So pro-democracy activists are on the streets in Moldova and used car dealers are raising a fuss in Vladivostok. But Russia's Interior Ministry is ready for unrest: It plans to buy more of these fearsome-looking crowd-control machines. OMG OMG fascism in Russia!!
Well, not exactly. The New York Times visited a decrepit fire engine factory in Siberia and produced this story -- complete with ominous headline ("Russians Bet on a Market for Dampening Dissent") and a preposterous nut graf:
Read on, however, and you'll find that these vehicles of state repression aren't exactly flying off the assembly line. "The Russian Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, has asked the plant to be ready to re-outfit the assembly line to produce many quickly, if needed," the reporter notes. "But no solid orders have come in yet."
I hate to beat up on the Times, but this is enough to make you long for the late, lamented eXile. In fact, we could do a bit of mirror-imaging here: a quick scan of Google News in Russian shows lots of stories about water cannons -- being bought by those bad old anti-democratic Estonians.
That doesn't mean the Russian media's coverage of less-than-lethal tools has been fair and balanced. Russia Today TV, the Al Jazeera English of the Kremlin, gleefully reported on the Georgian government's use of the Long Range Acoustic Device acoustic weapon -- as well as water cannons -- on protesters back in 2007.
[PHOTO: day.sec.ru]
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