Hard to avoid seeing the contrast---there, a journalist who died brutally for telling the story that had to be told....here, journalists selling their souls to avoid telling the stories begging to be told. It's very sad & I'm sure the evaders of responsibility are taking notes.

TORTURE THIS

Politkovskaya was honorable, brave, and smart. She belongs to that circle of dissident journalists who do battle with mythology--the mythologies our leaders sell us and that we, the people of any nation, want to believe. She exposes truth, especially the truth about war. There is a convergence between her, Christopher Hedges ("War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"), and Robert Fisk ("The Great War for Civilisation"): all describe war in interestingly similar terms: it is about death, it is a massive failure, it is beset with smuttiness, pornography, obscenity. In other words, they show war to be exactly the opposite of what any leader says it is--clean, pure, just, strengthening. We are all all-too-ready to believe the heroic view of war. (Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" conjectures that our propensity to buy into the heroic view of war is an evolutionary adaptation.) It takes work to overcome the false intuitions we've been saddled with. Truth is embattled everywhere, in our hearts and in the streets. Politkovskaya threw herself against this reality and was annihilated by it. It would be nice if her murderers were to wind up hanging by their heels in some basement in Grozny.

Anna Politkovkaya was the only remaining honest mature person who was strong and relentless enough to tell the truth to the ruthless government of her country. Unfrotunately, her murder once again confirmed the bad turn Russia has recently taken from democracy to totalitarianism. I thought that this small letter from my close Georgian friend who lives in Russia will help to realize any interested person the extent to which present Russian society has started to resemble Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Dark Age in Russia

It’s been slightly more than a week since Georgian authorities arrested four Russian officers on spying charges and turned them over to European intermediaries four days later. However I feel like months passed since that as things changed dramatically. Russia stopped all transportation between the two countries, stopped money transfers to Georgia, started military maneuvers in the Black Sea. We thought that was pretty tough for retaliation measures but it was just the beginning. Backed by heavy TV propaganda, painting Georgians as “nation whose representatives are responsible for many crimes”, Russian police and other special services mounted a massive attack on ALL GEORGIANS LIVING IN RUSSIA. People were stopped on the streets, taken from restaurants and from their own apartments; there were massive document checks; everyone with Georgian citizenship and even surname was taken for interrogation. At best, they spent several hours in jail and then released but many people (some with perfectly valid visas and registrations) were deported from the country by cargo planes. Then tax authorities and anti-organized-crime units started massive checks in all businesses owned (and even linked) to Georgians (and I mean ethnic Georgians, including Russian citizens)… and guess what – serious violations were found. Majority of Georgian restaurants are closed now (and there are about 150 of them in Moscow) as owners and personnel are afraid to show up. Migration ministry of Russia refused to give work permits to Georgians and publicly accused them of criminal activities. To finish the picture – there was an order for Moscow schools to prepare the lists of students with Georgian names and surrender them to police.

During this week I not once had a strange feeling that I am sleeping and this is a bad dream, or a movie, something unreal… But this is happening, here and now, in 2006, in Russia. For the first time in my life I am afraid to live home, this feeling of unsafety is something very ugly, I must say. And it’s happening so fast that I still am in dismay and confusion. Perhaps now is the time to leave this country, where I spent about 12 years, I don’t know yet… E ven if these repressions avoid me it is not safe to live in a country with such policies.

But now it’s really not about me, I am writing to ask you to spread this news – there is ethnic purge going on and innocent people are suffering . THIS IS NOT PERMISSIBLE - NOWHERE. Russian state should understand – even if they have a lot of oil, there is not permissible to persecute people based on their nationality. Unfortunately, Russian society today is too weak and immature to handle this internally, therefore the West should interfere, until this country completes its transformation into dangerous Nazi regime.

A Georgian Living in Russia for the Last 12 Years

We/I regret the loss of a great human being, a heroic woman and an extraordinary journalist.

The american MSM is a lost cause as they front for the evils of Bush and the Repubs. They do nothing but serve as a mouthpiece for our corrupt government and two corrupt religions, Catholicism, my religion, and the SBC, both of whom use religion for political purposes and are totally complicit in the deaths of our troops, the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani citizens and the end of our american democratic values.

America is quickly disintegrating thanks to our two fundamentalist religions. Christianity in america has proven to be a complete failure and now we are not much different from Russia or China.