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ladrecrusl
Reviews
Reggie Yates' Extreme Russia (2015)
A trio of facile anti-Russian tropes presented by an unqualified imbecile
Once again the BBC send an vapid ignoramus to investigate quite complex sociopolitical issues. Its easy to dig up the worst in any society as in this documentary, but you can find far right movements in Britain, and Nigeria or Jamaica, which are just as bad, or far worse. There are nine states in the USA which have very similar anti-gay laws as Russia.
This smacks of jumping on the bandwagon of Russophobia, rather than actually looking into Russian politics, much better to feed the small minded with predictable neo-cold war tropes. The whole thing was completely devalued when he described the small group of homophobic extremists as 'average Russians'.
I think the Yates is a monumental hypocrite, having made a career based on his willingness to appear on any and every reality show in Britain, and coming from a culture which is just as homophobic, he should investigate Jamaica before pointing his ill educated finger at others.
He went to the rally & the knife training meeting and it took him ages to clock on to what was actually going on. The group he was with seemed dangerous but also seemed like a parody of themselves, watching their leader give a demonstration was cringe worthy and it would be interesting to know how relevant they actually are in Russia, since he came across as a sort of racist David Brent.
I think it highlighted the dangers of nationalism anywhere, including this country, if you start creating division within society it doesn't end well.
The spotlight is just on Russia right now because of their role in Ukraine. I don't see documentaries of someone examining the inherent racism/classism in Chinese society, or the damaging effects of the caste system in India, or the resurgence of Neo-Nazi groups in some Eastern European countries. Those would all be easy targets as well, so why don't we talk about them? Because those guys aren't on our radar right now like Russia is.
Just remember that as well when you think about this. It all fits into a much bigger narrative, there is context there and that can give clarity.
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013)
West's "Pussy Riot" media coverage worse than "Soviet era" propaganda.
When the US government sanctioned the beating and arrest of US citizens for swaying from side to side in the Jefferson Memorial a couple of years ago, it provoked no response from the Western media (and therefore the Western zombie-citizens who rely entirely on the media for their 'opinions'). Yet the Russian government, sorry, 'Putin' (because everyone knows Putin is a dictator, right?) is broadly denounced as a 'tyrant' by these same Western zombies (again because their 'outraged opinion' was deftly inserted into their brains by the Western media) for putting a stop to the ugly spectacle of deranged Russian women sticking chickens up their nether regions in supermarkets, daubing outlines of phalli on bridges, staging lewd events in a museum and cavorting around like retards in Russian Orthodox churches as part of their 3 year long international attack on the Russian government.
Even the name 'Pussy Riot' strongly suggests that this band of nihilists has always viewed the English-speaking world as their main audience. If informing the Russian people about problems in Russian society was their main goal, surely a Russian name would have been top of their list of requirements. But that's not the job with which these self-described 'Trotskyists' were tasked. Their job is to provoke a reaction from the Russian government which can then be used by Western governments and media to launch an 'anti-Putin' propaganda offensive to prepare the ground for a plausibly 'popular uprising' against the Russian government. As we have seen recently in Ukraine, foreign governments can be 'legitimately' overthrown by a relatively small group of Western government-backed protesters without either the input or support of the vast majority of the population of the host nation.
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/who-or-what-is-russias- pussy-riot.html
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
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."