I don’t know why Pajamas Media publicizes the anonymous blogging collective known as Kim Zigfeld.
First of all, the writing is shrill and hysterical, and rather than actually debate anyone or counter them point by point, the style is basic schoolyard name calling and abuse.
Second, there are plenty of other Russia watchers who have sharply been critical of Putin in a less chicken little way, like Sean Guillory, who writes much better stuff (in spite of being a Marxist). But the best PJM can do is Kim Zigfeld?
This is a person who writes that if if certain academics urging a more calm or realistic approach to Russia don’t have pages on Wikipedia, then he or she must be a “loser”. And if you can’t find a Russian educational institution by Googling for it in English, it must also not exist (KZ also once questioned the existence of powdered cane sugar in Russia, something even the darkest corners of the USSR could get from Cuba thirty years ago, and also claimed that other bloggers photos were faked, like the moon landings). And no one even asks if any member of this anonymous blogging collective has ever actually been to Russia even as they heap scorn on other people’s credentials.
KZ repeats silly claims, like that Khodorkovsky was given an additional sentence for not raising his hands above his head in jail, that come straight from his lawyer, Robert Amsterdam. Nobody here asks, as even that notorious Russophile Anne Applebaum did writing for the Washington Post, what Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s money has bought in Washington D.C., or Berezovsky’s in London. Did anyone tell Tom Lantos in 2005 that Khodorkovsky’s chief of security, Oleg Pichugin, was facing capital murder charges for killing a Yukos exec in the same house as his family? Or that he’d also threatened a former secretary of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, the 2nd most powerful politician in Russia? Talk about winning friends and influencing people! Would anyone here at PJM care to guess why McCain has been so anti-Russia? Nothing to do with George Soros funding, and Bush being “soft” on Putin has nothing to do with Houston being in his home state. Wake up folks.
Is it really so incredible to think that Berezovsky, who almost took over the Kremlin in the late Nineties, won his aslyum in Britain by spilling secrets? Although how useful they were, who knows…probably garbage. But with BP-TNK and other deals on the line, and Israel and Britain start making noises about considering Russia’s extradition requests, then boom, suddenly Politkovskaya then Litvinenko die.
And then there are other idiotic things accepted as gospel in D.C. Is Kazahkstan really freer than Russia? If you believe the Freedom House rankings it is, even with a real president for life, and if you believe Reporters Without Borders, there’s as much press freedom in Zimbabwae as Russia. Can anyone who has actually been to Moscow or St. Petersburg and logged on to any website they want to read (like 35 million other Russians, or almost 1/4th of the country) believe this crap? No, but thousands of Pajamas Media readers will.
Was Ukraine entitled to natural gas at half the price Western Europe paid? Apparently some “free marketers” claim it was. Is Belarus a slavish servant of the Kremlin one day and a victim of energy imperialism the next? That’s downright Orwellian, but that was essentially what Bret Stephens said, insulting the intelligence of anyone in his audience for the recent debate covered by the Weekly Standard, “Resolved: Russia Is Becoming Our Enemy Again”.
Was Litvinenko killed by “the KGB” or by Boris Berezovsky, the man the late Forbes journalist Paul Klebnikov called the Godather of the Kremlin? Wretchard the Cat of the Belmont Club certainly was willing to consider the possibilities, but try getting KZ to acknowledge that anyone outside of the Kremlin might have wanted Litvinenko dead. Guilty until proven innocent, no?
Are ordinary Georgians helped by $5,000 per attendee conferences put on by American think tanks in Tblisi? No, but that’s what some D.C. think tanks are doing in Georgia. They have no connection with reality and are not doing anything for the Georgian people, but because Saakashvili speaks English and went to Columbia and hires good lobbyists in D.C., they say Georgia is now way ahead of the rest of the CIS in terms of corruption, without the slightest real evidence to support this claim.
Above all, does pouring out hatred and contempt for the Russian people day in and day out on a blog that gets a tiny fraction of the traffic of English Russia (a funny photo site) do a damn thing to advance the cause of freedom and human rights in Russia? Or is it all just glorified intellectual masturbation for the benefit of a bunch of old farts in D.C. who can’t let go of the Cold War and still talk about bringing down the USSR as the high point of their lives?
Geez, even Reagan said that the Cold War was over in 1987 and offered to share SDI with Gorbachev! Maybe he knew someday we might need to ally with the Russians again, the way we did in two World Wars, against Napoleon, and against the Taliban after 9/11? And yet those claiming Reagan’s legacy want to put interceptors right on the Russian border, 2,000 miles away from Iran. What insanity is this? If we want to shoot down Iranian missiles, than put the interceptors closer to the source of the threat, to hit them in their boost phase rather than when they’re coming in at 15,000 miles an hour surrounded by decoys.
How about highlighting the work of American missionaries and businessmen who are actually doing something for the Russian people, rather than all this screeching noise? Because that is all it is. Thomas P.M. Barnett is right. It’s all noise for old men longing for an old familiar world.
