#palace for putin
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Two years ago on Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Ukrainians that he and other high ranking officials would remain in Kyiv and defend the country against Putin's illegal invasion.
The video above, made less than 48 hours after the start of the invasion, was intentionally filmed outside recognizable buildings in Kyiv. At the time, Russian assassination squads were out looking for Zelenskyy. Invading Russian troops committing war crimes got within 22 km of the government district.
This video was one of the most audacious uses of the internet to date. If top government officials were willing to stand and fight, Ukrainians felt more confident they could do the same. 730 days after the start of Putin's planned three-day "special operation", Ukraine still stands.
Here's the Ukrainian text of that vid:
Zelenskyy: «Всім добрий вечір. Лідер фракції тут, голова Офісу президента тут, прем’єр-міністр Шмигаль тут, Подоляк тут, президент тут. Всі ми тут. Наші військові тут. Громадяни, суспільство тут. Всі ми тут. Захищаємо нашу незалежність, нашу державу. І так буде й далі. Слава нашим захисникам! Слава нашим захисницям! Слава Україні»
Others: «Героям слава!»
#invasion of ukraine#volodymyr zelenskyy#kyiv#stand with ukraine#russia's war of aggression#russian imperialism#genocide#war crimes#vladimir putin#three-day special operation#mariinskyi palace#UkraineAidNow#агрессивная война россии#нарушение россией будапештского меморандума#владимир путин#путин – убийца#путин хуйло#путин - военный преступник#добей путина#путин – это лжедмитрий iv а не пётр великий#руки прочь от украины!#геть з україни#вторгнення оркостану в україну#київ#деокупація#маріїнський палац#володимир зеленський#будь сміливим як україна#слава україні!#героям слава!
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PUTIN'S PALACE: HIDDEN FILMING IN "tsarist" interiors
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Putin & his large palace on fancy banknotes.
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Report: Putin Fled to his Bunker after Declaring Martial Law
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#gilas#jessica sojo#kapuso mo#kmjs#nba#noypi alliance#pba#Report: Putin Fled to his Bunker after Declaring Martial Law Putin has fled Moscow to bunker at his ‘secret palace’ after Wagner Group rebel#tulfo
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Putin wants to stay president and continue stealing money.
Jason Matthews, Palace of Treason
#putin#war in ukraine#oligarchs#materialism#jason mattews#matthews#2015#matthews 2015#palace of treason
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The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.
Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. In a video from the prison in January, he had appeared gaunt with his head shaved.
The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death.
In early December he had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.
A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.
The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.
Putin has recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term in office. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs again for office in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.
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Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. Right before he boarded the plane, he posted a film titled “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe” on YouTube. The video, nearly two hours long, was an extraordinary feat of investigative reporting. Using secret plans, drone footage, 3-D visualizations, and the testimony of construction workers, Navalny’s video told the story of a hideous $1.3 billion Black Sea villa containing every luxury that a dictator could imagine: a hookah bar, a hockey rink, a helipad, a vineyard, an oyster farm, a church. The video also described the eye-watering costs and the financial trickery that had gone into the construction of the palace on behalf of its true owner, Vladimir Putin.
But the power of the film was not just in the pictures, or even in the descriptions of money spent. The power was in the style, the humor, and the Hollywood-level professionalism of the film, much of which was imparted by Navalny himself. This was his extraordinary gift: He could take the dry facts of kleptocracy—the numbers and statistics that usually bog down even the best financial journalists—and make them entertaining. On-screen, he was just an ordinary Russian, sometimes shocked by the scale of the graft, sometimes mocking the bad taste. He seemed real to other ordinary Russians, and he told stories that had relevance to their lives. You have bad roads and poor health care, he told Russians, because they have hockey rinks and hookah bars.
And Russians listened. A poll conducted in Russia a month after the video appeared revealed that one in four Russians had seen it. Another 40 percent had heard about it. It’s safe to guess that in the three years that have elapsed since then, those numbers have risen. To date, that video has been viewed 129 million times.
Navalny is now presumed dead. The Russian prison system has said he collapsed after months of ill health. Perhaps he was murdered more directly, but the details don’t matter: The Russian state killed him. Putin killed him—because of his political success, because of his ability to reach people with the truth, and because of his talent for breaking through the fog of propaganda that now blinds his countrymen, and some of ours as well.
