- sábado jun 02, 2007 1:45 pm
#4175
Este texto foi um dos que a minha stora de inglês me enviou para comentar...
Ainda ia a meio e comecei logo a pensar... será que o Thompson não vai começar a atacar o IV como um jogo de incitação ao nazismo?
Ainda ia a meio e comecei logo a pensar... será que o Thompson não vai começar a atacar o IV como um jogo de incitação ao nazismo?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 18,00.html
When Katya Girenko answered the door of her family's rundown St. Petersburg apartment early one Saturday morning in mid-June, she saw two teenagers through the peephole. They asked if they could speak to her father, Nikolai Mikhailovich. When he went to the door and asked what they wanted, a gunshot rang out. The bullet smashed through the flimsy door and ripped into Girenko's chest, killing him almost instantly.
At first glance, Girenko might seem an unlikely target for assassination. A tall, somewhat fragile 64-year-old with a bushy gray beard, he was an ethnographer and anthropologist who earned his reputation as an academic specializing in Swahili studies and research on kinship. But he was also the leading expert on an indigenous Russian tribe ? the country's growing band of neo-Nazis. As founder of the Group for the Rights of Ethnic Minorities (GPEM), Girenko had been a key adviser in 15 Russian ethnic hate-crime trials, including the current prosecution of six members of the St. Petersburg neo-Nazi group Schultz88 for violent assault. Girenko's work has been crucial in ensuring that racially motivated assaults are classified as hate crimes, rather than mere hooliganism, and therefore warrant harsher sentences. He was gunned down as he was preparing for another trial, this one on charges of inciting racial hatred and violence involving a regional branch of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity (RNE) party in nearby Novgorod. Police cite Girenko's expert advice as the most likely motive for the hit, but are tight-lipped about possible suspects. No arrests have yet been made.
"Pity they didn't knock off that bastard sooner," says Alexei, 22, one of the Schultz88 members being prosecuted in St. Petersburg. "He really tried to put me behind
bars." In May, Alexei was released from six months in pretrial detention, but still faces the charges of violent assault. He says he had nothing to do with Girenko's murder.
A squat, powerfully built man bristling with barely contained aggression, Alexei is part of a new wave of nationalism that's sweeping through Russian society. As democratic reforms have foundered and living standards plummeted since the collapse of communism in 1991, the country's latent xenophobia has morphed into a more radical, virulent form ? and more and more young people like Alexei are coming under the sway of neo-Nazi ideology as a way to reassert lost national pride.
Girenko's "assassination came as a catastrophe we had long been dreading," says Alexander Vinnikov, a friend and colleague who's also a member of the GPEM. That sense of dread is spreading among members of Russia's ethnic-minority communities. Just four days before Girenko's assassination, a group of neo-Nazis killed an Azeri passerby in Saratov, some 1,400 km south of St. Petersburg; and in May, human-rights groups claim a neo-Nazi gang beat a Pakistani student to death in Ulyanovsk, 350 km northeast of Saratov. According to the Moscow-based daily Izvestia, neo-Nazis have violently assaulted at least 15,000 people over the past seven years. A recent report by the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights says 20 to 30 victims a year die from such assaults, which are increasing at an annual rate of 30%. And according to Alexei, Girenko's murder marks a turning point for Russia's neo-Nazi movement. "[We are] a white man's al-Qaeda," he says. "We don't care how many [ethnic minorities] end up dead. The more, the better. The time of our jihad has come."
We don't consider ourselves Russian. We belong to the white race!
? ALEXEI, member of neo-Nazi group Schultz88
...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 58,00.html
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It's a spring afternoon in downtown Moscow. Pushkin Square, a major hub of the Russian capital, is as vibrant as ever. Even those who hurry along on urgent errands steal a second to stop and enjoy the sunshine after weeks of rain and snow. But the atmosphere in one corner of the square is more menacing. A crowd of about 80 teenagers is chanting "Kill the U.S.A.!" and raising their arms in the Nazi salute. Zakhar, aged 15, with shaved head and camouflage shirt, is reluctant to talk to a journalist, but makes an exception to explain that the rally is "all about exterminating the Jews, Americans and other scum."
Immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Russians in their thousands brought flowers, wreaths, lighted candles and icons to the U.S. embassy wall. Something of a rapprochement between Russia and the West followed. But those feel-good days are gone. In a poll by the Public Opinion Foundation last month, 70% of those surveyed regarded the U.S. as a hostile country. And earlier this month, the U.S. embassy in Moscow received an e-mail in broken English that read: "We are to kill all the foreigners we see, marking the birthday of Hitler [April 20]. Send your citizens back ? or else. Russia is for Russians." It was signed: "Ivan, President, Skinhead Group of Russia." The embassy took the threat seriously enough to alert all Americans in Russia to the increased risk over the next several weeks.
For members of extremist and neo-Nazi groups, Hitler's birthday has become an occasion for venting their anger. And not just against the Americans. On April 20 last year, Moscow skinheads launched attacks that left a young Chechen killed and more than a dozen badly injured. Why do they do it? "Because [Hitler] gave us the holy idea of National Socialism," says Zakhar.
Moscow police have promised to take "necessary measures" to prevent skinhead violence on Hitler's birthday. But one policeman, who impassively observed Zakhar and his friends hoist "Skins against Bush" posters near the McDonald's in Pushkin Square, didn't seem too worried. When asked why no "measures" were being taken against this group, he shrugged: "Where do you see any skinheads here? It's a rally to support domestic chicken producers against American imports."
Ten years ago skinheads numbered no more than a few dozen in Moscow. Now the Interior Ministry estimates that there are 10,000 skinheads and other neo-Nazis in the country. Independent analysts put the figure at closer to 50,000. No official data on skinhead violence exist, but an estimate by journalists and foreign embassies suggests that skinhead assaults have left more than a dozen foreigners dead and 100 hospitalized in Moscow since May 2000. Similar attacks have taken place in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Novgorod. Russian officials dismiss these incidents as simple hooliganism but can't deny that they have become more common. "There is a sharp increase in physical and verbal attacks against foreigners," says a senior U.S. embassy official.
The situation has become so bad that last month 18 foreign students, mainly from African and Asian countries, studying at Rostov Medical University chose to leave Russia for good. They had been subjected to repeated beatings and insults by local skinheads, while the police turned a blind eye. At a conference held last week in Moscow to discuss dangers to foreign students, representatives of Russian universities said that in the face of police indifference they would have to hire private guards and form self-defense teams to protect their 70,000 foreign students.
The skinheads also target non-Slav minorities from the Caucasus, whom Russians disparagingly refer to as "blacks," and Jews. Last October, a crowd of 300 skinheads smashed a market in south Moscow, beating the "black" merchants, then moved on to the Sevastopol Hotel to attack Afghan refugees staying there. Four people were killed and more than 20 badly injured.
Dressed in bomber or camouflage jackets and heavy steel-tipped boots, skinheads prowl in packs of three to five "fighters" armed with clubs and steel rods. These groups can merge quickly to form mobs of several hundred for major assaults, which seem too well-organized to be spontaneous.
Many Russians hold politicians accountable for skinhead violence. "Why blame the kids?" asks Sergei Antonov, an unemployed Moscow economist in his early 40s. "Blame the government, which has condemned Russians to poverty while the blacks and foreigners are lording it over us." Today, most skinheads are still in their teens, warns Antonov, but soon "they'll take dominant positions as they become adults. You'll see their impact a decade later." In fact, their impact is already clear in Pushkin Square.
