WaPo casts Soviets as liberators
… in a very convoluted paragraph, WaPo contests Fred Thompson’s claim that Americans have shed more blood to liberate other peoples than any other country. Astoundingly, their proof point is the Soviet Union, which under Stalin shed more of it’s own blood in peacetime to suppress it’s own people [probably about 20 million] than any other country except Communist China, greedily partitioned Poland with the Nazis, and then for forty years brutally caged all the people it “liberated.”
Here’s the odd paragraph where WaPo explains its reasoning:
In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army “tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine.” It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies.
Ouch. I feel like I got a hernia just trying to follow those contortions.
Orwell would be proud.
Russia: Iran’s enabler
The Russian foreign minister is not amused by efforts to ratchet up sanctions on Iran nor by speculation by the French foreign minister that military action may eventually be necessary.
“As for sanctions, the United States and the European Union have taken their own decisions,” said a stony-faced Lavrov. “If we decided to act collectively on the basis of consensual decisions in the UN Security Council, what good does it do to take unilateral decisions?”
Two days after Kouchner made waves by musing about the prospect of “war” against Iran - a comment he was repeatedly asked about during his trip to Russia - Lavrov stressed that Moscow was “very worried about the growing number of voices considering military action.”
It seems quite clear that the Russians would be perfectly happy to have the US and the the EU tied down for decades trying to resolve crises in the middle east. Neutralize the superpower, free your own hands.
How can you ask one brutal rogue regime to help you contain another?
The dude doth protest too much, methinks
Russian foreign minister has pulled out a woefully obscure Hamlet quote to explain why the British are nuts to object to political assassinations on their soil:
“Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me,” Mr Lavrov said, quoting Hamlet’s address to Guildenstern in Act 3 Scene 2 of the play.
Addressing students at Moscow’s elite Foreign Relations Institute, he said that Britain had become involved in political intrigues against Russia by sheltering “certain odious individuals” such as the billionaire businessman Boris Berezovsky.
So, gents, if you don’t want us to assassinate people, don’t host them, OK? Geez. Not that they did it. They didn’t, but as OJ said, if they had done it, you’d have been asking for it, right?
“It expected in earnest to get the right to press buttons in Russia’s domestic politics. In the end, willingly or unwillingly, London became a party to intrigues and provocations against Russia,” Mr Lavrov said.
So when Russia sends someone to poison a Russian expat on the streets of London, it’s Russian domestic politics? Reminds me of Thurber’s fable of the Rabbits who caused all the trouble: “The wolves replied that the rabbits had all been eaten, and because they had been eaten, it was purely an internal matter.”
Russia’s getting creepier and creepier
Fantastic article in MacCleans [ht RealClearPolitics]. The Putin Paranoia in Russia continues to run deep and ugly. Some really scary things have appeared on YouTube lately. And the sabre rattling and fascist-toned paranoia are running thick.
Read the whole thing. Really. It’s long but worth it. One thing that caught my attention was the apologetics and West-blaming for Russia’s bad behavior among Western academics. There was a whole industry of this during the cold war.
I remember as a college freshman being assigned a book by William Appleton Williams, which basically stated that Russia has been fearful ever since the Mongol invasions and Napolean and Hitler didn’t help much, and anything belligerent they do can be explained by defensive paranoia about getting invaded again. Here’s a sample of the current variations on the theme:
Others think Moscow’s grievances run even deeper. Gordon Smith, who served as Canada’s ambassador to NATO from 1985 until 1990, traces the resentment to the period shortly after the reunification of Germany, when Western countries made a host of promises to Russia to the effect that the disposition of military forces wouldn’t change. “These assurances were made up and down, left and right,” recalls Smith, who now teaches international politics at the University of Victoria. “Then the enlargement of NATO took place, and the countries of eastern Europe made no secret of the fact that they wanted to come in as a protection against the dangers of a resurgent Russia.” The result, he says, was a disconnect in public opinion between Russia and the West that lingers to this day. While Canadians and Americans generally greeted NATO expansion as a sign that the Cold War was truly thawing, Russians took it as an act of outright hostility, a trick designed specifically to obtain strategic advantage.
