The QR-junta tightens its grip on St. Petersburg
The QR-junta tightens its grip on St. Petersburg
Authorities send a clear message: resistance to cattle tags will not be tolerated
The unofficial leader of St. Petersburg’s QR code resistance, businessman Alexander Konovalov, has been arrested and will remain in custody for two months while he awaits his trial.
Authorities claim Konovalov was involved in a bribery scheme. The cops reportedly carried out an hours-long search of the businessman’s home before (maybe after?) cuffing him.
With Konovalov now sitting in jail, St. Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov has essentially decapitated the city’s anti-QR code movement. Perhaps more importantly, Beglov no longer has to worry about Konovalov posting rude photographs and hashtags on Instagram.
Your humble Moscow correspondent has spent the whole day brooding over this deeply troubling (but entirely predictable) turn of events; we will probably need a day or two to organize our thoughts and write them down. In the meantime, we were impressed by the observations made by well-known Russian LiveJournalist El Murid:
A hundred, even two hundred establishments in a city of five million that have joined the boycott of the apartheid system is not enough. Therefore, the authorities waited, then carried out a punitive operation on the institutions themselves, and now they are clearing out the “instigators”. […]
[The system’s] existence is at stake, as the success of the [QR code] protest would have called into question the very right of the regime to power. Therefore, no illusions are needed—they will kill if they feel threatened.
Therefore, the rate of development, the rate of growth of resistance structures is the main and determining factor in such a struggle. The protesters will either build up their structure faster than the regime can destroy it, or the protest will be crushed.
Two hundred [non-compliant] establishments in a month is nothing. Therefore, the protest was crushed. The necessary condition—the accelerated growth of the structure of the protest—was not met. Hence the result.
It’s hard to disagree.
Russia is doubling down on the omicron scam, so we expect these kinds of crackdowns will become the norm.
First they came for Konovalov. Who’s next?
This is truly terrible and incredibly stupid of Putin & Co., who desperately need the support of their people on the global chessboard: the present geo-political stand-off in Ukraine between Russia & what's left of Western Imperialism/American Hegemony (US-EU-NATO, most of which have likewise capitulated to the "Pandemania" scam with the vaccine mandates/passports such as the Italian "green pass" demanded by their appointed authoritarian prime minister, Draghi, as analyzed by the Italian philosopher, Fabio Vighi in his series found at www.philosophicalsalon.com with his latest: "Red Pill or Blue Pill Variants, Inflation, and the Controlled Demolition of Society" (1/3/22). Vighi, with his profound grasp of economics, as well as his philosophical wisdom, informs us that this whole scam is the ruling elite's desperate attempt to stave off imminent global economic collapse due to their vast incompetence & greed...in order to save their riches by first, conning and controlling the rest of us with fear-mongering & fake "safety": "protection from Death, the Virus by means of mandatory lockdowns, masks & vaxes with digital tracking & policing leading to digital IDs & currency for their totalitarian takeover known as The Great Reset reducing 99.9% of us to their New Normal Serfdom or 21st century Feudalism. Meanwhile, they're destroying all of our smaller, resistant businesses & dissidents, such as seen not only in St. Petersburg, but around the world. This, even as The Elites of various countries and ideologies threaten each other for dominance & control of vital resources and what's left of human labor, especially the co-opted "intelligentsia" needed as "useful idiots"...until replaced by their robots & AI. However, as a psychologist, I view the whole scheme as Delusional/Psychotic and, sooner or later, doomed to Total Failure...but perhaps not before a nuclear war ignited over Ukraine or other means of human extinction in a massive soviet-style gulag...from which the courageous genius, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, saved the Russians and the rest of us in the 20th century as his "Gulag Archipelago" cracked its foundations. So write on Slavsquat! standing with other courageous Dissidents around the world...including here in Amerika.
Apparently the only protest that will work in these fascist countries is simply to quit shopping altogether. (except for food obviously - and these countries probably don't have the guts to starve you to death.)
Don't go to restaurants.
Don't go to movies.
Don't go to the gym.
Don't go to clothing stores.
Don't go to the mall.
Don't travel.
Don't stay in hotels.
Hopefully enough of your fellow citizens will join you and the economy will crash. If not, you'll just have to drop out of mainstream consumerist society and live among a remnant of like-minded people.
nb4. Of course this silliness may all come crashing down when the cases fall. Eventually there must come a time when everyone has been infected and the cases go to zero. That is, unless they can fool the people on an endless stream of new variants. But I'm not sure how long even the most gullible will believe that nonsense.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/