It’s impossible for non-Russians to live in the Russian Federation. They should leave the country. I know it’s complicated, but it’s more complicated than burying your children or having to nurse them back to health like this.
I know from my own experience. I’ve heard my fill of stories.
The harder life becomes in Russia, the tougher people will be on non-Russians. The blame here lies not with young, uneducated morons from troubled families, but with the ideologues of neo-Nazism and nationalism. And maybe the Kremlin will pick up the topic again when it needs to look for “enemies.”
Just don’t tell me the Soviet Union was a friendship of peoples. A friendship of people, sure, but the peoples were always pitted against each other.
Svetlana Choyzhinimayeva
Facebook
September 4, 2018
My nephew was beaten up on Sunday evening, just for the heck of it. Or, rather, not just for the heck of it, but because of his narrow eyes and the color of his skin. We spent all night at the hospital. The examination was brief, but the doctors said they had to wait another two to four days to be sure of the final diagnosis. My nephew’s left eye hurts, and he cannot open it. You can see for yourself.
Something similar happened to another nephew of mine around fifteen years ago, when he was in his sixth year at the Sechenov Medical Academy in Moscow. We had been returning from a concert by the beloved People’s Artist and singer Lyudmila Zykina, a concert to which she had invited us.
We took different trains in the subway. The boy was dozing in the train, his eyes half closed, when suddenly a boot smashed into his face with savage force. Although my nephew was a boxer, there was nothing he could do against a two-meter-tall, thickheaded lout. The result was a broken jaw, being fed through a tube for three months, and having to prepare for his thesis defense. The boy lost forty kilos.
How are non-Russians supposed to go on living?
Photo courtesy of Elena Zaharova and Svetlana Choyzhinimayeva. Translated by the Russian Reader
All the retrospective, self-aggrandizing, virtual handwringing I have been seeing on Russophone social media in recent days, occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, seems obscene on the part of people who have had nothing whatsoever to say, good or bad, about Russia’s signally destructive role in shoring up Assad’s brutal dictatorship in Syria.
What’s the difference between 1968 and now?
The difference is that the Czechs and Slovaks were “white” “Christian” Slavs, while Syria is, unfortunately, populated by people that Russians, many of whom hilariously regard “political correctness” as the greatest threat to civilization, would tend to think of as “blacks,” which is a term of real racist abuse in Russian.
Worse yet, most of those “blacks” are Muslims.
Syrians are thus sub-humans and, as such, were put in their place by a superior “white” nation.
Maybe very few Russians actually have bothered to think this through explicitly, but there is almost no evidence the vicious Russian bombing of opposition-held towns in Syria has bothered much of anyone in Russia at all, so the rest of us are free to impute any and all motives whatsoever to their actions and inaction. And remember, on this sad anniversary, that at the time only something less than a dozen brave Russians opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia publicly. {TRR}
Pictured: A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker about to be taken from her mother and placed in a facility where the staff (according to an interview) “is not allowed to comfort her.”
We are now essentially torturing parents who legally seek asylum in the United States (and their children), by taking away their minor children, caging those children, and telling the parents they may never be reunited—all to “deter” them (and those like them) from exercising their legal rights under U.S. law. This new Trump “zero tolerance policy” (announced and implemented April 6, 2018 by Jeff Sessions) is evil and not based on our laws.
As some of you know, I used to be a lawyer, and in the 1980s I used to do pro bono political asylum work for Salvadorans fleeing death squads. U.S. law allows you to claim political asylum here if you have a “well-founded fear of persecution” in your home country that fits within specified categories. You can either present yourself at a point of entry and claim asylum (risky—you aren’t afforded a lawyer and most asylum claims are turned down) or you can claim asylum as a defense to deportation.
Now on our southern border, the U.S. is (contrary to law) refusing to admit those legally claiming asylum. They are forcing immigrants to cross into the U.S. illegally, and then arresting them and (even if they have a defense to being deported because of a potentially valid asylum claim) taking their children to be housed in a concentration camp—an abandoned WalMart filled with cages or a new tent camp in 100 degree Texas heat on a military base. This is being done, per Jeff Sessions and Mitch McConnell, to “deter” them from seeking asylum—that is, as a punishment to them, to deter others from doing the same thing. Even though that thing (claiming asylum) is completely legal under U.S. law.
Accounts from Congressional Representatives and pro-bono attorneys reveal that parents are told that their children are being taken away “to get a bath” and then the children are not returned. When asked how they’ll be reunited, parents are being told “your families do not exist anymore.” Parents have been deported and they don’t know where their children are. Because there are at least four federal bureaucracies involved (CBP, DHS, ICE, ORR in addition to private prison corporations and the DOJ) and there was no planning for implementing the policy none of attorneys representing them, the Customs and Border Patrol, nor U.S. Congressional Representatives can get confirmation that the children are even being kept track of by family.
