Russian Journalist: ‘Violence Is the Price of Freedom.’ Statistics: ‘Uh, No.’
According to the most recent available statistics, Russia has an intentional homicide rate of 14.9 per 100,000 citizens. Only 13 countries on this planet have a higher rate.
The rate in the United States, by contrast, is 5.0 per 100,000 citizens — three times lower.
So it was strange, to say the very least, to hear Andrei Sitov, the Washington bureau chief of ITAR-TASS — the government-operated Russian version of Reuters — ask White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs whether the recent murder spree by Jared Loughner in Arizona was not an indication that while freedom generally was an “American” thing, “the quote, unquote ‘freedom’ of the deranged mind to respect, to react violently to that” was not also very “American.”
He added: “It’s the reverse side of freedom. Unless you want restrictions, unless you want a bigger role for the government.” In a separate statement Sitov clarified he meant that that “this is a cost that your country pays for freedom.”
Then, Sitov went further: “After the exchange Sitov told Politico he had heard of ordinary Russians who reacted to the shooting by saying, ‘And these people lecture us.’ He added, ‘If you want to stop this, you have to be willing to restrict some freedoms.’”
In other words, Sitov was clearly attempting to claim that Russia, where freedom is less, isn’t plagued by the ravages of intentional murder to the same extent America is. He was arguing that the Arizona murders proved the legitimacy of Russia’s anti-freedom, pro-dictatorship society and the illegitimacy of American calls for reform in Russia.
In other words, Sitov was lying.
He was spewing propaganda in the manner of Josef Goebbels, using a great American tragedy to score political points with his Kremlin puppet masters by totally disregarding the unquestionable fact that Russia’s experience with murder is far more devastating than America’s despite Russia’s total lack of freedom.
Russia, in other words, is living in the worst of all possible worlds. All the hardships of dictatorship, and none of the benefits. Good luck pointing that out to Russia’s press secretary in the Kremlin, though.
Russia has plenty of infamous serial killers. The most spectacular was Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered nearly sixty women and children before being apprehended, making Loughner look like Mother Theresa. Stories about brutal murders, including barbaric acts of cannibalism, flow out of Russia like a tsunami of blood.
And Russia has a variety of murders totally unknown in the U.S. — murders of opposition political figures and journalists not by madmen, but by but skilled assassins acting for political purposes, likely at the behest of the state. Here Russia’s recent roll of horror is seemingly endless: Starovoitova, Yushenkov, Shchekochikhin, Klebnikov, Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Markelov.
The world knows these names, even if the boss of the Russian Reuters has forgotten them. Indeed, a whole database had to be created to track the killings of journalists; Russia is of the world’s most dangerous countries for reporters.
A just-published study by international risk consultant Maplecroft of 196 countries found that a truly shocking 186 of them were less risky to do business in than Russia. You read that right: Russia is the 10th most dangerous place to do business on this planet. Maplecroft concluded:
Russia’s increased risk profile reflects both the heightened activity of militant Islamist separatists in the Northern Caucasus and their ambition to strike targets elsewhere in the country. Russia has suffered a number of devastating terrorist attacks during 2010, including the March 2010 Moscow Metro bombing, which killed 40 people. Such attacks have raised Russia’s risk profile in the Terrorism Risk Index and Conflict and Political Violence Index. The country’s poor performance is compounded by its “extreme risk” ratings for its business environment, corporate governance and the endemic nature of corruption, which is prevalent throughout all tiers of government.
Russia is rife with domestic terrorism, its entire Caucasus region on the verge of chaos.
Russia is the world’s most corrupt major economy according to Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index. In TI’s most recent survey, Russia fell to the 154th spot among 178 countries, placing it alongside Tajikistan and Kenya.
But facts like these just don’t matter in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Just as in Soviet times, Russia bigwigs feel themselves free to say anything, create any extent of alternate reality, because there is no opposition force powerful enough even to criticize them, much less to unseat them. Like the infamous emperor with his “new clothes,” Russia’s rulers will go on deluding themselves until, once again, their dishonesty and stupidity brings their nation to collapse.
Sadly, both the president of the United States and his press secretary are ignorant buffoons where Russia is concerned, and neither would be capable of pointing out any of these facts to an ape like Sitov. Gibbs’s stammering, ham-handed attempt to defend his country from Sitov’s attack was just a reflection of the fact that his boss is doing all he can to facilitate the rise of a neo-Soviet state in Russia, in the hopes of scoring cheap political points he can use during his bid for reelection.
And that, these days, is all too sadly a very American problem.
This is a Vicious Pack of Facts.
How dare you?
