IS RUSSIA AN EVIL EMPIRE YES OR NO

OTM

Honestly the amount of left Putin sympathizing/blind reposting of Russian state media articles I see is frustrating and mind-boggling. It's this weird combination of anyone seeming to oppose US Imperialism being viewed as a good guy, plus this weird leftover sympathy for Russia even though the Russia that once inspired American communists is so long gone.

Half the pieces trashing the renewed paranoia have been from strong, consistent Putin critics (Ioffe, Bershidsky, both Gessens, Antonova, etc). These are not criticisms of Putin, they're fantasies invented for domestic political gain. It's not just actively unhelpful in a US domestic context, it gives Putin an easy example of Western governments blaming Russia for their own problems and demolishes the credibility the US needs to be seen to be building up in reflexively sceptical nations. The Russian public needs to see the Clinton campaign / US press being better than this.

The McCarthyism comparisons are not a clean fit but there's a fairly strong line of continuity between the Russia hawks of the sixties and seventies and the Russia hawks today.

the Russia that once inspired American communists is so long gone

tbf it never really existed anyway

doesnt matter, it's RUSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAA.

autocrats is autocrats, no matter what flimsy little papers they claim as their foundation

uh Poindexter you might wanna look up Putin's early career

xxp
A fair amount of US citizens - American communists/economic migrants fleeing the depression did move to Russia in the early 30's. There is a good book about it called The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis. Maybe not a mass migration, but still a significant amount of people who believed communism would give them a more dignified and prosperous life. Obv it ends badly.

Jill Stein went to speak at a conference organized by a Russian propaganda outlet...

^^^^^^^^^whoomp there it is

just like W on Young Bill Clinton

Uhm, no.

Going on a college trip to the Soviet Union is nothing - my dad did the same, actually - but speaking at an event organized by a propaganda outlet?

greenwald logic: questioning a person's connections to putin and russian = out of bounds apparently. questioning a person's connections to israel and zionism = tuesday.

Russia Today, despite being unashamedly biased and self-serving, does give an outlet for alternative viewpoints that relatively few other major stations would. A huge number of those people are cranks or problematic in other ways (and Stein could arguably fit into either category) but they've given a lot more airtime to critical analysis of US anti-racism movements, for example, than a lot of places. They've done several very positive documentaries on BLM and associated groups. It's hugely hypocritical and designed to make the US look bad but for groups with limited options for media engagement, it's not hard to see why they use it as a platform.

XPost Putin's early career isn't relevant. That's not at all factoring into the questions being raised.

It isn't nationalistic fear mongering to question the political motivations of Wikileaks coupled with their absence of Putin and Trump "revelations"/criticisms. People in the US asking those questions aren't concerned that Putin is going to effect their lives beyond the extent of helping Trump get elected.

Also RT has already had a pretty toxic influence. They've been accused of promoting truther narratives in international reporting but a recent example is that they were a huge promoter of "voter fraud" conspiracies during the Dem primary. Trump's pre-emptive undermining of the results of the general election is largely inspired by those comspiracies.

xpost: I don't think that makes it better.

trying to undermine other nation's governments is a v bad thing, true

It isn't nationalistic fear mongering to question the political motivations of Wikileaks coupled with their absence of Putin and Trump "revelations"/criticisms. People in the US asking those questions aren't concerned that Putin is going to effect their lives beyond the extent of helping Trump get elected.

Absolutely, and if it stopped there instead of devolving into 'Jill Stein is a Kremlin stooge!', 'Trump once did business with a man who had a Russian-sounding name! Is he a Putin plant?', nobody would be having this argument.

xpost: I don't think that makes it better.

Perhaps, but you aren't pushing a minority position you believe is incredibly important in the face of almost absolute media disinterest. The likes of Stein could take a principled decision not to appear on Russia Today, and that might be for the best, but she would arguably be limiting the reach of her message. You could argue that Corbyn engaging with platforms like RT helped him maintain a profile when nobody else would interview him.

This absolutism also doesn't help when the US runs its own anti-Russian propaganda network and actively wants Russian liberals to engage with it.

You get that the difference is that Russia is an authoritarian regime, right?

When you're only ally is the propaganda outlet for an authoritarian regime, that might be an indicator that your viewpoints are wrong. So I don't have that much sympathy for Jill Stein (and find Corbyn's comments pretty disappointing as well)

The point is that smearing anyone who appears on RT as a traitor makes it easier to smear anyone appearing on RFERL in the same way. Encouraging a with-us-or-against-us mentality isn't particulalrly useful even if it feels morally superior,

If you genuinely think that failing to find a foothold in the mainstream media means you have no potential for support, Corbyn's shift from the fringe to leading Labour would seem to disprove it, but idk.

