What it means for women to be incarcerated together with men.

It is a mark of a civilized society that jailed criminals aren’t tortured, raped, or abused. The prison sentence is their punishment. Nobody should try to add to that punishment by mistreating them. Terrorizing female prisoners by forcing them to serve their sentence alongside male inmates is inhuman.

This is so wrong.

In 2004, Ukrainians were finally ready for democracy. They came out in massive protests against fraudulent elections and corruption. They prevailed. Real elections were held.

Unfortunately, what Ukrainians didn’t realize at that time was that democracy isn’t something that happens by itself after you declare you want it. Democracy is created and maintained daily. After the real elections were held, Ukrainians relaxed, went home, and sat there happily waiting for some Elon Musk to buy their Twitter kindly benefactor to create their democracy. This didn’t happen, and that first attempt at democracy fizzled out.

In the meantime, 2005 saw the only serious, violent protests against the Putin regime. They were brutally repressed. Those protests were organized by the Russian nationalists. They received no coverage inside Russia for obvious reasons and no coverage outside the country because the US was in the midst of the Bush administration. Bush was maniacally fixated on convincing himself that Putin was a simple-minded religious dude. The Brits, in the meantime, were housing every Russian bandit hoping to get some of their money.

In 2011, there was another wave of protests in Russia. These protests were toothless and represented no threat to the regime. They were humiliating, though. And they were followed by something worse. In 2012, young kids, starting at age 14 and up, came out to protest. The regime brutalized them. Terrible things were done. Nobody stood up for the young. There was nobody left in Russia capable of caring much.

In 2013, the Ukrainian regime tries to follow the Russian playbook and brutalize young protesters. But it doesn’t work. Millions of Ukrainians come out to protest. The regime falls.

We are now in the Obama presidency, right? Obama is a neoliberal. He needs to cozy up to China and foment internal divisions in the US. Because there’s no neoliberalism and no post-nation state without people at each other’s throats for invented identity-based reasons. Obama is hell-bent on introducing the word “neo-Nazi” into the common parlance and getting everybody to hunt imaginary neo-Nazis behind every corner.

Russians hand him one of the many invented “neo-Nazi menaces” that Obama craves. The new Ukrainian government is neo-Nazi! they explain. Who cares about what happens to those neo-Nazis, right?

Immediately, US mass media start featuring stories about “Ukrainian neo-Nazis.” Russia invades Ukraine. Murders, rapes, bombs, destroys. Nobody in the West gives a toss because neo-Nazis. In 2014, I was called a neo-Nazi routinely whenever I tried to talk about what was happening.

When Trump gets elected, the US establishment needs a way to discredit him. There’s little time to come up with something. The people who are in charge of inventing the Trump scandal invent the Russian scenario. Maybe it’s a Cold War reflex, maybe a result of being involved with Russian oligarchs.

For 4 years, the US establishment connects Trump to Russia. Then in 2022 Russia invades Ukraine again, and now it’s impossible to say that Ukrainians are neo-Nazis because that will muddle up the whole narrative of “Trump is a neo-Nazi Russian spy.” If the US establishment goes with the “good Russians” story again, what will that do to the whole “Trump is bad” argument?

Finally, the US media begin to notice Russian atrocities. They kind of have to because they painted themselves into a corner on this one. This is why the same horrors perpetrated by the same people were dismissed in the US in 2014 buy are finally noticed in 2022.