Support of
Anti-Putin America for Pussy Riot is 'Disgusting
and Ridiculous' (Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia)
"The
entire period of Putin’s rule has been a continuous series of propaganda
campaigns by Western mass media, NGOs, and American Congressmen against a
president popular among Russians. ... So now the global buzz is about the 'cheap
whores' [Pussy Riot]. This is such a
farce, that it is not only disgusting, but ridiculous."
Madonna on tour in Europe shows her colors, stamping the name of a band of young women, Pussy Riot, who are bold enough to challenge Vladimir Putin. Three of them are now doing prison time.
After the anti-Gorbachev
conspiracy of August 19-21, 1991 failed, the democratic West had an
opportunity, much to the “delight” of USSR citizens, to establish a
protectorate over our country and introduce radical reforms comparable to those
the West carried out in West Germany and Japan after WWII. Twenty one years
later, in August 2012, the West is losing the remnants of its moral and
political capital in Russia by fighting for the right of a punk group - whose
name in Russian translates to the despicable "cheap, conniving whore" -
to shit in church.
I was travelling around the country in the fall of 1991, and
in the aftermath of the collapse could observe the difference in perceptions between
the capital and the periphery. Moscow was living amid the euphoria of newly-found
boundless freedom. Central Television’s first channel, run by the democrats, broadcast
a loop of a mocking parody-recording of the USSR anthem performed by a dozen popular
rock and pop musicians. The periphery looked on in disgusted disbelief, dreaming
about a strong and predictable central authority, while rapidly losing faith
that [Boris] Yeltsin was capable of putting
one in place.
It is amazing, though, that a vast number of people, in both
the liberal Moscow and conservative Kuban,
and at many positions of authority and private business, and even among ordinary
city- and village-dwellers, sincerely hoped that we would be taken over by Washington
and Berlin.
“The center has not disappeared. It has moved abroad,” I
wrote in an article at the time, which was immediately reprinted by the Financial Times. In other words, during
those months, the West was considered as almost the only legitimate authority - not only externally, but internally as well.
Of course, it was an illusion, like many other post-Perestroika illusions, which
was possible only due to a complete lack of knowledge on the subject. The wise
George Bush Sr., during "Desert Storm"
in the winter of 1991, didn't even want to occupy Iraq after defeating Saddam
Hussein, reluctant as he was to bear responsibility for managing even a small
country. Then there was the entire Soviet Union.
But there was one role, useful to our country, that the West
with its authority could have played: being an independent arbiter of conflict.
Alas, the West could not handle it. In every conflict, the West always took the
wrong side. Singing the praises of either young reformers with their
catastrophically-unsuitable suggested changes to our country, or of Yeltsin in his
bloody conflict with the Supreme Council. The legitimization of the frankly
fraudulent elections of 1996 effectively disqualified the West from being a
significant participant in our domestic political process.
The entire period of Putin’s rule has been a continuous
series of propaganda campaigns by Western mass media, NGOs, and American Congressmen
against a president popular among Russians. The campaigns range from pinning personal
responsibility on Putin for the demise of the Kursk
[nuclear submarine] to accusations of murdering [KGB defector] AlexandrLitvinenko.
So now the global buzz is about the "cheap whores"
[Pussy Riot]. This is such a farce,
that it is not only disgusting, but ridiculous. One suspects either collective dementia
or complete venality in the Western democracies.
Posted by Worldmeets.US
“This universal howl over “rabid female genitalia” [another Russian
rendering of Pussy Riot] could have
been trumped up only with a massive PR investment. Now even such pillars of free
press as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times are comparing the
“pussies” to Andrei Sakharov
and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, and Putin to Stalin.” This was written by Eduard Lozanskii, president of the American University in Moscow
and a Soviet dissident with a more than tumultuous anti-Soviet biography. It isn't
clear whether to laugh or cry to see shining through the centuries-old tradition
of the democratic West the sly mug of [exiled oligarch] Boris AbramovichBerezovsky.
As for the stupid whores themselves [Pussy Riot], they are
simply caught up in metaphysical payback for the fact that 20 years ago, their
older comrades publicly defiled state symbols of their motherland. And I say
that as an atheist and anti-cleric.
