Comradely Greetings Read Online Free PDF

“prematurely democratized,” the result is a populism which ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism—no wonder then that today’s most economically successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. Does this line of thinking not also provide the best justification for the maintenance of an authoritarian regime in China?
    What is new today is that, with the continuation of the crisis that began in 2008, this same distrust of democracy, once limited to Third World or post-Communist countries, is gaining ground in the developed Western countries themselves. What, a decade or two ago, was merely patronizing advice to others, now concerns ourselves, as Western Europe, in its passage from the post-war Welfare State to the new global economy, is required to undergo a painful restructuring leading to widespread insecurity.
    But what if this distrust is justified? What if it is only the experts who can save us, whether with full or less than full democracy? The least one can say is that since 2008 the crisis has furnished us with more than adequate proof of how it is not the people but the experts themselves who, in the vast majority, have no idea what they are doing. In Western Europe, we are effectively witnessing the increasing inabilityof the ruling elite to rule. Look at how they’ve dealt with the Greek crisis: putting pressure on Greece to repay its debts while at the same time ruining its economy through imposed austerity measures—thereby ensuring that the debts will never be repaid.
    No wonder, then, that Pussy Riot makes us all uneasy—you know very well what you don’t know, you don’t pretend to have fast and easy answers, but what you are also telling us is that those in power don’t know either. Your message is that, in Europe today, the blind are leading the blind. This is why it is so important that you persist. In the same way that, after witnessing Napoleon entering Jena, Hegel wrote that it was as if he had seen the World Spirit riding in on a horse, you, sitting there in prison, embody nothing less than the critical awareness of us all.
    Comradely greetings,
    Slavoj

“We count ourselves among those rebels who court storms”
Nadja to Slavoj, February 23, 2013
    Dear Slavoj,
    One time, in the autumn of 2012, while I was sitting in pretrial detention with the other Pussy Riot activists, I came to your house for a visit. In a dream, of course.
    I get what you’re saying about horses and the World Spirit, about Chapman’s “buffoonery and irreverence,” and more to the point about how and why all of these are so forcefully bound up with one another. Pussy Riot has wound up on the side of those who feel the call to critique, to creation and co-creation, to experimentation and the role of the unceasing provocateur. To put it in terms of the oppositionNietzsche set up, we’re the children of Dionysus, floating by in a barrel, accepting nobody’s authority. We’re on the side of those who don’t offer final answers or transcendent truths. Our mission, rather, is the asking of questions.
    There are architects of Apollonian equilibrium in this world, and there are (punk) singers of flux and transformation. One is not better than the other: “Mamy raznye nuzhny, mamy raznye vazhny.” 1 Only our cooperation can ensure the continuity of Heraclitus’ vision: “This world has always been and will always be a pulsing fire, flaring up accordingly, and dying down accordingly, with the cycling of the eternal world breath.”
    We count ourselves among those rebels who court storms, 2 who hold that the only truth lies in perpetual seeking.
    Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in
Self-Knowledge
: “Truth as an object which intrudes itself and wields authority over me—an object in the name of which it is demanded that I should renounce freedom—is a figment: truth is no extraneous thing; it is the way and the life. Truth is