#denouncing other russians

[tomorrowusa]

Policing in Russia has not exactly been great – and it's getting worse.

Russia has one of the largest police forces in the world, employing over 900,000 officers to serve a population of 146 million, according to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. It has nearly 630 officers per 100,000 people - more than double the US or the UK. But in August, Interior Ministry Chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev said the country had a "critical" shortage of police officers, which could affect crime rates. How can that be the case, given the sheer number of officers?

In real terms, Putin has defunded the police. You get what you pay for.

"They haven't adjusted the salary at all," a former officer from Rostov, in southwest Russia, said. "After inflation and the new prices, it's not enough." He quit to become a taxi driver. His friend, who was also a police officer, is now a courier. Both of them earn twice as much as they did as police officers. "I reached the rank of major (the equivalent to a sergeant in the UK). But still a person working at a supermarket earned more than me - hardly dangerous work. Only an idiot would join the police now," the former officer from Rostov said. [ ... ] As the number of officers drops, the pressures on those who remain increase. Former officers have told the BBC this is leading to corruption. "Officers are beating confessions out of people, inflating arrest quotas, we're seeing this all the time," says a police major from the Russian city of Tomsk. "It's only going to get worse. There will be falsification of evidence, targeted beatings, there just isn't going to be time to investigate anything properly. "You've got a lead and you need to chase it? Much simpler to drag the first suspect back to the station and beat him up, so he takes the blame."

The war in Ukraine, of course, is making things worse.

Initially, the war convinced some officers to stay in the force. Russian police officers are exempt from being called up for military duty, so some officers who were on the verge of resigning when Russia invaded Ukraine told us they kept their jobs to avoid fighting. [ ... ] But as the war rumbles on, police numbers are dwindling. The force cannot fill existing gaps - let alone recruit the 40,000 extra personnel that the Interior Ministry says is needed in Donetsk and Luhansk, areas of Ukraine that Russia partly occupies.

Russia needs more police for the areas it illegally annexed in Ukraine.

Russia predicts it will need another 42,000 officers by 2026 if it occupies further territories. For serving police officers, having an opinion about the war is simply not allowed. They are not even allowed to call it a war. "Officers must keep their mouths shut," one detective says. "We can't have personal views about the 'special military operation' - or they'll fire us." [ ... ] Interior Ministry officials from the three Russian cities of Tomsk, Yekaterinburg and Yaroslavl claim they now spend most of their time investigating and revising "endless charges against people discrediting the army". "People are always looking for an excuse to denounce someone," a former major from Tomsk says. "There's nobody around... Everyone's gone to check on some grandma who saw a curtain that looked like the Ukrainian flag.

It's like the Stalin era in Russia – people are denouncing each other for fun and profit. Every time somebody complains to the police about real or (more likely) imagined pro-Ukraine sympathies or criticism of the war, the cops need to open a new investigation which keeps them from doing more typical police work.

The police situation is yet another way Russia is rotting from within.

[sixty-silver-wishes]

Tumblr's Guide to Shostakovich- Asides- Ivan Sollertinsky

So, in addition to my weekly posting for Tumblr's Guide to Shostakovich, I decided I want to do a series of related "asides" posts. These will be posted irregularly (as opposed to weekly) and cover aspects related to Shostakovich that don't fit neatly into one post focusing on one part of the chronological timeline. In this case, I want to talk about Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, specifically his role in Shostakovich's life and music. Sources I'll be citing include Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Shostakovich's own letters to Sollertinsky and Isaak Glikman, Dmitri and Lyudmila Sollertinsky's Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, Pamyati I.I. Sollertinskogo (Memories of I.I. Sollertinsky), and I.I. Sollertinsky: Zhizn' i naslediye (Life and Legacy), the latter two both by Lyudmila Mikheeva. Photo citations include the DSCH Publishers website and the DSCH Journal photo archive.

(Dmitri Shostakovich and Ivan Sollertinsky, Novosibirsk, 1942.)

Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky was born in Vitebsk, present-day Belarus, on December 3, 1902. He was a polymath, excelling in humanities fields, including linguistics, philosophy, musicology, history, and literature- particularly that of Cervantes. He specialized in Romano-Germanic philology, and spoke a wide range of languages; sources I've read vary from claiming he spoke anywhere from 25 to 30. (He specialized in Romance languages, but I can also confirm from sources that he studied Hungarian, Japanese, Greek, Sanskrit, and German. I've heard it said that he kept a diary in ancient Portuguese so nobody could read it, but I haven't seen this verified.) He had a ferocious wit, which he used to uplift friends and skewer enemies (there's a hilarious anecdote where he once saddled a critic opposed to Shostakovich with the nickname "Carbohydrates" for life), and worked as a professor, orator, and artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic. And yet, this impossibly bright star would burn out all too soon at the age of 41 due to a terminal heart condition, leaving his closest friend devastated- and inspired.

Dmitri Shostakovich first met Ivan Sollertinsky in 1921, when they were both students at the Petrograd Conservatory. While Shostakovich claimed he was at first too intimidated to talk to Sollertinsky the first time he saw him, when they met again in 1926, Shostakovich was waiting outside a classroom to take an exam on Marxism-Leninism. When Sollertinsky walked out of the classroom, Shostakovich "plucked up courage and asked him":

"Excuse me, was the exam very difficult?"

"No, not at all," [Sollertinsky] replied.

"What did they ask you?"

"Oh, the easiest things: the growth of materialism in Ancient Greece; Sophocles' poetry as an expression of materialist tendencies; English seventeenth-century philosophers and something else besides!"

Shostakovich then goes on to state he was "filled with horror at his reply."

(...Yes, these are real people we are talking about. According to Shostakovich, this actually happened. And I love it.)

Later, in 1927, they met at a gathering hosted by the conductor Nikolai Malko, where they hit it off immediately. Malko recalls that they "became fast friends, and one could not seem to do without the other." He further characterizes their friendship:

When Shostakovich and Sollertinsky were together, they were always fooling. Jokes ran riot and each tried to outdo the other in making witty remarks. It was a veritable competition. Each had a sharply developed sense of humour; both were bright and observant; they knew a great deal; and their tongues were itching to say something funny or sarcastic, no matter whom it might concern. They were each quite indiscriminate when it came to being humorous, and if they were too young to be bitter they could still come mercilessly close to being malicious.

(Shostakovich and Sollertinsky, 1920s.)

Sollertinsky and Shostakovich appeared to be perfect complements of each other- one brash, extroverted, and confident, and the other shy, withdrawn, and insecure, but each sharing a sarcastic sense of humour and love for the arts that would carry throughout their friendship. In Shostakovich's letters to Sollertinsky, we see him confide in him time and again, in everything from drama with women to fears in the midst of the worsening political atmosphere. When worrying about the reception of his ballet "The Limpid Stream," Shostakovich writes in a letter from October 31, 1935:

I strongly believe that in this case, you won't leave me in an extremely difficult moment of my life, and that the only person whose friendship I cherish, the apple of my eye, is you. So, write to me, for god's sake.

And, in a moment of frustration from August 2, 1930 Shostakovich writes:

"You have a rich personal life. And mine, generally, is shit."

(Famous composers, am I right? They're just like us.)

In addition to a friendship that would last until Sollertinsky's untimely death, he and Shostakovich would influence each other greatly in the artistic spheres as well. Sollertinsky dedicated himself primarily to musicology after meeting Shostakovich (his first review of an opera, Krenek's Johnny, appeared in 1928, after they had become friends), and in turn, Sollertinsky introduced Shostakovich to one of his greatest musical inspirations- the works of Gustav Mahler. Much is to be said about Mahler's influence on Shostakovich's music, to the point where it deserves its own post, but it goes without saying that without Sollertinsky, Shostakovich's entire body of work would have turned out much differently. Starting with the Fourth Symphony (1936), Shostakovich's symphonic works began to take on a heavily Mahlerian angle (in addition to many vocal works), becoming a permanent fixture in his distinct musical style.

