Pussy Riot VI: counterpoint and counterfactuals
[ by Charles Cameron — compare and contrast as a means of contextualizing, suggesting a tool that might be of use to the IC in any number of circumstances ]
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In this particular case, Pussy Riot is the topic, comparison with is the method, and some form of graphic the appropriate medium around which to build a presentation.
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Both these statements have been made recently by Catholic priests, and they portray opposite positions on the matter. Again, it is my sense that the graphical representation of these remarks calls forth in the reader both similarities and differences, as Cath Styles nicely put it:
A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.
From my point of view, the direct juxtaposition in a DoubleQuote or equivalent format does the job nicely when two fairly simple quotes are considered together.
Things can get more complex than that when a variety of discourses come together, but the same general principles can still be applied, and a graphical representation sought.
Bearing Cath’s point in mind, then, I’d like to examine some of the ways in which people have contextualized the Pussy Riot event in the Cathedral with counterfactual instances (ie by contrasting it with instances that in some ways parallel the factual instance, but in “what if” style alternate universes.
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Here, then, are the documents I’ll be drawing on. First, from Khanya, a blog I’ve praised in an earlier post:
An Amnesty International petition site (Take Action Now – Amnesty International USA) urges people to send an email with the following text to the Russian prosecuting authorities:
I respectfully urge you to drop the charges of hooliganism and immediately and unconditionally release Maria Alekhina, Ekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Furthermore, I call on you to immediately and impartially investigate threats received by the family members and lawyers of the three women and, if necessary, ensure their protection. Whether or not the women were involved in the performance in the cathedral, freedom of expression is a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and no one should be jailed for the peaceful exercise of this right. Thank you for your attention to this serious matter.
Now imagine, for a moment, that the boot was on the other foot.
Imagine that it was a Western European country, and that the act of “hooliganism” concerned was daubing swastikas on a synagogue. If that were the case, would Amnesty International be urging its members and the general public to send messages saying:
Whether or not the women were involved in writing the graffiti on the synagogue, freedom of expression is a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and no one should be jailed for the peaceful exercise of this right. Thank you for your attention to this serious matter.
I think that in Western Europe such a petition would be widely regarded as “hate speech”, and “anti-Semitic”, as would the graffiti. So why does Amnesty International think that it is OK to encourage people to send such things to Russia?
And then, of course, one can put the boot back on the first foot again. If these same three young women had daubed graffiti on a synagogue in Moscow, would they have been prosecuted for the same offence and in the same way as they have been in this case?
So there are differences between Russian culture and Western culture, and differences within Russian and Western culture.
That’s a pretty impressive example of the counterfactual genre — and doubly so, it seems to me, because of the final reversal, the twist in its tail.
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Next, here’s another quote from the same Fr. Hogan we quoted above. In this case, the mosque is used as the primary contrast to the cathedral, but the synagogue also makes an appearance — and Fr. Hogan throws at least one other interesting contrast into the mix — comparing Putin and western leaders:
Protest is fine, the day will come, I’m sure, and not too far away either I think, when we Christians may be protesting against our governments and engaging in civil disobedience, but protest must always respect others and the faith of others. As some have asked, would these ladies do the same in a mosque? They would not for two reasons – it would not be politically incorrect and they might end up being stoned to death before they had a chance to get out of the building. Is it legitimate to mock faith and descecrate places held sacred by people in order to protest against a political regime?
Some will say these ladies did so because the Orthodox Church is too close to the Russian government. Okay, well Judaism is considered by many to be too close to Zionism and the State of Israel – well, where are the lewd feminists dancing in the synagogues mocking Abraham and Moses? They are not there because they know it is inappropriate and wrong – just as it is inappropriate and wrong to desecrate a place of Christian worship.
What interests me here is that he uses multiple counterfactual contrasts, which perhaps makes his paragraphs a little less elegant than Khanya’s — but interesting in the complexity it adds to his analysis.
I’ll return to that remark about “we Christians may be protesting against our government” later.
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My last text — and I’ve quoted it here on ZP before — is Josh Shahryar‘s tweet:
I wonder if #PussyRiot would get so much attention if they were a band of men called #DickMob.
That comes at the Pussy Riot issue from a completely different angle, and is very elegantly done.
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Our next task is to see what oppositions we can find in these three statements.
