Kremlin dusts off Cold War lexicon

[PPLE]

Kremlin dusts off Cold War lexicon to make US villain in Georgia

Russians were told over breakfast yesterday what really happened in Georgia: the conflict in South Ossetia was part of a plot by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, to stop Barak Obama being elected president of the United States.

The line came on the main news of Vesti FM, a state radio station that — like the Government and much of Russia's media — has reverted to the old habits of Soviet years, in which a sinister American hand was held to lie behind every conflict, especially those embarrassing to Moscow. Modern Russia may be plugged into the internet and the global marketplace but in the battle for world opinion the Kremlin is replaying the old black-and-white movie.

The Obama angle is getting wide play. It was aired on Wednesday by Sergei Markov, a senior political scientist who is close to Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister and power behind President Medvedev.

“George Bush's Administration is promoting interests of candidate John McCain,” said Dr Markov. “Defeated by Barak Obama on all fronts, McCain has one last card to play yet - the creation of a virtual Cold War with Russia . . . Bush himself did not want a war in South Ossetia but his Republican Party did not leave him any choice.” The Americans were now engineering an armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Dr Markov added.

The Establishment and its media supporters are dusting off favourites from the Cold War shelf. Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, accused Washington of playing dangerous games. The West was guilty of “adventurism”, supporting aggression against peace-loving Russian forces who are engaged on a humanitarian mission to protect human life. Yesterday's headline in Commersant, a generally admired newspaper, announced with old-style sarcasm the imminent American “Military Humanitarian Landing” in Georgia.

A classic of Soviet-speak also came from Vasili Lickhachev, a former Russian Ambassador to the EU. “The West has spent a lot of time, energy and money to teach Georgia the tricks of the trade . . . to make the country look like a democracy,” he said.

“We and many other nations see through this deceit. We understand that the seditious tactics of the so-called colour revolutions are a real threat to international law and the source of global legal nihilism.”

These grooves from the Cold War grave are shrugged off by many Russians but they strike a chord in a nation ready once again to see itself as the victim of outside conspiracy. Blogs everywhere attract conspiracy lovers but Russian blogs have been exceptionally rich this week in theories of Western skulduggery over Georgia.

The old thinking finds more fertile ground now because, in the view of disillusioned Russians, President Bush relaunched the ideological war through a compliant American media, especially at the time of the invasion of Iraq.

“In the old days under Soviet rule we didn't believe a word of our own propaganda but we thought that information was free in the West and we longed for it,” said Katya, a middle-aged Muscovite. “But we have learnt since that the West has its own propaganda and in some ways it is more powerful because people believe it.”

Moscow is using novel methods to spread a very unsubtle, Cold War version of the Caucasian conflict to the world. Chief among them is Russia Today, a state 24-hour news channel that is fronted much of the time by cheery British and other English-speaking television professionals.

The smiles and studio banter could come from BBC World or CNN but the story is unrelentingly the Kremlin version. Banners flash along at the bottom of the screen saying such things as “genocide” and “aggression” or “city turns into human hell, many people still trapped under rubble”. Recapping the conflict yesterday RT's presenter said that Georgia's “brutal assault” had killed 1,600 civilians in its breakaway province in a campaign that destroyed 70 per cent of the buildings in Tskhinvali, its capital. Russian forces had moved in only to bring peace as Georgian forces killed women and children who were trying to flee, it said. Throughout its rolling cover of alleged Georgian atrocities, there was no mention of the heavy Russian military offensive.

The coverage goes down well in developing countries that want an alternative to CNN and BBC World Service, a Russian official said. “We have learnt from Western TV how to simplify the narrative.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 535173.ece

[blindpig]

Well, if that's the case, what exactly is the Times up to?

[eattherich]

The political realities of “democratic” Georgia
By Tom Eley
18 August 2008

One of the constant themes in the US government and media presentation of the conflict in the Caucasus is the depiction of Georgia as a bastion of democracy. The Bush administration has increasingly invoked the terminology of the Cold War by referring to “democratic Georgia” as a symbol of the “free world” and its struggle against authoritarian Russia.

The reality of political life in Georgia is far different than the media image.

