This morning, Maria Alekhina and Nadezdha Tolokonnikova, two member of the protest group Pussy Riot, were sitting in a McDonalds in Sochi when around fifty plainclothes police officers arrested them for robbery, according to their Twitter feeds. They were out of prison for a little less than two months, just enough for the world to feel slightly better about attending the gangster Olympics. And now the facade from Russias Potemkin human rights has been abruptly pulled away. If Putins plan with the Sochi Olympics was to mock democratic values, to show that everyone in the West can be played for suckers, and to demonstrate our hypocrisy to the rest of the world, he has completely succeeded. The very stupidity of the nature of the arrest is clearly strategic. Pussy Riot were arrested while they were minding their own business, and for no good reason. George Orwell noted in a letter about why he wrote 1984 that the point of the police state is not to demonstrate the states control over peoples bodies but their capacity to shape accepted reality. A police state needs to impose absurdity to show the depths of its power. Putin could easily have waited for Pussy Riot to stage a protest, to cause a disruption, and then arrested them on the basis of hooliganism as he did in 2012. Instead, he saw to it that they were arrested for the silliest of reasons, and made sure everybody knew how silly those reasons were. Time to don your Kafka t-shirt. Franz was the greatest prophet of his age.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 21:40:23 +0000