Andrei Khrapavitski: Belarusian American Blog

Sometimes it hurts to read the Belarusian blogosphere. Seriously. Among Livejournal bloggers, there are well-known Belarusian analysts, journalists, musicians, politicians, educators, nonprofit activists. I have met in real life many of the people whose blogs I occasionally read. Most of them seem to be totally adequate and normal people. But what some of them write on their blogs is troubling. A normal guy whose face could be seen on Belsat, or whose voice could be heard on Radio Liberty, or whose album you’ve just bought, writes outright racist, xenophobic postings on Livejournal.com. It leaves me guessing whether it’s some virtual alter ego, Slim Shady kind of persona being revealed online, while his or her real views are not that controversial. But then I ask myself what if that online persona is what this person is all about in real life, although not showing it publicly.

As an example, I was shocked to see a post like this in the Belarusian Livejournal political community by_politics, or to read a totally racist post like this. Haiti, in fact, has become a popular topic to chatter about and for some to sarcastically grin at the pain of Haitians. It hurts to read how my compatriots, some of whom have received foreign aid themselves, seem to be quite cynical about the Haitian earthquake and purely racist hiding under a veil of Internet anonymity.

Luckily, there are voices of sanity, for instance, here. So, please, by reading my blog post, don’t run into conclusions that Belarusians are xenophobes or racists. Unfortunately, some are.

China is known for its walls. Ridiculous as it sounds, now they’ve blocked access to Wired.com.

Current blacklist members and alumni include YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia, Google and most recently, IMDB, an encyclopedic movie information site. China’s censorship of the net is in constant flux, aided by sets of powerful firewalls marketed to the Communist government by Western technology companies.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/china-wired-censorship/#ixzz0c9pmYrOH

Is it the future of the Belarusian Internet? Scary.

Passing through Narach… Villagers are getting ready for holidays. The weather is getting warmer. Some pics in a slide-show. Merry Christmas, y’all!
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While walking across a parking lot at one of Vilnius malls, close to where I live, I nearly bumped into a couple of Christmas tree merchants offering passersby all sorts of evergreens at pretty low prices. They have dozens of trees piled in a small truck parked near the store. Day in and day out, they are bringing more. I couldn’t help thinking of how many trees are chopped down every holiday season so as to make our Christmas ‘authentic’ and more enjoyable. (more…)

So sick and tired of so called “Climate-gate”. Can’t see why some bright LJ-friends feed into this climate-deniers’ tune. Yes, the leaked e-mails raise questions. Such things have to undergo scrutiny. But how can this dubious case outweigh years and years of climate studies which clearly indicate the climate change is happening? It is also obvious that we, humans, are causing it. Just think how much crap we pump into the atmosphere every minute.

It is also more than strange that this climate-gate pops up on the eve of the important climate summit. It prompts all this anti-green hooblah around the world. What a convenient timing, don’t you think?

Journalists do have to cover this stuff, they do have to raise questions and give word to all sides. It is the nature of our job. So The Washington Post has published a loony op-ed by Sarah Palin. Can’t link to it, as it is restricted to Washpost subscribers, but the Republican diva pretty much expressed it on her Facebook account:

“Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a ’sin’ against the planet.”

Yeah, right. That’s the lady who cheered with the crowds chanting “Drill, baby, drill.” Who the hell votes for these people?

In a unanimous vote, the Belarusian Parliament has amended the Belarusian electoral law, mollifying some questionable parts, removing others, making it more palatable for international observers. Still far from ideal, it is yet unclear whether this change will be any helpful to the Belarusian opposition during the forthcoming local elections and a subsequent battle for the presidential post? (more…)

It’s interesting to observe how taints of green gradually penetrate into mainstream politics. It gives me hope. For so long, green activism was perceived as something marginal, even radical. Green ideas were often greeted with hostility, viewed as some form of quasi-communism, leftist gibberish. In essence, ecology leans neither left nor right.

To wavering conservatives I’d say, it is high time to realize that being green does not contradict capitalism or traditional values. Being green is purely traditional and capitalistic. First, it saves life on earth. Second, alternative renewable energy will probably be the most important industry of XXI century. The sooner you grant political and financial support to it, the better standing on the energy marketplace your country will have.

