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by American Dream » Tue Jan 01, 2019 12:08 pm
by American Dream » Fri Oct 11, 2019 9:02 am
The three degrees of separation between Lyndon LaRouche, the left, and the alt-right (part five)
This is the fifth and final installment in a series of articles about LaRouche’s movement that began on July 31, 2017 with the intention of demonstrating what a real fascist movement in the USA looked like as compared to the spectacles mounted by Richard Spencer and alt-right websites like the Daily Stormer. Unlike the fascists of today, LaRouche had built bridges to the CIA and important rightwing politicians, including Reagan administration officials. Even though objective conditions precluded him from ever achieving his dream of becoming the American Führer, his reach extended into the ruling class as well as into the corrupted trade union movement, especially the Teamsters.
In exploiting the fund-raising potentials of his cult members phone-banking elderly Republican Party voters to support the “Reagan revolution”, LaRouche diverted funds into his lavish life-style, including a 13-room mansion in Leesburg, Virginia.
The authorities finally caught up to him in 1988. After being found guilty of conspiracy to commit mail fraud of more than $30 million in defaulted loans, eleven counts of actual mail fraud involving $294,000 in defaulted loans, and a single count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, he was sentenced to 15 years but was released on January 26, 1994.
Keep in mind that LaRouche’s basic program prior to his imprisonment mapped closely to the Reagan administration’s, including the ardent support of Star Wars and the expansion of NATO. A lot of his economic policies had much more in common with “statism”, including the support of vast infrastructure projects that sounded both like what FDR carried out as well as Hitler and Mussolini. In addition, his primary allies were outright fascists such as Roy Frankhouser Jr., a former Grand Dragon of the KKK.
Much of my analysis was based on Dennis King’s “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” that concludes with his arrest in 1986. I had not given much thought to LaRouche in the more recent period except to take the time to give his cult followers a hard time whenever they set up a table in front of my high-rise on the Upper East Side.
However, after my first installment appeared, I was startled to discover from a friend and comrade that his movement was deeply involved in the propaganda network defending Bashar al-Assad and the Russian intervention in the Ukraine.
So I’ve come across the Larouchies several times while covering the Syrian conflict. While the Larouche organization itself is persona non grata in mainstream political circles there are several Larouchie and ex Larouchie organizations and individuals who are very active on the “alt right” and the Assadist pro-Putin “alt left.” There is a lot of spillover with Russia Today as well. it’s notable that during the 2011 Tahrir Square protests Russia Today featured Lyndon Larouche himself as an expert on the events. Many Larouche affiliated organizations seem to enjoy very active relationships with authoritarian regimes, an alliance that has become more useful to these governments after the Arab Spring created the need for a fresh crop of conspiracy theories to justify remaining in power.
Syrian UN ambassador recently spoke at a Schiller Institute a few months ago and he appeared very familiar with the individuals and the organization. The Virginia State senator Richard Black, who has raised red flags with his repeated contacts with the Assad regime, including a visit during which he posed in the cockpit of a Syrian government fighter Jet, has been a go to commentator on Syria for the LarochePAC YouTube channel. In a shockingly bizarre incident earlier this year, The Schiller Institute Chorus sang the Russian National Anthem after somehow duping local law enforcement into holding a ceremony with Russian diplomats after the crash of a Tu-154 crash that killed the Red Army Choir. It’s very noteworthy that the ceremony treats the incident as a terrorist attack and tries to draw a parallel to the 9-11 attacks even though the official Russian position is that this incident was an accident.
American Dream » Wed Feb 21, 2018 5:28 pm wrote:The Internet Research Agency: behind the shadowy network that meddled in the 2016 Elections
February 21, 2018 Alexander Reid Ross
The strategy: managed nationalism and hybrid warfare
A clue as to the strategy of the Internet Research Agency can be found among the leading members under indictment. Around the time their employee Anna Bogacheva allegedly visited the U.S. in 2014 to gather intelligence, she registered a PR firm called IT Debugger with Mikhail Potepkin, a former leader of the violent, far-right youth brigade, Nashi.
