The Potemkin Walking Tour
There’s a coordinated production underway, and it’s not subtle. The Kremlin has flown in every grievance merchant the West has to offer for a guided stroll through Russia’s greatest hits, and right on cue, their feeds fill up with sun-drenched footage of St. Petersburg while X drowns in carefully curated clips of migrant violence in Europe. The timing is about as coincidental as a Russian oligarch falling out of a window.
Which brings us to Bryce here, who looked at a 40-second Instagram video of a fountain and concluded that Russia is a crime-free Christian paradise with “no migrants, no Muslims, just Russians.”
Russia has roughly 15 to 20 million Muslims. That’s the largest Muslim population of any country in Europe. Moscow is frequently described as the biggest Muslim city on the continent, with somewhere north of two million. Russia also hosts millions of labour migrants, overwhelmingly from Muslim-majority Central Asia, because it turns out someone has to do the actual work while the locals are being fed into a Ukrainian woodchipper. The “no migrants” fantasy describes a country that does not exist and never has. Chechnya and Dagestan would also like a word, preferably not a polite one.
And the peaceful society bit? Russia’s homicide rate was 7.3 per 100,000 according to the UN, even after a long decline. That’s roughly seven times the Western European average and worse than the United States. Even independent Russian researchers note the official figures dramatically undercount murders, because beating someone to death in a vodka-fuelled rage gets filed under a different paragraph of the criminal code. Very tidy. Very Christian.
So yes, Bryce. A country with more Muslims than any in Europe, millions of migrants, and a murder rate that embarrasses Detroit. You’ve been given a tour of the lobby and mistaken it for the building.
Gandalv /
@Microinteracti1
Europe hates Russia 🇷🇺 because Vladimir Putin leads a nation where white men & women aren’t assaulted or murdered in the streets.
St. Petersburg is a city filled with life of Christians, enjoying a peaceful & happy society.
No migrants, no Muslims agitators, just Russians.