Fast forward to 2002, when the U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Moscow elite had all but given up raising such uncomfortable issues. Yet many average Russians were beginning to nurse a serious grudge, say diplomats who worked there at the time. “We did things that in their eyes looked aggressive,” says Rod Irwin, Canada’s ambassador Moscow from 1999 until 2003. “We had real reasons for doing them. We wanted to bring countries like Poland into the club, to help them and stabilize them. But that’s not how it was seen in Russia.”
Georgia in the crosshairs
Excellent analysis today by Melik Kaylan in WSJ on the ongoing intimidation by the Russians against Georgia. I noted it earlier today as well. It seems quite clear the Russians aren’t messing around here. They are trying to bully Georgia out of aligning with the West. Kaylan notes both incidents this spring and this summer, one involving a helicopter firing into Georgian territory, the other the fighter jets which dropped the bomb:
In both cases, Georgian authorities showed the world radar flight path data as proof. The world did nothing the first time, and will likely do nothing again. Meanwhile, unexplained incursions continue daily. This is the kind of near-lethal brinkmanship which Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili believes will only encourage more belligerence from Russia.
Read the whole thing.
These are not the droids you are looking for
[The picture is a charming drawing by a patriotic Russian youngster, showing the U.S. flag on the ground and the Russian flag held high, with the Kremlin in the background. Sweet]
Those Georgians are a hoot. Several weeks ago they accused the Russians of sending fighter jets over their territory which dropped dud bombs on the ground. Now they say that another military aircraft entered their airspace, which they fired on, and a forest fire started in the area. From context it could only be a Russian plane or that of a Moscow-backed separatist group.
The Russians, of course, are snickering. Russians are always fun to watch in these situations. Remember KAL 007, the Korean airliner they shot down back in the day without any provocation at all? They’re like the schoolyard bully who lies through his teeth, knows everyone knows he’s lying, but views that knowledge as part of the fun of it.
Alexander Drobyshevsky, a Russian Air Force spokesman, labeled the accusation “one more provocative piece of information directed against us,” according to the Interfax news agency, and insisted that no Russian aircraft had been in Georgian airspace or were missing.
Freudian oops there? Probably meant to say “provocative misinformation.”
“All force aircraft are currently on airfields, and the pilots are having a rest,” he said.
A well earned rest, no doubt.
Being neighbors with Russia is living next to the neighborhood lunatic. You just have to hunker down and hope someone else gets noticed today. James Thurber had it right.
Some memorial
Blue Crab draws our attention to a great column by Peggy Noonan, where, in an elegant indirect rebuttal to TNR’s slander of American troops, she describes an encounter with an elderly Frenchman in Normandy who, upon learning they were Americans, toasted them tearfully because they were …
sons and daughters of, the men of the Normandy Invasion. The men who had fought their way through France hedgerow by hedgerow, who’d jumped from planes in the dark and climbed the cliffs and given France back to the French. He thought we were of their sort. And he knew they were good. He’d seen them, when he was young.
Then, by contrast, there is this:
But this makes me think of the statue I saw once in Vienna, a heroic casting of a Red Army soldier. Quite stirring. The man who showed it to me pleasantly said it had a local nickname, “The Unknown Rapist.” There are similar memorials in Estonia and Berlin; they all have the same nickname.
Some memorial.
[In particular, Noonan describes the systematic practice of rape in East Prussia, the part of Germany now absorbed into Poland, Russia and Lithuania. My family came from that region, and I know first hand that the rep of the Russian soldier goes back to WWI, not just WWII.]
Thin-slicing the Russian mind
We’ve been trying for weeks now to figure out what the Russians are up to. Naked fishing expeditions, sending bombers hither and yon, bombing Georgia with dud bombs, sanitizing Stalin. They’re just sounding loopier and loopier.
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which argues that in the right circumstances, you can learn volumes about someone at a glance, more than you could if you read a book on them. He calls this thin-slicing.
With that in mind, I offer the following anecdote from today’s news as a thin-slice of the Russian mind:
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A woman set fire to her ex-husband’s penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, Moscow police said Wednesday.
Asked if the man would make a full recovery, a police spokeswoman said it was “difficult to predict.”