Not surprisingly, one man, after learning that his child had been taken away, recently killed himself.
Jeff Sessions announced the new policy on April 6, 2018, but Trump now (1) claims, inaccurately, that it’s “the Democrats'” prior law (a complete lie) and (2) tweeted today that he won’t change the new policy unless Congress agrees to fund the wall and end political asylum and end “catch-and-release.”
Today, DHS revealed that almost 2,000 children have been taken from their parents in the last 6 weeks under the new policy. Children are housed in cages on concrete floors. Many of the children don’t have access to anyone who speaks their language. The staff has no training to deal with the children’s trauma, and a whistle-blower recently explained that both the staff and the children are traumatized, while the CEO of the private prison company has been paid $1 million.
So here we are, friends. This is a violation of the Fifth Amendment guaranty of due process of law. It’s a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It is a violation of international law. I would hope that any of those who continue to assist the implementation of this new policy are shunned by their congregations of faith until that changes. (Catholic bishops have already discussed assessing Canonical penalties to ICE agents ranging from refusing the sacrament of communion to excommunication.) I would hope that our courts ultimately order them to cease and desist, and if they fail to do so, that they are jailed for contempt of court. I hope they are ultimately prosecuted as international war criminals and they can never travel outside the U.S. In the meantime, every single one of them has violated his or her oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and they deserve our horror and our contempt.
I’ve spent today in a funk, knowing that I needed to write this, and hating that fact. I have, despite every horrible thing up until the last nineteen months, been proud to be an American, choosing to concentrate on our lofty aspirations (equal protection, freedom of speech) rather than our tragic failings (slavery, segregation, white supremacy, McCarthyism.)
But this is simply unmitigated evil. And refusal to face it or to acknowledge it or to own it, is cowardice and a deliberate choice to enable evil. (Yes, friends, this is America, today. This is exactly who we are, until we change it.)
We are terrorizing families. We are traumatizing children. We are violating our principles and our laws to further a racist ideology of our misguided rulers. We are doing evil. We need to do everything in our power to stop that. Now.
Thanks to Jose Alaniz for the heads-up. I supplied the links and videos based on cues in the original text.
1.
“There’s really no place for self-righteousness in war.”
—Lord Richards, BBC Radio 4, Today, 14 April 2018
Lord Richards said this by way of arguing everyone should give up, permit the butcher Assad to win his genocidal war, and “let the Syrian people [?] get down to the business of rebuilding their country.”
He was immediately followed on the air by a bloke named Frank Gardner, who made the ludicrous claim it was the Russian “intervention” “that prevented Islamic State and the other jihadists from taking Damascus.”
Mr. Gardner was immediately followed on the air by yet another bloke, an MP of some sort, who was just as defeatist, but somehow, unaccountably, thought the “people responsible” for war crimes in Syria “would be held to account.”
Mr. Gardner and the MP weree followed by an American teenage girl, apparently a former member of the Obama administration, who absolved the second coming of MLK, Jr., of all responsibility for the bloodbath.
As if this were not bad enough, the teenage American girl was immediately followed on the air by Sebastian Gorka. Oddly enough, his comments were the most reasonable.
They were immediately followed on the air by the ridiculously ubiquitous Anne Applebaum and another bloke with a posh accent (David Stevenson), who didn’t “want to see an all-out war.”
This entire clown circus was preceded by a nice little chat with a “former” Russian general, whose only purpose was to tell the radio audience, “If you so much as scratch one of our boys, you’ll have all-out war.” (I am paraphrasing.)
All of this was camouflaged by an alleged concern for the “people of Syria,” and yet not a single actual Syrian voice was heard all morning.
What disgusting white freaks.
Russians at war
2.
Predictably, various so-called leftists on my Facebook news feed are in high dudgeon today over the milquetoast missile strikes on a few Syrian military facilities carried out overnight by France, Britain, and the US.
These very same people, some of whom are Russian nationals, have had absolutely nothing to say about Russia’s critical intervention in Syria on the side of the country’s war criminal dictator Bashar Assad for the last two and a half years.
How does that work? Russia gets a free pass because it is . . . what? Building socialism in Syria? On the right side of the conflict? Has been suffering so much since the collapse of the Soviet Union that it has the right to bomb whole cities into rubble and occupy neighboring countries without provocation?
No, Russia gets a free pass, especially from Russian leftists, because 99.9999% of the Russian populace knows quite well that their own homegrown dictator, Vladimir Putin, has certain pet projects that are off limits to criticism and protest.
Destroying Syria is one of those pet projects.
