Angry Planet - Why People Defend Dictators Online

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

There’s anti-government protests in Hong Kong, Venezuela, and Russia. The civil war in Syria rages on and, thanks to Twitter, VK, Facebook, anyone can share their opinion about world events. Elements of both the left and right say that any anti-government protest in one of America’s rivals is a CIA plot and dictators such as Bashar Al Assad are good, actually. Is this information warfare or just shitposting? Here to help us figure that out is Idrees Ahmad. Ahmad is Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Vice, and The Atlantic.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, at the War College listeners, this is Matthew Galt here with a quick insert at the top. I just want to say that we recorded this episode on October 3rd before the American withdrawal from Syria and the subsequent invasion by Turkey. The information here only deals in part with Syria and Assad, and I think after Turkey's invasion, more relevant than ever. But you'll see what I mean. Dennis Kucanich came to the UK to give a provost speech, and he was paid $20,000 for it by the same group. So that's not like the kind of money that an ordinary solidarity movement has. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. There's anti-government protests in Hong Kong, Vinner. Venezuela and Russia. The Civil War in Syria rages on, and thanks to Twitter, VK, Facebook, and Facebook, anyone can share their opinion about world events. Elements of both the left and rights say that any anti-government protest in one of America's rivals is actually a CIA plot, and dictators such as Bashar Al-Assad are good, actually. Is this information warfare or just shit posting? Here to help us figure that out is Idris Ahmed. Ahmed is a lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Sterling and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Vice, and the Atlantic. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be with you. All right, so just so we're clear up top, Syrian President Bashar El-Assad, bad guy, right? Yeah, I think that should be rather obvious because the UN has been pretty categorical. about that because they have accused him of the crime of extermination, which differs from genocide in only one respect, that it's not directed at one specific group because the regime has been pretty genocidal towards a host of groups. And in terms of the violence, we also know

that the majority of civilian deaths in Syria have occurred at the hands of the regime, and it has also carried out this actual campaign of disappearances that, again, has been compared to, well, the worst possible precedence in history, including Nazi Germany, because the disappearances range in over 100,000 and people in prisons, and

amnesty also had one report in which 13,000 people executed in just one prison in a five-year period. So I think there's no doubt about it that not only that the regime is criminal, but its campaign against civilians has been deliberate and sustained. So that's why very often the word that is used, civil war is very misleading. It's actually a war on civilians. So I think there are a little doubt about how bad Assad has been for Syrians. All right.

Why then? We see this in the West, particularly American. And they're usually left-wing political figures, not always, but usually, criticized the Syrian opposition and protests in Venezuela. And recently, I've seen people accusing the Hong Kong protests of actually being an imperialist CIA plot. What's going on here? Why is this happening? I think it's kind of a hangover from the time of the Cold War. There was that campist view in which if you accepted that the United States was engaged in imperialism, then.

anybody that was seen as opposing the United States was necessarily assumed to be somebody good or worth defending. And that view, even at that time, yielded some really horrific results. People apologized for everything from Stalin's terror to Khmer Rouge's genocide. And so it was never a position which was morally defensible. We also saw it's after the Cold War ended. Bosnia was one of the first instances where we saw a re-emergence of that kind of epilogia. But I think Seria has been quite extraordinary as the focus of this type of revived campism. But it has become, from there, these people have suddenly fanned outwards to provide the same services to any other authoritarian regime.

So it started off as something ideological, but I don't think it's ideological anymore because it has emerged that this, doing something like this can actually be profitable. So there are certain groups and certain individuals have emerged who have now started providing the same services, going from one conflict zone to another, doing the same thing, presenting anybody who is opposing any authoritarian regime as being in the either in the pay or in the service. of the CIA because they are seen to be opposing a regime which is in the U.S. government's bad books. You're talking about what I will politely term or maybe impolitely term grifting, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of a, it's become, this is why I feel like it's a bit different than the Cold War era, because back then there was at least ideological certainty behind

who buy the many prominent intellectuals and other individuals who are based themselves. But what happens now is that there are people who are clearly mercenary in this respect. So it's a form, it's clearly grifting, and then it has become really profitable, and then it has also got amplification. So if you are not successful in something like, you know, in a mainstream journalism career, So you can find a pretty lucrative niche for yourself by offering your services as an apologist for these regimes because now many of them have got their own. They've got their television channels. They've got their online presence. And so you can have a presence which can sustain an otherwise, I would say that unsustainable career because many of these people would never survive if they ever had to encounter an actual editor.

