Say this for the Russian regime. It may be composed of thugs, crooks, and liars, but its supporters and officials sure do have a way with words. My op-ed in the Los Angeles Times yesterday (entitled “Stand Up to Russia”) has brought this witty response from Pravda. The whole thing is worth reading for a laugh. But as a public service I hereby excerpt some of the best bits:
[T]his two-page schmuckfest of unadulterated bilge . . . could almost have been printed by the British Bullshit Corporation or written by that other insolent female who got a Pulitzer. . . . Paragraph after paragraph of lies, fabrications and insults more befitting of a latrine wall, written by some demented retard with his own excrement, than in the pages of what I thought (until last night) was a reputable publication. I mean, what an eye opener. . . . Max Boot calls Russia’s crossing into Georgia a violation of international law. So what does he have to say about the USA’s act of criminal agression [sic] and mass murder in Iraq? What does he have to say about the deployment of WMD in civilian areas? What does he have to say about the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? What does he have to say about the concentration camp at Guantanamo, which brings back flashes of Belsen, Treblinka and Dachau, or the innumerous concentration and extermination camps in the Baltic States?
Ironically, the author of this love note complains that “vapid claptrap” like my article is an indication that “it is virtually impossible for any US citizen to have a balanced idea of world events. The citizens of the USA are being misinformed, lied to and made clowns of by their own media.” Actually, it’s Russians who are being snowed under by their government-controlled media (of which Pravda is one organ among many others). Voice of America reports:
William Dunbar is a British citizen who worked as Tbilisi correspondent for Russia Today, Moscow’s international English-language television service. Dunbar resigned his position Saturday when the broadcaster refused to air his reports after he informed viewers on live TV that Russian warplanes had bombed the central Georgian city of Gori.
“I felt that I could no longer work for them because there was no real way hat I could be able to report the facts, and they did not really want to now what was really going on in Georgia if it did not sort of fit with the agenda that they were trying to put out,” Dunbar said.
The line the Kremlin is feeding its people can be glimpsed in this op-ed in today’s Financial Times by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He claims “there is . . . clear evidence” that Georgia has committed”atrocities” that are “so serious and systematic that they constitute acts of genocide.” Who knew that Georgia had committed genocide? But if the Baltic states can be guilty of running “concentration and extermination camps,” there’s no reason why Georgia cannot be guilty of even more heinous offenses–at least in the vivid Russian imagination.
“There can be little surprise, therefore, that Russia responded to this unprovoked assault on its citizens by launching a military incursion into South Ossetia,” Lavrov continues, as if Russian troops and its Ossetian puppets have not been goading Georgia for years by incursions into its territory (which, by the way, still includes Abkhazia and South Ossetia, not recognized as independent states by any other country). The notion that Russia cares about the fate of ethnic minorities in the Caucasus is particularly rich, given the way Russian troops razed Grozny and killed tens of thousands of people in their vicious campaign to retain control of Chechnya.
Lavrov goes on: “Despite Georgia’s assertion that it had imposed a unilateral ceasefire, Russian peacekeepers and supporting troops remained under continued attack–a fact confirmed by observers and journalists in the region.” Of course, what the bulk of “observers and journalists” say is precisely the opposite–that the Georgians tried to stop fighting but the Russians wouldn’t stop their attacks. Even now that Russia has announced a ceasefire, reports from Georgia indicate that its troops continue attacking.
It should be no surprise that Russian spokesmen are masters of the Big Lie–their Soviet predecessors practically invented the technique. What continues to depress and annoy me is how many well-intentioned Westerners are falling for the Russian line that it was really the Georgians who were the aggressors here.
