21st Century Wire says…
What was meant to be a quick hit-and-run viral YouTube video, somehow turned into a kind of BDSM performance.
It was over before it started. Before they could finish the first line of their song, the Russian ‘feminist activist band’ known as Pussy Riot, met with immediate force from the local Cossack cops at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
PUSSY WHIPPED: Cossack Cop shuts down group’s latest YouTube stunt, by cracking a 19th century horse switch.
Five females and one male ‘band’ members donned their signature fluorescent pink and yellow balaclava masks when the local street patrol Cossacks and other set upon them.
One officer wielding a horse whip, cracked a few blows to band members, while other police physically drove them off site before the band could finish their performance for their worldwide YouTube audience.
This was the band’s latest internet publicity stunt since its main members were released from jail in December 2013.
See full video footage of the incident here:
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To call them a ‘band’ would be a bit of a stretch actually, as Pussy Riot would struggle to hold together any basic chords and harmonies, although this kind of stab at ‘music’ can always be written off by a Generation X audience as some form of ‘punk’.
In fact, Pussy Riot were only an obscure “radical performance art collective” who finally came to international prominence after an arrest following their ‘music video’ performance on February 21, 2012, when five members of the group staged a religious-mocking ‘performance’ at the altar inside Moscow’s Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
It was a stunt that would’ve landed them in jail in another other country, including the US or Great Britain, yet this salient point is mostly lost on Western media commentators, ‘activist’ celebrity and politicians.
Other public ‘performances’ of note include group members photographed whilst having sex in the Timiryazev State Biology Museum in Moscow in February 2008, and there was also that incident where Pussy Riot simulated sex acts with frozen chickens in a Russian supermarket – not exactly high-brow art, but certainly enough to attract publicity. See their video portfolio here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTFmOFdYAbg
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Pussy Riot are not the first performance artists to court international controversy, but it just so happens that their arrival on the world media stage has come exactly at a time when US-European and Russian diplomatic relations are at their most strained point since before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Critics blame this in part on the entertainment industry’s ‘publicity machine’ opportunist mill, where western celebrities like Madonna, Jay Leno and British actor Stephen Fry – who are always looking for a cause to pin their own brand to, and who constantly (as Madonna does) leverage platforms like Amnesty International and ‘Live 8’ to advance their own publicity profile.
This latest outbreak of Russiaphobia in the West could be attributed to Westerners’ tendency to project their own political views and beliefs onto Russians. This point is underlined by the fact that for a band catering mainly to a western YouTube audience, Pussy Riot, have little support inside Russia itself. One recent poll found that two thirds of Russians think the band’s two year prison sentence was “either appropriate or too light”.
Both the US and British governments in particular, have been more than eager to hitch a ride on the ‘gender activist’ demonstration bandwagon in the run-up to this year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, as it garners their governments extra support at home, not only from the liberal voting blocs, but more importantly over foreign policy objectives in both Syria and the Ukraine. In the way, the advancement of Russiaphobia by Washington and London is a prime objective, which supports a much wider strategy of ‘neocontainment’ of Russia, minimising both its economic, political and ultimately – military, influence in the region.
If Pussy Riot were from Belarus, or even Poland – their videos would still be languishing in anonymity in the bowels of the internet – but because they happen to be from Russia – well, you should get the picture by now…
Meanwhile… the real battle for influence in the region rages on in the nearby Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
READ MORE SOCHI NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Sochi Files