The attack climaxed three years of acrimonious enforced co-habitation. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat, something common in Russia where property costs are very high.
“It was monstrously painful,” the wounded ex-husband told Tvoi Den newspaper. “I was burning like a torch. I don’t know what I did to deserve this.”
What you did? Uh, I’ll start with the naked TV and vodka party in your ex-wife’s apartment? Or … is my Western cultural bias peeking through?
Now this is awkward
Ever wonder what Dorian Gray’s picture looked like? Now you know.
At the very time that the Russians are busily trying to rewrite history to sanitize Stalin, the Estonians have charged one of the SOBs from that era with genocide for his role in deporting people to death in Siberia. [Since I have roots in Lithuania, I always feel a special pride when a Baltic state kicks a little butt.]
Russia and Estonia are societies cruising in opposite directions:
The authorities in Estonia said Wednesday that they had charged a cousin of a former Estonian president with genocide for his role as a Communist bureaucrat involved in the deportation of civilians to Siberia in 1949.
Arnold Meri, an Estonian who fought against the Nazis and became a prominent official in the Communist Party during the decades of Soviet occupation in the Baltics, was charged with genocide last week, his lawyer and the authorities said. If convicted, Meri, 88, could face life imprisonment.
Not sure what life in prison means to an 88 year old, but it is nice to see the Soviet-era SOBs get their share of what has heretofore been reserved for NAZIs. Stalin was, of course, as bad a mass murderer as Hitler, a little less ethnically focused, but no less ruthless.
Kudos to the Estonians.
Topless Putin threatens British airspace
Russia threatened British airspace with one of its little bomber jaunts, and the Brits scrambled two fighter jets to warn it off. And then this:
Last week President Putin said he was ending a 15-year suspension of bomber flights, and announced that 14 strategic aircraft had taken to the air from seven airfields across Russia. The tough new stance was illustrated somewhat graphically by pictures of Mr Putin fishing topless that had been released during the week.
Please, Vlad, put your shirt on. We’ll do anything you ask.
Putin’s Russia takes a fascist turn
Putin’s Russia, according to Paul Kennedy in IHT, is bent on reliving the dark glory days of the Czars and the Soviet Union, surfing on waves of oil and gas revenues.
[Anywhere you find oil revenue, you find creeps getting rich on them.]
Using energy threats, they are squeezing neighboring countries like Belarus and the Baltic states, but it doesn’t end there. Some of the most objectionable things are the easiest to overlook: hyperpatriotic youth organizations and a rewriting of history, for example:
Two examples will have to suffice here: the creation of a patriotic youth movement, and the not-too-subtle rewriting of Russia’s school history books. The youth movement called “Nashi” (it translates as “ours”) is growing fast, encouraged by government agencies determined to instill the right virtues into the next generation and to use this cadre of ultra-Russianists to buttress Putin’s regime against domestic critics. … The policies that Nashi advocates are eclectic. Among the main features are reverence for the Fatherland, respect for the family, Russian traditions and marriage, and a detestation of foreigners …
BBC hit by friendly fire
In continuing its ongoing spat with the UK, over the UK’s peculiar insistence that assassinating a political refugee in London is bad form, Russia has kicked the BBC world service off the airwaves in Moscow.
In explaining the decision,
Spokesman Igor Ermachenkov insisted management had taken the decision to remove BBC programming without outside interference.
“It’s no secret the BBC was established as a broadcaster of foreign propaganda,” he said.
Indeed it is not a secret. Many of us have felt this way for years. I felt this just the other day with the Padilla conviction, when the whole BBC story consisted of interviewing some barely coherent spokesperson from an obscure human rights group. The Queen of England felt that way when the BBC fabricated a media hit on her.
The BBC has long been an ideologically slanted thorn in the side of Western governments, particularly the UK and the US. All the more irritating because it is unaccountably funded by British tax dollars.
The puzzle is why the Russians would object. If there is an anti-Atlantic alliance story to be told, the BBC is usually in the forefront in telling it. Memo to Putin: The BBC may be SOBs, but they are not our SOBs.
