As Arnold would say, Putin is a girly man and as such is expected to act as such. Nor does he pretend to be anything other than the agent of evil his actions say he is. But the Russian Orthodox Church does have such pretensions and today it has been found guilty of hooliganism. Without the complicit help of the church, Pussy Putin could never have pulled off this farce.
To use the words of the Pontius Pilate judge, the church is guilty of the following:
"Hatred towards Christians"
"Openly displaying disrespect" not just for those in the cathedral but for all Orthodox Christians
"Degraded the moral feeling"
The church's crime is a conspiracy driven by hatred of religion and the court does "not trust" the testimony of the church because it is an attempt to "evade justice" and proven to be false
Just how much has this organization whored itself out? A true Christian explains:
Christians are still persecuted to this day
That Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of political power in Russia.
Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, the state-controlled corporations, or his menacing police system, or his obedient judicial system. It may be that the harsh, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; that otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more persuasive, transcendent guarantees of his long tenure at the pinnacle of power. It was then that it became necessary to make use of the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.
How did Putin succeed in this? After all, we still have a secular state, and any intersection of the religious and political spheres should be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society. Right? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of the Orthodox aesthetic in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had an aura of lost history, of something that had been crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present a new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project that has little to do with a genuine concern for the preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.
False Christians disrupted their worship
It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, given its long mystical ties to power, emerged as the project’s principal exponent in the media. It was decided that, unlike in the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the brutality of the authorities toward history itself, the Russian Orthodox Church should now confront all pernicious manifestations of contemporary mass culture with its concept of diversity and tolerance.
Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national television for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would in fact be presented, thus helping the faithful make the correct political choice during a difficult time for Putin preceding the election. Moreover, the filming must be continuous; the necessary images must be burned into the memory and constantly updated; they must create the impression of something natural, constant, and compulsory.
Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.
Perhaps the unpleasant, far-reaching effect of our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. At first, they tried to present our performance as a prank pulled by heartless, militant atheists. This was a serious blunder on their part, because by then we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out its media assaults on the country’s major political symbols.
In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
Satan's minions arrest Freedom fighter Gary Kasparov
As you can see, when Pussy Riot performed in the church, they were the only Christians there. They were saving it, cleansing its corrupt spirit. Naturally, its corrupt leaders and followers were aghast, anxious to prevent these true believers from exposing the frauds who believe in the church over God.
But just as the church leaders helped put Jesus on the cross, so today has another corrupt government with a rigged trial and another corrupt church force the innocent to pay for the sins of the guilty. It has been said that all it takes for evil to win is for good men to sit idly by. This is not true. Good men don't sit idly by, they rot if they do.
Today, Russia in all her glorious self-pity has set back by decades any progress she has made towards freedom and democracy. It's not just three young women who will pay, but all Russian people. A Russia who has made herself the laughingstock of the world. A Russia who is once again dominated by eavesdropping ears to put away all her imagined "enemies". It does not have to be this way. As always, freedom is there for the taking if we choose it.
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