Category: PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

Corruption is More Complicated Than That

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

I am tired of people talking about “corruption” in a simple-minded way.

Imagine three cases.

  1. The government spends tax money on a hospital but, in order to get any service, the patients must hand over small bribes to doctors, nurses and staff.
  2. The hospital is built, but the money for operating costs has been embezzled.
  3. The money for the hospital, operating costs and everything else is stolen before it leaves the capital.

Ask yourself these two questions.

  1. Which is the worst case of corruption? The answer is obvious: the third case although very few people know it even happened.
  2. Which is the most visible form of corruption? Again, obviously the first case because hundreds of people know about it.

And that is why I don’t take perceptions of corruption indices very seriously.

And it is why I think that, when people are speaking of corruption, they should think harder about big corruption and less about petty corruption.

For example: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Or, in plainer language: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.” And that is certainly corruption.

I would suggest that our part of the world has a lot more invisible corruption than Russia even if the latter has more visible corruption.

So, the question of whether Russia is more corrupt than some other country needs much more careful thinking than it generally gets.

Let’s Sanction Those Pesky Russians

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, UKRAINE

Kiev’s envoy at the Trilateral Contact Group Leonid Kuchma says it is impossible to talk about elections or constitutional changes in Eastern Ukraine without resuming control over the Ukraine-Russian Federation border.

Here’s the text of the Minsk II agreement. (My italics) “9. Restore control of the state border to the Ukrainian government in the whole conflict zone, which has to start on the first day after the local election and end after the full political regulation (local elections in particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts based on the law of Ukraine and Constitutional reform) by the end of 2015, on the condition of fulfillment of Point 11 – in consultations and in agreement with representatives of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts within the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group.”

Let’s blame the Russians for not sticking to the Minsk Agreement, shall we?

The Yawning Heights of New Ibansk

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, THE WORLD IS CHANGING

http://russia-insider.com/en/yawning-heights-new-ibansk/ri12389

(My title is a tribute to Зияющие Высоты by Aleksandr Zinoviev which I read years ago. We all now live the Total Ism in New Ibansk.)

As the West spirals down the toilet there are occasional – well, truth to tell, not so occasional – signposts of decline along the way. One is this piece from The Guardian; the title is pretty self-explanatory. “Europe is in crisis. Once more, America will have to step in to save us.” By one Natalie Nougayrède, she starts off comparing Joe Biden to George Marshall. To which one can only say !.

In essence Washington has to save Europe from Brexit; save it from Russia’s “military offensive” (such a slow-moving one, isn’t it? still not past Donetsk airport after months of fighting and dozens of invasions.) And take a few more Syrian refugees.

Oh, and US President Obama maybe should put Churchill’s bust back in the White House.

There. Fixed that, didn’t she?

But the interesting fact is not that the editors of The Guardian thought it worth while to devote space and, one assumes a fee, to this pitiful tripe but the reactions of the readers. I invite you to look through the comments – 800+ so far – and find one that is not completely scornful and contemptuous of what Nougayrède has written.

Here are some:

So then: to ‘save’ the EU, the US should attempt to influence a UK referendum, take some unspecified military action against Russia, and accept many more Syrian refugees even though most migrants entering the EU are not Syrians.
Yes, that sounds like a plan.

Bonkers logic there again from Natalie Nougayrede.

Yep,cos it’s not as if US foreign policy has triggered crisis in the middle east or prodding the bear has resulted in Putin’s actions in Ukraine. America can do no wrong,of course.

the last thing is to let the USA into our problems, it was they who started it in the first place

So the EU is a complete failure get out now and lets make our own decisions

Europeans can perfectly well look after themselves thanks… given that they get rid of the impenetrable layer of self serving fuckwits that run the place. THEY are the problem – not ‘Europeans’.

It seems that Natalie, whom I may have assumed wrongly is French, has fallen off the edge of her right wing flat earth and not heard that among many thinking people the U.S. has acquired the title of the ’empire of chaos’. Europe could certainly do without any more of that.

I don’t know if the Europeans will rise up, march on Brussels and raze it to the ground some day or whether they have become so morally emaciated that, as many Americans apparently are doing, they drink themselves to death in despair.

But, eventually, one way or the other, this will stop and New Ibansk will fall as Old Ibansk fell.

