TheAgitator.com
Putin Erases Dissent
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008And Russia gets a little scarier:
On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.
His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)
Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.
Old Communist nations die hard.
This is why democracy is tricky in poor and always-before-now autocratic countries. Liberty isn’t always the popular choice we think it should be.
Glad I live in the U.S. That could never happen here…
Mikhail better be careful what he eats.
Kinda creepy that after this and the ‘Bad Day’ Russian video, I get Radley’s ad for ‘Find your Russian Beauty today – Browse Photos Now!” on the right ….
the day will come – not too far off now – when folks will look at the slave nation formerly known as russia and sigh. they’ll see the poor russians in chains, yet again. they’ll see a thugocracy dictatorship ruling the country with an iron fist. they’ll see russia’s neighbors being dominated militarily and economically, just like the bad old days of the czars and the satellite nations of the iron curtain. they’ll bitch about the enormous cost in money and lives necessary to check the new ussr, and they’ll say “why didn’t we just help them after communism fell? it would have been so cheap! they could have been good allies! all those bright russians and those lovely natural resources! we could have bribed or whacked putin for peanuts, and now it’s too late!”
and the wise old moon will whisper in answer: “because only imperialist neocons, or warmongers like bush think like that!”
millions will suffer and die – again – because this country has grown terrified of criticism. because acting in our own interest has been deemed “bad”. one hopes that “at least the US fears our leaders!” is sufficient comfort to the prisoners of lubyanka and the gulags.
“millions will suffer and die – again – because this country has grown terrified of criticism.”
Millions will suffer and die whether their thugocrats are the US President’s bitches or not.
ah. so i gather you approve of the tens of millions butchered in ww2 instead of action taken against germany in, say, 1935, jor. and the 800,000 hacked to death in rwanda. and the half-million or so in the ongoing darfur thing. they may be dead, but at least they’re not the president’s bitches!, right?
so why not just come right out and say so?
In discerning my motives and values, your psychic powers have failed you.
I also don’t have the atemporal perspective and godlike cognitive powers necessary to play out various counterfactual ahistories, so I can’t comment on what might have occurred had Britain or America or whoever intervened against Germany in 1935. Maybe things would have turned out better, maybe worse. Unintended consequences are a bitch.