New York Times and alternate reality

On July 16, music critic Mikal Gilmore shared on Facebook an opinion piece from the New York Times, "No One Cares About Russia in the World Breitbart Made" by Joshua Green, pulling the following quote:

"Look to the right now and you’re apt to find an alternative reality in which the same set of facts is rearranged to compose an entirely different narrative. On Fox News, host Lou Dobbs offered a representative example on Thursday night, when he described the Donald Trump Jr. email story, with wild-eyed fervor, like this: 'This is about a full-on assault by the left, the Democratic Party, to absolutely carry out a coup d’état against President Trump aided by the left-wing media.' Mr. Dobbs isn’t some wacky outlier, but rather an example of how over the last several years the conservative underworld has swallowed up and subsumed more established right-leaning outlets such as Fox News."

https://www.facebook.com/mikal.gilmore/posts/10213875532309171

Olaf Errwigge replied: This is classic projection, since it is the New York Times and other self-described "liberal" media that have been creating and tirelessly reinforcing an alternate (McCarthyite) reality since Trump was elected.

Ken Eisner: Yeah, maybe take another run at that incomprehensible assertion.

Ken Eisner: Well?

Olaf Errwigge:

From "The World Through Breitbart-Vision" [as the piece appeared in print] by Joshua Green:

"Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer promising information that would “incriminate” Hillary Clinton …" — Veselnitskaya is not "Kremlin-connected" and wanted the meeting only to lobby against the Magnitsky Act. The interesting part of the story is why Rob Goldstone, who arranged the meeting, wrote to Trump Junior, "The Crown prosecutor of Russia … offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump …" and "Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday." Again Veselnitskaya is not a "Russian government attorney", had no dope on Clinton, and just wanted to lobby the Trump campaign about the Magnitsky Act.

"a metastasizing Russia scandal" — or a metastasizing attempt to manufacture a Russia scandal

"Another argument holds that Mr. Trump’s efforts to discredit mainstream outlets, echoed by the right-wing media, have stripped his followers of their ability to distinguish what’s real from what isn’t." — this in an effort by one mainstream outlet to discredit other mainstream outlets or the appearance of Trump-friendly voices on NYT-approved outlets

From editorial "Russia Isn't Delivering for Mr. Trump" [shared by Gilmore in the comments]:

"President Vladimir Putin has shown a ruthless commitment to self-preservation that relies heavily on returning Russia to a mythical place of power and glory, not in helping the West build a more stable world." — How dare Putin put Russian interests first! And what evidence supports the last clause (in either of its assumptions)?

"Mr. Trump is making sound policy making even harder, though, with his admiration of Mr. Putin and his willingness to surrender the country’s international leadership …" — Again, on what evidence are these statements based?

"Mr. Trump is noticeably more comfortable with Mr. Putin than he is with most of America’s democratic allies, despite Mr. Putin’s record of crushing domestic opponents, invading Ukraine and bombing civilians in Syria." — Hmm, no mention of the US/EU-supported coup to overthrow a democratically elected government in Ukraine, no mention of US bombing civilians in Syria and several other countries. Not to mention that Russia is democratic, too.

"… But that does not mean it is wise to underestimate, as Mr. Trump seems to do, the threat posed by Mr. Putin’s efforts to weaken NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance, subvert democratic procedures and institutions in Europe and America, wage cyberwarfare, destabilize Ukraine and secure influence in Syria." — Again, evidence? Again, the US/EU fomented the coup in Ukraine, and it is the US who is attempting to "secure influence in Syria"; Russia was always there.

"Last month, … the Senate approved legislation that would impose tough new sanctions on Russia for meddling in the 2016 election and allow Congress to block the president from lifting any sanctions in the future, including those relating to Ukraine. The bill has been stymied by partisan wrangling in the House, and the White House has tried to weaken it." — First, what meddling? That's the primary alternate reality (and projection) promoted by the Times and their ilk. Second, the editorial neglected to mention that the White House simply sent the bill back to the Senate as constitutionally invalid.

"His aides are also pressing Washington to return two diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York that were seized as part of the Obama administration’s response to the election meddling and were reportedly used for spying. But there is no reason to entertain these requests until Mr. Putin has pledged not to interfere in future American elections." — Again with the alleged "meddling", which seems to based on only 2 things: the existence of RT and the insistence that the DNC e-mails were hacked (by Russia!) rather than leaked.

"Russia is still occupying Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and is intensifying the war in the east against Ukrainian government forces, despite promising in the 2015 Minsk agreement to halt the fighting." — Crimea is part of Russia again, since it was clear that the US/EU overthrew the Yanukovych government to ensure that the lease on Sevastopol would not be renewed (that infernal self-preservation again!). And there is no evidence of Russian forces in Donbass but every evidence of NATO egging on Kyev, which has indeed been raining down more terror on Donetsk over the past year (which in the alternate reality/projection of mainstream US news is blamed on Putin).

"Nor has Mr. Trump persuaded Mr. Putin … to stop the dangerous face-offs with American warplanes over the Baltic Sea …" — Reality: The Baltic Sea borders Russia, not America; it is the US that needs "to stop the dangerous face-offs".

