It is indeed difficult to paint a comprehensive picture of today’s Russia and not to drown in the accusations of russophobia or pro-Russian propaganda. Although I tend to take the more realistic view of the nominal democracy currently on offer (that is, it could be much worse if moderate Putin were to be deposed by the hawkish elements in his administration), I was very much impressed by this excellent opinion piece by Claire Berlinski in Haaretz, which paints an apprehensive yet still a surprisingly as matter-of-factly sober picture of the reality as it is sobering:
Russia didn’t trigger the Gilets Jaunes. But Putin and the far right want to see Paris burn and Europe weakened and divided, so they jumped at the chance to contaminate and manipulate them.
Russia is shoveling enough manipulated excrement into the Internet that it might clog the pipes. […] Why is Russia doing this? The aim of Russia’s misinformation is to heighten the contradictions, as Lenin once put it. The Kremlin’s news organs urge the Yellow Vests on to ever-more spectacular violence – then portrays them as a maddened horde. […] Russia is an imperial kleptocracy running a state-controlled energy empire. It seeks to divide and conquer the West, turn the feuding nations of Europe into subservient vassals, and leave the United States isolated, friendless, and irrelevant. The Kremlin and Gazprom (same thing) use a three-part strategy of disaggregation, co-option, and pre-emption. Their goal is to discourage the EU from forming a coherent, common energy policy. They seek to disaggregate Europe’s governments by breaking up the EU or making it unworkable, then entice its governments into bilateral deals.
This is not to say that the Kremlin wrote the Gilets Jaunes’ script. The protests and riots are organic and real; […] There is no evidence that Russia conceived of this uprising. Nor is there evidence that it’s dangling the protesters’ puppet-strings. I stress this because the idea has become another lunatic Twitter conspiracy theory […] Russia does not have the ability to conjure up a movement like this ex nihilo. What they have the power to do – and what they do, without a doubt; indeed, you can watch them do it in real time – is scan the horizon for conflicts and divisions in open societies, then try to exacerbate them on social media.
I find it honestly one of the absolute best pieces written this year, not in the least for the chilling clarity of its view. Gilets Jaunes and their possible Russian connection are succinctly characterized in this piece on tango-noir.com:
The Gilets Jaunes are a very broad protest movement that cuts across all French political camps. While maintaining the generally anti-political character and refusing platform to major politicians, the Gilets Jaunes are nevertheless joined by minor activists from various political movements and organisations, including the far right who play a visible and often divisive role in the anti-government protests.
The Gilets Jaunes are also being instrumentalised by foreign powers, including the US, Turkey and, most notably, Russia that are trying to exploit the protests to push forward their own political agendas and discredit European liberal democracy. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the Gilets Jaunes feature a few far-right activists who have been involved in various pro-Kremlin efforts and maintain contacts with their Russian counterparts, there is no evidence that official Moscow has played any role in orchestrating the protest movement.
A much better exposé than shoddy reporting on idnes.cz (in Czech) about some anonymous, Russian-speaking members of some of the more aggressive partakers in the protests. Seriously, go read the tango-noir article. That’s what I call evidence-based, independent journalism.
On the opposite side of the spectrum sits this piece of… garbage by a certain Finian Cunningham of… Sputnik News. After all, what else would you expect?
In addition to the irrational malign distribution of wealth that capitalism bestows, Western states — that is, the oligarch-serving politicians — spend and waste inordinate financial resources on militarism and waging criminal wars.
The French extravagance on military is typical of all Western states and NATO members in particular. If they slashed their militarism, then other countries like Russia and China would also be able to reduce their military budgets, which are maintained out of defensive posture owing to the aggressive stance of Western states.
They are questioning the entire neoliberal capitalist system, and why they have been made to endure decades of economic exploitation and oppression. Moreover, there are signs that the yellow vest movement is inspiring the public in other European countries to likewise take to the streets and finally hold the oligarchic system to account.
Really? A Sputnik News commentator speaking from Russia describing Western capitalism as oligarchic?
[…] many other French citizens fear that what is really going on is the beginning of repressive crackdown by the state against democratic rights to free speech and public assembly.
WTF?
Arguably, capitalism is an irrational, anti-democratic system that always has a tendency towards oligarchy, militarism and fascism.
Oh, give me a break! If anyone else but a Sputnik News contributor wrote it…
When the economy is doing relatively well, then the system tolerates forms of “liberal democracy”. […] Decades of economic austerity and mass impoverishment across Western states show that capitalism can no longer disguise itself as liberal democracy. The people are rightly becoming restless and angry for their human rights: to have decent jobs, salaries and public services.
As if in Russia they already do. Hmm, so that’s way there are no mass protests?
The rebellious French are inspiring all people to demand what is their natural rights and to overthrow the injustice of capitalism […] across all Western oligarchic states. There again, the powers-that-be may, out of desperation to retain their privileges and wealth, go full fascism.
The ending is worth of Che Guevara. However, I’ll let Harry Whitehead on Quora summarize it:
Finian Cunningham is less of a journalist and more of a conspiracy theorist and Mumbo-Jumbo peddler. His ‘articles’ […] are a mixture of half-truths, innuendos, blatant fantasy and whatever his […] paymasters instruct him to write.
But it’s not the only thing I have read from Ms Berlinski that touches on Putin and contemporary Russia. She sure can write, as evidenced in her second article that I stumbled across. It is so excellent I shall quote the first half and the conclusion in their entirety (since no-one really reads my blog of sorts I hope she won’t mind):
Chaos is inevitable when a hegemonic power falls into decrepitude. The United States is now that hegemonic power – the sick man of the globe -and chaos is now inevitable.
