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Few can be unaware of the events in Russia where a trio of young women have been arrested and tried for the most specious of charges. They have acknowledged and apologised to those who were offended by their demonstration in the cathedral which upset the primate of the Russian Orthodox church so much, but I suspect not because of what they did but because they dared to do it at all.
They women have been in custody for several months, they have young children who they've not been allowed to see. They have been convicted in a Kangaroo court on the most absurd charges because they dared to challenge the might of the state and the church, both of which are active in their repression of liberties.
It was obvious from the beginning that they would be thrown to the wolves and they have been sentenced to two years in a labour camp - a dreadful punishment for what is at most a misdemeanour - they sang a punk song as prayer for the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin.
Most of you will know I don't believe in any deities, but it would be nice if their prayer were to be answered providing it didn't bring greater misfortune to land on them. I hope international pressure will cause an early release or suspension of their sentence but we all need to support these women, because if the forces of oppression are clamping down upon biological women, what chance do we have or other minority groups.
The pendulum is beginning to swing back to the conservative side and that concerns me with regard to civil liberties.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/17/pussy-riot-sente...
Comments
Back To the USSR
We are seeing what happens in a society where the people have been so oppressed for so long that they can't see the big picture. What people would truly vote the old ways back in. I've been to St. Petersburg twice in the last five years, and I saw a population of unsmiling people in a deteriorating infrastructure. I imagine they voted, if they did, for Putin because they were told that he was better than what they had. Anyone under the age of 25 doesn't have a clue what they had and how close they are to sliding right back there. It's tragic, but as long as Putin and his kind keep feeding the paranoia, Russia will never get on her feet.
Portia
Kangaroo court
Will this start a revolution like that which led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall?
May Your Light Forever Shine
Tip of the iceberg
Anna Politkovskaya - wife and mother of two grown up children - was assassinated for consistently speaking out against Putin's Russia in 2006. As far as I know she wasn't a member of a punk band but she was a respected journalist and human rights campaigner who had been long been warning of the dangers arising from Russia's failed transition to a functional democracy. Pussy Riot's 2 years is grossly disproportionate but at least, for the moment, they are still alive. In many ways what worries me more is that the Russian authorities will relent over Pussy Riot's sentences because then the worlds media will go back to largely ignoring the violence against (and sometimes murder of) less attractive and less newsworthy dissidents in Russia.
Or maybe I'm just grossly and unfairly cynical of our media's collective attention span...
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Attention span
The media has the attention span of their audience. The 'Good ol' Days' of a news organization actually attempting to educate and inform their viewers has passed, along with the likes of Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Huntley and Chet Brinkley, just to name a few. Four months from now, most people won't even remember the name "Pussy Riot" when it comes up in the year-end wrap-up of news stories.
I can't speak to or about Anna Politkovskaya, I really don't know the name at all, I'm embarrassed to say
"Less attractive . . . dissidents"? I don't believe Pussy Riot's "sex appeal" gained them much, if any greater audience here in the U.S.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Campaigns
There are a number of campaigns about to push for their release. One is also associated with the St Petersburg laws that clamp down on TLGB advocacy. Laws that effectively make it a crime to ask evil questions such as "What is wrong with being TLGB?"
Ang is right. Start with a majority group, like women, and see who they pick on next. Putin doesn't need to worry about votes, after all: he counts them himself.
Some of what Putin plays at may be deeper then we think.
Though I think he's entirely using the wrong methods to flush the scum out who are behind it and I'm not talking so much about "Pussy Riot".
There was a man doing some really schisty shit on their equivalent of Wall Street, big time insider trading or monopolizing an industry. Putin seized the stock and then it turned out the CEO didn't even own it and it defaulted back to a group of one of those old scumbag banking families.
So there is some definite suspicion Putin is fighting against people like this. Not to say I endorse any action shutting down descent. I would instead argue make things as transparent as possible, prove something is a smear campaign and why it is by showing where said media outlet is getting their money from. Putin is not doing this however. It just must be the ultimate effect of power which Putin has had a tremendous amount of in Russia for years upon years.
For this trial I think it speaks to Russia as a whole and the tremendous pathetic farce it is, that they're pretending to be so religious because they were Atheist for so long. We see this in how extra-conservative Russia seems to be being in terms of Christianity, no Gay Pride marches in Moscow and I'm sure many other things.
Communism is bad, so...
I've been told is the thinking can be boiled down to is something like this: "Communism was bad and wrong. Ultra-orthodox christianity was persecuted by communism, so ultra-orthodox christianity must be good. Ultra-orthodox christianity is good and therefor right, so must be right when they say GLBT is evil. This is OK, because one of communism's main tenets is "everyone is equal", and communism was wrong, so that means everyone is not equal." :-( :-(
Yeah... that happens with
Yeah... that happens with ideology and consequent anti-ideology. I think Communism did pretty much the same, sometimes for the better often enough not. What Capitalism did was evil, so if we do the opposite or don't do it we do it right.
I don't think incarcerating the women was a smart idea, but on the other hand they could have checked the law before their stunt. They got their media presence, but now they need to pay the price. I don't particularly like it, but I'm pretty sure they'd been sentenced for something if they'd tried a stunt like this in a nation of the western-world.
The law is not about justice, the law is about the law.
The law in Russia...
