Curated World-Who to believe on Moscow?
In a world of disinformation (deliberate) and misinformation it's hard to know who and what to believe -- and that's just how the dark actors want it whether it's the Moscow terror attack or Gaza...
Moscow: Putin points the blame magnet at Kyiv and away from him
In a classic Kremlin maneuver perfected by the former KGB-spy-turned president-forever it seems, Vladimir Putin sprayed blame for the appalling terror attack on concertgoers in Moscow liberally towards Kyiv and Washington.
Putin and Russian officials and their compliant and lying media acolytes smeared disinformation as fast as they could over the security lapses let alone that deaths of at least 139 people in an attack on the Crocus Town Hall venue.
Deploying what I think of as the “cunning devils” tactic of clouding facts with ideas so implausible they seem almost possible, Putin acknowledged that the Afghanistan-based ISIS-K group had claimed responsibility. However…
“We know that the crime was committed by radical Islamists,” Putin acknowledged in a televised government meeting, the Washington Post reported. He then took what the Post called an ‘angrier, conspiratorial turn’, saying: “We also know that the U.S. via various channels tries to persuade their satellites and other countries that, according to their intel, there is allegedly no Kyiv trace in the Moscow terrorist attack and that it was carried out by members of ISIS.”
In what is another “tell” of a conspiracy theorist, or in his case a maker of deadly mayhem, at work, Putin asked: “The question that arises is who benefits from this? This atrocity may be just a link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 by the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime.”
Those cunning devils in Kyiv and their dastardly American backers whose direct warning about a looking Islamist terror attack on a concert, Putin rejected as "provocative statements" that resemble "resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilise our society". Oops.
The official disinformation around the Crocus attack is matched only by the speed at which bonkers theories of Ukrainian involvement surged around the Internet (especially to my eyes on X and in one case from a would-be New Zealand politician).
To understand more about the affair and Putin’s skill at sowing chaos over a genuine crisis, I turned to two experts on Putin and on Russia, journalist and author David Satter, and English historian Mark Galeotti to try to understand what is going on.
Satter, who is a friend, wrote on X rather sardonically that: “the FSB and the Putin regime are perfectly capable of blowing up their own people for political reasons. In this case, however, it appears we are dealing with an attack by ISIS.”
His 2016 book The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin is an astounding indictment of Putin’s likely role in a series of deadly apartment bombings he used to cement his power and to launch into the second Chechen war to attack phantom terrorists.
“The Putin regime has no problem murdering its own citizens but at the moment and pending further information, this looks like one crime in which they were not involved,” Satter wrote on X, noting that ISIS had motivation aplenty to attack Russia given its role in propping up the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Galeotti, whose super-nerdy podcast is a must-listen on Russia, wrote in The Times that the attack posed a crisis of Putin — jeopardising his claim of domestic safety — while focusing the nation on a war of his own making with Ukraine.
“The president has sought to legitimise himself in the past by offering Russians an improving standard of living in return for political quiescence and by demonstrating that he was their tough defender,” Galeotti wrote in The Times.
“With the country sliding into stagnation under the pressure of its bloody war in Ukraine, he has had to stake everything on the latter. Yet while Ukrainian drones now strike at Russian oil refineries, he is also having to deal with the country’s worst terrorist attack in years. He is likely to feel an impulse to make a dramatic gesture in response — but against whom?”
Expect that “gesture” soon.
Go deeper on this subject
Here’s a section from GoodReads on the David Satter books, each of which has a better and more philosophical title than the last.
In the realm of sometimes unreliable yet sometimes spot-on analysis of this shadowy world of intelligence and false flag attacks and reality, the X user Igor Shusko has some interesting and potentially credible angles on whether Russian security forces may have at the very least been aware of the coming attack. I don’t vouch for it. (Good thing I didn’t vouch for it as it seems to have been soundly debunked.)
Gaza war of words about the impact and meaning of the word genocide
There is no more charged word in the Israeli mindset than genocide and the idea it could be applied to Israel itself is hard if not impossible to stomach for Israelis and many Jews in the diaspora.
First, the International Court of Justice, what we often call the World Court, took on a case from South Africa accepting that there was a “plausible” case that Israel had committed genocidal acts in its invasion of Gaza since the October 7 Hamas massacre. Now the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories has issued a series of shattering allegations, vigorously denied by Israel, that there are ongoing acts of genocide in the Israeli invasion.
Francesca Albanese published Anatomy of a Genocide to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday. In it she describes incidents that she says align exactly with accepted definitions of genocidal acts.
“Israel has committed three acts of genocide with a requisite intent: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” she told a news conference CNN reported.
Israel already sees the Human Rights Council as hostile and went further to accuse Albanese of delegitimising the state of Israel. Taken with the ICJ agreeing to take on the South African case, the report is a damning indictment of the conduct of the invasion of Gaza by a country built on the ashes of the original genocide.
Go deeper on this subject
East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" By Philippe Sands is a remarkable examination of the legal definitions and the people who came up with them in the shadow of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials.
Recommended reads this weekend
Minimum wage is UK’s ‘most successful economic policy in a generation’ in The Guardian is an analysis on a fascinating report by a UK economics think thank. It will prepare you for dinner time conversations about layabouts and freeloaders.
Molten magnificence: how Richard Serra’s giant steel sculptures bent time and space in The Guardian describes the epic work of the sculptor who died this week. (If you haven’t seen it the Serra at Gibbs Farm on the Kaipara is among his largest and most spectacular works and should be something of a national treasure.)