Different Stans

Are Special Wars Really New and Special or Are They Old Dirty Tricks?

John Schindler, the former NSA official and professor at the US Navy Academy, has a theory of "special wars" -- basically running wars like the Russians do in order to be able to fight them.

Except, I'm quite sure neither he nor any supporters would like that reductive description of the concept.

I love John Schindler's stuff -- don't get me wrong. I always marvel that someone that young who didn't directly fight the Soviets in the dissident trenches understands so much about them and their methods, and is even able to teach others about it methodically. It restores my hope in the NSA after Snowden, which for me, like CableGate, is at least in part about the failure of government to keep out the adversarial hacker culture that accompanies wikification and moving life online.

Schindler has been absolutely right on Snowden and all things related to it, so I take seriously any theory he comes up with about how to fight the Russians better, especially now that they have really gone full-tilt into enemy mode. I'm all for containment, Cold War, deterrence -- the works because all of that is required with this kind of real threat to the West.

So how hard will it be to put "special war" over politically, given the Obama "progressives" and what is to come if they succeed again in 2016?

Here's where Schindler first wrote about it at length and more this week since it was covered in the New York Times.

I've been thinking about it since last year, and have questions about it:

Ever since I heard of Schindler’s “special war” theory last September, I’ve pondered whether I like it or not — but then, war isn’t something you “like like” – as you do a Facebook kitty. There’s the Catholic theory of “a just war” which should have as its goals the ending of war. Does it fit?

I wonder how some of its aspects are to be distinguished from what used to be called “CIA dirty tricks” — and maybe it’s not. For those who don’t want to endorse drones and mass killing, “special wars” is an attractive alternative. And indeed, any moral person has to ask why we wouldn’t opt for “special wars” that are more efficient, require much less troops, seem brainier, and are more pin-pointed. That is, a drone might have “collateral damage” or hit women and children or wedding guests while going after the fighters who deliberately mingle among them — there’s lots of angst about drones become of the remoteness of the operation of them. Then massive numbers of troops — as in the “surge” in Afghanistan — that just seems to get lots of our soldiers killed, and not win the war anyway — precisely because we live in the age of “special wars” which the Russians and the Taliban for that matter are really good at.

So wouldn’t we rather have an intelligence agent parachute in and assassinate the Pakistani ISI operative who is sustaining the Taliban, or infiltrate a political party, or get inside the prime minister’s office, or whatever it is that you do, instead of massing troops around borders and trying to drone away militants. In the old days, that’s what the CIA did, and it worked in some places, but it got a bad rap.

That’s my question then. Once “special wars” gets going, how will it deal with the bad rap? The Russians and even some Ukrainians think the US has mercenaries parachuted into southeastern Ukraine already (we don’t); what if we start really doing that sort of thing?

Next, there is so much wrong with the military — scandals in the top leadership, suicides, massacres of civilians, PTSD– as I’ve noted before, I think this is a mismatch between the reality of what war is, and the PR campaign that the armed forces insist on retaining, which implies that you “learn a skill” and “get a job” through the military — meaning that the poor people who come into this setting think their goal is to get a skill and be assured of a job, instead of going into dangerous places and killing people. So that begs the question: can we make “special wars” with *this* army?

In general, I’d like to see less contractors in the armed services and government in general — most problems we’ve had — think of Snowden – are related to them. So would “special wars” be done with contractors? I think it would be better to have permanent, trained, regular armed services doing this.

We also need more HUMINT, foreign languages, education — how will that be assured? Can existing academies like West Point create the cadres of the “special wars” or does some other academy have to be created?

Finally, what about the moral problem of “becoming like them”? The Russians are good at “special wars” because they’re cynical nihilists exploiting illiberal ideas like nationalism or Eurasianism. Can you get good at “special wars” and remain decent?

 

So basically, it comes down to this: if Schindler means that we should get better at fighting the Russians who use this whole array of Bolshevik methods, from disinformation to masking to lying to agitation and propaganda -- by using more counter-intelligence and counter-propaganda, I'm for that. But how much will we be lying, cheating, disinforming, faking, masking, ourselves then?

Would it involve committing terrorism against civilians?

That is, I'm for exposing propaganda, calling out lies, vigorously challenging all the bullshit coming out of the Kremlin and broadcasting much more of it than we do. I'm for getting a lot more clever about dealing with this ruthless enemy in the Kremlin. Some of that requires clandestine work that the public will have to take on faith needs to be done, and the less they know about it, the better. But how to get that through in the age of Snowden, where the default of most young people is to distrust government and imagine the US is the greatest evil in the world?

 

 

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HUMINT And The Drone War

The Zhovtis Case and the Soros Mission in #Kazakhstan

I'm glad Yevgeny Zhovtis was freed early from his four-year jail sentence for involuntary vehicular manslaughter. It was an unjust case from start to finish, and I hope he will be able to resume his important human rights work after recuperating and getting his bearings.  He returns from his isolation in a prison colony 1,000 miles from his home to a country that is worse off, human-rights wise.

Ironically, it was Zhovtis himself who recommended that the West give its blessing to the notion of having Kazakhstan as the chair of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); he thought it might put his country into the glare of international scrutiny and bring about human rights reform.

It didn't. Things got worse, with the passage of a worse press law, the jailing of a journalist, harassment of independent media and NGOs, and in the end, a  highly compromised NGO parallel conference at the official summit (limited in its numbers and forced to accept Kazakh officials and GONGOs on the speakers' list) -- which produced nothing, and ended in a stand-off.

Since then -- one could argue that Astana's sense of impunity with the chair set the stage -- the human rights situation has dramatically deteriorated, with the shooting of at least 14 striking workers by official admission (and credible reports of possibly as many as 64), and the jailing of journalists and opposition members. I think we're going to see this situation get worse before it gets better and it opens up the question of the extent to which human rights groups can function there -- including Zhovtis and the Kazakhstan Human Rights Bureau he has headed for years. They've weathered many a storm; they will survive. But it will be tough. How can the international community help?

That brings me to the issue of the Soros Foundation-Kazakhstan of which Zhovtis was former chair from 1999-2002, and was also a board member of OSI’s Central Eurasia Project. The Kazakhstan Open Society Foundation is now looking for an executive chair, as sadly, the former chair, Anna Alexandra, passed away from cancer at an early age.

INITIAL CAUTIOUS OSF RESPONSE TO ZHOVTIS CASE

At the time Zhovtis was arrested, for various reasons, from what I gather, both the local office and the international overseers in New York decided not to have an OSF presence at the trial. Apparently, there was concern that if the "Soros" brand was too visible and close to this trial, it would actually make things go worse for Zhovtis. At home and abroad, the Soros name is inevitably tied to conspiracy theories by conservatives -- likely the tactic was to keep this kind of thing away from the case.

I couldn't have disagreed more. I thought that in his hour of need, the people who had in part put Zhovtis at risk with this regime by having him on their board should stand visibly by his side, with the highest level they could muster in their operation. There was always the tension of the local office versus international norms -- these local Soros foundations are often forced into compromises with the powers-that-be merely to preserve their presence. In Russia, this discrepancy between local pressures and international expectations eventually led to the closure of the office, as it appears to be doing in Azerbaijan. Soros has tended to pull back in recent years due to a tidal wave of backlash about his alleged involvement in financing "colour revolutions" -- by what's to be ashamed of, really? I'm for challenging this strategy.

While there wasn't a campaign in Kazakhstan, OSF did put out a statement on Zhovtis in New York. It was masterfully drafted, likely with legal as well as political advisory staff, and stayed away from declaring Zhovtis as innocent, or pronouncing his case as trumped-up to silence him on the eve of the Kazakh chairmanship of OSCE, and didn't demand his release.

Thirty years of New York human rights movement saddle-bag balancing and 50 years of European diplomacy went into this remarkable statement:

It is in the spirit of the values and standards to which Zhovtis is devoted, that we wish to convey our hope that Zhovtis will enjoy full rights in accordance with the law of Kazakhstan and international conventions to which Kazakhstan is party. His position as a leading rights defender does not entitle him to have any fault on his part overlooked. Nor should it result in any attribution of fault or harsher treatment than is warranted by the evidence.

Thanks, guys! One wishes, oh, the state of Israel enjoyed such kid-glove treatment from the Soros-funded Ken Roth and Human Rights Watch.

