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The Cutesy Pie Vocabulary of 21st-Century Fascism: “Dvushechka” and “Jam Day”

By Sergey Chernov

The St. Petersburg Times

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/cutesy-pie-vocabulary-of-21st-century-fascism/

The Russian language is believed to be rich and highly nuanced.

This made foreign journalists think hard about how to translate the worddvushechka, used by President Vladimir Putin in reference to the two-year sentences the imprisoned women of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot were given in August for an anti-Putin performance in a Moscow cathedral.

“The whole case ended up in court and the judge slipped them a dvushechka,” Putin said when interviewed for his 60th birthday television special, which aired Sunday.

Dvushechka is a vulgar diminutive of “two,” and so news agency Agence France-Presse translated it as “a little two,” while the Associated Press news agency chose to avoid the subtleties and translated the word as a plain “two years.”

This is a pity because the Russian word says a lot about the person who uses it. It sounds loutish, somewhat tender and almost lustful, giving the idea that a man who has it in his vocabulary has a certain amount of power, finds nearly sexual pleasure in imposing it on those who cannot defend themselves and does not care what others think about it.

In classic Russian literature, diminutives are frequently used by the most repulsive characters.

Using the word about prison terms for anybody — even if they were not young women, two of whom have young children — suggests a sinister background and evil frame of mind.

After dropping his dvushechka, Putin, however, was quick to remark, “I have nothing to do with it.”

According to Putin, Pussy Riot’s performance was not political, but pure hooliganism, for which they “got what they asked for.”

If anybody had any doubts about his direct involvement, now they should not.

Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, were arrested March 3, while Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, was arrested March 16. The three have been held in a Moscow detention center since then.

Their crime consisted of entering the church when there was no service being held and trying to videotape a music performance, which was stopped by the church’s guards after less than 60 seconds.

Like Pussy Riot’s other performances, it was directed against Putin and was called “Holy Mother of God, Drive Putin Away.”

Putin expressed his satisfaction about the verdict three days before a postponed appeal hearing, scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 10. The women’s defense team said it sees his remarks as applying pressure on the court.

But quite frankly, an official of such stature has many other, more discreet ways to give orders to the court than via television.

A number of protests are planned around the world Wednesday, but not in St. Petersburg, where a rally was held Oct. 1. Check Pussy Riot’s support websites for times and locations.

Meanwhile, in a videotaped birthday card that resembles a deliberate and total inversion of Pussy Riot’s brief performance in the Moscow cathedral and their entire short career prior to that, the “women’s movement” Otlichnitsy (“Teacher’s Pets”) invoked a frequent and irritatingly cutesy-pie play on words whereby den’ rozhdeniia (“birthday”) is turned into den vareniia (“jam day”) and presented the so-called Russian president with several jars of jam, including orange jam (by the woman on the right in the back row) “so that our country is never shaken by orange revolutions and there is more vitamin C in our politics.” (Thanks to Comrade Olga for the heads-up.)

Reflections on Seminar Xvii

Audio: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously

Chávez Wins New Term in Venezuela, Holding Off Surge by Opposition

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/world/americas/venezuela-presidential-election.html?pagewanted=all

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez, long a fiery foe of Washington, won re-election on Sunday, facing down cancer and the strongest electoral challenge of his nearly 14 years in office and gaining a new mandate to deepen his socialist revolution.

Though his margin of victory was much narrower than in past elections, he still won handily. With 90 percent of the votes tallied, Mr. Chávez received 54 percent, to 45 percent for his opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, the national election council said. Fireworks erupted in Caracas after the news, and Chávez supporters celebrated in the streets.

Shortly before 11:30 p.m. local time, Mr. Chávez stepped out onto the balcony of the presidential palace in Caracas and waved to a sea of jubilant supporters. “My words of recognition go out from here to all who voted against us, a recognition for their democratic temperament,” he said. A former soldier, he called the election a “perfect battle.”

Still, after a spirited campaign, the polarizing Mr. Chávez finds himself governing a changed country. He is an ailing and politically weakened winner facing an emboldened opposition that grew stronger and more confident as the voting neared, and held out hope that an upset victory was within reach.

Mr. Chávez has said that he would move forward even more aggressively to create his version of socialism in Venezuela in a new six-year term, although his pledges were short on specifics.

His health, though, remains a question mark. He has undergone several rounds of treatment for cancer in the last 15 months, but has refused to make public essential details of his illness. If he overcomes the disease and serves out his new term to its end in 2019, he will have been in power for two full decades.

Toward the end of the campaign, facing pressure from Mr. Capriles, he pledged to make his government more efficient and to pay more attention to the quality of government programs like education. He even made appeals for the middle class and the opposition to join in his revolution.

But Mr. Chávez spent much of the year insulting and trying to provoke Mr. Capriles and his followers. And on Sunday night, he had to face the fact that the people he taunted as squalid good-for-nothings, little Yankees and fascists, turned out to be nearly half the electorate.

As the opposition’s momentum grew, Mr. Chávez’s insults seemed to lose their sting. By the end of the campaign, young people in Caracas were wearing colorful T-shirts that said “majunche” or good-for-nothing, Mr. Chávez’s favorite taunt.

Mr. Capriles was subdued on Sunday night, congratulating Mr. Chávez and saying he hoped the president would see the result as “the expression today of a country with two visions, and to be president means working to solve the problems of all Venezuelans.”

