Russian ADL/SPLC Equivalent SOVA Center Shut Down By Ministry of Justice

We all deserve to hear some good news for once!

The SOVA center, which was the equivalent of the SPLC or the ADL in Russia, has now officially been put on the list of foreign agents and banned in Russia.

A true Russian’s Russian! As slavic as they come!

Amusingly, SOVA was sponsored by the Russian government up through 2016. Then, after the funding dried up various NGOs picked up the slack. Khodorkovsy’s Open Russia NGO, various Soros groups, prominent ethnic neocon groups, and Western embassies provided their funding. Right up until yesterday.

RFERL:

The Moscow-based SOVA analytical center said on March 20 that Russia's Justice Ministry has asked a court to disband the think tank as a crackdown on providers of independent information continues. According to SOVA, the ministry's March 10 request was based on allegations that the organization had violated its charter by organizing or taking part in 24 events held outside of its place of registration, which is Moscow. Sova said it will appeal the move. The SOVA center conducts sociological research mostly focusing on nationalism and racism in the Russian Federation.

Looking back, 2016 was the year when active repression of right-wing groups in Russia ended. The infamous 282 hate speech law was then decriminalized and the authorities began issuing warnings to cease and desist in hateful speech before simply just busting people’s doors down and hauling them off to the slammer. Also, the law was then repurposed and re-applied to putting pressure on various Islamic groups instead, and, in a few cases, Western missionaries. Which is a good thing!

As for why this was the case, I think it is because anger at the Kremlin’s betrayal of the Donbass separatist cause had begun to peter out and the so-called “Russian Spring” which was a brief flash-in-the-pan rise in Russian patriotic sentiment had died down by that point as well, so there was no longer anything to fear.

As for SOVA, they worked in much the same way as their Western equivalents, making lists of patriots and then passing them on to the Russian government with a suggestion to investigate and then possibly arrest the people. There is little evidence of the Russian government doing SOVA’s bidding at any given time, despite their heavy-handed persecution of nationalists which caused many to flee to Ukraine and fill up the ranks of Azov. The government did what they did because nationalists like Navalny allied with the Liberal Opposition and marched against the Kremlin.

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Patriots ought to take a leaf out of their enemy’s playbooks and start collecting lists of traitors. It is difficult to battle “Liberalism” or “Wokism” because when it is conceptualized in its ideological state, it is akin to a kind of dark miasma seeping into people’s minds and infecting society at large.

And how does one even begin to combat such an amorphous foe?

Well, the conservatives in Russia (and the West) have stated that they want to defeat their opponents on the battlefield of ideas. In other words, they said that the strategy for patriots ought to be to simply try to convince other people, preferable powerful people, of their ideas in open, respectful dialogue. Lol.

A far more effective strategy is just to figure out who exactly the Liberals or the SJWs in your country are. These people have names, addresses and deep-pocketed donors. Once you do, all of a sudden, you are no longer fighting a war against an invisible ideological plague, but against its carriers, who can be named, shamed, isolated, cut-off, and, eventually, hopefully, arrested. And this strategy works.

Do you know how I know?

Well, because it has been used effectively against Populists and Patriots the world over since the end of WWII and before that to get the war started in the first place. Ideologies need carriers to be able to spread amongst the population. Isolate the super-spreaders and you suppress the ideological contagion. Censorship and repression works. It simply works.

For years I have tried to convince prominent Russian conservatives of the necessity of going on the offensive against the enemy. For all my efforts, I was simply ignored by many and labeled an “extremist” or a “hooligan” and even blacklisted by some. Now the Ministry of Justice, the final arbiter of who gets labeled a dangerous extremist or a law-abiding and moral citizen, has finally ruled in my favor. Liberals and their organizations now get named, shamed, and shut down on the grounds of being foreign agents.

Apparently, this was doable all along.

All it took was a little political will to do so.

Fancy that.

Unfortunately, a more recent initiative started after the SMO and supported by people with money and government connections to create a patriotic reverse-SOVA center has petered out without even getting off the ground. The reason? My Russian podcast partner, who was asked to be part of the brainstorming group, said it was more of the same self-immolating CuckThink that caused the group to give up and then splinter up.