(Colorized image of Shostakovich, his wife Nina Vasiliyevna, and Sollertinsky, 1932. One of my absolute favourite photographs.)

Shostakovich's letters to Sollertinsky, from the 20s to early 30s, are characterized by puns and literary references, snide remarks, nervous confessions, and vivid descriptions of the locations he traveled to during his early career. However, as the 1930s progressed and censorship in the arts became more restrictive, signs of worry begin to take shape in the letters. This would all culminate in January 1936, with the denunciation of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in Pravda. I'll go further into detail about the opera and its denunciation in a later post, but for now, I want to focus on its impact on Shostakovich and Sollertinsky's friendship.

As one of the first world-famous composers whose career began in the then-relatively young Soviet Union, targeting Shostakovich proved to be a calculated move. Due to his prominence and the acclaim he had previously received, both in the USSR and abroad, the portrayal of Shostakovich as a "formalist" meant someone had to take the blame for his supposed "corruption" towards western-inspired music and the avant-garde. The blame fell upon Sollertinsky, who was lambasted in the papers as the "troubadour of formalism." To make matters worse, Sollertinsky had long showed a fascination with western European composers, such as the Second Viennese School, and had previously praised Lady Macbeth in a review as the "future of Soviet art." An article in Pravda from February 14, 1936, about less than a month after the denunciation, stated:

“Shostakovich should in his creation entirely free himself from the disastrous influence of the ideologists of the ‘Leftist Ugliness’ type of Sollertinsky and take the road of truthful Soviet art, to advance in a new direction, leading to the sunny kingdom of Soviet art.”

Critics who had initially praised Lady Macbeth had begun to retract their positive reviews in favour of negative ones, and a vote was cast on a resolution on whether or not to condemn the opera.  According to Isaak Glikman, their mutual friend, Shostakovich spoke with Sollertinsky, who was conflicted on what to do, beforehand. Although Sollertinsky didn’t want to condemn his friend, he supposedly told Glikman that Shostakovich had given him permission to “vote for any resolution whatsoever, in case of dire necessity.” When denouncing the opera (supposedly with Shostakovich's permission), Sollertinsky had commented that in order to develop a “true connection” to the Soviet public, Shostakovich would have to develop a “true heroic pathos, and that Shostakovich would ultimately succeed “in the genre of Soviet musical tragedy and the Soviet heroic symphony.” After Shostakovich’s second denunciation in Pravda of his ballet, “The Limpid Stream,” and the withdrawal of his Fourth Symphony- arguably the most Mahlerian of his middle period works- the Fifth Symphony, easily interpreted to follow these criteria, had indeed restored him to favour. Sollertinsky’s reputation, too, was saved.

(Aleksandr Gauk, Shostakovich, Sollertinsky, Nina Vasiliyevna, and an unidentified person, 1930s.)

In 1938, Sollertinsky contracted diphtheria. Ever tireless, he continued to dictate opera reviews and even learned Hungarian while hospitalized, although he became paralyzed in the limbs and jaw. Shostakovich wrote to him often with touching concern:

Dear friend, It's terribly sad that you are spending your much needed and precious vacation still sick. In any case, when you get better, you need to get plenty of rest.

By the time the letters from this period break off, it's because Shostakovich was able to visit Sollertinsky in the hospital, which he did whenever he was able.

While Sollertinsky was able to recover, their friendship would face yet another test in 1941, due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union during WWII. Sollertinsky evacuated with the Leningrad Philharmonic to Novosibirsk, while Shostakovich chose to stay in Leningrad. However, as the city fell under siege, due to the safety of his family, Shostakovich fled with Nina Vasiliyevna and their two children to Kubiyshev (now Samara) that October, having spent about a month in Leningrad during what would be one of the deadliest sieges of the 20th century. It was in Kubiyshev that Shostakovich would finish his famous Seventh Symphony (which, again, will receive its own post), before eventually moving permanently to Moscow (although he still taught for a time at the Leningrad Conservatory).

During this period of evacuation, Shostakovich's letters to Sollertinsky are heartbreaking. We not only see him pining for his friend, but worrying for his safety and that of his family, including his mother and sister, who were still in Leningrad at the time. Still, he reminisces of their time together before the war, with the hope that he and Sollertinsky would be back home soon. In a letter from 12th February, 1942:

Dear friend, I painfully miss you, and believe that soon, we will be home, and will visit each other and chat about this and that over a bottle of good Kakhetian no. 8 [a Georgian wine]. Take care of yourself and your health. Remember: You have children for which you are responsible, and friends, and among them is D. Shostakovich.

In 1943, Sollertinsky arrived in Moscow, where Shostakovich was living at the time, to give a speech on the anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death. At long last, they finally were able to see each other, and anticipated that soon enough, their long period of separation, made bearable only by letters and phone calls, would come to an end: Sollertinsky, living in Novosibirsk, was planning to return to Moscow in February of 1944 to teach a course on music history at the conservatory. When he and Shostakovich said their goodbyes at the train station, neither of them knew it would be the last time they saw one another.

Sollertinsky's heart condition, coupled with his tendency to overwork, poor living conditions, heavy drinking, and added stress, often left him fatigued. On the night of February 10th, 1944, due to a sudden bout of exhaustion, he stayed the night with conductor Andrei Porfiriyevich Novikov, where he died unexpectedly in his sleep. His last public appearance had been the speeches he gave on February 5th and 6th of that year- the opening comments for the Novosibirsk premiere of Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony.  A remarkable amount of telegrams and letters from Shostakovich to Sollertinsky survive and have been published in Russian. Some seem hardly significant; others carry great historical importance. Sollertinsky took many of them with him from Leningrad during evacuation; those letters were considered among his most prized possession. His son, Dmitri Ivanovich Sollertinsky, was named after Shostakovich- breaking a long tradition in his family in which the first son was always named "Ivan."

As for Shostakovich, we have letters to multiple correspondents detailing just how distraught he was for months after receiving news via telegram of Sollertinsky’s death. To Sollertinsky’s widow, Olga Pantaleimonovna Sollertinskaya, he wrote:

“It will be unbelievably hard for me to live without him. [...] In the last few years I rarely saw him or spoke with him. But I was always cheered by the knowledge that Ivan Ivanovich, with his remarkable mind, clear vision, and inexhaustible energy, was alive somewhere. [...] Ivan lvanovich and I talked a great deal about everything. We talked about that inevitable thing waiting for us at the end of our lives- about death. Both of us feared and dreaded it. We loved life, but knew that sooner or later we would have to leave it. Ivan lvanovich has gone from us terribly young. Death has wrenched him from life. He is dead, I am still here. When we spoke of death we always remembered the people near and dear to us. We thought anxiously about our children, wives, and parents, and always solemnly promised each other that in the event of one of us dying, the other would use every possible means to help the bereaved family. ”

Shostakovich stuck to his word, making arrangements for Sollertinsky's surviving family to return to Leningrad after it had been liberated, going through the painstaking process of acquiring the necessary documentation and allowing them to stay at his home in Moscow in the meantime.

 In 1969, he would write to Glikman:

“On 10 February, I remembered Ivan Ivanovich. It is incredible to think that twenty-five years have passed since he died.” 

Furthermore, Shostakovich recalled:

Ivan Ivanovich loved different dates. So he planned to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of our acquaintance in the winter of 1941. This celebration did not take place, since the war had ruined us. When in our last meetings, we planned the 25th anniversary of our friendship for 1947. But in 1947, I will only remember that twenty-five years ago life sent me a wonderful friend, and that in 1944 death took him away from me.