He is also dead because he returned to Russia from exile in 2021, having already been poisoned twice, knowing he would be arrested. By doing so he turned himself from an ordinary Russian into something else: a model of what civic courage can look like, in a country that has very little of it. Not only did he tell the truth, but he wanted to do so inside Russia, where Russians could hear him. This is what I wrote at the time: “If Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.”
That Putin still feared Navalny was clear in December, when the regime moved him to a distant arctic prison to stop him from communicating with his friends and his family. He had been in touch with many people; I have seen some of his prison messages, sent secretly via lawyers, policemen, and guards, just as Gulag prisoners once sent messages in Stalin’s Soviet Union. He remained the spirit behind the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a team of Russian exiles who continue to investigate Russian corruption and tell the truth to Russians, even from abroad. (I have served on the foundation’s advisory board.) Earlier this week, before his alleged collapse, he sent a Valentine’s Day message to his wife, Yulia, on Telegram: “I feel that you are there every second, and I love you more and more.”
Navalny’s decision to return to Russia and go to jail inspired respect even among people who didn’t like him, didn’t agree with him, or found fault with him. He was also a model for other dissidents in other violent autocracies around the world. Only minutes after his death was announced, I spoke with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader. “We are worried for our people too,” she told me. If Putin can kill Navalny with impunity, then dictators elsewhere might feel empowered to kill other brave people.
The enormous contrast between Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of Putin’s regime will remain. Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.
Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.
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Spanish radio chatting about #Picassogate.
Summary: The French are a lot better at hiding high-profile adultery, and the Danes have a lot to learn. The pics were sold for 25-30,000 euros. Genoveva’s flat has two bedrooms and her ex-husband may be paying for it. Danish press is pretty passive, at least by Spanish standards, but some have wondered if Fred wanted the photos to come out. Genoveva knows the press very well. The photographers didn’t see Fred arrive with his suitcase, so he may have been in the apartment for several days.
Fred was caught kissing a brunette once and he apparently had a bridge opened (it had been closed due to weather) so he could visit a girlfriend (I hadn’t heard that one) after his children’s christening. Fred may still be seeing his old underwear model girlfriend. The Danish are very tolerant of adultery (not sure about that).
Much discussion of Juan Carlos and Corinna. Corinna slept with Putin???? Genoveva is friends with Carolina Herrera.
Amalia spends a lot of time in Spain because security in the Netherlands is difficult. Many European royals like vacationing in Spain because of the security. News to me, honestly. I guess that explains all the vacay pic in Ibiza and Mallorca.
Much discussion of the suitcase. Did his security bring him his suitcase? Did he keep clothes in Genoveva’s flat?
Genoveva studied philosophy. She leaked her soup kitchen work to Hola!, just like Meghan. Lol, this is hilarious. After her divorce she still worked for the Duchess of Alba Foundation and she spent the quarantine in one of the Alba palaces.
She was going to sue if the pics weren’t unpublished and the magazine didn’t apologize in 24 hrs, but she hadn’t done so.
Not sure how accurate any of this is, but it’s a fun listen.
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Alexei navalny did not like tragedies. He preferred Hollywood films and fables in which heroes vanquish villains and good triumphs over evil. He had the looks and talent to be one of those heroes, but he was born in Russia and lived in dark times, spending his last days in a penal colony in the Arctic permafrost. A fan of “Star Wars”, he described his ordeal in lyrical terms. “Prison [exists] in one’s mind,” he wrote from his cell in 2021. “And if you think carefully, I am not in prison but on a space voyage…to a wonderful new world.” That voyage ended on February 16th.
Mr Navalny’s death was blamed by Russian prison authorities on a blood clot—though his doctor said he suffered from no condition which made that likely. Whatever ends up on his death certificate, he was killed by Vladimir Putin. Russia’s president locked him up; in his name Mr Navalny was subjected to a regime of forced labour and solitary confinement. Mr Navalny will be celebrated as a man of remarkable courage. His life will be remembered for what it says about Mr Putin, what it portends for Russia and what it demands of the world.