I think that sort of equivocating shouldn't have been in the statement, because the task at hand was human solidarity, not legalities. International human rights doesn't cover everything; and OSF should never have implied that you can get a fair trial in Kazakhstan with its wimpy "hope" for one. There's a fiction we all engage in when we call on these states to abide by their international obligations, but when it comes down to your very colleague on your very organization's board going to jail for a long time, the fiction shouldn't be indulged. The CEP leadership should have attended his trial, made multiple vigorous statements, and put out something less limp than this signed by the Brussels office. They didn't.

The Brussels statement opened with the same curiously elaborate apology to the victim of the accident, which may have been dictated by either the government of Kazakhstan itself, or Kazakhstan foundation leaders who felt this was the best approach to take.  Yet it's just plain odd to begin first with condolences to a pedestrian who completely accidently was killed when struck by the car Zhovtis was driving, and then as an afterthought, add condolences to Zhovtis. In a normal country under the rule of law, if you were not DWI and you were not at fault, striking dead a pedestrian would not lead to a jail sentence. That it did in Kazakhstan (and doesn't for everyone as we know) was a function of the regime's desire to pounce on this fortuitous situation to muzzle Zhovtis.

This very strange and stilted statement was possibly designed at someone's advice to "make things go better for Zhovtis" and possibly just a desire by lawyers to limit liability for litigation or association with a situation that would cost their entire presence in Kazakhstan.

RTP: the Insidious Doctrine

Sadly, David Rieff pretty much gets it right with his provocative article this morning, "Save Us From the Liberal Hawks" (whose URL contains the phrase "Syria Is Not Our Problem."

As he says, in argument against military intervention to stop crimes against humanity in Syria:

If the looming victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the failure of the democratic project in Iraq, and the fact that the most significant political outcomes of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya have been instability and the victory of political Islam have not chastened them -- and clearly they haven't -- nothing will.

I agree. Human rights activists have to think of this, and be accountable. With largely uncritical support of the Arab Spring, with support of the NATO intervention in Libya, and now support  of some military intervention in Syria, they are helping to usher in systems through massive violations of human rights. This has prompted Brazil rightly to talk now in the UN Security Council about "responsibility WHILE protecting." When we intervene, then we have ownership of these governments that are then more massively violating human rights than the previous autocrats. That should pose more of a challenge to the human rights ethos than it does.

As I wrote in 2009 in objection to Gareth Evans on Open Democracy, Responsibility to Protect (RTP) is an insidious doctrine as it implies that bad actors will act to protect their own people, which they won't, and that good actors will somehow avoid massive human rights violations in waging RTP wars, which they won't -- or that the results are pretty -- which they have never been.

We should at least wait to see if any of these other situations where we intervened and are losing ever improve before trying it again.

The religiosity of RTP has prompted Ken Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, now to call for us to "nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam" as if we can count on such rights-respecting.

The obsession with RTP intervention is preventing us from thinking about other means, such as putting pressure on China and Russia in other ways.

This is in sharp contrast to Anne-Marie Slaughter and other enthusiasts of RTP who have been strenuously calling on Twitter to "do something," with urgent argumentation against the realpolitickers like Joshua Foust -- who doesn't then have another plan to put pressure on Russia (or China) because he's generally uncritical of Russia (for him Georgia is always worse, etc.)

The massacres in Syria should be among the many reasons we really review the terms of the "reset" with Russia (and certainly not do things like "abolish" Jackson/Vanik when we can just simply declare that Russia has graduated from it). While it's unglamorous, we should return to the more patient type of human rights of the Cold War era when we had to combine rhetorical condemnation and documentation and incremental progress with arms talks. We should let the Arab League do the heavy lifting on dealing with the murderous regimes in their own region. No, it doesn't provide an immediate salve to the conscience -- the regimes resulting from intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't either for the last 10 years, and we should be mindful of that.

If this seems callous, go back to the half dozen failures mentioned at the top -- they should be chastening. I say "sadly" about Rieff's doctrine because I don't take any smug joy about it as some will, because it's so bleak. Nobody wants to stand by while people are murdered. But we might find ourselves in a proxy war with Russia or at least Rosvoorouzhenie (the Russian state arms supply company) in Syria that will make things worse.

As I said, an unseemly byproduct of the RTP doctrine and political human rights these days is Ken Roth's call on us to "nurture" Islamic states. He does this in much the same way as my friend Sergei Kovalev has always imagined that you could still have a socialist state even like the Soviet Union that might still be imagined to obey international human rights law. There's always been an assumption among such liberals that we can be agnostic about the social system of countries and pretend that one social system versus another isn't better about respecting basic civil rights and liberties. We'd all like this to be true. We can all show it to be false simply by looking at the Freedom House or Transparency International surveys.  That doesn't mean we can argue backwards and decide to go soft on human rights criticism of Western liberal capitalist democracies because their systems ensure rights better (the Jean Kirkpatrick debate of the 1970s).  But we can go to where the violations are, and admit that they should deserve the lion's share of our resources and attention.

The feminists who have challenged Amnesty International's disturbing doctrines in support of "defensive jihad" and jihadists who support the abrogation of women's rights have challenged Roth now, too, in a petition.

Normally I sign their petitions, for example, in defense of Amnesty's gender advisor who was forced to leave over these issues, but this particular open letter to Roth just had a problem for me in the invocation of the idea of the "right" to separation of church and state. I agree this is a good thing to have, but it's nowhere enshrined as a "right" in international law, although it is in the US in the First Amendment. I'm all for it, I just think in the international context you have to find a different way of saying this. And I do think then you have to talk about the assumptions that certain social systems (i.e. religious or socialist) are "better" or "not good" for promoting human rights.

Roth's essay is offensve because it attempts to guilt-trip liberals reticent about endorsing the Arab Spring results as "Islamophobic":

Rather, wherever Islam-inspired governments emerge, the international community should focus on encouraging, and if need be pressuring, them to respect basic rights—just as the Christian-labeled parties and governments of Europe are expected to do. Embracing political Islam need not mean rejecting human rights, as illustrated by the wide gulf between the restrictive views of some Salafists and the more progressive interpretation of Islam that leaders such as Rashid Ghannouchi, head of Tunisia’s Nahdha Party, espouse. It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name. So long as freely elected governments respect basic rights, they merit presumptive international support, regardless of their political or religious complexion

God speed to Rashid Ghannouchi, but Ken really ought to be more intellectually honest here and talk about the disaster that is Egypt. What are we getting in Egypt? Or for that matter, Libya? No government merits "presumptive international support". Hamas was freely elected and then didn't respect basic rights at home or abroad. Israel's government is freely elected and has a basic system of respecting human rights which Ken Roth doesn't really acknowledge given Human Rights Watch's obsession with Israel/Palestine. This is politics. Let's not pretend it's human rights. Or let us say that in fact human rights are always in fact political and drop the mask.

Roth then goes on to construct a notion of Turkey that tends to undermine his own theory:

Perhaps the most interesting new presence in the region is Turkey. Despite its distinct history, it remains a powerful example of a country with a religiously conservative elected government that has not used Islam as a pretext to undermine basic rights. Turkey has capitalized on its growing stature by entering the political fray of the Arab world. More vigorously than its Arab neighbors, Turkey denounced the political killing in Syria, championed democratic change in Egypt, and opposed Israel’s punitive blockade of Gaza.

Turkey has done those things, of course, for its own geopolitical interests and to satisfy growing conservative domestic constituents -- not because it has gotten human rights religion. And where's the bar for "rights-respecting" in the test for whether we should embrace Islamic governments, if "Islamic-inspired" Turkey still has so many problems?

Yet Turkey faces several challenges if it is to live up to its enormous potential in the human rights realm. Will it use its growing influence in multilateral arenas to oppose the outdated view of India, Brazil, and South Africa that it is somehow imperialistic to stand with people who are risking their lives to protest repression by their governments? Will Turkey press for democratic change not only among the uprisings of the Arab world but also in Iran, which crushed its Green Revolution in 2009, and the stultified and repressive countries of post-Soviet Central Asia? And will Turkey clean up its worsening human rights record at home–including persistent restrictions on freedom of speech and association, a flawed criminal justice system, and long-term mistreatment of its Kurdish minority—so it can be a less compromised proponent of human rights abroad? Turkey can make a positive difference on human rights in the region—if its leaders take the bold decisions at home and abroad needed to advance this cause.

