MosNews reports that youth in St. Petersburg held a rally comparing Bush with Hitler. It was not, however, for the reasons that courageous Western youths often make the comparison–the stifling authoritarianism in the US that requires me to submit all I write to my GOP overlords for approval at risk of joining Democrats in the reeducation camps that dot the landscape, for example.
No, instead…
The protestors, members of a local branch of the United Socialistic Party of Russia and Congress of Socialist Youth, accuse the U.S. of supporting the so-called velvet revolutions in former Soviet republics.
They displayed journalists a portrait of the U.S. President George W. Bush with orange toilet paper tied to it. “It expresses our attitude towards the American president and his initiatives,” Vitaly Chernov, leader of the Congress of Socialist Youth, said.
“We express our protest against U.S. interference in Russian and CIS countries’ internal affairs and dispute ’pre-paid’ revolutions and encroachment on our country’s freedom,” Chernov went on.
I guess I understand the position. After all, this and this look exactly like this.
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Nathan Hamm – author of 2974 posts on Registan.net.
Nathan is the Founding Editor and Publisher of Registan.net, which he launched in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with private and government clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural and political factors shape risks and opportunities and how organizations can adjust their strategic and operational plans to account for these variables. Nathan is currently seeking research, analysis, and consulting opportunities. He can be contacted via Twitter or email.
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{ 3 comments }
i love russians, i really do, but i swear they have an inborn inability to even imagine that a) other peoples might not appreciate being cuddled under their benevolent, parental wings and b) not all other countries are out to get them.
i think i find them easy to love because they seem so much like us…
sorry but if you follow the political debate for example in Germany you see that criticzing capitalism is not a monopol of russia (DW is offical german gosudarstva telvision)
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1566615,00.html
Maybe you want to live in Abu-Ghureib or in a Guantanamo camp and i guess they are similar to Stalin’s worldfamous gulag, but please accept that there are reason to not like America…
so give me your explanation for the london bombings? Probably russian KGB hiding behind the El-Kaida….
I know there are reasons, but you’re walking a fine line there, bud.
What amuses me about this is that they’re taking a very shaky conspiracy theory that has had a good result–that of increased freedom–and equating it with what Hitler wrought. The Orange Revolution is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust or the destruction of Soviet cities?
But if you think Guantanamo and the Gulag are morally comparable, I can see why this would be shrugged off as normal.