While reputable news organisations from the BBC to the New York Times fire news reporters who try, however inadequately, to tell the truth, Russia Today has extended its reach. Putin is about to increase its $300m budget by 40%. Its resources will soon compare with Fox News. But while Fox serves the peculiar tastes of the American right, Russia Today has global ambitions.
.. Russia Today feeds the huge western audience that wants to believe that human rights are a sham and democracy a fix.
.. David Remnick of the New Yorker described Russia Today’s “nastily brilliant” ability to feed “resentment of western superiority and resentment of western moralism”. He forgot to add that nowhere is that resentment stronger than in the west.
.. Russia Today’s second mission is to spread conspiracy theories that help Russian power and provide sensational audience-grabbing stories – in every sense of the word. If you have heard that the Ukrainians who oppose Putin are fascists, that there is a land called “Novorossiya” in south-east Ukraine that historically belonged to Moscow, or that Assad did not gas Syrians, the odds are the story will have started on Russia Today.
.. I said that no one believed Putin offered a future for humanity. But his post-communist, postmodern flexibility means that many are prepared cut a deal when the bent copper makes an offer. Alex Salmond admires him because the break-up of Britain is in Russia’s interests. Nigel Farage, Marine le Pen and all the other leaders of Europe’s far right run to him because he shares their hatred of the EU. Despite his alliance with what we once called neofascism, the old communist left in Germany, George Galloway and Julian Assange support him because opposition to the west trumps anti-fascism in their book.
Russia Today provides a platform for anti-fracking greens because Putin wants us to remain dependent on Russian oil and gas.
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power
Added complications arise when the evil in question is related to a state leader’s responsibility for mass deaths. A general tacit assumption is that wars fall into a special category, in which mass deaths can occur without automatically bringing moral odium on the leaders who gave the orders. But revolutionaries, or leaders who still have revolutionary transformation on their mind, think they fall into that category of exemption, too. They see the deaths they cause in the same “necessary” light as those caused in war. It’s a dilemma for historians, who are likely to have an aversion to letting revolutionaries claim the exemption, especially once the revolution is won and they are in power.
.. In his final chapter, Kotkin tackles the question that is often asked but seldom answered: what if there had been no Stalin? His answer is that “if Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivisation – the only kind – would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high”.
Hyper-sourced: Ukraine and the Art of Limited War
In discussion of this intervention, commentary has focussed on two distinctive though related features of the Russian campaign. The first was thedevelopment of so-called “hybrid warfare”, involving the integration of local agitators along with both irregular and regular “volunteers” from Russia. The second was the reliance on information operations.
A Pump War?
The Russians have noticed. How could they not? They’ve seen this play before. The Russian newspaper Pravda published an article on April 3 with the headline, “Obama Wants Saudi Arabia to Destroy Russian Economy.” It said: “There is a precedent [for] such joint action that caused the collapse of the U.S.S.R. In 1985, the Kingdom dramatically increased oil production from 2 million to 10 million barrels per day, dropping the price from $32 to $10 per barrel. [The] U.S.S.R. began selling some batches at an even lower price, about $6 per barrel. Saudi Arabia [did not lose] anything, because when prices fell by 3.5 times [Saudi] production increased fivefold. The planned economy of the Soviet Union was not able to cope with falling export revenues, and this was one of the reasons for the collapse of the U.S.S.R.”
Indeed, the late Yegor Gaidar, who between 1991 and 1994 was Russia’s acting prime minister, observed in a Nov. 13, 2006, speech that: “The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices. … During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed. … The Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.”
.. But have no doubt, this price falloff serves U.S. and Saudi strategic interests and it harms Russia and Iran. Oil export revenues account for about 60 percent of Iran’s government revenues and more than half of Russia’s.