This letter is a rebuttal of Anne Applebaum’s ‘How Turkey confounded Putin’s favourite narratives’, Washington Post, November 25th, 2015. The author is a research fellow at Oxford University.

Dear Sirs:

Applebaum and her husband, former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski are leading proponents of neocon policies

I am deeply dismayed by your insistence on continuing to publish Anne Applebaum’s unadulterated propaganda in your esteemed newspaper’s foreign affairs column.

It is difficult to understand why a serious publication such as the Washington Post should be disseminating the bias-driven opinions of someone so determinedly living in her own parallel universe, and displaying such a revanchist, warmongering agenda towards Russia.

Ms Applebaum’s column provides no analysis on this most important issue of the week, proffering simply disinformation, factual distortion, exaggeration and obfuscation, dressed up as current affairs commentary, coupled with a strong dose of blame-shifting.

In psychology, this is known as projection – defending your own obnoxious impulses by denying their existence while attributing them to others. A person who is rude, for instance, may constantly accuse others of being rude. Someone who is aggressive towards others will always accuse others of initiating aggressive behaviour.

Although Ms Applebaum describes her interpretation of Vladimir Putin’s reaction to the downing of the Russian plane by Turkey as “overly literary”, one is at pains to find anything literary about it. Repetitive, yes -- given how she trots out her favourite mantra (the “narrative”) multiple times in the article -- but certainly not literary. Tedious, also, in that the article is replete with her usual obsessions: that Putin is preoccupied with a western plot to destroy Russia, that everything emanating from Russia is for the sole purpose of propaganda, and so on, and so forth. Most strikingly absurd of all is her contention that the only question that matters to Putin is ‘to which of his narratives should [the downing of the Russian plane] belong?”.

Some of the information-twisting that Ms Applebaum presents as fact:

“Famously, the Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine in 2014 were repeatedly interpreted by the Kremlin as a revival of Nazism, inspired and supported by NATO”.

This is one of Applebaum’s clever sleights-of-hand: by throwing NATO into the phrase, she deflects our attention away from the prime instigators behind the Euromaidan demonstrations, the European Union and the US State Department. Recall the repeated visits to Kiev in the autumn/winter of 2013-14 by assorted EU bureaucrats (Barroso, Ashton) and US government functionaries (Nuland, McCain)… and leading the charge for the EU in Ukraine, we recall, was none other than one Radolsaw Sikorski, Poland's then foreign minister... and Applebaum's husband. (Clever, old girl, but no cigar). It has escaped no one that, in the last two years -- since the Maidan demonstrations began in Kiev on this day in 2013, with EU (and US) funding -- the world has changed dramatically and dangerously for the worse, almost unrecognisably so.

As for “a revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, a wide range of YouTube videos are available that attest to this phenomenon. (And welcome to Europe!)

“The propaganda continued even when elections brought centrists to power and excluded the tiny far-right parties in Ukraine from any serious influence”.

Again, not entirely accurate: although he flopped in Ukraine’s presidential election, Dmitry Yarosh, the leader of Right Sektor, Ukraine’s far right political party, was elected to parliament as a deputy and later served as advisor to the Ukrainian Army’s chief of staff, acting as liaison between the Ukrainian military and his group’s volunteer battalions fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Link to BBC Article.

“Russian state television has claimed that Ukraine is a “supplier of weapons to ISIS”

Western primary sources for this assertion include US Marine combat veteran Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, who outlined the alleged transport route in detail in September, and Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept. While these western sources may have been referred to on Russian television as part of a news story, this does not mean that the story originated on Russian television, as Applebaum might have her readers believe. Mashable also carried the story.

“Is the [downing of the Russian plane] part of the terrorist plot against Russia? If so, that looks a bit odd, given that Turkey claims to be fighting terrorism too”.

It does indeed look odd that Turkey claims to be fighting terrorism, when its own allies, like the US, admit that Turkey has been a principal source of funding for ISIS. In fact, US Vice President Joe Biden admitted as much at Harvard the other week. Link to Audio Tape Here W hat looks even odder is that such a distinguished journalist as Anne Applebaum is either unaware of the vast evidence linking Turkey to ISIS, including the awkward ‘family business’ aspect involving President Erdogan’s son and the ISIS oil trade, ( See here and here for articles from NEO and Global Research. ) -- or is, for whatever reason, unwilling to address it publicly. Which, one would think, is what any journalist worthy of the profession would do, especially a Pulitzer Prize-winner like Ms Applebaum -- unless, of course, they had a different agenda.

W here here Instead, because no Applebaum piece is ever complete without a dozen obligatory references to ‘Russian propaganda’, she again slips in the “Russian state television” propaganda angle: “The Turks are saving ISIS,” one “expert” said on Russian state television”. As though the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, US General Wesley Clark didn’t make exactly the same point live on CNN last week, only much more explicitly.

If Ms Applebaum has no respect for Washington Post readers, at least the Editorial Board might show some. The Comments section, week after week, contains a litany of complaints about Ms Applebaum’s habit of passing off her unsubstantiated, polemical opinions as informed commentary and analysis.





A sample selection from Washington Post readers’ comments to Ms Applebaum’s column this week (available online):







It does get monotonous, this relentless disinformation campaign against Russia and Putin, and one wonders why she is allowed such a platform so consistently. Rumour has it that even The Economist has felt compelled to make changes to their Russia team when readers found its coverage wanting in the credibility department.Washington Post