...is and has been for, literally, centuries, written with the express intent of making it impossible to follow one part of it without breaking another part. I repeat, this has been done deliberately. Further, parts of the law are not made available to the public, only being revealed when action is then taken against a "lawbreaker". This negates the idea that one can reasonably argue that "they should just have checked the law". Your statement also includes the Western assumption that those enforcing the laws will honor them, or follow them to any great degree whatsoever. I assure you from my own experience and that of close friends that that is bleakly NOT the case.
Next. Do. Not. EVER! wish a Russian prison on your worst enemy. Just... don't.
Lastly, the argument that "the law isn't about justice, but is about the law" completely ignores the development of all functional and consistent theories of jurisprudence in the western world for the last five centuries. It's a morally bankrupt argument.
One cannot argue with any degree of moral rectitude that the victims of a fascist, authoritarian regime -- like that of the Russian Federation -- are deserving of their punishments. That is what these women are: victims of something we smugly convinced ourselves we'd "defeated" even as we sowed the seeds of its modern renewal, both in its former fields (such as Russia) and at home (I look at the trends in the US and... I try not to cry).
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"
Except that the Soviet Union
Except that the Soviet Union was never Communist, despite what the west said. They were Socialists, and bad ones at that. If they were Communists and everyone equal, how do explain the elite with their Dachas and vacations to the Black Sea, and the poor schmucks waiting in line to get a loaf of bread?
That being said, Putin is the rear end of a horse. And while I cannot agree with the bands choice of venue, it looks like the gulags are back for political prisoners.
May I...?
Can I just add a thoroughly specious comment?
I just think "Pussy Riot" is perhaps one of the most rockin' band names for a girl-group I have EVER heard!!
The only thing that astonishes me...
...is that people have the idea that this is either new, or that this is a change at all. P***n has been doing this sort of thing unceasingly since before Gorbachjov started in with his ideas of openness and conciliation, back when he, P***n, was just a mid-level officer in the KGB, and increasingly so once he became its head. He has not changed, and the only slowing that happened was when he could not leverage himself into a position of power. That beast (not man; he is never that, nor can he be at this point) is a greater threat to world peace and the lives and livelihoods of all people than any single person outside of the US except certain media magnates. I say this, not to diminish the horrors inflicted by evil men throughout the world, but because few of them have the capability to reach into so many arenas of world affairs, nor the number of connections to both world powers and other evil men.
Yes, I lived there. Yes I saw first hand some of what goes on. I am thankful to an indifferent universe that it was not so vengeful as to subject me to any more of what he is responsible for and what he encourages.
My heart goes out to those women. What has been reported of their treatment, even with world media attention, is only a fraction of what is done to them and even worse to those who do not share in the aegis of international indignation. If you pray, please pray for them with everything you have.
My apologies if my rhetoric seems extreme or exaggerated; sadly it is not. As well, my apologies if it seems inflammatory. If it is adjudged too extreme, I will remove it, but with a plea that it not be completely forgotten.
P***n is no friend to any person or any country that desires peace except under the heels of a fascist monster.
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"
No one can tell the emperor he has no soul...
...the man behind the government that covertly supported Sadaam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and has backed the Assads, and Ahmadinejad. The country still has the same mindset that between 1917 and 1989 arranged to kill the equivalent of the population of Canada - around 25 million - of their own citizens. The Cold War never really ended, and while the Iron Curtain may cover a window that looks into less square acreage, it has been painted with fresh paint; a sort of Trompe-l'Å“il of oppression!
Love, Andrea Lena
The sentence seems a bit harsh
This is Russia and they had to know this could happen. You go poking your finger in the eye of a grizzly bear it will come back on you.
Now this is a pet peeve of mine but still I see a trend here. It is a growing trend of demanding that others accept you and even to the point of getting in their face about it. They may be wrong in not accepting these things but they have the right to hold the views they do. That is the missing part here.
Are you aware
That St. Petersburg (in Russia) has already enacted legislation making it a crime to be gay? Make no mistake about it, these people are fighting for their very existence! They can either fight with words and music and public protests, or they can pick up guns and bombs and fight that way. A Russia in the upheavel of a armed insurrection is not good for the world. I'll leave the speculating to you, but let me remind you that the former Soviet Union left missles, nukes, and lots of associated hardware scattered all around Russia and Eastern Europe.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Harsh?
You might think they are being harsh, but it isn't much better in the UK or other western countries. One person has been in prison for the last 6 years because he doesn't want to wear any clothes. He was just freed and has been arrested a few days later for the same offence - disturbing the peace. It isn't only Russia that can seem excessive.
Yeah
Read a thing online the other day, don't remember what state it was. A guy was on trial and his court-appointed public defender made no effort at all - called no witnesses, did not challange the prosecution witnesses, even though there was solid proof the guy wasn't there. He ended up getting 40 years in prison.
His case got picked up by one of those freedom project groups that do pro-bono work trying to right the wrongs commited by the justice system. It took almost ten years but they finally got a retrial and the guy was found not guilty.
So he's a free man, right? Nope, still in prison. The state's attorney-general said the new results fell outside the time established for appeals, so the man has to stay in prison even though the trial that put him there was found to be a miscarriage of justice.
Oh, did I mention the man who was wrongly found guilty is black? Surprise! Not.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin