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dostoyevsky-official · 3 months

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Natalia Arno was fully inside the hotel room before she noticed the smell. It was sickly sweet, like a cheap perfume at the drug store, only more nauseating. [...] The Russian activist and non-profit director had been on the road, meeting with donors and organisers looking for ways to bolster democracy back in Russia. [...] Three hours later, Arno woke up with an excruciating pain inside her mouth — a burning sensation so unbearable she could barely open it. [...] By the time she had checked in at the airport, she could no longer stand straight. Her vision was blurred; she wobbled. In her mouth, she tasted stone. On the plane, Arno began hallucinating. Ever since Vladimir Lenin set up his poison factory, known as the “Special Room”, over a century ago, poisonings have become one of the Kremlin’s preferred ways to eliminate, cripple or terrorise enemies and critics. Over the decades, it has built up unrivalled expertise in the field. [...] Most targeted poisonings are, by design, hard to detect. [...] The horrific details of Russian poisoning attacks have accumulated over decades: the hiding of a ricin pellet inside the tip of an umbrella said to have been used in 1978 to stab the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in the leg, killing him in less than a week. The placing of a radioactive isotope, Polonium-210, in the green tea drunk by the former Russian security services agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. The smearing of one novichok variant, a deadly nerve agent, on the British double agent Sergei Skripal’s door in 2018 and another on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s underpants in a Siberian hotel room in 2020. [...] In October 2022, Elena Kostyuchenko, a Russian journalist working for the independent news outlet Meduza, became violently ill on her way back to Berlin from Munich. The same month, Irina Babloyan, a radio journalist with an independent station, got sick on the day she was meant to travel back from Tbilisi to Berlin via Armenia. Kostyuchenko and Babloyan experienced similar symptoms: sharp pain in the upper abdomen, palms that burnt or swelled, severe vertigo and fatigue. [...] Western governments may struggle to keep up with the security threat. The universe of potential toxic chemicals is limitless — and the advance of technology has multiplied the ways in which an enemy might use them. “There are agents we don’t even know exist that are out there [being used] right now . . . That makes it really hard to do analytics,” Holstege said. Most toxicology labs do not have experience in examining state-sponsored poisonings using unusual toxic agents. [...] When we spoke over the phone, Grozev was unfazed by the argument that the victims weren’t high-profile-enough targets. “Talking to insiders in the security services, there’s a clear understanding that the concept of a ‘traitor’ is much more easily assigned these days than before,” he said. “Any Russian who opposes the war or criticises Putin now is a potential victim.”

Russia’s terrifyingly effective poisoning operation

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mokhosz-nafo · 15 days

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A Czech investigation has confirmed that the 2014 explosions at weapons depots in the village of Vrbětice were carried out by members of Russian military intelligence (GRU)

The aim was to prevent the delivery of weapons and ammunition to areas where the Russian army was conducting its operations - primarily Syria and Ukraine. This was stated by the head of the National Center for Combating Organized Crime of the Police of the Czech Republic, Jiří Mazánek.

At the same time, the police had to close the case because Russia refused to cooperate with the Czech investigation.

The police report does not mention the names of GRU officers, but earlier investigators named Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. Britain believes they were involved in the 2018 poisoning of former Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

🪐 Subscribe to Live: Ukraine

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mariacallous · 3 months

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An investigation by The Insider has revealed the identities of several Kremlin agents living and working under false identities inside Russia itself. All of those identified thus far are members of GRU Unit 29155, the Russian military intelligence group best known for its role in the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England in 2018. Although The Insider previously disclosed that Unit 29155 officers had used their state-sanctioned assumed identities to make multiple other trips abroad, including to place explosives at Bulgarian and Czech military facilities, the activities of their alter egos inside Russia itself had remained a black box — until now. Below, The Insider presents the biographies of three such “domestic illegals.”

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uboat53 · 1 month

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I had a discussion with a friend of mine in the (US) military recently and it reminded me that most people in the US and, in fact, in the world, are almost entirely unaware that there is a new Cold War taking shape. I think more people should be aware of it, knowledge is power after all, and knowing about something gives you the opportunity to help shape it, particularly if you're a citizen of a country where your voice has an impact in government. I hope this LONG RANT (TM) helps someone better understand.

