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Taibbi On Putin, Our One-Time Bastard

Matt Taibbi's new piece charts Putin's rise with help of Western elites -- a history these same bigs would like to memory-hole
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You know how the hive mind says that we are now forbidden to consider the ways the West contributed to Putin’s unconscionable and utterly indefensible attack on Ukraine? Matt Taibbi, who cut his reporting chops as a gonzo journalist in 1990s Russia, is not letting folks get away with that. From his blockbuster Substack essay,after Taibbi quoted DC think-tanker Ben Wittes saying that we need to do “regime change” in Russia. Taibbi says he wouldn’t care if Putin were shot into space, but:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man with whom we could do business,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Thus follows a long list of detailed ways the West facilitated the rise of Putin. Honestly, I knew very little of any of this, though as Taibbi documents with quotes and links, much of it was out there in the press back in the day. Here he’s talking about actually covering Russia in the Wild West Nineties:

This was my first experience learning that “experts” lie. I’d believed all the tales of a benevolent American aid program helping Russia convert to democracy. Unfortunately the real story of Russia during those years was that it was leapfrogging both Europe and America in its progress toward a purely predatory capitalist model. It became overnight what America’s own future would eventually resemble. Occupy Wall Street would not identify the “1%” in America until 2011, but Russia achieved the parody version — a handful of mega-billionaires surrounded by a vast population with negative wealth — as early as 1995-1996.

The revolution of 1991 was really a greed-fueled intelligence mutiny, in which a collection of senior communists and KGB officers worked with Western partners to dismantle the Soviet Union. A happy by-product was that these insiders got to act as the bulwark to counter-revolution by privatizing the country’s wealth into their own hands, becoming the billionaire owners of obscene mega-yachts and jets and sports teams like Chelsea football and the future Brooklyn Nets. They became the instant-coffee elites whose personal investment in the survival of their states’ institutions are a consistent element of modern neoliberal democracies everywhere.

Instead of explaining this, Western reporter colleagues based in Moscow sent mountains of stories home about Russia’s “remarkable progress” (the term regularly used by the West’s aid community) toward a free-market, Western-style paradise. They churned out hagiographic profiles of the English-speaking, often Western-educated politicians like Anatoly Chubais, the aforementioned Gaidar, Maxim Boyko, and other architects of Yeltsin’s transition. The crucial events were the privatizations of Soviet industry, conducted at every step with the counsel of American (and specifically Harvard-trained) economists. These transactions were often described as “rough” or “bumpy.” Some of the more corrupt episodes, like the loans-for-shares auctions in which the Yeltsin government lent cronies money needed to buy controlling stakes in companies the size of Exxon or AT&T for pennies on the dollar, were described using mind-boggling euphemisms like “relatively fair” (the Washington Post formulation) or “relative transparency” (Euromoney, in naming Chubais “Central Banker of the Year”).

Taibbi recalls that the Russian oligarchs’ hold on post-Soviet Russia was settled at a 1996 Davos meeting at which their looting of the country was ratified internationally. Yep, Herr Great Reset himself had a hand in that. Now, if you have read anything about the 1990s in Russia, you know that for 99 percent of all Russians, it was a horror show of poverty, decline, misery, and humiliation. I remember thinking at the time that well, democracy and capitalism are messy, but it’ll all work out. What a fool. I was buying the same wishful thinking propaganda appearing in our media. Taibbi says that independent Russian journalists in the 1990s — some of them friends of his — risked their lives to tell the truth about what was happening to their country. That’s not the picture we had in America. We huffed hopium and looked the other way.

When he took power, Putin stabilized things. He did it crudely and cruelly, but he had overwhelming support from ordinary Russians who couldn’t take anymore of the chaos and suffering. Taibbi said Putin used to be our bastard, but then he became his own bastard, and here we are today. He goes on:

Not unlike Donald Trump, Putin made a wager early on that his country would fare better taking the nationalist path than it would as a vassal state to a global economic system he believed was declining. Now that he’s made such a dramatic commitment in that direction, his story is destined for the same treatment in the Western press as Trump’s election, as an unspeakable evil whose origins are a taboo subject. Anyone who even brings them up must be an apologist. What sort of person cares from whose womb the devil emerged?

Condoleezza Rice was on Fox Sunday, where host Harris Faulkner asked her to comment on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” Rice answered with a straight face: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” This dovetailed with Mitt Romney saying Putin’s invasion is “the first time in 80 years a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” and EC chief Ursula von der Leyen claiming Putin has “brought war back to Europe,” as if a whole range of events from Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo never took place.

