Pussy Riot went right back to the USSR in what can only be considered a return to the habits that made de-Stalinization of the nation so important. Pussy Riot got 2 years for expressing dissent
against Vladimir Putin and the major social engineer of Czarist tyranny, the Russian Orthodox church.
Assange is being hunted like an animal thanks to the machinations of political leaders who refuse to take responsibility for their own failures, and too bad about diplomatic processes. The Wikileaks revelations were no more than a release of facts. The only reason Assange is being treated like this is because people in Washington don’t like the truth they’ve created. (Assange, an Australian citizen, has declined Australian government assistance, but there's a growing amount of spin
on what the US is actually likely to do to prosecute.)
In both cases, opinions and facts are the last things anyone wants to hear or have publicized. This medieval, pre-Luther approach to the natural reactions of people to their governments and institutions is bordering on absurd. The trouble is that it’s also obscene. It flies in the face of the Information Age. It’s a denial of the realities of information movement. It is, in short, totally unrealistic.
Any noticeable signs of democracy in either case? Any right of free speech or whistleblowing? Not a damn thing, anyway you look at it. Washington’s totally hostile response to documentation of its apparently endless blunders is predictable. This is a culture of time-serving morons. The traditional escape is to blame others. This is also notable in the case of Bradley Manning, now being treated worse than Benedict Arnold for his alleged illegal but arguably very much in the public interest role in releasing classified documents.
Oppression- The sure sign of failed government
Watch the culture of failure at work. The US didn’t even bother to deny the Wikileaks information. By default, the official response more or less endorsed it. In some cases, this idiot culture actually went out of its way to say how important the information was. Not a damn thing, however, was actually done about any of it. To this day, the total failure of military security to adopt even basic monitoring of those documents has yet to be mentioned in mainstream media. Yet Manning and Assange are the villains in the farcical exercise in mismanagement?
Any Russian leader since Peter the Great would be aware of the nature of Russia’s feelings about its leaders. They didn’t like Ivan the Terrible. They didn’t mindlessly follow Catherine the Great. They sure didn’t support Czar Nicholas in 1917… And for some reason, a modern Russian leader assumes that a crackdown on dissent could solve anything? What about the facts?
The Bourbons in France were the incarnate form of the 1% in the most literal sense. This was a combination of economic and political repression which might look familiar to 21st century Westerners. They had all the rights, property and too bad about anyone else. They were also the major architects of their own destruction. Totally inefficient, unjust and incredibly stupid, they virtually built their own guillotines.
This current situation is no better. So the two major players in the Cold War haven’t really departed from the 1950s in their states of denial and massive social inefficiencies. The grim but very interesting side to this quaint reversion to tyranny as a way of government is that it never works. McCarthy was politically destroyed. Eisenhower, the last real Republican, loathed him, regardless of whose side he claimed to be on. Stalin, and a lot of his execrable machinery, went straight out the window in subsequent USSR governments. Ironically, it was retaining the machinery of oppression that finally destroyed the Soviet Union.
So here we go again. The reality of oppressive culture is hard to ignore. Behind a culture of idiot privilege, infantile denials and cretinous evasions of issues, one common factor is visible- Actual weaknesses, and a lot of them. These supposedly invulnerable Illuminazis pretend to be immune to public opinion. They act as if they’re bullet proof.
So what are they scared of? Why do anything about Pussy Riot and Assange, if they have nothing to fear from them and the information they both supply and represent?
History teaches one basic lesson about oppressive regimes- Every single one of them has fallen. They were either destroyed from within or without, but the result is always the same. There are no exceptions. It’ll be worth watching what happens to these anti-democracies trying so hard to be Fascist states. Whatever happens, they will deserve whatever destroys them.