September 11, 2007
Here's a real-life superhero dilemma: What do you do when you're the world's most powerful news and opinion magazine, carrying the English-language torch of freedom on behalf of your million-plus high-net-worth readers across the globe, and suddenly you spot injustice on the Eurasian horizon: Sham elections in an oil-rich Eurasian country, resulting in a one-party parliament; its autocratic leader just pushed through constitutional amendments allowing him to remain in power for life; and it's waging a campaign to bully Western oil companies out of their lucrative oil fields, in spite of contracts and investments made.
If the country in question is
For The Economist, the Putin-as-Fascist story isn't bound by traditional Newtonian concepts of time or space, let alone the basic principles of Western journalism. It's a story that can be played like a deck of trump cards. No matter what else happens in the world -- for example, the mega-clusterfuck in
Thanks to the English magazine's clever rhetorical strategy, calibrating an effective mixture of aristocratic contempt, two-notches-smarter-than-Newsweek diction, and occasional anti-elitist populism to pander to its majority-American readership, readers trust The Economist. They -- particularly American readers -- trust it because they think it knows more than they do; this is its entire appeal. They even get a sick thrill being talked down to by a dirty old aristocratic prig. For Americans in particular, accustomed to the lifeless, dumbed-down, least-common-denominator prose in their own media, reading The Economist is its own reward, giving them the sense not only that they're smarter than the average Time subscriber, but that it even makes them vaguely decadent, in a literary-aristocratic sort of way. They become smarter by osmosis simply by being in the imagined drawing room of The Economist's wit-slinging editorial offices.
In reality, The Economist is one of the most appallingly wrong and evil -- as in responsible-for-millions-of-dead-people evil -- organs in the world today. As far as "wit" goes, The Economist ranks up there with Benson, the snappy TV sitcom butler, though it's nowhere near as delightfully entertaining as the British butler in the godawful Dudley Moore comedy Arthur.
Or as Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, observed after moving to
If only it was a question of overrated wit. But it's much worse. It's a sinister and sophisticated English snowjob. Considering their influence and their influential readership, not to mention where they're leading us with their anti-Russia campaign, it's time to set the record straight, to put the "s" back in "limey" and call The Economist for the slimey fucks that they are, before they drag us all down with them again, just as they did with Iraq.
* * *
Last month's Kazakhstan/Russia coverage is a perfect example of what's so wrong with the magazine.
Just before Kazakhstan's sham elections, The Economist warned that an "ugly trade" might soon happen: Every country in the West, save two, had already agreed to overlook President Nazarbayev's out-of-the-closet authoritarianism, and give him the chair to the OSCE in 2009 no matter how disgraceful the elections turned out. The two holdouts were the
These two countries still haven't made up their minds about whether or not to allow
As mentioned above, this story is four fucking years old. There's no "now" to it. The Economist article relies on a report issued in 2003 by sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya. Back in 2003, The Economist's colleagues in the Western media covered the report as the news story it then was. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, ran a story called "KGB influence still felt in
"Olga Kryshtanovskaya is a sociologist who dances with wolves. For more than a decade she's been
"But even Ms. Kryshtanovskaya says she's alarmed by her own recent findings. Since Vladimir Putin came to power four years ago, she's been tracking a dramatic influx into government of siloviki - people from the military, the former Soviet KGB, and other security services - bringing with them statist ideology, authoritarian methods, and a drill-sergeant's contempt for civilian sensibilities."
For The Economist's brand of quantum journalism, time is relative, depending on the observer -- or rather, the observer's agenda. A story like this is like a fine wine, meant to be stored in a cool place, to be popped open for their readers to help them forget all that other depressing, confusing news coming out of
What's strange is how sloppy The Economist is about this, to the point where it reads like a classic case of four-years-late plagiarism.
But most readers would never know how dated the peg to the recent cover story really is. "Political power in
The Economist betrays even more nervousness about running a story this belatedly with another strange insertion in the opening sentence:
"On the evening of August 22nd, 1992 - 16 years ago this week [note the ludicrous time-peg, "16 years ago this week" - Ed.] - Alexei Kondaurov, a KGB general, stood by the darkened window of his
Let's leave aside for now the very strange decision to anchor an anti-silovik story to Kondaurov - a former KGB general who was a top Yukos executive (respect to the PR firm that helped arrange that). A couple of paragraphs later, we are introduced to Kryshtanovskaya and her four-year-old study. Here, The Economist pulls a classic example of censorship-by-omission: "According to research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a quarter of the country's senior bureaucrats are siloviki - a Russian word meaning, roughly, 'power guys', which includes members of the armed forces and other security services, not just the FSB. The proportion rises to three-quarters if people simply affiliated to the security services are included. These people represent a psychologically homogeneous group, loyal to roots that go back to the Bolsheviks' first political police, the Cheka."
