rigorousintuition.ca

Definitely punk rock, and I like it. Wish I understood Russian.

I'd like to take back something I said earlier, which is that the comparison to Serbia's Otpor movement is apt. That was a major student movement that had tacit western foundation support. This is a punk band that's gotten a draconian prison sentence for a protest, and their government's effective enemies are taking advantage of the situation for a big media hit.

Meanwhile, thirty people were just murdered in a labor strike attack in South Africa, and it was top story on google news for a split second; now it's nowhere on the front page, and Pussy Riot is back as top story (Orthodox Church forgives PR; Kasparov might go to jail for biting a cop's finger).

Kasparov's side of the story:


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087 ... lenews_wsj
When Putin's Thugs Came for Me
I was dragged away Friday by a group of police—in fact carried away with one on each arm and leg

By Garry Kasparov
Moscow

The only surprise to come out of Friday's guilty verdict in the trial here of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot was how many people acted surprised. Three young women were sentenced to two years in prison for the prank of singing an anti-Putin "prayer" in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Their jailing was the next logical step for Vladimir Putin's steady crackdown on "acts against the social order," the Kremlin's expansive term for any public display of resistance.

In the 100 days since Mr. Putin's re-election as president, severe new laws against public protest have been passed and the homes of opposition leaders have been raided. These are not the actions of a regime prepared to grant leniency to anyone who offends Mr. Putin's latest ally, the Orthodox Church and its patriarch.


Reuters
Police detain author Garry Kasparov during the trial of the female punk band "Pussy Riot" outside a court building in Moscow, August 17, 2012.

Unfortunately, I was not there to hear the judge's decision, which she took several hours to read. The crowds outside the court building made entry nearly impossible, so I stood in a doorway and took questions from journalists. Suddenly, I was dragged away by a group of police—in fact carried away with one policeman on each arm and leg.

The men refused to tell me why I was being arrested and shoved me into a police van. When I got up to again ask why I had been detained, things turned violent. I was restrained, choked and struck several times by a group of officers before being driven to the police station with dozens of other protesters. After several hours I was released, but not before they told me I was being criminally investigated for assaulting a police officer who claimed I had bitten him.

It would be easy to laugh at such a bizarre charge when there are already so many videos and photos of the police assaulting me. But in a country where you can be imprisoned for two years for singing a song, laughter does not come easily. My bruises will heal long before the members of Pussy Riot are free to see their young children again. In the past, Mr. Putin's critics and enemies have been jailed on a wide variety of spurious criminal charges, from fraud to terrorism.

But now the masks are off. Unlikely as it may be, the three members of Pussy Riot have become our first true political prisoners.

Such a brazen step should raise alarms, but the leaders of the Free World are clearly capable of sleeping through any wake-up call. If this was all business as usual for the Putin justice system, the same was true for the international reaction. A spokesman for the Obama administration called the sentence "disproportionate," as if the length of the prison term were the only problem with open repression of political speech. The Russian Constitution is freely available online, but this was a medieval show trial with no connection to the criminal code.

Mr. Putin is not worried about what the Western press says, or about celebrities tweeting their support for Pussy Riot. These are not the constituencies that concern him. Friday, the Russian paper Vedomosti reported that former Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann could be put in charge of managing the hundreds of billions of dollars in the Russian sovereign wealth fund. As long as bankers and other Western elites eagerly line up to do Mr. Putin's bidding, the situation in Russia will only get worse.

If officials at the U.S. State Department are as "seriously concerned" about free speech in Russia as they say, I suggest they drop their opposition to the Magnitsky Act pending in the Senate. That legislation would bring financial and travel sanctions against the functionaries who enact the Kremlin's agenda of repression. Mouthing concern only reinforces the fact that no action will be taken.

Mr. Putin could not care less about winning public-relations battles in the Western press, or about fighting them at all. He and his cronies care only about money and power. Today's events make it clear that they will fight for those things until Russia's jails are full.

Mr. Kasparov, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, is the leader of the Russian pro-democracy group United Civil Front and chairman of the U.S.-based Human Rights Foundation. He resides in Moscow.

Project Willow wrote:

Jeff wrote:On the day of sentencing, a member of Femen cuts down a cross in Kiev in solidarity.

I have a few issues with how the young woman simultaneously exploits and rebels against her object status, but I can't think of many acts that should be more quintessentially feminist than cutting down a cross. It's a testament to the power of enculturation, and perhaps savvy, that an anti-religious stance is a minor and contentious rather than a major thrust of feminist activism. If cross-cutting had been adopted as a symbolic act, we still wouldn't have the vote, let alone title IV.

