Gets a (firm) fourth star from me only due to the subject matter and persistence of the author. Residing in the culture via marriage, de Bellaigue is Gets a (firm) fourth star from me only due to the subject matter and persistence of the author. Residing in the culture via marriage, de Bellaigue is observant and immersed, but somehow still manages to be a bit haphazard and disorganized in his pursuits. Resulting in a book of many questions, some detail but not enough, and a reluctance to reach many conclusions.
Still worth it, though. Iran needs to be an open book in our era, not an orientalist's mystery-box. ...more
Comprehensive, concise, blunt where required. Fiona Hill is a professional Russia Analyst and the methodically organized outline here displays that exComprehensive, concise, blunt where required. Fiona Hill is a professional Russia Analyst and the methodically organized outline here displays that expertise. Recommended for all armchair kremlinologists....more
This is an epic investigatory report, on the finances of the Modern Russian state and its architect, little Vlad Putin, the boy who wanted to be a spyThis is an epic investigatory report, on the finances of the Modern Russian state and its architect, little Vlad Putin, the boy who wanted to be a spy and a tough guy. But it has none of the bitter drama of that description. It's a clear-headed, well-documented economic report, and most if not all of the overarching dramatic threads must be drawn by the reader.
This took me all of last summer to read and it was absolutely worth it. No one knew then, that The Littlest Czar would pull an international wobbly and go face down in the historical chip-dip. But he has. This book would take a twelve-page review to sum, analyze and draw conclusions from all the material included. But a funny thing has happened on the way to that necessity--- because Vlad has skipped the exposition and proceeded straight to the spoiler, with his Ukraine misadventure.
This was a great book in many instances, and clearly required grueling sky-high amounts of data and historical archaeology to produce. It's also a great book to have absorbed prior to Vlad's cross-border road trip. As such, probably best to leave this one to the economists and historians and not the casual readers. Be assured that the evidence is damning. ...more
Like the better longform Ken Burns documentaries, Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time whelms and then overwhelms with the low-level data, the core bLike the better longform Ken Burns documentaries, Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time whelms and then overwhelms with the low-level data, the core builds out from the copious scraps. What is left to the reader is a heartbreaking introduction -- or recapitulation-- of the searing, stormy history of the Soviet Union. As seen by the woman & man in the middle of the storm.
And as with any wide-screen portrayal of a people and place too complex to sum, the feeling that's left is entirely human, entirely poignant. Don't pick this up as a contemplation of the eternally altruist spirit of mankind, though. It's a deadly, cold-blooded account as well, when the circumstances demand it:
“… one said, “No matter what, I’m still a communist. We were supposed to build socialism. How could we have broken Hitler’s spine without Magnitka and Vorkuta?” The second one: “I've been talking to the local elderly … A lot of them worked or served--- I don’t know the right word for what they did—in the camps. They were the cooks, the guards, special agents. There was no other work out here, and those jobs paid well: salaries, rations, outfitting. That’s what they call it, ‘work.’ For them the camps were work. A job! And here you are talking about crimes against humanity. Sin and the soul. It wasn't just anyone doing time, it was the people. And the ones sentencing them, and guarding them, were the people, too—not foreign workers, not people brought in from outside—they were the very same people. Our own men…. Now, everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about it… it’s simple arithmetic … Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all this… and they found millions of people who were willing to…”
Let's be real-- this is a long and difficult read. But a country that was so instrumental-- some might say counter-instrumental-- to the story of the West really has to have its story told and understood. Fascinating and bleak. ...more
... I said nothing during the meeting, but afterward I went to see Alexander Nix. "This can't be legal," I told him. To which he replied, "You can'
... I said nothing during the meeting, but afterward I went to see Alexander Nix. "This can't be legal," I told him. To which he replied, "You can't expect anything legal with these people. It's Africa."
To my way of thinking, the Cambridge Analytica operation explains about ninety percent of both the American and British nightmare scenarios of the last few years: Trump and Brexit. Mr. Wylie was in a position to see the way the company came to be, the disturbing inside track. He is someone who knows it inside out, in the right order, and with the right inflection, because he knew all the players--and was there.
Wylie is something of a tech nerd, who bounced around the various spheres of influence in North America and Britain--basically offering credible social-science number-crunching, for persuasion and turnout in political campaigns. Gigs in Canada for the LPC party, then the US for Obama, then to Britain for the Lib Dems, before the move to the shadowy SCL Corporation in Britain, who did all manner of political analysis, polling and disinformation campaigns, all over the world. If you needed a referendum tipped in the third world, if you needed to target certain demographics in elections, then SCL could arrange all of it discreetly.