Don’t Get Stuck in the Details, It’s Not That Complicated

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, HISTORY, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

http://russia-insider.com/en/dont-get-stuck-details-its-not-complicated/ri12383

The recent Litvinenko report has set me thinking. I’ve been writing about the affair (here from 2007) and reading about it since it happened. The story metastasises on and on. Scaramella comes and goes. First it was thallium, then it was polonium. The Chechen connection. A man who doesn’t speak much English suddenly writes a fluent death note. Berezovskiy loses all his money, begs Putin to let him back into Russia and then kills himself. Then there are the endless details of who met whom and where and when. New stuff periodically appears (like this video alleging Litvinenko was contaminating places before he was “poisoned”). Mountains of details to examine and argue over. The file grows bigger and bigger but no one is ever persuaded; it gets more and more confusing and the points of argument get smaller and smaller.

But there’s a much simpler approach that cuts out this interminable minutiae. William of Ockham would like it. And it’s simply this: if Putin had decided to have Litvinenko killed, there is absolutely no way he would have chosen this method. Natasha has nailed it. Therefore, whatever happened to Litvinenko, it has nothing to do with Putin. QED.

Weapons inspectors arrive in Syria to check whether Assad is using chemical weapons. As their plane is landing, about an hour’s drive away, Assad launches a CW attack on civilians. No way. No one is that stupid. Therefore, whoever did it wasn’t Assad. Don’t bother arguing with Bellingcat’s chin pulling, any rational person can figure that out. QED.

US Secretary of State John Kerry assures us that the US has all the data, who fired it, where it came from and everything else relating to MH17. But we’ve never seen a smidgeon of it or any explanation why we haven’t. Anybody can figure out that, if the evidence were there, we would have seen it. Therefore the rebels didn’t do it. No need to argue over a billboard on some grainy film. QED.

Who did do these things? Well, now we have to dive into the minutiae and argue about this and that. But an intelligent twelve-year old can figure out 1) not Putin 2) not Assad 3) not the rebels. QED.

But there are still some questions. Who is so contemptuous of us that he (or she) expects us to believe that Putin would chose such a roundabout method of assassination and one that immediately made people point at him? Who thinks we’re stupid enough believe that Assad would practically gas the inspectors? Who thinks we can’t figure out that the gigantic US intelligence organisation must have seen something and, if they haven’t showed it to us, what it must have been?

Questions for a later time: I have a theory but I’m still thinking.

Maybe It Could Possibly or Even Probably be a Load of Codswallop

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

Here is the Litvinenko report https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/Litvinenko-Inquiry-Report-web-version.pdf

The word “probably” occurs 35 times; “possibly” 12; “maybe” 3; “perhaps” 35; “could be” 29.

The reader is invited to look for more incidents of what is basically “I dunno, but I’m going to say it anyway”.

The Moment When It Became Impossible to Say Anything Good About Assad

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, SYRIA

Her first article, published as Syria’s government started to attack citizens, was met with a wave of criticism. Both Buck and Vogue’s editor, Anna Wintour, were accused of taking part in a public relations campaign on behalf of the Syrian regime.

Within a month or so, the article was removed from the magazine’s website. Almost a year later Wintour broke her silence on the matter to explain that “we were hopeful that the Assad regime would be open to a more progressive society” but “as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue.”

Buck’s contract with Vogue was not renewed and that’s when she decided to offer an a 5,000-word explanation for her original sin.

It suggests that she was the victim of of manipulation from beginning to end…

Reference: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/aug/01/asma-al-assad-anna-wintour

I don’t know when it became impossible to say anything good about Putin, but, as I’m trying to show by my quotations about Putin series, it was pretty early in the game.

But the Assad thing is interesting, isn’t it? The moment when the Word comes down from on high and otherwise trendy and with-it people are instructed that they must eat crow. We don’t often see it in action do we?

The author fired, the article withdrawn and a Big Wheel forced to apologise.

 

 

 

 

 

The Fabled Isolation of Putin

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

From the Presidential website

Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Barack Obama on the American side’s initiative. January 13, 2016 22:15 http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51165

Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan on the initiative of the Jordanian side. January 14, 2016 18:10 http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51169

So isolated that you just can’t get anything done without talking to him.

 

Ukraine will Conquer Russia!

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, UKRAINE

In someone’s alternate universe. Maybe.

I was struck by this quotation in a piece by Anatoly Karlin; it is by one Adrian Bonenburger writing in Forbes in July. I am certainly not going to waste my time reading the rest of the Bonenburger oeuvre even though there may be more keepers in it.

