As Dubya’s approval ratings demonstrated, nothing consolidates the political status of an underperforming Leader like having all the media outfits shriek “OMG look, over there — THE ENEMY!!” Even, or especially, when the propaganda can be aimed at The Enemy Within. Guess Putin’s feeling a little underappreciated recently…
Dan Savage embeds a “new Russian anti-gay propaganda video”, Gays and Lesbians Adopt Children in Order to Rape Them:
… Anti-gay propaganda attacking gay parents lays the groundwork for passage a yet another anti-gay law in Russia, one that would rip children from the homes of their gay or lesbian parents and place them in notoriously awful Russian orphanages. (“Of course [a lesbian parent] should definitely be deprived of her rights to the child,” Alexei Zhuravlev, deputy of the Russian Duma, said in an interview. “Homosexuals must not raise children. They corrupt them. They do them much more harm than if the child were in an orphanage. I am deeply convinced of this.”)…
Kat Stoeffel, in NYMag:
Incarcerated Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova kicked off a hunger strike today, protesting the slaverylike conditions and human-rights violations at Penal Colony No. 14 in Mordovia, where she has been held for a year. In an open letter published in the Guardian today, Tolokonnikova writes that her brigade in the sewing shop (which manufactures police uniforms) works sixteen to seventeen hours a day (the legal limit is eight), seven days a week, to meet production quotas, which were increased by 50 percent two weeks ago, despite defective machinery….
“I will [strike] until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle ejected from the realm of justice for the purpose of stoking the production of the sewing industry; until they start treating us like humans,” she wrote.
Update on Mother Russia’s (You Have No) Human Rights Front (NSFW)Post + Comments (25)