Developed along with several other youth brigades linked to the Kremlin during a short period between 2004 and 2005, Nashi formed part of what then-First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration Vladislav Surkov called “managed nationalism.” Concerned about a possible “Color Revolution” in Russia, Surkov hoped to simulate an opposition movement and keep the public under the Kremlin’s control.
“Managed nationalism” and Surkov’s analysis of “network structures” paved the way for a strategy penned in 2013 by Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Armed Forces of Russia. Now known as the Gerasimov Doctrine, The New York Times called it “RT, Sputnik, and Russia’s new theory of war.” In Gerasimov’s words, “The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population.”
By the time Hillary Clinton received the official nomination of her party, strategy papers produced by the Kremlin-linked think tank Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) had specifically called on the Kremlin to dedicate such “applied methods” to “a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to Reuters.
“An Elite Club”
Longtime political operator in the Russian far-right, Aleksander Dugin, has worked for most of the past three decades to develop syncretic, left-right cooperation among anti-liberal opposition groups throughout the world. His influence on, and involvement in, “managed nationalism” and the Gerasimov Doctrine is consistent with his agency in the network that influenced the 2016 elections.
Shortly after Gerasimov published his doctrine, Dugin's efforts came to a head. He sent his associate Georgiy Gavrish a memo listing a number of pro-Russia political leaders on the European far right and left. Intent on making Moscow the “New Rome” of a spiritual empire of federated ethnostates from Dublin to Vladivastok and stretching south to the Indian Ocean, Dugin’s main aspiration lay in consolidating support networks for the Kremlin and developing ideological unity for his "Eurasianist" geopolitics.
Dugin’s efforts produced a “think tank” called Katehon with influential board members including a senior member of Putin’s Yedinaya Rossiya party and Leonid Reshetnikov, then the leader of the RISS. Reshetnikov is infamous for complaining in February 2016 that WWII was “orchestrated” by “the upper crust of the Anglo-Saxon elite” and is believed by officials to have sponsored a coup attempt that October to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO.
Another member of Katehon’s board, Lyndon LaRouche associate Sergei Glazyev, co-founded the far-right Rodina (Motherland) Party with Dugin, which in 2014 to 2015 led conferences and coordinating groups including members of the racist “alt-right” and the U.S. left that helped prepare the networks Dugin sought.
At the helm of Katehon’s board sits Dugin’s associate Konstantin Malofeev. Known as the “Orthodox Oligarch” for his far-right political positions and proximity to the Russian Orthodox Church, Malofeev was sanctioned by the U.S. for allegedly bankrolling the pro-Russia separatists in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea where Wagner Company operated. Aleksandr Borodai, the first prime minister of the Donetsk Republic, and Igor Strelkov, its first minister of defense, served as Malofeev’s former PR man and security chief, respectively.
The U.S. connection
Many of the crucial connections between the Katehon network and the Western far-right can be found through their mutual commitments to the anti-LGBQT hate group, World Congress of Families. When Stephen Bannon delivered a speech on the merits of Dugin and fascist occultist Julius Evola in June 2014 to high-level members of the World Congress of Families in the Vatican, he effectively endorsed the guiding “Eurasianist” spirit behind Katehon.
Bannon’s speech came in the middle of a four-year period during which Robert Mercer paid him to work for an anti-Clinton group. Also the primary funder of Breitbart News, Mercer was a member of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), which supported Trump staunchly during the 2016 elections and is heavily involved in the World Congress of Families.
The CNP has a long history of bridging U.S. and Russian far-right interests, dating back to when its founder Paul Weyrich and executive committee member Robert Kriebel helped launch the career of pro-Russia lobbyist Edward Lozansky — a man who would take a leading role in feeding the troll armies of the far right nearly 30 years later.