(Later in the life of the scam, the head of SCL and its corporate twin, Cambridge Analytica, one Alexander Nix, would be caught in a devastating BBC video sting, offering an array of 'fixes' to an offshore interest. From voter suppression to bribery to honey-traps, Nix assures the would-be clients, SCL/CA could arrange things in ways profitable to all players in the deal.) It's probably best to let the book speak for itself, in exerpts :
Social Engineering Is Big Business. Let's start with Breitbart, the disruptive right wing enabler funded by the affluent Mercers, and operated after the passing of Breitbart himself by the ever-calculating, pre-trumpist Steve Bannon.
“When Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced the Mercers to Bannon) died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took his place as senior editor, and assumed his philosophy.”
“… the Breitbart Doctrine: Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture…”
“At our first meeting, Bannon was the executive chair of Breitbart and had come to Cambridge in search of promising young conservatives and candidates to staff his new London bureau…. He had a problem, though. For all the site’s sound and fury, it became pigeonholed as a place for young, straight white guys who couldn’t get laid. Gamergate was one of the first, most public instances of their culture war: When several women tried to bring to light the gross misogyny within the gaming industry, they were hounded, doxed, and sent numerous death threats in a massive campaign against the “progressives” imposing their “feminist ideology” onto gaming culture.”
“Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened. Bannon realized the power of cultivating the misogyny of horny virgins. Their nihilistic anger and talks of “beta uprisings” simmered in the recesses of the Internet. But growing an army of “incels” (involuntary celibates) would not be sufficient for the movement he fantasized about. He needed to find a new approach. This is one of the odder moments in the Cambridge Analytica saga …”
Forging The Weapons For Dismantling The Culture. “Mercer looked at winning elections as a social engineering problem. The way to “fix society” was by creating simulations: if we could quantify society inside a computer, optimize that system, and then replicate that optimization outside the computer…. The structure chosen to set up this new entity was extremely convoluted, and it even confused staff working on projects, who were never sure who exactly the actually worked for. SCL Group would remain the “parent” of a new US subsidiary, incorporated in Delaware, called Cambridge Analytica…”
“Nix initially explained how this labyrinthine setup was to allow us to operate under the radar. Mercer’s rivals in the finance sector watched his every move, and if they knew that he had acquired a psychological warfare firm (SCL), others in the industry might figure out his next play—to develop sophisticated trend-forecasting tools—or poach key staff. We knew Bannon wanted to work on a project with Breitbart, but this was originally supposed to be a side project to satiate his personal fixations. Of course, this was all bullshit, and they wanted to build a political arsenal…”
All That Remained Was Finding Targeting Data. Enough Targeting Data. “One of the challenges for social sciences like psychology, anthropology, and sociology is a relative lack of numerical data, since it’s extremely hard to measure and quantify the abstract cultural or social dynamics of an entire society. That is, unless you can throw a virtual clone of everyone into a computer, and observe their dynamics. It felt like we were holding the keys to unlock a new way of studying society. How could I say no to that?”
Survey Says: Trust Facebook. Who Knows You Best? “He typed in a query, and a list of links popped up. He clicked on one of the many people who went by that name in Nebraska – and there was everything about her, right up on the screen. Here’s her photo, here’s where she works, here’s her house. Here are her kids, this is where they go to school, this is the car she drives. She voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, she loves Katy Perry, she drives an Audi, she’s a bit basic … and on and on and on. We knew everything about her – and for many records, the information was updated in real time, so if she posted to Facebook, we could see it happening.”
“And not only did we have all her Facebook data, but we were merging it with all the commercial and state bureau data we'd bought as well. And imputations made from the U.S Census. We had data about her mortgage applications, we knew how much money she made, whether she owned a gun. We had information from her airline mileage programs, so we knew how often she flew. We could see if she was married (she wasn't). We had a sense of her physical health. And we had a satellite photo of her house, easily obtained from Google Earth. We had re-created her life in our computer. She had no idea.”
“”Let me get this straight,” I said. “If I create a Facebook app, and a thousand people use it, I’ll get like 150,000 profiles? Really? Facebook actually lets you do that?””
“ … this means that, for an analyst, there’s often no need to ask questions: You simply create algorithms that find discrete patterns in a user’s naturally occurring data. And once you do that, the system itself can reveal patterns in the data that you otherwise would never have noticed. Facebook users curate themselves all in one place, in a single data form. We don't need to connect a million data sets; we don't have to do complicated math to fill in missing data. The information is already in place, because everyone serves up their real-time autobiography, right there on the site. If you were creating a system from scratch to watch and study people, you couldn’t do much better than Facebook…”
And That Only Sets The Stage. Wylie comes across as sympathetic, believable, and credible on the facts; he terminated his association with SCL/Cambridge within a year of Bannon's taking over, and before the Trump Campaign. If you had any lingering suspicion that the social media, elections or referenda in which you partake might be fair or unobserved by interlopers, you never will again. Recommended.
