Is 'Death to Russia' the New Black?

‘Opposition supporters who attended the Friday Prayer service in Tehran had responded to calls to chant “Death to America!” by chanting “Death to Russia!” instead’, Robert Mackey writes in today’s New York Times blog.

Though I completely agree with the commenter who noted

‘I’m not sure that “Death to Russia!” is the best way to reject anti-US animosity. It would be much better if the protestors could rally with pro-freedom or democracy chants rather than just demonising a different foreign power’,

there is definitely something to be said for lumping Ahmadinejad with Putin, even though this kinship has nothing to do with the tired and simplistic Western allegation that ‘both are dictators’.

Rather, as Slavoj Zizek writes in the current issue of the London Review of Books, Ahmadinejad and Putin embody a growing new ‘virus of authoritarian capitalism [that] is slowly but surely spreading around the globe’.

Ahmadinejad ‘has the backing not only of the organs of police repression and a very Westernised PR apparatus [but is also] supported by a powerful new class of Iranians who have become rich thanks to the regime’s corruption’.

The same could be said of Putin, whose popularity rests on symbolically ‘throwing crumbs’ to the people whilst actually maintaining an authoritarian free-market system.