He appeared poised to carry on his fight in the elections for state governors in December. “You should all feel proud, do not feel defeated,” he told supporters.

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a research institute in Washington, called the presidential election “a fundamental turning point.” He said Mr. Chávez was “going to have to deal with a very different society than he dealt with in his last term, a society that’s awakened and more organized and more confident.”

Even so, the opposition is a fragile coalition with a history of destructive infighting, especially after an election defeat. Mr. Capriles will have to keep this fractious amalgam of parties from the left, right and center together in order to take advantage of the new ground they have gained.

“The opposition has more power, it feels more support,” said Elsi Fernandes, a schoolteacher, who voted for Mr. Capriles on Sunday morning in Catia, a poor neighborhood in Caracas. “The difference is that we’re not going to stay with our arms crossed.”

The turnout was more than 80 percent, the highest in decades, the election council said. People stood in line for hours, although the voting appeared in most cases to run smoothly.

Venezuela uses a touch-screen electronic voting system, and voters are identified with a digital thumbprint reader; technical problems at some polling places caused long delays and, in some, a resort to backup paper ballots. Polling places were told to keep working until everyone in line at closing time had a chance to vote.

Venezuela is mired in problems, including out-of-control violent crime, crumbling roads and bridges, and power blackouts that regularly plague much of the country outside the capital. Oil production, the country’s mainstay, has plateaued in recent years, and other exports have not picked up the slack. The overall economy grew this year, largely because of a huge pre-election boost in government spending, but clouds loom. A devaluation of the Venezuelan currency, the bolívar, is widely seen as inevitable, and inflation remains stubbornly high.

Mr. Chávez has trumpeted his programs to help the poor, and has pointed to a sharp reduction in the number of people living in poverty. But he has governed during a phenomenal rise in oil prices, which have soared from $10 in 1998, the year before he took office, to more than $100 in recent years and the high $80s now, pouring huge amounts of revenue into Venezuela. Mr. Capriles, who has served as a legislator, mayor and governor, campaigned almost nonstop, seeking to contrast his energetic style with the reduced schedule of Mr. Chávez, who received a diagnosis of cancer in 2011.

Mr. Chávez has kept most details of his condition secret, refusing to say exactly what kind of cancer he has or where in his body it is. He received chemotherapy last summer after an operation to remove a tumor, but the cancer returned and he had another operation in February, followed by radiation therapy. The operations and treatments were performed in Cuba, taking Mr. Chávez out of Venezuela for extended periods.

His health, and whether he was well enough to serve a new six-year term, always loomed over the campaign, but it receded as an issue as Mr. Chávez gradually increased his public appearances. Still, he never threw himself into campaigning at the frenzied pace of Mr. Capriles.

Opposition to Mr. Chávez has long been divided and easily manipulated by Mr. Chávez, a master politician who kept his rivals off balance. Mr. Capriles changed that. He crisscrossed the country, campaigning in places long considered bastions of support for Mr. Chávez, including urban slums and poor rural areas. He told voters that he was the future and Mr. Chávez the past.

Mr. Chávez dismissed Mr. Capriles as an unworthy opponent, accusing him of lying about wanting to continue Mr. Chávez’s social programs. He called Mr. Capriles a right-wing oligarch in disguise who sought to bring back the bad old days of rule by the rich. In Catia, María Elena Severine, 59, who works as a cleaner in a bank, said that Mr. Chávez was still as fresh a candidate as when he first ran in 1998. She lives in a rental apartment but hopes someday to be given a new home government-built home.

“I like my president,” she said. “He is the revolution. He is change.”

Capitalism: How the Left Lost the Argument

by Slavoj Žižek

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalism

One might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious, unregulated capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental nature of the global economy.

One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought on by the system's worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If anything, we are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us of companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer money, and sweatshops where children work overtime.

Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a larger, more systemic failure, there's a limit to how far these critiques go. The goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting excesses and to extend democratic control of the economy through the pressure of more media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police investigations. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum dare not touch.

It's no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist expectations that the ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment -- the awakening from a dream -- turned out to be dangerously shortsighted. The year 2011 was indeed one of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the world. A year later, every day brings new proof of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening actually was. The enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious fundamentalism; Occupy is losing momentum to such an extent that the police cleansing of New York's Zuccotti Park even seemed like a blessing in disguise. It's the same story around the world: Nepal's Maoists seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela's "Bolivarian" experiment is regressing further and further into caudillo-run populism; and even the most hopeful sign, Greece's anti-austerity movement, has lost energy after the electoral defeat of the leftist Syriza party.

It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the ruling ideology are not put into doubt.

They are even more violently asserted.

Could we in fact be seeing the conditions for the further radicalization of capitalism? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once told me that, if there is a person alive to whom they will build monuments 100 years from now, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who did more than anyone else to promote and implement the marriage of capitalism and authoritarianism -- an arrangement he euphemistically referred to as "Asian values." The virus of this authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe, nowhere more so than China.

Faced with today's explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask when political democracy as the "natural" political accompaniment of capitalism will enforce itself. But what if the promised democratization never arrives? What if China's authoritarian capitalism is not a stop on the road to further democratization, but the end state toward which the rest of the world is headed?

Leon Trotsky once characterized tsarist Russia as "the vicious combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market," but the description applies even better to today's China. In the Chinese iteration, the combination may prove to be a more stable one than the democratic capitalist model we have come to see as natural.

The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy -- not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.