“On March 16, 2018, a day before The Guardian and The New York Times pubished my story, Facebook announced that it was banning me from not only Facebook but also Instagram. Facebook had refused to ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other armies of hate, but it chose to ban me.”...more
... I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort
... I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other , as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else's interests we can't even see ...
The trick with pro-grade "disinformation" seems to be not just creating one reality for each target audience, but the complete disregard with which you create a separate one for another target audience without alerting the first. Until the disinformer has mastered the art, he or she may be concerned with a unified spread of influence, across a broad range of a target population, but the opposite appears to be true. Narrowing and segmenting the target is much more important than any concern with "consistency". Micro-targeting sets specific mousetraps for specific, shortrange goals, undetectable shifts that can be expanded and later congealed as a position. And eventually a position that nobody would have agreed with in the first place. All is deniable, the important thing is outcome. Let them debate fairness, or moving goalposts, in the unflattering glow of defeat.
Soviet-Kiev born Pomerantsev takes a two-part approach to his book (his update, really, since his first book, which was more Russia-centric) --in which the main stream is his tour of world Information specialists, analysts, dissidents and movement people, who narrate their perspective of a world that is finding that truth is more debateable than ever. Against which he mixes in some elements of biography, his childhood with dissident parents, a family who escaped to the West. His parents worked in film and media, and Pomerantsev grew up in the shadows of his father's new employers, both the BBC and Radio Free Europe. Under each category of narrative in the book, the theme is basically the definition of control. Which entities shape history, and how their manipulation of information deceives the participants.
We get the all-too-familiar, with whispering campaigns, scam, smear, and fake news. Alongside of which we get the new developments, which the Russians call active measures--- where capillarity, white-jamming, sockpuppets, cyborgs, trolls and bot-herders all move among us. And which cumulatively are able to force large change in microscopic interest-groups.
The former Cambridge Analytica analyst Christopher Wylie has placed the blame for access squarely in the hands of Facebook: “Imagine we are on a blind date, we’ve never met before and I start telling you how much I love your favourite musicians, how I watch the same TV as you do etc, and you realise the reason I’m so perfect for you is because I spent the last two years going through your photo albums, reading your text messages and talking to your friends. Facebook is that stalker.” In the current climate of untrustworthy influence campaigns, using an algorithm-based, non-randomized platform to obtain your news, your politics, your positions-- is to hand over the keys of the car to an unknown driver.
Pomerantsev's book is a kind of intermediate disinfo reader; it hops all over the map, but it's useful to recall the timeline in the narrative. The key dates in the origin of the Information Plague are these: 1991, fall of the Berlin Wall & Soviet Union; 2000, election of Kgb Officer Putin to Russian Federation; 2007, the Russian hack and cyber-shutdown of Estonia; 2014, the Russian invasion and disinfo war with Ukraine; 2016, Brexit, and the assisted appointment of Donald Trump to the US Presidency.
The soaring use of influence campaigns is mirrored by the rise of unregulated new information platforms, only now imaginable via new technologies. Both the Russians and the West-- from the First World War forward, really--have used propaganda techniques to bias and control the facts and fictions that write history. America has always had a culture & soft-power apparatus operating in tandem with its wartime propaganda campaigns; the Cold War expanded and diffused those boundaries. The Russians seem never to have differentiated the two. The fine print under the Russian campaigns seems to be that Life Is Wartime. And to be fair, if your life was the 2oth Century in Ukraine or East Germany, that may not be far off. But it's important to recognize it and label it, define the components and name them. Pomerantsev, along with others, like Wylie, like Masha Gessen-- are doing just that.
It matters. It's personal, it's life and death. Manufactured Consent-- is not consent....more
Although this is pitched as something of a docu-drama, the author has gone to some lengths to make it purely non-fiction. And in the very-disputed terAlthough this is pitched as something of a docu-drama, the author has gone to some lengths to make it purely non-fiction. And in the very-disputed territory of French Resistance legends, that is not easily said or done. What Glass has concentrated on here is the splintered paths of two brothers, both British undercover officers, sent to France to work in clandestine operations during the German occupation. There is so much fiction and targeted exaggeration about France under the occupation that no one narrative defines it; it's good to have well researched non-fiction that helps to map the era.
Glass's account has three acts, organizing the underground maquisards & prepping for Normandy, the allied invasion itself & the guerilla work behind the lines, and then the straggling threads of the aftermath, often contrary or bittersweet for the resistance. As with any non-fiction, the exposition gets fairly elaborate, a little bit overly methodical. That said, when the moment comes, there is a visceral blast of action:
At a little before nine o'clock, the hour for the BBC's Messages Personnels, Yvonne Cormeau left the house alone. She walked to the barn, climbed up the hayloft ladder, and dug into the straw. Her wireless receiver lay in its familiar hiding hole. She assembled its four parts, hooked up the aerial, and put on her headphones. The radio sputtered static and German propaganda until she found the frequency of Radio Londres. The announcer greeted listeners with the familiar preamble, "Les Francais parlent aux Francais," --"The French speak to the French." Next came a litany of apparently meaningless phrases that made sense only to selected resistants. "That evening, 306 messages were sent out by the BBC; and that night, for the very first time, every single message was loaded with meaning," said Maurice Buckmaster, SOE Colonel, F-section, London.