I mean, we're beginning with something as simple as the quality of writing. It's just the atrocious pieces of writing, then the complete disregard for facts, and then it goes on from there. Well, let's get specific and talk about one of them that I think is, kind of sheds light on how this process works. Who is Max Blumenthal, and how would you describe him? Well, he's kind of like the, he was once described by one of his admirers as this. son of Democratic Party royalty. And so back then, he used to be kind of a star in the Democratic Party kind of circles. And then things changed somewhere along the way.

They used to be initially quite supportive of the Arab Spring at the time when it was a popular brand. And I think that once the counter-revolution settled in, so he probably realized that having an anti-Assad position wasn't as, in fact, he actually actually. actually said this. One of my friends had interviewed him at the time when he was still doing some critical journalism. So he was interviewed by at the University of Denver, and so he went on for quite some time, which even at that time had felt a bit strange about his financial difficulties because of having spoken out against Assad. And so I found that a bit strange, but what happened

is that then his financial difficulties a few years seem to have been resolved because he seems to be now doing rather well and traveling the world. And the only thing that changed in the meanwhile is that his views took a 180 degree turn. And that one of the catalyzing events then also was the same December 2015 meeting in Moscow. It was the 10th anniversary of Russia today. That was the same meeting where General former your Secretary of State, I'm forgetting this or not the

National Security Advisor who got indicted. I'm trying to remember the name. You're thinking of Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn, yeah. Mike Flynn was there and then Joe Stein was there and all these people were there and they put and attended the gala afterwards. So anyway, once he returned from there, so

his politics had taken a 180-degree turn. and he announced it a few months later with these series of articles attacking the white helmets, the Syrian white helmets, and which felt of a strange focus. This was when Aleppo was besieged and was under assault. So he started, that's where people first realized, oh, this guy has undergone some kind of a transformation. And since then, then it kept on getting worse because he got then denounced by a whole lot of people, including many of his former allies, and many, I think it's over 100 Palestinian writers wrote an open letter denouncing the fact because he presents himself as a champion of the Palestinians. And they said, well, they don't want to have anything to do with somebody who uses the same tropes against Syrians that they feel that they have been subjected to, and including. You know, just the demonization of something as innocuous as rescue work or providing medical aid.

And so that was kind of the transformation started there. And so soon thereafter, I presume, other people must have paid attention because then he started, other authoritarian regime also started benefiting from his way. kind of benign take on their actions. So he appeared for a kind of a rosy moonlight, kind of a dinner with Daniel Ortega. And then he was in Caracas where there's a kind of a silly video of him holding a sword that was given to him as a gift by Maduro. And obviously, the things that he started doing were so crassly propagandistic that he, At the time when 3 million of Venezuelans had been displaced because of lack of food and lack of opportunities and violence,

so he went around recording these videos for Russia Today, which they appeared on Russia Today. I don't know if they were actually recorded for Russia today, but where he goes around saying that the supermarkets here are so well stocked, that the actual challenge that people are facing is the choices, that they're just too many of them. I mean, it was just so crassly propagandistic that if you are Venezuelan, for obvious reason, you felt really offended by something like that. If you knew what was happening in Caracas and then you see this guy trying to whitewash the whole not just the incompetence, but the violence of the regime because, you know, the targets of the regime then also started targeting people like Michelle Bachelet, the performer. Chilean president who had investigated the extrajudicial killings for the UN. So anyway, what happened is these people, this guy became one of the key figures.