Searching this thread for the words 'treason' and 'traitor', you are the only one who uses them. This is not about nationalism, this is about being anti-authoritarian. And I don't think Putin needs any help in smearing people, and we should not hold off on criticism of his propaganda, and people helping him with it, because he might do the same.

The Greenwald article does a fairly comprehensive job of rounding up pieces either hinting at or flat-out declaring Stein and Trump as Kremlin stooges. Nationalism or opportunism, inventing or overplaying your opponents' links to the Russian government has nothing to do with countering authoritarianism.

The point again is that it helps Putin's punches land. The objective should be to convince 'ordinary Russians' that the US isn't the enemy, it's a political model to aspire to. This kind of cheap mudslinging with Russia in the middle is actively harming that effort.

And if you think you have less time for Putin than Masha Gessen...

it's a political model to aspire to

really?

I almost posted (in b4 Morbs posts "lol") after that tbh but, kind of.

it's def one to aspire to and i think the u.s. should continue aspiring to it

Again, nobody in this thread is declaring Trump or Stein a Kremlin stooge.

They're still idiots. And their behaviour should be questioned.

The thread is a discussion of the Greenwald article and the wider discourse around Russian in this election campaign. If we are all on the same page that the narrative is bogus and unhelpful then great.

I agree that calling Stein and Trump traitors and Kremlin Stooges is wrong. I don't think that's what's 'the narrative' of what has happened, despite the Greenwald article. Most people I've seen are legitimately questioning their behaviour.

All the people in Denmark involved in the US election?

stein is quite clearly not a "kremlin stooge" but trump might be. why not? it's not like he cares about this country and the things he does care about -- his businesses -- are heavily leveraged by russian business interests. in any case it doesn't matter: there are a million other reasons not to vote for him. But putin's obvious preference for trump over hillary isn't based on nothing

Trump appovingly cited Putin calling our president the "n" word. You don't need to be a nationalist to take issue with that.

Useful idiots

Trump approvingly cited Putin calling our president the "n" word. You don't need to be a nationalist to take issue with that.

― Treeship, Tuesday, August 9, 2016 12:12 AM (5 hours ago)

trump made this up, though, right? haven't heard about this anywhere else and assume it would be pretty major news if it had actually happened

Yep, it's from his 'Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11' file. It's also a stretch to say he cited it 'approvingly' - iirc the gist was that it shows how weak and ill-respected Obama is. It's arguably drawing more on the 'shoot Russian planes out of the sky if they buzz US ships' side of his portfolio than the 'let's hold hands and bomb ISIS together' one.

stein is quite clearly not a "kremlin stooge" but trump might be. why not? it's not like he cares about this country and the things he does care about -- his businesses -- are heavily leveraged by russian business interests. in any case it doesn't matter: there are a million other reasons not to vote for him. But putin's obvious preference for trump over hillary isn't based on nothing

This has been covered in the other thread but as Julia Ioffe points out, Trump's business dealings with Russia can be boiled down to trying and failing to build hotels and skyscrapers there - indicating that if he does have backing from any Russian capital, they don't have the juice or the money to sway the notoriously crooked former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, let alone the Kremlin. This was taking place at the same time as rival international chains like Sheraton and Carlson were being given the freedom to build wherever they wanted.

More broadly, there's absolutely nothing wrong in looking for evidence of links between Trump and Putin's inner circle - it's the kind of thing that journalists should be doing. Stringing together a chain of half-baked innuendo for columns, or even worse political attack ads, designed to imply that your opponent is a traitor should be left to 'authoritarian regimes', though. It's bad in a domestic political context, bad in an international context and makes the Clinton camp look far more desperate than they have any need to be.

This stuff doesn't just affect government-level politics - as with Iran, any business or personal relationships with Russia become 'suspect' and it bleeds into how people from across the region are viewed at home and abroad. There have been a few pieces picking out Russian-American eccentrics supporting Trump (or in some cases Stalin and Trump) with a not-particularly subtle suggestion that they're a fifth column. Even on the relatively trivial side, Melania Trump's speech prompted the Washington Post to run a poorly-argued quasi-academic piece about how plagiarism is second nature to Eastern Europeans. Ramping up the rhetoric feeds into a defensive victim mentality (justified or not) that makes it harder to engage constructively with people the US needs to win over abroad as well.

