America, Georgia & Russia
I read somewhere that the average blog is read by 3 people. So I just need two more to make it to average . . .
My difficulty with blogging is that whenever I think of something worth saying, a bit of my brain says, ‘ This might be a piece for Lobster’. I guess I will just have to get used to using the blog as a place for first drafts and stray thoughts. Of which here’s one.
The Independent had a front page headline last week about the war?conflict?skirmish? in Georgia: ‘After a war lasting six days in which scores have died’. Scores? Of course they have no idea about what is going on down there: no sources other than tainted/propaganda sources; and no reliable figures on deaths. ‘Scores’ is a sub’s bet-hedging guess, I suspect: gotta put something but have no information.
The real point about the Georgia thing is seeing the US and Russian military-industrial complexes getting back on the road – contracts, careers back on track. Just for a minute there, peace almost broke out! In this country, where politics has yet to be completely corrupted by money, it is difficult for people to grasp that US foreign policy exists mostly to enrich the military-industrial complex. As in: why have Poland and Georgia in NATO, given the geo-political damage this will do to relations between Russia and the rest of Europe? There will be a clause in the contracts somewhere which forces them to buy US weapons systems. That’s the price of entry.
August 25th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Robin, I’m sure you have more than 3 readers already, so I wouldn’t worry about that!
This is unrelated to the post, but I came across the following interview with yourself on “The Education Forum”, here: http://tinyurl.com/4ny8td
The reason I mention this is that, on further inspection, I was dismayed to find this forum preoccupied by accusations of disinformation and false identities. It struck me that this is an endemic feature of all forums that try to cover these “conspiracy” areas, it becoming very difficult to tell who, if anyone, might be an agent. When faced with such confusion the simple truth could be that there is no agent there, just the combination of viewpoints that form a confusing lens on people’s behaviour, and on their expectations of each other. The overall effect leads one to just stay away from anything of the sort, which achieves the alienation of similarly-minded people from each other, which must be a central goal of any opposition, regardless of ideology.
I’m not asking you to say anything on behalf of this forum, but the internet must be a key area the security services would like to exploit to further their goals, whatever they are. The problem is, how would you know the difference from behind a monitor? That is a problem for every internet forum moderator, and the fact that it is even a question has to be some sort of victory for the security services.
August 25th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
I hadn’t noticed the controversy on the Simkin website but anything which tries to deal rationally with these tricky politica/parapolitical areas is going to mired down in amateur spook-spotting. It’s an occupational hazard. I know because I was once prone to it, thinking I could see beneath the cover and identify the ‘obvious spook’. Sometimes you can – eg disinfo in the media – but mostly you can’t; or can’t reliably. And, of course, the nature of the Interent encourages this kind of activity: there is no (or very little) threat of legal action. (In retrospect it is rather curious how little I have accused of being an agent for this or that country/interest. Or maybe just an indicator of how insignificant I have been!)
I don’t know how to deal with this other than to rely on the moderator of the site to refuse to post accusatory material without evidence.
How much attention the security and intelligence services pay to these Internet activites is unknown. My guess would be relatively little: they can rely on freelancers to scew things up themselves….and with the Islamist question they have an awful lot on their agenda for the forseeable future.