Musings on Empire and Imperialism

1. Who is to blame for the current European situation? As I am not a theologian or an ethcist I can only point out that if we want to play the blame game there is a lot of blame to go around and a lot of blame to apportion if we want to be fair and balanced. If you want to blame, blame NATO, blame the US, blame intransigent I gotta show em my cock is hard Biden, blame the Ukraine, blame Russia, blame Putin, blame stupidity, blame hubris, blame moronicity, blame humans, blame imperialism, blame empire. 

2. More important than playing the blame game is to put what is happening in Europe into context. Putin has repeatedly warned the West and NATO, an arm of American imperialism, for years that Ukraine and Georgia were off limits for NATO expansion. He offered Ukraine Finlandisation, which means that Ukraine would have to remain, like Finland, neutral. While perhaps not perfect when you live next to an empire, which Pierre Trudeau likened to sleeping next to a cranky elephant--Trudeau was referring to the US and he well knew what it was like to be dominated by American economic, political, and even military imperialism--there is no perfect. I would think that, Finlandisation is better than war. But that's me.

3. Today American military bases can be found around the globe and they are, quite clearly, at least on one level, instances of continuing American imperialism. As for America's many imperial wars in my lifetime, the overt ones start with Korea and end with Iraq. The covert ones are going on around the globe almost everywhere as I type including in the Ukraine. Did you see that marvellous photo of McCain, Lindsey Graham, with the Ukraine military? But then the US is an empire. 

4. I have long been fascinated by the American civil religion. Americans like to think that their country is just there to lend a hand and to make the world a better place (translation, make the world accessible to American business and military "interests"). It is interesting to compare and contrast Britain's revelling in being an empire with America's studied amnesia of the fact that it is an empire. Britain's elites generally accepted that they were imperialists and they believed that they and their nation were, as their empire spread across the globe, "civilising" the world (translation: making it safe for British interests) thanks to Britain's natural and/or god given economic, political, cultural, and demographic superiority. The US generally revels in the myth of its civilising and helping hand "mission" and its own sense of economic, political, and cultural superiority (American White supremacists would add biological superiority to this mix), but it continues to wallow in its own John Wayne innocence. Such amnesia is not quant. It is simply delusional.

5. I want to end by noting that anyone who believes that Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq were defensive wars has been snorting the imperial koolaid and drinking too much cocaine. To paraphrase Chapelle, imperialism is a hell of a drug.

Musings on European Tensions...

1. The thing about NATO expansion is that it provided the context for what happened in Georgia and what is happening in the Ukraine. Given this, the argument that the elimination of NATO would have prevented both conflicts is equally if not more valid than the NATO is necessary argument. 

2. Great powers, including the US, always engage in state sponsored aggression in covert and overt ways. I am not sure any organisation, including the UN, can put an end to this reality at this point in time. Nationalism, after all, is a religion and it is, thanks to its apologetics and polemics (demagoguery), a powerful constructed faith which can turn even intelligent people into faithful red faced emotionally driven rageoholics. Periodic inquisitions and purges in the US point this fact up again and again. 

3. One has to look at imperialism on the descriptive level. Only then can one make normative judgements. One cannot ignore the past or present behaviours of any great power, including the US, and let's not forget that the US and its groupies helped destabilise the Ukraine over the years and was involved in a coup which overthrew an "elected" (I recognise that using the terms election and the Ukraine in the same sentence is problematic in all cases) government in 2013. and 2014. Given this descriptive reality one cannot avoid, normatively, putting some of the blame on the US mame. 

4. Power is a drug. And it is a drug that one can find everywhere including in the US, past, present, and, I suspect, in the future. 

5. On a normative level, I think a secular Calvinism is the most realistic approach to viewing human life, all human life, including that in the US. Humans, it seems to me and as history seems to show, are pretty skanky and slaggy. Flim flam capitalism and American and Russian imperialism are just two recent examples of human skankiness and slagginess. That said, one also has to go native and understand, for example, Russian paranoia, a paranoia grounded in the realities of the two world wars. Going native shows that both the US and Russia are imperialist great powers, oligarchies, bureaucratic societies (and hence oligarchic) with cultural ideologies of exceptionalism, messianism, and global mission. 

