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Filed under: Russia
You may recall that back in early August we reported on how Russian state-owned RTR television had Photoshopped a false version of the front page of the esteemed British daily the Times of London in order to launch an attack on hated dissident Boris Berezovsky.
Now, it turns out that what is sauce for the Western goose is not necessarily sauce for the neo-Soviet gander. When Putin's Kremlin is the recipient of this kind of activity, they lash out violently. Click the jump to read all about it.
The Moscow Times reports:
A Saratov newspaper is in hot water after local officials ruled that a photograph it published of President Vladimir Putin as beloved fictional spy Otto von Stirlitz was extremist. Saratovsky Reporter was issued a formal warning following a complaint by the Saratov branch of United Russia about the photograph, which was published Aug. 31, the newspaper's editor, Sergei Mikhailov, said Thursday.Investigators are also examining whether the photograph is libelous, said Tatyana Sergeyeva, spokeswoman for the Saratov regional branch of the newly formed Investigative Committee.The photograph shows Putin's head pasted onto the body of Stirlitz, the hero played by actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov in the 1973 made-for-television series "17 Moments of Spring," a staple of television programming to this day. Also in the photograph is Mikhail Isayev, a Saratov city lawmaker, whose head is on the body of Nazi official Heinrich Himmler, played in the film by Leonid Bronevoi. "Stirlitz, I ask you to stay," Isayev tells Putin in the picture, using a famously ironic line from the film. In the film, Stirlitz is a Soviet agent who infiltrates the upper echelon of the Nazi Party in wartime Berlin. Despite numerous close calls, Stirlitz remains cool under pressure and is never discovered as a spy, contributing greatly to the allied defeat of Germany. At issue appears to be the portrayal of Putin -- who served as a KGB officer in East Germany -- in an SS uniform, despite the fact that Stirlitz is an unequivocally positive character. "Any associations with fascism in a country that went through World War II are improper," said Yevgeny Strelchik, a spokesman for the Saratov branch of the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage. The newspaper's editor said they had run the photograph merely for a laugh. "We just liked the play on words," Mikhailov said, pointing out that Stirlitz and Isayev actually have the same last name. Stirlitz's real name is Maxim Isayev.
It's perfectly possible that this newspaper could be shut down, or the journalist, editor or publisher arrested, because of this incident (in fact, if that were all that happened they might be lucky, since many journalists in neo-Soviet Russia have been killed outright), and the chilling effect of merely making the threat of doing so extends far beyond this one newspaper. This is exactly what destroyed the USSR: A fundamental inability to be consistent, to follow anything remotely like a rule of law, combined with total isolation from the real world, cocooned within a comforting womb of lies and delusions, preventing the possibility of reform and improvement. How can there be any hope for Russia, if is going to so ritualistically repeat the mistakes of the past?
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Comments
Artfldgr says:
This is exactly what destroyed the USSR: A fundamental inability to be consistent, to follow anything remotely like a rule of law
Actually it IS consistent. Back when it was permitted to study this alien system rather than figure out excuses for the behaviors and false attributions, there were several papers put out. (I wish I could find them right now).
Key to this was an interview of a KGB officer (maybe GRU), and it was to the question of this kind of rule of law.
You see rule of law does not require consistency, it also does not have to act the way we think it should when things are in the cracks between structures.
We take it for granted that our code of law is based on a few premises, and here is that key that makes it consistent. Its also why the law since 1920 has increased 2000x in statutes and size. The idea is that the more socialist you become, the more you need to control the people, and the people don’t see this because SOFT methods are what are first used.
Well it was explained in these papers, and to me as a kid (by my uncle), is that its not supposed to make sense. in fact its designed so that its chaotic and that the people cant figure out the lay of the land. If monetary policy removes the resources from allowing someone to climb up, law structured and acted upon like this disallows people from gaining advantage and finding their way through the mine field.
In this way, law text is disconnected from how its adjucated. We do the same thing in the US now in feminist legal areas. the LAWS are stated in gender neutral terms, the way they are persued is NOT gender neutral. So if you act in accordance to the letter of the law, your trapped, and if you act in accordance to the way the law is adjucated, your trapped.
And this is the key. what happens is that the population cant navigate mutually exclusive situations and law that can change at whim at the needs of the state, by the bench usurping power (in the US), or having power delegated to it (russia), by state structures.
As our code gets more and more disconnected from reason, and premise, and such, the population responds by FREEZING. Like a deer in the headlamps they hold still and hope they are not in the way!
This is a something that most people in the west have a hard time imagining. If you didn’t read Pravda in the morning and you commented that you were hungry at lunch, and Pravda was reporting record food supplies, you were in trouble.
The point is that you soon learned not to talk… not to try… not to do anything other than you were instructed to do… and that didn’t stop that you would be ground up, that only minimized it to the point of it happening at the level of random noise. That all manner of stuff was made up and started just to keep a certain level of this going in the population.
So even if the whole town was a town of saints. Criminals would still be found to meet quotas and maintain the level of stasis.
This is exactly what they are implementing in the US in rape laws and other things. by setting a level of the presumed acts, they forbid those acts from ever going lower. If they do, then they claim that they are being hidden, if not then they claim that its going on. the one thing that cant happen once this starts, is that the crime fades from fashion (like nippers in the 1800s – people who would use nipper shears to slice a finger or ear off of a person suddenly to acquire their jewelry and cause enough pain and damage to forbid persuit)
If such premises were in place then, we would still be finding nippers to try to justify the known level that they assert. In this way, there is always a stream of criminals to show that the state isdoing something, to keep order, and to paralyze the population from acting in any way that the state doesn’t expressly order them to (event hat wasn’t a guarantee since some actions they ordered were followed with extermination for pragmatic reasons).
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