Did Oslo kowtow to Putin?

The Barents Observer is an online newspaper that’s published in English and Russian by the Norwegian Barents Secretariat (NBS), which is funded by Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is under the authority of Norway’s three northernmost counties, Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark. The NBS’s official objective is to promote “good relations with Russia in a region where the two nations cooperate and compete over fishing, oil and military strategy.” The Observer, based in the town of Kirkenes, near Norway’s northern tip, is that country’s most important source of information on the Russian oil and gas industries and the major local news operation in its far north.

barobs_staff_2015 — The editors of the Barents Observer

Until recently, the editor of the Barents Observer was a man named Thomas Nilsen, who has worked for NBS for thirteen years and served as editor of the Observer for six of those years. According to NRK, the Norwegian national broadcasting corporation, he’s “one of Norway’s leading experts on Russian nuclear security and nuclear submarines.” During these years, Nilsen has written “many critical articles and commentaries about conditions in Russia.”

Inevitably, his work has come under fire from Russian officials. Last year, according to the Guardian, Mikhail Noskov, Russia’s consul-general in the far north of Norway, “made a speech in which he strongly criticised Nilsen’s writing and warned it may damage bilateral relations.” Noskov singled out Nilsen’s reporting about Putin, which he considered disrespectful.

This May, when the newspaper’s staff asked that it be allowed to formally adopt a set of official Norwegian journalistic guidelines known as the Rights and Duties of the Editor, the NBS rejected the request. Nilsen and his colleagues publicly criticized the NBS for this action, which, they said, restricted their ability to engage in the “free exchange of information and opinions.” Their statement continued: “In a time with a repressive press freedom environment in Russia, we find it deeply worrying that the political leaders of northern Norway want to limit Barents Observer’s role as a provider of news and opinions that can be considered critical to crackdowns on democratic voices.”

The ax finally fell on September 28. Charging Nilsen with disloyalty, the NBS’s Stig Olsen fired him, effective immediately. In a press release, Nilsen’s colleagues said they were “shocked and outraged” and charged the Observer‘s owners with “doing what they can to destroy us and the news product which we have developed over the last 13 years.” Olsen refused comment.

Knut Olav Åmås, head of Fritt Ord, a Norwegian foundation that supports freedom of expression, described Nilsen’s firing as “a sad ending to an affair that we can only hope will not further cool down the climate of free speech in the northern regions….It is the opposite that is needed – more free media in an area where parts of the most important development in Norway will take place in the years to come.”

But Nilsen’s firing wasn’t the end of the story. On October 3, NRK came out with a report that was nothing short of sensational: Nilsen, maintained journalist Tormod Strand, had been fired because the FSB, Russia’s security agency, had “asked Norway’s government to silence the Observer.”

A Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesmen could neither confirm nor deny NRK’s report. Russia’s embassy in Oslo denied the charge. The head of the NSB refused an interview request by the Guardian. So did Noskov. As for Nilsen himself, he told NRK that the very idea was hard to wrap his mind around, but “if there is a connection here, that somebody on the Norwegian side has yielded to pressure, then the whole case is much more serious” than he’d thought.

Surprised though he was, Nilsen didn’t consider it unlikely that Norwegian officials might have kowtowed to Putin. Because of Norway’s reliance on North Sea oil, he told the Guardian, the Oslo government is obsessed with maintaining good relations with the Kremlin, despite the European Union’s Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia. The Norwegian government’s mantra when it comes to the Arctic, he said, is “high north, low tension.”

Meanwhile Geir Ramnefjell, culture editor of the newspaper Dagbladet, pointed out that this scandal came along at a time when the Kremlin had been complaining about a Norwegian miniseries, Occupied, which was about to begin airing on Norway’s TV2. The Foreign Ministry in Moscow claimed that the show’s premise – Russia, in the near future, invades Norway and seizes its oil fields – is ridiculous and offensive, bringing to mind the hatreds and suspicions of the Cold War and having no basis whatsoever in the reality of today’s Russia.

