As I stated in a previous post on this topic, I confess to knowing very little about Pussy Riot. The punishment does not seem to fit the alleged “crime.”

Protest has basically been criminalized in Russia. In a separate ruling, gay pride parades have been banned in Moscow for 100 years.

The fascist 1% in Team USA must be *green* with envy over what Vlad the Putin has wrought under his regime. Why how positively delightful to crush the 99% under Vlad’s bootheel.

However, the 1% in Team USA may not fare so well, themselves, in Vlad’s Russia. Just ask Mikhail Khordokovsky.

As I posted below, I wish someone whose knowledge of Russia is equivalent to Juan Cole’s understanding of the Near East would write an essay on Putin’s Russia. For the life of me, I do not know what he is afraid of, that he has to have 3 young women jailed for graffiti-level disturbances. As to Khordovsky, the man challenged the authority of the State. Europeans take such private challenges seriously. Look what’s happening to Rupert Murdoch.

Does anyone else out there see parallels between the early 1930s and today? Civil liberties are in retreat in much of the developed world.

They’d do it here if they(facist control freaks)

could…..

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-morello-paul-ryan-is-the-embodiment-of-the-machine-our-music-rages-against-20120816

My thoughts exactly. Financial elites ruined the markets and 3-4 years later the governments are squashing the people with poverty and repressing dissent.

Feels a lot like the stock market crash of ’29 and the subsequent radicalism, nationalism, and eventual war that followed.

Good lord thats alot of jail time for not really doing very much!!

I could see alot of Nationalism erupt in places like eruope and in parts of America where there are large pockets of homogenous populations. But you dont think America could actually entirely fall into that trap do you? We are too diverse, I think, I hope.

Putin’s Russia is truly a return to Czarism: No freedoms for the vast starving majority, and the tiny set of boyars at the top act with total impunity.

We were very lucky in the early 1930s — the labor movement was very strong and allied with the left (yes, even the scary Commies, who had yet to be demonized and hunted down like dogs), and they actively fought the bigots parading around under the nationalism flag. Even at that, the DuPonts and their allies still planned a coup to topple FDR, and it was only because Smedley Butler infiltrated their cabal and then spilled the beans to Congress that we know about it today.

I think you’re right about the diversity of the general population. However, there is almost no diversity among the people who actually write the laws and pass them into being. The Nationalism is strong in them, and their rhetoric serves to keep a large portion of the population in fear.

We’ve seen it since 9/11, and even more concentrated and venomous since the housing collapse. Look at the Tea Party, or the recent rash of mass shootings. Burning Mosques in Missouri.

Hell, even without the overt actions of radicals, we’re still drenched in the passivity of large swaths of populous. People who are willing to sit idly by while our country falls into ruin and our civil liberties are ground into dust.

I dunno, I’m wandering I guess. The point I’m trying to make is that’s it is already happening, this venomous nationalism, and it can only spread as poverty spreads and our government ramps up its rhetoric to hide its misdeeds.

Hooliganism? Really?

In the eyes of soccer/football hooligans — the standard by which all hooliganism must be measured — “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” is redundant. Of course hooliganism is motivated by religious hatred: as a matter of faith, my team is not only better than yours, but more holy, while your team is not only inferior but the embodiment of all that is wrong and evil in the world.

This is what hooliganism motivated by religious hatred looks like in Russia.

Soccer/football hooligans everywhere are no doubt outraged by this trashing of their reputation.

Football hooligans should form up and strike Russia.

This is wretched; Uncle Vladimir as “Uncle Joe”, with all of the scorn for basic freedom of speech that Stalin had.

I’m glad to see that some conscientious entertainers are stepping up to raise hell about it. I hope it builds into an international firestorm.

It’s also a great in-your-face name for an all-girl band. :o)

I think it’s really important to crank the vise handle on this one. Thanks, David, for toting the hod again.

The punishment couldn’t be a slap on the wrist; that would mean that they might slip out of Mother Russia and organize a tour, which, if they can even hum “Mary had a little lamb”, would fly.

If they’re in jail for two years, I don’t know how long the interest in this would last.

Atrocious.

Knut, I don’t have knowledge about conditions in Russia, but I do have a little knowledge about the Russian Orthodox church, being a member of that branch of Orthodoxy myself. It might help folk to understand the situation to know that when the Communists took power they blew up that particular cathedral on Red Square, destroyed it completely.