So, they are simply too scared to criticize Russia’s absolutely criminal actions against Syrian citizens in Syria, i.e., against people who have never, so far as I know, harmed any Russians at all, especially not in Russia itself.
Hence, when the so-called west makes a feeble, almost laughable gesture to oppose the Assadist-Putinist-Iranian-Hezbollah massacre in Syria, these Russian and Russophile leftists awake from their usual slumber, happily quoting Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and other great advocates of “peace in our time.”
It never occurs to any of them, apparently, that this is an absolutely demoralizing, pointless, and impossible stance on the matter. They are leftists who unconditionally support fascists and imperialists, and who support other, world-famous leftists who unconditionally support fascists and imperialists. They are thus leading the international leftist movement down the garden path either to utter destruction or utter irrelevance.
Sanders and Corbyn are dangerous clowns. If you don’t get that, you might not be as politically savvy or as leftist as you imagined you were.
At least, if you feel strongly about the issue, make your own arguments as to why it is okay for Putin, Assad, Iran, and the Hezbollah to slaughter Syrians at will, while it is a crime against humanity to toss a few missiles once a year at a few Syrian military bases and chemical warfare production facilities that were given a week’s notice and thus had happily been evacuated long before the missiles actually struck them.
But, no, amazingly enough, pro-Assadist and pro-Putinist leftists almost never make their own arguments, cowering instead behind the drivel spouted by the likes of Corbyn, Sanders, and Tariq Ali.
Russians at war
3.
Why would any “progressive” or “anti-authoritarian” leftist in their right mind refuse solidarity to the nine Penza and Petersburg antifacists caught up in an insane frame-up, engineered by the folks at Vladimir Putin’s old stomping grounds, the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, formerly known as the KGB), who have accused them of being members of a wholly fictional “terrorist community,” codenamed The Network, and charged them accordingly?
I ask this seemingly nonsensical question because, as I was thinking about the knee-jerk reaction of various “anti-imperialists,” Russian leftists, and Russophile leftists to last night’s missile strikes in Syria, it suddenly occurred to me this same mob of righteous Marxists has been as nearly as quiet about the so-called Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case as it has been about the Kremlin’s war against Syrian civilians and anti-Assad forces in Syria.
Why should that be? What is the connection between these seemingly unrelated events?
The answer is simple. If you pay too much attention to the Penza-Petersburg case and its gory details, you will realize all too quickly that Russia is ruled by a fascist clique of power-hungry ex-KGB lunatics who have somehow persuaded themselves that their greed, corruption, and ultraviolence are a supreme form of patriotism, not an utter degradation of all reasonable notions of governance, justice, and balanced international relations.
Thus, leftists who only get exercised over Syria when the so-called west makes a tiny, milquetoast, one-off gesture of resistance to the Putinist-Assadist-Iranian-Hezbollah killing machine are reluctant to talk too much about the horrifying Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case and many other similar cases that never make the headlines around the world, since they would reveal too palpably and obviously the natural affinities between Assad and Putin, two dyed-in-the-wool fascists who believe all resistance and opposition to their perpetual regimes is illegitimate, “extremist,” “terrorism,” etc.
If you are an “anti-authoritarian” or “progressive” leftist, however, it will not do to admit you stand for the same things as Putin and Assad cherish, so you just gloss over their crimes before and during the Syrian revolution, and hope no one will notice what violent criminal thugs they have been from day one, and how their violence and thuggery have only been spreading like wildfire across their own countries and all around the world ever since they came to power.
Russians at war
4.
God forbid the Russian people should rise up against their own dictator, Vladimir Putin, and the Chinese, Iranians and Hezbollah, say, rushed to help the Russian dictator put down the uprising. Not only would it be extremely humiliating were Chinese warplanes to bomb ancient Russian cities such as Pskov and Vladimir, were terrorists from Hezbollah and Iranian fundamentalists to murder innocent Russian children, women and men, but the whole world would remember how once upon a time not so long ago the Russians themselves helped the bloody dictator Bashar Assad gut and slaughter a grassroots revolution in Syria. Everyone would thus turn their backs—unfairly—on the Russians fighting to the death for their freedom and remain silent until their dictator, ably assisted by the Chinese, Iranian and Hezbollah killers, would force one half of the Russian populace to take flight to other countries, while killing and enslaving the other half. // TRR
Here’s the score, boys and girls. This is what happens, sooner or later, to everyone who has a beef, however minor, with the Putin regime. They get a visit from a “policeman” who is indistinguishable, in his behavior, looks, and speech, from an ordinary thug.
Today, it happened to my friends Lika and Alik, who are not only some of the nicest folks I’ve ever met, but run the invaluable Jewish Community Center on Rubinstein Street on a shoestring budget.
