Here Comes Temptation Dragging It Out Again
The Earth; Here Comes the Clown. No Joke.
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Nov vi, 1994
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WHEN Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the energetic Russian extremist who likes to spit and throw rocks at protesters, struts his stuff across the United States this week there volition be a huge temptation to laugh.
Don't. He'due south certain to exist offensive and clownish and captivatingly crude. Just it'due south time Americans realized he'southward not that funny. The United States is, afterwards all, a country he has denounced in nearly every speech he has ever delivered.
"All of y'all in the West take become rotten and moldy," Mr. Zhirinovsky said earlier this year when President Clinton came to Moscow.
"That's why yous got scared that a new, honest, brave homo has emerged in Russia," he continued, describing himself as he oftentimes does. "Y'all desire us to be weak and rot with yous. Merely we won't. Rot without usa."
That was one of his prissy comments about America. In France earlier this year Mr. Zhirinovsky said, "It's all over for y'all once you're Americanized and Zionized," which he sees as sort of the same thing. During that visit, he spat and threw stones and clay at Jewish picketers. (Mr. Zhirinovsky's father was Jewish, something he does not admit, instead referring to him only equally a lawyer.)
It is always exciting when Mr. Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russia'southward Liberal Democratic Party, reaches foreign soil. (The party is not liberal, not democratic, and these days not much of a party, although information technology stunned outsiders last December when it drew the biggest share of the vote in parliamentary elections.) France, Deutschland (three times), Switzerland, Slovenia, Norway and Espana have all denied Mr. Zhirinovsky visas this year. He has been expelled from Republic of bulgaria and been warned to keep out of Australia. Japan, on which he has threatened to dump nuclear weapons, has not yet had to consider whether to permit him in.
While in the United States he will address a foreign policy group in San Francisco, travel to Miami for what his printing secretary describes equally "private meetings," visit New York and perhaps stop in Washington. The State Section, which would rather have a visit from Comet Kohoutek, decided that information technology would be less noisome to let him in than to brand a martyr of him. They are probably right, but Mr. Zhirinovsky has a great capacity for surprises and unpleasantness.
In 1992, appearing on television during a visit to the United States, Mr. Zhirinovsky called "for the preservation of the white race" and warned that American whites were in danger of turning "their land" over to black and Hispanic people. On a trip to Republic of austria this year he was the guest of a sometime SS storm trooper. And at a coming together of the European Parliament in France he defendant other representatives of stealing his woolen fisherman's hat. At dwelling house he got into a nutrient fight on the first day of Parliament, stormed out of a contempo session, and last week said from the flooring that all current ministers will exist arrested in the new regime.
Mr. Zhirinovsky can be racist, barbarous, incessantly strident. But he knows how to draw a oversupply and how to hold it. He gives maybe the all-time political speeches in Russia, and he understands the power of pageantry and of simplicity. It would be easy to dismiss him as a clown with no real following -- nearly foreigners still do. And information technology is articulate he has lost some, peradventure much, of the support he had last twelvemonth when voters awarded him their ballots as a fashion to say they hated the Administration of President Boris Due north. Yeltsin.
But that doesn't hateful he isn't important. Russians have different psychic barometers than Americans, and what seems outrageous in Washington (where a man who was recently released from a Federal prison house seems almost to become mayor once again) is normal here. This is a country whose President could not be forced to drag himself off his jet and nourish a scheduled meeting with the Irish President at Shannon airport concluding calendar month. Information technology is a country where the nation'due south best-known swindler -- Sergei Mavrodi, president of the MMM investment firm that bilked millions of people of billions of rubles -- was simply elected to Parliament (with Mr. Zhirinovsky'south vigorous help).
Mr. Zhirinovsky's entreatment is not really that hard to understand. He tells people who have seen their rubles turn to mush and their nation reel awkwardly toward a marketplace that well-nigh Russians don't understand that they deserve ameliorate than they've gotten. He promises to go rid of the Mafia, which is something well-nigh Russians think is one of the hardest tasks facing the nation. (His solution is piece of cake: summary executions.) He as well pledges to recapture lost territory (he has bragged that Russian soldiers volition one solar day "wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean") and to make Russia slap-up again. Who doesn't want to hear that kind of message?
People here -- fifty-fifty those who don't like him -- acknowledge that he has helped push President Yeltsin toward conservatism on everything from agricultural reform to Russian rights in the countries information technology one time ruled. And fifty-fifty if he is obnoxious in pursuit of a greater Russia, many leaders here have goals that are similar, if not as extreme.
And he likes to confound people. Could it be that he will deliver the biggest surprise of all and exist polite in the Usa, finding great strength in California cabernets and scarfing down bagels on Broadway? After all, as he said the other mean solar day, "Bandits from all over the world get visas." Why shouldn't he be entitled to some fun?
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/06/weekinreview/the-world-here-comes-the-clown-no-joke.html
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