It is in overlooking this facet of the 21st century variant of the Great Game that the globalists made a grievous miscalculation. The digital and social media cyberwar we see waged now has been almost a total loss for the western mainstream. Sardo’s part, my role, and the efforts of the rest of the alleged Kremlin cyber agents will be highlighted all throughout this volume. However, the success of my Kremlin Troll comrades can easily be seen in the latest efforts in Germany and the EU, with the neocons and the technocrats in ramping up social media censorship on a massive scale. While traditional media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and broadcast news channels such as BBC and CNN, were easily leveraged by billionaire owners, social media like Facebook and Twitter were discounted by the aging elites.
Another critical voice, Patrick Armstrong, added credibility and pragmatic correctness that Russia Insider and the “message” needed. As anyone who has toyed with social media knows, sarcasm and the pseudo-intellectual game are played in heated intensity. Underneath though, in the stories and reports needed to properly drive a real message, real research and moral character sent Putin’s stock higher. With regard to Armstrong, I recall the article that brought his intellectual voice to my attention. Published on Russia Insider in April 2015, his article “The West Throws a Temper Tantrum” was a template for the deconstruction of the blasphemous NATO troll lie. In the report, Armstrong levels Graham’s useful hierarchy of disagreement against the idiotic arguments that “trolls” hollering “liar, liar, pants on fire” will ever change the mind of someone with a different idea or view. Armstrong’s “proof,” as it were, is part of the basis for this book. For the same reason Vladimir Putin has little need of billions in personal wealth, the Russian leadership never deployed any such useless army of idiots.
Armstrong, a well-respected and long serving analyst of first the Soviet Union and later Russia, is a brilliant if somewhat austere colleague who has given a lot to the positive discussion of Russia. Here’s a short autobiographical sketch by Dr. Armstrong and his contribution about a huge lost opportunity cost that few understand.
The Confession of Patrick Armstrong
I started work for the Canadian Department of National Defense in 1977 in the Directorate of Land Operational Research of the Operational Research and Analysis Establishment. I participated in many training games in real time and research games in very slow time. The scenarios were always the same: we (Canada had a brigade group in West Germany) were defending against an attack by the Soviet/Warsaw Pact side. In those days NATO was a defensive organization and, as we later found out, so was the other side: each was awaiting the other to attack. Which, come to think of it, is probably why we’re all here today.
I enjoyed my six years, often as the only civilian in a sea of uniforms, but I realized that a history Ph.D. stood no chance of running the directorate so, when the slot opened, I contrived to switch to the Directorate of Strategic Analysis as the USSR guy. I should say straight off that I have never taken a university course on Russia or the USSR. And, in retrospect, I think that was fortunate because in much of the English-speaking world the field seems to be dominated by Balts, Poles or Ukrainians who hate Russia. So, I avoided that “Russians are the enemy, whatever flag they fly” indoctrination: I always thought the Russians were just as much the victims of the ideology as anyone else and am amused how the others have airbrushed their Bolsheviks out of their pictures just as determinedly as Stalin removed “unpersons” from his.
That was November 1984 and Chernenko was GenSek and, when he died in March 1985, Gorbachev succeeded. While I didn’t think the USSR was all that healthy or successful an enterprise, I did expect it to last a lot longer and when Gorbachev started talking about glasnost and perestroika, I thought back to the 20th Party Congress, the Lieberman reforms, Andropov’s reforms and didn’t expect much.
In 1987 two things made me think again. I attended a Wilton Park conference (the first of many) attended by Dr. Leonid Abalkin. He took the discussion over and, with the patient interpretation of someone from the Embassy, talked for hours. The Soviet economy was a failure and couldn’t be reformed. That was something different. Then, on the front page of Pravda, appeared a short essay with the title “A New Philosophy of Foreign Policy” by Yevgeniy Primakov. I pricked up my ears: a new philosophy? But surely good old Marxism-Leninism is valid for all times and places. As I read on, I realized that this was also something new: the author was bluntly saying that Soviet foreign policy had been a failure, it was ruining the country and creating enemies. These two were telling us that the USSR just didn’t work. As Putin told Stone, “it was not efficient at its roots.”
These things convinced me that real change was being attempted. Not just fiddling around at the edges but something that would end the whole Marxist-Leninist construct. As far as I was concerned, it had been the communist system that was our enemy and, if it was thrown off, we should be happy. Sometime around then I was interviewed for a job at NATO, and the question was what, with all these changes, was NATO’s future. I said it should become an alliance of the civilized countries against whatever dangers were out there: the present members of course, but also the USSR, Japan and so on.
Well, that didn’t happen, did it? I remember a very knowledgeable boss assuring me that NATO expansion was such a stupid idea that it would never happen. He was wrong too.
In 1814 the victors — Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria — sat down in Vienna, with France, to re-design the world. They were wise enough to understand that a settlement that excluded France wouldn’t last. In 1919 this was forgotten and the settlement — and short-lived it was — excluded the loser. In 1945 Japan and Germany were included in the winners’ circle. At the end of the Cold War, repeating the Versailles mistake, we excluded Russia. It was soon obvious, whatever meretricious platitudes stumbled from the lips of wooden-faced stooges that NATO was an anti-Russia organization of the “winners.”
But I retained hope. I think my most reprinted piece has been “The Third Turn” of November 2010 and in it I argued that Russia had passed through two periods in the Western imagination: first as the Little Brother then as the Assertive Enemy but that we were now approaching a time in which it would be a normal country.
Well, that didn’t happen, did it?
And so, the great opportunity to integrate Russia into the winners’ circle was thrown away.
For a long time, I thought it was stupidity and ignorance. I knew the implacably hostile were out there: Brzezinski and the legions of “think” tanks (my website has a collection of anti-Russia quotations I’ve collected over the years) but I greatly underestimated their persistence. Stupidity and ignorance; you can argue with those (or hope to). But you can’t argue with the anti-Russians. Russia wants to reconquer the empire, so it invaded Georgia. But it didn’t hold on to it, did it? No, but that’s because we stopped it. Putin kills reporters. Name one. You know, whatshername. There were provocative exercises on NATO’s borders. But NATO kept moving closer to Russia. Irrelevant, NATO’s peaceful. Putin is the richest thief in the world. Says who? Everybody. Putin hacked the US election. How? Somehow.