Only last November, in the midst of mounting protests against his regime, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili employed dictatorial methods against his opponents. On November 2, opposition demonstrations began in Tbilisi, demanding democratic reforms and the ouster of Saakashvili. These protests, while organized by billionaire media tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, gave vent to grievances against government repression and the desperate living conditions of the population. They attracted tens of thousands to the streets of Georgia’s capital city.

The demonstrations continued until November 7, when the state police, acting on orders from Saakashvili, used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons and truncheons to disperse the protesters. More than 600 required medical attention after the crackdown. On the same day, Special Forces raided Patarkatsishvili’s broadcasting corporation Imeldi, beating journalists and disabling equipment.

Saakashvili declared a state of emergency, suspending democratic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly. Independent broadcasting was halted even before the state of emergency was declared, and only the state-controlled television station was allowed to broadcast for a period of fifteen days. Imeldi was taken off the air indefinitely.

During the crackdown, Saakashivli called for snap elections to be held less than two months later, on January 5. The elections, held under conditions of political intimidation and repression, placed the opposition at an enormous disadvantage.

All media were under the de facto control of Saakashivli. In addition, two opposition leaders, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia and Shalva Natelashvili, were declared “wanted for treason.” The government accused them of conspiring with Russia to overthrow the government.

Patarkatsishvili, who likewise faced a government investigation for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government, began his campaign from Israel. He withdrew from the elections after the government released a recording of him attempting to bribe a police officer.

Patarkatsishvili died suddenly last February in London at the age of 52. Authorities attributed the death to a massive heart attack, but Patarkatsishvili believed the Georgian authorities were targeting him for assassination.

The early elections eliminated two other serious rivals for the presidency—former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili and lawyer Tinatin Khidasheli—both of whom were just shy of 35 years of age, the minimum, at the time of the vote.

Okruashvili fled the country shortly after the crackdown in what ABC News called “mysterious circumstances.” He had accused Saakashvili of corruption, but after being placed under arrest he was apparently forced to retract the allegations.

During the campaign, election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported that the credibility of the election had been placed in doubt by allegations that Saakashvili had used state money, blackmail and vote-buying. With rivals under arrest, under police investigation, in exile or legally barred from running for office, it is little surprise that Saakashvili won reelection. After his victory, the opposition claimed that the vote had been manipulated. His vote total surpassed by 20 percent that which had been projected by an opinion poll released one week earlier.

The Saakashvili regime faced international criticism from foreign capitals and human rights organizations for its assumption of dictatorial powers. Though the level of repression Saakashvili employed exceeded the measures that had been taken by his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, against the so-called “Rose Revolution” that brought Saakashvili to power in early 2004, criticism from the United States was much more muted.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew J. Bryza, a close ally and personal friend of the US-educated Saakashvili, acknowledged that the State Department was “hearing more and more reports that people were grabbed from stores or that passers-by were beaten,” but concluded merely that “Things got out of control.”

NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer responded with little more than a wrist slap against the Georgian government, which was seeking NATO membership. He limited himself to the observation that “the imposition of emergency rule and the closure of media outlets” were not in line with “Euro-Atlantic values.”

In fact, the “excesses” of Saakashvili in putting down peaceful protests were not mere aberrations. The US State Department, in its 2008 “Country Reports in Human Rights,” listed the following in relation to the Georgian government: “at least one reported death due to excessive use of force by law enforcement officers, cases of torture and mistreatment of detainees, abuse of prisoners, excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations, poor conditions in prisons and pretrial detention facilities, impunity of police officers, continued overuse of pretrial detention for less serious offenses, lack of access for average citizens to defense attorneys, lack of due process in some cases, and reports of government pressure on the judiciary.”

The report went on to state: “Respect for freedom of speech, the press, assembly and political participation worsened, especially during the fall crisis. Other problems included reports of government pressure on the judiciary and the media, restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, and corruption among senior-level officials. Despite government efforts, trafficking-in-persons continued to occur.”

The so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004-2005) did not represent the spontaneous will of the masses. They were political coups orchestrated from Washington, with the aide of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) subsidized by the US government and private foundations.

Chief among the NGOs involved in Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” was the Liberty Institute, which was funded by the United States Agency for International Development’s Eurasia Foundation as well as billionaire financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute. The Liberty Institute’s co-founder, Giga Bokeria, took a Soros Foundation-funded tour of Serbia in February 2002 to learn how the Otpor, or “Resistance,” student opposition had ousted Slobodan Milosevic following a disputed election in the autumn of 2000.

