Is _Harperman_ to Stevie what _Pussy Riot_ was to Vlad?

Perhaps a living saint like Jean Vanier could genuinely feel a modicum of compassion for the venal and malevolent crew that is toiling to keep the Harper regime in power.

I do not.  In fact, I'm genuinely thrilled to gloat about the latest Harper government shit to hit the fan. 

An Ottawa federal scientist is being investigated for breaching the public service’s ethics code for writing and performing a highly political protest song to get rid of the Harper government.

Tony Turner, a scientist in habitat planning at Environment Canada, was recently sent home on leave with pay while the government investigates the making of Harperman, a music video posted on YouTube in early June that has attracted about 48,000 hits.

Mark Johnson, a spokesman for Environment Canada, said the department wouldn’t be commenting on the case because of “privacy concerns.” He said public servants agree to comply with the value and ethics code — which lays out expected behaviours — when they join the government regardless of their level or job.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents federal scientists, said the union was representing Turner. It said he was put on leave pending the outcome of the probe into allegations that he violated the ethics code by writing and performing a political protest song.

“We will stand up for its members who face the prospect of being disciplined for exercising their democratic rights as citizens. The Supreme Court of Canada has confirmed that public service workers, like all Canadian citizens, benefit from freedom of expression,” said PIPSC president Debi Daviau.

A disclosure.  I know Tony Turner, as a fellow congregant in the same community of faith.  He never speaks of his employment.  An avid singer and composer, he has worked with the congregation's youth in organizing hootenanny-style musical evenings.

Last June I posted and tweeted _Harperman_ with its exuberant cast of performers.

At the time, it did cross my mind that a humourless, vindictive prick like Stevie might use his regime's power to suppress the video.  And now we learn that Tony is being hounded through his employment.

_Harperman_ is trending today on Twitter. And @chris_sigurdson created this hilarious, brilliant meme.

We've produced many blogposts about _Pussy Riot_ here at DJ!  The parallels are clear: Harper, like Putin, is an authoritarian, ruthless, prevaricating leader who abuses his political power to stifle ideological dissidents.

In addition, Tony is a scientist. The Harper regime systematically suppresses research, muzzled government scientists, cut highly regarded programs and destroyed libraries.

No wonder the malignant narcissist who promised to destroy Canada is affronted by the words of _Harperman_.

*Mother* Russia and her Totalitarian Christian Patriarchy

From Putin and Kirill - the dogmatic duo that viciously punished Pussy Riot - more ideological crap.

Christians from Russia's Orthodox community are demanding that the country's Apple division remove the famous half-bitten apple logo from its products and replace it with a cross, because they find the apple image offensive to their beliefs.
In popular culture, an apple is often used to represent the fruit that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge when tempted by the devil, as found in Genesis 3 in the Bible – although the exact type of fruit is not mentioned in Scripture.
Still, conservative Christians in Russia have insisted that the logo should be removed and replaced with a cross, Xbitlabs.com reported from a translated article from Interfax news agency.
The Russian conservatives may get their way and force Apple to change its logo because of new laws being proposed in the country's parliament on blasphemy and insults targeting religious, spiritual, or national values. It is expected that President Vladimir Putin will back the laws, especially since the Russian Orthodox Church heavily supported him during his election campaign in 2012. Besides replacing the logo, conservatives may even stop Apple product sales in Russia if they manage to convict the company of committing anti-religious deeds.

From here.

In spite of Amnesty International's concerns for the safety of the Pussy Riot women condemned by Putin's puppet court, they have been sent to serve their sentences in two of the worst prisons in Russia. 

The stench of fundamentalist christian sharia is floating around the Kremlin.

Whether it is islamist misogyny or ultra-orthodox gynophobia, it always ends with violent and murderously vindinctive retaliation against women who won't do men's bidding.

What's new, Pussy Riot?

 
There's more than meets the (public) eye, it appears.

In 2007 I wrote about the social and political, pervasive and persistent, institutional oppression of women in Russia. The change in regime, from diluted Stalinist communism to criminal corporative and oligarchy-driven capitalism has not improved the living circumstances of women. It's the same-old same-old patriarchy, in a different guise.






It would seem gynophobia rules within organizations pledged to denouncing Putin's neo-totalitarianism. For example, Voina that spawned Pussy Riot.

This French abolitionist feminist organization is very critical of les rapports de force between the male and female artists that founded Voina. It deconstructs and savages its protest performances.

You can measure the degree of feminism of an action by how men react to it, and if men collectively cheer and celebrate it, then you can be pretty sure there’s something wrong about it, or that it doesn’t somehow support our liberation from men. And as far as I can recall, even the slutwalks didn’t get as much coverage or public appraisal. What was it that men liked so much about Pussy Riot?


