Inspiration: an image with FEMEN topless, of course, up top and below examples of accomplished female professionals and the charge was that FEMEN were not feminists but the workers were.
Where women enjoy security beneath the umbrella of reasonable and sound laws, it should not make a difference how one or the other choose to bring attention to political or social issues that concern them.
Free to work; free to bare the breast (at times); free to choose: free.
***
The hidden principle and cultural value behind this discussion is “modesty”. In civil and day-to-day life, most may agree that modesty is a virtue.
Keep your clothes on.
🙂
However, in the liberal western democracies that adjust themselves with thought and thoughtfulness, there’s been ample room for peaceful civil disobedience and protest. It’s in that context that a passionate defense of persons against wrongdoing my be interpreted. Perhaps where attention is needed — perhaps we should discuss FEMEN’s causes more than its methods — attention is gotten.
The Eugene Delacroix painting is famous and here somewhat between camps because she is “Liberty” herself leading the charge against tyranny.
Eugene Delacroix, “Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple.” Source: Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives via artsy.net
The prompt: opprobrium for much of President Trump’s other actions and utterances with glowing exception for announcing the moving of the American Embassy to Jerusalem.
Trump has to respond to internal personal as well as external political pressures. He has to make decisions with those two universes somewhat in balance.
The “Jerusalem Declaration” sense a message to (you know what I’m going to say — fill it in), and the timing is right as Israel is somewhat surrounded by PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia (which has military stationed about eight miles from the Golan).
The West has symbolically re-planted its flag at the Israeli bridgehead with what used to be more predictable despotic “eastern” dictatorships or “politically absolute” governments (some of them, of course, plainly hideous).
Russo-Iranian imperial aggression in the middle east has pushed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia westward, and the same has focused the remaining liberal states of EU / NATO (so perhaps not Turkey or Hungary or Poland) on resistance to extremist and tyrannous politics). The President’s move in Jerusalem nudges the other side to back off or up its game. We hope that Moscow axis will “hold” where it is and reconsider its ambitions and the means now applied — including election meddling and real fake news — toward achieving them.
Sharapov was imprisoned for 10 years when Vladimir Putin came to power.
Prior to this, in 1993, President Yeltsin confessed to him and his teacher, Vladimir Gomelskyi, that he cannot remove communists even around him in the Kremlin.
Sharapov was an assistant to the deputy of the Commission the Legislative Assembly of the city, where Putin comes from (Saint Petersburg). He was one of the initiators of the procedure for liquidating the District Committee of the Communist Party in the city, and transferring the building to the House of Freedom. Together with Gomelskyi, he was an initiator of dismantling Lenin’s monument at the central station in St. Petersburg.
Starting from 1989 until his arrest in 2000, he was creating anti-communist trade unions without employers and their agents on the basis of the Charter of the Polish group “Solidarity”. These unions were members of the Association of Free Trade Unions “Justice”.
Sharapov won a number of court trials while protecting employee trade unions, but lost his own criminal trial. The court passed the verdict without the presence of a jury in a remote northern region of Russia, where prisoners were tortured. The court’s decision contained Sharapov’s accusation in killing of a previously convicted person with two blows into the stomach, however, the man was killed by the two policemen. In reality, the authorities could not forgive him for the organization of anti-communist trade unions independent of the government in the largest Russian port, on the main railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and in St. Petersburg’s subway, as well as for the organization of victorious workers’ strikes.
After his release, he was seen among the defenders of the Euromaidan barricades in Ukraine.
The same have witnessed the destruction of Syria by Bashar al-Assad as flanked by Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei and how the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures have mounted on the chaos and mass destruction of warfare overseen by Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran.
If you think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a separate issue . . . think again.
The organizer of the march for Ukraine in Washington, D.C., Ed Skibicki reports that the Ukrainian-language version of the march has pulled more than 120,000 views.
In BackChannels’ opinion, these videos and related material should be pulling hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide as Ukraine serves — and as it has many times in history and too much in modern or “post-medieval” history — as a front line state standing against the barbarism, iron rule, greed, malign narcissism, and ruthlessness put on full display in Syria and Crimea by the once “Red-Green” phantoms of the Cold War.
Note and update 5/22/2017: BackChannels has trusted UA Position but hasn’t seen second source corroboration on the Crimea story. Source seems to be Crimean Tatar via
Related by Euromaidan Press and published in April 2017:
An alarmist announcement in one publication associated with the justifiable want of sympathy in the maw of an invading force encourages doubt; however, as noted immediately below and in patched-in sections, open source headlines and reports suggest Russia has been revitalizing once abandoned Cold War Era assets in Crimea.
Again: has Moscow really planted nuclear missiles in Crimea?
This note comes from the Federation of American Scientists and comments on similar web claims dating back to 2014:
The news media and private web sites are full of rumors that Russia has deployed nuclear weapons to Crimea after it invaded the region earlier this year. Many of these rumors are dubious and overly alarmist and ignore that a nuclear-capable weapon is not the same as a nuclear warhead.