INTRODUCTION

As I said, there's a new Cold War beginning, and, like the previous Cold War, there's a strong component of ideology to it. Specifically, the world is beginning to fracture between liberal democracy and autocracy.

What makes this conflict particularly complex is that we're at the early stages. When thinking about the Cold War, capitalism vs communism, it wasn't until the 1950s, 1960s, or even the 1970s in some cases that it was really clear which side most consequential nations would end up on. It was pretty obvious that the Soviet Union and the United States would be the major communist and capitalist powers, respectively, but the status of many other nations didn't become clear until long internal political debates and outside interventions had a chance to play out.

So, without further ado, let's get into it.

WHY IS THERE A CONFLICT AT ALL?

This is one of the key questions and, honestly, it all comes down to the interconnectedness of the modern world. You see, modern autocracies that don't rely on the divine right of kings to justify their rule generally justify it by results. In order to make sure the results come out correctly, they control the information available to their people to ensure that their people are told that the autocratic rulers are giving them the best results, whether that's in terms of economics, culture, religion, or whatever else they want to focus on.

As my old boss used to tell me a decade and a half ago, "North Korea can't afford to allow YouTube to get to the average person even if the average person just watches stupid videos because it's going to become really obvious that, yes, this person is an idiot, but that idiot has a fridge, a TV, a car, and has obviously never missed a meal in their life; they can't possibly be poorer than us."

In the olden days that would be fairly easy. Radio signals only travel so far, so as long as you control the TV and radio stations and limit the ability of printed media to spread too widely, you could completely control what information your population receives.

Nowadays, however? Well, that's very different. The internet allows people from all over the world to talk to each other in an instant and it can even go a long way to easing language barriers. The advent of satellite internet means that even efforts to control internet traffic such as the so-called "Great Firewall of China" will be increasingly limited in their effectiveness.

Today, in order for an autocracy to control the information their people receive, they not only have to control the information environment in their own country, they have to control the information available in other countries as well. That's the reason you're seeing things like the Saudi Arabia's murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, Russia's poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a Chinese attempt to kidnap dissidents in the US, India's alleged killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and it's attempt to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

All of these were killings or other physical violence that took place in liberal democratic countries (except for Khashoggi who, though American, was lured to the Saudi embassy in Turkey where was killed) where what the individuals were doing was perfectly legal. This is the driver of conflict today, authoritarian nations attempting to maintain their monopoly on the information their citizens receive in a global information environment.

THE EARLY DAYS

We're currently in the early days of this autocracy vs liberal democracy competition and there are numerous nations currently in conflict over which side they're going to be on including, unfortunately, our own. In order to explain that, I need to get a bit technical over the difference between "democracy" and "liberal democracy".

Democracy, basically, can describe any situation where leaders are elected by some kind of popular vote. If you look closely at that for a second, you'll realize that it's such a broad category that even the autocratic Soviet Union technically qualified. Obviously, a category broad enough to include actual autocracies isn't really in opposition to them.

Liberal Democracy, on the other hand, is a Democracy, but with a whole bunch of other things as well. In general, a Liberal Democracy will feature multiple distinct candidates and/or parties in their elections, some sort of separation of powers between branches of government, the rule of law (law that applies equally to all), an open society (one in which individuals make choices rather than being controlled by tribes or other type of collectivism), a market economy with private property, universal suffrage, and the protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms for all people.

(That definition borrowed almost entirely from the Wikipedia article on Liberal Democracy, check it out if you're interested.)

In other words, Liberal Democracy is more than just "do people vote for leaders?", but encompasses just about everything we'd associate with individual rights and liberties and the structure of institutions to ensure them. People in an Illiberal Democracy may technically vote for their leaders but, without all of these other rights and protections, they can hardly be said to have truly chosen them. And, when you define it clearly, you can see that there's a bit of a disagreement about that in American politics right now.

