Russian conductor Valery Gergiev (right) with Russian president Vladimir Putin
Russian conductor Valery Gergiev will be banned from conducting at Carnegie Hall bacause he hasn’t condemned Putin. This is apalling and is taking us down a dark path. https://t.co/NhPxphiMq6
— Nick the Greek (@nick_the_geek78) February 28, 2022
Um.
This morning.
Meanwhile…
…Via EuroNews:
Gergiev’s closeness to Putin, whom he has known since 1992, and his loyalty to the Russian president on the annexation of Crimea, as well as his participation in concerts in bombarded South Ossetia and in Palmyra alongside the Syrian army, have been the subject of much controversy over the past decade. But only now are they conducting the direction of his professional life.
That’ll learn him.
Brilliant headline Nick!
Take the rest of the day off.
i wonder will mrs scottser still order a vodka and coke next time we’re out?
There’ll be a White Russian in your bed before you know it
Some things never change eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
You MUST be joking. Please tell me you’re trying to take the Micko.
Nope.
I don’t think anyone should be banned from anything because they haven’t said the right words to appease.
Which people, exactly, should be insulated from any consequences to their actions? Do you have a list, or do you just know them when you see them?
Inaction
He hasn’t done anything.
Wait’ll you find out that inaction has consequemces, too. It’ll be rough, but you’ll be better off.
Ah, Micko, he’s really foaming at the mouth today, running himself into the ground trying to eliminate logic & rationality from the debate. Did you see that retreat from sanity, as soon as you pointed out the flaws in the views the media told him to hold?
Classic!
If Putin can only get your knack for randomly declaring total victory over his opponents this would all be over within the hour.
Ok Nigel. So if he says and does the thing you want him to say – then he’s alright yeah?
Nullzero makes an excellent point below too.
Easy for us to criticise a madman when he doesn’t know where our families live.
Nigel, if the Russians simply adopted the methods of the US then Ukraine would already be a smouldering wreck full of dead civilians & destroyed infrastructure & you’d really have some atrocities to get hot under the collar about.
Of course, that’s ignoring the reality that you’d likely just do a defensive run for any imperialism, cultural or military, that the US decided to inflict on anyone.
If you were sitting in the ruins of Dublin, after it was flattened by a few American cruise missiles, you’d be explaining how we deserved it for not condemning America’s enemies in strident enough terms.
That or maybe because we weren’t woke enough & hadn’t yet installed a Nigerian as Taoiseach.
Nigel’s gone very George W Bush of late. What was that quote in the lead up to the Iraq war? “You must know you will be held accountable for inactivity..You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror”. The depth of his understanding of the situation in Ukraine seems to be that Putin is an “evil-doer” who does what he does because he “hates us for our freedoms”…or something to that effect
I bet that there were plenty of sound ordinary South African rugby players and flautists during Apartheid – still and all, the only way of the international community to make clear it’s abhorrence of the regime was through sanctions, including banning the people above from sporting and cultural events. It was the right decision then, it’s the right decision now.
“Nigel’s gone very George W Bush of late.”
Ha ha ha! Very true. Great observation F.
It was a moronic stance then as it is now.
‘Ok Nigel. So if he says and does the thing you want him to say – then he’s alright yeah?’
I don’t want him to say anything. But if you feel like blaming someone for association with Putin becoming so toxic, why not blame Putin?
‘That or maybe because we weren’t woke enough & hadn’t yet installed a Nigerian as Taoiseach.’
I like how you rounded off your straw-man ranting with a little racist flourish.
‘Nigel’s gone very George W Bush of late.’
It wasn’t me who was trying to make opposing the invasion ‘objectively pro-Nazi.’
‘Putin is an “evil-doer” who does what he does because he “hates us for our freedoms”’
I bet you win nearly all the arguments you write both sides of, don’t you?
Sorry, Nigel, it isn’t a Strawman, I genuinely believe, actually, I know, that you will defend anything the American or European ploitical elites do, no matter how evil, no matter how stupid. The noxious carry-on of you during the Fake Pandemic cannot just be brushed under the carpet, no matter how ashamed you’ll be of the lies you believed & told, at some future point.
As for your assertion that mention of the word “Nigerian”, constitutes racism, man, you’re disgraceful, utterly, utterly disgraceful.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
You believe many things. Many, many things. So many things.
from the quoted article:
“as well as his participation in concerts in bombarded in South Ossetia ” – hardly just because he hasn’t said ‘the right words to appease’.
Anyone with any link to the Kremlin should have been banned from entering the EU the moment MH17 was shot down by Russian army regulars.
