[Infowarrior] - A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot

[Richard Forno]

A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot

Jim Rutenberg

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/04/business/rutenberg-lessons-in-free-speech-from-pussy-riot.html?_r=0

MIAMI BEACH — On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump wrote on Twitter that people who burn the flag should be punished with “perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Two days later, I went to a little cafe here to meet with Nadya Tolokonnikova of the Russian punk band and activist art collective Pussy Riot. The group’s 2012 guerrilla performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which viciously mocked Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, resulted in a two-year prison sentence for Ms. Tolokonnikova and another of its members.

I had been in South Florida for family reasons and when I saw that Ms. Tolokonnikova was swinging through Miami for Art Basel, I immediately reached out to her. I’d come to view her as an emissary from a dystopian political-media environment that seemed to be heading our way, with governmental threats against dissent, disinformation from the presidential level and increasingly assertive propagandists who stoke the perception that there can be no honest arbiter of truth.

It’s what Ms. Tolokonnikova was protesting, and it’s what led to her brutal internment, which lasted more than 20 months and ended in 2013.

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

She pointed to Russian oligarchs who helped engineer Mr. Putin’s rise to power at the end of 1999 but didn’t appreciate the threat he posed to them until they found themselves under arrest, forced into exile or forced into giving up their businesses — especially if those businesses included independent media critical of Mr. Putin (see Berezovsky, Boris; Gusinsky, Vladimir).

Of course, the United States has checks, balances and traditions that presumably preclude anything like that from happening, she acknowledged as we sat comfortably in sunny Miami Beach while it played host to a celebration of free expression (Art Basel).

“It is a common phrase right now that ‘America has institutions,’” Ms. Tolokonnikova said. “It does. But a president has power to change institutions and a president moreover has power to change public perception of what is normal, which could lead to changing institutions.”

As if to make her point, later that day the informal Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski declared that The New York Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, “should be in jail.” In October, The Times published an article about leaked pages from Mr. Trump’s 1995 state tax returns.

If influential advisers to Mr. Trump continue to so loosely issue jail threats to journalists for doing their constitutionally protected work after Inauguration Day, well, that’s a big change to the institution of the presidency in my book, as well as in the one the founders wrote.

None of it is all that shocking to Ms. Tolokonnikova, who at 27 has seen this music video before.

When I met her, she was relaxed, wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Wild Feminist.”

She was planning a lecture that night urging artists to become more engaged and pick up where the politically conscious punk bands like the The Dead Kennedys left off — their messages largely lost in the music of corporate-label imitators who hardly said boo through the debates over two wars, the Great Recession and racially charged police shootings.


In February 2014, riot police officers detained Nadya Tolokonnikova, center; her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, right; and a Pussy Riot member, Maria Alyokhina, left, during a protest in support of opposition activists in front of a Moscow court building. Sergei Chirikov/European Pressphoto Agency
So it was that some of the most provocative musical statements of the presidential election came from the Russian women of Pussy Riot, whose work is about things much bigger than their own careers.

They have been working on their English-language music with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio and the producer Ricky Reed, Ms. Tolokonnikova said.

The last video they released, in late October, was called “Make America Great Again.” It showed fictional Trump agents in red armbands raping and torturing in a campaign against Muslims, Mexicans, women who have abortions, gays and lesbians.

It was certain to offend. But it wasn’t illegal, at least not here — at least not yet.

And it was a modest Russia-in-America answer to the more voluminous pro-Trump propaganda Mr. Putin exported to the United States. Some arrived through his sophisticated state-financed news networks (one, Sputnik, featured #CrookedHillary hashtags on its Twitter feed). And if assessments by the United States intelligence community are correct, some came through state-supported internet skulduggery.

Ms. Tolokonnikova said she became more involved here because the stakes were bigger than one country.

“What happens in one country makes huge influence on what’s going on in other countries,” she said. “So, I didn’t want Donald Trump to be elected because it would obviously encourage authoritarian politicians around the world to be more authoritarian, and it did.” (To wit, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines claiming without substantiation that Mr. Trump had endorsed his murderous drug crackdown.)

Yet as the web enables Mr. Putin to spread propaganda that encourages nationalist movements to campaign for walls and isolation — most recently, it is claimed, in Italy, where a referendum was held on Sunday — it also breaks down the cultural barriers between countries.

There are places in Russia where the internet provides a rare route to real news, given that Mr. Putin has effectively pressured so much of Russia’s independent journalism out of existence on television, on radio and in print.

But truth cannot break through if people never find it or believe it when they do. And the problem in Russia is the same one we’re seeing here, Ms. Tolokonnikova told me. “A lot of people are living really unwealthy lives so they have to work not one but two jobs, so they don’t have time to analyze and check facts, and you cannot blame them,” she said.

And, after so many years in which the “lift-all-boats” promises of globalization didn’t come to pass, she said, “they don’t trust bureaucrats, they don’t trust politicians, and they don’t really trust media.”

That’s why the top Russian propagandist Dmitry K. Kiselyov can assert that “objectivity is a myth” and, here in the United States, the paid CNN Trump-supporting contributor Scottie Nell Hughes can declare: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

When there is no truth, invasions are “liberations” and internment camps are “relocation centers.”

But, as Ms. Tolokonnikova said, “There is always a way if you really want to tell the truth.”

Doing so, for her, has come at a cost, even after prison. Informal Cossack security forces beat her and other Pussy Riot members as they prepared to perform in Sochi during the 2014 Olympics. That same year, a youth gang attacked her with trash and a green antiseptic chemical in Nizhny Novgorod, where she was protesting prison conditions. The men were clearly identifiable but, she said, police made no arrests.

Ms. Tolokonnikova has also co-founded a news site called Media Zona. She said it avoided opinion so that readers would accept it as a just-the-facts counter to disinformation.

“You are always in danger of being shut down,” she said. “But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.”

Her counsel for United States journalists: You better be, too.
--
It's better to burn out than fade away.