The Republican Party, and particularly its MAGA wing, is increasingly of the mind that not everyone's vote is legitimate and has been putting in place barriers to voting that disproportionately affect disfavored groups. In addition, they're pushing to end much of the separation of powers, putting more unchecked power in the hands of the president at the expense of checks, balances, and sometimes guarantees of individual liberty. Democracy would continue, but Liberal Democracy would end.

To be clear, this isn't just an American problem, but one that is faced by nearly every Liberal Democracy today. As part of autocrat's efforts to control information outside of their own borders, they've been attempting to influence politics within Liberal Democracies and promote internal autocratic movements; usually right-wing nationalists. From the Republican Party's MAGA wing to France's National Front to Germany's Alternativ Fur Deutschland, just about every Liberal Democracy in the world now has a fundamentally autocratic right-wing party that is doing much better than it did just ten or twenty years ago and, if you scratch the surface, you will find support for them, both financial and otherwise, from autocrats around the world.

Of course, it's not just the far-right either, autocrats have been promoting the far-left in Liberal Democratic countries as well. While the far-right has had much more electoral success and is much more politically organized in the west and, thus, has received more attention, we can't ignore the fact that autocracy is largely neutral on the political scale and operates anywhere that conspiratorial thinking can take hold and distract people from the removal of their freedoms or even convince them that those freedoms hold no value in the first place.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

Well, that's the trillion dollar question, isn't it?

Conflict will likely continue between autocratic and liberal democratic states, but the complexities are growing. Much like communism vs capitalism, autocracy vs liberal democracy is more of a spectrum than a hard binary and many states are actively sloshing around along that spectrum.

There's also the uncertainty of how different countries react to incidents like the ones we're seeing. Technically, killing a person on the soil of another country is an act of war, but not many people in the modern world are willing to go to war for the killing of one person. Most likely what we'll see is a gradual hardening of blocs as liberal democracies react to provocations by slowly pulling back from cooperation and connection with autocratic nations.

We're also likely to see countries switch sides. Unlike the rapid shift in allegiances that we saw during the Cold War, however, these are likely to be more gradual shifts like what we've seen in Hungary and Turkey where individual rights are stripped away gradually and a governing autocrat is slowly ensconced in power rather than a hard and fast coup. We could, of course, see countries go the other way as well, as in the case of Ukraine which has slowly strengthened individual rights and overthrown its autocrats.

All of this, the solidification of blocs and the shifting of countries within this spectrum, is going to create the opening situations for this particular conflict. Whether it becomes a conflict of more rigidly defined blocs or even sparks proxy wars remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION (TL;DR)

The days of a fairly open world, both in physical travel, the movement of goods, and in communication, is starting to come to an end as that openness begins to threaten the hold of autocrats on power. Those autocrats are attempting to keep both the openness and power by working to control the information available in countries that practice Liberal Democracy and generally guarantee individual liberties.

Over the next several decades, it is likely that we will see increasing separation between a bloc of autocratic nations and a bloc of liberal democracies, much as the Cold War saw separation between pro-capitalist and pro-communist countries. Some of that separation will likely not go smoothly and we will likely see at least some military tension and possibly even armed conflict as leaders react to changes or even try to distract from them with military force.

Just as importantly, we are likely to see tension within countries all over the world as autocratic political parties attempt to take control of liberal democracies and pro-democracy movements attempt to overthrow autocrats.

I'll admit this isn't the most hopeful vision of the future that we'd like to see, but I think it's fairly realistic given the current realities we see. I hope that this gives you some insight into what's going on and allows you to plan accordingly.

As always, let me know if you think I missed something or got something wrong, I'm always up for adjusting my thoughts, and I hope you enjoyed the read.

#politics #international politics #liberal democracy #democracy #individual rights #autocracy #cold war #new cold war #long rant (tm)

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songsofprotestpeacerevolution · 1 year

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Pussy Riot — MAMA, DON’T WATCH TV / МАМА, НЕ СМОТРИ ТЕЛЕВИЗОР (ANTI - WAR SONG)

(Until I can find an unblocked by youtube version, you will have to click on the watch on youtube in the above)

STATEMENT This song is our statement against the war that Putin started in Ukraine.

