Capitulation: Obama Admin Mum as Russia Squeezes Opposition Press
The Obama administration, spearheaded by “conservative” Michael McFaul, is working feverishly to undermine American values in Russia and to turn back the clock on democratic reform, just so that Obama can claim illusory “victories” in regard to nuclear weapons and Iran. It’s time actual conservatives stood up to McFaul and his band of treacherous brown-noses in the White House.
A few weeks ago, a Russian court ruled that the country’s leading independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, had violated the press code of conduct by covering and reporting the statements of Russia’s exploding skinhead nationalist groups. Under the code, it’s two strikes and you’re out: one more such “conviction” and the Kremlin can simply switch off the mighty little paper’s gallant presses for good.
It’s perfectly clear now that the Kremlin does not intend to allow Novaya Gazeta — the publisher of murdered hero journalist Anna Politkovskaya — to survive much longer. After the next presidential elections, if not before, the paper will breathe its last, and print journalism will go the way of the dodo. Only days ago, the Russian version of Newsweek shut its doors, removing one of the last somewhat independent magazines from the newsstands as well.
When responding to such ominous events, one of the favorite propaganda memes used by the Putin dictatorship is that it does not matter if the Kremlin liquidates newspapers and TV stations and replaces them with government-sponsored pablum, because “there is always the internet,” and the Kremlin can’t control that. A new Harvard study proves what a ridiculous lie that is.
Even if the internet did offer a solid edifice of freedom for Kremlin criticism, most Russians would never see it. Russia is a country with an average wage of $3 per hour and an average lifespan that doesn’t rank among the top 130 countries in the world. Most Russians simply can’t afford regular internet access, and two-thirds of them almost never use it.
Given that miniscule audience, Harvard’s finding that there are only 11,000 blogs in all of Russia dedicated to “active core discussion” of basic issues is hardly surprising. Harvard found that the vast majority of this miniscule population (remember, Russia has over 140 million citizens) is located on just one blogging platform, LiveJournal, and it found that only a small fraction of them are devoted to serious, independent political debate (many others are either paid mouthpieces or focused on cultural topics).
The tiny number of blogs clustered on a single platform means that the Kremlin can — quite easily — shut down Russia’s blogging industry whenever it chooses to do so. And the facts clearly indicate it will happen sooner rather than later.
The Kremlin is already hard at work developing its own search engine to compete with and eventually replace Google, and it is struggling just as feverishly to create a Cyrillic domain into which will be swept all Russian content. It is developing and testing technology to block websites it does not like from access to the internet, and it has legions of its own cadres cruising the blogosphere to viciously attack and intimidate any blogger who gets out of line.
The Kremlin isn’t above using criminal charges to stop bloggers, either. On November 26, 2009, a court in Kazan convicted blogger Irek Murtazin of “defamation” and sentenced him to nearly two years in prison because he mistakenly reported that Mintimir Shaimiev, the so-called “president” of Tatarstan, had perished. The day before in Iribt, Alexander Batalov, a former administrator of the official Web site for the city, was put on trial on libel charges for failing to remove anonymous comments left by someone else on the site. He faced a crippling fine of $8,000.
Opposition political leader Oleg Kozlovsky reports that Russian “law enforcement” officers are openly bragging about intercepting and reading opposition party email communications, and using what they learn to carry out preemptive arrests to block demonstrations from ever happening.
Rustem Adagamov says: “The Internet is the last free territory [in Russia] — but it won’t stay that way for long.” He’d know. He’s the most widely read blogger in Russia, holding forth as “Drugoi” (“The Other”) on Live Journal.
Reflecting on all this, former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, visiting the editors of the Washington Post, declared that he and other opposition leaders in Russia felt that America’s “reset” with Russia needed to be “more principled.” That’s a diplomatic way of saying that — in the manner of Neville Chamberlain — the Obama administration has sold out American values in exchange for political expediency, cutting tens of millions of Russians loose to float into the whirlpool of neo-Soviet horror.
It’s worth nothing that perhaps the chief perpetrator in the Obama regime is ironically a supposed conservative from the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Back in 2005, writing for the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, Hoover ’s Michael McFaul issued a scathing condemnation of the Bush administration’s hypocritical failure to live up to its promise to stand as Ronald Reagan did for liberty and democracy around the world.
McFaul wrote:
After Bush’s speech, the “realist” argument for ignoring Putin’s rollback of democratic practices in the name of national security interests can only undermine Bush’s credibility. Bush made clear that he planned to promote liberty in every pocket of the world — surely including the largest country of all. If Bush goes to Bratislava and fails to reiterate the sentiments of his inaugural address in public appearances with Putin, then the critics were right and authoritarian leaders everywhere can sleep easy. If the president neglects to affirm his commitment to freedom with Putin at his side, Bush will be signaling that his words don’t count.
In one of the most amazing political turnabouts of the last decade, just three years later McFaul then joined the Obama administration and became the world’s leading poster boy “for ignoring Putin’s rollback of democratic practices in the name of national security interests.” He and his boss have stood mute while Putin has obliterated basic democratic principles like local government (Putin recently had the mayor of Moscow, one of the world’s largest cities, fired and replaced with an unelected Kremlin flunky) and freedom of expression, and Obama has effectively used McFaul’s presence in the administration as cover for his craven capitulation to the KGB regime of Putin.
Obama is desperate for anything that can be touted as a foreign policy “success” and that can distract attention from the increasingly bleak prospects of the Obama economy. Worse, he simply does not believe in the basic values of democracy, which have always been an annoying stumbling block to those who, like him, wish to build a socialist “utopia.” It’s time to hold McFaul accountable for helping perpetuate this outrage, just as voters will hold Obama accountable at the polls next week.
