard in so many foreign lands—from the Philippines to Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia and so many others— for more than a hundred years, “Fuera Yanquis!” Or, as some homegrown rock bands are putting it, “Kill the Yankees.” Incidentally, and this bears repeating, even among fierce nationalists, there is no real hatred for the American people as such, only their government and globetrotting business elites. Most youth around the world, when not poisoned by invidious ideologies, are naturally peace-loving. Murderous hate, as the famous lyric from the operetta South Pacific reminds us, has “Got to Be Carefully Taught.”—PG
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
Alexander Tarasov
‘Kill the Yankees’ a Mantra of Counterculture
If you believe what you see on television, no songs of protest are being sung in today’s Russia.
But that’s a false impression. In the hungry, penniless provinces, where social, property and class contradictions are all the more obvious than in Moscow, a particular world, a particular youth culture has evolved, one opposed not only to the present political regime, but also to the “culture” that regime endorses. This youth has created its own culture, including its own music. They have their idols, groups like Che Dance, Mental Depression, AK-47 and others that are never on the hit parades because of the openly subversive content of their songs. That’s understandable; what sane DJ would dare play, say, a song by the group Ilich Ramirez Sanchez with the refrain, “I’d rip Chubais’ balls off”? (Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is the well-known terrorist “Carlos” who is doing a life sentence in a French prison.) Continue reading »
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Perhaps my most important–and ambitious article to date proposes a new but logical reincarnation of the OWS movement, Democracy Unchained, that aims to make Occupy’s ideal of a society for everyone, not just the 1%, a political reality. Just as Occupy focused its criticisms on the 1% and corporatocracy, Democracy Unchained attacks the corrupt Democrat-Republican duopoly that maintains corporatocracy. D.U.’s strategy’s included. It’s September 17, 2013 in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. The park is crowded (and mottled) with the same diverse, mixed-age, chanting, sign-carrying crew who launched the Occupy Wall Street movement exactly two years earlier. Is this simply an anniversary, a nostalgic commemoration of that once-vibrant movement? Or is this something new and different? Let’s listen more closely to what they’re chanting.