They never mention when the report was published, because if they did - "According to a report four years ago..." - it would kind of contradict the "now" in the sub-header. So you just don't mention it. Instead, you crudely manipulate her findings: "the proportion [of siloviki] rises to three-quarters if people simply affiliated to the security services are included."
Is that really what Kryshtankovskaya reported? In an interview with Radio Free Europe last year, she explained "The 78 percent figure...is not a precise figure." But precision, a quantum journalist might argue, is itself a relative concept.
* * *
For the last few years, The Economist has been waging a relentless, obsessive-compulsive campaign to rebrand
"It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in
That's as serious a charge as can possibly be levied - Nazi Germany with thousands of nuclear weapons. Fascism in the popular consciousness has a pretty simple, straightforward definition: a country that will invade and enslave the world by force, and gas its Jews. Is that
The Economist gets around this death-of-mankind problem by softening up its definition of Fascism, thereby making it fit Russia while at the same time defusing its seriousness: "History also offers a term to describe the direction in which Russia sometimes seems to be heading: a word that captures the paranoia and self-confidence, lawlessness and authoritarianism, populism and intolerance, and economic and political nationalism that now characterise Mr Putin's administration."
Yep, that's right, Fascism doesn't mean violently aggressive militarism, invasions, and the industrial slaughter of millions. Nope, you had it all wrong. In these multicultural times, we need to expand Fascism's meaning, to make it accessible to other cultures, particularly those we dislike. So now the new expando-version includes "self-confidence, lawlessness, populism"... Let's see, what else is happening in
This sleazy redefinition of the word Fascism allows The Economist to effectively rebrand
* * *
It wasn't always this way. In fact, if you hopped aboard The Economist's own DeLorean time machine, you'd find that there was a time when they downright loved their li'l Fascist spy in the Kremlin. Sometimes they loved him, that is. And sometimes they didn't. Kinda depended on the day of the week -- and to what degree he served Anglo-American geopolitical/corporate ambitions.
Keep in mind that in this relationship, Putin is the only one who's been consistent. When he came to power in 2000, he promoted the siloviki, shut down opposition media, and brought all other sources of power -- the Duma, Federation Council, and regional governors, under the Kremlin's control in what was called the "vertikalnaya vlast'." It was all out in the open. Everyone knew it.
In the beginning of his reign, The Economist was skeptical -- about everything, ranging from Putin's credentials as a liberal to an even more serious concern for Western investors, whether or not he could really get the chaos under control, which in his first year or two was really the main concern of Western investors--and The Economist:
"Though Mr Putin has said he will 'eliminate' the oligarchs 'as a class', the early signs are not encouraging." (May 13, 2000)
"It is not just that reform has bogged down, that economic growth is fizzling out, and that the Chechen war is dragging on unwinnably; the Kremlin's own authority also seems to be fraying." (March 16, 2001)
Regarding the media crackdown, in a rare moment of truth-telling The Economist explained, "Independent media in the provinces of
That provided some solace then, but is never mentioned today, even though any Russian with a radio or Internet connection is still in the same position they were in on April 17, 2001. Read that quote again, and again ... it's so incredible in its complete contradiction to everything The Economist says now that I can almost feel my hair falling out of my scalp...
But for those few hairs remaining, there's this Economist shocker, coming just a few months later:
"At home and abroad, things have never looked brighter for
Wait...didn't they just say...you can't do that, can you? Let's pull up another 2001 quote:
"
Ah, that's what I likes to hear. Yeah, feed me more of that anti-Putin moral crusading, baby. Come on, daddy-o, feed me:
"Mr Putin's huge popularity means that his new foreign policy faces no direct threat. Most Russians are delighted to see their country more popular and respected, and glad to avoid a direct entanglement in
Wait -- you can't flip-flop like that. Or can you? Yup indeed, if you're The Economist, you can go a-flippin' and a-floppin' all you want, on any issue you please. Even the most sacred issue of all: Putin's human rights record:
"Other western allies, such as
Wow. So first it was unsettling and foreboding, and these days it's Hitlerian, but way back in 2002, it's just... a "blot." And blots like these are par for the course for the West's friends, so therefore it's not really an issue.
By now, it's pretty obvious why The Economist decided to switch to pillow-talk mode with Putin: In the months after 9/11, it looked like he was going to be
To put it in their own words, "On acute issues, such as American involvement in the former Soviet empire, Mr Putin is shunting
Inevitable indeed. They really called that one. But at the time, they were gloating like a clique of English villains proud of their own deception: "That's a good Pootie-Poot! Good boy! Now go run along and play with, Blair. Go on, be a good doggie!"