And yet, there was still one more tribute left to make. Shostakovich had already dedicated a movement of a work to Sollertinsky- a setting of Pasternak's translation of Shakespeare Sonnet no. 66 in Six Romances on Verses by English Poets- but after Sollertinsky's death, he completed his Piano Trio no. 2 in August of 1944, a work that had taken months to finish. While he had started the work before Sollertinsky's death and mentions it in a letter to Glikman as early as December 1943, it would since bear a dedication to Sollertinsky's memory.

The second movement of the Trio is a dizzying, electrifying Allegro con Brio- and probably my favourite work of classical music, ever. Sollertinsky's sister, Ekaterina Ivanovna, was said to have considered it a "musical portrait" of her illustrious brother in life, with its fast-paced, jubilant air. The call-and-response between the strings and piano seem, to me, to reflect one of Shostakovich and Sollertinsky's early Leningrad dialogues- the image of two friends out of breath with laughter, each talking over each other as they deliver witty comebacks and jokes that only they understand. For the few minutes that this movement lasts, it is as if Shostakovich and Sollertinsky are revived, if not for just a moment, the unbreakable bond that defied decades of hardship now immortalized in the classical canon, forever carefree and happy in each other's company.

And then comes the pause.

It is this silence between the Allegro con Brio and Adagio that is the loudest, most powerful moment of this piece as eight solemn chords snap us into reality, like the sudden revelation of Sollertinsky's death- as Shostakovich said, "he is dead; I am still here." These eight chords form the base of a passacaglia, the piano cycling through them and nearly devoid of dynamics as the cello and violin sing a lugubrious dirge. The piano- Shostakovich's instrument- seems to mirror the stasis of grief, the inability to move on when paralyzed by loss.

The final movement of the Trio, the Allegretto, seems to speak to a wider form of grief. By 1943, the Soviet Union was receiving news of the Holocaust, and the Allegretto of Shostakovich's Trio no. 2 is among the first instances of Klezmer-inspired themes in Shostakovich's work (not counting the opera Rothschild's Violin, a work by his student Veniamin Fleischman that he finished after Fleischman's death in the war). The idea that the fourth movement is a commentary on the Holocaust is the most popular interpretation for Shostakovich's use of themes inspired by Jewish folk music, but other interpretations include a tribute to Fleischman (who was Jewish), or a nod to Sollertinsky's birthplace of Vitebsk, which had a substantial Jewish population until the Vitebsk Ghetto Massacre in 1941 by the Nazis. (While I haven't read anything confirming that Sollertinsky was ethnically Jewish, the painter Marc Chagall and pianist Maria Yudina, both carrying associations with Vitebsk, were.) Whether the grief expressed here was personal or referencing the larger global situation, the quotation of the fourth movement's ostinato followed by the final E major chords suggest a peaceful resolution after a long movement of aggressive tumult and grotesque rage.

Shostakovich would continue to grieve and remember Sollertinsky, but the ending of this piece- composed over the course of about nine months- perhaps implied closure and healing. In the following years, the war would end, Shostakovich would form new connections (such as a lasting friendship with the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg), and, as he had done through tragedy before, would continue to write music. Sollertinsky was gone, but left a mark on Shostakovich's life and work, his memory carried in every musical joke and Mahlerian quotation that found its way onto the page.

(Shostakovich at Sollertinsky's grave, 1961, Novosibirsk.)

(By the way, check the tags. ;) )

[butchstalinist]

—

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 11 June 1943, Karl Gorath, a 20-year-old gay German nurse, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was first arrested for homosexuality after being denounced by a jealous lover in 1939, and given a prison sentence. After his release he was sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he was made to wear a pink triangle denoting LGBT+ prisoners. Working in the camp's health department, with some comrades he attempted to smuggle food to Russian prisoners, who were being starved to death. Their plan was discovered by the Nazis, who then sentenced Gorath to transportation to Auschwitz as a criminal and political prisoner, to be denoted with a red triangle. Despite contracting dysentery, he managed to survive the war and was released in 1945. But within a few months he was arrested again by West German authorities, who had kept the homophobic Nazi laws intact. His case was overseen by the same judge, who greeted him with the words "You are already here again!" and gave him the maximum sentence of five years. His lawyer requested that his time served in the concentration camps be counted as part of this, but his request was denied. After his release, because of his convictions he was unable to get a job for a decade. And when the time came to draw his pension, his years interned in concentration camps were deducted from his allowance, as were his unemployment payments. He died in 2003, having never received compensation for his treatment, unlike some other Holocaust survivors. He told his story in a 2000 documentary, "Paragraph 175", named after the relevant section of the penal code. This Pride month, check out our podcast series about LGBTQ history: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/lgbtq/ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=642169591289593&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[mariacallous]

The target is you, voter. Russia, China, Iran, and other bad actors sought to interfere in the run-up to today’s US elections, according to research by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), which has been monitoring online trends along with statements by governments, private companies, and civil society in its Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker. As DFRLab experts detail below, this year’s malign efforts in many ways surpass previous influence campaigns in sophistication and scope, if not in impact—and they are expected to continue well after the polls close.

Tipping the scale

“By sheer volume, foreign interference in the 2024 US election has already surpassed the scale of adversarial operations in both 2016 and 2020,” Emerson says.

Dina notes that each US adversary played to its strengths. For example, Iran and China “attempted to breach presidential campaigns in hack-and-leak operations that raise concerns about their cyber capabilities during and after the elections,” she tells us.

At the same time, the United States is more prepared than it was in previous election cycles. Russian efforts in 2016 “made foreign interference a vivid fear for millions of Americans,” Emerson notes. “Eight years later, the US government is denouncing and neutralizing these efforts, sometimes in real time.”

In fact, Graham tells us, “the combined actions by the US departments of Justice, Treasury, and State against two known Russian interference efforts was the largest proactive government action taken against election influence efforts before an election.”

Doppelgangers and down-ballot races

US officials this week called Russia “the most active threat,” and it’s easy to understand why. Emerson notes Russia’s “ten-million-dollar effort to infiltrate and influence far-right American media,” alongside the “Doppelganger” network, which has spread “tens of thousands of false stories and staged videos intended to undermine election integrity in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.” Increasingly desperate, Russian actors have even sought to shut down individual polling places with fake bomb threats, he adds.

Meanwhile, China has focused on “down-ballot races instead of the presidential election to target specific anti-China politicians,” Kenton explains. Using fake American personas and generative artificial intelligence, China-linked operations have appeared across more than fifty platforms. Perhaps surprisingly, Kenton adds, “attributed campaigns appeared sparingly” on the Chinese-owned platform TikTok and far more often on Facebook and X.

Faith, fakes, and falsehoods 

“The primary aim is to erode Americans’ faith in democratic institutions and heighten chaos and social division,” Kenton explains, and thus to undermine the ability of the US government to function so it will have less bandwidth to contain adversarial powers.

“Some of the fake and already debunked narratives and footage circulating before the elections will likely continue to be amplified by foreign threat actors well after November 5,” Dina predicts. Expect to see activity around the submission of certificates of ascertainment on December 11, the December 17 meeting of the electors to formally cast their votes, and through inauguration day on January 20.

And in a post-election period where the results will likely be contested, Graham thinks there’s a “high likelihood” that foreign actors will “cross a serious threshold” from pre-election attempts to broadly influence American public opinion in service of their geopolitical interests to “direct interference” by trying to mobilize Americans to engage in protests or even violence.

Nevertheless, Graham points out that the high volume of foreign-influence efforts observed during this year’s election cycle so far does not appear to have had a significant impact in terms of changing Americans’ opinions or behavior.  

The consequences of foreign disinformation, Emerson adds, should be assessed against “the far more viral, sophisticated, and dangerous election-day falsehoods that Americans spread among themselves.”

