Russian security forces raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow Friday night, less than 48 hours after the country’s top court banned what it called the “global LGBTQ+ movement” as an extremist organization.
Police searched venues across the Russian capital, including a nightclub, a male sauna, and a bar that hosted LGBTQ+ parties, under the pretext of a drug raid, local media reported.
Eyewitnesses told journalists that clubgoers’ documents were checked and photographed by the security services. They also said that managers had been able to warn patrons before police arrived.
Russia looking a lot like their old enemy the Nazis these days.
Russia has always been anti-LGBT+. Stalin called them abomination and Putin is just a dimestore version of that monster.
It’s worth remembering that for all of the numerous issues Western nations and especially the US have with freedom of speech and expression, for every convert to some racist ideology, there is also a new supporter of LGBT+. The rise in hate we see is paralleled by a rise in acceptance of the marginalized. Freeze peaches is a double edged sword and always has been.
The paradox of tolerance is certainly an issue, but the very fact we’ve evolved as a culture to the point we’re having a discussion about it says something about the benefits of that freedom. Our culture isn’t stagnant. We have the capacity for growth and change, and while the government usually maintains the social status quo, we in turn can affect what the status quo is.
Fucking peaches.
Not always. Soviet Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1917, and it was the first country in the world to do that. But it was recriminalized again in 1933 by Stalin.
Fuck Stalin
I was reading several months ago that there was a time in the mid ‘90s that there were a few gay clubs in Russia that were relatively unmolested by the cops, as long as the local “roof” was paid off.
Not always, there were periods in their history of acceptance of homosexuality.
Ironically, Russians think they are fighting Nazis in Ukraine.
And Ukraine’s president is Jewish.
And they always have
I don’t know people incorrectly try to associate everything with Nazi. It’s hard to take anyone serious when they don’t even know what a Nazi is.
This isn’t dissimilar from how they were under the Soviet Union. Russians are just going to Russian.
Not so much “Russians being Russian” as it is “Fascist power structure being fascist power structure “
It’s more accurate to say that Russia under the Soviets was also an authoritarian state.
Authoritarians by their very nature are right-wing.
Putin, the Soviets, the Nazis, Conservatives, and Fascists of all flavors are obsessed with control and conformity.
It’s far easier to control a population when everyone is exactly the same.
This is why the true left wing movements have always embraced minorities and outliers.
This of course is a call back to the very origins of the terms left and right when discussing politics. The French Revolution. A vote was held. One of the first of the new assembly. The question was, “Should the king have an absolute veto over new laws?”. Those in support of the monarchy sat to the right of the speaker’s podium. Those opposed sat to the left.
All the economic bullshit of capitalism v communism was added later. Making the Soviets, a supposedly communist nation, firmly right wing. Not that the Soviets were particularly good at actual communism. Communism sort of requires the workers to control the means of production, not the State. Workers must be working for their own profit, not the profit of the State.
Working for the profit of the State is more of a kleptocracy.
The nazis criminalized, imprisoned, and eventually exterminated gay and transgender people in death camps. So yes, comparisons to nazis are fair when you criminalize lgbt people and start rounding them up in jail, preventing them from gathering together, etc etc
Who defeated the Nazies, by the way?
Helping to defeat them isn’t an excuse to go around and act like them. And the countries the Soviet Union occupied after WWII ending up suffering greatly.
Too many massacres, war crimes, and genocides to list out. Start here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes
And again, how is anything the Soviet Union did during ww2 supposed to be an excuse or justification for the Russian government persecution of minorities 80 years later. I’m sure the gay people being thrown in jail, having their businesses destroyed, and being killed extra judicialy (for now) will take great comfort in the fact that a totally different government 80 years ago helped beat the nazis (though only after trying to make a deal with the nazis to invade and divide eastern Europe between them. The Soviet Union didn’t lift a finger until the nazis stabbed them in the back and invaded the Soviet union).
I see you are well acquainted with the idea of redfash
no such thing.
It’s true that authleft often looks a lot like authright, which supports the theory that political alignment is more like a circle than a line. After all, they were allies before Hitler betrayed Stalin. Since then being anti-Nazi became a big part of Russian propaganda.