Posted on December 2, 2015November 3, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Warren Beatty’s love letter to Lenin

We’ve spent the last couple of days contemplating Shirley MacLaine‘s love affair with Mao’s China. Now let’s turn to her brother, Warren Beatty, and his long-term crush on Soviet Communism. Our focus is on the epic 1981 movie Reds, Beatty’s “dream project” and “labor of love,” which he co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. It tells the true story of John Reed (Beatty), a journalist – and devoted Communist – who, in the U.S., helped establish the American Communist Party, and, in Russia, was a fervent participant in and witness to the birth of the Soviet Union, where he became one of Lenin’s very first American useful stooges and ended up as the only American to be buried in the walls of the Kremlin.

Politics aside, Reds is a good old-fashioned big-screen drama in the best Hollywood tradition. Over three hours long, it’s as stirring and sweeping as Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia. And there’s no fashionable modern-day moral ambiguity: Reed is, quite simply, a hero. The movie encourages us to view his commitment to Communism as admirable. As Peter Biskind wrote in a 2006 retrospective on the film for Vanity Fair, it’s an “homage, of sorts, to the Russian Revolution as well as to the high passions that animated the largely forgotten American left in the years before, during, and after World War I.” In Biskind’s eyes, it wasn’t just John Reed who was a hero – Warren Beatty, too, was a hero, whose “vision and persistence” enabled him to win over studio heads who weren’t enthusiastic about the idea of a motion picture that would “dramatize the Russian Revolution from a not entirely unsympathetic perspective.”

Biskind tells a story that provides a glimpse into Beatty’s mindset. While visiting the Soviet Union in 1969, Beatty was asked by Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk to star in a movie about Reed. Beatty turned Bondarchuk down – not because he was loath to take part in a project that would have been a work of sheer Communist propaganda filmed under close Kremlin control, but because he didn’t like the script. Even then, however, he was already thinking of making his own Reed movie, and asked to meet an old woman who had been one of Reed’s lovers. She had spent 16 years in a labor camp, and hated Stalin, but was philosophical, telling Beatty that “of course the revolution is in its early stages.” Beatty’s reaction? “It was at that moment I thought, I have to make a movie about that kind of passion.” Not, note well, a movie about that kind of self-destructive delusion – the woman was still devoted to an evil and pernicious ideology that had landed her in a labor camp for 16 years! – but about what he regarded as a laudable ardor.

Trimming Hedges, part two

Yesterday we started looking at Chris Hedges, a journalist and commentator who is a hero on the radical left – and, above all, a hero in his own mind. He routinely describes the U.S. as a totalitarian power, and routinely represents himself as a courageous truth-teller about that totalitarian power.

But that’s not all. When he’s not depicting the U.S. as a dictatorship, he’s celebrating the real tyrannies. Get a load of this, from last February:

We have a renaissance in Latin America taking place that is extremely exciting. Nations like Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador.…Venezuela has spearheaded Latin America’s emergence from literally centuries of subordination to the U.S. regarding media, economic policies, culture, and international relations. That alone is a killable offense in the eyes of Washington.

Like other critics of his persuasion – and other writers in The Nation‘s stable – Hedges has in recent years become a fixture on RT (Russia Today), the Kremlin-owned TV network, where he reliably bashes the U.S. and Israel (and what he describes as their lapdog mainstream news media) and stands up for assorted terrorists and tyrants. Appearing on RT last November, he describedfreedom of the press in the U.S. as a myth – quite a claim to be making on a TV network run by a government that orders hits on opposition journalists.

And this past January, rejecting the claim that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was an act of jihad, he argued that the atrocity had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, but was, rather, an understandable response by “the global dispossessed” to a life of “poverty, aimlessness, and despair” that is the fault of the wealthy and privileged people of the Western world.

Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons about Islam, Hedges insisted, were not brave free-speech acts carried out in defiance of acts of terrorism, but were inexcusable assaults on the poorest and most helpless people in France; the murdered cartoonists had been mocking the only thing that oppressed and brutalized Muslims have to cling to, namely their religion, and the Muslims had responded in the only way they had available to them. “When everybody is chanting ‘Je suis Charlie Hebdo,’” Hedges maintained, “what they’re really chanting is, you know, ‘We can’t stand dirty Arabs.’” (For good measure, he also called the killing of Osama bin Laden a “war crime.”)

But Hedges’s way-out-there views aren’t the worst thing about him. We’ll get around to that in our next installment.

Posted on July 31, 2015July 15, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

How did Stephen F. Cohen become a Putin fanboy?

James Kirchick, writing in the Daily Beast last year, called him “perhaps the most infamous American apologist for the Russian government.” Eschewing the word “perhaps,” Jonathan Chait of New York magazine identified him as “[t]he most prominent intellectual apologist for Putin.” And Cathy Young of Slate called him “the Kremlin’s No. 1 American apologist.”

We’re talking – again – about Stephen F. Cohen, America’s highest-profile Russia “expert.” He’s vigorously rejected his critics’ characterizations of him, insisting: “I am the only American patriot.” He’s made a career of labeling those who don’t share his take on Russia as ignoramuses and/or liars, but these days he’s gotten into the habit of expressing righteous outrage at those lesser beings who now dare to put him down for his outrageously Putin-friendly views. To criticize him on such grounds, he says, is “scurrilous” and “defamatory.” His critics, he declares, are “neo-McCarthyites” who “are trying to stifle democratic debate by stigmatizing” him. And yet, himself using a McCarthyite term, he’s argued that it’s “un-American” for his critics to challenge his pro-Putin statements as robustly as they have; such intense criticism, he says, is “a form of censorship.”

Funny that a guy who defends Putin – who engages in real censorship, to the point of having his critics beaten up, imprisoned, tortured, and killed – should accuse other folks of censorship just because they don’t share his perverse admiration for this tyrant.

Funny, too, that a radical leftist who used to shill for the USSR should become an equally fervent apologist for Putin – a man who, despite his KGB history, is usually categorized as a right-wing nationalist. Or maybe not so funny? After all, the Kremlin is still the Kremlin. No, Moscow’s corridors of power may no longer be decorated with portraits of Marx and Engels and Lenin, but, hey, you can’t have everything.

Think of it this way: for Cohen, this whole business isn’t just about Russia. It’s also very much about America. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that, in the eyes of far-left types like Cohen, the fall of the Soviet Union wasn’t a blessing but a disaster – because it made America the world’s sole superpower. We’re talking here about people who, quite simply, don’t view America as a benign force in the world. They’re eager to see America contained, humbled, kept in check. And the simple fact is that an aggressive, autocratic, nationalistic Russia can do that just as well as an aggressive, autocratic, Communist USSR.

Indeed, to listen to Cohen, it’s America, not Putin’s Russia, that is the real aggressor in this match-up. Take the Magnitsky Act of 2012, which denies U.S. visas to Russian officials responsible for the 2009 death of human-rights lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The law passed both houses of Congress with strong bipartisan support and was signed by President Obama. Human-rights groups around the world praised the law, as did pro-democracy activists in Russia; polls showed that most Russians supported it, too. But Cohen savaged the act, calling it “a very harsh Cold War law,” and even signed a statement denouncing it.

Or consider his take on NATO – a classic case of through-the-looking-glass thinking. Consistently, Cohen speaks of NATO as a brutal threat – not a defense against a brutal threat. Putin’s saber-rattling in Eastern Europe is understandable, Cohen argues, because “twenty years of NATO’s eastward expansion has caused Russia to feel cornered.” He ignores entirely the fact that if Russia were a genuinely free country with no belligerent international ambitions, it wouldn’t perceive NATO expansion as a threat; on the contrary, a truly free Russia could itself be a member of NATO.