Deeply connected to the U.S. far-right, Lozansky founded a dubious think tank eventually named the American University in Moscow “on the same floor as the Heritage Foundation.” Through his organizations, Lozansky has hosted conferences and an annual event known as the World Russia Forum. Featuring speakers like Chuck Grassley, Jeff Sessions and Dana Rohrabacher, the World Russia Forum and Lozansky’s Russia House enjoy a high profile inside the Beltway of Washington, DC. However, there is a more obscure side to the Russia Forum and its related American University in Moscow.
Lozansky’s syncretic fellows
Lozansky’s American University in Moscow has become a crucial hub for the cultivation of editors and journalists behind key “fake news” sites propagated by the “Translation Project.” The list of “Fellows” at his institution is a rogues gallery of syncretic pro-Kremlin spin doctors:
Alexander Mercouris, the founding editor of leading pro-Kremlin site, The Duran, which promotes InfoWars, the Western radical right and conspiracy theories.
Patrick Armstrong, who contributed to the short-lived geopolitical cutout, Global Independent Analytics, along with Flores, and was program coordinator at the Lozansky-linked anti-evolution Discovery Institute’s “Real Russia Project.”
Anatoly Karlin, formerly of Da Russophile and currently an antisemitic blogger for the alt-right-associated Unz Review.
Mark Sleboda of the Duginist Centre for Conservative Studies.
Daniel McAdams, head of the Ron Paul Institute.
Gilbert Doctorow, contributor to Russia Insider and Consortium News
Members of RT, Voice of Russia and RISS.
More at: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/201 ... -elections
by coffin_dodger » Fri Oct 11, 2019 10:21 am
by American Dream » Sun Nov 03, 2019 3:57 pm
Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months running fake social media accounts at self-described ‘ePR firm’ in Wrocław
The southern Polish city of Wrocław, from where Cat@Net runs multiple fake social media accounts .
The undercover reporter, Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz, spent six months this year working at Cat@Net, which describes itself as an “ePR agency comprising specialists who build a positive image of companies, private individuals and public institutions – mostly in social media.”.
A member of the Reporters’ Foundation, a consortium of Polish investigative journalists, Pruszkiewicz’s first task when she joined the company was to set up a social media avatar for sharing “social and political content” with the aim of attracting 500 followers.
After a trial period, she was given access to the company’s internal communications channels, through which the company’s employees, each of whom ran a dozen or so social media accounts, would receive guidance and instructions from their managers – what issues to engage with, who to promote, and who to denigrate.
The accounts produced both leftwing and rightwing content, attracting attention, credibility and support from other social media users, who could then be rallied in support of the company’s clients.
“The aim is to build credibility with people from both sides of the political divide. Once you have won someone’s trust by reflecting their own views back at them, you are in a position to influence them,” said Wojciech Cieśla, who oversaw the investigation in collaboration with Investigate Europe, a consortium of European investigative reporters.
“Reading these communications, you can see how the leftwing and rightwing accounts would receive their daily instructions, how they would be marshalled and directed like two flanks of the same army on a battlefield.”
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 17, 2021 5:59 pm
Vladislav Surkov: ‘An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state’
The longtime Kremlin éminence grise on shaping Russia’s managed democracy, Alexei Navalny — and why Putin is a modern Octavian
“There are two options,” says Vladislav Surkov as we settle into our seats. “The first is Anglo-Saxon. I give you the menu, you can choose what you want. The second option is Russian. There is no choice. The chef chooses for you, because he knows better what you want.” Surkov smiles. “I suggest the Russian option.”
And so begins a meal heavily seasoned with allegory and metaphor, orchestrated by a man who helped to strangle Russia’s infant democracy and replace it with an enfeebled parody of heavily scripted political reality TV that has kept Vladimir Putin in power for 21 years and counting — despite the rising tide of dissatisfaction and unrest at its dwindling economic benefits.
Surkov is a founding father of Putinism, and one of its key enablers. He is the architect of Russia’s “sovereign democracy”, an ostensibly open system with a closed outcome: elections are called, candidates campaign, votes are cast, ballot boxes are opened, and the same man wins, every single time.
Its core idea is that the stability of the state supersedes the freedom of the individual, and entails fake opposition parties, rigid control of the media and impossible barriers to entry for political figures not approved by the regime, offset by the illusion of the traditional trappings of a true democracy.