More Russians behaving badly II
I promised more from that wascally wabbit Putin, and, sadly, I have delivered. The Telegraph has a morbid and shocking story of how mental hospitals in Russia are being used to silence dissent and torture dissenters, in a chilling flashback to the days of Stalin.
At a rally in the city in June, she delivered as a member of the United Civil Front - the opposition party of Garry Kasparov, ex-chess champion - a powerful denunciation of Mr Putin’s crackdown on dissenters.
Such unorthodox views are enough to get anyone labelled an eccentric in Russia these days. But the state psychiatrists holding her insist she has a history of mental instability, pointing out that she sought counselling for stress and insomnia in 2004. [!]
Because she is forbidden from seeing anyone apart from her immediate family - who were also threatened with enforced treatment after they demanded visiting rights - it is impossible to judge Mrs Arap’s state of mind.
I’ve said it before but it cannot be said enough: Russia is burdened with an unreconstructed Viking/Mongol culture which never had a Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment, and never discovered the sanctity of the individual that runs from Locke through Jefferson to Lincoln.
Culture matters. Their’s sucks. Stop being surprised.
More Russians behaving badly
Sometimes I think I should just turn this into a 24/7 Russians behaving badly blog. There is too much material, and I’m getting dizzy keeping up. WSJ has a column today on Russian intransigence on independence to Kosovo:
A different Europe might unite in response to the Kremlin’s provocation. This one is splintering, as in the early 1990s also over the Balkans. Britain wants to push ahead on independence, while the Germans fear antagonizing Moscow. In between, the French claimed the diplomatic lead and pushed the three-month delay.
Again, the choice has been laid before the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party at the U.N., with a rogue state on the security council [this time Russia] trying to stuff the dormouse in the teapot. Again the Europeans acts like they were raised on free range boneless chicken farm, while the U.S. is distracted. Putin is just being Putin, seeing this as just one more chance to spit in the eye of the West. [And note the cool historical parallel that WWI started in part through Russian determination to protect the Serbs.]
Check back tomorrow for more adventures with that wascally curmudgeon Wadmir Pootin!
Help! Russia has claimed my cellar
Hilarious exchange in the Daily Telegraph, an echo of the Onion headline, “Angelina Jolie Wants to Adopt Your Baby”:
Dear Sirs, When I went down to the cellar of my property at 4 Eustace Gardens to check my electricity meter today, I discovered that a Russian flag had been planted there. I am wondering if this has any connection with the Russian flag recently planted on the ocean floor beneath the North Pole. It could be that Eustace Gardens is part of a Russian master-plan for exploiting minerals or for launching a missile attack. What is the council going to do about it? Yours faithfully, R. P. Stringer.
Dear Mr Stringer, Following receipt of your letter, this is to inform you that it has been necessary to move your house to a higher council tax band, on the grounds that a) it has valuable mineral deposits underneath it, or b) that it is clearly highly prized by the Russian government. Please complete the enclosed form, stating the height of the flagpole in your cellar, as this raises planning permission issues.
The correspondence continues. Read the whole thing.
Russia scams Titanic footage for Arctic stunt
Russia is obviously very casual about truth. They fly over countries and drop bombs and give hysterical explanations. They assassinate dissidents abroad using sophisticated radiation poisoning, and then blink innocently. Is it any surprise that they borrowed footage from a film to illustrate their arctic adventure?
Russia faces embarrassment over its flag planting expedition to the North Pole after claims that state broadcasters borrowed scenes from the movie Titanic to “beef-up” footage.
Television company Rossiya sent images of mini submarines descending to the ocean floor around the world in its report about the mission.
But a 13-year-old boy from Finland spotted the scenes in the national daily newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, and realised that they resembled images on his Titanic DVD.
What a gas
I’m probably not supposed to be amused by this, but Canada is now getting into the arctic oil and gas gambit, facing off against the Russians. Denmark is making a few squeaks as well. What really cracks me up is that all of this is made possible by the melting of the polar ice cap and higher hydrocarbon prices.
According to some estimates, the Arctic contains billions of tonnes of gas and oil deposits, which could become more accessible as the ice cap that cover them begins to melt. This is happening just as their exploitation becomes more economically viable because of high hydrocarbon prices.