- Kanya uses Amnesty’s concerns regarding freedom of expression vs appropriateness of expression by comparing the cathedral incident with women “in a Western European country” daubing swastikas on a synagogue, thus also proposing a comparison between eastern and western European mores.
- Then, in a reversal, Kanya uses the same cathedral incident vs daubing graffiti on a synagogue specifically in Moscow this time, to explore the degree to which Moscow might be more tolerant of anti-Semitism than of anti-Orthodoxy, both in terms of public opinion and via political and legal systems.
- Fr Hogan’s question poses a contrast between the cathedral (and Orthodoxy and Putin) and a hypothetical mosque (and Islam and, say, a militant faction in Pakistan).
- His second comparison is between two church-and-state collaborations, Orthodoxy with the Russian state and Judaism with the Zionist, and again the question he raises is whether similar behavior in a parallel situation would be tolerable.
- Then there’s his intriguing third comparison, which I said I’d return to, in which he suggests that the “not too far” future may hold the need for civil disobedience and anti-government protests by Christians – in the west presumably. Fr Hogan hails from Ireland, which has had its own share of Church troubles and no longer wields the power it once did over Irish people and politics. Present day Russia, then, contrasted with a hypothetical future Ireland.
- But the malaise is more widespread, and to add a comparison of my own into the pot, Fr Hogan’s remark reminds me of something Cardinal George of Chicago said not so long ago, looking at the looming battle between an increasingly secular state and his own moral stances on such issues as abortion and same sex marriage:
I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.
- Finally, there’s Josh Shahryar’s contrast between a factual girl band named Pussy Riot and a counterfactual boy band called DickMob.
But that’s oblique to our narrative here…
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What sort of a graphic would allow us to rotate all these polarities in our minds?
One answer is a Sembl-type game board — see design below — but with concepts rather thyan objects in the “positions” on the board:
But I’m also after other possibilities here. What would our fine artists, engineers, architects, dancers, cartographers, logicians, musicians, data visualizers and computer scientists suggest?
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It would of course be nice if we could wrap this whole business of counterfactuals with a nice British cuppa tea, eh? Perhaps we can…
From a comment in the Guardian:
With the best will in the world I can’t see that if a bunch of noisy youngsters stood up in Westminster Abbey and screamed obscenities about the Queen to the accompaniment of electric guitars turned up to eleven, that the rest of the world would throw up its hands in horror if they were first stopped and then charged with an offence.
What’s that? We endured the Blitz, for goodness sake!
August 22nd, 2012 at 8:28 pm
Finally some sanity. I didn’t think Charles and Zen would fall for the Anti-Russia Lobby/Soros/Demintern machine line on this issue forever (for a description of the ‘Demintern’ aka the several hundred people employed either part time or full time to promote regime change in Russia, see this): http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5980#comment-87054
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Besides, the Catholic Church knows if the Sandra Flukes of Russia are lionized as heroes by the international press, an Obama 2nd term could mean open season on Catholic churches with every lunatic who wants to disrupt a Mass claiming they did so to protest the alignment of the Catholic Church with the GOP on abortion or the HHS mandate. It’s simply a mirror image of what’s happened in Russia and now Ukraine with FEMEN sawing down Orthodox crosses to victims of Stalinism with chainsaws.
Curiously enough, the ‘Streetwise Professor’ that comment was addressed to has stopped blogging about foreign policy (as it’s now admitted Al-Qaeda are the ‘best fighters’ among the Syrian opposition) and MF Global. Gee I wonder why.
August 22nd, 2012 at 8:30 pm
And on the topic of Catholic bishops and what they say, I was recently listening to EWTN (I am Orthodox not Roman Catholic, but it’s the only non-Protestant radio I can get) and I think it was Drew Marianni was quoting one of the U.S. bishops as saying, “My service to the Church will end dying in bed. My successor as bishop will die under persecution. His successor will die a martyr” talking about the U.S. With PR I see how anti-Christian activities can be dressed up as political protest with just a miniscule amount of spin. One wonders what more polished anti-Catholic and anti-Orthodox activists could do who don’t get denounced even by fellow Russian opposition members as freaks for publically having sex a few days before a baby is due and other antics.
August 22nd, 2012 at 9:02 pm
Hi, Mr X:
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It was Cardinal George who was being quoted on
ESPNEWTN — thanks for correx pointer, Mr X — and I quoted him (with slightly different wording) in my post above..