6. By the way, I don't think that finlandisation of the Ukraine is a problem. I doubt if the Ukraine will ever be Finland economically or politically, but I find this proposal, one Putin has, according to sources made, a reasonable and rational one and probably the best one given the circumstances. It is fascinating that the US apparently dismissed this reasonable, rational, and pragmatic proposal out of hand.

Musings on War in the Dark Continent...

My guess is that Putin's endgame now is to re-annex, offcially or unofficially, much if not all of the Russian speaking parts of the Ukraine. My understanding is that he offered the West and the Ukraine findlandisation but they rejected this, to me reasonable, offer but then the West was behind the over throwing of an elected govenment in the Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 sympathetic to Russia. Left without many options--one commentator noted Putin has, compared to Imperial America and her groupies, a relatively weaker poker hand though he has up until now played it well--Putin may well have, as a result of attacking Ukraine and thanks to the red faced vigilante response driven largely by propaganda around the globe directed at Russia as a result of the attack, overplayed his relatively poor hand.

By the way, it appears that Russia, in a act of hubris similar to that of that other much stonger and more hegemonic great power the US, may have thought it would only take the 200,000 troops--the number of troops according to sources Russia sent the Ukraine--to take the Ukraine...

The Books of My Life: The Man With the Movie Camera

By the time I first saw Dziga Vertov's, Yelizaveta Svilova's, and Mikhail Kaufman's The Man with the [a] Movie Camera at Indiana University for the first time, probably in one of James Naremore's film classes, the film and its author-supervisor, editor, and cameraman, were already feted and celebrated particularly by those who wanted to make films that not only described the world, if not in a Hollywood kind of way, but that also changed the world they described.

Graham Robert's The Man with the Movie Camera: The Film Companion (London: Tauris, Kinofiles series, 2000) nicely explores Vertov's film on a variety of different levels. Roberts nicely puts Vertov's "experiment" in its historical, political, economic, cultural, and biographical contexts. Robert's provides an intriguing and enlightening structural and textual analysis of Man's shots, scenes, montage, and mise-en-scene, untangling the argument of the film in the process. Finally, Roberts's book explores the afterlife of the film in both the USSR and the West.

For Roberts The Man with the Movie Camera has to be set against the backdrop of constructivist, futurist, and what Roberts calls productivist, cultural and artistic contexts. Man, Roberts notes, was an experiment doomed to failure in the USSR of the late 1920s and 1930s, just as the dogma of socialist realism with its heroes, villains, and uplifting plots and its emphasis on the need for a literature, film, and theatre, that could be readily understood by the masses. Man, with its montage is the message structure and its message of Soviet power bringing about the triumph of socialism in one country, the USSR, and inevitably globally, was, or so Soviet leaders thought, simply not amenable to easy interpretation by the masses. As a result, Vertov's career languished.

As Roberts notes, the powers that be in the USSR and the Soviet masses may not have been ready for Vertov's, Svilova's, and Kaufman's Man with the Movie Camera, but avant garde artists and filmmakers in the West in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were and many film makers and film students impacted by the countercultural 1960s in the West, such as Jean-Luc Godard, and even in the Iron Curtain East, such as Dusan Makavejev and his wonderful and wonderfully Vertovian collage film WR: Mystersies of the Organism, were. It was the counterculture sixties with its celebration of the experiment film and of the need to change the world that provided the context in which I first say Man With the Movie Camera.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the avant-garde, Soviet film, Soviet experimental film, ahd the artistic straitjacket that was state mandated socialist realism.

