A special essay for WordPress readers

Uncategorized 5 Minutes

As some of you may be aware, I use this WordPress platform to publish my video interviews and their transcripts. I maintain this platform mainly for the purpose of giving viewers access to my earliest archived essays going back more than a decade. All of my current essays are published elsewhere, on my Substack channel – Armageddon Newsletter. That is open to both free and paid subscribers, and I note that the numbers of subscribers and readers there are many times greater than here on WordPress.

I call this fact out in particular to my Japanese audience. I am very pleased that my latest book “War Diaries” has found a significant number of purchasers on Amazon.co.jp not only in ebook but also in paperback format. This is quite remarkable, because the Japanese market is very hard to crack for writers in English. Since I see Japan among the dozen leading countries watching this WordPress platform daily, may I suggest that you sign up for my Substack platform so that you can read my daily essays and not just see podcasts.

Today I make an exception to my rule against publishing essays on WordPress. The growing controversy in Alternative Media that I have precipitated has become bitter and ad hominem in nature. Accordingly I am obliged to respond, as I do in the essay below:

A riposte to Scott Ritter’s latest calumny

At the top of the profession, the world of geopolitical interview podcasts is fairly narrow. In terms of popularity as measured by viewer numbers on each and every broadcast, there is a cluster of names that come up again and again:  Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer. 

To my surprise, over the past 18 months since my first debut on ‘Judging Freedom’ hosted by Andrew Napolitano, I find myself among these leading names. I say ‘surprise’ because this kind of public activity was never in my plans or expectations. I have been in ‘public intellectual’ mode since 2010, when I began publishing analytical essays online and my audience over the years reached to hundreds, then thousands of readers. To be sure, in 2016, when I was the guest on mainstream Russian talk shows on all federal channels, I appeared on programs watched by very large audiences, but that ended in 2017 when Russian TV’s fascination with Americans in the Trump camp came to an end.

cThe idea of reaching 200,000 viewers with a single half-hour interview, as has happened repeatedly over the past year, was something I did not strive for and did not have the means to achieve until my good friend Ray McGovern put me together with Judge Napolitano.

 With respect to Napolitano’s program, where the host himself shares broadly the views of the aforementioned guests, I am an outlier who serves as a useful demonstration of the program’s openness to diversity of opinion, if nothing more, since none of his guests agrees with my positions on this or that as regards Russia. And why should they? Apart from Ray and me, not a single one of the guests on this channel is a Russia expert. Not a single one of them knows more than three words of Russian. We work from very different methodologies, which by itself predetermines outcomes of analysis.

 On another channel, one which came later to prominence and still has lower subscription numbers, that of Professor Glenn Diesen, my views are closer to those of the host and, presumably, to his target audience.

The end result of this process is that I am at the center of controversy in Alternative Media. In an ideal world, that would not be a problem. But in the real world, the controversy has too often been highly personalized and venomous.  There is no one more active in spreading venom than Scott Ritter, who has on air in recent months described me as ‘a moron’ and as ‘a piece of shit.’ So much for politesse.

 In his latest interview with The Judge, he is more careful in choosing his words though in his remark about my travels in Russia, ‘if they let Doctorow back in’ you get an inkling to what kind of skullduggery he is attempting in Moscow and Petersburg during his ongoing visit there.

I invite the Community to watch Ritter’s latest interview with The Judge.  He gratuitously attacks me three or four times over issues big and small. But that is NOT the reason I recommend viewing this interview. It is to see and consider Ritter’s thinking processes, because they are emblematic of how this very popular public figure in Alternative Media bases everything he says about Russia today on what he hears from front line military commanders including the director of a drone unit, from government officials in the energy sector, from intelligence officials. These are, for Ritter, the whole of Russian society, which is fully backing the war, the way it is being waged, the collegial government around President Putin, and Putin himself.  He is not being feted by RT, he says, but is on a book promotion tour.  Indeed! And one may ask who his publisher is and who actually is putting up the funds to host him. He is admittedly not paying his way, which should make the Buyer beware.   I pay for every visit to Petersburg out of my own pocket.

To be very kindly about it, there is a strange naivete in Ritter’s thinking about how Russia stands apart from the ways in which the rest of the world operates.  There can be no internal contradictions between different Russian government agencies! Everyone is pulling in the same direction! No personal ambitions seem to exist!

