Free Pussy

[Magda Hassan]

WHO OR WHAT IS RUSSIA'S "PUSSY RIOT"?

West's "Pussy Riot" media coverage worse than "Soviet era" propaganda.
by Tony Cartalucci

Accurately described as bigots and hooligans, the 3 member musical band known as "Pussy Riot" is now on trial for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." This came after they burst into a church in Moscow, disturbing the peace while mocking the beliefs of practitioners in an attempt to protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin.


I dare you to last for the length of the above screamfest. Meanwhile Madonna, Sting and the Chili Peppers all speak of the right to "freedom of artistic expression" when it comes to these tools. But then, we all know the stink of media whores by now, don't we:
Had skinheads done something similar in a synagogue in the West, surely they'd have long ago paid steep fines and begun their lengthy jail sentences for "public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity" (and here).

The Guardian's article titled, "Pussy Riot trial 'worse than Soviet era'," opens immediately with overt propaganda, describing the courtroom and Russian flag as "shabby" and a police dog as "in search of blood."
The British paper attempts to portray Russia itself as having a "stark divide" between conservatives and liberals, the latter fighting against the state "with any means it can."
Already the Guardian runs into trouble ~ by portraying Russia as "divided" it is dismissing recent elections that granted Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party a sound mandate to lead the country. And while it is true that in reality, between voter turnout and Putin's garnering the support of 63% of those that did turn out (in a 5-way race), only about 40% of Russia's total registered voters actually voted for Putin, his mandate is still sounder than that of US President Barack Obama's 32% in a mere 2-way race, or last year's victory here in Thailand by Yingluck Shinawatra with a tenuous 35%, a victory hailed by the Western media as a "sweeping" mandate.

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Image: Screenshot taken from the National Endowment for Democracy website featuring US funding for the NGO "GOLOS." [url=http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/12/bombshell-us-caught-meddling-in-russian.html]GOLOS allegedly was searching for "election irregularities" in Russia's recent elections" GOLOS and other US-backed NGOs and opposition parties are now attempting to trigger an "Arab Spring" in Russia. (click to enlarge.)
It should also be noted that Russia's recent elections were marred by election monitoring NGO "GOLOS" attempting to call the results fraudulent. It would be later revealed that this NGO, billed as "independent" by the Western press, was in fact funded and directed by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Attempts by Wall Street and London to frame the elections as fraudulent set the groundwork for a wider campaign of political destabilization ~ a campaign "Pussy Riot" has now become a key player in.

TASTELESS PR STUNT THE WORK OF THE US STATE DEPARTMENT

The Guardian however is absolutely correct when they call the "Pussy Riot" proceedings a "show trial." However, they are wrong in claiming that the showmanship is the work of the Russian Federation.

Instead, it is showmanship put on by the Western media and the US State Department's vast network of faux-NGOs.

The Guardian's entire article is propaganda written with a literary rather than journalistic tone. The article itself cites the defendant's lawyer whose comments form the very basis of the article's title. And while the Guardian may prey successfully on the emotions of ill-informed, unsuspecting, but well-intentioned readers, it lets slip several telling clues as to who is really behind the showmanship.

According to the Guardian, the defense "tried to call 13 witness, including opposition leader Alexey Navalny." Navalny, of course, is a longtime operative receiving both political and financial support from the West in efforts to undermine the Russian government and bring back the days of Wall Street and London's unhindered plundering that marked the 1990's.

Alexey Navalny was a Yale World Fellow, and in his profile it states:

"Navalny spearheads legal challenges on behalf of minority shareholders in large Russian companies, including Gazprom, Bank VTB, Sberbank, Rosneft, Transneft, and Surgutneftegaz, through the Union of Minority Shareholders.
He has successfully forced companies to disclose more information to their shareholders and has sued individual managers at several major corporations for allegedly corrupt practices. Navalny is also co-founder of the Democratic Alternative movement and was vice-chairman of the Moscow branch of the political party YABLOKO.
In 2010, he launched RosPil, a public project funded by unprecedented fundraising in Russia. In 2011, Navalny started RosYama, which combats fraud in the road construction sector."