[txttletale]

yo i really like your content and agree with you on most things but i don't really know what you mean with that last one. my friends from ukraine both oppose the war's existence but would rather not be violently annexed by an imperial power so of course they, with little other options, support resistance efforts.

it's really hard for me to understand what you're going for because if ukraine stopped fighting back it'd just get taken by russia. maybe i just have bad brainfog, but it's hard to understand what you're asking us to do and believe. should we try and take out both the russian and american imperialist powers at once? but that's unrealistic and unlikely to happen in the near future, no matter how much i personally support it, which i do.

i guess my question is, what's an actual realistic thing we should support in the meantime? we can't just pretend that somehow revolution will take out both american and russian imperialist interests immediately, so. it's like, well yes we should have a better world playing by better rules, but how do we do the right thing when we are bound by the rules now.

i have friends who have family who died in the war, and sometimes it feels like bloggers i otherwise trust say things that sound suspiciously close to "ukraine should stop this pointless fighting and give up." which i am aware isn't your intention, and i want to be an effective anti imperialist and have the correct and informed opinions on stuff like this, but i am having a very hard time understanding what you are trying to say.

i really promise i am not a concern troll or nato apologist or anything, i just also have personally been struggling with what to support and how to save innocent lives. i hate war and i wish we could magically create a situation in which ukraine didn't have to rely on horrible things for self defense. i just don't know what to do or believe because my friends would rightfully hate me if i said ukraine should stop defending itself.

i mean, first off: don't worry, you obviously don't sound like a concern troll or a nato apologist. this is an eminently reasonable question -- healed's law strikes again. & i certainly don't blame you for worrying that marxist-leninists are apologists for russian imperialism, because unfortunately many self-proclaimed marxist-leninists have been deceived by the frankly paper-thin figleaf of 'denazificaiton'--even as putin, puppet of the russian bourgeoisie denounces lenin & the bolsheviks & the soviet union with every speech he makes. it sucks!

first of all, i think the important thing here and the central point of disagreement is on what constitutes 'ukraine'. liberals and nationalists alike consider nations to be fundamentally one whole: that all the people of ukraine together constitute 'ukraine', and so 'ukraine as a whole' has consistent interests, and acts as a one--the ukrainian government represents this unitary ukraine armed forces of ukraine fight for this ukraine.

but the marxist analysis of the nation is completely different. from the marxist perspective, the nation is split across class lines. ukraine is not 'ukrainians', but in fact 'the ukrainian working class' and 'the ukrainian bourgeoisie'. now, of course, there are further contradictions even within these classes--there is a faction of pro-Russian bourgeoisie, and a faction of pro-Western bourgeoisie. but remember, we must apply the same analysis to these countries too: the 'pro-Russian' Ukrainian bourgeoisie do not wish to submit to Russia's working class, but to their oligarchs. the 'pro-Western' Ukrainian bourgeoisie are not opening the nation's economy to the European and USAmerican working class, but to their bourgeoisie. so the bourgeoisie are, in every case--even when split among themselves--only ever in league with other sectors of the bourgeoisie.

so, through this lens, how do we see the war in ukraine? well, i think that the union of communists in ukraine must have a far better handle on this than i, because they're living through it: so i will quote their analysis and then elucidate on it in relation to your question.

The puppet regime in Ukraine participates in this war in the interests of Ukrainian oligarchs, who have made themselves completely dependent on big capital of the West and NATO, who have turned the Ukrainian army into an advanced military unit of the Western bourgeoisie. The war is not about "the Ukrainian nation," not about "the Ukrainian language and culture," not even about "European values". It is a war for the united interests of the Ukrainian and international bourgeoisie, which coincide in their desire to destroy the economic and political power of the Russian bourgeoisie. No interests or rights of Ukrainian workers are protected by this war. Both Ukrainian and Russian workers in this war have only the right and obligation to go to the front and die so that one group of the world bourgeoisie defeats the other and gains more monopoly rights to oppress the workers, both in their own country and in the defeated countries. […] For the working class of Ukraine, this imperialist war has the most tragic consequences. It lies on the shoulders of the workers the role of "cannon fodder" and the inevitable deaths in the fighting, mass impoverishment, unemployment, complete restrictions of rights and freedoms for the sake of protecting the interests of the Ukrainian big bourgeoisie, the oligarchs and the interests of the Western bourgeoisie in destroying and robbing Russia and seizing its natural resources. This will inevitably be accompanied by the destruction and seizure of Ukrainian industrial and natural resources, including in the case of Russia's success. The same fate awaits the vast majority of the Ukrainian petty bourgeoisie. The big bourgeoisie has already bought its children out of the war and taken them abroad, just as it took its capitals out. But that is not the main point: the big bourgeoisie is profiting from the war under Zelensky, just as it profited under Poroshenko: stealing finances, making money from reselling weapons, supplying the army with uniforms, food, repair work, humanitarian aid, etc. In war the bourgeoisie makes billions of dollars, while the mobilized people have to be equipped and fed by relatives, friends and volunteers – which is clearly not enough. As in peacetime, but even more brazenly, the bourgeoisie is getting rich off the bones of the working class!

—Union of Communists of Ukraine, On the War and the tasks of the working class

that is to say--the russian army, which is funded by the russian bourgeoisie, is fighting to establish the exclusive right of that russian bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the ukrainian people. meanwhile, the ukrainian army, funded by the ukrainian and western bourgeoisie more broadly, are fighting to maintain the exclusive right of the ukrainian and western to oppress and exploit the ukrainian people. already, ukrainian public assets are being put up in a fire sale for western buyers--(and of course, should russia's offensive have been as succesful as they'd hoped and this war already over, they'd be doing much the same thing for the benefit of buyers among the russian bourgeoisie).

this is what is meant by 'inter-imperialist' war. it's easy to say 'well, the ukrainian army isn't imperialist--it's fighting for the nation's independence!' but in terms of real economic interests there is no 'the nation'. the ukrainian army isn't fighting for the ukrainian working class (which of course includes themselves!)--the government that pays them and the states that equip them wouldn't do so out of any sense of interest in the well-being of the working class. we can see this clearly as the western imperialist powers now start to equip the ukrainian army with depleted uranium shells, which will poison swathes of ukrainian land and cause sickness and death among the people this army purports to be fighting for. the goal of the ukrainian state and army isn't to protect any working class people--only to protect its total right to the economic exploitation of those people.

it's this that the ukrainian state is afraid of when it fights not to cede territory, not the (surely real, to be clear!) brutality from the russian state that would face the inhabitants of any such ceded territory. in fact, funding nazi groups that operated in those areas before the war and will surely continue to operate afterwards, the ukrainian govenrment makes it clear that brutality against the inhabitants of its eastern provinces alone does not phase it, so long as the ukrainian bourgeoisie (& their western bourgeoisie patrons) continue to be the ones profiting off the region's people and resources.

elsewhere in the article the UCU observe the same thing that can be observed by those outside of ukraine by listening to the words of zelenskyy and the ukrainian government's allies--that even the goal of 'protecting its people' [read: protecting exclusive economic/extractive access to those people] has been sidelined by the dream of a total or partial obliteration of the russian bourgeoisie entirely--not for any moral or anti-imperialist reason, but simply so that the ukrainian/western bourgeoisie no longer have competition.

[...] the goals of warfare are changing. If at the first stage of the civil conflict the Ukrainian regime aimed to restore state control over the Ukrainian territories, where this control was lost, then at the second stage it aimed to destroy Russia as a condition for the existence of Ukraine.

