This is what happens in Russia when you blog against the government

MOSCOW - Authorities charged Alexei Navalny, one of President Vladimir V. Putin's fiercest critics, with theft on Tuesday, threatening him with a 10-year prison sentence as the Kremlin ramps up a crackdown on dissent. Navalny rejected the charges as baseless.

www.philly.com...

Forgive my cynicism, but I suspect a certain number of ATSers will prefer to hope no one notices this, or they will write in to say that "The US does the same thing."

We, as individuals and as a nation, are not alone in the world. If we believe in freedom we must be sensitive to its loss anywhere and use our influence to restore it.

They've come a long way from socialism, where millions were deported to labor camps if they said anything against Government. This is why Americans value freedom...and the leftists dont.

Originally posted by lucid eyes
They've come a long way from socialism, where millions were deported to labor camps if they said anything against Government. This is why Americans value freedom...and the leftists dont.

You just got my first star.
Great comment and so true

Originally posted by lucid eyes
They've come a long way from socialism, where millions were deported to labor camps if they said anything against Government. This is why Americans value freedom...and the leftists dont.

They were never socialist.

I will quote Chomsky...

When the world's two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.

It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist -- surely any serious Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.

The Soviet Union Versus Socialism Noam Chomsky

You have to realise that in those time the working class were predominately socialist. The capitalist class had to control this in someway in order to maintain control of the economy. So they appropriated left wing terms in order to coerce support from the working class. Just like in today's politics they lied to garner popular support.

To say the left does not support freedom is ridiculous. The original meaning of left and right...

The original political meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’ have changed since their origin in the French estates general in 1789. There the people sitting on the left could be viewed as more or less anti-statists with those on the right being state-interventionists of one kind or another. In this interpretation of the pristine sense, libertarianism was clearly at the extreme left-wing.

www.la-articles.org.uk...

The left were always the anti-statists, the anarchists for example. All left-wing ideologies ultimate goal is free association...

In the anarchist, Marxist and socialist sense, free association (also called free association of producers or, as Marx often called it, community of freely associated individuals) is a kind of relation between individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, in a society that has abolished the private property of means of production. Once private property is abolished, individuals are no longer deprived of access to means of production so they can freely associate themselves (without social constraint) to produce and reproduce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their needs and desires.

Free association (communism and anarchism)

reply to post by jjf3rd77


Reminds me of this: Pussy Riot: will Vladimir Putin regret taking on Russia's cool women punks?

The feminist collective hit the headlines when three members were arrested after an anti-Putin protest. Now they face up to seven years in jail, a prospect that has shocked and radicalised many Russians. On the eve of their trial, some of the women speak exclusively

7 years?

If Romania blows, Russia will fall, again. They asked for it, with this, in red, indelible ink. Good catch, OP.

Increasingly, putin is showing his true lineage: a 'career politician'. In power, till he is overthrown. I think the world's had quite enough of these addicted ones. They are mad about power, and will do anything to hold onto it. I don't know the details, but I was told that putin pulled some shady deals to be in place, this time around.