I have been criticized not only by Ritter for using anecdotal evidence in support of generalizations in my travel reports. I do not deny that because it would be impossible to take in everything happening in that vast country in a methodical, scientific manner in a three-week visit, or even in a three-year visit. A great deal rests on the judgment and prior experience of the observer.  My experience goes back to 1967.  I lived and worked as a head of corporate representations in Moscow and Petersburg from 1994 to 2000. None of my peers can say the same.  They bring different background experience to the table when they speak and so it is no wonder that we come to different conclusions.

To suggest that my dinner hosts on National Unity Day were Navalny supporters, meaning subversives, as Ritter does in this interview, is gratuitous calumny.

Enjoy the show. And think over carefully the mental processes you see the hero of the piece bringing to bear on the vital questions of our times.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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20 thoughts on “A special essay for WordPress readers”

  1. I watched Ritter today and am happy to read your rebuttal. To be honest I do not care for Mr. Ritter, this is a simple gut reaction from the first time I heard him speak. He seems to be more on self-promotion than giving a nuanced opinion. I also noticed he really does not like you or your opinions. Keep up the good work sir your counterbalance to the bulk of what is expressed on the Judges show is a welcome source of information. Thank you for your continued work, FOOT.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. I stopped listening to Scott Ritter for quite some time ago. I gradually got the gut feeling that most of all he was promoting himself.

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  3. I remember a cartoon I saw decades ago. 2 vultures on a fence and one vulture says to another: “I am tired of waiting, I want to go kill something.”

    Comparing my first trip to Russia in 2001 with my last in 2019, I understand the great appreciation that everyone has for Putin, even those who would want a more aggressive policy.

    But sooner or later, if the current situation continues, they will kill something.

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  5. One of the negatives Ritter mentioned was your saying police are taking bribes again, like they did in the ’90s. For things like speeding in one’s car, I presume, one might assume you could escape an official fine by “buying off” a police officer.

    Do you have first hand knowledge that this is indeed happening again? Or is it something you merely heard?

    There’s no question Ritter criticized you harshly — for the bystander such as myself, I just want to know the general mood in Russia. I’m not convinced either one of you is truly correct in your pronouncements. And remember, Helmer and Sleboda live in Moscow as well, neither of them are fools, and likely speak a word or two of Russian. So you are not unique among pundits.

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    1. Normally, Mr. Malcolm I instantly delete your commentary because 99% of the time it is verbal diarrhia, insulting in every way and congtentless. However, this time I let it pass so as to directly answer your points. I spent 3 weeks in taxis, not behind the wheel. And when a Tadjik driver tells me what he has experienced in a shakedown it resonates and I report it. Basta. I could not care less what Ritter reports on that subject, ignoramus that he is. As for Helmer, in which world do you live? Helmer was booted out of Russia 15 years ago and has not been back since. His Dancing with the Bears website is deceptive on that very point of where he is writing from, which is one reason why I denounce him as a fraud. As for Sleboda, you are talking about an RT asset, nothing more; fluff.

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  6. As an earnest follower of your analyses on the Ukraine proxy war, I admire your willingness to go where others don’t. I seldom miss your podcasts and interviews.

    With this brief preamble, allow me to make a few suggestions:

    1. I feel your time is wasted in skirmishes with the handful of names of fellow analysts/commentators you mention. It is far more usefully directed at what you excel at. Reading the tea leaves at both higher political and grassroots levels and connecting dots that are invisible to your peers. You are not addressing them, you are sharing your views with a much wider audience across the world. So long as you keep prompting them to think afresh, it doesn’t matter what your peers say or write. It’s a free internet (still). Let the audience draw their own conclusions on who is more credible.
    2. Second, your point on Putin’s reluctance to act decisively to end the war before the crazy NATO warmongers build up their war machine is well taken. I am sure many among your audience, including me, are asking the same question. You have been very successful in pointing out the slow motion war of attrition has reached the end of its shelf life and it is time for Russia to make some bold moves to bring matters to a swift conclusion. I look forward to your take on the end game here for Russia. Not just in Ukraine but, arising therefrom, its longer term impacts on Russia’s re-emergence as a super power.
    3. Third, the empire is flaying out wildly even as its five centuries-old fabric is fraying apart. While it is clear the unipolar order is on its death throes, it is nowhere as clear what the multipolar order will look like realistically. As in the next decade, not over the rest of the century. Under Trump, the US, seat of the empire, has finally dropped all pretense and soothing niceties to flex the muscles of its formidable war machine at every turn, against every country, ally and foe alike. I hope you could take some time away from the Ukraine battlefield, or project it wider, for a couple of podcasts or articles on what the end game would be like for the empire.