In short, the other conservative activists and the sponsors expressed moral trepidation at “using the tactics of the enemy”. My attempts to explain that there is no such thing, that there are only tactics, techniques, weapons and the only difference is the groups of people who use them, fell on deaf ears. In particular, the self-professed Christians were the most vehement about the immorality of our proposed course of action. What exactly is immoral about gathering information about key enemy financiers and their propaganda mouthpieces escapes me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t accept appeals to some kind of cosmically shared morality as legitimate arguments in and of themselves because universal morality is clearly just a spook in feminized people’s minds. But, even if I put myself into the shoes of a virtue-signaling moral busybody who does, I still can’t see where exactly the moral trespass is, in this particular case.

Perhaps minds holier than mine can enlighten me in the comments section below.

Still, at the very least, the enemy being shut down is a victory that levels the playing field for Russian patriots going forward, even if they struggle to set up anything that promotes their own agenda. The only successful, functioning patriotic organizations in Russia are the various veteran support communities, a few media projects and lots and lots of Telegram channels. Otherwise, we don’t even have an NRA like the Americans do. And when people like Maria Butina get sent over to America to figure out how to set one up in Russia, they get jailed by the feds.

So, that means that all that patriotic Russians have to lean on is their own government, essentially.

And it sure is nice to see the government do its job on occasion and actually fight the enemies of the people instead of funneling money to them as they clearly would prefer to do under normal circumstances. The fact that the government does the right thing so rarely is proof, in my mind anyways, that the peasants need their own institutions dedicated to defending their own interests. But the spook state is always quite eager to clamp down on any efforts to self-organize by the peasants. Which is why you cannot have both a spook state and a functioning civil society.

Can’t be done, folks! Can’t have both! Impossibe!

Just look at how thoroughly the FBI worked to infiltrate any and every politically-inclined group or organization within the US from the 90s onwards. The America of self-organized yeoman capable of handling their own problems that Solzhenitsyn so praised once upon a time is now long gone. Every time you do as much as join a Facebook group, you now have that little niggling doubt in the back of your head that you’ve possibly taken one step closer to landing yourself on a no-fly list.

This is because the enemy doesn’t fear your guns, and they don’t fear your rights or the toilet paper that they were written on. What they do fear is your ability to organize with like-minded and like-blooded people, form a hierarchical command structure, and start working to effect your agenda. The guns and the high-minded declarations are useless without the organized strength behind them. Effective organization is a force-multiplier and applied strength is the only thing that gets results in this world.

It seems that we have forgotten this, or worse, we realize just how much strength has been stripped away from us and try to cope with this psychologically by retreating to the moral high ground.

But any student of political history knows that this is putting the cart before the horse. You get to moralize at your enemies only after you defeat them. And the victors decide who is moral and who isn’t. The right way to do it, if you are an honor-less, sanctimonious man possessed with unbecoming democratic and religious proclivities, and a festering pus wound where your soul ought to be, is to add insult to injury by moralizing at your opponents after they are defeated - the equivalent of kicking dirt in their faces.

Me, personally, I am not so low a person to engage in such obscene behavior.

Our world has plenty of very moral-minded people in positions of power grinding the peasantry under their heels and moralizing at them all the while. Should I ever become an elite in this lifetime, I pledge to you now that I’d have the decency to admit that I got where I was because I was cleverer, stronger, and more ruthless than my opponents. And my charity would go unappreciated by the masses, naturally, who would prefer that I pretend that I was a paragon of morality and force them at the point of a gun to believe that too.

But I digress.

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Hey!

I should have an interview with a Russian Duma deputy coming up soon! No spoilers, but it will be a topic that I think you guys will find very very relevant to your interests. A welcome change from all the morality-related crap that I’ve been fixated on lately, at least. Give me some time though. These politicians are slippery and hard to pin down.

Also, some deep dives into Ukrainian opposition political lore are coming your way as well. I’m tired of complaining about Russia, so we will choose an even more depressing country to talk about instead.

Oh and I’ve been trying to write a comprehensive bare-bones summary of what has happened in the last year over the course of the SMO. A quick and dirty guide to get people up to speed as they start sobering up from their 5D stupor.

And, finally, the Ukrainian counter-attack is getting closer and closer. That should be a game-changer when it occurs.

Much to look forward to!

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