Actually Ames engages in a little bullshit of his own here, but in general it's great.
The eXile Issue 221
Bullshit Rising
Manufacturing a Kremlin Bogeyman By Mark Ames
Nothing is more annoying than the crunchy civics teacher telling you the pious tale about how "one person can make a difference." For every Rosa Parks tale that we eagerly swallowed, our teachers neglected to add that a few hundred million Africans before her failed to make a difference.
Out here in Russia, where there is little civil society, a suffocating bureaucracy, and rampant cynicism, it's even more difficult to imagine this mythical one person who can make a difference.
Enter the intrepid husband-wife duo, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. They served as The Washington Post's correspondents in Moscow from early 2001 through late 2004. During their tenure, they churned out a steady stream of rock-solid copy, grave in tone and ideologically as centrist as they come. Their tone only began to take a gradual turn towards the darkly foreboding right in step with the Bush Administration's decision to re-evaluate their friendship with Putin -- which is to say, sometime after the arrest of pro-American oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Baker and Glasser returned to Washington and quickly reworked their articles into a book, Kremlin Rising, that was released this past summer. And it is this book which may, like little else produced in the past five years, condemn Russia to pariah status for the remainder of Putin's political career, and perhaps beyond.
The tale of how Baker and Glasser took on the Kremlin Tyrant isn't exactly the morally-inspiring equivalent of Casey Sheehan's. The aggrieved mother of a son killed in Iraq stood completely alone with literally no chance whatsoever of making a difference, faced down one of the most frightening powers on earth, took a shitstorm of abuse, and managed to hold on against all odds. Baker and Glasser, on the other hand, slyly collected their material and waited until they'd safely beat it back home to safety, then unleashed an incredibly powerful work of anti-Putin, anti-Russian propaganda that is intellectually sleazy and appallingly deceitful, yet extremely influential, given their positions in the Post.
(snip)
Forgetting history -- the 1990s, to be specific -- is one of the key strategic omissions Baker and Glasser employ in order to give the impression that everything bad in the Putin regime is alarmingly new, terrifying, and demanding our immediate attention.
Baker, a short, energetic, health-looking man with a young, pointy face and a pointy little smirk, is said to be the real talent in the duo. Glasser, on the other hand, is sort of the Andrew Ridgely to her husband's George Michael, bitterly aware of her limits and of the fact that she is piggybacking on her husband's success, yet said to be grotesquely ambitious and resentful. She also has horrible teeth, according to one good source, who winced when describing them..
The sheer enormity of their sleaze and deceit is too much even for a lead article. A chapter-by-chapter survey of the duo's book is a good way to become acquainted with their agenda.
Chapter 1, "Fifty-two Hours in Beslan." The brutality and incompetence described in this account of Beslan are shocking and, admittedly, well written. But without some perspective -- namely, the Yeltsin regime's response to the hostage crisis in Budyannovsk in June, 1995, when special forces shot and killed dozens of hostages in bungled attempts to storm the hospital, and again the brutality and incompetence of the Pervomaisk hostage crisis a year later, with similar bloody results. Beslan may have had a higher and more grisly kill-count, but it differed little in substance. By omitting the fact that the Chechen Wars, both 1 and 2, were Boris Yeltsin projects designed to keep him in power and protect his interests, Baker-Glasser manipulate history and throw the entire blame on the bad guys -- Putin, the KGB, and anyone not sufficiently pro-American (Yelstin was our tool, so therefore, the authors do their best to simply leave his name out.).
Another interesting omission is the eerie similarity between Putin's m.o. and Bush's. For example, they take him to task for linking the war in Chechnya to Al Qaeda and international terrorism, observing, "at its root, the Chechnya conflict had little to do with Al Qaeda." With Bush linking the war in Iraq to Al Qaeda, and Blair blaming the London Underground bombings on Al Qaeda, you'd think that Baker-Glasser, whose newspaper was one of the strongest cheerleaders for war in Iraq, would be a little more humble. Wrong. "Rather than resolve the underlying political grievances and remove the popular mandate for the rebels, [Putin] had demonized, victimized, and consequently radicalized an entire people." What's grossly wrong here is that the Chechens were already pretty damn radicalized after Yeltsin's war, having kidnapped (and in some cases beheaded on video camera) some 3,000 Russians during their period of independence from 1996-9, introduced Wahabbi-style Sharia law, and finally they invaded Russia in the summer of 1999. I repeat: they invaded Russia! These facts are given little play, however, making their account of the Chechen war as duplicitous as if someone were to report on the rampant terrorism in Iraq today without mentioning that it first arose with the American occupation.
