Russian Anti-War Activist Sentenced To Six Years In Prison For Internet Posts
A court in the Russian city of St. Petersburg sentenced anti-war activist Olga Smirnova to six years in prison on August 30 on a charge of spreading fake news about the armed forces.
I searched for her name and despite the RFE article being a week old, no other more credible outlets have picked up on it. Maybe other outlets are using a different romanization of her name but this is certainly a red flag.
It literally isn't. RFE is definitely a US propaganda platform, but it objectively has nothing to do with the CIA these days. But you should probably check under your bed one more time just to make sure.
RFE also "objectively" had nothing to do with the CIA for nearly 20 years after it was created, at which point it turned out the CIA had been funding it all along. But now we know they've stopped because they said they did, and anyone suggesting that they're not editorially independent is a paranoid loon, just as they would've been in the 50's and 60's.
Some of us don't believe that the people whose job it is to lie stopped lying because they said they did. Suggesting that the CIA is still doing things that they did regularly and successfully kept hidden in the past is not a conspiracy theory.
The CIA routinely funds groups covertly. As is the case with RFE, we are often able to confirm this covert funding decades later.
A main purpose of the CIA is to obscure what groups the U.S. supports. Did they just stop doing their job one day?
sourced directly from the fertile fields of your ass
Compared to Russian sources radio free liberty is a baron of truth and press accountability, so frankly it does not matter.
A shitty source not being the absolute worst source doesn't make it any less shitty than it is. If your only options for news are US government propaganda or Russian government propaganda, the only valid choice is to stop following the news.
Stop the war
Here’s a map of the global freedom status, and Russia seems to be in the same group with most of Africa Middle East and Asia. Considering this context, the news article doesn’t seem surprising at all. Just another sad day in Russia.
The makers of this map, Freedom House, receive funding mainly from the US government. They also took money from BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms manufacturer.
Yeah, well it might not be the best source, but at least they have a map that measures something interesting. The second best option would have been the map of press freedom index. It’s not quite the same things and it isn’t entirely relevant to the conversation either, but there you go. At least it tells you something about the attitude different countries have towards the media, which may or may not be associated with the attitude towards activists. This map also paints a slightly more nuanced picture, but the conclusion is largely the same as before.
See also: Wikipedia
Well, there's less bias typical for UK-funded sources than usual. At least Azerbaijan is not the same color as Armenia (thought the UK seem to have made a 180-degree turn on that conflict in the last couple of weeks, while keeping the same "formal"legal" position).
Ah, that's OT, about Russia - it would be purple on that map even before 2008.
....and Russia seems to be in the same group with most of Africa Middle East and Asia. Considering this context, the news article doesn’t seem surprising at all. Just another sad day in American brain dead news for morons.
Honestly how do you people manage to tie your shoelaces?
So is Turkey, your NATO ally who bombs minorities and steals other peoples cultural heritage. Stop being a hypocrite
Big words from someone who just brought three different forms of sharia law into BRICS.
I still don't fucking understand why tankies simp so hard for this shit. It's like you are trying to prove that your philosophy is no deeper than "America bad."
Unfortunately NATO wasn't designed in a way that conceived of a rogue member state like Turkey. This means that it has a very limited toolkit for reigning in Erdogan's excesses. He also has a huge amount of leverage due to Turkey's pivotal role on the Black Sea which is obviously critical to everything happening in Ukraine. For now, NATO really does have its hands tied with regard to Turkey.
Stop supporting nazis.
Link this whenever people tell you posting doesn't matter.
Did the war stop?
Similar thing happened across the border, in Ukraine, with a pacifist being accused of "justifying the war", as reported by Democracy Now!
Russian pacifists want Russia to stop invading Ukraine.
Lemmygrad / Hexbear pacifists want Ukraine to appease Russia and give up territory.
They are not the same.
Russian pacifists want Russia to stop invading Ukraine.
Western "pacifists" want to send NATO tanks to Ukraine.
They are not the same.
Russian anti-war activists have a correct position.
But an important consideration should be whether one's actions actually contribute to Russia withdrawing sooner, or if they instead help justify further, equally self-interested NATO involvement in the war.
Unless you are Russian, it's most likely the latter.
There are two imperialist blocs involved in the conflict, and it doesn't matter which one of them technically started it.
No, we want Ukraine to stop trying to ethnically cleanse the Donbas and give the people there self determination. And we want the Ukrainian government to stop forcibly conscripting people to go die needlessly on the front in a clearly losing war. We want NATO to stop enabling all of that (it literally wouldn't be happening if they weren't demanding that it continue). That's what it is to be a peace activist. And I'm fairly sure I can speak for all of us, we are not pacifists, lol. But we are advocates for peace and the end to the horrible and needless loss of life.
Nice try to completely twist reality, and completely misrepresent us, as you war mongering dronies always do.
Edit: We actually give a shit about all the Ukrainian people being thrown into a fucking meat grinder. We care about their lives. The people who just say "more weapons to Ukraine!" do not give a shit about the lives of the people there. They're happy to just let the war keep dragging on until the last capable Ukrainian is dead. An example of how WE feel about the tragedy of the situation: https://hexbear.net/post/503747 (hexbear link to a lemmygrad news post)
Adding "jailing pacifists for speaking out" to the things dronies openly support, along with forcing others to fight when they're not willing to, poisoning civilians with generations of birth defects, and giving cluster bombs to Nazis.
The moral high ground, ladies and gents
At least she didn't jump out of the window 🌝
This news story is over a year ago, and the US locks up people all the time for political reasons
yeah both are bad
although the source on this article is dubious so this case is probably made up
I don't know if they'd go through the effort of staging the photo
https://vkrizis.ru/obschestvo/olga-smirnova-prigovorena-k-shesti-godam-za-sem-postov/ https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6186252
I don't read russian but I think this is legit? I just copied and pasted her Cyrillic name in Duck Duck Go, so these might still be western propaganda targeted towards Russians like I said I don't speak or read Russian or know major outlets in Russia.
Whataboutism
Can you provide proof that people in today's US have been given jail time for posting online government criticism?
Here's a guy who got locked up for saying that if they try a local Jan 6th in Florida people need to be armed to resist. Dude got sentenced to 4 years of prison for posting about defending the country from Jan 6thers.
I tried to look through a lot of cases. It seemed like most every case was leaking information, threats of actual violence, stolen valor, or other generally agreed upon crimes. There's truth to the notion that a government is more likely to look for crimes if you're a specific person, but I don't know of anyone in the modern US who goes to jail for lying about things the army has done. I use the word "lying" because Russia courts make the claim that that's what happened here.
Also, there are more recent cases of Russia imprisoning someone for essentially this same crime.
I'm more interested in her secret to staying young
How on Earth is the US green 😭
Julian Assange.
Internet posts?! This is why online discussions are ridiculously stupid. A classic argument over semantics about Internet posts, when so many people have been censored for speaking out against the government. Anybody that thinks the US is a bastion of freedom has bought into the propaganda. The idea that the US can critique anybody about this tickles me. Green my ass
How many years did donkey get? Did she at least get her swamp back?
