More creepy activity from Registan_net -- and what can you do? You have to push back. "
I noticed on Twitter that Joshua Foust was complaining that Radio Ozodlik, the Uzbek Service of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, had linked to my blog about this affair of the two Uzbek students interrogated by the SNB (National Security Service) of Uzbekistan over their discussion of human rights topics in an NGO program.
He yelped that I was "knowingly printing falsehoods" (does he consciously imitate the wording of Art. 190-1?) and claims my blog contains "lies" and that I was "attacking his friend Sarah Kendzior" and that I am a "troll" (sigh), and therefore ordered RFE/RL to remove the link to my blog.
I can't see where in fact they did link -- I know a previous article about the terrorist suspect Jamshid Muhtorov linked to both my blog with translations of old press about him, as well as to Registan, as I've seen the hits on this blog. I don't know if there are other stories in Uzbek that have links -- I don't see them on ozodlik.org but it may dynamically change (i.e. they have a Twitter feed and it could be there, for example, or versions of the story are updated).
It occurs to me that as professional and balanced as Radio Ozodlik has always seemed to me, they might feel they have to remove the link (Washington establishmentarianism). I've always defended Ozodlik in fact from the Registan readers' nasty detractions and claims that it is biased because it is funded by the US Congress -- but maybe they could feel restrained by that larger-than-life presence that the Kerry-for-Secretary-of-State in Obama II American Security Project seems to project with Joshua Foust on Twitter (or the shadow of the Department of Defense, or whatever it is that gives him his mana).
I got a rather testy reply from @RFE/RL as you can see:
Interactions
@CADialog @ozodlik @sarahkendzior @rferl I'd rather not feed the troll by naming it. They know which one I mean.
joshuafoust @joshuafoust Hey @ozodlik, why do you keep linking to a blog that knowingly prints false allegations about my colleague @sarahkendzior? @RFERL
RFE/RL @RFERL @joshuafoust @CADialog @sarahkendzior Yes, we know who the blog belongs to. I have passed on your concern to the head of our Uzbek Svc
@RFERL @sarahkendzior Thanks. The link to the post accusing her of supporting the SNB was way beyond acceptable & could be dangerous.
CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitz @RFERL @sarahkendzior @joshuafoust It's hugely scary that you'd let these people tell you what to link to on the Internet!
@catfitz We did not (and will not) let @sarahkendzior & @joshuafoust "tell us what to publish." They are free, as are you, to voice concerns
Well, the proof is in the pudding. If there is a link and it is still there and they didn't remove it, good! But that first interaction sounds like RFE/RL is convinced -- "we know who the blog belongs to" (er, it's not a secret as it is contains my name and biography) and "passing it on" makes it sound like they accepted that there should be "concerns". I'll have to follow up and see where all this might stand.
Some avenues I think this story needs for inquiry:
o why isn't the State Department making a statement?
o again, isn't there concern about the relatives? Have they been questioned?
o will the State Department now direct exchange programs to remove human rights or face interrogations?
Meanwhile, once again to refute Foust's incendiary claims that are merely meant to smear me, and are the usual tactics of this bully, who always makes it seem as if every legitimate criticism of him and Registan is tantamount to red-baiting or McCarthyism.
1. I don't accuse Sarah Kendzior of "supporting the SNB". I accuse her of not sufficiently criticizing the SNB when it merits criticism, pulling her punches, and of allowing Registan commenters tto walk all over victims of the regime with only pleas for tolerance and balance -- instead of the condemnation they deserve. It's about poor judgement and lack of good politics -- not about a claim of some sordid agent status. Yeah, I get it that academics don't see themselves as in the human rights business, but you know, there is such a thing as human decency.
Nathan Hamm, operating the registan_net account was hysterically claiming as well that I was accusing Registan of freelancing for the SNB. Again, if you are going to make statements that tend to support the regime and justify its supporters, and if you are repeatedly going to provide a forum for obvious regime supporters in the comments, you can't honestly get away with bitching when people call you out on that. You have to explain yourself. That explanation isn't a crass "we're paid $50 per post". But whatever nuanced realpolitik thing it is, it's ok to demand it without being smeared with charges of McCarthyism. Can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen sort of thing.
2. I point out once again that in telling the story of the suicide girl, Kendzior floats the hypothesis that this could be "someone with an agenda" trying to discredit the emigres or human rights groups, but she implies once again that it's just one emigre group squabbling with another. She does not say forthright that one of the very likely hypotheses is that the SNB concocted the whole thing from start to finish not only to discredit groups but scare people off the Internet.
3. I point out that this story of the two students is awfully similar to the suicide girl story -- interrogation by the SNB, and then panic, and then the entire community of Uzbekistan-watchers all abuzz about the Dangers of Talking About Human Rights Especially On the Internet.
4. As I noted, the story of the two students is more than likely to be true, although questions have to be asked about it (i.e. why they did not fear for their relatives in publicizing this, and why there is no US government protest about this story now that it is public). My concerns are *the uses to which* Kendzior and others are putting this story, it is not about questioning the students.