On 24th February 2022 Russia began a wide scale military attack on Ukraine. Russian bombs and rockets destroyed Ukrainian homes, schools, hospitals, wrecking towns and destroying lives. We believe that Putin’s regime is a terrorist regime, and Putin himself, his officials, generals and propagandists are war criminals.

The chorus is based on the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier who, in a telephone conversation with his mother, said "Mom, there are no Nazis here, don't watch TV." Russian propaganda daily poisons the hearts of people with hatred.

Those who oppose Putin are imprisoned, poisoned with military poisons and killed. The tradition of political poisoning for more than 100 years, "laboratory x" - the first laboratory of military poisons created by the NKVD. Opposition figures of anti-government movements became victims of the "experiments". Putin and the FSB are proud of this "tradition" and continue it: Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Pyotr Verzilov, Alexei Navalny.

Russia has continued its military aggression on the territory of Ukraine since 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea and began the occupation of the Donbass region. Every day since then Ukraine has had to fight for the right to live and for freedom, fight to guarantee its sovereignty.

During all these years, the international community has looked for compromise and conducted business with Russia, at the same time sponsoring Putin’s cruel war. The Kremlin receives billions of Euros from the sale of oil and gas and each day this money converts into Ukrainian blood.

We call for: 1. An EMBARGO on the purchase of Russian oil and gas, on the sale of weapons and police ammunition to Russia. 2. ARREST the western bank accounts and property of Russian officials and oligarchs and introduce personal sanctions against them. 3. An INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL to try Vladimir Putin, employees of Russian state propaganda, army officers and everyone who is responsible for the genocide of the Ukrainian nation. Мы обращаемся к тем, кто в России: Пожалуйста, не участвуйте в этой войне! Не берите повестки, не ходите в военкоматы, не слушайте пропаганду! Каждый жест против этой войны важен.

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carsonjonesfiance · 2 years

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I want everyone to know that "The person who tried to walk [me] through [my] bias" in this case is apparently Minisoc telling me Russia never poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Russia was right to fine RT Britain for ever saying that they did.

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deborahdeshoftim5779 · 2 years

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It has been two years since Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the Russian government using Novichok. This is a banned chemical weapon that Russian authorities had previously claimed not to possess. As Navalny says in his latest letter from prison, nobody within the Russian state has taken responsibility for this attempted assassination.

Instead, Russia and the rest of the world have been treated to a cocktail of feeble and insulting lies by Putin and his mafia government. Russian propaganda news media have vomited out ludicrous alternative explanations, alongside their usual distract and divide strategies.

Since Navalny bravely returned to Russia in January 2021, he was promptly arrested by Russian police on fraudulent charges. After an equally fraudulent court hearing, he was sentenced to more than three years in prison. This year, he has been sentenced to a further nine years in prison and has been moved to an even more stringent penal colony.

We are understandably focused on the war in Ukraine and the atrocities which Russian soldiers have committed there.

The more this war continues, however, the more I begin to suspect that Putin began this to cover up major political abuses such as imprisoning Navalny for longer. The imprisonment of Navalny on yet more fictional charges was done while the world was focused on an impending invasion of Ukraine.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that during the war, Putin was said to be undergoing serious cancer surgery, a report circulated among intelligence services and outlets such as NavalnyLive for months.

After Putin is brought to justice for his crimes against humanity in Ukraine, the West must not forget his other crimes, which have been unpunished for over twenty years. Putin has entire government departments dedicated to spying, persecution, and murder of Russian citizens who oppose his dictatorship.

These departments do not just operate in Russia, but also target Russians living abroad. We recently discovered that Putin had sent a group of neo-Nazi mercenaries to try and capture and murder the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Putin’s regime is not just a moral disgrace to Russia, but a national security threat to all Europeans-- we see proof of this daily in Ukraine.

Alexei Navalny is not the first to be poisoned, and it seems as though he has not been the last. Since the Ukraine invasion, oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Anatoly Chubais have both fallen ill mysteriously. Abramovich and Chubais both deviated from the Kremlin’s line as far as the war in Ukraine was concerned, with Abramovich wanting to broker peace, and Chubais leaving Russia in protest against Putin’s invasion.