In another piece in today's Sunday Review, "A Playboy President and Women's Health", Michelle Goldberg wrote, "after nearly six months in office, Mr. Trump has already surpassed George W. Bush as the American president most hostile to reproductive rights and measures to promote sexual health." — In this alternate reality, Ronald Reagan is forgotten, as are the facts that more abortion clinics closed and more state restrictions were imposed during Barack Obama's tenure than under any other President's, that Obama tried to prevent over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill, and that Obama made such a cursory statement after the murder of Dr George Tiller that it was effectively a kiss-off.

Jerry Murrel:

Olaf Errwigge wrote: "Veselnitskaya is not "Kremlin-connected" and wanted the meeting only to lobby against the Magnitsky Act."

That's a ludicrous statement; in fact it's the precise talking point that the Kremlin is pushing in defense of the charges of election meddling. Although Veselnitskaya was heavily involved in lobbying efforts to try to have the Magnitsky act repealed, it's reported by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen that Russian operatives would only broach the subject of a meeting to discuss damaging information on HiIlary Clinton if there were a discussion about a secondary matter (Magnitsky Act) to provide cover in case the meeting was later scrutinized as inappropriate, or the offer of opposition research was rejected by the Trump campaign:

"But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-jrs-russia-meeting-sure-sounds-like-a-russian-intelligence-operation/2017/07/14/5f7f3dfe-6762-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html

Here's a truthful article by Julia Ioffe which explains more about Ms.Veselnitskaya:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/natalia-veselnitskaya-trump-junior/533670/

Jerry Murrel:

Olaf Errwigge wrote: "more abortion clinics closed and more state restrictions were imposed during Barack Obama's tenure than any other President's."

What a disingenuous statement! A relationship doesn't prove causation; the fact that more abortion clinics were closed during Obama's tenure has nothing to do with Obama; these closures are the result of sweeping red-state legislation by Tea Party Republicans to attack women's rights. The implication that Obama had anything to do with these clinics closing is absurd; but it's typical Breitbart propaganda.

Olaf, you have a destructive and anti-democratic agenda, and I'm calling you out for your misinformation and deceit.

Olaf Errwigge:

Jerry Murrel — Trump Junior's receptivity to dirt on Clinton was already established. The meeting ended quickly when it was clear that Veselnitskaya was there for other reasons. The twisted piece in the Washington Post reads more like conspiracy theory than explanation. And again, it is more likely another example of projection: If there was an "operation" behind the meeting, the more plausible explanation is that it was a trap laid by the Clinton campaign. In his attempt to create an alternate reality, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen does not mention Fusion GPS, who was doing opposition research for Clinton and had also worked for Veselnitskaya. Veselnitskaya would have then gone public with her story to cover up the fact that Trump Junior did not compromise himself (perhaps on the coaching of Manafort and Kushner) as hoped for, to pretend that the meeting was innocent.

As for Obama and abortion restrictions, it is one example of his general domestic neglect, in stark contrast to Bill Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno, who actually fought to protect access to abortion.

Olaf Errwigge: Here's another example of the New York Times's selective (Memory Hole) reality in the July 12 "Fact Check", "Stories of Foreign Election Influence, Separate and Not Equal" by Linda Qiu: The second part dismisses DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa's working with the Ukrainian embassy to expose Trump's then–campaign manager Paul Manafort's work with the pre-coup government. The dismissal is fair enough, but what is not mentioned at all is that the original story in Politico was by the very well respected Ken Vogel, who since June 26 was now working for the New York Times.

Ken Eisner: Mikal, ya got a "live one" here.

Olaf Errwigge: "Uppity" seems to be the word you want.

Fake documents to foment fear of Russia: 1924 edition

From Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker:

The Daily Mail, a conservative London paper, published a forged letter. It was October 25, 1924.

The letter was purportedly signed by Grigori Zinoviev, a Russian communist leader, and addressed to the Communist Party in England. It appeared four days before the general election of 1924 – an important race for Winston Churchill, who had lost two previous campaigns.

The letter, marked “very secret,” talked of a “successful rising in any of the working districts of England.” Its prose had faintly Churchillian cadences in places – there were phrases such as “strain every nerve” and “pronounced its weighty word” – but with an admixture of bolshevistic pastiche. “It would be desirable to have cells (nuclei?) in all the units of troops, particularly among those quartered in large centres of the country, and among factories working on munitions and at military store depots,” the letter said. The headline in the Daily Mail was “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters.”

Churchill’s devoted supporter Esmond Harmsworth wa the son of Lord Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail. Churchill’s close ally in Secret Intelligence, Desmond Morton, first forwarded the letter from an obscure Latvian source to the British Foreign Office, attesting to its authenticity.

Moscow called the letter a “clumsy forgery” and a “crude fabrication” and demanded an apology. ...

Churchill and other conservatives used the Zinoviev letter to unseat Prime Minister MacDonald. Churchill compared MacDonald to Alexander Kerensky, the weak Russian socialist leader who allowed the Bolsheviks to triumph.

