On Tuesday, something unusual happened. Two articles by Glenn Greenwald appeared in The Intercept. Any article by Greenwald is a matter of some interest, since he is one of the most perceptive and honest journalists out there. So two on one day is a little special.
Both were on the same subject: Russia – or rather, the Russia hysteria that seems to have gripped a lot of people in the west. And, as I have said before, I think that this hysteria is one of the most significant things, in terms of politics and world affairs, that is going on at the moment.
The first article was entitled “Dutch Official Admits Lying About Meeting With Putin: Is Fake News Used by Russia or About Russia?“
Basically, the story is that,
“While election campaigning two years ago, [Halbe] Zijlstra said that in 2006 he had been at Putin’s dacha when he heard the Kremlin leader speak of plans for a “greater Russia” which would include some of Russia’s neighbors.
“I was tucked away back in the room, but I could clearly hear Putin’s answer to the question about what he considered greater Russia,” Zijlstra told a gathering in 2016 of his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which heads the new Dutch government.
“He said this included Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states, and, well, Kazakhstan would be ‘nice to have’,” he said in his speech, which was recorded on video.
But on Monday he acknowledged he had never been at the meeting with Putin and had heard of the comments second-hand.
“I wasn’t present at the meeting in President Putin’s dacha,” the minister said in statement on Monday.”
(The outcome, by the way, is that Zijlstra resigned yesterday.)
Dubious stories
That is just the beginning of Greenwald’s article. He goes on to point to several other recent stories that have appeared in the western media which have turned out to be highly questionable.
1) On January 10, 2018, we got “Russian bid to influence Brexit vote detailed in new US Senate Report” (The Guardian).
By contrast, on February 8, 2018, Reuters reported that “Britain says it has not seen any evidence that Russia interfered in British elections, though May has said it has planted fake news stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord and undermine the West. ” Fake News stories? Sowing discord? Western governments and politicians do that all the time!
2) On January 22, 2018 we got (Associated Press) “Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations are pushing a conservative meme related to the investigation of Russian election interference, researchers say.”
The following day, the Daily Beast informed us that “Despite claims the Kremlin is driving a campaign to disclose an anti-FBI memo, a source says an early in-house analysis concludes the hashtag has been mostly pushed by Americans. The online groundswell urging the release of House Republicans’ attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation appears thus far to be organically American—not Russian propaganda, a source familiar with Twitter’s internal analysis told The Daily Beast.”
3) On July 4th last year, we got “Germany is expecting Russia to try to influence its general election on Sept. 24, but there are no indications of which party it would seek to back, officials said on Tuesday.”
But just before the election, on the September 21, it was admitted by those who were watching eagerly for signs of Russian interference that they hadn’t managed to spot any.
4) On May 6 last year, a Telegraph headline proclaimed “Russia blamed as Macron campaign blasts ‘massive hacking attack’ ahead of French presidential election.”.
On June 1, however, “The head of the French government’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.”
And that is in addition to numerous cases “when the U.S. media was forced to retract, or issue humiliating editor’s notes, about stories regarding the “Russian threat” that turned out to be false.”
The serious side of this is that despite the fact that nobody can point to any evidence that Vladimir Putin has any hostile intent toward western countries, or that Russia is any threat to our peace or safety, people in high positions keep speaking as Russia really is a threat to us.
Just last month, General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the Army, said that “Britain’s ability to respond to military threats from Russia will be “eroded” without further investment” and added that “Russian hostility could come sooner than expected and Britain must prepare to “fight the war we might have to fight.”
In my humble opinion, that is simply silly. The BBC’s Jonathan Beale comments:
“the likelihood of any direct military confrontation with Russia seems extremely remote. . . General Carter’s intervention is more driven by fears of further deep cuts to the UK’s armed forces. The Ministry of Defence has a black hole in its budget. It is rare for a military chief to make such an obvious and public appeal for more cash. But he’s doing it under the orders of the Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. He has sent his generals over the top to put pressure on the chancellor.”
A couple of days later Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson told the Daily Telegraph that Moscow was spying on energy supplies which, if cut, could cause “total chaos” in the country. The Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov responded that Mr Williamson had “lost his grasp on reason”, and added “The comments were worthy of a Monty Python sketch”, and he accused Mr Williamson of trying to scare the British public in an effort to get more money for the armed forces.