The Democratic Alternative, also written DA!, is indeed a National Endowment for Democracy fund recipient, meaning that Alexey Navalny is an agent of US-funded sedition. And despite posing as a champion for "transparency," Navalny is willfully hiding this from his followers. The US State Department itself reveals this as they list "youth movements" operating in Russia:
"DA!: Mariya Gaydar, daughter of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaydar, leads DA! (Democratic Alternative). She is ardent in her promotion of democracy, but realistic about the obstacles she faces. Gaydar said that DA! is focused on non-partisan activities designed to raise political awareness. She has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a fact she does not publicize for fear of appearing compromised by an American connection."
Navalny was involved directly in founding a movement funded by the US government and to this day has the very people who funded DA! defending him throughout Western media. The mention of co-founder Mariya Gaydar is also revealing, as she has long collaborated, and occasionally has been arrested with, Ilya Yashin, yet another leader of a NED-funded Russian "activist" opposition group.
If "Pussy Riot's" defense is calling up a documented agent of Western interests as a "witness," one wonders under what context and to what degree Navalny, and by consequence, the National Endowment for Democracy, is involved with the defendants. admits that he is "acquainted" with one of the band members, but was not actually a "witness," and rather would have testified in order to "defend law and justice."

Clearly then, the defense's attempts to include him in the trial were politically motivated, having nothing to do with either law or justice, and serves simply as a means to link "Pussy Riot" to the US State Department's subversive opposition, many of whose leaders were caught filing into the US Embassy in Moscow earlier this year.

Also telling, is that Oksana Chelysheva ~ board member of the Finnish-Russian Civic Forumand a steering committee member of the NED, convicted criminal George Soros Open Society-funded FIDH, Open Society, Ford Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust-funded Front Line Defenders, and US State Department-run Amnesty International-affiliated EU-Russia Civil Society Forum ~ is heading "Pussy Riot's" support campaign.

Images: "Pussy Riot's" support campaign is spearheaded by Oksana Chelysheva of the US State Department-funded "Russian-Chechen Friendship Society," a clearing house for Chechen terrorist propaganda. Along with US State Department-subsidized Alexey Navalny and the West's media outlets on their side, the hooligan anti-establishment "punk rockers" now on trial in Moscow have a decidedly "establishment" backing. (click images to enlarge) ....
Chelysheva was also "Deputy Executive Director" of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, fully funded by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy. The "Friendship Society" was essentially a public relations front of Al Qaeda-aligned Chechen terrorists ravaging Russia's Caucasus region - a plot offered new relevance as the US, NATO, and Gulf States openly support similar groups of terrorists now ravaging Syria. The "Friendship Society" served a similar function to the now discredited "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights."

While it is unknown, so far, whether or not the members of "Pussy Riot" were contacted by any of these groups, or by the US State Department or its subsidiaries to carry out their hooliganism, it is clear that these groups and the US State Department itself has turned an otherwise tasteless disturbance of peace and a violation of Church-goers' rights to practice their faith without harassment, into a point of political leverage against Russia.

Helping to push down on this political lever are propaganda outfits like the Guardian, portraying the trial as a case of liberal Russian opposition groups fighting against a judicial throwback to the Soviet Union.
In reality, it is another Wall Street-London production in the same vein as Serbia's US-funded Otpor movement, the Kony 2012 fraud and the US-engineered "Arab Spring."
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.ca/2012/08...-riot.html

[Charles Drago]

You missed your calling: headline writing.

[Keith Millea]

You missed your calling: headline writing.

Yeah,it got me all tingly inside.......:mistress:

[Peter Lemkin]

While [no doubt] anti-Russian entities took advantage of the event[s] [as they always have].....IMHO, the three women are not political stooges of anyone...and were making a sincere statement against KGB-PUTIN-OLIGARCHY--OLD-THINK--Undemocratic-Controlled Russian Politics point of view as an art happening. What others made it into [on all sides] is another thing. Two years plus five months served in prison for a few minutes of political-social commentary is not just nor proportionate. Two weeks, maybe. Timed served still too harsh. Two years more......justice undone.

[Peter Lemkin]

Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich has given a closing statement, which is a critique of Russian oligarchy:

"The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin's former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of powerfor example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin's government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and shouldn't any intersection of the religious and political spheres be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of Orthodox aesthetics in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had the aura of a lost history, of something crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present their new political project to restore Russia's lost spiritual values, a project which has little to do with a genuine concern for preservation of Russian Orthodoxy's history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long had a mystical connection with power, emerged as this project's principal executor in the media. Moreover, it was also agreed that the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the crudeness of the authorities towards history itself, should also confront all baleful manifestations of contemporary mass culture, with its concept of diversity and tolerance."