—ibid.

so--now that i've really dug into the precise nature of this war and why it's being waged on both sides, i'll answer some of your points directly:

if ukraine stopped fighting back it'd just get taken by russia "ukraine should stop this pointless fighting and give up."

both of these positions, both the one you hold yourself and the one you worry about others expressing, assume that what the ukrainian armed forces with NATO backing and full-throated embrace of fascist paramilitaries is doing constitutes 'ukraine' 'fighting back' against 'russia'. but it doesn't--it represents the ukrainian bourgeoisie fighting back against the russian bourgeoisie.

so, the big question--do i think that the ukrainian proletariat should abandon armed resistance against the russian invasion? absolutely not!

genuine popular resistance against the russian invasion is heroic and commendable--i am under no belief whatsoever that in the face of imperialist war the ukrainian people should not arm themselves and fight against the imperialists. i just reject the framing of the actual war as prosecuted as constituting this, because, to go back to what i've already established, there is not in fact one 'ukraine' but two--only one of which constitutes in a mieaningful sense the ukrainian people. i don't believe (and neither do the UCU, whose analysis i base mine on somewhat) that 'the war' as you ponder 'supporting' constitutes the ukrainian proletariat arming themselves or fighting against imperialism on their own behalf, but rather being armed by the bourgeoisie and fighting on their behalf.

and obviously i'm not an idiot who's blind to the actual numerial and material realities. the communist, anti-imperialist movement in ukraine, just like in most of the world, is completely dwarfed by imperialism and its footsoldiers. 'the ukrainian proletariat as self-armed acting organization rising up and challenging both imperialisms and freeing itself from both sets of bourgeoisie' is not something that's gonna happen tomorrow, and it's not an immediately actionable plan--no ukrainian communist can wake up tomorrow and say 'well, today i shall hit the big proletarian revolution button'.

the realities are that as the meeting ground between two imperialisms, ukrainian communists have to make decisions about which one they can most ably fight, might need to temporarily align themselves with or allow themselves to benefit from the ukrainian bourgeoise state--but never support it. like any bourgeoise state, a communist should know the ukrainian state is an enemy of the proletariat. yes, the pressing material realities on the ground might well make cooperation with that bourgeoise state the best temporary option--but 'cooperation' should never mean 'support' or 'loyalty', and should be done only tactically with ultimately loyalties remaining above all else with the working class.

in fact, refusing to offer the government and army a show of support and valorization is a key element of creating the conditions--radicalization, agitation--that would allow the proletariat to effectively rise up and truly combat imperialism, rather than choose under which imperialist heel they would rather be ground into dust. don't support an end to the war on either imperialist bloc's terms, but rather on proletarian terms--understand that the state of ukraine is not on the side of the ukrainian people, except tangentially, in individual moments of necessary alliance. raise awareness of the true war, the class war, and resist the ukrainian state's claims to stand with the people when it pursues the interests of the bourgeoisie.

tldr: the anti-imperialist position is not that the ukrainian proletariat should not be fighting, or that their fight is not worth supporting. the anti-imperialist action, therefore, is to draw the most awareness possible to this division within 'ukraine' among the working class themselves, make them aware of the realities of the economic condition. this is of course the foremost anti-imperialist and communist task across the entire world, because it is only through creating organizations of the working class that will fight for the working class can international imperialism be dfeated.

i'll leave this answer off by adding what the UCU said about this very topic in the same statement i've been quoting:

We understand the complexity and danger of these tasks, which inevitably cause repression on the part of the bourgeois political regimes. That is why workers' and communist organizations will need to develop illegal forms of class struggle along with legal ones in order to set and implement such tasks. The UCU has been forced to conduct its work in illegal forms since 2014. Many workers' and communist organizations may consider these antiwar tasks impossible because of their organizational weakness and lack of influence on the working class. However, historical experience shows that a correct and honest formulation of the tasks of the working class in conditions of war – real, not momentary tasks – may not yield success immediately, but will yield gains as the revolutionary situation intensifies. Since the task of destroying capitalist social relations is an international task, the international coordination of workers' and communist parties' actions, including the joint elaboration of tasks for the struggle against the imperialist war of the twenty-first century for the sake of uniting the international struggle against this war, for a communist reorganization of society and world peace, is becoming increasingly important. Proletarians of all countries, unite! 

[marykk1990]

My next post in support of Ukraine is:

Next site, is Ukrainian Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Ісак Еммануїлович Бабель), a "soviet writer, journalist, playwright and literary translator." He was born in Odesa in 1894 to a Jewish couple, Manus and Feyga Babel. After graduating from the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business he moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in defiance of the Pale of Settlement laws that restricted Jews from living outside of that area in Ukraine. He eventually moved back to Odesa and wrote a series of short stories called "Odessa Stories." (Remember, this was when Odesa was still part of the soviet union & was spelled with the "russian" spelling.) He later wrote a play, "Maria," which was "a portrait of the sordid underbelly of soviet society during the "russian" Civil War." Not surprisingly, the NKVD canceled the performances of the play while it was still going through rehearsals. The play "Maria" was never performed in "russia" until after the collapse of the soviet union. In the 1930s, after stalin passed a decree that soviet writers and artists had to conform to "socialist realism," Babel quit writing as much and "was publicly denounced for low productivity." It was a scary time for writers in the soviet union and many soviet writers were rewriting their earlier works, but Babel didn't. In 1939, Babel was arrested by the NKVD on "fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage." At first, he vehemently denied the charges, but after three days, he confessed and supposedly named others. Of course, he was probably horrifically tortured during those three days. He later recanted his confession and stated that he "had slandered several people" in it. In January 1940, he was sentenced to death by shooting. His trial was on January 26, 1940. The trial lasted about 20 minutes. He was then shot on January 27, 1940.

#StandWithUkraine

#СлаваУкраїні 🇺🇦

Anyone out there still wondering why Ukrainians are fighting so hard for their freedom and sovereignty, it's because of history like this. Isaac Babel is only one person out of thousands and thousands of Ukrainians over decades and centuries with stories just like his.

[antifainternational]

Hey so like three years ago I think I sent a post asking, effectively, about some criticisms of generally accepted antifascist philosophy that David Rovics made on a like, three hour podcast that was posted on YouTube.

I know I was waaaaaay all over the place and super rambly and it was probably a weird/maybe uncomfortable thing to get in your inbox. Long story short- I was dealing with hella anxiety and undiagnosed CPTSD (at the time, I’ve got a good therapist now and I’m medicated, and they’re both very well managed now) that was partially triggered by events going on during the summer of 2020. I guess I just wanted to apologize for any weirdness, frustration, stress, or problems that might have caused. Realistically I’m probably overthinking this and y’all probably don’t even remember that, but I’ve wanted to clear things up for awhile, so I am. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, even on anon.

Hope you guys are well and have an excellent day. Also, free Palestine. ✊🏻🇸🇩

Oh hey! It's been, well, more than a minute, hasn't it? You're right that we actually didn't remember our conversation very well but we looked it up again to refresh our memory. First: we're well-pleased to hear that you've been able to get help with your mental health, that you're taking good care of yourself, and that you're feeling much better now than you did when you wrote to us in early 2021. Second: no need to apologize! For one thing, you were putting forth well-intentioned and thoughtful arguments in a respectful way. We're always here for that! A movement that won't pause and do some self-reflection or take some self-criticism from time to time isn't a very good movement, after all. Finally: this might be a good time to see what's happened with David Rovics and violent white nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach since Rovics platformed Heimbach in a fawning, two-hour video filled with softball questions and lots of head-nodding agreement about the "anti-white racism" which Heimbach whines about being a victim of.