Okay, now, the protest under discussion here was not just, as David says ‘at the Cathedral’ but was in the midst of a church service – which for the Orthodox has a focus on sanctity, on being in the presence of God – we Orthodox really believe that and we go to church in order to participate in a lengthy sung liturgy which is similar to the Catholic one but involves the churchgoers with a beginning, middle and end to the ongoing music and readings that resembles a symphony or other expression of artistic feeling with the intent of being, as I said, in the presence of God. So all of the people there assembled are not thinking political thoughts but of their relationship to what they believe, and there is no place for political interruptions, whether by the state or by someone protesting the actions of the state.

So, what these girls did was foolish and wrong. What they did could or should have taken place outside on the steps of the cathedral, or anywhere else for that matter. Not in the church.

Nobody that I read is standing up for this principle, which is separate from the political discussion about a court trial and its ramifications. I stand up for this principle, because I know at least what the Russian people have suffered in defending their faith. Church and state (or non state) are and must be separate. That’s the freedom issue here, the freedom of those people who were attending that service to do so in the important activity that prayer really is, and not to be interrupted in doing that important task by anybody!

Thanks Kris. I dont know if you were wandering but it was very poetically put.

Here are the statements of the women in response to the trial.

They are still strong in the Eurozone. Among the developed countries the U.S. is an outlier.

No, it is exactly the reverse. The relative homogeneity of European populations and the shared history of national groups, which includes a history of revolt against oppression, makes them far more resistant to fascism than the United States. I should think that the odds of the US becoming a military dictatorship within 15 years must be on the order of 30 percent.

Fair enough. I know that church. It used to be the world’s largest swimming pool after Stalin blew up the original. Just across the street from the Pushkin Museum. I agree that the girls should be punished for interrupting the service, though two years seems a bit excessive.

About 20 years ago I was involved with a curious discussion with a Russian priest in an ancient cathedral just outside Vladimir. It’s a national monument dating to the 12th century. He was extremely nationalistic, and claimed that God only speaks in Slavonic. Very intense, dressed like a mujhik with the great felt boots. I felt as though we had been transported back to Dostoievski’s time.

Well military dictatorships are not always nationalistic. Sometimes its just a power grab like in Egypt (now), Chile (under Allende). I agree about the US veering towards marshall law, there is nothing now that is not justified but the War on Terror. In the republican budgets, the way the republicans plan to ‘cut the deficit’ is to cut all discretionary spending save only defense. If the republicans win, the defense contractors and military personnel will be the only ones with money.

I disagree about the nationalism here and in Europe. I think it is way easier to rekindle the flames of hatred than to remember why WWII was so horrible (seeing as how most of the people in that great generation are now passing into the pages of history). Here in the US I think it will be harder to do.

I think it is way easier to rekindle the flames of hatred *IN EUROPE* than to remember why WWII was so horrible

Fiddlesticks.

Pussy Riot had no right to use the Christ Our Savior cathedral as a platform for anti-Putin protest.

It was in bad taste and rude and outside the limits of decency. What if such young women had walked into YOUR church without permission to stage some kind of anti-political shenanigans? Pretty outrageous, yes?

Not that I support a 2 year sentence for “blasphemy”, but I certainly do not support the general public anywhere sauntering into cathedrals to stage political protests. No. It is not ok. Not in Russia, not in America, not any place. At the very least they deserved to be run off the property and busted for trespassing.

Bad form. Bad idea. Outrageous behavior.

It was in bad taste and rude and outside the limits of decency. What if such young women had walked into YOUR church without permission to stage some kind of anti-political shenanigans? Pretty outrageous, yes?

FAINTING COUCH ALERT: The Suducees and Pharisees of the San Hedrin said the same thing about the actions of another rude, obnoxious hooligan that had a really bad habit of using rhetorical needles and flame-throwers to pop their ideological bubbles of narcissism and set ablaze their respective sacred cows. Perhaps you heard of him?!?

Then again, I’m the kind of guy who would march right into St. Mary’s Catholic Church in my hometown in the middle of service, and after presenting the congregation with evidence of 10 Democratic Party mayors having criminalized dissent, protests, and giving food to the poor since Occupy’s inception, demand to know if everything this particular pesky hooligan ever said about “wealth” and “ropes” was still an integral part of the Catechism services they provide, or was it purged down the fucking rabbit whole with the rest of their Ever-Quest lives, lady-finger attention spans, and Communion wafer thin conscience?!?

Because I can pretty much guarantee — at least in America — that if there existed at least ONE Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian church in a metropolis that has its real-estate holdings sub-primed out of existence, they’d be comparing the signatures on the foreclosure forms with their membership rolls and attendance records, and getting nice roiling fire in the ol’ belly about the presence of greedy opportunistic wolves in the midst of the Lord’s good sheeple …