Russian Acts of Kindness

[David Powelstock]

Irony is especially easily lost on those who deliberately ignore it in the
interest of confirming an existing bias.

In this case, we have a couple of private citizens making a stupid joke
about burning a book. Big deal. It is private political speech expressing
intolerance toward someone else's private political speech. One of the
larger questions in all this that tends to get lost is the distinction
between private citizen's intolerance of others' political views (rampant
everywhere) and state intolerance of certain political views. All the
obnoxious and/or censorious blog postings in the world combined do not
amount to a single case of someone being imprisoned or harassed by the
state for expressing anti-government views by means of a
far-from-independent judicial system.

Another point worth making has to do with the practical effectiveness of
free speech. Putin, et al., have learned an important lesson about
"managing" democracy in the information age. The ham-handed suppression of
speech practiced by the Soviets cannot succeed in the new environment. The
new strategy is to allow speech to be free up until it reaches a certain
threshold of influence over the Russian public. At that point the speakers
are persecuted or otherwise defanged. It works as a pressure release valve,
to keep the opposition visible, marginalized, and dissolute. Thus, the
state takes control of the media with the farthest reach--national
television stations--and lets the opposition play around with lesser media.

Finally, one doesn't need to subscribe to any kind of "essentialist" theory
of Russian nationality to accept the fact that the current Russian
government rules by undemocratic means. By way of analogy, think of the age
of robber barons in the US, for example. Perhaps Russia is going through
just such a stage. That's speculative and debatable, of course. But the
broader point is that nations change throughout history. Putinism has just
about run its course, I think. The questions is, what's next?

Cheers,
David

 * * * * * * * * * *
David Powelstock
​

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Vanchu, Anthony J. (JSC-AH)[TECHTRANS
INTERNATIONAL, INC.] <anthony.j.vanchu at nasa.gov> wrote:

> That hardly qualifies as a bona fide book burning, public or semi-public.
>  It would seem that irony is perhaps often all too easily lost.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Robert Orr
> Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2013 7:25 AM
> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Russian Acts of Kindness
>
> Do we see cases of Russian academics staging (semi)public book burnings?
>
> Russia-based readers on the list?
>
>
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/02/san-jose-state-university-meteorology-decides-burning-books-they-dont-agree-with-is-better-than-reading-them/
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------​
>
>

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