But I’m not really on one side or the other — let alone of one wing or another. I’m concerned with nuance and balance, contexts and ramifications, conflicts and dialogues and resolutions — and how we can possibly map these things or model them and explain them — and in this post I tried to turn my attention away from the Riot and towards that question, which applies to many things beyond the PR and Church-State relations in Russia and America.
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We live in a highly intricate world, and almost any complex problem we tackle with be imbricated with other problems, so that what works as a solution here topples something significant over there — in a sequence that is many fold more complicated than a single set of toppling dominoes.
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This is a domino effect in n dimensions, and we don’t yet know how to think about — or computer — anything of that kind.
August 22nd, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Agreed. And I think you meant to say EWTN not ESPN, unless Cardinal George was at a Notre Dame game.
August 22nd, 2012 at 10:07 pm
I also should point out here that I consider myself to be a moderate Russophile. Even as an Orthodox Christian while I’m prepared to accept that the Czar and his family died as confessing Orthodox I am wary of the tendency especially among the Russian church abroad to portray the Czar as a martyr in the fullest sense of the word and ignore the problems and atrocities committed by the White side that drove some to the Bolshevik banner.
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Just as the ROCOR and some holdouts to the patriarchal unity insist the Moscow church was compromised and remains so by the KGB (what Zen alluded to), there are also those in Russia who don’t understand the Cult of Nicholas II in exile even if they revere him as a victim of the Bolsheviks along with his innocent children. They’re well aware that the Czar’s mistakes and involvelment in WWI allowed the Communists to seize power.
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In the case of PR, I also agree with Zen that the authorities played into the hands of these women, not necessarily by charging them but by delaying the trial so long as to build more PR for PR and by not giving the women a better, more “restorative justice” sentence that Prison Fellowship and other Christian groups in the U.S. could approve of i.e. hundreds of hours of community service at an Orthodox orphanage or homeless shelter. If no provision exists for such sentences than I think the State Duma where the Orthodox Church has no small amount of influence and a few deputies could pass such a law for the next case.
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THAT would’ve helped to shame some of PR’s fan club a bit and remind people that the offense was not protesting Putin but interfering with the rights of the parishioners and clergy to peacefully worship guaranteed by the Russian Constitution and here in the U.S. by the 1st Amendment. And stiff fines and community service should be the Russian government’s MO going forward for this type of activity because if it’s completely unpunished even at the urging of the Church to forgive I think it will be open season on every Orthodox or even Catholic liturgy.
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Where I disagreed with Zen is that even he has to admit it’s painfully obvious D.C. and London are not happy with Moscow right now over the Syria situation and are looking for any pretext to wildly hype whatever opposition to Putin does exist, even if some members of the anti-Kremlin protests want NOTHING to do with Pussy Riot or at least have been quiet about their case. The Western media bureau chiefs I’ve spoken with in Moscow seemed largely burned out, unenthusiastic about their posting and perhaps even tired of churning out the same old evil Putin stories for their masters in D.C. and New York every week.
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As another commenter pointed out by asking ‘qui bono?’ Putin’s clique would like nothing better than to portrary all of the opposition as anti-Orthodox freaks with a fetish for public sex just a few days before birth (was that what the ‘natalist’ reference was to?). Finally as to the matter of Putin himself I think if he’d left office after just two terms his historic legacy would look fairly good, better than Pinochets and Lee Kuan Yew whom many on the Right still have a soft spot for. In fact I would argue if he hadn’t stayed Putin would be remembered as a liberalizing modernizer, by admittedly flawed if not dismally authoritarian historic Russian standards. Now that he’s stayed I’m afraid despite the firewalls Russia has built up against the krizis ravaging its top trade partners in Europe and soon to slow commodities imports by China Putin will receive some of the blame for economic shocks that are looming from Great Depression 2.0.
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Recall that not everything that outwardly appears authoritarian in Russia is truly that way (the ‘Stalin was a good manager’ textbooks being a perfect example, they were seized upon but were never broadly distributed or adopted due to outcry from many Orthodox conservatives). And not everything that is portrayed as liberalizing or trendy in the West is in fact an example of freedom rather than another step toward high-tech feudalism — whether you’re talking about the HHS mandate to which the opponents of are ‘warring against women’ (there’s Alinsky tactics if there ever were some), DHS snooping on domestic political opponents, TSA gropedowns, the droning of America, etc etc etc. That is in fact my own concern as an American who’s lived and worked in Russia in a nutshell — Russia is slowly, painfully becoming more free overall while the U.S. and UK if not most of the Anglosphere and Europe are going in the opposite direction.