Canadian_watcher wrote:I dunno 'bout this whole thing.

the balaclavas & the 24 7 coverage add up to no good in my books.

something stinks.

Jack rather aptly laid out the "what stinks" in his post above.

Abrahamic faiths are ANTI women. So I definitely applaud a militant feminist stance against these religions. Or, at least standing up to the doormat treatment of women in religion and third class citizenship.
I find it so refreshing to see this whole Pussy Riot situation, tackling both the tyranical Russian government and religion.

wordspeak2 wrote:Um, yeah. 8bitagent, you're missing the obvious. It's not apologetic to Putin to point out that the U.S.-led Empire would much rather him out of power and the oil oligarchs who totally ran the country under Yeltsin back in effective power. In order to maintain his nearly two-thirds popularity (down from 80+% at one point) Putin/Medvedev have been relative economic nationalists; much of the financial and energy sectors are in Russian hands, rather than the U.S./Empire-preferred transnational corporate hands. The fact is, the vast majority of Russians; knowing socialism in their not-too-distant past, and the majority believing life was better under Stalin, do not want the country's wealth completely privatized. Putin has held onto power by giving the masses what they want to a certain degree, though of course nowhere near the liking of Russia's Communist Party. Also, Russia under Putin/Medvedev is relatively friendly with Iran, which worries the U.$., as well as Putin's support of Assad. Not to mention Russia selling Venezuela some serious military arsenal a couple years back, as I recall. It's blatant from a geo-political perspective that the Empire would rather have a subservient client regime in power in Moscow than the current one. Read capitalist think tank press, and they spell all this out. Hillary Clinton wanted a "reset" in U.S. relations with Russia, but that ended up being a bungled media stunt, and relations as it were have not improved, i.e. Russia is not doing exactly what the U.S. says.
So, anyway, hence the western press has given massively disproportionate coverage to every tiny anti-Putin protest over the past couple years, with Gary Kasparoz as their hero media darling. The usual stealth capitalist foundation operators, such as Soros' OSI and the Ford Foundation, are doing their thing supporting and propping up "opposition" bloggers and the like while Reuters and AP etc. have been hyping up every "pro-democracy" (pro-complete-privatization, pro-west) anti-Putin demonstration or figure who surfaces.
Pussy Riot, though clearly well-intentioned activists with good feminist politics and understandable rage at the government, was nonetheless a gift to the western media/foundation apparatus. By pulling an Abby Hoffman type stunt, "enticing the system to over-react," PR contributed to a hell of a media hit against Putin, and an easy one, considering it's true that locking these women up for two years over a free speech stunt is draconian. The comparison to Serbia's western-supported Otpor movement is apt, as they're both youth organizations formed sincerely within the country with totally legitimate grievances that the west harnessed as unwitting pawns in its broad effort to unseat a leader who was/is not exactly socialist but refuses to be completely controlled by transnational corporatism, due to the widespread sentiments among the populace and the leader's desire to stay in power (well, not that foundations are directly supporting Pussy Riot as far as I know; I imagine it's just a carpe diem media hit). It certainly doesn't mean that Putin's power is currently in jeopardy, but it's doing a lot to turn global public opinion against Russia, and that's a big part of the game in this globalized world, and it seems to be making some impact domestically, though most Russians are not sympathetic to Pussy Riot.
The CFR magazine Foreign Affairs' latest coverage of the Pussy Riot fiasco:
http://www.cfr.org/russian-fed/stake-pu ... cul-081612

From the article: "The center is holding--but it's embattled. And there are new challenges ahead: Russia may be sliding into a recession. If that happens, will Putin be able to retain the loyalty of his disadvantaged working-class supporters? If the price of oil continues to slide, how will he resolve disputes about budget shortfalls?"

Also from the article:
"...with developments like the Pussy Riot trial, Russia has, in some ways, become a kind of international laughing stock. For many people, [the country seems] further behind in modernizing itself and coming into the European mainstream than Putin [would probably care to acknowledge]. But Putin never claimed that Russia was going to be guided by international opinion."