But then again, just as in the Cold War days, the word “freedom” is barely in Cohen’s vocabulary. He actually told an RT interviewer that the U.S. has, in effect, said to NATO members in Eastern Europe that they “can punch Russia in the nose and hide behind NATO.” In other words, Cohen has the nerve to depict countries like Estonia and the Czech Republic – which for decades were subjugated and brutalized by Moscow – as anti-Russian aggressors. And he talks as if NATO had forced itself on these countries, rather than being invited and gratefully welcomed by them as a bulwark of their freedoms.

It’s bizarre: Cohen endlessly asserts Russia’s right to act in its own national interest, but he seems not to recognize the right of any former Soviet republic or satellite to its own national interest. If Poland or Ukraine or Latvia perceives Putin’s Russia as a threat to its freedom and sovereignty, why shouldn’t it be allowed to do whatever it feels is necessary in its own defense – including join NATO?

For a long time, Cohen’s routine answer to this question was simple and confident: Putin, he averred, doesn’t represent a threat to any of his neighbors. In speech after speech and interview after interview, Cohen contended it was “ridiculous” to think Putin would make a military move into Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics.

Then Putin invaded Ukraine.

Yet even that invasion didn’t silence Cohen. He continued to treat the liberation of the Eastern European and Baltic nations a quarter-century ago – and the aspiration of their citizens to become full members of the Free World – as offenses against Russia by an aggressive U.S. Clearly, the very concept of a “Free World,” or of its opposite, is off Cohen’s radar. For him, none of this is about freedom or tyranny – it’s about spheres of influence. Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century; it’s been an independent country for just over a couple of decades; ipso facto, it’s a part of Russia’s proper sphere of influence.

Which, for Cohen, means that the Ukrainian people’s own desires are irrelevant. If most of them want to be closer to the West, which for them means freedom and peace and prosperity, than to Russia, which means the opposite of all those things – well, too bad for them. Ditto the Lithuanians, the Slovaks, and the rest. Because they were once part of the totalitarian Soviet empire, Russia has the right to an unquestioned “sphere of influence” over all of them – a right, even, to re-conquer them, if it wishes, and turn these now free and democratic nations back into exploited and terrorized subject states. Freedom be damned.

It’s a detestable way of thinking – a morally repellent legitimization of the Russification of the Soviet “republics” after 1917, and of Stalin’s Communization of Eastern Europe after World War II. But this is precisely the view of Putin’s Russia that Cohen now preaches in the media – and, presumably, to his students at New York University.

Which raises the question: how does NYU feel about the fact that a member of its faculty is a one-man PR outfit for a tyrant?

Posted on April 23, 2015July 1, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

Stephen F. Cohen, Putin apologist

If Pat Buchanan is probably Vladimir Putin’s most prominent fan on the American right, the Russian strongman’s leading admirer on the American left may well be a gentleman named Stephen F. Cohen.

If you’re of a certain age and are in the habit of watching the Sunday morning political shows and perusing the op-ed page of the New York Times, you’ve likely been encountering Cohen for decades. He’s almost surely America’s most high-profile “Russia expert.” A professor at Princeton from 1968 to 1998, he’s now at NYU.

Back when there was a Soviet Union, of course, the proper label for a guy like Cohen was “Sovietologist.” In those days, like many other members of the breed, he was also more than a bit of a Sovietophile, meaning that he (a) had a soft spot – to put it mildly – for Bolshevism and (b) regarded the Cold War as being at least as much America’s fault as the USSR’s.

Yes, Cohen openly acknowledged the (shall we say) unfortunate aspects of Soviet rule; but instead of viewing them as inevitable consequences of Communist ideology, he blamed them on Stalin – the idea being that after Lenin got the Soviet experiment off to a promising start, Stalin made a wrong turn and wrecked everything. If not for him, who knows what utopia might have been achieved?

(Case in point: Cohen’s 1998 Times review of Gulag Archipelago. While accepting Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of the Gulag, Cohen drew the line at his “indictment of the whole Bolshevik tradition,” which he called “one-sided.” Yes, Aleksandr, we’re all sorry you had to spend all those years in the Gulag as punishment for writing a letter, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to let you go around smearing Communism.)