August 22nd, 2012 at 10:10 pm
Even economically Russia is slowly getting less dependent on oil and arms exports, though no one disputes that a collapse of oil prices to early 09 ‘levels would be devastating to the Russian economy. They still have grain, timber, growing manufacturing (mostly outsourced from Germany/EU), an increasingly high tech workforce (including Russian-speaking workers and entrepreneurs who commute between Skolkovo and the Silicon Valley/Wadi aka the AMBAR Club guys) and an arms industry that thanks to quiet Israeli tech transfers and plenty of AK/ammo orders from the U.S. is about to revive in a big way.
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:30 pm
On the ESPN / EWTN matter, you’re right — I don’t watch much TV, but I like Scott Hahn’s work on liturgy as an eschatological and timeless (eternal) event, so I see some EWTN, & probably (being a bookish sort whose preferred game is the Glass Bead Game) little to no ESPN.
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Thanks for the correx.
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Now, to read your longer posts…
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:38 pm
Sorry for the lengthy comment, I just wanted to clarify that I am neither in the ‘Putin is Stalin redux’ nor the ‘Putin is awesome’ camps. He is simply a politician as well as a former security officer (though President George H.W. Bush was director of CIA and probably worked for the Agency well before that, and there’s circumstantial ‘aka legends/postings’ evidence Obama’s grandparents were also Agency, according to Angelo Codevilla). And thank you for attributing the quote I’d heard on EWTN to Cardinal George:
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:51 pm
Hello again:
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The nuances and balances are important, and ;length is no problem.
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I’ve added some para breaks in (our software needs tweaking in that regard) and tend to do so in any long comments I see — and I;d also note that if you write ‘blockquote” the software won’t recognize it as HTML, but I’ll edit it in HTML and fix it any time I see it.
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Thanks again, C
August 23rd, 2012 at 1:48 am
Sorry Charles, I tried using blockquote HTML and it came out a bit funny. Also paragraphs are tricky.
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I don’t have much else to say on this topic but did note that the comments from (presumably, Western Catholics or small c Anglican catholics) were overwhelmingly supportive of PR being prosecuted even if some called for clemency/community service sentences. The Vatican given its own history of involvement in postwar Italian and European politics (now declassified documents show involving some sums of money being transferred to the Christian Democrats by the CIA to defeat the Red Menace) is also loathe to comment.
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http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2012/08/20/catholics-should-be-wary-of-supporting-the-russian-orthodox-church-against-pussy-riot/
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And I write not so much to the benefit of you and Zen who are well aware of these historic factors, even where I disagree with Zen in the ‘KGB Church’ thing, there were plenty of martyrs too particularly during the 1920s and 30s which the modern Church honors today. I write for certain Zen readers who may be reading this who don’t know very much about Orthodoxy. Thus these readers may be tempted to go with the flow of a generally ignorant press often manipulated by either emotional Russophobes or more cynical operators who need Oceania to always be at (cold) war with Eurasia. The operators well, we know where they hang out — the Jamestown Foundation, the NED, NRI, the whole machine the former Serbia lobbyist and D.C. lawyer James George Jatras called ‘the Demintern’.
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As for the emotiona Russophobes they tend to fall into two camps: Westerners who’ve spent their whole careers either training to fight or fighting Moscow and hence they cannot give it up. Or Russians or former USSR nationalities either conditioned to despise their former ‘imperial master’ (whereas most in the Baltic or Ukrainian Diasporas that I’ve met like young Poles are more mellow), and a few 1st or 2nd generation Russian immigrants (Cathy Young comes to mind) who left at a very young age and have never gone back or wanted to go back and need to emotionally validate that choice by making things in Russia much worse than they are, turning the modest improvements in livelihoods and freedoms of the past several years into a neo-Soviet hell.
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That’s not to say the Russian authorities aren’t awfully tempted to shut down thef free Ru-net that has developed over the past decade. They still could do so. But if they did, more than likely it would be merely copying or even using technologies and techniques developed to suppress dissent on the Web in the West, whether blasphemy (PC laws/codes), fake copyright claims (SOPA/CISPA-like no judge, no jury), or government ‘outsourced’ denial of service attacks (some of the same people who denounced Assange and Anonymous on Twitter cheered the hack/takedown of Russia Today recently).