The Books of My Life: Sergei Eisenstein (Bulgakowa)

Born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1898, Sergey Yesenstein, son of a Jewish father and a well off St. Petersberg mother, became, during his lifetime, one of the most famous and celebrated directors of the new technology and art of cinema. Over the course of his life Yesenstein would be feted by the Soviet film industry and state, German film culture, and even Hollywood, including Walt Disney, thanks to films like The Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1945) and the cinematic technique of montage. At the same time, Yesenstein would be attacked by the Soviet state for his avant garde "formalism", in both his films and in his many writings on culture, art, and film theory and practise, and criticised by others for his cinematic experimentation, something some found too far removed from the socialist realism mandated in Soviet art by the Soviet powers that be after the late 1920s. Yesenstein would also, like Orson Welles after him, find himself sometimes unable to finish many of the films he began and some of the writings he began, many on the cinema, for a variety of economic, political, and cultural reasons.

Oksana Bulgakowa's outstanding biography of Yesenstein, Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (San Francisco: PotemkinPress, 1998, 2001) is everything an excellent biography should be. Bulgakowa does an excellent job of putting the life of Yesenstein into broader political, economic, and cultural contexts. She explores how Yesenstein was impacted by political decisions made by Soviet bureaucrats, by the economic conditions of his times, and by the cultural movements of his era which he came into contact and was influenced by, including Formalism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Mysticism, Occultism, Freudianism, psychological theory, linguistic theory and practise, and studies of comparative religion, all things that put Yesenstein sometimes at odds with the Soviet state and its leaders. Bulgakowa nicely explores the origins and making of Yesenstein's films. She nicely summarises, explains, and puts into context Yesenstein's many writings on culture, art, and cinema. I highly recommend Bulgakowa's book for anyone interested in modernity, the birth of cinema, film as an art, and Soviet history and culture. For those interested in Yesenstein, this is a must read.

The Books of My Life: Russian Popular Culture

Culture, a word social scientists have defined in several ways since the eighteenth century, has been at the heart of social and cultural anthropology since the nineteenth century and became a prominent part of sociology in the mid and late twentieth. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, for example, delineated 164 definitions of culture in their historically sensitive book Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions of 1952. Kroeber and Kluckhohn argued, however, that all of these definitions could be boiled down, in the final analysis, to three: the high culture notion of culture in which culture was excellence in taste in the fine arts and the humanities and two definitions of culture that attempted to escape the iron cage of normative description, culture as the integrated pattern human knowledge, belief and behaviour grounded in human symbolic thought and social learning and culture as the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practises that characterise an institution, an organisation, or a group.

The last two definitions of culture, culture as a meaning system that over time fossilses, routinises, and is fetishises into, as social constructionists note, the institutions, organisations, goals, and practises of a society, are at the heart of Richard Stites's book Riussian Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In his selective introduction to Russian popular culture Stites explores the popular culture--I would prefer to call it the mass popular culture--of Russia from 1900 to the 1990s just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Stites looks in brief at Russian light reading material, Russian variety entertainments, Russian popular movies, Russian sports, Russian popular entertainments, Russian popular dances, Russian popular music, Russian popular television, and Russian popular radio.

Given that both culture and popular culture is dynamic--a fact that adds another dimension to the difficulty of defining culture--Stites delineates several stages in modern mass Russian popular culture. Russian mass popular culture, as was the case all across the modern Western world, arose with the coming of modernity with its industrialisation, its bureaucratisation, its mass politics, its mass economic systems, and its mass culture, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Russia's first mass popular culture, according to Stites, a popular culture that gave rise to new cultural forms and new inflections of "traditional" cultural forms in Russia, arose in a mass industrialising and mass bureaucratising Russia, in the 1900s under the last of Russia's Tsars. The second stage of Russian mass popular culture, a mass popular culture that gave more new inflections to Russian popular culture, ran from the Bolshevik Revolution to the rise of Stalin to power in 1928. The third stage of Russian popular culture, a mass popular culture which saw the attempt to create the New Soviet man, the new Soviet proletarian culture, and the cult of Father Stalin, though it didn't eliminate mass cultural aspects of the past, ran from 1928 to the Great Patriotic War. The fourth stage of mass Russian popular culture, a mass popular culture that saw the return of repressed aspects of "traditional" popular culture from before the Stalin era during the war and a return, after the war, of the Stalin era popular culture of the previous stage, ran from 1941, the year the Nazis and Germans invaded the USSR, to 1953, the year Stalin died. The fifth stage of Russian popular culture, the stage of Khrushchev and the cultural thaw, ran from 1953 to 1964, the year Khrushchev was removed from power. The sixth stage of Russian popular culture was the era of Brezhnev and his successors and ran from 1953 to 1984. In these years the thaw was slowed down but a return to Stalin era popular culture did not occur. The seventh stage in Russian popular culture was the era of Gorbachev with its openness and reform from 1985 to 1990, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Russian and other nation-states arose out of its ashes. A concluding chapter makes educated speculations about where diverse Russian culture is going.

