In which I collect all the examples of this strange mental defect that have caught my attention in the months of October and September in the seventeenth (and final?) year of The New American Century.

PUTIN, PUTIN EVERYWHERE!

PUTIN OF THE EVIL SCARY DEATH EYES

The Economist, one of the reliable goto sources for anti-Russian extrusions, sums up evil-eyed Putin:

Every week Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, finds new ways to scare the world. Recently he moved nuclear-capable missiles close to Poland and Lithuania. This week he sent an aircraft-carrier group down the North Sea and the English Channel. He has threatened to shoot down any American plane that attacks the forces of Syria’s despot, Bashar al-Assad. Russia’s UN envoy has said that relations with America are at their tensest in 40 years. Russian television news is full of ballistic missiles and bomb shelters. ‘Impudent behaviour’ might have ‘nuclear consequences’, warns Dmitry Kiselev, Mr Putin’s propagandist-in-chief—who goes on to cite Mr Putin’s words that ‘If a fight is inevitable, you have to strike first.’

(Editors note: shouldn’t you mention that he used to be in the KGB?). Even its readers don’t buy it – look at the most recommended comments. Soon The Economist will excrete a piece arguing that, for the sake of free speech and other Western values, those who disagree with Big Brother (aka purveyors or dupes of Putin’s “hacking and disinformation campaign“) should be silenced.

PUTIN AND THE AMERICAN ELECTION

The big story before the election, as Clinton was floundering, even in the polls that overstated her numbers, was that Putin was interfering in the US election. The Administration “officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, including by hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations” and counter attacks were promised. Newsweek, a few days before the election, explained “Why Vladimir Putin’s Russia Is Backing Donald Trump” (no doubt a teaser for its Madame President edition). The Washington Post again hammered away at the meme: “Putin’s hope to ignite a Eurasia-style protest in the United States“. (Top comment “we need to deliver trump such a blow on november 8 the whole world will see the sane and reasonable are really still in charge here.”) Although more sober voices argued that there was no serious evidence of Russian involvement and the FBI found “no link between Trump and Russia”, the story had wide coverage: 6 million Google hits. Wikileaks was part of Putin’s conspiracy: by publishing revelations of malfeasance (and the author doesn’t doubt their truth) the media was forced to, well, how else to put it, reveal the malfeasance. That mental incoherence somehow proves “why Putin’s plan is so devilish: He’s undermining the credibility of two key American institutions in one go.“

There was, of course, a giant logical problem with these Putin-is-trying-to-get-Trump-elected conspiracy theories using fake news (if I may emphasise): it put into peoples’ minds the idea that the election could be rigged – into 41% of American voters’ minds, to be exact. And Trump himself started saying that the election might be rigged and that he would reserve judgement on the results. This was not the purpose of the fake news, and the purveyors of these conspiracy theories had to try and walk the story back: the WaPo ran a piece to reassure the punters, “Reminder: There’s almost no chance our election can get hacked by the Russians“. The NYT incoherently squared the circle by saying it won’t be “rigged” but it could be “hacked”.

So as the election began early on 8 November the story was that Putin had but couldn’t and you should either be scared that he had or reassured that he couldn’t; in any case he wanted you to vote for Trump.

The election happened but the expected result did not. Leaving the readers of the WaPo, NYT at al concluding that Putin had indeed finagled the result. Now what? Nuke Russia? Declare the election null and void? Or fess up that the whole story was an invention to divert attention from the Clinton machine’s corruption of the process? The cover story had dangerous implications.

Fortunately, the White House has been responsible and acted to reverse the Russia-did-it meme. Not only did President Obama personally begin the transition by meeting with Trump but the White House stated that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people” (of course, having got out on the limb in the first place, it couldn’t avoid mentioning “Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election”). But the next day a spokesman walked the story back even farther: he repeated that the results reflected the will of the people and added “The federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day… We believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.” I suppose that’s as close as we will get to an official admission that the Russia hacking story was fake news. To nail the coffin lid tighter, Five Thirty Eight had an analytic piece showing that “Demographics, Not Hacking, Explain The Election Results“.

As a final gasp we have this (WaPo of course): “If you’re even asking if Russia hacked the election, Russia got what it wanted: It’s all about sowing confusion and doubt”. So, even if the whole conspiracy theory was assembled out of fake news it’s really true.