And he used to work for more mainstream left-fing organizations. He used to be published by nation books. He used to write for the nation and Daily Beast. But what happened is that over time, he started failing downwards. First, from there, he decamped to alternate, then alternate fired him, then he went to something called the real news, then they fired him, and then he ended up with something, well, he ended up establishing his own thing, which nobody knows how it's funded, and they don't reveal. For that matter, he still hasn't revealed who funded his trip to Moscow, but the thing is that this thing called the Gray's Own project seems to be entirely a defense service for international authoritarian regimes. Do we have a good idea of what sort of reach they have in terms of who they're reaching and how they're impacting the public perception of these regimes? Because I've heard, I've talked to people who have said, you know, these are pretty niche people.

They don't have that big of a reach. But I've seen their stuff shared on social media by friends of mine and people who I went to school with. So it does seem like they are cultivating an audience. Well, I think this is the problem with social media that kind of, works through osmosis, it kind of makes it into the mainstream. Like it's sometimes people who have scores to settle, like if you're, you know, one of the rival. So what happened with somebody like him is that his actual audience is pretty niche. If you look at many of them, so what they do is that they're amplified by a lot of bot activity.

because if you look at who amplifies these people, the retweets, every one of their tweets seem to be, there seems to have thousands of retweets. But then when you look at them, all of them are these clear bots, a lot of Twitter eggs and people with five or three followers. And then you rarely find anybody who's in any way legitimate. But what happens is that ultimately when something like that comes along,

like they had done this whole thing attacking Clarissa Ward of CNN, accusing her of benefiting from the services of Al-Qaeda, and which these kinds of claims, well, I mean, I'll come to that in a minute, that why that is so pernicious. But what happens is that people who have scores to settle against, let's say, Clarissa Ward. So they start amplifying them. So what has happened now is that the reason why they end up. reaching the mainstream is that you have got a convergence of different types of worldviews. You have won the Syrian regime and its supporters. Then you've got the people who have a very friendly attitude towards the Kremlin,

and which includes people on the far left and also on the far right. And then beyond that, you've got people who are of the sort of traditional Marxist persuasion who have still retained this kind of a romanticized view of Moscow and the Kremlin. That to them it is the internal sort of communist regime, even though it's super capitalist now and everything. But the thing is that they maintain this romanticized view and then they reject things like their favorite term for describing any Russian interference as Russia Gate. And so all these different types of, I want to escape. skeptics, but they're more like the cynics. So they like this type of information.

They like this type of information. And in the case of, I think among Muslims, there's also the sectarian factor at work, because I've seen people, including some people working at Al Jazeera who amplify, even though, I mean, I think that's not really kind of the main tendency within Al Jazeera, but people within Al Jazeera who used to amplify somebody like Blumenthal. I mean, he used to appear until very recently, you know, on their shows. So I think that there's a variety of different types of ideological formations who find this type of views serviceable.

So it makes it into the mainstream, but I still think that their actual reach is very limited, and even though they get amplified fully by the Russian media. So if you go on Russia Today's website, and if you just type in this guy's name. So they literally, every treat, every little video he creates, so they devote an entire article to it. And they amplify it through that. And, you know, he has a, well, he's a frequent guest there.

His book gets amplified by people like Chris Hedges. And there's another former CNN guy who has ended up there. A lot of these people whose careers in the mainstream journalism failed. So they ended up in Russia today. and now what they do is that I think they probably, I wonder if they do it just because they actually find value in it or whether this comes out of some instruction. But, you know, that's a matter of speculation. But they do amplify his work all the time. All right.

We're going to pause here so I can record an ad break. You are listening to War College. We will be right back. All right. Thank you, listeners. We are back on War College. All right. So we've been talking a lot about like America's failed journalists and kind of the left wing. But I also want to make sure that we stress that it's not just limited to the political left.