If America pulled 1/20th the shit Syria, Russia, China etc does to its own people I can't even imagine the reaction people would have. America gets called fascist for banning dancing at a public monument. Politely put, I find it odd that there's no blanket condemnation of fascism and tyranny. It's like, oh yeah....Iran hangs gay people, but uh, the US hates Iran so Iran is good.
I'm against all tyrannies and evil governments. Western, Arab, Asian, etc governments who do horrible things internally and overseas. I have no problem with anti Russian, anti Chinese, anti Sudanese, etc 'propaganda' because I also support anti American, anti British, etc propaganda.

I mean, one could claim ALL uprisings are CIA spook setups. I know about OTPOR, but I agree the sentiment was real. One could claim Occupy, Assange/Wikileaks, Manning, Pussy Riot, etc is all fake, all CIA. I dont subscribe to the leftist conspiracy view that the Serbs were setup and the massacres were faked. Of course, we also know genuine public outrage and revolutions are largely co-opted by the PTB.

wordspeak2 wrote:Definitely punk rock, and I like it. Wish I understood Russian.

I'd like to take back something I said earlier, which is that the comparison to Serbia's Otpor movement is apt. That was a major student movement that had tacit western foundation support. This is a punk band that's gotten a draconian prison sentence for a protest, and their government's effective enemies are taking advantage of the situation for a big media hit.

Meanwhile, thirty people were just murdered in a labor strike attack in South Africa, and it was top story on google news for a split second; now it's nowhere on the front page, and Pussy Riot is back as top story (Orthodox Church forgives PR; Kasparov might go to jail for biting a cop's finger).

Just saw that. 34 dead and 78 wounded. Very shocked to hear that, since I was naive to think South Africa stopped being fascist. Like Coca Cola and big oil using death squads against union members, I guess it should be of no shock when countries or corporations lash out in deadly ways against workers standing up for their rights.

800 parachuted teddy bears used to try and topple Belarus dictatorship
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012 ... t-dictator

The strange balloon boy saga going on in the world never ceases to amaze me...but people sure are getting creative in their fight against tyranny.

barracuda wrote:

compared2what? wrote:There's some kind of beef between them and the U.S. State Department/Western media? No way!"

Yes way.

And please note Mr. Carlucci's poorly drawn equivalence of Pussy Riot's actions with some of the more notorious anti-semites in semi-recent history:

It's Cartalucci. (As I see you got on the later quote.) Also: Well, yeah. But he's kinda LaRouchie. Talking hatefully about Jews largely in code might be the only thing he gets any enjoyment out of, so you really can't begrudge him it too much.

I mean, really, to be honest, if my blog were part of an online fulcrum of news-and-commentary websites run and/or populated by people who learned everything they know about how the world works from Lyndon LaRouche and/or Scientology and/or their institutional legatees, I'd probably continually say stuff about how Amnesty International was a State Department front, too. You know. Just to deflect.

One mustn't be unduly harsh, is what I guess I'm saying.

compared2what? wrote:he's kinda LaRouchie. Talking hatefully about Jews

I don't suppose you'd like to support those allegations with evidence?

^^Bwaaahahaha.

compared2what? wrote:It's Cartalucci.

It was an easy mistake, in mind of a similar question.

One mustn't be unduly harsh, is what I guess I'm saying.

You are too kind. No, really. You are.

wordspeak2 wrote:I suppose... but the authorities actually let Occupy go for months before cracking down, right?

No. Not much more need be said. Absolutely not. You can review the timeline of police repression from almost the git-go in our mammoth Occupy thread, among other places.

lupercal wrote:

compared2what? wrote:he's kinda LaRouchie. Talking hatefully about Jews

I don't suppose you'd like to support those allegations with evidence?

I don't actually see any allegations in that quote. But sure. I'd be happy to elaborate.

WRT to the LaRouchie-ness, I was speaking casually of the tone and content of his writing, which it seemed (and still does seem) fair to me to characterize as, precisely, "kinda LaRouchie."

But (fwiw) he also links to Engdahl, Tarpley, etc. And while I know that neither of those gentlemen is thought to be actively involved with LL anymore, the writing of both does very much show that they learned about how the world works from his teachings, which are not sane or reliable.

As I believe I've said before, I think that's a shame, since both are gifted.

The "talking hatefully about Jews" thing wasn't a serious comment about Cartalucci. I was just being snide.

There is, of course, the additional evidence of the piece you posted an excerpt from, though.

Insofar as he concludes that Pussy Riot are operatives for the State Department based on one untrustworthy person's having said (one time) that he was acquainted with one of them, I think it could probably be said that he already had some kind of unstated/non-explicit agenda when he sat down to mull the question over.