Another US government outfit involved in the ouster of Shevardnadze was the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a center of international intrigue and subversion set up under the Reagan administration and relying heavily on the services of the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy. The Democratic Party wing of the NED, known as the National Democratic Institute, in the words of Wall Street Journal columnist George Melloan, “helped introduce Mr. Saakashvili to the methods insurgents in Serbia used to depose dictator Slobodan Milosevic.”

Saakashvili’s reelection last January was based politically on an appeal to rabid Georgian nationalism. The central plank of his campaign was a pledge to restore Tbilisi’s authority over the pro-Russian breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They had established de facto independence as a result of bloody fighting with Georgian government forces that followed the revocation in March 1991 of the autonomy guaranteed them under the Soviet constitution.

Within months of his reelection, Saaskashvili was assuming unprecedented powers in what the Manilla Times called “a distinctly undemocratic one-party state.”

Saakashvili is the representative of one faction of the Georgian ruling elite. Including in its ranks former officials of the old Stalinist regime, the new financial oligarchy emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union, amassing its wealth by plundering the formerly nationalized economy.

In contrast to Western tributes to the economic growth and modernization of Georgia under Saakashvili, his government oversees a miserably poor and highly polarized society. Formerly one of the wealthiest Soviet republics, in 2007 Georgia ranked 108th in the world in per capita gross domestic product (GDP), below countries like Bhutan, Equador and Guatemala. Its GDP ranks 114th in the world, below that of Equatorial Guinea.

If it were a US state, Georgia’s GDP would rank at the bottom, equaling about one-third of Vermont’s. The official unemployment rate in Georgia stands at nearly 13 percent. More than one half of the population lives below the official poverty level. Over one quarter lives on less than $2 per day. Last year the average monthly pension was $30.

But Saakashvili’s pro-Western, “free market” economic policies have fostered the growth of a small but growing wealthy elite. Georgia earned the World Bank’s 2008 designation as “the number one economic reformer in the world” because it improved in one year from 112th to 18th in creating what is euphemistically called “a friendly business environment.”

What this means in practice is the scrapping of all regulations and encumbrances limiting the exploitation of the working class and the accumulation of personal wealth by a rapacious financial elite. In 2004, Saakashvili’s first year in power, his government abolished the progressive income tax and replaced it with a 12 percent flat tax.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug20 ... -a18.shtml

[eattherich]

Beat the dead horse, or Putin’s revenge
22.08.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru
URL: http://english.pravda.ru/world/ussr/106 ... _revenge-0

(Rome) The old adage according to which time is the great equalizer holds sway in a special way in contemporary totalitarian America. Unlike the old-horse-beaten-until-it-drops-dead knows it is being beaten, our people are beaten in such a horrendously clinical manner that they do not even realize they are being beaten. Though aware of their mortality, gently beaten human beings however have come to resemble the whipped horse in that they do not seem to realize they are dying from the blows. The problem is there is little or no public opinion. And that collective memory is dead.

A second old horse adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink no longer applies to Americans. We drink and drink and drink without even looking up at our tormentors. Without an iota of curiosity even as to who they are and what they are doing to us.

Vladimir Putin must have been astounded at how Georgia and its American puppeteers fell head over heels into the Caucasian trap. Ingenuously, facilely, Saakashvili, America’s puppet leader of Georgia, sent his US armed troops into South Ossetia shooting wildly at anything moving and challenging Moscow on its home territory. What could be crazier? On that first day European media showed the Georgian “invasion” of South Ossetia, just as the NEXT day it showed the crushing Russian response that reduced Georgia to the virtual reality of the US proxy state it has become.

For the first time since the collapse of the USSR, Russia went on the offensive. Its victory accomplished in a few hours rewrote the global balance of power. Yet, the American public knows little or nothing of these earth-shaking events. The NYT and Washington Post, CNN and Fox, speak only of a Russian invasion of Georgia, a country of wine growers and tourism operators. Don’t American people even wonder why this sudden outburst of military operations in peaceful Georgia which all of a sudden decided to challenge powerful Russia and invade territories inhabited by Russian citizens? Don’t people wonder why and how come Russian tanks are in no hurry to leave “independent” Georgia?

