EDITORIAL: The Scourge of Pandemic Russian Racism and the Cowardly Treachery of Barack Obama

EDITORIAL

The Scourge of Pandemic Russian Racism
(and the Cowardly Treachery of Barack Obama)

According to a recent report by the BBC, nearly 60% of black people living in Russia have been physically assaulted in a racially motivated attack, and live in constant fear of such incidents.  A quarter of those surveyed by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy had been attacked more than once and four out of five had been verbally assaulted.

These besieged people are terrified to ride the metro, cower in their homes like prisoners on any nationalist holiday, and avoid all crowds in general. 

Commenters on the BBC story told the tale:

EDITORIAL: Mr. Obama, How Dare you Stand Mute on Russian Racism?

EDITORIAL

Mr. Obama, How Dare you Stand Mute on Russian Racism?

If you were to simply peruse the news accounts of race violence in Russia during the last two weeks, they would read like pulp fiction — and the realization that they are nothing like fiction, but the cold, hard reality of daily life in the neo-Soviet dictatorship for hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned people, both visitors and residents, this realization would surely curdle your blood.

The silence of Barack Obama in the face of this outrage, just as certainly, would make your blood run cold.

Russia’s Coming Fascist-Racist Nightmare

Last week, a black American teenager, a tourist from Rhode Island, was stabbed in Russia, in just the latest in a long series of brutal and barbaric racial attacks in which Russia leads the world. In another, a 20-year-old Tajik worker had his head cut off and stuffed in a dumpster. These events continued apace even as the Russian economy was supposedly flowering. What will happen now as it collapses? When will dark-skinned people, of any nationality, realize that they have no future in Putin’s Russia?  Paul Goble reports:

Rising unemployment, cuts in the size of the military, drug abuse and alcoholism, corruption, and increasing attacks on ethnic minorities “have created [in Russia] a very favorable basis for the development of fascism,” according to one of the leading foreign policy commentators in Azerbaijan.
Indeed, the situation is so dire and Russia is so “pregnant with fascism,” says Vafa Guluzade, that ethnic Azerbaijanis – and presumably members of other groups from other post-Soviet states – now resident in the Russian Federation should “leave there before it is too late”.

Guluzade, who earlier served as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s Arabic translator and as the late Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev’s national security advisor, said that the situation in Russia today resembles the one in Germany in 1933 which brought Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power there. “God forbid that Russia will repeat the fate of fascist Germany,” he continued, a danger that could prove threatening to a large number of states given Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. As a result, he said, the entire world should be paying close attention to what is taking place in the Russian Federation now. 

“The present leadership of Russia has led its people into poverty,” the Azerbaijani analyst added.

Race Murder Explodes in Putin’s Russia

The Moscow Times reports that already this year Vladimir Putin’s Russia has seen a shocking 114 race-motivated murders, a shocking average of than two each and every week.

More than 100 people have been killed in hate crimes in Russia this year, with natives of Central Asia being the most frequently targeted victims, according to figures released this week by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights. Through Nov. 15, a total of 114 people died in racist attacks, 37 of whom hailed from the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, according to the nongovernmental organization.Alexander Brod, head of the NGO, said this week that another 357 victims were injured in the 269 hate crimes that his organization managed to register in the same period, Interfax reported Tuesday.

EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Ignorance

EDITORIAL

Annals of Russian Ignorance

The black voters cast their ballots without thinking. The victory of democracy and tolerance in the United States is a sham. Obama won simply because of the black majority that voted for his skin color and not his views or policies.

–Russian political analyst Alexei Chadayev, quoted in the Moscow Times

Sometimes (well, most of the time) Russian ignorance is so mind-bogglingly deep and wide that there simply are no words to describe it. Often, when one Russian tries to correct another, it only makes matters worse.

Take Moscow Times columnist Boris Kagarlitsky, for instance, in our view one of the most hopelessly ignorant human beings on the planet. Trying to correct Chadayev’s shameless racism, he points out:  “Blacks have never constituted a majority in the United States, and even if the Latino population were added, the aggregate sum would still represent a minority of voters. The truth is that the majority of Americans who voted for Obama were not black.” 

Even Kagarlitsky, a rabid Russian nationalist and Kremlin apologist, is shocked and embarrassed by this so-called intellectual’s naked barbarism, and chides: “Not only do our pundits have a distorted view of what is happening overseas, they are detached from domestic realities as well.”  Appparently he doesn’t stop to think that this ignorance might bleed into the Kremlin as well. 

Or reach himself — but any educated American would instantly realize that it has.  After all, he’s one of those pundits.  Kagarlitsky’s comments are just as stupid as those he purports to criticize, if not stupider. And given the breathtaking, apelike stupidity of Mr. Chadeyev, that’s saying quite a lot.

EDITORIAL: The Story of David and Goliaputin

EDITORIAL

The Story of David and Goliaputin

See that fellow above? Sure, you see him. He’s the one standing next to the burning cross and wearing the KKK costume.  The one who’s probably just about ready to go lynch some black and/or Jewish children, and likely salivating at the prospect.

His name is David Duke, an infamous American wacko and racist, proud card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.  Think of him as Pat Buchanan without the pretense.

And guess what! Just like Pat, David Loves Vladimir Putin’s KGB-dominated, hyper-racist state of Russia!

EDITORIAL: On Being “Russian”

EDITORIAL

On Being “Russian”

We have a challenge for you. Go to Moscow, sidle up to the first Russian you see, and ask them whether the following names are “Russian” — Nazyr, Islam-Beka and Aslanbek.

You won’t need to hear an answer. The quizzical “what kind of moron am I talking to” stare you will get should be sufficient. People with names like Nazyr, Islam-Beka and Aslanbek are subject to being lynched on sight in the Moscow city subway system or being cut to ribbons by machine gun fire in places like Chechnya and Georgia.

Yet, as the first week of the Olympic games drew to a close, Russia had won only seven gold medals, a puny total exceeded or matched by seven other countries, and six of them had been won by Nazyr, Islam-Beka and Aslanbek — two each in the sport of Greco-Roman wrestling. The only athlete with a “Russian” name who had won a gold medal was Valeriy Borchin in race walking (20 km).

How is it that folks like Nazyr, Islam-Beka and Aslanbek get to be suddently “Russian” when the are capable of winning medals at the Olympics, but then immediately lose that status everywhere else in Russia? How is it that, having divested them of that status, Russians can still lay claim to the territories they live in as being “part of Russia”?

These are the questions we are asking.