Worse Than Nuclear War

Lukashenka plays the role of an ugly girlfriend.

There is a cute parody channel in the vast expanses of Telegram called “Soviet Belarus”. They write there in approximately the same style as “sovbeliya”, only it’s funny and vice versa. And from time to time they conduct reader surveys.

So, the other day a poll appeared there: what will you choose — Lukashenka or nuclear war? And 90 percent of subscribers answered: nuclear war. Then, of course, Yarmoshyna’s bots came to the channel and began to pump up votes in favor of Lukashenka to prove that he is better than nuclear war. But even Yarmoshyna’s bots were unable to change the voting results: live subscribers continued to vote for a nuclear war against Lukashenka.

For a second I imagined a continuation of the channel’s authors’ fantasy using other types of weapons of mass destruction. Are you for Lukashenka or for chemical weapons? Are you for Lukashenka or for the use of mustard gas? Are you for Lukashenka or for anthrax? I'm afraid even in this situation he has no chance. Not because people want a war with the use of weapons of mass destruction, but because in relation to Lukashenka, a Belarusian, in principle, cannot use the pretext “for”: their tongue cannot pronounce this, and their hand does not obey. “For Lukashenka” is a gross grammatical error, it is against the simplest language rules. So no one succeeds. And what is there in contrast — nuclear war, rat poison, watching videos of the Gruzdev sisters — no longer matters.

And this is, perhaps, the only project that Lukashenka’s implementation turned out to be super successful: a complete change in linguistic rules, when a preposition and a proper name, which can totally be combined in any other variations, in this case — “for” and “Lukashenka” — scatter in different directions. Any modern language, of course, undergoes changes and is generally plastic; it accepts borrowings and neologisms, and sends out-of-use words marked “arch.” (archaizm) to old explanatory dictionaries. However, this is a slow process. And in order to completely eliminate one phrase from use in just a couple of decades, despite the fact that the proper name is still quite alive and even moving, it would take a lot of effort. But Lukashenka really tried. And he achieved it. “She’s uglier than a nuclear war” — that’s how we used to slander ugly girlfriends when we were teenagers. Now there is no need to slander — here he is, alive, worse than a nuclear war.

By the way, about ugly girlfriends. Previously, it was believed that an ugly girlfriend is an indispensable attribute of a bitchy lady: against the background of this very poor thing, the bitchy lady shines, sparkles with all facets, looks advantageous, and therefore drags her along with her everywhere, letting her go ahead, so that later she can enter as a winner and collector of trophy hearts. So, Lukashenka, apparently, did not understand that for many years he has been playing the role of an ugly girlfriend under Putin. Compared to what Lukashenka did, Putin always looked almost decent. “Look,” Putin nodded at his ugly girlfriend, “he has thousands of political prisoners, but I still have a couple of dozen vague liberals. He doesn’t have a single independent journalist left in the country — everyone is imprisoned or has fled — but I have Muratov walking around Moscow freely. His political prisoners are dying in prison, but mine are healthy ones.” And even against the background of the war — I myself recently heard remarks from Western colleagues — they say about Russia: “No, after all, the regime there is not as terrible as in Belarus; Some media remain there, human rights organizations still work there, Navalny and Kara-Murza are not included in the list of terrorists. Well, yes, the war is monstrous, but the scale of repression is still incomparable with that in Belarus.” This is all thanks to the ugly girlfriend, who is truly worse than a nuclear war.

Iryna Khalip, specially for Charter97.org

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