Manning Apology

Via BuzzFeed:  “I’m sorry that my actions hurt people. I’m sorry that it hurt the United States.”

Julian Assange and 1917

In Western Europe and North America the name of WikiLeaks is often invoked by advocates of Internet freedom and liberty of expression. An hour or so spent with the 2011 Russian-language publication WikiLeaks. Разоблачения, изменившие мир [Wikileaks. Revelations that Changed the World] (available from B&N here) has been enough to convince me that the information-leaking system devised by the "Internet warrior" Julian Assange is viewed rather differently at the far eastern end of the Baltic Sea.

The book, by the journalist Nadezhda Gorbatyuk, presents an overview of Russian-language material in the WikiLeaks archives, focusing mainly on those parts of the material that concord with the official Russian state view of events in the Baltics, Georgia, and the Middle East during the first decade of the 21st century, and makes no bones about the true nature and purpose of Assange's project. Right from the start, the services of Yulia Latynina are enlisted to make one thing clear. Assange has not been publishing secret U.S. documents in the name of freedom of information:

Assange's purpose is exactly the opposite, and it is formulated in two of his programme articles of 2006 which not been translated into Russian, and so they are given here in the original language - "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance". 

"They are rather amusing essays, which follow a remarkable schizoid-cybernetic logic," writes Latynina. "('Conspiracies are cognitive devices.'; 'What does a conspiracy compute? It computes the next action of the conspiracy.') If the mathematician Perelman had taken an interest in the problems of society, perhaps he would have written something similar."

Following Latynina, Gorbatyuk first explains that for Assange 1) America is an "authoritarian state";  2)  all authoritarian states are ruled by a conspiracy; 3)  a conspiracy exists when the conspirators have dedicated links to each other and therefore have privileged access to information that is not available to those who are not members of the conspiracy. This structure can be weakened by strategically removing the secrecy from the conspiracy. To quote Assange himself:

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

Latynina emphasizes the importance of this point. Assange's aim is  not to increase the amount of information available to the public, but to limit the amount of information on the basis of which the U.S. government takes decisions. This, she says, is a revolution in the classical Marxist sense of the word:

Once upon a time these guys were throwing bombs at presidents, "physically destroying the conspirators". In 1968 they were throwing Molotov cocktails at the Paris police, and in the early 21st century they were making revolution, trying to force the system to take wrong decisions by restricting the amount of information available to it.

According to Marxist theory, a revolution takes place when the the relations of production change in the wake of the productive forces.

Now the productive forces have changed - the Internet is here, and Assange has changed the relations of production. He has made use of the Internet, in the same way as in 1917 the proletariat made use of cobblestones.  

Reading about WikiLeaks

Looking again at Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (David Leigh and Luke Harding, Guardian Books, 2011) in the context of the Snowden affair, which it predates, it's possible to see some places in the book where more information might have been useful. While the sections on the Afghanistan and Iraq cables are fully worked out, with many fascinating details, the passages that deal with Russia and Eastern Europe are sketchy, to say the least.

Although the flow of descriptive and biographical material is generally strong and animated, at one curious point in the narrative there is what feels like a sudden hiatus, a tug of uncertainty. We read first about "Adam", to whom Assange handed over batches of cables:

"He seemed like a harmless old man," said one staffer, "apart from his standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen." He was introduced as the father of Assange's Swedish crony, the journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about "the Jews". 

This was the WikiLeaks "associate", Israel Shamir, who in the wake of events in Sweden said that Assange had been framed by "Langley spies" and "crazy feminists". Some details about Shamir are given, including a very brief biographical profile, and his activities in Belarus are noted. But then we are told that "Assange himself subsequently maintained that he had only a 'brief interaction' with Shamir." And with that, Shamir drops out of the Guardian Books narrative altogether.

This seems a pity, as some further investigation of this enigmatic figure might have proved more interesting than the rather bland few pages devoted to the Russia cables and the characterization of the "mafia state" (the title of another book by Harding).

