When perspective is lost

In this writing, I am going to criticize two people.  That is not habitual, but I think there is a very valuable informational issue here, for people of the collective west.  Of course I mean the awake ones, awake to the adventures and horrors of their own state apparatus, understand some of the historial stones that this was built on, and not those that bumble along in complete ignorance.  I don’t even speak to these as it is hopeless.  Growth is personal.

The first is an essay by Gilbert Doctorow.  It is not kind.  The second is Scott Ritter’s discussion with the media after his house was raided by the FBI and his subsequent short video explaining his stance.   My comments will follow:

Doctorow:  The FBI search of Scott Ritter’s home yesterday:  a contrarian view

I have little doubt that there will be a hue and cry today among progressive humanity over the FBI’s execution of a search warrant against the very prominent activist in the Opposition movement to U.S. foreign policy, former marine and arms control inspector Scott Ritter.

Since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation, Scott has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Russian forces, telling us nearly every week how Russian victory and Ukrainian capitulation are just around the corner. It is no wonder that he attracted to himself a huge public audience both in the United States and abroad.

This misleading analysis of the war I forgive him.  All observers, myself included, have been left wrong-footed by the willingness of the United States and its allies to regularly escalate and change the nature of the conflict from a Russia-Ukraine conflict to a Russia-NATO war, in which new assets are wagered at the casino tables and the war is drawn out, moving with the horizon.

However, along the way Scott Ritter has made some serious errors of judgment which have led ineluctably to the present search and to his likely trial and conviction.

This is not the fate of one brave but misguided public figure that I am writing about. It is the failure by Ritter and others to understand what constitutes correct behavior with respect to the publicly identified adversary of the United States, which Russia is today just as the Soviet Union was in the days of the first Cold War. I write to inform a new generation of activists where the red lines are and what to avoid lest they fall victim as Ritter has and similarly discredit the Opposition.

Ritter hanged himself when he acknowledged last night in a video released on the internet that he had accepted ‘compensation’ from both RT and Sputnik, which are news outlets financed by the Russian government.

That likely will not be the sole charges against him for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) when his case goes to court. He also accepted travel to Russia and within Russia paid for by Russian hosts, first a publisher of one of his books in a Russian language edition and then by a group of extreme nationalists linked to the philosopher-political activist Dugin. Their financial arrangements with the Russian government are opaque. This also showed willful disregard for propriety and for the journalist’s obligation to be objective. That Ritter’s objectivity had been compromised was perfectly evident from his glowing reports on Russia upon his return to the United States.

No country has a monopoly on stupidity. There is plenty to go around for all of mankind.  And the existence of RT is a perfect demonstration of the occasional blindness of the Russian government.  Its director Margarita Simonyan is a brilliant public speaker with a phenomenal memory for quotations from Russian poetry that she uses to add depth to her appearances on television.  However, the RT project that she has overseen represents a misallocation of Russian state funds and failure to exploit Russia’s news gathering manpower properly.

From the very start, RT positioned itself as a mirror to America, with programs prepared and delivered by has-been U.S., Canadian and other English speaking journalists.  The results were second rate in terms of quality and misguided in mission.  Mirrors to America’s blemishes and rot are better held up by Americans in country, not by the country’s adversary.  More importantly, RT never exploited the wealth of material right under its nose within the state’s Russian language broadcasting to its domestic audience. It would have better served Russia’s reputation in the world if the high quality news broadcasts of Vesti and the top quality political talk shows like The Great Game or Evening with Vladimir Solovyov were either re-broadcast with English voice-over or with English subtitles.  This was never done.

The Russians also have been foolish in their organization of the annual Valdai Conference gatherings in which, prior to CO VID and to the Special Military Operation when travel to Russia became impossible, they year after year invited Russia-haters like Angela Stent of George Washington University to come, take the microphone and have their photos taken with Vladimir Putin for later display on their desks back in their university.  By these invitations, the Russian leadership only lent credibility to an enemy.

But to come back to Ritter:  my drawing red lines against accepting compensation or ‘favors’ from Russian state news broadcasters is not a rule that I came to by myself.  It was given to me by an icon of the Opposition movement in the United States going back several decades, professor Steve Cohen.  For more than two years, I was in daily contact with Cohen as from 2015 when we jointly created the American Committee for East-West Accord.  During this period, Cohen was invited to Russia to take part in the Valdai conferences but declined the invitation because he considered it dead wrong to take travel and expenses from the Russian hosts lest he expose his flanks to ridicule and attack by American patriots.  Stent had nothing to fear in this regard considering her stream of anti-Putin, anti-Russian publications. But for Cohen, it would discredit the movement.   This, alas, is precisely what Scott Ritter has done.

The FBI search of Scott Ritter’s home yesterday:  a contrarian view

SCOTT RITTER – MEDIA INTERVIEW

The media interview looks scrubbed on most channels. But here it is via a separate X account.

Scott Ritter @RealScottRitter explains what he knows about the FBI raid on his home

"This has a chilling effect on freedom of speech" pic.twitter.com/gPcWoESFQk

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) August 7, 2024

Then, the next few actions:

– ⛔️The book reading and signing dinner (https://t.me/ScottRitter/2528) on August 10 in Poughkeepsie, NY has been CANCELLED.

– We will do Ask the Inspector tomorrow night as usual ✅

– Scott Ritter Show Ep. 82

On episode 82 of the show we are joined by Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot who was involved in a diplomatic incident between Russia and the United States. On May 28, 2010, he was arrested in Liberia on suspicion of drug trafficking and extradited to the United States and on September 7, 2011.