“You all know the story of Kerensky,” Churchill said in a campaign speech, “how he stood there, like Mr. MacDonald, pretending that he meant to do the best he could for his country, and all the time apologizing behind the scenes to the wild, dark, deadly forces which had him in their grip.”

Churchill won his election. Still he couldn’t stop talking about the Zinoviev letter. Conspirators and revolutionaries “of every race under the sun” had assembled in Russia to plan world revolution, he asserted in the Weekly Dispatch. “Everywhere they have endeavoured to bring into being the ‘germ cells’ from which the cancer of Communism should grow,” he wrote. ...

Evil masterminds behind citizen opposition to evil masterminds

Here’s a mildly fun game. The New York Times’ crusade against Russia has become such a caricature of cold-war-era propaganda that it now resembles the tirades against the Koch brothers for forcing all of us to burn fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow and duping us into opposing the turning of our last rural and wild places into industrial wind and solar energy facilities.

On Nov. 30, the Times published an article by Andrew Higgins titled “Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests”. As with most such openly propagandistic pieces at the Times, the article is not opened to comments. The article is reminiscent of one at The Guardian on June 19 reporting then Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s claim that Russia is “secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking”. Yes, the choice is between fracking (injecting a slew of toxic chemicals into the ground at high pressure to fracture rocks and release deposits of methane, much of which is released into the air, with some 25 times the greenhouse gas effect of CO₂) and ... what, exactly?

In each of these articles, one can simply substitute Russia with Exxon, Putin with the Koch Brothers, and fracking with wind turbines and, as if they were written from a “Mad Libs” template, one has another typical article that avoids the actual issue involved, rather evoking a vague powerful network of “astroturf” organizations surely backed by a nefarious puppetmaster. The articles flip the power relationship to portray the frackers/wind developers as victims of the monstrous power of local opposition. The local officials who thought it was fine to sell out their communities are left scratching their heads, cursing (and having it dutifully reported) what they can only assume (out of their own worldview) to be “well financed and well organized” opposition instead of acknowledging the power of democracy and information. The lack of evidence for the charges only proves how powerful the evil geniuses behind it really are. The fact that people across the social and political spectrum unite against these developments is also presented as proof that they can only be paid agents – or gullible dupes – instead of recognized, even celebrated, as the populist power of a common cause.

In the Guardian article, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth laugh at Rasmussen’s claim. Maybe those groups should reconsider their own demonization campaigns against people who oppose large-scale wind and solar developments in rural and wild areas.

Anti-Russian Ukrainians resent complexity

First up is the Orwellian warning by Chrystia Freeland, Canadian MP and long-time armchair anti-Russia agitator on behalf of Ukraine, against nuanced or neutral (let alone objective) language in describing the rebellion in Donetsk and Luhansk and particularly Russia’s involvement (Sept. 5, New York Times). Instead, she praises the popular success of the Twitter hashtag ”#RussiaInvadedUkraine” as perfectly conveying the truth of the matter. Needless to say, she does not mention the EU’s and USA’s, as well as her own, role in overthrowing a democratically elected government because it was not favoring “The West” enough — or likely even more simply because it was ready to renew the lease on Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. The swift (and peaceful) action by Putin to secure Crimea in response to the coup must have been what sent Nato’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen round the bend, much as Putin’s protection of Edward Snowden and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s deft thwarting of American bombing of Syria left Obama seething — Putin is a devil because he sees through these hypocritical machinations of “The West”, especially those of the U.S. military empire.

What could be more Orwellian than reducing this complex situation to the nonsensical “#RussiaInvadedUkraine”?

Then today’s local newspaper featured an article about local Ukrainians (no Russians!), including Victoria Somoff, assistant professor of Russian at Dartmouth College, who grew up in Donetsk:

Somoff said she is used to sorting out problems rationally, but the conflict has put that approach to the test.

“It’s becoming this full-scale anger. It almost scares me because I’m not a confrontational person,” she said. “I feel it’s so unjust and unfair for Russia to take over my town and my country.”

Somoff said national tensions have led to sharp disagreements between her and colleagues, many of whom live in Russia, where local support for Russia’s action runs high. ...

That point was underscored to Somoff on Wednesday, when a conversation with a professor in Russia turned sour. “We were supposed to talk about scholarly matters, a completely unrelated topic,” she said. But the international conflict looms so large that it’s almost impossible to ignore, she said, and soon the discussion became heated.

While her colleague wasn’t defending Russia, he said some blame also was due to the Ukrainian government for its poor treatment of Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens.

But Somoff said she can no longer afford to see the picture in shades of gray.

“I am a scholar. I see complexity,” she said. “But there is a point where the boundaries are drawn and arguments for complexity play to Putin. I am kind of losing any ability to be objective here.”

Acknowledgement of complexity plays to Putin, so Somoff must deny that complexity and join Rasmussen and Obama in seething rage against Putin for denying them their “win” (and for making them act like simpletons?). They would rather start World War III than admit their own contributions to fomenting and perpetuating the crisis, simply because it did not go as they planned.

It is, after all, “The West” that has left a trail of death, chaos, and destruction throughout Africa and southwest Asia, and sought to add Ukraine to that list.