Go back to your defense of RT, that was hilarious

Useful idiots

all the kids are sayin' it!

https://twitter.com/LudWitt/status/762719244341669888

Go back to your defense of RT, that was hilarious

Yes, the "defense" when i described them as "unashamedly biased and self-serving", featuring a wide variety of "cranks", "hugely hypocritical" and implied they were a "propaganda outfit".

The Greenwald article does a fairly comprehensive job of rounding up pieces either hinting at or flat-out declaring Stein and Trump as Kremlin stooges

Greenwald has been a cherry picker par excellence for a long time, yes

I'm not sure he'd argue that he is cherry picking. He's covering a widespread theme not suggesting it's universal.

yeah he never sez ironclad truth like Stein voters prefer Trump over Democrats

(just like the entire DemocracyNow demographic)

I don't know why I'm wasting my time on this but let me try to structure an argument instead of just taking potshots:

- If the bar here is "it's understandable, not unreasonable" for minority viewpoints to seek out appearances on RT, then it is also understandable and not unreasonable for a political campaign to emphasize its opponents relationships with a threatening, authoritarian regime, which by the way also supports policies that the campaign's platform planks are specifically opposed to: violent homophobia, violence against the press, and encroachment into allied nations' territory.

- If none of the above is valid, fine, and if this is just rhetorical and has no substance behind it (which, whatever, the only GOP platform plank Trump's campaign cared about at all was a pro-Russian stance regarding Ukraine and the Crimea) who exactly are we trying to "engage constructively" with abroad, again, and what do they need to see from us? It seems much more likely that Russian-adjacent states and others in the sphere of Russian influence might be just as impressed with strong resistance to Russian attempts to influence our politics, especially since the alleged instrument of that influence is already making a name for himself by publicly complaining about NATO allies not paying up.

- "Useful idiots" is a perfectly cromulent term when people are displaying a bewildering degree of ignorance about Putin's politics and modus operandi in pursuit of tu quoque arguments against the liberal party of the US. I often wonder whether progressive/"green" attitudes about international realpolitik and statecraft are willfully ignorant or not, but I am always willing to give folks the benefit of the doubt because on domestic policies we agree 99% of the time.

You're thinking simply in terms of states and leadership - the objective if the US wants reform in Russia and normalised relationships has to be win over the public and softly encourage a push for domestic change. Positioning Putin as a strategic mastermind pulling the strings of movements all over the world, rather than highlighting the fragility of the government, doesn't help that.

Making a point of blaming Russia for Trump also doesn't help win the trust of people with no great love for Putin but an ongoing distrust of US policymakers, particularly those called Clinton. Russia has been effective in turning pretty much every US action in the region into a conspiracy against it. Giving more ammunition with paper-thin, easily debunked allegations provides more evidence that the Democrats are out to get them.

I am not particularly defending Stein or her decision to go on RT but she has limited options. Clinton is in full control of how she chooses to attack Trump, there are a million and one options, and choosing to focus on a fairly spurious network of unproven allegations doesn't seem smart, especially if it is unnecessarily ramping up hostility between Russia and the US again.

This, from earlier today, is broadly correct '

https://t.co/UozcxQiaYx

I think "blaming Russia for Trump" is a gross exaggeration - I haven't seen anyone actually saying that, just that Trump is himself a useful idiot of the Putin regime.

I believe that highlighting the fragility and poor governance of Russia comes after the election. Right now it seems perfectly sensible to portray Putin as a clod-footed wannabe supervillain, since in this context, the narrative shoe fits quite nicely.

I don't think the principal allegations are paper-thin. The behavior of his campaign regarding the party platform is OTT. The DNC hack is pretty straightforward.
I also don't think Clinton is "choosing to focus" on these allegations - they are part of a wide range of attacks on Trump that the campaign is availing themselves of. Greenwald chose this topic for an essay because it was easy for him to write. Love the part where he pivots and says "you know who REALLY loves Russia - Hillary does!" because he doesn't even care about the issue, he just wants to take a swing at liberals.

By the way, isn't it funny how Greenwald always knows the intelligence community is full of lying liars who lie like dogs up until one of them says something that superficially supports his argument ("we have not found a link between the emails on wikileaks and the Russians")?

Just wants to point out, the intelligence guy didn't say they have no link between the emails and Russia, they're saying there's no evidence of the Russians giving the mails to wikileaks. There's evidence that the Russians got the mails, but who knows, perhaps a completely different and undetected hacking attack were the ones wikileaks used.

I think the way Greenwald puts it is quite misleading.

Here, cop a load o' some Novichok, gerrit down yer neck.

Although they're still alive, I assume this guy and his daughter are goners, they're never going to wake up are they?