David Duke, you know, former Grand Wizard of KKK and American politician has visited Syria in support of Assad. And there are lots of far right figures that, you know, praise Putin and other authoritarian figures, Duterte, especially, you know. what's the cross-pollination here? What is it about these dictators that draws people in and makes them want to praise them? Well, I think that's a very kind of right now, that's one of the most dangerous phenomenons, that you have got these crossover. Actually, this is something quite interesting that there's a, I think, West Coast-based American academic named Alexander Reed Ross.

So he had written a very good piece looking at this overlap for the Southern Poverty Law Center. And then Max Bumenthal used his connections and threatened them with lawyers to get that taken down. But the thing about it was that the whole idea at the time was showing that what is happening is that there's this conversions. and Syria has been one of the kind of nexus for where they have overlapped, so you've got the far right, and you've got the alt-right, which have a very favorable view of Assad, and for the way same reasons, they have a very favorable view of Putin, because they see them as the bulwarks of a kind of civilized, in a civilizational war. and Putin, in fact, is seen very overtly as a true defender of the white Christian kind of West.

So that's why they are lionized. And so the right motivation is that. And the left has its own motivations, but they converge on the key actors. So the admiration for Putin and others. And then you have certainly people from, like Richard Spencer actually used to have the Syrian regime's flag on his, even on his Twitter name that it was inserted between Richard and Spencer, the regime flag. And there are people who, one of the oddest kind of views was there's this guy called Matthew

Heimbach. So he used to actually, he does pictures of him wearing a Hezbollah flag. So it's a kind of an odd conversions. And what, but it's based on the fact that they see these people as doing the kind of, waging the kind of war on terror, the more unabashedly directed at, well, they declare everybody to be Islamist and jihadists who are standing up against the supposedly secular regime, which is protecting minorities. That is the narrative that has been built around Assad. And that was kind of the narrative that the regime used.

and first to just avoid criticism and to avoid any attention, but now to court open admiration. So many of the people that they have tried to court, they include also some mainstream Christians that they appeal to both, they appeal to various churches across the U.S. and also over here. And some of them, they actually, there's a, I think, I forget, well, he's from the Anglic, church or some of the churches there's this guy called Paddy Ashdown, not Paddy Ashdown, it's Andrew Ashdown. So he's one of the priests who has been a frequenter of, he was also present there celebrating when Aleppo was falling.

So you have had this, they have tried to quote various formations. They have certainly quoted the European far right. So the European far right, including Britain's Nick Griffin is the head of, he is the head the fascist BNP, then you have the French fascists who even recently were on visit, and Greek fascists, and then you have got, I don't know if the AFD also, yeah, absolutely, and the German AFD has great admiration, and they've sent delegations, and they have also tried to, they have another reason for their, they're trying to rehabilitate Assad, because once Syria gets declared a post-conflict situation, they can

force back the refugees. So you've got this very interesting sort of this, this, kind of almost like this sort of syncretic support for, for both, from left and right. And then it forms these interesting convergences that on Sputnik, there's one show in which you have this former alt-right guy, Breitbart guy, and then they're supposedly leftist, and then they host these types of sometimes these far right figures and sometimes these left wing figures and they have very shared views.

And then Blumenthal has written a book in which he finds nobody trustworthy enough, nobody invest in journalism. But his trusted sources then are people like Kivor Kalmassian. He's this Syrian, a regime supporter, who lives in Germany

and he works as a spokesperson for the anti-immigrant. He lives there as a refugee, but he works for the anti-immigrant AFD. So you've got these odd figures and odd kind of associations that have formed around this conflict. And I just want to toss out that I don't think, I think that there's a tendency to simplify narratives. And I think that's part of what these people do. And I don't want us, and I'm not saying that you are, but I just want to say this to the audience. I don't want people to think that this is just horseshoe theory, right?