If you’re wondering why the levels of media insanity in response to Putin’s attack have been cranked up to levels never before seen on the Internet — “as if there had been Twitter on 9/11” is how one reporter friend put it — it’s not just because Putin’s act in isolation is horrible, and barbaric, and a tragedy for Ukraine and the region. It’s also because the event creates a massive propaganda imperative. Even though the pre-emptive war pretext Putin invoked was identical to the one Rice, her boss George Bush, and current media hero David Frum deployed to attack Iraq, there will be an effort now to hammer home with younger audiences especially that Putin’s war is the first violent break of the international order since the Sudetenland. For people like Rice and Frum, Ukraine is a ticket to absolution.

Whatever you’re doing now, stop it and read the whole thing. 

If I had seen Condi Rice denounce invading sovereign nations as “war crime,” I would have thrown something at the TV. See, that kind of thing is why I both denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but also refuse to march along blindly to whatever the talking heads are telling us is the correct opinion to have about Russia and Ukraine.

I don’t know how true this is — I wonder if there’s a reliable history in English that tells the story — but I have been informed that Viktor Orban’s rise to power in Hungary followed the same general pattern as Putin’s, in this sense: he stood up to the corrupt post-Communist clique that exploited its connections to profit off of the sale of Hungarian state-owned industries after Communism fell. He took the nationalist route on behalf of the rural and small-town people who saw Eurocratic elites moving smoothly from their premier social and economic roles in the Communist order to the same position in the post-Communist order. (The book to read about this phenomenon in post-Communist Poland is Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon In Democracy).

The British novelist of Hungarian descent Tibor Fischer tells an amusing version of Orban’s rise in The Hungarian Tiger, available as a Kindle Single for only 99 cents (free if you have Kindle Unlimited). I read it in published form, but my copy is on the other side of the Atlantic, so I just bought the electronic version. Here’s Fischer talking about how Orban was voted back into power in 2010, after the ex-Communists had run Hungary for eight years. Fischer said it was their second victory, in 2006, that was their undoing:

You can’t understand a thing about Orban’s election to power in 2010 without knowing about the infamous leaked 2006 speech given by Socialist PM Ferenc Gyurcsany to a private party conference. It was supposed to be a confidential speech, but someone in the room recorded it, and leaked it to Magyar Radio, which broadcast it, causing two days of serious political protest, and an Orban victory at the next election. This Wikipedia entry about the profane speech, in which Gyurcsany admitted that his government hadn’t done any good, and had lied to win votes, is a good backgrounder. This one-minute clip of the speech, with English subtitles, gives you the gist:

Orban came in, sorted things out, and put the economy back on track. The Left has never recovered.

Towards the end of the essay, which was published in 2014, Fischer laments that Orban has surrounded himself with some unimpressive characters. But Fischer also says how much he hates the way the Western media simply lies about Orban and Orban’s Hungary. The idea that the anti-Orban media is suppressed here is absurd, he says. Despite all Orban has done for Jews here, including making Holocaust education mandatory, the West still accuses him of anti-Semitism, a groundless charge (the Right criticizing George Soros is no more evidence of anti-Semitism here as the Left criticizing Sheldon Adelson was in America). They condemn Orban as “far right” even though his politics are in many ways center left. And so forth.

Tibor Fischer writes about Orban’s rise from the very beginning, when he gave an incredibly brave public speech near the end of the Communist era, calling on the Russian troops to get the hell out of Hungary. Fischer’s account of Orban’s rise, and of Hungarian politics of the late Communist and post-Communist era, is highly entertaining. How much do you know about what brought Orban to power, and why Hungarians voted for him? Little to nothing, I bet, because our English language media doesn’t tend to report that kind of thing. How much do you know about the extent to which the Communist elite remade themselves into liberal Eurocrats, and continued to run things in post-Communist countries? Many of the people who vote for parties like Fidesz in Hungary and Law & Justice in Poland do so out of resentment that these people got away with it, and still get away with it.

I probably shouldn’t have gone off on this Orban tangent, when the real issue in front of us today is Putin. Taibbi’s blistering essay, though, reminds us of how little we actually know about what happened in history to get us to where we are today. And it should make us aware of how likely we are to be spun by our media and the pundit class. Just today I learned that the Hungarian government has had a longstanding beef with the Ukrainian government over what Budapest regards as bigoted mistreatment of the Hungarian minority living in far west Ukraine. I obviously don’t know enough about the history of that conflict to know what to think about it, but this information made me realize how damn complicated all this is. Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression, which cannot be justified … but Ukraine is also a highly corrupt state. All of these post-Communist countries are to some degree. The undeniable heroics of President Zelensky are deeply admirable, and he’s made himself into a Luke Skywalker battling Putin’s Darth Vader. I hope the Russians come to ruin over what they’re doing to Ukraine right now. But let’s not get carried away with Narratives. When Condi Rice goes on national TV to denounce an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, we had all better be on notice that we are being spun.