Grey cardinal, éminence grise, a modern Rasputin, a Russian Richelieu — Surkov exhausts the clichés as the consummate Kremlin backroom operator. Never elected, he was Putin’s chief ideologist and by most accounts his closest political confidant for more than a dozen years, who went on to stage-manage the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia’s involvement in the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.
Surkov is either 56 or 58, depending on which biography you believe; in Russian political terms, he is only just reaching his prime. But he is no longer inside the towering red brick walls of the Kremlin, having parted ways with Putin last spring. From scripting Russia’s democracy, he is now simply controlling my diet.
In jeans and a pullover, in a secluded corner of an ostentatious restaurant perched on the roof of a luxury Moscow department store, Surkov says that his departure is irreversible, and that a year away from Putin’s side has taught him “the true meaning of serenity”. He has stayed out of the limelight since departing, publishing some poetry and — he tells me — exchanging political management for political philosophy.
We order champagne (Surkov says he only drinks sparkling) and as the first of five preordained courses arrives — a mess of barely discernible shredded vegetables drowning in truffle oil — I ask the obvious question: how does one dismantle democracy while enhancing its facade?
“In the Soviet Union, there was a lot of homogeneity. And that homogeneity ruined the Soviet Union, because people need diversity. But in the 1990s, we had diversity. And that diversity was ruining Russia even faster,” he begins.
“For a while I was a student at the institute of culture. I studied the Commedia dell’arte. There is a limited cast: Pantalone, the merchant. There is a judge, Tartaglia. There is Harlequin, a stupid servant. Brighella, a smart servant. Colombina, the young servant, and so on. There is a limited group of players, but they represent all strata of society.”
I am initially bemused by this detour into Italian theatrical nomenclature but it soon becomes clear.
“People need to see themselves on stage,” he continues. “In this masked comedy, there is a director, there is a plot. And this is when I understood what needed to be done.
“We had to give diversity to people. But that diversity had to be under control. And then everyone would be satisfied. And at the same time, the unity of the society would be preserved . . . It works, this model works. It is a good compromise between chaos and order.”
Later in our conversation, which took place three weeks before Wednesday’s summit in Geneva, Surkov will spell out his central doctrine with even less nuance: “An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state,” he says. “Anything that is medicine can be poison. It is all about the dosage.”
Raised by his mother in a city 300km from Moscow, his Chechen father having left the family when Surkov was still young, he took an unorthodox route to Putin’s side.
He served in the Soviet army, worked as a turner in a factory, and spent years “smoking and talking with hippies and some other queer people” before entering the chaotic world of Russia’s nascent capitalism as first a bodyguard and then a PR man for banking and oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky was later stripped of his assets, jailed and exiled during Surkov’s time in the Kremlin.
After a stint at Russia’s state TV channel he was made an assistant to Alexander Voloshin, President Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff, in 1999. When Putin inherited the Kremlin at the turn of the millennium, Surkov was made deputy chief of staff.
“When the change happened, it was absolutely clear to me that the personality of the new leader provided an opportunity,” Surkov recollects. “With Putin, I realised everything that I wanted to do could be done now.”
Surkov entered the Kremlin when Russia’s democracy was just eight years old. In that short time, Yeltsin had survived an attempted coup, almost lost the presidency to a communist, and had in effect mortgaged the Kremlin to a small coterie of businessmen who were now calling the shots.
The industrious young political strategist got straight to work, building a party for Putin — today’s United Russia, which has won every election it has entered — while also helping to set up other parties such as the nationalist Rodina (Motherland), nominally independent but Kremlin-directed, designed to appeal to disgruntled citizens who might otherwise have voted for real opponents of Putin, such as staunch leftists.
He tells me that Putin, with his help, created “a new type of state”. He describes his former boss as a modern-day Octavian, the Roman ruler who succeeded Julius Caesar.
