This is why we keep the “critical” in “critical support”, comrades. What a hellworld we live in where this dumpster country is the second biggest threat to american hegemony.
I thought about that too… Aren’t you strengthening rainbow imperialism by doing this sort of bullshit? You’re essentially giving out ammo like candy to western liberals who are now going to screech even louder - “muh LGBT rights in Ruzzia!”. At the same time, you’re missing out on the opportunity to say “look, the West is full of shit, they only pretend to care about gay rights, but we here don’t do these empty gestures”. Not to mention that innocent LGBT people will get hurt because of this by being a political pawn.
Comrade Lenin said it 100+ years ago about Jewish people - “they are not the enemy, the capitalists are”. A century passes - the game is still the same, they just found a new group to attack.
It’s because “LGBT is imperialism!!1!” is just an excuse. The real reason they are doing this is, simply enough, because Russia’s leadership is very conservative. Conservatives gonna conservative, they just need to present their target minority as a ploy from the enemy and voilà, persecution justified.
Yeah this is straight up reactionary shit. They say it’s not meant to persecute people with different sexual orientations, rather just target “the movement”, but wtf does that even mean? How do they even legally define what “the LGBT movement” is? Do they think that people are card-carrying members of some official LGBT organization? This is so vague that it allows basically any interpretation that they decide is politically expedient at any given time.
Depending on public opinion this could range from being virtually a nothing burger that will only be used to go after western sponsored political opposition groups (which would be foreign interference anyway, Russia already has laws for that), all the way to making life a nightmare for queer people and trying to completely erase them from public visibility. Basically what will happen is up to what the mood in the general Russian public is at any given time and how much pushback there is when the government oversteps, but unfortunately at the moment a lot of Russians have very reactionary views on this subject.
The sad part is that i’m not sure that the outcome would be any different even if the ruling party was a communist one, at least if it chose to tail the masses on this issue. It’s a difficult problem to solve because a vanguard party should not be tailing the masses but it also should not impose completely unpopular policies that the masses are not yet ready for. The correct thing to do is to prepare the people for more progressive policy with a thorough campaign of education and normalization.
They say it’s not meant to persecute people with different sexual orientations, rather just target “the movement”
This shit has me so baffled. “We don’t hate queer people we’re just gonna ban their most visible movement and make it illegal to teach sex education that isn’t heteronormative”
The sad part is that i’m not sure that the outcome would be any different even if the ruling party was a communist one, at least if it chose to tail the masses on this issue.
At the very least there wouldn’t have been the reactionary backslide due to the return of the power of the church (especially the reactionary sections that were previously exiled).
I was thinking more along the lines of if tomorrow the communists seized power and had to govern a country that has already undergone this reactionary backslide. Of course if the SU never fell the circumstances and the social attitudes would be entirely different today, but we can’t change the past, only the future.
Y’know I get this is supposed to be against “rainbow capitalism”, but with them also promoting the whole “traditional family values” bullshit it’s certainly not a good look.
Reactionaries worldwide all understand the value of a scapegoat. Russia’s bourgeoisie benefit from the populace blaming LGBTQ people for their problems just as much as the ones in the west do.
Cheap political points at the expense of vulnerable minorities, perhaps to create a possibility of accusing them of the ills of capitalism later, once the contradictions start biting down the road.
Yet another reason for me to be labeled extremist