Eh, but it wasn’t shot down by the Russian Army, was it, Rob? I mean, we could pretend to know that, if you want?
It was a Buk missile fired by the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade – don’t take my word for it, read the report by the Dutch, Ukrainian, Malaysian, and Belgian public prosecutors that make up the Joint Investigation Team who are charged with investigating the shoot-down.
Good. Ban a few more and expel the rest.
“Call on me, Valerie
Come and see me
I’m the same boy I used to be.”
Unfortunately.
The rest of what?
I think Hughie wants to ban everyone from everything, Gavin. It would probably be more efficient if you ask him who he doesn’t want to ban & from what.
One the one hand you say say he’s getting what he deserves. On the other if he, or any other Russians for that matter speak out against Putin he or his family would likely find themselves the victims of unfortunate “accidents”.
He’s not merely silent (which in fairness would be understandable enough, given the circumstances) but a ‘friend and supporter’ of Putin.
Look lads – I get that it’s all big talk from the internet.
But the reality is, if a lunatic like Putin told you that he liked your music and wanted you to work at some concerts, you’d all be over him like flies on poo.
“Yes sir, no sir, I really like that picture of you topless on a horse while fishing.”
I know I would too btw. Anything to keep my family alive.
Sucks to live in a pariah state and be friends with its pariah leader.
If anything this will endear him to Putin, though, so swings and roundabouts.
How friendly & supportive has somebody told you he is, Rob? What sort of retaliation do you reckon we should use on Putin’s wife or mistress? Ban them from twitter, maybe?
Do a list.
Or maybe, Nullzero, he actually doesn’t want to speak out against Putin, because, like most Russians, he’d rather have less nukes pointed at Russia from close quarters, rather than more.
You think, maybe?
If there’s one slam dunk certainty its that the odious Marine Le Pen won’t be getting anywhere near the Élysée Palace this April. I see they are having to pulp 2 million copies of a new glossy manifesto featuring pics of herself and pariah Putin. Oh dear, how sad, never mind – dogs and fleas – pigs and sh*te
Ah, stephen, that was never going to happen anyway. The French establishment have a tendency to elect a globalist scumbag as President, no matter how people vote. Then everybody gets to detesting the scumbag, again.
what i really meant is that she won’t even make the run offs – As with Trump, everything Putin touches is poisoned (very literally in Putin’s case) – the old rule of thumb is- always get a ground floor room – no balcony required
For 15 years Russia has told the West that, just as the US would not tolerate missiles in Cuba, it would not tolerate missiles in Ukraine.
The West first promised not to pursue this, then ignored their own promises & pushed ahead with trying to get both Ukraine & Georgia into NATO. Georgia took the arms they were offered, then told NATO to bugger off but Ukraine has an extremely corrupt government, courtesy of not one but two CIA-backed coups, which were both illegal, of course.
Zelensky’s junta accelerated it’s attempts to join NATO & began to have NATO military exercises on its territory, another illegal move by both parties.
Russia got fed up after 15 years of talking & being ignored so they took a minimal military action, not flattening the country like the US did Iraq but they’ve over-run the Ukrainian army, which now has about 24 hours to surrender or be annihilated.
I have no doubt the comedian, Zelensky, will order his generals to die but there’s very little chance they’ll actually pay any attention to him, so this should be all over, bar the shouting, in two days or so.
The fact that Nigel & the other war-hawks on here support the corruption, aggression & international criminality exhibited by the Zelensky junta & its war-mongering imperialist backers in Washington, while demanding online censorship for hurty feelings in our former democracies, just exposes the gross hypocrisy that, combined with blood-lust & authoritarianism, forms their lingua franca.
That some of these people consider themselves “on the Left” just exposes them to ridicule & obvious questions about their sanity.
I do enjoy their predictable reaction to any news story that emerges, whatever the Legacy Media, the Billionaire Psychopaths or the gofers in Government tell them to believe, they profess, as if they were deeply held, humanitarian beliefs but when you engage them in debate, they have no depth, no argument to present, because, like the SS, they’re “only following orders”. Not one of them has a counter-argument worth dismissing, just childish demonisation & name-calling. Although he displays a bit more intelligence than know-nothing Dolly, Nigel is just another empty vessel making too much noise. He’s made too many silly, fact-free, confused posts to be taken seriously, at least Dolly knows she’s out of her depth with this story.
It’s good to see that Nigel has Googled the Logical Fallacies while he was away but he’s now intent on applying them to comments that use exaggeration for humourous purposes, so he’s got a long way to go, yet.
‘The fact that Nigel & the other war-hawks’
You’re unapologetically supporting Putin’s war.
The Dullard of Denn