The story reports that, despite international opposition on the grounds that it was done to suppress free speech opposing Russian president Vladimir Putin, the Russian courts jailed the three women singers of punk group Pussy Riot last year, and have now refused their applications to be released on bail, arguing that they "had not repented of [their] crime" ("Pussy Riot's", 2013, para. 2).
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| Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova remains in prison for singing a song. |
But even worse than Putin are the religion's followers, the members of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is like a Russian version of Catholicism. Thankfully, in developed Western countries, religious groups like the popes and churches no longer have power to torture, censor and kill to stop people thinking and speaking freely, but in less developed nations, such as Russia, as the story shows, religion still interferes in politics to act immorally against decent citizens. The church claims to practise love, peace and all of those wonderful spiritual qualities, but their behaviour shows them to be tools of Russian politics, and active political players themselves, seeking not spiritual things, but power, property and prestige, and willing to commit evil in their quest to take those things from other people, especially by stifling free speech that they don't like.
Thinking about this story also reminded me of own youthful days, now long past. I'm not much into music these days, and really have no idea what young people listen to, but I'm sort of glad that punk is not entirely dead. Punk was new on the scene and all the rage in the late 1970s early 80s when I was at university in Sydney, and I got quite caught up, though perhaps more in the look and the ethos than the music. Like many young people, I liked teh idea of rebellion, or protest, and of shocking. But it was hard to shock the old generation at Sydney University: for a while, I would turn up at my lectures in punk clothing, with a wonderful mohawk haircut, and the professors just didn't care! They very sensibly cared about my ideas, my essays, my logic assignments, my translations from the dead languages I studied, my contributions in class and so on, but not my clothes or hair style. And they were right.
About the only modern singer of renown I can even name is Lady Gaga - I kind of like her style, especially that meat dress, but have to admit that when I actually listened to a song last year, I didn't really like it: it was repetitive, not very intelligent, and not even very catchy, although the video was great. But that's OK, she's sending out her message, giving a lot of pleasure, and perhaps a few ideas, to millions of young fans, and making a well deserved fortune for the value she is creating. It doesn't matter that much if I think her music is of poor quality - it's certainly not a reason to want her thrown into prison, or to ban her as the religiously obsessed Indonesians did, claiming that her music is disrespectful to their religious beliefs. If your religious or other beliefs are that delicate, I think they deserve to be smashed.
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Reference
I think this blog post is a better example of a piece of writing that responds to a story in the BBC News.
ReplyDeleteAnd again, all of your answers last night analysing a blog response should be similar for this one. In particular, it has the same three parts that do the same three things as the other two blog responses I've written this week.
What are those three parts?
What does each do? What is my purpose in each?
And I'm happier about the lengths of each of the three parts in this example of a response to a news article.