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The funny thing about our man in Vancouver and analysts like him is that they believe media coverage, especially in big outlets like the NYTimes, has total primacy over events on the ground, and how they are perceived and contested by the people who actually live there. I would be reluctant to comment on politics in Vancouver, which I've only visited once, but Roger is somehow confident that having his eyes glued to the "right" websites (like Russia Insider?) is all the savvy Canadian anti-imperialist militant requires when discussing life eleven time zones away. Back in the real Russia, this is how the famous Soviet-Russian bard poet Alexander Gorodnitsky, a child survivor of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, reacted to the shameful surrender of the city to European and American neo-Nazis at the Holiday Inn on Sunday: Those who rented Piter [Petersburg] out today To a Nazi congress Have wiped their feet on the fallen, Whose bones lie at rest round here. These days they hand out Medals to us, the Siege survivors. During the war we did not surrender the city, But they surrender it and put it up for rent. http://www.novayagazeta.ru/columns/67771.html This "scary conference" has been a big deal here, not only because of the relatively large and speedy mobilization of antifa, progressive leftists, and liberals against it, resulting in several arrests and possible jail terms for some of the protesters, and the heavy local and national media coverage, but also because of the reactions of otherwise politically quiescent or loyalist folk like Gorodnitsky and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, who sent out this communique yesterday: http://www.feor.ru/news/index.php?newsid=12968 The Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia expresses its extreme concern and bewilderment that the most ultranationalist forces in Europe were allowed to gather at a large-scale forum in St. Petersburg, a city that survived all the horrors of a Nazi siege. The Congress, according to the official list of participants on the forum site, was attended by members of various ultranationalist parties in Europe, including such notorious ones as the Greek Golden Dawn, the National Democratic Party of Germany (whose leader, Udo Voigt, who also took part in the forum, earlier expressly stated that he believes his party the successor to the Nazi party NSDAP), the Austrian Freedom Party, the Swedes Party (formerly called The National Socialist Front), the British National Party (whose former leader Nick Griffin, who also took part in the forum, is an infamous Holocaust denier ), and the Italian Forza Nuova, whose leader Roberto Fiore directly calls himself a "fascist." Most of these parties, from the FJC's point of view, could be safely included in the list of extremist movements, whose activities should be banned in the Russian Federation. The Russian Jewish community is also extremely astonished that a gathering of nationalists was held in a city that was one of the hardest hit by the Nazis in the Soviet Union during World War Two and which was the most northerly of the places where Nazis executed Jews en masse. This event creates a very negative impression and looks like a real "dance on the bones" of National Socialism's victims. The gathering looks especially cynical vis-a-vis the large-scale events planned in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazism. The Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia considers that hosting and organizing events involving such a roster of participants in our country is absolutely unacceptable and blasphemous to the memory of the victims of the Great Patriotic War. _______ Another local context that Roger, of course, knows nothing about is the rather serious wave of neo-Nazi attacks against immigrants, foreign students, antifascists, and leftist activists in Petersburg (and all around Russia) during 2004-2000. That wave abated somewhat when police finally went after some of the gangs behind the attacks, but general attitudes towards Central Asian migrants and people from the Caucasus have only gotten worse in the meantime, if anything, partly egged on by the regime. This is borne out by recent massive virtual neo-Nazi attacks against two friends of mine, attacks that were also motivated by that old Russian standby in times of trouble, anti-Semitism: https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/antisemitism-petersburg-frenkel/ Given all these different contexts, it is no wonder that so many people here reacted so strongly to the little neo-Nazi fest at the Holiday Inn on Sunday. The NY Times didn't make up that reality. And the Lord Haw-Haws at Russia Insider are constitutionally incapable of covering it. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
