Bobby Fischer has died. Best known as the Commie-busting chess champion of Cold War America, “The Corduroy Kid” would later sully his fame by “emerg[ing] now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and against Jews,” among other erratic and eccentric behavior including the renouncement of U.S. - and adoption of Icelandic - citizenship.
Although unrelated, it’s interesting to note another chess champion railing against his own country’s government - albeit with less anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and a tad more validity. David Remnick of the New Yorker details former world champion Garry Kasparov’s emergence as a leader of Other Russia, an opposition party to Putin’s ever-increasing autocratic regime, and the BBC reports on the resulting price Kasparov is beginning to pay. It seems that some of Kasparov’s arguments may hold water as the December Russian elections are being criticized by international monitors - as if you needed them to confirm the obvious.
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