“So we’re just going to forget WikiLeaks and Russia helped Trump?” Well, if the story is bunkum – and most of the readers seem to think so – then maybe we should just forget about it.

FAKE NEWS

Because the WaPo was one of the principal purveyors of the fake news based conspiracy theory about Putin hacking the US election it is fitting that it should be the principal purveyor of the next chapter in the Putin Derangement Syndrome saga. (I have italicised these expressions to make the point that the real fake news is produced in locations rather closer to Washington than the Kremlin.)

Here’s the ur-source, the Washington Post 24 November 2016:

The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

The authority for much of this is an outfit called PropOrNot (website) whose criterion is absurdly widespread: “it does not matter whether the sites listed here are being knowingly directed and paid by Russian intelligence officers, or whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point“. In short, anyone who disagrees with the site. People like Ron Paul, Drudge or ZeroHedge. I won’t bother to criticise this latest fake news based conspiracy theory because Matt Taibbi has done it better than I could. “The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting“. The story is collapsing: when even The New Yorker trashes it (“a close look at the report showed that it was a mess“) it’s gone. Or, at least, this version is; I don’t think we’ve heard the last.

I can’t resist referring to a piece I wrote a couple of years ago on the motivation for this stuff: “The Western Spinners are Losing and They Know It“. The whole idea of Putintrolls writing content for our news outlets is preposterous:

Has your Local News Outlet mentioned the evidence that the Malaysian airliner was shot down by a Ukrainian aircraft? How about evidence that the “Heavenly Hundred” were actually killed by “elements of the Maidan opposition, including its extremist far right wing”? Any questioning of NATO’s commercially-obtained satellite photos? Mention of atrocities by “volunteer battalions” in the east? No, of course it hasn’t. You can only read about MH17 on sites like globalresearch.ca, the Maidan killers in academic journals, NATO’s evidence is only criticised on websites, only Russian news sites report atrocities. These are easily dismissed as, in order: crazy conspiracy sites, probably not peer-reviewed, pro-Russian websites and Kremlin funded so-called news organisations. None of it is “real journalism” and therefore none of it is worthy of inclusion in your LNO.

They’re losing and they’re trying to stop criticism and alternate points of view. It tells you where the truth lies: in the Old Days the Soviets jammed our broadcasts; we didn’t worry about theirs.

PUTIN’S WORLDWIDE MIND CONTROL

And its not just the spinning that’s coming apart: Brexit, politicians open to Russia winning in Bulgaria and Moldova, the Trumpquake, the Italian referendum and many many other signs of dissent. In a few years, the assertion that all these disparate but linked events were a Kremlin conspiracy will be seen as entirely laughable. But not (quite) yet. Russia is “brainwashing” Europeans says Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius: “In conventional warfare there was artillery attack before the real battle… Now there is no need to use artillery. You can brainwash.” As a former high official in the Communist Youth League of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (Google it), he should have insider knowledge about brainwashing. A German newspaper worries that Russian “cyber attacks” may affect Germany. Putin is about to win the French presidential election: “France’s next president is likely to be part of a new, hardline Moscow-Paris-Washington axis: supporting Russia’s Vladimir Putin, appeasing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and turning geopolitics away from liberalism and human rights”. Amazing how influential RT and Sputnik are isn’t it? And on such a modest budget too.

Disclaimer. I confess to relying on a lot of sites on PropOrNot’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Why? Because after years – not years, just the last 12 months will do – of Putin’s gunslinger walk, secret love children, billions stashed in Panama, Russian submarines in Sweden, “last hospital in Aleppo” destroyed over and over again, Putin “probably” dunnit, verdicts based on social media, “moderate rebels”, “Crimea’s ‘new normal’ of repression”, Russian sports cheating and “barrel bombs” I have come to a simple conclusion:

“Fake news” from these sites is more reliable than “real news” from the WaPo and its tribe.

MISCELLANEOUS SCARY THINGS

“Putin tells budding geography students that ‘Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere’ amid growing tensions with the West and NATO“. Actually he said граница (singular) and he’s pedantically correct – the border – the edge – of Russia (or any other country) is continuous. The kid answered the question “where does the Russia-US border end?” correctly but it was not the question Putin asked.

“THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING Vladimir Putin’s nuclear warships pictured steaming towards the English Channel as Royal Navy prepares to scramble fleet“. Well, they didn’t invade the UK after all.

From The Guardian, another evergreen source of all things scary: “Aleppo, Ukraine, cyber attacks, Baltic threats: what should we do about Putin?“. “Putin, like a marauding Red Army tank, has no reverse gear”. “Assuming Trump loses, a Clinton administration has three possible courses of action….”. But he didn’t lose and other possibilities appear.

As an entry in the Putin Derangement Syndrome Scary Headlines that Have Nothing to do with the Content Category we have “Vladimir Putin’s secret CLONE ARMY of designer attack dogs taught to sniff out explosives.” Not so scary and not so secret either: the three dogs were cloned by a South Korean professor who presented them to the police in Yakutia where he is doing research.

And finally, the clear winner in the Putin Derangement Syndrome Return of Cthulhu Category from the UK’s Daily Express: “Is 14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin? A KILLER giant squid that can hypnotise its prey and paralyse humans at a distance of 150 feet using poisonous venom is being developed as a secret weapon by Vladimir.” The short answer is “no”. Note to editors: research Lake Vostok and the plot of The Thing in Wikipedia. Mercifully, not even the WaPo or The Economist have seen fit to repeat this piece of fake news.

THE FUTURE

Will this be the last of my Putin Derangement Syndrome series? I don’t think so, the illness is too strongly held but I do hope that it will diminish. In the meantime, I leave you with this quote so easily applicable to the Putin Derangement Syndrome condition.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

In which I collect all the examples of this strange mental defect that have caught my attention in the month of September in the seventeenth year of The New American Century.

THE TRUMPUTIN CENTAUR

(Not a very original idea, actually)

PUTIN WILL HACK THE ELECTION

“The official cautioned that the intelligence community is not saying it has ‘definitive proof’ of such tampering, or any Russian plans to do so.” But mere lack of evidence shouldn’t stop endless headlines and all-round panic, should it?

Never fear, the US Congress may investigate. Or at least Warn Putin’s Hackers To Stop Meddling. (Of course, if they were really afraid, they might introduce paper ballots or voter identification or some other means of making the flimsy US voting system a little harder to game.)

Applebaum explains that, either way, Putin has it covered: “4. The Russians attempt to throw the election. They might try to get Trump elected. Alternatively — and this would, of course, be even more devastating — they might try to rig the election for Clinton, perhaps leaving a trail of evidence designed to connect the rigging operation to Clinton’s campaign.” She’s not alone: “If Mr. Trump wins, Russia wins. But if Mr. Trump loses and people doubt the outcome, Russia also wins.”

Assuming, of course, Putin hasn’t poisoned Clinton first. No evidence, just speculation, but it can’t possibly do any harm to get the story out there. (And don’t forget the added verisimilitude that Will Smith played him in the movie.) Is Trump in on the plot too? Could be.

While Clinton isn’t prepared to agree that the New York City bombs were an “attempt by ISIS or ISIS sympathizers, or really any other group, maybe the Russians, to influence the presidential race in some way and presumably try to drive votes to Donald Trump”, she did helpfully point out that “a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS.” And of course, more than once she’s suggested Trump is channelling Putin.

But cheer up, Putin’s DNC Hack Will Backfire because the Kremlin isn’t very good at meddling in other countries’ elections. (So why all the headlines and passionate calls for investigation then?)

TRUMP IS PUTIN’S TOOL

Trump will bring fascism which is somehow related to “Putinism” says the husband of Clinton’s possible foreign minister. Savage bear illustration warning!: Timothy Snyder agrees that Putin, or somebody he’s strongly influenced by, is a “fascist”.

Clinton’s running mate tells us that this is just one of a number of very, very troubling instances where Trump’s coziness with Putin… blah blah, very very blah blah.

This month saw the opening of a whole website melding Putin Derangement Syndrome with Trump Derangement Syndrome: putintrump.org. “The stakes are enormous. Voting Trump / Pence in 2016 could lead to a Putin / Trump world in 2017.” The Dangers of the Putin-Trump Relationship “In this current cycle, Glaser is funding a new kind of political effort: a website—PutinTrump.org—intended to highlight the connections between the Republican presidential nominee and Russia’s authoritarian president.” The founder of the site is a big donor to the Democratic Party. (The Clinton campaign is, after all, the fons et origo of the Russia hack story. And for pretty obvious reasons too: to divert attention from the real scandal. And maybe worse.)