He was sentenced by an American court to 20 years in prison. On April 27, 2022, he was released as a result of an exchange for US citizen Trevor Reed.

—

Now we discuss. Scott has not changed his ways. He still pretends that he is an INSPECTOR while attempting to build a media empire. He has not read the winds and the waves and is sailing deeper into turbulent waters without considering that he is taking a crew and many that seek truth with him. Not to speak about the citizens of the other countries, that he puts in danger without blinking an eye. It is fine for him, but he is doing material harm.

Doctorow is right in his commenting on RT, he is projecting his own wishes in his commentary on the SMO, he is right in his cricism of RT and I must admit, other Russian media and Scott’s head is too big for his boots.

A small history:

I became aware of him when he burst out, just after the SMO was announced and started and told the community that NATO is going to pull together a million man army and Russia has no idea what they are doing and they are going to be decimated. His friends set him straight and I led a discussion on the now defunct Saker site on this very same issue. It was one of the discussions with the most comments on the Saker site ever.

Then, he felt that he was the only one that is going to ‘save mankind’ and started making friends or speaking to friends inside of Russia and even set up a major tour to Russia to make a movie. If only he could make the Russians and the Americans be friends, all will be OK. This was to say it kindly, deeply naive to the greatest level. But, what it displays yet again, is the danger of misconstruing the war, the Russian stance and their commitment to solving their own problems in their own way. It was horribly naive to even believe that ‘He was the man that could make it all better’. He has the gift of the gab, has solid experience in things of western war and mostly, to those that knew less, he shot up like a star and we saw the beginnings of the building of a media empire, around him as the Star of the Show.

It was irresponsible to continue working with the Russians. And it was irresponsible of those outlets to accept him. The cost of the advertised movie making trip was that some people in Russia ended up in jail and a bunch lost a bunch of money. It was irresponsible for the Russian media to use him as an essayist and even a expert of some kind. We can truly dismiss RT as a source of note, as mostly all one reads there, is US news. They would be better placed to give us Russian news. The cost of this, and Ritter’s naivite, is going to circle out because neither the English speaking Russian News, nor Ritter had much respect and certainly no deep understanding of what they were dealing with. Russians an Americans got hurt and will still be hurt because of Ritter’s very American habit of thinking and projecting himself as ‘that his Shining City upon the Hill’. That attitude does not breed people who are that modest and above all intelligent in terms of their own abilities. He considers himself and others do too, as intelligent but I tell you now, that in international affairs he has no clue! Because he saw one side of the fence in depth, he assumes he sees another in depth.

I complained now and again about his attitude but it was not very important, until people like Vanessa Beeley and others started tearing him apart, because of his attitude which was no different in his work, than the average American that still believes that they are the leader of the world. He acted as if he was one of the leaders of the world, not in actuality, but in beliefset, only now in an alternative view. Ho Ho Ho! Here comes Scott Ritter, an American that was going to fix it all for everyone. Then he pled that he lost many international friends. He did not understand for one minute what those people were talking about because he was unwilling to think outside of his own drugged state. He did not heed the warnings that came his way.

He shot himself in the foot, and harmed and hurt others. He did not heed the warnings that came his way, like losing his passport while trying to fly to Russia. He created himself as a billyclub that the US can use to beat Russia. I’m talking about Russia so far, but the same holds true for the zionist entity and the Palestinian killing fields. As I mentioned in the video posted today (Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen): https://sovereignista.com/2024/08/08/irans-impending-retaliation/

I mentioned to take note of how very carefully these three use their words and said that I will take it up in another context. This was the context that came to mind.

Scott did not mind his words, he did not heed the warnings that came his way and even today, he is not minding his words. American exceptionalism is inculcated with mother’s milk and is a drug that while it courses in the veins, harms, and does not help. If one does not know yourself, and understand your own motivations, your actions, even how heartfelt, will be harmful at the end of the day.

I am sorry this happened and I am sad to be talking about it. But this gives an opportunity for the people of the collective west to learn some lessons.

If you are dealing with a country that your country is at war with (and this is mostly the whole world), understand that you are only an individual and you must obey the dictat, otherwise move for heaven’s sake or take a low profile! Or, shoot yourself in the foot.

If you are dealing with a country that your country is at war with (and this is mostly the whole world), the other side has a say that is frequently more important than your say. I Am an American cuts no mustard here! You need to take responsibility for both sides, as we see from Prof Marandi’s discussion this morning. Iran is taking responsibily for all stakeholders in its decision of when and how to deal with the entity Zionist Israel. Today we can consider that a maxim for going forward.

If you consider yourself an erstwhile physician that is going to heal deep social ills across wars, first do not harm and if you are too naive to even know what that is, Shut Up!

Finally, this sequence was not a small error. Those that consider Scott their savior, please read broader. If you want to work with him, first detox from the exceptionalism drug. There is going to be fall-out here and I will not list those that will fall under an ax of some kind because they do not heed their words, they are exceptional in their own minds, and of course, the precious freedom of speech that does not exist. Excepting, it does, if you heed your words.

We are hosted in Hong Kong, so we moved. Not only for ourselves but also for the ones that read and comment here. Today a site owner may be drawn into problems by the commentariat. See now why I keep such a strong hand on that? For us, it is a long term affair and I would rather study BRICS than fight a government. Very short of wisdom, Scott has just declared war on his own government. Ho Ho Ho! Sounds good eh! The Inspector Inspects again. I hear the sound of bullets striking feet. Today, he is a journalist I kid you not.