Well, under closer inspection I discovered that the high level of coverage was related to – though indirectly – promoting men’s right to women’s sexual subordination and the pornification of our movement. The arrested women actually form part (and are victims of) a mixed anarchist group called “Voina” (meaning “war”), founded in 2007 by two men called Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaïev, who regularly engage the women in extreme and degrading women-hating pornography as part of their public “political stunts”. Some of Voina’s men have actually already been incarcerated in 2011 for hooliganism – which is punished for 7 years of prison in Russia, but their bail was paid for by an artist named “Banksy” four months after their imprisonment. (More information can be found here and here)

Included in their anti-government actions are a “public orgy” in the national museum of biology in a room full of stuffed bears, where several men anally penetrated their female partners in a position of submission, including one heavily pregnant women, as a metaphor to “bugger/fuck Medvedev”. “Medved” means “bear”, hence all the stuffed bears – this was meant to be symbolic, artistic and revolutionary according to the activists. Here the male anarchists literally used women as dead bodies or receptacles through which to make a political point to other men. Violating women as a means to offend other men is nothing else but an age-old patriarchal mechanism – behind which the intended target are us, for men to bond over our annihilation.

Another planned stunt in the name of “sexual freedom”, inspired by extreme forms of pornography such as zoophilia/ necrophilia, includes a member of Pussy Riot masturbating with a dead chicken in a supermarket under the watch and camera of the anarchist males, after which she inserts the dead chicken entirely into her vagina and hobbles with the chicken inside her out of the supermarket.

More about Voina, and its high-profile, confrontational media events from Libération (google translation provided).

Isn't it tediously predictable that the female members of Voina would be assigned submissive roles?

Think how much more visually transgressive the anti-Medvedev event would have been, had Voina women, equiped with strap-on godemichets, sodomized its men. A MASSIVE role reversal and gender fuck for misogynists. Signify THAT!

Unlikely it would happen though. It's evident that the weeny-waggers in Voina are controlling, macho chauvinists. They're unwilling to abandon their sexual fetishization of women - purportedly their equals - and their position of phallic privilege, particularly in their deliberate choice of agonic-imbued actions fuelling their campaign of provocations aimed at Putin and his male-dominated bureaucracy.

DJ! earlier posts about Pussy Riot, here and here. Perhaps the event staged in the Moscow cathedral was not only directed at Putin and Kirill, but also a statement of feminist revolt and revulsion against the Voina misogynists. I would hope so.

Weaseldicks Vladimir and Kirill silence dissidents.

They are trying to muzzle the members of Pussy Riot and their supporters. To no avail, as this statement from Yekaterina Samutsevich goes viral, alongside their protest video.

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to express my views about the causes of what has happened with us.

The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

Powerful, lucid, trenchant.

The Putin-controlled court may have sentenced the trio to prison for their challenge to his glorious national immanence, but the international media winners of this confrontation are clearly the women. Other dissidents, as well as those opposed to Putin's totalitarianism, are the windfall beneficiaries.

The Putin system has made a PR catastrophe out of a situation that could have been easily contained with an administrative fine for a public order offence. Its actions have also revealed its clear desire to align itself closely with the Orthodox Church as a source of political support. The visible price of this policy has been the fusion of the Church’s principles and values with the “legal” process in the trial of the Pussy Riot activists.
The result has been to sow divisions within the ruling elite about how to handle the case and, at the same time, to create new dividing lines in society, including among Orthodox believers, about the type of justice that should be applied to Pussy Riot and the form it should take.

The authorities have also gifted a rallying point to the nascent and amorphous political opposition. Paradoxically, this comes at a time when opposition forces are struggling to rekindle the protest mood that swept Moscow in March during the run-up to the presidential election.

How is it that the Putin system was able to produce these outcomes that run counter to its interests of dividing the opposition and demonstrating the futility of protest?

There is more. Unlike the New York Times which dismissed the Pussy Riot's deliberately engineered protest as a "stunt", other media have considered the dissidence, the trial and the outcome.

In a chilling passage of the verdict read aloud in a Moscow court today, three members of punk group Pussy Riot were said to be "motivated by religious enmity and hatred". A reasonable response might be that those who have locked up these young singers for the crime of blasphemy in Vladimir Putin's Russia were motivated by religious bigotry and fear.

Far from being hooligans, as the prosecution alleged, the three feminists were unconventional campaigners whose anti-Putin songs in a Moscow Cathedral achieved a much vaster audience than originally anticipated.

The Kremlin's foolish over-reaction, which included keeping the band members in custody and away from their families for five months, led it to a lose-lose situation today. Hand down the full sentence of seven years and incur the wrath of international condemnation; let them go free and appear weak.

No open society can brutally suppress free expression in the name of preserving other people from offence. If such suppression becomes the norm, it will inevitably be mobilised at the convenience of those in power. So it is, by all accounts, in Moscow now. The scenes outside the courtroom today, which included the bundling into a police van of former chess champion Garry Kasparov, suggest the country's slide into autocracy is, if anything, accelerating.

The Pussy Riot saga (DJ! original post last month).

It appears Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the three women sentenced today, has a Canadian connection through her husband.