Lies, Damned Lies, and Vladimir Putin's Public Statements
Filed under: Russia
The Moscow Times reports on an amazing scandal which neatly encapsulates the shocking depths already being plumbed by Vladimir Putin's neo-Soviet regime in Russia.
At a recent televised Q & A with the Russian public, a purported Siberian septuagenarian grease monkey called in to ask Putin what he thought about former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declaring that Russia's Siberia region had too many resources for one country alone to be allowed to control. Putin characterized Albright's remark as "political erotica" and dismissed it.
The only thing is, she never said it. "I did not make that statement, nor did I ever think it," she emphatically declared. Challenged later by the press to source his accusation, the interlocutor responded: "I don't know. I might have made a mistake. But I don't think I did. The question I asked is just the tip of the iceberg."
That didn't end the matter. Last Sunday, Russia celebrated a bizarre holiday known as "People's Unity Day" and, on Red Square, one Robert Shlegel, an activist with the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth cult group, declared that Albright had "lost it" because of her frenzied jealousy over Russia's national resource wealth. The MT reported that "he said Albright had made [her statement] during an interview with Alexei Pushkov on the Postscriptum news analysis program in 2005." Shlegel boldly announced: "The president's words could hardly have been unfounded."
No, she didn't. Yes, they could. The MT spoke to Oksana Yanovskaya, editor in chief of the program, who stated that "Albright was never interviewed on the program and that Pushkov had just cited a statement that he had seen or read somewhere else." She was emphatic: "I am absolutely sure there was no interview," she stated.
Think it couldn't go even further? Think again. The MT continues:There are those who argue that it doesn't matter what Albright said -- they know what she was thinking. Boris Ratnikov, a retired major general who worked for the Federal Guard Service, said in a December 2006 interview with government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that his colleagues, who worked for the service's secret mind-reading division, read Albright's subconscious a few weeks before the beginning of the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999. Albright, who as secretary of state played a major role in the lead up to the attacks, was one of the main targets of Russian criticism of the bombing campaign. Apart from her "pathological hatred of Slavs," Ratnikov said "she was indignant that Russia held the world's largest reserves of natural resources." On Tuesday, Ratnikov, 62, said he hadn't been part of the mind-reading experiment but had worked as an analyst on the data produced by his colleagues in the study. He said the mind-reading process involved using a picture or some other image of the person under study. "By tuning in on her image, our specialists were able to glean these things," he said.
The MT also reports: "Alexei Sidorenko, coordinator for the society and regions program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that although the alleged quote had been making the rounds in Russian on the Internet since 2005, his center had been unable to find any mention of it in the English-language media. He said conjuring the image of an external enemy to mobilize the population and deflect attention from domestic issues was nothing new in politics, and the fact that Albright was no longer in government meant she had no official channels through which to respond." Sidorenko concluded that it's a classic example of neo-Soviet propaganda: "The Kremlin's entire political strategy at present rests on consciously created myths, and they are beginning to dominate the agenda."
The world has grown used to hearing this kind of bizarre gibberish spewing from the mouth of feral lunatics like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. But they aren't members of the G-8, now are they? Russia is. But it shouldn't be, and we should be doing far more than we are to prepare for a new cold war. If Russia is willing to stoop to these depths at a time of relative prosperity, can you imagine how low it will be prepared to go in tougher times?
Soviet Union low, that's how low. Welcome back to the USSR! It's just amazing, really breathtaking, that Russia has already become such a closed society, so far out of touch with the reality of the rest of the world, that these types of Soviet pronouncements can reappear so prominently and go so unchallenged in the mainstream Russian media. Even more amazing how ready the world has been to overlook the fact that Russia is being governed by a proud KGB spy.
Meanwhile, preoccupied with a frenzy of neo-Soviet pathology, the Kremlin has no time to do the people's business. The New York Times reports: "More than 17,000 people died in fires in 2006 in Russia, nearly 13 for every 100,000 people. This is more than 10 times the rates typical of Western Europe and the United States." Most recently, nearly three dozen elderly infirm were killed when fire swept through an old-age home.
As has always been the case in Russia, the country's real enemies are in the Kremlin.
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