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Annoy Putin—Watch This Movie
At the screening of a film about Soviet horror, thugs arrive to intimidate free-thinking Russians.
Oct. 27, 2021 6:38 pm ET
Last year this column lauded the brilliant film “Mr. Jones,” (click above to watch trailer) which chronicles the Soviet Union’s mass starvation of Ukraine during the murderous reign of Stalin—and the 1930s media coverup led by Walter Duranty of the New York Times. A year later, the film hasn’t gotten any more popular among Russian enemies of liberty.
A recent Washington Post editorial noted that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a courageous critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, remains unjustly incarcerated a year after he was the target of an assassination attempt. The Post editorial board adds:
Meanwhile, Mr. Putin’s authoritarian system grinds on. The latest attempt to suppress an independent voice is one of the most alarming and fundamental yet, targeting the Moscow human rights organization Memorial, founded in 1987 to protect the memory of the deaths and misery caused by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and to fight against abuses in the present day. Memorial is a conscience of the past and the present.
On the evening of Oct. 14, Memorial sponsored a long-planned screening of Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 historical drama, “Mr. Jones,” which portrays British journalist Gareth Jones, who was the first to report on the Stalin-instigated famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. Because Memorial was designated a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities in 2014, it must ask official permission for the event, which was granted. Halfway through the screening, a group of rowdy thugs burst in and stood in front of the screen, disrupting the event and shouting slurs at the audience.
Memorial called the police. They arrived quickly — and then let the thugs go, locked the doors and forced Memorial’s employees to remain inside for interrogation. The police only left hours later, carting off Memorial’s DVR. The next day, the police returned and demanded to inspect documents and confiscated computers.
Nataliya Vasilyeva reports in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph:
Irina Shcherbakova, a board member who was in the room during the attack, told the TV Rain channel the masked attackers appeared to be very young and well organised.
She said Memorial has faced threats before but never at this level.
“This was scarier than what we have seen before,” she said. “What we’re witnessing is a purge of civil society.”
Meanwhile in Washington, the mad rush among Democrats to enact a massive spending plan the country doesn’t need could result in new tax rules that even the plan’s House architects don’t understand. The Journal’s Richard Rubin and Theo Francis report:
In a narrowly divided Congress, Democrats need every member in the Senate to back the same plan to succeed in a party-line vote and can only afford to lose a few members of the House, where lawmakers are watching the flurry of Senate tax proposals come out with some frustration.
“I’m open to entertaining some revenue measures as they become understandable in legislative text and people actually have a chance to vet them the way we did,” Rep. Richard Neal (D., Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said Tuesday.
The latest trial balloon is a new corporate minimum tax. But the sloppy drafting means that Democrats may not end up subsidizing alternative-energy boondoggles backed by giant Wall Street banks quite as much as they intended. The Journal report notes:
… the minimum tax could effectively limit the incentive companies have to invest in capital projects by limiting the benefit they get from immediate expensing, said Rohit Kumar, Washington national tax services co-leader at tax and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“The net result is, oh, you have too big of a depreciation deduction this year? We’re going to take some of it back,” said Mr. Kumar, a former aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).
Indeed, the American Council on Renewable Energy criticized the plan late Tuesday, saying its protections for clean-energy tax credits were helpful but that projects would be hurt by changes to the value of depreciation deductions.
The alternative-energy crowd is fully capable of lobbying for additional Beltway favors. But the average taxpayer can only wonder what Democrats have in store for the businesses they intend to harm.
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Parent Power
In Virginia, former governor and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe and various pundits argue that parents have no say in selecting the curricula for public schools in the state. But former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai helpfully points out a relevant section of the Virginia code, which states:
§ 1-240.1. Rights of parents.
A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.
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More Good News from the Middle East
The Jerusalem Post reports:
An Israeli private jet landed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday morning, per KAN news, marking the first time a public flight from Israel has ever landed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The news comes just a day after the first flight from Saudi Arabia landed in Israel, as an Emirati 737 Royal Jet landed in Ben-Gurion airport Monday evening.
This is the latest among improving regional ties for Israel: agreements to normalize ties with four nations — UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — have been realized since the 2020 Abraham Accords.
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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
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(Lisa Rossi helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Maria Flynn and Tony Lima.)