that you go around too far one of the other sides. You go, you go too far right. You come out the side, you know, the side of the left, etc. I think it's more complicated and weirder than that. Like, you've kind of been saying that it's weirder. But I also want to circle back and drill down on something you said earlier that part of the grift and part of the game here, you called it pernicious, is attacking the legitimate sources of journalism. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's kind of, that's been one of the, that has, it's kind of broadened out from starting with the, there's a Kremlin strategy, but it also broadened out from there that because you want everything to become disputed. So manufacturing doubt is essential to all of this. So it's not like these people are coming out with a coherent counter-native. But what they want to do is that they want their narrative to be one, among many, and every one of them equally either as dubious as their own. So what they try to do is that they try to attack mainstream journalists and try to attack mainstream sources. So if you look at, for example, this guy, Bromenthal's activity in the past few years, it has mainly involved targeting precisely the human rights groups. They have attacked here Amnesty International. He calls, Ken Roth, something like the regime change, can't.

or something like that. And so it's almost like the Trumpian slurs being used against various people to try to discredit them. And journalists, people like I just mentioned Clarissa Ward, and then institutions which are providing the data on which people rely everything from Syrian on the ground rescuers to organizations like the Syrian American Medical Society, which provides medical services. over there. So all the institutions which are able to provide or which are able to undermine their narrative, so they have taken a preemptive measure that they try to discredit them in advance. So that later on, if you say a Syrian Network for Human Rights says that here is this many civilians have been killed by the regime. Oh, but isn't that part of some regime change lobby and isn't that receiving money from somebody who has a links to somebody else who was also

linked to some NATO operation somewhere. So it's these kinds of things in which everything is declared to be somehow shady because it has on five or six removes is connected to some Western government. At the same time, they see nothing embarrassing about being on the premier propaganda organization of the Russian state or going on trips to the Kremlin where Putin presides or where matters or going to Syria recently, to a labor conference, which was the most ironic one. So one week after the Syrian regime hosted the European far right, so they organized something called, it was described as a billed as a labor conference.

The only thing is that in Syria, you don't have independent unions. And the event itself was presided over by Assad. So here was not even at any remove, there were people directly appearing at any event. which was organized by Assad. But on the other hand, Clarissa Ward works with CNN. CNN is funded by somebody else, and that person has some relative who works for NATO or something like that, and that becomes a reason to dispute anything that CNN reports.

So it's kind of a way of manufacturing doubt on the one hand, and on the other hand, trying to discredit through association all the potential sources of legitimate news or legitimate. information. Because I think one of the things that they have had to contend with, they're confronted with it all the time, is that there are all these mainstream institutions. You have human rights groups and you've got the UN's agencies and you've got all these mainstream journalists who are reporting one truth

and it seems to be a coherent story because all of them seem to be coming to the same conclusion. But because they're coming up with their counter-narrative, it becomes essential for them to suggest that somehow the fact that all of these people are reaching the same conclusion based on their independent investigations is itself evidence of some big conspiracy. I do have my own brief little story about being labeled an al-Qaeda supporter shortly after I got back from Ruzava. That was fun.

Because it's what they do. It's absolutely how they approach things. I had a brief interaction with Max on Twitter that led to me being added to a list called Al-Qaeda fans. just because despite the fact that I don't believe any of the SDF people I was with were particularly aligned with Al-Qaeda or any of that sort of thing. Certainly didn't see a lot of Al-Qaeda or ISIS fans when I was in Raqa. Well, absolutely. I think recently, so I'll mention my experience that recently, just a couple of weeks back, I was on the BBC today talking about the situation in Italy. it was kind of a brief interview and it was all about just describing what the reality is there and the UN's latest report that I mentioned.

And then it was, my university came under this storm attack that there was, next thing you know, you have these hundreds of people writing into the university complaining and it was very kind of, and the worst part of it was that the people who are, writing in. So they, it was, in my case, I mean, it's very different than, you know, for you, a man called Kevin being called Al-Qaeda supporter, you know, you can kind of brush it off. But the thing that happens is that they know that it's a different thing that somebody named, whose first name is Muhammad and whose last name is Ahmed, that they try to tar you in these ways, that they try to create this kind of, they deliberately weaponize Islamophobic. and they try to, I mean, so the slurs are just extraordinary. I mean, I get called everything from jihadist.

