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Tag Archives: Pussy Riot

Ukraine – Moscow’s “Active Measures”

28 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Active Measures, authoritarianism, Donald Trump, Moscow contemporary active measures, nationalism, political Brown, Political Incoherence, Pussy Riot, Putin, Soviet / post-Soviet propaganda, ultra-nationalism

While Russia’s hand in Ukraine has hardly been a secret, the emails, if genuine, provide fine-grained detail of Mr. Surkov’s office in setting up separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s east.

They also shed light on the workaday activity of a propaganda shop, including a rare example of a draft text apparently edited in Mr. Surkov’s office that can be compared with a final version.

The Ukrainian group, calling itself CyberHunta — a mocking reference to the Russian assessment that the Kiev government is a fascist junta — released 2,337 emails from the address prm_surkova@gov.ru, many from 2014 as the eastern Ukrainian separatists established their mini-states.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/world/europe/ukraine-russia-emails.html – 10/27/2016.


BackChannels inclines to trust the Atlantic Council before anything coming out of the maw of Moscow.

Why?

On Soviet Era “Active Measures”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures;

https://www.spymuseum.org/education-programs/news-books-briefings/background-briefings/active-measures/;

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/26/putin-s-wicked-leaks-didn-t-start-with-the-dnc.html;

http://fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/su0523.htm;

http://www.statecraft.org.uk/research/russian-active-measures-modernised-tradition

Now Back to the Chaos

Posted by wearepussyriot, October 27, 2016

Posted by WeAreChange, October 27, 2016

Who needs “Active Measures”?

Related (sigh) —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/29/ftac-americas-division-leans-toward-moscow/ – 8/29/2016.

Perhaps most frightening is how Pussy Riot sees Moral America, which is actually pretty good as regards the creation of the civil society that the deeply anti-authoritarian Pussy Riot needs as audience and consumers of its entertainment.  Nonetheless, it too appears to have perceived in Presidential Candidate Donald Trump’s demagoguery similarities with Putin’s now rapidly developing ultra-nationalist politics.

–33–

Ukraine – A Slice of Time in Links – Kiev to Pussy Riot’s Latest

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Fast News Share, Politics, Regions, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

news, political, politics, Pussy Riot, Russia, Ukraine

I wonder how this news may be making its way back to Moscow’s opposition intelligentsia.

Search “Ukraine, Navalny” seemed quiet today, but “Ukraine, Pussy Riot” didn’t quite get the combination, but it may have gotten the spirit: Pussy Riot presents Sochi punk video – The Washington Post; Pussy Riot members whipped by Cossacks at Sochi Olympics – latimes.com.

No need to date links in this compilation: I believe all were published today, and some within a few hours or an hour of this news watching typing that goes on around here most days.

______

Ukraine Protests: A Blank Slate for Geopolitical Projections | New Republic – 2/20/2014.

What the Papers Say, Feb. 20, 2014 | News | The Moscow Times

Critics Fear Post-Sochi Crackdown | News | The Moscow Times

Drone Captures Bird’s-Eye View of Kiev Unrest – NBC News.com

BBC News – Ukraine crisis: Renewed Kiev assault on protesters

Dozens killed in Kyiv as Ukraine ‘truce’ shattered | euronews, world news

Ukraine: Opposition Leader Warns Yanukovych ‘You Will End Like Gadhafi’ « CBS DC

White House Considers Sanctions on Ukraine as EU Talks Continue

* * *

22 MORE Dead in Ukraine As Truce Fails – YouTube – 2/20/2014.

# # #

A Note on Russia’s Post-Soviet Hangovers

25 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

perhaps, political anachronism, Pussy Riot, Russia, Russian prisons, Syria, Syrian Civil War

With revolution, something goes, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean something else takes its place, or much of it, all at once.  With Pussy Riot getting more media play in these its quiet years than perhaps (darn!) it did in its earlier and exuberant phase, a part of the global conscience has been taking a second look at the state’s now anachronistic prison system plus its deeply antiquated view of its own purpose.

What brought this into focus was the notice that what has given way in Syria is of the same corroding poison: the Ghost of Soviets Past and perhaps (ach!) the Phantom of the Czars.

______

is it about to lose its last ally in a newly democratised Arab world, of which Syria will remain a vital hub whatever happens? Russia inherited its Middle East presence from the Soviet Union, but it did not gain any new friends. With Gaddafi gone and Assad on his way out, Russia stands to lose more than physical assets.

Syria: a Soviet hangover turned headache | Comment is free | The Guardian 1/31/2012

Here we are coming up on two years later and Syria as a fine place to work (perhaps [grimace]) and play isn’t looking so good.

With the Kurdish Community enjoying autonomy and perhaps (egads!) enjoying fending off Al Qaeda a little less, with the faces of satellite-made maps rearranged significantly, with more than 110,000 souls absent forever and some millions struggling with new and insecure quarters, in the country and in other countries, and two superpowers arguing over the rules rather than the war, Syria has long passed the point of repair and territorial restoration.