A man of formidable intelligence, Mr Navalny identified the two foundations on which Mr Putin has built his power: fear and greed. In Mr Putin’s world everyone can be bribed or threatened. Not only did Mr Navalny understand those impulses, he struck at them in devastating ways.
His insight was that corruption was not just a side hustle but the moral rot at the heart of Mr Putin’s state. His anti-corruption crusade formed a new genre of immaculately documented and thriller-like films that displayed the yachts, villas and planes of Russia’s rulers. These videos, posted on YouTube, culminated in an exposé of Mr Putin’s billion-dollar palace on the Black Sea coast that has been watched 130m times. Despite the palace’s iron gates, adorned with a two-headed imperial eagle, Mr Navalny portrayed its owner not as a tsar so much as a tasteless mafia boss.
Mr Navalny also understood fear and how to defeat it. Mr Putin’s first attempt to kill him was in 2020, when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok smeared inside his underwear. By sheer good luck Mr Navalny survived, regained his strength in Germany and less than a year later flew back to Moscow to defy Mr Putin in a blast of publicity.
He returned in the full knowledge that he would probably be arrested. On the way back to confront the evil ruler who had tried to poison him he did not read Hamlet. He watched Rick and Morty, an American cartoon. By mocking Mr Putin, he diminished him. “I’ve mortally offended him by surviving,” he said from the dock during his trial in 2021. “He will enter history as a poisoner. We had Yaroslav the Wise and Alexander the Liberator. And now we will have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”
Mr Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in jail on extremism charges. He turned his sentence into an act of cheerful defiance. Every time he appeared in court hearings via video link from prison, his smile cut through the walls of his cell and beamed across Russia’s 11 time zones. On February 15th, on the eve of his death, he was in court again. Dressed in dark-grey prison uniform he laughed in the face of Mr Putin’s judges, suggesting they should put some money into his account as he was running short. In the end there was only one way Mr Putin could wipe the smile off his face.
In his essay “Live Not by Lies”, in 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel-prize-winning Soviet novelist, wrote that “when violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ‘I am violence. Run away, make way for me—I will crush you’.” Mr Navalny understood, but instead of running he held his ground.
His great strength was to understand Mr Putin’s fear of other people’s courage. In one of his early communications from jail he wrote that: “it is not honest people who frighten the authorities…but those who are not afraid, or, to be more precise: those who may be afraid, but overcome their fear.”
That is why his death portends a deepening of repression inside Russia. Mr Navalny’s murder was not the first and it will not be the last. The next targets could be Ilya Yashin, a brave politician who followed Mr Navalny to prison, or Vladimir Kara-Murza, a historian, journalist and politician who has been sentenced to 25 years on treason charges for speaking against the war. The lawyers and activists who continue to defend these dissidents are also in danger. Since Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the number of prisoners has increased 15 times. Even as the remnants of Stalin’s gulag fill with political prisoners, professional criminals are being recruited and released to fight in Ukraine.
Mr Navalny’s death also casts a shadow over ordinary Russians. In Moscow and across Russia, people flooded the streets at the news. Before the police started to arrest them, they covered memorials for previous victims of political repression in flowers. Yet that repression is intensifying. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, 1,305 men and women have been prosecuted for speaking out against it. A wave of repression is also swallowing up people who never before engaged in politics. The president will shoot into the crowds if he must.
For the West, Mr Navalny’s death contains a call to action. Mr Putin considers its leaders too weak and too decadent to resist him. And for many years Western politicians and businessmen did much to prove that fear and greed work in the West, too. When Mr Putin first bombed and shelled Chechnya in the early 2000s, Western politicians turned a blind eye and continued to do business with his cronies. When he murdered his opponents in Moscow and annexed Crimea in 2014, they slapped his wrist. Even after he had invaded Ukraine in 2022, they hesitated to provide enough weapons for Russia to be defeated. Every time the West stepped back, Mr Putin took a step forward. Every time Western politicians expressed their “grave concern”, he smirked.
The West needs to find the strength and courage that Mr Navalny showed. It should understand that Mr Navalny’s murder, the soaring number of political prisoners, the torture and beating of people across Russia, the assassination of Mr Putin’s opponents in Europe and the shelling of Ukrainian cities are all part of the same war. Without resolve, the West’s military and economic superiority will count for nothing.
