I had meant to add this information to my earlier ‘Banned in Russia?’ post, but there was just too much going on. It needs its own post.
The Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church are working together to hold power in a stalled if not decaying country – and they’re blaming homosexuals, ‘atheist scientists’, and amoral Westerners for their problems.
Russia is in trouble. Russia has been in trouble, more or less, for the last thousand years. The trouble changes flavors but its goals are almost always the same: to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a very few, drain power and wealth from the majority of citizens, and somehow make the citizens enthusiastically complicit in (or at least meekly resigned to) their fate. America didn’t really ‘win’ the Cold War. By some metrics, Russia lost because of state incompetence. In many ways, the Cold War is still merrily churning on.
The Russian economy has rewarded those who managed to get rich by raping natural resources away from any kind of sane central oversight. For everyone else, lifespans and birthrates have been going down. Alcoholism and drug use are climbing. The current political heads got their training with the KGB and its post-Soviet incarnations. Journalists who rock the boat are threatened, exiled, jailed, or killed. Reliance on science and reason has been dwindling since the mid-1990s. Russia today is a hotbed for many so-called ‘alternative’ medicines, New-Age beliefs, and religious-based scams. Corruption is so rampant that foreign companies (except China, who has strong reasons to covet empty Russian farmland) are reluctant to invest in the Russian economy. Even ordinary citizens know not to drive without dash-mounted cameras to document accident fraud on the roadways.
One tried and true way to shift blame from state corruption and incompetence is to convince the populace that someone else is responsible for all the trouble. Don’t blame the government, says the government. Blame Jews. Blame those pesky gays. Blame those horrible decadent Westerners, who don’t care about our unique traditions and history!
Ah, Russia? I love your history, art, language, and culture. I hate to see you going down the Taliban’s road as you expunge any hint of homosexual ‘deviance’ from that culture. Your young people are not having babies and not forming families because they’re being led into gay culture; they’re avoiding children because they see the future growing too bleak for them, let alone their children.
There is growing international pressure against Russia for its vague, draconian, and inhumane new anti-homosexual laws, and the unofficial culture of discrimination, theft of assets, rape, torture, and murder sheltering behind those laws. Some folks are talking about banning Russian products from the US and the UK (not a good idea, until you know for certain it’s really a Russian product!) Others are asking the International Olympic Committee to take the Winter Games out of Sochi, for fear of attacks on gay athletes and spectators. I’d guess that the IOC is a bunch of money-hungry wimps (as they showed in the face of Ai Weiwei’s protests against human rights abuses in China.) The only recourse most non-Russians really have is to:
1. Don’t visit or watch the Sochi Games.
2. Don’t buy from businesses sponsoring those Games.
3. Tell those businesses why we are not buying.
Stephen Fry wrote about it here. George Takei has a scathing blog post here. Harvey Fierstein talks about the Russian crackdown in the NY Times. Dustin Lance Black exhorts Hollywood to pay attention.
Any capable online search can reveal why Russia allowed this grim nonsense to go through, including a very good Reason.com article by Cathy Young. She writes in part, ‘…Religion has become the Russian state’s new ideological prop, a “national idea” to fill the post-communist void. Not surprisingly, this religion-as-ideology often seems more political than spiritual—an aggressively statist creed perfectly aligned with Putin’s worldview.’
In the UK, David Cameron looks set to try something similar, via vague new anti-smut laws aimed at protecting minors. He might actually manage it, since much of the same British populace who is relaxed about sexuality is 1) too apathetic or cynical to vote and 2) does not remember how anti-gay Britain was in recent history.
Which is why I follow these developments with a wary eye toward the future of the USA.
I live in a country where religious extremists, under several more-or-less successful masks (including voter restrictions, deficit reduction, claims of reverse racism, and a coldly hypocritical ‘concern’ for children and morality) have stalled our government, restricted women’s reproductive rights, celebrated their disdain for and fear of science, and claimed that natural disasters are somehow God’s will for us treating gays, people of color, Jews, and atheists like real citizens.
I’ve seen these same religious extremists enter unholy alliances with massive corporations who cynically pretend to share their ideals, bankroll their ‘grassroots’ protests and political groups, all the while ready to cut off funding the moment that association becomes inconvenient. Thank you again, SCOTUS, for penning Citizens United and making the plutocracy that much more powerful.
I’ve seen skilled online and television journalists and scholars laugh ruefully when asked if they’d ever run for office. Usually with a reason like ‘I’d never get elected. I was too outspoken in college, or too wild.’ Most of us have not texted pictures of our genitals to strangers (I hope). Many of us also know better than to throw stones while living in glass houses. The downside of such reasoned discretion is that the people who are often actually running for office are somehow convinced of their own moral purity – and want to share it with the rest of us. 
I’ve seen at the local level what happens when seizure of assets is combined with corrupt and cash-strapped police departments and self-justified religious ‘excuses’ for theft, extortion, and threat of violence against ‘outsiders’
I’ve seen predictions from right-wing scholars who have been watching the violent transformation of the Republican Party. These are not ‘bleeding heart liberals – and even they largely agree that the GOP cannot reverse course now. It is too tied to an extremely partisan base, which may lead the party to ultimately field some of the worst Presidential candidates yet seen for the 2016 elections. If current demographic trends hold, most of these potential Presidents won’t even get as far as Romney did. But if redistricting, lobbying, unchecked campaign donations, and voter restrictions increase even a few percent, the true ‘will of the people’ may not matter.
That’s three years away. I’d like to be focusing on the economy, health care, infrastructure, and climate change. I fully intend to write more smutty science fiction and fantasy novels and stories. But I know that if one of those disastrous candidates wins in 2016, in 2017 my country might begin to look a lot like Russia today.