And why?

In the post-Soviet internal grab fest, the Assad’s Syria just went on working as it had before the revolution.

Somebody forgot to invent and install Assad Regime in Syria 2.0

Or start to work on the problem.

Perhaps.

(it’s like a hiccup).

______

Tomorrow Today Amnesty demands “Russia must investigate prison abuse allegations by Pussy Riot member”:

“The prison administration claimed that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova had been placed in isolation for her own protection, but we are concerned this could be yet another punishment for demanding that her own rights and the rights of other inmates are respected. What authorities should do is investigate the allegations she made,” said Sergei Nikitin, Director of Amnesty International’s office in Moscow.

If there is a dictator around and true to form, he will blame the adverse and scrutinizing media challenge on foreign agents and then do nothing or, at best, attend the cosmetics by summoning up the empire’s most renowned tailors of public relations to sew up a caring and concerned cloak to wrap around the matter.

That sort of thing suits emperors.

However, if the dictator is absent and another kind of administrator present, independent assessments and studies will be supported, an open conference or two may be arranged (and, perhaps [pfft] institutionalized), and Amnesty will be answered with a degree of candor possibly unknown to Russia’s best invested class.

______

Also wheezing around like an old fart on matters post-Soviet: my own United States of America:

In 1974, Congress enacted the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which limits trade with “nonmarket” countries that restrict emigration. While it did not mention the Soviet Union, it was clearly aimed at pressuring Moscow to grant Jews the freedom to leave the country. Two decades after the fall of Communism, that is no longer a problem, but the law is still in place.

A Costly Anachronism – NYTimes.com Op-Ed, 2/27/2012

Shocking!

I don’t know if the matter has been addressed, and, right now, I don’t want to know.  Celebrities in jail and civil wars grab everyone’s attention and inspire the nimble to undo the wrapping and have a look at who, what, where, how, and, perhaps especially (oh, groan), why!

Tariff law?

That’s kind of wonky, y’know?

“If Jackson-Vanik is not lifted, American exporters — including big players such as Caterpillar and Boeing — will be paying higher tariffs than European and Asian competitors” just doesn’t reach out and sing to me quite the way that Pussy Riot’s Prison Blues do.

Additional Reference

Prison people, New Times, n.d. (in Russian, machine translated)

Khodorkovsky, Tymoshenko Revive Old Tradition Of Prison Correspondence 9/6/2013

Two Notes

1. To citizen and professional journalists and publishers: please dateline everything published.  Otherwise, one may as well be reading short stories.  Perhaps (I think that was one too many).

2. Khodorkovsky’s in a funny spiritual space.  My impression from reading Fragile Empire is that he had leaped from the Communist Party into private ownership of whatever he could get his hands on during the transition, and though his heart may have been in the right place despite its oil-laden and much enriched blood, the wrangling over taxes would seem to reveal as greedy a Republican soul as any known to the royalty of black crude in Texas.

On the other hand, Putin’s Robin Hood may have played if the distribution architecture hadn’t so favored so many Merry Men of old and new acquaintance — no funny propaganda intended.  Then too the revenue generating resource and the money have to move through their trade and economic channels and should a president not start with his own channels?

Perhaps (this one’s different) not.

Tempered modification may be the watchword for how states of affairs evolve in Russia.

While concentrations and movements in wealth and power hold interest, there’s an underlying dimensions analogous to operating a wood burning stove: whose job is it?  How much fuel should it be given?  How much oxygen, ventilation, and exhaust?  Who is harvesting the wood?  Who is holding it?  Who is sitting next to the stove?  Why?  How?  By what right? Etc.

With Putin, Russia has avoided anarchy.

It has not avoided oligarchy, so far, nor has it transformed itself in the direction of an integrated global political modernity.  That’s a thing larger than “the west”: it includes India, for example.

And Kenya for another.

Two steps forward.

One step back.

Russia is going to be fantastic!

# # #

Russia – Pussy Riot – Anarchy and Drama Queens – Back to the Gulag!

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

gulag, honesty, Pussy Riot, Russia

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has written a long letter detailing life inside prison colony No 14 in the Russian region of Mordovia, revealing appalling conditions reminiscent of the Soviet Gulag system.

Pussy Riot member starts hunger strike over prison conditions | World news | theguardian.com 9/23/2013

In the “final battle between good and neutrality” (Navalny’s phrase), I hope the good will lift the lids off the sewers and get into the subterranean chambers, one way or another, sooner or later.

If it’s for the good of humanity, much including humanity in Russia, is it really anarchy?

*

So far the alleged features of Pussy Riot prisoner Nadezhda Tolokonnikova include the following:

  • Seven days of 16 to 17 hours of work a day, essentially, in the Mandarin style, an 8-hour workday with an impossible quota in piecework;
  • Beatings known to and sanctioned by prison authorities;
  • Death threats by authority, allegedly.

*

A spokeswoman for the Federal Prison Service said the member of the feminist punk rock group is now in a spacious single cell with a bed, a refrigerator, toilet and personal belongings.