Stites does something in Russian Popular Culture that is critical for those wrongly obsessed with the concept of totalitarianism, autocratic rule from above, and for students of Russia and the USSR to understand. When I lived in Moscow, for instance, what I heard and what most Russian talked to me about was not the historical inevitability of communism, the joys of Mikhail Bulgakov, or the joys of Dmitri Shostakovich, though a few intelligentsia did talk to me about them. What I heard a lot about instead was the film Volga Volga, the heroes Chapaev and Zoya, the bard Vladimir Vysotsky, and the singer Alla Pugacheva, among others. What I heard a lot about, in other words, was Russian and Soviet popular culture and popular culture figures, mass popular culture and popular culture figures that most in the West, including many Western Sovietologists, had never heard of. The twentysomething daughter of the family I lived with when I was in Moscow, relatives of Mikhail Kalinin, head of the Russian SSR from 1919 to 1946, was a Beatles fan and had an Abba album released on the official Soviet record label, Melodiya. Another lesson I learned from Stites is that Russian and Soviet popular culture has always had subcultures and countercultures. Still another lesson Stites teaches, one I learned very early on in my studies of the USSR, was the puritanical nature of Russia's cultural mediators. Such paternalism, of course, is hardly the monopoly of Russia or the USSR. Still another important lesson Iearned from Stites is that Russian mass popular culture had a number of formal similarities to the popular culture of the masses throughout the modern world. Russian popular culture, like modern popular culture throughout the modern West, was romantic, escapist, sentimental, manichean, and nationalist. Finally, the important moral lesson I learned from my experiences in Russia and from Stites is that the Soviet Union was far more complicated and complex than many Western Sovietologists and mandarins allowed.

I highly recommend Stites's book for the reader with some knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and culture. The reader without an understanding of Russian and Soviet history and culture is likely to get lost in the rather large tangle of Russian and Soviet cultural figures and popular culture movements Stites tells us about. I also highly recommend the book to those interested in modern Western culture and its forms and contents
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The Books of My Life: Isaac and Isaiah

I have long had an interest in culture, ideology, the social and cultural construction of identity and community, social and cultural movements, and culture wars. David Caute's Issac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (London: Yale University Press, 2013) serves up these and more.

On one level Caute's Isaac and Isaiah is a biography of the Isaac and Isaiah of the title, Polish born Marxist Issac Deutscher, author of well-known biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and liberal political theorist and Russian born Isaiah Berlin. But Caute's book is more than just a biography of Deutscher and Berlin. Both Deutscher and Berlin, in Caute's book, serve as key symbols around who a host of noted others, including George Orwell, E.H. Carr, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and Hannah Arendt, a host of noted Cold War events, and a host of familiar Cold War controversies, intersect and swirl. Caute's book is thus part history of the Cold War and the roles Deutscher and Berlin played in it, part cultural history--it explores the culture of Marxism and liberalism--part intellectual history--it puts Deutscher and Berlin in broad intellectual contexts--part academic history--Berlin was a fellow at All Souls, Oxford and Deutscher lectured in universities in Europe, the UK, and the US--part Jewish history--both Deutscher and Berlin were East European Jews who escaped from Hitler and Stalin respectively settling in England and who had personal and political interests in the Israel--part history of communism and anti-communism--Deutscher saw himself as a renegade Marxist who saw Stalinism as a detour from Leninism while Berlin had a hatred of Soviet communism and saw Stalinism as a continuation of Leninism--part critique of Deutscher, Berlin, and the Cold War, and part expose of Berlin's black balling of Deutcher's appointment in Soviet Studies at the new University of Sussex in 1963. By books end neither Deutscher or Berlin come off as saints though Deutscher was never the purveyor of ad hominems that Berlin, in private correspondence, was and who, on several occasions, expressed his hatred of Deurscher, who he regarded as the worst sort of apologist and polemicist imaginable

