The Russians and all of ‘progressive humanity’ have been jumping up and down about this pseudo-documentary film. The sound bite from one War Room participant that “I wouldn’t mind killing tens of thousands of Russians” has been trumpeted as a major provocation. Baltics politicians on both sides of the issue are furious. However, seeing the film through to its unexpected ending, one is left with big questions about the intentions of its producers and of its high level participants that so far no one has addressed.
Author: 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.
Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary ‘Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution’ as a significant political event of our times
The activities of aggressive nationalist and neo-Nazi armed movements in present-day Ukraine are the focal point of Moreira’s documentary. Their existence is not denied by any of his leading critics in France even if they try to find excuses. Meanwhile, the ability of these same nationalist extremists to control parliament on the key questions of war and peace even if their own electoral support is tiny by using intimidation and violence makes a mockery of Ukrainian democracy.
Sergey Lavrov: “On one thing we agree with our Western partners – there will be no more ‘business as usual’”
Our Western colleagues sometimes declare with passion that there can no longer be ‘business as usual with Russia. I am convinced that this is so and here we agree: there will be no more ‘business as usual’ when they tried to bind us with agreements which take into account above all the interests of either the European Union or the United States and they wanted to persuade us that this will do no harm to our interests. That history is over and done with. A new stage of history is dawning which can develop only on the basis of equal rights and all other principles of international law. (From Lavrov’s opening remarks to his press conference, 26 January)
Vladimir Putin’s interview with ‘Bild’: what we learn from comparative textual analysis
Cold intellectual superiority would not have had the effect on Putin’s interlocutors that his going the extra mile and reaching out to them in German did, all the more so in an area of high culture that revealed his respect. This was in counterpoint to his critical words at the start of the interview about the unconstructive role played by Bild and the German media generally
Trump and ‘The National Review’: we are defined by our enemies
What follows is not an unqualified endorsement of Donald Trump for the November elections. But it is a call to reason among American intellectuals who are as skeptical of voting for a populist, one of the unwashed, as the Russian intelligentsia is skeptical of their country’s own populist, Vladimir Putin.
Continue reading “Trump and ‘The National Review’: we are defined by our enemies”
Angela Merkel: Going, Going… Gone?
Can Angela Merkel, “the most powerful woman in the world” per Time magazine’s designation of her just a few weeks ago as 2015 Person of the Year, finally be on her way out? An overview of the German press suggests that may be the case.
European Values and ‘Nomenklatura’
The new confrontation over European Values between Poland and Brussels acting as the proxy for Berlin relates nominally to new Polish laws giving the government the power to appoint chiefs of civil service departments including the chiefs of the public media. It is, simply put, legalizing patronage or ‘Nomenklatura’ practices, but when the media is frankly and openly part of this patronage, official Europe gets very huffy.
Germany, the European Union and the Polish Question
The net result of the growing public row heralded by the bitter rebuke to Warsaw of European Parliament president Martin Schulz may be to unravel one of the key foreign policy achievements of Angela Merkel’s 10 years in power – consolidating her country’s hold over Mitteleuropa.
Continue reading “Germany, the European Union and the Polish Question”
‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine editor loses his marbles: publishes call for end to sanctions
Though the latest issue of Foreign Affairs shows continuing decline in professional standards, it has upside surprises that the editors may yet regret. In a newsworthy essay, by hit or miss, the author rejects current U.S. policy on Russia for its abject failure to deliver on expectations.
Russian Documentary Film: ‘World Order.’ Its not so hidden message and its relevance to the US presidential campaign, for those who care to pay proper attention
If ‘World Order’ is a piece of propaganda, it is sophisticated and serves certain higher values, not the interests of individuals or power for power’s sake. In effect, it is a wake-up call to avert nuclear war by reining in exceptionalism and safeguarding the principles of the UN Charter.
Gilbert Doctorow 