I don’t doubt that he is right – including the bit about it being worthy of Monty Python.
And the lesson of all this?
Greenwald’s concludes
“If there’s any lesson that should unite everyone in the West, it’s that the greatest skepticism is required when it comes to government and media claims about the nature of foreign threats. If we’re going to rejuvenate a Cold War, or submit to greater military spending and government powers in the name of stopping alleged Russian aggression, we should at least ensure that the information on which those campaigns succeed are grounded in fact. Even a casual review of the propaganda spewing forth from Western power centers over the last year leaves little doubt that the exact opposite is happening.”
That is important: Scepticism is required because we should ensure that information on which decisions are taken is grounded in fact. But the exact opposite is happening.
The Harvard Professor
Which brings us to Greenwald’s other piece.
It concerned Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. In the wake of the crash of a Russian airliner shortly after take-off, he posted a tweet which, in Greenwald’s words, “strongly insinuated that the Russian government may have purposely sabotaged the plane, murdering all of those on board, in order to silence one of the passengers, Sergei Millian, who has been linked to a couple of figures involved in the Trump-Russia investigation.”
What Tribe wrote was
“Among those killed in the tragic plane crash yesterday: Sergei Millian, a Papadopoulis friend who had emailed Kushner and is said to be behind one of the most salacious claims in the dossier on Trump’s involvement with Russia. Probably just coincidence.”
Greenwald writes:
“What’s wrong with Tribe’s claims? Everything. To begin with, Millian was not on that plane. . . . . Tribe apparently saw someone making this claim somewhere on the internet and then, without bothering to check if it was actually true, told his 289,000 followers that it was true, and then constructed a rabid, deranged conspiracy theory around it.”
“Even if Millian had been on the plane, casually suggesting that Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or some combination of other villains purposely murdered everyone on the plane in order to silence one witness is deranged to the point of being a clinical pathology. That sort of baseless conspiracy-mongering ought to disqualify anyone from serious company for a long time.”
But it almost certainly will have no effect on Tribe’s standing. “
In fact, comments Greenwald,
“The more deranged he gets, the more Tribe — needless to say — becomes not just a social media star . . . , but has also become an MSNBC favorite, as they exploit his credentials and pedigree to depict his madness as some sort of insightful, investigative dot-connecting. That’s because, as I documented this morning, false claims about Russia are now a routine part of the U.S. media diet.”
The outcome of this one was rather different from the first. While the Dutch Foreign minister for forced to resign for his dishonesty, Tribe had a piece published on the opinion page of the New York Times. In other words, Greenwald turned out to be correct when he said “But it almost certainly will have no effect on Tribe’s standing.” Hence Greenwald’s tweet describing the fact that Tribe had a piece on the NYT’s opinion page: “Yesterday, Tribe spouted an utterly deranged (and factually false) conspiracy theory about the Russian jet crash. Today, he’s presented in the NYT as a Trump/Russia expert.“
In other words, conspiracy theory has gone mainstream. The sources that one normally accepts as believable have ceased to be.
The three memos
Which brings us to a third recent story – that of the memos. Three memos relating to the federal inquiry into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election campaign have been in the news.
The first is the “Nunes Memo” (by by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes ) – which was released on February 2.
The memo makes a lot of claims (mostly alleging improper behaviour by the FBI) and we don’t yet know how true they are. We will have to wait for answers to the questions it raises.
But two things about it are interesting – two things about what was not in it.
First, there is nothing at all in it about whether or not Vladimir Putin or the Russian government did anything unusual or improper with regard to the US Presidential election. We are still waiting for any evidence regarding that. Instead, discussion of the Mueller investigation is increasingly dominated by allegations of improper procedure by America’s intelligence agencies, Justice Department, and politicians. And remarkably few of those allegations seem to be about the Trump election campaign.
Second, according to Caitlin Johnstone, ” both the FBI and high-profile Democrats have been claiming that the memo’s unredacted release would pose a national security threat.” However, after the memo was released, it was clear that whatever the truth of the claims in it, nothing in it posed any threat at all to national security.
But how much truth was in it? Well, for that we await the second memo, the Democratic Party’s response to Nunes. But we have not seen it yet. Ironically, the reason is that on February 10, Donald Trump blocked it’s release because of “sensitive passages” that created “concerns for national security”. This seems strange, since the Nunes committee, consisting of both Democrats and Republicans, had voted unanimously to make it public.