I'm Al-Qaeda supporter, and I'm supposed to be a Vahabi, which I'm not, and people are calling for me to go back to Saudi Arabia from where I'm not. So it's these kinds of things that you, they encounter, institutions then kind of, I don't think that at the moment they are quite prepared for these type of activities. You know, they haven't encountered anything like that in the past, but these days it's just so easy for these apps organized online mobs to be activated and to target institutions. And BBC's then Twitter account got flooded with all these, the same people. And the center of it is always people like these. That's who, you know, they go with all kinds of false charges.

is and all kinds of I think one of the other things that they count on is that Twitter is a kind of medium where you can get away with a lot and anonymity grants people this escape from responsibility that you get on Twitter and you're abusing people and that you're able to slander people and you can get away with it and an individual then doesn't have the capacity to be going after where here are, you know, a hundred accounts that are saying something nasty about you. How many of them are you going to go and many of them are not even real people? Well, how are you going to contend with that?

So I think that that has created a very toxic atmosphere and institutions are still struggling to find out ways how they can, you know, deal with a situation like this. Okay. I have a question, I think, about a long-term concern that I do have about the influence of some of these media figures. Recently, Bellingat revealed some funding that some of these people had been receiving from

pro-regime organizations and Ben Norton, who's one of these figures who we haven't really talked about, but is closely affiliated with Blumenthal. He dismissed it by saying, I think it was to Jimmy Doer. He said, look at them making

a big deal out of a measly $2,500. Which $2,500 actually is not a small amount of number. And for those of us who have reported in places like Syria, we wish we could get funding like that. But therein lies one of the struggles. These people seem to be getting a hold of funding, and they seem to have the mobility to go to these places, whereas journalists and freelancers who risk their lives to get this information are finding it increasingly difficult. Do we have a danger in which these well-funded people could eventually start subsuming the legitimate voices who can no longer gain access to these places? Well, that has been the approach.

One of the reasons why people like Marie Colvin and Paul, who was with her when she was killed, he's a good friend of mine. And the thing is that one of the reasons why they had to take such enormous risk is that critical journalists cannot go to these places. And the regime is very kind of selective in who it grants visas to. And the kind of people that it grants visas to are people they know to expect. favorable reporting from. There have been very few exceptions, like people who have gone on regime. It's usually people that they didn't know,

and later on, you know, did some critical work. I think there was a why he said this extraordinary documentary by this journalist Isabel Young, and she was brilliant financial times at Erica Solomon. Well, what these people do is that they go there, they receive funding, obviously, because there's a last time there was this kind of a gathering. So it was Asad's five.

father-in-law. He lives in the UK and he is flush with money. So he organized such a trip. And then we had the famous case of Tulsi Gabbard and Genskosinich visiting. And so they were then, their trip was facilitated by the Syrian socialist, SSMP, I'm forgetting its actual kind of the title. But what happens is that these fronts have then been created. this one, the Serena Shem award, was interesting because it wasn't just the 2,500 that Jimmy Dole received, because all the people who have been avoided, they also receive $5,000. You know, that's the kind of a minimum award that they grant. And they also give money for other things. Like Dennis Kucinich came to the UK to give a pro-Assad speech, and he was paid $20,000 for it by the same group.

So that's not like the kind of money that an ordinary solidarity movement has. And they call themselves the Syrian Solidarity Movement, which is behind the whole thing. So that's not the kind of money that I've seen any kind of solidarity movement handing out. So these people are flush with money, and then they are able to reward people for this type of coverage. And so it ends up in a situation where, you know, writing critically doesn't bring you any benefit as what's his name, Broomenthal himself discovered. that at the time when he wrote critically. So, you know, he was among so many other voices who were saying that Assad is bad. But the thing is that when you started saying the opposite, then you were a rare commodity,

and then you were, you know, there were people willing to fund you. And I think somebody like, you know, Norton is a good example. The only encounter I had with him was that he, many years back, he befriended me on Facebook, and he was, and he wanted, he said that how much he appreciated my work and everything. and then he wrote this article about the drone war, which I had written an academic piece about, and I gave him the leads, and I gave him an interview, and he ended up writing this thing, and he always presented himself as the big supporter of the Syrian Revolution. And then he also did that 180-degree turn.