Here’s what Lika wrote about their encounter with the Putinist police:
I just got a visit from two plainclothes “policemen.” What was their business? Literally: “Have you been writting all kinds of crap on Facebook about wogs getting beaten up?” I am conveying what they said to me. The prosecutor’s office found your message, which you wrote one and a half years ago. We need a clarification from you. I see he’s holding printouts from the Sova Center. I told them they had woken up on time, since one and half years had passed since then. After I said that, one of the “policeman” was rude to me. “Why do you write garbage? Do you have nothing to do?” I asked him not to talk to me like that and show me his ID. He refused and behaved very aggressively. My husband tried to take his picture on the phone, but he threatened to smash the phone. He really was holding papers from the prosecutor’s office. Supposedly, they had been given three days to take care of the matter. I said I could deal with it on Friday morning. The conversation ended with our promising to call the police and closing the door.
There is no doubt they were from the police, judging by their behavior.))
I am writing a complaint to the prosecutor’s office.
Here is a photo of one of the “heroes.”
___________________________
I myself just got chewed out, on a leftist mailing list, for writing a “screed” about how Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky had sold out to Putinism by appearing on RT. What is worse, the super-righteous Hedges, an ordained minister, if I’m not mistaken, has even started presenting a program on the channel.
Why do I object so strongly to this? Because whether they know it or not, Hedges, Chomsky, and everyone who behaves like them is putting their stamp of approval on the way this country is misruled by thugs like the ones who just visited and threatened my friends Lika and Alik.
Make no mistake: this is not a one-off, random incident. This is something that has happened millions of times, and often in much rougher form, since Putin took charge of Russia eighteen years ago.
So, when you say to yourself that your “anti-imperialist” (or whatever) message is so earth-shakingly important that you’ll go on a TV channel paid for by Russian taxpayers, but run as a flagrant anti-US, anti-western, pro-Assadist, pro-Putinist propaganda outlet by thieves, crooks, and thugs who openly intimidate, assault, and sometimes murder these same taxpayers for the “criminal” act of disagreeing with the general line or drawing attention to a wrongdoing or demanding that state officials, including police and judges, actually do their jobs in keeping with the Russian Constitution, the Russian law codes, and the international and European conventions on human rights to which Russia is still a signatory, you have to have a lot of chutzpah.
In fact, you have to have decided, whether consciously or not, that ordinary taxpaying Russians who don’t toe the Putinist line are your enemies, and you don’t mind at all if they’re crushed in the dirt by absolute fucking scumbags as long as self-righteous snake oil salesmen like Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges have yet another “outlet” for their tiresome message, which we all memorized years ago and which, in fact, they’ve had no trouble at all disseminating at will to whoever will listen for years on end.
Pretending that they’re “forced” to go on RT, because they can’t get a hearing anywhere else, is the last refuge of an “anti-imperialist” scoundrel. TRR
Frightened Passengers Do Not Let Ilyas Nikitin Board Plane in Vnukovo IslamNews
April 4, 2017
On Tuesday afternoon, passengers did not let Russian citizen Andrei (Ilyas) Nikitin, identified by the media as the alleged organizer of the terrorist attack in the Petersburg subway, on board a plan. The victim himself told IslamNews about the incident.
According to Nikilin, he had passed through passport control, but could not board the Rossiya Airlines plane due to protests from frightened passengers.
Ilyas Nikitin at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. Photo courtesy of IslamNews
Even airport security personnel could not resolve the situation. Ultimately, Nikitin was forced to miss the flight.
Nikitin said the reaction of the passengers was a surprise to him, because on Tuesday morning he had flown from St. Petersburg to Moscow witn no problems.
He noted that law enforcement officials helped him get a refund for his ticket.
“The airline said it would not be able to put me on this plane. I hope to fly out on another plane tomorrow morning,” said Nikitin.
In connection with the incident, IslamNews appeals to its colleagues to comply with journalistic ethics. In particular, you should not publish unconfirmed information that could damage people’s reputations and cause panic in society.
Nikitin gave St. Petersburg law enforcement agencies high marks for their work after the terrorist attack in the city’s subway.
As previously reported, on the day of the terrorist attack, Nikita himself went to the police and said he was not complicit in the tragedy. Before this, video and photos of Nikitin, shot by a CCTV camera, went viral in the media. Because of his outward appearance (the clothes and beard typical of Muslims), the man was christened [sic] the alleged bomber.
____________________
The Search for Jihad in St. Petersburg*
Denis Korotkov Fontanka.ru
April 3, 2017
The guise of the suspect in the explosion in the Petersburg subway, whose photo has been distributed to police, is unambiguous. If the assumptions are correct, this is a public show. The man in a skullcap with a typical Muslim beard stepped right out of a poster for Islamic State, an organization banned in Russia.