This is the greatest risk we face for World War III. Not that Russia defeats Ukraine and moves toward Poland and Estonia, but that Ukraine wipes out the Russians currently in Ukraine, and Putin is forced to take some drastic action to prevent further losses. After all, why should Ukraine not feel entitled to take some of Russia’s territory in return for their lost Crimea? And who will be there to stop them, save demoralized and confused Russian conscripts?

I don’t think “deluded” is a strong enough word. Bonenburger obviously believes that 1) Ukraine is soon going to be “Europeanised” 2) that “Putinism” is soon going to collapse and 3) that European armies squash Russian armies like bugs.

And, you know, he’s right. The Ukrainian juggernaut did smoothly roll over the pathetic rebels in the summer and Putin is said to be hiding out with his (only) friend in Pyongyang.

European armies do routinely crush Russia’s demoralised and confused conscripts. We’ve all seen paintings of Charles XII crowning himself in the Kremlin. Who has not admired Napoleon’s glorious summer house among the volcanoes of Kamchatka? Every schoolchild has heard of the historic Hitler-Tojo meeting in January 1942 in Sakhalin.

It’s rather fascinating that anyone would pay Bonenburger to do anything more complicated than lifting heavy objects.

WaPo Says the NED Does What the CIA Used to Do: But they’ve forgotten they said that

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

http://russia-insider.com/en/wapo-says-ned-does-what-cia-used-do/ri9078

2015-#150-Johnson’s Russia List

Russia has expelled the National Endowment for Democracy. This is a fully-funded-by-the-US-government entity that has the nerve, on its home page, to describe itself as a “private, nonprofit foundation” with a “nongovernmental character”. It has just been declared an undesirable organisation in Russia.

As to be expected, the Washington Post, in its role as Stern Defender of the Right, especially where Russia is concerned, fulminated a few days ago that “Vladimir Putin is suffocating his own nation“.

IN THE tumult and uncertainty that marked Russia after the Soviet Union imploded, when the state was weak and many institutions tottering, a vital lifeline was extended from the West. The U.S. government, as well as foundations and philanthropies, responded generously. The financier George Soros, through his Open Society Foundations, provided small grants that sustained many impoverished scientists. The MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) were vital sources of support to civil society, education and human rights.

Now, President Vladimir Putin is forcing these organizations out of Russia, using law enforcement and a parliament that he controls. Mr. Putin’s larger target is to destroy civil society, that vital two-way link in any democracy between the rulers and the ruled. The latest move, announced Tuesday, is to declare the NED an “undesirable” organization under the terms of a law that Mr. Putin signed in May. The law bans groups from abroad who are deemed a “threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, its defense capabilities and its national security.”

The charge against the NED is patently ridiculous. The NED’s grantees in Russia last year ran the gamut of civil society. They advocated transparency in public affairs, fought corruption and promoted human rights, freedom of information and freedom of association, among other things. All these activities make for a healthy democracy but are seen as threatening from the Kremlin’s ramparts.

The charge is “patently ridiculous” is it? Let’s step into the time machine provided by Mr Google and travel back to 1991 when the WaPo thought it had the future of Russia all figured out.

There we find – note the title – “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups” by David Ignatius. “Spyless coups” indeed. That sounds a bit like what the Russian MFA said, doesn’t it?

The analysis of concrete projects shows that most of them are aimed at destabilizing by various means the internal situation in countries that pursue an independent policy in accordance with their own national interests rather than on orders from Washington.

Anyway, back then, Ignatius positively gloried in the idea of “spyless coups”.

There’s an obvious lesson here for Gates, or whoever ends up heading the CIA. The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the agency into such trouble during the past 40 years, may be obsolete. Nowadays, sensible activities to support America’s friends abroad (or undermine its enemies) are probably best done openly. That includes paramilitary operations such as supporting freedom fighters, which can be managed overtly by the Pentagon. And it includes political-support operations for pro-democracy activists, which may be best left to the new network of overt operators…

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” agrees Weinstein. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.

Allen Weinstein is just one of many overt operatives who helped prepare the way for the political miracles of the past two years by sponsoring exchanges and other contacts with liberal reformers from the East. It’s worth naming a few more of them, to show the breadth of this movement for democracy: William Miller of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations; financier George Soros of the Soros Foundation; John Mroz of the Center for East-West Security Studies; John Baker of the Atlantic Council; and Harriett Crosby of the Institute for Soviet-American Relations. This has truly been a revolution by committee…

The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private group headed by Carl Gershman that is funded by the U.S. Congress. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert — dispensing money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain.

