Posted on 06/02/2006 11:19:10 AM PDT by sergey1973
When Russian prosecutors opened a criminal case against journalist Vladimir Rakhmanov for writing a satirical Internet article calling President Vladimir Putin the nation's "phallic symbol," it raised eyebrows. But a case that began as an odd curiosity in Russia's Ivanovo Oblast is quickly becoming an international cause. Reporters Without Borders has taken up Rakhmankov's case as part of what it calls a campaign to preserve Internet press freedom in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. With print and broadcast journalism already subject to heavy-handed state control, free-press advocates are increasingly looking to save the Internet as the region's last censorship-free zone.
PRAGUE, June 2, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Rakhmankov's article comparing Putin to a phallic symbol wasn't the first time the online journalist has irritated the authorities.
In March, he accused Ivanovo Governor Mikhail Men of taking bribes. In an interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service, Rakhmankov said the official response was violent.
(Excerpt) Read more at rferl.org ...
Maybe Putin has a "Phallic Inadequacy" problem........
If you call a Russian leader a dick, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the shaft.
"Politicians who persecute their satiricists have an inferiority complex problem."
Generally that's true. But we have to consider the context. Putin's response to people who make substantial criticism is to send Mafia members to kill them. So in a sense, this response is relatively restrained.
Our "Putins" will likely use the same gambit here. Just wait and see. Not a dime's worth of difference.
Putin=communist
Internet censorship spreads from China to Russia...
IBTRWC!
And who can expect anything else from the morally bankrupt Russian culture.
Next year they will be imprisoned for criticismand in ten they will be murdered by the thousands .
The Kremlin was the agent of the deaths of 100 million in the last century.
100 million! Its not just a statistic.
"Posted by spanalot to sergey1973; Romanov
On News/Activism 06/03/2006 8:51:25 AM EDT · 11 of 11
IBTRWC!
And who can expect anything else from the morally bankrupt Russian culture. "
I guess the "Soviet culture" was more to your liking since you decided to pay homage to the Soviets with a visit to Commieland during Brezhnev's era. Says a lot about your character, or lack there of. You were visiting our enemy and providing them much needed hard currency during the Cold War. And yet, you criticize the very men who joined the US military to defeat that system. Oh, that actually makes sense - of course you would criticize men who defeated the communists that you paid homage to. My bad. Commie.
"I guess the "Soviet culture" was more to your liking since you decided to pay homage to the Soviets with a visit to Commieland during Brezhnev's era. Says a lot about your character, or lack there of. "
Thats an interesting way of characterizing a Holdomor survivor family going to the USSR to see their family for the first time in several decades.
"Thats an interesting way of characterizing a Holdomor survivor family going to the USSR to see their family for the first time in several decades."
Unfortunately anything you write can't be taken as true since you wiggle and worm your way through lies told out of convience to whatever position you are trying to hold. What's odd is a Holodomor survivor would want to return to the Soviet Union after such an event. Especially since you claim your parents fled Polish territory. Make up your mind.
I think this sums it all up:
"Himka, John-Paul. "War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora". Spaces of Identity 5 (1): 5-24.
"I am not saying that the famine or the other components of the victimization narratives do not deserve historical research and reflection, nor that evil should be ignored, nor that the memory of the dead should not be held sacred. But I object to instrumentalizing this memory with the aim of generating political and moral capital, particularly when it is linked to an exclusion from historical research and reflection of events in which Ukrainians figured as perpetrators not victims, and when “our own” evil is kept invisible and the memory of the others’ dead is not held sacred."[1]
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Holocaust"
This is from a Ukrainian who understands the importance of being historically accurate when talking about such crimes and how the politicization is used by nationalists to further their own goals AND refute the ample evidence of their own collusion in said crimes. You fit this category perfectly and I doubt your loyalty to the United States since your main thrust in any conversation is furthering the aims and goals of Western Ukrainian nationalism.
Worth repeating:
"^ Himka, John-Paul. "War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora". Spaces of Identity 5 (1): 5-24.
"I am not saying that the famine or the other components of the victimization narratives do not deserve historical research and reflection, nor that evil should be ignored, nor that the memory of the dead should not be held sacred. But I object to instrumentalizing this memory with the aim of generating political and moral capital, particularly when it is linked to an exclusion from historical research and reflection of events in which Ukrainians figured as perpetrators not victims, and when “our own” evil is kept invisible and the memory of the others’ dead is not held sacred."[1]
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Holocaust"
"And who can expect anything else from the morally bankrupt Russian culture."
Exactly. Putin has terminated freedom of speech. It is pathetically naïve, really, to imagine that he would allow freedom of speech on the Internet. People who think this way need to wake up and smell the coffee---while they still can.
"Next year they will be imprisoned for criticismand in ten they will be murdered by the thousands ."
Agreed.
"The Kremlin was the agent of the deaths of 100 million in the last century.
100 million! Its not just a statistic."
Interesting number. Can you give me a quick breakdown of this? I heard Stalin starved to death 10 million in the Ukraine, but I don't have much sense of any other numbers.
Don't let these bastards get you down, man.
"Don't let these bastards get you down, man."
Me?
Our family lost thousands of acres and evertything they could not carry to the communists and it will take a lot more than these mental midgets to get me down.
