Countries invested in the Olympics — an amateur affair where sports are to enjoy contests to the side of politics with national pride second to pride in individual athletic striving and accomplishing.
The international press excoriated Sochi in regard to its encounter with substandard facilities; such as myself have tried keep Sochi and Syria in the same frame with the money front and center — i.e., a Russian pledge of $10 million for Syrian humanitarian aid while Sochi went forward with a $51 billion price tag.
Humanity is not what the Syrian civil war is about. It’s not about God either. It’s about despotism. Humanity would probably (that’s a validated probably, considering the numbers in casualties and refugees) not be in the middle of it. The obscenity of the treatment meted by both sides to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp underscores the inhumanity displayed between contesting forces.
The world’s getting the message between Chinese and Russian Security Council complicity in relation to the Syrian Civil War.
Neither has interest in voting against a dynastic dictatorship; both have interest in containing or rebuffing Islam, which in the weird way described by Aboud Dandachi in the previous post, has both emphasizing and tacitly supporting the presence of al-Qaeda-type fighters as a demonstration of who is just as bad and promises to be far worse — and would be if they themselves were not there to block them. In essence, these undemocratic political elite are attempting to curry favor with the global war watching public by keeping before their eyes the atrocious barbaric excesses of a foe that make themselves look the little bit better choice.
Putin is so good, he has got the world focused on Snowden and the NSA rather than his revived “mafia state” and the immense redevelopment and redirection of the KGB beneath the banner FSB: “There are more SVR/FSB personnel per capita in today’s Russia than during the period of the Soviet Empire, and there are at least as many SVR officers in the US today as there were KGB officers during the Cold War.” http://www.cicentre.com/?page=191
During the last weeks, three big companies in Norway has released lgbt-related campaigns
First was the national lottery with their “out of the closet”-video, and then Stormberg gave two days of income from their website (aprox. 18 000 Euro) to the Russian project for the national lgbt organisation. And now the sport company XXL released this one
More than 450 Indian migrant workers in Qatar have died in the last two years, media revealed on Monday. Another upcoming report will show that 400 Nepalese have lost their lives scrambling to get the Gulf state ready for the 2022 World cup.
WANT TO know how badly U.S. Syrian policy is going, as President Obama works with international mediator Lakdhar Brahimi? Over the weekend Brahimi apologized to the Syrian people that their hopes for a resolution has come to naught, as the peace talks collapse. It’s made worse that Russia is blocking humanitarian assistance to the people, putting President Obama in a very tough spot.
The latest virtual manufacture in the world might be called “nested conflict dolls”, the creation of successive wars by proxy between Russia and the United States / NATO and played out between layers of Sunni and Shiite Islam within the Islamic Small Wars of the middle east and elsewhere, perhaps too between nationalist movements, at least one of which, Hungary’s Jobbik, claim far back Iranian roots, and the liberal-progressive do-good societies of the open democracies.
Predictably, RT’s rakin’ the muck — and no need to fabricate it — from the Arab world while Americans like Taylor Marsh (and myself) view Sochi (a $51 billion show) and Syria (for which Russia has pledged $10 million in humanitarian aid) side by side.
For Putin, Russia, and the rest of the world, Sochi, in memory and in fact, will survive Syria.
The jet set will go skiing, plan winter vacations, ape their own Olympic moments, take snapshots, and dine like royalty by the Black Sea while those punished by years of war and the destruction of their former lives will go on struggling along in the darker shadows of history.
For thought on the role that money, big money, Ayatollah money, corporate money plays in political sports everywhere and on every issue:
“I’m happy to promote business, but I’m not one of those folks who’s going to be directed by billionaires and I think that’s one of the divisions we have in the Republican conference,” he added.
Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa voiced the above complaint in relation to U.S. domestic immigration reform; however, in principle, he’s remarked for all intents on the gravitational sway of wealth in its own right. Whatever the lobbyists may promote, however they may define issues and do battle over them, the money has no conscience but rather a life of its own and the want of more (and more and more and more) of itself.