The Economist's flip-flopping is so over-the-top absurd and unapologetic that it reads like a scene out of a bad Mel Brooks skit, with Harvey Korman playing Edward Lucas, by turns grotesquely sweet-talking or contemptuously dismissing the character of Putin, played by Cloris Leachman. One minute Putin's popularity is "not trustworthy" and "artificially bolstered by a servile state-run television," a few months later, "Most Russians are delighted" and "Mr Putin's huge popularity means that his new foreign policy faces no direct threat."
In the sleaziest of all of these flip-flops, they even managed, in the above-quoted November 2001 article, to brush off a future martyr's threat to her safety, balancing it positively against a grotesquely obvious PR exercise:
"Change is least visible in politics...The squeeze on the independent press continues: Anna Politovskaya, the most intrepid Russian reporter dealing with
I-bee-bee-bee-bee-whuhhh? So what you're saying is, Politkovskaya had to flee for her life, but hey, didja see the way they pulled up those
So what changed? Why did Putin's crackdown on the media go from being a problem, then to a blot not unlike other blots, then to something you contrast to a successful corpse-salvage mission in
What changed is Yukos. The arrest of oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in October, 2003. The darling of everyone from Exxon and Chevron to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle. The man who argued that
The Economist has admitted as much: "If the emergence of Yukos epitomised
What "excesses" might Yukos have committed? Murder, if you believe ex-Wall Street Journal writer David Satter, whose study of the rapacious oligarchs was once was cited favorably in The Economist. Mass theft, if you believe even Khodorkovsky's candid account of how Yukos' assets were acquired. Not that that's a big secret. But you see, admitting that into the record would sorta muddy up the picture. So that all gets passed off as "excesses," which could really mean anything, like "excess of free-market zeal." It's a whitewash, just like when Putin seemed pliable, The Economist downgraded his human rights record to mere "blot" status.
This is how The Economist has always worked in
Take this example from the Yeltsin years, a period where The Economist's record is so appallingly deceitful that it would require a separate article, and scores of beta-blockers just to read through without suffering a 10-valve thrombo. In late 1997, when it still looked like Western financial institutions were reaping huge profits and stood to earn more, The Economist said of Yeltsin and his notoriously hated "privatization" lieutenant, Anatoly Chubais:
"Market forces have grown stronger with each year, but may not yet be strong enough to propagate themselves unaided. Their chances would be much better if there were a hundred more people in government of Mr. Chubais's calibre, or even a score. Mr. Yeltsin, at least, appears to believe that there isn't one. Un-Marxist as it might be to argue as much, great men are needed to do great things. Mr. Yeltsin, in his way, is one such. And Mr. Chubais, in his way, is another."
Exactly four months later, as the IMF-backed pyramid scheme was unraveling and Westerners started getting burned, The Economist changed its mind, but in smarmy known-it-all language suggesting it had known this all along: "Russia's institutions being worryingly weak and the powers of its president frighteningly strong, it is vital that the man in charge is beholden to neither demagogues nor billionaires... Unfortunately, as age, vodka and the wooziness of barely diluted power get the better of him, Mr Yeltsin is utterly failing to do this part of his job.... Once a Titan, rightly lauded for helping to pull down one of the world's most evil regimes, he now seems to lurch, disaster-prone, from one fit of bad temper to the next. Poor
Yes, it was so long ago that he was "rightly lauded," I mean, how could anyone possibly have guessed he'd turn out to be so bad four long months later? It's like when Austin Powers discovered that Liberace was gay: "Who would have guessed? I never saw that one coming!"
The Economist even played their Fascism card back in the Yeltsin years ... although to entirely different purposes, as this 1998 email from scholar Anatol Lieven to David Johnson shows:
"Dear David, attached is part of my book on
In 1998, The Economist lied about a Russian Fascist threat in order to prop up a wildly unpopular, corrupt regime, which had overseen the total collapse of its economy, devastated the health of its citizens, and forever ruined the concepts of "liberalism," "free markets" and "free speech" in the minds of those who survived it ... all because it seemed to benefit us. Today, they're lying again about the Fascist threat, only this time in order to bring down a highly popular (albeit corrupt) regime that has overseen the unexpected revival of its economy and power. All because Putin isn't our bitch.
How did The Economist get to such a vile state?
The horrible answer is, it's always been this vile. If you go back to The Economist's beginnings in Victorian England, you'll find, for example, the magazine's brave stand on the Great Irish Famine, the English-led genocide that left up to two million Irish dead. When a cry went up to stop the famine, The Economist countered, "It is no man's business to provide for another. If left to the natural law of distribution, those who deserve more would obtain it."
And speaking of Hitlers, in the mid-1930s, The Economist even found time to praise you-know-who: "Herr Hitler is showing encouraging signs of statesmanship." Yes, they really did write that.
The first and last example of genuine wit that The Economist ever produced.
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