5. And what are those uses? Registan is highly selective in the human rights stories they pick up. When, after the exposure of the suicide hoax, another hoax happened with Ablutov involving a student arrested for leaflets, they were silent, and Sarah left the implication open in her rendition of the suicide story once again that it's one emigre with an agenda against another. So the uses of Registan here are multiple:
A. To highlight the danger of human rights discussions on the Internet, to prove the academic theory that talk of repression reduces Internet use (like Prof. Peter Ludlow, who would make the news of griefing in order to study it). More and more, with social media, academics don't like to just study from a distance and wait for the picture to unfold, consciously or not, they want to accelerate the premises with the use of social media -- hence Registan as a project.
B. To send and then applaud the signal that people should be more careful and these programs should pull in their horns (in support of the status quo). It's my sincere belief that what the SNB hoped to achieve with this was a megaphone use of Registan to bruit about the dangers of talking about human rights -- mission accomplished.
C. To enable the anklebiters to come out and support the regime and trash the two students.
Of course, C) is particularly disturbing, and the reason for allowing that kind of bad faith, so common on Registan, has to do with not only the agendas of A) and B), but projecting a sense of "balance" and "academic impartiality". Most normal, decent people see creeps like Metin or Will harassing a victim of Uzbek injustice or second-guessing activists as something that a moderator on a moderated blog should moderate. They are hateful and nasty. I don't believe in moderating comments that don't incite actual damages, but since they moderate all the time (banning, deleting, reprimanding), the fact that they let those two and other regime sympathizers strike again and again is creepy.
The game that both Metin and Will play is that they aren't regime sympathizers, even, and certainly aren't in the pay of the regime or any supportive Western government, but just happen to have those pro-state views naturally. Okay, but then, we still get to criticize them as they are reprehensible.
Why does Sarah Kendzior write these convoluted posts where she stops shy of direct confrontation with the regime or direct calling out of SNB tactics, and gets embroiled in these long academic twists and turns claiming the real corrosive problem of the Internet isn't the actual SNB, but the projected SNB about which people are paranoid and distrustful?
Well, for one, virtualized paranoia is easier to study than the secretive SNB, although it's not true what Sarah keeps saying about it -- that we "can't know" or "we know nothing". We just had two fairly credible reports from some students about how they were interrogated! And we get stories of such things daily (read Urlaeva's email and fergananews.com not to mention ozodlik.org).
But I also think -- again -- that it has to do with being a sort of "smart Fred Starr in training." That is, like the establishment figures Martha Brill Olcott or Frederick Starr and others, who can range from "understanding" to "apologetic" for the Central Asian governments, Kendzior wants to make sure she isn't burning any bridges to the country where her main theses reside, and to which she needs to get visas. The problem of Sovietology has always been access and the ability of your object of study to deprive you of access to itself, so it's always been dysfunctional that way.
In that sense, Kendzior is like scores of academics before her in this field who always strive to be "balanced" or "academic" or "impartial" or "open-minded" or simply "quiet" (normally good and useful qualities) to make sure they get in. That's how the game works -- it's her right to do so, and believe that she is really all those things; it's my right to call it out as fundamentally fake.
She may do this instinctively after years of studying in or around Uzbekistan and may not see it as any kind of conscious moral decision. I do. And that's ok.
Registan's game is always and everywhere to squeal like stuck pigs that somebody is baiting them as SNB agents if they criticize them. This is "dishonest" and "mendacious" and "all lies" and all the rest of the screeching we hear from Foust.
No. If you can't tell the story of Gulsumoy without admitting as one of the options that it was likely all the SNB, you are not intellectually honest -- speaking of honest. You are suppressing inquiry and legitimate hypotheses. It's not that you must -- as I have -- hew to the opinion that it is most likely the SNB -- but if you simply don't even mention that it could be, that's just not right.
By repeatedly invoking the notion of the SNB as "being everywhere" -- even quoting Arendt -- I submit that Kendzior is in fact helping to shore up a notion that it is "nowhere". It is only in our paranoid imaginations. And I think that does a grave disservice to the facts. Thousands and thousands of people have gone through the SNB's clutches and there are huge numbers of eyewitnesses and documented reports like Human Rights Watch. So to say that it's overstated or exaggerated or the operative social factor is only distrust/paranoia and not actuality is an act of bad faith.
I realize that Kendzior's whole academic treatise hangs on this notion of the virtualized SNB as a social factor that outweights the real SNB. But it's tripe. The real SNB is really bad. The virtualized SNB is understandable and for people to mention and people to discuss. Registan tries to make it happen so that you can never, never suspect or discuss the role of intelligence manipulation of the public discourse -- or risk being discredited.
Perhaps some of them have some legitimate concern about a discussion that "goes nowhere" or "is beyond the pale" or "goes too far" or some other gentlemanly establishment notion. But the reality is, we all can and should go on questioning those who keep carrying water for the regimes at Registan, regardless of how they came to be carrying that water. It's not taboo or off limits to do so, and smearing people who question others' support of the regime and attacks on its victims (like those two students) as McCarthyites is really what should be unacceptable.