And so the comical thing about him is that the first thing that he did, when he made his 180-degree turn, is that he was, went on this sort of veeding operation that he I think it was 18 articles that somebody was able to retrieve that he had deleted

in which he had written critically about Assad so he wanted to reinvent himself with a clean bill of health for his new audience so these people are I think recognizing that okay if you're going with a certain position which is

uncontroversial Like if you were saying that, well, Asad is bad, well, yeah, so are, you know, tens of thousands of people saying the same thing. So you don't stand out. So if you are then coming out with this counter narrative, so suddenly you're in the market because, you know, there are people willing to avoid you for it because you're basically, I mean, that's kind of like the kind of a moral price that you are willing to pay, that you are willing to accept the, the, the, you're basically. derision of people like me probably, and then you're willing to, you know, trade whatever credibility you had for whatever benefit that you expect to gain from it. All right. I want to transition now to our last little line of questioning.

We kind of hits on some of the stuff that you've been talking about. We recently had Peter Pomeranzov on. His parents were Soviet dissidents, and he talked about this in his latest book when they got to Britain, they were exiled. Peter's mother became part of the academic community in London and was told by her colleagues in London that she was biased against the Soviet Union and therefore her opinions were invalid. What's the deal with white Westerners telling refugees and exiles that the horrible governments they're fleeing are actually good and they don't understand their own countries.

Well, yeah, I mean, Peter is brilliant, and recently I will give you a recent example of that. There's a Lebanese PhD student who was here at Edinburgh University. This is all public, so I'm not revealing anything to you. So what happened with him is that he had an encounter with a white professor at Edinburgh University, who was very pro-Assad.

So he said to this professor that, okay, why don't I introduce you to some Syrians so that they can actually tell you what they have experienced? Because this professor is part of this group of British academics who are, who deny that Assad commits crimes. In fact, their view is that it's really the British state behind it with white helmets who have been committing all these crimes to just tar Assad's image. I mean, that's literally the kind of views we are seeing being promoted by professors at prestigious. I mean, it's not just Edinburgh University, Bristol University, and previously it was Sheffield University as well. So these are people at the, you know, they're known as the, they are kind of like the American Ivy League. So at these universities, they are promoting these kinds of views.

But what happened, his response was quite extraordinary. He said that why would he want to talk to people who have the most biased view against Assad? So he's talking about the Syrians who have suffered. most from Asset, to him they're the least trustworthy, precisely because their view has been biased by their bad experience. So it is kind of an insane position to hold. And yes, there's actually, there was a really great exchange back in the 80s. There was this Polish philosopher, Lisek Kolokovsky,

that who had settled over here because he again had been exiled. and so one of the great British historians, E.P. Thompson, he wrote him an open letter and denouncing him that why is he sitting in an imperialist country and denouncing the Eastern Bloc, which may have its flaws, but its intentions are good. That was his kind of argument. And Kolokowski then at the time wrote a blistering response. It's blistering because it's kind of really understated, but it's just so devastating because he completely destroys. Thompson's logic. And I would recommend your readers to look it up online. They can find it. It's just called, the piece is called My Correct View on Everything. And so what Kolokowski, one of the things that he mentioned is that what a lot of these people do is that when it comes to a criticism of their own states, they only deploy moral categories. So they are absolute in saying that torture is bad. or similar things. Collective punishment is bad.