“Octavian came to power when the nation, the people, were wary of fighting. He created a different type of state. It was not a republic any more . . . he preserved the formal institutions of the republic — there was a senate, there was a tribune. But everyone reported to one person and obeyed him. Thus he married the wishes of the republicans who killed Caesar, and those of the common people who wanted a direct dictatorship,” he says.
“Putin did the same with democracy. He did not abolish it. He married it with the monarchical archetype of Russian governance. This archetype is working. It is not going anywhere . . . It has enough freedom and enough order.”
This is easy for him to say. Less so for those who oppose Putin’s stealth autocracy, such as Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia’s grassroots opposition, who has mobilised hundreds of thousands of protesters against the regime over the past decade despite constant attacks. Last year, he was poisoned with a weapons-grade nerve agent in an assassination attempt he says was ordered by the Kremlin and, after he recovered, was arrested and jailed.
In response, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets this winter, only to be violently beaten by riot police and detained. Is that part of Surkov’s scripted democracy?
“When I started my work in 2000, I suggested a very simple system to bring law and order. We split the opposition into systemic and non-systemic. And what is systemic opposition? That is one that obeys the rules, laws and customs,” he says, referring to Kremlin-directed opposition parties.
I call him out on this obvious paradox. An opposition that is loyal to those who set the rules is no opposition at all. He presses on.
“The second requirement is that they do not work for foreign governments. If they do that, they cannot represent Russians . . . it breaches our sovereignty,” he says. “How to exclude it is a matter of taste, and depends on the temper of certain people.”
Navalny’s organisation has been designated as a “foreign agent”, and its members will be banned from participating in elections. It denies receiving foreign support.
I ask him if he is shocked by the new level of violence being used by police against protesters this spring. He smiles, and says he has no idea. I recommend he goes to a protest. “Me? Why should I?” he responds with mock affront.
“The state protects itself, everywhere,” he retorts. “Sorry, I’m saying simple things like a Kremlin propagandist, but this is obvious. In all countries, illegal rallies are crushed by force. Why should we be different?
“That man is not acceptable. Navalny is not acceptable,” he says. “He should not be part of Russian politics. Germans love him, let him be elected to the Bundestag . . . They can give him a German passport.”
This sharp nationalist edge lies just below the surface of this suave intellectual, who blends Bible quotes with financial market theory and kept a photo of the late US rapper Tupac Shakur in his government office.
Waiters bustle around. Delicious tuna carpaccio is an improvement on the sorry salad, and next comes slices of excellent rare beef under shredded parmesan. Surkov barely touches his food and takes tiny sips of his champagne.
In 2011, Surkov moved from the Kremlin to become deputy prime minister, and in May 2013 was dismissed from government. His rivals toasted the end of his regency. But four months later he returned, this time as a formal aide to Putin, with oversight over Ukraine policy. It would be an assignment with similarly seismic impacts as his first.
Surkov tells me that when he worked for Khodorkovsky in the 1990s, he wrote a memo to a senior politician arguing for the need for Russia to retake Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that became part of independent Ukraine when the USSR dissolved. But, he admits, Russia lacked both the resources and the organisation at the time.
In February 2014, five months after Surkov’s new appointment, unmarked Russian troops entered Crimea to capture strategic sites, and lend muscle to pro-Russian separatists that demanded independence from Kyiv.
A month later, in a referendum declared illegal by the UN General Assembly, the territory voted to become a part of Russia. Simultaneously, pro-Russian groups in eastern Ukraine, supported by Moscow, began taking control of regional institutions and clashing with federal security services — clashes that erupted into a full-blown war that continues today.
Surkov is unrepentant, and portrays himself as someone seeking to help — not dissect — a country long divided between east and west. “Ukrainians are very well aware that for the time being, their country does not really exist. I have said that it could exist in the future. The national core exists. I am just asking the question as to what the borders, the frontier should be. And that should be the subject for an international discussion,” he says.
“The country can be reformed as a confederation, with a lot of freedom for the regions to decide things by themselves,” he continues. “Two bones need soft tissue between them. Ukraine is right between Russia and the west, and the geopolitical gravity of both will sever Ukraine.