Western governments should start by treating people like Mr Kara-Murza as prisoners of Mr Putin’s war who need to be exchanged with Russian prisoners in the West or prisoners of war in Ukraine. They should not stigmatise ordinary Russians living under a paranoid dictator and his goons, or put the onus on ordinary people to overthrow the dictator who is repressing them.
The best retort to Mr Putin is by arming Ukraine. Every time America’s Congress votes down aid, Russia takes comfort. The leaders assembled at the Munich Security Conference, who heard Mr Navalny’s wife, Yulia, speak of justice for her husband’s death, need to stiffen their resolve to see through the war. For their part Ukrainian politicians must see that standing up for Russian activists and prisoners is also a way of helping their own country—just as Mr Navalny called for peace, for rebuilding Ukraine and the prosecution of Russian war crimes. Liberating Ukraine would be the best way to liberate Russia, too.
The voyage ends
After he had been poisoned, Mr Navalny returned home because he believed that history was on his side and that Russia was freeing itself from the deadly grip of its own imperial past. “Putin is the last chord of the ussr,” he told The Economist a few months before he took that last fateful journey. “People in the Kremlin know there is a historic current that is moving against them.” Mr Putin invaded Ukraine to reverse that current. Now he has killed Mr Navalny.
Mr Navalny would not want Mr Putin’s message to prevail. “[If I get killed] the obvious thing is: don’t give up,” he once told American film-makers. “All it takes for evil to triumph is the inaction of good people. There’s no need for inaction.”
Mr Navalny’s death has seemed imminent for months. And yet there is something crushing about it. He was not alone in believing that good triumphs over evil, and that heroes vanquish villains. His courage was an inspiration. To see that moral order so brutally overturned is a terrible affront. ■
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🟠 Tue night - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime
(1 of 2)
▪️(Not Israel, but this is major) NUKES: Russian Ministry of Defense: "We started the first phase of the tactical (non-strategic) nuclear weapons exercises in the southern military zone, under the direction of President Putin. The purpose of the exercises is to maintain the competence of the military units in regards to the use of tactical nuclear weapons."
▪️DEFENSE MIN ON ARREST WARRANTS.. “The attempt of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, to reverse the situation will not succeed - the parallel of the prosecutor between the terrorist organization Hamas and the State of Israel is despicable and disgusting. The State of Israel is not a party to the Court and does not recognize its authority.
Prosecutor Karim Khan's attempt to deny the State of Israel the right to defend itself and free its hostages must be rejected outright.”
RUSSIA on the warrants: "We are not part of this institution and do not recognize its jurisdiction."
▪️LEBANON.. Walid Jonblatt, who heads the Progressive Socialist Party in Lebanon and the Druze community says: “We are only at the beginning of the war with Israel."
🔶 DEAL TALKS.. Qatari Foreign Ministry: "The talks on a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the hostages are about to reach an impasse.”
▪️ISRAEL CONFISCATES AND SHUTS DOWN.. a live AP news feed from Sderot showing live IDF activity in Gaza, the feed of which was being sold to Al Jazeera. The Min. Of Communications says it warned that the feed was illegal and harming IDF actions, but was ignored.
.. The White House: "The report is being investigated, journalists have the right to do their job - it bothers us.”
.. AP: We comply with the Israeli censorship laws which forbid the showing of the movement of soldiers which could endanger them. The live footage of the Gaza Strip usually shows smoke rising from the area.
▪️TRUCK FILLED WITH INFILTRATORS.. a flatbed truck was caught at Eliyahu checkpoint into Israel hiding 7-11 infiltrators (most likely for work) under the bed.
▪️COUNTER ANTI-AID PROTEST.. Arab and Jewish activists from the "Standing Together" movement went to the Tarkomiya checkpoint to prevent anti-aid protestors from stopping aid trucks from Jordan heading to Gaza (and usually taken by Hamas).
▪️HOUTHIS SHOOT DOWN.. another US MQ-9 observation drone, the 5th one, at US$ 30 million each.
▪️THE REAL SAUDI STORY.. an official from the Saudi palace spoke to N12: "Without real guarantees for a two-state solution - there will be no normalization."
