"We are heating Europe, but they still threaten us with closing the border. But what if we cut off [gas] for the Poles and, for example, for the Germans? What will happen then?"

"We should stop at nothing when defending our sovereignty and our independence.... I would recommend that the Polish leadership, the Lithuanians and other brainless people think before speaking."

Said President Lukashenko of Belarus, quoted in "Huge far-right protest in Warsaw as Poland-Belarus border crisis intensifies" (London Times).

"Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus..."

"Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there...."

In 1995, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, told Russian NTV television : “The history of Germany is a copy of the history of Belarus. Germany was raised from the ruins thanks to firm authority, and not everything connected with that well-known figure, Adolf Hitler, was bad. German order evolved over the centuries and under Hitler it attained its peak.”...

This is the nemesis of the new Nobel Prize-winner in Literature....

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"...

... to Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus.

In an interview posted on the press’s website, Ms. Alexievich said her technique of blending journalism and literature was inspired by the Russian tradition of oral storytelling. “I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me,” she said. “Each person offers a text of his or her own.”

“By means of her extraordinary method — a carefully composed collage of human voices — Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy said.

ADDED: What's really interesting here is that the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded for writing  nonfiction, though it's not purely nonfiction. It's a "mix of nonfiction and fiction."

I want to know which purely nonfiction writers have won!

While the Nobel committee has occasionally awarded the prize to nonfiction writers, including Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill, it has been decades since a journalist or historian has won. Some prominent writers, among them the New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, have called for the Nobel judges to recognize nonfiction as a worthy art form.

The unintended "absurdity" theme.

After posting that last post, I saw I'd done 2 posts in a row with "absurdity" in the title. That more or less determines that I will at least do a Google "news" search on the word in an effort to make some sense of the coincidence. Perhaps everything is coming together today over absurdity.

I see there are over 3000 current news articles on congressional absurdity, and I decline to click on things like "The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster.'" I also don't care about "The love for fantastic absurdity at the [Boston Symphony Orchestra]" or "The Sheer Absurdity of Favoring Eli Manning Over Peyton Manning."

But I'm motivated to click on "The absurdity of education" in the Saudi Gazette (comparing a British girls' school with 2 teachers and 8 students to a Saudi girls' school with 600 students and 50 teachers and no working bathrooms).

And then there's "2013 Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate absurdity and science," including:

Safety/Engineering Prize: The late Gustano Pizzo, for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to Earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, anti-hijacking system for aircraft, May 1972.

And:

Peace Prize: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. The audience was asked not to applaud and were given a demonstration of one-handed clapping.

"Throughout their existence as a separate culture, Ruthenians formed in most cases rural population, with the power held by local szlachta and boyars..."

"... often of Lithuanian, Polish or Russian descent. As in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the trade and commerce was mostly monopolized by Jews, who formed a significant part of the urban population."

Since the Union of Horodlo of 1413, local nobility was assimilated into the traditional clan system by means of the formal procedure of adoption by the szlacht... Initially mostly Ruthenian and Orthodox, with time most of them became polonized. This was especially true for major magnate families... whose personal fortunes and properties often surpassed those of the royal families and were huge enough to be called a state within a state. Many of them founded their own cities... with settlers from other parts of Europe. Indeed there were Scots, Germans and Dutch people inhabitating major towns of the area, as well as several Italian artists who had been "imported" to the lands of modern Belarus by the magnates.

Have you thought about Belarus, today's "History of" country?