So, connecting the dots, we see that global warming, presumably caused by burning carbon fuels, is going to make it possible to recover huge supplies of carbon fuels from the region, and already the dogs are growling over the slab of meat.
The irony brings home the pointlessness of the odd little self-indulgent rituals like turning off the lights of London or Sidney for a couple of hours, or burning biodiesel on film sets.
Bart caught with his pants down
Great stuff in this update on the Russian incursion into Georgia, which Russia met with the Bart Simpson defense: “I didn’t do it, no one saw me, you can’t prove anything.” Well, maybe they can:
Georgia said it had collected radar records from both its civilian and military air traffic controllers that clearly show an aircraft enter from Russia, fly to the area of the strike, then turn around and fly back into Russia.
Georgia also released audio recordings and a transcript of an apparently frustrated Georgian air traffic controller. The controller was talking with his counterpart in southwestern Russia, asking about an unscheduled flight along the border that he was seeing on his screen, the Georgian government said.
The Russian controller checked with his supervisor, according to the recording, which was released to journalists. He then told the Georgian controller that no planes were flying.
“Our bosses said that nobody is there, neither by plan nor in reality,” the Russian said.
“Well, O.K., it might be a U.F.O.,” the Georgian answered.
“Our bosses said that nobody is there, neither by plan nor in reality.” You can’t make this stuff up.
Tokyo Rose in reverse
Many of you will already have seen this WSJ op/ed by a former Romanian intelligence officer on the tactic of smearing American presidents and American soldiers to undermine U.S. stature abroad. There is some potent stuff here, and it should be shared as widely as possible.
The upshot is that slamming the U.S. president, comparing him to Hitler, questioning his integrity and the integrity of our government and our troops at every turn, turning every negative event into an opportunity for immoderate self-flagellation–all of these were a calculated Communist cold war strategy.
We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman–the leader of the new “occupation power.” Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.
The financing of Western Leftists by Communists is now a well-documented story. But the calculated caricaturing of U.S. presidents is not so well known:
The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the “butcher of Hiroshima.” We went on to spend many years and many billions of dollars disparaging subsequent presidents: Eisenhower as a war-mongering “shark” run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer. In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a “Yankees-Go-Home” petition, at the same time launching the slogan “Europe for the Europeans.”
Also note the calculated demonization of U.S. troops:
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.
This tactic by our enemies can, at times, put us in a difficult position. We want an open society that can address and treat infections before they become gangrenous. On the other hand, when people distort and lie, as the TNR blogger did or John Kerry did in his congressional testimony during the Vietnam war, or when they obsess at inordinate length over inevitable mistakes and invent moral equivalence with the worst excesses of our enemies, one must wonder if their motives are to be honest so as to correct, or to demonize so as to destroy.
This is much like an intimate relationship where “honesty” is thin cover for emotional abuse. A spouse or a parent, under the guise of being open, harps obsessively on real and imagined faults until they utterly destroy the other. A wise friend concerned with the other would find ways to address concerns openly, but also not stretch to believe or hammer on every evil insinuation that crosses her mind, while ignoring all that is noble and good.
It’s like Tokyo Rose in reverse: Instead of telling the soldier the girlfriend is cheating, she tells the girlfriend the solider is a fiend.
Either way, she’s an enemy whore.
Mutant crocodile survives 12 story fall
OK, I don’t know it was mutant. But it did live in a town with a nuclear power plant, the article tells us. I assume there was a reason for including that fact? And it did fall 12 stories and live to smile about it, and I’m guessing that this kind of fall resistance doesn’t come naturally. No, I don’t know if it bounced. And no, I didn’t read it in the The New Republic.
Residents in the Russian nuclear research town of Sarov got a jaw-dropping surprise on Tuesday when a crocodile fell from its owner’s 12th storey flat.
The one metre caiman crocodile landed on a footpath after leaning too far out of the window of the flat where it had lived for the last 15 years, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted an official with the local branch of the ministry as saying. [Did it live alone? How far did it normally lean out the window?]
Frightened passers-by called the emergency services and rescuers managed to lasso the stunned animal and take it to a shelter for stray pets.
It was soon returned to its owner, unharmed apart from damage to one of its teeth, the official said.