"Wilma says yes" was code for destroying the Angouleme-Bordeaux railroad. "It's hot in Suez" decreed the cutting of telephone and telegrah cables. "The dice are on the table" and other doggerel told operatives from Calais to Marseille to demolish, rampage, and kill in a wave of terrorist violence to disrupt and distract the German occupiers. At last, Yvonne Cormeau heard, "Ia a une voix de fausset,"--"He has a falsetto voice".
"I didn't even bother to go down the ladder," she said later, "but jumped down so as to tell everybody about it, because this was the culminating moment of our mission--"
The message meant the Normandy landing would be at dawn on the following day.
The central plots are the nighttime work of the underground, often here a wild alignment of French nationals, Spanish communists, English & American special operatives. A gradeschool teacher with her schoolhouse of children-- perhaps on a class field trip to a cathedral or similar--- often made as good an intelligence operative as a courier on a stolen motorcycle. Here the documentary approach of the author is borne out; the real thing is more exciting than what might be invented, a colorful insurgency taking place in secret by moonlight-- and the even more-dangerous exploits undertaken in broad daylight.
It should be said that each and every aspect here of clandestine organization, underground communication, sabotage and adventures in general-- introduce new names and place names in every clause or clarifying statement. I know of no fiction that has as many named participants, villages, towns, rivers, canals, forests, ridges, roads, nationalities & military entities. The wary reader should know that of the hundred or so participants, there are at most only ten or a dozen key characters, and that a general knowledge of the French terrain and frontier area will get you by.
Maybe it's something of a spoiler, but la Résistance was successful. What was not a success was unravelling the movement to align with the takeover by newly arrived uniformed allies, new to the terrain and the struggle. As it turns out, even the Brits, Spaniards and Americans who served in the underground couldn't disentangle themselves from the maelstrom of the gruesome land war in Europe; many ended under suspicion, or buried in back offices, or even under court martial. Some were swept into the concentration camps in Germany before their eventual liberation. The story at hand in "They Fought Alone" owes much to the fact that a trial was conducted by the British, persecuting their own man in France, for war crimes.
There remains a nagging unreliability about everything that happens in an occupied zone, or in the same zone once open war has arrived. Scores to be settled, war profiteering, risk-averse warriors and the occasional barbarism of the resistance movement itself-- all come back to haunt the participants. Wartime heroics, as with wartime crimes, are inevitably obscured and filed deep in that famous, if dusty, catch-all file drawer, "War, Fog-of"....more
The basic line of Russian foreign policy through 2011 was not that the European Union and the United States were threats. It was that they should c
The basic line of Russian foreign policy through 2011 was not that the European Union and the United States were threats. It was that they should cooperate with Russia, as an equal ... [but] what had been an oligarchy of contending clans in the 1990s was transformed into a kleptocracy, in which the state itself became the single oligarchical clan. Rather than monopolizing law, the Russian state under Putin monopolized corruption. In matters of peace and war, Moscow also took actions that made it harder for Europeans to see Russia as an equal. In April, 2007, Estonia was crippled for weeks in a major cyberattack. Although the event was confusing at the time, it was later understood to be the first salvo in a Russian cyberwar against Europe and the United States.
Yale Historian Timothy Snyder's newest book is a revelation, a consensus-rattling study of East-West dissonance in our era of failed glasnost, the crumbled optimism of the late eighties. Snyder doesn't do a lot of dithering on possibilities, but dwells on what we have actually seen in that timespan from Russia (actually beginning as all things must, in the aftermath of World War One). As opposed to what we have heard from Russia, in that same timespan.
Same Chessboard, Different Rules On Each Side Snyder presents the dueling inevitables that emerged after the Great War and the October Revolution: For Russia and communism, structured revolutionary cycles were known in advance; with the Czar overthrown, capitalism would be replaced by socialism, collectives would lead to pure communism, private property would be dissolved permanently, and the idea of 'state' would be a union of collectively held soviets or people's councils. For Europe and capitalism, colonial arrangements would be replaced by the unalterable dynamic of trade and free markets, leading inevitably to open democracy. The idea of 'state' would be kept only for matters of defense.
Neither of these worked out awfully well. While the Soviet Union would actually crash and burn in the 2oth century, the post-colonial West with its free-market ethic would be saddled by humanitarian concerns, deep rifts and self-reexamination brought on by the blithe immunity of 'markets' to the actual concerns of 'people'.
