Riotous Female Private Parts in the Russian Federation

When the music doesn't sell records, try pulling a stunt.

It worked for the Dixie Chicks, sort of, several years ago.  They were a moderately successful country act trying to break into mainstream pop.  What better way to do so than to abandon the generally conservative country fan base and stick a needle in the eye of George W. Bush, by belittling the president abroad?

That certainly wasn't going to play well in Dallas.

It stoked up what the English call a "row" with Toby Keith.  He is still playing to tens of thousands.  They are broken up and playing in small bars.

Attention getting is a short term proposition.

The most famous Russian punk band in the world is Pussy Riot.  Not because they have produced appealing music. but because they broke into a landmark church and profaned its sanctuary.  Think if some minor grungy band ran into the National Cathedral and started slandering Catholics and the Pope.

There is freedom of expression, but there is also property rights.  Any church has private property rights.  They were violated by a group of women trying to make a political statement.  They could have just as easily made their point outside the church on the sidewalk.  If they had then been arrested, then their supporters among American liberals and conservatives would have had a point.

Officials arrested the band.  They will be spending a lot more time behind bars than their crime probably deserves.   But they did violate the property rights of a church and that is not an insignificant crme.

Defending the property rights of the Russian Orthodox Church is no defense of Vladimir Putin who is gradually centralizing his control. And I understand that there is a centuries old tradition of church and state interest fusion in the East that dates back to the Byzantine Empire.   That being said, like the French in the 1850s, centralization under Putin seems to be a trend that has broad support among the Russian people.  Even voter fraud cannot fully account for the most recent returns.  Putin is here to stay whether American liberals (who hate Putin, but love Leftist murdering thugs like Castro or Chavez) or conservatives (who have global strategic concerns and memories of the Cold War) like it or not.

The English language St. Petersburg Times argues that:

As Soviet-era dissident Eduard Lozansky wrote to me: “This furor over ‘female genitals run amok’ could ordinarily only have been accomplished with a wildly expensive PR campaign. Now, even such pillars of the free press as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times compare Pussy Riot to Soviet-era dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, while Putin has been compared to Josef Stalin.”

I would say that the democratic West is not selling out but suffering from a sort of collective dementia. 

Link to original article:  http://sptimes.ru/story/36119

Having concerns over the fate of Russia and what that means for American interests is reasonable.  How are they dealing with Poland and other westward leaning states of the old Warsaw Pact?  How will they react to an Israeli strike on Iran, if that happens?  What about Syria?  These are important questions.   But Pussy Riot is not the place to pick a battle or even a debate.  They are not worth it.  We should focus on the real issues at hand.