I enjoyed Caute's Isaac and Isaiah immensely. I highly recommend it particularly for those with interests like those mentioned above and for those interested, in particular, in the history of the Cold War and its ideologies.

The Giant Galactic Cock That Threatened the Russian Universe

The art piece of the day is the "Giant Galactic Space Dick" of Saint Petersburg, Russia to your left. This 213-feet-tall, 89-feet-wide phallus which was put on on the Liteyny Drawbridge in St. Petersburg in 2010 by the Russian art activist group Voina, the group out of which Pussy Riot arose. The giant cock, by the way, points in the direction of Russia's biggest dicks of all (all puns intended), the internal and external security agents of the FSB and the building they inhabit, the FSB Building in Peter's. The FSB, of course, is the Russian successor to the KGB. Not surprisingly both Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and its Christian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, both of whom are making an example of Pussy Riot presumably in order to nip criticism of the neo-Tsarist Russian state they have created or recreated in the bud, were once agents of that biggest of Soviet dicks, the KGB.

Speaking of Pussy Riot and freedom of expression what does it mean when a Bahrani human rights activist Nabeel Rajab gets three years for protesting against Bahrani authoritarianism on Twitter while Russia's Pussy Riot gets two for their non-violent protest against Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the cathedral that was once destroyed by Stalin in 1931 to symbolise that the Soviet state would no longer be the theocracy the Tsarist state was only to be resurrected in the 1990s by Yeltsin and others enveloped as they were in a haze of nostalgia for a time in which church, state, and subjects apparently knew their divinely ordained place, something Putin and Kirill are now teaching those who don't know their place in the new old neo-Tsarist Russia they have created. Durkheim lives. But back to Rajab and Pussy Riot, does the differential sentences mean that Islamic theocracy is one year harsher in its treatment of dissidents expressing their freedom of speech than Christian theocracies? Does it mean that neither Bahrain or neo-Tsarist Russia have experienced the Enlightenment?

Speaking of the Enlightenment does that notion of that Tea Party evangelical Christian idiot running for the Senate from Missouri, Todd Akin, about how the bodies of women who are legitimately raped-this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rape, by the way, is not novel to Akin and has been common in some circles within the Republican party since the 1980s-excretes some sort of magic chemical during rape that inhibits pregnancy, indicate that many Americans haven't yet experienced the Enlightenment or learned much from the Scientific Revolution?

And why are there so many dicks anyway? I have already mentioned dicks in Russia and Bahrain but there are, of course, dicks in every time and in everyplace. Currently we have dicks in Great Britain where governmental officials threaten the Ecuador embassy with invasion if they don't give up that celebrity activist Julian Assange and where a nation in the midst of cuts to government services is spending thousands of pounds a day to surround the Ecuadorian embassy with cops whose sole mission seems to be to arrest Assange who they apparently consider the essence of all evil in the known universe, should he come out. We got dicks in South Africa where police killed 44 striking workers who confronted them with primitive weapons in what seems to some eerily reminiscent of apartheid era South Africa. We got dicks in India who spread rumours of sectarian violence causing thousands to flee preemptively. We got dicks in the United States where neoliberal Randfan Christians want to punish the poor for their sins, religious and secular, and reward and celebrate the one percent for their apparent inherent godliness or naturalness in a return to the days of Ebenezer Scrooge, the days of that old time gospel of wealth, and the days when good old social Darwinism ruled the one percent roost. And we got dicks, boy do we have dicks, right here in river city who want to close historic pools and historic bath houses while giving money and services to private businesses who, our politicians promise, will finally bring salvation to our economic problems. Of course, these dicks have been making these promises almost every year since the 1950s.