Second Chances Shambling into shape after the fall of the Wall and the loss of the Eastern European client states, Russia suffered no such pangs of conscience. Vladimir Putin finally arrived at a plan, complete with an historical reference from Russia's past imaginings... The Russian fascist-christian ideologue Ivan Ilyin, 1883-1954, is a much revered, much quoted influence on the contemporary philosophy of Putin and his regime.
... It is impossible for a human being to do what Ilyin imagined a Russian redeemer should: emerge from a realm of fiction and act from the spirit of totality. Yet a feat of scenography by skilled propagandists (or, in the nice Russian phrase, "political technologists") might create the appearance of such an earthly miracle. The myth of a redeemer would have to be founded on lies so enormous that they could not be doubted, because doubting them would mean doubting everything. It was not so much elections as fictions that allowed a transition of power, a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Then Ilyin and Putin rose together, the philosopher and the politician of fiction.
The work of Ilyin is a mirror for what Putin will imagine, fulfill, or emulate on his way to consolidating the kleptocracy under the falsified banner of 'republic'. Snyder uses Ilyin's vision throughout the book (as in fact Putin has progressively done ever more so, since his sojourn away from the presidency in circa 2008-2012. During which it appears he was a very busy man, scheming at a new menu of measures that would begin to reinstate the size and scope of the Russian state he felt was lost after the USSR.) Philosophy now neatly wrapped and swaddled with Christian Orthodoxy, Putin launched after 2007 into a new wave of Russian aggression, starting with the cyber attack on Estonia. The full dress rehearsal would have to wait for the Ukraine to push back against its Russian puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, after which Putin could invade.
Active Measures Snyder takes the Ukraine experiment as his central set piece, explaining as it does how Russia's new hybrid war, the combination of disrupting while spreading disinformation-- could take place in the 21st century, the fully wired and connected century. Way too involved to even summarize here, Snyder comprehensively covers topics like : reverse truth or schizo-fascism, unmarked resources, implausible deniability, reverse asymmetry, frozen conflict, susceptibilities, pre-emptive cyber, and active measures, the full array of disruption and control that Russia was developing in Ukraine. He makes a convincing case that the grudgingly resentful New Russia was exercising every 'virtual' trick in the book, alongside its more conventional, if unmarked, combatants in the field.
Without a lot of warning, having handled the prelude, Snyder gets to the direct case that Russia would go from Ukraine to cyber attack on the Brexit decision and then the United States:
All of the major Russian television channels, including RT, supported a vote to leave the EU in the weeks before the June 23, 2016, poll. A persuasion campaign on the internet, although unnoticed at the time, was probably more important. Russian internet trolls, live people who participated in exchanges with British voters, and Russian Twitter bots, computer programs that sent out millions of targeted messages, engaged massively on behalf of the Leave campaign. Four hundred and nineteen Twitter accounts that posted on Brexit were localized to Russia's Internet Research Agency--later, every single one of them would also post on behalf of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Britons who considered their choices had no idea at the time that they were reading material disseminated by bots, nor that the bots were part of a Russian foreign policy to weaken their country...
Winning The World Having thus set the stage and drawn the characters who would participate in the last act of his book, Snyder brings on the great ghostly presence whose qualities are even more mysterious than those of Vladimir Putin himself. He leaves us in no doubt about what has happened during the course of the proceedings:
… The politics of eternity are full of phantasmagoria, of bots and trolls, ghosts and zombies, dead souls and other unreal beings who escort a fictional character to power. “Donald Trump, successful businessman” was not a person. It was a fantasy born in the strange climate where the downdraft of the American politics of eternity, its unfettered capitalism, met the rising hydrocarbon fumes of the Russian politics of eternity, its kleptocratic authoritarianism. Russians raised a “creature of their own” to the presidency of the United States. Trump was the payload of a cyberweapon, meant to create chaos and weakness, as in fact he has done.
Trump’s advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.
Throughout the exercise, Russians knew what was fact and what was fiction. Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the “VERY successful businessman” of his tweets, but an American loser who became a Russian tool. Although Americans might dream otherwise, no one who mattered in Moscow believed that Trump was a powerful tycoon. Russian money had saved him from the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure.
History much later in this century will have its verdict on how point-by-point correct Timothy Snyder has been in this book; but it is scrupulously footnoted and annotated, verifiable factually. It also may be the best rendition we have of the recent years of our century in Europe and the U.S. And it is distinctly bleak....more
For What It's Worth : Let's start off with a quick confession. I've been a politics junkie of late, and nothing is more fascinating in this era than thFor What It's Worth : Let's start off with a quick confession. I've been a politics junkie of late, and nothing is more fascinating in this era than the Trump-Russia probe. An adventure that's got everything-- white-knuckle moments of confrontation and accusation, intriguing coldwar-reprise spycraft & deception, and near-shakespearean levels of hubris and ominously flawed self-regard. A tale of a doomed, reverse Excalibur, where he (insert your guess here) who dares grasp the sword is fated to live forever in the dumpster of history. And everyone who will be his accomplice --is splattered and stained with the same shame.