The Technorevolutionaries

Some comments I wrote on the Wired State blog, in a discussion of Edward Snowden, Sarah Harrison and WikiLeaks:

... I wonder what it is one might be looking for amid all this intrigue, these wheels within wheels? Back in the Soviet era there was clarity in most of the Kremlin's strategies: it was a power game, played mainly with the United States, with stocks of real weaponry on both sides, and the real prospect of the game turning nasty - after all, nuclear war was just around the corner in 1962 and 1983. Nowadays, however, one has the sense of watching an almost surreal parody of the old power struggle: the postmodernist propaganda pumped out by RT may be flashy, grotesque and fun to watch, but it has nothing like the sinister and soul-crushing presence of the anti-Western stuff that churned from Moscow in endless volumes across the airwaves during the Cold War.

Looking at Russia and the West in the context of Snowden and the WikiLeaks scandal it's not clear what we are witnessing: is it just that a generation of young and relatively young folk in the West have developed a strain of nihilism that caused them to turn against their own heritage of relative freedom in the name of a suddenly-conceived dislike of national security? Did some diehard retro Kremlin stooges decide to take advantage of this, out of boredom, resentment and bile? Or are we genuinely seeing a replay and revival of the Cold War in modern dress? What could have induced a nice young American man like Edward Snowden to re-enact the role of Cold War NSA defector, or a nice young Englishwoman like Sarah Harrison to resurrect the somber memories of 1951?

Perhaps there are unresolved questions of education and social psychology at work here, and until these essentially domestic, home-centered issues are examined and analysed, the true political dimension of what appears to be a spontaneous protest hijacked by some ex-KGB pros will remain obscure. The children are acting out a drama based on the political past of their parents and grandparents, but the plot of the drama is confused, and so far the characterization is at best sentimental and shallowly defined. 

One difficulty with the "Cold War isn't over" argument is that it immediately brings anyone trying to promote it into contact with people whose motivations and world view are often far from balanced - all the way from those who push the conspiracies associated with the Mitrokhin Archive to one or two comparatively respectable international commentators and journalists on the right - and sometimes the left - of European and American politics. The real, authentic Cold War had a presence and an atmosphere that was irreversibly fixed in the historical ambience of the twentieth century, with a peculiar, unique quality that can't be repeated, any more than the unique socio-political ambience of the Soviet Union can be repeated now. Those who say without metaphor, as if it were an established fact, that the Cold War never ended, or the Soviet Union never went away, are talking from a position of unreality which deprives their otherwise often plausible arguments of the support they need. The world has changed, and the political processes and the actors that drive them have changed with it. To deny this is to drift off into a mode of thinking about the past and present of global politics that is unhistorical, and therefore likely to be fruitless.

Where the WikiLeaks scandal and the leadership of Julian Assange are concerned, it's often noted that both the movement and its leader style themselves as "anarchist", whereas in fact - as you point out - the techniques and ideas they employ have much more in common with those of Leninism and early Bolshevism than with any recognizably anarchist instruction book. Perhaps it's not going too far to move the Cold War analogy out of the way and gaze further back into twentieth-century Russian history. In the period immediately preceding and following the October Revolution of 1917 there was a similar blurring of the lines between the different revolutionary movements, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Anarchists and Social Revolutionaries. In looking at the contemporary techno-revolutionary phenomena it may make more sense to view them in an analogy with the era of 1917 - not as an exact copy or a continuation of that era, but as manifestations of the "revolutionary pragmatism" that Lenin advocated: a practical and technical agenda and strategy for radical international social and political upheaval, in which the overthrowers of the established order become the guardians and rulers of the world that is to replace it.

For that is what is really so disturbing about the technolibertarians and technocommunists, the Assanges, Snowdens, Greenwalds, Appelbaums and others who seek to destroy the governmental,security,informational and social structures of the Western state. What they all share is a desire to dominate - on the successful completion of the revolution to fill the empty seats of power themselves, and to impose their own intolerant notions of social and political justice. Given the choices and rejections of those who hold them, those notions appear to derive more from the authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies of countries like Russia, Iran and China than they do from the "distillation of Australian cultural values...[the] distillation of American cultural values" and "the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution" that is claimed by Assange.

And maybe that is what Obama needs to be focusing on right now.

Menendez: Russia Must Return Snowden

Robert Menendez, chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

Edward Snowden is a fugitive who belongs in a United States courtroom, not a free man deserving of asylum in Russia.

Regardless of the fact that Russia is granting asylum for one year, this action is a setback to US-Russia relations.

Edward Snowden will potentially do great damage to US national security interests and the information he is leaking could aid terrorists and others around the world who want to do real harm to our country.

Russia must return Snowden to face trial at home.

Pogrom in St Petersburg

A camera follows a group of Russian nationalists as they make the rounds of St Petersburg fruit stalls run by migrants from Central Asia and the south of Russia, overturning and stealing the fruit and threatening the migrants - mostly women and elderly men - with baseball bats. The police back up the nationalists, first standing idly and approvingly by while the intimidation takes place, and then detaining many of the migrants on suspicion of illegal status.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ju4LUSMFu8


Hat tip: Marina Litvinovich on Twitter

Cyberwarfare and Propaganda

At Wired State, Catherine Fitzpatrick has compiled a detailed timeline that highlights the deep interrelation of events surrounding the WikiLeaks state security-breaking campaign, the Snowden affair and the involvement of the Russian government and intelligence services in both. As she points out, there is a clear mutual, though not necessarily causal connection between

Kremlin TV's propagandistic celebration of US hackers in Anonymous; WikiLeaks and Occupy; Russia's own crackdown on Internet freedom and "foreign agents" at home (mirroring its one-time championing of Western peace movements by the Soviet government even as it jailed pacifists at home).

Fitzpatrick also notes that

America has enemies from both domestic and foreign non-state and foreign state actors, some of whom show signs of collusion with each other; they are succeeding to alarming degrees; the pushback against them causes new backlashes and enables enemies to portray the US as "oppressive" and distract from the greater oppression of Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian states...

Tolokonnikova Denied Parole

Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova's complaint about an earlier denial of parole has been rejected by a court in Mordovia.

http://www.rferl.org/content/pussy-riot-release-from-prison-hearing/25057418.htmlhttp://www.svoboda.org/content/article/25057327.html

Alyokhina Denied Parole

Maria Alyokhina has refused further participation in the parole hearing at the Perm Regional Court, which she has been attending via videoconference from the remand center where she is being held, claiming that the proceedings are a travesty of justice and her rights are being fundamentally violated. As a sign of her non-participation, she turned her back to the camera. Her request for parole has now been denied by the court.

36 Photos From Russia That Everyone Needs To See

It’s a scary place for LGBT people in Russia right now.

Navalny Interview

Alexey Navalny has given his first full-length interview since being freed from captivity. TV Rain's Ilya Vasyunin is the interviewer. Excerpt:

Васюнин: Многие, в том числе оппозиционные, политики, сегодня говорят о том, что Навальный стал некой разменной фигурой в политической игре, за него вступается одна группа против другой группы в Кремле. Как ты к этим разговорам относишься?

Навальный: Это что за оппозиционные политики такие? Это какие-то клоуны, а не оппозиционные политики. У меня нет ни желания, ни возможности, ни необходимости доказывать кому-то, что я не являюсь пешкой в игре. Есть люди, которые меня окружают. Эти люди мне верят. Мне этого достаточно. Какие-то там непонятные «оппозиционные» политики меня совершенно не интересуют.

Vasyunin: Many people, including members of the opposition, politicians, are saying today that Navalny has become a kind of interchangeable figure in the political game, that one group in the Kremlin stands up for him against another. How do you feel about this talk?

Navalny: What sort of opposition politicians are they? They are some sort of clowns, not opposition politicians. I have neither the desire nor the possibility nor the need to prove to anyone that I am not a pawn in a game. There are people who surround me. Those people trust me. For me that's enough. Some strange "opposition" politicians don’t interest me at all.

Navalny Returns to Moscow

Navalny and Ofitserov Released Pending Appeal

In a sign that the Kremlin may be having some second thoughts, Alexey Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov have been released from custody pending their appeal, with travel restrictions.

http://rapsinews.com/

In Eurasia Outlook, Petr Topychkanov writes of two points that may underlie the effects of this decision:

the unexpected consequences of a political act, undertaken without the proper understanding of the rapid political, social, and economic changes that are taking place. The second one is that trying to secure their political position by means of primarily pressure or violence, political actors can weaken their position.

Alyokhina 'Beaten by Guards'

Khodorkovsky Center reports that Maria Alyokhina has been beaten by guards in the remand center in Solikamsk where she is currently being held, for refusing to be transferred to another prison without access to documents. More details from RAPSI.

