AndyRussian invasion of Ukraine
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I was off work sick yesterday, so spent some time catching up on my blog reading. Here is my idiosyncratic pick of the past few days’ blog posts:
- Glowing Georgians and Radioactive Russians wins the ‘Best post title of the week award’.
- Copydude writes an open letter to a British tabloid journalist, accusing him of “blatant propaganda and irresponsible, scaremongering journalism”.
- A brief history of recent SCO-CSTO war games from Once Upon A Time in the West.
- The town at the end of the world looks a lot different if you live in a town on the far side of the town at the end of the world. Tim Newman posts two perspectives of Vladivostok.
- A video montage of Siberia, including some great shots of Lake Baikal and Irkutsk, the finest town in all of Russia, from Jane Keeler.
- The Foreign Policy blog reports that Dimitri Medvedev (Putin’s heir apparent, they say) “wowed” the business bigwigs at Davos.
- Mmmmm. Pelmeni.
- And finally, a small diversion. La Russophobe and The Exile are in the midst of an little public spat – largely over the size of LR’s bottom, it would seem. Warning: the bottom is illustrated.
You should point out that the “Once upon a Time in West” thing is by someone who believes that the EU is part of a decades-long Soviet strategic deception plan, just as the collapse of the USSR was.
This goes back to the defector Anatoli Golitsin, who began to come up with weirder and weirder theories after MI5 realised that he was bullshitting a lot of the time. But the far right in the US liked him.
ALEX: If you’re going to suggest that something needs to be pointed out, then it behooves you to post a link to the alleged statements you are complaining about. Otherwise you’re a rather large hypocrite.
The details that I think Alex is refering to seem to be fairly prominent on the ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ homepage. I don’t think Alex is hypocritical – more likely, he didn’t feel the need to post a link.
An extract:
“Once Upon a Time in the West is devoted to the analysis of geopolitics, based on open-source documentation and the testimonies of East Bloc defectors, both before and after the KGB-managed “collapse” of communism in Eastern Europe, between 1989 and 1991. It is primarily designed to benefit inhabitants of the West who have been misinformed about the objectives and modus operandi of communists worldwide.”
I must confess, though that, having read the sidebar blurg, I’m still not quite sure what OUTW believes is the real threat – other groups that seem to be identified are pro-World government Western elites, various forms of communism and Islam.
ANDY: Au contraire. Alex was chastising you for not warning people without giving any clue as to what he was talking about. That’s hypocrisy, plain and simple. He calls for warning but doesn’t give one himself. You yourself say that you’re “not quite sure” what the blog is saying, so there’s obviously ambiguity, and you have no idea whether the quote you are citing is the same one Alex references. It behooves Alex to give specific sourcing if he’s going to call for it from you.
What’s more, the quote you cite says nothing specific about an EU – Soviet conspiracy such as Alex mentions. Eastern Europe is not EU.
I continue to be amazed and disappointed by Alex’s hypocrisy.
ANDY: I’m curious, did you know (as my blog has reported) that Mark Ames, boss of the eXile, has become an employee of state-sponsored Russia Today TV? Any comment? I attack the Kremlin and it’s little lapdog attacks me. Interesting, isn’t it?
I guess we should probably wait for Alex himself to give us the definitive view on what he actually meant…
As for Mark Ames, I read your post to mean that he had undertaken a freelancing job for Russia Today, rather than being an actual employee.
Having looked at it, I thought it should be pointed out that the author espouses a well-known and utterly squarko conspiracy theory. It’s a pity, because hardly anyone ever talks about the SCO except for maniacs. Anyone who followed the link would see the evidence at once – they put it in the blog’s sidebar after all.