Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 25 – By attacking
the Telegram messenger service, the Putin regime has not only revealed its
reactionary nature and generated its own nemesis in the form of a population
appalled by what it is doing but has generated its own nemesis, a Russian
people which now views the regime as an object of scorn and laughter, Lev
Shlosberg says.
The Yabloko politician says that the
attack on Telegram shows “the total inadequacy of the Russian authorities. They
are absolutely out of date, a quality that guarantees their inevitable political
defeat” because “strictly speaking, they do not understand the nature of the
world they are living in” (gubernia.pskovregion.org/columns/cifrovoe-soprotivlenie/).
“The Soviet nature of the Russian
authorities does not allow them to look forward. Today, the Russian powers are
a machine turned to the past.” Its “idee fixe is absolute control over citizens
via the total suppression of the rights and freedoms of the individual.” It
requires from them only “subordination and obedience.”
Aleksandr Zharov, the head of Roskomnadzor,
the organization that has attacked Telegram, speaks about “the degradation” of
the latter. But what has degraded is in fact
the regime itself. Its minions “have shown themselves enemies of progress” who
cannot function in the modern world.
Instead, Slosberg says, they have
retreated into their “cave-like besieged fortress” and are animated by “an
organic hatred of freedom and human rights.”
Such a regime “cannot have any future.”
The Russian authorities, he
continues, “are above all dangerous for the citizens of Russia. they are
depriving almost 150 million people of a normal present and thus a normal
future. The real ideology of the Russian authorities is obscurantism: they do
not have any historical perspective but are capable of fucking up the lives of
all who have to live under them.”
Not surprisingly, this generates “the
strongest natural human protest” because the attack on Telegram affects the
daily life of millions in ways that make no sense; and they recognize that such
an attack will inevitably fail. They see
the harm the regime is wreaking, and they also see the ease with which they
personally can do an end run around its prohibitions.
“Millions of people,” Shlosberg
says, “have chosen the simple and correct path: they have retained for
themselves the possibility of using Telegram by simple technological means.”
Indeed, evidence of the government’s failure came immediately: in the first
week, the number of Telegram users grew by almost a quarter.
And this “increase in the number of people
suffering from the illegal and unjust government pogrom in the Internet
logically and quickly is increasing the number of the opponents of the powers
that be.” Thus, “in trying to destroy freedom,” the Putin regime has “broadened
the space” in which Russians can act freely.
Perhaps the best evidence of this is
that Russians have begun to laugh about Roskomnadzor, calling it “Roskom-shame,
Roskom-pogrom, Roskom-bedlam, Roskom-bardak, Roskom-degradation and Roskom-failure.”
Laughter, after all, “is he most powerful weapon against a dictatorship. A
dictator who is laughed at is condemned to defeat.”
“The hunt for Telegram … has shown
that the Russian powers today are a dead end branch of political development,
one dangerous for all humanity.” But it
is hardly unexpected that officials would pursue this given that the president
of the country views the Internet as a CIA plot.
He may but society does not, Shlosberg
says. And faced with a choice of “returning to the cave or the right to
freedom, [Russian] society is choosing freedom. Intuitively because it feels
right and that means it is. That is what
good sense dictates. Good sense against
obscurantism is the essence of what is occurring in our country.”
The regime, of course, is responding
just as one would expect: It has launched an investigation for extremism into
the newspaper, Pskovskaya guberniya, in
which Shlosberg’s articles regularly appear (svoboda.org/a/29189514.html).
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