For The General Reader : Those who want to be updated on just how we got here might do a lot worse than the Isikoff / Corn account. I can't rate its accessibility for the average reader, because I came to it having read hundreds, maybe thousands of pages about this already. So a daunting cast of characters was, for myself anyway, almost entirely comprised of persons I knew something about already. I can say, though, this doesn't try for being a completist sort of account, either. It struck me that it seemed well-paced and concise, though probably best suited to a general readership with some familiarity with the material.
Several thoughts came to mind in reading through this. In no particular order:
For The Record : Trump is definitely a Russian asset. That’s not even up for debate. Anyone who’s read spy fiction or non-fiction knows --there are an infinite array of levels of asset, from the deeply embedded government mole who passes nuke schematics to the enemy-- all the way down the line to the hat-check girl at the after-hours club, who can tell tales on important somebodies. Or perhaps as importantly, even just the nights they were out late. So Trump is somewhere on the spectrum, even if not very consciously so, and even if we go only by his own public admissions.
One of the things I’m realizing as I read the Russian Roulette book--- is that the Dnc hack and then the WikiLeaks / Guccifer leaks of same-- did not really matter in the election. Think back. What did we find out from those leaks (which were emails from HRC, Podesta, Mook, Abedin, Wasserman-Shultz, etc etc)…? Net value: nyet. We learned crap-level gossip, like the Dnc was favoring HRC and was mean to Bernie Sanders. That Donna Brazile had handed off one of the debate questions to the Clinton people. Junk level anecdotes. Barely a news item there in any of it.
But the media narrative says the Dnc hacks were the foundation of the whole Russiagate thing, and the right wing points to it as being standard election dirty tricks, that there was no actual criminal activity, that Mueller is on a witch hunt, etc etc.
Thing is, the CozyBear / FancyBear actions in the matter overall-- that is, the active measures from Russian intelligence-- are what count. Not the effectiveness of the data they dropped. But rather in the sense that all of it, the thousands of pages, the death by a million cuts, swelled the disinformation being filtered into the American electorate. That overall, Clinton was untrustworthy because of emails or something, and Trump was coarse but just the antidote to that smirking liberal elitism which despises real Americans--yes, but the bigger picture.
Because the Dnc thing is like number 137 on a list of Trump-Russian-Intelligence interactions, starting long long ago with the Russian funny-money buying his properties in the 8os. Once you concede that Putin’s Russia is a mafia state, it’s clearer than clear that his intel services and financial entities--- are mafia mechanisms. That ensnared silly, grabby, tabloid-trashy Trump. It isn’t a political story, or a spy story. It’s a Russian Mafia story.
So to even discuss Trump as “an asset” is wrong. Because that kind of implies agent, actor, some independence but aligned with a foreign minder, on certain accounts. Because that hat-check girl can actually cut off her arrangement, steer clear, but Trump can't. When you go with the more likely Russian Mafia overlay-- he’s a front-man, an owned employee, a low-level somebody who fronts for the made men-- you understand what he is. Simply described, Trump is a puppet. And his every move is furtive, guilty, a default denial before the accusation even arises …
For The Trainspotters : Some fun factoids emerge in Russian Roulette, notably a few that aren't quite common knowledge:
* The HRC campaign nearly did a little spy catching themselves, but thought better of it: Clinton campaign manager Rob Mook, armed with warnings from the Fbi, "... wondered if the campaign could mount what he called a "honeypot" operation. The Clinton team would plant phony information about Clinton or the campaign within the Dnc computer system and wait to see if the Trump campaign or its allies later made public use of it. If they did, it would prove that the Trump camp was in league with the Russians." The idea was voted down as being too melodramatic. Probably a good call. But they could have done it anyway, kept it quiet, and tucked it up their sleeve for insurance. Hindsight.
* From one of the Steele memos that comprise the dossier, a miniscule notation, an accusation, that the Trump camp was "using moles within the Dnc and hackers in the U.S.-- to provide intelligence to Russia." Small thing, but no Dnc 'mole' has ever surfaced or been identified, anyone working for Trump within the Dnc at cross-purposes to the campaign. Interesting because almost all of the Steele Dossier material has been borne out so far, and if this is the case, that person is in a position to know a lot of things. The mere existence of such a person would be direct evidence of collusion, full stop.
* This one is an Analysis sort of point, but valid nonetheless: it was judged within the Obama security apparatus and cabinet that returning fire, in cyber terms, for what they were watching coming in from Russia would put the U.S. at a disadvantage. "In one of the meetings, Director of National Intelligence Clapper said that he was worried that Russia might respond with cyberattacks against America's critical infrastructure--and possibly shut down the electrical grid." Validating the inherent superiority, in asymmetrical war conditions, of the party that has less to lose (than a tech-driven superpower like the U.S.)
