Working class people at a spontaneous pro-Putin rally in Yekaterinburg, the “Russian Pittsburgh”, showing not only their support for the PM, but their opposition to the pro-Western suck-up managerial creeps who purport to speak for society.
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“Citizens, our voice is important!” (text on sign in foreground)
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Ever since the chaos of the Nasty Nineties, the working people of Russia have mistrusted the thin layer of pro-Western lickspittles who “speak” for Russia to the Western media. Click here for a western media report (AFP) on pro-Putin rallies. You see, “limousine liberal” poseurs like Serge Schmemann, Sophia Kishkovsky, Anya Schmemann, and Katrina vanden Heuvel only speak to a small circle of zapadnik pseudo-intellectuals and “biznessmen” (the word is a pejorative in Russian… normal people tend to spit after saying it). Look at how they cream their jeans over Gorbachyov! Let me tell you, Mikhail Sergeyevich is one of the most hated men in Russia… most ordinary people blame his dithering and indecision for the death of the USSR and the import of the most feral forms of Western capitalism.
Let me give you a small example. SVS hates the Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers and calls them “Fundamentalists” (always a term used by the overeducated and underinformed). Supposedly, they’re racists, homophobes, “traditionalists”, yadda, yadda, yadda. I’ll tell you why they hate them… they’re working class people who won’t be led about by phoney pseudo-intellectuals like John Behr, Paul von Meyendorff, and Patrick Henry Reardon. C’mon, such sorts imagine themselves to be modern Mahatma Gandhis, but they’re really the political and academic equivalent of Verka Serduchka (click here and here for two of his funny vids). As for the Banner-Bearers, their strongholds are gritty blue-collar suburbs like Lyubertsy (the famous rock band Lyube comes from there… here’s one of their songs (“KomBat” is a Russian military acronym for “Battalion Commander”)) and Bibirevo (in Moscow, the workers live in the outer ‘burbs, not the oligarchs), not the effete environs of the Vanil Restoran… where one can find Dickie Wood sipping a martini with his oligarch pals (as photos indicate). The people in the image above are of the same ilk. Working people don’t need “direction” from jumped-up fraudulent “middle class voices”. They can do their own thinking and come to their own conclusions, thank you very much, even if credentialised putzes in academe and the media think otherwise.
If you were to ask most working people, they want a society with Social Justice and Social Democracy (with a good dose of Socialism as part of the mixture). Yet, they also want a society where bureaucrats leave them alone and where John Law stays off their backs. That is, they’re NOT Neoliberal “conservatives”, yet, they’re not American-style “liberals” either. I’d say that working people want a society like the New Deal… where there’s a social safety net and social benefits to ensure a decent “floor” for living, where the government looks out for the “little guy”, but where criminals go to the slammer, and where the state leaves people free to pursue their private lives. That’s what most ordinary folks want… not the “freedom” to rape one’s fellow man for personal gain, or, for the “right” of corporations to have more rights than living-and-breathing people do.
The ordinary people of Russia are speaking… and they’re NOT saying what the NY Times, the Economist, CNN, and Fox News want you to hear. Look at the image… and be enlightened. “Citizens, our voice is important!” I’d say that’s true here, too… Barack Obama and Mitt Romney should heed it…
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Saturday 28 January 2012
Albany NY