Pussy Riot member put in solitary confinement – Central & South Asia – Al Jazeera English 9/24/2013

She “worked her shift in the morning and then, for no reason whatsoever, went and wrote this statement,” Russian news agencies quoted Mr. Morozov as saying.

One Day in the Life of Pussy Riot: A jailed artist shines light on Russian prisons – CSMonitor.com 9/24/2013

It would seem Orwell’s world — actually, possibly, something even more dismal — has returned to the post-Soviet pseudo-medieval Russian system.

*

Hide something.

Get something.

*

What has Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to hide?

Apart from humane treatment and a little human respect, what has Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to get from having written such a letter?

These are fierce fighters, these Russians, and that would seem to include their wild women, these of Pussy Riot a bit Out There in the way of the young but brought down to earth by way of Putin’s courts and, so far as we know today, Putin’s prisons.

Other Links

Pussy Riot – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One Day in the Life of Pussy Riot: A jailed artist shines light on Russian prisons – CSMonitor.com 9/24/2013

The Navalny Case and the Final Battle between Good and Neutrality? | In Moscow’s Shadows 4/13/2013 — FBBGN is a great meme and should be used sparingly with the form “Navalny’s ‘Final Battle Between Good and Neutrality'”.  Of course, it’s everyone’s battle, but one ginormous state at a time, says I.

Lies are Told for Only Two Reasons | BackChannels

Video – Possible Stalinist Gulag-Style Prisons for ‘Pussy Riot’ Members – WSJ.com 9/21/2012

Russia’s Stalinist Treatment of Pussy Riot Women | World Affairs Journal – 9/30/2013.

# # #

Obscenity, Savagery, Boundary Disorders, and, Alas, Pussy Riot

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

antisocial behavior, boundaries, psychology, Pussy Riot

First, in case you never heard of it, a couple of years ago one of the band’s members put up three effigies in one of Moscow’s big supermarkets, with a sign saying that Jews, gays and migrant workers should be driven out of Moscow. I think the authorities should have looked into their activities back then.

After that, they staged an orgy in a public place. Of course, people are allowed to do whatever they want to do, as long as it’s legal, but this kind of conduct in a public place should not go unnoticed by the authorities.

Putin Jokes About Orgies to Cast Pussy Riot Protesters as Degenerates – NYTimes.com 9/6/2012

I’ve seen the orgy in the museum pictures.

While one in the west and of a Jewish background may lend more attention to abuses and abusers of power, one may become mindful too of abuses of freedom, and then too, within the bipolar and narcissistic constructs with which I’ve played on this blog, the clinical observation of ignored boundaries comes into play.

Perhaps it is one thing within the way of both Playboy and punk ethos to adapt a private space, an hotel room, a mansion, a club to to one’s enthusiasms and quite another to carry them into the public’s cherished secular and religious institutional space.

Where is the ethic in “pushing the boundaries” so far as to breach them entirely?

Hillel the Elder famously stated as the way of Torah, “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.”

The book I own on Hillel, and by the prolific Rabbi Telushkin, is Hillel: If Not Now, When?

Perhaps the volume should be available for reading in prison.

______

An RT clip (clean enough and informative just in case you’ve come out of a cage and are blinking in the sun muttering “pussy riot, wha’?”

▶ Pussy Riot has Orgy in museum and has sex with chicken in a supermarket – YouTube

______

We’re a wild species.

It’s a fact of nature borne out in thousands of clans, cultures, languages, and religions, and in addition we’re endowed with a remarkably creative survival psychology: our ears turn on and we start scanning for meaningful or useful sound and with just that part active acquire a fair part of our primary or “mother tongue” language and its social rules.

Whether for boredom — a hot mind plays havoc with time — or simple creative misapprehension, one may get things a little bit inside-out.

Add hormones.

And youth culture.

______

Cultural and personal self-containment become dimensional themes within the concept of “maturity”.  Whether person or state, what does it mean “to mature”?

In the combat- and other war-related videos, one sees both an ugly and kind of stupid side to humanity, but perhaps one sees that too at the edge of a boxing ring or soccer pitch.  Still, when the boxer bites an opponent’s ear, cuts out a liver for eating, drags a body naked through the streets — no less did Achilles with Hector’s body, but that was a long time ago — one wants a powerful hand to stay the excesses.  There is in that concept of limits, even in war, even with one’s gravest enemy, the ugliness of the Banu Qurayza legend.

Where and when to stop?

Perhaps when and where one has been heard fairly, soundly, and widely and the compromise and respect attending one’s own position becomes certain and mutually beneficial and engaged.

That is the end of the spirit’s suffocation and the annulment of limitless, ruthless self-absorption and its political and social consequences.

______

In addition to the politics attending Pussy Riot’s antics, other figures come up frequently in relation to Putin’s autocracy, and they too may bear their own second and closer look in the cause of a more accurate and encompassing comprehension.

Related Reference

Antisocial personality disorder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bipolar disorder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Narcissistic personality disorder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

# # #

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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