The world's largest country, home to 150 million people, the country that gave us Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Aivazovsky and Kandinsky, the country with amazingly rich culture and history, is bound to swim in the filthy waste of its own moral degradation for years to come. Lack of ordinary conscience in too many hearts and common sense in too many
minds is the underlying reason.
Suppression of free speech in the last year has reached levels unseen even back in 2012. Somehow, this has gone by largely unnoticed by Huffington Post, CNN, or Fox News. Moreover, the degree of support of such oppression among the common folk does not receive nearly enough attention in the west.
In this video, we see ordinary Russian citizens protesting the war in Ukraine. These people are bullied not by the police or the Security Services, but by their fellow countrymen. (The blue-and-yellow flag is Ukrainian).
Such is a nature of a dictatorship: oppression of people by their own kind, not just by the Evil Man Upstairs, be it Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin or Vladimir Putin.
The attackers in the video think they are being patriotic. They have no idea what is it they are doing to themselves, to their children. There is no law without free speech. There is no feedback and no way to govern effectively without free speech. They are handing their own government a terrible license to squash any one of them individually.
President Obama had to issue a statement of condemnation and a call for a transparent investigation, of course. He had no choice. Still, I am sure, he realizes that demanding justice of the current Russian government is nothing short of naive.
It is probably time to address the nation as a whole, because a significant portion of it -- though hopefully not a majority -- supports the policies of Kremlin.
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