Frankly, I find the Russians to be more credible and less vicious that the media owned and operated by our American leftists.
It’s like the difference between a childhood bully and adulst con artists. Bullies are obvious and can be nutralized. Con artists can operate for decades without being discovered (i.e., from 1950 to 2004).
And as for Gibb’s reply, the question, as always, is really whether his buffoonery is planned or built-in, and whether his masters picked him for his role as propaganda minister because he is an idiot or a genius. Personally, I lean to the idiot side.
..another vote for idiot !
…me too, I vote idiot.
I reserve judgment until he conclusively proves he is in fact an idiot. By at least once doing something correctly, purely by accident.
clear ether
eon
Put me down as another vote for idiot; do you think the motion will carry unanimously?
There is something very disconcerting about the lack of real information in the make up of liberals. We see it everywhere. Politicians, journalists most tellingly, opinion writers, and the general liberal partisan. A smug belief in a liberal point-of-view instead of knowledge of relevant facts. It is like they read opinion all day and never reach the underlying facts. Even picking up The World Almanac to review a readily available statistic, say Russian Homicide Rate. Or Percentage of Aliens in Federal Penitentiaries, Hate Crime Statistics, Temperature Records, etc. all seem beyond their ability.
Leftists don’t accept the importance, or even the validity, of facts and truth. In their world-view, there are 6 billion sets of truths.
So really, what difference does it make whether Russians commit more murder than Americans? Since Russia has a better system than the US, Americans ought to commit more murders. That’s the truth they see.
This also makes modern journalism a lot easier. For example, little Paulie Krugman was able to report about the Tucson murders within minutes of the time they happened, from 3 thousand miles away, without having seen any video or having read any but the most cursory on-the-scene reports of the facts of the situation. I know, because I was on-line that day and the information available was extremely sketchy for hours. Yet, little Paulie was able to determine the motives and political persuasion of the perpetrator, and diagnose the root causes of the crimes within 2 hours. Indeed, most of the time it took him had to have been spent polishing and editing the prose, or even more probably, tweeking the article he had written months ago.
He stands by his reporting, since nothing has changed the key facts he knew before the crime was even committed.
As one who has a degree in Economics, I assure you Krugman writes about economics in the same manner. No facts at all. Sometimes facts completely made up. Totally fraudulent.
I can believe that, even though Frugman got a Nobel in economics. But so did Obama, Al Gore and the IPCC. Al Gore even got an Academy Award. What a joke. The left awards themselves to impress the unwashed masses. It reminds me of banana dictators that appear in uniform with a chest full of medals.
Even scientists who are liberals exhibit this same disdain for fact-based decisions.
And these are the same scientists who so intimidate their colleagues on the right that in our universities those professors who disagree with the party line are forced into silence for fear of losing their jobs. These “conservative” scientists who hold to a cosmological worldview must keep their mouths zipped or risk being ostracized.
For too long we have been fearful and intimidated; had we had the courage of our convictions from the very beginning, the left would not have been able to gain the traction they did, as they smelled the blood of fear among their opponents and have been crushing us ever since. But now they see our numbers grow and our daily-firming resistance, and they’re lashing out as bullies will do. This is a good sign that their offense is weakening, their utopian dream-world seen for the irrational and ruinous project it is: they stand naked and exposed for what they are — despots.
Along with stating the facts (whether factual or not) that fit their cause I would add that as a general rule leftist in particular have an astonishingly limited knowledge of history about anything, anyone, anywhere, anytime. This would explain Obama and Gibbs ignorance about anything Russian or knowing anything about the other 195 countries in the world.
Leftists also have a seemingly total inability to access the massive amount of statistics available on the WWW on almost any subject that one might wish to discuss intelligently.
And that’s a fact.
Perhaps Gibbs could not adequately defend the US because he looks at the US from a socialist point of view.
Gibbs could have reminded the Russian journalist that Russia has had its experience with less freedom under the communist and millions of their people were starved, shot and worked to death. That many were taken off the street and pressed into government labor camps and many others exiled to a meager existence in Siberia.
He could have mentioned that Russians have never had the benefit of the recognition of God given rights written into a constitution.
He could have mentioned the action of one deranged person is not a trend and certainly not the result of law abiding citizens owning guns. He could have mentioned that if others in the crowd had been armed the killer could have been stopped saving lives and injury.
……………….Sadly, both the president of the United States and his press secretary are ignorant buffoons……………..too bad no one mentions the horrific rate of violence and murder in the new workers paradise venezuela
you give them far too much credit.
stop insulting buffoons.
To my way of seeing the “great American tragedy” when it comes to murder in America is how agendas are served and criminal deaths politicized and their meaning subverted to belie, as in this instance, statistics that tell the real story.