So that's suggestive, too.

If America pulled 1/20th the shit Syria, Russia, China etc does to its own people I can't even imagine the reaction people would have. America gets called fascist for banning dancing at a public monument. Politely put, I find it odd that there's no blanket condemnation of fascism and tyranny. It's like, oh yeah....Iran hangs gay people, but uh, the US hates Iran so Iran is good.
I'm against all tyrannies and evil governments. Western, Arab, Asian, etc governments who do horrible things internally and overseas. I have no problem with anti Russian, anti Chinese, anti Sudanese, etc 'propaganda' because I also support anti American, anti British, etc propaganda.

I mean, one could claim ALL uprisings are CIA spook setups. I know about OTPOR, but I agree the sentiment was real. One could claim Occupy, Assange/Wikileaks, Manning, Pussy Riot, etc is all fake, all CIA. I dont subscribe to the leftist conspiracy view that the Serbs were setup and the massacres were faked. Of course, we also know genuine public outrage and revolutions are largely co-opted by the PTB.[/quote]


I have no idea who says Iran is good, as it were. Who? Maybe some of the "Workers World Party" Ramsey Clark crowd. Yeah, them; other than that I don't see it. Iran is indefensible in every way imaginable.
I do, though, think the U.S. certainly pulls 1/20th the shit Russia does, in many ways just as much shit. For instance, the U.S. has the highest per capita prison population in the world. Is this not the most overt form of oppression? The "fascism" is more stealth here, because there are several Americas. Things aren't so rough on the overt fascism front for middle-class white people, but the crack-ridden ghettos are extremely raw with brutality. Admittedly, it's hard to compete with China on raw oppression, but, of course, it's a global system; Chinese factory workers are making U.S. goods.
8bit, you're uninformed about Serbia/Yugoslavia; you should read some Michael Parenti or www.tenc.net. Milosevic was no progressive hero, but NATO didn't bomb his people back to the stone age because of perceived human rights abuses, rather because quasi-socialist Yugoslavia wasn't going along with the transnational privatization fest. If Serbs were guilty of "massacres" some evidence needs to be shown; there isn't any.
But back on topic, Pussy Riot seems great. I like the rebellion against the church. I see no compelling evidence that they were aided by some western spooks. That this fiasco is being exploited heavily by the western press, which has been giving wildly disproportionate attention to the Kasparov-led protests over the past couple years because of U.S./NATO dislike of Putin/Medvedev is *really fucking obvious and not really refutable, if you've been following this stuff.* There's been a media conspiracy to cast Putin as a tyrant for quite some time, and this played nicely into the narrative. Putin just doesn't seem to care much about international opinion. The questions of interest should be- why is the U.S. and allies so upset with Putin? Does this strife have the potential to threaten a world war? Are U.S. war hawks going to make a serious attempt at a missile defense shield at some point? etc. I noticed there was some talk a couple years ago in the CFR crowd about drawing Russia into NATO- there are differing opinions on "beat em" vs. "join em" (or its inverse, as it were) re: Russia. It seems those "join em" voices have faded, though; the reset failed. Don't underestimate the influence of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote, "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained."

Meanwhile, Russia's getting friendlier with Iran, which supports Hezbollah, and with trigger-happy nutcases on both sides of the I/P divide, big-picture geopolitical crisis seems to be escalating, not de-escalating.

I agree with c2w's take on Webster Tarpley and William Engdahl- both have a lot of truth, but both very much Larouchites, which tarnishes them heavily. Still worth listening to, imo.

JackRiddler, I don't think we really disagree- unacceptable and draconian repression of peaceful protest on both sides of the world.

lupercal wrote:Yes it's almost as if the whole thing was scripted to play well on CNN. Oh wait, it was. I wasn't going to say anything but now that the cat's out of the bag, yes CW, it is a stunt coordinated by your southern neighbors, like those demonstrations in Tahir square that Alice used to gush about. Notice how Egypt is now run by an ex-Cal State Northridge professor who just fired the Egyptian heads of the military and intel agencies and replaced them with US-trained, US-friendly stooges...

Interesting lupercal. You certainly had the Arab Spring thing nailed.

One final thought...

If they were called something other than Pussy Riot (say Nickelback) would we still be getting inundated by the amount of stories about this?

So what is the consensus here is Pussy Riot for real or some State Dept bullshit because I am gonna be pissed if they arent legit and used up one of the greatest band names in the history of music!