Still don't get the picture? Look above or just look around you at the spectre of dicks which haunts the universe in which we all live. The patriarchal and paternalistic mentality that helps give rise to dickism exists almost everywhere and has been taken to new heights in the "civilised" modern West. There really is more to fear than fear itself.

Further Viewing and Reading
"Why Russian Art Group Voina ‘Dicked’ a St. Petersburg Bridge", 16 June 2010, Animal

All Hail the Motherland: Musings on "Putin's Kiss"

The worlds a mess it's in my kiss
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As someone who has spent time in Russia and in Moscow I watched the premiere of Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s 2012 documentary Putin’s Kiss (http://itvs.org/films/putins-kiss) on PBS World today with great interest.

Putin’s Kiss focuses on two journalists in Putin’s Moscow, Oleg Kashin, journalist for Kommersant and critic of the Putin regime, and Marya “Masha” Drokova, the teenager who rose to journalistic prominence thanks to her skills and her connections to Nashi, translation, Ours, the pro-Putin, nationalist, pro-democratic, and anti-fascist youth movement founded by Vasilly Yakanenko in 2007.

Drokova joined Nashi in 2007 when she was 15 and gained fame as the teenage girl who asked and was allowed to kiss Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the cheek, the strong, upright, and decisive man who, she said, at the time, was the man of her dreams. With fame came fortune. Drokova rose to become a commissar and spokesperson for Nashi. Soon she was enrolled in one of Moscow’s top universities, had her own apartment, had her own brand new car, and had her own pro-Putin television talk show.

Putin’s Kiss’s tale of Kashin and Drokova is a fascinating one. Kashin, because of his opposition to the Putin regime, was brutally beaten and almost died on 6 November 2010, two days after National Unity Day, a holiday near and dear to Nashi hearts and Nashi minds, a day on which Nashi holds pro-Russian anti-enemies of Russia marches on.

Drokova strikes up a friendship with liberal journalists, including Kashin, though she doesn’t necessarily agree with them in each and every way, and, in the course of the film, moves further and further away from the Yakanenko and Nashi orbit and breaks with it when she joins a picket in front of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow demanding that the authorities investigate the beating of Kashin. That is her carrying a placard at that picket in the picture above.

From one point of view Putin’s Kiss, like Bonnie Sherr Klein’s National Film Board of Canada 1981 documentary Not a Love Story before it, is a tale of redemption, a story about how someone from the dark side, thanks to a road to Damascus experience, turns, serendipitously of course, from the dark side to the side of truth and justice and the "American" way during the course of the film. In Not a Love Story it is the former stripper Linda Lee Tracey who sees the light and is transformed from someone who sees pornography in a positive light to someone who takes a much more critical view of the world of porn. In Putin’s Kiss it is Drokova who sees the light and while she doesn’t think that Yakanenko, who is now the head of the Russian Ministry for Youth Affairs (while at the same time still essentially running Nashi), had anything to do with the attack on Kashin she begins to see the darker side of Nashi ultra-nationalism.

As I was watching Putin’s Kiss I couldn’t help but reflect of the dark ultra-nationalism of Nashi. One of the most powerful of many powerful scenes in the film is when Pedersen and Company take their camera to one of Nashi’s demonstrations on National Unity Day. Through the kino eye we see Nashi activists carrying signs with pictures of the "enemies of Russia" prominently displayed on them, Russian “enemies” who include politicians, human rights activists, and journalists. They bring these placards in a line up to a preordained place on the street where they then throw them down in disgust while a handful of Nashi activists stomp on and poke at the faces of the “enemies of Russia” on the posters with their sticks.