Investigators like Christo Grozev from Bellingcat, which uncovered the plots to murder Navalny and other Russian dissidents, believe that Abramovich was poisoned. What induced Chubais’ illness is not yet clear.

Before Navalny, many Russians critical of Putin’s regime either survived poisoning or died because of it. Famous cases include those of Dmitri Bykov, Vladimir Kara-Murza (currently in prison for condemning the war in Ukraine), Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal, Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and more. This list does not include Russians who were assassinated by gunfire, defenestration, kidnapping, assault, and ‘unexplained’ heart problems.

Navalny himself may have been poisoned during a previous stint in prison back in 2017, and is wife, Yulia Navalnaya, also mysteriously fell ill back in 2020. We now know that FSB agents had been following the couple and the poisoning of Yulia Navalnaya may have been the consequence of a previous attempt to kill her husband.

The international community must keep asking Putin questions about the events of 20 August, 2020 and demand an impartial investigation into the use of Novichok on Russian soil for the purpose of murdering Russian citizens. If the Russian authorities do not accept these requests, then Russia should no longer be a member of the OPCW. This is surely not a controversial request today, given Russian provocations near Ukrainian nuclear plants.

And, of course, freedom for Alexei Navalny and all political prisoners.

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gungieblog · 2 years

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World Declared Russia a Terrorist Country, Now What?

by The FINANCIAL October 13, 2022 in Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine

A resolution to declare the Russian Federation a terrorist regime has just been passed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe with 99 yeas and one in abstention. Russian issue: State Sponsors of Terrorism, U.S. State Department

The document titled “Further escalation of the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine” was presented at the PACE autumn session in Strasbourg today. PACE is made up of 324 parliamentarians from the national parliaments of the Council of Europe’s 46 member states, and usually meets four times a year in Strasbourg.

Earlier, Latvia’s parliament declared Russia a state sponsor of terror Thursday for its targeted military attacks against civilians and public places.

Lativia’s unicameral parliament, known as the Saeima, approved a resolution noting that Russia has supported and financed terrorist regimes and organizations for years.The Saeima used as examples Moscow’s support for the Assad government in Syria shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 and the poisoning of British intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018.

“It has been evident for years that Russia uses terrorism to pursue its goals, whether its targeting civilians in Ukraine or Chechnya, supporting the Bashar al-Assad’s brutal actions against his own people in Syria, assassinating political opponents abroad, or using fronts such as the Wagner Group to shield its malign activities from public view,” said Congressman Jared Golden

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: ‘Never yet in history was united Europe as strong as it is today’

#russia #ukraine #news

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dostoyevsky-official · 9 months

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A signal for the whole elite’: the demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin

A former senior Kremlin official told the FT: “I thought they were definitely going to rub him out. And so they did. Things like that can’t be forgiven. Everyone understands that the response to treason will be irreversible and swift. It’s a signal for the whole elite.” [...] “Obviously this was ordered,” a person close to the Russian defence ministry said. “It was his people who killed the airmen, after all. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. It was totally unclear for two months why he was travelling the world . . . now they’ve liquidated him and it all makes sense.” [...] As Prigozhin’s jet criss-crossed Russia and Belarus, and then flew as far as Mali, Moscow elites and western security officials alike started to suspect his time would soon be up. “I thought they’d use novichok,” said a second former senior Kremlin official, referring to the nerve agent used to poison Kremlin opponents such as ex-spy Sergei Skripal and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. “They’ve added something new to the menu.” [...] “The crisis has been dealt with quickly and effectively,” said Andrei Soldatov, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and co-author of several books about Russia’s security services. Soldatov said Putin had taken time to deal with Prigozhin’s assets and punish hardliners before exacting his ultimate revenge.