After the catastrophe of the world wars, the slogan “America First” was synonymous with shame. The United States repudiated the doctrine of isolationism, having realized at incalculable cost it was a fatal fantasy.
American statesmen thereafter pursued consistent foreign policy aims: a Europe “whole, free, and at peace,” made possible by United States’ hard and soft power, in particular, through its construction of NATO and support for the European Union. NATO’s critical Article V placed Europe under a security umbrella underscored by the United States’ superior military power.
In doing so, we ended centuries of competition among European countries to dominate the Continent by force – a series of rivalries that had repeatedly reduced Europe to rubble, each iteration more sanguinary than the last. Funds for the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe were conditioned upon Europe’s progress toward uniting to form a single market, with the ultimate goal a United Europe in many ways similar to the United States.
We sought to expand the free world – the world of open and prosperous liberal democracies, all engaged in free trade – through the construction of specific institutions, such the United Nations and the World Bank.
This foreign policy doctrine derived from the overwhelmingly obvious lesson of World War II. The United States could not flourish without global order, and that order must rest on American power, for no other power capable of providing it met with our trust, and no power that met our trust was capable of providing it. Constructing this order was in our interest, as was sustaining it.
If this was true then, it is true now.
Anyone who claims the American-led order is obsolete must answer the question: What exactly has changed? Geography? The rise of a more benevolent hegemon?
Russia, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, continues to pursue the same geopolitical aims.
Either oblivious to, or supportive of, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to discredit NATO and pull apart the EU, Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated he shares the Kremlin’s goals, even though the social, economic, and political disintegration of Europe would be as disastrous for the world today as it would have been then.
Despite the division of the United States into antagonistic partisan tribes who insist they have nothing in common, the retreat of the United States into solipsism and indifference to the world actually began under Barack Obama, who campaigned on the promise of a disengagement from the world and “nation-building at home.” He was rewarded by the electorate’s enthusiastic affirmation. Trump’s foreign policy does not represent a repudiation of the Obama Doctrine. It is fundamentally the same philosophy.
But Trump has behaved so erratically, and has been so overtly hostile to our allies and so sycophantically enthusiastic about our adversaries, as to cement American isolationism and set the world on an irreversible course toward chaos.
Before Trump’s election, America’s allies allowed themselves to believe that American foreign policy under Obama was a bizarre experiment, not an inexorable trend, and that the next president would seek to compensate for Obama’s failings, not accelerate them.
But Trump has proven that Obama was no accident. A very sizeable constituency of Americans, of both parties, genuinely no longer sees the need for the postwar order America created, and truly believes we maintain our alliances as an act of foolish largesse – or a dangerous provocation. There is enough public support for American retreat that no country, including Israel, can now say, with confidence, that America will be a reliable ally in three years’ time – or seven.
Trump alone is not responsible for this: Illiberal actors – particularly Russia, the far-right, the far-left, and a host of Islamist groupings and states – understand perfectly that a united West is the prerequisite for liberal democracy’s survival. It is, not incidentally, a prerequisite for Israel’s survival, as well. Russia, above all, has embarked upon a systematic campaign to alienate Americans from Europe and European nations from one other.
Their efforts have been dismayingly successful. We are now seeing their fruit. The president of the United States, for reasons no one quite understands, now gives every impression that he is actively trying to disunite the West and the global order that has allowed it to flourish.
Perhaps this is because he’s a senile dotard who has no idea what he’s doing. Perhaps it is because he is under Russian control. Or perhaps he genuinely wishes to see it collapse. These questions will be debated for centuries by historians.
But for our purposes, it does not matter: The catastrophic effect is the same.
I understand this blog entry may seem a bit incoherent; I am not even sure myself why I am posting it. It is as difficult to describe Vladmir Putin accurately (incidentally, called a purely opportunistic technocrat by Robert Skidelsky) as it is to grasp the Russian soul and worldview, from blatant obsequiosness to authorities through to acts of kindness unparalleled in other cultures. The aforementioned historian tries to pitch in with this summary:
the Ukrainian academic Anton Shekhovstov views [the Russia’s estrangement from the West] as the paranoid response of Russia’s “authoritarian kleptocracy” to the West’s far-from-vigorous attempts to defend the independence of new sovereign states like Ukraine and Georgia. President Vladimir Putin’s regime has spun a narrative in which these efforts are depicted as a threat to the integral Russian space and soul.
And finally, this:
The democratic structure of western society is based largely on trust. Politicians, even if the most crooked ones, know they cannot be caught in a blatant lie, as their rivals and the media will pounce and denounce. Journalists, even if they’re not objective, fair or balanced, are committed to reporting the truth, from fear of their colleagues and rivals and the politicians themselves. The crucial accuracy of official statistics, economic data, public health and the safety of buildings and transport infrastructure, all depend on the commitment of politicians and journalists to minimal standards of truthfulness. What happens when large parts of the public lose that trust?
An atmosphere of mistrust towards mainstream politicians and media is what allowed an American president who doesn’t even bother to try and connect his statements with actual facts to take the White House. The openness, transparency and trust of western society become its weakest link when non-democratic regimes use technological tools, developed by the west, to break that trust.
[…] Le Pen is expendable, as is Donald Trump and all the Kremlin’s other useful idiots and fellow travelers. The grand-prize in Vladimir Putin’s hybrid warfare is making up for Russia’s economic and military weakness against those he perceives as his rivals, by weakening the trust which is the most crucial element in the west’s success and prosperity.
In the end, I’ll just limit myself to stating — I am really surprised how non-conspiratorialy Haaretz (and Times of Israel, respectively) appear. In today’s media climate this sort of reality-grounded approach definitely feels refreshing.
I am not a blogger 