The idea that Turkey should be the engine for democratic change in Central Asia is about as useless as having Russia, China, or for that matter the US as the engine. In most Central Asian countries, the Turkish influence has now been greatly challenged with the expulsion of not only Turkish businesses but the Turkish schools related to the Nurchilar movement. Both are seen as covers for extremism. (I'm for endorsing the rights of religious schools or "inspired" businesses such as those associated with the Gulen or Nurcilar movement, which has been expelled from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while also calling on this more liberal form of Islamic organization not to impose the violation of women's rights and other civil rights.)

What all of these problems come back to today is Iran, and the inability of liberals to have a reasonable containment program for Iran, rather than silly things like hoping that Turkey is going to reform Iran, or hysteria about Israel bombing Iran. You know there's a thing that you do when you can't have a hot war, and invade countries and kill thousands of people or install shakey governments that then kill thousands more people. You have a cold war.

 

 

 

It's Not My Party But I'll Cry If I Want To

Careless Kate.

Recently I visited Washington, DC and had a chance to contemplate once again how incredibly rigid the foreign policy establishment is, what a tight, incestuous world this is, and how fearful people are of giving offense and losing face or even losing their jobs. We saw this play out in the think-tank wars around the issue of Israel and anti-semitism and the Center for American Progress and AIPAC -- there was a "take-no-prisoners attitude" and two staffers "had to die," each on each side of the dispute, before peace was restored. (And naturally Glenn Greenwald had the last world, insisting that now CAP had suffered a "chilling effect" on its speech because of all those pesky people who can't distinguisn between "legitimate criticism" of Israel and antisemitism.)

Something like that happened to me because I dared to take on Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior, Katy Pearce and others at Registan -- on my own blog or theirs, not even on the company site, which ultimately forced me to leave a good job. I've explained the outrageous thing that happened there, but today I had occasion to wonder about this again when I read this story about David Seagram, a pro-SOPA freelancer and zealot invading the comments section of other news stories and getting dismissed (temporarily) because he was out of line -- and the wild protests stirred up that forced management to take him back.

Frankly, I think management was correct in their original action -- although a reprimand rather than a dismissal might have been in order precisely because he was out of line (the reason he can seem "right" is because there's a certain fan base that is anti-SOPA and loves to stick it to the man). Seagram wasn't on his own blog or his own column, he was invading other NBC stories demanding mindshare just because he felt NBC wasn't covering his pet cause. It was really annoying and obnoxious, but the partisan bunch that read Business Insider did what all geeks on the Internet do these days -- they threatened and bullied. If BI didn't immediately restore their hero, they would never read it again. They'd boycott it and is advertisers. The implication was -- they might even sic Anonymous hackers on it! Boo!

So the freaks got their way, and a partisan crusader is back to do more damage spreading the anti-SOPA mindshare. It was an interesting episode in that it made me ask: how come no EurasiaNet readers did that for me? I didn't crayon outside the lines like that fellow -- I wrote on my own blog or Twitter or in Registan comments, not on the company blog, and what I wrote elsewhere was not objectionable -- except for ideological reasons to the Registanis. Why did no one stick up for me? Where's intellectual freedom and solidarity?

Oh, let me answer: because I'm not as important as a Business Insider writer (they're very popular and have very rabid fan bases).

Oh, and because everyone is dependent on Soros in one way or another in this field.

Oh, and because nobody understands intellectual freedom in this way anymore. If they ever did.

But let me concede on my own behalf:  the reason a lot of readers didn't come to my defense is that most people didn't know, and there no comments open on EurasiaNet such as to have a community of people who could make their voice heard (the Facebook group for EurasiaNet occasionally has a comment or two from readers, but dissent is so harshly discouraged there any differences moderated away that it's not really a community, either).

And there's something to be said for not having to deal with comments, and something also to be said for not having to deal with wild rebelllious readers that tell you who to hire or not hire.

Oh, except in reality, that's what happened: EurasiaNet caved to Registan.

I wrote about the problem with Registanon my other blog, and on this blog wrote about the creepy suppresison of intellectual freedom -- but my blogs have only a fraction of the readership of EurasiaNet (although a story on the individual EurasiaNet blog pages, as distinct from the front page, actually gets *far less* traffic than my blog -- it's a mechanical factor in part dictated by Google reader and other RSS readers and SEO).

But more to the point: people are afraid. They might think what happened to me when I crossed Foust was wrong (and some who came to defense found their remarks were deleted!); they might think I should never have been locked out over a witch hunt started by the creepy Registan.net people, but they aren't going to say anything. A few might. Most won't. They want to keep things as they are.

So here's what happened when this issue was unfortunately -- and accidently -- put to the test. Someone going to a party asked me to come along but asked the host first -- I was then told not to come because Joshua Foust would be there.

Fair enough -- but still, I found it personally pretty offensive, actually, that somebody would actually ask me *not* come to a large party of people in the Eurasian field merely because Joshua Foust was coming to the same party. That is, sure, duh, I do get it that hosts of a party get to do what they want (like web site owners)!  Especially if they aren't my friends and only distant acquaintances. And they surely get to avoid unpleasant situations where they think people might raise their voices or someone might make an Ottoman Slap. I do indeed get all that.

But still...what they really should do is admit that Joshua Foust is wrong to do what he does, and they should stop fearing him and/or wishing to accommodate him just to keep the establishment going. That's wrong.

I haven't done anything wrong; Joshua Foust has. It's important to remember that.  While I realize there are social niceties at stake here, not inviting me to a party that Foust is at because you think I'm going to confront him is cowardice. Indeed it is. That has to be said. Yes, I get it that Foust, if not a friend, is an important figure to other people that likely they simply fear crossing. They fear crossing him because they think he has some kind of power, or following, or stature or they just think he's smart and interesting and certainly not worth dissing. And I get it that most people just like to avoid conflict. But it's wrong.

It shouldn't be me who is shunned for standing up to this bully; it should be Foust and his enablers like Kendzior and Pearce who are, for their outrageous behaviour. That they won't be is the way of the world and I get all that. Even so, I'm going to call it out. Maybe there will be only one person who gets it -- that's enough.

One thing I found interesting in this episode was that there wasn't a basic sense that I wasn't to blame for this story, confronting Foust. There wasn't a basic acceptance that Foust was outrageous (that some people do have, of course, especially the many who have been targeted by him).

And in addition to all the other regions that he paralyzes people from doing the right thing, there's this:  a FALSE accusation was made that I spread a rumour or made a contention about Registan.net, to the effect that it is funded by Gulnara Karimova (hence explaining the rabid hysterical criticism of the Gulnara picket last year).

That's a lie, as I've never written or spoken any such claim. If you look at the post I made after I was banned from Registan, you will see I never make any such claim. I said that his accusation against Olcott for supposedly carrying water for the regime (!) -- which was ridiculous and somehow "ok" for him to make -- sure sounded hypocritical when he himself minimized the significance of the workers' shootings in Kazakhstan, and his awful attacks on the human rights movement accomplished the same thing.

Oh, to be sure, I'm very well aware that there is a rumour going around the community about Gulnara and Registan because I've heard it from several sources; it is a claim made by some; they even put in exact dollar amounts; they even explain, when anyone objects that such support would be counterproductive and too obvious, that in fact it is done through cutaways, and so on and so forth. They even say, if you object, "But Foust denies this," that "Oh, but Foust is likely lying about this." I get all that. Truly I do.

Even so, I think it's fake, it's not my contention, and I insist again and again, to everyone playing the game of trying to figure out who funds or backs Foust -- and there are LOTS who play this game, so it's really unfair to pin it on me! -- that he must be argued on the merits. That it doesn't matter if any of the individual writers of Registan are supported/funded/abetted/incited by any government or secret police or corporation -- or if their anonymous readers are. What matters is that they get a pushback on awful views that sound as if they are supported by governments. That's all. It's very simple.

I think there's really only one thing to do with situations like this: subject them to glasnost and more glasnost. And so I do. I realize that will make some people mad or uncomfortable. But again, what's really wrong here isn't that people spread rumours or develop suspicions or don't like confrontations in social situations; what's wrong is that there is a website that bans and deletes critics and that a group of think-tank fellows and academics could hound someone out of an intellectual discussion for their dissent and that they should try thus to maintain a status quo for establishments and their enablers. That's hugely creepy, and that has to be said again and again. What's wrong is that Foust shouldn't be told to behave, and that I shouldn't be welcome.

My Vision

Thomas Edward Gordon, Lake Victoria, Great Pamir, May 2, 1874

This is my vision for an operation curating news and engaging in critical discussion, through "Different Stans" and my related blogs "Minding Russia" and "Wired State".

