LA Times: A classic example of Disinformation

The opinion piece in the online version of the Los Angeles Times (2008.08.12) is a clear and classic example of the type of material western readers are being bombarded with in what appears to be an orchestrated campaign of disinformation to shape public opinion against Russia. As was the case in Iraq, the Western public is being duped by what amounts to a perverse act of manipulation... and is guzzling the bait hook, line and sinker.

Photo: LA Times: A classic example of Disinformation

The piece “Stand up to Russia” was shown to me by a Russian friend, who asked me to reply in PRAVDA.Ru, which was quoted in this two-page schmuckfest of unadulterated bilge. It could almost have been printed by the British Bullshit Corporation or written by that other insolent female who got a Pulitzer. Max Boot, “Senior fellow in National Security Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations” is the name of the author in this case.

We now see clearly why the National Security Agency was so adept in defending the people of America on 9/11, as adept in fact as Washington’s (chuckle) military advisors were in Georgia.

When I read through this article last night, I thought, “Where does one begin?” I mean, it is one nonsensical piece of drivel from beginning to end, a tissue of lies and insults directed at Russia without one iota of truth from the first letter to the final period.

For a start, the piece opens with a childish chortle, comparing the Russian Army to the “Red Army”, a clear attempt to paint the modern Russian Federation with the Soviet brush, then, wait for it, yeah here it is, line 2 of paragraph 2, the “collapse” of the Soviet Union. It’s like those animal documentaries where you have three failed hunting scenes then finally the kill, where the lionesses get the gazelle and cart it off to daddy. And it is so predictable as to be boring.

True, like the Red Army, the Russian Army has the capacity to carpet nuke all countries, be they NATO or anything else, which commit acts of aggression against Russia but unlike the USA, Russia does not deploy atomic weapons or Depleted Uranium against civilians. And for Max Boot’s information, and that of his readers, once and for all, the Soviet Union did not “collapse” (there was no confrontation after all, not even a stand-off; relations with the West were at their highest point at the time, with perestroika and glaznost in full swing). The voluntary dissolution of the Soviet Union was forecast and accounted for in its Constitution. When the members wished to leave, they did and most of them formed alternative and looser trading organizations such as the CIS, among others.

The one lacking in legitimacy here is Georgia, which was bound under its act of secession from the Union to hold referendums in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, for the peoples of these regions to vote as to the degree of autonomy they wished to have. Georgia refused.

We then have an infantile reference to Chechnya. In the last free and fair referendum, 95 per cent of the people of Chechnya voted to remain within the Russian Federation. Stick that up your readers, Max Boot, and tell them to sit on it.

We then get down to the most absurd claims one could expect to find. Is it the LA hard Times, or what? Paragraph after paragraph of lies, fabrications and insults more befitting of a latrine wall, written by some demented retard with his own excrement, than in the pages of what I thought (until last night) was a reputable publication. I mean, what an eye opener.

Max Boot calls Russia’s crossing into Georgia a violation of international law. So what does he have to say about the USA’s act of criminal agression and mass murder in Iraq? What does he have to say about the deployment of WMD in civilian areas? What does he have to say about the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? What does he have to say about the concentration camp at Guantanamo, which brings back flashes of Belsen, Treblinka and Dachau, or the innumerous concentration and extermination camps in the Baltic States?

Nothing. The Georgian massacre of two thousand Russian civilians in one night, war crimes in which grenades were thrown into basements where women and children were huddling, tanks opening fire on old ladies, children being burned alive, are relegated to the word “details”. Details, eh? Yeah right, today a child, tomorrow a terrorist, so blast the crap out of him and get it done with. Is that what you teach as Senior fellow, Mr. Boot? Is that really how the people of the United States of America feel?

Then in that case I apologise. After reading this article (there is more, comparisons with Hitler – and if the author knew that 26 million Soviet citizens gave their lives to stop that Nazi criminal lunatic, he would not be so insulting; comparisons of Putin with Mussolini, then references to the appeasement that led to WW2) I apologise to all those people I have told to be lenient towards Americans, that there are decent and balanced people over there with valid opinions.

If this is the sort of vapid claptrap that its more famous publications publish, then imagine what you can find in the tabloids and infer from this that given this level of systemic and systematic mis- and disinformation, it is virtually impossible for any US citizen to have a balanced idea of world events. The citizens of the USA are being misinformed, lied to and made clowns of by their own media.

And how someone like Max Boot can be a Senior fellow of a National Security studies institution, well if it was not so frightening it would be risible. Here is a man who calls for the West to unite against Russia and who claims that the Georgians should be supplied with anti-tank and AA-missiles.

As if there were not hundreds of American and Israeli advisors in Georgia who were routed along with their pupils, with their tails hanging between their legs. And while we’re at it, there is an investigation going on as to who perpetrated the war crimes. And a handful of missiles would have made a difference? If Russia were to use US military tactics, they would blast a hundred-metre crater around where the missiles were being fired from. Besides, Russia has enough precision missiles to neutralise and exterminate any military threat anywhere on Earth at any given moment, be this a matchbox, a tank or a concentration of troops, without even sending in one soldier.

The difference is that while the Russian press is full of cultural pieces, information about the economy and the need to proceed with friendly relations with its international partners, US and western papers are caught by a clique of control-freaks, desperate not to let the truth get out and the result is Max Boot and his Stand up to Russia.

More like a stand-up comedian.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY

PRAVDA.Ru