For Fuck's Sake : All this isn't about some zany "dirty tricks" from a bygone election. Asymmetrical war isn't cold war, with its brinksmanship and balance-of-power nuances. It is direct confrontation via other means, actual hot war, with the lesser party intending to inflict Pearl Harbor or 9-11 type physical damages on the stronger party, with surprise as the defining element.
It was two days before the election, and Clint Watts was still trying to warn America. The former FBI analyst and two colleagues published a report noting that they had monitored more than seven thousand media accounts in the previous thirty months and had discerned a "small army of social media operatives" with the goal of "moving misinformation and disinformation from primarily Russian-influenced circles into the general social media population." They saw an integrated and coordinated Russian attack.
There are two prongs to the Trump Russia story, as I see it. First is the long and dire history of citizen Trump, his failed loans, marriages, businesses, careers, his later bankruptcies and finally, self-reinvention. Which came with the aid of his money-laundering escapades involving secret, dirty Russian money. The Second is the closely related campaign from the New Russia, the mafia state, the entity that regrets its failed status since the Wall came down and the country went gangster. This is the asymmetrical-war-plan of disinformation and disruption, using financial and cyber means mainly-- though in a last resort, military, as in Ukraine-- to reassert itself into what it considers its rightful superpower status....more
Winter was coming on--the terrible Russian winter. I heard businessmen speak of it so: "Winter was always Russia's best friend. Perhaps now it will
Winter was coming on--the terrible Russian winter. I heard businessmen speak of it so: "Winter was always Russia's best friend. Perhaps now it will rid us of Revolution."
Jack Reed was a reporter, adventurer, bohemian. And a quintessential New American. Never a conformist, he was willing to take the world as it came to him, gave due consideration to all comers, and was the very image of what 1910 thought of as The Modern Man. His exploits were conducted with minimal preparation but astounding amounts of nerve and abandon, pure willpower. In his Collected Works we have three non-fiction books: Reed's first journey into revolution and survival below the Rio Grande, called "Insurgent Mexico" … the picaresque adventures in the Balkans he called "The War In Eastern Europe" .. and the major opus, "Ten Days That Shook The World", which chronicles his extended involvement with the 1917 revolution in Russia.
South Of The Border The first book presents an already-in-progress situation, with Reed more or less embedded with the rebels, soldiers of fortune and guns for hire that made up the resistance to the federales--soldiers and police-- who protected the status quo of the landowners and aristocrats, little changed from the Spanish regime onwards. This was the Mexico of 1913, ripe for change, no rules and no allegiances except what could be forged in the struggle; charismatic men like Orozco, Madero and Pancho Villa were the catalysts in a grand upheaval, directly across a thin borderline from El Paso Texas.
Reed saw his chance, and moved right into the middle of the conflict, inventing for himself the idea of participatory journalism in the process. To say he was embedded with Villa and his men was no exaggeration, and although not mentioned outright, it would have been wildly unlikely for Reed not to have taken up arms for his own day-to-day security in the circumstances.
What transpires in the weeks of the war was catnip to American audiences, the vision of a romantic Latin culture full of violence and color just across a river from the mainland US; giant army movements comprised of Mexicans of every stripe, surging across the desert badlands and treacherous mountains like the ragtag armies of Napoleon crossing the steppe. With every wave of combatants came the camp followers, the women, the children, the laundry and hospital trains tracking the battles and the encampments behind the lines. At night, the bonfires and the corridos, building the myths of the day's heroes.
The modern reader needs to remember that wild-west environs and blown-up train tracks were the thrillers of the day, featured in broadsheets and tabloids from San Francisco to New York; Jack Reed, jauntily reckless junior journalist, blundered through and wrote it all up as adventure, and on his return found that he had written his ticket for the future.
On The Doorstep Of The Mysterious East In all ways the best of the three books in this collection, the "War In Eastern Europe" takes us not just to another legendarily exotic region, the Balkans, but it does so in the company of a considerably better writer than the one we were with in the bleak hinterlands of Chihuahua. Reed has been back to his Greenwich Village milieu in New York in the meantime, now toast of the town for his dashing reporting, and managed to step up to a new, accomplished level of descriptive prose for his next project. That his story from Mexico concerned a bottom-up revolución, redolent of class struggle everywhere, anywhere-- was not lost on the group of influential, often-celebrated writers, artists and publishers in his New York circle. His work would grow in maturity, and in strict qualitative terms; safe to say he wasn't aiming at the newsstands now, but at the bookstores & libraries.
