#8 - JRL 7239
From: "Viktor Kalashnikov" <machinegun@online.ru>
Subject: Russian media
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003
After a month in circulation, our daily ‘Russian Courier’ was granted an official warning not to publish anything ‘trivializing’ about Mr. Putin anymore – be that texts or cartoons (especially - cartoons). They referred to particular samples of the past days falling under that category.
By reading Western, especially British media these days, one may find that they not only had been reproached by Putin’s people in similar way – like some German papers and TV channels after Dubrovka disaster – but have obviously overreacted. Those weak liberal nerves, you know. Today, every college student in the West may see what Soviet press at the height of Brezhnev era looked like.
Also, today or tomorrow, the market price of the press-freedom in Russia will be publicly announced, in British pounds. Watch the oil ceremonies
Anyone who still believes that business itself may generate humane societies should recall that the death camp system in Nazi-Germany was working as a big corporation producing useful goods and services and contracting in competitive way with industrial firms. There also have been plenty of reports that US firms had overmatched the SS-owned ‘factories’ in price and quality in supplying the Nazi-regime.
So, if we talk about the SS, why shouldn’t we talk about those firms, too? - A 'Russian question', I agree.
All big oil concerns in Russia have been run by the secret services from the very beginning. Or, rather, by conglomerates which included Mafia as it was necessary to secure balance and stability, those much-praised pillars of Putin’s regime.
Does someone seriously think that it was the small comsomol activist Khodorkovsky together with a couple of friends who had ruthlessly suppressed local oil bosses, arranged killings of thousands of opponents and stroke compromises with gangsters across Siberia to set up an oil monster like Yukos?
Sure, the US has positive experience with incorporating former comsomol activists into its propaganda community. But even the best young communists cannot manage things in Russia that only KGB-generals do.
Of course, I don’t intend to suggest anything ‘trivializing’ here like that Chechnya slaughter is nothing but a Kremlin-run enterprise with a substantial portion of oil business in it. It also is needles to explain that massive arrests of militia gangsters this week in Moscow, whichever propaganda purposes behind it, did unravel only a very small portion of corruption and terror practiced by authorities in this country.
I agree that it’s due to natural innocence of American bureaucrats that the acting KGB officers represent various American institutions in Moscow – thus sending very clear signals across the town. But - to ‘feel the difference’ – is something like that thinkable somewhere in Central Europe? Why the double standards then? And anyway – what would American taxpayers say about that kind of allocation of their money?
What I’d still like to maintain is that the West is progressively loosing its vital instincts for freedom and democracy – those instincts which only can effectively protect against Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and Holocaust.