# 52
This began with a comment about ‘Pussy Riot’ left on Facebook by my friend Jasper Singh:
“They’ve been found guilty and it’s wrong, however I was puzzled by the deafening silence of Amnesty and international celebrities when Charlie Gilmour was imprisoned for sixteen months last July after swinging from a flag on the Cenotaph. What’s the difference? Genuine question because I don’t get it so I must be missing something here.”[1]
Well, he’s right, I thought, what is the difference? Or were their actions somehow equivalent and the consequences roughly comparable?
The first thing I found was that Gilmour was not charged ‘with swinging from a flag’ and he wasn’t in court for anything he had said. Pussy Riot were in the dock both for what they had said (or, to be more accurate, ‘sung’) and for where they had chosen to say (or sing) it. In terms of gathering widespread support, you could say that Pussy had a prayer and Charlie didn’t. Amnesty’s backing for Pussy Riot states that, “International human rights law absolutely outlaws restrictions on free speech when they are based purely on the notion that others may find the content offensive.” [2]
Charlie Gilmour was sentenced to sixteen months and released after four. He was sentenced for ‘violent disorder’ which included throwing a dustbin at a police car and kicking against the windows of Top Shop. The judge, Nicholas Price QC, mentioned “public outrage at his disrespect to the Cenotaph” when passing sentence. It hadn’t helped Gilmour’s defence when – although an undergraduate reading History at Cambridge
In The Guardian this week, Simon Jenkins has let fly at ‘the West’s hypocrisy over Pussy Riot…’[3] and gone a long way to answering Japser’s question. Jenkins argues that the sentences given to Charlie Gilmour and to last August’s rioters were part of a politicised response to crime which was disproportionate, ineffective and blatantly unjust. “British ministers and courts,” he wrote, “are craven to what passes for public opinion.” They politicise our system of justice by demanding that, “Whenever a crime or anti-social action hits the headlines, ‘The courts must send a message’.” And justice in Russia has never been without a political dimension.
Three women from Pussy Riot have been sent to prison for two years. This is on top of five months in custody since their arrests in February. The charges they faced were for ‘hooliganism’ compounded by blasphemy. This wasn’t just about the words of their song. Many Russians were deeply offended by where they chose to sing them. Their performance of ‘Virgin Mary Redeem us of Putin’ lasted 51 seconds and took place at the altar of Moscow
The women of Pussy Riot know they are not popular with the majority of their fellow citizens. Singing that song in that church was obviously going to offend. It was meant to. That was the whole point. But, as Amnesty say, “…while this behaviour might not be to everybody’s taste, it doesn’t qualify as crime.” Not like chucking a bin at the cops, Charlie.
Pussy Riot are ‘situationists’. They are a collective of performance artists with a programme which takes them into politics. They have now discovered that art and politics are not the same thing and not interchangeable. As John Harris commented (again, in The Guardian), “Politics is about increment and compromise; in the cultural sphere you are free to be as exacting and impossiblist as you please, and thereby say and do things that the moment actually demands.”[4]
Pussy Riot are finding more support in the West than they do in Russia because they have tapped into the radical chic so much enjoyed by our own would-be cultural dissidents. The name ‘Pussy Riot’ means nothing in Russian and is probably untranslatable. It links them, quite deliberately (I am told) to the Riot Grrrl fanzine that flourished on the west coast of America in the 1990’s and featured bands such as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile[5]. And ‘Pussy’ is, of course, one of our most beloved double entendres[6]. The name matters for its shock value - ‘kitten’ or ‘vagina’? You choose. As we’ve known since Dada - let alone the Sex Pistols - a name can be chosen as a deliberate affront.
There was no “deafening silence” from Charlie Gilmour’s detractors when he was arrested. Political and social commentators had a field day at his expense. The Sun kicked off with the headline, “Cenotaph yob is son of Pink Floyd Star”[7] Most reports mentioned that, at the time of the offences, he had been high on drugs and alcohol. There were also many sneering remarks about his wealthy and privileged background. The dreaded Amanda Platell put the boot in on behalf of Daily Mail readers, saying that he had made “the most grievous attack on all we hold dear.” The gaol sentence she described as “…too lenient, given the acts of violence he perpetrated and the deep offence he caused that day.”[8]
Amid all the noise, posturing and banter surrounding Gilmour and his exploits I have found only one published article which scales everything down to an appropriate level while also being, in its own right, a fulsome celebration of genuine freedom of speech. It was a piece in The Observer, written by David Mitchell, which concluded with the lines: “The Remembrance Sunday Service would be so much more hopeful if, at the core of it, was television footage of the Queen, prime minister and all the senior politicians and generals, twirling round the Cenotaph from brightly coloured flags in a joyous, gyrating orgy of respect, like boozy villagers around a maypole of death.”[9]
As I assume Jasper would have suspected all along, the real equivalence between Charlie Gilmour and Pussy Riot lies in the fact that political interference in the system of justice leads to disproportionate sentences. In the far off pre-Murdochian days of 1967 (when to be the editor of ‘The Times’ actually meant something) William Rees-Mogg wrote a famous editorial under the title ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’[10] His subject was the injustice of sending Mick Jagger down for four months simply for possessing four amphetamine tablets which he had purchased legally in Italy
Rees-Mogg took the theme of his editorial from a work by Alexander Pope. It deserves, perhaps, to be quoted more fully here, if only for its uncanny applicability to Gilmour on the day he committed his offences:
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings
This painted child of dirt that stinks and sings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’er enjoys.[12]
The similarity between Charlie Gilmour and Pussy Riot exists only in the harshness of their politically-inspired prison sentences. Nothing else. The treatment of ‘this painted child’ in England does not merit any romantic comparison with events in Russia
In Britain
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[1] Jasper Singh on his Facebook page, Friday 17 July 2012.
[3] ‘The West’s hypocrisy over Pussy Riot is breathtaking.’ Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, 21
August 2012.
[4] John Harris, 19.08.2012. www.guardian.co.uk
[5] No, I’d never heard of them either.
[6] Google Mrs Slocombe’s pussy for the full awfulness. Or try Pussy Galore - played by Honor Blackman in the James Bond film ‘Goldfinger’. Interestingly, Pussy was a lesbian in the original Ian Fleming novel. Pussy Galore was also – again, so I am told - the name of a US
[7] The Sun 12 January 2011
[8] Daily Mail 6 August 2011
[9] The Observer 7 August 2011
[10] The Times 1 July 1967
[11] Richard Hamilton Swingeing London series, 1967-72. Tate Gallery.
[12] Alexander Pope. Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, January 1735.
