The New Cold-War propaganda battlefield came into stark focus this week as two highly personal attacks on leading anti-Putin pundits came out in quick succession. Peter Pomerantsev featured as the main target in tandem with Michael Weiss - both now very prominent, both associated with The Interpreter, the relentless online gadfly against the Kremlin. There was a time when one could use the phrase ‘war of ideas’ but it lacks verisimilitude in the current context. The Soviet Union peddled ideas, universal ones, however thinly patched to justify Moscow’s power urge. These days, Moscow offers no universal ideology. Kremlin apologists are reduced to emitting a stridently one-note sound, that of condemning the West for every ill Moscow visits on the world. So it is with Mark Ames’s article about Pomerantsev in the web publication Pando and equally with an article in The Nation by James Carden entitled “Neo McCarthyism and the US Media”.
One must say, up front, that the attacks suffer from egregious factual inaccuracies. For example, Pomerantsev is not nor has ever been a 'lobbyist' for anyone. That word has a technical dimension and should be used very fastidiously because it suggests that you take money in order to advocate a particular position, specifically for that purpose, as a PR shill. To say this about Pomerantsev is like saying Orwell was a paid lobbyist against totalitarian systems. I won't go into a list of detailed factual issues here because far deeper issues of principle take priority. You will see what I mean in short order.
We can deal with Ames first but let’s have a brief intro to the dramatis personae. Pomerantsev wrote the genuinely profound and much-lauded recent book about Russia, “Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible”, then went on to author a treatise about Kremlin disinformation with Michael Weiss. Weiss himself is now a widely published journalist, commentator on CNN and co-author of the recent book “Isis: Inside the Army of Terror”. I’m deliberately keeping the bios sparse for a reason. Otherwise one can quickly sink to thumbnail ad-hominem name-calling which tends to substitute for a true point-counterpoint of ideas. Hence, you’ve got Ames banging on about neo-cons and Carden about “Neo-McCarthyism.” That aside, Mark Ames knows something about Russia having lived there and edited the notorious expats-behaving-badly Moscow publication the eXile for some years. He personifies the online gonzo journalists polarity to James Carden’s more buttoned-up conservative approach. Carden writes for The American Conservative. He also served on a Presidential Commission advising on Russia and got a graduate degree in Moscow. He too is no amateur. That the two weighed in on the same subject within days of each other, with no particular news hook to prompt them, must give us pause. One more such and you’d think there’s a concerted campaign.
I musn’t say that Mark Ames is a Putin apologist. From previous articles, he seems scattershot in his jeremiads. But he certainly hits all the standard notes in this article. Here’s the gravamen of his complaint: He feels that Pomerantsev now serves as a too single-minded advocate for countering Kremlin propaganda, appearing at a Congressional hearing to push such policies. Pomerantsev has taken sides, therefore what he says can’t be trusted.
"what the Hell is a presumed journalist/writer like Pomerantsev, who claims to have been most influenced by literary figures like Christopher Isherwood, doing lobbying the US and UK governments to pass bills upping psychological warfare budgets and imposing sanctions on foreign countries? Where does the independent critical analysis stop, and the manipulative lobbying begin?"
There’s really nothing new here. Pomerantsev is doing exactly what he’s accused of - as he should if he cares about the region’s future and indeed the world’s. The rest of the article offers up interminable guilt-by-association indictments: to wit, the (‘sleazy’) rich folk, Browder and Khodorkovsky, who funded foundations employing Pomerantsev, had made money in Russia until Putin dispossessed them. That’s why they’re backing people like Pomerantsev now. Out of sour grapes. (Fact: Pomerantsev never worked for Browder in any way.) Furthermore, the media manipulation of the Russian masses began under Yeltsin with American advisors. America committed the original sin. Ergo leave Moscow alone. Nowhere is the main issue joined: is Putin brainwashing the Russian masses to accrue power at home and impose it on others abroad thereby costing thousands their lives and homes? Is he befogging his crimes through disinformation? Should that be countered by the West explicitly and deliberately? The answer, surely, is yes to all the above. Not in service of neo-con agendas for warmongering or cynical profiteering purposes but for self-evident reasons. That’s the nub of it. Instead, as in any typical defense of Kremlin expansionism, we’re furnished the same liturgy of reasons why Western critiques can’t be trusted.
Carden’s highly detailed, exhaustively sourced essay suffers fatally from the same sinister flaw. This time the blame for anti-Putin currents in the US falls on neo-McCarthyism – certainly not on any blameworthy act by the Napoleon in the Kremlin. Let us first note that James Carden is a conservative appearing in a proudly lefty publication. This phenomenon is old news already: Putin has successfully managed to create common ground between elements of opposing political poles in the US and Europe. Some even take his money. Bully for them. In the West, they’re allowed to support the big bully in Moscow and divide the West. One might, at a stretch, think of them as dissidents.
Now think of how dissidents fare in Russia these days. But you won’t catch Carden worrying about them; he has higher concerns. He opens his article with a somber itemization of the Ukraine war’s ravages. “And yet,” he continues, “a special report (see link above) published last fall by the online magazine The Interpreter would have us believe that Russian ‘disinformation’ ranks amongst the gravest threats to the West.” To which the riposte must be yes to the latter, it is a huge threat, precisely because of the former, Putin’s wars. Are Russian troops invading and fighting in Ukraine while pretending not to? Is Russian disinformation media abetting that process? Is the Kremlin not at all to blame for the bloodshed and devastation there? The offending report deals exactly with such matters as part of “how the Kremlin weaponizes information.” As for Carden, nowhere does he make the merest reference to malfeasance by Moscow in a long long article. The fault lies not in Moscow but always in ourselves.
And the article rolls on checking all the hackneyed polemical boxes of the pro-Russian side.
Russophobia? Yep. Thus the Interpreter report could be a “publicity stunt by two journalists attempting to cash in on the Russophobia so in vogue among American pundits”. Apologist alert: apparently nobody arrives at fear of Russians rationally. Despite the score of invasions into foreign lands, the millions dead, in the last century. Russophobia just exists; people exploit it for dark ends.
Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders? Check. Can we kill this canard for good and all? Countries like the Baltics joined the EU as soon as Moscow’s grip relaxed. Nato protects the EU. Therefore it must abut Russia’s borders. Despite that, various strategic weapons haven’t been provided for the defense of such countries for fear of alienating Putin.
Opposing Moscow means provoking war. Check. Carden's article says “the policy of belligerence toward Russia that Weiss and Pomerantsev so staunchly support has been one of the primary culprits in the Ukraine crisis”. Always, it’s the Putin critics, not Putin, who provoke war.
And, of course, the biggest threat of all: McCarthyism. Not Putin with nukes. Not “little green men” spilling jauntily into others’ lands. Not the Russian occupation of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, other pieces of Georgia, Crimea, Donbass and the like. Neo-McCarthyism is referenced here for a purpose, to turn the focus inward and away from the evils of Putinism and the possible answers thereto. In this scenario, the useful exercise of identifying pro-Kremlin arguments and their exponents becomes instead a form of persecution. (For true persecution, google “murder of Nemtsov”.) Sure it’s a pretty clunky process as yet, precisely because it isn’t in vogue. It’s just barely starting. The West's old Cold Warriors have faded away leaving no continuity of knowledge or skills while the KGB abides as a living tradition in the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the actual Cold War is back on all fronts from cyber attacks to tanks to summits to subversion to disinformation. Distracted by events elsewhere, the West is still debating whether to engage. Pomerantsev and Weiss are trying to show us how because, sooner or later, we must.