▪️ON THE CONSCRIPTION LAW.. Mothers on the Front" movement: "According to the order of the High Court and the position of the ombudsman, recruitment orders for the charedi candidates should have been sent starting on April 1. Every day that they are not sent, this constitutes a serious injury to the IDF soldiers and their commanders and is a de facto offense against the law.”
🟠 Tue night - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime
(2 of 2)
▪️LAG B’OMER.. Tiberius: Mayor orders closure of Rabbi Akiva tomb/complex from Shabbat until Monday, including access roads to the area - to prevent crowds on Lag b’Omer and becoming a war target risk.
Beit Shemesh: Large temporary bleachers and facilities being assembled in the RBS-D section of the city, to allow Lag b’Omer celebrations with an attendance of tens of thousands.
▪️IDF CLOSES.. and mothballs remaining Patriot anti-air and anti-missile batteries, opening additional Iron Dome batteries instead.
🔥FIRE TERROR - PISGAT ZE’EV, JERUSALEM.. fire broke out in the Mir forest near Pisgat Ze'ev in Jerusalem. Firefighting planes have been launched and many teams are working on the scene. Molotov cocktails were reported thrown.
♦️JENIN - SHOMRON.. major counter-terror operation has been going throughout the day. IED’s fired by terrorists, IDF forces destroy a terror house, firefights.
Hamas: "The Jenin massacre will not stop us from continuing and escalating the resistance operations throughout Judea and Samaria.”
♦️RAFAH, GAZA.. conflicting reports: mainstream media says Israel not deploying additional forces following a US plan for ‘gradual safe civilian protecting action’, alternate reports say 2 additional fighting battalions deployed with a significant expansion of fighting in Rafah.
♦️LAUNCHERS IN A MOSQUE.. Troops of the Armored Brigade operating on the outskirts of Jabaliya located a cache of rockets and launchers in a mosque. Captured.
♦️POP-UP CAUGHT.. Troops of Givati Battalion captured three armed operatives who popped up out of a tunnel in Rafah. The three were detained and taken for further questioning.
⭕ HEZBOLLAH fires ANTI-TANK MISSILES at Mt. Dov. Started a fire.
⭕ HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS intercepted over Tiberius, also fired at Baram.
⭕ HAMAS ROCKETS at Ashkelon, intercepted.
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Dictator Vladimir Putin probably hates this film which Alexei Navalny made about his greed and corruption. That's the best reason to watch it!
Much of the documentary focuses on what we call the Putin Palace – Vlad's opulent crib on the Black Sea near Gelendzhik. The Putin Palace makes Saltburn look like a cheesy AirBnB. The Putin Palace is said to be the largest single residence in Russia.
Speaking of Saltburn, this is even longer than that film. So make sure there's plenty of popcorn on hand. 🍿
Since it's probably banned in Russia, look at ways of sending this vid to friends and family there which can get around digital censorship.
EDIT: Putin is as afraid of the dead Navalny as he was of the living Navalny.
Russian digital map service reportedly blocking reviews at memorial sites visited by Navalny mourners
Alexei Navalny death latest: Putin critic’s wife says Kremlin ‘waiting for novichok poison’ to leave his body
Putin's assassination of Navalny seems to be turning into another Russian public relations disaster.
#alexei navalny#russia#vladimir putin#the putin palace#documentary#film#putin's corruption#oligarchs#greed#assassination of navalny#алексей навальный#Геленджик#путинский дворец#коррупция#олигархи#владимир путин#долой путина#путин - вор#путин хуйло#путин – убийца#путина в гаагу!#нет войне#путин – это лжедмитрий iv а не пётр великий#союз постсоветских клептократических ватников#руки прочь от украины!#геть з україни#вторгнення оркостану в україну#деокупація#слава україні!#героям слава!