I want to cover critically the Eurasia Region in the period of the withdrawal of US combat troops along the Northern Distribution Network military route, and supposed establishment of a New Silk Road. I want to create a least a small space of alternatives.

Existing news sites are either commercial mainstream media, which has limited space and attention for the stories on human rights and social and political issues in this region; or they are nonprofits and think-tanks funded by foundations which tend to have a certain political line, depending on their origin, or they can be cautious and/or silent because they have staff in the region. There are so many people who are silent about this region, for one reason or another -- they are dealing with classified information; they are government contractors on non-disclosure agreements; they fear oppression. I want more opportunities for voices to be heard from and about this region.

I want to try and see if news can be funded not by commerce, not by foundation grants, but by individual donations through a program like Kickstarter.

I have 30 years of experience living in and writing about Russia and traveling in the region. I also had a particular focus for many years on Belarus, and in the last five years, I have been writing mainly on Central Asia.

I see a need for more alternative approaches to try things differently and try to use social media to achieve this. I'm critical of social media and new media -- they have inherent limitations; Twitter revolutions are a flash in the pan. But I do think we can use these platforms to find like-minded people to accomplish shared goals, to make new and lasting connections to, and I always have.

Stage I

Via blog posts and news curation tools and Twitter:

o gather and publish more original interviews with people in the region (in translation), more background stories, i.e not just scenes narrated by Western reporters or British English-speaking reporters at Al Jazeera or RT;

o cover Central/South Asia together, so that the human rights problems of Uzbekistan are not seen in isolation from the human rights problems in Pakistan or India -- curation of human rights/humanitarian news from the regions together; yes, they are areas with very different pasts (Soviet, Western colonial) but they have many shared issues around the war in Afghanistan;

o cover terrorist attacks not only from the government/military/militant leadership approach but from the victims' perspective and the social factors that lead to extremism; to not be afraid to take a critical look at extremist ideologies and also see the authoritarian regimes' generation of extremism through their repression of society;

o cover multilaterals like the UN and OSCE from a critical perspective and "end-user" interpretation;

o curation of news on the topic of the Northern Distribution Network and New Silk Road that cuts across the headlines of delivery issues, logistics,  terrorist attacks, war casualties, political developments, etc. that affect this route; and critical examination of whether you can really convert a military cargo lane into a route of business prosperity

o critiques of government, establishment blogs and government/foundation news/views on the region

This stage would be enough -- I'm committed to doing this on a volunteer basis for a time and will look for small donations to enable me to spend more than an hour a day translating/curating, and to payfreelance  journalists and photographers. I'm looking for other volunteers to post and curate.

Stage II

This stage is more ambitious, but a small, doable version of it could start just by meeting once a month at an Afghan restaurant in New York, Bamiyaan -- something some of us already do. I would use Meet-up and Facebook to organize larger meetings (say 30 people tops, with maybe even informal speakers if someone interesting is visiting town or has a project to discuss.)

o Creation of a network of people who follow and care about this region who do not need to raise money (or at least, very little for very specific things i.e. "pay for plane ticket to go cover X event or conference") and who are not in silos bound by their jobs in academia, nonprofits or governments or who can at least reach across those boundaries, even with a pseudonym to enable more open discussion

o For the purpose of organizing regular discussions and information and news exchange to understand what is happening  in the Eurasia region, which will likely be affected by the US pullout and other conflicts in the region.

Stage III

This is only theoretical now, and is at least as much about finding out whether a new kind of organization is possible in the world as it is about the content of that organization.

o Eventually establishment of a virtual organization of sorts that does not require government or foundation funding (which wastes a lot of time of nonprofit organizers) but which can help people create connections -- to make trips, to write stories, to start small businesses, to study abroad, and so on. Something that is like an email discussion list, or a club, or a bulletin board, or a self-help union but actually none of those things, but more open.

Instead of a closed, prestigious organization like the Council on Foreign Relations, or a closed influential business group like the Eurasia Group or the American Chamber of Commerce in Uzbekistan, or groups that constantly need funding and permissions and mandate-vetting like Human Rights Watch, I am thinking of something more versatile, flexible, open and transparent. Something that functions as a resource but doesn't need hierarchical leaders and management of boards and such (usually all related to fiscal responsibility).

The goal of this network/organization would have to be very simple and versatile like "sharing news" so that it is not tugged this or that way by interest groups.

I think nowadays many costs that hobbled nonprofits can be dispensed with and jobs can be accomplished online for less -- but always, I am looking for a way for the Internet to help people make livelihoods, instead of having the Internet destroy livelihoods.

 

What's Good and Bad at EurasiaNet

A number of people have asked me whether I think EurasiaNet is still reliable as a news service., now that I have left it  -- not only over the unconscionable imposition by management of a Twitter gag on me about the whole region of Central Asia, but about disturbing indications of a change in the company line (you can read my statement about this in detail here).

I'm going to refrain from answering that question now, just out of genuinely needing to think about it a lot more, but let me weigh in on what I think is good and bad.

No one is irreplaceable and even though I produced half of the content on this website most months, I have no doubts that the waters of EurasiaNet will close over me without a trace.  Some of what I produced will be replaced but the dedication to digesting the regional press and letting the regional voices speak for themselves may be reduced.

The irony is that I can get more traffic on my little blog here than I could being only on my blog page at EurasiaNet, i.e. not on the front page. And even the front page didn't yield so much more traffic as to warrant submitting to a Twitter gag. The reality is that unless you are in the top three News story slots at EurasiaNet attached to people's Google readers and other news readers on their i-phones, you might as well be in a dissident newsletter in Uzbekistan. But those top stories might be about milking reindeers in Mongolia or the Kyrgyz language missing in Google or a reprint from RFE/RL . Consumers should demand more.

So what makes for good reporting at EurasiaNet, given these and other constraints?

This story by crack investigative reporter Deirdre Tynan is a very good EurasiaNet story. Indeed, among the best from this author.

I posted the same story myself  10 days ago to the "queue" but it never got passed because it wasn't "polished and textured" (snort) or perhaps it sounded too dire (people were scavenging for firewood to burn in Andijan, according to uznews.net). [Update: later I noticed it was published just to the blog page after this post appeared.] But Deirdre did what reporters in the region can and should do (as distinct from bloggers and chroniclers of regional press in New York can do): she reported.

She picked up the Skype and/or email and called real people that lived in Andijan and got their live quotes. This is what Radio Ozodlik does every day, with a far bigger staff and larger stringer network -- it's hard, it's expensive, it's dangerous. That is indeed what is required to report the news from this region, however, and it has to be realized.

Deirdre did what EurasiaNet reporters so often don't do: she reported, and kept herself out of the view, instead of striking a mannered pose like a gentleman explorer-diarist of the 19th century. I always feel as if some sort of writing-man's version of Indiana Jones is lurking behind the EurasiaNet pages with so many pieces there. There is always this mannered sort of hardened cowboy-reporter shtick  -- "I was the man, I was there, I saw it, now give me a drink -- oh, and Mashenka, go top off my cell phone minutes, there's a good girl."

Then there's the "let's sit at my desk and not go out and report and just pick up the news and see if I can snark at it." It's one thing if your job is to digest the news and you sit in New York, but if you are in the region, you should pick up the phone/email more or at least comb the regional press for stuff besides cats (the traffic-building staple for EurasiaNet) -- on a week when the new prisoner total is released, when the ombudsman is summoned by OSCE because they can't get into the prisons; when prisoners have been rioting for days, when the main human rights activist is being harassed by having a child in her care jerked around by authorities.

Taking up the snide "thinking man's anti-Sovietism" -- which these "progressives" aren't especially good at doing -- seems to be the garden perennial. Just like the old newsroom adage for reporters, "it's always the anniversary of something" -- you can always ridicule Soviet stuff for easy copy and never think about the springs and dyanamics of what maintains it.

This piece by David Trilling has that sort of lack-of-reporting and condescending-tone posturing that I find teeth-grating (and which I myself was pushed to write, and simply refused).

We all get it that these dictators are monsters, are caricatures of themselves, and are soft targets for lampooning. They've been hit again and again and everybody's taking their turn at throwing eggs. But could you now report something? Yes, I realize this sort of paragraph is dripping with, um, "polish and texture":

Uzbekistan’s apparatchik-in-chief could still give a Sovietologist pause. Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Islam Karimov – an economist by training – continues to stuff his people full of fabulous statistics, records even. But like the excerpts from a Central Committee meeting, something doesn’t quite add up.