So they will take absolute positions. But when it comes to countries with which they are ideologically allied, so then they use political categories. They say that, yeah, collective punishment may be bad, but look, there are so many al-Qaeda in there. So what option does the Syrian regime have except to bomb Aleppo? I mean, that will be the kind of thing. Well, yeah, torture is bad, but look, these people have risen up against a legitimate government. So what other option does the government have except to use? violence against, you know, protesters and some people have become, if civilians have died,

that's, you know, the unfortunate cost of maintaining order. So this is the kind of argument that they come up with. So anyway, so this is not a new phenomenon, but there's a whole history of it. And this is why I think that this needs to be encountered more, confronted more directly and more often because we do see this a lot. We do see this even sometimes making it into the mainstream. At Boston Globe, actually, somebody like Stephen Kinzer still has a column, even though the kind of things that he writes are appalling, like justifying every kind of atrocity in Syria and denouncing, again, one of the famously Kinzer had written this article, denouncing Western media because they said that they don't do any on the ground.

reporting and then this is something I use as a case study in my classroom because students then they see that his own sources are one Facebook comment from somebody anonymous and a blogger from the Iranian regime's Iranian Supreme Leader's personal website. So these people, it's also a kind of, I think it's also the psychology of these people that they demand absolute kind of evidence of proof when it comes to accepting that Assad has committed some crime. So, you know, his chemical attacks, whatever evidence you gather, it will never measure up because they will be so exacting in terms of what they demand.

But on the other hand, they will be quite willing to accept on the most dubious basis the claims that will come out from the regime. It began within 2012 when there was a first big massacre. It had occurred in a place called Hula. And, I mean, you know, you can still look up just how many of the prominent left-wing figures in Britain and the United States. They readily accepted the claim. It was planted by the regime that it was the rebels who did it themselves to try to trigger a Western intervention. So I think there's a long history of things like these, and it's an unfortunate tendency.

it persists, and I think that's why it needs to be confronted again and again. How do people regain control of their own history? I think it's by demanding more from our institutions need to do better. And I think that's why organizations like I am Belling Cat, I think, have been a godson in that respect, because they do, they have brought a higher degree of verifiability, accuracy to reportage. And I think institutions, like, for example, our media institutions did do things over the previous, you know, 20 years, which led to a certain degree of cynicism about them.

And now, even though I feel that journalism today is much better than it was 15 years back, I mean, if you take prominent publications, like New York Times of, you know, the present-day New York Times is so much better than the New York Times we had 50 years. years back, washing posts is definitely better. But the thing that happens is that you have, like, for example,

London Review of Books published on its front page these two or three conspiracy theories by Seymour Hirsch. He was a big name, and a lot of people used to, a lot of us used to respect him. But once those stories were proven to be false,

there has not been any kind of any expression of regret or even an apology. And I think that what it does is that it creates that situation where truth becomes an irrelevance, that it all becomes about the political truths, that, well, you feel not the epistemic truths, which are, you know, that if something is verifiable, factual, that doesn't matter.

But it becomes all about whether it fits the broader narrative to which you subscribe. And I think that that's why we need to be, journalism will have to play a big role in that, because more credible journalism is definitely going to be, is going to be what it takes to restore that kind of a trust in these institutions. And I think we are seeing some signs of that. 2016 was probably a wake-up call. And since then, we are seeing, you know, one people, there's a, the Guardian has increased its subscribers.

New York Times has increased its subscribers. So there's certainly, there's this view, There's this realization that if you don't have good, trustworthy journalism, so this is what you can end up with. We have Brexit here. In the U.S., you have Trump, and then we have an international order that is facing collapse in the face of these type of regimes, which not only commit mass crimes, but they are also, the mass crimes just become matters of eternal dispute, rather than becoming matters of. fact. Adrease, thank you so much for coming under War College and walking us through this

complicated and fascinating yet also awful topic. It was an absolute pleasure. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much for listening to War College. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell, which you got to hear a little bit in this episode doing his producer thing.

He was created by myself and Jason Fields, who is enjoying a luxurious retirement away from the podcast. If you like the show, please like and subscribe, rate us on iTunes, share us around the web. We are found wherever fine pods are casted. If you want to find us online, please go to our Twitter account at War underscore College. I am at MJ Galt on Twitter, and Kevin is at KJK, No Dell. We will be back next week with more stories from behind the front lines. Please stay safe until then.