On the other hand, we now have this meme thanks to Matthew Heimbach (center, with glasses)

Since then, and after immense public pressure, Rovics did remove the video of his interview with Heimbach. But! Rovics' next move was to talk about the whole affair in an interview with a notorious anti-semite and Holocaust denier, during which Rovics also agreed that "people should be able to ask questions about the Holocaust." and that antifa were "likely Russian agents." Rovics went further then this, hosting and interviewing the noted anti-semite Gilad Atzmon in a discussion about "Jewish identity/tribal politics." All this, of course, led to more public denouncements of Rovics and more criticism. His response has been to cast himself as a victim of "cancel culture" and to categorize his critics as puritan radicals obsessed with identity politics. More disturbingly, Rovics has singled out two critics - researchers Shane Burley and Spencer Sunshine, both of whom are Jewish - and insinuated that they may be Mossad agents, working to discredit him on behalf of the Israeli regime. In the summer of 2023, Rovics publicly doxxed alleged members of Rose City Antifa and then quibbled that he hadn't actually doxxed anyone because he only published their names and social media handles, not their home addresses, in a lengthy essay he self-published in which he also describes notorious far-right extremist and grifter Andy Ngo as "a conservative journalist" and a victim of baseless attacks by antifascists. Rovics appears to have not learned anything from all of this or changed his views in any way. About a year ago, he wrote a rambling screed where he defended TERFs and "feminists," and villainized trans women ("who were raised as boys," Rovics claims for no apparent reason) as the real problem, for their refusal to allow fascist to hold public space or use platforms to broadcast their bullshit. This, according to Rovics, is the real problem - antifascists refusing to concede public space to fascists. So in summation, thanks for reaching out, glad you're doing better, and 100% fuck David Rovics.

[qqueenofhades]

What are tankies?

They are the truly insufferable Online Leftists whose one and only political theory is "America is responsible for all the bad things in the world ever and no other country, government, or group of people has any agency at all, this is very progressive of me." If that sounds like a vast oversimplification, it's actually not. They have, at best, a middle school grasp of history, social studies, civics, politics, etc; it's like they learned about American imperialism in ninth grade and can't shut up about it or adapt any more nuanced or complicated view of the world. They are often also big fans of not voting and/or encouraging other left-leaning young people not to vote because in their view, the Democrats are as bad as or actually worse than the Republicans. Needless to say, the Kremlin is extremely vested in continuing to support and promote all of this.

I have likewise written posts about how the American left has a problem with denouncing Russia, since they still have an old-school, unreconstructed view of the USSR as the "triumph of socialism" and which is wrong on about 800 different levels. Tankies likewise tend to subscribe to old-school Marxism or Communism (you know, as if the entire twentieth century didn't happen) and have some jumbled Baby's First Commune idea of how society would work, thus revealing that they actually know nothing about globalism and capitalism while pretending to oppose both. They are often virulently misogynistic and think that race, gender, religion, etc are irrelevant; the only valid struggle is The Class Struggle. Some of them, particularly Glenn Greenwald and that horrible Briahna Joy Gray chick who used to work for Bernie and was a big proponent of "don't vote for Hillary Clinton because SCOTUS isn't important," have gone full-fledged Russian fascist cheerleaders, because Putin hates America, they hate America, and therefore they must be friends! Which, you'll note, is functionally identical to the GOP extreme-right Lunatic Caucus buddying up to Putin for the same reasons.

Anyway: tankies suck, they are wrong about literally everything, they're an insult to every actually progressive or historical-minded person with a basic grasp of reality, and the fact that their rhetoric has pervaded so far into young left-identifying political and social spaces, and is often taken as gospel by the members of those spaces, constantly drives me crazy. So yes.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Julian Borger and Andrew Roth at The Guardian:

The international criminal court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant and the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war. It is the first time that leaders of a democracy and western-aligned state have been charged by the court, in the most momentous decision of its 22-year history. Netanyahu and Gallant are at risk of arrest if they travel to any of the 124 countries that signed the Rome statute establishing the court. Israel claims to have killed Deif in an airstrike in July, but the court’s pre-trial chamber said it would “continue to gather information” to confirm his death.

The chamber ruled that there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility as co-perpetrators for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”. The three-judge panel also said it had found reasonable grounds to believe Deif was responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, torture, rape and hostage taking relating to the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 in which fighters killed more than 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and kidnapped 250. Netanyahu’s office denounced the chamber’s decision as “antisemitic”. “Israel utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the international criminal court, a biased and discriminatory political body,” the office said in a statement, adding that “no war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza”. The statement pointed to an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct against the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan who sought the charges against the three men in May. Khan, 54, has denied the allegations and said he will cooperate with the investigation.

The US national security council issued a statement “fundamentally” rejecting the court’s decision. “We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” the statement said, without any detail of the alleged errors. “The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter. In coordination with partners, including Israel, we are discussing next steps.” The US has previously welcomed ICC war crimes warrants against Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials for atrocities committed in Ukraine, exposing the Biden administration to accusations of double standards from many UN members, particularly from the global south.

Netanyahu can expect more resounding support from the incoming Donald Trump administration. During his first term, in 2020, Trump imposed US sanctions on the ICC, aimed at court officials and their families. The then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, made clear the sanctions were imposed because the ICC had begun investigating the actions of the US and its allies in Afghanistan, as well as Israeli military operations in the occupied territories. The panel said the full version of the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant were secret “in order to protect witnesses and to safeguard the conduct of the investigations”, but the judges released much of their reasoning. This focused on the obstruction of the supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which it judged to be deliberate.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for genocidal maniacs Israel PM Benjamin Netanayhu, former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas’s military leader Mohammed Deif.

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: International Criminal Court Issues Arrest Warrants For Netanyahu And Hamas Officials

[marxistcomedy]

Anyone working in counter-propaganda can testify to a curious experience: we’ll put in hours of careful research collecting an impeccable set of resources that undermines some warmongering narrative, and we’ll eagerly share it with someone who claims to despise racism in all its forms — say, an outspoken opponent of the West’s so-called “War on Terror.” Unexpectedly, we are met with a response that is somewhere between chilly reticence and downright hostility. What’s going on?

From our perspective, we’re offering water to a person who’s self-identified as thirsty, and yet they react as if we were trying to poison them! They turn on a dime to defend the same institutions whose lies they were denouncing just moments before. At this point the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from seeing through propaganda and putting puzzle pieces together into a satisfying historical account gets brutally transformed into its exact opposite: a sense of crushing defeat. In response to this bitter experience, many researchers — serious people, with plenty of experience reading and writing, and sometimes even of being published! — lash out. They decide that people have been “brainwashed” beyond the point where they can be reached by words or rational appeal. They “realize” that the masters of propaganda have been far more successful than we first imagined: it turns out we’re not David fighting Goliath, we’re more like an ant facing an asteroid.

The same inquisitive nature that first led them to unravel war propaganda narratives begins to feed an even larger psycho-historical narrative, and nihilism takes hold. The tragic cycle begins to appear eternal: innocent, well-meaning, hard-working folks are, time and again, viciously tricked by the scapegoating of a new rogue in the gallery — Indigenous, Black, Spanish, Jewish, Soviet, Vietnamese, Cuban, Serbian, Muslim, Libyan, Syrian, Korean, Venezuelan, Russian, Chinese. Due to the sheer power of propaganda and mass-media, the masses helplessly fall for hatred and volunteer for war, even though it comes at a very high cost to ourselves, our loved ones, and our ideals (religion, environmentalism, etc.). Sadly, the innate human propensity to “hate the Other” seals our fate as a society… or something along those lines.

I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.

But am I not just worsening the problem, aggravating our hopelessness, by criticizing the critics in a way that suggests that no one escapes ideological self-flattery? I don’t think so. Paradoxically, it brings us all back to a more even and possibility-rich playing field.

The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda (in Gramscian: organs of coercion and consent). We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

[emphasis mine]

[grumpy-aino]

✨Little S2 Musical Analysis✨

You guys remember when Aziraphale forgives Maggie's debt in the first episode in exchange for some records?

Those records are by none other than Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and I know LOTS about this man (and why the choice to include him may have something to do with Aziraphale's character arc in s3!)...

Shostakovich's life is usually characterised by his tricky relationship with Stalin. During the 30s, the musical freedom enjoyed by Russian composers came to an end, Stalin clearly preferring more traditional classical music. Although Shostakovich had been criticised for his more adventurous works in the late 20s, his 1936 ballet, Lady Macbeth of Mstsensk got him officially denounced by Stalin's official newspaper (Pravda).

