#political dissidents

[agentfascinateur]

Somewhere there's a hauntingly beautiful symphony where Pavel Kushnir belongs.

Rest in peace 🕊️

Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and educator, and his mother a music school teacher. He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket. Asked in a 2005 interview what composition he would never perform, he replied: "The Russian national anthem."

Arrested for 4 social media posts objecting to the war in Ukraine. Died from a hunger strike in protest. 💜

[phantomridefilmvideo]

"...contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents."

from A Mindset For The Trump Era by Gal Beckerman

[marionto]

Police takes phone and computer from activist in El Salvador

Early today, the house of the artist and digital activist, Temple of Evil, was raided. Just as, in the case of another journalist, they took his computer and mobile phone. They told him that his case is not publicly available.

[majokko120]

Escaping the Liberal World: The Illusion of Dissident Right Realism

Some people escape the witchcraft of the Liberal world with its contradictions and shallowness ("fake and gay clown world") only to arrive in the Dissident Right and embrace the same presuppositions. The so-called Left lures and brainwashes people to accept their own Death & Destruction as something good, something that good people do: for the environment, for the refugees, for whatever absurd reason.

The Left ultimately seeks an end of Death & Destruction, sugarcoating it, coercing people into its spiral of decay via enforced conformity. Many wake up and escape this powerful spell eventually, and a new danger begins. The Dissident Right (what you find on /pol/, poa.st, gab, X, Dark Fedi, etc.) argues from a different position. Here you encounter the next stage of the dialectic. One that rejected its first baptism. One that is now awake, and redpilled.

Here you find people tired of endless lies and the absurdity expected on the Left. They had enough and cut straight to the chase, to facts, to realism. It is this realism that strangely aligns them with their Liberal counterparts. While the Left ultimately aims for Death & Destruction, sweetening it with absurd and contradicting lies, the Dissident Right, having seen through it, rejects the method, but with no alternative, accepts the ultimate end.

TKD, TND, DOTR, Billions Must Die, Nothing Ever Happens, and other such expressions prove the fixation and obsession with death in these spheres. Nothing works, nothing matters, everything must die. What else could it do? The crux of the situation lies in the assumption common to both sides, Left and Right, how there is no Absolute Truth, no God, no Life, here or eternal, no reason for hope, and thus only death and nothingness remains: Nihilism.

The sinister aspect on the Dissident Right lies in the fact that it argues from a position of apostasy from those obvious lies. It welcomes people into this circle of the awakened to deliver its message that there is no truth. "You've seen the lies. You've seen the contradictions. You've seen the clownish antics leading to the destruction of their oblivious victims. You rejected it all, and in its stead you found nothingness. You found death."

"Now live death. Think death. Speak death. Nothing true, everything allowed. All roads lead to the abyss, and as we travel together we take the world with us. And may whoever remains follow us to take the same path." The Initiate leaves behind the artificial lights reflected on the wall, and firmly arrives in utter darkness. All lights are lies. Only darkness is real. And he shouts "the truth is, there is no truth." Choosing to remain in the cave.

However, there is Truth. Not as an abstract concept. But something that we think, speak, act, and ultimately live (Logos) to change first ourselves. Life in the here and Life Eternal through Jesus Christ, God and Savior of man. But having rejected the first baptism as fake, and consciously chosen the red pill, the stakes for repentance from this satanism is one's own intelligence. Thus Pride stands guard, keeping watch, over one's jail in the dark.

[filosofablogger]

The Legacy Of Alexei Navalny -- A Man Of Courage

Few political dissidents in Russia have escaped Vladimir Putin’s evil wrath.  Alexei Navalny could have sought refuge outside of Russia after he recovered from an attempted assassination by poisoning in 2020, but instead he chose to return to Russia and keep fighting the evil regime, even knowing that he was putting his life on the line and would likely eventually be targeted again.  And he was,…

[odinsblog]

“This brutal war is not only mass murder of people and destruction of the infrastructure, economy, and cultural sites of Ukraine, but also a severe blow to the future of Russia, a country that is now pushed back into totalitarianism, but this time into a fascist totalitarianism.

We are being punished for daring to criticize authority.” —Oleg Orlov

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

This captures it. Chappell Roan is rightfully disillusioned by the two-party system.

Here are some of the correct responses to her (justified) criticism of the U.S. government.

[djuvlipen]

remember in the 1990s when historians were saying "they were kept in camps with no food, with no heat, and made to sleep in the mud, but gypsies are used to living like that, it's in their culture, so it wasn't so bad actually"

[thefugitivesaint]

"International benefit compilation on digital and cassette (sold out) for on-the-ground humanitarian mutual aid in Gaza. All proceeds minus bandcamp/paypal fees are donated. Free Palestine." If you're looking for some political punk, I suggest the above benefit compilation. "Digital download is pay what you want."

[seaseren]

Ok I said "we infected Alphinaud with the wanderlust" but he already had it. Hos grandfather infected him. His own ambitions infected him. I don't think there was ever a future for Alphinaud where he just stays in Sharlayan.

