Uh-Oh: In Neo-Soviet Russia, Regime Critics Check in but They Don't Check Out
No sooner had the Kremlin announced a new set of restrictions on NGOs, including the ability to retain anyone in the country on allegations of having failed to pay taxes (in Russia's arcane system, such a charge can be leveled against anyone at any time) than it started actually denying foreigners the right to leave the country. The Moscow Times reports:
The French director of the Institute for Collective Action, an NGO, was prevented from leaving the country after border guards at Sheremetyevo Airport questioned her residency permit, she said Monday. Carine Clement, a French citizen whose husband is a State Duma deputy, said she believed she might have been stopped to keep her from speaking about Russian housing scams at a conference that opened Monday in Brussels. The incident could raise new worries among nongovernmental organizations, which have complained of growing state pressure over the past two years. "The border guards would not allow me to get out of the country, saying that my residency permit is an old form and that I should have changed it into a new one," Clement said. She said she visited Rome a month ago and that she did not have any problems leaving the country. But when she mentioned this to the border guards, she said, she was told that foreigners were supposed to change their old residency permits for new ones under a government decree that came into force one month ago.
Clement, whose residency permit expires in May, said she knew nothing about the decree. "If I find out that this decree doesn't exist, I'm going to bring legal action against the border guards, and if I find out that the decree does exist, I'm going to contest it because we didn't have enough time to change our residency permits," she said. It was not immediately possible to confirm the decree Monday. All government offices were closed for a public holiday.
Clement is married to Oleg Shein, a Just Russia deputy who was elected in a single-mandate district in Astrakhan and formerly belonged to Rodina. She said she might have been prevented from leaving the country because she was supposed to report to the European Housing Forum in Brussels about the plight of Russians swindled out of new apartments by developers. "The Russian government at the moment wants to have a good reputation in European society," she said.
The two-day forum, held under the auspices of the European Parliament, opened Monday. More than 200,000 people nationwide are believed to have paid companies for homes that were never built or that were sold to multiple buyers. Many of these people have nowhere to live and no money to buy new homes. In April, hundreds of defrauded home buyers demonstrated in Moscow, Ulyanovsk, Rostov-on-Don, Voronezh, Smolensk and Samara. Clement said the border guards who stopped her refused to give her their names. Calls to Sheremetyevo Airport went unanswered Monday. No one picked up the phone at the Federal Border Service, part of the FSB.
NGOs have found it more difficult to operate in Russia since a law came into force last year that increased the amount of paperwork they must keep and required them to reregister under stringent new guidelines. The law was adopted after President Vladimir Putin said he would not tolerate foreign funds being used by NGOs for political activities. Foreign-connected NGOs played key roles in regime changes in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004.
Among the NGOs that have come under fire is the Educated Media Foundation, formerly Internews Russia, which trained regional journalists. Its head, Manana Aslamazian, has been charged with smuggling after she failed to declare 9,550 euros ($12,400) at Sheremetyevo Airport in January. She has left the country and vowed not to return until her name is cleared. Investigators raided her organization's offices in April and seized its computers and documents amid what they called an investigation into possible money laundering and illegal business activities. Without the papers and equipment, the NGO has been forced to close.
Labels:
iron curtain,
neo-soviet crackdown,
russia
2 comments:
This doesn't make much sense! I thought the Kremlin was all about not letting foreigners and civil society activists IN to Russia.
James,
Let me let you in on something. The kremlin, and communists, are generally sociopathic psychopathic (This means that they have no actual sense of guilt). Actually a large proportion of the population is, so it’s not remarkable that in such a system, the practices of sociopathic rule is the norm.
More than once I have pointed out that we are not the same, as western feminists, and socialist ideology has been painting. And so ANY analysis and examination starting from the premise that “they think like me, and so if I was them, I would do”.
What you are trying and keep failing on, is trying to figure them out based on their ideological statements and such. however the reason they think their system is better and stronger and will win is that it’s a system with a focus on NO LIMITS, no opposing forces. While the western system is based on LOTS of LIMITS, and opposing forces.
How to reconcile contradictory thoughts and the actions? Easy, you DON’T RECONCILE THEM!!! this is exactly what western feminists do, this is what socialists do, they just take the item and treat it as an atomized whole, and so without examining the different things in connection with each other, one doesn’t get the sense that something is wrong. however that sense is a limitation.