Until April 3, 2017, terrorists did not try and blow Petersburg up [sic].** Homegrown skinheads, who assembled small DIY bombs, do not count in the bigger scheme of things. The first explosion in the subway has been marked with a clear trace. If the man wanted by the Chekists [sic] and police is guilty, he has issued a challenge. He wore no disguise, was emphatically Muslim in appearance, and was calm.
The explosion in the fourth car of the train that had departed from Sennaya Ploshchad subway station was heard around 2:30 p.m., when the train approached Tekhnologichesky Institut station. The dead and wounded are being counted. At the moment, officials agree that “about ten” people have been killed, and the number of wounded is around fifty. According to our information, the number of dead is fourteen. Another explosive device has been discovered and disarmed at Ploshchad Vosstaniya station.
Ambulance crews, Emergency Ministry teams, and police units, sirens blazing. The subway closed, endless traffic jams. Petersburg has never seen the likes of this.***
The prosecutor’s office initially declared the incident a terrorist act, then changed its mind. By 6:40 p.m., the Investigative Committee of Russia had decided the case would be investigated as a terrorist attack, with the proviso that the “investigation intends to look into all other possible explanations of this incident.”Meanwhile, Petersburg police had already received the photo of the man who, presumably, could have placed the explosive device in the fourth car.
A tall, black skullcap, straight-cut black clothing, a typical beard with no mustache: for a considerable number of Petersburgers [sic], this is what a classic Wahhabi looks like [sic], the kind of person from whom the subway is closed by metal detectors and police units.
Subway explosions have been the “privilege” of the capital until now. On June 11, 1996, a blast between Tulskaya and Nagatinskaya stations in Moscow killed four people and injured sixteen. On January 1, 1998, an explosive device was discovered at Tretyakovskaya station; three subway workers were injured when it exploded. On August 8, 2000, a blast in the underground passage on Pushkin Square killed thirteen and injured sixty-one people. In 2004, an explosion in a train traveling between Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stations killed forty-one and injured two hundred and fifty people. On August 31, 2004, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at Rizhskaya station, leaving nine dead and injuring fifty. On March 29, 2010, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up at Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations, killing forty-one people and injuring more than a hundred.
The outcome of the investigations of the 2014 [sic] and 2010 explosions is well known: the female suicide bombers were radical Islamists who blew themselves up at the behest of their religious mentors.
It was calm in Petersburg until then.**** The bell sounded in August 2016, when an FSB Grad special forces team stormed a rented flat on the tenth floor of a sixteen-storey building on Leninsky Prospekt by breaking through the ceiling [sic]. The details of the operation are unknown even now. According to official reports, four Islamist militants shot back and were destroyed by return fire. Judging by the fact that the liquidated militants were part of an Islamic State-affiliated terrorist group, led by Timur Likhov, who had been killed several days earlier, they had not come to Petersburg for a holiday.***** The FSB’s press service did not say what exactly was contained in the canisters and bags that were taken from the ransacked flat and loaded into an official van.
In November 2016, FSB special forces again stormed a flat, this time on the first floor of a five-storey building on Sofia Kovalevskaya Street. The “peaceful taxi drivers” from Uzbekistan and Kirghizia [sic] who lived there had automatic weapons and explosives in their possession, which did not stop them from asking to go home with an infantile naïveté, right after embarrassed confessions of plans to set off bombs in the Galeriya shopping mall on Ligovsky Prospect or in the subway.
Given that immediately after the explosion on the approach to Tekhnologichesky Institut an explosive device was discovered on Ploshchad Vosstaniia, the Investigative Commission’s proviso about “other explanations,” except a terrorist attack, looks more like overcautiousness. Real explosives were discovered were almost simultaneously as the first explosion in the Petersburg subway happened. You can discuss how typical it is for Islamic terrorists to use a fire extinguisher as a casing for an explosive device or place a bomb under a seat in the subway instead of using suicide bombers, but the list of possible explanations is very short [sic].
Surveillance cameras recorded the man in black allegedly leaving a briefcase containing explosives in the fourth car, strolling across Sennaya Ploshchad without the briefcase, talking with someone on the phone, and then leaving [sic]. ****** He could not help but understand he was doing this in the crosshairs [sic] of video cameras. Then his skullcap and beard are not just a typical image, but a signal.
The signal has been received.
The Petersburg subway reopened at 8:40 p.m. For the time being, Petersburgers prefer not go to under ground.