On this occasion it was a Russian journalist circumventing statistics and manipulating perception in order to score ideological points. In America we do the same to ourselves as with the half dozen murders in Tucson in which the names involved are subverted or made stars at will according to how useful it is to politicking. Palin or Loughner trade the spotlight according to political usefulness such as gun control or demonizing a political opponent while the actual dead are little mentioned.
Black Americans trot out Emmet Till and post-Civil War lynchings as stars in some kind of hyper-reality that are in fact attempts, like the Russian journalist, to ignore real statistics that paint an entirely different and disproportionate picture from Jim Cone’s and Tavis Smiley’s assertions that Christians kill people every day and black Americans are dying every day from the poison of white racism when the exact opposite is true.
Senseless killings and outright murder are used to sell laws like celebrities endorse perfumes. Some murders, particularly those of children, strike us deep and have been used less cynically and more like memorials to enact legislation like Amber’s Law or Megan’s Law in an attempt to make a senseless and horrific act have some larger meaning and purpose in going forward.
Knee jerk reactions to murders taken out of a larger context can have a noted chilling effect on personal freedoms. Hate crime legislation has its own politically correct moral overtones that inflates the worth of people according to distorted urban myths and public perceptions rather than anything happening on the ground; the severity of murder can be at once lessened or enhanced according to skin colors or religion involved. The liberal Left insists there is a growing Islamophobia in the U.S. while stats say Jews are much more in harms way in a topsy turvy reality engendered almost entirely by political correctness and expediency.
Murder statistics have come to mean nothing in America as they are gerrymandered like Playdough and then harden into unreal shapes that become reality.
Here we see that Blacks commit a majority of murders in America.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_43.html
Notice that all Hispanics are grouped with Whites for this purpose. Indeed, crime seems to be the only area where Hispanics are grouped with Whites as normally such a grouping is for dispensing affirmative action and privileges. This grouping is hide the fact that 28% of incarcerated violent felons are illegal aliens. In spite of ICE’s efforts to prevent the arrest of the violent aliens to maintain the fiction of friendly Mexicans.
Interesting data. More murders by blacks than whites, which means the White murder rate in the US is probably about Canada’s rate, possibly lower, once Hispanics are removed. I wonder if Hispanics might also commit more murders than Whites. You can’t tell from the data.
They must have excluded Tea Partiers from the data.
Or perhaps the governemnt agency that gathered the statistics is racist.
Frankly, it is appalling. Black males, representing about 6% of the population, commit about 52% of the murders in America.
Mr. May, who are you? Your insight and commentary on the many matters you deleve into are excellent. Your syntax, thought and flow remind me of William F. Buckley.
Did you notice his name? It’s blue. See how most are black?
That blue color tells you the text is a LINK. Click on it and you’ll be taken to his website.
Looking at eastern European homicide rates it almost looks like the places that were overrun by the Mongols, or were on the frontier (like the Baltic nations) have high homicide rates…slavic countries that weren’t under Mongol rule for a long time, don’t.
Slavic/Baltic or other eastern European type countries like Russia, the Ukraine, Lithuania and Georgia have high homicide rates, but Bulgaria, Serbia and the Czech Republic don’t.
The idea doesn’t work that well for Poland or Hungary (like Lithuania, also on the frontier of the Mongol khanates), but otherwise it correllates pretty well.
That’s the only pattern I’m seeing, though I haven’t spent a whole lot of time looking at, or thinking about it.
The pattern is actually a very old one (and you were correct in referencing the Mongol invasions).
Simply put, it is the pattern of one or more groups within a society concluding, based on past experience, that they can get away with almost anything with no adverse consequences.
In dictatorships, it is usually those in charge who have this “perk”. In societies emerging slowly from such dictatorships, the former “top dogs” and their minions may continue trying to do “business as usual” well into the post-autocracy period. There is also the factor of people who were previously victimized by those “top dogs” settling old scores. Plus people who want power, and don’t believe in plebiscites when there are a lot of perfectly usable weapons handy to ensure that only their opinion counts when deciding who gets to run things. (Most of the Balkans falls into this category. So does Somalia, among other places. I expect Tunisia will be the next example, whoever comes out on top in that fracas.)
In some such states, the dictatorship may simply “reorganize” itself, calling itself by another name, and go back to its old SOP. (Russia is an example of this.) Also, active or reforming dictatorships will generally go to considerable lengths to “hide” such anomalies as serial killers, because admitting their existence would allow the dictatorship’s opponents at home and abroad to question just how “perfect” their “perfect state” really is.
