The World Cup in Russia is off to a flyer, serving up a feast of football amid the special and unique atmosphere generated by this quadrennial event. Fans from every corner of the globe having been packing the stadiums, some of them custom-built, reminding us that, despite our differences, we are one human family.
However not everyone is happy. For Russophobes and neocons the success of the
World Cup in Russia is something to mourn rather than celebrate, interfering as it does with their relentless demonisation of a country, in Russia, which refuses to know its place as a subaltern power, home to retrograde cultural values, relative to the West.
In fact given the intensity of anti-Russia invective that has played out in the Western mainstream media these past few years, many watching the World Cup will have been genuinely surprised to know that, yes, the sun actually shines in Russia too; and that, yes, its people are not oppressed and living in gulags.
Comment: The West's unrelenting, baseless anti-Russia propaganda is... being completely ignored by the vast majority of people.