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delectablywaywardbeard-blog · 1 month

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“Sindrome dell’Avana”: cos’è l’arma segreta russa usata dal Cremlino su Fbi, Cia e ufficiali Usa

Gli stessi ufficiali dei servizi segreti militari russi del GRU dell’unità 29155 che hanno avvelenato Sergey Skripal stanno paralizzando i diplomatici e agenti americani in tutto il mondo con un’arma segreta che usa microonde e ultrasuoni e causa quella che è nota ormai come “sindrome di Havana”, consistente in gravi danni cerebrali e all’orecchio che causano fortissimo mal di testa, perdita di…

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regioonlineofficial · 2 months

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De Vrede van Nijmegen Penning 2024 wordt toegekend aan de Britse oprichter van het internationale onderzoeksjournalistiekcollectief Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins. Hij ontvangt de prijs voor zijn vernieuwende bijdrage aan vrede en mensenrechten. De penning wordt op 18 april 2024 uitgereikt in de Stevenskerk in Nijmegen, waarna Higgins de Vrede van Nijmegenlezing zal uitspreken. Bellingcat Het internationale netwerk van (burger)journalisten Bellingcat maakt sinds 2014 op innovatieve wijze gebruik van openbare gegevens en beelden om de waarheid boven tafel te krijgen over misdaden, mensenrechtenschendingen en misstanden in conflicten en oorlogen. Oprichter en burgerjournalist Eliot Ward Higgins (1979) schreef als blogger en burger-onderzoeksjournalist eerder onder het pseudoniem Brown Moses. Hij gebruikt voor zijn onderzoeken naar misstanden vooral open data en social mediakanalen. In 2015 ontving hij de Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award, een Duitse onderscheiding voor uitmuntendheid in de journalistiek. Higgins en Bellingcat onderzochten bijvoorbeeld de oorlogen in Syrië en tussen Rusland en Oekraïne, het neerhalen van de Malaysia Airlines vlucht MH17 en de vergiftiging van Sergei en Yulia Skripal. Higgins kreeg zijn eerste brede media-aandacht met het identificeren van wapens in video's van het Syrische conflict. Bellingcat werkte met Transparency International aan het blootleggen van misbruik van Scottish Limited Partnerships voor criminele witwasconstructies in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Ook publiceerde Bellingcat met Forensic Architecture een spraakmakend onderzoek naar de moord op Óscar Pérez in Venezuela. Eliot Higgins, oprichter van Bellingcat (©) Bellingcat deelt deze methodiek met een nog altijd uitbreidend netwerk van burgerjournalisten. Ook grote instituten zoals het International Criminal Court en het International Independent and Impartial Mechanism on Syria van de VN hebben interesse getoond in het gebruik van open data voor bewijsvoering. De innovatieve benadering van Bellingcat, met gebruik van openbaar beschikbare gegevens en analyses door burgerjournalisten, is bijzonder belangrijk voor het duiden van feiten en beelden tot bewijzen van misdaden, misstanden in conflicten en mensenrechtenschendingen. Met hun publicaties dragen zij op hedendaagse en innovatieve wijze bij aan internationale vrede en veiligheid. Met deze prijs laten Radboud Universiteit, NXP en gemeente Nijmegen blijken dat zij, naast waardering voor mensen die aan vrede bijdragen vanuit het openbaar bestuur, de literatuur en de wetenschap, ook grote waarde hechten aan iconen van moedig en betrokken burgerschap. Meer info & aanmelden voor de ceremonie: Vrede van Nijmegen Penning | Into Nijmegen Vrede van Nijmegen Met de Vrede van Nijmegen kwam er in 1678 een tijdelijk einde aan de oorlogen die Europa teisteren. In de Waalstad sloten onder meer Spanje, Frankrijk, Zweden, de Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden en het Heilige Roomse Rijk vredesverdragen om verschillende oorlogen op het Europese continent te beëindigen. In veel Europese landen heeft de Vrede van Nijmegen een plaats gekregen in de geschiedenisboeken als een cruciaal moment in de Europese geschiedenis. Vrede van Nijmegen Penning De Vrede van Nijmegen Penning is een tweejaarlijkse onderscheiding die wordt uitgereikt aan een internationale hoofdrolspeler die zich ingezet heeft voor Europa. Het is de zevende keer dat de Vrede van Nijmegen Penning wordt uitgereikt. Eerdere laureaten zijn: Jacques Delors (2010), Umberto Eco (2012), Neelie Kroes (2014), het Europese Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens (2016), Paul Polman (2018) en Frans Timmermans (2022). Vanwege de coronapandemie is de Penning in 2020 niet uitgereikt. De Vrede van Nijmegen Penning is een initiatief van de gemeente Nijmegen, de Radboud Universiteit en NXP Semiconductors N.V. en wordt ondersteund door het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken. Avondprogramma De Toekomst van de Waarheid met Eliot Higgins