To left-wingers I’d say, green jobs are not outsourced, they stay at home, and they feed life back into your home economies.

Frankly, I am quite frustrated with most Belarusian politicians being quite blank and lackadaisical as it comes to green ideas. Fortunately, there are exceptions. I salute both Milinkevich and Lyabedzka for their quite vocal opposition to construction of a nuclear plant in the greenest region of Belarus. Belarus also has a Green Party which has partly sprung up from the community of anarchists and leftwing youth. The Green Party may be small, but I salute them for being active opponents of the nuclear plant construction.

Belarusians have suffered from nuclear power enough. We have reasons to go green. No way would it happen though. Not with this government… It is sad to see how our foreign policy is all about getting cheap gas and oil; when we don’t, we are in big trouble. So we want to fight our energy dependency from Russia by building a nuclear plant. Anecdotally, it is Russians who will build it for us. I wonder what kind of energy independence that would be?

Well, maybe I don’t need to be so harsh on the nuclear energy. I know it is cleaner than coal. But I also know that the spent fuel rods contain highly radioactive fission products and must be stored safely. These used fuel rods are considered high level nuclear waste. I wonder where it would be stored. Is Belarus prepared for it? Is local population prepared for it? Hardly. My impression is that they do not know what they are subscribing to. All they hear from the authorities is pro-nuclear propaganda. Voices of dissent are marginalized. In such a political climate, are we really prepared to build a nuclear plant properly? How safe will it be when the government ignores opinion of ecologists (one was even detained)?

I personally would rather see Belarus invest in wind power. We don’t get much sun here, but we do have winds. How come our country totally ignores this endless source of energy, while the world, especially the European Union, is actively building up its wind power infrastructure? Are we wearing a blindfold?

I’ve just finished reading Timothy Snyder’s impressive volume “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999.” Although this book is not as detailed about Belarus as about the intricacies of Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Lithuanian relations within the nation-building process, I’d still highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Belarus as part of the greater regional context. The author offered quite a realistic and unbiased narrative about the occurrence of nation-states in place of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which Belarus and Ukraine were integral parts of. Whereas Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine succeeded in this “reconstruction” process, Belarus failed due to a bunch of reasons enumerated in this book. Here’s just a small extract on this issue:

Tradition involves what people actually do now, whereas history narrates what people supposedly once did. Where tradition stops and history begins appears to depend a great deal upon the social origins of national activists. Here again the Lithuanians enjoyed an unexpected advantage over the Belarusians. Activists of humble social origins, whose families never played any role in early modern politics, found it easier to treat the entire past as history. Lithuanian activists, often Russian-educated peasant sons, happily skipped over several centuries and spoke of rebirth. Belarusian activists, Polish-speaking Roman Catholic gentry, were bogged down in the received truth of the actual tradition they learned from their parents and grandparents.

I can’t agree more.

OK, here’s another laughable story for you. As I wrote earlier, BPF Party has recently elected a new leader, Yanukevich, who was in opposition to the old party elite.

The party did not split as it had happened in the past when an old party leader could not accept to cooperate with a new one. The old leader would just bang the door, taking his supporters with him. That was before. Now our democratic parties are becoming more democratic and tolerant, aren’t they?

Well, let’s just say that somebody’s hands are itching to put stokes into the wheels of the newly elected party leader and council. According to the Belarusian blogosphere, a webmaster, loyal to the previous leader, is refusing to pass passwords and website requisites to the new team. Thus they can’t update the party website. A source in the party revealed that they are now thinking of registering a new domain to bypass the obstacle.

Can you imagine anything like that happening in your country? For example, what if Bush web team refused to pass control to Obama’s team over whitehouse.gov? Belarus is surely a pretty odd place.

For quite a while, I’ve been intrigued by Estonia, the fatherland of Skype and Hotmail, the most wired country in Europe, the only Nordic post-soviet state, as it is often portrayed in the media. True, some of it is just hype, clever image-making, but Estonians have, indeed, shown some staggering progress in IT sphere, even conducted the first Internet elections (in spite of being not quite prepared for it, as diagnosed by many experts).

Now it seems, if nothing goes wrong, this country will be the first Baltic state to adopt euro. Way to go, Estonia, way to go!