[Dawn Meredith]

You missed your calling: headline writing.

Agreed. My jaw dropped when I saw that. Giggle.

[Jan Klimkowski]

You missed your calling: headline writing.

Agreed. My jaw dropped when I saw that. Giggle.

I thought Magda had a litter of tortoise-shell kittens for sale.

I couldn't work out why she'd posted it in Propaganda though...

[Peter Lemkin]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3946[/ATTACH] Pro-Pussy-Riot-Happening

[Keith Millea]

August 23, 2012

Hitting the Commercial Jackpot

The Secret History of Pussy Riot

by ISRAEL SHAMIR
Moscow.

Universally admired, Pussy Riot (or PR for short) have been promoted as superstars. But what are they? A rock or punk group they are not. A British journalist marvelled: they produce no music, no song, no painting, nada, rien, nothing. How can they be described as "artists"? This was a severe test for their supporters, but they passed it with flying honours: that famous lover-of-art, the US State Department, paid for their first ever single being produced by The Guardian out of some images and sounds.

We are able to stomach obscenity and blasphemy; I am a great admirer of Notre Dame de Fleurs by Jean Genet, who combined both. However, the PR never wrote, composed or painted anything of value at all. Chris Randolph defended them in Counterpunch by comparing them with "the controversial Yegor Letov". What a misleading comparison! Letov wrote poetry, full of obscenity but it still was poetry, while the PR have nothing but Public Relations.
Hell-bent on publicity, but artistically challenged, three young women from Russia decided well, it sounds like a limerick. They stole a frozen chicken from a supermarket and used it as dildo; they filmed the act, called it "art" and placed it on the web. (It is still there) Their other artistic achievements were an orgy in a museum and a crude presentation of an erect prick.

Even in these dubious pieces of art their role was that of technical staff: the glory went to a Russian-Israeli artist Plucer-Sarno of Mevasseret Zion, who claimed the idea, design and copyright for himself and collected a major Russian prize. The future PR members got nothing and were described by Plucer as "ambitious provincials on the make", or worse.

Lately they have tried to ride on a bandwagon of political struggle. That was another flop.

They poured a flood of obscene words on Putin in Red Square, in subway (underground) stations with zero effect. They weren't arrested, they weren't fined, just chased away as a nuisance. And they did not attract the attention of people. It is important to remember that Putin is an avowed enemy of Russian oligarchs, owners of the major bulk of Russian media and providers of the Moscow literati, so they print on a daily basis so much anti-Putin invective, that it's lost its shock value. You can't invent a new diatribe against Putin it has been already said and published. And Putin practically never interferes with the freedom of the press.

My foreign journalist friends are usually amazed by the unanimity and ferocity of the anti-Putin campaign in Russian media. It can be compared with the attacks on G W Bush in the liberal papers in the US, but in the US, there are many conservative papers that supported Bush. Putin has practically no support in the mainstream media, all of it owned by media barons. A valuable exception is TV, but it is expressly apolitical and provides mainly low-brow entertainment, also presented by anti-Putin activists like Mlle Xenia Sobtchak. So PR failed profoundly to wake up the beast.

Eventually the young viragos were mobilised for an attack on the Church. By that time they were willing to do anything for their bit of publicity. And the anti-Church campaign started a few months ago, quite suddenly as if by command. The Russian Church had 20 years of peace, recovering after the Communist period, and it was surprised by ferocity of the attack.

Though this subject calls for longer exposition, let us be brief. After the collapse of the USSR, the Church remained the only important spiritual pro-solidarity force in Russian life. The Yeltsin and Putin administrations were as materialist as the communists; they preached and practiced social Darwinism of neo-Liberal kind. The Church offered something beside the elusive riches on earth. Russians who lost the glue of solidarity previously provided by Communists eagerly flocked to the alternative provided by the Church.

The government and the oligarchs treated the Church well, as the Church had a strong anti-Communist tendency, and the haves were still afraid of the Reds leading the have-nots. The Church flourished, many beautiful cathedrals were rebuilt, many monasteries came back after decades of decay. The newly empowered church became a cohesive force in Russia.

