Skip to main content

Anna Politkovskaya RIP

I have hesitated to write about the brutal murder of Anna Politkovskaya.

She was a close friend of friends and I know many people who will be simply stunned at this senseless crime.

Politkovskaya was in a very real sense the conscience of modern Russia. A voice speaking up for tolerance and mutual respect. She was scathing about the failings of the Putin regime, and in Chechnya she had seen the crimes of that regime up close. Her life had been threatened several times, but she had the courage and determination not to give in to the thugs and crooks who now dominate political and economic life in Russia, and especially in the North Caucasus.

Several hundred protestors gathered in Pushkin Square in Moscow to mourn her death. The setting was significant, for it is where dissidents protested during Soviet times.

It is hard not to despair of modern Russia. The casual - and unsolved- killings of Galina Starovoitova and Andrei Kozlov have shown that any independent voice in Russia risks their lives. The bully-boy tactics against Georgia show the Putinistas at their very worst.

Newly assertive abroad, but lawless at home. The bear is still dangerous, but as always the danger is mostly born by its own citizens.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This article on Radio Free Europe shows the kind of outrages that Anna Politkovskaya told the world about:

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/09/ba53439c-db63-423d-a08e-736db03e6998.html
7:46 pm
Anonymous said…
http://www.voima.fi/content/view/full/1867

Persons from internal famous (in Finland) band members of Ultra Bra, with new temporary name Työryhä created song Anna dedicetd to memory of Anna Politkovskaya.


Download and share the News!
1:52 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more