Russia's Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the "LGBT movement" should be designated as extremist, in a move that representatives of gay and transgender people fear will lead to arrests and prosecutions.
This is why we keep the "critical" in "critical support", comrades. What a hellworld we live in where this dumpster country is the second biggest threat to american hegemony.
Russian here.
Yeah, I heard about it yesterday. The orthodox church were especially excited about this.
In my opinion it's another Putin's political mistake.
A sign of short-sightedness and a failure of ideological struggle. It feels like they don't realize at all that this is exactly the kind of thing the west expects from them.
Not to mention the problems this may create for the people. Russian capitalists are so disconnected from reality that they don't realize that following clericalism and right-wing politics is a path to failure. And not just for capitalist goverment. The international imperialism are getting stronger because of their mistakes, because of their capitalist reactionary nature and progressive tendencies are weakening. We need opposition to the liberal lies, chauvinism and anti-communism that is represented by the ukraine goverment and its owners. And if that opposition is not present, then international imperialism is already at an advantage.
Such a shame. Another evidence that we need a communist powerful state to stand up for the interests of the people.
I thought about that too... Aren't you strengthening rainbow imperialism by doing this sort of bullshit? You're essentially giving out ammo like candy to western liberals who are now going to screech even louder - "muh LGBT rights in Ruzzia!". At the same time, you're missing out on the opportunity to say "look, the West is full of shit, they only pretend to care about gay rights, but we here don't do these empty gestures". Not to mention that innocent LGBT people will get hurt because of this by being a political pawn.
Comrade Lenin said it 100+ years ago about Jewish people - "they are not the enemy, the capitalists are". A century passes - the game is still the same, they just found a new group to attack.
It's because "LGBT is imperialism!!1!" is just an excuse. The real reason they are doing this is, simply enough, because Russia's leadership is very conservative. Conservatives gonna conservative, they just need to present their target minority as a ploy from the enemy and voilà, persecution justified.
Yeah this is straight up reactionary shit. They say it's not meant to persecute people with different sexual orientations, rather just target "the movement", but wtf does that even mean? How do they even legally define what "the LGBT movement" is? Do they think that people are card-carrying members of some official LGBT organization? This is so vague that it allows basically any interpretation that they decide is politically expedient at any given time.
Depending on public opinion this could range from being virtually a nothing burger that will only be used to go after western sponsored political opposition groups (which would be foreign interference anyway, Russia already has laws for that), all the way to making life a nightmare for queer people and trying to completely erase them from public visibility. Basically what will happen is up to what the mood in the general Russian public is at any given time and how much pushback there is when the government oversteps, but unfortunately at the moment a lot of Russians have very reactionary views on this subject.
The sad part is that i'm not sure that the outcome would be any different even if the ruling party was a communist one, at least if it chose to tail the masses on this issue. It's a difficult problem to solve because a vanguard party should not be tailing the masses but it also should not impose completely unpopular policies that the masses are not yet ready for. The correct thing to do is to prepare the people for more progressive policy with a thorough campaign of education and normalization.
They say it's not meant to persecute people with different sexual orientations, rather just target "the movement"
This shit has me so baffled. "We don't hate queer people we're just gonna ban their most visible movement and make it illegal to teach sex education that isn't heteronormative"
The sad part is that i’m not sure that the outcome would be any different even if the ruling party was a communist one, at least if it chose to tail the masses on this issue.
At the very least there wouldn’t have been the reactionary backslide due to the return of the power of the church (especially the reactionary sections that were previously exiled).
I was thinking more along the lines of if tomorrow the communists seized power and had to govern a country that has already undergone this reactionary backslide. Of course if the SU never fell the circumstances and the social attitudes would be entirely different today, but we can't change the past, only the future.
Y'know I get this is supposed to be against "rainbow capitalism", but with them also promoting the whole "traditional family values" bullshit it's certainly not a good look.
Reactionaries worldwide all understand the value of a scapegoat. Russia's bourgeoisie benefit from the populace blaming LGBTQ people for their problems just as much as the ones in the west do.
Cheap political points at the expense of vulnerable minorities, perhaps to create a possibility of accusing them of the ills of capitalism later, once the contradictions start biting down the road.
Everyone catches strays, like when the LGBT death squad plants their rainbow flag on gaza or the US posts about their LGBT attack helicopter crew. The system alienates and fragments everyone by tricking one group it hates it slightly less than another. If you aren't principled, it's easy to buy into it.
Or this interview with a gay Israeli veteran recalling a time during the Lebanon war when his fellow soldiers murdered gay civilians at random. Didn't seem to bother him much.
At first I was skeptical but it checks out, they’ve been misinterpreting people existing as Gay or Trans as some sorta Western delicacy or some reactionary nonsense for a lil while now. Extremely upsetting that THIS is one of the topics of criticism in Russia’s critical support.
They haven’t been “misinterpreting” anything. It’s a political weapon with which they can divert attention to a made up enemy to distract from their failings.
This the bread and butter tactic of capitalists and fascists. Blame immigrants, or the gays, or the Jews. Anyone but themselves.
I think I speak for most everyone when I say that this isn’t based, but marginally better than the Nazis that Ukraine brings into their ranks and radicalize other troops to accept Fascist-friendly brigades. Everyone here should criticize Russia in their many faults at the same time. That’s the beauty of the Dialectical Method, we can point out shortcomings and successes and address them as they are, not how we would like them to be.
Communism is the only ideology at the present which actually gets better over time, rather than just decaying into fascism. I see a lot of anticommunists point to their past failings or current flaws and there's a reason they ignore things like plans for the future; because it would make them look like a nazi. They can almost frame themselves as the antifascists even while all their actions point towards a fascist future.
The Russian government can have reactionary positions when it comes to LGBT issues, and yet still be the main force in the world today killing nazis who would like nothing more than to wipe LGBT people off the face of the earth.
It's possible to both recognize how a state (Russia, Iran) can occupy an anti-imperialist position due to their circumstances and also recognize that they have seriously bigoted domestic politics.
Russia has lots of Ls, they just happen to play the vanguard role in breaking western hegemony over the world right now. I hope Russia can find its way back to the light one day though. And breaking western empire is a prerequisite for that.
It really seems like most of Russia's Ws are just kind of incidental, arising naturally from the fact that they're an enemy of NATO. The Russian state is still a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, they've just been forced to align themselves against western imperialism.