Friday, August 3, 2012

Russia's "Pussy Riot" Trial

I have no proof but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that "Pussy Riot" is some kind of CIA launched provocation outfit, in Russia.

The mysterious female punk group went into a cathedral and started singing an anti-Putin song, "Holy Shit".

This is not the first time, female "protesters" have been at the center of a protest. Remember, we have already had female naked protesters in Moscow, who turned out to be from the Ukraine.

Pretty girls get attention. It all sounds inspired by Gene Sharp.

Here's About.com on this group:

Depending on who you ask, Pussy Riot is something different. The Russian government views them as criminals. The Russian Orthodox Christian church views them as heretics and blasphemers. The internet views them as a Youtube phenom, and the punk scene views them as something exciting, an angry energetic female machine that could quite possibly be the second coming of Riot Grrrl.
Perhaps the women known as Pussy Riot are all of those. A feminist political collective formed of friends that found they held similar ideals at anti-Putin protests in Moscow, they formed a group based on punk ethics and political activism. The identities of the group's members, said to number 10 permanent members, is kept secret, and they wear brightly colored outfits and balaclavas to their protests, inviting others to join in wearing disguises as well.
The group got their start staging miniature flash protests in locations like the Moscow Metro, performing short, fast politically charged punk songs that are harshly critical of Vladimir Putin's government, specifically its restrictive stance on women's issues. From that point, the scale of the venues chosen for their unsanctioned performances grew in scale, including a concert from the roof of a detention center where protest leader and blogger Alexei Navalny was being held in police custody on December 14, 2011. There, the band was able to catch authorities off guard, staging their performance before making a hasty escape.
But it was the group's next performance - in Moscow's Red Square on January 20, 2012 - that launched the band to international news outlets as well as landing eight of the group's members in police custody. After being released after paying a fine, the collective was not ready to stop. On February 21, 2012, they took their protest to Christ the Savior Cathedral, where four members played at protest set that lasted less than five minutes, and included the song "Holy Shit", before it was halted. While church officials made demands of lawmakers that blasphemy should be declared a crime, the local law enforcement is exploring charges of hooliganism, which could carry a penalty of up to eight years with conviction.
Here's UK's the Guardian on the current trial:
 By the end of the first week of Pussy Riot's trial, everyone in the shabby Moscow courthouse was tired. Guards, armed with submachine guns, grabbed journalists and threw them out of the room at will. The judge, perched in front of a shabby Russian flag, refused to look at the defence. And the police dog – a 100lb black Rottweiler – no longer sat in the corner she had occupied since the start of Russia's trial of the year, but barked and foamed at the mouth as if she were in search of blood. 

The trial of the three band members, jailed since March after performing a "punk prayer" against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's main cathedral, has been about more than the charges brought against them – formally, hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. In five days of testimony, lawyers and witnesses have laid bare the stark divide that has emerged in Russian society: one deeply conservative and accepting of a state that uses vague laws and bureaucracy to control its citizens, the other liberal bordering on anarchist and beginning to fight against that state with any means it can.
The court is dominated by a glass cage that holds the three women – Maria Alyokhina, who has emerged as their unofficial spokeswoman; Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, whose chiselled features have made her the band's unofficial face; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, who sits in a corner of the cage looking every bit the disgruntled punk....
The prosecution was allowed to call all its witnesses, mainly people who were inside the church at the time of the performance or who had viewed a video of it on YouTube. They answered questions like: "What does your Orthodox faith mean to you?", "Was the women's clothing tight?" and "What offended you about their balaclavas?"
One witness said she heard music during the band's performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, although footage shown in court showed the women singing with no live instruments. The music was added later to their viral video clip, "Virgin Mary, Chase Putin Out!"
"What kind of music did you hear?" asked the defence. "It wasn't classical – and it wasn't Orthodox," the witness replied.
The defence, meanwhile, tried to call 13 witness, including opposition leader Alexey Navalny and celebrated novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Syrova only allowed them to call three. The prosecution launched the questioning of all its witnesses with the same question: Are you an Orthodox believer? When the defence tried to ask the same question of one of its three witnesses, Syrova shouted: "Question stricken."...Putin said this week that the women should not be judged "too harshly". They face up to seven years in jail if convicted but their lawyers took Putin's comments as a signal that they would not receive the full sentence. A verdict is expected next week

7 comments:

  1. Going all out for world-wide chaos, aren't they? OccupyWallStreet, Tahrir Square, Anna Hazare, Pussy Riot, different strokes for different folks..

    Tellingly, the formal, supposedly secular indictment also drew on clerical language, citing “sacrilegious humiliation of the age-old principles aimed at inflicting even deeper wounds to Orthodox Christians”; “deep offense and humiliation of the religious guides of the believers”; “chaotically waving arms and legs, dancing and hopping… all with a goal to cause a negative, even more insulting resonance in the feelings and souls of the believers”; “desecrating the cathedral, and offending the feelings of believers.”

    Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/07/putins-religious-war-against-pussy-riot.html#ixzz22WBBKgrz

    The globalists are at war with orthodox religion everywhere
    .
    Sure it's a provocation.

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  2. That about.com article reads like a professional PR person wrote it. Pretty good for some Russian punk rockers.

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  3. Don't judge the 'Pussy Riot' as political interventionism too quickly.

    There has long been a strong classical liberal presence in Russia. Older Russian classical liberals - hence forth I'll call them libertarians - have been ground down repeatedly by blatantly and openly corrupt government and civil society. Most of them with whom I have spoken have come to believe that their libertarian views are impossible in the real world - utopian.

    Younger people have the same vision, but without the harsh and authoritarian disappointments that have jaundiced the elders. They have a radical vision entirely separate from the manipulations of any Agents provocateur.

    Young libertarians in Russia do not believe that liberty is utopian. They believe there is a real-world exemplar - The United States. There, they are largely unaware that the US has strayed so far from its Jeffersonian roots.

    Their optimism and idolization of the US as a libertarian haven is mostly not due to foreign government influences or agents provocateurs. It is a comparative analysis that has been a feature of Russian culture since the time of Peter the Great if not earlier.

    The complaints Americans have of their new burgeoning police state, where police can do as they wish with you, are very, very old in Russia. In Russia people are not friendly with the Militziya. They fear them. And for good reason.

    In Russia the subjugation of talented people is so extreme and has been extreme for so long, that talented people leave. They leave to destinations abroad, or they find solace in the bottom of a bottle, or in other hedonistic diversions.

    Competence is not a blessing in Russian culture, but the mark of the soon-to-be enslaved.

    And while there has been a steady stream of departures from the cities to form suburban 'dacha' communities since the fall of Communism, Russians don't dare physically separate themselves from the authoritarians among them by moving further into the country.

    There, they may be literally killed and eaten by roving bands of bandits, as was reported earlier this year. Whatever the real threats of rural or frontier living in Russia, the fear of it is real in Russians.

    Just suggest they could be free in the wide-open spaces of Russia and see what they say. Ask them. They will tell you.

    In short, Russians compare the cultures and status of other countries to their own rather authoritarian and repressive history and make their own conclusions. Things like this 'Pussy Riot' affair are the necessary and unavoidable blow-back of centuries of Russian authoritarian behavior and corruption.

    They have a saying in Russia, "Everything comes last to Russia".

    Russians with libertarian leanings inevitably find one of two main expressions of their dissatisfaction. They either become political radicals within Russia, or they emigrate elsewhere. The reports of expatriate Russians back to their friends and families back in Russia feeds the process.

    That is why most western men can find a Russian woman that is better in every way than what he could find elsewhere...younger, smarter, better educated, more personable, and more physically attractive. It is because for many Russian girls even a pudgy middle-aged westerner of medium income is a bargain.

    Full disclosure: I've been married to one of them for the last 10 years, speak Russian fluently, and like talk politics and economics with the relatives and their friends.

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  4. Russia has never been a democracy and will never become one. It has historically been the Empire and so it will remain.

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  5. This whole thing sounds like a Bulgakov tale. I didn't know that the Moscow Art Theatre was still in operation.

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  6. Pussy Riot is a punk group affiliated with an avant-garde art group Voyna ("War"); and so far they and Voyna didn't do anything other than few mildly offensive performances (like fucking in a museum under some banners bearing some rather unintelligible slogans (like "Fuck For The Bear Cub's Successor!")). I'd have a really hard time believing CIA bureaucrats have imagination for things like that. The first thing anyone needs to understand about secret agencies is how amazingly incompetent they are.

    The interesting part here is not who funds them (they don't really need funding, I guess... it's not like tuneless singing in a church is a high-budget production, and their antics is nothing more than youthful rebellion against the rather stuffy and odious regime), but the massive over-reaction by the Russian state and the state church. It's curious how the bureaucrats in charge of the judicial system there - and the church, which has its top ranks hand-picked by KGB back in the days of the USSR - seem to be hell-bent on shooting themselves in the feet. They could've gotten the entire incident closed and forgotten by simply slapping the girls with a nominal fine for trespassing.

    Although CIA does get involved in regime changes, I'd think that CIA is pretty much impotent in anything happening in Russia... Russians are well aware of the massive manipulation of the public opinion by the media and are quite skeptic about it (one of the common words in Russian political discourse is "polit-technology"). The idea that media manipulates reality is one of the central themes in the modern Russian literature (I'd recommend watching "Generation P" based on the eponymous novel by a highly popular novelist, Victor Pelevin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_%22%D0%9F%22).

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  7. Freeman - Pussy Riot (usually abbreviated as PR:) got themselves quite a following of very talented people who don't care much for the puerile escapades, but do care about the encroachment of the theocratic officialdom on the civil liberties. Many of these people are quite capable of writing better English than most American P.R. flacks.

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