As it became strong, the Church began to speak for the poor and dispossessed; the reformed Communists led by the Church-going Gennadi Zuganov, discovered a way to speak to the believers. A well-known economist and thinker, Michael Khazin, predicted that the future belongs to a new paradigm of Red Christianity, something along the lines of Roger Garaudy's early thought. The Red Christian project is a threat to the elites and a hope for the world, he wrote. Besides, the Russian church took a very Russian and anti-globalist position.

This probably hastened the attack, but it was just a question of time when the global anti-Christian forces would step forward and attack the Russian Church like they attacked the Western Church. As Russia entered the WTO and adopted Western mores, it had to adopt secularization. And indeed the Russian Church was attacked by forces that do not want Russia to be cohesive: the oligarchs, big business, the media lords, the pro-Western intelligentsia of Moscow, and Western interests which naturally prefer Russia divided against itself.

This offensive against the Church began with some minor issues: the media was all agog about Patriarch's expensive watch, a present from the then President Medvedev. Anti-religious fervour was high among liberal opposition that demonstrated against Putin before the elections and needed a new horse to flog. A leading anti-Putin activist Viktor Shenderovich said he would understand if the Russian Orthodox priests were slain like they were in 1920s. Yet another visible figure among the liberal protesters, Igor Eidman, exclaimed,"exterminate the vermin"- the Russian Church in the rudest biological terms.

The alleged organiser of the PR, Marat Gelman, a Russian Jewish art collector, has been connected with previous anti-Christian art actions which involved icon-smashing, imitation churches of enemas. His and PR's problem was that it was difficult to provoke reaction of the Church. PR made two attempts to provoke public indignation in the second cathedral of Moscow, the older Elochovsky Cathedral; both times they were expelled but not arrested. The third time, they tried harder; they went to St Savior Cathedral that was demolished by Lazar Kaganovich in 1930s and rebuilt in 1990s; they added more blasphemy of the most obscene kind, and still they were allowed to leave in peace. Police tried their best to avoid arresting the viragos, but they had no choice after PR uploaded a video of their appearance in the cathedrals with an obscene soundtrack.

During the trial, the defence and the accused did their worst to antagonize the judge by threatening her with the wrath of the United States (sic!) and by defiantly voicing anti-Christian hate speeches. The judge had no choice but to find the accused guilty of hate crime (hooliganism with religious hate as the motive). The prosecution did not charge the accused with a more serious hate crime "with intent to cause religious strife", though it could probably be made to stick. (It would call for a stiffer sentence; swastika-drawers charged with intent to cause strife receive five years of jail).

Two years' sentence is quite in line with prevailing European practice. For much milder anti-Jewish hate talk, European countries customarily sentence offenders to two-to-five years of prison for the first offence. The Russians applied hate crime laws to offenders against Christian faith, and this is probably a Russian novelty. The Russians proved that they care for Christ as much as the French care for Auschwitz, and this shocked the Europeans who apparently thought hate laws' may be applied only to protect Jews and gays. The Western governments call for more freedom for the anti-Christian Russians, while denying it for holocaust revisionists in their midst.

The anti-Putin opposition flocked to support PR. A radical charismatic opposition leader, the poet Eduard Limonov wrote that the opposition made a mistake supporting PR, as they antagonise the masses; the chasm between the masses and the opposition grows. But his voice was crying in the wilderness, and the rest of the opposition happily embraced the PR cause, trying to turn it into a weapon against Putin. The Western media and governments also used it to attack Putin. A Guardian editorial called on Putin to resign. Putin called for clemency for PR, and the government was embarrassed by the affair. But they were left with no choice: the invisible organisers behind PR wanted to have the viragos in jail, and so they did.

Commercially, they hit jackpot. With support of Madonna and the State Department, they are likely to leave jail ready for a world tour and photo ops at the White House. They registered their name as a trade mark and began to issue franchises. And their competitors, the Femen group (whose art is showing off their boobs in unusual places) tried to beat PR by chopping down a large wooden cross installed in memory of Stalin's victims. Now the sky is the limit.
In August, vacation season, when there is not much hard news and newspaper readers are at the seashore or countryside, the PR trial provided much needed entertainment for man and beast. Hopefully it will drop from the agenda with the end of the silly season, but do not bet on it.

Israel Shamir reports from Moscow, his email is adam@israelshamir.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/23/t...ussy-riot/

[Peter Lemkin]

What does Zero Hedge have to say about Pussy Riot futures and derivatives? Maybe we've all been 'had'....but never make a final judgment until the the denouement.