Chapter 2: "Project Putin." The description of Chubais, a man hairline-deep in the largest corruption scandals in human history: "a tall, red-haired reformer who had orchestrated the largest sell-off of state assets in world history..." Wildly deceitful description #2: "With Yeltsin's permission, Putin dispatched troops to [Chechnya]." That would be like saying, "With Hitler's permission, General Walther von Brauchitsch dispatched troops to the Soviet Union for Operation Barbarossa." The whole purpose of the Second Chechen War was to create popularity for Putin, thereby securing the Yeltsin clan's power, loot and immunity. Stepashin was fired by Yeltsin because he didn't have the balls to launch the second war on behalf of the Yeltsin clan; Putin was brought in specifically to head that war. Saying Yeltsin "approved it" is about as bone-white a whitewash as you can get. Omitting this is incredibly sleazy, yet it is necessary in order to create the Kremlin Villain which is central to Baker-Glasser's pitch.
Chapter 4: "The Takeover Will Be Televised." Here the omissions and whitewashings reach fever pitch, and the revisionism turns to outright lies. Commenting on Putin's takeover of NTV in 2000/2001, they write, "The showdown at Ostankino had been building ever since [NTV's] Igor Malashenko had refused to help the Kremlin install Vladimir Putin as the next Russian president in the summer of 1999, saying he could not trust a KGB man." He sounds like a good guy, right? Except that the real reason Malashenko didn't support Putin was because his boss at NTV, oligarch Vladimir Gusinksy, backed a rival senior KGB operator, Yevgeny Primakov, who, had he won, would have shut down ORT, the TV station that backed Putin. Meanwhile, Gusinsky's rise to power is whitewashed this way: "One venture led to another until finally he was able to put together a bank in 1989." This kind of explanation-by-omission is so cheap, it recalls Ash's attempt to take the Book of the Dead: "Klatu...Veratu...one-[cough]-venture-[cough]-another... Okay, then, we described it. Everything's cool." In one of the most violent, corrupt countries, one wonders what this "one venture led to another" business was all about -- but if explained, it might seriously undermine the dichotomy setup that is crucial to this book. Later in the chapter, Mikhail Kasyonov is described as "pro-market" and "respected in the West as a formidable international-debt negotiator and seen as a reliable promoter of capitalism -- so much so that some had questioned whether he was profiting personally on the side." Note how they slyly avoid mentioning what everyone in Russia associates with Kasyanov -- his nickname, "Misha Two-Percent," supposedly the fee he charged on every single corrupt international debt deal he oversaw -- by arguing that he was so darned good at being a pro-Western capitalist that certain unnamed enemies (and we can all guess who they are) jealously smeared him. No halfway professional journalist could possibly spe
nd four years in Moscow during Kasyonov's reign, and fail to mention his nickname, or how he earned it -- not unless it's part of an agenda. Which of course it is. Kasyanov is a good guy; therefore, any bad news about him is both omitted and dismissed as mere jealousy. Lastly, in this chapter, Baker and Glasser's larger hatred of Russia spews into the open: "While the intelligentsia was outraged at the loss of NTV, the vast majority of the public was not, so long as they continued to get foreign movies and other high-quality entertainment they had come to expect from the channel." To prove their point about the innate savagery of the Russian masses, they compare their reaction to that of America's most reliable lickspittles, the Czechs: "By coincidence, around the same time, more than one hundred thousand people protested in the much smaller Czech Republic against the appointment of a new state television director they considered insufficiently independent." Gee, why not just compare Russian apathy to America? That's because it would be pretty embarrassing. How many Americans hit the streets when Peter Arnett was fired from NBC at the beginning of the Iraq War for saying that the Americans were meeting more resistance than they had planned for; or when ABC fired Bill Maher for suggesting that the 9/11 terrorists weren't cowards; or MSNBC demoting Ashleigh Banfield just after the Iraq War for her criticism of media jingoism? Remember those huge crowds that poured into Washington over that? Moreover, Baker-Glasser cited a poll showing that 57 percent of Russians supported censorship of the media, but failed to note, for perspective, a recent US poll showing that 43 percent of Americans believe that the media has too many freedoms, while 22 percent believe that the government should censor the media -- and remember, this is from a population that has freedom of speech enshrined in its 200-year-old constitution! With Russians, on the other hand, supporting censorship was really a way of supporting a crackdown on the hated oligarchs, who had destroyed the free media under Yeltsin, and used it to advance their commercial and political fortunes. While for Americans, supporting censorship is purely an expression of fascist idiocy, for Russians, it is seen as a way to curb the influence of a small clique that had destroyed their lives.
http://www.exile.ru/2005-September-09/bullshit_rising.html
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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