Several U.S. lawmakers who oppose nuclear arms control use the Crimean deployment to argue against further reductions of nuclear weapons. NATO’s top commander, U.S. General Philip Breedlove, has confirmed that Russian forces “capable of being nuclear” are being moved to the Crimean Peninsula, but also acknowledged that NATO doesn’t know if nuclear warheads are actually in place.
Nuclear arms agreements may have comfort the public of an earlier day, but ambiguity would seem to bedevil the field.
From BackChannels’ open source perspective, there are no authoritative or official sources or statements. What appears in the chronologically ordered headlines, however, suggests a course in the redevelopment of Cold War Era military facilities.
A few twists and turns further and the driver pulled over to the side of the road. He was saying something about a monastery, and pointing to a series of blue roofs that rose up above the trees ahead of us. Presumably, it was the only viable tourist destination that he could think of in this vicinity. He seemed friendly enough, so I risked blowing our cover – leaning forward to say, “Objekt Dva-Dva-Adin.”
Our driver laughed, repeated the name of the colossal ruin, once a well kept military secret, and turned the car around.
It is a functioning military base with an anti-ship missile system,” the villager told a Reuters reporter who visited the area in July.
The bunkers are just one small part of a new Russian programme to militarise the Crimean peninsula. Based on recent site observations by Reuters, accounts from locals, media reports and official Russian data, Moscow has reanimated multiple Soviet-built facilities in the region, built new bases and stationed soldiers there
I had started this separate post last night, but as things may move fast in Crimea and Syria — readers may wish also to take a look at Russia’s cash position as regards funding its aggression and barbarism against the autonomous, democratic, or western-leaning states of its surrounding world — this brief referencing may as well ride along on the same because, essentially, the material is about the same thing: Moscow’s brandishing its biggest gun, i.e., the threat of nuclear exchange and all that may follow it.
Chess pieces, demonstrations, exercises, sales, and threats — there’s a mix of prudence and evil that seeps down into the economies of all Big Defense Production states, but Moscow has placed itself in the desperate position of wanting to produce a primary defense industry even while Russians suffer from the funds siphoned away for its foreign ambitions and apparently natural kleptocratic tendencies.
Related: General Russian Defense Industry
Putin is allocating unprecedented amounts of secret funds to accelerate Russia’s largest military buildup since the Cold War, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The part of the federal budget that is so-called black — authorized but not itemized — has doubled since 2010 to 21 percent and now totals 3.2 trillion rubles ($60 billion), the Gaidar Institute, an independent think tank in Moscow, estimates.
Stung by sanctions over Ukraine and oil’s plunge, Putin is turning to defense spending to revive a shrinking economy. The outlays on new tanks, missiles and uniforms highlight the growing militarization that is swelling the deficit and crowding out services such as health care. Thousands of army conscripts will be moved into commercial enterprises for the first time to aid in the rearmament effort.
The above were posted today, May 17, 2017, on YouTube. The “feed” from Ukraine’s war with Russia is continuous, but all seems to quiet at the desktop as the drama becomes familiar and outside anger dissipates into other breaking news.
Every hour, all 24, every day, the global public may not see the “blast and battle” taking place in Crimea, but what is happening appears in the government’s response to exigencies as well as reports from the front lines.
BackChannels hopes it will “scrape” less and interview now and then as the post-Cold War conflicts move through time and, God willing, resolve against the feudal past and for the more favorable modern democratic future with the strength to support rule of law in service to liberal ideals.
For this post, the blog may only encourage looking at the struggle of a state leaning westward and putting distance between itself and a demonstratively barbaric, corrupt, criminal, cruel, disingenuous, and kleptocratic feudal society that adorns itself on the spoils of malign narcissistic thieving under the guise of “protection”.
Wiesenthal Center Urges Ukrainian Authorities to Take Action Against General Who Threatened to Murder Jews
May 17, 2017
Jerusalem-The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Ukrainian government to take legal action against retired Security Service General Vasily Vovk in the wake of a recent Facebook post of his in which he wrote that he intends to murder Jews, among them Jewish MP Vadim Rabinovych. In a letter sent to Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Hennadii Nadolenko by its Director of Eastern European Affairs, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center emphasized the severity of the general’s comments and lack hitherto of an appropriate response by the Ukrainian authorities.
According to Zuroff’s letter:
“I am aware of the fact that the embassy here in Israel responded to express your regret about the ‘highly provocative post of [an] anti-Semitic character,’ but there is no indication that any legal action of any sort has or will be taken against General Vovk. So although the embassy ‘condemns all kinds of manifestations of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance,’ the bottom line as far as the Ukrainian authorities are concerned, is absolute impunity for vicious anti-Semites.
“We urge you to convey our concerns to the authorities in Kiev with a demand that appropriate and resolute action be taken against General Vovk, to send a clear message that in democratic Ukraine there will be no tolerance whatsoever for anti-Semites and bigots of any type.”