Instead of reminding us once again that Uzbekistan is still "like" the Soviet Union (to go further, it *is* the Soviet Union that never really quite broke up), why not find out more  what do people think about it? Can we get some interviews? Can we get some World Bank bureaucrat -- paying for all this -- off the record? Can we even work that well-worn rolladex that consists of Alexander Cooley and...Alexander Cooley and get a comment?

That answer is "no" -- not only because of a certain amount of antequated and lagging journalistic habits that die hard, but because it is expensive. It takes time -- and money -- and more reporters -- to get stuff like that, and there isn't the budget on this really shoe-string operation, in relative terms. I usually tried to fix the problem of having only the Soviet-like press for "news" generation every day by trying to counterpose it -- "they say this, we say that, or they say the other thing."

Even so, you can go further if you drop the 19th century/early 20th century "I'm a journalist in this exotic region!" pose. Learning the lingua-franca (Russian) and the local languages might help, too. Treating people as other than ponies in your "stable of journalists" helps, too -- treat them as equals and colleagues who might be better than you at some things.

I also have to point out that this whopping 568-word piece with heavy cut-and-paste from other people goes way over the "norm" I was given of 300-400 words -- and without any seeming complaints as it has continued for years just as I continued for years with pieces that long until suddenly nickled-and-dimed to death last month.

Possibly in the name of "objective journalism" or perhaps time constraints,  this author doesn't seem to contact any grantees live -- they're an email away, and one thing Human Rights Watch has been able to do with George's $100 million is to staff up for every conceivable issue and/or country) -- or ask some of the people -- live -- in the cotton campaign, although Trilling does link to some FAQs with allegations that the Karimov family personally benefits from cotton sales (likely, but not really established).  That's already progress for this author, who strangely linked to an apologia for child labour in the cotton industry the last time he put a link in an article in Foreign Policy.

I mentioned wondering where the prison strike was, and when we'd see it on EurasiaNet -- finally after some days, it appears today. The news from this region is extreme -- it's that kind of place. So why soften the headlines and say "Authorities Confront Mass Prison Protest" -- as if we have to worry about the authorities (!) maintaining their status quo here, instead of running with the headline that every other news site, regional and international ran with: Prisoners sewing their mouths shut, they are that desperate.  Or even, Prisoners revolt after 30 deaths. Something that lets us know that you understand the newsmaker here is the desperate prisoners, not the nervous authorities.

I've got lots more to say on this subject and will be saying it. Now, isn't it somehow verboten to comment on a place where you used to work critically? Or "unprofessional" or spiteful?

Oh, no. Oh, not at all. And that some might think so is what is wrong with the terribly conformist and stultifying intellectual life of the left around the Soros empire.

EurasiaNet is a public resource, that is paid for by George Soros' billions, and it has charitable tax-exempt status. It is a nonprofit organization. And that doesn't make it excempt from criticism any more than a corporation is exempt from criticism.

There are no comments on the site open -- that's by design, by fear of the managers. They have this site under a ridiculously draconian legal lock and key and fear people reaching for George's deep pockets in lawsuits, so they keep the comments closed. To be sure, they have an "[email protected]" where you can write what you "like and don't like" -- ensuring that every author's name has to appear in Google zillions of times with the phrase "don't like" -- which is one of the many demotivators there. Most sites would call it "feedback" instead of inciting hatred. And they'd open the comments -- RFE/RL does, admirably; Registan does, to some. Many others do.

And there's something sacrosanct about NGOs and foundations -- people never criticize them aloud because they fear for their own livelihoods. What if they never get a grant -- or a job! -- in this town again!

I totally understand that fear, having faced it literally myself, unlike any of you. The reality is, however, that the combined salaries of the well-situated academics and pundits like Joshua Foust at Registan utterly dwarf the freelancer fees and independent contractor fees for EurasiaNet writers. And perhaps in a non-profit advocacy operation that's warranted. Yet it means that it's a voice that has outsized visibility due to the powers of Soros in general, but one that if it weren't funded by Soros might not survive. That means it does deserve a critical eye. Not only the savaging that Foust has subjected to it -- and the creepy accommodation that EurasiaNet has now made to him and his "stable" -- but any content there, as any article in any news site deserves -- and gets -- scrutiny and free comment.

 

 

 

Eerie Silence at Registan -- And a Pattern of Suppression of Critics

I thought they might be victory-dancing like griefers, but the Registani authors who so harassed and bullied me on Twitter here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and more -- and deliberately targeted my employer with complaints about me -- are silent. Eerie.

(Remember, the beef these two professors had with my simple, factual post about a factual surge of Facebook membership in Uzbekistan is simply scientism -- Socialbakers is an accepted analytical company that simply publishes the quantative membership on Facebook from a given country. It works in cooperation with Facebook, and it is accepted as an industry standard.)

Intriguingly, Kendzior, Pearce, Foust, and Hamm don't have a single comment about my statement about their harassment of me and efforts to get me silenced and removed from EurasiaNet and while they are no doubt talking among themselves, they don't evidence it anywhere else (and that's no doubt how they operate on a lot of things). (UPDATE:  Oh, except from this nasty little Aesopian tweet by Foust -- Ugh).

Although they aren't admitting it, indeed they are guilty of harassing and silencing a legitimate critic, a person whose work has always been highly valued in this field.  That's scary -- that's scary for all of us. Their actions caused my employer to pick up their allegations in alarm and demand of me a complete and utter silence on Twitter and all social media about the Central Asia region in general. That's wrong.

That's an unacceptable condition of employment for a freelancer, and one that is especially unconscionable when the employer, Open Society Foundations (which funds Open Society Institute Central Eurasia Program), doesn't have any clause in the independent contractors' contract restricting their comments on social media or restricting their publications elsewhere, and doesn't have any separate internal written policy distributed to contractors, and doesn't even have a verbal policy universally stated to all -- indeed, no other EurasiaNet writer was under this Twitter gag, only me.

As noted, I urged the management to make a concerted policy not to have any EurasiaNet writers respond to attacks and harassment from Joshua Foust and other writers, rather than allowing him to proceed with what was obviously a planned and executed assault on EurasiaNet to get it to change its content and line on Uzbekistan and the NDN and other issues.

Instead, the editors chose to allow some EurasiaNet authors like Joshua Kucera to argue and banter and disagree with Foust, but then on his terms, with the appropriate accommodations. When asked why one author could do this and another, I was told merely that it was "different". What's different is clear -- I refused the accommodationist approach. The Registan saga is only part of the policy troubles at EurasiaNet that caused me to be forced out, but that's another story;  Registan's instigation in harassing me and getting me removed is on the record, and should be deeply disturbing to anyone who values journalism, blogging, and free intellectual discourse about the Central Asian region.

Foust is a known and obvious quantity and his actions harassing human rights advocates are clear and part of his strategy and his ideology. What's more murky is the participation of the academics who support him and his views and Registan. Why are they doing this?

After Nathan Hamm set the stage by denouncing me as a "self-righteous troll" and a "tremendous black mark on EurasiaNet" merely because I correctly called out Foust on his hypocrisy and unconscionable attack on Martha Brill Olcott, then Katy Pearce, a professor at University of Washington, Department of Communication, and Sarah Kendzior, a professor of anthropology at Washington University at St. Louis, and co-authors and Twitter buddies and pals with each other and Foust, made a concerted demarche to my editors complaining about me in order to get me removed.

They did this because I legitimately criticized a joint article of theirs, rightfully expressing legitimate concern about a thesis that says if people report repression on the Internet, it scares others off, and then the overall growth of the Internet (and by implication, reforms) are slowed down or, as they explained, "how political protest is derailed".

They weren't just making a study of the obvious -- that arrests of journalists and bloggers puts a chill on Internet expression. They were making a thesis of how these countries change, and thereby setting up a policy rationale for not vigorously supporting alternative news sites because they had insufficient audiences, little impact, and actually were counterproductive as people got into trouble and others were scared off.

If that's *not* the policy prescription that appears crystal-clear in their work when it is finally published in full, it's my right to express *my fears about it anyway* because I genuinely suspect that's where it will go.

Put simply: if you're looking for a thesis not to expect unrest or the Arab Spring in Central Asia because you need those things not to happen for your own geopolitical reasons; if you're looking for a thesis to justify cutting funding to independent media in this region and shifting it elsewhere, this is your thesis.