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/russian-spy-claims-poisoned-just-12165770

xp. From wikipedia :

Their effect on humans was demonstrated by the accidental exposure of Andrei Zheleznyakov, one of the scientists involved in their development, to the residue of an unspecified Novichok agent while working in a Moscow laboratory in May 1987. He was critically injured and took ten days to recover consciousness after the incident. He lost the ability to walk and was treated at a secret clinic in Leningrad for three months afterwards. The agent caused permanent harm, with effects that included "chronic weakness in his arms, a toxic hepatitis that gave rise to cirrhosis of the liver, epilepsy, spells of severe depression, and an inability to read or concentrate that left him totally disabled and unable to work." He never recovered and died in July 1992 after five years of increasing ill-health.[24]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/06/sergei-skripal-does-revenge-for-treason-lie-behind-harm-to-ex-spy

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/counterterrorism-police-are-investigating-the-unexplained?utm_term=.vp5NWR4y56#.wgam96q2Nl

Here we go...

Although they're still alive, I assume this guy and his daughter are goners, they're never going to wake up are they?

― Buff Jeckley (Tom D.), Monday, 12 March 2018 18:57 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O me of little faith...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/29/yulia-skripal-conscious-talking-nearly-month-chemical-attack/

Amazing: Putin bombs Syrians to aid Assad, precipitating a refugee crisis in which decent people fled for their lives.
Now Putin's RT makes a racist documentary about why refugees should not be welcome in Sweden.
Truly, the pits https://t.co/Qb4hoO9qxq

— teresa smith (@treesey) July 6, 2018

Hardly surprising.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/21/europe/montenegro-attempted-coup-accusation/index.html

Vlad has his Bond villain pic

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-just-showed-off-a-potentially-world-ending-nuclear-doomsday-torpedo-that-the-us-cant-stop/ar-BBL0a2h

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/europe/russia-uk-novichok-skripal.html

Fuck, I had missed the whole part about the people finding the perfume bottle and falling ill/dying.

those two novichok victims are exactly the type of people who the Tory government have been trying to kill off themselves for the last 8 years. But they get upset when other ppl do it!

interesting

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-announces-extradition-alleged-russian-hacker-responsible-massive?

those two novichok victims are exactly the type of people who the Tory government have been trying to kill off themselves for the last 8 years. But they get upset when other ppl do it!

OTM, Russians >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> evil fucking Tory bastards.

I find those alleged Russian agents' choice in street fashion 1000% unsurprising in every way

i like how one is in all black and one is in all blue

Putin jokes Russia will "definitely" intervene in the 2020 US elections pic.twitter.com/wY51XTpboQ

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) October 2, 2019

meh what's the big deal?

just a little surrealism for your wednesday

maybe i'm alone in thinking things like this are intensely surreal

Putin would be good at Cheat

lol

The Russian Federation is possibly evil, but is it an "empire"?

I don't speak Russian and this doesn't have subtitles and I don't know how to get subtitles for it but the translated original tweet pretty much says it all:

Неделю назад, перед публикацией видео об отравителях из ФСБ, я сел за телефон и начал звонить своим убийцам. С одним из них я говорил 45 минут. Теперь мы знаем очень многое:https://t.co/cEi8rbgxO4

— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) December 21, 2020

"A week ago, before publishing a video about the FSB poisoners, I sat down at the phone and started calling my killers. I spoke with one of them for 45 minutes. Now we know a lot"

OK, translation and story apparently here:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/21/if-it-hadnt-been-for-the-prompt-work-of-the-medics-fsb-officer-inadvertently-confesses-murder-plot-to-navalny/

this is just astounding

I can't begin to imagine goig through this and then returning to the country, as he plans

what kind of numbskull is this guy to answer these questions on an unsecured line? It can only be that the virus/fever impaired his judgment that he actually went along with this...just incredible

Amused by the protracted Tomsk/Omsk confusion at the beginning

WATCH: 8 Russian diplomats and their families used a hand-car to cross the border from North Korea to return home as rail service between the 2 countries was suspended due to the pandemic pic.twitter.com/NJlxFHQpJ6

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) February 26, 2021

damn i was hoping it was going to be one of those ones with the pumping arm

lol yeah that would have been perfect

it's actually even worse that they don't even get the pumping arm!

this is a classic 'what's on your ipod?' situation

Some story this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/belarus-put-on-notice-of-sanctions-over-hijack-of-ryanair-flight

See also https://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=7990150&boardid=40&threadid=100650

I represented Belarus in the Model United Nations summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, 2005. AMA.

(xp) Oh right, somehow failed to notice that thread.