*********
* This incendiary, Islamophobic article, which shows every sign of violating Russian Criminal Code Article 282 (stipulating incitement of racial, ethnic, and religious hatred as a criminal offense) was posted on Fontanka.ru‘s website on April 3 at 9:35 p.m. Since that time, the “terrorist” in the CCTV camera still photograph, above, has voluntarily visited the police, been identified as Ilyas Nikitin, and has told the police he had nothing to do with the bombing in the Petersburg subway on April 3. Apparently, the police believed his testimony, because they immediately released him. And yet, as of 9:30 a.m. on April 5, this article is still posted on Fontanka.ru without the slightest indication that there have been any developments in the case since then. Is this the way ethical journalists work?
** This claim is false, both in terms of Petersburg’s recent history and certainly in terms of its history more generally. What were the Nazi trying to do during the 900-day siege of the city, during WWII, if not “trying to blow [it] up”?
*** A city that went through three revolutions, a civil war, and a 900-day siege by the Nazis from 1905 to 1944 “has not seen the likes of this”?
**** Petersburg in the mid noughties was anything but “calm.” There were hundreds of assaults, perpretated by neo-Nazi skinheads, on Central Asian migrant workers, students and visitors from Africa and Asia, people from the North and South Caucasus, foreigners in general, and local anti-fascists, many of them fatal.
***** The reporter’s only sources here are articles previously published on Fontanka.ru. Given the website’s well-known connections with local law enforcement agencies, I see no reason to treat these stories as necessarily or wholly true. The Russian security forces would not be the first to exaggerate the terrorist threat by fabricating or embellishing the particulars of its counter-terrorist operations.
****** Where are these images? Where have they been published?
Everything that happened on April 3 was awful, sad, and alarming. Today, at the entrance to the Vladimirskaya subway station, I was asked to step aside for an inspection. My backpack was checked, and I was asked to take everything out of my pockets. A man of “Slavic” appearance had been walking right in front of me, carrying a big backpack. No one stopped him. On the way back, at Narvskaya subway station, me and another comrade were asked to show our IDs. There was a young woman with us who, sensing the injustice, asked whether she also had to show her ID, but she was told no, she didn’t have to. Racism in action. Everyone has it hard right now, I realize, but some people have it harder. Everyone is scared to go into the subway, but the fear and humiliation is double for some. Skin color, the shape of one’s eyes, and place of birth do not make anyone second-class human beings. We must always remember this. We must remember it everyday.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Mr. Shtorn for his kind permission to translate and reproduce his remarks here.
That’s okay. The home audience just wants to hate on “Europe” and “Muslim terrorists” even if they have been edited, remixed, and totally fabricated out of thin air. The important thing in Putinlandia is to have something and someone to hate intensely all the livelong day.
And if you think this hatred is restricted to the “yobs” and other “uneducated” types, you’d be dead wrong. Over the last glorious seventeen years, I’ve been hearing this free-floating hatred spilling out in increasing quantities from the educated, from professionals, from the so-called intelligentsia.
In fact, I heard it again last night during my Finnish class (not the first time there, either). The remarks were “triggered” by the fact that I had had our group read a Helsingin Sanomatinterview with the up-and-coming Somali-Finnish screenwriter and filmmaker Khadar Ahmed, who spoke with an utter lack of bittnerness (and in a totally fluent Finnish that none of us “Aryans” have yet achieved) about the total alienation and discrimination he had experienced as an immigrant to Finland. He’s now relocated to Paris.
My classmates were totally unimpressed that a road movie based on Ahmed’s screenplay, Saattokeikka, would be hitting screens in Finland in the coming days, or that a previous screenplay of his (Kaupunkilaisia) had been filmed by country’s hottest young filmmaker, Juho Kuosmanen, whose luminous and completely perfect film The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäkiwon the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes festival and was submitted by Finland to the 89th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
My classmates had never heard of Kuosmanen or the film, either, although Olli Mäki was screened right down the street from where we were sitting. That was a few months ago during the annual Finnish film festival, paid for by the Finnish government, who have been trying so hard to be besties with the “neighbor to the east,” which just wants to puff out its chest and hate on everybody as a matter of state policy and mundane practice.
We also read another Helsingin Sanomat piece, about the state of the Finnish nation and the state of “Finnishness,” in which well-known Finns were asked to respond to a set of ten questions that pollsters had posed as well to a larger sampling of ordinary Finns. One of the respondents was the Finnish rapper Prinssi Jusuf (aka Iyouseyas Bekele Belayneh), whose family moved from Ethiopia to Finland when Jusuf was two.
Yet my classmates were convinced, for some reason, that Prinssi Jusuf must rap in English, not Finnish, as if Finnish were too complicated for black people to learn.
One of my classmates was also on the verge of making a comment about who Prinssi Jusuf resembled. As an amateur psychic, I could imagine what she was about to say (Barack Obama, although they don’t look a thing alike), but a well-timed glare shut her up.