But, there is some hope: Julia Ioffe believes that somehow, Russia’s ban of Pornhub reflects badly on Trump.

MISCELLANEOUS

Maybe Putin & Co aren’t fascists at all: someone at MSNBC thinks it’s “authoritarian, communist Russia”. And note the cute hammers and sickles at putintrump.org. Does that make Trump a secret commie?

Krauthammer is distressed by people who think Putin plays by the rules: “It makes you want to weep. This KGB thug adhering to norms? He invades Ukraine, annexes Crimea, bombs hospitals in Aleppo — and we expect him to observe cyber-code etiquette? Of course, like most of his columns, he’s really bashing Obama: Putin and Xi are just convenient sticks to hit him with.

Obama solemnly informs us that Putin is no more genuinely popular than Saddam Hussein was. Another example of many that show the stunning ignorance in his Administration about Russia. A long and, if you think about it, frightening list of delusions.

The reluctance of some Balkan countries to jump on board the NATO bandwagon is due to Russia’s years-long plot to influence Balkan politics and nothing to do with memories of NATO’s wars there.

But I think this month’s outstanding example of sheer silliness is this one. “What is behind Vladimir Putin’s curious interest in Mount Athos?“. Not much of a mystery: there has been a Russian monastery there for 800 years, Russian governments traditionally supported it, Putin is a believer. But no: must be a “listening post or centre for intelligence gathering” or some other “secret agenda”.

I’ll be away a lot of October and November so you’ll have to wait a while for the next one. By then we’ll know if Putin gamed the US election so that either Trump or Clinton won. But you know… either way… Putin wins!

What follows was put into my head by a piece claiming that in Syria “Russia [was] using advanced weapons system developed through a secret agreement with extraterrestrial visitors“. I’m not suggesting that anyone take this seriously but notice the assumption that Putin is in the superhuman category. Its creators are losing control of Putin Derangement Syndrome.

At first Putin was a figure to be mocked. He overcompensated for being short by taking his shirt off on all possible occasions, by catching large fish, finding amphoras and wrestling tigers. The high point of the mocking period was the Olympics: he’d squandered billions building a site where the water was brown and the doorknobs fell off.

But then the quick little regime change in Ukraine went sour and Putin became evil. As one of Canada’s professional Ukrainians put it “My Ukraine: A personal reflection on a nation’s dream of independence and the nightmare Vladimir Putin has visited upon it.” Ukrainians just wanna have fun but Putin turned the dream into a nightmare. Remember Olga Znachkova who didn’t want the Eurasian Union but wanted frilly undies instead? Evil Putin stole them too. “Smart but truly evil man” says Madeleine Albright (of all people). Too evil for derision but still limited in his effect: a “regional power” acting out of weakness.

But PDS has evolved far past any localised evil, let alone mockery. In my Putin Derangement Syndrome collection in August there were two principal themes. The first was that Putin had the very same uncanny influence over Donald Trump and Jill Stein that he had had over Bernie Sanders; in other words, he has such a grip on the American election that Hillary Clinton is the only truly American candidate left. The second theme was the extraordinary ability of RT and other Russian media outlets to shape people’s thoughts; far exceeding the effects of the much (much) better funded Western outlets. Putin has the power to cloud minds at a distance: he operates at a more than merely human status and he’s using that power to reshape the world.

This is an illuminating case study because it shows that propaganda can take off on its own and exceed the intentions of its originators. The US establishment is fond of demonising its enemies – in recent times we have seen it happen to Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden and many others – but those hate campaigns, once they had whipped up war support, ceased and were forgotten (anyone remember Aidid?). Washington’s current trouble is that it has never tried the technique against someone whom it can’t get at, against someone who is not cowed and, worst of all, against someone who outwits it at every stage. The propagandists have no idea of what to do except turn the volume up higher and higher. So the rhetoric builds and builds, more and more extreme, larger and larger until it bursts into full-blown psychosis and panic.

