Photographic evidence of Tibet’s military, circa 1950
FRESNO, CA — Writing a column on the military history of Tibet seemed like a good idea in the good old days, a week ago, before I started actually trying to research it. I’ve never, ever had a harder time finding decent info on a topic.
One reason is sheer shame; the Brits, for instance, don’t want anybody to know they invaded Tibet in 1904 and slaughtered a whole bunch of Tibetans for no reason except they were bored.
But some of the stuff on Tibetan military history is just so damn weird it made me feel like that scene in Ghostbusters where Rick Moranis gets possessed by some ancient demon and starts ranting: “During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a very large and moving Torb. Then of course in the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him, that of a Sloar. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.” (more…)
This is the cover of Issue #287 of The eXile, published in April of 2008.
This article was first published in The eXile, April 2008
Last summer, The eXile took a safari journey in search of the legendary Gopniki, Russia’s underworld answer to the OGs of South Central, Long Beach, and the Bronx. Those notorious shaven-headed toughs in their kepki-tabletki and track suits, with their bad-assed “cho blya!” faces and their greasy-haired sluts, were our heroes. In our journey through the podmoskovie ghetto of Lubertsy, we discovered tragedy rather than adventure: the Gopniki, those proletarian toughs and kings of the petty crime margins, had all but gone extinct in the Putin Era. They’d survived Stalin’s Terror and flourished under Brezhnev’s Stagnation, but in the end, they were no match against the soul-sucking effects of capitalism and bourgeois Evroremont. Today, the nearly-extinct Gopniki are little more than irony fodder for urban Russian hipsters in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Word has it that this summer, the “Gop-Stop” look is the Cool New Thing. (more…)