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What I read in 2023, pretty good going 👍 (apologies for long non sims post)
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot
2. Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Prism of Value by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts
3. The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue
4. The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction edited by Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks & Masashi Matsuie
5. Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money by George Caffentzis
6. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze
7. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
8. Civilizing Money: Hume, his Monetary Project and the Scottish Enlightenment by George Caffentzis
9. An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans
10. Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata
11. Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
12. Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard
13. Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England edited by Sabina Freitag
14. The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P by Rieko Matsuura
15. A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance by Claudio Pavone
16. Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda
19. Lady Susan by Jane Austen
20. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi
21. This Should be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle
22. The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard
23. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History by Larry Shiner
24. Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder
25. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
26. Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo
27. Carol by Patricia Highsmith
28. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson
29. Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political by James Kelman
30. Mem by Bethany C. Morrow
31. Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin by Boris Kagarlitsky
32. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
33. The History of the British Film 1918-1929 by Rachael Low
34. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System by Henryk Grossman
35. Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory
36. White by Marie Darrieussecq
37. Dream Houses by Genevieve Valentine
38. The Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard
39. Maigret Takes a Room by Georges Simenon
40. The Lodger, That Summer by Levi Huxton
41. Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner
42. Grundrisse by Karl Marx
43. A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske
44. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
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I don't follow you but I would just like to thank you for your thorough research about this queen bullshit. I hate how people tend to have selective memory about the terrible history of certain important figures and it just boils my blood. So thank you for all your hard work. :)
You're welcome. The way I see it is like this. Vladimir Putin has not set foot in Ukraine, or fired a weapon, or personally killed any Ukrainians in the current war, but everybody (except for tankies, but they don't count) has no problem understanding that he is ultimately responsible for what is happening there. He gave the order, it is happening under his government and with his say-so, and in pursuit of policies which the entire Russian state apparatus has long supported. No, QE2 is not functionally equivalent to an autocratic dictator with essentially absolute power over the degraded political systems in his country, for any number of reasons. But she was likewise the head of state and ultimate authority of the British government and the many terrible actions it took both at home and abroad between 1952-2022 (the period of her reign). Any idea that she doesn't know or bears no responsibility for her enthusiastic, unwavering, and lifelong support of the institutions that facilitated and carried them out, often with her direct advice and counsel (see: weekly meeting with the PM, privileged access to state papers) is just... wrong.
As others and myself have pointed out, the monarch actually does have considerable power in the UK system, even without getting into the shadowy process of Queen’s Consent and backroom wrangling to get the Palace exempted from diversity laws (because what are they going to do, say no to her?) She opens Parliament, she gives the speech laying out the government's agenda (even if it is written for her), she has to give "consent" to all draft laws, and so forth. Besides, her figurative and symbolic role also confers a great deal of assumed social and cultural authority on her, which is why she was often held up as an impartial "beacon" somehow above the muck-slinging of regular party politics. To act as if the literal Queen of England, head of that entire system, when even the minority party in parliament has to style themselves "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" to demonstrate that they're opposing the other party, but not her personally, is totally exempt from that, is, to say the least, strange.
This is obviously, again, rooted in white supremacism, the Anglo-American cultural background, and the fact that the British (and the British Empire) are still largely portrayed as "cool," "aspirational," or "universal" (why does everyone in every period piece have modern British accents, regardless of the time or place, and why do we accept that was how the past sounded?) In other words, it's the "good" empire, rather than the "bad" empire (as the rhetoric was during the Cold War in re the USSR). This ignores the fact not just of the British monarchy itself and the actual things that QE2 did in support of that paradigm, but the fact that an empire is by its nature an inherently harmful, exploitative, and assimilationist political structure. Besides, you would think that the least she could do would be to proactively address the bad stuff of the past and try to fix it, right? Nope. All the "modernization of the monarchy" came under extreme duress and only in moments of reactive crisis, and even after all the shit that England did to Ireland over the centuries (including the height of the Troubles during QE2's reign) she could only, on one occasion, offer something that was described as "the closest thing" Ireland had ever gotten to a formal apology, without being an apology. Even the goddamn Pope has apologized for the historical injustices/sexual abuse scandals of the institutional Catholic Church. If those guys are doing better than you in the historical-atonement department, there's something REALLY wrong.
Likewise, there is no doubt that overall, QE2 will have an absolutely glowing, lavish, and uncritical epitaph, and people who call that legacy into question will be stigmatized. Which is the last thing Britain needs right now, with a new hard-right government, a massive cost-of-living crisis (splashing out on a state funeral while people cannot both eat and heat their homes? Huh), and all the economic and social crunch that will be put on its most vulnerable citizens as a result. QE2 was sitting on massive amounts of automatically granted taxpayer money, and yet she steadfastly resisted any attempt to let the public have any notion at all of how she spent it (along with, as noted, sealing Philip's will and that of other senior royals). That alone was a massive moral failing of the country she supposedly "dedicated her life to serving," and it is neither bad nor disrespectful to point that out and seriously question all the saintly hagiography we are expected to uncritically embrace.