Obama would love to rule like Putin, and his whore-like flunky is just one of his enforcers.
Be that as it may, Russia IS a police state.
Period.
It’s worse than that. Obama’s state department flunkies actually believe, or have persuaded themselves, that Russia really wants to help to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, and that Russia is more likely to do so if the US is nice to it. Tosh. Absolute bunkum. Russia has absolutely no intention of placing significant obstacles in the way of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons – because it is something that threatens, agitates and unsettles the US, and Russia, with catastrophic follishness, thinks that Iran’s program is no threat to it, possibly because it thinks the grateful mullahs will never slip a nuke into the hands of Russia’s (sunni) insurgencies.
Of course, boy Medveyev will mouth platitudes and support mild sanctions, but he will do everything he can get away with to help Iran circumvent their impact.
You doubt this? Look what happened with the placement of missles in central Europe. Russian foreign policy people, in a silly sting straight out of the old KGB handbook, took their state dept counterparts aside and told them earnestly that Putin wanted to help on Iran, but needed a face saver. They got their face saver, the scrapping of the missle placementss, but nothing changed. That the state department fell for it is staggering.
So not only is Obama’s state department looking the other way while Putin’s grubs restore the security services to something like their former privileged lawless position; State is doing so in pursuit of a chimera. Wake up.
Was this about Obama and Fox News or was it in a different dictatorial country?
Putin and Medvedev enjoy the consent of the governed in their country far more than do Obozo and Pelosi in ours.
Oh, and by the way, why does Pajamas Media consider it worthwhile to lend its audience to a blogger whose blog is called “La Russophobe”? This individual is motivated by an irrational hatred for the Russian people. This is called bigotry. Why is it okay to hate on the Slavs, but not on any other ethnic group? Just askin’.
“Leading independent paper Novaya Gazeta is on the ropes and Russian internet media is next, but Obama would prefer to keep up appearances.”
there is one word in that sentence that is wrongly placed there. “but”.
Obama would *love* to do what putin has done to Novaya Gazeta and about to do to Russian Internet Media. Actually Obama is quite farther along his path to do a very similar thing to rightist Internet media.
So the the sentence above should read, “Leading independent paper Novaya Gazeta is on the ropes and Russian internet media is next, and *naturally* Obama would prefer to keep up appearances.”
Color me unsympathetic. Newsweek is nothing but a leftist propaganda rag and there is not a word of truth in it. They’ve plugged for the leftist/jihadist agenda for as long as I can remember, and that’s a very long time. Russians have had enough bitter experience with leftists and jihadists already; they don’t need or want any foreign propaganda promoting the interests of their enemies. If the Russian government wants to shut down the Russian version of Newsweek, all I can say is that Newsweek has it coming.
Oh, and by the way, George Soros has an ugly record of funding “NGOs” and supposedly “independent” media outlets for the purpose of creating astroturf revolutions in former Eastern-bloc countries, so as to make it easier for Soros to make a profit in those parts of the world. That man truly belongs in the lowest circle of Hell.
“The Kremlin is already hard at work developing its own search engine to compete with and eventually replace Google, and it is struggling just as feverishly to create a Cyrillic domain into which will be swept all Russian content.” That’s because Google was started with seed money from (cough, cough) you know who in Northern VA and Maryland and it continues to be their master. Steve Schmidt’s creepy comments about people having to change their names if they don’t like what creeps like Kim Zigfeld do to ‘Google-bomb’ their reputations online is just one example. But ‘La Russophobe’ isn’t going to call that neo-Soviet cyber–thuggery. Or did you think Sergey Brin didn’t meet with Medvedev when practically everyone else in Silicon Valley did out of spite? No, he didn’t want to have to file a detailed contact report to his REAL venture funders – Uncle Sam’s No Such Agency. Google is one giant data mining operation and Zigfeld is the low level cyberthug who goes out and Google bombs people’s names for daring to have a different opinion on Russia. BTW, I suspect Ziggy is really a certain lonely 50something lady in New York who has displayed similarly obnoxious Google bombing and spamming behavior on Second Life.
Basement Cat is right on about Soros being a cutout and the Weekly Standard, National Review et al never mumbling a word about his NGOs in Eastern Europe while moaning about his support for MoveOn.org and a few leftist journalists in America. BFD, compared to overthrowing whole governments in Ukraine and Georgia.
I love how providing technical support for one nuclear reactor at Bushehr that even the Israelis said they would ok so long as Russia or Turkey maintained the stocks of nuclear fuel and kept tabs on it at all times is twisted into support for an Iranian nuclear bomb. There’s a big difference between 10% and 80% enrichment boys and girls.
So if that commenter really was from Israel — you should look forward to the news that your county’s leaders are gonna sell a crapload of advanced arms and nanotech to Russia. I look forward to seeing Frank Gaffney, Krauthammer, and George Will and all the other Russophobes in D.C. blow a gasket when Israel jumps into bed with the Kremlin. For now they prefer to pretend this relationship does not exist, as it’s too un-PC to fit into their worldview of the Evil Empire always being an enemy of the Jewish State.
Prokofy, summarizing LR’s m.o. (which is likely her own) “not only do they post the most vituperative commentary about you, they viciously stalk you around the Internet, posting everywhere you post to try to smear your reputation, finding you where you live — even in real life! They ferret out RL data and use it to vilify you; they post outright falsehoods. These types of enemies loathe your very being and want you gone from the Internet.” [7]
—Prokofy Neva, summarizing things nicely,