Global war against women: Pussy Riot whipped by Cossacks

Can’t say that this Russian crapola is entirely due to the global war against women, but Pussy Riot is indubitably female — remarkably brave women, too — and the Cossacks took whips to them in Sochi.

Yes, whips. Yes, Cossacks.

You remember the Cossacks fondly, too, I’ll bet. They were, at least anecdotally, the shove in the back that encouraged my people to leave Odessa and Bialystok. We Jews who have blonds in our midst grimly attribute those glamorous hairs to Cossack rape. (We have extant blonds in my family, namely my sister.) This is possibly a canard but our prejudice against Cossacks is more judgment than pre.

A long time ago my Uncle Saul introduced me and my cousin Bobby to 78 recordings of what was then known as the Don Cossack chorus. I had fond memories of the music, especially a great tenor singing “Danny Boy” in barely comprehensible English. When, a while ago, I went in search of these recordings, I found that the robust male chorus had been renamed the Red Army chorus. I even went to Avery Fisher a few years ago to hear the chorus. They are musically great, still. (Although the shape of their military hats is sublimely silly. What do they keep in them? Collapsible Kalashnikovs?)

An odd sort of name-change, though, because the Cossacks are not and never have been official army. And loving that Cossack music is similar to loving Wagner: my aesthetic sensibilities rage moral war with the creature(s) that made the music.

Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the Cossacks are, as I always knew, not an official military organization. They are, hm, paramilitary. There are, in short, the Russian prototype for Brownshirts and Blackshirts and America’s “tea-party” militias. And we know what militias are, don’t we? (Won’t bother dropping the words “paranoiac,” and “gun-crazy” and “primitive violent anti-everything-except-themselves dumb cult” into your ears. That is, I wouldn’t if I were whispering, which I am not.)

So those are the Cossacks and here is the New York Times story which provides a link to a video of Cossacks whipping members of Pussy Riot as they protested in Sochi.

The Cossacks clearly have not managed to advance beyond their ancient totalitarian pretensions and male-dominated values. They remain medieval thugs, homo ever so sine sapiens. What an utterly queer, rabid thing this is! Pussy Riot — highly intelligent and civilized women protestors — whipped by Putin-unleashed troglodytes. It’d be a noir cartoon if it weren’t so horrific.

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