Rachel Maddow and the New Cold War narrative

I don't recall off-hand whether I've ever quoted Radio Free Europe on this blog before. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a US government-sponsored news agency. It can legitimately be called a propaganda service, although that doesn't mean that their stories are false. So far as I'm aware, RFE/RL has a pretty good record for accuracy. But they make no secret about their government funding:

Q. How is RFE/RL funded and managed?
A. RFE/RL is funded by the U.S. Congress through the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The BBG is a bipartisan federal agency overseeing all U.S international broadcasting services. In addition to RFE/RL, this includes Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, Radio Sawa, and Radio Marti.

Under IRS rules, RFE/RL is a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation. Chartered in Delaware, it receives federal grants as a private grantee. RFE/RL maintains a corporate office in Washington, D.C.

Here's the reason I'm quoting it here. The perennially perky Rachel Maddow has not been shy about covering the Russia-Russia-Russia story. Here's one of her more substantial reports, Republicans To Put Russian Bank Lawyer In Coveted DoJ Position MSNBC 09/28/2017:

This is substantial because it deals with the Trump team's business entanglements with Russian entities of various kinds. I'm still in the camp that thinks the dubious business dealing will be the main thing bringing him down - or at least leading to major members of his team being indicted - rather than Boris and Natasha meetings to scheme about the Presidential campaign.

I've written quite a bit about the hacking issue, and I think I've been pretty consistent in saying that it is serious and needs to be dealt with realistically.

But this report of Maddow's from the previous day strikes me as an insufficiently realistic way to look at this issue, Expansionist Russia Promotes Division Everywhere Else MSNBC 09/27/2017:

Actually, it strikes me as a frivolous Cold War 1.0 polemic, just without the Communism. Or anti-Communism, as it were. She opens it with a segment on this event, as reported by RFE/RL in Ukraine Security Chief Says Depot Blasts Dealt 'Big Blow' To Combat Capability 09/28/2017:

Massive blasts followed by a blaze at a military depot near Kalynivka in the Vinnytsya region, 270 kilometers west of Kyiv, forced the evacuation of 30,000 people on September 27. Another depot in the eastern city of Kharkiv was destroyed in March. That blast was blamed on sabotage. ...

Chief military prosecutor Anatoliy Matios on September 28 rejected earlier statements from authorities suggesting that foreign saboteurs may have set the [Kalynivka] depot on fire.

Matios said investigators were looking into possible negligence, abuse of power, or sabotage by those who were authorized to handle the ammunition.

He added that the investigation found that the fire alarm at the depot wasn't functioning and that its security team was understaffed.

"Neither the investigators, nor the Security Service, nor any law enforcement agencies found any groups of saboteurs in the Vinnytsya region that people are talking about on Facebook," Matios said, an apparent reference to comments made by several senior Ukrainian officials on social media on September 27 blaming Russian saboteurs for the fire.

In the aftermath of the blast, authorities said they launched checks at military bases across Ukraine and discovered serious violations.

Investigators found a colonel and a lieutenant colonel in charge of security at a military depot holding Soviet-era ballistic missiles who were "completely drunk," Matios said.

Listen to Maddow's report and see if you hear anything about those official denials from the Ukrainian government that they were assuming sabotage was involved in the Kalynivka incident, as reported by RFE/RL. She said that otherwise unnamed "Ukrainian authorities say that this one, too, may have been started by sabotage." And, "the Ukrainian govenrment is saying, saying today essentially that the Russians were able to get them" in the blast at the Kalynivka depot.

My point here is not that Rachel Maddow or the US propaganda channel RFE/RL has the definitive version of this blast on this past Wednesday. It is rather that her report differs significantly from the other one. Now it's entirely possible that the Trump Administration is requiring the RFE/RL to be more Russia-friendly to the point of completely distorting a report like this. But Maddow presented it as obvious that the Russians blew up this depot. Then she launches directly into a discussion of Russian expansion and "information warfare" by the Russians in support of various kinds of secessionist movements in other countries.

This is also a fascinating observation from her report:

As Russia was literally seizing territory from a neighboring country in the last few years, they became one of the only modern industrialized nations in a generation to have invaded a neighboring country and taken over part of its territory. Russia also simultaneously took to the information space to shut down activists from that country. They've also been all over the globe promoting secession movements and breakaway independence movements in all sorts of countries. They've been lit-, in other words, they've been looking to get bigger while they've been busy working to make sure that everybody else gets smaller. They're literally taking over neighboring countries' territory to make Russia a larger country while promoting, in the online space, movements that would break apart their rivals and competitors on the global stage.

She proceeds from there to promote a Twitter-style online poll that currently appears at her program's website:

I wonder what the Russian way to say "are you [bleeping] kidding me?" would be.

The English answer, of course, is that yes, she's kidding, at least in part. She's kidding by mocking the notion of Russia supporting obscure secessionist movements in the US are basically only taken seriously by people who are heavily medicated or seriously need to be.

But she seems to be very serious about her Russia-is-trying-to-undermine-the-whole-world part of her report. My first question about that part quoted above is, has Maddow ever read a book on Russia by a real historian? Or even the Britannica Online entry? The latter being perfectly respectable, BTW. Britannica also uses real historians to write those pieces. Their current online article on Russia lists 14 scholars of Russia as their contributors.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there were four significant wars in which Russia took a major role. There were two separate wars in Chechnya, an area which has been continuously part of Russia since 1860, where the Russians were fighting Muslim separatists. Or, as they are called in Trumpian-patriotically-correct terms, "radical Islamic terrorists." Naturally, our American motives against such opponents in our War on Terror are entirely praiseworthy. But Russia's were entirely reprehensible, I'm sure.

There were clashes in Georgia in 2008, where ethnic-Russian-dominated areas established two autonomous republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, actively backed by Russian. Then there were the dramatic conflicts in Ukraine from 2014, when Russia also backed ethnic Russian autonomy movements and annexed the Crimea to Russia. Let's stipulate here that these actions raised all sorts of international law issues, especially the Crimea annexation.

Backing the autonomy movements in Georgia and Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea, were geopolitical responses - right or wrong - to the expansion of NATO and moves to incorporate those two countries into NATO. If Russia is in effective control of part of those countries' territories, it makes it much more difficult to incorporate them into NATO. Because NATO would then be committed to defending borders that Georgia and Ukraine don't actually control. (Not for nothing, the status of ethnic Russian communities in those areas involves issues going back to Czarist settlement policies in territories incorporated into Russia.)

So, yes, the annexation of Crimea was an expansion of Russian territory from what it was at the beginning of 2008. This is what Rachel Maddow describes as, "They're literally taking over neighboring countries' territory to make Russia a larger country while promoting, in the online space, movements that would break apart their rivals and competitors on the global stage."

I've refrained until this point from invidious comparisons involving American policies. So let me just say that I've very much looking forward to Rachel Maddow's in-depth report of the history of US regime change efforts in Venezuela. Or Chile. Or Argentina. Or Brazil. Or Guatemala. Or El Salvador. Or Paraguay. I'm sure those will be passionate and informative. And delivered in a cheerfully perky manner.