And here is a good breakdown on the 100 million deaths - all exported from the Kremlin at the point of an AK-47.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:N5kbmYA_FJQJ:www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM+communists+100+million+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=6&ie=UTF-8
"You fit this category perfectly and I doubt your loyalty to the United States since your main thrust in any conversation is furthering the aims and goals of Western Ukrainian nationalism."
Not really - my posts today relate to gun control, the bias of the MSM, Tutankammon, exotic disease, and the war on terror.
You are "...sick of the anti Russian posts on FR"
"You are "...sick of the anti Russian posts on FR"
Very MSM of you. You'll note the context of that statement. What I said is I'm sick of anti-Russian bias that is posted on here by others who wish to explain away or deny their own peoples involvement in Soviet crimes. The SOVIETS have a lot to atone for and that includes any Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Balts, Turkmen, etc., who were involved in their crimes. Likewise, Nazis and their supporters in Nationalist movements in the Eastern bloc ALSO deserve condemnation and not some revisionist history painting them into an undeserved "hero" status, as you have done on numerous occasions.
This Ukrainian has described you and people like you to a "T" (and it's a shame you spend more time blasting American vets when defending your Ukrainian heros in the UAP and UON.):
"Anyone who consults the media, especially the electronic media, of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America cannot but be struck by how much attention it devotes to the issue of suspected war criminals.[4] This has been going on for some time. The press, and Ukrainian-diaspora scholarship as well,[5] followed with concern the workings of the Deschênes Commission, which was struck in 1985 to investigate war criminals in Canada. The press also closely followed the American and Israeli legal proceedings against Ukrainian-American John Demjanjuk, who was suspected of being the sadistic camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” Diaspora press accounts depicted the trial as a travesty of justice. It has also portrayed the search for war criminals more generally as a witch-hunt,[6] harming almost exclusively innocent people and tarnishing the reputation of Ukrainians as a whole. There has been almost no attempt on the part of the Ukrainian diaspora to confront the issue of war criminality in a less defensive and more soul-searching manner. (The few exceptions will be mentioned below.)
Instead, there persists a deafening silence about, as well as reluctance to confront, even well-documented war crimes, such as the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)[7] and the cooperation of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in the execution of the Jews.[8] In his submission to the Deschênes Commission in 1986 John Sopinka, counsel for the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, stated that Ukrainian nationalist organizations “were not in any way allied with the Nazis.”[9] It has also been denied that the Ukrainian movement in World War II had any ideological predisposition which could have facilitated participation in genocidal actions. UPA veteran and military historian Lev Shankovsky, for example, asserted at a round-table discussion that organized anti-Semitism “never existed in Ukraine. But there exists a myth about Ukrainian anti-Semitism” promoted by Moscow.[10]
In the diaspora one frequently encounters a double standard in discussing war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Ukrainians as opposed to those perpetrated against Ukrainians. Memoirs and eyewitness accounts, for example, are considered untrustworthy evidence for the former, but trustworthy for the latter; that is, Jewish or Polish first-hand accounts of Ukrainian war crimes are dismissed as biased, while an important Ukrainian victimization narrative, the famine of 1932-33, has relied primarily on just such eyewitness accounts.[11] The argument is made that no order has ever been discovered instructing the UPA to kill Polish civilians in Volhynia.[12] On the other hand, that the famine of 1932-33 was the result of deliberate policy is never questioned, even though this too remains without its “smoking gun” (as of course does the Jewish Holocaust). The crimes of Polish police in Nazi service are taken to provide some measure of explanation or justification for the attack on Polish villages in Volhynia,[13] but never do Ukrainian diaspora authors suggest that Ukrainians should be held collectively responsible for the crimes of the Ukrainian police in German service.
***
Linked to the denial of war criminality, although also motivated by other factors, is the construction of Ukrainian victimization narratives.[14] The most important of these concerns the famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33, which Ukrainians in the diaspora frequently contrast and connect with the Holocaust.[15] Yaroslav Bilinksy set out his position at the Ukrainian-Jewish conference held in 1983, which happened to be the 50th anniversary of the famine. Professor Bilinsky denied “a causal connection between alleged collaboration of Jewish-born Communists in the collectivization of agriculture and the Great Famine and any proven collaboration of Ukrainian-born extremists in the Holocaust.” Yet he maintained that “each community is bound to ask pointed questions about the share of guilt and that each national community may draw premature conclusions and erect stereotypes. To obviate the emergence and cultivation of dangerous stereotypes on the Ukrainian side, let us study the responsibility for the Great Famine as carefully as many Jews are studying the responsibility for the Holocaust. Both logically and morally, the two tragedies are equivalent. Genocide is genocide.”[16] Later at the conference, in the round-table discussion, he made more explicit his view that Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust was to be understood in roughly the same terms as Jewish participation in the famine.[17]"
That is just a snippet of a very accurate article written by a man who escaped the Soviets. The entire article can be found here: http://www.univie.ac.at/spacesofidentity/_Vol_5_1/_HTML/Himka.html
I suggest you read it. Of course, it will be painful for you to see a fellow Ukrainian explain how people like you exploit the dead for political gain and disrepect the deaths of other ethnic groups.
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