There is a third memo, known as the Grassley memo, which was released last week and which has so far received very little coverage, but which some commentators suspect may be more significant than the Nunes Memo. Like the Nunes memo, it makes serious allegations.
And that is what this whole thing is about. Allegations. Claims. The Dutch foreign minister was basically making allegations. Lawrence Tribe of Harvard was, if not actually making allegations, making suggestions. And then, there are all the allegations about Russian interference in various elections.
When somebody makes an allegation or a claim, and it is serious or controversial, the obvious question is “What is the evidence?” As Greenwald wrote about Nunes memo, back in January, before its release,
Anyone who is genuinely concerned about the claims being made about eavesdropping abuses should understand why the issue of evidence is so critical. After all, the House, Senate, and FBI investigations into any Trump collusion with Russia have so far proceeded with many startling claims in the media, but to date little hard evidence for the public to judge. Nobody rational should be assuming any claims or assertions from partisan actors about the 2016 election are true without seeing evidence to substantiate those claims.
That is the point. The issue of evidence is critical.
To date very little hard evidence has emerged. And nobody rational should simply assume that claims by people who might be biased are true – without seeing evidence to substantiate those claims.
Superstition
This is about what we believe. Or, to put it another way, it is about faith. While the words “faith” and “belief” may often be used in slightly different ways in modern English, they really mean the same thing. In ancient Greek – the language the New Testament was written in – the same word is used for both.
And if one simply believes claims and allegations by politicians (or other partisan people) about their rivals or opponents, it seems to me that this does amount to “blind faith” – even superstition. And here, I come back to the words of Arthur Custance that I quoted in November: “Faith without reason is superstition.” And by “reason”, he means examining claims and allegations – and, in particular, looking at the evidence.
I think that the Russia hysteria that is affecting large parts of the political classes in a lot of western countries could be called superstition. There is an almost religious refusal to question it. There are some political parties where it seems to be an article of faith that Russia interfered in the 2016 US Presidential election, and so one never hears about prominent members of those parties (or possibly even any members of those parties) questioning the claim. Russian interference is simply assumed to be fact, despite the fact that has often been pointed out that there is pretty well no hard evidence for it – almost a year and half after the claims were first made. Which is astonishing, considering the fact that as of December, $6.7 million had been spent on the Mueller investigation!
A final thought
And there is a thought that strikes me. Take two claims: the claim that the Russian government “interfered” in the presidential election (whatever the word “interfered” means, and I must confess that “interfering in an election” could be interpreted very widely) – and the claim that Jesus rose from the dead after being executed from the Romans. If you look at the evidence for those two claims, the evidence for the latter looks a lot more impressive.
And yet, bizarrely, that is probably not what most people in the west believe today.
Think about it. The evidence for Jesus rising from the dead, basically consists of claims certain people made – claims that they saw him, met him, talked with him, ate with him, spent several days with him – after his execution.
In this case, one has to ask the question “are those claims credible?”
Yes, they are astonishing. But some astonishing things are true. Might this be one of them?
And that, it turn, leads to the question “Are those witnesses credible?” Would you trust the disciples – like James and John and Simon and Andrew?
And the answer is that I think that they are much more credible as witnesses than the politicians and figures in the intelligence community who are making the claims about Russian interference. For a start, anyone who looks at the utterances of those politicians will find that a lot of them have made wildly exaggerated statements on a fairly regular basis, and often have told outright untruths. (Remember this one?) Similarly, many of the leaders of America’s intelligence agencies have a pretty poor record for honesty – including those making claims about Russian interference.
On other hand, the disciples of Jesus who proclaimed the resurrection, were people of honesty and integrity – and people who stressed the importance of honesty and integrity. Unlike modern politicians, they had no personal interest, nothing to gain, by the claims they were making. Indeed, making these claims got them thrown into jail, and even executed.
And those claims have been examined, and the evidence has been looked at, by hundreds of thousands of intelligent, educated people over the the past 20 centuries – as I explain here.
They have stood the test of time.
It seems to me that there is pretty well no doubt about it. If you come to this objectively, with an open mind, and examine the evidence – I believe that you will agree that there is a much stronger case that Jesus rose from the dead, than that Vladimir Putin used illegitimate tactics to influence the result of the American election.
But how many people will look at this with an open mind? Not many, I fear.
Temporary Resident 