This will be short, I think. I have things I need to do that are not completely centered around computers–an almost impossible coincidence but it does happen–but this needs attention now.
Actually I am finding the ramping up of violence and legally mandated persecution against QTBLG people in Russia too alarming to be able to form many coherent thoughts about it, or at least not enough to fill much of a page here. Mostly I have been like: shit! I have been having nightmares about this exact thing since the turn of the millennium only in my dreams we are hiding from the police in New York or Seattle, but maybe we have been in St Petersburg this whole time? And now it is actually happening? Uhhh, somebody do something! Anything! Somebody?
A couple of people with more readers than I will ever have have spoken up so far, and they are articulating my own thoughts very well. Especially Stephen Fry, who points out the obvious–the glaringly fucking obvious–parallels between the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics set to be held in Sochi, Russia.
It could be argued that both he and I are overreacting to these similarities, and perhaps we are, but how much of a risk would we take if we acted (or did not act) as though nothing is really going on because we do not believe fascist regimes of extermination could possibly ever arise again in “the west”? I might address the difficulties of terminology later: is this truly fascism that we see emerging in Russia? How “western” is Russia? I cannot say I care all that much about those sorts of problem just yet and I do not know if I will. Right now is a time to act if I ever saw one.
George Takei beat Fry to the punch; he posted yesterday a similar request to move the Olympics. He is less pointed about the historical resonances, but he includes a link to An Internet Petition as a point of registering protest.
Pass these around, please. More importantly, make noise. The petition is a nice start but please do not stop making noise until the Olympic Committee finds its ethical backbone.
This shit scares the fucking daylights out of me.
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