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Alexei Navalny, who has died suddenly aged 47 while in prison, was Russia’s best-known campaigner against high-level corruption. For many years he was the leading critic and opponent of President Vladimir Putin and his political party, United Russia.
Repeated arrests, jail sentences and physical assaults did not deter Navalny from digging up financial scandals, which he published on his blogs and X feeds as well as YouTube. In a 2011 radio interview, he described United Russia as a “party of crooks and thieves”, which became a powerful and popular mantra on social media and at political protests.
Repression did not stop him attracting enthusiastic crowds in support of opposition politicians in local elections in cities across Russia. Occasionally he ran for office himself, most notably in 2013 for the mayoralty of Moscow, when the official result gave him 27% of the vote – which he said was rigged so as to deny him victory.
In 2016, Navalny launched a campaign for the 2018 presidential election but was barred by Russia’s central election commission due to a prior criminal conviction. In 2017 he was attacked with a spray, leaving him partially blind in one eye. In 2019 Navalny fell ill in prison, from what he claimed was poison. His most dramatic brush with death came in 2020 at the end of a political campaign trip through Siberia, when he was taken seriously ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. His condition was so grave that the pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was rushed to hospital. Navalny’s wife and supporters asked for him to be taken to Germany, where they felt he would be better treated.
The Russian authorities agreed and Navalny was flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where toxicology tests showed traces of the nerve agent novichok in Navalny’s body. Russian officials complained that the test results were not made public nor disclosed to them. Navalny recovered and was released from hospital after a month.
He decided to convalesce for several weeks in Germany. Russian court authorities announced that if he returned late to Moscow he would be jailed for breaking the terms of a probation order. The threat was seen as a device to deter Navalny from returning to Russia in the hope, as the authorities saw it, that in exile his influence would rapidly decline.
Showing great courage, but defying the advice of his family and friends, he flew back to Moscow in January 2021, accompanied by his wife and dozens of journalists, and was arrested on landing. His Anti-Corruption Foundation promptly published on YouTube an investigation with pictures of a luxury multimillion-dollar mansion on the Black Sea, which they dubbed Putin’s palace.
Navalny’s stock had never been higher at home or abroad, and when a court gave him a two-and-a-half year sentence, western political leaders, including the US president, Joe Biden, protested openly and imposed sanctions. But Putin was determined to destroy him politically.
In 2022, Navalny was sentenced to an extra nine years after being found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court. In 2023, he was given a further 19 years in prison on extremism charges.
Navalny was born in Butyn and grew up mainly in Obninsk, a small town south-west of Moscow. His mother, Lyudmila, worked as a lab technician in micro-electronics and then moved to a timber-processing factory. His father, Anatoly, a Ukrainian, was in the military. In addition to Russian, Alexei learned Ukrainian through spending summers with his grandmother near Kyiv. He gained a law degree (1998) at the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow.
In 2000 he joined the United Democratic party, known as Yabloko. Under its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, the party stood for liberal and social democratic values. Navalny gained an economics degree at the Financial University (2001), and from 2004 to 2007 served as chief of staff of the Moscow branch of Yabloko. A charismatic speaker, he was attracted by the concept of television debates, and in 2005 founded a social movement for young people, with a name taken from the Russian word for yes, DA! – Democratic Alternative, which was active in the media.
Navalny started to move gradually to the right, and in 2007 he was expelled from Yabloko after clashing with Yavlinsky over Navalny’s increasingly nationalist and anti-immigrant views.
He then co-founded a movement known as Narod (The People), which aimed to defend the rights of ethnic Russians and restrict immigration from Central Asia and the Caucasus. A year later he joined two other Russian nationalist groupings, Movement Against Illegal Immigration (MAII) and Great Russia, in forming a new coalition called the Russian National Movement.