August 23rd, 2012 at 2:04 am
And to give you a more concrete example of why I’ve grown to despise the ‘Demintern’, besides the irony of the NRI/NED making possible a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt through the ballot box, I give you one Thor Halvorssen. He is a Venezuelan-born activist of Norwegian descent who came from a wealthy family that clashed with the prior authorities prior to Hugo Chavez winning power in Caracas. I happen to have met him once in a certain city — I won’t say where or any of his minders might figure out who Senor Equis is.
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Several years ago Thor’s mother was shot by Chavista thugs while beating pots and pans as is a common form of protest by women in Latin America. In every respect I understand why he has a burning desire to see Chavez overthrown and would cooperate with anyone who offers to help in that task. But this is where, as with the Cuban exiles who sought to topple Castro after the Bay of Pigs turning to the dark side, things go awry. Because Thor is now saying Pussy Riot are wonderful freedom fighters rather than cranks who infringed on someone else’s religious freedom to make a political statement. And more disconcertingly, he invites Ahmed Zakayev to the Oslo Freedom forum and praises him as a democrat.
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Mr. Zakayev is well known in Russia as a financier of Chechen terrorism, and there is far more published evidence linking his activities to the folks who attacked Beslan and the Moscow subway many times than there is tying Patriarch Kirill to ‘the KGB’. The fact that Wikipedia pages have jealous guardians and the ROC doesn’t mess with the Patriarch’s profile is rather beside the point. You cannot edit Walter Isaacson’s page to mention his speech to the Broadcasting Board of Governors in which he said ‘we must not be outcommunicated by our enemies’, only later clarifying when Russia Today reported it that he didn’t mean that Russia and China were enemies. Which from the context it seems clear he was saying. You also cannot touch Paul Goble’s Wikipedia page to make reference to any criticism of his work as citing the crankiest writers in Russia as someone in Estonia will immediately ‘protect’ his page. Just examples I am personally familiar with.
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Another example of Western funding for the ‘dark side’ is Finnish taxpayer funding for the Kavkaz Center website hosted outside of Russia (I checked it and the pro-Khodorkovsky sites from Moscow, just to see if they were blocked, they were not). Kavkaz Center routinely praises suicide bombers as martyrs and calls for the Republic of Ikcteria to be established. Imagine if the Russians were funding the Republic of Texas movement. Now I seriously doubt even 1 out of 1000 Finns has ever heard of the Kavkaz Center much less knows that their taxes modestly fund it. So we’re talking about a very small group of people who have the potential to hijack ‘democracy promotion’ in general toward darker, more Zigniew Brzezinski-type goals of promoting ethnic separatism and possibly the break up of the Russian Federation.
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All of which breeds Russian cynicism that for many in the West the Cold War never really ended and strengthens the hard liners who call the U.S./NATO enemy no. 1. If Zen is upset about Putin as President, he may want to consider what happens when Dmitry Olegivich Rogozin (who’s seen the NATO sausage get made up close) becomes the 1st Prime Minister soon and starts being groomed as Putin’s successor.
August 24th, 2012 at 12:57 am
Two more counterfactuals to consider.
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The first comes from my own post Pussy Riot VII: three “very different” characters:
The second is from a post by Ginny on ChicagoBoyz, The Pussy Riots Seen from Texas by an ROCOR Priest’s Wife, which I recommend for its insights into Orthodoxy in practice:
That last one is particularly powerful, I think.
August 24th, 2012 at 2:07 am
I should point out here that even some Russian Orthodox nationalists believe priests who crash sports cars ‘lent’ to them by parishioners while under heavy medication have brought reproach on the Church.