The result of these events is that two decades after the fall of Soviet Russia, the heart of Europe—I refer to Germany, France and Italy—despite their warnings to Moscow to withdraw have never been closer to Russia. If the most pro-American European leader, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, must choose between Bush and Putin, he will unfailingly choose Putin. This European heart is not about to build the anti-Russian alliance Bush and Cheney dreamed of. Washington doesn’t grasp the elementary fact that Russia is an integral part of Europe which today is overflowing with Russian tourists, replacing in many places such as Venice the missing Americans. Maybe this unpleasant combination of events is why the NYT and Washington Post, CNN and Fox, didn’t tell the people the reality of the two-day military action—the first day, the Georgian incursion into South Ossetia, and the second, the crushing Russian response. That was the war! Instead the US media described in Cold War terms the fiction of an unprovoked Russian imperialist invasion of peaceful Georgia.

Only America, its tiny allies of the Baltic region, Georgia, to a certain extent Ukraine and pliable right-wing Poland, believed Russia would do nothing. Poland and Czech Republic, and most probably the Baltic states too, today still intent on pushing Russian borders back to the gates of Moscow, will soon come to terms with their European history and their rightful place in it. They will soon realize that their future is Europe, not the America that considers them territory for military installations.

The break between the heart of Europe and these temporary American satellites splits NATO, the European Union and the West in general. But it draws the heart of Europe and Russia nearer. The “war” in Georgia makes this tendency explicit. As soon as Moscow’s victory was evident, French President Sarkozy, current rotating President also of the Europe Union, flew to Moscow, then to Tbilisi, as Europe’s representative. Not a peace mediator, his mission was in effect to ratify the Russian victory, to recognize its sphere of influence in the Caucasian region and to seal America’s defeat. Georgia can now forget South Ossetia and Abkhazia as well as its ambitions for NATO membership. Who wants America’s satellite in NATO anyway?

This real Europe of Germany, France and Italy are not what imperialist neocon America dreamed of. Most certainly New World Order America didn’t count on a resurrected Russia capable of the re-conquest of lost territories of the Russian Empire and of a new relationship with Europe. Moreover, not even in its worst nightmare did America dream of exchanging its alliance with real Europe for a string of powerless satellites on the Baltic, or happy-go-lucky romantic Georgians.

Official reactions from Brussels are NATO reactions, that is, US-dominated NATO. And even NATO words are unexpectedly mild—“firmness” and demands for Russians withdrawal. Russia answers facetiously that its peace-keeping mission in Georgia may last a few more days. Meanwhile in Rome, without haste Berlusconi plans a trip to Moscow too, in early September. Georgia is not to interfere with the vacation period.

Saakashvili is known to be more American than Americans, his nation armed and supported by the USA. But armed and supported for what? Only for its oil and gas pipelines, of dubious value and a dubious future? Not at all.

The sad truth for Georgia is that its leader over-estimated American support for his stupid attempt to re-take the disputed territory of South Ossetia peopled by Russian citizens. In a way, this was also a case of the tail wagging the dog, As if the USA, already bogged down by Iraqis and Afghans, would seriously go to war with Russia over Georgia! Something about this reminds me of the American-instigated Hungarian uprising of 1956, crushed then by Soviet tanks.

Russia today is confident. It is not afraid as it was of the multi-colored revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and NATO’s advance up to its borders. US humanitarian aid to Georgia or talk of Russia’s exclusion from the G8 do not disturb Putin. He now knows he can count on the real Europe. Russia is not about to surrender to American demands and threats. NATO-USA accuses Russia of invading small countries, Russia charges NATO for supporting the criminal regime of Georgia. While NATO and Russia both claim that their relations will never be the same again, Russian tanks roam around the Caucasus region as they please. Europe has received Putin’s message to the world loud and clear. The Russians are truly back.

The question is, has the American public, busily drinking from the fount of NYT and Washington Post, CNN and Fox News, grasped the trap-like situation their arrogant, unrealistic, self-absorbed, narcissistic leaders have lead them into? For it is clear as day that a huge bill is falling due and the American people will ultimately have to pay it.

Gaither Stewart, Senior Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal/tantmieux, is a novelist and journalist based in Italy. A longtime student of Russian culture he maintains particular interest in developments affecting Russia also after the overthrow of Communism. His essays and dispatches are read widely on many leading Internet venues.

By Gaither Stewart

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