My legitimate criticism sparked a howling denunciation of me as "assanine" and suffering from "poor analytical skills" and sparked their nasty jibes with the deliberate use of the @eurasianet to ensure that it got visibility on the front page of EurasiaNet. (By the way, Hamm's denunciation of me for my legitimate defense of Olcott and criticism of Foust, that I was a "black mark" for EurasiaNet stayed in the view over the entire Christmas holidays, harming my reputation wrongfully.)

I wouldn't worry about Twitter snarking or even academic findings that seem to pre-bake policy prescriptions into their research if it weren't for the fact that these two scholars support Registan so heartily, tacitly support the banning and deletion of critics, and vet only a certain "line" of the site that cleverly feigns to be critical of the US and the Central Asian regimes it supports, but winds up time and again supporting the status quo for realpolitik reasons. And silences critics.

Sarah Kendzior is of course someone I've heard of for years who is admired in the human rights community for her seminal work on Andijan and the government's claims that an Islamic fundamentalist business group called Akromiya was fabricated by the government. This article was critical in opposing S. Frederick Starr, who was condemned by the human rights movement as supporting Karimov's version of the massacre in Andijan at the time. I've always been troubled, nonetheless, by some aspects of her article, and now that it's come together for me further, I will write about that separately.

But knowing of her background, which I interpreted to be critical of the Uzbek and other regimes, I was quite surprised and troubled when I saw, again and again, Kendzior took part in shaping discussions in such odd yet subtle ways that seemed to keep supporting the status quo in Uzbekistan. And as I noted, I believe she was the person referenced when Hamm said he consulted a "kind soul" who justified banning me -- as she was the person whom I challenged most besides "Will" on the "suicide girl" thread, it was likely she.

Although I had read Kendzior's Andijan piece, I had never heard of Nathan Hamm and Katy Pearce. It turns out they have tag-teamed each other before in suppressing criticism in worrisome ways.

First, Nathan Hamm. I see now that one of the reasons he reacted with such malice and spite in permanently banning me from Registan is that he believed me -- falsely -- to be a part of a group that he said had libeled him and threatened his livelihood in the past.

(He also Google witch-hunted me, found that I was banned from some Second Life fan site and was considered an "infamous antagonist" in the Second Life virtual world, and assumed that I had some horrible reputation -- a line Foust also took in heckling me about SL. In fact, I'm proud of my reputation in SL which involves hateful invective from some quarters merely because I stood up to bullies, documented abuses, tackled the thuggish Anonymous variants in SL, and fought for basic human rights and democracy in social media as I have done everywhere else in my career.)

I marvel at the recurring theme Hamm has made in a number of episodes to the effect that others are plotting and libeling him and threatening his livelihood, when in fact what is really actionable on his part is his libeling and actually harming my livelihood by inciting distrust and anger in my employers and making them put a Twitter gag on me that I ultimately could not accept because it was unjust and unfair and selective. It takes two to tango here -- Registan's creepy banning of a legitimate critic who called out Foust justly dovetailed with EurasiaNet's disturbing willingness to tag-team their perma-ban by putting a Twitter gag on me.  It's especially weird, given that EurasiaNet's own team of authors writing on NDN and Uzbekistan had been viciously attacked for months on end, along with various human rights advocates, by Joshua Foust from his constant stream of Twitter invective.

People project on others what their own constant obsessions and fears are, and that may explain it. I can only repeat that I have no idea what Hamm was talking about when he accused me of being part of some mysterious group of people who had maligned him and harmed him, apparently in some recent incident (unless he has such an elephant's memory he is referencing one from 2006). I can't see anything about this anywhere, and would appreciate some clues from readers ([email protected])

The incident of some six years ago, however, had all the same earmarks of what happened to me -- and I submit that my case is far worse because my livelihood was forced to be removed and I depended on it for my family's survival. I make no pretentions of understanding a thing about Armenia or the Armenian blogosphere -- I don't follow either at all. And I don't know who is wrong or right in this episode, but it doesn't matter: what I see is the strong hand of Hamm and Pearce interfering in free speech they don't like.

Links about censorship allegations are removed. Onnik Krikorian, an Armenian blogger, has complaints and then his posts are removed (I will write and ask him about this). As I see him continuing to post on Registan, and with important criticism BTW, perhaps he patched things up with the Registanis, but Hamm sounds like an overbearing and paranoid prat in this post. He's young; the young live in fear of reprisals for their Internet activity and are horridly comformist as a result. It's one of the biggest chills on intellectual discourse in general -- that horrible conformism of the young, so unlike the 1960s or 1970s. (OWS is actually merely a more extreme form of conformism to extreme ideologies than most.)

Onnik had this to say, back then:

But let’s get something straight. Your involvement started with me turning down doing an Armenian summary for Global Voices because I could see your involvement — even indirectly — with New Eurasia and I see Katy Pearce has being one of the biggest threats to the Armenian blogosphere — pushing her own ambitions even though her knowledge of the situation in Armenia is limited.

And elsewhere he called Pearce "authoritarian" -- that link survives. Again, I don't know who was wrong and who was right in this dispute as I don't follow the Armenian blogosphere.

But I do see a pattern that jibes with my own very pronounced critique of Global Voices which I've had for a long time: in my view, the founders and editors are mainly all about harnessing this region, as others, in a political drive for power and influence in the US in support of a "progressive" agenda. They're accordingly selective about the content they encourage or discourse on Global Voices. I've had fundamental disagreements with Ethan Zuckerman about what I have seen as his opportunistic use and/or disparagement of Twitter revolutions in this region; I've had fundamental disagreements with Rebecca McKinnon about her efforts to influence the takeover of the Internet by "progressive" technologists -- these are people who seemingly I should be compatible with as we share some of the same goals for Internet freedom, the same colleagues, projects, and organizations even -- but I don't support them because I fundamentally mistrust their drive for political power and influence. Of course, anyone could object that anyone, even the lowliest blogger, strives for power and influence in their way. But the more resourced and powerful strive more and have more.

Then there's this strange story of a link removed and someone also complaining about Hamm and Pearce. And the links within that story are removed and the trail goes cold, but there is a remark about Hamm and Pearce "showing their true colours". Again, perhaps it's this Armenian blogger who was somehow at fault  -- somehow I don't think so, but it's hard to tell when all the links are removed or blocked -- but something is "up".

That professors would use this kind of method to remove even speech they might be able to justify as "wrong' or "false" is profoundly, profoundly troubling; it becomes even more creepy if in fact the criticism about them or their ideas is true and no claim is false (and that's I believe that is surely the case with my criticism and statements about their "derailing" theory).

I remember thinking with the kind of clarity that my rather partial ESP sometimes gives me some months ago, that the attacks by Foust were so fierce, the reaction by EurasiaNet management and writers so weak and ineffective, and the accommodationist steps so odd, that I thought to myself, "Somebody has to die for Foust's deliberate plan to take down EurasiaNet, and that person will be me, because I write the most human rights and opposition stories, and these will be derided as the 'advocacy' that Registan scorns and mocks EurasiaNet most for."

 

Office Wives on the Internet

Since I can see the narrative that my former editors are going to employ to discredit me, along with the defense think-tankers and academics at Registan whom they have strangely accommodated, I'll explain in this post exactly why I think it is not only legitimate, but moral, to call Sarah Kendzior, the academic expert on Central Asia, an "office wife" for Registan_net.

Of course, the shrill and malicious way this is being described already (by Joshua Foust on Twitter in direct communications to EurasiaNet) is that it is "really really really really misogynist" is how some people will capture this saga. They will maliciously seek to portray me as someone betraying my values for women's rights and human rights in general by using this term.

So I'll explain the context and my thinking on why this particular term was warranted, and why indeed we must keep alive the space for ad hominem attacks on the Internet -- and why I go on upholding women's rights along with holding up the free speech that ensures them. I don't believe this statement of mine is "really really really misogynist"; I believe simply that it is true and appropriate to use in robust speech to protest the disturbing intellectual school of Registan.

Here's the short form, on the principles at stake:

When someone is put into a situation of powerlessness -- banned from a well-read area-studies blog for legitimate criticism and defense of persons and principles; silenced at a job;  put into horrible editorial queues to try to extract conformity; told to shut up completely on Twitter about the region; and then subjected to unfounded disparagement on public streams aimed at their employer for a news story, I believe strongly they have to fight back. Some people would bow their heads at that point and suffer in silence.

