Sunday 26 April 2009

Russia

The way I see it, pretty much every country in this world is useful for something. England has given the world tea, sandwiches and Northeners. America has given coffee, hot dogs and Ron Paul. Even Iraq has given us oil, silk and Sadda...I'll stop there. But Russia is completely useless in my mind...a country which produces caviar, expensive oil and a chap called Putin. And it doesn't stop there with me. Not only does the sodding country produce raw fish eggs and expensive oil, but it also scares the hell out of me.

I don't get it, but I am scared of Russia. It sounds odd...and to be fair it is. But everything about Russia gives me the willies! The cold and barren siberian ice fields dotted with rotten villages being overcome with snow, the freaky children who seem to have a permanent evil glare and the creepy cities, ruined by the communist regime. It just doesn't make sense to me. A country with such...um...interesting history should be a hotspot for history-loving folk like myself but I just hate the place. And I think I've found out why.

Have you played Call of Duty 4? Well if you haven't then I'll elaborate. Half way through the story, you are plonked in to 1980's Pripyat, set 20 miles out of Chernobyl. The development team from Activison created an exact replica of Pripyat and put it into the game. You are told to run in to a hotel and snipe some arms-dealer, then once you have, you must run back out, evading enemy fire while carrying your friend. Towards the end, you are told to put your friend down, lay out some defences and survive for 10 minutes while a chopper comes to collect you. The remastered theme park in the centre of the town is the site and as you crouch in the ruined Ferris Wheel, sniping at the incoming pixels, you begin to realise something. This was real for some people - not the sniping, and the friend and the pixels - but people died here after a horrible mistake which lead to many deformed children being born and hundreds of people's lives destroyed by cancer.

So what? I hear you ask. But that's the point! We have taken a 'so what?' attitude to this sort of stuff. You can sit at home, with a controller in your hand and guide those pixels around a pixelated town made of pixels while shooting at pixels through a gun made of pixels, but people actually died there. People lost their lives to a mistake made by their own government, albeit a very poorly managed and left-wing government, but the government in which it's people voted for. And that's why I'm scared of Russia, because of their 'so what?' attitude to everything. If I ever step foot in Russia, I will make sure that I don't get taken in by the Putinist government. Because as they say; "In America, you break the law. But in Soviet Russia, law break YOU!"

-Steve

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