Always on the cat beat, BuzzFeed has stayed on the story of Pussy Riot even as attention from other media outlets has faded in recent months. Now the site has obtained a series of emails from a Russian diplomat to the U.S., in which the diplomat tries to justify the persecution of the band members for a fairly harmless prank they pulled at a Moscow cathedral, which netted them sentences of two years in prison. The emails, which were leaked to BuzzFeed by a U.S. government official working on human rights issues in Russia, are a marvel of half-baked rationalizations and plain old misogyny.
The diplomat appears to prefer a free associative style of argumentation. “Life is strange — kill 12 people in a movie theater, and you are a psyco boy, maniac; show your ass in a nation biggest cathedral — and they will call you a prisoner of conscience,” he mused philosophically.
What does this mean? If you read the words in order, it seems as if the diplomat is arguing that “show[ing] your ass” in a cathedral is somehow a worse crime than mass murder and lamenting that those silly human rights activists tend to think the opposite. But this cannot be, as that is crazy. We’ll never know, though, because when pressed to explain further by the U.S. official, the diplomat goes off on a misogynist rant that, while more coherent, is no less bananas.
“Generally, I am of the opinion that those pussies are simply not happy in their sexual life. And that makes them riot,” the diplomat wrote. “They simply need a good f..k,” he continued. “Unfortunately, we don’t have such a capital punishment in our criminal law.” Fantasies of raping the feminism out of women: not just for blog comments and Twitter anymore.
While one might feel it’s poor form for a U.S. official to tattle on a diplomat this way, I can’t help but applaud this move, if only for Russia’s own good. If this is what passes for diplomacy in Russia, Americans could be forgiven for wondering if the entire Russian government is being run by a bunch of bottom-feeders from the Free Republic website. Then again, maybe this is all part of Vladimir Putin’s master plan to convince the rest of the world that he and the people who work for him are crazy.