INNOVATE Meetup i.s.m. Radboud Reflects Hoe onthul je de waarheid in een post-truth tijdperk? Hoe verandert journalistiek in tijden van sociale media en open source informatie? Hoe navigeren we door een landschap waarin informatie zowel vrij als onbeperkt aanwezig is? Als onderdeel van het programma rond de Vrede van Nijmegen Penning 2024 organiseert Innovate samen met Radboud Reflects een Meetup over de evolutie van nieuws, de uitdagingen van desinformatie en onze gezamenlijke zoektocht naar waarheid in een tijd van digitale overvloed. Meetup: 17 april 2024, 20.00 uur, St. Stevenskerk, met bijdragen van Eliot Higgins (Bellingcat), journalisten en wetenschappers. Programma en tickets: https://DeToekomstVanDeWaarheid.eventbrite.nl

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mariacallous · 4 months

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Pilger’s politics can fairly be described as anti-American, in that he reflexively saw the United States as a malevolent actor in any conceivable situation. That idée fixe in turn drove him to the conviction that any regime opposed by the US was automatically innocent or even benign. Interviewed on the state-propaganda outlet Russia Today in 2018, he declared the Putin regime’s attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury a ‘carefully constructed drama in which the media plays a role’. He said in December 2021, as if Ukrainians lacked any capacity to speak and act for themselves and were merely puppets of Washington: ‘It was the US that overthrew the elected govt in Ukraine in 2014 allowing Nato to march right up to Russia’s western border.’

The apotheosis of this approach was an article in 2016 in which Pilger claimed: ‘The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.’

There was, I need hardly say, no truth whatever in this preposterous fabrication. With all too familiar legerdemain and gullibility, Pilger had alighted on an article on the Russia Today website and, without stating this was his source, plagiarised it. In my view this episode marks, in its combination of idleness and indecency, the nadir of Pilger’s career, and it was a very low and shady point indeed.

This is not the place to set out the chronology of the Bosnian war but what the mainstream media (including The Guardian, through the exemplary reporting of Ed Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane) said about it at the time was simply the truth. The war was not a cover for American power: it was a campaign of genocidal aggression conducted by Bosnian Serb forces covertly orchestrated from Belgrade, and in which Nato intervened against their positions far too late. It was also, as I have described here, a terrible augury of the barbarous assault that another European autocrat, Vladimir Putin, would direct against Ukraine 30 years afterwards.

What, then, of the earlier body of Pilger’s work, before his alleged journalistic and ethical deterioration? In the nature of things, it was not always wrong, but it was always reductive. His condemnation of Australian recognition of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, in print and in his 1994 film Death of a Nation, was entirely correct. But to be right on a discrete issue was never enough for him. He would have to construct some overarching explanation (or, less politely, a conspiracy theory) in which to embed it. He hence charged that Australia was administering a ‘hidden empire’ that ‘stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the South Pacific’. You’d be hard put to find any such coherence in Australian foreign policy, which has often been made on the hoof and at the mercy of events.

When East Timor eventually achieved its independence, it did so to the fury of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It was, in their eyes, an affront, for East Timor (whose population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic) was properly a ‘part of the Islamic world’ and belonged to Indonesia. This complaint was explicitly cited by bin Laden in justifying al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Indonesian tourist resort of Bali in October 2002, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians.

Pilger was usually quick to blame western foreign policy for provoking terrorism – he referred to the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005 as ‘Blair’s bombs’ – yet here was a case where western nations incurred the wrath of al-Qaeda for unequivocally (if belatedly) doing the right thing. The geopolitical situation was more complex than he had supposed, and than you would imagine from reading his output. He dealt with the disjunction of theory and fact in time-honoured fashion, by never mentioning it.

John Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster

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