(All dictatorships are “perfect”- just ask the dictators. Or their fans in other countries. Yes, I’m looking at you, Tom Friedman, and you, too, Paul Krugman.)
In democracies, what usually happens is that one or another social group claims to be the victims of discrimination, and uses guilt over their grievances (real or imagined) as a “Get Out Of Jail Free Card” to protect themselves. Not just from the consequences of illegal actions, but even from having to face up to the fact that their behaviors are inherently self-destructive.
(As another poster noted, African-Americans commit the majority of murders in the United States according to the best available statistics. However, he forgot to add that the majority of the victims in these homicides are also African-American.)
This is the difference between homicides in a dictatorship, or former dictatorship, and those in a democracy. In a dictatorship, anyone not part of the “privileged class” is fair game, and politics is the most frequent motive.
In a democracy, motives are more likely to be personal, ranging from personal animosities, to crime motivated by financial gain, or simply somebody wanting to kill to “prove something” (as with Loughner) or just because they think it would be a “thrill” (most gang murders have this element). Which means that in most cases, the victims will be relatively “closer to home” for their slayers.
It’s the difference between “official policy”- and just “doing (their) own thing”.
clear ether
eon
Russian’s lying – I’m shocked!
Ah! There it is: “Sadly, both the president of the United States and his press secretary are ignorant buffoons where Russia is concerned…”
It’s sad and scary. If you lift the last four words from that line and substitute relevant words, you will have explanations for the START treaty, for the street murders in Iran all last summer, for incompetence with regard to dealing with Pakistan, for the puzzlement on the faces of the French, newly-declared best friends of the United States…..the grand and deep ignorance of the obaMadministration accounts for most of the damage they are doing.
What the Russian journalist (ha! Oxymoron) means is… that violence is the special privilege of the state. Just like gun ownership. Violence committed by proles is evil, but violence committed against people who speak out against government policies is the duty of the state, less people think they have inalienable rights or some-such nonsense.
The most important thing to know about Russians is that they have no sense of humor. I have listened to their jokes – both Russian and Ukrainian – and have never laughed once. The typical joke is about powerlessness or existential angst or inevitable tragic bitterness. It is as if they think Tolstoy was a stand-up comic. They are always laughing in the face of death. However, I notice that I too have changed. I used to think that the Three Stooges were funny. Now I laugh at Nancy Pelosi.
Violence is the price of slavery, russki.
I as a Russian by origin and whose father was a journalist under Commies, can say that all Russian journalists who work for state-sponsored agencies are political and moral prostitutes. Period.
But the same we see in the USA: NPR, Democracy Now! are just some examples of the same situation. If not to mention all Lefty media, Universities and and entertainment industries: one has first to sell his/her soul to be hired.
So, don’t waste time making an issue out of nothing, as if it’s something new or unusual.
Everybody here is right.
America is full of gutless wonders who call themselves professors or diplomats or ceo’s. The right in this country is soooo gutless that they will not stand up to the liars on the left.The biggest liars of them all in the media will not say a thing even if they know they are right about something. If the right (repubs and teapartiers) stood up and called a spade a spade for everything that the left spews,then good will come of it.Too many times they ask(will I be sacked),or (will my friends desert me?).
Whoever called republicans or Americans in general COWARDS,they were right.
The left are bullies.Bullies usually give in when confronted.Why dont you lot try it????? it just might make you feel good about yourself for a change.
Um, I’m not sure I can relate to what was mentioned. To each his own I suppose.
“Perhaps Gibbs could not adequately defend the US because he looks at the US from a socialist point of view.”
Possible, but I suspect he probably just wasn’t aware that Russia has a lot higher homicide rate than America does.
If he had known that, he could have said: Yeah, we’re a lot freer than you are in Russia, and we also have a lot less murders. Next question.
So what the hell did Gibbs say? Yes, I know his response can be found at the link — but when part of the article’s point is that he fumbled the question, at least part of that fumble should actually be quoted.
As an aside, the Russian “journalist’s” name isn’t actually “Sitov” as widely reported, it’s written in Russian “Андрей Шитов.” The letter “Ш” in Russian is the letter compound “sh” in English.
So his name is properly written Shitov. No kidding.
http://www.rg.ru/2010/03/25/obama-med.html
I think Eric Schmidt from google is right when he says that if you use the itenrnet you have to be clear about the fact that the information is not private. Any information that you send over a network can end up being hacked. I used to be very careful with many social websites, however, I am becoming more and more open with my (non-private) information. If somebody searches for my name, they’ll find publications, my blog, they’ll know my age, some of my opinions on politics, my passport number (from a government publication of scholarships), and several countries where I’ve been living. I think it could be worse.