Not me. I do fight back and I do call names -- especially if, up until that point, I had never called a name or done anything that was illegitimate by any stretch of political correctness. And that wasn't good enough, and I was still silenced for my ideas and for criticism of ideas.

The tradition of the ad hominem attack, so vigorously and maliciosly policed on the Internet but practiced nonetheless, is, in my view, an important one to retain as firmly secured by the First Amendment.

If the powerless can't call the powerful names, they cannot exercise a check against their power. If I can't at least call someone a mild little slight -- and that's how I view it -- on my own blog of a few hundred readers, or a few dozen Twitter followers out of 1,000 who might pay attention, when decent human rights people are being slammed for criticizing a tyrannical regime, then where can I? In fact, under the Constitution, I can call them a more severe slight, in a wider audience, and if a court of law can't show "actual malice," and the person is a public figure and hasn't suffered damage to their livelihood, they'll have to accept it. That's America. Or so it was America before the Internet.

With all the TOS restrictions on the social media platforms we need for political debate, with workplace political correctness religiously and zealously enforced, where do you think the First Amendment will live and have its being?

While everybody agrees in the professional context you shouldn't call people names or use even mild slights of this nature, the phrase "office wife" was used to describe a role a woman played in relationship to a website and its filtered intellectual climate, not even to the men there. Furthermore, it was used precisely because of the accomplice role she played in not only silencing me on a public forums, but inciting my employer to silence me. Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce are indeed gasping in feigned horror about me calling Sarah Kendzior "an office wife. Yet where were all these net nannies when:

o Elena Urlaeva was accused of merely getting involved with human rights cases because she was "getting money" to do this, and other nasty remarks were made about her;

o Elena Kostyuchenko, an investigative journalist, was compared to the "baba" in the Russian saying "Odna Baba Skazala" -- "an old lady tells a rumour" -- and further disparaged for attempting to tell the truth about the massacre of workers in Zhanaozen

o Marta Brill Olcott was ridiculed as out of touch and craven with the Kazakh regime, and her name was reduced to "LOLcott".

o I was called "Catty Catty catfitz" by Foust and falsely characterized as using obscenity (supposedly calling Hamm "a Stalinist asshole" -- completely false -- or demanding he not "censor" -- also completely false).

o I was disparaged as having "poor analytical skills" and "sloppy statistics" for writing a criticism of an idea and a news story.

As I always say to such persons clutching their pearls to their indignant bosoms about something I'm saying after I've been bullied relentlessly by others, and watched them stamp on others, welcome to the Newly-Acquired Conscience Society.

Rare Adult Supervision at Registan

I love it when the adults show up and demand some accountability from the young punks at Registan. That doesn't happen very often -- almost never, as far as I can see from some of the archives -- but when it does, it sure is appreciated. Michael Hancock-Parmer's colleague (supervisor?) from the University of Indiana showed up to comment on his long post on Zhanaozen.

Before that, the conversation had deteriorated to some anonymous bird asking whether Joshua Foust or MHP worked for Chevron -- those sort of gotchas are never the point about these people. They need always and everywhere to be debated purely on the merits and not on the suspicions of what or whom is backing them. That is, it's good if people take a whack at those murky backgrounds sometimes, but it is generally a lose/lose. It's much better to call out the lapses in knowledge, the wrong claims of facts, the tendentious and specious argument-mongering, the protectivist tap-dancing around regimes and so on.

Prof. Anderson basically scores MHP for dragging their university into drama (that's what you get if you tangle not only with The Exiled but Registan); for writing a long and poorly constructed post; for being snarky to people in the comments; and for possibly having only the selfish and emotional motive of only helping his friend Foust -- oh, and not making clear what is real vested interest might be in Foust.

It's too bad she didn't get to the substance of the argument, but fortunately, another poster before her, "Minty," got right to the point, on something I hadn't really thought about -- and that's the put-down implied in lumping Elena Kostyuchenko together with the notion of "Odna Baba Skazala," implying she was just jotting down the rumour mill. To some extent I dealt with this in my long parsing of his awful post, but I'm glad she brought it up.

The fact is, the expression  -- which I've heard for 30 years or more -- isn't only in the form Одна Бабка Сказала. It can be Одна Баба Сказала as well -- both are present in the Russian lexicon. Just Google either and you'll easily prove this (as it is spoken in Russia; it is spoken in Russian in other post-Soviet republics, too but maybe takes different forms). This phrase is not a context that means "broad" ("whore" is going too far for "Baba" in any event); it's a context more leaning towards "granny" whether "Baba" or "Babka" is used. Don't forget that in provincial colloquial Russian, it's common to say "Baba Volya" for "Grandmother Volya," not necessarily "Babushka" and never "Babka".  So the commenters are right: this is not "some woman said" but a folkoric representation of the rumour mill.

Furthermore, OBS (it's sometimes jokingly referred to by just those initials as if it is a radio station, like VOA) does *not* mean newspapers, it's the grapevine. It's the babushki talking to each other in the courtyards, it's the rumour mill. For him to compare the work of an investigative journalist from an independent highly reputable newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, to Odna Baba Skazala is not only insulting, it's ignorant. Nobody uses it in that fashion.

Only somebody tendentiously and maliciously trying to take down a reporter in order to protect an official version of events would do that. Or, if we are to believe it, only someone emotionally going to any lengths merely to defend his friend, who in turn was protective of the Nazarbayev narrative, and was called out on it by Mark Ames. There's just no way you can characterize the news-gathering and rendering of Korkel's story by Elena as OBS. It's wrong. Not with the efforts she went to sort through different narratives, and not with the thorough level of detail she supplied.

On social media when these pretendious academics show up and question basic ordinary news-writing and news-gathering functions, they only make themselves look stupid. Their science here looks like faux science or sciencism -- they really lose sight of the forest of the trees. This may be anecdotal but I really see an increasing problem -- as we saw from Dr. Katy Pearson today on Twitter -- of sciencism from people like these annoying academics on Registan in rejecting ordinary levels of news and news meaning, and insisting on a deep "scientific" subtext to every communication or unit of knowledge -- utterly distorting basic sense in the process.

I'll reiterate here the crucial translation errors I found in MHP's piece -- it really does change the meaning if you describe Kokel as someone pushing through a crowd, and pushing against the falling wounded, and being such in the thick of things that a dead person toppled at her feet (the wrong translation) and as I corrected it, hanging back (she had a child with her, but they had uncertainly started in the direction of the child's mother; she was marching in some kind of line ahead of them with striking workers), and seeing how people dragged the wounded back to the rear of the event, and lay the dead bodies at her feet -- very different feel.

Blogging doesn't necessarily communicate a story or help improve writing. If anything, I know famous published writers who swear that their abstention from Facebook and Twitter is what makes them great writers.

I personally am not interested in being in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Somebody else can do that. I personally am much more interested in *thinking and discussing with others to come to some comprehension* and I think with the explosion of information and connections in our time, whataever academia offers, social media discussions are really the only way of comprehending the firehose of news.

I don't mind if MHP's writing is baggy and unfocused and raggedy. I do mind, however, if he deliberately hides the main point of the story: that an investigative journalist found a knowledgeable witness that she decided was credible. No, worse than hides it, impugns it merely out of spite and spleen, merely because that's the same point that frankly Mark Ames made, although he was a total ass in making it, and got it wrong as far as conflating Elena's source Kokel with Elena as a reporter.

 

 

What Derails Political Protest

This is not the NDN. It is not even a railroad in Central Asia. It's in Australia. Photo: Louise Docker.

I continue to be troubled by the theses represented in this paper:  "Networked Authoritarianiam and the Demonization of Social Media in the Republic of Azerbaijan."

As I said, the excerpt of the paper published appears to suggest that documenting abuses and protesting them is futile and may even harm protest movements or more incremental reform. It's an argument against the human rights documentalist approach and an argument for a pragmatic accommodation to the regimes to avoid further human suffering and perhaps preservation of a core of intellectuals for a better day.

I haven't misread this excerpt: the theses are there to be seen.  Curiously, Sarah Kendzior implies in the comments here that you cannot criticize a paper when only the excerpt is available; her co-author Katy Pearce even implies that expressing concern about the logic of certain theses is "an attack". Why the thin skin, ladies? If you don't want your paper read and critiqued by the general public before its time, don't publish excerpts, or even keep the entire paper hidden behind a paywall or academic log-on.

