Actually, the kind of voices I mean don’t reach Russian ears either: their mass media are controlled by the KGB junta, while all opposition websites are blocked for internal consumption.
Silenced are the Russian PLUs (People Like Us): those who abhor tyranny, detest tyrants, long for basic liberties, civic (and civilised) society – those who suffocate, as most of us would be suffocating, in the deoxygenated air permeated with all-pervasive war hysteria, xenophobic chauvinism and propaganda of anti-West hatred.
Turning the offensive volume up and the dissenting voices off – that’s how the notorious 82 per cent public support for Putin is whipped up, something that so excites our useful idiots, from Trump to Hitchens. The herd is there, and the KGB has plenty of experience in making it bray.
Meanwhile, the junta is proceeding to devise and implement laws that, in theory at least, make it possible to prosecute every citizen. Of course a society whose every member is a potential criminal is a criminal society, and there are still Russians, the silent minority, who realise this.
The idea of laws capable of criminalising the whole population goes back to Lenin, whose mummy still adorns Red Square. (Comparing his revolting pagan mausoleum to Churchill’s modest, unadorned tombstone at St Mary’s, Bladon, should tell those who seek understanding all they need to know. Alas, such inquisitive minds are thin on the ground.)
Capitalising on his correspondence degree in law, the genius looked at the draft criminal code, specifically the article providing for the execution of those conspiring to restore capitalism. A good law, he thought, but a tad too narrow. Lenin’s great legal mind went into action, and he added four words after ‘conspiring’: “…or capable of conspiring…” He saw what he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Every citizen could now be put up against the wall – at the discretion of the state but perfectly legally.
Putin’s jurisprudence follows the course charted by the founder of the modern Russian state. The latest steps along that road are taken through the ‘Yarovaya laws’, so called because they were proposed by the deputy Irina Yarovaya.
To be fair, the Yarovaya laws don’t call for the death penalty, yet. However, the maximum punishment for extremism (a charge routinely brought against social media users opposed to Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine) has been increased from four to eight years. Inciting ‘mass disturbances’ (anti-Putin demonstrations) is now punishable by five to 10 years in prison.
Actually, those familiar with the Magnitsky case – in which even Hitchens grudgingly admits Putin’s personal involvement – will know that imprisonment and the death penalty often amount to the same thing in Russia. But in any case a tenner in the pokey is fairly steep for peaceful protest, wouldn’t you say?
The new laws also prohibit missionary work outside ‘specially designated areas’, and it’s that injunction that was mocked by one of those forbidden voices, that of the columnist Yevgeny Ikhlov. This is what he wrote in a blocked on-line magazine:
“At last: a law has been passed and, what’s very important, already applied in Russia, making it possible to prosecute all the apostles, starting with Peter, Paul and Andrew.
“Actually, the Saviour was already culpable under a raft of extremism laws: offending believers’ feelings at places of worship, hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, disrupting religious services, inciting subversion, principal complicity in the forming of an extremist organisation …
“Also, organising, on multiple occasions for a period of one year, unsanctioned disruptive mass gatherings, both public and private, perpetrating illicit medical practice and fraud, unlicensed production of alcoholic beverages…
“However, so far the apostles and their flock have been regarded as law-abiding by the country’s jurisprudence. But a time has come to take a closer look at their activities from the standpoint of security and prevention of extremism.
“The justly celebrated Irina Yarovaya proposed, the Federal Assembly shuddered but passed, and the president sighed but signed new amendments making it possible to prosecute the apostles for illegal missionary activities.
“For, in flagrant violation of existing laws, they belonged to an unauthorised religious organisation…”
It was Gogol who first talked about laughter through tears, and since then the Russians have developed a knack for such lachrymose hilarity. While the insane ones protest by nailing their crotch to Red Square cobbles, and the strident ones rave, the wise ones laugh – and they all weep.
The mulititudes, the herd, bray on cue – and their ugly noise is music to the ears of our useful idiots. Where normal people hear screeching, discordant sounds, the useful idiots (so defined by the subsequently mummified genius) hear mellifluous melodies.
Mark, one of those chaps who, according to Ikhlov’s spoof, could be prosecuted in Putin’s Russia, quotes another subversive as saying “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”
Implicit in that seditious statement is the understanding that some, possibly most, people are deaf. The deafness hinted at wasn’t physical but moral. The latter is more widespread because it’s harder to treat, and hearing aids are in short supply.
You could always be put away for ‘breaching the peace’ but a messy trial could be avoided by getting a KGB psychiatrist to declare you insane and you could be put away with hardly anyone knowing. I think it was only the social media that stopped western governments, SEOs and transnational corporations doing similar thing to ‘whistle blowers’. The Lenin’s ‘thought crime’ ploy so dramatically publicized by Orwell, is however the most effective way of controlling everyone by fear and was anticipated by the various Catholic inquisitions (no proof of crime required, all that is needed is an easily arranged confession).
Sorry, SOEs (state owned enterprises).