Such sentiments are, of course, the sentiments that ultra-nationalism creates and these actions are the actions ultra-nationalist sentiments sometimes give rise to whether it is the ultra-nationalism of Russia’s Nashi or the ultra-nationalism of some of the groups on the American right. No longer, in the mental world of ultra-nationalism, is it possible to agree to disagree with the "loyal opposition". In ultra-nationalist ethnocentric culture there is no loyal opposition, you are either with us, the ultra-nationalists, or against us. You are either good Russians or enemies of Russia or true Americans or socialist, commie, nazi, liberal traitors who are undermining the very essence of America and what it means to be American.

The binary demonology that ultra-nationalism creates is, not surprisingly, sometimes an open invitation to the more thuggish elements in ultra-nationalist groups to brutalise and terrorise the "enemy", as the actions of Hitler's the Brown Shirts, of the thugs of Nashi who defecate on the cars of the "enemies of Russia, and brutally beat or even kill the "enemies of Russia"--and remember hundreds of journalists and critics of the Putin regime have been killed since he took office in 2000--or of those right wing Americans who kill parishioners in a Unitarian-Universalist Church because that is, they say, where they think the evil "liberals" are, show. If such ultra-nationalism is fascist then groups like Nashi and some of the groups on the American right are very close to crossing over the line into fascism or have already crossed the line into the very fascism they claim to detest and struggle agains.

Let me close by saying that I am giving a thumbs up to Putin’s Kiss. It has proven to be as much of a favourite with me as it was with the Sundance Film Festival where it won the World Documentary Cinematography Award earlier this year. See it if you have any interest in Russia, in Russian ultra-nationalism, in ultra-nationalism in general, in ethnocentrism, and in historical documentaries.

We Hear You Have Been a Naughty Girl: Constructing Deviance

I recently ran across this little ditty online dateline Moscow (http://news.yahoo.com/russians-pray-correction-anti-putin-punks-062308383.html). According to this article the powers that be in the Russian Orthodox Church are calling for the "correction" of members of the anti-Putin punk band eollective Pussy Riot for their "defil[ing]" "of the holy shrines", presumably by this they mean the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow where Pussy Riot held a protest against Putin, and the "good name of the Church", by which they presumably mean Pussy Riot's contention that the Orthodox Church in Russia had long been a supporter of Vladimir Putin who Pussy Riot and others regard as someone who stole an election. I am not sure why the Church would regard this as defiling the good name of the Church since the Russian Orthodox Church has long been a supporter of Vladimir Putin as anyone familiar with contemporary Russia knows including, presumably, Russian Orthodox Church leaders. Some Russian Orthodox went beyond calls for "correction" urging that the members of Pussy Riot be burned alive or shot. The fate of the members of the band, as I write, lie with the Russians Criminal Courts where the members of the band are being tried for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. The 90% conviction rate of the Court doesn't bode well for Pussy Riot or for freedom of speech in increasingly theocratic and frightening Russia.

What is, of course, really going on here is yet another act in a very long play. It is the same old story about how societies and cultures construct conformist cultures. It is not only authoritarian or totalitarian societies that construct of "normal" and "deviant". Notions of what is "normal" and what is not are as characteristic of capitalist countries and democratic countries as they are of communist countries, dictatorial countries, authoritarian countries, and totalitarian cultures. The manufacture of "deviant" "others", in other words, has more to do with the construction of "mainstream" and "orthodox" and their antitheses "counterculture" and "heresy", culture, than with economics or politics. As history shows all societies, sad to say, construct what they think of as "normal" and what they think of as "deviant" and tend to push "deviants" toward conformity either through persuasion (the carrot) or coercion (the stick).

Bibliography
Natalia Antonova, Pussy Riot Are Scapegoats for Russia's Political Crisis, 7 June 2012, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/07/pussy-riot-russia-punk-prayer-service