Putin is already the Moriarty, the Voldemort of the US propaganda machine: the hidden power behind everything bad. Will we see Putin the extraterrestrial agent or Putin the Antichrist, already out there in the crazy fringe, start to appear in the NYT or WaPo as they are compelled to account for the next ratcheting up of hysteria?

Economist cover sometime next year: Cthulhu Returns!

In which I collect all the examples of this strange mental defect that have caught my attention in the month of August in the seventeenth year of The New American Century.

A NEW MEME?

Vladimir Nosferatuvich Putin

PUTIN IS WINNING THE US ELECTION

Hillary Clinton says “We know that Russian intelligence services, which is part of the Russian government which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC. And we know that he arranged for a lot of those e-mails to be released.” (Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would call this “hyperventilating” but what’s he know?).

Anne Applebaum informs us: “This time the goal is to disrupt the American election, discredit the process and, if possible, elect Donald Trump as President of the United States. All available evidence now points to Russian involvement in a thorough hack of the Democratic National Committee.”

Speaking of “all available evidence”, the WaPo tells us the lack of “fingerprints” is the evidence; CBS says the presence of “fingerprints” is the evidence. One or the other, I guess: but it’s all “evidence”, isn’t it?

A “scholar of Russian espionage and political subversion” informs us “For the first time since the 1950s, Russian subversion of the American political process has become a presidential campaign issue.”

Jill Stein of the Green Party has been contaminated by Putin.

They’re everywhere: “Putin’s Pawns: Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left .”

And then there’s Donald Trump himself: “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” A Clinton campaign video lays out the evidence of “Donald Trump’s connection to Vladimir Putin“. “So, you can say Trump and his friend Putin are the founder of ISIS, which probably would be more accurate than calling out the commander-in-chief in that way.” McFaul explains “Why Putin wants a Trump victory (so much he might even be trying to help him)”. Clinton says Putin, Farage and Trump are all together; her campaign chief details the links between Putin and Trump.

But maybe none of this matters, as the WaPo explains; Putin might use Russia’s tremendous hacking power to disrupt the entire election. He’s already sniffing around: “Russians Hacked Two U.S. Voter Databases, Officials Say” and he’s gnawing away at the “newspaper of record“. Maybe it’s already too late: “Vladimir Putin Has Already Won Our Election: It’s time to face the facts: Kremlin spies and hackers are undermining American politics“.

(A small request – can we have a pronunciation closer to vla-DEE-mir than VLAD-i-mir? Americans ought to be able to pronounce the name of their soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief.)

PUTIN’S MIND CONTROL

Just watching RT for a short time can so twist people’s thinking that they have to be put on a remedial course of BBC watching.

Are Putin’s beauties on a secret mission to break up the UK?

Then there’s the Nooscope. Whatever that is. But it’s frightening and sinister. A sort of mental Dracula, I suppose. Fortunately we have Masha Gessen to guide us through the forest “A final fact about Vayno is that the letters of his last name can spell voyna, the Russian word for war. Is this the message that Putin is sending?” Вайно – война, you decide. Maybe Putin’s “gunslinger walk” or Asperger’s affects his ability to spell. (But he could probably find, or create, someone actually named Антон Эдуардович Война if he really tried, don’t you think?) But, as Gessen is a homonym for guessin’, who knows what message is being sent by whom?

The NYT suggests that in Sweden, where actually two thirds don’t want to join NATO, all expressed opposition to joining can only be the work of A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories. (Amusing to consider the three “false stories” the NYT mentions and think: 1) nukes in İncirlik 2) renditions and other things we only learn about later and 3) SOFA – see Okinawa. The NYT should put more effort into its propaganda: this is an insult to its readers.)

MISCELLANEOUS

Time for another Olympics, time for another invasion says Luke Harding. (Bit stale-dated that, but the Para-Olympics aren’t over so there’s still time for Putin to invade somebody. But Harding can recycle the piece in two years.)

Why is Russia in Syria? Don’t waste your time listening to what the Kremlin says: the current Porcelain Cup holder knows it’s because “Russia wants to erase the humiliation of the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

But there’s hope: despite all that Putin has done “Twenty-five years after the great revolution that toppled the Soviet regime, the spirit of dignity and freedom still burns.”

Next month, new collection. The PDS epidemic is very contagious.