Do you think it’s wrong to play computer games on your mobile during a church service? I certainly do.
Even a non-believer must realise that doing so is a sign of disrespect both to the liturgy and to those parishioners who take it seriously. If you don’t think either is owed any respect, don’t attend mass. If you do decide to attend, you’ve joined a game played to certain rules that must be obeyed.
Do you think the culprit should be rebuked? Good, we’re in agreement on that.
A footballer who trips an opponent must be whistled for a foul. A tennis player who steps over the line when serving must be faulted. And a boor who plays computer games during mass must be…
This is where the fun starts. Such a man could be dealt with in any number of ways. He could be told to stop or get out. He could be summarily evicted. He could be told never to show his face at that church again. In any civilised society, that is.
If you still think that Russia is one such, think again. For Ruslan Sokolovsky of Yekaterinburg has just been arrested for exactly that transgression. He has been charged with two crimes: insulting the feelings of believers and inciting hatred. The first one carries a prison sentence of up to three years. The second, up to five.
Either punishment would be too soft, according to the Interior Ministry spokesman. Not even five years in the slammer would be commensurate with the crime.
One would think that a supposedly Christian country acting like a Muslim theocracy should give Putin junkies in the West second thoughts. But it won’t. Nothing will.
No doubt they’ll hail this theocratic fascism as a laudable display of the KGB junta’s conservatism. They’d feel the same way even if Sokolovsky were immolated or torn in half by two horses, which was how religious issues were settled under the early Romanovs. That’s what conservatism is all about, isn’t it?
I wonder what excuse they’ll find for the next case, that of the Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin. There the judges who sentenced Luzgin are clearly liberals getting in touch with their feminine side.
The maximum sentence for Luzgin’s crime was three years in a labour camp, and yet he got away with a mere fine of 200,000 roubles. That’s about £2,300 in our money, roughly what a teacher gets in a year or a pensioner in 18 months.
What was the blogger’s crime? I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. Luzgin was charged with publishing a piece that violated the tersely worded Article 354.1 of the Russian Criminal Code (“Vindication of Nazism by the public denial of facts established by the Nuremberg Trials’ verdict and by the dissemination of knowingly false information about the USSR’s activities during the Second World War”).
The blogger had the audacity to write that not only Germany but also Russia committed aggression against Poland, thereby starting the war. Admittedly, the information Mr Luzgin disseminated indeed denied the ‘facts’ established at Nuremberg.
Except that the trials where Stalin’s Russia sat in judgement along with the Western allies were both a travesty of justice and a giant cover-up. Apart from punishing Hitler’s crimes, the trial set out to exonerate Stalin’s, which were equally heinous.
There’s nothing false about the information that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a criminal pact dividing Europe between them. That happened on 23 August, 1939. A week later, on 1 September, the Second World War started with Germany’s attack on Poland.
Contrary to the popular misapprehension, the war wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for the Nazis. Though initially stunned by the blitzkrieg, the Poles regrouped to the east of the Vistula, and their resistance was growing stronger by the day. Meanwhile the Germans were running out of essential supplies, especially aircraft bombs.
Their new Soviet allies helped, restocking the Nazis’ arsenal, as they later did during the Battle of Britain. But the Nazis demanded more tangible action, and the Soviets obliged. On 17 September they knifed Poland in the back by attacking her from the east. That put paid to the resistance, and the two predators divided the spoils stipulated in the pact.
The SS Einsatzgruppen came in the Wehrmacht’s wake and began to exterminate Jews in the western part of Poland. Similarly, the Soviet army in the east was followed by the NKVD, which had by then gathered vast experience in mass murder.
Several hundred thousand Poles were immediately deported, to the accompaniment of pistol shots fired through the heads of the usual suspects: aristocrats, priests, teachers, writers, scientists, administrators – and POW officers. The widely publicised massacre of 22,000 such people at Katyn and elsewhere was the culmination of that process, far from its entirety.
Such is the historical truth declared criminally false in Putin’s Russia. Now what do you call a regime that, on pain of punishment, forces its people to accept lies as truth? I call it fascist. Putin’s useful idiots call it conservative.
I’ll spare your delicate sensibilities by not telling you what I call Putin’s useful idiots. Let’s just say that my understanding of conservatism is at odds with theirs.