This is the lovely world that Putinism has built over the last seventeen years, although everyone answers for the garbage in their own heads, ultimately.
By the way, here’s a video of Prinssi Jusuf rapping in what sounds to me like perfectly fluent Finnish. ||TRR
I was just unfriended on Facebook by an actual friend and comrade, and a person for whom I have boundless respect. Apparently, I said too many bad things in electronic print about their chosen candidate for president, Dr. Jill Stein of the US Green Party.
Pro-Putinism of the Steinerian or Trumpian variety should be a make-or-break issue if you call yourself a democrat, a leftist, a left-liberal, an anti-imperialist, an anti-fascist, a progressive, pro-labor, pro-human rights, a pacifist, a democratic socialist, a socialist, a communist, a liberal, a republican or (in fact) a conservative.
On the merits of his now very long stint in office, Putin should appeal only to extreme right-wingers, dyed-in-the-wool fascists, neo-Nazis, racists, and massively deluded fundamentalist Christians (because Putin isn’t actually spearheading a worldwide revival of “conservative Christian values”; he is just using the Church and the churchly to advance his own personal and political ends), as well as members of various organized criminal groups around the world, who probably can’t help admiring how a “party of crooks and thieves” have taken over an entire country, the world’s largest, and started running it like the mob runs a chunk of turf on the Jersey shore.
Oh yes, and Bashar Assad loves Putin. And Silvio Berlusconi does, too.
So this is a US presidential election in which all the choices are very bad? Then please, at least don’t imagine one of the candidates has qualities she really doesn’t have, and please don’t whitewash or blatantly ignore her glaring deficiencies.
Being “soft” on Putin is a damning quality, because it means (as has become clear from Dr. Stein’s limp, weasel-worded response to the open letter written by the brave, exiled Russian environmentalists Yevgeniya Chirikova and Nadezhda Kutepova) you feel no solidarity with the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and maybe even millions of Russians who have either fought back against Putin’s seventeen years of tyranny or suffered very badly from it.
It also means you have funny ideas about “effective leadership,” as Trump seems to have. Just as Trump is probably no great shakes at “business,” his idol Putin is actually a crummy politician when it comes to implementing any of the things held dear by the sort of people, who occupy most of the known political spectrum, I listed above. In fact, he is slowly leading his country to economic, social, moral, environmental, industrial, aesthetic, and ideological ruin.
In the US, where the ruthlessly effective Russian leader has not established an authoritarian pollocracy yet, his ratings don’t look so great. Image courtesy of NBC News
Or it means you have funny ideas about “world peace” and “imperialism.” Meaning, you think only the US, NATO, and EU are imperialists, while Russia, China, the other BRICS countries, and more or less the rest of the world are, mysteriously and without having done much of anything to merit the merit badge, “anti-imperialists.”
I am going to go out on a limb and say (without arguing the point further here) that while Russia has the most going for it in terms of natural and human resources, it is the BRICS country least likely to succeed because of its ruinous, criminal governance. I have more confidence that South Africa and India will turn things around than I do Russia will.
And China has lots of “negatives,” as they say about the candidates these days, but despite them I never get the sense the country is run by haughty criminal lunatics. Or maybe the Chinese Communist Party are haughty and corrupt sometimes, but they seem to have a plan of sorts and are capable of rational thought and acting collectively (and dictatorially) to advance rational interests, whether or not those rational interests are ones their own people or the people of Hong Kong or Taiwan or we ourselves would approve.
When a candidate is soft on Putin, it doesn’t mean she or he is unqualified to lead the US military-industrial complex or “advance our country’s interests” by attacking countries no one asked us to attack.
It just means they’re hopelessly stupid. TRR
_________
Apropos the article below. Pobrecitos! Thank God no one in Russia has been trying to tarnish the image of the US or its less-than-effective president. That would be so uncool. Image of the label for Abama craft beer, produced by a microbrewery in Putin’s hometown of Petersburg, courtesy of Comrade EO
Putin Talks of Attempt to Recreate “Evil Empire” Image in US Elections
Olga Nadykto and Polina Khimshiashvili RBC
September 17, 2016
Using the topic of Russia and the Russian president in the US presidential campaign is an attempt to manipulate public opinion within the country, said Vladimir Putin. According to him it is an attempt to “recreate the image of an evil empire.”
Speaking to journalists at the end of the CIS summit in Bishkek, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on the use of Russian topics in the US election campaign.
Putin expressed the hope that the “use of Russia and the Russian president” in the US election campaign was “was also due to Russia’s growing influence and significance.”
“But I think it is mainly due to attempts to manipulate public opinion within the country. We are witnessing an attempt to recreate the image of the so-called evil empire and scare the average citizen. It is quite sad. It is a fairly crude attempt and counterproductive,” said the Russian president [sic].