Worse, following the now-standard Registan smear method, Kendzior implies that my "poor analytical skills" (i.e. my normal and legitimate critique of this excerpt and its theses) means I shouldn't be employed in this field. My, that's rather severe punishment -- and truly an illegitimate means of debate -- for having a different opinion and expressing legitimate concern about the inexorable logic of the paper as it stands now: that the message activists should draw is to cease being active -- to "watch out," because their activism not only is futile against such authoritarian regimes, it may actually harm further progress that might be achieved other ways, or even the longer term prospect of the more thorough revolution. Say the authors:

Many assume that greater exposure to information technology leads to increased activism in authoritarian states.[i]  [...] In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest.  We argue that this is particularly evident in the authoritarian countries of the former Soviet Union – the very countries, ironically, that fuel the misguided Cold War analogy.  Often neglected in analyses of the internet, these countries have a unique approach to internet regulation that represents a “middle path” between open access and censorship

Their approach, rooted in the particularities of post-Soviet political culture, exploits problems of trust, cynicism, and insecurity in the population.[ii]  Other scholars of the internet have defined these internet regulation practices  as “networked authoritarianism”.  Rebecca MacKinnon defines networked authoritarianism as when “an authoritarian regime embraces and adjusts to the inevitable changes brought by digital communication”. States that practice networked authoritarianism do not strictly censor online dissent: they compete with it, making an example out of online dissenters in order to affirm the futility of activism to a disillusioned public.  This is what we believe happened in Azerbaijan.  Our study found that the Azerbaijanis who were most active online during the donkey blogger affair were the ones whose attitude to protest was most negatively affected by the crackdowns on activism.

Obviously, I'm not the only one who will find problems with all these theses, even starting with the simple observation about the milk of human kindess that has been more on evidence than you might imagine even in those societies ridden with distrust and cynicism. I'm also not convinced that "networked authoritarianism" functions quite the way Rebecca MacKinnon indicates. This is Evgeny Morozov's thesis as well -- that these post-Soviet countries "don't have to" use prior or post censorship or even arrests for speech offenses much of the time because they can prevail with the cynical statist narrative and use every bad-faith Soviet-style propaganda and active-measure trick in the book to discredit dissenters online, often through sock-puppets in the comments sections of blogs or news sites.

While they're masters at this -- they have all the time in the world to wait out the distractable West -- they sometimes get overwhelmed, they sometimes pick their battles, they sometimes so overplay their hands that they get blowback. It's not a one-way street. (BTW, a bit of that "networked authoritarianism" laps at the shores of Registan.net itself, as they ban critics like me, delete statements by their defenders and keep nastily trying to control the narrative in any way possible.)

Then there's the problem that even those more "subtle" networked authoritarians like Russia and Kazakhstan on its better days in fact do in fact censor (they block journalists from entering a crisis area); they do deploy arrests strategically and pull Live Journal accounts and use other methods of pressure.  (I'll never forget the array of characters brought forth to persecute Samodurov).

No doubt Kendzior and Pearce have compelling field studies -- they know their business and their methodical interviews are going to tell what any of us have seen for ourselves, that people are intimidated if a fellow blogger or any Internet user is punished and an example was made of him. To be sure, a commenter named Ani on Registan.net (Ani Wandaryan @GoldenTent on Twitter) has elaborated that what was a critical factor in the "donkey bloggers" case is that these comics were not seen as "political," i.e. as part of the organized human rights groups or political parties, so it seemed doubly disconcerting that the regime picked on them.

And the analytical model is undoubtedly correct and helpful and not something I'm trained to comment on; I never chose to go into academia. (Years ago when I contemplated getting a higher degree in political science, a seasoned professor of Soviet studies laid out all the branches and theories and schools to me in several meetings, and I found all of them inadequate to explain the intuitions one gathers from living and studying these countries of the Soviet bloc first-hand, which I had done. The field was also filled with fellow-travellers who relied on good relations with the Soviet and other communist regimes for their very field of study and access -- the number of scholars of dissent could be counted on half a hand. While there have been improvements in the last 20 years, I don't find the field free of these problems to this day.)

Writes Kendzior and Pearce:

In Azerbaijan, there is a non-relationship between frequency of internet use and support for political protest.  Unlike in the Arab world, where citizens were mobilized by the documentation of state crimes on social media, the arrest of Azerbaijani bloggers only demoralized frequent internet users.  We argue that this is because of the Azerbaijani government’s embrace of “networked authoritarianism”: the use of the internet to compete with and engage with internet activists through propaganda campaigns in cyberspace and physical force on the ground.

In an indignant response, Kendzior says -- for my sake -- "One thing I’d like to make clear is that the situations in Azerbaijan, and in other places I wrote about, can change, and the grimness of the current situation does not therefore mean activists should cease their work."

But she didn't say that in her excerpt; it took some prodding. That's unfortunate. They did indeed  paint a grim picture: they said documenting human rights abuses only scares people away and that ultimately publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest -- those were their words. They didn't say, "But we don't mean to discourage activists" or "we understand people surprise us with their bravey and overcome intimidation anyway" or "it's a moving target and this is just our take now." They said their main thesis: publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest.

The point is, if someone -- already presupposed to feeling burned on colour revolutions -- wanted to find some theoretical underpinnings as to why they should stop giving grants in "non-permissive environments" -- this could be their thesis.

The facts that Kendzior and Pearce found -- and they aren't disputed, just insufficient -- they packaged, in this excerpt (which we have no reason to believe differs substantively from the still-to-come longer piece) do inexorably lead to a policy prescription: don't spend a lot of money on people who are going to go to jail and cause the regimes to backlash so hard that even milder forms of Internet activity could be harmed.

Nedouchki like myself, of course, can't be allowed to debate academic papers or scientific models. But when they move from the realm of theory to policy, then I as a tax-payer and blogger do get to comment. And so I do. The policy prescription indeed seems to be one of caution and incrementalism. It is a body of data and thinking meant as a bulwark against cyber-utopianism which at this point can get people killed in countries like Uzbekistan.

Remember how the story of the suicide girl got real legs? It wasn't from Urlaeva, writing in Russian on a limited mailing list, or fergananews.com that ran a short piece quickly buried by other news. It wasn't from me, who didn't write about it for some days out of distrust of the story because of its classic intelligence memes. It was from Sarah Kendzior, writing in English on the fairly widely read Registan.net, taking it very seriously, and even adding thoughtfully, "Facebook doesn’t kill people; the national security services of Uzbekistan do." Indeed, it was seeing her taking the story at face value, and other people expressing sympathy about the tragedy on Twitter that made me think that I would be churlish to express my doubts and not write, too. That's how it works.

 Socialbakers is showing quite an increase on Facebook use in Azerbaijan -- there's a big jump this last month -- over the New Year's holidays, maybe people had more time to go on line. "The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan is reaching 604040 and grew by more than 185200 in the last 6 months." So, donkey blogger backlash or no, people keep coming; we do understand that their cute-catting does not have a high dissident conversation rate, however, such as to justify the ROI of granting to Internet programs for velvet/coloured/spring revolutions. And we do get to ask a simple question vis-a-vis the thesis of Kendzior and Pearce: with growth like this, maybe the demonization of social media by the government just didn't work?

Again, the policy debate out of this is what matters -- academics likely argue even among themselves when they measure the fluid and elusive thing called "the Internet" (which is a new field of study in a context of a lot of pseudoscience from Silicon Valley motivational consultants like Jeff Jarvis and Seth Godin).

Even without any arguments about Central Asia and the Caucasus, the failures of the Arab Spring to deliver those velvety democracies some hoped for are their own brake on policy; if you listen to Ethan Zuckerman's cute-cat talk all the way through and don't just read Cory Doctorow's self-serving digest of it, Zuckerman does throw in some cautionary stories about killed people on the square in Egypt.

My guess -- although it's completely a hunch -- is that if Azerbaijan experiences a larger growth in Internet and people, especially those connected to the leadership, see it as a way to make money, the regime will find ways to create the managed class of technologists and technologically-savvy I spoke of and get them to do their own policing away of dissent without having to use jailings but it's all going to move forward. And the other narrative is about Islam, which I will return to later.

Everything depends on whether you adopt a strategy of accepting the regime's incrementalism as a pose that you constantly attempt to dodge or call its bluff, or accept incrementalism as having actual merit that ensures a sturdy and reliable conveyor belt between the regime and its coopted intellectuals and their professional positions and perks.