Update 1: In a statement to Novaya Gazeta, Alyokhina's lawyer Oksana Darova has denied that she saw her client being beaten.

Update 2: Alyokhina has written a letter to Novoye Vremya from the remand center in Solikamsk.

Navalny Declared Guilty

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has been found guilty of embezzlement, in a political trial aimed at silencing him.

See  also these links:

 https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23navalny&src=typd

http://navalny-en.livejournal.com/

http://www.interpretermag.com/navalny-verdict-liveblog/

http://www.svoboda.orghttp://rapsinews.com/judicial_analyst/20130718/268208297.html

Sentence is 5 years.

Obstructions of Justice

On the day that the British government refuses a request by Coroner Sir Robert Owen to hold a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, Edward Snowden announces his intention to seek political asylum in Russia.

The Bomb and the Hedgehog

Despite the often invoked ending of the Cold War, Russia’s defence policy is still focused on nuclear deterrence, and particularly the nuclear balance with the United States.  Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov recently announced that Russia will continue to increase its potential in airspace forces and other parts of its nuclear deterrence strategy.

The Defense Ministry worked on building the early-warning radars along Russia's borders as well as permanent deployment of S-400 and S-500 anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems.

"We have a possibility to efficiently counter a high-technological enemy should it undertake aggression against Russia," Gerasimov said.

Writing in Pravda, a defence correspondent noted that

according to Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Wesley Miller, U.S. nuclear weapons are in need of urgent modernization. Defense structures experienced global reduction that affected nuclear armed forces of the United States. The Americans are also concerned about Russia's efforts to increase the readiness of its nuclear forces.

Russia’s conventional armed forces are still in a state of relative disarray, and are currently no match for their U.S. counterparts:

During a conference in Moscow last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that an attack with the use of 3,500-4,000 units of high-precision weapons would deprive Russia of the possibility to resist in only six hours. "According to current estimates from the United States, as a result of such an attack, 80-90 percent of the Russian nuclear potential could be destroyed," said Deputy Prime Minister.

Commenting on Twitter, Carnegie Moscow Center director and defence analyst Dmitri Trenin points out that  while there is an absence of strategic trust between Russia and the United States, the enormous disparity in conventional military power between the two nations means that nuclear deterrence remains the only area in which Russia can maintain equivalence. For Russia, he notes, “this is a hedgehog posture”. 

Eurasia Outlook

Eurasia Outlook is a new Carnegie Moscow Center blog with quite a wide range of contributors and topics. Recent English-language posts include a comparison of the protests in Turkey and Russia by Lilia Shevtsova, an American Interest op-ed on the surge of new authoritarianism throughout the world, and a discussion by Dmitri Trenin of the interconnection between economic and political factors in the process of civic awakening.

The blog also publishes material in Russian, French and several other languages. In the Russian-language section Alexey Malashenko considers the demise of Egypt's President Morsi, and points to the lessons that will inevitably be drawn from it by leaders of other nations in the region:

За ситуацией в Египте пристально наблюдают в соседних странах. И поражение местных исламистов (если это, конечно, поражение, а не временное отступление) эхом отзовется в Тунисе, Ливии, в некоторых других государствах, в том числе в Турции.

No sheikh under the mosque's dome

“We thought there was a sheikh under the mosque’s dome.” Egyptians say this when they anticipate something big from someone and then get nothing at the end. Before reaching power, we thought the Brotherhood were these great business people who will improve the living standard of Egyptians. On the contrary, we discovered that the MB know nothing about the economy and their economic policy depended solely on borrowing money from anyone who showed any sign of willingness to lend. We thought they were Warren Buffets, they turned out to be Seven Eleven cashiers.

Read more at
http://www.bigpharaoh.org/2013/07/03/why-are-egyptians-revolting-against-an-elected-regime/

Tales of the Caucasus

A recent Levada Center poll indicates that half of Russians would not oppose Chechnya's secession from Russia:

http://www.rferl.org/content/chechnya-russia-poll-independence/25034502.html

Meanwhile, a new video by Caucasus Emirate leader Doku Umarov appears to call for a resumption of hostilities on Russian soil, and contains a threat to the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics:

http://northcaucasuscaucus.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/caucasus-emirate-will-try-to-stop-sochi.html