I first heard about Valentina Tereshkova when I was a small child. My grandmother, an old peasant woman with few, tragically few, years of schooling, had boundless admiration for Valentina Vladimirovna, as if, through an interposed person, she could ease some of the burden of her life of toil and labor.
First woman in space, daughter of a Soviet who will not reach 100 years of age, in the aftermath of her feat, certainly struck a chord in the imagination of many women, educated and uneducated, feminist and not.
With her commitment and determination, with her technical degree obtained by studying at night after factory shifts, with her flight into space, the lark Valentina Tereshkova proved once again to the world of small and fearful men that woman and female are two different words, that a woman is not a baby-making machine and her place is not just the kitchen or the bridal thalamus.
Valentina Tereshkova was and is an exceptional woman and now, at venerable age of 85, she finds herself sanctioned by the European Union along with another great of Russia, filmmaker Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov. The ninth round of sanctions decided by Brussels found them both guilty of being.... Russians. Of not hating their own land, their own homeland. Of not condemning the war Moscow was forced to start to save not only the Donbass but its own existence.
A girl friend of mine asked me incredulously if I really believed that there are Nazis in Ukraine. There was a moment of polite silence; I think I even looked out the window. I could have cited to her the articles I read, the analyses I translated, the footage I saw. Of course, the Nazi muck that is in Ukraine is not the majority of the Ukrainian population, now being treated as cannon fodder, but what is there is enough, because it is being armed by the Americans and defended by their propaganda. And by their psychologists.
I could have told my friend about those two beasts in human form named Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed, whom Wikipedia demurely refers to as “political activist” and who died respectable gallant deaths in the United States instead of hanging from a gallows after Nuremberg, as they deserved.
The beautiful Chinese jade-colored eyes with which my friend looks at the world seem blind to what is really going on. It is a form of disconnection from reality that affects not only her but also many other people.
Those who wanted sanctions against Russia are the same people who tortured Greece for years, imposing mindless austerity that destroyed that nation and ruined the lives of many people. These are the same people who elevated the little Swedish girl Greta Thunberg to a small pagan deity of a beggar-thy-neighbor environmentalism that is both not scientific and lacking of any real basis. It is the same people who have imposed temporary jobs on us, telling us that “flexibility” (sic) would make us richer and more satisfied. It is the same people who “believe” in the nonsense of gender theory, who want us to stop using cash at all costs, who have imposed pandemic lockdowns and green passes on us. These are the same people who want us to eat bugs, to live in a “fluid” world and, last but not least, firmly believe that a woman could emancipated with an Onlyfans or Pornhub account.
In other words, these are people we can do without. It is the same muck that is in Kiev, only slightly different in its apparent qualities. So, no one should be surprised that we have reached this point of madness and that the European Union is spiraling into a self-destructive path that will sooner or later lead governments to act more and more openly against their own people. We had a taste of this with the repression during the Covid outbreak, including in Italy, but I fear it will get worse.
Nikita Sergeevich! We thank you for your movies that have taught us a lot! We wish you more of them and may they also be your gift to the undeserving people who have sanctioned you.
Valentina Vladimirovna! We love you and we are your friends... Thank you for your feat! Thank you also for reminding us that one can love one's country through a lifetime because, as the Iraqi poet already wrote in the aftermath of the Americans' arrival in Baghdad, “to the bad weed of the foreigner I prefer the nettle of my own home”.
Brussels should be careful about the decisions it makes, the subserviences it accepts, but it is as if it has gone mad. What future can it have?