Replying to a question about which of the candidates he supported in the US presidential elections, Putin said he had “nothing new” to say.
“We support anyone in any country who wants to work towards neighborly relations and partnerships with us,” he stressed.
“We are sympathetic to those who speak out publicly about the need to build relations with Russia on an equal basis and see a lot of sense in this for their country,” Putin concluded.
Earlier, on the NBC program Commander-in-Chief Forum, Donald Trump, the US Republican Party presidential candidate, said of the Russian president, “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.”
Trump also predicted he would have “very, very good relations” with Putin if he became president.
Trump’s statement was criticized by US President Barack Obama, who supports the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Clinton herself had earlier accused the Russian secret services in the attacks on the Democratic Party’s servers. She has also commented on an article in the Washington Post, claiming that Russia was possibly planning to disrupt the US elections. She said it was a serious threat that had to be eliminated quickly.
Drawing to Go on Living
Yuri Ivashchenko
November 3, 2015 Mediazona
Photographer Yuri Ivashchenko looks for people who have been assaulted by racists and homophobes in Russia. He asks them to make a schematic drawing of what happened to them on a snapshot of the crime scene.
Mikhail Tumasov, Russia. Assaulted April 2012 in Samara
Mikhail came out to a new friend, who violently assaulted him. Mikhail spent a week in the hospital. A magistrate judge rejected Mikhail’s lawsuit, since Mikhail had not listed the assailant’s birthplace, registered address, and other personal data.
Ibrahim Yunusov, Uzbekistan. Assaulted on October 3, 2008, at Sokolovskaya railway platform in the Moscow Region
Ibrahim and his brother, immigrants from Central Asia, were assaulted at the railway platform, where they had gone to see off a Belarusian friend. When eyewitnesses of the assault called the police, the officers who arrived on the scene suspected the brothers had been involved in a recent rash of telephone thefts on commuter trains. Despite eyewitness testimony corroborating the Yunusovs’ alibi, a court found them guilty of stealing other people’s property and sentenced Ibrahim to a year of probation. His brother Rustam was sentenced to six months of probation. The six months they had spent in a pretrial detention facility was deducted from their sentences.
Alexander Lee, Uzbekistan. Assaulted June 17, 2014, on Leningrad Highway in Moscow
Alexander was standing at a tram stop when several men attacked him. Fighting them off, he ran towards the Sokol subway station. Screaming, “Kill him!” ten to fifteen young men chased Alexander. They caught up with him and surrounded him on a lawn. One of the assailants hit Alexander in the back. He fell to the ground and was beaten up by the mob. The assailants took Alexander’s telephone and wallet, which contained around 10,000 rubles. Later, passersby called an ambulance. Alexander was taken to hospital, where he spent over a month. Doctors have diagnosed Alexander with a bruised spinal cord. A criminal investigation of the assault is underway, and there are suspects in the case.
Mele, Cameroon. Assaulted November 30, 2013, at the Novoslobodskya subway station in Moscow
Mele was attacked in the late evening at the turnstile to the subway by a man shouting racist slogans.
The assailant was arrested. He confessed his guilt in court and was released after reaching a settlement with Mele that involved paying him compensation and apologizing.
Anvar Yusupov, Tajikistan. Assaulted January 16, 20112, in the Moscow subway
A group of drunken young men, their faces covered in scarves, attacked Anvar and two of his friends when they were returning home from work. Noticing the young men were wielding knives, Anvar decided to defend himself with a beer bottle and managed to wound one of the assailants. Subsequently, the wounded young man was arrested in Saint Petersburg for stealing tennis shoes and testified about the incident in the subway. The court, however, found Yusupov guilty and sentenced him to six months’ imprisonment in a penal colony, which was later commuted to a fine.
John, Russia. Assaulted April 18, 2015, near Nevsky Prospect, 184, in Saint Petersburg
John was walking down the street in rainbow-colored glasses when he drew even with two young men. One of them bumped John hard with his shoulder. John asked the passerby why he had done this. The man replied that he hated “fags” and head-butted John. John responded by pepper-spraying the assailant, who fled the scene with his companion. The police refused to open a criminal investigation into the incident.
Pictured: A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker about to be taken from her mother and placed in a facility where the staff (according to an interview) “is not allowed to comfort her.”
Russians at war
Russians at war
Russians at war
Russians at war
Apropos the article below. Pobrecitos! Thank God no one in Russia has been trying to tarnish the image of the US or its less-than-effective president. That would be so uncool. Image of the label for Abama craft beer, produced by a microbrewery in Putin’s hometown of Petersburg, courtesy of Comrade EO