It made little impact and Navalny turned his attention to journalistic muckraking. His main outlet was a blog, LiveJournal. In 2010 he published leaked documents about the alleged theft by directors of millions of roubles from the pipeline company Transneft. The following year he exposed a scandalous property deal between the Russian and Hungarian governments. He decided to establish the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which continued until his death.
He also went back into electoral politics, leading street protests over unfair practices by United Russia. Navalny urged people to vote any way they liked in the 2011 parliamentary elections, including for the Communist party, so long as they voted against United Russia. He was tempted to run against Putin in the 2012 contest for the presidency, but said the ballot would be rigged. After the poll, he led several anti-Putin rallies in Moscow and was briefly arrested.
The following year Moscow was to elect its mayor. Navalny registered as one of six candidates. The next day he was sentenced to five years on embezzlement and fraud charges. Initially he called for an election boycott, but when he was released on appeal he changed his mind. Some analysts speculated that Putin wanted him to run to make the electoral contest look genuinely open. Navalny lost to the incumbent mayor and Kremlin ally Sergei Sobyanin, but claimed to have won. In 2016 he announced he would stand against Putin in the 2018 presidential contest. More arrests and repression followed.
Navalny’s nationalism put him in agreement with Putin on one major issue: Crimea. The territory had been ceded to Ukraine in 1954, but in 2014 Putin used force to reincorporate it into Russia. Navalny said he would not return it to Ukraine if he had the power to do so. Like Putin, he argued that Ukraine was an artificial construct. “I don’t see any kind of difference at all between Russians and Ukrainians,” he said, while admitting his views might provoke “horrible indignation” in Ukraine.
However, his agreement with some of Putin’s views on Ukraine did not bring him to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That March, Navalny released a statement from jail. Through his spokesman he urged Russians “to overcome their fear” and take to the streets and demand a “stop to the war” against Ukraine. He called Putin an “obviously insane tsar”. “If in order to stop the war we have to fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves, we will fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves.”
“Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we must pay this price. There’s no one to do it for us. Let’s not ‘be against the war’. Let’s fight against the war.” At the end of 2023 he was transferred to the remote penal colony at Kharp, north of the Arctic circle.
In 2000 he married Yulia Abrosimova, and she and their daughter, Daria, and son, Zakhar, survive him.
🔔 Alexei Anatolievich Navalny, politician and anti-corruption campaigner, born 4 June 1976; died 16 February 2024
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Putin’s special guard at the winter palace
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nothing more humbling than when you eat something and have to use the bathroom. like you're really just a tube with stuff in it. we all are. each and every one of us is just a complicated messy poop machine. some of us act like they aren't. some of us see a cow chewing cud and go "how pathetic they spend all day chewing stuff its like a full time job to them" and they point at the cow and laugh. even though they're doing the same thing with their insides producing all sorts of slimes and liquids and solids. when armstrong landed on the moon his meat tubes were hard at work making poop like he was thinking about that cute leap for mankind speech while his stomach was making acid to dissolve little bits of astronaut food. astronaut food that he mashed up with the outside bones of his mouth hole and pushed down a muscley meat tube into a meat bag full of acid. maybe he even heard a little rumble tumble from his astronaut tum tum. when kennedy was shot he was making poop in the back of that convertible. jackie too. in fact, jackie's gut was excreting slime to make sure her freshly made poop wouldn't get stuck on its way to her butthole. they were both filled to the brim with food and poop and various liquids. putin has at one point in his existence on this planet shat his pants and it was disgusting it was so sticky and smelly and he had to clean himself off with soap and water. and then he had to go eat more food and mash it up and dissolve it in the meat bag to make even more poop just to stay alive. right now at this very moment there's someone in the united nations general assembly making poop by churning a very long meat tube inside of their body. every royal palace has toilets. and royal people shit into them. and then they push a button or pull on something or use some sort of mechanism to activate another mechanism and that mechanism flushes their poop down a pipe and they stand there and the smell lingers and they're still royals but they're also stinky smelly animals with poopy butts. in fact, they're among the smelliest stickiest poopy butt animals in the world because some years ago their ancestors started walking around on their hind legs which made their glutes fucking enormous and buried their buttholes deep inside a dark moist crack and now they're royals in a royal palace but they still have to use paper or a jet of water or perhaps a washcloth and stick their fingers all the way up into that crack to clean their wrinkly stinky butthole
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