This is why when a sociopath gets arrested they cry… the gullible will think they are crying for the victim and the seriousness of the situation has made them realize. However that’s a case of “they think like me, and so if I was them, I would do”. the truth is that they are crying because they cant have their destructive fun and are afraid for what might happen to them if others knew their real nature (and acted correctly on it as our ancestors did).
Now to make it as clear as clean pure water. Logic is not liked by those following this ideology because logic is a mode of thought that demands either or. it shrinks the points down to the level that one can then make a choice. I can have my cake, or eat it.
However any cursory glance at the world can tell you that in a lot of things, such modes of thoughts become a self limiting system in which people force themselves to choose between two options.
So in your case, your logic says… they are being contradictory…
However your looking at is as one cake… in other words the logic that we follow to be consistent and productive with each other in society is a limitation to those who manipulate. So the first, the more normal, seek homogeneity and consistency to increase predictablility and then increase productivity by diminishing communications.
However, when you don’t produce, and your not in place by merit, these limitations create a situation in which you have to make the right choices to unlock the rewards.
To them, they don’t see this as one big cake, they see it as lots of them… and so they can apply one set of rules to the one set of cakes, and have them… and apply another set of rules to another set of cakes and eat them. at no time will reality require them to be consistence since the consistency is only a convenient illusion for the sake of productive society, and those who are meritrocritous.
Lets look at it another way…
When you go out to gamble, you put a quarter down on a number and see if you win.
They say, that’s a limitation… I wont put my quarter down till I know where the end result will be, or I will cover all bets.
But the system says only one bet to a person… so they invite 36 people in and each person bets on 1 different number.
While your playing this set of rules that is not backed up by reality since they are not at that low level, they are saying… there ARE NO RULES, and those who follow them, are our servants.
In this way, they get the horse to turn… never caring what the horse thinks… and the horse, rationalizes so they are not uncomfortable, saving them the trouble of doing the work of comking up with an explanation. So rather than make an excuse, they say nothing, and so you do all the work to convince yourself what would make it ok. They don’t even have to know what that is as it’s a natural consequence of your minds need to resolve things tounderstand them. if you don’t know not to, then you waste a lot of time (resources), figuring out or trying to figure out a consistency that was never there!!!
Basically its like people looking at a random string of numbers and constantly trying to see a pattern in it.. however, since the actions are all dependent on pragmatic outcomes, and those are not the places they look, they only see random actions.
What governs them is outcome. end justifies the means… with the only limit being a means that costs you more ends than grants you… other than that, ANYTHING goes. And I mean literally anything. poision, assassination, etc.
In this case, it was pragmatic to delay them… the fall out will not be as bad as the outcome of no fall out.. and so for them, pragmatism says to delay those that you need to delay… let go those you don’t care about… and let all the useful idiots waste their PRECIOUS time spinning their wheels trying to make consistent sense of it, when the only consistent sense is the end and cost.
[this is why people cant see the analysis that I made of turkey, iran, iraq, and Afghanistan. And I was wrong in thinking that the separation between Afghanistan would minimize things in Pakistan… however, if I took the time to really look at the map, Pakistan would be an alternative route given India has a hard communist leaning. In other words… the whole analysis stems from ignoring all the moral arguments and stuff, and only looking at the ends desired by both.
west wants stability as that increases their productivity, the east wants destabilization because they cant produce the same way, and doing such lowers the other sides productivity and artificially inflates the profits from the oil. After all, 77% of all oil is owned by state run socialist/Islamic states!!! Only 2% are run by free enterprise companies like in the US… and the productivity gap is that the US only has 2% of the capacity, but supplied 8% of all the output.
The wests honesty and consistency and such gives it a huge bonus in productivity… which is why the propagandic attacks were to loosen up the population so that it wouldn’t be honest, and consistent… that would be more even footing…
Its really no different than trouble makers in a class room creating a situation that makes things better for them… after all, if they were smart enough to compete (or focused), then their best tactic would be to compete. but if they are not, then the best tactic is to lower the outcomes of the productive… after all, once you are on the bottom, one doesn’t lose by shaking the whole thing…
if you were building a stack of blocks and I was building a stack of blocks.. we would both need stability to have both of us succeed. But if one of us refused to grasp principals and couldn’t get blocks to stack well, then shaking the table puts both on the same level regardless of competence.
Is that really that hard to understand?
Post a Comment