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    1. Thank you for your support and constructive suggestions on where future essays may be useful. I will try to address your issues in future writings. However, with respect to the nexus of Larry Johnson-Scott Ritter-Peter Hanseler, the situation is uglier than you or most readers can imagine. I have been in the Russia game for a very long time, and in the 1970s when I got started in the consulting business and first visited Moscow month after month to create a core clientele of major US corporations seeking to establish large projects in the USSR, I saw firsthand the kind of (Western) reptiles who flourished in Moscow and used every dirty trick to keep others out. Johnson-Ritter-Hanseler are exactly of this ilk. They, in scheming with ultra-nationalists, ultra-Orthodox authoritarian scum on the fringes of the Kremlin are seeking to make me persona non grata in Russia, as you can pick up in this latest Ritter interview with The Judge. As for Napolitano, he is clueless on what is going on. That is the real world and accordingly I cannot just ignore their dirty play but am calling it out in public.

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      1. I stopped following them since the early past of this year. They have become repetitive, not just individually but also as in a backslapping mutual admiration society. I do read/view them occasionally. I have to admit I missed their recent critiques of you and how objective or otherwise they have been. From your reaction, it’s obvious it has been largely otherwise.

        If you won’t take it amiss, perhaps your recent open criticisms of Putin, especially the chances of his potential ouster in a palace coup, are offering fuel to your ill-wishers. They are all red carpeted by RT which cannot brook a single pea under Putin’s mattress, let alone air views on his potential departure from the stage. You might be making it easier for them to ostracize you.

        That you have also acknowledged alongside those criticisms Putin’s popularity among the Russian public remains high (arguably the highest among elected leaders in the world) is neither here, nor there. When someone wants to snipe at you, they are not looking for bouquets. You might want to think of ways to ease back on this sensitive/vulnerable point in your otherwise illuminating work. I can’t presume to tell you how to go about it.

        Keep at it, Doc. This is a long haul and you haven’t come close to leaning on your second wind yet. As for me, I live half way across the world in Malaysia with my globe trotting done with in 2011. I visited Moscow only once, in 1984. I struck up a friendship with the second secretary at the Russian embassy here around that time due to our shared passion for squash. The only other Russian I knew closely was my young protege at the UN in 2010-11. None of which hopefully disqualifies me from exercising my basic gumption and sense of fair play to separate right from wrong in Russia’s existential struggle against the Collective West.

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  7. I am a free subscriber of your substack newsletter and I have never (-never-!) been able to read one of your posts, apart from the one you are reposting here.

    All the times substacks advices me that I need a payed subscription.

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      1. I am the ‘owner’ of the Substack entry Armageddon Newsletter and, accordingly, have no experience with sign-up to the unpaid/paid subscriptions. But since there are 3200 unpaid subscribers of whom a great many read the essays each day, somehow they all do get the texts without complications, except for Russell, it would appear. Something is likely wrong on his end. To receive the texts you must have the Substack App on your device. As for Comments, they are only the right of paid subscribers.

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      3. Dear Dr. Doctorow,

        it is possible that I am wrong. I have no doubt about your 3200 subscribers. I myself am one of them. But: How can you be sure that they read your essays? As you yourself state that free subscribers cannot comment?

        I have already complained about the issue on this blog. And to be sure, I installed the substack app. But nothing changed. I suspect that all your free subscribers can read only the excerpt of your essays, like me.

        Maybe it suffices to ask here: is there any of you, free suscribers, able to read all the posts of Armageddon newsletter?

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      4. I will do that in a few minutes. But the logic is that people are able to read the full texts, because otherwise they would just cancel their subscriptions and almost no one is doing that over the past year or more.
        I do know that there are glitches in the Substack system. I used my powers as owner to set up a free of cost subscription for one individual, but in the end it seems he never did begin receiving emails and texts. Regrettably I have no interlocutors at Substack with whom to discuss technical problems which may arise.