“Until we reach that outcome, the fight for Ukraine will never cease. It may die down, it may flare up, but it will continue, inevitably.”
Surkov describes the Minsk agreements — a peace deal signed by Moscow, Kyiv and pro-Russian rebels — as an act that “legitimised the first division of Ukraine”.
I remind him that 14,000 people have been killed in fighting since 2014, including 298 civilians on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was shot down by pro-Russian rebels, according to international investigations that Moscow rejects. Surkov says that was “a pity”.
“I am proud that I was part of the reconquest. This was the first open geopolitical counter-attack by Russia [against the west] and such a decisive one. That was an honour for me,” he says. “Could it have been done better? Of course it could . . . But we have got what we have got.”
Throughout his time at Putin’s side, Surkov was deployed as a deft propagandist, and shrewd manipulator of public mood. He helped birth Nashi, a nationalist youth group that venerated Putin and harassed perceived enemies of the state. Much of the Kremlin propaganda spewed out by state TV and social media troll armies was drafted on his desk.
“People need it,” he says in response to my comment that much of that propaganda is dangerous. “Most people need their heads to be filled with thoughts.
“You are not going to feed people with some highly intellectual discourse. Most people eat simple foods. Not the kind of food we are having tonight. Generally most people consume very simple-meaning beliefs. This is normal. There is haute cuisine, and there is McDonald’s,” he laughs. “Everyone takes advantage of such people all over the world.”
Yet at some point, his methods saw him fall from favour. He had become, in his own words, “too odious”.
“When someone fills a certain office, and people talk about him for so long that he is a puppeteer, that he is a strangler of democracy, that he is [19th-century reactionary adviser to three Russian tsars] Pobedonostsev and Rasputin — that is the essence of being odious,” he says. “The government has to remove such people now and then . . . those people have to be replaced, so that they stop irritating people.”
But he also asserts that his final departure was mutual — that the fun of dressing up a one-party state as a democracy had gone.
“In 2000, it was unbelievably exciting. It was for the first time. Everyone said: ‘Wow!’” he recalls. “And so then what else? I had built this car, but I got bored driving it. It needed people who are more patient sitting at their desks. I am not a driver.”
Yet he still evidently likes to be in charge. Without my knowledge, he has already settled the bill. I protest, citing FT rules. He waves me away, citing his own.
Surkov, who has mystified Kremlin watchers with his low profile since leaving — neither political exile nor lucrative business appointments — rebuffs my persistent questions about a possible return to the fray. But as the plates of panna cotta are cleared, and I ask about his role in the next Kremlin transition, his discipline finally cracks.
“Well, let’s wait and see. Some exciting things are ahead of us. There will be many new dramatic transformations,” he says. “Yes, I would like to understand when it will happen. If I live long enough, when it happens, then I will have a job.”
Henry Foy is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief
by JackRiddler » Sat Jul 17, 2021 6:58 pm
by Harvey » Sat Jul 17, 2021 7:04 pm
by Harvey » Sat Jul 17, 2021 7:07 pm
JackRiddler » Sat Jul 17, 2021 11:58 pm wrote:Indeed, adorable conceit in the present context. But it's also not an eternal necessity that it be so.
Interesting that Surkov was once working for Khodorkovsky.
Large parts of interview ridiculous -- Foy more than Surkov, but at least as written, they end up agreeing on every big lie of recent Russian history in its standard Western telling. That the 1990s were freedom. That there was an infant democracy to strangle and that it was Putin who did it in 2000, as opposed to Yeltsin in 1993. That Yeltsin had faced a coup, by which I guess Foy means '93. (Yeltsin of course enacted a coup d'etat against the parliament so as to force through shock-therapy and privatization.) So by acceding to the Foy lie (at least as implied here) that the Yeltsin years stood for democracy and freedom (and the truth that it was all chaos), Surkov is happy to claim the success of managed open authoritarianism, or whatever the present hybrid should be called.
Funny to see this thread bumped.
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