[agentfascinateur]

Rename the Arctic's seas the "Navalny Sea"

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

Even MORE great news:

Russian dissident Ilya Yashin is FREE from a Russian prison! It is finally good to hear of a Russian dissident who has been released this time.

Here he is, with members of the late Alexei Navalny's team, including Leonid Volkov (white shirt), Maria Pevchikh, and Ivan Zhdanov behind her.

JUSTICE does come!

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Police commissioner Perry decided to invite three of the “Revolutionary Socialists” to a secret meeting to get a sense of their intentions. Victor Midgley, Bill Pritchard, and Jack Kavanagh were all stalwarts of the Socialist Party of Canada from British Columbia. Midgley was the union official beaten by veterans during the sympathetic strike in Vancouver the previous August. He was one of the main organizers of the Calgary conference, which named him secretary of the One Big Union central committee. Pritchard joined him on the central committee. With his spectacles and a quiff, he had more the appearance of a mild-mannered school teacher than a longshoreman on the Vancouver waterfront. But Pritchard was a fire-and-brimstone orator who had played a pivotal role planning the Calgary conference, then guiding its debate. He would later serve a year in prison as one of the convicted leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike. Kavanagh, also a longshoreman and newly installed as the president of the BC Federation of Labour, was in charge of the committee that was meant to proselytize in favour of the One Big Union [OBU] in British Columbia.

In the report of the meeting that Perry made to his superiors, he described the trio of Reds as “intelligent, well-read men.” “They are tireless in pursuit of their objects,” he wrote, “and have all the fervour of fanatics.” He did not think they were plotting a violent overthrow of the government, but he feared them nonetheless.

I am not prepared to say that they are aiming at a revolution in the ordinary sense of that word, but I do say that they are influencing a section of labour in the West and unchaining forces which, even if they so desire, some day they will be unable to control. Here is grave danger to the peace and security of the country.

Even so, Perry urged caution. He feared that repressive measures would simply radicalize the more moderate members of the labour movement. Returning to the subject of armed revolution, he observed that “it can only succeed if a considerable number of returned soldiers join the movement.” The Reds knew this and were doing their best to court the veterans. He urged the government, therefore, to promote full employment and whatever other policies it could to placate the grievances of the soldiers.

Another crucial document influencing government thinking about the labour situation was a “Memo on Revolutionary Tendencies in Western Canada” prepared in early April by C.F. Hamilton. Hamilton was a former journalist (he covered the Boer War for the Toronto Globe) and wartime press censor. He had been assistant comptroller of the Mounted Police before the war and rejoined the Mounties afterward as an intelligence officer. He was a highly influential official within the force who reported directly to the commissioner. In his thirteen-page memo, Hamilton argued that there was a small but active band of revolutionaries at work in western Canada attempting to subvert the Canadian government.

Their openly avowed aim is to procure the establishment of a Soviet government, with its concomitants of the disappearance of parliamentary government, the subversion of the rule of the majority, the abolition of private ownership of property, and the destruction of the other institutions upon which society is founded.

Hamilton admitted that armed insurrection seemed unlikely in Canada, but he argued that there were circumstances in which it could occur. The key was the troubled labour situation, he said, and he sketched out a plausible scenario for the “would-be revolutionists.”

What they aim at is an intense conflict between labour and capital, embittered by riots and bloodshed; they calculate on a general dislocation of the industrial system, passing into an uprising of the working classes, probably reinforced by masses of discontented returned soldiers. The whole project turns upon the propagation of bad temper and mutual hate between classes …

Despite his dire prognosis, Hamilton did not believe that direct repression was the correct response. Instead, he called for a campaign of counter-propaganda highlighting the failure of Bolshevism to bring social peace and prosperity to Russia.

As alarmist reports piled up on the desks of senior ministers in Ottawa, the acting prime minister, Sir William Thomas White, panicked. White, a Montreal financier who had won his seat in Parliament in the 1911 election as an opponent of freer trade with the United States and had been rewarded with the finance portfolio in cabinet, was filling in for Prime Minister Borden who was still away at the peace negotiations in Europe. He cabled the absent prime minister in mid-April with the news that Bolshevism was rampant in Canada among soldiers and workers, especially in British Columbia. There was a revolution brewing, White reported, and he wanted Borden to ask the British government to dispatch one of its warships to Vancouver where “the presence of such ship and crew would have steadying influence.” Borden was in Paris hobnobbing with heads of state, making the world safe for democracy. He was impatient at White’s bothering him with what no doubt seemed like petty, and exaggerated, domestic problems. “I would very much like to reply, For Heaven’s Sake, let me alone,” he peevishly confided to his diary. Instead he advised White to do the best he could with the armed forces at his disposal. There would be no request for British help."

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 82-84.

[reading-writing-revolution]

With authoritarianism rising everywhere, don’t forget about what the dissidents have to teach us. Gal Beckerman on the "existential attitude" it takes to survive autocracy:

[useless-catalanfacts]

Foto utilitzada per Antena3 per il·lustrar els represaliats per l'Estat espanyol...

Lòpez llibertat!