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      5. First of all, thanks for your kind attention.

        Anyway, it is obvious that free subscribers “do not receive access to [your] full texts on essays that are designated as ‘paid’”, as you write on your neweset post on substack. And since free subscribers cannot even comment, nobody will complain on substack. About “the logic” that people would have cancelled their subscriptions, I didn’t do it (that is, I didn’t cancel by subscription”). I suspect that it is the same for the other people.

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    2. Yes, I get the full postings, including videos and transcripts in my mail inbox. The sole limitation is I can’t comment on them. Dr Doctorow has clarified only paid subscribers can comment.

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  8. Thank you very much for your informed and perceptive commentary. I value it greatly. As do many people.

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  9. Judge Napolitano used to be Fox News and (when he started Judging Freedom) not a good interviewer. He received training, obviously. If you look at his guests: all of them are pro Kremlin (I didn’t say pro Russian). Long before I saw you on the Judge, I’ve read some of your books (“Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I, II”, “A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs” and “Does the United States Have a Future?: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2015-17”). But I’ve also read Paul Craig Roberts “Empire of lies” and “The Neoconservative Threat to World Order: America’s Perilous War for Hegemony – 17 augustus 2015”.

    After seeing mr. Kirill Dmitriev, the US “educated”, WEF affiliated long term “friend” of president Putin taking the lead in “negotiations” with “our dear friends and partners” and instigator of the “war”, I started looking into the Kremlin regime. It explained a lot of the “slow meatgrinder” or so called “war”. I started to read the substacks of (former) Russian “dissidents” (pro Russian, anti western but not pro Kremlin) and Russian Newspapers (via https://en.topwar.ru/ – policy/economy). And re Agenda 2030: https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/ , Yuri Roshka (in prison): https://telegra.ph/On-false-dichotomy-and-useful-idiots-01-26 and an interview between the two: https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/putin-an-alternative-perspective?utm_source=publication-search

    I’ve read mr. Paul Craig Roberts was very glad you were one of the view who saw the real (as he wrote on his blog) state of the “war” and that it’s not looking good for Russia (https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/?s=doctorow). He has been critical of the Kremlin/Putin since 2013, when the coup began.

    Which made me wonder why you should degrade yourself by appearing on Judging Freedom. You must be aware Napolitano used Jack Devine (Council of foreign Relations and very much pro war with Russia) for example as a tool to amuse/entertain his viewers, who are mainly pro Kremlin (“Putin/Lavrov are the only adults in the room”), anti EU “governments” and pro Trump. And believe in the Multi Polar World/BRICS/Axis of resistance fantasies of Pepe Escobar and the like. I think he is using you in the same way.

    If Paul Craig Roberts would appear on Judging Freedom he would get the same treatment as any other “dissident” (everyone who doesn’t tell us Russia is winning, Putin is a hero, meeting headchoppers in the Kremlin is 5 D chess and so on).

    So: maybe you should talk with Paul Craig Roberts, don’t waste time on Ritter, Johnson and the other (probably payed off) stooges and be aware Napolitano may not be the “neutral” interviewer he pretends to be.

    I stopped watching Napolitano and his propgandists after Ritter told us the Palestinians loved to be bombed because they will get a state of their own that way (…), MacGregor told us Turkey (a NATO member, mind you) would come to the rescue of “Palestine”, Johnson told us Russia is crushing NATO and Escobar was sure the “axis of resistance” would crush Israël…..

    Best wishes and don’t take payed (Kremlin, Brussel or Washington) stooges serious.

    Menke

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    1. Thanks for taking the time to set all this out!
      I agree substantially with your remarks on the stable of interviewees in Judging Freedom. However, Napolitano has the largest subscriber base in such interview programs and while the audience is skewed to fans of Ritter and Johnson, there are a great many other viewers who are not – and I reach them, which is all to the good. As for Paul Craig Roberts: his skepticism towards Putin was long based on his reading of John Helmer, which is a very flawed source. PCR of course has no direct readings on Russian affairs and so can be blind to many things. BUT PCR is stubbornly immune to what the herd is saying, and that is a great positive.

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