Today, Cohen’s a fan of Vladimir Putin. In the last couple of years, in a blizzard of writings, talks, panel discussions, and the like – most notably a February 2014 Nation essay, “Distorting Russia,” and a lengthy March 2014 interview with Newsweek – Cohen has absolved Putin of blame for pretty much everything the guy has done.

The conflict in the Ukraine? “Putin didn’t bring this on,” Cohen insists. “He didn’t want it. It was the last thing he wanted.” The tanking Russian economy? Cohen actually puts a positive spin on it, claiming that “some of its indicators are better than US ones.” The 2006 murders of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow and Putin critic Aleksandr Litvinenko in London? Cohen says there’s not “a shred of evidence” to tie Putin to the killings, and calls the charges “exceptionally vilifying.” Pro-democracy Russian activists? Repeatedly, Cohen has sought to discredit them, saying that their “policies are rarely examined.” And he’s consistently pointed to Putin’s sky-high popularity, omitting to note that when a population is force-fed pro-regime propaganda and opposition voices are systematically silenced, poll numbers are hardly a fair measure of anything.

Ah, there’s nothing like a true believer.

Not only has Cohen roundly dismissed concerns about Putin’s saber-rattling, his imprisonment of critics, his demonization of gays, etc., etc.; he’s slandered those who do express concern about any of this stuff, calling them “shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory” and accusing them of lacking his own “expertise” and of failing to provide the “multifaceted analysis” that he presumably proffers. Putin’s critics, Cohen charges, refuse to give the Russian president credit for his good deeds: for example, just before the Sochi Olympics, he freed over a thousand prisoners, “including mothers of young children.” Cohen neglects to mention that many of those prisoners – mothers of young children included – had been jailed in the first place for criticizing Putin’s regime.

Among them, incidentally, was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, who was punished for his disapproval of Putin by being stripped of his billions and tossed into the slammer. Khodorkovsky’s jailhouse memoir, My Fellow Prisoners (2014), is an eloquent portrait of life inside a Putin prison. Has Cohen read the book? One strongly doubts it. For Cohen, Putin’s incarceration, torture, and (yes) murder of his opponents is a veritable non-issue. (You can’t make an omelet, after all, without breaking a few eggs.)

Also a non-issue for Cohen are Putin’s harsh new antigay laws. Indeed, instead of denouncing those laws, Cohen has assailed Western gays for going to Russia and making a fuss about them. Presumably Cohen, good lefty that he is, thinks that the Freedom Riders who traveled to the American South in the 1960s to fight for civil rights were courageous heroes; but Western gays fighting for the rights of gays in Russia? Mind your own business, he instructs them. “I don’t remember any Russians coming over here and telling American gays how to fight for their rights.” Reminded by a Newsweek interviewer that “things are dire for gay people in Russia,” Cohen shot back: “how is that our concern?…Why is it America’s job to go over there and sort out the gay problem when 85 percent of Russians think they should have no rights?”

Did Cohen feel this way about the rights of blacks in apartheid South Africa? Does he feel this way about Palestinians? One suspects not.

As for Pussy Riot, the pro-democracy punk protest group, Cohen actually told Newsweek that “[i]n 82 countries they would have been executed for what they did.” Later, confronted with facts that contradicted this statement, Cohen revised his remarks, saying that “Pussy Riot would have faced criminal charges in many countries and the death penalty in several of them.” The point, in any case, being what? That Putin is somehow less of a bad guy for murdering his critics because his counterparts in places like North Korea and Iran do the same thing?

(FILES) A file picture taken on July 20, — Pussy Riot

Is it any surprise that an NYU professor who’s willing to imply that the brave young women of Pussy Riot deserve execution has been welcomed as a frequent guest on the Kremlin-owned “news” network, RT, and as a regular blogger at the Kremlin’s Voice of Russia website?

Posted on April 21, 2015July 1, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Useful Stooges