Communism built a society in which an insufferable goober like that is able to spend all their time playing a little game while pretending it’s important. Those tAnKiE sCuM won WW2 so he could play with horsey pieces instead of working.
Kasparov’s grandfather was a staunch communist, but the young Kasparov gradually began to have doubts about the Soviet Union’s political system at age 13 when he travelled abroad for the first time in 1976 to Paris for a chess tournament.[198] In 1981, at age 18, he read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a copy of which he bought while abroad.
Goober
When you have to read a book to believe your country is evil because your lived experience doesn’t lead you to that conclusion whatsoever
My guess is this douchebag was young, easily impressionable, and absolutely desperate to fit in socially with the rest of the people in the sport.
This is a bad recipe for socialists in sports, because sports people from capitalist countries are going to continue being the majority for a long time. They travel abroad, want to fit in and end up taking on the role of a pick-me. Everyone joining a new community is going to try to fit into that community and the advantage of capitalist hegemony is going to affect socialist sports people, especially because they’re young.
Gulag Gulagovich Gulagov is a pretty good username.
what is it with chess players and being reactionary shitbags
If you have the time and resources to get good at a game like chess and believe the IQ bullshit in chess culture, it’s not that hard to end up a reactionary.
Yep, the elitism for sure. NGL, it’s embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to realize that a lot of reactionaries aren’t “dumb sheeple”, but complete asswipes that think they’re better than everyone else. With the “chess is for smart people” bullshit, no wonder a lot of the top chess players have politics that match their pompous attitudes.
: “I am better than everyone else and therefore people like me deserve special treatment to ensure no rube ‘steals’ power that I earned by birthright.”
A lot of chess players are stupid as hell, they’re just really good at chess. There’s a lot of reverence for the game but it’s basically a combination of high level trivia and poker.
Always been a boy’s club, and not a good one. Just like golf. Patriarchal elite sport.
Elite chess players can be strange too. Kasparov popularized this wacky conspiracy theory.
The new chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.
[…]
Fomenko’s historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scientists, historians, and scholars, who brand them as pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology, and pseudoscience, but were popularized by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Billington writes that the theory “might have quietly blown away in the wind tunnels of academia” if not for Kasparov’s writing in support of it in the magazine Ogoniok.
Kasparov met Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko’s conclusions concerning certain subjects were identical to his own regarding the popular view (which is not the view of academics) that art and culture died during the Dark Ages and were not revived until the Renaissance.
Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans and the Greeks living under the banner of Byzantium could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. Kasparov does not support the reconstruction part of the new chronology.