The three amigos of post-Soviet dictatorship — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — put on a good show and spread it around some through their systems of patronage, but as the web in English gets around, it may become ever more difficult to “follow the money” without also seeing the blood spattered across it and hearing the agonized crying of the suffering behind it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the world will in about eight to ten hours bear witness to peaceful competition among nations by way of the winter Olympic games in Sochi; however, while they are doing that, Bashar al-Assad and forces beneath his command may continue prosecuting their war as they have since spring 2011; the other side may be mixed with forces still loyal to Idris — there’s a Quixote story somewhere down there in that beleaguered company — but they too will be at play in the killing fields, and one cannot make such as al-Nusra or ISIS / ISIL (I get so confused) look better than they have proved themselves in battle against bakeries and truck drivers.
“By turning a blind eye to hateful homophobic rhetoric and violence, Russian authorities are sending a dangerous message as the world is about to arrive on its doorstep for the Olympics that there is nothing wrong with attacks on gay people,” Tanya Cooper, a Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times.
Probably, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy with the $50 billion investment in Sochi and hopes for a glamorous Winter Olympics is to play to global business and profit motive while hoping that the demons and ghouls attending the Syrian Civil War stay away.
The other blindside involves an eastern European-type drift into resurgent nationalism, which is nothing new for Putin’s Russia; in fact, it could be leading the pack.
(Is there a Russia –> Syria –> Iran –> Hungarian Jobbik relationship in place)?
The gay thing, rather like the Jew thing, signals other things that are never good.
The Russian President’s decision to sign a law prohibiting ‘the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors’ last summer probably made sense to him at the time. This measure, along with one that bans the adoption of Russian children not just by homosexuals but also by heterosexuals residing in countries that have gay marriage on the books, is reportedly supported by 74 per cent of Russians. And Putin has for years been able to get away with much worse: invading (and still occupying) Georgia, fuelling Assad’s murder machine, rigging elections, jailing journalists and opposition activists. Other than the odd bleat of protest from the European Union or US State Department, all that has had few serious consequences.
But Putin can’t have anticipated the magnitude of worldwide outrage that would pour forth in response to his gay propaganda law.
For the vast expanse of research available as regards homosexuality in nature and in humanity, all may be bypassed by way of a simple binary: is mankind to pursue exclusivity amid infinite possibilities for discrimination or is the world — or perhaps the intellectual leadership of it — to pursue a course in inclusion with appreciate and tolerance for as much differentiation as may be possible with peace?
I’ve added to the sidebar of this blog four of the values and virtues I feel most relevant to developing a more peaceful global village — compassion, humility, inclusion, integrity — but I’ve added a wildcard: “empathy”.
The possession of empathy in human affairs would seem not only not given but more likely absent than present around the world.
In the west, actors, artists, and writers encounter the concept early, and those who may favor color, engineering, mathematics, and pattern over social drivers in their arts may dispense with this imaginative element potential in their own humanity and go on to make things that have presence in a language absent of a great part and potential in humanity.
Others, especially actors and writers, have always before them the challenge of inhabiting someone else’s perspective. If they haven’t that ability — or ability to cultivate empathy and live a few moments in other shoes — they will not be actors or writers or even, really, very good humans . . . which might bring us back to Putin, Sochi, Syria, and gay bashing in Russia.
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I had not intended to write about the gay community at all this morning, but in the way of the web and social networks, some set of items and opportunities always appears in material streaming across the desktop, and it happens that some things come together and one works with the themes.
Had the suspect in a Seattle nightclub fire chosen a straight bar for a target, the post about it on a conflict-analyzing blog would not have had the cast it took.
The same applies here with Sochi. The news turns up this facet of Russian nationalism — Islamic Jihad compulsively persecutes gays and, whaddayaknow, Russian nationalists do too! — and one merely makes note of the observation.
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