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http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2012/08/in-case-of-pussy-riot-everyone-is-wrong.html
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Here’s a link to Stanislav Mishin, who is best known for his essay in Pravda (the closest to the old Soviet paper being Komsomolskaya Pravda, not the website) being quoted by Glenn Beck in the essay ‘American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper’. That was of course not long before Beck left Fox under heavy pressure, perhaps due to the ongoing blackmail of Murdoch over the phone hacking scandal (you’d never thought you’d see gun control endorsed on FNC), or due to Beck’s probing into questions like whether there is any link between Soros funding Media Matters/Democrats and funding the Rose/Orange Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Clearly the higher ups at Fox didn’t want him to go there and discuss whether Soros was ever a conduit for CIA stuff. When I visited Bulgaria some years ago you didn’t have to walk very far in Sofia to find an NGO that started with Soros funding shortly before the Iron Curtain came down. Scouting juicy ex-Communist assets to acquire on the cheap in the post-Eastern Bloc privatization drive? And why does Oleg Deripaska hang out with David Rothschild if they’re just another old European family? As some Russians say, everyone has a kyrshe, and the money used to acquire ex-Soviet assets for kopeks on the dollar did not come from nowhere, even if Deripaska is not Lord Rothschild’s employee.
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On the question of wearing of fancy watches even if they were gifts from Orthodox lay people that could not be politely refused (think here of Judas saying the gift of nard could’ve been sold and the money given to the poor, not because his intentions were good but because he was a thief and traitor to Christ) — I suspect the watch was a gift to the Patriarch from Russian Railways CEO Vladimir Yakunin. Which means, in an irony lost on Kirrill’s critics, that the American taxpayer in funding RR’s shipments to Central Asia/Afghanistan may have partially paid for that watch. I do not think Kirill should have refused the gift but I also think he’s unlikely to wear such gifts again.
August 24th, 2012 at 2:14 am
The playing up of PR is also of one with the urge to deny that atrocities are being committed against Christians in Syria, apparently:
Whereby @ReginaldQuill cites the Brown Moses Blog, whose main purpose seems to be to rebut negative publicity about the Free Syrian Army, and where gunmen running around with (stolen) vestments can be explained as local militia playing dress up in cooperation with the local Church, not after looting it. Also trying to explain away use of POW as unwitting suicide bomber.
” data-mentions=”ReginaldQuill Alexblx cjchivers” data-name=”Brown Moses” data-screen-name=”Brown_Moses” data-user-id=”288755234″>
7h Brown Moses ?@Brown_Moses
@ReginaldQuill @Alexblx The use of a prisoner to drive the truck? @CJChivers wrote about it, he’s eminently reliable http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/syrian-rebels-coalesce-into-a-fighting-force.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1&ref=world …
<div class="simple-tweet tweet js-stream-tweet js-hover js-actionable-tweet js-profile-popup-actionable opened-tweet" data-item-id="238725255156338689" data-tweet-id="238725255156338689" data-is-reply-to="false" data-expanded-footer="
12:51 PM – 23 Aug 12
via web
· Details
” data-mentions=”Brown_Moses ReginaldQuill cjchivers” data-name=”Alexblx” data-screen-name=”Alexblx” data-user-id=”246993396″>
6h Alexblx ?@Alexblx
@Brown_Moses @ReginaldQuill @cjchivers Story re this Talwid unit using a shibiha arrested for murder & rape to drive a truck bomb prob true
12:51 PM – 23 Aug 12 via web · Details
August 24th, 2012 at 2:37 am
Beck isn’t the booger man he’s made out to be. He reminds me of Molder of the old X-Files program—he caught a glimpse of the corruption and felt compelled to squeal. I like him, as his rings true in some of his musing.
August 24th, 2012 at 3:47 am
“ike whether there is any link between Soros funding Media Matters/Democrats and funding the Rose/Orange Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.”
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I think any serious forensic audit would turn up dozens if not hundreds of links between George Soros and the color revolutions, though probably not all to the same degree. The blogger Pundita first came to my attention through her post Democracy Stage Show Kit on this subject.
August 24th, 2012 at 8:21 pm
Thanks for the link Zen.
August 25th, 2012 at 6:19 am
Hi Scott:
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I just wanted to note that on the topic of Mahdism, Beck has shown himself to be woefully misinformed. Indeed, he had an extended conversation with Joel Rosenberg in which he persisted in referring to “Twelvers” as though they (the “Twelvers”) were a sect of ultra-Mahdists who had been banned by Khomeini, rather than the major sect of Shi’ite Islam to which everyone from Khomeini himself to Khamenei and Sistani all belong…
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It was clear in context that he was talking about the Hojjatiyeh — but getting the two confused is a bit like mistaking the Lefebvrists for the Catholic Church. Unfortunately Rosenberg, who has written best-sellers on Mahdism (neat thrillers, but not works I’d look to for theological or political guidance), did nothing to correct him, and in fact seemed unclear on the matter himself.