Of Blind Butterflies
There is a little known (outside Georgia) Georgian writer named Otar Chiladze, whose best-known work, A Man Was Going Down the Road (pub. in 1973) I read over the summer. A remarkable literary achievement, not the least because it was written in the Soviet Union while taking a subtle dig at it, (subtle enough to fool the Soviet censors), it is set in the Colchis of the Greek myth, and which encompasses the territory we now know as Georgia. In the book one of the micro-stories that particularly struck me was the story of Absyrtus, the younger brother of Medea (of the Jason and Golden Fleece fame).
This Absyrtus had a particularly odious obsession, he liked to blind butterflies, because a butterfly that is not blind is able to distinguish between flowers, which is to say have choices, preferences, and tastes. Not so the blind butterflies, for whom the choices, preferences, and tastes are not a matter of individual decisions, they are given and taken away by the will of the one who gives and takes them away, Absyrtus.
Enter modern day Azerbaijan, a dictatorial regime run by the Aliyev clan. A couple of days ago, a popular Azeri caricaturist of some talent named Gunduz Aghayev, who regularly lampoons the regime (within safe parameters), drew a caricature criticizing the duplicity of the Aliyev regime for starving Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenian population and trying to get total control over them by making a show of humanitarian aid it is supposedly delivering.
The story would end there were it not for the army of Aliyev's "blind butterflies," the internet trolls who can't distinguish flower from shit, and shit from flower. These trolls have now started a campaign of harassment against Aghayev, calling him (as you would imagine), every nasty thing imaginable.
But then that's the thing about "blind butterlfies": for them the choices, preferences, and tastes are not a matter of individual decisions, they are given and taken away by the will of the one who gives and takes them away, Aliyev
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