It is right to loathe what the Russian military is doing to Ukraine. But the war hysteria overtaking our chattering class is getting scary. Late last night, out of curiosity, I watched a little bit of English-language RT, the Russian state media channel, on YouTube. It’s being banned in the European Union, and will probably be off YouTube later. Facebook and Microsoft have banned it from their platforms in Europe. I wanted to have a look at it to see what was so horrible.

I saw an interview with a British academic who was angry about the way Western governments are seizing the mansions of Russian oligarchs and other rich people, as well as banning RT. I was astonished to realize that here, on Moscow-funded television, the man was making a sensible point. Nobody likes Russian oligarchs, but what gives us the right to seize their property and their bank accounts because we hate what the Russian government is doing? Asset forfeiture is a bad policy, even when it seizes the property of unpleasant figures. Why are we being coaxed into hating everything Russian now? Why shouldn’t Western audiences have the opportunity to get the Russian government’s point of view in media broadcasts? Is this liberty? I think the Russian government is doing something evil to Ukraine, but I still want to know what their messaging is saying, because I don’t have full faith in our media’s presentation of the conflict.

All of this stuff is happening so quickly, because everybody hates Russia over Ukraine. It reminds me of the stampede to pass the Patriot Act in the aftermath of 9/11. If you were against taking maximalist stands like that, then you were soft on terrorism. Might it not be the case that in our rush to punish Putin’s regime over Ukraine, we are trampling over some important liberties?

Maybe so. Maybe not. I don’t know. But I do know that we aren’t talking about it, and our ruling class doesn’t want us to talk about it. Knowing how badly they report the whole truth about Viktor Orban and Hungary, because they are globalist liberals who have decided that Orban is evil, and that narrative doesn’t need to be complicated by facts, balance, and context, I am distrustful of how the Russia story is being sold to us. It is not that I think there is any excuse for Russia’s invasion — I don’t! And I hope Putin gets taken out by his inner circle. It’s rather that it seems we are barreling towards a wider war, maybe even World War III, and a lot of intelligent people are choosing not to think hard about any of this.

They probably don’t want us to talk about the role of the Davos elites in ravaging Russia in the 1990s, and in bringing Putin to power, either. A media class that can rehabilitate Condi “We Don’t Want The Smoking Gun To Be A Mushroom Cloud” Rice, and David “Unpatriotic Conservatives” Frum, author of the president’s “Axis of Evil” speech justifying the Iraq War, is not one that is all that interested in reviewing any of that history. Memory hole it, Hollywoodize the new narrative, get the American people to stop thinking about the role their own elites played in bringing this catastrophe into existence, and let’s get on to manufacturing consent for the next war. Read Taibbi — you’ll be glad you did.

(You watch: it’ll take about five minutes before some comments-section bleater will say, “So, Dreher, you’re saying Putin was right to invade Ukraine? Four legs good, two legs baaaad!”)

UPDATE: A bit off-topic, but this story from The Guardian about what Putin’s warmongering has done and is doing to the Russian economy is harrowing. Excerpt:

If there was shock on the streets, then the mood among the business community was even more dour. Several owners of mid-sized companies said that the invasion and subsequent isolation of Russia had made their businesses unprofitable overnight.

One, the owner of an advertising services company with 100 employees, said that he was about to announce to his employees this afternoon that he is leaving the country for Armenia with his wife and two sons.

“I’m going to tell them that we are going into a crisis that we have never experienced before,” he said. “It’s like flying on a plane with no engines or the engines are on fire.”

His company, which handles contracts for international brands like Pepsi and automakers like Volkswagen, was booming as recently as January 2022, a record month for them. Now many of those brands were pulling out of the Russian market and his business was shrinking “immensely”.

Another business owner with hundreds of employees in the food and beverage and tourism industries felt that he was completely in the dark about the future under Vladimir Putin.

“We have no fucking clue what he will do next,” he said. “No one in the business community has a clue any more. Everyone is so depressed. I have experienced so many economic crises here, the pandemic being the latest.

“But there was always a reason to keep on fighting for your business,” he said. “Now, I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. Even if peace is achieved, the damage is done. How do we reverse it?”

There was a sense on Monday that this crisis was passing the point of no return, as Russian bombers began flying over Ukraine and rocket artillery began firing on populated districts of Kharkiv, a city of more than one million people.

 

 

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