Composers who refused to comply with the standards were denounced as formalists (including Western elements in their art) and risked deportation to a remote area of Russia, imprisonment and even death.

On to the record in question! The Symphony No. 5 was written after this denunciation. It was a success, being to Stalin's liking and praised as a "Soviet artist's practical and creative response to just criticism". Shostakovich was back in Stalin's good books.

Who else do we know to be once denounced and hated by a regime who has just recently got back into their good books?

This might just be a neat reference to Shostakovich's life in comparison to Aziraphale's, but Shostakovich's story doesn't end there: In 1948 he was denounced a second time for his Symphony No. 9, which was promised to be large and triumphant to celebrate the USSR's victory in WWII, but was completely the opposite - playful and cheery, mocking Stalin.

The second denunciation was in a way more serious than the first. Shostakovich (and other composers who were accused of formalism) were made to give quite a public apology. Many of his works were banned and he was expelled from the Leningrad Conservatory.

Although he was put to use again by the government in 1949 at a New York press conference, it had been remarked upon by Nabokov that Shostakovich was "not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government." Even after Stalin's death, Shostakovich still had a strained relationship with the government. They still largely controlled art and in 1960, Shostakovich was devasted when he joined the communist party.

Of course, all of this information could be completely irrelevant and it could just be Aziraphale buying some classical music. especially because the Symphony No. 5 is NOT 21 minutes long like Aziraphale implies (in fact, it's a little over an hour). But so much of this media is intentional and the PARALLELS are insane.

The second denunciation could mean a whole lot for season 3. Aziraphale is probably likely to 'go along' at first with Heaven (Shostakovich wasn't really on board with the heroic nature of his symphonies - the 5th, according to one musicologist, is a love symphony), but might be plotting something. This second denunciation appears like it could be entertaining.

What's more! Shostakovich also had a best friend who died before they could have their post-war reunion (as Shostakovich talked about it his letters). Honestly the whole thing's really tragic and hurts to think about; Shostakovich promised he'd never write another note again after his friend's death, but instead wrote his incredibly painful Piano Trio No. 2.

✨Anyway hoped you liked that✨

tagging @neil-gaiman bc why not?

[grayheartart]

Democrat Lies: Media Shrugs and Stays Silent After Perpetuating "Russia Disinformation" Hoax for Years.

..."In 2020, CBS News’ Lesley Stahl literally laughed mockingly at then-President Donald Trump when he raised the Hunter Biden laptop and what it revealed about the Bidens."... ..."former Chief of Staff at the CIA and Department of Defense Jeremy Bash, who told MSNBC that the laptop “looked like Russian intelligence” and “walked like Russian intelligence.” He dismissed the relevance of the laptop before the election by declaring that “this effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic, Russian playbook disinformation campaign.” Bash, like others behind the conspiracy theory, was later given an intelligence position by Biden."... ..."CNN’s Alex Marquardt told viewers, “We do know it is a very active Russian campaign.”...

..."the Washington Post has continued to suggest that this reporting was accurate. One of the leading purveyors of this false story was the Post’s Philip Bump, who slammed the New York Post for its now proven Hunter Biden laptop story."...

..."In 2021, when media organizations were finally admitting that the laptop was authentic, Bump was still declaring that it was a “conspiracy theory.” Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bump continued to suggest that “the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”... ..."Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of the 50 who signed the letter, also claimed that the laptop bore “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”... ..."James Clapper, a former director of National Intelligence and CNN analyst, said the laptop was “classic, textbook Soviet, Russian tradecraft at work.”... ..."Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who told the media not to join Giuliani as a “vehicle for Russian disinformation.”... ..."Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, insisted that the laptop was clearly “Kremlin propaganda.”... ..."This long-debunked claim was even recently repeated in Congress by Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who claimed that the laptop could not be authenticated even though it was just authenticated and introduced in a federal prosecution."...

Every single Democrat in this post lied to your face for years about a laptop that belongs to a child raping, crack addict. The only reason they did this is to help Biden and his family from facing the consequences of their actions. Democrats happily lied to the general public and perpetuated a "Russian Disinformation" hoax for years to save face for Biden, a dementia riddled old man and garbage father.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence has long been regarded as dangerous for her Syria contacts and stance on Ukraine

Guardian international staffThu 5 Dec 2024 18.00 AEDTShare

In 2018, a Syrian dissident codenamed Caesar was set to testify before the House foreign affairs committee about the torture and summary executions that had become a signature of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on opposition during Syria’s civil war.

It was not Caesar’s first time in Washington: the ex-military photographer had smuggled out 55,000 photographs and other evidence of life in Assad’s brutal detention facilities years earlier, and had campaigned anonymously to convince US lawmakers to pass tough sanctions on Assad’s network as punishment for his reign of terror.

But ahead of that hearing, staffers on the committee, activists and Caesar himself, suddenly became nervous: was it safe to hold the testimony in front of Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii congresswoman on the committee who just a year earlier had traveled to Damascus of her own volition to meet with Assad?

Caesar at the closed member-only briefing with the House foreign affairs committee in 2018. Photograph: Syrian Emergency Task Force

“There was genuine concern by Democrats in her own party, and Republicans and us and Caesar, about how were we going to do this?” said Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an activist group, who had previously traveled with Gabbard in Syria in 2015. “With the member sitting on this committee that we believe would give any intelligence she has to Assad, Russia and Iran, all of which would have wanted to kill Caesar.”

During a congressional trip in 2015, Moustafa recalled, Gabbard had asked three young Syrian girls whether the airstrike they had narrowly survived may not have been launched by Assad, but rather by the terrorist group Isis. The one problem? Isis did not have an air force.

Photographs from the 2018 briefing showed a heavily disguised Caesar sitting in a hoodie and mask giving testimony before the House committee.

“I often disguise [witnesses],” said Moustafa, who had worked closely with Caesar and served as his translator. “But that day I was especially wary of Tulsi.”

There is no evidence that Gabbard sought to pass any information about the Syrian whistleblower to Damascus or any other country, nor that she has any documented connection to other intelligence agencies.

But within Washington foreign policy circles and the tightly knit intelligence community, Gabbard has long been seen as dangerous; some have worried that she seems inclined toward conspiracy theories and cosying up to dictators. Others, including the former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have gone further, calling her a “Russian asset”.

Those concerns have been heightened by Gabbard’s nomination under Donald Trump to the post of director of national intelligence, a senior cabinet-level position with access to classified materials from across the 18 US intelligence agencies, and shaping that information for the president’s daily briefing. The role would allow her to access and declassify information at her discretion, and also direct some intelligence-sharing with US allies around the world.

Tulsi Gabbard during an antiwar rally to mark the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine in February 2023. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Gabbard and her supporters have denounced those attacks as a smear, saying that her history of anti-interventionism in Syria and Ukraine has been misrepresented as a kind of “cold war 2.0”.

In Washington, she has staked out a unique foreign policy position as a strong supporter of Israel and the “war on terror” – but also as a critic of US rivalries with countries like Russia and Iran (she strongly criticised Trump’s decision to assassinate the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani as an “illegal and unconstitutional act of war”).

“When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” she told a Hawaiian newspaper in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.”

Jeremy Scahill, the leftwing US journalist and activist, wrote that to “pretend that Gabbard somehow poses a more grave danger to US security than those in power after 9/11 or throughout the long bloody history of US interventions and the resulting blowback is a lot of hype and hysteria”.

But Gabbard has repeatedly shared conspiracy theories, including claiming shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine that there are “25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world”. In fact, the US program stemming back to the 1990s is directed at better securing labs which focus on infectious disease outbreaks.

Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, in October. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

And she has repeatedly supported dictators, including Assad, suggesting that reports of the 2013 and 2017 chemical weapons attacks were false, and calling for the US to “join hands” with Moscow following its 2015 intervention in Syria.