Gershman, still doing business at the same stand, isn’t happy either: “the latest evidence that the regime of President Vladimir Putin faces a worsening crisis of political legitimacy” and so on.

QED, as they say; the NED is indeed busy overthrowing governments the USA doesn’t like (“undermining its enemies” – what could be plainer than that?).

Just as the Russians say.

I guess the Washington Post people don’t read their own paper.

Although I suppose that, for them, “friends” have “democracy” and “enemies” don’t. By definition.

 

 

Bubble Media Confuses Itself: But not us

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, MH17, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE

http://russia-insider.com/en/bubble-media-confuses-itself/ri8805

An Australian MSM outlet known as news.com.au has published a video and transcript with the breathless title of “Full transcript: Russian-backed rebels ransack the wreckage of MH17 in shocking 17-minute video”. The sub-title is :”For 17 minutes, they ransacked the luggage of innocent people who had just been shot out of the sky. The full transcript of the never-before-seen footage reveals what they were looking for.” We are helped to the correct feelings with comments like: “No respect … Rebels taking what they want ” “Disgusting … A rebel going through the bag of a victim”.

Here it is: see for yourself.
So, this news outlet thought it had a scoop that would further cement the Accepted Western Story about MH17 and put more all-round blame on the rebels in eastern Ukraine.

But instead….

The problem with living in the bubble is that you don’t know that you are inside the bubble. You do not understand that 1) there is no evidence worthy of the name that the rebels or the Russians shot MH17 down and 2) that your job is to manufacture more fake evidence.

What being in the bubble really means is that you are so far inside the bubble, that everybody you talk to is in the bubble with you, that everything you read or see is selected for the bubble-view that the bubble-view becomes the only view. And you come to believe that there’s no one outside the bubble except conspiracy theorists and Putin trolls. The walls of the bubble are thick and impenetrable. So you do not know what a “Sukhoi” is because you’ve never seen the evidence that a Ukrainian Sukhoi-27 shot MH-17 down.

So you have no idea when you rush to publish another smear job that what you have actually done is add another piece of evidence to the Sukhoi shoot down theory.

Here is some of the evidence (there is more)that MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter plane:

  1. The suppressed (but not suppressed enough) BBC report of eyewitnesses.
  2. The witness of the Ukrainian air force technician.
  3. Not necessarily on order from Kiev, by the way.
  4. An eyewitness.
  5. Another eyewitness.
  6. A report arguing an air-to-air missile destroyed it.
  7. And, thank you news.com.au, now there is your evidence.

Read these excerpts from the transcript. These people are not looting; they are trying to figure out which bits are from MH-17 and which from the Sukhoi fighter they shot down. They are going through the wreckage trying to understand what they have here.

Here are the excerpts that the inhabitants of Bubble-land didn’t understand:

They say the Sukhoi (Fighter) brought down the civilian plane and ours brought down the fighter.

Background: But where is the Sukhoi?

There it is … it’s the passenger plane.

 

Background: [Undistinguished]. Where is the Sukhoi then?

Background: It’s confusing. No idea where the Sukhoi is, it’s burning here and there and debris everywhere

Background: Who’s opened a corridor for them to fly over here?

 

Cmdr: Hello, yes. They saw a pilot crawling at Rassipnaya. A pilot was seen crawling.

Cmdr: It’s a civilian.

Cmdr:…F***. Passenger plane was f*****.

 

Cmdr: The other plane that fell down, they are after them, the pilots.

Background: The second one?

Cmdr: Yes, there’s 2 planes taken down. We need the second.

Background: The second one is a civilian too?

Background: The fighter jet brought down this one, and our people brought down the fighter.

Background: They decided to do it this way, to look like we have brought down the plane.

 

Yes Kalyian. I understood you, but we’re already at the crash site. A passenger plane was brought down. They brought down the passenger plane and we brought down the fighter.

We’re at the crash site.

 

Cmdr: The parachute jumpers are there.

Background: But there are two planes, from my understanding.

Background: And what’s the other one? A Sukoi?

Cmdr: A Sukhoi.

The Sukhoi brought down the plane and we brought down the Sukhoi.

Is it far from here? Where did it fall?

Looks like … Where’s the smoke coming from?

Somewhere else is burning, the 49 village.

I mean … the two pilots landed on parachutes.

 

Cmdr: Five parachutes jumped off this plane. Five people jumped off this plane on the bird site. How to get there?