Sochi Games: world authors join protest against Putin

[dipsydoodle]

Source: Guardian

More than 200 prominent international authors, including Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen, have joined forces to denounce the "chokehold" they say Russia's anti-gay and blasphemy laws place on the freedom of expression, amid a growing swell of protest on the eve of the opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

The authors' open letter, published in the Guardian on Thursday, comes as athletes and journalists from around the world descend on the Black Sea resort before the lavish opening ceremony at a specially built stadium on Friday evening. President Vladimir Putin has spoken of the Games as a personal project to show the world Russia's greatness and its ability to host such major events, but the build-up has been marred by controversy over corruption and rights abuses in Russia.

The open letter to Russia condemns the recently passed gay propaganda and blasphemy laws, which respectively prohibit the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" among minors and criminalise religious insult, as well as the recent recriminalisation of defamation. The three laws "specifically put writers at risk", say the authors, and they "cannot stand quietly by as we watch our fellow writers and journalists pressed into silence or risking prosecution and often drastic punishment for the mere act of communicating their thoughts".

Grass is joined as a signatory by three fellow Nobel laureates, Wole Soyinka, Elfriede Jelinek and Orhan Pamuk, and by acclaimed writers from over 30 countries, including Ariel Dorfman, Carol Ann Duffy, Edward Albee, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Neil Gaiman. Russia's foremost contemporary novelist, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, is also a signatory to the letter.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/feb/06/sochi-games-anti-gay-blasphemy-laws-russia-putin-letter-writers

[tblue37]

1. I just read an article--with pics--about the really gross accommodations for athletes and

journalists. It seems most of that $50 billion got skimmed off in corruption, because it's clear it didn't go into creating an appropriate infrastucture for the games. Maybe this disaster will make the obvious corruption of the Olympic Commitee itself so repulsive that it won't take the probable disaster in Brazil to change the way venues are awarded in the future.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Yes but the US can't hold them.

Dodgy gun laws as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

[bossy22]

6. yet the u.s. murder rate is significantly lower than russias

If our gun laws is what really "ties them up" then these people have a serious priority problems

[davidpdx]

5. The awarding of the Olympic Games to Sochi was a mistake

The anti-gay laws, corruption, environmental damage, terrorism, etc.

[tblue37]

7. A mistake--or maybe evidence that the IOC can be bought. nt

[davidpdx]

8. Both

I think you are right though.

[pangaia]

2. I had no idea Gunter Grass was still alive.

Apologies, Herr Grass..

I read The Tin Drum in-- must have been 1966-67-- while in grad school.
That, and reading Catch-22 at about the same time, and then Cat and Mouse had a huge influence on me, opened up so much.

Grass has always been sort of one of my heroes... Glad to see he is still fighting..

[jakeXT]

4. I remember when he came clean about being in the SS

I was in Hitler's SS, admits Günter Grass

...

He said his feelings of guilt developed only in later years. "It was always combined with the question: 'Could you not have realised at that point what was happening to you?' "

Grass, the author of dozens of plays and 11 novels, the most famous of which, The Tin Drum, is an examination of wartime Germany, has long been seen as the embodiment of the German zeitgeist. Throughout his career he has famously criticised those unwilling to deal with Germany's Nazi past.

Grass said in the interview that he wanted to dispel the notion that Germans were unwilling victims of Hitler. Germans, he said, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi regime. "Of course they were seduced as well, but many were involved with enthusiasm.

"I wanted to trace the origins of this enthusiasm and the reasons behind it. I did this in The Tin Drum and again, half a century later, that's what my new book is also about." He said his writing was a way for him to deal with his personal guilt.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526206/I-was-in-Hitlers-SS-admits-Gunter-Grass.html