Establishment Democrats and Republicans have openly questioned whether or not she poses a threat to national security.

“I worry what might happen to untold numbers of American assets if someone as reckless, inexperienced, and outright disloyal as Gabbard were DNI,” wrote Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman who served on the foreign affairs committee with Gabbard in 2018 when Caesar testified.

The person close to the intelligence community said that there were continuing concerns about Gabbard’s contacts in the Middle East, stemming back to the controversial 2017 meeting with Assad – an encounter that Gabbard has insisted she does not regret.

Those contacts may be explored during a Senate confirmation hearing early next year, the person said.

Gabbard was briefly placed on a Transportation Security Administration watchlist because of her overseas travel patterns and foreign connections, CNN reported last month, but was later removed.

She does not have a background in intelligence, although the Hawaii native served in the army national guard for more than two decades, and has deployed to Iraq and Kuwait.

Moreover, there are concerns that her choice could affect intelligence sharing among US foreign allies, including the tightly knit Five Eyes intelligence group that includes the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Nato and allies in Japan and South Korea.

“Much of the intelligence we get, at least from the human collector side, is from our partners,” said John Sipher, formerly deputy director of the CIA’s Russia operations, noting that the cooperation was usually informal, “personality- and trust-based”.

“They’re going to be really hesitant to pass [information] to a place that that is becoming more partisan and less professional … they would be making their own checklist: ‘Hey, this sensitive thing that we would in the past have passed to the CIA that could do us damage if it becomes public … Let’s just not do that this time.’”

[mariacallous]

Huge crowds have taken to the streets of Tbilisi and other Georgian cities in recent days to protest the government’s November 28 decision to freeze accession talks with the EU. This latest wave of protests comes following weeks of unrest in the wake of the country’s controversial October parliamentary election, which opposition parties and independent observers say was marred by widespread fraud.

The announcement of a freeze in the country’s EU membership bid coincided with a European Parliament resolution denouncing Georgia’s parliamentary election as “neither free nor fair” and calling for a rerun of the vote under international supervision. The resolution strongly condemned “Russia’s systematic interference in Georgia’s democratic processes,” and criticized policies implemented by the ruling Georgian Dream party as “incompatible with Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”

Opponents accuse the Georgian authorities of violating the Georgian Constitution, which mandates integration into European and Euro-Atlantic structures. The decision to put the EU accession process on pause has sparked widespread anger and dismay throughout Georgian society, where a majority have long favored closer ties with Europe. Polls indicate that around 80 percent of Georgians support the country’s EU integration.

Protests erupted as soon as the decision to freeze EU talks was announced, with large numbers of people flocking to the center of the Georgian capital to defend against what many see as an attack on their country’s democratic system and European future. The authorities have reacted by ordering a hard line response that has included the use of water cannons and tear gas against protesters along with the arrest of prominent opposition figures and multiple incidents of heavy-handed policing. Security forces are accused of deliberately targeting journalists and attacking protesters seeking to record evidence of excesses.

The protests currently taking place across Georgia are the latest episode in an extended period of anti-government unrest that began last year when the ruling Georgian Dream party attempted to pass Russian-style foreign agent legislation targeting civil society. Protests then resumed in the aftermath of the parliamentary election in October. Many in Tbilisi are now comparing current events to the April 1989 protests that were crushed by the Soviet authorities, sparking Georgia’s independence movement. There have also been widespread comparisons with Ukraine’s two post-Soviet Maidan revolutions in defense of the country’s fledgling democracy and European choice.

Some Georgian government officials are siding with the protesters, with hundreds signing an open letter condemning the suspension of EU accession talks. A number of Georgian ambassadors and senior officials including Deputy Foreign Minister Teimuraz Jandzhalia have resigned in protest. Meanwhile, schools and universities across the country have halted classes amid signs of a growing civil disobedience campaign.

The protests have also attracted considerable international support. In a November 29 statement, US Helsinki Commission leaders expressed solidarity with the Georgian people while condemning the government crackdown and declaring the Georgian authorities “illegitimate.” Other countries have issued similar statements or imposed sanctions measures on Georgian Dream officials linked to violence against protesters.

The mounting confrontation in Georgia has potentially far-reaching implications for the wider region. Critics of the Georgian Dream authorities accuse the party of seeking to turn their country away from Euro-Atlantic integration and return Georgia to the Russian sphere of influence. They argue that Georgia is a key battleground in the struggle between the democratic world and the emerging axis of authoritarian nations led by Russia and China.

If Moscow is able to return Georgia to the Kremlin orbit, this could have grave consequences for neighboring Armenia, which has sought to deepen ties with the West amid disillusionment over Russia’s failure to support the country during its recent war with Azerbaijan. It would also send a powerful message to other countries looking to turn away from Moscow at a time when Russia is waging the largest European war since World War II in Ukraine over Kyiv’s European aspirations.

The Georgian Dream authorities reject accusations that they are steering the country away from Europe and back toward Moscow. During the recent parliamentary election campaign, they focused on messages of peace and stability while claiming to being shielding Georgia from Ukraine’s fate. However, the sheer scale of the current protests suggests that a large percentage of Georgians reject the idea of securing peace at the expense of their most basic human rights and democratic freedoms.

With the opposition movement gaining momentum, much may now depend on the role of the international community. Protest leaders will be hoping that the US, EU, and other Western countries impose tougher sanctions on Georgian Dream officials while increasing their support for Georgia’s independent media and civil society. As they mull their response to events in Georgia, Western officials will be well aware of the high stakes involved. The outcome of the protests will likely define Georgia’s future and shape the geopolitical climate in the southern Caucasus and beyond for years to come.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The most notorious internee held in any of the Canadian [internment] camps was Leon Trotsky. When news reached North America in March 1917 that the Russian tsar, Nicholas II, had abdicated, Trotsky was living in exile in New York City. He immediately arranged to return to his homeland. On March 27 he boarded the Norwegian freighter Christianiafjord with his wife and two sons, bound for Petrograd. Trotsky had been under surveillance in New York where British authorities took note of his departure. The situation in Russia was confused, but the Allies knew that socialists like Trotsky wanted to withdraw Russian troops from the war. It was widely believed that they were enemy agents funded by the Germans to divide the Allied war effort. At Halifax, the British naval commander received orders to board the Christianiafjord when it arrived and to detain Trotsky and the other Russians with whom he was travelling.

On April 1 the freighter steamed into Halifax harbour. Naval officers marched Trotsky and his comrades to jail cells in the Citadel, the imposing stone fortification overlooking the city. Then, while Natalia Sedova Trotskaya and the boys were lodged with a police employee in town, the men were interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, a converted iron foundry at Amherst near the New Brunswick border.

Trotsky was not cowed by his treatment. Quite the opposite: he defiantly petitioned the Russian government and the British prime minister, protesting his illegal detention. Meanwhile, he began to harangue his fellow prisoners with speeches, in fluent German, proclaiming the need for a revolution in Germany. “That month the concentration camp very much resembled a perpetual mass meeting,” he later wrote. To the dismay of officials, he became a hero to the 800 other detainees. He was “by far the most popular man in the whole camp,” the commander reported. Another officer recalled that Trotsky “gave us a lot of trouble at the camp, and if he had stayed there any longer [...] would have made communists of all the German prisoners.”

Trotsky was a citizen of a country with which Great Britain, and therefore Canada, was an ally in the fighting, and he was travelling with perfectly legal permits and visas. His internment was giving Canada a black eye internationally. At rallies in New York and Russia, speakers denounced Canada as a tyranny, no better than the Tsarist autocracy. Finally, after a month in confinement, he won his release. A crowd of cheering prisoners lined his path as he walked to the gate, followed by an impromptu camp band doing its best to play the Internationale. And with that, Leon Trotsky’s sojourn in Canada ended."

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 17-18.