Reed entered the theater of war through the back door, at the open city of Salonika, Greece. Sarajevo had happened, and the Empires had clashed by this moment in 1915; but it was the era before the Lusitania and the American entry into the war in Europe, though all parties knew it must happen. Thus there was a rapt audience in both the Us and the Uk for the news from Europe. In his by-now typical, haphazard way, Reed and an Illustrator made their way up through the Balkans, chasing the war but mainly observing the culture, the lay of the land. It was unfailingly picturesque.
White distant walls, round towers, and a row of dazzling buildings edged the bay, and little by little a gray and yellow city grew from the barren landscape, climbing a steep hill wide-spread from the sea, a city of broad, irregular tiled roofs, round domes, spiked with a hundred minarets, encircled by the great crenellated wall that was built in the days of the Latin Kingdom--Salonika, the Eastern gate of war!
What gets reported is as much travelogue, in the best sense, as it is documentary, alongside the telling detail that tips the reader to the dissonance below the surface:
Offshore drifted to us the cries of Arabian porters, the shouts of the bazaar, strange minor chants of sailors from the coasts of Asia Minor and the Black Sea, as they hoisted their lateen sails on ships painted at the bows with eyes, whose shape was older than history; a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer; the braying of donkeys; pipes and drums playing squealing dance-music from some latticed house far up in the Turkish quarter. Swarms of rainbow-colored boats manned by swarthy, barefooted pirates jostled each other in a roar of shrill squabbling, two hundred yards away. A skiff, carrying a big Greek flag, brought the medical officer. He bounded up the ladder shouting: "No one ashore who wants to come back. The city is quarantined--plague--"
Everywhere Reed turns, the world is trembling with the enormity of the war on the European plain; the old hierarchies and allegiances are being overturned left and right, the turmoil is palpable. But the truth of the matter is that Reed and his pictorialist friend don't ever see much of the war itself. The battles are far too fraught and locked-in, this being the trench style warfare of the day. But the imagery he finds is no less rich for originating behind the lines and on the outer flanks:
Colonel Doshdovsky, the one-armed Russian commander of all the Turcomans, wore the cross of St. George, and the first and second class of the Order Of Vladimir--for he was a great hero--and his vicious Turcoman sword was covered with Persian verses inlaid with gold. With him we inspected the Turcoman camp... Many had taken off their long caftans, revealing the thin black undergarment, laced tight at the waist, that fell to their baggy red trousers. Others had doffed the great fur hats--and beneath was a brown head shaved bald except for a scalp-lock on the crown, covered by a little silk skull-cap. High saddles bossed with silver lay around, bundles of rich-colored cloths from Khiva and Bokhara and Samarkand, sleeping-rugs and praying-rugs whose weave and color are secrets of the dead. They wore twisted silver chains down their backs, wide sashes of brilliant silk, straight and curved daggers inlaid with precious metals, and swords in richly ornamented scabbards that perhaps Tamerlane had seen...
On the boundaries of the greatest mechanized war the world had ever seen, a million and one ethnic and cultural artifacts hovered and went extinct. Moving targets pass other moving targets in the night, with impenetrable logic and chaos all intertwined. Reed manages to report.
The Ten Days That Shook The World Timing is everything, they say, and there never was more stunningly intuitive timing than that which took Reed to Petrograd in September of 1917. That he lived and recorded a peak moment of human history unfolding-- is undeniable. Somehow, though, the main pillar of the trilogy, the classic work that John Reed will always be known for--is a giant Glossary Of Terms, an ever-morphing Org Chart of the revolution of the Soviets.
Reed kept and constructed his account from notes of his own, but also from an admittedly enormous cache of newspapers, documents, handbills and speech transcriptions that he smuggled out afterwards. The book suffers with the weight of all this infinite minutiae, especially given that one evening's plan, proclamation or manifesto may be replaced, on the following morning, with a new order, decree, appeal or declaration. In the conditions of a mass revolution, the backdrop of rumors, distortions and outright lies-- leaves not much foundation for lasting reports. Everything in TDTSTW is perhaps valuable for the historian of social change mechanisms, but the Org-Chart lists and data clusters-- are arguably irrelevant to nearly any other reader. Vladimir Lenin does not appear, though present throughout, until over 2oo pages into the proceedings.
In the end, for narrative devices (which is to say not spreadsheet-datapoint arrays, but storytelling angle)-- Reed has only the one, and it is the relentless, rising tide of change. And one subject, really, but a monumental one: the inevitable arc of justice, that must somehow create an equalized society in the end.
To read that into TDTSTW, you must metabolize literally hundreds of pages of factoids and administrative fine points along the way. That mostly fall away, in the insanely euphoric and almost aphrodisiac bliss when the rush of humanity --and conscience--wins the day. Overcoming failed regimes and promises, swept away by the onslaught of History itself. But take this reader's advice on this, and try the Movie. ____________________ ["Reds" 1981]...more
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